The Sacred Spaces of Margaret Wertheim
by Paul Mitchell
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 63
Autumn 1999

Part 3

Understood broadly, there are two proposed views of a future digitalised paradise, often referred to concurrently, both of which Wertheim refutes.

One is the idea of the eternal cyber-soul. The individual human mind is downloaded into cyberspace and lives forever, with or without an accompanying "avatar" image which digitally "embodies" the mind in cyberspace. The second idea is cyber-utopia. If the whole world logs on then the very nature of cyberspace, as Negroponti claims, will usher in a "New Jerusalem"; an egalitarian world community, which may or may not include digitally constructed cyber-souls.

Wertheim points out that the first view of cyber-Paradiso is effectively "an electronic reinvisionment of the Christian soul".

"Orthodox Christianity", she says, "has always said that when the resurrection comes then the virtuous go to heaven, but that you will not just be there in spirit, you will be there in body. The 'glorified body' won't age or get sick or die. These people don't recognise that they are reinvisioning a religious and specifically Christian dream. [But] they don't see it that way, they say this is just technology."

Wertheim doubts seriously that any attempt to create the on-line cyber-soul imagined first in William Gibson's 1984 novel, Neuromancer, could ever succeed. One of her chief objections stems from the fact that Hans Moravec, a robotics expert and significant proponent of this idea, says the downloading of the mind could be achieved by recording in sequence onto a computer each layer of the physical brain, all at one sitting. "For Moravec's process to work," Wertheim writes, "you would have to argue that every memory and every piece of knowledge that someone possessed were somehow electrically present at every waking moment. But in that case every moment would be one of omniscience. I find such a notion untenable."

Wertheim is equally sceptical about any 'wired utopia'. She sees too much evidence of exclusivism (emerging private chat groups) and cyber-misogyny (the exclusion and abuse of women in chat groups and USENET groups), notwithstanding ubiquitous pornography and forums for racial hatred and intolerance, for cyber-utopia to emerge simply as a consequence of the technology. And if we spend massive amounts of our time in the flesh logged onto the internet, what, she asks, will happen to physical community?

"You might be able to get friendship and connection and lots of wonderful things on-line but you sure aren't going to get looked after when you are sick", she says. "And that is why cyber-utopia is effectively the Manichean heresy, that the body is evil and that we need to get rid of it as quickly as possible. It is one of the major Christian heresies precisely because the church recognised that abandonment of the flesh is ultimately abandonment of communal responsibility."

Yet despite her concerns Wertheim remains positive about cyberspace's role in reconnecting humanity with the realm of the "immaterial". But for Wertheim the immaterial is not what theologians would recognise as 'spiritual'. Though she says theologians would be "deeply sympathetic" to her critique of cyber-utopian dreams, she believes we need to recapture Descartes' vision of res cognitans (minus its otherworldly, spiritual content) to help counterbalance the emphasis we have placed on the philosopher's vision of res extensa (the physically extended realm of matter in motion).
"For Descartes, the res cognitans was meant to be the realm of mind and spirit. What I am ultimately interested in is not so much a re-spiritualisation of the world, but that we have to take seriously the notion of the self, or the psyche, as an actual part of reality."

Wertheim is adamant in her rejection of the modern scientific view that the self is an illusion, that reality, in terms of mental phenomena, has to do purely and simply with the physical properties of the brain.

"I think that is utterly bogus. Descartes in saying 'I think therefore I am' is right; I am first and foremost this immaterial me that thinks and feels. The philosophical problem is to understand how that experiential self can actually know the physical world. The people of Descartes' time understood this. Modern scientists think that problem is resolved and I think they are simply wrong."

To: Perspectives Issue 63

Paul Mitchell Paul Mitchell is Associate Editor at Zadok and edits the e-zine www.shootthe messenger.com.au. (See Alan Gijspers' review of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace)