On Human Plasticity, DNA Data Storage and the Singularity

Imagine an individual, says Nietzsche, who could embody the entire history of mankind; assimilating all that was once strange and alien and accessing knowledge and experience long forgotten. Such plastic power would make him a god, would it not?

Well, thanks to the possibilities opened up by new techniques and technologies, including DNA data storage, perhaps we might all one day have the opportunity to carry around within us every book, every image, every piece of music, every memory, every possibility ...    

Scientists at the European Bioinformatics Institute have already converted digital data into the four nucleobases found in DNA and then successfully stored and retrieved the text and audio files - which included Shakespeare's sonnets - with between 99.99 and 100% accuracy (i.e. with an extremely low rate of data loss).

Obviously, there's still some way to go before we might use a little finger as a flash drive, but the future is fast approaching at an ever-accelerated rate and rather than fear it, perhaps we should go with the flow and ensure that artificial superintelligence also belongs to us and not just our machines in a posthuman world ...

Note: Just to provide some idea of how pressing the problem of data storage is and why DNA is such a potentially fantastic solution ... In 2020, it's estimated that we'll need to store 40 trillion gigabytes of data. That requires 2.6 billion hard drives, or 42 billion USB sticks. However, just a single gram of DNA can also do the job.   

Tell Them the Cross is a Tree Again

The Budding of the Cross  

Stephen Alexander (2016)

For Nietzsche, innocence is the power to accept oneself as a mortal creature and to forgive oneself for crimes ranging from scrumping to deicide. Indeed, the innocent human being has the ability also to forget past deeds, past shames, past horrors; to forget, ultimately, that there is anything to forgive.

When man can forget and rise in innocence before the present, then the past has no claim over him. And what is man's self-overcoming if not an overcoming of an historically constructed and determined subjectivity? By liberating himself from the past, he is able to reinvent himself in the present and project himself differently into the future.
 
It's fatal, argues Nietzsche, to be unable to close oneself off from history; just as it's vital that we learn to discriminate and evaluate amongst memories - for this is a sign of a healthy will to power. The stronger an individual or a people, the more history it will be able to recall and assimilate without developing a bad conscience and the less it will be obliged to forget.
 
Nietzsche refers to this as the plastic power of an individual or people. Those who could incorporate the entire historical experience of humanity as their own and endure such would exhibit a plastic power of almost superhuman proportion and would constitute, says Nietzsche, a new nobility "the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of". Not only would such a new nobility be innocent, they would be happy.

Nietzsche writes: "if one could burden one’s soul with ... the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling - this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter ..."

This godlike feeling is what Nietzsche understands to be the humaneness of the future.

It seems to me that D. H. Lawrence closely follows Nietzsche here and agrees that it's vital for mankind, having bitten and swallowed the fruit of temptation, to find a way to digest the apple. When this is achieved - when the Old Adam is able to rid himself of belly ache and bad conscience - then, and only then, will man be free to re-enter paradise and the New Eve pick fresh fruit and consort with serpents as she pleases.

Although Lawrence chose to discard the following passage from the final version of The Plumed Serpent, it is particularly pertinent to our discussion here. Ramón tells Kate:

"'Go! Tell them the Cross is a Tree again, and they may eat the fruit if they can reach the branches. Tell them the snake coils in peace around the ankle of Eve, and she no longer tries to bruise his head. The fruit of Knowledge is digested. Now we can plant the core.'"

The symbolism could hardly be clearer: the Cross is a Tree again - i.e. an instrument of torture and sacrifice upon which mankind has been fatally self-divided for two millennia has been transformed back into the sacred Tree of Life. And the fruit of this tree may be eaten, for with the death of God there's no longer any divine law or categorical imperative to prevent us - providing that is that we can reach the branches, which is to say, surpass ourselves as a species, overcoming our old humanity.

As for the second line concerning the relationship between the Eve and the snake, this is telling us that in her new nakedness and innocence the woman has overcome the burden of shame which robbed her and all the world of its joy, and that the serpent of desire has finally been accepted as having its own raison d’être and its own beauty.

In an essay entitled 'The Reality of Peace', Lawrence had some years earlier entered into his own slightly uneasy truce with the serpent:

"I must make my peace with the serpent of abhorrence that is within me. I must own my most secret shame and my most secret shameful desire ... Who am I that I should hold myself above my last or worst desire? My desires are me, they are the beginning of me, my stem and branch and root. ...
      I shall accept all my desires and repudiate none. It will be a sign of bliss in me when I am reconciled with the serpent of my own horror, when I am free from the fascination and the revulsion. For secret fascination is a fearful tyranny. ... The serpent will have his own pure place in me, and I shall be free."

The fruit of knowledge is digested: this means not only can we now move beyond good and evil, but so too can we overcome our obsession with having to know everything in our heads and exert our fanatical will to truth. For now we can plant the core and that means we can be free to experience life directly and come into full being as creatures with bodies, not just minds. And so too can we develop a new culture based on innocence, laughter, and forgetting and a new society in which men are more than well-trained house pets.

As victors, then, we travel to Eden home; victors over God and over our own humanity. For too long have we roamed in the land of Nod, that twilight zone of sleep and death, suffering from mad dreams and hallucinations: "'Who sleeps shall wake! Who sleeps shall wake!'" cry the men of Quetzalcoatl. And men shall awaken in the way of the snake; i.e. into earthly, sensual life.

This, then, is how Lawrence develops the Nietzschean project of revaluation in The Plumed Serpent. Via moral transgression, a revolutionary politics of cruelty and the substantiation of religious mystery, Lawrence suggests we can regain an earthly paradise.

Obviously, I now have difficulties with this line of thinking - how could I not in an age of militant Islamofascism? But I thought of all this once more as I sat eating a bunch of grapes last night and reflected on the strange beauty of the stem ... 


See: 

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), IV. 337.

D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 547 and 128.

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 36-8.