Panpsychism & Krakoan Resurrection
Pound-for-pound, Jonathan Hickman’s work on X-Men is the 3rd most important era after Chris Claremont’s OG 17 year run––which made X-Men into what it is today––, and Grant Morrison’s 45 issue run on New X-men––which brought mutants into the 21st century.
Hickman propelled them into the future. And as the two most significant components of the propulsion engine, he provided a living island on which to start a sovereign mutant nation, and resurrection protocols that made mutants immortal. This resurrection engine makes sense within the confines of the Marvel Comics of the era. It is internally consistent with the rules of the world created––not just of Hickman’s era but also the previous 60+ years. And being leaps and bounds more talented, creative, and industrious, Hickman adorned his comic books with extensive prose to turbocharge his worldbuilding––at which, I’d argue, he is second to a grand total of no one. But are these resurrection protocols consistent with any of the current philosophical stances on how consciousness works? Now that is a question worth scribbling a few thousand words about.
The way the protocols work is that Professor Xavier routinely (mostly once a week) makes back ups of every mutant on earth. Apparently he’s been doing this for a long time. He extracts the mental back-up psychically, which ostensibly is a comprehensive process that extends from personality to affect, to memories to the subconscious. Does Xavier know how to “read” the true contents of all that he downloads? Or does he just know how to extract it and store it in a back up? I’d say the first one, since this is so absurdly resource intensive that unless he is able to access a state of being where he can experience extreme time dilation, he would never have time to do any of that––what with all the responsibilities that he has gone out of his way to shoulder because apparently no one can do anything without him (or his say so). Additional back-ups of the back-ups are made for contingencies, and without philosophizing too much, they claim to store the essence of a person in the back-up cradles. So far, consciousness seems not panpsychist, not even dualist, but entirely of a physicalist nature.
Onto the more traditionally physical components of resurrection, Egg (formerly called Goldballs) creates these, well, golden balls of non-description biological material that seemed to be completely useless in the past, which Proteus proceeds to transform into viable fertilizable embryo’s with his reality warping powers. Elixir uses his Omega level healing powers by biokinetically fertilizing the eggs and growing a husk body. Then Tempus manipulates the passage of time within the husk to bring the embryo’s to their desired ages. Hope Summers facilitates this entire process by creating synergy with her mimicry powers. And Xavier (or any other competent psychic) adding the finishing touch by downloading their most recent back up into their brains, and voila: a dead mutant is alive again with their most recent back up––which almost always means they do not remember how they died.
Now upon this technology becoming available to mutants, most of them start acting like complete jackasses. They are kamikazeing around like suicidal maniacs, getting themselves killed right and left for shits and giggles, crowding up the resurrection queue when The Five (as the resurrection crew was called) have 16 freaking million mutants to slowly resurrect from the Genoshan Holocaust (from Grant Morrison’s first issue of his aforementioned epic run). The young mutants are especially guilty of this as they pointlessly fuck around asking to get killed (e.g. Pixie, Kid Omega, etc) because resurrection seems fun and exciting, and also because they get to do cosmetic adjustments to their physical appearances during the protocol. Like asking for naturally pink hair, lack of hair pigments in places they don’t wanna deal with waxing, and I’m sure all sorts of genital adjustments (which I’m praying would be denied). All in all, this seems incredibly disrespectful for the spiritual work The Five are doing literally full time since the Dawn of Krakoa.
Human life is precious, because it is finite. The last season of The Good Place (especially the very last episode, which does NOT make me cry every time I watch it–ok???) does a very good job depicting this issue with the concept of ‘forever’ w/r/t humans. It makes just about everything pointless, worthless, and destroys one’s motivational balances by rendering everything non-urgent. So while this was a reasonable solution to the world’s unending genocidal attitudes about mutants, being able to resurrect the victims of hate crimes and massacres in a world that hates and fears them, it sure had the typical unexpected consequence literally any invention ever always brings with it. But with no checks and balances, mutants start putting bullets into each other’s heads when a limb gets mangled because it’s easier to throw the baby out with the bathwater since the resurrection protocols have become a factory of custom endless designer babies.
Pretty much the only person who is not a complete jackass about this stuff is Storm, being a legit Goddess she is, sees human life as valuable, and is afraid of how her value system might get mangled if she starts living life with such a fundamental paradigm shift in the backseat. If I remember correctly, she never dies and gets resurrected, and even deletes her back up to earn the respect of the belligerent Arakkoans on Mars that she was ruling over. This is Ororo; she understands that resurrection is not a toy; so she doesn’t live life like a suicidal blockhead Eren Jaeger style; be like Ororo.
A similar mechanic is used in Altered Carbon (haven’t read the books, just the Netflix show). People routinely back-up their psyches into what they call “stacks”, which are literal hard drives they keep in their necks. And these stacks can be installed into any body and those people seem to resume life in that other body as if nothing happened.
This type of consciousness is what Nick Bostrom would refer to as “whole brain simulation”, which, in Superintelligence, he claimed would one day be possible. But the tiny little teensy itsy bitsy problem with this operation is that seeing that it is merely an absurdly high-fidelity copy of the original, it is completely disjunctive from the original in continuity, and therefore, it’s fucking death. Death, and then some other program that thinks they are you is walking around acting and living exactly like you, while you ceased to freaking exist.
Now this is just awful, because as much as I was nerdgasming right and left binging on the ~550 issues of Krakoa era X-Men over a period of 4 months or so, for the first 4-6 weeks of it, I couldn’t get over the fact that my beloved X-Men of decades of adventures were getting killed off in dumb circumstances (sometimes at the hands of incompetent writers) and getting replaced by Altered Carbon replicas. I literally remember getting nauseated when Wolverine accidentally killed Jean Grey off panel as an afterthought at the beginning of issue 2 or 3 of the new ongoing Wolverine. Of course, Jean was already a Bostromian clone at least once over as she perished with the entire rest of the team during the assault on the Master Mold Forge during HOX/POX, Still, I really struggled with how worthless mutant lives had become in the process of all this. From childhood to now, I handled my freaking comic books with terminal care to keep them in mint condition. And now, the actual characters in them were treating each other (not to mention themselves) like worthless bargain bin back issues. Unintended consequence to the max: mutant lives had become worthless because they were getting hate crimed willy-nilly, and the solution made their lives worthless at their own hands. Oy-veh.
Ok, so with the gigantic introductory shenanigans established, how about we look to see if any of this bs can plug into the philosophical stances on how the mind works.
Physicalism: There is no separation and no two type of things in the universe. Everything is physical. So when a brain is backed up digitally, that is merely a digital back of of organic material, and that organic material now is d-e-a-d.
Verdict: Mutants done died.
Dualism: There is physical stuff, and also some non-physical stuff, that is mostly the stuff we were able to describe physically. This is Descartes’ position. Now this, can maybe save mutants and not render Xavier the biggest self-genocidal Genghis Khan of 616-Marvel. There are the physical bodies of mutants, with their mysterious brains which produces their personhoods and such, but then that adheres to some other type of spirit component, so provided that the same body can be created with the correct backed up information uploaded into its new wetware, then maybe it attaches to the same ‘spirit’ thingie in the…psychological aether?
Verdicts: We might not be dead yet.
Psychological Aether Theory: Ok, so this is an extremely new theory (by Paul Draper of Purdue) but I really love it. Mainly because this is exactly what I saw during psychedelic experiences myself. There is a layer of consciousness in the universe, and when physical entities get adequately complex and sophisticated, then they ‘acquire’ part of that consciousness layer––borrow it for the duration of the physical husk maintaining its integrity––for a period of time. And then when the body dies, I think the consciousness goes back into the aether, with all that you’ve known and felt and experienced, and later on another entity that becomes sufficiently complex (i.e. a baby) acquires it. And that’s how sometimes kids are born who just seem to have “maturity” and who simply “know” stuff. Nothing goes to waste in life, even if you didn’t get a chance to write it down on your personal blog. And by this logic, one could argue that the same creature with the same physiology and brain waves getting recreated could, in “theory”, tether itself to the same aspect of the omnipresent consciousness that comprises the psychological aether. Small gaps in memory due to back-up frequency can be forgivable.
Verdict: Hickman’s Resurrection Protocols might be alive.
Panpsychism: This is actually the main third corner of the primary triangle of Physicalism (everything is physical), Dualism (some are physical, some are not), and then, boom, Panpsychism (everything is NOT physical)––I just wanted to give the Aether special treatment. So, apparently, everything might be, just, consciousness. Like, exclusively. There is nothing other than consciousness. Even the physical gets manifested out of that consciousness. Some want to say that everything has a small amount of proto-consciousness in it and then when entities get sufficiently complex enough, there is a threshold where the sum is larger than its parts, so self-aware consciousness “emerges”. That’s actually “emergentism” (of which there is strong and weak emergence, which serve different roles, and I truly believe this is a significant force in existence––of all things. I mean, heck, there is an entire research institute of people who have dedicated their entire lives to studying emergence from different disciplines towards understanding complexity in the universe at Santa Fe Institute. And as far as I understand it, there is no comprehension of complexity without considering emergence. But the shitty thing is that the most prominent panpsychists choose to refuse these useful nitty gritties in the details as part of the panpsychist puzzle, hence I am reduced to break away from the flock and proselytize my own version of acceptable Panpsychism instead.
Verdict: We are all one, and if resurrected X-Men acquire slightly different components of the omnipresent consciousness, then big whoop, it’s all coming from the same source––maybe in slightly different quantities, wavelengths, and cadences. At least it’s not like the physicalist Altered Carbon stuff where you think you are you, but you didn’t even exist until the original you made a back up before death, and now everyone else gets to enjoy a “you” because you are such a high-fidelity copy, while you, my friend, are fucking dead. But Panpsychism is a loyal cousin to pantheism; and when everything is God, Monism saves us.
Micropsychism (from Physicalism): But then we do come full circle, because the one thing I like more than Draper’s Aether, is Galen Strawson’s embrace of the panpsychist stuff into his physicalism, by saying that “yeah, everything is physical. But we just don’t know everything that exists, can’t measure it, can’t see it, can’t do a lot of things that might be in existence. So just because we don’t have the machinery (be it biological organs or technological know how) to observe and measure something, that doesn’t mean it has to be something magical that we’ll never understand. Physicists have, through time, found particles that are barely there to our finite capacity, or very hard to observe or measure. So why do all the mental gymnastics to fetishize something as elusive, instead of admitting that elusivity that might one day be no more?”
Verdict: I think Hickman killed everyone, and Xavier was unwittingly playing with dolls in his island of a dollhouse.
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Once you suspend not common sense, but esoteric philosophical minutiae, X-Men comics are very enjoyable. I grew up with these characters. Some of them were, in a way, my best friends at times. I didn’t necessarily enjoy each instance of a random writer reanimating their intellectual property corpse with their mediocre writing. But across all the random one-off resurrections, laughable retcons, and some of these characters not going through any personal growth because their parent company’s editorial won’t let them, I am so-freaking-grateful that someone like Hickman put forth some effort in standardizing this simulation of a universe with superpowers, innate or artificial alike, caricaturized racism (wishful thinking by me?), and historical landmarks getting destroyed faster than they can be rebuilt. I see some people nitpicking this and that about the Krakoa era. And not just the bad series written by objectively bad writers, but Hickman’s main body of work itself. I could understand it to a certain extent if they are comparing this work to other non x-men, non superhero comics. But in this soap opera that’s been going on for 60 years, about half of which I witnessed and followed in real time, I have nothing to do but express appreciation for having someone every two decades or so who will do something bold, and allow my childhood friends to age alongside me, instead of being stuck in the same hollow platitude of stories the way editorial likes to push.
I hope someone comes again in a decade or so and boldly maybe sort of accidentally kills all my favourite mutants but then does it so well that I thank them for it, and maybe write a philosophical blog post about it, if not an actual peer-reviewable paper. Or I can do whatever I want, since I’m not under the editorial thumb of Marvel or Disney.
It’s fun being a mutant.
