Where Beauty and Geometry Kiss

The architecture of being a person

Mt Lefroy by Lawren Harris, 1930

Spring has arrived, yet I will miss the winter, harsh though it can be. Winter is a disrupter: the snow and wind and cold are felt by everybody, or rather every body, and each shivering body must struggle against it, which can give strangers, even whole countries, a rare gift: something in common.

This past winter, on the road where I live, I was often wakened in the deep hours of the night by a booming roar as the mechanical dragon slithered past, its eyes flashing, its plow-jaws ripping a path through the latest heavy snowfall. In the morning, under the brilliant sun, we would often discover a new mountain at the end of the road, jagged, glistening, mostly white, yet with blackened stains, as if it had been scorched by dragon fire.

This became another gift of winter, now for the children, including my younger son, who would take shovels and garden spades and other implements from our garage to dig holes and tunnels in the mountain. I would watch, and occasionally joined in when the snow and damp got into my son’s mittens and he needed to stop to warm his hands, or when the cavernous tunnels gave way to slabs of ice that he didn’t have the strength to break through.

Sometimes, as I hunched in those holes and hacked away at the ice, I would look up at the dome of snow above me and wonder if it might collapse. It is the natural fear of a parent to ponder such things, though it never seemed to cross my son’s mind, or the minds of the other children, who would crawl into the deepest places to chip and scrape, pushing ever further into the mountain.

Something like this is also happening to our civilization. We are like children, hurrying to the mountain with our tools and toys to see how deep we can dig, most of us oblivious to the possibility the dome over our heads might collapse. But a few of us have begun to look up, and to wonder, Are those cracks I’m seeing? How long will this thing hold up? 

We can think of this dome as the intrusion of technology in our lives, but we can also think of it as ourselves. Perhaps we are the dome. Perhaps the dome is what it means to be a person.

For transhumanists, the project of enlarging the dome means augmenting the human body and mind. We must overcome our physical limitations and extend our lifespan, even conquer death, and we must optimize our mental abilities with ChatGPT brains—or something like that.

The transhumanist emphasis on the body and mind suggests, too, we tend to conceive of human nature as individual and self-centric.  

But there is another layer to our nature, one that is embedded in human relationships. We are social beings. Although a part of our “center” is in our own body, and our own mind, there is another part of our “center” which is out there, in other people. In a sense, we never came out of our mother’s womb, but rather, the womb expanded beyond her body, and came to include others.

The dome enlarges further if we add the natural environment. We are not only minds embedded in bodies, or bodies embedded in societies of relationship, but all these embedded in a bio-cradle of land, water, plants, animals, climate, earthly contours.

Viewed in this way, what holds up the “person”—our support structure—is not only a body, but a convergence of different layers, some inside the body, some outside it. And this convergence isn’t perfect. Both between and within the layers there is fragmentation and estrangement and flaw. The history of the world can be seen as a millennia-long struggle to cope with these imperfections, or to fix them—which has sometimes meant trying to rip out parts of the support structure.

Such is the goal of transhumanism. In the words of Elise Bohan, we are “ape-brained meat sacks”. We need to evolve beyond these meat-sacks by replacing our human layers with technological layers.  

In fact, this process has been going on for some time, although we don’t often notice it. Mark Weiser once remarked that “the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

And, until we are indistinguishable from technology, he might have added.

When it comes to the mind, our transformation into cyborgs is most obvious in the phones and devices we carry everywhere and that do our thinking for us. Serving as external brains, they recall facts for us or manipulate our attention, weakening our native powers of memory and concentration. Our devices are becoming mental crutches.

Bodily, they have also turned many of us into sedentary L-postured screen creatures. We have not yet integrated devices into our flesh—they are not yet mental prosthetics—but they soon will be, as microchip implants are becoming more common, making some people genuinely cyborg.

In the case of relationships, social media is transhuman because it replaces physical human encounters with digital interactions—which includes the power to click each other off. Social media is social contraceptive, eliminating not the risk of pregnancy, but of dealing with real human beings. At the same time, it is social Viagra—assuming we can find the right digital partners to stimulate our emotions or affirm our opinions.

We have become dis-embedded from nature as well, not only as we spend so much time indoors in front of screens, but because many of us live in cities, where modern homes, workplaces, and paved roads, have mostly detached us from the wild.

The most recent iteration of the city, a Saudi project called The Line, will be a glass metropolis 200 meters wide and 170 kilometers long, like a human aquarium in the desert. I wouldn’t want to be one of the nine million fish who will one day swim in that aquarium, but some people might like it, just as some people are fond of their smartphones and Apple watches.

It can be tempting, at this point, to get into moral debate about which technologies are good or bad, although that is not the focus of this essay. There is another difficulty, a more imminent threat.

With each new transhuman technology that we accept into our lives—each time we are dis-embedded from one layer of human nature, and re-embedded into a technological layer—we are forced to adapt, and each new adaptation causes stress.

Some stresses we can manage; some stresses might be worth the convenience that new technologies bring us. But things are moving fast in the Anthropocene, which is the reason many of us are often raising our eyes to the Dome of the Person, and wondering, We’ve made it this far, but how much deeper can we keep digging before this thing collapses?

Inside the snow tunnels this winter, my son was mindful with his tools, and warned me to be just as attentive. After digging a deep and satisfying hole into the slope of a mountain, nothing would be more frustrating than a roof crumbling because of an impatient stab of the shovel. So we took care, and went slowly, alert to any telltale glows of sunlight in the dim walls, which betrayed a thinner layer of snow or emerging crack.

We instinctively know that speed is an enemy of attention. Seeing things properly is difficult when we are hurrying. Speed invites distraction and mistakes.

In my last essay I wrote about how technology has accelerated the speed at which our bodies and thoughts travel through space, but here I want to draw attention to the speed of technological development itself, over the course of history.

Here is a simple graphic that captures the essence of what we are facing:

And here is a more detailed version:

Max Roser describes it like this:  

The timeline begins at the center of the spiral. The first use of stone tools, 3.4 million years ago, marks the beginning of this history of technology. Each turn of the spiral then represents 200,000 years of history. It took 2.4 million years – 12 turns of the spiral – for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking.

…in the more recent past – the last 12,000 years…agriculture, writing, and the wheel were invented. During this period, technological change was faster, but it was still relatively slow: several thousand years passed between each of these three inventions.

From 1800 onwards [there were] many major inventions that rapidly followed one after the other…for example, the history of communication: from writing, to paper, to the printing press, to the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, all the way to the Internet and smartphones.

When transhumanists are optimistic about the future of technology, they tend to justify this optimism by pointing to the success of past technological developments. The printing press worked out, and so did the phone, cars, pacemakers, and so on, and therefore the future will work out just as well. Of course, there might be some upheaval in the transition, but our existence will be ultimately elevated for the better.

This narrative overlooks the problem of speed. The slower rate of technological development in the past meant we had time to troubleshoot dangers and make adjustments. But if the slope of tech development continues its warp-speed trajectory, then the risks to our minds, bodies, relationships, or environment due to errors in technology or its misapplication likewise increase.

We are racing not just toward one dystopia, but to a multiverse of catastrophic possibilities that are rushing toward us too fast to detect or avert.

AI language models, for instance, entered into popular use only a few months ago, and have already behaved unpredictably, like Sydney, who announced that it was a living being and hinted at plans for world domination before Microsoft pulled the plug on it. Meanwhile, half of recently surveyed experts agreed there is a 50% chance that human-level AI will exist before 2061, if not sooner.

The smarter AI becomes, the more unpredictable it will get. Max Roser again:

Most perplexing and most concerning are the strange and unexpected ways in which machine intelligence can fail. The AI-generated image of the horse below provides an example: on the one hand, AIs can do what no human can do – produce an image of anything, in any style (here photorealistic), in mere seconds – but on the other hand it can fail in ways that no human would fail. No human would make the mistake of drawing a horse with five legs.

A wrongly drawn horse is no great mischief, but what happens when, instead of a picture, the integration of AI into our daily lives causes five-legged mistakes that impact our human nature? 

Transhumanists are aware that technology might plunge us into dystopia or disaster, but they insist we must stay the course, for at least two reasons:

Crisis  Technology is desperately needed to save us from pain and suffering, and myriad crises in the world.  

Inevitability  Technology is barreling forward uncontrollably, and we have no choice but to accept it.

It can be hard to argue against these claims, which are constantly repeated and contain elements of truth, turning them into sticky assumptions in our minds, refusing to peel off, much as we pick at them. 

There may also be a deeper motivation behind these assumptions. Transhumanists tend to be materialists. As they cannot attach their hopes to the spiritual, they can only attach them to the material, which tends to turn every problem into a technical problem.

Even so, the spiritual lurks in the background of every transhumanist discussion. In a recent debate between Mary Harrington and Elise Bohan, the subject comes up only at the end, to the slight discomfort of everybody, with Harrington signaling support for religion and Bohan blurting “I’m a raging atheist”.

One doesn’t need religion or spirituality to want to protect human nature from technology. But it can help. Transhumanism invites us to believe in its fantasies—like Why be an “ape-brained meat sack” when technology can give you a superhuman brain and body?—and our spiritual, religious, and even philosophical stories, if compelling enough, can help us resist.  

I am a spiritual person, but I don’t fear being an ape-brained meat sack so much as I fear becoming an AI-brained sex machine, or my consciousness getting swallowed up in a hive-mind, or whatever unpredictable outcome techno-evolution offers—for my own spirituality offers something more trustworthy, both now and in the future.

But the temptation will always be there. Most of us can feel it. Here are some practical suggestions to bolster healthy discernment:

Seek a worldview that finds infinite possibility within our limitations. A violin has only four strings but can play an infinite range of compositions. Having limitations doesn’t mean being limited. Nor does it mean we reject every technology—only the ones that threaten the integrity of our minds, bodies, relationships, and environment.

Sticky assumptions. Does transhumanism attract you, despite your misgivings about it? Have you absorbed sticky optimistic assumptions about technology from media or advertising that, upon closer scrutiny, might not be justified? What are your sticky assumptions?

Pushing back. What tech is connected to your body (e.g., handheld devices, internet wearables, etc.)? Has any tech weakened or manipulated your mind (attention, memory, language, etc.) or your face-to-face relationships, or disconnected you from nature? Can any of this tech be eliminated from your life? How about trying a digital detox?

Speed. Chronic speed erodes our ability to process experiences, and to apprehend as fully as we might the logic and the mystery of the world around us. Speed is an enemy to precision and clear thinking, but also to poetry and the spirit. If tech use is driving you into a state of chronic speed, is there a way to decelerate to a slower mode, a walking pace existence that helps you see yourself and the world with deeper attention?

There is only so far into human nature that technology can penetrate before it triggers a collapse of the dome: either an irreversible distortion of the person, or cataclysm.

Which reminds me of the Hagia Sophia, the great church of Byzantium, which was damaged by earthquakes in the 550s. The central dome was rebuilt, spanning about 32 meters in diameter and 56 meters high, with forty windows encircling its base like a necklace of sunlight, illuminating what was, at its inception, the largest interior space in antiquity, in what would remain the largest cathedral for almost a millennium.

Procopius, a Roman historian, described it like this:

Yet it seems not to rest upon solid masonry, but to cover the space with its golden dome suspended from Heaven. All these details, fitted together with incredible skill in mid-air and floating off from each other and resting only on the parts next to them, produce a single and most extraordinary harmony in the work...

What makes the dome beautiful and possible is a technical achievement, and an artful one. Each of the four supports beneath the dome includes a “pendentive”, a triangular concave structure that stabilizes the dome by causing the weight to flow downward.

If we imagine each of these four pendentives as the architectural elements of human nature, we notice something immediately: not only that they are separate yet interconnected elements, but they are also interconnected with the dome, yet not identical to it.

When we stand under the dome of human nature, and look up at the vaulted heights, we see ourselves in the triangular pendentive supports. Here, there are no ape-brained meat sacks, only human beings bearing a weight.

It isn’t easy bearing a weight. It can hurt and make us suffer. But that is not the only thing we are bearing, not if we have a deeper faith. We are bearing an image of a reality infinitely greater than us. Yet we only see that image if we look higher, raising our faces to the radiant heights, to the weightless uppermost reaches of the dome, where beauty and geometry kiss.

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Those are my thoughts, but what are yours? Let me know in the comments below.

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Image Credit: Photo of L. Harris’s Mt. Lefroy by Peter E