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Pill Pod 77 - Trans/Post-Human Technics (Exclusive)

🕑 Added 2022-04-22 12:00:06 +0000 UTC

Comments

ageOfBumFires

Damn that hammer reference to memory storage really blew my mind. Checks out, and makes me think I need to revisit Being and Time's own hammer-time, see how they compare and if he goes down this route at all.

Walker Goff

Jameson always calls Heidegger’s work on technology “Heidegger at his worst.” I’ve never had the chance to query him on that unfortunately. If I figure it out I’ll let y’all know.

Walker Goff

Y’all do touch on a lot of the same content as related to intentionality, but I guess I take a very different perspective on the same processes.

Walker Goff

Haven’t listened to all the episode yet, but I think Nick Land would have fit in well here. What makes him interesting is that he takes artificial intelligence to be a phase of a more general trajectory two of whose distinct moments are Darwinian natural selection and the proverbial invisible hand of market dynamics. I think he’s correct for the following reason: if the human is surpassed by the machine it will not be due to some appropriation of technology by supposedly rational human agents. It will be due rather to a completely inhuman process. Humans may participate in it, but they simply do not have control of it. Even powerful people like Elon Musk are merely responding to aggregated analytics of whatever variety: social media or the Dow Jones industrial average. You’re basically correct to dismiss transhumanism if its taken to be a political project. It would literally be a stage of capitalist production and consumption. Body modification would be the first thing I think. Designer babies, etc. I think if we get past the old dichotomies of philosophy like mind/body, spirit/matter, then we will see we already attempt to move beyond the human with each action we take. And what is the human aside from a relic of the renaissance, itself an epiphenomenon of changes in finance and banking.

Harry Shakespeare-Davies

Would love to hear more about the maths stuff :)

anacidcommie

This is fascinating, please keep this subject matter coming! Damn, I didn't know that the creation myth was created in that way partly to create that hierarchy between Christianity and other religions/gods too, fuckin dark stroke of genius. Also, not sure if this is relevant, but one of the first things you learn in undergrad psychology is how 2 of the most influential 20th century developmental psychologists, namely Piaget and Vygotsky were both constructivists, of the individual and social kind respectively. So such ideas are definitely not new and shouldn't be controversial nearly a century or so later.

Eric Bolo

Thanks for making me discover Bernard Stiegler ! I found this video down the YouTube rabbit hole (in french, the auto translate is not bad) where Stiegler discusses symbolic/aesthetic misery. https://youtu.be/-3mrwqeFGao . In it, among many other interesting points, he notes that consumers of cultural industrial products (i.e. us), being excluded from the creation of the (aesthetic) world we live in, cannot develop a basic sense of self-esteem ("primary narcissism" as Stieglier quoting Freud puts it). The macbook/t shirt/record(/graphics card 😉) I buy may temporarily buttress my identity but ultimately these are aesthetically speaking borrowed goods.

Alex B

If one of these super AIs breaks out of its facility, at least it's not going to be a lib

Tim Ritchie

Watching the symbolic misery stream, just wanted to lyk if you do stuff like invert the colors and pitch the audio the youtube bots don't pick up copyrighted info

Matthew Theisen

Would one consider the Russian Cosmism movement of the 1870s to 1920s a predecessor to Transhumanism? Such as Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov (1828—1903) who was an extremely religious person and he hoped via science and technology we can resurrect the Dead as a common project of all mankind bringing a utopia.

Peter Haggar

Thanks for these episodes. Would there be an opportunity when Eric does animal posthumanism to bring in a feminist perspective? Margaret Grebowicz perhaps?