Comment

Stan Grant
The brain in a box

What is the most significant news story of the past couple of weeks? Trump’s Gaza deal? The attack on a British synagogue? Closer to home, is it Andrew Hastie’s political manoeuvrings?

Certainly, those stories have made the headlines. They are each, in their way, intriguing or tragic, no doubt about that. I don’t wish to diminish their relative importance, but they are crises du jour. They are events and events pass, even horrendous events such as war.

Tucked away in one newspaper, though, was a story that may define the future of humanity. This story will eventually touch every one of us, wherever we live, whatever our faith or culture.

Beyond the level of curiosity it did not make big headlines. Yet its implications are enormous.

The story told of the creation of artificial brains with real human brain cells. Researchers store these “brains” in boxes in a lab in Melbourne, at a start-up called Cortical Labs. The scientists communicate with the cells via electrical impulses. They are talking to each other, and the hybrid is learning.

These boxes contain the first commercially available biological computer. Let that sink in. The intention is to build on the reality-shattering work being done with artificial intelligence and power it with human tissue.

Philosophers warn we have not yet begun to explore the ethical and moral limits of this new world. I might go as far as to say we do not even have the language or the soul to contemplate this inevitable question: Where does the human end and the computer begin?

These hybrids may eventually control robots. They may be particularly useful for diagnosing and treating disease. They may also make music, create art or write novels.

This level of human interiority worries me. It should worry you. T. S. Eliot told us the “music of poetry is not something which exists apart from the meaning”.

Poetry, he said, “is one person talking to another”. Are we ready to give that up? Are we henceforth mere simulacrum?

To surrender awe, beauty, truth is something I find terrifying. We are not simply building a more efficient machine; we are reimagining the human.

What species decides its own demise? More to the point, why are we not concerned? The newspaper article read as dispassionately and mechanically as the machines themselves.

This is not science fiction. We have long left that behind. This is human destiny. These brains in a box are the next point on a human experiment to make the human redundant.

From the 15th century, humans set our fate by numbers. Mathematics became the source of highest truth. This is the world of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. In 1657, Christiaan Huygens patented the pendulum clock and with it a mechanical philosophy that turned the divine nature of the human into a part of the machinery of the universe.

Mathematician and philosopher René Descartes captured this new mechanistic vision in his dictum cogito, ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. Ironically, Descartes is thinking about the nature and existence of God, yet he unleashes an idea that in time kills God.

In the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche laid bare our deicide, and asked who are we to erase the horizon? What is left of the human now is a triumph of wills. He saw the coming of what he described as “the Last Man” – a mediocre nihilist whose own voice comes back at him “like that of a dying person”.

I mention this genealogy because we walk through a world not knowing what is happening or how we got here. By this stage of late modernity, we are an extension of the machine.

Modernity has tricked us into accepting that existence trumps essence. The human soul is optional.

We should remind ourselves we are but a blink of the eye in the life of the universe. In mere human times, modernity is an aberration. For tens of thousands of years civilisations existed and thrived with art, music, ceremony, law and the sacred without being troubled by the nature of their own existence.

In a matter of a few centuries, we have taken a turn that has left us existentially bewildered. The mathematical revolution plunged us into a mechanical world beyond our understanding. As science has pushed back the horizons of knowledge, we have shrunk into our dark corners of ignorance.

We still peddle base human hatreds, only with more devastating weapons. Morality and ethics born out of a response to science struggle to hold together an untethered world. The late Austrian physicist and mathematician Wolfgang Smith lamented that we are “denizens of an impoverished universe”.

The contours of our lives, he wrote, are twinned by physics and psychology – one describing the mechanical world, the other our human psychosis. “Beyond this,” he wrote, “we see nothing; we cannot – our premises do not permit it.”

We are locked in a world that speaks for us and we have no way of even beginning to understand it. Hence, an article appears foretelling a human-machine hybrid future and we barely notice it.

Smith’s answer is to see the world with the soul. Here we see a real universe, not merely mechanical but one of colour and sound and fragrance. It is a universe in which, he wrote, “things speak to us, and everything has meaning”.

This is the world of humans: “body, soul – and above all, heart”.

Is this human lost to us? In a world of convenience food, reality television and faceless friends, I fear we have already chosen efficiency over the soul. We have chosen the machine over the human heart.

It is a fear echoed by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who in 2000, following fears of a Y2K technological catastrophe, warned us we are living in what he called “liquid modernity”.

“Change,” he wrote, “is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty.”

Liquid modernity is a revolution of time and space. Technology has made location meaningless, so we are uprooted. The conquest of space has tamed time. Distance no longer measures travel. We don’t ask how far but, rather, how long.

Experience is instantaneous. Software trumps hardware. Information moves at light speed. We live in a world of permanent now.

Bauman wrote that we have moved from heavy modernity to light modernity. Previously, territory determined power, hence nations and empires. Wealth was once measured in possessions. Now mobility is wealth. Power is to live beyond borders.

According to Bauman, the first thing to go is our relationship to each other. Light modernity is atomised and the human alienated. We lose a common destiny.

Being freed from space, we lose our physical proximity, Bauman writes; we are “stripped of the challenge of togetherness”.

Artificial intelligence, transhumanism, brains in a box – these are the last human inventions. The human is conquered by the mechanical universe humans have created.

Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, saw this future and warned that “this day is the world’s night … rearranged into merely technological day. This day is the shortest. It threatens a single endless winter.”

Heidegger wrote: “The world becomes without healing, unholy.”

I can think of no political leader on the global stage who offers any clue about how we navigate this world. The media is obsessed with the events of the day, while our future is being decided in laboratories.

The world is moving at warp speed and the human is travelling at a snail’s pace. Google mastermind and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil says in the 21st century the world will undergo the equivalent of 20,000 years of technological progress.

He calls it the singularity: “The culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology … There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine…”

Kurzweil was once asked if in the singularity there was a new God. No, he said, not yet. There will be, however. The machines will create their own God.

This is the biggest story of our times. Of all times. The mark of a civilisation in terminal decline is when it no longer notices its own end.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 11, 2025 as " The brain in a box".

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