Back in the first year of this blog, I wrote a piece called I love my new technomodified chakras that was partly about Ray Kurzweil’s concept of the Singularity. Kurzweil pointed out in a book called The Singularity is Near that we are starting to replace body parts by digital and electromechanical devices. His notion is that we will have achieved significant fusion of body and ’bot by 2045, and we will Borg onwards thereafter. For if we are fused with computers, then we are fused with whatever the Internet looks like 36 years from now.

I was reminded of this earlier this week by reports that researchers at the Cognitive Neuroscience Centre in Bron, France, had identified a centre in the parietal cortex of the brain that seemed linked to decision making. A few headlines announced the doctors (who had been operating on brain cancer patients when this emerged) had discovered the brain’s centre for free will. This seems overstated, especially because the patients, who were locally anaesthetised but not unconscious, believed they had moved fingers and limbs that had in fact remained stationary.

Still, one of the Qabalistic ideas that fascinates me is that the central sphere in the Tree of Life, called Tiphereth, is connected with the faculty of imagination. Decision-making stems from what are primarily imaginings. This brings us close to the realms of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret and the other creative visualisers out there. Which bothers me, especially because what I really wanted to write about this evening was the economy.

My remaining readers (thanks, both of you) may have been watching or reading upbeat news this week about the recession bottoming out, house prices stabilising and, in Canada, the creation of new jobs. Most of this is hooey, and a high proportion of the new Canadian jobs are self start-ups by people who see no chance of finding paid jobs this year, and so have taken their skill-sets, printed some cards and set up websites, and are freelancing. Been there, done that – good luck, because you’ll need it.

Europeans are much more pessimistic than North Americans, and are either despairing about the loss of a comfortable lifestyle, or, in parts of Germany and Hungary especially, joining right-wing organisations to campaign against Roma (Gypsies) or Muslim and other non-white immigrants. Or whomever.

This recession could be a sorting-out phase for macroeconomics, and it could be derailed by social issues surfacing in nasty ways. For years, Europe has bought off its own populations in many places, and once the money becomes unavailable, the trouble starts. Carl Jung referred to a visit he made to North America as an escape from “Europe, the mother of all demons,” and some of those demons are surfacing now. Before the wealth bought peace in eastern Europe, communist regimes enforced it. Yugoslavia, as an example, disintegrated into Bosnia, Serbia and other xenophobic republics after President Tito died and communism receded.

All of which makes me wonder what opinions we will be exchanging in our Kurzweilian singularity. As I pointed out in the technomodified chakras post, simply replicating the functions of the central nervous and endocrine systems won’t do much if we don’t grasp their potential. Since the experimentation that followed the psychedelic phase of the ’60s, if not before, we have usually tended to view any and all ‘spiritual’ occurrences as epiphenomena of ‘normal’ brain functioning. The idea that conventional mental processes might be a consequence or manifestation of a deeper stratum is not much in play in neuroscience. The spiritual is seen as the unpredictable exception, and thus a possible aberration; not the true ruling principle behind the confused and confusing manifest mind.

From a fear of being excessively curmudgeonly, I don’t complain too often here about the vicious incivility of online comments. But they can be frightening, like street thugs peeking out from their slums out on the fringes of social interaction. I like to think commenting online is just a hobby for the socially inept, who rarely dare to act out their hate. But while the equivalent to burning Roma homes and killing the occupants as they run out has not happened much recently on this continent (I acknowledge church burnings in the U.S. as one prominent exception) it would be naïve to imagine it couldn’t or won’t happen, especially if unemployment is widespread and persistent, and the hunt is on for convenient scapegoats.

We are, it’s fair to say, in a time of enormous pressure, and of little understanding of what to do. I don’t believe President Obama’s trillions in “loans” to banks and auto companies are safely distributed: there is too much chance of a second wave of default that could wipe out the whole economic base. But hunting for scapegoats, whether they be unpopular racial minorities, high-paid bank executives or unionised autoworkers, is understandable but also ludicrously irrelevant. We collectively accepted the benefits of an ultimately untenable pyramid of pseudo-wealth, so we collectively bear the responsibility. The only problem, it seems, lies in owning up to that fact.

So, assuming Kurzweil is right, and something like a bionic fusion of humans is possible in a few decades, who or what will be in charge? Will somebody program the protoBorg processing centres (PBPCs) to dilute the capabilities of our collective parietal cortices and make us more compliant? Will narrow communities, whether racial supremacist or Islamist or ultra-right wing capitalist, take over the various emerging parts of the PBPCs? If the world faces increased agony from long-term denial of creature comforts, let alone true wealth, what will be the governing factors? Will we still strive to go into space, or will we attempt to police all private behaviour? Or both?

The Thelemite in me wants to believe that deeper levels of consciousness would, in fact, move in regardless, taking advantage of the enhanced communication systems to push us through an intense, highly uncomfortable transition phase that marginalised the worst elements in our now-collective natures, and moved us into a more stable and higher-functioning mentality. Meditative awareness and mindfulness require no great wealth or credit cards (unless you pay your ashram or spiritual group through the nose), so we could become able to stabilise rage and pain and thought, at least within our own PBPC.

Kurzweil set out, it seems, to address this in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, which I’ve not read, but from online reviews seems to be about anything but what I would recognise as spirituality. Also, he predicts we will eventually shed all organic tissue and become pure machines, which tells me he doesn’t really know how to have fun. I suggest he isn’t the person to address topics beyond the level of what conventional ego-consciousness can embrace; but others in the Transhumanism movement presumably have.

The notion of such apparent diminution of individuality is distasteful to most people. Yet, if we accept any of the perspectives (Buddhist, Hermetic, Vedantist, Sufi et al) that view individual humans as major localisations of a vast, pre-existing supernal consciousness, the essential concept isn’t too dreadful. The fear is not that we might start to interlink (something we’ve been doing at least since the commercial telegraph emerged 170 years ago), but that we create something unable to adapt itself to what it unlocks. That is, that we link up through the mid-21st Century equivalent of Windows Vista, and our mental focus keeps crashing as we try to make it less balky and more inclusive of all our persistent humanity.

The Singularity (a term I dislike because I think it would actually be a Mega-Multiplicity) is still a long way off, and I don’t think Kurzweil, who appears to be both a perpetual optimist and a blinkered materialist, grasps all its ramifications. But something approaching it is bound to emerge eventually, unless we really are on the brink of bankrupting ourselves back to the Bronze Age.

Perhaps more than oil, or food, or water, we will in future be struggling to make such an agglomeration help us, not with what we have been doing for the past few decades (acquiring stuff with borrowed money), but finally fulfilling the dream of transcending our limitations of lifespan, intellect, memory and vision. The key thing, which I suspect Kurzweil might find somewhat irrelevant, is to include everything that has made us human till now, and not simply to reject it as uncool or grossly physiological. While I’m sure most transhumanists would insist they will do nothing of the sort in the near-perfect world that is coming, that seems to be the primary trap they could have us all fall into.