If the image of the future has already been colonized by the inevitability of a planetary automation or by the Singularity, is it at all possible to re-introduce alieness in metaphysics beyond a master pattern that knows it all? As neural nets experiment with predictive learning, they also evolve machine percepts and concepts. These are not of an optical nature, but are exclusively algorithmic. The growth of the network however is never given, but is conditioned by the indeterminacy of trial and error in the effort to predict what has not yet been programmed – known or thought – from within the system. This dynamic mode of machine learning algorithms can be taken as a starting point to rather defy the transcendental schema of neural networks. The neural schema of machine vision algorithms must therefore be re-vised in terms of a transcendental imagination that can defy the image of the master algorithm.
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Biography
Luciana Parisi
Luciana Parisi researches the philosophical consequences of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. She is a Reader in Critical and Cultural Theory at Goldsmiths University of London and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit. She is the author of Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004, Continuum Press) and Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013, MIT Press). She is now writing on the history of automated reason and the transformation of logical thinking in machines.