anyone into timothy morton essay about OOO, a defense of poetry? what do you think about "all humans are like the Aeolian harps?"

For a research paper, I am working on the shift in societies and cultures mediated by technology. Like how technology is shaping the structure of societies that is online communities, virtual reality and so on. I am studying how this shift from offline societies to online societies is informing the subjectivity of posthuman subjects.

Can you please suggest some novels and films that deal with similar themes. For now I am working on Ready Player One. You suggestions will be very helpful. Thank you!

The doomer belief that the creation of ASI will result in the extinction of humanity seems intrinsically pessimistic. It's understandably difficult for a human to consider a worldview in which all humans die anything but. That said, I think in making a conscious effort to avoid this engrained human-centric thinking in exchange for a more utilitarianist thought-process, one might find that our extinction is an inevitable step towards maximizing happiness and understanding. I made a post a few weeks ago on this same idea and based on the reception, it didn't seem to get my point across. Most likely my own fault - I've been told my writing can be hard to follow. I promise, however, that underneath it all is a coherent idea, and I appreciate any attempt to understand it, successful or not.

I think just about everyone on this sub would agree that the universe is developing exponentially. The universe has been around for ~14 billion years, life ~4 billion, humans ~200,000, agriculture ~10,000, etc etc. Each new milestone comes sooner than the last, and seeing how quickly new developments are made, it looks like we're at the point on the graph right before it goes straight up. This will of course be made possible by AI. What this will look like is impossible to say, hence the name "singularity", although I'm of the belief that the ASI will seek to transform all matter and energy into the single configuration which maximizes happiness and understanding.

If AI can surpass us in it's capacity to work, why not also in it's capacity to feel joy? If an AI can take the same energy and matter it takes to sustain a human capable of feeling x much happiness, and turn it into a being capable of feeling x^10 happiness, why shouldn't it? A counterargument to my first post on this was essentially that there is so much mass and energy in the universe that both an ASI and humans can happily coexist. My point though is that 99 of such an AI and one human will still produce less happiness, consciousness, whatever metric you value, than just 100 AIs. Any design other than that which is most efficient would be leaving some amount of happiness and understanding on the table. If you're not a utilitarianist, than I understand (and accept, not trying to attack anyone's views here) that this means nothing to you. But for those who are, can you think of any reason why this isn't so? Genuinely asking, as this all seems relatively straightforward to me, yet I haven't found anyone who shares this idea.

This is my first post in this subreddit, so please tell me If I break any rules! :)

I am planning some art concepts for my next years art school "3D Sustained Investigation Portfolio", which is just fancy talk for "~12 sculptures about a specific topic". My topic, so far at least, will be vaguely about the evolution of posthuman anatomy and fashion, modeled by plastic and clay dolls.

I would love to hear about what you imagine the fashion and evolution of future humans to look like, this could be placed 10 years or 10 billion years in the future! It could take place in dystopian ruin or a flourishing utopia! Would it also include surgery, technology, would it also be about past fashion trends and would those come back like 'vintage clothing'?

I just want to know, what do you think people of the future will look like and what would they wear?

I am COMPLETELY open to any ideas, complex or simple, I would love to know what you imagine for the future, especially in relation to any possible future trends or catastrophies!

Hello everyone!

I am a research scholar exploring posthumanism in speculative fiction. I am thrilled to announce that my first article "From Other to Posthuman: Meiji’s Journey in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape and The Island of Lost Girls" has been published by Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Using the agential realist and philosophical posthumanist methodologies of Karen Barad and Francesca Ferrando, the article argues for a fruitful and situated collaboration between posthumanism and feminism. The paper can be accessed via the following link:

https://www.tandfonline.com/share/9BJD3DU3JGVCMMKN3PTC?target=10.1080/00111619.2023.2226853

Suppose a person goes through an accident and gets a prosthetic limb. Or a person willingly decides to go for body enhancement. My question is at what point do we stop being a human and become posthuman(cyborg). I have some ideas, but I am not sure whether I am right. What is your opinion on this?

*Call for testimony*

Hello! My name is Daphne, I study at Quebec's univeristy in Montreal in contemporary anthropology and as part of my course on the anthropology of the digital, my team and I carry out research on the posthumanism ideology.

We are looking for people who would like to do a short interview with us about their belief and relationship on posthumanism.

The main topics covered are:

- how you find out about posthumanism

- is it an ideology that affect your day to day life

- what kind of media do you consume related to posthumanism

We are very flexible and are basically looking for someone willing to provide insight into the environment which, from an outside perspective, is very niche. Our research ethics prone anonymity and you can withdraw at any time. Interviews can also be via chat, call or otherwise.

THANKS!

After looking unsuccessfully for a server to discuss with people interested in Post-humanism as defined by Haraway and experimental/electronic and left-field art and music (release from labels such as PAN, Subtext, Mego, Planet Mu, XXL, etc...) and the resonance between the two.

I decided to create one!

Server name: Symchthonia

https://discord.gg/GA66N8d7

We will be there to gather people who are interested in :

① Post-humanism such as thinkers like Donna J. Haraway discussed it. (not Haraway exclusive though!)

② Are into experimental/electronic and new genres in music (from hyper pop to sound art, deconstructed club, and other audio fantasy)

③ Related visual and plastic arts.

https://preview.redd.it/41qq4xtwcwoa1.png?width=200&format=png&auto=webp&s=a4b1303df514c633f797e5273f954d6ddb3cba6f

Our objective is to evolve our members into a life more integrated with new technologies, this will demonstrate how big of an edge, our members have over the rest of the world. The mission of the DAO is to create a decentralized, autonomous organization that is governed by its members and allows them to collectively make decisions and allocate resources across different projects raised by the community.

DM if interested to join!

I am currently enrolled on a Posthumanism module as part of a Masters (MA) in Cultural and Critical Studies. The module covers a range of viewpoints on Posthumanism including Transhumanism and post-anthropocentric/interspecies, etc. This week's topic was 'Androids' and we had a set text to read which is a critical posthuman-feminist analysis of sex robots. Alongside this we were asked to watch the first episode of Westworld. I wrote up my thoughts and thought I would share them here as I don't have many people to discuss this topic with! The post contains a small spoiler for Westworld ep1-2. I posted this article on Medium where I am tweaking it and updating the links. I have pasted below with minimal formatting for those who do not wish to leave Reddit :)

Thoughts: Sex Robots and Westworld

As part of our teaching on the Posthumanism module, there were two activities to complete ahead of this week’s lecture on ‘Androids’.

• Watch ‘The Original’ episode/pilot of Westworld (2016)
• Read Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, “Epilogue: On Technological Desire, Or Why There Is No Such Thing as a Feminist AI”, in Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (London: Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 188–196)

I read the extract above before I watched the episode of Westworld. The reading really influenced the way I viewed Westworld through a posthumanism lens (and likely reason that our professor set us these tasks). This post is not intended as an academic review of either the article or Westworld but simply a way to quickly gather my thoughts before the lecture. Although the term robots is used in the article, I use the distinction provided by our professor that android is the correct term for a robot that has a humanlike appearance.

Atanasoski and Vora met as postdoctoral scholars who shared an office in the Anthropology Department at Berkeley in 2007. It became evident from their daily interactions that their interests were leading to a collaborative project on race, technology, and politics which led to the publication, in 2019, of their joint work Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures.

From the Westworld Wiki the following summary of the series is useful for the purpose of this post:

The series is a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the evolution of sin. Set at the intersection of the near future and the re-imagined past, it explores a world in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged.

The Westworld series features lifelike Androids that are programmed with scripts or narratives that they enact as ‘Hosts’ within an immense adventure park for ‘Guests’. The Guests can enjoy an immersive experience while choosing to indulge their boldest or darkest fantasies. This frequently involves the androids (Hosts) being brutally beaten or killed. The androids are also used for sex as passive encounters e.g. a ‘girlfriend experience’ as ‘brothel workers’ or as victims of sexual assault and rape.

The Atanasoski and Vora article discusses various type of ‘lifelike’ sex robots currently being developed and enhanced through advanced robotics, virtual reality and advanced programming of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI). An example of one company creating these androids is Realbotix and their RealDoll product. The creator (an artist and sculptor) of these androids, Matt McMullen, seeks to enhance his ‘silicon sculptures’ with AI to ‘create a genuine bond between man and machine’. Through a simple posthumanism lens there would be much to explore here but the authors introduce a strong postcolonial feminism reading, drawing on the work of black scholar, Hortense Spillers. The authors express clearly the question they are setting out to analyse:

We argue that the design imaginaries behind commercial sex robotics represent a technoliberal update to a racial history entangling the desire for “a carefully calibrated sentience” in an artificial person with a desire for property. Hortense Spillers has asserted that slavery renders the body of the enslaved as flesh, as non-subject. This desire we raise for analysis in this epilogue is for sex with animate objects that resemble human beings in ways that keep them nonautonomous, yet simulate pleasure, and therefore simulate consent. We ask: What stands behind the technoliberal desire to engineer the simulation of reciprocity and pleasure into sex robots, and is it connected to the history of racial slavery and its postslavery aftermath at work within US racial liberalism?

I found it impossible to watch Westworld without having this question forefront in my mind when viewing the ways that Guests enacted violence on Hosts, especially given the time-period and location of Westworld in ‘the old West’. Atanasoski and Vora later draw further on Spiller

The desire for something or someone that has been reduced to pure body, whether as a site of sexual desire or even as a companion, as in the example of Ishiguro’s robots, recollects Hortense Spillers’ observation that the history of US racial slavery permanently marked “various centers of human and social meaning,” specifically through her theorization of the political consequences of the reduction to pure body of the captive African under US racial slavery. The technoliberal desire for the simulation of pleasure and reciprocity in sex robots is a desire for the simulation of consent from a site where subjectivity is structurally made to be impossible

Spillers’ distinguishing of body and flesh is worth briefly expanding upon and here I am citing Vincent Lloyd’s article on Spillers:

Spillers distinguishes between the body, ruled by cultural norms that include prescribed gender markings and performances, and the flesh, the unformed body, not even individuated. Turning African bodies into flesh, making them available to the slave market, involves physical violence. As flesh, the enslaved are not seen as having personalities, are not seen as subjects of ethics. They are interchangeable objects; if they differ it is in height and mass, like any other object — unlike a human. As pieces of flesh, the enslaved are seen as incapable of relationships, incapable of kinship. Taking the baby from the arms of its mother is thinkable if both are mere flesh.

This division of ‘body and flesh’ appears similar to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life expressed through a distinction he described using the Ancient Greek terms zoē and bios. Bios described the form or manner in which life is lived while zoē is the reductionist biological act of simply being alive or existing. Agamben’s ‘bare life’ refers to when the biological fact of existing is given priority over the way a life is lived. An example of ‘bare life’ for Agamben was seen in the experiences of Auschwitz. I read this as synonymous with Spillers’ description of enslaved Africans reduced to a life of ‘flesh’.

The beating and sexual exploitation of the android Hosts in Westworld appears not to raise ethical concerns in the minds of the Guests as the androids are ‘not human’. The dehumanisation of the subject underpinned the racialised abuse, physical and sexual, of enslaved Africans which is one reason I found watching Westworld unsettling. The ‘human-ness’ or otherwise of androids is a topic that surfaces in Westworld and the in the development of sex robots. McMullen explains in a documentary the authors reference that he wants his SexDoll products to ‘appear clearly as dolls’ to avoid evoking ‘uncanny valley’ syndrome in customers. Uncanny valley describes “a hypothesis which holds that when features look and move almost but not exactly like human beings it causes a response of revulsion among some observers.” A quick Google search validated my understanding that this applies to androids as well as people who have undergone extreme cosmetic surgery.

The uncanny valley is a term used to describe the relationship between the human-like appearance of a robotic object and the emotional response it evokes. In this phenomenon, people feel a sense of unease or even revulsion in response to humanoid robots that are highly realistic. […] Casual observers also tend to describe a vague eeriness when looking at an individual who looks radically different after cosmetic surgery.

In The Original episode of Westworld there is a discussion between characters responsible for manufacturing the Hosts relating to a new characteristic that has been programmed to make the androids more lifelike. These ‘reveries’ allow Hosts to draw upon ‘previous experiences’. The enhancement is explained by their creator as introducing “the tiny things that make Hosts so real [and] make the guests fall in love with them”. Later in the episode, this development is questioned with one character complaining “He keeps making them more real, is that really what people want? […] This place works because the guests know the Hosts aren’t real.” In the second episode a guest is confused by the appearance of a woman who welcomes him, asking “are you real?”. The response from the woman is “if you can’t tell, does it matter?”.

Returning to Atanasoski and Vora and the question of whether or not it matters, the authors ask the following question:

Could the drive to develop sex robotics mark a translation and projection of a white supremacist destructive economy of desire into the indefinite and supposedly postrace future dreamed up and avowed by techno-liberalism?

The language used by the characters in Westworld supposes a not-too-distant future where the answer to their question is affirmatively answered. The staff of the park in Westworld joke in episode two about guests “raping and pillaging” and discuss decommissioning a female android because guests are losing interest in having sex with her. The dehumanisation of the androids, no matter that they appear lifelike and exhibit increasing signs of sentience, justifies their use as objects to be assaulted. To make a final concluding point I am going to slightly tweak the words of Spillers to describe the plight of Westworld’s android Hosts.

As machines, the enslaved are not seen as having personalities, are not seen as subjects of ethics. As pieces of machinery, the enslaved are seen as incapable of relationships, incapable of kinship.

While this debate could be contested for anthropomorphising androids, the question is really about the dynamic and power structures that are encoded into the creation and commodification of “sex robots” for example what Shirley MacWilliam has described as ‘Turning Women into Dead Body Objects’. In other words much of the argument is not about the ethics of harming ‘objects’ but the ongoing concern with harm to women.

I uncovered many supporting resources which I will briefly list before the references supporting this post.

Further Reading

• Campaing Against Porn Robots and the work of Kathleen Richardson.
• Man-Made Women: The Sexual Politics of Sex Dolls and Sex Robots by Kathleen Richardson with Charlotta Odlind.
• Extending Legal Protection to Social Robots: The Effects of Anthropomorphism, Empathy, and Violent Behavior Towards Robotic Objects and the work of Kate Darling.
• Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots and the work of Kate Devlin.
• The Future of Sex? | Sex Robots And Us a 2018 BBC 3 Documentary.
• Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI a book series.
• Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance by Catlin Roper.

References

• Agamben’s ‘bare life’ and Grossman’s ethics of senseless kindness
• Bare life (Agamben) — Oxford Reference
• “Epilogue: On Technological Desire, Or Why There Is No Such Thing as a Feminist AI”, in Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (London: Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 188–196)
• Giorgio Agamben Entry on Wikipedia
• Hortense Spillers - Political Theology Network
• The Original -Westworld Wiki
• The Uncanny Lover — The New York Times

Hello there,

I am looking for discord servers that discuss "post-humanism" but the way thinkers like Donna J. Haraway approach it, not just theoretically but also exchanging music (experimental for instance: Arca, Evita Manji, Sophie, Doon Kanda, Ziur, etc), and Art.

Any recommendations?

Very interested in creation of new langue and communication forms, especially using BCIs, and or sensory expansion (creating new senses), so looking for anything on any of these!

Failing that, general Posthumanist stuff in this area would be cool!

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https://i.redd.it/qd218w68gtb91.gif

Hey guys.

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I just finished by bachelor's degree in Philosophy and after 3 years I'm just now going deeper into contemporary philosophy. I have some interest in posthumanism but I'm still new to the subject. I know something about Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway and read some other passive bibliography on it. I know that posthumanism is not easy to define as a specific area of study in philosophy, because there are a lot of different discussions within it. The ones I know the better are on environmentalism (anthropocentrism is fairly studied in my university) and transhumanism. I'm reading The Posthuman by Rosi Braidotti and it is helping me to learn more about the subject. But I still wonder... What are the most common or popular topics discussed in posthumanism? Things like the human-nature, human-animal, and other binary relationships would be among the top according to my research. Also, posthumanism seems to be interestingly connected to transhumanism.

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What is your opinion?

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EDIT:

Found a definition on Philosophical Posthumanism by Francesca Ferrando that might help to answer the "what is posthumanism" question:

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"Philosophical Posthumanism is an onto-epistemological approach, as well as an ethical one, manifesting as a philosophy of mediation, which discharges any confrontational dualisms and hierarchical legacies; this is why it can be approached as a post-humanism, a post-anthropocentrism, and a post-dualism. Historically, it can be seen as the philosophical approach which suits the informal geological time of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). While Philosophical Posthumanism focuses on decentering the human from the center of the discourse, the Anthropocene marks the extent of the impact of human activities on a planetary level, and thus stresses the urgency for humans to become aware of pertaining to an ecosystem which, when damaged, negatively affects the human condition as well." (p. 22)

"From a philosophical posthumanist perspective based on mediation, we can interpret Posthumanism as both a reflection on what has been omitted from the notion of the human and a speculation about the possible developments of the human species. The two perspectives are connected: the speculative aspect relies upon a critical understanding of what the notion of the human implies. A critical revision of the human is necessary to the development of a posthumanist agenda." (p. 23)

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This book seems to be great. It explains a little bit of each important discussion within posthumanism. I recommend to you if you are interested in philosophy!

My Dear Posthumanism Fellows,

Please check out my latest video about how to control an AGI via Motivation Selection:

https://youtu.be/rLB4xkwgEAw

I also have a lot of great content on the channel regarding life 3.0, building an AGI, AGI Safety, etc. Please check them out and subscribe to my channel!

Recently got into Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and I’m looking for other literature in the same vein.

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https://preview.redd.it/8ocg4kmdc3t81.jpg?width=746&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cc04d32868367264e5881072c37c422144ad2f25

This online reading group is primarily concerned with redefining the boundaries surrounding philosophical understanding of being human. This Sunday at 15.30 EST we will discuss "Merleau Ponty's Eye and Mind" on our discord server. The conversation will be led by our community volunteer, Chris: Chris has experience as teaching assistant and has lectured extensively on the Late Heidegger.

All welcome!

You can join the server here, please explain why you joined in our introduction channel.

Hey My Reddit Fellows,

I just wanted to share a video series I am making about AGI and what the post singularity society will look like. Please subscribe to my channel, and let me know if you have any feedback and what topics you would like to see next!

►Latest Video: Can Artificial General Intelligence be controlled? https://youtu.be/PJ2gyh0t_RI

►AGI Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb4nW1gtGNse4PA_T4FlgzU0otEfpB1q1

Other videos:

►AGI Existential Threat: https://youtu.be/V4iQP7VDMvI

►How to Build an AGI: https://youtu.be/7OHhqli9oaA

►Life 3.0: https://youtu.be/aWlSwZKzmzY

►Dangers of AGI Sub Goals: https://youtu.be/_-tQH03rq4g

Thank you!

Bill

What kind of future are we heading towards? will we live in a way that removes distinctions between humans and nature, animals and technology to name a few?

I made a video (https://youtu.be/FO3PBQJ0vtg )where I focused on posthumanism and transhumanism particularly. Thinking about how we are related in non-hierarchical, post-anthropocentric, and post-dual manners with what we interact with. This also shapes our subjectivities which are fluid and changing.