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    Marc Roux – To eternalize consciousness

    hyperion

    It is an idea that grates my mind for some fifteen years now, but it must have been there since the beginning of the world. Recently, I found it again in Plato,[1] Pascal,[2] Spinoza,[3] or Sartre[4] and finally in Michel Serres.[5] In the texts of a contemporary author like Dan Simmons, it becomes a divine artificial intelligence (Hyperion). For Jean-Michel Truong, it becomes “The creature” (Le Successeur de Pierre, Totalement inhumaine)…

    [Read the French language version]


    The idea that “the spirits of the ancestors” even “the psyche”, are immortal and must be as ancient as religious or metaphysical thought. The idea, though, that a consciousness which is perceived as a simple epiphenomenon, stemming from the activity of substance, might touch eternity, seems newer.


    This idea then, I do not only see it confirmed in a stronger way in western thought, but I also see it epitomized, acquiring flesh and bone in technique.


    The eternalization of Consciousness can be accepted by most people as an essential perspective.


    I do not have space, here, to develop all the arguments that make me think that the eternalization of human consciousness is, perhaps, a crossroads where all the reasons of existence meet. I cannot but end up with an accumulation: to have children, to write books, to mark our name in History, to live some years longer, to discover a habitable planet outside the solar system, to merge our souls with Nirvana, to secure its salvation, to earn social recognition, to be successful, to lead, to be the best, to give our lives for the cause… All the motives that make a life, or one death, seem to me to emanate from the same, very human, obligation, against the anxiety that is born by the acrimonious consciousness of our mortal fate: the need to transcend our self, the need for sublimation.


    Shall I say that, in my opinion, this intimate obligation spread its roots in our deeper “nature”?


    I was impressed when I found out (if I got it right) that the basic process of the formation of memory (speech, consciousness) is congruent to that defining the being: again, identical, reproduction of a molecule and mutation, in other words reproduction and evolution.


    What then produces our consciousness belongs to the same class as what makes us live. Consciousness is nothing else but the most elaborate product of the alchemy of being. What is the reason of the existence of being, then, what is its nature? Spinoza: To insist.


    I suppose (and surely I am not the only one) that consciousness is the best way that evolution has discovered, up to now, in order to guarantee in the best manner the future of being.


    This is an opportunity to note that since it is well distributed among human creatures, it could also be useful as a pillar for the bridges that connect civilizations (European, Indian, and Chinese). The experience of the Cartesian cogito seems to me as a condition for universality. The sense that if we didn’t have the consciousness to perceive and comprehend human history, the latter would have no sense of existing could be just another factor.


    Therefore, consciousness can be considered as a driving force for the necessary sublimation and, at the same time, the best medium for its materialization.


    Humanity realizes, at this instant, that it has now acquired the means to make the eternalization of Consciousness possible.


    And, indeed, human beings, armed with their consciousness, their science, start to realize that, theoretically, they are in a position to prolong for a very long time the existence of their species, or at least of their consciousness.


    While they will be able to maintain the ecological, economic, sociological and political balances that are necessary (this should not be taken for granted), they will primarily be able to continue the perpetual search for knowledge and of the ever-growing control of the universe that surrounds them and of themselves.


    Technological progress, via a transhumanistic perspective, announces another type of evolution, like the one that Michel Serres called ‘Hominescence’. Through its own activity, the human being of tomorrow (or rather of the day after tomorrow) will no longer belong to the same family, perhaps not even to the same species, so much that we will actually hesitate to call it a human being.


    Since the human being evolves in a more and more “unnatural” environment, inhabited by machines and equipped with bionic extensions, with neurological implants, genetically transformed, attended by nanotechnology, permanently connected to the whole world and his life expectancy, with his sensory and mental abilities decupled, it will not look more like us than the homo sapiens to a Neanderthal.


    Evolution doesn’t stop here, though.


    If I accept the primal need for sublimation, then I can assume that the human being can chose, at some point in time, to give absolute priority to Consciousness. Because its survival will be more important than the human form of existence!


    Indeed, it is not unlikely that a day will come (distant, very distant) when the support which carries consciousness will be proved to be unsuitable. Which body would be able to escape from the solar system in order to cross interstellar, intergalactic distances? Which material support is going to face the long universes, the conditions of traveling near to the limits of the speed of light, to face the hostile environments outside our planet?


    I remind those two assumptions: In Dan Simmons’ (Hyperion), like in other works of S.F. as well, machines decide to sacrifice humanity to the eternalization of consciousness. In Jean-Michel Τruong’s Le Successeur de Pierre, humans themselves are sacrificed without remorse to the mineral Moloch of A.I.[6]


    I also observe, however, that in both occasions, the specific writers chose to end up with a note of hope, giving humanity a chance.


    Since, how is it possible that we are satisfied with those perspectives? Isn’t something going to revolt against this programmed extinction of humanity? But how can a humanistic ideal be reconciled with the eternal search for immortality?


    This is what I am trying to think about, for a long time.


    I am thinking that if I admit that, in order to allow the eternalization of Consciousness, in the long run, I will have to deal with a radical transformation of human “support”, or of the human “carrier”, and then that human beings, with the “arrogance of Prometheus”, will always want to maintain something essential, something which through the millennia and the transformations should make us able to at least talk about human consciousness or the human medium of Consciousness.


    So I pose this question to transhumanism or Humanism, in general: what do we think is essential? What do we want to bequeath without fail to the future generations, our “successors”? What will seal Consciousness with an indelible human sign?


    Is it, for example, our mortal fate? Is it our individuality, the attachment to the individual search for happiness? It is the arrogance that pushes us to provoke Gods and Time? I don’t know.


    On the contrary, what I do know, what I feel deeply inside of me, shining like the cogito, is that in order to have sense, the existence of Consciousness will not be enough. What will be required is that human Consciousness exists eternally.


    Notes

    [1] Plato, the flying float in Phaedra.

    [2] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, para. 230.

    [3] Baruch Spizona, Ethics (London: Wordsworth, 2001): “to insist in our Being”.

    [4] Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).

    [5] Michel Serres, Hominescence (Paris: Pommier, 2001), pp. 176-177: “Does the world need to know how to perpetuate itself?”

    [6] J-M Truong also expresses the following encouraging assumption: in the context of a material universe where entropy would condemn substance to fall apart in the vacuum for ever, a mineral material support would not be enough in order to secure the perpetuation of Consciousness. The latter should change its vehicle again and adopt radiation as a means of transport.


    Special issue: transhumanism
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