Letter #10: The Point of it All

And Yes, I'll Tell You What It Is

Mine son,

Your response sent such a spark from my implanted device to the pleasure centers of my brain that it set my underpants collection on fire. The specific sentence that caused an impulse to leap from my cortex and start my laptop playing the Hallelujah Chorus was this: “Our humanity is good, is miraculous, is the point of it all.” I’m delighted your mother taught you something. Believe me, I would have taught you things too, but I was, you know, busy.

As much as I admire Elon Musk for his extraordinary creativity and consumption of mind-altering pharmaceuticals, the fact that humans can perform some central tasks better than machines is, to me, irrelevant. Who cares what machines can do? They’re machines. Who cares if some over-clever undergrad can philosophize himself into believing a piece of metal that seems to think and feel is really thinking and feeling? An undergrad is half an idiot. Wait till he’s in graduate school. Then he’ll be a complete idiot.

I recently read a book about trans-humanism by a guy who calls himself Martine Rothblatt because he likes to pretend he’s a girl. Kind of like I call myself Aaron Judge because I like to pretend I’m a right fielder. Rothblatt begins by saying, “21^st century software made it technologically possible to separate our minds from our bodies. This can be accomplished by downloading enough of our neural connection contents and patterns into a sufficiently advanced computer… [Then] we would have chosen a new form — software — although we would be the same person.”

Well, yes, except no, we totally wouldn’t. A human is not a brain and a downloaded brain would not be a human any more than a robot dog is a dog. Who believes his life is just the thoughts he thinks and not also the wind on his face and the taste of his lover’s lips and his walk in the park at the start of autumn — and yes, his suffering too and his fear of death and death itself? When you say humans are “the point of it all,” that is the point that humans are: the whole experience.

You say we have to know what the job of being human is. Lucky for you, your father is still just barely alive enough to tell you. The job of being human is to journey toward the image of God within us, to become that person we were created to be but are not yet. In doing this, we become workers in the vineyard of that creation — a branch of the vine of life bearing its fruit, which is a new and unique experience of existence — your existence; mine.

Can machines (and mind-altering pharmaceuticals) help us do that job, or are we born with all the equipment we need?

Let us leave that question to another letter.

Yer loving Father