One of the most captivating films I've ever watched and watched, and watched, I think I've watched it six or seven times, is An Evening with Andre.
Two old friends meet at a restaurant, and this is the documentation of the dinner. They discuss the meaning of life, relationships, tidbits of gossip, and then delve deep into profound, most profound questions in philosophy. This is an amazing movie.
And this combination of intimacy, the intimacy of the individual on the one hand, coupled with the width and breadth and expanse of the universe and the way the world, reality, challenges us and we're struggling and have been struggling for thousands of years to come up with answers, which we would deem appropriate and satisfactory.
It's been a failure either two, but a glorious failure.
And so the other day, I've had an evening with R.
R is a friend of mine, not with Andre, but R.
And he asked me a series of questions that forced me to think were thought provoking.
And I want to share with you some of the things we have discussed and I did my best to try to respond to his questions realizing in the process how little we have come, how far we are as mankind, as humanity, how far we are from truly being able to rest on our laurels to say we've made it we found the answer this is it.
It's so far from it.
We started by discussing life and I told him that life is expressed in multiple forms.
There are bees and rats and human beings and human beings who are rats and you know.
And so there's so many life forms, millions and millions and millions of tens of millions of them.
Life is a cornucopia. It's an eruption, a celebration of variety and diversity and pluralism.
And so I think the relationship between life and its various forms is like the relationship between electricity and the devices and appliances powered by electricity.
I think life is the electricity and the various life forms are like the devices and appliances that we plug into the socket and get the juice. Life is the juice.
But I also think that life is a package deal.
I think that all life includes all the elements of life to varying degrees of course, varying intensities, but they're there.
Consciousness, emotions, cognitions, regulatory mechanisms, feedback loops, all these are there. All these elements are there.
So an insect or a plant would have consciousness, would have emotions and cognitions, would regulate itself, would rely on the environment for external regulation, would interact with the environment, via feedback loops, etc.
All these, it's the same for insects, for plants, for chimpanzees, for human beings, and even for politicians. It's all the same.
Life is a series of specs, specifications.
And the only difference between an insect and me, I think, is a question of degree.
I don't think there's any fundamental difference. I don't think I possess somethingthe insect does not.
I just think that the elements and ingredients and components of life are modulated.
So sometimes they are not detectable. And sometimes quantity translates into quality. There are phase transitions. They're meta levels, especially meta levels of description.
The problem is a problem of language in my view.
We fail to come up with a universal language which would allow us to capture life.
And so we are forced to make lists, lists of plants, list of animals, and so on so forth. It's a very primitive phase.
It's not even science, it's taxonomy, no zoology, call it as you wish. It's not yet science.
Biology, zoology. All these are not yet sciences, botany.
So, if you think of life this way, these challenges head on some very important principles in evolution theory.
Now, evolution theory reminds me of quantum mechanics.
Both evolution theory and quantum mechanics predict the world perfectly or close to perfection.
Quantum mechanics has never failed in predicting interactions between elementary particles, to the best of my knowledge. It has never failed in predicting interactions between elementary particles, to the best of my knowledge, has never failed.
And yet, we have no idea. What is it that quantum mechanics is saying?
We don't understand quantum mechanics, the philosophy of it. We don't know how to interpret it. We don't know what to make of it. It is anything between senseless and nonsensical.
Yet it works.
I think the same applies to evolution theory.
Or theories, because by now there are quite a few, you know, punctuated equilibrium and this and that.
So evolution theories, this family. I think they capture dynamics and mechanisms of the world perfectly, and they yield predictions which are easily verifiable and haven't been falsified either too.
So we know that quantum mechanics and evolution theory and so forth somehow touch the essence of the universe, but we have no idea how and why. We have no language to conceptualize evolution theory or quantum mechanics.
And manyscholars over the past 140, 150 years try to attribute to evolution theory, all kinds of tenets and principles and ideas and philosophies and ideologies and so on and so forth, which fly in the face of reality or are counterfactual.
For example, there's survival of the fittest, a natural selection. These are two principles associated, closely associated with evolution theory.
But so many things countermand and contradict this. For example, altruism.
Altruism is not explained satisfactorily. There's no satisfactory explanation of altruism in any evolution theory that I'm aware of.
Yeah, I know. There are all kinds of gimmicks, ways to explain altruism, to account for it.
We're altruistic because we expect to be treated the same way.
Altruism pays in the long run and all kinds of BS in my view.
There's no good explanation. There's no good explanation for the emergence of medicine.
Why would we engage in negative eugenics? Why would we prolong the lives of the weak and the diseased and the old? That's against natural selection. That's against survival of the fittest.
Medicine is making us overall much weaker. We are much more sick today than we have been 100 years ago. That's a fact, by the way. And life expectancy hasn't changed that much. That's a myth.
The mortality of newborns has declined and that contributed to the statistical alterations in life expectancy, but adults live more or less to the same age.
So medicine is a subversion of evolution theory.
Think, you know, let's go down a bit. Let's go down a level.
Think of Mama Bear. Mama Bear has a cub, and the cub is threatened by a hunter. And Mama Bear puts herself in between the hunter and the cub, willing to die for the cub.
This defies evolution theory.
If organisms were rational or if rational principles have been built into, baked into organisms and the way they comport themselves, Mama Bear would have run away, not protect the cub.
Why?
Because Mama Bear has the potential to generate or create many additional cubs. By endangering her life, Mama Bear is giving up on all future cubs that she could have come up with, just to save the life of a single cub.
You see, how illogical this is. The logical thing to do would have been to run away, to preserve her life so that she can continue to create cubs in the future.
It doesn't make sense to sacrifice the life of a productive organism for the sake of a single organism.
And yet, there's no mama bear alive who wouldn't protect her cub to the death.
So is evolution wrong?
It's not wrong. Evidently, it's working.
Our interpretation of it is wrong. What we attribute to it is wrong.
And I think part of the reason is that somehow there is an internal conflict.
Evolution theory tells us we are nothing special, we have a culmination of a process here, but we are nothing special. We are just a chain, a link in the chain, that's all.
And yet we believe that we are special. We experience ourselves as special.
And the reason, of course, is introspection. The fact that we have an internal experience.
We say to ourselves, we have an internal experience. No one else has an internal experience. So we're special.
But how do we know that no one else has an internal experience? A cockroach, mama bear, an elephant, how do we know they don't have internal experiences? Everything shows us that the vast majority of animals do have internal experiences.
They're not like ours. They may be more simple or less complex. They're different, of course, but they are internal and they are experiences.
So they must involve a modicum of introspection. Many, many species recognize themselves in a mirror.
That in itself is a strong indicator of an inner world, a perception of the self. Most species are capable of predicting the future, making tools, and so on and so forth, bonding and attaching, many of them.
So the reason we mechanize evolution theory, the reason we render it highly mechanistic, highly automated, highly robotic, is because we would like to believe that all other species are some kind of hyper-sophisticated devices. Some kind of walking, talking appliances, or walking, not talking appliances.
They have no soul. They have no spirit. They are there for our leisure and pleasure and use.
So while evolution theory is working, what we attribute to evolution theory, our attempts to explain why it is working, this is built on the supremacy of mankind. Supremacy of the human being. Anthropos supremacy.
And I think that's where the mistake emerges. That's where it starts.
Because DNA, the genetic code, the book of instructions, the user manual, the DNA is common to all life forms. All bacteria, viruses, plants, human beings, chimpanzees, we all share anywhere, anything between 95 and 97% of our DNA. 95, 97% of DNA.
You hear me well? That's almost identity. That's as good as identity.
If we want to understand a truly different life form, we can't do it on Earth. Even if we were tomorrow, miraculously, to invent a method to communicate with plants, we would still be communicating with very, very close relatives, because we shared the same DNA.
If we really want to get into the mind, into the head, to gain access to another being, we need to chat with aliens. Only the minds of aliens who do not share our DNA could provide a true basis for comparison.
Of course, there are a million assumptions here. For example, the assumption the DNA is not a universal phenomenon.
It might well be. The law of parsimony, Occam's razor would imply that it is.
There is another hidden assumption here that aliens would be possessed of a mind.
But a mind is not the inexorable, ineluctable, end point of evolution. I'm not sure that minds exist. I have no idea what is consciousness, nor does anybody else, Penrose and all others included. No one knows what they're talking about. End of story. It's all nonsense speculation in the best case.
So what is a mind? What is a consciousness?
It is a desperate attempt to organize, to make sense of our inner experience. It's a hermeneutic organizing principle, totally arbitrary.
Therefore, there's no guarantee that aliens would have minds. They may organize their internal experience differently. They may not have an internal experience. Or they would understand the world with a different physics, a different chemistry, and so on so forth. Or maybe they won't have a science.
There's too many assumptions here that they are like us.
Aliens, if they're like us, the dialogue would be superfluous and useless. We need to talk or communicate with someone who is really, really not like us.
And even this sentence includes two hidden assumptions.
Number one, that communication would be possible and that everything and everyone communicates all over the universe.
Who said? Who said that?
Number two, when I say we need to communicate with someone, it's as if every society of aliens or every group of aliens, every collective of alien would be organized along individuals comprising the collective.
This might be wrong.
The individual is an organizing principle, the self of the ego.
These are metaphors at best. Metaphors at best, I dispute the existence of individuals, personalities. I think it's just language. These are language elements, this is literature, these are not science.
So we can't be sure that if we were to communicate with an alien, it would be an individual, it would have a mind, it would organize itself, similarly, it would think at all, if at all, thinking is cognition, emotion that's a path chosen by evolution on Earth. There's no reason to assume that it would apply everywhere.
So many things, so many things are dubious at question.
Even then, even if we were to come across aliens who would be a minimum of communication, would understand what it is to communicate, and would engage in it.
Even then, in principle, there is no way we can access other minds. End of story. No way, not direct, not indirect, not by probing, not by testing, not by experimenting, not by observing, not nothing. There's no way to access other minds. We are forced to rely on the veracity and truthfulness of self-reporting one way or another.
FMRI, when we conduct FMRI, we are not accessing another mind. We are accessing another brain.
And so when we deal with the question of other minds, there's a problem because they are inaccessible and we have to speculate. We have to theorize. We observe. We test. We predict. We expect. We falsify all the time pretending that we have an ironclad theory which captures the essence of mind because somehow we have an interaction with the underlying brain.
It's a little like studying the hardware of a laptop and then reaching conclusions about the software when you have never had any access to the software except indirectly.
Now my thought-provoking interlocutor asked me, well if there's no mind and so on so forth will we ever be able to download ourselves to the cloud, to a computer and so and so forth?
And I said to listen, we are already downloading ourselves. Your children are downloads. You downloaded yourself into your children.
If you have written books, a book, you've downloaded your mind into the book or the movie or whatever else you've created.
We're constantly downloading ourselves.
The mind is based in hardware, is based in wetware, so we believe at this point, in this point in time.
Anything that is based in hardware or software or wetware is in principle downloadable. Anything that is based in hardware, in principle, is downloadable. That's a truism.
And because we are already engaging in massive acts of downloading, we are downloading genetic material via our offspring, we're downloading our mind, via cultural artifacts, and so on.
It's not alien to our nature to download ourselves.
And I think ultimately, yeah, absolutely. We will be able to download ourselves, although this would be a bit limited.
I think we'll be able to download memories, mainlymemories, and perhaps some templates or organizing structures, today known euphemistically as egos and selves and so.
We'll be able to download the self as a library system and the contents of the library, which are essentially memories and this gives rise to identity we'll come to it a bit later
The problem when we download anything is that we are not secure, we are not safe from artifacts.
Now we are surrounded with artifacts. We are drowning in artifacts.
For example, free will is an artifact. It's an artifact of a system's view of existence.
We apply to our existence, the perception of everything is a system. Our body is a system. Our mind is a system. Society is a system. Everything is perceived as a system.
And so concepts like personality and free will and so on so forth emerge naturally from a system's view.
Because a system's view must make certain assumptions in order to function.
For example, the assumption of agency, personal agency, which is coupled with the assumption of rationality, the rational agent, or rational player, the assumption of personality.
We are more or less stable across the assumption of personality. So we are more or less stable across the lifespan. We are recognizable and we are responsible for our actions.
But all these assumptions are at best debatable.
Our personality, for example, is mutable. It is in flux throughout the lifespan.
Our personality is a mere artifact. So it cannot be downloaded. It cannot be preserved.
We cannot download or preserve something that constantly changes. That's the core problem of psychology.
Psychology is a pseudoscience because the raw material changes dramatically and essentially all the time from one minute to the next.
So it's not replicable and there's no science without replication.
Personality is an artifact. So it cannot be preserved or downloaded.
As I said, we could maybe download memories. And ultimately we could download the core identity, but not the personality.
This personality is the way we react to and interact with changing environments. And consequently, it changes all the time.
Once we have downloaded ourselves, our memories and our core identity, some organizing features to render us recognizable to ourselves, I believe that once we have downloaded memories and identity, there would be an automatic process of self-reflection, self-referral, and all the theorems and statements within the download would be decidable.
The system, therefore, would be imperfect, but consistent, to riff on Kurt Gödel.
So once we've done this anyone who accesses anyone with access to our download would be able to incorporate it or interact with it and we would be able to put ourselves into another person we'll be able to experience the synergy and confluence of being guests in another person's mind while fully equipped to be the host and maybe we will play games or I'm the host now you're the guest you're the guest now I'm the host.
It opens up vistas of amazing interactions between human beings that are hitherto unprecedented.
Eternal life is impossible as a unitary entity owing to entropy and other considerations.
But eternal life is possible as an interactive enterprise, a collaboration between the initial nucleus of the self, of the identity, of the memories, downloaded, and all future users.
So when you create a piece of software, or when you create a book, when you create a poem, that's only the beginning.
The body of readers, of viewers or users interact. These bodies interact with the creative endeavor.
And it isor users interact. These bodies interact with the creative endeavor.
And it is these interactions that gives the book or the movie or the song or the poem or the its meaning.
So once you've downloaded memories and identity onto the cloud and someone downloaded it from there, you've uploaded it to the cloud and someone downloaded it from there at that moment there is a new thing a new synergy a new You uploaded, someone has downloaded that minute, you are inextricably connected. You have become determinant of each other's identical.
And so this raises, of very profound philosophic questions, this identity upload and download.
For example, by attempting to perpetuate ourselves this way, does it alter the meaning and purpose of our existence? Is the temporal dimension critical to our existence? For example, the fact that we are finite creatures faced with death. Does this imbue our lives with meaning and makes, does this make sense of our lives? Does it give our lives direction and purpose?
And if death is eliminated via this process of upload and download, and if our brains, our captured minds, our uploaded minds become distributed among billions and zillions of users in the future, in which sense are we dead? We're not dead.
And if we have eliminated death this way, what happens to the innate raison d'etre, reason for existence of our lives? What is our role?
We know that we are agents of construction. We increase order in the universe, but we are also agents of destruction. They kind of slaves to the demiurge, the malevolent god that has created the world according to the Gnostic tradition.
Our historical record affirms this duality of being agents of order and agents of chaos and this duality is reflected in narcissism the malevolent God and the benign real God.
So which is it what are we going to become? Will being able to upload our minds and preserve them for eternity? Will this change our role somehow? Will we then become much more constructive?
Sooner or later, we're going to be forced out of Earth. The resources here are limited. They're getting more limited by the day. Climate change is just a symptom of this disease. The planet is dying, decomposing. We'll have to exit. Elon Musk is sending us to Mars.
So are we going to repeat the same experience there? Are we going to be serial polluters of the galaxy? Are we going to pollute our way through the nebulae and the galaxies and are we going to colonize them in order to destroy them contaminate them pollute them use them to the maximum and then dump them?
Sounds a bit narcissistic and this is the view of religions all religions of religion presents itself as a method to save us from our innately evil nature.
Religion is the buffer, the protective wall, the moat, the firewall between our destructive, wicked, demonic perhaps, inner nature and our survival. Religion guarantees our survival because it is a way to tame us, to domesticate us, to threaten us with punishment and thereby modify our behavior.
Our destiny and fate is to master, to own and to control creation, religion says.
But we are flawed. There's been a defect in manufacturing to control creation, religion says.
But we are flawed. There's been a defect in manufacturing. We're glitchy and buggy. And religion is the debugging system.
So what are we? Are we essentially good agents of order and God and God? Or are we perhaps on the wrong side of the divide, aligned with Lucifer and his horde?
Some traditions suggest that our task is to heal God. God has been somehow injured or became mentally healed or something. It is our task to complete him, to render him whole again. This is the religion, the point of view of some mystical traditions.
And of course science tells you, tells us that we are just random beings. I mean there's this schooling in physics and so and so forth that suggests that we are here, that the universe is somehow adapted to our needs and so and so forth.
But the vast majority of scientists would dismiss this as nonsensical, unreasonable, and would insist that we are the end products of a giant lottery, and so we are random beings.
The this view that we are random beings was represented by the scientific camp.
But in the Enlightenment, there was also a teleological camp, a camp that attributed to ussome mission, some task, universal in nature, and cast us as agents of order.
God was banished in the Enlightenment, but God was replaced by a kind of scientism which elevated and idolized and pedestalized order, structure, reason, logic, mathematics as a universal language.
And so we are not quite sure how all this is going to be affected by our ability to upload our minds and the ability of others to download them, to interact across the ages and space in such a way.
Today we upload ourselves into an airplane and we are downloaded by the receiving airport. And even that has created a huge upheaval in human affairs and this is nothing compared to the uploading and downloading of minds.
In many mystical traditions, God had to suffer in order to create us. He had to minimize himself. That's the Kabbalah. He had to minimize himself. That's the Kabbalah. He had to sacrifice himself. That's Christianity. And he did it for our sake.
So God has sustained injuries in the process. He didn't emerge unscathed. His very omnipotence and omniscience had been rendered doubtful in the process.
The vessels of the universe broke. Creation was a very disruptive event. And now we need to fix them. We need to restore harmony and symmetry, says the Kabbalah.
In one way to restore harmony and symmetry, perhaps, is if you were to live forever in a community of disembodied minds. Minds that do not perhaps pollute as much as bodies do.
Maybe we are transitioning from an age of bodies to the age of minds, from the age of earth and soil and blood and tears and sweat, to the age of clouds, metaphorical clouds, computing clouds. Maybe we're becoming more ephemeral and ethereal. Maybe we are on our way from mass to energy.
No one can tell. But these issues are facing us right now.
And as usual, we tend to ignore the implications of artificial intelligence, of the cloud, of our ability already to play with the mind, neuralink, other things. We are ignoring the outcomes and implications.
The way we ignored during the industrial revolution the implications for the environment and for climate, we have this capacity to deny, it's a psychological defense mechanism.
And yet if we don't face and confront the dilemmas aroused by new technologies, artificial intelligence and others, now, nowwe are doomed.
Because starting with nuclear weapons in the 1940s we have entered a territory of existential threat. There has never been an existential threat even during the black death, the plague. We've never been really threatened with extinction. But now we are on multiple levels in numerous ways. And these ways are multiplying day by day.
We had nuclear weapons. Then we had climate change. Now we have artificial intelligence and so on so forth.
We need to look the beast in the face. And we need to adopt and adjust, courageously, unflinchingly, or we will perish.