The Posthuman Reality of Feed-Based Social Media Systems

The conceptual boundary between the subject and user parallels the boundary between humanist and posthumanist definitions of human being, and the challenges of new media communications technology today impel this evolution. My dissertation discusses subjectivity as the self-differentiation of a particular set of processes, and the influence of communications media upon this process. Here, it includes the basis of differentiation for an I, including: the question of identity, potential agency, and knowledge. The collage of attributes that constitute a portrait of what I call the user, the subject of online social media, is demonstrably emergent, dispersed, and discursive; in terms of agency and sovereignty, the useras with other instances of posthuman subjectivityis contingent upon its media ecology and is decidedly less free than other definitions of subjectivity (such the self-sovereign individual of the social contract, which comes to be as a negation of contingency). The concept of self-sovereignty excludes the influences of history, and other influences upon the emergence of the subject, emphasizing an exclusively internal causation. The users existence, conversely, is processual and dispersed throughout networks; its being and agency are dividual, not individual. The subjectivity of the user must thus be thought in terms of its mediated contingency, as the self-sovereign agency that is characteristic of humanist traditions is less applicable to todays media ecologies. I argue that the traits of the subject in humanist traditions can be interpreted as the epiphenomena of societies whose information ecology was dominated by logocentric, typographic literacy. Today, with the advent of social media and its users, we can understand from a new vantage how subjectivities are modulated, amplified, and attenuated by technical distributions, particularly the unseen (and unseeable) non-human agents in the computation systems that constitute online social networks

Uexküll and Whitehead on meaning, process and life

The paper approximates Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of meaning and the process-thought in Alfred Whitehead’s philosophy. As the main idea, the paper points at the compatibility of meaning and process according to the perspectives of Uexküll and Whitehead. It suggests that Uexküll’s common meaning rule can describe the processes of novelty in the world as does Whitehead’s principle of creativity. It is also suggested that Uexküll and Whitehead abandon a substantialist view of the organism – the organism means much more process, activity and creation than anything thing-like. In approaching Uexküll’s theory of meaning, a semiotic interpretation of Whitehead’s principle of creativity is proposed in which the concept of the threshold is fundamental to defining the boundary between the semiotic and the non-semiotic areas corresponding to the living (animate) and the non-living (inanimate). In conclusion, the paper suggests that the activity of meaning distinguishes animate entities from inanimate ones in the sense that meaning and life overlap – meaning could not have existed prior to life (and to the contrary).    &nbsp

Bridging the AI Inventorship Gap

In Thaler v. Vidal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that an artificial intelligence (AI) machine cannot be an inventor under patent law. This decision leaves open the question of whether a natural person can be the legal inventor of AI-generated inventions. This is a pressing question because it decides whether AI-generated inventions are patentable, as no patent rights can exist without an inventor. Scholars have proposed two doctrines that might resolve this question: (1) the doctrine of simultaneous conception and reduction to practice and (2) the doctrine of first to recognize and appreciate. This Note analyzes the two doctrines and argues that neither doctrine readily applies to AI-generated inventions, thereby leaving an “inventorship gap.” Because the current patent system is ill-equipped to deal with the inventorship of AI-generated inventions, Congress should adopt and repurpose copyright law’s work-for-hire doctrine and recognize the natural person using the invention-generating AI as the legal inventor of those inventions. Doing so bridges the inventorship gap, offers certainty as to the patentability of AI-generated inventions, and facilitates the goals of the patent system

Could homo oeconomicus become a revolutionary ? On the need to teach and practice a different economics

This paper investigates the standard economic paradigm as to the possibility for the agents to become revolutionaries, i.e., to develop the desire and effective action to overturn the prevailing social order. We take our cue from Amartya Sen’s remark that the Second Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics might be part of ‘a revolutionary’s handbook’. In analyzing the meaning of Sen’s assertion, we uncover the deep-lying difficulties which the standard paradigm, characterized by a vision of individuals as self-enclosed ‘monads’ and of social order as monadological coordiantion, has in even making sense of the notion of revolution. We are thus led to the intermediary conclusion that the neoclassical paradigm is structurally unable to see the agents as (even only potential) revolutionaries. In the course of our demonstration, we show that economics needs to be conceived not primarily as a ‘teaching about’, the economic system and the agents ’actions, but as a ‘resource for’ the agents within the model itself to reflect on the directions they want to give to social change. We endow the economic agents themselves (and not just the theorist who looks at them ‘from above’) with a significant capacity to educate themselves in order to form a judgment about what kind of economy they want to act in. In other words, asking whether the economic agents might in some cases become revolutionaries leads us to militate for the need to fully endogenize economics as a component of the economic model itself.Revolution;agency;economic models;epistemology of economics;critical theory

Communicating the Unspeakable: Linguistic Phenomena in the Psychedelic Sphere

Psychedelics can enable a broad and paradoxical spectrum of linguistic phenomena from the unspeakability of mystical experience to the eloquence of the songs of the shaman or curandera. Interior dialogues with the Other, whether framed as the voice of the Logos, an alien download, or communion with ancestors and spirits, are relatively common. Sentient visual languages are encountered, their forms unrelated to the representation of speech in natural language writing systems. This thesis constructs a theoretical model of linguistic phenomena encountered in the psychedelic sphere for the field of altered states of consciousness research (ASCR). The model is developed from a neurophenomenological perspective, especially the work of Francisco Varela, and Michael Winkelman’s work in shamanistic ASC, which in turn builds on the biogenetic structuralism of Charles Laughlin, John McManus, and Eugene d’Aquili. Neurophenomenology relates the physical and functional organization of the brain to the subjective reports of lived experience in altered states as mutually informative, without reducing consciousness to one or the other. Consciousness is seen as a dynamic multistate process of the recursive interaction of biology and culture, thereby navigating the traditional dichotomies of objective/subjective, body/mind, and inner/outer realities that problematically characterize much of the discourse in consciousness studies. The theoretical work of Renaissance scholar Stephen Farmer on the evolution of syncretic and correlative systems and their relation to neurobiological structures provides a further framework for the exegesis of the descriptions of linguistic phenomena in first-person texts of long-term psychedelic selfexploration. Since the classification of most psychedelics as Schedule I drugs, legal research came to a halt; self-experimentation as research did not. Scientists such as Timothy Leary and John Lilly became outlaw scientists, a social aspect of the “unspeakability” of these experiences. Academic ASCR has largely side-stepped examination of the extensive literature of psychedelic selfexploration. This thesis examines aspects of both form and content from these works, focusing on those that treat linguistic phenomena, and asking what these linguistic experiences can tell us about how the psychedelic landscape is constructed, how it can be navigated, interpreted, and communicated within its own experiential field, and communicated about to make the data accessible to inter-subjective comparison and validation. The methodological core of this practice-based research is a technoetic practice as defined by artist and theoretician Roy Ascott: the exploration of consciousness through interactive, artistic, and psychoactive technologies. The iterative process of psychedelic self-exploration and creation of interactive software defines my own technoetic practice and is the means by which I examine my states of consciousness employing the multidimensional visual language Glide

Cortex, countercurrent context, and dimensional integration of lifetime memory

The correlation between relative neocortex size and longevity in mammals encourages a search for a cortical function specifically related to the life-span. A candidate in the domain of permanent and cumulative memory storage is proposed and explored in relation to basic aspects of cortical organization. The pattern of cortico-cortical connectivity between functionally specialized areas and the laminar organization of that connectivity converges on a globally coherent representational space in which contextual embedding of information emerges as an obligatory feature of cortical function. This brings a powerful mode of inductive knowledge within reach of mammalian adaptations, a mode which combines item specificity with classificatory generality. Its neural implementation is proposed to depend on an obligatory interaction between the oppositely directed feedforward and feedback currents of cortical activity, in countercurrent fashion. Direct interaction of the two streams along their cortex-wide local interface supports a scheme of "contextual capture" for information storage responsible for the lifelong cumulative growth of a uniquely cortical form of memory termed "personal history." This approach to cortical function helps elucidate key features of cortical organization as well as cognitive aspects of mammalian life history strategies

The Lived Experience of Virtual Environments: A Phenomenological Study

This is study of the experience of virtual environments (VE) in the context of safety training. Research involves participants from two companies who use VEs for safety training in hazardous work environments. The research approach is phenomenology. The key findings of the study show how the users actively form the VE experience. These insights will be useful for VE research and development

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal