Posted 19 November 2008 - 08:13 AM
Stories from the Future, Stories for the Future
Next to soldiering and prostitution, story-telling is probably the oldest ‘profession’ extant. It’s a pity that story-tellers nowadays appear to be mostly unaware of their venerable tradition. Not all, mind you, but most of them are. Also, story-telling has been torn from its rightful position of central importance, and been forced to share or even surrender its throne to a variety of pretenders. Foremost among them are ‘Literature’ and ‘Art’. Helping them, directly and indirectly, is a wide spectrum of liars, who have corrupted human minds by taking the magic out of ‘story’ and pretending that certain types of ‘story’ are physically real. I am speaking of religion and ideology, of course. I might mention ‘journalism’ as well. Advertising. Politics. Historical discourse.
Many learned tomes have been written about the essence, structure and the ‘why’ of story-telling. Explanations for the persistent human addiction to ‘story’ comes from many different and apparently unconnected areas of human thought. About the only one that makes any sense, however, is the one that states that we are stories; that what we call our minds are formed from complex entangled loops of narrative, and that all our lives, thoughts, feelings and deeds are nothing but expressions of those narratives; that our memories and our intentionality are just a way of looking at what goes on in the swirling clouds of narrative in our brains. In that picture of things, there is no central ‘core’ to our being. We are the stories, and it is there that we find what we call our ‘identity’.
What is the relevance of this to the subject at hand? Well, I thought it was obvious, in so many ways. The Emortalist project and the Transhumanist Utopia it might lead to in the imaginations of some, is nothing but a particular set of narratives, most of them grounded in and derived from narratives already in existence; stories as old as story-telling itself.
What Emortalists—and whether they call themselves that or not is, as you surely must realize, very important!—need to do in order to make the project progress, and ‘successfully’ so, is to make their narratives become the narrative of humankind at large; or of at least of a large-enough and significant-enough portion of it. In order to do this they have to tell stories that will grip their audience. The process is nowadays also known as ‘promotion’.
The way to ‘grip’ an audience—and, in the end, there is only one way—is to ‘engage’ and ‘involve’ them. They have to become a part of the tale, like the boy in The Neverending Story. They’ve got to open that book, start reading and be sucked into it, until the story becomes their reality. That process is sometimes known as ‘conditioning’; or, more uncharitably, as ‘brainwashing’. It has been used since time immemorial by demagogues and manipulators, and it has not lost any of its power; especially now that the manipulators have acquired new, shiny tools for broad-spectrum manipulation of people’s personal narratives. Adolf, eat your heart out!
One might argue that Emortalism should use those same tools as best as it can, and there’s some merit in the suggestion. But there is an even more powerful argument against it. For the narrative manipulations known as ‘promotion’, ‘conditioning’ or ‘brainwashing’—in ascending order of noxiousness—are all designed to reduce the intelligence and thinking faculties of their targets. In the parlance of ‘narrative’ it means that these manipulations are designed to simplify the complex story of the manifold expressions and aspects of ‘life’ into something that serves the purposes of those doing the manipulating. In other words, and not to put too fine a point on it, they’re designed to make people stupid. The record shows that the attempt is becoming ever-more successful, getting better as the enterprise acquires solid scientific grounding. The more we figure out what makes people think as they do, the better we get at dumbing them down. Knowledge is power.
The problem is that the hypothesis that a lot of people really feel more comfortable when they can be stupid, is supported by scientific evidence. Ironically, the sentiment is shared by those who would not ordinarily think of themselves as stupid or ‘simple’; quite the contrary. But every election in your average ‘democratic’ nation provides a plethora of examples. And there’s religion, of course.
But humankind is also possessed of something called ‘curiosity’, which is an evolutionary adaptation found across the spectrum of animals we consider to have some form of ‘intelligence’. Curiosity in itself does nothing at all, but its physical expression is an activity known as ‘exploration’. This can be internal, such as when one thinks about stuff that has become the target of one’s curiosity-attention; or it can be external, such as when one pokes around places that are labeled ‘off-limits’. I’ll come back to that later, when I talk about the Gatekeeper.
Curiosity and exploration lead to ‘expansion’—of one’s physical or mental horizons, one’s abilities, ones perspectives, even one’s emotional potential.
What I would label ‘good narrative’ provides the recipient—and the creator as well!—with one or more paths to curiosity and exploration.
‘Bad narrative’, on the other hand, discourages this. It can do this in several ways. One is by content that suggests strongly that curiosity and exploration and bad things—maybe not in all ways, then at least in some particular ones. The other is by providing narratives whose effect it is to create ever-deeper mental ruts and thought patterns.
The irony of what I’ve just said is not lost on me. After all, one could argue that my own Emortalist inclinations, sustained over as long a period as they have, constitute an established thought pattern that might be called a ‘rut’ after all these years. And my favorite kind of literature is mostly SF&F, which means my conditioning narratives are oriented in particular directions. And it is true that this has always been a choice. Certainly, nobody forced them upon me.
But this doesn’t affect the validity of the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, mentally ‘expanding’ and ‘contracting’ or ‘limiting’ narratives. Indeed, and despite the awfulness, pretentiousness, and conceptual, emotional and ‘derivative’ paucity of much SF&F, it still remains the genre where one is most likely to find ‘paths to curiosity and exploration’. That’s simply because science-fiction and its associated future-fiction offshoots are concerned with the future. And, just to remind you of one essential fact of life, whenever we explore something, it’s done after-now.
Yes, I know, everything is done after-now, because whatever you do, you can’t ever do it before-now, because that’s just not the way things work in space-time; not even in time-travel scenarios. Note that I called it ‘after-now’ and ‘before-now’, rather than ‘past’ and ‘future’; because these are different things. The mere fact that something’s done after-now, doesn’t make it ‘future-oriented’. But ‘exploration’ is future oriented, because, for humans at least, it is an activity resulting from an intention., and all intentionality is oriented toward the future. We explore, driven by a myriad of motivations, few of which may be rational. But no matter what these are, they all share ‘intention’.
Future-oriented narrative is very likely to encourage and promote exploration and investigation. All of which means that it nurtures a mindset that asks questions, because that’s what exploration is all about. “Why does this have that effect?” “What’s beyond that mountain?” “What would people be like if…?”
Future-oriented narrative is good narrative. Do not confuse it with narrative merely ‘set in the future’ though. A lot of ‘future’ setting is stale, static and just…well, ‘setting’. Examples? Think just about anything suffused with strong political ideologies, from Socialism to Ayn-Rand-ism.
Also, there are many stories set in the past, but which are really all about the future. The good ones, the ones that have survived in their basic form for millennia despite being reshaped again and again, are those that provide us with our basic framework of mental existence. Think of them as the bones of the body of human narrative. And the skeletal structure of that body doesn’t change much, though without it we’d just be blobs of…well, whatever.
These narratives, sometimes labeled ‘archetypal’, are formed by and during the process of ‘growing up’. They are provided by interactions with the society around us, which act as examples we observe and emulate. They are, of course, mixed in with other narratives that are specific to particular societies. In this manner a ‘mind’ is formed; put together from bits and pieces of various narratives. What comes out of it is what amounts to a pretty unique individual, which shares certain narratives—many of them so deeply hidden that they’re seldom made explicit—with others, thus making mental/emotional/conceptual links. These narratives are the source of that much-maligned phenomenon, the ‘cliché’. Though the term is almost always used in a pejorative sense—especially by literary and film critics—it is actually neutral, a term describing pervasive, widespread fragments of narrative that serve to give the members of communities common bases for thought, discourse and action.
Where am I going with all this?
Well, in the context of what this little book is all about, it’s the quality and content of the Emortalist—well, currently it’s really ‘immortalist’—narrative that concerns me. It seems to me that it is riddled with too much ideology, a great deal of hypocrisy and far too much ‘past’. The stories Immortalists/Transhumanists and their ilk tell us have a false ring to them. I think that many people exposed to these narratives sense this, and that makes the job of promotion and involvement of large numbers of people harder.
I also think that the Emortalist project is stuck between a rock and hard place; an essential dilemma that gives rise to these false-sounding narratives. I’m not sure I can offer good suggestions of how to get out of that dilemma. But I believe that if in doubt the best story to tell is one that reveals truth, and this is how I see it. And, yes, I know that what I’m about to say is going to have everybody and sundry in the Immortalist/Transhumanist movement (a) up in arms and self-righteous rejection of my analysis, or (b) carefully and disdainfully ignoring that it was said, which would be best accomplished by ignoring me. Well, such is life.
Let’s start with a surfeit of ‘past’ in the story; all of which is linked closely to ‘too much ideology’.
This problem is found mostly in the long-term Transhumanist and Posthumanist visions, promulgated almost as gospel inside the ‘movement’ and served up to those outside as the basic Grand Vision of what we could be; if only, as s starter, we were able to live forever. Said visions are derived mostly from archetypal narrative fragments of the mystical Shangri-La variety. They qualify as ‘religious’ and are at their heart almost indistinguishable from the precepts of, say, the Jehova’s Witnesses, who also expect to live ultimately in an paradise on Earth where the lion will lie down with the lamb and all that. Change the terminology around a bit, add a hefty dollop of science, technology and pseudo-rational babble, and you’ve got pretty much what the Trans/Posthumanists offer us.
“But”, you might argue, “what’s wrong with that? It’s all about building a better future than the past.”
It looks that way. And who in his right ethical mind would reject such a thing? Isn’t that what we’re all working toward, or should be working toward? So, how could such a vision for the future be considered objectionable?
Well, it’s a ‘bad’ story, no matter how apparently benevolent.
Suppose we could—without fear of dire and mostly lethal consequences as was the case in Joss Whedon’s Serenity—tweak a few genes here and there and make people ‘better’; so they would behave more ‘rational’; inflict less or no suffering on their fellow human beings; talk and not fight; strive to achieve together rather than apart; be more faithful to their spouses (Nick Bostrom himself once suggested that he might consider such a thing); be more truthful; have more profound life-experiences; be more sharing…and so on.
Suppose we could make up the magical gel-cap that does it all and mass-produce it.
Suppose this thing really does what it’s meant to do—to you and everybody else. Evil and suffering will be eradicated. No more drugs problem, no more filthy rich bastards taking from the poor, no more injustice, no more social strife, no more class struggle; enhanced mental abilities for all, to enjoy the life-experience and to love your neighbor and everybody and sundry, and… You get the idea, yes?
Questions:
First of all, should we make it, mass produce it and distribute it—free, if necessary, so everybody can afford it?
Secondly, if you were given the option to take one of those things, would you? (Or would you—just in case you’re tempted to say ‘no’!—if the very same gel-cap contained your Emortality cocktail, and indeed this were a pre-condition to actually get said cocktail?)
If you answered ‘yes’ to both questions, please stop reading right now, because we’ve got nothing to talk about.
If you didn’t say ‘yes’—and, if you’re consistent, it would have to be ‘no’ to both questions then!— you must surely also understand why the Utopian visions of Shangri-La like human futures are ‘bad’ stories. And in case you don’t see it yet, here’s the reason: because they remove our freedom to choose to be other than what we’re ‘supposed’ to be. And what we are ‘supposed’ to be, nobody knows—for the simple reason that we aren’t ‘supposed’ to be anything. We just are.
That includes being mortal!
There’s no reason get petulant about it, as so many Immortalists do. They think it’s somehow unfair that they have to die one day. That death is an ‘imposition’ on the species; something that ‘ought not to exist’. Within what framework of ethics and justice? Well, I guess it’s some cosmic thing. Like the universe isn’t being fair to its creatures, or like it mis-designed us.
Stupid universe! How could you not design us better? Don’t you know how just plain…wrong!...this is?
I know that Immortalists, when they’re in their philosophical mode, don’t think in those exact terms, but somewhere underneath something similar is lurking—and ‘petulance’ is definitely an applicable term. Like they’re owed something they’re not getting. Like they’re ‘owed’ anything at all. Like they have a ‘right’ of sorts; in this instance the ‘right to life’.
They don’t. Nobody has any ‘right’ to anything. Any ‘right’ we have is established through our ability to, if you will, ‘make it so’. If you don’t make it so, or if those around you don’t make it so for you, you’re not going to have it. In a social context that translates, for example, into a ‘society’ of social creatures being of a disposition to agree to grant that its members are entitled to this and that; and out of that, for many societies, have sprung our notions of ‘human rights’. Indeed, ‘societies’ are formed by creatures that can agree—prompted by whatever may drive them to such agreement—on certain rules of ‘social’ life and members’ rights and all that.
All of these putative, but ultimately human-created, ‘rights’ ultimately have their origin in one single fundamental cosmic mechanism, which you’ll find from the largest to the smallest scale, from cosmos to elementary particle; and on the scale of system-complexity as well, from elementary particle, through element, to compound to a physical structure and a human body, to even ‘functional’ structures like ‘minds’. At each level this basic cosmic rule expresses itself differently, depending on which emergent context it is expressed.
The basic rule I’m referring to goes something like this: Every unit of ‘existence’, at whatever level of complexity, resists its own destruction.
There are a gazillion ways in which to interpret and apply, from case to case, the terms ‘resistance’ and ‘destruction’, but I hope you get the gist. ‘Human survival’ is just one variation upon that theme, albeit one that’s very close to our hearts and concerns. Also the rule sometimes has non-obvious consequences; like that some UOEs (Units of Existence) actually appear to behave in such a way as not to be following this rule. That’s because the rule, like all rules, is ultimately statistical. Every damn thing in this cosmos is statistical.
Also, like many apparently simple rules, it can give rise to complex emergent phenomena that lead to its negation in certain circumstances. That’s why engineers, and especially software engineers, should know that ‘bug-free’ systems simply don’t happen!
Back to our own lives and the grim reality of existence, which doesn’t include any definite cosmic prescriptions, except that we usually really don’t want to be snuffed out.
But whether we actually manage to ‘make it so’ for ourselves; now that’s a completely different questions. What we actually going to end up becoming as a result of wanting to make it so, is a matter of natural contingency and our choices. Those choices, in order for them to be ‘choices’ worthy of the appellation, must include the option not to be like what some—maybe many; maybe even everybody else!—think we’re supposed to be like.
And, let us not forget that the choice to be ‘good’ is not by any means the ‘natural’ one; nor is it in any way obvious that it ‘ought to’ be made. Also, what is ‘good’ is likely to depend, as always, on an individual’s context. In situations where two differing and conflicting interpretations of ‘good’ are present, conflict will arise, and there will always be a time when ‘reason’ will suggest that violence is appropriate to resolve the conflict in one’s favor—unless, that is, the very notion of the possibility of violence has been excised from our brains and our range of possible choices. That’ll be the only way, because ‘reason’ does not just because it’s ‘reason’ exclude violence as an optional course of action, and quite possibly as the more sensible one.
A humanity robbed of its choice to do ‘wrong’…
Well, if that’s what ‘post’-humanity is all about, then ask yourself: is that really what you want—for yourself and your descendants? Is that what you’d want us to develop into?
If this is the narrative that we, as Emortalists (or whatever we choose to call ourselves), serve up to the rest of the world, it’s not a good or useful one; if for no other reason but that people aren’t going to take it seriously. Salvation and Paradise-on-Earth in one’s lifetime, even if it’s a long lifetime, is actually beyond the scope of most people’s imaginations, simply because what they have now, their current experience of life, is utterly different. It’s easy to concoct and even believe tales of Heaven-After-Life, because by relocating everything into another, incomprehensible realm it becomes conceptually manageable. It’s ‘here’ now and ‘there’ sometime after the ‘now’ is over and done with. But to cross the experientially conditioned narrative of their existence with that of a Paradisiacal Utopia is, for most, just too hard to swallow. It sounds like fiction, not likely fact. (And it is fiction, so the ordinary man’s intuition in that instance is on the mark!)
And, yes, the whole Heaven-After-Life is also fiction, but it’s fiction that becomes believable because nobody ever has to mix it with ‘real life’; except in the sense of using it as a guide for living, or patterns of narratives for thought and action. But that it should actually happen…that’s something completely different.
And, yes, some people will believe it. Of course they will. But ‘some’ isn’t enough. ‘Some’ also believe that the Earth is flat. ‘Some’ believe that UFOs will come and take them away to other worlds. ‘Some’ people believe that we never landed on the Moon. ‘Some’ believe any damn stupid thing.
But these ‘some’ are aberrations, and Emortalism isn’t meant to be just an aberration, but a pervasive phenomenon benefiting all humankind. The Emortalist narrative isn’t meant for ‘some’. If the enterprise is to succeed, it must become the narrative of most. Meaning that the story’s got to be told in such a way that it can become integral to the fabric of our species’ stories.
What people need to be able to tell themselves isn’t necessarily that the future will be all good and bright, but first of all that there will be a future for us. That ‘evil’ should still be with us, is much more credible than that it should have been erased. Indeed, I wonder, if for most the very notion that there should only be ‘good’—as absurd as the notion is in principle—doesn’t actually occasion a certain repugnance and gut-level rejection. The thing is, you see, if everybody is basically ‘good’, when in what way can you ever improve or ‘be better’? For these things are always measured against a social standard, against what others are. And so, what have we in a ‘good’ world? What happens to our development? Our notion that we can do something to… Well, what? What are we to do, to strive for, to develop into, to become if we’re placed in a position where we’re basically ‘flat-lining’? If all’s well with our world, everything becomes dull and pointless.
People know this, I think. It’s fundamental to the human narrative. I suspect that it is, at heart, what really drives everything: that we are not only imperfect, but that we are very far from even reaching the asymptotic part of the approaching-perfection curve. Tell people a story that claims otherwise and it’ll remain fiction to them.
Another tale that will remain fiction will do so because it’s just dumb and reeks of hypocrisy. We need to get this straight, though I have no idea how. Disposing of the silly more-than-human fiction is simple by comparison.
Remember those question I asked in the chapter titled ‘Where are the Emortals?’
I suspect that most of you glossed over them, dismissing them as thought games that were either inherently irrelevant or definitely irrelevant to you. When I say ‘you’, I assume, of course, that you’re an Emortalist of sorts already. If you’re not, you might have considered the questions more seriously, either to put you off Emortalism, or else to use as ammunition against it—whatever your dispositions and inclinations happen to be.
Well, we’re going to come back to them now, because we’re going to deal with hypocrisy.
The more astute ones among you might have figured out that the questions were really quite different questions in drag; and the real ones go something like this—and, yes, I know, this is going to be very long-winded; so shoot me:
Suppose that there were a way to achieve the Emortalist project—the introduction of significant life-extension to begin with, and Emortality in due course and by implication and the achievement of biological ‘escape velocity’—without doing this ‘openly’, as it is currently being done. Suppose we—meaning those of us who want to live indefinitely long—could achieve Emortality without having to rely on the, very public and essentially open and democratic, work being done by private and academic researchers all over the world. Suppose ‘we’ could benefit from such non-public research, but those benighted people who don’t know about it, can’t. However, it would be up to ‘us’ to keep mum about it.
That would mean, of course, that a lot of the problems associated with the introduction of Emortalism would go away. No overpopulation, no social strife, none of the grim scenarios I alluded to earlier in this book. The rest of the world would continue on its merry course, with the rest of humanity none the wiser, though many probably living better lives anyway, because moderate life-extension and better health and all that would continue to develop and spread. Not Emortality though. At least not initially. Maybe later…
Suppose that this were an possible course of action.
Should ‘we’ choose to take it?
Or not?
This is, of course, just an extension of the scale of the questions I asked earlier; but now we’re not talking about just you hiding things from your loved ones—because you can take them with you in this scenario—but about a whole group of people hiding something from everybody else.
And, by the way, never mind the implausibility of keeping this secret, for there’s always someone who can’t keep his mouth shut, or being able to implement it without the current levels of ‘public’ research and development. This is after all a thought experiment.
But suppose, just for the sake of the argument, that this could be done…
The important point here is that, yes, you and anybody you care to choose, can become Emortals, but not everyone will. Your own survival—the desire for which originally prompted you into becoming an Emortalist to begin with!—will be fulfilled, without the pesky consequences associated with the fact that, as things stand now, either everybody knows about it and becomes a potential Emortal or nobody will. You don’t have to get old and die. Neither do your spouse and children, or whoever you happen to care about. Your choice. But your neighbor…well, that’s a different question. Again though: your choice. ‘You’ in this case being plural.
In practical terms, keeping mum is not going to make a big difference in your lives for a long time. The world around will muddle on pretty much as it has, but without the upheavals likely if everybody did know about this thing.
In fact, you would be doing the world a favor in many ways. And you are certainly not doing anybody any harm. If anything, you won’t be a burden on he health system anymore, and you are probably going to turn into considerably more useful persons, now that you have a lot of years to look forward to, rather than the measly few decades you would have had. So, that’s all good. And you got what you wanted!
Guilt? Well, yes, there’s that. But about what? Not telling? Not causing your society to break into chaos? Remember the stock market upheavals and economic recessions and suffering; prompted by causes far more trivial than something like widespread Emortalism coming along? Would you want to be the cause for starting something much worse as those huge parts of the economy relying of people’s predictable deaths collapse overnight?
In due course, after all, Emortality will become widespread and pervasive. It cannot be kept a secret forever, because that’s not he way things work. Nor should it be. Eventually. But just not right now.
Now to the Immortalist/Transhumanist narrative, which basically goes like this:
“We will not accept that kind of scenario. We want to save the untold millions dying every month. Everybody should have this, and we’ll make sure everybody does. A.S.A.P.”
The hypocrisy of the narrative is that the vast majority—not everybody, but 99.9+%—telling and promoting it would do the exact opposite and accept the deal I offered above.
Why?
Because they’re human, that’s why. And because, despite the domestication of the “I-don’t-want-to-die” narrative, they really, really just don’t want to die. Because with the near-infinite human capacity for rationalization of that which is desired, thus making it kind-of objectively good, sensible and reasonable, they’ll find a way to rationalize away their previously held high-moral-ground stances.
Besides, they’re only liars if they know they’re not telling the truth; and it’s probably true to say that much of the lying is done to themselves—in terms of denial of the truth. And the truth must be denied; a classic case of making the best out of what appears unavoidable. Thing is, if this tale weren’t used as the stock-Emortalist narrative, then there’ would be no tale to tell and nothing to use as a focus to promote the cause, as it were. The only way to sell it to everybody is to say “we want it for all of you”, and that is also the only way to make it become real, because it provides a rallying point, a thread, a spine.
So, what was the point of me exposing all this to the ugly light of day? Why not just leave the narrative alone, instead of exposing it for a canard. Sometimes, maybe the truth is not best.
Well, maybe, but to Emortalists—incarnated as ‘Immortalists/Transhumanists’—I say this: You can’t afford hypocrisy, at least not to yourselves. You can’t afford living in denial of what’s real and true, especially about yourselves and your motivations and why you’re doing all this.
Recognize the promotional narrative for what it is: a tool to get the job done. But don’t succumb to your own fiction. Accept that your grand mission with regards to Emortalism isn’t really so grandiose at all, but is primarily about your own self-preservation; and, if you’re fortunate enough to have such people in your life, of those you care about. The same applies to just about every Emortalist you come across. That’s why people become Emortalists to begin with: because they don’t want to die; because they, too, have night-terrors when they wake up at some early pre-dawn hour and lie there and get a glimpse of what it means that one day they’ll die and be no more; because even those who have ‘religion’ are not exempt from experiencing at least a glimpse of the horror of the prospect of the precious narrative of their lives just…ending. If they don’t suffer these terrors, and if they’re just in this as an alternative to religion or whatever—as some surely are—well, what can I say. Variety and the spice of life. Personally, I will never understand such people. Emortalism needs to come from the heart and the soul and the gut, or else it’s just vapid nonsense and ‘just another’ bit of ideological BS.
For those who have felt the touch of death-consciousness (and why else would they have come to Em/Immortalism?), the ‘mission’ is not about ‘saving humanity’; making them into more than they are now; making the world a better place; saving the planet; becoming some creature whose shape and nature we can’t even being to understand and which many of us would probably find repugnant and off-putting. All of those things, or none, may happen in consequence of the Emortalist project succeeding. ‘May’—not ‘should’ or ‘will’. For maybe what will really happen could be something completely different and unforeseen. The future has always been resistant to precise analysis and prediction.
The ‘mission’ is about survival.
The ‘mission’ is about not dying.
That’s what it’s really always been about anyway. That’s what all our science ultimately has always been all about. Because we are creatures evolved with a built-in narrative that threads through all other built-ins: Survival; avoidance of reverting to ‘not-being’, the state we were in before being conceived and born. We are not in that state once we’re alive, and one could almost say that the essence of ‘aliveness’ is the existence of the ‘survival’ narrative. It does not matter that, once we’re dead, we won’t care anymore. So, one might argue, why give damn? I’ve had this kind of argument with many people. My answer has always been the same: I care, and it matters because right now I am not dead and I choose not to want to be dead. Whether I continue to care once I am no more, is not a factor in the equation. It also doesn’t matter that once I was not: before I was conceived, or before some critical point in my in-womb development that constitutes the dividing line between ‘being’ and ‘not being’. None of this is important. In terms of ‘justification’ of my existence, the past before-being is as irrelevant as the future-after-being.
Survival is the central tale of the Emortalist project. Everything else is optional. To make ‘survival’ into a mere component of some wider Utopian project, as Transhumanists are prone to doing, dilutes the power of that narrative. The philosophical sophistication introduced to the subject by the likes of Nick Bostrom, while lending it profundity, also deflates and dulls the narrative’s raw urgency and degrades its impact. Harrington’s Immortalist had just about all the sophistication required to enhance and channel the story’s innate energy. Anything more is useless ballast.
The flattening of the Emortalist narrative’s emotional energy is the direct consequence of the denialist hypocrisy of the Immortalists/Transhumanists, who would like it all wrapped up in some suitably respectable ethical framework. I would like to suggest that they drop the pretense and get back to what’s really behind it all; without apology and without the need for extensive justification but the one that’s true: “I don’t want to die.” (I know this ain’t gonna happen, but I no harm in suggesting it.)
Wouldn’t that return us to selfishness and all the wrong motives for wanting this? Isn’t the whole Transhumanist/Utopianist philosophy necessary to remind of why we really should be doing this?
Well, no—to both questions.
We’re still playing at it (the selfish thing) anyway, with the all the original basically me-me-me motives; they’re just covered up with layers of hypocrisy. And there are no reasons why we ‘should’ really do it for any other reason, except the one and only: because we don’t want to die, and death really and truly sucks.
Does that mean that this is likely to make Immortalists/Emortalists into people less likely to care about what happens to the world as it faces the realization of Emortalism?
I don’t think so. Indeed, the contrary is likely to be true. Someone who realizes that the fulfillment of his or her desires is contingent on this actually working out on the large scale, is much more likely to throw their weight behind making it come out all right than Utopian idealists, who are forgetting that it’s not about the grand distant better future, but about everybody living for long enough to get there to begin with.
It’s not a bad thing to be truthful; to admit that, yes, one wants this so much that one would accept the gift, even if billions aren’t going to get it. There’s nothing wrong with wanting it that much—not unless it’s at the actual cost of other lives, over and above the cost to others implicit in your existence already. But, now that you’ve admitted just how much you want it, has come the time to make some serious decisions regarding what price you’re willing to pay, in terms of personal inconvenience and sacrifice, to get it and keep it. If you want it badly enough …
This is the story wannabe Emortalists have to tell: to others and among each other. And they have to admit to this desire and its strength and how it drives them and drives them…as it drives everybody, only that some get more passionate about things than others. Emortalist newbies usually come into the fold because of this, and many of them are very, very much just afraid of dying, self-centered, uniopic and often fervent to the point of fanaticism.
Some never get beyond this. They just want stuff for themselves: more fun, more games, more ‘interesting things’ to do, greater self-realization, yada yada yada. This juvenile attitude is pretty much par for the course. Just because people want to live forever, doesn’t mean they’re any more perceptive or intelligent or responsible than your average Ephemeral. Actually, they aren’t. They’re just selfish, juvenile and scared; stuck, as most Ephemeral adults are, in the maturity state of a mid-teen and the reality-state of a life-whipped grown-up.
Others discovering their fear of death and drifting into an Immortalist harbor soon adopt the bits or all of the framework of Transhumanist-related philosophy, because it provides for them what the likes of me have been struggling to come to terms with for decades: a good reason why it’s all right to want this; why it doesn’t make you into a selfish git. Or some reason to pursue it at all—beyond “I don’t want to die”, which for many after a while of turns out to be not quite enough of a justification. It is the real and only reason, of course, but having a nice ethical framework to justify it is an excellent crutch.
These people often become missionaries, focusing on proselytizing for a ‘better world’ and wasting much of their time thinking and talking and often agonizing about what the world could be like, and what they could be like and would like to be like. They concoct these endless, fruitless narratives, none of them with a shred of evidence to suggest that they make any sense whatsoever, about what lies beyond the horizon—all the while forgetting to create those that’ll navigate us through the treacherous reefs lying immediately ahead. All these narratives are really for themselves, of course; but it looks so much better if they’re meant to appear universal and full of pseudo-general-profundity.
Sitting there, spinning useless tales, philosophizing vapid philosophies, pretending that with all this they’re actually doing something for ‘the cause’, when in truth they’re just…what?
I find it difficult to figure out just what they’re doing. Being Ephemerals, I guess; with Ephemeral mindsets; afraid of dying; pissed off at it and the unfairness of the universe; waiting for someone to fix this thing for them; pissed off at anybody who doesn’t agree with them; thinking that just because they support ‘the cause’ they’re actually doing something to advance it. Looking down on Ephemerals, when really they’re just looking down on themselves.
Are they thinking of doing this like forever? Or is it that they think that, if only this death thing were solved and off their backs, they could finally become better people, because life would just be so much peachier? Is there really any difference between these people and others who keep hoping for that big Lotto win before they start living? Like those who always wait around for their ‘big break’? If only…
In the little Franz Kafka tale ‘Before the Law’, man comes to a great door seeking the Law. The door is open, but the Gatekeeper tells him he isn’t allowed to enter at that moment. “It is possible, but not now,” he tells the man. The man tries to peer inside the door and see what’s there. The Gatekeeper tells him: “If you are so much tempted, try to enter—despite of my prohibition. But know that I am powerful. And I am only the first and least significant gatekeeper. Before each room beyond stand gatekeepers, and each is more powerful than the one before. Myself, I cannot even bear even one glimpse of the third.”
The man seeking the Law decides to wait around until the situation changes, so he can get to the Law. Occasionally he tries to bribe the Gatekeeper, who accepts the gifts, but remains unyielding. They also have lots of conversations, during which the Gatekeeper imparts much wisdom to the man. But the man does not seem to benefit much from all that, and indeed he becomes more petulant and childish as time goes on. He forgets about all the other Gatekeepers waiting beyond this one, and instead focuses his sense of being unfairly treated on the one immediately before him.
In this manner, the man waits for all his life—as does the gatekeeper, barring that gate. Finally, at the point of dying, the man asks the Gatekeeper why it is that nobody else came along during all this time to get to the Law. Everybody wants it; so why didn’t anybody try to go through that door?
That’s because, the Gatekeeper tells him, the door he guards was only meant for this man alone—and once he is dead, it will be closed forever.
The theme of this story was picked up, inter alia, in the Seinfeld episode ‘The Chinese Restaurant’, and also in the movie ‘Stardust’. In the latter, the outcome was very different to Kafka and Seinfeld though. Instead of paying heed to the Gatekeeper’s refusal-to-allow-access (in this instance to the ‘Land beyond the Wall’), the man in question tricked the Gatekeeper into believing that he had given up and, when the Gatekeeper’s attention was diverted, sprinted around him and through the break in the Wall. What he found there was both exhilarating and scary, and had major consequences from himself and others. Years later, his son, who was one of those ‘consequences’, had to face a much more cunning and forewarned Gatekeeper; but that didn’t stop him from trying—though ultimately success was achieved not by passing through the break in the Wall, but by another ‘consequence’ of his father’s original actions, which turned out to be of immense significance in other ways as well.
‘Stardust’, originally penned by Neil Gaiman and adapted for the screen with his assistance, is in the format, if you will, of a fairytale, but it’s also so much more, with its many levels of allusion and meaning.
For Immortalists and Transhumanists and their ilk—as well as for the myriad of those wannabe Immortalists-in-waiting—the story, especially when taken together with Kafka’s tale, holds important lessons. It is one of those narratives representing the spirit of the narratives we should be telling; rather than sitting around moping and thinking weighty thoughts about Utopias and Trans- and Posthumanist futures.
Way I see it, the only people who are doing anything worthwhile and actually the only ones doing anything at all, are scientists. Many of them don’t even know what they’re doing, but there they are, beavering away at the age-old and venerable human enterprise of survival; of our version of the cosmic law I talked about before. Some of them do the pit-face work in their labs, while others, like de Grey and Fossel, try to put all these precious facts together, to see the patterns underlying them and maybe use them to finally solve humankind’s oldest problem. Those are the good guys.
The rest…well, for all I can see, they mostly sit around and talk. A few of them, like David Brin, act as ‘consultants’ to help others in the real world with practical issues, but these people are few and far between—and even here I get a sense that the real issue isn’t being addressed; unless someone actually is doing it, but nobody’s talking about it. Maybe someone in some of the governments of the world is thinking hard about the consequences of impending widespread life-extension, but I have an uneasy sense that it’s more about how to prevent this from happening than the opposite. Which is, you must admit, curious, given that these people are human, too, and you’d expect them to have a sense of their own mortality. Or maybe they are really to detached from what is real and going on in their own heads—too full of religious, ideological or just general BS—that they actually believe they’re doing what they should be doing; and never mind that they, too, will go down the drain with everybody else into personal oblivion.
I really don’t know. Not being inclined to conspiracy-theorizing, I think it’s all basically cock-ups, not careful planning and plotting. Still, I could be wrong. It’s happened.
One of the reasons why I have kept myself apart from the Immortalist/Transhumanist ‘movement’ is that every time I explore the groups that are around, mainly on the internet, I find nothing to resonate with my concerns and what I consider essential to make this work. I go back and have a poke around periodically, but it’s always the same old story. Been like that for as long as…well, basically forever, only years back these people were mostly on the loony fringe, and many actually were outright weirdos. Nowadays they’re almost respectable, but their basic characteristics have changed little. They just more respectable because the whole longevity thing isn’t quite as outré anymore.
It looks like, apart from a few with a sense of ‘mission’ and a desire to found organizations that ‘do’ things—whatever those are, and there’s nothing to suggest they have a clue of what they ought to be doing!—everybody who isn’t a scientist suffers from a sense of futility and the basic uselessness of their own involvement in the grand indefinite-lifespans project. They cover it up by pretending to being some kind of part of it, by signing up to organizations of this kind or that and thinking that that’ll make a difference. It’s a bit like giving to a charity helping those suffering in Dafur and thinking it’s going to change anything.
Only way to do something is to go out there and do it. Standing before the gate and arguing with the Gatekeeper is worse than stupid. Great deeds are accomplished by people doing things; not by them waiting until others do them for them.
Still, the grim truth is that only a small percentage of the members of any group will actually be proactive, rather than reactive. Most of them will be followers—though in many instances they’ll demand ‘a say’; but they usually want it without being willing to accept responsibility and work. The whole ‘movement’ is like this. Which means that it’s probably futile, this appeal of mine, to have everybody get off their butts and stop philosophizing and wondering and asking the Gatekeeper dumb-ass questions and waiting and waiting and waiting, hoping that things will change. The thing is that what lies beyond that first gate is going to be a doozy of a problem, and if people can’t even get themselves to move and defy the first Gatekeeper’s injunctions, how are they ever going to tackle the next one?
Still, there actually is no excuse for anybody who dares called themselves ‘Immortalist’, ‘Prolongevist’ or, my personal catch-all term, ‘Emortalist’ to sit on their behinds and do nothing, even if they’re not scientists! They need not just skulk around the internet or other fora of the like-minded.
But first they need to change their narratives, starting with their personal ones, which should have the premise “I can actually do something useful.”
Next come the narratives presented to the world, which have to change from the current flat-lining Utopian BS that being peddled. People living here and now by and large aren’t interested in Utopias or even ‘futures’ in general, because most people lack a decent imagination—and whatever imagination they might have possessed is being leached from them through an ever less diverse ecosystem of narrative stimulants, served up through the electronic media.
I know, people think it’s just the opposite, but that’s probably the most insidious and widespread urban myth extant.
What people do, however, understand is the basic thing of not wanting to die. At the same time they really can’t conceive of anything else, because ‘death’ has been the standard ending to every ‘life’ story. Maybe some religions added reincarnation, but every reincarnation still ends in death. The rest of them offer either pie-in-the-sky heavens or dismal hells. Others offer variations on the ‘Hades’ theme. But these are not ‘life’ narratives anymore. All life narratives end in death. Which means that, despite the dreadfulness of it all, it’s also comforting in a twisted kind of way.
Long before Alan Harrington referred to our desire to become gods, Erich Kästner, the uncredited author who wrote the script for the 1943 Baron Münchhausen movie, made the Baron state at the end, that his immortal state left him in a kind of semi-existence: half-human and half-god. What he really wanted, however, was not half-ness but being one of those two completely. Since god-hood was not really an option, he chose human-ness and the woman he loved. And so, entirely by his own choice, he surrendered his immortality and thus became fully just-human again.
These lines express a very profound wisdom, and here, in a sense of closure, I want to come back to the equally profound wisdom of Absurdist philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of choice and action as the deciding elements in the judgment of all things human.
You see, trying to sell people Transhumanism and Utopia is futile to the point of ‘stupid’. That’s because most people either can’t grasp it or simply aren’t really interested in what lies too far beyond tomorrow—or both. When I say ‘most’, I’m being kind. My guess is that, without wanting to put numbers to it, ‘almost all’ is far more in line with the reality of human nature. And it is my experience that those who are interested and capable of thinking about such things, tend to be dismally incapable of considering the immediate and practical. Somehow these things don't seem to want to cohabit in the same brain. Search me why!
If selling Utopias and futures to people are futile, there is something that can be sold, and let me try to make you understand why ‘choice’ is this thing.
So, you wake up in the morning. A new day. Rarely do even those interested in longevity at this highly symbolic instant stop to ponder the beautiful ordinariness of this moment. Instead they probably moan and groan, silently or vocally, about the day they’re going to face. Rarely do they just pause to consider that they might not have woken up at all; that when they went to bed it might have well have been their last time ever to do so. And as the day goes on, even less often does anybody consider than any action could be the last time they perform it or anything similar.
Being alive is an ordinary state for those who are alive; well, most of them anyway.
But it could be different. Where they are now, and where they are doing what they are doing…well, they might not be there anymore. And one day they won’t be; not from choice but because that’s the way the cookies crumble. Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall. The last dumb-ass question to the Gatekeeper. Curtains.
Maybe I’m just a freak of nature, but I am aware of this, and have been for as long as I can remember. And I have cultivated this awareness, because it keeps me on my toes and reminds me of what’s important and what isn’t. Nowadays it’s like breathing and my heart beating, or doing daily chores or whatever else there is that’s ‘ordinary’.
And what I know from myself is that the one and only tale I can believe is not the one that tells me that I’m going to be an Immortal and never die. Even for someone of my imaginative capacity—and I have a lot of that; no point denying it; that’s why I tell stories—that narrative actually fails to grab me. I guess, I just don’t have the religioid capacity or inclination required for it.
But I do get the ‘choice’ thing, and judging from the people I’ve talked to about this—all non-longevity folk—it’s something they would buy much easier.
“Well, supposing you did have a choice. Not committing yourself to living forever, but at least choosing if you want a few more years or not…”
That’s not living a most inconceivable half-human-half-god existence, but just having been given the power of choosing this one thing. It means not having to live with the niggling notion—somewhere in the dark corners of your mind when the awareness comes to the fore more than it usually does—that one day you might not have this precious ordinariness anymore, and you’ll just be…gone.
To sell this, make people believe that you’re not trying to plug the Emortalist line, and drop it cunningly into some suitably-angled conversation. Works like a charm. And in my novels, especially the Tethys series—where the theme is everywhere, mixed in with adventure and romance and political shenanigans and murder and bloodshed and the usual complement of good rattling stories—I’ve yet to hear a reader complain about the subject’s presence in the stories. Actually, talking about my work to people is usually a good place to bring up the subject—casually, mind you; very casually.
I am convinced that the “give people a choice” narrative is infinitely more grabbing and success-promising that all the Utopian and Transhumanist BS. People aren’t interested in this kind of academia-speak. It sounds elitist and grand and hoity-toity—and it is!
But that’s not what a human life is all about! Human life is about ‘living’, and part of improving the basic conditions associated with said ‘living’ would be to have a choice as to whether one lives or dies; about not writing the same dumb-ass ending under every life-story, but allowing the individual to have a say in how the end is written and when it is placed. Something else maybe than the dismally pathetic down-endings we are faced with every day, but whose existence we do our best to deny.
Choice is what we really want—and if we don’t want to choose…well, we’d like that choice, too—and by not making a choice we still make one.
So, in the end I must disagree with Alan Harrington, no matter my profound gratitude to the man for having wrenched my life into a new direction 30+ years ago. It’s not about humans becoming gods, because we don’t really believe that we can, nor do I think we actually want to. (And if you think that you do want it and that I’m just talking through a hole in my head—well, maybe I’m just too ordinary a person to compete with the likes of you.)
It’s about something much more basic, something that evidences just how profoundly we are connected, even in ‘mind’, to the basic laws of the cosmos, and in particular the one about the resistance of any object to its own destruction.
People understand that, at a level far more profound than anything else we can really appreciate. It’s possibly our most basic narrative, because every other is built on it. All we really need to do is go out and make this implicit narrative explicit; without covering it up and sanitizing it. And, let’s face it, when presented properly, it can be gripping and imagination stimulating. Because presenting people with ‘choice’ is also one of the ways to stimulate their ‘hope’, and to make them believe that they have at least one reason to hope.
Those of us who know what you might call ‘the truth’ about the situation, will, of course, realize that ultimately it will leave humans in the demi-godly state, and that will in due course create its own problems with some Gatekeeper a few rooms down the track. But that is for us to know and not to tell. Not now. Not until the time is right; until people have been given enough courage to go through that first door.
And those who don’t…well, some people will never find the courage to take thought, desire, imagining and planning into ‘action’. And that, too, is as it should be…because that’s just the way it is. Should we drag them after us through the door, whether they want to or not?
You go figure it out.
To finish:
After all this beating up on folks, it will be asked, quite rightly so, what I am doing to advance the Emortalist project. After all, talk is cheap. Actions are a different matter. And hypocrisy is when you say one thing and do another.
So, what about me? And, yes, sorry for bringing ‘me’ into this, but someone’s going to point a finger and say accusingly “And what are you doing?” Which is fair enough, because I’ve just pointed a lot of accusing fingers!
Well, in terms of real science I also can do only little to nothing. I just don’t know enough about the relevant fields to contribute significantly. I may have my own ideas, but their utility is questionable, even to my own critical self-inspection; and this would be even more so, if I broached said ideas to those who’d consider themselves much more expert at such matters.
“Man’s gotta know his limitations”, and all that. Nothing wrong with limitations, for we all have them. It’s part of that being-human thing.
But I do have science degrees (physics/biophysics and cognitive science) and I have spent more than 20 years working in what’s called ‘IT’, most recently for several years as a technical writer; which basically means that it’s my job to explain things to people. I also write stories—novels and screenplays—and have even made a feature-length movie.
Oh, and I’ve been an Emortalist like forever.
Like others I’ve often asked myself “What can I do?” to help this enterprise along? The answer was often frustrating, because the utility of doing anything except scientific/biomedical research and technology development is not obvious.
In the end I decided to use what talent I discovered I have; which is telling stories. And, from what you’ve read above, you may appreciate that this isn’t a bagatelle. I don’t want to get into the whole technical and social thing about story-telling, though it would fill another booklet like this one.
But stories aimed at large audiences can be very powerful and change things. It’s not that the pen is mightier than the sword—only in the minds of pen-wielders is it that!—but that a good story has the power to move people to do big things. As an Absurdist, it’s perhaps ironic that I bring up the Bible as an example, but there you have it. Mostly fiction and awfully written, but there you have billions using it to guide their lives. Or take something else, a bit more modern ‘pop’, like Star Trek or Star Wars. Huge numbers of people today think very differently about life and the universe and everything to what they would have, if it hadn’t been for ST and SW. Literally everybody in Western culture—even many of those whose native tongue is not English—knows the wink-wink when someone says “Beam me up!” (even without the 'Scotty’ at the end) or refers to a ‘Jedi Mind Trick’.
I try to tell stories that will appeal to large audiences, and which prepare them mentally for the things they’ll have to deal with in the near future. I do this by telling tales that are set in the far future—well, just over 1000 years—and on faraway places, but those places, at their core, mirror the familiar. They aren’t necessarily mirror images, but they contain elements of ‘life’ and everyday circumstances and, if you will, ‘decision-space’ mirrors of people.
Of course, not everybody is into SF&F, but I can’t help that. If you talk about anything to do with longevity and the future you invariably end up with SF. I tried something more contemporary once, but found that this also ended us SF-ish; so I told myself that I might as well bite the SF&F bullet and never mind the snooty way in which the literati look down upon the genre. Steve Perry has tried, with Immune Response, to be as un-SF-ish as possible, but his is the closest straight-down-the-middle tale with the requisite dash of science and no SF&F frills and ploys that I know of.
My personal task, self-appointed, is—apart from writing the next sequel in the Tethys series, which will delve even deeper into Emortalist issues—to promote my work enough so that more people get to read it. I dislike doing it, because it looks like I’m promoting myself. Still, this is a world of shameless self-aggrandizement and promotion, and I may have to bite that bullet, too. It sucks.
The bottom line, with my own case as an example, is that we can all do something, no matter how apparently small. And everybody involved in the ‘movement’ can. And it can be useful. Just exactly ‘what’, I do not know. Depends on who you are and what you ‘do’. But I think that starting with doing what’s possible, in whatever way that may be, to communicate actively with people who are not ‘on-board’—rather than the already-converted—is an excellent beginning.
And, to all the Immortalists/Transhumanists with their symposia and academic chats and books and movies and internet sites and high-flying thoughts I say: your promotional skills suck! Sorry, but that’s the only way to say it. It’ll look cool to the converted, but those standing apart will, by and large, be untouched. Recruiting Ephemerals into the Emortal camp is not a job for amateurs.
Look at how the pros do it! They succeed selling just about anything, useful and utterly useless, for good reasons. ‘Persuasion’ is an art-form and a skill, and nor something that one just ‘does’.
To those to feel too powerless to do anything about ‘doing’ things: Feel better just talking to those who think like you? Want to just ‘share’ in the warm sentiments and companionship of a like-minded ‘community’?
Well, it’s not about feeling better. It’s about survival, and if we want to make this work, we need many, many more people on-board and ready-to-go when it happens. Not thousands either. We need millions—and that’s just to start the ball rolling.
Think about that.
And that's the end, folks.