nano-gloop of pure information

(Spoilers!) Is Scarlet Jo emerging as the poster girl for Transhumanism in mainstream cinema? That's the second film I've watched this year where she becomes the mythical, tech-assisted transcendental consciousness of materialist dreams (we prefer to catch them late round here). Following her inspired voicing of the sentient Operating System in Spike Jonze's Her, that sees her 'character' expand into infinity in the third act, in Luc Besson's Lucy she enacts a similar denouement after an accidentally imbibed superdrug boosts her mind beyond its bodily limits, becoming a kind of nano-gloop of pure information sucked from global digital connectivity (which is portrayed as a good thing, by the way).

Transhumanism, partly an over-excitable projection of the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (see recent Wire article for a sober update of progress), represents the emergence of a natural human yearning for cosmic completeness in a secular culture which has colonised even spiritual discourse (see this most obvious example). It accompanies a widespread interest in Meditation and its decaffeinated cousin, Mindfulness (with or without physical yoga, with or without the technical assistance of an app), the emergence of antidotal practice in the face of the stress and anxiety of modern, urban life. All of which provides a fertile ground for a deeper emergence of ideas about the nature of reality which expose the entirely limited nature of materialism as a presiding philosophical discourse.

Added: from here: "In this vision the Internet and web are just the first rung of a ladder that leads to neural implants, sentient computers, nanotechnology and eventually the Singularity, that mystical moment when progress happens so quickly that all of humanity's problems disappear"

Pic from here

achieve a higher morality

From here, a summary of Transhumanism (a dream of spiritual perfection delivered by technology): 

"(A) network of beliefs that people can/ will - sooner-or-later/ and should: 
1. Always be happy - never suffer (except insofar as they wish to)
2. Never be ill, never age
3. Never die - there will be no ageing (see above) and death will be infinitely postpone-able - the person will be open-endedly repairable or restoreable - death will be reversible
4. Be able to improve intelligence, personality, strength, capacity for pleasure etc - beyond anything yet attained by any human
5. Be able to change sex, make new sexes, abolish sexual identity and the need for sex itself - or redefine and modify them endlessly
6. Wholly detach reproduction from sex - be able to make babies,perfect babies, without intervention of parents - to bring them up perfectly without 'need' for families
7. Go beyond historical levels of human wisdom, goodness - achieve a higher morality (which will be effortless and universal)"

See also here

metaphorical landscapes

Just caught up with Interstellar (warning: link contains spoilers and massive pisstake). I prefer to wait several months until the hype dies down on these movies, watch them free from too much cultural noise. It's a typically materialist epic in which the earth rejects the human race, withdraws its food supply, and dumps acres of dust over the American Midwest home of the main characters, prompting them to look for a new planet to live on. 

So, drawn by mysterious signs sent across time and space, the hero sets out to overcome all obstacles, external and internal, before finding himself (SPOILER!) in a place beyond our conventional space-time limitations. Here he is able - through a channel of love to his daughter, who is still back on earth several years before he left (you have to get past the logic) - to lay the path he himself has subsequently followed to where the human race can find their salvation. Which raises interesting questions about current materialist thinking and how it's reaching for meaning beyond limitations imposed by its own viewpoint. 

Focussed exclusively on exterior measurable qualities of the world, and regarding human intelligence as essentially formed by a unique combining of atoms (consciousness is not discussed in the film), these characters are led to construct metaphorical landscapes out of speculative reasoning around theories about the nature of time and space that deny the conventional (Newtonian) frameworks materialism conducts its day-to-day business within. The film ultimately proposes that love (between father and daughter in the key narrative device, but discussed elsewhere in the film as a potential impersonal guiding material force) is the key to our ultimate salvation, trumping, for instance, one character's insistence that the survival instinct is all we have. 

Love is one of the great imponderables for materialist thought. It cannot be explained away by science. Sure, the bond between partners, family members, between tribes, societies, nations, races, species etc, can be analysed in terms of Darwinian natural selection, but none of that explains where that deep conscious self, opened up to purely unthinking benevolence, comes from. The way love is discussed in the film, suggests that discourses outside of the purely materialist and secular are providing the ground for a resolution of the central conflict raised, even if it is just-out-of-reach of conventional explanation.

Pic from here

constant feedback loop

From Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, A Brief History of Humanity, in the Guardian:

“I don’t take capitalism and neo-liberalism for granted. I teach all these 20-year-old students and they were born into a capitalist world. It’s the only system. There’s no alternative and nobody can even imagine that there could be. But I remember the time when these things were really hotly contested.”

Could just as well be talking about materialist realism. Also:

“When people talk about merging with computers to create cyborgs, it’s not some prophecy about the year 2200. It’s happening right now. More and more of our reality exists within computers or through them... we will see real changes in humans themselves – in their biology, in their physical and cognitive abilities. It was the same with the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago. Nobody sat down and had a vision: ‘This is what agriculture is going to be for humankind and for the rest of the planet.’ It was an incremental process, step by step, taking centuries, even thousands of years, which nobody really understood and nobody could foresee the consequences.”

Not for how our brains respond. They are clearly deeply effected by exposure to constant digital stimulus, hooked into a constant feedback loop of desire and its unsatisfaction. But that doesn't change the essence of being human. Maybe it even causes a quicker than traditionally-conceived breakdown of tolerance for delusional consumerist contentment.

Ultimately, though, this has to be seen as an impersonal process playing out beyond our control, with its naturally-arising antithesis built in. Look at how we are simultaneously turning to interior experience, witnessing our own minds at work. Learning how to process stress and anxiety, recognising what depression is, and by doing so, affirming the presence of a deeper ground of being that remains stable beyond the fluctuations of desire. 

Pic from here

unpredictably dangerous rogue

No one's judging robots just yet. But would we judge one fully-tooled up with artificial intelligence and able to develop its own responses? Probably not. We'd say, No, it's acting according to its complex programmed logic, however refined that's become. And that's on us. Wouldn't stop us terminating it as an unpredictably dangerous rogue element in society. But we wouldn't actually apply moral judgement to it. We'd continue to reserve that for human behaviour (over a certain age and with observable functionality). Even though human behaviour is probably not that different.