🍄 We are Just Beginning to Know What it Means to be Human [Magician]

Thank you ChatGPT, you have stirred us from our slumber. The virtuality is inside. And it is our "magic.”

May 19, 2023

Exploring every rabbit hole there is. For more wanderings, become an Alice in Futureland subscriber—it's free.

🍄 AudioDose: this is Alice on Sonic Mushrooms. Dream while you’re awake here.
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Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. Faced by our voyage into a simulated world of generative AI, there is now a desire to regain our innate abilities we have lost as a species—to tap into the "force." The human potential movement is not a movie, it is real and it is fantastical.

It’s fantastic that evolution should have ended up with us. What other kind of creature could it have been? You’ve probably followed these fantastic recent discoveries in China about the dinosaur having feathers to keep them warm but then they learned how to use the feathers to fly. Do we have something, some faculty that we haven’t put to use the way the dinosaurs had put to use these feathers of theirs until later?—Alice Archive: Excerpt from 2001 Interview with the hero of the black hole theory, John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911 – April 13, 2008)

The Real is Fantastical

The cultural desire is to re-imagine reality; to experience an epiphany. This describes a paradigm shift in consciousness that is occurring worldwide. In our age of accelerated culture, we are looking to enjoy the "now"—what is real, what connects us to ourselves, makes us feel more human. Because we live so much inside the network, the simulation, everything that is "real," that we can feel in some form, becomes “fantastical.” We are moving towards an era where everything real becomes a wonder. We are at the point of figuring out the origin of life (via the human genome); the origin of nature, the cosmos; on our way to birthing new life forms through AI, biological computing, biotechnology, quantum physics, etc. Our future possibilities are a greater story than we can imagine. As we intertextualize our world by fusing what is real and what is virtual, suddenly the "real" becomes the story.

I think that human is a distributive brain. That means that the brain starts at the fingertips and it ends at the toes. So rhythm, information as rhythm, information as polyrhythm, is a good way of triggering the distributing intelligence of the body, because every part of the body thinks.—Alice Archive: Excerpt from 2000 interview with Kodwo Eshun, Concept Engineer and Author More Brilliant than the Sun

Animism: The Hyper Sensorial Human in the Quantum World

Animism is the ancient belief that everything is alive. It is the premise by which we have built our machines, our technology, our digital world. Everything is intuitive, reactive, adaptive. We are creating our technologies based on the biological model, the mirror of ourselves. The mirror is perhaps the best model of our future technology. The ancient curiosity of humankind is the mirror image of the self. The dream of the self-made double is perhaps our wish for immortality. Perhaps the simple but larger questions are this: Who are you? Where are you from? And what will matter to you in our animated world? In the animated world you have a heightened perception of yourself. Your body. Your surroundings. Your actions. Your presence in the world. Your life is art. We agree with John Wheeler: It’s fantastic that evolution should have ended up with us. What other kind of creature could it have been? Do we have something, some faculty that we haven’t put to use?

What else we are wandering

🔍 “How To Become a Centaur”
In their prescient 2018 winning essay published on JoDS (the Journal of Design and Science) at M.I.T Press, Nicky Case proposed some ideas on how you can design a good partnership with an AI — and how to become a centaur.

Five years ago Case saw the challenge many of us fear with losing jobs to today’s advanced Chat4. It’s not about AI vs. Us.

“When you create a Human+AI team, the hard part isn’t the “AI”. It isn’t even the “Human”. It’s the “+”

We once thought that our technology would gift us humans with IA (intelligence augmentation). But we have offloaded IA as Case observes: “technology shifted from tools for creation and more towards tools for consumption. But now, these two story threads may be starting to wrap together, forming a new braid in history: AIA — Artificial Intelligence Augmentation.”

But by leveraging our IA, we can “give AI the human partnership it needs in order to remain aligned with our deepest goals and values.”

Borrowing from Mother Nature, Case concluded with resonating advice: We need to live in symbiosis with AI. Symbiosis shows us you can have fruitful collaborations — it doesn’t have to be humans versus AI. “Symbiosis is two individuals succeeding together not despite, but because of, their differences. Symbiosis is the ‘+.’”

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper—Unknown

🔍 What would you do with 53 senses?

According to eco-psychologist Michael J Cohen, humans have 53 senses at our disposal. The more emotions we are familiar with, the richer our human experience becomes. People with high emotional granularity tend to have better mental and physical wellbeing than people with low emotional granularity. They have more positive social experiences as well, because they’re able to perceive and work with the nuances of interactions with others. Cohen breaks the senses down into four categories:

Radiation Senses: sense of color, sense of moods associated with color, sense of temperature.
Feeling Senses: sensitivity to gravity, air and wind pressure, and motion.
Chemical Senses: hormonal sense, such as pheromones, hunger for food, water or air.
Mental Senses: pain, external and internal, mental or spiritual distress, sense of self, including friendship, companionship and power, psychic capacity.

🔍 Our sense of touch is unique. In fact, people have a "touch language”.
A group of researchers from University of Southern California explored if this "touch language" can be sensed remotely. They wanted to see if two companions (platonic or romantic), could communicate and express care and emotion remotely. The baseline for their study found that people perceive a partner's true intentions through in-person touch an estimated 57 percent of the time. They found that when interacting with a device that simulated human touch, respondents were able to discern the touch's intention 45 percent of the time. The challenge for the researchers was to create an algorithm that can be flexible enough to incorporate the many dimensions of touch. Overall, 661 touch gestures were recorded. About 45 percent of the time, individuals wearing the armband were able to understand the intended emotion communicated via remote touch. The study proves that the social meaning and expression conveyed through in-person touch can be communicated remotely. There are a few long distance touch bracelets that mimic the sense of touch between two people virtually through a mobile app. With Hey Bracelet, when one person touches their bracelet, the application triggers the other bracelet to vibrate and light up or squeeze.

🔍 A Generative Future
Transformative technology pioneer Nichol Bradford has been exploring the importance of mindset, deep human presence, and ancient interconnectedness in overcoming limitations and achieving our goals in this age of AI. Her writings are spot on…check out her article “Unlocking Human Potential: Embracing Ancient Wisdom and Technology for a Generative Future” here.

🔍 Tune in...
The idea that consciousness exists in every atom throughout the universe, and therefore consciousness is in everything, calls for a paradigm shift in the way we view the world. Watch our book trailer: ‘Tuning Into Frequency’

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