Improving Human Consciousness
From the Natural to Artificial and Virtual
The world of Humanity will increasingly evolve by incrementing the artificial factor — the material basis created by man with his technical means. Man sets images and rebuilds the world of Nature for his own needs — either by dividing the matter by those parts, from which he constructs his own world, or by cultivating the species of flora and fauna, that he, for the most part, consumes. At that, the very essence of natural origin is emasculated, which allows the elements of nature to develop and adapt in the course of gradual evolution.
Man’s impact is truly revolutionary: he never waits. He needs results here and now, because life is short and the force of possession, passion for consumption and the power of creative transformation multiply the speed of all biochemical processes, intruding into the normality of Nature’s ‘laboratory’.
Consciousness acts as a catalyst in the transformation processes.
At the first stage, the new material order is created — the man-operated world of everything artificial, non-biological, but with small inserts of the natural, domesticated and tamed. Yet man does not dare to cut his navel cord with Mother Nature: he inclines to agricultural production, prefers everything natural; and from Nature’s harmony, he derives energy and finds the principles of his existence. But the artificial world begins to grow rapidly in the twentieth century, capturing the positions that once seemed unshakable: the Nature’s matter becomes raw material, a subject for evaluation and classification; and its inventory defines what resources — and for how long — will be substantial for people.
Man’s attitude to Nature can be called a full-scale ethical catastrophe.
This pushes people to the complete neglect of natural laws. Besides, it can be somewhat called ‘growing pains’ in the throes of growing up: a peculiar period of Mankind’s adolescence was marked by global wars, in which millions of individuals, conscious of their ‘I’, were unable to curb their own aggression or draw it on to SELF-DEVELOPMENT.
There was a conflict between the centuries-old attraction in the once holy lap of Nature (reflected in folklore as Mother Earth or Mother Nature) and enforced isolation of millions of people from this profound affection, aggravated by the occurrence of unusual and confusing data store, in which all achievements and problems of civilization, and, at the same time, dangerous negative tendencies began to reflect. All this led to a feeling of isolation of a particular personality from the roots of nature, swept by the giant waves of information into the void of abandonment, loneliness, and neurotic existentialism.
Unable to realize what was happening, millions of people rushed headlong into the suicidal streams, clashed in bloody wars, destroying naturalness in others, at the cost of wasting of all the ethical principles of the Conscious in themselves. The cutting of the navel cord was not bloodless at all; but the Man’s world was different — subordinate to the artificial laws of the artificial world — more sophisticated, more techno-genetically severe, more information-dependent, and less natural, less harmonious.
Languages began to change, adapting to the rapidly expanding information field. The value of linguistic forms is not as much of their richness of emotional expression, as the ability of concise summary, high communication and well-defined message — the more intense, the more comfortable.
Even philosophers were confused in their attempts to reflect the meaning of what was happening in the background of something constant and logically aligned. Philosophy began to turn into linguistics — a dispute about the forms and methods of expression, a hermeneutical device attached to the world escaping into the artificiality. The form of presentation of philosophical treatises became lifeless, obscure, artificial, and far-fetched — generally, a pathetic attempt to reflect grandness of transformations, even without affecting the ethical metamorphosis and problems of coexistence of biology and consciousness.
Not the love of wisdom, but a desire of self-expression and self-realization, a desire to be modern and quite incomprehensible to obtain a place in the cemetery of theories and concepts — these are the motivations of some pseudo-thinkers works for the last hundred years. They do not give answers, why it is that man felt the need to rise above Nature and what consequences it would cause; generally, how much of this is due to the development of the Universe, to what extent it is inherent to the world’s existence and whether there is a purposefulness — of higher or of current, or momentary character.
Humanity is stepping into a new phase of its own reconsideration: it cracks not only the natural world, but also the world of artificial being — like a nutshell of the material world. Man is hatched into the super-material world; he is caught by the streams of information, he is taken beyond the borders of Being into the world of virtual Consciousness, where, on the verge of contact between Something and Nothing, the laws of life are deformed to disappear altogether, having conceded its superiority to an omniscience of the Highest Consciousness.
“In the twilight of the second millennium, a unique synergy of technology and culture has formed which received the name of ‘virtual reality’. The uniqueness of this phenomenon lies in the fact that, until recently, culture sporadically included some technical innovations (for example, in music, new mechanical and electronic instruments have appeared); and only with the advent of virtual reality, the situation has radically changed: now it is the technology, which involves the ENTIRE culture. On the same compact disk, there are artistic images, music, and text recorded, for all the muses to join as one in virtual ecstasy into a single multimedia entity called ‘electronic game’. Any supreme goal must be inevitably closed within itself and to serve nothing but self-achievement; otherwise, it will not be the supreme goal but the intermediate one. In light of this, the supreme goal of technology and culture, bonded together in virtual reality, is presented by that very externally aimless game. Man of the future is that Homo ludius — ‘the playing man’. The aim of the game is an exit to the different reality in order to create a new universe and become a God in it. Th ink about it: what can be grander than these plans and where else can they be carried out, but beyond the boundaries of our world?” (Alexroma)
Creation of virtual reality is the inevitable aspiration of Reason in all of its forms.
At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there is a virtual reality; and it carries away and attracts people a lot more than the whole world of artificial being for the last few centuries. As the biological aspect earlier conceded its billion-years old bastions to the artificial one, now the virtual and informational aspects acquire the power over the people, raising and activating the conscious beginnings and suppressing the flesh — the biological part of man. Nature always has been something unpredictable, incomprehensible, too slow developing for man. He has been always trying to speed up the processes of evolution: after all, his own life is so short that he is not able to enjoy all the fruits of his own labor — so he hastens the environment. For the rapidly growing intelligence, the evolution of being seems infinitely retarded, practically imperceptible throughout a single human life. The intelligence longs for productivity, to make the person entirely targeted on achieving his objectives and results. The mind hurries a man, spurs him in his thought creation and further transformation of being.
Of course, the development and outcome of the existential evolution have been calculated in colossal dimensions, which lies beyond all knowing and understanding by the human mind; and it does not set off feelings of participation in the well-ordered, harmonious development of being from one ‘Big Bang’ to another. This process of revival of the Universe, which is difficult for human consciousness to accomplish, has no primary importance for each single person. It is the Highest Consciousness that is anxious about understanding of this infinite mystery play. Man is more concerned about his own entity, the presence of a conscious start, and the participation of his conscious ‘I’ in the world of intellectual relationships.
Able to reproduce non-material things, to create in his minds myriads of worlds, images and forms, man is actively using the highest creative potential. That is where an infinite field for thought creation lies — where habitual language borders are lost and new thought forms are launched, quite different from all the natural and earthly. Hence arises the neglect of Nature. The Earth and Nature are favored as a picnic area, an integral part of landscape design for the civilized world, overloaded with artificial matter. Humankind wishes to see this part of the natural beginning as the most convenient for administrating, devoid of unpredictable dangers and metamorphoses.
More than five thousand years ago, the spiritual began to get deeper into man’s everyday life. Then the human consciousness came to a new level: the Homo sapiens began to fit out the supernatural world of his own, actively creating artificial elements in his natural life environment.
After fifty centuries, Mankind is trying to create artificial intelligence, an artificial prototype of consciousness, an artificial rationality. Humanity creates its own completely non-natural, non-material world of virtual reality.
Possibly, in the coming decades we shall be fully convinced that the thinking matter will inevitably guide us to the spiritualized matter, and further on — to a non-material spiritual state.
Kayros O`Hara