Techgnosis, Infomysticism, and the War Against Entropy, by Steve Mizrach
The Techgnostic Vision
Although I've provided the bare outline of what can be called the techgnostic
or infomystical worldview, I have so far left out one of the most critical
elements: the idea of some prior fall or disruption which has left humankind
cut off from the universal intercommunication, akin to the shattering of
vessels described in the Hebrew Kabbalah. The best exponent of this viewpoint
is Philip K. Dick, whose later writings suggest that at one point the Earth
was part of some vast pan-galactic information network centered around
Albemuth or Sirius, but that the connection was severed (for unknown reasons,
although the time he gives for this event was the destruction of the Temple of
Jerusalem in 70 CE). As a result Dick describes, a Black Iron Prison which
descended around Earth. Finding the Earth cut off from the rest of the
universe, the Sirians dispatched a satellite (VALIS) to try and pierce the
noise blanketing the planet with a divine invasion of a pure, rational,
restoring signal.
From the techgnostic viewpoint, isolated and closed systems must necessarily
degenerate. Entropy sets in once they can no longer exchange matter,
information, and energy with the rest of the universe. Human beings would do
so quite rapidly if they were not constantly taking in new matter from the
environment; apparently humans replace every molecule of substance in our
bodies every seven years or so. Living organisms and ordered systems are
ultimately whirlpools or vortices, patterns of organization which suck in new
matter and energy all the time. They expel entropy into the environment (waste
matter) but reduce it in themselves. (They can't do this forever; eventually
multicellular life must succumb to entropy in the form of biological death.)
But closed systems are entropic systems. Fundamentalisms block new ideas,
closed societies block new innovations, and closed biotic communities block
the introduction of new gene flows. They fall into entropy more rapidly than
open systems.
Thus, the problem of theodicy or the existence of entropy becomes explained as
a severing of communication. The goal of Earth is not merely to join all human
minds into one Gaian planet-mind; ultimately, the goal is to shatter the Black
Iron Prison and rejoin this galactic network, reducing the entropic (Kali Yuga-
like) state in which it is currently in. Dick even hints that this might mean
the triumph over death. Some biologists think organisms acquire genetic errors
throughout their lifetime (whether through wear and tear or some
preprogramming or both), and that death results when the errors so overwhelm
the signal or code of the organism that it can no longer maintain itself in
dynamic homeostasis. The inability of the body to function shuts off blood to
the brain, and thus the code of the personality or identity of the person is
extinguished as well. Death is the extinguishing of information (but sexual
reproduction and culture preserve some of it, in the form of genes and
memes.)
www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/mar/mizinfo.html
