Letter #6: Memory Man Versus Vampire Guy

Consider firing your algorithm.

Dad,

Wild that all those dead guys couldn’t even keep it down for the duration of the Ravens game. Are they in the room with us now? Should we be worried?

Actually I’m less alarmed about all the talking dead guys than I am about all the guys that think they’re never going to die. One of them is Bryan Johnson, a millionaire who apparently outsources all his life choices to an algorithm. He’s also into doing shockwave therapy on his junk, which obviously means his nickname should be Bryan “electric” Johnson. Anyway, most people know him for trying to extend his life by shooting blood plasma from his teenage son into his own veins. When you end up zapping your gonads and leeching your kid’s bodily fluids, maybe it’s time to fire your algorithm? Side note: I love you very much but I am never, ever feeding you my blood.

Usually I try not to pay attention to cranks on the internet, but Johnson said something on Monday in an interview that struck me. Discussing a new generation of tech futurists, he said, “We’re willing to divorce, open to divorce from ourselves all human norms, all human customs, all human thought.”

Here’s why I’m talking about this: yesterday you touched on the fact that memory is what binds the soul together, gathering our momentary perceptions into one coherent, conscious whole. And I get the impression that this particular Internet Crank has stumbled, in his own creepy way, on exactly the opposite of our worldview. For him, being human is an imposition, a burden, an accident: to experience “reality,” you have to shuck tradition, release identity, slip out of consciousness itself. You have to commune with the eternal and unfeeling world of math and information. “I just trust data and numbers, and the only thing I believe in, is I don’t want to die.”

Nobody’s ever thought of that before! Oh wait, here’s Democritus, in the 5th century B.C.: “the surface of things is a matter of convention. It is by convention that things are sweet or bitter.” For you and me, human experience is a key into the most real reality, the spirit spoken in the language of the flesh. For Democritus, and the Epicureans who became his heirs, human experience was an illusory product of atomic flow. The only reality was the quantifiable fact of matter in motion. Sound familiar?

I think that’s basically the choice we’re up against: either our humanity is everything, or it’s nothing. The men of power and riches, who would ascend to be as gods, know which path they’ve chosen. They want to shrug off their pitiful human limitations once and for all. I suspect they’re going to get a rawer deal than they imagine.

Love,
Spencer