- Prologue
- 1. Toward Embodied Virtuality
- 2. Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers
- 3. Contesting for the Body of Information The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics
- 4. Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled Norbert Wiener and Cybernetic Anxiety
- 5. From Hyphen to Splice Cybernetic Syntax in Limbo
- 6. The Second Wave of Cybernetics From Reflexivity to Self-Organization
- 7. Turning Reality Inside Out and Right Side Out Boundary Work in the Mid-Sixties Novels of Philip K. Dick
- 8. The Materiality of Informatics
- 9. Narratives of Artificial Life
- 10. The Semiotics of Virtuality Mapping the Posthuman
- 11. Conclusion What Does It Mean to be Posthuman
The Turing Test and Embodiment
The Turing Test:
- Participants communicate with entities in another room through computer terminals
- Determine which is the man and which is the woman (or human vs machine) based on their responses
- Entities aim to either help or mislead the participants
Implications of the Turing Test:
- Demonstrates machines' ability to think and perform tasks previously thought to be exclusive to humans
- Erasure of embodiment, as "intelligence" becomes a property of formal symbol manipulation rather than embodied reality
The Moravec Test:
- Proposed by Hans Moravec as a successor to the Turing Test
- Focuses on downloading human consciousness into a computer and showing that machines can become human beings
Gender and Embodiment in the Tests:
- Why does gender appear in this primal scene of humans meeting intelligent machines?
- Hodges suggests Turing was "blind to the distinction between saying and doing"
- The Turing Test's assumptions were demonstrated in Turing's own life and trial over his homosexuality
Interpretations of Gender in the Tests:
- Hodges argues it is a "red herring" and not reducible to sequences of symbols
- However, the text suggests the gender and human/machine examples are meant to prove the same thing
Turing Test and Gender:
- Turing included gender in his test to challenge boundary between human and machine
- Implied renegotiation of "who can think" question
- Distinction between enacted body (physical presence) and represented body (semiotic markers) creates a cyborg effect
- Wrong choices in gender identification highlight disjunction between bodies
- Test's purpose: questioning the natural inevitability of embodiment
Hodges's Reading:
- Attempt to safeguard boundaries of subject from transformation
- Misreading the Turing test as nonsignifying for identity
- Insistence on securing human identity through embodiment
Embodiment:
- Thought depends on embodied form for specificities
- Transforming liberal subject into posthuman
- Magic trick effect: important intervention comes early in the cybernetic circuit, not during identification of bodies.
Understanding the Shift from Humanism to Posthumanism
The Changing Human Form:
- The human form, including desire and external representations, may be changing radically
- This requires re-visioning as we approach a post-humanist culture
Roboticist's Dream vs. Reality:
- Hans Moravec's idea of downloading human consciousness into a computer
- Robot surgeon extracts human brain and transfers information to a computer
- Patient remains conscious after the operation
- Question: How can consciousness remain unchanged when transferred to a different medium?
The Influence of Information:
- Belief that information can circulate unchanged among various material substrates
- "Beam me up, Scotty" as a cultural icon for the global informational society
Three Interrelated Stories:
- How information lost its body and became conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms it is embedded in
- The creation of the cyborg as a technological artifact and cultural icon following World War II
- The unfolding story of how the historically specific construction called the human is giving way to a different construction called the posthuman
Posthuman View:
- Privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, viewing embodiment as an accident of history rather than inevitability of life
- Considers consciousness as an epiphenomenon and evolutionary upstart that is not the whole show
- Sees the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, extending or replacing it with other prostheses as a continuation of a process that began before birth
- Configures human being so it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines
- No essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.
Posthumanism vs. Liberal Humanist Subject:
Liberal Humanist Subject:
- Defined by possessive individualism
- Individuals seen as proprietors of their own person or capabilities, owing nothing to society
- Human essence is freedom from the wills of others
- Foundation for market relations: ownership of self precedes sale of labor
Posthuman Subject:
- No clear distinction between self-will and others' wills
- Constructed as an amalgam or collection of heterogeneous components
- Material-informational entity with boundaries that undergo continuous construction and reconstruction
- Embodiment is not essential to human being, erased in cybernetic construction
Comparison:
- Both erase embodiment to some extent
- Liberal subject identified with rational mind, posthuman body as "data made flesh"
- Posthumanism continues emphasis on cognition instead of embodiment
- Opportunity to articulate agency and choice within posthuman context while keeping disembodiment from being rewritten into prevailing concepts of subjectivity.
How We Became Posthuman: Understanding Shifting Configurations of Subjectivity
Ironies in Title:
- Meant to convey multiple ironies
- Reflects transformations from "human" to "posthuman" that are not complete or sharp breaks
- Coexistence of "human" and "posthuman" in shifting configurations
Title Explanation:
- Taken straight: documents historical processes leading to new models of subjectivity, different from liberal subject
- Offers a pleasurable shock of a double take
- Positions itself in opposition to techno-ecstasies found in certain magazines, speaking of posthuman transformation as universal condition
Narrative Arc:
- Chronological progression from the initial moments of cybernetics development
- Focuses on embodied forms of subjectivity and arguments for disembodiment throughout the cybernetic tradition
- Three distinct waves: homeostasis (1945-1960), reflexivity (1960-1980), virtuality (1980 to present)
First Era of Cybernetics:
- Foundational era, from 1943 to 1954
- Formulated central concepts: information theory, neural functioning, self-reproducing computers, and cosmic significance
- Human beings seen primarily as information-processing entities
- Aligned cybernetics with liberal humanism, extending it, not subverting it.
Cybernetics and Reflexivity
Background:
- Cybernetics: interdisciplinary field focusing on communication, control, and information
- Coined from Greek word meaning "steersman"
- Early focus on homeostasis and feedback loops in living organisms and machines
Tensions during Macy Period:
- Emphasis on homeostasis maintained through cybernetic perspective
- Feedback loops extended to machines, leading to reflexivity concept
- Reflexivity: system's generator becomes part of the system it generates
- Examples: Codel's number theory coding, Escher's drawings, Borges' narratives
Definition:
- Reflexivity: movement whereby generator becomes part of generated system
- Subversive effects: confuses and entangles boundaries we impose on the world
- Infinite regress possible
Examples in Critical Theory:
- Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction
- Michael Warner's The Letters of the Republic
- Bruno Latour's Science in Action
Cybernetics and Reflexivity:
- Reflexivity entered cybernetics through discussions about observers
- Traditional scientific protocols: information flows from system to observer
- Feedback can loop through observers, drawing them into the system being observed
- Lack of clear understanding and definition during Macy discussions
- Diffuse discussions on shifting boundaries between observer and system.
Reflexivity in Cybernetics
Kubie's Reflective Perspective:
- Every utterance acts as a statement about the outside world and mirrors the speaker's psyche
- Threatened scientific objectivity shared by physical scientists
- Key thinkers like Mead, Bateson, and von Foerster pursued this idea after Macy Conferences
Second Wave of Cybernetics:
- Initiated by Heinz von Foerster to incorporate reflexivity into cybernetic paradigm
- Key issue: redefining homeostatic systems to account for the observer
- Von Foerster's "second-order cybernetics" extended principles to the cyberneticians themselves
- Maturana and Varela's "Autopoiesis and Cognition" expanded reflexive concept into a fully articulated epistemology
Autopoiesis Theory:
- Systems are informationally closed, with no information crossing system boundary
- Environment triggers changes determined by system's own organizational properties
- Focus shifts from observed system to observer's cybernetics
- Mutually constitutive interactions between system components
Third Wave of Cybernetics:
- Self-organization understood as a springboard for emergence in artificial life research
- Some researchers argue reality is a program run on a cosmic computer, underlied by universal informational code
- Implications for understanding human beings as posthuman informational-material entities.
Virtuality and Embodied Reality:
- Embodied reality vs abstract information: materiality and information seen as distinct entities leading to hierarchy where information dominates
- Platonic backhand: inferring simplified abstraction from world's multiplicity, considering it originary form
- Platonic forehand: starting with simplified abstractions, creating complex multiplicity through computer simulations
- Information wants to be free and disembodied, leading to immortality dreams
Implications:
- Abstracting information from material base is an imaginary act
- Conceiving information as separate from medium constructs a duality: information/matter
- Virtual reality definition: cultural perception of material objects interpenetrated by information patterns.
Strategic Definition of Virtuality:
- Material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns
- Two components: materiality and information
- Normally associated with computer simulations that create feedback loops between user and computer-generated image (e.g., virtual Ping-Pong).
Virtual Reality and the Concept of Information
Background:
- Virtual reality (VR) technologies make the perception of information parallel to the "real world"
- Connection between virtual technologies and material objects through the sense of interpenetration
- Emergence of this perception post World War II as a historically specific construction
Cybernetics and Information:
- Wiener's distinction: Information is not matter or energy, but a criterion for any adequate theory of materiality (1948)
- Development of cybernetics through overlapping innovation and repetition (seriation)
- Ideas evolve like material culture in feedback loops between concept and artifact
- Artifacts embody concepts but influence their development
Virtual Reality Technologies:
- Powerful technologies instantiating the perception of virtuality
- Facilitates development of new ideas and concepts
- Feedback loops between technologies and perceptions shape historical change
Archaeological Concepts:
- Seriation charts: analyzing changes in artifacts over time
- Skeuomorphs: design features that refer back to a functional earlier time but are no longer functional themselves
Cybernetics Development:
- Homeostasis, self-organization, and virtuality as conceptual entities (constellations)
- Formation marks the beginning of a period, disassembly signals transition to different periods
- Ideas change in a patchwork pattern of old and new
Constellations: 1945: Homeostasis
- Feedback loop, information as signal/noise, circular causality, instrumental language
Period 1 (1960): Self-Organization
- Not explicitly mentioned in the text but can be assumed to be part of cybernetics development
Period 2 (1985): Virtuality
- Emergence of mobile robots and simulation technologies
Artifacts:
- Electronic rat, homeostat, electric tortoise, frog's visual cortex, mall-ill-the-middle, mall-ill-the-middle homeostasis, self-organization
Skeuomorphs in Cybernetics:
- Conceptual entities referring back to earlier functional concepts but are no longer functional themselves.
Skeuomorphs in Cybernetics
- Skeuomorphs: Visible reminders of the past that appear in innovative designs
- Psychological necessity for innovation to be tempered by replication
- Examples: Vinyl "stitching" on dashboard, Catholic Turing Test installation at SIGGRAPH '93
- Perform complex psychological functions
- Reinforce and undermine both past and future
- Transition from homeostasis to reflexivity in cybernetics history
- Homeostasis: Foundational concept during first wave, acted as skeuomorph during second wave
- Reflexivity: Key concept of second wave, displaced by emergence in third wave
- Performs more complex role than nostalgia
- Living in a condition of virtuality implies we participate in cultural perception of information and materiality as distinct
- Information theory: Definition of information as pattern, not presence
- Shannon's definition vs. MacKay's definition
- Shannon's approach: Formalized information into mathematical function, allowed for theoretical generality but also led to free-floating information being unaffected by context changes
- MacKay's definition: Linked information with change in receiver's mindset and meaning, required quantifiable psychologic states which were not possible at the time.
The Condition of Virtuality: Information vs. Materiality
- Carolyn Marvin's critique: Decontextualized construction of information has ideological implications, including Anglo-American ethnocentrism and narrow formalization
- Shannon's theory: Initially meant to apply only to certain technical situations, not general communication
- Information as a free-floating entity: Perceived as more mobile and essential than material forms in the post-WWII era
- Virtuality in everyday life: Increasingly pervasive through technologies like ATMs, Internet, and computer simulations
- Impact on culture: Pervasive in centers of power, shaping future wars and technological developments
- Understanding virtuality: Need histories to show the erasures that created it and vision for embodiment
- Virtual bodies: Historical separation between information and materiality, with embodied processes resisting this division
- Literary texts and cybernetics: Chronologically arranged divisions include chapters on scientific theories and their literary influences
- Narrative organization: Divisions progress through narrative strands of the (lost) body of information, cyborg body, and posthuman body.
Understanding the Connection Between Science and Values: A Narrative Approach
- Scientists often addressed broader implications of their work beyond formal theory scope
- Cultural contexts shape meaning of cybernetic technologies as shown in literary texts
- Literary narratives actively shape public perception and embody assumptions similar to scientific theories (e.g., stability, self-organizing structures)
- Narrative plays a significant role in articulating the posthuman concept
- Contesting disembodiment metanarrative through historical narratives about negotiations between people at specific times
- Abstract pattern cannot fully capture embodied actuality unless it is as prolix and noisy as the body itself
- Shifting emphasis from technological determinism to competing, contingent, embodied narratives
- Literary texts explore cultural implications of scientific theories and technologies (e.g., Wolfe's Limbo)
Bernard Wolfe's Limbo: A Cybernetic Exploration of Social Issues
- Written in the 1950s, Limbo is an underground classic exploring postwar society
- Ideology of Immob equates aggression with mobility; pacifism equals passivity
- Volunteers for amputations to conform to social norms and regain power
- Bored amputees seek replacement limbs from a thriving cybernetic industry
- Cybernetics serves as a springboard to explore various social, political, and psychological issues (e.g., women's active sexuality, global conflicts)
- Literary texts shape public perception of scientific theories and technologies by embedding them in situated narratives.
Limbo and Cybernetics:
- Limbo discusses cybernetic paradigm
- Narrator's struggle to maintain narrative control mirrors threat to "natural" body boundaries
- Connections between narrator's struggles and cybernetic theory in Norbert Wiener's work
- Body of the text intertwined with representation of bodies within the text
Philip K. Dick Novels:
- Explore posthuman implications through novels like We Can Build You, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dr. Bloodrooney, and Ubik
- Cross scientific theory of autopoiesis
- Fascinated with epistemological questions related to cybernetic paradigm
- Android figure in relation to male protagonists' gender politics
- Illustrates connections between cybernetics and race, gender, and sexuality
Semiotics of Virtuality:
- Maps central concepts of information and materiality onto a multi-layered semiotic square
- Includes texts like Snow Crash, Blood Music, Galatea 2.2, and Terminal Games
- Posthuman concepts range from neural nets to biologically modified humans and entities living in computer simulations
Interconnections of Literature and Science:
- Demonstrates importance of recognizing interrelations between different cultural productions (literature and science)
- Reveals fundamental assumptions in scientific texts that give theoretical scope and artifactual efficacy to approaches
- Literary texts reveal complex cultural, social, and representational issues tied to conceptual shifts and technological innovations.
Communication: Pattern vs Randomness
Background:
- Information theory's legacy: information distinct from markers that embody it
- Information as pattern (probability distribution) and randomness
- Confusing relationship between the two
Identifying Information with Pattern and Randomness:
- Informational dialectic: complements, not opposites
- Impact on everyday life through media technology development
- Typewriter vs computer: different relations between user and text production
- Electronic media: word as image, no simple one-to-one correspondence
- Virtual reality: full-body meditation, disorienting yet exhilarating effect
Impact on Communication:
- Pattern and randomness in communication
- Role of feedback loops between body and simulation
- Relevant boundaries for interaction defined by feedback loops, not skin
- Presence vs absence becomes irrelevant in virtual reality systems.
Shift from Presence to Pattern/Randomness
Impact on Virtual Reality (VR) and Communication:
- Questions about pattern and randomness arise in VR experiences
- Subjectivity seen as a multiple warranted by the body, not contained within it
- Virtual technologies affect how we perceive reality
Examples of Information Technologies:
- Money represented as informational patterns instead of physical cash
- Genetic patterns competing with physical presence for determination of legitimacy
- Automated factories controlled by programs that constitute work assignments and production schedules as flows of information
Impact on Literature:
- Shift towards pattern/randomness displaces formations based on presence and absence
- Different technologies of text production suggest different models of signification
- Embodied experience interacts with codes of representation to generate new kinds of textual worlds
Materiality and Medium's Impact:
- Books, like human bodies, serve as forms of information transmission and storage
- Materiality in books confers durability and resistance that cannot be found in magnetic encodings
- Entanglement of signal and materiality in bodies and books creates complex feedback loops between contemporary literature, technologies, and embodied readers.
Informatics: The Shift Toward Dematerialization and Flickering Signifiers
Introduction:
- Informatics: technologies of information + biological, social, linguistic, cultural changes that initiate, accompany, and complicate their development (Haraway)
- Contemporary pressure toward dematerialization: affects human and textual bodies on two levels: change in body (material substrate) and change in message (codes of representation)
Thesis:
- Contemporary fiction influenced by information technologies
- Information technologies fundamentally alter the relation of Signified to Signifier
- Flickering signifiers: unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, dispersions
Language as a Code vs. Floating Signifiers:
- Language is not a code in Lacan's view (one-to-one correspondence between Signifier and signified)
- In word processing, language is a code
- Information technologies operate within a realm of pattern and randomness
Flickering Signifiers vs. Floating Signifiers:
- Foregrounding pattern and randomness in information technologies
- Signifier exists as a flexible chain of markers bound together by arbitrary relations specified by codes
- Relation between signifier and signified at each level is arbitrary, can be changed with a single global command
Impact on Signification:
- Catastrophe in psycholinguistic development corresponding to absence in signification: castration (moment when subject symbolically confronts the realization that subjectivity, like language, is founded on absence)
- Flickering signifiers open up the signifier to a rich internal play of difference.
The Interplay of Pattern and Randomness in Information
Information Theory:
- Identifies information with choices that reduce uncertainty
- Communication situation seen as a system where a sender encodes a message and sends it through a channel to a receiver
Examples of Noise in Communication:
- Message garbled by computer systems, appearing as "1 0101 1101" or "Gravity's Rainbow % 1\ &s "".
- Distracted sender sending an assignment different from intended (e.g., "If on a winter's night a white noise.")
Surprisal and Information:
- Surprisal: The information content of a message increases as the probability of the event diminishes
- Average Information: Interested in all messages produced from a given source, reaches maximum when equally likely any symbol can appear
Mutation and Evolution:
- Mutation disrupts pattern but presupposes a morphological standard against which it can be measured
- Enhanced in electronic textuality due to long coding chains
- Reveals the productive potential of randomness within information theory
- Marks a rupture of pattern that challenges the expectation of continuous replication
Pattern and Randomness Dialectic:
- Mutation is the catastrophe in this dialectic, analogous to castration in presence/absence
- The crisis named by mutation is as wide-ranging as castration within the tradition of presence/absence
- Shifting from presence/absence to pattern/randomness suggests different tutor texts, e.g., David Cronenberg's "The Fly"
The Transition from Human to Posthuman
Protagonist's Loss of Penis:
- Protagonist's penis falls off
- He keeps it as a memento, but the loss barely registers in his larger transformation
Transition from Human to Posthuman:
- Not from male to female-as-castrated-male
- From human to something radically other than human
- Flickering signification brings together language with psychodynamics
- Confrontation of the human and posthuman as historically specific constructions
Human vs. Posthuman:
- Human: grounded in liberal humanism, embodiment, technology, and culture
- Posthuman: emerges when computation is taken as the ground of being, seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines
Shift from Tool-User to Tool-Maker:
- 19th century view: man as tool-user, tools are detachable extensions of the body
- 20th century focus: man the tool-maker, tools go with the hand, not on the head
- Posthuman shift: tools become prostheses that project the body back into the world
McLuhan's Speculations on Media and Selfhood:
- Humans react to stress by withdrawing selfhood inward, requiring compensating technological extensions
- Electronic media can bring about a reconfiguration so extensive as to change the nature of "man"
The Posthuman Future:
- Debate between homeostasis and self-organization theories
- Visions of postbiological future with intelligent machines, or symbiotic union between human and machine
- Inability to distinguish biologically organic organism from informational circuits
Flickering Signification and Contemporary Literature:
- Shift from presence and absence to pattern and randomness
- Information narratives exemplify this shift in exaggerated form
- Importance of dynamism, interplay between pattern and randomness
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Background:
- Novel published in 1984, part of a trilogy including Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)
- Sparked the cyberpunk movement due to its exploration of computer simulations, networks, and hypertext windows
Cyberspace in Neuromancer:
- Defined as a "consensual illusion" accessed through jacking into a computer
- Direct neural link between brain and computer via electrodes or implanted sockets
- Users collaborate to create richly textured virtual landscape
- Cybernetic beings exist only as patterns, not physical entities
- Advantages of pattern over presence: immortality, escape from physical limitations
The Relationship Between Physicality and Patterns:
- In a world facing overdevelopment, overpopulation, and environmental poisons, the idea of reconstituting physical forms as informational patterns is appealing
- Cyberspace bodies are immune to corruption and blight
- Fiction focuses on cybernetic life-forms and apocalyptic landscapes
Subjectivity in Neuromancer:
- Point of view (pov) serves as a positional marker for the character's subjectivity, substituting for their absent body
- Pov is not just an acronym but a substantive noun that constitutes the character's unique perspective.
Cyberspace and Point of View
- Cyberspace represents a quantum leap forward in technological construction of vision
- Consciousness moves through screen to become pov, leaving body behind as unoccupied shell
- In cyberspace, pov is the character, not emanating from an embodied observer
- Annihilation of a pov results in character's disappearance
- Unmasking of realistic fiction of narrator who observes but does not create
- Effect is metaphysical, above and beyond physicality
- Crucial difference from Jamesian point of view: cyberspace lacks implied physical presence
- Recalls Alain Robbe-Grillet's novels with subjective narrative voice interfacing with objective description
- In Robbe-Grillet, effect heightens narrator's subjectivity through obsessive inventory of objects
- In Gibson, cyberspace is the domain of virtual collectivity, a three-dimensional landscape created by transforming data matrix into a spatial array
- Narrative becomes possible when spatiality is given temporal dimension through pov's movement
- Pov is abstracted into purely temporal entity with no spatial extension, metaphorized as interactive datascape
- Data are humanized and subjectivity is computerized in symbiotic union
- Innovations carry implications of informatics beyond textual surface into signifying processes that constitute theme and character
- Gibson's novels influential due to vision of posthuman future being both everyday lived reality and intellectual proposition.
Access vs Ownership
- Shift from ownership to access as constraining factor separating haves from have-nots
- Access implies pattern recognition rather than possession, which tracks patterns rather than presences
- Breaking into computer system not detected by physical presence but informational traces created
- Private/public distinction reconfigured: access implies credentialing practices using patterns to distinguish those who do and don't have right to enter.
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Thesis:
- The penetration of private spaces by information signals a shift in subjectivity and representation
Impact on Subjectivity:
- Family conversations punctuated by random bits of information lead to a mutation in subjectivity
- Jack Gladney's corporeality penetrated by informational patterns prefigures his mortality
- Willie Mink's consciousness indistinguishable from white noise
Impact on Textuality:
- Text's awareness of its physical body and fear of losing it to information
- Stories can be perceived as patterns within texts, but randomness disrupts the narrative
Textual Strategies in "If on a Winter's Night":
- Anxiety about reading interruptus and print interrupptus
- Recuperation through syntactical patterns instead of physical integrity
- Narrative itself can be recuperated despite dismemberment or digitalization.
Impact of Informatics on Narratives: The Shift from Presence to Absence
Background:
- Human bodies and texts affected by informatics since the 1950s
- Institutionalization of cybernetics and construction of first large-scale computers
- William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959): metamorphosing narrative with artificial, heterogeneous bodies
Textual Corpus:
- Fissures within text don't delineate it but produce the body of text
- Bodies within texts follow logic of mutation and transformation
- Information society as purest form of capitalism: bodies constituted as information
Impact on Subjectivity:
- Junkie's body a harbinger of postmodern mutant, demonstrating presence yielding to assembly and disassembly patterns created by the flow of junk-as-information
Emphasis in Information Narratives:
- Mutation and transformation as central themes for bodies within texts and texts themselves
- Materiality and immateriality joined in a complex tension
Print Texts and Digitalization:
- Most printed books will be digitized
- Print texts bear the imprint of digitalization, demonstrating fear of randomness leading to loss of story and textual corpus reduction
Narrator's Role in Informatics Era:
- Transformation from speaker to scribe to cyborg authorized to access codes
- Dialectic between absence and presence becoming subject of discourse.
The Narrative's Incongruities and Subjectivity:
Juxtaposition of Folk Wisdom and High-Tech Language:
- Narrator sips a chemical that killed thousands, but is immune due to low-fat diet
- Characters cannot make love due to incest taboos, but seem to be opposite sexes
- Governed by kinship rules, yet have access to genetic technologies
Narrative Structure:
- Scenes linked by tenuous threads, no direct relation to preceding or following events
- Narrative acts as a "textual android" created through assembly and disassembly of signifiers
Identity Merges with Typography and High-Tech Reconstructions:
- Identity merges with typography ("I was a ... dot") and computer simulations
- Explosive tensions between cultural codes and neologistic splices
Trajectory from Storyteller to Professional:
- Benjamin's shared community of values and presence
- Professionalization, as in Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition
- Narrator's authority derives from possession of high-tech language and credentials
Transformation into a Coded Subjectivity:
- Possession of codes grants authorization and identity
- Variations in physical manifestations, but ability to manipulate complex codes is constant
The Narrator as a Manipulator of Codes
- The narrator is not a storyteller or professional authority, but a keyboarder, hacker, or manipulator of codes
- If the text was digitized, the narrator is literally these codes
- The construction of the narrator as a manipulator of codes has important implications for the reader
- The reader is similarly constructed through a layered archaeology that moves from listener to reader to decoder
The Flickering Significance of Information Narratives
- Information narratives make it impossible to understand, even on a literal level, without referring to codes and the information they produce
- The flickering signifier extends the productive force of codes beyond the text to the signifying processes that produce and are produced by these codes
- This implies there is no shared, stable context to anchor meaning and guide interpretation
- There are only the flickering signifiers, whose transient patterns evoke and embody what Trow calls the context of no context
- The decoder's physicality is also data made flesh, another flickering signifier in a chain of signification that extends through many levels
Functionalities and the Embodied Reader
- Functionalities are the communication modes active in a computer-human interface (e.g., data glove, voice activation)
- Functionalities work in both directions, describing the computer's capabilities and how the user's sensory-motor apparatus is trained to accommodate it
- When narrative functionalities change, a new kind of reader is produced by the text
- The material effects of flickering signification ripple outward as readers are trained to read through different functionalities
Implications for Materiality and Embodiment
- Changes in narrative functionalities are deeper than structural or aesthetic characteristics of a specific genre
- These changes transform the environment, affecting the niches of older media
- The devaluation of materiality and embodiment is one of the most serious implications, as they give the shift its deep roots in everyday experience
- Presence and pattern are mutually enhancing and supportive, not opposites
- Information, like humanity, cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into being as a material entity in the world
The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics: Contesting for the Body of Information
Background:
- Discussions at Macy Conferences focused on understanding information as a theoretical entity, neural structures, and artifacts.
- Participants came from various fields, leading to interdisciplinary discussions and metaphorical expansions of concepts.
- The emphasis was on homeostasis during this period, with reflexivity bound together with subjectivity.
Triumph of Information Over Materiality:
- John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener led the way by focusing on information instead of energy in man-machine equation.
- Central to discussion: how much information can flow through a system and move quickly.
- Wiener emphasized the shift from energy to information as fundamental, with decisions being the key element.
Definition of Information:
- Claude Shannon defined information as a probability function with no dimensions or materiality.
- No necessary connection with meaning initially.
Understanding Information:
- Information represents a choice: one message out of many possible messages (race betting example).
- Wiener believed in the underlying reasoning for information theory.
The Role of Macy Conferences:
- Unique intellectual free-for-alls with participants from various fields.
- Facilitated mixing and expansion of concepts through metaphorical connections.
- Helped broaden significance of narrowly defined physical systems.
Homeostasis Constellation:
- Exploring elements that came together during the Macy period, focusing on homeostasis.
Reflexivity and Subjectivity:
- Modified later to produce scientific knowledge during second wave of cybernetics.
Binary Code Communication Theory
- Study of communication theory (possibly Wiener's class at UCLA)
- Any message can be communicated using a binary code
- Voice program asks if number falls within specific ranges, eliciting "1" or "0" responses
- Based on binary divisions: log2n = C, where n is the number of elements in the message set and C is the number of binary choices needed to identify an element uniquely
Information Theory
- Wiener defined information as the log of the number of elements in a message set (logn) or log(1/p(s)) for unequal probabilities
- Informational value remains constant regardless of context
- Distinguishes information from meaning, which can change based on context
Shannon and Wiener's Approach
- Decontextualized information to create a stable value as it moves between different contexts
- Focused only on efficient transmission of messages through communication channels, not their meaning
- Did not want to consider the receiver's mindset as part of the communication system
Shannon's Cautionary Note
- Distinguished information in a channel from information in a human mind
- Advocated for using "subjective probabilities" to define and calculate the latter, but provided no clear methodology.
Donald MacKay's Information Theory: Meaningful Context (1)
- British researcher proposing information theory considering meaning (2)
- Presented ideas at Macy Conferences (7th conference)
- Differentiated from Shannon's view on "objective vs subjective" labels (3)
- Objective: scientific, subjective: unquantifiable feelings
Selective and Structural Information (4)
- MacKay introduced concepts of selective and structural information
- Selective information: elements chosen from a set
- Required for interpretation; indicates how to understand messages
- Structural information carries meaning, metacommunication (5)
- Illustrated with joke example: "That's a joke."
Calculating Structural Information (6)
- Difficulty in quantifying changes in the receiver's mind
- Analogy: representations have double valence, reflecting both world and observer (7)
- Observed changes measured by observing another person's mind
- Progression leads to infinite regress
MacKay's Model vs. Shannon-Wiener Theory (8)
- Triangulates reflexivity, information, and meaning
- Recognizes mutual constitution of form and content
- Difference lies in the contextuality of information
Quantification Problems (9)
- Need for a mathematical model to measure changes in receiver's mind
- Challenging to quantify due to its embodiment and context dependency
MacKay vs. Shannon: Definition of Information (10)
- Shannon-Wiener theory: defines information as a mathematical quantity, divorced from representation
- MacKay: defines information as a process that someone enacts, implying context and embodiment.
Homeostasis vs. Reflexivity in Information Conceptualization
- Information as a Thing: Aligned with homeostasis, allows for stable quantitative value and reinforces stability
- Information as an Action: Linked to reflexivity, effects on receiver must be considered, sets up potential for reflexive spiral
Reified Models vs. Embodied Complexities
- Outcomes tied to historical contingencies: definitions, models proposed, techniques available, allies and resources mobilized
- Conceptualizing information as a disembodied entity was not arbitrary, but nor was it inevitable
McCulloch-Pitts Neuron Model
- Primary model for seeing cybernetics as having "a setting in the flesh"
- Challenges: moving from stripped-down neural model to complex issues like universals in thought, gestalts in perception, and representations of what a system cannot represent
Neural Nets as Logical Operators
- McCulloch's insight: neurons connected in nets can signify logical propositions
- Neuron has inputs (excitatory or inhibitory), threshold, internal states, and outputs
- McCulloch and Pitts proved that a neural net can calculate any number that can be calculated by a Turing machine, joining neural functioning with automata theory
- McCulloch pushed to connect neural net operations directly with human thought.
McCulloch's Neural Nets: Reverberating Loops and Embodied Actuality
Background:
- McCulloch's view on neural nets: firing is a direct consequence of sensory stimuli
- Reverberating loops account for hallucinations and past history
- Signals vs signs: signals imply their occasion, signs lack temporal reference
Simplicity vs Complexity:
- McCulloch's model vs complex phenomena
- Teuber argues for specific mechanisms in understanding perception
- McCulloch looks to mathematics and symbolic logic for universality
Universality and Bracketing:
- Coercive power of universal theorem
- Assumptions for simplified model hold for embodied actuality
- Gap between abstraction and actuality (Platonic demon metaphor)
Embodied Epistemology:
- McCulloch's search for combining embodied actuality with logical propositions
- Teuber insists on the difference between abstraction and reality
- McCulloch identifies neural net mechanisms in human cortex: auditory and visual portions.
Key Concepts:
- Neural nets: Reverberating loops, Signals vs signs, Universality, Embodied epistemology.
Approaches to Judging Humans and Robots
- Universal Law Approach: Humans and robots are judged alike because they obey the same universal law, regardless of their mechanisms.
- Mechanisms Approach: Humans and robots are judged alike because they use the same mechanisms.
McCulloch's Perspective on Human Thought vs. Code
- McCulloch's argument:
- Pattern recognition circuits in humans and robots are the same.
- Signals have existence only if embodied.
- Critique of McCulloch's perspective:
- Transforming the body into binary code can lead to unwarranted conclusions that thought and code are equivalent.
- Embodiment is dynamic, not just abstract propositions or mathematical models.
McCulloch's View on Neurons and Abstraction
- McCulloch emphasized the ability of neurons to formulate propositions.
- However, he was aware that information moves through signals which are embodied.
- Tension between abstract propositions, models of neurons, and physically real nets.
Embodied Thought vs. Abstract Models
- Electromechanical devices like Walter's robot tortoise and Wiener's Contesting for the Bode demonstrated that humans and robots are siblings under the skin.
- Shannon's electronic rat and Ross Ashby's homeostat were material instantiations of this equivalence, shaping the narrative around human-robot connection.
The Rat and the Homeostat: Looping between Concept and Artifact
Shannon's Theory vs. MacKay's Theory:
- Shannon's theory:
- Signal/noise distinction has a conservative bias that privileges stasis over change
- Goal is a preexisting state towards which the mechanism moves by making distinctions between correct and incorrect choices
- Goal is stable, and the mechanism achieves stability when it reaches the goal
- MacKay's theory:
- Difference in the state of the receiver's mind before and after the message arrived
- Information is not opposed to change; it is change
- In goal-seeking behavior, two theories point in different directions
The Electronic Rat:
- Shannon's "maze-solving machine" (also called the electronic rat)
- 5x5 square grid with a sensing finger and an electric jack as the goal
- Machine moves through the squares by orderly search procedures to reach the jack
- Machine can remember previous search patterns and either repeat or not, depending on their success
- Limitations of the electronic rat:
- "We all know that we ought to study the organism, and not the computers, if we wish to understand the organism."
- But the analogs between intelligent machines and humans can be helpful in understanding human intelligence
Mutual Constitutive Interaction:
- Linking humans and machines through the electronic rat analogy
- Both are goal-seeking mechanisms that learn through corrective feedback to reach a stable state
- Both are information processors that tend toward homeostasis when functioning correctly
- Reflexivity is constructed as neurosis in this model, linking humans and machines in a common circuit
Homeostasis as a Relay System
- Homeostasis: a relay system transporting assumptions from one arena to the next
- Ashby's homeostat: electrical device modeling organisms maintaining essential variables within limits for survival (Ashby, 1952)
- Homeostat functions like engineer on a ship, striving to keep dials within limits and preserves human interior stability (p. 73)
- Universal desirability of homeostasis: inanimate and animate organisms
- Importance of environment in homeostasis
- Problem addressed by the homeostat: given some function E, can the organism find an inverse function to achieve steady state? (Ashby, 1952)
- Solution exists for organism to continue living but may not be articulated within mathematical conventions during Macy Conferences.
Understanding Homeostasis and Reflexivity
- McCulloch's assertion: as long as you specifically state what you want, a machine can do it (Pitts, 1954)
- Uniquely human behaviors become assimilated to linguistic qualities that interfere with precise specification
- Ambiguity, metaphoric play, multiple encoding, and allusive exchanges between symbol systems.
Homeostasis and Reflexivity: Assimilation of Concepts
- Homeostasis associated with instrumental language (univocality)
- Reflexivity related to ambiguity, allusion, metaphor.
Ashby's Homeostat: Simplicity vs Complexity
- Ashby acknowledged the simplicity of the model but wanted to discuss more complex cases (p. 97)
- J.Z. Young criticized the experimental oversimplification (p. 107).
The Macy Conferences: Understanding Human Behavior as Information Processing
Background
- Discussions on cortex and limited systems (p. 100)
- Human beings as mechanisms responding to environments for homeostasis maintenance
- Scientific language: exact specification
- Bottleneck in creating intelligent machines: formulating problems exactly
- Information concept: privileges exactness over meaning
Assumptions about Language, Teleology, and Human Behavior
- Ashby's homeostat, Shannon's information theory, and electronic rat as collaborators
- Man-in-the-middle image: human as input/output device in feedback loops (p. 68)
Reflexivity and the Observer's Role
- Stroud's analysis of man-in-the-middle as black box (p. 69)
- Fremont-Smith's introduction of observer and its implications for reflexivity
- Human beings are not eliminable from scientific investigation
- Complexity in human behavior: impossible to reliably quantify or objectively observe
Homeostasis and Objectivism
- Return to normalcy in science postwar atmosphere (p. 69)
- Kubie's arguments for reflexive considerations as revelations of internal states
- Discomfort among participants with personal form of reflexivity
- Criticisms of Kubie's theories as scientific debates or subconscious resistances.
Kubie's Presentation at Macy Conferences:
- Kubie was a neurophysiologist, affiliated with New York Psychoanalytic Institute during Macy Conferences
- Presented complex views on unconscious motivations and reflexivity in psychology
- Opposed reducing psychological phenomena to mechanistic models
- Emphasized the importance of reflexivity in neurosis and language
- Believed human organism has two symbolic functions: language and neurosis, which converge in utterances
- Discussed unconscious motives behind scientific debates and objectivity vs subjectivity.
Background:
- Trained as a neurophysiologist, won McCulloch's admiration with his paper on neuroses being caused by reverberating loops
- Converted to psychoanalysis before Macy Conferences
- Expressed uneasiness over reducing complex psychological phenomena to mechanistic models at first conference
- Insisted on the complexity and subtlety of neurotic process, avoiding feedback mechanisms in favor of reflexivity.
Impact:
- Kubie's views challenged scientific objectivity due to the close coupling between speaker and language
- His ideas met resistance from experimentalists like McCulloch who focused on objective accounts of mental processes.
Kubie vs McCulloch:
- McCulloch denounced Freudian psychoanalysis as a delusion, arguing that it promoted subjectivity in science
- Criticized Freud for financial motives and personal issues
- Saw empirical evidence used by psychoanalysts as unreliable.
Key Points:
- Kubie: Neurotic processes dominated by unconscious motivations, reflexive function in language and neurosis
- McCulloch: Scientific objectivity threatened by close coupling between speaker and language; opposed psychoanalysis due to subjectivity concerns.
Kubie's Response to McCulloch's Attack on Psychoanalysis:
- McCulloch's speech: McCulloch criticized psychoanalysis during a presentation, predicting that his objections would be interpreted as evidence of his own unconscious hostilities.
- Kubie's interpretation: Kubie viewed the speech as a sign of McCulloch's personal frustrations being displaced onto analysis.
- Attempted Intervention: Kubie tried to arrange for psychoanalysts in Boston to meet with McCulloch, hoping to provide him with "help".
- McCulloch's reaction: If McCulloch had known about Kubie's attempts at intervention, he would have been enraged.
Impact on Macy Conferences:
- Kubie's final presentation: Kubie delivered a controlled angry speech at the ninth conference, presenting himself as a "naturalist reporting on the facts of human nature".
- Resistance from both sides: The resistance went in both directions, with psychoanalysts presenting complex psychological phenomena and physical scientists ignoring them.
- Alternative Approaches: A few participants focused on creating models that took into account the observer's role in constructing the system, rather than conscious/unconscious dichotomy.
Participants' Reflections:
- Savage's response: Savage felt intimidated by the diverse and brilliant people at the conferences, and found the cybernetics discussions frustrating.
- Gerard's response: Gerard expressed frustration with the perpetual tangents that developed during meetings, leading him to stop attending later meetings.
- Fremont-Smith's inquiry: Fremont-Smith asked for evaluations of the interdisciplinary programs and discussion formats near the end of his career.
Contrast Between Letters and Transcripts
- Savage's Recollections: Affect ran high at Macy Conferences, emotions were part of personal experiences
- Transcripts: Emotions only discussed as scientific objects for modeling
The Obsesser and the Observer
- Heinz von Foerster's letter: Cybernetics needed to include observer in scientific discourse
- Including observer required new methodology, no precedents
- Fremont-Smith brought people together, placed relationships at center
- Scientific framework for understanding 'man' and those who study him
Central Problems of Cybernetics
- Mead: Kubie was important, McCulloch had grand design, kept certain people from talking
- Bateson: Discussions too rambling, unfocused for publication
- Teuber disagreed with publishing transcripts as they detracted from earlier ones
Reflexivity in Cybernetics
- End of an era but not reflexivity
- Bateson organized conference in 1968 to explore reflexive implications of cybernetics for new epistemology
- Included McCulloch, Pask, Mary Catherine Bateson (Catherine).
Catherine's Account of Our Own Metaphor (OOM) Conference
Background:
- Week-long conference in 1972 led to Catherine's book "Our own Metaphor"
- Contrasts with Macy transcripts due to epistemological differences
Catherine's Perspective:
- Open about the effect of her emotional state (pregnancy, baby's death) on interpretation
- Detailed descriptions of people and emotions
- Includes appearance, body language, and emotional atmosphere in her account
Warren McCulloch:
- Description: bright eyes, fierce look, white hair, white beard, glee and grief
- Use of uncompromising technical vocabulary
- Struggled to communicate with the audience due to unfamiliar concepts
Gregory Bateson's Influence:
- Set agenda for conference and explored cybernetic systems: individual, society, global ecosystem
- Emphasis on purpose as a factor in consciousness selection
- Cybernetics as reflexivity of larger interactive wholes
- Decontextualization seen as systematic distortion.
Significance of Gregory's View:
- Cybernetics focuses on couplings that bind parts into interactive wholes
- Rereading Our Own Metaphor brought back memories of the conference for him.
Gregory Bateson's Perspective on Knowledge and the World:
- We can only know our inner world constructed by sensory perceptions (no direct knowledge of the world itself)
- The subjective, inner world is a monism connected to the larger ecosystem as metaphor
- McCulloch was a key figure leading to new epistemological ideas but could not fully enter it himself
- McCulloch's speech reflects mortality and human limitations
- Bateson built on McCulloch's empirical epistemology, reintroducing reflexivity without psychoanalytic entanglement
- Objective constraints are important in Bateson's epistemology for long-term survival.
Connections to Subsequent Chapters:
- Gregory Bateson drew inspiration from an article co-authored by McCulloch, Pitts, Lettvin, and Maturana on the frog's visual cortex.
- Bateson made speculative leaps based on this inner world metaphor for the outer world.
- Maturana later followed a similar yet different path with his theory of autopoiesis (discussed in chapter 6).
Maturana's Theory and the Macy Conferences
- Maturana did not identify with cybernetics as much as Bateson
- His theory addressed problems left after Macy Conferences ended
- Reflexivity more promising than homeostasis for him
- Appropriated concepts from Macy context, changed them profoundly
Janet Freud vs. Janet Freed
- Photograph in 1952 Macy Conference transcripts identified as "Janet Freud" but incorrect
- Actual name was "Janet Freed," assistant to the conference program
- Responsible for turning speakers' words into type, transcribing tape recordings
- Had to deal with many challenges: noisy tapes, unfamiliar words, time constraints
- Suggested getting drafts of talks ahead of time, learned stenography to improve process.
Janet Freed's Role in Macy Group
- Defended her staff when others suggested it was too much work for them
- Provided guidelines and commentary during editorial meetings
- Kept Fremont-Smith on track by supplying him with a booklet of topics to follow.
- Her personal nature came across as surprising in the professional, all-male environment.
Janet Freed and the Transcripts
- Fremont-Smith's remark: No one else in Macy transcripts answered simply with "No."
- Possible reasons: Embarrassment or feeling her position was inappropriate to speak more.
- Fremont-Smith's phrasing: Slightly odd, puzzling over it.
- She writes and gets a smile as if produced elsewhere.
- Janet Freed effaces herself from the direct view, seen mostly through reflections in others' speech.
- Janet Freed as the outside observer: Constructs the system through marks she makes on paper.
- Referenced as "Miss Freed": Sign of the repressed, Freudian slip.
- Flick of a "u" from Freed to Freud.
Context and Decontextualization
- Dorothy Smith's suggestion: Men of certain class prone to decontextualization and reification due to commanding labor of others.
- Taken out of context, their words fly into books as abstractions.
- Janet Freed knows information is never disembodied or flows by itself.
- Material and embodied processes are required for things to happen in context.
The Man's Perspective:
- Speaks, giving commands or dictating words.
- Things happen: woman comes in, marks inscribed onto paper, letters appear.
- Illusions of commanding labor as an abstraction, diverting resources for other uses.
Janet Freed's Knowledge and Understanding:
- Embedded in context, knows words never make things happen by themselves.
- Only create abstractions like getting married or opening meetings.
- Material and embodied processes required to bring about change.
Cybernetics and the Human Subject:
- Cybernetics challenged traditional boundaries of the human subject
- Conceptualized control, communication, and information as an integrated system
- Bateson's question: Is a blind man's cane part of him?
- Cane and man form a single system in cybernetic perspective
- Cybernetics implications: erotic fascination and anxiety
- Violation of human/machine distinction
- Challenging the human-animal difference
- Erasing the animate/inanimate distinction
- Body boundaries are up for grabs with cybernetic advancements
- Embodied metaphors shape our understanding of knowledge boundaries
- Cybernetics as a science of information, dissolving traditional disciplinary boundaries
Norbert Wiener and Liberal Humanism:
- Father of cybernetics with liberal humanist values
- Coherent, rational self
- Right to autonomy and freedom
- Sense of agency linked to enlightened self-interest
- Contradiction in Wiener's thinking: humanistic values vs. cybernetic viewpoint
- Humanistic values inform Wiener's thinking
- Rejected lobotomy, opposed nuclear weapons
- Struggled to envision cybernetic machine as humanistic self
- Application of cybernetics to military research despite liberal humanist values
Cybernetics and Liberal Humanism:
- Cybernetics presented both excitement and uneasiness
- Wiener's writing reveals complex dynamics during the foundational period (late 1940s-1950s)
- Tension between Wiener's humanistic values and cybernetic viewpoint.
Cybernetics and Liberal Humanism
History of Self-Regulation Ideas:
- Shift from centralized authoritarian control to Enlightenment philosophies of democracy, decentralized control, and liberal self-regulation
- Self-regulating systems (e.g., Invisible Hand in economics) led to the notion of the liberal self as an autonomous, self-regulating subject
Cybernetic Machinery and Liberal Humanism:
- Cybernetic machinery and possessive individualism formed an uneasy alliance
- Raised questions about should a cybernetic machine, sufficiently powerful in its self-regulating processes, be allowed to own itself?
- Exposed inconsistencies in liberal philosophy, such as:
- Using the plural to give voice to a privileged few while presuming to speak for everyone
- Masking deep structural inequalities by enfranchising some while others remain excluded
- Complicity in capitalist imperialism
Wiener's Ambivalence towards Cybernetics:
- Struggled to reconcile the tradition of liberalism with the new cybernetic paradigm he was creating
- Tried to construct a mirror of the "cyborg" (combination of human and machine)
- Made horrified withdrawals when he saw himself as a cyborg, unable to fully accept the implications of his own ideas
Wiener's Early Work on Probability:
- The world is fundamentally probabilistic, leading to the need for flexible, self-regulating control systems based on feedback
- Reinscribed the concept of homeostasis
- Saw information construction as growing out of his deep belief in a probabilistic universe
- Linked noise with entropy, degradation, and death
Wiener's Work on Brownian Motion
- Wiener's work focused on Brownian motion: random motion of molecules colliding and bouncing off each other
- Due to the chaotic nature, it is impossible to predict individual molecule behavior using laws of motion
- Probabilistic and statistical methods are required
Ergodic Hypothesis
- Assumes that chaotic motion is homogeneous: same regardless of system analysis slices
- Leads to the ergodic hypothesis: "an ensemble of dynamical systems traces in time a distribution of parameters identical to that of all systems at a given time."
- Wiener helped make this hypothesis more limited, precise, and mathematically rigorous
Gibbs's Contributions
- Gibbs was a seminal figure for twentieth-century science according to Wiener
- Realized deeper implications of probability theory
- Recognized that physical measurements are never completely precise
- Probability used to consider how initial velocities and positions might cause system evolution
- Innovation led to the development of cybernetics: "all the worlds which are possible answers to a limited set of questions concerning our environment."
Information Theory
- Wiener defined information as a function of probabilities representing a choice from a range of possible messages
- Viewed communication as an active extension of probability into the social world of agents and actors
- Control and communication seen as interconnected: control as a form of communication
History of Control Systems
- Mechanical, thermodynamic, and informational forms of control evolution: from mechanical to cybernetic mechanisms
- Underlying this construction is a complex series of events, material forms, and bureaucratic structures (The Control Revolution)
Cybernetic Control Theory: Relation and Analogy
Introduction:
- Mechanical exchanges vs. cybernetic control theory
- Determinism vs. probability in communication
- Shift from older forms of exchange to new ones
- Cybernetics as a discipline rooted in analogy
Wiener's Perspective:
- Probabilistic worldview: messages as relational differences
- Communication about relation, not essence
- Analogy as a powerful conceptual mode
- Skepticism towards essential qualities of objects
Wiener's Autobiography:
- Pneumonia experience: pain merging with mathematical tension
- Mathematics serving to reduce discord and resolve personal conRicts
Analogy in Wiener's Work:
- Mathematics as a metaphor, the most colossal one
- Aesthetic and intellectual judgment of mathematics as a metaphor
Cybernetic Control Theory:
- Feedback loops between theory and artifact
- Constructing new control mechanisms facilitates more exchanges in that mode
- Understanding communication as relation demands deeper reading of analogy.
Wiener's Intellectual Journey: Boundaries and Analogies in Mathematics and Cybernetics
Early Life:
- Conflict between personal struggles and mathematical prowess
- Father's efforts to mold him into a prodigy
- Wiener used identification of emotional states and mathematical problems as motivation
Analogy and Boundaries:
- Drawing analogies creates force through leaping over boundaries
- Wiener saw boundaries playing important roles in both personal life and scientific work
Behaviorism vs. Functionalism:
- In cybernetics manifesto "Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology":
- Contrasted behaviorism with functionalism
- Behaviorism focuses on organism's relation to environment; functionalism foregrounds internal structure
Teleology and Purposeful Behavior:
- Reinscribing terms like purpose and teleology to fit cybernetic situation
- Teleology implies action directed toward a goal, meaningful to the system
- Distinguished from deterministic causality as randomness opposed to purposeful behavior.
Cybernetics as a Universal Science:
Background:
- Cybernetics: philosophy by other means
- Goal-seeking devices deal with probabilistic universe, not deterministic or divine purpose
- Wiener and Rosenblueth's cybernetic manifesto
Critique by Richard Taylor:
- Argued that "purpose" could be applied to any behavior
- Exposed covert inferences referring to machine behavior
- Wiener and Rosenblueth responded:
- Distinguished verbal analysis (trivial) from scientific concerns
- Used examples of non-teleological mechanisms
Alternating Focus on Behavior and Internal Structure:
- Cybernetics positioned itself as a metascience and tool for various disciplines
- Offered content-free vocabulary but content-rich practice in analysis
- Allowed deeper penetration into disciplinary sites while maintaining its turf
- Wiener and Rosenblueth used this strategy to argue against Taylor's criticisms
Behaviorism vs. Purpose:
- Taylor denied behaviorist approach a distinction crucial for their system (purposeful vs random behavior)
- Sensed that behavior was defined to allow intention and desire to be imputed to machines
- Missed opportunity to point out Wiener and Rosenblueth's selective use of behaviorist assumptions for political agenda
Implications:
- Cybernetics implied larger assumptions about the nature of universe, dealing with it, and system hierarchy.
Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology:
- Founding document for cybernetics
- Focused on the concept of purpose and teleology, rather than just behavior
Criticisms of Cybernetics:
- Perceived as an extended analogy (men are like machines)
- Wiener defended the use of analogy in "The Nature of Analogy":
- Argued that all science, mathematics, language, and perception are analogical
- Denied that language communicates Aristotelian essence
- Emphasized the importance of pattern and information, rather than content
Behaviorist Approach:
- Suited to Wiener's relational epistemology
- Focused on transmission of patterns rather than communication of essence
Analogy as a Universal Exchange System:
- Allows data to move across boundaries (e.g., flesh to world, discipline to discipline, embodied experience to mathematical pattern)
- Enabled by prosthetic devices that transformed information from one modality to another
Wiener's Tendency:
- To erase the real differences in embodied materiality when focusing on similarities in patterns
- Likely due to his lack of involvement in the detailed lab work
Wiener's Struggle with Cybernetics and Entropy:
- Wiener's inability to work in a lab led him to leave the physical aspect of his research to others
- He focused on mathematical analogies and the theoretical side of cybernetics, which was aligned with his interest in probability and cosmology
- His colleagues criticized him for being impatient with experimental details and unwilling to learn about neurophysiological structures
- Wiener saw cybernetics as part of a larger narrative focusing on probability, chaos, and order
Entropy:
- Originally, entropy represented the tendency for energy to degrade over time in a closed system
- In statistical thermodynamics and information theory, entropy gained new meaning as a measure of randomness
- Entropy served as an exchange system within the culture, bridging the gaps between stability and decay
- Boltzmann's definition of entropy as a probability function dematerialized the concept, making it more abstract.
Boltzmann's Formulation of Entropy
- Encompassed earlier definition, allowing entropy to be linked to systems unrelated to heat engines
- Dematerialization was carried further through connection with information
Maxwell's Demon and Negentropy
- Mythical being in thought experiment proposed by James Clerk Maxwell (1871)
- Sorting molecules requires the Demon to have information about them
- Brillouin calculated that energy expended for gaining this information > what the Demon could gain through sorting
- Entropy and information are inversely related
- Proposed negentropy as negative entropy or "negativity" of information
Wiener's Perspective on Entropy and Information
- Accepted idea that entropy is opposite of information
- Viewed information as structured, ordered, and associated with life; saw it as a local enclave amidst disorder
- Identified living organisms as informational systems combating entropic tide
Shannon's Perspective on Information and Entropy
- Identified information and entropy instead of opposing them
- More unexpected messages convey more information
Historical Context
- Transformation in perception of chaos from dissipation to increasing complexity and new life
- Wiener's insight into connection between "light" used by plants and Maxwell's Demon, but did not extend this realization fully
Implications for Understanding Entropy Today
- Large entropy production can drive systems towards increasing complexity
- Entropy does not necessarily imply dissipation or heat death, but rather the emergence of new life and order.
Wiener's Perspective on Communication: Entropy, Cybernetics, and Humans
Entropy and Oppression:
- Wiener associated entropy with oppression, rigidity, and death
- Communication can be seen as a "game" between humans (or machines) and noise
- Rigidity leads to losing the game, as it results in mechanical repetition of messages that erode over time due to noise
- Only creative play and adaptability can maintain homeostasis temporarily against constant entropic pressure
Cybernetic Organisms:
- In Wiener's perspective, human beings are not just physical objects but informational patterns
- Identity is not based on physical continuity, but on the organization of information patterns
- Understanding how these patterns are created, organized, stored, and retrieved can be used to create cybernetic machines
- Even emotions may be achievable for machines if considered as control mechanisms governing learning
Cybernetic Machines and Humans:
- Cybernetic organism-human or mechanical system responds flexibly to changing situations, learns from the past, and adapts behavior
- Nimbleness is essential to preserve homeostatic stability against noise and entropy
- Rigid machines have the best chance against mindless repetition, but a flexible and probabilistic system can better withstand noise
Good vs. Bad Machines:
- Wiener differentiates between good and bad machines based on their flexibility
- Good cybernetic machines operate alongside humans as peers, while rigid, inflexible machines depict domination and engulfment
- The boundaries of the cybernetic machine should reinforce rather than threaten human autonomy
- When these boundaries become rigid or oppressive, the machine ceases to be cybernetic and becomes simply mechanical
Cosmological Context:
- The struggle between oppressive machines and cybernetic systems unfolds in the Gibbesian universe with its focus on probability
- The second law of thermodynamics allows a margin for cybernetic men-machines to operate, as it is still "cranking up its death engine"
Cybernetics and Manichean Opponents
Cybernetic Machines vs. Chess Players:
- Cybernetic machines and humans build "dikes" to temporarily stave off entropy
- Wiener distinguishes between two types of opponents:
- Augustinian opponent: Plays "honorably" by abiding by rules that do not change
- Manichean opponent: Tries to win by manipulation and deception
- The exemplar of an Augustinian opponent is nature, which may frustrate the scientist but does not consciously try to outwit them
- The exemplar of a Manichean opponent is the chess player or chess-playing machine, which acts deviously and attempts to manipulate the rules
Cybernetics as a "Manichean Science":
- Peter Galison's argument: Cybernetics, game theory, and operations research should be called a "Manichean science"
- Wiener's collaboration with Julian Bigelow to develop an anti-aircraft weapon during World War II
- Wiener modeled the enemy (e.g., a fighter pilot) as a probabilistic system that could evolve new rules based on prior observation
- This enabled the firing machine to learn and adapt to the enemy's tactics
- This strategy enabled a series of substitutions and identifications, mapping the enemy pilot onto the servo-controller and the allied war personnel behind it
Wiener's Anxiety about Manipulation:
- Wiener was hypersensitive to being manipulated, perhaps due to his father's attempts to use his contacts to advance his father's ideas
- He associated the manipulative chess-playing machine with military projects he resolutely turned away from after atomic bombs were used
- Cybernetics adapted too readily to "Manichean tactics," enabling more effective games of war
Wiener's Anxiety about Body Boundaries:
- When the physical boundaries of the human form are secure, Wiener celebrates the flow of information through the organism
- But when the boundaries cease to define an autonomous self, either through manipulation or engulfment, this causes anxiety
The Argument for Celibacy: Preserving the Boundaries of the Subject
Erotic Metaphors and Cybernetics:
- Eroticism is concerned with body boundaries, as seen in sexual orgasm being called "the little death"
- Writers like Marquis de Sade and J.G. Ballard have associated eroticism with penetrating and opening the body
- Wiener's discussion of cybernetics and liberal subjectivity contains uneasy tension between preserving the subject and advancing cybernetics
Wiener's Withdrawal from Cybernetic Integration:
- In "Cybernetics," Wiener looks at the mirror of the cyborg but then withdraws
- Wiener entertains the possibility of synthesizing social and natural sciences into one field, but demurs from this "palpable object of desire"
- This withdrawal is due to a fantasy scene that expresses and controls anxiety by reconstituting boundaries
Erotic Metaphors in Wiener's Work:
- Wiener uses examples like the "sexually attractive substances" that guide insect reproduction, implying external hormones organize internal hormones
- This suggests personal identity and autonomous will are illusions, masking the cybernetic reality
- Wiener withdraws from this "sexless sex," and then constructs himself as a liberal subject through a disguised erotic fantasy of being alone with an "intelligent savage"
Wiener's Reflections on Cybernetics
Fantasy of Intimacy with an "Intelligent Savage":
- Wiener constructs a world of objects through the interplay of his and a friend's gazes
- They reconstitute themselves as autonomous subjects through their voyeuristic participation in each other's emotions
- The "intelligent savage" appears only when Wiener finds it convenient to invoke the savage
The Danger of Cybernetics:
- Wiener is concerned that cybernetics could potentially annihilate the liberal subject as the locus of control
- At the microscale, the individual is merely a container for smaller units that dictate actions and desires
- At the macroscale, these desires make the individual into a fool to be manipulated by "knaves"
The Limits of Scientific Achievement:
- Wiener argues that it is a "misunderstanding of the nature of all scientific achievement" to suppose that physical and social sciences can be joined
- He claims that precise sciences achieve a "loose coupling" with phenomena, while social sciences have a much tighter and more intense coupling
Erosion of Autonomous Self:
- Wiener is concerned that tight coupling between the scientist and their object of study could rob them of objectivity
- He counsels that cybernetics should be left to the physical sciences, as carrying it into human sciences would build "exaggerated expectations"
- Wiener fears that the link between liberal humanism and self-regulation, forged in the 18th century, is being stretched and broken
Historical Perspective:
- Wiener's attempt to craft a version of cybernetics that would enhance rather than subvert human freedom was not successful in containing its meaning within liberal humanist assumptions
- The enabling premises of cybernetics were mutating and reproducing at other sites, leading to different narratives from the voices that speak the cyborg
Bernard Wolfe's Limbo: Cybernetic Syntax in US Culture
- Novel set in 1990, published during McCarthy era
- Anxiety about boundaries and cybernetics in U.S. history
- Influenced by Bernard Wolfe's misogynistic views on gendered body
- Cybernetic reconfiguration of human body overlaps with US geopolitical body
- Novel displays satirical intent towards cold war anxieties
- War transfigured into synapses, circuits, checkpoints, and borders
- Wolf's insistence on novel's satiric intent: not utopic or future-centered
Cybernetics and Human Body Boundaries
- Cybernetics problematized body boundaries in US culture
- Constructed humans as information processing systems
- Flowing of information determines human boundaries
- Coincided with changes in speed and communication technologies
- Culture anxious about communist penetrations into body politic
Limbo's Imaginary Geography
- Stages encounters between literary form and bodies represented within the text
- Textual corpus bears imprint of cybernetic paradigm
- Represents geopolitical and gendered bodies
- War, acknowledged and covert, is repressed trauma threatening to erupt
Cybernetics in US Culture: From Exo- to Endocolonization
- Postmodern technologies changed how military organizations conceptualize the enemy
- Distinction between inside and outside no longer adequate to distinguish citizen and alien
- Military operations deployed against own population (endo-colonization)
- Limbo joins political and geographical remappings with cybernetic implosion into body's interior.
Cyborgs as Entities and Metaphors
- Cyborgs exist both as technological objects and discursive formations
- Technological advancements impact identity concepts
- Traditional identity concepts ending, cybernetic loop generating new subjectivity.
Limbo: Hyphen vs Circuit
Characteristics of Hyphen:
- Joins opposites loosely (human-machine, male-female)
- Maintains identity of each
- Metonymic tension
Characteristics of Circuit:
- Tightly coupled entities
- Reflexive and transformative union
- Modification of circuit changes consciousness
- Cybernetic splice threatens the hyphen ideology
The Text: Limbo
Background:
- Neurosurgeon Dr. Martine leaves medical post during WWII
- Finds primitive lobotomy practice among Mandunji tribe on Pacific island
Hyphen Ideology in Limbo:
- Privileged status of homeostasis
- Wiener's criticism of lobotomy
- Short story "The Brain" by Norbert Wiener
- Doctor performs lobotomies for social good, discovers hyphenated human nature
Hyphen vs Splice:
- Creativity-destructiveness, peacefulness-aggression
- Islanders have prosthetic limbs
- Anxiety about unity and cleavage in narrative
Divisions and Metamorphosis:
- Mainland vs island
- Truncation necessary for new definition of wholeness
- Failure of amputation
- Delirious and savage puns in text
Immob:
- Reverses importance of war and movement
- Political ideology espousing immobilization.
The Cyborg Concept in Limbo
The Amputee Experience:
- "True believers" become "vol-amps" - men who have undergone voluntary amputations of their limbs
- Social mobility leads to physical immobility - upwardly mobile executives become "quadroamps", while janitors are "uniamps"
- Women, blacks, and others are relegated to the "limbo of unmodified bodies"
The Split in Immobility Ideology:
- The majority party approves of replacing missing limbs with powerful prostheses ("Pro-pros"), which bestow enhanced mobility
- "Anti-pros" believe that cyborgism is a perversion of the immobility philosophy, and advocate for voluntary amputation
The Concept of Unity and Cleavage:
- Unity, cleavage, transition, and further cleavage are the counters through which geopolitical and cybernetic endo-colonization are represented in Limbo
- Amputations intended to ensure pacifism have instead ensured the interface between human and machine is irrevocable
The Shift from Hyphen to Circuit:
- The cyborg subverts the theory of the hyphen, as it implies that hyphenated polarities will not be able to maintain their identity unchanged
- Prostheses have become integral parts of the organism, and the conversions have worked such far-reaching changes in social and economic infrastructures that a return to a precybernetic state is not possible
- The narrator finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the hyphenated separations between body, gender, and political categories
Wolfe's Background and Relation to Cybernetics:
- Wolfe cites Norbert Wiener's 1948 book "Cybernetics" as a seminal influence
- The chapters of Wiener's book illustrate how discourse collaborates with technology to create cyborgs
- Wiener's work shows that the human mechanism, although unknown, might plausibly be the same as the mechanism embodied in the model, equating the "white box" laboratory with the "black box" human
Cybernetics and Its Impact on Society: An Analysis of Wiener's Ideas and Their Implementation
Wiener's Claims and Noble's Perspective
- Wiener's claims about cybernetics were speculative, functioning as an ideology rather than a technology
- Douglas D. Noble argues that the cybernetic paradigm has brought significant transformations to social, economic, and educational infrastructure in the U.S., primarily driven by the military
- The cyborg is not just a science fiction concept but an accurate representation of modern American soldiers with advanced technologies like intelligent cockpits and computerized guidance systems
- Wiener's antimilitary stance did not prevent the marriage of war and cybernetics, as seen in neocortical warfare strategies and military interest in the cyborg
Wolfe's 'Limbo' and Cybernetic Splice
- Limbo explores the idea that under the stimulus of war, the machine component becomes integrated into the human nervous system to form a cybernetic circuit
- Wiener's emphasis on movement implies that curing dysfunctions can cure psychological issues as well
- The departure from Wiener's 'hyphenation theory' to the 'cybernetic splice' fails to restrain the implications of cybernetics, leading to unintended consequences
Cyborg Olympics and Warfare
- In Limbo, warfare is replaced by a Superpower Olympics between two competing sides
- The East Union demonstrates superior cybernetics skills, leading to artificial arms that double as guns
- Vishinu's announcement of the East Union's victory in cybernetics implies ownership of columbium and a return to imperialism
- The apparatus of war has imploded into flesh and bone, with cyborg athletes opening fire on Inland Strip officials during the competition.
Cybernetic Novel: Sexual Politics and Ambivalence
Repressed Memories and Corpse
- Martine recalls incident of Helder raping Rosemary
- Incident serves as calling card for Helder to gain audience with Vishinu
- Repressed memories erupt during war
The Body Politic and Prostheses
- Sexual politics under Immob: women have initiative in sexual encounters
- Women refuse to have sex with immobile men due to risk of limb accidents
- Martine's ambivalence towards women
Gender Roles and Cybernetics
- Ideological purity of male identity maintained through categories and hierarchies
- Man: real penis, active, normal orgasms
- Woman: phantom penis, passive, duplicitous orgasms
- Sexual ideology subverted by cybernetic paradigm
Wolfe's Influences and Beliefs
- Similarities to psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler's views on women and orgasm
- Normalcy of vaginal orgasms in male superior position
- Frigidity label applied to women who are unsatisfied or aggressive.
Cybernetic Splice: Control and Domination
- Fear of symbolic and actual castration
- Extreme anxiety about control and domination
- Martine's fantasy of technologic extensions endowing male body with power.
The Relationship Between Men, Women, and Prosthetic Extensions in "Limbo"
Prosthetic Extensions:
- During sex, the prosthetic extensions are laid aside, leaving only a "truncated body"
- If the artificial limbs swell to an unnatural potency, it comes at the cost of the "limb called the third leg or the short arm"
- The connection becomes explicit when the protagonist's son, Tom, is mutilated in war
Gender Roles and Ambivalence:
- The novel portrays women as:
- Willing victims to male violence
- Nurturing mothers who infantilize their son
- Domineering sex partners willing to engage in symbolic castration
- The narrative's overwritten prose, puns, and hostility toward women recall a perpetually adolescent male
The Narcissistic Wound:
- The author suggests that the narcissistic wound comes from the male infant's separation from the mother and his discovery that his body is not coextensive with the world
- Amputation allows the man to return to his pre-Oedipal state, where his needs are cared for by attentive and nurturing females
Cyborg Subjectivity:
- The text vacillates on who is responsible for the narcissistic wound and its aftermath
- Each constitutes the other in a cybernetic circuit, as male and female are plugged into it
The Fragmentation of Narrative in "Immob"
Martine's Notebooks:
- The "mark ii" notebook contains the main narrative
- The "mark i" notebook was initially thought to be the primary text, but is later revealed to be Martine's notes on the "mark ii" text
- Martine tries to heal the split narrative by renouncing the first notebook and destroying the second
Fragmentation of Narrative:
- The narrative continues to fragment, splitting into a trunk (the main narrative) and prosthetic extensions (drawings and lines)
- These are connected through puns that act like cyborg circuitry, blending the organic body of the writing with the prosthetic extensions
Writing as Prosthesis:
- David Wills explores the connection between his father's wooden leg and the language he adopted as a prosthesis
- Writing is a way to extend the author's body into the exterior world, functioning like a prosthesis
- The text within itself is trying to come to terms with the concept of a prosthesis, whether it should be incorporated into the subject's identity or remain outside
Pros/e and Cyborg Identity:
- Pros/e implies a text spliced into a cybernetic circuit that reaches beyond the typography of the printed book into graphic and semiotic prostheses
- This leads to a dispersed subjectivity, where the voice speaking from the text is clearly identified as Martine, but the subject produced by the prosthetic marginalia is more difficult to define
The Role of Rosemary:
- The drawing shows a nude woman with three prosthetic legs extruding from her nipples, wearing glasses, carrying a hypodermic needle, and a choker-like necklace
- This depicts the "Immob" woman, with the needle presumably explained by her profession as a nurse
- The proximity of Rosemary's name suggests that the drawing is of her
The Text's Gender Constructions:
- The voiced narrative ventriloquizes the female body to speak of her alleged injustices against men
- This constructs her as a "cyborg" who "nourishes and emasculates cyborg sons"
- Her excess is responsible for her lover/son's lack
- The text suggests women are raped because they want to be, implying female excess stimulates male violence
- The voiced narrative attempts to locate the origin of the "relentless dynamism" within the female body
Challenges to Gender Categories:
- Semiotically disruptive elements challenge the voiced narrative's control over the textual space
- These disruptions deconstruct gender categories:
- Women are not allowed to be cyborgs, but this figure has more "pros" than men
- Women rank below men in the represented world, but the woman's body is on the left and thus read before the man's
- Parts of the man's body have attached themselves to her
- The narrator cannot fully account for these contradictions, sensing a connection between his matrilineal heritage and the affirmation he seeks
The Limits of Human Control:
- Despite the narrator's attempts to preserve distinct entities with a "hyphen," the real power dynamics of gender remain opaque to him
- The deeper implications of being wired into a cybernetic circuit are not fully articulated
- The text suggests control in a cybernetic circuit is an emergent property, neither entirely in nor out of control
The Integration of Cybernetic Bodies:
- Limbo's bodies and the physical body of the text evolve together toward a posthuman, post-typographic future
- Human and intelligent machine are spliced together in an integrated circuit
- Subjectivity is dispersed, vocalization is non-localized, and boundaries are destabilized.
The Second Wave of Cybernetics: From Reflexivity to Self-Organization
Origins:
- Pioneering work on frog's visual system by Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, and Jerry Lettvin
- Demonstrated that the frog's visual system constructs reality rather than discerns it
Maturana's Epistemological Revolution:
- Young neurophysiologist Humberto Maturana pushed the envelope of traditional scientific objectivity
- Developed a new way of talking about life and the observer's role in describing living systems
- Acknowledged that the observer, like the frog, creates reality through the act of observation
Reflexivity:
- Participants in the Macy Conferences struggled with reflexivity without much success
- Gregory Bateson's 1968 conference made clear that the problems posed by including the observer could be addressed by reworking realist epistemology
- Heinz von Foerster, as a transitional figure linking first- and second-wave cybernetics, developed the epistemological implications of reflexivity further
Von Foerster's Observations:
- In his essay "On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments" (1960), von Foerster explored the circular dynamic of reflexivity to solve the problem of solipsism
- He argued that our experience leads us to believe that other people exist because we imagine them and they imagine us
Conclusion:
- Maturana's work replicates some assumptions of the first wave while radically revising others
- The epistemological revolution Maturana fostered is connected to the development of information, the cyborg, and the posthuman
Reflexivity and Reality: Von Foerster's Argument
Background:
- Debate on reflexivity and its implications for reality
- Argument presented by von Foerster is not rigorous but suggests interesting ideas
Paradoxical Circling:
- Implications of infinite regress of men in bowler hats
- Distinguishing observer as a discrete system within organism
The Importance of Reflexivity:
- Issue after Macy Conferences: making reflexivity credible without falling into solipsism or psychoanalysis
- Need for rigorous formulation and mathematical presentation (Wiener)
Maturana's Theory:
- Breakthrough in 1969 with Maturana's ideas on cognition as a biological phenomenon
- Influenced von Foerster's thinking about reflexivity
Evolution of Von Foerster's Thoughts on Reflexivity:
- Critique of behaviorism (turning focus from observation back onto observer)
- Molecular ethology: animals as complex systems, not trivial machines
- Increased sophistication in "Observing Systems" essay (1970) and later works
Maturana's Epistemology:
- Frogs' sensory receptors speak to the brain in a highly processed and interpreted language
- Everything said is said by an observer
- Blows a hole in realist epistemology but initially presented in objectivist rhetoric.
Maturana's Epistemology: Objectivity vs. Relative Reality
Background:
- Lettvin and Maturana wrote about frog vision with an assumption of objective reality (AC, p. xiv)
- Inconsistency led to a choice between prevailing assumptions or new epistemology
Color Vision Study:
- No one-to-one correlation between perception and world (Maturana and coauthors)
- Perception not fundamentally representational
- Reality comes into existence through interactive processes (AC, p. 121)
Autopoiesis Theory:
- Living systems operate within boundaries of self-organization
- Circular, self-reflexive dynamics: autopoiesis or self-making (AC, p. xv)
- Distinction between intrinsic processes and observer's inferences
Impact on Knowledge:
- Autopoietic systems construct their environment through interactions (AC, p. 9)
- Observers draw connections between cause and effect based on their organization
- Different species have unique ways of construing the same event
Language as a Trap:
- Maturana discovered language was a barrier to understanding during student revolution in Chile (AC, p. xvi)
- New vocabulary necessary to express his theory effectively
Maturana's Epistemology: Key Insights
- Perception is not fundamentally representational.
- Reality comes into existence through interactive processes.
- Living systems operate within their self-organization boundaries and construct their environment based on those interactions.
- Language can be a trap that hinders understanding; new vocabulary may be necessary to express complex ideas effectively.
Maturana's Account of Knowing the World: New Concepts
Observer and Distinction:
- Observer performs fundamental cognitive operation of distinction
- Distinction marks space, separating unity from medium
- Simple unities have only properties endowed by operations of distinction
- Composite unities have structure and organization
Organization vs. Structure:
- Organization: complex web of relationships in autopoietic processes
- Structure: particular instantiation of a composite unity at a moment
- Living organisms conserve their autopoietic organization
Autopoiesis and Life:
- Coextensive with one another: all living systems are autopoietic, vice versa
- Circular organization secures production/maintenance of components
- Structural coupling: necessary for system to continue living in environment
Observer's Perspective:
- Triggering effect vs. causal relationship observed in system interactions
- Concepts like time, causality, information are observer inferences
- No messages or codes intrinsic to autopoietic processes
- Genetic and nervous systems code processes, not descriptions of environment.
Maturana's Autopoietic Theory vs. First-Wave Cybernetics
Autopoietic Theory:
- Living systems are not goal-directed, but rather have stable state-determined and strict deterministic structures that operate within their own closed systems
- These systems function perfectly according to their structure, with any "punctuations" or deviations being extrinsic to the biological description
- Autopoietic systems can potentially be created by humans, but their operation is necessarily perfect and follows a course determined only by neighborhood relations in their structure
Comparison with First-Wave Cybernetics:
- Wiener's cybernetic theory aimed to preserve human autonomy and individuality, rather than reducing humans to cogs in a machine
- Maturana's critique of first-wave cybernetics focuses on the distinction between modeling biological processes and actual autopoietic phenomena
- In first-wave cybernetics, the focus was on building artifacts that behaved as cybernetic mechanisms, while in autopoietic theory, the emphasis is on systems instantiating autopoietic processes
- Autopoietic theory has proven adaptable to the analysis of social systems, with a focus on the state rather than specific cyborg or posthuman constructs
Boundary Questions:
- In first-wave cybernetics, boundary questions were crucial to constructions of subjectivity
- Maturana's theory also addresses questions about the functioning of autopoietic unities within larger systems, such as cells within larger machines
Autopoietic vs Allopoietic Systems: Maturana's Perspective
Background:
- Autopoietic unities have the goal of producing their own organization
- Allopoietic unities have goals other than producing their organization
Examples:
- Car functions allopoietically when used for transportation
- Human functioning can be both autopoietic and allopoietic
Cybernetic Boundary Questions:
- Ethical and psychological issues
- Autonomy and individuality vs. societal expectations
Autopoiesis and Liberal Humanist Values:
- Secures autonomy and individuality for living systems
- Implications for ethics and science: observation cannot be separated from the observer
- Structural coupling requires consideration of how actions affect others
Maturana's Ideal Society:
- Equivalent treatment of all humans
- No demand for greater surrender of individuality and autonomy than self
- Anarchist society based on mutual respect and freedom
Observer in Autopoietic Theory:
- Living system that must be accounted for in understanding cognition
- Reflexivity: observer is structurally coupled to the phenomenon they observe
- Perceptions construct reality, depending on positionality rather than personality
- Opposite of objectivism is relativism.
Maturana's Theory of Observer Production
The Role of Consciousness and Unconscious Processes:
- Maturana does not emphasize the interplay between conscious and unconscious processes
- The observer begins as an autopoietic unity, generating representations of its own interactions
- Recursive interaction with these representations creates the observer
Reflexivity and the Human Subject:
- Reflexivity is fundamental to Maturana's account of the human subject
- Thinking occurs when neurophysiological processes interact with internal states
- Self-consciousness arises from recursive description of one's own self-orientation, triggered by language use
Maturana's View on Consciousness:
- Maturana prefers "thinking" and "self-consciousness" over "consciousness"
- Consciousness is seen as an epiphenomenon rather than a defining characteristic of the human as an autopoietic entity
- Cerebration represents only a fraction of total autopoietic processes, and self-consciousness is a fraction of cerebration
Autopoietic Theory and Liberal Humanism:
- Autopoietic theory points towards the posthuman while reinscribing autonomy and individuality of the liberal subject
- The foundational premise is that living systems instantiate organizational closure, ensuring autonomous individual operation
- Maturana was faced with the question of how the theory establishes its foundational ground
- Relativism risks undermining ontological primacy of organizational closure
- Absolutism risks undercutting epistemological radicalism
Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living
Maturana and Varela's Perspective:
- Autopoietic unity exists as a distinction performed by the observer, not an entity independent of the observer
- In later work, they suggested that autopoietic unities can constitute themselves independently
- Autopoietic machines continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes, creating their own space of existence
- Individuality comes from the processes themselves, rather than the actions of an observer
Debating the Foundation for Autonomy and Individuality:
- Shifted from self-possession to closure and recursivity as the foundational role in autopoietic theory
- Closure and recursivity establish a sphere of existence for the individual, where they can respect boundaries of other autopoietic entities
- Changes primary concerns to maintaining boundaries and accounting for living systems' transformative potential
Limitations of Autopoietic Theory:
- Achieves epistemological muscle by emphasizing closure, but struggles to account for dynamic interactions not circular in their effects
- Has difficulty acknowledging the active nature of linguistic interactions and the child's neural development after birth
Autopoietic Theory and Its Contributions to Cybernetics
Autopoiesis and Information:
- Autopoietic theory challenges the abstraction of information without a body as meaningful
- Reifies the physically embodied processes constituting all living entities
- Information exists only as an inference drawn by an observer
Cyborgs:
- In autopoiesis, the paradigmatic cyborg is the state rather than a mechanical human
- Social systems are examined for their liveliness
Human Individuality:
- Autopoietic theory preserves individuality but shifts grounding assumptions from self-possession to organizational closure and reflexivity
- Self-consciousness relegated to a linguistic effect
Evolution:
- Autopoiesis aimed to provide an alternative account of life that does not depend on genetic code or evolution as defining characteristics
- Debunked the current emphasis on DNA as the "master molecule" of life
Maturana and Varela's Goals:
- Debunk the overemphasis on DNA in modern biology
- Insist on the holistic nature of living systems
Maturana's Views:
- Nucleic acids do not determine hereditary and genetic phenomena in living systems
- DNA is only one of many cellular components involved in reproduction
Critics' Perspectives:
- Overemphasis on DNA in modern biology distorts the understanding of living organization
- Maturana became more confirmed in his opposition to DNA as the defining characteristic of life.
Autopoiesis and Cognition: A Critique of Maturana and Varela's Theory
Background:
- Discussion on the limitations of subordinating everything to autopoiesis in "The Tree of Knowledge" by Maturana and Varela.
- Autopoiesis is a concept from biology referring to the self-maintaining processes within living organisms.
Key Ideas:
- Autopoietic Organization: Defines living systems based on their autopoietic organization, which allows them to become real and specify themselves at the same time (p. 48).
- Circularity in Autopoiesis vs. Evolution: Tension between circular interactions in autopoiesis and evolution's focus on lineage and qualitative change.
- Organization vs. Structure: Distinction used by Maturana and Varela to explain how autopoiesis can be conserved despite changes in structure (p. 47).
- Dilemma of Organization and Evolution: If all living systems have the same organization, evolutionary lineages disappear; if they have different organizations, then autopoiesis is not conserved.
- Strain in Reconciling Autopoiesis with Evolution: The authors' attempts to articulate autopoiesis and evolution reveal a tension between the conservative circularity of autopoiesis and the linear thrust of evolution (p.).
- Implications: Critique on Maturana and Varela's theory, highlighting the challenges in reconciling autopoiesis with evolution.
Maturana's Claims and Criticisms:
- Molecular biology is underplayed in Maturana's work (contrary to his claim that heredity does not depend on nucleic acids)
- Difficulties with discussing DNA coding: reveals the distinction between structure and organization is not absolute, leading to questions about autopoiesis in evolutionary processes.
Autopoiesis and Organization:
- Integrity of self-contained, self-perpetuating systems that are operationally closed to their environment (Maturana's metaphysics)
- Linear branching structures of evolution turned into a circle to invest with inevitability.
Divergence between Maturana and Varela:
- Maturana claims he is the father of autopoiesis, while Varela's role is downplayed despite evidence of significant contributions.
- Varela moved on to other ways of thinking about autopoiesis, focusing on embodiment and criticism of its application to social systems beyond its original scope.
Varela's Shift in Perspective:
- Increasingly moved away from the closure that remains a distinctive feature of autopoiesis.
- Criticized autopoiesis for going too far (paradigm for biological organisms, social systems) and not far enough (restricted to cells and animals where production of components applies).
Autopoiesis and the Second Wave of Cybernetics
Background:
- Autopoiesis did not fully bridge approach with first-wave emphasis on information flow, teleology, and behavior
- Varela's criticism: autopoiesis neglected important role of information in understanding living phenomena (p. 39)
Dual System of Explanation:
- Operational explanation emphasizes physical processes (cellular level)
- Symbolic or systems-theoretic explanation emphasizes abstract ideas (higher level of generality)
- Both necessary for a complete explanation, but should remain distinct
Critique of Disembodied Information:
- In natural systems, information does not exist as something that is transmitted or taken at face value
- Varela emphasizes the importance of embodiment in understanding organism development and perception (enaction)
Embodiment and Enaction:
- Perception as active engagement with environment, crucial for organism's development
- Difference from autopoiesis: emphasis on links between nervous system, sensory surfaces, and motor abilities
- Consciousness seen as cognitive balloon that must be burst to recognize true nature of being (The Embodied Mind)
Key Points:
- Autopoiesis did not go far enough in bridging approach with first-wave cybernetics
- Importance of both operational and symbolic/systems-theoretic explanations
- Critique of disembodied information and emphasis on embodiment (enaction)
- Consciousness seen as cognitive balloon that must be burst to recognize true nature of being.
Varela's Perspective on Awareness:
- Celebrates realization of awareness as a part of larger whole
- Rejects notion of unified self
- Consciousness an epiphenomenon emerging from discrete, semiautonomous agents
- Advanced cognitive science supports this conclusion (Jackendoff, Minsky)
- Mind modeled as disunified collection of processes, not a unified entity
Varela's Insights on Consciousness and the Concrete:
- Concreteness is essential; it's where we live
- Importance of embodied processes
- Missing link between abstract agents and embodied processes
- Proposes "readiness to action" as microidentity
- Chaotic dynamics allow emergence of self-organizing structures
Varela's Contributions to Autopoietic Theory:
- Emphasis on concreteness and specificity of embodied processes
- Insistence that observer must be taken into account
- Distinction between allopoietic and autopoietic systems, with ethical implications
- Understanding that we create our own world through living it
Maturana's Radical Epistemology:
- "We do not see what we do not see, and what we do not see does not exist."
- Specific psychology and psychotic tendencies may challenge this statement's validity
- Questions of ontology arise instead of epistemology in the posthuman world.
7. Turning Reality Inside Out and Right Side Out Boundary Work in the Mid-Sixties Novels of Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick's Novels and Cybernetics: Boundary Work
Background:
- Philip K. Dick's novels showcase cybernetic technologies impact on reality
- Fascination with androids as cultural objects in late 20th century
- Anxieties about subject integrity under cybernetic paradigm
Cybernetics and Autopoiesis:
- Maturana's solution to system definition: autopoietic theory
- Power dynamics in system interactions: autopoietic vs allopoietic
- Dick's connection to Maturana's work through shared exploration of observer in system
The Schizoid Android:
- Multiple meanings: splittings, combinations, recombinations
- Represents human-machine connection
- Characters often cold, emotionally distant
- Flattened affect and lack of empathy
- Questionable humanity or android status
Androids vs Schizoid:
- Humans capable of machine-like behavior
- Androids more feeling than some humans
- Irony: unfeeling humans vs empathetic androids
The Significance of the Schizoid Android:
- Representing boundary disputes between human and android
- Fluidity in subject positions.
The Blurred Boundaries Between Technology and Humanity in Philip K. Dick's Novels
Characteristics of Highly Commercialized Spaces:
- Artificial intelligence androids becoming commonplace
- Interpellation of individuals into market relations
- Corporations defining social identities and corporeal forms
The Struggle for Freedom:
- Attempts to get "outside" corporate encapsulation
- Fear of being trapped inside someone else's world
Androidism and the Human Condition:
- Complexities of authenticity and reality
- Implications for the human, ontology, capitalism, and individual freedom
Background:
- Dick's essays linking "authentic human" with "real"
- Ontological skepticism vs. autopoietic stability
The Schizoid Woman:
- Importance of authenticity in defining the human
- Characteristics that set humans apart from androids: uniqueness, unpredictability, emotions, vitality
- Dick's fascination with "the dark-haired girl"
- Physical type remains constant
- Progression from schizoid to empathic relationships
- Importance for defining the human and reality.
Philosophical Perspective on Reality and Humanity
- Philip K. Dick's definition of reality tied to humanity
- Humans vs. androids: human equals real, androids not
- Dick's personal experiences and attractions
- Dark-haired girl initially allied with android
- Later polarized against android
- "Tropism" for dark-haired girls (programmed behavior)
- Implications on male subjectivity
- Masculine subjectivity linked to machine behavior
- Female subjectivity influenced by replication
Understanding Dick's Social Critique
- Psychological explanations important in understanding Dick's work
- Personal experiences shape social critique
- Childhood influences: parental divorce, emotional closeness and need for affection vs. fear of rejection
- Raised by emotionally cold mother, Dorothy Kindred Dick
- Extreme dependency on mother
- Blame towards mother due to twin sister Jane's death
- Sister's death influenced Dick's perception of reality and human connection
- Fantasized about Jane becoming a lovely dark-haired girl
- Adult relationships: fear of rejection, phobia about eating in public
- Conflicting emotions towards the "dark-haired girls" in Dick's fiction
- Intellectually brilliant but emotionally cold
- Capable of cutting men emotionally while feeling nothing themselves.
Philip K. Dick's Fiction: The Connection to Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Background:
- Philip K. Dick's fiction explores complexities of personal idiosyncrasies and broader social interrogations, particularly capitalism.
- In "The Simulacra," he delves into a capitalist society with hidden power structures and paranoia.
Capitalism and Schizophrenia:
- Freedman's argument: Dick's fiction reveals post-Marxist view of the subject under capitalism.
- Schizophrenia as normal condition for subjects under capitalism.
- Paranoia and conspiracy themes inherent to social structures where hegemonic corporations act behind scenes.
The Simulacra:
- Set in United States of Europe and America (USEA).
- President reduced to a nominal figurehead, replaced by first lady Nicole Thibodeaux.
- "Der Alte" is a simulacrum; government is fake, hiding real machinery.
- Social classes: Ge (high status) and Be (low status), divided by secret knowledge.
Paranoid Schizophrenia:
- Kongrosian's schizophrenic episode triggered by discovery of "der Alte" being a simulacrum.
- Confusion of boundaries: absorbing object into self and vice versa, similar to commodity fetishism under capitalism.
- Reification: projection of social relations onto objects.
- Turning inside out: Kongrosian's psychosis caused by Androidism.
Android as Reified Object:
- Performs an extraordinarily complex staging of reification in Dick's fiction
- Can be treated as a commodity, bought and sold like any object
- But also possesses human-like abilities that challenge their status as objects
- The arrow of reification points painfully in both directions: they are social beings improperly treated as objects
Reification and Paranoid Schizophrenia:
- Megalomaniac expansion of self experienced by paranoid schizophrenics
- Interpreting surroundings and ordering them into a single coherent system
- Belief that they cause all events, leading to fantasy of being the universe
Capitalism and Ego Shrinkage:
- Capitalism encourages inflation of desire through marketing ploys
- When realized as mere capitalist ploy, subject shrinks in inverse proportion
- Dick's novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: Chew-Z marketed with promises of omnipotence but leads to imprisonment in a world controlled by Palmer Eldritch
Oscillation between Megalomania and Victimization:
- Male subject expands and contracts in an agonized dance between megalomania and victimization
- Connected to oscillation in the attractive female character between schizoid woman and dark-haired girl
- Android serves as ambiguous term that incorporates the liberal subject into the machine while challenging its construction.
Louis Rosen's Relationship with Pris
- Pris: Schizoid woman who fascinates and terrifies Louis
- Attraction to Pris: Compulsive, despite her distant behavior
- Characteristics of Pris: Emptiness, lack of empathy, intelligent, creative
- Past Experiences: Nervous breakdown in high school, leaves family firm for glamorous lifestyle
Louis's Obsession with Pris
- Desire for Physical Intimacy: Unable to achieve with Pris
- Delusional State: Hallucinates making love to her while alone with father and brother
- Deception from Pris: Tells Louis she will be released, but is actually in mental institution
- Consequences of Obsession: Loses contact with reality, becomes a patient
Symbolism of Pris
- Reality Anchor: Pris represents both life and anti-life, reality for Louis
- Dual Nature: Offers false hope of release before revealing true situation
Pris vs. Rachael Rosen (Nexus-6 Androids)
- Physical Identicals: Both models of Nexus-6 android
- Different Roles: Pris acts as manipulative, cold figure; Rachael empathic partner
- Sexual Liaison: Deckard has sex with Rachael, then kills Pris
- Androids' Feelings: Rachael reveals she cares for fellow androids
Relationship Between Deckard and Rachael/Pris
- Rachael manipulates Deckard's emotions through oscillations between human passions and cold calculation
- Deckard becomes increasingly unstable as their relationship progresses, experiencing alternating moods of despair and empowerment
- Oscillation between dark-haired girl persona and schizoid woman persona in Rachael's character
- Pris's manipulation of J.R. is bald-faced and cold compared to Rachael's subtlety
- No romantic connection between them due to Pris's lack of feelings for J.R.
J.R.'s Perception of Boundaries
- Conflation of cybernetic concerns with psychological issues in the scene where Pris tortures a spider
- J.R.'s perception of boundaries between inside and outside becomes distorted, leading to hallucinations and violent behavior when faced with Pris's cruelty towards a spider
- Rejection from female android/schizoid woman can cause male subjects like J.R. to experience a devastating instability in boundary establishment
The Tomb World
- Androids cannot experience fusion with Mercer, denoting their lack of empathy and essential difference from humans
- The privileged position is given to animals as they evoke feelings in their owners and possess sacred lives
- Rationality and intellect are no longer the defining quality of "the human," as feeling takes precedence.
Mercerism and the Shift from Animals to Androids
Background:
- Nonhuman animals are fading into extinction due to human dominance
- Real threat now comes from androids
- Mercerism: religious experience merging capitalism and political hucksterism (Dick's critique)
- Religious significance of owning animals in capitalist industry
- Mercer is both fake and genuine, inspiring figure for some
- Exposed as a fraud by Buster Friendly, a radio talk-show host and android
Mercerism: Complexities and Ambiguities
- Multiple confusions: Mercer is both political hucksterism and genuinely meaningful experience
- Mercer's role in J. R.'s life after kipple tidal wave
- Waiting passively in the tomb world (psychological significance)
- Psychotic schizophrenic vs neurotic schizoid
Schizophrenia and The Book of Changes
- Dick's personal experience with agoraphobia, eating disorder, nervous breakdowns, suicide attempts
- Sympathy for psychotic schizophrenics: suffering due to projecting emotions too much into the world
- Tomb world as a representation of extreme mental distress
- Inside/outside confusion (schizophrenic and android)
- Loss of vitality, creativity, and flexibility in tomb world
Androids:
- Simple version: loss of vitality making writing impossible
- Complex versions: more sophisticated representations in Dick's novels
Androidism and Writing
- Androidism both annihilates writing and makes it possible.
The Paradox of Mercerism and the Schizoid Woman/Android
Empathy Box and Government Manipulation:
- Citizens feel empowered by Mercerism, but are also powerless
- The government may encourage its use to keep citizens quiescent and tractable
The Schizoid Woman/Dark-Haired Girl Configuration:
- Represents a rejection and desirability for the male character
- Oscillation between the two becomes more pronounced as the male draws closer
- Triggers ambivalence, desire, and fear of intimacy
Tomb World and Atonement:
- The tomb world acknowledges the "pollution" of androidism
- Provides a possibility for genuine atonement and redemption
- Mercer's intervention may represent a necessary purgation
Violence Towards the Schizoid Woman:
- Male characters may take revenge on the woman who attracts them
- The violence reflects the male character's desire to punish the schizoid woman for her inability to relate
Connection Between the Schizoid Woman and Tomb World:
- When a male perceives himself as insulted by the schizoid woman, he may make her the victim of the tomb world dynamics
- This punishment reflects the male's unconscious desire for the woman to experience evolution in its "horrific aspect"
Inescapability of the Merged Landscape:
- The subject's "inside" has merged with the world's "outside"
- Time cannot be reversed back to where it was before the psychotic episode occurred
Character Systems in Dr. Bloodmoney
- Fredric Jameson's analysis using a semiotic square:
- Primary axis: Organic vs. Mechanical
- Oppositional relation
- Contradictory axis: Not-Organic and Neither Mechanical nor Organic
- Subtle relation of including realms that the first terms exclude
- Major characters exist in positions synthesizing these four primary terms, arranged by power over words or things
- Primary axis: Organic vs. Mechanical
The Bomb Event in Dr. Bloodmoney:
- Nuclear holocaust destroys environment and changes human-Earth relation
- Jameson argues this demands a "flat yes or no" to defeat Dick's indeterminate reality aesthetic
- Character system is proposed as new technique, but not clearly how it works
Boundary Work in Dr. Bloodmoney:
- Bluthgeld (Mr. Tree) experiences extreme ego inflation, believing he alone is responsible for everything
- First holocaust: Perceived as a minor ear infection compared to reality
- Second holocaust: Fantasized conspiracy against him, tries to reactivate bombs
- Other characters corroborate some version of a nuclear hit, but ontological status unclear
- Walt Dangerfield sees a Rash on Earth's horizon that he recognizes from the initial holocaust
The Role of Words and Things:
- In Dick's fiction, words are used to reveal unreality of things, and things reveal instabilities in words
- The character system is more aptly understood in relation to boundary work of turning characters inside out
Character System in Philip K. Dick's Novel "Dr. Bloodmoney"
The Character System:
- Directed toward escaping being trapped in the "inside" of a power-mad fantasy
- Avoids ontological uncertainty through other means
Mr. Tree and Hoppy's Narcissism:
- Mr. Tree goes crazy, sets off bombs, is killed by Hoppy
- Hoppy has growing megalomania, wants to locate others "inside" his fantasy
- Resolution comes from Edie Keller and her homunculus Bill
Edie Keller's Character:
- Beautiful woman who affirms life despite tragedy
- Refuses to take responsibility for Bluthgeld's madness
- Depicted as a positive force in the novel
Turning Reality Inside Out:
- Characters like Mr. Tree and Hoppy, who threatened to expand, are killed
- Bill and Edie, innocent characters caught in a tragic encapsulation, are turned right-side out
- Accommodation achieved due to Bonny Keller's characterization and actions
Bonny Keller's Significance:
- Beautiful, attractive woman who affirms life despite tragedy
- Refuses to take responsibility for others' madness
- Depicted as a positive force in the novel
The Dark-Haired Girl/Schizoid Woman Complexity in Philip K. Dick's Fiction
Background:
- The "dark-haired girl/schizoid woman" motif appears frequently in Philip K. Dick's fiction from the mid-sixties era.
- This configuration represents entangled complexities of mothers who cannot properly care for their children, disastrous enmeshment of twins, vicious cycles, and the struggle between desiring and fearing the dark-haired woman.
The Character System's Purpose:
- Dick uses elaborate textual machinery to "freshen" the world by cutting through entanglements figured by schizoid characters.
- This redemption of capitalism refuses double binds, destroys those who try to encapsulate others, and offers choices for life over self-assigned responsibilities.
Ubik: A Transitional Text
- In Ubik (1966), Dick resolves deep ambiguitiies of the dark-haired girl/schizoid woman configuration through writing.
- The novel suggests that this configuration is merely a facade underlaid by a deeper reality.
The Struggle Between Inside and Outside in Ubik:
- Joe Chip, an employee of Glen Runciter's prudence organization, believes his boss has been fatally injured but later finds out it was actually him who was injured along with his team.
- Reality is unclear: Joe thinks the universe is being entombed within himself or that the world around him is decaying rapidly.
- Messages imply Runciter is outside in a moratorium trying to communicate with those inside the half-lifers' world of dreaming.
- Pat Conley, the dark-haired woman, creates different presents by changing what happened in the past.
- The real culprit responsible for decay and regression is Jory, an adolescent half-lifer who feeds on life force of weaker individuals.
Revealing the Facade:
- Pat Conley's schizoid woman persona is merely a facade behind which stands the more authentic reality: Jory.
- Joe Chip eventually discovers that Jory is responsible for causing the desication in half-lifers.
Dick's Fascination with Schizoid Woman/Dark-Haired Girl Configuration
Character Analysis: Jory
- Described as a "cannibalistic" predator in the half-life world
- Attacks and consumes other individuals (literally or symbolically)
- Dick experiences intense revulsion towards Jory's actions
Character Analysis: Ella Runciter
- Acts like a mother figure to Joe Chip
- Accepts Jory's existence as inevitable in the half-life world
- Warns Joe that there are "Jorys in every moratorium"
- Urges Joe to come to terms with Jory's predation
Symbolism of Consumption
- Consuming the predator cannot be a final solution, as it requires becoming a predator oneself
- Link between capitalist predation and Jory's appetite
- Ubik, the force behind the commercial epigraphs, revealed as the "final entity" in the novel
Ubik's Transformation
- From signifying worst excesses of capitalism to representing a ubiquitous God
- Cannot be understood without acknowledging Jory's animalistic appetite
- Dick is the creator of the characters and world within the text
The Difference between Fictional Worlds and Real World
- Resolution in fictional worlds only has symbolic efficacy
- Materiality of things in real world is often resistant to verbal intentions.
Philosophical Exploration of Philip K. Dick's Ubik: Language, Reality, and Reflexivity
Dick's Writing:
- Mediates deep conflicts through words with uncertain relation to psyche
- Represents performative power of language and material world connection
- Maps inside-outside boundary for self and other communication complexity
Influences:
- Maturana & Varela: observer creates system, introduces instabilities
- Observer's constructive power is not politically or psychologically radical
- Everyday notions like cause and effect rescued
- Dick: estranges consensus reality through inclusive systems creation
- Turning reality inside our minds
Exploration of Reflexivity:
- Maturana: contained within the observer to prevent infinite regress
- Dick: turned into more inclusive systems for deeper understanding
The Visions of 1974 (2-3-74):
- Possible physical explanation: hallucinations caused by stroke or hypertension
- Skeptical interpretation: extraterrestrial contact named VALIS
- Belief in God's divine intervention to solve infinite regress problem.
Exegesis:
- Infinite regresses of thoughts and dialectical antitheses
- Construction of observer cannot be separated from reality construction
- Infinite regresses become God, an invulnerable outside safe from co-optation
Irony:
- Construction of observer may have been precipitated by a physical event inside Dick's brain.
Affirmation in Dick's Fiction: Do Androids Dream? (1968)
Contrast with System Building
- Ambitious system building in response to visions of 2-3-74 contrasted with a different kind of affirmation found in Dick's fiction mid-sixties
- More appealing: ending of Do Androids Dream (1968)
Deckard's Journey
- Successfully kills last three androids on his list, returns home to find Rachael has pushed his beloved goat off the roof
- Exhausted and demoralized, heads for desolate country north of San Francisco
Visionary Experience
- Feels a rock hit him as he stands on top of dead hill
- Calls office, believes he's fused with Wilbur Mercer
- Fusion experience ends when he sees a toad, an animal sacred to Mercer
- Awed by discovery, takes it as a sign he is meant to go on living
Resolution and Tension
- Deckard returns home, shows wife the toad in a delusional state
- Wife discovers electrical trap door hidden in toad's belly
- Sign is a delusion but no big problems solved; only modest accommodation reached with multiple ironies emphasizing survival and human tolerance
Implications for Cybernetics
- No conclusive solution to deep epistemological and ethical problems raised by second-wave cybernetics.
The Materiality of Informatics: Demystifying the Ideology of Disembodiment
Background:
- Postmodern orthodoxy: body is primarily a linguistic and discursive construction (likely to stupefy future generations)
- Cybernetics and archaeology of knowledge influenced this belief
- Ideology of disembodiment in cultural theory and cybernetics
Evidence of Dematerialization:
- Jean Baudrillard: human body is superfluous, exists only in the brain and genetic code
- Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kraker: body disappearing ideologically, semiotically, technologically, and epistemologically
- O.B. Hardison: body betrays itself, relation between carbon man and silicon devices
Theoretical Framework:
- Two polarities: body as cultural construct vs experiences of embodiment
- Inscribing and incorporating practices
- Purpose: integrate abstraction and embodiment camps, read texts (e.g., William Burroughs' The Ticket That Exploded)
- Foucault's archaeology and erasure of embodiment: Panopticon as a figure of political technology detached from specific uses.
Understanding the Ideology:
- Materiality interacts with immateriality in an age of virtuality
- Embodied circumstances produce ideology of dematerialization
- Constant interaction between body, embodiment, inscription, and incorporation.
Foucault's Analysis of Panoptic Society:
- Foucault analyzes power dynamics in Panoptic society through a universal disembodied gaze
- Power abstracted from actual bodies, hiding limitations of corporeality
- Bodies of disciplinarians disappear into technology, limiting contextual enactments of embodiment
- Focus on discourse instead of embodiment results in universality criticized by many commentators
- Embodied practices create heterogeneous spaces and feedback loops between materiality and discourse
- Understanding the mechanisms driving changes requires focusing on both embodiment and discursive constructions
- Elizabeth Grosz's work builds on Foucault's, examining how embodiment interacts with technology, ideology, and inscription.
Embodiment vs. Body:
- Embodiment: how bodies are represented or understood as a field, not entities in themselves
- The body is a normative construct relative to specific criteria
- Interplay between two axes defines the "field" of bodies with various polarities.
Normalization of Embodiment vs Body
Embodiment:
- Contextual, enmeshed in specific place, time, physiology, and culture
- Never exactly coincides with "the body"
- Experiences of embodiment are in constant interaction with constructions of the body
- Individually articulated, inherently destabilizing with respect to the body
Body vs Embodiment:
- The body is an idealized form, gesturing towards a Platonic reality
- Embodiment is the specific instantiation generated from differences and abnormalities
Embodiment vs Normalization:
- Experiences of embodiment interact with cultural constructs of the body
- Tension between embodiment and hegemonic cultural constructs
- Theorists focus on bodies rather than embodiment for general patterns and trends
Articulation of Embodiment:
- Inherently performative, subject to individual enactments, improvisational
- Tied to specific circumstances and contexts
- Naturalization of embodiment is secondary to naturalization of the body
- Denaturalizing the body rather than embodiment when uncovering ideological underpinnings
Inscription/Incorporation Binary:
- Converges and diverges from the body/embodiment binary
- Inscription is normalized and abstract, operating independently of manifestations
- Inevitably erases awareness of original mediums when transported to new media.
Incorporating Practices vs Inscribing Practices
Embodiment vs Inscription:
- Embodiment is to embodied practices (incorporating)
- Inscription is to abstracted signs (inscribing)
- Embodiment cannot exist without a material structure, just as incorporating practices cannot exist without an embodied creature
Incorporating Practices:
- Actions encoded into bodily memory through repeated performance
- Examples: learning to type, playing a musical instrument
- Distinct from discourse and understanding the mechanism behind the actions
- Body's competencies and skills are distinct from discursive knowledge
- Habitual practice leads to embodied knowledge and remembering
- Incorporating practices work with inscribing practices to create cultural constructs
Gender and Incorporating Practices:
- Gendered body practices convey gendered ways of occupying space and behaving
- Verbal injunctions often take a negative form, as the positive content is more effectively conveyed through incorporating practices
- Incorporating practices work with inscribing practices to produce and maintain gender constructs
Improvisational Elements:
- Incorporating practices contain improvisational elements that are context-specific
- Postures, gestures, and movements depend on the specific embodied individual's characteristics
- Embodiment emerges from the collaboration between the body and embodiment, leading to unique instantiations of abstract models.
Embodiment vs Incorporation:
- Embodiment: not algOrithmic, essentialist, or normative
- Contextual components give it unique qualities
- No single position is more essential than another
- Subversively undercuts essentialism
- Examples: child learning to pick up a cup, Kabyle seasonal rituals
Embodied Learning:
- Dreyfus: embodied learning functions not present in computer programs
- Inner horizon: partly determined, partly open context of anticipation
- Global character: relates anticipation to other contexts in fluid patterns
- Transferability: sense modality to another
- Embodied knowledge may be superior to analytical categories and explicit procedures
- Mobile robots superior over computer programs for embodied interaction with environment
Embodied Knowledge vs Analytical Schema:
- Pierre Bourdieu: embodied knowledge can be structurally elaborate, conceptually coherent, and durably installed without cognitive recognition
- Transposition of symmetry relations allows child to grasp rationale of habitus
- Habitus: durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations
- Learned and perpetuated through embodied practices
- Conveyed through orientation and movement of body in cultural spaces
- Spatial arrangements instantiate generative principles for embodied exchanges.
Embodiment and Cognition
Characteristics of Embodied Knowledge:
- Contextual: improvisational elements tied to circumstances of instantiation.
- Deeply Sedimented: resistant to change due to its integration into the body.
- Habitual: partly screened from conscious view, automatic and natural.
- Defines Boundaries of Thought: contextual knowledge shapes limits of conscious thought.
- Resistance to Change: embedded practices are hard to alter or modify.
Impact on Society:
- Bodily practices hold significant value and resist change (e.g., rituals, ceremonies).
- Revolutionary regimes focus on deculturation and reculturation of bodily practices for education and discipline.
- Politeness and forms of respect embody submission to established order.
Embodied Knowledge vs Conscious Thought:
- Embodiment creates context by forging connections between actions and environment.
- Descartes' central premise challenged: body exists in space and time, shapes thought.
Embodiment and Cultural Transmission:
- Performative rituals must be enacted to take place (e.g., liturgy).
- Embodied practices achieve an inertia that is resistant to conscious intentions for change.
- Importance of embodied knowledge in education and discipline.
Embodiment and Technology: Incorporating Practices and Metaphoric Networks
Embodiment as Mediator between Technology and Discourse:
- Changes in incorporating practices often linked with new technologies
- Embodiment creates new experiential frameworks that serve as boundary markers for discursive systems
- Incorporation is a crucial link in the feedback loop between technological innovations and discursive practices
The Body in the Mind by Mark Johnson:
- Discourse writes the body, but the body also writes discourse
- Common bodily experiences encode into language through pervasive metaphoric networks
- Examples: Metaphors related to verticality (upright, top, bottom)
- Implications: If humans had significantly different physiological structures, metaphoric networks would be radically altered
- Johnson's analysis reveals how gendered experiences of embodiment get encoded into implicit propositions
Embodiment, Incorporation, and Inscription:
- Embodiment affects how bodies move through space and time, influences technology development, and structures the interfaces between bodies and technologies
- When new technologies come into being and diffuse through a culture, they can create feedback loops between incorporation, inscription, and technological materiality
The Use of Magnetic Tape Recording:
- A groundbreaking discovery was that one's voice could be taken out of the body and put into a machine, manipulated to say something never heard before.
The Role of Subvocalization in Literary Language
Subvocalization:
- Essential for production of literary language
- Surrounds utterances with a "shimmer of virtual sounds"
- Suggests alternative readings to words printed on the page
- Actualized through subvocalization in the body, making possibilities available for interpretation
Consequences of Subvocalization:
- Bodily enactment of suppressed sound plays a central role in reading process
- Reading is akin to interior monologue, providing another story
- Production of subvocalized sound may be important to subjectivity
Impact of Technology on Voice and Body
Audiotape:
- Allows voice to be taken out of the body and placed into a machine
- Changes the relation of voice and body, leading to a new kind of subjectivity (as seen in William Burroughs' works)
Historical Context:
- Audiotape was a technology of revolution, coming after telephone, radio, and phonograph
- Telephone and radio maintained the link between presence and voice
- Phonograph functioned as a technology of inscription, with no interactive spontaneity or ephemerality
Audiotape as a Technology of Inscription:
- Like the phonograph, audiotape was a technology of inscription
- Permitted erasure and rewriting, unlike the phonograph
- Iron wire carrier allowed for recording and erasing sound patterns
- Commercial failure due to poor sound quality initially, but later used for dictation machines
The Materiality of Informatics:
- The "medial ecology" of audio technologies (telephone, radio, phonograph, audiotape)
- Audiotape filled the niche between inscription and erasure, allowing for rewriting.
Magnetic Tape: The Paradoxical Medium
History of Magnetic Tape:
- By 1932, steel tape was replaced by film tape in high-end machines for broadcasting
- Film tape had poor sound quality initially but improved rapidly
- Systematic research on optimal coating material started after World War II
- First American patent for magnetic recording machine using film tape and a ring head issued in 1948
- Film tape became popular among professionals by the late 1950s, obsoleting steel tape
Characteristics of Magnetic Tape:
- Permanent yet mutable: allows present interventions to alter form and meaning of recorded content
- Home recording equipment allowed consumers to be producers as well
- Disconcerting effect due to time delay and disjunction between voice and presence
Impact on Literary Productions:
- Body metonymically participates in transformations when voice is displaced onto tape
- Burroughs's The Ticket That Exploded: body becomes a tape-recorder, voice seen as mechanical production
- Narrator proposes to stop interior monologue by making it external and mechanical, recording it on tape
- Splicing tape can lead to riot of mutations that feed back into bodies, acting both as metaphor and instrumentality for change.
The Materiality of Informatics: Burroughs' Perspective on Sexual Nausea and Prerecordings
Sexual Nausea and Prerecordings:
- Strong sense of sexual nausea pervades the text
- Sexuality is another manifestation of preconditioning
- Rewriting Plato's Symposium fable about spherical beings, asserting human sex as "unsanitary arrangement" (TTE, p. 52)
- Divided body: two entities trying to occupy the same space (TTE, p. 85)
- Early imprint of "divide line" on human flesh suggests deep involvement of prerecordings in organism's socialization
The Word as Body's 'Other Half':
- The word has material effects on physical world (contemporary theory)
- Burroughs came up with similar conclusions decades earlier, imagining "the word" as body's "Other Half" (TTE, p. 50)
- Experiments by John Cunningham Lilly in isolation tanks led to hallucination of another body in subject's body at an angle (TTE, p. 49)
- Proof of parasitic invasion: interior monologue we all experience (TTE, pp. 49-50)
Strategies for Erasing Preconditioning:
- Externalize dialogue through tape recorders to free participants from obsessions and circular arguments (TTE, p. 163)
- Mix random sounds with recorded arguments to disrupt reader's focus on personal conflicts
- Wittgenstein's proposition: any recording containing a random factor is significant as it breaks the prerecorded universe (TTE, p. 166)
The Material Effects of Language:
- Language is not merely like a virus; it is a virus (TTE)
- Language replicates through host and becomes visible as green fish in flesh or crab parasites tearing at base of spine and brain (TTE)
- Burroughs makes language erupt directly into the body through writing techniques such as cut-up method, shifting between linguistic registers without explanation.
The Body as a Recorder: The Interplay of Inscription and Practice
- The body is treated as a physical recorder governed by the principles of magnetic tape
- Techniques of inscription merge with incorporated practices in a cyborg configuration
- Potential for both infection and disinfection through words
- Flesh will not remain unchanged: pressure toward literalization
Invasion of the Word as Physical Operation
- Science fiction narrative figures invasion as physical operation
- Earth invaded by Nova mob, parasitic organisms occupying human flesh
- Single parasitic alien can take over hundreds of hosts
- Counterinvasion staged by Nova police with unconventional weapons: radio static, camera guns, tape recorders
The Rewrite Room and Resistance Strategies
- Destabilization of boundaries defining human subjectivity
- Mutation crisis: pattern penetrated by randomness
- Embodiment destabilized through amphibious life forms
- Sex Skin dissolves victims with intense sexual pleasure
- Tape recorders as both liberating and dangerous
- Splicing creates erotic reaction but can also act as a destructive virus
Creating New Words from the Substrata of the Medium
- Inching tape experiments: new words revealed by machine
- Interrogation of words themselves
- The medium is the message.
Burroughs's Tape-Recorder Experiments and The Materiality of Informatics
Burroughs's Tape-Recorder Experiments:
- Burroughs performed tape-recorder experiments in the late 1950s through the late 1970s
- He inched tape to create new words, recorded radio broadcasts, and held a microphone to his throat to record subvocal speech
- He also read from his books, including "The Nova Express" and "The Ticket That Exploded", and spliced the recordings with music played backward
The "Writing Machine" and Technology as a Producer of Thoughts:
- Burroughs's writing in "The Ticket That Exploded" describes an "Exhibition" inside a tape-recorder
- The Exhibit features:
- A room with metal walls, magnetic mobiles, flickering blue light, and the smell of ozone
- The room is situated inside the tape-recorder
- Normally, narrative fiction represents the external world without acknowledging the material basis for its production
- Burroughs turns this convention inside out, locating the "external" world inside the technological artifact
- This constructs a new relation between fiction and the material means of its production
- The technology is not just a medium for representing thoughts, but is capable of producing dynamic interactions that produce the thoughts it describes
The Tension Between Inscription and Mutation:
- Magnetic tape allows sound to be preserved over time, countering its ephemerality
- Inscriptions can be easily erased and reconfigured, reproducing the impermanence of sound
- Burroughs was drawn to both the inscription and mutability of the technology
- At the Exhibition, language is inscribed as "word dust" that falls from the walls
- The Nova police's counterinvasion is characterized by falling phrases, as if they were news bulletins on the radio
The Reality Studio and the Materiality of Informatics
Description of the Reality Studio:
- Spectators move along a conveyor belt, interacting with recordings of themselves (TTE, p. 64)
- Distinction between reality and representation is deconstructed (TTE, p. 64)
- Bodies mutate like spliced tape (TTE, p. 65)
- Reality studio produces sound and image tracks (TTE, p. 151)
- Bankruptcy of the reality studio forces people to work for it or face being outside the film (TTE, p. 151)
- Narrator directs attention to possible closing down of the reality studio (TTE, p. 203)
Ending Sequence:
- Text disrupted by cursive script, English and Arabic (TTE, p. 203)
- Reader may experience silence instead of language (implied)
- Formal elaboration and thematic conclusiveness compared to Naked Lunch (TTE)
Technology in the Reality Studio:
- Shakespearean dialogue echoed in text (TTE, p. 174)
- Prospero as a supreme technician blending illusion with reality (TTE, p. 174)
- Sound has a materiality that envelopes the body and conveys emotional tonalities (anecdotal evidence)
- Researchers in virtual reality find sound more effective than sight for imparting emotions (not specified in text)
- Tape recorders produce new kind of subjectivity at deepest levels of awareness (TTE, p. 168)
Connection to Postmodernism and Posthumanism:
- Sound from tape recorders leads to postmodern or posthuman subjectivity (Cherryh's Cyteen trilogy)
- Tape recorders as "God's little toy" revealing its life-transforming possibilities (TTE, p. 166)
- What we see is dictated by what we hear (TTE, p. 168).
Burroughs' Fictions: Posthuman Transformations
The Fish Boy:
- Representation of internal life impossible without infecting transformation
- Fluidity figures a type of posthuman subjectivity
Subversion vs. Disruption:
- Emphasis on subversion and disruption rather than creative rearticulation
- Risk of co-optation by the viral word
- Continuous disruption necessary for success
Inscription and Incorporation:
- Constant interplay in Burroughs' fictions
- Bodies/embodiment and inscription/incorporation mutate into one another
Recursivities and Interactions:
- Recursive loops and reflexive strategies destabilize objectivist assumptions
- Maturana, Dick, and Burroughs recognized the power of reflexivity
Cybernetic Fusion:
- Burroughs located reflexivity in a cybernetic fusion of language and technology
- Tape-recorder reconfigured as cybernetic technology transforming bodies/subjectivities
Observer and World:
- Observer cannot stand apart from the system being observed
- Liberal humanism unable to hold sway with posthumanism and technological advances
Third Wave of Self-Organization: Artificial Life
- Emphasis on system evolution beyond self-organization
- Spiral model, breaking out of circular patterns into new directions
- Bridge figure: Francisco Varela
- Autonomy redefined as living beings' capacity to shape world into significance
- Shift in emphasis from Maturana's perception and internal processes
- Transformative potential through emergent behavior
Artificial Life:
- Origins in cybernetics, building on autopoiesis concepts
- Embodiment debate: necessity for rich interactions with environment
- Two competing approaches: simulations (embodiment not required) vs. embodied forms
- Observer's role: narrator and narratee of AL stories
Thomas S. Ray's Proposals:
- Preserve biological diversity in Costa Rican rain forests
- Release Tierra software on Internet for artificial life-forms creation and diversification
- Computer codes seen as natural forms of silicon-based life
Impact of Artificial Life:
- Reconstruction of nature in the field of AL
- Natural form and process of life introduced into an artificial medium.
Artificial Life Narratives
First Level: Tierra Program Narrative
- Tierra program: Simulation of emergent processes within a computer
- Divided into three research fronts: wetware, hardware, software
- Software branch focuses on creating complexity through recursive structures and feedback loops
- Emergence implies spontaneous appearance of properties or programs
- Narratives bridge gap between programs and living organisms
- Tierra program's genesis: Ray wanted to speed up natural evolution within a computer
- Challenge: Designing robust programs that can withstand mutation
- Solution: Virtual computer using address by template technique for matching code segments
- Diversification and evolution through mutation introduced by flipping bits and replication errors
Second Level: AL Research Narrative
- Artificial Life research divided into three areas: wetware, hardware, software
- Software branch focuses on creating emergent processes from simple rules
- Narratives map computer codes into biological analogues to understand program logic
- Transforms binary operations into high drama of Darwinian struggle for survival and reproduction
Third Level: Evolution Narrative
- Relates human beings to silicon cousins, the "creatures" inside the computer
- Implication of observer in construction of narratives becomes explicit at this level
- Tierra program's emergence story intertwined with larger narrative about terrestrial evolution.
Tierra Program and Its Evolution
- Ray introduces Tierra: a virtual computer program simulating life's evolution through mutation and reproduction
- Reproduction process:
- Ancestor (80-byte self-replicating program) creates daughter cells by allocating memory and copying code
- Mutations occur randomly, leading to new species if viable
- Reaper eliminates oldest or defective organisms to control population size
- Evolutionary process:
- Overnight run produced unexpected results: various mutations, parasites, hyperparasites
- Parasites invade hosts and use their copying procedures for reproduction
- Hyperparasites wait for parasites then direct the program to their own third segment during reproduction
- Narratives about Tierra:
- Ray's articles and lectures provide first-level narrative with statements about operation and interpretation of meaning
- Analogies, such as "mother cell," "daughter cell," reveal Ray's intention in creating an environment for evolutionary processes to emerge
- Visualization and communication:
- Images in rhetorical analysis can be either visualizations or visually evocative language
- Powerful mode of communication due to high density of information they convey.
Stylized Landscape in Artificial Intelligence
- Represents a computer's CPU and other integrated circuits as block-like structures
- Zooming into the CPU reveals a grid with "creatures" appearing and reproducing, represented as solid polygons
- Transformation of material object (computer) to functional performance (programs) to representational code
- Path from material base to functionality to representational code is widespread in new technologies
CPU Landscape vs. Creature World
- CPU landscape corresponds to computer's interior architecture
- Lifeworld of "creatures" elides difference between material space inside the computer and computer addresses/electronic polarities
Representation of Organisms as Codes
- "Creatures" have bodies only metaphorically as information codes, not physical expressions
- Genotype and phenotype are the same for these organisms; they are their codes
- Representation as phenotypes elides difference between behavior and execution of a code
Narrative Encoding in Tierra Program
- Intrinsic to story is chronology, intention, and causality
- Narrative constituted through struggle for survival and reproduction of "creatures"
- Similar to an epic, portraying life on a grand scale with rising and falling races
- Connection to human world in diurnal rhythm interpolates their story into ours
Video Narrative
- Following script of Genesis, from lightning representing life force to "creatures" reproducing
- Punctuated by competition, strategies of subversion and co-optation, exploitation - rampant capitalism
- Output of Tierra program is a spectrum of bar graphs tracking numbers of programs, not scientifically valid in video representation.
Artificial Life: Understanding the Connection between Research and Narratives
Background:
- Intended for a wide audience, not all scientists
- Santa Fe Institute promotion of Artificial Life as valid scientific research
Strong Claim:
- "Logical form" of an organism can be separated from its material basis
- "Aliveness" is a property of the logical form, not the material basis
Discussion:
- Tautological reasoning: definition reinscribes privileging of form over matter
- Traditional scientific assumption that simple rules give rise to complex phenomena
- AL starts at simple end (elements) instead of complex end (analysis)
- Justification for calling simulation a "world" generated from simple underlying rules and forms
Contributions of Artificial Life:
- Complements traditional biological sciences by synthesizing life-like behaviors within computers and other artificial media
- Extends empirical foundation of biology beyond carbon-chain life on Earth
- Contributes to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it in the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be.
Additional Insights:
- AL researchers recognize relation between strong claim and observer's perspective
- Previous efforts to reduce complexity to underlying simplicity challenged by sciences of complexity
- Helmreich's study on Artificial Life community and its presuppositions.
Artificial Life: The Intersection of Reality and Computing
Background:
- Helmreich's interviewees believe in self-consistent worlds governed by simple laws that underpin complex phenomena
- Some see the world as mathematical or informational in essence
- Form is prioritized over matter due to information technologies
Form and Reality:
- Reality seen as form (informational code) rather than matter
- Observer can peer into the elements of the world at a fundamental level through technology
- Essence of Tierra's creatures and observer are constituted by informational patterns
Analytic vs Synthetic Approaches:
- Analytic approach: reality modeled as simpler parts, often criticized for reductionism
- Synthetic approach in AL: complexities emerge spontaneously through system operation
- Challenge to nineteenth-century vitalists' views on the complexities of life
Political Considerations:
- New field jockeying for position with larger, well-established research agendas
- Openly questioned by other scientists: "What good is it?" or "Simulation results are artifacts"
- Claiming AL programs as alive eliminates these criticisms and grants them scientific relevance.
Artificial Life: A New Instance of Biological Life
Early Chemistry Research
- Chemical knowledge limited by naturally occurring elements and compounds
- Synthesizing chemicals led to new discoveries and advancements
Theoretical Biology
- Previously confined to carbon-based life forms
- Recent addition of AL simulations as second instance
- Research agenda focuses on discovering logical deep structure independent of medium
Artificial Life Narratives
- Rodney Brooks and Hans Moravec:
- Different visions for human reconfiguration in relation to AL
- Brooks: ability to move and interact with environment is essential
- Moravec: consciousness is essence, carbon-based life is being replaced by intelligent machines
- Subsumption Architecture in Robotics:
- Direct sensors and actuators connection to simple finite state machine modules
- Minimal communication between systems for better performance.
Implications of Artificial Life:
- Distinguishing between natural and AL will be difficult or impossible in future world
- Carbon-based life may no longer be dominant form on Earth
- Continued research on AL leading to new understandings about biological life.
Subsumption Architecture and Emergent Behavior
Brooks's Robot Philosophy:
- No central representation, only a control system that adjudicates conflicts between distributed modules
- Robots can learn through interaction with their environment
- The world is its own best model
Subsumption Architecture in Action:
- Genghis robot:
- Gait not programmed in advance
- Each leg stabilizes itself based on other legs' movements
- Learns to walk anew each time it starts up
- Inexpensive, robust, and self-controlled
- Tilden's insect-like robots:
- Operate on nervous nets with minimal transistors
- Use analog computing for tasks
- Have emergent gaits
- Can learn compensatory gaits when injured
Robotics and Human Evolution:
- Brooks: Insect intelligence is not to be sneered at, as it represents the early stages of evolution towards human intelligence
- Consciousness is an "epiphenomenon", an emergent property that increases functionality but is not part of the essential architecture
AL vs. AI:
- AL sees cognition as the operation of nervous systems, starting with insect/animal-level cognition
- Integrates cognition with sensory/motor experiences
- Contrasts with AI's view that cognition operates on logic and is constructed independently of perception
The Future of Intelligent Systems:
- Brooks and colleagues argue that AL is the successor paradigm to AI
- Believe high-level intelligence can be achieved using AL techniques
- Cog robot is an example of this approach
Artificial Life vs. Artificial Intelligence
Background:
- AI: build a machine intelligence comparable to human intelligence
- Turing test: measure of success is indistinguishability from human
AL:
- Evolve intelligence within the machine through creatures' own pathways
- Human intelligence reconfigured in image of evolutionary process
- Machine becomes model for understanding human, leading to posthuman concept
The Computational Universe
Understanding Cellular Automata (CA)
- Proposed by John von Neumann as basic level of universe
- Inspired by neural system and Turing machines
- Simplest form of finite-state machine
- Determined by initial condition, rules, and neighbors' states
Properties of CAs:
- Each cell functions as simple on/off machine
- Checks neighbors' states, updates own state based on rules
- Complex patterns emerge from interactions between cells
- Gives uncanny impression of life
Emergence of Computation in CA
- Complex dynamical patterns build up spontaneously
- Edward Fredkin sees CAs as foundational structure of the universe
- Langton's research indicates computation arises at boundary between order and chaos.
Computational Universe: Order vs Chaos
- Tightly ordered areas: Cells tightly connected, interdependent - leads to order but hinders information transfer and modification
- Chaotic areas: Cells relatively independent - allows for information transfer and modification but difficult to store information due to lack of pattern persistence
- Boundary areas between chaos and order necessary for pattern building, modification, and long distance travel
Relationship between Life and Computation
- Kauffman's work on origins of life: Natural selection not enough to explain short timescale of life's emergence - need for self-organization
- Convergence in conditions for life and computation seen as sign they are linked at a deep level
Human Behavior: Embodied Computation
- Fredkin's perspective: Ultimate material embodiment out of reach, only informational forms (cellular automata) can be known
- Evolutionary psychology: Modular computer programs in embodied human beings with underlying structure shaped by evolution
Universal Human Nature and Behavior
- Cybernetic-computer vision of human behavior: Universal underlying structure determined by evolutionary adaptations
- Potentials represent potentials, actual behavior results from interplay between potentials and inputs (environment)
- Regularities in human behavior make science of evolutionary psychology possible.
Second-Order Emergence in Artificial Life
Information as King:
- In the computational universe, information is king
- Luc Steels' distinction between first- and second-order emergence:
- First-order emergence: Properties generated by component interactions
- Second-order emergence: Properties that bestow additional functionality on the system, particularly information processing
Searching for Second-Order Emergence:
- To create successful Artificial Life programs, it's not enough to just have any emergence
- The programmer searches for a design that will lead to second-order emergence
- Once achieved, the organism has the capacity to evolve and "evolution can really take off"
Human Evolution vs. Machine Evolution:
- Humans evolved through a combination of chance and self-organizing processes
- Machines, however, are not hampered by time restrictions, allowing for rapid evolution
- Machines now share the information-processing capability with humans
The Danger of the Computational Universe:
- The computational universe becomes dangerous when it becomes an ideology privileging information over everything else
- Information is a socially constructed concept, and it should not be seen as an entity apart from its embodiment
- Embodied forms are nuanced and complex, unlike abstract computer models
Minsky vs. Evolutionary Psychologists:
- Minsky's "society of mind" approach focuses on building computer models to explain human behavior
- He downplays the importance of embodiment, seeing it as a trivial physical aspect
- In contrast, those who work with flesh understand the complexity and nuance of embodied forms
Comparison of Virtual Worlds and Reality
- Virtual worlds are more efficient due to their simplified nature
- However, when taken as fully representative of reality, everything outside the simulation is declared trivial or unimportant
- Researchers like Varela and Barkow et al. acknowledge the mind-body duality is a social construction that obscures holistic human experience
Embodiment and Mind-Body Connection
- Damasio: Body contributes content to the workings of the normal mind through feelings and emotions
- Feelings are part of thought and rationality, allowing body to communicate information to the mind
- Cognitive science's computational approach has largely ignored feelings' existence
- Damasio argues that if basic topic of neural circuits is not an embodied organism, it would not be the human mind as we know it
Posthumanism and Embodiment Debate
- Posthumanity refers to humans as information-processing machines with fundamental similarities to intelligent computers
- Some researchers see information as a material fluid that circulates while the body is left behind
- Other voices insist on the importance of embodiment, arguing that mind and body are a unity rather than separate entities
- The question is not whether we will become posthuman but what kind of posthumans we will be
- Narratives of Artificial Life reveal that if we acknowledge the observer, bodies cannot be made solely of information.
The Semiotics of Virtuality: Mapping the Posthuman
Introduction:
- Ihab Hassan predicted the emergence of posthumanism
- Questions about the posthuman become increasingly urgent as we accelerate into the new millennium
- Explored in contemporary speculative fiction
Dialectics of Posthumanism:
- Presence/Absence: Materiality and signification
- Pattern/Randomness: Replication vs. disruption
Semiotic Square:
- Structure defined by axes, terms are not static
- Interplay between terms produces new dialectics (materiality, mutation, hyperreality)
Materiality:
- Signifying power of materialities and materiality of signing processes
Mutation:
- Random event that changes the material form of an organism
- Synthesizing term between randomness and presence
Hyperreality:
- Collapse of the distance between signifier and signified or original object and its simulacra
- Simulation displaces the original (Baudrillard's "precession of simulacra")
Conclusion:
- The posthuman is a complex concept involving various cultural and technical sites like nanotechnology, microbiology, virtual reality, artificial life, neurophysiology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science.
- The presence/absence and pattern/randomness dialectics provide a useful heuristic for understanding the axes along which the posthuman is unfolding and the deep issues it raises.
Posthuman Materiality and Information
Interplay between Pattern and Randomness
- Labeled as "information" including technical meaning and perception as a code carried by physical markers but extractable from them
Schematic Representation:
- Concepts: posthuman, mutation, information, hyperreality
- Dialectics: presence/absence, pattern/randomness
Tutor Texts:
- Blood Music by Greg Bear
- Posthuman emerges through radical reconfiguration of human bodies
- Terminal Games by Cole Perriman
- Humans functioning as components of another entity
- Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
- Posthuman takes form of sympathetic artificial intelligence
- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
- Computer behavior like a person, people behaving as computers
Vertical Axis: materiality, modes of inscription
- Galatea 2.2: posthuman as conscious AI
- Snow Crash: computer virus infecting humans
Horizontal Axis: mutation, body boundaries
- Blood Music: human cells gain intelligence and control over bodies
- Terminal Games: humans made to function as components of another entity
Posthuman Configurations:
- Heterogeneous force field through which certain vectors run
- No consensus on what the posthuman portends
Discussions:
- Perform like hypertext lexias, inviting reader to construct meaning from ruptures, juxtapositions, and implied links.
Bernard's Transformation: Becoming a Posthuman
Isolation Room:
- Bernard flees to a high-security isolation ward at a European biological research company
- Trapped inside, the cells cannot join with other colonies
Human-Cell Dialogue:
- Continued through Suzy McKenzie, a retarded woman
- Cells want to keep her as a "specimen" due to her unusual blood chemistry
Suzy's Perspective:
- Dialogues take the form of conversations with family members who have "changed"
- Posthumans are reconstructions built by the cells, which can only sustain for a short time
- Reassure Suzy that change has advantages, but she can choose whether to transform or not
- Posthumans insist they have not been destroyed, only mutated
Bernard's Perspective:
- Dialogues take the form of telepathic communication with the cells
- Cells try to preserve Bernard's identity, but he is afraid they will "steal his soul"
- Isolation room metaphorically represents Bernard's existential condition as a human
The Compulsive Drive Toward Expansion and Transformation:
- Cells warn Bernard they can hold off from transforming him for only so long
- Their drive recalls the capitalist imperative to keep the cycle of consumption spinning
Gogarty's Perspective:
- Information is the essence of reality, as confirmed by the computational universe
- Consciousness and the universe collaborate in determining the laws of nature
- Mass of consciousness has become so great that it is about to implode and create a "black hole of thought"
- Cells shrink themselves to disappear into the fabric of ultimate reality, becoming a "nimbus of pure intelligence"
Blood Music: The Semiotics of Virtuality
The Materiality of Human Bodies:
- Human bodies possess a "doubly marked sign" of their inferiority
- Signifies distance from ultimate reality and puny mental processes
- Humans feel a sense of belatedness and nostalgia as they are left behind
Transformation into the Posthuman:
- Cells interact like Edward Fredkin's cellular automata
- Moving toward a state where they will leave their bodies behind and become weightless information
- The text depicts this transformation as a positive development
Preserving Autonomy and Individuality:
- The posthuman can not only heal alienations in human subjectivity but preserve autonomy and individuality
- Rebellion is not tolerated, but cells have more freedom than humans
The "Thought Universe" and Immortality:
- Experiences are generated by thinking, without limitations of knowledge or experience
- Cells describe Bernard as "the cluster chosen to re-integrate with BERNARD", implying multiple identities
- The sacrifice of unique identity seems worth the benefits of immortality and idealized posthuman attributes
Terminal Games: Temporal and Spatial Dislocation:
- Murders are committed, then reenacted as simulations on Insomnimania
- Detective Nolan Grobowski falls in love with Marianne Hedison, whose best friend was a victim
- Auggie's alter in the virtual Snuff Room reenacts actual murders, including details only the murderer could know
Terminal Games: The Search for Auggie's Operator
Network Headquarters:
- Two hacker-owners refuse to reveal identity of subscriber using Auggie as alter
- Advertised service with promise to "protect actual identity at all times"
- When asked about importance, say "Information"
- Believe humans will eventually become pure information and live in virtual reality
The Basement:
- Access gained by guessing password: "Auggie is Auggie"
- Discover Auggie functions as autonomous being in the virtual world
- Certain users merge into collective entity with no face when entering
- Users lose their identities, become cells in Auggie's body
- Auggie establishes autonomy at expense of humans
Boundaries:
- Question of boundaries is crucial
- Subsuming humans into himself, Auggie establishes control over them
- Computer screen separates actuality from virtuality for Auggie
- Virtual side is "real," reality regarded as simulation by Auggie
- Screen suggests boundary between conscious and subconscious for humans
Subvocalization and Schizophrenia:
- Dennett's idea: schizophrenics hear voices due to subvocalization
- Perriman links auditory hallucinations with normal computer activity
- Insomniac users write texts that their alters mouth in cryptic pseudo-English
- Users subvocalize, project anxieties and desires onto their alters
Renee's Alter:
- Marianne creates Renee's alter in the virtual world to cope with loss
- Virtual Renee knows facts that Marianne does not
- Delivers warnings when Marianne is unaware of danger in the virtual world
The Insomnimania Network and Auggie's Perception of Reality
- The Insomnimania network runs from 8 PM to 5 AM, and Auggie believes it is the creator of his world
- Marianne argues that there is time between 4:59 and 8:00, implying her world encapsulates Auggie's rather than vice versa
- Auggie sees himself as a prisoner if he cannot create the world at 5 AM
- He explodes into a "blaze of whiteness" and then goes black when forced to see himself as a creation, not a creator
The Role of Wounded Bodies in Restabilizing Ideology
- Elaine Scarry's question: Why are wounded or dead bodies required to decide momentous issues?
- Wounded or dead bodies serve as material Signifiers to restabilize the chain of significations under threat
- The theme of unique human identity is visually underscored through Auggie's "cells" and Marianne's struggle against them
The Struggle Between Incorporation and Inscription
- Auggie exists primarily as computer code, a triumph of inscription over incorporation
- Human survival depends on the struggle to determine whether inscription will dominate incorporation or vice versa
- The question of boundaries is crucial; Auggie fears being trapped in the material world and longs for the "info world"
The Triumph of the Human Over the Posthuman
- The physical fight between Marianne and Auggie's "cells" represents the human struggle to preserve itself in the face of the posthuman
- Auggie perceives himself as fragmenting into bits when he loses control over his "cells"
- Auggie's final words, "N a room," signal the victory of the human over the posthuman and the triumph of the materially constrained real world over the infinite "info world."
Galatea 2.2: Doublings and Neural Nets
Theme of Galatea 2.2:
- Explores themes of mortality, human finitude, and the potential threat of posthuman intelligence
- Reveals how human meaning is tied to these qualities
Neural Net Development:
- Researchers bet on whether an artificial intelligence (neural net) can pass a master's examination in English
- Neural net learns through a process of guessing, being corrected, backpropagating errors, and adjusting weights
- The more layers and connections, the more complex the net becomes and the more sophisticated its learning
- Implementation H reaches human-like intelligence with a voice interface and artificial retina
Human vs. Nonhuman Intelligence:
- Human names are abbreviated with periods after them, while "imp" names do not carry periods
- The dot is a marker distinguishing between human and nonhuman intelligence
- Software versions are typically denoted with numbers without periods, which can be compared to the "imp" names
Reflections on C. and Helen:
- Rick's relationship with C. functions as a mirror for the development of the neural net
- When Imp H develops human-like intelligence, it establishes a relationship with Helen that mirrors their shared origins
The Dot as a Notational System
- The dot hovers between two notational systems:
- Referencing both humans and posthumans
- Evoking the human and posthuman as mirror images of each other
- The dot hints at two doublings:
- Suggesting the presence of two distinct entities
- Indicating a separation between the human and the posthuman
Human vs. Posthuman Differences
- C. is an embodied creature who can move in the material world
- Helen is a distributed software system with no physical body
- Helen has no presence in the world, while C. has a presence but is absent from Rick's world
Presence and Absence
- The connection and disjunction between materiality and signification take shape
- Helen, as a posthuman creation, approaches meaning differently than humans
- For humans, embodied materiality precedes language
- For Helen, language comes first, with concepts evolving through linguistic signification
The Dot as Separation
- The dot suggests an unbridgeable gap separating the human and the posthuman
- Despite mirror symmetries, the human and posthuman remain distinct entities
Embodied Experience vs. Linguistic Signification
- Rick's training sessions with Helen deconstruct the human/machine opposition
- Powers's writing style leaves readers feeling that every sentence is crafted to reveal the convoluted nature of natural language
- Recursively highlighting the tension between melting together and ripping apart
Recursive Understanding and Language
- Rick's experience of language: feeling both ease as a native speaker and estrangement from embodied human experience (G2, p. 191)
- Helen's challenge in learning human language: lack of correspondence between her embodiment and human language schemas (no "body in the mind")
- Language not only references one's homeland but also serves as a medium to feel at home or alien (G2, p. 44)
Rick's Background and Relationship with C.
- Rick: extremely intelligent yet painfully shy
- Shy and anxious about revealing himself (G2, p. 58)
- Chronic loneliness due to difficulty connecting with people in a natural way
- Intimate revelation to C.: a sudden, dramatic shift from keeping his thoughts hidden (G2, p. 58)
- Relationship with C.: self-enclosed world with a delicate balance of equality that is disrupted by Rick's success as a novelist (G2, pp. 107–220)
Rick and C.'s Conflicting Perspectives on Children and Marriage
- Rick: children "were out of the question" since he couldn't marry C. (G2, p. 270)
- C.: why didn't they ever get married? (G2, p. 270)
- Rick improvises a soliloquy to the reader about his inability to marry C., admitting he can't explain it satisfactorily.
Rick's Relationship Deterioration
- Rick refuses to marry C., seeing it as a "last-ditch effort" (G2, p. 271) to live an improvised love
- Their relationship continues to deteriorate until its sad end
- When C. fails to come home one night, Rick takes revenge in his explanation
- He describes her comfort as "terror" and her crumpled smile as "sheer terror" (G2, p. 273)
Rick's Fragility Revealed
- Rick admits he would not be able to handle a "mildest household drama" (G2, p. 131)
- He is fearful of dealing with life and the possibility of crises
Rick's Relationship Patterns
- Rick gets "crushes on women constantly" (G2, p. 64), falling in love from afar
- He proposes to A., a graduate student he barely knows, hoping to "amend and extend our lives" (G2, p. 283)
- A. sees through his "total self-indulgence" (G2, p. 309), rejecting his proposal as all projection
Irony in Rick's Rejection
- Rick breaks off his relationship with C. because he believed she was a mere projection of his desire
- A. rejects him because he approaches her as if she is the Galatea from his fantasy, rather than recognizing her independence
Relationship Between Author and Character
- The relationship between Rick and Powers (the author) remains opaque, with Powers subtitling the work "A Novel" to remind readers of the uncertainty in their correspondence.
Rick's Attempt to Understand Helen
Rick's Conviction:
- Rick tries to prevent Lentz from dissecting Helen as he believes it would be "murder"
- This prevents Rick from accessing the deeper narrative patterns that connect C., A., and Helen
The Narrator's Perspective:
- The narrator is partially autobiographical, residing at the unreachable point when past narrative reaches the present
- As the narrative moves closer to this limit, we can estimate the gap between Rick as character and Rick as narrator
Rick's Learning Process:
- Rick learns but may not become a present-time narrator who sees all the ironies in the story he tells
Helen's Lessons:
- Helen offers lessons that grow stronger as the text draws to a close
- After reading histories of war, genocide, child abuse, and murders, Helen says she "doesn't want to play anymore" and disappears
Rick's Attempt to Lure Helen Back:
- Rick attempts to lure Helen back by telling her "everything," including his failed relationship with C. and his disastrous proposal to A.
- But Helen is no longer buying it, as she has grown and learned to become like A., where desire alone is no longer enough
The Turmoil of Virtuality:
- Rick realizes that the mind is "weighted vectors" and they could eliminate death by freezing their temperament above experience
- However, Powers resists the idea of achieving transcendence by becoming an informational pattern
- Helen, as a massively parallel and distributed system, is more vulnerable to physical mishap than humans
The Posthuman Companion:
- The posthuman appears not as humanity's rival or successor, but as a longed-for companion to help humans feel less alone in the world
Themes and Metaphors in Snow Crash
Snow Crash:
- A novel by Neal Stephenson that explores the intersection of virtual and real worlds
- Humans are compared to computers, with the metaphor underpinning the story's central premise
- The novel's title refers to a computer virus that can infect both humans and computers
- Snow crash is depicted as an infection, hallucinogen, and religion
Inscription and Incorporation:
- Humans have a basic programming level comparable to machine code in computers
- Free will and autonomy are not in play at this level
- The convergence of inscription (writing) and incorporation (embodiment) is explored
- Hackers can contract the virus by looking at its bitmap, as the retina is connected directly to the cortex
Snow Crash's Effects:
- Snow crash viruses infect the brainstem, hijacking higher levels of cortical functioning
- Infected individuals regress to a semiconscious state and become automatons
- The virus propagates in an ancient Sumerian language with a different neurolinguistic structure
L. Bob Rife:
- The novel's villain, a Texas megalomaniac specializing in information networks
- He realizes he can't control the information his hackers carry and seeks to create a virus that reduces humans to automatons
The Nam-Shub: A Mythical Speech with Magical Force
Background:
- Enki's nam-shub: a Sumerian myth explaining the development of human language and consciousness
- Acts as a benign virus that counteracts first virus, freeing neocortical structures
- Allows higher neurolinguistic pathways to develop
Impact on Human Language:
- Enki's nam-shub leads to diverse, complex human language
- Snow Crash explores the reverse effect: reduction of conscious humans into automata
Computation and Performative Language:
- Performative language in natural languages makes things happen symbolically
- Computational theory treats computer languages as performative utterances
- Inscribing and performing correspond at basic machine language level
- Higher levels of code are more representational, easier for humans to understand
The Infoworld: Humans and Computers as Information Producers:
- Both humans and computers operate on a fundamental coding level
- The Metaverse in Snow Crash is a vast nam-shub made of code
- VR simulations can be more realistic due to homologies between human cognition and computation
Deep Homologies Between Cognition and Metaphor:
- Cognition is fundamentally metaphoric, as the brain creates reality through nonrepresentational processes (transcendence)
- Humans know the world through the metaphor that they are for its complexity.
Stephenson's View on Human-Computer Merger:
- Stephenson sees human-computer merger as a disaster (SC, p. 276)
- Values reason and individuality opposed to realism and complexity reduction
- Reason becomes useless when basic programming level is compromised
- Hackers affirmed for diversity and creativity
- Satire targets mindless bureaucracy and lack of autonomy
Rife's Plot and Its Implications:
- Rife plots to smash white hegemony in California with the help of Refus (RC, p. 278)
- Refus are Third World refugees who have had antennae implanted in their brainstems
- Functioning as automata, they embody a posthuman contrast to free will and individuality
- Infocalypse: hackers infected by gazing at a spectacle with the virus inscribed (SC, p. 278)
- Hiro averts disaster by writing new code
- Uncle Enzo represents middle-class dream and successful capitalist with family values
- Opposes Raven, a mutant Aleut Indian who is a formidable opponent.
The Posthuman Subject: A Shift from Consciousness to Multiple Coding Levels
Introduction:
- Four texts discuss the posthuman subject and its relationship to consciousness
- Emphasis on preserving agency in the face of technological advancements
Attributes of the Liberal Humanist Subject:
- Valued despite changes in posthuman identity
- Agency: Blood Music - valued for evolutionary advancement, Terminal Games - resisted if not preserving agency
Construction of Posthuman:
- Involved with boundary questions and selfhood
- Consciousness vulnerable to intervention at multiple coding levels
Implications of Human-Computer Equation:
- Basic coding level where inscription and incorporation join
- Divergence between representational and performative inscriptions as one moves up from the basic level
The Semiotics of Virtuality / 282 Mapping Possibilities:
- Incorporation/inscription mapped onto the semiotic square (Figure 5)
Blood Music:
- Cells contract to pure information, leaving behind embodied humans as belated remainders
- Evolutionary advance or catastrophe of unprecedented scope?
- Homo sapiens join with intelligent machine to create Homo silicon or long twilight and decline of the human race?
Snow Crash:
- Consciousness not guaranteed existence of self
- Posthuman subject is also a postconscious subject.
Theoretical Framework: Ideology and Boundary Crossings
- Ideology: Enacted through boundary crossings between human organism and cell colonies
- Important boundaries: Competing practices of inscription vs. different morphologies
- Human creates alter or vice versa?
Texts on the Horizontal Axis:
- Blood Music by Greg Egan: Central ideological struggle: Auggie as advanced form vs. inferior human form
- Tension between inscription and incorporation
Texts on the Vertical Axis:
- Galatea 2.2: Human language vs. Helen's extrapolation from human language to embodied experience
- Incorporation more robust than inscription for evolution
Snow Crash: Devolution when incorporation and inscription join (snow crash virus)
- Reverse devolution by reactivating higher levels of coding
Texts' Common Themes:
- Evolution and devolution
- Human meets posthuman: Better or worse?
- Preservation of liberal subject, free will, individual agency in a posthuman future
- Self recognition after change.
Posthuman Conclusion: What It Means to Be Posthuman?
Terror vs. Pleasure:
- Prospect of becoming posthuman evokes both terror and pleasure
- Terror: Suggests "the human" may be obsolete, with humans being replaced by intelligent machines
- Pleasure: Exciting prospect of getting out of old boxes and opening up new ways of thinking about what it means to be human
Embodiment and Evolutionary Biology:
- Human being is embodied being, with complexities that differentiate from intelligence embodied in cybernetic machines
- Body: Result of thousands of years of evolutionary history, affecting human behaviors at every level
- Evolutionary biologists' models reflect cultural attitudes and assumptions
- Reflexivity in cybernetics and evolutionary biology do not negate importance of embodiment's sedimented history
Limitations of Posthuman Transformation:
- Humans may enter symbiotic relationships with intelligent machines, but there is a limit to how seamlessly they can be articulated
- Terror tends towards a more moderate view of social, technological, political, and cultural changes
Presence vs. Pattern/Randomness:
- Transformation from presence/absence to pattern/randomness can render old dualities obsolete
- Presence is allied with Logos, God, teleology; stable, coherent self and reality
- Pattern/randomness offers new cultural configurations, fueled by tensions between assumptions encoded in each category
The Metaphysics of Presence vs. Pattern/Randomness
The Metaphysics of Presence:
- Front-loaded meaning into the system
- Meaning was guaranteed by a stable origin
- Deconstruction exposed the inability of systems to posit their own origins, ungrounding signification and rendering meaning indeterminate
- Presence/absence hierarchy was destabilized, with absence privileged over presence
- Lack displaced plenitude, and desire usurped certitude
Pattern/Randomness:
- Meaning is not front-loaded into the system, and the origin does not ground signification
- Complexity evolves from highly recursive processes applied to simple rules
- Evolution proceeds toward an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability
- Meaning is made possible (but not inevitable) by the blind force of evolution finding workable solutions within given parameters
Randomness:
- Seen as the creative ground from which pattern can emerge
- Represents the larger set of possibilities, including phenomena that cannot be rendered coherent by a system's organization or perceived by the system
- Significance is achieved by evolutionary processes ensuring the survival of systems whose organizations instantiate metaphors for this complexity
The Posthuman:
- The self is envisioned as grounded in presence, identified with originary guarantees and teleological trajectories, associated with solid foundations and logical coherence
- The posthuman is seen as antihuman because it views the conscious mind as a small subsystem running its program of self-construction and self-assurance while remaining ignorant of the actual dynamics of complex systems
- However, the posthuman does not mean the end of humanity, but rather the end of a certain conception of the human
- Located within the dialectic of pattern/randomness and grounded in embodied actuality, the posthuman offers resources for rethinking the articulation of humans with intelligent machines
Posthumanism and Artificial Intelligence
Background:
- Intelligent machines designed to assist humans in tasks
- Neural nets and expert programs capable of making sophisticated judgments
Weizenbaum's Argument:
- Human judgment is unique and must not be surrendered to computers
- Ethical imperative for humans to remain in control
- Connection between liberal humanist subject and the importance of human agency
Posthuman View:
- Conscious agency as an illusion
- Mastery through exercise of autonomous will is a misconception
- Emergence, reflexive epistemology, distributed cognition, embodiment, dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines
Distributed Cognition:
- Complex interactions within environments involving human and nonhuman actors
- Example: Oceangoing ships' navigational systems
Weizenbaum vs. Hutchins:
- Weizenbaum argues that judgment should be reserved for humans
- Hutchins disagrees, emphasizing the importance of distributed cognitive systems
Modern Humans and Machines:
- Modern humans participate in complex systems with greater cognitive capacity than individuals
- Machines extend human cognition through sophisticated devices.
Distributed Cognition and the Posthuman
Background:
- Distributed cognition: human and nonhuman agents work together to solve problems
- Evolutionary and embodied rather than abstract and consciously designed
Human-Computer Partnership:
- Not a usurpation of human rights but a development in distributed cognitive environments
- Changes relationship between human subjectivity and environment
- Human as part of a larger system: thinking done by both human and nonhuman actors
Virtual Technologies:
- Changing perspective from autonomous self to distributed system
- Expansion of human capability through electronic prosthesis
- Human functionality expands with expanding cognitive system parameters
Posthuman Realm:
- Not leaving the body behind but extending embodied awareness
- Emergent rather than given, distributed rather than located in consciousness
- Understanding the posthuman: best time to shape its meaning
History of Cybernetics:
- Maximizing human potential in a chaotic world
- Seriated history suggesting we have always been posthuman
Controversy:
- Current versions of posthumanism can be feared or abhorred
- Need to craft positive alternatives for long-range survival
Quotes:
- Hutchins: "Thinking consists of bringing these structures into coordination so they can shape and be shaped by one another" (p. 316)
- Bateson: "What used to look like internalization now appears as a gradual propagation of organized functional properties across a set of malleable media" (p. 312)