Document prepared for course participants
Technology and the Future of Human Nature
Technology describes a transformational mode of consciousness
recognizable in
[1] intentional acts to alter life experience,
[2] implemented reiteratively in environments of missing
information,
[3] forming systems of self-organizing complexity.
The origins of <technology> are the archaic, archetypally patterned
processes of growth and novelty in the Universe, emerging in magical,
mythic, mental, and integral structures of consciousness.
Technology is a mode of consciousness and is not identical with
technological objects. Yet those objects are factors in successive
reiterations and the ongoing emergence of consciousness. We shape our
tools and our tools shape us.
Examples of technological emergence include the use of:
*signs (magical)
*symbols (magical)
*totems (magical)
*fire (magical)
*weapons (magical)
*agriculture (magical)
*grammar (mythic)
*writing systems (mythic/mental)
*alphabet (mythic)
*printing (mental)
*steam power (mental)
*internal combustion (mental)
*aeronautics (mental)
*electronics (mental)
*cybernetics (mental/integral)
*astronautics (mental/integral)
*genomics (mental/integral)
*quantum techniques (mental/integral)
It is important to understand these examples as transformational
<fields> of consciousness rather than as the <figures> of specific
implements or techniques.
That is to say, the actual effects of printing in changing life experience
disclose more about the emergent transformational mode of
consciousness than the mechanical structure and processes of press,
paper, ink, etc.
The actual effects of digital technologies in changing life experience
disclose more about the emergent transformational mode of
consciousness than the digital structure or processes of hardware or
software.
This description shifts attention from the external implements and
techniques of technology (figures) which are often understood to be
technology. The origin of technology is a transformational mode of
consciousness (field).
An emergent technology (transformational mode of consciousness) is
integrative when the values of living experience are disclosed, enhanced,
and advanced.
An emergent technology (transformational mode of consciousness) is
disintegrative when the values of living experience are obscured,
diminished, or regressed.
Another shift of attention in this model is that technology precedes
epistemology; technology as a transformational mode of consciousness is
the pilot wave of knowledge rather than the reverse. Instinct,
archetypally patterned, precedes and guides perception. As infants, we
do before we know.
Culturally, the application of an innovation or artifact precedes its
emergence as a normative value of experience. With most high
technologies, we are experimenting across vast scales of magnitude
without the ability to predict a full range of consequences of what we are
doing.
A primordial and continuing danger is the disintegrative (value
diminishing) projective identification of a technology with external,
autonomous artifacts. This projective identification in magical structure
is fetishism, in mythic structure is idolatry, in mental structure is
atomization or schizoid fragmentation, in integral structure is artificial
transcendentalism.
With integral consciousness, humankind can actually evaluate our
knowing—with the critical awareness of the limits of mental
consciousness—before we continue or initiate doing. With integral
consciousness, it is possible to contemplate the field effects of technology
as a transformational mode of consciousness in the life experience of the
global community, at all scales of magnitude, aperspectivally,
atemporally, and adimensionally.
There are no more urgent or universal priorities in the global community
than these contemplations of the limits of mental consciousness and the
radical effects of technology as a transformational mode of consciousness
in altering the field of consciousness in planetary life. Through
technology as a transformational mode of consciousness, humankind
obtains co-creational powers that carry co-creational responsibilities that
evoke our most profound sentience, wisdom, and compassion.
To consider technology is to consider human nature. They are not
separate topics, and the greatest danger is seeing them as separated. Of
all patterns experiencable with human consciousness, none is as
complex as those described as <human nature>. There is no physical or
organic pattern of equal complexity. The forces of human nature exceed
human understanding. The most profound and holy response to this
truth is the integration of human consciousness through faith and
compassion and spiritual practice. Any mentality that presumes to
reduce (control) the complexity of human nature cannot succeed. Any
technology that presumes to master, disrespect, and desecrate this
complexity is disintegrative, and cannot ultimately succeed. The point of
failure will always occur in a field of missing information. Arrogance
before missing information is the catastrophic attractor of all delusions.
The question of this class is how does technology enhance the ongoing
processes of reality that can be understood as human nature, and how
does technology diminished the values of these processes. The building
up of these values is the integrative mode of technology as a
transformational mode of consciousness that allows the human to
become a greater whole than we now are. When the practice of
technology is integrative, that is, when enhancing values, then
technology is NOT other than human.
Diminishing these values is fractional and reduces the wholeness that we
are. When deficient and diminishing the values of the larger wholeness of
human experience from which it arises, when it reduces and lessons
what otherwise might be enhanced, then technology appears to be
OTHER than human because it exaggerates the deficient practices it
extends. There is a choice here, and a responsibility both grave and
joyous.
The patterns of <good and evil> in human nature arise with origin, are
archaic and archetypal, magical, mythic, and mental. The ultimate
character of integral consciousness is the integrative containment and
transformation of these patterns. In religious consciousness, the
transformation of these patterns is identified, with apocalyptic
importance, as full recognition of disintegrative suffering, the necessity of
repentance (turning around), metanoia (change of mind), and
regeneration (new birth and new life) through faith (unreserved
acceptance).
Generations now alive are facing magnitudes of change without
precedent in human experience. That sentence I typed with a mechanical
typewriter on onionskin paper more than thirty years ago. Now, in 2001,
perhaps the most universally stated questions on Earth concern
technology and the future of human nature.
As we begin to search through these things together, we can consider
that Plato identifies techne as a refined form of know-how, based on the
perception of ideas or images (logos, eidos) that are disclosed in nature
(physis). Plato himself examines techne with regard to matters of
grammar. We may have to make some effort to appreciate the technical
effects of <grammatical thinking> as a deeply enculturated norm. We in
these classes have largely been taught to reject and to de-value or to
dismiss non-grammatical thinking. Nevertheless, grammatical thinking
(as in the reading of this writing) is only one way of thinking, not the only
way of thinking. There are earlier structures of thinking—magical and
mythic.
Technology is a mode of revealing (Heidegger). Technology enhances
human ingenuity to unconceal new possibilities of experience, but always
at the cost of obsolescing what came earlier. After efforts at retrieving the
values of a perceived loss, an emergent, restructured consciousness is
organized. From the most basic number and writing systems to
supercomputers and Internet, technologies bring forth enhancement,
obsolescence, retrieval, and restructuration (McLuhan). Reflecting
human nature from the earliest origins, technologies extend processes
that are both integrative and disintegrative, creative and destructive,
blessed and cursed—processes through which we can both advance and
betray ourselves.
The Danger lies in enframing our projective creativity in delusions that
we can by our own ingenuity advance ourselves beyond all limits and
ultimately escape all costs (Heidegger). This amounts to worship of our
own projective identifications. Again, this element of human nature
precedes technology; it is an archetypal pattern of history. When acted
out on the grandest of technological scales, as we are now witnessing,
the effects of such delusions are selective inattention, narcissistic
numbness, psychic dissociation, cultural catastrophe, and selfamputation. Vast capital is invested toward magnifying our projective
power toward creation of an infinite mirror in which human will to power
is brought to perfection with invincible wealth, such that nothing could
ever be missing or lost. Doing so, we obsolesce our actual selves. Human
nature disappears in the mirror of technological pretension.
Marshall McLuhan observed that when radical, powerful, rapid
technological change occurs, what is "figure" and what is "field" between
cultures can be reversed. We are not "perceiving" what is actual because
of this radical field-figure reversal which exists in a "resonating interval"
of chaotic change. This is so between traditional cultures, and it also
true between the older and the emergent forms within a given culture,
and it is also intra-psychic.
In the 20th century, technology revealed the consequences of mentalities
that set out upon the world and enframe themselves as totally selfcontained, self-determining, and self-sufficient. This technological
movement justifies market conquest, total war, world dominion, mastery
of life and death, and synthetic immortality. The allure of artificial
intelligence and a quantum automaton is the projection of the perfected
human image, of permanent values without the limitations or necessities
of actual presence.
This is the figmentation of standing reserve and holding sway against
death (Heidegger). Such is not an image of who we are or who we can
become. The image we make of ourselves, invested with infinite capital,
cannot save us from ourselves, nor can it redeem us. The finite cannot
compel or dispose of the Infinite. To deny our incompleteness and
ambiguity is to terminate growth.
Origin means “to leap-forth” and “to arise” as with the leaping-forth and
arising of the very thought you are now experiencing. Your thinking is
originating. Technologies are integrative when clearing the way for the
possibilities of human nature in the fullness of the ever-present Origin
(Gebser). When technology enhances the processes of origination, it is in
an integrative mode. When technology diminishes origination, for
example, in reducing the value of the life of a single, unique individual, it
is in a disintegrative mode.
Perennial wisdom teaches that individual authenticity and integrity are
transcending values. Biology observes that ontogony repeats phylogeny—
the genesis of the individual repeats the genesis of the species.
Spiritually, the complementary statement is also a profound truth: The
fullest integration of values at the scale of magnitude of the unique
individual is the highest value. Integral psychology affirms the
overarching motivation for such fulfillment; violence in all forms and in
all techniques is the shadow of that motivation.
To the Greeks in the sixth century BCE, the guiding question was, What
is real?
At the beginning of the 21st century CE, guiding questions are:
How do we live and die?
What shall we become?
On the personal scale, the most urgent question is, How am I integrating
the missing information in my own identity and how is that process
being transmitted throughout corporate life and planetary life?
On all scales of magnitude, I am drawing our attention the importance of
recognizing the power shadow that has and could continue to
institutionalize the denial of human nature and our actual existence. All
power has a shadow (all consciousness, all existence has shadow).
Shadow is not all negative, but also positive. Shadow describes what is
hidden and lost, but also what is hidden and integrative. No one
“exercises power” perfectly; that remains a limit case. To deny shadow, to
deny one’s limits, can be deadly.
That is the key to shadow, in the most profound way; namely, what
changes when we truly and deeply face the fact that we do not have all
the information about ourselves and our intentions? This is the key to
humility, compassion, and wisdom: There is more than we know and
more than we can EVER know. The established attitude in modern and
late modern capitalism is that information=power=profit, thus what is
unknown and unknowable is nonsensical, non-existent. This contributes
to the massive, globalizing power shadow that has brought us to
planetary crisis. We are conducting incomprehensibly dangerous
experiments.
Present technological practices, with the momentum of economic forces
and confidence in the principles of information theory and cybernetics,
generally set aside epistemological concerns. Cybernetics, with a radical
rational-empiricism, grounds reality in information, mathematically
describable, and intentionality, as the referent of control system
operations. Cybernetic technologies generally operate with the intention
to increase the information computational power of the technologies inthemselves, including the generation of “standing reserves” [Heidegger] of
such power in the form of economic wealth, or capital. Cybernetic-based
reality models, in the extreme, can be expressed as the quest to extend
mathematical description of all possible information such that all
problems are subject to intentional solutions with an infinite surplus of
standing-reserves, or capital.
As with all fixed perspectives, the danger of cybernetic-based reality
models centers in what has been excluded from the model as irrelevant
or meaningless. It is not possible to establish information, or
mathematics, as an absolute ground of reality, and the attempt to do so
brings the dangers—on a very broad scale of magnitude—as any attempt
to fix a single perspective as the basis of reality.
Integral awareness transforms all intentionalities. Integral consciousness
models direct attention to awareness that has been excluded and
shadowed in science and technology—the experience of the poor, of
women, children, animals, and all living things. These models affirm the
spiritual dimensions of reality, the ever-present Origin, and all that is
brought forth of archaic, magical, mythic, and mental consciousness.
Integral consciousness affirms the nature of psyche as soul and finds
psyche to be a constituent of all cosmic reality, as was the original Greek
meaning.
Such inceptions as uncertainty and quantum wave function, non-locality
(signal-less communication), complementarity, and the observer effect,
open awareness of interconnectedness in science and technology. Such
awareness suggests include a re-imagining of science, technology, and of
capital that includes meaning as a constituent of reality as basic as
matter and energy.