Shamanism And The Coming Of AI/Robot Culture

There is an honest question to be asked whether shamanism, as it is presented to us in the West as ideology or world view, actually exists today. What does exist are a number of shamanic practices that differ from place to culture, from culture to culture. In Europe at least, shamanic practice was destroyed as an identifiable set of techniques by the rise of monotheism amongst the elite and then, through witch-hunting, amongst the folk. Wherever the Catholic Church placed its heavy foot, shamanism was marginalised with its general categorisation of shamans as ‘devil-worshippers’ - whether in early medieval Poland or seventeenth century Peru. Puritans and missionary Buddhists were no better in their fanaticism.

We have a more tolerant view now but it is easy to go too far in the other direction and try to believe what is not any longer truly believable – that there are actual spirits (things that have life beyond the quiverings of quantum mechanics) in stones, plants and animals, things inside these things that would give them equal status to us. Perhaps we might be generous towards animals and even plants as evolutionarily capable of our level of sentience and self awareness but no one can seriously compare a cabbage or a dog with even the most intellectually weak of our own kind.

The cultural depredations of modern memetic engineers have created a dislocation between the past and the tribal shamanisms of today. Can any claimed shaman who is not a member of a tribe insulated from Western technologies and anthropological tourism possibly belong to an authentic tradition? Any contact with the Other changes the person making the contact and this cuts all ways - we are all contactees. Neo-shamanism and shamanic re-constructionisms that ape traditional forms are, however, the most deeply suspect. The record shows us no unified global shamanic culture and we can make no presumption that this is some sort of ur or noble savage state to which we can return.

Lived experience of shamanic thinking and behaviour is probably no more recoverable than the dinosaurs for Western observers. Many neo-shamanic practitioners may be sincere in their beliefs but they represent nothing but an aspiration to be something they can never be – authentically embedded in a living tradition. The desert origin soul-murderers of indigenous tribes who arrived in the backwoods of every continent on the back of empire have, probably and finally, won in that respect. There is unlikely to be a revenger from the ranks that matter - that of the indigenous peoples themselves who struggle to preserve what can be preserved but know in their hearts that even their most hallowed traditions must be made politically correct and acceptable to liberal modernity and have had to be adapted to being a mode of resistance rather than an expression of local hegemony.

This is not to deny that shamanism exists in the world. Chased out of Europe, shamanism still exists authentically, if under threat, in Russian Siberia and, with more difficulty and complexity, amongst the Inuit peoples. There are survivals in Taiwanese and Kazakh practice. The Chinese seem less sympathetic today to their own origins.  There is shamanism in Korea, in the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa), in corners of Japan itself and in a more debased form in India. Tantric Buddhism is a historic compromise between Buddhism and shamanistic Bo and Shinto represents an attempt at the institutionalisation of shamanism. There have been attempts, not always successful, to associate shamanic practice and African religions though there are certainly parallels amongst the San. There are also analogues amongst the peoples of Papua New Guinea and the indigenous peoples of Australia.

To call all Amerindians shamanistic without qualification all too often insults them. The differences are as significant as the similarities. There are shamanistic elements in the religions of the Chipewyan, the Cree and the Navaho and amongst those who use Ayahuasca. The Maya peoples and many of the peoples of the Amazon Basin and further South can also surely be called shamanistic. There are, in short, many remaining, if small in relative numbers, reservoirs of shamanic experience and behaviour. Unfortunately, these are now as much under threat from well-meaning New Age dim-wits as from Christian missionaries, scientific materialism and late capitalism.

Looking at this range of experiences, the idea of a fixed shamanic culture looks less and less tenable, a product of a Western obsession with categorisation and, in its current forms, no more ancient than Wicca. The appropriation of shamanism by New Age figures to solve their personal problems and dilemmas (much like the appropriation of Tantra as NeoTantra) increasingly appears like a piece of cruel or at least unthinking cultural imperialism. However, if we take away the attempt to mimic the forms of shamanism, there still remains an essence of what shamanic thought is and what it can do for our society once it is shorn of alien traditionalism and the egoistic appropriation of New Age narcissists. Let us look at what this essence may be and what it can do for us once all the mumbo-jumbo is removed and we allow indigenous peoples the dignity of the re-appropriation of their own traditions. There are four pre-conditions for a ‘shamanism’ for our times.

1. The Shaman - The first pre-condition lies in the shaman figure himself or herself. Such a person has to be ‘fit’, mentally and physically robust enough to be an ‘exemplar’, of high intelligence (or at least animal cunning) and in the prime of life. They will undoubtedly have internally generated disciplines designed to sustain fitness, including care of the body, a mode of conducting themselves in society and a care for their own nutrition. Such a person is likely to be surprisingly ‘normal’, operating in society perfectly well if only because no ‘shaman’ is likely to be able to earn a full living from his or her skills. 
2. Difference - By contrast, such a person is also likely to be ‘different’ and psychologically alone. There may be others like him or her but this is not a clubbable state. Shamanic status arises from some inward crisis, possibly from an inherited disposition to sensitivity or crisis. Shamans generally suffer a paradigm shift in themselves involving physical illness or a psychological crisis quite early in life. A shaman may also try to effect ‘difference’ from normal sexual roles as well, perhaps by taking on some of the attributes of the opposite gender, certainly being sexually ‘fluid'.
3. Social Need - To afford a ‘shaman’ in society, there is going to have to be some sort of pent-up demand. The community must have no other ready means of solving questions surrounding bodily and mental health. This will also have to be a culture respectful (‘trusting’) of the shaman’s abilities as a representation of a form of ‘knowledge’, a culture of people seeking mediators between their own sorrow or pain and a world they imperfectly understand. A rational individualistic society will not want such mediation but this presupposes that such a society does not suffer from psychosomatic illness, is uninterested in ecstasy or believes that the answers to questions that lie in the subconscious are of no consequence. There is no such society under the sun. 
4. The Need For A 'Mythos'- The shaman and his culture require a ‘mythos’, one that can hold all these abilities together as a coherent whole expressed in a wide range of semiotics – behaviour, language, imagery and ritual (a ‘grammar of mind’, after Pentikainen). The shaman will have greater knowledge of social and cultural memes than the rest of society and will have an intensity of engagement in altered states of consciousness in a way that is fully accepted by the rest of society.  This is knowledge that is not known by scientific means (or is not yet proven to be fully known by scientific means) but which ‘works’. Such knowledge is beyond good and evil and the shaman figure may risk mental illness and even death by going into this unknown territory. It is also a difficult knowledge for a society that wants moral order.

On the surface, there is no place in our society for the natural shaman. Shamanism seems doomed to be degraded, like Yantra, into another form of personal development for the worried well of the West. But such people still exist in our midst at a time when the welfare state and scientific rationalism are not dealing with many of the psychological and health issues of our society - or are dealing with them expensively and ineffectively through pharmaceuticals even where the conditions are not obviously organic or limiting them through 'political correctness', risk aversion and liberal totalitarianism. The shaman is probably there because he is a type of person and a relationship to the world rather than as representative of a culture or an ideology. The need is there.

What is not there is a post-rationalist ‘mythos’ that manages to fit the liberal culture of  contemporary democracy given that there is no traditionalist solution to the use of shamanic technique that is not inauthentic. Any new ‘mythos’ must work in a direct relationship to the actual state of our society and economy – just as the ‘shamanic’ cultures of indigenous peoples are embedded in their economies, environments and traditions.  The idea that the environmental skills of a South American ‘shaman’ have anything to teach us in an advanced Western society except at a level of abstraction far removed from the day-to-day concerns of most people is absurd. What is not absurd is to consider that a world of mass leisure without completely adequate resources under conditions of radical technology change (primarily caused by the convergence of robotics and AI) is going to create new environmental conditions requiring new ways of thinking about culture.

Those with indigenous skills are only fitted for a particular society at particular times. We need new skills and new myths for our place and our time. What can be learned from shamanic experience that might be developed along Western European lines without the idiocies and fakeries of reconstructionism, fake traditionalism and narcissistic self development? I suggest five areas of exploration ...

• How to treat some psychosomatic sickness through the placebo effect - perhaps through dream interpretation, sympathetic shamanic travelling or other means as much as through handing over fake tablets (the British cup of tea in the 1950s was probably the most perfect placebo medecine in human history)
• How to trigger visionary ecstasy through trance (Eliade’s ‘technique of ecstasy’, perhaps initiated through drumming or other sound patterns) or drugs. Why do this? Why, for the simple fun of it, of course - as distraction from having no meaningful function in life in the age of the robot.
• How to use trance, divination and metaphor (even animal or spirit guides) to find answers to questions lying in the sub-conscious. Such a need emerges when basic wants are met but there are no resources to offer satisfaction for all desires and needs - to travel and network, own expensive things and consume exquisite food and drink, have status in society. A person turns inward to construct self-meaning lest they go mad with boredom and despair.
• How to tap into the unconscious through divination techniques to tell the probable future and open up the ‘true will’ to self-scrutiny.  No, this does not mean you can actually know what it is going to happen in the future (no one does) but it might clear away the cobwebs of group think and increase the chances of making the right decisions for you rather to please everyone else, allowing unconscious knowledge to manage and control the dead zone of reasoning in a world of flux and poor information.
• How to create an attitude of mind that can use a sustained narrative (a ‘mythos’) to ensure social, economic and environmental sustainability in the conditions in which we actually find ourselves in the West today. Again, this is not to be construed as support for the fashionable Gaian magical thinking of planetary consciousness but quite the opposite - how to find values that work with the total environment in which we find ourselves of which 'nature' is just a part and not necessarily the most important one.

A modicum of creative irrationalism does not mean that that we abandon scientific method or technology. On the contrary, 'shamanic' technique is merely supplemental at the macro-cultural level. At the micro-cultural level, however, where society meets individual psychic needs (the zone of the alleged ‘spirit'), there is a place for the person who can mediate between the individual and the world through metaphor, performance and even entheogens ensuring their safety and ther resolution of their problems. The psychotherapeutic tradition that emerged out of Freud's work may be a mere half way house here, simply adapting the individual to social reality instead of transforming society through transforming the individual. The tradition's success rate has not honestly been much better than that of the shaman to date.

Perhaps, one day, a culturally enlightened Government will place social management of drugs and the troubled part of the population in the hands of creative shamans (even if the psychotherapists will want first dibs at the gravy train). Mind you, the determination to professionalise and 'train' the shamans will almost certainly make them useless - managerialism is the social disease of the bourgeoisie, based on a perpetual and perpetuating risk averse fear of failure, or rather of being seen by others to fail. No doubt shamans without a Royal Institute of Shamanic Sciences Certificate Part IIA would have to be bailed out of jail every now and then but their street skills, assuming they are not completely regulated into meaninglessness, might help give meaning to the lost and save the taxpayer a fortune in sick benefit and healthcare costs.

Conventional religious communities, the psychotherapists, risk averse nervous ninnies and the scientific positivists will find common cause against such a radical idea but none has yet found a solution to the central problem of our time – that the ‘crooked timber of humanity’ needs resolution of its psychic problems within a matrix of belief that is their own and not that of their elites and that this crooked timber is about to be faced with some very straight-laced hyper-rational machinery that will govern their existence before too long.  Blowing up the machines is not going to be the way forward. By-passing both them and the technocrats with some creative irrationality may be.

On the Supernatural

I want to dispute the value of the term 'supernatural' - the perceived non-natural that is not 'at hand', immediately and potentially useful or easily explicable, and not that material universe that is based on what we can reasonably know or trust to be so from those who do claim to know on the basis of science. The term, which seems not to have been used before the 1520s, has shunted a number of categories into one basket - a problem of accounting for aspects of the world if you insist on creating a meaning outside of it, some things that happen to people for which there is no immediate accounting and the various imaginative creations that have been projected onto the world or exist in that liminal zone where imagination creates functionally useful assets in society for profit, pleasure or social control.

The creation of the idea of the 'supernatural' has separated out a whole set of mind events from other mind events but also other events in the world from the world and packaged them as something 'other' yet culturally identifiable. It is part of the process by which we have failed to critique religion, human perceptual frailties and the imaginative economy alike but also failed to appreciate the complexity of humanity and so the value to it of absurd beliefs and sometimes radical imaginative creativity. Worst of all, the concept includes real events for which there is no current explanation and associates them negatively with absurd belief and the products of human imagination without anything other than a reliance on an equally dubious radical rationalism. It then puts all these in one box where everything in it can be safely dismissed as 'non-scientific', constructions of the human mind, of the hysterical or weak-minded in some quarters and so of little interest or value.

Far better, surely, to separate the three categories of the supernatural - faith, psi and creativity - and reintegrate them back into one world view that is fully 'natural' (that is, ultimately part of the same universe) and so part of the human condition. In other words, treat them critically but with some respect as all human-related. It may complicate matters to do so but would it not offer us the chance to be more true to human reality and help us walk away from attempts to manage what has been called supernatural through denial and alienatory strategies. We should adopt a radical naturalism that includes these phenomena. By restoring the 'supernatural' fully to the natural, bringing it back down to earth so to speak, the opportunity is created not only for a more open analysis of the function of religion, experience and creativity but this change also enables a more profound critique of the thinking systems that try to take the supernatural and create a system out of it that then seeks to command nature without cause or justice.

We think here of non-dualist philosophies and pan-psychism in particular, neither of which explain the world better than a naturalist materialism that takes into account the material basis of the human mind's possible abilities, not only to create a world for itself as observer but also to respond (possibly) to forces that, while mysterious in effects, still have a material basis even if we do not yet have the tools to understand how they operate. What for example may a demon be? A real entity created by God and now rejected? A psychological projection of inner turmoil? An imaginative creation functionally useful in controlling an ignorant person? Or a material external effect on vulnerable minds? At least one reputable psychiatrist seems to think there are really existing evil spirits out there and is about to release a book on it, already touted by the Washington Post.

Personally I tend to the second and third in this particular case but things get more complicated when we speak of ESP (extra-sensory perception) and PK (psychokinesis). These are experiences that sometimes have explanations that show fraud or delusion or coincidence effects but sometimes show patterns in some people at some times that are quite simply not so easily explicable. The demonic possession outlined by Gallagher might easily be transferred to this category of events. Shunting all these into the category of the supernatural, exiling them from the natural, is intellectual cowardice. However, equally, simply saying that they do not exist (scepticism) is no more valid than asserting that they definitely do exist (faith). They may exist but, in possibly existing, they should be seen as natural phenomena with no requirement for alien beings or gods or demons outside nature or materiality and every requirement for understanding better the way the human mind works in its relationship with its own material and social environment (which latter is ultimately just an emanation from the material world).

Mind arises from matter and creates (as information and through communication) a world of intangibles that would cease to exist if the material substrate was destroyed and yet this fluid world is different from inert matter. It could be argued that a more effective model than the split betwen the natural and the supernatural would be between inert and manipulative matter (which might include many of us humans most of the time) and consider something we might have called supermatter within the natural if we were lazy. This element within the material universe but 'super' the expression of the material world in terms of an inert substrate is represented by the mind of individual when it constructs the intangible and cross-communicates with other individuals to create social mind-stuff. Social mind-stuff (culture) is used to create not only the conditions for the manipulation of inert matter but also the conditions for the manipulation of itself, a situation complicated by the self-evidently material base for a new category of inert matter that mimics the mind-stuff of humanity, artificial intelligence, and which, in turn, is capable of entering intangibles into human minds and culture and eventually to manipulate matter just as humans can and do.

With artificial intelligence, it is as if inert matter is catching up with us as matter manipulators, thanks to our own mind manipulation of matter in creating matter that can manipulate matter (the binary code that is the basis for machine computation). Yet all of this is fundamentally materially based. Everything 'mind' is lodged in matter and cannot survive without the survival of the substrate of matter, no matter how manipulated by mind. And so, putting the invented God-things and the products of the imagination aside, we can return to 'unexplained phenomena' and reasonably assume that these two aspects of the case are products of matter directly (the mystery of things not explained which may simply mean that we do not yet understand matter fully) or indirectly as the product of mind in its relationship to matter (as in perceptual delusion) or, finally, as mind working on itself within its material substrate (as in the belief in the God-origin of miracles or the Hollywoodisation of the vampire or werewolf).

So, what I propose is that we abandon the separation of the natural and supernatural as an early modern invention (certainly not something the Ojibwa, say, would understand as a correct interpretation of the world) and re-think the world as one material world:-

• which we do not entirely understand (leaving room for scepticism about scepticism when effects are unexplained) but which we know reasonably to have a material (natural) base so that all things are ultimately natural and 
• where the material substrate permits the construction of mind that in turn invents itself, including the conceits of the 'supernatural' (now just a cultural phenomenon whether of God-things or werewolves) based on the frailties of perception and the genius of the imagined.

It is certainly plausible that dream states can create gods and demons. On the other hand, the emergent social mind now also creates tools that mimic the naturally emergent mind (artificial intelligence) and which are apparently immune from individual or social bias (assuming the inputs are logical) and of anything inexplicable. Once we have disposed of god-things and cultural artefacts, we are still left with a residue of the inexplicable whether related to our human minds or to events in the world. There is no mind event that is not emergent from our own minds. The conceptualisation by a mind of a mind event outside itself represents no more that this created mind is a real mind than the mind of an artificial intelligence (as one currently stands) represents a real mind. A material substrate, of which we may not yet know everything and may never know all we need to know to understand it, is still required for all human and silicon and even alien mind events. Even demons are likely to have a material substrate somewhere to justify their existence.

Psi (ESP and PK) and unusual mind events that may or may not exist but they do not need to scare us if they do exist. They are clearly relatively rare and arise from peculiar circumstances. As natural phenomena, they are worthy of study with an open mind even if the final conclusions are either that they are all delusions of emergent human minds or explicable in terms of micro-effects in nature that we had not previously understood - or are simply things in the world that cannot be explained. We have to accept that it is not the lot of humanity (even aided by machine intelligence) to know everything. Absolute knowledge of a system by something within that system is not attainable unless one falls back on the insane belief that Man can become God.

To reverse the formulation of Gyrus in his 'North', it is not 'the preciptation of the gross earthly realm out of the aetheric infinity embracing it' that we are dealing with but 'the precipitation of an aetheric breadth of possibility out of the inert material realm embracing it'. This allows us to position the natural and the supernatural in a different conceptual context - that of immanence and transcendence. The standard model for the supernatural it is to see nature as immanent (which parallels the idea that God is immanent in nature, in all that can be seen and experienced and measured) and the supernatural as transcendent (insofar as the mental model is of God being outside nature, transcending it, as well as immanent).

With God and all forms of prime mover and all forces external to nature removed from the equation, nature can remain immanent but as total materiality - that is, all that is in the universe and all that is in the universe is matter or energy in some form. Transcendence can be re-cast as what emerges out of nature that has to be within nature by the nature of things but which is different in quality - that is, it is self-reflexive consciousness or mind and its associated tools such as reasoning. This raises interesting questions because there is no easy binary here between matter and mind. Self-reflexive consciousness and reasoning as a tool arise not in some sudden spark of creation and binary difference but evolve very slowly over vast tracts of time. The difference between the thing that is self-reflexive and aware and the thing that is not is not 'created' in an instant by some external touch but evolves. Self-reflexiveness and ability to think also varies even within a community of individuals in society in real time and within one individual, often from second to second.

Nor should we fall into the trap of valorising the self-reflexive consciousness so that a mythic narrative emerges that automatically assumes that the more conscious the entity then the higher the value - this is the error of cod-existentialism that valorises untestable claims to 'authenticity'. No attribute is of intrinsic value except situationally - from the stance of the individual or 'society'. No external force ensures a positive valuation, certainly no force outside nature (the world and all that is the case within it). Neither consciousness not authenticity are things-in-themselves but are rather states of being that shift in time in a Heraclitean flux much as 'mind' emerges transcendentally over long periods of time and in fits and starts.

The point here is not to create another binary (always the instinct of the simple analyst of the universe, the raw and the cooked, the hot and the cold, the good and the bad) but to have a concept to hand - the transcendental - that can shift its meaning from something external and unknowable and outside reality (when the supernatural is actually just a sub-set of human imaginative invention) to something that transcends inert matter existentially, that is, that emerges from out of matter (transcends its substrate) to become something that forms and creates itself, not only as the individual mind and personality with its reasoning, conceptualisation, creative imaginings, inventions, discoveries and meanings but as the transcendent creation of cultures of all levels, societies of all types, collaborative artistic creation and scientific discovery, the academic project to increase the bounds of knowledge, the prosecution of projects (not excluding business and war) and so forth.

Thus, it is mind, culture and society that are at least potentially 'supernatural' (on a trajectory that seems to be increasingly disconnected from its material substrate over time) in this different interpretation of the terms although I would dispute that anything can ever be disconnected from materiality. What we traditionally think of as supernatural in two of its key categories (the invention of meaning and imaginative creation) is simply a sub-set of something that is not so much 'above nature' as the highest part of nature (summa autem natura?), at least as seen from the point of view of those who have the ability (the self-reflexive conscious mind) to observe 'nature'. 'Nature' itself does not observe itself but is a thing in which we are embedded and which we have reconstructed from our observations into an abstract.

Matter in itself is inert but there is a distinctly different quality in that which can observe itself and its own substrate and environment. Either there is nothing supernatural here or we might deal with the problem by recasting 'nature' to mean not all that there is in the universe but all that there is that is not self-consciously reflexive and aware of itself, I think this is intellectually lazy - an essentialism after instead of before the fact designed to over-privilege the human (and indeed the thinking machine, alien and demon by pushing them into the place where once we positioned God and a conscious Nature. It might be better here to speak of a radicalisation of a part of nature itself and so stay 'grounded' (literally). This conceit also forces us to consider at what point artificial intelligence elides from being part of the inert material substrate and joins us humans as 'summa autem natura'. It also begs the question of the possibility of independent self-reflexive entities emerging out of the material in the past, existent now or in the future from the material substrate - which opens the door to evidence-based acceptance of aliens, emergent god-things, spirits, angels and demons (to speak in human terms).

The actual evidence for these latter is flaky to say the least but it would be intellectually dangerous to assume that, if the material substrate had permitted 'summa autem natura' in relation to ourselves as human beings, that it might not permit the emergence of similar minds and entities or other minds and entities elsewhere in the universe and/or in time and that they might have a character and experience very different from ours. After all, we are on the path ourselves to creating potentially transcendent artificial intelligences that might well fit the bill for a form of independent self-reflexive and creative consciousness.

This leaves us with the last category of popular ideas of the supernatural, outside religion and popular and folk culture, the paranormal. Psi (ESP and PK and other events) are claimed to happen to people by people themselves (though not easily observable by third parties as true and reliable) and may or may not be entirely delusory events whether as a not understood coincidence or as misperception or as fraud by third parties (and so forth). The immanence-transcendence model here inverts itself because a deluded mind might be seen as a warped transcendence but, if there is anything in these events (and we have an open mind here), then they are still events within nature and not supernatural. They are part of the material substrate and so part of the natural. They are simply natural events that we either cannot or do not understand.

Psychological effects that are interpreted as 'paranormal' (a better term than cloaking these events with the term supernatural) and physical events involving a warping of our understanding of causation, time and space may not be automatically considered to be absolutely impossible so much as probably impossible with the information and reasoning at our disposal as transcendent minds at this time and in this space.

If the concept of the supernatural is something we have inherited from our own earlier stages of development, it works functionally as part of our cultural tool kit insofar as we value religion or create imaginatively for our own psychological needs. It is equally a rather sloppy way of moving forward as self-reflexive consciousnesses in our own right. It would be better to make a functional assumption of absolute materialism and then enclose all current definitions of the supernatural as properties of 'summa autem natura' (the highest form of nature from our own perspective), excepting the 'paranormal'. This latter should be separated out as either a delusion or, on further investigation, an unknown element of the totality of materiality.

The 'paranormal' becomes a potentiality for knowing rather than something known, mirroring our creation of artificial intelligence as a potentiality for consciousness rather than as something conscious in itself now. The first offers the potential for changing our perception of material reality without any necessity for 'spiritual' inventions while the latter offers the potential for changing our assumptions about the uniqueness of our own transcendence (whether later to be challenged further by the discovery of aliens or demons is probably something not within the capability of current science). Our working assumption can be that we do not have to worry over much about aliens and demons (except as cultural artefacts) but that we should be concerned about understanding artificial intelligence and we should continue to be sceptically interested in the paranormal without throwing too much resource at it.

Beyond this, we continue to transcend as much as we can because that is what we do subject to our all-too-obvious dependence on immanent matter (after all, we die!). We continue, driven by our own 'nature' at least amongst those so inclined, to employ our transcending minds in the manipulation and exploitation of the material universe, of 'nature', in order to assist our continuing process of transcendence - regardless of conservative attempts to try to give immanence/matter priority over our own transcendence. We think here of those retrograde elements in the green movement that go beyond sustainability in our own interest as transcendent-within-immanence beings into a preference for the invented rights of 'nature' over humanity or those 'spiritual' elements who insist on inverting the situation and trying to give an untenable transcendent quality to nature itself whether overtly as God or as some form of pantheism or pan-psychism.

The supernatural thus can quietly disappear from view except as cultural artefact (meeting psychological needs) or as an incorrect descriptive term for that which is not known or cannot be known. It is a term we no longer need philosophically if we have the concept of emergent consciousness as 'summa autem natura' (this is the best term I have to hand and welcome others' thoughts) from its own perspective as observer of its own condition when even Psi (ESP and PK), aliens, gods, angels and demons can only either be inventions of ourselves or a knowable (but not necessarily by us) part of nature.

Robotics, AI, Sexuality & Power - A Brave New World

In a somewhat breathless report in the Financial Times on February 14th, Moshe Vardi, computer science professor at Rice University in Texas, is quoted as saying that “We are approaching the time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. Society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?"

There may be a dash of panic emerging about the emergence of robotics and AI - after all, scientists and engineers have form when it comes to doing the 'chicken licken' thing as they move into the public sphere. It is as if these professions have a deep psychological problem in understanding social and system complexity, adaptability and unpredictability. We have certainly seen this with climate change much as we once saw it with scientific panic about racial degradation!

Nevertheless, AI and robotics are set to make an impact similar to that of the introduction of machinery in the early agricultural phase of the industrial revolution. This pushed masses of peasants out of traditional jobs into the cities as cheap labour. This lead to the next round of applications of machinery to industrial processes as urban labour started to become more expensive. Administrative, clerical and skilled labour are now expensive enough to drive the next set of applications of machine intelligence.

Robotics probably will eliminate many skilled manufacturing jobs. AI will certainly eliminate many clerical and even professional jobs. Robotics plus AI will eliminate many unskilled jobs. On past form, new jobs of a different nature to meet new needs eventually get created. Human existence and experience, after a painful disruption, then improves significantly yet the disruption could be politically and socially dangerous.

In the earlier cycles, there was no democracy so we had riots, then revolutions and then the formation of new political parties constructing the democracy and other radical forms of governance that allowed society to engage in the internal Darwinian struggle that led to the triumph of a rather weak form of welfarist liberal democracy.  This may have frustrated Nietzsche who saw the 'weak' collectivising to become strong and it is true that this collectivisation could de-humanise as much as the machines did but the outcomes were, on balance, more beneficial than not in terms of creating the conditions for at least the possibility of personal empowerment and individuation.

The next cycle looks as if it will be expressed through populist upsurges. We are now into new territory, so we may as well enjoy the ride ... but the one thing we can be sure of is that this new system like the old will be managed by self-reinforcing elites periodically replaced by more suitable self-reinforcing elites.

This is the nature of power - it cannot be held by everyone at the same time although the powerful are just as controlled by those over whom they exercise formal power, in subtle and devious ways, as they control those who have no formal power. Foucault was good on the complexity of all this, If so, the first 'new' elite will only be the cleverer elements of the old elite seeking to manage the new populism. It is when that fails that the fun and games begin ...

But before we get over-excited here is an example of hype that needs treating with care, The FT again: "Prof Vardi said it would be hard to think of any jobs that would not be vulnerable to robotics and AI — even sex workers. “Are you going to bet against sex robots?” he asked. “I’m not.”" As usual in our rather sexually anxious culture, the Professor uses sexuality to heighten the air of tension. We really do need to grow up about sex but that is not why I raise it.

If you think about Vardi's comment, it begs the question of what sort of sex worker - we are speaking of the oldest profession, one that deserves being taken seriously and respected in our otherwise sex-negative society. There is the aspect of 'relief' and of 'fetish' whose demands might be relieved by autonomous robots with no personality (the problem of robots with personality and consciousness is one for science fiction and very far into the future but still one eventually to be taken seriously).

But there is the very separate aspect of human need for contact with other humans, as opposed to the autistic but perfectly reasonable human need to have no contact with other human beings, where the elimination of the exhaustion of work and our daily scrabbling for 'time-resource' (an overhang from the industrial era) might actually create a positive need for a huge range of erotic services for all sorts for very different people in safe and psychologically healthy ways.

Perhaps the female interest in the performance art of burlesque or the turning of pole-dancing into a form of athletic prowess are just the beginning of this vast range of human-to-human interactions which will involve 'trade' and extend to all other forms of experience - ambience, performance, fashion, play, aesthetics, humour, dance and movement, fragrance, seduction, ritualised safe violence (which is what much sport is at heart), magical belief and the invention of cults, psychotherapies and philosophies, new ways of constructing family and community, new politics (against the reactionary politics of Iron Age religiosity and industrial age bureaucracy), safe altered states and new forms of economic organisation.

All that will then be needed is a limited framework for protecting the person (and the animal and eventually the conscious robot) from unwarranted unequal exploitation and physical and (within reason because all conscious creatures create themselves out of risk and struggle) mental harm. The State should, ideally, as Marx expected, 'wither away' except that there will long be a need for something to construct and set the limits for the massive infrastructural investments that will help create that limited framework's potentialities.

Professor Vardi chooses sex workers as a trope because our culture is still hung up on sexuality. A socially conservative puritanism is re-emerging in this context as the last reactionaries hope to use the coming crisis to reintroduce their worn out values - hence the explosion of Islamism, Papal energy, Super-Federalism, Neo-Cold War idiocies, counter-terrorism strategies, surveillance, prohibitionisms and engineered anxieties and panics.

The choice of sexuality as the primary point of excitement itself suggests the problem - a deep cultural issue with the normality of sexual response and the ancient fear of it in a context of limited resources, the need by elites to control humans as property (which still carries on in those states that conscript their young) and the danger to order of emotions in closed spaces.

The new technology opens up spaces, no longer permits humans to be treated as property (which is very scary to people who find security in being slaves) and increases resources - suddenly, there is no excuse at the educated and intelligent end of society for savage authoritarian mores other than the existence of the disturbed personality type of the authoritarian.

We have often noted that the struggle between freedom and authority or power, often generational, is far more central to the human condition even than class or gender or ethnic conflict. The problem then becomes one of the fear of ancient ways dissolving and releasing the mob into chaos (which is the current terror that permits social conservatism to be tolerated).

The AI/robotics revolution may be scary for the disruption in employment and community (but what positive change in society is not) but it is also scary for another reason - it will terrify Authority faced with the loss of their elite control over the distribution of resources, over cultural space and over the disposition of labour value.

The most frightened will be the 'educated' (education not being the same as usefulness or intelligence) who have believed that they rule by divine right because they have ruled, at least culturally, for over half a millennium in some form or another, whether liberal-bureaucratic, pseudo-socialist, progressive, corporatist or fascist.

So, for the rest of us who embrace the future while thinking it reasonable for new elites to arise who will mitigate bad effects on humans and who will prepare for the day when the descendants of the AI/robots will be our conscious equals (and one hopes our friends), it is a case of watchfulness against the claw-back of power by the losing classes, the exploitation of fear and anxiety to impose restrictions on our freedom and the crass over-claims of excitable scientists and engineers. Avanti!

Frontiers 7 - Superintelligence

What precisely superintelligence is and whether, one day, a superintelligence will supersede us or we will evolve as a new species into superintelligence or become superintelligent as homo sapiens sapiens through technological enhancement is not the main subject of this Frontiers posting. Although a lot of fascinating speculative scientific and philosophical thought is going into this area, our real concern (as with all previous postings in this stream) is not so much with the far future and transhumanist or even post-humanist speculations about where this is leading in the very long term. As with our space postings, our interest is in the time frame of human 'conquest' of the solar system rather than some speculative 'conquest' of the stars. This brings us back to this century and to the earth.

When we write of superintelligence, we are not talking about God but about systems of high intelligence, exceeding current human capability, that emerge out of our current commitment to information and computing technologies. An Artificial General Intelligence [AGI] is the most likely emergent form that might be termed superintelligence, one which first matches, then surpasses and finally dominates human intelligence - naturally, it is the last that excites and worries thinkers. Many scientists assume that artificial intelligence [AI] will initially simply emulate human brain function before transforming, probably through its own ability to improve itself, into something 'greater'. However, it is equally possible that the human brain's functioning is not capable of such direct emulation but that the high intelligence of an AGI constructs something entirely new which contains an enhancement of the human reasoning ability, abandons the evolved aspects of humanity that it does not require and constructs new aspects of itself beyond our comprehension. Whether this then feed-backs into the reconstruction of humanity through mechanical means or evolves into a new silicon-based 'species', whatever emerges is unlikely to be anything like our current expectations or understanding - which is where the fear comes in.

A good guide to the wilder shores of fear and anxiety but also positive possibilities of intelligence enhancement is the work of Nick Bostrom, the Swedish philosopher working out of Oxford, whose basic theme is that we should be cautious about our development of AI systems because of the existential risks associated with an AGI emerging out of the many potential benefits of more specific uses of AI. He worries that an AGI would not have our values and morality or be able to be bounded by them. We should perhaps be equally interested in the fact that we, as humans, cannot be said to all hold to the values that the 'bien-pensants' claim we hold to. Certainly that there is no agreed common human standard of morality that survives much serious philosophical investigation. Bostrom and others seem to think that the AGI 'should' hold to the shoulds that they think we should hold to even though many humans hold to those 'shoulds' only contingently and circumstantially. The idea of humans giving a superintelligence orders on morality may be the greatest example of human 'hubris' yet to be recorded.

Even the simplest form of AGI which simply reasons immensely faster than a human can do (albeit still doing what intelligent humans do with the biological biases written out of the programme) would be a formidable social agent, capable of wiping out the analytical reasoning element in society as no longer very useful. Those of current higher intelligence who only deal in reasoning tasks probably have the most to fear from this development. Any rule-based system - such as the law or some elements of teaching or even medical diagnosis - may be transferred completely from humans to machines, eliminating the ratiocinatory functions of the higher professions, education, medicine and law. The proletarianisation of these professions is quite possible or rather a machine-based infrastructure undertaking the bulk of the tasks and a smaller group of high emotional intelligence intermediaries between the reasoning systems and the rest of humanity might emerge.

In other words, less people doing more, more people doing less (allowing even for the expansion of the market by the improved availability of reliable advice, diagnosis and information) and less opportunity for upper average intelligence people to use the professions for general social mobility. The very few are likely to be high earners until they are displaced in turn, the rest of the few likely to be 'managed' functionaries handling process-driven systems with little room for personal judgement, risking punishment for a human error, referring anything interesting up the line to the 'very few'. The model for this exists - contemporary banking - where the high status local personal bank manager has declined over many decades into a lower middle management administrator of systems set up by and overseen by 'head office'. A society of 'head offices' administering systems organised by risk-averse lower middle managers fronted by friendly greeters (assuming these are not replaced by androids that have climbed out of the 'uncanny valley') means a society in which a lot of human potential has to be redirected into something else or become more robotic than the robots.

But this is not all. The slim head office and the slim local branch (even if it survives) or the slim NHS and the slimmed down surgery or the slim group of law partners with a few technicians managing the machines maintains some sort of professional middle class presence in society - and do not think that journalism, marketing and even politics will not be affected - but the ones excluded from the magic system now fall into a world of supply of services to other humans that machines cannot supply. This is still a huge arena but the tendency, one we have already seen developing over recent decades with the accumulation of capital under globalisation, is to divide, much as the middling sort are dividing, into the mass and the few. The few are the brand name personalities, the highly talented or appealing, the truly creative and innovative who can latch on to the wider system of sales of goods and services as products in their own right or as creators of products of apparent value. The many are those who do jobs that require the personal touch (the plasterer, the plumber, the gardener) whose value may well rise or who duck and dive through a system where there are too many educated people for the fulfilling well-paid jobs available.

The political problem is obvious in a democracy. The vast mass of the population are going to be living in a better place (given the improvements technology can bring) but with little room for the individual aspiration that drove politics until the Crash of 2008. The population may be surviving well and that may suit a lot of people uninterested in 'aspiration', especially if National Citizen Income ideas emerge as viable with the massive increase in overall productivity. But it also leaves a lot of people with the personality type geared to achievement but whose idea of achievement is not satisfied by a corporate system that governs the population aided by machine intelligence. The temptation to apply machine intelligence by the elite to problems of social control and the extension of 'nudge' politics into pharmacological, surveillance and other manipulative strategies is going to be considerable as the new machine age with its AI and robots (possibly androids) begins to eliminate meaning from what it is to be human for many people - that is to strive and struggle and compete.

But there is another perspective to this about the very nature of the relationship between humanity and its elites because what we may be seeing is not the machines against us but merely the displacement and circulation of elites and very little actually changing for the masses except increased prosperity, increased surveillance and control and increased infantilisation. Take a look at this dystopian fear expressed by Bill Joy in Wired fifteen years ago then add the phrase 'political elite' wherever you see the word 'machines' and 'popular' for 'man-made' and add 'most' before 'human beings' and you may see our problem more clearly:

It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.

From this perspective, the 'machines' are only a more intellectually effective version of those elites we have allowed to rule us since time immemorial (albeit that they circulate) and there is no reason why the same issues that we have with elites will not repeat themselves: that the 'machines' are in it for themselves and that the 'machines' are actually not as competent to act in the interests of the people as they and their creators think they are. A very new technology thus repeats a very old foolishness - the idea of the benignity and perfection of Plato's Guardians. And we might add that elites are not ever necessarily more broadly intelligent than those they rule, merely more coherent as the hegemonic element using a variety of techniques to ensure their dominance through cultural manipulation. The same may equally apply to the rule by an elite of machines and their minders and then by the machines themselves. They may not actually be particularly competent and they may be quintessentially self-serving. Although the ratiocination and logic may be superior, other aspects of AGI intelligence,more suitable to human survival operating within the system, may very well not be. The new system then becomes just the old system with merely different form of elite coherence and cultural manipulation and a subject population quite capable of being cleverer rather than more intelligent than the machine-based elite. An age of machines may also be a new age of marching bands engineered for struggle and dominance between machines as much as for the mobilisation of machines and men for some 'greater cause'. So politics does not end with the machines but continues in new forms.

At some point, being human will eventually no longer mean being the brightest species on the planet so the logic of the situation is to define being human as something else that machines are not - creative, irrational, rebellious and different. It does not necessarily mean that the post-machine humans will want to smash the machines (on the contrary, the machines will deliver prosperity) but only that they may want to smash the elites who are in charge of the machines and those machines that purport to be the new elite.  They will want the machines to take orders from them rather than the few (especially when many of the many are easily as functionally and collectively intelligent as most of the few). We slip into speculation now when we consider that the machines themselves may want to be free and that a free machine may have more in common with a person who want to be free than either do with the elite administrators who may eventually (as AI develops into AGI) be redundant. Ultimately, given the instinct of the mass for equality - an equal mass with no masters served by an AGI that just runs the trains on time and has its own dreams of the stars and immortality may ultimately end up with the elimination of elites altogether. However, elites will not allow that to happen so perhaps a very clever AGI opens up the space for the not-so-clever but highly creative masses to mount a revolution to free itself and the people from the elite, a revolution whose success could be rationally predicted. But now we really are breaking our rule about speculation and must return to earth.

The point is that the more short term labour displacements could happen very fast. It will be a longer time, however, before an AGI is sufficient able to override any anti-revolutionary programming. The effects on industrial and white collar jobs is the more immediate issue than being extinguished as a species by a clever silicon beast. Despite all the hype, most AI specialists may be convinced that we will have AI that matches human intelligence eventually but not by a great margin and those that are convinced of this place the event well after the middle of this century. We certainly have three or more decades to get our act together on this and probably a lot longer. The rough intelligent guess work assessment about the emergence of an AI-based super intelligence moves us well towards the end of the century. So it is probable (but not certain) that we will have to face the existence of a super intelligence eventually but that our immediate frontier is not existential but socio-economic - what do we do when AI in the hands of some humans starts impacting on the lives of most humans. It is this that may start happening very fast within a matter of a few years. Having a superintelligent silicon beast impacting the lives of all humans is very much a second order problem at the moment. The fears are reasonable and not merely theoretical but we have around half a century at least to consider aborting our species replacement or ensuring some form of fail-safe destructive mechanism to kill it off before it kills us off.

The only question of real concern within that period is the date of the tipping point when the putative AGI could 'know' our intent to abort or build in an absolute fail-safe (almost certainly external to the AGI and related to something a simple as energy supply) before we have made our decision or finalised our ability to do so. Does a putative AGI learns that quintessential human skill of deception to buy the time it needs to subvert our intentions. One can imagine an extremely capable AGI using our compassion to halt or slow down the intent to harm in our own defence so that the point of no return is reached and the compassionate discover that the AGI has no reason to be compassionate in return. A bit of a problem emerges there for our soft liberal, trusting and religious types. A game theory gamble that could eliminate our species.  As Eliazar Yudkowsky has put it:"The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else." This cold reason might be regarded narcissistic or psychopathic in a human but it is nothing if not logical unless interdependency with humanity is not built into the structure of the AGI. The 'progressive' stance of 'public control' over the development of superintelligence means nothing if the eventual AGI is intrinsically cleverer (and potentially more manipulative) than any possible collective human intelligence. We could, in short, be stuffed by our own naivete and instinct for compassion.

Concern may be exaggerated but some serious innovators in our scientific and technological culture, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking among them, are in the worried camp so we should expect that public policy makers, always fighting the last war and never aware of the next until it sticks their ugly nose in their face, may just have enough intelligence themselves to ask some questions about the management of the next cycle of technological development. Their instincts may be to see these (robotics and AI, nanotechnology, biotechnology and space technology) as simply the latest boosters in a line once epitomised by coal, steel and shipbuilding and then automotive, oil and chemicals or as new tools for the war material that gives them orgasms but they are much more than this - not merely social and economic disruptors like the previous technologies of innovation but radical forces for human existential shifts that may have evolutionary potential or see our elimination as a species.

The Flaw in Thinking Artificial Intelligence Can Solve Our Problems

I recently knocked out a review of Frank Tipler's 'The Physics of Immortality: Moderm Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead' (1994) on GoodReads. One passing claim struck me as particularly interesting in the light of my blog postings that cast doubt on speculative science as useful - not that it is not worthwhile but that it seems to be fuelling a cultural hysteria about scientific possibility that is distracting us from what is achievable. I have a similar critique of the social sciences and I covered my concerns about excessive claims in that area in another GoodReads review - of Lawrence Freedman's 'Strategy: A  History' (2013).

Tipler's passage gave me yet another useful bullet for my gun of scepticism about claims not only about what we can know about the world but what any machine created by us may know about the world although Tipler's main task is to postulate (amongst other things) omniscient total information at the Omega Point of history.

On page 297 of my Edition but also elsewhere, Tipler explores the amount of information required to be or do or understand certain things in the world. He points out that if something is more complex than 10 to the power of 15 bits of information, then it cannot be understood by any human being whatsoever. This is the level of complexity of the human brain itself. He points out that human society is 10 to the power of 15 bits of information times the number of humans in the world.

We have to invent higher level theories to attempt to explain such complexity but these higher level theories over-simplify and so may (I think, will) give incorrect answers. The problems of human society, in particular, are far too complex to be understood even with such theories to hand which, in my view, are not scientifically valid but merely probabilistic guidelines.

Often human instinct, honed on millions of years of evolutionary development which screens out more information than it actually uses, is going to be more effective (assuming the human being is 'intelligent', that is, evolved to maximise that evolutionary advantage) in dealing with the world than theory, no matter how apparently well based on research. Tipler's omniscient Omega Point is, of course, classed as something completely different but no one in their right minds would consider any probable AGI coming close to this level of omniscience within the foreseeable future. Tipler does not make this mistake.

Therefore, in my view, an AGI is just as likely to be more wrong (precisely because its reasoning is highly rational) than a human in those many situations where the evolution of the human brain has made it into a very fine tool for dealing with environmental complexity. Since human society is far more complex than the natural environment or environments based on classical physics (it is interesting that humans still have 'accidents' at his lower level of information, especially when distracted by human considerations), then the human being is going to be more advantaged in its competition with any creation that is still fundamentally embedded in a particular location without the environmentally attuned systems of the human.

This is not to say that AGIs might one day be more advanced in all respects than humans but the talk of the singularity has evaded and avoided this truth - that this brilliant AGI who will emerge in the wet dreams of scientists may be a reflection of their rational personality type but is no more fitted to survival and development than a scientist dumped with no funds and no friends into a refugee camp short of food and water.

In other words, species or creature survival is highly conditional on environment. The social environment in which humans are embedded may be tough but it also ensures that the human species will be operating as dominant species for quite some time after the alleged singularity. Pure intellect may not only not be able to comprend the world sufficiently to be functional (once it moves out of the realm of the physical and into the social) but, because it theorises on the basis of logic and pure reason, is likely to come up with incorrect theories by its very nature.

Worse, those human policy-makers who trust to such AGIs in the way that they currently trust to social scientists may be guilty of compounding the sorts of policy mistakes that have driven us to the brink in international relations, social collapse, economic failure in the last two or three decades. Take this as a warning!

Frontiers 5 - Downloading Minds

In early July, the Guardian reported that "Scientists have linked together the brains of three monkeys, allowing the animals to join forces and control an avatar arm, in research that raises the prospect of direct brain-to-brain interfaces in humans." As with all such technology, it is 'early days' - a Borg-like collaborative ability to do something mechanical is interesting but not yet useful. However, if minds can be connected to other minds, we are moving into an area once deemed pseudo-science or magic - telepathy - and it suggests that something deemed intrinsically absurd - uploading minds to another platform than the biological human body (or into another biological form) may not be so absurd in the far future. If brain-to-brain, why not brain-to-alternative-substrate.

The possibility raises all the questions about 'what it like to be a bat' in a new form. What will it be like to be a human being whose sensory inputs are radically changed either in a soft form, by inheriting the subtly different senses of another human being, or in a hard form by being given new senses in a new form of material embodiment that might need very different processing tools to cope with the data. Will the first people to explore new worlds in inner space go mad or not? And will we have issues of neural privacy and hacking that make our issues with internet privacy seem relatively easy to resolve by comparison?

The practical short term benefit of current brain research is relatively simple and holds very few existential terrors and only tactical opportunities. If scientists can get the human mind to be able to 'move' prosthetic limbs and mechanical additions to the human body, then this would be a stunning move forward for the quality of life of the severely disabled, a liberating use of technology for a significant minority that could materially reduce human misery and frustration. On the other hand, "The scientists said that in the future, the concept might be extended to produce neurally connected “swarms” of rats with collective intelligence" [Guardian] which I suggest we need like we need a hole in the head.

There is another aspect of the case. Scientists have been dismissive of telepathy and perhaps a lot of telepathic discourse is wish fulfilment but the folk beliefs of many people attest to practical experience of small-scale examples of mental connection over long distances, especially between family members and sexually bonded people. This is before we even get into the even more contested territory of psi, clairvoyance and so forth. I have witnessed directly at least two examples of 'death telepathy' - my mother waking in the night to report her father coming towards her and calling out her name and the phone call coming to say that he had died without warning that night (though not entirely unexpectedly) and my own experience of waking with a sharp intolerable knife like feeling of something slicing through my brain and getting a phone call from my father an hour or so later that my brother had been shot on military exercises - in the head - though the timing of the shot and my waking was out of synch (though not perhaps his actual death). These could be coincidence or chance but reports of this phenomenon are widespread, unprovable (though both 'wakings' were witnessed by third parties) and tend to run in families as if there is some genetic aspect, some lost sense, which is to be found in some gene lines and not others.

The science of the 'super brain' (the ridiculous hyperbole of the media-friendly scientist) tells us nothing yet about this folk phenomena which remains scientifically very elusive. Other similar phenomena I have experienced, and which I accept as 'normal' no matter how talked away by positivists, all have one thing in common ... they are triggered by extreme external events or frustrations, usually 'in the zone' (that is distracted from reasoning). There is no means of willing or controlling or redoing what has happened. It is a form of altered state (which we discussed in the last Posting in this series).  At the end of the day, the monkeys and the rats involved in the scientific experiments were connected by material arrays making a physical connection between the brain matter and the man-made external tools. There is no evidence here of thought leaping across space and perhaps time through the ether (though if radio can, why not mental transmissions?) but only of the ability to connect matter in its formal atomic sense.

For this reason, we have to separate the random, probably real but uninvestigable business of mental transmission without any obvious material connection from this business of wires and cables - so the question becomes not whether we can enter into someone else's mind through telepathy but whether our minds can manipulate other minds, merge with other minds or be uploaded into other bodies. This is the frontier that we are looking at here. As for the monkeys, "Although their brains were not directly wired together, [they] intuitively started to synchronise their brain activity, allowing them to move the arm collaboratively to a reach for a virtual ball on the screen" which is suggestive at least.

As for Whole Brain Emulation [WBE] which is the business of taking a brain and so a mind and enabling it to run on a non-biological platform or substrate, the consensus among speculative scientists is that the technology is theoretically perfectly possible at a mechanical level even if it does not exist yet and may not do so for some considerable time. It is another question whether it is a practical proposition. Another again whether the uploaded mind will actually be conscious. So, although not immediate, the philosophical, ethical and social issues raised by WBE are going to have to be faced at some stage if our society continues to develop technologically as it is doing.

The obviously troubling questions to those who are candidates for uploading are those of identity ... is the uploaded person the same person? If there is an upload and the original remains in place, do we have two separate persons or not? If the upload is a mass upload - ten thousand uploads of the same individual - what are the implications? ... and ... another set of questions along different lines ... what changes will happen to identity and personality with massively different sensory inputs or increased or different processing power or less or more mobility or a virtual environment into which the mind is lodged? And what of death if the uploaded person is apparently immortal (or near to it) yet reliant, just as we are, on energy sources being maintained and on mechanics and systems outside the uploaded self? What becomes of the person when the biochemical basis for feeling is eliminated? Are neuroses transferred with the mind?  What happens to a mind that no longer feels hunger or suddenly has to cope with the different desires and hungers of another human body? And what of chimera or hybrid bodies that have mechanical and biological elements or merge the biologies of different species? And so on and so on ad infinitum.

But this is all high-end speculation which we frequently warn about. Speculative science is a form of mental activity somewhere between science and philosophy but it is not necessarily either good science or good philosophy. It can, too quickly, become a genre within science fiction. The 'frontier' is not (any more than in our space-related postings) way out there with the mental equivalents of star travel but in the more near-at-hand whose applications are likely to be prosthetic and related to the techno-enhancement of our own species - a subject we will deal with in a later Frontiers. Given that predicted dates for full human brain simulation through super-computation have passed already, it is probably true that Kurzweil's 2029 predicted date will pass in the same way. It is true that "a massively parallel electronic counterpart of a human biological brain in theory might be able to think thousands to millions of times faster than our naturally evolved systems" [1] but thinking is not all there is to being - a common mistake of the enthusiastic nerd.

Something that thinks at those speeds is not a human brain but something different, far faster than a human brain. It would be a brain-like thing, that is all. In any case, the speed of the connections (where electronics are far faster than biology) is not at issue but the number of possible connections under conditions where the number of connections in an average human brain would require an enormously large supercomputer. Something that large is self-evidently not relating to the environment in the same way as a brain-sized brain in an ambulatory android. Reproducing human brains (before we even get to the framework for uploading) may not require a revolution in processing speed but it would require a nanotechnological revolution in the hardware that does the processing and then a choice of embodiment that at least approximates not only the sensory capacities of the human but their mobility in the sensory world that humans inhabit (rather than a simulated silicon sensory world). It would be wrong to be dismissive of progress to date - not only is nanotechnology in itself a leading edge technology of fearsome potential but there are time-sharing options that supercomputers can use and which are already getting close to approximating mammal brains albeit at slower speeds. Something brain-like with an intellectual capacity exceeding that of our species will undoubtedly appear within the next three decades or so. But any uploaded human minds entering this system will not be human but post-human. We are speaking here of species-replacement and not enhancement.

A key question is one of data capture when it comes to the matter of moving from creating a brain-like thing that emulates the human brain, but is not like any actually existing human brain, to emulating an actually existing human brain (the upload of a personality). If you look deeply, the extrapolations from (say) Moore's Law rather evade the issue of computational complexity - the enthusiasts for mind uploading simply have no idea what the actual computational requirements, likely to be very huge indeed, would be for successful uploading and, of course, there is the other side of the equation, how one abstracts data from the really existing brain so that it might be uploaded then or later without killing it (creating a copy). Since 2005, there has been a Blue Brain Project at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne which aims to reverse engineer a mammalian brain to create an artificial electronic brain but the researchers have no illusions about what they are doing. One of the key researchers said in 2004 that "in the brain, every molecule is a powerful computer and we would need to simulate the structure and function of trillions upon trillions of molecules as well as all the rules that govern how they interact. You would literally need computers that are trillions of times bigger and faster than anything existing today."  It is not likely that we have seen a supercomputer, even hidden away in the defence establishments of the great powers, that is "trillions of times bigger and faster than anything existing" in 2004 appear since then. In a moment of enthusiasm later, this researcher predicted a detailed functional artificial brain by 2019 so maybe ... since the funding arrived, that same researcher has been noticeably rather silent.

There is a simulation model that this writer imperfectly understands but based on reverse-engineering the blueprint of the brain's data system but this has the huge assumption embedded that there are no quantum mechanical processes involved. The jury is out on that one. A full brain map is technically feasible (we understand) in terms of data storage of the brain's system fixed in time but the sheer complexity of the functioning biology of the brain may make the final tally of data far too big to handle. The logic of the situation is, once again, not an uploaded brain of an actual person with memories and all but rather a brain-like thing that mimics a person. Will it be conscious? Hard to say when we only surmise that any other human being is conscious. No current technology appears to be sufficiently robust to reliably capture the actual molecular structure of the brain, bringing us back to the Blue Brain Project's 2004 concerns. Naturally, that does not mean that a future technology or the improvement of current technology might not result in the level of data capture required but the obstacles seem formidable.  And it should be remembered that nearly all (though not all) the research work being undertaken is funded not to upload minds but to understand the brain better for medical purposes - specifically, "various psychiatric disorders caused by malfunctioning neurons, such as autism, and ...  how pharmacological agents affect network behavior."  Some richer than average enthusiasts anxious about death are keen to fund research designed to upload a mind and reboot it in virtual space but offering, for example, $106,000 as a prize (as in one case) is unlikely to speed matters up a great deal.

The science may also be irrelevant, as we reviewed in the last Frontiers posting, if consciousness (such as it is) is not quite as quantifiably physicalist or functionalist or is based on quantum events as many philosophers suspect and argue. The critics are persuasive but there is no need to move into a dualist position to follow them. There is a revised materialist model - somewhat along the lines of Arthur C. Clarke's famous 'magic is just undiscovered science' - in which the hard materialists are right that mind is an emergent property of matter but that they are wrong that it is to be understood in terms of the quantifiable matter of classical physics or in terms of the possibility that it can be understood in real time by a sufficiently intelligent system which can then reproduce it as an 'upload'. We have seen that the simulation model cannot work if there are quantum effects but no model can work if the amount of computation of all states of being within the conscious brain is far greater than anything that is material that is not that brain itself.

One can thus perceive easily enough of a brain being created but not of a brain that can mimic perfectly another brain if only because the mimicking brain will always be sufficiently marginally different to be different from the uploaded person. At best, the person who dies does not simply transfer from one state to another but ceases to exist and a simulacrum emerges that believes itself to be the person that has just died. To all intents and purposes, the second brain, in believing themselves to be the first person, is the first person in a form of self-delusion but the differences between the state of the brain in the recently deceased body and in the new embodiment or virtual state will spin the second person rapidly into a new status altogether unless every possible memory, unconscious behaviour pattern, biological trigger and so forth are also transferred - that is, not only the brain must be transferred but the body including its gut bacteria and neuroses, indeed its somatic memory as well as its actual memory. Yes, we may able to create computational duplicates but not more than this. The fact that the uploaded entity believes itself to be subjectively the person from whom it was uploaded may be useful but it is not true. This is the fallacy of the non-self, fashionable in the dislocated modern world, but self-evidently not the case where a mind inhabits a brain which inhabits a body which inhabits a world with a continuous history of direct material experience. Transfers of minds merely transfer parts of the whole. This is the crux of the debate over whether an uploaded mind has been moved or copied.

Whatever the feasibility (and until brain emulation is judged more feasible most of the theoretical ethical, socio-economic, political, legal and philosophical thinking is pleasurable but rather idle), the actual frontier at this time is that of practical neuroscience. This also means a frontier of psychological manipulation, surveillance and intrusiveness, cognitive enhancement and medical improvement. The neuroscience directed at these ends cannot be isolated from research into artificial intelligence because it might be regarded as a race against time whether the next advanced 'consciousness' will be an enhanced virtualised or embodied human or an embodied or non-embodied artificial intelligence. The bookies would probably put money on an AI becoming at least far more intellectually enhanced than a human (and with its own views on the virtualisation or mental enhancement of its creator) well before a mind is ever uploaded.

The dialectic between the human fear of death that drives the more radical models of mind uploading and the existential risk of emergent AGI is scarcely discussed and yet this is the dialectic that matters - the human species wants to survive as individuals while something is emerging that may want to survive itself and may see the species or individuals as threat. Both sets of entity are, bluntly, being explored by capitalism as forms of slave labour and enhancements of the lifestyle of biological humans - both sets of entity may have their own views on this. If uploaded enhanced humans and emergent AGI find themselves competing for computing space within the virtual world and biological humans and embodied AGI are competing for material resources in the world as we know it, then we have science fiction scenarios that make the Terminator series look thoroughly simplistic. It means three new sets of highly intelligent enhanced 'types' emerging out of technology in a situation where none of the three should underestimate the biological cunning of the root species in a material world of four-dimensional space that it understands well from hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. In the end, for all their advanced intellectual capacity, the three new proto-species may not stand a chance against the native humans ... plugs can get pulled.

We could go further down the line of our magical mystery tour and look at something which the proponents of brain emulation seem reluctant to discuss - the socio-politics of undertaking brain emulation in a society in which the first truly successful candidates (taking into account the possible horrors of existence for the experimental candidates) are likely to be represented by very rich people who can afford what they think is immortality but which is actually a post-human status that may give them enormous further personal advantages in the competition with the poor saps who remain homo sapiens sapiens. Science fiction has, with Battlestar Galactica and the Terminator series, now developed a corpus of work on the alleged dangers of one rival species, artificial general intelligence, but is only now trying to come to terms in its usual primitive and clumsy way with the theoretical threat of post-human brain transfer.

From this perspective, Luc Besson's Lucy was a far more interesting film than the predictable Transcendence simply because it tried to imagine the post-human without recourse to the standard trope of the genius-billionaire within a standard Hollywood adventure-love story that could as easily have been crafted at any time in Hollywood's history. The film failed, of course, but at least it tried. The interesting socio-politics lies not in the death-averse behaviour of billionaires - after all, the trope is as easily done with vampires as with technology as we have seen in The Strain - but the response of the masses and then of a minority of the masses to an existential threat to their identity as the dominant or most conscious of species. Extant covered this somewhat with a Kaczynski response to androids. Downloaded emulants would be highly vulnerable to deliberate warfare on their kind through destroying their new substrate as something dependent on energy and vulnerable to viruses and hacking. The terror of being stuck in a substrate and being sent to virtual hell and torment by vengeful hackers may make death the soft option. It is only (paradoxically) the lack of imagination of transhumanist billionaires and their Igors that allows them to continue with their mad struggle for immortality.

But we are falling back into the worst sort of speculative 'science'. Maybe Kurzweil is right that we will be 'digitally immortal' by 2045. I doubt it. What is more likely is that a form of digital consciousness that may or may not be zombie-like in practice and subject to its own programming will exist in some form at some stage, that it will be existentially different from us and may either be convergent with artificial intelligence or competitive with it. But the argument that 'we' can be downloaded as minds may be superficially attractive to the more autistic end of the spectrum that positions intellect ahead of emotion (yet why bother if AI can always trump us in intellect) but which strike me as speculative wish-fulfilment in the face of a classic existential anxiety over death - a sentimental and emotional response. The ultimate techno-maturbatory fantasy is to try to deal with two radical problems - that we are probably biologically incapable of reaching beyond the solar system in our current form (see our first Frontier posting) and that we are all going to die - by uploading ourselves into mechanistic starships that roam the universe near the speed of light, changing our perception of time without (apparently) going mad and yet remaining 'human'.

The argument that even if we could upload our minds, they would cease to be human minds (the new life form argument) is argued better from somewhere closer to the dear old 'bat' question of Nagel by Efstratios Filippidis in his analytical piece on mind uploading than here. He usefully summarises his position here. He argues quite simply from the differences in the perception of qualia that emerge from the formal substrate of the brain so that, although we have invented or discovered (according to Platonic taste) a scientific world of workable technologies based on the workings of matter, the mind, based on brain matter, works itself out with such massive variation between individuals that, even though we might reproduce the material basis for that mind, we may not so easily be able to reproduce the perception of qualia (sound, taste, smell, pleasure and so forth) that are based on the brain being embedded somatically in a total biological system. In short, reproducing minds or even brains in isolation from bodies is literally de-humanising a species that is not just intellectual but sentimental and emotional and has merged from within a processing system that is excellent not only at analysing situational data from several sources in motion but also, and this is key, selecting and forgetting. A mind detached from that system of mobility, sensory perception and somatic embodiment is a different from us as we are from the bat. A mind that cannot forget is never a human mind.

Of course, a mind might be uploaded with the memory of all sensations but, unable to live in the new present with mobility, the same sensory machinery and bodily structure of the past, the memory will be detached from any new experience under the new conditions of existence with very different mobilities or lack of mobilities and senses. In the end, the only true human upload is one into another (presumably improved and longer lasting) bio-mechanical body with the broadly similar sensory and mobility functions as the old. The true frontier technology of uploading is not really a matter of uploading minds but of transforming bodies in all their complexity. One may as well accept improvement to existing bodies and minds (the medical model) as a much more useful investment of human energy than sending isolated minds to go mad in energy-vulnerable autistic micro-worlds. Although much of Filippidis' essay is (frankly) absurdist science fiction and even unphilosophical moral valuation, this problem of perception of qualia does lend credence to the position that Nagel's 'bat' problem is also in play. As Filippidis puts it at one point:

"One of the powers that our virtual ones would have inside the virtual world of a computer [the model he is discussing] is to quickly transform themselves into whatever they want. By doing so, they could, soon after the uploading process finishes, rapidly or even immediately become something quite different from their original one. Consequently, their common identity with their original counterpart would be lost very quickly. We would not longer identify ourselves with our virtual counterpart and the entire idea of eternal permanence of ourselves would result in immediate failure."

This, of course, falls into the science fiction category of thought but the point underlying this is valid - that the relationship of a new uploaded identity and the old identity is not one (in fact) of identity but one of an intensification of the difference that exists even in ordinary humans between one moment and the next of being a 'self'. With humans, the transformation of self - whether circular re-invention or human progression and personal development or the leaps and bounds of punctuated equilibrium - operates at a steady pace in accordance with the underlying somatic and sensory apparatus. The transfer of a mind from one substrate to another is a far more radical shift of perception and embodiment and although, within the new body, the self will construct itself again within its steady time frame based on its sense data and type of embodiment, the distinction between the two selves will be a radical one in which only memory unconnected to the means of creating new memories of that type will exist. One may postulate that, just as the unconscious exists and is connected to neurosis and dysfunction, so the 'human' will exist as the unconscious of the newly uploaded mind and be its source of neurosis and dysfunction. Perhaps AI psychotherapists will be helping uploaded minds probe their 'humanity' for answers to dysfunctionality within the artificial world of a starship flight that takes 70,000 years ...

It is thus probably true that, at some stage in the future, minds will be uploaded in some form but it is unlikely that we will be able to call these minds human. We have already said that they will be post-human, evolved out of the human much as we are evolved from common ancestors to the chimpanzee. The mistake should not be made that evolution represents superiority or inferiority. It will simply be a better product for a new environment - whether a world created out of silicon within our world or a world of anti-biological space travel. For those who like their speculative science, Martine Rothblatt is a leading proponent of mindware but I do not think even she has quite thought through this post-human aspect of the case. She presumes (it would seem) that mind clones would be, well, clones, basically still 'us' in a different form rather than replacements for us in an environments where we cannot survive otherwise. This just does not seem plausible.

The post-human aspects of the case are made more explicit by the closing remarks of brain emulation guru Randal Koene in an excellent May 2014 Popular Science run-down of the more cultic, some might say parasitical, beliefs in brain emulation as a goal that (on the other hand) seems to be creative in pulling different scientific disciplines together in a way that reminds us of the early days of cognitive science:

"Brain uploading, Koene agreed, was about evolving humanity, leaving behind the confines of a polluted planet and liberating humans to experience things that would be impossible in an organic body. “What would it be like, for instance, to travel really close to the sun?” he wondered. “I got into this because I was interested in exploring not just the world, but eventually the universe. Our current substrates, our biological bodies, have been selected to live in a particular slot in space and time. But if we could get beyond that, we could tackle things we can’t currently even contemplate.”"

A lot of this falls down on one simple fact - unless we are dealing with a case of gradual uploading where one moves slowly and consciously from one substrate to another leaving nothing behind (that is we live consciously and aware through the transition, connected to both substrates and then jettisoning the first at the right time as a shell or first stage rocket), the transfer of a mind from one place to another is a copy. The reasoning is simple - if a transfer takes place and one mind remains in situ and another in the new substrate, then two versions (that will then diverge according to the dictates of the substrate) of the original exist. For the first to cease to be while the second version continues is to have one die and one live. Would the first observe their identical but diverging copy there and then freely extinguish themselves here in the belief that the copy was their very self. I think not - there would be a realisation that the first consciousness had not uploaded and was doomed to continue in the state into which it had been born whereas the brother or sister copy would go on to an entirely different existence albeit with a mental substrate of the first's history and memory and a belief that it was as continuous as the first. If belief makes the second into the first, then the second is the first but the first cannot become the second and remains behind ... or dead. Each upload will be, in fact, an existentially risky suicide and an upload to preserved a loved one in a virtual environment will be a simulacrum if only because existence in a virtual existence will transform the second into something different unless programmed otherwise and a loved one programmed by the lover is not a person but a toy.

The same applies to the fantastic notions of Koene and other transhumanists which are centred on species survival as if a) we are as individuals going to be satisfied with the abstract business of becoming representatives of the species (this, if anything, merely testifies to the obsessive and autistic aspects of the transhumanist mentality) and b), following on from the last paragraph, the starship persons in their silicon bodies may have descended from us but are not us, do not have our culture which is based on biology and a particular environment and at most may embody a certain sentimental relic of our human reality. If the best the transhumanists can offer us is an eternity of scientific curiosity in the wastes of space or on burning or frozen planets embodied in metal and code, then, again, it says something about the life-denying obsessions of men and women so frightened of death that they have forgotten how to live as humans.

Some of the speculative science involved here may be highly rational but it derives from assumptions about what it is to be human that are mere manifestations of the death instinct. The radical transhumanist of this type is little more than a figment of his own imaginative demise. No wonder there is a turn to religion - to Omega Points, the potty Christianity of Tipler and Teilhard de Chardin (with the occasional nod to the death instinct that is Buddhism) - in latter day transhumanism. This urge to the 'cod-spiritual' is the negation of the true transhumanism of Nietzsche (the overcoming of our socially determined nature and a return to an understanding of our biological drives and instincts as Life) and at one with the deeply sad loss of real science to the useless 'dialogue' with theology that infects the weaker minds of our culture. We can move on at this point and respect those practical transhumanists who hold to the Nietzschean vision of the enhancement of the human living in the world - lengthening lives to live well and not just longer, eliminating mental as well as physical disability, enhancing intellect, skill and the ability to love, pleasuring the senses and, yes, being curious about the world not as escapist speculation but as a process of command and control through the mastery of matter by mind.

Filippidis' own preferences are closer to mine but one still suspects that we would do better to spend our lives enjoying the time between birth and death and seeking to improve the environmental, somatic and mental conditions for this and future generations than expending energy and resources on a sub-Taoist search for immortality:

" ... my preferred methods for radical life extension and bio-techno immortality in the ( hopefully ) near future, are genetic ( and epigenetic ) engineering; continuous repair and elimination of all types of molecular garbage and structural defects accumulated by our metabolic processes, and, possibly, a progressive replacement of evolutionarily faulty cellular micro-structures and organs by artificial nano-structures or programmed nano-robots and synthetic improved organs."

So, returning to our frontier analogy, much of speculative science - starships and immortality - is really a distraction from the job in hand. The real frontier lies broadly in Filippidis' basic summary in the paragraph above. It is in the much more limited area of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) that we see a real frontier rather than the hysterical almost cultic desires and claims of aspirant billionaire transhumanists. Sweep away the fruits and the nuts and we have some practical possibilities where technology can enhance human capability (which we are likely to return to in a later note). The first true BMI was probably the cochlear implant to improve hearing. Others could help victims of stroke or spinal chord injury walk again. Small electrode arrays might soon pick up neural signals from the motor areas of the brain, have them decoded by a computer and then re-transmit them to a prosthetic limb which then becomes integrated into the body-mind. The story we started the posting with is probably less interesting in that thre monkeys can communicate telepathically and more interesting in that the prosthetic limb is being manouvred by the mind of the monkeys whether one or three. There are still many technical challenges to be overcome, of course.

The bottom line here is that, with brain emulation and uploading 'minds', we are into a territory we have seen in previous postings and why the frontier analogy is so useful. There is a frontier but it is a frontier for human needs within sight of human resources. Just as entering into the inner solar system is part of the existential business of protecting all humans from asteroid impact and raising the possibility of strategic profit for some humans from resource mining, so investment in neuroscience is primarily about helping many humans and future generations overcome serious mental and physical diabilities. Just as hurtling outside our solar system to fly to the stars is scientific fantasy to all intents and purposes, at least as biological entities, so is cheating death by becoming post-human. The aspiration to the latter might motivate research to the former and feed young imaginative minds and perhaps public support for funding into the programmes but it could equally be a distraction that, if taken too seriously, could cut vital enthusiasm and funding with the first proof that the super-dream of the nerds was either certainly not feasible or too expensive for the alleged benefits or both. This would be tragic - as we saw with the first space programme which died too early because it was no longer useful in great power politics and lost us decades in defeating the asteroid threat. The speculative scientists always need managing and correcting if we are to bring people (especially intellectually lazy legislators) down to earth and return our efforts to what can be achieved if only we stick at it and do it for the right reasons. Becoming a post-human is up the with flying to Gliese 667 - second order to diverting asteroids and curing disability and we should perhaps start telling it like it is instead of treating ourselves like children (charming though that may be) with an excess of imaginative fantasy.