Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  He needs a little pain (maybe a lot) to bring him to his senses, to remind him that he has a body, his body, and that the “moral gaze” begins there. . . . If we don’t keep this subjective kind of bodily sense in mind as we negotiate our technoculture, then we . . . will objectify ourselves to death.260

  Historically, objectification is often a prerequisite to repression or worse. In Nazi Germany, deportees arriving at Auschwitz were shorn and tattooed with ID numbers whose true purpose was an open secret:

  And as they gave me my tattoo number, B-4990, the SS man came to me, and he says to me, “Do you know what this number’s all about?” I said, “No, sir.” “Okay, let me tell you now. You are being dehumanized.”261

  When we objectify ourselves-our own bodies-we enter the numb, neon nightmare of Crash, where people are “mannequins dressed in meaningless clothing” and only a violent collision can jolt them back to their senses.262 The social critic Walter Benjamin foreshadowed just such a world in the early thirties when he noted that mankind’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”263

  Posthumanists such as Vinge and Moravec fulfill the premonitions of Benjamin and Sobchack when they contemplate the disappearance of humanity from the assumed perspective of smart machines. It appears that neither thinker has much in common with the Extropians after all, since the sympathies of both men lie not with the individual ego, self-transforming or otherwise, but with the ultra-intelligent machines they believe will render Homo sapiens obsolete. Moravec delights in humanist-baiting pronouncements about the self-assembling automata he predicts will put DNA out of a job, and Vinge suspects humans may not survive his postevolutionary singularity:

  If you do create creatures that are smarter than you, they become the principal actors. . . . If we got in their way, whether they’d rub us out or use some other solution would probably depend on the expense.264

  Whether or not the posthuman futures imagined by Moravec, Vinge, and others are likely to come true, and what humankind’s fate will be if they do, are brainteasers for AI experts, futurologists, perhaps even chaos theorists. Meanwhile, we might consider (since few seem to be doing so) the immediate social, political, and ethical implications of posthumanism, specifically Homo Cyber’s reduction of the body-his or her body, as Sobchack insists-to an organic machine. As Andrew Kimbrell points out,

  The idea that we are biological machines has consequences. Consider: What rights adhere to a biological machine? What duties and obligations are owed a biological machine? What dignity and love should be given to a biological machine? The whole constitutional system of rights, duties, and respect is based on the old-fashioned idea that we are reverable persons, not machines.265

  Moreover, he notes, the dehumanization of societal outsiders that has so often been a prelude to their exploitation or extermination has been extended to the natural world, which Kimbrell argues was desacralized “before we moved in to destroy it.”266 In that light, the fantasies of postevolutionary space migration entertained by Stelarc, Burroughs, Moravec, and the Extropians exhibit what Andrew Ross calls the “technohumanist contempt for a planet that, once exhausted, will then be left behind.”267 In a Whole Earth Review forum devoted to the question “Is the Body Obsolete?” the computer programmer and cybercultural theorist Yaakov Garb wonders,

  Why . . . are we so eager to disown the material substrates of our lives in a time when the fabric of our world-from soil to ozone layer-does actually feel like it is disintegrating? Why, as toxins and radiation trickle into the most fundamental recesses of our cells and ecosystems, is there such enthusiasm for self-sufficient space colonies, disembodied intellects, and cyborg futures?268

  Thomas Hine notes, in his discussion of Moravec, that the roboticist’s prediction that “self-reproducing superintelligent mechanisms” with our cultural DNA will “explode into the universe, leaving us behind in a cloud of dust,”

  make[s] the unthinkable survivable. It argues that there is life after life. It is reassuring that if humans make the Earth uninhabitable for themselves as organisms, it will still be possible to continue by other means. Nuclear war need not be an obstacle, or death of any kind. There can be lifeboats for our minds.269

  As Hine hints, it is equally likely that we are not, as the painter and William Burroughs coconspirator Brion Gysin was fond of remarking, “here to go.” Perhaps we are here to stay, in these bodies, on this planet. The sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, who holds the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professorship of Science at Harvard, argues that the Earth is “finite in many resources that determine the quality of life” and that, simultaneously, “scientists theorize the existence of a virtually unlimited array of other planetary environments, almost all of which are uncongenial to human life.”270 He warns,

  Many of Earth’s vital resources are about to be exhausted, its atmospheric chemistry is deteriorating and human populations have already grown dangerously large. Natural ecosystems, the wellsprings of a healthful environment, are being irreversibly degraded. . . . Earth is destined to become an impoverished planet within a century if present trends continue. Mass extinctions are being reported with increasing frequency in every part of the world.271

  The sobering assessments of scientists such as Wilson imply that even cyberculture has its limits, and no one likes limits, least of all Michael G. Zey, a management professor and the executive director of the Expansionary Institute in Morristown, New Jersey. In Seizing the Future: How the Coming Revolution in Science, Technology, and Industry Will Expand the Frontiers of Human Potential and Reshape the Planet—a book whose title takes corporate futurology to the carnival midway-Zey maintains that

  humanity does not have to choose between progress and the health of the environment. . . . As the Macroindustrial Era evolves, society will simultaneously tap the potential of its own inventions and utilize technology to improve the environment.272

  The gloomy forecasts of Wilson and his ilk, he asserts, are nothing more than anti-growth, anti-technology fearmongering based on “sketchy” evidence: “Humanity is about to overcome scarcity, biological restrictions, and nature itself.”273 Zey, prophet of a hyperventilating “hyperprogress,” derides the idea of “living in balance with nature”; he is a diehard defender of the Old Testament article of faith that

  humanity, not nature, has ultimate domain over the planet. . . . The species must be willing to accept the responsibility that its unique abilities and superior intelligence have thrust upon it to improve itself, enrich the planet, and ultimately perfect the universe.274

  Zey’s pronouncement “We stand at the most critical juncture in the history of humanity” echoes, nearly word for word, the Mondo editors’ announcement that “we are living at a very special juncture in the evolution of the species.”275 An ingrained suspicion of the very notion of limits makes strange bedfellows of Zey; the techno-yippie authors of the Mondo 2000 editorial, who urge an all-out assault on “the limits of biology, gravity and time”; and Andrew Ross, a self-styled “left libertarian” struggling toward “a green cultural criticism.”276 As Ross argues, limits are too often “socially induced for the purpose of regulation, or even repression”; the “language of ‘limits,’” he stresses, “can have different meanings in different contexts, some very progressive, some not.”277

  Ross is rightly wary of the use of irrefutable “natural” laws to validate social limits that bound human possibility. A healthy skepticism about limits, “natural” as well as social, is a necessary safeguard against encroachments on individual liberty. But social limits justified by artificially created scarcity are not synonymous with natural limits imposed by the biosphere’s interaction with the technosphere. Ross, unlike Zey or the Mondo manifesto-makers, concedes that we are in the middle of an “ecological crisis” that is largely if not entirely attributable to the blinkered worldview of industrial culture, with its calamitous ideology of ceaseless consu
mption, unrestrained growth, and inexhaustible resources-an obdurate refusal, in short, to acknowledge limits of any sort.278 “The devastating consequences of viewing the physical world as mere raw material make it clear that no livable future is possible if current trends in capitalist production continue,” he writes.279 (Ross never makes clear how he resolves his ecopolitics with his libertarianism.)

  Posthumanist visions of the mind unbound, of the Earth dwindling to a blue pinpoint in the rearview mirror, are a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the end of limits, situated (at least for now) in a world of limits. The envisioned liftoff from biology, gravity, and the twentieth century by borg-ing, morphing, “downloading,” or launching our minds beyond all bounds is itself held fast by the gravity of the social and political realities, moral issues, and environmental conditions of the moment. Try as they might to tear loose from their societal moorings and hurtle starward, the millenarian science fictions of “transcendental” posthumanists such as Moravec, Vinge, and the Extropians remain earthbound, caught up in a tangle of philosophical problems: Sobchack’s contention that we are in danger of “objectify[ing] ourselves to death” versus Moravec’s mechanist premise that we are objects, that consciousness is the result of wholly material processes and is therefore reproducible by technological means; Donna Haraway’s belief that “the Earth really is finite, that there aren’t any other planets out there that we know of that we can live on, that escape velocity is a deadly fantasy” versus Zey’s conviction that natural resources are the raw material of expansion and that the “movement to the Moon, the planets, the stars represents a transcendent process in which the species fulfills its destiny.”280

  Zey’s heady exclamations are textbook examples of what the historian Leo Marx calls “the rhetoric of the technological sublime,” hymns to progress that rise “like froth on a tide of exuberant self-regard, sweeping over all misgivings, problems, and contradictions.”281 Verging at their most exultant on almost mystical transports of rapture, these paeans to post-evolutionary apotheosis constitute a theology of the ejector seat. It is a theology founded, like much of the Western religious tradition, on a contempt for the body and the material world. What will become of the body once the mind is “downloaded?” wonders Fjermedal, in his interview with Moravec. “You just don’t bother waking it up again if the copying went successfully,” replies the roboticist. “It’s so messy.”282

  Oddly, for all its reductionism, transcendental posthumanism suffers from a Cartesian confusion of mind and spirit. As Hine has noted, it is passing strange that an unequivocal scientific reductionism should

  have the effect of reviving dualism in yet another form by its presumption that human intelligence can exist separately from the organism in which it evolved. That places intelligence in much the same position in which, for example, Christian thought has conceived of the soul. . . . There are, of course, far more differences than similarities. . . . But there is one important way in which the two ideas are similar: They both tend to devalue the body and the life of human beings on Earth. . . . Both beliefs tend to discount physical reality and exalt the abstract.283

  According to Fjermedal, the computer scientist Charles Lecht theorizes that

  when the computers and the robotics become sufficiently advanced to carry their human creators to a certain pinnacle, we may attain a point where “we may ultimately leave even our technology behind us.” When that day comes, when we do become mind, [Lecht] says we will be given a boost, “out of the physical, and from there into—where else?-the spiritual.”284

  We may be born, as St. Augustine shuddered, “between feces and urine,” but we will spend eternity, the story goes, as disembodied demiurges in cyberspace or reincarnated as the superlunary voyagers envisioned by the cultural critic O. B. Hardison, Jr.285 In Disappearing through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century Hardison arrives at the conclusion that “the idea of humanity is changing so rapidly that it. . . can legitimately and without any exaggeration be said to be disappearing.”286 Taking a leaf from Moravec, he imagines human minds “downloaded” into deep space probes fitted with solar sails. Powered by sunlight bouncing off the solar cells silvering their spinnakers, these otherworldly beings drift lazily between galaxies. Ultimately, they sail off our star charts, into the eye of infinity, little less than gods. Perhaps, he suggests, this is

  the moment at which the spirit finally separates itself from an outmoded vehicle. Perhaps it is a moment that realizes the age-old dream of the mystics of rising beyond the prison of the flesh to behold a light so brilliant it is a kind of darkness.287

  Nonetheless, even the most sublime evocations of the Posthuman Assumption seem shadowed by doubts. The dream of software without hardware-mind without body-runs aground on our profound ignorance of the nature of consciousness and its relation to embodiment. In The Silicon Man, Charles Platt’s cunningly wrought novel about a cabal of government scientists who have realized the dream of “downloading,” a digitized human intelligence living in computer memory tells a fellow cyberbeing about an unfortunate candidate whose scanned intelligence never regained consciousness. “We’re still working on it,” explains the “infomorph,” a woman named Rosalind French. “The peel and the scan were good; his intelligence is intact. It just won’t-come to life. The trouble is, we still don’t really know what consciousness is.”288

  Indeed, we don’t. The neurobiologist William H. Calvin, who decries the “malignant metaphor and rampant reductionism” of the brain-as-computer conceit, believes that brains are “the most elegantly organized bundles of matter in the universe.”289 “Everyone’s always underestimating the brain,” he maintains, pointing out that the shopworn factoid that the brain contains ten billion neurons is in fact an estimate of the number of neurons in only the cerebral cortex of one hemisphere, and that, moreover, the cerebral cortex is only “the frosting on the cake”; Calvin will not even hazard a guess about the number of neurons in the entire brain.290

  The physicist Erich Harth holds that neurobiology and consciousness are inextricably entangled, a premise that renders “downloading” theoretically impossible. In The Creative Loop: How the Brain Makes a Mind, he asserts,

  The information we try to transfer is specific to the brain on which it grew in the first place. It cannot just be lifted from one brain and downloaded onto another. To run the stored software of a lifetime of experiences and thoughts, we would need a system that-unlike the general purpose computer-is matched to the stored information, a brain equivalent that not only is genetically identical to the original brain, but contains all the myriad random modifications of its circuitry that occur between conception and maturity. The amount of information necessary to specify this system is astronomical. That even a small portion of it could be extracted from a living brain without destroying it is doubtful.291

  Of course, the “downloading” adherent David Ross, who concedes Harth’s point that the brain is not a general-purpose computer, would counter that even a von Neumann machine, as such computers are called, could support a human consciousness if the emulation “reach[es] down low enough (probably at least to the individual neurons) so that it is emulating systems that are below the essential level of the brain”—that is, the transistors and switches from which “mind” is supposed to arise.292 But Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist and intractable “biochauvinist,” does his best to dash such hopes, stressing that neurotransmitters and regulatory hormones are not confined to the brain, but are scattered throughout the body, in the intestines, the lungs, even the sex organs. “This ubiquity,” he remarks,

  has stimulated a startling question that is currently haunting neuroscientists around the world: Is it possible that our definition of the brain is too narrow? That the regulatory processes that we now localize within our heads are much more widely distributed?293

  Acknowledging that a “person is not just brain cells,” Ross speculates that “nanomachines invading [our subject]’s body wi
ll replace all sensory neurons as well, and then replace all the parts of his body that influence the neurons with programs [that] do the same thing.”294 The infomorph inhabits a cyberspace whose fidelity to reality is so impeccable that the muffled thump of his heart, the wind tickling his sweaty back, the rusty sweetness of red wine, and a universe of other sensations, no less subtle or complex, is virtually indistinguishable from embodied experience.

  Assume, then, that the mind could be distilled from the body, that we could follow to its ultimate conclusion the process of bodily extension and “auto-amputation” which, according to McLuhan, constitutes the history of technology, “downloading” our selves after having delegated, one by one, all of our mental and physical functions to our machines. Still, a shadow of a doubt remains, nagging at the edge of awareness-the doubt that once our bodies have been “deanimated,” our gray matter nibbled away by infinitesimal nanomachines and encoded in computer memory, we might awake to discover that an ineffable something had gotten lost in translation. In that moment, we might find ourselves thinking of Gabe, in Synners, who unexpectedly finds himself face-to-face with his worst fear while roaming disembodied through cyberspace:

  I can’t remember what it feels like to have a body. . . . He wanted to scream in frustration, but he had nothing to scream with.295

  Stelarc with Laser Eyes, Third Hand, and

  Amplified Body. Photo: Polixeni Papapetrou

  Amplified Body / Third Hand / Virtual Arm

  schematic. © 1995 Stelarc

  Sitting / Swaying Event for Rock Suspension

  (1980). Photo: Kenji Nozawa

  Handswriting (1982). Photo: J. Morioka

  Amplified Body, Laser Eyes, and Third Hand

  (1986). Photo: T. Shinoda