Omnipresent Virtualities
Virtual reality releases solitary
dreamers into the collective dream
by Star
Larvae
As waking and
sleeping converge in the enriched
brains of our extraterrestrial descendants, the conscious and unconscious
experience of those descendants should fuse into an undifferentiated mode of
subjectivity.
Immersive
media look like they're just about ready to facilitate the colonizing of the
dream state.
Already, digital wizardry approaches in style and content the surrealistic
hyper-reality of the dream. Hollywood movies, with increasing fidelity, capture
the unearthly fly-around perspectives and temporal elasticity of dreams. In its
advertising, television, notably when promoting sugar to children, evokes the
zany, weightless world of dreams.
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Jump
Start comic strip from http://comics.com/jump_start/2010-09-23/
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For
its part, the dream world acknowledges new technologies as they come on line.
Cars, airplanes, telephones, radios, and now computers insinuate their ways
into the dream milieu. Surrealist fantasies of a culture of the unconscious
look today like a premonition of the computer age, in which any scene or sound
can morph into any other.
But
the extroverted among humankind’s extraterrestrial descendants might cringe at
the prospect of terminal, albeit spectacular, introversion in the dream, even
the lucid
dream. For the extroverts, the networked dream might provide relief. Space
brains will have at their cortex tips access to uncharted frontiers of
expression, gregariousness, and interpersonal fusion.
Through
virtual reality (VR) technologies, weightless dreaming becomes a social medium.
VR systems are sensorimotor-feedback setups that link users and computers in
information-exchange loops. The motions of the users are fed into the
computers, which respond by sending appropriate signals back through visors and
headphones and potentially other interfaces. The signals—translated by the
visors and headphones into synthetic sights and sounds—give users the
impression that they are interacting with a physical environment. But the
environment exists only as a computer program and a sequence of perceptions.
Nevertheless, the virtual world can be shared by as many inhabitants or
visitors as the available computing power and bandwidth can support. Pokémon Go
is a baby step along the path. (Variations on the VR concept are sometimes
called telepresence
or tele-immersion.)
The Communal Lucid Dream
The
phenomenology of dreams segues naturally into that of virtual reality. Dreams and virtual
realities are interactive and immaterial, though phenomenologically habitable,
spaces. The literature on therapeutic and recreational VR applications seems
modeled after that of dreams, especially that of lucid dreams. Themes of
conflict resolution and wish fulfillment are prominent in descriptions of the
virtues of both worlds. If Marshall McLuhan’s technological prostheticism
struck near the mark, and electronic media extend into the physical world the
collective patterns of human subjectivity, then VR technology extends specifically
the capacity for lucid dreaming, not particularly into the physical world, but
into the collective experience of the networked community.
"A biotechnical, and not
merely biochemical, straitjacket, whereby the psychophysiology of an
individual's behavior would be permanently relayed to instantaneous information
capabilities, his/her body wired with electronic pathways that would extend the
nervous system. [. . . . ] Once this happens, adoption of a sedentary life
tends to become final, absolute, since the functions traditionally distributed
within the real space of the town are now exclusively taken over by the real
time of the wiring of the human body."
"The real is produced from
miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models—and with
these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to
be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal of negative instance.
It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped
by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of
an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without
atmosphere."
Virtual
realities can only become increasingly engaging as they gain resolution and
responsiveness. The prospect of VR technology accessorized with brain sensors,
such as those used in EEG monitoring, let alone brain implants, suggests the potential for a new
level of intimacy of shared experience. Mythic forms from the unconscious will
be available as blueprints for a cosmic arcade in which experiences are
manufactured from such stuff as dreams are made of.
The Brains-in-Vats Scenario
One
potential of VR has been thrown under a sobering light by writers of cyberpunk
science fiction. The Gothic-styled genre of high-tech low-life takes its
dystopian inspiration from the familiar scene of glazed-over couch potatoes.
Cyberpunk writers have seen the implications of tomorrow’s tech: bodiless
brains suspended in nutrient vats, networked and synchronized with other vatted
brains. The cyberpunk genre’s Gothic stylizations can obscure the astuteness of
the vision, namely the insight that urbankind already consists of networked
brains in vats on wheels. One need only notice one's co-motorists fumbling with
their phones to recognize it.
Nineteen
ninety nine’s popular action film, "The Matrix
" presented the
brains-in-vats scenario to a large audience. The movie's premise involves the
subjugation of humankind by a race of malignant machines. The premise is taken
to an extreme in which the ruling machinery cultivates human beings as an
energy crop. Each head of human livestock is raised in a life-support pod, fed
artificially, and tapped like a battery for excess metabolic energy. But the
citizen slaves believe themselves to be living normal lives, thanks to a shared
virtual reality piped into their brains. Little imagination is needed to
recognize in this arrangement today's corporate cubicle farm, in which
networked human livestock productively ruminate, their energies drained to feed
the demands of their various masters. And the growing number of debt slaves who
occupy today’s protoMatrix do so largely in a state of pharmacologically
induced complacency, thanks to a pharmaceutical industry eager to lavish
antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs on a spiritually eviscerated workforce.
" presented the
brains-in-vats scenario to a large audience. The movie's premise involves the
subjugation of humankind by a race of malignant machines. The premise is taken
to an extreme in which the ruling machinery cultivates human beings as an
energy crop. Each head of human livestock is raised in a life-support pod, fed
artificially, and tapped like a battery for excess metabolic energy. But the
citizen slaves believe themselves to be living normal lives, thanks to a shared
virtual reality piped into their brains. Little imagination is needed to
recognize in this arrangement today's corporate cubicle farm, in which
networked human livestock productively ruminate, their energies drained to feed
the demands of their various masters. And the growing number of debt slaves who
occupy today’s protoMatrix do so largely in a state of pharmacologically
induced complacency, thanks to a pharmaceutical industry eager to lavish
antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs on a spiritually eviscerated workforce.
But the machines of the developing matrix
need not exert their control coercively, as they do in the films of the Matrix
series. Human beings eager to enter the pods, whether on Earth or in space,
will be easy to find. Many minds conditioned by an entertainment industry to
despise the humdrum and by an advertising industry to crave novelty find
synthetic realities to be as appealing as anything that exists outside of
cyberspace.
An
eagerness to transcend the meatbot by plunging into a comprehensive environment
of synthetic inputs expresses itself through the ambitions of transhumanism, a
movement that advocates plunging headlong into as technologically mediated a
reality as can be engineered. Transhumanism's selling points revolve around
technological enhancement of human faculties and experiences, the enhancements
intensifying until reaching a breaking point: the vaunted
"Singularity," a secular rendition of Heaven/Nirvana.
That
oligarchs would encourage their subjects to embrace a programmable digital
infrastructure, thereby further empowering the oligarchs, seems not to occur to
transhumanist enthusiasts.
Transhumanism or Exohumanism?
The
dystopian "brains-in-vats" scenario of the cyberpunk future approaches the star
larvae scenario. But essential differences distinguish the two storylines. The
cyberpunk future is dystopian because it ignores foundational elements of the
extraterrestrial program:
It
might be only in the unwieldy vastness of space, in a prosperous solar economy,
that communities will be able to pursue destinies independently of the evolving
global power elite. Once again, self-directed freedom-seekers might need to
tackle a frontier
to secure their autonomy.
On
the optimistic side, and with noetic prescience, Marshall McLuhan glimpsed the
light at the end of the postmodern tunnel. In Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man he summons an epiphanous
image:
he summons an epiphanous
image:
"If the ultimate reality and
therefore our own deepest nature is creativity, then to 'obey' it means not to
give complete allegiance to any of creativity's past products, be they
scientific ideas, religious dogmas, political institutions, or economic
systems. Likewise, to 'obey' the will of God for our lives is to become more
rather than less creative. True obedience is therefore manifested in a life of
maximal creativity."
"Today
computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or
language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by
technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The
next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages
in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the
collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson. The condition of 'weightlessness,'
that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the
condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective
harmony and peace."
McLuhan’s
early grasp of what later would be called cyberspace
may have been a reaching for the phenomenology of outer space. In the passage
above, he proposes that technology has as its covert aim the engineering of a
kind of rapture. Humanity's collective calling may be to fabricate the
communion of angels by evolving into it. Evolving into angels—or whatever label
best suits our extraterrestrial descendants—will require letting brain circuits
express themselves fully by letting them take shape weightlessly.
"The new media are not
bridges between man and nature:
they are nature."
— Marshall McLuhan
Humanity's
complex of devices and programs and the extensions of that technological
complex yet to come can be seen as humankind’s attempt to engineer around
itself an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent parent. This Freudian
ambition has as its goal the preserving of humankind's posthuman descendants in
a state of retarded, neotenous, development. On Earth, this program threatens
to impose the nightmare scenario of a global technocracy perpetually exploiting
it pharmacologically anesthetized drone-citizens. In space the program plays
out as a metamorphosis of humans into the angels of the religious imagination.
The Star Larvae Hypothesis:
Stars constitute a genus of organism. The stellar life
cycle includes a larval phase. Biological life constitutes the larval phase of
the stellar life cycle.
Elaboration: The
hypothesis presents a teleological model of nature, in which
- Stellar nebulae manufacture bacteria and viruses in their interiors as they cool.
- Biology evolves within an ontogenetic program that in its entirety, on- and off-planet, constitutes a generational life cycle of the stellar organism.
- Technology plays a necessary role in evolution. It enables biological life to emigrate from planets to weightless space.
- Postplanetary life manufactures the protons needed to create, then metamorphoses into, new stars.
- A prescient complex of celestial religious motifs expresses humankind’s stellar calling. The star is the human imago.
- Nature's metabolism encompasses the organic and the inorganic in a continuum of anabolic and catabolic exchanges.
From Star Larvae @
http://www.starlarvae.org/Space_Brains_The_Synergy_of_the_Network.html
For more information about floppy socks see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/free%20energy
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