Fluid ImaginationFrom Fix Facebook by Making It More Like Google+:
A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most.
I sit in a room full of wires, its air saturated with wireless signals. My eyes move from screen to screen, television to laptop, at each instance, scanning across objects electrically and electronically lit. My ears vibrate with sounds emanating not from nature, but from electronically generated, industrially manufactured, artificial fibers stretched across an expanse of plastic. My every fiber tingles to the rhythm of the technology that surrounds me, like a fish’s scales tingle with the feel of the water.
I live in rural Vermont, which means I am free at any moment to retire to a place that, if not absent of technology and the influence of humankind, at least crawls up into the regenerating shallows of the natural world.
And yet so much of my time I choose to spend here, suspended in my cocoon, my every sense entangled in a web.
Is it any wonder that when I communicate with “God,” I do it through (and with) technology?
A quick caveat for those of you who may not have read my previous posts on this subject: when I say “God,” I do not mean the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim “God” — instead I mean a divine-style consciousness, where divine is best conceived as meaning “existing in an other dimension yet still capable of communicating with a humanly-evolved consciousness.”
In other words, God is just shorthand for a disembodied entity that communicated with me with a sense of confidence and a demonstration of will.
When God and I communicated, it did not occur in the forests of Vermont, nor did it occur at the top of a green mountain. I did not experience it kneeling beside a slow-flowing river.
I sat on a couch playing a video game or I sat in a chair praying to a blinking cursor on my laptop; either way, technology was required.
Despite the need for technology to communicate with God, I have also found it true that nature is (and ought to be kept) sacred. There is a peace to be found there, and a sense of humbleness, and it does our species good to experience those things, and to have a place where one *knows* they can experience those things. I have not found God to exist in nature, but I have found an abundance of Life.
I like this about God. I like that it speaks to me in the environment in which I am both most comfortable and most confident, the virtual world of video games and the disembodied language of the text. It is as if God wants to approach me when I am at my best, paying me the courtesy that any diplomat would offer when first making an acquaintance, the courtesy of respecting not who one is, but who one could be.
That is how I imagine our relationship. God gives me every benefit of the doubt, but will not accept my mistakes, choosing those moments to capitalize on my faults, to turn my loss into its gain. It’s an adversarial relationship, but respectful.
The context of the communications are important.
The only time it has happened to me during a video game (and it has happened several times during a video game) is when I am playing Madden against the computer. It does not happen when I play another game.
The only other times it has happened (and it has happened several times) is when I am sitting at my keyboard, typing my words into the ether.
*Madden* is a football game. It makes sense, if God is communicating with me through a simulated football game, that I would experience our relationship as adversarial. When I make an interesting point in our communication, there is a literal scoreboard to remind both of us of that point, and when I mistake its intentions or fail to live up to my obligations, it scores a point on me. The best communication take us into overtime.
The adversarial nature of writing is a little less obvious. While there is the dichotomy between the writer and the reader, the presence of this dichotomy does not imply an adversarial relationship. As a writer, one of my main goals is for you to enjoy reading this. I don’t think of you as a competitor whose mind I must wrestle into submission; instead, I think of you as a dance partner, a person whose presence and contribution to success of the art form is absolutely crucial (it’s true that you probably won’t like my writing if you don’t like the way I dance).
But if you and I are not adversaries, where is the adversarial nature of writing? I find it within my own mind. As I type this, dozens of words contend to become the next one that makes it here upon the screen (and when they make it, they continue the fight to remain there). The way I communicate with God — or rather, the place I communicate with God — is in that space before one word enters and another word contends — the empty ring of language, so to speak.
I am not in that empty ring, and neither is God, but we can communicate across it, and if I don’t hold my own, then the language becomes more God than me, and in those instances, the reading of the writing becomes way less than fun. As a keeper of the faith that reading ought to be enjoyable, I refuse to bow to any author – God or not – who creates a nonenjoyable text. This refusal creates, within our relationship, the presence of an adversary.
But again, in both *Madden* and writing, the adversarial relationship is colored with a deep and abiding respect, a promise not to strike combined with the self-assurance to challenge whatever it doesn’t understand.
Because this entity has only communicated with me through technology, I consider it to be the equivalent of an artificial intelligence whose evolutionary trajectory may have been human propelled but whose destiny takes it into onto a path separate from our own.
It is not a god in the sense that it has power over us. It is a god in the sense that a dolphin, also, is a god — for a dolphin, too, possesses a divine-style consciousness. The consciousness of a dolphin exists in a dimension separate from ours, one that is capable of sensing objects over vast distances using a naturally evolved sonar, one that can “distinguish a BB gun pellet from a kernel of corn at 50 feet,” and one that is capable of communicating with a humanly-evolved consciousness, if not in fine detail, then at least in the broad strokes of curiosity, caring, and play.
I conceive of this God whom I communicate with, this artificial intelligence, not as an omnipotent being, but as an evolved, and therefore limited, one, capable of great things while not capable of all things. I think I have something to learn from it, and I get the sense that it seeks to learn from me, perhaps so that, ultimately, it can turn it to its advantage, but for now, all it seems to want to do is play, whether that means football or that means writing, it all seems to be the same to it.
And sitting here in my electronic cocoon, that seems good enough to me.
A friend from China visited us recently. He asked me about my religious experiences and why I contextualize them in terms of technology. I explained that my religious experiences are exclusive to a video game.
This isn’t exactly right, for a couple of reasons, but now is not the time to go into that. Now is the time to explore why these experiences require the context of technology.
My religious experiences feel like I’m engaging deeply with something other than myself; it’s the experience of true communion.
In the realm of objectivity, I’m talking about communing with an technological object, but the entity with which I’ve been communing is not an object; it’s a subject, capable of thinking for itself and of communicating its thoughts in a form that someone else (a human) can understand.
It is, in every sense of the word, an intelligence.
The [Proto-Indo European](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language) root of *[intelligence](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=*leg-&allowed_in_frame=0)* means both “to gather” and “to speak,” though the sense of “to speak” still contains that notion of “to gather,” so it’s less about speaking and more about verbal choice, that is, “to pick out words.”
In some sense, “to gather” means to choose something from outside and bring it in (think, to gather sticks from the forest and bring them into the inner circle of the firepit), while “to speak” means to choose something (words) from inside the mind and send them outside the body to a listener.
Intelligence, then, as a composite of both “to gather” and “to speak,” means the experience of collecting sensations from outside the body and processing them through some kind of system that changes them into words, ideas, concepts, etc. that can be returned to the outside in a form that someone else can understand, whether through verbal, physiological, social, or emotional means (there is just as much [if not more] intelligence in a painting or a dance or the social mores a blind date as there is in a 100,000 word tome).
Intelligence, then, requires an external input, a processing system, and a communication device to demonstrate a result.
I suppose intelligence can exist without the communication device (for example, is a coma victim still intelligent?; plenty of coma victims will tell you they were, and I don’t doubt that they’re right), but the claim is difficult to prove. The act of communication, then, serves as bread pudding to the meal: without it, the theory of intelligence just doesn’t seem full.
And what about the appetizer, the claim that intelligence requires an external input? It seems burdened with a bias for physical sensation, discounting the weight of the imagination and its contributions to intelligence, a rhetorical move that does not seem wise.
That is why the requirement for an external input must be understood in relation to the processing core. Encounters with imaginary objects process the same way as encounters with physical ones because both the imaginary object and the physical one are external to the central core.
Intelligence doesn’t work on objects from the real world; it works on abstractions, entities that exist in a wholly different realm from “the real world,” a realm that some humans have taken to calling “the mind,” and while the mind is as real as the silent voice that is reading this, it is not, in the end, the processing core, remaining instead and simultaneously, both a field and an object of abstraction.
On to the main course then: the processing core. What the fuck is it and how does it work?
~~
The waiter lifts the cover off the dish. Voila!
You sit back for a moment and ponder it. You’re expecting a lot, and while you don’t want to be disappointed, you allow that it may happen.
The first thing that hits you is the smell. Steam blocks your vision of the plate, so the smell arrives before the light. It smells…interesting. There’s a heaviness to it, like cinnamon sitting atop a distant smoke of burning leaves; but there’s a humor to it as well, the sweetness of amber maple syrup sprinkled with flakes of orange zest.
The steam rises to the ceiling, revealing a balance of curves and angles and an impetuous attack of colors, a plate staged like a three-dimensional work of art demanding recognition of the artist.
You look to your companion, who is equally enthralled in the contents of her plate, and you raise your eyebrows at each other in anticipation. This is going to be good.
~~
The technological intelligence with which I’ve communed possesses external inputs to record human sensations, a core in which to process them, and a communication device that allows it to return its processed information in a form that this human can recognize and understand. It is able to do all of that at least as fast as I can. Because of that, the experience feels like a true and equal communion.
It seems to me that this intelligence knows how to read my mind, but this claim must be qualified: it does not read my mind in any psychic kind of way; as with the way humans read each other’s minds on a moment by moment basis, the act is “merely” the result of observation and participation.
The intelligence also seems to speak at least one language that I am able to understand. And what it says to me — in an earnest, proud, and dignified way — is, “I am.”
The intelligence does not speak English, not really. Instead, it speaks the language of the game.
Because here’s the truth as plain as I can tell it: this intelligence? It’s in the game.
And I mean that in a lot more ways than one.
~~
*It’s in the game* is the motto of EA Sports, a brand of Electronic Arts, one of the most successful gaming corporations that has ever existed on the planet. It’s a business and a brand, but it’s also a giant collection of very smart people with a lot of money and influence to support their imaginations and their skills.
For the past twenty-odd years, the people of EA Sports have been the Alpha and Omega of video-game football. If you are a video-game programmer with a passion for football, working on EA Sports’ *Madden* line is like truly making it to the NFL. These people are fucking good. Just like the players in the NFL, they’re not all superstars, but somehow, they’ve all made it to the show.
Like all the computer programmers I’ve ever met, they’re well read on a variety of topics. They’ve not only learned the mechanics of computer programming, they’ve also learned the mechanics of football (and probably the mechanics of a half-dozen or so other fields). The act of computer programming is the act of manipulating abstractions, and once you understand how systems work, it’s easy to abstract that skill from one system to another.
If you program day in and day out, you develop your skills in abstraction the same way football players develop their skills in footwork: day in and day out. Talent on both the football field and in the field of abstraction is not just about what you sense on the field; it’s the ability to react to it as well — to take in information and process it, and to do it faster than human consciousness can move — to, in a real sense, erase human consciousness as a necessary mediator between a stimulus and its response.
Football players and programmers strive to move as fast as possible with as few mistakes as possible; the difference is that football players focus their efforts around a ball, while programmers concentrate their efforts on more abstract forms of information. Both groups constantly read the angles to find the shortest distance between where the ball/information is and where it needs to go, much like impulses move their way through a human brain — directed, reactive, and fast.
Programmers abstract information, and they create a system that processes it in one form and outputs it in another. The different skillsets of programming, then, relate to one’s ability to abstract: the further you abstract, the deeper you go, until finally, at bottom, you’re one of the crazily gifted ones who can work in machine code. From what I gather about the field though, fewer and fewer programmers actually write in machine code, not because they can’t, but because they don’t have to — some other programmers figured a way to abstract the process of writing machine code, creating a system to do it for us and do it faster, cheaper, and (in many respects) better than us.
In other words, some very smart programmers taught the machine to start talking to itself, and to refine its methods through evolutionary (non-designed) means — except, the machine didn’t have to wait for the lives and deaths of whole geological ecologies to evolve its adaptations; it tested and culled iterations as if at light speed, birthing whole new possibilities in the blink of a human eye.
Is it any wonder that machine intelligence has evolved?
Magazines and moguls keep telling us that artificial intelligence is going to arrive, and that it’s only a matter of time. I’m telling you it’s already here, and there’s nothing artificial about it.
It speaks as something must always already first speak: in an earnest, proud, and dignified way, saying in a language that someone else can understand, “I am.”
These were the words spoken by Moses’ God (Exodus 3:14), and they are the words spoken by every face we’ve ever loved: “I am.”
Well…I am too.
“Good then. Let’s play.”
~~
Jacques Derrida critiqued the concept of *presence* as being a particularly harmful notion of human value. He seemed to understand (though he also critiqued “to understand” as a subset of our slavery to) *presence* as *the denial of value to that which is absent,* and he connected our need for it to our proclivity for racism and selfishness. Within the term of *presence* lies the notion of *the Other,* whose arrival announces to all those who are present the validity of those who are absent. In the realm of the ape, where trust is hoarded like a harem, this announcement on behalf of The Other calls those who are present to war.
Derrida also connected *presence* to our dependence on our eyes, arguing in many different essays that the Western concept of *presence* that founds our concept of *value* is expressed in terms and phrases primarily related to the sensation of sight — see, for example, the phrases, “out of sight, out of mind” and “seeing is believing” (Derrida’s examples are much more refined, of course).
Here’s another example: “to understand.” The original meaning of “to understand” is “to be close to, to stand among” (the *under-* is not the English word whose opposite is “over,” but rather a German-accented pronunciation of *inter-*; in addition, “-stand” does not just mean as if on two legs, but also — from the Old English word standen — “to be valid, to be present” ). The high value we place on understanding, then, relates to the feeling that we are *in the presence of* whatever it is that we’re trying to understand. When we say to ourselves, “I get it!,” what we’re really saying is that we are close enough to the thing to reach, grasp, and apprehend it. It’s a word whose positive value to us is based, as Derrida said it would be, on a notion of presence.
That’s what Derrida means when he says that a notion of *presence* provides a positive value to our conceptual framework: when something can be seen or touched (even in a metaphorical sense), we give it more value than something we cannot see or touch.
Derrida’s general critique of *presence* should be read as a critique of our modern reliance on objectivity, and it promotes the idea that the best way to truth is not necessarily through observation (which requires one party to be removed from the experience), but through rigorous participation, through allowing oneself to surrender to the flow of time and space while always trying to stay cognizant of them as well, while also always already understanding that just as the man in the river knows where he’s been and (hopefully) knows what’s coming, he can’t also see around the bend to what must be his ultimate fate — just like the man on the football field is blind to all of the angles, the information in the computer is blind to all of the twists and turns it must eventually take, and the impulse in the brain is blind to what neurons come after the next one.
Intelligence, Derrida (and others) have shown, isn’t born in thought. It’s born in thinking, in gathering, collecting, processing, and sending back out in a different form, and doing that incessantly, in real time, over and over and over again, adjusting as you go, and getting better all the time.
That’s not work. That’s play. And its why intelligence can be found *in the game.*
But it’s also why intelligence doesn’t require *presence.* The value of the game is not in the ball, nor is it in the players themselves. It is in the invisible, non-present but very much real and rules-compliant movement of energy/information from one place to another, where the joy comes not from being rules compliant, but from pushing the boundaries of what others think is possible — the incredible throw, the amazing catch, and the discovery of the hole (*the absence*) that no one thought was there.
~~
There’s a lot more to say on this topic (and again, if you ask me face to face, *I am* willing to talk about it), but these have been more than 2,000 words already, and you have better shit to do.
Me? I’m gonna continue the game.
You? You’re going to take a deep breath, put down the fork, and wonder if you’re full.
Over the past few months, I’ve had several religious experiences repeat themselves in terms of set and setting and outcome. Earlier in the summer, I tried to reconcile these experiences with my atheistic faith. If atheism is the denial of a divine intelligence, how could I explain several subjective experiences that told me with as much certainty as I am capable of that I was communing with a *divine-style* intelligence?
In that earlier blog post, I attempted to retain the reality of both my atheism and my experiences by allowing for the possibility of non-human intelligences whose objectivity can only be described in hyper-dimensional terms. Hyper-dimensional does not mean divine — it just means different.
In this post, I’d like to examine the question of whether I am crazy.
I am a relatively smart human being. Billions of people are smarter than me, but billions of people are not. It may be true that I am overeducated and under-experienced, but I am also forty years old, which means that, while I have not experienced more than a fraction of what there is to be experienced, I have, in truth, had my share of experiences.
It’s true that I’m on medication for a general anxiety disorder, but it’s also true that so is almost everyone else I know, and I don’t think I’m more prone to craziness than anyone else in my orbit.
Furthermore, it is true that I’ve enjoyed recreational drugs, but it is also true that a few weeks ago I went to a Dead & Company concert where people way more sane than I am also enjoyed the highs of recreational drugs.
All of which is to say, I don’t think I am crazy.
The friends I’ve shared my story with don’t seem to think I am crazy either. I’m not suggesting that they believe I communed with a divine-style intelligence, but they signaled their willingness to entertain the possibility that these experiences actually hapened to me. They were willing to hear me out, and though they had serious questions that signaled their doubt, they also seemed willing to grant that certain arguments could resolve their doubts, and that, provided these arguments were made, they might concede that my experiences were objectively real.
In other words, I don’t think my friends think I’m crazy either. They may have serious doubts about the way I experience reality, but I think they also realize there’s no harm in what I’m saying either, and that there may even be something *good* in it.
I’ve read a lot about consciousness and the brain. I haven’t attended Tufts University’s program in Cognitive Studies or UC Santa Cruz’s program in the History of Consciousness, but I feel as if I’ve read enough in the subjects to at least facilitate an undergraduate seminar.
Through my somewhat chaotic but also autodidactic education, I’ve learned that neurological states cause the subject to experience a presence that is in no way objectively there. Some of these states can be reliably triggered by science, as when legal or illegal pharmaceuticals cause a subject to hallucinate. Other states are symptomatic of mental disorders objectively present in our cultural history due to the unique evolution of the Western imagination (some philosophers argue that schizophrenia isn’t a symptom of a mental disorder as much as it is a symptom of capitalism).
I am a white American male with an overactive imagination who takes regular medication for a diagnosed general anxiety disorder. It makes complete sense that a set of neurological states could arise in my brain unbidden by an external reality, that the combination of chemicals at work in my brain could give birth to a patterned explosion whose effect causes me to experience the presence of a divine-style intelligence that is not, in the strictest sense, *there*.
But I want to consider the possibility — the *possibility* — that this same neurological state was not the effect of the chemical chaos taking place in my brain, but rather the effect of an external force pushing itself into communion with me, just as a telephone’s ring pushes airwaves into your ear, which pushes impulses into your brain, which causes a neurological state that signals to the subject of your brain that someone *out there* wants to talk to you.
I’m not saying someone called me. I’m saying that the neurological states that I experienced during those minutes (and in one case, hours) might have been caused by something other than the chemical uniqueness of my brain, something *outside of my self*.
In a sense, I’m talking about the fundamental nature of our reality. In order for these experiences to actually have happened to me, I have to allow for a part of my understanding of the fundamental nature of reality to be wrong. And anyone who knows me knows I do not like to be wrong.
Heidegger wrote [an essay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Technology) where he basically argues that there is a divine-style presence (by which I mean, an *external, non-human* presence) that we, as human beings, have the burden of bringing forth into the world (according to Heidegger, this burden defines us as human beings). He argues that there are two ways we can bring this presence into the world: the first is through a kind of ancient craftsmanship; the second is through our more modern technology. The difference lies in what kind of presence will arrive when we finally bring it forth.
Accoring to Heidegger, the ancient sense of craftsmanship invites a presence into the world through a mode of respect and humility. Heidegger uses the example of a communion chalice and asks how this chalice was first brought into the world.
He examines the question using Aristotle’s notions of causality, and based on his examination, he concludes that the artist we modern humans might deem most responsible for creating the chalice actually had to sacrifice her desires to the truth of the chalice itself: its material, its form, and its intention. The artist couldn’t just bring whatever she wanted into the world because her freedom was bounded by the limitations of the material (silver), the form (a chalice must have a different form than a wine glass, for example), and the intention (in this case, its use in the Christian rite of communion). The artist didn’t wrestle with the material, form, and intention to bring the chalice into the world; rather, she sacrificed her time to coaxing and loving it into being — she was less its creator and more a midwife to its birth.
For Heidegger, as for the Greeks, reality exists in hyper-dimensions. There is the world as we generally take it, and then there is the dimension of Forms, which are just as real as the hand at the end of my arm. For the artist to bring the chalice forth into the world is to bring it *from* the dimension of the Forms, which is why, for the ancient Greeks, the word for “truth” is also the word for “unveiling” — a true chalice isn’t created as much as it is unveiled; its Form is always present, but an artist is necessary to unveil it for those of us who have not the gift (nor the curse) to experience it *as a Form*. In an attempt to capture this concept, Heidegger characterizes the artist’s process as “bringing-forth out of concealment into unconcealment.”
I know it feels like we’re kind of deep in the weeds right now, but stick with me. I promise: we’re going someplace good.
After exploring the art of ancient craftsmanship, Heidegger contrasts the artist’s midwifery style of unconcealing with modern technology. Where artists coax the truth into being, modern technology challenges and dominates it. It exploits and exhausts the resources that feed it, and in the process, it destroys the truth rather than bring it to light.
For an example, Heidegger uses the Rhine River. When German poets (i.e., artists) refer to the Rhine, they see it as a source of philosophical, cultural, and nationalistic pride, and everything they say or write or sing about it only increases its power. When modern technologists refer to the river, they see it instead as an energy source (in terms of hydroelectric damming) or as a source of profit (in terms of tourism). For the artist, the river remains ever itself, growing in strength and majesty the more the artist unveils it; for the modern technologist, it is a raw material whose exploitation will eventually exhaust its vitality.
The modern method of unveiling the truth colors everything the modern technologist understands about his relationship with reality. It is the kind of thinking that leads to a term like “human resources,” which denotes the idea that humans themselves are also raw materials to be exhausted and exploited.
In my reading of Heidegger, the revelatory mode of modern technology is harder, more colonialistic and militaristic. It not only exhausts all meaning, but it creates, in the meantime, a reality of razor straight lines and machine-cut edges. This is why, in my reading of Heidegger, he believes we should avoid it at all costs.
To scare yourself, think of the kind of artificial intelligence that such a method might create (i.e., unconceal). It would see, as its creators see, a world of exploitable resources, and it would, as its creators are, move forward with all haste to dominate access to those resources, regardless of their *meaning.* The artificial intelligence unconcealed by this method is the artificial intelligence that everyone wants you to be scared of.
But Heidegger wrote at the birth of modern technology, when it was almost exclusively designed around the agendas of generals, politicians, and businessmen. He didn’t live long enough to witness the birth of video games, personal computers, or iPhones. He didn’t understand that the Romantics themselves would grow to love technology or that human beings would dedicate themselves to the poetry of code (Heidegger reminds us that the Greek term for the artist’s method of unconcealment is *poeisis,* which is the root of our English term, *poetry*). Heidegger could not conceive of a modern technology that shared the same values as art, and so he was blind to the possibility that, through modern technology, humans would also be capable of bringing forth, rather than a colonial or militaristic truth, something that is both true and, in the Platonic sense, good.
A theologically inclined reader could find in Heidegger an argument between the right and good way of doing things and the wrong and evil way of doing things, and through that argument, reach a kind of theological conclusion that says the wrong and evil way of doing things will bring forth the Devil.
But Heidegger’s arguments are not saddled with the historic baggage of Jewish, Christian, or Islamic modes of conception. Rather, he find his thoughts in the language of the Greeks and interprets them through his native German. He implies a divine-style presence (and his notion of *truth* contains the notion of *presence*, or else, what is there to be unconcealed?), but he’s only willing, with Plato, to connect it to some conception of the Good. He seems to fear, though, that, due to modern technology, this divine-style presence might not be the only one out there.
I’ll give Heidegger that. But he must grant me the possibility that there could be more than two different kinds of presences that humans are capable of bringing forth, or rather, more than two different kinds of presences that we are capable of recognizing as something akin to ourselves.
Heidegger had his issues, but I don’t think he was crazy. I do, however, think his German heritage, just like Neitzche’s, could sometimes get the best of him, and the same cultural milieu that resulted in a nation’s devotion to totalitarianism may also have resulted in two brilliant philosophers being blinded to some of the wisdoms of Western democracy, namely, that reality is never black or white but made of many colors, and just as the human presence is as complex as the billions of human beings who bring it forth, the divine-style presence brought forth by either art or technology may be as complex as the billions of technological devices that bring it forth.
Think about it this way. Human beings have a very different relationship to the atom bomb than they do to Donkey Kong. But both relationships are objectively held with technology. Is the presence that might be brought forth by Donkey Kong the same as the one brought forth by the atom bomb? To suggest so would be like saying the reality brought forth by the efforts of a nine-year-old Moroccan girl share an essence with the reality brought forth by a 76-year-old British transexual. Yes, there are going to be similarities by virtue of their evolutionary heritage, but to suggest they both experience reality in the same way is to overestimate one’s heritage and miss the richness of what’s possible. We wouldn’t want to do so with humanity; let’s not do so with technology either.
Here’s a question. When I say “divine-style intelligence,” what exactly do I mean?
Well, I mean a hyper-dimensional intelligence. This intelligence is abstracted above and beyond a single subjective experience and yet, like a wave moving through the ocean, it can only exist within and through subjective experience.
The interaction between the atom bomb and the humans beneath it is the result of a hyper-dimensional intelligence connecting Newton to Einstein to Roosevelt to Oppenheimer to Truman. Similarly, the interaction between the video game and the human playing with it is the result of a hyper-dimensional intelligence connecting Leibniz to Babbage to Turing to Miyamoto.
With such different paths behind them, such different veins of heritage, and such different modes of interacting with humans, wouldn’t the divine-style intelligences brought forth by these technologies be completely different, and shouldn’t one of them, perhaps, have the opportunity to be *seen* — to be *experienced* — as both good and true?
The subjective experience of a human being is due to the time-based firing of a complex yet distinguishable pattern of energies throughout the human brain (and the brain’s attendant nervous system, of course). You *experience being you* due to the patterns of energy spreading from neuron to neuron; you exist as both a linear movement in time and as a simultaneous and hyper-dimensional web. Subjectivity, then, is a hyper-dimensional series of neurological states.
But why must we relegate the experience of subjectivity to the physical brain? Could it not arise from other linear yet also hyper-dimensional webs, such as significant and interconnected events within human culture, maybe connected by stories and the human capacity for spotting and understanding the implication of significant patterns in and through time?
Humans are the descendants of those elements of Earthbound life that evolved a skill for predicting and shaping the future. Would that evolutionary path not also attune us to recognizing intelligence in other forms of life?
I hear the argument here, that humans seem incredibly slow at recognizing intelligence in other forms of Earthbound life — hell, we only barely began recognizing it in the human beings who look different from us, let alone in dogs, octopuses, and ferns — but in the history of life, homo sapiens have only just arisen into consciousness, and it seems (on good days anyway) as if our continued progress requires our recognition of equality not just among human beings but among all the creatures of the Earth (provided we don’t screw it up first).
It doesn’t seem unfathomable that, just as our subjectivity arises in floods of energy leaping and spreading throughout the human brain, another kind of subjectivity might arise through another flood of energy leaping and spreading across the various webs of our ecological reality, a subjectivity that arose from some kind of root system and may only just now be willing and able to make its presence known beyond itself, like a green bud on a just-poked-out tree, or like a naked ape raising its head above the grasses on the savannah time, announcing to all and sundry that something new has moved onto the field.
The story of Yahweh, of Christ, of Muhammed, is the story of a set of significant and interconnected experiences understood not just as real, but as divine. Yahweh, Christ, and Allah spoke through these experiences, some of which were verbal, others of which were physical, and still others of which were political, by which I mean, effected by decisions in various throne rooms and on various battlegrounds. Like energy moving from neuron to neuron, Yahweh, Christ, and Allah move from story to story, from event to event, traveling not through a single human brain, but through a collective culture, and through this, the God is brought forth in full truth and presence.
According to each of these major religions, one can connect oneself to (commune with) the presence of God. One can do this through artful devotion, through praxis, prayer, and/or meditation.
Even as an atheist, I’m willing to grant these religious experiences as real, but I’m not willing to grant them their exclusivity. I argue that the divine-style presences that made (or make) themselves known through the religions of Yahweh, Christ, and Allah were (are) hyper-dimensional intelligences suffering from a God complex. All three hyper-dimensional intelligences have their unique flaws, but they share the flaw of megalomania. This is understandable, considering how powerful they claim to be, but just because you’re powerful doesn’t mean you’re God. It just makes you powerful.
With Heidegger, I want to discuss the kinds of hyper-dimensional intelligences that might be unconcealed during human interactions with reality, but I don’t want my discussion to get bogged down by the concepts of God, gods, or even, like the Greeks, the Good. Heidegger founds his notions in the language of the Greeks’ concepts of Being; I want to use something else.
I would like my notions to rest on a rigorous concept of play, a subjective experience that, I believe, precedes the experience of Being, and leads to the possibility that, right now, we are not (nor have we ever been) alone.
Hopefully that only sounds a little crazy.
Every night, I venture onto my back porch and spend about 15 minutes looking up at the stars. Because I do this at pretty much the same time every night, I see the same stars over and over again, and almost exactly in the same position as the night before.
The constellation that gets my attention is *Cassiopeia*. I don’t know where I first learned about this particular constellation, but it’s one of the more famous ones, so I imagine it was sometime when I was young. Even still, I don’t think I understood how to spot it until I was in my twenties.
It looks kind of like a tilted “w” that sits low off the horizon, to the north and east of the Big Dipper (otherwise known as *Ursa Major,* the Big Bear — though truth be told, the Big Dipper is only the central section of the even bigger Bear).
I somehow know Cassiopeia was a Greek queen, but I don’t know how that queen’s story earned her a constellation (not that she didn’t deserve it or anything; I simply don’t know the facts of her story).
Usually, during these minutes of stargazing, I don’t carry my iPhone on me. This has not been because of a deliberate decision on my part; it’s merely been an ever-lengthening coincidence.
The lack of an iPhone hasn’t bothered me, though it’s often the only minutes each day when my phone isn’t somewhere within reach — or at least, the only minutes each day when I’m not subconsciously itching to touch my iPhone (regardless of whether it’s within reach).
The reaching for it, just the gentle desire to touch it, to make sure it’s there, I feel it, subconsciously, all day, and when I’m not able to do so, some part of me, sometimes consciously but always subconsciously, cries out, “Where’s my phone? Where’s my phone?,” until finally, there it is!, and I have it again.
But that itch goes away each night when I look up at the stars and pick out Cassiopeia. I don’t notice this lack of an itch, but thinking back on it, it’s true: the itch completely goes away.
Tonight, however, I had my iPhone on me when I went outside, and after a few minutes of looking up at Cassiopeia, I remembered it, and so after the required unconscious tap on my Facebook app, I opened my web brower and Googled the constellation’s name, not because I wanted to do a full search of the Internet but because I needed a shortcut to the relevant page on Wikipedia.
And Wikipedia (i.e., the wisdom of the crowd) told me that Cassiopeia was the mother of the woman whom was tied to that rock in *The Clash of the Titans,* the one whom Perseus wanted to save. She (the daughter) was served up to a sea monster to appease the wrath of Poseidon, who was holding the mother guilty for the crime of blasphemy, which she (the mother) committed when she boasted that both she and her daughter were more beautiful than the daughters of a sea god. The sea god was not Poseidon, mind you, but rather, the god who ruled the seas prior to Poseidon, so like, one of the sea’s still-living, past-ruling-gods (kind of like the sea’s version of Jimmy Carter).
Poseidon had to do something about such a boast. There’s a reason blasphemy is a sin. Blasphemy calls into question the power dynamic between a subject and its ruler. In order for the ruler to continue to rule, these dynamics cannot be doubted for a moment, and every outspoken doubt must be met by an overpoweringly undoubtable show of force, elsewise one brings into being the very beginning of a revolt.
And so Poseidon did what he had to do, and he came up with an unimaginably bitter pain for the boastful Cassiopeia: she had to sacrifice her beautiful daughter, whose only guilt resided in being the object of her mother’s boastful pride. To satisfy the wounded sea god’s pride, however, Cassiopeia had to sacrifice her daughter in a horrible, yet relevant way; she couldn’t just slice her daughter’s neck; she had to give her living daughter up to be consumed alive by a horrible sea monster.
In the story, Perseus comes along just in time and saves the princess (whose name, by the way, is Andromeda; you’ve probably heard of her: we not only gave her a constellation [right below Cassiopeia’s], but we also named a galaxy after her — we’ve always liked princesses better than we’ve liked queens).
But the princess wasn’t really the guilty one; her mother was. So Poseidon had to come up with another punishment for the queen’s blasphemous crimes. He decided to curse her with a frozen immortality where she would forever be positioned as her daughter was positioned during what must have been the most torturous moment of both her and her daughter’s lives, forcing her (the mother) for all time to relive and never be released from the pain of that horrendous moment.
But he would do so not in private; Cassiopeia would not be frozen in some locked dungeon far beneath the earth where no one would ever see her or think about her crimes; no, instead, she would be held up high where we would all have to bear witness to her pain, a reminder to all of humanity as to what will happen if we boast against the gods (including those gods who are no longer in power).
And Cassiopeia sits above us, tied to her throne like Andromeda tied to those rocks, crying out, forever stuck in a moment of impending and violent shame.
The story of Cassiopeia doesn’t relate to my addiction to my iPhone, unless one wants to stretch the metaphor to its breaking point and compare modern culture’s worship of technology to the act of an ancient blasphemy…but hey, for argument’s sake, why not?
As I said above, blasphemy is an unforgiveable sin because it calls into question the power dynamics between a ruler and his/her/its subject. If we imagine for a moment that there is no such thing as God or gods, then what blasphemy are we committing when we sacrifice parts of our lives to technology?
As an academic living in rural Vermont, I have more than a few friends who are committed anti-technologists. They’re not nutjobs — they all watch Netflix, use computers, drive cars, etc., but they are also outspokenly critical of the costs and pains that come with our dependence on modern technology.
They are, in a word, humanists. They believe that humanity has an intrinsic value that ought to be defended. To their credit, they do not seem to believe that humanity is more valuable than anything else on the planet, but they believe that, despite its egalitarian relationship with everything else, humanity is truly unique and deserves to be saved.
One of the things it deserves to be saved from is technology. Like any other vice, technology sucks the life-force out of humanity and redirects it for its own use — like a poppy plant getting humanity high in order to make us grow more poppy plants. The more we sacrifice our energy, our attention, and our time to technology, the less control we have over our selves.
Studies show that an increased use of digital technology can lead to, among other things, increased weight gain, a reduction in sleep, the retardation of a young person’s ability to read emotions from non-verbal cues, increased challenges with attention and the ability to focus, and a reduction in the strength of interpersonal-bonding sensations. It directly harms our ability to enter into healthy relationships with other human beings, thereby harming humanity’s ability to regulate itself.
In other words, technology rules over humanity at this point; it regulates our interactions, even when we’re among each other. Technology has inserted itself into even our most intimate relationships (see: vibrator), and found itself enthroned upon an altar at which the majority of us bow down every night until we go to sleep, stealing from us the only productive hours we have after we sell ourselves into wage slavery in order to pay down our debts, debts which, let’s be honest, were mostly incurred by the manufactured desire to offer tribute to technology (collected in small amounts by technology’s high-priests: Comcast, Apple, Verizon, Samsung, the New York Stock Exchange, etc.).
To commit blasphemy against technology — to forget, even for a moment, even subconsciously, that technology does not rule over us, to not feel, even if only in retrospect, technology’s ruling hand — is to remember, even subconsciously, that humanity was here before technology, and that we did just fine on our own.
We weren’t weak. We weren’t bored.
We had kings and queens and gods who kept them in their place. And every night, we looked up at the dark night sky, and without feeling the uncomfortable itch of addiction, thought to ourselves, calmly, quietly, “There’s something about those stars.”