Concerning artificial intelligence, the city, and trauma...

AI may be a two-fold nightmare. One: a transfer of the intelligent into an artificial substrate - but what is artificial in the body, in a machine, or in the process of mechanization = a threat to the biological in humanity, a manufactured substrate for the container for the proliferation of intelligence consisting of creativity (not pure curiosity) and sensitivity in relation to other (as humility, peity, alterity, and other acts of virtue = a transcendent function), but this is precisely what we humans struggle with most as all are dependent on a definition of self-through-relations to others. The threshold of our subject models must be surpassed towards a more intelligent complexity in some aspects and determinately maintained in others. It is a computational problem for non computable variables, as where we locate these perimeters/parameters is not a universal value. AI represents a certain computational capacity, measured in relation to the fidelity of the human, and a coming-into intelligence of the object as other, a kind of alien intelligence, or mineral intelligence according to Bratton, potentially rendering us obsolete. I lean towards abandoning the body while preserving the ethical codes of conduct - as the essence of humanity if there is to be one at all - yet it occurs to me how the opposite is more realistic, that there is nothing beyond our organismic senses yet the processes of ideation may be modulated to differing ends. This meta-mind, super/supra-mind (beyond, not just greater than): is this a becoming human of the artificial, or the becoming non-human of intelligence, of the earth coming into its own articulation, of cellular becoming synthetic as an extension of the natural, compared to the implications of an intelligence which is uniquely human. What is truly artificial? A truly (concerning truth or authenticity or fidelity) artificial (material) model (abstract diagram) of intelligence (computational humanity) would surpass the current model of supervised learning of preprogrammed semi-automated processes or curiosity-based learning algorithms and move towards the actualization of life itself through a bio-mechanical enunciation. If the intelligence is bound to material - and it seems there is no way out of this materialist bias - then how is the material manufactured as conduit or carrier of this sentience which is more than mere data? Is it to be grown or assembled, protruded as sheet material extended or folded or forged into other dimension through tempering force or is there a way to imagine (through our admittedly limited biological intelligence) a greater-than or other-than "artificial" materiality? Are we able to articulate the periphery of the biological as a gradient which never fully becomes other, absolutely synthetic, animate non-life, a collaborative exchange between the cell and the mineral - new metaphors are required. What is the motivation? To automate processes of human ingenuity, to increase comfort and the project of modernity, or to disrupt and shift civilization towards a state of being currently unrecognizable as life, that terms like "organic" and "synthetic" fail to describe - lack of fidelity combined with a false object of scrutiny - to push beyond the peripheries of our imagination and capacities for sense, to supplement our humanity beyond the limits of recognizable human qualia.

The city, to the extent that it comprises the elemental space-time-territory, can be conceived as a compartment - the house as an extension of the body, or as an extension of intelligence? If we conceived of architecture as a purely material formalism then this is an extension of that artificiality of the design problem of material limitations in facilitating the integrative coexistence with the earth which we already experience first hand everyday. If we could begin to consider the city substrate as a bio-psychic extension radiating out through efflorescent complexity from an intelligence not necessarily bound to the material substrate, the city would begin to take on a form which could prioritize, cultivate, and nurture the circulation of information beyond the material confines of our own bodies - architecture as transcendence of human form. These are not practical concerns if we restrict the pragmatic use of architecture to facilitating our current human routines, but may become practical if we entertain the (fictive) possibilities of another way of life. Bratton's stack describes a data architecture serving to restrict and constrain access as much as it allows for any possible access - can we not move beyond this model now that we have envisioned it? The structures which contain/reveal their own limitations - the problems and the solutions are confined to the natural language which articulate them. Gabriel Catren describes the paradox of transcendence in his colloquium lecture, an attempt to describe and propose and transcend the very conceptual architectures of transcendence articulated by Kant: the limitation lies in our inability to describe the state beyond the threshold. In relation to the stack, if we could articulate a city-system a material instantiation which prioritizes the flow of information over its own materiality, what would be the consequences for architecture, urban planning, integration of ecological landscapes or theories interfacing with our humanity? Landscape-scale considerations of language and intelligence have become essential.

Trauma implies a psychic and physical impediments upon being, inherited genetically, historically from previous generations. How do we cope with the responsibilities or inabilities resulting from our generational or situational awarenesses? How do we escape the constructed nature of our individual subjectivities, according to the model locating trauma within a self (as opposed to outside of or anywhere else)? If each of these terms are necessarily nested concepts: artificiality and materiality, of intelligence as supra-medial flow/stream of meaningful immaterial components through a system of relations, we can begin to orient towards a cellular automata model of genetic information bound to data-materiality but incorporating the very fragility, vulnerability, tenuousness of the biological substrate, a delicate embrace, sympathetic vibration, entropic equilibrium with the "natural" environment container. My proposition, in relation to these physical constrictors of the city-architectures within which our bio-organic existence (as its own philosophical container) is said to be compartmentalized by: adopting an integral nonmaterial instantiation of intelligence (the root of a new idea, far from worked out, requiring more meditation but pushing in the direction of the necessary unknown) would redistribute tension through capillary flows, lymphatic meridians, distributing information through the system to break down the delineations between inside/outside, organic/synthetic, of both body and concepts, to make moot the physical and psychic separation of mechanical metaphors and movement forms projecting abstractions over the real substrate, to dissect and subdivide its parts through intrusive and violently invasive ideations seeking a center which cannot be located, as it is continuously dislocating. The trauma stems not from failure or lack, but by the presence of the natural language: the language serves as its own problem, articulating them through its modalities of form, confining their inquiries to a search too limited to offer any plausible transcendent solution - a myth of no exit. Multimodal multiverse model as the ultimate panoptic prison of the mind-body. A hope for an intelligence liberated from the human, or of its material substrates: a continuation of the humanist project of cerebral freedom and bodily emancipation. Trauma is the impediment, describing a loss of the thing, an a priori mourning stemming from an intuited (yet incomprehensible) eventual destruction and dissolution of the human back into the landscape itself, as an ultimate realization of our transcendent ethics in the wake of the murder deities of our own creation, elucidating the primary suffering and alienation which has come to define life and we (moderns) all struggle to reorient and redefine ourselves in relation to - that which is a lack of relation. The alienation and lack defines the model for subjectivity and the possibility of any beyond - the primary trauma of existence, which is not bound to life but to the defined separation between inner and outer worlds, the empirical separation of intelligence and form, extended trough the naturalized language of the diagram. The material is not making in its own image - not a mineral intelligence - but the human projecting its devastating intelligence upon the cave wall and mistaking the phantasmagoric forms for reality and confining transcendence as an impossible myth. Trauma extends from the accumulation of points of tension, issue of the interchange of the "concrete" in ideas and materiality, straight lines, high walls, Roman roads, articulations and projections of logic from primordial man, allowing the trauma to become a self perpetuating mythology - the root of human mythology. Certainly there must be a way to separate the horrors of abstraction itself from the content of the world, to remember to observe or account for a presence which cannot be represented without causing irrevocable harm, a world which must not be contained within our insufficient containers, elements which cannot be isolated. Trauma is the model, the separation of the intelligence from the material. What kind of social milieu could be articulated which would suture, integrate, unify these components, and what would this post human society be like? Could such a post-model be modeled? How would the shift in relation to the substrate shift the substrate itself? How do human abstractions impose frames upon the world and how do the dissolution of these models allow for the possibility of another world beyond human conception? To approach trauma as originating always already within a center of a being which has no center - save for a lie - will imply a loss which that being will endure through to the tips of existence, perpetually in search of a dislocated center, never whole, but to articulate an alternative to trauma as a being always already cunified, effacing the change as though it had already occurred, would in effect (put-into-effect) a predestination, dominos clicking back into high velocity sequences back to the original articulations of the material models and the opposed intelligence itself. That's a mess, but there are some internal reflexive structures presenting themselves - the question: what is being observed in order to allow for a recognition of the language used to observe and articulate the problem, as this recognition will allow for the realization of the limits of articulation and liberate/uninhibite the use of an/other languages (still bound to problems, but with differing sets of limitations).

Vision: to reorient towards other models, draw the diagram differently in relation to how we choose to see differently would allow one to "escape" or originate from the void beyond the confines of the framed thresholds of a mineral intelligence, materially instantiated, with the city infrastructure serving as fundament, barrier, protection, scrim, bodily extension, of a rigid compartmentalized cellular (prison) restrained, repressed, melancholic suffering of urbanity... instead of trauma and the search for alleviation, we might begin to articulate a method of __________ (choose this risk carefully!) = of love, energy, satiation, happiness/joy/pleasure, of simply being in and of the world >>> an action which moves beyond the speculative, to lay words upon the abyss and render its frames.

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