Singularitar-WHAT?

After my lastest bout of paper-writing / cold-fighting / food-poisoning hijinks (a vegetarian salad? C'mon, I can accept getting turned inside-out by a salad, but a vegetarian salad?), apparently my resistence has been lowered to the point where I can now be infected by the Singularity meme.

In the fog of a mind overcome with something looking like scattered poetry magnets dancing just outside the Van Allen belts... or in the ionosphere with the aurora... or something... I did about the most dangerous thing I could ever do under the circumstances: go browsing at the bookstore.

How I ended up with Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near is a little beyond me; I wasn't particularly looking for a transhumanist manifesto. Never mind that the very first instructor I faced when I knuckled down and went back to school was Max More.

Sorry, but I just have to digress. I spent two years and change at Ambassador College in east Texas, and based on my experience there (which I would later discover was not all that representative of university-level study) I pretty much gave up on the idea of higher education. So I'm reflecting on how I left off with a very fundamentalist, authoritarian system and picked up again with a junior college class in Philosophy of Religion conducted by a libertarian transhumanist... Well, it makes me chuckle, anyway. I can chuckle because I've recovered from the resulting whiplash.

So, anyway, I'm back home, wiping the sleep from my eyes after a well-deserved noon rising, checking the UCLA website for my grades and looking at this tome I've picked up from the pound. Somehow, the fact that it is a BIG BOOK and that I normally shudder at the idea of reading BIG BOOKS doesn't cross my mind as I start thumbing through. It doesn't take long to get hooked. On several occasions, my husband is prying the book from my leaden sleepy fingers.

It's so... sudden. It's so... eschatalogical. And it's so... neat-o.

I want to be a cyborg.

That having been said, I remind myself as the diligent grad student in literature that any work offering a "straightforward" explanation usually is ignoring or eliding something. So I turn back to my friendly copy of Kate Hayles's How We Became Posthuman - a book that I admit I had trouble getting into at first - and I discover precisely what the trouble is. Namely, have we settled on this issue of embodiment? Granted, this work by Hayles predates TSIN by six years - enough time for significant fin-de-siecle technological changes - and Kurzweil does make a special point of acknowledging issues of embodiment... but does he fully satisfy the criticisms levied in HWBP?

I'm not so sure. But for me, this is thinking directly into the blog, and I require some time to explore this further.

But here are some questions I think of: if the point of converting to non-biological (super)intelligence is meant somehow to optimize the human experience, what does this mean to someone who is culturally Deaf, and who risks not only her deafness but her language in a potentially post-linguistic communication system? What does it mean to a model of "neurodiversity" that looks at differing ways of brain engagement not as pathological deviations from a norm (Miz AD/HD has got to ask this), but as multiforms? Is equating "open free market" with "evolution" a natural induction, or is it naturalized?

Did anyone working on this book stop to read Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto"? Cuz, you know, I personally am getting mixed signals here. There are two voices in the room talking simultaneously, each seemingly oblivious to the other, except for the strident increases in volume coming from both.

I bet the answer is somewhere in the middle. And as the middling person I am, maybe I'll find something. Well, between my assignments. Somewhere between Barnaby Rudge and Angels in America and OMG am I going to have to deal with that pompous ass Wordsworth again??? (Well, with that outburst, chalk one up for materiality.)

And I also bet that superintelligence won't be enough to resolve certain paradoxes of the networked demopublican society, regardless of how many "let's hopes" we plug into this otherwise utopian vision.

Hope everyone is enjoying their holidays. Or break. Or downtime. Please don't feel sorry for me: know that I undertake disturbing intellectual journeys during breaks on purpose, to keep the Boredom that Surpasses All Understanding at bay in the absence of assignments and deadlines. That's what I do.