HUMAN SEPARATENESS: THE FUTURE FABRICATORS
by Victor Greetree

Do you like horror stories, to take long hot baths in the kind of chilling artistic stewpot that indulges your most grotesque nightmares? If so, grab a book, The Tomorrow Makers by Grant Fjermedal (MacMillan). If you haven't pissed in your socks by its end, you must be on anti-diuretics. What's so stark raving edgy about this volume is that it's not fantasy imagination, like Friday the 13th, The Living Dead, or Psycho. Those confabulations end presumably when you leave the movie house. This one follows you out into the night, into the real world. What did happen at the Bates Motel is now happening with an array of on-the-fringe, neo-hacker Tony Perkinses at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), M.I.T., and Carnegie-Mellon University. Can life on our planet become a sort of surreal dream now relegated to special genre fiction? Here's what the book says:

• It was during the course of my travels through America and Japan that I met the Tomorrow Makers. Among them are the world's greatest scientists, and they are in a desperate race to be first at downloading the contents of the human mind into a computer housed within a robotic body.

The book reads like a kind of nerd wet dream: a world disfigured, a pleasurable, grotesque, auto-erotic science lab, the lone social-misfit's sweet oral pain of escape into cheap, paper-backed, trashy, Byzantine futuramics. Yet--and I apologize for my fun-poking high jinks--we must take these people very seriously. The Whole Earth Review calls Fjermedal's report "formidable ... a fine comprehensive sweep." The book's characters are not adolescent sociopath junior rangers working in their basements. They are extremely intelligent thinkers, with Ph.D.s from our most prestigious universities, whose work is sanctioned by other universities pre-eminent in the sciences and financed largely by federal grants. Their research is being applied already to warfare and industry and will surely trickle down to the private sector. They believe that a human being = the physical structure of his/her brain. And, physical brain structure = a computer program. Therefore, human being = a computer program. Once we have "created computer copies of our minds ... [our] old bodies would be disconnected." By making multiple program copies, we could "be in two or more places at once" and a "backup copy" would insure life spans of "fifteen hundred years or more."

McLuhan gave us non-understanding media which rapidly became the dominant pop-culture mode of our Counter-Art Society. Its natural extension is now being created by scientists. The myth of human superiority and thus separateness from the rest of living things is now best exemplified here. Artificial Intelligence and robotics, certainly a major part of humanity's future, can be our next non-understanding media. If we wish the future to be different than these scientists predict, we must dispute the basis of their more theoretic claims, their underlying premises. But more importantly, we must imagine the more realistic implications of what they do, how robots will actually take over the running of our lives.

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I examined the indexes of books by about twenty-five AI (Artificial Intelligence) scientists--not a statistically significant number perhaps, but sufficient to show anti-shamanic penchants. When you think of it, the index of a book is kind of computer-ish. It's a menu, a type-simulated-proto-brain. In categorized format (and alphabetically), an index referentially and cross-referentially includes all the packets of information that make up the book's contents and supplies a means of accessing that information and linking it to all other information. Since the same people who write these books will also make the computers and robots that the books describe, we can assume that they will place the same bits of information in these electronic forms as they have placed in their print-bound counterparts. Or, to state it simply, a machine, of however advanced circuitry, is originally as smart as the person who creates it. Even if the creator "teaches" the machine to learn and eventually make ever-advancing models of its own self (as most AI scientists predict), that superior, self-propagating organism can still only base itself upon its maiden programming. If something is missing originally in the programmer's own head and thus his program, it cannot be invented by the machine. Therefore, I was shocked by what was missing in these indexes, what their authors had left out about artificial (and human) brains. There were no references for any of the following:

brain waves, alpha and theta waves
dreams
hallucinations
altered states of consciousness
hormonal effects on brain activity
peak experiences
religious experiences
meditative states
various sleep states
emotions or feelings
creativity
intuitions or extrasensory perceptions
self healing
death

These categories of information are not excitedly imaginative or on the fringe. All of them are qualities of human brains or mental activity that are widely accepted and confirmed by research and much experience. If, as Hans Moravec of Carnegie-Mellon University and "many researchers" believe, your brain, 100 neurons at a time, will be written into programs so that "your mind--some would say your soul--has been removed from the brain and transferred to a machine." And your body "disconnected" and "the computer is installed in a shiny new one, in the style, color and material of your choice"--if that were possible for me, I am certain that I would wish to have all of the above mentioned mind categories included in my transfer.

THE HIGHEST TRANCE STATE AND THE EARTH:
A TECHNIQUE SECTION
If the human experiences described in my bookThe New Artist are possible and desirable then any AI, or attempt to improve the human mind, would be seriously incomplete if it excluded them. I certainly would wish, as a robot, to continue entering a trance state and experiencing the Other Reality. Why? Because without such experiences I have no proof of possible human sublimeness nor of the basic premise of this book: that in the world of nature and the earth around us, there exist evidences of a benevolent, all-encompassing universal being whose representation in the material plane is art. I would like to suggest a means of that proof now and request that all AI scientists immediately try this. The following is from a talk that I gave:

• If you go out into the woods, or the desert, or to the sea and go into a trance, you may be able to stop time. That is, the forces of the earth will open up a space into themselves and you will see what is real. If you have difficulty doing this, that is because you are not relaxing--and just looking. Instead, you are trying to see something, trying to create something. Just look and see what is there. You don't have to think or create anything. The force of the earth is not man-made. It exists by itself without human volition. When you stop time and really see the earth, so that each tree, each plantlet, each pebble, each dead leaf on the ground is entirely real and itself, you will experience that it is all permeated with a presence. This presence is wordless, thoughtless, really. Silent. The holy presence Who occupies the space around natural things like an invisible light and penetrates them is often called OLOMA, or Our Mother, the loving Earth who cares for us in life and death. You must hear the Silence. You must see the Silence. You may also smell the Silence as you breath quietly in and out.

This experience is the real proof, the only proof, of the reality of the earth. What shamans have always known. It belies the humanistic, technologic viewpoint which denies any absolutes in the universe, which claims that the human mind creates reality. The force of the Earth, the shamanistic intuitive knowledge of it, is not dependent upon what we believe. In fact, to try to believe in it, to create it, will make its perception impossible. It is absolute. And that is why, just why, it is so urgent and imperative that we keep the earth intact, that we fight those who wish to eliminate our last contacts with wildness. For when, and where--as in our cities--men and women cannot longer see what is real--as they may in the forests, deserts and oceans--reality must certainly depend upon our minds. But that reality cannot be the highest one or the best that we can know, at least on this earth, and what has been lost to humankind will never be replaced or regained.

* * *

Grant Fjermedal's book intimately describes the daily lives of AI scientists. There are numerous references to diets and snacks, of chocolate milk and Cheerios, M & Ms, vending machine bagels and Chinese food, Coca Cola, etc. People who feast on junk food should of course find little objection to breathing polluted air, drinking toxified water, or living near nuclear plants. More basically, the book seems to define the kind of "head-tripping" person who is out of touch with his/her body. If a psychotherapist were working with one of them, he would probably try to get the person to recognize and strongly experience emotions within. MIT professor Gerald Jay Sussman says: "If you can make a machine that contains the contents of your mind, then that machine is you. The hell with the rest of your body, it's not very interesting." But in order to feel, one must be in touch with one's body. Anger, joy and love are thoughts in our minds which are closely connected to and stimulated by bodily sensations. Without the body, there is a void, an emptiness. This is quite easy to demonstrate to yourself: close your eyes and think of someone you are angry with. Now focus your awareness on your body. You will find that the anger is associated with an excitation and tension in very specific parts of it. Now relax those parts and, you will see, the anger goes away. And yet, in all of the descriptions I have read of human beings transferred to robots or of robots who are human beings, I have not found one with a real synthesized body, a tension-related-to-mind body.