We are the machines that die for love

We are the machines that die for love

One of the central themes of “Dream Now” was the distinction between a Machine metaphysics (the cosmos as a closed, computable system) and a Dream metaphysics (radically open-ended, forever evading any final definition or Theory of Everything). One of the main characters of the essay/idea-collage was Plenty Coups, the native American chief whose life and leadership were altered by two prophetic dreams involving the Little People of the Pryor Mountains. Discussing C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image, the following passage from Daimonic Reality (Patrick Harpur) speaks of “mythical” species like the Little People as emissaries of the Dream, as beings whose existence prevents the universe from becoming too orderly.

C. S. Lewis tries to depict the universe as it was seen through the eyes of a medieval person. He describes their view of the heavens, with its precise system of astral spheres towering like a great cathedral, vast but finite, into space. And he is just about to describe their view of Earth and its inhabitants who occupy the lower end of the Great Chain of Being, which stretches down from God and the angels, to man, animals, vegetables, and even stones, when he finds himself obliged to pause and consider an anomalous class of beings. They are not only strange to him, as a literary historian and Christian apologist, but they are also at odds with the cosmology he is outlining, a world even more precise and orderly than our own worldview. Following the Roman writer Martianus Capella, he calls these beings Longaevi (presumably “long-lived ones”): “dancing companies” of which “haunt woods, glades, and groves, and lakes, and springs and brooks; whose names are Pans, Fauns, Satyrs, Silvans, Nymphs, and the like.”

“In a sense,” says Lewis, “their unimportance is their importance. They are marginal fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the Model [i.e. the medieval cosmos] does not assign, as it were, an official status.” And this is as true of our own Model as it was then. It is the nature of the Longaevi to be always unofficial, to constitute a stumbling block to the orderly structures by which we envisage Creation. To his credit, Lewis does not disapprove of them. “Herein lies their value,” he says. “They introduce a hint of irreducible wildness and uncertainty into a cosmos that is in danger of being a little too self-explanatory, too crystalline.”

Italian essayist Christina Campo makes a similar point in regards to fairy tales:

The inexorable, inexhaustible moral of the fairy tale is victory over the law of necessity, the constant transition to a new order of relationships and absolutely nothing else, for there is absolutely nothing else to learn on this earth. Victory over necessity, over law, over nature, over causation itself.

This biographical sketch of Aimé Michel (1919-1992) from Jeffrey Kripal’s Authors of the Impossible speaks to many of the themes and ideas from my essays: Dreams vs. Machines, “dwarves”, the ineffable and the improbable, the sacred nature of a certain childly innocence.

Aimé Michel was a living paradox. A humpbacked dwarf of a man who suffered intensely throughout much of his life and wrote about his body as “the Machine,” he thought in cosmic terms and looked upon humanity as a transitional species evolving toward a spiritual identification with the entire universe. His was both a deep and painful pessimism and a nearly limitless cosmic optimism. There were biographical reasons for this gnosis, for this radical vision of the Human as Two.

Each person is simultaneously a conscious, constructed self or socialized ego and a much larger conscious field that normally manifests itself only in non-ordinary states of consciousness and energy, which the religious traditions have historically objectified, mythologized, and projected outward into the sky as divine, as “God” and so on, or introjected inwards into the human being as nirvana, brahman, and so on.

As a young child on his first day of school, little Aimé was cruelly stricken down by polio. He would lie paralyzed for three years. He was now essentially locked into his own consciousness and unable to communicate with the outside world, and this at a crucial stage of psychosocial development. Aimé gradually learned to observe the intricacies of his own mental processes. These, Méheust points out, now moved outside the habitual or normal channels of social thought and made strange connections. Michel even claimed that he learned to think without words. He also observed his fellow playmates, with whom he could not play, as entranced “somnambulists” acting out a dream-like social script—the consensual trance.

The result of this three-year meditation was a kind of permanent childhood, a stable altered state of consciousness that left Michel remarkably open to the inexpressible, the improbable, and the nonhuman, an openness that others, including and especially Bertrand Méheust, felt as a kind of “aura” or philosophical charisma, as an alien presence. Aimé Michel was a stranger among men, a being between worlds, in his own words now, “neither man nor woman, neither from here nor from there” (“ni homme ni femme, ni d'ici ni d'ailleurs”). This is how, Méheust explains, Aimé Michel “born a philosopher” not in the vein of a professional academic but in the lineage of a Socrates, a Descartes, or a Pascal.

This is also how he lived. In his adult life Michel sought out more solitude, thought and wrote well outside the orthodox academic sphere, lived a life of eccentric holiness that brought the ridicule of some and the admiration of others, and paid the price of mysticism’s process.

Scott Alexander writes about another dwarf by the name of Raymond Palmer (1910-1977), an author and magazine editor influential in the first wave of science fiction whose life story was strikingly similar to Michel’s.

Palmer was an anomalous person who liked anomalous things. Standing at 4’0”, he had suffered a series of spinal injuries and subsequent complications that everyone thought would kill him. After a year spent immobile in a hospital — strapped to a frame meant to stabilize his back — he achieved a seemingly miraculous recovery. He attributed his survival to exercises through which he cultivated his will to live, eventually fanning it to such intensity that he (per himself) developed minor psychic powers. He’d always thought there was something more to the world than what met the eye.

Douglas Rushkoff makes essentially the same argument I’ve made, except he frames it in terms of (Meme) Magic vs. Technology instead of Dream vs. Machine.

Surrendering memes and culture to science is a bit like finding proof of one’s gender identity in chromosomal chemistry. On one level, it’s nice for someone who feels misgendered to be able to point to a hormonal phenomenon that occurred in the womb and has left a verifiable artifact in the genetic code. But any requirement to find official, material proof of one’s gender identification betrays the whole right to self-determination. How can you, as Aleister Crowley offered, ‘Do what thou wilt’ if it’s all already in the code?

Likewise, if memes lose their basis in myth, they also lose their potential for magic. Memes are not digital units or programming code, however attractive those metaphors may have been in the beginning of the cyber era. Memes are alchemical in shape, but they are mythological in content. They find their origins in repressed, pre-linguistic symbols. They are symbolic and allegorical, not utilitarian or realist. Like the work of the early symbolist artists of the late 1800’s, they are less a product of dehumanizing industrial technology than a response to it.

Memes are a way of conjuring, and you can only conjure with them if they’re not locked down. Reducing memes to code and dismissing myth as superstition only disempowers us. It removes the wiggle room that a counterculture needs in order to operate. It leaves otherwise well-meaning social change agents thinking about how to “upscale humanity” with “better code.” We’ve seen where the techno-solutionists want to take us. They’re still using the most frightening memes they can muster about social media or AI controlling our thoughts to in order to manipulate us, themselves. They are playing us—for our own good, they believe, but it’s still manipulation.

We memesters, artists, writers, and cultural provocateurs are the players, here. We understand that what most of us mistake for reality is just a social construction. It’s an agreement between us, negotiated in an ongoing way. There are true conditions on the ground, and they matter. But we must not cede the power of our myths, either. Particularly not right now.

The “large language models” currently invading our networks and consciousness represent the latest, perhaps ultimate expression of Dawkins’ ultra-scientistic world view. They are not conscious AIs at all, but probability maximizers. They look at past language constructions, and generate the most probable combination of words based on a query. They quite literally revert us to the mean. They are the antagonists of novelty.

Those of us who play with culture — whether memesters, artists, or activists—must proudly reclaim the magical roots of our tradition. We must take the “meme” meme back.

AI-driven, techno-solutionist, eugenic capitalists assert the probable. If we want to keep things alive, we must instead assert the possible.

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

It’s about systems and their transcendence.

All “systems”, whether organisms, organizations, conceptual frameworks, or theories, resist destruction or dissolution (see: the Shirky Principle); this survival instinct manifests as a totalizing impulse, a drive to become so absolute and so complete—so perfect—that the system appears as reality itself or an immutable feature thereof. How, then, do you break free of “reality”?

If reason only justifies what we already know and believe, then it may seem that reason can only create a hall of mirrors, trapping us within the confines of our own preconceptions. How do we escape this hall of mirrors, according to William Blake? We escape it, he suggests, through the faculty of imagination. It is for this reason that a hypertrophied reasoning faculty (sometimes referred to by Blake as “The Spectre”) closes itself off and attempts to destroy imagination.

In a similar vein, Grothendieck points to something even more fundamental, the quality without which we don’t even dare to imagine in the first place.

In our probing of things in the Universe (mathematical or otherwise), we dispose of a crucial rehabilitating power: innocence. By this I mean the original innocence which we have all received at birth and which rests within us, often the target of our scorn and of our deepest fears. It alone unites the humility and audacity which allow us to penetrate into the heart of things, while also allowing these things to penetrate into us and impregnate us with their meaning…Yet, it is not those [intellectual] gifts, nor even the most burning of ambitions accompanied with a relentless will, which allow us to cross the “invisible and imperious circles” which enclose our Universe. Only innocence can cross them, without noticing or even caring to, during the times where we find ourselves alone and listening to the voice of things, intensely absorbed in child’s play…

Great minds are great because they embrace the simple truths.

Here is Félix Ravaisson, at the end of his life. By all accounts a virtuosic scholar; I can testify to his skill with the footnotes having translated over a hundred of them. But, folks, this is what he has to say about life, the universe and everything: “The obscure intuitive feeling that, from the outset, the great creative force is love.”

No one felt this Truth and lived it more than Fred Rogers, producer and host of the iconic children’s show Mr. Roger’s neighborhood.

A modern-day saint, his physical form was love incarnate.

Rogers was a creature of habit. He woke up every morning at 5:30 a.m. and started his day by reading and writing prayers for those who asked for them from him. He took a nap every day in the late afternoon and went to bed at 9:30 p.m., sleeping for a solid uninterrupted eight hours,

That constant pattern likely accounted for another constant in his life: his weight. For 30 years, Rogers weighed exactly 143 pounds. In fact, he checked his own weight daily.

“Every day, Mister Rogers refuses to do anything that would make his weight change,” Junod wrote in his story. “He neither drinks, nor smokes, nor eats flesh of any kind, nor goes to bed late at night, nor sleeps late in the morning, nor even watches television.”

And not only does he avoid habits that could change his weight — he literally kept himself in check. “Every morning, when he swims, he steps on a scale in his bathing suit and his bathing cap and his goggles, and the scale tells him that he weighs 143 pounds.”

While some may just dismiss the number as a random three digits, Roger was always about seeing things on a deeper level and found meaning in the results of the daily weigh-ins. “Mister Rogers has come to see that number as a gift, as a destiny fulfilled,” Junod described.

Each of the numbers, he reasoned was the number of letters in each word of the phrase, “I love you.” When describing that delight, he says in only a way Rogers can: “Isn’t that wonderful?”

And so he kept that constant for decades, maintaining his very being in a number that equated love — and taking what the scale showed him and spreading it into every corner of the universe.

Roger’s profound love was born of profound suffering; his sickly childhood mirrored those of Michel and Palmer.

Rogers had a difficult childhood. Shy, introverted, and overweight, he was frequently homebound after suffering bouts of asthma. He was bullied as a child for his weight and called “Fat Freddy”. According to Morgan Neville, director of the 2018 documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (note: highly recommended), Rogers had a “lonely childhood...I think he made friends with himself as much as he could. He had a ventriloquist dummy, he had [stuffed] animals, and he would create his own worlds in his childhood bedroom”.

Fred’s message was as simple as it was radical and powerful.

It all goes to Fred’s notion of a gap between what is and what might be. For Fred, creating is an expression of optimism, an act of faith. Faith in progress, in invention, in some basic urge to constantly make life better. Perhaps the best way to understand just how radical his message would be is to think of what happens when soil isn’t tended. A barren landscape. A toxic soil. An atmosphere devoid of love and of acceptance, where a person’s internal wars go unnoticed and unattended. What sort of creations come out of those people, stuck in that place? A world war? Walls? Children in cages.

“I think that how we were first loved — or not — has a great deal to do with what we create and how,” Fred once told me.

He put it this way in a speech:

“There are those of us who have been deprived of human confidence. Those who have not been able to develop the conviction that they have anything of value within. Their gap is rather a chasm. And they most often despair of creating any bridges to the land of what might be. They were not accepted as little children…They were never truly loved by any important human other…And so it seems to me that the most essential element in the development of any creation, any art or science, must be love. A love that begins with the simple expressions of care for a little child. “When people help us to feel good about who we are, they are really helping us to love the meaning of what we create.”

The speech was a commencement address at Carnegie Mellon University. After Fred delivered the last line, he began singing his song “It’s You I Like,” and hundreds of students joined in.

It’s you I like.
It’s not the things you wear
It’s not the way you do your hair
But it’s you I like.

The way you are right now
The way down deep inside you
Not the things that hide you
Not your degrees
They’re just beside you.

But it’s you I like.
Every part of you
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new.
I hope that you’ll remember
Even when you’re feeling blue
That it’s you I like
It’s you yourself
It’s you —
It’s you I like!

Fred told the crowd that he wrote that song “for the child in all of us — that part of us which longs to help in the creation of a new and better world.”

Anne Strieber, the wife of science-fiction writer and American abductee and visionary and Whitley Strieber, used to say, “Mankind is too young to have beliefs. What we need are good questions.”

…The same paradoxical comparative method quickly reveals another uncomfortable truth: beliefs limit what is possible. Beliefs shut down. Beliefs decide. If specific beliefs can be thought of as fish-hooks that sometimes catch real fish, it can also be said that beliefs generally only catch fish, and particular kinds of fish that the hook is designed to catch, no less. But, if we extend the metaphor, we can also say that the waters are filled with other sorts of beings, most of which couldn’t care less about these particular belief-hooks. Which is another way of saying beliefs can miss a great deal, really almost everything. Of what would we be capable if we did not limit ourselves through what we believe? (Jeffrey Kripal, How to Think Impossibly)

I actually did some research, because I heard a quote that was attributed to Pablo Picasso, which he said, “Computers are useless, because they only give you answers.” And I actually did some research, and I found out he actually did say that in the 1960s. And that was a real prompt, because it appears that, more and more, if you want a good answer, you’re gonna ask a machine. It turns out the machines are actually really good at giving you answers — and not just simple answers. I think they’re gonna increasingly give us answers to complicated questions.

But it does appear that, so far, machines are not very good at asking questions. So we have this world where, basically, answers have become cheap and ubiquitous and pervasive, and they’re everywhere, and so what’s much scarcer are good questions. And good questions are kind of like a discovery. They’re kind of like a way of exploring “what if?” And it turns out that they’re not very efficient. And so what machines are really good at are all the things where efficiency counts, where productivity and efficiency counts, and those are the kinds of tasks we’re gonna give to the machines. And we’re, as humans, left with things that are inefficient, which happens to be the things that we enjoy most, like discovery or innovation. Innovation is inherently not efficient — or science, for that matter. Science is inherently inefficient, because if you are 100 percent efficient as a scientist, you’re just not learning anything new. So trial and error, there’s the error part. There’s the failure. There’s the dead ends. There’s trying prototypes. All these things are the essential part of exploring, trying, discovering, which are all inherently inefficient. And so are human relationships. And so we’re — humans are — we’re expert at wasting time. We’re expert at the things where efficiency and programmability don’t count for much.

And I think that’s — as the robots rise and the AIs rise — that’s one of the answers to the questions about what we’re gonna do, and I think there’s plenty of room for us to explore, curate, invent, innovate, love, chat, experience things, all of which are inherently inefficient and not things that machines are good at. And I think, ultimately, there’s a — as you’re suggesting, there’s a kind of a larger resonance of this idea of asking a question, of asking “why?” — not just “Why?” the first time, but “Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” all the way down, as far as we can go.

And I think, in some ways, that does echo some structure of the universe — that it’s probably built on a question, rather than an answer; that it’s very likely that the universe is really a kind of a question, rather than the answer to anything. And so I think that’s why we resonate with a question — a good question so much, rather than just with a smart answer. (Kevin Kelly)

In the opening section of “Dream Now”, Philip K. Dick asked, “I would like then to ask this: what is it, in our behavior, that we can call specifically human? That is special to us as a living species?”. Here is an answer:

The sine qua non of the Human, that which is specifically and specially ours, is the transmutation of suffering into love and creation. In other words, a human is a machine that transforms pain, hatred, sadness, and ugliness into Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

Only through love does Man become more than Machine.

Agape—this is what Jesus claimed how God loved individuals. This is the love that a parent has for a child. This is not the love of consummation. Not trying to consume the child. That’s evil. And it’s not friendship. When you bring a child home from the hospital, and I’ve done this twice. That’s not your friend. That’s not even a person. It’s basically a slug.

Here’s the astonishing thing. You love it, not because of any way you can consume it or be one with it. Eww. You don’t love it because, “Hey, great friendship.” You love it because by loving it, you turn a non-person into a person. It’s the closest thing to a miracle—that sounds hackneyed, I know—but stop and think about this. You depend on agape. Because people loved you before you were a person you have become the person you are. Love turns non-persons, animals, into moral agent persons. It’s like somehow if I could just care about my sofa enough, it would turn into a Ferrari or something. It’s powerful. (John Vervaeke)

Love creates more than just persons—it creates reality itself.

Among human beings, only the existence of those we love is fully recognized. Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.

The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: cf. the Upanishads, the Taoists, and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification).

That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical.

This is a major theme in the thought of Simone Weil.

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. It is the same with the act of love. To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself.

The authentic and pure values, truth, beauty, and goodness, in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.

Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act. All the other advantages of instruction are without interest.

Inspired by Weil, Iris Murdoch offers a theory of will, attention, and love:

I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort…One is often compelled almost automatically by what one can see. If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over…

…It is in the capacity to love, that is to see, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called ‘will’ or ‘willing’ belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, and consisting of, love…Freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action.

As I revisited these paragraphs recently, I was struck by Murdoch’s notions of fantasy and freedom and the role she assigns “attention to reality.” Honestly, I’m occasionally tempted by the idea that this is the most important task we could set ourselves: the cultivation of attention in this sense that Murdoch identifies, and that all else could, in the very long run, flow from this. I realize this is an example a perfectly foolish proposition, judged by all of the usual metrics. But this is the problem, isn’t it? The metrics we currently deploy to judge what is useful, efficient, effective, and realistic have trapped us; they make it impossible to see in precisely the way Murdoch describes here. It is part and parcel of the fantasy that has enchanted us. (L. M. Sacasas)

The desire to discover something new prevents people from allowing their thoughts to dwell on the transcendent meaning of what is already known. My total lack of talent, which makes such a desire out of the question for me, is a great favor I have received…The most commonplace truth, when it floods the whole soul, is like a revelation.

The beings I love are creatures. They were born by chance.
My meeting with them was also by chance. Their death is inevitable.
What they think, do, and say is limited, and is a mixture of good and evil.
I have to know this with all my soul and not love them the less.