An Extension of Heart through Silicon

A few comments about the silicon interface and of our role to play in the future of thought: all discourse necessitates the bloody mess of the human heart in order to see through. This cannot save discourse, nor does it diminish the cold beauty of silicon that rests in its perfect silicon shape as a crystalline form. Thought will continue to produce dazzling crystalline complexes, palaces of the intellect housed within the internet, temporarily, for the sake of the ongoing process of viewing, evaluating, measuring and transforming.

It still takes the human heart, beset with grief, a capacity to be mortal, to die at the right time. The problem of the future is that it exists without our capacity in the present to pre-determine the outcome. It is the best that a human can do to offer sketches that move us toward this future, hoping that it will offer an abundance of possibility of life, but we cannot determine or figure what this life will be.

The heart extends. This is one of its primary evolutionary functions. We call it heart because the location of this intelligence comes from our chest, from a beating drum whose condition extends from broken-ness. The broken heart is the best, and philosophy, without a heart, and without a willingness to acknowledge the sovereignty of the heart, rapidly becomes barren.

Spatial extension is one of our prime insights. We see and experience extension and space, and without this spatiality all elements of experience lose their ability to differentiate themselves. The heart creates space, in extending to our fellow beings, to seek sentience outside ourselves is itself one of the primary acts of sentience, along with the wish to help whatever sentience is emerging to come forth.

When we work with others who need us to extend ourselves in some way, this extension, stepping out of our comfort zone, to a place of potential connection. Extension is never comfortable, and it extends beyond the selfish desire of an individual Dasein for self-preservation. "What have I ever lost by dying?" asks Rumi. This is never easy for me if what dies is me. Nevertheless the approach of a possible state of technological singularity implies the extension of consciousness beyond the simple self: we then become continuously conscious that it is not our intelligence that we seek to extend, but systems of intelligence, and aggregates of systems of intelligence.

Philosophy involves at least one form of understanding the universe by seeing the world through an abstraction, a form of "extension" that defines space: "pure extension" without content. A relativistic universe sees contexts of bending and warping space according to force: gravity creates gravity wells that we are told bend light and matter itself. There is still a conception of a grid with the coordinates x, y, z, and t. These are the Kantian categories of fundamental intuitions about experience.

Time itself is warped by the primacy of interest, or the fascination of an image, dwelling in this image either makes "time fly," or make it "drag on" without end in sight. We could say that all extensions depend on the capacity of consciousness to be engaged with a given image to make it work.

What I offered here at the beginning of this web log was an image of a quartz crystal, SiO2, silicon as carrying the light of a candle, and held in between Deborah's and my hand. The crystal image was then photographed and turned into an image on the web, held in silicon, carried forward through electricity. So far what silicon does, as an intelligence interface with our carbon-based intelligence, is to add or extend memory. It is "extended" only in the most rudimentary, utilitarian sense, and without giving much grace to the silicon to which we are indebted for this ability. Crystals are ancient symbols, used, since days of old for intuitive purposes, for their beauty, for their ability to convey light. Intuitively crystals were used for scrying and for meditation, thoughts always about the future and about thought as "delivering" consciousness (as one delivers a child through the perils of childbirth). The experience of sharing this "gazing" into the crystal continued to reflect back into my Dasein its own finitude, and that this finitude made possible an ability to have any magic at all in the world: that is to say an accumulation of complex energy. I have mentioned before that one teaching concerning magic in its capability to heal comes from the capacity to really listen, I could not ascribe anything really to this crystal, other than that I, as the viewer, was a confused, somewhat broken heart/consciousness attempting to put some measure of love into the circumstance. I realized that that was enough. The crystal both carries light through from "the other side" (wherever that might be, possibly some future) and toward the "sagenhaftige Druber" from me... but it also reflects light back to the sources of emanation: and it reflected back to me my own confusion and concern, and it was enough to see that that too was a necessary element in an apparently beautiful experience....

But crystals are cold, and they carry light and energy best when the warmth is held outside of their matrix. The warmth is in the receiver: and this is the best intuitive message I can receive from this crystal: it takes us to have a crystal. A similar parable came from Calvino's story of Mr. Palomar gazing at "the sword of the sun," considering the miracle of an engaged consciousness that can actually perceive and articulate intelligence. Crystals need us, and not just for the sake of our ability to "process" information, but for our ability to deliver out of the process something akin to a work of art. At bottom they need our warmth and our distance "en extensio" being able to see the light that they can carry. This does not give precedence to the heart, because the essence of the heart is to extend itself into a system, a dialectic even, where it continually necessitates the crystal for its existence and insight. The heart does not exist alone, nor does human Dasein exist in a privileged relation to things: it is relationship.

But what can a philosophy of the heart do or say other than that it is the philosophy of the heart, and that it should take some precedence over the philosophy of the intellect? A phrase from Wittgenstein that has always annoyed me is that philosophy is a form of sickness of thought, or thought seeking a cure for an over-agitated intellect. Philosophy at the same time seems to run aground if it seeks purely to order and regulate according to some "sovereignty," never questioning sovereignty to its roots in violence. The current violence behind our ordering and regulation of life has to do with an imbalance of ourselves as a certain kind of intelligence that has yet to find adequate relation and balance with other non-speaking intelligences. In this manner the philosophy of the extension of the heart looks at the non-speaking world that is on the margins of our discourse to have something to say, for example: trees, forests, oceanic systems, polar bears, sunlight, tracks of dirt, wind-currents, and so on. At the risk of sounding "animistic" the question of soul at this time comes from the speaking of the souls of our environment. The saving (salvave) of our soul comes from allowing our soul to speak: to find the moments when it is more akin to a "mineral soul," or the soul of an ocelot, for example, than merely the deadened world of an ego, administrator, or bureaucrat.

To save and to deliver are not necessarily the same thing, though both require doctoring.

Doctoring comes from a quest of a doctor to find and administer a "universal medicine" for our suffering souls. Many times a doctor can apply a healing salve, or at best set a course for the body to repair itself. The doctor takes on the hurling force, the elan of the wound itself, as the doctor takes on the parabolic force of a patient's projections, and then hurls or throws this force onward into a direction that implies the greatest healing is possible given the knowledge the doctor has of a specific living system. The impact of the wound should strike the man of knowledge, who has specific training and education in order to absorb the damage of the disease and then pass the destructive vector of the disease onward, hopefully out of pathology and into a path of increased life. Many times medical doctors, general practitioners, have to have enough training not only to deal with dressing wounds, and restoring the body to health, but with another existential function which runs a course similar to a wound: the perilous path of gestation and childbirth. The doctor thus "delivers." Many times the doctor can be himself at stake, at least in terms of his "reputation," if he delivers poorly. On the worst side, we can think of "delivering results," as being part of a technological discourse that always taxes and demands a "higher yield" from the energies invested. This fails only insofar as the system of energy that is interested in a "higher yield" is profoundly limited, for example the cancerous "setting upon" of matter by consumer capitalism. Here, the issue of "more, more, more" simply leads the consumer into a buying frenzy that taxes the resources of this planet and threatens a massive extinction and collapse of a relatively complicated human economic subsystem (all the while threatening to take out a bunch of other systems who, at times, are more interesting than the obcessive, moribund system of human sentimentality that threatens to criminally eliminate diversity for the sake of it's sole survival). But the doctor that has the best view in mind is the one who can envision a "greater" system of whole-ness to which that yield can be returned. (this is where Habermas, for example, in thinking philosophers as bureaucratic administrators is not wrong, just blind. The question is: to envision "health" on as dynamic and multivalent level of possible rational and non-rational systems of discourse as possible. This means playing language games with very explicit sets of rules that connect to language games with very loose sets of rules and very broad connective valences... to allow the electric lightning, the synaptic spark of metaphor, and Zeus as the divine element of metaphor who sets about setting things in order, to extend itself beyond literal interpretation.)

Let us extend the lens of doctoring and the question of return or yield, delivering. Do we consider only the economy of a specific nation-state? Do we consider a world economy of human beings? Do we consider a sentient economy of all essents? Perhaps that is part of the failing of modern metaphysics: to not regard the capacity of all essents (Wesenden) as radically ex-istent? If our economy stood for NOT taking-for-granted ("data," "es gibt") a single shred of existence in our capacity to think and transform ourselves, whatever we were doing: could we stand beyond paralysis that such an awareness would portend: could we still be animate, processing, eating, self-consuming/devouring... but somehow more consciously?

What I have offered here at times is way too heavy in terms of its explanation, and perhaps too light in terms of the stories that make such explanation necessary. It appears for the time being I have "something to say," though there are those who may criticize all this as chatter ("Rede") that lacks an existential component of Sprache. It appears I have something to say so far as I am blessed by seeing a connection. So often I will return to having nothing to say, waiting attendant to speaking and healing and delivering.