User:Tancre/2/outline

= Thesis Statement

Body

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

• The hard problem of consciousness

How can conscious experience 'emerge' from the brain processing information? This question arrested the naive positivism of explaining consciousness from a purely physicalist point of view. Consciousness instead seems to be an experience to some extent aerial. The problem of consciousness can be ascribed back in time to the more general mind-body problem which generated a variety of approaches, from monism to dualism to panpsychism. A solution is still to be found and the mind-body problem, reformulated in neurophilosophy researches as the hard problem of consciousness becomes a not avoidable challenge. In the last 30 years, an increasing number of scientists started to take the problem into consideration as a valid field of study. What we basically learned during this time, is that our knowledge of consciousness is in a primitive state and now it is starting to become a proper field of science.

• Why is this relevant in the context of AI?

During the end of the '60s, cognitive scientists developed a model of the mind based on the computational power of computers, the so-called: computational theory of mind (CTM). The brain becomes a computer and reasoning a computational process. Vice versa through the computational power of the computer it would be possible to reproduce the brain and its properties. At that time, Artificial Intelligence was already born and the Turing's test opened up a series of reflection on the actual possibilities to create intelligent computers capable to interact with humans and trick them by

• Metzinger's theory of consciousness

In

• 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
The 

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