Terrified Medieval Christs and Weird Picasso Women

Izabela and I went to the art museum in DC today, and I realized that pretty much my favorite thing in visual art is the expressions on peoples' faces. Even in the extensive galleries of medieval and renaissance pictures of Jesus, which generally make me sick after a few minutes (and aghast that so many humans could believe so many stupid things for so long -- and wondering what things almost as stupid as the whole crucifixion/resurrection drama we may currently believe --) , I found myself moved by some of the facial expressions.... Some painters (and fewer sculptors, Rodin being my favorite by far) have a remarkable way of catching exprssions that capture the essence of a person's being -- or at least, that give the illusion thereof ... they capture SOME essence, and how that essence relates to the actual human who was being painted doesn't matter much from my point of view....

The essence of some human's being -- what does that mean? The core of some human's personality.... It's different for each one of us, but still there are common patterns -- a common essence of being human. Always some pleasure and some pain. Some resignation to fate, some resolution to struggle. In the interesting faces, some deep joy, some terrible suffering. We humans are bundles of contradictions -- that's part of what makes us human.

I thought about the Singularity, of course -- about transcending what is human, and about perfecting what is human to make something that's human yet better than human. And I found myself really intuitively doubting the latter possibility. Isn't the essence of being human all bound up with contradiction and confusion, with the twisting nonstationary nonlinear superposition of pleasure and pain, of clarity and illusion, of beauty and hideousness?

Some humans are perverse by nature -- for instance, priests who condemn child molestation in their sermons while conducting it in their apartments. But even without this nasty and overt sort of self-contradiction, still, every human personality is a summation of compromises. I myself am a big teeming compromise, with desires to plunge fully into the realm of the intellect, to spend all day every day playing music, to hang out and play with my wife and kids all the time, to live in the forest with the pygmies, to meditate and vanquish/vanish the self....

Potentially with future technology we can eliminate the need for this compromise by allowing Ben to multifurcate into dozens of Bens, one living in the forest with the pygmies, one meditating all day and achieving perfect Zen enlightenment, one continually playing childrens' games and laughing, one proving mathematical theorems until his brain is 90% mathematics, one finally finishing all those half-done novels, one learning every possible musical instrument, one programming AI's, etc. etc. Each of these specialized Bens could be put in telepathic coordination with the others, so they could all have the experience, to an extent, of doing all these different things. This would be a hell of a great way to live IMO -- I'd choose it over my current existence. But it'd be foolish to call this being human. Getting rid of the compromises means getting rid of humanity.

The beauty I see in the faces portrayed by great artists is largely the beauty of how individual human personalities make their own compromises, patch together personal realities from the beauty and the terror and the love and the hate and the endless press of limitations. Getting rid of the compromises is getting rid of humanity....

Trite thoughts, I suppose.... Just another page in my internal debate about the real value of preserving humanity past the Singularity. Of course, I am committed to an ethic of choice -- I believe each sentient being should be allowed to choose to continue to exist in its present form, unless doing so would be radically dangerous to other sentient beings. Humans shouldn't be forced to transcend into uberhumans. But if they all chose to do so, would this be a bad thing? Intuitively, it seems to me that 90% of people who chose to remain human rather than to transcend would probably be doing so out of some form of perversion. And the other 10%? Out of a personality-central attachment to the particular beauty of being human, the particular varieties of compromises and limitations that make humans human ... the looks on the faces of the twisted medieval Christs and weird Picasso women....

(Of course, in spite of my appreciation for the beauty of the human, I won't be one of those choosing to turn down transcension. Though I may allow a certain percentage of my future multi-Bens to remain human ... time will tell!)