the timboucher experience

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Identity Formation Process
3. Narrative Identity, Storytelling
4. Viewpoint
5. Mimesis & Mirror Neurons
6. Participation Mystique
7. Body-Swapping
8. Sensory Substitution
9. Thesis
10. Moral Applications of Transhuman Technology
11. The Good News
12. Synthetic Vision Systems & Pictorial Avionics Formats
13. Ubiquitous Computing, Everyware, Ambient Intelligent Environments
14. Shape-Shifting
15. You Be More For A While (And I’ll Be You)
16. Celebrity Shamans
17. Constructing Consumer Identity
18. Government Monopoly of “Official” Identity
19. Anthithesis: Surveillance
20. Synthesis: Co-Emergent Liberation
21. Welcome To The Future

Introduction

For most people it seems the questions of Who am I really? and What am I made of? rarely - if ever - enter their conscious thought processes. Apart from the small fringe of philosophers, artists and allied seekers, most people accept their social identity as a monolithic, unchangeable entity. They understand themselves through their jobs and through social obligations: roles, activities and responsibilities. The artist, of course, has only these tools to work with as well in uncovering the nature of their True Self, but instead of passive acceptance, they actively experiment with these tools to find or to build some kind of meaning above and beyond simply what has been attached to them through the accidents of society and upbringing.

Identity Formation Process

Wikipedia explains the process of identity formation in clear enough terms for our purposes:

Identity formation is the process of the development of the distinct personality of an individual regarded as a persisting entity (known as personal continuity) in a particular stage of life in which individual characteristics are possessed by which a person is recognised or known (such as the establishment of a reputation). This process defines an individual to others and themselves. Pieces of the entity’s actual identity include a sense of continuity, a sense of uniqueness from others, and a sense of affiliation. Identity formation leads to a number of issues of personal identity and an identity where the individual has some sort of comprehension of him or herself as a discrete, separate entity.

Narrative Identity, Storytelling

Cribbing from that brief summation, we might be able to put forward a list of what identity typically means - to most people:

1. Attached to or associated with a particular entity
2. Discrete, unique or separate from others of its kind (from similar entities)
3. Yet still existing within a class or type of entities, with whom they exhibit certain shared characteristics, affiliations, reciprocal exchanges
4. Some kind of continuity or persistence through time

Starting with the basics, humans perceive themselves as entities first and foremost through their bodies. Our bodies are a particular recognizable shape, though genetic variations and mutations occur:

The process of growing up could be described as a process of coming to know one’s own body (perception, sensation), one’s relationship with other nearby bodies (family members, neighbors, friends), similarities and differences with same, and explanatory narratives of how it all fits together. “Such and such is my father. I grew up with him, he looks like me and I model my actions after his.” Or “She’s my friend because we have similar interests and went to school together.”

In philosophy, identity (also called sameness) is whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable, in terms of possessing a set of qualities or characteristics that distinguish it from entities of a different type. Or, in layman’s terms, identity is whatever makes something the same or different.

Viewpoint

Pretty much all of human activity revolves around those basic principles, exploring the perceiving self, communicating and exchanging with other perceiving selves, and concocting narrative explanations as to what’s going on, why and what is likely to happen next within our network of relationships (predictive analysis). These processes, for the vast majority of humans, are more or less completely unconscious. Narrative explanations forming the core of how we look at ourselves and how others look at us tend to be deeply buried under years and years of social condition. Likewise, each perceiving center, situated differently within a network of relationships and supporting narrative develops its own explanatory storyline of what is going on in its experience of life and why.

Mimesis & Mirror Neurons

Phylogenetically, humans are primates or what is known as apes. Etymologically, to “ape” something or someone is mimic it:

The verb “to imitate” (1632) is implied in to play the ape (1579), and the noun sense of “one who mimics” may date from c.1230.

The ancient Greeks used the term mimesis to describe something similar: the imitation of or representation of through Art, some antecedent thing in Nature. Mimesis forms the basis for all forms of drama, theatrics, stagecraft and performance: the ability of a human to project some element of their own identity into some entity outside of themselves.

Modern science brings us a close analogue in the form of what is known in the brain as mirror neurons.

A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspecific) animal.[1] Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself acting. These neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to exist in humans and other species including birds. In humans, brain activity consistent with mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.

In other words, at a very basic level inbuilt into the human biological system itself is the ability to perceive actions outside of our own physical entity as occurring somehow within us as well, if only in reflection. But whether it’s a real action taken by us, or an action taken by somehow outside entity, at least a certain portion of our perception system - on a biological level - responds to the action in the same, suggesting that perhaps the components of identity are not so cut and dry as we’d like to imagine them.

Participation Mystique

French sociologist, Lucien Levy-Bruhl termed this phenomena “participation mystique” and attributed it to so-called “primitive” modes of consciousness:

In the states of participation mystique and archaic identity there is no differentiation between object and subject and no distinction between lived experience and what the subject believes he or she perceives about the world.

Body-Swapping

Curiously, modern science has begun investigating notions such as mimesis, self-identification and participation mystique through a series of experiments related to swapping in and out or replacement of inputs into the sensory/perceptual system of human and other entities.

“In the first experiment, the head of a shop dummy was fitted with two cameras connected to two small screens placed in front of the subjects’ eyes, so that they saw what the dummy “saw.” When the dummy’s camera eyes and a subject’s head were directed downwards, the subject saw the dummy’s body where he/she would normally have seen his/her own. The illusion of body-swapping was created when the scientist touched the stomach of both with two sticks. The subject could then see that the mannequin’s stomach was being touched while feeling (but not seeing) a similar sensation on his/her own stomach. As a result, the subject developed a powerful sensation that the mannequin’s body was his/her own. “This shows how easy it is to change the brain’s perception of the physical self,” says Henrik Ehrsson, who led the project. “By manipulating sensory impressions, it’s possible to fool the self not only out of its body but into other bodies too.”

And: “…the brain will identify with the body it perceives itself to be in, not necessarily the body it is housed in.”

Using the motif of androids and electronic substitutes and augmentations not dissimilar to that described above, science fiction author Philip K. Dick explored extensively the notion of what makes us fully “human.” His answer, which I’m inclined to agree with, has to do with empathy: with this innate ability to mimic, to ape, to mirror activity outside ourselves (especially human activity) and to be moved by it sympathetically, to be struck almost like a chord or a stringed instrument so that our own frequencies resonate harmoniously with that of another entity. We can walk a mile in their shoes, or imagine ourselves as them.

But what happens as we move forward technologies such as described above is that we edge closer - in actual reality, not just in our imaginations or in our mirror neurons - to being able to actually live some other entity’s experiences from the inside-out.

Sensory Substitution

I’ve been researching and writing extensively lately on the subject of sensory substitution technologies.

“Sensory substitution means to transform the characteristics of one sensory modality into stimuli of another sensory modality. It is hoped that sensory substitution systems can help handicapped people by restoring their ability to perceive a certain defective sensory modality by using sensory information from a functioning sensory modality. A sensory substitution system consists of three parts: a sensor, a coupling system, and a stimulator. The sensor records stimuli and gives them to a coupling system which interprets these signals and transmits them to a stimulator. Sensory substitution concerns human perception and the plasticity of the human brain; and therefore, allows us to study these aspects of neuroscience more through neuroimaging.”

One such technology for the blind is known as BrainPort and consists of a series of head-mounted cameras which transform visual input into electrical impulses which can be perceived through a tongue-based interface. Apparently, the electrical data transmission pathways within the human brain can be re-trained so that electrical input coming in from the tongue can be re-wired and translated to the visual cortex as, if not totally equivalent, then analogous to visual stimulus.

Thesis

My thesis in exploring such technologies has been that technology may be used to positively augment natural human tendencies towards mimesis, participation mystique, and empathy. In short, that the brain may be functionally re-wired to accomodate a new kind of identity, a new paradigm of human existence and identity for which online identity applications and the development of social media networks is only a faint foreshadowing.

My hunch is that, using technological augmentations of the human perceptual system, we’ll be able to create fully-functional multi-member collective identities, distributed intelligences & agencies which transcend individual human bodies. Many people balk at even considering such applications of technology, fearing that they will necessarily unleash some hidden sinister dark-side of humanity. The Star Trek series has expertly explored these fears through the hive-like entity known as The Borg, which assimilates other races automatically into its collective technological consciousness.

Moral Applications of Transhuman Technology

Modeled after Christian Anarchist Jacques Ellul, however, it is my belief that technology (which is nothing if not an extension of Man - Man being himself an expression of Nature, and Nature an expression of God) always expands to fulfill all possible uses. Technologies themselves, are therefore only potentialities. And potentialities, when actively explored and experimented with by volitional agents (in our case, humans) always expand to cover all possible interpretations and expressions.

Put more simply, these things are going to happen with or without our consent. These technologies exist, in their infancy, already. And most of the really in-depth research and development surrounding them has been done and continues to be done, almost exclusively, by government-controlled or sponsored research bodies, such as DARPA. And if the only people exploring a particularly ground-breaking technology have as their core goals military applications (defense, security, etc) and industrial applications, then it makes sense that the preponderance of expressions of these technological potentialities will occur within that domain.

The Good News

Which, according to my current state of awareness, is unacceptable. It is my firm belief that technologies which not just allow but are expressly created to transcend the limitations of the human body ought to be equally owned and controlled by all humans - since, as perceiving members of the same basic ontological type, we all equally have a stake in their exploration and expression. Just like the Buddha and Jesus took it up as their life’s mission to spread their own liberative teachings (themselves a form of transcendent personal technology) or the “Good News” to all peoples: that human suffering, alienation and disconnection may be overcome, I believe it is our generation’s onus to share technologies which allow us to more fully understand what it means to be a human, what it means to have an identity at once unique to oneself and simultaneously co-arising as part of a group, as part of a larger class of beings.

Whether techno-scientific methods such as sensory substitution, body-swapping and learning how to project your consciousness into natural, virtual, augmented and synthetic spaces is “enough” by itself is not the point. The point is that these techniques and technologies form part of a larger toolset available to the human race: transcendent technologies which can put us perceptually & immediately in touch with the Root of Being. Exploration of such realms, in my experience, profits most from a mixed strategy in which many tools, languages, systems, paradigms, disciplines and methods are leveraged. And none of these techniques, due to their inherent sacred nature (in that they can put us in touch with the sacred), ought to be restricted by corporations, defense interests, wealthy elites. They ought to be the shared communion of the human race.

And maybe they ought to be the shared communion of even more than just simply the human race. Perhaps it ought to be our goal to create technologies which will act as universal translators and media of exchange between humans and all other types of entities and intelligences, whether or not they find the format of their perceptual loci are distinctly similar to our own body shape or not.

Synthetic Vision Systems & Pictorial Format Avionics

However, that doesn’t mean that governmental and industrial partners in these areas of research have nothing to add. While we may dream of things like technological body-swapping, astral projection, remote viewing and telepresence, the fact remains that we live - as humans in bodies - within an experiential reality which requires certain physical infrastructures to remain operational while we learn to explore and express ourselves fully as perceiving centers.

Government research actually has a great deal to teach us about creating lasting and usable technological augmentations to the human conditions. Consider SVS and what’s known as pictorial format avionics:

“Synthetic Vision systems — from sandbox to reality Synthetic Vision, as applied to the avionics display area, is a term used to describe the creation of a computer-generated 3D representation of the environment an aircraft is operating in, and is the subject of intensive ongoing research and development. The promise of these systems lies in their ability to fuse three-dimensional (3D) data into intuitive displays that can provide lifesaving awareness to flight crews.”

[Source]

“Pictorial Format Avionics was the original name for a SVS system, when under initial development in the 1980s. Sometimes, it is still used to describe the same. Pictorial format refers to the use of a rendered 3D display to show the plane’s position relative to terrain, weather abnormalities, jet streams, and other aircraft, rather than expecting the pilot to know all these from their cockpit view. It consists of a series of data maps, as complete as possible. Some, like terrain, are uploaded onto the plane before a flight. Others such as weather patterns, updated from the ground. Other planes appear on the display based on their GPS data, and the plane’s own representation moves in response to the plane’s GPS signal and internal instruments. It offers a complete view of the area around the plane which a cockpit window cannot match.”

[Source]

Ubiquitous Computing, Everyware, Ambient Intelligent Environments

Parallel to evolutionary technology in the realm of physical identity comes, what I see as, the unstoppable rise of post-computer era technologism. That is, the era in which functionality which we’ve heretofore ascribed to the physical objects known as “computers” becomes liberated from the actual devices, becoming ambient, ubiquitous or pervasive within human existential environments.

Again, many people balk at the notion of transitioning into a world of animist electronics, where software and hardware become more and more indistinguishable, and ordinary reality may be “programmed” through things like the application of free-floating graphics within hybrid real/augmented/synthetic spaces. But after much analysis of the technologies and the business interests which seem to be aligning to make these things a reality, these developments will happen with or without our consent. My intention is to be an active participant and voice in the exploration of these perceptual technologies rather than a passive consumer. To quote William Blake, “I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s.”

Shape-Shifting

In a ubicomp environment, in which ordinary objects and software applications seem to come alive, awake, or even become somehow sentient, the notion of human self-identity is once again called into question. Just as we might swap our senses or even our bodies with other humans through technology, it only stands to reason that we’ll have those same opportunities (and obstacles) of exchange and communication with other types of entities wholly outside the normal realm of what most people think of as being “human.”

Using a novel measurement we show that the unitary and localized character of the self can be experimentally separated from both the origin of the visual perspective and the location of the seen body, which is compatible with clinical data.”

What if you could temporarily mesh your sensorium with that of a wolf, or a mouse, or a killer whale? What if you could somehow perceive - from the inside out - what it felt like to *be* a shoe, or a car, or a tree, or a software program? What if, likewise, you could “lease” out your own perceptual system, acting as a host for any of these entities to experience first-hand what it’s like to be you? Would you do it? What would be the benefits, drawbacks? What would that do to your sense of self? Who or what would that make you when you had the technology at your finger-tips to become perceptually-linked at a fundamental level with any other entity in existence?

You Be More For A While (And I’ll Be You)

Digested quotations from an online friend of mine, a fellow-traveler in these realms of the weird:

“As a result of shared experiences, we tend to perceive other people as being more similar to us, and this applies also to the recognition of our own face. This process may be at the root of constructing a self-identity in a social context,” [...]

“The study reveals that recognition of our own face is not as consistent as we might think. The participants’ ability to recognize their own face changed when they watched the face of another person being touched at the same time as their own face was touched, as though they were looking in a mirror. Specifically, when asked to recognize a picture of their own face, the picture that people chose included features of the other person they had previously seen” [...]

“If we believe ourselves to be what our sensory input tells us we are experiencing, what happens when we can control that input to such a degree that we can cut ourselves off completely from the actual lived experience of our bodies? If we can fail to accurately identify our own faces after tricking our brains in such a manner, what happens when our entire sensorial experience becomes interchangeable with someone else’s?”

Celebrity Shamans

It stands to reason, within such a system of inter-changeable identity, that certain perspectival viewpoints would become “more popular” than others, for whatever reason. It may have to do with quality of experience, with what’s available perceptually through any given “channel” (meant in both a television and mediumistic sense), with what character or role a particular perceiving center is playing within the larger collective narrative.

“Erik Davis (1999: 173), for example, conceptualises premodern shamans as ‘the social and ecological psychiatrists of their societies’. He aligns shamanic magic with both ‘empirical science’ and ‘virtual theatre’, arguing that the shaman used ‘language, costumes, gestures, song, and stagecraft’ in order to apply ‘techne to the social imagination, actively tweaking the images, desires, and stories that partly structure the collective psyche’”

Ian writes: “What I fear is a world where, instead of reading about celebrities in a magazine and living vicariously through them via the paparazzi, we can actually live vicariously through their broadcast experience.”

Thanks to mirror neurons though, most people already do live - on some level - someone else’s broadcast experience, or a highly edited version of someone else’s experience. But this is precisely the purpose of entertainers, in a sense, to become everyman characters, to become tangible vessels of experiences which may not be available to the individual human entity. Entertainment, at root, is a method for people to transcend their own experience and to, however temporarily, merge with another perspective, viewpoint or consciousness. Both mass media and religious ritual seek to use that natural urge towards binding people together in a common ground of experience, language and metaphor. The future, I think, belongs to those compassionate shamans and shepherds who understand these fundamental principles of individual and collective experience and who can act as guides and stewards towards Liberation, empowering all perceiving centers with the tools and knowledge to experience the Sacred Ground of Being™.

Constructing Consumer Identity

In cultural studies bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across social divisions to create new cultural identities. In particular, it is a feature of subcultures such as, for example, the punk movement. Here, objects that possess one meaning (or no meaning) in the dominant culture are acquired and given a new, often subversive meaning. For example, the safety pin became a form of decoration in punk culture.

As it stands today in Western Culture, most people consciously or unconsciously craft an identity for themselves according to what products and commodities they align themselves with. A person may buy a particular car, not because they desperately need that model, but because they want to clothe themselves emotionally with a certain feeling, and want to present a particular image of themselves to others.

In sociology and social psychology, impression management is the process through which people try to control the impressions other people form of them. It is a goal-directed conscious or unconscious attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object or event by regulating and controlling information in social interaction. It is usually synonymous with self-presentation, if a person tries to influence the perception of their image. [...]

We construct an image of ourselves to claim personal identity, and present ourselves in a manner that is consistent with that image.

We live in a culture where the primary means of such personal expression is through the acquisition, use and display of products. It is not an accidental condition either, but one which has been purposely manufactured by commercial interests to further their own business ends, while ostensibly meeting “consumer needs.” {See: excellent BBC documentary “Century of the Self” for a history of lifestyle marketing} With new consumer-tracking technologies related to things data mining and “reality-mining”, commercial interests are becoming ever more able to observe, influence and predict consumer behavior, and to modulate their own product offerings to meet the needs of consumers who are constructing their identities out of products and marketing narratives.

Government Monopoly of “Official” Identity

Coming at the same subject from another angle is, once again, the government whose function as a state is to legitimize the existence of entities subordinate to it by offering them licenses in exchange for subservience. That is, you get a driver’s license and you pay taxes and it affords you (allegedly) equal protection under the law. You’re allowed to do certain things and not other things because they have given you a lease to do so, not because those powers are inherent in your own being. Within the statist monopoly of individual and collective identity, you are allowed only one singular legal identity as a human entity. Assuming many names and identities is illegal, forgery, fraud. But, you can apply through the government for variances on these rules: through corporate law you can take on other identities - but once again, only through special permit of the governing body.

What’s more, thanks to the boogey-man of “terrorism”, we increasingly find ourselves in a world where the government is asserting that it needs to further restrict, limit and catalog our identities and actions by means of omnipresent surveillance and micro-analysis. Eyes in the sky:

Real-time streaming video of Iraqi and Afghan battle areas taken from thousands of feet in the air can follow actions of people on the ground as they dig, shake hands, exchange objects and kiss each other goodbye.

The video is sent from unmanned and manned aircraft to intelligence analysts at ground stations in the United States and abroad. They watch video in real time of people getting in and out of cars, loading trunks, dropping things or picking them up. They can even see vehicles accelerate, slow down, move together or make U-turns.

Anthithesis: Surveillance

And don’t, for a second, think that such identity technologies are applied in off-shore “foreign” environments only. Most major cities in America now feature prominent street-level surveillance technologies, which are described as tools for cutting down crime, but which ultimately become viewpoints in the compilation of identity data. The government is trying to determine the narrative of your life by watching you from the outside. Maybe not “you” in particular, but the Universal You.

A friend of mine recently mentioned that he requested the FBI’s file on him under the Freedom of Information Act. Not only did it take three years to procure a government document about himself, but when it arrived, significant portions of it were blacked out. In other words, there are certain things about oneself which - no matter the legal liberties afforded us as citizens of the United States - we are simply not allowed to know about ourselves. This is ludicrous!

The reasoning behind it, I feel, is narrative and dramatic. The government, like a corporation (or any perceiving center, for that matter), has a vested interest in its own narrative construction. That is, a perceiving center sees itself in a particular way, and has persistent explanations as to what it itself is, which form a narrative depiction of its worldview. The primary operational goal of most discrete entities is the preservation of their entity-hood. Survival. The government sees individuals in terms of how threatening they are to its own survival, just like corporations view individuals according to their utility, how profitable their behaviors may be to the corporation.

Synthesis: Co-Emergent Liberation

A main focus of my interest in transcendent or liberative identity technologies is that they afford the user, whether an individual or a networked co-arising distributed collective, means to thwart outsider monopoly of one’s identity. Take for example this tech description of an avatar-assignment function within a (proprietary) virtual environment:

ActiveWorlds: Avatar Overriding VR is not just a chance for you to choose how you would like to be seen, it is a chance for others to choose how they would like to see you. To assign you a form other than the one you chose, and see you in that form, without you ever needing to be aware they are doing it. Simply overriding their perception of you, to be something different.”

In other words, while corporate-governmental coalitions may be trying to bind your identity strictly to your biological body, tracking and driving behavior through biometrics, credit reports and the narrative fictions associated with all kinds of “permanent records”, the shape-shifting technoshaman is playing a game which is wholly other, a drama which operates according to rules completely outside of the dominator-monopolist paradigm of identity: one where every piece, every object, every player, every perceiving center on the grand stage or gameboard of life may become temporarily drafted as a transmitter/broadcaster or carrier wave for a particular intention, intelligence, consciousness, existential system or paradigm.

Welcome To The Future

It’s a future which I find, frankly, as bewildering and terrifying as I find exciting and liberating. But in the end, it is - I think - a hopeful vision because it embraces whole-heartedly the questions central to the human experience: Who am I? and Why am I alive? As long as there is anything recognizably human left in this world, we’ll be asking those questions. And in the end, it may be precisely the questions we ask and what we do about them in the world which determine ultimately what it means to be human.

• “What Tim means by ‘animist technology’”
• Podcast 16: Breaking the Monopoly of Identity
• Good Collective Identity Quotes
• Rebellion Against Identity
• Cheques and balances