| Peche |
6 september 2016 19:17 |
It can only communicate information, and that information has to be made real in this world by human coders. So if we were to set out... light-heartedly... to build a virtual reality as alien as we could make it... I maintain that three quarters of the way our hair would be standing on end. Because we would realize, we are not inventing this, we are discovering it.
The monkey flesh is penetrated by something... dare I say it... divine. Or at least alien, trans- planetary, and beyond the power of human comprehension. I don't know, if we're talking about God almighty here. I don't know if we're talking about the God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven, as Milton says. That seems a tall order. Maybe what we're talking about is the god of biology. Something has happened to this planet. It has become infected with an informational... call it virus, call it force... that is using matter, and yes using our flesh and our thoughts, to bootstrap itself to higher and higher levels. And now the prosthesis of machinery and the possibility of an artificial intelligence, raises the real option of actually mid-wife-ing the birth of an entirely new order of biological intelligence in existence.
The human-machine symbiot is upon us. It's been with us for a while, since the first wheel was carved, since the first stick was sharpened. But that was all very simple stuff. Now it's clear, that we are in partnership with an other mind which comes to us through our machineries and through the bio-sphere. Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent other. Which beckons us out of history and says you know, 'the galaxy lies waiting'.
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