Among the wizard hat’s many uses, one of its core purposes will be to serve as the interface between your brain and a cloud-based customized AI system. That AI system will become as present a character in your mind as your monkey and your human characters—and it will feel like you every bit as much as the others do.
Why is it that we think of ourselves as only this minute part of a totality far larger than we are?
What do we signify by the words like “me,” “myself,” and “I”? What does a story mean that starts with “In my childhood”? What is that strange possession “you,” which stays the same throughout your life? Are you the same person you were before you learned to read? You scarcely can imagine, now, how words looked then.
Let’s take playing chess. If you get an opponent who can always defeat you, you stop playing with him. If you get an opponent whom you can always defeat, you stop playing with him. But so long as there is a certain uncertainty of outcome and you win some of the time, then it’s a good game.
Consciousness is an ever-shifting process of abstracting shifting quality from a massive process of essential existence. It emphasizes. And yet, if we forget the background, the result is triviality.
We talk about virtual realities, designer drugs, downloading ourselves into circuitry, travel through time, disincarnate bodies, cloned identities, gender shifting, point of view shifting—all of these things, this is all about the rules of mind overwhelming the rules of physics. The rules of physics say you are a body, you are on a planet, you have weight, you have momentum, you have specific gravity, you must behave like this and like this and like this, and mind says: no, I want to be pure unleashed conceptuality, I want to be a thought blown in a hyperdimensional wind, I want to move from planet to planet with the twink of an eye, I want to know everything, see everything, be everything, feel everything.
It is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence.
One can explain my choice of words in Scrabble, for example, as an outcome of an extended cognitive process involving the rearrangement of tiles on my tray. Of course, one could always try to explain my action in terms of internal processes and a long series of ‘inputs’ and ‘actions,’ but this explanation would be needlessly complex. If an isomorphic process were going on in the head, we would feel no urge to characterize it in this cumbersome way. In a very real sense, the re-arrangement of tiles on the tray is not part of action; it is part of thought.
If you are interested in survival—and not mere survival, but an elegant survival—it’s necessary to be very wide awake to the ecological problem.
Tautology is the intellectual amusement of the Infinite.
The first veil of organised matter spread over the earth could neither have established nor maintained itself without some network of influences and exchanges which made it a biologically cohesive whole. From its origin, the cellular nebula necessarily represented, despite its internal multiplicity, a sort of diffuse super-organism. Not merely a foam of lives but, to a certain extent, itself a living film. A simple reappearance, after all, in more advanced form and on a higher level of those much older conditions which we have already seen presiding over the birth and equilibrium of the first polymerised substances on the surface of the early earth.
Technology and its powers must be handled by true materialists, and true materialists are people who love material; who cherish wood and stone and wheat and eggs and animals, and above all the Earth, and treat it with a reverence that is due to one’s own body.
It certainly has held human progress down that we have thousands of languages that are very tortuous to translate between. Imagine a kind of culture we would’ve built by now if we could effortlessly communicate with anybody anywhere, and they with us.
Observe the stages of this differentiation, the levels of abstraction: First, the organism from its environment, and with this knowledge of the environment. Second, the distinction of knowing knowledge from knowledge itself. But in concrete fact all this, like the finger-thumb opposition, is a difference which does not divide. The thumb is not floating in the air alongside the rest of the hand. At their roots both fingers and thumb are joined. And at our roots we are joined to the whole subject of nature. Of course, you might say that nature or the whole universe is nothing but a big abstraction. But tell me, is an orange nothing but an abstraction from its component molecules, skins, segments, fibers and fluids?
Jean Baker Miller pointed out that the so-called need to control and dominate others is psychologically a function, not of a feeling of power, but of a feeling of powerlessness. Distinguishing between “power for oneself and power over others,” she writes: “In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be.”.
The whole phenomenon of the automatic stratification of a cosmos in a state of cosmogenesis!
The moment we want to treat the more complex system of buildings and nature together, as one living system, we run into intellectual problems because we no longer have an adequate scientific definition of what we are trying to do. For example, according to present-day biological terminology, a city is not a living system, even though it is often referred to as a living system by social scientists in search of a metaphor. Obviously, too, a building is not a living system. How can we try to make a living system out of a region, or a city, or a building—even out of a garden—when, according to current scientific orthodoxy, these things are not living systems?
In the near future our scientific attention must be continually more attracted, even fascinated, by this extreme evolutionary point of our ‘forward dive.’
Is the world amorphous in structure, or does it on the contrary show signs of containing within itself a favored axis of evolution?
For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves.
Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.
Close the gap between what is and what you want it to be, between what is presenting itself and what you want to present itself. This gap of judgment is the separation you feel. You need to totally choose what is and lean into it with your whole being.
We do not resist the vibrations, pulses and rhythms of nature, just as the yachtsman does not resist the wind. But he knows how to manage his sails and, therefore, can use the wind to go wherever he wishes. The art of life, as we see it, is navigation.
Us vs. Them is always a delusion. The Story of Us isn’t a story of good guys vs. bad guys, but one about the tug-of-war that exists within each human head, each community, each society. In this epic story, heading together toward an uncertain fate, there is no Them. Just one big Us.