One
of the themes in my articles has been the human’s awareness of his
mortality. Humans, more than any other
organism, have a unique level of consciousness as a result of their superior
brain development and a corresponding unique concern about death. As a defense against death, humans have
developed varying theories about the life of the spirit after death. But because there hasn’t seemed to be any
definitive empirical evidence of this immortality that could be discovered
while living this life, most people have developed the backup of surrogate
immortalities of imprints made on the human field of experience and then preserved,
so that they would survive in some form after their corporal deaths. I have pointed out that developing the
technological structures present in our modern technological living
environments was a means to lift people somehow above the organic perishability
present in traditional living environments, so that they could be in vacuum
environments where the human imprint could be more easily protected and
preserved.
Nevertheless,
for some people, the symbolic aspects of surrogate immortalities are not enough
to satisfy their need for a certain real immortality. This article is going to deal with two
distinct approaches that have been developed for creating some kind of
certainty in a real immortality while in our present sensory world.
For
some people, if they themselves are unable to pass over to an afterlife while
they are living here on earth, at least perhaps there is a way for them to
communicate with people who have already passed over. People are always trying to communicate with
the dead, and they do it through mediums: people who become like empty vessels
that dead spirits can use to communicate with other human beings. Kate and Margaret Fox were two girls in
Hydeville, New York, who in 1848 started to become mediums for a spirit who
inhabited the house in which they lived with their parents. The spirit communicated by using knocks in a
kind of coded language. Margaret, the
older sister, later admitted that the spirit communication was a fraud and the
knockings or rappings were created by her own big toe as well as by the big toe
of her sister Kate. This didn’t stop
many people from continuing to believe in the sisters’ supposed spirit
communication. As a matter of fact, it
became the basis for a whole new religion called Spiritualism. The existence of this belief stimulated the
activity of many other people who claimed to be mediums. Many famous people got swept up by
Spiritualism. Arthur Conan Doyle, a man
known for writing novels about a meticulous rational detective – Sherlocke
Holmes – was a believer in Spiritualism.
And Spiritualism was used not only to communicate with deceased family
members, but with famous people from history as well.
Here
was a way for people who weren’t content with surrogate immortalities as a
certain continuation in some form of life after death. For those people who believed and continued
to believe even after one of the Fox sisters admitted their communication with
the dead was a fraud, the experiences with mediums increased their sense of
certainty that there was a spirit life after death, and that one day they too
could communicate through mediums with the living from the spirit world. Through mediums, it was as if people could
temporarily jump over into the space where they would be living after they died.
Spiritualism
represented an apex of activity in something that existed both before and after
it was around as a major cultural force.
Today, there is another vehicle for people seeking a form of confirmed
real immortality. I am talking about the
fascination with cyborgs – entities that are part human and part robot. There is a belief that people can go on
forever, if only they have parts to replace those parts of their bodies that
wear out. There is a sense of greater
durability in parts made of plastic or metal instead of parts made of organic
flesh. And organic flesh replacement
parts are much more difficult to find.
With plastic and metal parts, people can replace their decaying body
parts, and replace them relatively easily again and again. In this way, a human organism could
theoretically go on forever. Here the
focus of immortality concern moves from a greater connection to the world of
immortality in the afterlife, to the creation of a kind of immortality through
technology here on earth. The spirit
world was eternal, because it was a vacuum world. A vacuum world inhabited by vacuumized
figures – spirits - that had just enough self-definition to qualify as distinct
entities.
A
different approach is the search for a purely material immortality by becoming
a seemingly indestructible cyborg.
Indestructible in the sense of somehow maintaining a core psychological
human identity in spite of the need for replacement of material parts. But is this truly possible. Isn’t part of the foundation of coherent
human consciousness based on having a primarily coherent sense of
physicality. I am not talking here about
the effects of the isolated knee replacement or heart valve replacement or
prosthetic limb. Rather I am talking
about the gradual replacement of many parts of a human body as they wear out.
And,
in particular, what happens when a part of the brain is replaced with a
mechanical implant. Scientists are
already working on this to activate parts of a paralyzed person’s body, which
seems like a very positive goal. But
brain implants can be used for many purposes.
For instance, not only control and manipulation of a paralyzed person’s
limbs by the paralyzed person, but also control and manipulation of one
person’s actions by another person. In a
previous article, I argued that the mind was not the same as the brain, and
that it was difficult to reduce all mental ideation to the cerebral activity
that was observable in scientific experiments.
In other words, there is still a mind-body dichotomy that nobody has
been able to effectively resolve philosophically. That being said, the notion of a cyborg would
certainly test the capacity of changes in the brain to affect mental ideation. Mind and brain are distinct phenomena, but,
for sure, they are connected in some way within a person. I would suggest that replacing parts of a
brain would have to impinge on human consciousness. A person would be mentally conscious of
different foreign kinds of processes occurring in his reconstituted brain. With mechanical parts, there would be more
defined discrete stimuli – more discrete data – and fewer organic blendable
continual stimuli. Human consciousness
could start perceiving its field of experience through a kind of internal
screen with a content of pixelated figures.
With pixilated figures in the cyborg’s field of experience, the world
would be fragmented and ungrounded. And
this would leave the cyborg vulnerable to control by people with more coherent
wills. The cyborg could be subject to
being programmed like a robot to perform actions that the human side would not
necessarily choose to do.
So
the cyborg would lose the coherent consciousness of a fully organic human being
thinking and acting as an independent agent.
The price of this kind of flow of immortal material continuity in this
world is the loss of the coherent reflexive awareness that triggered the search
for immortality in this world. The price
of being this kind of entity – a cyborg – is a kind of living death.
There
is a Russian multimillionaire named Dmitry Itskov who sees the concept of
cyborg differently. He wants to make a
digital copy of a person’s consciousness and personality and upload it to an
avatar that could go on for thousands of years.
This notion really begs the question of the mind-body dichotomy, but
more than that, if by some chance it were workable, it would mean detaching a
person’s mind completely from its organic grounding. It is truly a way to dehumanize a human in
attempting to make him immortal.
This
article has dealt with two different attempts to find confirmation of human
immortality. One attempt has tried to
find certainty of spiritual immortality in life after death. The other attempts to create a kind of
material and psychological immortality in this world. In the first attempt, people have used belief
over evidence to affirm that which cannot really be proved in this world. The second attempt has yet to be fully
actualized, but, should it succeed, it would offer life without flavor, without
vibrancy, without immediacy, without meaningful engagement in the external
world. The human race has yet to
demonstrate that the existence of a meaningful immortality is possible in this
world.
(c) 2013 Laurence Mesirow
No comments:
Post a Comment