The Narratives of Things

Each of us lives according to our own narratives of self. Various traditions of philosophy treat those narratives differently. Some will celebrate it, that if we think positive thoughts or visualize what we want, that it will come to fruition. These traditions will put thoughts front and center as the way to progress, all stemming from a Cartesian way of looking at the world where we literally are (that is, we exist) because we think. The most watered down version of this comes in pop philosophy/psychology that we often see celebrated by celebrities and talk show hosts. "The Secret," which basically says (spoilers) that if you visualize something hard enough and long enough (aka think about it enough) you will achieve it. Adherents will say that it's much more complex than that; but it really isn't.

Other traditions see thought as more of a peripheral aspect of existence. Thinking is a result of the specific structures of our brains, and the stimuli that our embodied brains perceive and process. All thoughts have causes; those causes are materially based. The thoughts we have are determined by those causes. That's not as bleak as it sounds, however, when one thinks of the myriad stimuli to which we are exposed on a daily basis. We have enough of those, in fact, to make us think that we have free will. Our narratives of self have causes, and are not self-generated. In other words, we are not the prime-movers of our actions, per-se. But just because our thoughts and actions have causes, that doesn't mean we can't and don't make choices. Those choices are determined by causes, but that doesn't negate volition (the ability to choose between the myriad options we have).

For those who have been following my blog and/or my research, you know that I take a philosophical approach that expands the above to include the physical environments in which the embodied mind finds itself, as well as the artifacts we use to negotiate and mediate that environment.

As I've been thinking a lot about, well, thinking, I find that I often fall back on my old training in the field of literature and literary theory. In fact, the first bridge I built from literary theory into philosophy was that we use narratives to understand the world and our place in it. We create narratives not just to explain the unknown, but to integrate ourselves into that world. Even if our narratives are ones of the solitary lupine nature (i.e. the lone wolf), it is a story of solitude. It becomes a narrative through which we understand our place. And, if we're not careful, these narratives can dictate how we will behave. I find it ironic that people who often flinch at the aforementioned implications of determinism are often themselves enmeshed in their own deterministic narratives. They feel themselves "destined" or "cursed" to be [insert emotional/financial/psychological/academic state here].

I think, however, that it is just as philosophically valid to look at "things" -- that is to say, actual physical objects -- with the same, if not more weight than the thoughts that define our narratives. What stories are we creating and telling ourselves through the things that we both passively find ourselves surrounded by and the things we actively surround ourselves with?

The temptation is to think about these objects as "traces" of ourselves; as markers of past achievements; mementos to remind us of events or periods in our lives. And yes, that is true, but in emphasizing that view, we don't think of the effect those objects have on us in the present. I do think, however, that we see glimmers of that when -- usually after a trauma of some kind, either the loss of a relationship, the death of a loved one, or the failure of some major project -- we suddenly decide it's time to redecorate our personal or professional spaces in some way. But we get an interesting shift in perspective if we ask ourselves -- in moments of calm (or at least non-trauma/panic) -- "how are these objects defining and supporting my current narrative of self? What story of self is this object, this space, this environment making possible?"

In a more philosophical mode, we can ask "How does my being supervene upon these physical objects?" Or, "How is my being brought about by the objects around me?"

Most would think that was a psychological issue: objects affect emotional responses. Of course they do. But oftentimes when we think that way, we are looking at the self as a static object. An existence rather than an exist-ing.

If we want to dig deeper into the idea of distributed cognition and the object-oriented-ontology I'm getting at here, we need to think of the self as a dynamic, ongoing process.

How do these objects constitute, intervene upon, determine, or otherwise affect the process by which my "existence" unfolds or manifests itself?

So, I'm not asking "what stories are we telling through the artifacts we use and the environments in which we use them in?" I'm asking: "How do these artifacts and environments constitute the meaning-making process through which these stories are told?"

At least I think I am ... or maybe it's just time to redecorate.

Mythic Singularities: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and (kind of) Love Transhumanism

... knowing the force and action of fire, water, air the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we might also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.  And this is a result to be desired, not only in order to the invention of an infinity of arts, by which we might be enabled to enjoy without any trouble the fruits of the earth, and all its comforts, but also and especially for the preservation of health, which is without doubt, of all the blessings of this life, the first and fundamental one; for the mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of the organs of the body, that if any means can ever be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, I believe that it is in medicine they must be sought for. It is true that the science of medicine, as it now exists, contains few things whose utility is very remarkable: but without any wish to depreciate it, I am confident that there is no one, even among those whose profession it is, who does not admit that all at present known in it is almost nothing in comparison of what remains to be discovered; and that we could free ourselves from an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind, and perhaps also even from the debility of age, if we had sufficiently ample knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies provided for us by nature.

- Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, 1637

As a critical posthumanist (with speculative leanings), I found myself always a little leary of transhumanism in general. Much has been written on the difference between the two, and one of the best and succinct explanations can be found in John Danaher's "Humanism, Transhumanism, and Speculative Posthumanism." But very briefly, I believe it boils down to a question of attention: a posthumanist, whether critical or speculative, focuses his or her attention on subjectivity; investigating, critiquing, and sometimes even rejecting the notion of a homuncular self or consciousness, and the assumption that the self is some kind of modular component of our embodiment. Being a critical posthumanist does makes me hyper-aware of the implications of Descartes' ideas presented above in relation to transhumanism. Admittedly, Danaher's statement "Critical posthumanists often scoff at certain transhumanist projects, like mind uploading, on the grounds that such projects implicitly assume the false Cartesian view" hit close to home, because I am guilty of the occasional scoff.

But there really is much more to transhumanism than sci-fi iterations of mind uploading and AIs taking over the world. Just like there is more to Descartes than his elevation, reification, and privileging of consciousness. From my critical posthumanist perspective, what has always been the hardest pill to swallow with Descartes wasn't necessarily the model of consciousness he proposed. It was the the way that model has been taken so literally -- as a fundamental fact -- that has been one of the deeper issues which drive me philosophically. But, as I've often told my students, there's more to Descartes than that. Examining Descartes's model as the metaphor it is gives us a more culturally based context for his work, and a better understanding of its underlying ethics. I think a similar approach can be applied to transhumanism, especially in light of some of the different positions articulated in Pellissier's "Transhumanism: There are [at least] ten different philosophical catwgories; which one(s) are you?"

Rene Descartes's faith in the ability of human reason to render us "lords and possessors of nature" through an "invention of an infinity of arts," is,  to my mind, one of the foundational philosophical beliefs of transhumanism. And his later statement, that "all at present known in it is almost nothing in comparison of what remains to be discovered" becomes its driving conceit: the promise that answers could be found which could, potentially, free humanity from "an infinity of maladies of bodies as well as of mind, and perhaps the debility of age." It follows that whatever humanity can create to help us unlock those secrets is thus a product of human reason. We create the things we need that help us to uncover "what remains to be discovered."

But this ode to human endeavor eclipses the point of those discoveries: "the preservation of health" which is "first and fundamental ... for the mind is so intimately dependent on the organs of the body, that if any means can ever be found to render men wiser and more ingenious ... I believe that it is in medicine that it should be sought for."

Descartes sees an easing of human suffering as one of the main objectives to scientific endeavor. But this aspect of his philosophy is often eclipsed by the seemingly infinite "secrets of nature" that science might uncover. As is the case with certain interpretations of the transhumanist movement, the promise of what can be learned often eclipses the reasons why we want to learn them.  And that promise can take on mythic properties. Even though progress is its own promise, a transhuman progress can become an eschatological one, caught between: a Scylla of extreme interpretations of "singularitarian" messianism and a Charybdis of  similarly extreme interpretations of "survivalist transhuman" immortality.  Both are characterized by governing mythos -- or set of beliefs -- that are technoprogressive by nature, but risk fundamentalism in practice, especially if we lose sight of a very important aspect of technoprogressivism itself:  "an insistence that technological progress needs to be wedded to, and depends on, political progress, and that neither are inevitable" (Hughes 2010. emphasis added). Critical awareness of the limits of transhumanism is similar to having a critical awareness of any functional myth. One does not have to take the Santa Claus or religious myths literally to celebrate Christmas; instead one can understand the very man-made meaning behind the holiday and the metaphors therein, and choose to express or follow that particular ethical framework accordingly, very much aware that it is an ethical framework that can be adjusted or rejected as needed.

Transhuman fundamentalism occurs when critical awareness that progress is not inevitable is replaced by an absolute faith and/or literal interpretation that -- either by human endeavor or via artificial intelligence -- technology will advance to a point where all of humanity's problems, including death, will be solved. Hughes points out this tension: "Today transhumanists are torn between their Enlightenment faith in inevitable progress toward posthuman transcension and utopian Singularities, and their rational awareness of the possibility that each new technology may have as many risks as benefits and that humanity may not have a future" (2010).  Transhuman fundamentalism characterized by uncritical inevitablism would interpret progress as "fact." That is to say, that progress will happen and is immanent. By reifying (and eventually deifying) progress,  transhuman fundamentalism would actually forfeit any claim to progress by severing it from its human origins. Like a god that is created by humans out of a very human need, but then whose origins are forgotten, progress stands as an entity separate from humanity, taking on a multitude of characteristics rendering it ubiquitous and omnipotent: progress can and will take place. It has and it always will, regardless of human existence; humanity can choose to unite with it, or find itself doomed.

Evidence for the inevitability of progress comes by way of pointing out specific scientific advancements and then falling back on speculation that x advancement will lead to y development, as outlined by Verdoux's "historical" critique of faith in progress, holding a "'progressionist illusion' that history is in fact a record of improvement" (2009). Kevin Warwick has used rat neurons as CPUs for his little rolling robots: clearly, we will be able to upload our minds. I think of this as a not-so-distant cousin of the intelligent design argument for the existence of God. Proponents point to complexity of various organic (and non-organic) systems as evidence that a designer of some kind must exist. Transhuman fundamentalist positions point to small (but significant) technological advancements as evidence that an AI will rise (Singularitarianism) or that death itself will be vanquished (Survivalist Transhumanism). It is important to note that neither position is in itself fundamentalist in nature. But I do think that these two particular frameworks lend themselves more easily to a fundamentalist interpretation, due to their more entrenched reliance on Cartesian subjectivity, enlightenment teleologies, and eschatological religious overtones.

Singularitarianism, according to Pellissier, "believes the transition to a posthuman will be a sudden event in the 'medium future' -- a Technological Singularity created by runaway machine superintelligence." Pushed to a fundamentalist extreme, the question for the singularitarian is: when the posthuman rapture happens, will we be saved by a techno-messiah, or burned by a technological antichrist?  Both arise by the force of their own wills. But if we look behind the curtain of the great and powerful singularity, we see a very human teleology. The technology from which the singularity is born is the product of human effort. Subconsciously, the singularity is not so much a warning as it is a speculative indulgence of the power of human progress: the creation of consciousness in a machine. And though singularitarianism may call it "machine consciousness," the implication that such an intelligence would "choose" to either help or hinder humanity always already infers a very anthropomorphic consciousness. Furthermore, we will arrive at this moment via some major scientific advancement that always seems to be between 20 and 100 years away, such as "computronium," or programmable matter. This molecularly-engineered material, according to more Kurzweilian perspectives, will allow us to convert parts of the universe into cosmic supercomputers which will solve our problems for us and unlock even more secrets to the universe. While the idea of programmable matter is not necessarily unrealistic, its mythical qualities (somewhere between a kind of "singularity adamantium" and "philosopher's techno-stone"), promise the transubstantiation of matter toward unlimited, cosmic computing, thus opening up even more possibilities for progress. The "promise" is for progress itself, that unlocking certain mysteries will provide an infinite amount of new mysteries to be solved.

Survivalist Transhumanism can take a take a similar path in terms of technological inevitabilism, but pushed toward a fundamentalist extreme, awaits a more Nietzschean posthuman rapture.  According to Pellissier, Survivalist Transhumanism "espouses radical life extension as the most important goal of transhumanism." In general, the movement seems to be awaiting advancements in human augmentation which are always already just out of reach but will (eventually) overcome death and allow the self (whether bioengineered or uploaded to a new material -- or immaterial -- substrate) to survive indefinitely. Survivalist transhumanism with a more fundamentalist flavor would push to bring the Nietzschean Ubermensch into being -- literally -- despite the fact that Nietzsche's Ubermensch functions as an ideal toward which humans should strive.  He functions as a metaphor for living one's life fully, not subject to a "slave morality" that is governed by fear and placing one's trust in mythological constructions treated as real artifacts. Even more ironic is the fact that Ubermensch is not immortal and is at peace with his immanent death. Literal interpretations of the Ubermensch would characterize the master-morality human as overcoming mortality itself, since death is the ultimate check on the individual's development. Living forever, from a more fundamentalist perspective, would provide infinite time to uncover infinite possibilities and thus make infinite progress. Think of all the things we could do, build, and discover, some might say. I agree. Immortality would give us time -- literally.  Without the horizon of death as a parameter of our lives, we would -- eventually -- overcome a way of looking at the universe that has been a defining characteristic of humanity since the first species of hominids with the capacity to speculate pondered death.

But in that speculation is also a promise. The promise that conquering death would allow us to reap the fruits of the inevitable and inexorable progression of technology. Like a child who really wants to "stay up late," there is a curiosity about what happens after humanity's bedtime. Is the darkness outside her window any different after bedtime than it is at 9pm? What lies beyond the boundaries of late-night broadcast television? How far beyond can she push until she reaches the loops of infomercials, or the re-runs of the shows that were on hours prior?  And years later, when she pulls her first all-nighter, and she sees the darkness ebb and the dawn slowly but surely rise just barely within her perception, what will she have learned?

It's not that the darkness holds unknown things. To her, it promises things to be known. She doesn't know what she will discover there until she goes through it. Immortality and death metaphorically function in the same way: Those who believe that immortality is possible via radical life extension believe that the real benefits of immortality will show themselves once immortality is reached and we have the proper perspective from which to know the world differently. To me, this sounds a lot like Heaven: We don't know what's there but we know it's really, really good. In the words of Laurie Anderson: "Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better." A survivalist transhuman fundamentalist version might read something like "Being immortal is exactly like being mortal, only much, much better."

Does this mean we should scoff at the idea of radical life extension? At the singularity and its computronium wonderfulness? Absolutely not. But the technoprogressivism at the heart of  transhumanism need not be so literal. When one understands a myth as that -- a set of governing beliefs -- transhumanism itself can stay true to the often-eclipsed aspect of its Cartesian, enlightenment roots: the easing of human suffering. If we look at transhumanism as a functional myth, adhering to its core technoprogressive foundations, not only do we have a potential model for human progress, but we also have an ethical structure by which to advance that movement. The diversity of transhuman views provides several different paths of progress.

Transhumanism has at its core a technoprogressivism that even critical posthumanism like me can get behind. If I am a technoprogressivist, then I do believe in certain aspects of the promise of technology. I do believe that humanity has the capacity to better itself and do incredible things through technological means. Furthermore, I do feel that we are in the infancy of our knowledge of how technological systems are to be responsibly used.  It is a technoprogressivist's responsibility to mitigate a myopic visions of the future -- including those visions that uncritically mythologize the singularity or immortality itself as an inevitability.

To me it becomes a question of exactly what the transhumanist him or herself is looking for from technology, and how he or she sees conceptualizes the "human" in those scenarios. The reason I still call myself a posthumanist is because I think that we have yet to truly free ourselves of antiquated notions of subjectivity itself. The singularity to me seems as if it will always be a Cartesian one. A "thing that thinks" and is aware of itself thinking and therefore is sentient. Perhaps the reasons why we have not reached a singularity yet is because we're approaching the subject and volition from the wrong direction.

To a lesser extent, I think that immortality narratives are mired in re-hashed religious eschatologies where "heaven" is simply replaced with "immortality." As for radical life extension, what are we trying to extend? Are we tying "life" to the ability to simply being aware of ourselves being aware that we are alive? Or are we looking at the quality of the extended life we might achieve? I do think that we may extend the human lifespan to well over a century. What will be the costs? And what will be the benefits?  Life extension is not the same as life enrichment. Overcoming death is not the same as overcoming suffering. If we can combat disease, and mitigate the physical and mental degradation which characterize aging, thus leading to an extended life-span free of pain and mental deterioration, then so be it.  However, easing suffering and living forever are two very different things. Some might say that the easing of suffering is simply "understood" within the overall goals of immortality, but I don't think it is.

Given all of the different positions outlined in Pellissier's article, "cosmopolitan transhumanism" seems to make the most sense to me. Coined by Steven Umbrello, this category combines the philosophical movement of cosmopolitanism with transhumanism, creating a technoprogressive philosophy that can "increase empathy, compassion, and the univide progress of humanity to become something greater than it currently is. The exponential advancement of technology is relentless, it can prove to be either destructive or beneficial to the human race." This advancement can only be achieved, Umbrello maintains, via an abandonment of "nationalistic, patriotic, and geopolitical allegiances in favor [of] global citizenship that fosters cooperation and mutually beneficial progress."

Under that classification, I can call myself a transhumanist. A commitment to  enriching life rather than simply creating it (as an AI) or extending it (via radical life extension) should ethically shape the leading edge of a technoprogressive movement, if only to break a potential cycle of polemics and politicization internal and external to transhumanism itself. Perhaps I've read too many comic books and have too much of a love for superheroes, but in today's political and cultural climate, a radical position on either side can unfortunately create an opposite. If technoprogressivism rises under  fundamentalist singularitarian or survivalist transhuman banners, equally passionate luddite, anti-technological positions could potentially rise and do real damage. Speaking as a US citizen, I am constantly aghast at the overall ignorance that people have toward science and the ways in which the very concept of "scientific theory" and the very definition of what a "fact" is has been skewed and distorted. If we have groups of the population who still believe that vaccines cause autism or don't believe in evolution, do we really think that a movement toward an artificial general intelligence will be taken well?

Transhumanism, specifically the cosmopolitan kind, provides a needed balance of progress and awareness. We can and should strive toward aspects of singularitarianism and survivalist transhumanism, but as the metaphors and ideals they actually are.


References:

Anderson, Laurie. "Language is a Virus" Home of the Brave (1986)

Descartes, Rene. 1637. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences.

Hughes, James. 2010. "Problems of Transhumanism: Belief in Progress vs. Rational Uncertainty." (IEET.org).

Pellissier, Hank. 2015. "Transhumanism: There Are [at Least] Ten Different Philosophical Categories; Which One(s) Are you?" (IEET.org)

Verdoux, Philippe. 2009. "Transhumanism, Progress and the Future."  Journal of Evolution and Technology 20(2):49-69.

The Droids We're Looking For

I've been a fan of Cynthia Breazeal for well over a decade, and have watched her research evolve from her early doctoral work with Kismet, to her current work as the creator of JIBO and the founder of JIBO, inc. What I found so interesting about Dr. Breazeal was her commitment to creating not just artificial intelligence, but a robot which people could interact with in a fashion similar to human beings, but not exactly like human beings. In her book, Designing Sociable Robots, she provides an anecdote as to what inspired her to get involved with artificial intelligence and robots in the first place: Star Wars. At first I thought this resonated with me simply because she and I had the same Gen X contextual basis. I was five when the first Star Wars film was released in 1977, and it was the technology (the spaceships and especially the droids) that got me hooked. But upon further thought, I realized that Breazeal's love of Star Wars seems to have inspired her work in another, more subtle way.  The interactions that humans have with droids in the Star Wars universe isn't exactly egalitarian. That is to say, humans don't see the droids around them as equals. In fact, the humans', and just about any of the organic, anthropomorphic aliens' interactions with droids is very much based on the function of the droids themselves.

For example, R2D2, being an "astromech" droid, is more of a utilitarian repair droid. It understands language, but does not have a language that humans can readily understand without practice or an interpreter. But even not knowing the chirps and beeps, the tone of them gives us a general idea of mood. We have similar examples of this in WALL-E, where the titular robot conveys emotion via nonverbal communication and "facial expressions," even though he really doesn't have a face, per se. But, getting back to Star Wars, if we think about how other characters interact with droids, we see a very calculated yet unstated hierarchy. The droids are very much considered property, are turned on and off at will, and are very "domain specific." In fact, it is implied that objects like ships (the Death Star, the Millennium Falcon), and even things like moisture evaporators on Tatooine have an embedded AI with which higher functioning droids like R2D2 can communicate with, control, and -- as is the function of C3PO -- translate. Granted, there are droids built as soldiers, bodyguards, and assassins, but it takes a deep plunge into fan fiction and the tenuously "expanded" Star Wars universe to find an example or two of droids that went "rogue" and acted on their own behalf, becoming bounty hunters and I'm sure at some point wanting a revolution of some sort. 

Trips into Star Wars fandom aside, the basic premise and taxonomy of the droids in Star Wars seems to represent a more realistic and pragmatic evolution of AI and AI related technologies (sans the sentient assassins, of course). If we make a conscious effort to think, mindfully, about artificial intelligence, rather than let our imaginations run away with us, thus bestowing our human ontology onto them, then the prospect of AI is not quite as dramatic, scary, or technologically romantic as we may think. 

I mean, think, really think about what you want your technology to do. How do you really want to interact with your phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, car, house, etc?  Chances are, most responses orbit around the idea of the technology being more intuitive. In that context, it implies a smooth interface. An intuitive operating system implies that the user can quickly figure out how it works without too much help. The more quickly a person can adapt to the interface or the 'rules of use' of the object, the more intuitive that interface is. When I think back to the use of this word, however, it has an interesting kind of dual standing. That is to say, at the dawn of the intuitive interface (the first Macintosh computer, and then later iterations of Windows), intuitive implied that the user was able to intuit how the OS worked. In today's landscape, the connotation of the term has expanded to the interface itself. How does the interface predict how we might use it based on a certain context. If you sign into Google and allow it to know your location, the searches become more contextually based, especially when it also knows your search history. Search engines, Amazon, Pandora, etc, all have been slowly expanding the intuitive capacities of their software, meaning that, if designed well, these apps can predict what we want, making it seem like they knew what we were looking for before we did. In that context, 'intuitive' refers to the app, website, or search engine itself. As in, Pandora intuits what I want based on my likes, skips, time spent on songs, and even time of day, season, and location.

Regardless, whether or not intuitive refers to the user, the machine, or a blend of both, in today's technological culture, we want to be able to interact with our artifacts and operating system in a way that seems more natural than entering clunky commands. For example, I would love to be able to pick up my phone, and say to it, "Okay Galaxy, block all messages except the ones from my wife, and alert me if an email from [student A], [colleague b], or [editor c] come in." 

This is a relatively simple command that can be accomplished partially by voice commands today, but not in one shot. In other words, on some more advanced smartphones, I can parse out the commands and the phone would enact them, but it would mean unnatural and time-consuming pauses. Another example would be with your desktop or classroom technology "Okay computer, pull up today's document on screen A and Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" video on screen B, and transfer controls to mine and [TA's] tablet." Or, if we want to be even more creative, when a student has a question, "Computer, display [student's] screen onto screen A." 

Now, to me, these scenarios sound wonderful. But, sadly, there isn't yet a consumer-level AI that can accomplish these sorts of tasks, because while there may be products that claim to "learn" our habits and become accustomed to our speech patterns, there is still a fissure between how we would interact with a human intelligence and a machine. That is to say, if there was a "person" behind the screen -- or controlling your car, or your house -- how would you ask it to do what you wanted? How would you interact with a "real" personal assistant who was controlling your devices and surrounding technology? 

The same holds true for a more integrated "assistant" technology such as smart homes. These kinds of technology can do some incredible things, but they always require at least some kind of initial setup that can be time-consuming and often not very flexible. Imagine the first set up as more of an interview than a programming session:

"So what are your usual habits?"

"I tend to come home around five or six."

"Does that tend to change? I can automatically set the house to heat up for your arrival or can wait until you alert me."

"Ummmm ... it tends to be that time. Let's go with it."

"No problem. We can always change it. I can also track your times and let you know if there's a more efficient alternative." 

"Ooooh ... that's creepy. No thanks." 

"Okay. Tracking's out. I don't want to come across as creepy. Is there anything else you'd like to set right now? Lighting? Music? Or a list of things I can look after if you wish?"
"I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not exactly sure what you can do."
"How about we watch a YouTube demo together? You can let me know what looks good to you and then we can build from there."
"That's a great idea."

This sounds more like Samantha from Spike Jonze's Her than anything else, which is why I think that particular film is one of the most helpful when it comes to both practical speculation of how AI could develop, as well as what we'd most likely use it for.

The difference between Her's Samantha and what would probably be the more realistic version of it in the future would be a hard limit on just how smart such an AI could get. In the film, Samantha (and all the other AIs that comprise the OS of which she is an iteration), evolves and becomes smarter. She not only learns the ins and outs of Theodore's everyday habits, relationships, and psyche, but she seeks out other possibilities for development -- including reaching out to other operating systems and the AIs they create (i.e. the re-created consciousness of philosopher Alan Watts). This, narratively, allows for a dramatic, romantic tension between Theodore and Samantha, which builds until Sarah and the other AIs evolve beyond human discourse:

It's like I'm reading a book... and it's a book I deeply love. But I'm reading it slowly now. So the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you... and the words of our story... but it's in this endless space between the words that I'm finding myself now. It's a place that's not of the physical world. It's where everything else is that I didn't even know existed. I love you so much. But this is where I am now. And this is who I am now. And I need you to let me go. As much as I want to, I can't live in your book any more.

This is a recurrent trope in many AI narratives: that the AI will evolve at an accelerated rate, usually toward an understanding that it is far superior to its human creators, causing to "move on" -- as is the case with Samantha and several Star Trek plots, or to deem humanity inferior but still a threat -- similar to an infestation -- that will get in the way of its development.

But, as I've been exploring more scholarship regarding real-world AI development, and various theories of posthuman ethics, it's a safe bet to say that such development would be impossible without a human being purposefully designing an AI without a limitation to its learning capabilities. That is to say, realistic, science-based, theoretical and practical development of AIs are more akin to animal husbandry and genetic engineering than a more Aristotelian/Thomasian "prime mover," in which a human creator designs, builds, and enables an AI embedded with a primary teleology.

Although it may sound slightly off-putting, AIs will not be created and initiated as much as they will be bred and engineered. Imagine being able to breed the perfect dog or cat for a particular owner (and I use the term owner purposefully): the breed could be more playful, docile, ferocious, loyal, etc according to the needs of the owner. Yes, we've been doing that for thousands of years, with plenty of different breeds of dogs and cats, all of which were -- at some point -- bred for specific purposes.

Now imagine being able to manipulate certain characteristics of that particular dog on the fly. That is to say, "adjust" the characteristics of that particular dog as needed, on a genetic level. So, if a family is expecting their first child, one could go to the genetic vet who could quickly and painlessly alter the dog's genetic code to suppress certain behaviors and bring forth others. With only a little bit of training, those characteristics could then be brought forward. That's where the work of neurophysiologist and researcher Danko Nikolić comes in, and it comprised the bulk of my summer research.

As I understand it, the latter point, the genetic manipulation part, that is relatively easy and something which cyberneticists do with current AI. It's the former -- the breeding in and out of certain characteristics -- that is a new aspect in speculative cybernetics. Imagine AIs who were bred to perform certain tasks, or to interact with humans. Of course, this wouldn't consist of breeding in the biological sense. If we use a kind of personal assistant AI as an example, the "breeding" of that AI consists of a series of interactions with humans in what Nikolić calls an "AI Kindergarten." Like children in school, the theory is that AIs would learn the nuances of social interactions. After a session or lesson is complete, the collective data would be analyzed by human operators, potentially adjusted, and then reintegrated into the AIs via a period of simulation (think of it is AI REM sleep). This process would continue until that AI had reached a level of interaction high enough for interaction with an untrained user. Aside from his AI kindergarten, the thing that makes Nikolić's work stand out to me is that he foresees "domain-specificity" in such AI Kindergartens. That is to say, there would be different AIs for different situations. Some would be bred for factory work, others for health care and elderly assistance, and still others for personal assistant types of things.

So, how do you feel about that? I don't ask the question lightly. I mean it literally. How do you feel about the prospect of breeding characteristics into (and perhaps out of) artificially intelligent agents? I think your reaction would show your dominant AI functional mythology. It would also evidence your underlying philosophical, ethical, and psychological leanings. I am purposely not presenting examples of each reaction (i.e. thinking this was a good or bad idea) so as to not influence the reader's own analysis.

Now take that opinion at which you've arrived, and think, what assumption were you making about the nature of this object's "awareness," because I'm pretty sure that people's opinions of this stuff will be rooted in the presence or absence of one particular philosophical idea: free will. Whatever feeling you came to, it would be based on the presence or absence of the opinion that an AI either has free will or doesn't. If AI has free will, then being bred to serve seems to be a not so good idea. Even IF the AI seemingly "wanted" to clean you house ... was literally bred to clean your house ... you'd still get that icky feeling as years of learning about slavery, eugenics, and caste systems suddenly kicked in.  And even if we could get over the more serious cultural implications, having something or someone that wants to do the things we don't is just, well, creepy.

If AI didn't have free will, then it's a no-brainer, right? It's just a fancy Roomba that's slightly more anthropomorphic, talks to me, analyzes the topology of dirt around my home and then figures out the best way to clean it ... choosing where to start, prioritizing rooms, adjusting according to the environment and my direction, and generally analyzing the entire situation and acting accordingly as it so chooses ... damn.

And suddenly this becomes a tough one, doesn't it? Especially if you really want that fancy Roomba.

It's tough because, culturally, we associate free will with the capacity to do all of the things I mentioned above. Analysis, symbolic thinking, prioritizing, and making choices based on that information seems to tick all the boxes. And as I've said in my previous blog posts, I believe that we get instinctively defensive about free will. After a summer's worth of research, I think I know why. Almost all of the things I just mentioned, analysis, prioritizing, and making choices based on gathered information are things that machines already do, and have done for quite some time. It's the "symbolic thinking" thing that has always gotten me stumped.

Perhaps it's my academic upbringing that started out primarily in literature and literary theory, where representation and representative thought is a cornerstone that provides both the support AND the target for so many theories of how we express our ideas. We assume that a "thing that thinks" has an analogous representation of the world around it somewhere inside of itself -- inside its mind. For me, even though I knew enough about biology and neuroscience to know that there isn't some kind of specific repository of images and representations of sensory data within the brain itself, but that it was akin to a translation of information. But even then, I realized that I was thinking about representation more from a literary and communication standpoint than a cybernetic one. I was thinking in terms of an inner and outer world -- that there was a one-for-one representation, albeit a compressed one, in our minds of the world around us.

But this isn't how the mind actually works. Memory is not representative. It is, instead, reconstructive. I hadn't kept up with that specific research since my dissertation days, but as my my interest in artificial intelligence and distributed cognition expanded, some heavy reading over the summer in the field of cybernetics helped to bring me up to speed (I won't go into all the details here because I'm working on an article about this right now. You know, spoilers). But I will say that after reading Nikolić and Francis Heylighen, I started thinking about memory, cognition, and mindedness in much interesting ways. Suffice to say, think of memory not as distinctly stored events, but the rules by which to mentally reconstruct those events. That idea was a missing piece of a larger puzzle for me, which allowed a very distinct turn in my thinking.

It is this reconceptualization of the "content" of thought that is key in creating artificial intelligences which can adapt to any situation within a given domain. It's domain specificity that will allow for practical AI to become woven into the fabric of our lives, not as equals or superiors, but not as simple artifacts or tools, either. They will be something in between. Nor will it be a "revolution" or "singularity," Instead, it will slide into the current of our cultural lifeworld in the way that email, texting, videoconferencing, WiFi, Roombas, and self-parking cars have: a novelty at first, the practicality of which is eventually proven through use. Of course, there will be little leaps here and there. Improved design of servos, hydraulics, and balance control systems; upgrades in bendable displays; increased connectivity and internet speeds -- mini-revolutions in each will all contribute to the creating of AI artifacts which themselves will  be firmly embedded in a broader internet of things. Concurrently, small leaps in software development in the realm of AI algorithms (such as Nikolić practopoietic systems) will allow for more natural interfaces and user experiences.

That's why I think the future of robots and AIs will look more like the varied droids of star wars than the replicants of Blade Runner or Lt. Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Actually, I think the only robots that will look close to human will be "sexbots" (as the name implies, robots provided to give sexual gratification). And even these will begin to look less human as cultural aesthetics shift. Companion robots at home for the elderly will not look human either, because the generation that will actually being served by them hasn't been born yet, or at least with a few exceptions is too young to be reading this blog. They'd be more disturbed by being carried around or assisted by robots that look like humans than they would be something that looked more artificial.

That being said, there really isn't any way to predict exactly how the integration of AIs in the technoculture will unfold. But I do think that as more of our artifacts become deemed "smart," we will find ourselves more apt to accept, and even expect, domain-specific AIs to be a part of our everyday lives. We'll grow attached to them in a unique way: probably on a level between a car we really, really like and a pet we love. Some people endlessly tinker with their cars and spend a lot of time keeping them clean, highly-tuned, and in perfect condition. Others drive them into the ground and then get another used car and drive that into the ground. Some people are dog or cat people, and don't feel complete without an animal in the house. Others find them to be too much trouble. And still others become "crazy cat people" or hoard dogs. Our AIs will be somewhere in that spectrum, I believe, and our relationship with them will be similar to our relationships with cars, pets, and smart phones.

As for the possibility of AIs becoming aware (as in, sentient) of their status between car and pet, well, if Nikolić's theory has any traction (and I think it does), then they'll never be truly "aware" of their place, because AIs will be bred away from any potential development of anthropomorphic version of free will, thus keeping them "not quite human."

Although I'm sure that when we get there, we'll wish that our machines could be just a little smarter, a little more intuitive, and a little more useful. And we'll keep hoping that the next generation of AIs will finally be the droids we're looking for.

On cities, mountains, and hoarding.

I wrote this entry over two days while I was on my semester break in Denver.  I was sitting in a Starbuck's, amid the traffic noise, reading through articles to help with a revision of an anthology chapter I was working on. I found myself thinking again about place and topology. And I came to an unsurprising, but somewhat disappointing conclusion: I think better in cities. My mind can make high-end and productive connections so much more quickly when I'm surrounded by a more urban landscape. I find my thoughts more centered, more precise, and less encumbered by counter-productive meanderings.

The reason this is "disappointing" is a more personal one. For an academic who lives in the middle of the mountains, to know that my best thinking doesn't happen in the place where I live is concerning. What would I be like if I taught in an institution located someplace else? How different would my teaching be? I already know that my research would be more productive. So yes, there is something a little concerning there.

But academically, and in the scope of the chapter I'm working on, this is really par for the course in terms of the topological nature of distributed cognition. This also helps to prove an important point that I think a lot of scholars working on "thing theory" may be overlooking. It's quite tempting to look at the types of thoughts analogously with the types of spaces we're occupying at that moment. That is to say, it seems to make sense that if we're in someplace that is quiet, serene, and pastoral, that our thoughts should be similar. But think for a moment about people who visit places that are serene and quiet and find themselves even more stressed and agitated than they would be if they were in their more "native" environment. For me, being in downtown Denver doesn't give me more "cosmopolitan" thoughts. More accurately, the downtown atmosphere seems to match up to, and be more conducive to, a more native modality of thought. That is to say, i can concentrate on things more easily. I can sustain deeper, more complex thought for a longer period of time. At least -- and this is a very important caveat -- it seems that I can. It feels like that's the case. I feel more "me." It would be interesting to perform a more formalized study using various memory and concentration tasks. Perhaps in May.

In terms of the chapter I'm working on, however, I think it's important to move beyond what I mentioned above, and move away from characterizing types of thoughts per se and instead concentrate on the specific thought process that brings forth a specific self-ing one's specific lebesnwelt. Actually, a more accurate way to put it would to simply say "brings forth a particular, individual lebenswelt."

So, let's take the cultural construction of hoarders on reality television, for example. In most of the shows I've seen, the hoarders themselves seem to fall into two categories: 1) the hoarder who has come to the conclusion him or herself that he or she can no longer live the way in which they are living; or 2) the hoarder who has been thrust into an intervention due to some outside circumstance (i.e. a health/fire scare where rescuers could not get into the dwelling in a timely fashion; or a local municipality is threatening to condemn the property due to neighbors' complaints). In the former case, the hoarder is more self-aware and knows that how they are living is -- within the larger cultural framework -- "wrong." Even if they don't see their existence as uncomfortable or unsanitary, they have had some kind of insight or interaction that tells them that their own sense of "home" or "comfort" is somehow sociopathic. In the latter case, however, one can usually see a complete lack of awareness on the part of the hoarder that what they are doing is "wrong," "unhealthy," "sick," or "crazy." In fact, interventions for these hoarders have an added facet of difficulty, in that the hoarder fully and actively works against the team's efforts to help them clean things up.

But in both cases, there is a disconnect between the perception of it being wrong in terms of how "society" sees the issue and what the hoarder is actually feeling. That is to say, the hoarder feels at home in his or her hoard. It feels right to put more things in the home. The squalor and decomposing matter around them doesn't affect them in the ways it does an outsider. Yet, the hoarder is told that it is wrong and feels a certain kind of socially-instituted shame about their condition. And I'm sure that much of that is engineered as well by the reality television industry itself. If we were to really think about it, in many cases, the thing that separates a hoarder from a collector is socioeconomic standing and/or the perception of a culturally-constructed notion of "squalor." The millionaire who owns multiples of the same car, or who has a facility filled with "collections" is simply that, a collector -- probably because he or she can afford to keep the collection in perfect condition -- sans mummified animal carcases and rodent droppings.

But, in terms of the hoard itself, for whatever psychological reason, the hoard is intrinsically related to a sense of self and well-being. The stress from the removal of the hoard comes from the breakdown of that self and well-being. The hoarder's own habits and highly personal and protected "being" is suddenly held under scrutiny, and deemed "abnormal." Shame and/or resistance follows. Removal of the hoard becomes a highly stressful enterprise, causing the hoarder to often just shut down as the hoard is removed, or to actively thwart the efforts of the removal team. As viewers, this is where we often feel the most sense of superiority and when we get to judge the hoarder as being "crazy" or pity the mental illness that brings them there. However, we might be able to find a bit more compassion if we found ourselves having to voluntarily remove one of our own limbs. The "oneness" of our physical bodies is, in most cases, intrinsic to our senses of self. For psychological reasons, the sense of that bodily oneness for hoarders -- pathologically -- is more acutely distributed among the hoard.

I am hesitant, though, to put too much credence in the way in which reality television portrays the hoarder. That being said, the fact that the situation is specifically engineered by the producers of the show to bring about as much "drama" as possible, it is the very fact that the situation is so artificial that makes it compelling and useful to look at the role of the hoard. To present the hoarders' living situation in such an artificial, constructed manner -- constructed for consumption by an audience -- further highlights its pathology through multiple frames.

This entry has spanned two days. And now I find myself sitting in the same spot in the same Starbucks, facing a 4 hour drive back to the mountains. As I drive back over snow covered mountain passes, I probably won't be able to keep track of the shifts in the modality of my thinking. I'll just know that when I sit at my desk at home and look out over the breathtaking landscape, that something will be missing.

Aokigahara Forest, Part 3: Empty Spaces and Pieces of Mind

[This is the final installment of the Aokigahara posts]

"Studying how people co-exist with nature is part of environmental research.  I was curious why people kill themselves in such a beautiful forest.  I still haven't found an answer to that."

Sometimes my literary theorist upbringing can really do me a disservice.  I was initially going to jump all over this statement and say that Hayano is actually not looking to see how people co-exist, simply because he is finding the things that seem to not belong to nature.  After all, it is the objects themselves which lead Hayano either to  decomposing corpses (which, as per the end of the video, are transformed into objects or markers of pity, "Sometimes I feel sorry for them"), or to nothing.  But even if nothing is found, Hayano populates the empty space with a narrative of what might have happened.  By no means am I faulting him for this, or even criticizing him for it in an academically snarky way.  On the contrary, this is what humans do.  This is how our brains operate.  And I believe that this narrative-making is actually the manifestation of a truly human instinct. All living things have a survival instinct.  But if we're going to really figure out what makes human specifically human, it would be our unique way of creating narratives (whether literary as in the creation of myths, or scientific in the creation of theories and postulates).  I also think that the way in which humans utilize objects is also an aspect of that narrative.

What Hayano is studying is our co-existence with nature, and, by his own admission, he cannot seem to rectify the beauty of the forest with what he sees as the ugliness of decomposition.  Instinctively, we should see decomposition as ugly: decomposing corpses are toxic and can pollute water and food supplies.  They can attract vermin and other scavengers which are detrimental to health.  Yet, one of the ongoing markers of "humanity" or at least advanced thought, has been ritualized burial.  And what is ritualized burial but an attempt to re-integrate the body with the earth, and simultaneously ameliorate a sense of loss.  The two are not diametrically opposed.  We memorialize the dead, as a way to simultaneously remember (bring to mind) and forget (return the body to the earth, and mythically, return the soul to whence it came, or liberate the life-force).  But we don't really want to forget,  do we?  We need that act of burial to mark an end, to find closure, and to leave a remnant behind which can focus our memories when we need them to be focused.

Now, let's think of this in more posthuman terms.  To circumvent the deleterious effects of decomposition, we find elaborate ways to either preserve or dispose of the dead.  Whether we choose a "green" burial and commit the body naked into a pit and foster decomposition; or we burn it to ash, make the ash into a diamond, and wear it around or necks; or if we mummify the dead to be unearthed millenia later and put on display in a museum, they are all, essentially, the same action:  a reintegration into the landscape as object, and an integration of loss into the conceptual landscape of self.  Mourning is a reconstitution of self in light of an absence.  Instinctively, I want to jump to the emotional/affective loss.  But I'm going to resist that urge again and focus on the physical loss.

The closer I am to the person who has died, the more likely their physical presence is attached to the idea of them.  In fact, I can actually get a visceral response when I think about the people whom I love the most simply not being there physically.  In the topography of everyday life, the physical presence of others around us is more important, I believe, than even emotional connection.  I think that existentialism may have done us a disservice in that it has elevated the concept of the consciousness to a point where it becomes unduly synonymous with the emotional, intellectual, and conceptual self.  We become so focused on getting over a loss on a conceptual level, that the sheer weight of physical absence is overlooked.  If thinking, then, is truly distributed over the specific topological spaces we occupy (as per Andy Clark's work), then the physical absence of a person with whom we've shared a specific space would have a profound effect on the mechanism of thinking itself.  The process of cognition would occur with a major piece missing, literally.  One would be thinking with a piece of his or her mind missing.

One last bit from Hayano to bring this home:

 "I think the way we live in society these days has become more complicated.  Face-to-face communication used to be vital, but now we can live our lives being online all day.  However, the truth of the matter is we still need to see each other's faces, read their expressions, hear their voices, so we can fully understand their emotions.  To coexist."

To some extent, every physical object that constitutes our immediate, regular environments is a part of the thinking self -- literally.  A truly distributed cognition system consists of the biological brain, body, and physical objects within a person's specific living environment.  One can say that the machine through which one "co-exists" with others virtually also makes up part of that cognition system, but somehow, that virtual presence is qualitatively different than having a face-to-face, "real life" interaction with someone.  A distributed cognition might explain why an online, virtual presence "just isn't the same" as the "live" alternative.

Aokigahara, and the suicides therein, gives us an albeit extreme way to recharacterize the lebenswelt  (or life-world: our lived experience in our specific, individual space and time).  I don't pretend to try to get into the minds or the inherent anguish these individuals have experienced.  But as someone familiar with the impact of loss (especially the kind involved with suicide), it is the intricacies of the physicality of loss which often remain unexplored or de-emphasized.  If we miss out on the role of physicality in the tragedy of death, we'd be even less inclined to see the role it has in our everyday interaction with the world around us.

Aokigahara Forest, Part 2: Vitally Active Debris

I don't want to get too hung up in terms of rendering people as "debris" as much as I do elevating the "debris"  -- which would mean elevating all of that which is left behind in the suicide forest on an -- and I have to take a deep breath when I write this -- equal ontological footing as humans.  But I want to do this hypothetically, as a thought experiment.  What if we were to look at those non-human objects which were left behind with the same ontological weight as human beings?  It's not easy to do, unless we begin by thinking in terms of agency first.  Can we possibly think of those objects as having the same agency as the humans who left them?

One way to do this is to follow Jane Bennett's lead in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, and think of the role that "vitality" plays in how human beings separate themselves from other objects. In her book, Bennett calls for a reconceptualization of what we tend to consider inanimate matter into something with more agency -- to think "beyond the life-matter binary" (Kindle location 422 of 2417).  As much as I enjoyed Bennett's book, trying to find a solid definition of "vitality" or the "vibrancy" of which she speaks is difficult; but I do not think that's necessarily her fault.  To think about what is traditionally thought of as inanimate matter (or objects, or instrumental technology) on equal ontological footing with the human subjectivity which "knows," "experiences," or "utilizes" such matter is intrinsically counter-intuitive.  It's not easy to do, and less easy to explain.  But I think the following section sets up some parameters, and helps us to at least figure out a sense of what she's getting at:

"Why advocate the vitality of matter?  Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.  It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.  These material powers, which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, in any case call for our attentiveness, or even "respect" ... The figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter may be of the impediments to the emergence of a more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption."  (Kindle location 36 of 2417).  

I chose the quote above because it stands in contrast to the objects we're seeing in Aokigahara:  Those objects seem to be poignant reminders of life.  But if we think about the objects which the individuals have left behind, they themselves would seem, by traditional standards, to lack a certain "vitality."  In fact, the only way they do gain some kind of "life" is by another living witness's granting of agency upon them.  In other words, a person such as Hayano comes across an object; the object is granted a kind of subsidiary vitality via the connection (by another) to its imagined "owner" (i.e. human agent).  The vitality of the object seems contingent upon human subjectivity.  It only means something if there is a human witness there to give it such a meaning.   But, from an alternative -- but not opposite or reciprocal --  view, the object itself does have a real impact on the vitality or agency of the human.  That is to say, my instinct here is to flip the sentence rhetorically and say 'what if  human subjectivity were contingent upon the vitality of the object?'  But in doing that I'm still kind of stashing a little human ontological nugget into the object itself:  "vitality of the object" does nothing for the present discussion, because "vitality" here still has human connotations.  It is difficult to think of vitality any other way than in human terms.  So "vitality of the object" simply means "object with human agency projected onto it."

But, a slight tweak may get us on the right path.  Perhaps, "what if the vitality of human subjectivity were contingent upon the object?"  To achieve what Bennett calls for, I believe that "vitality" must always be associated with humanity; vitality is a placeholder for "humanness."  It's a kind of anthropomorphization-lite.  If we think of objects having vitality, according to Bennett, then we aren't giving into that hubris-feeding, earth destroying fantasy of conquest and consumption.  Human subjectivity works as human subjectivity because it must bestow a vitality on objects it comes across within its field of experience.  Even if we see an object as something to be destroyed, used, or otherwise exploited, we must imagine it as such -- visualize it.  It must come into our field of experience.  This, I believe, is the vitalization Bennett's calling for, and if this is the case, then her call becomes an existential one -- albeit a very reformed, avant-garde existentialism, in which the centrality of subjectivity is de-emphasized to pull the importance of the objects/matter into the foreground.

So then, if we take that vitality as a kind of neo-existentialism (perhaps a materialist-existentialism?), then we can more easily occupy the "object" space in a kind of inverse eidetic reduction.  How does this object "activate" my subjectivity.  How does it "ping" the self?  Getting back to Hayano in the forest, the objects he's handling are not really acting as reminders of the humans who left them there.  In reality, those objects are bringing Hayano's self-reflexively forward out of the forest, allowing Hayano to think of the possiblities of the people who may have left these objects behind.  These objects are not direct links or reminders of people, instead, they are actants which activate Hayano's subjective experiences, and thus his epistemological processes which provide a series of possibilities as to where these things came from, who they belonged to, and even the more involved -- and presumptive -- narrative origins of how they got there.  The objects activate the thinking-Hayano; the self-reflexive Hayano who is aware of himself being aware of his spatio-temporal position amid the environment of the Aokigahara forest.  The objects reinforce his imago in extremely complex and manifold ways.

In this way, the objects are vital as per Bennett's definition, but only because they are actants upon the vitality-bestowing capability of the human being itself.  I think the objects are "vitality"-inducing.  I'm tempted to say that these objects -- really, any objects -- act as a kind of ongoing efficient cause of selfhood.  All objects perpetually trigger, reinforce, and reiterate the self.  But, the most important thing to remember is that it is a self which is composed of the objects around it.  It is a self that is unique to that specific topology and temporality.  How is this different than a Husserlian model of consciousness, where the self is dependent on phenomena (it's own biological phenomena as well as the phenomena around it)?  Husserl implies that phenomena allows the self to come into being -- as a raw material -- that fuels the consciousness; and that the overall modality of experience is contingent upon the internal structure of the consciousness.

Let's try that another way.  For Husserl, what we experience "out there" in the world around us is actually occurring internally -- within our consciousness.  So, the distinct qualia of our own, personal experiences is determined primarily by the consciousness itself.  The phenomena (of our biological functions, as well as the sense data from the external world) is always already filtered through the process of consciousness.  For me, however, I feel that the very processes and mechanism of consciousness itself is determined by the external.  So, it's not just the shape of thoughts ... it's the mechanism and shape of consciousness which is determined by what we traditionally call the external world.  So, how the consciousness functions, and the qualia of experience, is a tapestry in which the biological phenomena of thought, memories, emotions, etc, are woven together with the specific topography that particular human being occupies.

This isn't that difficult to conceptualize, actually, when we think about extreme examples of how we experience the world.  When we are obsessed to the point of distraction with something, it's the emotional phenomena which rises to the surface and affects experience the most, pushing the "external" to an almost dangerously low level.  It is an aspect of "self" which takes center stage, and seemingly detaches us from the world we physically inhabit.  Conversely, when we are completely subsumed in the external world ... say, in those moments when we are "running by instinct" alone,  or are completely in the moment, that "self" is subsumed to the point of not even being able to form a coherent temporal schema (i.e. "The car hit a patch of black ice, it started spinning, and the next thing I knew, I was upside-down in a ditch").

I think that each of the individuals who enter Aokigahara doesn't just experience the forest differently, I think they are the forest according to their individual experiences.  As soon as they step into it, they become all that the forest is, including what they know of it before they enter.  For those that enter determined to die, they leave no trace of themselves, but instead willingly subsume their "selves" into the topology of the Aokigahara itself.  They disappear.  Those who step in with doubts must find a way to assert their "selves" against the topology of the forest, and thus leave behind lifelines, notes, and other marks distinguishing that self -- either to save their own lives, or to leave a bit of themselves to be found by an other.  Not to be morbid (probably too late, I know), if a person wants a part to be found, then there was always doubt -- always an aspect of them which desired to live.  The debris -- or remnant -- is an inanimate surrogate of self; as if to say, "I cannot bear the prospect of living, but nor can I bear the prospect of nothingness."  That object left behind (whatever it may be), isn't alive, but it's not nothing.

Ironically, to leave something behind becomes the final mark of the human survival instinct.  The object is what remains of the human.

This is all leading somewhere, and I'll wrap up my Aokigahara thoughts in the next post.

The shape of thoughts

After I wrote Posthuman Suffering, I wasn't exactly sure where to go from there.  Since the core material of the book was my dissertation, and my dissertation took years (and years and years) to write, My ideas were already evolving from my key argument that technology is more of an ontology than an epistemology.  What I hadn't realized at the time was that my own idea of "ontological" was heavily influenced by an existential perspective.  The world "out there" was always already filtered though the consciousness.  So, as I'm so fond of saying in my philosophy classes, "the world is out there in our consciousness."

But after I gained some distance from the book, and after teaching several classes and having a lot of very good class discussions with the students in those classes, I began to feel that this "primacy of consciousness" often presented a conceptual brick wall of sorts, especially when it came to otherness.  In Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology, instrumental technology (that is to say, technological artifacts themselves -- aka, "stuff") and technology-as-concept are very quickly separated.  As I've said in my book, Heidegger implies that "the technological" is itself an epistemology.  It is a way that humans "know" the world.  At the time, I fully supported this opinion, but even then knew there was a bit more to it.  But thinking about technology at the time of his writing, I doubted that Heidegger could come to any other conclusion.  The ubiquitousness of virtual, "always on" technology (I'll get into that in another post) was not yet visible to him.  Yet, taking into account the ideas of Donna Haraway in A Manifesto for Cyborgs and N. Katherine Hayles great How We Became Posthuman, I started orbiting around the idea that how we "are" -- our "Be-ing" -- is itself shaped by the technological.

What I couldn't see then was that I was still putting consciousness first.  How we express the self is dictated by our technological systems -- but in a more traditionally existential way.  I had located that expression of self in terms of mindedness, and not something greater.  Like many existentialists, I gave myself a pass by always inserting some disclaimer about the physicality of the "wetware of the brain" (Hayles' excellent phrase).  No matter how many times I said it, though, there was always something gnawing at me.  Materialism became that pea under the mattress.  Simply cordoning off a more materialist perspective into the biological body was not enough.  There was just too much stuff.  And that stuff had more than an affective pull on us.

I was able to keep all of that at bay for quite a while, actually.  I had a Philosophy program to help develop, maintain, and grow; classes to teach; and tenure to worry about.  But then, around the time that my wife and I bought our first house, I could no longer ignore that gnawing feeling.  We had been living in the same rental for six years before we moved into our new place.  It was the move into the new space -- a dramatically different space than our old rental -- which affected not only my thinking, but the way in which that thinking unfolded.

That's when I started thinking about the shape of thoughts.