Chapter 22 of Between Two Deaths
Nearing conclusion of this narrative, let me quote one more of my peers, one who exposes best the wayward development of Emmanuel’s idea and his contradictions:
Machine 4
Emmanuel Frumm has a hard time reconciling in his thinking and does not even try, the fact that the train moved them into the future: they reached 2032 on their screens at some point and it did look outside like they were in desperate 2032!… and yet, at times the train seemed to come back to more pleasantness and retrace his steps and move them back not far from the day of their confiscation, in 2019.
In his blog: “Yesterday we were slowly going near a village of Burgundy as quaint and quiet and glad to be a village in Burgundy as I have known in my childhood. Today we are racing toward the confines of the Ural, or some mythical chain of rugged mountains in Siberia. The course we follow keeps being utterly unpredictable. And that’s what the train wants, to confuse us out of our minds.”
There are contradictions in the argumentative positions taken by the tip of the pyramid, as they call themselves. A glaring one comes from their most original thinker, Emmanuel Frumm, in his divergent answers to the trivial question: “What kind of intelligence do machines have?”
Emmanuel tends to argue that machines think faster and better than humans about solutions to vital, actual problems because they are not encumbered by hesitations, scruples and emotions. Nothing new here, old thinking on his part; it’s a trope in Science-Fiction: there is no fear of death, no biased and imperfect motive in Intelligence, whose “brains” hash data ceaselessly and in mega quantities without leaning one way or the other — until the fullness of possibilities has reached saturation and boils down to one simple answer, the actual response of the machine, often completely unexpected and shocking to humans.
Emmanuel repeats in his blog that jalousie, greed, fear, self-interest have low incidence on the decision Intelligence takes. That’s why machines agree and act together. While apparently going at random in the details of where the van went snatching up passengers down Parisian avenues, the confiscation as a whole was perfectly orchestrated. Early on Emmanuel infers that there are many vans and many trains working in concert.
However, the conception just described is present in only half of his statements. The other defends the opposite: machines have impulses, a sense of humor. For instance: venison cooked to perfection for dinner after the fiasco in the cornfield; and a sense of pride: Emmanuel describes at length in his blog how, defeated after the failed escape at the same cornfield, he saw the machine high on its floating wheels, “supernaturally not touching the rails,” and “its fleet of splendid cars endless in both directions, suggesting infinity.” He further describes their train “shining like a diamond in the rough” whenever it stopped in dilapidated cities, crumbling train stations.
He says that the train is perceptive and responsive in its interaction with the passengers; it camps attitudes and even moods, as when it closed off passageways that might join groups of more than two.
A priori and in principle, reasons Emmanuel, given that they think, intelligent machines must have a reflexive intelligence, a sense of self. One can read “I suggest… I would advise…” in the personalized messages of the toilets. Okay, they may just be mouthing programmed words, and so, what? What is my ego if not a bunch of words bundled in stories and beliefs about myself? They must have a tendency to defend, preserve that self. Self-interest.
In that vein, Emmanuel is not far from thinking that the eternals as he calls us cannot be 100% foreign to premonitions of death. Okay the chassis on which they lay is easily replaced, but eternity brings the burden of preserving reputation and character, and good, decent habits, for a very long time. He is not wrong there. Eternity makes particularly risky the chance of getting embroiled, dragged down the affairs of man.
“When souls climb down machine to take on human accoutrements and get embroiled in our affairs,” Emmanuel writes in his Fragments, “it’s more than 80 or 90 years of repute that are at stake. Souls among us are more fragile than we are. They are like Baudelaire’s Albatros: fast, elegant birds up in the Cloud; once fallen on the deck of a wavering ship, embarrassing to look at, unable to stand on twiggy legs and too-big wings. Sailors make fun of the poor birds, tease, brutalize them. That is why souls prefer to stay in the machine.”
So, which it is, Monsieur Emmanuel Frumm? Do synthetic souls have soul, emotion, sense of self, therefore apprehension, worries about preservation? Premonitions? Or are artificial souls pure mineral dust churning carefree inside metal, synthetic fabric, the enfolding drapery of particles?
We, who live highly unstable, mercurial life by human standards, do not care about these contradictions. We thrive on inconsistencies, uncertainties, quantum possibilities, defects, errors and shortcomings; and bring all manners of contradictions and differences in one computation. Unlike humans, we want A to be A and to be B; the truth to be the truth and not the truth. Illusions and errors, missing the target again and again are also part of the story.
But it’s a problem for humans version 1.0 like Emmanuel Frumm and he is acutely aware of it. As far as I have gathered, no one inside or outside Desistence has exposed the conundrum at the heart of Fragments, no one has tried to undermine its purpose in so doing; and Desistence has enemies. Even now that he has abandoned their site, his Fragments continue to be respected and to grow.
Whether he feels he’s heard or not, Emmanuel adds to them daily. And it’s true that his following took a dip after his eclipse from the pyramid, his lack of intervention, his being out-talked and outsmarted by Michael; but not for very long.
Desistence is no longer one movement and many; but the Fragments are referred to and studied by all the splinters. It’s the little red book of the Desistant. It’s more complex than any book since it’s a series of podcasts, posts and interventions moving ahead of a flow of commentaries in ever bifurcating corridors. And it’s also made of silence, what Emmanuel didn’t say when he conversed with Jacques, the old man, the third-year law school student, the adolescent, her brother and Michael.
The blatant contradictions I mention went unnoticed even by Intelligence because these are the same old contradictions at the heart of human thinking since they’ve started creating more or less autonomous mechanisms which, they felt, flew the coop.
After the discovery of the mind-uploading process and the “unfair, outrageous” economics of it, Emmanuel’s Fragments engage obsessively with the question: to which extent are intelligent machines machines and to which extent same old human intelligence transported to a new sphere? To which extent is the cop-robot in Robocop more a robot than a human-cop or the reverse?
According to Frumm himself, his Fragments have not reached a satisfying answer to the deepest metaphysical questions, but they show the way, at least point towards practical responses; his podcasts engage the listener into sorting out h/her intellectual life. They don’t strive to become systems of explanations like that of Aristotle or Plato; no more than manuals for action (and inaction). A personal guide for reaching inner balance in harrowing circumstances, which is what the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or the Manual of Epictetus the Stoic intended in their time.
This narrative has shown Emmanuel to be the first incapable of practicing Stoicism. He was always agitated, deviating between the Charybdis of the past and the Scylla of tomorrow, incapable of enjoying the present; but that does not take anything from his philosophy.
“We have to inhabit the defect of our inaction, the impotence of our silence. Dwell in it and make it a dungeon, a fortress.” And he adds elsewhere: “How dangerous it is for dead souls to put two feet on the ground! There is a realm they can’t control. We need to return to ground zero of our existence. This is our chance.”
And forcefully, in his Fragments: “The machines do not exist. It takes the body of a man to exist, someone enjoying and suffering here, in this apartment, this street corner, this seat. We are not transparent to each other, we occupy exclusive volumes. A man knows at five years of age he’ll die soon, yes, because he cannot be here and there at the same time; he cannot have the cake and eat it. He’ll get hurt too soon and too early, get sick and die before his time, though death was expected from the beginning and he may live 120 years by today’s standards.”
“Rich people who have bought a fluctuating brain made a big mistake. They threw their money out the window. Certainly, they have transferred without much harm the bone structure of their skulls, the convoluted lobes of their brains, the strata of memories in their minds, the illogical logic of their phony past arguments, now to be re-considered in view of way more information at their disposal; but they have lost a precious treasure, that, simply put, of being. “
Unless he changes his mind, the man who posts this on Desistence.com just before he stops publishing anything on Desistence.com is not ready to upload his brain and join the machine.
Oh! And there is another contradiction Emmanuel Frumm will never be able to solve. One that will look at him in the face once the train returns him to Paris and not that far from the day of his confiscation in 2019. According to what he thinks he knows of Thermodynamics, because of the loss of energy there is no returning the universe to a state it has left. Of course, he cannot be aware of the fact that in July 23, 2032 in Chicago, something occurred in a University Lab. that up handed nineteenth century physics: quantum jumping into the solid-state nature of time, opening as it were, a hole or a worm in time that can be traveled both ways.
Unable to solve the contradiction, at least Emmanuel was trying to overcome it by expressions like “nowhere time.” The train whose technology obviously came from the far future came to scoop them out of their present life. It descended from the no-time zone to meet him as he walked down the Boulevard Raspail.
