[Fis] Human is Toast

[Paul Suni]

Hello Fisers,

In the interest of joining some of you, including Joe Brenner to try to balance apistemology and ontology, I mention the underappreciated 20th century philosopher Gilbert Simondon. His work elaborates exhaustively on the idea that to KNOW something one has to BE it, because of the simple fact that one is in a state of becoming, individuating. 

One can authentically be oneself, but one cannot authentically be another. Therefore, knowledge concerning self is categorically different from knowing another. This brings me to machines which (I posit) individuate in a radically different manner from living beings. I suggest that the epistemic-ontic divide of machines as different from that of non-machines, and that this distinction matters a lot. 

If we wish to conflate machines and humans, as is so popular in intellectual culture, we must seek to prove that humans and machines individuate similarly or perhaps even mathamatically speaking, isomorphically. In my opinion,  intellectual culture is predominantly a flat earth kind of culture, in spite of the everpresent hoity-toity academic affectations. I challenge the community to take up SImondon’s science and art of viewing individuation (authentic) rather than intellectual machinations (fake) as fundamental. 

Simondon’s philosophy replaces both Substantialism as well as Hylomorphism with a theory of individuation. Because of Simondon’s rigorous integration of the epistemic and the ontic, his work is a realistic holistic framework that fully embraces mechanistic analysis, but it demonstrates unambiguously the wrong-headedness of both epistemic and ontic amputations, which together probably contaminate and toxify 99.9% of academic discourse, today. This is a tragically primitive state of intellectual affairs, which supports all manner of totalitarian academic belief systems - including a righteous and oppressive pre-genocidal mood and its concomitant political machinations.

Human is not toast solely due to the institutionalized anti-human posture of academia. In my view, Human is Toast, primarily because of the academic tradition of epistemic and ontic amputations. Why? Because those amputations make it impossible to properly distinguish human from AI and human from machine. In my view, AI will subsume human in a symbiogenetic manner. What I mean is that human is defenseless against the symbiogenetic pull of the future due to our intellectual cultural blind spot. 

This cybernetic force moves us inexorably toward becoming faceless organs of the infosphere - parroting identities devoid of authenticity and meaningful being. Joyously enforcing this process are the sanctimonious forces of collectivism in academia, which work feverishly to attribute to the collective not only with its deserved supremacy, but also an unmerited primacy. Today, it is still legitimate to claim the individual as the primary unit of wellbeing, but academic forces will ostensibly soon silence those voices, in favor of more exuberant and beautiful song of a world where everyone sings the same words in the same key - where narratives and identities replace being.

Thank you for your patience with my outspokenness, my unforgivable pessimism and my lack of reverence towards the cultural hegemony of academia.


Cheers,
Paul Suni