What is the Future of Sex?
From Primordial Man - through Ancient Man - to Primordial Computer. How learning in the cultural system ensures us a secret world where sexuality can dwell - even with the end of sex
By: Hidden Righteous One
Where did Freud derive his basic form of thinking, of the patterns found in the psyche, where each time a certain pattern is replaced by another pattern of a more advanced stage, and then again replaced by another pattern? This is how he places every psychological phenomenon he identifies in an increasingly complex system of patterns (throughout his career and the development of his thinking, and in parallel throughout the psychological development of the child) - creating a complex and layered structure for the psyche. Such a layered structure later allows for movements of deepening, dialectics, and complexity in dealing with the psyche, which is expressed in treatment abilities (psychology), the ability to use his theory in art (especially narrative - like literature and cinema) and even in theorization (especially that which favors complicated patterns, like French philosophy).
In order to bring harmonization in the interpretation of contradictory perceptions in the Zohar, as if they were all part of the same large pattern, Lurianic Kabbalah often used the idea of replacing such patterns, which allowed it to create complexity and depth to the point of parody, in an unbelievably complicated picture of the upper world (this is similar to the operation of group multiplication in mathematics). For such replacement of patterns, which are ultimately a very abstract structure, to exist and "live" in some reality, the secret doctrine often associated them with some ancient world, where the changing patterns "lived", and their development was created, like "Adam Kadmon" [Primordial Man]. This Adam Kadmon is a kind of human pattern of divinity, or of a very early stage in creation.
Hasidism, in its teaching, emphasized the transfer of Kabbalistic structures into the person himself, in order to create a developed doctrine of the soul, and here the ancient medium is often related to the creation of the soul and its various levels, which are not conscious - and in which the patterns can "live". This systematic transfer allowed Hasidism a deepening, which in an anachronistic ironic way, can be called psychological today. Freud, who grew up in a Hasidic family (from Galicia), transferred the idea of pattern replacement into a "scientific" medium (although of course there was nothing scientific about it): early childhood and the development of the psyche in it. He transferred the spiritual space of the secret doctrine into an unconscious space. Thus, a space was created where patterns that allow complexity can "live". Adam Kadmon became a small child.
Today, with the biologization of the psyche and spirit, we are witnessing the transfer of the ancient and complex patterns at the foundation of man into the biological space. Whether it's about the brain - and its inner parts, its various organs (including the primitive brain), down to the resolutions of functional networks within it, and its initial and ancient development, from the womb to childhood - or whether it's about genetics - including the development of ancient man, and ancient developments of our genetic tree, deep into the depths of evolution. The ancient brain and the ancient genome are hidden spaces where "irrational" preferences and tendencies, secrets, lack of symmetry and moral injustice, arbitrariness, malfunctions, and deep influences we are unaware of can be housed. Everything that is not enlightened enough - can be housed in the dark medium of evolutionary or neurological explanation.
Let's take, for example, a typical classic test case for the hidden medium: gender preferences and sexuality. If Kabbalah dealt with them through the secret doctrine, and Hasidism through its transfer to the soul, while Freud already dealt with them through his system of patterns (whose detailed parallels to Kabbalah are obvious to those who know [Kabbalah]) which he called psychoanalysis (to receive the prestige of scientificity, understanding his generation) - today sexology is moving towards neuro and genomics. The day is not far when the sciences of neurosexology and sexogenetics will be the interpreting and even treating sciences for everything related to sexuality, and will do so with unprecedented technological efficiency, which may simply solve the sexual problem of man, as it solved the problem of hunger. Just as satisfying the food drive is perceived as a basic human right - so will the right to satisfying sex be perceived.
We, of course, recoil from the secular process we see here. In the ancient world, sexuality was a mysterious thing, which received deep mythical-literary treatment, such as in the sin of knowledge, and developed theurgic treatment. But we see here a long-term historical process of secularization of the myth: already Kabbalah itself, and certainly Hasidism, were in their time a spiritual technologization of sexuality in relation to the mythical space of the Song of Songs for example, or to pagan and shamanic spaces of sexuality. But the process in which healing in psychoanalysis (a completely imaginary medium) becomes healing in biological analysis, and the soul undergoes complete secularization - evokes recoil in the person of our time, who has not yet finished his process of secularization. If the secularization of the world has already been completed, with the help of science - man is not yet mature for the completion of the process: the secularization of the soul. After secularization from God - the time has come for secularization from man himself. Or, if we use Nietzschean wording: the death of God is only the first stage, and the next stage is the death of man.
If so, after a complete biological decoding of the soul, with what spiritual medium will we be left, in which layered secrecy, depth and mystery can exist? What will be left for us after the death of man, when the superman is late to arrive (and if he arrives - he is a computer)? What is the next stage in the process? There is still one mysterious medium, which biologization cannot touch, and which is a spiritual space where patterns creating complexity, or alternatively myths, can "live". Even after the death of man - culture will remain for us. Culture - including literature and art - is an ancient space where ancient preferences and lack of symmetry, irrationality, the arbitrariness of our specific history, our myths, our masterpieces, and everything that cannot be efficiently calculated can dwell. This is probably a mathematical limitation, meaning a hard limitation, to which even a computer is subject (known in complexity as the polynomial hierarchy): it is difficult to create masterpieces.
Even if man completely disappears, even physically, and is replaced by another spiritual entity, and even if physics cracks all the secrets of physical space, and reaches a theory of everything, and science annihilates every secret in nature - spiritual secrets will still remain. Even a computer will find it difficult to create masterpieces, by their very definition as exceptional achievements, regardless of its computational ability. For example: even a computer will find it difficult to prove difficult theorems in mathematics. It will not be able to solve every problem and provide a beautiful proof for every hypothesis - because computationally this is too difficult a problem, which has only flashes of insight - but no method. It is possible that artificial intelligence will be able to write literary masterpieces that surpass the Bible, but still any computational ability will encounter difficulty in writing its own Bible. This is a problem that cannot be "known how to solve" (like for example knowing how to solve an equation), because it turns out that there is a fundamental mathematical gap between the ability to evaluate and judge a work - and the ability to create it (and in the language of the people: P!=NP).
Moreover, since masterpieces are such only in a certain cultural context, that is, only in the context of the past of the cultural tradition, even a computer will find it difficult to write new masterpieces in the tradition of the Bible, even if this tradition rises far above the Bible. The cultural tradition - it will be the ancient world and the primordial spiritual medium of a post-human world, and in it the secret doctrine of even a silicon creature can dwell, or the foundational myths of a quantum computer, or the sexuality of artificial intelligence, or (surprise, surprise!) - the religiosity of the superman. Thus, the circle of the process of secularization will reach its paradoxical end: like a snake biting its tail. And with this mythical image - we will end.