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Quote by Sylvia Wynter

“The analogy I want to make here is this. That if the ostensibly divinely ordained caste organizing principle of the Europe's feudal-Christian order was fundamentally secured by the Absolutism of its Scholastic order of knowledge, (including its pre-Columbus geography of the earth and its pre-Copernicus Christian-Ptolemaic astronomy), the ostensibly evolutionarily determined genetic organizing principle of our Liberal Humanist own, as expressed in the empirical hierarchies of race and class (together with the kind of gender role allocation between men and women needed to keep this systemic hierarchies in place), is as fundamentally secured by our present disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences.”

Quote by Sylvia Wynter

Book:No Humans Involved
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No Humans Involved

This book delves into the consequences of AI integration, examining how it affects human life and societal structures. more

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Sylvia Wynter

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“If the human experience is born of compassion” the Little Light says angrily, “why does the Great Light curse humanity to suffer in the most unspeakable ways? Why is there so much grief, pain, and tragedy in the world?” Ketu gives a sardonic smile. The questions are easy to answer, but difficult to fully comprehend. It is one thing to gain knowledge, and another to experience it and fully understand its true meaning.”

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Book:The Little Light
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“We as manifest humans must come to terms -psychologically, cognitively, and ethically - with the hard fact of what it means to be human: One cannot have the cake of humanity without eating its consequences. Once we treat ourselves as a species of rights and entitlements, once we say what ought or ought not to be thought or done, the moment we distinguish the order of things and respons to it in accordance with what we think is right, however far from the truth it may be, we have committed ourselves to the impersonal order of reason to which sapiens belongs - an order that will expunge our manifest self-portrait. We have crossed the cognitive Rubicon. In committing to this impersonal order we must realize that what is manifestly human - us as we stand here, now - will be overcome by that very order. Reason is a game in which we are all fleeting players and from which we cannot defect, so let us play this game well by committing to its interests and its ramifications.”

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Book:Intelligence and Spirit
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“It is of course not the case that AGI research programs must wait for a thoroughgoing critique of the transcendental structure to be carried out via physics, cognitive science, theoretical computer science, or politics before they attempt to put forward an adequate model; the two ought to be understood as parallel and overlapping projects. In this schema, the program of the artificial realization of the human's cognitive-practical abilities coincides with the project of the fundamental alienations of the human subject, which is precisely the continuation and elaboration of the Copernican enlightenment, moving from a particular perspective or local frame to a perspective or experience that is no longer uniquely determined by a particular and contingently constituted transcendental structure. In the same vein, the project of artificial general intelligence, rather than championing singularity or some equally dubious conception of the technological saviour, becomes a natural extension of the human's process of self-discovery through which the last vestiges of essentialism are washed away. What remains after this process of retrospective reassessment and prospective revision may indeed - as Roden suggests - bear no resemblance to the manifest self-portrait of the human in which our experience of what it means to be human is anchored.”

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Book:Intelligence and Spirit
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“Images of time as an endless flow that underlines the insignificance of the human and its paltry concerns turn out to be antihumanist veneers upon a subjectivist account of time which, far from breaking from the dogmas of humanism, reinforces a deeply conservative form of humanism. This is a humanism afllicted by a deep-seated transcendental blind spot that not only uncritically posits the local and contingent characteristics of egocentric human experience as the characteristics of reality, but it also deems this very anthropomorphic reality - whether under the rubric of preindividual singularities or ceaseless becoming - to be the horizon for overcoming human exceptionalism. Such metaphysical accounts of time champion an infinite which is more pure alterity than the suspension of the finite. As such, they must both leave the finite intact in order to maintain their alterity and debase the finite as that which does not matter in so far it is perishable. The so-called finite of such images of time is thought, mind, or the human. But the human as finite will be haunted by human pettiness and its associated limitations. It will be doomed to bear the marks of exactly that which it seeks to seek clear of.”

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Book:Intelligence and Spirit
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