we, as data, can Ctrl + S our lives

In  21 Lessons for the 21st Century Yuval Noah Harari states that “Mandating governments to nationalize the data (like algorithms of our online behaviors) will probably curb the power of big corporations, but it might also result in creepy digital dictatorships,” and this would not resolve the fact that we are manipulated when our personal data is controlled. Harari goes on to say that “once politicians can press our emotional buttons directly (manipulate our data, as in know it), generating anxiety, hatred, joy, and boredom, politics will become a mere emotional circus” In 1988, I wrote a paper on the book Death of the Soul: from Descartes to the Computer by William Barrett. My conclusion was that once memory is interrupted strongly enough and for a long enough period, we would experience the death of the soul. Barrett’s book was about artificial intelligence and the nature of the soul.  I may not have done much more than reiterate Barrett’s conclusion, but it seemed a profound set of circumstances.   Even then, some individuals believed that if information about their lives could be saved in a supercomputer, a very large one in those days, their lives could be revived in the future when there was the ability to make the information flow again in/ or outside of bodily existence.  Now, it seems to me that Harari is suggesting that who we become is the data that we generate.  Regardless, Harari misses, at least in this portion of his book, what Maxine Sheets-Johnstone calls the “affective tactile-kinesthetic” experience of the human body.  Harari has scoffed at God for making us in the form of biological and limited bodies subject to decay.  Harari has indicated that we humans can do better than God (all the while, Harari denies God by speaking of how we have killed the soul of God but do not know how to dispense of God’s body) and can manipulate our data in a better way than God does by us using silicone, or making it data stored away and recreated or duplicated.  Harari has no novel or grand idea that was not already being toyed with in the 1980’s and before. Though some politicians may call Harari “the prophet,” Barrett seems to have beaten Harari to the draw.  

Comments

B said…
Honestly, the materialist arguments are growing increasingly tedious.
26 August 2022 at 10:18
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