"The Metaphysical Cyborg"*
Feb. 8th, 2011 02:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wolven7First things first: I owe the title of this post to Erik Davis; it's based of the title of a chapter in his book, TechGnosis, "The Spiritual Cyborg."
I've been seriously conisdering what it means to be a cyborg, lately. Not the social aspect, not the ontological aspect, not the technological or scientific aspects, but the metaphysical reality of what it means to become a self-reflexive, continually adapting fusion of biomechanical systems. What does that do to the conception of spirit, of selfhood, and of that self's connection to other selves? What I'm saying is, when we begin to endeavour to remove the intermediary between our technology and ourselves, what do we give ourselves the ability to do?
I've always found the concepts of artificial intelligence, cyborg enhancements, and nanotechnology to be nearly inextricably linked, so it should come as no surprise that I'm a big fan of the anime Serial Experiments: Lain. In it, we have an externally-created, self-sustaining, self-adjusting/-adapting aritficial life form, created in the potent gulf between augmentent reality-- what can be seen as the Casual Social Cyborging which exists in the interconnected nexus of e-mail, texting, In-Game Avatars, etc-- and Physical Experience. Lain exists as a product of the many different perspectives on and conceptions of Lain, including her perspective on her experience of herself. Her existential crisis begins when she's made aware of these different conceptions. When Lain begins to understand that the way other people see her is as literally a different person than the one as which she sees herself, a schism develops, as she recognises the other aspects of everyone which are hidden from view or only shown to certain groups or combinations of people.
This is an example.
The fact of the matter is, we're not characters in an anime, but it is equally true that people do understand us in different ways, and that we present ourselves in different ways in different circumstances. Our desires to fold into the social strata of our environments with the minimum hassle often overtake the integrity of our self-conception, and thus, while we may think that we are acting the same, those whose council we value may be able to point out to us the inconsistencies of our behaviour. The meaning that can be attributed to our selves changes, dependent upon the context, the observers, and those other people with whom that Self must interact. And that's just on a nomral day.
What is the nature of-- what are the implications for-- the self, when we start grafting into it, carving out of it, interfacing it with new and different technologies which, themselves, are viewed with such a range of ideas, connotations, hopes, and trepidation as to be fractious and row-inducing, even before they come in contact with a human being?
A paradigm in which we have access to augmented reality is one in which we can [(seemingly)] immediately-- that is without mediation-- access the perception of other individuals in our sphere, and change the way that they see the world, us, and themselves (cf. Doktor Sleepless and St Teresa's Eyes). This change perpetuates new modes of seeing and being, and those changes drive the kinds of technological apprenhensions we're willing to or even capable of making.
Much like my conversations about magic, the conversations about what the world Actually Looks Like when we technologically augment ourselves to remove factors of mediation from between ourselves, our creations, and the act of their creation is dependent on the apprehension of perceptual and conceptual change. As we deal with how other people approach our implants, modifications, and appropriations of technology, we have to deal with how that changes what they see of Us. In a very real sense, the cyborg's identity is directly connected to the continuing project of becoming and continuing to be a cyborg.
Being a cyborg is about being at least one step "ahead" of the baseline for human interaction. What that means is, staying ahead of the curve of whatever it means to be "Human" today-- which may, in fact, be what it meant to be "Cyborg," yesterday.
As we continue to "upgrade," "augment," and "enhance" (read: "cut on [and implant into]") ourselves to search for some kind of future, we change who and what we can become-- or at least alter the course of probability for what we can more easily grow to be-- and we also change how others can see us and how we can see ourselves (again: with respect to probability). Our identities and our universes necessarily change, as we change ourselves.
Obviously the nature of the metaphysique has been a major question, for millennia, as has the interaction of the human frame with its society and its creations. What we have, now, is an increase in the speed and a decrease in the clear borderland that separates the creation out from the implementation and the creator from the created. The question I'm trying to parse, here, is what kind of reality do we live in, if this is the case? What kinds of things can we expect (read: "probibalistically predict"), when our technology and our conception of self are so inextricably linked?
Entire architectures of knowledge [can] be created in the interactions between component systems on an individual. New ways of sensing, new ways of being and feeling. Intersections of data, emotion, sensation, and conception that were never before thought possible, even in bits of a single human being and what they have to offer the world around them of themselves. This is all to say nothing of what multi[tudes] of these individuals can create, when they act in concert.
The universe is different, now, and it is different because the tools which we are capable of leveraging to access it are different, and those tools are different because-- and because they are different-- we are different. By critically evaluating what it is we do and become when we seriously begin the project cyborg ourselves, we place ourselves in the position to radically alter what the universe can do and, more importantly, what that means. It is a major responsibility, and one which I don't think enough of us who are engaged in the project think about, let alone take seriously.
Consider what you are to become.
I've been seriously conisdering what it means to be a cyborg, lately. Not the social aspect, not the ontological aspect, not the technological or scientific aspects, but the metaphysical reality of what it means to become a self-reflexive, continually adapting fusion of biomechanical systems. What does that do to the conception of spirit, of selfhood, and of that self's connection to other selves? What I'm saying is, when we begin to endeavour to remove the intermediary between our technology and ourselves, what do we give ourselves the ability to do?
I've always found the concepts of artificial intelligence, cyborg enhancements, and nanotechnology to be nearly inextricably linked, so it should come as no surprise that I'm a big fan of the anime Serial Experiments: Lain. In it, we have an externally-created, self-sustaining, self-adjusting/-adapting aritficial life form, created in the potent gulf between augmentent reality-- what can be seen as the Casual Social Cyborging which exists in the interconnected nexus of e-mail, texting, In-Game Avatars, etc-- and Physical Experience. Lain exists as a product of the many different perspectives on and conceptions of Lain, including her perspective on her experience of herself. Her existential crisis begins when she's made aware of these different conceptions. When Lain begins to understand that the way other people see her is as literally a different person than the one as which she sees herself, a schism develops, as she recognises the other aspects of everyone which are hidden from view or only shown to certain groups or combinations of people.
This is an example.
The fact of the matter is, we're not characters in an anime, but it is equally true that people do understand us in different ways, and that we present ourselves in different ways in different circumstances. Our desires to fold into the social strata of our environments with the minimum hassle often overtake the integrity of our self-conception, and thus, while we may think that we are acting the same, those whose council we value may be able to point out to us the inconsistencies of our behaviour. The meaning that can be attributed to our selves changes, dependent upon the context, the observers, and those other people with whom that Self must interact. And that's just on a nomral day.
What is the nature of-- what are the implications for-- the self, when we start grafting into it, carving out of it, interfacing it with new and different technologies which, themselves, are viewed with such a range of ideas, connotations, hopes, and trepidation as to be fractious and row-inducing, even before they come in contact with a human being?
A paradigm in which we have access to augmented reality is one in which we can [(seemingly)] immediately-- that is without mediation-- access the perception of other individuals in our sphere, and change the way that they see the world, us, and themselves (cf. Doktor Sleepless and St Teresa's Eyes). This change perpetuates new modes of seeing and being, and those changes drive the kinds of technological apprenhensions we're willing to or even capable of making.
Much like my conversations about magic, the conversations about what the world Actually Looks Like when we technologically augment ourselves to remove factors of mediation from between ourselves, our creations, and the act of their creation is dependent on the apprehension of perceptual and conceptual change. As we deal with how other people approach our implants, modifications, and appropriations of technology, we have to deal with how that changes what they see of Us. In a very real sense, the cyborg's identity is directly connected to the continuing project of becoming and continuing to be a cyborg.
Being a cyborg is about being at least one step "ahead" of the baseline for human interaction. What that means is, staying ahead of the curve of whatever it means to be "Human" today-- which may, in fact, be what it meant to be "Cyborg," yesterday.
As we continue to "upgrade," "augment," and "enhance" (read: "cut on [and implant into]") ourselves to search for some kind of future, we change who and what we can become-- or at least alter the course of probability for what we can more easily grow to be-- and we also change how others can see us and how we can see ourselves (again: with respect to probability). Our identities and our universes necessarily change, as we change ourselves.
Obviously the nature of the metaphysique has been a major question, for millennia, as has the interaction of the human frame with its society and its creations. What we have, now, is an increase in the speed and a decrease in the clear borderland that separates the creation out from the implementation and the creator from the created. The question I'm trying to parse, here, is what kind of reality do we live in, if this is the case? What kinds of things can we expect (read: "probibalistically predict"), when our technology and our conception of self are so inextricably linked?
Entire architectures of knowledge [can] be created in the interactions between component systems on an individual. New ways of sensing, new ways of being and feeling. Intersections of data, emotion, sensation, and conception that were never before thought possible, even in bits of a single human being and what they have to offer the world around them of themselves. This is all to say nothing of what multi[tudes] of these individuals can create, when they act in concert.
The universe is different, now, and it is different because the tools which we are capable of leveraging to access it are different, and those tools are different because-- and because they are different-- we are different. By critically evaluating what it is we do and become when we seriously begin the project cyborg ourselves, we place ourselves in the position to radically alter what the universe can do and, more importantly, what that means. It is a major responsibility, and one which I don't think enough of us who are engaged in the project think about, let alone take seriously.
Consider what you are to become.
