March 2010
172 posts
“Knowmads are substantial agents of change, who drastically alter the infocologies they interact with. The level of freedom implied by the knowmadic state is a new existential virtuality that pushes into the real, in the process transforming and meshing the different dimensions in which our minds operate. Existing as non-localized behaviors of information processing, Knowmads are not consumers and cannot be looked upon as capital. Knowmads are the innovators of thought and vision, using an insight mechanism based on correlated data-spheres of complex infocologies. Knowmads do not care for labels of old style paradigms, such as gender ,creed, race or indeed status, what Knowmads care about are the pleasures derived in forming new connections, mash-ups and provisional options, innovative solutions for the next step in human evolution. Our complex neuro-mesh firing in tandem, has produced this amazing property we call conscious awareness, with the advent of 21st century tech, augmented reality apps, visually stunning info-graphics, virtualities at our finger tips, p2p technologies availability and the like we are becoming Knowmads. The value of the Knowmad state is thus in providing a fresh framework and a new narrative to fill our old storytelling needs in our ever-increasing process of self-description.”
—Wildcat: Hybrid futures Knowmads and the Notion state
“Determinism is true but thermostats can still control the temperature. And nobody denies that thermostats control the temperature.”
—Steven Landsburg paraphrasing Robert Nozick in The Big Questions
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“PEARCE: In maybe three or four decades or so, we’ll be choosing such traits as the average hedonic set point of our children. Over time, I think allelic combinations [suites of variant copies of mission-critical genes] that leave their bearers predisposed to unpleasant states of consciousness — unpleasant states that were genetically adaptive in our ancestral environment — will be weeded out of the gene pool. For a very different kind of selection pressure is at work when evolution is no longer “blind” and “random,” i.e. when rational agents design the genetic makeup of their future offspring in anticipation of its likely effects. In that sense, we’re heading for a post-Darwinian transition – ultimately I believe to some form of paradise-engineering.”
—Post-Darwinian Hedonic Engineering
“Existence is what mathematical possibility feels like from the inside. Turn off G.O.D., and we’ll go on with our lives, not noticing that anything has changed. Because the only thing that has changed is that the people who were running the simulation won’t get to find out what happens next.”
—The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory
“If we can feel real inside a non-magical computer simulation, then our feeling of reality must be due to necessary properties of the information being computed, because such properties do not exist in the abstract process of computing, and those properties will not cease to be true about the underlying information if the simulation is stopped or is never created in the first place. This is identically true about every other possible reality.”
—The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory
“…there’s still sometimes a tendency to think as though turning on a sufficiently advanced calculator causes something to mysteriously blink into existence or awareness, when all it is doing is reporting facts about some very large numbers that would be true one way or the other.”
—The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory