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Surpassing Man - Part VIII

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 5/27/2006

Dear Sam,

I liked your prognosis, it is quite correct :-). By the way, I do not know if I share Aurobindo's ideas. I just intended to demonstrate how different "surpassings" can be seen from different side of world. Yours is that of the West, technological, utopic, fantastic and titanic.

The transforming of earth by technological means. It is the old dream of the titans: to overthrow the gods. But they always lose and are punished, will they win this time? Will this be the century of the titans? It seems so...

Your last question is brilliant. Let's read it again:

"The big question is how will culture - this most flexible of mechanisms of adaptation - react to these tectonic shifts?"

Your question sums up all the problem and as a free gift , it provides a picture of the situation - which I earlier called the "inclined plane". The use of the _expression "tectonic shifts" is opportune and could be correct not only in a metaphorical sense. Something is moving under the surface. Volcanic, plutonic, elemental forces. It is interesting to note that, in such a view, technology appears not as a neutral medium but as an elemental force, a type of motion of the Earth itself - you use the term "organism". Technology as a phase of metamorphosis. This is a good start, here we have a pattern to work with. We have no reason to think there is something like progress in the universe (nature). All natural motions are circular, a development, they are born, grow, mature and die. Will technology preserve this natural cycle? That is to say, is "it", earthly technology, reaching an apex that will end in a quiet state - this point in time being its most celeriac motion - like the optical effect of a spinning wheel?

If this hypothesis is true then your fantastic dream about the super-techno-man will go the same way as the Stock Market does. It will grow till the last tension, it will accelerate to the fastest movement. It will explode as a supernova does and will illuminate the whole word like the fireworks of a great festival. It will live just an instant, a magical moment where time and space will be fixed once more. Having surpassed this point of maximum _expression it will decay and die.

In a few centuries, cows will graze in the ruins of the skyscrapers of technological mega-corporations, like the cattle which idled in Roman ruins shortly after its decadence. The other option means that the fastest motion implies a qualitative change, an epiphenomenon. We know very little about such changes, but surely it will mean the appearance of a meta-technology, or to be more precise, of magic.

This is a higher, a-human point of view - by its very essence, a solution cannot be found in time. What about the individual? What about free will, human choice? Shall we maintain the traditional knowledge that human choice is transcendent? Or shall we dwell on the modern, nihilistic way: nothing matters, we are mere subjects, slaves of elemental forces?

It is interesting to note that your concept of technology reveals it as elementary, "an organism". Then, in a reversal appears your audacious prophecy: Man will be God. Well, I have no question in my mind, Man will be a divinity, that is for sure. But here I disagree with you: he will not be "THE God", not even a "primus inter pares" one. To do that, to become THE god, to have the dominion, Man's mind should be infinite, and this is too bold, even for a technician:-))

Let's say, for all practical intents and purposes, that humans are left facing a choice, a decision has to be made. What values, which parameters shall Man apply in his choice? To the Greeks, hubris was the "sin of sins". The classic myth is that of Prometheus. What does it mean, this permanent obsession with limits, with hubris? Was it a primitive fear, a superstition, or is there some truth behind the mask? Does it mean that an excess of growth could provoke a dissolution of the organism?

Some answers in the next chapter of Surpassing man.

To be continued

Best regards
roberto


Dear RCM,

It is my turn to compliment you. You touched upon the main point: the dilemma's horns - magic versus culture. Technology is nothing but an instrument, a tool, a convenience. It has no intrinsic value divorced from this dilemma. It IS an elementary power unleashed. A natural manifestation - everything Man does is natural. But it secondary is to the real, conflicting camps in this Armageddon: magic versus culture. Magic versus culture - we should repeat this as an old-new mantra, as the plasma ejected from the supernova that our unconscious has become. People were terrified of nuclear weapons - and all the time this fundamental, savage battle was in the background, a battle much more decisive as far as the future of our race is concerned.

Because this is what it boils down to, this is the Hobson's choice we are faced with, this is the horror that we must confront:

If the only way to preserve our civilization is to de-humanize it - should we agree - or is it better to die? If the propagation of our culture, our world, our genetic material, our memory, our history - means that Man as we have known him hitherto will be no more or shall become only one of many human races - should we ink this Faustian deal?

Man, as he is, cannot survive if science and technology move on to become magic (as they have been doing since 1905). Should the larva sacrifice itself to become a butterfly? Is there a cultural, racial and collective after-life? Are we asked to commit suicide or just to dream differently?

All human civilizations till now have been anthropomorphic. There simply were no other human forms around and the technology to spawn such new races was absent. The universe was deterministic, uniform, isotropic and single - a "human-size" warm abode. Einstein, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, particle physics, string theory - expelled us from this cosy paradise into a dark universe with anti-matter, exploding supernovas, cold spinning neutron stars and ominous black holes. Hidden dimensions and parallel, shadow universes complete the nightmarish quality of modern science. The trauma is still fresh and biblical in proportion. Biology is where physics was pre-Einstein and is about to cast us into an outer darkness inhabited by genetic demons far more minacious than anything physics has ever offered. Artificial intelligence will complete what Copernicus has started: Man denuded of his former glory as the crowned centre of creation. Not only is our world not the centre of a universe with a zillion stars - we are likely not the only intelligent or even human race around. Our computers and our robots will shortly join us. A long awaited meeting with aliens is fast becoming certainty the more planets we discover in distant systems.

But all this - while mind boggling - is NOT magic.

What introduced magic into our lives - really and practically and daily - is the Internet. Magic is another word for INTERCONNECTEDNESS. Event A causes (=is connected to) Event B without any linearly traceable or reconstructible CHAIN of causes and effects. An Indra's Net - one pebble lifted - all pebbles move. Chaos theory reduced to its now (in)famous "butterfly causes hurricane" illustration. Fractals which contain themselves in regression (though not infinite). The equality of all points in a network. Magic is all about NETWORKS and networking - and so is the Internet.

The more miniaturization, processing speed and computing power - the more we asymptotically approximate magic. Technology now converges with magic - it is a confluence of all our dreams and all our nightmares gushing forth, foaming and sparkling and exploding in amazingly colourful jets and rainbows. It is a new promise - but not of divine origin. It is OUR promise to ourselves.

And it is in this promise that the threat lies. Magic accepts no exclusivity (for instance, of intelligent forms of life). Magic accepts no linearity (as in the idea of progress or of TIME or of entropy). Magic accepts no hierarchy (as in West versus East, or Manager versus Employee and the other hierarchies which make up our human world). Magic accepts no causation, no idealization (as an idealized observer), no explanations. Magic demands simultaneity - science abhors it. The idea of magic is too much of a revolution for the human mind - precisely because it is so intuitively FAMILIAR, it is so basic and primordial. To live magically, one must get to really know oneself. But culture and civilization were invented to DENY the self, to HIDE it, to FALSIFY it, to DISTORT it. So, magic is anathema to culture. The two CANNOT co-exist. But Man has scarcely existed without some kind of culture. Hence the immensity of the challenge.

Which brings us full circle to Nietzsche and his surpassing. It is an overcoming of CULTURE that he is talking about - and a reversion to the older arts of intuition and magic. The ubermensch is a natural person in the fullest sense. It is not that he is a savage - on the contrary, he is supremely erudite. It is not that he is impolite, aggressive, violent - he is none of these things. But he is the ultimate authority, his own law-setter, an intuitive genius and, by all means, a magician.

Until later,

Sam

(continued)