jacking themselves off in outer space, forever

Part 3: Eschatology

Engraving from The Life and Letters of Faraday (1870)

Earlier we glanced at some of the striking congruities between Dante’s vision of heaven in the Divine Comedy and the prognostications of a technological-singulatarian utopia issued by the modern futurist set. Last time we spun our wheels a bit in considering the differences between the worldview of medieval Christendom and the worldview of the secular West. Today we ought to finally cut into the meat of the tomato.

Both the mystical and the technological prophecies of salvation speak to common human desires. Though there’s plenty of debate on what constitutes happiness and how to arrive at it, everybody wants to be happy. The definition of beauty is even harder to pin down—but all of us we feel we recognize it when we experience it and would prefer to have more rather than less of it in our lives. Nobody wants to be sick, infirm, or in pain, and I think it’s reasonable to say that nobody who’s generally healthy and unweary of life wants to cease existing. I also think it’s fair to say that most or all of us want to be more than what we are: more intelligent, more knowledgeable, better-looking, and so on.

Dante’s Christian heaven offers all of these things—eternal life in joy and song, basking in the divine presence and partaking of its omniscience— in exchange for a life of faith and virtue. The futurist insinuates that a secularized package of these same goods will be for sale if we as a civilization just keep on doing things the way we’ve been doing them a little while longer (though maybe with a bit more intensity), and make well-informed policy decisions in the meantime.

If the notion of earning immortality and unrelenting bliss (payable upon the expiration of one’s natural life) in exchange for obeying the injunctions of a silent and invisible supernatural entity seems absurd, consider how insane a time-displaced futurist would sound, peddling his ideas in fourteenth-century Italy. Give me five hundred wagons full of gold and my people will figure out how to make a thing that you’ll put inside your own head to make you as wise as Solomon. We’ll devise a way to replace your organs with manufactured cognates and inject an elixir into your blood that will arrest the aging process. And…what? No, we can’t do any of this right now, but with enough time and resources, we can deliver a…

Even a muddy rube of peasant would call him a lunatic or a flimflammer.¹ There just wasn’t any track record for this sort of thing. As far as Whitehead was concerned, that didn’t change until the nineteenth century—the greatest invention of which was the systematization of invention. Whitehead:

The whole change has arisen from the new scientific information. Science, conceived not so much in its principles as in its results, is an obvious storehouse of ideas for utilisation. But, if we are to understand what happened during the [nineteenth] century, the analogy of a mine is better than that of a storehouse. Also, it is a great mistake to think that the bare scientific idea is the required invention, so that it has only to be picked up and used. An intense period of imaginative design lies between. One element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about bridging the gap between the scientific ideas, and the ultimate product. It is a process of disciplined attack upon one difficulty after another.

The possibilities of modern technology were first in practice realised in England, by the energy of a prosperous middle class. Accordingly, the industrial revolution started there. But the Germans explicitly realised the methods by which the deeper veins in the mine of science could be reached. They abolished haphazard methods of scholarship. In their technological schools and universities progress did not have to wait for the occasional genius, or the occasional lucky thought.

The spoils yielded by some 150 years of “disciplined attacks” upon obstacles to rationalization and invention should be obvious to anyone who’s reading this on an electronic device with a wireless connection to the internet. The nineteenth century minted the methods, and the twentieth century thrilled and trembled at the apparently limitless extent of what could be accomplished. After the airplane, the A-bomb, the polio vaccine, and Sputnik, who could say by 1962 it was flat-out impossible to put a living human being on the surface of the moon? Give enough of the right people enough time and enough money, and they’d make it happen.

By now we’ve grown accustomed to trusting the spokesmen and forecasters when they tell us that a technological paradigm shift is around the corner, since scarcely a decade passes whose texture of life would have been unrecognizable to anyone living twenty years prior. Now when a Silicon Valley spokesman or a quant delivering a TED Talk tells us we’re just X years away from intelligence-enhancing neural implants, some form of DNA therapy that reversing aging, or replicating human consciousness in a computer system, we’re far less disinclined than we would have been two centuries ago to tell them to get real.

And that’s really all there is to say about Dante and the singulatarians, isn’t it? Heaven is the beautiful but baseless dream of an epoch during which the mystery and uncontrollability of natural phenomena recommended themselves to magical thinking, developed into systematic form by a class of literate knowledge-workers and moral educators/enforcers. The TESCREAL people, on the other hand, can ground their utopian pitches on indubitable historical precedent and hard scientific fact. They miracles which they adduce aren’t only visible, they’re commonplace: smartphones, AI, mechanically responsive prosthetic limbs, gene therapy, etc. They’re not asking us to take a leap of faith, but to take stock of the progress we’ve already seen and trust that even greater marvels are forthcoming. They don’t deal in magical thinking, but the ever-expanding domain of the concretely achievable.

So they say.

Serial Experiments Lain (1998)

Adorno, from his lectures on Kant:

The more the world is stripped of an objective meaning and the more it becomes coextensive with our own categories and thereby becomes our world, then the more we find meaning eliminated from the world; and the more we find ourselves immersed in something like a cosmic night…The demystification or disenchantment of the world—to employ an expression taken from Max Weber—is identical with a consciousness of being locked out, of a darkness in which we are enclosed. In one of the coming lectures I shall give you a theory of the Kantian ‘block’ and its significance. But I can say already that the meaning of this block is that the more the world in which we live, the world of experience, is commensurate with us, the less commensurate, the more obscure and more threatening the Absolute, of which we know that this world of experience is only a detail, becomes…the more secure we are in our own world, the more securely we have organized our lives, then the greater the uncertainty which we find ourselves in our relations with the Absolute. The familiarity with our own world is purchased at the price of metaphysical despair.

In the evolution of our world-picture over the last thousand years, I see the outlines of a dialectic movement.²

The pre-scientific conception of an “enchanted” world situated humanity in a cosmos that could be called anthropic insofar as it was seen to be intelligible and immanently meaningful. In mysterious and uncontrollable phenomena there was some capricious but reasoning agent at work, or otherwise the event had its provenance in the forethought of some transcendent architectonic intellect in the light of which human reason stood as a kind of imperfect approximation.³ The individual abided in the world as the product of a temporal body and an irreducible, unextinguishable soul connecting his innermost essence to the Absolute. The suffering and injustice of earthy life were all part of an inscrutable but perfect divine plan destined to culminate in ultimate cosmic justice and the death of death.

The scientific revolution, from Copernicus to Darwin, deposed Earth from its seat at the center of the universe, analyzed all events until arriving at the mindless but lawful scurrying about of particles and energy, reduced Homo sapiens from a being created in the image of the divine to a primate that fortuitously skated along a radically divergent evolutionary path from its fellow apes, and discredited the notion of an eternal soul as a necessary and integral part of the human organism.

No serious person can contest these things. The very grounds for our existence are the outcome of a roll of the dice cast by the mechanistic operations of inconceivably vast, mostly empty, and altogether indifferent cosmos; the disinfecting glare of science has shone upon every obscurity in which any causally efficacious supernatural agents can hide, and Ockham’s razor has lopped off any explanation of physical events in which transcendent forces can play any kind of determining role.

In spite of the incompatibility of the transcendental myths which make human existence coherent to itself with the formidably consistent and demonstrably accurate materialist map of reality—and their mutual exclusivity will be obvious to anyone who’s made a concentrated attempt at going about their day bearing firmly in mind that they and everyone else around them are nothing but tangled formations of brute matter rolling determinately through space and time, and the content of experience is totally illusory—life had to go on.

Last time, we touched upon the braided ideologies from which contemporary futurism sprouted. One of the two was scientific materialism—and it should be remembered that the prerequisite for acquiring control over nature was its thoroughgoing demystification. The other was capitalism—but I err in calling it an ideology. It is indeed rather a form of social organization (an operating system if you’d like), but living within a society organized in such a way imposes certain assumptions, moral beliefs, metrics of value, and so on upon the person who grabs at the incentives, observes the proscriptions, and follows the paths laid out for him. If we refer to this weltanschauung as the “ideology” of capitalism, it’s only for lack of a more precise and adroit term. (I’m certain one already exists, and I’ll kick myself the next time I come across it.)

Scientific materialism describes the field of action, while participation in a culture congealed around capitalist production and consumption fixes practical reason in an orientation that strongly resists overwriting by mere theory and discourse.⁴ Moreover, modern infrastructure and modes of production have alienated humanity from the parts of the world it doesn’t make for itself by taking them out of consideration where the average person of an affluent society is concerned. The stars, for instance, were a source of fascination and wonder to premodern peoples not only because they were lustrous and beautiful and wholly impossible to account for outside of unscientific cultural narratives, but because people looked at them, and had quotidian reasons for doing so: maintaining an agricultural calendar, navigating the sea, and simply keeping time before the invention of the clock. There’s not much cause to feel much of any emotion about them when they’re irrelevant to our everyday affairs. Instagram is more exciting to look at and think about than the universe. It is more meaningful than the stars.

The resulting picture—the product of the extant psychological needs, cultural scruples, and existential exasperations once answered by a “magical world” framework coming up against a centuries-long process of disenchantment—is one in which humanity reassumes its old place at the center of the cosmos on the basis that we are the singular makers of meaning in a universe devoid of any intrinsic purpose or value. We’ve dug a trench between the anthropogenic and natural domains, and regard the latter purely in terms of its instrumental value to us, or the costliness of those instances where it barges in uninvited. Nothing is sacred; only useful, or otherwise perhaps intellectually or aesthetically ticklesome. Absent any telos grounded in the transcendent, all serious talk of human ends must ultimately circle back to productivity, propagation, and pleasure. Whatever philosophical niceties with which we care to augment these can only be matters of tenuous opinion or intellectual provincialism. The field of ethics, having taken its cue the scientific and technical rationalization of all things, concerns itself with isolating quantitative variables to maximize and minimize.

To be clear: this is all perfectly natural and reasonable for a people disabused of its supernatural illusions through the mathematical rationalization of nature and the domestication of its environment, and whose bonds of direct personal interdependence have been finally ground away and supplanted by technological and abstract forms of mediation between persons.

The sundry thinkers and spokespeople of the TESCREAL set can, in a very crude way, be analogized to the medieval Catholic preacher in the sense that they are essentially conservative voices admonishing the masses to maintain the status quo, framing the matter in terms of a binary choice between immortality among the stars or perishing in an inferno of our own making. And yes, for all their outlandishness of their teleological beliefs, they are conservative—with regard to social organization. In a society arranged to direct its energies towards the perpetuation of a permanent technological revolution, to suggest that we should stop, slow down, or pause to reassess our goals is essentially to ask for fundamental changes to our way of life. What the futurists implores us to do is to keep the machinery configured and running as it has been for the last couple of centuries. Stay the course. Keep innovating. Keep disrupting. Keep tapping new resources, keep increasing revenues, keep improving efficiency. Upwards and onwards.

What futurism offers is the assurance of an attainable light at the end of the tunnel for a civilization that’s as good at manufacturing potentially catastrophic long-term problems for itself as it is incapable of mustering the resolve and making the sacrifices to solve them.

The Christians professed that resurrection and eternal life after death is possible, in spite of all the evidence of experience. The TESCREAL faithful make the equally alluring and equally incredible claim that infinite growth can be achieved, and it only requires that we continue to act as though we believe it. Environmentalists and anti-capitalists of all stripes have long pointed out that such a thing isn’t possible on a finite planet, but the futurist maintains that any limiting value is basically an engineering problem to be worked out through calculated and protracted attack.

So we’re making the Earth uninhabitable; we’ll leave Earth. Outer space is a hostile environment to human life; we’ll modify humanity to make it more durable, or perhaps redefine human life such that a digital emulation of a “mind” running on a spaceborne supercomputer qualifies as human, or can be categorized under the genus Homo. The point of urgent importance is that we reach escape velocity, and soon. We don’t have to pay for all those externalized costs we’ve wantonly racked up over the last few centuries if we can sneak out before we’re handed the bill. (And by “we” I do not mean all of us.)⁵

A moment ago, I said something about the the futurist’s teleological beliefs—right after saying that scientific materialism doesn’t admit of such a thing. But remember the contemporary dichotomy between the human and the natural. The universe and its other contents are, in and of themselves, purposeless. Humanity is not. We alone have a cosmic destiny.⁶ Our end is to rise above every restriction imposed upon us by our biological origins on a little blue planet, to expand across the galactic frontier, to spread and multiply and consolidate our positions to the fullest possible extent.

There’s a blithely nihilistic rapacity in the TESCREAL vision of the future: Homo sapiens is to become the chrysalis of a mechanical locust swarm that sweeps out over the cosmos, exploiting whatever natural resources it finds, always multiplying, always advancing in technical perfection and expanding its dominion—until the heat death of the universe, however many billions of years from now. Or perhaps for even longer. In one of the Extropy Institute’s early publications, founder Max More waxes hopeful about carrying technological development to the point where we (or the “creatures” we make of ourselves) can “eventually overthrow the tyranny of the laws of nature and set our own terms.”⁷

What strikes me as strange about all of these projections into the future is that nobody talks about what our posthuman progeny will be doing except for existing.

In the same article, More describes his ideal endgame as “a universe populated by incredibly intelligent, unforgetting agents pursuing their own interests” in a life (or something like it) of “maximal peace, harmony, and productivity.” Right—but what are the interests of digitized minds wearing machine bodies? What are they producing, and why does it matter that they’re producing a lot of it? What are a novemdecillion immortal digital consciousnesses existing in (presumably?) wholly self-controlled virtual environments across the universe “living” for?

Bostrom’s “Letter from Utopia” describes unimaginable joy and pleasure (and in general it’s postulated that a digital “person” can experience these feelings exactly as an organism of hormone-soaked meat and nerve bundles does), but he is conspicuously scant on details about anything his future-people do. How do they relate to others? What are their obligations? What important choices must they make? What do they strive for? How does the individual conceive of their own existential situation?

The omission may be deliberate. Maybe the entire point is no longer having to concern ourselves with such things as from the confrontation with which emerges human grace and dignity.

On the face of it, the future the likes of Bostrom, MacAskill, and More would direct us toward is one of solipsism and onanism without limit. A million billion digitally emulated human(ish?) beings free of all want, effectively ageless, hermetically sealed off from the external world, jacking themselves off in outer space, forever—with nary a moment of the post-nut clarity where one glances from the semen in his palm to the Pornhub video on his smartphone screen to the clutter in his room to the nighttime skyglow outside his window and feels puny and absurd and sad.

Since we’ve repudiated the possibility of communion with the Absolute (the Absolute is tenebrous and impersonal, and therefore baleful to us—and the whole idea of it is silly besides), I suppose this is what we must be talking about when we talk realistically about eternal bliss: the eudaimonia of disembodiment and continuous self-induced orgasm.

Or maybe the existence of the digitized posthuman will be more akin to Aristotle’s unmoved mover, thinking forever on its own thinking. Or maybe he’ll swim around forever in a Metaverse without boundaries, play 4D multiplayer Minecraft for ten thousand years, or just procedurally generate an unlimited quantity of novels, films, songs, or some other sorts of virtual aesthetic objects. An interstellar hikikomori, in any case, become one with his bedroom, safe from the Outside.

This is the eschatology of late capitalism. And while it resembles the Christian idea of heaven in that it motivates human behavior, influences society’s priorities and its allocation of resources, and repackages the same perks in terms technical rather than supernatural, it does promise something unique to itself: the imminent transfiguration of humanity into a new form for which the alienness of our present way of life becomes a creaselessly perfect fit.

1. Or maybe not. An except from The Rise of Alchemy in the Fourteenth Century relates a case of a king investing in the services of an alchemist—and then regretting it.

A Patent Roll of 1330 identifies Edward III’s interest in alchemical transmutation of base metal and twenty years later [alchemist] John de Walden was arrested and sent to the Tower of London for relieving the Plantagenet monarch of 5,000 gold crowns and 20 pounds of silver to “work thereon by the art of alchemy.” His arrest would suggest that Edward wasn’t totally convinced by the end product.

2. By “our” I mostly mean the West (or what used to be called “Christendom”), but as Rammstein once said, “We’re all living in America.” This holds for everywhere the capitalist mode of production and the Western-flavored “cosmopolitan” or “transnational” mode of life predominate.

3. Such is the implication of using the term “Creation” to refer to everything that exists. If the things and processes of nature were deliberately made, they must be purposeful. They must have inherent value.

4. A line from Whitehead which I have cited a hundred times and will cite a hundred more:

It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts. But until this has occurred, words do not count.

5. Effective altruist Nicholas Beckstead, in his 2013 dissertation:

To take another example, saving lives in poor countries may have signifcantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards—at least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards—saving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.

CEOs, investors, engineers, and ethicists will be [up]loaded into the ark first.

6. Kant made this case in the Critique of the Power of Judgement—but for him the ultimate aim of the rational, meaning-making human animal was the realization of moral perfection. Incidentally, a recent Vox piece by one Sigal Samuel touches on the merging of the concepts of moral progress and technological progress.

7. As reluctant as I am to think or say anything about Magic: The Gathering these days—if you’re familiar with the lore, whom do the descriptors “expansionist,” “living machines,” and “happy all the time” immediately call to mind?

Afterthought: we’re piling speculation upon speculation here, but what happens if posthumanity discovers a planet with sapient but undeveloped life? Would you trust our spacefaring progeny to mind its own business and not strip the planet of its mineral resources (to build more Dyson spheres or whatever) and vivisect its lifeforms out of scientific curiosity?