Training Transhumanism (I WANT TO BECOME A CEPHALOPOD)

The literal definition for transhuman is »beyond human.« Another definition describes the enhancement of humans’ physical, cognitive and emotional abilities. For the last half-century, transhumanism has come to be understood as a vision for the future of the human that melds human and machine. Heavily influenced by science fiction and currently heralded by silicon valley, popular transhumanist projects attempt to upload the brain to the Internet, end death, enhance cognition through neurobiological intervention and artificial intelligence, and generally and push beyond the limits of human capacity with technology.

5. the cephalopod

#rolemodelspecies

Cephalopods are the class of marine mollusks that includes octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautilus. They have been in existence for over 400 million years.

5. embodied + tactile intelligence

IF

{it is in large part this intimate, fuzzy and malleable relation of mind/body/environment in the cephalopod that has enabled it to survive millennia, adapting to an ever- changing environment.}

THEN

{developing and improving a thinking in humans that listens to our body and occurs in relation to our environment will develop our awareness, understanding, concern and resiliency of/for/in our surroundings; environment; ecology. The ecological crisis will only intensify if we continue to solely foreground non-situated cognition to address ecological concerns.

To stimulate our tactile capacities.

To heighten our embodied sensitivities.

6. shapeshifting camouflage

Cephalopods can change color, texture, shape and even mimic other organisms’ movement patterns. They do this largely in order to avoid detection by predators and prey, and as a form of signaling – communicating with each other.

The malleability of representation of which cephalopods are capable makes them very resilient creatures, able to swiftly adapt to any situation. This is one of the reasons this animal – a shell-less invertebrate, essentially a giant piece of meat swimming through the sea – has been able to propagate and succeed for millennium in an ocean full of predators.

Consider also Mather and Kuba’s description of the S. sepioidea squid’s evaluation of predator behavior and subsequent response in a near-shore field study:

»Different cues elicited different responses within and across species… Could the squid be »mind reading« the intention of the fish? It is more likely that they were picking up small movement or postural cues, but the necessity to do such complex evaluations suggest a heavy pressure to succeed in these calculations.«¹¹

Such findings show that beyond a simple color-changing camouflage capability, cephalopods practice a complex and sophisticated shapeshifting strategy for best survival. This requires an immense awareness of their physical and social environment, which they gain through highly attuned visual, tactile, and chemo-receptive sensors – as well as embodied and tactile cognition – operating both centrally and locally.

The US military is funding both biological and engineering research to better understand how cephalopod skin and their chromatophores function, in order to develop materials and tools that will enable an evolution detection-avoidance capabilities for military purposes.¹² #TrainingTranshumanism takes a broader and more holistic approach. What can we learn from the complex interactions of the shapeshifter?

We define camouflage as:

1. [A] hyper-awareness of one’s hyper-local environment, and
2. [B] the ability to shape-shift – in role, behavior, identity or simply presentation – for utmost resiliency in said environment.

»All vertebrates share a general body-plan, and their nervous systems show a common inheritance. Cephalopods have an entirely different organization, both in body and in brain. The vertebrate plan features a head and spinal cord, with the peripheral nervous system coming off it. This is a rather centralized design. Molluscs, along with several other invertebrate groups, developed what is sometimes called a ‘ladder-like’ nervous system. In many molluscs there are knots of neurons, or ganglia, spread along the body, linked by two kinds of connections – ‘vertical’ ones along the body and ‘horizontal’ ones across it, like a ladder. Though this was the likely molluscan starting point, in the evolution of coleoid cephalopods there was both expansion and partial centralization of this nervous system.«¹³

This distributed neural organization in means that intelligence – the ability to think and respond – is spread throughout their bodies. Different body parts can sense and act upon sensation without that information necessarily ever traveling to the ‘main brain.’ Even the term ‘main brain’ may provide an incorrect model for understanding cephalopodic intelligence. As Godfrey- Smith writes,

»In fact, the cephalopod nervous system is so decentralized that it might seem to be a mistake to even look for this kind of unified processing. They may have a radically different style of psychological organization from us.«¹⁴

»For an octopus, its arms are party self- they can be directed and used to manipulate things. But from the central brain’s perspective, they are partly non-self too, partly agents of their own… central guidance of the movements is never complete, and the peripheral system always has its say.«¹⁵

Perhaps then, instead of understanding the octopus as a single organism with nine brains, we should understand it as nine organisms – housed within a single skin.

There is evidence that supports this position: Even after an arm has been severed, it can continue to hunt and catch food, attempting to feed it to a mouth no longer around.¹⁶ Octopus researchers describe different arms as appearing to have different personalities that remain consistent over time: one arm curious, another shy.¹⁷ Bret Grasse, cephalopod husbandry expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, tells of an octopus arm that attempted to feed itself only to have the body shoot jets of water at the arm in order to get it away. This debate continued for several minutes.¹⁸

»When we act, the border between self and environment is usually fairly clear. If you move your arm, for example, you control the arm both on its general path and also in many fine details of its motions. Various other objects in the environment are not under your control at all, though they can be moved indirectly by manipulating them with your limbs. Uncontrolled movements by an object around you are usually a sign that it is not part of you…If you were an octopus, these distinctions would be blurred.«¹⁹

We train this blurriness. How might our attitudes shift if we were at times unsure if what we encounter is self or other? If we trained to be so sensitive as to inhabit another bodies’ perceptions, sensations, activations inside our own bodies? »Other bodies« can include human bodies, non-human bodies, bodies of water, etc? How might our perceptions, relations, actions change?

As a vertebrate with a centralized intelligence, total distribution is impossible. Perhaps then, achieving cephalopod evolution is impossible alone. Perhaps then, the future of the human requires more than one human; to share cognition; to enter into states of shared intention; to become, for a while at least, a sort of single organism.

Our own embodiment is
never fully autonomous.
We require other bodies,
that in turn require other
bodies, to bathe us into
being.²⁰

Our skin is our sensor,
also our border, holding
this jumble of physical
organs, gases, liquids, we
call the self together. But
even our skin is a membrane
– porous.

So I want you to let this sharp distinction that we
usually carry around with
us to start to blur – just
get a little fuzzy at the
edges – where fingers touch
fabric, where weight rests
on surface, where arm
brushes leg.