Letters to the Cyborgs

by Judyth Baker

  4 4. http://www.metanexus.net/essay/h-cybernetics-antihumanism-advanced-technologies-and-rebellion-against-human-condition “H-: Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism: Advanced Technologies and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition” September 1, 2011 by Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Comments are excerpted from his essay, and the some of the arguments in “Termites” are based on quotes from DuPuy’s essay, available below. “Professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy is a Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the École Polytechnique, Paris. He is the Director of research at the C.N.R.S. (Philosophy) and the Director of C.R.E.A. (Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée), the philosophical research group of the École Polytechnique, which he founded in 1982. At Stanford University, he is a researcher at the Study of Language and Information (C.S.L.I.) Professor Dupuy is by courtesy a Professor of Political Science… “ “In his book The Mechanization of the Mind, Jean-Pierre Dupuy explains how the founders of cybernetics laid the foundations not only for cognitive science, but also artificial intelligence, and foreshadowed the development of chaos theory, complexity theory, and other scientific and philosophical breakthroughs.“ https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/jean-pierre-dupuy

  Selected quotes from his essay:

  “[N]atural sciences have become exclusively sciences of process and, in their last stage, sciences of potentially irreversible, irremediable “processes of no return.”... In her masterful study of the perils facing mankind, The Human Condition (1958), of which we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary, Hannah Arendt … [warns us that] the overweening ambition and pride of a certain scientific humanism leads directly to the obsolescence of mankind…”

  “In June 2007, the occasion of the first Kavli Futures Symposium at the University of Greenland in Ilulissat, leading researchers from around the world gathered to announce the convergence of work in synthetic biology and nanotechnology and to take stock of the most recent advances in the manufacture of artificial cells. Their call for a global effort to promote “the construction or redesign of biological systems components that do not naturally exist” evoked memories of the statement that was issued in Asilomar, California more than thirty years earlier, in 1975, by the pioneers of biotechnology. Like their predecessors, the founders of synthetic biology insisted not only on the splendid things they were poised to achieve, but also on the dangers that might flow from them. Accordingly, they invited society to prepare itself for the consequences, while laying down rules of ethical conduct for themselves. We know what became of the charter drawn up at Asilomar. A few years later, this attempt by scientists to regulate their own research had fallen to pieces. The dynamics of technological advance and the greed of the marketplace refused to suffer any limitation.”

  “The human subject will therefore need to have recourse to a supplementary endowment of will and conscience in order to determine, not what he can do, but what he ought to do – or, rather, what he ought not to do.… His will and capacity for choice are now left dangling over the abyss. The attempt to restore mind to the natural world that gave birth to it ends up exiling the mind from the world and from nature… “the same technological ambition that gives mankind such power to act upon the world also reduces mankind to the status of an object that can be fashioned and shaped at will; the conception of the mind as a machine – the very conception that allows us to imagine the possibility of (re)fabricating ourselves – prevents us from fulfilling these new responsibilities

  When we love somebody, we do not love a list of characteristics, even one that is sufficiently exhaustive to distinguish the person in question from anyone else. The most perfect simulation still fails to capture something, and it is this something that is the essence of love – this poor word that says everything and explains nothing. I very much fear that the spontaneous ontology of those who wish to set themselves up as the makers or re-creators of the world know nothing of the beings who inhabit it, only lists of characteristics. If the nanobiotechnological dream were ever to come true, what still today we call love would become incomprehensible.”

  The authors do not imply that all of DuPuy’s arguments hold water, but it seems he has produced the sieve with the fewest holes.

  5 5. Adapted from the science fiction movie Dune and the famed series of Dune novels written by Frank Herbert. By the end of the story, the reader will understand how “Dune” became involved.

  6 6. So efficient are these little insects at exploiting the metabolic capabilities of the different microbes that inhabit their hind-guts that they would produce up to two liters of hydrogen while digesting a single sheet of paper, making them one of the world’s most efficient bioreactors. A fact not unnoticed by the U.S. Department of Energy, which has planted a firm eye on termites while researching ways to replace fossil fuels with renewable sources of cleaner energy. http://scribol.com/environment/magnetic-termites-are-the-architects-of-these-giant-monoliths Retrieved July 20, 2015.

  7 7. Swarm intelligence is a soft bionic of the nature swarms, i.e. it simulates the social structures and interactions of the swarm rather than the structure of an individual in traditional artificial intelligence. The individuals can be regarded as agents with simple and single abilities. Some of them have the ability to evolve themselves when dealing with certain problems to make better compatibility [23]. A swarm intelligence system usually consists of a group of simple individuals autonomously controlled by a plain set of rules and local interactions. These individuals are not necessarily unwise, but are relatively simple compared to the global intelligence achieved through the system. Some intelligent behaviors never observed in a single individual will soon emerge when several individuals begin cooperate or compete. The swarm can complete the tasks that a complex individual can do while having high robustness and flexibility and low cost. Swarm intelligence takes the full advantage of the swarm without the need of centralized control and global model, and provides a great solution for large-scale sophisticated problems. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221491471300024X. Retrieved July 17, 2015.

  8 8. The queen produces an egg every three seconds for 15 years,” Margonelli says. “Her body distends. What starts off as being the length of a dime extends to be about the size of a human index finger.” As the workers construct elaborate vaulted chambers that can rise as high as 30 feet aboveground, the king remains inside a protective capsule with the queen throughout her life.… Her skin is stretched and translucent, revealing a bubbling juice underneath the surface. The babies begin to tend the queen. They feed her and they clean her. She sweats an exudate that they lick off continuously. These workers carry away the eggs, stack them in little piles and tend to them until the little termites hatch. Gradually, the queen gives birth to the entire mound.… Soon the queen is too big to leave the capsule. She has tiny legs and little stumps of wings and can’t move. “She really is this captive ovary,” It’s said that when she comes to the end of her usefulness, her children gather around her and lick her to death, drawing the fluids and the fats out of her body. Is she in charge – or is she in fact the captive slave, the ultimate queen mother who sacrificed everything for her children and the mound?” As the queen dies the workers keep tending her, cleaning her, and waiting for eggs. “The queen is their mother,” Moffett says. “She is their god. They have formed their whole identity around her health and safety. Once she’s gone, life does not make much sense.”

  The entire mound gradually dies out. “What they leave behind them is this immense shell, this city, this huge mound. It’s possible that it’s repopulated by her offspring, the young virgin queens she sent out earlier. That starts the cycle anew.” http://www.npr.org/2011/05/06/136028437/a-termite-queen-and-her-ultimate-sacrifice Retrieved July 24, 2015 (NOTE: The future termite Queen is intelligent enough to try to escape this kind of death and also to keep her Palace from going extinct, having been specially bred.)

  9 9. Paulus does not understand that this is ultraviolet light, which can burn and kill him and all with him: t
he ultraviolet lights kept molds and bacteria from reaching any of the sealed inner chambers.

  10 10. Coal-fired power plants are the largest human-caused source of sulfur dioxide, a pollutant gas that contributes to the production of acid rain. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Sulfur_dioxide_and_coalhttp://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Sulfur_dioxide_and_coal The Queen is making “acid rain.” Retrieved July 26, 2015

  11 11. “The activity of the termites is found to be affected by substratum vibration but not by airborne sound. Under the influence of substratum vibration, positive geotaxis, negative phototaxis, positive “chemotaxis,” and positive “thigmotaxis” in the termites are initiated, or become more marked.… it is suggested that the substratum vibration produced by the termites has the same effect on them as a warning signal.… Once the termites have been subjected to a disturbance, contact between individuals … caus[es] the release of the Vertical Oscillatory Movement. Two necessary features of this contact stimulus are the presence of a species-specific pheromone, which is probably detected by sensilla on the antennae, and some degree of movement on the part of the object contacted. Substratum vibration produced by the termites themselves acts to some extent as a releaser for the Vertical Oscillatory Movement.” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0003347264900156 Retrieved July 23, 2015.

  12 12. “Fly ash is a by-product of coal combustion. It can be reused in concrete production as a supplementary cementitious material.” [Hence, the People had made reinforced concrete tunnels which were partly composed of fly ash found in an old, burned out coal seam, which helped stretch out the supplies of sand and lime.]

  http://myfox8.com/2014/04/24/coal-ash-and-concrete-coal-combustion-by-product-use/ Retrieved July 26, 2015.

  13 13. The site, located in Hot Springs, could have developed what Paulus and his species became. “The South Dakota School of Mines and Technology offers Masters and PhDs in Biomedical Engineering, “The biomedical engineer serves as an interface between traditional engineering disciplines and living systems … applying the patterns of living organisms to engineering design or engineering new approaches to human health.… The objective of the MS program is to prepare a student for research and development careers in biomedical industry and further research at the doctoral level. The PhD program will prepare a student for a career as a researcher who advances the frontiers of biomedical science and engineering with attention to generating new ideas for commercialization.… Current focus areas of faculty activity … [include] biomolecular and genetic engineering. Students in the programs will be associated with one or more of several departments existing and research centers and laboratories, e.g., the Center for Accelerated Applications at the Nanoscale, the Center for development of Light Activated Materials, the Computation Mechanics Laboratory, or the Direct Write Technology Laboratory.”

  http://www.sdsmt.edu/Academics/Departments/Biomedical-Engineering/Graduate-Education/ Retrieved July 15, 2015.

  14 14. The bee brain has been well mapped out and analyzed. (See: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2935790/ ). “There is no unique feature of vertebrate intelligence that isn’t found in insects. Vertebrates can memorise places, insects can too. Both have a sense of time. Both can call on past experience to make future judgments (as in: I came here at 3 o’clock yesterday and ate a delicious aphid. I’ll do it again today!) Learning rules? No problem! Categorizing and sorting out information? Again, found in both groups. Even Pavlov’s dog experiment, which has traditionally been cited as a vertebrate-only type of response (salivating in expectation of food), has been replicated in a cockroach. It seems there isn’t much that vertebrates, with their relatively enormous brains, can do that insects can’t. Why? Having a large brain does not add any capabilities, it just improves the resolution. Think of a computer: you can have a dual core CPU, but it won’t bring you much if you’re only running Windows 98 and Minesweeper on it. Complexity is not a matter of power (i.e. number of neurons), but the ability to do more things.… All the basic components of neurons are present in vertebrates and insects, and are probably shared from their last common ancestor. Cognitive ability does not come from new types of neurons, or just more neurons. It is new links between different bundles of neurons that lead to tangible changes in behavior: to understand the brain, we don’t look at the size of it, but at how its different components interact.” https://bioteaching.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/insect-brains-and-animal-intelligence/ Retrieved July 27, 2015.

  15 15. The ordinary termites, having been bred to produce enough hydrogen to run the underground complexes, sustained by large beds of coal, were eight feet tall, whereas the Prince was nearly nine feet tall.

  16 16. This interesting conversation comes from Bryon J. Mendez, at Berkley: “Time Travel: There’s no Time Like Yesterday.” Now we come to the solution of the paradox problem that quantum mechanics predicts, parallel universes. In the quantum universe everything is probabilistic. The occurrence of an event is ruled by the probability of its happening. In quantum mechanics a particle has no definite position, energy, momentum or time. The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle tells us that we can only measure these quantities within a certain accuracy and beyond that accuracy they are uncertain. This is not simply a technological issue of measurement but the actual nature of the universe. Beyond a certain point the universe is in a state of mixed probabilities. This is what the universe is like.… There is an interpretation of this that says that all things that are possible to occur will occur in separate universes. These parallel universes would exist alongside each other in hyperspace with the universes of similar probability closer to each other. The universes very close to one another would differ by very little and those farther away by much more. There would be a constant creation of these universes as time progressed. The universes could connect to one another via wormholes or Kerr tunnels. As we have seen the wormhole and black hole solutions connect to regions of space-time that are not necessarily in our own universe.

  Now let us look at one of our paradoxical time travel situations and see how parallel universes save the day. Let us return to the Kennedy assassination. Again I have found a time machine and decide to go back in time and stop the assassination from occurring. Once again I am successful in stopping it. Now I would like to return to my own time and witness the changes that have occurred. But I have just created a parallel universe. One which was identical to my own up until the moment that I arrived in the past. Until that moment the universes were one. But in my universe there was no me in 1963, so the act of placing myself in that time has already created a new universe that will undoubtedly be different. In this new universe I go forward in time, perhaps through special relativistic effects and find a future very different from the one I knew. I might also find another me, the one that was born in this universe in 1973. We would be different people as we have experienced different lives. But what if instead of going forward in time through relativistic effects I simply decided to step back through my wormhole, what would I find? I would find that nothing has changed. Kennedy is still dead and there is no other me, because the past I visited is not in this universe. When I stepped through the wormhole I disappeared from this universe into another. It is easy to see that if I were not careful I could get lost in parallel universes and never find my way back. Consider the scenario where I travel to the future of the new universe and meet my doppelganger. What if I don’t like this universe at all, what if saving Kennedy leads to a nuclear war, can I go back to my original universe? No. I am now in another universe and I find a wormhole time machine with my counterpart. We decide to set it for November 22, 1963 and change things once again. But once again we create another parallel universe, this time there are 3 versions of me in 1963 and we all have different agendas. If parallel universes are real and some advanced society can create a stable wormhole and turn it into a time machine then time travel is certainly possible. The journeys that one could have in time would be quite an experience, t
o say the least.” http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/bmendez/html/time.html Retrieved July 28, 2015. Because Dr. Anton has read a message from the future from Paulus that can affect the present, will Paulus exist in Dr. Anton’s world in the future?

  17 17. This story assumes that other great universities such as Oxford and the University of Barcelona, which were founded earlier, were unable to escape the Final Purge, while this Swedish institution survived due to its extraordinary interest in preserving all life forms, its ability to work with genome sequencing and its expertise in radiation studies. For example: http://www.igp.uu.com/facilities/genome_center/?languageId=1 [July, 2015]

  18 18. Derived from: http://academicdepartments.musc.edu/ncvc/DG%20Kilpatrick/Socratic%20Dialogue.

  19 19. Derived from: http://lawschool.about.com/od/lawschoolculture/a/socraticmethod.htm

  20 20. IBID.

  21 21. IBID.

  22 22. IBID.

  23 23. IBID.

  24 24. IBID.

  Cryogenics

  For over a dozen decades, beginning late in the 20th century, a number of wealthy individuals opted to have their bodies or brains frozen in nitrogen upon death – a number that grew exponentially just prior to the Cyborg Revolution.

  The Cyborg Revolution allowed acceptable humans (political enemies and criminals excluded) to choose how much of their bodies (or the bodies of those they owned) would become mechanical and how much would remain “flesh.” Tyranny, the creation of mindless sex and labor slaves, and war resulted. Eventually, tissue and organ banks were put to work immortalizing bodies according to an immutable set of rules, using the Baker Single Cell Embedding Process (SCEP). Longevity factors,1 such as modified super-mitochondria – virtually immortal – unbreakable telomeres, and lifelong nano-surveillance of DNA, where instant repairs on “acceptable DNA” by nanobots would restore any aging cell to vibrant youth, erasing every health problem from aging to cancer for those deemed worthy. It was an age in which beloved pets and rare animals kept in zoos could also live as long as humans wished.