late wrote:Maybe later.
It's New Age-y.
This topic is far from being new-age and has little to do with the inclinations and prejudices floating bout in that brain of yours. There's no need to discuss these matters with someone who flaunts a disagreeable aptitude for new perspectives. Nevertheless, I shall carry on, and demonstrate the principle idea of consciousness as content.
In Phaedrus, Plato meditates on the implications of writing as a new technology.
Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.htmlWhat better example? Writing uses consciousness as content, reorganizes communication, and the retrieval of human experiences. Oration and the packaging of vibrations had been transferred to letters, which affected the transportation of information. Such a new mode of transportation transformed civilization and changed our environment. Writing eventually rerouted education and laid the foundation for technological discoveries which ultimately impacted the evolution of humanity. Thusly so, I support the notion again, that new technologies use the old technological ground as content.
What of this statement: Technological media as the extensions of man, project prosthetics of the human sensorium through which the figure-ground interplay of our mind/matter interface form cultural gestalts that incrementally influence evolutionary developmental biology.
In Understanding Media (which is a precursor to Laws of Media), McLuhan produced a chapter called "The Gadget Lover: Narcissus As Narcosis.
To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it. To listen to radio or to read the primed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the "closure" or displacement of perception that follows automatically. It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servo-mechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servo mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock.
Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar.
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The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die.
Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious awareness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness. With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have "social consciousness" presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or points of view. In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. https://archive.org/stream/Understandin ... n_djvu.txtI'm certain biology is merely a symptom and expression of consciousness. Likewise, I'm certain technology is a symptom and expression of a conscious human. If you follow the evolutionary sequence, it's not a new age concept to see technologies as an ecosystem unfolding in evolutionary systems in which the immaterial essence of the universe expresses its materiality. In other words, Material reality is consciousness adapting to itself as one self-organizing force.
Also, may I address a few more things...
Books like Biology Is Technology The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life, by Robert H. Carlson
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php ... 0674060159 hint at merging with our technologies in order to reconcile the evolutionary developmental feedback loops all technological environments create. However, there's the argument that as we outsource human consciousness to the extensions of ourselves and develop powerful tools to engineer nature, we will end up birthing our ecological successors.
In Darwin among the Machines, Samuel Butler warned,
We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.
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Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_MachinesMany thinkers have noted how cultural gestalts occur due to technological adaptation. Perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society or Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, would be of interest to a curious reader. The diffusion and promulgation of technology has been thoroughly studied by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock. Moreover, Malcolm Gladwell highlights how things change in Tipping point : how little things can make a big difference.
Technological slavery (Technological Slavery, Kaczynski) is human husbandry. It's my opinion that our technologies act as a cocoon for a pupal that will emerge and replace humanity as the dominant species and expression of consciousness on planet Earth.