by Erik Davis
By cracking apart his own fictional worlds, Dick left us fractured fables about the hilarious, bleak, and occasionally liberating interpenetration of virtual reality and real life. His characters are us, constantly tripping over ourselves as we slip back and forth, with or without technologies, between the virtual world of spirit and that material world where all things die. Though Dick heard VALIS’s negentropic call of information redemption, he also recognized that entropy is what erodes our illusions, and that such dark and ironic liberations may become even more important in a hyperreal world that disguises the devastating consequences of its technologies with the bright and shiny packaging of techno-utopia. Of course, we cannot know whether the information web that now girds the earth will be an electronic asylum or a holistic society of mind, a “vast active living intelligence system” or an infinite nest of Perky Pat Layouts. But even if we find ourselves absorbed into some bountiful network of collective intelligence, then you can guarantee that the network will inevitably go on the fritz.
Faced with the failure of all totalizing and redemptive schemes, Dick came down to nothing more than the drive to remain human in an often inhuman world. In contrast to the exhausted skepticism of the postmoderns or the juvenile glee of the posthumans, Dick never abandoned his commitment to the “authentic human,” which he tentatively described as the viable and elastic being that can “bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.” Perhaps the greatest strength of Dick’s wildly inventive, choppy, and comicly bleak narratives lies in his intimately rendered portrait of human beings, and especially of the jerry-built and fiercely creative measures that we hack together when metaphysical and technological solutions to our psychological and social ills collapse at our feet. Though Dick’s fiction shares some gnostic SF notions with L. Ron Hubbard’s writings, Dick’s characters are the absolute opposite of the superheroes of Scientology; they are bumbling Joes (and a few Janes), struggling with moral ambiguity, poverty, drugs, invasive institutions, credit agency robots, and shattered headspaces. They live in worlds where commodities have supplanted community, where androids dream, and where God lurks in a spray can. The most divine communications in such a world aren’t carried in a pink blast of otherworldly gnosis, but in that most telepathic of human emotions: empathy.
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Third Mind from the Sun
When the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin shuffled off this mortal coil in New York City on Easter Sunday, 1955, few people noticed. Though the priest was known as a scientist of sorts, the writings that would bring him posthumous fame—incandescent and poetic speculations about cosmic history and the future of humanity—remained largely unpublished. The reason was simple: the essays of his that had seen the light of day were so weird that certain Catholic bureaucrats had begun to murmur about excommunication. Rather than take this drastic step, Teilhard’s superiors simply prohibited him from publishing.
They also effectively banished him to China for many years, where he dated fossils, sifted through Gobi Desert dust, and helped dig up the Peking man. Teilhard was living in the East when his spiritual meditations on the history of earth led him to write The Phenomenon of Man, a masterwork of mystical science whose giddily optimistic view of humanity’s role in the evolution of cosmic consciousness has come to inform one of the most important questions that now tugs on hearts and minds around the planet: what is the nature of the now hypermediated global space we find ourselves within? Attempting to come to grips with the more cosmic and incorporeal dimensions of our networked world, a variety of techno-utopians, New Agers, and cybertheorists have crafted different visions of Gaian minds and global brains. But they all owe a debt to Teilhard, whose sweeping vision of planetary consciousness can still leave one wondering if he did not indeed possess a prophetic eye.
Critics of Christianity often accuse the religion of institutionalizing a dangerous rupture between humanity and nature. But Teilhard argued the opposite: Humanity, including its art, gadgets, and religions, was part and parcel of the planet’s evolutionary game plan. Though maintaining a measure of dualism between mind and body, Teilhard rejected the bitterness of Manichaean myth and proclaimed “the spiritual value of matter.” He saw evolution as the progressive unfolding of biochemical complexity, a process that, in turn, generated ever-greater organizations of consciousness. As evolution creaked forward from rock to plants to the beasts of land and sea, consciousness simultaneously grew into ever more novel and complex architectures of mind, architectures that he believed were intrinsic and internal to material forms. Eventually, this twofold process resulted in the subjective dimension of the human brain that allows you to understand these words. Thus for Teilhard, the emergence of the human psyche and its collective networks of culture and civilization were more than serendipitous froth on the surface of Darwin’s random soup. These structures of consciousness constituted the leading edge of the evolutionary wave of earth itself, a pantheistic planet that Teilhard saw, in a prescient intuition of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, as a “superorganism.”
Teilhard was not the most rigorous of scientists, however. He lost major points with his embarrassing and rather murky involvement with the Piltdown man—a purported “missing link” discovered in an English gravel pit that turned out to be a human skull cap mischievously arranged with the jaw of an orangutan. On the other hand, Teilhard’s evolutionary speculations were more than just the foamings of a preternaturally enthusiastic spirit, and other scientists of the early twentieth century anticipated some of his views. The brilliant Russian mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky also regarded the earth as a total living system, and held that planetary evolution was passing from a stage determined by biological laws to one molded by conscious human activity. The eminent biologist Julian Huxley, grandson of the great Darwinian cheerleader Thomas Huxley and brother to the novelist and philosopher Aldous, held a similar position. Huxley argued that “It is only through social evolution that the world-stuff can now realize radically new possibilities.… For good or evil, the mechanism of evolution has in the main been transferred onto the social and conscious level.… The slow methods of variation and heredity are outstripped by the speedier processes of acquiring and transmitting experience.”1
Teilhard had no doubts that this transfer was all for the best, because in the long run, human activity was going to awaken the physical planet itself. From its very beginnings, the Jesuit believed, the human mind wove itself into a collective matrix of culture and communication, an etheric web of consciousness that not only linked individual humans but was destined to cloak the entire biosphere like an onion skin. Teilhard called this cerebral crown of creation the “noosphere,” a collective psychic entity that emerged from the same organic and symbiotic drive toward unity and complexity that initially led freelance chemical elements to band together as molecules and cells. In the noosphere, however, the binding units are not chemicals but human minds, the accumulated accretions of imagination, language, and thought. The noosphere itself evolves, and as it continues “adding its internal fibers and tightening its network,” it will rope human individuals into increasingly collective forms of consciousness. Sounding a note that McLuhan would later trumpet, Teilhard argued that the noosphere’s thick tangle of economic, social, and information networks would submerge us into “an enforced resonance” with all the thoughts, wills, and passions of our fellow creatures.
Hold on to your hats, though, for this evolutionary process will not quit until matter achieves the ultimate state of superorganization and complexity. At that point, Terra herself achieves consciousness, and collective humanity will kick up its heels for the final number in the Time and Space Review. With matter and mind narrowing to a single point of what some technology gurus still call “convergence,” we will find ourselves sliding down a cosmic wormhole that Teilhard dubbed the “Omega point.” At that node of ultimate synthesis, the internal spark of consciousness that evolution has slowly banked into a roaring fire will finall
y consume the universe itself. Christ will “blaze out like a flash of lightning,” and our ancient itch to flee this woeful orb will finally be satisfied as the immense expanse of cosmic matter collapses like some mathematician’s hypercube into absolute spirit.
At this point in his conceptual journey, Teilhard had clearly drifted far from the Galapagos Islands. The Jesuit offered empirical evidence for the rise of biochemical complexity throughout planetary history (an argument that nouveau Darwinians like Stephen Jay Gould resoundingly reject), but Teilhard’s evolutionary road show boils down to a deeply Christian mysticism that is apocalyptic at its core. Though he tap-danced on the thin ice of heresy, Teilhard was thinking as a Catholic when he came up with the notion of the noosphere. Catholic literally means “deriving from the whole,” and Teilhard’s holistic vision of planetary consciousness derives from the orthodox image of the institutional Church as a universal spiritual body that seeks to absorb every unique human individual into its millennial flesh, topped with the head of Christ. Fans of Western philosophy will also recognize the dim shadows of Hegel’s idealism in Teilhard’s thought, with its similar hunger for absolute synthesis and its conviction in the ultimate absorption of matter into spirit.
Though it would be wrong to accuse Teilhard of practicing science, the man was certainly enthusiastic about synthesizing spirit with the technoscientific project of the modern world. In a revealing passage in The Future of Man, Teilhard argued that the mystical experiences undergone by the yogis of the East were actually emanations from the Omega point, but that the sages misinterpreted the message when they rejected the material possibilities of the world in order to cultivate transcendent reality. In contrast, Teilhard was a global perfectionist who believed that the divine progressively realized itself through the lumbering machinery of history, technological as well as natural. Teilhard’s mysticism thus fused two contradictory vectors of the Western spirit: the world-denying ascent toward transcendence and the headlong plunge toward the total domination of matter. “God awaits us when the evolutionary process is complete: to rise above the World, therefore, does not mean to despise or reject it, but to pass through it and sublime it.”2 Proclaiming that we move “upward by way of forward,” Teilhard honed a kind of theological Extropianism. In this sense, Teilhard’s work must be seen as a visionary response to one of the most pressing existential needs in twentieth-century thought: to find in the sloppy mechanics of evolution a positive basis for human life, some cosmic pattern or pulse that might enable us to see ourselves, our minds and cultures, as more than blind flukes doomed to bow down before the entropic second law.
With a winning combination of optimism, scientific enthusiasm, and mystical authority, Teilhard molded together Darwin and the divine. This synthesis of science and spirit, heretical to many on both sides of the divide, attracted legions of postwar readers, including Mario Cuomo and the New Age policy wonk Al Gore. In Earth in the Balance, Gore’s attempt to create a Green philosophy that won’t clog the pipes of the New World Order, the former vice president hopes that Teilhard’s “faith in the future” will inspire humanity to resanctify Gaia while taking technological responsibility for it. In his book The Phenomenon of Science, whose title consciously twists Teilhard’s famous work, the Russian cyberneticist Valentin Turchin attempts to describe the laws that drive the emergence of new phases of evolution, or what he calls a “meta systems transition.” Though eschewing Teilhard’s mysticism for the language of equations, Turchin still concludes that technology is launching us into a new phase of cultural evolution, one that will lead to the creation of a cybernetic superhuman organism, possibly through the mediation of the Internet. Traces of Teilhard even appear in the work of physicist Frank Tipler, who claimed in The Physics of Immortality that the antientropic forces of the universe are driving all things toward the ultimate improbability: an “Omega Point” supermind that will banish the forces of heat death and place the cosmos under the control of consciousness.
You don’t have to go as far out as Tipler to hear echoes of Teilhard in recent science. Like many thinkers attempting to construct an integral philosophy of mind and nature, Teilhard would have felt right at home with systems theory, that interdisciplinary tradition that has already reared a few of its hydra heads in this book. As we discussed earlier, systems theorists deemphasize the usual reductionist tack of dividing the fluctuating webwork of reality into isolated chunks of stuff. Instead, they look at the world as a nest of holistic and interdependent processes, a cosmos characterized by pattern and flow rather than form and matter. Systems theory began in the early part of the last century with the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy and the engineers behind cybernetics, and today finds one of its fullest expressions in the complexity theory that tantalizes scientists and researchers at places like New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute. Generally speaking, complexity theorists study systems, like the weather or the economy, that are neither excessively ordered nor wildly stochastic, but dynamically arise in the liminal zone that fluctuates between these two relatively simple conditions. Between the yin and yang of randomness and determinism, something like the Tao of becoming emerges: the propensity of certain systems to “self-organize,” to spontaneously generate novel patterns of behavior at precisely the moment they appear to be slipping into chaos. Whirlpools emerge in turbulent rivers, chemical regularities pop up in soups of random particles, bees swarm, and ants create cities. The Santa Fe heavyweight Stuart Kauffman calls these kind of emergent properties “order for free,” and however rigorously they are charted and described, they suggest something like the creative mind of nature herself, a mind we may also meet when immersed in artistic labor or the sensual poetry of perception.
Aiming for a language of pattern and process universal enough to be able to explain everything from LA traffic patterns to the distribution of galaxies, complexity theorists deal with terms and definitions that are necessarily slippery. In fact, one of the Santa Fe Institute’s grails is a rigorous definition of what exactly makes a system complex in the first place. As scientists wander through a tangled forest of fuzzy guesses and abstract terminology, it remains unclear whether “complexity” is completely quantifiable or appears partly in the eye of the beholder. According to the physicist and Santa Fe Institute associate Dan Stein, “Complexity is still almost a theological concept.”3 One suspects that this tricky, metaphysical air derives partly from the subtle cracks that complexity theory introduces into the mechanistic and reductive view of the universe that has dominated the Western world-picture for centuries. What Bateson called “the pattern that connects” invariably draws the human psyche into the web. And indeed, some complexity theorists consider consciousness itself to be the ultimate emergent property, the ultimate face of complexity—and Teilhard would surely have agreed.
As we noted earlier, one of the great conceptual leaps made by cybernetics was to characterize both living creatures and artificial gadgets as systems of information flow. Today this breakdown between the made and the born is cascading into a paradigm shift. Once life and mind are described as properties of complex systems, then complex systems, whether biological, ecological, or technological, begin to take on qualities of life and mind. We find ourselves faced with the image of the “organic information machine,” an image realized in the science of artificial life. By using powerful computers to simulate evolutionary processes, especially replication, mutation, and selection, Santa Fe researchers like Chris Langton are attempting to breed novel and unpredictable digital critters inside the superfast Darwinian boxing ring of their computers. With his Tierra program, the biologist Thomas Ray has created digital microworlds capable of evolving an impressive array of creatures and parasites that compete for the “energy” of CPU time. As you might expect, organic metaphors abound in the A-Life community, and scientists like Ray and Langton consider their progeny to be, in principle at least, living beings. When Ray booted up his program for the first time, he said that “the life force t
ook over,” making him the creator, or at least the midwife, to an altogether new order of life.4 Like the Kabbalists whose knowledge of the hidden Torah enabled them to create the mythical golem, the great android of Western esoteric lore, the wizards of artificial life use the spells of digital code to breed apparently autonomous beings on the other side of the looking glass. As the A-life researcher Daniel Hillis proclaimed, “We can play God.”5
Once again, we find a form of animism arising through the mediation of our most artificial and abstract of machines, a scientific animism bound up with the computer’s ability to act as a replicating demiurge. For though A-Life hackers may play God, the computer does the lion’s share of the work. Indeed, like chaos theory and most complexity research, A-Life could not exist without digital computation. With their number-crunching prowess and their ability to conjure up graphic simulations that model millions of parallel elements, computers can reveal patterns and properties impossible to notice in earlier times, when a line of inquiry might result in nothing more than a spew of apparently random numbers or the outlines of impossible equations. In a review of James Gleick’s popular best-seller Chaos, the mathematician John Franks compared the computer to the microscope, arguing that digital computation allowed access to heretofore invisible dimensions of natural and mathematical phenomena. In this sense, chaos, which is really a name for the order lurking in the apparently random, is the child of the computer. But artificial gods like Langton and Ray aren’t just looking at the world through digital glasses—they are engineering the world they see, channeling the life force into the virtual worlds of computer code.
