In the Business Section of the New York Times (June 13, 2010) an article caught my attention. Entitled “Merely Human? So Yesterday: The Singularity Movements Sees a Merger of Technology and the Mine,” the article describes this movement’s pretention to offer a way to what they consider to be a new stage of humanity. “They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process.”
They envision a “time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and live will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.”
The Breakout Creative Project also envisions some kind of species-level transformation; so how do the two visions compare?
Here I will note three points where the Breakout Creative Project emphatically diverges from the Singularity movement’s core conceptions (as described in this extensive article).
Three Fallacies:
First: Its “Utopian” nature. I define “utopianism” as a mental exercise that deploys instruments of one kind or another (scientific, political, religious) to implement one overriding idea that purports to “solve” humanity’s ills. Human history is replete with such monomaniacal dreams and at least since the 17th Century, these dreams have relied on the wonders of technology and science, in addition to religious fantasies to accomplish human redemption. In this case, the “quasi-religious answers to the fountain of youth” have to do with ameliorating the ills of the body and mortality. Other utopian ideas have focused on race or class as indicators of superiority. In all cases, they end up creating distinctions between have’s and have-not’s, and privileging one group over another.
One commentator remarks, “It is rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.” The danger of such a thing happening permeates all utopian notions. (In another article, in the Book Review section, for example, Justin Vaïsse describes the decline and increasingly rigid and nationalistic course of the “neo-conservative” movement – a fate of all utopian schemes, we believe.)
Second: “We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzwell, the ingenious and peripatetic icon of the movement. Such a vision betrays its mechanistic core. Biology consists of a complex and integrated assemblage of mechanisms in organisms, which both stabilize and repeat certain processes, and also evolve and adapt to changing circumstances, within a range prescribed by the constituents of the mechanisms. The movement’s idea is to extend the operational range of these mechanisms with nanotechnologies, genetic manipulations and pharmaceuticals.
One movement avatar expects to live to 700. We ask, why stop there?
In the Breakout Creative world, the envisioned transformation does not occur on the level of the biological, but on the level of the total psychic/somatic mode of engagement humans (at least, but not exclusively) have with all of occurrences that burst and sparkle around, amid and through us. That is, the Breakout Creative project entails the development of new faculties that more closely approach moments of pure emergence that are not yet resolved into any mode, biological or other and yet give rise to all such modes.
No mechanism suffices here; what we envision does, however entail a wider grasp of what we call “thought.” Thought is not calculation and mechanization, but real open and opening engagement of one’s whole being, that touches upon how the language of nature and the cosmos “write out” what cannot be anticipated or expected at all.
The facile notion of biological extension simply exploits the fantastically rich and varied means by which combinations of existing entities in nature can endure and be affective. But in the mode of “thought” (and not mere calculation and rationalization) we have already opened a non-biological dimension. Thought places the human in contact with moments of emergence that have not been comprehended, no less translated into a biological form. The drive toward art and new modes of science, such as self-organization and quantum physics did not originate in the biological realm, but in thought.
I love the comment cited in the Book Review section of the Times (also June 13, 2010) in an article entitled, “Random Acts of Science” (I love that title) by Paul Dirac, a true Breakout Creative figure and a founder of modern quantum physics: “quantum mechanics was the first mathematical theory in science in which the discoverers did not fully understand the meaning of the terms in their own equations (p. 25).” Welcome to the world of the Breakout Creatives Project.
And that goes to the third concern: Its notion of exponentialism. This is another version of 17th century science fictions of gigantism and Frankenstein, but now tamed and put to the service of human… something. This is an idea whose time really has to go away. Exponentialism means that change along an already defined and identified trajectory increases by multiplying by factors of itself, rather than by an external and constant multiplier.
Nature and the cosmos do not work this way.
Nature works by accumulations of factors accreting to the constitution of an entity to the point where its structures are no longer sufficient to sustain its own weight, density and meliorating, complicated contrivances. At a certain point, the increasing complexity of the entity gives way to a symmetry-break occurs, and the first entity (from atoms to galaxies and organisms) completely disperses. Under the right conditions, some components of the old entity mix with and encompass (completely foreign) new, freely available energies from the surrounding milieus and may even self-organize into a new entity. The factors from the previous entity may carry forward into the new structure, and so some manner of continuity is maintained from one side of the symmetry-break to the other – or not.
Thus the movement even misappropriates the idea of “singularity.” This is a notion that comes not from exponential accumulation, but from symmetry-breaking. It envisions an “event” as comprising a moment of dispersion, loss and epochal division, not the establishment of a process we control or guide.
The hubris of this mal-appropriation of the idea dazzles me.
In the Breakout Creative Project we envision humans as a species that drives toward instigating its own symmetry-breaking – and most decidedly not its own biological preservation. Humans are willing to die to strike out toward uncharted frontiers. We envision a drive that is not oriented toward immortality, but one that embraces mortality as a model for giving way to more expansive and encompassing ways of engaging cosmic, natural and earth-generated energies. We take our cue from the earth, as in the notion of “humility.” The idea of continuing human biology flies in the face of such a reverence for the mortality that gives rise to any and all modes of singularized beings throughout the universe.
Again, their arrogance amazes me.
Wrong-Headed
As I see it, this is just another example of the pre-mature and wrong-headed appropriation of the great mystic notion of humans as direct expressions of cosmic potencies. In this case, the still-alluring 17th Century conceits of the omnipotence of Reason, the Mind, and Science is rushing to the solutions it is capable of, and not doing the longer, harder, more patient and expansive work of discerning what a great cosmic impetus really demands of us, offers us and may portend as a path.
The notion the Breakout Creatives Project envisions is one in which humans develop new faculties, new orientations, new manners of engaging what occurs. Technology may, indeed will, abet this effort. But the end point is obscured and left open: we envision a symmetry-break occurring that forbids prediction, or even remembrance of a former way of being human (just as we now have no way to relate to the minds of our forebears of a millennium ago).
We sense that the drive of being human has nothing to do with immortality but has everything to do with ever more approaching that moment when actuality itself emerges and we open whatever we have been in order to embrace, celebrate the occurrence of what comes forth.
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