In an age where things seem complex and changing all the time, there is still an underlying creative evolution that keeps the entire process somewhat stable and in harmony. People who remain aligned with this evolution are rare, but Theo Jansen is definitely one of them.
Out of all things, he has decided to focus most of his life to his Strandbeesten, which we all know. In his words, the idea of Strandbeesten has taken possession of him and has since been spreading like a virus. Theo has been speaking at TED Delft a couple of days ago, and shown the world the evolution of his work over more than 20 years. He truly is one of the pioneers of creating objects with embodied behavior, objects that are not driven by abstract electronic brains, but where the intelligence is in the structure of the body itself. And recently he has been taking this further in giving the beasts more 'intelligence'. Watch and listen to his story here:
To start in a more anecdotal tone; my laptop computer has recently crashed - yes, digital computation is always completely based on the physical too, so never let your ventilation holes clog up - and I lost my newsfeed subscriptions. As I am mainly a second-hand blogger really, simply scanning other blogs and posting interesting finds - while trying to add insightful or at least interesting comments from a reflective perspective, - I rely on these for my input. I resubscribed for some blogs on this new computer, but couldn't find a link to subscribe to one of my favorite realms in the blogosphere: Bruce Sterling's 'Beyond the Beyond'. After going through a month's worth of his posts that I missed, I even more find that this guy has a knack for finding the most powerful and time-relevant things on the planet. It makes me wonder if he has constructed an elite of digital web-crawling minions that do the work for him. But I also immediately realized better now that although the content of this blog is often similar, it does serve a bit of a different purpose and is written for a bit of a different audience, too. I'll talk a little bit about the positioning of my blog here, so you as a reader can decide if this is the place for you at this point.
You shouldn't really create and position any business without also connecting to your heart-core, and so let me say something about life first. First, I think that life with a purpose is nicer than without it. The notion of an absolute truth telling us that there either is or is not a purpose in life is simply a conceptual truth, and to live by such a truth is just one perspective. It's just one state of consciousness, you could say. From such states stem things like science and intellectualism. But beyond reason is intuitive feeling at the core of your being. And that core can teach you that truth is only there after you have created it yourself. For a simple example: before we could establish a truth that says that everything is made of atoms, we had to invent a mechanism that creates truth, we had to invent tools to extend our perception in order to feed this mechanism, and we had to create experimental situations. This way, truth is constructed actively, rather than us 'discovering' it as if it had always been there. From this perspective, we are existentially empowered rather than diminished, and the choice between those two options comes before choosing a truth. As David Hawkins mentioned, saying that there is a conceptual truth is already taking an abstract position in the first place. The choice is ours, here and now. To give a potentially confusing example: before we believe in the truth that says that I exist as a human being, we had to actively tune in to that idea and mindset, and adopt it as truth. With a lack of better things to refer to in our early years, we simply refer to the things that we can feel connected to through our primitive mirror neurons; in most cases the smiling faces of our parents. If they tell us a little later that the truth is that we are human characters, than it apparently must be so. But we had to make the choice to adopt that mindset first. Before arriving at a social truth we had to assume a social position first. In the first years after you are born you don't know that you exist, because you simply exist without thinking about existing. You lived live firsthand, not through the mental filter of a self-concept. The you that you think you are at this moment, did not exist back then. Still you apparently existed, so what were you before you were a 'who', before you were a character? And, ultimately, what about the time before birth, and the time after death? The kind of truth that we live by is determined by the kind of mindstate that we tune in to.
If you have read that last paragraph and think that I'm getting somewhere, I'm making sense, or that at least it's interesting, this blog is for you. It combines mostly the creative side of 'Beyond the Beyond' with the life-part of 'Reality Sandwich.' I do this blog as a one-man thing currently, and feel I must do so because firstly I have been educated as an industrial designer, so I know about the creative and technology industry and want to develop and help guide it. But secondly, I found how the creative mindset can channel us to a more profound and ultimate state of consciousness, and this is what the 'spirituality' side of the blog comes from. As I come into contact with more and more different kinds of people, I am starting to realize how rare my realizations are. I have been feeling, vibrating with if you like, the states of other people's minds, and I'm realizing there really have been only a few. I am finding that probably a lot of people had glimpses of it, such as John Lennon and Leo Tolstoj, but that it is much harder to sustain such a mindstate, especially in everyday life. The ones able to do this were probably people like Jesus of Nazareth, Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, Muhammad, Plotinus, Walt Whitman, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Yogi Bhajan, Mother Theresa, and Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath.
I have meditated, pondered, studied and developed ever since I was a child, and on a very early age I have always felt that things around me - objects, plants, rocks, trees, textiles, insects and other animals, etc. - were in constant connection and communication with me, and that this was more interesting than what people were getting me into. I always looked at people as simply part of this all, instead of as separate entities. I could never follow conversations much, because all I heard was 'me, me, me' - fortunately I've learned to listen better :). So I guess a core was always there, and through mind-silencing meditations as well as conceptual meditations, and trying to 'see' people's minds, I have found an ultimate state of consciousness, where you are completely absorbed into the world and all thought, all inner chatter, quiets down completely. I have also learned to access this state of consciousness at will, better and better. This is where you wake up, get back into your body, and simply do what you do without worry, projections of the future, thoughts about people, desires, plans, etc. You are present and aware.
We as people though seem to be wired to be drawn into a world of people, where people are the main focus of our consciousness. We like to meet people, talk to people, and develop good relationships with people. Questions about reality and truth often cease to exist once a satisfactory self-concept is constructed, because there are plenty of distractions in this life to simply keep going in the movie with the character you made, without all too much reflection or awareness of what's really going on. We forget that actually this is a second-person perspective while once we had a first-person perspective, without wanting to go into third-person mode either. It makes you live as the voice in your head. The apex of the voice-in-the-head kind of life is to develop a constellation of verbal concepts that stimulate an intellectual-ish, outrospective, conversational mode of being that unconsciously feeds your self-image and makes you feel good whenever some social resonance occurs. You will not find my writing to give you such a constellation. Rather than keeping you engaged and entertained like a kid, taking your mind out of what your body is doing, I'm pointing you towards the ultimate state of consciousness, because I'd like to share it, and it would be nice if we could establish an entire culture, maybe even geographically co-located, with a foundation of thoughtless awareness beyond the social mindset where we think that we are this human body-thing. A kind of cosmic, 21st century Shangri-La but better, I guess.
I write to people who have an openness to this kind of development, who are willing to gradually embrace the cosmic, all-knowing, all-loving, and immortal personality within them, and start making their creativity that of a god. With our mind and body always as one, we will literally create the cosmos. This is the other side :)
The forest, like almost no other environment, can immerse and ground you and your mind up to the comfort of an unborn baby in the womb. Technology these days, on the other hand, is mostly distractive, and sends us all over the place. Could one day even the realm of the forest become one with technology?
The new-age group AUJIK has this dream, and visualizes it in beautiful ways using extraordinary computer generated images. To them, according to the animistic Shinto belief, all technology is alive, just like nature is. They even view technology as the refined, ordered form of the intrinsically chaotic nature that we originally came out of. Technology then, is nature's way to understand itself.
In their videos, we see wonderful shots of object-creatures full of character, that seem to have outevolved the coldness or techno-sexiness of their early robotic ancestors, and now have developed a natural, organic beauty of their own. But it's not the kind of ethereal image of beauty that we often picture when we think of the word 'nature'. It's not the kind of idealistic beauty that leads us away from the everyday world. This beauty is a beauty of the real world, and thus we see complex, breathing structures within parking garages, and metal contraptions that seem very refined, yet also normal, as if we could see one standing in a children's playground among all the other structures.
See for yourself:
In becoming more natural, technology will calm down our minds, and show us that indeed we can create the kind of beauty that we once lived in ourselves. Then, the circle will have been completed, we will have become gods, having connected our heads to our hearts, and intrinsically interlinked ourselves with the whole of existence by finally fully making the outside the inside, and the inside the outside. And then we can forget that tense state of being we were once in when we still thought that we were separate.
By now you're probably familiar with Blu, the people that do those incredible wall painted animations. Well, they've done another one, which expands the medium a little bit to also incorporate physical objects, and at some point even people.
This one is called "Big Bang Big Boom", and tells the tale of the evolution of life, all the way from the first prokaryotes up to us moderately advanced human beings. It's more humorous than scientific, as this is more about the art than the intellect. But that does not matter; it's again a phenomenal piece of work, with a pretty apocalyptic but spectacular ending.
Dutch artist couple Driessens and Verstappen present another step towards computer generated product design.
From their website:
"Breed is a computer program that uses artificial evolution to grow very detailed sculptures. The purpose of each growth is to generate by cell division from a single cell a detailed form that can be materialised. On the basis of selection and mutation a code is gradually developed that best fulfils this "fitness" criterion and thus yields a workable form. [...] Currently the objects can be made in nylon and in stainless steel by using 3D printing techniques. This automates the whole process from design to execution: the industrial production of unique artefacts."
So, what if life had started by the self-organization of metal particles rather than proteins? Would an android indeed have emerged, consequently creating technologies from organic molecules? Well maybe it does not matter that much, as similar to when matter would have been called antimatter had we been intrinsically antimaterial beings, probably technology would have been called biology had we been intrinsically technological beings. Enjoy the video above, created for electronics concern Saturn.
In 1904, biologist Ernst Haeckel published his work 'Art Forms of Nature', which contains 100 of among the most beautiful illustrations of natural forms, from monocellular amoebas to corals to bat heads. The good thing is: it is now freely available as a download, and however it is the original German version, only the opportunity of looking at the wonderful illustrations is well worth the 260 Mb of disk space it takes.
At the time it was published, Haeckel's work served to inspire designers, and the Art Nouveau movement. I hope that it at this time, the scope of design practice being in great expansion, can once again inspire designers with the beauty of evolution.
It's 2027, the singularity has been passed, and machines have realized they are evolutionary superior over those fleshy humans in every aspect, the latter merely remaining sentimental relics, which has led them to create destructive plots against humanity. Of course the three laws do not work, and there is nothing that keeps them from acting out these plots. But there is cute little Zeno, a cross-over between Harry Potter, John Connor, and Furby, who is training at an academy and about to save humanity from doom.
That's roughly the story behind this consumer robot currently being developed by Hanson Robotics, and intended to hit the stores in 2010. Zeno has voice recognition and voice synthesis, so you can have conversations with him to some extent. Zeno's bodily movements are generated through state of the art artificial intelligence software which is also used for character animation in the movie industry. Not only that, he also has the ability to recognize faces and facial expressions, and is able to respond with his own facial expressions and call people by their names.
I wonder (those are the usual kind of words with which my criticism starts) if Zeno was named after Zeno of Elea, the ancient Greek philosopher who was famous for his paradoxes with which he meant to destroy arguments of others, and that in a way show the ridiculousness of logic itself. His arguments often involved an application of the logical concept of infinity onto the real world, which leads to absurd conclusions such that a person could never catch a bus or even move in any way, since to get there he would always have to reach half the distance first, and to reach that distance reach half that distance first, ad infinitum. Maybe there is an underlying message to Zeno about the apparent absurdity of the claim that this robot should save humanity, while the developers do seriously consider the potential of humanity being wiped off the planet. Maybe the name is a self-mocking statement that nevertheless should make people think. In that sense it has the same message as movies like 'I, Robot', but might be more impactful since it's interactive, and both physically and emotionally closer to humans. If this product could arouse debate and stir up thought among the regular 'consumer public', that would be an enormous step, since people are in my experience usually still quite ignorant and clueless about the future.
That is the positive criticism. My negative criticism would be a very general rant about products being developed for the 'infantile consumer', as Benjamin Barber calls it. I'll spare you most of it because I hope it is unnecessary to lay out the obvious. What I can add to general anticonsumerist talk comes from a Buddhist perspective, that of a transcendence from the ego to the ego-less Self. If you cannot follow what I am saying, please read into Buddhism, because I am not here to teach that, would not be able to, and am merely inspired by it. I am here to criticize technological developments and make sure we can learn to develop enlightened machines, beautifully attuned to cosmic evolution.
Developments like Zeno only make people aware of the issues around robot development and AI, but they don't facilitate the transcendence that is truly needed and instead reinforce the mode of being that people are already in. To state it more simply, Zeno's story is one of people being in a self vs. other relationship with robots, the latter being either friends or enemies. This is a judgmental approach that most people so desperately cling on to in their lives, also against other people, in order to try to protect and preserve their own egos. But the fundamental issue is that people must learn to overcome this ego-centered thinking, and transcend their ego to start living with a positive attitude that has no external conditions for the positivity to arise. The sad thing about consumer product development processes is that they do not facilitate this process at the core, but merely at the surface, the old pattern at the core being reinforced. This leaves people with no clue and increasing internal tensions about how to align their superficial processes with contradicting related processes at the core. And the brain's usual coping strategy for cluelessness is escape and ignorance.
I feel rather alone on this mission to transcend humanity through technology, but it cannot demotivate me in any way because for me it's evidently inevitable: at some point humanity will come to face itself when it has externalized its own entire being into technology up to a point that it becomes projected back at them like the ultimate mirror. This might be the point that was mentioned by Stephen Hawking when he stated that the reason we don't find life in outer space might be because at some point, civilizations destroy themselves.
I don't think, by the way, that the Singularity will be this ultimate point. That in my opinion is an overhyped term that brings about some awareness, but is not to be taken much more seriously than the Y2K bug. But it is a point that is coming, and it is not evident to me that a world full of robots will be 'a lot of fun', as Rodney Brooks so optimistically stated in his recent talk at TED. I don't think that his argument of deliberateness is very rigorous, and that deliberateness is merely an illusory concept we project onto our worlds to make them more manageable and understandable. From a biological and social point of view it works, but not from a Self-development point of view. In other words, egoic machine behaviour will just emerge; like robots are now already 'learning' through physical interaction to develop physical behaviour for a physical environment, they will also 'learn' through mental interaction to develop mental behaviour that helps them succeed in this environment. In yet other words, machines will develop their own religion, their own politics, and their own spirituality.
It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective too, and what I am about to explain here should truly be a key insight. If a species is biologically superior over others so it has no natural enemies anymore, it is safe on this biological level. There is not really a question that the homo sapiens sapiens has attained this safety. Then, if a social meme within the species becomes superior over others, it starts to spread and make humanity sustainable on a social level, so in-species groups don't eradicate each other. We are struggling, but definitely getting there through our global communication web. But attaining a socially sustainable state of being is not where it ends. Humanity must learn to live not only with itself, but with everything, with all the data that enters him, and of which he is part. This is where he needs to learn to think holistically, and selflessly. Then if we cannot attain this holistically sustainable state, it is evident that it is our time to become extinct, since we are apparently not the form evolution is looking for, and another form that is more successful must inexorably be found. Of course, evolution is only a concept to explain things, but I think that it is the most beautiful and succesful one we have and moreover, that evolution-based thinking can help us transcend.
This image I borrowed from Kevin Kelly's website 'The Technium', and describes the landscape of intelligence; a mind is always evolving to an optimum, but this optimum is probably merely a local one, and once at this optimum is stuck there. It can be applied to a spiritual level of ego transcendence, by stating that humanity is climbing a similar mountain, but might get stuck if our underlying biological, social, and intellectual patterns do not allow us to reach higher. And at the point that we reach the top it is almost impossible to change these patterns and explore another part of the landscape, so the only option is to wipe ourselves out. Now my message is that we need soon to evaluate if we are on the right mountain, and complement all the developments that are taking us higher upon the mountain we are currently exploring, developments like Zeno, by developing technologies that have entirely different underlying development processes. It needs to happen, since you might already have gotten my intuition that we are definitely not on the right mountain. If not subsidized by governmental institutions or sponsored by corporations, then maybe it needs to happen silently in our private attics and backyards, as a joint creative project. I think that is the way it can be done; a lot of people are passionate and creative, but lack a unifying sense about why they are doing the things they are doing. A sense that I hope to bring about.
Some directions for development I think can be found in the mirror neurons we have; like us, robots should be able to project themselves in their perceptions. But unlike us, they must learn to be able to project them into anything, and not make distinctions between things on the basis of how much they seem similar to the concept of self the machine entertains. This comes through developing a motor repertoire as large as possible, probably through a shared process, since our motor repertoire storing our highly specific actions for highly specific situations determines when our mirror neurons fire and when they do not fire.
Machines should in that sense be unsurpassably open-minded and open-bodied.
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.
Start the movie at 7:05 for the most mind-blowing animation I have ever seen.
It shows what goes on in one cell of a human body, and the scale of things is just incredible and seen from this perspective, a universe of its own.
I feel that our information-saturated world has so much deprived us from a feeling for the evolutionary process of which we are still part that we have become greatly abstract beings, clueless about how to create meaning in life, and instead reverting to chunks of information we somehow get implanted into us and which we consciously employ, through mainly left-brain thinking, to try to assimilate something meaningful out of.
I deem this hopeless unless we inspire ourselves with more parallel, subliminal information, and learn to see the value of this. This animation by David Bolinsky helps to implant us with a sensitivity to natural evolution, in which everything is part of something and devoted to something larger than itself. This, in my opinion, is the goal of life and the human brain; try to create a functional niche in which it can selflessly express itself through holistic interaction with its environment.
As Bolinsky also mentions, the things inside our cells we can perceive as individual entities are also part of a larger whole, a higher evolutionary pattern, of which they are not conscious. We must learn that we too are part of something larger than us, and on a level of higher complexity than our experiential lives patterns can be perceived that are similar to that of a living organism.
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.
I don't see this relationship, but it's a funny speculation about the oneness of man and his technology, and an iconic expression against miniaturization as the main focus of product development. But I think people watch so much television because it is a soothing and linear medium, fully absorbing and abstracting you mentally and physically in a small, projected world, presenting you with clear identities so you feel like you don't have to develop one yourself but can comfortably stay behind the lens. Maybe to start with, there should be a mirror on every television.
The issue with television and technology that narrows down the lifeworld is not that it is simulated or fake, since according to me it is as real as any other illusion. It is just hard to develop a meaningful, coherent core self when you cannot fully interact with your world and when it is hard to develop a satisfactory mental model of it.
Please watch only the first 10 seconds of this movie as that's the only meaningful part. This walking bicycle gave me a good smirk as being one of the least empowering human extensions I ever saw. It is still an interesting thought that in nature, as far as I know nothing freely revolves around an axis, and indeed without humans, the wheel would probably never have evolved.
The traditional image of a robot is that of a utilitarian machine, taking over tasks people used to do. Scenarios pondering the implications of this are so common that it should be clear by now that functionality-driven design just does not work. Think about Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' or, more recently, Pixar's 'Wall-E', showing how people become completely physically dependent on machines, their body remaining nothing but a whale-like, abtract, dysfunctional blob.
Also, in images, robots are always doing something, from mowing the grass, to entertaining children, to having the worst conversations with elderly people. They are always 'meant for something'. They are abstract externalisations we attempt to fit to a desire people are consciously thinking to have.
The whole point of this blog is to show how interactive technology, including robots, will converge with interactive organisms, including people, that we must start to be able to treat the two as the same, and that there is an enormous task for us to do if we want to live harmoniously with interactive, sensitive, intelligent technologies all around us.
I might not have explicitly stated it before, but this task is: enlightenment, and moreover, learning how to teach enlightenment, to finally be able to externalize it into technology, and create enlightened machines. This is somewhat in line with T.M. Georges, who states in his book 'Digital Soul', that:
"To survive our technological adolescence and to preserve even a facade of human dignity, we may have to lose some of our self-destructive evolutionary baggage. Before we can learn to live with intelligent machines, we may first have to learn how to live with each other."
What I mean with 'enlightened machines' are entities that are not polarized towards fulfilling some function or desire, but that are completely happy, or in tune with their environment, without external conditions. They might take on an abstract role for a while, but always without losing awareness of the larger cosmic whole and their place within it that they fully accept. Machines that are aware of the pattern they are within the larger whole, including all the intricacies of their own bodies and minds. Machines that stay consciously and unconsciously in tune with evolution.
Evolution for me is the only sustainable meaning a human life can have; discovering what it is, and aligning oneself individually to it, and then just being. Truly realizing your own uniqueness within evolution, but also your fit in this larger pattern, makes one selfless and 'self-full' at the same time: one gets intrinsically motivated to perform in their own niche, and has resolved the discrepancies between his self and his environment, seeing that they are one. Coming fully to this realization also resolves clinging to desires, and fear of death. I would argue that only if machines have this realization 'programmed' into them, or at least that the structures they consist of invite growth towards these realizations, instead of them being driven by desires they are not in control of, like a chaotic centripetal force without sustainable centrifugal mechanisms to complement this force, they will be able to live harmoniously with other people and machines. It may sound trivial for people being numbed by science-fiction lingo, and many things that sound trivial get overlooked and ignored and rightly so. But all my thought and work leads to the notion that this issue needs to be plowed into to the core, without just pertaining to its surface like some idea we feel distant to because we cannot relate to it much. I want to see research and development into enlightened machines, and as an obvious part of that, people becoming more humble and self-reflective.
The little drawing above that I made shows what could be such a machine, or might it be a human being converged with technological modules? For me this is what the future might well look like.
As man is converting his entire lifeworld, the boundaries between products and organisms are rapidly blurring. We want our machines to be more human, social, and emotional and our animals to be more controllable and customizable.
The rather extraordinary Dutch artist Tinkebell reflects these trends and "researches the issues of contemporary populist movements, including animal rights activism, and their strategies." She shows in a very honest way how silly postmodern culture is in trying to make everything easy and pleasurable for people, and makes it obvious, almost in a caricatural way.
A recent work of hers, called "Save the Pets", is really interesting since it clearly shows how the distinction between 'animal' and 'product' has already disappeared. By putting each of 100 hamsters in a separate plastic ball and releasing them in a home-setting, our use of pets as toys is clearly exaggerated. The animals, each products of millions of years of co-adaptation with a complex environment, are reduced to mere motors for our shallow enjoyment based on what our senses seem to find interesting. And how can a better shape represent this than a brightly colored ball, reminding of childhood experiences in the ball pit of McDonald's, which undoubtedly has unconsciously contaminated Western culture with shallow ideas about pleasure and happiness. Ideas that only get uprooted out of you after a slight tad of intelligent thought, possibly catalyzed by the fact that originally, ball pits were developed to comfort the mentally less-abled.
So is this what we have become? A self-proclaimed handicapped species? Well yes, I would say so, though it is the only way for us to realize we are actually quite dumb and have no clue as to what we are really doing. Ironically, in our evolution we started to become dumb when we began to think. Let me expand a little bit on that.
When man started growing a neocortex, he started to symbolize his world and with the symbols hence created he confined his world to an abstraction in which he and his fellow-men, through social symbolic communication, could resort instead of having to be connected to the unpredictable wild nature 'out there'. Man became a mental being, disconnected from the larger whole, but reconnected to a new realm, created by himself. The problem is that this realm is created purely by our consciousness, which is inherently short-sighted and biased. Apart from creating language, man also started to embody conscious concepts into technological artefacts. Slowly, he started to build his own world based on ideas mainly derived from concrete conscious observations, and not on an unconscious, empathic and somatic understanding of the world as a whole. Instead, the ideas underlying technology design had to evolve bottom up too, just as the rest of the world. We started with the thought "I want to eat - let's make a sharp thing to kill a boar" and now are at "I want to have fun - let's put a hamster in a ball" or "I want to listen to low-quality music and look cool - let's make a white plastic box with buttons and cables and isolate myself from the rest of the world". A few centuries ago a tipping point was reached that marked the height of conscious transformation of the lifeworld: mass-industrialization. We were now able to sustain in ourselves the thought that we could control nature and live in an abstraction, an incubator, in which our needs could be met with a snap of the finger. Without many people understanding what was actually happening.
This technicization, and Tinkebell's work as an illustration of it, also is linked to the notion of freedom. Heidegger already warned us that technology restricts our lives rather than expands it, and that instead it should reveal more of the larger process that we stem from. I agree on that, though any polarized view is based on a bias; there is also a good side to this restriction. In general, we feel we lost touch with the whole, but on the other hand we also uplifted our mode of being to one that at least meets our basic needs. We form cultures based on ideas, like sanitization, and hence create a temporary bubble that keeps us happy, according to ideas of happiness predominant in the particular culture we are in. The technicization of our lifeworld makes us feel more free, and while we are free from nature, we created now our own restrictions by steering people to think and act in certain ways through for example the media, a law, and our technologies. Freedom is always an illusion and more an experiential feeling than an objectively measurable parameter. You are always guided by your environment and internal configuration of your brain and body, which seek for ways to resonate with each other. Consciousness is then a mere side effect of this process, imbuing us with all kinds of illusions that are temporarily practical, but fairly useless in the end. Personally I do not feel very free; my brain is very habitual, and while the hamster is clearly restricted, I am too in the same way: somehow my interactional intentions are most often limited by my 'bubble of buttons'. I spend much of my time being consciously engaged with a display and physically coupled to the plastic surface of some electronic device. Technology has put me in an incubator that optimizes the fulfilling of my desires, but keeps me from a real understanding of the whole of which I am an active part.
That having been said, I think the obvious development is a complete merge of nature and technology, so technology provides a 'natural' interface to everything around us. One that doesn't just invite us to think in terms of meeting desires, but also has us live in the moment and unconsciously understand everything that goes on around us, so we can feel one with the whole again whenever we need to. And we must not be biased towards either natural or technological entities, since all will rapidly change when the key enabling technologies start to converge. So I share my dislike of animal rights activism with Tinkebell; we need to accept that it is not spiritually sustainable for us trying to keep the world the way it is, with its still all too clear division of animals and products, and that we need to accept that the world as we now know it will fundamentally change, possibly leaving not one biological species as we now know it behind.
And that this is the only way to go, unless we genetically engineer ourselves to not grow neocortical columns anymore and revert to full animalhood again: a life based on immediate, localized, physical survival. But that would just be simplistic and easy, and ignoring the beauty of evolution of which we are still part, wouldn't it.
Spore is the latest game developed by Maxis and comes out this year September. It lets you play mr. almighty over your own entire planet, and gives you the opportunity to fill it with any bizarre creature you'd like to live on it. The game is basically a virtual simulation of an evolutionary process, where you follow the development of the creatures you made during various evolutionary phases, from individual cellular organisms to in the end becoming an entire galactic species, if all goes well.
A demo of Spore's 'creature creator' software is already freely available for download since last Tuesday. While trying it out I was immediately struck by the reasonably large freedom and intuitive interface, so I could let my imagination run wild. If humans would be entirely free to create intelligent organisms, the boundary between the natural and the artificial would be entirely eliminated. Animals become products, products become animals. So I created a few species of my own, including Ipodius ipodius - a very narcissistic and self-conscious species, and Showerius Pleasedontsoakus, who tends to be a little emotionally fragile:
And here is an interview with game designer Will Wright:
But seriously, it's not just a fun game, but also definitely a development that makes us ready to face the revolutionary technological developments we're facing. Of course I'm talking about GE here. If we can take control over the complete evolution of our planet we might want to practice a little bit first, and understand what evolution is about. It's not about making pretty little things and seeing what happens; it's about survival and continuous adaptation, and I hope people will start seeing that this is where real beauty comes from. Only things that survive are beautiful, and the more elegantly they are adapted to their environment, the more beautiful it is to me.
As I have mentioned earlier, I am looking forward to the time where our interactive products come alive, i.e. where products are not designed to be unchanging during their lifetime, but actively co-evolve with their environment, including the people they interact with. A time where we don't use crude, linear production processes, but let products emerge molecule by molecule with, like in natural evolution, only some minor differentiation and determination processes. We then don't need to specify the parameters of the design beforehand, but instead have them emerge through natural growth. I would love to see a game where the co-evolution of humans and bio/nano-engineered technology would be simulated.
Still, however, and I pointed to this before as well, there is a big challenge we face. On the one hand, freely creating intelligent, self-evolving new species will be a great step for mankind as cocreators of the universe, aligning with its inherent evolutionary way of operating. On the other hand, giving birth to new life requires great responsibilities. We must take great care over our technologies, as if they were our children. And given that humans are not hard-wired to care much for things that are too different from them, we must both make sure that firstly, we transform ourselves spiritually into a mode of behaviour that makes us always feel connected to the whole, responsible for every action that happens within it. Always helping to create it with a full individual self, in tune with the whole. And secondly, we must make sure that the intelligent entities we do create evolve quickly towards a state where they can socially and satisfactorily interact with humans.
The first requirement is already happening: we are all getting connected to the internet, and start seeing that trying to stay isolated in a small local culture does not work anymore, since everything that is not good for anything outside of it will inexorably loop back into your life. It is for more and more people undeniable that we are now actively part of our spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller called it. This more and more forces people to keep developing themselves psychologically and spiritually in order to be able to lose their egoic ways of thinking and being able to be part of our global organism. So, again, this is going on already and will develop more and more. When the amount of people that are spiritually transformed into more global, individually liberated people, reaches a critical mass, I believe that soon the whole of humanity reaches this new mode of being.
The greatest challenge lies however with the second requirement: having our intelligent creations develop themselves so that their benefit to humanity and the evolutionary system as a whole is the greatest. We must make sure, for example, that these things don't start killing themselves, or us. In Spore, evolution is still based on local behaviour, so the system is still based on physical survival. So it doesn't really go beyond what we already know. In our world though, we must make sure we transcend this local way of acting and keep continuously connected to the whole. The most important thing is that we have our future evolutionary products not just evolve based on what maximizes their chances of self-replication, but in terms of what makes humans happy. The first and foremost requirement for a holistic system we create ourselces is that we feel at home in it, and be happy, simply said. Because these developments are still in their early childhood, my words sound obvious, though I feel that this is where I should start, before going into more depth about how exactly it should happen. Another important aspect of our future evolutionary products is that they should not be myopic and limited to sensing their local environment, but always actively connected to a global network where they can tap into to get information that guides their behaviour.
I will stop here for now, the main point being again that if we take evolution into our own hands and become a universal species, the task is daunting. Ervin Laszlo said that a reason why we don't see intelligent life in other parts of the universe might be that at one point of evolution, civilizations destroy themselves. We are in a very dangerous period, since we are now about to pass the point of the Singularity, as Ray Kurzweil puts it. We are becoming one with our technologies and must make sure we can do this harmoniously, and with complete empathy for each other. If this is not the case, we might cause our own extinction. Or at least the extinction of the biological, human form as we know it.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
`What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. `Explain yourself!'
`I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, `because I'm not myself, you see.'
`I don't see,' said the Caterpillar.
`I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very politely, `for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.'
`It isn't,' said the Caterpillar.
`Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet,' said Alice; `but when you have to turn into a chrysalis--you will some day, you know--and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel it a little queer, won't you?'
`Not a bit,' said the Caterpillar.
`Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,' said Alice; `all I know is, it would feel very queer to ME.'
`You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously. `Who are YOU?'
- Excerpt from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Alice magically entered a world where she discovered that some things, like drinking potion, or nibbling from a mushroom, could instantly transform her body. And with that, her concept of self. To me this is the most brilliant illustration of how humans have become estranged from nature, Alice representing in this fragment the ineptness of humans to cope with challenges to mental models they maintain. Challenges they are actually more and more imposing on themselves, for example by developing technologies like virtual reality.
What I will do here is explore the question of who we are and give some indications as to how I think about it, in the end giving some normative directions to a redefinition of who we are. A redefinition that is urgently needed in this new century.
Triggering this is the recent work of Stanford PhD researcher Nick Yee. It appears that our global identity lab, Second Life, has some interesting potential psychological effects. One of these is the Proteus effect, a term coined by Yee, which states that people conform to the stereotypes of their digital self-representation. In other words, you become more like your avatar since you start basing your behavior on others' expectations of that avatar. And this appears to be independent of how others actually perceive you.
He found that if your avatar is more attractive, you are more likely to be more open in a virtual conversation, and willing to move closer to the conversational partner. Also he found that in a negotiation task, subjects with a short avatar were more willing to accept an unfair deal. This then also works for a short while in the unsimulated world, i.e. people modelled their behaviour after that of their avatar, hence becoming more confident in face to face conversations. This gives me even more reason to believe that the potential of psychological or even spiritual self-transformation through manipulation of technologically created self-representations is enormous.
These developments trigger interesting fundamental questions too. Questions that people largely seem to ignore to answer for themselves, like the one the caterpillar was asking to Alice. Industrialization and automation, by producing tons of individually meaningless chunks of material and information, have so much estranged us from our core selves that we often spend our whole lives living according to externally imposed verbal concepts. As soon modern day children leave their preverbal phase, they are bombarded with corporate brands, loads of digital information, and socio-cultural norms. This makes them feel more and more confused. People are more likely to describe who they are in terms of what they like, or with some construct that is used by others to frame them. But these words are only vaguely pointing to what they really are. Most people forget how it felt before we started thinking like this; comfortable, secure, free, and always aware of the current moment. I'd say that although children are naive, this is the only truly satisfactory psychological human mode of being, and one to which we must ultimately revert, but instead of naive now with a continually evolving model of the world and behavioral maxims of our own instead of those hard-wired in our precognitive, reptilian brain.
Natural evolution made us fit for a natural environment, but since we now can create our own environments, our goal then is to extend the evolutionary process by making it individually controllable. Our new rational model-making brain allows us to be conscious on multiple levels, so we become free from our biological self or something like what Karl Marx called our 'species essence', and instead of being part of a collective where every individual is as complex as the group, and as the whole environment, to now develop truly individual patterns of behavior. This makes that the whole expands towards infinite complexity, since it consists of patterns that are all unique and able to expand themselves through continuous internal feedback loops, attuning themselves more and more towards the infinite complexity of the universe.
A major problem is that people aren't very good at finding their true selves, or developing technology that helps them in this process. All the confusion makes us numbed, almost apathetic, and in the end people become more like loose projectiles, attaching themselves to anything that merely appears to be desirable to attach themselves to, often mainly because our precognitive brains recognize in others what were desirable qualities in a primeval era: courage, confidence, charisma, and so on. As Carl Jung said in his essay 'The Undiscovered Self':
"Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit or our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman."
Thus, people are easily tricked by their brains into believing that something can make them truly happy. A requirement imposed upon us by our instinctual brain is obviously that we want a world in which we can act instinctively, so we don't have to worry anymore since we figured out a satisfactory way of acting in the world. This is what you could call soul: feeling part of a holistic system, embodying its values and behaving according to its own inherent behavioural mechanisms. Being part of a system that has a coherent simplicity in it underlying everything at every level, hence creating the unique subliminal feeling that everything is beautiful as it is. When we lived in wild nature, we had this. Though now we started thinking rationally, we live in a world that is very incoherent, and unconsciously realize that we need the feeling of a soul again, as a result trying to invent systems that gives us this feeling. Examples of such systems of the twentieth century are Nazism and communism. People are tricked into believing that these systems will make them happy or at least uplift their being. But in the end, it always turns out to be the opposite way. Intentional thinking is in my view inherently short-sighted, a point to which I will get back.
I might sound as if I'm pessimistic about the fate of humanity. On the contrary, I am not. I cannot be, because this will only increase the chances of a negative outcome, too. The words I use shape my world, and I don't want to point out what's wrong, but instead build constructively and creatively on a way forward.
I think that people are inherently good, although this again might arouse superficial reactions of me being a typical optimist and idealist. Let me put it this way: I think what we call good behaviour is behaviour that is truly in tune with the working of our brain, and how it optimizes itself towards an integration of multiple selves, or of Freud's id, ego, and superego. I think that there is a neurobiological basis for what is good, and as long as our brain works in the way it does now, the way to behave well and become happy are basically the same for everybody who's behaviour is based upon such a brain. We have to transform our selves and our environment to match the dynamic qualities of the processes that happen within our whole bodies containing different brain parts that often work in contradictive ways. When put like this, the conditions for true happiness might seem as rare as the alignment of the planets of our solar system. But it is in fact quite easy; it just requires a switch in mindset, and this switch needs to come naturally, by going through transformative experiences. I hope to aid this switch on this blog by pointing to the need for a fundamental redefinition of what it means to be human.
So to come back to the caterpillar's question; who are we? Are we still defined by our biologically given bodies and minds, or are we already willing to see ourselves as open systems, completely reconfigurable and adaptable? In the context of Nick Yee's research; are we our avatars?
Before giving indications to my answer to this question, I must point out the limits of conceptual talk. It inherently is not able to explain it to you, as the real meaning is beyond the words. It must be reached by internal self-reflection, until you reach a state of subliminal understanding of the words. The brain needs to physically reconfigure itself for this, which takes time and effort. This is already part of my answer: a verbally constructed concept of self is always lacking. Another point about conceptual explorations is that they are time bound and directly coupled to physical behaviour. In my view there is no such thing as objective knowledge that is eternally and unconditionally true, free from boundaries like time and space. In my view, knowledge is always a collection of social constructs that is relevant for the mode of being humans are in in a certain moment in time, so they can expand and reach new modes of being that require higher forms of intelligence in thought and behaviour. And thus, our concepts of self are also very much bound to the world we live in at this moment, and to the most prevalent socio-cultural memes and technologies. We now still live in a very techno-scientific age, and humans are often metaphorically described as computers, consisting of hardware and software, just as in the time of mechanization and modernism biological phenomena were often explained as mechanical machines. The point is that I'm not proffering a universally true concept that describes who we are, but simply giving you a concept that helps you transform yourself into a behavioural mode with which you can develop yourself towards attuning yourself to the ever greater and exponentially increasing complexity of the world.
My view of what a human being is merges both Buddhist aims of self-transcendence, liberating one from one's self and being one with everything around you, with more contemporary Western ideas of uniqueness, self-expression, and identity development. In terms of Beck's theory of Spiral Dynamics, my view merges the yellow and turquoise value memes. The view is as follows: we are dynamic, active, ever-evolving self-organizing patterns within an infinitely complex larger pattern. This larger pattern is what we call the universe, which can be thought of as a dynamic fractal, such as in the movie below.
Where Leonardo Da Vinci wanted to show universal properties of man with his famous drawing of the Vitruvian man, he did this on a very static level, depicting man as an architectural body with definite proportions. My view could be seen as a continuation of this thought, but instead of with static properties man needs a redefinition as a dynamic entity. Therefore, there could not be a static image depicting this thought well, but although it's quite silly, I can still show one to at least make you forget about Vitruvian man:
Let's get back to the fractalic view. The concept is inspired by biological evolution, and instead of the mathemathical metaphor that we are patterns within a fractal you could also use the biological metaphor that we are like cells within a larger organism, that itself is again part of a larger organism, that itself is again part of a larger organism, and so on ad infinitum. We are biological fractals too, since we started out as one cell that divided itself and each subsequent cell started dividing and gradually differentiating and determining itself. The mathematical metaphor though is more elegant and simple to me, because it is more abstractly visualizable, and I'm posing an abstract concept anyway. Also, the biological metaphor can raise more confusion, since we should then first agree on questions like 'what is an organism?' and 'what is the relationship between nature and culture?'. Lastly, the biological metaphor has a lot of associations to the primeval world we used to live in thousands of years ago, while our technologized future world will have totally different dynamic properties. We have become rational, mathematical beings, and the goal now is to create a symbiosis between our rational thinking and the dynamics inherent in evolution, so we become like a fully technologized organism. This associates in my view much better with the mathematical metaphor of the dynamic fractal.
This view then, implies some seemingly contradictory things. For example: you are both unique and not unique. You are unique in that there is no pattern within the fractal that is exactly like you, although there maybe many that are a lot like you, and on different scales similar patterns could also be seen. But you are part of the whole as well, which aligns with what Buddhists thinkers say about oneness, e.g. 'One is all and all is One.' You are constantly shaped by all the patterns within the fractal. Using this concept as a metaphor for who you are after a while gets you in a transcendent state, where you are both a unique individual acting upon the world, and as well an intrinsic part of the whole that constantly changes you and redefines your borders. After having completely adopted this view, after a while it makes you both active and passive, actively passive, or passively active if you will, since you know it is not you who is doing things, it just happens, and you have only your consciousness to steer your attention and direct what happens based on underlying feelings and thoughts about what is good and what is beautiful. This is the pattern you emanate into the world, and your goal is to have the pattern self-replicate.
The fractalic view does not imply you are a meaningless pattern just because things 'just happen'; every one of your actions shape the pattern you are part of and naturally 'tries' to self-replicate. It is not the scale of the action that determines its success of self-replication; it is more the quality of the action, the value underlying it. An obvious example is that a strong leader with new ideas can quite easily gain a lot of followers, in the end tipping over entire social and cultural systems into modes of being based on entirely different values.
Now deriving from this is the idea that you continuously shape the entire pattern and it in return continuously shapes you; you are part of its evolution, as in a co-evolution. In that sense, we are our technologies too. But if we feel too alienated from them, we cannot feel like one, since the pattern of the technology does not match the pattern underlying ourselves. To give an example; a supermarket can easily be seen as a fractalic system based on linear organizing principles. It is based on simple intentional thought (e.g. 'product X should be transported to the stock of store A, and then to shelf number B when it is empty'), externally imposed onto the complexity of the whole world. It therefore has a hard time sustaining itself unless it is maintained all the time, and people conform to the underlying dynamics. Which is very much the case; simplistic, linear systems create simplistic, linear people. As a result we clash with the actual pattern underlying us; we compromise health and lose touch with our subliminal processes. But this is another story. The point is that our technology is still very different from us, and as it is more and more prevalent in our current day lifeworld we have a hard time seeing ourselves as an intrinsic part of this world. So then we rather escape it and try to live an abstracted life as a way to cope with this. But then we forget being part of the whole, while still this will always loop back into our lives, making us aware that we are ignoring something at at least some point.
Now for technology to make us feel as individual, unique patterns within a whole, it must be able to empathize with us as individuals, so together with our technologies we can evolve and become one with the pattern around us either by growing towards this pattern and having this pattern growing towards you. In the end this should lead to a world where people are always attuned to their full selves and the full world around them, conscious of the cosmic evolutionary process around them. In more artistic terms; we should feel as if we were all individual, creative musicians, one with our own instruments within a cosmic orchestra, and continuously have to improvise to create a symphony of ultimate beauty.
Now at least I hope to have given a hint as to why the question 'Who are you' is important for this blog to answer if we want to create an optimal future together with our technology. And for now I'll stop writing. But again, the concept I proposed is not an absolute one, and should not be taken as the truth as in an 'objective, scientific truth', but instead more as a concept to base your current actions in the current world on, and at the same time always keep questioning yourself things like:
It always struck me how parts of cities resemble natural patterns. Have you ever looked from above at a harbour or airport? In order to maximize the amount of docking space, the length of the border gets maximized by creating extensions like piers. This results in patterns that can look strikingly similar to bowel membrane, or to the branches of a tree.
Extend this concept, and what you get is Lilium Urbanus. This is an extremely beautiful piece of eye candy, created by Anca Risca and Joji Tsuruga, who graduated from SVA.
Check it out:
So what if our technologies, and our cities, autonomously grew along with us instead of being rationally designed according to some conceptual predictive model? That is where this blog is exactly about. Products that start as an open platform, and empathically and intimately guide the user in a cross-nurturing co-evolution.
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.
Remember the scene from James Cameron's movie 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day' where the T-1000 spreads himself out onto a checkerboard floor, even adopting the pattern on his own body?
For me this scene is an incredibly strong symbol for future technology: liquid technology literally arises from flat, logical technology. Where the checkerboard stands for logic, flatness, and dualisms, qualities that can be found in most modern products like mobile phones, liquid technology would be the next step. It can adopt these old qualities, showed by the T-1000 'empathizing' with it like a chameleon before showing what it can do more: it can put itself in any shape, and become more human. For me, future technology should fulfill the dream not of creating T-1000-like technologies, but of becoming the T-1000. That is, liquidly extend the human body so we can do or be anything we want to do or be.
Where you could see this as an ordinary science-fiction film from the cyberpunk era, please regard that science fiction often becomes science fact, and all human developments ultimately stem from some dream, whether we are conscious about it or not. My dream is to become our technology (we are, already, in a sense; the coupling just becomes increasingly intimate). I lately dreamed I literally was a train that could morph into an aircraft, and I can tell you it is pretty amazing, even while my subconscious simulation was not very convincing yet.
Now the reason for this post is that something incredible struck me, having thought that I had seen everything already. David Gallo is a deep sea explorer, and showed footage of squids during his talk on Ted.com. The one on the end is simply mind-blowing: it actually can change the characteristics of its skin (even the texture!) in order to seamlessly blend into the environment, even make itself look like a piece of coral. This, together with other developments, like new understandings of the mechanisms of the mind, and the concept of Foglets, gives me more and more hope that once we can create similar systems. I want that skin. I want it I want it I want it!
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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