Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/2624
53 www.hplusmagazine.com My own explorations had led me to understand that in fact, in a world where anything you want is true, the only way to deal with this is by learning how to deal with your will. Dealing with will is what magic has, in all cultures, always been about. This is why the shaman doesn't go insane when the world just disappears — they're ready for it. Because they understand that where they are isn't bound up in their idea of the world. > Prioritizing information over matter makes the issue of machine sapience irrelevant. Consciousness of the other is an intractable mystery even between two people. It's a mystery we can sidestep, if we grant awareness by degree. Davis: I think that we're going to find ourselves relating interpersonally with machines, whether or not they're actually alive or conscious in a way that scientists can debate about, we're going to be interacting with things that have those qualities. That's going to change the way we're going to experience life and other people. I think we'll come to meet future artificial intelligences in the personae of animated characters, on a pop culture level. There's an element of animism in technology now that's going to increase — in scientists exploring artificial life, kids interacting with intelligent dolls, in the relationship between ecology, technology and the environment — it all comes down to a growing element of animism, throwing us back to being Palaeolithic man living in a world of animated nature. Pesce: Each one of us grew up in a world where people and pets were invested with a certain internal reality that bricks and blocks obviously did not possess. This is not true for our children. With Furby we have crossed a line in the sand, and there's no going back: the current generation of children, comfortable with the in-betweenness of Furby, have a growing expectation that the entire material world will become increasingly responsive to them as they learn to master it. > The emergence of "artificial" intelligence is a process of symbiosis, transcendence via inclusion, and the posthuman integrates the human, rather than dissociating from it. Evolution proceeds by including prior forms in novel structures of higher complexity… likewise, the biological will likely be taken up into the embrace of intelligent machines. There is no precedent in evolutionary history for the "leaving behind" of evolutionary precursors. Bacteria and barter still exist, both independently and as elements of more complex organisms and economies. Pesce: These are prosthetics, these machines, or perhaps, looking the other way around, we are theirs, but neither can really exist without the other. So this "rise of artificial intelligence" is a misapprehension. The rise of intelligence, however — that seems historically inevitable. Intelligence cannot be made. Intelligence can only be grown. And that means that in essence the machines are no different than ourselves. These are not our masters we're talking about. These are our children. And how can we not help but love our children? How could they not help but love us? We can draw a line between ourselves and our machines no more easily than I can draw a line between myself and my eyeglasses. > Blind faith in technological progress as salvation is called into question, especially as regards the illusion of, and desire for, absolute control. Psychedelic transhumanism acknowledges the stubborn reality of the body. Our visions of the future are themselves products of our extended phenotype and evolutionary psychology and thus do not merit wholesale acceptance. Absolute control is an illusion, the consequence of ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes by which life and mind come into being. McKenna: Our technologies... are obviously lethal I would say, but they are fortunately a kind of chrysalis of ideological constraint that technology is in the process of dissolving. William Butler saw this in the 19th Century, Teilhard de Chardin reached it in the forties and the fifties McLuhan expressly articulated this vision in the fifties and the sixties. Everything is about to get very much more complicated, much larger, the number of choices are about to exponentially explode. In a sense, these technologies point us toward, if not literal godhood, then a kind of fictional godhood. We are all going to become the masters of the narrative in which we are embedded. Our separate stories are going