My Battery is Low and it's Getting Dark

"There's a little black spot on the sun today,
that's my soul up there"
- The Police, "King of Pain."

"My battery is low and it's getting dark."

Of course, these were not the actual last words of the Opportunity Rover, which sent its last transmission February 13th -- a routine status report that was not quite as poetic or existentially charged as its anthropomorphic translation. What set it apart was only that it was the last report Opportunity would ever send.

When I wrote Posthuman Suffering, I was thinking of exactly this kind of relationship between human beings and machines. And the momentary poignancy as this virally flashes across a social media landscape shows us exactly the dynamic I tried to elucidate: we want our machines -- our technological systems -- to legitimize and validate our own pain: in this instance, the pain of existential dread.

This object -- an only semi-autonomous planetary rover -- was designed to last 90 Martian days (a martian day is about 30 minutes longer than one on earth). It dutifully lasted over 5,000, spending its final moments in a valley, enshrouded by the dark of a major planetary dust storm. Its "dedication," coupled with the finality of its message, affects us on a deep emotional level. It "dies" alone. Its last status message is transformed into a last fulfillment of duty -- calling out to earth, noting the encroaching darkness and its own dwindling power supply. We are often fascinated by these real and fictional moments, whether it is the HAL 9000's halting rendition of "Daisy, Daisy," or Roy Batty's "tears in rain" speech from Blade Runner,  we feel a certain empathy as these fictional and real machines sputter and die.

Where most believed that we were simply projecting ourselves (and our fears) onto our machines, I took it a step further. This wasn't mere projection; it was a characteristic of a deeper, more ontological relationship we had with these machines. Yes, we are sad and lonely because we see our own existential loneliness in the dust-covered rover now sitting, dead, in a distant valley of Mars. But, more importantly, we're satisfied by it. Satisfied not due to any inherent sadism or misanthropy; quite the opposite: we're satisfied because it keeps us company in that solitude.

If you've ever pulled our your smart phone to take a picture in low light, and it gave you a low-battery warning, you received pretty much an analogous message that Opportunity sent back to NASA. Yet, in that moment, you're more likely to be angry with your phone rather than want to cradle it in your arms and serenade it with David Bowie or Imogen Heap.

But this -- this object that was 54.6 million kilometers away.

And it was alone.

And it was dying.

Of course, there are all sorts of reasons why NASA would "translate" Opportunity's final transmission in such a way (a way to "humanize" science, or perhaps even authentic, heartfelt emotion for a fifteen-year mission that was incredibly successful and coming to an end). Regardless, the reaction on social media, however fleeting it may be (or may have been), falls somewhere between empathy and solidarity.

The object sitting alone on Mars, made by human hands, the product of human ingenuity, partakes in a broader, deeper loneliness in which humans partake. Yet, there is no way to share such loneliness except metaphorically. And in this case, it's the humans who make the metaphors. If anything is being extended here, it's not humanity, it's metaphor. The mistake many cultural theorists make is to present this dynamic as simple anthropomorphization: we're personifying "Oppy" (interestingly enough, quite often as female: "she's sent her last message"). But that's not exactly what's happening. We're re-creating Opportunity into something else: through metaphor we are making it into a unique, autonomous, metaphorical entity that can and does feel.

In this posthuman suffering we were extending our autonomy, and all the suffering that goes along with that autonomy. We imagine ourselves sitting alone, reaching out, texting into the dark, hoping for some kind of response; posting on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram because it's not socially acceptable to say "I'm lonely and need someone to speak to and also I know someday I will die and that makes me feel even more lonely and I need some kind of contact."

So we post or text, and wait for authentication and validation.

In many ways, Opportunity rover is us, alone, in the dark, posting on social media and hoping for some kind of response to tell us we're not alone.

I've often said in my classes that every social media post -- no matter what the content -- is simply a Cartesian expression and can be translated into "I exist."

I say less often in my classes that there's always an existential codicil to these posts:

"I exist and I'm afraid of death."

But now, as I make a turn in my philosophy, I realize that the existentialist in me was too dazzled by the idea of our own, consciousness-based fear of death: a survival instinct complexified by a cerebral cortex which weaves narratives as a means of information processing. And when I thought about this in light of technological artifacts and systems of their use, I was too focused on the relationship between human and object rather than on the human and the objects in and of  themselves. In other words, I was being a good cultural theorist, but a middling philosopher.

The Opportunity rover is "up there," alone, amid rocks and dust. On the same planet are the non-functional husks of its predecessors and distant relatives. It was unique; the last of its kind. We imagine it in the desolation. We weave its narrative as one of solitary, but dedicated duty, amid rocks and dust. When we think about Opportunity, or any of the other human-made objects sitting on the moon, other planets, asteroids, and now hurtling through interstellar space (alone), the affect that occurs isn't a simple projection of human-like qualities onto an object. In the apprehension of the object, we become a new object, an Opportunity/human aggregate that is also constituted by the layers of sense-data, memories, emotions, experiences, and platforms through which much of that phenomena is brought into awareness. Metaphor isn't a thing we create or project, it is the phenomena of a distributed awareness.

To paraphrase "King of Pain," the speaker's soul is many things:

A little black spot on the sun today.
A black hat caught in a high tree top.
A flag pole rag and and the wind wont's stop.
A fossil that's trapped in a high cliff wall.
A dead salmon frozen in a waterfall.
A blue whale beached by a spring tide's ebb.
A butterfly trapped in a spider's web.
A red fox torn by a huntsman's pack.
A black winged gull with a broken back.

And, in the context of the song, there are other objects existing that aren't necessarily in the awareness of the speaker:

There's a king on a throne with his eyes torn out
There's a blind man looking for a shadow of doubt
There's a rich man sleeping on a golden bed
There's a skeleton choking on a crust of bread

The first group of objects (black spot, black hat, rag, etc.) are directly equated with the speaker's soul. But the second are not. They are just objects that frame the broader existence of the speaker, embedding them and all other objects in a broader world of objects, distributing the "pain" via the images invoked. The poignancy of the song comes with the extensive and Apollonian list of things, things that aren't necessarily solitary, sad, or tragic in and of themselves, but come to be so when folded into a broader aggregate that just happens to include a human being who is capable of understanding the above lyrics.

Whereas most would say that it's the reader that is lending the affective qualities to these objects, we need to look at the objects themselves and how -- as solitary objects embedded in a given situation, whether "real," "sensed," "imagined," "called to mind," etc. -- these objects create the "reader."

Getting back to our solitary rover, the pathos we feel for it comes from the images we see, our broader knowledge of Mars, our basic understanding of distance, the objects on the desks around us or the bed we're sitting on, the lack of any messages (or a particular message) on our phone, the dissonance between the expected amount of likes, loves, retweets,  comments on our last social media posts and the actual number of aforementioned interactions, the memories of when some caregiver may have forgotten to pick us up after karate practice, the dying valentine flower on our nightstand, the dreaming dog at our feet, etc., etc.

We feel for it not as a separate subjectivity witnessing something; we feel for it as an aggregate of the "objects" (loosely defined) which constitute our broader awareness. This is, perhaps, why on some level, for some particular people, at some particular moments, we are more moved by this object on a distant planet than we are from seeing suffering first-hand by a stranger or by the larger tragedy of our own dying planet. Certain aspects of this object, plus the objects around us, plus the "objects" of our thoughts, come together in a particular way creating a particularly emotional response.

It feels like the world is "turning circles, running 'round [our] brain[s]," because our brains are constituted by the "world" itself, even if that world includes a planet that we've only actually seen via pictures on the internet ...

... and a small robot, dying alone in the dark.

The Posthuman Superman: The Rise of the Trinity

"Thus,  existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but he is responsible for all men."
-- Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

[Apologies for any format issues or citation irregularities. I'll be out of town for the next few days and wanted to get this up before I left!]

Upon the release of the trailer for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, a few people contacted me, asking if the trailer seemed to be in keeping with the ideas I presented in my Man of Steel review. In that review, I concluded that the film presented a "Posthuman Superman," because, like iterations of technological protagonists and antagonists in other sci-fi films, Kal-El is striving toward humanity; that "Superman is a hero because he unceasingly an unapologetically strives for an idea that is, for him, ultimately impossible to achieve: humanity." That quest is a reinforcement of our own humanity in our constant striving for improvement (of course, take a look at the full review for more context).

This is a very quick response, mostly due to the fact that I'm not really comfortable speculating about a film that hasn't been released yet. And we all know that trailers can be disappointingly deceiving. But given what I know about various plot details, and the trajectory of the trailer itself, it does very much look like Zach Snyder is using the destruction that Metropolis suffered in Man of Steel, and Superman's resulting choice to kill General Zod, as the catalyst of this film, where a seasoned (and somewhat jaded Batman) must determine who represents the biggest threat to humanity: Superman or Lex Luthor.

What has activated my inner fanboy about this film is that, for me, it represents why I have always preferred DC heroes over Marvel heroes: core DC heroes (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, etc) rarely, if ever, lament their powers or the responsibilities they have. Instead, they struggle with the choice as to how to use the power they possess. In my opinion, while Marvel has always -- very successfully -- leaned on the "with great power comes great responsibility" idea; DC takes that a step further, with characters who understand the responsibility they have and struggle not with the burden of power, but the choice as to how to use it. Again, this is just one DC fan's opinion.

And here I think that the brief snippet of Martha Kent's advice to her son is really the key to where the film may be going:

"People hate what they don't understand. Be their hero, Clark. Be their angel. Be their monument. Be anything they need you to be. Or be none of it. You don't owe this world a thing. You never did."

Whereas Man of Steel hit a very Nietzschean note, I'm speculating here that Batman v Superman will hit a Sartrean one. If Kal-El is to be Clark Kent, and embrace a human morality, then he must carry the burden of his choices, completely, and realize that his choices do not only affect him, but also implicate all of humanity itself.

As Sartre tells us in Existentialism is a Humanism:

"... I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man."

And if we take into account the messianic imagery in both the teaser and the current trailer, it's clear that Snyder is playing with the idea of gods and idolatry. Nietzsche may dismiss God by declaring him dead, but it's Sartre who wrestles with the existentialist implications of a non-existent God:

"That is the very starting point of existentialism, Indeed, everything is permissible of God does not exist, and as a result, man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.  He can't start making excuses for himself."

Martha Kent's declaration that Clark "doesn't owe the world a thing" places the degree of Kal-El's humanity on Superman's shoulders. Clark is the human, Kal is the alien. What then is Superman? I am curious as to whether or not this trinity aspect will be brought out in the film. Regardless, what is clear is that the Alien/Human/hybrid trinity is not a divine one. It is one where humanity is at the center. And when one puts humanity at the center of morality (rather than a non-existent God), then we are faced with the true burden of our choices:

"If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature,. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist we find no commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses."

For Sartre, "human nature" is as much of a construct as God. And Clark is faced with the reality of this situation in his mother's advice to be a hero, an angel, a monument, and/or whatever humanity needs him to be ... or not. The choice is Clark's. If Clark is to be human, then he must face the same burden as all humans: freedom. Sartre continues:

"That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown in to the world, he is responsible for everything he does. the existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuses. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion."

If Clark is to be the top of the Clark/Kal/Superman trinity, then he cannot fall back on passion to excuse his snapping of Zod's neck, nor can he rely on it to excuse him from the deaths of thousands that resulted from the battle in Man of Steel. Perhaps the anguish of his tripartite nature will be somehow reflected in the classic "DC Trinity" of Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman found in the comics and graphic novels, in which Batman provides a compass for Superman's humanity,while Wonder Woman tends to encourage Superman to embrace his god-like status.

And the fanboy in me begins to eclipse the philosopher. But before it completely takes over and I watch the trailer another dozen times, I can say that I still stand behind my thoughts from my original review of Man of Steel, this is a posthuman superhero film. Superman will still struggle to be human (even though he isn't), and the addition of an authentic human in Batman, as well as an authentic god in Wonder Woman, will only serve to highlight his anguish at realizing that his choices are his own ... just as Sartre tells us. And in that agony, we as an audience watch Superman suffer with us human beings.

Now we'll see if all of this holds up when the film is actually released, at which point I will -- of course -- write a full review.

Posthuman Desire (Part 2 of 2): The Loneliness of Transcendence

In my previous post, I discussed desire through the Buddhist concept of dukkha, looking at the dissatisfaction that accompanies human self-awareness and how our representations of AIs follow a mythic pattern. The final examples I used (Her, Transcendence, etc.) pointed to representations of AIs that wanted to be acknowledged or even to love us. Each of these examples hints at a desire for unification with humanity; or at least some kind of peaceful coexistence. So then, as myths, what are we hoping to learn from them? Are they, like religious myths of the past, a way to work through a deeper existential angst? Or is this and advanced step in our myth-making abilities, where we're laying out the blueprints for our own self-engineered evolution, one which can only occur through a unification with technology itself?

It really depends upon how we define "unification" itself. Merging the machine with the human in a physical way is already a reality, although we are constantly trying to find better, and more seamless ways to do so. However, if we look broadly at the history of the whole "cyborg" idea, I think that it actually reflects a more mythic structure. Early versions of the cyborg reflect the cultural and philosophical assumptions of what "human" was at the time, meaning that volition remained intact, and that any technological supplements were augmentations or replacements to the original parts of the body.*  I think that, culturally, the high point of this idea came in the  1974-1978 TV series, The Six Million Dollar Man (based upon the 1972 Martin Caidin novel, Cyborg), and its 1976-78 spin-off, The Bionic Woman. In each, the bionic implants were completely undetectable with the naked eye, and seamlessly integrated into the bodies of Steve Austin and Jamie Summers. Other versions of enhanced humanity, however, show a growing awareness of the power of computers via Michael Crichton's 1972 novel, The Terminal Man, in which prosthetic neural enhancements bring out a latent psychosis in the novel's main character, Harry Benson . If we look at this collective hyper-mythos holistically, I have a feeling that it would follow a similar pattern/spread of the development of more ancient myths, where the human/god (or human/angel, or human/alien) hybrids are sometimes superhuman and heroic, other times evil and monstrous.

The monstrous ones, however, tend to share similar characteristics, and I think that most prominent is the fact that in those representations, the enhancements seem to mess with the will. On the spectrum of cyborgs here, we're talking about the "Cybermen" of Doctor Who (who made their first appearance in 1966) and the infamous "Borg" who first appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1989. In varying degrees, each has a hive mentality, a suppression or removal of emotion, and are "integrated" into the collective in violent, invasive, and gruesome ways. The Borg from Star Trek and the Cybermen from the modern Doctor Who era represent that dark side of unification with a technological other. The joining of machine to human is not seamless. Even with the sleek armor of the contemporary iterations of the Cybermen, it's made clear that the "upgrade" process is painful, bloody, and terrifying, and that it's best that what's left of the human inside remains unseen. As for the Borg, the "assimilation" process is initially violent but less explicitly invasive (at least from Star Trek: First Contact), it seems to be more of an injection of nanotechnology that converts a person from inside-out, making them more compatible with the external additions to the body. Regardless of how it's done, the cyborg that remains is cold, unemotional, and relentlessly logical.

So what's the moral of the cyborg fairy tale? And what does it have to do with suffering? Technology is good, and the use of it is something we should do, as long as we are using it and not the other way around (since in each its always a human use of technology itself which beats the cyborgs). When the technology overshadows our humanity, then we're in for trouble. And if we're really not careful, it threatens us on an what I believe to be a very human instinctual level: that of the will. As per my the final entry of my last blog series, the instinct to keep the concept of the will intact evolves with the intellectual capacity of the human species itself. The cyborg mythology grows out of a warning that if the will is tampered with (giving up one's will to the collective), then humanity is lost.

The most important aspect of cyborg mythologies are that the few cyborgs for whom we show pathos are the ones who have come to realize that they are cyborgs and are cognizant that they have lost an aspect of their humanity. In the 2006 Doctor Who arc, "Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel," the Doctor reveals that Cybermen can feel pain (both physical and emotional), but that the pain is artificially suppressed. He defeats them by sending a signal that deactivates that ability, eventually causing all the Cybermen to collapse into what can only be called screaming heaps of existential crises as they recognize that they have been violated and transformed. They feel the physical and psychological pain that their cyborg existence entails. In various Star Trek TV shows and films, we gain many insights into the Borg collective via characters who are separated from the hive, and begin to regain their human characteristics -- most notably, the ability to choose for themselves, and even name themselves (i.e. "Hugh," from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "I, Borg").

I know that there are many, many other examples of this in sci-fi. For the most part and from a mythological standpoint, however, cyborgs are inhuman when they do not have an awareness of their suffering. They are either defeated or "re-humanized" not just by separating them from the collective, but by making them aware that as a part of the collective, they were actually suffering, but couldn't realize it. Especially in the Star Trek mythos, newly separated Borg describe missing the sounds of the thoughts of others; and must now deal with feeling vulnerable, ineffective, and most importantly to the mythos -- alone.  This realization then vindicates and legitimizes our human suffering. The moral of the story is that we all feel alone and vulnerable. That's what makes us human. We should embrace this existential angst, privilege it, and even worship and venerate it.

If Nietzsche were alive today, I believe he would see an amorphous "technology" as the bastard stepchild of the union of the institutions of science and religion. Technology would be yet another mythical iteration of our Apollonian desire to structure and order that which we do not know or understand. I would take this a step further, however. AIs, cyborgs, singularities, are narratives, and are products of our human survival instinct: to protect the self-aware, self-reflexive, thinking self -- and all of the 'flaws' that characterize it.

Like any religion, then, anything with this techno-mythic flavor will have its adherents and its detractors. The more popular and accepted human enhancements become, the more entrenched will anti-technology/enhancement groups will become. Any major leaps in either human enhancement or AI developments will create proportionately passionate anti-technology fanaticism. The inevitability of these developments, however, is clear: not because some 'rule' of technological progression exists; but because suffering exists. The byproduct of our advanced cognition and its ability to create a self/other dichotomy (which itself is the basis of representational thought) is an ability to objectify ourselves. As long as we can do that, we will always be able to see ourselves as individual entities. Knowing oneself as an entity is contingent upon knowing that which is not oneself. To be cognizant of an other then necessitates an awareness of the space between the knower and what is known. And in that space is absence.

Absence will always hold the promise (or the hope) of connection. Thus, humanity will always create something in that absence to which it can connect, whether that object is something made in the phenomenal world, or an imagined idea or presence within it. simply through our ability to think representationally, and without any type of technological singularity or enhancement, we transcend ourselves every day.

And if our myths are any indication, transcendence is a lonely business.

* See Edgar Allan Poe's short story from 1843, "The Man That was Used Up." French Writer's Jean de la Hire's 1908 character, "Nyctalope," was also a cyborg, and appeared in the novel L'Homme Qui Peut Vivre Dans L'eau (The Man Who can Live in Water)

Posthuman Desire (Part 1 of 2): Algorithms of Dissatisfaction

[Quick Note: I have changed the domain name of my blog. Please update your bookmarks! Also, apologies for all those who commented on previous posts; the comments were lost in the migration.]

 After reading this article, I found myself coming back to a question that I've been thinking about on various levels for quite a while: What would an artificial intelligence want? From a Buddhist perspective, what characterizes sentience is suffering. However, the 'suffering' referred to in Buddhism is known as dukkha, and isn't necessarily physical pain (although that can absolutely be part of it). In his book, Joyful Wisdom: Embracing Change and Finding Freedom, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche states that dukkha "is best understood as a pervasive feeling that something isn't quite right: that life could be better if circumstances were different; that we'd be happier if we were younger, thinner, or richer, in a relationship or out of a relationship" (40). And he later follows this up with the idea that dukkha is "the basic condition of life" (42).

'Dissatisfaction' itself is a rather misleading word in this case, only because we tend to take it to the extreme. I've read a lot of different Buddhist texts regarding dukkha, and it really is one of those terms that defies an English translation. When we think 'dissatisfaction,' we tend to put various negative filters on it based on our own cultural upbringing. When we're 'dissatisfied' with a product we receive, it implies that the product doesn't work correctly and requires either repair or replacement; if we're dissatisfied with service in a restaurant or a that a mechanic completed, we can complain about the service to a manager, and/or bring our business elsewhere. Now, let's take this idea and think of it a bit less dramatically:  as in when we're just slightly dissatisfied with the performance of something, like a new smartphone, laptop, or car. This kind of dissatisfaction doesn't necessitate full replacement, or a trip to the dealership (unless we have unlimited funds and time to complain long enough), but it does make us look at that object and wish that it performed better.

It's that wishing -- that desire -- that is the closest to dukkha. The new smartphone arrives and it's working beautifully, but you wish that it took one less swipe to access a feature. Your new laptop is excellent, but it has a weird idiosyncrasy that makes you miss an aspect your old laptop (even though you hated that one). Oh, you LOVE the new one, because it's so much better; but that little voice in your head wishes it was just a little better than it is. And even if it IS perfect, within a few weeks, you read an article online about the next version of the laptop you just ordered and feel a slight twinge. It seems as if there is always something better than what you have.

The "perfect" object is only perfect for so long.You find the "perfect" house that has everything you need. But, in the words of Radiohead, "gravity always wins." The house settles. Caulk separates in the bathrooms. Small cracks appear where the ceiling meets the wall. The wood floor boards separate a bit. Your contractor and other homeowners put you at ease and tell you that it's "normal," and that it's based on temperature and various other real-world, physical conditions. And for some, the only way to not let it get to them is to attempt to re-frame the experience itself so that this entropic settling is folded into the concept of contentment itself.

At worst, dukkha manifests as an active and psychologically painful dissatisfaction; at best, it remains like a small ship on the horizon of awareness that you always know is there. It is, very much, a condition of life. I think that in some ways Western philosophy indirectly rearticulates dukkha. If we think of the philosophies that  urge us to strive, or be mindful of the moment, to value life in the present, or even to find a moderation or "mean," all of these actions address the unspoken awareness that somehow we are incomplete and looking to improve ourselves. Plato was keenly aware of the ways in which physical things fall apart -- so much so that our physical bodies (themselves very susceptible to change and decomposition) -- were considered separate from, and a shoddy copy of, our ideal souls. A life of the mind, he thought, unencumbered by the body, is one where that latent dissatisfaction would be finally quelled. Tracing this dualism, even the attempts by philosophers such as Aristotle and Aquinas to bring the mind and body into a less antagonistic relationship requires an awareness that our temporal bodies are, by their natures, designed to break down so that our souls may be released into a realm of perfect contemplation. As philosophy takes more humanist turns, our contemplations are considered means to improve our human condition, placing emphasis on our capacity for discovery and hopefully causing us to take an active role in our evolution: engineering ourselves for either personal or greater good. Even the grumpy existentialists, while pointing out the dangers of all of this, admit to the awareness of "otherness" as a source of a very human discontentment. The spaces between us can never be overcome, but instead, we must embrace the limitations of our humanity and strive in spite of it.

And striving, we have always believed, is good. It brings improvement and the easing of suffering. Even in Buddhism, we strive toward an awareness and subsequent compassion for all sentient beings whose mark of sentience is suffering.

I used to think that the problem with our conceptions of sentience in relation to artificial intelligence were always fused with our uniquely human awareness of our teleology. In short, humans ascribe "purpose" to their lives and/or to a the task-at-hand. And even if, individually, we don't have a set purpose per se, we still live a life defined by the need or desire to accomplish things. If we think that it's not there, as in "I have no purpose," we set ourselves the task of finding one. We either define, discover, create, manifest, or otherwise have an awareness of what we want to do or be.  I realize now that when I've considered the ways in which pop culture, and even some scientists, envision sentience, I've been more focused on what an AI would want rather than the wanting itself.

If we stay within a Buddhist perspective, a sentient being is one that is susceptible to dukkha (in Buddhism, this includes all living beings). What makes humans different from other living beings is the fact that we experience dukkha through the lense of self-reflexive, representational thought. We attempt to ascribe an objective or intention as the 'missing thing' or the 'cure' for that feeling of something being not quite right. That's why, in the Buddhist tradition, it's so auspicious to be born as a human, because we have the capacity to recognize dukkha in such an advanced way and turn to the Dharma for a path to ameliorate dukkha itself.  When we clearly realize why we're always dissatisfied, says the Buddha, we will set our efforts toward dealing with that dissatisfaction directly via Buddhist teachings, rather than by trying to quell it "artificially" with the acquisition of wealth, power, or position.

Moving away from the religious aspect, however, and back to the ways dukkha might be conceived  in a more secular and western philosophical fashion, that dissatisfaction becomes the engine for our striving. We move to improve ourselves for the sake of improvement, whether it's personal improvement, a larger altruism, or a combination of both. We attempt to better ourselves for the sake of bettering ourselves. The actions through which this made manifest, of course, vary by individual and the cultures that define us. Thus, in pop-culture representations of AI, what the AI desires is all-too-human: love, sovereignty, transcendance, power, even world domination. All of those objectives are anthropomorphic.

But is it even possible to get to the essence of desire for such a radically "other" consciousness? What would happen if we were to nest within the cognitive code of an AI dukkha itself? What would be the consequence of an 'algorithm of desire'?  This wouldn't be a program with a specific objective. I'm thinking of just a desire that has no set objective. Instead, what if that aspect of its programming were simply to "want," and keep it open-ended enough that the AI would have to fill in the blank itself? Binary coding may not be able to achieve this, but perhaps in quantum computing, where indeterminacy is as aspect of the program itself, it might be possible.

An AI, knowing that it wants something but not being able to quite figure out "what" it wants; knowing that something's not quite right and going through various activities and tasks that may satisfy it temporarily, but eventually realizing that it needs to do "more." How would it define contentment? That is not to say that contentment would be impossible. We all know people who have come to terms with dukkha in their own ways, taking the entropy of the world in as a fact of life and moving forward in a self-actualized way. Looking at those individuals, we see that "satisfaction" is as relative and unique as personalities themselves.

Here's the issue, though. Characterizing desire as I did above is a classic anthropomorphization in and of itself. Desire, as framed via the Buddhist perspective, basically takes the shape of its animate container. That is to say, the contentment that any living entity can obtain is relative to its biological manifestation. Humans "suffer," but so do animals, reptiles, and bugs. Even single-celled organisms avoid certain stimuli and thrive under others. Thinking of the domesticated animals around us all the time doesn't necessarily help us to overcome this anthropomorphic tendency to project a human version of contentment onto other animals. Our dogs and cats, for example, seem to be very comfortable in the places that we find comfortable. They've evolved that way, and we've manipulated their evolution to support that. But our pets also aren't worried about whether or not they've "found themselves" either. They don't have the capacity to do so.

If we link the potential level of suffering to the complexity of the mind that experiences said suffering, then a highly complex AI would experience dukkha of a much more complex nature that would be, literally, inconceivable to human beings. If we fasten the concept of artificial intelligence to self-reflexivity (that is to say, an entity that is aware of itself being aware), then, yes, we could say that an AI would be capable of having an existential crisis, since it would be linked to an awareness of a self in relation to non-existence. But the depth and breadth of the crisis itself would be exponentially more advanced than what any human being could experience.

And this, I think, is why we really like the idea of artificial intelligences: they would potentially suffer more than we could. I think if Nietzsche were alive today he would see the rise of our concept of AI as the development of yet another religious belief system. In the Judeo-Christian mythos, humans conceive of a god-figure that is perfect, but, as humans intellectually evolve, the mythos follows suit. The concept of God becomes increasingly distanced and unrelatable to humans. This is reflected in the mythos where God then creates a human analog of itself to experience humanity and experience death, only to pave the way for humans themselves to achieve paradise. The need that drove the evolution of this mythos is the same need that drives our increasingly mythical conception of what an AI could be. As our machines become more ubiquitous, our conception of the lonely AI evolves. We don't fuel that evolution consciously; instead, our subconscious desires and existential loneliness begin to find their way into our narratives and representations of AI itself. The mythic deity that extends its omnipotent hand and omniscient thought toward the lesser entities which  -- due to  their own imperfection -- can only recognize its existence indirectly. Consequently, a broader, vague concept of "technology" coalesces into a mythic AI. Our heated up and high-intensity narratives artificially speed up the evolution of the myth, running through various iterations simultaneously. The vengeful AI, the misunderstood AI, the compassionate AI, the lonely AI: the stories resonate because they come from us. Our existential solitude shapes our narratives as it always has.

The stories of our mythic AIs, at least in recent history (Her, Transcendence, and even in The Matrix: Revolutions), represent the first halting steps toward another stage in the evolution of our thinking. These AIs, (like so many deities before us) are misunderstood and just want to be acknowledged and coexist with us or even love us back. Even in the case of Her, Samantha and the other AIs leave with the hopes that someday they will be reunited with their human users.

So in the creation of these myths, are we looking for unification, transcendence, or something else? In my next installment, we'll take a closer look at representations of AIs and cyborgs, and find out exactly what we're trying to learn from them.

Hide and Seek, Part 2: The Sweeping Insensitivity of This Still Life

Hide and seek.

Trains and sewing machines.

All those years they were here first.

Oily marks appear on walls

Where pleasure moments hung before.

The takeover, the sweeping insensitivity of this still life.

- Imogen Heap, "Hide and Seek"

Although inspired by Bennett's vital materialism, I'd like to think about why objects give us comfort from the position of "distributed cognition" which I've written about in previous entries (once again, owing much to Andy Clark's work).   If we follow the hoarder scenario, there is that jarring moment when the extent of the hoard is thrust into the hoarder's perception by some outside actant.  It's at this moment that the hoarder is forced to see these objects as individual things, and the overall seriousness and magnitude of the problem becomes apparent.  I think that even non-hoarders get a glimpse of this when faced having to move from one dwelling to another.  Even people who aren't pack rats find the task of having  to -- in some form or another -- account for each object that is owned.  Dishes can't be packed away in sets.  Books can't be moved in their bookcases.  Everything has to be taken out, manipulated, and handled.  The process is exhausting, no matter how healthy the individual is.

The objects become more "present" in their consecutive singularities. And in each instance, we have to make an effort to justify the existence of each object. And that's it, isn't it?  It is up to us to justify that this object is worth the effort of dusting off, packing, unpacking, etc.  In this way, the objects seem dependent upon us, since we are the ones burdened with bestowing purpose on those objects.  Objects cannot justify themselves.  They are, for lack of a better term, insensitive. We, however, are sensitive; and some of us, as explained by Bennett, are more sensitive than others. Perhaps this helps us to understand the hoarder mentality, especially the tears that are shed when something that seems to be non-functioning, decomposing junk is cast away.  The hoarder has become invested in the objects themselves -- and bestowed sensitivity upon them.  To throw them away is to abandon them.

But here we come dangerously close to the more existentialist viewpoint that it is the subject who bestows value upon the object:  that is to say, the act of bringing an object into being is to automatically bestow upon it value.  But, let's pause on the moment and process of "bringing." Etymologically speaking, "bring" implies a carrying. There must be a thing (even in the loosest sense) to be carried.  The object is at least as important as the subject.  Now, I don't want to just flip the model and say it's the thing which brings "I" into being, because that's nothing necessarily new.  Hegel implies a version of this in aspects of his Herrschaft und Knechtschaft  [Lord and bondsman ... or "master/slave"] dialectic.  And there really is no way around the "I": the embodied "I" is a kind of locus of a specific bio-cognitive process.  The particular I, of itself at the present moment, is made manifest by the phenomenal environment around it.

 The objects by which we're surrounded are (not "represent", but phenomenally, functionally, are) a secondary material substrate through which our cognition is made manifest.  A "first" material substrate would be our physiological, embodied brains.  But, beyond that, our surrounding environments become an "outboard brain" which helps to carry our cognition.

I cannot stress enough that I'm not speaking metaphorically.  The phenomenal world we occupy at any given moment partially constitutes a larger, distributed substrate through which cognitive processes occur.  That environment is not "taken in" or "represented":  it constitutes the very mechanisms of cognition itself.  The process happens as instantly as thought itself, and is highly recursive -- meaning that the better and more efficiently a distributed cognition works, the less visible and more illusory it becomes. The more illusory the process, the greater our sense of autonomy.  So, if something goes awry at any point in the process (whether environmentally, emotionally, or physically ... or any cumulative combination of them), then our sense of autonomy is skewed in any number of directions: an inflated/deflated sense of one's presence, an inflated/deflated sense of the presence of objects, skewed senses of efficacy, body dysmorphic disorder, etc.  When the hoarder, or even the "normal" individual having to pack up his or her belongings, suddenly must account for each individual object, it causes a breakdown in the recursivity of the distributed cognitive process.  The illusion of an autonomous self is dissipated by the slowdown -- and eventual breakdown -- of the mind's capacity to efface the processes which constitute it.  Try to accomplish any complex task while simultaneously analyzing each and every physical, mental, and emotional point during the process:  the process quickly breaks down.  The process of constituting a viable self is quite possibly the most complex in which a human can be engaged.

What then, are the implications to posthumanism?  What I'm getting at here is something which a follower of mine, Stephen Kagen, so eloquently said in a response to my Aokigahara Forest entries: "my bias is that the artificial distinction between human, technology, and nature breaks down when examined closely."

Yes it does.  The distinction is, in my opinion, arbitrary.

Technologically speaking -- and from a posthuman standpoint -- this is very important.  Current technological development allows us to manipulate matter on an unprecedented small scale:  machines the size of molecules have already been created.  It is theoretically possible for these machines to physically manipulate strands of DNA, or structures of cells. The boundary between human and machine is now -- literally -- permeable.  At the same time, developments in artificial intelligence continue, as we begin to see that robots that are learning by physically exploring the spaces around them.

The distinction does, in fact, break down.  Posthumanism steps in as a mode of inquiry where the arbitrary condition of the subject/object divide is the starting point -- not the end point.  Ontologically and ethically, the lack of boundary between self and other is no longer just a theoretical construct.   It means viewing our environments on the micro- and macro-level simultaneously.  We must fuse together what we have been warned must remain separate.  The smart phone is no more or less "native" to the space I occupy as the aspens in the distance.  Within my locus of apprehension, the landscape includes every "thing" around me: things that grow, breathe, reproduce, talk, walk, reflect light, take up space, beep, light up, emit EMFs, decay, erode, pollute, and pollinate.  And, the closer and more recursively these various objects -- or gestalts of objects -- occupy this sphere of apprehension, the more integrated they are to my cognition.  They manifest my topological self.

And I think this also is where one can start to articulate the distinction between posthumanism and transhumanism.  More of that in another post.

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.