Transhumanism: Robot Version
Media Stars vs Heavenly Stars. LGBType Later.
Five or six years ago I pressed ‘play’ on a song linked in a Facebook comment section. The thread discussed humans as programmable metal-limb-waving robots, and post-human “insertees” of electronic hardware to render Man more physically robotic.
Robot came from Czech writer Karel Capek (1880-1938) who introduced it in a play called Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920), a story of a company using biology, chemistry and physiology to mass produce workers who lacked nothing but a soul. ‘Robot’ is from Orthodox Slavonic word robota, meaning servitude, forced labor or drudgery.
Back to the Facebook thread: the subject was transhumanism; the song was ‘My Name is Human’ which had reached number 1 in some chart of commercial importance, and it was played by a band called Highly Suspect, replete with dredging electric bass reminiscent of the heady alternative grunge rock genre of the 1990’s.
The song My Name is Human struck a chord (as (arguably) intended). The music industry often employs wannabe stars/talented artists for their look and sound, contracting the musician to sing specific lyrics; spell-casting if you will.
Regardless of the case here, the artist speaks/sings the following:
[…] Look what they do to you
Look what they do to me
Must be joking if you think that either one is free, here
Get up off your knees, girl
Stand face to face with your God
And find out what you are
Hello, my name is human
And I came down from the stars
Fireworld I love you, Fire world
I stole my power from the sun
I'm more than just a man
No longer disillusioned
And so on. In the extremely high end video (linked above) which came out in 2017, the artist builds a robot girlfriend. He creates new life and that life is online.
Define Online: controlled or connected to a computer. In or into operation or existence.
The same band had a hit single in 2015 whose chorus repeats; ♬ I can't breathe, much less believe the truth… ♫ Nice preparation for the approaching Covid debacle…
Proposition: Highly Suspect was given a Grammy nomination for their I can’t breathe single ‘Lydia’ (with stressful video of a girl tied up at the bottom of a swimming pool), was signed for a second studio album with ‘My Name is Human’ plus high-tech. video pre-ticked for another Grammy nomination ensuring people actually watched and heard the song, then their work was done. Follow-up albums: comparative crickets.
If the lyrics alone didn’t suggest an elevated message, the Egyptian blue crystal sea springing up around the artist in the video might; the first synthetic pigment known to the Romans as Caeruleum was a blue named for the Egyptian sky, also its reflection in the Nile. Caeruleum is related to Caelus, a Roman name for Greek Ouranos/Uranus.
The original meaning of Trans, a Latin prefix, is across, beyond, or on the other side of.
Humanism is defined as rationalist thought attaching prime importance to human reason rather than divine matters, but — Humanism, defined by metaphysician René Guénon, illustrates what we are truly trying to get across, pass beyond, and get to the other side of:
“A word that rose to honour at the time of the Renaissance, and that summarised in advance the whole program of modern civilisation is “humanism”.
Men were indeed concerned to reduce everything to purely human proportions, to eliminate every principle of a higher order, and, one might say, symbolically to turn away from the heavens under pretext of conquering the earth; the Greeks, whose example they claimed to follow, had never gone as far in this direction, even at the time of their greatest intellectual decadence […].
Humanism was a form of […] contemporary secularism; and, owing to its desire to reduce everything to the measure of man as an end in himself, modern civilisation has sunk stage by stage until it has reached the level of the lowest elements in man and aims at little more than satisfying the needs inherent in the material side of his nature, an aim that is in any case quite illusory since it constantly creates more artificial needs than it can satisfy.”
―René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World
Originally, robot meant a human slave. According to some, ‘hue-man’ meant man of colour: once used to describe a slave with a life of drudging servitude, later adopted as a general term for all mankind. (Hello, my name is Human, I came down from the stars.)
Tim Berners-Lee (who created the www’s first software in 1989) wrote a book called ‘Weaving the Web’. The first chapter is called Enquire Within upon Everything referring to content within a book, but also the meditative, introspective tendency in the seeker:
“When I first began tinkering with a software program that eventually gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire, short for Enquire Within upon Everything, a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child […]. With its title suggestive of magic, the book served as a portal to a world of information […]. What that first bit of Enquire code led me to was […] a vision encompassing the decentralized, organic growth of ideas, technology and society.” -Tim Berners-Lee
Terminator freaked out Gen. X even on the small screen and T2 stunned a generation.
“Come with me if you want to live.” -Cyborg Arnie.
T1 and T2 felt supremely prescient. By the time the third Terminator arrived I was on a Mac, compulsively learning — one might even say uploading — no longer interested in film (having been in and out of the film/theatre industry), disillusioned by illusion.
Define Cyborg: Cybernetic organism. (That’s us.) One is taught cybernetically (online) by organisms (people). The cyborg hand offers life and can teach us of our divine nature.
The stars/planets/gods are in our heavens. Robotic slaves don’t look up or question the stars; for them screen stars are employed to lead those robots to another place entirely.
“Come with me if you want to live.” -Dear old Humanist Arnie, needle deeply implanted.
This article reminded me of a time I accidently started a spat at a party. A mixed group of people, young and old, were fooling around with Alexa, asking it strange questions and delighting in its responses. I told that what they were really pining for was a slave.
They thought I was kidding and laughed it off at first. But as I calmly explained my theory to them further (including the origin of "robot"), they started to get very angry with me. I recognized their anger for what it was: they had glimpsed a mirror, and didn't like what they were seeing. But it was there: the snake that dwells in every human heart, dreaming of the godlike power to command.
It also reminds me of my first (and only) class in Artificial Intelligence. Our very first assignment, preceding all talk of linguistic engines or natural language programming, was Descartes' theory of automata, in which he parses human from animal by defining the latter as purely an i/o mechanism. In drawing that line, he accidentally invented a concept I like to call Marginal Man. And with each successive generation of humanist thought, the margin grew ever slimmer.
And so, now here we have arrived, at the transfer node. Some will turn the page, and fall into the bottomless void beyond the margin. Others might open a different book entirely.
(And don't get me wrong: I'm usually fun at parties.)