Eureka!

The human mind is an enigma. You can think about an issue for years, decades, and make little progress forward. But then, one day, seemingly for no reason, something clicks. At that point the mental thorn in your side, the niggle that wouldn't go away, the itch you couldn't scratch, becomes resolved. 

Such, for me, has been the issue of the apparent meaninglessness and purposelessness of the universe. Throughout the course of my life I've tried out various solutions to this question but none satisfied. There was still, appropriately enough, a hole at the center of my thinking about this. This hole is a meaningful symbol for what, more generally, might be described as The Void. The Void is where our existence is located and where we have our being. Its best expression is space itself, vast and inscrutable, a vast nothingness which reduces everything within it to just some more inconsequential detritus. It is impossible to place yourself in the context of the mass of space and imagine you are anything important or necessary at all. You just are. Remember that next time you imagine your views matter so much or that things around you must take notice of you. You are literally nothing special.

People, for as long as they could think, have wanted to ascribe some meaning to this vastness. Often they have wanted to ascribe some overarching purpose to it or give some reasoning which explains why everything is and how its all of a piece, a oneness, and to give it some reasonable basis for being. But people have always failed in this and this is why other thinkers have explored its emptiness and what that means for us as thinking people. But this is a clue to where we should be looking for answers. The Void is often conceived as everything out there and, in a spatial sense, it is. But this void of meaning, this void of understanding, is not out there. This particular void is inside each one of us. My "Eureka!" moment is realizing that, actually, we are the void. We have an absence of presence, a presence and substance we try to give things with our descriptive schemes in our role as engineers of a meaningless universe.

For what is it that creates this void of meaning and sets up the questions to which we can find no satisfying long-term answers? What is it that means that all we can ever do is relate things one to another, both giving them context and allowing them to fit into a map of our understandings and beliefs? It is us, us as the universe has given us life. This form of life of ours which must make meaning, must understand, must hold beliefs, it is this which creates the void that we cannot fill. It condemns us to relate things one to another in some great mental act of dexterity so that we can even survive. We must believe things. We must hold what we regard as understandings. Things must mean. Without these operations we would die. They animate us and give us purpose. And so its not some void out there that needs to speak to us and explain itself (and that's good because it never will). The void is in us. The Void is us. We are the ones who create the problem we then cannot solve. Just by being the beings we are. With this form of life we condemn ourselves to explanations but never to an explanation much less the explanation.

And so I ask myself "What is our form of Being?" and I reply "Chaos giving expression to itself." And then I ask "What is my existence?" and the reply comes back "A partaking in my form of Being." All our questions find an answer not out there, not from some God figure, whether personal or metaphorical, but in us, in our form of life, who we are. This form of life offers us up meanings but never the meaning. It gives us beliefs but never the truth. It proffers knowledge but never that thing beyond knowledge in which all talking and thinking would cease because, finally, we have found something that could speak for itself. If there was something (and it would be divine in the truest sense) that could speak for itself then we would have found what human beings have always searched for: something beyond their creative self-understandings with which they could get in touch and about which there would finally be no words, the thing that was not just another thing to relate to something else. But we don't have that. We never will. There are no divinities and, much as we would like it, no God substitutes either. All we have is a void we cannot fill but must, nevertheless, keep trying to.

Given this background, my mind wanders. I think about the Transhumanist agenda I've been interacting with for a year now. Transhumanists want to "improve" the human form of life and they think of this primarily in physicalist terms. So this means they want to stop bad physical outcomes like disease and illness and, eventually, even death itself. Obviously, overcoming death, that decay until life becomes impossible for an organism, is no small task. After all, the laws of the physical universe seem to be that all things decay and die on a long enough timeline. So Transhumanists are happy to go with extending life significantly as a starting point. But I have a huge problem with this and its there in a play by a French existentialist called Jean-Paul Sartre. The play is called No Exit. In this play there are but three characters and they have died. They are in a room and they, so the play seems to suggest, must spend their eternity together. The play focuses on their relationships (which in life were complicated) in this scenario and ends with the comment "Hell is other people".

This comment needs unpacking. Sartre is not saying there, at the climax of his play examining the idea that you would be in the public gaze for all eternity, that everyone else is a shit. That may or may not be the case from your point of view. Sartre's point is more that a life in the gaze of others that does not end is not a life in which people can be themselves. Its like this: imagine you yourself in your public life. You are constantly aware of other people in these types of situations and your behavior is molded to this scenario. You wouldn't do some things in public that you would do when you are home alone in your own place and you imagine no one is watching you. The point there is that the gaze of others changes your behavior and your consciousness of yourself. You often hear a related complaint made about social media where some people act like asses and are then told that they wouldn't act like that if we knew who they were. Exactly! The gaze of other people affects your behavior. Public CCTV cameras (of which the UK has amongst the most in the world) work on the same basis. You are being watched and its affects you. And so you become a socialized version of you and not the you you are by yourself. So why is Hell "other people"? Because it would be to act out that socialized, bad faith version of yourself that is a performance for public consumption forever.

And so how does this relate to Transhumanist dreams of radically extending life and to my "Eureka!" moment? I think its because the Transhumanist understanding of the human being, by which I mean the human form of being, is not adequate to the task. Primarily thinking of us as biological organisms in need of a pep up is not, I think, good enough. Its like thinking of us as a car and saying that if we had a more powerful engine we'd be a better car. Well, we might be. Or you might just ruin the car you had in the first place. Crucially, to my mind, such understandings do not take into account who we are and how we live in terms of our life and existence. And it needs to. Instead, it focuses quite narrowly on the perceived downsides of being physical, that we can be hurt, that we die, and says that if we could solve these things then, somehow (and this point is largely assumed and not explained) things would be better. One thousand years of you is better than eighty years of you, right? Really? Is that what being you is about? Are you just meat that needs to avoid hurt? I think that Transhumanists, either wittingly or unwittingly (and some seem more tuned into this consequence of their thinking than others, to be fair) want to actually supercede a human form of being for a post-human form of being. They want, I think, to head off into the "we are become gods" direction. They want the end of human being.

And this is the problem when, as I see it, we are The Void. Wanting to live forever and cure all diseases is just another way of trying to escape what fate has given us. (And being fated beings is yet another aspect of our being.) This is not to say that we shouldn't try to escape. Its not to say that we shouldn't do any of the things that Futurists or Transhumanists want to do. Its merely to contextualize it. It is, as Richard Rorty said, just one more way to try and escape "time and chance". Its another effort in the on-going plan to escape being human with all its flaws and failures, its pains and struggles. It doesn't, I think, understand or even examine what human being and human existence is at all. I don't think it is to glory in the physical flaws like some masochist to say this. But I see this as the real essence of humanity (in a descriptive and not an actual sense). The human being is the suffering animal, the animal that is aware but never sure of what it is aware. It is the animal that always lacks something. And knows it. It is the finite animal who can see death from almost the beginning of its days. It is the animal that wants and needs and desires. And knows it. Behold, it is become The Void.

I don't think that we will ever become gods. Far too much in this chaotic universe is out of our control. It seems that Dr Stephen Hawking is convinced we will kill ourselves and that some man-made disaster is inevitable at some point. There are many foreseeable future scenarios for this but its just as likely that an unseeable one gets us too. We don't have eyes in the back of our heads. But even if this didn't happen there is too much going on out there for us to control it all. Even the most arrogant of people wouldn't think we could account for everything (another human failing, incidentally). So I do not think that a divine life will ever be something we can approach. Indeed, I think that the urge for divinity is internally generated and part of this form of life that we have now. It is a way to fill The Void with meaning, as we must, as we are impelled by our existence as an expression of our form of being. We are more than biological organisms. Even if you do not think we are in any sense "consciousness" you can at least admit that we have a consciousness. This, too, is part of our being, part of who we are. And its who we are that concerns me when I read philosophers telling me that to become who you are is to find the most meaning that we can in life. 

But when you look into the mirror what do you see? 

Commentary (Part 3)

This week I am publishing a series of blogs simply entitled "Commentary" which is a selection of thoughts on life in general and other thoughts as they occur to me. The format is somewhat open and how these thoughts might be relevant or link one to another, or to other subjects, is left open for the reader to decide. It is hoped that these thoughts of mine may lead to thinking of your own.

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41.

The stream of consciousness.  Isn’t everyone an accident? Isn’t everything? Isn’t the idea of causal relations just another mirage? As Nietzsche showed, it’s a concentrating on some things and not others.

42.

They say that time heals all wounds. Is it not rather that it just causes you to forget, to lose the detail and be left with a vaguer outline?

43.

What’s the difference between willed ignorance and willed innocence? And what are their relative merits? Fine margins.

44.

See comment 31 (Commentary, Part 2).

45.

The problem, as I see it, is many-fold but, at bottom, arrives at a basic lack of the necessary tools and insights to be able to account for our Being, for meaning in an empty Universe, for giving any thoroughgoing purpose to anything. “Change and transitoriness” is all around after the metanarratives and metaphysics die, after all the false gods of knowledge, reason and rationality are exposed as insubstantial, after the crisis of (lack of) meaning has become apparent. We are nihilists in a world of nihilism.

The caveat to this is that this is not wholly true. There is still your situation, culture, society, options, opportunities, personality and motivations - even at bare minimum. Nihilism is the non-existence of universals and not the non-existence of anything at all. You are, in that sense, fated to the perilous path of freedom and creation. Seek only not after universals.

As a result it is not clear to me immediately why the response to Nihilism should be despair - although it often is. Might it not be seen as an opportunity, a place for creation and re-creation, a place where you can cut your cloth accordingly? This is not to say that the life of our lived experience is a playground where anything goes. Anything that can be made to go, goes (as Stanley Fish said). But if things can be made then they can be re-made.

46.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a beguiling enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. That, in retrospect, is probably the fatal mistake, to think there is a truth, reason, rationality or a necessary amount of knowledge to find. We need to stop up our ears to the siren songs.

47.

Life is the process whereby infinity constantly slips through our fingers.

48.

Life is a fate you can escape. Living is the price you pay for it.

49.

Can it be doubted that people are their own worst enemies? If you were creating a species you wouldn’t create a human being. What mixtures of wonder and madness we are!

50.

It’s been hell ever since.

51.

It’s not that I am frustrated and defeated; it’s that my own thinking, choices and actions are what must bring it about. The world is so (dis)ordered and (dis)arranged that every good turns out to be a seed of destruction. Here are perfect grounds for becoming an absurdist - for all is absurd.

52.

The stealing of innocence is the saddest thing of all. I’m always brought to tears when I see examples of it.

53.

Memories to me are often like wounds. Pain is so close to pleasure.

54.

The effort required in life is often more than I am prepared to give. The lazy die as surely as the motivated. In all things there is an internal cost/benefit analysis.

55.

Silence. It cleanses the soul.

56.

Your story is the story of your imperfections. Imperfection has the benefit of authenticity and authenticity, it turns out, is more valuable than an unattainable perfection could ever be.

57.

It is good that lived experience is a constraint and limiting. It is foolish and deliberate misunderstanding from those who would have us believe that anything goes. The very idea makes no sense. There is a world and it impinges upon us. It is good that we don’t control it. Many times the world has brushed up against me, often harshly, but it has made me think and examine. We should welcome such occasions, though they be painful, as aids to our progress along the way.

58.

I have no doubt that every single human being maintains themselves by use of illusions with which they are wont to delude themselves. Not every statement or thought need be perspicuous to some imagined reality. It would be an illusion to think it did need to be.

59.

In a world become mechanism, we are all aliens.

60.

Everybody’s different.

61.

In the practice of understanding your illusions you emancipate yourself from yourself. That is, rightly done, you engage in a constant practice of surmounting your own limitations. And it must certainly be assumed from the very beginning that you are a mass of limitations.

62.

All those who would try to codify and, formally and logically, delineate the world need to remember one thing: the Universe abhors predictability but it loves the unexpected. It might also help to have an entirely appropriate humility. Do we ever really KNOW what’s coming next?

63.

Mine has been an often solitary walk down the path of life. I’m not sorry for that and, reflecting, I don’t have any real feeling that I would want to change it. In any life there will be pluses and minuses for there is no perfect way to live and mistakes will always be part of the game.

64.

People who learn habits of self-reliance (learn to) need other people less. But they should continue to remember the benefits of another point of view, something they will never be able to supply for themselves.

65.

Innocence is something I value so very highly. I wonder now about it’s relationship to naivety, speaking as a man who has written music titled “I’m Naive” about himself.

66.

Sometimes I wonder if I have not just been numb since I was pulled, screaming, into this world. I lie at night and worry that I will be pulled, screaming, out of it too.

67.

Can people be blamed for who they are? It would seem an oversimplification.

68.

I once knew someone who felt beguiled by going astray. I actually am astray and the thought terrified her. Maybe it should terrify me too but I just think “What’s the worst that can happen?”

69.

Why don’t more people revolt from their lives of minimum-waged servitude? Is a diet of X Factor and Premier League really that worthwhile?

70.

The end is not always known from the beginning. Warning for fools.

Commentary (Part 1)

From time to time I write a commentary on things. More often than not this is on myself or my past or things that occur to me in life. This week I will publish a number of these commentaries for public consumption by unwary readers. Often these comments aspire to be nuggets of wisdom. It is of course for the reader to decide what they mean, if anything, and if they are of any use.

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1.

Still the same room. Still the same things. Still the same external conditions. And yet now I feel more hopeful. A sense of finitude can do that to a Man. Of course, my question concerning “what the point of me is” has not been answered. I currently think it’s one of those questions that can never be answered. To seek after generalised meaning or reason is a fool’s errand. Perhaps now I see life as a process of understanding, an awakening from an Edenic innocence, in which you try to make sense of who you are, where you are and why. This, you may agree, is basically a study of Being and what it means in a world without purpose or meaning beyond the local and contingent. I meditate, sometimes daily, on the fact that my life is but an Augenblick and my non-existence will be an eternity. In that perspective, how can any earthly, human, “cares of the living” really be that troublesome?

2.

Anything that can be thought of must certainly be a fiction, so wrote Nietzsche. How can my self-understanding, my telling of the paths and conduits of my life, be any less so? It is no privileged account to be sure. It’s merely my own as it occurs to me at a point in time. But I am lying to you and I do have my reasons. How could I not? And how could you not read me with your own needs to be satisfied? We are none of us here blank slates.

3.

The clock is ticking. That’s how important you are.

4.

Innerspace and Outer Space. Within your own imagination you can dream a billion dreams. Without, there are a billion truths you will never guess at. Each of us is stuck between the world within and the world without, an insignificant point of contact between the two. To one, you are of utmost importance. To the other, you are almost an insignificance. It is a source of wonder and mystery how consciousness could come of something so unconscious as the Universe.

5.

I got my wish. Am I happier? No. It remains a truism that people have little idea what is best for them. As a species, we are half blind in the fog, scrabbling around. For me, relationships are an excellent example of my blindness. The scars of bad ones get deeper and have more long-lasting effects over time. Of course, isolation is no solution.It merely solves one problem by creating another one. I console myself that at least no one else is involved in that case. But it’s a sticking plaster to deal with a broken bone.

6.

Are people basically honest with each other, or basically dishonest with each other? I come down on the side of the latter. Oh, I know that from time to time some people (perhaps Christian types) try to show that human beings are good and basically altruistic. However, I think they are pissing into the wind on this one. Of course, people CAN be altruistic but it seems to me that the fact you need to point this out speaks against it. The fact is that altruism is occasionally useful. But it’s the “what’s useful to me?” mentality that prevails overall.

7.

Not so much crying these days. Over the past year or two I’ve become very attuned to the solar cycle. Currently, as I write, we are heading towards the summer solstice. The days are long and the light hangs on into the night. I awake to sun beams through a gap in the curtain. I experience the beneficial effects of extra electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum (that’s light to you and me). I’ve noticed over the years that I seem very sensitive to the amount of light that is around. It’s no coincidence, in my mind, that my worst episodes of panic occur in early Autumn when light disappears. I know that there is a disorder for this (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and I think that I might fall within that category. Like everything else, I’ve never been diagnosed though.

8.

Power. In the end, I think that quite a lot comes down to this. Having it. Wanting it. To feel it, just for a moment. A lot of things can be explained by the idea of power. And that’s without being Foucauldian about it. Power, and powerlessness, are things that you could get very philosophical about if you wanted to.

9.

I’m still impotent, of course. But I wonder if I might not have settled for less. I was embroiled in an internet conversation in which I had taken on a false identity and I revealed myself to my unfortunate and unwilling victim. He took it quite magnanimously, considering, but then left a landmine of his own behind by suggesting that if only I used my clear powers of intelligence positively I might actually achieve something in life. It came to me as a slap in the face, I must admit. It’s good to hear contrary points of view. Humans are self-deceptive. They need it.

10.

Death can be a shadow, there is no doubt of that. And we can live in that shadow. I had always wanted to be able to die happy, joyously, having, as it were, howling into the void that I had existed. It would have been futile of course. But it would also have been my victory cry. “I existed! Fuck you all!”

11.

I am 46 years old. Still NO actual friends. A lot of the time it isn’t that bad. I have time, such as now, to think and write. Life without other people is certainly less complicated. In an ideal world of my imaginings I wouldn’t have lots of friends coming round anyway. I like (or, I have learned) to keep myself largely to myself. And I don’t dislike that fact.

12.

“The record shows I took the blows and did it my way.” And isn’t that all that one can ask for in life? It’s easy to be negative. My autobiography gives some examples of where I am certainly that. But how about biting back? There can be no more perfect life but than that you took hold of your circumstances and lived the life you wanted to live considering the circumstances you had. I don’t mean this in some secular, economic sense. I don’t mean it in the shallow terms of capitalist society either. I mean that you followed your own beliefs and motivations through. Authenticity to yourself, that’s surely what counts when you have to look yourself in the mirror? On your death bed what comfort would it be that you had achieved material possessions or a life enviable to others in the world? I’d much rather lie there thinking I had been true to myself. You may occasionally need to justify yourself to others. But you will need to justify yourself to yourself every day.

13.

My life and my music are truly intertwined. For those with ears to hear, my music is the best guide to what goes on with me internally. Its the escape valve.

14.

I don’t honestly think that I have any duty to justify myself to anyone. Oh, of course, it may be that this is sometimes expedient. Sometimes, it may even be due to power and authority taking me in hand. But it’s all a joke, isn’t it? A game? I return to a perpetual thought of mine right now: my life is an Augenblick and my death will be forever. What do I care what you think about me? If you honestly wanted a genuine assessment from the horse’s mouth, I could give you one. It wouldn’t be pretty because I know the things I have done. But I’m not a very convinced bad person. When I do wrong its because I’m bored, because I can or because I thought it “clever” to do so. I often regret bad things I’ve done. My heart isn’t in it. I just want to be left alone really and “live and let live” seems to be the best policy for that.

15.

“Physician, heal thyself”. Pulling threads from the twisted haystack of life is certainly a perilous thing. I should heed my own, unasked for, advice. The women were largely a mistake and responsible for massive scars on my psyche. Do good times ever outweigh the bad? I find it hard to think so. If only there was a way to have good times WITHOUT the bad. A solution to this problem has not yet been discovered.

16.

Knowledge is not all it’s cracked up to be. This is a conclusion that gains more force the longer I live. What’s more, knowledge without wisdom is next to useless and dangerous. There is little good in the bare knowing of something. At a bare minimum you also need to know where it fits and what to do with it. This is why choosing not to know things is often the better course. It is hard to “unknow” and such is our make up that we often feel the need to do things about what we know. This way many bad things have happened and not just for me but in general.

17.

My origins are an absurdity to me. It must be true, I muse, that absurdity is the principle of the Universe.

18.

I don’t think that it occurs to people very much just how temporary and fragile they really are. Of course, the old and the sick have this reality impressed upon them more frequently and with more force. But, in general, we seem to have a consciousness which, on the good days, operates as if we are in some way eternal. And I suppose that makes sense. How could you live on an even keel if your every other thought was of how vulnerable and contingent you are? Well, let me tell you from experience that the answer is “Not very well”.

19.

“The crisis of Being”. Only now, as I keep reading, in fits and starts, do I learn that people have been discussing this for decades, if not centuries. Perhaps I’m not so weird and individual after all? This year I’ve written a suite of music in 10 parts called “Human/Being” which really functions as a musical meditation on what it means to be human and the whole subject of Being. If my life is become anything to me it is a process of self- Enlightenment, a process that will one day just be snuffed out. Gone. Unimportant. Another example of “the concerns of the living”.

20.

“The Wanderer. He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer - though not as a traveler towards a final goal, for this does not exist. But he does want to observe, and keep his eyes open for everything that actually occurs in the world; therefore he must not attach his heart too firmly to any individual thing; there must be something wandering within him, which takes its joy in change and transitoriness.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, #638.

I could accept this quite well as a description of me. If I am anything at all it is a wanderer.

Existenz²: A Fable of The Inhuman Future

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer. (Nietzsche)

I have been writing for a number of months now about human being both as a musician and also more philosophically too. At the same time I became interested in matters of consciousness and also future technology, initially because of an online contact with similar interests. Simultaneously, I have had an interest in our species and how it is changing in modern times. I have always been interested in standing back and taking a larger view of things and asking myself how things have developed or are developing. I find it good to ask myself the questions "How did we get here?" and "Where are we going?". A specific interest in this time has been the worlds of technology and social media and how they have changed us. Because they have changed us. Today I was looking at a stream of tweets and it struck me as totally bizarre the messages that people just send out into the ether. Its like somebody in public suddenly blurting out to everyone what is on their minds. You would think that person was crazy if they did that in public.

The problem is that all these simultaneous concerns are complex and large topics even in themselves. It requires some serious thinking and some kind of conceptual framework to even attempt to make something from all of this. But I am nothing if not ambitious and, crucially, I am one of those people who sees a need to think things through to come to some sort of serious conclusion. So I apologise in advance if what follows seems to only skim the surface of the issues or be a little shallow. I put that down to the fact that these subjects could each take up many books in their own right and this is but a little blog where I doodle my thoughts. However, if it is the case that any of us regular Joe’s should be thinking about the world we live in, and reaching reasoned positions about that, well then please count this as one of my first hesitant attempts.

What I tell here is a fable of the present, where time means nothing or is absurd, something we are totally conditioned by but feel completely lost in. In this world innocents are crushed beneath the wheels of instrumentality, all value gone. Disappointment is inbred from birth here and dreams and hopes are but memories. We enter The Inhuman Age as humanism multiplies humanism and, as it must, devalues and devours itself and ends in nihilism. Men, the loci of a supposed rational agency, subvert their own descriptions of themselves. The more they insist on their rationality, the less it seems evident. Knowledge, truth, science and technology are venerated as our saviours but we are blind to their fallibilities.

In this fable our culture becomes about mass media, mass culture, social media, mobs, primitive emotions that shove thinking aside.  Everything, all our thinking, our whole narrative and its meaning, must be squeezed into 140 characters or less, or a picture or an instant message. Needs are mediated through what ever source. Politics here is in the service of base desire rather than people. Survive as anything or die as nothing is the rule. Speak up or be ignored. The more you have a voice through various media platforms the less your voice actually counts and the more anonymous you become. The more homogenized things are, the more fractured they become. Die in a corner and without any fuss. All fall into your liberal democratic camps to argue for your point of view whilst half the world population still live in huts and eat basic crops, a serious and on-going divide.

This is a fable about the humans who magnified themselves and magnified themselves and in that magnification they destroyed themselves, revealed themselves to be not exceptional but animal, just cleverer apes, a biological phase in the life of an unimportant planet. Eventually, they evolved beyond their biological origins and became pure technology. Humans were never heard from again.

Of course, this is a very 1st World fable. I am a first world person and have never set foot outside of this world. The populations of Europe and the USA come to something just over 1 billion people. This is basically the pool of views that any of us reading this now might ever hear from. Give or take. Social networks report 1 billion members and we sit and draw breath at the enormity of it. But the fact remains that far more people have never heard of Facebook or Twitter or Instagram than have ever used them. There is an unheard of and unconsulted population of the earth that numbers billions. Why do you think that Facebook, for example, are building super drones that can carry free internet around the world? To increase their membership and bring the “benefits” of Western society to other places and new populations.

In so doing I think its not too wide of the mark to say that they will be hastening the demise of the humans. I think this demise is being hastened on its way by the rise of a 24/7 world of social media interconnectedness in which each of us connected is expected to have an opinion on everything. In this world you are basically anonymous (even though you may have given yourself an amusing handle). People on these networks become anonymous anyones, nothings that replace the something you might have to genuinely look at and respond to (a physical person). People online are not real people, at least not while they remain there. They are cyphers for real people but ones you can block, mute, ignore, insult, threaten or abuse without any real consequences in the main. This removal of consequences is just one of the traces of a barely perceptible change, a change which in my thinking takes us from humanity to inhumanity.      

Should one wish to find an example of inhumanity in progress it is not hard to find. This Internet world of interconnectedness affords many places where one can egotistically proffer ones views as the fount of all knowledge in the face of others who demur and argue, to the contrary, that it is their views that should actually hold that place. One is left wondering, having observed such goings on, if any real communication ever took place. The Internet has allowed us people on the way to inhumanity a space where we may be brutes expressing our heartfelt urges and base thoughts, a place where we may offend others for the purposes of reinforcing our own identities. I imagine that some bright spark somewhere has invented bots that go online and run through a whole playbook of arguments to no purposes. Many people have probably interacted with them not even realising that they weren’t even talking to a person. It was just an agenda all along. But I validated who I am as a person so who gives a rat’s.

But what does this do to the humans? It pushes them one step further to becoming inhumans. Knowledge is not now about deep thought anymore. You cannot express a deep thought in 140 characters and certainly not unless you have had practice at doing so. Wittgenstein and Nietzsche did not develop their pithiness by tweeting or posting a Facebook post but by thinking. And this is precisely the activity that social media does not promote. It promotes instant response, the sharing of your gut feeling or your opinion. But it does not promote you giving a thought out, considered response. Social media promotes “feelz” as the new kid in town. Saying what you feel is now what matters. This changes us in terms of attention span too. We learn to expect instant solutions and instant answers. Now, now, now. The next thing. Repeat. Thinking becomes something strange and foreign.

But let’s switch focus from the content to the hardware. Technology. Devices. Everyone in the 1st World today knows that you have to keep in touch with everyone else. You need to be on top of things and know what is going on in the world. You need something to play games on and listen to music on. This is where you need to be at. If you don’t have a smartphone or a tablet you are literally not part of the human race anymore. Pretty much every day now as I take my daily exercise I will meet people staring into screens as they walk along in the street. I should declare at this point that I am old enough to remember when these devices didn’t exist at all. Its not that long ago really. Unless you are 25 or under in which case it probably seems ages ago. If you have lived both sides of this technological divide you are in the perfect position to be able to sit back and see how things have actually, demonstrably changed in real time as you lived.

When I was a lad (cue violins) if you needed to tell someone something you went round to their house and asked if they were in. Or you picked up your home telephone, if you had one (we didn’t), and spoke to them that way. In addition, all the people you knew would be from your locality. They were the people fate had decreed you were to grow up with. But then technology came along and everything changed. Now you can speak to people in every continent every day. If you want to you can even speak to them while seeing them. Technology has changed the horizons. You may think this is good but, ask yourself, where does it stop? In another article I wrote recently I mused about the possible future technology that, who knows, someone somewhere may well be working on right now. It makes sense that these communications devices we carry around with us actually become a part of us. Google Glass and other wearable tech is a step in this direction. One day someone will figure out an implant that gives us the global communications we say we need but not just as wearable technology but as technology integrated into our bodies. There are Futurists out there right now who dream of this.

When this happens, as I’m sure it will, it will be a big step. It will be a step along the technological road we have already headed down even though, maybe, you don’t realise that we have. Technology that changes us forever will not be presented as such. And this is part of my argument here as I talk of us going from humans to inhumans. None of this will be overt. The technology will be presented as beneficial, helpful, benevolent. You will almost certainly want it just as you want your smartphone and your computer right now. If you don’t have it you will even feel left out. I remember going for a job some years ago now when I didn’t have a mobile phone. The prospective employer asked for my mobile number and I replied that I didn’t have one. The look on his face spoke a thousand words. I didn’t get the job and I’m convinced that was a large part of why. Not taking part in societal norms can have consequences.

I have spoken a lot in the past few months about a technological future some see for humans. This is one reason why I see the future for humans as becoming inhumans. I read the futures mapped out by Futurists and Transhumanists and I concede to myself that it is foreseeable, one day, that some of the things they dream of will come to pass. Of course, as I’ve said before, a lot of their hopes are mere speculations that are yet to be proved possible but it is clear to me that there are significant funds and personnel tied up in making various technological futures happen. Those who hold out the hope of a pain free, disease free world will always be able to attract a certain audience too. For my purposes I have been content to point out that their future dreams of “techno-humans”, to my mind, leave the humanity part behind. (Our mass media, 24/7 society is part of this development and has effects as I am arguing in this very blog.) And this is what I’m explicitly saying in this blog now. Technologically advanced humans won’t be human anymore. Human beings are defined by their imperfection, not by their increased, increasing or actualised perfection.

There is another angle from which to view our progress along a scale from humanity to inhumanity and that is in terms of a focus on subjectivity. In our modern age we have very much been encouraged to be in control of things, primarily through the technology that we carry with us. Even our currency, money itself, is now being taken from the physical world and “contactless payment” is taking its place. On our TVs we have for some years now been encouraged to think that our views count as we are invited to vote in various popularity contests. The message is that we, as subjects, matter. The metanarratives of yesteryear are gone and even forms of intersubjectivity are shunned. You, the thinking subject, are what counts.

The flip side to this is that things have become rapidly de-centred and now its really just you on your own. Or a helpline in a country where the person speaks your language with a thick, ununderstandable accent. Nevertheless, the subject has become the focus of all things but it is as an anonymous, anyone kind of a subject. There is a sense in which we are all just subjects sitting in our homes in need of purpose, control and something to do. Its very disjointed. There is a move away from social cohesion to social isolation. People to turn to recede to online or difficult to access worlds where an actual person with a face does not exist. In a real sense our age is the age of the world going online which forces you to access it a certain way as nothing else exists. Is it really so hard now to imagine that we become cyber-beings, code with a personality? We are daily creating a world in which being a physical being matters less and less.

What is the symbol of this modern age, of the human becoming inhuman? I want to get in first and say that this symbol should be masturbation. This is the age of the masturbator. There are a number of reasons for this, not least that at any one time millions of us will be online masturbating to something. But my analysis is a bit more profound than this. Masturbation is a non-social way of giving yourself pleasure. It is, for now, a physical act but, in the end, that will be overcome since sexual pleasure is really only a matter of tickling the right neurons. It has nothing to do with penises and vaginas in our inhuman future. Masturbation is the symbol of our age because it is the ultimate subjective experience. Its you with yourself imagining. Its the thrill which reminds us that we are still alive, that there is more than a humdrum world largely devoid of meaning. It is the moment that means par excellence. Before it recedes and is lost again. And its only purpose is that thrill which lasts less and less the more you do it. But masturbation is also a disguise. Its there to cover over the fact that you are all on your own. Its another nothing that covers over where a something should be. No one would masturbate if they could have sex instead.

So this is my modern, badly explained fable. It is that our race, which has taken itself as the measure of all things and called it humanism, is on the way to making itself obsolete by means of itself, its own values and its own progress. It is a reminder that nothing stays the same and that things are always moving on down the pipe. Things always come from somewhere and always go to somewhere else. Standing still is not an option. In this, “inhumanity” and “inhumans” are not moral judgments. They are merely words which express the idea that humanity is changing and is fated to become something else. The animus of our age is technological and its effects upon us both now and into the future are fundamentally changing both us and our world. This will continue, in my fable, up until the point when there are no humans left any more. There will just be the inhumans that we have become. 

What form of life these beings will take is not yet clear but they will not be biological for biology is but one weakness that needs to be overcome. This Futurists and Transhumanists know well and I think they have a chance to succeed in their aims. As I have tried to show here, though, its not just a matter of turning our thoughts and memories into code and building a robot. Our form of life right now is changed by the devices we use and the networks we insert ourselves into. Humanity is already changed and continuing to change because of these technologically enabled networks and the media and opinion they dispense. 

My conclusion is summed up by the term Existenz². Existenz² is an idea, the idea that humanity, humans and humanism, through their excess and the superfluity of themselves and their values, thereby devalue and degrade themselves to nothing. They cause their own destruction and annihilation. Existenz squared is the end of humanity and the beginning of inhumanity. Think of it by analogy to sound which can be overdriven until the point at which it is pure distortion and the sound you began with has been annihilated. At that point you have just another sound. My message is that more and more of humanity does not equal a better humanity but the end of humanity. All values devalue themselves whether truth, love, compassion, knowledge or whatever. To all things there must be limits.

We as humans are defined by time, by our contingency in time and our finitude as beings in time. This is our lot, to be imperfect, fallible, weak and powerless. But we are also innocent beings, beings who strove to know and valued knowing but could never know enough or truly know anything at all. We were forever stuck with our own descriptions for things and our reasons for needing them, creatures who always wanted more but were always unable to get it. This realisation, naturally enough, leads to terminal disappointment and, in some, a blind refusal to accept the truth. This truth leads to the fact that the project of humanism will come to an end and we humans, the measurers of all things, will, eventually, become inhumans governed by a new project of inhumanism in a context bigger than our world, the world that has defined us but that we could never leave. Human beings are thus revealed as a phase of biological life on planet Earth, one that was always temporary and destined to be succeeded.

I do not know what it will be like to be an inhuman but it will surely not be like this. For just as to a person from 1500 who, were he stuck into the middle of a modern city 500 years later, would be overwhelmed by the world he found himself in, so would we be overwhelmed by the world of an inhuman. We cannot imagine what it would be like to be a machine for machines do not feel, cannot know pain, nor do they need to eat or drink. Should some future humans find a way to transfer our minds and personality to machines then our journey to inhumanity would be complete and we would die out for a superior form of life would have been born.

PS There is, of course, one huge rider to all this. And that is that we do not wipe ourselves out completely first before the inhumans we are fated to become have fully come to be.

This is written in support of my latest album called simply Existenz². You can listen to the sound of the approaching inhumans HERE!