The quest to control the input into our own consciousness is probably thousands of years old. We all have our ways of trying to backburner the unpleasantries of life while maximizing the good bits. My brother and I shared a coffee on his deck last week, and we talked about a friend whose way of dealing with things he doesn’t like, even in adulthood, is simply to refuse to acknowledge them. “I don’t think about that,” he’ll say.
If you have no distracting technology to aid you, I suppose affected stoicism or denial are the best available refuges from truth, if a tad primitive.
Content Management
If you are looking to manage the content of your own head today, there are plenty of options available. Last week, we mulled over a Simplicius post entitled “Synthworld Apostasy” in which he talked about Elon Musk’s developing Neuralink technology: a computer plugged directly into the human brain. Today, users control videogames without a keyboard. Tomorrow, maybe we can cure blindness. Simplicius writes, “Whether we like it or not, society will progressively digitize to the point where realities may become entirely subjective”, in effect allowing man to inhabit his own dreams.
I questioned the inevitability of this “convergence” in last week’s post. I certainly question the likelihood of its universality. Human societies simply do not distribute things they perceive to be of great value quite so democratically. They never have, and they never will.
The Last Great Burning Question
Simplicius went on to talk about “humanity’s last great burning question” and the possibility of replacing faith with fantasy. This is where we Christians come in, so let’s give his thought experiment some consideration. It’s not quite as far out as it used to be.
“Advance [progressive digitization] far enough, and we come to humanity’s last great burning question: If the simulation reaches a point of total convergence with reality, wherein it is no longer possible to distinguish the two, then does existing in such a state likewise become morally and spiritually tantamount to what was formerly known as physical, corporeal ‘life’?
Think about it this way: if God, who is said to have created everything, rewards us for our service to Him by apportioning us some slice of Heaven at his side, and if technology advances far enough where virtually no limit exists to the types of eternally euphoric states we can occupy in our jacked-in virtua-worlds, then does there come a point at which earthly religion, and by extension all our earthly ‘spiritual’ pursuits, simply obsolesces? If technology can advance to the point of total surrogacy of innate reality in every way, shape, and form, then would our previous religious experience or spiritual progression retain meaning any longer?
What can your God give you that the jacked-in synth experience dialed up to its fullest expression cannot? Immortality you say, as the after life is immortal, and this our telluric realm, lamentably, is not. But take the hypothetical to its full conclusion, which may very well be not too far off — even this century perhaps: technology at the level where we can ‘upload’ our consciousness into the etheric cloud, thereby ‘transfiguring ourselves’ into an immortal, all-pervasive state. At what point does that become indistinguishable from the biblical promises which have steered humanity for eons? What possible ‘meaning’ can religion have in such a state? What further nourishment can religion offer in the face of an indistinguishable, and perhaps even superior, facsimile?
You may split hairs and say that is not true immortality: even this distributed cloud ‘consciousness’ can be destroyed — whether by a fait accompli of foul play, or tragic accident. But everything is a matter of perspective: enough time elapses, and we can imagine a future where nanotech has refashioned our very cosmos into an ineradicable substrate of intelligence — a sort of universe-sized blockchain of consciousness, endlessly recursive, replicable, and persistent.
What then? What further argument could classical religion and spirituality have at that point?”
What Further Argument?
I don’t know that I make the best representative for “classical religion and spirituality”, but it seems to me the orthodox Christian faith has an answer at hand, perhaps more than one. In any case, it’s a good question, and asked quite respectfully for an unbeliever, so I’m happy to dignify it with a response. A synthetic religious experience, however emotionally powerful and convincing it might be, fails miserably in many ways to replace a genuine relationship with Jesus Christ. Let’s consider the most obvious three:
1/ Truth
I suspect Simplicius is right about one thing: if you offered the world an eternally euphoric state in a jacked-in virtua-world, billions of volunteers would line up to be first. Still, a stubborn subset of the population, not by any means limited to Christians, will always find the idea of artificial bliss repellent. The problem: by definition it’s not real. It’s not true. As fun and exciting as it might be to create your own virtual world and live in it, at some level we are all looking for meaning and purpose. These things do not self-create. You cannot wish them into existence, as humanity has discovered repeatedly throughout the course of history.
Blissful ignorance and distraction have their benefits, especially if you are in pain, but they provide no answers to the original problem of humanity. The fact that I might not be able to distinguish simulation from life does not do away with reality. It cannot change who I am at the core of my being. We are sinners, estranged from a God with whom we were designed to be in eternal, harmonious fellowship. Our whole being cries out for a solution to that problem, and it’s one no virtual nirvana can provide. None but Christ can satisfy. Even a being pumped full of bits and bytes of nano-distraction remains a being fundamentally out of synch with his own self, in need of a solution no intellectual, emotional or physical stimulus can ever provide, no matter how incredibly crafted.
We have been living for decades in a world that claims truth is both malleable and personal. As we look around at our sad, sorry fellow men and women who cannot even tell us which they are, Christians affirm that what subjectivity offers is not truth in any sense of the word. Self-delusion of this sort is a recipe for misery, envy and desperate, grasping need. Truth is external and divinely defined. All the virtual world offers man is a more convincing lie.
2/ Security
Simplicius recognizes a big potential problem with virtual immortality: things break. Yet he still tries to fantasize a scenario in which they won’t break just this once. “Enough time elapses,” he writes, “and we can imagine a future where nanotech has refashioned our very cosmos into an ineradicable substrate of intelligence — a sort of universe-sized blockchain of consciousness, endlessly recursive, replicable, and persistent.” Christians will recognize this formulation (“Enough time elapses”) as the same sort of wordspell by which our cosmos became untold billions and billions of years old in pursuit of a number less than infinity that would somehow render evolution by natural selection on planet Earth mathematically viable. It still wasn’t enough, and it won’t be in this instance either.
Our super-intelligent speculator is reckoning without the interference of man’s worst enemy, the second law of thermodynamics. There is literally nothing since the fall of man that hasn’t been subject to degradation, decay, human incompetence and the physical laws of the universe as currently operating. That includes digitization. I’m sure Simplicius has heard of the fascinating phenomenon of “software entropy”. As time passes, the code in a stored program invariably becomes increasingly garbled. The Jargon File, a repository of hacker’s lore, says “bit rot” can occur over time even if nothing has changed, almost as if the bits of information that make up a program are subject to radioactive decay.
The idea that endless amounts of time and human ingenuity amplified by artificial intelligence will solve this problem for us is a fond wish in the absolute absence of evidence.
In Christian terms, we would say God always has the last laugh. He offers us immortality with no fine print. “What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.” Our security is not human ingenuity or the deceptive simplicity of ones and zeroes, but the power that raised Christ from the dead. What manufactured illusion can compete with that?
3/ Creativity
Man is made in God’s image. One of the implications of this truth is that we are creative beings. If we are not the only creative beings in our world, we are certainly the most obviously creative. The fact that we have reached the point of envisioning and manufacturing machines to plug into our own brains is ample evidence of this.
But man’s creativity is both flawed (by the fall) and limited (to be made in the image of God is not to be made God). The bounds of the virtual worlds that we create for ourselves must necessarily be those of our own imaginations or those of the human designers of our fantasies. While these may be vivid, spectacular, and emotionally compelling, they cannot possibly compete with what Paul writes in Corinthians: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.” The word of God plainly tells us what we have in Christ is beyond our wildest imaginations. No man, however intelligent or creative, could ever manufacture a competitive substitute.
Furthermore, man is fallen. There is a dark side to our creativity. We all know this. Teach us how to split the atom, and the next thing you know we are melting cities. Teach us how to network the planet to distribute knowledge electronically, and we turn it into the biggest and most easily accessible porn delivery system ever conceived. Teach us how to go to the moon, and we’ll somehow forget how we got there. There is a reason scripture reminds us, “Cursed is the man who trusts in man.”
Looking at the Tower of Babel under construction, God commented of his image-bearers creating it, “Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” Human ingenuity is amazing. But being able to do what would otherwise be impossible is only desirable if it leads to good rather than evil. Bounded, corrupted creativity is not the solution to the human condition, and it cannot compete with the plans and purposes of God for us.
Other Arguments
There are other arguments to be made against replacing faith with fantasy. In fact, the notion of trying to do so could only be conceived by someone who does not rightly understand religious experience or the nature of God. We were made for fellowship with our Creator, not an eternity of mental masturbation. We exist at and for God’s pleasure, not he for ours. Any question that begins with the words “What can your God give you?” has gotten off on the wrong foot. Our God can give us eternal, imperishable glory and endless satisfaction, but all that is a by-product of knowing him, not an end in itself.
It’s certainly not a destination we can ever get to on our own.
No comments :
Post a Comment