Synoetics and Self: The Construction of Planetary Identity as an Aesthetic Oeuvre

Keywords: Synnoetics , Interactivity, Planetary Self, Global Consciousness Psi Phenomena, Deep Ecology.

Abstract In this paper an expanded model of a constructed planetary self is sought, informed by the meta-discipline of “synnoetics”-a term coined in 1961 by Louis Fein in unpublished documents, to describe “the cooperative interaction, or sym- biosis of people, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata into a system that results in a mental power (power of knowing) greater than that of its individual components.” (Fein, 1960) As the Net has brought about the death of the Cartisian cogito and the collapse of the Oedipal narrative, mono- lithic identity is renounced and replaced by a constructed identity of ubiquity. Synnoetics takes us one step further, as we are able to consciously construct a Synnoetic self as an aesthetic oeuvre, further challenging traditional notions of singular, monolithic identity and extending notions of the postmodern, decen- tered self into simultaneously new and ancient selves defined by shape-shifting, Psi-interaction, and cumulative, distributed, inter-species knowing.

It is my position in this paper that the parallel trajectories of development in nanotechnologies; research in Psi and anomolous phenomena, and the prolifer- ation of ubiquitous technologies has created a medium for the creation of a syn- noetic self. The merger of these research agendas represent a fourth stage in the development of cybernetics, as the research facilitates an entirely new channel for information exchange and communication between humans, plants, animals, and machines, and consequently, for the construction of a plan- etary, aesthetic, beyond the human, self. The role of technology shifts, as it is used not to augment or extend human consciousness, but to measure the extent to which the boundaries of human, plant, animal, and machine consciousness are not known. For example, in Psi phenomena, consciousness needs sensitive technology to be understood and directed, thus consciousness augments tech- nology, not the other way round. Psi phenomena as a form of wireless commu- nication may be of profound importance to the future development of interactive ubiquitious interfaces, synnoetic intra-species minds, and a new, undefined context for aesthetic experience.

... instead of being interpellated to occupy a pre-ordained place in the socio- symbolic order, the subject has gained the freedom (or at least the promise, the prospect of freedom) to shift between different socio-symbolic sexual

identities, to construct his Self as an aesthetic oeuvre - the motif at work from the late Foucault’s notion of the ‘care of the self’ up to the deconstructionist feminist emphasis on the social formation of gender. It is easy to perceive how the references to cyberspace can provide an additional impetus to this ideology of aesthetic self-creation: cyberspace delivers me from the vestiges of biological constraints and elevates my capacity to construct freely my Self, to let myself go in a multitude of shifting identities. (Zizek 1999: 112)

This paper seeks a possible methodology for an expanded model of self in terms of the meta-discipline of ‘synnoetics’ - a term coined in 1960 by the visionary computer scientist Louis Fein. In making a comprehensive projec- tion of the growth and dynamic inter-relatedness of the ‘computer-related sciences’, Fein included specific mention of the enhancement of the human intellect by the cooperative activity of men, mechanisms, and automata. For Fein, synnoetics described “the cooperative interaction, or symbiosis, of people, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata into a system that results in a mental power (power of knowing, consciousness) greater than that of its individual components.” (Fein, 1960) Fein hoped that synnoetics should be an academic subject, taught in an integrated fashion. Fein’s theories emerged out of post-war agendas set by Vannevar Bush, J.P.L. Licklider, and Douglas Engelbart. Their theories sought to emphasize human cognitive evolution as the central force in cybernetics, engineering, and computer science. These scientists made many sugges- tions in an effort to facilitate the redirection of US post-war agendas in sci- entific research, but most notably was the charge that research in computational systems shift from the replacement of human workers with computers to building machines to augment individual human intellect. Their research forms a clear set of criteria for an aesthetic, interactive context creation that is human-centred. As synnoetics addresses enhanced powers of knowing, constructed fields of experience, and symbiotic interac- tions between these fields, it overlaps with Englebart’s proposal of 1962, that computational systems be used for the development and augmenta- tion of ‘mental and cognitive structuring in the human’ (Engelbart 1962). What then are the potential effects of participation in a synnoetic system joining humans, mechanisms, plants, animals, and automata in cognition, subjectivity, and the self?

One line of reasoning is that the Internet has brought about the death of the Oedipal narrative (Zizek, Haraway, and others), forcing the collapse of already-eroded notions of monolithic identity and meta-narratives of an essential, inner self. The self is no longer understood as an essence, but as a construction. The addition of synnoetic systems to the interactive net- worked palette of self-construction takes us another step, offering us the potential to consciously construct a planetary self as an aesthetic oeuvre. This distributed, synnoetic self spreads across various planes of knowing; further challenging traditional notions of the monolithic identity and poten- tially extending notions of the postmodern, decentred self into multi-nodal selves. It is my position in this paper that the parallel trajectories in the development of high-speed and wireless computing, nanotechnologies, satellite systems, molecular computing, research in psi and anomalous phenomena, cognitive mapping, and ubiquitous technologies has created a medium for the highly sophisticated creation of synnoetic selves. A syn- noetic meta-identity might include simultaneously new and ancient subjec- tivities characterized by self/shape-shifting, interactions with paranormal, psychokinetic, anomalous phenomena, and cumulative, distributed, inter- species knowing. However, through this speculation a number of problems and questions rise to the surface that must be addressed to understand how and if the construction of a planetary subjectivity or self through syn- noetic coupling can occur. The questions might include:

• What is a self? • What is consciousness, is it only a property of humans, can non-living things be said to possess consciousness or sentience? • What is the common language, medium or operating system that would facilitate communication between distinctly different fields? • Could psi phenomena, including remote viewing, extrasensory percep- tion, psychokinesis, and the paranormal, participate in a cybernetic loop of interacting sentients? • In the synnoetic process of arriving at an Uber-mind, or ‘a mental power greater than that of the individual components’, what happens to human subjectivity? • Is this Uber-mind a next desirable step in human evolution, or would Homo sapiens become mere synaptic cogs in a gigantic planetary mind, as in Stanislav Lem’s ‘Solaris’, enslaved, trapped? • Is the anthropomophic point of view necessary for humans to hold a benevolent, respectful relationship toward nature? • Is this entire line of thought regarding a synnoetic construction of self a psychotic fantasy, more about the anthropomorphization of nature and artefacts than a valid line of inquiry?

It is not within the scope of this paper to definitively answer these ques- tions, because they inspire conflicting arguments. It is, however, possible to begin speculation about the future of the self and human subjectivity in light the synnoetic proposal, and of current and future scientific, technolog- ical, and cognitive research agendas. Issues that are vital to the construc- tion of a synnoetic self that might be useful to such speculation are the following:

• The research and development of human/machine symbiotic models for interactivity focused on the augmentation of the human subject. • The synnoesis between human/machine/other species/dynamic fields emphasizes a model of mutual exchange between interacting sentients, for the purpose of emergence and transcendence. • Mutually interactive systems can facilitate the development of new pat- terns of cognition in people, thus confirming a dynamic of mutual (ex)change, potentially facilitating the emergence of a planetary self. In what follows I will first discuss my own speculative aesthetic work regarding the representation and creation of multi-nodal selves, and then begin to describe some of the problems laid out in the preceding para- graphs.

Identity constructions, avatars, and bodies without organs

From 1986 to 1990 my work shifted from painting and installation to digital media; first using the computer as a tool to investigate paintings, then after an experience with the technologies of virtual reality, thanks to Jarion Lanier, I began to focus on digitality as a medium. Like many of my generation, I came into the digital realm with no formal training or experience with the technical aspects of computing. In 1989 I became fascinated with the potential for the construction of images to represent the self in shared virtual and cybernetic environments. These works of 1989-94 investigated what I called ‘identity construction’ or ‘self-shifting’. All constructions started as images of my body, and combined media-based samples from high and low culture into often abject images, that intended to be ‘opposed to the covert co-optation of the self by commodities’ (Little 1998: 193). In 1996 I built a VRML-based avatar construction interface (Figure 3), and published ‘A Manifesto for Avatars’ in 1998.

This essay is an attempt to examine the construction of alternative figures as models of resistance. ‘The Manifesto for Avatars’ offers a formal set of oppositional strategies for constructing unconsumable self- images. The apparent freedom of identity and gender enjoyed by the participants in multi-user domains and the Internet in general (Langley, Stone) is a dangerous illusion, masking the corporate agendas dominating the nature and spirit of the construction of cyberspace and avatars. (Little 1998: 193)

In 1998 I began to move from the representation of identity to the interior of the self through the con- struction of immersive virtual environments. These environments were constructed from recombinatory instances of collected qualia, forming visualizations of consciousness. Qualia collected from a large number of people across a range of geographic and cultural locations forms a model of consciousness that is distributed, dynamic, and multi-nodal. The capacity of immersive virtual environments to increase participant immersion and absorption is well documented (Gromala, Hodges and Shaw 2000), as is the potential for high absorption to facilitate the potential reconstruction of the self: ‘High absorption appears to represent a tendency for individuals, under conducive circumstances, to enter psychological states characterized by a restructuring or reconfiguring of the phenomenal self and the boundaries of the self’ (Tellegen, 1992). The virtual environment combines anatomical datasets from medical imaging sources including the virtual human project, with a three-dimensional laser scan of my body skin. These objects contain instances of qualia collected from a number of individuals. The goal of the project is to create a immersive anatomical landscape that mixes collected instances of conscious experience and anatomical data across the body in an evolving and recombinatory way, for the purposes of embodiment and self-reconfiguration. ‘The Dance of the Figure 2. Gregory Little, “Identity Construction”, 1993.

Body w/o Organs’ is the result of my desire to build a new relationship to my flesh, ‘The Flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 140), and to the body politic. The current status of this project, in collaboration with social scientist Dr Brian Betz, and artist/aesthetics researcher Dr Dena Eber, explores the rela- tionship between levels of participant presence, through quantitative and qualitative measures, to the degree of their aesthetic experience (Little, Betz and Eber 2004).

‘A synnoetic system’

One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart deposits of gritty reason ... The earth’s surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into regions of art. (Smithson 1974: 100)

In September 2003 I began developing an installation for exhibition at the Stubnietz Gallery at Adrian College in Michigan, USA. My goal was to create a prototype of a synnoetic system, and to begin to address some of the questions arising from this concept of synnoetics by seeking an under- standing of the response of visitors to the gallery who interacted with the system. My initial plan was to create parallel modes of interaction with two primary fields of behaviour, the human, and the material earth. The installa- tion design evolved to bring different ‘fields’ of information together with a variety of methods of interactivity, creating a multi-nodal recursive loop. Projected onto a 1 x 2 metre bed of salt on the floor of the darkened gallery was a composite image of a male body foregrounding a geological map of the world. (Figure 6) The male body was derived from a three-dimensional laser scan of myself, and animated through motion-capture data; producing very slow movements suggestive of a dreaming or contemplative, precon- scious state. The dark body skin was covered in fissures, craters, valleys, and embossed texts, reminding some visitors of a charred armour of lan- guage and tissue. Behind the figure a map of the world with numerous con- centric rings pinpointed the history of recorded earthquakes, with live updates of seismic activity streaming into the gallery every twenty minutes. A large shadow inched slowly across the map representing the transition from night to day. Current earthquakes are depicted as animated red con- centric rings, and past earthquakes are colour-coded according to date. Richter-scale measures are represented by the size of the rings, and inter- national time is given in the lower right corner of the map. The map is a representation of a global seismic monitoring system sponsored by the US Geological Society and collected from various sites and transmitted to IRIS servers by satellite.

A theremin hangs upside-down from the ceiling, positioned over the head of the projected figure, at about shoulder height. Participant proximity to the theremin controls the volume of pre-recorded, dual channel, remixed audio samples of actual earthquakes. A theremin uses the natural capaci- tance of the body to cause variations in the frequency of radio waves gener- ated by the instrument. The recordings have been speeded-up to bring their pitch into the audible range. These extremely low-pitch, eerie, and oddly rhythmic rumbling sounds are silent unless interactors come into the range of the theremin. The interactors’ proximity to the theremin affects the volume of the earthquake sounds. A chair is positioned at the foot of the projection. Resting on the seat is a simple biofeedback interface that mea- sures skin galvanization (moisture) in the palm, and generates an audio tone. The pitch of this audio tone, inaudible within the space, varies accord- ing to skin galvanization and controls the speed, positioning, and trans- parency of the body animation. The more moist the palm of the participant, the more restless the body becomes as the animation speeds up, the calmer the participant, the slower the body’s movements become.

Prior to the installation in February 2004, I visited the gallery and met with the curator. I learned that the building, built in the 1850s, had served several functions: hospital, church, residence hall, and classroom building. The building was a stop on the underground railway prior to and during the US Civil War in the 1860s, and acted as a safe haven and pick-up/drop-off point for escaped slaves making their way north toward freedom. Like many such stops, this building is considered to be haunted by a number of ghosts, most notably a Confederate soldier who died in an accident while chasing a runaway slave. Knowledge of this anecdotal oral history added another potential ‘field’ to the synnoetic system, of at least anomalous, if not paranormal sentience. I began researching ways to potentially engage with the paranormal and bring its presence into the interactive loop. I found a number of possibilities in common use among ghost hunters, including magnetic resonance sensors, dousers, and verbal provocations. Ghost hunters often attempt to address the spirit world verbally, by direct- ing spoken questions toward a specific ghost, and then letting audio recording devices run for several hours after the provocations. These indi- viduals commonly report that responses from the spirit world that can be heard on tape are inaudible without electronic, specifically magnetic, equip- ment. I subsequently recorded several friends and family members speak- ing questions to this particular ghost, and played them constantly during the hours the gallery was open. Upon daily closings the gallery attendants turned off everything in the exhibition, and turned on audio recording equipment, which recorded each evening. The tapes were dated, and the reels were changed each morning. I have not yet completed my analysis of the tapes and have nothing to report at this point.

In attempting to engage this particular spirit in this piece, my goal was not to prove or disprove the existence of ghosts; rather my goal was to create a context where participants must experience all these fields: the seismic, the kinesthetic, the biometric, and the anomolous, simultaneously. Referring back to previously cited work ranging from Engelbart to Tellegen, I was interested in learning if the integration of this synnoetic system into the constructed field of personal identity had any behavioural or cognitive effects on people visiting the installation. A number of participants reported in conversation and in questionnaires distributed during the installation a simultaneous feeling of vulnerability and aesthetic pleasure. They described a sense of the dismantling of fundamental tenets of identity, especially regarding wholeness, control over their environment and their sense of safety and well-being. Seeing themselves as dependent upon a dynamic, unstable earth, possibly surrounded by parallel planes of paranormal exis- tence, with biometric and difficult to control, sometimes autonomous inter- nal states mirroring seismic events; caused in many, at least for that moment, a movement from a self-reflective, narcissistic sphere of safety and unity to a larger, planetary self where boundaries between internal and external forces of body, earth, and imagination became squishy and uncom- fortably redefined. However, for many the aesthetic qualities of the work (tone, texture, colour relations, light, surface, and interactivity) allowed par- ticipants to be able to sit with the vulnerability and experience a sense of reintegration. In what follows I will use this prototype piece not as proof of position, but to initiate the aesthetic construction of synnoetic systems.

Questions of boundaries: the self, consciousness, lumps, and Uber-minds

I have referred above to the monolithic self, postmodern notions of the self, and the multi-nodal self. Such distinctions, especially when combined with an outright unmooring of traditional or intuitive definitions of self, beg for

further explanation. An initial assumption being made in this essay is that the self is a construction, not an singular essence or original condition. Notions of a divided self appear in Plato, and contemporary notions of self as construction, either social, biological, or psychological appear frequently in the work of a number of writers, among them Dennett, Turkle, Marx, Blackmore, Zizek, Deleuze, Haraway, Varela, and Calvino. Within the meta-discipline of synnoetics, multiple fields of sentience and knowing are required combinatory components for the augmentation of human cognition. It therefore makes sense to look at definitions of the self through the lenses of consciousness studies and psychology.

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett writes:

Each normal individual of this species (Homo sapiens) makes a self. Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds, and, like the other creatures, it doesn’t have to know what it is doing, it just does it. (Dennett 1991: 416)

For Dennett, the self is a representation, following Hume’s assertion of 1739, ‘I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception’ (Hume 1739). According to Dennett, our selves are spun through language, our narratives spin us: ‘Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source’ (Dennett 1991: 418). Dennett posits the conceptual location of the self as a ‘center of narrative gravity’, not a thing in the brain or heart, but a very tangible ‘attractor of properties, “the owner of record”’ of the properties and property of each individual. I will return to further definitions of the self at a later point in this narrative, but the notion of self as a con- struction is certainly a tenable position.

The essential issue of the synnoetic construction is Fein’s goal that the synnoetic system results in a power of knowing greater that the sum of its parts, an Uber-mind. As stated earlier, a number of issues must be addressed to lay the groundwork for this emergent creation, I cannot offer any proofs, only a synnoetic weaving of windows or opportunities in extant theoretical discourse on boundary objects, including the self, the other, consciousness, psi phenomena, and self-organization. A basic question within the notion of the construction of the Uber-mind is of boundaries - can consciousness extend beyond the boundaries of the self, or can the self come to include sentient fields beyond the boundaries of the body? There are three replies that emerge. Many will argue that what is outside the body is outside the self, that the boundaries of self are located at the epidermal layer of the skin. Others will argue that the self is a web, or network of inter- nal drives, and external social memes that shape, inform, and influence the self, as in Watkins ‘invisible guests’ (Watkins: 1999) theories, the ‘extended phenotype’ (Dawkins: 1982) of Richard Dawkins, or the ‘extended mind’ through ‘active externalism’, as articulated by Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers. As the invisible guests and extended phenotype theories describe a one-way action that is often pragmatic or representational in nature and not necessarily extending cognition, it is the notion of active externalism that is most relevant to a synnoetic construction of self. In the Clark and Chalmers model, specific elements of the external world are inter- actively and causally linked to the human organism, creating a ‘coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right’ (Clark and Chalmers 2002: 642-43). Within this notion, the self can come to be regarded as an extended system, a to-and-fro or mutual interaction between the internal biological organism and external resources, stretching the tra- ditionally internal epistemic (notional) content of the self out into the exter- nal world and potentially across space and time.

A third, highly controversial body of research states that subjective con- sciousness operates within the same principles as complex particle systems, energetic wave formations, and atoms, and that consciousness functions at a quantum level; able to extend beyond the boundaries of the body, of space and time, and to interconnect with other physical, psycho- logical, and sentient entities in similar or remote temporal and spatial loca- tions. This theory, most convincingly put forth by Robert G. Jahn, Professor of Aerospace Sciences and Director of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory, is supported by at least fifteen years of empirical, quantitative research on the influence of human con- sciousness on physical devices, information gathering systems, and tech- nological systems. PEAR researchers have found unexpected anomalies in these highly controlled systems, results that are significantly different from what was scientifically predicted. The results seem to indicate that human consciousness is able to influence physical systems and devices in subtle but significant ways:

... the empirical case is already strong enough to warrant re-examination of the prevailing position of science on the role of consciousness in the estab- lishing of physical reality, with the goal of generalizing its theoretical concepts and formalisms to accommodate such consciousness-related effects as normal, rather than anomalous phenomena. (Jahn and Dunne 1987: 148)

PEAR has investigated the notion that consciousness can have an entropy- reducing effect on external systems, exerting an ordering influence on oth- erwise random physical processes, ‘thereby reversing their normal thermodynamic tendency toward minimum information and maximum chaos’ (Jahn and Dunne 1987: 199).

It follows that, in light of Jahn and Dunne’s appeal to the physics of con- sciousness present in particles, waves, atoms, and quanta, their response to the question stated above, ‘Can non-living things be said to possess con- sciousness?’ is in the affirmative. Indeed, in Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World the authors write: ‘any functioning entity capable of generating, receiving, or utilizing information can qualify as a consciousness’ (Jahn and Dunne 1987: 258). To this definition based in interactive communication, the authors add the following contingencies:

any device, situation, or task that takes on anthropomorphic aspects in the perception of a human consciousness and can be represented in terms of the same set of quantum numbers defining its intensity, emotion/cognition balance, and assertive/receptive characteristics acquires thereby the requisite properties of a consciousness wave function for purposes of interaction with its environment, including the perceiver. (Jahn and Dunne 1987: 259)

Although variations on this theory, that non-living entities can and do possess consciousness, abound in so-called ‘New Age’ ideologies, theories of non-living consciousness and psychokinesis represent heated debates in the literature of consciousness studies:

Contrary to previous assertions most of the experimental work conducted by physicists concerning claims for psychokinetic effects have yielded no con- vincing evidence in support of these claims. An assessment of some of the more credible claims reveals inconsistencies that diminish the impact of these claims. (Jeffers 2003: 150)

if the enormous organizational and ontological difference between the organ- ism and the artifact is overlooked, it becomes possible to draw a superficial parallel between the computer and the brain, and the computer’s perfor- mance and consciousness. The comparison is of course absurd, for in evolu- tionary and thermodynamic terms the computer is only a lump, even if cleverly crafted ... proponents of the ‘strong Artificial Intelligence’ paradigm persist with the claim that: ‘every system with the right functional organiza- tion will have the same sort of conscious experience, no matter what it is made of’ (Chalmers 1996). This is nothing if not a new form of animism, ‘computer-assisted Pygmalionism’ (Bickerton 1994), betraying a deep igno- rance of the biological system and of what awareness entails. (Torey 1999: 12)

For many a defining and unique characteristic of humans as a species is our consciousness. Other species are aware, but we are uniquely aware of our awareness. Indeed, in A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination Edelman and Tononi define the true human self ‘as self aware of self’ (Edelman and Tononi 2000: 194). As promised above, I offer no conclusions to these problems except to say that it appears possible that the boundaries of the self might extend into the external world, that consciousness might also be able to affect enti- ties and fields outside the self, and that non-living entities might be con- scious. As an artist I am not interested in arguing about what is true, only about carefully outlining what is possible. According to the range of theo- retical discourses hinted at in the above, it appears that a synnoetic con- struction of the self on a planetary level may be more that a psychotic fantasy.

It’s a gaia thing

Current notions of networked intelligence, distributed mind, and the syn- noetic goal of the cumulative intelligence, or Uber-mind, are very close to current thinking falling under the ethicio-political position of ‘deep ecology’. Deep ecology considers Homo sapiens to be of the same level as other species, with obligations toward them. In the pantheist view, rocks and stones are objects of deep concern, and the earth is considered to be a living entity. In the ‘New Age’ view, man is considered supreme, but ethi- cally responsible for the care and well-being of all. Both strands of deep ecology lead ultimately to a merger of the human and the cosmos into a state of higher consciousness, possibly echoing Fein’s synnoetic goal. I must note here that Fein’s goals regarding synnoetics are not outlined in any depth, he published little on this idea, and my research found that his unpublished papers, once held in the collection at Stanford University, may have been destroyed by his family after his death. More investigation is nec- essary.

My point of view regarding the question of deep ecology and syn- noetics draws heavily on Slavoj Zizek’s essay ‘Of Cells and Selves’, published in 1999. Zizek’s primary critiques of the deep ecology movement revolve around two issues: anthropocentricism, and the relationship between human subjectivity and free will. In The Third Culture, edited by John Brockman, a number of authors assert that a new spiritual/cosmic relationship is emerging between man and the universe, one where man will emerge from his narrow egotistic, anthropic attitudes toward the universe into a new understanding, solidarity, and oneness with nature and the cosmos. We will end our ruthless egocentric exploitation of nature and see our humble posi- tion as a cog within a cosmic system. However, simultaneous with this realization and rejection of the anthropocentric point of view, deep ecologists charge man with the duty of ‘subordinating the narrow interests of the human species to the interests of all other forms of life and the entire biosphere’ (Zizek 1999: 305). Zizek charges then that this attitude reasserts an anthropocentric point of view by elevating man to the position of a kind of ‘functionary of Life’, a universal being:

birds, trees, rivers, and rocks are clearly not able to plead their own cause, let alone the cause of all other living beings - Deep Ecology thus in no way escapes the charge of anthropocentricism: the very demand it addresses to man to sacrifice himself in the interests of the entire biosphere confers on him the exceptional status of universal being. (Zizek 1999: 305)

The second proposal of the deep ecology movement posits that out of the human rejection of the anthropomorphic point of view and the develop- ment of our oneness with nature and the cosmos will emerge a new, higher state where the universe as a giant living organism will arrive at a con- sciousness of itself. Consciousness will evolve from the human to a higher state of evolution, a higher entity, an Uber-mind, or a universal cosmic con- sciousness (Hillis and others). This again seems to echo Fein’s call for the synnoetic development of a ‘mental power (power of knowing) greater than the sum of its individual components’, those components being, for Fein, ‘a symbiosis of people, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata’. This new age techno-ideology that we are on the threshold of, or indeed, have long since crossed into and are only beginning to gain an awareness of our location, represents a transformation of human intelli- gence into something more than human, a higher order entity toward which we stand like animals (or even cells) stand to us. W. Daniel Hillis writes:

We’re heading toward something which is going to happen very soon - in our lifetimes - and which is fundamentally different from anything that’s hap- pened in human history before ... If I try to extrapolate the trends, to look at where technology is going sometime early in the next century, there comes a point where something incomprehensible will happen. Maybe it’s the creation of intelligent machines. Maybe it’s telecommunications merging us into a global organism. If you try to talk about it, it sounds mystical, but I am going to make a very practical statement here. I think something is happening now - and will continue to happen over the next few decades - which is incompre- hensible to us, and I find that both frightening and exciting. (Hillis 1996: 385-86)

Zizek warns that the prospect of the global organism into which we are merged will deprive us of the very freedom which makes us ethical agents, a driving force in the deep ecology movement. Life in a constant state of ecstatic immersion in the ultimate Uber-mind would bring about the loss of subjectivity, ethical imperatives, and human dignity. The belief that ethically positive cosmic agendas will be achieved by giving over our consciousness to a ‘higher order of consciousness’ is certainly an example of anthropo- morphism because it places the human quality of consciousness onto the non-human; and further, assumes that this higher order entity would care about us, that it would hold our interests in the highest regard, or that it would have ‘interests’ at all. This global-ethical position may be another example of ‘The God Trick’ that Donna Haraway has referred to on a number of occasions (Haraway 1991: 24). Rather than, as deep ecology claims, that the prospect of the global organism would be beyond the human, a higher order entity, it appears that human definitions and quali- ties are required in our defining of this organism. Indeed, this observation of Zizek’s regarding deep ecology overlays a contingency noted above for Jahn and Dunne regarding consciousness in non-living entities, as the ‘anthropomorphic aspects in the perception of a human consciousness’. As our understanding of our own consciousness is a rich, difficult and highly suspect enterprise, human attempts to understand a global consciousness that is aware of its awareness, of which we are but a single entity among many, is algorithmically suspect or at least not easily answered. The ques- tion of the status of the anthropomorphic regarding non-living conscious- ness is further problematized when considering charges that the projection of human qualities onto the non-human may be required for humans to hold a respectful, harmonious relationship to their environment. Even in the case mentioned above, of Clark and Chalmers ‘Extended Mind’, they write: ‘In any case, once the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped, we may be able to see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world’ (Clark and Chalmers 2002: 650). My goal is not to support the conservative point of view that the only way to preserve human free will, subjectivity, and dignity is to restrict our probings and research agendas, nor to say that we are incapable of understanding, there are too many conflicts and no solutions, so let us forget the enterprise. Rather, my view is that possibly in the synnoetic problem, as in the definitions of the postmodern anti-aesthetic, it is difference and incompletion that emerge as the operating principles, not oneness and merger. Freedom through difference and incompletion as the very impossibility of merger into the one brings about awareness of our place within the overall scheme, a condition of simultaneous freedom and lack of control, as echoed by many of the participants in my preliminary work, ‘A Synnoetic System’. The planetary self, rather that involving a transformation of consciousness into an single distributed networked ‘Uber-mind’, may involve an ongoing, elastic formation and reformation of boundaries between self and other. As Varela notes in autopoesis, a self-organizing network of biochemical reactions produces molecules by forming boundaries, and thus reshapes the network and produces new boundaries. Zizek writes: ‘... as Hegel would have put it, life emerges when the external limitation (of an entity by its environs) turns into self-determination’. This is in contrast to being determined by the other. Zizek continues, ‘a self is precisely an entity without any substantial density, without any kernel that would guarantee its consistency’ (Zizek 1999: 311). Thus the self is not the internal kernel of an organism, but the organism’s surface, its delineator, or interface, in constant flux and negotiation with its environs, coupling and decoupling as necessary. If you penetrate the self in search of an essence it is like sand between your fingers. The insertion of autopoetic synnoesis into the practice of the construction of a planetary self adds awareness of the multiple dimensions at work in this elastic and ongoing surface demarcation, and potentially opens the self to a range of fields of knowledge and experience.

The role of technology shifts to a new agenda, as it is used not to augment or extend human consciousness, but to couple, connect, and facilitate the formation of new boundaries of self demarcated by subtle interactions between a variety of synnoetic fields. For example, in psi phe- nomena, consciousness needs sensitive technology to be understood and directed, thus consciousness augments technology, not the other way round. Psi phenomena as a form of wireless communication may be of pro- found importance to the future development of interactive ubiquitous inter- faces, synnoetic inter-species cognitive systems, and a new, yet to be defined context for aesthetic experience. Synnoetics may represent a fourth stage in the development of cybernetics, as the coupling facilitates an entirely new/reveals an ancient subjective channel for information exchange and communication between humans, plants, animals, matter in all forms, and machines, and consequently, for the potential construction of a plane- tary aesthetic model of subjectivity.

References

Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. (2002), ‘The Extended Mind’, Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (ed. D. Chalmers), New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 643-51. Dawkins, R. (1982), The Extended Phenotype, San Francisco: Freeman. Dennett, D. (1991), Consciousness Explained, Boston, MA: Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Company, pp. 412-18. Edelman, G., and Tononi, G. (2000), A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, New York: Basic Books, p. 194. Engelbart, D.C. (1962), ‘Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework’, summary report AFOSR-3223 under contract AF 49(638)-1024, SRI project 3578 for Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Menlo Park, CA, Stanford Research Institute. Fein, L., The Computer-Related Science (Synnoetics) at a University in the Year 1975, unpublished paper, 1960. Gromala, D., Hodges, L. and Shaw, C. (2000), ‘The Meditation Chamber’, GVU Center, Georgia Institute of Technology, https://www.gvu.gatech.edu/gvu/medi- tation/proj_frameset.htm. Accessed 20 August 2004. Haraway, D. (1991), ‘The Actors are Cyborg, Nature is Coyote, and the Geography is Elsewhere: Postscript to Cyborgs at Large’, Technoculture, (eds. C. Penley and A. Ross), Cultural Politics, Volume 3, Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 24-26. Hillis, D. (1996) ‘Close to the Singularity’, The Third Culture, (ed. J. Brockman), New York: Touchstone, pp. 385-86. Hume, D. (1739), Treatise on Human Nature, London: John Noon. Jahn, R., and Dunne, B. (1987), Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp. 193-253. Jeffers, S. (2003), ‘Physics and Claims for Anomalous Effects Related to Consciousness’, Psi Wars, Getting to Grips with the Paranormal (eds. J. Alcock, J. Burns, and A. Freeman), Exeter: Imprint-Academic, p. 150. Little, G. (1999), ‘A Manifesto for Avatars’, Intertexts, Webs of Discourse: The Intertextuality of Science Studies, 3: 2, p. 193. See also https://art.bgsu.edu/~glittle/ava_text_1.html. Little, G., Betz, B. and Eber, D. (2004), ‘Exploring Conscious Experience in Artistic Virtual Environments’, Consciousness Research Abstracts: Toward a Science of Consciousness, Tucson AZ: Imprint-Academic, p. 99. See also https://art.bgsu.edu/~glittle/presence/. Accessed 20 August 2004. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968), The Visible and the Invisible (ed. C. Lefort, trans. A. Lingis), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 140. Smithson, R. (1996), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (ed. Jack Flam), Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 100. Torey, Z. (1999), The Crucible of Consciousness, Auckland: Oxford University Press, p. 12. Watkins, M. (1999), Pathways Between the Multiplicities of the Psyche and Culture: The Development of Dialogical Capacities, London: Sage Press. Zizek, S. (1999), ‘Is it Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace?’, The Zizek Reader (eds. E. Wright and E. Wright), Malden, MA: Blackwell, p. 112. —- (1999), ‘Of Cells and Selves’, The Zizek Reader (eds. E. Wright and E. Wright), Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 304-20. Suggested Citation Little, G. (2004), ‘Synnoetics and self: the construction of planetary identity as an aesthetic oeuvre’, Technoetic Arts2: 2, pp. 81–98, doi: 10.1386/tear.2.2.81/0

Contributor Details

As an artist, theorist, and teacher, Gregory Little works with the technologies and theories of real-time simulation in multi-nodal interactive systems. Since 1990, his work focused on interactive arts from a cybernetic point of view, examining the rela- tionships between digitally-based systems and human and planetary identity, con- sciousness, and subjectivity. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Art at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA, where he teaches courses in 3D Animation, Art and Virtual Environments, Theory, and 3D Gaming. Contact: Assistant Professor of Digital Art, School of Art, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green OH 43403 USA. E-mail: glittle@bgnet.bgsu.edu