For a while now I’ve thought about starting a blog. For one, the ideas swirling around in my mind need a place to call home, and the occasional deep philosophical conversation with a friend is not satiating enough.
However, that alone was not enough. I am busy with work, having a social life, and all the other things a recent college-graduate might do… There is a priority queue for time and one must strictly manage it. Yet, several recent events have told me that this is something I cannot procrastinate on further. The first is my leaving Ohio for Seattle. Moving far away is something that most people would relish the opportunity to do, but I never have and still do not. I even have a friend who tried to move away from the Midwest to the vaulted California, only to find, like the family in the Grapes of Wrath, that California is no better. I still have trouble adjusting, but I will eventually get there.
Second is related to the first. By graduating from college, moving away, and starting a job, my effective friend base has been shrunk. This is not necessarily a negative event, but it does mean that my human need to have a forum to express ideas (discussed above) has lacked satisfaction.
Third, and I know I’m going to get some interesting feedback for saying this, is that over a year ago I saw the movie Avatar. Maybe I’m just a sucker for the engrossing philosophy that it projects, but it affected me on a deeper level than most movies do. The last movie that stunned me to the point where it numbed my brain for a week was “A Walk to Remember” – so maybe it’s just a coincidence, maybe it’s just because I have free time because I’m still on a Holiday hiatus, but I’m starting this blog. I make no New Year’s resolutions about keeping it updated, it is very possible my need for this forum will disappear and it will be relegated to what my Xanga page once was.
I intend this specific blog to be more about philosophy, intellectualism, religion, politics, literature, music, and how all of these and others tie into the quest for Truth, Fulfillment, Happiness, and Heaven on Earth. I will leave most of my day-to-day life out of this. I may start another blog to address that, but while no writing can be timeless, I can at least attempt to free this blog from the constraints of split-second pop culture and the enigmatic winds of change.
Now, onto what I really wanted to talk about in this blog, and that is Avatar. After I saw the film my first reaction was that it is a vision, albeit a flawed an incomplete one as all inevitably are, of paradise. The world of Pandora is a vision of heaven, with a message that it is possible for humans to enter into it. The word “paradise” is used in only one place that I can detect, in the song for the ending credits (Link: http://filmonic.com/i-see-your-leona-lewis-video-for-avatar-362, Lyrics: http://www.metrolyrics.com/i-see-you-lyrics-leona-lewis.html). But it is paradise, a paradise that the viewers can make a connection to.
After searching around to see what other reviewers think of it, the most interesting was this column by the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/opinion/21douthat1.html. I am not an advocate of pantheism or atheism; I am a hardcore Catholic. I also do not advocate that we should return to nature, I think the various differences between the world described in the movie and our reality are different enough to not allow for such an environment to exist, at least, not on Earth or not for a long while (more on this later). We cannot return to nature in the form that we came from it, but a part of me desperately wants to do so anyway. The most elegant answers in science and engineering are those that are the simplest, so I long for simplicity, for incorruptible purity (too many situations in fiction and reality document a fall from innocence into evil), and for some sort of advanced communalism (NOTE: Not communism).
So, ultimately, what is useful that comes out of this? Pandora doesn’t exist; we can’t move there (Though that doesn’t stop the emotional side of me from REALLY REALLY wanting to). What practical effects should we take away from this incredible piece of art? Frankly, to me parts of Pandora are not as far-fetched as they may seem. The main element is the built-in intra-planetary network. As has been shown from the Internet, there is enormous power in simply making connections from one entity to another. These entities do not even need to be sentient for the power to exist: if they are sentient, even better. Is it far-fetched to think that a human consciousness could be transferred, if not to a computational network then to an artificially constructed natural neural net not unlike what is on Pandora? Imagine if even just the memories of the greats of history were around to still influence the world. How would this change things? What if we were able to tap into this network, or to somehow commune with animals, trees, etc? The answer is we don’t know: it might be useless; but then again, it might not be. This is the key difference between Pandora and Earth, and why people get all up in arms about the movie promoting pantheism. However, this is not in opposition to God. Such a neural network is a concrete creation that science can grasp, albeit with difficulty. If religion and the questions of religion are outside of science, then the network of Pandora is only a conceived god, but it is not God; it is simply evolution showing its genius once again, though it could very well be a guided creation of God, the same argument that safely merges creationism and evolution. There is a living neural network on the planet that is capable of sustaining life and avoiding the problems that any sufficiently large society begins to run into. And as I’ve said previously, these entities need not be sentient for the advantages to be felt, so would somehow linking up with a tree be useful? Probably not, but we’ve also not tried it, and the laws of physics don’t forbid it, so why not?
And I think this networking idea is where the magic of evolution suddenly seems to be a primitive second banana to creating an ideal world, and it is also why we cannot return to nature. While nature has notions of communalism, such as parasitic commensalism, the V shape of flying birds, schools of fish, the signal transduction pheromonal pathways of both plants and animals, etc. These entities have still fundamentally evolved separately. Each one has a unique functioning power system, control system, propulsion system, and each can decide to deviate from the whole without necessarily impacting the other entities, though unwise, it happens. The communication mechanisms between groups of animals, plants, and often arguably humans are very primitive compared to the internal design and internal communication mechanisms of a living being. Much of the internal signaling inside the human body, or between neurons, has yet to be deciphered, the most eloquent masterpieces of human communication are arguably quite primitive compared to what might be possible from the type of link-up described in Avatar. If such a network could be created, either biologically or mechanically, this might actually allow for a Pandorian Earth to be realized. Stephen Hawking, in his book a Brief History of Time, argues that science will eventually overrule the guidelines of the natural system to make them work in harmony, and this would require that humans no longer actually look or act like humans. The “human race” may not look much like the “human race” in the future, because the world as we were given it has imperfections – Catholicism fully acknowledges this. These imperfections are the reason why we cannot return to nature in the same way from which we came. Either nature has to change or we have to change. Maybe the conception of the Na’vi in Avatar is not really alien, but a statement of where humanity needs to direct its self-guided evolution… Because barring an uncontrolled apocalypse, destroying the world in a nuclear war, or the depletion of our resources to the point of no survival as in Lost in Space, I say this evolution is only a matter of time. We are a production of evolution, a production that has evolved beyond evolution, and we will continue to do so.
However, Avatar is not the first place where we see this idea. Star Trek, as usual, was there first with its conception of the Borg. They are a humanoid-mechanical hybrid connected and ruled by a supreme nearly omniscient and omnipresent consciousness. But, as anyone who has seen the Borg episodes, they are far from an idyllic society. The collective consciousness sacrifices the individual consciousness and also does not respect the dignity, or balance of life. At any point a drone will sacrifice itself for the good of the collective, the Borg take incredible risks in the name of science, etc. This is the dark side of the technological communalist idea. By contrast, we are already aware of the dark side of the non-technological communalist idea; it is largely because that system wasn’t sustainable that humanity is where it is now.
The final element I want to discuss regarding Avatar is the notion of beauty. Roger Ebert’s review of the movie called Neytiri ‘sexy’. Frankly, I just can’t do that. Hollywood is very good at making girls sexy, it’s not so good at making them beautiful. Neytiri in the movie is beautiful, not sexy, and my reasoning follows. Her whole culture is beautiful. They don’t seem to have the problems of sexual abuse that our society does, so from the virginity standpoint she’s pure. Also, she moves more gracefully through the forest than I think even the best human jungle crawler could. Also, she shows more patience, kindness, forgiveness, faith, and strength than most people I have ever known. But this beauty does not just apply to her, it applies to her whole race, and indeed her whole planet. Some call the renderings of Pandora ‘stunning’ – I say, it’s beautiful, it’s a vision of heaven on not-Earth.
Now, have I violated my Catholic religious principles by proposing that such a system would be a good thing, and potentially something that we will inevitably work to build (and likely succeed)? Not in the slightest. I don’t think any religious person would disagree with the idea that we are to attempt to build heaven on earth, not in opposition to God, but in complement and in parallel to Him. In my view, Pandora is heaven. In my opinion, Jake Sully is one of the luckiest humans to ever not exist. He has a beautiful girl, an incredible community, and a lifestyle that is both healthy and infinitely sustainable. The Na’vi saw no appeal in human technologies, because they didn’t need them. While I do love the technologies we have developed (this was written on a computer after all), I could easily do without them in a heartbeat if presented with an environment in which the Omaticaya exist. When I got home after seeing Avatar, I changed my Facebook status to “Screw Earth, I’m moving to Pandora.” Frankly, if it were possible, I just might do it… The goal in life is to be fulfilled, the notion of “loyalty to one’s race” is something I take with less than a grain of salt; in fact, I don’t take it at all. I’m loyal to my principles, to my faith, and to the dignity of people everywhere – alien or not.