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Here is a motley collection of reading material related to cybernetics and transhumanism

Before trying to understand modern technology, a look at history improves the reader’s ability to audit modern media claims. One of the most readable books on the history of technology is sci-fi author L. Sprague de Camp’s 1963 “The Ancient Engineers”, from antiquity up to the Renaissance.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/l-sprague-de-camp-14/the-ancient-engineers-2/.

An Amazon review says “History, technology, culture, finance, and sociology intersect here. It’s not history from the top (kings and such, which some say is dry), nor history from the bottom (average people, which is necessarily endless and perhaps not very revealing). It’s history from the nuts-and-bolts middle–how structures were built, how materials were transported, how wars were fought. When you know this sort of foundational information, everything else becomes more real.”

This blog & Twitter account is run by an academic, http://stopthecyborgs.org/, “”Only the unmeasured is free”. It often has useful papers and articles.

Are Questions or Answers more important? http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park

In the 1950s, Heinz von Foerster coined the term “cybernetics”. He later lead the “Biological Computing Laboratory” at U of Illinois. One of his best essays is on the topic of Ethics, http://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html

“”Man does not have a nature, but a history. Man is no thing, but a drama. His life is something that has to be chosen, made up as he goes along, and a human consists in that choice and invention. Each human being is the novelist of himself, and though he may choose between being an original writer and a plagiarist, he cannot escape choosing. . . .. He is condemned to be free.

… the problem is understanding understanding; the problem is making decisions upon in principle undecidable questions … Metaphysics appeared and asked her younger sister, Ethics: “What would you recommend that I should bring back to my proteges, the metaphysicians, whether or not they call themselves such?” And Ethics answered: “Tell them they should always try to act so as to increase the number of choices”

“The Future of Futures” by Elena Esposito is expensive, but a web search may find an online version. Her work was influenced by Heinz von Foerster (cybernetics) and Niklas Luhmann (systems theory). She has interesting ideas about “probablistic fiction” and economics.
https://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/law/new_esposito_reviw_16-7-11.pdf
http://www.lse.ac.uk/management/documents/Esposito-transcript.pdf
http://www.mpifg.de/people/jb1/downloads/2013_Imagined%20Futures_TheorySociety.pdf

From a separate Amazon review: “This book reconstructs the dynamics of economics, beginning explicitly with the role and the relevance of time: money uses the future in order to generate present wealth. Financial markets sell and buy risk, thereby binding the future. Elena Esposito explains that complex risk management techniques of structured finance produce new and uncontrolled risks because they use a simplified idea of the future, failing to account for how the future reacts to attempts at controlling it. During the recent financial crisis, the future had already been used (through securitizations, derivatives and other tools) to the extent that we had many futures, but no open future available.”

Joss Whedon’s Angel TV series had an espisode set in Las Vegas, where “Lorne confesses he tells Lee about the people with bright futures, so that they can be lured into the Spin and Win game. Their destinies are sucked into the chip they play and later sold on the black market.”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_Always_Wins

Here is a blog post on the geographical equivalents of latency (time to access data in memory vs. disk vs. network). Time is the crux of many topics related to humans vs. robots vs. transhumans. What isn’t obvious to most people is that the path to robots and transhumans began with writing, when we started encoding “knowledge” in symbols that would eventually be read by “faster” machines.
http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-infinite-space-between-words/

For humans to compete with machines, we need to revisit the role of human memory, relearning oral skills (e.g. poetry & narrative) which we left behind with the advent of writing. The timing of communication _within_ the brain is faster than communication between brain & paper, brain & mobile phone, or mobile phone & cloud. Not to mention the metaphysics of non-symbolic consciousness.
Storytelling and memory: http://www.story-alchemy.com/?page_id=211
Memory training techniques: http://artofmemory.com/

19 Comments

Megan Edwards says:

August 30, 2014 at 1:00 pm

HI Catherine!
First, awesome story about Mo Ne Davis of Philadelphia. I will look her up further… The town where we live was overtaken by “Little League World Series Fever” a couple of years ago because our local team was one of the final 2 or 3 (I’m not a parent, and I’m forgetting…sorry) in that big game, which includes teams from other countries, the end of summer. The young guys, ages 12 or 13 or so, were adored for months afterward… a parade… an invitation to the major league stadium by the pro baseball team … on and on. It is a kick and a half to see her success! A GIRL !! African American !! Wow.

Secondly, I enjoyed the J. Rappoport inverview about Ebola (is ‘enjoyed’ the word?). There is an interesting article from 2013 in the New Yorker about the rich natural resources in the region… The richest iron ore deposits in the world are there…besides diamonds. I think Jon Rap. is right in his analysis that they can shut down the whole region with the Ebola problem and start grab- bing the natural resources. Already I read about commercial flights not flying in and out of these W. African countries. Anyway, link below. THANKS.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/08/buried-secrets
Rich Persaud says:

August 29, 2014 at 2:20 pm

Here is a motley collection of reading material related to cybernetics and transhumanism

Before trying to understand modern technology, a look at history improves the reader’s ability to audit modern media claims. One of the most readable books on the history of technology is sci-fi author L. Sprague de Camp’s 1963 “The Ancient Engineers”, from antiquity up to the Renaissance.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/l-sprague-de-camp-14/the-ancient-engineers-2/.

An Amazon review says “History, technology, culture, finance, and sociology intersect here. It’s not history from the top (kings and such, which some say is dry), nor history from the bottom (average people, which is necessarily endless and perhaps not very revealing). It’s history from the nuts-and-bolts middle–how structures were built, how materials were transported, how wars were fought. When you know this sort of foundational information, everything else becomes more real.”

This blog & Twitter account is run by an academic, http://stopthecyborgs.org/, “”Only the unmeasured is free”. It often has useful papers and articles.

Are Questions or Answers more important? http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park

In the 1950s, Heinz von Foerster coined the term “cybernetics”. He later lead the “Biological Computing Laboratory” at U of Illinois. One of his best essays is on the topic of Ethics, http://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html

“”Man does not have a nature, but a history. Man is no thing, but a drama. His life is something that has to be chosen, made up as he goes along, and a human consists in that choice and invention. Each human being is the novelist of himself, and though he may choose between being an original writer and a plagiarist, he cannot escape choosing. . . .. He is condemned to be free.

… the problem is understanding understanding; the problem is making decisions upon in principle undecidable questions … Metaphysics appeared and asked her younger sister, Ethics: “What would you recommend that I should bring back to my proteges, the metaphysicians, whether or not they call themselves such?” And Ethics answered: “Tell them they should always try to act so as to increase the number of choices”

“The Future of Futures” by Elena Esposito is expensive, but a web search may find an online version. Her work was influenced by Heinz von Foerster (cybernetics) and Niklas Luhmann (systems theory). She has interesting ideas about “probablistic fiction” and economics.
https://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/law/new_esposito_reviw_16-7-11.pdf
http://www.lse.ac.uk/management/documents/Esposito-transcript.pdf
http://www.mpifg.de/people/jb1/downloads/2013_Imagined%20Futures_TheorySociety.pdf

From a separate Amazon review: “This book reconstructs the dynamics of economics, beginning explicitly with the role and the relevance of time: money uses the future in order to generate present wealth. Financial markets sell and buy risk, thereby binding the future. Elena Esposito explains that complex risk management techniques of structured finance produce new and uncontrolled risks because they use a simplified idea of the future, failing to account for how the future reacts to attempts at controlling it. During the recent financial crisis, the future had already been used (through securitizations, derivatives and other tools) to the extent that we had many futures, but no open future available.”

Joss Whedon’s Angel TV series had an espisode set in Las Vegas, where “Lorne confesses he tells Lee about the people with bright futures, so that they can be lured into the Spin and Win game. Their destinies are sucked into the chip they play and later sold on the black market.”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_Always_Wins

Here is a blog post on the geographical equivalents of latency (time to access data in memory vs. disk vs. network). Time is the crux of many topics related to humans vs. robots vs. transhumans. What isn’t obvious to most people is that the path to robots and transhumans began with writing, when we started encoding “knowledge” in symbols that would eventually be read by “faster” machines.
http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-infinite-space-between-words/

For humans to compete with machines, we need to revisit the role of human memory, relearning oral skills (e.g. poetry & narrative) which we left behind with the advent of writing. The timing of communication _within_ the brain is faster than communication between brain & paper, brain & mobile phone, or mobile phone & cloud. Not to mention the metaphysics of non-symbolic consciousness.
Storytelling and memory: http://www.story-alchemy.com/?page_id=211
Memory training techniques: http://artofmemory.com/

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