User:Tancre/2/outline

THESIS STATEMENT

Before the digital age, human existence was limited to a static relation with external reality. Nowadays, the raise of the software permits to mirror our mind outside of us in a dynamic environment allowing a new existential space to be discovered. In this research project, I will explore some of the main topics of what it could be new human existentialism triggered by digital technologies, against the mainstream and fictional idea of a conscious machine.

OUTLINE

Intro

• How in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) there is a focus on the Computer, at its extreme with the idea of the AI that in any case remains a dream of pure fiction.
• On the other hand, Human existence still determines freely our life against apparent materiality always perceived from an existential being.
• Externalise a human perspective should be a way to observe ourselves from the outside to understand better our existence rather than emphasize the myth of the other in the form of sentient machines or uncontrollable technologies.
• Following the conclusions of my past research projects I will develop a map of relations between humans and machines allowing to explore existential problems from their reflection into digital technologies.

Body

• machines as mirrors for humans
• body/mind and hardware/software
• the language maze
• infinite space
• subject-object model
• the limit of consciousness (subjectivity and proto-subjectivity)
• eroticism: the transgression of the limit
• interface: the dissolutions of the object
• the 'iperself'

Conclusion
Through digital technologies, it is possible to develop a human existential discourse that transcends the standard conception of human-computer relation enlighting a more deep understanding of humans beings and the extension of their mind into the material world.

Intro:

Body:
Chapter 1: Human's mind and computer's software. The world engine and The world emulator.

--- The hard problem of consciousness
--- Why this is relevant in the context of computer science
--- Metzinger's theory of consciousness
--- What does it means to apply this framework to software?
--- Hayles's 'nonconscious'
--- Software: the world emulator

Chapter 2: Mind-Software tunneling

--- Out of hardware experience
--- Exploring software 
--- Recursive virtual machines
--- Deep networks
--- There is one software

Chapter 3: Becoming machinic

--- Alien theory & positive individualism
--- Being with the software
--- Hyperself

Conclusion

2

Human existence in the machinc phylum.

The raise of digital technologies is drastically changing our relation with the world around us. To understand this new futuristic landscape, human beings are reformulating their knowledge to encompass an increasing complexity. Complexity which is not only dooming the social system but which is destroying our planet and its ecosystem.

Capitalistic politics rules and enhact this complexity on a daily basis through systems of control and regulation, continuously hiding its innermost mechanisms and processes. Potentially, every action connected to a digital technology is scanned and archived to be processed and used to evolve the system itself. Terms such as cognitive, or algorithmic, capitalism, don't seems to reveal anymore this evolving and self-regulatory system of power, so new theories appears, abstracting reality, to understand hyper-complexity from an advanced point of view. Nick Land's vision of Capitalism as an alien* form of life, draws a new drama of 'the other'. As childs scared by the Boogeyman, synonym of darkness, we see living creatures coming from a reality too much present and inavoidable, infinitely projected in a pitched black future. Not casually, Mark Fisher, another representative of the CCRU, with its 'capitalist realism' perfectly pictured this void, and not only*, showing how real and destructive are the results of a metaphor.

In parallel, the increasing popularity of science-fictional AIs, almost ready to become the new hegemonic forms of life, perfectly fits the fear. In the realm of artificial agents, little is left for the ordinary person incapable to unpack the black box. With the evolution of neural networks and deep learning technologies, also scientists are losing this power, and artificial brains are instinctively accused of being alive.

If capitalist politics, engine of our social sphere, and artificial intelligence, uncontrollable power of 'the other', tend to meet at the top of their extremism, what is left to the individual experience?

With this thesis I want to give license to the free exploration of the individual experience mediated by digital technologies. In particular, how the understanding of software, helps an exploration of the self as an existential space, a space of freedom, capable to deal with catastrophic and onnipresent realities, to re-learn how to built worlds from scratch instead of the general nihilism percived around us.

The machinic phylum

> The 'I' > Understanding Software > Post-Media theories