Absalom, Absalom–Sutpen the Ubermensch

On my first trip to the Mississippi, looking over the vast, flowing white cotton fields; and after reading Mississippi State history, I was amazed at the story of plantation owners, like Faulkner’s fictional Thomas Sutpen, who came from the East to realize great wealth from the rich bottom land of the Delta.  Many of these planters came from tobacco lands in Virginia and North Carolina which, because of over-farming, had lost their productivity; and others, like Sutpen, made the journey from the mountainous backwoods.  In all cases, they had to clear the land of cypress and thick semi-tropical underbrush; remove stumps, rocks, roots, and the natural detritus of the forests and swamps; clear swamps; and finally till the new land.  It was a herculean task, all done with the sweat of manual labor, usually by slaves that the planters had brought with them from their old plantations. 

I was amazed not only because of the physical labor of clearing virgin land, but the entrepreneurial passion that moved men to undertake long journeys through undeveloped country – through forests, swamps, mountains, land infested with insects, snakes, wild animals, alligators, and disease, and vulnerable to Indians and bandits.  These men could have stayed in Virginia – and many of them did – but they chose to risk the journey, and the malaria, dengue, and yellow fever of their promised land. This was early America (Sutpen moved to Mississippi in 1833) – an America still wondering at the vast new lands opened by the Louisiana Purchase only twenty years earlier, touched by Manifest Destiny, and with the desire and indomitability of the earliest settlers.  What moved these new Southern planters is what still moves America – the desire for wealth, more wealth, and still more wealth.  The development of the Delta is just a microcosm of America and the rapid, inexorable move West.  Less than 150 years passed until the last of the continental United States territories were incorporated as states.

Absalom, Absalom is Faulkner’s finest book.  It is an operatic story of power, incest, murder, jealousy, and hatred – the rise and fall of a Southern family; but it is also a chronicle of Southern history, a story of class, race, and family within the context of the Civil War; and a lyrical narrative told by many tellers.  The language of the book is some of the finest in English.  Here is the very first paragraph of Chapter 1, perhaps one of the very best openings of any novel:

From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler and which as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of old dead dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling window blinds as wind might have blown them.  There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came no and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away; and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bold upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet, inattentive, and harmless out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust.

In this one paragraph, Faulkner creates the atmosphere of the novel, introduces future events (dead sister, father, a husband who might not have been); and introduces the bitter, angry, and frustrated character of Miss Coldfield who dominates the book (in a sense, she is the main character of the book and not Sutpen). 

The rest of the book continues in the same lyrical, expressive way, telling the story of Thomas Sutpen principally through the words, reminiscences, and speculations of Miss Coldfield, Quentin Compson, Quentin’s father and grandfather.  The life of the main characters – Sutpen and his many children, their wives, mistresses and children; their interwoven stories – is created through these narratives.  Like Browning and others before him, Faulkner tells one story through many different observers.  “There are thirteen ways to see a blackbird”, said Faulkner once, quoting Wallace Stevens, referring to the impossibility of arriving at one truth, one true story, one factual event.

I have always preferred the Nietzschian supermen of Elizabethan theatre who are ‘beyond good and evil’.  Tamburlaine (Marlowe) and Richard III (Shakespeare) are men whose ambitions are pursued for purely personal gain, without regard to morality.  Perhaps this is because villains are so much more fun – we prefer to watch Richard or Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Edmund, Goneril and Regan, or Iago in their is evil pursuits than the more temperate (and less powerful) Richard II or Henry VI – but there is something else as well. Society by its very survival-first nature is conservative and intolerant of the outliers, those who challenge received wisdom, and in particular those who reject conventional morality.  The marauding hordes of the historical Tamburlaine and especially his countryman, Genghis Khan,  are well-known.  Tens of millions of people were slaughtered in his absolute, pure, and complete path of dominance and extension of empire as Genghis Khan swept out of the steps to the east and west.  Nietzsche does not advocate for the literal unfettering of the immoral man, but that Supermen with their pure will, indomitability, and single-minded pursuit of power, and expression are necessary and admirable.

Nietzsche calls for exceptional people to no longer be ashamed of their uniqueness in the face of a supposed morality-for-all, which Nietzsche deems to be harmful to the flourishing of exceptional people. However, Nietzsche cautions that morality, per se, is not bad; it is good for the masses, and should be left to them. Exceptional people, on the other hand, should follow their own "inner law." A favorite motto of Nietzsche, taken from Pindar, reads: "Become what you are." (Wikipedia)

Nietzsche had an influence on a number of writers – G.B.Shaw, Jack London, and James Joyce – and although there is little scholarship on the matter, I believe that he may have had an influence on Faulkner as well, at least in Absalom, Absalom. Or, perhaps more possibly that Faulkner simply thought like Nietzsche in creating Thomas Sutpen.

Sutpen has what he calls ‘my design’, a plan to become the wealthiest, most powerful landowner in Mississippi if not beyond.  He comes to Mississippi out of the West Virginia hills by way of plantation experience in Haiti and buys ‘Sutpen’s Hundred’ – 100 square miles of land bought from the Indians and worked by his wild (Haitian) slaves, overseen by an indentured French architect, and created out of his vision and realized through the force of his will, all very Nietzschean.  As part of his design, he knew he had to take a wife who would give him the respectability, if not Southern noble name, which would lend legitimacy to his enterprise.  He understood the way of the South with its strict social codes, differences between whites and blacks, and among blacks and whites themselves.  He felt that marrying Ellen Coldfield would provide the remaining piece to the design.  Little did he know that his life would be dramatically caught up in the politics of class and race.  As each unforeseen and tragic consequence of his first ‘mistake’ – having a mixed-race child by an octoroon mistress/wife in Haiti – occurred, he did not waver, but pursued his design and his dream of wealth, acceptance, and respectability.

Sutpen was a heroic figure.  He resisted an armed slave insurrection in Haiti, saving the plantation owner and his family; and he fought with distinction in the Civil War.  From this perspective – his worthy pursuit of land, respectability, and power – was within the framework of traditional morality; but his obsession with his own succession and the complicating factor of race were outside it and the reasons for his ultimate failure.  He was indifferent to his wife, daughter, and son; dismissive to his dead wife’s sister Rosa (Miss Coldfield), suggesting that they see if she can produce a son, then they would marry; manipulative of his white sharecropper tenant; and abusive and egomaniacally dismissive of his newborn daughter, born of the granddaughter of the sharecropper. 

In other words, his Nietzschean will to succeed carried him through the simpler phases of the plan.  It was relatively easy to dominate the plantation society of Haiti, through the sheer force of will create Sutpen’s Hundred, build the house, and work the land; but will was not enough to dominate his son, Henry; his first-born, mixed-blood Charles Bon, Bon’s mother, Rosa Coldfield, his mixed-race daughter Clytie, or the sharecropper who in an act of rage and outrage and social frustration, finally kills him.

There was no doubt that he could do anything.  Even the tenant farmer, who admires Sutpen before the outrage, acknowledges that anything he, Sutpen, touches, turns out the way he wants it.  However, his will becomes twisted and obsessive.  His hauling of family gravestones across half the country is a sign of perverted obsessive design if not madness and is emblematic and symptomatic of the destruction of the man:

It seemed to Quentin that he could actually see them: the ragged and starving troops without shoes, the gaunt powder-blackened faces looking backward over tattered shoulders, the glaring eyes in which burned some indomitable desperation of undefeat watching that dark interdict ocean across which a grim lightless solitary ship fled with in its hold two thousand pounds –space containing not bullets, not even something to eat, but that much bombastic and inert carven rock which for the next year was to be part of the regiment, to follow it into Pennsylvania and be present at Gettysburg, moving behind the regiment in a wagon driven by the demon’s [Sutpen’s] body servant through swamp and plain and mountain pass, the regiment moving no faster than the wagon could, with starved gaunt men and gaunt spent horses knee deep in icy mud or snow, sweating and cursing it through bog and morass like a piece of artillery, speaking of the two stones as ‘Colonel’ and ‘Mrs. Colonel’….

Thomas Sutpen, like all the super-villains mentioned above, is destroyed by his own delusions.  ‘My horse, my horse! My kingdom for a horse’ shows how Richard, despite his pure will, has misunderstood the practicality and reality of survival.  Macbeth is destroyed because his belief in his innate and bestowed power is far beyond reality.  Iago and Edmund are found out.  The bloody Titus is such a blood-thirsty tyrant that he cannot possibly survive.

To me, Sutpen is not only a Nietzschean figure to be admired for the power of his will and the very American nature of his vision, but he is the most tragic figure of all.  He tries his best to negotiate the tangled web of race and class and to maintain the clarity of his vision, but he is doomed from the start.

This was ultimately Faulkner’s vision – the winning of the South was heroic, but had the seeds of its own destruction within it from the very beginning.

Obsession And The True Nature Of Perception - For The Rest Of Us A Tree Is Just A Tree

Even as an infant Billy Klegg knew the meaning of ‘fat’.  He pointed his chubby little finger at flubbery stomachs, thick thighs, high booty, pendulous breasts, and triple chins and said, “Fat”.

He pointed at stanchions, pylons, posts, and trash bins and correctly said, “Fat”.  Billy understood girth.

His mother, thinking that this ability was a sign of high intelligence rather than the developmental challenge that it was, encouraged him.  At his insistence, she read him only stories of fat people.  His favorite was about Farmer Bialek, a peasant from the Russian shtetl who had a barnyard full of fat animals.  In liltingly rhyming couplets the nursery rhyme told of geese with their plump breasts ready for eating, fat chickens laden with eggs for laying, and cows with heavy udders ready for milking. 

When he got a bit older and could deal with numbers, his teachers were impressed with his ability to gauge circumference.  Even without seeing completely around an object, he was able to estimate its circumference within a few millimeters.  He couldn’t make neither heads nor tails out of pyramids, cylinders, or cubes.  It was as though they weren’t there, out of his field of vision. 

As he grew, his obsession continued.  His world was completely circumscribed, so to speak, by round objects.  Only they mattered to him.  New Jersey was his favorite state because when he rode up the Turnpike and passed the giant, spherical gas containers at the refineries, he was ecstatic and kept pestering his parents to stop so that he could climb them.  He no longer called things fat, and his obsession morphed into to something more expansive.  It now was mass that appealed to him.  To most other children, skyscrapers were simply overwhelmingly tall.  To Billy, they were massive, as were mountains, huge semi rigs, and dams.  His mind could not calculate mass as easily as circumference, but he measured it in his own way and was surprised by the various forms that mass could take. To him outlines and perimeters did not exist.  The shape itself was never interesting, only the mass contained within it.

For a classmate of Billy's the world was only rhythmic sound and movement.  He saw and limited his vision to the rhythmic flap of wings or the sound of a train crossing a trestle.  He heard and isolated a dripping water faucet, the creaking of a dormer expanding equally under the heating of the sun, or the sound of engine tappets at idle.  He had no interest in chaotic events – a flag flapping irregularly with the intermittent wind, the chop of the Potomac River, or the stop-and-go movement of traffic.

The girl next door saw only colors, but instead of seeing the color of an object, she saw in her mind all the similar colors that it was not.  A dandelion yellow sweater was not daffodil yellow, or flashing light yellow, or burnt red-yellow, or yellow ochre, or goldfinch yellow.  Her mind was a riot of colors.  A downtown street is colorful enough without the obsession of seeing all the colors it could be.  She had to wear glasses with special lenses to block out color, especially during summer when the sun brightened all colors, and brought out tint and hue almost painfully. 

After knowing obsessive children like this Harper Phelps realized how bland his own own perceptions were - sharp enough to distinguish shapes, colors, and size and to appreciate the difference, but never intense like theirs.  He would have moments of insight when he suddenly saw the mass of a mountain silhouetted by the setting sun, or heard a rhythm that pierced through the horns and battering of the city, or saw the blue spectrum in a scarf; but he was not built like them, and the city would always be bits and pieces, scraps of color, and odd measures of rhythm, nothing else.

Indian yogis, in their evolution towards enlightenment, are able, it is said, to see without thinking; to take in a varied scene of movement, sound, smell, shape, and color and receive it, absorb it, assimilate it without analyzing it.  It was a purer perception, a higher state of perception than any still mired in complex phenomena the deciphering of which leads nowhere except to more futile attempts to disaggregate, categorize, organize and ultimately make sense out of a world of flickering and impermanent images.

Phelps, hoping to square his conviction that obsession enhanced experience and offered insights that normal desultory perception never could with the contrary Hindu conviction that only withdrawal, emotional neutrality, and the dismissal of rational perception as meaningless, traveled to Hardwar, one of the holiest sites in India.  He wanted to visit Hardwar because it was in the foothills of the Himalayas near the source of the Ganges.  The water, unlike the brown sludge of the Ganges in the vast Indian plains, was a brilliant turquoise.  The water poured down upland rapids for miles until it joined with other rivers to become the powerful but placid river of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar before emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

Harper's real reason for going to Hardwar, however, was because it was a relatively quiet place compared to the vast, dense and sprawling holy cities of Varanasi or Allahabad.  There he would be able to meditate on the banks of the river, and try to at least get a glimpse of ‘seeing without thinking’.

Hardwar was all that he expected – a devotional place meant for prayer, cremation, and meditation.  It was cool and fresh, a welcome change from the heat of Delhi. Harper sat in the traditional yoga pose, breathed deeply, and opened his eyes.  In the river, men held large pieces of broken glass on top of the water as lenses to see through so that they could locate gold teeth, jewelry, coins, and other valuable bits and pieces that survived the burning and charring.

Upriver were the burning ghats, the high funeral pyres stacked with wood under white-wrapped bodies.  Along the riverbank were the prayer stalls where Hindu priests located in some arcane book your caste name, took your money, and promised to offer prayers for the dead.  There were kites – scavenger birds – which pecked and pick at the leavings that floated downwind from the pyres.

The problem was, of course, that Phelps could not help but analyze, categorize, and organize.  The color of the water was like a cold Caribbean, he thought.  The color of a woman’s sari was like that of a former girlfriend in Bombay.  The cawing of the crows was like that of the birds scavenging rat pieces near Kemp’s Corner. 

He tried again and again with no luck.  He had been trained for thirty years to see things not just for what they are but for what they resemble – how they are like other things in a category, or dissimilar, like the plants of Linnaeus in a world of taxonomy.  It would not be possible to change so quickly, if at all.  Phelps tried for moments, seconds of clarity, first baby steps on the way to perceptual purity.  Nothing.  The incredible, new, unique, and unexplained sights and sounds around me were too much.  Westerner to the core, he had to understand them.

Phelps left India more confused and discouraged than ever.  Not only did he have the intense, perceptions of Billy Klegg and his classmates but he was equally unable to disassociate himself from the compulsive need to analyze, sift, and make sense of everything from paper to God.

This perceptual confusion led to its own obsession. There was a third and even more important way that perception could be altered, Phelps felt, by adjusting the perception of time.  Repetition, for example, sped things up.  Every morning that he made his bed, smoothed the wrinkles, and arranged the blankets, he was not only aware of that singularly repetitive act, but of the many days he had done it.  Every evening that he left his office and walked down the corridor past the pictures of smiling African women pulling water from wells, or children staring at the camera, he knew that he had done that very same action the day before and the day before that.  Now a year had passed without him realizing it.

If he changed routines, he reasoned, changing routines, altering routes from office to street, making the bed in the middle of the day or just before bedtime, he could slow the passage of time.   All that he accomplished, of course, was to establish new, eventually predictable routines.  The days all sped by, and he turned 70 when he should only have been 30.

He was back where he started, caught between 'two purities' - the ability to see the world according to one's own innate perceptual order; and the equally remarkable ability to see it as a pastiche of unrelated and meaningless objects in random movement. His attempts to slow time was nothing more than a futile and ironically obsessional attempt to engineer perception.

Absalom, Absalom tells the story of the Sutpen family through the eyes of many observers, some who have seen events happen directly, but most who either have heard about them second hand or more and who conjecture about fact and reality.  It is Faulkner's treatise on human perception as well as a chronicle of Southern history, manners, and morals.  

Faulkner said, quoting a poem by Wallace Stevens, said that reading Absalom, Absalom was like looking at a blackbird thirteen different ways.  When asked about that quote by a student at the University of Mississippi who wondered why 13, Faulkner replied, “I made a mistake.  Not thirteen, but fourteen”.  The student looked at him quizzically.  “You are the fourteenth”, said Faulkner.

Harper Phelps eventually realized that he was not naturally able to see shapes for their consistency and meaning; nor could he hear sounds as patterns that intimated universality ; nor was he disciplined enough to remove the misleading intent of logic. He was neither Billy Klegg or a Himalayan sadhu. Perhaps most importantly, he shared none of the obsession of both.

He couldn't even convince himself that Faulkner, Robert Browning, or Akira Kurosawa were right in observing that there is no such thing as one unique, true, unalterable perception; who concluded that one can only cobble together multiple views and come up with something resembling reality; and that perceptual obsession had no place at all in human activity.

Harper Phelps ended up like everyone else believing that sounds, colors, and shapes have no meaning other than superficial designators; that logic and rational intelligence are God-given and what make us human.  Questioning their relevance or validity would be senseless; and to suggest that they should be suppressed for enlightenment irrelevant. The external world is a randomly assigned given and the internal one a mystery, so trying to make sense out of their interface would be a futile enterprise from the very start.

In other words he muddled through, never bothering about what things meant or why they were ordered the way they were.  He was ordinary, as befuddled by what he saw as anyone, but thanks to his obsession with obsession, was able to relax and take life as it came.

Virtual Reality–Brain and Computer Can Now Communicate

The BBC today reported a remarkable discovery:

Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words.The technique reported relies on gathering electrical signals directly from patients' brains.Based on signals from listening patients, a computer model was used to reconstruct the sounds of words that patients were thinking of.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16811042

A mind-computer link has finally been established, and there is no limit to where that relationship will lead.  Although the short-term prospects are to enable comatose and other ‘locked-in’ patients to communicate, there is no doubt that that this discovery will quickly and surely evolve into a fully-linked mind-computer network.  Once the electronic code to our thoughts has been deciphered, we will, through the mediation of the computer, be able to communicate with any other individual.  As importantly we will have access to the world’s electronically-recorded information.  Combining the two, we will be able to create our own completely virtual worlds and live in them with whomever we choose, whenever we choose, and wherever we like. 

In 1973 I wrote a novel called Amerikua which was about virtual reality.  It was a bad novel.  It was overloaded, undeveloped, character-less, with no sense of drama, feeling, or plot.  It was, nevertheless, a work that correctly anticipated the future.

The book explored ideas that had taken root in my many years living in India where I was taken with the idea that higher states of consciousness – or at least different states of consciousness – were possible and apparently achieved by sadhus. This belief in accession to a higher, more spiritual world was accepted and aspired to by most Indians. The concept that individuals might be able to leave one kind of reality and join another, however, was beyond the reach of most Westerners.  We had neither the tradition, the patience, the discipline, or even the desire to begin this spiritual journey – at least not in the Hindu way.  

After India I lived in Mexico and Guatemala and visited the ruins of Mixtec and Zapotec civilizations near the border.  These pre-Columbian civilizations were animist with a powerful relationship with the forces and elements of nature:

Zapotec religion was animistic. Although not monotheists, "they did recognize a supreme being who was without beginning or end, who created everything but was not himself created,but he was so infinite and incorporeal that no images were ever made of him. This supreme being had, in turn, created a series of powerful supernatural forces including lightning, sun, earthquake, fire, and clouds which interacted with the Zapotecs. (Wikipedia)

Standing near Monte Alban, looking out over the valley to the mountains beyond, I visualized a primitive, yet spiritually sophisticated life, intimidated by unexplained forces of nature – wild storms, thunder and lightning.  A life overpowered by spiritual forces not simply residing in but being mountains, immovable, dark, threatening.  Zapotecs must have been, startled and amazed by the sun and the sky, and they offered human sacrifices to appease the physical and supremely powerful forces around them.  The religions of the West, by comparison, where power and sacrifice were reduced to consecration and symbolism, were tepid, dilute, and passionless.  The awe of the Middle Ages where this ritual sacrifice was performed in vast, towering, echoing cathedrals, the closest thing to a sense of being in the physical presence of spiritual forces, was long gone.

Finally in this short but important period, I visited Austin, Texas, and there I saw what is common in every city now – mega-houses designed with the owners’ vision of reality; Greek Revival, Tudor, Mediterranean, Georgian mansions that had been constructed with no sense of place, environment, or history.  They were pure fantasy.  I had the sense then – a sense which has only increased and been consolidated in the ensuring years – that Americans are not satisfied with reality.  The what is does not excite us; the what could be does. Out of the scrub brush of the Texas bush came icons of Elizabeth I, the grand Spanish colonial empire, and visions of antiquity.   

Out of these three experiences – in India, pre-Columbian Mexico, and Austin, Texas – came my idea of a very unique American virtual reality; one which was as unfettered, free, and liberated as that of an Indian sadhu; one that was as frighteningly powerful as a Zapotec sacrifice; and one which was typically American in its eagerness for new experiences, to create and fashion reality according to individual whim.   At the time, at the infancy of the computer age, there were only glimmerings of the possibility of the new technology, the first insights into artificial intelligence, and only a few glancing references to how man and machine would interact.  But the suggestions that the language of the mind and that of the computer would at some point become one were there, if only few and speculative.  We would some day be able to transmit our thoughts to the computer, and it would talk back.  That day has come.

There is no doubt that we prefer a virtual world.  We travel in virtual worlds every day.  Reality is being disassembled.  Computer games, for example, are becoming so sophisticated that it is hard to tell if they have been computer-generated or are recordings of the real world.  Movies are now out in 3-D, and it will not be long before the experience moves from a flat screen and becomes truly three-dimensional and fully interactive.  We will be part of a projected, fantasy world in our living rooms.  Teleconferencing is common today, but soon there will be virtual conferencing where our avatars, holographic images of ourselves, programmed with sophisticated social and intellectual software, will take our places.  There will be fewer and fewer reasons to travel when software programs become so sophisticated that the three-dimensional virtual experienced will be better than the real one. 

An essential point is that once a virtual reality becomes equal to or better than the actual reality, a Rubicon will have been crossed.  No going back.  Why would you? If the virtual world is no different from the real one, but it is enhanced, more beautiful, more exciting, more fulfilling…why would you ever choose the real? 

An equally important point, and the key to progressing from our currently embryonic virtual reality to a more mature and complete one, is that we don’t care about reality.  Despite the laggards who insist that the smell of a real pine forest, high up in the Rockies can never be replaced, it can – easily.  Virtual scents are a reality, and the creation of a supra-real mountain experience no different from the ‘real thing’ is only decades away.

The study on which the BBC report is based is historic.  Its title is appropriately modest, academic, and factual; but the implications are revolutionary.

Using the electrocorticographic speech network to control a brain–computer interface in humans

Eric C Leuthardt et al 2011

Journal of Neural Engineering Volume 8 Number 3

The discovery is like that of Watson and Crick and DNA.  When the news broke in 1953, there was certainly no way to know that the discovery would revolutionize the very nature of human life.  Thanks to the discovery of DNA, genetic recognition and modification are realities.  We can be screened for all kinds of genetic mutations which increase our risk from disease.  Our ancestry can be confirmed.  The genetic modification of plants and animals make them more productive and more resistant to disease.  Eventually – and it is a question of when, not if – human beings will be genetically modified.  Human nature itself will be changed. We will be able to create our own fantasy vision of our offspring, just as the old residents of Austin designed their fantasy houses.

Eventually, thanks to this new brain-computer interface, we will be able to communicate freely with the computer – not only words, but images, thoughts, and feelings.  We are only at the very tip of the deciphering of the electronic codes for cognition and feeling; and once they are known, the range, depth, and intensity of the communication to others via the computer will be limitless.

In the almost 40 years since I wrote the book, I have heard every possible argument against this virtual world.  “I don’t care”, was the most common, “I will always prefer the real world”.  My follow-up question, “But if you can’t tell the difference”, was rejected out of hand.  There was something sacrosanct about real dirt, real birds, and the real taste of a Camembert. 

Philosophers have debated the nature of reality for centuries, asking the fundamental question posed here – what is reality?  Are we real, or living in an imagined world? Or do we create an imagined world, as Bishop Berkeley argued in the 17th Century:

George Berkeley (12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753), also known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne), was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived. Thus, as Berkeley famously put it, for physical objects "esse est percipi" ("to be is to be perceived"). Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism. (Wikipedia)

Imagining a virtual world, then, is not necessarily far-fetched, nor somehow perverse.  In a sense, the vision I have presented here is no different from that of Berkeley, the only difference being that we are not imagining chairs and tables, but a much more complex world.

There is an inevitability about both the DNA and brain-computer interface revolutions.  There will always be those who feel that such human tampering with the laws of God is wrong; or those who are simply attached to their own beliefs in substance, material, and reality; but the train has left the station, and it will eventually and ultimately arrive in a world which will be unrecognizable from this one.