In the last few days I have had the occasion to explore and communicate with Rich Carlson, who is part of team maintaining a very high quality website on Science, Culture, and Integral Yoga, which brings informed ‘postmodern’ reconstructions of the integral theory of Aurobindo. (see as an example, his masterly treatment of Ken Wilber as a colonialist ideologue)

Rich is similarly concerned with exploring the (false and dangerous) promise of transhumanism, which predicts the replacement of the human race. It is very much in tune with my own “theses on the cyber-sacred” as well as Dale Carrico’s political critique of that same movement.

One of the interesting pieces in the blog is chapter four of a book by William Irwin Thompson, Self and Society, which has a very cogent critique of transhumanism, which I’m only excerpting here:

William Thompson:

“It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labor to subtract it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation with the help of the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the robotics scientist.

What is common to most of the practitioners in the new field of A.I. or Machine Consciousness is a preliminary move that eliminates the phenomenon one wishes to explore and then goes on to celebrate the scientific power of the engineer’s new academic discipline. Sloman and Chrisley show this eagerness to move away from the phenomenon of consciousness so as to feel more adequate with he tools and concepts of one’s discipline. “We start with the tentative hypothesis that although the word ‘consciousness has no well-defined meaning, it is used to refer to aspects of human and animal information processing’. This is equivalent to saying that dimensionality has no well-defined meaning, so let us define a cube as a set of lines. In a similar move of eliminativism, Susan Blackmore defines consciousness as an illusion generated by competing memes, but this confident Dawkinsian proclamation is a silly as saying that sunshine is an illusion generated by competing leaves.

“This atmospheric inversion from above to below, one in which a sky turns into the smog of a thickened air, happened once before in the world of knowledge, when Comtian positivism inspired a functionalist approach to the study of the sacred. The social scientists first said that in order to study the sacred, one had to study how it functioned in society; then having contributed to the growth of their own academic domain, they more confidently claimed that what humans worshipped with the sacred was, in fact, their own society. There simply was no such thing as God or the sacred, and so Schools of Divinity began to be eclipsed by the elevation of the new towers of the office buildings of the Social Sciences. Indeed, as I turn now away from my computer screen, I can see outside my window, the William James Building of Social Relations competing for dominance of the skyline with the Victorian brick Gothic of Harvard’s Memorial Hall.

“This clever move to eliminate the phenomenological reality of human consciousness as a prelude to the growth of a new robotics industry is a very successful scam, for it has helped enormously with the task of fund-raising for costly moon shots, such as the Japanese government’s ‘Fifth Generation Computer Project’ which promised to create an autonomously thinking machine in the 1980s. No one seems to talk much anymore about the failure of this project, but the gurus of A.I. continue to prophesy — as Ray Kurzweil now does — that by 2020, humans will be surpassed in cultural evolution by machines.

“Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are now at a great bifurcation in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and Hans Moravec prophesy that we are at the end of the human era, and that ‘nanobots’ are about to be embedded in our bodies until our antique organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by a new silicon noosphere of networked computers. Like ancient mitochondria or chloroplasts surrounded by the gigantic eukaryotic cells, we are about to be engulphed [sic] in the next evolutionary stage. So the mechanists see noetic technologies surrounding human culture and consciousness and compressing it into an endosymbiont in a larger and swifter and more elegant evolutionary vehicle.

“Technologists are closer to paranoids than they are to mystics in the sense that they are literalists given to perceptions of misplaced concreteness; they always see spiritual experiences as the products of technology — as emergent domains that are caused by technological innovations, such as LSD or computer networks. The ‘difference that makes a difference — in the famous phrase of Gregory Bateson — between the mystic and the paranoid is that the mystic is in a state of wild cognitive and creative joy, the satchitananda of the yogi, but the paranoid is in a condition of anxiety and a cosmic sense of fixation on literalism and the control of reality through machines. Rather than saying her spiritual intuition has inspired her to see a pattern of connectedness to a world of higher dimensions, s/he claims to have been abducted by flying saucers who have implanted microchips into her head and are beaming directly into her brain from the mother ship.

“Mystics flip this literalism over to see technology as a system of externalized metaphors that derive from pre-existing ontological modes at play and at large in the universe. For them, technology is like the Catholic Baltimore Catechism’s definition of a sacrament: ‘an outward sign of an inward state’. For the mystic — be she Cabbalist or Sufi — an angel is a ‘Celestial Intelligence’ — a form of cosmic noetic organization that does not require a detour through animal evolution. So when Kurzweil claims that by 2030 implanted nanobots in the bloodstream will enable humans to turn off to the outside world to attune to a virtual reality, the mystic would recognize a literalist rendering of the process of meditation.”