by Erik Davis
the resources marketed in high technology are less about matter and more about mind. Under the impact of high technology, the world is moving increasingly from a physical economy into what might be called a “metaphysical economy.” We are in the process of recognizing that consciousness rather than raw materials or physical resources constitutes wealth.13
Almost everywhere one turns these days, one finds signs of this “metaphysical economy,” the parodic mirror image of Marx’s insistence on the ultimately material basis of wealth and value. The Pleroma returns as the world’s financial markets, where money ascends into angelic orbit, magically multiplying itself in a weightless casino of light pulses and symbolic manipulations. As corporations, cabals, and networks of trade and dataflow overlay the territorial and social borders of nations, some thinkers believe that the information economy actually transcends, rather than simply extending, the previous material economies of industry and agriculture. As the technology futurist George Gilder put it, “The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter.… The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.”14 This technological dualism is perhaps most starkly reflected in the world economy’s myopic and cavalier relationship toward the biosphere itself, the material matrix of trees, water, wetlands, critters, and toxins within which our bodies remain inextricably embedded.
As Bey notes in a scathing attack on Hoeller and the gnostic roots of information ideology, “In his enthusiasm for a truly religious economy, [Hoeller] forgets that one cannot eat ‘information.’ ”15 For Bey, the “metaphysical economy” depends on the alienation between mind and bodily experience, an alienation that receives its most intense religious form in gnosticism. Though our “materialistic” culture has abandoned such mystical mumbo jumbo, Bey argues that mass media and information technology actually deepen the mind-body split by fixating our flow of attention on alienated information rather than the direct, face-to-face, and embodied experiences of fleshy human life, experiences that he believes form the core of any genuine spiritual freedom:
In this sense the Media serves a religious or priestly role, appearing to offer us a way out of the body by redefining spirit as information.… Consciousness becomes something which can be “downloaded,” excised from the matrix of animality and immortalized as information. No longer “ghost-in-the-machine,” but machine-as-ghost, machine as Holy Ghost, ultimate mediator, which will translate us from our mayfly-corpses to a pleroma of Light.16
Like the Holy Ghost, an invisible medium that allows us to plug into the spirit of God, the virtualizing machineries of media and information offer to port our data-souls out of the body and into a digital otherworld. William Gibson inscribed this dualism into the mythos of cyberculture when a virus destroys the console cowboy Case’s ability to interface with cyberspace. Falling into “the prison of his own flesh,” Case experiences “the Fall”—a Fall we now can see is more gnostic than Christian. Nor is this dualistic mythos restricted to cyberpunk science fiction. As the culture critic Mark Dery shows in Escape Velocity, one of early cyberculture’s defining tensions is the opposition between “the dead, heavy flesh (‘meat’ in compu-slang) and the ethereal body of information”—an opposition that is “resolved” by the reduction of consciousness to pure mind. Combing through the worldviews of obsessive programmers, hackers, and gamers, Dery repeatedly came across the rather startling belief that “the body is a vestigial appendage no longer needed by late-twentieth-century Homo sapiens—Homo Cyber.”17
Perhaps the most zealous shock troops for this new band of Homo Cyber are the brain-boosting transhumanists and cyber-libertarians known as the Extropians. As we’ll see in the next section, the Extropians have spent a lot of time plotting out neo-Darwinian future scenarios dominated by artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, smart drugs, weird physics, and massive government deregulation. But in doing so, they resurrect patterns of identity and desire that resemble the most transcendental of mysticisms, and it’s the simultaneous commitment to cold hard reason and speculative fancy that makes their techgnosticism more compelling than most varieties found in the digital wing of the New Age. With the brash enthusiasm of a geek Übermensch whose steroid-fed muscles are bursting his “Beam Me Up Scotty” T-shirt, the Extropians are meticulously planning for the day when technology will form the ultimate escape hatch, and machines will free us forever from the clutches of the earth, the body, and death itself.
Extropy, Ho!
Of all the bummers lurking in the laws of physics, entropy is the heaviest. For if it’s true that entropy holds all the trump cards—and Maxwell’s second law of thermodynamics suggests that it does—then everything we stumble across that’s ordered, interesting, or energetic enough to catch our eye is doomed to decay into a cold, tasteless Jell-O of meandering, know-nothing particles. As we saw earlier, Maxwell’s second law only applies to closed systems, which by definition are sealed off from the world at large. But this technicality has not done much to curtail the rather gloomy suspicion that the law of entropy is inked into the charter of our lives, our creations, our civilizations—even the cosmos itself. Sculptures rust, cultures corrode, and the rose bouquet of being fades to putrid mulch. The slap-happy nihilism of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a visionary hymn to postwar entropy, seems motivated in part by the sense that the bulk of human endeavor boils down to a Sisyphian uphill jog on the slippery slope of the second law.
However doomed we are, though, we certainly do not emerge from our mothers’ wombs as rotting corpses, which makes one wonder what cosmic force allows us and everything else to resist the swampy clutches of entropy, if only for a time. Some form-giving fluke of the universe wrestles down the second law, allowing babies and blueprints and biospheres to flourish, far from the entropic equilibrium that to living things spells death. This creative force has gone by many names over the centuries, from the spirit of God to the élan vital to the notion of information itself; recently we have been inclined to speak of novelty, self-organization, and emergence. But the snappiest buzzword of all may be extropy.
According to the Extropians, an LA-based crew of futurists, philosophers, and transhumanists hopped up on megavitamins and cognitive enhancement technologies, extropy is the universe’s way of strapping a booster rocket onto the wayward course of evolution and making it go. Giving rise to redwood trees and Gothic cathedrals alike, the force of extropy generates novelty, breeds complexity, produces information, and thrusts us onward and upward. It is the opportunistic punch that surges through the more redundant and cyclic laws of matter and energy, and it manifests itself in human lives as reason, science, technology, and whatever evolutionary compulsion compels some human beings to learn new stuff, overcome physical and psychological limits, amplify intelligence, build weird contraptions, and dream of future possibilities. All of which just happens to be the kind of stuff that Extropians like to spend their days doing. And though the Extropy Institute officially closed its doors in 2006, the philosophy they promulgated continues to speak for many of the transhumanist currents of thought that continue to charge the technological imagination (including a contemporary variant known as Extropism).
Incarnating the Promethean archetype with a high-tech salesman’s edge, the Extropians set their sights on various technofuturistic scenarios that have been floating around science fiction and the science fringe for decades. Leafing through their magazines and plunging through their Web pages, you’ll find upbeat prognostications about offworld space colonies, advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, and life extension. The Extropians keep the cold flame of cryogenics alive, and they hearken as well to the clarion calls of nanotechnology, a now well-established branch of engineering that seeks to build molecular machines theoretically capable of fashioning everything from space shuttles to T-bone steaks. Along with their Tom Mix will to power, the Extropians also hew to a skeptical empiricism that violently opposes “dogmas” in any form, even as it remains
blissfully ignorant of the often naive assumptions that lie beneath its own, almost adolescent enthusiasms.
With their incandescent optimism and entrepreneurial hostility to voices of caution and restraint, the Extropians have become some of the most brash and notorious proselytizers of the libertarian cause in cyberculture. As they see it, social programs, legislatures, tax-hungry politicians, and environmental regulations all dampen the evolutionary force of extropy, preventing us from enjoying a veritable Cambrian explosion of diverse goods and giddy opportunities for economic growth. But their hostility to the state also derives from a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed techgnosticism, a passionate commitment to the transformative potential of the engineered self and a corresponding snarliness toward all external forces that inhibit that potential. In his “Extropian Principles 2.5,” Max More, the iron-pumping president of the Extropy Institute, not only trumpets the anarcho-utopian assertion that no “natural” limits are written in stone, but emphatically calls for “the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization.”18
At first, coming across a bit of New Age jargon like “self-realization” in the midst of an Extropian rant is like catching a whiff of Nag Champa incense in a Wall Street cigar bar. But along with exploiting all that reason and commerce have to offer, the Extropians also extol a new strain of technological perfectionism, one that comes across as a brain-jacked, hardheaded revision of the human potential movement. In his electronic text, More explains: “Shrugging off the limits imposed on us by our natural heritage, we apply the evolutionary gift of our rational, empirical intelligence to surpass the confines of our humanity, crossing the threshold into the transhuman and posthuman stages that await us.”19 According to the Extropians, Nietzsche was not just having a bad case of indigestion when he proclaimed that “Man is something that should be overcome.” At the same time, their stance can also be seen as old-school humanism with the volume turned up. Like the Renaissance Kabbalist Pico della Mirandola, the Extropians have elected themselves “free and proud masters” of their own mutation.
Along with a host of New Age perfectionists and technolibertarians, the Extropians justify their transhumanist goals by hooking them onto the engine of evolution. Just as natural selection honed the human race over millennia, so too must we continue to transform ourselves on an individual basis by constantly learning, improving, and sharpening the self. So while the Extropians reject the pastel visions of the New Age, they embrace similar “technologies of transformation”: brain machines and visualization techniques, meditation regimes and cognitive enhancement drugs, computer networks and neuro-linguistic programming. Moreover, More acknowledges that Extropianism’s positive-thinking, “onwards and upwards” commitment to personal evolution can fill the existential gap left by the collapse of traditional religious narratives. More argues that, unlike most twentieth-century thought, Extropian philosophy provides meaning, direction, and purpose to human life; at the same time, it does not seek, as many religions have done, to suppress intelligence, stifle progress, or crush “the boundless search for improvement.”
Like any spiritual leader worth his salt, More also emphasizes that his principles are not abstract ideas but ethical points that should be practiced and integrated into lived experience. Once successfully brought into the orbit of our lives and habits, Extropian principles allow us to overleap the ordinary run of the murky human mind. They will encourage us not just to think or believe differently, but to actually become transhuman—smarter, stronger, more masterful. But what happens to all those messy emotions that so vex the human animal, muddying all our best-made plans? In general, the Extropians have scant praise for the feelings and intuitions that haunt our sinews. Many want to transcend emotions altogether, though More—revealing more than he knows—insists Extropians simply want to make them more “efficient.”
Once we’ve shed our doubts and fears, and hopped on the transhuman express, we will not just reap rewards in the here and now. Like saints awaiting the final trump, we will also be actively preparing ourselves for the moment when machines make a quantum leap beyond all science fictions and everything changes. Here is More’s prophecy:
When technology allows us to reconstitute ourselves physiologically, genetically, and neurologically, we who have become transhuman will be primed to transform ourselves into posthumans—persons of unprecedented physical, intellectual, and psychological capacity, self-programming, potentially immortal, unlimited individuals.20
Extropians spew a lot of pixels and ink plotting these great technological advances, but for all their hard science-fiction rigor, the group’s technological speculations ultimately rest on the patterns of the apocalyptic imagination. Along with other transhumanists, the Extropians dub the awesome metahistorical moment they anticipate the Singularity, a term poached from the science of nonlinear dynamics and injected with millennialist yearning.
No Extropian desire is more audaciously transcendental than their hope of overcoming entropy’s most degrading insult: death. As aspiring Immortalists, many Extropians gobble brain pills and antiaging formulas; they scour technical journals and websites for signs that DNA’s planned obsolescence may be forestalled; they open installment plans with cryogenics outfits that will one day freeze their biological hardware into Popsicles. But just in case the flesh will always remain an albatross of doom, the Extropians have an even more mind-boggling trick up their sleeves: uploading their consciousness—their mind, their self—into a computer.
The dream of uploading can be traced to the first decades of the computer age, when cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and communications theory hinted that the mechanistic philosophy of modern science might finally colonize the most incorporeal of territories: the human mind. Though the body has been considered a meat machine for centuries, and nineteenth-century psychology embraced the image of the “teeming brain,” these new approaches to complex information systems suggested that the mind might finally be described as a nervous contraption that churns through feedback loops of symbols and percepts, and somehow boots up the self in the process. For artificial-intelligence Mephistos like Marvin Minsky and the Churchlands, a reductionist cogsci husband-and-wife team, the mind is no less a machine than anything else you can point to—that is, the mind is an essentially physical system that we can understand, describe, and, in theory, replicate. Every wistful memory, every crafty gambit, every tasty nibble of a chocolate éclair remains a product of the brain, and if we can figure out how the brain works, or even simulate its underlying network of nodes and linkages and chemical triggers (all major ifs), then we should be able to conjure up a mind inside the only machine that theoretically can simulate any other machine: the computer.
As the science writer Ed Regis points out in Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, a study of hard-core fringe science, the possibilities of uploading are implicit in information theory, which holds that any information can be reduced to controlled bursts of electrical energy. Since the brain is already alive with electrical activity, it’s not that difficult to reimagine ourselves and our experiences as patterns of information crackling beneath the skullcap like an endless fireworks show. As Regis points out, “Everything hinge[s] on the fact that the human personality was, in essence, information.”21 Needless to say, this “fact” precariously rests atop a number of rickety assumptions about the nature of human consciousness, the role of the body in modulating thought, and the power of machine “intelligence.” But if our minds and personalities do indeed boil down to patterns of information humming in the peculiar hardwiring of our nervous systems, then it’s really not too much of a leap to imagine replicating that unique architecture inside the bowels of some machine—and thus digitally restuffing the seat of the soul.
No one follows this postbiological line of speculation with the mechanist abandon of the Carnegie-Mellon robotics wiz Hans Moravec. In his book Mind Children, an Extropian classic s
o full-on that it’s sometimes tough to believe the author is serious, Moravec makes the case that not only will we be able to transfer our minds to machines, but that nothing should please us more. In one particularly bracing scene, he describes in pulp detail how this digital metempsychosis may occur. First, a robot surgeon lops off the top of your skull and begins probing your gray matter with high-tech nano-fingers that take minute magnetic resonance measurements. The robot doc then programs a high-resolution simulacrum of your brain inside a computer, a model so accurate that “you” suddenly find yourself popping up inside the machine. And away you go.
This is outrageous stuff, but if you are willing to cast a cold eye on the self, Moravec’s logic remains devilishly compelling. To start with, we already live inside a virtual reality of sorts; sights, sounds, textures, and flavors are all ghosts in the brain, woven out of preexisting conceptual patterns and the incoming signals we receive from senses that shape those signals on the fly. These signals do not carry the things themselves, but only information about how we are prepared to relate to those things. In this view, the experience of “me” is a kind of cream that forms atop a swirling stew of memory, perception, and various recursive cognitive loops. And since there is nothing magical about the process that coaxes the mind from our neural networks, then nothing in theory should prevent the train of thought from laying its virtual tracks straight into a sufficiently high-resolution copy. In fact, such translation might improve things considerably. There we will sit, gazing out at a now brainless corpse flopping about in its final spasms, looking at our former body like astral travelers with cyborg eyes.
Of course, Moravec’s macabre flight of fancy instantly triggers countless questions. At a time when theme parks and edutainment replace history, and when electronic screens and computer gadgetry increasingly supplant embodied experience, Moravec’s investment in the ontological power of simulation seems part and parcel of a wholesale abandonment of the claims of the physical world. Can we so easily uncouple the mind from its embedded, carnal context, or identify reality with the ability to produce the perception of reality? How can we so confidently identify the self with cognition alone and ignore the emotional and transpersonal elements of the mind? Moreover, psycho-neuro-immunologists argue that the body thinks as a whole, that cognition is not limited to the brain but emerges from the entire “ecosystem” of the flesh. Other neurologists argue that emotions—the bugaboo of Extropian psychology—play a fundamentally constructive role in human thought. Moreover, meditators and mystics the world over agree that many different levels of consciousness are discoverable through contemplative introspection, states that, while possibly measurable, cannot simply be identified with the chattering conceptual activity that cognitive science fixates upon and Moravec wants to simulate.
