The Idea of a Wired Brain and its Limitations

Although the rise of “surveillance capitalism” has far-reaching consequences, it is not yet the true game changer: there is much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain–machine interface. One can safely surmise that all kinds of secret agencies are working intensely on it—what we learn is just the public face of it, the often sensational news about it in our media. The best-known project in this direction is Neuralink, an American neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk and eight others, and dedicated to developing implantable brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), also called neural-control interfaces (NCIs), mind-machine interfaces (MMIs), or direct neural interfaces (DNIs)—all these terms indicate the same idea of a direct communication pathway, first between an enhanced or wired brain and an external device, and then between brains themselves.¹

There are thus two steps in this direct communication: first, when our brain is connected to digital machines, we can cause things to happen in reality just by thinking about them (I direct my thought at the TV screen, and the selected program starts to play; I direct my thoughts at the coffee machine, and the coffee gets made; etc.); then, my brain directly connected to another brain, so that my thoughts are directly shared by another individual (I daydream about an intense sexual experience and another individual can directly share my experience). The gradual development of communication in the direction of adding additional layers of mediation —spoken word, writing, telegraph, phone, Internet—is here cut short, and the prospect of direct link bypassing these additional layers emerges.

The consequence of this direct brain-to-brain communication is not just greater speed, but also accuracy: when I think about something, I don’t have to translate my thought into linguistic signs which brutally simplify meaning, my partner directly perceives what I think—or, to quote Musk himself:

There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing. That’s what language is—your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. And then it’s got to listen as well, and decompress what’s coming at it. And this is very lossy as well. So, then when you’re doing the decompression on those, trying to understand, you’re simultaneously trying to model the other person’s mind state to understand where they’re coming from, to recombine in your head what concepts they have in their head that they’re trying to communicate to you . . . If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person . . . If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy. You wouldn’t need to verbalize unless you want to add a little flair to the conversation or something (laughs), but the conversation would be conceptual interaction on a level that’s difficult to conceive of right now . . . That’s the thing—it’s difficult to really understand what it would be like to think with someone. We’ve never been able to try. We communicate with ourselves through thought and with everyone else through symbolic representations of thought, and that’s all we can imagine.

What’s difficult to conceive is the idea of directly sharing intimate experiences: “Say you’re on a beautiful hike and you want to show your husband the view. No problem—just think out to him to request a brain connection. When he accepts, connect your retina feed to his visual cortex. Now his vision is filled with exactly what your eyes see, as if he’s there. He asks for the other senses to get the full picture, so you connect those too and now he hears the waterfall in the distance and feels the breeze and smells the trees and jumps when a bug lands on your arm.” And what is more logical than to extend this idea onto the domain of sexuality: “You could save a great sex experience in the cloud to enjoy again later—or, if you’re not too private a person, you could send it over to a friend to experience. (Needless to say, the porn industry will thrive in the digital brain world.)”²

The first and rather obvious philosophical reproach to this vision arises from the so-called “externalist” theory of consciousness: my self-awareness is not “in my brain,” it is rooted in my individual bodily existence, it is meaningful only within this horizon, as a moment of my concrete embodied existence which comprises the thick web of my interactions with others. So what survives of my mental state (experience) if it is torn from this concrete context? What if experiences can only be shared in some quasi-religious abstract collective trance which obliterates all divergence? The latest version of the “radical externalist” position was deployed by Riccardo Manzotti—here is Tim Parks’s description of Manzotti’s claim that my experience is “out of my head”:

For the rainbow experience to happen we need sunshine, raindrops, and a spectator. It is not that the sun and the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them. Manzotti is not a Bishop Berkeley. But unless someone is present at a particular point no colored arch can appear. The rainbow is hence a process requiring various elements, one of which happens to be an instrument of sense perception. It doesn’t exist whole and separate in the world nor does it exist as an acquired image in the head separated from what is perceived (the view held by the “internalists” who account for the majority of neuroscientists); rather, consciousness is spread between sunlight, raindrops, and visual cortex, creating a unique, transitory new whole, the rainbow experience. Or again: the viewer doesn’t see the world; he is part of a world process.³

viewer doesn’t see the world; he is part of a world process.

(From a Marxist viewpoint, one should add here that what forms human perceptions is not just the whole of experience but also the way perceptions are embedded into the totality of human activity, as a moment of the interaction between humans themselves and between humans and non-human objects and processes: what we perceive and how we perceive what we perceive is always overdetermined by our practical interests.) I see a double problem with this stance. First: yes, my perception of a rainbow is spread between sunlight, raindrops, and visual cortex, creating a unique, transitory new whole, the rainbow experience, so that, when another living being takes a look at the same piece of reality as me, it doesn’t see a rainbow—but in some sense we are looking at the same piece of reality, or, rather, my transitory whole (of perceiving rainbow) and another’s transitory whole of seeing something different partially overlap. How are we to think this Real in which both transitory wholes co-exist? To make this point clearer, let’s replace rainbow with a table: the point is not that we should strive to isolate the same isolated “real” table that remains the same when each of us perceives it in a different way, but simply that of thinking the shared space in which different “transitory wholes” co-exist. I think the topological model of the twisted space of a Klein bottle helps here:⁴ the Real is not a transcendent thing-in-itself at which we arrive when we abstract from all our perceptual distortions, but the fluid “unorientable” space in which, through reflexive turns-into-oneself, multiple realities can emerge. To put it in Leibnizean terms, we are dealing here with extended monads which partially overlap with regard to their content, and the problem is how to think the space of their co-existence since there is no divine absolute that would encompass them all.

Second: it is a little bit too easy to say that “the viewer doesn’t see the world; he is part of a world process”: in some radical sense, I (as a viewing subject) am never directly part of the world in which my perception takes place, since every reality that I perceive already relies on my specific subjective standpoint—by definition I cannot directly locate myself in reality since this would mean that I somehow stepped out of myself and looked at myself “objectively,” from nowhere. This means that I as a subject am not directly part of the world: I of course have no substantial reality out of the world, but I am the void (what Hegel calls the pure self-relating negativity) that enables the constitution of a specific reality (Manzotti’s “transitory whole”) in the midst of the chaotic unorientable Real.

Back to Singularity: it may appear that, if we endorse the radical externalist view, then the prospect of shared experiences through a wired brain should be denounced as a dead end. That is to say, since the reality that we perceive is not an image in our head but outside our head, located in the whole of my brain, the perceived objects or processes and their interaction, even if a machine can fully reproduce my brain processes, it cannot reproduce our experience of what I see since it reduces it to what goes on in my brain and by definition misses the complex whole in which my experience is located. However, the case is far from conclusive: the complex interaction of my brain with its environment gives rise to complex meaningful experiences, but this interaction has to be somehow registered in my brain, so that by reproducing the neuronal processes in my brain it could be possible to generate in another subject (to share) the same experience. Does something like this not happen when I feel a missing limb? Of course such an experience can only arise out of the concrete interaction between me, my body and its environs, but it remains registered in my brain and can be “pathologically” resuscitated even when the limb is missing.

We should not be too surprised by the prospect of mind-controlled machines: Is my body not already a kind of mind-controlled machine, an organism directly regulated by my mind? The catch is, of course, that my body is mine—I am directly embedded in it, while a machine is external to me. However, the prospect of a wired brain introduces a crack into this immediacy: If it is possible for an external machine to directly register my thoughts, does this not imply that I am also not directly my body, that is to say that my body is also external to me, that I am in some sense outside myself?

However, even if we endorse the feasibility of shared experiences, various questions arise here. The first concerns the role of language in the formation of our thoughts and of our “inner life” in general. Musk simply assumes that our thoughts are present in our mind independently of their expression in language, so that if I connect my brain directly with another’s brain, the other individual will experience my thoughts directly in all their wealth and finesse, not distorted by the clumsiness and simplification of language. However, what if language in all its clumsiness and simplifications generates the elusive wealth of our thoughts? Yes, language reduces the mess of our thoughts to simple words and sentences—say, when I say to somebody “I love you!,” the wealth of my feelings is reduced to a simple formula pronounced thousands of times every day. However, this very condensation of the chaotic wealth creates complex meaning, it evokes the rich texture of what is left unsaid. We are here automatically victims of a fetishist illusion: the surplus of “deeper meaning” left unsaid is not already there and just discovered or alluded to, it is generated by the reduction of our thoughts to simple linguistic formulas. Suffice it to recall a simple substitution of “a boat” for “a sail”: the boat is reduced to one of its parts, but this reduction in itself gives birth to a web of meanings which reach far beyond a simple “boat.”

One could play here with the Hegelian variations: a thought’s true content actualizes itself only through its linguistic expression—prior to this expression, it is nothing substantial, just a confused inner intention. When speaking, I only learn what I wanted to say by effectively saying it. We think in words: even when we see and experience things and processes as particular entities, their perception is already structured through our symbolic network. Say, when I see a gun in front of me, all the meanings associated with it are symbolically overdetermined—in short, I perceive a gun but this perception is given its specific spin by the word “gun” that resonates in it, and words always refer to universal notions. Therein resides the paradox of the symbolic overdetermination: when I perceive a gun in front of me, it is the abstract-universal word “gun” associated with it which confers on my perception the rich and complex texture of meaning that colors this perception.

However, this key role of words in our experience of meaning does not automatically devalue the project of Neuralink: all one has to do to save this project is to abandon Musk’s premise that thoughts are present in our mind independently of their expression in language. Insofar as Neuralink will register our inner flow of experience, why could it not also register the verbal material present in our mind, words in which we think—words reduced to mental representations, but still words?⁵ The core of the problem resides elsewhere: in the fact that the very reduction of the material support of the expression of an idea can strengthen the expressed content (meaning). To illustrate this key point, Hegel evokes a wonderful example from the sphere of education. He notices that small children prefer to draw images using colors, while later they prefer to do them in grey, with a colorless pencil. Humanist theorists of education see in this the oppressive result of educational violence: children’s creativity is thwarted, they are forced to express themselves wearing the straitjacket of colorlessness. Hegel’s reading, however, is exactly the opposite: it is this reduction to colorless space that, by way of reducing the sensuous wealth, enables the children to articulate the higher spiritual dimension.

The tragic fate of Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow, his first sound film, is the stuff of legend.⁶

Commissioned by a Communist youth group, the film’s production ran from 1935 to 1937, until it was halted by the central Soviet government, which said it contained artistic, social, and political failures. In the 1960s, it was learned that Eisenstein’s wife, Pera Atasheva, had saved splices of film from the editing table. Starting in 1964, a reconstruction of the film was created (and set to a musical score by Sergei Prokofiev) by Sergei Yutkevich with Naum Kleiman. The film was edited to the original script, to preserve the original cutting continuity; new intertitles were also created from the script, and a new spoken introduction was added. The film now exists as a 35-minute “silent film slide show,” something like Chris Marker’s La Jetée from 1962, a 28-minute-long featurette shot in black and white which is constructed almost entirely from still photos (and which tells the story of a post-nuclear-war experiment in time travel). Like Cindy Sherman’s series of untitled movie stills (from non-existing movies, sometimes even with subtitles of dialogues added), Marker’s reduction of the cinematic flow to a succession of motionless stills is intentional—part of his artistic project. The situation with Bezhin Meadow is more ambiguous: the reduction to a silent-film slide show is, of course, not part of the original project; it resulted from the desperate attempt to save whatever could be saved and somehow render presentable the remaining raw material. However, the result is so impressive that one cannot but entertain a doubt: What if the reduction to stills makes it a better film than Eisenstein’s lost original, a full talking movie? What if it not only produces a poetic effect of its own, but also makes us imagine the “real” continuous action in a much richer way than its direct rendering in a continuous movie shot?

What we find in human sexuality is the obverse of simplification which gives birth to a surplus: an unnecessary complication which prevents direct access to a goal. Human sexuality comes in a variety of perverted forms and procedures which not only cannot be reduced to different ways to reach the same goal of procreation, but often run directly against this goal. However, one should always bear in mind that this excessive diversity is set in motion by an underlying impossibility or antagonism. This is why, from the psychoanalytic standpoint, one thing is sure: what the shift to the post-human amounts to at its most fundamental is the overcoming (leaving behind) of the sexual in its most radical ontological dimension—not just “sexuality” as a specific sphere of human existence, but the sexual as an antagonism, the bar of an impossibility, constitutive of being-human in its finitude. Therein resides the lesson of transgender: we have the masculine, the feminine, and their antagonism (difference) as such. Transgender individuals are different (from the established difference) and, as such, they are the difference itself—the difference from the established difference is the difference itself. That’s why the third category, those who do not fit the hegemonic binary of masculine and feminine, are “universal” and “different”: they stand for universality precisely insofar as they are radically different, that is to say, insofar as they do not have a proper place in the established order. (In exactly the same way, the third type of public toilets demanded by transgender, neither male nor female, can be called “universal” or “(for those) different.”)

And the issue carefully avoided by the partisans of the new asexual man is: To what extent are many other features usually identified with being-human, features like art, creativity, consciousness, etc., dependent on the antagonism that constitutes the sexual? This is why the addition of “asexual” to the series of sexual positions listed by the partisans of LGBT+ is crucial and unavoidable: the endeavor to liberate sexuality from all “binary” oppressions, to set it free in its entire polymorphous perversity, necessarily ends up in the abandoning of the very sphere of sexuality—the liberation OF sexuality has to end up in the liberation (of humanity) FROM sexuality.

Sexuality also provides the basic matrix of the dialectical reversal of failure into success. Since France is the land of love and seduction, no wonder French cuisine, the paradigm of high cuisine, works in this way: Is the origin of many of its famous dishes or drinks not that, when they wanted to produce a standard piece of food or drink, something went wrong, but then they realized that this failure can be resold as success? They were making cheese in the usual way, but then the cheese got rotten and infected, smelling bad, and they found this monstrosity (measured by the usual standards) charming in its own way; they were making wine in the usual way when something went wrong with the fermentation, and so they began to produce champagne. Is this not exactly how our (human) sexuality works? Something goes terribly wrong (measured by the standards of simple instinctual mating), but this failure is then endorsed and cultivated as the resource of new sexual pleasures. Can we imagine anything more stupid (from the standpoint of successful reproduction) than the tradition of courtly love in which the completion of the sexual act is endlessly postponed? So how could courtly love become the model of high eroticism? And what about our perverted games in which a particular object or gesture which should be constrained to a subordinated moment of erotic foreplay becomes the central feature, the focus of libidinal intensity which eclipses the big procreative Act? Is this dimension of erotic mediation not threatened by a direct brain-to-brain link?

In the British TV series Doc Martin, which takes place in a small Cornish seaside village, the dates between the two main characters, Martin, a doctor who has moved there from London, and Louisa, a teacher at the local school, repeatedly go wrong because of his distant attitude (after kissing her, he tells her that there must be something wrong with her stomach because of her bad breath, etc.), so she breaks off with him and they politely ignore each other, limiting their interaction to the necessary minimum. When, after one such cold encounter, he leaves her house, he just turns around near the entrance, approaches her again and says with a desperate voice “Marry me!,” to which she quickly replies “Yes,” and they passionately embrace. There is no gradual warming up, no patient work to repair the broken ties: when things go wrong between the two of them, their predicament is reduced to the bare fact that they really love each other, the fact which explodes in all its naked force. This is how success (the couple’s triumphant reunion) can only take place after and through a series of failures.

The cliffhanger finale of the second season of the TV series Succession (2019) is another superb example of such a reversal. Logan Roy, the patriarch of his super-rich family and the boss of the large media corporation Waystar Royco, gathers on his yacht his three sons and a daughter, plus some other top managers, in the final countdown to the shareholder meeting that will determine the company’s ownership. They all know that, due to a big sex-exploitation scandal, a “blood sacrifice” will have to be performed, that is to say, a top member of the family (main shareholders suggest Logan himself) will have to be sacrificed. He or she should publicly state that he is solely responsible for the scandal and thereby assume full responsibility since, as he will state in his confession, nobody else at the top knew about it. The previous evening, Logan has a private conversation with Kendall, his second oldest son, who is primed to lead the company after him. Although the relationship between the two has always been full of tensions, Logan tells him that he really appreciates his ingenuity and intelligence; but when Kendall asks him if he ever considered him as his successor at the top of the corporation, Logan says that Kendall nonetheless lacks a key feature of the head of a corporation: the readiness to kill, to ruthlessly destroy the opponent when this is needed. So when the family is gathered, Logan informs them that Kendall will be sacrificed: he will have to appear at a Senate hearing and assume all responsibility, thereby saving his family’s company. Kendall graciously agrees to perform this act, but when he appears at the hearing, he turns into a killer, denouncing Logan, his own father, as being solely responsible for the scandal and for other illegal activities in the corporation, plus announcing that he will soon make public documents proving all of this. The reversal comes in the final seconds when we see Logan (who watches Kendall’s public statement on the TV) with a mysterious smile of satisfaction—what does this smile mean? Brian Cox (who plays Logan) explained it in an interview with Vulture: “There was a certain inevitability to it . . . Logan is really setting Kendall up to become the man he has not been.” This ties back into the conversation the previous evening where Logan informs Kendall of his blood-sacrificedom, and where he refers to the prophecy where a son was annihilated so brutally that he would rise again:

Logan knew in order to sacrifice himself, he would have to do it through his family. He figured that the one chance he had was to make Kendall into the killer. That’s why, at the end, he smiles. He’s achieved what he was after. “My son has come of age. He’s now officially a killer” . . . Once Logan received the death sentence, it was important to him who’d deliver the death. He wanted to keep it within the family, as opposed to it coming from outside of the family. The smile is him saying, “Finally, my son is stepping up to the plate, doing what he needs to do to run a business. Finally, he’s the heir apparent to Waystar Royco.”⁷

In short, Logan knew that he himself would have to be sacrificed in order to save the company, and his gesture of sacrificing Kendall is well calculated: he knows that Kendall will betray him and turn against him, and that by performing this act, Kendall will become a killer, thereby acquiring the quality he lacked in order to be the next boss of the corporation. So the true sacrifice is not Kendall’s but Logan’s, and the only question that remains open is: Was Kendall himself aware of this double game, that is to say, was the entire plan coordinated between father and son, or did Kendall really think that he was to be sacrificed? If we follow Logan’s impeccable logic, Kendall’s strike had to be sincere: the top had to be sacrificed, but to keep the company in the family, the killing strike had to come from the family itself; and to make the strike believable for the public, it had to appear that the killer (Kendall) was sincere. If Logan’s plan is to succeed, he has to be betrayed for real, not just as part of some intricate family game.⁸

Such a positive spin of a failure can best be illustrated by the loop of symbolic representation: a subject endeavors to adequately represent itself, this representation fails, and the subject is the result of this failure. Recall what one might be tempted to call the “Hugh-Grant-paradox” (referring to the famous scene from Four Weddings and a Funeral): the hero tries to articulate his love to the beloved, he gets caught in stumbling and confused repetitions, and it is this very failure to deliver his message of love in a perfect way that bears witness to its authenticity. This paradox makes it clear why, as Hegel put it in his Phenomenology, we can say our speech and our labor

express the inner too much as we can say that they express it too little. Too much—because the inner itself breaks out in these expressions, no opposition remains between them and the inner; they do not merely provide an expression of the inner, they immediately provide the inner itself. Too little—because in speech and action the inner makes itself into an other and thereby abandons itself to the mercy of the element of transformation, which twists the spoken word and the accomplished deed and makes something else out of them than what they, as the actions of this determinate individual, are in and for themselves.⁹

They express it too little because they cannot ever adequately capture our inner intention: we always fail to put into words what we wanted to say. Simultaneously, they express it too much because in and through this very failure they express more than we wanted to say, the truth of what we subjectively meant. We may complement Hegel here: this “too much” has two aspects, it can refer to the socially determined “objective” meaning of our speech (we may mean something as sincere praise but the predominant use of language makes it a cold cynical appraisal—we don’t control the effects of our speech), as well as to the deeper truth about the speaking subject itself (the subject’s failure to say what it really wanted to say may bring out a dimension of its desire it was not aware of). So instead of bothering with the question “Can Neuralink capture the true meaning of our flow of thoughts?,” we should focus on a different question: Can it capture the overlapping of too little and too much indicated by Hegel, can it capture the excess produced by the failure itself?

Furthermore, it is obvious that Grant’s individuality expresses itself precisely through these failures: if he were to declare his love in a perfect and smooth way, we would get a robot-like recitation. For this reason, the next question that arises is: Will our individuality survive this passage into singularity? Technology has so far enhanced our individuality because it has introduced more alienation, additional layers in our exchange with others, and even alienating us from ourselves (our screen image is not directly “ourselves”)—so what happens when this distance disappears? Musk’s first line of defence is that, in his version of BCI, the individual is not totally immersed in it: it maintains a minimal distance from it, so that, in order to allow the machine (or, through it, another individual) to register and/or share your thoughts and feelings, you have to actively consent to it, to will it:

One concern that comes up when people hear about thought communication in particular is a potential loss of individuality. Would this make us one great hive mind with each individual brain as just another bee? Almost across the board, the experts I talked to believed it would be the opposite. We could act as one in a collaboration when it served us, but technology has thus far enhanced human individuality . . . People won’t be able to read your thoughts—you would have to will it. If you don’t will it, it doesn’t happen. Just like if you don’t will your mouth to talk, it doesn’t talk.

But how does Musk know that an individual will maintain this minimal distance? Remember that BCI works “objectively”: our brain is wired, linked to a machine which, strictly speaking, doesn’t “read our thoughts,” but the processes in our brain which are the neuronal correlate of our thoughts; consequently, since when I think, I am not aware of the neuronal processes in my brain, how should I know if I am plugged in or not? Consequently, is it not much more reasonable to surmise that, when I am plugged into BCI, I will not even be aware when my inner life is transparent to others? In short, does BCI not offer itself as the ideal medium of (political) control of the inner life of individuals? As is the case with all inventions that pose a threat to human freedom, their promoters try to obfuscate the issue by emphasizing dazzling examples of how such inventions might improve the lives of incapacitated individuals—here is a typical report: “Paralysed man walks using mind-controlled exoskeleton. French patient’s breakthrough could lead to brain-controlled wheelchairs, say experts.”¹⁰ No mention of how mind-controlled machines imply also machine-control of mind itself.

Already in May 2002, it was reported that scientists at New York University had attached a computer chip able to send signals directly to a rat’s brain, so that it would be possible to control the rat (for example, determine the direction in which it would run) by means of a steering mechanism (in the same way one runs a remote-controlled toy car). For the first time, the “will” of a living animal agent, its “spontaneous” decisions about the movements it will make, were taken over by an external machine. Of course, the big philosophical question here is: How did the unfortunate rat “experience” its movement which was effectively decided from the outside? Did it continue to “experience” it as something spontaneous (that is to say, was it totally unaware that its movements were being steered?), or was it aware that “something is wrong,” that another external power was deciding its movements? Even more crucial is to apply the same reasoning to an identical experiment performed with humans (which, ethical questions notwithstanding, shouldn’t be much more complicated, technically speaking, than in the case of the rat). In the case of the rat, one can argue that one should not apply to it the human category of “experience,” while, in the case of a human being, one should ask this question. So, again, will a steered human being continue to “experience” their movements as something spontaneous? Will they remain totally unaware that their movements are steered, or will they become aware that “something is wrong,” that another external power is deciding their movements? And, how, precisely, will this “external power” appear—as something “inside me,” an unstoppable inner drive, or as a simple external coercion? If the subject will remain totally unaware that their spontaneous behavior is steered from outside, can one really go on pretending that this has no consequences for our notion of free will? Most of those who reflect on Neuralink focus on the individuality of my experience—will I lose it or not when I am immersed in Singularity? But there is the opposite option: What if I retain my individuality in experience and don’t even know that I am controlled and steered?

When people reflect on the implications of BCI, they usually focus on how our immersion in Singularity will affect us, making us a homo deus: like a divine being, I will be able to move things and trigger processes in reality by merely thinking about it—the German idealists called this overlapping of perception and activity intellectual intuition, a perception which creates what it perceives. Only gods can do this: our finite minds are forever constrained by the gap that separates thinking or perceiving from acting. But we should rather take a step back and ask the question: Who will control the chips in our brain which sustain the BCI? Chips are cheap. Perhaps the saddest aspect of the vision of Neuralink is the cynical opportunistic calculus that sustains it: we (humans) gave birth to a higher form of intelligence which, if left alone to deploy its powers, will reduce us to gorillas in a zoo: “Most post-humanists agree that it would be ironic if humankind were surpassed by beings that humans made possible, and tragic if such post-humans did away with humankind altogether. Still, more than a few posthumanists assert without nostalgia that evolutionary development is indifferent to the fate of what came before. For them, the prospect of dramatically improving ourselves in the process of giving birth to something far greater than humankind more than justifies taking risks.”¹¹ The only choice for us to avoid this fate is to join the winner, to leave behind our humanity and immerse ourselves in Singularity. But will all of humanity as a whole “join the winner,” or will the emergence of Singularity give rise to new unheard-of forms of domination, so that (post)humans themselves will be divided into new winners and losers?

This essay was originally published in Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

1. Non-attributed quotes that follow are from Tim Urban, “Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future,” April 20, 2017, https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html.
2. Urban, “Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future.”
3. Quoted from Tim Parks, “The Mind Outside My Head,” New York Review of Books, April 10, 2012, www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/04/10/mind-outside-head-consciousness/. See the systematic presentation of Manzotti’s position in Tim Parks, Out of my Head: On the Trail of Consciousness (London: Harvill Secker, 2018).
4. I developed this model in Theorem III of my Sex and the Failed Absolute (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
5. In a limited way, this can already be done: “Doctors have turned the brain signals for speech into written sentences in a research project that aims to transform how patients with severe disabilities communicate in the future. The breakthrough is the first to demonstrate how the intention to say specific words can be extracted from brain activity and converted into text rapidly enough to keep pace with natural conversation.” Quoted from Ian Sample, “Neuroscientists decode brain speech signals into actual sentences,” Guardian, July 30, 2019, www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/30/neuroscientists-decode-brain-speech-signals-into-actual-sentences.
6. Summarized from “Bezhin Meadow,” Wikipedia, last modified March 12, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezhin_Meadow.
7. Quoted from Brady Langmann, “Succession Star Brian Cox Just Explained What Logan’s Smile Meant In the Big Season Two Finale,” Esquire, October 15, 2019, www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a29472259/succession-season-2-finale-ending-logan-smile-explained/.
8. Does something similar not happen at the end of the psychoanalytic treatment? Does the analyst also not have to organize a way that his patient will “kill him,” i.e., break out of the transference to the analyst, get rid of him without feeling indebted to him? Such a sacrifice is something that Stalinism, with all its obsession with sacrificing oneself for the Party, cannot afford.
9. Quoted from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/pinkard-translation-of-phenomenology.pdf.
10. See Agence France-Presse, “Paralysed man walks using mind-controlled exoskeleton.” Guardian, October 4, 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/04/paralysed-man-walks-using-mind-controlled-exoskeleton? CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1570182539.
11. Michael E. Zimmerman, “The Singularity: A Crucial Phase in Divine Self-Actualization?,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 4, nos. 1–2 (2008), 347–70, http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/107/213.