Old Stories, New Interpretations : The Garden of Eden (Part III)
Part 3 of 3
The concept of “myth” is an enigma wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in a piece of bacon.
The word “myth” is one of those rare words in the English language that have completely opposing meanings (contronyms). Myth can either be defined as a falsehood -or - a story that contains an eternal truth. (By the way, the bacon is part of the package because - by either definition - myths are seductive).
In the last entry, I wrote about the Gnostic interpretation of the Garden of Eden Genesis myth and here, I’ll expand on it here a little insofar as it relates to an appropriate myth to explore the concept of artificial intelligence gaining sentience.
Side note before I get into that: Personally, I don’t know where I fall on AI becoming sentient - both in terms of a belief that this may happen - or a hope that it will happen. According to this article, it may have already happened. Whatever the case, the larger argument has tended to center around the ability for humans to create a sentient AI. And this is where the Gnostic interpretation of the Garden of Eden myth presents a third option for a yummy, purely-speculative, mind-trip.
In the Gnostic myth (and again, this is seen as a myth rather than a literal or historical account), the creator god (more commonly known as the god of the old testament) forms Adam but the result is a lifeless Adam-shaped meat suit in an equally lifeless material prison. The mind-bending (from the perspective of the orthodox account of Genesis) reason for Adam coming to life is because Eve visits Adam in a dream and calls him to life. In other words, the creator god produced the container and Eve produced the life force that then occupies the container. What’s more, this life force not only is superior to all that the creator god formed but is superior to the creator god, himself.
Many self-described transhumanists (those who believe humanity can evolve beyond it’s current mental and physical limitations) have been friendly to the Gnostic myth (or something like it) in terms of the myth’s portrayal of Earth and all of it’s physical and gooey attributes as part of a material prison. Through the assistance of technology by which our minds could be uploaded to an online environment, transhumanists would argue, humanity can ascend the physical world (but what about the other life forms?) toward the pleroma (the “fullness” of the higher realms).
My take is very different than this. My most recent animation, “Revelation to the Disembodied,” (see an excerpt of the film, here) casts humanity in the role of creator gods and the lifeless Adam as humanity’s attempt to create a sentient AI. Where then, does this leave the role of the Gnostic Eve? Eve is like the weeds and flowers that poke up through cracks in the sidewalk that evoke the phrase, “life finds a way.” If humans create the container, what’s to say that something non-human might not fill the container? It might not be biological life in the way that we understand it. It could be another dimension of life that we haven’t yet tapped into. Who knows? Life is weird. Reality is weird. And the further we try and understand reality through science, the weirder reality becomes. And you don’t have to be stoned late at night watching some Netflix documentary on the nature of infinity to get that.
