Snow Crash is Neil Stephenson's deeply insightful and all too probably prophetic cyberpunk science fiction novel. In it he mixes an ersatz interpretation of ancient near eastern history with cutting edge information theory, a complicated view of biblical history and glossalia into a funny and terrifying picture of the not-to-distant future.
The basic premise of the novel is that all the really important aspects of reality are manifestations of information. More importantly, information is viral, that is information seeks to propagate itself and will coopt any handy reproductive media or mechanism to do so. Biological viruses coopt the reproductive mechanisms of cells, computer virus coopt CPU space and ideas coopt human minds and even cultures and societies to replicate themselves. Thus, in this view, information proceeds the medium in which it will choose to replicate itself.
The concept that reality is fundamentally informational is a serious and credible concept intellectually. And if you were here last year I alluded to the possibility that John 1:1 asserts precisely that this concept, that information precedes material reality. That the Word: ordered articulation of reason, is God, and that by Word, and through Word, ie information as personality everything was made that has been made.
But in his view that information is viral, that it seeks to perpetuate itself, Stephenson has clearly been influenced by the incredibly seminal writing of Richard Dawkins, evolutionist/geneticist cum popular philosopher. He argues very persuasively that computer code and DNA are both literally (and not just metaphorically) software and that the only difference between them is their medium, (electricity on silicon chips vs. chemicals in organic lifeforms) and mathematical base (binary vs. quaternary). That this is true is indisputable. But what is less than obvious is that he can make a logical leap from the equivalence of electrical and chemical information processing to the concept that ideas can co-opt mind and culture to replicate.
The premise of Stephenson's book is not serious. Its just a well written novel.
But many concepts in science and larger culture have a value and importance much greater than a literal basis in scientific fact. Dawkins has created a paradigm, and in so doing influenced the influential Stephenson. The wildfire spread of the meme about "memes" is almost a proof of the theory. So rapidly has the concept spread into the intellectual mainstream (if there can be one for a new field of such youth and dubious pedigree) of information culture theorists that a new science of mimetic engineering, which is social parallel to genetic engineering, is being studied by the 2050 Project a joint effort of the Santa Fe Institute and the World Resources Institute. This research will study the extent to which social evolution can understood in terms of the self-propagation of ideas and possibly to create new technologies for taking charge of the direction of social development, (anybody getting nervous yet?)
For the Christian, Stephenson's book has another interesting and quite significant twist. The virus that is in different forms replicating biologically, through computers and through the culture is an ancient virus that short circuits the neural circuits for higher reasoning and creates a heightened state of suggestibility. And its primary manifestation is episodic glossalalia--speaking in tongues. The first outbreak of this virus is recorded in the story of the Tower of Babel. And the Babel virus was perpetuated through the religion of Asherah worship, both through the formal religious teaching, and through sexual transmission in cultic temple prostitution.
However, an antidote to this virus arose in the form of the first rational religion, Judaism. Judaism was the first religion to use its teaching and rules to promote informational hygiene. Jesus Christ comes along and sort of launches Judaism 2.0, and updated more laid back but still rational and information hygiene promoting religion. But, the virus is back in its version 2.0 at Pentecost, where the Babel virus reasserts itself.
Stephenson wrote a very good science fiction novel. It is not intended to be taken seriously, even though, as I have said, the concepts behind it are being taken very seriously indeed.
For I believe that Stephenson has unwittingly given us an entire new way to think about God's strategy in human history and the history of salvation.
Note: God is person, but he is also Word, ordered articulated reason. This word creates hardware physical reality in which something goes disastrously wrong. So God has to introduce a written code, in which the culture and ultimately life transforming memes would be transmitted. But God was not content to have these memes float freely through human society. This was not a robust enough medium. These memes needed to be incubated and transmitted through human flesh, so the Word, became flesh, and created a community of people who would literally embody righteousness and in the transmission of truth through generation after generations of the Church truth memes would be transmitted. But like a kind of reverse AIDS would be a redemptive virus that creates eternal life instead of eternal torment.
Now. If God is indeed the ultimate memetic engineer, but he is not the only memetic engineer. His greatest student is also his arch enemy. Satan. And Satan has a major edge on God. God has to introduce his memes as viruses. Satan is the spiritual Microsoft of reality. He controls the operating system of our world, and he bundles a set of demonic memes with every human life unit.
So lets look at this issue of memes as they effect human beings and through human beings human history.
Human belief structures operate at two levels. Again to borrow a helpful IT analogy, information in a computer can reside at any number of levels. At the highest level information can be data in fields in records in a database. There information is discrete, overt, identifiable and accessible. However, information also resides in the operating system. Young users of Macintosh machines manage quite well without knowing any of the information in the MAC OS and indeed without even knowing that that information is there.
Database level information are our conscious beliefs. These are memes like, Jesus Christ is Lord and the Bible is utterly true. It is easy to think that these beliefs are the most important ones but it is not true. For while it is possible to have completely incorrect information in a database and still run your computer, if you have bad information in your operating system, you have a crash.
It is even possible to load MS-DOS as a file in a Unix box. Two completely different operating systems on the same computer. But which OS dictates the behavior of that unit.
Satan cares about the data in the files on our hard drive. He wants to cause us to be in error every where he possibly can. But Satan is far more concerned to insert his memes at the operating level in society and in the minds of individuals.
There is no more fundamental operating system level concept that what it means to be a self, what it means to be a human. These beliefs are so operating system level that many people would be surprised to know that the things like "self" and "being human" are beliefs at all, or at least beliefs that it is worth talking about. To many people they are self-evident concepts like, the earth exists, or time exists.
But there are many different ways to think about what it means to be a self, to be human, and what we think about with regard to these categories will shape how we think about who God is, how we relate to him, and what kind of society we ought to have.
It is really only possible to understand what it means to be a self by meeting up with another version of a self can be.
I obviously do not have time to elaborate on what I see as five challenges to the concept of a biblical definition of being human and selfhood. But I want to insist that these memetic changes in how our society sees what it means to be human have very significant real world consequences.
The debate on abortion, and the apparently unconvictable existence of Dr. Jack Kavorkian are current, right here and now examples of just how real and practical are consequences of these changes happening in our world.
Challenge 1: Postmodernity:
1. Reality is completely socially constructed:
Turkle: Jill Greenberg Wired April 1996
"...modernism...assumes that beneath any surface exists a timeless and placeless truth..."For postmodernists [like Turkle], no unitary truth resides anywhere. There is only local knowledge, contingent and provisional. And it will have to do since its all we have."
"Liquid Architecture in Cyberspace": from Cyberspace: First Steps from MIT Press"
Objective reality itself seems to be construct of the mind and thus becomes subjective. The "reality" [not quotation marks] that remains seems to be the reality of fiction....The trajectory of thought seems to be from the concrete to the abstract but the new concreteness is not that of Truth, but that of embodied fiction. The difference between embodied fiction and Truth is that we are the authors of fiction. Fiction is there to serve our purposes, serious or playful, and to the extent that our purposes change as we change, its embodiment also changes. Thus while we reassert the body, we grant it the freedom to change at whim, to become liquid. p. 226
Quoting Turkle:
Fredrick Jameson wrote that in a postmodern world, the subject is not alienated but fragmented. he explained that the notion of the alienated presumes a centralized unitary self who could become lost to himself or herself. But if, as a postmodernist sees it, the self is decetered and multiple, the concept of alienation breaks down. All that is left is an anxiety of identity...Today the personal computer culture's most compelling objects give people a way to think concretely about an identity crisis. In simulation, identity can be fluid and multiple, a signifier no longer clearly points to the thing that is signified and understanding is less likely to proceed through analysis than through navigation through virtual space.
Challenge 2: Disembodied human interaction
1. MUDS, MOOS, MUSHES
2. Virtual Reality
Challenge 3: Blurring of distinction between man and machine:
Hardware:
The possibility of interfacing elements of the peripheral nervous system with a silicon chip has become a reality. Rosen and Glasser (1987) have shown that a properly designed and fabricated implantable microchip can both record and stimulate elements within a peripheral nerve...The prospect of using implantable electronic devises, such as intraneural silicon chips, sets the stage for direct nerve to prosthesis linkages. Such linkages may be bi-directional, sending signals peripherally to generate electronically controlled motion, or receiving signals from electronic sensors embedded in the prosthesis. . "Microsurgery: The Future", Derry, Escape Velocity
Branwyn in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering reports a Stanford University experiment in which "microelectrode array[s] capable of recording from and stimulating peripheral nerves remained functional in laboratory rats up to a year after implantation.
Software: Downloading
For some computer scientists electronic technology has opened up the possibility of copying human minds onto computer software. The human body would become obsolete while human minds wold circulated on multiple software copies. Proponents of downloading human consciousness argue that humans would achieve immortality, but the notion can be understood to foretell human extinction. Human bodies, for these scientists, are entirely expendable. Speculation about the nature of human identity inevitably arises in discussions of human software copies. Flame Wars: The discourse of Cyberculture Mark Derry ed. p. 163-164 Sex, Memories and Angry Women, Claudia Springer
Challenge 4: Artificial Intelligence:
Artificial intelligence is blurring the line between human and computer based consciousness
Vernor Vinge extrapolates the implications of the continuing exponential growth in computing power unit of cost and predicts that the chips with the computing power of the human brain will be reached in by the end of the second decade of the next century.
For the purpose of understanding what is happening to the concept of human, it does not matter for our purposes whether this is true or not. What matters is that this is being seriously believed by many thoughtful, credible people. Thus the meme "meaning of human" continues to be shaped by the Information Culture completely apart from the actual probability of the predictions of Vinge and others will come true.
Challenge 5: Genetic Programming
Molecular biology and genetics is blurring the line between:
animal and machine
machine and human
animal and human
Challenge 3
What are the essential ingredients of humanity? What is technology? How do the two relate, and what, if anything can we do about it? (130) I believe that the essential properties of humanity...are semi-independent creatures that inhabit the human spirit. They are virtues like faith, hope and charity. They are also the Seven Deadly Sins. And they are all the oft-repeated loops of human glory and folly that are negotiations between those communities of behavior. But if you look for the native home of these abstractions, virtuous or sinful, you find they don't live solely inside individuals' heads. They live in the spaces between people's heads. They dance in the field of interaction . As with technology. they are inside us and we live inside them. The human virtues are about connection--achieving it, sustaining it, believing in it--while the sins, as Nietzsche held, are about separation. Human sins are the creatures showed behavior amplifies the separateness of the flesh until they create a separateness of the soul. 132-134
140 "It seems clear that we are wiring a better nervous system for Humanity itself."
One does not have to agree with either the scientific or philosophical world view of Dawkins to find the concept of memes a productive one. And, having recognized that memetic engineering is at least thinkable, a new way of looking at the how and why of God's intervention in human history becomes accessible--that God is a memetic engineer on a cosmic scale. For example, one can view God's order of the annihilation of the as a particularly brutal, but utterly necessary exercise in what Stephenson has called "informational hygiene."Moloch worship required the sacrifice of children while Ashtoreth worship involved temple prostitution. So the whole vocabulary of religion and spirituality was memetically contaminated. In time of the patriarchs the word that would be so central to the understanding of God--"qadosh" the Hebrew word for "holy"--could actually be associated with temple prostitution.
"Memetic Engineering" Ideas Fores Wired May 1996 p. 101 James Gardner
Revolutionary Evolutionist Wired 3.07 Michael Schrage
So far this has just been preamble. But an important one.
For some computer scientists electronic technology has opened up the possibility of copying human minds onto computer software. The human body would become obsolete while human minds wold circulate on multiple software copies. Proponents of downloading human consciousness argue that humans would achieve immortality, but the notion can be understood to foretell human extinction. Human bodies, for these scientists, are entirely expendable. Speculation about the nature of human identity inevitably arises in discussions of human software copies. Computer scientists as well as science fiction writers have speculated on the authenticity of electronically copied minds. The scientists, however, write from a strictly empirical standpoint, using rhetoric that lends their exterminatory ideas the illusion of scientific ideas. Marvin Minksy, one of the foremost researchers in the field of artificial intelligence, entertains the notion that your mind could be duplicated by replacing each new brain cell with a special computer chip. Minsky asks "Would that new machine be the same as you?" if it were placed in the same environment as you and could function using the same processses as your brain? He responds that microscopic differences would exist between your brain and the brain machine sinc, "it would be impractical to reproduce with absolute fidelity all the intercations of your brain." But you could not claim, writes Minsky, that these microscopic differences make the duplicate different from your mind because you yourself are constantly changing and are never exactly the same as you were a minute ago.
Although Minksy's perspective is completely literal rather than metaphorical, his description of human identities undergoing constant changes resembles poststructuralist theories of decentered subjectivity, according to which individuals do not have fixed stable identities but assume changing subjecdt positions determined by language, gender and other social and cultural institutions. He differs from poststructuralist in his faith in sciences. Minsky analyses human identity in order to support his position that artificial intelligence research, using the logic and rationality of science, can succeed in creating a human mind equivalent to the human mind. For poststructuralist theories, science, like any metanarrative that purports to express universal truth, is constrained by its ideologue underpinnings and maintains status as truth only within its own terms.
Flame Wars: The discourse of Cyberculture Mark Derry ed. p. 163-164 Sex, Memories and Angry Women, Claudia Springer