Escape Velocity (47 page)

humanity, not nature, has ultimate domain over the planet. . . . The species must be willing to accept the responsibility that its unique abilities and superior intelligence have thrust upon it to improve itself, enrich the planet, and ultimately perfect the universe.'^^'*

Zey's pronouncement "We stand at the most critical juncture in the history of humanity" echoes, nearly word for word, the Mondo editors' announcement that "we are living at a very special juncture in the evolution

of the species."^^^ An ingrained suspicion of the very notion of hmits makes strange bedfellows of Zey; the techno-yippie authors of the Mondo 2000 editorial, who urge an all-out assault on "the limits of biology, gravity and time"; and Andrew Ross, a self-styled "left libertarian" struggling toward "a green cultural criticism."^^^ As Ross argues, limits are too often "socially induced for the purpose of regulation, or even repression"; the "language of limits,'" he stresses, "can have different meanings in different contexts, some very progressive, some not."^^^

Ross is rightly wary of the use of irrefutable "natural" laws to validate social limits that bound human possibility. A healthy skepticism about limits, "natural" as well as social, is a necessary safeguard against encroachments on individual liberty. But social limits justified by artificially created scarcity are not synonymous with natural limits imposed by the biosphere's interaction with the technosphere. Ross, unlike Zey or the Mondo manifesto-makers, concedes that we are in the middle of an "ecological crisis" that is largely if not entirely attributable to the blinkered worldview of industrial culture, with its calamitous ideology of ceaseless consumption, unrestrained growth, and inexhaustible resources-an obdurate refusal, in short, to acknowledge limits of any sort.^^^ "The devastating consequences of viewing the physical world as mere raw material make it clear that no livable future is possible if current trends in capitalist production continue," he writes.-^^^ (Ross never makes clear how he resolves his ecopolitics with his libertarianism.)

Posthumanist visions of the mind unbound, of the Earth dwindling to a blue pinpoint in the rearview mirror, are a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the end of limits, situated (at least for now) in a world of limits. The envisioned liftoff from biology, gravity, and the twentieth century by borg-ing, morphing, "downloading," or launching our minds beyond all bounds is itself held fast by the gravity of the social and political realities, moral issues, and environmental conditions of the moment. Try as they might to tear loose from their societal moorings and hurtle starward, the millenarian science fictions of "transcendental" posthumanists such as Moravec, Vinge, and the Extropians remain earthbound, caught up in a tangle of philosophical problems: Sobchack's contention that we are in danger of "objectify[ing] ourselves to death" versus Moravec's mechanist premise that we are objects, that consciousness is the result of wholly material processes and is therefore

reproducible by technological means; Donna Haraway's belief that "the Earth really is finite, that there aren't any other planets out there that we know of that we can live on, that escape velocity is a deadly fantasy" versus Zey's conviction that natural resources are the raw material of expansion and that the "movement to the Moon, the planets, the stars represents a transcendent process in which the species fulfills its destiny."^^^

Zey's heady exclamations are textbook examples of what the historian Leo Marx calls "the rhetoric of the technological sublime," hymns to progress that rise "like froth on a tide of exuberant self-regard, sweeping over all misgivings, problems, and contradictions."^^' Verging at their most exultant on almost mystical transports of rapture, these paeans to post-evolutionary apotheosis constitute a theology of the ejector seat. It is a theology founded, like much of the Western religious tradition, on a contempt for the body and the material world. What will become of the body once the mind is "downloaded?" wonders Fjermedal, in his interview with Moravec. "You just don't bother waking it up again if the copying went successfully," replies the roboticist. "It's so messy."^^^

Oddly, for all its reductionism, transcendental posthumanism suffers from a Cartesian confusion of mind and spirit. As Hine has noted, it is passing strange that an unequivocal scientific reductionism should

have the effect of reviving dualism in yet another form by its presumption that human intelligence can exist separately from the organism in which it evolved. That places intelligence in much the same position in which, for example, Christian thought has conceived of the soul. . . . There are, of course, far more differences than similarities. . . . But there is one important way in which the two ideas are similar: They both tend to devalue the body and the life of human beings on Earth. . . . Both beliefs tend to discount physical reality and exalt the abstract.^^^

According to Fjermedal, the computer scientist Charles Lecht theorizes that

when the computers and the robotics become sufficiently advanced to carry their human creators to a certain pinnacle, we

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may attain a point where "we may ultimately leave even our technology behind us." When that day comes, when we do become mind, [Lecht] says we will be given a boost, "out of the physical, and from there into-where else?-the spiritual."^^"^

We may be born, as St. Augustine shuddered, "between feces and urine," but we will spend eternity, the story goes, as disembodied demiurges in cyberspace or reincarnated as the superlunary voyagers envisioned by the cultural critic O. B. Hardison, Jr.^^^ In Disappearing through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century, Hardison arrives at the conclusion that "the idea of humanity is changing so rapidly that it. . . can legitimately and without any exaggeration be said to be disappearing."^^^ Taking a leaf from Moravec, he imagines human minds "downloaded" into deep space probes fitted with solar sails. Powered by sunlight bouncing off the solar cells silvering their spinnakers, these otherworldly beings drift lazily between galaxies. Ultimately, they sail off our star charts, into the eye of infinity, little less than gods. Perhaps, he suggests, this is

the moment at which the spirit finally separates itself from an outmoded vehicle. Perhaps it is a moment that realizes the age-old dream of the mystics of rising beyond the prison of the flesh to behold a light so brilliant it is a kind of darkness.^^^

Nonetheless, even the most sublime evocations of the Posthuman Assumption seem shadowed by doubts. The dream of software without hardware-mind without body-runs aground on our profound ignorance of the nature of consciousness and its relation to embodiment. In The Silicon Man, Charles Piatt's cunningly wrought novel about a cabal of government scientists who have realized the dream of "downloading," a digitized human intelligence living in computer memory tells a fellow cyberbeing about an unfortunate candidate whose scanned intelligence never regained consciousness. "We're still working on it," explains the "infomorph," a woman named Rosalind French. "The peel and the scan were good; his intelligence is intact. It just won't-come to life. The trouble is, we still don't really know what consciousness is."^^^

Indeed, we don't. The neurobiologist William H. Calvin, who decries the "malignant metaphor and rampant reductionism" of the brain-

as-computer conceit, believes that brains are "the most elegantly organized bundles of matter in the universe."^^^ "Everyone's always underestimating the brain," he maintains, pointing out that the shopw^orn factoid that the brain contains ten billion neurons is in fact an estimate of the number of neurons in only the cerebral cortex of one hemisphere, and that, moreover, the cerebral cortex is only "the frosting on the cake"; Calvin will not even hazard a guess about the number of neurons in the entire brain.^^^

The physicist Erich Harth holds that neurobiology and consciousness are inextricably entangled, a premise that renders "downloading" theoretically impossible. In The Creative Loop: How the Brain Makes a Mind, he asserts,

The information we try to transfer is specific to the brain on which it grew in the first place. It cannot just be lifted from one brain and downloaded onto another. To run the stored software of a lifetime of experiences and thoughts, we would need a system that-unlike the general purpose computer-is matched to the stored information, a brain equivalent that not only is genetically identical to the original brain, but contains all the myriad random modifications of its circuitry that occur between conception and maturity. The amount of information necessary to specify this system is astronomical. That even a small portion of it could be extracted from a living brain without destroying it is doubtful.^^'

Of course, the "downloading" adherent David Ross, who concedes Harth's point that the brain is not a general-purpose computer, would counter that even a von Neumann machine, as such computers are called, could support a human consciousness if the emulation "reach[es] down low enough (probably at least to the individual neurons) so that it is emulating systems that are below the essential level of the brain"-that is, the transistors and switches from which "mind" is supposed to arise.^^^ But Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist and intractable "biochauvinist," does his best to dash such hopes, stressing that neurotransmitters and regulatory hormones are not confined to the brain, but are scattered throughout the body, in the intestines, the lungs, even the sex organs. "This ubiquity," he remarks.

has stimulated a startling question that is currently haunting neuroscientists around the world: Is it possible that our definition of the brain is too narrow? That the regulatory processes that we now localize within our heads are much more widely distributed?^^^

Acknowledging that a "person is not just brain cells," Ross speculates that "nanomachines invading [our subjectj's body will replace all sensory neurons as well, and then replace all the parts of his body that influence the neurons with programs [that] do the same thing."^^"* The infomorph inhabits a cyberspace whose fidelity to reality is so impeccable that the muffled thump of his heart, the wind tickling his sweaty back, the rusty sweetness of red wane, and a universe of other sensations, no less subtle or complex, is virtually indistinguishable from embodied experience.

Assume, then, that the mind could be distilled from the body, that we could follow to its ultimate conclusion the process of bodily extension and "auto-amputation" which, according to McLuhan, constitutes the history of technology, "downloading" our selves after having delegated, one by one, all of our mental and physical functions to our machines. Still, a shadow of a doubt remains, nagging at the edge of awareness-the doubt that once our bodies have been "deanimated," our gray matter nibbled away by infinitesimal nanomachines and encoded in computer memory, we might awake to discover that an ineffable something had gotten lost in translation. In that moment, we might find ourselves thinking of Gabe, in Synners, who unexpectedly finds himself face-to-face with his worst fear while roaming disembodied through cyberspace:

/ can't remember what it feels like to have a body. ... He wanted to scream in frustration, but he had nothing to scream with.^^^

A COMMENT ON SOURCES

All unattributed quotes in this book are taken from interviews conducted by the author, who is grateful to the following for willingly submitting to lengthy interrogations:

Guy Aitchison, J. G. Ballard, John Perry Barlow, Glenn Branca, Stewart Brand, Rodney Brooks, Pat Cadigan, Gary Chapman, David Cronen-berg, Erik Davis, Maxwell X. Delysid, Eddie Deutsche, Julian Dibbell, K. Eric Drexler, Rhys Fulber of Front Line Assembly, William Gibson, H. R. Giger, Brett Goldstone, Rob Hardin, Eric Hunting, Billy Idol, Greg Kulz, Jaron Lanier, Brenda Laurel, Timothy Leary, Bill Leeb of Front Line Assembly, Chico MacMurtrie, Terence McKenna, Michael Moorcock, Paul Moore, Hans Moravec, David Myers, Orlan, Rodney Orpheus, Marcus Pacheco, Mark Pauline, Genesis P-Orridge, Lynn Procter, Dr. Richard Restak, Trent Reznor, Dr. Joseph M. Rosen, Andrew Ross, Rudy Rucker, Rick Sayre, Barry Schwartz, Elliott Sharp, Jonathan Shaw, John Shirley, Pat Sinatra, R. U. Sirius, Stelarc, Bruce Sterling, David Therrien, Mark Trayle, Shinya Tsukamoto, and his translator Kiyo Joo.

A word about quotes from electronic bulletin board systems: I have attempted, when possible, to observe the yoyow ("you own your own words") dictum that is a cornerstone of netiquette, securing the written permission of anyone quoted. Unfortunately, as was the case with several contributors to BaphoNet echomail discussions, dogged attempts to track down users sometimes proved fruitless. I can only hope that they will be flattered to find their quotes in these pages.

Responsibility for any errors of fact or misrepresentations must be laid, as always, on the author's doorstep.

NOTES

Introduction

1. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory

of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), p. 63.

2. Robert B. Reich, "On the Slag Heap of History," New York Times Book Review,

Novembers, 1992, p. 15.

3. Bernard Weinraub, "Directors Battle Over GATT's Final Cut and Print," New

York Times, December 12, 1993, International section, p. 24.

4. Michael J. Mandel et al., "The Entertainment Economy," Business Week, March

14, 1994, p. 59.

5. Sales figures quoted in the Computer Museum's "People and Computers:

Milestones of a Revolution," Annual Report 1991 (Boston: Computer Museum, 1992), p. 18.

6. Otto Friedrich, "The Computer Moves In," Time, January 3, 1983, p. 14.

7. Philip Elmer-Dewitt, "First Nation in Cyberspace," Time, December 6, 1993,

p. 62; John MarkofF, "The Internet," New York Times, September 5, 1993, p. VII.

8. Estimate given in Markofif, "Internet".

9. Figure cited in Gareth Branw^yn, "Compu-Sex: Erotica for Cybernauts," Flame

Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture /South Atlantic Quarterly, ed. Mark Dery, vol. 92, no. 4, (fall 1993), p. 781.