The problem is when scientists then say, “Ah, that means we are nothing but machines.” So, they turn a statement they assume for pragmatic reasons into a statement about the reality of the world. And, that is when I come into problems with them. People who do that are usually the ones who do not believe that human are narrators...
I always like to think that robots will be our future partner species. In a way when you look at humans, we are so desperately lonely. We look desperately for animal intelligence by trying to communicate with chimps and dolphins. And, at the same time we look for extraterrestrial intelligence. So, in a way, we are a very lonely species. And, for me as a theologian, that is because we lost our relationship with God that was started at the beginning. So, it makes sense that we would try to build a species that would be our partners and friends...
(T)he best way to build an intelligent machine is to build it in accord with a human newborn, and like a human newborn let it grow in intelligence with its interaction with humans. And, so those robots can only become smart if they have interaction, and that’s exactly how a human baby eventually becomes a smart grownup.
An insightful Interview with Prof Anne Foerst on Groks Science, covering robot intelligence, human narrative and species loneliness. Previous observations here and here. Our growing relationship is an outcome of the physical needs of the fragile organism, an objectively-occurring, always-arising facet of embodied existence. Nothing changes our essential reality and interior process.
formless ground
Monday, December 14, 2015
very lonely species
Labels:
artificial intelligence,
consciousness,
robots,
science
Friday, October 9, 2015
blue splintered plastic
Accidental art. Urban installation. Created over centuries. Various materials: tarmac, brick, concrete, and paint, with placed objects (pieces of blue splintered plastic chip shop fork). Various performers, all unknown. Site specific: intersection of Henry and Malinda streets. Place: Shalesmoor, an area off the centre of Sheffield, UK. Post code: S3 8UL. Map: take a walk around. More: here
Thursday, August 27, 2015
global cultural phenomenon
This
account
of three of The Beatles taking LSD with two of The Byrds in LA 50
years ago this week marks a significant moment in the mass cultural
breakthough of non-dual thought and practice in the West that
occurred two years later (48 years ago this week), when Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi gave a talk at the Hilton hotel on Park Lane in London.
That event, attended by all The Beatles, triggered an eruption of
this kind
of discussion on mainstream Saturday
night TV, that
brought concepts into public discourse of a kind that had previously
only been known among a small cognoscenti, but have been a part of our
world ever since (with occasional popular waves like the widespread
uptake of Mindfulness
today).
Perhaps
the chief event during the LA Acid drop was George Harrison hearing
Dave Crosby playing Indian raga style on the single guitar they had
between them (they were in the bathroom at the time, all of them,
hiding from the armed security guards hired to prevent fans overrunning the house they were staying in), and recognising an artistic fit for his growing spiritual
sensibility. Crosby and Roger McGuin in their previous incarnation as
the Jet Set had practiced at World Pacific studios where their
manager worked as an engineer, and where Ravi Shankar,
the great Indian maestro, recorded. Crosby's raga prompted an
enquiry from George that led to him investigating the source
material, buying a sitar on his return to England, and introducing
the sound (an elementary riff played as if on a guitar on the song
Norwegian Wood) on The Beatles next album (Revolver, released Aug
1966 – 49 years ago this week).
But
it also led to him meeting Ravi Shankar and travelling to India to
study with him. While in India, George, along with his then wife,
Pattie Boyd, were introduced to Indian spirituality by Shankar, who
considered the philosophy a vital underpinning to his musical
approach. They met teachers and practiced
physical yoga, partly because it was necessary for the posture required to play the sitar
effectively. But it was back in England that Pattie Boyd, who worked
as a model and had met George while playing a small part in The
Beatles first film, A Hard Day's Night
(release in July 1964 – 51 years ago last month), began to pursue a
dedicated practice in order to realise a deeper personal
understanding. At that time, London had many
centres that studied and practiced in the Indian traditions, but none
were as active in promoting the message as the Spiritual Regenaration
Movement founded in 1957 by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Maharishi
was a disciple of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati the head of the Jyotir Math,
a monastery in northern India founded in the 8th
century by
Adi Shankara,
the great teacher who established Advaita as the principle school in the Vedanta tradition (as propounded in three key texts, the Upanishads, the Baghavad Gita and the Brahma
Sutras). According to Advaita (literally translatable as non-duality)
the idea that we exist as separated, competing individuals in a world
of material objects, is a delusion caused by ignorance of the reality, and creates suffering, the endless dissatisfaction of desire. From its perspective the world of
form arises from the formless ground of pure consciousness, and
everything that appears in the world has its root in consciousness.
Realising the reality – which eliminates the sense of isolation and
fear, ends yearning for the objects of the senses, and brings blissful fulfilment - is the goal of
human life, and turning inwards to recognise this truth is the end of a natural process that governs the cosmos (known as Karma).
Maharishi
thought that the post-2nd
World War world, dominated by the West, which was then locked into a
nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, had drifted so far from the
truth that it needed a rescue mission, and so he stripped out much of
the potentially alienating cultural accoutrements of Indian spiritual
practice, and presented a key component, meditation - and in
particular, mantra meditation (the repetition of a sacred sound in
order to lead the mind off of its deluded thoughts and allow its core
reality to emerge naturally) - as an accessible pursuit. He then began
a series of world tours in 1958 that by 1967 saw him established in
many countries, including Britain, and able to command respectably
sized audiences for his talks. His London supporters used to
advertise events in The Times newspaper, one of which caught the attention of Pattie Boyd one Sunday at home in Surrey. She subsequently attended a course at Caxton Hall over a weekend, received initiation and became a practitioner of what is termed Transcendental
Meditation.
That
was in February 1967, while her husband was away
touring with The Beatles. She then inspired George enough for him to recruit the rest of the band into attending the famous
meeting some months later in August of that year. The Beatles were such a huge global cultural phenomenon that every action they took was recorded by the
international media. The event at the Hilton, and what followed (The
Beatles flew to India to study at Maharishi's ashram, along with a
retinue that included the Hollywood star Mia Farrow,
and influential folk-rock musician Donovan)
represented a moment when ideas about spirituality, consciousness,
the non-dual nature of the universe and our purpose in life - held as
revealed truth in all cultures throughout history, yet long dormant
in the West, where spiritual traditions had lost sight of their
own essential message - forcibly reasserted itself as a field of
cultural enquiry. It is remarkable to see the form it took in 1960s British society, and allows us to look more objectively at current circumstances, and how similar debates
are structured around these issues today.
pic from here
pic from here
Labels:
advaita,
advaita vedanta,
consciousness,
faith,
meditation,
mindfulness,
non-duality,
popular culture,
vedanta
Saturday, July 25, 2015
nano-gloop of pure information
(Spoilers!) Is Scarlet Jo emerging as the poster girl for Transhumanism in mainstream cinema? That's the second film I've watched this year where she becomes the mythical, tech-assisted transcendental consciousness of materialist dreams (we prefer to catch them late round here). Following her inspired voicing of the sentient Operating System in Spike Jonze's Her, that sees her 'character' expand into infinity in the third act, in Luc Besson's Lucy she enacts a similar denouement after an accidentally imbibed superdrug boosts her mind beyond its bodily limits, becoming a kind of nano-gloop of pure information sucked from global digital connectivity (which is portrayed as a good thing, by the way).
Transhumanism, partly an over-excitable projection of the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (see recent Wire article for a sober update of progress), represents the emergence of a natural human yearning for cosmic completeness in a secular culture which has colonised even spiritual discourse (see this most obvious example). It accompanies a widespread interest in Meditation and its decaffeinated cousin, Mindfulness (with or without physical yoga, with or without the technical assistance of an app), the emergence of antidotal practice in the face of the stress and anxiety of modern, urban life. All of which provides a fertile ground for a deeper emergence of ideas about the nature of reality which expose the entirely limited nature of materialism as a presiding philosophical discourse.
Added: from here: "In this vision the Internet and web are just the first rung of a ladder that leads to neural implants, sentient computers, nanotechnology and eventually the Singularity, that mystical moment when progress happens so quickly that all of humanity's problems disappear"
Pic from here
Transhumanism, partly an over-excitable projection of the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (see recent Wire article for a sober update of progress), represents the emergence of a natural human yearning for cosmic completeness in a secular culture which has colonised even spiritual discourse (see this most obvious example). It accompanies a widespread interest in Meditation and its decaffeinated cousin, Mindfulness (with or without physical yoga, with or without the technical assistance of an app), the emergence of antidotal practice in the face of the stress and anxiety of modern, urban life. All of which provides a fertile ground for a deeper emergence of ideas about the nature of reality which expose the entirely limited nature of materialism as a presiding philosophical discourse.
Added: from here: "In this vision the Internet and web are just the first rung of a ladder that leads to neural implants, sentient computers, nanotechnology and eventually the Singularity, that mystical moment when progress happens so quickly that all of humanity's problems disappear"
Pic from here
Labels:
artificial intelligence,
consciousness,
faith,
materialist realism,
popular culture,
psych,
transhumanism
Friday, July 24, 2015
achieve a higher morality
From here, a summary of Transhumanism (a dream of spiritual perfection delivered by technology):
"(A) network of beliefs that people can/ will - sooner-or-later/ and should:
1. Always be happy - never suffer (except insofar as they wish to)
2. Never be ill, never age
3. Never die - there will be no ageing (see above) and death will be infinitely postpone-able - the person will be open-endedly repairable or restoreable - death will be reversible
4. Be able to improve intelligence, personality, strength, capacity for pleasure etc - beyond anything yet attained by any human
5. Be able to change sex, make new sexes, abolish sexual identity and the need for sex itself - or redefine and modify them endlessly
6. Wholly detach reproduction from sex - be able to make babies,perfect babies, without intervention of parents - to bring them up perfectly without 'need' for families
7. Go beyond historical levels of human wisdom, goodness - achieve a higher morality (which will be effortless and universal)"
See also here
"(A) network of beliefs that people can/ will - sooner-or-later/ and should:
1. Always be happy - never suffer (except insofar as they wish to)
2. Never be ill, never age
3. Never die - there will be no ageing (see above) and death will be infinitely postpone-able - the person will be open-endedly repairable or restoreable - death will be reversible
4. Be able to improve intelligence, personality, strength, capacity for pleasure etc - beyond anything yet attained by any human
5. Be able to change sex, make new sexes, abolish sexual identity and the need for sex itself - or redefine and modify them endlessly
6. Wholly detach reproduction from sex - be able to make babies,perfect babies, without intervention of parents - to bring them up perfectly without 'need' for families
7. Go beyond historical levels of human wisdom, goodness - achieve a higher morality (which will be effortless and universal)"
See also here
Labels:
consciousness,
faith,
materialist realism,
science,
transhumanism
Monday, July 13, 2015
metaphorical landscapes
Just
caught up with Interstellar
(warning: link contains spoilers and massive pisstake). I
prefer to wait several months until the hype dies down on these
movies, watch them free from too much cultural noise. It's a
typically materialist epic in which the earth rejects the human race, withdraws its food
supply, and dumps acres of dust over the American Midwest home of the
main characters, prompting them to look for a new planet to live on.
So, drawn by mysterious signs sent across time and space, the hero
sets out to overcome all obstacles, external and internal, before
finding himself (SPOILER!) in a place beyond our conventional
space-time limitations. Here he is able - through a channel of love
to his daughter, who is still back on earth several years before he
left (you have to get past the logic) - to lay the path he himself
has subsequently followed to where the human race can find their
salvation. Which raises interesting questions about current
materialist thinking and how it's reaching for meaning beyond
limitations imposed by its own viewpoint.
Focussed exclusively on
exterior measurable qualities of the world, and regarding human
intelligence as essentially formed by a unique combining of atoms
(consciousness
is not discussed in the film), these characters are led to construct
metaphorical landscapes out of speculative reasoning around theories
about the nature of time and space that deny the conventional (Newtonian) frameworks materialism conducts its day-to-day business within. The film ultimately
proposes that love (between father and daughter in the key narrative
device, but discussed elsewhere in the film as a potential impersonal
guiding material force) is the key to our ultimate salvation,
trumping, for instance, one character's insistence that the survival
instinct is all we have.
Love is one of the great imponderables for
materialist thought. It cannot be explained away by science. Sure,
the bond between partners, family members, between tribes, societies,
nations, races, species etc, can be analysed in terms of Darwinian
natural selection, but none of that explains where that deep
conscious self, opened up to purely unthinking
benevolence, comes from. The way love is discussed in the film,
suggests that discourses outside of the purely materialist and
secular are providing the ground for a resolution of the central
conflict raised, even if it is just-out-of-reach of conventional
explanation.
Pic from here
Labels:
consciousness,
materialist realism,
popular culture,
psych,
science
Monday, July 6, 2015
constant feedback loop
From
Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, A Brief History of Humanity, in the Guardian:
“I
don’t take capitalism and neo-liberalism for granted. I teach all
these 20-year-old students and they were born into a capitalist
world. It’s the only system. There’s no alternative and nobody
can even imagine that there could be. But I remember the time when
these things were really hotly contested.”
Could
just as well be talking about materialist realism. Also:
“When
people talk about merging with computers to create cyborgs, it’s
not some prophecy about the year 2200. It’s happening right now.
More and more of our reality exists within computers or through
them... we will see real changes in humans themselves – in their
biology, in their physical and cognitive abilities. It was the same
with the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago. Nobody sat
down and had a vision: ‘This is what agriculture is going to be for
humankind and for the rest of the planet.’ It was an incremental
process, step by step, taking centuries, even thousands of years,
which nobody really understood and nobody could foresee the
consequences.”
Not
for how our brains respond. They are clearly deeply effected by
exposure to constant digital stimulus, hooked into a constant
feedback loop of desire and its unsatisfaction. But that doesn't
change the essence of being human. Maybe it even causes a quicker
than traditionally-conceived breakdown of tolerance for delusional
consumerist contentment.
Ultimately,
though, this has to be seen as an impersonal process playing out
beyond our control, with its naturally-arising antithesis built in. Look at how we are simultaneously turning to interior experience, witnessing our own minds at work. Learning how to process stress and
anxiety, recognising what depression is, and by doing so, affirming
the presence of a deeper ground of being
that remains stable beyond the fluctuations of desire.
Pic from here
Pic from here
Labels:
capitalism,
consciousness,
faith,
free will,
materialist realism,
psych,
robots
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