AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 06, 2023 1:32 am
(...)
That said, I look forward to your response. I actually thought of a metaphor to employ which may clarify my points more, but I will hold off on sharing that for now.
Here we are, Ashvin, back to the main topic. I tried my best to gather the essence of my thoughts, from VR to transhumanism. I look forward to yours, and to the metaphor!
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Dec 31, 2022 8:20 pm
With the VR perspective within the sensory spectrum, we add yet another set of constraints on our spiritual activity (at this stage, we are quite literally putting on a headset and constraining our hands to the controllers). Yet the nature of this set of constraints is such that, within its sub-sensory spectrum,
our activity becomes somewhat more spiritualized. The transformation of imagery is less dependent on our physical legs, arms, etc., or the 'laws of nature', and more dependent on our heads and fingers. We must actively do something for the images to transform, unless we are simply watching videos. We can push a few buttons, turn our head, spin around, and view the 7 wonders of the world in full panoramic relief. I think we both agree that there is something of great significance taking place here, either for better or for worse (and usually for worse).
I would doubt we can say that different sets of sensorial configurations, or spectrums, can make our activity more or less spiritualized. Can we say that, because we will - or cause - a certain transformation from one frame to the next through the move of a finger, or a blink in one direction, rather than through stretching a leg, then our activity becomes more or less spiritualized, as a consequence of which body part is involved? I am not sure.
If I can borrow some vocabulary from Cleric’s last essay, which I imagine is fresh memory for all of us, we steer our configuration spaces all the time,
our activity is equally spiritualized all the time. It hardly matters whether we are doing it within a natural configuration space, or a VR-supplemented one. As I put it before, "
that the virtual world doesn't exist in the same way our natural world does, is irrelevant from an experiential perspective". Said in yet another way, the transformation of imagery in VR is not “
less dependent on our physical legs, arms, etc.” because it's just never dependent on those anyway.
At most, I would imagine, when we will a certain transformation through a head movement rather than through our usual leg movement, there is a theoretical possibility that we can come to conceive the potential
separateness of idea and physical movement. Maybe that’s what you mean, that we can hope to notice the primacy of our thinking gestures in that shift.
I have to say, I really really don’t believe this can happen in practice. Unless one already understood that, unless one already realized that outside VR, it’s not because we supplement the sensory spectrum with the 7 wonders of the world that we will come to realize that we live at our human-scale geodesics all the time. That would be a miracle! I think
we cannot reasonably expect that sensorial variations will illuminate our living thinking, and make us grasp the secret. As I put it before, only thinking can manipulate thinking. Conversely, for you who have already understood that clearly, there’s no value added to be found in the VR experience either.
So the only great significance I see in the VR-supplemented sensory spectrum is, at the cultural level, that it enacts certain evolutionary trends, whilst, at the individual level, I think it’s only significant in terms of the soul preferences it reveals.
On these bases, I am still convinced that VR
as a regular practice is at best - for those on a living thinking path - a useless gizmo, a gadget-practice unable to deliver any
original state (exclusively experienceable through VR practice), and at worse - i.e. for everyone else - I think it's a damaging practice, apt to exasperate materialistic beliefs, and to exasperate a baseline of fear and anxiety with regards to knowledge and mastery of the physical and spiritual environments, in all the ways I have previously said.
I think the etheric body has to be loosened in healthier, T-led ways rather than by trying to cut it apart with a forever dull VR-knife, which also puts unnecessary obstacles on the path. It’s as if we entrust a mediocre and unskilled surgeon - who not only was educated in past, obsolete (materialist) methods, but also has to operate with a forever dull knife - with the task of lifting our etheric body. So I can't help but disagree with a future-oriented look on VR. I rather see it as an expression of
old, dying-off stuff of the past. As I see them, these are the last, or before-last, gasps of reductive materialism. Borrowing again from Cleric's vocabulary, I see VR, and transhumanism for that matter, as
part of the reductionist dead ends in evolution.
To conclude before I move on to transhumanism, I will take the liberty to quote Cleric’s words of caution with regards to the possible spiritual import of Michael Levin’s model. Surprisingly or not, I think these words would also perfectly apply to VR:
Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Jan 04, 2023 6:09 pm
It’s much more efficient if one can directly tackle the reality of our central thinking space and go on to work outwards from there. But for various reasons, very few seem willing to step into this direct experience. The intellectual habits of the last five centuries still hold a very strong grip on the soul and most thinkers feel obliged to invest themselves into an intellectual scaffold before daring to confront their spiritual activity directly.
This is not only a more roundabout way, full of traps and loopholes in which our thinking can become entangled, but is also a very tempting ground for our unconscious desires.
The previous actually provides a perfect transition to the topic of transhumanism, insofar as Levin’s model can be seen as a precursor of an upcoming new sort of vertically integrating scientific bio-models that will open the way to advanced body modifications, biohacking, and other transhumanist pursuits.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Dec 31, 2022 8:20 pm
Earlier you mentioned that VR could be seen as a link in the chain to transhumanism.
Do you agree the latter is a pathological manifestation of a natural spiritual evolution, in which the eternal human soul seeks to de-identify itself with its physical sheath and reunite with the spiritual worlds in which it subconsciously dwells? If so, then the question we should ask is, what makes VR or transhumanist pursuits pathological rather than healthy? In SS terms, why is loosening the etheric body, with its imaginative forces, from the conceptual constraints of the physical sheath a healthy pursuit for the Anthroposophist and a pathological one for the VR gamer or the transhumanist? I have already mentioned my answer to this question a few times in a few different ways, so instead I am interested to hear yours.
I think transhumanism goes deeper than VR and the metaverse into the dead end of materialist reductionism, and into its illusion of mastery and knowledge, because what VR proposes as an external equipment for self-seclusion in a fully mastered parallel world of senses (or at least the ambition is that it would be fully mastered) is extended in transhumanism into a permanent, internal modification of the physical body. That
the self-seclusive device is brought within the threshold of the skin, means that the longing to move into a fully mastered reality got bigger and stronger. The new ambition is to
make this new fully mastered world coincide with the natural world, rather than it remaining a leisure or escape activity, with a headset to put on and play with. In a way, it’s similar to when Elon Musk says he wants to colonize Mars. Life as a whole should coincide with a new, fully artificial, secluded space, no matter how much waste we need to permanently leave unresolved behind us in order to achieve this (although I think transhumanist pursuits are somewhat worse, more alarming, than space colonization pursuits).
All this to say that I don’t think transhumanism expresses a natural wish of de-identification with our physical sheath. Rather the opposite. It expresses the most exasperated materialistic belief that
the body is all we are, and that we should direct our efforts to the final pursuit of full knowledge and mastery of its workings. It’s based on the illusion that our thirst for truth will be appeased the more we enable ourselves to forge our physical world at will, starting from ourselves (our physical bodies).
Everything else is an afterthought, is denied, reduced, deprived of any possible level-specific causality.
Is transhumanism pathological? It’s certainly detrimental to human spiritual development. In that sense only it can be said to be pathological. But it’s not a word I would choose. I would rather say, it’s a dead end, but
I don’t think it helps loosen the etheric body in the same way VR can theoretically, and accidentally, be imagined to do it (if we are very generous) when we put on our headset. The
transhumanist self-seclusion is forever (whatever transhumanists hope “forever” means). There is no back and forth in which we can entertain any hope to notice by contrast any differences in thinking gestures. Transhumanism is the last gasp, so to say, the full deployment of the reductionist obsession.
It’s the end of the dead end (hopefully).
Unsurprisingly, my conclusion is that it’s not necessary to make (VR, the multiverse, and) transhumanism fit into a lawful and unified evolution of the spirit, where it should supposedly express a natural, only unconscious, longing of the soul to reunite with the spiritual worlds, whilst the anthroposophist expresses the same desire in full awareness. In the trajectory of evolution there are dead ends. And
I doubt it’s desirable, or even possible, to redeem dead ends by descending into them. They would be best redeemed/extinguished if others pursue spiritual development and enter into the depth of reality
directly.