[-empyre-] Re: a-life intimacy / transpecies relations..

["Mauro Annunziato" <mauro.annunziato@tiscali.it>]

> Are we scared of the possibilities of a-life and emergence and
> rationalising it to distance ourselves from it..? or are we embracing it,
> can we humans cope with not being the centre and/or pinnacle of life in the
> universe?
> thanks for your thoughts so far

> Melinda

This is really an interesting question which I repeat myself continuously 
without to be able to reach a stable answer.

Especially in the installations, I try to use these two components of the 
human reaction in front of a-life entities: attraction and fear.

The attraction seems connected especially to a sort of self-identification 
with anything is living: -the life is continuously search for the life-. 
Furthermore the evolution selects that organisms which are naturally 
inclined to the reproduction: - born to re-create life -.   In this sense, 
anything seems living immediately activates a process of empathy, attraction 
and protection.

On the other hand, the same primitive instinct, tell us to evaluate the 
potential of danger in the "alien". Is it dangerous for us ?  is it a 
predator ?    The answer is quite simple with known living beings but what 
about unknown creatures ?.   In some sense this emotional situation recalls 
the unknown creatures populating our infancy or our ancestral dreams.

We cannot avoid these two instinctive reactions. But after a while our mind 
try to activate simulations for the future of this kind of creatures. 
Unlikely or Likely (?) we are full of catastrophic collective imaginary 
about wars between the human beings and aggressive robots. I could estimate 
about 99 % of movies/books on this topic are catastrophic. So before all, we 
should free our mind from this collective ancestral panic. With a free 
mental space we could take into account some different aspects.

The idea that humans can "download" direct intelligence in a creature seems 
an utopia. A social evolutionary process is generally necessary to develop 
creatures with an intelligence able to constructively interrelate with 
humans. An evolutionary process it means a long process of co-evolution 
between human societies and robot societies. Necessarily they should live 
very close to us (at the extreme, they could life inside our bodies). In any 
case there is a very important factor to take into account: they live in our 
physical space, so this process is so long (centuries ?) that we will have 
time to co-evolve in a pacific way.

By my point of view, this is not the real focus of the problem: the world of 
the intelligent robots is very far us. This is something emerging from our 
dreams but our reality is completely different. We have connected millions 
of computers and created the digital dimension. In the idea of Jack Monod 
("Le hazard et la necessitè"), the appearance of a new media should 
corresponds to a new evolutionary jump. This jump will be the explosion of 
the digital life on the net (ten-twenty years ?).

The digital life will be not confined in the net but it will be present 
everywhere in our home, office, car, dresses. Furthermore you should take 
into account that digital life can re-built an evolution similar to the 
humans in few computing months with impressively huge populations. So this 
my first conclusion: digital life is the real focus of the next alien 
intelligence.

With digital life, we loss any possible reference. They don't have a body, 
they travel quickly from an extreme to the other of our planet. We cannot 
see, we are not sure they really exist.
There is a great confusion about these common ideas.

I appreciated a lot the text wrote from ken. I am fascinated by the poetic 
mixing of organic and robotic parts in Autopoiesis. Here I report a sentence 
of  this text.

> Since we exist in physical space and do not question our state of "being
> alive," it seemed logical that, in order for the works to have the aura of
> "being alive," they needed to exist in physical space.

The concept ken expresses for a artwork, normally is widely accepted by the 
community as a "condition for life". I would like launch new two questions 
for the list discussion:

-        Have digital entities a body ?
-        Is the body-mind distinction so critical as a condition for life ?

I prefer does not give a general answer. I would speak about my experience.
In my installations there are "digital entities". They have sensors in the 
"physical" human environment. They produce visual and acoustical actions 
that invade the "physical" world.
They are "physically" located in the computer. Their action is a complex 
organization of the dynamics of changes between 0 and 1 in the memory cells. 
Similar to the consistence of my body that activates a complex signal 
dynamics in my neuronal synapses.  We have completely different bodies and 
media, but similarities in the evolving mechanisms. What I do, is to build 
"inter-media interfaces" which embody both physical and digital dimension (I 
call it "hybrid ecosystems" in Human-Artificial Ecosystems: Searching for a 
Language,  www.plancton.com/papers/evolang.pdf  ) and "languages"  to 
communicate and manifest our reciprocal presence.

So my second conclusion is that to find (prepare) a new relation between 
humans and intelligent (future) digital entities we have to reconsider these 
possibilities and destroy the last residuals of the mind-body dualism. We 
have to forget the idea that sw is the mind and hw is the body. This is an 
inheritance of the computational theory of the mind that we cannot solve in 
this simple black-white approach. More complex answers and languages are 
necessary to prepare the interrelation, like new inter-media interfaces, 
better comprehension of the difference between the conscious human mind and 
the unconscious digital mind, new inter-languages. At this moment all these 
concepts are still in embrional and emotional germination. Art could play 
the role of the ice breaker in the exploration of human/digital mind, 
society and intereelations.

Mauro