the alien within us

"If the individual cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy, and identity of himself and others for granted, then he has to become absorbed in contriving ways of trying to be real, of keeping himself or others alive, of preserving his identity, in efforts, as he will often put it, to prevent himself losing his self." R.D. Laing (1965), The Divided Self.

In a world where we finally realize that madness is just a convention, created by a society that itself can be characterized by lunacy, people will feel freed to morph their bodies according to their mental self-image. For your friday night transhumanist flavours, here's the Museum of the Mad, the Macabre, and the Marvelous, featuring some fictitious creatures blurring the boundaries between the fleshly and the mechanical:



"Sir Gustav von Cancertonus [...] has disassociated feelings towards humans and feels closer along side the crustacean family. He underwent an unorthodox procedure to correct his perceived shortcomings."



"The hoax [...]. A crude and tasteless look into the imagination of man, discovered in an Old Antique Shoppe where it was used as a conversation piece."



"Aerwig Mechanism. [...] An alkaline powered amalgamation of functioning pocket watch components, tar paper, and porcelain doll parts."



"Cupid papillon ansestrous. [...] The cupid fly was found in a small remote village stricken by disease. Some suggest flies laid eggs in the departed and genes were crossed resulting in a hybrid."

Before we have found an extra-terrestrial civilization, we will probably already have become the aliens we used to project outside of us.

a frappuccino fresh from the phone

Along these lines, wouldn't it be interesting if we had a technology that would be our perfect biological complement, that would nourish itself with our waste products, and produce waste that we could use as food? Think of a robot that would eat our fecals, drink our urine, and in turn produce, say, vanilla pudding with chocolate sprinkles, while being perfectly happy about all that. I think something like this might be possible, and that there is no inherently decreased evolutionary quality to things we consider to be waste products. Only from our own biological frame of reference this is so, but if we can create other forms of life than merely carbon-based ones, I think we could surely have a biological complement.

how giant crabs will save us

Experts Agree Giant, Razor-Clawed Bioengineered Crabs Pose No Threat

This is the best parody on techno-progressivism I have ever seen.

growing someone else's organs

The realization of the idea of having a body that you can change almost instantly in whatever way you like is coming ever nearer. It is now possible to create human organs inside a laboratory or inside an other animal, hence creating a kind of hybrid species, or an extreme form of parasitism. Take a look at this video:

human organs made to order

In this time where boundary after boundary is being blurred, dichotomy after dichotomy being dissolved, we need to start reflecting in a forward direction, see that understanding how everything is becoming united lies in the understanding and feeling that it already is united, that nothing really changes because all there is is one big cosmic process of which the understanding lies not in the modelling of it, the theorizing, the creation of mental images, but in the resonance with the direct experience and optimization of its beauty as perceived by you. A fundamental realization, the ultimate dichotomy we need to overcome, is that of seeing that life is the same as death, that our classification of things being living as opposed to dead is a mere concept, that there is a fundamental beauty transcending this dichotomy too, and that this transcendence is a critical point towards a state of being where we are enlightened with our minds, and later also with our bodies with which we will have lost identification completely, seeing them both as objects and as subjects so also this dichotomy disappears, making way for a supreme, holistic, invulnerably blissful mode of being.

Honey, can you walk out the fish today?

The content of car commercials was already peaking in far-fetchedness, but this is just insane. Apparently if you drive a Volkswagen Spacefox, why not go for the Fishdog as well?

Muto by Blu; surreal wall-painted animation

Fantastic wall painted animation 'Muto' by Blu studio, touching upon themes like multiple identities, morphing bodies, blending of flesh and technology, metamorphosis, and even mind-body dualism as at some point a man's brain starts living an own life and evolves into a new man with butterfly wings, seemingly signifying that the most beautiful self we can become is hidden in our minds and needs to evolve separate from our body. This animation, definitely inspired by genetic engineering, is sometimes a bit silly but nevertheless highly inspirational once you take it seriously that this sort of art can be a precursor to actual developments that become more and more prevalent in our everyday lives.

Just another liquid man

A little drawing I made while waiting for my machine to finish a 3D picture. Mostly we're one, but sometimes he needs time of his own and then we follow parallel creative tracks.

It was just an image in my head, that if man externalizes his reflective capabilities to the extent that he gets immediate control over his own body, he can transform it to live in any environment. In my view it is the next step of evolution of man and technology that the two converge and each conscious individual can find its ecological/functional/whatever-you-want-to-call-it niche, like a newly formed fully technologized and networked animal. Where in pre-medieval times man was in the process of conquering the liveable world, we will be able to greatly expand the notion of what liveable is, and enter a new, similar process, where we will roam new environments to occupy new niches, like the bottom of the ocean, the moon, or inside volcanoes.

The problem here though is the clash between our hardwired reptilian brain and our reflective neocortex, and I predict that this stage will take hundreds of years and in that I think I am less provoking and less technologically biased than Ray Kurzweil, who predicts full oneness of man and technology by the end of this century. I think that there is something fundamental which we need to overcome first as a species: the understanding, control and incorporation of our instincts with the thoughts and technologies we construct.

Regressive self-transformations

A movie you might find eerie at first, it shows a boy who wants to transform into a mouse because this would save him money on renting a living space. But seen the developments in genetic engineering, something like this may well be possible one day. But the question that radically challenges self-concepts then is; is this new form then still the same 'person' it used to be? According to me, a self-concept, probably including a name, is just a social construct. When it is not useful anymore, we might as well treat a new embodiment as a new person. Did the old person die, then? Yes, if people's concepts about that person are not relevant and useful anymore at all you could say he died.

In my opinion,  people inherently live by concepts and nothing but concepts, which are illusions. We have no truth; truth is constituted by the illusions that are most useful. This is a pragmatist stance, but in a world so complex as it will be, this is the most useful stance according to me; it makes you flow along with these developments instead having to go through clash after clash with internal beliefs you try to maintain.

Now we have rather static implicit conventions on this, but these sort of developments will make the world so complex that we need to explicitly start discussing these now perhaps seemingly absurd topics. We need to develop an intelligence based not on old, rational, science, but on practical embodiment theory. We need to learn and get a feeling for the relationship between bodies and their environments, and how the two can be attuned to each other to result in the most meaning, or happiness for the individual. Then, we will be able to think more creatively and analytically about how our bodies should be constituted so we feel at home with them, rather than regressing to static images already present in the mind, like that of a mouse in the case of the Halifax commercial.