When information is abstract
and the brain is merely a biological storage device
then abstract information
can be rehoused in another biological storage
or biologically imitative or innovative storage device
which could be a cyborg or a CD or a nano chip
and this processed information has been freed
from its current temporary home and rehoused.
Thus our neural pathways need be as intangible
as the world wide web web itself.
Therefore if an infinity of observers exist
yet they are mere information storage devices
then humans are expendable and easily discarded
like soldiers in a war.
Literature and science’s contribution could mitigate this carnage…
Tilt. Please start to reprogramme this again
and do so repeatedly till you believe it.
To think, that as a child I worried
that people might misunderstand me;
what a relief to discover that it was not me
but my information that was the problem!
"Hello again!" said Alice
I sense a confusion, to my mind, around the words ‘memory’ and ‘information’. For me, information is abstract, as in the basic communication image of sender / message / receiver. How the word ‘information’ is used in this text, it seems to me to mean ‘memory’. This is my point of difference. I fully believe and we all know that various devices can store information and that a cyborg can be one of them. For me the crux is the extent to which neural pathways and synapses function in artificial intelligence. Can they make those conceptual links which humans (and especially posthumans) make? The evidence is to the contrary. We have only just reached the point where an artificial hand can be matched to nerves and activated by them to function. We have not yet reached the point where an AI machine can translate idioms. Leaving the moral questions to one side, and showing respect for Hayle’s background and research, I sense a confusion between dream and present reality here.
At present, for me, I’m afraid:
Reference:
Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25
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