Archive for the ‘Transhumanism’ Category

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Saturday, January 24th, 2009

No prescription tramadol online legally, In his blog series "A programmer's view of the universe", Google engineer Steve Yegge is exploring the ontological insights gained in his years writing software.  His first post told the sad story of a pet fish who died after discovering the nature and limits of its own captivity, its tank, while looking out through the glass walls to a world it could never reach.  His latest post uses the video game Mario Kart to explore the concept of embedded system, where the player controls drivers who race around a track inside a universe completely contained within the computer, but with the illusion of a landscape that stretches off into the horizon.  Here he introduces the concept of the one-way wall, which the players butt up against, for example, when attempting to drive too far off the track.  The rules of the game keep the players safely within prescribed boundaries; the game software itself can monitor and control all activity within the simulated game world, but the game cannot "see into" the containing world outside its confines.

Yegge is probably fully aware of the well-worn philosophical implications of this line of inquiry; he is, after all, a self-proclaimed fan of Douglas Hofstadter, whose almost mystical ruminations on the nature of recursion and embeddedness in Gödel, Escher, Bach are a metaphysical classic in the computer-geek canon.  Seeing oneself as a creature in an embedded system attempting to perceive the workings of the "outer system" - to look through the one-way-wall the other way - has forever been a preoccupation of intelligent and spiritually-inclined seekers.

Flammarion woodcut


I would submit, contra Baudrillard, that while we denizens of the internet may today experience an unprecedented degree of abstraction, humanity has never inhabited a space other than one populated by self-created simulacra, and that indeed, the simulacrum has always been the very nature of the worldview of every individual who has ever lived.  For the human brain is itself an embedded system, fed information through a one-way wall (our sensory input) and developing a model of the world outside to the best of our abilities and according to our internal propensities.

Human communities are also an embedded system, one in which individuals reside, and they share a pool of common assumptions about the world (myths) and the "rules" by which we participate in it, refining and elaborating on the individual's innate sense of right and wrong.  Much like cells organizing themselves in a human body, or ants in a colony, all of human civilization and culture -- indeed all human achievement -- is built up of thousands of individual decisions within a socially prescribed rule system.  Such self-emergent organization -- whereby progressively more complex, richly varied systems construct themselves from a few basic rules -- is very appealing to computer geeks, who can create such embedded systems on their computers with just a few lines of recursive code, like this 1-dimensional cellular automaton:

1d cellular automata


This ties into a conversation I was having the other day with a colleague who had just finished reading another computer-geek classic, Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near.  Kurzweil's work of Utopian fantasy is popular among geeks, since it promises a future world (not too distant, either: according to his projections, within the next 50 years) in which technology will become sufficiently advanced that computer intelligence will outpace human intelligence.

What happens beyond this point is impossible to say, but according to Kurzweil's theory, machine intelligence will recursively create new machines with rapidly accelerating intelligence, Very Cheap Tramadol, which may (among other things) provide capabilities for human immortality, interstellar space travel, or perhaps even, one day, create nanobots that will transform the nature of matter and reality so that all matter will reach a point of "supersaturation" in which the entire universe becomes a gigantic supercomputer.  This event is called the singularity, also known as "nerd rapture".

To which I replied: What if the singularity has already happened?  How would you know, no prescription tramadol online legally.

Singularity speculation (in its modern form) began in 1965 with J. L. Good, but was eagerly adopted in the post-psychedelic era by early transhumanist and Harvard psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary in his eccentric 1979 book The Game of Life, in which he uses the Tarot, the I Ching, Kundalini Yoga, and various other esoteric traditions as metaphors for a projected evolution of life (and accompanying stages in the development of individual consciousness), beginning with single-celled organisms and progressing through fish, lizards, mammals, apes, primitive humans, early civilizations, monarchies, and monotheism, then stepping into increasingly liberated states of self-awareness, reality fabrication, DNA manipulation, and atomic, gravitational, and quantum manipulation, into the final payoff, Tramadol Caps 50mg, fusion into a black hole, which in turn creates a new universe.  (Paul Davies also alludes to this possibility, that new universes could be spawned by sufficiently advanced technology.)

The key insight that Leary brings to this fantasy is one of cyclical motion: once a new universe is spawned, the cycle begins anew, for new worlds and new civilizations to repeat this journey.  Indeed, for Leary, each stage of evolution goes through a three-stage cycle of birth, maturation, and decay before leading into the next stage.  This reflects the notion of a cyclical universe in Hindu cosmology, which however sees the course of civilization as one destined toward decay and destruction rather than a state of perfection.  In the Hindu view, it is the individual life that re-enters again and again in new forms to attempt to climb the ladder to liberation. No prescription tramadol online legally, In any event, the key ingredient to this timely yet ancient cosmology -- recursion -- leads us to the insight that no matter the ultimate direction of history or the universe, we exist only in a single moment, a point in motion, brought here by events outside our control and to be swept away by forces outside our control, in death and decay.  We act out our parts as best we can, knowing that we are subsumed in the eternal flux of creation and destruction that define all existence.

This problem is present in all cosmologies (including the modern scientific one), and it's a crucial weakness for the monothestic/Judeo-Christian view, which sees an eternally static Creator God "zapping" the world and time into existence exactly as we see it today, then just as abruptly, destroying it all in a raging fire, whisking his faithful off to eternal, static bliss.  I find this view of the universe pitifully unimaginative and lacking a key ingredient: sacred union, from which we derive imbalance, from which comes change, repetition, recursion, and eternity.  The Judeo-Christian god is deeply flawed for lacking (or, more truthfully, denying) a creative feminine force, which drives this change and evolution.

In fact, to reconcile this problem, Kabbalistic thinkers have developed the idea of tzimtzum: that, in order to make room for creation, the omnipresent God had to withdraw from a part of himself, leaving himself imperfect.  Thus even Yahweh seeks a mystical union with his own creation.  In any event, Cheap Tramadol Fedex Overnight, we know from experience that the nature of reality is the paradox of eternal change, and yet in common Christian thought Yahweh immaturely seeks to deny this, asserting the immutability of his own personality and ego.  (Gary Snyder reports a Mahayana Buddhist commenting, "He needs to do more meditation.")

A frequent counter to the idea of an "unmoved mover" god is the question: well, where did God come from, then?  The answer, "I am that I am", is true yet unsatisfying; this is not the petty, adolescent, egotistical, tribal Yahweh-god but his Mother - the primordial Void, the backdrop in which the creator God appears - talking.  Here's Jesus, emerging from Mother-God's vagina, represented as a Mandorla:

Mandorla


That's more like it!  Every cause must have a cause, and this leads us into a state of "turtles-all-the-way-down", or infinite recursion, which may as well be an eternal cycle, represented as the self-devouring serpent ouroboros:

Ouroborous


The ultimate, all-encompassing religious expression of this concept is contained within this modern image of the Tibetan Buddhist Dharmapala (dharma-protector) Mahakala:

Mahakala


Here, the Great Time-Lord Mahakala advances through time in a blaze of activity, through all dimensions, in perpetual combat with himself as he generates adversaries (his own image) and slaughters and devours them, thereby regenerating himself.  His myriad arms, at once swords and wings, cradle in their clawed hands Bodhisattvas (saints and future Buddhas).  From this eternal recursive creation-destruction, all forms are generated (symbolized in the tiger skin, the leopard prints, the octopus tentacles, the various faces... well, What Is Tramadol Used For, keep looking, you'll see).  The two tracks of infinitely-receding adversary heads are joined in an earring which points to the empty heart of the beast, the Void.  Yet in his hands, amid the fires and the creation and the death and destruction, he protects in a delicate (vaginal/Mandorla-like) clamshell the central Mystery of the sacred union, Yabyum: the eternal, dark Buddha making love to his own ephemeral feminine nature, enraptured in the embrace of the beloved.

In the distance stand other Buddhas, Dharmapalas, and various demons: the Dharmapala replicated, again, across yet other dimensions (other universes, perhaps?).

The lesson that the Dharmapala brings to us is this: wherever you are, whatever you are doing, all things are in flux.  There is always change, there is no Utopian state of perfection, for creation and destruction are intertwined.  Fighting through the one-way wall, stepping out of the matrix, you find yourself in another matrix, and you cannot escape.  Concentrate therefore on the center, this fusion of opposites, from which all things flow, and you will inhabit at once all levels of existence; the nested shells of all matrices outward and inward come into focus, and you see them line up in eternal recursion in all dimensions for all time.  This is Moksha, liberation.

In the meantime, humanity will continue to attempt to construct a utopia out of machines.  It's what we do, worker bees that we are. Futile though it is, it's in our nature.  It is clear that while we may construct bigger and more fantastic fishtanks for ourselves, Ultram Overdose, we cannot escape fishtank existence.  But perhaps we don't really want to.

No matter.  Onward.  Upward.  Inward.  Outward.  Always.

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Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Two items from the last week:

Mars lander landing Cheap tramadol without prescription, This photo depicts the Mars Phoenix lander in descent, as shot by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing says: "How badass awesome is it to be a human. Super badass awesome."

Amazon tribe fights off airplane

This is a view of a group of "uncontacted" indigenous people in the Amazon, who were photographed last week from a plane flown by Survival International, a group that advocates for indigenous rights.

While I sit and type on my Macbook Pro, others of my culture are busy sending machines to investigate another planet.  And here on our own planet, we investigate each other: Westerners, using advanced technology, to look at other human beings who have a radically different (but no less "human") experience of the universe.

Amazingly, this is also the dawn of the first time in Western history when we might be able to actually begin to treat these folks with some respect and dignity - by leaving them alone and preserving the ecosystem upon which their lifestyle depends.  Where previously Europeans might have invaded with hostility and taken their land by force, or, Description Tramadol, more recently, killed them with kindness in a misguided attempt to "rehabilitate" or "assimilate" the "natives" into a "modern" lifestyle, we are beginning to have enough understanding to be humble about our relationship toward others with an autonomous, self-sufficient way of living.

At Sentient Developments, George Dvorsky ponders the ethics of leaving them in the wild, untouched by the wonders of Western civilization.  He raises the following "ethical issues":


  • What if some of these people need medical help and medicine?

  • Is it ethical for us to not let them know about the greater world around them?

  • How could we ever have consent for contact and/or cultural uplift. Should it be assumed, cheap tramadol without prescription. Why. Why not?

  • Are we sufficiently justified in keeping this tribe in a zoo-like scenario?

  • If eventual contact is unavoidable, why wait until then. Would contact with the modern world ever be 'on their terms?'

  • How would we feel if we discovered that we were being observed and purposefully held-back by a more advanced civilization?

  • Is this the kind of cultural diversity that we want to preserve. If so, why, Tramadol Antidepressant. Cheap tramadol without prescription, To what end. Does cultural diversity benefit the lost tribe?

  • What does it mean to say that we risk their "extinction?" Is it accurate to equate the extinction of a culture with that of a species. What are the consequences of a lost cultural mode for a) those who used to participate in it and b) for those who will never be a part of it. What are the consequences relative to the benefits of adopting a new culture?


  • First of all, let's dispense with the notion that by leaving them alone, we're somehow confining them to a zoo.

    This is the wild world, you know, the world that predates our civilization and will outlive it.  It couldn't be more different from a zoo. Animals in zoos are transported from their natural environment into an extremely confined cage, where they are fed processed food and monitored round the clock, cheap tramadol without prescription. If anyone's in a zoo, it's us out here in the "modern" world.

    Secondly, Least Expensive Tramadol, it's telling that Dvorsky's first impulse is to assume there are people needing medical help and medicine among them.  Probably so, but tell that to the millions of impoverished third-world people deprived of access to traditional medicines AND modern medicine.  The warriors in the photographs look plenty strong and healthy.  Any group of people that can survive in the jungle - surrounded by insects, snakes, wild cats, poisons and dangers of all kinds - is going to have ways of coping with them.

    The rest of the questions are amazingly condescending in their premises, assuming that "we" in the civilized world have knowledge to share with them, and that this knowledge only goes one way: that their understanding of the world is necessarily incomplete or naive.  How would we know that?  Presumably, they've developed a mythological/religious framework that is well-suited to their environment.  We're not "holding them back."  They're doing what they want on their own terms.

    Consider for a moment the possibility that human knowledge exists outside the published canon, and that there are paths to spiritual fulfillment that are outside of the realms of typical Western experience. Cheap tramadol without prescription, We're looking at a tribe which doubtless has a complex system of myths and rituals, replete with oral history, magic, storytelling, probably music and dancing, and (since the evidently have paint) possibly also art. Self-fulfillment is not contingent on a Western lifestyle. In fact, Side Effects Tramadol, one could argue that the comforts of a Western lifestyle are an obstacle to be overcome.  An intimate familiarity with the bounties and dangers of one's own environment and an understanding of one's place within it is a treasure we often just don't have in cities.

    There's nothing that Westerners can do to "help" these people. They've been doing quite well for millennia, and their culture - which includes amazingly advanced technologies for survival wholly incompatible with a Western worldview - would be utterly shattered by any contact with Westerners.

    No, we have nothing to offer them, cheap tramadol without prescription. Nothing. Before extolling the benefits of Westernization, let's see if we can't clean up its record first by making life better for the millions of impoverished people already living under the grip of industrial society in slums around the world. Then - MAYBE - we can talk. Until then, Godspeed, indigenous people. 150 Tramadol, May this be the last anyone in the West ever sees of you.

    UPDATE:

    Check out Werner Herzog's heartbreaking documentary on a well-meaning first encounter gone horribly wrong:

    Part one

    Part two

    Part three.

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