Transcendence and our Egotistical Desire to be Gods

by Christopher Barr

"The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity." 

- Ray Kurzwell 

Transcendence was a horribly executed film about a scientist, Dr. Will Castor that is shot with a poisoned bullet by an unrealistic group of 'grunge-rats' and before his death is uploaded into a powerful quantum computer.   Castor becomes the first person’s conscience that has been successfully uploaded into a computer and then uploaded onto the internet.  He does execute self-replicating nano-machines to help him 'save' the world from organic extinction. (The end of the film has another absurd notion of organic, nano-style.)

Sifting through the films many problems, including the lack of character chemistry, the plot holes and theme reversals, the film is at its core about loss.  It’s about how we grieve when we lose someone we love, and what we would be willing to do if we could prevent that loss.  Pet Cemetery dealt with this subject as well, when a dead child was buried purposely in an ancient burial ground knowing that this place resurrects the dead.  Obviously the child comes back but he’s not the same child his parents use to know and love.

Transcendence coasts along this same premise of selfish disbelief; people die all over the world but not my loved one, they’re special because I’m special.  So the film explores the idea of ‘transcending’ someone through a form of singularity into a computer and allowing them to live forever.  Dr. Castor’s wife Evelyn, unethically, uploads her dying husband into a computer to selfishly save herself the grief of his loss.

This film dives deep into how petty people can be, and how willing they are able go to not lose what they believe completes them.  This film explores selfishness to the ultimate decay of society itself.  It explores and exploits the structures of what is actually collapsing humanity in the first place.  Which is our unwillingness to let go of things even if it means it may hurt more people in the process.  We are emotional hoarders and we think that we are worth saving along with those that complete the story that we have built for ourselves.  We are microscopic in the universe and we only wish to be highlighted, we wish to be seen as special and we want those in our lives, family and then friends to see us as special, unique and worth saving.

It is phenomenal how wrong we are about ourselves and how we will most likely never arrive at that conclusion.  We as a species are not special in the universe, we are not even special on this planet, we are not special in the cities we live in, we are not special in our communities and generally, we are not special in our families.  But we believe we are bigger than life itself in some cases.  We celebrate our lives like they are worth celebrating on a universal level.  I’ll pose a scenario; what if only half the people on this planet were given the chose, to save themselves or the universe, what would they choose?  First most people on this planet are not educated enough to know that it’s a trick question.  If they choose themselves, they die, if they choose the universe, they die, the point is; how much outside of yourself is it possible for you to care about?  

This is not to say that half the people of the world are capable of killing us all, it just implies that they wouldn’t know better in the first place.  Meaning we are selfish not by status and community but rather by nature itself, which the Governments and Corporations in turn are easily able to control.  Evelyn, under the absurd odd circumstances of the film, even though she is a ‘smart person’, is knowingly and willingly conscious of destroying the world in order to maintain the illusion of her happiness.  This is and can only ever be defined as madness.

Technology isn’t the problem; it’s the people who misuse it.  This film attempts to display that these are two of the same but they are not.  At its best, technology is a marvel as humanity advances progressively through time.  The misuse of this technology by stupid people and corrupt people are what gives it a bad name.  It’s not the ice creams fault if the kid spills half of it on his face and shirt.  This film attempts to discredit technology but then in the end claims that it may save us.  It also attempts to discredit the idea of the soul and religious beliefs, through the scrutinizing quantum computation of artificial intelligence, only leaving us with the belief that this super computer has a soul that cares for individuals, for people.  Secular intellectuals like these scientists should clearly see this as an illusion but yet they don't, because there is a Hollywood dust that gets sprinkled on everything, distorting reality.

The problem with Artificial Intelligence is language as we know it, and how we use it all over the world, as well as consciousness.  First off, language is a system of signs that they themselves are only representations of reality and are not part of the real world at all.  It might be easy for one to say that we can program a computer to speak in a language, but the problem is; language itself doesn’t actually mean anything that can be computed as a value in the artificial mind of a computer that was designed by programmers, that they themselves, have no insight on the symbolic arbitrary nature that is language.   

Consciousness is a realm of the mind that is small compared to the vastness and the computational complexity of the unconscious, which stores a person’s every moment and every experience into a vast memory network.  To unleash that into an A.I. system without ever understanding it on any intellectual level is simply not possible.  Those that study the Singularity and the concept of Transcendence would hopefully and likely find this concept along with this film absurd.

This leaves us to the simple-minded people that are the masses that want to see movies with explosions, which this film about ‘smart people stuff’ is catering too.  This films biggest problem isn’t the subject matter; it’s the audience, the demographic it is trying to reach to make money.  By compromising this way, the potential film has become a movie, a movie where ideas go to die like that town dilapidated Brightwood where Evelyn goes to build Castor’s army of 'Hybrids'.

True transcendence is getting over yourself, by truly avoiding your narcissistic tendencies that govern “me-ness”.  This is the plague, the virus of humanity, this is and what will always pull us down from the peaks of progress; our desire to be celebrated as one even though we live in a world of many.  If we are unable to get over ourselves then we are all going to perish, because we can’t live in a world entirely built of Kings and Queens.