*http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/peter-sloterdijk-man-machine-interview_55e37927e4b0aec9f3539a06 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/peter-sloterdijk-man-machine-interview_55e37927e4b0aec9f3539a06>*
*Kurzweil argues that expanding our minds into the cloud and vice versa will create more diversity and less uniformity because we will have access to almost infinite information with which to fertilize our imagination and construct our personality. Do you agree with this line of thinking?* In speaking of the “cloud,” Kurzweil positions himself in a field that is preformatted by traditional philosophy. With his concept of the “objective spirit,” Hegel outlined the formal premise of a “cloud”: these consist in the “expressions” of the spirit, which have solidified into institutions. Institutions are programs for cultural transmission handed down to future generations. It should not be especially difficult to develop the concepts of “spirit” and “institution” into the concept of the cloud. Clouds are liquidized institutions, as it were, in which the mass of prior experience that is capable and worthy of transmission is made available for later interested parties. The difference between a cloud and a school reveals itself in the fact that in the former, the autodidactic (and *eo ipso *auto-domesticative) factor increases -- whereas schools, as prototypes of formal institutions, are principally heterodidactic (authoritative) and conservative (hetero-domesticative) in their structures. What clouds and schools have in common is that both wrestle with a nonsense problem: schools can never be entirely sure of passing on what is worth knowing, and cloud visitors are all the more incapable of distinguishing with certainty between nonsense and no nonsense. One part of the modern-postmodern situation is the instability of the difference between institutionalized and de-institutionalized knowledge. In this respect, one must take the cloud metaphor seriously in a literal sense: clouds cover up the clear sky. The current infospheric encasement of the human field is the continuation of the “objective spirit” by other means -- and today, those are digital means. It had already become evident in the 19th century how far the “objective spirit” can transform into an ideology and communicative plague (propaganda). The first half of the 20th century belonged entirely to the conflict among (pre-digital) ideological clouds. The second half of the 20th century brought -- in the form of the Cold War -- a form of ceasefire in the war of clouds. It is unforeseeable whether the hyper-cloud of the 21st century will end the regional immersion in institutionalized untruths that was typical of the 20th century. Nor do we know today whether the clear sky, or the cloud that covers it, is the information. Anyone who uses the word “cloud” in the singular risks falling prey to mystification. At present, once more, there are several cloud systems, and what we once called the Cold War now returns as the war of clouds. One of the nasty surprises of the incipient 21st century is that the demons of propaganda have returned in a digitally updated form. To counter the new empires of lie and perspectival distortion, a renewal of the idea of enlightenment is indispensable. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
