Notes:
Hologenome: Fields in space AND fields in time.
What alien life might want? What alien life might be able to do?
Peter Watts - Blindsight - The Island
Are things just dead or alive? Or are there things in between?
Cryopreservation.... threshold of alive and death has expanded.
Watts: certain kind of evolution might respond to a gravitational context... where does intelligence reside? Are we separate from our bodies?
Andromeda Strain -- Crystalline Structure
Schrodinger - crystalline structure
Bees (peter watts pg 224 blindsight)
The subtext in all of this: Aliens speaking with humans (or visa versa), communication becomes the key question.
Chinese Room....
The brain - "thinking tumor" - are humans better for "thinking", or is it that there are different cognitive platforms?
Does are cognitive architecture develop in 1G of gravity? Can humans get pregnant in space?
Game Theory
Solar flare - is this a computational device?
Oblique or Orthogonal Ecologies: Variations on life, variations on mind
Variations on life and on life. Variations of mind.
If you have a particular lens through which to look through the world, then you will miss all kinds of things. If you are equipped with a certain tool kit of perception, then your framing of the world is limited to that tool kit. We have to develop toolkits to think about concepts beyond our perception.
Crystalline Structure of Silver:
“That we would wish to define the very existence of A.I. in relation to its ability to mimic how humans think that humans think will be looked back upon as a weird sort of speciesism. ”
What is mind?