The Fruit Fly Of Babylon
And: Decolonizing Europe; War Outlook Dims -- & Weimarization Of America Rises
So, I was so downcast from the remigration thing (see below the paywall) that I had to go visit the Brueghels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum the next morning, before taking the train back to Budapest. That great Vienna temple of art has the world’s largest collection of works by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. I wrote something about that visit for The Free Press on the train ride home; it’ll be published soon, so I won’t get the jump on it here. Of course one of the canvases on the wall is his most famous painting, “The Tower of Babel”:
Thought about that yesterday when I saw these two items on X.
In the first one, a lab used brain cells from a dead human being to create a human-machine hybrid capable of learning and carrying out acts:
Here’s a news story about it. It is literally merging the human with the mechanical. Where does it stop? I think we all know the answer to that: it won’t stop. So what are some outcomes?
Another Xer on this story; click the link for video of what the virtual fruit fly is doing.
What do you think would emerge on the computer screens if scientists used the vast computing power of AI to copy the human mind? Virtual zombies? Entities that are neurologically human in every material sense of the word, but lack a soul? What would happen if one could insert the chips on which the human brain has been wired, as with the fruit fly, into an android? What about your brain: if it could be mapped as such, and embedded on chips, would that still be you? Would you be immortal? Would you have a soul?
What is a soul, then?
In the future, will anybody ask that question?
You’ll recall our discussion in this space last week about how we are engineering generations to lose their brain’s capacity to perceive the spiritual, the numinous, via constant exposure to screens. Conceivably, in the future, nobody will particular care about the emergence of these biologically engineered human-like creatures. (But then, for materialists, there will be no difference between them and the rest of us, will there?)
This isn’t science fiction. This is now.
Once we’ve offloaded capacity for human memory to the cloud, via radical dependence on AI, who will recall what it means to be human?
Look at this: an engineer “gave an AI a body”. The first thing it did was breathe.
I feel like 99.9 percent of humanity are like the plowman in Brueghel’s “Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus”: just carrying on with everyday life while staggering events — I would say “staggeringly evil” events — are happening around us, unnoticed. See the legs of the fallen Icarus, tiny on the lower right? Nobody sees that a flying man has fallen from the sky. They’re too busy getting on with daily business.
Subscribers, thank you for sticking with me in this space. We are far out to sea, and we are going to need each other to talk our way through the months and years ahead. Read on to see part of what I mean. This Iran war is going sideways fast…
