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A.I. as Extension of the Human Mind

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Extensions, Becoming, and the AI Doorway We are living at the edge. Let me say that again: we are living at the edge . The edge of what was, the threshold into what is becoming. And around us, technologies — once thought inert tools, mere prolongations of muscle or sight — have quietly become the very fabric of how we experience being human. To speak of these machines as mere “gadgets” or “utility” is to miss the cosmic joke: the gadgets are us. They are our limbs, our senses, our brains, grafted outward into the world. And now a new grafting is underway: AI as an extension of the mind . (1) McLuhan, extension, and the prosthetic mind McLuhan famously said that every technology is an extension of the human body—of sight, hearing, motion, nerve, and sense. The wheel extended the leg; clothing extended the skin; the telephone extended the voice and ear; the television extended sight and the nervous system; the computer extended memory and central nervous coordination. What was i...
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The Collective Mind and Its Unconscious

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Let us begin with one clear image: humanity sprawling across the globe, technological networks glittering like synapses under a vast fMRI scan, fiber-optic cables as axons, smartphones as dendritic tips, missiles as bursts of neurotransmitters, the stock exchange as a convulsive epileptic fit. This is not merely a metaphor. If Lacan’s dictum that “the unconscious is structured like a language” still holds, then the global mind—the planetary nervous system—must be grasped precisely as a split linguistic apparatus, riddled with gaps, repression, disavowal, and symptomatic eruptions. What if this collective brain is already psychotic? That is, what if the world-mind we inhabit is not a smoothly integrated consciousness, but a fractured subject whose “I” is split between the hallucination of a benevolent ego (the “international community,” as Washington PR departments name it) and the eruptive return of its repressed (Houthis with homemade drones, hackers in St. Petersburg basements, s...
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