being Cyborg

Client Eastwood

Well-known member
The singularity/cyborgs/transhumans

Is this really coming in the next 50 years, or it just hard sci-fi?

"We are entering a new era. I call it "the Singularity." It's a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our planet. One can make a strong case that it's actually the cutting edge of the evolution of intelligence in general, because there's no indication that it's occurred anywhere else. To me that is what human civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny and part of the destiny of evolution to continue to progress ever faster, and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially.To contemplate stopping that — to think human beings are fine the way they are — is a misplaced fond remembrance of what human beings used to be. What human beings are is a species that has undergone a cultural and technological evolution, and it's the nature of evolution that it accelerates, and that its powers grow exponentially, and that's what we're talking about. The next stage of this will be to amplify our own intellectual powers with the results of our technology."

https://www.edge.org/conversation/ray_kurzweil-the-singularity
 

sufi

lala
i just discovered this - totally fucking brilliant

https://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_za...her Virtual Worlds/Texts/cyborg_manifesto.pdf

A Cyborg Manifesto
Donna Haraway
Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature(New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

An ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit

This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.
 

sufi

lala
I would love to write something that gets a review like this

This is a book that contradicts itself a hundred times; but that is not a criticism of it, because its author thinks contradictions are a sign of intellectual ferment and vitality. This is a book that systematically distorts and selects historical evidence; but that is not a criticism, because its author thinks that all interpretations are biased, and she regards it as her duty to pick and choose her facts to favor her own brand of politics. This is a book full of vaporous, French-intellectual prose that makes Teilhard de Chardin sound like Ernest Hemingway by comparison; but that is not a criticism, because the author likes that sort of prose and has taken lessons in how to write it, and she thinks that plain, homely speech is part of a conspiracy to oppress the poor. This is a book that clatters around in a dark closet of irrelevancies for 450 pages before it bumps accidentally into its index and stops; but that is not a criticism, either, because its author finds it gratifying and refreshing to bang unrelated facts together as a rebuke to stuffy minds. This book infuriated me; but that is not a defect in it, because it is supposed to infuriate people like me, and the author would have been happier still if I had blown out an artery. In short, this book is flawless, because all its deficiencies are deliberate products of art. Given its assumptions, there is nothing here to criticize. The only course open to a reviewer who dislikes this book as much as I do is to question its author's fundamental assumptions—which are big-ticket items involving the nature and relationships of language, knowledge, and science.
 

sufi

lala
I've been sketching some ideas of what physical form a dissensus cyborg might take were it to assume a non-virtual existence
 

luka

Well-known member
Typically replacement limbs are good for violence and for mechanical work but not good for loving. So it's a question of your priorities. A lovers touch or an arm with a selection of screwdrivers and bottle openers etc?
 
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sufi

lala
really like this line from Retromania:
Yet these two talents are responding to similar macro-cultural shifts: the emergence of the Internet as a landscape of the sublime, occupying a roughly equivalent place to Nature in the imagination of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century com*poser, and to the city for the twentieth-century composer.
this was the side of the chillwave continuum that seemed to lose momentum/relevance pretty quickly in the 2010s. not so much the alienation side of things.
the dematerialized sublime. it's no longer storms on the ocean or really tall mountains or ancient civilizations or whatever, it's now ...whatever the internet equivalent is.
It was always nostalgic/backwards facing though wasn't it? AOL. Early iterations of Windows. Netscape Navigator. Sega Megadrive. About childhood in a way, and a child's imagination engaging with those 2d spaces flashing on the screen. Monitor light in a dark room.

I've got an article on this sort of thing open in another tab, might be worth its own thread.

The impossible architecture of video games

There is a saying in architecture that no building is unbuildable, only unbuilt. Structures may be impossible in the here and now, but have the potential to exist given enough time or technological development: a futuristic cityscape, a spacefaring megastructure, the ruins of an alien civilisation. However, there are also buildings that defy the physical laws of space. It is not an issue that they could not exist, but that they should not. Their forms bend and warp in unthinkable ways; dream-like structures that push spatial logic to its breaking point.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-02-12-the-impossible-architecture-of-video-games

being cyborg on the chillwave continuum
 

sufi

lala
Wrt deLillo - well, if the way you want to resist capitalism is to be an individualist famous writer, of course you're going to get co-opted because capitalism fetishises the 'exceptional' individual. Plays right into its hands. You have to resist as part of the collective in order to avoid this logic - and the collective IS the machine.

So antihumanism could be seen, as someone has said upthread, as music/art from the perspective of the machine - from the perspective of the workers who are the machine, from our perspective (unless Jeff Bezos is lurking here) when we see ourselves at a macro-level, rather than from that well-worn (cynical?) romantic perspective of us as free beings that dominates pop culture. And maybe that's why antihumanism can feel so emotive even when it's anti-emotional. The world is antihuman.

Brilliant thread: Thirdform you have really brought the obscure tunes here. Hardly heard any of these, and 90% killer.
As a famous writer and exceptional individual deeply committed to the Kollective I belive that there is a feedback loop in which the E.I is the product to some extent and the pride of the collective and in return the EI feeds back into the collective and raises its collective level. They are part of the same machine and shouldn't be separated. Not everyone is DJ Hype but what's DJ Hype without jungle.

What a writer journalist does is take a conversation and make it hierarchical. So they become the mouthpiece for all these anonymous hidden inputs. What a forum does is return that vertical to the horizontal.
being cyborg on electro
 

sufi

lala
Typically replacement limbs are good for violence and for mechanical work but not good for loving. So it's a question of your priorities. A lovers touch or an arm with a selection of screwdrivers and bottle openers etc?
getting fed up with having laptop headphones trailing around all the time i'm wondering whether i could just superglue them to myself instead
 

sufi

lala
Typically replacement limbs are good for violence and for mechanical work but not good for loving. So it's a question of your priorities. A lovers touch or an arm with a selection of screwdrivers and bottle openers etc?
actually tbh when i was a small kid i got the end of 1 finger cut off in a horrific accident famous in bristol, @Mellsman was present

so i often wondered if i could maybe get a biro attached. or some sort of weapon

i was recently checking out a this website which has amazing replacement digits

and yeh i guess dildonics potential
 

sufi

lala
actually tbh when i was a small kid i got the end of 1 finger cut off in a horrific accident famous in bristol, @Mellsman was present

so i often wondered if i could maybe get a biro attached. or some sort of weapon

i was recently checking out a this website which has amazing replacement digits

and yeh i guess dildonics potential
why does this sound like a spambot?
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Not sure, now that you mention it. My guess is the endorsing nature of it, like you are just directing traffic toward this particular site. I would have ranked it on the higher end of bots I've encountered here though.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Like I said, I think I would approach bots as if they were real. Just as human-to-human dialogue can be a rich source of feedback, perhaps dialogue with bots could bring something new to the table, provide insights that may otherwise go overlooked or unilluminated.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Like if there was a section to this forum with exorbitant bot traffic, I'd consider becoming a local.

edit: that is, regardless of whether or not they would be dildonically enhanced.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
We could make elaborate polls to gauge the collective bot swarm, that higher dimensional entity. Perhaps someone would even be able to train them, suchh that they would appear when summoned, perhaps after some wait time to make it more realistic, and answer our queries. We could engage in a post-human sociology of them, a cultural study of bots. Maybe some of them will get better reaction scores than we do, given some certain training. Who knows?
 

sufi

lala
also
I think the big thing with these digitally mediated sexual experiences, these parasocial experiences, involves the locus of agency, a locus that once was housed in the body, but is gradually being abstracted.
The conscious organism being a physical machine of such complexity it can actually detect and exploit loopholes in its own wiring. A hastened evolution. "Wait, we don't need to actually be touching another body in order to regulate these chemicals. Pixels will do." etc.
 
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