The Millennial Reincarnations (The Millennial Trilogy Book 1)

From Il Foglio on Thursday, September 3rd, 2015
"Daniel Mark Harrison is an ambitious technology evangelist who has written a book (itself ambitious) that aims to upgrade the Cartesian "Cogito Ergo Sum" for something more applicable to the the Millennial era. The Millennial Reincarnations is a collage of stories set between 1990 and 2014, where the theme is not so much ideological as it is governed by the actions of the Millennial generation, in which the mentality of the generation is expressed at its highest level, which is to say, how it affects our entire society.

The final stage of enlightenment that will be conceived by this influential generation is, I Feel Therefore I am Not, Harrison argues. Harrison's reasoning is this: thinking skills, a capacity for abstraction and basic computation, on which Descartes founded everything he wrote, is now a questionable skill due to the fact technologically it is easily reproduced. There are machines that can "think" in a manner analogous to the Cartesian mode of thinking and to Descartes' notions of higher thinking, and in fact they do so more efficiently than any human.

So the problem has moved on from thinking being expressed as something of a mere Turing Test, lavishly conveyed in the movie "Ex Machina": if it is not the ability to think that is important though, what distinguishes man from machine? The answer is our ability to feel: and specifically, to feel sensations that can not be captured in an algorithm.
The sentient machine, however, is no longer an image from an old science fiction book. In Silicon Valley, there are legions of engineers sure it is only a matter of time before one is created, and even if they do not act like man or conceive of ideas in the way man does, life and the universe of feelings is no longer the great moat that separates man and a surrogate technology from his enlightened self.

I Feel Therefore I Am Not is then the paradoxical outcome of the doubt that even the sentiment captures the essential characteristics of the human, so that if the process of feeling proves replicable artificially then we would "directly understand our own creative mechanism, which would cease to qualify us as human, making some form of human divinity out of us instead (this, after all, is what we aspired the Enlightenment)," writes Harrison.

The interesting thing here about The Millennial Reincarnations is that it does not just line up the theoretical or moral dilemmas of man struggling with the prospect of a future post-human or trans-human self (which is not that new in and of itself), but the author instead explores the influence of this concept today, on how Millennials conceive of their work, the economy, their social bonds, their observance of the law, their sexual interactions, their accumulation of knowledge, as well as the criteria they use to make critical decisions about the kind of life they want and the aspirations they seek to cultivate.
Harrison carries out an investigation here into the possibility that there exists for this new Millennial generation a metaphysical dimension whereby the Cartesian existential paradox is ultimately overcome, with thinking as the more synthetic of senses and feeling being something of an essentially human quality. These are certainly not matters to be entrusted to an algorithm."

-- By Mattia Ferraresia