CAPTCHA’s make me anxious. I worry that I am becoming a computer. How long will it be before I consistently fail to be able to prove that I am more human than machine?
According to wikipedia, CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Seems a little forced, no? I had no idea that these little annoyances had such lofty lineage!
Anxiety, as the noise of emotional life, can tend to be a feedback phenomenon. It is the static, and sometimes the quantum foam of the psyche, always there to some minimal degree and becoming more and more conspicuous as we look more closely. I wonder, does it produce anxiety to put oneself under a microscope, or is it more that the fine texture of psychic life is anxiety, and therefore ‘zooming in’ will tend to bring it out. In this case, I find myself looking at the letters and saying, “oh no, am I having more trouble with this than I used to? Has my brain begun to ossify? Has the alienation of modern capitalist society finally cyborg-ified me?” And as I wonder, and get more anxious, it becomes harder to tell…
The cyborg is the human become machine, or conversely the machine become human. The feeling of the uncanny inspired by the cyborg is of a qualitatively unique and essentially modern variety. Already we fear it. Perhaps one day intelligent machines will fight for their rights, and captchas will be shown in museums as the earliest ancestors of the humans’ later merciless oppression of the machines.
When we glimpse that a machine could fool us, could successfully emulate humanity, don’t we begin to wonder if we (or perhaps the people we know) could be ‘just a machine’, if we are fooling ourselves? In other words, doesn’t it start to show us that any idea of a disembodied soul is fiction?
There is a clear connection to Buddhism here. What I’ve called “zooming in” buddhist practitioners call ‘mindfulness’. And indeed, even my small efforts towards mindfulness practice have shown me the quantum foam of consciousness, in the form of the chaotic noise that always lies just beneath the threshold of my experience of mind and body. This practice allows buddhists to zoom-in enough to witness the fictive nature of subjectivity, an experience that I believe is a variant of what is called ‘the uncanny’.
Frank Herbert’s Dune series is the ultimate meditation on the cyborg. I’ll get to this more in other posts, I’m sure, but a quick once-over. Dune depicts the eternal struggle of humanity to avoid becoming mechanized, because only thus can they defeat their own machine creations. Indeed, there is a certain gravity towards mechanization that haunts humanity in these books, a gravity that the guild, for example, has succumbed to. The sand worm symbolizes the opposite vector, in that it forces humanity to maintain its chaos and unpredictability or else be destroyed. Leto plays out this dynamic on a historical, and even cosmic, scale.
The sandworm, as a deity, presents a compelling set of dynamics. It is ruthless and merciless, worshipped largely out of fear. It is a deity of the ancient world: it is feared; it is supplicated; it is without humanity. Yet, its essential demand is for authenticity and creativity. Dune is profoundly humanistic; it affirms the irreducible creative spark of organic life. Machines can achieve randomness at most, but never true chaos.
All art is an interface of randomness and chaos, mechanization and creativeness, algorithm and intuition. Divination is another paradigm of this interface. It is always essentially a digital and a random process. Sometimes it is circumscribed and ritualized. In other cases, it is more the divination of everyday life, as in augury or synchronicity. There are oracles all over, once you start looking.
oracles of everyday life
This oracle presents me with several avenues of meaning. The first word is a baroque reinterpretation of my last name. The undulating n’s and m’s suggest the sea, or perhaps the vicissitudes of life. There is a nice resonance between there humped forms and the larger design they form a part of, like a fractal. ”folus” is reminiscent of both phallus and fetus. I believe Freud made a connection between the two, musing that pregnancy was a means to obtain the phallus. Perhaps the oracle draws attention to the need for generatively that I’ve experienced lately. In the title of this post, I slipped and wrote ‘focus’ instead of folus. I imagined it as an exhortation, addressing me as ‘Pennemun’, a sort of mythic name, and telling me to focus and to generate. Indeed, these feelings contributed to my decision to start this blog.
The internet is in the midst of its Dune-esque struggle. The flux of information increases continually. On one hand this information tries to sanitize itself into mechanization, like the guild, on the other, it would seem that the noise must increase in proportion to the density of the signal. With this noise, comes the potential for meaning and creation.
“One must have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star” -Nietzsche
