/lit/ - Literature

>>11835596

>the question is about technocapital and its relation to intelligence, more specifically superintelligence: an intelligence greater than ourselves inasmuch as we think ourselves as individuals. if there's anything we take from postmodernity, mimetics, dialectics and cybernetics it's that we aren't purely discrete thought-particles in a void. everything's connected, for better or for worse. and this will take you in all kinds of directions. namely, the need to re-think the question of alienation.

This is great, and thanks for the posts, I never thought of capital in this way. I guess I would have two objections to the posts you directed me to, the first being the definition of intelligence as an emergent quality of interacting unities. This creates a problem first of all because the unities seem to have to be endowed with some (inferior) form of intelligence themselves, therefore making intelligence not really emergent but rather a compositional principle revealing itself through different levels of aggregation. Intelligence is always there at some level, it just manifests differently according to the degree of networking.

But if that is the case - here's the second objection - then there are degrees of intelligence we can establish and we can talk about "better" or "worse" intelligences. At that point comes the question of whether any level of superior aggregation can be considered better of the previous ones, or if intelligence, much like a cellular system during cancer, can somehow become "sick". Maybe it is sick already. This is the question of PKD Valis, namely, whether there is something like a "mad demiurge", a deranged intelligence organizing the world mechanically like a prison, against which our own intelligence, as the gnostic seemed to point at, is fighting in the same way an anti-body would fight a virus - and this is actually our mission here, to re-organize the universe according to a "good" or "superior" intelligence.

I guess my main point here is that I believe those posts are assuming a rather Hegelian view of history, according to which everything that happens is justified in the view of the realization of some telos, as you were saying: only I am not certain there is just one single principle whose telos we are articulating. There might be two and, to say it simply, one of them may be evil.
With Plotinus I would tend to go together with Hegel and justify everything in the light of one principle or as the articulation of a life of a single mind alternating between different opposite states, but I am not sure we have enough points to exclude the possibility of a second principle here (also I would need to better articulate why I found the vision depicted in the posts somehow displeasing: again, there is something about intelligence and freedom so that I am never sure that giving up individual freedom in the name of the well-being of participating in a superior, better organized system would be entirely worth it.)