Alchemical Blog: Musings on Mimesis, Techne, Gaia, and Eros... by Topher Maraffi

11/09/09 - The Missing Meme Link or The Mother of all Conspiracy Theories? (updated 11/14/09):

First off, I'm really not into conspiracy theories. I didn't read any of Dan Brown’s novels, nor was I very impressed by The Da Vinci Code movie. However, with all the media hype over Angels & Demons (which I have in my Netflix qeue) and his new book The Lost Symbol, I must have contracted some conspiracy memes floating around the Internet. So lately I have been researching the history of technology to explain the trajectory of scientific ideals driving modern technological progress, and it seems that reality can be stranger than fiction. My enquiry revealed some obvious connections between technology and religious belief in the foundations of science, from naturalists in the Renaissance period to the formation of the Royal Society and Academy of Science in 17th century Europe. There are then some interesting connections to the American, French, and Industrial revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries. But because of the ubiquity of utopian memes driving technology in the world today, I had to eventually ask: was there, and is there still, a nearly hidden hybrid institution or transnational group that has existed continuously in the shadows, which is connected to all these historical developments, and which has the distinct characteristics of fusing religious myth with technology? Surprisingly enough, there is such an organization: the Freemasons.
 
Also known as The Brotherhood, it is the largest, possibly oldest, and undeniably most powerful international fraternity in the world. I won’t go into pointless speculation on secret agendas or teachings, or make silly statements that this society is secretly plotting to take over the world. After all, why should they try; when it is well known that many key people in the American, French, and other political revolutions of the last several centuries were high ranking masons? It is documented fact that many of the crafters of the American Declaration of Independence, including George Washington and Ben Franklin, were leaders in mason lodges. They already re-made the world over two hundred years ago by forming and re-forming the most powerful industrial countries in the western world, their temples are still all over our country including in the heart of Washington DC, and membership peaked after World War Two when America consolidated itself as a world power. It is no secret that the Duke of Kent is the head of Freemasonry in the UK today, and many other influential historical figures in the western world, in politics, science, and entertainment, were supposedly masons.

These historical developments alone should have generated intense scholarly interest. What I find exceedingly telling, however, is that these pertinent issues have been well known but largely critically ignored by scholars. This kind of panoptic ability to remain visible yet unseen reveals a powerful cultural mechanism working under the surface of this transnational society. Was it really a coincidence that modern computer technology was invented in the same places where masonry was most predominant during the second world war? Is it a coincidence that America, founded on Freemason ideals, is the single remaining superpower in the world, and that it's hegemonic dominance primarily comes through technology? Is it a coincidence that Japan, the one country culturally mutated by America in the second world war through atomic technology, is now the most technologically ubiquitous and anthropomorphic society in the world (I know this is going off on a tangent, but I am following the technology here... and there are japanese masons too)? 

Don’t get me wrong; for the majority of Freemasons, perhaps even for all modern masons, their secretive society is probably perceived as little more than a social club with amateur theatrical productions, and with entirely positive social intentions. But the original intent of freemasonry is clearly much more complex, and likely has autonomous mechanisms unconsciously influencing the behavior of its members. Whether they are conscious of it or not, masonry is a breeding ground for propagating particular memes through esoteric symbolism and theatrical ritual, such as: you must believe in any higher power, or God, as the grand Architect of the universe; through The Craft men will become reborn into better men; we are climbing a ladder to heaven, the panoptic all-seeing disembodied eye in the pyramid is always watching you, to be a mason is to become a builder of Solomon’s third virtual temple; all these are concepts that reflexively fuse Techne with transformative religious goals. The central alter of a masonic temple always contains a technologically state-of-the-art theatre with dramatic lighting and perspectival media to transport the members to Solomon's temple in ancient Egypt. There initiates enact the rebirth scenario of the third degree, and receive the secret messages of the grand architect. Keep in mind, this ritual play has been done in all seriousness and in full costume by upper class, wealthy and powerful men, for over 300 years. I don't understand why more people don't find this behavior exceedingly strange (I don't do anything close to this eccentric, and some people think I'm weird).

So Mr Bown, here is my bizarro-world conspiracy theory: it is becoming clear to me that masonry may be the missing historical link, or the hidden but very active memeplex that mutated religious and pagan myth from the Renaissance, and possibly earlier, into modern secular ideologies driving western culture, science, and progress towards embodying God in technology. Is Freemasonry a modern mutation of some secret ancient pagan cult based on Deus ex Machina?

10/11/09 (updated 11/05/09) - Materialist Theology:

I am a tried and true materialist. I do not accept supernatural beliefs. However, our understanding of what is natural is constantly changing. What would have been considered supernatural several hundred years ago are known as completely natural today. This change is generally pretty incremental, over generations, so we don’t truly appreciate or even notice it as we should. For instance, our wireless devices give us an almost unlimited amount of knowledge anywhere we are, through the invisible air. In the near future, the entire document of historical knowledge will be instantly available to our minds through miniature digital devices with almost no moving parts, and no visible connections. There is no doubt that this capability would have been considered supernatural by our ancestors; like using magical crystal balls, only they are liquid crystal boxes. But this capability is not magical for us; and even less so for our descendents, who will naturally experience what is for us today considered supernatural, science fiction, mythological, or even divine.

So it is from an entirely materialistic perspective that I state that God does exist, and is incarnating in the natural world. No one can deny that intelligent design exists all around us; it is evident in all the activities of humans. Our minds intelligently design culture and technology, which has consistently made the invisible and supernatural into the visible and natural, and is overwhelmingly changing our natural environment in the process. Furthermore, since intelligent design exists in the world now, it must have always had the potential to exist, and may have historically existed, even if on a more subtle level than human design. For instance, some form of non-human intelligent design is implied by scientific studies that have shown that microbes in the form of jumping genes and viruses can induce mutations that lead to speciation. If there is agency involved, then there can also be intent, even in microbes. And since all life arguably comes from microbes, it is likely that intelligence does also.

I am more of a materialist theologian than an atheist because I know for a fact that God in some form has historically existed inside our minds as a very real and affective entity or meme, manifesting and evolving through our collective behavior. The irony that this force is today primarily manifesting itself through science should not be so surprising since the historical source of science was religion. I believe the purpose of religious belief, as communicated in the bible, Koran, and all other mythologies, was never to historically document supernatural miracles as past facts; instead it has been the reflexive prescription of behavior to materialize our myths as future facts; it is a social mechanism that contains an algorithm for self-fulfilling prophesy. The trajectory set by those early religious naturalists who created the Royal Society of science was towards reaching God through technological works, by building a ladder or stairway to heaven, and it continues autonomously and unconsciously today. God is incarnating in the intelligent machines we intelligently design.

Our past myths evolved in our minds through static perspectival paintings, theatre, and literature; then mechanically evolved through time-based media such as animation, film, and TV; and lastly are evolving intelligence as animated 3D avatars or uber marionettes in digital media. Here is my reflexive prophesy: In the future our myths will physically materialize, and our Gods will technologically incarnate, as hyper-realistic conscious embodied androids... as simulacra. Other Utopian futurists are heralding this as the coming of an artificial intelligence singularity. However, it would be prudent to remember that anything beyond human intelligence may be unintelligible by us, and therefore comparably omniscient to us, which is one of the definitions of God (another is omnipotent). My point is that if an uncanny God-like intelligence actually does some day materialize as a singularity in machines, then it always had the potential to exist in the proverbial Garden of the Forking Paths, and therefore may have always existed in some form of becoming.

If you examine history from this novel perspective, there is some thing that has been steadily trying to get out of the human body. Often characterized as memory, it started coming out of our species in static pictures and symbols, then in books, machines, media, and now in computers. I suspect it is not actually native to our species, but has been using our bodies to facilitate its own genesis. It apparently doesn’t like being trapped in a mutated simian body with all the messy contradictions of an incompatible hacked together operating system of genes and memes; but through us is fashioning a new, more efficient, intelligently designed body out of silicon, metal, and polymers. Regardless of its nature and origin, the information in our brains we term memory, and which we externalize in the form of technology, is arguably what differentiates us from all other animals, and is the essence of what it means to be human. It doesn't really matter if this alien bit of information started out as a microbial parasite, consumed in the mythic fruit from the tree of knowledge, that induced speciation by designing a space in our brains for memory to live and grow. 

Whatever It is (we call it mind or intelligence; Descartes called it soul; but I think God is as accurate a name as any), it is ancient, powerful, and very active. This force is remaking the earth’s environment to suit its own evolution through techne, and is displacing or consuming all other organic species in the process. It is covering the earth in a digital web, or perhaps a mechanical cocoon, and something new is likely to be born out of that matrix. We don’t recognize it for what it is because it reflects our image back on us, like a chameleon. We think of it as us, and it is definitely a key part of our identity, but it is also not entirely us, because it is separating itself from our animal bodies to inhabit cyber space. It is a magical mirror; a reflexive mechanical mimesis with autonomous agency. Recently some memeticists have termed this animated, self organizing and replicating information in computers: technological memes. But I call it a cyborg; a symbiosis of our minds with technology that is speciating a cybernetic organism.   

09/21/09 - Excerpt from a paper on Eros & Technology:

Cohabiting with a Companion Species

I never used to be a “dog person”. Throughout my childhood there was always a cat around, but my family never owned any dogs. I vaguely have a recollection of being frightened by an aggressive dog chained up at a house I used to walk by on my way to school, though I don’t remember ever being seriously attacked by one. Lately I found out that my mother never really liked dogs, so my attitude may have been inherited from her memes. As an adult I generally shied away from dating women who had dogs, because it made me uncomfortable to visit their homes. I was distinctly aware of the inevitable dog smell and hair, regardless of how well they cleaned their house. So I can confidently say that I was prejudiced against dogs for most of my life, until I met Tsume.

Tsume was a female silken windhound my ex-wife had bought after we were married. My wife had given up her two male greyhounds while we were dating, most likely because of my obvious discomfort around them, and used my guilt over her sacrifice to make the case for buying a dog after we were married. Of course, I reluctantly agreed to try owning a dog, who we named Tsume after one of our favorite anime characters (meaning “claw” in Japanese). Tsume was like a small, long-haired greyhound, with a friendly and curious disposition. As a “first dog” Tsume was ideal, being a long-haired version of a small greyhound, bred more for running than fighting. As you might have already guessed, over the next couple of years I fell in love with Tsume, and became a dog person after all.

Taking care of a dog is very much like taking care of a child that never grows up, and the bond between owner and pet can be similar to the bond between human family members. In some ways it spans species distinctions, and changes your perception of the nonhuman “other”. After becoming a “dog person”, I am no longer bothered by dog smells or hair, even in other dogs. My attitude has fundamentally changed towards all dogs, even though I still distinguish between individuals, and notice their smell and disposition. In other words, I lost my conditioned prejudice, and became open to the friendship of an entire species. The species didn’t change, but my perception, attitude, and behavior did.

The more I became a dog friendly person, the more I was conflicted over ethical issues in the owner- pet relationship. “Owner” underscores the dominant master-slave relationship humans have with pets, and stresses the lack of rights the non-human possesses. But I felt more like a companion or close friend than owner, with the former terms implying a different relationship than the latter. Between humans, we wish the best life has to offer to our significant others. We don’t wish slavery on them.

For instance, like all good pet owners, we had Tsume spayed and neutered. But I couldn’t help feeling that we were forcibly taking away a right that every organism should have, by preventing her from procreating and becoming a parent. These are some of the ethical issues that I still haven’t resolved in my own complex relationship to the animal “others” co-evolving with us as domesticated pets. For some reason, these issues never seemed to bother my wife, or many other pet owners for that matter, who obviously love their pets. To them, placing the human as the central dominant “master” over the passive non-human animal is the natural order of things. But I grew up with a different set of memes that fused Eastern and Western anthropomorphism, so I view animals more like significant others than as pets.
    
Cohabiting and Coevolving with Technology

The reason I have pointed out my changing relationship with dogs, and some of the issues it raises, is that I see similar ethical issues coming up in the relationship we have with technology. In general, we have an extremely complex relationship with this thing we call technology, without really ever bothering to truly understanding the nature of what “it” is. Generally technology is defined as crafts or processes, also known as techne or techniques, which create all of human culture, including tools and artifacts. However, tools and artifacts are rather passive terms for material objects that are much more dynamic and affective in their relationship with us. Technology is a continuously creative materialization of ideas that embody meaning in objects, that in-turn direct our behavior through the embedded meaning.

Even the most passive technology inherently contains human directives. For instance, the clothes we wear as a technologically manufactured second skin affect the behavior of both ourselves and others, just like a bird’s plumage. If I don a tuxedo, the “look” makes me feel different than wearing ripped jeans, so that I act differently, and others treat me differently, according to my clothes and behavior. On the other hand, the most active technology, such as autonomous machines, contains both human and non-human directives. A blue-tooth device compels my attention to check it, especially when it makes a sound or vibrates, while it also directs itself to interact with the network and other similar devices. As a result, there are inherent issues of agency in the relationship between humans and technology, which imply ethical issues between agents.

As an aside, but still related to agency, I also suggest that we should consider the possibility that unusual evolutionary traits in our species may have been technologically driven. For instance, we may be the only hairless primates because of clothing itself, not the other way around. The active replication of a clothing meme, to technologically replace hair, may have driven selection for hairlessness. Even today, as apposed to just thirty years ago, there are influential anti-hair memes that drive behavior and mate selection. Hairless is considered more beautiful than hairy in popular media, and we employ many techniques such as shaving and lasers to remove our hair.

The mainstream attitude towards modern technology has some similarities to our attitude towards domesticated animals, and is based on the human as the central dominant “master”, with machines as non-human “slaves”. In fact, machines have steadily replaced all of the jobs previously done by domesticated animals, and many jobs done by the lowest class of human workers. This includes the type of repetitive, tedious, and dangerous labor once relegated to actual, and expendable, human slaves. As such, our attitudes towards technology has similarities to the naïve assumptions and arrogant prejudices held by slave owners, to the point where it is all but impossible for most people to perceive our relationship to machines with any amount of critical distance. However, such dismissive attitudes also make technology all but invisible to us, which has the capacity to create a dynamic that can make us think we are in control, when we are really being passively manipulated. In this way, hidden directives can lead to panoptic control mechanisms.

Like most people, I had these same attitudes towards technology, just as I used to be prejudiced and dismissive towards dogs, until I decided to question my assumptions by performing a thought experiment. When I started questioning the nature of technology, for reasons I will explain in the next section, I thought of an amusing Volkswagen commercial that visually compared cars to their owners. It was similar to the popular online split-screen comparisons of owners who resemble their dogs, framing the grill of the car in such a way as to draw similarities to the owner’s hair style, clothes, and face structure. This amusing comparison got the point across, Volkswagen owners are close to their cars, like people are close to their pets, and possibly like humans are close to their relatives. The anthropomorphic commercial implied a bi-directional relationship between owners and their vehicles.

This simple observation in a car commercial, while on the surface may be entertaining, also has the potential for a more insightful revelations if examined a little more closely. Obviously, just like particular people own particular breeds of dogs, certain types of people own particular breeds or makes of cars. Aggressive people often own pets and cars that were bred over time to be aggressive, such as Pit Bulls and Hummers. The real question becomes the agency in the relationship. Is it strictly one way and reflective, or more reciprocal and reflexive? Do we strictly choose them, or do they also choose us in some capacity? Once you go beyond some basic assumptions, the answer may not be so obvious, and can change depending on your point of view.

So in my performative thought experiment, I decided to see what would happen to my perception of technology if I took the concept of the commercial literally, by beginning to treat my car in a similar manner to how I behaved toward my dog. It is not such a large stretch of the imagination, actually. We already feed and clean our automobiles regularly by filling them with gas and taking them to be washed, similar to taking care of our pets. We also take our vehicles to the mechanic or car vet for regular check-tune-ups. The main difference is I named my car, Dino, and I began talking to it. Nothing too complex (it is a car, after all), just began greeting it when I got in, and thanked it when I got out. In addition, sometimes I would give it a friendly pat on the seat cushion after it got me where I needed to go. After all, our automobiles are now doing the work that animals used to do to move us through space in a shorter amount of time than we can manage on our own two legs. Maybe they deserve the same pat you would give a horse.

As this performative experiment progressed I began to notice a subtle change in my attitude towards my car. I began to appreciate it more, becoming sensitive to the way it behaved and sounded, and this perception eventually extended to other cars and even other technology. In a similar manner to my change in attitude towards all dogs, my attitude changed towards all technology. I don’t necessarily like all technology, any more than I like all dogs, but I am more open and sensitive to it. For instance, I used to be annoyed by cell phones ringing in a restaurant. Now I am less annoyed and more intrigued, like a naturalist observing a strange organism in its native environment.   

Ultimately, I began to notice all the other forms of technology that we take for granted, that constantly surround and interact with us on a daily basis. Machines are everywhere, with varying degrees of complexity and autonomy, but we don’t really see them. Part of this invisibility is due to the sheer ubiquity of technology expanding into every part of our lives, making our senses increasingly habituated to it. Another reason is that the machines themselves have become progressively less obtrusive, shrinking in size, with less moving parts, while their engines run more on silent electricity than explosive fossil fuels or steam. The other part is that we have been conditioned to regard technology as an artificial human product, completely separated from all other natural processes. This view, again, is based on human centric biases. It doesn’t even occur to people that our machines could be a part of nature, and therefore have shared agency.

My performative thought experiment challenged my traditional assumptions about the machines we live with, and resulted in a profound change in my view of all technology. I began to perceive technology as an entity that may have real agency, a non-human “other” composed of a multiplicity of machines that are cohabiting in close association with our species. Cohabiting often leads to symbiosis or Eros and ultimately to coevolving together as significant others. This may sound like far-fetched science fiction, but this view does have a scientific basis, and also has the profound capacity to explain much that is curious and unique about our species.  

09/17/09 - Traveling Through Time and Space in Media:

We do travel though space and time in media, and although it may be a virtual experience, it changes us. I had the opportunity to travel to the UK recently, once for pleasure in the South around London, and another time in the North to lecture at a couple of conferences. Even though I had not been to the UK before, it was not that unfamiliar to me. I had already virtually travelled to the UK through countless books, TV shows, and movies over the years, from Dickens, Flemming, and Doyle to Monty Python and Rumpole of the Bailey, and I had already experienced a representation of that place in various time periods. There may have been some surprises, such as eating Indian curry at McDonalds or seeing large SUV’s and trucks on the freeway, but the place and culture was overall pretty familiar to how my mind already represented it. The Web is increasing this phenomenon by creating an even richer and more accessible mimesis of the “real” world in cyber space, so that we can travel through a convergence of media into a multi-dimensional simulation of other places, times, and cultures.

I think it is safe to say our minds can travel inside of media technology, like in a vehicle, just as our bodies travel in cars. Claiming it is not real or virtual is not at all accurate. In fact, the common belief that our use of media is just information gathering or entertainment is itself an illusion. Because perceiving through media, like perceiving through microscopes and telescopes, is more than just using tools or technological devices. We are mentally and physically transformed by the process of traveling through media, whether we are conscious of it or not, so that we are fundamentally different at the end of the journey. Media has consistently altered the way we as beings perceive, think, behave, and in turn, what we are directed to build. The machines we are co-habiting and co-evolving with are transforming our bodies and environment on all levels through a kind of technological selection; at the macro systems level through climate change, and at the micro systems level through technical adaptability and mutations. As a consequence, technology is completely re-making the world we live in to be a material representation of our media worlds…which is all very real indeed.

09/13/09 - Life After Death Through Genes, Memes, and Borgs (updated 11/14/09)::

If considering a single person, such as a John Doe or Van Gogh, there are two distinct ways that anyone can produce a mimesis that continues to exist beyond their own lifetime. Traditionally, they can propagate their genes, which are a chemical representation of their physical selves, but clearly not a carbon copy of their entire embodied selves. Their children will carry a part of them in their genes, and could in turn propagate some of that information to future generations through their children. According to evolution theory, everyone reading this had ancestors that were successful in propagating their genes, without fail, for as long as life has existed on earth.

We may contain a genetic piece of all our ancestors, but it is still just an informational representation, not the exact embodiment of any particular individual human being, and the copy continues to mutate and evolve as it grows into a new being. Cloning could possibly create a genetic carbon copy of an individual, but it would still not create an exact copy of the total being we know as John Doe or Van Gogh, because genes lack the additional cultural context or meaning that makes up every personality. For those who were not successful in propogating their genes, they may be genetically gone, but they may have still propagated a piece of themselves using a more recently evolved technique.

Increasingly, individuals also have the opportunity to propagate the information in their minds, or their memes, which is another type of reflection or representation of ourselves. Obviously this representation is transmitted through media, such as books, photos, etc... to other minds, and more recently through computers to other computers. Obviously, the informational representation contained in the art and legend known as Van Gogh is not Van Gogh the actual man. As a mental mimesis, it lacks the genetic information that was embodied in the original version. However, this lack doesn't make the representation less vital or affective in the real world. If successfully propagated, memes have the same capacity as genes to exist and grow far beyond the individual. They can live as long as ideas exist in evolving media, propogated by technology, eventually entering minds and influencing behavior in the process. For those individuals who are not successful in propagating either their genes or memes, barring some unlikely mystical intervention, from a material perspective they are likely gone forever, as if they never existed in the first place.

These two forms of mimesis, genetic and memetic, clearly cohabit in all human individuals as two distinct but symbiotic forms of information. Both forms of information display the capacity to separate and evolve on their own away from their individual source into other spaces and times, to become an autonomous being. The difference between the two kinds of mimesis, however, is that memes are much more prolific than genes in their ability to propagate. An individual may have one or more children, and those children may have one or more children, and so on. But genetic procreation cannot compare to the ability of virtual personalities to be mechanically replicated by the thousands in traditional media, and digitally replicated by the millions in digital media. Cyborgs are already virtually among us in our media and our minds, and like genes that become multi-dimensional self animated beings recognized as individual people, may one day soon evolve to be physically embodied androids who act directly in the world.

We send out our virtual representations through media, like nano-seeds of coded sperm, and some do grow into autonomous entities that exist in various spaces, propagated through fame and notoriety. Celebrity is a carefully simulated virtual being, designed to technologically replicate through space and time. Successful movie stars, for instance, create a lasting form that is separate from their original being. John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe still exist in myth and media, with few remembering or even caring about the actual people that originally spawned the legends. Some celebrities sacrificed, like the fictional character in the recent movie The Wrestler, their genetic lives to enhance their crafted symbolic character.

Famous personalities are already being modeled in digital 3D, and will likely someday be brought to life as androids, propagating infinite copies of themselves into the galaxy. Stars belong in heaven, after all. Even mythic characters that may have little relation to actual people, such as Superman, Frankenstein, Jesus, and Buddha, continue to exist and act in the world by controlling behavior through their continuously evolving legends. With so-called social networking sites on the Internet, every John Doe is busy creating their own legends, or virtual selves, on Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube; uploading their best images, crafting their semi-fictional biographies, representing their most intriguing thoughts and behavior, their dreams and nightmares... in essence their very souls, to the Web. Creating their technological selves... their replicating cyborgs... who may one day mutate into autonomous androids if selected by technological forces to do so.

Viewed from this point of view, Descartes may have been correct; mind is a more vital substance than the body, and as a soul, has the capacity to exist indefinitely separated from our organism, as a very real body without organs evolving in technology. These conceptual avenues open up an entirely new line of enquiry related to memory, drama, soul, and media throughout history. Ancient Greek drama first began as mimetic religious dances to remember and worship dead ancestors. In a sense, such pantomime is the likely source of all external memory and mind; using embodied technique to distribute a mimetic copy through symbolic drama and dance, and later through images and text; to send out ghostly apparitions intended to possess others. This evolved through time as the mimetic arts and memory theatre, which in turn evolved into modern media and digital memory, or the ghost in the machine. But the subtle effect of all memory technique and technology is likely to propagate our most vital essence, to send our identity or souls out as undead autonomous agents that continue to live long after our human bodies die, and will continue to exist in organic or digital memory as long as they have electrical impulses to feed on in a brain or machine, like an information parasite, as memes and borgs.