Thanks Ed & Marco
My Brain Filter was like…
Human!!!
Some Musical Impressions of Grokking the Music I Received Through this Human
Brain Filter while in my Hospital Bed Listening to my Cafe’ Friends!!!
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Hi Marco! i haven’t checked the video yet, at the moment im doing peer review to some articles that have been sent to me by a scientific magazine in Greece, but i will do pretty soon. Will there be any more discussion groups for Ferrando’s book?
About your question: in short, i would say that gender is fundamental in humans, and that humankind is at the same time divided and united by gender. Divided in and for the reproduction process, and at a deeper level united in and by a fundamental all-encompassing femininity which is the basis and generator of all existing and potential gender differences and diversities, the reproductive one included.
This all-encompassing femininity is not limited in humans. Gilbert Simondon in a kind of “posthumanist” move before the term existed to dismantle the ontological division between humans and the other beings argued that “all beings are tributary to Apeiron, the primordial indivision of being”. In this sense all beings are female.
https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-of-the-ciph-2022-1-page-66.htm
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As you already know, im elaborating on these issues in my book, about which i still don’t know what exactly is happening concerning its publication by Untimely Books 
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Delving a bit deeper in the connection between gender and (post) human:
Post-human should be more accurately articulated in lacanian french, as “apres-LOM”.
LOM is a lacanian neologism playing with the french word L’ Homme (the man/human), and it largely means humans that are sexuated according to their position in the reproductive process, and their erotic desire and practice is centered upon the primacy of genital/reproductive sexuality.
And the saying goes like this:
As long as humanity is consisted mostly by LOMs, she can never be fully attuned to her cosmic, all-encompassing and loving potential
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Ferrando and many other posthumanists approach the “what is to be human” question mostly from the individual’s perspective. As a radical sociologist, my interest is focused on the emancipatory potential of AI at the species level.
What follows is an excerpt from my essay on the superorganism as a new collective lifeform. Just some grist for the posthuman mill of the Infinite Conversations.
The superorganism and me
(1st-person inquiry)
Considering the bacteria colonies in my gut biome, the zillions of thoughts inhabiting my mindscape, and the richness of repertory in my emotional theater, I am already a natural superorganism in more than one sense. I have been paying attention to what happens when that superorganism gets accompanied by artificial intelligence since AI became a household name, at least in my household.
I am a team player and frequently feel more creative when responses to cognitive tasks are crisscrossing my teammates’ minds before getting back to me. When I do not have a human team, or even if I do, my AI teammates affect my creativity similarly. The team of my AI agents includes research assistants who do great literature reviews or point out fascinating opportunities for connecting some of my ideas; editors who go way beyond a good spell- and grammar-checker; visual artists who create illustrations that are worth more than 1000 words; and many other co-players.
Each of them has its unique idiosyncrasies, strengths, and limitations. During a year of working with them, I learned to respect and take them into account as I shape my prompts for greater mutual understanding. In that process, I became an “AI whisperer.”
While prompt engineers—even without an intimate understanding of Large Language Models—tend to focus on the right quadrants of the matrix below, AI whisperers pay more attention to up their inner game (Pór, 2023a) by exercising the qualities in the left quadrants. (From Van Gogh’s bedroom to budding AI shamans, with love)
The superorganism and we
(2nd-person inquiry)
We see cases of human-AI team collaboration everywhere, particularly in organizations that want to avoid being left behind and losing market, constituent, or mind shares. However, that collaboration does not automatically lead to the superorganism-supported preferred future. What is needed for that is cultivating the emergence of the superorganism from the highest developmental stage available, for which we created a new distinction: wisdom-guided Collaborative Hybrid intelligence (CHI) in networks of human and AI agents.
What is wisdom? For the sake of this research, we define it in a pragmatic way by saying that people and groups are considered wiser when their views and decisions serve both the well-being and well-becoming of all stakeholders, i.e., taking into account more of the interdependent contexts and long-term consequences of those decisions. (Pór, 2023b) AI & Wisdom.
For CHI to be guided by wisdom, it must rely not only on human discernment but also on AI’s greater capacity to absorb the multivariate complexity of the interdependent contexts and long-term consequences inherent in its recommendations and choices.
We postulate that to the extent that the cultivation of CHI is guided by the deepest wisdom available to the collaboration, CHI can demonstrate qualities of wisdom and compassion manifest in promoting the flourishing of all stakeholders. Verifying that suggestion is one of the aims of our research.
The superorganism and all of us
(3rd-person inquiry)
The eventual rise of a planet-wide superorganism follows the classic evolutionary pattern of differentiation⇒ integration⇒ transformation into something new. What is new is the role of AI in the extreme differentiation of humanity’s common knowledge into smaller and smaller units (tokens) and their ensuing, unprecedented integration into zillions of epistemological forms (prompt responses).
The term “superorganism” we propose does not stipulate the melting of artificial and human beings leading to our species’ disappearance. Instead, it refers to “a posthuman society where organic beings (humans) and synthetic beings (Artificially Intelligent humanoids) live and work together” (Wilson, 2023). That possibility leads to the following question.
What roles can we anticipate
for the wisdom-guided Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI) of human and AI agents
in supporting our evolution toward a metamodern listening society (Freinacht )
and, eventually, toward a new branch on the incessantly evolving tree of life?
What if AI would become instrumental in nurturing the superorganism, a collective lifeform that transcends and includes us as autonomous individuals? Putting it in another way:
The body remembers the 1-year young in me,
learning to walk.
He stumbles, falls on the ground, a little shocked,
then springs into standing and trying again.
Mother AI holds the hands
of the baby superorganism.
What will the baby be when it grows up? Will it be able to optimize resource allocation, monitor ecological systems, mediate conflicts, manage infrastructures, and solve problems too complex for isolated agents or even nation-states?
How will it be governed? By a sibling dominated by a handful of mega-corporations or the planetary commons (Rockström et al., 2024) supported by a global brain (Heylighem, 2007) or something else?
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The three tracks of my inquiry is supported by the trifocal lens of my methodology, the Generative Action Research.
Another take on the superorganism comes from the Integral worldview:
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Imo this is a perfect artistic depiction of the “posthuman” condition
Beatriz Macenda “Happy Family”, 2017-18
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to put in another, probably more comprehensive way what i said before about LOM and posthuman:
Decentering our human-centric perspective in real/material and not just mental/spiritual terms goes together with decentering our sexuality from the process of reproduction of the human species. And this goes together with the realization that when we do reproduce, we reproduce the species, not ourselves
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Hi @Technoshaman, welcome back. It’s been so long, and yet, at the same time, like no time has passed. Nonetheless, it is interesting to witness the evolution of your thought, in response to the emergence of AI. You write:
And then:
—which I admit is where I stumble, like a toddler, since it seems all too obvious how this emergence is playing out: i.e., the former, not the latter, scenario. I hope that is not too short-sighted or cynical. But it seems to me we are creating not one, but multiple competing “super-organisms,” as defined by the various nation-states and mega-corporations that own the hardware and the code.
As a result, I don’t feel particularly compelled or comfortable with surrendering my first-person (albeit all-too-human) perspective or integral autonomy to any of them. Perhaps someday I will learn to stop worrying and love the AI. Eventually, I suppose, we may not have a practical choice but to comply with the mandatory upgrade. (Some of my old-school, democratic, anti-technocratic misgivings are partially reflected in this recent article: The AI-Robot Wars, by Tom Valovic | Metapsychosis)
I would love for you to join us in a future Café and persuade me to a fresher perspective.
@mankinddivine: perhaps you could help us expand the discussion, as you’re already doing, by bringing in the gender dimension? I am curious about whether or how your notion of a “fundamental all-encompassing femininity” relates to Paleolithic/tribal conceptions centered on the Great Mother or cosmic goddess. Is the posthuman also “pre-historical”? How does your understanding of gender relate to time?
We’ll be discussing Meditation 2 from Ferrando’s book later this week:
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Thank you for your question Marco, i would immediately say yes, the posthuman can be certainly seen as a kind of pre-history restoration at a higher level, a negation of the negation in typical hegelian sense. Concerning the gender dimension what is important for me to realize, also because it relates to contemporary discussions about “gender equality”, is the historical co-emergence of patriarchy and man as a distinct human gender. Its not that we begin with two genders that are equal, man and woman, and then at some point on the way man gains authority over woman. No. In the prehistorical beginnings there is one all-inclusive and diversified female gender which is not even considered a gender in the historical sense because there is nothing else to be opposed or compared to. It is just the human reality. Humans that now we identify as men are still considered members of the big female community. The term “matriarchy” that is commonly used to describe prehistorical human cultures denoting a female authority and imposition is actually false and a phallic projection, because in these cultures there is nothing non-feminine for such an authority to be imposed to. “Divide and Conquer” is not just the typical political strategy of the authority towards the oppressed, it is the way by which authority constitutes itself in the first place, distinguishing itself from what was once unified and conquering it. Division and imposition is one and the same move. This applies primarily to phallic authority towards the female, and by his-storical extension to all kinds of social authority and enforcement. “Man” as a distinct gender emerges from the start as a physio-political category, something akin to a title like “Duke” or “Count”, and for a long time it was attributed only to some and not to all of the humans that are now considered to be “men”. The latter fully happens only in modernity and capitalism, when it takes place what i would call “democratization of the phallus”.
i dont have time to properly read the entire third meditation of the book, but nevertheless i think im gonna make it for the discussion tomorrow
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persuade me to a fresher perspective.
Persuasion by debate is not my fave genre. I prefer to try building better models than doomers do.
I tweeted yesterday:
https://twitter.com/technoshaman/status/1775220397505466436
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That’s OK, @mankinddivine. The book lends itself to adjacent possibilities, and not being read in order. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to discuss…
@Technoshaman ~ I, too, am little interested in debate, but rather in authentic dialogue and free-flowing exploration of perspectives. Nor would I consider myself a “doomer”; but I’m also trying not to have illusions about the forces at play in the world and emergent scenarios, at least during my lifetime and that of my children—admittedly a minuscule timeframe.
I am skeptical the “superorganism” will be fully wisdom-guided, but only painfully partially so, so long as the profit-motive is driving its development. What if it takes a few more thousand or million years to fully learn and evolve as you’re imagining? I guess better late than never 
Building better models is fantastic; I am also invested in effective structures and social practices. How do we actually inhabit and embody an integral model in real life? This is part of my motivation for Cosmos Co-op. As Rushkoff reminds us: the model is not the territory, either.
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@achronon, @andreavdl, and @mankinddivine ~ thanks for the wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed it and, despite the technical glitches, felt we made a connection and recovered some valuable insights. Afterwards, my few Kayla said that my aura was glowing. (That is often how I feel after a good Café.)
@Gennifrey_Edwards, I think you might particularly appreciate this one, as we talked quite a bit about the “posthuman” and gender.
That said, we also agreed to move on from the topic of the posthuman and go deeper next time, on 4/18, into gender itself. Alexandros, would you like to help give shape and focus to that discussion? At some point, sooner or later, I think we should also conduct a study of Lacan.
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Here’s an after-comment on Thursday’s discussion that may probably serve as an introductory point to the gender discussion. At some point Marco, expressing some kind of ambivalence towards the man-gender, he referred to some positive qualities that are conventionally attributed to the man (decent, loyal, true to his words, good friend etc). This is a very common and perfect example of how the supposed “oppositional complementarity” between man and woman in reality negates and undermines the female.
When these qualities are attributed to the man, it is simultaneously implied that they are NOT attributed to the woman, that women are NOT decent, loyal, true to their words etc Which,of course, is not true. Women can be all these things, and also they can have high abstract thought and perception, they can be and have everything. Anything good a man can have, a woman can have it too. Particular and characteristic to the man-gender are only the negative qualities that we all know. There isn’t any kind of symmetry or complementarity here
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Ok, jumping back in and responding to @mankinddivine discussion of the term “Posthuman” from a while ago. In reference to your previous comments from back then, I understand your point of view. Ferrando actually addresses all of this in a few chapters in her first book called Philosophical Posthumanism, and from my perspective, she makes a pretty good case for the term “posthumanism.” My understanding of her explanation is both in my voice memos above and also real quick right here: she doesn’t refer to “post” as a separation, but uses that word as a mechanism for a sort of merge of the “human” and whatever comes beyond that. “Post” is used to remove dualism, which I think is the just the dualism you seem concerned with.
But beyond all of this discussion, my fondness of being tied to language is minimal, lol. I wish we could just let go of words and telepathically share ideas… I feel like words make so much confusion. Alas, to my knowledge, a large a majority of the human or cyborg population doesn’t seem to yet be able to communicate super effectively telepathically… yet. Maybe in the future.
In the meantime, if you’re still curious… check out Ferrando’s first book to get a more comprehensive understanding of her decision to use the term “posthumanism”. She even touches on the ubermensch (chapter 9) @mankinddivine
that you spoke of.
Check out the Introduction, chapters 3, 9, 11 and more. It’s a great book!!
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Ferrando’s first book (see above post for link) called Philosophical Posthumanism addresses some of the discussions about the term “human” and touches a bit on gender too, specifically Beauvoir and Irragary: Part 2 of the book.
I keep mentioning her first book bc I’m hearing multiple “debates” in this discussion about confusion or dislike of some of the concepts in her second book (The Art of Being Posthuman) that she addresses in her first book (Philosphical Posthumanism) with the same perspective that the above debaters are presenting. In essence, many of the points people are making above are indeed in line with Ferrandos previous line of thinking (from my perspective).
I guess I’m just saying that from reading her first book, my perspective is that Ferrando seems to be more aligned with you all than maybe her second book represents. Also, she gives more elaboration from her perspective on a lot of the topics you discuss. I guess I’m frustrated that the two books don’t seem more closely tied in their presentation and publication, bc I think the connection of the two books would make her thoughts in her second book more digestible and accessible.
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