Topic: Community/Culture

The unconscious has its own, structured language that can be deciphered and analyzed. Logic has an affective side, and affect has logic. Perhaps the models of human mind that grow from emergent AI [Artificial Intelligence] might come to support a more integrated view. The interest of psychoanalysts in these models suggests some hope that they might, but there is reason to fear that they will not … Information processing left affect dissociated; emergent AI may try to integrate it but leave it diminished.

Emergent AI falls into line with postmodern thought and a general turn to “softer” epistemologies that emphasize contextual methodologies … Its constituent agents offer a theory for the felt experience of multiple inner voices. Although our culture has traditionally presented consistency and coherence as natural, feelings of fragmentation abound, now more than ever. Indeed, it has been argued that these feelings of fragmentation characterize postmodern life. Theories that speak to the experience of a divided self have power.

Emergent AI’s message about complexity and emergence seems to be something that many people want to hear. The nondeterminism of emergent systems has a special resonance in our time of widespread disaffection with instrumental reason.

The language of “society” is helping to disseminate the idea that machines might be able to think like people and that people may have always thought like machines … Because the constituent agents of emergent AI offer almost tangible objects-to-think-with, it prepares the way for the idea of mind as machine to become an acceptable part of everyday thinking.

These days, when people look at emergent computer models, they see reflected the idea that the “I” might be a bundle of neuron-like agents in communication. This sounds close enough to how people think about the brain to begin to make them feel comfortable.

Even as people have come to greater acceptance of a kinship between computers and human minds, they have also begun to pursue a new set of boundary questions about things and people. After several decades of asking, “What does it mean to think?” the question at the end of the 20th century is, “What does it mean to be alive?” We are positioned for yet another romantic reaction, this time emphasizing biology, physical embodiment, the question of whether an artifact can be a life.

We are moving toward a culture of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real.

As human beings become increasingly intertwined with the technology and with each other via the technology, old distinctions between what is specifically human and specifically technological become more complex. Are we living life on the screen or life in the screen? Our new technologically enmeshed relationships oblige us to ask to what extent we ourselves have become cyborgs, transgressive mixtures of biology, technology, and code. The traditional distance between people and machines has become harder to maintain.