rigorousintuition.ca

Belligerent Savant » Fri Jun 10, 2022 7:20 pm wrote:.

I took his references to "God" as more symbolic, though will readily admit I haven't yet looked at his Twitter account beyond the thread I posted. That said, it's often a mixed bag when perusing Twitter, and even within a particular profile or post, one can regularly encounter conflicting comments/thoughts, or otherwise a mix of good and bad takes. Much like many of us here.

No objections with much of the objections you and Joe raised, as I had similar issues with certain insinuations raised by the twitter posting in the OP, but that wasn't my focal point, and didn't feel, upon an initial read, that the topic was based on any 'racist' underpinnings.

Where does this Twitter handle indicate "proud racist" on his profile? All I see is this:

Forrest
@Foz89107323

Resisting the singularity

Joined October 2017

2,021 Following
2,118 Followers

Am I missing something?

Also: please point out examples of other content with "racist" tones that I may have shared here. Seems you're painting with a mighty broad brush. It's interesting how easily that word gets tossed around whenever someone raises talking points that fall outside mainstream narratives. Sometimes it may be warranted, of course.

Lastly: good ruminations from DrStrangelove; that's the type of response I was hoping to garner.

NEUROLOGY
Mind Control by Cell Phone

Electromagnetic signals from cell phones can change your brainwaves and behavior. But don't break out the aluminum foil head shield just yet.

By R. Douglas Fields on May 7, 2008



Hospitals and airplanes ban the use of cell phones, because their electromagnetic transmissions can interfere with sensitive electrical devices. Could the brain also fall into that category? Of course, all our thoughts, sensations and actions arise from bioelectricity generated by neurons and transmitted through complex neural circuits inside our skull. Electrical signals between neurons generate electric fields that radiate out of brain tissue as electrical waves that can be picked up by electrodes touching a person's scalp. Measurements of such brainwaves in EEGs provide powerful insight into brain function and a valuable diagnostic tool for doctors. Indeed, so fundamental are brainwaves to the internal workings of the mind, they have become the ultimate, legal definition drawing the line between life and death.

Brainwaves change with a healthy person's conscious and unconscious mental activity and state of arousal. But scientists can do more with brainwaves than just listen in on the brain at work-they can selectively control brain function by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). This technique uses powerful pulses of electromagnetic radiation beamed into a person's brain to jam or excite particular brain circuits.

Although a cell phone is much less powerful than TMS, the question still remains: Could the electrical signals coming from a phone affect certain brainwaves operating in resonance with cell phone transmission frequencies? After all, the caller's cerebral cortex is just centimeters away from radiation broadcast from the phone's antenna. Two studies provide some revealing news.

The first, led by Rodney Croft, of the Brain Science Institute, Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, tested whether cell phone transmissions could alter a person's brainwaves. The researchers monitored the brainwaves of 120 healthy men and women while a Nokia 6110 cell phone—one of the most popular cell phones in the world—was strapped to their head. A computer controlled the phone's transmissions in a double-blind experimental design, which meant that neither the test subject nor researchers knew whether the cell phone was transmitting or idle while EEG data were collected. The data showed that when the cell phone was transmitting, the power of a characteristic brain-wave pattern called alpha waves in the person's brain was boosted significantly. The increased alpha wave activity was greatest in brain tissue directly beneath to the cell phone, strengthening the case that the phone was responsible for the observed effect.

Alpha Waves of Brain

Alpha waves fluctuate at a rate of eight to 12 cycles per second (Hertz). These brainwaves reflect a person's state of arousal and attention. Alpha waves are generally regarded as an indicator of reduced mental effort, "cortical idling" or mind wandering. But this conventional view is perhaps an oversimplification. Croft, for example, argues that the alpha wave is really regulating the shift of attention between external and internal inputs. Alpha waves increase in power when a person shifts his or her consciousness of the external world to internal thoughts; they also are the key brainwave signatures of sleep.

Cell Phone Insomnia

If cell phone signals boost a person's alpha waves, does this nudge them subliminally into an altered state of consciousness or have any effect at all on the workings of their mind that can be observed in a person's behavior? In the second study, James Horne and colleagues at the Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre in England devised an experiment to test this question. The result was surprising. Not only could the cell phone signals alter a person's behavior during the call, the effects of the disrupted brain-wave patterns continued long after the phone was switched off.

"This was a completely unexpected finding," Horne told me. "We didn't suspect any effect on EEG [after switching off the phone]. We were interested in studying the effect of mobile phone signals on sleep itself." But it quickly became obvious to Horne and colleagues in preparing for the sleep-research experiments that some of the test subjects had difficulty falling asleep.

Horne and his colleagues controlled a Nokia 6310e cell phone—another popular and basic phone—attached to the head of 10 healthy but sleep-deprived men in their sleep research lab. (Their sleep had been restricted to six hours the previous night.) The researchers then monitored the men's brainwaves by EEG while the phone was switched on and off by remote computer, and also switched between "standby," "listen" and "talk" modes of operation for 30 minute intervals on different nights. The experiment revealed that after the phone was switched to "talk" mode a different brain-wave pattern, called delta waves (in the range of one to four Hertz), remained dampened for nearly one hour after the phone was shut off. These brainwaves are the most reliable and sensitive marker of stage two sleep—approximately 50 percent of total sleep consists of this stage—and the subjects remained awake twice as long after the phone transmitting in talk mode was shut off. Although the test subjects had been sleep-deprived the night before, they could not fall asleep for nearly one hour after the phone had been operating without their knowledge.

Although this research shows that cell phone transmissions can affect a person's brainwaves with persistent effects on behavior, Horne does not feel there is any need for concern that cell phones are damaging. The arousal effects the researchers measured are equivalent to about half a cup of coffee, and many other factors in a person's surroundings will affect a night's sleep as much or more than cell phone transmissions.

"The significance of the research," he explained, is that although the cell phone power is low, "electromagnetic radiation can nevertheless have an effect on mental behavior when transmitting at the proper frequency." He finds this fact especially remarkable when considering that everyone is surrounded by electromagnetic clutter radiating from all kinds of electronic devices in our modern world. Cell phones in talk mode seem to be particularly well-tuned to frequencies that affect brainwave activity. "The results show sensitivity to low-level radiation to a subtle degree. These findings open the door by a crack for more research to follow. One only wonders if with different doses, durations, or other devices, would there be greater effects?"

Croft of Swinburne emphasizes that there are no health worries from these new findings. "The exciting thing about this research is that it allows us to have a look at how you might modulate brain function and this [look] tells us something about how the brain works on a fundamental level." In other words, the importance of this work is in illuminating the fundamental workings of the brain-scientists can now splash away with their own self-generated electromagnetic waves and learn a great deal about how brainwaves respond and what they do.

Pentagon is researching gene editing, Internet of Bodies & AI to enhance human performance: RAND

A new superhuman era of transhumanism: US Defense & Intelligence communities may forever alter what it means to be human: perspective

Tim Hinchliffe
9 months ago

The Pentagon is investigating how to fundamentally alter what it means to be human, funding research into creating super humans that are smarter, faster, and stronger through human performance enhancement.


The US Defense and Intelligence communities are on the cusp of ushering in a new era of transhumanism by funding research into gene editing, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Bodies (IoB) to enhance human performance.

If successful, these “people” would have the potential to never tire and think smarter, move faster, jump higher, see farther, hear better, hit harder, live longer, adapt stronger, and calculate quicker than any other human being on the planet.

A Pentagon-sponsored RAND report published today outlines the technological potentials of this controversial transhumanist research, which includes potentially “adding reptilian genes that provide the ability to see in infrared,” and “making humans stronger, more intelligent, or more adapted to extreme environments.”

According to the RAND report, “Technological Approaches to Human Performance Enhancement,” modalities for human performance enhancement (HPE) can be grouped into three principal categories:

Gene editing
Applications of artificial intelligence (AI)
Networked technologies that are wearable or even implantable (the so-called Internet of Bodies [IoB])

For the US Defense and Intelligence communities, human performance enhancement offers “the potential to increase strength, speed, endurance, intelligence, and tolerance of extreme environments and to reduce sleep needs and reaction times—could aid in the development of better operators.”

The report adds that in the next few years, “HPE could help military service and intelligence analysts through the use of multiple techniques to connect technology to human beings.”

If successful, humanity as we know it may split into an entirely new species, where those not genetically edited or technologically altered could never compete with those who were.

Worse than being serfs, those not able to keep up in this brave new transhumanistic world would be rendered irrelevant, redundant, useless — unnecessary even for manual labor.

Here’s how the US government is forever altering the course of what it means to be human through gene editing, AI, and the Internet of Bodies.

Gene editing for human performance enhancement

An ethical minefield, gene editing is now going beyond treating diseases and into the realm of human performance enhancement that is changing the definition of what it means to be human.

Genetic editing, according to the RAND report, has the potential to:

Make humans stronger, more intelligent, or more adapted to extreme environments
Provide new capabilities (such as infrared vision)—applications with potential implications for military and intelligence operations
What’s to become of the soldiers and government agents that have been genetically edited with superhuman powers once their service has ended?

What advantages or disadvantages would people with godlike abilities have compared to the rest of humanity?

Examples of gene editing applications given in the report include:

Adding reptilian genes that provide the ability to see in infrared
Fostering specific physical attributes (e.g., ability to cope with low oxygen levels) that could aid warfighters
Increasing muscle mass in disease-free humans
Increasing an average runner’s endurance to the level of an elite marathoner
For space travel and living on other planets: Adding genes from Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium that can survive in high levels of radiation, and adding genes from a variety of organisms to enable humans to synthesize all 20 amino acids (humans normally synthesize only 11 and extract the remaining nine from food)
What would happen if the elites ever used their influence and power to enrich themselves through genetic editing?

Examples of gene editing applications given in the report include:

Adding reptilian genes that provide the ability to see in infrared
Fostering specific physical attributes (e.g., ability to cope with low oxygen levels) that could aid warfighters
Increasing muscle mass in disease-free humans
Increasing an average runner’s endurance to the level of an elite marathoner
For space travel and living on other planets: Adding genes from Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium that can survive in high levels of radiation, and adding genes from a variety of organisms to enable humans to synthesize all 20 amino acids (humans normally synthesize only 11 and extract the remaining nine from food)

What would happen if the elites ever used their influence and power to enrich themselves through genetic editing?

In the survival of the fittest, Homo sapiens, as we know ourselves, would become irrelevant in a future of genetically engineered humans.

The next HPE modality in the RAND report has to do with merging humans with artificial intelligence to create AI-human hybrids, or cyborgs.

Creating AI-human cyborgs to enhance human performance

Merging humans with AI is about speeding up the decision making process, hands-free device control, improved communications, and precision medicine.

According to the report, the pattern recognition and data-processing power of AI lends two potential advantages:

First, the speed of data acquisition and processing would allow for real-time feedback, such as transcranial stimulation, to improve real-time human response and decision making

Second, AI can be used to individualize treatment that is generally believed to affect performance positively, analogous to precision (personalized) medicine; personalization could be used with any performance enhancement modality

If successful, HPE-AI could substantially reduce the time required to process data and respond to situations, as well as “improve decision making through cognitive prostheses” — brain-computer interfaces (BCI).

The primary application researched for BCIs, according to the report, is “neuroprosthetics (i.e., bypassing the nervous system for the purpose of controlling external apparatuses, such as mechanical limbs or cochlear implants).”

Some potential applications of HPE-AI listed in the report include:

Substantially reducing the time required to process data and respond to situations
Allowing for human-system teaming (not only through better system design but through implantable brain-computer interfaces)
Enabling complex, real-time, hands-free control of devices or robots
Concerning the seemingly telepathic nature of BCIs, the report adds, “Humans can be trained to control all sorts of external devices, such as movement of a computer mouse, robotic arms, and drones.”

On the last day of the World Economic Forum meeting in 2020, a discussion about “When Humans Become Cyborgs” attempted to tackle some of the very large ethical questions surrounding bodily integrity and digital ownership of cyborgs.

Ilina Singh, professor of neuroscience and society at Oxford, told the Davos crowd that one of the major concerns from military officers was a sense of ownership and bodily integrity.

Military officers were concerned over many issues, such as:

Do I own my own implant?
Does my implant become part of me?
What happens when I leave the military?
Who pays for my implant?
Does my implant get removed?
Do I get to keep my implant for life?
Does my implant get upgraded? Who pays for that?

In the same discussion, National Academy of Medicine president Victor Dzau told the Davos elites that using brain-computer interfaces to augment humans beyond their natural capabilities was crossing the ethical line.

“I think you’re in pretty safe ground when you use these technologies for the purpose of curing disease, treating disease, or at least addressing impairment,” he said, adding, “I do think you start crossing the line when you think about enhancement and augmentation.”

...

RAND argues that perhaps “the most advanced and invasive IoB technology under development is the BCI, which can both read and write to the brain. DARPA and commercial technology developers (such as Neuralink and Facebook) are working in this field.”

...



From a military and intelligence perspective, the IoB can be used for:

Remote assassination of high-ranking individuals through IoB devices (i.e. targeting someone’s pacemaker)
Making multitasking easier, enhancing cognition, or improving memory via BCI
Providing new channels of communication and the next generation of peer-to-peer networking
Human-swarm interfaces to enable users to monitor and direct potentially hundreds of unmanned platforms simultaneously in real time

According to a different RAND report from 2020, the IoB “might trigger breakthroughs in medical knowledge […] Or it might enable a surveillance state of unprecedented intrusion and consequence.”


Additionally, “Increased IoB adoption might also increase global geopolitical risks, because surveillance states can use IoB data to enforce authoritarian regimes.”



If state-sponsored hackers or criminal organizations were to gain access to a medical device used by a high-profile target, the hackers could simply switch it off and assassinate their target.

As Richard Staynings, Chief Security Strategist at Cylera, once told The Sociable, “You no longer need to be MI6 and issued a Walther PPK in order to assassinate someone; you just need to gain access to the medical devices that are keeping that individual alive.”

What will it mean to be human in the coming decades?

Will there be pushback to the transhumanist agenda, or will the so-called fourth industrial revolution inevitably lead to the fusion of our physical, biological, and digital identities as World Economic Forum (WEF) Founder Klaus Schwab has so fervently insisted?

“Governments, corporations, and armies are likely to use technology to enhance human skills that they need like intelligence and discipline while neglecting other human skills like compassion, artistic sensitivity, and spirituality” — Yuval Harari

Speaking at several WEF meetings in Davos over the years, historian Yuval Harari has predicted that, “In the coming decades AI and biotechnology will give us godlike abilities to re-engineer life and even to create completely new life forms.”

...

I have an insurance driving tracking app on my phone that measures hard stops, quick starts, speed and time you are driving.

ITS BEEN COUNTING MY FUCKING BIKE RIDES AND LOWERING MY DISCOUNT.

My insurance company told me to hit the button "I wasn't driving for this trip" which does... NOTHING! You still suffer the loss of your discount and you can't remove/adjust/fix the registered trip.

20% down to 15% in two months.

FUCK CARS AND FUCK THE COMPANIES INSURING THEM!

Edit:

1) "Don't be poor" is not a solution.

2) "Well then I just won't save anything" is not logical.

3) What is with the data sharing paranoia? How many of you are out here driving like total CAR BRAINS scared you are going to get caught?

4) "WhY aRe YoU lEtTiNg ThEm TrAcK yOu?!" .... Money. I thought I was very clear about this. Explain how I can sell my data for a price equal to 10-20% of my years insurance cost, please? (See #2)

“Magic . . . may even be the origin of techniques.”
—Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society


“In the future, man will apparently be confined to the role of a recording device; he will note the effects of techniques upon one another, and register the results.”
—Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (p. 93).


“The state has no more real choice than the worker on the assembly line; it is led to the technical society by the very terms of the problem” (Ellul, p. 271-72).

“The intensive use of propaganda destroys the citizen’s faculty of discernment. . . . In the so-called democracies, propaganda must become more and more intense in order to dominate its rivals. It becomes thereby more and more insidious” (Ellul, p. 276).

“The technological state corresponds directly to modern society itself since it is technically constructed and exists in the very soul of men who worship efficiency, order, and speed” (Ellul, p.280).

'The Nazis recognized that a science of human behavior would make it possible to dispense with many legal rules. If the people to be administered were “persuaded,” if they were made to understand by sufficiently powerful means that the observation of the rule was in their own interest, that rule would become more and more useless' (Ellul, p.296).

"Technical progress today is no longer conditioned by anything other than its own calculus of efficiency. [T]he individual participates only to the degree that he is subordinate to the search for efficiency, to the degree that he resists all the currents today considered secondary, such as aesthetics, ethics, fantasy. Insofar as the individual represents this abstract tendency, he is permitted to participate in technical creation, which is increasingly independent of him and increasingly linked to its own mathematical law" (Ellul, p. 74).

The organization of work, psychological research, the apparent adaptation of the machine to the human being—these in fact permit the aggrandizement of the mechanical. The greater the aggrandizement, the more society requires that countermeasures be taken; but since the countermeasures are themselves of a technical nature, they allow the sphere of the mechanical to develop even further in a vicious circle. . . . The progress of the machine depends on the proposed humanist remedies, and they in turn are rendered obsolete by each new mechanical development (Ellul, p. 357).

The more rapidly our machines operate, the more precise they must be, and the less we can allow ourselves the luxury of using them arbitrarily. This is as true of the machines we have in our houses as of the machines we meet on the street. Our movements must approach perfection to the degree that the machines approach it and continue to increase in number. Our motions are no longer entitled to express our own personalities. It suffices to take one look at distracted and panicky elderly people in the middle of a Paris street to understand that modern velocities render motion abstract and no longer tolerate imperfect motions just because they are human (Ellul, p. 331).

What is driving the progress is not the individual’s true quality of life (which is and always must be a spiritual question), but a plurality of techniques, that “converge toward the human being [so while] each individual technician can assert in good faith that his technique leaves intact the integrity of its object ... the technician’s opinion is of no importance, for the problem concerns not his technique, but the convergence of all techniques” (Ellul, p. 391). It matters little how well-intended the majority of medical professionals are, when what is assembling the parts has another agenda in mind, and could care less about individual human life, never mind its quality, since it only has eyes for the bigger picture of “Progress” (also known as Evolution)! And what is evolving (humanity) is—technology!

As Jacques Ellul writes:

The more factors there are, the more readily they combine and the more evident is the urgent need for each technical advance. Advance for its own sake becomes proportionately greater and the expression of human autonomy proportionately feebler.... The humanitarian scientist finds himself confronted by a new dilemma: Must he look for ways to make people live longer so that they are better able to destroy one another? (1964, p. 92, 125)

All this creates a vacuum where once the soul was, and along with it a void of purpose and meaning. “Comprehending that the proliferation of means brings about the disappearance of the ends, we have become preoccupied with rediscovering a purpose or a goal” (Ellul, p. 430). Blind faith in the goals of science (including medical science) is something that is only possible in an atheistic/nihilistic society, but in such a society, it is not merely possible but necessary. Nihilism and material reductionism go hand in hand with an unquestioning belief in scientific progress and the pursuit of comfort (“safe spaces”), by which everything becomes means, with no end in sight. So it is that “Technique ... transforms culture into luxury” (Ellul, p. 424).

Since all this “computing” both provides the specifics of the problem and formulates the solution, the nature of technocratic rule, though apparently (and actually) oligarchic, is also more or less automatic. Just as decisions within a corporate environment have until recently been wholly based on profit (things have become more complicated with identity politics, not to mention “the Great Reset”), hence not decisions but calculations, there is less and less room, or need, for human agency within the rule of technocracy. The levers that regulate the machine become a higher kind of cog within it.

The combination of man and technique is a happy one only if man has no responsibility.... Man must have nothing decisive to perform in the course of technical operations; after all, he is the source of error.... In the same way that military machines condition strategy, organizational and other techniques condition the structure of the modern state.... The state is no longer caught between political reality and moral theories and imperatives. It is caught between political reality and technical means. The problem is to find the state form most adequate to the application of the techniques the state has at its disposal (Ellul, p. 132-3, 277).

In Neoliberalism and Political Theology, Carl Raschke condenses this rise of techne to the throne of Leviathan in a few deft strokes:

The history of “high modernism” has been the irreversible replacement of mētis [contextualized understanding] with epistêmê [rule-based, rigorously deductive knowledge]. [T]he development of the modernist epistemology has gone hand in hand with the evolution of techne ... Where mētis is contextual and particular, techne is universal. Scientific universalism—what Kant referred to as “pure reason”—cannot be separated from the quest for global dominion.... The goal of an all-encompassing mathesis universalis, however, was not so much the glory of the sovereign as the creation of a new form of human solidarity that would replace, at least in the West, the organismic with a smooth-running Baconian orbis terrarum machina (“world machine”), the corpus Christianorum with something like Hobbes’ Leviathan (2019, p. 99).

“The intrinsic rationality of the natural world,” Raschke adds, “no longer emanates from divine design, but from the technological genius of human beings themselves, who bring the mathesis to bear on political life itself” (ibid). Raschke cites the famous opening lines of Hobbes’s classic: “Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal... For by Art is created the great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE ... which is but an Artificiall Man” (ibid). “The social,” he concludes, “is no longer a predicament but a project” (ibid, p. 100).