Some initial thoughts about Reza Negerastani’s complexity critique of the Disconnection Thesis made during a recent New Centre Seminar: ‘The Future of Intelligence in the Age of Intellectual Scarcity’: The critique hinges on the claim that unbounded posthumanism depends on an instability analysis of complex systems. To wit, that in a dynamic system characterized by […]
Tag: singularity
The Robo Menace to our Morals
Eric Schwitzgebel has a typically clear-eyed, challenging post on the implications of (real) artificial intelligence for our moral systems over here at the Splintered Mind. The take home idea is that our moral systems (consequentialist, deontologistical, virtue-ethical, whatever) are adapted for creatures like us. The weird artificial agents that might result from future iterations of AI […]
Dark Lord Possibility Space
According to the Disconnection Thesis (Roden 2012; 2014: Chapter 5) a posthuman is an agent descended from some part of the human socio-technical system that has “gone feral”. In its ancestral form, it may have served human ends, or have been narrowly human itself, but (post-disconnection) has accrued values and roles elsewhere. To date there are no posthumans […]
Objective Ecological Value
In order to construct an anthropologically unbounded account of posthumans, we need a psychology-free account of value. There may, after all, be many possible posthuman psychologies but we don’t know about any of them to date. However, the theory requires posthumans to be autonomous systems of a special kind: Functionally Autonomous Systems (see below). I […]
Ray Brassier on Transhumanism and its Critics
http://new.livestream.com/accounts/3922964/events/2254759/videos/24842111/player?autoPlay=false&height=360&mute=false&width=640 In this highly illuminating talk from EXPO1 at MOMA, Ray proposes that there is nothing inherently wrong with the transhuman reengineering of nature on the “promethean” grounds that nature has no ethical dispensation. Thus there is no natural, ontological or theological order violated by the extension of human cognitive powers or by the […]
Michael Anissimov on Intelligence Amplication
Over at I09 here
The Analytic of the Vile
[See also Posthuman Life, pp. 96-103, section 4.3] Charles Stross’ science fiction novel Accelerando provides a vivid and blackly funny portrayal of a transition from a merely transhuman to a genuinely posthuman world. In Accelerando, the Singularity has arrived by the 22nd Century (Vinge 1993). The self-improving AI’s that now run the world […]
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