evolutionary therapy: I

"Animals in order to survive have had to be protected by fear-responses, in relation not only to other animals but to nature itself. They had to see the real relationship of their limited powers to the dangerous world in which they were immersed. Reality and fear go together naturally. As the human infant is in an even more exposed and helpless situation, it is foolish to think the fear response would have disappeared in such a weak and highly sensitive species. It is more reasonable to think that it was instead heightened, as some of the early Darwinians thought: early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value."
--Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Yes, they did indeed pass on to their offspring a realism (that is, the fear response, which I'm gonna call the death urge because this is supposed to be a horror movie blog, after all), and since the men who developed this sense of anxiety about the world would have lived longer than those without it, he would have produced more and more offspring. The death urge would have been naturally selected for and passed on to future generations via genetic information.

Becker concludes thusly: "The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none." I said something very similiar to a very pretty young girl while we sat on the floor on Valentine's Day, but in Becker's quote, I believe that I have found the crux of the idea that I have felt germinating inside me for the past couple of years. I have wanted to be a therapist, but it is becoming increasingly harder for me to reconcile the reality of how most of the people in the mental health field think. They are not scientifically inclined, and it has hurt the development of empirical data to back up most of the claims that the field makes about how it rehabilitates people. There is always a push to legitimize the social sciences, but mental health has been lagging, lagging due to generations of scholars perpetuating Freudian non-sense, hypnotherapy, Christian-based counseling, and the like.

But here, it seems, lies the roots of the idea that I am calling evolutionary therapy. This could become my life's work, I think, and it's based upon a simple premise. All mental disorders (calling them mental illnesses is a misnomer) are rooted in the fear of death, a very real, biological sense of mortality which is unique to humans. The death urge has helped humans to increase their numbers and ensure the ongoing survival of the species, but it has also rooted in us an innate, genetic anxiety. Therapy can help to alleviate this anxiety, but first it must take aim at the ways that humans have naturally selected for the death urge, and the ways that we can healthily deal with it. This involves educating people on biology and the evolutionary roots, of their fears, depressions, anxieties, and psychotic behaviors which have been misunderstood and allowed to take control over their lives. Humans need science and evolutionary theory in order to ensure the continuation of the species. I do not know if this is a new theory, but there has never been a scholarly article written which utilizes the term 'evolutionary therapy'. This may not be new, and it may not even be novel, but it is a beginning of my academic pursuits and, I hope, will offer an alternative to the soft, touchy-feeliness which therapy is often associated. Like the films that I will make because they are the types of movies that I want to see, I am going to develop a new model of social work practice, because I cannot exist and work with the existing one.

uh

I just found a file on my computer, a text file that I created on 3/2/2008. I do not recall creating this file. I don't remember writing anything. When I opened it, it was a Word Works document consisting of a single sentence, four words:

MARS IS EARTH'S NIGHTMARE

THE GHOST OF THE COMPUTER

I have reached a point in my purging where I know that it is entirely possible to adopt a perspective merely because it is interesting to do so. There is no way to quantify belief. One can say that he believes in god, and we have not yet developed a physical way of observing that one actually does believe in god, in a material way. We have neurological scanning technology that can visualize the chemical processes at work, but all they tell us is that the individual is experiencing the act of belief. I want my brain to be a clearinghouse for ideas, a sacred ground where all ideas and perspectives are considered equally. My eventual neurological scans will reveal religious beliefs, I suppose. It is quite rational to believe in god despite a lack of physical evidence to support the case. Belief is a conscious choice, a selection of an emotional process over a rational one, and it is arrived at via reason. I will explore all avenues of human thought and expression and life, adopting any belief system as I see fit, believing none, believing all.

Once mankind has accepted that the thing we have chosen to call the soul is really nothing more than our personalities or our collected intelligences, then human thought and discourse can get truly interesting. If we are willing to stake a belief in a human soul, then, why are we not willing to take the same leap to inquire as to the nature of the machine’s soul? It's just as immaterial as the human soul and the odds are about the same of proving its existence. What does an appliance feel? Does a computer have dreams? (See Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs wherein the protagonist tries to create a subconscious for his computer by creating a random folder and interesting random text files of information. What else is the human subconscious but all the information we filter through our brains, all of the clutter that we don’t know what to do with? A computer’s subconscious is more relevant than any theory of a human subconscious, anyway, because we can at least point to an actual folder that is the machine’s subconscious.)

Further food for thought: computer software is dependent upon line after line of binary code, endless sequences of data which inform the technology’s function and usage. It can only do what it is programmed to do. Well. Sounds similar to human coding, DNA, genetics, right? What if human begins are nothing more than the genetic equivalent of a player piano, acting out some predestined, scripted existence? Perhaps our entire lives are already written out in a long strand of genetic coding? More to the point, if humans are willing to believe that we have a soul despite the absence of any tangible evidence to justify our having this belief, then we should be just as ready to believe that our computers have souls, too, and perhaps our houses are haunted by the ghosts of our discarded toys, washing machines, microwaves, and television sets. This will be a key to the initial work that I will produce over the next couple of years, where one realizes that belief in nothing is ultimately belief in everything, since saying that we are all wrong and all explanations for the existence of life are meaningless and lacking is also saying that all explanations are valid and you can freely pick and choose from any existing belief systems, and even create new ones. Nothing is everything and we’re all right because we’re all wrong.

When you open yourself up to the possibility of the ghost of the computer, then you open yourself up to the possibility that artificial intelligence is just as valid as human intelligence. Digital is just as valid as analog, a point that digital filmmaking, which will be the medium through which I express myself until I can afford others, must ultimately make due to the fact that it will be created through digital (that is, pixilated) processes. What we must point out is that digital information is nothing more than a tangible expression of the stuff of the universe; cells and colored light. What we perceive in a film is no less relevant than the stimuli that we perceive in our everyday lives. This is the path to truth, the only way the human line of thought can continue. This leads us to the acceptance that science and religion are really the same things, just ways of explaining the universe, and ultimately are all part of the all-encompassing continuum of human expression and feeling and evolved behaviors. Science is the rational side of life, the order-seeking side, the 1s and 0s binary code of life, while religion points to the supernatural, the part of the human mind that wants to tear structure and logic asunder. Once we see that science/religion, digital/analog are really the exact same thing, we free ourselves to the possibility of anything, literally everything being possible. The ghost of the computer becomes real. So too does the soul of the appliance.