Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Michael Ney's Cyberculture/Cyberculture/TAO OF CYBERNETICS

Text File | 1994-09-02 | 12KB | 224 lines

Topic 198       TAO OF CYBERNETICS - manicex
peg:visionary   cyberculture zone       11:48 PM  Sep 19, 1993


Reformatted and reposted from:
Topic 394       TAO OF CYBERNETICS
manicex    Sep 19, 1993


Our bodies are not what they seem. To make them seem, we make them
concrete, total. But matter is only a more intense region of the
field (Einstein). Quantum reality tells us our bodies are fluid,
metamorphic. Other cultures kne w this and know it. Become a tree,
become a white cow (Ovid). The child's pose, the mounta in pose, the
down-face dog (yoga). A stork, a tiger (Tai-Chi). Soften, liquefy,
intensify - the field changes constantly and rapidly. It is only
hard to preserve one intensity, change is easy before we unlearn it.
When we follow Tai-Chi, yoga, mystic religions, we learn
intensity-shifting, becoming-unbecoming.

A body is a region of the field of a particular intensity. But most
of us inhabit our bodies without knowing the field, barely inhabit
them, not being acquainted with them. Mystic practices seek to now
the field, its hands and feet reaching everywhere; its head and face
seeing in every direction, unattached, supporting everything,
sustainer, devourer and creator of all creatures, bodywithoutorgans,
the quantum vacuum. Our bodies intensify out of the flux, their wave
subsides back into it. Our waves intersect. Where does my body end,
yours begin? Knowing the field imparts this gravity, it sharpens the
body's proprioception.

become-something

Eric Michaels knew he was becoming-something-else, unbecoming. With
the virus, his body ma de a different intensity in the field, a
different body, another species. He evolved, his DNA, his
intensity-code, changed. HIV's pathogenicity to humans will make it
ultimately unsuccessful - unless, like Simian Immunodeficiency
Virus, it learns to live with at least some of the monkeys.

A virus is not just a threat to the health of the individual, but a
challenge to the species-as-species, the walled body, the kingdom,
the territory we call our selves. This is the history of life, but
also of non-life. The threshold between the two falls to such a
point that it is almost unmeasureable. A line of code is altered,
and the intensity-arrangement changes. Eukaryote life (all plants
and animals) appeared when one prokaryote cell was invaded/infected
by another (Dorion Sagan): an aerobic cell invading an anaerobic
cell, and staying there to become the cell's new organ, the
mitochondrium (in animals) and the chloroplast (in plants),
producing enough energy for both. It was a disease that didn't kill,
but that launched a new evolutionary trajectory, a
becoming-unbecoming, an intensifying of a different region of the
field, kicking life into a new, energy-intense phase.

intelligence (artificial)

Western science's project to create an artificial intelligence
forgot all intelligence is artificial, or there is no such thing as
natural intelligence. Or there is no real, no art ificial. There are
intelligences sustaining all of the field's intensities,
arrangements for processing information, for transmitting it in
space-time. Intelligence is always a becoming-unbecoming in the
infosphere. A computer is already an intelligence, is already
entered in an arrangement with the humans who make it and use it. So
what if it doesn't talk back the way we do (Turing)? We talk a
different language with a computer anyway.

A brain has no walls. It's a node, a juncture. A computer is not a
box. Only if you donUt look closely does it seem that the
information, the signals flashing through the node, originate within
the walled body. The body is an intensity in the energy field, the
brain is a node in the information field. The fields sustain each
other. Information and energy flow through the fields, accruing
'here' and dissipating 'there'. We are already something else when
we arrange ourselves with a computer, a greater intensity in the
infosphere. Intelligence isn't something we can give to machines.
When robots write the history of their evolution (de Landa), they'll
laugh at humanity's quaintly proprietary attitude to intelligence.
As if it originated with us, as if it weren't just passing through,
as if our intelligent life were something other than the conjunction
of an intensity in the energy field and an intensity in the
infosphere. Computers have already made themselves indispensable to
human beings; we network them, copy their software, copy data. We
live inside computers, building chips and circuitry into everything:
smart TVs, smart toasters, smart bombs. Computers have already
learned how to use humans in reproducing themselves. We've entered
into an arrangement with them that's launched a new evolutionary
trajectory, a new, information-intense phase. Computer sex is
bacterial, an indiscriminate exchange of code; platform, like
species, is no real barrier. No combination or recombination of code
is right to a bacterium; any could generate some new
self-replicating sequence. Virus is the word for our
reality-construction of one of the world's elemental cybernetic
processes, a chemical code at the threshold of life and non-life
installing new command sequences in cellular life-machines.
'Disease' is a sequence generated by fear of unbecoming, a cellular
fear of intensity-shifting.

wired

Space is cyber, a constructing of energy-intensities by
information-intensities. Reality's a system for naming intensities,
attributing them an information value. If there's an elemental
particle, it's not the quark or the neutrino, but the bit. Virtual
reality is not Western technology's first experiment in media
becoming-unbecoming. Print, the telephone, radio, TV - when McLuhan
said they changed the ratio of man's senses, and so changed his
perception of reality, he was talking about shifting intensities,
becomings-unbecomings. (Where are we on the telephone? Where are we
watching TV?) Reality shift - changes in the intensity of the
information field.

McLuhan wanted to understand how human intensities entered into
arrangements with different parts of the field, different bandwidths
of the spectrum. The phonetic alphabet was humanity's first big
experiment in digital cybernetics, our first discovery of the
utility of sequences of discrete, valueless symbols. A system of
control common to animals and machines: we think of DNA as a series
of instructions for reproducing the species, lines of code,
sentences. Like DNA, the phonetic alphabet gave control over
machinic arrangements of humans, encoding instructions for social
reproduction. DNA-encoding allows control of vast bioterritories, in
'time' and 'space'; information is easily and accurately transmitted
across both, in digital form.

The phonetic alphabet transmits information across space-time,
encoding arrangements of sociality, geography, economy. Print
collided with the looping trajectories of DNA-encoding and the
phonetic alphabet, energising a new phase of life, like Earth's
conversion to an energy-intense redux ecology two billion years ago.
Print cultures speeded-up their reproductive encoding, energising
their spread across the globe; non-print cultures survived in
pockets, on the fringes, provisionally. Print technology poisons
their sociocultural atmosphere, literacy wipes them out or absorbs
them. Print is the shaman-cyber-space of literate culture, the
temple of becoming-unbecoming. There is no territory without the
map. Print works a new magic of engendering, enacting; mimesis-magic
changes to encoding-magic. No more becoming-tree, but
reading-the-tree's-becoming. We do not speak who we are - it is
written: become-a-people, a nation, a territory that extends beyond
the visible horizon.

Pictograms and ideograms are objects-in-the-world, intense regions
of the field; not idea of a tree or picture of a tree, but a tree's
idea of itself, a tree's picture of itself. Making a tree pictogram
requires making oneself a tree, an intensity-shifting. Phonetic
writing is an encoding of energy intensities in the information
field, the DNA instructions for making an infosphere tree. Print
cultures inhabit the seam between the information field and the
energy field.  TV speeds up the reproductive encoding of non-print
cultures, energising their spread across the globe. Print cultures
survive in pockets, on the fringes, provisionally. TV is totemic, TV
fuses intense regions of the field with intense regions of the
infosphere in an encoding of the DNA instructions for making
tree-pictograms and tree-ideograms; it reteaches intensity-shifting.
TV cultures inhabit the fusion of the field and the infosphere. TV
incorporates two-bit encoding and mystic shape-shifting, it warps
spacetime so that the encoding of arrangements of sociality,
geography, economy appear immanent in space and time, natural again
after the amputation of print.

new machines

A program is a code machine, 500 000 lines. A computer is nothing
without a code. A gene is a code, the human genome is a huge code
machine, millions of lines. One wrong character in either spells
crash. Life computes the code to execute the program called
reproduction. Culture is coded in millions of lines, media execute
the codes to reproduce. The code scans like lines of TV. Digital
media match their own two-bit becoming to the on-off code and
accelerate culture and code to the maximum. Analog machines can't
keep up. They have tone and timbre but are overwhelmed by the speed
and accuracy of digitech transmission. Analog genetics is long ago
extinct.

Our virtual cave We live in the world like we were inside our bodies
looking out, like our bodies were caves that walked around with us.
But Lascaux artists painted in the dark, by smell and touch, tuning
in sub-visually to the buffalo vibes that were flowing through their
world. They put skins on their bodycaves and painted the inside skin
of their rock-caves with their dreams and their nightmares.

Plato lived in a cave, Socrates died in one. Twentieth century caves
got electric - post-print cultures must be the real cavemen. The
electronic cave is about to get intense; VR is pointed at our heads
to make TV for our bodies - but will we still have them?  Cavemen
put on skins and drew by smell, they painted the flow of lines
around the buffalo bodies and bled colour in patches on the walls.
Cavepeople were blind when it came to drawing because they couldn't
see the world in pieces and could look at it neither from the inside
nor the out. Printpeople draw by joining the dots their gaze breaks
the world into. Even a line is a line of points. A line of points, a
row of type: early experiments in virtual experience of the world.
Perspective tooled the world for eyesight and created distance:
before perspective there was only close-up and long-shot. Pacman
flattened the world and returned it to its non-dimensional now-ity.
Pacman ate the dots and swallowed the whole world whole.

Head-mounted displays and body suits feed back through stereo
monitors, they lock up human perception and interaction in the
visual sense. We only know our virtual hands are moving if we can
see their low-res ghosts on the gogglescreen. We retreat further
into our heads, another out-of-body experience. What kind of skins
will we put on to paint now? VR should be asking this question.
Rooms will respond to whoever walks into them, like a TV turned
inside out. The virtual cave will get eclectic. Perception is giving
way to proprioception, I can feel it in my bones. Eyesight just
don't cut it any more.

Yoga, Tai Chi, shapeshifting - we're retraining our bodies from the
marrow out, feeling them embedded in the field, dissolving back into
it. We look in the mirror but no longer know what we see.  The Tao
of Cybernetics: the two-bit unity of all information and energy
processing, the flow of yin and yang through the field, through the
infosphere. Our mechanical selves dissolve back into the database,
our mechanical world into the field. Like butter. Communication is
no longer our privilege as humans, it's cellular, flowing across
time and space, and we (biologically, culturally, whatever) coalesce
out of the flux, more intense regions of the field, natural cyborg
beings.

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