The Blackberry Walk

Literalism is the death of soul. History is a battle between literalism and metaphorical thinking (there isn't even a word for this - WordHippo comes up with inexactitude...). The metaphorical Neo-Platonists swung to the literal Scholasticists, to the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, to Romanticism, to Positivism, to Post-Modernism. Yet despite being in the age of post-modernity, Positivism and scientific literalism reign supreme. Sci-fi as a genre represents the logical extreme of scientific endeavor. Should we pursue the philosophy of scientific growth for long enough, we will become a space-faring civilisation with synthetic food and mechanical bodies. Galaxy Express beautifully shows how the pursuit of this ideal leads to the death of authenticity, how there is something irreplaceable that has been lost in the imagined world of scientific reductionism. What if we could have a cybernetic body? Seeking pleasure all day, forever, without fear of dying. But by donning the robotic body, soul is lost. Something one can't quite place their finger on. You can go to Las Vegas and see the Eiffel Tower if you like but there's no authenticity to it - it just isn't the honmono. So why do we have such an aversion to the inauthentic? Nature is full of deception - flowers bait in insects to eat them, stick insects which blend in as plants. In order to survive, animals must differentiate between the true, authentic food/predator from the deceiver. The inauthentic world of synthetic ramen and robot people gives us a visceral reaction since from the origin of time, animals have been evolutionarily programmed to feel uneasy about the fake. Yet now we must trust artificial sweeteners and preservatives and chuck them straight into our mouths. Trust is needed to get anything into your mouth - eat the wrong plant and you're a goner. Tetsuro, the protagonist, initially is a slave to his culture and believes that the artificial is just as good, if not better, than the real. Let's do a thought experiment: would you have a problem swapping your consciousness into a body which is atom to atom identical to your own? Matter wise, you would be the same, yet something feels wrong. Perhaps you agree it would be fine out of principle, but something feels a little off in your stomach about the answer, as if something is lost. Tetsuro learns by meeting people who are experiencing organic life that there's something more. Something more to the body - that it's more than just its constituent parts. Objects have souls. A souvenir has value because of it's personal history. A bowl of ramen has soul because the wheat was farmed, the soy was fermented, the meat was raised as an animal and slaughtered and died for your meal. That is it's provenance. To give up your body for a mechanical body, is to give up the body's (not your) soul. The many adventures you've had with your body - the work you've put into it and trust you've built with your body along the way. The authenticity of us and the extension of us - our things - is our humanity, it is irreparable, divine and transcendental. And the journey both Tetsuro and we must take is to cut through society's sludge to realise that.