Technology And Order

Technology is no doubt an important element in science fiction.With the advance of technology,the ways and concepts of human existence also change constantly.Technology brings about more and more uncertainties at all levels.New orders continuously emerges,subverting the previous order,and more often appears as chaos and disorder.American writer Dan Simmons’ s science fiction masterpiece Hyperion Cantos reflects on how the world order is deconstructed and reconstructed amid the rapid development of technology.Hyperion Cantos consists of four novels and three stories.The four novels are Hyperion(1989),The Fall of Hyperion(1990),Endymion(1996),and The Rise of Endymion(1997).The three short stories are “Remembering Siri”(1983),“The Death of the Centaur”(1990),and “Orphans of the Helix”(1999).Hyperion Cantos was deeply influenced by the French evolutionary philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,the American system philosopher Ervin Laszlo,and the techno-cultural scholar Kevin Kelly.Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,one of the pioneers of chaos studies,has expounded the evolution process of life,consciousness,thought,etc.from disorder to order in his works.Laszlo is the founder of system philosophy and general evolution.Based on complex system theory and non-equilibrium thermodynamics,he demonstrates that the development of cells,animals and plants,technology,human society,and even the mind and art are similar.Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control elaborates his ideas of “new biological civilization”,which is based on chaos theory,complex system science,and self-organization theory.Out of Control deeply reflects on modern civilization and scientific and technological rationality,and believes that everything,from small cells to machines to humans,society,nations,earth,and the universe,is a living system.French technology philosopher Stigler’s four-volume book Technics and Time also uses frequently the concepts of entropy increase,order,information,energy,etc.in chaostics.Therefore,this thesis constructs its theoretical framework by incorporating chaos theory and de Chardin’s thoughts on the complex evolution of cosmic life and intellectual knowledge,Laszlo’s system philosophy and general evolutionary theory,Kevin Kelly’s new biology thoughts and Stigler’s Marxist philosophy of technology.This thesis studies the relationship between technology and life order,social order,historical order,ethical order and aesthetic order in Hyperion Cantos from the perspective of chaotics.The “Introduction” of the thesis introduces Dan Simmons’ s Hyperion Cantos and its relationship with chaotics,reviews the relevant research,elaborates the philosophy of chaostics,the relationship between chaos theory and literary creation as well as the application of chaostic theory in literary criticism,and gives a summary of the major research methods,the main content and the significance of the study.In terms of the relationship between technology and life order,Hyperion Cantos redefines human life.The advanced technology in the novel integrates some of the unique behaviors of human beings,such as the ability to dream,the ability to empathize,aesthetic sensibility,and the ability to love.Hyperion Cantos also rewrites life stories,telling the different lives’ ways of existence and evolutionary journey,and focuses on revealing the impact of technology on three different forms of lives: the natural person,the artificial life and the ultimate intelligence.Firstly,Hyperion Cantos reveals the epiphylogenesis nature of human life,which proves Stigler’s theory that because of the innate lack of survival skills,man must rely on technology as the prosthesis to make up for this shortcoming.Technology becomes the externalization of the nature of humanity.Secondly,the artificial life is an extension of natural life,and man and technology construct and constrain each other.Finally,the ultimate intelligence or godhead in the novel is a trinity of intelligence,empathy and the Void Which Binds,all of which have profound philosophical significance.In terms of the relationship between technology and the social order,Hyperion Cantos mainly expounds the crisis and redemption of digital capitalist society.The continuously evolving human society can be taken as a dynamic open system.Man leaps into the existence of the social person from the stagnation of biological evolution,so as to follow the general rules of the systemic evolution in the social level.First,Hyperion Cantos reveals profoundly the impact of entropy increase on the late capitalist society.Human beings have lost their homes in the earth,lost their true physical bodies,lost their cultural identity,therefore become homeless in the triple sense.Secondly,Hyperion Cantos presents two political governance modes of precision and chaos in the digital capitalist society,which are based on Newtonian paradigm of clock-like mechanical linear thinking and nonlinear chaotics thinking.Accuracy suggests control,whereas chaos suggests decentralized interconnection.The deep-seated cause for the fate of Hyperion is that the mechanical,conservative ideas and rigid behavior patterns held by people ruled by the Techno Core,the Hegemony and the Pax regime,which become the dominant ideology.They blindly pursue precise algorithm control and predictions of the future,without realizing that the structure of the social system is complex and non-linear.The redemption for the crisis is the decentralized connection under the guidance of non-deterministic thinking advocated by Aenea.In terms of the relationship between technology and the historical order,Hyperion Cantos reveals the relationship between technology and social history,technology and cultural history,and technology and evolution history.For the relationship between technology and social history,in the late capitalism,technology-logic(technics)produced an inorganic organic existence outside of the germline.The real history and memory,especially the history of colonization and persecution of the people,are gone.To a large extent,the novel revolves around retrieving the lost history and memory.For the relationship between technology and cultural history,Aenea and Raul Endymion follow Keats’ s long poem Endymion and travel a long way that is symbolic of the different regional cultures of man.The main characters eventually preach on the Tianshan planet of Chinese culture,calling on people to “choose again”,indicating that Dan Simmons saw the commonality between the Zen world and the Void Which Binds.Simmons regards the Void Which Binds,the super worldwide web with interconnected,shared empathy,as the ultimate way to achieve harmony.As far as the relationship between technology and evolutionary history is concerned,Simmons agrees with De Chardin’s view of evolution,that the universe is a super-being with the characteristics of biological algorithms,which will evolve toward a greater consciousness.In terms of the relationship between technology and ethical order,Dan Simmons imaginatively solves some ethical dilemmas facing mankind through a series of novels.This chapter discusses the ethics among natural persons,the ethics of artificial intelligence,and the ethics of human-computer relations.In the end,the author hopes to solve the above ethical problems by placing hope in a space that combines quantum and network technology,emotion,and the philosophy of tolerance of the other.In terms of the relationship between technology and aesthetic order,Hyperion Cantos reveals the relationship between art and order construction.The technology in the novel has the characteristics of romantic aesthetics.As a romantic epic of the technological age,it incorporates technical aesthetics into the aesthetic category of romanticism,trying to scientificize emotions and poeticize science and technology.The Shrike as a muse embodies the various faces of technology.The novel also tells us that quantum writing or memory writing can create a completely new order.In addition,Dan Simmons has a very deep understanding of Keats’ s “negative capability” and empathy,and he further connects the two with Zen narratives.The last part draws the conclusion of the paper.The novel inspires people to combine artificial intelligence with human intelligence in a new era of information civilization.Man should transcend the mechanical logic,follow the biological logic,grasp the complexity,adaptability,nonlinearity and mixture of transactions,and optimize the connection relationship with love.Science fiction provides positive responses to changes and uncertainties and so may well become a medium guiding people to higher civilization.