https://doctorow.medium.com/james-bridles-ways-of-being-e1a43bf6d013
"Bridle wants us to understand that our convenient categories are not just
useful handles that empower us to grab onto abstract concepts — they also limit
us, by forcing us into umwelts that are walled off from the most powerful,
useful ways of relating to the rest of the world.
One of Bridle’s most provocative moves is mixing of the natural and the
technological worlds, which he pulls off in a way that is implausibly
convincing. Computers are actually a very good way of understanding nature. The
models of networks that we built after the emergence of the World Wide Web turn
out to shed light on the webs of nature that had been right there all along.
New technological endeavor, such as machine learning systems, likewise
illuminate concepts that have been missing from our understanding of the
natural world. The fact that we can build systems that we can’t interrogate or
fully understand — but still find useful — is a way of settling the most
troubling aspect of the collapse of our categories argued for in the book’s
first half.
Finding ways to co-exist with systems we can’t fully explain or control —
finding ways to collaborate with those systems — is an ancient idea, one that
connects well with indigenous ways of being and ancient animist practices. It’s
also the underlying premise of cybernetics — the use of feedback mechanisms and
sensors to understand the wider world.
Sometimes cybernetics seeks to steer the world — in the same way that a beaver
builds a dam, or a First Nation uses controlled fire to tend to ancient
forests, or the way that we build seismic dampers into our tall buildings. But
just as often, cybernetics simply seeks to accommodate the world, the way
livestock run away from a volcano before it erupts, or the way a First Nation
moves from a summer settlement to a winter one, or the way we respond to
weather forecasts by changing our weekend plans.
Thus, drawing on cybernetics, Bridle builds a bridge to the “more than human”
world, where a kind of personhood can be imputed to machines, the environment,
animals, and plants — a personhood, moreover, that can never be separated from
our own.
Bridle argues that every time our human societies has expanded their view of
personhood — of the right of something to be respected on its own terms, rather
than because it is beneficial to “real” people — everyone has benefited. The
extension of personhood to enslaved and colonized people, to women, to
children, and, in limited ways, to animals, was universally beneficial."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
