[...] highest level of operative collective organization. It may very well be (as I have investigated elsewhere) that the globalization of consciousness, which would be a non-denominational and superficially [...]
@ bob:
Now this gets into an interesting question that I've often thought we'd end up discussing, but which, apparently, we needed to work our way to.
Yes, in terms of the inseparability of action and subjectivity. I think we get this one in the same way. State of mind and action will in some way determine each other, and in special instances state of mind can matter to the law, but state of mind itself isn't the object or ground of ethics and morality - except possibly where they border on religion.
We're still merely human regardless of how flexibly internetted or otherwise augmented our capacities may have become as long as each "I" is constructed in relation to other "I"'s, and suffers, cares, lives, and dies as a one. But I will have to think further on how to present this.
I was sloppy in my moral/ethical formulation. I agree with your response about the need for actualization up to a point. Although "state of mind" and mental capacity are generally recognized as an aggrevating or mitigating factors.
From a karmic perspective, the state of mind is inseparable from the action. Maybe the end of your last paragraph comes at that from a different angle, but is still similar?
At any rate, a more precise, but maybe not clearer formulation: The moral/ethical dimension resides in what ontological status we attribute to our cyborg selves. I'm thinking of for instance - are we still merely human or do we thin of ourselves as some H+, Transhuman, post singularity consciousness, global or universal perspective?
Mass social construction is a biologically determined capacity. How can it not be?
I would say biologically co-conditioned, not "determined," and actually the same is true for individual consciousness (nature vs. nurture), though the differences between how an individual may "process" information and how a society does are, to say the least, non-trivial.
The moral/ethical dimension of the question resides in how we think about our cyborged selves.
I disagree. The moral/ethical dimension - eventually the religious or spiritual dimension - must be realized, actualized, not merely thought. Morality and ethics are methodologically indifferent to the internal subjective states of individuals. What matters to morality and ethics is what we do, not how we "really" thought about it. It knows our thoughts only to the extent we externalize (socialize) them. "Men look into each other's eyes, but only God looks into their hearts." But even on this level, and in a sense all the more on this level, what the individual does with what's in his heart is what signifies, what matters, even in the way that thinking is an action, not his description or reflection upon what he's done or is.
Mass social construction is a biologically determined capacity. How can it not be? What is new is the degree and perhaps, therefore, the kind.
Growth grows and consciousness is information. At what point does information become consiousness, I don't know. As you point out, war was a significant condition for past IT growth. Now IT growth is not the result of war needs, but defines them.
The moral/ethical dimension of the question resides in how we think about our cyborged selves. What is enhanced? Only the quantity of information we can process, or our being, our global/universal view?
@ bob:
"Shared identity" is defined contextually in the piece, and doesn't refer to biologically determined mental capacities, but rather to a mass social construction.
Good image. I liked the NYTE image because it isolates one set of global synapses geographically, but referring to them metaphorically as synapses doesn't yet make them the same as synapses. The internet grows organically in part because it serves organisms, but also because that's how growth grows.
"Was it ever anything else?" is a question that embeds several other questions, but appears to lack a moral-ethical dimension.
"Shared identity" seems to me more a product of primate evolution than that of the "imperial nation state". What's a difference of at least degree and maybe kind is our cyborgization leading to the NYTE image at the end.
A similar, but more developed image shows all the class C networks of the internet in 2003.
If this principle of thought is to be realized enough to end history, then maybe we are inadequate to the task. The internet images look quite organic. It is becoming more reasonable to ask who is driving information tech growth, evolution - us or the machines. Soon maybe we will be their neurotransmitters, their arms and legs while they are the locus of impossibly abstract thought of the Hegelian real.
Then we will be left once again with our mere human consciousness, asking ourselves was it ever anything else.
@ CK MacLeod:
"Cool" is a banal response, but that's what I'm going with. Cool. Then, this...meant to be said in a Slingblade voice..."I like the way you write, boy."
Now we all either rise to the level of world view through spontaneous Grace or get crushed by the weight of world state disorder.
Or consider that they approach each other asymptotically as you dissolve the spiritual/material dualism. We can imagine the "world view," but that doesn't mean we have attained it. We can perhaps say that we attain it as we realize it, and vice versa. Or we can say that its possibility precedes us, and our activity alters that possibility.
Would a universal view be higher than a world view? I think there might be a difference. It would be theological or cosmological, and complete the circle, returning us to the level of phenomenology on the way to the question of consciousness, just as quantum physics and astrophysics seek the same math at the furthest reaches of macro and micro in both time and space, and at "beginning" and "ending," at the very highest levels of abstraction and yet throughout our concrete experience at its most banal.
Hold on. I want to read this again and then comment. One thing that comes to mind immediately is that there's a difference between what Ken Wilber refers to as "world view" and what you describe. "World view" is high level consciousness. It happens when someone works from a global perspective in respect to what's good for people. It transcends a national view, which transcends a community view, which transcends a personal view. But the transcendence would happen through the advancement of consciousness. What you're describing has been forced on us. Now we all either rise to the level of world view through spontaneous Grace or get crushed by the weight of world state disorder.
@ miguel cervantes:
Police work in a big U.S. city can also be "very gritty." There are places in the world where people are still fighting with swords and spears. There's even a sense that remote, de-centralized warfare becomes intimate all over again, even super-intimate - since distance is an illusion, it all takes place "inside" our brains. But all that Afghan grit is being accumulated 15,000 miles out of sight and out of mind, and is of increasingly doubtful significance.
Most of this war, is very gritty, re Restrepo, for one example, and not at all antiseptic, as the argument was about the First Gulf War. 'Strangelove' is premised on the notion, that our military leadership,
General Ripper is loosely based on the caricature of Lemay, was insane.
But if your saying that Gibson seem to have presaged this in Neuromancer, I somewhat tend to agree
That's a very Burnhamian view, for those like my brother in the Stans, I assure you it's not remote, or many in that same circumstance, similarly those a Firebase Chapman, but you're saying total war, the kind that was almost seen in Times Square, is the norm.
[...] highest level of operative collective organization. It may very well be (as I have investigated elsewhere) that the globalization of consciousness, which would be a non-denominational and superficially [...]
@ bob:
Now this gets into an interesting question that I've often thought we'd end up discussing, but which, apparently, we needed to work our way to.
Yes, in terms of the inseparability of action and subjectivity. I think we get this one in the same way. State of mind and action will in some way determine each other, and in special instances state of mind can matter to the law, but state of mind itself isn't the object or ground of ethics and morality - except possibly where they border on religion.
We're still merely human regardless of how flexibly internetted or otherwise augmented our capacities may have become as long as each "I" is constructed in relation to other "I"'s, and suffers, cares, lives, and dies as a one. But I will have to think further on how to present this.
@ CK MacLeod:
I was sloppy in my moral/ethical formulation. I agree with your response about the need for actualization up to a point. Although "state of mind" and mental capacity are generally recognized as an aggrevating or mitigating factors.
From a karmic perspective, the state of mind is inseparable from the action. Maybe the end of your last paragraph comes at that from a different angle, but is still similar?
At any rate, a more precise, but maybe not clearer formulation: The moral/ethical dimension resides in what ontological status we attribute to our cyborg selves. I'm thinking of for instance - are we still merely human or do we thin of ourselves as some H+, Transhuman, post singularity consciousness, global or universal perspective?
bob wrote:
I would say biologically co-conditioned, not "determined," and actually the same is true for individual consciousness (nature vs. nurture), though the differences between how an individual may "process" information and how a society does are, to say the least, non-trivial.
I disagree. The moral/ethical dimension - eventually the religious or spiritual dimension - must be realized, actualized, not merely thought. Morality and ethics are methodologically indifferent to the internal subjective states of individuals. What matters to morality and ethics is what we do, not how we "really" thought about it. It knows our thoughts only to the extent we externalize (socialize) them. "Men look into each other's eyes, but only God looks into their hearts." But even on this level, and in a sense all the more on this level, what the individual does with what's in his heart is what signifies, what matters, even in the way that thinking is an action, not his description or reflection upon what he's done or is.
@ CK MacLeod:
Mass social construction is a biologically determined capacity. How can it not be? What is new is the degree and perhaps, therefore, the kind.
Growth grows and consciousness is information. At what point does information become consiousness, I don't know. As you point out, war was a significant condition for past IT growth. Now IT growth is not the result of war needs, but defines them.
The moral/ethical dimension of the question resides in how we think about our cyborged selves. What is enhanced? Only the quantity of information we can process, or our being, our global/universal view?
@ bob:
"Shared identity" is defined contextually in the piece, and doesn't refer to biologically determined mental capacities, but rather to a mass social construction.
Good image. I liked the NYTE image because it isolates one set of global synapses geographically, but referring to them metaphorically as synapses doesn't yet make them the same as synapses. The internet grows organically in part because it serves organisms, but also because that's how growth grows.
"Was it ever anything else?" is a question that embeds several other questions, but appears to lack a moral-ethical dimension.
"Shared identity" seems to me more a product of primate evolution than that of the "imperial nation state". What's a difference of at least degree and maybe kind is our cyborgization leading to the NYTE image at the end.
A similar, but more developed image shows all the class C networks of the internet in 2003.
If this principle of thought is to be realized enough to end history, then maybe we are inadequate to the task. The internet images look quite organic. It is becoming more reasonable to ask who is driving information tech growth, evolution - us or the machines. Soon maybe we will be their neurotransmitters, their arms and legs while they are the locus of impossibly abstract thought of the Hegelian real.
Then we will be left once again with our mere human consciousness, asking ourselves was it ever anything else.
@ CK MacLeod:
"Cool" is a banal response, but that's what I'm going with. Cool. Then, this...meant to be said in a Slingblade voice..."I like the way you write, boy."
Scott Miller wrote:
Or consider that they approach each other asymptotically as you dissolve the spiritual/material dualism. We can imagine the "world view," but that doesn't mean we have attained it. We can perhaps say that we attain it as we realize it, and vice versa. Or we can say that its possibility precedes us, and our activity alters that possibility.
Would a universal view be higher than a world view? I think there might be a difference. It would be theological or cosmological, and complete the circle, returning us to the level of phenomenology on the way to the question of consciousness, just as quantum physics and astrophysics seek the same math at the furthest reaches of macro and micro in both time and space, and at "beginning" and "ending," at the very highest levels of abstraction and yet throughout our concrete experience at its most banal.
Hold on. I want to read this again and then comment. One thing that comes to mind immediately is that there's a difference between what Ken Wilber refers to as "world view" and what you describe. "World view" is high level consciousness. It happens when someone works from a global perspective in respect to what's good for people. It transcends a national view, which transcends a community view, which transcends a personal view. But the transcendence would happen through the advancement of consciousness. What you're describing has been forced on us. Now we all either rise to the level of world view through spontaneous Grace or get crushed by the weight of world state disorder.
@ miguel cervantes:
Police work in a big U.S. city can also be "very gritty." There are places in the world where people are still fighting with swords and spears. There's even a sense that remote, de-centralized warfare becomes intimate all over again, even super-intimate - since distance is an illusion, it all takes place "inside" our brains. But all that Afghan grit is being accumulated 15,000 miles out of sight and out of mind, and is of increasingly doubtful significance.
Most of this war, is very gritty, re Restrepo, for one example, and not at all antiseptic, as the argument was about the First Gulf War. 'Strangelove' is premised on the notion, that our military leadership,
General Ripper is loosely based on the caricature of Lemay, was insane.
But if your saying that Gibson seem to have presaged this in Neuromancer, I somewhat tend to agree
@ miguel cervantes:
The feelings of two or three soldiers don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed-up world.
That's a very Burnhamian view, for those like my brother in the Stans, I assure you it's not remote, or many in that same circumstance, similarly those a Firebase Chapman, but you're saying total war, the kind that was almost seen in Times Square, is the norm.