A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women by Siri Hustvedt

Author:Siri Hustvedt
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Phantasy Land in Its Sincere and Ironic Modes

The idea that immortality is just around the bend via machine intelligence has been avidly promoted by Ray Kurzweil, scientist, inventor, and best-selling author, a person repeatedly described as a “genius” in the popular press and the subject of a documentary fittingly titled Transcendent Man. Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology was something of a sensation. “The singularity,” although used in physics, is a term first coined for technology by the mathematician Vernor Vinge in 1983. According to Kurzweil, the singularity will arrive in 2045. There will be an intelligence explosion. Human beings and computers will merge. The jacket copy for The Singularity Is Near tells the reader that we humans are poised for a revolution “as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity.”284 The admittedly eclectic Journal of Consciousness Studies has dedicated two entire issues to the singularity and has published not only Kurzweil but other thinkers who are eagerly anticipating the imminent transformation when we will be freed from our mortal bodies, a science or science fiction version of what fundamentalist Christians call “the rapture.” David Chalmers, an analytical philosopher, wondered in an essay why the singularity had not created more interest among “philosophers, academic scholars, cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers.”285 The rhetorical tone of its proponents may be one reason some thoughtful persons have chosen not to “go there.”

Some believe that although biological reproduction and birth will disappear after the singularity, sex will remain, and according to one of its boosters, it will be bigger and better, enhanced and freed by technology. All impediments to ecstasy will be eliminated. David Pearce in his Internet essay The Hedonistic Imperative (1995) writes:

Erotic pleasure of an intoxicating intensity that mortal flesh has never known will thereafter be enjoyable with a whole gamut of friends and lovers. This will be possible because jealousy, already transiently eliminable today under the influence of various serotonin-releasing agents, is not the sort of gene-inspired perversion of consciousness to be judged worthy of conservation in the new era.286

Serotonin was a high-fashion neurochemical in the midnineties when the essay was written; its role as a panacea has diminished significantly since then. SSRIs, the miracle antidepressants of that moment, have lost their otherworldly glow. Whether or not their placebo effect is what made drugs such as Prozac successful, there is no scientific evidence that low serotonin levels cause depression.287 What seems certain is that the reputation of these drugs as cure-alls is over. Jealousy is an emotion that involves strong attachment to another person and the desire to have that person all for one’s own. Surely, it grows out of our earliest attachment and love for our mothers and fathers or important caretakers. I vividly remember my own infant daughter playing peacefully by herself at my feet when she was not yet one year old. The moment I picked up the phone to make a call, however, her mood turned, and I had a whining, protesting little person clinging to my legs.

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