Beyond Hive Consciousness, Part 2

Jaron Lanier ends his long awaited first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by trying to explain his gig as a philosopher of the early 21st Century. In doing so, he cannot help but allude to Marshall McLuhan:

The phase of life we call "childhood" was greatly expanded in connection with the rise of literacy, because it takes time to learn to read. [...] It has even been claimed that the widespread acceptance of childhood as a familiar phase of human life only occurred in conjunction with the spread of the printing press. (180)

Lanier takes pains to show a physiological basis for metaphor, for metaphor is the route by which we get closer and closer to the nature of consciousness, and that brings us full circle to Chapter 1.

The Part and the Whole

The many in the one is the characteristic of universality;

The many not being the one is the characteristic of particularity;

The universal is formed by many species which are in themselves identical;

Their identity is shown in the difference of each in its own essence;

The principle of the interdependent origination of the one and the many is wonderful integration;

Disintegration means that each retains its own character and does not become the whole.

This all belongs to the realm of wisdom and is not said from the standpoint of worldly knowledge.

By means of this skillful device, you can understand Hua-yen.

Adapted from a verse by Fa-tsang (643-712 CE)
in Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra
by Francis H. Cook

The Reconnection

I.

picking the itch
a defrocked flower and
an Indian maid
with a third ear
middle

faceless alabaster
slides head first
into the silty stream as
a pumpkin sun
sets on cattails


II.

starwheel
throwing off suns
helping to remember
stolen dreams

collapsible staircase
ascending
approval
one-on-one

a pair on bikes
"We could catch up."
kaleidoscopic
mushroom cloud

so glad to see
the Blue
amid a whirling field
of stars

There is something more.

a panther in silhouette
against the sunset

a turquoise fly
transmogrifies and

a ruby-throated hummingbird
flies on by


— by Chris "Starbaby" Hayden

as transcribed by Sally Paradise in The Kharma Comes

Beyond Hive Consciousness, Part 1

Jaron Lanier begins his long awaited first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by trying to explain his day job as a technologist of the late 20th Century. In doing so, he cannot help but allude to Marshall McLuhan:

We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (webcams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). (5)

This would have been yesterday's news to McLuhan, whose 1964 opus, Understanding Media, is subtitled "The Extensions of Man." McLuhan understood well that Lanier and his technologist coworkers were merely extending human organs in new, virtual ways.

Lanier, however, is aware of his ironic position, and takes pains to separate himself from the hive mentality that dominates Web 2.0 and all of its adherents (including contributors to the blogosphere). And since his own subtitle is "A Manifesto," which would seem to indicate a high level of public importance, Lanier provides a self-help list of do's and don'ts for those addicted to the superficiality of Web 2.0 reductionism:

• Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
• If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don't yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
• Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
• Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
• If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.
(21)

That's some good advice. If we all adhered to Lanier's dicta, we would be spared the vituperative trash that infects topical forums, Wikipedia would be useful background to the real story, websites would be windows into our souls, YouTube would be worth watching, more blogs would be worth reading, and Twitter might actually be interesting. Imagine the kind of Singularity we could then produce!

In 1991, Brian Eno famously quipped that "Future TV will be made with simple equipment, unqualified people, small budgets, and bad taste." Lanier sees the fulfillment of that prophecy in a section called "Schlock Defended." Again, he can see the irony of YouTube, and suggests that, while it could--and should--be of much higher quality, the motivation to create schlock is inarguably human.

Lanier then takes on computationalism in his chapter titled "I Am a Contrarian Loop," an obvious spoof on our own Doug Hofstadter's work. Lanier critiques the three "flavors" of computationalism that are supposed to result in the Singularity--the awakening of the web. First there's the notion that sheer quantities of data held in databases such as Google's will somehow wake up to some kind of cosmic consciousness. A second flavor--that proferred by Hofstadter--requires self-aware recursion--a "strange loop"--in order to qualify as consciousness. Finally, there is Web 2.0 computationalism, which holds to a new twist on the Turing test: if you buy music based on the recommendations of the hive "then the hive is effectively a person" (156). Lanier then suggests that human evolution is, in fact, realistic computationalism, and we could construct a myth, a creation tale, "to think computationally that isn't as vulnerable to the confusion brought about by our ideas about ideal computers" (157). For McLuhan, myth "is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects" (McLuhan, 1962, 266). This "complex group of causes and effects" is simply another way to express Lanier's realistic computationalism.

To be continued...

[NOTE: This blog post was four weeks in the making. Part 2 could be four more. :dj]

from "Nixon's Kids (My Generation)"

In fifth grade, an experiment
        Was tried on some of us to see
        If more kids simultaneously
In class was more efficient.

We had not one or two but four
        (To teach us all according to
        The strengths of every student who
Had tested high or low before

On various subjects) one of which
        turned out to be the niece of that
        old Presidential candidate
They'd kicked around: Old Tricky Dick

Himself, who also happened to
        Have lived just down the street from us
        In Yorba Linda. So what does
One do, but hold a vote to choose

Our own class president? It soon
        Got ugly, way beyond just signs
        And slogans, promises and lines,
Until we nearly, once at noon,

Had us a riot by the bars
        At recess when some seven guys
        Deplored the war we fought disguised
As just containment of Karl Marx.

I can't recall who won that day
        But never mind: Miss Nixon went
        To the inauguration bent
On stating America's way.

But having for one's teacher the
        Niece of one so powerful
        Had merit undeniable
And took me places unforeseen.

For instance, once when Nixon flew
        To the southland for a stay
        In his new place in San Clemente,
I dragged my parents, joined those who

Went out to see if Air Force One
        Would sink into the tarmac of
        Our little airstrip. Heads above
The rest he waved, the favorite son,

And I was quite inspired to write
        A news account of that great day.
        I showed it to Miss Nixon, a
Great source for her of no small pride;

She sent it off to Uncle Dick,
        Who sent it to his pilot: shall
        Lt. Col. Ralph B. Al-
Bertazzie tour his bailiwick?

And so we went, my parents and
        The press and I to El Toro
        Where Air Force One awaited for
Our entourage. I took a stand

From that day forth: I'd try to train,
        Become a pilot, hopefully,
        Serve God and country faithfully
And told Miss Nixon of my aim.

But then one day at recess I
        Observed a sonic boom fly by
        When we'd just learned astronomy
And all about the speed of light.

I ran across the asphalt lea
        To my beloved, said in glee:
        "Miss Nixon, everything we see
Is in the past!" She looked at me

And said with utmost certainty,
        "No, it's not!" I turned away
        And never held her in that way
Again. I still think she delayed me.

Consider That

The Sun never rises;
our star never sets.
It appears in the east
as Earth turns from west.

Consider This

Every day, the largest nuclear reactor in the solar system appears on the eastern horizon; in fact, it is constantly doing so somewhere on the planet. This star alone is responsible for the reserves of energetic capital that we are rapidly depleting through our heavy reliance on fossil fuel technologies. We must now remember how to live solely on our solar income, tapping into our savings only when absolutely necessary.

A Sense of the Divine

Toward a Coherent Life

What, exactly, would a coherent life look like? How can we make all the parts of a life add up to something that hangs together and seems logically connected? And how can we earn a decent living, all at the same time? Matthew B. Crawford takes an interesting stab at questions like these in Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.

Crawford teases his reader with only the barest of glimpses into his own life, but it seems as though it went something like this: Grew up with mom and sis on a California commune, did not attend high school (which may explain his later success), took his undergrad in physics (just like his dad), earned a master's degree in philosophy (unlike his dad), then terminated with a doctorate in the philosophy of politics; worked for an information services firm, ran a thinktank, and now makes his living as a motorcycle mechanic, the only job he's ever really enjoyed. "[F]ixing bikes is more meaningful," he writes, "because not only the fixing but also the riding of motorcycles answers to certain intuitions I have about human excellence" (196).

Here we see the concrete supporting the abstract--a competent wrench supporting grace on wheels and the need for speed. Contrast this with his previous positions, first as a writer of abstracts for an academic database of journal articles (most of which he could not understand and was not given enough time to even try to understand), then as the director of a thinktank whose mission it was to make arguments against the case for global warming appear to be scholarly. There's simply no room for that kind of bullshit in motorcycle maintenance--either the power and handling are there, or they're not.

My point, finally, isn't to recommend motorcycling in particular, nor to idealize the life of a mechanic. It is rather to suggest that if we follow the traces of our own actions to their source, they intimate some understanding of the good life. This understanding may be hard to articulate; bringing it more fully into view is the task of moral inquiry. Such inquiry may be helped along by practical activities in company with others, a sort of conversation in deed. In this conversation lies the potential of work to bring some measure of coherence to our lives. (197)

I would suggest that this conversation in deed is one conversation in which we all should engage. And I would recommend letting Matthew B. Crawford lead the discussion.

Scenario Universe

In Synergetics, R. Buckminster Fuller succinctly lays out his definition of Universe and humanity's place therein. The problem with that opening sentence, however, is that Universe is not some system within which one exists.

As Bucky sees it, "Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciouly apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences" (81). Note that, by definition, Universe requires conscious apprehension and communication, without which it would not exist. In the ultimate self-referential recursion, Universe requires humanity to experience Universe as much as humanity requires Universe as the ground against which we experience life. "We have only one counterpart of total complexity," Bucky says, "and that is Universe itself (85).

Thus mutually dependent, Universe and humanity are but components of one eventuation, or, as Bucky notes, "Universe is technology--the most comprehensively complex technology. Human organisms are Universe's most complex local technologies" (85).

At the same time, Universe is not a system. If it were a system, we could stand outside of it and say "There is the Universe"; but that is not the case. Anywhere humanity goes, there is Universe; thus Universe is a scenario, not a system. Furthermore, "Universe and its experiences cannot be considered as being physical, for they balance out as weightless," and "weightless experience is metaphysical" [emphasis added] (84).

Having declared that reality is thus metaphysical, we can look to Joseph Campbell for insight into how humanity experiences this Fuller Universe. "Our eyes are the eyes of this earth," Campbell writes in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion; "our knowledge is the earth's knowledge. And the earth, as we now know, is a production of space" (2). Obviously Bucky would substitute Universe for earth, but he would undoubtedly assent to Campbell's earth as "a production of space"--production as in artistic performance.

Campbell refers to Immanuel Kant's four-term analogy to make this clear: a:b::c:x "where x represents a quantity that is not only unknown but absolutely unknowable--which is to say, is metaphysical" (29), the point on which Bucky and Campbell converge. Moreover, Campbell notes, "as Jesus also is reported to have declared (in the recently discovered and translated Gnostic Gospel of Thomas): 'The Kingdom is within you'" (53).

To conclude, while Shakespeare's cliched theatrical analogy--"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players"--certainly has some merit, it would be more instructive to consider the fact that the play resides in the minds of the players, even as the players inhabit the play: scenario Universe.