Month: April 2015

In The Matrix, a virtual world exists that everyone believes to be real. It is exactly like the real world in that it is shared and that you have limited freedom but freedom nonetheless. Furthermore, no one is aware of the fact that it is virtual. For all intents and purposes, it is the shared phenomenological reality. But in fact it is not, rather it is a world designed by machines who are in fact keeping the humans prisoner. They conceal true ‘reality’ from the humans they use as a power source, and as such keep them locked in a virtual lie.

Cypher decides to go back to this false world. He becomes disillusioned with its harshness, and decides that going back to the Matrix would represent for him a “more real” life. At the end of the film Neo decides to stay in this false world, saying “I’ll show your prisoners a world where anything is possible”. These two examples are extremely interesting to me because in both cases they represent a profound philosophical break with the primacy of the ‘real world’ in favor of a kind of projected authenticity (or created self) based on one’s own experience and one’s own vision of reality. Furthermore, they get to a ‘liberation of consciousness’ and a transcendence of limitations that that is at the top of the transhumanist agenda.

This notion of transcendence gets to the heart of what I find most interesting about the potential of the internet (and of virtual reality more generally) as a potential liberatory pathway for human consciousness from the body. Ghost in the Shell (the anime film by Mamoru Oshii) best shows this, as the main character literally fused with a program and ventured out onto the “boundless ‘net”. She characterizes the ‘net as “truly vast and infinite”, and saw it as something that would liberate her from her machinic body that caused her to not even know for sure if she was really ‘human’. Furthermore, she wished to be freed from what she worded as her “freedom only to expand within boundaries”. To add another element, the program she fused with literally characterized the transition from physical reality to the ‘net as “elevating our consciousness to a higher plane”.

Liberation through virtuality in these instances did occur, but in an idealized fashion. I would ask the following: how can virtual reality in our present circumstance be a kind of liberation? If the ‘net (or the virtual world of the Matrix) is a vast and infinite place where “anything is possible”, then can our internet similarly be by definition a place where we can redefine ourselves? How can it have a liberatory potential (or not), and how can we get there? Is there a liberation of human consciousness (or the human body) on the horizon? And if so, would it truly be a ‘liberation’, or just another enslavement or freedom within set boundaries?

PS: It is worth noting that the Wachowskis have stated publicly that they owe a ‘profound debt’ to Oshii and his work, and that along with Simulation and Simulcra, Ghost in the Shell was assigned viewing for all cast and crew.

In Chapter 2 of Shelly Turkle’s Alone Together, she talks at length about robots and technology more broadly as having this ‘alive’ quality. In particular, the fact that like us robots, like us, make decisions based on ‘data’. The difference between us and robots however, is that this data can be uploaded and does not have to be ‘experienced’ in a conventional sense. In particular she talks about people who would honestly rather confide in a robot than a human being in a romantic situation. She brings up the example of Howard, who would rather confide in a robot than his own father about a prospective dating situation (50-51). She quotes Howard as saying “People are risky. Robots are safe”.

This use of the language of ‘risky’ and safe’ is interesting to me. This is because it implies that humans are unpredictable, whereas robots are. In this instance it would mean that the robot would not give ‘bad advice’, but this inherently means that it is predictable in this way. This language to me could also be used to describe the situation between Theodore and the OS as described by his ex-wife in the film Her. She accuses him of being in a relationship with an OS because he ‘can’t handle real emotions’.

These two situations for me feed into the claim that robots (and technology more broadly) create a kind of narcissism. This is because by creating predictability you eliminate what French thinker Emmanuel Levinas calls in his work Totality and Infinity the “Otherness of the Other”, or that which makes humans human: that is their inherent spontaneity and unpredictability. Levinas says that you cannot know the Other, because you cannot know that which is not you or within your ‘world’ as yourself. He goes on to say that humans have an impulse to attempt to make the Other the Same (that is within their ‘world’) because it is easier to predict what the ‘Same’ will do, and it feeds a very similar kind of narcissism. It is this that creates lack of respect for other humans, colonization of indigenous peoples, and other practices that result from this lack of reciprocity. It also creates an impulse to create likenesses of yourself or find likenesses of yourself in others.

My question leading from all this is: Can these two aforementioned situations (Howard in Turkle and Theodore in Her) be likened to the human impulse to create predictability? What I mean is that these two situations seem to have an inherent impulse to not encounter an unpredictable Other, with a preference for a predictable Same. Do robots feed our desire to create the Same? And if so, what are the ethical implications of this phenomenon? Does this desire to create predictable robots reflect an increasingly inability to encounter the Other on its own terms?

Citation for Totality and Infinity:

Lévinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity; an Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969. Print.

One of Martin Heidegger’s key points in “The Question Concerning Technology” is that what lies in the essence of modern technology is a Gestell or standing-reserve. What he means by this is that what lies in modern technology is not only a means to an end, but a whole mode of existence, centered around a gathering, or an ordering of information in a set way. Where this leads for him is an understanding of nature as an object that can be examined, something from which you can distance yourself and make your object, your instrument, and in the end the slave over which you are master. He states that “The modern physical theory of nature prepares the way first not simply for technology but for the essence of modern technology” (Heidegger “Question” 10), that is this ordering and gathering of information from the point of objective observation. This is what he means when he says that behind technology lies an “enframing”: a whole mode of existence centered around ‘objectivity’ and exact calculative ends.

The question I would like to raise here is “What does this truly mean for us?” The issue here seems to be that we’ve lost the ability to think in terms other than instrumentality. Heidegger says as much in his piece “Memorial Address”, stating that modern technology has in essence reduced our ability to think meditatively, that is to step back and examine our situation and the truth behind elements in our life. He states that “The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought…Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry” (Heidegger “Memorial” 50). This would say for me that technology’s ‘enframing’ has led to a kind of extractivism that views nature as simply a means to an end. It may be a stretch to say that it is all modern technology that is the problem, but it is fair to say (I think ) that it is the way of relating it creates that is at issue here.

Given all this, my questions are as follows:

1. Is there a way of reconciling our use of modern technology with a view of nature that isn’t merely calculative?”

2. Have we truly lost our capacity for what Heidegger calls “meditative thinking”? If so, how can we get it back? Or is it even necessary to?

Citation for “Memorial Address”: ­­

Heidegger, Martin. “Memorial Address.” Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. 43-57. Print.

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