So watching Transcendent Man, the documentary about Ray Kurzweil's idea of The Singularity is a sublime experience in the truest sense - a total mix of awe and terror. Kurzweil supposes that we will be able to avoid death and aging via technology, specifically, I think, Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics. The Singularity is a metaphor, as I'm understanding it, for a total intertwining of man and machine. We will be cyborgs and we will be happy about it.
Except we won't. Meaning is dependent, causally determined by finitude. Let me explain: for any event to be meaningful it must be caught up in risk. One of the meta-risks is that you will only have so many events - you may never have this experience again. So if we live forever, which means we obliterate the very notion of Time, how does any event mean anything? What difference does it make what happens? It will happen again, and again, and again.
Essentially, I think Kurzweil, if he could accomplish what he has set out to accomplish, would actually cause the very thing he wishes to avoid: the destruction of meaning. Kurzweil obviously thinks when you die, all meaning goes away. However, he doesn't seem to realize that it's only because of death, because it is an always-already present reality for us as mortals, that anything can mean in the first place.
So it is the final irony that death, the ultimate end of meaning, at least for the person who's dying, is also the very thing that constituted the possibility of meaning.
But everyone should watch the documentary - Kurzweil is exactly the kind of mad scientist whom I can't help but love.
It is hard to imagine humanity without death. I had the same thought reading Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island in which humans are cloned into adult bodies — no more childhood. It's hard to imagine humanity without childhood.
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't think the difference b/w childhood and death is so great. I think this pertains to my post about fading memory — so much of who we are, how we create and invest meaning, is reckoning the loss of ourselves, of our childhood: we die in middle age long before we die of old age.
I think both Houellebecq and Kurtzweil are misanthropes in the true sense of the word: they don't like humanity and so seek to create something else entirely.