by Erik Davis
Here then is the real wonder: that information technology allows even the most hard-core materialists to ruminate once again on the ancient dream of slipping the incorporeal spark of the self through the jaws of death unscathed. In the introduction to his book, Moravec proclaims that it is no longer necessary to adopt “a mystical or religious stance” in order to imagine liberating our thought process from “bondage to a mortal body.” Moravec also tells Regis that his uploading dream “really is a sort of Christian fantasy: this is how to become pure spirit.”22
This claim demands a bit of theological bracketing. For all its otherworldly denigration of the flesh, the orthodox Christian “fantasy” embraces the total physical reality of the created world and insists that the saved will wear flesh again in the perfect world that follows Judgment Day. More important, the linchpin of all Christian creeds is Christ’s incarnation in a human body that suffers, dies, and resurrects; in the Roman communion, the body of Jesus literally manifests itself as foodstuff through the miracle of transubstantiation. According to the patristic heretic patrol, many Gnostics rejected this image of the physically suffering savior. According to the not entirely dependable Saint Augustine, some Gnostics claimed that Christ “did not really exist in the flesh, but in mockery of the human senses proffered the simulated appearance of fleshly form, and thereby also produced the illusion not only of death, but also of resurrection.”23 Even the ex-Manichaean Augustine, who was no great fan of the horny bag of piss and pile we all carry around, berates the Gnostics for their Docetist belief in Christos Simulacrum.
This curious doctrine, which supplants the entropic reality of the body with an incorporeal simulation, shows Moravec’s fantasy to be less Christian than gnostic—and, it must be added, a mighty simpleminded gnosticism at that. As William Irwin Thompson notes in The American Replacement of Nature, “With its detestation of the imprisonment of the soul in matter, its imagery of mind as light, male, and informational, a logos spermaticos, and the flesh as dark, female, and entrapping, Gnosticism is a basin of attraction that awaits those naive technologists who step outside modern society’s conventional worldview.”24 Thompson’s point is astute: as modern Prometheans pursue the “rational” possibilities of science and technology, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to maintain the commonsensical perspective of the man on the street. Instead, such thinkers and tinkerers are loosed in a world of possibility whose profound metaphysical and religious dimensions they are often incapable of handling, let alone recognizing; as such, they find themselves unconsciously drawn to the soul’s most adolescent fantasies of transcendence and immortality.
Moravec’s gnostic inclinations are also boosted by the trace elements of Platonism that course through his rationalist bloodstream. According to the allegory of the cave, Plato held that we are so dulled by the restless swamp of ordinary sensual perceptions and feelings that the pure and eternal world of transcendental forms appears to us only as shadows flickering on a womblike dungeon wall. Similarly, Moravec and his Extropian fans drive an ontological wedge between our fallible and decaying bodies and the abstract process of cognition itself. On the one side lies our half-assed perceptual, emotional, and logical wetware; on the other lies the conceptual perfection of disembodied intelligence, an informational array of codes, rules, and algorithms they identify with the potentially immortal self and its infinite computational abilities.
For Plato, the art of geometry offered a window into the world of forms, the crisp perfection of its laws and figures describing a rational world that our material one, with its chaotic undulations and crumbling materials, can only approximately embody. Similarly, Moravec and crew also attempt to transcend our cheap evolutionary baggage through the distant descendants of Plato’s ideal forms: binary logic, information theory, and mathematics. Though nearly all mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers have long ago abandoned the Platonic view that numbers refer to a real world more substantial and perfect than our own, they do not always so easily shed the psychological dynamics of Platonic thought, with its inherent love of abstract perfection, and its hope that the hidden patterns of the universe boil down to computable functions. “It is curious how, at times in the most unpredictable way, something of the old Platonic spirit surfaces in the world of computer science,” Roszak notes. “As tough-minded as most scientists might be (or wish to appear to be) in their response to the old mathematical magic, that Platonic dream survives, and no place more vividly than in the cult of information.”25
The temple of this cult is of course the computer, which, as Jay David Bolter explains, embodies the world as logicians would like it to be. Bolter argues that computers hearken back to the universe of a Greek cosmologist; though the logic of Aristotle has long since been abandoned, the contrast between “order within and chaos without” remains.26 Moreover, given the explosive power of digital number-crunching, complex predictive modeling, and data visualization, the logical operations of the computer are coming to assert their existence in an increasingly substantial yet incorporeal world of information that exists on the other side of the looking glass. As this world grows in complexity and representational power, it seems to parallel ours—even, in its binary perfection, to exceed it. Gazing onto a data-dense graphic rendering of global weather patterns or the factual reproduction of a high-res leaf, we slip unconsciously into the worldview of Pythagoras, a mystical predecessor of Plato who held that the universe not only obeyed mathematical laws but was actually composed of numbers—numbers that he identified with geometric shapes. In the Timaeus, Plato revamped this notion, claiming that the four elements that compose the visible world are in essence four regular solid polyhedrons, rather like the two-dimensional graphic polygons that built the virtual surfaces of earlier computer games like Zelda and Quake.
Perhaps the most brazenly metaphysical manifestation of this “old Platonic spirit” occurs in the mind of Edward Fredkin, a brilliant and eccentric computer scientist whose autodidacticism and lack of published papers did not prevent him from becoming an MIT professor and an important figure in some scientific circles. Fredkin believes that the universe is a computer—literally. Beneath the smallest subatomic dandelion tuft recognized by today’s physicists lies a bunch of bits, a pattern of information reproducing itself according to basic algorithms. Espousing a land of digital pantheism, Fredkin imagines the universe as a great cellular automata—one of those computer programs that consist of simple elements and basic rules, but which eventually breed into complex cybernetic ecologies. Fredkin’s fascinating, if loopy, theory, which continues to be developed by mathematicians and computational theorists like Stephen Wolfram, shows the full cosmological extent of the digital paradigm. For once you conceive the universe itself to be an immense logical matrix of algorithms, then the activity of earthly computers may well assume a metaphysical, almost demiurgic power. The universal machine becomes a machine that builds universes.
Unfortunately, the siren call of the information Pleroma also tends to suck human beings into the more troubling aspects of Platonic psychology. Once you fixate on the logical perfection of the computer’s looking-glass world, then you may have a particularly tough time accepting the dying animal that you are. One does not have to look far to find a deep strain of body loathing in the engineering imaginary favored by Moravec and many Extropians, but unlike the old desert anchorite’s horror of lusts, excrement, and bile, this loathing arises from a tinkerer’s distaste for lousy design. As the futurist Bob Truax put it in Regis’s book, “What right-minded engineer would try to build any machine out of lime and jelly? Bone and protoplasm are extremely poor structural materials.”27 The Extropian hero Bob Ettinger, whose 1964 book The Prospect of Immortality launched the cryogenics movement, proposed that one of the first operations we should perform on our new transhuman bodies is to make the things clean and shit free. Hearing such plans, one almost automatically envisions the stereotype of the awkward and ungainly hacker, complaining abo
ut having to fuel, discharge, and occasionally even bathe his ever-decaying meat machine.
Hans Moravec wonders why we don’t just go all the way and literally become machines. Moravec cannot fathom why the android Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation wants to be human; as he sees it, siphoning our minds into circuitry will allow us not only to dodge the grim reaper but to leap over our hardwired human limitations with a single bound. Once we are posthuman cyborgs, all the knobs can be twisted to the demigod settings: memory, information intake, perceptual acuity, processing power. Even the sky’s no longer the limit, since our ability to siphon our minds into any number of possible machines will allow us to explore deep space, colonize other planets, and mine wealth from the raw stuff of the solar system.
Curiously, the imagery of the cyborg, which undergirds many Extropian speculations, is bound up from the beginning with extraterrestrial flight. The term itself was coined in the early 1960s by two scientists, Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, who wanted to tweak the bodies of astronauts technologically and pharmacologically until our boys could feel at home in outer space. In this sense, the cyborg interpenetration of technology and humanity is part and parcel of the heroic, otherworldly dream to leave the planet, a dream that sums up the transcendental materialism exemplified by Moravec, the Extropians, and other transhumanist mutants. Later we will see how the Heaven’s Gate cult swallowed this dream hook, line, and sinker, but offworld religious exuberance is hardly limited to UFO fanatics. As David Noble shows in The Religion of Technology, the American space program has been touched by the spirit since the rocket-man Wernher von Braun, freshly arrived from post-Nazi Germany, converted to fundamentalist Christianity in the 1950s. Indeed, with all the Bibles and communion wafers that astronauts have trucked back and forth to the moon, and with all the Mormons and born-agains running the show at home, it is hardly surprising that General Motors, one of the fathers of the U.S. space program, attempted to build a Chapel of the Astronauts near the Kennedy Space Center in the early 1970s.
Space technologies do not just materialize the offworld yearnings of those desperate to flee the grave. They also literalize the cosmic homesickness that vibrates in so many human hearts, a longing for a transcendental level of authenticity, vision, and being reflected in the heavens. Many thoughtful moderns, religious and not, believe that this sense of estrangement cannot really be assuaged; instead one gains authenticity by throwing oneself into the existential conditions of real life, with all its limitations, sufferings, and insecurity. Others find this cosmic longing satisfied by the realization that earthly life is already composed of stardust, and that the patterns of distant galaxies are reflected in palm fronds, tide pools, and the iris in a lover’s eye. But such intimations are not always enough to quench the gnostic suspicion that there is more to us than nature allows. As Hoeller proclaims, “The exoteric and esoteric traditions declare that earth is not the only home for human beings, that we did not grow like weeds from the soil. While our bodies indeed may have originated on this earth, our inner essence did not.”28
Needless to say, the bishop, like most libertarians and techno-utopians, has a pretty short fuse when it comes to environmentalists. On a political level, environmentalists represent tyranny because they proclaim the reality of limitation. They argue that we are reaching the natural limits of the biosphere, that regulatory agencies should impose limits on private citizens and corporations, and that technology is severely limited in its ability to clean up the mess it’s already made. On a spiritual plane, many tree huggers, New Agers, and deep ecologists reject Hoeller’s sense of offworld estrangement as pathological, embracing instead an almost pagan identification with nature and its healing powers. The philosophers and poets of a blooming earth have little fondness for the Platonic tradition of denigrating material life in the name of abstract ideals, or for the anthropocentric legacy of a triumphant and restless humanism. Nor are they particularly fond of Descartes’s mechanistic philosophy, which cleaved the mind from the body and sapped enchantment from nature until nothing remained but a machine to hack.
Putting the pedal to the metal of the West, the Extropians bring all these antiecological trends to a feverish pitch, distilling what Dery mordantly pegs the “theology of the ejector seat.” In the Extropian utopia, the mind abandons the body, technology rewrites the laws of nature, and libertarian superbrights leave Terra’s polluted and impoverished nest for a cyborg life in space. Certainly these dreams can be seen as symptoms of an arrogant and deadly rift with nature, or a hubristic refusal to acknowledge the grip of necessity, or a naive and callous disregard for the social and ecological networks that continue to bind us in the here and now. But the Extropians’ technological drive toward transcendence must also be seen as a science-fiction mask of a psychospiritual intuition that’s been tugging on humans for millennia. The intuition is alchemical: buried in the murk of the human self lies an unformed golden core, and with technology, in both the metaphoric sense of techniques and the literal sense of tools, we can tap and transform this potential. We are already cyborgs, an Extropian might say, and we might as well set our sights on the stars.
V
The Spiritual Cyborg
If human history is the story of a creature who molts from ape to angel—or, as Nietzsche claimed, from beast to Superman—then somewhere along the way it seems that we must become machines. This destiny is rooted in our recent historical evolution. For as the engines of civilization pulled us farther and farther away from the unpredictable and often spiteful dance of nature, we withdrew from the animistic imagination that once immersed us in a living network of material forces and ruling intelligences. We started dreaming of transcending the old gods, of controlling our “animal souls,” of building an urban heaven on a mastered earth. We became moderns. Though technology was by no means the only way that humans expressed or inculcated their experience of standing apart from nature, it certainly became the Western way. The modern West could even be said to have made a pact with machines—those systematic assemblages of working parts and potentials that by definition lack a vital spirit, a soul grounded in the metaphysical order of things. And so today, now that we have technologized our environment and isolated the self within a scientific frame of mind, we no longer turn to nature to echo our state. Now we catch our reflections, even our spirits, in the movements and mentations of machines.
This imaginal relationship between man and machine was a long time coming. The ground was laid by the mechanistic cosmologists of ancient Greece, and it seized the imagination when tinkerers like Heron started building those fanciful protorobots we call automata—mechanical gods, dolls, and birds that fascinated ancient and medieval folks as much as they fascinate kids at Disneyland today. The elaborate clocks that decorated medieval churches were often outfitted with mechanical figures representing sinners, saints, grim reapers, and beasts, all mimicking our passage through time. The notion of a mechanistic cosmos, which these clocks helped engender, eventually landed us at the philosophical doorstep of Descartes, who adopted the revolutionary notion that bodies were not animated by spirits of any kind. The difference between a living being and a corpse was nothing more than the difference between a wound-up watch and a spent automata. The Catholic Church recognized the threat to religion that Descartes’s new mechanistic philosophy posed but was satisfied with the philosopher’s dualistic solution: simply divide the res cogitans, the realm of the mind, from the res extensa, the spatial world of bodies and objects, and insist that never the twain shall meet.
The enormously productive power of Cartesian philosophy ensured that bone-cold mechanism would come to dominate the Western worldview—so much so that today the flimsy wall that Descartes erected to protect the thinking subject has broken down. Cognitive scientists, psychopharmacologists, and geneticists are now off-roading into the wilderness of the human mind, mapping every step of the way. The most cherished images and experiences of the self are being colonized by authoritative
scientific languages that threaten to reduce our minds and personalities to complex mechanisms—Rube Goldberg assemblages of genetic codes, mammalian habits, and bubbling vats of neurochemicals. Modern psychology can barely keep its hoary old tales alive; as Time magazine opined, even the Oedipus complex, that grand drama of human personality, has been reduced to a matter of molecules.
As we come to know more about the nuts and bolts of human life, we inevitably come to suspect that our actions, thoughts, and experiences, which seem so spontaneous and free, are programmed into our bodyminds with the mercilessness of clockwork. Speaking before the congressional committee that funded the Human Genome Project, which sequenced the entire human genetic code, the Nobel laureate James Watson said, “We used to think that our fate was in the stars. Now we know that, in large measure, our fate is in our genes.”1 As if such genetic determinism wasn’t enough, sociologists and psychologists have also amassed a load of evidence that points to the profoundly automatic patterns of much of our social and cultural life—patterns that arise not only from our animal instincts but from institutions, family dramas, and cultural conditioning. Common sense may not be so common after all; our understanding of what constitutes normal reality may simply represent the power of what the psychologist Charles Tart calls “consensus trance.”