William Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) was a British writer of Science Fiction, who dealt with themes which explored heightened utopic possibilities of human subjectivity. As one may see from his dates, he lived somewhat contemporaneously with Sri Aurobindo and it is not unlikely that he may have come across his writings or ideas. Stapledon's philosophical explorations into collective consciousness led him to use the term "supermind" for a global consciousness related to the mutual resonance and union of all human minds. Such ideas as also those of communication between different life forms and explorations of humanity's seeking for Truth and future perfection form the subject of many of his books. Stapledon may be thought of as one of the founders of modern Sci-fi and had a strong influence on other such masters of the genre as Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanislaw Lem, C. S. Lewis and John Maynard Smith. In this short story, The Flames, Stapledon brings together many of these themes and explores them from a certain perspective.   more »

I've taken the liberty of typing in all of Chapter 4 of my copy of this important book, because it powerfully addresses one of the main themes of SCIY, the manifold relationships between science, culture, and consciousness. (ron)

"It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labor to subtract it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation with the help of the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the robotics scientist. ...

"Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are now at a great bifurcation in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and Hans Moravec prophesy that we are at the end of the human era, and that 'nanobots' are about to be embedded in our bodies until our antique organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by a new silicon noosphere of networked computers. Like ancient mitochondria or chloroplasts surrounded by the gigantic eukaryotic cells, we are about to be engulfed in the next evolutionary stage. So the mechanists see noetic technologies surrounding human culture and consciousness and compressing it into an endosymbiont in a larger and swifter and more elegant evolutionary vehicle. ...

"Mystics flip this literalism over to see technology as a system of externalized metaphors that derive from pre-existing ontological modes at play and at large in the universe... For the mystic — be she Cabbalist or Sufi — an angel is a 'Celestial Intelligence' — a form of cosmic noetic organization that does not require a detour through animal evolution. So when Kurzweil claims that by 2030 implanted nanobots in the bloodstream will enable humans to turn off to the outside world to attune to a virtual reality, the mystic would recognize a literalist rendering of the process of meditation. Kurzweil's vision of the world in 2030 reminds me of Borges's 'Library of Babel'. 'I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, useless, incorruptible, secret'. [2] And here we need to be sensitive to the full force of Borges's use of the word 'Babel'. ... "   more »

In his 'Postscript on Control Societies,' Deleuze marks our emergence from the disciplinary, panoptic societies Foucault studies. He describes a movement from a society 'equipped with thermodynamic machinces presenting the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage' to a society functioning 'with information technology and computers, where the passive danger is noise and the active, piracy and viral contamination' (Deleuze, 1995: 180). Deleuze's observations suggest more than a shift in the metaphors by which we understand society; they indicate a shift in the material relationship between humans and machines. Deleuze and Guattari's work has extensively explored this relationship, from molecular proto-machines of desire to the molar assemblages of the state. Their work operates, in part, on the shifting boundaries between aesthetic and technological paradigms. Science Fiction has also worked upon this boundary. Though the generic term 'Science Fiction' only hints at the multiple possibilities for communication (and contamination) between the two, Deleuze and Guattari recognize its potential, noting that the genre 'has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, vegatable and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, molecules, and things impreceptible' (1987: 248).    more »