Posthuman Blues

"Belief" is an illness. It almost makes me wonder if we were genetically engineered by beings who wanted to maintain a means of controlling our psyche. After all, computer programmers install "backdoors" through which they can covertly enter a machine's system architecture. Our willingness to believe in higher intelligence -- when faced with the option of critical thought -- is frightening indeed.

Arthur C. Clarke has called religion a "disease of infancy." My concern is that we will remain a stillborn species, failing to migrate into space because of the obsolete chips embedded in our brains. (Curiously enough, we don't hesitate to upgrade our computers to keep them up to speed. But we ignore the software in our own brains, never installing new components, not even scanning for the occasional virus.) Humans are deficient by definition; we must mutate or we will fall silent, a genetic failure, a curiosity in the fossil record. As George Carlin has remarked about politicians, "Garbage in, garbage out." Are these mangled excuses for human beings the best we can do? Or are we caught up in a retroactive feedback loop? (And this is assuming for the sake of argument that we live in a true democracy, which we certainly don't.)

This planet is stifling. I feel trapped, glued to the ground by dogma and short-sightedness. My grumblings about Bush and his cohorts are actually aimed at a much larger spectrum of human failures, as if I'm single-handedly staving off the ideological detritus of an entire species.

And yet there is compelling evidence that we're not the only so-called intelligence around. Something vast and wonderfully cryptic is interacting with us, possibly extraterrestrial but more than likely multidimensional. We're so used to its presence that we're essentially blind to it -- which is exactly what the "other" intelligence wants. Quantum physics offers a useful analogy: A quantum-level event cannot be accurately measured because of an apparent limiting mechanism in human perception. We can choose to observe a subatomic particle's momentum or its position, but never both at the same time. The alien intelligence in our midst seems curiously similar: it observes but fails to interact in way that would fundamentally disturb the world at large. Perhaps it is simply incapabale of doing so, just as particle physicists cannot defy the Uncertainty Principle. Or so it seems to us, trapped in three dimensions.

Scientists sympathetic to the UFO problem have wondered if there is something like a cosmic "hands-off" policy keeping alien visitors from making the explicit contact we've been trained to expect from science fiction. There is almost certainly some truth in this; the last thing a technologically or mentally superior intelligence would want to do is reveal itself in all its novel splendor unless it specifically wanted to exploit our predisposition for belief. There may very well be egomaniacal "gods" lurking in hyperspace, but it seems as if we're dealing with something more akin to an infestation of goblins. I suspect they (if it's a "they," which is far from certain) are using our collective unconscious as a means to propel us forward along unseen psychoevolutionary rails. So in a sense we're being exploited -- but not for the alien intelligence's short-term ego-glorification. Whitley Strieber might have said it best when he wrote, simply, "It seeks communion."

Hence my interest in the alien-human hybrid phenomenon, whether real or fiction. Dr. John Mack interprets encounters with nonhuman intelligence as "reified metaphor": the visitors' intentions manifested symbolically. There may be no flesh-and-blood hybrid fetuses sulking in vials of synthesized amniotic fluid. But the implications they conjure -- the joining of two worlds, the intimate juxtaposition of the alien and the familiar -- achieve the desired end nonetheless.