Sex and Deviance

by Guillaume Faye

  * * *

  Some people will object that superhumanism is a blind, titanic movement, a defeat of reason, a senseless risk — hubris. This argument is based precisely on the illusion of reason. Human reason, logos, and wisdom have never been anything but short-term or middle-term instrumental qualities. The techno-science born in the nineteenth century and, before that, all technologies invented since the Neolithic period have had dangerous consequences, unforeseeable over the long term, which have had to be managed in an improvised and pragmatic way.

  Long term foresight that navigates over long distances is not part of human nature. The very idea of a ‘precautionary principle’ is inept, since it is inapplicable. Of course, superhumanism allows for experiments that plunge us into the unknown. But to plunge into the unknown is precisely human nature — or in any case, that of the superior part of human nature. But what if, at the end, there is death, catastrophe? Isn’t each individual man mortal in any case? Is not humanity destined to disappear, as the sun is destined to die out?

  We are only at the very beginning of man’s self-transformation, of taking human evolution into our own hands through techno-science and the self-instrumentalisation of human material as well as of artificial intelligence. To make a comparison with the history of arms, we are still at the crossbow stage, going toward the arquebus, then the rifle, then the cannon, but the logical prolongation of this process is the multi-head nuclear missile. The twenty-first century will witness (as long as civilisation does not collapse) an intrusion of technology into sexual evolution.

  * * *

  To conceive of nature as a harmony (an opinion common to most philosophies and religions) is perhaps a serious mistake. This ancient cosmogony of harmony has been called into question by twentieth century epistemology, especially by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Einstein’s relativity equations (themselves relative and subject to higher principles, like those of Newton, valid only to a certain level of reality), and by the surprising observations of astrophysicists.

  Nature seems to obey a certain order, more exactly, an auto-logical and plural system with risky internal cycles, but certainly not a harmony (for example, at the miniscule level of the solar system, we know now that the circumsolar trajectory of the planets, their axial inclination from the plane of the ecliptic, that their rotations are all irregular over the long term and in no way resemble a ‘celestial clock’, but rather a broken wristwatch). Nature instead resembles a cosmic system governed by great fundamental forces creative of perpetual disharmony, dominated by becoming and the struggle against entropy and negentropy.[1] Space-time is not ruled by teleonomy.[2] We do not know (yet) whether space-time includes a single universe, several, or an infinite number. The Big Bang theory is not a certainty, and it is currently being contested by the proponents of the parallel plurality and infinite succession of universes.

  * * *

  The very idea that life, founded upon the chemistry of carbon, only appeared once within space-time, on the Earth, is no longer acceptable for exobiologists[3] or mathematical statistics. The idea that intelligence or other forms of life based on other chemical processes are, were, or will be present in the universe is a hypothesis not to be discarded, given the law of probability. For the community of astrophysicists, the existence in our galaxy of several million (conservatively estimated) exoplanets similar to the Earth that could give birth to life has become a near-certainty. And there exist several billion galaxies in the universe....

  God, for those who believe in him, can only be one of three things: either a conscious and creative supreme being, or the conscious principle of an increate and eternal cosmos, which is thus merged with this cosmos (Pantheism, Buddhism), or an unconscious unifying principle, which is the ‘God of the physicists’, or of Aristotle.

  But there is also a fourth hypothesis: that there is no unifying principle; that all laws are provisional and only locally valid, and even then imperfectly so; that the only unifying anti-principle is perpetual and uncertain Becoming, erratic, risky — impermanence, incertitude.

  The intuition of the Greek mythology of the titans at war with the gods is very interesting. It implies that the divine order is not immutable, as it says. The titans represent unchained forces pulling in all directions, both creative and destructive. Their only goal is to create movement and Becoming, against Being. Humanism is on the side of the gods, superhumanism on that of the titans.

  [1] Negentropy, or negative entropy, is the entropy a living system exports in order to keep its own entropy low. –Tr.

  [2] The apparent purposefulness of the structures of living organisms which derives from their evolutionary history. –Tr.

  [3] Those who study the possibility and likely nature of life outside the Earth. –Tr.

  Appendix G

  Artificial Intelligence

  Present-day computers, based on binary electrical exchanges and silicon — inert matter — are an extension of the human brain, but only of certain aspects of its faculties, namely its purely logical-primary faculties. Thus one cannot compare human memory to that of a computer hard disk as the latter only repeats and reinforces a small part of human memory. Similarly, the functioning of present-day silicon-based computers merely extends and improves human calculating and organising ability, which only involves a small part of the brain, just as a tool or a machine only reproduces, amplifies, or improves human physical capacities: carrying, transporting, digging, building, moving, and so on. Even the most powerful silicon-generation computers are only a substitute for a limited part of brain capacity. They only constitute a ‘reform’ and not a ‘revolution’.

  It will be different with the second generation of computers, which will bring about a real rupture of historic and phylogenetic dimensions. This second generation is in preparation, and concerns molecular computers and biological computers. In these, electrical exchanges are no longer guaranteed by inert chips of silicon or other materials, but by living molecules. This revolution involves a gigantic increase in the complexity of these machines. Not only will they be able to extend other functions of the human brain, but they may possibly even add new functions to it. Science fiction authors — who often, since Jules Verne, have not been mistaken — foresaw this evolution, which obviously poses enormous problems and plunges us into the unknown.

  * * *

  The questions are as follows: Will these molecular, and then biological, computers be human para-brains or human super-brains? Will they be endowed with emotional capacities? Will they possess amplified versions of human brain capacities without suffering their inconveniences: memory loss, unhinged behaviour, rapid ageing, susceptibility to illness, excessive emotion connected with the lower cortex, and so on? Will they be capable of a sort of self-consciousness, autonomy, creativity? Will they be able to escape total control by the humans who have made them? Is there a chance they will become indispensable, and thus plunge their human creators into a dependence a thousand times more burdensome than our dependence on current computing systems? Can they be endowed with all sorts of material envelopes, with objects of all sizes, whether fixed or mobile, in the manner of androids, including animal and vegetable artifacts?

  The answer to all these questions is perhaps, but certainly not no! Should we, for all that, conclude that man risks being dispossessed by himself, by his own synthetics? No one can answer this question, just as no one could answer the question of what would be the consequences of inventing agriculture and stock breeding, or of the extraction of minerals, or thermal machines. By its very nature, technology has a blind autonomy. It is only a posteriori that one can manage its effects; that one can try to manage its effects.

  In any case, if we succeed in building conscious biological computers (it will be necessary to design complex tests to determine whether they are truly conscious or whether their invento
rs merely programmed them to simulate consciousness) then we can say that man has truly built a living being in his own image: the first living beings not to be sexed. Some scientists think they will never be self-conscious and that they will not be living beings but artifacts that imitate and amplify the capabilities of the human neo-cortex. Very reassuring...

  * * *

  Artificial intelligence, brought about by the crossing of computer science with biology, is currently in development, and it is an illusion to think we will be able to control it completely. Until now, we have tried clumsily to manage the consequences of technology in an extrinsic manner, which is already a difficult undertaking. Now, with artificial intelligence and all the other genetic technologies, they will also have to be managed in an intrinsic manner, which will be much more difficult. The Jewish allegory of the Golem, the animated doll that escaped from its creator, and which takes up some of the themes of the Prometheus legend, deserves to be meditated upon.

  * * *

  There is another point that must be mentioned, and which might appear gratuitous science fiction if laboratories were not presently working on it. Hold on to your seats: it is the downloading of the contents of a human brain onto a computer. The contents of a brain consists essentially of electronic exchanges between groups of neurons (psycho-electrical exchanges). A next-generation chemico-biological computer would thus be able to collect the (partial) content of a human brain, especially the memory. From this point to believing that a man at the point of death could be resuscitated in a biological computer is a large step. But no hypothesis should be dismissed out of hand.

  In any case, research into the downloading of the data of human brains onto computers (by connecting encephalograms to computer circuits) is currently aimed at accelerating the programming of future generations’ artificial intelligence computers. Will we be able to download the conscience, the personality? What will be the consequences of such an innovation? These sorts of questions are beyond the logic of the teams of researchers working on the projects. Techno-science has a procedure both intello-affective (innovate at any price) and pragmatic (propose and sell new products). Philosophers and epistemologists comment on them from outside, without influencing them. Researchers on artificial intelligence do not ask themselves any questions of a philosophical order about their own work; they are only animated (like their predecessors who invented the steam engine, the aeroplane, calculators and computers, portable telephones) by practical considerations.

  * * *

  The creation of artificial intelligence (para-human, post-human, superhuman or whatever you please) along with all forms of eugenics or genetic modification, are technological facts which will probably end — as is usual in history — by breaking through the dams, prohibitions, and censures of ethics. The order and force of the material sphere always ends by imposing itself on the order and force of the spiritual sphere, constrained to adaptation and compromise. The material always overcomes the spiritual because matter contains spirit, and spirit is at first matter.

  Moreover, the morality (secular or religious) which is opposed in the West to advanced artificial intelligence and genetic engineering is Christomorphic, of Christian origin. It is based on theocentrism and anthropocentrism — of which the Rights of Man and humanism are an expression. But the great regions of techno-scientific experimentation will henceforth be Asian; they will partake of a pantheistic conception of the world in which there are no spiritual or moral taboos concerning the inalterability of ‘human nature’.

  Similarly, among the Westerners of European origin who produced the mental revolution of Darwinism and were, since antiquity, the principal (but not exclusive) promoters of sciences and technologies, the prohibitions pronounced by political authorities against the ‘deviations’ of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering — in the name of the inalterability of man, of the principle that ‘the Commander shall decide’, of the ‘Rights of Man’ — resemble paper shields, if only because, even in the Judeo-Christian West, considerations such as the curiosity of the researcher, his prestige, the taste for innovation, and the call of the market/financial gain always end by winning out over successive waves of religious or moral prohibitions. The question does not arise for Islam, because of a trivial fact: the global Muslim community does not have many high-level scientific research teams, nor does it seem capable of formulating the slightest epistemological ethic, since Muslim reflection limits itself to commentaries on ritual prohibitions.

  * * *

  The force of techno-scientific research and its possible applications surpasses in intensity, then, the political or moral counter-forces that are attempting to oppose it. In the same way, the United States, over the course of the twenty-first century will approve, assist, or even order research programs into artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. They will be led to do so by the global competition for power. Market pressure (private demand for therapeutic biotechnologies, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence) will also be a significant factor in the defeat of the censors.

  It is also possible that in the twenty-first century, the applications of artificial intelligence with artifacts declared living and conscious, as well as the applications of biotechnologies involving manipulats, will give rise to new philosophies, indeed, to para-religions. But that is another subject.

  Artificial intelligence and biotechnologies constitute, therefore, a major break in the relation which man maintains with himself, one which is comparable to the Neolithic revolution. They will enter the taboo domains of the brain and sex, which is much more serious and significant than addressing the stomach, the circulation of the blood, the intestines, or the vegetative organs. We are leaving the domain of medicine, of pharmacopeia (biological prevention), and of first generation technologies. We are entering the heart of the matter in a sense analogous to our immersion in the nuclear industry, so decried by windmill enthusiasts because they are afraid of these forbidden and taboo intrusions into the profane material core of the atom, as they are now afraid of our doing the same with neurons and with the genome.

  What did Prometheus bring to man? Fire. Prometheus was condemned by the gods, chained on his rock, and had his liver devoured by a bird of prey. But the gods were unable to keep man from possessing fire. The inferno continues.

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  Beyond Human Rights

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  Carl Schmitt Today

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  Manifesto for a European Renaissance

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  The Problem of Democracy

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  Germany’s Third Empire

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  The Arctic Home in the Vedas

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  Revolution from Above

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  The Fourth Political Theory

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  Putin vs Putin

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  Return of the Swastika

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  Fascism Viewed from the Right

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  Metaphysics of War

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  Notes on the Third Reich

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  The Path of Cinnabar

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  Archeofuturism

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  Convergence of Catastrophes

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  Why We Fight

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  Suprahumanism

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  The WASP Question

 
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  We are Generation Identity

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  War and Democracy

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  The Saga of the Aryan Race

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  The Owls of Afrasiab

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  Homo Maximus

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  De Naturae Natura

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  Fighting for the Essence

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  Can Life Prevail?

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  The Conservative

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  The NRA and the Media

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  Rise of the Anti-Media

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  The Ten Commandments of Propaganda

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  Zombology

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  Morning Crafts

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  A Handbook of Traditional Living

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  The Agni and the Ecstasy

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  The Jedi in the Lotus

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  Barbarians

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  Wildest Dreams

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  Essential Substances

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  It Cannot Be Stormed

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