Kyborg

The Kantian Cyborg - the Kyborg - is the best model of the limits of our intelligibility, and by probing the limits of Kyborgs, we will arrive at the best assessment of our hopes and failures.

We are used to the world being transparent to our systems of knowledge. The Corona Virus disrupted life across the planet but we knew that the pandemic will be ‘solved’ sooner or later.

I wrote the series a day at a time.

That burst of activity has also given me a taste for what daily writing can do to clarify my thoughts so I am going to continue in that vein, i.e., daily updates for four weeks give or take a day or two, followed by a week long break and then another four weeks.

Early on I looked at attention.

Attention goes beyond the intellect, it’s also related to power.

Then I asked what it means to see people as people.

Humanism has a long history in many philosophical and religious traditions, but seeing people as people, as autonomous self creating beings not dependent on divine sanction (i.e., people as people, not people as children of God) is a major departure from prior conceptions of being human.

That took me to machines and the self.

Machines have eaten the world. They take us to the bottom of the ocean and the depths of space.

In April I turned to Kant himself.

I am hoping Kant will offer us clues, he being the first cartographer of our promised land. But not in his self appointed role as a legislator, for that’s a promise of adulthood we can’t keep anymore, but a mythical Kant, the dreamer of reason.