The Myth of the Artificial

In the late spring a certain flower blooms in the hills near my neighborhood, and this flower is not only beautiful in its purples, blues and greens, but it is heaven for hummingbirds. I enter their peaceful realm whenever I can. I want to be a part of their little world, where they gracefully dance around the air with their turbo-vibrating wings. The scent of spring in the air – it seems such a wondrous life for the little ones in this setting: mating, feeding, and simply enjoying the pleasures of life around them as their full time job. But it is difficult to know their true experience of all these things. Perhaps it is only peaceful and beautiful for me – perhaps it is somehow a world of terror for hummingbirds, a crazed race-to-the-top of nectar harvesting and competition between males and females. This, perhaps, I will never know. And, it seems, it is enough for me that my experience of them is so sublime. But one thing I can tell you for certain is: they live in a different world than I do – and it is a world that gives me great peace.

            Perhaps it would be helpful to imagine another intelligent species entering our human realm and trying to understand, quite hopelessly, the human experience on earth. What would they see? What might they imagine? Would advanced technologies simply seem like a more complex version of beehives? And how much of human experience is merely illusion? Perhaps knowing the true experiences of beings is less important for understanding their existence than it might seem. We human beings, for example, like to use simple categories to understand the world around us. These categories often do not, and have not, accurately described the realities they were meant to depict. So could the alien’s viewpoint be, in fact, more accurate and truthful than our own? Perhaps, the truly accurate depiction of the world would be the most wondrous of all.

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As an adolescent I found myself worried that what I once found strange and awe-inducing would simply become plain, normal and boring. I saw that everyday life is both absurd and miraculous, and yet, over time, it seemed to become something merely mundane. I wanted to keep hold of that vision of life around me that saw its special sort of magic, its absurdity and its odd, ineffable miraculousness. But what was it that instead drew me so strongly toward an imagining of life around me as boring and normal?

Around that time I developed a theory that the science fiction and fantasy I loved so much was part of the problem; that to explore the “extranatural,” or supernatural, was to paint everyday life as less than extraordinary, boring, and mundane. Why was it, though, that these works could have the effect of dulling my everyday experience? And what, really, was the basis of this powerful demystifying process? Could it be that I was somehow tricked into numbness and boredom by the very ideas and cultural norms I lived by? But which beliefs and ideas were to blame? How could such beauty and awe be replaced with such normalcy? Could it be that an idea as plain as “the artificial” plays a substantial role in such an undesirable metamorphosis of mind and life experience?

But the idea of something singularly “artificial” is a myth, and perhaps one of the most powerful myths within many cultures and languages. That nothing can be truly and completely artificial goes against the grain of common sense and basic life experience. Isn’t the computer I now type on clearly “artificial,” or at least the smartphone in my pocket? Or perhaps the car that I drive around? Or, if none of these truly leave the realm of the “natural,” then could at least my own thoughts – or even “artificial intelligence” itself – be considered completely “artificial”? But there is no such thing as the pure artifice of which many conceive. The rest of this essay will attempt to explain why this is, and what consequences (even the demystification of the world) that such a powerful myth can have.

To believe that something can be purely artificial and exist separate from nature is to believe in singularly human place where nature’s laws no longer apply. In this make-believe space and time, ecological consequences can more easily be ignored. Human bodies and minds can exist unhindered by the greater spaces beyond.  The myth of the artificial can be a beautiful creation of space-time away from responsibility and into remarkably creative spheres. But these spheres were always part of nature, as far from it as they may have appeared.  

To believe that Fukushima’s nuclear reactors could simply exist within their own artificial, constructed space – and never seep out into the greater spheres of which it always was part – is a fairy-tale that certain people badly wished to believe. Similarly, to believe that what happens in cities stays in cities is a naïve and comforting dream that many human beings enjoy. But just as cities reach out into the biospheres beyond (and indeed, exist within them), even private life reaches out into the life beyond (and the separation is merely a comforting, and sometimes benign, dream).

But is the myth of the artificial benign? I do not think so. I think it is an illusion that will soon see its demise, literally and figuratively.  As human societies continue to affect Earth’s biosphere, it becomes clearer that we, as human beings, are ourselves woven into larger ecosystems and climates. Our bodies are microcosms of these greater ecosystems, and they too, will see destabilization and stark reminders that humanity--and the illusion of artifice--were always fundamentally natural. The myth of the artificial was a luxurious belief that human societies could once afford to have.

Why have some resisted seeing the human as natural? Because some fear that that either means all human behavior is then forgiven and equalized, or that somehow humanity is unchanging or biologically determined. But, nature has always changed and the wild branch of nature that is humanity has shown itself to be incredibly dynamic. The plasticity of human culture is not only a great boon for humanity’s potential to survive on earth, but it also makes artifice some of the most unbelievable parts of nature. And perhaps that is another reason that the myth of the artificial is so difficult to shed.   

Imagine for a moment that the sleek sharp-cornered black monolith of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” represents artifice and the power to shape and control nature with which human beings seem to be graced. Even though this particular “artifice” was of “nonhuman origin” in the story, it also triggered the use of tools and weapons in proto-human hominids, and leads to the long journey to Jupiter’s moon and also seemed to encourage the increasing advancement of science and technology. What was the moral of this story? That despite the mastery achieved in science and technology, the nature of the universe still strongly held the upper hand on humanity. Even HAL, the computer designed to be superhuman, fell to the trappings of all-too-human weaknesses, themselves bread in, through, and by nature.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) itself is still a part of nature and natural ecosystems. It comes through and by natural biological forces, i.e. human educational and technological systems that were always organic and natural in origin. AI perhaps is the most difficult sphere of nature to see as natural. It is the most purified human construction and yet it, just like human thought itself, cannot escape the realm of nature either. They both are embodied, either through organic matter or metal, electrons and silicon – earthly, universal and natural sources.

The dream of the artificial is like a cubbyhole or a warm cave. It is a place one can feel safe, unhindered by the outside world – it is the dream of complete protection from the storms outside. But this dream has become pathological. The false line between the artificial and the natural must be painfully exposed for the fairytale it has always been.

But if the myth of the artificial is a place of safety, the end of that myth is a place of awe and inspirational reimagining of the universe. It is a turn that could seep wonder back into the mundane. We, our products, and our conscious imaginations, have all miraculously emerged from a complex universe. It is real magic; it is a fairytale itself, but one that entails new responsibilities because it recognizes new limits and fragilities. Human life is far more fragile than the cozy myth of the artificial would have us believe.  

The difficulty of giving up the dream of the artificial is that it requires a re-imagination of the self, a reconsideration of the realities of being human. The facets of our DNA, cells, sinew, bone, fat and muscle; the limited agency of being a highly complex natural organism that is constantly exposed to changing environs, climate and ecosystems.  But these truths of the body, like the truths of the greater natural world, seem to only gain recognition when all options for delusion and deception have finally run dry.

I am reminded, again and again, that the human brain is no truth machine – rather, it is a survival machine. It become more like a truth machine, we should hope, when survival finally requires truth.

If the myth of the artificial is a fantastical safe-haven with colonialist implications, then it is also a form of conceptual territorialization: to denote one conceptual sphere from another is akin to marking off territory. In this case, it is an aggressive and ingrained kind of conceptual territorialization.