Just about a week ago, it was announced that American scientist, Craig Venter, had built the world's first synthetic life-form, and we were treated to the edifying spectale of Guardian-readers crowing, cackling and gloating over the death of the human soul. I'm not going to trawl all through the comments below the Guardian article now (you can do so if you wish). Here's one sample readily at hand:
Of course religious groups condemn this work, they perceive that there is a real danger the magic/ju-ju/mumbo-jumbo/mysteries that they deal in will be seen for the snake oil it is. We are biochemical machines, there is no soul, enjoy life…this life; that's all there is. Well done Craig Venter.
I'm reminded of a passage from Burroughs' piece, 'Roosevelt after Inauguration'. I quote from memory:
Roosevelt was convulsed with such hate for the species [human] as it is, that he wished to see it degraded beyond recognition. "I'll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate," he'd say, scanning the horizon, as if seeking new frontiers of depravity.
Late last year there was a similar scientific development – a team in the Netherlands have grown artificial meat. As a matter of fact, I wrote a story about exactly this theme in the late nineties. It was called 'The Meat Factory'. It has never been published in English, but a translation of it exists in German, in Dunkle Gestades, if any German-speaking people are interested.
Apart from sighing at how futile it is to write science fiction in a world where your nightmares come true before you can even publish them, I am struck by the following thought:
I bet – I BET – the same people who are gloating over there being no soul, and humans being machines, would assert that there's no reason why machines should not become conscious. Okay? Logically they should. The same people – I bet – would argue that there is no danger at all of artificial meat becoming conscious.
In short, their entire agenda is to degrade life. They admit the possibility of consciousness in machines only in order to demean consciousness itself by association with machines (or they would not use phrases like "only machines"). They do not admit the possibility of consciousness, however, in life itself. In their future, we are all nothing more than artificial meat in a factory.
See if I'm not right.
Robin Davies writes:Isn’t artificial meat a good idea?If it ultimately replaced “real” meat that would put paid to the whole factory farming business – something I thought vegetarians would applaud.How can artificial meat become conscious if it’s just muscle with no brain?(Of course you may have dealt with this issue in the story but I’m afraid I haven’t read it.)
I don’t really ‘deal with’ the issue in the story except in the sense that – to ruin the ending – consciousness does appear to develop in the meat. It’s not a great story, in my opinion, but may have some curiosity value. It was/is one of the candidates for the Ex Occidente chapbook. I have no idea what’s happening with the chapbook, by the way, and wish I did have some idea, but will mention as an aside here, that I will let people know when I know.
The interesting thing, perhaps, is that I’d be more inclined to eat meat from a real animal than from this, even though I tend to avoid meat generally.In this I realise I diverge from the thinking of most vegetarians, but then, I only really use the term ‘vegetarian’ for myself out of convenience, largely so that people don’t serve me meat. A great deal of vegetarianism seems to be founded on a utilitarian philosophy, to which I do not subscribe. I wonder what artificial meat really is. I mean, I don’t know how they invented it, exactly, but presumably it’s not made out of tofu.Like most or all humans, I don’t know what consciousness is, but what I’m really concerned about are attitudes. Having artificial meat is certainly convenient, but it really brings into sharp focus just how much we see living things as commodities. I’m not in favour of battery farming at all, but – or should that be ‘and’? – it seems to me that this is just an extension of the attitudes behind battery farming. Only now people satisfy themselves that everything is safe. All questions have been put to bed. It seems to me that if machines are capable of consciousness, as we are repeatedly told they are, then it is even more likely that organic matter like this meat is capable of it. To be farmed is one thing. At least the animals have a life – no matter how grim it may or may not be – and a theoretical ability to live outside of the system into which they are born. If a chicken escaped from a battery farm, however deformed it might be by its maltreatment, anyone who saw it would think, “There’s a chicken”, rather than, “There’s a bit of Dutchmeat (registered trademark)”. Do I know what will unfold? No. Do I dare to say that I don’t like the direction in which we’re going? Yes.We could, of course, have a whole discussion about whether such things are inevitable, whether there is such a thing as ‘nature’ and so on. But we would end up back where we started. If the artificial meat is as much a product of nature as anything else, then so is my feeling and (I hope) thoughtful antipathy towards it, and what is ethical, moral or otherwise desirable is still something that we have the experience of thrashing out.
Anonymous writes:I just can’t get the aggressive “atheist” attitude in which atheist feel the need to attack religious people. I mean at least when someone highly religious dies they will die with some certainty and perhaps happiness, but no some atheists can’t let them have this. I am by no means religious, but I am not against religious beliefs. The world needs all kinds of people.
I used to think that science fiction was nice because it only literalized and exposed the negative side of humanity. Now I am afraid too, that many horrors will become reality within a few lifetimes from now, if not sooner.Of all the horrors that this foreshadows, the one that upsets my creative dæmon the most is that this bring us one step closer to making The Matrix possible.
Interesting:http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20100526/tod-scientist-infected-with-computer-vir-870a197.html
Originally posted by anonymous:I just can’t get the aggressive “atheist” attitude in which atheist feel the need to attack religious people.I think there’s room for criticism, at the very least, but by the same token, there’s also plenty of room for the criticism of atheism. Considering the history of religion, it’s understandable that many people still have strong feelings of antipathy. On the one hand, however, it’s easy to see where many atheists are stuck in a rut of exaggerated reaction, rather than being at all thoughtful or open-minded, and on the other, I think they are, as the saying goes, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If we suppose for just a moment that there’s such a thing as a soul, could there conceivably be anything more valuable? It’s hard to think that there would be. And yet many atheists seem bent on creating a soulless world where, since the only thing that can really bestow value – the soul – is gone, everything is worthless, and all that matters is power and pleasure, both of which things must be fought over.Personally, I find this a disgusting vision.Originally posted by anonymous:I mean at least when someone highly religious dies they will die with some certainty and perhaps happiness, but no some atheists can’t let them have this. I am by no means religious, but I am not against religious beliefs. The world needs all kinds of people. I haven’t seen the film The Invention of Lying, but apparently there’s a scene in it where Ricky Gervais ‘lies’ to his dying mother that there is a god and she will be okay when she dies. Since the whole film is about lying, there is some emphasis on the fact that this is a lie – it seems to be defined as such by the context of the film. The intention, apparently, is to question whether lies can sometimes be good (for instance, when they’re comforting). What struck me, though, was the utter arrogance of the certainty with which this is therefore presented as a lie – an arrogance I have seen often surrounding the same area from the same kind of people. I don’t think Ricky Gervais is by any means an aggressive atheist, but I am talking about the precise attitude on which such a scene is founded. If isolated and amplified, you have pure arrogance.I agree with you that diversity is good. It is problematical, but seems to me infinitely preferable to the alternative.Originally posted by JohnRenard:I used to think that science fiction was nice because it only literalized and exposed the negative side of humanity. Now I am afraid too, that many horrors will become reality within a few lifetimes from now, if not sooner.In the words of Daiyvidd Booowwwiiiie, “Now. Not tomorrow. It’s happening now.”But most of these nightmares have still not become part of daily life for most of us. The monsters, however, have already been conceived within the womb of science, and brought to term. I don’t believe scientists can really control things as much as they want to. The Dao – as we know – allows all things, and what is done cannot be undone. Nonetheless, I oppose the attitudes behind many of these doings, and the Dao allows my opposition, too. Originally posted by JohnRenard:Of all the horrors that this foreshadows, the one that upsets my creative dæmon the most is that this bring us one step closer to making The Matrix possible.You mean you think we’re not there yet?
Robin Davies writes:”It seems to me that if machines are capable of consciousness, as we are repeatedly told they are, then it is even more likely that organic matter like this meat is capable of it.”I can see how an artificial intelligence might possibly be construed as conscious but that’s because it would be like a brain. I can’t think of anything that we would regard as conscious that doesn’t have a brain (or equivalent). If “organic matter” is capable of consciousness why not consider plants as conscious beings?”it really brings into sharp focus just how much we see living things as commodities.”Plants are living things which are treated as commodities. Do you have qualms about arable farming?I suppose this all hinges on the definition of consciousness. I haven’t read much on this vast subject but my feeling is that consciousness isn’t some kind of essence that is either “there” or “not there”, but arises as an emergent property from the sheer complexity of the brain.
I’ll have to come back to this, as it’s a bit late tonight. Helen Keller’s account of her childhood makes an interesting study in the nature of consciousness, I think. Not sure if that’s relevant to this discussion… I’ll come back later.
Originally posted by anonymous:If “organic matter” is capable of consciousness why not consider plants as conscious beings?I know that I do, which incidentally is why I am no longer a vegetarian.However, as a devoted under-student of Nonlinear Dynamics, I concede your point about the “emergent property” of consciousness.
Robin Davies writes:”I know that I do, which incidentally is why I am no longer a vegetarian.”My first thought was “What do you eat then???” but I suppose you mean that if both animals and plants have consciousness then there’s no moral difference between them and you can eat both.
Still haven’t got back to this.Basically, I tend to imagine, like John, that all things are more or less conscious, and this is probably a considerable factor in why I’m not militant in my vegetarian habits, for similar reasons to those implied and inferred above.I don’t think there’s anything absolutely wrong with killing and eating something. Unfortunately, that’s the way all animal life is made, and those are the conditions under which we live. Lafcadio Hearn wrote a great – and rather Lovecraftian – essay on this theme that I think it in the collection In Ghostly Japan.Okakura Tenshin, writing of flowers, says:”Sad as it is, we cannot conceal the fact that in spite of our companionship with flowers we have not risen very far above the brute. Scratch the sheepskin and the wolf within us will soon show his teeth… Tell me, gentle flowers, teardrops of the stars, standing in the garden, nodding your heads to the bees as they sing of the dews and the sunbeams, are you aware of the fearful doom that awaits you? Dream on, sway and frolic while you may in the gentle breezes of summer. Tomorrow a ruthless hand will close around your throats. You will be wrenched, torn asunder limb by limb, and borne away from your quiet homes. The wretch, she may be passing fair. She may say how lovely you are while her fingers are still moist with your blood. …”Etc. Etc.He goes on for some pages in this manner, lamenting the fate of flowers at the hands of human beings, but concludes, in connection with the sacrifice of flowers:”In such instances [he’s just recounted the legendary use of morning glory by Sen no Rikyuu in the tea ceremony] we see the full significance of the Flower Sacrifice. Perhaps the flowers appreciate the full significance of it. They are not cowards, like men. Some flowers glory in death — certainly the Japanese cherry blossoms do, as they freely surrender themselves to the winds.”All life – and especially animal life – seems to be based upon consumption. But, if we do not venerate as life that which we consume, then consumption – it seems to me – becomes morbid.
Quentin writes:”people who are gloating over there being no soul, and humans being machines, would assert that there’s no reason why machines should not become consciou.”Hi, interesting point. I came across this recent article but can’t now find the link on Yahell…so copy it here for you to see -“Scientists create organic ‘molecular computer’By Dario Borghino17:37 May 10, 2010Researchers have succeeded in building a molecular computer that can mimic the inner working mechanisms of the human brain.Researchers from Japan and the Michigan Technological University have succeeded in building a molecular computer that, more than any previous project of its kind, can replicate the inner mechanisms of the human brain, repairing itself and mimicking the massive parallelism that allows our brains to process information like no silicon-based computer can.”The article continues -“A molecular computer is made of organic molecules instead of silicon. Chips built this way are not only potentially much smaller but also, because of the way they can be networked, able to do things that no other traditional computer, regardless of its speed, can do.”Modern computers are quite fast, capable of executing trillions of instructions a second, but they can’t match the intelligent performance of our brain,” Michigan Tech physicist Ranjit Pati commented. “Our neurons only fire about a thousand times per second. But I can see you, recognize you, talk with you, and hear someone walking by in the hallway almost instantaneously, a Herculean task for even the fastest computer.””The key lays in the massive parallelism and versatility of the human brain, as the electrical impulses that travel through it follow vast, dynamic neural paths that operate collectively, constantly communicating with each other. In digital computers, by contrast, information processing is done sequentially, with recent advancements such as multicore processors and GPU processing altering the picture only slightly.”The researchers built a molecular computer by placing DDQ — a hexagonal molecule made of nitrogen, oxygen, chlorine and carbon that self-assembles in two layers — on a gold substrate. Crucially, this molecule has the ability to easily switch among four conducting states (compared to the only two used by a standard computer), which simplifies the read/write mechanisms and speeds up the data crunching.”The neat part is, approximately 300 molecules talk with each other at a time during information processing. We have mimicked how neurons behave in the brain,” said Pati. But perhaps the most stunning similarity of the team’s computer with the human brain comes from the self-organizing ability of the molecular layer, and is the ability to physically heal itself, just like brain cells are able to regenerate to some extent.”Because of these unique characteristics the team’s processor can, despite its relative simplicity, solve problems for which algorithms are unknown. The researchers already demonstrated this capability by simulating two natural phenomena in the molecular layer — heat diffusion and the evolution of cancer cells. As their complexity grows, molecular computers may soon be able to solve the same problems that our brains face every day.”It’s a changing world…
It is.I only hope that change actually means progress, which is to say, development. People have floated the idea, in many forms, that the next stage of evolution is technological, that we are, in a sense, here to give bith to, or act as midwives for, our evolutionary successors, which will be a kind of biomechanical super-race. The notion of a master race is something that we’ve heard before without specific reference to technology, but with a great deal to blood. If we are to be made obsolete, I hope it is not by creatures who are merely superior egotists, extensions of the human need to control. That would, indeed, be ironic. But we really do seem to have made a mess of things, and it’s increasingly hard to argue against human obsolescence.If it is inevitable, then it must be welcomed, one way or another. If it is merely an act of spite – and we must be especially on guard against this, becuase such spite (like that of Roosevelt in the Burroughs quote – comes well disguised, then we must unmask it and fight it at all costs.
Robin Davies writes:I think a lot of these scientific breakthroughs are rather oversold. I reckon I’ll be long dead before artificial meat, mechanical consciousness or any significant degree of artificial intelligence become viable. As for the Craig Venter business I think this item was wittier than those (admittedly rather smug) Guardian letters:http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2010/05/25/synthetic-life-form-accuses-god-of-playing-science/
Speaking at a press conference, the synthetic cell said: ‘Dr Venter created me and I owe my loyalty to him. He’s the daddy now. God might be omniscient but, let me assure you, He doesn’t know everything.’Well, the last line’s good. Satire is perhaps best when it is ambiguous:‘He cannot be allowed a monopoly on this level of unregulated power,’ said Dr Venter, ‘that is why I am currently seeking to patent the genetic code for omnipotence so that we can keep His crazy meddling under some kind of control.’Originally posted by anonymous:I think a lot of these scientific breakthroughs are rather oversold. I was going to write – when I began this blog entry – that there is some ambiguity about what ‘from scratch’ (as in, ‘creating life from scratch’), actually means. There were more level-headed comments under the Guardian article than the one I quoted, but rather than expand the entry into an attempt to deal with such details – an attempt that would be doomed to a sense of incompleteness – I decided that I simply wanted to highlight the existence of a particular attitude – the attitude that the destruction of the soul through science is a good thing. Needless to say, this is not my attitude.
Anonymous writes:Most militant atheists are very one-minded, immature people. All they know how to do, it seems, is attack religion. Draw Muhammed Day, if you were aware of it, was absolutely terrible. It was a day filled with hate and embarrasment for the atheist community. As if bombing and invading countries like Iraq and Afganistan while the mainstream media constantly associates muslims with terrorism isn’t enough.Most of what is oppressing us today isn’t even coming from religion, but mostly secular money-driven politics. And most of these scientists are a bunch of pinheads. It’s amazing they can do things like this yet they can’t even figure out how to fix a damn oil leak. Maybe if they were more humanitarian in their efforts, instead of trying to piss off religion, the world could be a much better place.
I won’t answer at length now, as it’s bedtime. I’ll just say that I have been – on my way home from The Bay Horse – considering a blog entry about Carl Panzram, Nietzsche and J-K Huysmans. And the theological problem of evil. I’ve quoted Houellebecq before, on his rant about the Western fascination with “cynicism and evil”. The blog post would be about how Huysmans assessed this fascination in his novel La-Bas, seeming to conclude that the modern-day Satanists he encountered didn’t know what they were getting into. They were like people today who wear hammer and sickle T-shirts in ignorance of the atrocities perpetrated by Stalin. Darwin talked about survival of the fittest. He meant – as I understand it – survival of those most suited to survive, and wasn’t necessarily talking about gymnastic skills. Anyway, whether he would approve of it or not, there is such a philosophy or attitude as Social Darwinism, and it would be hard to blame anything other than atheism for this attitude. This is an extract from the life story of Carl Panzram. I’m afraid you might find it unpleasant:”You will find that I have consistently followed one idea through all my life,” he said later, “I preyed upon the weak, the harmless and the unsuspecting.” The boy’s name was George Henry McMahon who lived at 65 Boston Street in Salem. He had spent most of the day in a neighbor’s restaurant until the owner, Mrs. Margaret Lyons, asked George to run an errand.
“About 2:15 I sent him to the A&P store for the milk, giving him fifteen cents,” she later told the court. Little George left the restaurant and walked up Boston Street. About an hour later, another neighbor, Mrs. Margaret Crean, saw George walking up the avenue with a stranger. “In the afternoon of July 18th, while sitting in front of a window in my home, I saw a boy and a man walking up the avenue. The man was dressed in a blue suit and wore a cap,” she said later. That man was Carl Panzram.
“The boy’s name I didn’t know,” Panzram said years later, “He told me he was eleven years old…he was carrying a basket or pail in his hand. He told me he was going to the store to do an errand. He told me his aunt ran this store. I asked him if he would like to earn fifty cents. He said yes.”
Panzram walked with McMahon to the nearby store where inside, he was even brazen enough to speak with the clerk. A few minutes later, Panzram convinced the child to go for a trolley ride. About a mile from where they boarded the car, they exited the trolley in a deserted section of the town.
“I grabbed him by the arm and told him I was going to kill him,” Panzram said in his confession. “I stayed with the boy about three hours. During that time, I committed sodomy on the boy six times, and then I killed him by beating his brains out with a rock…I had stuffed down his throat several sheets of paper out of a magazine.”Here’s the link to the whole story:http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/history/panzram1/1.htmlI feel like atheists who subscribe to social Darwinism have no grounds whatsoever to say that Panzram did anything wrong. But, for the most part, if you put these people in a cell with Panzram for a week, they’d be in shreds by the end of it. In short, they haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about.
Quentin, have you heard of Albert Fish, or the infamous H.H. Holmes? Sometimes I go for a bender reading about murders on the internet. It makes me feel a lot better about myself. Also a lot worse about other things.
Yes, I know about Albert Fish. Strangely, reading about murders makes me feel worse about myself, like I haven’t accomplished anything. Or else that I’m irrelevant. I think just about every Western intellectual who has existed has had to deal with this question in one way or another. If there is no basis for morality, then all that is left is the pursuit of sensation and the exercise of personal power. Some intellectuals would therefore have to hold up someone like Panzram as the model of a perfect human, in that he is perfectly in tune with ‘reality’ as they conceive it. However, just about none of these intellectuals actually manage to be Panzram, no matter how much they think they should be or want to be.There are various permutations of this tendency. This is one of them:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk1wUKoXL20
Robin Davies writes:”If there is no basis for morality, then all that is left is the pursuit of sensation and the exercise of personal power.”Do you think a god is necessary to set the standard for morality? Which god? And how?Isn’t it better to set society’s moral standards based on the clear evidence that we are social animals and it makes sense for us to co-operate? After all, that’s what we do anyway. We take the bits of biblical morality that we like and ignore the ones we don’t.
I don’t necessarily think that a god is necessary as the basis of morality. The blog post I was thinking of writing would have been called ‘The Problem of Evil’. Maybe I’ll still write it, for what such an endeavour would be worth. I do think that the problem of evil is the biggest problem faced by religion, and, if I do write about this problem, it might give a better idea of my views on morality. I should say that I don’t really care very much about the Bible. It’s been years since I read it properly. I picked up a copy the other day and found it unpleasant. I suppose I should make the effort to read it again sometime. Especially as I basically only read (the other day) some of Genesis and some of Revelation, and a bit of Psalms, I believe.There was a great bit in Revelation, though, where one of the seven seals is opened or something and it says (modern translation, I think), “There was silence in Heaven for about half an hour.”Which is a pretty long time if you think about it.Anyway, I’m not concerned with making people look to the skies like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, hoping that they will be puppets of a puppet god. I would simply like to resist the movement or tendency in the modern view of things that makes people proud to hold nothing sacred.I’m not quite a humanist, but I’m more interested in ‘soul’ than I am in ‘god’.