A2 Deleuze and Guattari

Greenhill 2009

8/8Arnav

Perms

The 1AC is a slow experiment; even if it fails to liberate us, it is better than the negatives fast rejection and overdose, which leads to collapse and deathGilles Deleuze, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris; and Felix Guattari, psychoanalyst, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 160-161

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You dont reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratifiedorganized, signified, subjectedis not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole diagram, as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines. Castaneda describes a long process of experimentation (it makes little difference whether it is with peyote or other things): let us recall for the moment how the Indian forces him first to find a place, already a difficult operation, then to find allies, and then gradually to give up interpretation, to construct flow by flow and segment by segment lines of experimentation, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, etc. For the BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not my body without organs, instead the me (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds).

Alternative Increases Oppression

In practice their alternative will further tyrannical control and genocideRichard Barbrook, coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster, 8/27/1998, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9808/msg00091.html, accessed 3/3/03

Deleuze and Guattari enthusiastically joined this attack against the concept of historical progress. For them, the 'deterritorialisation' of urban society was the solution to the contradiction between participatory democracy and revolutionary elitism haunting the New Left. If the centralised city could be broken down into 'molecular rhizomes', direct democracy and the gift economy would reappear as people formed themselves into small nomadic bands. According to Deleuze and Guattari, anarcho-communism was not the 'end of history': the material result of a long epoch of social development. On the contrary, the liberation of desire from semiotic oppression was a perpetual promise: an ethical stance which could be equally lived by nomads in ancient times or social movements in the present. With enough intensity of effort, anyone could overcome their hierarchical brainwashing to become a fully-liberated individual: the holy fool. Yet, as the experience of Frequence Libre proved, this rhetoric of unlimited freedom contained a deep desire for ideological control by the New Left vanguard. While the nomadic fantasies of A Thousand Plateaus were being composed, one revolutionary movement actually did carry out Deleuze and Guattari's dream of destroying the city. Led by a vanguard of Paris-educated intellectuals, the Khmer Rouge overthrew an oppressive regime installed by the Americans. Rejecting the 'grand narrative' of economic progress, Pol Pot and his organisation instead tried to construct a rural utopia. However, when the economy subsequently imploded, the regime embarked on ever more ferocious purges until the country was rescued by an invasion by neighbouring Vietnam. Deleuze and Guattari had claimed that the destruction of the city would create direct democracy and libidinal ecstasy. Instead, the application of such anti-modernism in practice resulted in tyranny and genocide. The 'line of flight' from Stalin had led to Pol Pot.

Deleuze and Guattari's belief in transformation through freedom from dialectical opposition fails the figures and institutions which could create this freedom are reappropriated by contemporary oppositional politics, foreclosing exits from the existing political systemMann, Prof of English at Pomona, 95 (Paul, Stupid Undergrounds, PostModern Culture 5:3, Project MUSE)

Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot protect itself from the order of fashion. Becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becoming-ruin. Such instant, indeed retroactive ruins, are the virtual landscape of the stupid underground. The exits and lines of flight pursued by Deleuze and Guattari are being shut down and rerouted by the very people who would take them most seriously. By now, any given work from the stupid underground's critical apparatus is liable to be tricked out with smooth spaces, war-machines, n - 1s, planes of consistency, plateaus and deterritorializations, strewn about like tattoos on the stupid body without organs. The nomad is already succumbing to the rousseauism and orientalism that were always invested in his figure; whatever Deleuze and Guattari intended for him, he is reduced to being a romantic outlaw, to a position opposite the State, in the sort of dialectical operation Deleuze most despised. And the rhizome is becoming just another stupid subterranean figure. It is perhaps true that Deleuze and Guattari did not adequately protect their thought from this dialectical reconfiguration (one is reminded of Breton's indictment against Rimbaud for not having prevented, in advance, Claudel's recuperation of him as a proper Catholic), but no vigilance would have sufficed in any case. The work of Deleuze and Guattari is evidence that, in real time, virtual models and maps close off the very exits they indicate. The problem is in part that rhizomes, lines of flight, smooth spaces, BwOs, etc., are at one and the same time theoretical-political devices of the highest critical order and merely fantasmatic, delirious, narcissistic models for writing, and thus perhaps an instance of the all-too-proper blurring of the distinction between criticism and fantasy. In Deleuze-speak, the stupid underground would be mapped not as a margin surrounding a fixed point, not as a fixed site determined strictly by its relation or opposition to some more or less hegemonic formation, but as an intensive, n-dimensional intersection of rhizomatic plateaus. Nomadology and rhizomatics conceive such a "space" (if one only had the proverbial nickel for every time that word is used as a critical metaphor, without the slightest reflection on what might be involved in rendering the conceptual in spatial terms) as a liquid, colloidal suspension, often retrievable by one or another techno-metaphorical zoning (e.g., "cyberspace"). What is at stake, however, is not only the topological verisimilitude of the model but the fantastic possibility of nonlinear passage, of multiple simultaneous accesses and exits, of infinite fractal lines occupying finite social space. In the strictest sense, stupid philosophy. Nomad thought is prosthetic, the experience of virtual exhilaration in modalities already mapped and dominated by nomad, rhizomatic capital (the political philosophy of the stupid underground: capital is more radical than any of its critiques, but one can always pretend otherwise). It is this very fantasy, this very narcissistic wish to see oneself projected past the frontier into new spaces, that abandons one to this economy, that seals these spaces within an order of critical fantasy that has long since been overdeveloped, entirely reterritorialized in advance. To pursue nomadology or rhizomatics as such is already to have lost the game. Nothing is more crucial to philosophy than escaping the dialectic and no project is more hopeless; the stupid-critical underground is the curved space in which this opposition turns back on itself. It is not yet time to abandon work that so deeply challenges our intellectual habits as does that of Deleuze and Guattari, and yet, before it has even been comprehended, in the very process of its comprehension, its fate seems secure. One pursues it and knows that the pursuit will prove futile; that every application of these new topologies will only serve to render them more pointless. The stupid optimism of every work that takes up these figures is, by itself, the means of that futility and that immanent obsolescence. One must pursue it still. Deleuze Bad (General)

DELEUZIAN PERSPECTIVISM COLLAPSES INTO NEOCONSERVATIVE SUPPORT FOR THE STATUS QUO BECAUSE IT DOESNT PROVIDE A SOLID POINT OF CRITICISM OF OPPRESSION

Zerzan no date

[John, primitivist, The catastrophe of postmodernism, the Athenaeum Reading Room, www.evans-experimentalism.freewebspace.com/zerzan01.htm, acc 1-15-05]

The dilemma of postmodernism is this: how can the status and validity of its theoretical approaches be ascertained if neither truth nor foundations for knowledge are admitted? If we remove the possibility of rational foundations or standards, on what basis can we operate? How can we understand what the society is that we oppose, let alone come to share such an understanding? Foucault's insistence on a Nietzschean perspectivism translates into the irreducible pluralism of interpretation. He relativized knowledge and truth only insofar as these notions attach to thought-systems other than his own, however. When pressed on this point, Foucault admitted to being incapable of rationally justifying his own opinions. Thus the liberal Habermas claims that postmodern thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard are `neoconservative' for offering no consistent argumentation to move in one social direction rather than another. The pm embrace of relativism (or `pluralism') also means there is nothing to prevent the perspective of one social tendency from including a claim for the right to dominate another, in the absence of the possibility of determining standards.

D & G Exclude Women

D & G exclude womenAlice Jardine, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, 1984, http://substance.arts.uwo.ca/44/04jard44.html, accessed 2/21/03

Why then do D + G privilege the word woman? First, as they explain through a series of unanalyzed stereotypes, because it is "sexuality itself" which is the ultimate, uncontrollable becoming, when it can manage to escape immediate Oedipalization. ("Sexuality passes through the becoming-woman of /the/ man and the becoming-animal of the human" [MP, p. 341].) But also because, as "introductory power," "Woman" is both the closest to the category of "Man" as majority, and yet she remains a distinct minority. D + G explain that the notions of majority and minority here should not be opposed in any purely quantitative way: "Let us suppose that the constant or standard is Manany white-male-adult-city-dweller-speaking a standard language-European-heterosexual (the Ulysses of Joyce or of Ezra Pound). It is obvious that "the Man" has the majority, even if he is less numerous than the mosquitoes, children, Blacks, peasants, homosexuals . . . etc." (MP, p. 133). The problem is not to gain, or accede to, the majority, but to become a minority; and this is particularly crucial for women if they desire to remain radical, creative, without simply becoming (a) Man: The only becoming is a minority one. Women, regardless of their number, are a minority, definable as a state or sub-set; but they only create by rendering possible a becoming, of which they do not have the ownership, into which they themselves must enter, a becoming-woman which concerns all of mankind, men and women included. (MP, p. 134) The woman who does not enter into the "becoming woman" remains a Man, remains "molar," just like men: Woman as a molar entity must become woman, so that man as well may become one or is then able to become one. It is certainly indispensable that women engage in molar politics, in terms of a conquest which they conduct from their organization, from their own history, from their own subjectivity: "We as women . . ." then appears as the subject of the enunciation. But it is dangerous to fall back upon such a subject, which cannot function without drying up a spring or stopping a flood. The Song of life is often struck up by the driest women, animated by resentment, by the desire for power and by cold mothering.... (MP, p. 339) That is, woman (with her obligatory connotations: "transparent force, innocence, speed," [MP, p. 354] is what Man (both men and women: "virility, gravity," [MP, p. 354]) must become. There must be no "becoming man" because he is always already a majority. "In a certain way, it's always 'man' who is the subject of a becoming.... A woman has to become woman, but in a becoming-woman of all of mankind" (MP, p. 357). That is, Man is always the subject of any becoming, even if "he" is a woman. A woman who is not a "woman-become" is a Manand a subject to that extent and to that extent only. Woman is never a subject but a limita border of and for Manthe "becoming woman" is l'avenir de l'homme tout entierthe future of all Mankind. For D + G, She is what the entire world must become if Man men and womenis truly to disappear. But to the extent that women must "become woman" first (in order for men, in D + G's words, to "follow her example"), might that not mean that she must also be the first to disappear? Is it not possible that the process of "becoming woman" is but a new variation of an old allegory for the process of women becoming obsolete? There would remain only her simulacrum: a female figure caught in a whirling sea of male configurations. A silent, mutable, head-less, desire-less, spatial surface necessary only for His metamorphosis? Physicists say: Holes are not the absence of particles, but particles going faster than light. Flying anuses, rapid vaginas, there is no castration. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux Most important theorists have a repertory of exemplary fictions, fictions that they call upon frequently to interact with their specific theories in creative if predictable ways. Between the scene of Lacanian psychoanalysis and that of Lol V. Stein's ravishing, for example, the privileged rapport is one of repetition: for Lacan, Marguerite Duras understood and repeated his teachings without him.19 Or, between the invagination of Derrida's ecriture and that of the narrator in Maurice Blanchot's L'Arret de mort, what is privileged is the process of mime: for Derrida, Blanchot understood his writings with him, inseparably. 20 D + G's exemplary fiction writers include Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, Pierre Klossowski, and Michel Tournierto mention only a few. What all of these writers' texts share with those of D + G is the surface quality of their figures: the privileged modality of relationship between the configurations of Deleuzian becoming and those of fiction is allegory. This is made most clear through Deleuze's essay on Tournier's 1967 novel, Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique. 21 There it is no longer a question of whether Duras's Lol, as hysterical body, is or is not a subject of narrative; of whether Blanchot's J. and N., as organs of a hysterical text, are or are not simply new angles for modernity. For here it is a question of Speranza, a true Body-without-Organs: a woman who is not a woman but a female figure (an island), a space to be unfolded, molded, into new configurations for the metamorphosis of Man. In t, we first stumble across Robinson just after he has been shipwrecked on his island. Finding himself completely alone, the Only and perhaps Last Man on this island, he first succumbs to depression, evasion, infantile panicleaving himself exposed, helpless. For Deleuze, this signals Man's first steps outside of intersubjectivity: "What happens when others are lacking in the structure of the world? There only reigns the brutal opposition of the sun and the earth, of an insupportable light and an obscure abyss . . ." (LS, p. 355). To avoid loss of self, however, this twentieth-century Robinson first tries the old solutions. He creates for himself a task: he spends months, perhaps years, perhaps even decadesthe length of time does not matterbuilding a new boat-structure in which he might escape. But once the vessel is completed, it is too large, too heavy, and too cumbersome for him to push to the sea towards freedom. Robinson succumbs, once again, to the deepest depressionand, indeed, abjection: He kept eating, his nose to the ground, unspeakable things. He went underneath himself and rarely missed rolling in the soft warmth of his own excrement.... He moved about less and less, and his brief movements always brought him back to the wallow. There he kept losing his body and delivering himself of its weight in the hot and humid surroundings of the mud, while the noxious emanations of the stagnating waters clouded his mind. (VLP, p. 38) Haunted by his lost sister (the one who died young), his mother (sometimes cold but always self-sacrificing), his wife (left behind in old England), Robinson-the-Man has a brush with what the Man calls insanity. And so, as a Man, Robinson decides that he must henceforth master both himself and the island if he is to survive. He sets about building a kingdom: he creates a calendar; he invents a way to write; he builds a house, cultivates the land. He names the island Speranza and realizes that now, in time and mastery, she is his slave. Woman is, therefore, no longer absent from Man's adventures, even though he remains outside of inter-subjectivity: Besides, it seemed to him, when looking a certain way at the map of the island which he had sketched approximately, that it could represent the profile of a headless female body, a woman, yes, seated with her legs folded under her, in a posture within which it would have been impossible to sort out what there was of submission, of fear, or of simple abandonment. This idea crossed his mind, then it left him. It would come back. (VLP, p. 46)22 In spite of various humiliations, depressions, and disappointments, Robinson continues his mastery over Speranza. A decisive step is the introduction of time into this one-Man kingdom with a kind of primitive clock. In the "future," Robinson succumbs to his former states of abjection within the space of Speranza only when that clock of progress stops. Slowly, however, and in spite of his frenzied, productive activity, Robinson realizes that his relationship with "himself" is changing. His "self," in fact, can no longer exist in a world without the Other. Robinson is ready to lose his Self, his Manhood: "Who I? The question is far from being pointless. It isn't even insoluble. Because if it's not him, it must be Speranza. There is from here on a flying I which will sometimes alight on the man, sometimes on the island, and which makes of me, in turn, one or the other" (VLP, pp. 88-89).A2 Life is Carbon

THE AFF IS WRONG THE HUMN BODY ISNT LIMITED TO CARBON, BUT IS SILICONIC IN THE MACHINIC WAY IT EMERGES FROM INTERSUBJECTIVE FLOWS LIKE COMMUNICATION AND CAPITAL, INDICATING MEANING TO LIFE BEYOND THE MATTER THAT COMPOSES US

Beddoes no date

[Diane J., Material gadget, Breeding Demons: A critical enquiry into the relationship between Kant and Deleuze with specific reference to women, Transmat, www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Beddoes/BD7s4.htm, acc 1-15-05]

Deleuze notes that biologists have often questioned why life is effected through carbon, rather than through silicon, and goes on to say that la vie des machines modernes passe par le silicium (the life of modern machines runs through silicon).[377] This is where becoming-women moves, where money released from capital moves, where life becomes non-organic, nature becomes a thinking machine, infinities of tiny demons leap, effecting a co-ordinated and fluid movement, eroding the statues of power, the historical . Becoming-woman moves towards becoming-imperceptible, but women do not dissolve or disappear in that movement: it is rather than life itself becomes mobile, because it is not longer in the womb nor arranged in the organisms which emerge from them, but instead becomes a movement, a cycle that turns on its hinges. Humans are no longer the privileged class, but the surrogate reproductive machinery of a machinic phylum which is passing across into a different base, in a movement which effects the conjunction of teleology and mechanism, and transforming the nature of intelligence.

HUMAN IDENTITY IS MORE THAN CARBON ITS CODED BY COMMUNICATION FLOWS, THAT RECOGNITION IS NECESSARY TO RESIST CAPITALIST ALIENATION

Brassier 2001

[Ray, Doctoral candidate at University of Warwick, Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter, Doctoral Thesis, April, www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Brassier/ALIENTHEORY.pdf, acc 1-14-05//uwyo]

Yet it is a failure which transcendental scepticism may yet help

circumvent through the Alien-subjects unilateralising force-(of)-thought; an

intrinsically sceptical force which constitutes an instance of a priori cognitive

resistance to those epistemic norms and informational codes via which a

triumphant World-Capitalism maintains the structural isomorphy between

material power and informational force, thereby ensuring its quasitranscendental

dominion over all cognitive experience. A transcendental

scepticism agrees with eliminative naturalism: human beings are simply carbonbased

information processing machines. But it also recognises the necessity of

cross-pollinating that assessment born of evolutionary reductionism with

transcendental insight; an insight which consists in radicalising and generalising

Marxs identification of the material infrastructure as the ultimate determinant

for the ideological superstructure315: World-Capitalism is now the global

megamachine determining a priori the cognitive parameters within which the

phenomenological micromachinery of organically individuated sapience

operates. By acknowledging the fact that political intervention can no longer

afford to ignore this insight; by recognising that empirical agency alone is

incapable of circumventing capitals all-encompassing universality as World-

Capitalism, transcendental scepticism constitutes an instance of a priori

political resistance.A2 Death Doesnt Destroy Being: 2AC (1/2)

FIRST, EVEN IF DEATH DOESNT KILL BEING, IT DOES ANNIHILATE CONSCIOUSNESSES THAT ARE COMPOSED OF PRECISE COMBINATIONS OF ENERGY AND MATTER, MEANING THAT DEATH EXTINGUISHES THOUGHT PROCESSES THAT PEOPLE ARE ATTACHED TO, MEANING THAT FORCED DEATH IS VIOLENT AND UNDESIRABLE

SECOND, THIS IGNORES THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATION IN CREATING HUMAN IDENTITY. WERE MORE THAN THE MATTER OF OUR PARTS, BUT CREATE MEANING THROUGH COMMUNICATIVE PROCESSES, SOMETHING DESTROYED BY DEATH

THIRD, CARBON ATOMS ARENT THE KEY COMPONENT OF LIFE, COMPLEX INFORMATION PROCESSING IS, MEANING THAT DEATH CAUSES ANNIHILATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Tipler 94

[Frank J., Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, New York: Doubleday, 1994, 124-5//uwyo-ajl]

IN ORDER TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER LIFE can continue to exist forever, I shall need to define "life" in physics language. I claim that a "living being" is any entity which codes information (in the physics sense of this word) with the information coded being preserved by natural selection. Thus "life" is a form of information processing, and the human mind-and the human soul-is a very complex computer program. Specifically, a "person" is defined to be a computer program which can pass the Turing test, which was discussed in Chapter II.

This definition of "life" is quite different from what the average person-and the average biologist-would think of as "life." In the traditional definition, life is a complex process based on the chemistry of the carbon atom. However, even supporters of the traditional definition admit that the key words are "complex process" and not "carbon atom." Although the entities everyone agrees are "alive" happen to be based on carbon chemistry, there is no reason to believe that analogous processes cannot be based on other systems. In fact, the British biochemist A. G. Cairns-Smith! has suggested that the first living beings--':our ultim:ate ancestors-were based on metallic crystals, not carbon. If this is true, then if we insist that living beings must be based on carbon chemistry, we would be forced to conclude that our ultimate ancestors were not alive. In Cairns-Smith's theory, our ultimate ancestors were self-replicating patterns of defects in the metallic crystals. Over time, the pattern persisted, but was transferred to another substrate: carbon molecules. What is important is not the substrate but the pattern, and the pattern is another name for information.

But life of course is not a static pattern. Rather, it is a dynamic pattern that persists overtime. It is thus a process. But not all processes are alive. The key feature of the "living" patterns is that their persistence is due to a feedback with their environment: the information coded in the pattern continually varies, but the variation is constrained to a narrow range by this feedback. Thus life is, as I stated, information preserved by natural selection.

A2 Death Doesnt Destroy Being: 2AC (2/2)

FOURTH, EVEN IF THERE ARE OTHER POSSIBILTIES AFTER DEATH, THE IDENTITIES THAT WERE ATTACHED TO WILL BE EXTINGUISHED BECAUSE CONSCIOUSNESS COMES FROM INFORMATION PROCESSSING THAT REQUIRES PARTICULAR SEQUENCES OF QUANTUM STATES TO OCCUR

Tipler 94


The Bekenstein Bound follows from the basic postulates of quantum theory combined with the further assumptions that (1) the system is bounded in energy, and (2) the system is bounded, or localized, in space. A rigorous proof of the Bekenstein Bound would require quantum field theory, but it is easy to describe in outline why quantum mechanics leads to such a bound on the information coded in a bounded region. In essence, the Bekenstein Bound is a manifestation of the uncertainty principle. Recall that the uncertainty principle tells us that there is a limit to the precision with which we can measure the momentum of a particle and its position. More precisely, the uncertainty principle says that the location of a point in phase space-a concept I defined in Chapter III-cannot be defined more closely thal1 Planck's constant h. Since a system's state is defined by where it is located in phase space, this means that the number of possible states is less than or equal to the size of the phase space region the system could be in, divided by the size of the minimum phase space size, Planck's constant. (I've given a mathematical expression of this argument in the Appendix for Scientists.) This state counting procedure, based on there being an absolute minimum size h to a phase space interval, is an absolutely essential method of quantum statistical mechanics. We have already used it in Chapter III to prove the almost periodicity of a bounded quantum system. It is confirmed by the thousands of experiments which have been based on this counting method.9 In high energy particle physics, any calculation of the "cross section" requires counting the possible number of particle initial and final states, and the above state counting method is used.lO The cross section, which is the measure of how many particles scatter in a particular direction when they collide in particle accelerators, is the basic quantity tested in particle physics. The Bekenstein Bound on the number of possible states is thus confirmed by the correctness of the calculated cross sections. In summary, the Bekenstein Bound on the total information that can be coded in a region is an absolute solid conclusion of modern physics, a result as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.

One can also use the Bekenstein Bound to deduce an upper bound to the rate of information processing. The time for light to cross a sphere of a given diameter is equal to the diameter of the sphere divided by the speed of light. Since a state inside the sphere cannot completely change until a signal has time to travel trom one side to the other, the rate of information processing is bounded above by the above Bekenstein Bound divided by this time interval. Putting in the numbers (details in the Appendix for Scientists), we calculate that the rate of state change is less than or equal to 4 X 1051 bits per second, multiplied by the mass of the system in kilograms. That is, the rate of information processing possible for a system depends only on the mass of the system, not on its spatial size or on any other variable. So a human being of mass 100 kilograms cannot change state more rapidly than about 4 X 1053 times per second. This number is of course enormous-and in fact a human will probably change state much, much more slowly than this-but it's finite.

A2 Life is Meaningless Because the Sun Will Go Out: 2AC

FIRST, THERES NO WARRANT FOR WHY THE DEATH OF OUR PLANET IN BILLIONS OF YEARS MAKES LIFE THAT EXIST NOW MEANINGLESS. EACH INDIVIDUALS CREATES CONTINGENT VALUE FOR THEIR LIFE THROUGH COMMUNICATION AS DEMONSTRATED BY THE HABERMAS EVIDENCE AND TO FORCE DEATH UPON THEM BECAUSE OF AN EVENT IN THE UNFATHOMABLE FUTURE IS REPUGNANT

SECOND, HUMANITY WILL ADAPT TO THE DESTRUCTION OF ITS HABITAT BY INEVITABLY PROGRESSING TO A TYPE III CIVILIZATION

Kaku 95

[Michio, Prof. of theoretical physics at the City College, NY, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension. New York: Ancor Books, March, 281//uwyo-ajl]

Taking the larger view of the development of civilization, Dyson also believes that, at the current rate of development, we may attain Type I status within a few centuries. He does not believe that making the transition between various types of civilizations will be very difficult. He estimates that the difference in size and power separating the various types of civilizations is roughly a factor of 10 billion. Although this may seem like a large nuimber, a civilization growing at the sluggish rate of 1 percent per year can expect to make the transition between the various civilizations within 2,500 years. Thus it is almost guaranteed that a civilization can steadily progress toward Type III status.

THIRD, THIS OUTWEIGHS ALL OTHER ARGUMENTS BECAUSE 20TH CENTURY GENOCIDE DEMONSTRATES THE SHEER HORROR OF EXTERMINATING LIFE

Tipler 94


I shall obtain a hold on this future reality by focusing attention on the physics relevant to the existence and behavior of life in the far future. I shall provide a physical foundation for eschatology-the study of the ultimate future--by making the physical assumption that the universe must be capable of sustaining life indefinitely; that is, for infinite time as experienced by life existing in the physical universe. All physical scientists should take this assumption seriously because we have to have some theory for the future of the physical universe--since it unquestionably exists-and this is the most beautiful physical postulate: that total death is not inevitable. All other theories of the future necessarily postulate the ultimate extinction of everything we could possibly care about. I once visited a Nazi death camp; there I was reinforced in my conviction that there is nothing uglier than extermination. We physicists know that a beautiful postulate is more likely to be correct than an ugly one. Why not adopt this Postulate of Eternal Life, at least as a working hypothesis? I shall show in Chapter n that the universe is in fact capable of sustaining life at least another million trillion years. Specifically, I shall demonstrate that it is technically feasible for life to expand out from the Earth and engulf the entire universe, and that life must do so if it is to survive.

Documents

A2 Deleuze and Guattari