The
Star Larvae Hypothesis
Omnipresent VirtualitiesVirtual reality releases solitary dreamers into the collective dream.
As waking and sleeping converge in the enriched brains of our extraterrestrial descendants, the conscious and unconscious experience of those descendants should fuse into a much less differentiated mode of subjectivity.Immersive media are at the ready to help bring about this fusion, to help colonize the dream state. Already, digital wizardry approaches in style and content the surrealistic hyper-reality of the dream. Hollywood movies, with increasing fidelity, capture the unearthly fly-around perspectives and temporal elasticity of dreams. Television, notably when promoting sugar to children, evokes the zany, weightless world of dreams. Mass media compose a world of the surreal
For its part, the world of the dream incorporates new technologies as they come on line. Airplanes, telephones, radios, and now computers insinuate their ways into the dream milieu. Surrealist fantasies of a culture of the unconscious look today like a premonition of the computer age, in which any scene or sound can morph into any other. But extraterrestrial extroverts might cringe at the prospect of terminal, albeit spectacular, introversion in the dream, even the lucid dream. For those extroverts, the networked dream might compensate for any unwanted introversion. Space brains will have at their cortex tips access to uncharted frontiers of expression, gregariousness, and interpersonal fusion. Through virtual
reality (VR) technologies, weightless dreaming becomes a social medium. VR systems
are sensorimotor-feedback setups that link users and computers in information-exchange
loops.
The Communal Lucid DreamThe phenomenology of dreams segues naturally into that of virtual reality. Dreams and virtual realities 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 of these phenomenological domains. 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 networked community. "A
biotechnical, and not merely biochemical, straitjacket,
whereby the psychophysiology of an individual's behavior would be permanently
relayed to instantaneous information capabilities, his/her body wired
with electronic pathways that would extend the nervous system. [. .
. . ] Once this happens, adoption of a sedentary life tends to become
final, absolute, since the functions traditionally distributed within
the real space of the town are now exclusively taken over by the real
time of the wiring of the human body."
— Paul Virilio "The
real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory
banks and command models—and
with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of
times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no
longer measured against some ideal of negative instance.
It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it
is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer
real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating
synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without
atmosphere."
— Jean Baudrillard Virtual, or synthetic, realities can become only increasingly engaging as they improve in resolution and responsiveness. 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 will be available as blueprints for a cosmic arcade in which experiences are manufactured from such stuff as dreams are made of. The Brains-in-Vats ScenarioOne 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. Cyberpunk writers have seen the implications of tomorrow’s tech: bodiless brains suspended in nutrient vats, networked and synchronized with other vatted brains. The cyberpunk genre’s Gothic stylizations can obscure the astuteness of the vision, namely the insight that urbankind already consists of networked brains in vats on wheels. One need only notice one's co-motorists fumbling with their phones to recognize it. Nineteen
ninety nine’s popular action film, "The Matrix ![]() But the machines of the developing matrix need not exert their control coercively. Human beings eager to enter the pods, whether on Earth or in space, will be easy to find. Many minds conditioned by an entertainment industry to despise the humdrum and by an advertising industry to crave novelty surely will find synthetic realities to be as appealing as anything that exists outside of cyberspace. An eagerness to transcend the meatbot by plunging into a comprehensive environment of synthetic inputs expresses itself through the ambitions of transhumanism, a movement that advocates plunging headlong into as technologically mediated a reality as can be engineered. Transhumanism's selling points revolve around technological enhancement of human faculties, the enhancements intensifying until reaching a breaking point: the vaunted "Singularity," a secular rendition of Heaven/Nirvana. That oligarchs would encourage their subjects to embrace a programmable digital world, thereby further empowering themselves, seems not to occur to transhumanist enthusiasts. Transhumanism or Exohumanism?The dystopian "brains-in-vats" scenario of the cyberpunk future approaches the star larvae scenario. But essential differences distinguish the two plotlines. The cyberpunk future is dystopian because it ignores foundational elements of the extraterrestrial program: It might be only in the unwieldy vastness of space, in a prosperous solar economy, 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, Marshall McLuhan glimpsed the light at the end
of the postmodern tunnel. In Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man
McLuhan’s early grasp of what later would 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 evolving into it. Evolving into angels—or whatever label best suits our extraterrestrial descendants—will require letting brain circuits express themselves fully by letting them take shape weightlessly.
"The
new media are not bridges between man and nature:
they — Marshall McLuhan Humanity's complex of devices and programs and the extensions of that technological complex yet to come can be seen as humankind’s attempt to engineer around itself an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent parent. This Freudian ambition has as its goal the preserving of humankind's posthuman descendants in a state of retarded, neotenous, development. On Earth, this program threatens to impose the nightmare scenario of a global technocracy perpetually exploiting its anesthetized drone-citizens. In space, however, the program plays out as a metamorphosis of humans into the angels of the religious imagination.
The Star Larvae Hypothesis: Stars constitute a genus of organism. The stellar life cycle includes a larval phase. Biological life constitutes the larval phase of the stellar life cycle. Elaboration: The hypothesis presents a teleological model of nature, in which
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