Posthuman Blues

This evening I went to Starbucks, downed a double-shot of espresso and became immersed in Michio Kaku's "Hyperspace," a title I've been neglecting for about ten years.





Although Kaku hasn't mentioned it (yet), string theory has obvious bearing on the "implicate order" envisioned by David Bohm. A universe of sympathetically vibrating "strings" does away with such messy concepts as "energy" and "matter" -- to say nothing of awkward notions of "forces" and "fields."

Bohm postulated that the seemingly fragmented universe we experience is in fact unexpectedly coherent, but only at a deeply enfolded level beyond the scope of our meat-based brains. The concept of hyperspace promises much the same thing, proposing a seamless, unseen realm where the disparate forces that bind the universe together are one and the same phenomenon.

Perhaps an arbitrarily capable technology can transcend our present blinkered state and allow us to experience the dance of the superstrings directly. We may even find bizarre new forms of life waiting for us among the endless vibrations; ultimately, each "string" may function as a synapse in some inconceivable universal mind.