ongoing drama

Channeling the psychedelic left confluence of exotic spirituality with popular oppositional anarchist politics, Patti Smith at Glastonbury brings the Dalai Lama onstage for a birthday celebration and a speech about compassion, and then sings People have the Power to the crowd. This of course exposes the hopeless confusion of that particular radical strand that goes back to Patti's friend and mentor, Allen Ginsberg, and his kind, and is kept alive in Britain almost single-handedly by Russell Brand. One of Buddhism's central characteristics is its belief in Karma, that great underlying driving force of the cosmos, that moves everything according to its implicit law. Every single organism is driven by it, just part of the big ongoing drama of creation. That may emerge as left wing activity, but it may equally emerge as its opposite. The universe is indifferent. Not that the crowd are likely to have shared her political views if these figures are accurate, despite the efforts of the organisers and the festival's regular speechmakers. 

utopian dream

From the Open Source Nano Replicator Initiative, another pitch for the end-of-suffering utopian dream that materialist realists can't function without. Same God's-kingdom-on-earth pitch as the religious millenarianists, the externalisation of spiritual enlightenment. See how detailed it is: 

several changes that the existence of a nano-replicator would bring to the world. They include:

• The end of poverty
• The creation of abundance & utopia
• The end of crime through the removal of greed
• End of financial and resource driven wars
• The end of money as we know it
• The end of energy problems throughout the world
• The end of government as we know it

destroy our sense of individual self

"For the secularised mind, meditation fills a spiritual vacuum; it brings the hope of becoming a better, happier individual in a more peaceful world. However, the fact that meditation was primarily designed not to make us happier, but to destroy our sense of individual self – who we feel and think we are most of the time – is often overlooked in the science and media stories about it, which focus almost exclusively on the benefits practitioners can expect." 

That this statement appears in an article in the Guardian (newspaper of the UK  liberal bourgeois worldview) is a sign that the widespread understanding of mindfulness/meditation is under scrutiny from from an informed spiritual perspective. The widespread emergence of mindfulness/meditation (and physical yoga) practices in western society over the last 50 years or so (really since The Beatles met the Maharishi at the Hilton Hotel in London one summer evening in 1967) can be seen as an antidote to mass existential anxiety, arising as traditional life modes are superseded by a global materialistic outlook. This anxiety is underpinned by an economic system rooted in atomised individualistic drives, so it's not surprising that meditation is presented from this atomised materialistic perspective, and widely supported by the kind of corporations that drive the economic system, part of the incorporation of people into the underpinning bourgeois materialist lifestyle. 

pic from here

invested with complex functionalities

UK TV Channel 4's new series, Humans (Sun nights @ 9pm), has got people's attention. It's a drama with Robots, or Synths as they are termed in the show, and its subject matter is the usual concern about artificial intelligence (AI) threatening the social order. One character, a concerned professor, even makes a speech about the singularity. It's that kind of script, plenty of inter-human relationship problems but underwritten by big ideas, not the least that of affection between humans and machines (see here for some preliminary notes on the general subject).

It's a growing concern in popular culture, as movies like Her, Ex Machina and Transcendence demonstrate, but its becoming an issue in economics and politics too. Thoughts about the great "decoupling" of workers from production are stirring debate about how our current economic structures are going to support idle populations. (It could also be viewed as the deeper question prompting current interest in the Citizens Income, which has advocates on the liberal Left see EC730 and libertarian Right.)  

For this blog, however, the main question is how our culture deals with the nature of consciousness, and what discussion about AI reveals about the dominance of what I term, materialist realism. That robots are becoming a feature of our landscape is obvious, but fears that they will come to rival us, as conscious organisms in a competitive power game, is clearly a projection of our own drives onto what will be simply usefully functioning adjuncts to our world. 

Artificial limbs activated by brainwaves is just one way the human body is becoming enhanced by robot technology, but consciousness in this instance remains with the human. Under material realist presumptions, consciousness is only the interaction of certain forms of insentient matter, so, for materialist realists, consciousness might just as easily develop in a machine that has been invested with the complex functionalities of a human kind. 

From our perspective, this is a complete misunderstanding of what consciousness is, but provides a useful context for the kind of discussion that places this fundamental question of human existing in a popular framework. We need a much more sensible approach to metaphysics to grasp the nature of our own sentience, of which consciousness is the foundation, and allay fears about future wars with machines that betray present time confusion and ignorance. 

pic from here