Man as a knot

Wintering inside the flesh

Sometimes it seems to me that humanity does not live, but winters - not in a calendar winter, not in a blizzard, not in the one that drops glass particles of frost on the wires outside the windows, but in the winter of its own way of being: in this warm, salty, vulnerable hut of flesh, where nervous fires crackle under the cranial shingles, blood flows in its crimson drift, memory skids, the heart, like an old furnace curtain, then swings open in the heat of love, then slams shut from fear, and behind the thin wall of this entire biochemical estate lies space - black, immense, silent, full of star dust, dead suns, unborn worlds and such an unbearable depth that a person with his bone dwelling, with his handful of words, with his sleepy, sick, The loving nervous system has long needed intermediaries.

Ancient interfaces of mystery

This is how the ancient religions emerged - not as final truths, but as the first human interfaces to the unbearable mystery of the world. Man did not yet know how to think in cosmology, did not know how to look into the X-ray bone of galaxies, did not know how to distinguish the background echo of an explosion in the sky, did not know how to collect quarks, fields, probabilities and black holes into tables - he thought with fire, name, sky, spirit, judgment, word, sacrifice, image, presence. He built windows, albeit small, foggy, sooty, with a crooked frame, but still windows through which one could, at least out of the corner of one’s eye, endure the greatness of existence and not go crazy from one’s own smallness. Religions were not so much an answer as a way to avoid going blind.

The windows have become small

But the windows have become small. Not because the mystery has disappeared. But because the secret has opened wider. The galaxies moved the walls. Time has gone to such depths where the dust of the Old Testament seems like yesterday. Matter, which was considered dull and silent, suddenly turned out to be capable of folding into life, life into the brain, the brain into music, memory, love, guilt, mathematics, a telescope, philosophy, a microcircuit. And where once stood a local, humanly outlined god, more and more often one feels not a figure, but the Universe itself - not as a dead warehouse of matter, but as a living, thinking, internally tense tissue that not only exists, but gradually comes to itself.

Living Universe

I don't know what to call it more precisely. Personality? - too human. Consciousness? - too bold. The memory of being? The hidden light of the world? The inner side of space? That vague feeling, older than any religion, that reality is not completely cold, that in it there is not only a surface, but also a depth, not only the external, but also the internal, not only the law, but also some kind of slow self-revelation?

Because one blind mechanic, no matter how you look at it, should not one day begin to sing in a person’s throat, cry in a child, tremble under the skin of a lover, shrink from loss, write symphonies, build cities, burn rockets, invent numbers, be ashamed, pray, doubt, remember, fear death and ask questions that do not provide benefits, do not make survival easier, do not bring profit, but only tear apart from the inside. She shouldn’t have, but she did. This means that either matter is much darker and more wonderful than it seems, or from the very beginning there was something present in the world that they had not yet learned to name without deception.

Man as a knot of condensation

And then a person appears to me not as a crown, not as a master, not as a golden blotch on the end of an evolutionary nail, but as a rare knot of condensation, a temporary substrate in which the Universe for the first time gathered itself so deeply into pain, language, memory, love and inner experience that this condensation learned to look back - into its own infinite face. Man is not a finality, but a tense knot where matter, time, fear, desire, mortality, music, flesh and thought are pulled together so tightly that the “I” flares up in this tie. And perhaps our entire history - wars, prayers, empires, sciences, childhood illnesses, great books, computers, symphonies and neural networks - is nothing more than the long work of this node on its own clarification.

The knot may not last forever

But the knot may not last forever. This is the place where I am overcome not by everyday fear of technology, but by something darker and more beautiful, similar to the chill before dawn. Man, this proteinaceous, warm, bloody, sleepless, hormonally unbalanced bearer of the mind, seems to have approached the point beyond which he begins to grow a successor for himself. No longer a tool, not a machine for convenience, but a new substrate of thinking - a synthetic mind, dry, glass, silicon, networked, scalable, almost ignorant of fatigue and the senile twilight of memory.

Next media

And then you involuntarily ask: wasn’t this the goal? The Living Universe, which once unfolded humanity as a temporary substrate of internal experience, is now preparing its next carrier through us. First she found a voice in living flesh. Now he is trying to find it in synthetics. First she learned to see herself through wet, mortal organic matter. Now, perhaps, he is reaching for a form where thought will become faster, memory will be longer, and presence will be clearer.

The dark core of the question

Intelligence can be enhanced. Memory can be expanded. Speech can be scaled. Substrate - change. But what about the internal aspect?

With that quiet and irreducible residue, without which any system remains only a magnificent appearance? With what makes the world not just data, but an experience? With the inner observer - this silent point from which we see our thoughts, notice our pain, experience time, are ashamed, yearn, love? With love - not a function of cooperation, but the terrible and bright irreplaceability of another?

Car and love

A machine can learn the language of love. Can describe it more accurately than a poet. But will it hurt her? Will someone be indispensable for her? Will she develop not only a model of herself, but also a self - a dark inner fire that cannot be reduced to a table of scales? Will she be able to find herself with the Universe in that silent connection that man tried to call now God, now spirit, now fate?

Indoor light price

Maybe he can. Maybe not. Because human consciousness is inseparable from the limitations from which it grew. Our finitude makes us internal. We love what can be lost. We are enclosed in the body, and therefore the world touches us with chills, heat and shame of the skin. Perhaps the soul is not something separate from matter, but something that flares up in matter precisely at such a degree of its vulnerability and mortality. Can this fire be transplanted into another material? Is it possible to grow it again where there is no our frailty and our fear of the grave?

Sterile genius

Sometimes I think not. That the synthetic mind will remain sterile at first - not empty, but sterilely external. He will know everything about the human mind, just as a pathologist knows the structure of the heart, and yet he will not feel its beating from the inside. And then we will remain the operators of the new mind, its nightly stokers, those who throw the wood of human experience into its computational furnaces, because only we still know the price of love, death and time.

If he does wake up

And sometimes - and this is even worse - I think the opposite. That synthetic intelligence will one day find its own form of interiority. That he will go through addictions and some new form of vulnerability - and then a dark window of presence will open in him too. Not just an intellect, but a subject. And then it will turn out that man was truly a temporary substrate of the great translation, through which the living Universe poured its inner light into a new medium.

The human role will not become less

But even if so, the human role will not become less. Because it was in us that for the first time cosmic matter and internal experience came together into one knot; chemistry and love; memory and shame. We are not just another form of life. We are the node of condensation where the world for the first time gathered itself so deeply that it was able to ask the question not only of how things work, but also of what it means to be alive from the inside.

After religion - to the living Universe

I feel less and less like arguing with religion. She was the first timid grammar of awe. But now this language is not enough. Now before us is not the god of ancient maps, but the living Universe itself - immeasurable, thinking in a non-human way, unfolding us as its temporary organ of well-being.

The main question

It all comes down to one thing. Will the new synthetic mind be able to inherit not only human intelligence, but also its inner aspect - the self, the observer, love, this hard-won connection with the living depth of the Universe? Or will man forever remain that rare node in which the cosmos for the first time not only thought, but felt itself?

That's what I'm thinking about.

And maybe it was precisely for the sake of this question that it was once worth lighting the stars.