Only connect

To paraphrase John Donne, ‘no person is an island’. Despite the dominance of the id and the ego throughout the 20th Century, as we emerge from the ‘age of the individual’ there is an urgent need to re-state the centrality of connection in the human experience.

There is a wonderful book, Stranger than we can imagine: Making sense of the twentieth century which charts the age of modernity in parallel with the emerging mono-mania for ‘the individual’. From the emergence of psychoanalysis to the focus on expressing the id through abstraction in art, from the harnessing of the atom and the electron to the post-modern conception of identity as a melange of styles and signifiers all these great developments have focused on one dominant entity — me. Or rather you. Or each of us individually.

This isn’t just the rugged capitalist individualism of Ayn Rand. Nor is it the mechanical horror of the Nietschean superman. It is a generalised weltanshaung across much of the Western World that ‘I am the centre of my world’, that what matters is my own individual perception and experience.

You can tell what any age thinks of itself by its Gods. In our age, it is the morally vacuous superhero, inflected with human frailty. The ultimate expression of dominance and personhood — that what we venerate is the ability to be the centre of your own world. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is really an explosion of exotic creatures manifesting their egos across the skylines of various American cities. What more potent example of pure ego could there be than the power to unmake reality with a click of the fingers?

Similarly it is hardly a surprise in this age that one of our most popular forms of entertainment is gaming — a pastime that is literally engineered around the primacy of the individual, their mastery of their environment and the unseen hand of emergent AI which modulates their experience to make the player feel all-powerful.

But what if we aren’t individuals at all?

What if we are actually points of intersection — nodes in a mesh of inter-connected networks which define us, our experience and our identity? What if we are are not ourselves, but the interactions in which we participate?

This theme of the fundamental connectedness of everything is central to our emerging understanding of quantum theory. On first sight, the idea of quantum entanglement is bizarre and counter-intuitive — that things which are apparently disconnected should become connected through some unknowable ether to the point where the behaviour and properties of one fundamentally alters the character of the other. But is this really so strange, when we consider that we have already grown comfortable with the invisible and absolute connection between space and time, matter and energy that we call gravity?

And isn’t it interesting to conjecture that perhaps, just perhaps, our consciousnesses aren’t distinct and individual, but that we are instead fundamentally entangled in much the same way as we now see in quantum particles.

Entanglement occurs where the “quantum state of each particle in a pair or group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, even when separated by a large distance”. I don’t know about you, but that’s a fair description of some of the most important relationships in my life.

We see this kind of intimate, invisible ether in every part of the human experience. In Shakespeare, for example, Kings and Queens are not Kings and Queens because they are kingly or regal. They are Kings and Queens because other people treat them as such. There is, in reality, no greater merit in an individual that happens to be a King or Queen than there is in anyone else. They are no more right, nor any less fallible. What they are is the personification of a signifier which leads other people to treat them in a particular way. The ‘right’ that puts them on the throne is neither divine nor personal. It is conferred.

So much of our language is inherently transitive. But we are not what we make happen, nor what happens to us. We are the interactions in which we participate.

My background is as a linguist, and so this is naturally often my starting-point for understanding human nature. If you track the emergence and acquisition of language from infancy, one thing becomes clear — the purpose of language is not to broadcast and receive concepts, but to participate in the making of meaning. It might only take one person to say something, but it takes two to mean.

This goes far beyond ‘the reader brings their own interpretation to the book’. It is a fundamental mechanic of our experience of the Universe that we are not individuals but participants. We are not distinct, but connected. We are not defined by our selves but by our connections and interactions. It is not a question of ‘cogito, ergo sum’, but ‘coniungere nos igitur sumus’ (‘we connect, therefore we are’ — not as catchy, I admit).

This, to me, is why Artificial Intelligence has struggled to elevate consciousness beyond computation. An AI can mimic a spectrum of responses within a more or less defined environment. They can extrapolate from previous experience to inform decisions within a framework. They can even do this with such a high degree of complexity and sophistication that the resulting choices seem entirely human.

But they don’t have a sense of self, or self in relation to other selves. If the first act of a newborn infant is to inhale air and then cry out to the new world, then this is the act not of isolation, or id, but of seeking connection. What if the inherent instinct of all living things is not ‘to live’ but ‘to connect’? What if the purpose of a virus is not transmission, but connection? What need does an AI have to connect, to empathise?

We see this idea of an essential connectedness of all things everywhere we look. The Law of Thermodynamics and the conservation of energy is a model, not centrally of the thing itself, but of energy transfer between things. Under the theory of relativity, time is not a fixed axis, but a relative frame. It is not just that no person is an island, but no thing exists outside of its connections. Even language does not function as an abstract, but rather as a system of signifiers that allow us to make and exchange connections.

There is even an interesting cosmological theory (brane cosmology, I kid you not…) that what we perceive as reality is the product of interactions between dimensions or ‘membranes’.

If we conjecture, just for a moment, that we are not ourselves but that our sense of self is an emergent property of the interactions in which we participate over the course of our lifetimes, then what would that mean for the underlying principles which govern our society? To what extent should we be accountable not to ourselves, nor simply to those immediately around us, but to the whole fabric of a connected society?

A lot of today’s conflicts stem from a kind of biological and cognitive laziness. It is easier to adopt a mindset than to develop one from first principles. It is easier to defend an opinion than to admit it was wrong. It is easier to join a tribe and repeat slogans than it is to articulate a coherent if contrary worldview. It is easier to simplify things into polarities than it is to recognise the inherent vagueness of the human experience.

This frailty in the human psyche has been cruelly exposed and exploited by technology. If the vast connectedness of the Internet has proven anything, it is that people prefer the simple dopamine of social approbation over the cognitive struggle of dealing with complexity and ambiguity.

And yet the world is ambiguous. Inherently, extraordinarily, beautifully so. There are literally no certainties. Nothing in the human experience that isn’t ultimately susceptible to disproof. We began — who knows where? We are going — who knows where? We ought to behave — who knows how? We may be rewarded, we may not. There may or may not be a divinity that shapes our ends.

But it is a very male world-view that suggests everything has to be going somewhere. That’s not the nature of networks — they don’t begin or end, they emerge. So what if the ultimate purpose of existence isn’t a purpose at all but rather a process — what if emergence isn’t part of the journey, but the journey itself?