The madness of much of our modern world is that madness can be eliminated. Qualitative outliers–the random, the unpredictable, the inherently uncontrollable–can be vanquished. Perfect order can be achieved. I mock this order in my Inquisitor piece by offering an image of Sade salivating over a billion piles of perfectly arranged ash.
But it truly seems to me that the transhumanists want something like this. They want order, order that is as transcendent as their materialistic biases allow. They do not want qualitative reorganization through mania, through visions, through useful delusions and hallucinations. They do not want the uncontrolled, the Dionysian, the ecstatic, EXCEPT when and how they want it, via drugs–and later software–carefully programmed to create an exact and predictable effect.
Let me ask this question: if a drug existed which when taken would give you the same thrill solving the equation 2+2=4 that Einstein got in deriving General Relativity, would you take it? What if the thrill were LARGER, exponentially so? What if the feeling could be induced in you of ecstasy that lasted for days?
What if you could be made to fall in love with your phone? What if chemicals could be administered which not only mimicked the best, highest qualitative feelings of being in love, but surpassed them considerably?
What role does conscious awareness play, what role logic, in this universe? What purpose does life have? If we can take drugs which create the FEELING of purpose while floating aimlessly in a backyard pool, can we say that the concept of “meaning” has meaning, that it is something more than a biochemical sensation?
I say yes, definitely so. I say that mechanistic understandings of life make these sorts of mind experiments possible, but that in the final analysis, life is not coterminous with biology. This is a metaphysical point, and a critical one; and one at that well supported empirically.
We can discuss these issues, and failure is not inevitable. We do not have to abandon principle at the first sign of resistance. We do not have to feel guilt at not always being “nice”. We can stake claims as to what it means to be human, and counter the claims of those whose empirical backing is much weaker.