Perception, Reality, and the Post-Human

There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dream girl together, the dream girl takes him apart.
William Gibson
Neuromancer

The idea of multiple realities over varying mediums is fascinating. The images Cronenberg envisions in Videodrome and Gibson creates in Neuromancer are as prescient and applicable to today's image-driven, technophilia societies as they are in the creative realities they create in their works. Walking across campus, one can see the realities of our students played out across these varying realities through a number of mediums. A young lady sits behind a keyboard on the first floor of the library. In her hand she has the latest smart-phone as she texts with an unknown entity, she is holding a conversation with a classmate physically sitting next to her, and she is Facebooking another friend in a third landscape. Technically she exists here in this three dimensional reality, but she is just as real, at least her conversation is, to the characters she is texting via airwaves and through the fiber optics of the university internet server system. So how do we address these realities, and what is the logical end to our present reality? Are there a series of multidimensional realities in our future as illustrated by Gibson in Neuromancer and, as the cliched nineties t-shirt that deplored us to Kill Your Television, a real concern?

To answer these questions, we must begin with the venerated, Dr. Oblivion. Dr. Oblivion is a twist on the Memorex logo: is it real or live. Dr. Oblivion, with partners, developed the Videodrome "virus" to control the minds of viewers de-synthesized to ever increasing visual acts of sexual abuse and violence. Dr. Oblivion, fearing the control of the virus over its viewers, seeks to destroy his creation. His partners at Spectacular Optical, in turn, murder Dr. Oblivion with his own creation, the Videodrome virus. The theme of the creator destroyed by his creation is explored in more depth in William S. Burroughs's "Talking Asshole" routine in Naked Lunch, where a ventriloquist teaches his asshole to talk and the creation ultimately consumes the creator with a mind of its own. (Cronenberg and Gibson both borrow heavily from Burroughs's control routines.) Attempting to capture his "essence" and foist his warning of danger to the public, Dr. Oblivion, in a contradiction of argument, records thousands of hours of videotape to polemicize the use of the media (used roughly in this sense to cover all forms of media-internet, texting, video, and print) as an agent of control. In fact, the danger is that the creators of the Videodrome virus, as Cronenberg describes it, have something Max does not: "It has a philosophy. And that is what makes it dangerous." The philosophy is the agent's use of control.

For the Videodrome virus, the agency of control is manifested in the use of the television. Today, though, we can argue any technological visual interface is an agent of control and not too far from Dr. Oblivion's assertion that "Television is reality, and reality is less than television." If we deconstruct this statement, it's true. We have to accept reality as a Decartesian paradigm of "I think; therefore, I am." Perception is reality, but amongst what planes are these realities manifested in a sentient and human ontological experience? The mere notion of thought is simply not enough to create the I. In a virtually constructed world, the I's identity can be created by an external thought constructed by another individual manufacturing its digitized image of reality. The television image, therefore, created by an alien thinker (one outside of the mental processes of the receiver) constructs an external reality for the viewer or end-user. This construct builds an image on the screen that, for all intent, is as real to the viewer as the chair they are sitting in. They can see the signified object of the signifier and refer to its presumed material manifestation. For example, in a matter of moments of keystrokes on a keyboard or depressions on a television remote, a viewer may find themselves at the feet of the Great Pyramids, at the State of the Union Address, or having sex with a buxom blonde on a pay-per-view, point-of-view website. The neuro-receptive properties of the brain witness these "virtual" images no differently than the eye does in real-time. Again, doesn't Dr. Oblivion tell us that "Television is the retina of the mind's eye?" These experiences of the mind and the virtual perception as reality creates a conundrum within the viewers sense of the real. If the viewer logs-in to a particularly violent website that depicts extreme sexual violence and his mind and perception begins to believe this as natural behavior and is de-synthesized to the imagery, how then does he return to the material reality and benefit from the socially-acceptable norms of sexual behavior? Can he? No, in a word. The constructed image has become his reality, and his material reality no longer equates to an equal as the constructed; therefore, to match the sensations of his imaged-based world, he must create the same imagery in his material world to enjoy the sexual action.

These multidimensional realities do create a social disadvantage because it leaves the human mind searching for something beyond the material world, and we, human, are the arbiters of our own material-reality breakdown. The most pertinent-and disgusting-analogy of our material-reality's breakdown is played out on stage in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Peter Riviera is a stage player in a virtually constructed vacation location. He is a computer-generated construct, and he is capable of "magic" in the sense he can digitally render images of material objects on command. The evening of the show, Case and Molly, the male and female protagonists, are in the audience with their benefactor, Armitage. On the stage is a single mattress bed-clothed in a white silk sheet. As the drama unfolds, a single hand, then a pair, then legs, then a torso, and finally the face of Molly appear on the bed in a coital wrestling match with Riviera. Molly, a paid assassin, underwent a surgery in the meat material-as Case calls the material reality-to implant knives under her finger nails. As the frenzy of the virtual rape, if you will, grows, Molly protracts the knife-like projections and slowly takes apart the construct of Riviera as he builds hers. Case, as the scene unfolds, suffering from a virulent let-down from the latest drug found in the vacation destination, escapes the scene, but "He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart" (183).

The inverted symmetry does not only lay in the dreamgirl's construction and deconstruction it also exists in our fomenting of the technologies which work to alter our material reality. Humankind is striving to build better technologies to alleviate the human workforce from repetitive and monotonous jobs and, as we do this, we are also attempting to create "artificial" intelligences replete with subjectivity to create better consumer products and increase production. Fallaciously, still comfortable in our humancentric values, we believe this AI subjectivity is somehow less than human: but, is it? Subjectivity leads to experience, experience is the precursor to learning, and learning is the first step to cognitive evolution. If we explore the notion of cognitive evolution, it also lends us to question the definitions of evolution. Assuming we take the early definitions of evolution as a species (loosely defined here as anything with a modicum of subjective intelligence) willingness to survive, then what we are witnessing is an evolutionary split where our species, homo sapiens, is fostering the evolutionary moment of the human form from a carbon-based, degradable carrier of the organic phenomena of subjective thought into an indestructible amalgamation of pure thought constructed of electrical impulses beyond the human carrier. In essence, and in what Gibson terms "an inverted symmetry," we are building construct of thought which will ultimately destroy the carrier of our organic thought much as Riviera built his destructive dreamgirl . We are on the threshold of an indestructible human evolutionary moment.

Works Cited

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 2004. Print.