I do not see any actual argument being made, besides "I do not like those who waste their time discussing superlative technologies" which is not an argument and is not relevant to anything concrete anyway….. but your position still sounds to me like "you cannot play in my team because you are black / Xian / gipsy / gay / ... [insert some other thing unrelated to whatever the team does]". Don't you see that the only possible result can be alienating potential allies? If you do not want someone in your football team because he is Xian, at some point he will say "well then, screw your team". Is that what you want?
Of course, I have actually written thousands upon thousands upon thousands of words explaining why identifying with idealized outcomes yields sub(cult)ural movement-politics that, I have argued and offered up reasons to believe, [1] tend to derange practical foresight, [2] tend to facilitate True Belief and hierarchical political organizations, [3] tend to support elite-incumbent political interests (even when advocated by people who explicitly renounce such politics), and [4] tend to frustrate actual diverse democratic practices of stakeholder deliberation over technoscientific change.
But, in spite of all that Prisco doesn't see any argument happening here. What he sees is me saying "I don't like you." My position still sounds to [him] like "screw your team."
In other words, with perfect behavioral predictability according to the terms of the very critique of mine he is supposedly responding to (or at least discounting), Giulio Prisco's own sub(cult)ural futurism (he is a transhumanist-identified person) makes him literally unable to see anything but personal defamation where I am offering up structural critical analysis. Points [1] through [4] above, look to him more like racist, sexist, or homophobic slurs than analysis of technodevelopmental politics.
That is to say, he is sitting there at the keyboard in the livid glow of the screen, calmly, relentlessly, interminably proving one of my key points. No, Prisco can't see anything but sub(cult)ural politics in what I say, even though I am saying nothing of the kind. Sub(cult)ural Futurism is the organizational cul-de-sac he seems to be caught in, it's the lens that appears to be organizing his political intuitions here.
That is, of course, the very problem under discussion. It seems to me Prisco and other transhumanist-identified or Singularitarian-identified or Extropian-identified people (among countless other marginal but symptomatic sub(cult)ural movement-formations organized at the site of "technocentricity" or "futurism") all want to be on the "Team" that holds the Keys to History.
What I want, very much to the contrary, is for all the stakeholders to technoscientific change with whom I share the world to have a say in public decisions that affect them.
These are radically different political paradigms, it seems to me. This is a matter of something like Pan-Movement Politics as opposed to Democratic Politics. One of the key registers in which this difference plays out is in an opposition between Superlative Outcomes and Open Futures as a guiding organizational aspiration. (For Pan Movements, by the way, see Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism.)
My critique is not about Liking or Not Liking particular people. Perfectly likeable people can misunderstand politics at a fundamental level. I don't want "allies" for some Ideal-Futurological Implementation "Team," I want a world of Peers collaborating and contending with with me in democratic and emancipatory technodevelopmental social struggle toward open unpredictable futures. Education, agitation, and organizing is not the same thing as whomping up enthusiastic "members" for a would-be Pan-Movement.
I think the reason I have such trouble playing this discursive game with Sub(cult)ural Futurists is that we seem to be playing on two separate boards altogether and I don't think they have quite grasped this yet.
10 comments:
I have grasped it but I admit it took me a while. I didn't fully understand your point of view until only about a month ago. A stumbling point is the sometimes unnecessary verbosity of your writing.
I agree that the future should be open as much as possible, but in practice, there are developments which rely on small groups of people. For instance, Jamais is becoming a more important player in discussions about MNT because he is taking on more responsibilities for CRN. What he says in public about MNT means more than what most other people do, and he should present himself accordingly.
Just because a future is open and democratic doesn't mean that, in practice, some people will have more influence than others.
The movements within transhumanism *attempt* to have a greater-than-typical impact on specific technologies and their political entailments. That is our goal. Some of us may take it too far and think we're holding some "Key to History", but I think that the notion of an honest effort is more important than putting oneself into some sort of egocentric shrine.
But some, do, in fact end up having a massively disproportionate impact on technology or scientific development. Look at Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Craig Venter, etc. These are people that transhumanists look up to and want to be like. No harm in that, unless it spins off into other pathologies. (Some of which you have discussed.)
Also, when you call people cultists, obviously they're going to be offended! You left that little part out.
Michael Anissimov wrote:
> Look at. . . Albert Einstein,. . . etc. These are people that transhumanists
> look up to and want to be like.
Unfortunately, **some** transhumanists have decided, a priori, that
they've **already** achieved that likeness (or indeed, something
better).
"I used to have a neighbor who told his wife that he
was the youngest person since Sir Isaac Newton
to take a doctorate at Oxford. The neighbor gave
no evidence of a world-class education, so I looked
up Newton and found out that he had completed
his baccalaureate at the age of twenty-two (like most
people) and spent his entire academic career at
Cambridge. The grandiose claims of narcissists are
superficially plausible fabrications, readily punctured
by a little critical consideration. The test is performance:
do they deliver the goods? (There's also the special
situation of a genius who's also strongly narcissistic,
as perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright. Just remind yourself
that the odds are that you'll meet at least 1000 narcissists
for every genius you come across.)"
http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/dsm-iv.html
> No harm in that, unless it spins off into other pathologies.
> (Some of which you have discussed.)
And they're doozies.
"[My] publisher said of somebody, 'That man will get on; he believes
in himself.' And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my
eye caught an omnibus on which was written 'Hanwell.' I said
to him, 'Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in
themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in
themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know
where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide
you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really
believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.' He said mildly
that there were a good many men after all who believed in
themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. 'Yes, there are,'
I retorted, 'and you of all men ought to know them. That
drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy,
he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from
whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself.
If you consulted your business experience instead of your
ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing
in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors
who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't
pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail,
because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not
merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.
Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief
like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has
`Hanwell' written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus."
-- G. K. Chesterton, _Orthodoxy_,
Chapter 2, "The Maniac"
> Also, when you call people cultists, obviously they're going to
> be offended! You left that little part out.
They need to get past it. There are also **ex**-cultists, you
know. And glad to be such.
Yes, we are playing on two different boards.
I wish to play on a concrete board, and focus on concrete things. You and I happen to agree on many concrete programmatic points. I am telling you, forget that we disagree on other things, forget that I am a God Robot Cultist who engages in Superlative Technology Discourse and believes that the Eschaton will upload him to a Techno-Heaven, and let's join forces to achieve the common objectives.
According to my perception, that may of course being completely mistaken, you are playing on an abstract board and focusing on abstract issues characterized by endless questioning of others' hidden motivations and "identity". As I see things, I am focused on outcomes, and you are focused on identity (from a critical perspective of course, but focused on identity anyway). I think different identities should not matter much as long as there is agreement on outcomes.
I have made this argument several times and not succeeded in making it clear. Let me try again.
There is a well known story of a couple of hundred years ago: a bill was debated in Parliament, and someone in the losing camp tried to disqualify the vote of someone in the other camp on the basis of the fact that he was a cuckold.
To our modern eyes this is of course ridiculous: we see immediately that being or not being a cuckold has nothing to do with politics. It is something else, that belongs to a separate and non overlapping part of life. Same with sexual, religious, and football team preferences: these things have NOTHING to do with politics.
To me, and again I admit that I am probably wrong and have not understood your argument, you sound like that member of Parliament. Even worse tactically, because you wish to disqualify many people who would be in _your_ camp when concrete and practical matters are discussed.
Giulio,
I think Dale is not attacking transhumanists but the way a very few people with major ego problems (for instance self-professed 'Singularitarians') are coming across.
M.Anissimov has got serious problems if he can't see why some might be annoyed by Singularitarians. It really is the height of irony for M to complain about being offended by being called a cultist when the 'in crowd' of which he was a part (SL4) did nothing but spit vitriol at people.
Yudkowsky's 'party line' is that 'stupid people' don't count, aren't fit to consider any of the issues of transhumanism and are 'crack pots' (charming isn't he?). Remember to Yudkowsky, a 'stupid person' is any-one who doesn't have a super IQ and doesn't think exactly the why he does. Charming isn't he? If you can't see why this may cause people to be suspicious of superlatvies like 'Singularity' and reflect poorly on transhumanism you've got serious problems my friend.
If you wonder why jim rightly labels Singularitarians as cultists, perhaps you should look at the past behaviour of people on the SL4 list. All Yudkowsky (the list owner) did was patronize and talk down to people in an unbelievably mean and nasty way - to this day he can't seem to go for 5 lines of text without alluding to his superior hidden knowledge and getting in a jibe at 'stupid people'.
---
By the way, jim made a good point about the need to get 'results' to distinguish real genius from crack-pottery. Guilio and others should remember my repeated claims for the very interesting idea of
'multi-dimensional time' (more than one time dimension).
You should check the messageboard archives, since I mentioned the idea a great number of times both on wta-talk, SL4 and the everything-list - and my postings are dated as being years old.
Did you see the front cover of the last 'New Scientist' (the one that mentioned transhumanists?).
Readers of this blog may like to check the front cover of the October 13th issue of 'New Scientist'. Look at the feature story (and fronmt cover head-line for that issue)
Or, if you don't have it in print, I can refresh your memory at the link below:
http://www.newscientist.com/contents/issue/2625.html
My ideas get results.
Cheers
Marc -- um, once again, I feel compelled to point out how you're coming across. I don't want to keep blathering off topic on Dale's blog (and I realize I've yet to respond in detail to some of the more interesting content here), but it sounds an awful lot right now like you really want to be a Genius, that you want people to think of you as a Genius, etc. It sounds pretty shockingly arrogant.
Please note that not every danged thing in the world is about you, and you've no need to try to keep perseverating on whatever feuds you may have had with the SL4 folks. I don't see how proving yourself to be a Real Genius has any relevance to this discussion. Sheesh.
I'm not interested in looking like a genius AnneC. I've long since realized that unless I was a famous professor with a phd (like Tegmark) I could spill all the secrets of the universe on to a messagelist and no one would take the slighest bit of notice.
When I say it (Math is the foundation of the universe) I'm a crackpot, but hey, when Max Tegmark says, Wow its a great new theory of the universe!
I had been called a 'crackpot' a number of times on transhumanist lists. After being called a 'crackpot' isn't it only fair that I mention in passing recent scientific confirmation for a key idea I had been advocating (namely 'extra time dimenions')?
It just seems strange that no one ever mentioned that the confirmation for my idea is pasted all over the front cover of 'New Scientist', especially since that issue of 'New Scientist' was about transhumanists:
http://www.newscientist.com/contents/issue/2625.html
Feature Story - 'Time gains an extra dimenstion':
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19626251.400-time-gains-an-extra-dimension.html
I think what I'm saying is entirely relevent. gp seems mystified as to why self-appointed gurus (like 'Singulartarians') have been so harshly attachked here and I'm explaining the situation - pointing to repeated nasty-minded behaviour from Yudkowsky which marks the Sing Inst and SIAI as a cult.
I was also pointing to the pot calling the kettle black. Apparently Mr Yudkowsky and 'Singularitraians' can ridicue who ever the hell they want on transhumanist lists, but as soon as someone does it to them they're up in arms acting all indignant.
Yesterday was a teaching day and so I am returning to these ongoing conversations a bit late, I'm sorry to say. I do mean to say something in response to Michael and to Guilio but I worry a bit that they won't scroll through all the material here to find my response. Please let's all try to keep the Moot on topic?
When people respond to my readings and analyses of discursive and organizational formations by accusing that they have no content apart from name-calling I feel quite a bit of frustration at that, since usually these readings and analyses are actually enormously painstaking, and surely pretty conspicuously argumentative in fact (with recognizable claims, careful definitions, substantiated through close textual reading, anticipation of objections, and so on).
This isn't to say that I expect them to be everybody's cup of tea or to elicit universal assent (in fact, if either of these outcomes were to occur I would almost certainly regret having posted the case or claim that elicited it, thinking it too boring to be worth mentioning not to mention almost assuredly wrong).
But, anyway, dismissing my writing as nothing but "name-calling" seems at best obtuse and at worst a kind of cynical bad faith -- and I certainly feel the same for those who would, of all things, affirm my writing on the basis of that same sort of reduction of my writing to "personal attacks," which Marc sometimes seems to be doing.
Needless to say, this is an argumentative place, I'm an argumentative person, argument is often offensive and oftener makes people defensive, and my humor is too acerbic to help matters much in this department. But, honestly, let's not dwell on personal slights. Contention can spice the meal, but surely there is substance here a plenty that deserves our attention, else why would people be here in the first place?
And, by the way, folks who want to use this space for self-promotion are going to get their comments deleted just as I would any spam. Needless to say, I'm lenient here because I don't enjoy being censorious, but there are limits. Use your heads, people.
Giulio wrote: I wish to... focus on concrete things... [Y]ou are... focusing on abstract issues characterized by endless questioning of others' hidden motivations and "identity". As I see things, I am focused on outcomes, and you are focused on identity.
This comment would be flabbergasting if I weren't so completely used to hearing it at this point.
Are you denying you have unconscious motives that can sometimes be more intelligible to others than to yourself? Are you denying that the normative pressures exerted by social formations impact conduct and perception and can look different depending on whether one is inside or outside that formation? Are you denying that argument consists of more than simply the delineation of logical propositions and the relations of entailment that obtain between them, that the force of argument makes no recourse to metaphor, framing, schematism, or to the citation of customary topics, tropes, generic conventions, and so on? Do you think cults don't exist, can't be studied in ways that generate useful observations, and that these observations cannot illuminate authoritarian organizational structures outside the cult form, fundamentalist religiosity, for example, charismatic art movements, politicians with mass-mediated celebrity, and so on? Do you claim that True Belief isn't a phenomenon one can usefully diagnose in others? Do you claim that there is no difference between forms of identity politics and other modes or that these differences don't make a difference? Do you think the stress and fear of technodevelopmental change doesn't activate irrational passions at the level of personal and mass psychology and that it pays to attend to these effects?
These are all perfectly concrete questions to which I devote attention here, they are no more abstract than most scientific claims that exercise the attention of technocentric people who like to read Amor Mundi -- they are certainly no more abstract than the sociological claims that preoccupy some who would pooh-pooh cultural readings as "literary" or "abstruse," and -- honestly -- these concerns are easily quite as "concrete" you can be sure as predictions about the arrival any time soon of Robot Overlords or digital immortality for embodied human people.
These aren't the only things in the world that repay attention, certainly, but to dismiss these sorts of issues as some of my interlocutors sometimes seem to do is really just too obtuse for words. It's hard even to know how to respond to such attitudes sometimes.
There is something painfully insufferable about the smug dismissals of "abstractness" in favor of "concreteness" one hears from facile reductionists. And the fact that claims attesting to these oversimplifications often actually frame the debates one engages in with technocentric folks really gets things off on the wrong foot for somebody like me.
Michael Anissimov, for example, offers up this helpful statement in the opening gambit of his response to this post: "A stumbling point is the sometimes unnecessary verbosity of your writing."
What am I supposed to say to that? Hey, fuck you? Honestly! "Unnecessary verbosity?" Tell me Michael are all your words precisely the necessary ones? Necessary to whom, for what purpose? What if I chose some of my words because they delight me? You got a problem with that? What kind of self-image drives the choice to frame a discussion with moves like that in the first place?
If I may offer up one of my questionable armchair psychologizing readings, I'll admit that sometimes I get the eerie feeling that advocates for AI try to write like Spock or Colossus would (or think they are so doing, since such projects inevitably fail: conceptual language is always metaphorical, argumentative moves are always as figurative as literal) as some kind of amateur performative tribute to the post-biological AI they believe in but which never seems to arrives on the scene as such.
This isn't a diagnosis, actually, I know this is hard for you guys to grasp, I don't really believe it's "true," I don't have remotely enough in the way of data to affirm this "theory" as a warranted belief or anything. Treat it as you would treat comparable glib conjectures offered up in actual social conversation, as a kind of placeholder for the perplexity I often find myself feeling when confronted with the curious claims and moves of technocentric folks. Take it as an utterance of the form: What is up with that?
So, just to be clear: I like writing words that are "uneccesary." I like doing things that are uneccesary. I am unafraid of the dimensions of experience and expression that are not governed only by necessity. I can cope quite well with such necessities as I must, but I don't want to live in the (to me) gray world where everything gets framed in those terms. That's a dull, ugly world, a robot world, as far as I can tell. Stop crowing about how not verbose, not abstract, not esthetic you guys are if you want to impress me or the people who likely come here for pleasure or provocation. It's not at all a winning strategy in a place like this.
Giulio continues: I am telling you... forget that I am a God Robot Cultist who engages in Superlative Technology Discourse and believes that the Eschaton will upload him to a Techno-Heaven, and let's join forces to achieve the common objectives.
Are you shitting me? I am quite happy to ignore the Robot Cult thing if we are in conversation about whether it's better to wipe your ass with one-ply or two-ply, but if we are talking about the documenting and shaping the ongoing discursive formations through which technodevelopmental social struggle is articulated, then I'm not going to ignore the Robot Cult thing. It's relevant. It's WAY relevant. It's epically WAY relevant.
I think different identities should not matter much as long as there is agreement on outcomes.
Dude, five thousand mostly white North Atlantic sf/popular futurology enthusiasts joined a social club they enjoy (which is perfectly fine and possibly charming) and decided they were a "movement" (which is rather silly but still mostly fine).
Now, when you compare your discomfort as a "transhumanist-identified person" at people inquiring into the politics of your organizational structure, the leading metaphors in your canonical literature, and the peculiar entailments of your arguments with the suffering of persecuted ethnic, religious, gender minorities (minorities consisting of millions of people with long histories of documented abuses leaving palpable legacies generating irrational stigmas with which we all must cope as people who share a diverse world) it is, to be blunt, fairly flabbergasting.
When you, on the other hand, try to pretend that your status as a "transhumanist-identified" person is a triviality like eye color or preferring boxers to briefs, this is nearly as flabbergasting: inasmuch as if it were true you wouldn't be going on about it so endlessly, even in the face of my ongoing critique, but also because it's so palpably like saying a person's actually-affirmed identification as a Scientologist, a Mormon, a Freemason, or a Republican, is something that one should pay no attention to in matters of urgent concern directly shaped by that affiliation and in ways that tend to subvert one's own ends. Who in the hell would ever think like that? What are you talking about?
"[B]eing or not being a cuckold has nothing to do with politics. It is something else, that belongs to a separate and non overlapping part of life. Same with sexual, religious, and football team preferences: these things have NOTHING to do with politics."
Well, actually, all of these things are enormously imbricated in politics. But bracketing all that, just sticking to the specifically wrong thing you are saying instead of all the many more generally wrong things you are saying here: If you happen to be a cuckold I agree that I could care less about that if we are arguing about a current technoscientific issue (unless attitudes toward infidelity come into that issue in some way, obviously). If you see current technoscientific issues as stepping stones along a path that eventuates in the transcendentalizing arrival at Superlative Omni-predicated outcomes in which you have invested deep personal faith, then it would be almost unthinkably stupid for me not to care about how these curious attitudes of yours might derange your sense of the stakes at hand, the significance of the issue, your estimation of likely developments in the near to middle term and so on.
you sound like that member of Parliament.
I don't know what that is supposed to mean.
Even worse tactically, because you wish to disqualify many people who would be in _your_ camp when concrete and practical matters are discussed.
I don't have the power to "disqualify" people. I say what I think is right, what I think is wrong, what I think is possible, what I think is important, and what I think is ridiculous. And I won't stop. In general, I am not looking for a "camp" to find my way to in any case, and while I am a big believer in political organizing I understand p2p politics well enough to know how foolish pan-movements, party machines, and camp mentalities should be to anybody who claims "tactical" wisdom in contemporary politics.
Giulio Prisco wrote:
> I wish to play on a concrete board, and focus on concrete things. . .
>
> [F]orget that I am a God Robot Cultist who engages in
> Superlative Technology Discourse and believes that the
> Eschaton will upload him to a Techno-Heaven. . .
> I am focused on outcomes, and you are focused on identity. . .
>
> [T]hese things have NOTHING to do with [the price of tea in
> China].
>
> [Y]ou wish to disqualify many people who would be in _your_
> camp when concrete and practical matters are discussed.
Well, these comments were directed at Dale, and it's up to Dale
to answer them fully, but in the meantime, I just have to say
that you have a rather, um, idiosyncratic notion of what
counts as "concrete and practical".
I once e-mailed a friend:
Ain't it amazing how fiction can reify political and philosophical
systems? They don't call it "world-building" for nothing.
Tell a story about it, and it seems true. It's even worse than
TV! ;->
Thus Damien Broderick can say, in a talk about "the Spike"
( http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/edit9737.html )
"The distinction between human and AI will blur and
vanish – or rather, double and re-double in some chaotic
cascade of novelty – because we’ll see a fusion of the
two great orders of mind. "
Say what? What "two great orders of mind?" Poetic license
of the SF author -- make a story about it, and it **is**!
Similarly, Doris Lessing can have "the Canopean emissary,
Klorathy, [explain] laughingly, 'Laws are not made - they are
inherent in the nature of the Galaxy, of the Universe'"
(_The Sirian Experiments_, p. 278). Sez who? William James?
"The next day at the hour of sunset Aragorn walked
alone in the woods, and his heart was high within him;
and he sang, for he was full of hope and the world
was fair. And suddenly even as he sang he saw a maiden
walking on a greensward among the white stems of
the birches; and he halted amazed, thinking that he
had strayed into a dream, or else that he had received
the gift of the Elf-minstrels, who can make the things
of which they sing appear before the eyes of those
that listen.
For Aragorn had been singing a part of the Lay of Lúthien
which tells of the meeting of Lúthien and Beren in the
forest of Neldoreth. And behold! there Lúthien walked
before his eyes in Rivendell, clad in a mantle of silver
and blue, fair as the twilight in Elven-home; her dark
hair strayed in a sudden wind, and her brows were bound
with gems like stars."
Ahead Warp Factor One, Mr. Sulu!
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