The central character in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer is a cybernaut who has lost the freedom to roam the virtual world. Punished for cheating by his former employers, he is compelled to pass his days in his mortal shell. He sees his return to earthly life as confinement: ‘For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.… The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.’
Today’s cybernauts are unknowing Gnostics. The flight from the prison of the flesh is the essence of the Gnostic heresy that, despite incessant persecution, persisted in Christendom for centuries, and which survives to this day in the Mandean community in Syria. For Gnostics, the Earth is a prison of souls, ruled – perhaps created – not by God but by a demiurge, an evil spirit which enticed humans into the captivity of the flesh by showing them the beauty of the world. A twentieth-century Gnostic, C. G. Jung, stated the central Gnostic myth in precisely these terms. He speaks of
… that idea of the Gnosis, the nous, that beholds his own face in the ocean: he sees the beauty of the earth and … he is caught, entangled in the problems of the world. Had he remained the nous or pneuma, he would have kept on the wing, would have been like the image of God that was floating over the waters and never touching them; but he did touch them and that was the beginning of human life, the beginning of the world with all its suffering and beauty, its heavens and hells.
Jesus promised the resurrection of the body, not an afterlife as a disembodied consciousness. Despite this, the followers of Jesus have always disparaged the flesh. Their belief that humans are marked off from the rest of creation by having an immortal soul has led them to disown the fate they share with other animals. They cannot reconcile their attachment to the body with their hope of immortality. When the two come into conflict it is always the flesh that is left behind.
The cult of cyberspace continues the Gnostic flight from the body. Cyberspace offers a promise of eternity that is more radical than what Gibson calls ‘the sham immortality of cryogenics’. The Extropians are a contemporary cult, whose members aim to shed their mortal flesh. Citing Nietzsche’s dictum ‘Man is something to be overcome’, the founder of the cult asks, ‘Why seek to become posthuman?… Certainly, we can achieve much while remaining human. Yet we can attain higher peaks by applying our intelligence, determination and optimism to break out of the human chrysalis.… Our bodies restrain our capacities.’
Once the frail and wasting body is cast off, the Extropians believe, the mind can live for ever. These cybernauts seek to make the thin trickle of consciousness – our shallowest fleeting sensation – everlasting. But we are not embrained phantoms encased in mortal flesh. Being embodied is our nature as earth-born creatures.
Our flesh is easily worn out; but in being so clearly subject to time and accident it reminds us of what we truly are. Our essence lies in what is most accidental about us – the time and place of our birth, our habits of speech and movement, the flaws and quirks of our bodies.
Cybernauts who seek immortality in the ether are ready to disown their bodies for the sake of a deathless existence in the ether. Perhaps someday they will achieve what they crave, but it will be at the price of losing their animal souls.