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Tag Archives: philosophy

What it Means to Be A Neurohacker

15 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by Venessa Miemis in neurohacking

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consciousness, ethics, neuroscience, philosophy

socrates

This post originally appeared on neurohacker.com

Dr. Zachary Stein, philosopher of education and a research member of the Neurohacker Collective, begins a series on the ethics of neurohacking. This series is part of our commitment to engage our research community on the challenges and opportunities in the space.

On Neurohacking

As a philosopher and educator I am sometimes asked about my work with NHC and about the word neurohacking in particular. To my mind neurohacking means using the best of what is known about how the brain and mind work from all fields and disciplines in the service of realizing humanity’s deepest potentials, starting with self-realization and moving outward. Calling this kind of endeavor neurohacking is putting old wine in new casks—adding modern neuroscience to the ancient philosophical practice of seeking self-transformation in service to humanity. What the neurohacker does is focus on actualizing the next logical step of including psychology and neuroscience in the pantheon of inspirations and tools for a life dedicated to wisdom, love, and service. At its best neurohacking involves some of the key tasks of philosophy, such as phenomenology, reflective self-authorship, and the exploration of human potentials in self and relationship.

My colleagues who are dialectal critical realists would group neurohacking under what they call, “totalizing transformative depth-praxis” – an intentional transformation of human self- consciousness– “depth-praxis” – based on a comprehensive critical philosophy of mind-brain and culture-society. Fans of integral meta-theory would call it Integral Transformative Practice. My former colleagues at Harvard called it Mind, Brain, and Education, or educational neuroscience.

Of course, neurohacking is a term that draws on a computer metaphor. It is also a term originating in a particular time (2000s) and a particular place (Silicon Valley). It comes pre- loaded towards reductionism, hyper-masculinity, technocratic, scientistic, and empiricist readings. The term implies instrumental control and even a kind of cheating or shortcutting, wherein the hacker somehow benefits from outsmarting the normal order of things. When understood this way it can be seen as an ideological outgrowth of the simplistic medical models that dominate the healthcare industry, which make us think that a magic pharmacological bullet can be bought and mechanically inserted into the body as a quick fix. I’d like to see these connotations drop away from the term, which is part of mission of the NHC—to define neurohacking. Personally, I prefer organismic metaphors to computer metaphors when thinking about the mind and body. But neurohacking has a much nicer ring to it than “totalizing transformative depth- praxis,” for instance. Who would join a totalizing transformative depth-praxis collective?

You either hack your own mind and brain or they get hacked for you…

Truth is that when it comes to the use of neuroscience and psychology to transform human consciousness the train has already left the station. I’ve written a book about how psychology and neuroscience have long been used in the service of social control in schools. Advertisers have been using psychology since the birth of the field and use it even more now, as they help build psychometric backends that track your social networking activity to customize ad delivery. The governments and corporations that control large swaths of the mass media are also not ignorant of findings from the modern sciences of mind regarding the malleability of human preferences and perceptions. Tomorrow’s pioneers in the technologies of virtual and augmented reality are already consulting neuroscientists and psychologist in the design of future computer-brain interfaces. So you either neurohack yourself into autonomy or you get neurohacked into conformity, by the media, schools, psychiatry, advertising, or the emerging technologies of augmented and virtual reality.

However, if you are neurohacking to become smarter, or get better at your job, or find happiness, you are confusing means for ends. These are all aspects of one’s full humanity, parts which can be “improved” in isolation, but which must ultimately hang together in some kind of coherence with the rest of you. Make one of these an end-in- itself and you are confusing a fragment of yourself for the whole. The result will be negative externalities and diminishing returns from efforts. Get smarter and you may quit your job. Get better at your job and you may become unhappy. Tinkering with parts in the short run backfires. The neurohacker has his eye on the whole and the long run, not some sort run gain like “productivity.”

All this talk of “increasing productivity” begs the question of what exactly one is working to produce. Too much of the conversation surrounding biohacking and the human potential movement is about how to “get the competitive edge” or “unfair advantage”—both terms that assume one is playing a zero-sum game. Knowledge and practices that “upgrade” our body and mind should be used to liberate our capacities, freeing us to create new and better kinds of value, new forms of work and life, new social systems. We must not merely seek to harden ourselves to better function as cogs within the many dysfunctional social systems that surround us. Neurohacking must include a critical discourse on the ethics of self-instrumentalization. At times we all feel compelled to make our own body and mind into a kind of tool fit for social utility. We can mistakenly hack ourselves into a shape needed to be of service to ideals we would not choose in our better moments. This is a kind of counter-revolutionary co-optation of neurohacking’s potential—something that through the creation of the NHC we are intending to end.

The neurohacker’s commitment to self-authorship expands outward from the self and eventually touches on all aspects of culture and society. When neurohackers get together, say to form a collective, they need to remember the root of what they are doing and create a self-authoring organization. Indeed, with its penchant for commodification, gadgetry, and expensive ingestibles, neurohacking itself could be readily co-opted by largely commercial interests, and become only a small quirky branch of the pharmaceutical and medical technologies industries. Instead we must adopt post-corporatist ethos and design and empower each other through the dissemination of knowledge and best practices. Importantly, the best things in neurohacking are free, starting with your own brain, which is simply a good child of the universe. Meaningful and transformative relationships, mediation, and the natural world are abundant free of charge. Nutrition and exercise are incontestably the most basic elements of brain health, learning, and emotional well-being. Those elements of neurohacking that can be bought and sold, such as nutraceuticals, bio-feedback machines, or quantified-self apps—these ought to be carefully curated in light of an ethos that emphasizes benefits and value over profit and appearances. The post-corporatist ethos of NHC is without a doubt one of its most important features because it assures that we don’t confuse the goal of businesses (making money) with the goals of neurohacking (liberating human potential and self-authorship).

The body is politics. This notion is as old as civilization. The most basic right a human has is to the integrity of their own body. Neurohacking is rooted in each person’s right to sovereignty over their essential organismic integrity. Neurohackers declare independence from deficient systems providing inadequate healthcare and food. Neurohackers declare independence from simplistic and stigmatizing medical labels and industrial-era ontologies of (dis)embodiment. Neurohackers declare independence from the grip of industries that profit from human disease and are thus disincentivized from promoting human wellness. Neurohackers are a diverse group of DIY citizen scientists who are finding ways to free humanity from its current regimes of bio-power. Neurohackers are reclaiming the brain and mind from its cooptation as part of the push towards an increasing politicization, bureaucratization, and commodification of humanity’s biological substrate.

Dr. Stein serves as Chair of the Education Program at Meridian University and Academic Director of the activitst think tank at the Center for Integral Wisdom. He sits on the board of the Society for Consciousness Studies and is a Reseach Member of the Neurohacker Collective. Zak is also Co-Founder of Lectica Inc, a non-proft dedicated to using the science of learning to redesign standardized testing infrastructures. His book Social Justice and Educational Measurement (Routledge, 2016) looks at the injustices of contemporary high stakes testing and has been called “original and powerful… a work of genius… philosophy at its best.”  Zak’s second book, Education in the Anthropocene: Essays on Schools, Technology, and Society will be published in early 2017. For more see: www.zakstein.org

Yasuhiko Genku Kimura on the Causes of Mediocrity

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by Venessa Miemis in Uncategorized

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philosophy

Screen Shot 2014-11-23 at 8.19.30 AM

In response to the last post on mediocrity, style, and exquisiteness, philosopher and Zen Buddhist priest Yasuhiko Genku Kimura shared this passage he wrote on the causes of mediocrity, excerpted from his essay Self-Responsibility, Self-Integrity, and Freedom from the Guru.

He proposes the notion that mediocrity is not about being average, but about conforming to the average, and genius is not about living up to an external comparative standard, but about cultivating self-responsibility and self-integrity. This presents an empowering narrative that geniushood is about bestowment rather than endowment, leaving the matter of embodying it a choice solely ours to make. Reprinted with permission.

THE CAUSE OF MEDIOCRITY

What are the reasons for this sorry state of affairs? There are several different ways in which to answer this question. First, we will approach this question from the point of view of the conspiracy for mediocrity, as this sorry state of affairs is an exemplary case of the all-pervasive conspiracy for mediocrity existing in the world. Continue reading →

Summary: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

29 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by Venessa Miemis in Uncategorized

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philosophy

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this is a book review/summary of Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
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How do we define ‘knowledge’ in a postindustrial society equipped with new media, instantaneous communication technologies and universal access to information? Who controls its transmission? How can scientific knowledge be legitimated?
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These are the questions Lyotard asks in The Postmodern Condition. He believes that the method of legitimation traditionally used by science, a philosophical discourse that references a metanarrative, becomes obsolete in a postmodern society. Instead, he explores whether paralogy may be the new path to legitimation.
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I. The Field: Knowledge in Computerized Societies
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The nature of knowledge itself is shifting from being an end in itself to a commodity meant to be repackaged and redistributed. In order to be valuable, learning must be able to be reformatted into these packets of information in computer language, so that they can be sent through that channel of communication. Today, we increasingly hear the words “knowledge economy” and “information society” to describe the era we are entering. As was always the case, knowledge is power. Now, in an increasingly complex world, those with the ability to sort through the vast amounts of information and repackage it to give it meaning will be the winners. Technologies continue to solve problems that were formerly the source of power struggles between nations (i.e. the need for cheap labor is diminished by the mechanization of industry, the need for raw materials is reduced by advances in alternative energy solutions), and so control of information is most likely to become the 21st century’s definition of power.

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2. The Problem: Legitimation

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The definition of knowledge is determined by intertwining forces of power, authority, and government. Leotard draws a parallel between the process of legitimation in politics and of those in science: both require an authority figure or “legislator” to determine whether a statement is acceptable to enter the round of discourse for consideration. In an increasingly transparent society, this leads to new questions:

Who is authorizing the authority figure? Who is watching the watchers?
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3. The Method: Language Games
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The manner in which communication unfolds is like a dance. Or a battlefield. Those patterns that define our social interactions are identified here as language games, and put us in constantly changing positions and roles based on the type of discourse.
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4. The Nature of the Social Bond: The Modern Alternative

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Lyotard says that to understand the nature of knowledge in modern times, one must be able to understand how the society operates. In this case, postmodern society it is either a whole, or split in two. Is it an optimistic model that views society as a cohesive, unified whole, or a model based in dissonance, where the needs of the people and functions of the system are incompatible? Either way, society is a machine, and knowledge is a cog in the system that keeps it running.

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5. The Nature of the Social Bond: The Postmodern Perspective

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The social bond is itself a language game, each of us nodes on a communication net, intercepting and resending messages throughout the system. These messages affect the nodes in the language game, causing “moves,” “displacements,” and “countermoves,” all which potentially enhance and enrich the system by creating innovation and novelty. This method of communication differs greatly from the modern institutional approach at language games, which limit the kinds of ‘moves’ able to be made by creating rigid boundaries and rules.
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6. The Pragmatics of Narrative Knowledge
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Science is not the same as knowledge. Whereas science is made up of denotative statements, and must be observable, repeatable, and verifiable by experts, knowledge casts a wider net, being composed of a competence that encompasses concepts of truth, justice, efficiency, and beauty. Knowledge is not limited to a specific class of statements; it is characterized by a fluidity and flexibility that can identify the relationships across subjects in order to make “good” utterances. Narratives then decide the criteria of the competence of knowledge – in traditional knowledge this would be “know-how,” “knowing how to speak,” and “knowing how to hear.” A narrator attains legitimation simply by being the narrator; the information is transmitted to the listener, who then attains the knowledge, and through meter and repetition pass of the criteria of competence and the acceptable rules of a culture.
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7. The Pragmatics of Scientific Knowledge

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Scientific knowledge is characterized by the ability to provide proof supporting a statement, and ability to refute opposing statements. The combination of these two conditions do not prove a statement ‘true,’ but rather as being likely to be true based on our understanding of reality. The competence needed in the formulation of scientific knowledge does not require a social bond; it is one-sided, only requiring a sender’s competence, and is composed only of the language game of the denotative utterance.

In postmodern society, we have two types of knowledge: narrative and scientific. Neither can be judged as right or true or better in comparison to the other, because their criterion of competence is difference.

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8. The Narrative Function and the Legitimation of Knowledge

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Narrative knowledge is looked at disdainfully by advocates of scientific knowledge because it doesn’t put legitimation as its foremost priority when forming statements. Ironically, scientific knowledge must resort to narratives in order to legitimate itself, as arguments and proofs are merely dialectics. The new function of narrative knowledge is characterized by both denotative utterances concerning truth, and prescriptive utterances concerning justice. “The people” decide that what is needed to determine the legitimacy of truth or justice is simply their debate and consensus.

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9. Narratives of the Legitimation of Knowledge

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The two predominant versions of the narrative of legitimation. The first is “humanity as the hero of liberty.” Humanity becomes the validator of knowledge: laws that are created are just because the citizens who create them desire them to be just, and so it follows that they must be just. Knowledge is valuable insofar as it serves to meet the goals of the collective. The second positions science as a path to morality, ethical action, and spirituality. Legitimation then becomes the subject of the philosophical, of the spirit.
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10. Delegitimation
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In the postindustrial society, the grand narrative is dead. A process of deligitimation was inherent in terms of positive science, as its version of ‘knowledge’ was legitimated by itself  “by citing its own statements in a second-level discourse,” and is therefore not true knowledge at all. Instead, science can be seen as a speculative game that is defined by a certain set of rules. As the rules are being bent, fields of science are converging, and areas of inquiry are applicable to a greater range of disciplines. No one can master all the languages, and in the absence of a metalanguage,legitimation leaves the realm of being based on performativity and is accepted to be based on the social bond, consensus and communications.
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11. Research and Its Legitimation through Performativity

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New methods of argumentation and establishing proof are changing the pragmatics of research. It is accepted that there are a variety of methods to arguing truth, not just a universal metalanguage. New moves, new rules, and new games are all pathways of progress in scientific knowledge. Proof is increasingly established through technology, because the technical apparatus can make observations more efficiently than human senses. The problem is that technology costs money, and so truth can most often only be established by the wealthy. This interweaving of efficiency and wealth has meant that research is typically conducted not to establish truth, but to turn a profit and gain power. If those with wealth are running the game, they continue establishing proof by funding more research, which then increases efficiency or ‘performance improvement,’ which allows more ‘proof’ to be produced, which as an end in itself becomes a type of legitimation. So in the postmodern world, power is the knowledge of how to increase the efficiency of the system, which is accomplished by having, creating, and reformatting the most information and data.

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12. Education and Its Legitimation through Performativity

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What defines learning and education when knowledge becomes the equivalent of performativity of the social system? Education ceases to end with young people at the university level – instead members of society will need to continually absorb new information in order to be able to function in an ever-evolving system. The role of professor as transmitter of learning may decrease, as computer-based learning opportunities increase. When information becomes universally accessible and ubiquitous, learning becomes a matter of knowing how to harvest the information out of a vast pool of data, how to ‘create’ knowledge by reassembling available information in meaningful ways.
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13. Postmodern Science as the Search for Instabilities
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Lyotard says that postmodern scientific knowledge cannot be based on performativity, because efficiency must be calculated based on a stable system. Nature and society are not stable systems, it is impossible to define all the variables of those systems, and so they can never be perfectly controlled. Their success and progress are based on inconsistencies and innovations, or “new moves.” As is demonstrated by tyrannical governments or authorities, control does not increase performativity, but rather stifles the system. So knowledge in the postmodern world is about change, adapting to it, and generating new ideas, not on an established rigid scientific method.
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14. Legitimation by Paralogy

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Postmodern thought accepts that there cannot be a fixed, static paradigm for legitimation in a system that is fluid, organic, and constantly in flux in its process of growth. It is more apparent now that at any other previous point in history that we are living in a world of accelerating technological change, and flexibility of the players to create new moves and rules will be crucial to society’s functioning. Permanence has always been an illusion, and aligning our interactions and interpretations of society and knowledge more with the notion of transience and ephemerality will only service in our favor.

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update: lynne desilva johnson: “it can be a useful exercise to remove philosophical texts from their heritage and create new ownership of concepts and language, reapplying these concepts heuristically out of context to new and different times and places. While the author wishes some accuracy in terms of the general translation of this model, she is less concerned with the original application/ontological trappings and as such the following essay should read as her extrapolated contemporary reading of this theorist as applies to this time and place”

(from the archives; 19 march 2009; media studies graduate paper)

imagery from the Imaginary Foundation

Reflection: The Concept of Enlightenment

26 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by Venessa Miemis in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

philosophy

musings on Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.

When I review these passages, my mind speaks back – “the machine is using us”.

The goal of the enlightenment was to free our minds, by favoring ‘rationality’ over myth and mysticism. Nature became something that was to be controlled by us, quantified, compartmentalized, labeled, manipulated.

But, this new scientific way of looking at things changed the way we THINK… or perhaps limited our ability to think at all. Instead of looking for greater ‘Truth’ or deeper meaning in things, identifying the essence of a thing, giving it ‘value’, it becomes a mere definition. The framework of thoughts are based in a soul-deadening logic and mechanicality. Everything that can be named and described and explained away can be somehow controlled, and there’s a power in that, but at the same time, something sacred is lost.

The belief in positivism seems as irrational to me as mythology must have been for those that started the enlightenment movement. To place utmost value in what the senses can perceive, and call it Truth, is ridiculous. I think we’re finally coming around full circle, not to a return to mysticism, but at least allowing ourselves to say that there’s more to life than meets the eye. In some ways, science itself has pointed out its fallibility. The more we dive into quantum mechanics, the more incongruities and incompatibilities we find with what we think we know and what is. Perhaps there really is an unknowable universal. Is it really such a horrible thing to have a sense of awe of the world around us??

We become like slaves in invisible chains, our minds shaped into the pattern of a machine: efficient, mechanical, repetitive, causal, our thoughts on the conveyor belt of an assembly line – there are no alternative paths for them to take.

This machine-like way of thinking is tied directly to the division of labor – the mechanized process of thinking is merely a function of material production and the “all-encompassing economic apparatus”. By abandoning the cumbersomeness of formulating actual thoughts in favor of following a predetermined reified path, the greater machine/system of society can operate smoothly. At the same time, the smooth operation leads to a distillation of society, a loss of culture.

By treating nature as something outside of oneself, something that needs to be manipulated and controlled verse something with which to be in harmony, humans become isolated and estranged. Both the lowly worker and the ones in charge are victims – the dominated are resigned sheep, and the dominators are equally immobilized by their distance from the experience, the self imposed detachment and repression of novelty in favor of utility in order to ‘better’ perform their role of power.

(from the archives; friday february 6, 2009; media studies graduate paper)
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image via wisdom quarterly

Online Detox from the Baltic Coast

10 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by Venessa Miemis in Uncategorized

≈ 35 Comments

Tags

philosophy

I’ve just spent the past few days unplugged and invigorated by the simplicity of just Being. Apparently it required me to travel to the Baltic Coast of Latvia to make this happen. In this little wooden house, with no electricity, no running water, and certainly no wifi, I remembered what it means to be at peace.It took a day to overcome the nervous twitch in my hand, antsy to impulsively check email and twitter on the iphone.

How could I possibly survive without knowing what was happening at that very moment?

How could I sustain my community if I wasn’t tweeting, posting, or commenting at least every few hours?

Resistance was futile – there was no choice but to actually be present in physical reality. Continue reading →

A Life Manifesto

13 Thursday May 2010

Posted by Venessa Miemis in Uncategorized

≈ 31 Comments

Tags

philosophy

For far too long, we have been asleep — silently accepting the reality presented to us.

In this illusion, we are powerless. Conformity and convention have manipulated us into feeling alienated, afraid, and full of despair. Our souls are in agony to connect, be understood, share our inner light, and express our creativity in a beautiful world gone mad. Some have given up hope, and sadly live in darkness.

But, there is a shift underway, and though it is often so hard to see, many of us are starting to wake up. It is already happening all around us, in our cities, in our workplaces, in our homes, around the world.

We are empowering ourselves.

We thought — if we could only make this shift more transparent, perhaps we could accelerate its rate.

And so, in one of humanity’s greatest displays of ingenuity, we have created the Web.

It is not a destination.

It is an interface between minds that transcends space and time.

It is not a solution in and of itself, nor a savior.

It is an opportunity and a tool to find our tribes and ourselves.

It is an environment and an ecology where communities can emerge and unite.

It is a training ground in which to experiment with what might happen if we learn to open our hearts, to trust, to share, to be authentic, to engage in discovery, embrace uncertainty, and allow ourselves and each other to grow.

The Web will not save us.

It can only show us that we already have everything we need in order to heal, and it’s not located out there.

It’s in here.

It always has been.

The solution is us.

We can only save ourselves.

– venessa miemis 05.13.10

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