Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/2592
54 FALL 2009 to take on dimensions so multifarious that for all practical purposes we will each move into a cosmos of our own creation and control. Attention becomes the limiting factor in an ecology of mind. And with finite attention and infinite possibility, the vast majority of whatever world in which we find ourselves will remain beyond our dominion. New technology not only liberates new realms of expression, exploration, identity, and ethical depth but pushes the world ever-farther from our ability to control it. This is a simple property of complex systems, as much a fact of existence as anything else. David Pearce: I think discontinuities in our normal state of consciousness lie ahead that exceed the gulf today between waking and dreaming consciousness. That which can't even be discussed today because we lack the necessary "primitive terms" may well be the most important. What can the congenitally blind person say about the nature of visual experience? For the congenitally blind, more illuminating than intelligence-amplification is the gift of sight. I think it's fair to say the transhumanist community is mostly interested in intelligence-amplification — superintelligence rather than supersentience. I share an interest in cognitive enhancement, but in my opinion there is an important sense in which a congenitally blind person with an IQ of 220, or 920, is just as ignorant as a congenitally blind person with an IQ of 120. I worry more about our ignorance in the latter sense than I do about our limited reasoning powers. Psychedelic drugs can briefly give us a tiny insight into how "blind" we normally are; but we soon lapse into ignorance again. Such is the state-dependence of memory. If I'd never tried psychedelics, then I fear I would be scornful of their significance because of the incoherence of most users' descriptions of their effects. But using the blindness analogy again, someone congenitally blind who is surgically guaranteed the gift of sight can take years before they can make sense of the visual world... at first they are overwhelmed and confused by visual stimuli. We are linguistically unprepared to address the incredible diversity of perspectives that seem poised to bloom from increasing disparities in bodymind configurations and deepening strata of developmental levels within each of those continua. Claiming to know how these trends will ultimately manifest themselves in the world is what Leary called "caterpillar fantasies about what post-larval life will be like." Given an imperfect knowledge of the future, we have to be careful that transhumanism does not lapse into merely commodifying the unknowable, playing to people's drive for immortality and pleasure as a meme in competition with the satisfaction of more immediate concerns. If transhumanism is understood as faith in our transcendental potential, then wisdom is a technology and real transhumanism starts now. Davis: How do we live with creative intelligence and awakened senses in a groundless world beyond our control? Behind the veneer of objective medicine, psychopharmacology is simply offering its own resolutely philosophical answer to the eternal problem of human suffering: Use technology to control its symptoms. The posthuman self is a self on drugs — SSRIs, hormones, brain boosters, neurotransmitters. We have entered an era that sanctions the psychoactive use of commercial chemicals, not just to cure disease or even to relieve suffering, but to reformat who we feel we are. It's likely that people will become ever more comfortable with the notion that unpleasant (and unproductive) psychological states are simply bad code in the Darwinian bio-computer. And once you're comfortably ensconced inside that materialist cosmology, where meaning is secondary to mechanics, there is no particularly compelling reason (other than medical fallout) not to debug the mind with consumer molecules. McKenna: Everything is about to get very much more complicated, much larger, the number of choices are about to exponentially explode.