Reading Spiritual robots: Religion and our scientific view of the natural world by Robert M. Geraci

The pope’s vehicle is much stranger than I remember. He really looks like an artifact in a display case at a museum. An interesting blend of security and visibility.

Reading William Gibson’s blog and thinking about his discussion of ATMs as part of his extended nervous system, I decided to start mapping mine. I began with the interface I spend most of the day with, my Mac - then to the WiFi router, then the cable modem, then the cloud, then the servers and the ‘others’. There’s so much more to add… And strange that it really did come out looking so hierarchical - I was expecting it to be more rhizomatic. Perhaps I’m not representing it correctly - or maybe that which was born of ARPANET actually IS more hierarchical than it seems. After all, the military designed it…

(If you visit Gibson’s blog - take note of the strange structure of the interactivity - rather than allowing comments on the blog, there is a separate message board which he clearly reads and comments on in his blog. Any thoughts on this?)

I’ve been working on completing a paper I began in Jenna Tiitsman’s Cinema and Religion course at Hunter College which explores the numinous potential of replicants in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner.

Cyborgs challenge the praxis that has traditionally divided human and machine (and companion/slave, animal/food, creator/creation, etc.). In doing so, they threaten to disrupt those “certain dualisms” that Donna Haraway suggests “have been persistent in Western traditions.” Like cyborgs, the replicants of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are situated outside the human/machine polarity. By threatening binary systems and insisting on an identity of plurality, replicants and cyborgs are granted access to a sanctuary in which they can interface with the numinous place of origin; the place Jenna Tiitsman describes as the chaotic “territory of creation.”

The following paper in progress (and this research blog) is a journey of exploration to map the cyborg sanctuaries in that chaotic territory of Tiitsman’s “creative becoming.” To situate these emergent conceptual-crossroads within more familiar cognitive spaces with supernatural access, I refer to them as the temples of cyborgism.

Download a draft of the paper here: Mapping the Temples of Cyborgism

The following quote from Tiitsman’s article on destabilized spectatorship and the creative potential of chaos in Blade Runner suggests another cognitive space in which a Temple of Cyborgism emerges.

“Replicant identity can only be unequivocally determined by a test of involuntary pupil dilation in emotional response. However the viability of this test is thrown in to question as the replicants spontaneously develop human emotions on their own after a few years. For the genetic designers, this ability signals a facet of replicant development exceeding the control of their design — the emerging life of the robotic beast.”

As Tiitsman points out, the genetic designers see the development of ‘their creation’ exceeding the control, or original intention of their design. This is clearly a similar reaction to that seen in human parents when their children pursue a path that diverges from the expected. However, in this case, the replicants aren’t ‘getting a piercing’ they are getting ‘humanness,’ rising to a ‘higher’ level of sentience. This suggests they are a kind of emergent life form, they are coalescing in the way that microbial life may have become more than it was by “adding the uniqueness” of other life forms to its own (the quotes here indicate the borrowing of this phrase from Roddenberry’s ‘Borg’ concept).

Emergent, yes, but what kind of beast is this? The beast that swims the moat around the “territory of creation?”

continue reading "Emergent Robotic ‘Beast’"

Quote from metacritical.com:

Jesus is a computer.
Transubstantiation via silicon wafer.
We have declared the cyborg religion.
Mammon is God, born this day.

From a summary of the preceedings of the 2000 AAR meeting: “Models of God in Religion and Science”

“Cyborg religion” also came up at a Religion and the Social Sciences section devoted to, “The Moral Life of Cyborgs: Issues in Forging, Navigating, and Resisting Virtual Communities.” A foursome from Union Theological Seminary, including Rachel A. R. Bundang, Nancie Erhard, Davina C. Lopez, and Aana Marie Vigen, offered a fascinating exploration into this cutting-edge topic.

This Union Theological Seminary group argued that virtual technologies are profoundly re-mapping “the actual way in which human beings relate within the world.” Presenters situated cyberspace within the larger political-economic-cultural context of an emergent visual age. Four themes were discussed: (1) the impact of visual images upon people, (2) the impact of cyberspace upon ecological relationships in the non-human world, (3) issues of morality as they are related to the body and sacred community of life, and (4) the relationship between the proliferation of information technologies and changes in patterns of human labor within the internet economy.