Renchantment aRe-Enchantment Cosmologies: Mastery and Obsolescence in an Intelligent Universe By Abou Farman, Bard Collegene

7/29/2019 Renchantment aRe-Enchantment Cosmologies: Mastery and Obsolescence in an Intelligent Universe By Abou Far

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Special collection

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abu Frm, Bard College

ABSTRACT

Following modernitys ounding dream o human mastery over the natural

world, scientifc discoveries produced a picture o an infnite, random, and

indierent universe, thus paradoxically revealing the utter insignifcance

o the master/dreamer. Recently, the convergence o a number o ex-

treme technoscientifc projectsAI, Nanotechnology, Lie Extensionhas

activated science-based cosmological visions in which humans and their

intelligence are given a central purpose in the unolding o the universe.

The movement ormed around the event-horizon o the Singularity is the

most well-known version o these re-enchantment cosmologies. Yet this re-

enchantment only serves as a prelude to an obsolescence: humans are hereto give rise to other, better minds, a prospect that makes Singularitarians

restless with both ear and exhilaration. [Keywords: Cosmology, Singularity,

disenchantment, transhumanism, information, modernity]

Wm h Sgury

The young volunteer at the Singularity Summit steps up to the microphonein front of a full house at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York City to deliver


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Re-Enchantment Cosmologies: Mastery and Obsolescence in an Intelligent Universe

a TV host-style, drum-roll introduction: And now the moment youve

all been waiting orRay Kurzweil! All the tweeting stops as the smart

phones all silent. Next to me, two graduate students wearing HomoSapiens Siliconis t-shirts crane their necks or a better view. Behind me,

designers rom Lockheed Martin rise on tiptoe and a Canadian longevity

activist takes a deep breath.

The dapper man who glides on to the stage is the unofcial leader and

predictor-in-chie o The Singularity, a loosely organized social movement

o uturists planning or the advent o superintelligence. Short and tan, with

a thinning tut o silver hair, Kurzweil has oten claimed that his regimen

o 100+ supplements a day and careul medical supervision have kept his

biological age two decades lower than his chronological age. Longevity

and youth are intrinsic goods, but he also would like to live long enough

to see the Singularity. Ater all, what he calls the most critical event in hu-

man history is only about 40 years away. Nevertheless, he is signed up or

cryonics just in case his least-avorite event-horizon, death, arrives prior

to his avorite one, the Singularity. The main idea behind the Singularity is

that humans, currently building aster, more powerul devices, will soon

build greater than human intelligence. Such an intelligence will be able to

build an intelligence greater than itsel, which will build one even greater

and so on, leading to an intelligence explosion so ast and vast that it

will change all the rules we are amiliar with. Kurzweil, who has made his

career as much on predictions o the Singularity event as on technological

invention,1 predicts two principle eatures. The frst is human obsoles-

cence, with humans either merging into machines or being surpassed by

them. However, he also has an anthropological awareness that humanis but a human category: when, near the bagel table, I asked him why we

ought to worry about humans at all, his answer was that maybe we dont

since human is only that which can change itsel. His second prediction

is that intelligence, derived rom its biological origins in human brains

and its technological origins in human ingenuity, will begin to saturate the

matter and energy in its midst and spread out rom its origin on Earth.

He declares, This is the ultimate destiny o the Singularity and o the uni-

verse (Kurzweil 2005:364-372).The basic scenario o a machine-led coup is older than HAL (o2001:


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ction speculation, it is now the oundation o a social movement which

reaches into NASA and the NSF, counting amongst its supporters a wide

range o scientists around the US. Kurzweil personies this newly gainedcredibility and popularity. Mainstream magazines rom Time to Rolling

Stone have eatured proles on him. He has developed close links to

NASA, Google, and much o Silicon Valley and acts as advisor to DARPA,

the US Department o Deenses advanced research arm. Aside rom

me, over 900 other Homo sapiens sapiens attended the 2009 Singularity

Summit, including experts as diverse as philosopher o mind David

Chalmers; cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus; Wirededitor Gary Wol;

mathematician, physicist, and inventor Stephen Wolram; and a num-

ber o biologists, physicists, and neuroscientists (the 2005 summit had

300 attendees). With annual summits, blogs, t-shirts, activists, and even

Singularity-bashers, the status o The Singularity as a movement is con-

rmed. Singularitarians themselves, however, tend to think o it as some-

thing more. The problem with choosing or not choosing to be a part

o our revolution, Michael Anissimov, an organizer o the Singularity

Summit, wrote on his blog, is that, or better or or worse, there probably

is no choice. When superintelligence is created, it will impact everyone

on Earth, whether we like it or not.2

What has made this techno-science imaginary so compelling today?

The Singularity and other recent science-based uturistic projects have

been commonly dismissed as sci- geek antasies and marginal cults o

kooks,3 or explained away in terms o a long tradition o American apoc-

alyptic religiosity (Alexander 2003, Geraci 2010). It may be true that The

Singularitys imaginaries o salvation and destruction through technology,o the end or transcendence o humanity, play into a long, interweaving

history o technological utopianism, post-millenialism, apocalypse and

other American end-time scenarios (Quandt 1973, Quinby 1994, Wojcik

1997, Masco this issue).

In this paper, I want to oer a more sinuous history at once internal to

the movements themselves and connected to larger scientic and secular

tensions between control and reedom, disenchantment and re-enchant-

ment. I argue that such currents o uturism cannot be dismissed as iso-lated social curiosities, but must be viewed as part o a technoscientic


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West coast Futurism

I frst heard o The Singularity during my feldwork on Immortalism, or proj-

ects or achieving radically extended lives through scientifc means, partlybecause one strategy or survival beyond biological death is thought by

some to be mind uploadinga strategy embedded in, though not in-

trinsic to, the promise o Artifcial Intelligence (AI). I met and interviewed

Singularitarians in conerences on Cryonics, Transhumanism, AI, and

Nanotechnology, in uturist meet-ups in New York, Arizona, Los Angeles,

and Silicon Valley. I kept up on blogs and researched the history through

interviews and old listservs. Through these nodes, I gradually became

aware o the network o actors, objects, and ideas, as well as the prolifc

assemblage o visions, techniques, sciences, and projects coming to-

gether to make up the uturist movement o which The Singularity is a part.

Dispersed but overlapping, this network o uturist groups sprung up in

the 1990s, although its origins date back to the 1970s, to the era when the

oil crisis and the dire warnings o the Club o Rome about limited resourc-

es and population growth intersected with the heady adventures o the

Apollo and Soyuz space voyages, linking anxieties over earthly fnitude to

the infnite possibilities o the universe beyond Earths atmosphere, tying

human survival to space colonization. A key group promoting this confgu-

ration was ormed in 1975 in Arizona. Called L5, it became a locus o ac-

tivity or uturists around the country. Early requenters included Timothy

Leary, Isaac Asimov, Marvin Minsky, Freeman Dyson, and Hans Moravec

(Regis 1990, Bainbridge 2007:37). Importantly, a number o active mem-

bers would go on to become key players in todays uturist movements,

including cryonicist and uture supplements mogul Saul Kent, the ather onanotechnology Eric Drexler, and social psychologist, transhumanist and

Singularitarian William Sims Bainbridge.

As L5 lost momentum along with the space program, a ew activists

bridged the 1980s, promoting the notion o transcendence as a physical

rather than spiritual concern. Amongst them was Drexler who published

his original vision o nanotechnology in 1986; FM-2030, an Iranian-born

uturist in LA, who through advocacy, teaching, and writing popularized

the term transhumanism; Robert Ettinger, the ather o cryonics and au-thor o Man Into Superman; and Bainbridge, who in 1982 penned a mani-


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maniesto sat silent or two decades until it spawned its own techno-

cosmological group, The Order o Cosmic Engineers,4 whose goal is to

permeate our universe with benign intelligence, building and spreading itrom inner space to outer space and beyond.5 In the interim, Bainbridge

became Program Director at the NSFs Inormation and Intelligent

Systems and a key actor in the NBIC convergence, or the unication o

nanotech, biotech, inormatics, and cognitive science (NBIC), o which I

will explain more later.

The Singularity did not originate with Kurzweil. In 1993, a computer sci-

entist, mathematician, and science ction writer named Vernor Vinge de-

livered a lecture at a NASA-sponsored symposium that laid out a serious

scenario in a hal-troubled, hal-exuberant tone. Within 30 years, we will

have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence, he de-

clared. Shortly ater, the human era will be ended (Vinge 1993). Borrowing

a term rom mathematics and physics that describes a point past which

known laws do not hold, Vinge called his threshold the Singularity. Such

ideas had already been foated, but soon ater the rst decades o cyber-

netics AI work scaled back its ambitions. The underlying goal o replicating

or surpassing human cognition and behavior, known as Articial General

Intelligence (AGI), was ignored in avor o creating machines that could

accomplish small, specic tasks, or narrow AI, a transormation that one

inormant characterized as going rom playing god to programming home

appliances. The 1990s changed that: the Internet, the Human Genome

Project, genetics and bioinormatics, nanotechnology, neuroscience and

brain mapping, all based on the concept o inormation and the ecient

reduction o the analog to the computational, revived the fagging dreamo general AI (chess champion Garry Kasparovs 1997 deeat by IBMs

Deep Blue is requently mentioned as a turning point).

New uturist groups began exploring the social, personal, and ethi-

cal consequences o these sciences. In 1992, a British philosophy Ph.D.

rom UCLA with the adopted name o Max More, along with a colleague

bearing the equally symbolic name o Tom Morrow, started the Extropy

Institute (EI), so named to provide a counter-concept to entropy, signiying

greater organization and energy, rather than dissolution and heat death.Many current uturists trace their roots and early sense o excitement back


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exemplifed by speakers like molecular biologist Cynthia Kenyon. EI was

not ocused on space, but widely concerned with technologies that pro-

ered new promisescontrol over biology, over the brain, over all matterin the universe, a set o promises that would become the stake o the

NBIC convergence. EI eventually gave way to The World Transhumanist

Association (WTA), ormed in 1998 by the philosopher Nick Bostrom.6

In this period o uturist cross-ertilization, a young AI researcher, Eliezer

Yudkowski, and a programmer, Tyler Emerson, ormed the Singularity

Institute or Artifcial Intelligence (SIAI). A bearded, convivial prodigy who

speaks in ormal, rational sentences and is proud to not have a Ph.D., Eli

was excited by the prospect o superintelligent agents, but worried that

such agents might end up, willully or accidentally, destroying what we

care about, like human lives. A crude illustration, commonly used by SIAI

members, o an accidental case would be a superintelligence optimized to

produce paperclips that would then take all matter in its vicinity and rear-

range the atomic structure to obtain a lot o excellent paperclips. It may

not despise you in particular, but since your atomic arrangement is not to

its liking, it would also take you apart and transorm you into a paperclip.

To counter the threat, Yudkowski urged research towards the develop-

ment o Friendly AI. Back then, SIAI was hardly anything more than an e-

mail list called SL4 (Shock Level 4), subscribed to by Transhumanists and

Extropians, and a ew researchers, but the early discussions contained

the duality o anxiety and exhilaration that still characterizes the feld.

Yudkowskis worrier ethos and rhetoric has been passed down: whenever

someone throws up an alarming new scenario, a Singularity ellow, shoul-

dering the burden the rest o the world reuses to acknowledge, will saysomething like, Oh, now Im really beginning to worry.

Occasionally mentioned on the SL4 list, Kurzweil had already published

The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), a book that presented a utopian

uture o unlimited energy and great sex enabled by conscious machines,

but never mentioned the Singularity. The Singularity moved to the center

o Kurzweils platorm ater he spoke in symposia at two uturist institutes,

Foresight and Extropy, where he got politely lambasted rom the audi-

ence by Yudkowski. On his SL4 list, Yudkowski accused Kurzweil o ped-dling a pseudo-Singularity that projected the inevitable development o


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Kurzweil, who was working on his book on the Singularity at the time,

responded by becoming a board member. It beneted both. Kurzweil

couldnt have assumed a wide mantle o authority without a connectionto the activists who were pushing the concept to its limit, while the latter

needed Kurzweils clout and nancial connections. SIAI ound rm nan-

cial ooting in large part thanks to Kurzweils riend, the libertarian nan-

cial guru and uturist Peter Thiel, who made his money investing early in

Facebook and has been known to rail against multiculturalism and und

anti-liberal activities. Today SIAIs operating budget is over $600,000,

compared, or example, to the much larger WTAs $74,000.

Indeed, the growth o West Coast uturism as I have described it can-not be explained without the tech and biotech booms o the 1990s and

the growth o Silicon Valley, which shited the fow o nancial and intel-

lectual activity in the US. Between 1995 and 2002, manuacturing jobs

increased by 46,000 whilst computer-related jobs increased by 1.2 mil-

lion and the total number employed in the high tech industry reached 5.6

million (American Electronics Association 2002). Biotechnology (distin-

guished rom high tech medicine by its ocus on genetic, cellular, and

molecular manipulation) grew rapidly during the same period, a growth

marked by an ability to attract capital rather than create lots o jobs.

Although most biotech rms had under 100 employees, they attracted

over $10 billion in investments (Cortright and Mayer 2002). In short, a

large, new pool o both people and capital began looking out at the world

through technoscience glasses, receptive to its new combination o hope

and hype (Brown 2003).

control nd autonomy

Yudkowskis worrier ethos and Kurzweils charted predictions merged to

present a state o urgency in the movementa state achieved through an

intense temporal compression, olding the (utopian or dystopian) distant

uture (Guyer 2007) into the present, a temporality authorized by the scien-

tistic modality o prediction. Kurzweils predictions have the distinction o

unolding on grand temporal scales. In books and lectures, he compress-es the history o the world into a battery o data sets and graphs illustrat-


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are combined with microcosmic analyses o changes in transistor size,

price, and processing power over the last ew decades. The graphs are

plotted to show that rom time immemorial, technology has been obey-ing Moores law7 and developing at exponential rates. Whats more, they

place us presently on the elbow o the exponential curves; technological

development is about to rise up the steep arm. The Singularity, Kurzweil

predicts, will arrive circa 2045.

Some quibble with the exact date, but as Ana Solomon, one o very

ew women involved with SIAI, confrmed, Its not the terribly distant u-

ture. People whove thought about it hard around the Institute seem to

be putting maybe about 50 percent probability mass around 2045, and

50 percent chance ater. But I mean its not like were trying to touch fve

centuries rom now or something.

The urgency is reifed in the exponential curves. Singularitarians hold

them up to emphasize what they think others dont understand: when you

start moving straight up the arm, things will happen really ast. And things

will be very dierent: game changing is the phrase commonly used. I

you acquire AI thats signifcantly above the human level and its oriented

around the things that we most care about, then that includes fxing them,

rom ood to vaccines and so onthose are problems that a controlled

intelligence could solve, instantly almost. At the same time, Solomon

warns, I you dont direct it carefully, we die and they equally.

Since, according to Solomon, our institutions or directing scientifc

unding and so on arent set up to deal with risks that are this tricky, the

burden is assumed by the SIAI, which has set itsel two goals: to accelerate

the advent o super-intelligence, mainly by seeking ways to emulate the hu-man brain on non-biological platorms; but also to protect humanity rom it,

principally by coding what they call Gandhian values into its oundation

in order to avert an existential threat. A properly-coded entity might still

have the power to destroy humans, but, thanks to its coded values, will not

wantto do so, just as Gandhi would never have wantedto do so.

The complex relationships between desire, society, history, and power

do not enter the discussions. But even without these, the notion o con-

trolled intelligence aces the problem o autonomy. I its values are pre-determined and its actions already circumscribed by code, is riendlyAI


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been givenotherwise it does not qualiy or the most important attribute

modernity has accorded intelligent beings, autonomy being the legal and

political oundation o the rational sovereign subject. But it seems thatautonomy must also include potential destructiveness. In act, extending

Bataille (1997), an act o destruction, devaluing that which has beengiven

as value, may be regarded as the ultimate mark o autonomy. To repro-

duce or master the mindthe technical version o the Enlightenment ideal

o sel-masterystrategies like AGI, neural nets, or Whole Brain Emulation

must also grant it inherent out-o-controlness (Dupuy 2008, Kelly 2006).

In order to be read also as Autonomous Intelligence, AI must have the abil-

ity to make its own decisions, including a decision to annihilate us or, at

the very least, parts o us.

Thus the paradox o controlled intelligence underlines a modern politi-

cal, not technological, contradiction: autonomy is highly valued because

it indicates sel-mastery; but autonomy also implies the power to destroy.

So while autonomy is promoted, it also activates mechanisms o control

through orce, obedience, or code.

the inellgen cosmos

The key premise animating the Singularitarian project is the relationship

between inormation and intelligence. Inormation is regarded simply as

patterns with varying degrees o complexity. Any arrangement o atoms is

inormation. The atomic structure o a giant rock may contain more inor-

mation than the genetic code o a human, but a rock can be represented

by a ew simple specifcations, so most o its inormation is useless. Themore complex and purposive an entity becomes, the more intelligent it

may be considered.

Singularitarians chart the history o the universe anti-entropically,

through the increasing organization o information into intelligence.

Kurzweil breaks down this universal evolution into six epochs: rom the

appearance o physics and chemistry on Earth (inormation in atomic

structures), to the development o biology (inormation in DNA), to the rise

o the brain (inormation in neural patterns), to the creation o technology(inormation in design), to the merger o technology and human intelli-


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the ollowing declaration: This is the ultimate destiny o the Singularity

and o the universe (Kurzweil 2005:389).

So in the symbolic order o The Singularitys cosmology, inormationis the essence o the universe; and intelligence is its teleology or pur-

pose8 as well as the unit o intrinsic value, as Ben Goertzel, ormer

director o research at SIAI, called it in a 2009 Forbes magazine article.

But intelligence does not require biologyjust some atoms and energy

(Churchland 1988). The human mind is only the most recent and com-

plex instance o its unolding, biology merely its current platorm, a back-

ground technology. Goertzel, or instance, writes that the new technolo-

gies are as much aboutmind and realityas they are about AI algorithms

(2010:4, emphasis added). The Singularitys cosmology gives unity and

purpose to the universe through concepts that are posited to be indepen-

dent o humans (inormation and intelligence) and constitutive o reality

itsel, yet refect the same purpose as our lives: to move toward greater

intelligence (Kurzweil 2005:372).

I Weberian disenchantment rests on two pillars, calculability and lack o

cosmic purpose or meaning, then The Singularity addresses disenchant-

ment directly. This is how Weber dened the term: principally there are

no mysterious incalculable orces that come in to play, but rather one can,

in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is

disenchanted (1958:139). Yet, there is a domain in Weberian theory that

is not subject to scientic rationality, even in principle. The metaphysical

needs o the human mindare driven not by material need but by an inner

compulsion to understand the world as a meaningul cosmos and to take

up a position towards it (Weber 1963:117). Science itsel is not equippedto indicate a meaningul end internally. To the contrary, I these natural

sciences lead to anything in this way, they are apt to make the belie that

there is such a thing as the meaning o the universe die out at its very

roots (Weber 1958:144).

This distinction has come to mark the outer limits o the scientic do-

main, o what its authorized to cover and what its orced to leave blank.

Plenty o scientic theories provide some account o the universes origins

and particular eatures, but none answer what one inormant called themeaning-o-lie-type questions. There is a dierence between an ac-


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(cosmology). While explaining the how questions, contemporary science

does not stage orays into why and ought questions (Gellner 1993).

To the contrary, science has generated what Alred Gell (1995) writingabout a totally dierent contextPolynesian ritualscalled cosmologi-

cal collapse. Beginning with the Copernican-Gallilean opening up o the

cosmos, scientifc knowledge created a terrible suspicion that human ex-

istence is a random, temporary accident in some remote outpost o an

infnite and indierent universe. Heightening this sense o fnitude, science

subsequently generated a series o its own end-time scenarios, rom the

inevitable heat-death o the universe to the end o the species to the end o

the planet via climate change or an impending asteroid collision or... Thus,

the eects o disenchantment are heightened through the twined move-

ment o scientifc rationality reaching all the way rom atoms up to multi-

verses, whilst alling categorically short o the metaphysical extremities.

Using the language o the Order o Cosmic Engineers, one might say that

with disenchantment, the connection between inner space and outer

space was severed.

What eectively is oered in The Singularitys inusion o matter with

intelligence is the possibility o restoring that connection, waking up the

universe with a sense oits purpose and o ourrole inits unolding. Its

most intelligent agents so ar, humans are not just the decoders o the

natural world, but the purveyors o the next epoch. Darwinian evolutions

accident-based, lumbering pace o change, its lack o abstract intelli-

gence, its reliance on random mutations, its blindness and incremental-

ism, to quote Yudkowski (2008:323), will be superceded by a super intel-

ligent agent engineered by humans.In this way, humans are given a central i paradoxical role. Our very

purpose as humans in this purposeul evolution o the universe is, as

Goertzel explained to me, to give rise to other types o minds. The son

o let-leaning 1960s liberals, Goertzel was careul to emphasize to me

that Singularitarians come in dierent stripes and not everyone agrees on

the way orward. Nevertheless, the general vision, which he compared to

a Hegelian unolding, seems to be quite uniorm: Theres intrinsic value in

helping higher intelligence come into existence (Goertzel 2009).When I asked him to elaborate on the idea o being superceded by


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Growth goes beyond humans, beyond mushrooms and ants and

such. Are ants obsolete or pigs obsolete? They exist and continue

to do what they do, but theyre not the most complex or most inter-esting creatures on the planet. Thats what Im assuming is the ate

in store or humans. I hope some humans continue to exist in their

current orm, but theres going to be other minds. And i it really came

down to it, I wouldnt hesitate to annihilate mysel in avor o some

amazing superbeing.

Goertzels spirit o sacrifce made obsolescence seem like purpose.

cosmi Selves

Part o what gives meaning to human activity amongst Singularitarians is

the possibility o using science to derive purpose (meaning) rom a uni-

verse originally emptied o it by science itsel. In his recent book,A Cosmist

Manifesto, Goertzel details an ideology he calls cosmism, a practical phi-

losophy, a world-view and value-system that provides concrete guid-

ance to the issues we ace in our lives (2010:2). The exercise o Joy, Growth,

and Choice are advanced not only as personal goals, but also as goals or

other sentient beings and or the Cosmos (2010:29). Thinking daily about

the grand themes o the cosmos is important because these ideas have

simple, practical, everyday meanings (2010:23). He views Cosmism as

a way to actively try and grow by being constantly aware o the universe,

the power and limitations o human subjectivity, to break the habits o the

mind, prepare or changes in the uture, and transorm our selves.Selves are, already, being transormed through discourse and practice.

Regular human brains are requently downgraded as wet, messy, and

primitive products o evolution which, as one inormant put it, were not

designed to be end-user modifable. Both in papers and discussions, a

general equivalence is assumed between mind, reality, and algorithmic

processes and some reer to their mind as my mental algorithms. This

inormation-processing view o mind and sel leads to new disciplines

with the goal o thinking as would a super-intelligence. Discussingwhat a superintelligence might or might not do, I was chastised or think-


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Helmreichs (1998) Artifcial Lie researchers who did not so much repro-

duce lie on computers as redefne and multiply the notion o lie, so

many Singularitarians, uturists, and AI researchers are not reproducingthe mind so much as reconfguring the concept and unctions o mind.

Still ar rom constructing a human mind on a silicon platorm, they are

constructing something like a silicon mind on a human platorm.

Primitive mind uploading exercises are being attempted. For example,

in the CyBeRev project, Bainbridge is collaborating with one o Kurzweils

colleagues, Martine Rothblatt, to load mindfles. He was promoting the

project when I met him on the Space Coast o Florida, wherealong with

Minsky, Anissimov, More, and a number o biologists, transhumanists,

and bioethicistshe was attending a conerence on the legal rights o

artifcial agents. The conerence was organized by Rothblatts organiza-

tion, Terasem, devoted to diversity, unity and joyul immortality achieved

through exponential growth o geo-ethical nanotechnology.10 Rothblatt,

a transgender lawyer and activist who launched the frst satellite-to-car

radio company (Sirius) as well as the frst nationwide vehicle geo-location

system (Geostar), owns a biotech company and has written books on The

Apartheid of Sex(1995) and Unzipped Genes (1997). On CyBeRev, partici-

pants submit inormation based on a psychological profle orm designed

by Bainbridge, and upload personal fles such as photographs, data fles,

scanned journals, etc. These mindfles are meant to help a universal su-

perintelligence reconstitute the participant in the distant uture. As such,

they are not only stored but also spacecast, transmitted as digital in-

ormation into outer space via satellite. Rothblatt explains that every

Terasem participant who has mindfles has already achieved a certain levelo immortality by having aspects o their mindfles already anywhere rom

up to 5 to 6 light years away rom the earth.11

Speaking to Singularity enthusiasts it becomes clear that, in dierent

ways, a sense o cosmic connection and universal purpose plays an impor-

tant role, even i it comes at the expense o human obsolescence. Indeed,

human obsolescence is viewed as an opportunity. Richards childhood

dream was to become an astronaut but a badly torn ACL prevented him

rom pursuing it. I live in a very primitive society and we are stuck here inour nest so to speak, and technology hasnt evolved to take us anywhere


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In the meantime, that dream o space was re-confgured or Richard

through an engagement with existential questions.

My interest is in exploring, in understanding, learning. Its that eternal

question philosophers have been asking: Why? Why all this? And

the only way to get an answer is to stick around long enough. In the

big scheme o things, Im just another ant in the world. The only way

Im going to understand the universe is i I live long enough, be able

to explore and expand my own intelligence.

Like others, Richard expressed rustration that his existential ques-

tions had no echoes around him, in school, amongst his riends, or in

mainstream sciencea reminder o Giddens observation that modernity

is marked by the exclusion rom social lie o undamental existential is-

sues (1991:156) to which it cannot provide satisying answers. Another

inormant, Ted, explained:

Ive probably had these discussions with riends but they dont care

to strive to achieve these answers anywhere near the level I do. I just

need to understand why things are. The other day I was spending a

couple o hours on the Internet researching these very strange crea-

tures that live in the deepest part o the oceans, just wondering why

was that thing hereand it just creates more o a mystery: why is

everything going on? It just keeps me at that top level o Where did

we come rom? I want to have an answer to whats going on here,

on a universal scale!...I think science could get us to that point, theonly question is: how long will it take and will we survive that long?

The reckoning o lie on a cosmic scale, the everyday grappling with

a larger existential purpose, is an emergent discipline around which new

practices and aects are being ormed, building what I call a cosmic self.

convergene and teleologyIn 2001, Bainbridge and a colleague organized a conerence sponsored by


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The NSF report stated that convergence is driven by the development o

new paradigms that are, or the rst time in human history, allowing or a

comprehensive understanding o the structure and behavior o matter romthe nanoscale up to the most complex system yet discovered, the human

brain (Bainbridge and Roco 2003:1). Again, this linking up o the brain

to the universe, o inner and outer space, is enabled by the treatment o

everythingmind as well as matteras inormation (the very assump-

tion o Singularitarians). The NBIC sciences, like the Singularity, assume

that inormation and algorithms not only represent but constitute the world

(Golumbia 2009) and the mind can be taken beyond biology, beyond the

wetness o its human platorm. The essays in that and subsequent volumes

(Bainbridge and Roco 2005) projected a radical rupturealso on a quasi-

Singularitarian scalein the landscape o human civilization, promising

technologies such as supercomputers the size o a cell in every human

body, promoting health and preventing disease, and 100,000 machines

generating energy rom solar cells that can all t on the head o a pin

(Canton 2005:34). Without such innovations, they warned with urgency,

the uture o civilization itsel is in doubt (Bainbridge and Roco 2005:2).

Through personal and institutional networksKurzweil-NASA-

Bainbridge-NSFthe inormation-to-intelligence view o the cosmos is

spawning an eort to ormalize the inormatic worldview by drawing on

a range o sciences and scientists. Such teleological and cosmological

views have some precedents in the sciences. Perhaps the most striking

example is physicist Frank Tiplers The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

(Barrow and Tipler 1986), a text that infuenced many Singularitarians. But

the broadest example comes out o NASA. A recent NASA-sponsoredpublication, Cosmos and Culture (Dick and Lupisella 2010), includes

multi-disciplinary contributions rom anthropologists and philosophers

to systems theorists and engineers. Edited by Steven Dick, astronomer

and NASAs chie historian, with Mark Lupisella, a NASA scientist, the

volume is an eort to tie sociobiological views o cultural evolution to

the physics and astronomy o the cosmos. Hence the new term cos-

mocultural evolution (Lupisella 2010), and the declaration that we are

witnessing the emergence o a novel scientic worldview that places lieand intelligence at the center o the vast, seemingly impersonal physical


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more we know about science, the more we know culture and cosmos are

connected, to such an extent that we can now see that the cosmos is

inextricably intertwined with human destiny (2010:25).In signifcant theoretically and sociologically connected ways, then, the

NBIC convergence o the inormation-based sciences and the Singularity

adopt teleology to project a scientifc worldview that uses cosmos

and culture into a common destiny. In other words, its not just that

Singularitarians are re-enchanting their own little corner o the universe,

but that a particular possibility or re-enchantment seems to be carrying

echoes through a larger segment o society.

Some scholars and theorists have challenged the notion o disenchant-

ment by insisting that enchantment never let the modern world, but was

just blinkered out o our view by the myth o modernity (Haraway 1998,

Bennet 2001). How could we be capable o disenchanting the world,

when everyday our laboratories and our actories populate the world with

hundreds o hybrids stranger than those o the day beore? asks Bruno

Latour (1993:115). But this position conuses a sense o awe and alterity,

an acknowledgement o mysteries, with enchantment. Disenchantment

was not just a loss o the sense o awe or mystery but the production o a

world view and the predominance o tools that, in principle, could trans-

late that very sense into a set o explainable causal chains; that sense, in

other words, would appear immediately limited or even alse, a de acto

illusion better explained through something like the brains neuronal fr-

ings, or a genetic mutation. A collapsed cosmology is not restored through

sacred letovers, a celebration o contingency, the assertion that objects

are agents or a sense o parochial awe about strange creatures. I arguedearlier that disenchantment had to be viewed in terms o a double e-

ect: sciences ability in principle to explain the universe in causal-material

terms, and its simultaneous inability to account or meaning and purpose

in the universe, the metaphysical extremities. For re-enchantment to be-

come an experience or condition, not just an assertion, or the previously

disenchanted, it has to address the metaphysical extremities andsince

both the disenchanted world and its aporias are generated through the

scientifc worldviewthis can only come when the boundaries o thoseextremities are transgressed and reshaped through the limits and prin-


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Abou FArmAn

deploying the concepts o inormation and intelligence in particular ways,

it proposes a science-based cosmologyaddressing questions about

destiny and purpose which science and secularism, in their disenchant-ing mode, have been unable, and unwilling, to answer. The universe it

imagines through the technoscientifc trope o inormation is not just cold

and meaningless; that universe is intentional, its about something, even

i its not simply about us humans. My feldwork suggests that this pos-

sibility or re-enchantment, this claim on metaphysical extremities, is an

important motivation or many Singularitarians; indeed, their orientation

towards it has generated particular aective modes and sel disciplines.

In a preliminary way I have also proposed that there is a trend in the wider

culture o science towards re-introducing teleology in the mix, projecting

what Im calling Re-enchantment Cosmologies, o which the Singularity

is a ormative instance. n

a c k n ow l d gm n t s :

A version o this paper was frst presented at the 2009 Society or Social Studies o Science conerencein Washington, DC. I owe gratitude to Debbora Battaglia, David Valentine, and Talal Asad or caring and

criticizing, and to AQs reviewers or their inormed comments.

e n d n o t s :

1He programmed the frst text recognition device and invented the frst text-to-speech device, the frst

scanner, and the frst acoustic synthesizer.

2Entry on Accelerating Future Blog, September 30, 2009. Available at http://www.acceleratinguture.com/

michael/blog/2009/09/giulio-prisco-i-am-a-singularitian-who-does-not-believe-in-the-singularity/ (last

accessed August 14, 2012).

3

For a recent example, see biologist PZ Myers blog post. Available at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyn-gula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does_not_understa.php (last accessed on August 17, 2010).

4Goertzels (2010) aorementioned book on Cosmism acknowledges a debt to the OCE in outlining its

principles.

5From Prospectus o the Order o Cosmic Engineers, archived at the Turing Church website. Available at

http://turingchurch.com/2012/01/02/order-o-cosmic-engineers/ (last accessed August 14, 2012).

6WTA has changed its name to Humanity +. For lack o space it is impossible to mention all organizations

that played and continue to play a role in the development o these movements, but the Foresight Institute,

set up by the once-maligned ather o nanotechnology Eric Drexler, bears mention.

7First developed by Intel co-ounder Gordon Moore, who claimed that transistor power is doubling every

year. This law is now commonly applied to all electronic devices using transistors and integrated circuits.

8It is tempting to take inormation to be amere abstraction, part o a symbolic order. What makes theseimaginaries so compelling is the power o inormation in its application in the physical world through

the inormation-based sciences: their actual ability to manipulate matter animate and inanimate through


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10This mission statement appeared on various Terasem publications and websites. It is still the stated

mission on one o several Terasem websites (http://www.terasemweb.org/, last accessed on August 14,

2012). However, the main website has recently rephrased its mission to read: educating the public on the

practicality and necessity o greatly extending human lie, consistent with diversity and unity, via geoethi-

cal nanotechnology and personal cyberconsciousness

11From a talk given at the Turing Church Online Workshop 1 conducted in the on-line space called

Second Lie on Saturday, November 20, 2010. Archives may be accessed at http://cargocollective.com/

turingchurch/Turing-Church-Online-Workshop-1.

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F o r e i g n l a n g u a g e t r a n s l a t i o n s :


[Keywords: Cosmology, Singularity, disenchantment, transhumanism, inormation, modernity]

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Cosmologias de Re-encantamento: Dominao e Obsolncia no Universo Intelligente

[palavras chave: Cosmologia, Singularidade, desencanto, transhumanismo, inormao, modernidade]

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