Singularity theory (of the technological variety) as held by numerous self-prominent proponents (even when considering the niggly philosophical differences that persist amongst them) remains a nearly psychotic outpost of hyper-elevated, techno-romantic effluvia that’s beyond untenable and profusely, intellectually dishonest: it’s quite radically growing immoral by-the-day (the current issues of The Economist.com and WIRED.com bear this out all-too-well), and, though, still today, circus-side-show-marginal, microcosmically indicative of a dissociative technoeconomic potential in the coming century so vertiginously portentious I can only hold it to be an exquisitely pernicious threat to the well-being of humanity – par exemplar – and an enterprise of thought that when even judiciously contemplated risks fully threatening subhuman outcomes the likes of which humanity has never known.
May I say that we have reached a stage of foresight wherein I feel this ‘trend of things’ must be fought and openly disavowed.
And that’s to not mention the innate transpersonal potentials that remain pathologically untapped (and which are the fulcrum-leverage points of today’s Wilber-driven Integral movement), unexplored by those who choose instead to meditate on the blind-watchmaker and his workshop of time-telling mechanics, myth-and-lore chicanery.
The persistent stagnation of foresworn formal-operational minds locked in self-scared reifications to dualistic materialism is now forging pathways for a profoundly dissociated behaviorism to merge with crude technological violations of the human bodymind boundary.
Far from holistic, even further from “integral.”
And this very freedom to cry out will go with it all.
The rubbishy nature of transhumanist singularity theory is explored further below (and can be extensively furthered should such a debate be requested in writing). But for this interval allow me to say precisely that as today’s leading biologizers, the obsessive groping by transhumanists for the computational-model metaphor that is to prophetically be birthed with the advent of an “Einstein of information sciences” thoroughly rivals myriad forms of fundamentalism on the scene for a blind-faith religiosity standard, and ’second-coming’ fatalism.
“Scientific” crossed over to “Scientism”…And a better science, an integral science, continues to slip from reach…
Already the sacred and mysterious blood-brain barrier is violated-cum-laude by a cornucopia of pharmaceutical interventions that proclaim transcendental management of developmental pathologies and amidst constant controversy exercising liberal, civil jurisprudentiality to circumscribe the discomfiting clinical truths. Soon they will champion crude verites such as “interface” and “bionics” and gangplank us all into oblivion one policy adjustment and marketing process at a time.
Why?
Because too many could not or would not tolerate and thrive vis a vis their own embodiment.
…And even this very freedom to cry out will go with it all.
I fear not merely for my future considering the event horizon is littered with so much reductionist refuse, but for the well-being of civilization as a whole as countless numbers of “smart narcissists” continue assuming dark mantles of power throughout the landscape of civilis-en-toto and labor to further convert our exoteric technocracy into an esoteric one as well (“the final frontier, they say!) through various means, while onanistically dreaming the child’s dream of sci-fi salvation and libertopian meansway as The Grand Inquisitors heralding The New Faithless Faith.
I personally can certainly be described as Wilberian in my approach to philosophical matters. The only thing that excites me more than Wilber’s work-in-print is the cross-paradigmatic openness in his community regrading critique, controversy and dissenting opinion. If anything, his hermeneutic world is nothing but an abundance of healthful critique and an embarrassment of heartful riches of perspective on all matters transcendental.
Wilber’s philosophical successes at formally resolving the pragmatic concerns around the mind-body problem stands as just one of many valuable blows to an orthodoxy of reductionism that has simply gone down the rabbit-hole of pathological regress toward a pagan preoccupation with finding all ‘qualia’ in the “brain-body” by mappings du jour of proteomic cascades that give rise to neural circuitry as if the ghost were truly a machine and it’s salvatory refinement a time-anticipating matter of Wolframian automata stare-off contests.
Sri Aurobindo set it best, many decades ago, embarrassing us today with his insight and prescience:
“As a consequence, the preoccupation of the mental intelligence and its powers with the material existence as it is shown to it through the senses, and with life as it has been formulated in a compromise between life and matter, is a special stamp of the constitutional Ignorance. This natural materialism or materialised vitalism, this clamping of ourselves to our beginnings, is a form of self-restriction narrowing the scope of our existence which is very insistent on the human being. It is a first necessity of his physical existence, but is afterwards forged by a primal ignorance into a chain that hampers his every step upwards: the attempt to grow out of this limitation of the wholeness, power and truth of the spirit by the materialised mental intelligence and out of this subjection of the soul to material Nature is the first step towards a real progress of our humanity.”
Perhaps it’s our collective and developmental fate to be living through just such a philosophical edge-time, I merely am maintaining against any and all strongholds of concentrated consideration that total destruction either by an inefficiency of spiritual imagination to service right perspective or by the happenstance of all-too-foreseeable unintended consequences is an inconsiderable failure. For the while, our post-industrial fates remain milky at best.
I personally remain full of tone so imperious I might bother one to risk one’s own self-deconstruction.
-Farsam (Samfar@gmail.com)
Nice post Farsam…I am bothered to risk my own self-deconstruction!