Transhumanism, and the human network.

A little something I scribbled down a moment ago. Maybe it would be an interesting read for some of you, especially when viewed in light of the digital art -social networking age we live in right now.

The term transhumanism is thrown around a lot these days. It’s almost as if it is fast becoming a whole generational movement instead of a novelty philosophy catering to a limited cadre of technophiles. The true attraction of the movement I believe, is the real possibility that many things currently considered impossible might become possible in the future, not through any institutional reform but through a technological revolution capable of suiting individual tastes and goals. In many ways the movement of transhumanism is intensely political yet at the same time as politically neutral as it can be.
It seems transhumanism is about increasing the capacity to do things on the individual level without regards to a unified direction. After getting the ability you want using technological means, you can be a hardcore communist or a hardcore libertarian. The movement of the transhumanism itself doesn’t dictate what its proponents should do after becoming ‘transhuman’, and the only political ideal directly associated with the philosophy of transhumanism is the one necessary in making it come true, free and unrestricted access to technology and information. It can be said that the transhumanism and the theory of singularity so many people attribute to the movement of transhumanism is like deus ex machina come to life, the proverbial genie of the lamp given flesh in human adaptation of technology. However, it should be noted that the post-cyberpunk transhumanism ideals aren’t quite as clean and wish-wash as some of its predecessors of the enlightenment and industrial revolution, instead opting to put its faith in the very opening of the possibilities themselves rather than what those possibilities can ultimately achieve, and I dare say that it is this new way of thinking that defines the current generation’s zeitgeist regardless of geological locale or technical proficiency. Propagation of systems of thought through generational sentiments instead of any strict governmental or academic structure (that might even go beyond regional and cultural taboo), a sort of social-blogging approach to the propagation and practice of systems of thought. Yet in this case, the physical entity of the net is not a necessity. Instead, majority of the network-forming, linking and subsequent emergent behavior results from interactions between people and ideas, the technical infrastructure only acting as a catalyst for already present elements in precipitating metamorphosis.

As the idea of physical distance becomes fuddled in the future and virtual density of the human population increases, the idea and practice of the net-less networking built into all conscious life forms in the innate interaction between life forms themselves and the life and idea-structures will become more and more profound, its effects more and more pronounced, perhaps enough to truly dictate the course of human history, and perhaps, even human beliefs.

In search of connections

I haven’t written a decent blog entry for a whole week now, I think. My life had been a little hectic with the things at the lab and all, but that’s not the reason for the sudden fall in my blogging output. I have been thinking about the relationship of arts and sciences in general, trying to find some way that goes further than the dictations of intuition so commonly attributed to the study of art and inspirations of science.

As I have written before, the origin of human creativity is a single topic that seem to show up persistently in some corner of my mind, bumping into me like a boogie man regardless of what I’m doing at the moment, from trying to calculate oscillation for a complex plasma to walking through a gallery of abstract expressionists. I consider the problem of the origin of creativity to be the problem of a complex system, deeply intertwined with variety of other questions regarding the nature of beauty, perception, self-recognition, origin of life-like system in nature and historic/cultural zeitgeist. And the questions are quite overwhelming for me. The more I seek, the more questions I find, without a clue as to what the answer to any one of them might be. So I decided to do what almost anyone with a science background does. Formulation and mathematical analysis, with moderation and deep retrospection given the nature of the problem I’m trying to understand. As with many artists I began with the beginning of human history and civilization viewed from the perspective of art, identifying general similarities and isolating persistent homocentric behavior that shows up on universal scale without regards to economic or technological sophistication. A search in collectively unconscious human behavior some might say. After identifying some of them, I applied the idea of complex emergence in regular complex science to those universal characteristics… To no understandable solution.

To be honest, beyond the technical jargon and back-of-the-napkin logic, the whole idea is rickety and I have no idea what exactly I’m looking for, or what I should do with what I get.

I do have an idea of some of the consistently recurring topics like formation of myth/folklore and metamyth/metafolklore, presence of ‘sudden madness’ as a type of primordial force/catastrophe much in the same fashion as the ancient’s concept of flood which strangely enough also acts as a deus ex machina of sorts (like the cult of Sakhmet), near-obsession with metamorphosis on the global scale, and contributions to and from zeitgeist and its different names and understanding throughout times and cultures. But how to connect them into a persistent structure that would let me have an insight into it all? I have no idea. Or rather, I have about a thousand ideas and don’t know what to do with them all.

I’ve frequently made clear my conviction regarding the nature of arts and sciences, and I’d like to state it again. The very idea that arts and sciences somehow exist on opposites ends of a spectrum is a load of bollocks. They are meant to be together, and they are meant to be applied in similar reasoning and purpose. The question is how they would be able to be together. Simply saying that arts and sciences should both follow aesthetic conviction and reasonably sound thinking is not enough because, frankly, we had been doing it since the beginning of civilization, with mixed results. There is a strange and as of yet little understood way these things work, perhaps intimately linked with how lives and brains are formed in this physical universe. Thus study and understanding of arts and sciences require resources from variety of other academic disciplines, because in the end everything is artistic and scientific as long as human beings are involved in it. And this is the reason why I push for the study of artificial life as a zenith between the limitations of the field of art and the field of sciences, a connection between the physical world and the perceived world.

Maybe I’ll do a summary posting of my thoughts on Jasper Johns or complex plasma later. I really need time to sort out all the things in my head.

Thought flow, from Jackson Pollock to Animism.

I had to wait for a long time for some of my test results to come in yesterday, so I thought I’d spend the day in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is only about 20 or so minutes away from my lab at the most. I sat down in front of the modern arts exhibition and began to jot down notes on everything that came into my head, ranging from weather to what to have for dinner, and etc.

And then somewhere along the line I began to have some interesting ideas regarding some parallel between the idea of metamorphosis, artificial life, art, music, and writing etc., so I jotted them down and decided to share it with you. The note was organized in rather chaotic manner (with drawings and other silly things) and written in a foreign language to boot, (as is my frequent habit when making personal notes) so this might end up not making much sense.

Some of the practices of art are very reminiscent of the practice of distilling the random pieces of lines, lights, and shapes to subsequent psychological and philosophical response of the human being and the world around the art object. The distilled ‘atoms’ of art objects are then reconstructed as the artist sees fit, into something breathing and constantly struggling and reassessing, something that is part of the world that is alive. Such practice can also be observed in the scenes of artificial life, where random bit of numbers are distilled into certain crystals of flexible pattern and form, which are then reconstructed into whole systems for the express purpose of turning it into, or at least get a hint of, a life. Will it be immature to suppose that certain seemingly random arts of the modern age, such as that of Jackson Pollock pieces, follow similar philosophy and goal?

If the parallel can be drawn between the medium of visual art and that of artificial life, how about music and writing? How can they come closer to a singularity without being confined by their characteristic medium? Modern classic seem to offer some glimmer of understanding for me, as they find a few simple yet poignant tunes and form them into simplistic yet most profound patterns of rich meaning and tapestry of metamorphic perspectives. As for how writing can achieve such an effect, I have no idea…

That is the problem. The art of Kandinsky can easily be visual, musical, and living. Yet how to translate a symphony into a writing? How to write a portrait of abstract thought and feelings? The subtle melodies to echo in the readers minds?

I do not believe I am mistaken in seeing some sort of commonality in the artificial life and arts of various format. Yet what is common between them is rather complex to define.

Perhaps the similarity between a life and an art is in their inherent intentionality to be given birth. The paints and the pieces struggle to come out into the world and walk among us. And when inanimate things created by human hands try to walk among us, we step into the realm of anthropological religion.

Modern religion came from branches of Animism in that religions generally try to imprint human face upon things that are usually inanimate and inorganic, like the winds and the water. In a foreign world the first approach of a human being is to humanize her environment, turn it into something that can be communicated with, albeit in some obscure and strange way that would defy normal human habits. Simply put, gods are created in order to control the world by human hands. The act of worship is really an act of communication. Just as we don’t yell at our computers to turn on and calculate the billionth place of pi like we would at living mathematicians, complex rituals are formed to translate human intentions into a language volcanoes and storms can understand. Inanimate forces and phenomena of nature are considered to have their own consciousness based on human understanding of humanity. Remnants of such way of thinking is apparent in still present sex division in the modern world, as we would often jokingly refer to men or women as unreasonable and pedantic about meaningless things. Perhaps current form of glorifying the object of one’s worship as one’s master became fashionable as the politics and religion became intermingled with each other at around the time of Mesopotamian civilization. Maybe the uneasy relationship shared between the fields of sciences, religions, and the arts reflects this complex web of intentions and commonality formed in the deeper recesses of the human psyche.

Perhaps the one ideal dreamed by the ancient and modern artists, from Pygmalion and African reliquary makers to Auguste Rodin and Mark Rothko is the world itself gaining intentionality, something so close to even the conventional notion of a deity. In the end attempting to create something like a god, when the form of the said god is very close to a human spirit, a god created in shape of humanity.