new illuminati: evolution

Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts

Friday, 30 December 2016

Omnipresent Virtualities: Virtual reality releases solitary dreamers into the collective dream

Omnipresent Virtualities

Virtual reality releases solitary dreamers into the collective dream

by Star Larvae

As waking and sleeping converge in the enriched brains of our extraterrestrial descendants, the conscious and unconscious experience of those descendants should fuse into an undifferentiated mode of subjectivity.

Immersive media look like they're just about ready to facilitate the colonizing of the dream state. Already, digital wizardry approaches in style and content the surrealistic hyper-reality of the dream. Hollywood movies, with increasing fidelity, capture the unearthly fly-around perspectives and temporal elasticity of dreams. In its advertising, television, notably when promoting sugar to children, evokes the zany, weightless world of dreams.

Jump Start comic strip from http://comics.com/jump_start/2010-09-23/

For its part, the dream world acknowledges new technologies as they come on line. Cars, airplanes, telephones, radios, and now computers insinuate their ways into the dream milieu. Surrealist fantasies of a culture of the unconscious look today like a premonition of the computer age, in which any scene or sound can morph into any other.

But the extroverted among humankind’s extraterrestrial descendants might cringe at the prospect of terminal, albeit spectacular, introversion in the dream, even the lucid dream. For the extroverts, the networked dream might provide relief. Space brains will have at their cortex tips access to uncharted frontiers of expression, gregariousness, and interpersonal fusion.

Through virtual reality (VR) technologies, weightless dreaming becomes a social medium. VR systems are sensorimotor-feedback setups that link users and computers in information-exchange loops. The motions of the users are fed into the computers, which respond by sending appropriate signals back through visors and headphones and potentially other interfaces. The signals—translated by the visors and headphones into synthetic sights and sounds—give users the impression that they are interacting with a physical environment. But the environment exists only as a computer program and a sequence of perceptions. Nevertheless, the virtual world can be shared by as many inhabitants or visitors as the available computing power and bandwidth can support. Pokémon Go is a baby step along the path. (Variations on the VR concept are sometimes called telepresence or tele-immersion.)

The Communal Lucid Dream

The phenomenology of dreams segues naturally into that of virtual reality. Dreams and virtual realities are interactive and immaterial, though phenomenologically habitable, spaces. The literature on therapeutic and recreational VR applications seems modeled after that of dreams, especially that of lucid dreams. Themes of conflict resolution and wish fulfillment are prominent in descriptions of the virtues of both worlds. If Marshall McLuhan’s technological prostheticism struck near the mark, and electronic media extend into the physical world the collective patterns of human subjectivity, then VR technology extends specifically the capacity for lucid dreaming, not particularly into the physical world, but into the collective experience of the networked community.

"A biotechnical, and not merely biochemical, straitjacket, whereby the psychophysiology of an individual's behavior would be permanently relayed to instantaneous information capabilities, his/her body wired with electronic pathways that would extend the nervous system. [. . . . ] Once this happens, adoption of a sedentary life tends to become final, absolute, since the functions traditionally distributed within the real space of the town are now exclusively taken over by the real time of the wiring of the human body."

— Paul Virilio
Open Sky

"The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal of negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere."

— Jean Baudrillard
Simulations

Virtual realities can only become increasingly engaging as they gain resolution and responsiveness. The prospect of VR technology accessorized with brain sensors, such as those used in EEG monitoring, let alone brain implants, suggests the potential for a new level of intimacy of shared experience. Mythic forms from the unconscious will be available as blueprints for a cosmic arcade in which experiences are manufactured from such stuff as dreams are made of.

The Brains-in-Vats Scenario

One potential of VR has been thrown under a sobering light by writers of cyberpunk science fiction. The Gothic-styled genre of high-tech low-life takes its dystopian inspiration from the familiar scene of glazed-over couch potatoes. Cyberpunk writers have seen the implications of tomorrow’s tech: bodiless brains suspended in nutrient vats, networked and synchronized with other vatted brains. The cyberpunk genre’s Gothic stylizations can obscure the astuteness of the vision, namely the insight that urbankind already consists of networked brains in vats on wheels. One need only notice one's co-motorists fumbling with their phones to recognize it.

Nineteen ninety nine’s popular action film, "The Matrix" presented the brains-in-vats scenario to a large audience. The movie's premise involves the subjugation of humankind by a race of malignant machines. The premise is taken to an extreme in which the ruling machinery cultivates human beings as an energy crop. Each head of human livestock is raised in a life-support pod, fed artificially, and tapped like a battery for excess metabolic energy. But the citizen slaves believe themselves to be living normal lives, thanks to a shared virtual reality piped into their brains. Little imagination is needed to recognize in this arrangement today's corporate cubicle farm, in which networked human livestock productively ruminate, their energies drained to feed the demands of their various masters. And the growing number of debt slaves who occupy today’s protoMatrix do so largely in a state of pharmacologically induced complacency, thanks to a pharmaceutical industry eager to lavish antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs on a spiritually eviscerated workforce.

But the machines of the developing matrix need not exert their control coercively, as they do in the films of the Matrix series. Human beings eager to enter the pods, whether on Earth or in space, will be easy to find. Many minds conditioned by an entertainment industry to despise the humdrum and by an advertising industry to crave novelty find synthetic realities to be as appealing as anything that exists outside of cyberspace.

An eagerness to transcend the meatbot by plunging into a comprehensive environment of synthetic inputs expresses itself through the ambitions of transhumanism, a movement that advocates plunging headlong into as technologically mediated a reality as can be engineered. Transhumanism's selling points revolve around technological enhancement of human faculties and experiences, the enhancements intensifying until reaching a breaking point: the vaunted "Singularity," a secular rendition of Heaven/Nirvana.

That oligarchs would encourage their subjects to embrace a programmable digital infrastructure, thereby further empowering the oligarchs, seems not to occur to transhumanist enthusiasts.

Transhumanism or Exohumanism?

The dystopian "brains-in-vats" scenario of the cyberpunk future approaches the star larvae scenario. But essential differences distinguish the two storylines. The cyberpunk future is dystopian because it ignores foundational elements of the extraterrestrial program:

· The geographical separation of space colonists from terrestrial control

· The solar economy of abundance

· The neurological enrichments of weightlessness

It might be only in the unwieldy vastness of space, in a prosperous solar economy, that communities will be able to pursue destinies independently of the evolving global power elite. Once again, self-directed freedom-seekers might need to tackle a frontier to secure their autonomy.

On the optimistic side, and with noetic prescience, Marshall McLuhan glimpsed the light at the end of the postmodern tunnel. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man he summons an epiphanous image:

"If the ultimate reality and therefore our own deepest nature is creativity, then to 'obey' it means not to give complete allegiance to any of creativity's past products, be they scientific ideas, religious dogmas, political institutions, or economic systems. Likewise, to 'obey' the will of God for our lives is to become more rather than less creative. True obedience is therefore manifested in a life of maximal creativity."

— David Ray Griffin
God and Religion in the Postmodern World

"Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson. The condition of 'weightlessness,' that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace."

McLuhan’s early grasp of what later would be called cyberspace may have been a reaching for the phenomenology of outer space. In the passage above, he proposes that technology has as its covert aim the engineering of a kind of rapture. Humanity's collective calling may be to fabricate the communion of angels by evolving into it. Evolving into angels—or whatever label best suits our extraterrestrial descendants—will require letting brain circuits express themselves fully by letting them take shape weightlessly.

"The new media are not bridges between man and nature:

they are nature."

— Marshall McLuhan

Counterblast

Humanity's complex of devices and programs and the extensions of that technological complex yet to come can be seen as humankind’s attempt to engineer around itself an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent parent. This Freudian ambition has as its goal the preserving of humankind's posthuman descendants in a state of retarded, neotenous, development. On Earth, this program threatens to impose the nightmare scenario of a global technocracy perpetually exploiting it pharmacologically anesthetized drone-citizens. In space the program plays out as a metamorphosis of humans into the angels of the religious imagination.

The Star Larvae Hypothesis:

Stars constitute a genus of organism. The stellar life cycle includes a larval phase. Biological life constitutes the larval phase of the stellar life cycle.

Elaboration: The hypothesis presents a teleological model of nature, in which

Stellar nebulae manufacture bacteria and viruses in their interiors as they cool.
Biology evolves within an ontogenetic program that in its entirety, on- and off-planet, constitutes a generational life cycle of the stellar organism.
Technology plays a necessary role in evolution. It enables biological life to emigrate from planets to weightless space.
Postplanetary life manufactures the protons needed to create, then metamorphoses into, new stars.
A prescient complex of celestial religious motifs expresses humankind’s stellar calling. The star is the human imago.
Nature's metabolism encompasses the organic and the inorganic in a continuum of anabolic and catabolic exchanges.

From Star Larvae @ http://www.starlarvae.org/Space_Brains_The_Synergy_of_the_Network.html

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Monday, 7 November 2016

Programmed Evolution: Ontogeny, Phylogeny, Teleology and Evolution’s Empirical Conundrum

Programmed Evolution:

Ontogeny, Phylogeny, Teleology and Evolution’s Empirical Conundrum

Star Larvae

Scientists and philosophers of science have proposed various metrics by which to assess the merits of scientific theories. An often cited one is Karl Popper’s requirement that a theory be in principle empirically falsifiable. For example, the discovery of rabbit fossils in Precambrian geological strata would demolish Darwinian theory. Another often cited measure of merit is a theory’s ability to make accurate predictions. This has always been a difficult hurdle for Darwinian evolution. What predictions can the theory make?

Unfortunately for Darwinian theory, the difficulties are several. They include the time scale required, the need to rely on necessarily incomplete fossil remains, and the small sample (one planet). But something new has changed the situation. Darwinian theory now is in a position to belly up to the bar and, like other respectable scientific theories, make some bold predictions.

What has changed is our ability to analyze DNA. Genomic sequencing and analysis projects are in full swing around the world. Researchers are using new technologies to, not only sequence DNA, but also statistically analyze those sequences across species. So, Darwinians, what’s going to come of it? If you understand how changes in DNA propagate through generations within a species and into new species, if you understand the sources of genetic novelty, if you understand why some genes are preserved in a species and others selected out, then let’s have some predictions.

What will ongoing genetic sequencing and analysis turn up that will corroborate Darwinian evolution and falsify rivals?

But before we try to pin Darwinists to the mat, let’s entertain a relevant thought experiment, as an intermission:

Let’s suppose that we observe a complex process, one that involves discernibly discrete entities. We might call these entities organisms. We notice that over time, as the process progresses, the organisms give rise to new organisms. And we notice that older organisms perish.

We notice that the descendants differ from their ancestors. As more generations turnover, the forms of the descendants vary more dramatically. Morphological forms, and their attendant functions and behaviors, proliferate through the population of descendant organisms. And, having been fortunate enough to observe the process from its outset, we know that the multiplicity of forms descended, ultimately, from a single ancestral form.

An intriguing process. How to account for it? Let’s consider two competing theories.

(1) We might conjure an explanation that invokes a more or less deterministic influence, one that bridges the generations and guides the process as it works its way from the ancestral form to the many descendant forms. Such an influence would be teleological. We might call this formative influence a genetic program. Its action across the generations would constitute development, an unfolding of pre-programmed potential into a multiplicity of forms.

(2) Alternatively, we might conjure an explanation that invokes nondeterministic, nonteleological factors. We might say that the process is the result of two interacting subprocesses, one being unpredictable changes that exaggerate variation among the members of a generation, and the second being the varying numbers of progeny that members of each generation leave behind. We might call the first subprocess random mutation and the second process natural selection, and we might posit a relationship between the two that causes descendant populations to display a diversity of morphologies (and functions and behaviors) based on pure chance and environmental selection. There is no preprogrammed potential unfolding, just selection among various traits among individuals and a disproportionate retention in descendant generations of the selected traits.

Now comes the hard part: determining which explanation best accounts for the observed process of descent. Being conscientious scientists, we want empirical corroboration. What observations might we make, in principle, that could determine which explanation has the greater merit? How would one distinguish, empirically, a teleological process from a Darwinian one? What would one look for to detect the presence or absence of a program?

Phylogeny: Polymorphous descent from a common ancestor. In principle, what sort of observation would establish the presence or absence of a program?

Ontogeny: Polymorphous descent from a c

ommon ancestor. In principle, what sort of observation would establish the presence or absence of a program?

One observation that would help clear the air is the discovery of an information code in the organisms that expresses itself as the organisms’ various morphological traits. The codes for the traits we might call genes. If we were to find genes in ancestors that lay waiting, unexpressed, but are preserved and jump to life in descendant species, this would bolster the case for a programmatic process.

A Darwinian process would not predict such a discovery. Darwinism includes no anticipatory mechanism whereby genes needed in the future would be present, though dormant, in ancestors. Only a teleological theory would predict an anticipatory genome. Anticipatory evidence would suggest a pre-coded program underlying the process of multi-generational morphological diversification.

And this is precisely what we observe in ontogeny. We observe that genes dormant in the fertilized ovum do not express themselves until the time comes for them to produce muscle cells, liver cells, brain cells, etc. Then these dormant genes spring to life. Their expression unfolds sequentially to create descendant species of cells of multifarious types.

Or at least this is the prevailing account. Alternatively, maybe it’s just a coincidence that genes dormant in the fertilized ovum are useful in descendant cell types. Maybe nature is resourceful and discovers uses for the inherited supply of genes. It might be the case that the differentiation of cell types during embryonic development has nothing to do with any precoded program. Maybe it’s happenstance, the result of random mutations and natural selection.

This line of thinking probably is not worth pursuing. But is phylogenetic descent really that different? Would the discovery of descendant genes in ancestors argue for a programmed phylogeny, or would it argue only for the happenstance of random mutations and natural selection?

These are no longer rhetorical questions, because genomic sequencing and analysis is finding unexpected, unpredicted instances of descendant genes in ancestors. Does Darwinian evolution predict that the genomes of primitive species should contain genetic programs for newer, more complex species—?The discovery challenges the logic of normal evolution theory, because it suggests that evolution, as ontogeny is thought to do, unfolds from a pre-programmed genetic potential. These findings are ongoing:

A news release (11/24/2005) issued by the journal Trends in Genetics announces that

"Corals and sea anemones (the flowers of the sea), long regarded as merely simple sea-dwelling animals, turn out to be more genetically complex than first realised. They have just as many genes as most mammals, including humans, and many of the genes that were thought to have been "invented" in vertebrates are actually very old and are present in these "simple" animals."

The full text of the release is available at http://www.sars.no/research/technau_Science.pdf

Newer (2007) sequencing and analysis results corroborate the anemone anomalies. Another example comes from research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, which found human genes in a marine worm. The news release (11/24/2005) announcing the finding is at http://www.embl-heidelberg.de/aboutus/news/press/press05/press25nov05/index.html

Additional research discovered that genes essential for human nerve cells to communicate with one another are present already in bacteria. This research is described in a NIH news release (6/1/2004) at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/new/releases/genes.cfm These and other anomalous (in the Darwinian context) results of genome analysis are collected at http://www.panspermia.org/oldgenes.htm.

This page of Brig Klyce’s "Cosmic Ancestry" web site includes commentary on the relevance of these findings to panspermia. The discovery of advanced genes in primitive organisms suggests that the evolution of life on Earth constitutes an ontogeny—the ontogeny of Gaia.

If a process of descent is programmatic, then it would seem to be dependent on some kind of timing mechanism. What triggers the production of new descendant types? How does the developing embryo know when to kick out a new cell/tissue type? In the case of ontogeny, researchers posit various chemical signals from within the organism and/or from its gestating parent as potential triggers. In the case of phylogeny the timing triggers are harder to determine.

Nonetheless, various candidates present themselves. Phylogeny might also be paced by chemical signals. Organisms exchange chemical signals all the time, through eating one another, through exchanges of pheromones. Terence McKenna argues that ingestion of plant drugs among our primate ancestors played a role in human speciation. Other environmental triggers might include the terraforming of Earth’s atmosphere by the release of oxygen from photosynthesis. Glaciations might act as triggers. Industrial pollution is another candidate.

Maybe the prevailing accounts of ontogeny and phylogeny are artifacts of the time scales involved. If we could observe a sped-up movie of evolution might we perceive a programmatic development from the first to the most recent species—the gestation of a pregnant planet from impregation to delivery? If the embryonic development of a long-lived organism required a few billion years, might it not look like a Darwinian process?

So how do approaches to evolution stack up as scientific theories based on their abilities to predict? A teleological, programmed model, predicts that genes active in descendant species can be found already in distant ancestors. What does the Darwinian model predict? Genomic sequencing and analysis is in the early stages. There’s time to render predictions. The star larvae hypothesis predicts an accumulating pile of anomalous data that will stretch the Darwinian model to the breaking point. Those data, however, will find themselves well integrated in a new paradigm, one that proposes an overarching ontogeny that envelops evolution and repositions biology into the role of larvae to the stars.

From Star Larvae @ http://starlarvae.blogspot.com.au/2008/12/ontogeny-phylogeny-teleology-and.html

For more information about new evolutionary paradigms see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/evolution