Cyber Soul-Space

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 7 - Cyber Soul-Space

This chapter explores the ways in which cyberspace is uniquely poised for comparison with religious - i.e. Christian - eschatology. The parallel lies in the perceived possibility of trancendence that this new space offers. After all, Revelation is about: "Transcendence over earthly squalor and chaos, and above all transcendence over the limitations of the body" (256). As Lanier says (quoted by Wertheim), "I see the Internet as a syncretic version of Christian ritual, I really do. There's this sensibility and transcendence that's applied to computers, regularly. Where did that come from? That's a Christian idea" (253).

Wertheim presents numerous examples of people adopting sartorial religiosity (much the way an admitted atheist, Stephen Hawking, does when he speaks of the Mind of God) in their speaking about cyberspace and its potential to grant salvation. Wertheim calls this "posited immortal self, this thing that can supposedly live on in the digital domain after our bodies die", the "cyber-soul" (266). "What we have here, with these visions of cyber-immortality and cyber-resurrection, is an attempt to re-envision a soul in digital form" (266). The question is why many have come to accept this substitution.

The answer, according to Wertheim, has its roots in Pythagorean mysticism:

A contemporary of the Buddha in India, of Zoroaster in Persia, of Confucius and Lao-tzu in China, Pythagoras was a mystic of a uniquely Western stripe. Half a millenia before the birth of Christ, he formulated a radically dualistic philosophy of nature that continues to echo in cybernautic visions today. According to the Samian sage, the essence of reality lay not in matter - in the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water - but in the immaterial magic of numbers. For Pythagoras, the numbers where literally gods, and he associated them with the gods of the Greek pantheon. True reality, according to him, was not the plane of matter, but the transcendent realm of these number-gods.
For Pythagoras, the soul too was essentially mathematical. To him it was the soul's ability to express things rationally - literally to in terms of ratios - that was its primary characteristic. In Pythagorean cosmology, the true home of the sol was the transcendent realm of the number-gods, and after death this is where all souls would return" (267).

As Wertheim explores in greater depth in her previous book, Pythagoras' Trousers, the irony is that Pythagorean mysticism was a religion, but it is the seedbed of modern physics (which we tend to think of as being unquestionably secular), i.e. the desire to find mathematical relationships underlying phyiscal phenomena. And indeed this thinking has paved the way for the wild imaginings of the cyber enthusiasts. Wertheim comments on the implausible scenario we find ourselves in: "That this site of religious expectation is being realized through the by-products of science - the force that so effectively annihilated the soul-space of the medieval world picture - is surely one of the greater ironies of our times" (255).

To me, it seems that the religiousness of this cybertalk verges on idolatry, rather than resembling what I would call spirituality. Commenting on the connotations of Gibson's famous cyber novel, Neuromancer, David Thomas says it suggests "that cyberspace must be understood not only in narrowly socioeconomic terms, or in terms of a conventional parallel culture, but also... [as a] potential creative cybernetic godhead" (254). (A similar notion of the godhead can be found in the Matrix trilogy; the twist in these, however, is the recognition of this godhead as false, and the subsequent affirmation of the human above this false godhead when Neo breaks through and destroys the Matrix.) The point I am making is that we may worship this new godhead, it is a God that demands nothing of us but our reverence, and it requires none of the demands of spiritual life.

One thing cyberspace seems to help us do is accept the plausibility of an immaterial self - e.g. we can all grasp the me-but-not-me-ness of an avatar - which solves one of the greater religious conundrums. For centuries, theologians spoke of an incomprehensible "glorified body", "free from the limits of the mortal flesh", "in every sense incorruptible": "Just what it meant to have a body in a place that was, strictly speaking, outside space and time was a question that much vexed medieval scholars, but tha was indeed the position on which all the great theologians insisted" (259). We get it now.

But the mistake we make - it's a small, seemingly logical leap - is to think that avatars are or could be this "glorified body". And this is never more evident in the language adopted by the virtual reality community, and in particular the sub-community within this, the proponents of downloading ourselves into cyberspace to achieve deathless, cyber-eternity. The fault of this logic lies in the fact that there has been another series of substitutions along the way: the transmutation of the human from an ineffable "self", to a material composite of atoms, to (finally) a "pattern of data" (e.g. FMRIs): "Such cybernautic dreams of transcending bodily limitations have been fueled by an fundamental philosophical shift of recent years: The growing view that man is defined not by the atoms of his body, but by an information code" (260).

Perhaps an ever greater fault of this logic, in my opinion, is in the misunderstanding of the point of religion, which I personally see as a code for how to be a better person. For reasons that make perfect sense, we are obsessed with the notion of salvation. But I would argue that capitalism (and its psychosis, consumerism) has created a culture where we accept the abstracted object as a satisfactory embodiment of the real thing; and as such, we would readily accept the shortcut to heaven of downloading ourselves into eternity. Consider how this works for money: As Marx said, "Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract." I am suggesting that this same abstraction has happened for salvation: it is reduced to the end value, i.e. eternity, but obscures the necessary human labor, i.e. the hard work of being a good person. The result is that we see it as entirely plausible to take a shortcut to heaven. After all, in a capitalist world, "He who can buy bravery is brave, though a coward." So long as we can get eternity, it hardly matters that we don't deserve it. (I would love to explore this idea further... but not here.)

Wertheim says it best: "In cyberspatial fantasies of reincarnation and immortality, the soul's eternity entails no ethical demands, no moral responsibilities. One gets the immortality payoff of religion, but without any of the obligations" (269). This is because, crucially, "The cyber-soul... has no moral context" (269). Here we see a perversion of the Pythagorean origins: "In the original Pythagoreanism, to take away the moral context would have been to spiritually bankrupt the entire system - which is effectively what the new cyber-Pythagoreanism has done" (270).

It makes sense, then, that we are so keen to justify our deservingness of cyber-salvation by imagining "the divine parts of ourselves, that we invoke in that space" (Pesce, 253). Where is the evidence of this divinity? There are examples of it, I'm sure (see Hawken's Blessed Unrest), but there are probably far more examples of troll-like behavior. Nothing about this space, I would argue, necessitates divine behavior.

One of the problems that Wertheim highlights (although I would emphasize it much more than she does!) with regards to this obliteration of the material self is that it devalues physical communities. "What is left out here is the element of community and one's obligations to the wider social whole" (280).

Orthodox Christian theologians have long stressed that an essential reasons for valuing life in the flesh is that on the physical plane we are bound into physical communities to whom we have obligations and responsibilities. Someone who does not value life in the body is less likely to feel obligated to contribute to their physical community: Why bother helping a sick friend if you believe he would be better off dead? Why bother trying to extend life in the flesh if you think it is an evil to be transcended as quickly as possible (279)?

Futher: "Commentator Paulin Borsook has noted that the culture of the Silicon Valley cyber-elite is indeed imbued with a deeply self-serving libertarianism that shuns responsibility toward physical communities. It is a tendency she terms 'cyber-selfishness'" (279-80). This is why I think it's important to reenvision the Internet in spiritual terms, perhaps beginning from the notion of "selflessness."

As a side note, I have to wonder what happens to this possible divinity - which has obvious moral implications - if we ever do achieve immortality. Do we even need religion at all once we have conquered death? I actually agree with Richard Dawkins that human morality does not depend on religion; but I do think that if we succeed in removing the need for religion, we will feel a substantial loss and go through a long period of moral bewilderment.

I wonder if one of the interventions we can make in a revisioning of the Internet would be to reintroduce death into technology. We tend to chuck data into this space as if preserving it in a sub-zero freezer. It will stay there forever, in case we need it later. But what if data had an expiration date on it? It would require more attentive care, and an editing eye in the first place. Would we really put effort into maintaining negative contributions? Or would this compel us to contribute more positively?

I am getting the impression that if we design technologies from the perspective of this Western line of thinking, or indeed invoke Christian rhetoric, the path inevitably leads to the development of increasingly realistic virtual reality simulations. Consider this quote from a virtual reality modeling language (VRML) expert, Pesce: "Let us begin with the object of desire. It exists, it has existed for all of time, and will continue eternally. It has held the attention of all mystics and witches and hackers for all time. It is the Graal. The mythology of the Sangraal - the Holy Grail - is the archetype of the revealed illumination withdrawn. The revelation of the graal is always a personal and unique experience. ...I know - because I have heard it countless times from many people across the world - that this moment of revelation is the common element in our experience as a community. The graal is our firm foundation" (251). For the virtual reality folk, enlightenment lies in realizing the absurdity of our thinking that there is meaning in our physical reality, any more than there is if we were living in one great computer program. If it is real enough, they suggest, we wouldn't even know that we are living in a simulation. Everything that seems real is not. All is illusion.

Now that I write that, it seems an almost perfect application (though clearly a perversion) of Buddhism to the digital realm. But I think the key difference is in the implications of this in the cybernautic sense, which equates to an imperative for a grab everything, free-for-all (Wertheim describes this in the next chapter as a digital equivalent of Western imperialism, the colonization of cyberspace (294)). Something quite different happens when you interpret this nothingness as a call to dwell in a mental/emotional plane, as opposed to living in a simulated material plane. Nonetheless, this is getting complicated. Particularly because of the enlightenment connotations, which do evoke Buddhism more than Christianity. One of the religious associations with cyberspace, for example, is the parallel between cyberspace and the New Jerusalem: "The New Jerusalem, then, is a place of knowing, a space that like cyberspace Benedikt says is rooted in information" (256). And this quest for knowledge seems to make sense to me as spirituality. "The pattern of seeing new technology as a means to spiritual transcendence has been repeated so many times that Erik Davis has coined the term 'techgnosis' as a generic description of the phenomena" (278).

Again, I come back to the fact that cyberspace does seem, as counterintuitively as it may have seemed before reading this book, to offer unique possibilities for spirituality... but that these possibilities have not been realized because we are focusing on the wrong thing, getting all twisted around. On a very fundamental level, the basis of religion according to Emile Durkheim is the organization of the world into "sacred" vs. "profane." And in sociological terms, cyberspace makes perfect sense as a "sacred space", because it is the antithesis of our "profane", material world. According to Stenger, cyberspace creates "'the ideal conditions' for what Eliade terms a 'hierophany' - that is, 'an irruption of the sacred" (254). This is a continuation of a lasting theme in Western organization and understanding of the world: "Western culture has within it a deep current of dualism that has always associated immateriality with spirituality" (254).

The imperative, in light of this, is to begin to treat cyberspace as sacred space; and to develop it in such a way as to encourage spiritual, sacred engagement with it. In this way, cyberspace may be a means of helping us become better humans.