Sunday 25 November 2012

What a Brain can do?

"The future (of the) brain seems, at this point, to be determined by the opposition between organic and cybernetic. We might employ Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology to say that while the human brain is deterritorialized onto the circuitry of the cybernetic brain, the cybernetic brain is simultaneously reterritorized onto the human brain. Consequently, the human brain has begun to wander through the wider circuits and pathways of the computer—even to the point where the distinction between human and cybernetic is blurred, if not dissolved altogether. Nevertheless, the human still tries to conceive of this relationship between the two brains according to an earlier former-matter distinction, by which it would appear that the human brain was simply employing the cybernetic brain as a path to its own actualization. Thus, there is more than a vestige of Hegelianism remaining in contemporary scientific narratives of the brain, in which Spirit (or Mind) takes a circuitous path of externalization in order to achieve a final identification between the actualized brain and the ideal that is potential in matter. We maintain, rather, that the mind is only the “ghost in the brain,” the sensory-motor double that has taken control of thinking but that thought is always catching the image of, like a strange spirit whose haunting we only dimly perceive. In neuroscience and the philosophy of mind, one usually finds the question of the cybernetic brain treated in terms of the possibility of artificial intelligence. For instance, the question arises as to whether it would be possible to create an intelligent machine (i.e., a “conscious” machine). But isn’t this the most feeble means of imagining the brain, determining its capacities and powers according to an organic (“human”) configuration? Deleuze is fond of Spinoza’s claim that “we do not know what a body can do,” but we are no closer to knowing what a brain can do when we reduce even its cerebral productions to reproductions, to making a “brain like our own.” Two dangers belong to this desire: the creation of a “disciplinary brain,” and the production of a new unconscious brain." 

GREGG LAMBERT AND GREGORY FLAXMAN 
full article at the Artbrain.org

Sunday 18 November 2012

Mutual Core

What you resist persists,
nuance makes heat
To counteract distance I know you gave it all,
Offered me harmony if things were done your way.
My Eurasian plate subsumed, Forming a mutual core

This eruption undoes stagnation.
You didn't know I had it in me,
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