From: "psypher" <overload@fastmail.ca> Subject: Re: virus: Re: Technology (was manifest science) To: virus@lucifer.com Date sent: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 09:09:02 -0400 (EDT) Send reply to: virus@lucifer.com
>
> Joe E. Dees [the answer man] wrote:
>
> > It's superGodelian degree of complexity, which permits recursive
> > self-reference and thus allows us to be not only conscious (which
> > many animals are), but also self-conscious (conscious of our own
> > consciousness - conscious of our conscious selves).
>
> ...hey Joe. You've referred to this idea on more than one occasion
> and I know I [and probably a few others I'm guessing] would
> appreciate some explanation.
>
> [assuming a non-argumentative tone:]
>
> ...as I understand it [still immersed in the learning process here]
> our consciousness is a process in which the body gathers stimuli from
> the environment [ie. there are fuzzy things outside the structure of
> our organism which impinge on the system and elicit response]. Once
> taken into the organism these stimuli become information which is
> successively processed through the cognitive system to build up a
> sensory model of the environment.
>
> ...because of the complexity of our organism, features of this model
> can be cross referenced with experienced past models and predicted
> future models to provide a point of steady reference [the "self" in
> which the process is embedded].
>
> ...as far as technology [in the traditional "tools and machines"
> sense] goes, the environment - on all levels from the raw physical
> systems to the more abstract stimuli constructed by social
> organizations - are put together to pose organizational problems for
> the organism, which then responds to the environment by attempting to
> organize its action in such a way that the variables relate towards
> its best ends.
>
> ...while I don't think evolution "wants" anything or has
> "intentionality", or acts in any way which is analogous to my
> [particular organismic] experience of the environment it's a process
> by which the energy put in to open systems is organized and
> dissipated. We [as organisms] do the same thing with technological
> innovation, don't we?
>
I must come back to the point that there is no will in evolution, thus
it cannot intend, plan or carry a plan out. Evolution thus is not, in
the natural world, evolving technology (the Hermit's circuits are a
different matter). We do all of these (intend, plan, carry out plans)
in design and manufacture. While evolution has provided us, quite
unintentionally, with our finite, incarnate, and perspectival
embodied condition, technology allows us to construct out of our
external environment material means by which we may augment
our limited natural ground capacities for perception, action and
cognition.
> -psypher
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