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Summary
Cyberspace
technologies provide new opportunities and questions concerning the
spiritual. This paper looks the spiritual in 20th century art and science
as the basis for examining the spiritual implications in cyberspace,
itself the outgrowth of art and science. This is followed by a discussion
of the virtual worlds of William Gibson and Frank Tipler. The emerging
discipline of studies in consciousness is introduced as a link between
the spiritual and the digital, and the prophetic work of the Jesuit
Teilhard de Chardin discussed for his concept of the 'noosphere'. The
spiritual implications of a conscious Internet are then examined.
Keywords:
spiritual, cyberspace, consciousness, Gibson, Tipler, Teilhard de Chardin,
artificial life, virtual cosmogenesis.
The Spiritual
in 20th C Art and Science
In this paper I shall use a simple categorisation of the spiritual: a
distinction between the religious, the occult and the transcendent.
The 'spiritual' will be a broad term that covers these three distinct
areas. The religious is intended to convey traditional and organised
religious spirituality such as Christianity , Islam, or Buddhism; the
occult an esoteric preoccupation with such matters as the paranormal,
reincarnation, clairvoyance and disembodied beings; and finally the transcendent
as dealing with a shift in personal identity from the physical and temporal
to the infinite and eternal, or with mystical union, or with 'nirvana'.
Clearly the boundaries between the religious, the occult, and the transcendent
(as used here) are blurred, but can be useful in looking at the spiritual
in art and science.
The twentieth century has seen the development and promotion of alternative
forms of spirituality, some of which have had a significant impact on
modern art. The key movements in Europe at the beginning of the century
include Theosophy, founded by H.P.Blavatsky and H.S.Olcott, Anthroposophy,
founded by Rudolf Steiner, and the work of G.I.Gurdjieff and P.D.Ouspensky.
All three movements had explicit teachings on the arts, though Steiner
and Gurdjieff made the arts more central to the lives of their students
than Theosophy, which focused on the preparation for the new World Teacher
(a conflation of the second coming of Christ and the Buddha). There is
not space here to even introduce the teachings of these three movements,
other than to say that all three have an occult leaning (as defined earlier);
Gurdjieff and Theosophy share some transcendental elements, and Anthroposophy
and Gurdjieff include strong Christian themes.
In examining the spiritual in 20th century art we are indebted to art
historian Roger Lipsey for ground-breaking work in his book An Art
of Our Own The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art. One of the premises
of his work is that the arrival of the abstract in modern art allowed
a new exploration of the spiritual; he is also clear that Theosophy was
amongst the important spiritual influences of the time. However the tension
between the spiritual and artistic is immediately present in his choice
of title, for it comes from a quote from Brancusi:
In the
art of other times there is a joy, but with it the nightmare that the
religions drag with them. There is joy in Negro sculpture, among the
nearly archaic Greeks, in some things of the Chinese and the Gothic
... oh, we find it everywhere. But even so, not so well as it might
be with us in the future, if only we were to free ourselves of all this
... It is time we had an art of our own. [1]
The 'all
this' we need to free ourselves from, and which 20th century Western artists
and writers have done so thoroughly is the religious baggage of
previous centuries. In Modernism and later art movements the 20th century
does have an art of its own, but Lipsey is interested in where
the spiritual lies within it. If the modern artist rejects traditional
religion, what is the source of the spiritual? In the first decades of
the century the answer, using the terminology of this paper, is in the
occult, though 20th century innovation in art also maintained its
ancient function: to act as a religious vehicle. This function of art
will always remain while mainstream religions are part of mainstream culture,
and innovators like Antonio Gaudi simply prove that religious art will
always be fertile. However we are interested in new art and spiritualities
that arise in conjunction with new thinking in the 20th century (particularly
science) and how these meet in cyberspace. Returning to Gaudi: mainstream
religion has lost ground to the two other types of spirituality categorised
here, the occult and the transcendent. If the occult was the cultural
preoccupation in the early part of the 20th century, there can be no doubt
that in the latter part it has been the transcendent. We see this markedly
with the American Abstract Expressionists after WW2, and I would argue
that the transcendent is again the preoccupation with the artists of cyberspace.
The transcendent can show itself as a transcendence of the biological
organism; many indeed speak of a post-biological world, or of 'obsolescence
of the body'. This is the theme of the work of performance artist Stelarc.
His visually stunning performances raise all kinds of questions regarding
transcendence of the body, surrender of personal will, and the acceptance
of pain, all of which are traditionally spiritual questions. In interview
however he is rather wary of the direct spiritual implications of his
work; even though he practised yoga for twenty years he does not want
direct parallels to be drawn.
Fakir Musafar is another performance artist, though working without electronics,
but is less reticent than Stelarc about the spiritual indeed he criticises
Stelarc for his silence on this area. Musafar's work turns us back to
the occult (as defined here): it has its roots in out-of-body experiences,
shamanism, and fetishism. An overwhelming spiritual experience at the
age of seventeen (after fasting and a form of self-immolation) led to
a conviction that he had lived before in a completely different culture
and time, and that the erotic and bodily were deeply linked to the spiritual.
He comments:
That beautiful
experience colored my whole existence. From that day on I wanted everyone
to have that kind of liberation. I felt free to express life through
my body. It was now my media, my own personal "living canvas,"
"living clay." It belonged to me to use. And that is just
what I have done for the past thirty years. I learned to use the body.
It is mine, and yours, to play with! I wrote a poem after the
experience. It said:
Poke your
finger into Red,
Feel the
feeling through.
And when
the feeling is no more,
Feel no-feeling
too! [2]
Musafar is significant as an artist who occupies the spiritual territory
of the fakir (usefully defined for us in the work of G.I.Gurdjieff
[3]), that is one who's path
is through the body rather than through mind or heart. The transcendent
implications in his poem, and the occult nature of his out-of-body experiences
reminds one again that we cannot apply these categories too strictly however.
An important contemporary piece that has implications for the spiritual
in cyberspace is Char Davies' Osmose, an "immersive virtual
space" inspired partly by a mind-altering experience as a deep-sea
diver. [4] The work has transcendent
overtones, rather than religious or occult, and operates via interaction
with the user's breathing. Meditation on the breath is one of the fastest
routes to transcendence in Buddhism, and in many languages the word for
breath has the same root as the word for soul. Davies emphasises both
breath (with its transcendent dimension) and balance (with its integrating
dimension) in her VR piece, giving osmosis as the metaphor driving its
conception: "transcendence of difference through mutual absorption,
dissolution of boundaries between inner and outer, intermingling of self
and world, longing for the Other." While transcendence is a theme
here, so is integration, particularly of mind and body: "Our culture's
privileging of the mind over matter has contributed to devaluation of
the body, as well as women and various 'others.' [5] " Her comment points up one of the paradoxes of the
spiritual: transcendence in religious and mystical thinking is as often
about integrating mind and body (Yoga, Walt Whitman) as about transcending
it (Buddhism, Plato). This paradox is at the heart of spiritual issues
in cyberspace; the recent "Religion Issue" of Mediamatic
(for example) shows this in a number of essays. This paradox may not go
away, but recent developments in science have made great contributions
to understanding the issues involved.
Books (mainly by physicists) have appeared in the last four years with
titles such as The Mind of God, or The God Particle, or
with subtitles such as Science, Religion and the Search for God,
or Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead. Many
more are also in print that relate science, usually the 'New Physics'
that arises from quantum mechanics, to spirituality. It is a reasonable
assertion today to say that the subjective entered science with
quantum mechanics (this is enshrined in a minimal kind of way in what
is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation). Whether the spiritual
does or does not is a question that is highly debatable; the erudite New
Age guru and writer Ken Wilber denies it [6],
while a more cautious approach may be to suggest that it gave the scientists
the first real excuse to talk about the spiritual. In addition to the
approaches based purely on quantum mechanics there is another approach,
called the anthropic principle, which finds wider evidence for
the central role of human existence or consciousness in the structure
of the universe. An example is the ratio of fundamental constants to each
other, such as that of the mass to the charge on the electron: the tiniest
change in this ratio would mean that the universe as we know it would
be impossible. This theme is developed fully in Tippler and Barrow's The
Anthropic Cosmological Principle [7].
Though many scientists, through the confrontation with quantum theory
and other developments in the 'new' physics, were having to re-evaluate
science itself, and in many cases found parallels in religion or mysticism,
it was the physicist Fritjof Capra who first brought the parallels to
popular attention in 1975 with his book The Tao of Physics. Gary
Zukav, trained in the liberal arts rather than physics, followed with
The Dancing Wu Li Masters in 1979. If we relate the works of Capra
and Zukav to our simple taxonomy of the spiritual, then the parallels
they draw are mainly to the transcendent, with references here and there
to the occult.
Roger Lipsey's thesis in his An Art of Our Own is that the transforming
event for the spiritual in 20th century art was the development of abstract
art. The transforming event for spirituality in 20th century physics is
clearly quantum theory. What then can we say about the spirituality of
the late 20th / early 21st century cyber artist, who effortlessly integrates
the artistic and scientific progress of the 20th century? Do we agree
with Roy Ascott that all art up to and including Modernism and Postmodernism
is largely a failure and is both to be swept aside and consummated in
cyberspace? [8] These are difficult
questions and rely as much on an understanding of science as they do of
culture.
Gibson and Tipler: Jack In / Download
We cannot investigate the spiritual in cyberspace without reference to
the man who coined the term: William Gibson. His seminal science fiction
novel Neuromancer in fact raises many of the fundamental questions
about cyberspace, though they are not in the first instance spiritual
questions. One scene that poses the most difficult technical question
is on the virtual beach towards the end of the story. If we really wanted
to build a virtual reality that imitated beyond any doubt the real world
(or a real beach) then we need to use physics right down to the molecular
level. The appearance and behaviour of objects depends on this: the exact
distribution of momenta and articulations in the suspension of a car determines
the way it corners for example; the exact distribution of pigments and
carriers in the car's paintwork determines its finish (and whether the
car looks new and expensive or old and cheap). A convincing reality requires
modelling at the molecular (or even atomic) level, and for this you would
need a processor for every molecule or atom. 'Molecular computing' as
it is called does look in fact like a possibility, but even if we could
build an information processor at the molecular size, we would land up
needing one per molecule in our model: in other words you would need a
whole universe to model a universe! Think back to Gibson's beach as Case
and Molly survive on washed-up ration tins she comments that it (reality)
is 'seamless' [9]. Would you
need a computer the size of the beach (and the sea and the sky) to simulate
it? The grains of sand fall off her ankle, it smells of brine, the teeth
on his French nylon zipper are clogged with salt.
There is one escape from this restriction: procedural modelling.
This is a technique whereby, for example, cities can be constructed using
a rule-based system: by abstracting out the main principles whereby cities
grow and their elements are constructed and appear to us, we can generate
cities (or beaches) 'on the fly'. In addition we need (in visual terms)
to be able to render any view of these constructed environments on the
fly, but this is a separate problem requiring only that there is adequate
processing power. An inadequate processing system might result in 'picture
loss' if turning one's virtual head rapidly, or when directing one's gaze
beyond the boundaries of the virtual world (what has Wintermute constructed
for Case and Molly beyond the bluff at the end of their beach?) There
is, sadly, an objection to the procedural modelling let-out: yes, it would
require a computer some orders of magnitude smaller than the universe,
but it would need to be orders of magnitude faster; and we know
that the speed of all interactions are limited by the speed of light.
This objection to Gibson's vision of cyberspace is only a technical one
however. Behind it there is a more fundamental one of cosmogenesis, which
is a spiritual one: who or what has put the virtual show together. Before
tackling this question, let us look at an even more radical version of
cyberspace: that of Frank Tipler.
Frank Tipler is a physicist and author of The Physics of Immortality.
Tipler's ideas can be summarised as follows: modern cosmology predicts
the elimination of biological life as we know it, either through the 'heat
death' (lack of energy in fact) in an ever-expanding universe, or its
consumption in the inferno of the 'big crunch' (the final singularity
of the universe as it contracts again). In any case organic life on Earth
has only some billions of years to go before the Sun wipes it out. However,
the anthropic principle requires that life (consciousness) is central
to the cosmos, and therefore the future evolution of it must be such as
to ensure its existence (in some form or other) for eternity. From this
premise Tipler deduces that we shall all be resurrected by God to live
for ever in the far future: what's more he claims to have the scientific
'proof' for the existence of God and our immortality. Here is the conclusion
to his book:
The Omega
Point Theory [the name is taken from Teilhard de Chardin's writings]
allows the key concepts of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition now
to be modern physics concepts: theology is nothing but physical cosmology
based on the assumption that life as a whole is immortal. A consequence
of this assumption is the resurrection of everyone who ever lived to
eternal life. Physics has now absorbed theology; the divorce between
science and religion, between reason and emotion, is over.
I began
this book with an assertion on the pointlessness of the universe by
Steven Weinberg. He repeats this in his latest book, Dreams of a
Final Theory, and goes on to say "... I do not for a minute
think that science will ever provide the consolations that have been
offered by religion in facing death."
I disagree.
Science can now offer precisely the consolations in facing death
that religion once offered. Religion is now part of science. [10]
To show that
his premises lead to his (startling) conclusions, Tipler has to make a
number of radical assumptions along the way. Firstly, life, including
the personality of every person that ever existed, can exist as a digital
simulation; secondly that robot 'probes' can colonise the universe (thus
disseminating digitally encoded life) and engulf the universe with intelligence
before its collapse has gone too far; third that this intelligent
life can engineer the final collapse in an asymmetrical way (harnessing
the features of chaos theory) in order to provide huge amounts of usable
energy; fourthly that this collective intelligence (called the Omega Point)
will be benign enough to collect all possible data regarding each one
of us and initiate our eternal simulation on vast computers; and finally
that the last infinitesimally small period of time before the final singularity
will feel 'subjectively' to us like an eternity.
Each of these major assumptions then requires another group of assumptions
to make them work: for example that colonisation of the universe will
be achievable through matter/anti-matter engines (no-one knows at this
point how to build one), and that mind is computable so that we
can be 'uploaded' into computers (Roger Penrose, for one, disagrees with
this [11]). Our resurrection then depends on
the fact that living persons now (and in the past) can be photographed
billions of years in the future from the light-rays bouncing off the edge
of the universe, and that will give the Omega Point sufficient information
to run an exact simulation of us, preferably choosing us in our
prime.
But what if it would it take a universe to model a universe, as I suggest?
Gibson as a fantasy writer does not need to worry about this, and Tipler
clearly has not contemplated this possibility, merely extrapolating from
the present progress in computer power to the assumption that an infinite
computing power will be available in the far future. If my objection is
right though, we can only create a virtual universe that is a low-resolution
universe: we can only to model the salient features and leave out or fake
the rest. (For a further discussion of faking it see my paper on virtual
reality Virtual Reality: Give Us a Visual Clue. [12])
This would mean restricting the possibilities for the virtual inhabitants,
not expanding them as Tipler suggests.
While I believe that the anthropic principle deserves a place in modern
thought, it is undermined in this work by Tipler's obviously emotional
attempt to avoid his own, and others', mortality. The really interesting
part of his work, and of a growing number of other scientists', is their
willingness to use (some would say hijack) the language of religion. In
terms of the categories of spirituality developed above, Tipler's work
is clearly religious (or theological) rather than occult or transcendent.
One of the interesting spiritual implications of Gibson's or Tipler's
virtual universes lies in their origins. The cosmogonies that we are familiar
with from Genesis or Plato's Timaeus have competed with modern
theories of evolution, and we have the same problem in virtual cosmogony.
Is our virtual world designed by a person playing as God, is it designed
by committee, or does it evolve from an initial set of conditions (a virtual
Big Bang)? In religious terms we are confronted with the equivalents of
monotheism, polytheism, and Deism. Deism is the late Enlightenment / early
Darwinist belief that God created only the starting conditions and then
stood back and watched the universe unfold (though according to some he
lost interest and got involved in more promising projects).
One way of tackling the cosmogenesis problem is to ask the question of
how consciousness enters the virtual universe. For Gibson it is easy:
we use the traditional carrier of human consciousness, the human body/brain,
and merely connect it electrically with the simulation: we jack-in
to the virtual universe. Stelarc and Char Davies show us this technology
in its early stage. Tipler poses a much more difficult scenario however,
as the body is discarded and consciousness itself is downloaded. To consider
this problem we need to take a brief look at our current thinking on consciousness.
Consciousness
It is only possible to give here a brief summary of the positions of the
key players and the key debates on consciousness, but the main positions
can be usefully categorised as materialist and dualist.
Francis Crick, famous for his part in the discovery of DNA, probably best
represents the materialist or reductionist view of consciousness, summed
up in his "astonishing hypothesis [13]" that we are nothing more than a pack of neurons,
and that all consciousness is merely neuronal activity. He seeks to find
the neural correlates of perceptions (he works mainly with the sense of
sight), thus tackling the qualia problem (i.e. explaining the 'redness'
of red), and eventually to find the neural correlate of consciousness.
Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, is a more moderate materialist who rejects
the Cartesian duality of mind and brain, and wishes to replace the concept
of a Cartesian theatre (where all sensory input are ultimately unified
into a holistic perception) with the Multiple Drafts Model [14].
This only accepts that perceptions are conscious when 'noted down' in
memory, and proposes a continual editorial process as a model for consciousness
(the "word-processing" model?).
The dualists in some way or other are forced to accept Descartes view
of a "ghost in a machine", or some kind of distinction between
brain and mind. Roger Penrose [15], is not happy with the term dualist, arguing that scientific
advances since Descartes, particularly quantum theory, make the term less
useful than in an era of Newtonian mechanics. Penrose believes that quantum-mechanical
effects in the brain allow for the entry of important aspects of consciousness
that cannot be explained by the 'classical' science of Crick and Dennett,
these being indeterminacy (allowing for free will) and coherence (allowing
for the holistic nature of consciousness). Penrose suggests that the transfer
of quantum mechanical phenomena into the classical region of the brain
is a result of physics that we do not yet understand, and proposes that
structures called microtubules are the location for these effects [16].
The basic problem that dualists face is this: how to explain that a non-material
entity such as mind can influence the brain as matter (downward causation)
and how matter can impinge on mind (upward causation). Downward causation
is only a real problem if one privileges free will (most scientists consider
this to be something of an illusion) while the problem of upward causation
is simply a recasting of the basic problem of consciousness. Another way
of putting the classical dualist position is that consciousness 'accrues'
to organisms under the right conditions, this doesn't however provide
an explanation.
The more engineering-minded of consciousness scientists duck the philosophical
issues for the time being and construct machines which could eventually
be conscious; then, they say, we'll cut them up and see what makes consciousness
tick. Dennett is pursuing a mild form of this, focusing on cognitive robots
that specialise in vision, but the computer scientist Igor Aleksander
for example has gone further in deliberately constructing a machine to
be artificially conscious. It is called Magnus; it consists of an artificial
neural net (ANN) of some 16,000 neuron equivalents, and is designed to
tell us what it is like to be Magnus.
Where both materialists and dualists probably agree is that the complexity
of an organism, whether biological or technological, has a bearing on
the potential for consciousness. Materialists can approach this position
via chaos theory, and posit that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon
requiring a certain level of complexity within the organism. Dualists
also agree that consciousness accrues to organisms depending on their
complexity. Let us look at an influential writer on spirituality whose
work supports this view: Tielhard de Chardin.
de Chardin and the Noosphere
Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955) was a Jesuit priest and a palaeontologist
with a special interest in evolution. His conviction that evolutionary
theory was correct and applied to man (at least as far as he was an organism)
ran, of course, headlong into his Church training, and hence he struggled
with it in a way that a lay scientist would not have had to. The Church
prohibited him from publishing his honest and unique attempt to reconcile
his science and religion, with the result that his major works were published
only after his death. In The Phenomenon of Man he shows how man
was not merely the arrival of a new species, but an event for the whole
planet: the creation of a new 'layer.' The first layer (itself composed
of substrata) is the geosphere, the second the biosphere, and with man
came the noosphere. Biogenesis gave rise to living organisms, psychogenesis
gave rise to an animal with a mind, and noogenesis gives rise to a planetary
mind or consciousness. The noosphere arises from us communicating with
each other, and as this communication reaches speed and critical mass
the noosphere is created. Through this idea de Chardin accommodates both
the biologists' discoveries and the Church teaching of the elevated position
of man:
With that
it bursts upon us how utterly warped is every classification of the
living world in which man only figures logically as a genus or
new family. This is an error of perspective which deforms and uncrowns
the whole phenomenon of the universe. To give man his true place in
nature it is not enough to find one more pigeon-hole in the edifice
of systematisation or even an additional order or branch. With hominisation,
in spite of the insignificance of the anatomical leap, we have the beginning
of a new age. The earth 'gets a new skin'. Better still, it finds its
soul. [17]
De Chardin could not anticipate the exact nature of future communications
systems, but many commentators now think that the Internet is the key
structure that allows for the formation of the noosphere. Jennifer Cobb
Kreisberg has introduced de Chardin to the Wired readership [18]; Paul Groot has introduced him to the Mediamatic
readership [19]; both in connection
with the Net. So can we conclude, like Kreisberg and Groot, that de Chardin
predicted that the planet would 'finds its soul' through the Internet?
And what could this mean? Let us explore this question through from the
perspective of consciousness.
The Conscious Net?
The brain has of the order of 10 billion neurons giving a storage capacity
of 10 to the 15 bits of information. The complexity of the brain may in
fact be much higher than this if the work of Hammerof is proven correct:
he proposes that the microtubules in each neuron interact with those in
other neurons throughout the brain, giving a massively higher connectivity.
(We may remember that Aleksander's Magnus has only 16,000 artificial neurons
in comparison.) The Internet may have the potential to reach such connectivity,
so why should it not eventually become conscious, fulfilling de Chardin's
prophecy of the planetary soul? From both the materialist and dualist
understanding of consciousness there are no immediate reasons why not,
but I have reservations. Let us look at look at the relationship between
consciousness and complexity in terms of what the Artificial Life people
call the four F's: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproduction.
In a world of finite resources complexity grows as a survival strategy
(according to Darwinian thinking). If you wished to evolve complex life,
then a very simple strategy is to make its prime requirement, energy,
scarce. The hunt for energy (food) then requires the evolution of complex
sensory apparatus, and the ability to model the natural environment in
order to anticipate the changing patterns of availability, favouring the
development of mind and intelligence. This satisfies chaos theory, but
what about dualism? Simply this: it is interesting to have to search
or hunt for food. A fine balance then evolves between the anxiety that
grows when insufficient food is found to maintain the integrity of the
organism, and the delight in its procurement and consumption (energy is
delight, said Blake).
As populations increase, and different species evolve different strategies
for energy gathering, fighting for food becomes inevitable, but provides
another major stimulus for the growth of complexity. Fighting may not
always provide 'delight', but it always provides drama. A pacifist may
find this a hard proposition, but without the possibility for conflict
I believe that consciousness would fade and die. Fleeing is a natural
counterpart to fighting: if the odds are hopeless then the intelligent
thing to do is flee, and in complexity terms this provides stimulus for
well-developed motor systems. In terms of dualism we have the introduction
of a psychological element that is essential to the drama of life: fear.
I believe that fear is another essential component of consciousness.
As organisms of any kind, however good their self-repairing systems are,
must die (Plato points this out when he calls the body a "composite
thing"), offspring are essential. For all the higher life-forms on
this planet sexual reproduction seems to be the norm, despite the biologists'
inability to find a good reason for it. For humans this introduces one
of the major complexifying factors in behaviour: love.
From chaos theory we learn that it is not enough that an organism is complex
in terms of quantity (in this context the mere number of neurons or interacting
elements), but it has to be in structure. Our four F's show how
complex structures arise in life through the pressures on individuals,
and the tensions between competition and cooperation in all four aspects.
From this perspective we arrive at the first of several arguments against
the conscious Net: there is only one Net. With no one to play with,
or to fight with, or to mate with how would interest, aggression, fear,
or love arise? And how would the necessary complexity for consciousness
arise? Remember that quantity is not enough; structure is needed.
A second objection arises from research into synthetic actors by the Thalmann
team in Geneva. They encode a virtual universe of sets and actors, and
attempt to give the actors personalities through limited autonomy and
personal goals. All this information is present within a single computer
system, and has to be available to different subsystems at different times;
in this respect no different to the Internet. It became a problem to keep
the actors 'interesting' if they had complete access to the database.
How can you make a detective movie with synthetic actors if they know
the murderer from the start? How can there be any dramatic tension if
a synthetic actor can 'see' through a wall to the vicious killer or terrified
blonde on the other side? It turned out that the only solution to maintaining
any kind of drama in the virtual universe is to keep its actors ignorant
to some degree; they do this by endowing them with an artificial vision
as an analogue to our own. [20] For the Net to engage in any of the
life-dramas necessary for complexity/consciousness it would have to 'partition'
itself in a similar way and set parts of itself in competition with other
parts quite at odds with the whole origin and ethos of the Net.
The third objection to a conscious Net is the lack of a body, or at least
an interesting one: what can you do if your physical manifestation
is a sphere? There are no articulations and nowhere to go (except round
and round in circles). It would have to find energy of course, but would
its search be interesting? Would it have the fun of waiting behind a rock
to pounce on a rabbit? Or of wandering like a cow through fields of sweet-smelling
juicy grass? Or browsing through the delicatessen counter at the supermarket?
None of these I suggest.
For these reasons, I am not sure that the Net, or some equivalent noosphere
has the right conditions for consciousness as we know it. However, the
inexorable progress towards intelligent robots does satisfy all
the conditions for artificial life, and we can empathise with the kind
of consciousness they may potentially possess. But the Internet, or any
similar monolithic neuronal structure with no body (worth speaking of),
or similar companions to interact with, could not have consciousness as
we know it. De Chardin was not suggesting this of course: his "confluence
of thought" would surely create a unique consciousness; Tipler is
moving in the same direction with his "Omega Point". I think
that we are left with two possibilities: firstly that the Net as conscious
being would 'partition' itself into multiple personalities and act out
dramas in a virtual world similar to Gibson's, but if any of us tried
this wouldn't it be treated as a sign of insanity? The second is that
the Net would become God. Though I don't propose to debate this further,
isn't it perhaps what de Chardin, and countless others perhaps, are looking
for? Isn't it perhaps the driving obsession behind the technology?
The Spiritual in Cyberspace
To sum up: the cyberspace technologies of the Internet and immersive Virtual
Realities present us with spiritual possibilities and questions that are
not all new, but are sharply accentuated. However the highly speculative
work of Gibson, Tipler and Teilhard de Chardin are all amenable to a criticism
based in actual research programmes, whether in consciousness, VR, or synthetic
cinema; likewise a broad base of spiritual tradition is needed. On a practical
note, Web sites like SpiritNet provide a forum for debate and dissemination
concerning the spiritual on the Internet, while immersive realities like
Char Davies' Osmose challenge the assumption that mind should be
privileged over body. The transcendence of the body is probably the key
spiritual question in cyberspace; the question whether God will emerge from
a glorified telephone system is attractive, but probably less amenable to
proper debate. As electronic artists the immortality of our artefacts may
be assured, but isn't the prospect of our own digital immortality terrifying?
References
[1]
Lipsey, Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century
Art, Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 244
[2] Musafar, Fakir, 'Body Play',
in ( Adam Parfrey, Ed.) Apocalypse Culture, Portland, Oregon:
Feral House, 1990, p. 105
[3] Ouspensky, P.D. In Search
of the Miraculous - Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, Arkana, 1978,
p. 44
[4] Davies, Char, 'Osmose: Notes
on Being in Virtual Immersive Space', in Proceedings, International Symposium
on Electronic Art 1995, Montreal, ISEA'95 Montreal, 1995, p. 53
[5] Davies, Char, 'Osmose: Notes
on Being in Virtual Immersive Space', in Proceedings, International Symposium
on Electronic Art 1995, Montreal, ISEA'95 Montreal, 1995, p. 55
[6] Wilber, Ken, Quantum Questions
- Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists, Boston and London:
Shambhala, 1985
[7] Barrow, John D. and Tipler,
Frank J., The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford: Clarendon
Press 1986. See also Wheeler, J.A., At Home in the Universe, The
American Institute of Physics, 1995
[8] See for example Ascott, Roy
'Wormholing in Cyburbia, and Other Paranatural Pleasures' in Proceedings,
International Symposium on Electronic Art 1995, Montreal, ISEA'95 Montreal,
1995, pp. 1- 6
[9] Gibson, William, Neuromancer,
London: Harper Collins, 1993, p. 283
[10] Tipler, Frank J. The Physics
of Immortality - Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead,
London: Macmillan, 1994, p. 338
[11] Penrose, Roger, Shadows
of the Mind - A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, Oxford
University Press, 1994
[12] King, Mike, Virtual Reality:
Give Us a Visual Clue Split Screen Conference Proceedings, Chichester,
1996
[13] Crick, Francis, The Astonishing
Hypothesis - The Scientific Search for the Soul, Simon and Schuster,
1994
[14] Dennet, Daniel C., Consciousness
Explained, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1991
[15] Penrose, Roger, Shadows
of the Mind - A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, Oxford
University Press, 1994
[16] Some of the most recent developments
of this theory, derived from neuroscientist Stuart Hammerof's work, is to
be found in their joint paper: "Conscious Events in Orchestrated Space-Time
Selections" in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 3, No.
1, 1996, pp. 36-53
[17] Teilhard de Chardin, P. The
Phenomenon of Man, Readers Union Collins, London, 1961, p. 182
[18] Kreisberg, Jennifer Cobb,
"A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain", in Wired, June
1995, pp. 108-113
[19] Groot, Paul, "Teilhard
and Technognosis" in Mediamatic, 8 #4, Spring 1996, pp. 37-43
[20] Noser, Hansrudi, and Daniel
Thalmann, 'Synthetic Vision and Audition for Digital Actors' in F. Post
and M. Gobel Computer Graphics Forum, Maastricht Conference Issue,
Eurographics Association, 1995, p. 327
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