Heimburger - Davis: Ch. 4-5


Chapters four and five delve into the mixture of spirituality, psychology and philosophy that have developed as a result technology’s increasingly prominent role in human society. I attempted to arrange the web of ideas and concepts presented in the reading into a more linear visual representation. In reality, the stage of Extropian thought marks the ending of the first chapter, indicating the chain of events that occurred as a result of combining American values of libertarianism and exploration with emerging realms of information, rationalization and empiricism. In the second chapter, man’s understanding of his own machinery escalated into separate categories of reactionary thought. Once man was thought of as a predictable series of mechanical processes, which could be shown by the consistent behavior of information consumption found online, people reacted to such a seemingly cynical perception of humanity by emphasizing the necessity of escape, and ultimately, transcendence. Due to the emphasis the book places on transcending one’s own thoughts in the second chapter, I decided to place these concepts towards the top of the geological mountain figure. Through this visualization, the state of the “spiritual cyborg” is demonstrated to have greater scope and vision, looking back upon the valley of all his past behaviors and thoughts and subverting them through his own current and future techniques.    

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