Upload
maricel-llenado-rivas
View
220
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
7/29/2019 Post-singularity and Primitive Intelligence
1/12
[153]
POST-SINGULARITY AND PRIMITIVE INTELLIGENCE
Virgilio A. Rivas
Institute of Cultural Studies, Polytechnic University of the Philippines
Abstract
The argument of post-singularity states that evolution can be hastened to advance towards amore desirable direction once it is released from its biological inhibitors. To hasten this process
intelligence must be maximally pushed to its post-human direction.
But the possibility of post-singularity will have to rely on a much traditional approach known to
primitive intelligence. Among others, the efficacy of this approach can put so-called higher than
human consciousness status of AI into question. Yet, for all its worth primitive intelligence is not
invulnerable to systematization. This paper concludes with a recommendation on how to retain
its positive kernel at the same time that one can be critical of its objectifications in present-day
state of technology and global processes of subject formations in the era of Anthropocene.
Keywords: anthropocene, reflexivity, post-singularity, singularity
Introduction
In one of his most important works on the topic of
singularity Australian philosopher David Chalmers
criticized the academic resistance to the idea of
intelligence explosion, or roughly, singularity, that he
considered to be the result of a highly speculative
flavor (3) that goes with the hype with which it has
been treated in the popular and new media
environments like internet forums, etc., at least in
highly developed societies. The speculative import
that Chalmers attributes to this resistance is not to
be mistaken with the intellectual trademark for
which the speculative brand of Continental
philosophy has been known in philosophic literature.
It is rather the case that singularity is well
entrenched in popular media as opposed to
academic institutions with their own unique
attribution of the speculative, that it is transcendent
to untutored public opinions.
It is worth noting here the rhetorical
strength of the idea of singularity as, perhaps, the
major foil to understanding its importance as a
philosophical concern. This rhetorical strength may
be attributed to a number of factors chief among
them is the undeniable social power of technology
that has destroyed many traditional barriers
7/29/2019 Post-singularity and Primitive Intelligence
2/12
[154]
concerning our everyday relation to time and space,formerly held to be transcendent to human nature.
Nonetheless, this social power of technology has not
come unnoticed by social theorists critical of the lack
of reflexive attribution that technology, particularly,
artificial intelligence or AI ought to otherwise
inculcate in the users and consumers of its cultural
goods. AI critic Hamid Ekbia describes this, rightly so,
as the attribution fallacy. In referring to AIs fallacy
of attribution Ekbia underscores the propensity of
people to uncritically accept implicit suggestions that
some AI program or other is dealing with real-world
situations (Ekbia, 2008: 9). Ekbia observes then that
Some AI authors implicitly encourage their
readers to let their own concepts slide and
glide fluidly back and forth between the real
world and the model, so that in the end no
clear notion is built up about how
microscopic the worlds being dealt with
really are (9).
We can attribute this fallacy to the
technological culture of our time whose enormous
social power may be judged to be unreflexive due to
its conscious toleration of narrowing the reflective
space between the truth-value it projects and the
use-value it promotes. It is also worth mentioning
that some of the major proponents of artificial
intelligence have strong commercial and
entrepreneurial backgrounds (Kling and Iacono,
1995; Ekbia, 2008:33; Lenat and Feigenbaum, 1991).
On the whole, these backgrounds inform how truth-
values are tied up to usage, consumption, anddistribution in a veritable economy of signs, images,
and cultural goods which populate the new media.
In this light, attempts to radicalize the
evolutionary algorithm to the highest intelligent
capacity of the human race, through developing theright software (Chalmers, 6; Vinge, 1993), cannot be
dissociated from a certain belief-system that
promotes a unique conception of what intelligence is
and what it can do. In principle this is not far from
the manner by which primitive intelligence aimed to
organize the social order based on the power of the
abstract, a disembodied notion of reality by means
of which it was believed one could transcend the
limits of localization (by which we mean individual
existence) in order to achieve a certain form of
globality (a post-existent kind of living presence in
the sense of having overcome a localized form of
individuation germane to being). Across these social
experiments, the body is reduced into a region of
physicality by a generic method of importing mind
to matter (Ekbia, 86) just so to radicalize evolution
by other means (Kurzweil, 1999 in Ekbia, 66), with
varying degrees of articulation, concentration,
specialization and predictable outcomes across time.
But it is only in light of the postmodern
quest to radicalize the evolutionary algorithm thatthe concept of singularity has acquired tremendous
speculative import that, as Chalmers rightly
observes, merits serious philosophical attention. We
beg to differ with Chalmers, nonetheless, on his
emphasis that the speculative flavor with which
singularity has been received in popular media is due
to a distorted objectification of singularity like a
horror or pulp fiction is to a traditionalist or classical
literary audience concerning depictions of reality.
What makes its reception speculatively tainted is not
also far from how systems are most often perceivedto be anathematizing the interests of the human
agency. The speculative import rather illustrates
how singularity or post-singularity discourses fail to
convince human subjects that intelligence explosion,
which may lead to the end of organicism, of error-
7/29/2019 Post-singularity and Primitive Intelligence
3/12
[155]
prone vitality of living systems including humans,may give complete autonomy to machinic algorithms
in the name of the fullest expression of human
freedom where errors are minimized if not reduced
to zero.
Certainly, singularity can boost human
survival. Poverty, unemployment, food as well other
security issues that burden modern human existence
can be addressed by maximal and effective
technological interventions. But the problem lies in
how singularity fails to communicate the paradoxesthat come with sacrificing organicism in favor of
machinism. Thus, it becomes less a question of
technological determinism (it seems people are
more accommodating to technology) than of a
political program (people are indifferent to politics
which can potentially ignite resistance when politics
becomes too obvious). Singularity discourse can be
seen as concealing a cryptic content, hermetic to
knowledge that the public either ridicules or turns
into an object of horror and fear. The failure is
therefore educational.
There is no easy path for science and
technology to bridge this communication gap. But if
singularity aims to improve the human condition the
task of educating the public is all the more pressing.
Education is already an improvement of the human
condition, though far from the highest desirable
condition in which perennial threats to human
existence, such as diseases, food security, etc. are
minimized or more efficiently addressed than they
were being handled and confronted centuries beforethe incremental rise of singularity in the 21
stcentury.
Examining singularity is therefore an
opportunity to relate to the possibility of intelligence
explosion whose outcomes we at present have the
power to realize or forestall, for better or for worse.We identify this opportunity for reflection as an
embodied intellectual labor of reflexivity just as
much as this kind of engaging the future can only
take place in the present where bodies still exist,
that is, in both form and substance.
Reflexivity and Singularity
For purposes of this paper we are taking the
definition of reflexivity from a post-Kantian or
speculative philosophy (Tauber, 2005) which
attributes reflexivity to the ability of thought to
recognize its internal contradiction. Nonetheless, if
thought has such ability it also follows that it is
incapable to singularize itself into the peak of its
power, into the absolute saturation of its
intelligence, intelligence being the site of internal
contradiction itself. Otherwise there will be no more
thought to recognize its own work, finished or
unfinished.
Thus, a certain notion of alterity (of
thought) escapes thought itself at the same time
intrinsically attached to it in a way that makes it
possible to ask, why there is consciousness?
(Chalmers in Blackmore, 2006: 70). Roughly
speaking, it is consciousness interrogating itself
(Petra in Blackmore, 277), its mirror image which in
principle is said to be capable of existing
independent of the embodied referent of
experience. This in principle logic is incidentally one
of the chief features of traditional AI, its claim that
intelligence is transcendent to mind-body problem
(Brooks, 1999: 9; Ekbia,10), therefore its existence
can be independently affirmed, especially if its
existence is taken from the standpoint of evolution
driven by intelligence. The more contemporary
7/29/2019 Post-singularity and Primitive Intelligence
4/12
[156]
claims of AI however attempt to fuse intelligenceand physical body (Ekbia, 3) only to elevate
intelligence to a position that can hasten the
evolutionary process, or evolution by other means
(Kurzweil in Ekbia, 73) regardless of the bodythis
time where the body means flesh. This physical
body where intelligence can perform super-human
capability, and ultimately, achieve immortality for
conscious entities (Kurzweil in Ekbia, 76), is a far cry
from the phenomenological conception of the body
as biologically embodied.
Speculative philosophy (by which we mean
the philosophy of immanence that began with Hegel
but earlier proposed by Spinoza) at least restricts a
similar notion of singularity to the highest immanent
capacity of the human subject to prolong itself as
long as life is still embodied, as long as the
mysterious surplus of the corporeal ensures the
endless possibilities of face-to-face communication,
empathy, affective relation and human
understanding. Nietzsche described this subject as
the overman (Hollingdale 1969); Heidegger Da-sein(1999); Derrida differance in terms of the
impossibility of totalizing the subject even as subject
(in Nancy 2009); Lyotard a subject always in status
nascendi (in Cadava et al, 1991); Nancy being
singular plural (Nancy2000); Badiou an autonym of
an empty idiom (Cadava et al, 1991); Ranciere a
nonsubject (in Cadava et al, 1991), among other
continental philosophers who attempted to describe
this notion of subjectivity based on a nomological
affirmation of the subject. This subject is yet to exist
but in a way exists in the sense that it behaves as itshould in a radically impossible environment that
can only be properly lived out by an embodied
thought from whose standpoint nevertheless this
embodied thought is deemed inactual (Agamben,
2005).
But even as speculative philosophy isemboldened by a similar notion of singularity such
as, among others, an idea of a self-less subject as the
perfect embodiment of the human in the future to
come, a human capable of self-determination as an
instance of the universal in its capacity as a singular
subject, at the same time capable of transversing
singularity in terms of becoming other than itself,
the post-singularity direction of this philosophy has
never amounted to the celebration of the ultimate
closure of embodied experience in favor of evolution
by intelligence explosion. The singularity of this
explosion expresses a distinctive aim for evolution,
that is, to radicalize its seemingly backward design
into the highest level of singularity, unlocking the full
computational potential of the human species in
which intelligence possesses the key.
Self-modeling and Computational Strategy
If continental philosophy has its own notion of
impossible subject, contemporary neurophilosopherThomas Metzinger, whose works we believe straddle
the analytic and continental divide, describes this
subject as nemocentric anchored on
An egocentric frame of reference (centered
on the model of the body as object and
origin of behavioral space) while at the
same time phenomenally operating under a
nemocentric reality (centered on a globally
available but fully opaque self-model
embedded in the current virtual window ofpresence (Metzinger,2003: 336).
What is striking in this model of subjectivity
is that it is unconstrained by neither temporal
presence, the given-time of the present (Derrida,
7/29/2019 Post-singularity and Primitive Intelligence
5/12
[157]
1993: 17; Heidegger, 1999: 68) nor the romantic ideaof self-becoming in the future to come. Rather this
subjectivity is already happening and yet requires a
more conscious attention in the midst of what
Metzinger also describes as an organized attack
against the space of consciousness (in Brockman,
2011: 97-99) facilitated by the new media, the
internet and the smart machines, etc., propelled by
AI dreams. This organized attack on the space of
attention, Metzinger argues, creates a new form of
waking consciousness that resembles weakly
subjective statesa mixture of dreaming, dementia,
intoxication and infantilization which he lumps
together under the category public dreaming (99).
The creation of weakly subjective states is
no less an assault against the object and origin of
behavioral space, the body. While Metzinger is
pursuing a rather ambivalent engagement with the
singularity and post-singularity ambitions of our time
despite a patent form of technological determinism
that these aims encourage, he also argues, oddly
enough, in respect of the remainder of technologicaldeterminism, always the human that remains
untotalizable, that even this kind of determinism
leaves a space for reflection. Where the real danger
lies is in the fact that the remainder is consistently
seduced by the new media into appropriating weakly
subjective states which discourage full attention to
the world around them. Yet, as Metzinger also
argues, this remainder is nothing that can be
ontologically defined as self (Metzinger,2003). Thus,
on the more fundamental level of subjective
experience, this self resists closure and totalization.
In the case of the dream of singularity it is
simply unviable to radicalize the evolutionary
algorithm in terms of pushing the limits of human
intelligence to its extreme potential simply because,
and as Metzinger adds, subjectivity operates on theprinciple of necessary self-reification (Metzinger,
338). Under this personal reification format, even
the computational resources available for self-
representation, which could be made globally
available for intervention and manipulation, are
necessarily minimized by the self-modeling subject.
Self-representation or self-modeling possesses a
potentially infinite and circular logical structure
(338), the so-called reflexive loop, such that self-
reification blocks the possibility of system
breakdown in terms of providing the system with
interminable supply of computational resources for
global determination, both on the level of conscious
subjective experience and social cognition. If the
subject minimizes the availability of computational
resources that systems can take advantage of it is,
paradoxically speaking, for the benefit of the survival
of systems themselves. Subjects from the outset
may not be fully attentive to this capacity of them to
minimize the availability of computational resources
for which Metzinger, allots them, at least, an opaque
nonepistemic potential (Metzinger,131).
One way or another, systems can cause
their non-attentiveness whose efficacy however
cannot be totalistic because, attentive or not,
subjects remain the ultimate source of
computational resources. Owing to the fact that the
subject that has to minimize its availability for
evolutionary radicalization can retain its integrity as
untranscendable, post-singularity has no definable
subject to begin with, a subject it can singularize into
its computable transcendable limit.
But it is not only the subject of which we
have to be grateful in terms of pre-empting a system
breakdown for which an embodied human
civilization like ours still survives but also the very
7/29/2019 Post-singularity and Primitive Intelligence
6/12
[158]
system of global computation of subject formationsunwittingly legitimated by the very subjects it wishes
to totalize. On this score, the freedom to question
the systems claim to truth, at the same time that
the user is consuming its goods and values, suggests
of a reasonable acceptance of the systems
functional usefulness. The user withholds judgment
as to the systems temporally constitutive values,
epistemic, moral or political, which go beyond their
function as use-values. The withholding possible in
this case is akin to a deconstructive strategy of
questioning the pre-epistemic presuppositions of
truths before they acquire public epistemic presence
as use-values. This without necessarily breaking the
system of use-values itself, for one way or another
the systems capability to reflexively understand its
own constitutive work is closed off from its own
computational intelligence (it has no real intelligence
other than that which is invested by subjects) which
already indicates that global systems do not have
absolute power over self-modeling or subjective
computational strategies.
Withholding of judgment as already a form
of engaging the system in a veritable symbiotic
relationship is made possible by the fact that one is
enveloped by a pervasive network of subject-
positionalities, a global system of computation
whose determination is at least necessary for
subjects to descend to extended reflexive loop
without which subjects may misuse their potential
for infinite self-representation, the potential for bad
infinity. The global system preempts the subject to
implode into the dark infinity of self-totalization. Inturn, structural patronage of the system avoids the
possibility of system breakdown. In the case of the
present order of singularity, this means that the
invasiveness of social structures is necessary owing
to its psychosocial functionality as that to which
human agents extend their need for self-representation. Incidentally, these structures are
increasingly populated by smart machines, expert,
and physical symbolic systems, computational
culture, virtual environments, and knowledge-
intensive products (Ekbia,106), all chief features of
contemporary AI or artificial intelligence. But the
very invasiveness of this singularity world or social
structuration is ultimately temporal and contingent.
Insofar as it governs individual lives in
extensively impersonal ways, the most advancedexample of singularity in terms of totalizing subject
formations under the aegis of global computation is
that of money economy. In essence it is an attempt
to globalize what always remains untranscendable.
But it may also be argued that no matter how evil
money economy is its determination is necessary at
some point. Yet its evilness is temporal. Certainly, it
is going to be challenged by the principle of the self-
reification of subjects that resist closure and
totalization at which point subjective withholding of
informational resources for computationalimprovement of global intelligence boils up to
generate tectonic resistance. All the more then that
global systems need to be sensitive to the plight of
the human agency.
Ironically, the determination of this form of
globality rests on the power of the subjects to pre-
empt any system breakdown. In principle the same
applies to the post-singularity dream of AI. It is
simply in the evolutionary nature of subjects to block
not only a system breakdown especially with respectto themselves but also the possibility of a fully
transcendent system. For its part, a reasonable
global intelligence cannot allow for the possibility of
breaking the potentially infinite circular loop of self-
modeling. Embodied subjects have the capacity for
7/29/2019 Post-singularity and Primitive Intelligence
7/12
[159]
radical forms of computation that they are ratherfree to take on notwithstanding their inherent
reflexivity, that is, their opaque knowledge of the
causes of system breakdown such as radicalizing
those very limits, all within the bounds of embodied
subjectivity that straddles the personal and social
cognitive realms.
Traditionalism of Post-singularity
Singularity is not different from the intentionality of
primitive intelligence that on grounds of survival
grounds itself on the principle of self-reification,
itself aleatory to the full representational or
epistemic attempt to radicalize the direction of
human evolution via a certain form of intelligence
explosion. Yet, even this is not a cause to celebrate.
If this primitive form of intelligence started
by nurturing the aleatory guarantee of self-
reification in its own attempt at singularity, though
backward by all means, in order to avoid systembreakdown then the post-singularity direction of
todays singularity is somehow structurally
guaranteed not to go awry. But at some point in the
global computation of available resources for the
persistence of subject formations the primitive form
of intelligence that used to guarantee the self-
maintenance of the system became unable to
guarantee, for instance, the once stable condition of
the feedback loop, that is, between cultural change
and physical change. The key to understanding the
eventual disparity is time. Science historian Ronald
Wright summarizes this concept for us:
Cultural change begat physical change and
vice versa in a feedback loop...
Nowadays we have reached such a passthat the skills and mores we learned in
childhood are outdated by the time were
thirty, and few people past fifty can keep up
with their culturewhether in idiom,
attitudes, tastes or technology... Most
people living in the Old Stone Age would
have not noticed any cultural change at all.
The human world that individuals entered
at birth was the same as the one they left at
death (Wright, 2004:14).
This explains the disparity in terms of the
feedback loop that in many ways connects with what
Metzinger earlier described as the reflexive loop that
has the potential for infinite circularity but which in
the end can still threaten the system to breakdown,
especially, if the resources available for self-
modeling reach a dead end. This is where we can
radicalize the assumptions of Metzinger.
The system is guaranteed against going
awry solely because of the immanent capacity of
subjects to reabsorb the system to their logically
infinite loops where the concrete possibilities for
infinity lie. Since the dawn of human apes, subjects
have always proceeded from themselves. But human
civilization has already reached a certain point at
which a massive system breakdown can threaten to
wipe out the entire human race, quickly or gradually.
It has never been more pronounced since human
civilization entered the era of the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocene is a term used by Nobel
laureate Paul Crutzen to describe the current period
of evolution in which humanity is driving its course
rather than natural forces (Kolbert in Elsworth and
Kruse, 2012). This nearly spells out the dreaded
process of entropy that has now started to roll out
7/29/2019 Post-singularity and Primitive Intelligence
8/12
[160]
on the geological plane. But this time humanity ishelping entropy by introducing more complex
patterns of existence into a state of natural
equilibriumby systematically polluting and over-
populating the planet. On this note it may suffice to
say that the primitive form of intelligence that used
to guarantee stability is now pushed to its planetary
limit by which we mean the excessive rationalization
of the human condition thus far by the highest
immanent limit of singularity, a post-singularity in its
own terms, by the abstract rule of money that has
been responsible for much of the ecological crises,
and most of the worlds economic and political
calamities our planet is facing.
The chief target of these crises is a
planetary body of human subjects, accidentally
divided by geography, race, gender, cultural, political
and class differences. But their accidental dispersion
in spatial dimensions (geographies) are now
effectively being leveled into a single plane of
determination courtesy of the global ramifications of
the entropic process that the era of Anthropocene isbringing to attention. Ironically, the rule of money
singularity has allowed the multiplication of deprived
subjects, which as thermal bodies are viable source
of energy supply, on an unprecedented geological
scale. But if world economies are now
accommodating the wisdom of population control it
is not for the recovery of the planet that this gesture
is more inclined to promote but rather the gesture is
preoccupied with the necessity of singularity, the
effective machination of labor and production where
quality, efficiency, and cost reduction are the tallorder of the day. Only this time, smart machines will
take the place of organic thermal resources once
provided by laboring bodies.
This system of rationalization alreadyoperates in the form of depriving subjects, already
least favored by the evolutionary game, of their
capacity for good infinity, by which we mean the
capacity for self-reification necessary to achieve
organic balance (which is no longer the
preoccupation of global systems as mathematical
machinism is increasingly taking place), at the same
time sustaining the arbitrary divisions that set
subjects apart mostly by means of naturalizing their
differences (in terms of dividing the scales of the
planet according to per capita income of populations
and continents). Today, under the guise of a global
social contract, now termed globalization, which
promises to guarantee the availability of global
resources for self-modeling and human flourishing,
least evolutionarily favored subjects have become
objectal coordinates of a system that increasingly
determines itself according to the purity of a
disembodied notion of reality.These coordinates (or
information extracted from deprived subjects that
have been entrapped by the visibility machine of
global systems) are necessary for an increasingly
singularizing global system. They serve as knowledge
base for a more efficient transformation of
informational societies. The key here is how to
better expose their bodies and their opaqueness to
their own subjective experiences for a more efficient
biopolitical control.
The appeal of disembodiment already
explains the attractiveness of singularity to world
economies. Global systems are in a rush to provide
smart artificial platforms for public expression andfulfillment which increasingly alter human neural
capacities for self-reification. This is already
happening on a global scale as virtual global
communities and other global networks of subject
formations are increasingly redefining what it means
7/29/2019 Post-singularity and Primitive Intelligence
9/12
[161]
to be human these days, as N. Katherine Haylesnotes in her influential study (1999). We may
wonder how subjects run out of infinity that they
become easy targets of systems. The explanation
may be simple. The global resources that can sustain
bodies are now redirected to sustain the new
mantra of global singularity by organic subjects
whose motives are obviously evolutionaryto keep
themselves above the organized disembodiment of
the human condition. This leads us in the final
analysis to the non-epistemic opacity of primitive
intelligence.
The Politicization of Primitive Intelligence
Those subjects capable of minimizing the
transparency of information-processing or
computational resources vis-a-vis the global
computational systems are the very embodied
subjects capable of harnessing the systems at the
expense of phenomenally weak subjects, those
whose direct and immediate contact with their
selves may be considered computationally poor and
inadequate, a variation in information-processing or
self-modeling leading to differential subjectivities,
altogether borne by evolutionary processes.
Metzinger underscores at length:
Phenomenal selfhood results from
autoepistemic closure in a self-representing
system: it is a lack of information. The
prereflexive, preattentive experience of
being someone results directly from the
contents of currently active self-model
being transparent. Any system acting under
a transparent self-model will, if all other
necessary conditions for the emergence of
phenomenal experience in the domain
constituted by this class of systems arerealized, by necessity experience itself as
being in direct and immediate contact with
itself. The phenomenal property of selfhood
is constituted by transparent, nonepistemic
self-representation, and it is on this level of
representationalist analysis that the
refutation of the corresponding
phenomenological fallacy becomes truly
radical, because it has a straightforward
ontological interpretation: no such things as
selves exist in the world... What exist are
information-processing systems engaged in
the transparent process of phenomenal
self-modeling (Metzinger, 2003: 337).
Where does nonepistemic opacity of
primitive intelligence fit in? As nonepistemic,
primitive intelligence is nonpropositional which true
to its form and substance does not generate truth or
falsity in the order of epistemological presence,
rather simply presents a wealth of information-
processing materials through the subjects virtualwindow of presence available to any given system.
Evolutionarily speaking, self-modeling varies
according to circumstances and opportunities in
which computational agents find their own selves
situated. Those that can actually and efficiently
minimize the information-processing materials
available for global determination are
understandably in a better position: 1) not to expose
themselves too much for systems to take advantage
of; 2) to help the systems evolve into a global
reference for egological flourishing but only to suchan extent that systems do not suck them dry (that is,
the favored ones), and, 3) to seal the system against
totalizing computationally accomplished subjects,
those that have successfully represented their
precomputational, preattentive rootedness in
7/29/2019 Post-singularity and Primitive Intelligence
10/12
[162]
nonepistemic opacity, thus capable of negotiatingwith systems better than those whose opaqueness
are poorly represented to their own subjective
experiences.
This form of singularity can be
acknowledged for its attentiveness to the differential
algorithm of evolutionary processes as they relate to
individual levels of conscious subjective experience
and social cognition. It certainly admits of the
cognitive experimental advantage of subjects that
can minimize their self-exposure to the power ofglobality, but unfortunately always at the expense of
other subjects disfavored by the evolutionary game.
In general, subjects (favored by evolution) are
unwilling to radicalize their cognitive advantages for
the benefit of championing the necessity of self-
reification; instead they support computational
visibility in terms of promoting self-transparency
which is essential for the preservation of globality.
The radicalization of ones cognitive advantages
would amount to supporting the cause of self-
reification as an ambivalent but necessary act thatpreserves both the self and the system. (We contend
here that reification does not absolutely proceed
from system to self. Systems are for the most part
incapable of reification. Subjects reify themselves
most of the time. But reification as an important
mode of existence helps the system inhibit itself
from totalizing the subject in terms of forcing it to
embrace visibility and abandon reification).
When systems begin to reify at the risk of
collapsing, it is only then that subjects allowthemselves the reification they undergo. This
reification is two-fold. First, subjects who are in the
best position to take advantage of the system
influences the system to demand visibility of other
subjects. Second, least evolutionarily favored
subjects unwittingly or consciously embracetransparency which systems can maximize to
enhance global determination. Unwittingly, least
favored subjects allow system breakdown when they
completely embrace computational visibility for
systems to take advantage of. It is in this sense that
it will not benefit any system to demand complete
visibility of subjects. Ultimately, it will not benefit
(favored) subjects to influence the system to
demand computational visibility. This demand may
take the form of championing the gospel of self-
transparency, which will reveal the subjects lack,
which in turn allows systems to define for them the
fullness they seek, leading to systems taking
advantage of least favored subjects in todays
culture industry in terms of creating avenues and
platforms for self-expressions aided by the new
media.What the culture industry promotes is that
there is no lack of computational information, no
opaqueness of subjective experiences. The only
thing that is missing is the correct way of looking for
information.
The moment one seeks information,
visibility follows for one is also a bit of information
that others seek. By becoming visible one helps the
social order increase its knowledge base for global
computation in terms of mapping, mining and
analyzing psychosocial coordinates necessary for
systems to widen their scope, which by and large
means high return of investment. To encourage
visibility and hence to increase the knowledge base,
systems resort to the psychosocial dynamics of
combating anonymity, reification and obscurity byproviding accessible thus therapeutic platforms for
coming out into the world, venues for expressibility
and collective recognition, promoting the dictum
that opacity is specious, that the darkness it
promotes is suspiciously evil. Popular social
7/29/2019 Post-singularity and Primitive Intelligence
11/12
[163]
networking sites champion this new mediaphilosophy, that there is such thing as a transparent
self, contrary to the assumption that lack of
information realistically defines the subject. In other
words, in the beginning there is already information.
This may be true evolutionarily speaking,
but it can also serve to promote a more suspect
truth that in the beginning, with reason already at
work, primitive intelligence (the arche-information)
is bound to favor some and isolate the majority, that
this isolation seems to be the ultimate structure oftime, that by necessity this isolation justifies the
necessity of computational violence to nature, both
human and nature at large. If this is called civilization
then Wright is pointing out the obvious that
civilization is not a guarantor of moral progress
(Wright, 36).
Yet we can radicalize a different face of
singularity in terms of pushing evolution to its
proper ethical direction in which primitive
intelligence is radicalized to serve the self-modeling
needs of the many disfavored by the opaqueness of
evolutionary processes. This computational model of
singularity is another way to describe evolution by
other means, other than the intelligence explosion
that has been treated with so much hype by the AI
community.
The other means possible is another way
of stipulating differences on the level of global
systems, differences that are concretely marked by
embodied subjectivities as the objects and
genealogies of behavioral self-modeling spaces. The
obvious elitism of singularity by intelligence
explosion is here pitted against singularity by
sustaining the surplus of the corporeal whose ideal
end, if at all it can be posed, may be described as
post-singularity whose root intelligence or primitivecomputational base (also the root space of hitherto
existing singularities by virtue of the primordial
opaqueness of being that makes itself available to an
active frame of self-modeling) is once and for all
recast to serve the aims of the human condition
under the emphatic terms of equity and social
justice.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. (2005). The Coming Community.
Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis and London,
University of Minnesota Press.
Blackmore, S. (2005). Consciousness. A Very Short
Introduction. New York, Oxford University Press.
Brockman, J. (2011). Is the Internet Changing the
Way You Think? The Nets Impact on our Minds and
Future. New York, Harper Perennial.
Brooks, R. (1999). Cambrian Intelligence: The Early
History of the New AI. Cambridge, MIT Press.
Cadava, E., P. Connor, J-L Nancy. Eds. (1991). Who
Comes After the Subject?New York, Routledge.
Chalmers, D. (2010). Singularity. A Philosophical
Analysis.Journal of Consciousness Studies 17:7-65.
Derrida, J. (1993). Finis. In Aporias.Trans. Thomas
Dutoit. Stanford, California, Stanford UniversityPress.
Ekbia, H. (2008). Artificial Dreams.The Quest for Non-
biological Intelligence. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
7/29/2019 Post-singularity and Primitive Intelligence
12/12
[164]
Hayles, Katherine N. (1999). How We BecamePosthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature
and Informatics. Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, M. (1999). Contributions to Philosophy.
From Enowning. Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth
Maly. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana
University Press.
Hofstadter, D. (1995). Fluid Concepts and Creative
Analogies.New York, Basic Books.
Kling, R., and S, Iacano. (1995). Computerization
movements and the mobilization of support for
computerization. In Ecologies of Knowledge (119-
153). S. L. Star. New York, SUNY.
Kolbert, Elizabeth (2012). Enter the Anthropocene:
Age of Man. In Making the Geologic Now:
Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary
Life. Ed. Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse.
Brooklyn, New York: Punctum Books.
Kurzweil, R. (1999). The Age of Spiritual Machines:
When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence . New
York, Viking.
Lenat, D. and E. A. Feigenbaum. (1991). On the
Threshold of Knowledge.Artificial Intelligence 47 (1-
3): 185-250.
Metzinger, T. (2003).Being No One.The Self-Model
Theory of Subjectivity. Massachusetts, MIT Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1969). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Ed. R.J.Hollingdale. England: Penguin Books.
Spinoza, B.d. (1985). The Collected Works of Spinoza.
Ed. E.M. Curley. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton
University Press.
Woolgar, S. (1995). Representation, Cognition andSelf: What Hope for the Integration of Psychology
and Sociology? In Ecologies of Knowledge: Work
and Politics in Science and Technology. (154-179).
S.L. Star.New York, New York State University of New
York Press.
Tauber, Alfred. (2005). The Reflexive Project:
Reconstructing the Moral Agent. History of the
Human Sciences 18: 49-75.
Vinge, V. (1993). The coming technological
singularity. How to survive in the post-human era.
Whole Earth Review.
Wright, R. (2004). A Short History of Progress.
Toronto, House of Anansi Press.