Welcome to the Vicarious

“I speak that you know what may be done: what shall be done here. This Institute – Dio mio, it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing. It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind, the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature.”  – From That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis, a novel first published in 1945.

Introduction

In essence, the transhumanist project, or vector, strives to escape its sense of what “Nature” is: an imperfect machine. Imperfection, of course, is the cause of unnecessary suffering, and so really ought to be perfected (malapropian tautology intended). Now consciousness itself, held taut by gadgetry and software like weeds in a rushing river, is poised to be wholly subsumed by the gush of Progress, magicked away into a technological ether whence it will cheat death at last!

But this is a cartoon fantasy: confected system as spoiled brat with far too much money and a coterie of hangers on, squealing for fawning loyalty while egesting soft belches of faux caring.

Who wants what they’re selling? C. S. Lewis did not. I do not. Nor do I know anyone who does.

Listen carefully to the image from Zuckerberg’s Meta above. What does it speak to you? Do you really want to give yourself to its disinfected mediocrity? To those who do find it alluring, please consider this: Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. The one thing you can never leave behind is the quality of what, or how, you are – though you can and do degrade or improve your quality by the decisions you make. The grass may well look greener on the other side, but it is the same old you who goes there to enjoy it. And honeymoons are necessarily brief affairs.

In this article, we look at the profoundly disappointing wages of life lived vicariously – one metaphor for which is eating only sugar to meet all your needs –, and also at how that necessary disappointment is a function of the nature of reality.

Interesting, is it not, that “Zuckerberg” translates to “sugar mountain”.

No other side

There is only that which we experience in the ever unfolding now. Put differently, there is only God. God is an intimately interconnected multitude of organic entities – I’m beginning to understand “organic” as something irreducibly ineffable, alive, somehow beyond subject and object via the dizzying complexity of its interconnections, and finally beyond reason’s and logic’s capacity to comprehend –, where each entity is a unique perspective within and of God, a child of God whose experiences constitute, in an ever changing way, the flow of God, of All That Is. As such, there is no other side, no barrier to break, no Rubicon to cross but that perspective which is a (mysterious) consequence of our quality of being as it looks out into reality – which it co-creates – interpreting what it experiences through the filter of what it is. I can conceive of no escape from this foundational property of reality.

It is in fact of no particular importance – initially – whether you couch this as ‘spiritual’ or ‘materialistic’; the core concept presented in the above paragraph maps fairly neatly to both notions; for example, swap out “God” for “Universe” to give it a materialist bent. And yet there is something necessarily infuriating to the rational mind – mind entrained by the sequential pathways language and science necessitate – about such ill-disciplined circularity. Confronted with the apparently paradoxical nature of reality, the rational mind – for poetic effect I might say inorganic mind – agitates to neaten, to straighten out, to clarify. It has been busy working this problem for millennia. We call its endeavour civilisation.

Lo and behold, we now find ourselves face to face with the drab pinnacle of that agitation: the first serious transhumanist sales pitch for its utopian interpretation of Eternal Life. Version 1.0 looks like a condescending children’s comic written and illustrated by a board of directors desperate to offend nobody. But fear not, TwoPointOh! will be New and Improved. Better yet, it lies just on the other side.

In the Vicarious, better things must lie on the other side, just around the corner, just up ahead. (Our stewards will let us know when it’s ready, you can count on that.)

So… there is another side? Well yes, loads of them. Nothing but Other Sides everywhere we look.

We modern humans are atomised in bitter consequence of our cultural state of mind, a state that perceives reality as atoms (atomism), objects (Newtonian physics), commodities (postmodernism). This state of mind separates us off from Not Us, divides us into Us and Them, You and Me, Self and Other. So much so, in fact, that Self is fracturing under this weightless, indecipherable strain, a fracturing that is the bottomless pit of our insatiable hunger for communications, chat, entertainment, distraction.

Now we live fully in the Vicarious. Self is mist, diffused imperceptibly somewhere along the way. It is housed, ghost like, in a hall of mirrors that holds it in non-discerning attention, in a paralysis of anxious uncertainty, forever seeking certainty from someone, something, somewhere. In this state of being, we exude a scent that attracts tyrants insatiable for our hunger for them.

Bewitched in this shifting kaleidoscope of Other Sides, we have forgotten there is no other side. In the Vicarious, reality seems to be nothing but the other side: that tantalising, just-out-of-reach, real-unreal Out There we must forever suckle on, endlessly soul-destroyed by how unnourishing our feeding is. Always hungry, we devour images of ‘things’ as commodities of ‘things’ that were anyway never there quite as we imagined. Pressed hard against the limits of our culturally throttled imaginations, as if against the thick ice of a frozen river, we are pulled ever on by the flood waters of Progress to Nowhere Else But Here.

I think the insanity of it all is becoming apparent to more and more of us, increasingly now as Old and New Normals unravel at breakneck speed. I intuit a mounting desire for health breaking through. No… not WHO health, not corporate commoditised health, I mean organic health, the health that is the natural reward of meaningful lives.

This fractured relationship with Self, this perverted relationship with NotSelf as Unreality Out There, always experienced vicariously, is coming to a fevered climax – as it must. If I belabour this point it is because fear stalks the land, further addling already addled minds. In this historical turbulence, we all need to remember the fundamentals, to reconnect with them over and over again. It’s not that the turbulence is an unexpected superfluous cruelty that must be dispatched asap, it’s that learning from it requires constant reconnection with deeper truths. As I tried to honour in my previous post, confusion troubles us only because of how we value it – lopsidedly – from the perspective of rampant rationality as idolised good, a non-spiritual god hell bent on ‘perfection’ at all costs.

Those costs have come due and will be paid in full.

Who wants what they’re selling?

Transhumanists want to seduce us into doubling down on their Icarus escape into their virtual la-la land. To want what they advocate, therefore, is to persevere in desiring escape from reality. It is, in other words, to want an impossibility.

For the sake of argument, let us grant our transhumanist fellow travellers a flawless Virtual Reality (VR) several versions down the road from TwoPointOh! Should we conceive of this flawless VR as being exactly as biodiverse and astonishingly rich as the earthly biosphere we currently inhabit? Or should its perfection be understood as a diluted or perhaps distilled copy thereof? If the former, what’s the point? If the latter, what’s the point? Isn’t it necessarily a folly, a flat absurdity in fact, to pair down or recreate reality into what suits our current cultural imagination – particularly considering our (infantile) relationship with decay and death – as if in so doing we are somehow improving our lot in life? Can we really convince ourselves this path is wise or healthy? And if we fail to convince ourselves when pressed on such details, wouldn’t that failure beg the question as to the underlying purpose of the VR in the first place, both from cynical and functional perspectives?

We could perhaps argue that the above paragraph’s veracity is, albeit counterintuitively, demonstrated by the fact that most will not make any such analysis, will not subject the advertised trinket, the titillating bauble, to the scrutiny it deserves, and buy in. Heaven knows life is hard enough! This is the attitude transhumanism’s PR people prefer. But I think two observations make such an argument moot and condescending.

The first is that non-critical or frivolous consumption of the proffered bauble does not permanently snuff out life in souls so inclined. The spark of life can only ever be but temporarily restrained. Life is by definition a process that must favour healthy over unhealthy outcomes. (Please note I am not talking about individual lives per se, but life – aka consciousness – generally.)

One vital part of the life spark is free will. And although currently, and perhaps for some time now, a large majority of us lack the courage to wield our free will fully, it must out. The remaining minority represents, or is a champion of, free will. Its actions always penetrate somehow, call to the more timid to come out and live, play, create! The percentages representing the two sides are not all that important; free will is a fundamental property of consciousness. Arguing otherwise is arguing that reality is mechanical, which it obviously is not. A mechanical reality cannot possibly produce experience and meaning, whereas a conscious, organic reality is experience and meaning. In other words and to get back to the original observation, no matter the lack of judgement going into the honeytrap, life will, one way or another, burst the banks of that which seeks to restrain it.

The second observation derives from the first: reality is self-balancing, though often turbulent. Reality is also, to be extravagantly redundant, all pervasive; its rules are therefore necessarily present in everything humans might do to ‘escape’ it; we are of it, always and only. To repeat, we must bring ourselves with us wherever we go, and we are life. Everything we do can only transpire within reality. Since reality self-corrects, or more profoundly is always ‘perfect’ in a way that defies ego-based conceptions thereof, everything we choose to do contributes to the quality – or manner – of that continuing self-correction, that perpetual rebalancing towards health over time.

As you do unto other, so you do unto self. Everything is interconnected.

Rephrased in less esoteric language, we do not live outside ‘nature’. We are not alien scientists tinkering with a mechanical system we are separate from – let’s say the biosphere we are born of and live in –, as if reaching in through a hermetically sealed glass box, pushing our hands into impervious gloves then manipulating The World to our liking … by building ‘perfect’ smart cities and ‘cool’ virtual realities.

This reflexive, erroneous sense of How Things Are is reflected in false dichotomies like “nature and nurture”, “natural and artificial”, they and others like them being the misbegotten children of humanism and materialism, twinned paradigms that have structured our thinking for centuries. Their habits of thought have indeed produced marvels terrible and beautiful, but their limits are becoming ever more apparent. Being operated by humans, the institutions and infrastructure built to perpetuate humanist modernity are congenitally compelled to fight off the tide of change that threatens to sweep them away. It should therefore be no surprise that this historical moment is fraught with tensions, deceptions and turbulence.

But despite their fevered bluster, they must fail.

Certainly there are dysfunctional and functional, healthy and unhealthy ways we can be, but all must occur within reality, which is, for me, synonymous with ‘nature’ – where could ‘nature’ possibly ‘end’ and some other ‘thing’ ‘begin’? We have earth’s biosphere as our home, but this is just a tiny part of a system we call Universe. Or, put differently, just a tiny part of reality, or All That Is. Nobody conceives of the biosphere as somehow wholly separated off from the rest of the universe in which it is situated. And surely nobody conceives of cities, smart of otherwise, as wholly separated off from the biosphere. Whichever terminology we use, at whatever scale we think, we are confronted with the fact of intimate and all-pervasive interconnections as definitional for how reality is.

There is no other side.

Conclusion

Without change, there can be no life.

I know it’s banal, but there is, in the end, never a good reason to worry, no matter how horrible things can get. Besides, worry is always worse than a waste of time. We know this. Somewhere in all of us, we know this. It is the quality of life that matters, not whatever quantity of it we can defensively amass before we die. Change – here I mean in the form of discernible difference – is a prerequisite for experience, and includes what we call death. So if we want experience – if we want life –, by extension we also ‘want’ death, death being but one form of change.

Without change, life cannot be.

What does it benefit us to live in fear of change, of death? Whom does it benefit that we live in fear? None other than those who are systemically compelled to control us. And yet, being dysfunctional, this compulsion does not in fact benefit even those dominated by it, let alone us, the ostensible targets of that compulsion.

In the end, then, it doesn’t really matter who wants what they’re selling. And I say this believing nobody can wholly want it, for the reasons set out above. In other words, while there will be fearful, reflexive and/or frivolous participation in the VRs coming our way – and the many other palliative honeytraps like it –, what will transpire as a consequence of that part-acceptance can only conform in some unpredictable way to life’s nature, which flows towards healthier outcomes. Being afraid of the historical turbulence that is but one manifestation of the rebalancing we’ve touched on in this article is, in effect, being afraid of reality. It is undignified, joyless, and anti-life. We are capable of healthier, nobler states of being. When we embrace this, when we find the courage to act on this, it will become clear that we do not want the Vicarious any more, do not want to expend our energies in perpetual flight from the inescapable. We never really did.

Which means, of course, that each of us has work to do, but on ourselves in symbiosis with our contribution to the quality of how history – reality – effects its inevitable rebalancing and introduces us to what succeeds our rapidly disintegrating humanist-materialist experiment, as we experiment with what to do next.