Title: Living Technology : Toward a New Science of Integrated Information

Author 1:
First Name: Branden
Last Name: Collins
Organization: yoo.world
Country: United States
Email: [email protected]

Contact Author: Author 1

Keywords: Topological Quantum Computing, AI, Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Wearable, Indigenous Wisdom, Information, Consciousness

Abstract: We have created a room-scale many-bodied quantum computer, with each visitor behaving as individual entangled topological Qubits. The turbulent, chaotic nature of social dynamics in our closed environment act as insulators for the encoded information in each Qubit state vector as they enter and exit a series of gates. This, in essence, mirrors the conditions of the quantum vacuum, with fluctuations that result in an emergent spacetime fabric. Our quantum computer is a model of the universe as a single quantum system. The state vectors are therefore encrypted via quantum entanglement as each state...

RECENT SCIENTIFIC IDEAS HAVE FORCED US TO RE-ASSESS HOW WE UNDERSTAND NOTIONS OF ‘ORDER’ AND ‘DISORDER’. THEORIES OF CHAOS, CATASTROPHE AND COMPLEXITY CHALLENGE OLDER HUMANIST PREOCCUPATIONS WITH MECHANISM, REDUCTIONISM AND DETERMINISM AND, AS SUCH, CAN BE CONSIDERED POSTHUMAN THEORIES, OR AT LEAST AS HAVING POSTHUMAN IMPLICATIONS.

In the essay “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” the writer bell hooks offers an account of her initial attraction to theory. It had nothing to do with cherished books or favorite teachers—nothing to do with education, as we think of it, at all. She’d had a sad childhood. “I came to theory because I was hurting,” she wrote. “I found a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently.”

III. The End Of The Enlightenment

Gardels: Heidegger talked about cybernetics as the end of Western metaphysics because, through feedback loops within a system, the organism and the machine, the objective and the subjective, were able to integrate. Henry Kissinger more recently argued that the advent of AI marks the “end of the Enlightenment,” of human-centered philosophy since, like humans, machines can now adapt to their environment by incorporating, through learning from experience, the unexpected events of contingency.

Now, Kissinger argues, instead of the Enlightenment philosophy giving birth to the technological domination of the West, AI is propelling the search for a new philosophy.

IV. A New Axial Age

Gardels: Does all this suggest we are entering a new “axial age,” as the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers named that period 2,000 years ago when all the great religions and ethical systems — Confucianism in China, the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, Homer’s Greece and the Hebrew prophets — emerged simultaneously in a de-synchronized and mostly unconnected world?

In history, the accomplishment of convergence yields a new divergence. As we’ve been discussing, the search for a new beginning after the triumph of modernity is now underway. The global conquest of the West and its philosophy has now reached its limits and is fragmenting. The dialectic is turning. The modern Tower of Babel is poised to crumble.

If we are in a “new condition of philosophizing,” what comes next?

Hui: We are at the beginning of what you call a “new axial age” as a result of this universalization and convergence. The question now is not “what will happen,” but “what can happen?”...

However, for me, this discourse on locality doesn’t mean a refusal of change and of progress, or any kind of homecoming or return to traditionalism; rather, it aims at a re-appropriation of technology from the perspective of the local and a new understanding of history.

This idea of recursivity corresponds to what we have understood as the soul. The soul has the capacity of coming back to itself in order to know itself and determine itself. Every time it departs from itself through a new encounter, it actualizes itself in the traces we call memory. New information — contingency — triggers the process of individuation. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson put it, information is “the difference which makes a difference.” That is why he spoke of “an ecology of the mind.” The uniqueness of every being is constituted by this play of recursivity and contingency.

Hui: Because our technological creations are challenging historical limits through climate change, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, it is critical to reexamine the diversity of cosmotechnics, or how technology is infused with a worldview. The modernizers of China during the last 150 years have enthusiastically embraced the Western meaning of technology — tools to establish human dominion over all else. However, in order to go beyond Western modernity and the current mode of global modernization, we have to reflect on how non-European thought and corollary ways of being can affect the development of technology.