by Andrew Stark
It was Kurzweil who, in 1990, foresaw that a computer would beat a world champion at chess. And in 1997 it happened when IBM’s supercomputer, known as “Deep Blue,” defeated Garry Kasparov. Perhaps, then, Kurzweil is thinking of our all merging into some gigantic version of Deep Blue.5 Let’s take that as the closest proxy for what he and the others have in mind.
Both of these human futures—our blending into a universal mind and our crumbling into the physical universe—share a common feature. Together, they reframe the ultimate choice we think we have, inviting us to view it in a different way. Not, as we typically do, as a choice between our remaining forever conscious and our becoming permanently unconscious. Instead, it’s a choice between our becoming part of a larger immortal consciousness—a single all-embracing superintelligence, an omniscient Deep Blue—or becoming part of a larger permanent unconsciousness: the cosmos of rocks, dust, molecules, atoms. When the singularity arrives it will force each of us to make a decision. We could either upload our consciousnesses into the universal mind, or we could remain “original substrate” humans, biological humans who—as they always have done—will die, dissolve into particles, and “drop back,” in Willa Cather’s words, “into the immense design of things”: the physical universe.
Let’s entertain the possibility that this is how we should look at the choice toward which destiny is taking us: merge into the universal mind or dissolve into the physical universe. Something like these two options, many smart people are telling us, will be our fate sooner or later. What, then, would be the better alternative? Those smart people have no doubt: become part of the cosmic consciousness. Are they right? Or would it be better to become part of the cosmos itself?
There once was an amiable and capable Canadian cabinet minister named Harvie Andre. One evening Andre dropped in on a party at the opulent home of an Ottawa lobbyist, a man who had been conducting a lucrative business representing clients to Andre and his office. Surveying the expanse of elegance and exquisiteness that lay all around him, Andre famously quipped, “Why is it so much better to know Harvie Andre than to be Harvie Andre?”
Would it be better to become part of the cosmic consciousness that comes to know the beauty and secrets of the cosmos—secrets that remain totally beyond our current ken—or to become part of that mysterious, fascinating cosmos itself?
I understand what it means to become part of the cosmos. It means that my body will return to organic nature, dissolving over time into molecules—compressed into a rock, osmotically engorged by a tree, food for snails, a home for fleas, a nest for birds, atoms in a galactic storm, or back to where it all began, the sea, each particle lasting forever. What does it mean, though, to become part of cosmic consciousness, the posthuman collective consciousness that spends eternity knowing the cosmos? It’s hard to get a grip on that.
And for good reason. Consciousness, unlike the cosmos, is unitary. There is no such thing as being a “part” of a larger cosmic consciousness in the way one can become part of—particles in—the larger cosmos.
To say that consciousness is unitary doesn’t imply that consciousness is just one thing, as opposed to a grab bag of different functions—visual, aural, cognitive, and the like. It simply means, as John Searle says, that we always have a “unified conscious field. At any moment you do not just experience the sound of the music and the taste of the beer, but you have both as part of a single, unified conscious field, a subjective awareness of the total conscious experience.”6 Certainly, the kind of hyperaware cosmic consciousness of which Kurzweil speaks, one that has no secrets from itself—one with nothing even hidden in the basement of an unconscious7—would be unitary in this way. And so “we” would have been obliterated. To use the words that Kurzweil himself favors, we would “meld” and “merge” into the unitary whole of cosmic consciousness, not remain discrete entities within it.8
True, not all versions of cosmic consciousness envision our merging and melding. N. Katherine Hayles, a perceptive critic of the Kurzweil-type vision, speaks of what she calls a “distributed” universal consciousness. We would each play our own separate part in a glorified version of—to use the psychologist Daniel Wegner’s analogy—the “group mind” of a typical household. As Wegner, in a New York Times article, recounted his domestic scene, “I remembered where the car and yard things were, she [Wegner’s wife] remembered where the house things were, and we could each depend on the other to be an expert in domains we didn’t need to master.”9 Because he and his spouse remained distinct individuals within their household cybermind, Wegner foresaw that the same could be true in the universal cybermind. That’s why his article is called “Don’t Fear the Cybermind,” and why he spoke of our one day each becoming “part of the biggest, smartest mind ever.” In Wegner’s vision, then, individual consciousness would remain; the parts wouldn’t dissolve into the whole.
But that’s because there would be no real universal mind. No entity in “distributed” cosmic consciousness would, actually, possess cosmic consciousness, knowing where both the yard and the household things are. By contrast, in true “cosmic consciousness,” as William James long ago realized, it’s impossible to imagine what “individuation” would look like.10
While true cosmic consciousness might obliterate individuality, and while distributed consciousness might preserve individuality at the cost of not being truly cosmic, visionaries like Ray Kurzweil himself seem to toggle, unresolved, between the two possibilities. Kurzweil certainly heralds the moment when we will all meld and merge into a true cosmic mind. But according to Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, the philosopher who helped run the Templeton Foundation’s Immortality Project, Kurzweil also “doesn’t like the single global consciousness idea, because he thinks that it would preclude him being there. He assumes that his individual self would not persist.”11
Kurzweil seems conflicted. Indeed, at one point in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil gestures toward this dilemma but without ever grasping its horns. He inquires of an imagined superhuman collective intelligence: “So, you separate your personalities . . .” and the entity responds, “At times. But we still share our knowledge stores at all times.”12 Kurzweil, then, evidently sees some kind of trade-off between shared knowledge and the separation of personalities, between true cosmic consciousness and individual survival. But he offers no indication of how they might be reconciled. Perhaps that’s because they can’t be.
So let’s suppose, as many a visionary predicts—whether he or she welcomes or fears it—that the choice that one day will confront us is to either dissolve into true cosmic consciousness or else become particles in the cosmos itself. Either future “humans” would at one point after birth get uploaded, losing their individuality in the universal mind—or else they would remain individual biological organisms, living and dying in the time-honored way, before crumbling into the physical universe. What’s the better option?
True, this is a deliberately polarizing choice. There may in fact lie innumerable shades of gray in between. Human beings could easily retain their individuality without remaining entirely biological organisms. They might one day integrate complex computational hardware into their individual organic brains, and in so doing they might each attain ever greater individual intelligence short of cosmic consciousness. But my purpose here is not to speculate about possible futures, or about the vast range of scenarios scientists have floated for our acquiring ever more powerful individual minds situated on vastly extended silicon-based substrates. Instead, it’s to look at whether there’s anything consolatory to be gleaned from thinking about the stark choice between our merging into a vastly extended cosmic mind and our clinging, instead, to our individual, doomed-to-crumble, carbon-based physical substrates.
In the end, I think it’s better to be Harvie Andre than to know Harvie Andre. It’s better to crumble into the physical cosmos than merge into a cosmic consciousness that spends eons contemplating that cosmos. Why? Because it’s better to b
e an object of admiration than the one doing the admiring.
True, it’s better to be a conscious admirer, like an art connoisseur, than an unconscious object of admiration, like a work of art. But if both are on the same level—if both admirer and admired are conscious (think of Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story), then it’s better to be the “object” being admired. And so if instead “you” will be unconscious either way, why not be part of the object being admired rather than dissolve into the subject doing the admiring?
Emotionally, I find myself gravitating toward the imagery writers use to describe our becoming particles in the cosmos itself—the molecules of my body becoming flowers and trees, sustenance for worms, motes in the sunlight that warms the earth, stardust, a comet’s tail, diffused into the mother of life, the sea. It’s a process that begins well before we die, as the Canadian actress Linda Griffiths so acidly noted in her play Maggie and Pierre, in which the twenty-two-year-old Margaret Trudeau describes brushing her lips against those of the fifty-two-year-old Pierre as akin to kissing a drying rose petal.13 In contrast to these organic metaphors, the lifeless pictures conjured up to give us some sense of what cosmic consciousness would be like—melding into a matrix or a hologram, merging into a code or an algorithm—leave me metallically cold.
As part of the cosmos, I might disintegrate into billions of particles, into what Edna St. Vincent Millay calls “dull . . . indiscriminate dust.” But that dust will go “to feed the roses,” the poet says, and “fragrant is the blossom.” My “bone ash” will rise “in the saplings . . . passing into the shells of snails, the bones of fish and birds.”14 It will go back to a kind of life, a part of Gaia, the organic respiration of the planet. But meld into cosmic consciousness? That’s not life but death. The singularity prognosticator Ben Goertzel unwittingly makes the point: “If it came down to it, I wouldn’t hesitate to annihilate myself in favor of some amazing super being.”15 What’s key here is the equation of merger into a superconsciousness with annihilation.
But of course this is all a kind of magical thinking. It’s impossible for an individual to experience either dissolving into cosmic consciousness or becoming particulate matter in the cosmos itself. And yet like much magical thinking, this instance too clues us into a deeper psychological reality. At some level we rightly fear that although we will not be physically obliterated in the cosmos itself—our particles will last forever—we would be mentally obliterated in cosmic consciousness. No parts of us would remain.
Perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that in the future as imagined by Kurzweil and company, either “option”—cosmic consciousness or the cosmos itself—would spell death and the dreaded annihilation it entails for individual consciousness. It’s just that it would be the death of the individual in the case of our melding into cosmic consciousness. And it would be the death of consciousness in the case of our particles blending into the cosmos itself. We would thus lose individual consciousness whether we lived or died. And so life, if we opted for Kurzweil’s cosmic consciousness, truly would intimate death—even when it comes to the most fearful loss that death can deal, the loss of individual consciousness. If that’s our future, then perhaps we do abide in the best of times, a beautiful bubble in history, right now, before we have to face the choice between individual consciousness and individual consciousness. And maybe that’s some consolation.
It’s funny. The question on the table is whether the losses that life deals us are, when it comes right down to it, any different from those that death imposes. If no difference emerges, then we should feel at least weakly consoled about our mortality.
But my “priors,” before examining the question, would have led me to believe that while the mere vicissitudes of life can take from us many of the same things that our death ultimately does—a spouse (if her affections wander), children (if their anger estranges them), businesses, jobs, homes, homelands—the one loss that life can never deal us is the loss of individual consciousness. The ebbs and flows of life can take from us many, perhaps all, of the beloved objects that populate our consciousness, I would have thought—and especially our lovers, friends, sons, and daughters—with every bit as much finality as our own death does. But life can never, I would have thought, destroy our own bare individual subject itself the way that death can.
It’s actually more the reverse. The one death-dealt loss that life too can inflict, at least potentially, turns out to be the loss of subjective individual consciousness. Human life, if the cosmic-consciousness visionaries are right in their prognoses, will finally terminate individual consciousness, even if (perversely) so many of them seem to welcome that prospect. Meanwhile, all those other losses—the losses of all the objects of our consciousness, and in particular the people we moon over and obsess over and spin over and over in our minds? It turns out, as I will argue in the next chapter, that the tragedies—the conflicts and failures, however devastating—of human relationships, of life itself, can never deprive us of those we love in the way that our death does. And that, too, is a good thing. While it doesn’t console me about death, it consoles me about life. And I need that too.
Of course, my own individual consciousness is what I want most of all. I’d rather be a cognizant, sentient human being than a corpse. But if the day ever comes, I’d turn down the chance to dissolve into computational consciousness, into the universal mind. Instead I’d choose to become a lasting part of living, organic nature, part of the physical universe.
Meld into Deep Blue? No thanks. I’d rather merge into the deep blue sea.
fifteen
EVERY TIME I SAY GOODBYE, I DIE A LITTLE
“For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes,” Joan Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking; “I did not age.”1
It’s an affecting thought. A husband looks at his sixty-nine-year-old wife and habitually, reflexively, sees the twenty-nine-year-old he first knew. His doing so is contagious. She too comes to view herself in the same way. Only when the husband then dies does the wife—for “the first year since I was twenty-nine,” as Didion says—suddenly see “that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger.”
An affecting thought, but also a paradoxical one. For consider the main theme of Didion’s book: her lingering sense, over the course of the subsequent year, that John was not dead but on an out-of-town trip. At any moment he would “return and need his shoes” or jackets or chair or office. Certainly that’s what the evidence suggested. The planet continued to bear his physical imprint as clearly as ever. He might have been gone but the world retained—in exactly the way it always had whenever he was simply somewhere else—the spaces, whether small ones like sneakers or large ones like dens, that he would come home to occupy.
Put the two together: on the one hand, when John was alive, he kept Joan frozen in time, ageless as a young woman. On the other hand, once John died, Joan kept him moving forward in time, persisting as a breathing, organic creature. The living Joan never moved beyond twenty-nine; John, dead at seventy-one, continued to live on. Each thought bookends the other.
Whatever you might think of the other consolatory streams—that death for one reason or another is actually benign, that mortality gives us all we could ever gain from immortality, or that immortality for one reason or another would actually be gruesome—you might still not be able to get past death’s most massive affront: the devastating and overwhelming losses it inflicts, the final farewells it forces us to bid to everyone and everything we love. I am here interested in the loss not of consciousness itself, as I was in the last chapter, but of all the things in the world that attract and delight our consciousness: the loss not of the subject of consciousness but of all its objects. And yet what if all of the losses that we would sustain in death, all its poignant permanent goodbyes, can and would come with life anyway? Shouldn’t that, at least in a backhanded way, console us about our mortality?
Many have thought so.
Since our “world is a world of continuous loss,” the psychiatrist Adam Phillips argues, “all the quotidian experiences of loss, all the disappearances of everyday life, are like rehearsals” for “the hidden drama of one’s own death.”2 Yes, death might bring tremendous “loss,” the poet Kate Clanchy acknowledges, “but, in a way, I had lost plenty of friends just through life’s ordinary processes—they had moved away or married someone I didn’t like.”3 Or consider John Updike, in a story whose main character encounters a former lover: “I felt in her presence the fear of death a man feels with a woman who once opened herself to him and is available no more.”4
So the idea on the table for consideration—the putatively consoling idea—is that all the losses that death brings would come with life anyway: and I am, as I have been throughout, setting aside losses due to physical decline and decrepitude. Let’s focus, then, on the sharpest kind of losses that your death will bring: the heart-clutching thought that the hour will arrive when you must part for eternity from everyone you love—soul mate, lover, children, friends. Never more, as Lucretius says, “will your happy home give you welcome”; never more “will your [spouse] and sweet children race to win the first kisses, and thrill your heart to its depths with sweetness.” Now: in what way does life itself impose similar losses, force equivalent goodbyes?