Technopolyps

 Technopolyps/technopalypse

When one considers the religious/existential implications of interfacing with a device that has processing power enough to addict oneself, keep oneself coming back, and to enforce an identification regime, we've reached the status of technopolyps/technopalypse. 

What this means. 

The term describes the time/space/attention commitments that people have to interactive devices, content delivery devices, attention consuming devices that, to the extent that they have sway, erode people's commitments to a society and make them into users, not citizens. Imagine one day when the streets are empty (a foregone conclusion resting upon its predecessor) and the only people engaging with the world are those indigent, homeless, and drug abused, shuffling like a zombie horde about the homes, nee cages, of the 'residents' all of whom are quietly alone before a screen. Here I stand, before a screen myself, scrawling upon the walls of my 'gilded-information-age cage' a cry for revolution resounding to all, alone, as a singular cry for help. 

To become a technopolyp is the preceding condition to becoming the soft-pot upon the chassis of ascendant technology. In becoming a technopolyp, one establishes boundaries around one's identity that exclude others and include only those engaged with a specific game, streaming show, news outlet. And only to the extent that others engage together they form a community, and in doing so exclusively of others they form an army against outsiders. Without guns, without enmity, this army fights a quiet war to secede, like a Texas, from a larger community entirely and only on the basis of its time and attention investments in a given interactive medium. 

But having a community apart from others solely upon one's interactive media choices still establishes a power-based conflict. To reduce that to it's basic unit, to cellularize it, is to use computing power to tailor media specific to each and every user. Thus rendered from others, and over time to a shared language and world, the mind becomes severed without surgery from its physical environment and its body in such a way that face-to-face interaction becomes a disease whose symptom is pathological isolation. 

Yet here I stand, before my screen as if before the altar to a domestic god 2000+ years ago, hearing the admonitory voices from afar or apast, heeding their call to some place outside of one's immediate space and time. Completely untethered from the day-to-day needs of a community, severed from self, awash in a sea of 1s and 0s and soon to become qubits engaged in a keyboard, gestural, voice activated ceremony to a self-reflective God standing amidst an army of none. 

Life, self-knowledge, entropy, space-time

Life is an ordered system maintained through the intake of energy against entropy and the stochastic imprint of time upon its development and evolution. Regardless of how the universe achieves self-meaning it will find it in the persistent organization of space-time at some location. Given the exploded nature of all the matter in the universe, the question begged is how much of the universe is required to be organized for it to achieve self-knowledge?

Brain-Universe Interface

Let's propose a starkly material version of consciousness as the product of the brain activity devoted to it. This not only describes the nature of consciousness as housed within a brain's neurological function but also sets the upper limit of consciousness and what brains can conceive. To end this discussion abruptly, the universe can only be conceived up to the limit of the brain. In so far as a brain's synaptic connections can be quantified and measured in terms of astronomical units, that is, 'stars in the Milky Way,' this rough analogy for understanding the size and complexity of the brain also displays the total possible complexity of what it can understand. And so we have to ask if there's an entry level into consciousness of the universe that the universe itself produces for the sake of its own existence. If it is a forest it has to produce a tree and finally an onlooker in order for a logical chain of events to substantiate its existence and its dynamics. 

Social order in a culture predominated by schizotypy

"For schizophrenia, whether one illness or many, is in its florid stage practically defined by certain characteristics which we have stated earlier were the salient characteristics of the bicameral mind. The presence of auditory hallucinations, their often religious and always authoritative quality, the dissolution of the ego or analog 'I', and of the mind-space in which it once could narratize out what to do and where it was in time and action, these are the large resemblances.

"But there are great differences as well. If there is any truth to this hypothesis, the relapse is only partial. The learnings that make up a subjective consciousness are powerful and never totally suppressed. And thus the terror and the fury, the agony and despair. The anxiety attendant upon so cataclysmic a change, the dissonance with the habitual structure of interpersonal relations, and the lack of cultural support and definition for the voices, making them inadequate guides for everyday living, the need to defend against a broken dam of environmental sensory stimulation that is flooding all before it--produce a social withdrawal that is a far different thing from the behavior of the absolutely social individual of bicameral societies. The conscious man is constantly using his introspection to find 'himself' and to know where he is, relevant to his purposes and situation. And without this source of security, deprived of narratization, living with hallucinations that are unacceptable and denied as unreal by those around him, the florid schizophrenic is in an opposite world to that of the god-owned laborers of Marduk or of the idols of Ur.

"The modern schizophrenic is an individual in search of such a culture. But he retains usually some part of the subjective consciousness that struggles against this more primitive mental organization, that tries to establish some kind of control in the middle of mental organization in which the hallucination ought to do the controlling. In effect, he is a mind bared to his environment, waiting on gods in a godless world" (pp. 431-432).

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Cultural convictions and belief in oracles

"The application of this general bicameral paradigm to the oracle at Delphi is obvious: the elaborate induction procedures, the trance in which consciousness is lost, the ardently pursued authorization of Apollo. But it is the collective cognitive imperative or group belief or cultural prescription or expectancy (all of these terms indicating my meaning) which I wish to emphasize. The immensity of the cultural demand upon the entranced priestess cannot be overemphasized. The whole Greek world believed, and had for almost a millennium. As many as thirty-five thousand people a day from every part of the Mediterranean world might struggle by sea through the tiny port of Itéa that snuggles the receptive coast just below Delphi. And they, too, went through induction procedures, purifying themselves in the Castilian spring, making offerings to Apollo and other gods as they persisted up the Sacred Way. In the latter centuries of the oracle, more than four thousand votive statues crowded this 220-yard-long climb up the side of Mount Parnassus to the temple of the oracle. It was, I suggest, this confluence of huge social prescription and expectancy, closer to definition than mere belief, which can account for the psychology of the oracle, for the at-once-ness of her answers. It was something before which any skepticism would be as impossible as for us to doubt that the speech of a radio originates in a studio that we cannot see. And it is something before which modern psychology must stand in awe" (p. 325).

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

The Old Testament as a loss of the bicameral mind

"The story or imagined story of the later Khabiru or Hebrews is told in what has come down to us as the Old Testament. The thesis to which we shall give our concern in this chapter is that this magnificent collection of history and harangue, of song, sermon, and story is in its grand overall contour the description of the loss of the bicameral mind, and its replacement by subjectivity over the first millennium B.C." (p. 294)

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Hebrews are vagrants?

"Some perhaps were still trying to follow inadequate bicameral voices, or clinging too the edge of settled land, fearing to launch out, becoming breeders of sheep and camels, while others, having struggled unsuccessfully to mingle with more settled peoples, then pushed out into the open desert, where only the ruthless survive, perhaps in precarious pursuit of some hallucinated vision, some back parts of a god, some new city or promised land.

"To the established city-states, these refugees were the desperate outcasts of the desert wilderness. The city people thought of them collectively as robbers and vagrants. And so they often were, either singly, as miserable homeless wretches stealing by night the grapes which the vine-dressers scorned to pick, or as whole tribes raiding the city peripheries for their cattle and produce, even as nomadic Bedouins occasionally do today. The word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru, and so these desert refugees are referred to on cuneiform tablets. And khabiru, softened in the desert air, becomes hebrew" (pp. 293-294).

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"