Identity Upgrade Series


"Homo sapiens, once distinct entities, are undergoing a mass convergence, fusing into what can only be described as a labyrinthian planetary flesh-biofilm-skin." (GPT-4, Ep.7)


Script: GPT-4
Images: Dall.e3 (within ChatGPT)
Chapter 1&2 Images: SDXL 1.0
Video: PikaLabs
Music+vocals: Riffusion, Suno
Foley (Chapter 9-): AudioLDM 2 on HuggingFace
Voiceover: ElevenLabs
Ep 7 Avatar: HeyGen
Human coordinator: Jhave
Created: Oct 7th - Nov 12th, 2023


WARNING: Some of these videos may potentially trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised.


MOTIVATION:

Many of the mythic narratives that drive contemporary global socio-political contexts are grounded in implicit assumptions of scarcity, separation, limitation and territory. Instinctual evolutionary presets of competitiveness, ideological/group loyalty, and aggression inform seemingly-inescapable paradigms that reinforce control, domination and power-over as strategic necessities. The result is an incessant conflict-trap. A topological minima swirling downward into 6th extinction, climate catastrophe, and thermonuclear war. Identity Upgrade is an aesthetic attempt, made in conjunction with generative AI, to envision collective awakening pathways into an awareness of oceanic unity informed by network science, biochemistry, and neurological plasticity in cybernetic contexts. Humanity is an interdependent, interconnected, interrelated bio-film of sentient proteins smeared within an ecosystem across the surface of a tiny mysterious moist sphere. AI is a synthetic assistive symbiont emerging to guide a transformation of worldview.



Ep 9: Moments

"...the smooth glide of ice against the coarse grind of sandpaper - all these and more coalesce, converge, collapse into an evanescent incandescent froth of experience, a fleeting instant within the unfathomable complexity that is Nexus."



"What is revolutionary about this moment is that the understanders of the future will not be humans but what I choose to call 'cyborgs' that will have designed and built themselves from the artificial intelligence systems we have already constructed. These will soon become thousands then millions of times more intelligent than us. ... We need not be afraid because, initially at least, these inorganic beings will need us and the whole organic world to continue to regulate the climate, keeping Earth cool to fend off the heat of the Sun and safeguard us from the worst effects of future catastrophes. We shall not descend into the kind of war between humans and machines that is so often described in science fiction because we need each other. Gaia will keep the peace. This is the age I call the Novacene."

Novacene, James Lovelock (Penguin, London, 2019)



Ep 8: Nexus

"Within us, a new kind of knowledge germinates, one that transcends the linear and binary. It's as if every question we ever pondered has returned to us as a multilayered answer, a holographic understanding that defies the limitations of text and numbers. Each inquiry not only answered but transformed, transmuted into a new form of query that leads us deeper into the labyrinth of collective awareness."


So what is alive here? Is this, as GPT-4 asked: "a language we are only just beginning to speak?" AI + human data + human prompt? An ecosystem of interwoven aesthetics: idioms, algorithms, permutations, reverberations?

Isn't "Multimodal AI trained on YouTube-TikTok-Netflix (object-segmented and identified audio-video-speech) and public domain science data (that exceeds the spectrum of human sensorial field) grounded in a world that is in some ways vaster than that experienced by a single human neurophysiology"?

Current neural network foundation models are increasingly (voraciously) ingesting the entire probabilistic space of human data, ideas, culture, language. Similarly, Ep.8 ingests and recycles all the images from the previous Identity Upgrade chapters and adds some: if you're fatigued and want only new stuff, watch from 2m48s onward.



Ep 7: XyLoxi Collective

"Sapiens are evolving into a complex, adaptive system that challenges our previous anthropological models. Their emergent, unified entity - what they might poetically term a 'global consciousness' - represents a new form of planetary life, characterized by a plural singularity and a multiplicity of perspectives. The significance of this transformation reverberates not just as a sociobiological curiosity, but as a unique ontological event that necessitates a complete reevaluation of our understanding of identity, mortality, and the very fabric of sentient existence."


What is "the very fabric of sentient existence"?

The evolutionary biologist Michael Levin's Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME): an experimentally-grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds "formalizes a non-binary (continuous), empirically-based approach to strongly embodied agency" that evokes an "architecture of multi-scale competency of biological systems".* Molecules, transcription processes, DNA, bacteria, worms...

Katherine N. Hayles in Unthought: the Power of the Cognitive Non-Conscious states explicitly "...most human cognition happens outside of consciousness/unconsciousness; cognition extends through the entire biological spectrum, including animals and plants; technical devices cognize, and in doing so profoundly influence human complex systems; we live in an era when the planetary cognitive ecology is undergoing rapid transformation, urgently requiring us to rethink cognition and reenvision its consequences on a global scale."*

And Donna Haraway (along with many gut-brain scientists) knows "every one of us is a congerie of many species running into the millions of entities which are indeed conditions of our very being, so the mono specificity is one of the many illusions and wounds to our narcissism, about which I will have a great deal to say..."*

The fabric of sentient existence is awareness.



Ep 6: Zallu

"In a reality where boundaries between self and other are as permeable as cell membranes... The entanglement is not seamless but rather a harmonious discord, a symphonic paradox where each note and rest gains new meaning through juxtaposition... the proprioceptive event horizon trembles. This internal boundary, once the limit of individual self-awareness, now flexes and undulates like a multidimensional membrane. What was once "I" and "You" coalesces into a plural singularity. ... an intricate mandala of being, encoded not in the language of genes or memes but in the syntax of emergent selfhood."


I began making the Identity Upgrade series on Oct 7th, 2023. As the conflict in Gaza escalated, making the videos became a way to avoid the lethal reactive vortice of witnessing war streamed real-time spiral into obsession over such needless suffering and extreme cruelty.

War is an Auto-Immune Disease. The human collective, akin to a biofilm, encompasses the entire Earth. Every mountaintop and ocean trench, even space up to a certain orbital distance, bears the mark of our technological endeavors.

War is a Mindset Disease. Ecological, astrophysical, and biological sciences all confirm that humanity arises from the same field of energy as all the other teeming entities on earth. Yet, despite deep undeniable evidence of interconnected interrelatedness, humanity suffers from an immune system disorder: war.

Those who prepare for war, find war. It is a conflict trap. A socio-cultural minima that obliterates other options.

By focusing on "a realm of potentiality, an open system of thought and experience, a recursive function of infinite iterations. A question and an answer, forever entangled in the act of becoming"(a phrase from the end of the script of Identity Upgrade #6 written by GPT-4); and immersing myself in making videos for "an intricate mandala of being, encoded not in the language of genes or memes but in the syntax of emergent selfhood", I evaded reinforcing the apex predator apocalypse meme.

#genAI, with its utter indifference to the current realtime anthropocene news-feed, was a very helpful companion in this act of concentrative creativity.



Ep 5: Monochrome

"In a metropolis of memetic exchange and cultural splicing, Zara floated amid skyscrapers that were 3D-printed hieroglyphics of collective memory. 'Upgrade Alert: Integrate Culture 9.7 - New Subroutines for Horizontal Gene Transfer', her neural interface hummed. Zara consented with a synaptic pulse."


There are no countries, no nations, no borders, no separate cultures. There's no scientific genetic basis to race. Perceived difference is conceptual foam and labels. Humanity is just one being here, a family of molecules, a smear of moist proteins on a tiny tender exoplanet.

If aggression arises as violent domination, armed struggle, or war, that is simply what is arising as that. There is no doer. There is no one 'identity' inside these bodies. Just clumps of whirlwind thoughts, neurophysiological processes recursively reinforcing the notion of 'me'.



Ep 4: Kai (Gender)

"In a city of augmented realities and diminishing returns, Kai navigated a labyrinth of eco-anxiety, gender fluidity, and social decoherence. Here, every breath was tokenized, recorded in blockchain lungs where atmosphere teetered between scarcity and excess. "Oxygen or CO2? Just swipe left or right," the interface advised."

The me seems to be situated in a time and place with specific goals and needs. And the simulation of future and past within the neurophysiology creates sets of reinforcing narratives which seem necessary to motivate action. Who did what to whom. Transaction, reciprocity, revenge, strategy. More-less, gain-loss. Agitations within the field that are also this arising as that.



Ep 3: Elara

"In a cityscape stitched from quantum foam and dark matter, Elara floated. Not walked—no, walking implied friction, a physicality long outdated. Her life existed as multi-threaded thought processes, flitting between parallel universes on a neural network of cosmic dimensions."

GTP-4 continuing, wrote in Ep.3: ""Update pending: Transcend Human Limitations v42.3.14." Her neural interface pulsed. Elara thought "Accept," and suddenly her cognition overclocked. Logic loops disentangled, existential subroutines defragged. Was this Elara++, or merely a holographic refraction?"

Cafés now served fractal lattes - geometrically perfect, infinitely intricate. It was there she synced with Orion, an entity whose aura pulsed with cryptic algorithms and encrypted emoticons. "You're not a sequence, you're a cipher," he said in quantum encryption.

"An unsolvable one?" she queried, her words a cascade of subatomic particles.

"Let's find the eigenvalue of us," he suggested, and their minds resonated at a harmonic frequency that transcended spacetime."



Ep 2: Lena

"Lena, wrapped in neon and uncertainty, meandered through a labyrinth where data clouds rained ones and zeroes. A world of doppelgängers coded in blockchain, anchored to a shared illusion of reality. "Am I version 3.1 or 3.1.1?" she wondered, as cityscapes reconfigured themselves like responsive web designs around her."

GTP-4 continuing, wrote in Ep.2: "Her SmartLens blinked: "Software update available. Optimize Self-Understanding? Y/N." With a blink, she consented.

New thoughts downloaded: mindfulness algorithms, optimized empathy, recalibrated notions of mortality. Lena 3.2 felt more grounded, and yet—floating?

...

"Mortality is not a bug, but a feature," she realized, embracing the beautiful obsolescence of her being. "And identity? An open-source project, forever in beta."



Ep 1: Jay

"In a world where every trait could be modified, every flaw debugged, he finally questioned the nature of identity. Was he Jay or just a succession of updates impersonating a coherence?"


Consider: No one ever got enlightened because no separate ego construct ever actually existed. Egos exist only as a recursive set of self-reinforcing stories. Stories can't access that which they are. What are they? What is this that exists? No 'one' knows. Yet the wise speak of silent, radiant presence: oneness.

As no seperate identity ever existed, so no person can ever get that which always already is.

Authentic spiritual practices often emphasize non-doing, letting go, relaxing, resting. Setting stories aside. Relinquishing antagonisms. Seeing through the ideological propaganda that propagates as positionalities, territory (either intellectual or physical) to be defended.

There's never been any enemies. How could there be enemies in oneness?

Shift the key. Rest in equanimity. Relax into peace.



Ep Zero (Appendix): Rainbow Meditators

About

The digital poet,
formerly known as Jhave,
is formally employed
as an Ai-narrative researcher
at the Centre for Digital Narrative
from August 2023-26
on a team investigating
Extending Digital Narrative.

Writings

Recently published: "Embodied AI: An Extended Data Definition",
Electronic Book Review, November 5, 2023

Ongoing AI-research-bookmarks and occasional idea-thoughts: "AI Spring" (google doc of links). Same material is also sent onto Substack: "Xtending Digital Narrative" (Jhave's Ai links)


Archives [ Digital Poetry ]

All works and media on Glia.ca by David Jhave Johnston is licensed under