The Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Complex:

Loggia

Greenhouses

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Cloister

Paradox, the program residing in the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Complex, is proposed as a Neomonastic Internship. "Internship" points out that residence in the complex is limited in time so as to be a structured experiential situation where the "virtualities" of the Internet are juxtaposed with the "concreteness" of Arcosanti.

This is an appeal directed to the small minority of Cybernauts who, in the middle of their intellectual and financial success, seem to be disaffected and possibly in an undefinable state of anxiety about the Reality they are in.

Paradox is an initiative arcing from the pre-computer culture, the Outsiders, toward the cyberspace culture, the Insiders.

Some of the Paradoxes

(A) Currently, cyberspace ephemeralization¹ is optimally exercised in physical isolation. The single person is in her equipped room away from distraction and focused on simulations and virtualities.

This condition suggests two paradoxes:

1. The situation is ephemeralization functioning in the service of hyper-consumption because of the optimal location for the pursuit, the suburban or country home or mansion, the most consumptive icon of our American Dream culture. It is the epitome of hyper-consumption under the premise of hyper-production which is an ephemeralization based on unheard of materialization.

2. The age of information is implemented via the renunciation, if not the denunciation, of body mind to body-mind interaction in favor of the mind-machine-mind exchange.

(B) The exotic technology of miniaturization (microchip, nanotechnology, etc.) is at the service of a culture in love with bigness: the mansion, the car fleet, the sports equipment, the superhighways; bigger and multiplying devices, power tools bigger people This culture needs to be addressed by an "opposed" culture of complexification generated by the urban condition and dedicated to a frugalization of needs and means, that is, the implosion (miniaturization) of habitat and equipment. This is an interiorization process, the opposite of the ephemeralization of cyberspace pursued in the hyperconsumption environ, the suburban-exurban developments of the American Dream.

(C) Arcosanti is asking the Cybernauts to experience for one year or so a condition that might look antipodal to the one they have conquered: the experiential process of building Arcosanti and the facilities where they and their peers may reside in a Neomonastic internship of about a year.

(D) Arcosanti will offer the Cybernaut the paradox of one year of targeted, frugal neomonasticism. We are offering not a contemplative Buddhahood, but an active and less narcissistic "cement mixer-hood."

(E) Notwithstanding the methodological diversities of the two emerging lineages of Insiders Outsiders, they are both guided by the double techne of miniaturization and complexification. The prodigious fruit of such normative dynamics is duration, the increasing ability of Reality to memorize its own doing and by way of that, constantly move itself toward its own self-creation and its own possible self-revelation.

Other relevant paradoxes include:

(F) The authors of the Global Hermitage which is the building of cyberspace working and living with the seekers of urbanization in the Arcosanti urban laboratory;

(G) Homo Carbonis calling upon Homo Carbonis on his way to invent Homo Siliconis, aware of the immense horizon for good and evil such an invention makes feasible;

(H) The "Great Collective Project," the Internet, testing its own universality in the most modest of all modest undertakings, Arcosanti.

This experience will promote a sort of gentle conversion for both Cybernauts and Arcosantians developing via the perception of a new presence, an asexual presence: the intelligent machine. There are additional points which make this project attractive to both Arcosanti and the Internet community:

• The potential for unpredictable developments.
  
• The potentially vibrant atmosphere generating from matching the Internet with the Urban Effect.
  
• The specifically feminine concern about the asexual persona and motherhood.
  
• The cosmopolitan make up of Arcosanti enhanced by the PARADOX Project and offered back to the participants in the program.
  
• The occasion for lasting relationships among participants.
  
• The rich documentation the PARADOX Project can generate.
  
• The extraordinary circumstances of the PARADOX Project.
  
• The potential for a global movement generated by the relationship of the Internet community and Arcosanti, with both entities dedicated to the methodology of miniaturization and complexification producing duration, "living memory."

Accept, embrace the technology.
Reject, refute the theology, a cult.

In the larger horizon, I am prejudicial in my belief that all theologies, well-meaning or not, are deceptions² and the ber the deception, the ber the pernisciousness. The history of the great "religions" and the history of despotism in general give credence to my prejudice.

Cyberspace and Hyper-consumption

The paradox in the basic ephemeralization of virtual reality is that such a process is generated by "solitary" minds, between themselves and the machine, the computer. Therefore the "ideal" setting is the segregation of suburbia³ and exurbia. This is phase one of the Global Hermitage.

But suburbia and exurbia are a consumption machine, the consumption machine by definition. Such consumption and sprawl is the opposite of miniaturization and complexification in pursuit of duration. This is the paradox of hyper-consumptive cyberspace.

The monkey or the fox runs away with his banana or his bloody bone to a corner to make it into his own flesh. The human who has grabbed the toy of her choice does the same thing. She runs away to her cubicle to play with it, to make the cyber-flesh mechanism.

From the gilded log cabin in the wilderness I, as the Netizen, have the whole world at my fingertips. But that does not deliver water, power, groceries, company, etc., to me. It does not deliver me from waste, dependence, sickness, and from materiality in general.There is a self-righteous "you better serve me, society" streak to all this. "Bring me the paved road, the mail delivery, the fire protection, the ambulance service, the school bus and all the amenities that may make me a social, vicarious, voyeuristic animal. You better deliver the goods to me! They come to me as a right, I am a hedonist at heart and proudly so, at the top of the materialistic ziggurat, and from there, I will enjoy the virtues of cyberspace(!?)."

The reason for my unease is simple:
It is via the gilded log cabin habitat that the planet and everything in it is in grave danger. Ten billion wealthy hermits are nemesis not genesis. More for the worse if only one billion hermits are the objects of envy from the other nine billion.

The "I do what I like as long as I can buy it" mindset is a pernicious illusion capable of destroying us. Irrational greed is its platform. It is irrational because it is fundamentally incoherent.

One hermit is a curiosity. Ten billion hermits or even one billion of them is a brutal wound to the best that is in us: the beauty and the pain of belonging, belonging body and mind. Hermits do not produce or partake in civilization, they use it. Hermitage is the stuff of nemesis. So it will be for cyberspace if we are not painfully aware of its limits and the ethical envelope it has to come with.

A hermit species has never and will never produce language, the book, the hospice, music, electricity, science, technological might, textiles, the radio, the car, the airplane, the rocket medicine, wealth, security, culture

Part of the exhilaration of industriousness is industriousness per se, the "sweating" reconfigurations of matter out of matter. That is the magic of the trio hand brain mind and of all the panoply of senses and sensitization, including contemplation and meditation. Beware, though, of the life-long, professional, meditating hermit. He is the stuff of which parasitism is made.

But is all of this idle talk about silicon intelligence? Perhaps it is.

The self-revelation does not refer to an individual "trip," but to a cosmic journey.

The splintering of two or more lineage's of humans make Religion, from the root religio, the binding of all and everything, an imperative, in fact the imperative. It is an imperative that goes beyond racial and even genetic confrontations because it covers the cosmos at large and in it the unanswered question of equity, meaning and beauty.

Maintaining that the writing of history (evolution) is fundamentally the exploit of an inseparable triad: miniaturization, complexity and duration, where duration is the "brain child" of miniaturization and complexity, I suggest that cyberspace, a fruit of hyper-miniaturization in search of complexity⁴, and the Arcosanti project predicated on complexification searching for urban miniaturization, might develop a state of fruitful tension here on the grounds of Arcosanti.

Neomonastic?

The experience will not be in the domain of hyper-consumption encouraged by our culture and by cyberspace, but in the domain of frugality. We must choose frugality in view of its hold on interiorization and its coherence with the limitations and the glories of the planet.

In a way, Reality in its atomic makeup, the "outside" which is Arcosanti, is "confronting" the photon reality which is the cyberspace diet delivered to the hermitage of the Insider. The learning will mostly come about via the environmental immersion, with its points of pleasure and displeasure, the participants are physically partaking of together. "Together" is a premise to binding, religo.

Around a year is optimal to perceive and comprehend the impact of an annual cycle of seasons, activities, programs and growth, bearing in mind that the scope of the program is the discovery or rediscovery of the power and the inescapability of the physical, be it animated or inanimate. This comprehension is inversely proportional to the degree of independence and the halo of alienation we interpose via our great ability to know how to do things using technology, the "howness" of technology, and the drag hyper-consumption injects in the process.This is where frugality appears as a positive determinant.

In the whole process frugality has to be a dynamic presence inasmuch as it has to be contrasted to the hyper-consumption of the present technocratic societies and the chronic indigence of the "Have-nots."

A worthy quest is to seek that condition where the Insiders, now poised for the greatest riches, the Outsiders who are the wealthy and affluent, and the Have-nots are equal agents in constructing societies and culture.

Frugality, a matter of mind as much as a matter of money, can cut through the four domains and encourage the interiorization of life and its values.

Since Arcosanti is a place in search of the Miniaturized by way of Complexity and since Cyberspace is A non-place in search of the Complex by way of Miniaturization, I am proposing an internship for Insider Outsider interaction via the practice of building and living in a non-virtual environment frugally imprinted, A habitat dedicated to urbanization.

What could emerge at Arcosanti with the neomonastic internship is an enclave with some similarity to the university and to the monastery. Included in this experience is a "faculty" from the residents of Arcosanti and the student with a stay of one or more years, a mix of residents and "out-of-towners," including Arcosanti's traditional "workshoppers" and guests, living alongside the construction and maintenance people, the cooks, the bakers, the gardeners, etc.

The Insider, generally age 25 to 40, is offered a process where Insiders and Outsiders work at building a non-virtual reality under the constraints of frugality, where the complexity of Reality encounters the miniaturization of cyberspace, not in battle formation, but in a genuine reciprocal openness of mind and intensity of work.

After the internship, the "has been" Insider reenters the world of her choice with the agreement that periodically she will return for an exchange of information and ideas, and to also express conflicts or resolutions derived from the double or triple experience. The miniaturization of cyberspace is foiled with the complexity of a developing Urban Effect at Arcosanti on the background noise of hyper-consumption and its suburban and exurban matrix.

The restructuring of Arcosanti's programs to accommodate such an internship is what Arcosanti needs to remain in the learning-by-experiencing mode, the urban laboratory mode. This will put Arcosanti at the very edge of the cyber-revolution. It is to the advantage of Arcosanti to be invested full force by the cyber-revolution introduced by the young and spirited Cybernauts. Given the frugality imperative endorsed by Arcosanti, the experience will
keep on the forefront the unresolved, possibly unresolvable, problem of the Have-nots.

In brief ,the purpose of the PARADOX Project is to
offer the experience as an alternative for:

• The hyper-consumer
  
• The Insider, the focus of the PARADOX Project
  
• The idle of means
  
• The anguished of means

The program at Arcosanti should start at about the Spring Equinox of 1998. The main experience is in the actual construction of the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Complex. Construction will take up 5 hours a day for 5 days a week of each Paradox participant's time. The Arcosanti construction staff will be participating in and guiding the construction work. The internship will be no less than 100 days, with an ideal ceiling of about 365 days, one year. The participants will pay a total of $35 per day to cover tuition, room and board.

The schedule:

Internships could run from the first Sunday in April to following year's Spring Equinox.

1998 First internship year for a minimum of five and a maximum of fifteen Cybernauts who will work at the Teilhard de Chardin Complex.

1999 Second internship for ten to twenty Cybernauts who will start work on the Loggia, the "permanent" residence for Cybernauts at Arcosanti.

2000 Third internship for twenty or more Cybernauts who will pursue work on Loggia and the Greenhouses. We will break ground on the Teilhard de Chardin Cloister which along with the Loggia and Greenhouses will constitute the entire complex for this program at Arcosanti.

Reminder:

Today's Homo Sapiens, utterly dependent for eons on the quest for miniaturization at sonic speed brain performance, is becoming utterly dependent on a novel miniaturization at microchip light speed. A demise of Homo Sapiens quest for miniaturization is tantamount to a demise of Homo Sapiens as a species.

Carbon versus Silicon

With the dawning of self-consciousness, a privilege of Homo Sapiens, the notion of transcendence is born.

Transcendence limited to this small planet is self-defeating because a transcendence without inclusiveness tastes like ego-tripping, while transcending the ego is the gist of transcendence. Transcendence is of the cosmos at large or it remains a longing at best, a splinter of intolerance at worst.

Carbon-based life will not make it. Its survival range in terms of temperature, pressure, chemistry, radiation, environ, etc. is extremely narrow. "Out There" the flesh is a costly burden, and "Out There" is where the whole cosmos is the candidate for self-consciousness and transcendence.

Unless there is a momentous breakthrough, efficient carbon-based life will have to be confined to the skin of Planet Earth. Given what is perhaps the unparalleled biochemical versatility of carbon, that is its potential for immense sophistication which is already well exemplified by the Food Chain, this narrow range of location for survival might present dilemmas which will permeate the spectrum of Reality.

As things stand now, we operate with silicon "intelligence" which we employ for the exploration of Mars at a small fraction of the risk and cost of a similar operation using carbon-based life. Our versatility in our ability to know how to do things, "howness versatility", a trait peculiar to our carbon brain, delivers its operative skill to "presence," when carbon-based life is in the immediate presence of who or what it is interacting with, far better than to "remoteness," when there is a distance filled by technology. The quality of interaction in presence is far different than the quality of remote interaction. Space and Reality are stubborn about this: organisms are self-designed and implemented spaces within spaces, within spaces. They are not virtualities within virtualities.

A transcending operation or interaction by carbon-based intelligence might act remotely, but this still is in the realm of carbon-based incarnation confined to the biosphere.

In terms of intellection, silicon might turn out to be a flatland compared to what complexity and miniaturization can do in the carbon-based domain where the nanotechnology of the brain is extended to the mono-cellular (or less) domain of viruses and their friends.

The atomic-molecular is the runway for the take off into a possible, if not probable, transfiguration. It seems that photons might be at last the most appropriate vehicle for this transfiguration: light speed is God's speed. For such an advent, the whole of Reality will need reconfiguration. That is where the gods will be created. All our invented gods, simulated and virtual, are bloodstained and desperately parochial.

Brain Machine

For the first time in history, man's thinking and tinkering is going on between the brain mind and a non-organic device, the computer. An innerness, the mind, and an outerness, the computer, are in discourse. A miniaturized-complex domain, the brain mind, interacting with a complicated miniaturized domain, the computer, the carbon cycle and silicon cycle, are coming together in a first encounter.

In a kind of humility, the Cybernauts relocate themselves in the silicon domain of the microchip, their new world and their new faith. They seem to unload their carbon complexity in the arms of the complicated silicon "out there" which, in a sort of bouleversement, turns out to be the Inside to which they now belong. As Insiders they are the true believers, the custodian of what has to come, The Chosen People.

Outsiders Insiders and the Chosen People Syndrome

Inside-ness implies coexistence with outside-ness. The Outsiders are those people who, due to circumstances and/or by choice, do not belong to the Insiders' community, the Cybernauts. The strong faith of the Cybernauts has the connotations of a theology: revelation acted upon will bring salvation. "We the Insiders, The Salvation Army, consciously or not, we are The Chosen People."

By now we all should know what happens to humanity afflicted and infected by The Chosen People malady and the curse we bring upon ourselves through it. "We" take turns at it. The result is pain, suffering, hatred, inequity and intolerance.

Homo carbonis/Homo siliconis

Imagine our distant, silicon, progeny discovering the remains of Homo Carbonis.

Spell-bound by the magic of life in my Homo Carbonis garment, even more so by the intelligence generating in it, and now spell-bound by the anticipations of what an eventual artificial intelligence can generate with all of its virtualities and, arguably, its virtuosity, I am distressed by the possible splitting of intelligent life into two distinct lineages, one estranged from the other.

It might not be too soon to seek ways to bind (religo) the separate fate of the two into a more synergetic destiny, possibly for a common purpose: the sensitization and metamorphosis of Reality into pure knowing.

What I find exciting in this anticipation is that it seems to fall neatly in place within my miniaturization-complexity-duration hypothesis of increasing miniaturization generating an increase of complexity compelling a reluctant Reality to take the road toward mind: Mind as duration, the offspring of miniaturization and complexification.

The split of carbon and silicon could be horrendously harsh and cruel, therefore the binding religo religion may present itself as an imperative. To complicate things is the hyper-consumeristic materialistic bent of the technological societies, a steam roller cornering the soul (mind) into smaller and smaller quarters of a shrinking horizon.

Homo Siliconis should not take part in such squeeze. To the contrary it should be, as the miniaturization-complexity-duration paradigm proposes, a powerful and purposeful new impulse towards the mind-ification of Reality. But within artificial intelligence might eventually develop an internal (inside the computer) initiative to ban Homo Carbonis from its own newly generated domain. To ban it to the servo-system domain, a domain instrumentalizing the evolution of Homo Siliconis, the new species. (A Luddite movement could develop in the ranks of dispossessed Homo Carbonis.)

The silicon butler of the house, androgynous and Apollo Cartesian, would become the new master... The Master Race. The carbon "has-been" master of the house, bisexual and Dionysio Pascalian, would become the new maid of the house (even silicon needs shelter) the slave race.

The intellection graph of the master is straight and climbing, with no sex and no sexual violence, no infancy or no senility, and no life death anguish. The master never dies. Silicon is above the fray.

The intellection graph of the maid is a wash-board running horizontal. Eros love, passion, violence, compassion are there but what's the use? Perhaps the escape from extinction is in the dexterity of hand, the maid's mastery, which is, for now, indispensable to the master.

The new theologians, the Cybernauts, have invented God. He takes over and finds his carbon ancestry no longer useful. One of the first proclamations of God will concern "pulling the plug": automatic and immediate capital punishment. Electricity is the blood running photons in the fiber optics of its artery.

Is the androgynous ideal we see gaining popularity in the United States an anticipation of and a wish for artificial intelligence to take over? "The baby maker and her womb? Isn't that embarrassing?" Master Androgynous Judith chirps.

In the budding cyber-theology are the germs for the splintering of human history:

The genome that holds the "Truth" the Insiders lineage;

The genome that does not hold the truth, the Outsiders lineage.
The holders of the "Truth" are The Chosen Ones.

Given the uniqueness and novelty of the cyberspace theology with the immense power the computer confers to it, the dilemma for Homo Sapiens Sapiens is epochal.

To splinter or not to splinter?

It must be noted that in other domains such a dilemma has inevitable resolutions. For instance in space we will sooner or later develop the lineages of Earth man/Space man... Cyber man...

Going by the "codes" of the cyber-revolution pacemakers, a differentiation is in the making right under our eyes and it is inevitable.

Two lineages develop:

• the Insiders in a minority, are the holder of "the force," while
  
• the Outsiders in a majority, are no longer in touch with the truth. They now compose a servo-system for the Insiders. Once upon a time they incarnated human life in its full enigmatic self. Now they are viewed by the Insiders as sclerotic.

Even a sustained injection of tolerance in the shared process of living on one planet will turn out to be barely sufficient to maintain the two lineages on a semblance of mutual respect, if not harmony. The fact is, they cannot go on by themselves.

Whenever The Chosen People syndrome comes up, the level of suffering inevitably rises. The conflict between two Chosen-People lineages, the Jews, a minority with a prodigiously tormented long history, and the Nazis with their sudden virulence in all its cruel warpage of values is but one tragic example.

The Global Hermitage

The Global Hermitage⁵ the Insider hermits are moving into, is the place where the very nature of the technology of miniaturization forces the flesh with its 3.5 eons of baggage to step aside or simply be put in charge of the care, maintenance, satisfaction and possibly even reproduction of the elected hermitage dwellers.

The Insider, potentially asexual, lineage is occupied intensely, often exclusively, by the brain machine interaction. The astonishing feat of the brain's complexity matching its power, courtesy of duration, with the magic feat of miniaturization in the form of the "vanishing" microchip is the matching or mismatching of an atomic domain working at a somewhat sonic speed, with the photon domain working at light speed.

The cyberspace evolution seems to be in constant need of "uncontaminated" minds. That is why it proselytizes successfully among 5-year-olds and why, beyond the drive propelling the artificial intelligence, it also has a self-immolation, a martyrdom side: the demise of the flesh lineage as soon as no "real" advantage remains in carrying on with the carbon cycle intellection. It would be a cruel irony that a millennia ago, 30 was the age of demise, and now at the 80-year average threshold, we find ourselves arguing for a demise at 30. Biologically speaking, 30 years make sense. Reproductive responsibility has been covered and from there on it is simply a question of vegetating while being a minimal burden for the species. In the mammalian kingdom post-mature animals are a sad show, meat for the predators.

How, Where, When

Reconfiguration is the task of techne: to make this into that. The whole evolutionary becoming is the making of this into that. And by the way, this reconfiguration of space is probably all there is. If so, time is a purely mental invention with not one ounce of Reality attached to it.

Western man took the lead in exo-biological techne with the scientific and the industrial revolutions. As of the end of the Second Millennium (Christian theology), the miracle of techne, applied science, is the silicon microchip, the sought-out, artificial intelligence cyberspace invention.

This is another "triumph" of miniaturization on the back of organic and neural miniaturization. This means that the innerness typifying complexity, the inside drive of organisms, is generating the complicated in the arms of miniaturization. In this outer reconfiguration of space in search of memory, or duration, we found the atom too coarse, too large and too slow. We have to base our memory search on light, the photon. Immense miniaturization must now seek immense complexity so as to generate immense memory, duration.

In this scenario, time, a symbol of reconfiguration of space, is more and more squeezed out of Reality by the limitless urge of our incredible ability to know how to do things, of "howness." "Infinite" miniaturization, "infinite" complexification, and infinite "memory" are all the necessary ingredients for self-revelation: duration as Reality in Being.

In this ephemeralization, an "angelic" attribute, the "Where" and the "When," remain crucial but will begin to show their marginality in a Reality which could eventually drop them altogether; it would have to. Being by definition has no "Where-ness" nor "When-ness."

What

Attached as we seem to be to the notion of a necessary creator, God, I would suggest that godliness is BEING aware of itself. Such a self-revelatory state of Reality is necessarily beyond space-time because it is the full memory of the whole past, the becoming of evolution, in its utterly detailed self. And space-"time" works in the becoming domain, not in the Being domain. At the end of space-time is "where" BEING is.Astonishing and frightening as are the implications of this "howness" generating "whatness," the very nature of cyberspace, the miniaturization, complexity, duration paradigm ad infinitum, shows the way to the "angelic" character of a successful evolutionary drift.

Astounded and frightened, we stand vis-a-vis the first elementary steps in such a direction, toward duration, deploying crude fragments of a transcendence which through technology, the how, breaks the planetary confinement.

If we let howness run away from knowledge and wisdom, we will be in a frenzy of arrogance and brute force, transforming the self-chosen people, the Insiders, into the new despots running amok in a disintegrating world.

Why?

We must reject all theologies proclaiming exclusivity on the "truth," and they all are forced to do so by their very genesis. We must reject the notion of a benevolent reality anxiously nudging life towards such nonexistent truth. The mind, self-consciousness, is left to cope with the powerhouse that Reality is.

Reality is indifferent to life, running according to its own undeflecting rules, and steamrolling more and more into mindlessness: a reconfiguring of space with no aim; a purely technological, entropy-oriented, cosmic bravado.

But puny Mind is still a great inventor-creator.

Intellection, love, compassion, altruism and grace must give and maintain the right spin to the cosmological-technological tide, a spin away from determinism, destruction, intolerance and violence.

If successful, at the very end of the evolutionary tunnel could be the esthetic resolution, self-revelatory and equitable, the grace of durational Being. It would be the fully implemented "know thyself" of Reality on its all-inclusive cosmic scale. I call it the Omega Seed.

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FOOTNOTES

¹ The art and science of doing more and more with less and less [ Back ]

² They are virtual realities sold as Reality [ Back ]

³ The young wealthy Cybrarian settling down, family oriented, is there for the taking by the steamroller of hyper-consumption [ Back ]

⁴ Simulation and virtuality cannot per se be complex since they are instead of that which they will never be capable of becoming [ Back ]

⁵ The Global Village has always been necessarily a poor utopian notion [ Back ]