Technology and the Religious Impulse - Vehicles of Transcendence

Technology has brought us out of the forest and onto the field, released us from the merciless grind of survival and endless sickness, so surely it can usher us beyond the limits of our planet and our mortality? The assumption that these things are just beyond the next horizon appears to me to have become something of a modern-day sacred cow that functions to divert our attention away from an essential reckoning with our physical limits.

The impulse to transcend limits is, of course, an entirely natural drive, but one that seems increasingly to be distorted by our scientific materialist worldview into a pathological form. No longer able to conceive of a subjective transcendence of the separate ego-self, we project this impulse outward onto the material world. Having rejected so much of our traditional practices and systems of thought through which this impulse could be engaged with internally, we now have no choice but to express it in techno dreams of immortality and planetary escape. As inheritors of enlightenment rationality and empiricism, the dimension of subjective experience with all its ambiguity and qualitative richness has been rendered obsolete, substituted for the cold hard facts of objective reality, which is the real.

This means that our intuitions related to the expansive dimensions of Being, unrealized, become literalized in near-term technological speculations.

Of these speculations, there are several that are particularly symbolic of our subverted spiritual or religious yearnings. Let’s start with our hopes for personal immortality.

Cryogenics, now an aging dream of ever-lasting life, and a popular narrative device in sci-fi movies has captured the hopes of many influential figures. Those who have signed up to have their bodies frozen upon death (sometimes just their head!) include the founders of PayPal, Luke Nosek and Peter Thiel; Oxford trained philosopher, Nick Bostrom; inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil; actor and creator of Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane; Larry King, and many more. Clearly, these people are intelligent, and celebrated within their respective fields of endeavour, so the assumption among ‘ordinary’ folk can only be that such a thing is not just possible, but also desirable. What this reveals about such people is the degree to which they, and by extension we, as a culture, are willing to forego good sense in the hope that permanent death of the physical body can be avoided.

The obvious question is never asked because the question itself is taboo, and the answer has already been decided - Is death something we need to avoid?

It's worth considering that for the vast majority of equally intelligent humans that have ever existed, death was understood and related to in very different terms than how we now conceive of it. Modern Western cultures are increasingly death phobic and spiritually adrift; a fact that maintains our alienation from self and world. Terrified of the body's mortality, we seem to have have substituted presence for the will to dominate and control.

If we look at the underlying beliefs that make cryogenics a suitable vehicle to carry our projected intuitions of transcendence, it becomes obvious that they originate in the unexamined assumption that somewhere inside the body, probably the brain, exists a personal self that can be placed in stasis and reanimated, if and when we make the appropriate medical advancements.

In this view, qualities of experience such as taste, touch, love and anger, are all produced by the grey matter of the brain. As qualities, they are inseparable from a perceiving subject, therefore consciousness is believed to be an emergent property of brain activity. This is the standard position of mainstream science, but is an article of faith, being neither proven empirically, nor able to survive any degree of philosophical rigour. What science can say with confidence is that there are correlations between brain states and subjective experience, but this does not mean that one causes the other. Correlation is not causation.

Despite their obvious intellect, the advocates of such a vision appear to me to be confused about the nature of consciousness. It is a confusion that thinks about definitions of consciousness, but cannot recognize its ever-present simplicity in the raw, direct experience of moment to moment perception. Without sufficient contemplative enquiry, consciousness remains too subtle, too simple, and too close to be grokked within a labyrinth of conceptual complexity. Consciousness is not a perceptible object that can be analysed, and thus not a link in the chain of cause and effect; it cannot be contained, or placed in stasis, by manipulating the physical body; It is always and already free and unbounded, so the body’s limitations do not define it on an absolute level.

"This is emergency medicine we are doing," More told me. "We do not see patients as dead. Dead is gone forever. They're here waiting to be brought back to life."

This comical statement is from the founder of the leading cryogenics institute. It is not clear whether he really believes this, or if he is, in fact, just selling snake oil.

All of these mistaken assumptions, or category errors, apply equally to notions of uploading or creating consciousness in AI systems. Both of these depend on the promissory note that one day we will be able to reduce consciousness to bits, and therefore back engineer it with a view to either replicating or transplanting it into artificial systems. These assumptions contain all kinds of interesting dilemmas. One such dilemma arises in the event that we can perfectly replicate human behaviour, and even cognitive processes, neither of which automatically endow a system with subjective experience, or to use Thomas Nagel’s definition of consciousness - ‘something it is like to be the system’.

Currently, this perfect replication remains a thought experiment, but one can imagine the difficulty we would have in determining if such systems are actually conscious, rather than just intelligent, which is a programmable trait. Such confirmation will always remain an impossibility, in fact. Forever confined to our own personal world of subjectivity, we can never experience the interiority of another.

What need, then, are we attempting to meet when we imagine a future with conscious robots? I suggest that it is the literal expression of an evolutionary imperative to transcend the limits of the ego, here imagined as consciousness freed from its deteriorating meat-sack. This need comes directly from our correct intuitions about the unbounded nature of consciousness.

If we follow this line of thought a little further, soon we are in danger of disappearing into a rabbit hole of solipsism. Can we ever be sure that there are any other conscious entities beyond our own subjective domain? Regardless of how unpalatable this prospect may feel, there is a profound truth to be recognized here. That is, everything that we think of as reality, the world and its inhabitants, are always and forever experienced inside our own consciousness, which is the only thing that we can be sure of; everything else is extrapolated or imagined into existence from this basic fact of direct experience. Consciousness is the ground, or substrate, of experience. All models of reality and symbolic systems of thought that we use to explain consciousness, such as language and mathematics, emerge from consciousness. Science, in its dismissal of philosophy has blinded itself to the absurd, tail-chasing fact that it is attempting to explain consciousness in terms of its symbols. Our position is akin to that of a gardener who believes the soil to be an emergent property of the interaction of his plants. So enamoured is he by the fragrance of the flowers, and the taste of the fruit, he neglects the soil on which he stands. Consciousness or cosmic mind is arguably the irreducible base of reality.

As Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory stated in 1931 - “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness."

Our hopes for immortality are not confined to the individual but extend to the species as a whole. Such hopes are currently being projected onto neighbouring heavenly bodies, specifically Mars, as a potential second home to contain population over-spill, or as a back-up in the event of catastrophe. As the very public spokesperson for this project, Elon Musk makes some extravagant claims - Musk said in January 2020, he plans to send one million people to Mars by 2050, and “The future of humanity is fundamentally going to bifurcate along one of two directions: Either we’re going to become a multi-planet species and a spacefaring civilization, or we’re going be stuck on one planet until some eventual extinction event”

Here, Musk conceives of our future in absolute terms as either perish or expand. What if we used the enormous capital needed to colonize Mars to alleviate suffering in the present? Might that not be the best solution for the existential dilemma of the human condition?

Clearly a towering and original intellect, in this context, he appears to me like an addict who, instead of attending to his suffering in the present, spends his energy and attention on avoidance by projecting his salvation onto a future possibility that, in actuality, is worse than the present he hopes to escape. The image of the emaciated drug addict is a good analogy for what Mars is actually like. Mars is not earth; it is freezing cold, arid, lifeless and continually bombarded by lethal radiation. It is not our salvation.

It can reasonably be argued that, from the perspective of developmental psychology, all of this is unbridled dissociation; a symptom of the egoic fear of being subsumed by the feeling/sensate life of the body and the planet. It is escapism pure and simple, and it will do nothing to address the very real problems that increasingly intrude on our daily lives.

Imagine, for a second, the consequences of a successful colonization attempt, to say nothing of the monumental logistical, technological and energy consumptive restrictions that such a success would require us to surmount. What happens if it is possible for us to consume this planet’s resources and then conveniently lift-off just in time to avoid the consequences of our actions. What kind of species do we become if this is our future?

Given the two choices, either learn to exist sustainably within our natural limits and expand in the subjective dimension, or surrender to the unchecked growth impulse and expand on the objective dimension, which is more conducive to our individual and collective well-being?

This is a false dichotomy, of course. We can certainly do both, but I suggest that our collective expansion of consciousness will radically alter our conception of what we are, and therefore what kind of future we want to create. Instead of metastasizing across the galaxy, maybe we will choose to attend wisely to our earthly garden. Maybe we will become present enough to our self-inflicted suffering that we create a world aligned towards the highest fulfilment of its inhabitants, and by doing so, embrace our eventual demise peaceably, and with a broader vision that honours the profound mystery of life and death.

The point is that we, as modern secular humans, have forgotten that there really is a there there, when it comes to transcendence. Until we reclaim this human potential from the jaws of science induced nihilism, we will continue to be seduced by promises of literal and material immortality.