-- In which the author muses a bit about symbolism, religion, morphic resonance and the Eurycosm, in the context of some personal recollections about recent visits to Ethiopia and Paris...
The Mystical Heart of
Ethiopia
Addis Ababa is often rated Africa’s dirtiest city. The air is filled with particles of dust —
not small particles like one finds in developed cities, from factories or car
exhaust, but large particles resultant from endless cars driving across unpaved
or partly paved roads, stirring up clouds of dust in the air. The traffic is ridiculous and chaotic, with
cars driving every which way and veering millimeters away from each other,
making it seem miraculous there aren’t many more accidents and injuries than
there are (and there are surely a lot).
On the other hand, Addis is also where the energy is, where
the action is. It’s where everyone comes
from the “rural side” looking for jobs or business opportunities. The level of opportunity for the young
ambitious person in Addis, without pre-existing wealth or strong social
connections, is very low compared to what one finds in developed-world
cities. But it’s massively higher than
in other Ethiopian cities.
Addis has a vibrant nightlife and a huge variety of
subcultures of interesting, friendly, outgoing people. Like pretty much everywhere in Africa, one
gets a feeling that people are just more HUMAN, more interested in and capable of genuine
human-to-human contact, than in other places.
Even in rapidly modernizing Addis – and even in the hi-tech,
sciency corners of Addis culture -- one can still find plenty of “old
mysterious Africa”, not too far beneath the surface. As an
example, I have had some discussions with a physics professor from an Addis
university named Abraham Ameha, who is working on a theory of the spiritual
world, somewhat analogous to Einstein’s general relativity theory – a theory of
the curvature of the spiritual dimensions, it seems. He also talks a lot about demons, and at
least based on one conversation, seems believe that there literally exist
demons under the ground, beneath Ethiopia.
He gave a talk at a symposium I co-organized at Addis Ababa University,
and I was thrilled to see his PPT slides combining tensor field equations with
mentions of giant demons and the apocalypse.
After Dr. Ameha’s lecture, my Hong Kong colleague Gino Yu,
whom I’d brought on that trip to Ethiopia, gave a talk about a sort of goggles
that induced an altered state of consciousness in the wearer by flashing lights
in their eyes in a complex pattern. The
goggles experience was fascinating and successful for most of the students and
professors who tried it out there in the Addis Ababa University student center,
but they caused one of our AI programmers to have what appeared to be an
epileptic seizure, right there in the university campus lounge. But Dr. Ameha was not taken aback by the seizure
at all; he said that was the sort of thing he saw frequently during
exorcisms. And thus I learned that in
Ethiopia, traditionally, what we in the West think of as epilepsy, is generally
thought of as a manifestation of demonic possession…
Indeed ideas of demons are never too far from mind in
Ethiopia, it seems. There was the time
Ruiting, Getnet and I encountered a drunken Ethiopian in a Chinese restaurant
near the Addis airport, emphatically lecturing me and my dinner companions on
why Ethiopian politics was so fucked up: interference of the demons under the
Ethiopian soil.
But still, while it’s there, in Addis the mystical aspects
of Ethiopian culture are not right out in front, constantly hitting you in the
face and the heart, like it is in some other parts of the country. In Addis the theme is the quest for
modernity and the urge to make it big — money, success, stardom, whatever.
Of the places I’ve visited in Ethiopia Harar is probably my
favorite — a Muslim walled city from 1000AD or so, with Arabic alongside
Amharic on the signs, and close to 100 mosques in a rather small area among the
tiny winding streets, outdoor market stalls and little cafes.
One can also visit the house of poet Arthur Rimbaud, who
lived there for 11 years and took an Ethiopian wife. At that stage of his life Rimbaud had long
since given up poetry (all his famous poems were written during his teenage
years) but when one visits his house one sees his artistic impulse was still
very much alive and well during that phase of his life … the display of the
photographs of Harar at the turn of the century (the end of the 1800s) are
beautiful and striking.
Rimbaud’s poetry was very important to me in my own teenage
years — both for the unique beauty of the writing and for his vision, expressed
in his letters, of “the poet as the thief of fire”, as a Promethean adventurer
grabbing inspiration from the world beyond and pulling it into this world,
often at great personal cost. Years
afterwards I discovered Scriabin’s “Prometheus” which has a similar feel and
theme to it, but more grandiose than any of Rimbaud’s works, even than “A
Season in Hell.” Rimbaud dove into the
other world to grab inspiration and then quickly beat a retreat back to his
life as a tormented artistic teen. He
sought the “disorganization of all the senses”, finding that when the orderly
input from the everyday senses ceased, then the mind’s ability to grab patterns
and feelings from the other world kicked in, and the disorganized senses could
serve as antennas for forms from beyond, forming themselves into shapes
obtained from the greater universe (much as, e.g., memories of past lives tend
to come into the minds of young children whose episodic memories are not yet
well organized, rather than into those of older children whose episodic
memories are full of order and structure already). Scriabin on the other hand immersed himself
in the patterns from the other world more and more fully, internalizing both
the joy and the torment of feeling its transhumance patterns flow into his
human body and push its mental and physical limitations to the bursting..
Rimbaud was also gay, and it’s notable that while he had an
Ethiopian wife for the 11 years he lived in Harar, he didn’t produce any
children by her. One suspects the native
wife was a convenient cover for his other sexual activities. But modern Africans don’t like gays very
much, so mentioning Rimbaud’s homosexuality in Harar is definitely a way to
make yourself rapidly unpopular.
A young Muslim named Hadi Awad – a friend of a friend -- struck
me particularly when visiting Harar, due to his unique combination of technical
brilliance, devout Islam and sheer enthusiasm and good-heartedness. Hadi is sufficiently devout that when he
talks to me he punctuates nearly every sentence with “Inshallah” …. I suppose the density of Inshallahs is
higher when talking to me than in his usual conversation because we talk so
much about the future, and the tradition is to say “Inshallah” — “Allah
willing” — whenever making a projection about the future. “Once
the Singularity comes, Inshallah, then scarcity will be gone, Inshallah. And it will be beautiful, Inshallah. Artificial intelligence will be more
beautiful than the ordinary human mind can imagine, installah.” ….
Hadi is studying computational linguistics
and machine translation, and running a small cafe’ and an IT support and
computer repair shop, and doing all manner of other entrepreneurial things, all
while praying many times each day and — like nearly everyone in Harar —
constantly chewing khaat (a psychoactive leaf that is very widely and cheaply
available throughout that whole region of Ethiopia, and that seems to have the
majority of the population of the region in a kind of pleasant addicted
semi-stupor).
When my friend and colleague Ralf Mayet visited Harar he met
Hadi as well, and due to fortuitous timing, he got to accompany Hadi to a
Muslim prayer ceremony atop a local mountain, with a group of Hadi’s
friends. The species of Islam practiced
in Harar is somewhat close to Sufism — it’s a mystical variety of Islam, with a
significant aspect of directly perceiving the divine through “altered” states
of consciousness (of course that is always present in Islam via the regular prayer
ritual which in itself involves an altered state of consciousness, but some
kinds of Islam place more emphasis on this aspect and have more rituals that
seem explicitly oriented toward deepening altered/mystical states of mind)….
In early 2017 I brought a number of Western friends with me
to Ethiopia, to collaborate on R&D at iCog Labs in Addis Ababa, to see the
first Ethiopian robot soccer competition, and to join me on a side trip to
Lalibela, a World Heritage Site in the north of Ethiopia what is famous for its
medieval stone churches. Many of these
churches are architecturally exceptional as they are buildings carved out of a
single rock. The Ethiopians traditionally
believe the Lalibela churches were built by hand by one man — King Lalibela —
with the help of angels.
The stone churches in the town of Lalibela (population 15K
or so) are architectural wonders, dating from 900AD or so, but are also rather
touristy at this point, with lots of foreigners poking around with cameras,
verbose tour guides and local children ceaselessly begging for money. I found visiting the churches on the
outskirts of Lalibela more interesting and moving. Climbing 3 hours up a mountain to a more
remote stone church we spent some time inside with the resident priest, who
took out a religious book from 900AD, the pages made of goat skin and
beautifully preserved, with bright-colored pictures of Biblical scenes,
including scenes from the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, which is not part of the
standard Christian Bible but which seems to play a particular role in the
Ethiopian Orthodox religion. An aged
man with a beard and a robe was sitting by the outside of the church, by the
edge of a cliff over which there was an amazing view of the countryside,
looking down at the ground muttering and praying or just breathing and being
silent. Was he a crazy homeless man or
an enlightened mystic meditating on the mountain? What was the difference, exactly?
A 17km drive out of Lalibela, we found a church from a
slightly later period (the 1300s), with amazing weird paintings inside,
including not only the usual angels and saints but also many animals and space
aliens. The local priest explained that
the bird-man on the wall was named Aristophorus, and was an alien from another
planet (another physical planet in this universe, not another dimension of
reality), whom God had transported here to help the local Ethiopian Christians
do battle with some of their enemies. We
found no documentation of this alien on the English Internet, but Hruy — one of
our Ethiopian colleagues from iCog, who was along with us on the trip — found
brief mention of him in an Amharic version of the Book of Enoch.
Hiking 2.5 hours up a mountain from this church and its
aliens, past small villages that obviously did not see many tourists, we got to
another church, which was built around 600AD.
This one was situated inside a cave, and also had strange evocative
paintings inside it (painted in the 1300s, when the church was already
ancient). There were two skeletons
lying near the church, with bits of mummified skin on them. A few days before we’d visited another
cave-church, which had had 5000 skeletons nearby, in a big pile near the back
of the cave. But these two were easier
to inspect, lying right out near the church, and had more of a personal feel to
them.
The church was still in everyday use as the local place of
worship of the people in the villages nearby.
It had been in continuous use for Christian services since shortly after
600AD — a time much closer to them time of Jesus than to the present day.
The guard in front of the church asked us — via Hruy, the
only member of our party who spoke Amharic — not to proceed further up the
path, as there were 5 monks who lived up ahead, and lived under a vow that no
other human should see their faces.
They lived and prayed atop the mountain, preparing their own food and
avoiding the rest of society. If people
came up to disturb them, they would retreat further into the wilderness. But a couple times a year, we were told,
they could come down from the mountaintop at midnight for a religious ceremony,
making sure their long hair was covering their faces so nobody could see them.
Tongue-in-cheek, we cooked up a plan to come back there with
a drone carrying a camera, so as to secretly photograph their mystical
retreat. This is one of those plans
somewhat unlikely to get executed in practice, however…
Addis is a whole other world from developed countries. After flying back from Addis to Hong Kong I’m
always disoriented for a week or two … I feel like I’m paying 20x too much for
a bottle of water or a hamburger, and I feel perplexed that there are no hungry
young children following me around begging for money. I feel surprised when I go into a public
bathroom and there is toilet paper there, and a nice clean toilet seat … and
when the Internet “just works” on my smartphone everywhere, without random
outages and slowdowns.
But then, the mountains around Lalibela, and the alleys of
Harar, are a whole other world than Addis.
Addis is trying to be part of the developed world, and it’s struggling
but it’s getting there. Our work at
iCog Labs is one small part of the process the city is going through as it
seeks to become part of the modern technological economy and culture. These more remote areas — which I realize I
can barely begin to understand in any real way, due to language and culture
barriers — are still vibrant with a different mode of living and experiencing,
which is tied into the past rather than the future, and into symbolic and
mystical rather than scientific or commercial ways of thinking.
There is a church a couple hundred kilometers from Lalibela
that, it is said, contains part of the actual cross on which Jesus was
crucified. In the Ethiopian version of
the Bible, Jesus traveled to Ethiopia after Egypt at a certain point. To the locals this story is literally true
and also holds a powerful symbolic power that I can barely begin to relate
to. (In general, while I’m fascinated
to brush up against the ancient profound mysticism of Ethiopian Christianity
and Islam, I’m very aware that I can perceive and understand it only at a very
superficial level … due to language and culture barriers, and also due to me
not putting much time into understanding the relevant subtleties and
complexities. So it goes. I find these cultural and spiritual matters
intriguing and important but not quite so much so as AGI, life extension,
fundamental physics and the other things I spend more of my time thinking about
it. But even as I work toward the
modernization of Ethiopia and the spread of advanced science and technology and
associated culture throughout the country, I also feel some regret for the
fading of these traditional cultures.
Just as every animal or plant species has unique information and beauty
in it, so does every human culture. The
beauty of a traditional culture is not obsoleted by scientific or technological
advances. But yet I am even more
attracted to the potential for creating new cultures combining the symbolic
potency of traditional belief systems and the empirical honesty of modern
science!)
The Ethiopian National Museum in Addis contains the remains
of Lucy, a proto-human from 3.9 million years ago, unearthed in Ethiopia. However, to most Ethiopians, Lucy is just a
funny animal. They are proud this animal
was unearthed in their country, but since they don’t believe in evolutionary
theory, they don’t believe Lucy was humanity’s predecessor in any fundamental
sense. The vast majority of Ethiopians
are quite confident that the Earth was created around 6000 years ago, as the
Bible says.
From Rodin to Morphic
Resonance
A month after returning to Hong Kong from Ethiopia I went to
Paris, mostly for some urgent business meetings with a potential AI-consulting customer
there; but since Ruiting was there with me and she had not seen Paris before,
we spent some time in the city’s numerous art museums also. I
hadn’t seen the standard Paris museums since my first visit to Paris about 30
years previously; long enough ago that I figured they would be new to me all
over again.
There was a Rodin centennial exhibit at the Grand Palais and
among the many amazing sculptures there was a
terra cotta sculpture of Jesus on the cross.
For some reason this one impacted me emotionally, whereas
the hundreds to thousands of other pictures or sculptures of the crucifixion
I’d seen in Paris museums on that trip had made no emotional impact whatsoever
(to be honest, going through the Louvre and so many old churches in Paris, I
had gotten enormously sick of looking at pictures of Jesus and Mary and saints
and so forth).
The messy nature of the terra cotta medium Rodin had used,
combined with the elegance of the form and the sheer human emotion on the
figure’s face, somehow made me feel that: Here
is a human actually suffering. Here is
all human suffering. Here is the
suffering of human beings, trapped as we are between our human bodies and minds
and some sort of more perfect form, some more perfect universe.
I remembered Jack Kerouac describing himself as “just
another soul trapped in a body.” And
Rimbaud viewing himself as a Thief of Fire, plunging into the realm beyond our
world to grab new forms and ideas, and then back into this world, arranging the
patterns and feelings from the cosmic other-world into poetic artworks to be
read by plain old everyday humans, and to be apprehended by the transcendent as
well as the corporeal aspects of its readers.
I saw Jesus, in that moment, as – among so many other things
– a symbol for the way we humans all straddle the material and the transcendent. We all have one leg in the material world
and one leg sticking out further into the eurycosm, and our lot is to learn to
dance as elegantly as we can given this constraint. But the transcendent in each of us is often
too much for society to handle, and so society tortures our material portion,
out of intolerance for our transcendent portion. The image and story of Jesus, among other
things, is a metaphor for the torture all of us suffer when our minds and souls
stretch too far out of the constraints of our routine material and social
lives, and society and psychology squash us.
This is course is how many of the hippies saw Jesus back in the 1960s
and 70s in the US – Jesus Christ
Superstar, and so forth. But I’d
never really felt it before, though – like Philip K. Dick -- I had been
attracted to some of the Gnostic aspects of early Christianity.
The reason this sort of tragedy recurrently happens, in my
scientific-philosophical world view, fundamentally has to do not with apples
and the Garden of Eden but rather with the nature of individual and group
selection in evolution, and with the challenges of creating and maintaining
complex dynamics given severely limited computational resources.
Christianity teaches that the origin of suffering lies in
temptation, in the individual choosing pleasures of the flesh over pleasures of
the spirit. Basically in the balance
between the material aspect of humanity and the transcendent aspect of
humanity, getting broken by the material aspect getting too big for its
britches (and thus Eve eats the apple).
On the other hand, for instance, the Popol Vuh (the Mayan holy book) has
a different twist: In its take, the perfection of early humans was destroyed
because the gods/creators became jealous of their creations and thought humans
would not be obedient unless they were made more blind and ignorant.
As pure poetry, I tend to prefer the gnostic myths that say
we were gods who become bored with our godhood and blotted out some of our
knowledge and abilities so as to give ourselves the challenge of reachieving
our godlike abilities and knowledge (actually I first encountered this theory
when I was 12 or 13 in the SF novel “A Darkness in My Soul” by Dean R. Koontz,
who later became famous as a horror novelist).
Whatever. The key point is that
the suffering comes from the back-and-forth between the transcendent and the
material aspects of our beings. Between
the part that is stuck in a very finite, constrained plane, and the part that
reaches out into far less constrained regions that appear to our material
selves as the Great Unknown…
Musing on the nature of the symbolic power of
Christ-on-the-cross and other powerful
artistic-philosophical-conceptual-emotional-transcendent concoctions, my mind
drifted to my research on psi phenomena and my attempt to create a model of the
universe that could explain ESP, precognition, psychokinesis and so forth. It is
these phenomena, among other factors, that moved me to posit a “eurycosm”, a
wider universe in which our physical world is embedded. The eurycosm, as I hypothetically model it,
operates according to different principles than our physical world, including
principles reminiscent of Sheldrake’s “morphic resonance” principle — which
posits that energy and pattern flow between forms and other similar forms. Morphic resonance is one way of
conceptualizing the power of symbolism.
In a domain where morphic resonance happens, a symbol with certain forms
and patterns to it, has a direct impact on anything else that shares some of
those same forms and patterns. In this
sort of domain, symbols have their own kind of truth, different from the
empirical truth of modern science, yet not totally unrelated to or nonintersecting
with scientific truth (e.g. some psi phenomena appear to lie at the
intersection).
From a modern scientific view, the idea that King Lalibela
built all those stone churches by hand, with help from angels, seems ridiculous. As my AI-geek colleagues and I walked around
those churches, we kept thinking about how they could have been built by one
person or a handful of people using clever mechanical contrivances. Linas Vepstas, in particular – an OpenCog
programmer with a physics background, who was in Africa for the first time -- came
up with a fair number of specific and reasonably convincing stories in this
regard.
On the other hand, as a piece of symbolism, the vision of
one king building all the churches with the assistance of angels obviously has
a powerful oomph to believers in the Ethiopian Orthodox religion. And to the extent that morphic resonance is a
reality, this sort of belief — packed with powerful symbolism — may have a
direct and real impact on the lives of the believers. By embracing the literalist, empiricist point
of view, the morphic resonance power of the symbolic, faith-based point of view
gets sacrificed.
On an earlier trip to Ethiopia, I was amazed and dismayed to
see a large number of women, many sick with various diseases praying outdoors
near a monastery for God to heal their ailments. I was told many of them had problems that
could be cured by antibiotics, and that there were routes for them to get
antibiotics for free — but that they preferred to leave it in the hands of
God. If God wants cure me, He’ll cure me
— otherwise that means He wants me to come back home. I saw these suffering women and wanted to
somehow convince or compel them to seek modern medical care!
But I also thought about the flip side. Reading about near-death experiences and reincarnation-type
experiences of various sorts, it seems clear that the experience of dying
doesn’t have to be one of pain and regret, it can be one of joy and a feeling
of coming-home. It seems that in
cultures focused on mystical symbolism and spiritual experiences, it is much
more likely that when a person dies, they literally feel themselves moving on
to a different realm, through a joyful, warm and illuminated process. Or perhaps if they themselves feel they have
lived a terrible and evil life, they feel themselves moving into a different
realm in a much more unpleasant way.
Modern science provides antibiotics and many other wonderful
ways to extend life in this realm and make it happier and healthier. But it also, in its present form, tends to
cut off powerful forms of connection between this realm and others.
Walking through the various art museums of Paris on this
trip, I found I looked at the various artworks on the walls very differently
than the previous version of Ben Goertzel had, when he had been to those same
museums 30 years previously. Back then
I had seen amazing works of visual art, created by geniuses under the spell of
delusional systems (principally Christianity).
As I saw it then, these artists had fished into the cosmic realm of
inspiration a la Rimbaud, but in the process of extracting forms and feelings
from this realm, they had distorted these forms tremendously in accordance with
their cultural delusional systems.
Now I saw all this still — but I also saw, much more vividly,
how these “cultural delusional systems” (e.g. Christianity) had been powerful
engines for allowing these brilliant artists to reach into the Cosmic Beyond
and fish out beautiful patterns. The
Christian religion provides a system of symbols that — in the form it takes
within the mind of the appropriately-minded believer — causes a powerful
morphic resonance with various patterns in the Eurycosm, making it much easier
for the believer to fish fantastic patterns out of the Eurycosm, than it would
generally be without such a system at hand.
So this is one thing religion and traditional culture
provide, that science does not (or does only much more weakly, so far). It’s not just that religion provides
psychological comfort, and a framework for social support. It’s also that religion provides a rich
network of symbols, which resonates with the realm of patterns and symbols
existing beyond this material world, and helps the believer to resonate with
aspects of themselves that exist beyond this material world.
Somehow all this hit me with a wallop as I stared at Rodin’s
gorgeous, heartbreaking terra cotta Christ in the Grand Palais in Paris. A lot of psychedelic and meditative
experiences had intervened for me in the 30 years since I had last visited the
Paris museums; plus a lot of confusing and revealing life experiences, and a
lot of wide reading on the evidence for psi, reincarnation, survival and other
phenomena pointing beyond the materialist perspective.
The Turing Church,
Morphically Resonant Mathematics, and So Forth
But then I ask myself: Is it necessarily the case that, to
provide a system of symbols that enables powerful morphic resonance with
patterns in the near eurycosm, one must go against empirical observations about
our everyday world?
I don’t see any reason why it should be. Rather, it seems to me that it’s EASIER to
construct powerful symbolic systems, with resonant reach beyond this material
reality, if one ignores the empirical particulars of this material
reality. But it seems perfectly viable
– just a bit more challenging in some ways -- to construct powerful symbolic
systems that do not contradict science but rather complement it.
I can see how the fact of violating empirical reality may
give some psychological oomph to some religious symbol systems. This is similar to how believing plainly
empirically false things about one’s lover, can give some oomph to romantic
love. On the other hand, intense and
devoted and passionate romantic love can also exist without false beliefs. The value of false beliefs for propping up
romantic love is tied up with their ability to work around psychological
screwiness on the part of the lover holding the false beliefs. A healthy, rational, mature, coherent mind
can partake of intense romantic love while seeing their lover genuinely for
what they are, not needing to build up false idealizations of their lover to
“justify” their love. And similarly, the
oomph of embracing symbol systems that go against empirical reality may give
satisfaction to some human minds; but a healthy, rational, mature coherent mind
should be able to embrace the morphically-resonant coherent and beauty of
symbol systems even if these do not contradict observed empirical everyday
reality.
Creating powerfully resonant symbol systems that cohere with
empirical scientific understanding is a different sort of challenge. This is what Richard Feynman had in mind
when he made beautiful, radiant paintings of the flames at the edge of the
sun. It’s what people have in mind when
they make psychedelic pictures from fractal structures in human brains or lungs
or leaves. It’s why we love colorful
spiraling images of the DNA double helix.
Not to mention psychedelic
electronic music….
On the other hand, shallow moves like the substitution of
Newtonmas for Christmas don’t quite do it in my view — Isaac Newton was a
great scientist and mathematician but celebrating his birthday simply doesn’t
have the oomph for the physicist that celebrating Jesus’s birthday has for the
Christian. If one wants to celebrate
some physics-related event, the date of the discovery of the quantum, or of the
first empirical validation of General Relativity Theory or of the cosmic
background radiation (validating the Big Bang theory) would be more
appropriate. Or what about the date of
discovery of the structure of DNA? or of the germ theory of disease? After all, in science, it is not really the
individual scientist that is key, but rather the progress of knowledge and
understanding.
To me, as a mathematician, the abstract structures of
category theory and algebraic topology and complex analysis so forth, have an
incredible beauty and an obvious morphic-resonance power, far beyond Christ on
the cross and Tibetan mandalas and so forth.
However, to someone who’s not a mathematician, these things are just a
bunch of babble and a bunch of random-looking marks on a page.
I do wonder, though, if future AGI or cyborg mathematicians
may explicitly create mathematical theories with a view toward their
morphic-resonance oomph, as well as their practical applications and their
formal properties. Or actually, though,
how different would that be from what we’re already doing? What is the crux of the mysterious notion of
“elegance” that guides most mathematical invention? Like the beauty of a sculpture or painting
or poem, the elegance of a mathematical theorem, proof or definition combines
aspects that are clearly relative to particulars of human psychology and
culture; and also aspects that appear more “cosmic” and universal, more broadly
resonant – perhaps more powerfully and extensively reaching beyond our world
into the eurycosm.
Giulio Prisco has proposed the idea of a “T
uring Church”, a religion focused on the power of advanced technology to provide joy and
salvation.
Once one gets beyond the
comical image of a bunch of geeks bowing down in prayer to a robot in priestly
robes, there is some depth and beauty to this vision.
Above all it feels to me like a challenge: to
create symbol systems that are coherent with modern science, but that equal or
exceed the morphic-resonating aesthetic oomph of the good old religious
symbol-systems.
I do think this challenge is going to be met, but (just as
Giulio himself has suggested to me in conversation) it may not be met by folks
like Giulio and myself who are intellectually musing about these ideas. Such symbol systems may emerge organically
as human and posthuman culture evolve, just as prior art and literary and
religious movements have evolved via the collective activity of multiple
communities of creative minds. Perhaps
they will take the form of new kind of visual art or music or literature. Perhaps they will take the form of new types
of mathematic, or new dynamics of mathematical theorem-proving that can only be
appreciated by AGIs or people with special uber-Mathematica brain chips. Most probably, after a bit of evolution they
will take some form utterly unimaginable by our limited and ignorant 2017 human
minds.
In the meantime, while I cannot accept the belief systems
going along with the stone churches of Lalibela or Rodin’s sculpture of Christ
on the cross, I can now -- more richly than my earlier versions -- appreciate
the resonant power of the symbol-systems they embody … and I can now realize,
far more fully than I did 30 years ago, that neither I nor the modern
scientific paradigm as a whole have yet come to grips with the various
dimensions of this sort of power and its ability to connect human minds with
aspects of reality beyond the everyday material realm.
And So It Goes…
