Science, in spite of its awe-inspiring magnitude, contains
one flaw that partakes of the nature of the universe itself.
It can solve problems, but it also creates them in a genuinely confusing ratio.
They escape unseen out of the laboratory into the body politic,
whther they be germs inured to antibiotics,
the waiting death in rocket silos,
or the unloosed multiplying power of life.
We are finite creatures seeking to establish our own reality against infinity.
Man has twice been forced to revise his concept of time. Revise is perhpas too tame a word for this pair of universe-bending revelations. The first realization was that the Earth was countless millions of years old, rather that the conceivably tangible few millenia previously thought. The second was that, although the Earth was infinitely older than previously thought, the span of a single human life could wrap itself around time.
How different is the world today than it was when my grandfather, now 89, was born? That difference is greater than the difference between the birth of Christ and the birth of Columbus. There was a time when time was seen as relatively short (circa 4000 years) and when a human life merely marked the constant and unchanging passage of the same, as the material world did not change at all during the course of one's life. No more. And we, we destroyers of time, are left to live our lives amidst this unparalleled disorientation as if it were the most natural thing imgainable.
This smashing of time has led to unprecedented wealth and leisure, myopically defined as success. But it is this very success that has led to ignorance, myopically defined as specialization. And it is this very specialization that leaves us more vulnerable than ever before.
We have created a world in which a disease can circle the globe in a single day, yet hundreds of millions of people have no idea how to make a fire, how to hunt, how to navigate. A world in which buildings reach into the sky, but would be rendered totally unusable if an electrical generator were to fail. This act of painting every "modern" society into a corner is what time now dramatizes for us.
The human brain has become superorganic. It functions in ways that are totally unnecessary for organic survival. What is the biological logic of imagination? There is none. In the most elemental sense, it is a waste of calories. It paid off, however, this investment in the unnecessary, so that now we are superorganic creatures, no longer totally bound by physical dimension. If we become carried away with this gift, however, we will expose ourselves to organic dangers that were conquered long ago by our "less evolved" descendants.
By superorganic, I mean this: the brain is not limited in its capacity by the human body. The physical host and the brain need each other to live, of course, but the function of the brain is not bound by the function of the body. For example, if my lungs begin to fail, I can't borrow the energy from a healthy person's lungs to restore my own. If, however, I want to know something about Persia, I can take information about it from the brains of countless others.
Lungs don't leave breath for future people to use. Brains leave whatever they want for countless followers to use as they can. This indefinable and ephermeral, and infinite, swarm of information, words, thoughts, music, ideas, and all the rest can never be extinguished. That is the miracle of the human brain. That is superorganic. Cemeteries of thought have much more life left in them than cemeteries of men. Let us pray we do not allow them to become the same.
3 comments:
Awesome! In both the literal and figurative sense of the word.
Your comments at the end of the article in particular remind me of the ideas fantasized about in a sci-fi novel called Accelerando. Although the author uses improbable technologies to get past the problem of 'painting ourselves into a corner' due to specialization, he brings up an interesting result of this possibilty: that information itself and the capacity to store and the speed of its access could well become the limiting factors of survival in the universe. And this in turn could create additional levels of 'specialization' problems, especially ones in which organic life can not concievably compete.
I guess the question is, how does sentient life adapt to this problem? Do we harmonize with the organic in future development to our best ability? Will we be able to develop 'technologies' that blend seemlessly with the teeming life around us? But then how can we deal with globe shattering, in the literal sense, events? Could we even domesticate the Earth and the Cosmos to fit our hopes? Our will the universe decide that it doesn't need us. Or should we be willing to accept our species evolutionary limitations?
I'm not sure I can imagine doing that....
I disagree with the thought that imagination is biologically useless a "waste of calories." It is, in fact, a very wise and efficient use of calories. Instead of just doing things the way we have always done things, we can imagine up new and more fficient ways thereby saving energy. Small output of calories in the brain to save large output of calories in the muscles (for instance a bow and arrow instead of running, jumping, stabbing).
This isn't to say I think your point is all wrong. I definately think that our technology has gone beyond what we need for basic survival. However, it does make us utilize less physical energy. In the past, this has allowed our species to be the fittest and, therefore, survive. I definately agree that now we feel our technologies allow us to be compartmentalized and no longer realize that, no matter how it seems, we are still interconnected and can still affect and be affected by others in many small and large ways.
A quick point and pet peeve of mine:
Science is observation and hypothesis. It is investigation for the sake of understanding. Technology is the application of knowledge, and that knowledge need not necessarily come from scientific exploration. Scientific method, however, has the benefit, because of its nature, to be correct more often than not. This results in technologies dervied from science in being more succesful in their aims.
The problem is that the words "technology" and "science" are seen as synonomous today, due to the fact that the scientific method is pretty much the base mode of operation for any sort of work, for a hell of a lot of people. As such, science sometimes is maligned for 'creating' problems in this world when in reality it is that capability of our species for tool use that is the root cause of the 'problem'.
And even then, is that really the problem? After all, primates and birds, have technology (tool use). It would seem to me that it is our lack of foresight and holistic understanding in ALL things, that creates these problems, intentional or not. Especially now that we are learning things and building things that span distances and times greater than the existance of our, and many other, species.
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