Cockleburs of Wisdom
And other non-sequiturs
I’ve been re-reading Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and it’s got me in a particularly post-modernist mood today. It has set me on a head-long collision with transhumanism and emergent biological Kingdoms.
You may recall learning about the biological kingdoms back in high school…or not. In any case, there are six of them: Archaea, Bacteria, Protozoa, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia. The transhumanists propose a seventh: Cyborgia.
I blame this mood on my kids, of course. They chipped in together and bought me a hearing aid, because it inconvenienced them that I answered questions they didn’t ask, and didn’t answer ones they did. I haven’t told them that I employ Selective Hearing, a technique invented by the great Erma Bombeck to swat away life’s annoying gnats.
As for the actual deafness in my right ear, I blame a Led Zeppelin concert in 1975, and I even told Robert Plant as much 20 years later over breakfast at a hotel in Reims, France, but that’s a different story.
Anyway, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could put a ring on my arm and program a swarm of nanobots that I keep in my blood stream to go build me a cochlear implant to restore my hearing without surgery, or having to buy and wear various unsightly appliances?”
The implant would be molded to my anatomy from my anatomy, and be practically invisible, and I wouldn’t have to buy those damn little batteries that cost an arm and a toenail, and last all of 10 minutes.
This, naturally, led me to think about connecting my USB-C bioport to my base station and downloading a doctorate’s worth of ontological expertise while I read the news, or picking up a new language the night before a business trip, or completely redesigning my face while I slept, after robbing a bank. Suppose I could disguise myself as a Romulan, so I could sneak aboard their ship and steal their cloaking device?
The mind boggles!
Frankly, the more I think about this, the more I think being just a plain old human sucks. Those little molecule-sized boogers could be plucking microplastics from my gut, eating plaques off my arterial walls, gobbling up pre-cancerous tumors and dumping the waste in my liver. Heck, if I didn’t like the food I was served, I could spit some nanobots on the vittles and have surf ‘n’ turf before we finished saying grace.
I’m one of those freaks who doesn’t see a difference between humans and nature. I figure humans are a product of, and thus inseparable from nature. Anything we can conceive of and do is perfectly natural.
Oh sure, there are those niggling moral and ethical considerations, but adults can do pretty much anything they want to themselves and other consenting adults. There is yin and yang, light and shadow, creation and destruction, good and evil, but nothing in the universe can be unnatural.
There is nothing unnatural about a skyscraper, since natural creatures designed it and built it using natural resources and physical laws. Like George Carlin said, “Suppose the universe wanted plastic, but needed us to make it?” We may not appreciate the consequences, like mountainous garbage heaps, but it’s still natural.
Big ideas that portend big changes always face resistance. It is a fundamental law of nature that everyone pause for a moment to consider whether we should jump off a cliff. After all, vinyl was a perfectly good sound recording medium, but CDs were better still, and FLAC files beat both of them. The rest is whether we have ears to hear — see how nicely I tied that back to Robert Plant?
The one caveat I have in all this is the issue of consent. I believe technology has its place and is not inherently bad, unless it begins making choices on behalf of the individual without full foreknowledge and consent.
I believe if you want a cell phone, you should have one, and if I don’t, then your self-absorbed histrionics at the next table should not impinge on my peaceful repast. Take your business out to a more appropriate setting or I’ll throw ice cubes at you.
Similarly, if you want to pump your body full of microscopic critters that can leave you looking like a grotesque Frankensteinian ogre, please do so, provided they can not leap from your fetid corpse to my Adonic masterpiece of human perfection.
If your choices make you more competitive, successful, and able to control more resources than me, more power to you. You have won the Darwinian Olympics.
I, however, prefer to view the universe through the lens of unintended consequences. The universe, as far as I can perceive it, prefers equilibrium, where all variables are in harmony with all others. Whenever that equilibrium is upset, there follows a period of chaos in which all variables seek to find a new level of stability. The result may or may not be advantageous to the individual or the species, but universe is wholly unconcerned with that. There are plenty more species to work with where we came from.
I can list a thousand benefits to any given technology. The idea of tiny machines running around my innards constantly repairing things, and programmable to effect changes that my current system can not do, has a certain appeal. As long as it doesn’t hurt.
In the process, though, there are a million variables whose equilibrium has been established over millions of years of trial and error, any one of which might cause my nose to grow out the back of my neck, thus suffocating me when I cinch up my tie.
Conceptually, I like the idea of nanobots performing maintenance. I’ve got this knee thing that has given me nothing but grief for 40 years, and push-button repairs at the molecular level sounds glorious. But I have to ask: did the manufacturer consider every possible variable and iteration in the design process? I think not, even with strict adherence to ISO guidelines.
All of which brings us back to Oedipa Maas and the ramifications of a single letter that draws her into a an ever-expanding web of contradictions, conspiracies and communications.
The Blackberry 850 was introduced in 1999, and took the world by storm, based on nothing more than the ability to send and receive email on the go. Twenty-five years later, the Blackberry is long gone, but the ripples it created in the universe are still causing chaos as the world tries to find equilibrium in the wake of such radical mobility.
As Socrates and Plato often noted, just because we can do a thing, it does not follow that we should.
In our relentless pursuit of novelty and our zeal for convenience, we might want to pause and ponder the creation of a new Kingdom of Cyborgia. As our distant descendants stand on the shores of some far-flung exo-ocean, watching a red dwarf set over the primordial waters of alien phyla, will they thank us for their gleaming forever-bodies, or curse us for their relative immortality?
In the meantime, my knee is killing me.
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The greatest Pynchon-eque film I have yet found is The Big Lebowski (1998), arguably the best of the Coen brothers’ consistently high-quality portfolio. Jeff Bridges and John Goodman put in their best performances, and every viewing brings to light new details, connections and insights. In a word, brilliant.
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How do we get from Cockleburs of wisdom to the kingdom of cyborgia(?) from Zepplelin .
In my confusion I had to research a cocklebur and low and behold Xanthium strumarium is a weed. W're you smoking that imposter during the concert and get that Whole of love piped in your ear-Are sure it wasn't the master Page strumming that Axe and just butter upped to blame Plant? If I were I'd sue for damages, maybe blame them for your insasnity!
If we can ever get over the senseless premise of anthropogenic climate change, we could burn the combustible part of our trash in a boiler and make electricity with it. The Japanese had a plant back in the 70s where they picked the recyclables out of the trash on the way to the boiler on a conveyor belt. The workers were in isolation suits like those worn in a biolab.