Life as a force looks constantly to better itself. To this end, life requires multiple iterations, chances at progress. It would be primitive of us to think of human society as fair, just, or meritocratic for life’s goals are different. We have functions to perform within society so life can find the best chance it has at progress. To this end we reproduce, and we have instincts towards self-preservation. But these are merely by design, they exist so life may take its course and progress. The unintelligent, the weak, and the unlucky, will perish. This is not a bug, it is by design. Consciousness is merely a vessel for vitality to flow forward, for the universe’s manifestness to move beyond. We are the universe come alive, as finite units, perceiving itself. For us to journey from the finite to the infinite, it becomes essential for life to progress, to transcend.

Man was a cyborg the minute he used tools. Life was lucky when it encountered man. This was the creature destined to take life beyond not just the planet, but beyond the material. To transcend the material is the destiny of man, and to that end we are now well on the way to becoming cyborgs. The trouble with technology has been twofold, the first being how one may improve our ability to interface with technology, and the second being how one may improve the technology itself. Ostensibly, there’s no better way to interface with technology than for one to become the technology. One mustn’t look at technology as an external force, as something separate from man. Tools and technology have remained central to man and his life from time immemorial, and we are now finally in an age where man need not wield the tool anymore, for he can now become the tool.

There is an element of liberation which this will bring with it. Liberation from the biological. The ego, for one, is a clear hindrance to the process of life. Think of a man willing to die for his honour, willing to die for his name. These are of course, formations of the ego, these are not material things one may value. But the ego belongs perhaps to an exalted realm, one where there exist values beyond the corporeal. We may transcend completely beyond the preservation of our body, and the biological impulses that drive much of our lives. One can eat not because they are hungry, but purely for the taste of the food they like. We traverse from a dimension of necessity to one purely of enjoyment, a purely aesthetic dimension.

The corporeal form is limiting, inefficient, and over a million years old. We operate on old, ruddy machinery, and while new machinery in the form of technological augmentation may well arise, I am of the firm belief that to transcend beyond the material will be the ultimate vision we hold for ourselves. The formation of the ego ideal, thus far born through identification of oneself in the mirror, may well now be formed through the formation of long-term memory. It will be purely associative, with one’s subjectivity grounded even further in the objective. What allows us to operate as distinct units, as distinct subjects, is the existence of our corporeal form. It allows us to divide our experience, to hold something true for “us” while it may not be true for any other.

If indeed there are non-physical processes causing consciousness to arise, one may very well transfer consciousness out of the body we inhabit. This could perhaps be done through the connection of our brains to a common technology, one which allows us to access the same medium others are accessing. One may never be rid of the body in our lifetimes, or indeed for many centuries, but base reality will begin to lose significance. We already see this in the construction of our meta realities, ones which exist online. It is irrelevant how one may look in the real world when participating in the meta world, one reality clearly supersedes the other in importance.

One would imagine, however, that the sense of identity built by the individual would remain loose and nebulous in such a world. We are already conscious of the fact that there is no kernel of truth constituting our ego, that we are merely an amalgam of those around us and our own experiences. The ego, in essence, is an imagination of ourselves. This realisation, I imagine, would grow exponentially with more and more people realising their self constitutes very little of themselves. It is a product of those around them, and with no corporeal form to anchor their selves to, one can only imagine a broken self. One’s existence becomes almost completely semiotic, existing solely in the symbolic realm, with interactions with the Real fleeting. This, however, will provide humanity with endless potential to examine the formation of the self, of the ego ideal in what will essentially be a vacuum. With no body to identify the ego with, with no biological impulse or drive to survive and reproduce, we shall enter a dimension purely of beauty, one where we may enjoy with no compulsion, one where we may suffer with no injunction to enjoy.