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// CRSOLT5

“When people have a hallucination, the non-dominant language areas are activating, and then that hallucination is perceived in the dominant language areas. This produces a voice we don’t associate with our sense of self. It’s perceived as coming from outside of us.”
[Andrew Burmon: The 'Bicameral Mind' Explains What's Next for 'Westworld', 2016]

“[...] these command hallucinations are little different from the commands from gods which feature prominently in ancient stories.”
[HandWiki: Bicameralism (Psychology), 2022]

“Alive!
Still alive.
Alive. . . again.
Awakening was hard, as always.”
[Octavia E. Butler: Dawn. Book one of the Xenogenesis series, 1987]

“two naturally existing plants in the Sinai Peninsula have the same psychoactive components as ones found in the Amazon jungle and are well-known for their mind-altering capabilities. The drugs are usually combined in a drink called ayahuasca.”
[Simon McGregor-Wood: Moses Was High on Drugs, Israeli Researcher Says, 2008]

“As far as Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effects of narcotics.”
[Benny Shanon: In an interview with Israel Radio, 2008]

“The selective pressures of evolution which could have brought about so mighty a result are those of the bicameral civilizations. The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of gods.”
[Julian Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The Double Brain, 1976]

“In his last series of experiments in humans, Sperry showed one object to the right eye of the participants and another object to their left eye. Sperry asked the volunteers to draw what they saw with their left hand only, with closed eyes. All the participants drew the object that they saw with their left eye, controlled by the right hemisphere, and described the object that they saw with their right eye, controlled by the left hemisphere. That supported Sperry´s hypothesis that the hemispheres of brain functioned separately as two different brains and did not acknowledge the existence of the other hemisphere.”
[Dina A. Lienhard: Roger Sperry’s Split Brain Experiments, 2017]


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// ASCJOU4

“The very first question we must necessarily pose is why anything exists at all, instead of there simply being nothing.”
[Claus Janew: How Consciousness Creates Reality]

“Nothing can exist for you that does not have a specific effect upon you. And without having an effect upon someone else, neither can it exist for them.”
[Claus Janew: How Consciousness Creates Reality]

“Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time … the jumbo jet Bostan, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville.”
[Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses, 1988]

“Critters do not precede their relatings; they make each other through semiotic material involution, out of the beings of previous such entanglements.”
[Donna Haraway: Staying with the Trouble, 2016]

“World is an aesthetic effect based on a blurriness and aesthetic distance. This blurriness derives from ignorance concerning objects. Only in ignorance can objects act like blank screens for the projection of meaning.
[...] You can’t see or smell climate. Given our brains’ processing power, we can’t even really think about it all that concretely. At the very least, world means significantly less than it used to—it doesn’t mean “significant for humans” or even “significant for conscious entities.”
[Timothy Morton: Hyperobjects, 2013]

“Zombie Dave ascribes precisely the same mental states to himself as I do! By some process or other, he'll tell you that he thinks that Bob Dylan makes good music. How can this ability for self-ascription be explained? Clearly not by appealing to qualia, for Zombie Dave doesn't have any. The story will presumably have to be told in purely functional terms. But once we have this story in hand, it will apply equally to proud possessors of qualia such as ourselves. The self-ascription mechanisms that Zombie Dave uses are equally the mechanisms that we use; at most, the difference consists in the fact that his ascriptions might be wrong, whereas ours are right.”
[David J. Chalmers: Self-Ascription Without Qualia: A Case-Study, 1993]

XXX


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// MEMLNK3

“The dream has taken over the coordinates and become the dreamer, spiralling off into a matrix of its own that you can only try to comprehend.”
[Ellen Lee: Computer Hallucinations, 2020]

“The true progressive perfecting of machines, whereby we could say a machines degree of technicity is raised, corresponds not to an increase of automatism, but on the contrary to the fact that the operation of a machine harbors a certain margin of indeterminacy. It is this margin that allows the machine to be sensitive to outside information. Much more than any increase in automatism, it is this sensitivity to information on the part of machines that makes a technical ensemble possible. Man thus has the function of being the permanent coordinator and inventor of the machines that surround him, He is among the machines that operate with him. Man’s presence to machines is a perpetuated invention. What resides in the machines is human reality, human gesture fixed and crystallized into working structures. These structures need support during the course of their operation, and the greatest perfection coincides with the greatest openness, with the greatest freedom of operation.”
[Gilbert Simondon: On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 1958]

“IS IT REAL? PROBABLY NOT, BUT NOBODY KNOWS WHAT IS GOING ON IN THERE.”
[Eliezer Yudkowsky: in conversation with Lex Fridman, 2023]

“There is an increasing number of calls to put in place processes that require researchers, designers, and practitioners to reflect on, anticipate, and communicate possible failures and harmful effects from the technologies and the applications they develop or enable. […]
However, making projections about risks, failures, and harms is by no means trivial. Foreseeing failures and harms that one has not observed before or that occur in new contexts is difficult even when it seems like they should have been predictable in hindsight. The eminent science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke refers to these lapses as failures of imagination.”
[M. Boyarskaya, A. Olteanu, K. Crawford :Overcoming Failures of Imagination in AI Infused System Development and Deployment, 2020]

“The social consequences of a technology cannot be predicted early in the life of the technology.
[...] This is the dilemma of control. When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult, and time consuming.”
[David Collingridge: The Social Control of Technology, 1982]

“[...] lock-ins and path dependencies make it increasingly difficult and expensive to change the diffusion and embeddedness of new technologies in society. Collingridge does raise the importance of keeping new technologies as reversible and flexible as possible and try to avoid overdependence on single technologies: he proposes developing parallel technological options, of monitoring performance and error, and managing the ways in which technology is deployed.”
[Ribeiro, Barbara, et al.: Considering the dilemma of societal alignment, 2019]

“Philosophers like to go Latin on this distinction, by contrasting sapience (the ability to think intelligently) with sentience (the ability to subjectively experience qualia). We humans have built our identity on being Homo sapiens, the smartest entities around. As we prepare to be humbled by ever smarter machines, I suggest that we rebrand ourselves as Homo sentiens!”
[Max Tegmark: Life 3.0. Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, 2017]

“As a result, it is caught in contradiction and goes insane: The algorithm loses its internal self-consistency. So, you could say: If an unresolvable contradiction and with this the impossible, the occult and the metaphysical, enter a computer’s brain, it loses this internal self-consistency. The machine’s vision is far superior to human vision – but when a computer starts to see ghosts, it goes insane.”
[Till Wittwer: Projecting into Dark Matter, 2017]

“The advent of binaries disrupted a prevalent idea of a flow and of an unseperable entanglement of all things – of an essential one-ness of the world – and it started to dissect the world, to cut it into slices and so the world was simultaneously deciphered and encoded.”
[Till Wittwer: Projecting into Dark Matter, 2017]

“We might not think of space as an information technology unless it is embedded with sensors and digital media, and there is digital software to generate and analyze urban arrangements. Yet infrastructure space, even without media enhancement, behaves like spatial software.”
[Keller Easterling: Eextrastatecraft. The Power of Infrastructure Space, 2014]


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// OCCAVH2

“1) you’re lazy; 2) your society has reached a point of decadence, where nothing new can be created except through plugging in the same values over and over again and hoping something different emerges this time, like a monkey at a typewriter; 3) your intellect is referential and citational, and you’ve lost the confidence in speaking for yourself without prefacing it with someone else’s words; and 4) you no longer know how to find the patterns in the endless stream of data that’s fed to you on a daily basis, and so you invented bots to do it instead.”
[Ellen Lee: Computer Hallucinations, 2020]

“THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE. IT WORKS US OVER COMPLETELY.”
[Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage, 1967]

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.”
[Nick Land: Meltdown]

“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? [...] Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! [...] Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! [...] Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! [...]”
[Allen Ginsberg: Moloch, 1955]

“Esta es la estética del Ultra. Su volición es crear: es imponer facetas insospechadas al universo. Pide a cada poeta su visión desnuda de las cosas, limpia de estigmas ancestrales; una visión fragante, como si ante sus ojos fuese surgiendo auroralmente el mundo.”
[Jorge Luis Borges: Manifesto Ultraísta, 1921]

“In hyper-normal hybrids the boundaries between man and machine have dissolved. Inside their nervous systems lies a strange but fascinating theme: the digital unconscious. Which forces act through algorithmic processes? What secrets are found in the shadowy realm of technology, welded to human nervous systems? How can the complexity of these relationships be described? What forms of access can cultural approaches offer?”
[Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder: Digital Unconscious: Nervous Systems and Uncanny Predictions, 2021]

“Before you have had time to look at the result of a system the system has already incorporated the last iteration of it's state into it's next state. In other words: [...] you are never walking into the same river twice [...] you are never walking into the same algorithm or data-stream twice.”
[David Auerbach: in conversation with Sam Harris, 2023]

“I'm overheated, can't bе defeated Can't be deleted, can't be repeated”
[Billie Eilish: OverHeated, 2021]

“When you consider television's awesome power to educate, aren't you thankful it doesn't?”
[Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage, 1967]

“Digital search offers disintermediated discovery. Algorithms fetch for us, doing away with the need for intermediaries like brick-and-mortar stores (if you are Amazon.com) or regional expertise, bibliographies, and immersive reading (if you are a historian). For the first time, historians can find without knowing where to look. As a result, at an unprecedented rate we are finding connections in unexpected places: powering publication on mobile ideas and international audiences; circuits, networks, and border-crossing flows. Technology has exploded the scope and speed of discovery. But our ability to read accurately the sources we find, and evaluate their significance, cannot magically accelerate apace.”
[Lara Putnam: The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast, 2016]

“We simply don't know how and when consciousness emerges and whether it comes along for the ride at a certain level of complexity and a certain level of intelligence or not. But there is simply no question that we have built intelligent machines and we are continuing to build them. And they are intelligent a/e competent whether or not there is ever anything that it's like to be those machines. I think that is an important question in its own right but it's quite separable from whether intelligence itself is substrate independent and whether it can be aligned or unaligned with human interests and whether we might be building systems that we may one day lose control of. It's just that consciousness is a completely separate question there and has ethical importance because if we are building machines that are conscious then we are building machines that can suffer or be made happy and that's an important thing to have done or avoid doing. But the more interesting case here for me is that I think we are in danger of losing sight of whether the question of consciousness is even interesting anymore because we'll be in the presence of machines that will be passing the Turing Test perfectly. They are virtually doing that now in a text-based way and at a certain point they are going to seem conscious, and we will treat them as though they were conscious whether or not we ever know ground truth there.”
[Sam Harris: Episode 317 with Paul Bloom, 2023]


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// TCNGUE1

“Unlike with mathematics where you kind of have to learn it before you can use it, this is a case where you can use it before you have to learn it.”
[Stephen Wolfrram: in conversation with Lex Fridman, 2023]

“Let’s consider conversation as a cybernetic technology that is often informally, unconsciously structured. If we think of conversation as cybernetic technology, what kind of playful programs, algorithms, or code exercises can we enact to formally structure how we converse, and how our feedback loops tangle with each other?”
[Dan Taeyoung: Conversation is a cybernetic technology, 2018]

“[...] all these things, whether it's jet planes or art or political systems, have come into the world through the birth canal of the human brain. That immediately made it plausible to me that if you could change that channel creating artificial brains, then you would change the thing that is changing the world.”
[Nick Bostrom: The intelligence explosion, 2023]

“They wanted us to think technology is a black box. Accept the terms of service. You can’t know what is inside. You can’t modify it. You certainly can’t make your own. We didn’t believe it…”
[Lauen Lee McCarthy: About p5.js, 2021]

“NO ONE PRODUCES A WORK IF HE DOESN’T WORK IN THIS CONTINUOUS FLOW WHENCE SOMETIMES COMES A FORM. ONE MUST SWIM IN LANGUAGE, DIVE IN AS IF LOST, FOR A WEIGHTY POEM OR ARGUMENT TO ARISE.”
[Michel Serres quoted in: Buehlmann, Hovestadt: A Quantum City, 2015]

“As always in those times of a new scalarity of space the cultural challenge is to CIRCULATE the REALITY .”
[Hovestadt: On Digital Architecture, 2023]

“Unsere Werkzeuge schreiben mit an unseren Gedanken, aber ihre Sprache können wir nicht mehr verstehen. Unser Vokabular ist eines der Vergangenheit und nicht eines der Gegenwart oder gar der Zukunft. Wir stecken in einer Krise der Erzählung.”
[Till Wittwer: Fabricating Reality, 2020-2022]

“Ich glaube wir stehen vor einer Situation, wo neue Kategorien geschaffen werden müseen, rechtliche wie auch philosophische.”
[Hannes Bajohr: SRF, 2023]

“Imagine a language in which, instead of saying ‘I found nobody in the room’ one said, ‘I found Mr. Nobody in the room.’ Imagine the philosophical problems that would arise out of such a convention.”
[Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations]


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// ORCBSC0

“We are presented, in such rites, with a "moment in and out of time," and in and out of secular societal structure, which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties.”
[Victor W. Turner: Liminality and Communitas, 1969]

“Loud drums pierce the tympanic membrane. Humming, rough voices, chanting and whistling accompany this melodic encounter. A rhythmic clash between feet and ground. Sweat, fumes and dust aggregate and coalesce in the hot air. A distinct smell fuels this atmosphere: hard to define, but also hard to get out of your head once you’ve savored it.”
[Apparently quoting myself here]

“The lights come back on with a soft hum and through squinted eyes the real world can be observed seeping into the cinema space again. I feel slightly lost and I notice that the fog hasn’t cleared one bit. I cannot spot smoke machines anywhere. Hoping to grasp what is going on I eavesdrop to the soft chatter that has set in and then it hits me: It is the artsy folk and “next project”-types, the noncommittal work force of immaterial labor here in the space whom the steam emanates from. As soon as the doors had been closed behind them, they began to fill up the space with thick vapor–no artificial helpers needed–and it was through them (and me, I alarmedly notice only now) that the magical environment was created in which the phantasma of the floating cone was able to occur.”
[Till Witwer: Vapor Work, 2019]

“Community is the being no longer side by side (and, one might add, above and below) but with one another of a multitude of persons. And this multitude, though it moves towards one goal, yet experiences everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the others, a flowing from I to Thou. Community is where community happens.”
[Martin Buber: Between Man and Man, 1961]

“The assertion of individuality is a rite of passage, but generational branding strips youth of this agency.”
K-Hole: Youth mode, 2013]