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.

House of Being: The Ecconomics of the Text and the Gesture of the Soul

We are sitting here as we watch the oil and energy crisis grow increasingly fierce. There seems to be a kind of a bottleneck on growth: that comes in the mode of the limited resource of energy.

That's really what we face in the light of the information revolution: we have the information, and we have put it out there on the web, but only as long as the web retains energy.

We already pay the phone companies in order to have access to the world wide web. Lets face it, communication ain't free. However by web it takes a lot less energy than me transferring my whole body half-way round the earth by jet airplane. We may log hundreds of hours of internet conversations, but may have used only a fraction of the same amount of energy and/or money as if we had traveled for three hours on a commercial jet.

So it's cheaper to "conversate" (this term gratefully acknowledged as a neologism) via the web. We have in this sense uploaded the virtual bodies of our discourse from paper to electronic inc.

The thing with a written letter is that it is stable; perhaps one day we will manage to make an electronic network as stable as a three-hundred year old letter: the ink is still there, the hand that wrote and the eyes that first looked in receipt belong to physical bodies of people who have passed on: but the gesture of the body, and, in that, a piece of the gesture of the soul remains in the physical gesturing of each of those letters, and the letters also contain some form of yearning toward the subjectivity of the one they were originally intended to be received by.

There are lots of stories of the prometheus types who believe they have discovered a source of unlimited energy. They seek to bring this into the world: they are turned into Pariahs and shunned. Perhaps this could go back in human history (beyond Prometheus) to the example of Christ, of Nikola Tessla.

There is still one principle in an energy system that had not been thought through for Tessla: even if he found an abundant source of energy, abundant does not mean infinite.

The human race has a tendency to push limits. As all life forms tend to expand to their maximum capacity within a given system. Things tend to move to extremes until they exhaust the given base energy of a system, or a set of hunter entities moves up the food chain and reduces the population of the emerging species once again. Any meta or predator species is reliant on the other elements of the system, and ultimately to a certain energy base of a system, in order for it's survival. Predators might even get smart and herd flocks for them to prey on.

So here we are, this flock of sheep called humanity, chained to an addiction to oil because oil companies want us to purchase oil. Are we preyed upon? -Of course. Our labor and energy is going more and more to feed the oil industry.

Global scarcity of fuel: as the pond fills up with lily pads: Chinese industry now kick-started, India not far behind: the energy system that used to have a few elite countries producing refined goods and exploiting the under-developed countries for resources dwindles: "too many chiefs and not enough indians," that is what some people will say. But we knew the system would get like this. This is in somebody's plan, no? There must be someone who is fantastically rich and well informed who is playing "God" or at least "Demi-ourge." But I Cannot believe that this fabulously wealthy man or woman would want the system to implode, apparently the way it's doing. It's a juggling act, oh yes, to be certain, but it is not just a matter of throwing these things up in the air too lightly: the hell of this juggling act is that if we cease juggling and the light goes out, then that is "it" for us. We step out of the system and things are completed, done at least in our respect. The knowledge, and the yearning, that rests in the libido of these writings, would then be extinguished, for each of these writings themselves is bent and formed from some inner voice that is yearning toward the future, that it itself expresses a gesture of soul seeking to live forever. Ah yes, but you only live forever in those small acts of kindness. And this small act of kindness is what apparently disappears in the technological age: now we only have grand sweeping theories of kindness.

But kindness is a sort of acceptance of obliteration. You leave a mark that is immortal insofar as you have received or insofar as you have fed. Isn't this what kindness boils down to? Nurturance of another human soul? (Rod Gorney may have gotten this much right).

What is the act of kindness for all of us human beings toward the earth? Is that not the same old question; the same old answer to which seems to be "we are stewards." This is old news in one respect: probably as old as the Christian mytheme in some respects. Deeper still is the question driven deeper to the level of materiality: the earth becomes my own materiality: the fabric of the gesture becomes woven of the human body, the gesture of an open hand. But deeper still to my own particular, finite, singular existence.

Singularity. this term is used as a potential source of energy, a potential source of something very strange, and very other. Currently we are producing singularities in the largest particle accelerator in the world. So far we are still alive: what is that that keeps us alive, really if not our love that extends itself? What is a singularity but a curled up contraction? A black hole!

We are facing an economic black hole: the finite reserves of one energy system are rapidly dwindling: what is two or three hundred years geologically? The hope of the system: to discover an advanced and super-abundant energy system from which to grow.

Tessla did not think to the next step of the energy system. Or to the fact that the human race, as is common to most systems (not just parasites, unless we count the vegetable kingdom as parasitical to the solar/mineral system), will expand to the limits of the energy system and simply absorb it: at a certain point it flourishes to excess (Bataille) but then dies back.

Bigger is not necessarily better: sometimes its just uglier. There has to be a shift in consciousness. The sprawl of urban and suburban landscapes: blighting the intelligence (and apparently successful juggling-balance) of living systems (chaparral, forest, kelp bed, tundra, wetland, desert, prarie, swamp...) creates harsh forms of abuse to intelligence: inner cities produce abusive people: straight-formed concrete, glass and steel: lacerate and pulverize the human soul in an abstraction: Corbusier's architectural obscenity: "a house is a machine for living."

Dynamiting trees in "Fitzcarraldo" Herzog sees the wilderness as an opposing resource of tremendous energy, but it is guarded by its intense opposition to human "leisure." Opposing us, the ultimate example of forest, and the instinctual lives of we human beings ourselves: "suffocation and fornication in the jungle," is what Herzog calls it. He calls it a "glacial emptiness in the eyes of the Grizzly bears" (in Grizzly Man): this force guards and protects nature as it terribly opposes us in its innocence. Innocence, I laugh, innocent we are not.

But what if we human beings have to learn to live on the threshold of that terrible outer existence: that nature. We make simple encampments and tell each other stories of what is and what should be. We are, above all, small, minuiscule, dwarfed by the immensity of the forest, all of us, each and every one, anthropologists who have "gone native." The only answer that I believe Heidegger could think of: "Language is the house of Being."

Such words, Heidegger's words, are written to carry the greatest depth of grief, and to bring out a shattering and most utterly singular expression, the gesture of the soul of the soul. Singularities contract, but love extends itself a little further: from the shattering of the soul, there remain those who pick up the pieces: not just rag-and-bone-men: we are picking up pieces of lives. And what is life if we do not extend in offering to give someone, a friend, the one we serve... to give someone back their soul. This may be the essence of any "therapy" or any real "education."