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The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature’s Plan for Humankind
Part 3. Space Brains

The Synergy of the Network

Virtual reality releases solitary dreamers into the collective dream.

As wakefulness and sleeping converge in the enriched brains of native extraterrestrials, conscious and unconscious subjectivity seem destined to fuse into an undifferentiated experiential mode. And the manufactured realities of digital media will be on hand to facilitate the fusion. Through digital wizardry, the synthetic environment of digital media approaches in style and content the surrealistic hyper-reality of the dream. Hollywood’s digital production houses, with increasing proficiency, manufacture cinematic product that incorporates the unearthly fly-around perspectives and temporal elasticity of the dream world. Television, particularly when promoting sugar and caffeine to children, already simulates with considerable fidelity the feel of the zany, weightless world of dreams. Just spend a Saturday morning watching cartoons on TV with the kids, and you'll know where the idea of flashback came from.

For its part, the dream world welcomes the input. Oneiros seems to crave novel props and incorporates technologies as soon as they become objects of waking consciousness. Airplanes, elevators, telephones, radios, and now computers readily insinuate themselves into the mind’s nightly fantasms. Within a few generations, the discontinuity between the structures and contents of private dreams and those of public culture might become indistinguishable. The surrealists’ fantasy of a culture of the unconscious surely was a premonition of the phenomenal world of digital programming, in which any scene or object can morph into any other according to the technical proficiencies and imagination of the programmers.

But the more extraverted among humankind’s extraterrestrial descendants might cringe at the prospect of terminal, albeit spectacular, introversion in the dream, even the lucid dream. For them the technology of computer networks might provide relief. Space brains will have at their cortex tips access to uncharted, digitally mediated frontiers of gregariousness.

Through broadcast virtual reality (VR), weightless dreamers will be free to reach out and touch their fellows interactively to create communities of networked dreamers. VR systems are sensorimotor-feedback devices that link users and computers in information-exchange loops. The motions of the users are fed into the computers, which respond by sending appropriate signals to the users through visors and headphones. The signals—translated by the visors and headphones into synthetic sights and sounds—give users the impression that they are interacting with a three-dimensional, physical environment. But the simulated environment exists only in the computer program. Nevertheless, it can be shared by as many inhabitants or visitors as the available computing power and bandwidth can support. (Variations on the VR concept are sometimes called telepresence or tele-immersion.)

The phenomenology of dreams segues naturally into that of virtual reality. Dreams and virtual realities alike are interactive and immaterial, though phenomenologically habitable, spaces. The literature on therapeutic and recreational VR applications seems modeled after that of dreams, especially that of lucid dreams. Themes of conflict resolution and wish fulfillment are prominent in descriptions of the virtues of both worlds. If Marshall McLuhan’s technological prostheticism struck near the mark, and electronic media extend into the physical world the collective patterns of human subjectivity, then VR technology extends specifically the capacity for lucid dreaming, not particularly into the physical world, but into the collective experience of the electronically networked community.

The simulated worlds of VR can only improve in resolution and responsiveness as the technology matures. The prospect of VR technology accessorized with brain sensors, such as those used in EEG monitoring, let alone brain implants, suggests the potential for a new level of intimacy of shared experience. Mythic forms from the unconscious could serve as blueprints for a cosmic arcade in which the shared experiences are manufactured from such stuff as dreams literally are made of.

One potential of VR has been thrown under a sobering light by writers of cyberpunk science fiction. The gothic-styled genre of high-tech low-life takes its dystopian inspiration from the familiar scene of glazed-over couch potatoes zonked by mass media. Cyberpunk writers have seen the implications for tomorrow’s technology: bodiless brains suspended in nutrient vats and synchronized with other vatted brains through electronic networks. The cyberpunk genre’s gothic stylizations can conceal the astuteness of its vision, namely that urbankind already consists of networked brains in vats. One need only notice one's co-motorists tuning their radios and fumbling with their cell phones to recognize it.

Nineteen ninety nine’s popular action film, "The Matrix" presented the brains-in-vats scenario to a large audience. The movie's premise involves the subjugation of humans by a race of malignant machines. The premise is taken to an extreme in which the ruling machinery cultivates human beings as an energy crop. Each head of human livestock is raised in a life-support pod, fed artificially, and tapped like a battery for excess metabolic energy. But the citizen slaves believe themselves to be living normal lives, thanks to a shared virtual reality piped into their brains. Little imagination is needed to recognize in this arrangement today's corporate cubicle farm, in which networked human livestock productively ruminate, their energies drained to feed the demands of industrial capitalism. And growing numbers of the wage slaves who occupy today’s protoMatrix do so in a state of pharmacologically induced complacency, thanks to a pharmaceutical industry eager to lavish antidepressants and anti-anxiety chemicals on a spiritually eviscerated labor force.

But the machines of the developing matrix need not exert their control coercively, as they do in the films of the Matrix series. Occupants eager to enter the pods, whether on Earth or in space, might not be hard to find. Many minds conditioned by the entertainment industry to be intolerant of the humdrum and by an advertising industry to crave the latest novelties already find synthetic realities superior to those that exist outside of cyberspace. The trend points to a global ant-hill culture in which a political power elite enlists each technological advance to more effectively neutralize dissent and keep the machinery of the hive humming.

The dystopian "brains-in-vats" scenario of the cyberpunk future approaches the star larvae scenario. But there are essential differences. The cyberpunk future is a dystopian one because it lacks central components of the extraterrestrial evolutionary program:

• The geographical separation of space colonists from terrestrial political control

• The solar economy of abundance

• The neurological enrichments of weightlessness.

It might be only in the unwieldy vastness of space, in a solar economy of abundance, that communities will be able to pursue destinies independently of the evolving global power elite. Once again, self-directed freedom-seekers might need to tackle a frontier to secure their autonomy.

On the optimistic side, and with noetic prescience, McLuhan glimpsed the light at the end of the postmodern tunnel. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man he summons an epiphanous image:

"Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson. The condition of 'weightlessness,' that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace."

McLuhan’s early grasp of what later would come to be called cyberspace may have been a reaching for the phenomenology of outer space. In the passage above, he proposes that technology has as its covert aim the engineering of a kind of rapture. Humanity's collective calling may be to fabricate the communion of angels by becoming it. Evolving into angels—or supermen, or whatever our extraterrestrial descendants turn out to be—will require letting brain circuits—neurological phenotypes—express themselves fully by letting them take shape weightlessly.

Humanity's complex of devices and programs and the extensions of that technological complex yet to come—within which neoteny drives evolution—can be seen as humankind’s attempt to engineer an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent parent. Evolution's Freudian objective is to allow human beings, or at least their posthuman descendants, to remain forever in a neotenous, juvenilized state. In space the program plays out as a metamorphosis of extraterrestrial humans into the (neotenous, supersentient) angels of religious and romantic popular imagery. On Earth, the technological program threatens to impose the nightmare scenario of a subjugation of humankind by a global technocracy and the devolution of humans into pharmacologically anesthetized drones tapped metabolically to serve a soul-less matrix/hive.

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