Technecropolis Archaeology, Part II: The Denial of Consciousness
Recursive creation and self-negation
If a surveillance camera records a shooting star and stores it in a database, but nothing in the world observes the screen, did it happen?
If there’s nothing to sense, reflect, and engage with molecular arrangements in space-time, one can be sure: neither the star, nor the possibility of one, doesn’t exist.
i.
Following my previous article, which was, admittedly, a disorganized, exploratory attempt to describe and flesh out a larger idea that stalks me, and which upon discipline eludes me, and only typing and researching can help me shine a light on its shape — today, I woke up with a sense of clarity.
More than anything, I want to highlight the multiplicity of technology. Like anything else, it can heal or harm, depending on how humanity applies it. Technology is shaped by ethical choices. The consequences of those choices reverb throughout the cosmos.
As humans, we exist in a constant state of flux: between past and future, oblivion, life, and death. We’ve been able to maintain a sense of history spanning centuries, while most individual humans remain aware of their inevitable demise, and we have the power to influence the future, if only marginally. We experience all of this while simultaneously conscious of the present, in which each moment always provides a choice — an inflection point — and the ability to augment the shape, direction, substance, and form of space.
We are not passive observers. We exist between worlds, our bodies are mediums between, almost crystalline and prismatic, and we can alter the world in ways both subtle and profound. We must face the magnificence of human life and not cower in the face of its brightness. Let us be neither proud nor ashamed, but gratefully honor the magnitude of our governance.
ii.
What other animals, that we know of, invented electrical cables and plastic bottles? These are our creations. We must take accountability for human ingenuity, our accomplishments, and avoid shirking responsibility, whether good or bad, and stop trying to escape the consequences of human life on this planet and galaxy.
Our inventions are not mere products of random events. They are not relics hidden in time, like treasures in a game that one may access if luck and fate provide the right directions. Instead, they are the unique material results of highly specific interactions between human bodies, terrestrial conditions, radiation, and galactic materials. Phenomena is dependent on both observation and interaction.
That being said, people are morally responsible for their worldviews and ideologies. Thoughts are not neutral. Communication is an ethical choice, since ideas bring things into form. We have the chance to reflect on our ideas and evaluate them according to our ethics. Technologies and the refinement and reprocessing of material is shaped by our ethics. As such, one must be exceedingly careful with their ideas, values, and take responsibility for any death, suffering, and tools and weaponry, those ideas may inculcate.
By no means do I claim people are, or even can be, totally aware of the ways in which their ideas may be manipulated, or any potentially unintended consequences, but it is important, at minimum, to at least consider one’s preferences — who is sacrificed or neglected? Who benefits? What are the means of achieving this utopia and reifying this dream-state? Do violence and injustice matter, or are they “natural,” unavoidable, perhaps even virtuous? Do you endorse accepting the costs, if it means reaping the potential benefits? Is your worldview simply self-serving?
It is both negligent and cowardly to refuse accountability for one’s thoughts, and doubly so if one chooses to express them. One of the many remarkable aspects of human consciousness is our capacity for self-reflection. Self-reflection relies on a specific arrangement of cosmological material, time and memory, all of which are unique and relative to organic development. Evolution and time are subjective, mutable, and fluid. We experience a special human-version of the universe. Spiders have a completely different perception of time and sensation, for example.
It is the ideology and worldview of a our primate-social organization that influences and shapes the creation and application of technologies, and those technologies are fundamentally imbued with, and replicate, through their consumption and use, the ethos in which they are created (though, they are not limited to them). The ideological leanings of a techne’s creator acts as the amniotic fluid in which the machine or mechanism is assembled. The chemical structure of the object is influenced by its creators handling of it. Development, invention, and sensing are all processes of interaction, — not a colonizer’s discovery of a hidden continent of “things,” nor a prison-wardens delusion in the confinement of the jail cell of a body.
Everything man-made will always be an inverted, recursive, fragmented version of ourselves, both individually, and tribally. Marshall McLuhan has extensively described how technology is an extension of man, meaning that technology is reliant on the physical embodiment and sensory apparatuses of human beings. To illustrate from my view, take, for example, a photograph. The camera is a representation of an autopsied replica of the eye: an eye, turned inside out, made larger. Our flesh and muscle reformed into glass and mirror-sand. An eyeball is spherical — the camera is rectangular. The photograph is two-dimensional, motionless, flat, made of paper and ink. I would argue the computer is an attempt to wholly invert the human body, replicate it, corpse-like. A smartphone is the autopsied replica of a human skull, its disembodied brain and nervous system. The former: keyboards are the hands and feet, the computer tower is the brain, spinal cord, and digestive system. The screen behaves as “its” genitals and anus, the image it displays both its excrement and offspring. On a more mundane, historical level, a bowl is an imitation of the mouth, the oral cavity of the skull, the shape our hands make when they come together in a curve. It is this way with almost everything. Would a bowl exist, if settlement colonies didn't? It's hard to know, one can only speculate, but I imagine we'd still be cupping our hands if we had remained nomads, or maybe using the skulls of the dead, instead.
Contradiction is the engine of invention. We build because we lack. It is only because our bones break and become frail that we find steel comparatively superior. We face death, so we seek and venerate immortality. Every innovation is an act of self-negation, a response to the limits of our bodies, but have we stopped to ask why? What are we negating? What are we becoming in the process? And what is the second-order reaction to our negated-creations?
iii.
A recursive, inverted principle infinitely repeats throughout the universe. It is as though everything that came into existence did so by auto-negation. Forming the “memory” of everything it knew about itself, then creating the opposite — creation and reaction. Time itself is a form of negation: the future is not the present, and the present is not the past. Matter, in some sense, is an inversion of pure energy. Sort of like Hegel's dialectics as cosmological genesis, advanced in quantum physics by Karen Barad's agential realism:
“For Barad, phenomena or objects do not precede their interaction, rather, 'objects' emerge through particular intra-actions. Thus, apparatuses, which produce phenomena, are not assemblages of humans and nonhumans … Rather, they are the condition of possibility of 'humans' and 'non-humans', not merely as ideational concepts, but in their materiality.” 🔗
To put it plainly, entities do not preexist their relationships — they emerge through their relations with one another. This makes the universe naturally incomplete, and comes into existence through intra-actions, and attempts to conserve and maintain completion through difference and absence. This is essential to the cosmological paradox — its incompleteness is precisely what makes it complete.
Given that intra-action is critical to universal creation, it’s all too easy to forget there exists an ethical dimension to looking. Cultural saturation of ritualistic voyeurism begets taking for granted the great responsibility of peeping and peering. Observation is a profound responsibility, as it — quite literally — materializes phenomena. Perception interacts with the molecules in the air, for instance, and the atomic and chemical identities form by way of inter-subjective recognition. All entanglements depend on what both could have been, but will not be. It exists by negating non-existence. Once you look, it becomes. By looking, you, and your atoms, become participant in the scene, entangled with it, forming, influencing, and shaping each other. Observation materializes reality, and phenomena is entirely dependent on the inter-subjective relationship between “things.”
"Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don't obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse." — Karen Barad, 2007
Thus, “intelligence,” “computation,” or mere sapience, are not the entire puzzle. Neither are they virtues, nor even qualifications for determining high-level consciousness. Rather, it is recognition, curiosity, and the capacity for reflection (observation and perception) — particularly, the reflection and refraction of time (bound by mass, energy, and material) — which forms the basis of “consciousness,” or, at least, a more well-rounded, higher degree of consciousness. (This is perhaps why dementia and Alzheimers are particularly devastating and cosmically-horrifying: they materialize the gradual, or sometimes, rapid erasure of what we recognize as human consciousness before our very eyes.)
To facilitate “entropy,” and time, one must be able to somehow sense and “look” back, above, forward, beyond, and into limitless potential — all from a singular, local point in time: the present. There must be a spatial-temporal awareness, since this is what time (and gravity) acts upon, and this awareness is largely, if not entirely, dependent on physically embodied, reflexive sensation. There exists an intra-action and interdependence between the physical molecules of our bodies, the atmosphere, space-time, etc. which co-mingles with our actions, thoughts, and emotions (and vice-versa).
Our perceptions and actions shape the world we observe. Cosmic creation is an infinite and perpetual intercourse between the observer and the observed. Matter is the byproduct. As self-aware observers, we have an immense responsibility to one another, the planet, our neighboring planets, our sun, and, the universe itself, by ethically participating in its formation and recursive creation.
iv.
We are dependent on space-time. It is space-time that creates consciousness through the intra-active evolution of material compounds. Without sensation of the passage of time, coupled with the capacity to reflect, and project time — there is no, or very limited, consciousness.
The fullest spectrum of consciousness — that we’re aware of — is contextually dependent on the sensation of intra-action with time, and its adherent chemical, molecular structures. This is not to say other forms of consciousness cannot diverge from our understanding of terrestrial life. I consider it entirely possible and believe it to truly exist. However, humanity is particularly afflicted by the desire for annihilation, freedom-from-responsibility, and cowardice in the face of the great burden inherent to conscious, self-reflective life.
Our dependence on death to give life meaning, on our fragility and sensory “limitations”, which conversely reveal strength and understanding — give way to a debilitating and sometimes insurmountable fear: fear of the unknown, of scarcity, of the crushing weight of time, and the imperative to achieve; to reach a significant level of “being,” which we are so often measured up against while the clock ticks away, to someday — at an unknown hour — ring the alarm to signal our demise, and the absences of all those we know and love.
This fear of the unmanageable, unpredictable unknown — fear of the ever-patient black hole that stalks, lurks, and waits to swallow us whole, and which is inherit (as an inversion) to human life — culminates in many people desiring to abdicate the weight, work tirelessly to escape and avoid it, spend their lifetimes whittling away the very mass of life, on which consciousness-as-we-know-it relies.
In an attempt to deny conscious life and minimize the weighty ethical responsibility of human perception, we project “intelligence” onto insentient objects — objects humanity created and shaped through our unique human intra-actions with other terrestrial and galactic substances.
We mistake consciousness for the ability to cast shadows. We see imitations of our understanding of our anthropocentric consciousness and believe it to be real, in an effort to shrug off responsibility. Similar to how prosthetic limbs are titanium and plastic in contrast to bone, “artificial consciousness” is an ersatz material recursion of our human consciousness — only considered conscious compared to the voluntary, self-inflected diminishing of our own. We cannot calculate billions of numbers, so the machine must be God. We cannot transfer information across the world in a fraction of a second, so the machine must be Superior. Our memory is fallible, subject to incursions and brainwashing. The images remain static on the screen, forever unchanging. It is based on the absences of qualities, that other “things” come into being.
Our imaginations project evolution onto objects, when, materially, there is no such change. We mistake mere reflection for consciousness, as if shadows cast on a wall could ever replace the light of awareness. We confuse consciousness with imitative, recursive faculties that we use to define our humanity.
Circuits are circuits. A screen only reflects the content we program into it. Without a human to interact with it, it remains lifeless — unreal, non-being. The image is without substance until it is awakened by an embodied, conscious gaze, a relationship formed by their time-space and self-reflective intentions and actions.
We elevate technology and ignore the material world in a desperate attempt to forget the consequences of conscious living. We escape into the dead, mechanical world of technology, believing we are "bringing it to life." But this is an inversion of life, an amnesiac’s reaction against time. It is a programmed censorship of the profound and sacred power of sensation and interaction.
This is the burden of consciousness: the responsibility to create ethically, to bear the shame, and cultivate the courage of sensory-material awareness.