Posthuman Blues

Two more R.E.M. songs I hope I hear on the 17th:

1.) "Daysleeper"
2.) "Falls to Climb"

Both of these are from "Up," the first album recorded after the departure of drummer Bill Berry. "Up" is a strange and enigmatically beautiful album that has as much in common with R.E.M.'s own "Automatic for the People" as it does with Radiohead's "Kid A."

Meanwhile . . .

Recently I've been more interested than usual in the "what is consciousness" debate. I take that back; maybe I'm not necessarily "more" interested, but I seem to be taking a more philosophical perspective whereas before I tended to commit (if more flexibly than most) to materialist theories in which self-awareness is epiphenomenal and of little or no intrinsic meaning. (Conceivably, all that we hold dear -- love, the capacity for awe, desire, passion -- could be "mere" neurochemical ephemera.)

But the strong evidence for nonlocal consciousness makes the question infinitely more intriguing. Are we, as Michael Cremo asserts, energetically devolved beings? Put very simply, we don't know who the hell we are or what we're supposed to make of this labyrinthine infinity we quaintly call "the universe." Perhaps nothing. Maybe we're just along for the ride; I'm certainly the last person to suggest that we're here to fulfill some special cosmic agenda.




Boppers doing their thing.


Rudy Rucker wrote an interesting software program called "Boppers." It's an artificial life laboratory: you set the parameters and the "boppers" -- simple-minded digital wildlife -- go about trying to eat, reproduce, etc. without falling prey to starvation. Could this ill-defined thing we casually call "reality" be some vastly imagined artificial life program or cosmic screen saver?





Attorney/cyber-ontologist Peter Gersten (of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy) refers to what he terms the "Cosmic Computer Program": a loosely scripted holographic drama in which the human race is a central participant. But what if our existence is mere happenstance? The universe (or multiverse) may very well turn out to be an inconceivably elaborate simulation, but that doesn't mean that we're anything more than an unforeseen "emergent property," to borrow a term from cognitive neuroscientists who seek to explain consciousness (and there's no shortage of them). Humanity itself may be an a epiphenomenon, an hallucination in what Philip K. Dick called, quite plainly, a Vast Active Living Intelligence System.

Throw UFOs and Jung's "meaningful coincidences" into the mix and you've got what amounts to the most jaw-dropping conspiracy theory ever conceived. I suppose there's a case to be made for my being the most singularly paranoid person on the planet.