Uncannis Familiaris
A Manifesto Concentrate
The philosophical impetus behind Dognosis.
"Canis lupus familiaris, indeed; the familiar is always where the uncanny lurks." Donna Haraway, When Species Meet
"As man lifts his eyes to the stars and meets the other inhabitants of this planet, his horizons become widened, his science deeper, his philosophy more in tune with the universe as it exists.” John Lilly, Communication between Man and Dolphin
I - Poiesis Technology
Our sapien ability to manipulate both atoms and bits may be at a civilizational zenith. Yet, by being entombed in the ego-dominator culture1, the radical potential of our wizardry risks remaining unrealised and new possibilities afforded appear shackled to a system of thought centered around the Anthropocene.
Heidegger claims the essence of modern technology is an aletheia or a revealing of truth.2 He argues that this revealing has two modes, the dominant one in modern society being a ‘challenging’, that reduces all beings to vessels qualified by their degree of ‘standing-reserve’. Arguably, many trials to human and other-than-human survival and flourishing are downstream from this conception of technology.
The second mode, Heidegger calls poiesis3. Poiesis technology can be understood as the bringing-forth of the true nature of things. Poietic events “are acts of unconcealment … in which entities are allowed to show themselves.”4
II - Dialogical Living
“Animals are just like humans. We eat our fill when our gardens are full of bananas and rasa si palm fruit and they eat their fill when the fruit of the forest trees is abundant. This is their food as it is ours, for the animals we hunt are the ghosts of our ancestors transformed into game in the beginning of time” - Davi Kopenawa, Falling Sky
The core idea of poiesis pre-dates a certain fallible 20th century German philosopher. Many indigenous peoples in the Americas held the belief that humans must work dialogically to live fulfilling lives.5
Technology as a means of mastering relation is a theme resplendent in the metaphysics spun by Davi Kopenawa in his description of the Yanomami way of living.
Poiesis technology and dialogical living shine light on the pre-existing intelligence of the natural world and interweaves and amplifies this wisdom using tools we fashion from our anthropotechnics.6
"I love ChatGPT, but I'm going to bet on Mother Earth. I'm going to bet on soil." - Paul Stamets [link]
III - Collared and Un(leashed)
"Relations are constitutive; dogs and people are emergent as historical beings, as subjects and objects to each other, precisely through the verbs of their relating." Donna Haraway, When Species Meet
Humans and dogs have danced a dance of millennia. Recent studies suggest our interspecies entanglement goes back 11,000 years, sparking right at the dawn of the Holocene, when the retreat of ice allowed sapiens to spring forward and leave history in our wake. Walking besides us7, canis familiaris was close witness to the monumental eras of human history - agriculture, the domestication of livestock, the wheel, writing, paper, and the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, and the internet, and of course, artificial intelligence. And as our mastery over the physical (and informational) world grew tighter, our comradeship with canids began to contort — from convivial companions to collared captives.
The relations that dogs and humans enter into are forges that fashion the nouns of our being and the verbs of our becoming. As such, they bepaw a certain intentionality, a capacity for response. Haraway points out that such capacity “can be shaped only in and for multidirectional relationships”. If we don’t allow for response-ability, if our “material–semiotic relating breaks down or is not permitted to be born”, we consign our dogs into becoming “biological artifacts” shaped by us to serve our ends.
We can already see the barring of response-ability in the language of ‘owner and pet’ and the curious assumption underlying the necessity of asking an owner to pet a pet. The consequences of such petization are far from petty, as the cruel health effects of in-breeding make clear. Lapdogs are not laptops, their heat is not mere epiphenomenon, and the gasping of the pug from a nose engineered to be cute can be seen as a direct consequence of our broken paradigms of relating.
Lapdogs are not laptops, their heat is not mere epiphenomenon, and the gasping of the pug from a nose engineered to be cute can be seen as a direct consequence of our broken paradigms of relating.
A pointed question at this point is if such a gulf really matters when we are surrounded by the horrific and genocidal chasms such as the meat-industrial complex that emerge from our capitulations to Moloch. Yes, we bar our dogs from living their lives to their full canine potential but aren’t there bigger fish to unfry? While it is indeed proper to acknowledge that canines fare better than most, it is precisely this closeness to the open that makes the search for ways to improve our relationship all the more vital. For if our best friends are kept collared, leashed, and gasping for air, the prognosis for homo sapiens to engender healthy and shared inter-dependence is dire indeed. We must strive to do better and we are most fit to start at home.
“The relationship between humans and dogs is the prototypical instance of intelligence alignment between beings of varying capacities.”
IV - Nosing Towards Aligned Uplift
‘To be able to break through to understand the thinking, the feeling, the doing, the talking of another species is a grand, noble achievement that will change man's view of himself and of his planet.’ - John Lilly, Communication between Man and Dolphin
“The spiders have equivalents of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, but they think in terms of intricate interconnectivity, of a world not just of sight but of constant vibration and scent. The idea of two prisoners incapable of communication would not be an acceptable status quo for them, but a problem to overcome: the Prisoners’ Dilemma as a Gordian knot, to be cut through rather than be bound by.” - Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time
The dominant theme of the 21st century, assuming we have historians in the 22nd and beyond, will likely be the advent of artificial intelligent systems. The rise of silicon intelligences is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying - a civilisational roller-coaster whose tracks are being laid out on the fly. Metaculus currently predicts Artificial General Intelligence to be ten years away, and 31% of ML researchers in 2022 (n=355) believe AGI-type systems would make the world markedly worse. The consequences of truly alien, non-carbon based intelligences, capable of immediate replication and continuous self-improvement is already vividly depicted by plenty of sci-fi creations - HAL, Skynet, Ultron - with none truly capturing the inanity of sapien capitulation in the current moment. Prompts of doom-foom rarely make for compelling manifesto material, but the year is 2023 and such is but necessary when conjuring up an alternate vision of technology and the future.
The resonance of uplifting biological intelligences is made all the more deeper when considering the alternatives. While Sam Altman is right that biology has limitations, these limitations can be transcended, not just by simply leaving behind the soil of Being, but better, by rerouting our technological prowess towards synapsing connections that burst pass the bars of our Umwelt and seed an interconnectedness that is mycelial, harmonious, and aligned from its very conception.
ego-dominator culture is from Terrence McKenna’s Food of the Gods.
“Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.” Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 1954, p. 6
First originally coined by Aristotle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poiesis
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#Tec
Shorter, D. D. (2016). Spirituality. In The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History.
Peter Sloterdijk’s ‘anthropotechnics’ is described by Erik Davis in High Weirdness as “techniques of body and mind that enable individuals to mould and experiment with their own existence” with an emphasis on “the iterative, even cybernetic nature of such learning practices”.
or behind us as Caesar Milan types would have it