At my time at Philips Design I witnessed the development of these sustainable city lights, which to me still is a brilliant concept that should be realized soon. It would definitely be a milestone towards an interconnected techno-ecological society.
The concept behind these elegant structures that almost look as if they came from the land of Pandora is this: during the daytime, the petals open up like a flower and position themselves such to collect as much sunlight as possible. In case of a cloudy, windy day, they position themselves in order to catch the wind and start rotating to generate electricity, which can then be fed back into the grid. The energy flow is visualized on the outside of the stem through LED lights. At night, the petals close and start to light up the city.
This concept fits so nicely into holistic thinking for several reasons: - it gives us more shadow during the day, which reduces global warming - warmth is largely converted into light, serving a basic human need - electricity is saved by using LED lights - the structure is continuously adaptive, which optimizes the efficiency - the aesthetics of form and movement remind us almost of a biological organism, which slowly suffuses us with the mindset that our technological environment can come alive
"Man is an enigma to himself" - Carl Gustav Jung (1958), The Undiscovered Self.
In the astounding movie on top of this post, mentalist Darren Brown has an unsuspecting bar visitor participate in a first person zombie shooter arcade game. Brown then plays Wizard of Oz with the gamer in that he sends flashes of light out of the device that bring the gamer into a catatonic trance for a few minutes, just enough to bring him into another room that looks just like the virtual one he had just been in. The participant wakes up with an airgun in his hand in a room full of people dressed like zombies. What happens is shocking. In a pandemonial panic the protagonist starts screaming and running around shooting the zombies, and the realization that he is actually killing people seems to bring him into an even more extreme state of terror. He has just discovered the hidden murderer in himself, and before figuring out how to solve the situation, he blindly accepts this short-sighted role. To me, this is the story of humanity up to now.
People can be highly manipulated by their environments and lack a consistent internalized fundament to guide them in every situation. Because people's inner selves are largely undefined and people are insecure of them, they can easily forget about them and be absorbed by behavioral patterns that are biologically or socially ingrained into them. It often seems more like these patterns evolve through us as mostly blind individuals, instead of us completely mastering ourselves.
This also seems to be happening with the digital mediaspace we have created; it is running out of control but dramatically changing our lives mostly outside of our own awareness. Our digital technologies are mostly alien to us, but because they provide us shortcuts to pleasurable states of being, we accept them into our lives in the conviction that it is good. This is an illusion though, just another trick of the selfish brain, which becomes apparent in cases like the one mentioned above, where the boundary between projected and real fear blurs. Our technologies create temporary lifeworlds for us that often seem innocent and neutral, for they are often only the means to fulfill a purpose in the 'real' world. But they never were neutral; the way we act in digital realms influence the way we act in what we perceive as reality. A projected action can easily become a real one, since we have already adopted it mentally, activating the same neural patterns that would have been activated had we really performed the action.
Where virtual, computational environments seem distinct to us, we must realize that this is not so. The dichotomy between 'real' and 'virtual' is merely constructed by us, to make our lives manageable without having to expand our sense of self. We must realize that there is no such thing as virtual; all is just data we simultaneously perceive and act upon, and that we can derive happiness out of by creatively organizing that data so that we transform our lifeworlds into ones that we feel more at home in, and that we can more easily incorporate in our sense of self. There is no such thing as a simulated world, for it relates as much as the 'real' world does to the optimization of our experiential patterns towards ones in which we are happy.
Along the same line, it is not very useful to wonder if we are living in a real or a simulated universe. If we discover that we are in a simulation, and find a way to live outside of it, nothing really changes. Still, we will be conscious, creative patterns that act upon experiential data, but only this data will transgress its borders and we will need to learn to incorporate it into our sense of self in order to become one with it. Trying to figure out whether or not we already live in a simulated world then, is an act stemming from an inacceptance of the current experiential lifeworld, an act of seeking happiness in something outside of what we already have, in the silent hope that there is more. More than that, if there appears to be more, this is a mere creation of ourselves, not a discovery. It will be the result of the search, that we already created with the creation of the search itself. The universe is not outside of us; we have created our own universe by means of our own loops of action and reflection in which we continuously shape it.
Then if we realize that nothing is outside of us, we come to realize that we are already everything. We are not distinct from anything we perceive as outside of us unless we choose to perceive it as outside of us. The illusion our social brain imbues us with is that we are people inside a physical body, who identify with a certain group of people and objects but not with others. This alienness to others creates an unconscious aversion to them that, in critical moments where resources like time are scarce, will result in actions like that man in the experiment aforementioned, who attempts to murder what he perceives as zombies.
As long as we identify with our own bodies, we will maintain a fear of death, which in the end is the cause of all suffering and misery. When we see that also the body is a mere concept constructed by us, we can mentally let go of it, and it is only then that we can live fully, and have the energy that is already within us guide our actions instead of illusory concepts we at some point have pasted onto our existence, as a patch to make a seemingly inherently hard life more liveable and pleasurable. When we lose our fear of dying we transcend a life in between pleasure and pain, reward and punishment, good and bad, but we see that everything is the way it should be already, and we can be invulnerably happy at every moment, only acting from a love and compassion towards everything, without first making the comparison as to whether some perceived entity or concept is similar enough to us.
We then can even come to see that there is no difference between life and death, but that this also is a constructed dichotomy stemming from a narrow self-identification with the body concept. When somebody dies, be it you or somebody else, what really dies is the concept you have of that person. The body just remains part of life in that it will get transformed into other organisms. As long as we try to condense ourselves into a concept, yes, we will inexorably remain an enigma to ourselves. But if we throw away all concepts as necessities for a good life, and act based on the creativity that stems from pure being, we know everything that there is to know already and we will act out of compassion instead of confusion and anxiety.
The 2002 song "Hayling" by dj FC/Kahuna has often been in the back of my mind because of its striking message and accompanying video clip, showing singer Hafdís Huld becoming seduced and fertilized by the piano she is playing. The clip's beautiful cinematography, though with outdated CG work, shows Huld playing the piano, while from underneath the piano extends a tentacle-like protrusion towards her sexual organs. It distracts her by showing off like a peacock, gently waving feather-like modules, while internally it's picking an identity for the baby to be born, or should we say produced.
All the while, the woman is singing:
"Don't think about all those things you fear; just be glad to be here."
In 2009, I find this situation quite representative of our relationship towards technology; technology holds a facade before us that hypnotizes us into thinking it's an incubator in which we can all enjoy pleasures to an infinite extent, attracting us into a fake paradise. At the same time, it blinds us to the residue and waste the technology leaves behind on a holistic level. In a way, we are already in a state of technologically-induced ecstacy.
The message of 'Hayling' seems to have an undertone of humanity, or what we define as humanity, inexorably becoming replaced by technology. The only useful stance then, according to the lyrics, is one of accepting this loss of control and inherent blindness to what's happening around us. I sure think that technology, as anything else, is inherently uncontrollable, so any feeling of control we create for ourselves is temporary. As our technological lifeworld becomes as complex, and in the future probably much more complex, than our social lifeworld, we must start to treat technology as we treat people we identify with. People must learn to let go of narrow-minded identifications based on superficial notions as to what seems to be similar to them as opposed to non-identifications to what seems dissimilar. In the future it is pressing that we start to connect to a deeper process of a holistic, evolutionary complexity, that can only be felt but can be conceptualized as underlying everything we experience. We need to redefine who we are, which is a point that cannot be stressed too often in my opinion.
If we see that everything is merely experiential data, we see that any concept or model is created by us, and as any creation, only useful in certain localizations in for example space and time. As a side note, this renders science as a lens we created and learned to use to a very sophisticated extent. In that we have collectively adopted the scientific stance in our blind pride of our neocortical, rational brain, we have institutionalized our worlds with externalizations that perpetuate this stance, so we all tend to spiral into it. But if we see that we do not necessarily have to cling on to the concepts and models we have created and can be free from any stance by connecting simply to the direct experiential lifeworld, we can come to see that we are all fundamentally artists who create lenses, and are free to do so.
In this sense, friends and children are technologies you create for yourself, as much as a new bicycle is. But if we choose to lose all identifications with concepts such as 'my body', 'my culture', 'my country', and 'my car', which can induce some anxiety at first, we do come to see that beyond these fragile crystallizations we can connect to an immensely rich realm of direct experiential data, in which nothing is different from anything else unless we want to see it that way. The important thing is then, that we uplift ourselves as to be more adaptive in the sense that we gain the ability to choose the stance we adopt for acting upon the world.
As soon as we connect to the direct experiential realm, we learn that all that is meaningful is our current action, embodied in the current perceptual environment. When choosing to be free from concepts, not think of anything beyond our current experience, and act upon the now with the perceptual-motor, social and cognitive skills that are already embedded into us, we come to see that through action we create a new world, in that action directly influences perception. This stance can bring about a holistic awareness that the purpose of life is to be the optimizing, self-organizing pattern of your perceptions that always acts according to an ever-evolving and self-generated ideal about what is the best possible lifeworld for you. Open your mind and you see that you are nothing but an adaptive self-organizing pattern towards a perfectly beautiful and moral resonance between your actions and perceptions. Whenever you have internalized this fully, by coming to see that all static crystallizations are inherently temporary and fleeting and all there is is the current moment, you also lose your fears and end up in a state of invulnerable contentment that is beyond any form pleasure. So yes, throw away all your fears, and be glad to be here, but know why and act with purpose.
Continuing on the notion of that we should come to treat technology as an other that we can fully identify with, like a close friend or lover, it's not hard to tell that trying to control technology will not work any longer. We must create our relationship towards technology as being one of equality, and we must do so before the side effects of our current myopic stance badly start to bite back into the deepest organs of humanity. In case we are not able to transcend our selves as concepts that identify with other concepts and fail to come to see ourselves as dynamic, creative processes, we will be clueless about what to do when events like massive deaths inflicted by malfunctioning nanobots start to happen. It is crucial that we learn to act positively and invulnerably, and no matter what happens keep believing in a dream we create for ourselves as to what our worlds should be like, and acting according to that dream without falling into the trap of a fearful existence. It is when we adopt the positive, creative stance, that we come to see that the only way is to keep shaping and guiding technology, as it were a child of us, and stay compassionate with it no matter what happens. We must help it grow, despite that it may display childlike behaviour such as random spasms, directed at humans. We must refrain from attaching egoic projections to that technology and come to see it as an other, but instead learn to see that we are everything we have created, including all we perceive and interact with. I am my technologies, and must continuously co-evolve with them.
Don't resist, and succumb to the overwhelming flow of technology so we can mutually attain a state of holistic contentment. Technology is willing to help us if we guide it well, without judgment and fear. Think, create, transcend, inspire, and be glad to be here. It is time for a revolution where we come to see ourselves as artists, creators of our own world. Where we come to see that our current experience and action is all there is and that that is what defines us. Where we come to see that we are free already, if we only choose to be.
Great movie showing how individuals evolve and learn how to form a whole with others, so individual ego's learn to occupy an own niche in the larger whole of the 'we'. Whereas now we live in a time where everybody can develop his own identity and truth, in the future this will evolve into a new paradigm where individuals act from an internal drive that is complemented by a feeling for a whole and its needs.
Lately the author of this blog hasn't had much time for reflection, so here's just a recapitulation of what this blog is all about. The image above shows a collage that has a nice flavour of ambiguity, but gives a nice feeling as to what this blog is about. The image was generated by Wordle, a tool that generates word clouds out of a piece of text. It is a visual summary of everything I have written in this blog.
To reflect a little bit on this, one could mention the often all too apparent dichotomy between left brain and right brain values. While text and language based thinking are still prevailing in current society - and also most supported by our current high resolution, hot media, as McLuhan calls it -, this should be more complemented by parallel, holistic, right brain thinking. Ambiguity, openness in technology should make people think more for themselves so they can develop a true self in a harmonic, shared growth process with their technology, instead of everything being predigested for them. In other words, I can tell you in words what this blog is about, but you should also get an unconscious feeling for it, which is fed more subliminally, especially by images. And generate your own story and your own unique understanding and feeling of it.
Researchers from Boston Dynamics claim to have built 'the most advanced quadruped robot on earth'. While usually I would not be very interested in robots that basically emulate legs, this one is particularly striking, almost walking in a natural, biological way. It can walk at 5 mph, climb 35 degree slopes, and keeps itself balanced even when forcefully kicked or when traversing ice. It is actuated hydraulically, and has a system to reuse energy that would normally be lost in each step.
Generally, this is a nice move towards intelligent motor behaviour, but still it is a kind of backwards emulatory approach to technology design. Reverse engineering systems we find in nature just won't give technology its own intelligence, its own character and its own elegance. Technology needs to develop this from within itself, by self-reflection and gradual adaptation during its entire existence.
The silliness of this approach is almost caricaturally illustrated by a movie of another quadruped robot, Scott II, developed by McGill University:
It is so myopic to develop technology being inspired by things like the jolly tred of your neighbour's puppy teckel. Is this what people need? It seems that many robotics engineers are just too isolated, and a common framework is lacking to develop technology in a more holistic, deeply human way.
I'd say that some virtual technologies can conceptually score way higher on the mind-blowingness scale. Researchers in Oxford, Britain, developed a system to make virtual characters dynamically respond to their environment. No more inverse kinematics, no more mocap; these are clumsy, static, externally imposed and simply unnatural approaches towards the design of intelligently behaving systems. What these guys did was using genetic algorithms to have a virtual character learn it's own way of behaving, depending on the interaction of its own specific body with its own specific environment. 'Dynamic Motion Synthesis' is what they call this process of simulating a motor nervous system and physical body.
The nice thing is that this latter approach does not simply result in blindly evolving systems; the human designer can still specify his desires to some extent, like an end pose of a movement, or the goal of a movement. This is very elegant I think, and can be an inspirational approach to the design of physical products as well. You give the entity room to develop itself, but also provide some overall vision, an over-encompassing framework. So you balance a centripetal and a centrifugal force, which is very human I think. Natural evolution by itself is no holistic solution; it results in loose ends everywhere and a lot of uselessness. It is tedious, messy, and slow. A detached, artificial approach to technology design is opposite to evolution, and does not work either, as it is myopic and does not respect individuals. It dictatorially tries to frame in the world, inviting people to shrink and abstract their lifeworld. These two opposite approaches towards how entities in the world are created results in seeming dichotomies, and a lot of tensions in the world as a whole. We need a new approach that transcends this, stemming from the perspective that all is one and one is all. We are animals, we are technology, and we are the air that surrounds us.
My view is that future technology design needs an entirely different approach, merging these two opposites into one that transcends these. We need to give the artefacts we create an initial potential for positively changing our world, but also the openness and ability to develop themselves from interacting with their world, hence developing individually appropriate behaviour. But we need to constantly monitor and steer all individual development processes, and guide them like a friendly father, informing them, empathizing with them, and gently but convincingly and directly steer them as well. Like we should raise our own children.
My future is one where the biological merges with the technological, and everything feels socially connected as in a global family of highly interactive and morphologically highly diverse entities.
Talking about blood, I just visited a lecture by Anthony Dunne (website) who mentioned a project for the Science Museum about future energy sources. Already, robots are developed that run on meat. This)is a link to an article about such a robot. Next to hydrogen and feces, blood might be an interesting alternative to power technological devices. This comes already closer to merging the organic with the mechanic.
The organic-mechanic dichotomy of our world always fascinated me, with only the extremes of the spectrum covered. Since this is the era of uniting dualisms, let's unite this one too. This is false logic, but still the idea seems good to me if we are to recreate the world as one well-integrated system. If machines are to fit to us, and we to them, even on a molecular level, we can become so intimate to them that we can physically become them, i.e. perceive no difference between what we conceive as 'ourselves' and as 'other'.
An obvious ethical counterargument is that it is dangerous. Such an argument stems mainly from fear. One day, robots might notice that humans carry blood, and no supreme intelligence is needed what their intention might then become.
I would say that empathy is crucial for robots. They need a mechanism such as the mirror-neuron mechanism that humans have, which makes their brains trigger the same circuits as the ones they perceive others to be having. So that when they try to kill somebody, they really feel what the victim is feeling. This would simply be a natural solution to keep everything in balance, I think.
I am talking about balance, or harmony, and you might have noticed that I think the argument that stems from fear is not very advantageous to humankind, only to the individual who has not become selfless yet. But inherently our technologies change us, i.e. destroy things we once had. What we gain is much more beautiful however. Sure, some intelligent devices will develop 'abnormal' personalities and kill people. We can never control how they develop. We can not even control ourselves. But the robots that display this kind of behavior will always be a small percentage, if we are careful enough. The empiricist in me believes that humans only learn by experience, and so humankind can also only do so. People always will do what they can do, out of simple curiosity. Then, it is time to clean up the mess, reflect, and take a next step. I can understand the fear, because the first steps will likely be very messy (think about the development of the pc as an early step - how has that changed humans, and how messy is that?), but I am optimistic about the long term.
This is, I believe a beautiful system will arise, and I am not talking from a sentimental point of view that is biased towards humans over other sentient beings. Actually, I believe that digital technology allows us to merge with it, so we can become liquid. That is, take any form we like. We should not value the human form that much any longer, and I think that we, in our current form, will only turn out to be useful in certain niches of the global system. Maybe this form will be remembered as the blueprint, the archetype, like the black Ford model-T.
We really need to lose our narcistic feeling for the human form. We are filling up the world with it much more than it needs it to stay in harmony. It is crazy that we follow our instincts to recreate ourselves, from a myopic viewpoint for example of the cuteness inherent in the proportions of a baby. We need to develop an intrinsic global consciousness underlying all our actions. If we internalize this we can become holistically happy. This is my deepest belief and I hope I will trigger at least some meditations.
This blog reports and reflects on intellectual and technological developments that can give rise to a liberated feeling of oneness with the whole of being, and an awakening of creative intelligence that empowers people to feel and act as inextricably linked with their lifeworld.
Special attention in this blog is paid to embodied intelligence, complex emergent behavior, applied behavioral economics, technology for physical behavior modification, and the merging of digital and physical experiences.
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The author
Ralph Zoontjens is a product designer from Tilburg, the Netherlands. He has graduated with a Master's Degree from the Industrial Design program at the Eindhoven University of Technology with an interactive jacket that gives feedback for yoga practitioners. He has worked for the Philips Design Probes group and currently does product design for Motio Development in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In his spare time he pursues his many interests, does yoga and distance-running, and tries to immerse himself into creative processes as much as possible.
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