Philosophy 101 Unit 1

This was a fun class.

Thoughts everyone?

Alas, the anniversary of my birth and the day the website dies has come at last.  This post goes out to spite Jason, who said I shouldn’t post on my birthday.  : p

So good bye lovely philosophy classmates and friendly Allen Hall dwellers.  May we meet again soon on the Internet to discuss ethics, or perhaps via a risky, interpersoanl interaction.

Have an excellent Holiday(s) of your choosing, get some rest, and enjoy non-dorm food while it lasts.  I enjoyed getting to know you all throughout our longwinded/longtyped disagreements.

PS — If KeepOn is ever mass marketed, please let me know.  I really, really want one : )

This question has arisen many many times in relation to economics, and I think it parallels a lot of what we’ve discussed on what makes up being.  The question from an ecomic perspective, is “Does a corporate body qualify as a person, and should it be subject to the same freedoms, responsibilities, etc. etc. as a person?”

The reason for bringing up this question here is because I think that a machine and a corporation bear many great similarities–both are ‘designed’ entities.  While I know this is a far stretch scenario for now, I do think we need to consider these questions.

In the case that machines do reach a point where they can pass the Turing game, and they do, at the very least, emulate humanity; should we not grant them the same rights and responsibilities as a human?

This, then, raises the question of whether we should grant ‘personhood’ to so-called ‘artifacts,’ which, I would argue, also include corporate bodies.  To be honest, my initial inclination is to say that machines possessing primarily humanistic qualities should be treated as equal to human in the eyes of the law and society, while corporate bodies should not be allowed such priviledge.  However, I cannot seem to clearly articulate my reasoning as to why, as it seems that it would only make sense to allow a corporate body, if it proves it carries humanistic traits, the priviledge of ‘personhood’.

I suppose scale does play hell with this scenario, as a corporation is capable of reach beyond the scope of a single person or machine, however, it doesn’t seem ‘fair’ to impose a regulation based on such an analog, and imprecise distinction.

Here’s a scenario to play with:

Let us consider the legal case of a charge of manslaughter.  For the case of the robot, a single (or maybe a few) people are accidentally killed during its routine operation.  If we are to consider the machine to be autonomous, and self running, the machine must meet justice for what has happened, regardless of intent.  Simply imprisoning a machine will do little to ‘punish’ it, and nor will it ‘fix’ the problem. How should this case proceed?

As a parallel case, let us consider a corporation which inadvertently causes the deaths of a few tens or hundreds of people (to compensate for scale of existence).  In this case, the corporate body, if treated as a person, must be held accountable for what has happened.  However, much like a machine, we cannot expect to incarcerate a corporate body.  Again, how should this case proceed, and how would it compare to the proceedings in a human case and to a robot case?

Granted, these questions seem to bring our legal structure and proceedings into question more than the comparison of machine, corporation, and person; but I do still think this is an apt place to begin discussion.

Google Flu Trends

Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States. Our results have been published in Nature.

 

How’s this for sharing values?

Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy (Nature.com)

Human ingenuity has given us means of enhancing our brains through inventions such as written language, printing and the Internet. Most authors of this Commentary are teachers and strive to enhance the minds of their students, both by adding substantive information and by showing them new and better ways to process that information. And we are all aware of the abilities to enhance our brains with adequate exercise, nutrition and sleep. The drugs just reviewed, along with newer technologies such as brain stimulation and prosthetic brain chips, should be viewed in the same general category as education, good health habits, and information technology — ways that our uniquely innovative species tries to improve itself.

What do you guys think about the use of cognitive enhancing drugs? The BoingBoing guys talked about this earlier in the semester, and Nature just published this (already controversial) article arguing for their use and acceptance.

I will be at Cafe Paradiso between 1-3pm on Thursday. Please leave a comment in this thread if you are planning on coming to talk to me, so I know what I am getting in to.

When you read Jenkinson’s ‘Collaboration with Machines’ a few things become clear.  Jenkinson sides with Gehlen in that both believe that technology frees man by creating new possibilities for him.  For Jenkinson, this means new ways to make music, fundamentally changing the music created.  This freedom strikes a frightening note when the composer finds himself “in a wasteland of desolate freedom” (169).  Jenkinson finds anyone who believe he is solely in control (and machines innocent bystanders) to be delusional, and furthermore to be hampering their own creative efforts.

What implications does this have?  Going back to the book Dan mentioned in class a while back, Nudge, about how our surrounds impact all our choices, I think this has a huge impact.  Not to side with a Nazi, but Heidegger was right about enframing.  Living in this technological world does impact the way that we think.  Expanding that to a moral context, our technological surroundings impact what we ought to do by changing what we can do.  The possiblity of a “curtosy call” or a quick email changes our societal obligations and expectations.

But Nudge has something to say about Jenkinson’s Collaboration that goes beyond the social realm and says something about cognition.  The way food in a cafeteria is arranged, for example, impacts the choices we make.  If healthier food is in the front and we see it first, we tend to eat healthier (consider that when your first stop in Allen is the desert counter and perhaps veer left to the fruit instead).  In that same way, if machines are around, they impact our choices.  Having a music-making machine, like in Jenkinson’s article, changes the type of music he made.  Jenkinson romanticizes that a little in saying the machine should also get credit for the music produced, but from the Nudge perspective the inspiration  for the music was the machine.  He goes so far as to say that the person making music on a computer is a “machine user-artist” (170).  To me, that’s like saying, “he’s not a pianist, he’s a piano user-player.”  It seems wordy and unnecesary to make such statements.

Then Jenkinson makes a jump to the island of conclusions that is nearly impossible to follow.  He says that music frees us from “the problem of bodily death” (171).  He says that the goal of an artist is to encode himself in his work which becomes an envoy of the self, therefore surviving past the death of the body.  As machines’ involvement in the artistic process increases, our work serves as a dual envoy of both creators, we begin to feel both inferior to and jealous of machines.  I cannot deny that my word processor changes the writing process, but I cannot agree that producing a novel makes me feel any less afraid of death.  I would like to finish a novel by the time I die because it is one of my goals, but it in no way changes the nausea  I experience when I consider being dead.  As a creative person, I appreciate the romanticized view of leaving part of oneself in art, but even if I agreed with that premise, my fears about death remain.

I have a problem with Jenkinson’s writing.  The further you get into the article, the less need he feels to explain any of his premises with examples or explainations.  That entire last paragraph needs expanding.  I’m not saying I disagree with everything, but frankly the arguement is unwarrented.

I have some more stuff to say, so stay tuned to this website for more of my rants.

However, I have a really quick request from Tim. He is starting a new project called IDEALS @ UIUC, where Allen Hall students upload work they do in unit one courses into a database that other future students have access to. If you are interested in participating in this program, visit the website and see whats up!

If you want to upload your papers for future classes, you need to fill out a form granting UIUC the right to archive your intellectual property. You can get this form, print out a copy, and turn it in here. If you have any question, contact Tim McDonough at timmcdonou at gmail.com

“It is in this trick of perspective, from the humble “it happened” to the questionable “I made it happen” to the disastrous “I can make it happen” that lies the labyrinth of paradoxes that is our “modern” world”- Tom Jenkinson

I found this article really stiking, perhaps because I’m a musician, but most of what Jenkinson has to say is excellent (when it doesn’t come off as just slightly elitist).  Anyways, as I was reading it and nodding my head furiously, I thought of a bunch of artists and just random examples that sort of related to what he had to say, so I thought I would share those with you today.  First up, Mr. Bird!

“I feel like it is a deliberate creative process to hear a sound in my head and then rummage around for the object that makes that sound. Sometimes, as I’ve noted before, the object itself gets assigned a mystical value and must be on a song, though I know most listeners could not care less whether we use a Telefunken mic or a 30-year-old calf skin drum head… perhaps that’s why I ascribe mystical/religious properties to microphones, tape machines record players”- Andrew Bird (taken from the NY Times blog Measure for Measure)

As we see, Andrew Bird follows along the lines of what Jenkinson has to say; he ascribes a lot of character to his violin, his guitar, and even to the bare basic things of recording like microphones, tape reels, etc.  These things add something that he alone obviously could not.  Just because he is the one putting the instruments and mics in place does not make him the priveleged user, however.  He is in fact, perhaps just another tool, the one that puts everything in place and orchestrates it all.  Indeed, he plays a vital part in the making of songs, but ultimately, every tool involved is just as pertinent to the song as the next (including himself).

“This is why I decided to start in Nashville with the basics - voice and guitar - because it’s easy to lose your rudder in overdub realm”- Also Andrew Bird

Again, we see that Andrew Bird acknowledges the studio (overdub realm) as almost its own entity, in that it’s easy to lose direction.  In fact, things are bound to lose some direction in the studio.  “Recording is full of counterintuitive stuff like this, so you can see how quickly the original sentiment of a song can get derailed.” - Again, Andrew Bird

———————

According to Wikipedia, on a radio show in 2003 to publicise the release of Hail to the Thief, Yorke remarked that he would rather make a record just with a computer than with only an acoustic guitar.

Here, I think the implication is that Yorke can pull more sounds out of a computer than he can out of an acoustic guitar.  I think that goes to say that the computer is a more versatile tool and would thus serve a greater role in the system of tools that would define Yorke’s songs.  This is a great example of the collaboration of artist and machine.

———————

“…we gave absolutely no thought to what we were doing, whatsoever. This music is unblemished by any expectations of a specific result, on our part. The three of us simply got together to hear what music had to say that week. We had fun together and this is the record of that fun.” - John Frusciante

This was said of Frusciante (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) about the recording of a side project called Automatic Writing II.  Really, I think this is the best example of what Jenkinson wrote about.  No explanation needed.

Donna Haraway describes the idea of a cyborg in her manifesto. She actually sets out to describe “an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism,” so it’s not entirely clear when she describes the cyborg whether she means the myth or her idea of what a cyborg should be. Haraway describes the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,” created through non-organic means and thus not needing to bother with sexual pleasures, or rather distractions. The cyborg “does not revere” and thus has no religious delusions. Cyborgs are sunshine, “ether,” invisible. Haraway presents this idea of “Informatics of Domination,” which are modern concepts of tomorrow’s cyborg world, replacing the “Old Hierarchal Dominations” of the White Patriarchal Society and religion. Some of it seems arbitrary or just rewording, where “noise” replaces “heat,” “subsystem” replaces “small group,” “optimization” replaces “perfection,” “comparable worth” replaces “family wage.” Some of it, though, makes sense, depicting a scary, emotionless future if it comes true: “science fiction, postmodernism” replaces “bourgeois novel,” “biotic component” replaces “organism,” “Star Wars” replaces “Second World War,” “cyborg citizenship” replaces “public/private,” “communications enhancement” replaces “cooperation,” “robotics” replaces “labor,” the list goes on. Haraway encourages throughout her paper that feminists should strive to become like cyborgs, which would thereby eliminate the endless dualistic struggle plaguing the past centuries.

This idea of the cyborg, however, of eliminating awareness of gender, doesn’t seem like the way to solve the heated interactions between men and women. By replacing sexual reproduction with “replication,” and “organic sex role specialization” with “optimal genetic strategies” seems not to blend humanity with machine, but rather to throw away all humanity for only the machine. Since we can’t be machines, this replacement only results in a poor attempt to imitate a being completely and utterly different from us, both in makeup and cognitive capacity, which translates to the destruction of ourselves. Haraway discusses a few ideologies in the beginning of her manifesto, among them biological determinism and technological determinism. Biological Determinism rejects monotheistic thought that man lords above the animals and the earth, celebrating the blend between humans and animals, given that we are really not so different. Technological Determinism accepts the blend between humans and machines, revealing how blurred the lines have become between man and machine: “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert.” This very quote describes how inherently bad Technological Determinism is for humanity, and how they function as an inverted relationship: when one gains strength, the other loses it. Should we all alter ourselves to emulate the qualities of a cyborg, we would lose touch with our humanity.

I don’t understand this article, but I think I understand why I don’t understand. If anyone wants to help, that would be nice.

If you haven’t read it, Lihy wrote a lovely post that, as far as I can tell, accurately captures the general idea. Bruno’s thesis seems to go as follows: the object-subject dichotomy, while useful, is out dated, and a nonhuman-human dichotomy provides a more accurate way of approaching the distinction between the contrasting entities that compose a society. He illustrates this with a chart that shows that the concept of “object” and “subject” merge over time, and the resulting “imbroglio of humans and nonhumans” is what demands a new perspective.Then, he goes on to explain the eleven sociotechnical levels of this concept. I don’t know what he means by sociotechnical, and therefore can’t quite grasp what these levels are for, but I can only assume it is to break down the social aspects of technology, going from a mass scale (11. Political Ecology), to a more individualized level (1. Social Complexity). “Mass” and “individualized” aren’t exactly the right words for that, though. I’m think of this scale as level 11 looking at the planet as a whole, moving closer and closer until you reach the little electrons and stuff at level 1. That was an analogy, not what the article is seriously about (in case my obvious confusion and mental clutter is making you equally lost).

So, Bruno introduces these layers by saying, “For my present pragmatogony*[mythic origin of technology], I have isolated eleven distinct layers.” Calling it a “mythic origin of technology” made me think he was saying, “these layers are not real,” as though he were explaining what people mistake as layers when they use the object-subject frame. However, the levels seem to be defined by using examples of the appropriateness of the nonhuman-human paradigm. At this point, I decided I didn’t know the real definition of pragmatogony, and neither does the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and so I still don’t know. Between that and “sociotechnical,” I feel a little less than confident about my comprehension of this article.

Additionally, Bruno uses all these phrases such as “Machiavellian primates,” “Daedalus’s maze,” “Durkheim,” and so on, which presuppose knowledge about things that I apparently have no knowledge about. I’m hoping those were unimportant details that I missed, though.

That all sounded less academic and much more whiny than I intended it to. Whoops.

I feel like I kind of understand what the layers mean, even if I don’t know what they’re for. So, in the spirit of Lihy’s post, I’m going to continue summarizing the final six levels.

6) Internalized Ecology

“… we find the most extraordinary extention of social relations to nonhumans: agriculture and the domestication of animals. The intense socializeation, reeducation, and reconfiguration of plants and animals- so intense that they change shape, function, and often genetic makeup…” (186) .

He says that we need to give nonhumans-plants, animals, and proteins-social characteristics for them to fit into the “collective.”

5) Society

“a society is primitive indeed: it precedes individual action, lasts very much longer than any interaction does, dominates our lives… it is externalized, reified, more real than ourselves…” (186).

- He believes that society is not socially constructed, because “humans proliferate below the bottom line of social theory” (187), even though the term society is socially constructed.

-It is interactions that do construct society, and since so many “techniques” aid and enable interactions, they too are part of society.

4) Techniques

“articulated subprograms for actions that subsist (in time) and extend (in space)” (187).

-At this point, he isn’t talking about humans anymore, but “social prehumans.” Basically, stuff that is reorganized (he uses the example of a hammer and net), to make them different from the original.

3) Social Complication

“no society, no overarching framework, no dispatcher of roles and functions; there are merely interactons among prehumans…Here complex interactions are marked and followed by nonhumans enrolled for a specific purpse. What purpose? Nunhumans stabalize social negotiations” (187).

2) The Basic Tool Kit

“The extension of social skills to nonhumans” (188).

- He uses the example of monkeys who don’t have much technique, but still create and use social tools in a process of altering each other. This ability is also given to nonhumans, by “treating a stone, say, as a social partner, modifying it, then using it to act on a second stone” (188).

1) Social Complexity

“primates…engage in social interactions to repair a constantly decaying social order. They manipulate one another to survive in groups…” (188).

-Note: even though this is the last stage, it still uses techniques and tools just as much as the other ones.

The End.

I forgot that I still have some money left over for this class. Enough to get, say, a few pizzas or something.

If you leave me a note in this thread before 6pm I will be running to the store to get food/snacks/candy/soda or whatever. Make suggestions and I’ll see what I can do.

Douglas Adams is brilliant. His article, while a little dated, seems very accurate. He makes several great points about the Internet in many ways.

He first talks about age gaps, essentially. Everything invented before we were all born, is completely normal. We never question the use of telephones, or really go, wow this thing is quite amazing, unless your really thinking about what life must have been like without it. Next, anything that is invented when we are under 30, is creative and cool. I think it is safe to say that everyone in this country who is older than 10, has a cell phone. 10 might be low, but I think you understand my point that cell phones are abundant and have become a very normal part of our generation’s society. Well, most of them anyway. Because, Douglas states that after 30, anything new is against the natural order of the world and “is the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.” He says 30, but I think it is between 30 and 40, with the latter being the more probable. It is just that people over that age take longer to adjust to new things. My parents took a rather long while to get used to computers, and I believe they still don’t really understand the capabilites and whatnot. It’s just natural. People who are over 65, the generation that brought us hippies and the psycholdelic movement, were the only age group Obama didn’t win. It’s because that they just cannot change that quickly anymore. But as Douglas says, “until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.” They will adjust. A great example is Strom Thurmond, an extremely racist senator who blocked the civil rights act, even he eventually became less racist…I think.

The next point that Douglas makes is the stereotype about how you cannot trust what you read on the web. It’s an old argument that we all know and some of us have probably said before (I am guilty, though I think I usually said it in a joking manner). Douglas correctly states that “Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards, or in restaurants.” I mean, he just hit the nail on the head. It’s all about properly filtering information. We talk about how we cannot trust what he see on the web, when we turn on the TV and are subject to Faux News. I mean, are you going to go to an anti-choice website for information about “Partial-Birth Abortions”? Not if your interested in accurate information. You must learn who can and cannot be trusted and to use natural skepticism when it starts going off.

There are many other great points in the article, but I cannot touch on all of them. So I will quickly go over ones I found important. Getting back to how the article is dated, it talks about things like Netscape, dial-up, and external modems…whatever all that is. Basically that there are criticisms that the Net is another divide of the rich and poor. I kinda disagree with that completely. I think if anything, the internet has narrowed the rich-poor gap. I mean, prices of computers have dropped greatly in the last decade and have become as affordable as a TV, and honestly much more useful. Cheap internet is possible. If there is one thing that the rich and the poor have in common is their ability to use and surf the internet with no restrictions. Obviously I am referring to low income, not the dirt poor, and also money would play apart in how good the computer/internet are, and I mean people in this country, because poverty in other countries is another story. It is a weak argument I know, but I still believe that the Internet narrows the divide more than it broadens it.

The last point I would like to comment on is how Douglas talks about kids improvement. He talks about people coming together and speaking different languages and that they will somehow develop a way of communicating with each other, but there wont be any real grammar; that it would be the First Generation who starts to develop it. I wont comment on that exactly, as I don’t really understand it and am not a Linguistics major. But the point is is that, yes, the older generations did indeed create the Internet. They started it a good 15-20 years ago. However, the Internet is what it is today because of us. Essentially hackers, ages ranging from 10-30, are responsible for the Internet that we have. MySpace was virtually created by people in their mid to late 20’s and Facebook, by a 20 yr old kid, and these are some of the most popular websites on the web. To put it in a Douglas Adams way, we have created the grammar, improved it, and pushed it’s boundaries all within a single generation.

From USA Today

NEW YORK (AP) — What does a teenage brain on Google look like? Do all those hours spent online rewire the circuitry? Could these kids even relate better to emoticons than to real people?

These sound like concerns from worried parents. But they’re coming from brain scientists.

While violent video games have gotten a lot of public attention, some current concerns go well beyond that. Some scientists think the wired world may be changing the way we read, learn and interact with each other.

There are no firm answers yet. But Dr. Gary Small, a psychiatrist at UCLA, argues that daily exposure to digital technologies such as the Internet and smart phones can alter how the brain works.

When the brain spends more time on technology-related tasks and less time exposed to other people, it drifts away from fundamental social skills like reading facial expressions during conversation, Small asserts.

I strongly suggest reading the full article. It also recommends the book iBrain, which I just ordered (and yes I’m geeking out). <

Question: Does this mean that both Clark and Dreyfus are right: Technology fundamentally shapes the way our minds work, and in so doing it undermines our basic humanity?

Post questions and discussion on the final in this thread. I’ll do my best to help, but everyone should feel free to contribute.

I’ve sent around comment count updates, so you should know how many more comments you need before the deadline on Friday at midnight. Most of you are nearly finished, and quite a few of your are already over the requirements, so good job.

I’ll probably send around a more extensive grade update later this week, so you know exactly what you have going into the final.

This is an update on the prosecution of the mother who helped her daughter make a fake myspace to torment another girl.  The fictional boy wound up saying some pretty mean things causing Megan, the tormented girl, to hang herself.

Watch it

I don’t agree with those of you who feel meaningful conversations over the internet are equivelent to those had in person, but I find it impossible to deny that criticism, no matter how disembodied, does have a strong effect.  For example, has anyone else heard about the woman married via second life (who had never met her ‘husband’ in person) who tried to kill him in real life after catching him snuggling on a couch in second life with another woman?  As a society, we’ve developed thin skin when it comes to enduring criticism and jealousy, in my opinion.  Even through the medium of a screen, which desesitizes us to gory CSI’s and brutal war films, can our fragile self esteems be crushed with flippant words exchanged via myspace.

Something else interesting to consider is the punshment.  The newcaster mentions that the mother faces 3 years in prison and a fine of $300,000 if convicted with the full sentence.  Nothing is said about the daughter.  Should she be punsihed for her role too?  Is the court’s punishment of the mother satisfactory?  Should it be more or less severe?  To what extent can we police the internet — it’s a task that seems even more overwhelming than the way our country has been trying to play policeman of the world.  How can we possibly have justice online?  If Megan’s case is pursued, shouldn’t they all be?

One of Dreyfus’ problems with the internet is the fact that there is higher authority of the internet; one giant figurehead that controls all the information being published on the net at all times of the day. First I would like to point out is that that is impossible. The internet has become so vast, it is impossible for an organization, let alone one person to monitor everything that goes on the net. Nevertheless, let us delve into the realm of possibility and assume that it is doable, or better yet, we start smaller and go with out good friend Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, the thing that makes teachers smile with glee when they see it in a Works Cited page as they reach for a red marker, is a great source for learning vast amounts of (sometimes useless) information. Let us say we had a Supreme overlord of Wikipedia, Supreme Wikipedian. This person had the ability to correct all articles and make it so that once he has had the last word, they cannot be edited again unless the event is ongoing (articles dealing with living people, modern films, etc.) in which case a new development would have to occur for someone else to be able to edit it. Nevertheless, the Supreme Wikipedian always has the final say.

Now my problem with this is that no one person is the expert on EVERYTHING! It is extremely improbable that one person could be an expert on Nuclear Physics, Cartesian Philosophy, Hulk Hogan, Metal Gear Solid, Sailor Moon, Sebastian Bach, Chinese history, Renaissance Art, and Romantic period Literature. I mean, it is so unlikely, that I would even say it is impossible. Now if say you had two people, then they might be able to cover a much wider range of topics, but then if they have conflicting views on an issue, the history of the Manhattan project, then who takes precedence? The history expert or the nuclear physicist? The more ‘experts’ you have that run things, the more problems like this you would have. It becomes much trickier when you get into more subjective areas like the Arts. Dan Pierson mentioned in a post that he disagrees with critic in the Tribune. While I am not saying that Dan is wrong (I am by no means a musical expert, let alone Jazz), all I am saying is that things like music and the arts are very subjective and there really is no official saying, this is good or this is bad, it is all a matter of opinion. I imagine that if enough artists get together and declare something good/bad, then that’s the majority opinion, but there will always be those dissenters who feel the opposite because it appeals/doesn’t appeal to them. This is different than say mathematics where you cannot argue that 1+1=2. We know that it is fact, and anyone who disagrees either doesn’t understand or/and is a moron. Yes, I know comparing math to art isn’t necessarily fair, but I am just trying to show why a supreme authority, especially for art won’t work.

I believe the system currently at play in Wikipedia is a good one. People check pages and read them and if they notice things are all wrong, they get corrected and re-corrected until you get the truth or as close as you can to the truth. Of course, you should always take everything with a grain of salt, but I prefer the few inaccuracies to the Supreme Wikipedian (SW) and their lack of all knowledge and probable bias. Yes, I believe it is impossible for the SW to be totally and completely unbiased. Every human has a bias in something, and if they had to be the supreme decider on the arts, their bias would easily come out in some manner. So no SW, let the masses be the correctors of the Internet and they will also decide which websites are credible and which not.

SOCIALISM BABY…only on the net, of course.

Bruno is trying to say that the dichotomy between subject/object cannot be outdone by human/nonhuman but that we are heading in a direction where the latter distinction is more appropriate. There seems to be a confusion concerning objects (which I believe can refer to technology of sorts): “What gives thrust to the arrow of time is that modernity at last breaks out of a confusion, made in the past, between what objects really are in themselves and what subjectivity of humans believes them to be, projecting onto them passions, biases, and prejudices” (180).  I believe that this is the problem many of the philosophers that we have encountered deal with, the notion of projecting our subjectivity onto technological devices that are capable only of objectivity. He goes through a series of levels to break down the meaning of what sociotechnical refers to…feel free to add segements!

11: Political Ecology

–”Political representation of nonhumans seems not only plausible now but necessary, when the notion would have seemed ludicrous or indecent not long ago”

This odd notion was discussed in a previous post when the AIdan was place in a scenario, and the question was how to punish a robot? If nonhumans have the same rights as humans, will it be as effective to charge them the same way? If they have the same rights…how far are they from being our equals? Is our society ready for that?

10: Technoscience

I’m confused in this section how yeast and the scientist are related…but this part is interesting:

“…a scientist introduced himself, ‘Hi, I am the coordinator of yeast chromosome 11.’ The hybrid whose hand I shook was, all at once, a person (he called himself ‘I’), a corporate body (’the coordinator’), and a natural phenomenon (the genome, the DNA sequence, of yeast). The dualist paradigm will not allow us to understand this hybrid” (182).

My question is, how is this a hybrid? The scientist may interact with yeast in a lab, but that doesn’t mean that he is “of” yeast. How does he fall under this category? I guess the last part of the quote is correct, I still can’t seem to grasp this concept.

He also makes another interesting claim, “Nonhumans are endowed with speech, however primitive, with intelligence, fore-sight, self-control, and discipline, in a fashion both largescale and intimate” (183). I have a hard time with this claim because he uses terms that are too broad and elicit certain capacities that technological devices don’t have. Self-control? How so? Intelligence? Very VERY primitive at best. Speech..okay…maybe. Though, from the examples that I’m aware of, these nonhumans are endowed by HUMANS all these capacities..and at this point they are very limited capacities.

9: Networks of Power

I don’t really understand what Hughes has done, but I think this writing is based on previous knowledge of sorts. I do know that Bruno claims that humans and nonhumans borrow from one another’s realms for two purposes, “to socialize nonhumans” and “to naturalize and expand the social realm.” Gehlen would prefer to call this “crossover” manipulation of sorts rather than the implied exchange by use of the word “borrowed.”

8: Industry

“…there is no difficulty in defining material entities because they are objective…composed of forces, elements, and atom. Only the social, the human realm, is difficult to interpret…because it is complexly historical…’symbolic’” (184).

Haraway referred to this notion of history/symbolism as a detriment to the human race. The beauty of cyborgs is that they have no “origin story,” whereas every human has one and builds their lives based on many elements composed from their origin story. Bruno of course is trying to suggest otherwise, that objects do have a history, that they aren’t primitive or immutable. This is because of all the crossovers that he has already discussed in the essay thus far.  He believes that industry has this capacity to extend to “matter a further property that we think of as exclusively social, the capacity to relate to others of one’s kind” (184). Bruno also believes that when you have machines working together, as in, a system of machines, “ruled by laws and accounted for by instruments, is to grand them a sort of social life” (185).

7: The Megamachine

“the organization of large numbers of humans via chains of command, through a range of ‘intellectual techniques’ of the many nested subrograms fro action” (185).

–Bruno believes that nonhumans replace some of these subprograms, “machinery and factories are born.” These subprograms seem to be the feedback loops that some philosopher was talking about.

I’m being too nitty-gritty (sp?) so yeah…you guys give it a go!

one last bit:

“But my main point is that, in each of the eleven episodes I have traced, an increasingly large number of humans are mixed with an increasingly large number of nonhumans, to the point that, today, the whole planet is engaged in the making of politics, law, and soon, I suspect, morality. The illusion of modernity was to believe that the more we grew, the more separate objectivity and subjectivity would become, thus creating a future radically different from our past” (190).

See? I told you. The Cylons. They look like us now.

The handpiece you mention–alternately known among fashion reporters as the roboglove, the gling or Anti-Rihanna Death Grip–actually was handcrafted by Beyonce’s longtime jeweler, New York-based Lorraine Schwartz. Despite Internet rumors that the piece was fashioned of pure gold–possibly in the legendary Elven forges at Rivendell–it’s actually made of…

…titanium!

And, according to sources close to the gling, it’s also one of a kind and therefore close to priceless.

More details on the roboglove? Sure.

• Schwartz had her artisans working day and night on the piece, laboring 24 hours a day until it was complete.

• It fits literally like a glove. Beyonce’s entire upper arm was cast in wax so that the titanium piece would wrap perfectly.

• It’s actually several pieces, including a ring, a glove and a separate component that covers the upper arm. It can be worn all together or separately.

• It looks heavier than it is. Titanium is about 45 percent lighter than steel.

• Beyonce really, really doesn’t want to take it off. She wore it on Saturday Night Live. She wore it in her “Single Ladies” video. She wore it in her cover spread for Gotham magazine. She wore it on the red carpet at the MTV Europe Awards.

• The glove was Beyonce’s concept all the way, I am told–a “superpower” hand to complement the singer’s new Sasha Fierce ego.