Toward a Global Immune System

* Article: Refounding Legitimacy Toward a Global Immune System. By Olivier Auber. Preprint, October 2015

URL = https://www.academia.edu/16621395/Refounding_Legitimacy_Toward_a_Global_Immune_System

Source: presentation for: "Consciousness Reframed – The Matter of the Immaterial Art & consciousness in the post-biological era The 18th International Research Conference. In The Planetary Collegium’s Series. Shanghai, November 20-22, 2015.

Abstract

"The fusion of human and technology takes us into an unheard world, often described as populated by quasi-living species that would relegate us to the rank of alienated agents emptied of their identity and consciousness. I argue instead that our world is woven by simple, though invisible, perspectives, which — if we become aware of them — may renew our ability of judgment in order to maintain our autonomy. I became myself aware of these invisible perspectives by observing and practicing a real time collective net art experiment called the Poietic Generator. As the perspectives unveiled by this experiment are invisible, I have called them Anoptical Perspectives (i.e. non-optical), by analogy to the Optical Perspective of the Renaissance. Later I have realized that these perspectives are holding their cognitive structure from the political origin of our language. Accordingly, it is possible to define certain cognitive criteria for assessing the Legitimacy of the Anoptical Perspectives just like some artists and architects of the Renaissance have defined the geometrical criteria that establish the legitimacy of the optical one. Finally I argue that — if we apply those criteria to the technological artifacts which pretend to autonomy or tend to invade our bodies and minds — we could move from the status of Selected to the role of Selectors in the Darwinian selection of artificial species. Therefore we could emulate a kind of Global Immune System that would prevent the takeover by some illegitimate bodies. Towards which direction? Nothing less than an emerging era of ethics where systemic predation would have vanished. I propose to call this era: Aethogenesis."

Vocabulary

• Anoptical Perspectives: (i.e. non-optical), by analogy to the Optical Perspective of the Renaissance.

• Atechnogenesis: "The anthropologist Cadell Last has named recently Atechnogenesis (Last 2015) the passage of a world without technology to a world with technology that we experience at the moment on earth and that may have also occurred elsewhere. His Atechnogenesis would lead to the birth of technological life. According to the cognitive scientist Jean-Louis Dessalles, one can trace the Atechnogenesis back to the emergence of the genus Homo itself, that is to say, to the emergence of a proto-language among some hominids."

(https://www.academia.edu/16621395/Refounding_Legitimacy_Toward_a_Global_Immune_System)

Discussion

The Invention of Weapons as Generator of Human Equality

Olivier Auber:

"Dessalles puts forward strong arguments that suggests that the invention of weapons, even before the invention of fire, has been the Singularity that has triggered the explosion of our symbolic codes (Dessalles 2014). According to this theory, weaponry in its most prehistoric version, — that is our first technology —, would have made the social order based on physical domination brutally obsolete. For the first time, weapons would have allowed hominids to kill without risk, not only wild beasts, but above all: dominant peers.

“Once, for whatever reason, easy killing became possible among our hominid ancestors, the absolute right of the strongest instantaneously became obsolete.”

This political crisis would have put enormous stress on our species. From then on, individuals whose behavior seemed more adapted to survival in these dramatic conditions would have been selected. The selected individuals would have been those who proved their capability to both identify unexpected signs of danger, and to communicate them to peers by a hand gesture, a vocalization, and later by an increasingly articulated language.

As analysed by Dessalles, the language would have been our Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) to escape the political crisis triggered by the invention of weapons that has threaten the dominants. From then on, language would have overthrown the brute force to become our main daily activity, as well as the driving force that shapes our social structure." (https://www.academia.edu/16621395/Refounding_Legitimacy_Toward_a_Global_Immune_System)

The Fourth Singularity

Background:

• Four singularities of the universe:

- the first Singularity of the Universe (the alleged Big Bang).

- the second Singularity that took place on earth and probably on billions of other planets: the explosion of codes called Abiogenesis, that realized the transition of a world without biology to a world with biology. Most species that emerged during the Abiogenesis disappeared or mutated, while a small number have proliferated into the present.

- the third Singularity; the origination of the human language,

- the fourth one; the inception of two possible class of artificial living species (Artificial General Intelligence and Mindplexes) (https://www.academia.edu/16621395/Refounding_Legitimacy_Toward_a_Global_Immune_System)

By Olivier Auber:

"The fourth Singularity?

If weapons were the trigger for our language, both continued to evolve together until they were almost inseparable, so much that we now live within their complex entanglement. Even more refined than military weapons, I believe that the mother of all weapons is now invisible, immaterial and essentially logical: that is Capital and Money. Unlike the previous Singularity where weapons were used by dominated peers in order to threaten the dominant ones, the monetary weapon is now exclusively in the hands of the dominants (that is not the elites). Moreover, by driving the technological development, this weapon is becoming an instrument of total domination. Indeed, Capital — traditionally seen as the accumulation of stocks and means of production — has been suddenly dematerialized in the form of complex economic and symbolic values activated by robots and Artificial Intelligence working for an ever smaller number of people; i.e. the Vectorialist Class which owns the vectors of our interactions (Wark 2004). Who can not see that this exponential concentration leaves around vast desert areas, where currency as other economic values are in the best cases maintained under perfusion? The monetary code, based on its mode of creation by debt (Graeber 2013), appears more and more like a carnivorous operating system that inevitably leads to destruction. It is as if its runaway allows a kind of quasi-living system to practice a systemic predation of our species. That is to say, it can kill safely, blindly and indiscriminately our fellow humans (as well as animals), whatever their social ability, to the point that the ancient order, based on our language, seems to become obsolete. Our species seems to be submitted to a new political stress, similar to the one which led to the invention of language, but in a reverse direction. What is this phenomena of such a magnitude, if it is not the announcement of a new Singularity?

Some researchers think that the coming Singularity will target this monetary crisis (Laborde 2010). Indeed, the inception of Alternative Currency Models (ACM) could boot a completely different monetary order. But ACM — if controlled by some Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — could also reboot an even worse domination. No doubt that ACM are new weapons that we have to control in a certain perspective. At present, Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAO) emulated by ACM are popping up everywhere like spontaneous generations of artificial living species within a transitioning ecology. They compete with one another, as they try to proliferate on the same playing field of our economic relations. We know that they will combine, mutate or disappear until a new revitalized ecosystem emerges." (https://www.academia.edu/16621395/Refounding_Legitimacy_Toward_a_Global_Immune_System)

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