Technology, Mass-Culture, and the Prospects of Human Liberation

Cultural evolution is arguably just as fascinating as biological evolution (if not more so), with new ideas and behaviors stemming from the same kinds of natural selective pressures that lead to new species along with their novel morphologies and capacities.  And as with biological evolution where it, in a sense, takes off on its own unbeknownst to the new organisms it produces and independent of the intentions they may have (with our species being the notable exception given our awareness of evolutionary history and our ever-growing control over genetics), so too cultural evolution takes off on its own, where cultural changes are made manifest through a number of causal influences that we’re largely unaware of, despite our having some conscious influence over this vastly transformative process.

Alongside these cultural changes, human civilizations have striven to find new means of manipulating nature and to better predict the causal structure that makes up our reality.  One unfortunate consequence of this is that, as history has shown us, within any particular culture’s time and place, people have a decidedly biased overconfidence in the perceived level of truth or justification for the status quo and their present world view (both on an individual and collective level).  Undoubtedly, the “group-think” or “herd mentality” that precipitates from our simply having social groups often reinforces this overconfidence, and this is so in spite of the fact that what actually influences a mass of people to believe certain things or to behave as they do is highly contingent, unstable, and amenable to irrational forms of persuasion including emotive, sensationalist propaganda that prey on our cognitive biases.

While we as a society have an unprecedented amount of control over the world around us, this type of control is perhaps best described as a system of bureaucratic organization and automated information processing, that gives less and less individual autonomy, liberty, and basic freedom, as it further expands its reach.  How much control do we as individuals really have in terms of the information we have access to, and given the implied picture of reality that is concomitant with this information in the way it’s presented to us?  How much control do we have in terms of the number of life trajectories and occupations made available to us, what educational and socioeconomic resources we have access to given the particular family, culture, and geographical location we’re born and raised in?

As more layers of control have been added to our way of life and as certain criteria for organizational efficiency are continually implemented, our lives have become externally defined by increasing layers of abstraction, and our modes of existence are further separated cognitively and emotionally from an aesthetically and otherwise psychologically valuable sense of meaning and purpose.

While the Enlightenment slowly dragged our species, kicking and screaming, out of the theocratic, anti-intellectual epistemologies of the Medieval period of human history, the same forces that unearthed a long overdue appreciation for (and development of) rationality and technological progress, unknowingly engendered a vulnerability to our misusing this newfound power.  There was an overcompensation of rationality when it was deployed to (justifiably) respond to the authoritarian dogmatism of Christianity and to the demonstrably unreliable nature of superstitious beliefs and of many of our intuitions.

This overcompensatory effect was in many ways accounted for, or anticipated within the dialectical theory of historical development as delineated by the German philosopher Georg Hegel, and within some relevant reformulations of this dialectical process as theorized by the German philosopher Karl Marx (among others).  Throughout history, we’ve had an endless clash of ideas whereby the prevailing worldviews are shown to be inadequate in some way, failing to account for some notable aspect of our perceived reality, or shown to be insufficient for meeting our basic psychological or socioeconomic needs.  With respect to any problem we’ve encountered, we search for a solution (or wait for one to present itself to us), and then we become overconfident in the efficacy of the solution.  Eventually we end up overgeneralizing its applicability, and then the pendulum swings too far the other way, thereby creating new problems in need of a solution, with this process seemingly repeating itself ad infinitum.

Despite the various woes of modernity, as explicated by the modern existentialist movement, it does seem that history, from a long-term perspective at least, has been moving in the right direction, not only with respect to our heightened capacity of improving our standard of living, but also in terms of the evolution of our social contracts and our conceptions of basic and universal human rights.  And we should be able to plausibly reconcile this generally positive historical trend with the Hegelian view of historical development, and the conflicts that arise in human history, by noting that we often seem to take one step backward followed by taking two steps forward in terms of our moral and epistemological progress.

Regardless of the progress we’ve made, we seem to be at a crucial point in our history where the same freedom-limiting authoritarian reach that plagued humanity (especially during the Middle Ages) has undergone a kind of morphogenesis, having been reinstantiated albeit in a different form.  The elements of authoritarianism have become built into the very structure of mass-culture, with an anti-individualistic corporatocracy largely mediating the flow of information throughout this mass-culture, and also mediating its evolution over time as it becomes more globalized, interconnected, and cybernetically integrated into our day-to-day lives.

Coming back to the kinds of parallels in biology that I opened up with, we can see human autonomy and our culture (ideas and behaviors) as having evolved in ways that are strikingly similar to the biological jump that life made long ago, where single-celled organisms eventually joined forces with one another to become multi-cellular.  This biological jump is analogous to the jump we made during the early onset of civilization, where we employed an increasingly complex distribution of labor and occupational specialization, allowing us to survive many more environmental hurdles than ever before.  Once civilization began, the spread of culture became much more effective for transmitting ideas both laterally within a culture and longitudinally from generation to generation, with this process heavily enhanced by our having adopted various forms of written language, allowing us to store and transmit information in much more robust ways, similar to genetic information storage and transfer via DNA, RNA, and proteins.

Although the single-celled bacterium or amoeba (for example) may be thought of as having more “autonomy” than a cell that is forcefully interconnected within a multi-cellular organism, we can see how the range of capacities available to single cells were far more limited before making the symbiotic jump, just as humans living before the onset of civilization had more “freedom” (at least of a certain type) and yet the number of possible life trajectories and experiences was minuscule when compared to a human living in a post-cultural world.  But once multi-cellular organisms began to form a nervous system and eventually a brain, the entire collection of cells making up an organism became ultimately subservient to a centralized form of executive power — just as humans have become subservient to the executive authority of the state or government (along with various social pressures of conformity).

And just as the fates of each cell in a multi-cellular organism became predetermined and predictable by its particular set of available resources and the specific information it received from neighboring cells, similarly our own lives are becoming increasingly predetermined and predictable by the socioeconomic resources made available to us and the information we’re given which constitutes our mass-culture.  We are slowly morphing from individual brains into something akin to individual neurons within a global brain of mass-consciousness and mass-culture, having our critical thinking skills and creative aspirations exchanged for rehearsed responses and docile expectations that maintain the status quo and which continually transfers our autonomy to an oligarchic power structure.

We might wonder if this shift has been inevitable, possibly being yet another example of a “fractal pattern” recapitulated in sociological form out of the very same freely floating rationales that biological evolution has been making use of for eons.  In any case, it’s critically important that we become aware of this change, so we can try and actively achieve and effectively maintain the liberties and level of individual autonomy that we so highly cherish.  We ought to be thinking about what kinds of ways we can remain cognizant of, and critical to, our culture and its products; how we can reconcile or transform technological rationality and progress with a future world comprised of truly liberated individuals; and how to transform our corporatocratic capitalist society into one that is based on a mixed economy with a social safety net that even the wealthiest citizens would be content with living under, so as to maximize the actual creative freedom people have once their basic existential needs have been met.

Will unchecked capitalism, social-media, mass-media, and the false needs and epistemological bubbles they’re forming lead to our undoing and destruction?  Or will we find a way to rise above this technologically-induced setback, and take advantage of the opportunities it has afforded us, to make the world and our technology truly compatible with our human psychology?  Whatever the future holds for us, it is undoubtedly going to depend on how many of us begin to critically think about how we can seriously restructure our educational system and how we disseminate information, how we can re-prioritize and better reflect on what our personal goals ought to be, and also how we ought to identify ourselves as free and unique individuals.

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Irrational Man: An Analysis (Part 4, Chapter 11: The Place of the Furies)

In my last post in this series on William Barrett’s Irrational Man, I examined some of the work of existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, which concluded part 3 of Barrett’s book.  The final chapter, Ch. 11: The Place of the Furies, will be briefly examined here and this will conclude my eleven part post-series.  I’ve enjoyed this very much, but it’s time to move on to new areas of interest, so let’s begin.

1. The Crystal Palace Unmanned

“The fact is that a good dose of intellectualism-genuine intellectualism-would be a very helpful thing in American life.  But the essence of the existential protest is that rationalism can pervade a whole civilization, to the point where the individuals in that civilization do less and less thinking, and perhaps wind up doing none at all.  It can bring this about by dictating the fundamental ways and routines by which life itself moves.  Technology is one material incarnation of rationalism, since it derives from science; bureaucracy is another, since it aims at the rational control and ordering of social life; and the two-technology and bureaucracy-have come more and more to rule our lives.”

Regarding the importance and need for more intellectualism in our society, I think this can be better described as the need for more critical thinking skills and the need for people to be able to discern fact from fiction, to recognize their own cognitive biases, and to respect the adage that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  At the same time, in order to appreciate the existentialist’s concerns, we ought to recognize that there are aspects of human psychology including certain psychological needs that are inherently irrational, including with respect to how we structure our lives, how we express our emotions and creativity, how we maintain a balance in our psyche, etc.  But, since technology is not only a material incarnation of rationalism, but also an outlet for our creativity, there has to be a compromise here where we shouldn’t want to abandon technology, but simply to keep it in check such that it doesn’t impede our psychological health and our ability to live a fulfilling life.

“But it is not so much rationalism as abstractness that is the existentialists’ target; and the abstractness of life in this technological and bureaucratic age is now indeed something to reckon with.  The last gigantic step forward in the spread of technologism has been the development of mass art and mass media of communication: the machine no longer fabricates only material products; it also makes minds. (stereotypes, etc.).”

Sure enough, we’re living in a world where many of our occupations are but one of many layers of abstraction constituting our modern “machine of civilization”.  And the military industrial complex that has taken over the modern world has certainly gone beyond the mass production of physical stuff to be consumed by the populace, and now includes the mass production and viral dissemination of memes as well.  Ideas can spread like viruses and in our current globally interconnected world (which Barrett hadn’t yet seen to the same degree when writing this book), the spread of these ideas is much faster and influential on culture than ever before.  The degree of indoctrination, and the perpetuated cycles of co-dependence between citizens and the corporatocratic, sociopolitical forces ruling our lives from above, have resulted in making our way of life and our thinking much more collective and less personal than at any other time in human history.

“Kierkegaard condemned the abstractness of his time, calling it an Age of Reflection, but what he seems chiefly to have had in mind was the abstractness of the professorial intellectual, seeing not real life but the reflection of it in his own mind.”

Aside from the increasingly abstract nature of modern living then, there’s also the abstractness that pervades our thinking about life, which detracts from our ability to actually experience life.  Kierkegaard had a legitimate point here, by pointing out the fact that theory cannot be a complete substitute for practice; that thought cannot be a complete substitute for action.  We certainly don’t want the reverse either, since action without sufficient forethought leads to foolishness and bad consequences.

I think the main point here is that we don’t want to miss out on living life by thinking about it too much.  Since living a philosophically examined life is beneficial, it remains an open question exactly what balance is best for any particular individual to live the most fulfilling life.  In the mean time we ought to simply recognize that there is the potential for an imbalance, and to try our best to avoid it.

“To be rational is not the same as to be reasonable.  In my time I have heard the most hair-raising and crazy things from very rational men, advanced in a perfectly rational way; no insight or feelings had been used to check the reasoning at any point.”

If you ignore our biologically-grounded psychological traits, or ignore the fact that there’s a finite range of sociological conditions for achieving human psychological health and well-being, then you can’t develop any theory that’s supposed to apply to humans and expect it to be reasonable or tenable.  I would argue that ignoring this subjective part of ourselves when making theories that are supposed to guide our behavior in any way is irrational, at least within the greater context of aiming to have not only logically valid arguments but logically sound arguments as well.  But, if we’re going to exclude the necessity for logical soundness in our conception of rationality, then the point is well taken.  Rationality is a key asset in responsible decision making but it should be used in a way that relies on or seeks to rely on true premises, taking our psychology and sociology into account.

“The incident (making hydrogen bombs without questioning why) makes us suspect that, despite the increase in the rational ordering of life in modern times, men have not become the least bit more reasonable in the human sense of the word.  A perfect rationality might not even be incompatible with psychosis; it might, in fact, even lead to the latter.”

Again, I disagree with Barrett’s use or conception of rationality here, but semantics aside, his main point still stands.  I think that we’ve been primarily using our intelligence as a species to continue to amplify our own power and maximize our ability to manipulate the environment in any way we see fit.  But as our technological capacity advances, our cultural evolution is getting increasingly out of sync with our biological evolution, and we haven’t been anywhere close to sufficient in taking our psychological needs and limitations into account as we continue to engineer the world of tomorrow.

What we need is rationality that relies on true or at least probable premises, as this combination should actually lead a person to what is reasonable or likely to be reasonable.  I have no doubt that without making use of a virtue such as reasonableness, rationality can become dangerous and destructive, but this is the case with every tool we use whether it’s rationality or other capacities both mental and material; tools can always be harmful when misused.

“If, as the Existentialists hold, an authentic life is not handed to us on a platter but involves our own act of self-determination (self-finitization) within our time and place, then we have got to know and face up to that time, both in its (unique) threats and its promises.”

And our use of rationality on an individual level should be used to help reach this goal of self-finitization, so that we can balance the benefits of the collective with the freedom of each individual that makes up that collective.

“I for one am personally convinced that man will not take his next great step forward until he has drained to the lees the bitter cup of his own powerlessness.”

And when a certain kind of change is perceived as something to be avoided, the only way to go through with it is by perceiving the status quo as something that needs to be avoided even more so, so that a foray out of our comfort zone is perceived as an actual improvement to our way of life.  But as long as we see ourselves as already all powerful and masters over our domain, we won’t take any major leap in a new direction of self and collective improvement.  We need to come to terms with our current position in the modern world so that we can truly see what needs repair.  Whether or not we succumb to one or both of the two major existential threats facing our species, climate change and nuclear war, is contingent on whether or not we set our eyes on a new prize.

“Sartre recounts a conversation he had with an American while visiting in this country.  The American insisted that all international problems could be solved if men would just get together and be rational; Sartre disagreed and after a while discussion between them became impossible.  “I believe in the existence of evil,” says Sartre, “and he does not.” What the American has not yet become aware of is the shadow that surrounds all human Enlightenment.”

Once again, if rationality is accompanied with true premises that take our psychology into account, then international problems could be solved (or many of them at least), but Sartre is also right insofar as there are bad ideas that exist, and people that have cultivated their lives around them.  It’s not enough to have people thinking logically, nor is some kind of rational idealism up to the task of dealing with human emotion, cognitive biases, psychopathy, and other complications in human behavior that exist.

The crux of the matter is that some ideas hurt us and other ideas help us, with our perception of these effects being the main arbiter driving our conception of what is good and evil; but there’s also a disparity between what people think is good or bad for them and what is actually good or bad for them.  I think that one could very plausibly argue that if people really knew what was good or bad for them, then applying rationality (with true or plausible premises) would likely work to solve a number of issues plaguing the world at large.

“…echoing the Enlightenment’s optimistic assumption that, since man is a rational animal, the only obstacles to his fulfillment must be objective and social ones.”

And here’s an assumption that’s certainly difficult to ground since it’s based on false premises, namely that humans are inherently rational.  We are unique in the animal kingdom in the sense that we are the only animal (or one of only a few animals) that have the capacity for rational thought, foresight, and the complex level of organization made possible from its use.  I also think that the obstacles to fulfillment are objective since they can be described as facts pertaining to our psychology, sociology, and biology, even if our psychology (for example) is instantiated in a subjective way.  In other words, our subjectivity and conscious experiences are grounded on or describable in objective terms relating to how our particular brains function, how humans as a social species interact with one another, etc.  But, fulfillment can never be reached let alone maximized without taking our psychological traits and idiosyncrasies into account, for these are the ultimate constraints on what can make us happy, satisfied, fulfilled, and so on.

“Behind the problem of politics, in the present age, lies the problem of man, and this is what makes all thinking about contemporary problems so thorny and difficult…anyone who wishes to meddle in politics today had better come to some prior conclusions as to what man is and what, in the end, human life is all about…The speeches of our politicians show no recognition of this; and yet in the hands of these men, on both sides of the Atlantic, lies the catastrophic power of atomic energy.”

And as of 2018, we’ve seen the Doomsday clock now reach two minutes to midnight, having inched one minute closer to our own destruction since 2017.  The dominance hierarchy being led and reinforced by the corporatocratic plutocracy are locked into a narrow form of tunnel vision, hell bent on maintaining if not exacerbating the wealth and power disparities that plague our country and the world as a whole, despite the fact that this is not sustainable in the long run, nor best for the fulfillment of those promoting it.

We the people do share a common goal of trying to live a good, fulfilling life; to have our basic needs met, and to have no fewer rights than anybody else in society.  You’d hardly know that this common ground exists between us when looking at the state of our political sphere, likely as polarized now in the U.S. (if not more so) than even during the Civil War.  Clearly, we have a lot of work to do to reevaluate what our goals ought to be, what our priorities ought to be, and we need a realistic and informed view of what it means to be human before any of these goals can be realized.

“Existentialism is the counter-Enlightenment come at last to philosophic expression; and it demonstrates beyond anything else that the ideology of the Enlightenment is thin, abstract, and therefore dangerous.”

Yes, but the Enlightenment has also been one of the main driving forces leading us out of theocracy, out of scientific illiteracy, and towards an appreciation of reason and evidence (something the U.S. at least, is in short supply of these days), and thus it has been crucial in giving us the means for increasing our standard of living, and solving many of our problems.  While the technological advancements derived from the Enlightenment have also been a large contributor to many of our problems, the current existential threats we face including climate change and nuclear war are more likely to be solved by new technologies, not an abolition of technology nor an abolition of the Enlightenment-brand of thinking that led to technological progress.  We simply need to better inform our technological goals of the actual needs and constraints of human beings, our psychology, and so on.

“The finitude of man, as established by Heidegger, is perhaps the death blow to the ideology of the Enlightenment, for to recognize this finitude is to acknowledge that man will always exist in untruth as well as truth.  Utopians who still look forward to a future when all shadows will be dispersed and mankind will dwell in a resplendent Crystal Palace will find this recognition disheartening.  But on second thought, it may not be such a bad thing to free ourselves once and for all from the worship of the idol of progress; for utopianism-whether the brand of Marx or or Nietzsche-by locating the meaning of man in the future leaves human beings here and how, as well as all mankind up to this point, without their own meaning.  If man is to be given meaning, the Existentialists have shown us, it must be here and now; and to think this insight through is to recast the whole tradition of Western thought.”

And we ought to take our cue from Heidegger, at the very least, to admit that we are finite, our knowledge is limited, and it always will be.  We will not be able to solve every problem, and we would do ourselves and the world a lot better if we admitted our own limitations.  But to avoid being overly cynical and simply damning progress altogether, we need to look for new ways of solving our existential problems.  Part of the solution that I see for humanity moving forward is going to be a combination of advancements in a few different fields.

By making better use of genetic engineering, we’ll one day have the ability to change ourselves in remarkable ways in order to become better adapted to our current world.  We will be able to re-sync our biological evolution with our cultural evolution so we no longer feel uprooted, like a fish out of water.  Continuing research in neuroscience will allow us to learn more about how our brains function and how to optimize that functioning.  Finally, the strides we make in computing and artificial intelligence should allow us to vastly improve our simulation power and arm us with greater intelligence for solving all the problems that we face.

Overall, I don’t see progress as the enemy, but rather that we have an alignment problem between our current measures of progress, and what will actually lead to maximally fulfilling lives.

“The realization that all human truth must not only shine against an enveloping darkness, but that such truth is even shot through with its own darkness may be depressing, and not only to utopians…But it has the virtue of restoring to man his sense of the primal mystery surrounding all things, a sense of mystery from which the glittering world of his technology estranges him, but without which he is not truly human.”

And if we actually use technology to change who we are as human beings, by altering the course of natural selection and our ongoing evolution (which is bound to happen with or without our influence, for better or worse), then it’s difficult to say what the future really holds for us.  There are cultural and technological forces that are leading to transhumanism, and this may mean that one day “human beings” (or whatever name is chosen for the new species that replaces us) will be inherently rational, or whatever we’d like our future species to be.  We’ve stumbled upon the power to change our very nature, and so it’s far too naive, simplistic, unimaginative, and short-sighted to say that humans will “always” or “never” be one way or another.  Even if this were true, it wouldn’t negate the fact that one day modern humans will be replaced by a superseding species which has different qualities than what we have now.

2. The Furies

“…Existentialism, as we have seen, seeks to bring the whole man-the concrete individual in the whole context of his everyday life, and in his total mystery and questionableness-into philosophy.”

This is certainly an admirable goal to combat simplistic abstractions of what it means to be human.  We shouldn’t expect to be able to abstract a certain capacity of human beings (such as rationality), consider it in isolation (no consideration of context), formulate a theory around that capacity, and then expect to get a result that is applicable to human beings as they actually exist in the world.  Furthermore, all of the uncertainties and complexities in our human experiences, no matter how difficult they may be to define or describe, should be given their due consideration in any comprehensive philosophical system.

“In modern philosophy particularly (philosophy since Descartes), man has figured almost exclusively as an epistemological subject-as an intellect that registers sense-data, makes propositions, reasons, and seeks the certainty of intellectual knowledge, but not as the man underneath all this, who is born, suffers, and dies…But the whole man is not whole without such unpleasant things as death, anxiety, guilt, fear and trembling, and despair, even though journalists and the populace have shown what they think of these things by labeling any philosophy that looks at such aspects of human life as “gloomy” or “merely a mood of despair.”  We are still so rooted in the Enlightenment-or uprooted in it-that these unpleasant aspects of life are like Furies for us: hostile forces from which we would escape (the easiest way is to deny that the Furies exist).”

My take on all of this is simply that multiple descriptions of human existence are needed to account for all of our experiences, thoughts, values, and behavior.  And it is what we value given our particular subjectivity that needs to be primary in these descriptions, and primary with respect to how we choose to engineer the world we live in.  Who we are as a species is a complex mixture of good and bad, lightness and darkness, and stability and chaos; and we shouldn’t deny any of these attributes nor repress them simply because they make us uncomfortable.  Instead, we would do much better to face who we are head on, and then try to make our lives better while taking our limitations into account.

“We are the children of an enlightenment, one which we would like to preserve; but we can do so only by making a pact with the old goddesses.  The centuries-long evolution of human reason is one of man’s greatest triumphs, but it is still in process, still incomplete, still to be.  Contrary to the rationalist tradition, we now know that it is not his reason that makes man man, but rather that reason is a consequence of that which really makes him man.  For it is man’s existence as a self-transcending self that has forged and formed reason as one of its projects.”

This is well said, although I’d prefer to couch this in different terms: it is ultimately our capacity to imagine that makes us human and able to transcend our present selves by pointing toward a future self and a future world.  We do this in part by updating our models of the world, simulating new worlds, and trying to better understand the world we live in by engaging with it, re-shaping it, and finding ways of better predicting its causal structure.  Reason and rationality have been integral in updating our models of the world, but they’ve also been high-jacked to some degree by a kind of super-normal stimuli reinforced by technology and our living in a world that is entirely alien to our evolutionary niche, and which have largely dominated our lives in a way that overlooks our individualism, emotions, and feelings.

Abandoning reason and rationality is certainly not the answer to this existential problem; rather, we just need to ensure that they’re being applied in a way that aligns with our moral imperatives and that they’re ultimately grounded on our subjective human psychology.

Irrational Man: An Analysis (Part 3, Chapter 8: Nietzsche)

In the last post on this series on William Barrett’s Irrational Man, we began exploring Part 3: The Existentialists, beginning with chapter 7 on Kierkegaard.  In this post, we’ll be taking a look at Nietzsche’s philosophy in more detail.

Ch. 8 – Nietzsche

Nietzsche shared many of the same concerns as Kierkegaard, given the new challenges of modernity brought about by the Enlightenment; but each of these great thinkers approached this new chapter of our history from perspectives that were in many ways, diametrically opposed.  Kierkegaard had a grand goal of sharing with others what he thought it meant to be a Christian, and he tried to revive Christianity within a society that he found to be increasingly secularized.  He also saw that of the Christianity that did exist, it was largely organized and depersonalized, and he felt the need to stress the importance of a much more personal form of the religion.  Nietzsche on the other hand, an atheist, rejected Christianity and stressed the importance of re-establishing our values given the fact that modernity was now living in a godless world, albeit a culturally Christianized world, but one that was now without a Christ.

Despite their differences, both philosophers felt that discovering the true meaning of our lives was paramount to living an authentic life, and this new quest for meaning was largely related to the fact that our view of ourselves had changed significantly:

“By the middle of the nineteenth century, as we have seen, the problem of man had begun to dawn on certain minds in a new and more radical form: Man, it was seen, is a stranger to himself and must discover, or rediscover, who he is and what his meaning is.”

Nietzsche also understood and vividly illustrated the crucial differences between mankind and the rest of nature, most especially our self-awareness:

“It was Nietzsche who showed in its fullest sense how thoroughly problematical is the nature of man: he can never be understood as an animal species within the zoological order of nature, because he has broken free of nature and has thereby posed the question of his own meaning-and with it the meaning of nature as well-as his destiny.”

And for Nietzsche, the meaning one was to find for their life included first abandoning what he saw as an oppressive and disempowering Christian morality, which he saw as severely inhibiting our potential as human beings.  He was much more sympathetic to Greek culture and morality, and even though (perhaps ironically) Christianity itself was derived from a syncretism between Judaism and Greek Hellenism, it’s moral and psychologically relevant differences were too substantial to avoid Nietzsche’s criticism.  He thought that a return to a more archaic form of Greek culture and mentality was the solution we needed to restore or at least re-validate our instincts:

“Dionysus reborn, Nietzsche thought, might become a savior-god for the whole race, which seemed everywhere to show symptoms of fatigue and decline.”

Nietzsche learned about the god Dionysus while he was studying Greek tragedy, and he gravitated toward the Dionysian symbolism, for it contained a kind of reconciliation between high culture and our primal instincts.  Dionysus was after all the patron god of the Greek tragic festivals and so was associated with beautiful works of art; but he was also the god of wine and ritual madness, bringing people together through the grape harvest and the joy of intoxication.  As Barrett describes it:

“This god thus united miraculously in himself the height of culture with the depth of instinct, bringing together the warring opposites that divided Nietzsche himself.”

It was this window into the hidden portions of our psyche that Nietzsche tried to look through and which became an integral basis for much of his philosophy.  But the chaotic nature of our species combined with our immense power to manipulate the environment also concerned him greatly; and he thought that the way modernity was repressing many of our instincts needed to be circumvented, lest we continue to build up this tension in our unconscious only to release itself in an explosive eruption of violence:

“It is no mere matter of psychological curiosity but a question of life and death for man in our time to place himself again in contact with the archaic life of his unconscious.  Without such contact he may become the Titan who slays himself.  Man, this most dangerous of the animals, as Nietzsche called him, now holds in his hands the dangerous power of blowing himself and his planet to bits; and it is not yet even clear that this problematic and complex being is really sane.”

Indeed our species has been removed from our natural evolutionary habitat; and we’ve built our modern lives around socio-cultural and technological constructs that have, in many ways at least, inhibited the open channel between our unconscious and conscious mind.  One could even say that the prefrontal cortex region of our brain, important as it is for conscious planning and decision making, has been effectively high-jacked by human culture (memetic selection) and now it’s constantly running on overtime, over-suppressing the emotional centers of the brain (such as the limbic system).

While we’ve come to realize that emotional suppression is sometimes necessary in order to function well as a cooperative social species that depends on complex long-term social relationships, we also need to maintain a healthy dose of emotional expression as well.  If we can’t release this more primal form of “psychological energy” (for lack of a better term), then it shouldn’t be surprising to see it eventually manifest into some kind of destructive behavior.

We ought not forget that we’re just like other animals in terms of our brain being best adapted to a specific balance of behaviors and cognitive functions; and if this balance is disrupted through hyperactive or hypoactive use of one region or another, doesn’t it stand to reason that we may wind up with either an impairment in brain function or less healthy behavior?  If we’re not making a sufficient use of our emotional capacities, shouldn’t we expect them to diminish or atrophy in some way or other?  And if some neurological version of the competitive exclusion principle exists, then this would further reinforce the idea that our suppression of emotion by other capacities may cause those other capacities to become permanently dominant.  We can only imagine the kinds of consequences that ensue when this psychological impairment falls upon a species with our level of power.

1.  Ecce Homo

“In the end one experiences only oneself,” Nietzsche observes in his Zarathustra, and elsewhere he remarks, in the same vein, that all the systems of the philosophers are just so many forms of personal confession, if we but had eyes to see it.”

Here Nietzsche is expressing one of his central ideas, by pointing out the fact that we can’t separate ourselves from our thoughts, and therefore the ideas put forward by any philosopher are really betraying some set of values they hold whether unconsciously or explicitly, and they also betray one’s individual perspective; an unavoidable perspective stemming from our subjective experience which colors our interpretation of those experiences.  Perspectivism, or the view that reality and our ideas about what’s true and what we value can be mapped onto many different possible conceptual schemes, was a big part of Nietzsche’s overall philosophy, and it was interwoven into his ideas on meaning, epistemology, and ontology.

As enlightening as Nietzsche was in giving us a much needed glimpse into some of the important psychological forces that give our lives the shape they have (for better or worse), his written works show little if any psychoanalytical insight applied to himself, in terms of the darker and less pleasant side of his own psyche.

“Nietzsche’s systematic shielding of himself from the other side is relevant to his explanation of the death of God: Man killed God, he says, because he could not bear to have anyone looking at his ugliest side.”

But even if he didn’t turn his psychoanalytical eye inward toward his own unconscious, he was still very effective in shining a light on the collective unconscious of humanity as a whole.  It’s not enough that we marvel over the better angels of our nature, even though it’s important to acknowledge and understand our capacities and our potential for bettering ourselves and the world we live in; we also have to acknowledge our flaws and shortcomings and while we may try to overcome these weaknesses in one way or another, some of them are simply a part of our nature and we should accept them as such even if we may not like them.

One of the prevailing theories stemming from Western Rationalism (mentioned earlier in Barrett’s book) was that human beings were inherently perfect and rational, and it was within the realm of possibility to realize that potential; but this kind of wishful thinking was relying on a fundamental denial of an essential part of the kind of animal we really are.  And Nietzsche did a good job of putting this fact out in the limelight, and explaining how we couldn’t truly realize our potential until we came to terms with this fairly ugly side of ourselves.

Barrett distinguishes between the attitudes stemming from various forms of atheism, including that of Nietzsche’s:

“The urbane atheism of Bertrand Russell, for example, presupposes the existence of believers against whom he can score points in an argument and get off some of his best quips.  The atheism of Sartre is a more somber affair, and indeed borrows some of its color from Nietzsche: Sartre relentlessly works out the atheistic conclusion that in a universe without God man is absurd, unjustified, and without reason, as Being itself is.”

In fact Nietzsche was more concerned with the atheists that hadn’t yet accepted the full ramifications of a Godless world, rather than believers themselves.  He felt that those who believed in God still had a more coherent belief system given many of their moral values and the meaning they attached to their lives, since they were largely derived from their religious beliefs (even if the religious beliefs were unwarranted or harmful).  Those that were atheists, many of them at least, hadn’t yet taken the time to build a new foundation for their previously held values and the meaning in their lives; and if they couldn’t rebuild this foundation then they’d have to change those values and what they find to be meaningful to reflect that shift in foundation.

Overall, Nietzsche even changes the game a little in terms of how the conception of God was to be understood in philosophy:

“If God is taken as a metaphysical object whose existence has to be proved, then the position held by scientifically minded philosophers like Russell must inevitably be valid: the existence of such an object can never be empirically proved.  Therefore, God must be a superstition held by primitive and childish minds.  But both these alternative views are abstract, whereas the reality of God is concrete, a thoroughly autonomous presence that takes hold of men but of which, of course, some men are more conscious than others.  Nietzsche’s atheism reveals the true meaning of God-and does so, we might add, more effectively than a good many official forms of theism.”

Even though God may not actually exist as a conscious being, the idea of God and the feelings associated with what one labels as an experience of God, is as real as any other idea or experience and so it should still be taken seriously even in a world where no gods exist.  As an atheist myself (formerly a born-again Protestant Christian), I’ve come to appreciate the real breadth of possible meaning attached to the term “God”.  Even though the God or gods described in various forms of theism do not track onto objective reality as was pointed out by Russell, this doesn’t negate the subjective reality underlying theism.  People ascribe the label “God” to a set of certain feelings and forces that they feel are controlling their lives, their values, and their overall vision of the world.  Nietzsche had his own vision of the world as well, and so one could label this as his “god”, despite the confusion that this may cause when discussing God on metaphysical terms.

2. What Happens In “Zarathustra”; Nietzsche as Moralist

One of the greatest benefits of producing art is our ability to tap into multiple perspectives that we might otherwise never explore.  And by doing this, we stand a better chance of creating a window into our own unconscious:

“[Thus Spoke Zarathustra] was Nietzsche’s poetic work and because of this he could allow the unconscious to take over in it, to break through the restraints imposed elsewhere by the philosophic intellect. [in poetry] One loses all perception of what is imagery and simile-that is to say, the symbol itself supersedes thought, because it is richer in meaning.”

By avoiding the common philosophical trap of submitting oneself to a preconceived structure and template for processing information, poetry and other works of art can inspire new ideas and novel perspectives through the use of metaphor and allegory, emotion, and the seemingly infinite powers of our own imagination.  Not only is this true for the artist herself, but also for the spectator who stands in a unique position to interpret what they see and to make sense of it the best they can.  And in the rarest of cases, one may be able to experience something in a work of art that fundamentally changes themselves in the process.  Either way, by presenting someone with an unusual and ambiguous stimulus that they are left to interpret, they can hope to gain at least some access into their unconscious and to inspire an expression of their creativity.

In his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche was focusing on how human beings could ever hope to regain a feeling of completeness; for modernity had fractured the individual and placed too much emphasis on collective specialization:

“For man, says Schiller, the problem is one of forming individuals.  Modern life has departmentalized, specialized, and thereby fragmented the being of man.  We now face the problem of putting the fragments together into a whole.  In the course of his exposition, Schiller even referred back, as did Nietzsche, to the example of the Greeks, who produced real individuals and not mere learned abstract men like those of the modern age.”

A part of this reassembly process would necessarily involve reincorporating what Nietzsche thought of as the various attributes of our human nature, which many of us are in denial of (to go back to the point raised earlier in this post).  For Nietzsche, this meant taking on some characteristics that may seem inherently immoral:

“Man must incorporate his devil or, as he put it, man must become better and more evil; the tree that would grow taller must send its roots down deeper.”

Nietzsche seems to be saying that if there are aspects of our psychology that are normal albeit seemingly dark or evil, then we ought to structure our moral values along the same lines rather than in opposition to these more primal parts of our psyche:

“(Nietzsche) The whole of traditional morality, he believed, had no grasp of psychological reality and was therefore dangerously one-sided and false.”

And there is some truth to this though I wouldn’t go as far as Nietzsche does, as I believe that there are many basic and cross-cultural moral prescriptions that do in fact take many of our psychological needs into account.  Most cultures have some place for various virtues such as compassion, honesty, generosity, forgiveness, commitment, integrity, and many others; and these virtues have been shown within the fields of moral psychology and sociology to help us flourish and lead psychologically fulfilling lives.  We evolved as a social species that operates within some degree of a dominance hierarchy, and sure enough our psychological traits are what we’d expect given our evolutionary history.

However, it’s also true that we ought to avoid slipping into some form of a naturalistic fallacy; for we don’t want to simply assume that all the behaviors that were more common prior to modernity let alone prior to civilization were beneficial to us and our psychology.  For example, raping and stealing were far more common per capita prior to humans establishing some kind of civil state or society.  And a number of other behaviors that we’ve discovered to be good or bad for our physical or psychological health have been the result of a long process of trial and error, cultural evolution, and the cultural transmission of newfound ideas from one generation to the next.  In any case, we don’t want to assume that just because something has been a tradition or even a common instinctual behavior for many thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years, that it is therefore a moral behavior.  Quite the contrary; instead we need to look closely at which behaviors lead to more fulfilling lives and overall maximal satisfaction and then aim to maximize those behaviors over those that detract from this goal.

Nietzsche did raise a good point however, and one that’s supported by modern moral psychology; namely, the fact that what we think we want or need isn’t always in agreement with our actual wants and needs, once we dive below the surface.  Psychology has been an indispensable tool in discovering many of our unconscious desires and the best moral theories are going to be those that take both our conscious and unconscious motivations and traits into account.  Only then can we have a moral theory that is truly going to be sufficiently motivating to follow in the long term as well as most beneficial to us psychologically.  If one is basing their moral theory on wishful thinking rather than facts about their psychology, then they aren’t likely to develop a viable moral theory.  Nietzsche realized this and promoted it in his writings, and this was an important contribution as it bridged human psychology with a number of important topics in philosophy:

“On this point Nietzsche has a perfectly sober and straightforward case against all those idealists, from Plato onward, who have set universal ideas over and above the individual’s psychological needs.  Morality itself is blind to the tangle of its own psychological motives, as Nietzsche showed in one of his most powerful book, The Genealogy of Morals, which traces the source of morality back to the drives of power and resentment.”

I’m sure that drives of power and resentment have played some role in certain moral prescriptions and moral systems, but I doubt that this is likely to be true generally speaking; and even in cases where a moral prescription or system arose out of one of these unconscious drives, such as resentment, this doesn’t negate it’s validity nor demonstrate whether or not it’s warranted or psychologically beneficial.  The source of morality isn’t as important as whether or not the moral system itself works, though the sources of morality can be both psychologically relevant and revealing.

Our ego certainly has a lot to do with our moral behavior and whether or not we choose to face our inner demons:

“Precisely what is hardest for us to take is the devil as the personification of the pettiest, paltriest, meanest part of our personality…the one that most cruelly deflates ones egotism.”

If one is able to accept both the brighter and darker sides of themselves, they’ll also be more likely to willingly accept Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Return:

“The idea of the Eternal Return thus expresses, as Unamuno has pointed out, Nietzsche’s own aspirations toward eternal and immortal life…For Nietzsche the idea of the Eternal Return becomes the supreme test of courage: If Nietzsche the man must return to life again and again, with the same burden of ill health and suffering, would it not require the greatest affirmation and love of life to say Yes to this absolutely hopeless prospect?”

Although I wouldn’t expect most people to embrace this idea, because it goes against our teleological intuitions of time and causation leading to some final state or goal, it does provide a valuable means of establishing whether or not someone is really able to accept this life for what it is with all of its absurdities, pains and pleasures.  If someone willingly accepts the idea, then by extension they likely accept themselves, their lives, and the rest of human history (and even the history of life on this planet, no less).  This doesn’t mean that by accepting the idea of the Eternal Return, that people have to put every action, event, or behavior on equal footing, for example, by condoning slavery or the death of millions as a result of countless wars, just because these events are to be repeated for eternity.  But one is still accepting that all of these events were necessary in some sense; that they couldn’t have been any other way, and this acceptance should translate to one’s attitude toward life reflecting this by some kind of overarching contentment.

I think that the more common reaction to this kind of idea is slipping into some kind of nihilism, where a person no longer cares about anything, and no longer finds any meaning or purpose in their lives.  And this reaction is perfectly understandable given our teleological intuitions; most people don’t or wouldn’t want to invest time and effort into some goal if they knew that the goal would never be accomplished or knew that it would eventually be undone.  But, oddly enough, even if the Eternal Return isn’t an actual fact of our universe, we still run into the same basic situation within our own lifetimes whereby we know that there are a number of goals that will never be achieved because of our own inevitable death.

There’s also the fact that even if we did achieve a number of goals, once we die, we can no longer reap any benefits from them.  There may be other people that can benefit from our own past accomplishments, but eventually they will die as well.  Eventually all life in the universe will expire, and this is bound to happen long before the inevitable heat death of the universe transpires; and once it happens, there won’t be anybody experiencing anything at all let alone reaping the benefits of a goal from someone’s distant past.  Once this is taken into account, Nietzsche’s idea doesn’t sound all that bad, does it?  If we knew that there would always be time and some amount of conscious experience for eternity, then there will always be some form of immortality for consciousness; and if it’s eternally recurring, then we end up becoming immortal in some sense.

Perhaps the idea of the Eternal Return (or Recurrence), even though this idea began many hundreds if not a few thousand years before Nietzsche, was motivated by Nietzsche’s own fear of death.  Even though he thought of the idea as horrifying and paralyzing (not least because of all the undesirable parts of our own personal existence), since he didn’t believe in a traditional afterlife, maybe the fear of death motivated him to adopt such an idea, even though he also saw it as a physically plausible consequence of probability and the laws of physics.  But either way, beyond it being far more plausible an idea compared to that of an eternal paradise after death, it’s also a very different idea; not only because one’s memory or identity isn’t preserved such that one actually experiences immortality when the “temporal loop” defining their lifetime starts all over again (i.e. the “movie” of one’s life is just played over and over again, unbeknownst to the person in the movie), but this idea is also different because it involves accepting the world the way it is for all eternity rather than an idea revolving around the way they wish it was.  The Eternal Return fully engages with the existentialist reality of human life with all its absurdities, contingencies, and the rest.

3. Power and Nihilism

Nietzsche, like Kierkegaard before him, was considered to be an unsystematic thinker by many, though Barrett points out that this view is mistaken when it comes to Nietzsche; a common view resulting from the form his writings took which were largely aphoristic.  Nietzsche himself even said that he was viewing science and philosophy through the eyes of art, but nevertheless his work eventually revealed a systematic structure:

“As thinking gradually took over the whole person, and everything else in his life being starved out, it was inevitable that this thought should tend to close itself off in a system.”

This systematization of his philosophy was revealed in the notes he was making for The Will to Power, a work he never finished but one that was more or less assembled and published posthumously by his sister Elisabeth.  The systematization was centered on the idea that a will to power was the underlying force that ultimately guided our behavior, striving to achieve the highest possible position in life as opposed to being fundamentally driven by some biological imperative to survive.  But it’s worth pointing out here that Nietzsche didn’t seem to be merely talking about a driving force behind human behavior, but rather he seemed to be referencing an even more fundamental driving force that was in some sense driving all of reality; and this more inclusive view would be analogous to Schopenhauer’s will to live.

It’s interesting to consider this perspective from the lens of biology, where if we try and reconcile this with a Darwinian account of evolution in which survival is key, we could surmise that a will to power is but a mechanism for survival.  If we grant Nietzsche’s position and the position of the various anti-Darwinian thinkers that influenced him, that is, that a will to survive or survival more generally is somehow secondary to a will to power, then we run into a problem: if survival is a secondary drive or goal, then we’d expect survival to be less important than power; but without survival you can’t have power and thus it makes far more evolutionary sense that a will to survive is more basic than a will to power.

However, I am willing to grant that as soon as organisms began evolving brains along with the rest of their nervous system, the will to power (or something analogous to it) became increasingly important; and by the time humans came on the scene with their highly complex brains, the will to power may have become manifest in our neurological drive to better predict our environment over time.  I wrote about this idea in a previous post where I had explored Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, where I explained what I saw as a correlation between Nietzsche’s will to power and the idea of the brain as a predictive processor:

“…I’d like to build on it a little and suggest that both expressions of a will to power can be seen as complementary strategies to fulfill one’s desire for maximal autonomy, but with the added caveat that this autonomy serves to fulfill a desire for maximal causal power by harnessing as much control over our experience and understanding of the world as possible.  On the one hand, we can try and change the world in certain ways to fulfill this desire (including through the domination of other wills to power), or we can try and change ourselves and our view of the world (up to and including changing our desires if we find them to be misdirecting us away from our greatest goal).  We may even change our desires such that they are compatible with an external force attempting to dominate us, thus rendering the external domination powerless (or at least less powerful than it was), and then we could conceivably regain a form of power over our experience and understanding of the world.

I’ve argued elsewhere that I think that our view of the world as well as our actions and desires can be properly described as predictions of various causal relations (this is based on my personal view of knowledge combined with a Predictive Processing account of brain function).  Reconciling this train of thought with Nietzsche’s basic idea of a will to power, I think we could…equate maximal autonomy with maximal predictive success (including the predictions pertaining to our desires). Looking at autonomy and a will to power in this way, we can see that one is more likely to make successful predictions about the actions of another if they subjugate the other’s will to power by their own.  And one can also increase the success of their predictions by changing them in the right ways, including increasing their complexity to better match the causal structure of the world, and by changing our desires and actions as well.”

On the other hand, if we treat the brain’s predictive activity as a kind of mechanistic description of how the brain works rather than a type of drive per se, and if we treat our underlying drives as something that merely falls under this umbrella of description, then we might want to consider whether or not any of the drives that are typically posited in psychological theory (such as power, sex, or a will to live) are actually more basic than any other or typically dominant over the others.  Barrett suggests an alternative, saying that we ought to look at these elements more holistically:

“What if the human psyche cannot be carved up into compartments and one compartment wedged in under another as being more basic?  What if such dichotomizing really overlooks the organic unity of the human psyche, which is such that a single impulse can be just as much an impulse toward love on the one hand as it is toward power on the other?”

I agree with Barrett at least in the sense that these drives seem to be operating together much of the time, and when they aren’t in unison, they often seem to be operating on the same level at least.  Another way to put this could be to say that as a social species, we’ve evolved a number of different modular behavioral strategies that are typically best suited for particular social circumstances, though some circumstances may be such that multiple strategies will work and thus multiple strategies may be used simultaneously without working against each other.

But I also think that our conscious attention plays a role as well where the primary drive(s) used to produce the subsequent behavior may be affected by thinking about certain things or in a certain way, such as how much you love someone, what you think you can gain from them, etc.  And this would mean that the various underlying drives for our behavior are individually selected or prioritized based on one’s current experiences and where their attention is directed at any particular moment.  It may still be the case that some drives are typically dominant over others, such as a will to power, even if certain circumstances can lead to another drive temporarily taking over, however short-lived that may be.

The will to power, even if it’s not primary, would still help to explain some of the enormous advancements we’ve made in our scientific and technological progress, while also explaining (at least to some degree) the apparent disparity between our standard of living and overall physio-psychological health on the one hand, and our immense power to manipulate the environment on the other:

“Technology in the twentieth century has taken such enormous strides beyond that of the nineteenth that it now bulks larger as an instrument of naked power than as an instrument for human well-being.”

We could fully grasp Barrett’s point here by thinking about the opening scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where “The Dawn of Man” was essentially made manifest with the discovery of tools, specifically weapons.  Once this seemingly insignificant discovery was made, it completely changed the game for our species.  While it gave us a new means of defending ourselves and an ability to hunt other animals, thus providing us with the requisite surplus of protein and calories needed for brain development and enhanced intelligence, it also catalyzed an arms race.  And with the advent of human civilization, our historical trajectory around the globe became largely dominated by our differential means of destruction; whoever had the biggest stick, the largest army, the best projectiles, and ultimately the most concentrated form of energy, would likely win the battle, forever changing the fate of the parties involved.

Indeed war has been such a core part of human history, so it’s no wonder Nietzsche stumbled upon such an idea; and even if he hadn’t, someone else likely would have even if they wouldn’t have done so with the same level of creativity and intellectual rigor.  If our history has been so colored with war, which is a physical instantiation of a will to power in order to dominate another group, then we should expect many to see it as a fundamental part of who we are.  Personally, I don’t think we’re fundamentally war-driven creatures but rather that war results from our ability to engage in it combined with a perceived lack of and desire for resources, freedom, and stability in our lives; but many of these goods, freedom in particular, imply a particular level of power over oneself and their environment, so even a fight for freedom is in one way or another a kind of will to power as well.

And what are we to make of our quest for power in terms of the big picture?  Theoretically, there is an upper limit to the amount of power any individual or group can possibly attain, and if one gets to a point where they are seeking power for power’s sake, and using their newly acquired power to harness even more power, then what will happen when we eventually hit that ceiling?  If our values become centered around power, and we lose any anchor we once had to provide meaning for our lives, then it seems we would be on a direct path toward nihilism:

“For Nietzsche, the problem of nihilism arose out of the discovery that “God is dead.” “God” here means the historical God of the Christian faith.  But in a wider philosophical sense it means also the whole realm of supersensible reality-Platonic Ideas, the Absolute, or what not-that philosophy has traditionally posited beyond the sensible realm, and in which it has located man’s highest values.  Now that this other, higher, eternal realm is gone, Nietzsche declared, man’s highest values lose their value…The only value Nietzsche can set up to take the place of these highest values that have lost their value for contemporary man is: Power.”

As Barrett explains, Nietzsche seemed to think that power was the only thing that could replace the eternal realm that we valued so much; but of course this does nothing to alleviate the problem of nihilism in the long term since the infinite void still awaits those at the end of the finite road to maximal power.

“If this moment in Western history is but the fateful outcome of the fundamental ways of thought that lie at the very basis of our civilization-and particularly of that way of thought that sunders man from nature, sees nature as a realm of objects to be mastered and conquered, and can therefore end only with the exaltation of the will to power-then we have to find out how this one-sided and ultimately nihilistic emphasis upon the power over things may be corrected.”

I think the answer to this problem lies in a combination of strategies, but with the overarching goal of maximizing life fulfillment.  We need to reprogram our general attitude toward power such that it is truly instrumental rather than perceived as intrinsically valuable; and this means that our basic goal becomes accumulating power such that we can maximize our personal satisfaction and life fulfillment, and nothing more.  Among other things, the power we acquire should be centered around a power over ourselves and our own psychology; finding ways of living and thinking which are likely to include the fostering of a more respectful relationship with the nature that created us in the first place.

And now that we’re knee deep in the Information Age, we will be able to harness the potential of genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and artificial reality; and within these avenues of research we will be able to change our own biology such that we can quickly adapt our psychology to the ever-changing cultural environment of the modern world, and we’ll be able to free up our time to create any world we want.  We just need to keep the ultimate goal in mind, fulfillment and contentment, and direct our increasing power towards this goal in particular instead of merely chipping away at it in the background as some secondary priority.  If we don’t prioritize it, then we may simply perpetuate and amplify the meaningless sources of distraction in our lives, eventually getting lost in the chaos, and forgetting about our ultimate potential and the imperatives needed to realize it.

I’ll be posting a link here to part 9 of this post-series, exploring Heidegger’s philosophy, once it has been completed.

CGI, Movies and Truth…

After watching Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which I liked, though not nearly as much as the original trilogy (Episodes IV, V, and VI), it got me thinking more about something I hadn’t thought about since the most recent presidential election.  As I watched Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia, both characters made possible in large part thanks to CGI (as well as the help of actors Ingvild Deila and Guy Henry), I realized that although this is still a long way away, it is inevitable that (barring a nuclear world war or some other catastrophe that kills us all or sets us back to a pre-industrialized age) the pace of this technology will eventually lead to CGI products that are completely indistinguishable from reality.

This means that eventually, the “fake news” issue that many have been making a lot of noise about as of late, will one day take a new and ugly turn for the worse.  Not only is video and graphic technology accelerating at a fairly rapid pace to exacerbate this problem, but similar concerns are also arising as a result of voice editing software.  By simply gathering several seconds of sample audio from a person of interest, various forms of software are getting better and better at synthesizing their speech in order to mimic them — putting whatever words into “their” mouths that one so desires.

The irony here is that this means that despite the fact that we are going to continue becoming more and more globally interconnected, technologically advanced, and gain more global knowledge, it seems that we will eventually reach a point where each individual becomes less and less able to know what is true and what isn’t in all the places that you are electronically connected to.  One reason for this is that, as per the opening reference to Rogue One, it will become increasingly difficult to judge the veracity of videos that go viral on the internet and/or through news outlets.  We can imagine seeing a video (or many series of videos) released on the news and throughout the internet containing shocking events with real world leaders or other famous people, places, and so forth, events that could possibly start a civil or world war, alter one’s vote, or otherwise — but with the caveat that these events are entirely manufactured by some Machiavellian warmonger or power seeking elite.

Pragmatically speaking, we must still live our lives trusting what we see in proportion to the evidence we have, thus believing ordinary claims with a higher degree of confidence than extraordinary ones.  We will still need to hold to the general rule of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence in order to meet their burden of proof.  But it will become more difficult to trust certain forms of evidence (including in a court of law), so we’ll have to take that into consideration so that actions that result in more catastrophic consequences (if your assumptions/information turn out to be based on false evidence) require a higher burden of proof — once we are able to successfully pass some kind of graphics Touring Test.

This is by no means an endorsement for conspiracy theories generally nor any other anti-intellectual or dogmatic non-sense. We don’t want people to start doubting everything they see nor to start doubting everything they don’t WANT to see (which would be a proverbial buffet for our cognitive biases and the conspiracy theorists that make use of these epistemological flaws regularly), we still need to take this dynamic technological factor into account to maintain a world view based on proper Bayesian reasoning.

On the brighter side of things, we are going to get to enjoy much of what the new CGI capabilities will bring to us, because movies and all visual entertainment are going to be revolutionarily changed forever in many ways that will be worth celebrating, including our use of virtual reality generally (many various forms that we do and will continue to consciously and rationally desire). We just need to pay attention and exercise some careful moral deliberation as we develop these technologies. Our brains simply didn’t evolve to easily avoid being duped by artificial realities like the ones we’re developing (we already get duped far too often within our actual reality), so we need to engineer our path forward in a way that will better safeguard us from our own cognitive biases so we can maximize our well being once this genie is out of the bottle.

Darwin’s Big Idea May Be The Biggest Yet

Back in 1859, Charles Darwin released his famous theory of evolution by natural selection whereby inherent variations in the individual members of some population of organisms under consideration would eventually lead to speciation events due to those variations producing a differential in survival and reproductive success and thus leading to the natural selection of some subset of organisms within that population.  As Darwin explained in his On The Origin of Species:

If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisation, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometrical powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being’s own welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.

While Darwin’s big idea completely transformed biology in terms of it providing (for the first time in history) an incredibly robust explanation for the origin of the diversity of life on this planet, his idea has since inspired other theories pertaining to perhaps the three largest mysteries that humans have ever explored: the origin of life itself (not just the diversity of life after it had begun, which was the intended scope of Darwin’s theory), the origin of the universe (most notably, why the universe is the way it is and not some other way), and also the origin of consciousness.

Origin of Life

In order to solve the first mystery (the origin of life itself), geologists, biologists, and biochemists are searching for plausible models of abiogenesis, whereby the general scheme of these models would involve chemical reactions (pertaining to geology) that would have begun to incorporate certain kinds of energetically favorable organic chemistries such that organic, self-replicating molecules eventually resulted.  Now, where Darwin’s idea of natural selection comes into play with life’s origin is in regard to the origin and evolution of these self-replicating molecules.  First of all, in order for any molecule at all to build up in concentration requires a set of conditions such that the reaction leading to the production of the molecule in question is more favorable than the reverse reaction where the product transforms back into the initial starting materials.  If merely one chemical reaction (out of a countless number of reactions occurring on the early earth) led to a self-replicating product, this would increasingly favor the production of that product, and thus self-replicating molecules themselves would be naturally selected for.  Once one of them was produced, there would have been a cascade effect of exponential growth, at least up to the limit set by the availability of the starting materials and energy sources present.

Now if we assume that at least some subset of these self-replicating molecules (if not all of them) had an imperfect fidelity in the copying process (which is highly likely) and/or underwent even a slight change after replication by reacting with other neighboring molecules (also likely), this would provide them with a means of mutation.  Mutations would inevitably lead to some molecules becoming more effective self-replicators than others, and then evolution through natural selection would take off, eventually leading to modern RNA/DNA.  So not only does Darwin’s big idea account for the evolution of diversity of life on this planet, but the basic underlying principle of natural selection would also account for the origin of self-replicating molecules in the first place, and subsequently the origin of RNA and DNA.

Origin of the Universe

Another grand idea that is gaining heavy traction in cosmology is that of inflationary cosmology, where this theory posits that the early universe underwent a period of rapid expansion, and due to quantum mechanical fluctuations in the microscopically sized inflationary region, seed universes would have resulted with each one having slightly different properties, one of which that would have expanded to be the universe that we live in.  Inflationary cosmology is currently heavily supported because it has led to a number of predictions, many of which that have already been confirmed by observation (it explains many large-scale features of our universe such as its homogeneity, isotropy, flatness, and other features).  What I find most interesting with inflationary theory is that it predicts the existence of a multiverse, whereby we are but one of an extremely large number of other universes (predicted to be on the order of 10^500, if not an infinite number), with each one having slightly different constants and so forth.

Once again, Darwin’s big idea, when applied to inflationary cosmology, would lead to the conclusion that our universe is the way it is because it was naturally selected to be that way.  The fact that its constants are within a very narrow range such that matter can even form, would make perfect sense, because even if an infinite number of universes exist with different constants, we would only expect to find ourselves in one that has the constants within the necessary range in order for matter, let alone life to exist.  So any universe that harbors matter, let alone life, would be naturally selected for against all the other universes that didn’t have the right properties to do so, including for example, universes that had too high or too low of a cosmological constant (such as those that would have instantly collapsed into a Big Crunch or expanded into a heat death far too quickly for any matter or life to have formed), or even universes that didn’t have the proper strong nuclear force to hold atomic nuclei together, or any other number of combinations that wouldn’t work.  So any universe that contains intelligent life capable of even asking the question of their origins, must necessarily have its properties within the required range (often referred to as the anthropic principle).

After our universe formed, the same principle would also apply to each galaxy and each solar system within those galaxies, whereby because variations exist in each galaxy and within each substituent solar system (differential properties analogous to different genes in a gene pool), then only those that have an acceptable range of conditions are capable of harboring life.  With over 10^22 stars in the observable universe (an unfathomably large number), and billions of years to evolve different conditions within each solar system surrounding those many stars, it isn’t surprising that eventually the temperature and other conditions would be acceptable for liquid water and organic chemistries to occur in many of those solar systems.  Even if there was only one life permitting planet per galaxy (on average), that would add up to over 100 billion life permitting planets in the observable universe alone (with many orders of magnitude more life permitting planets in the non-observable universe).  So given enough time, and given some mechanism of variation (in this case, differences in star composition and dynamics), natural selection in a sense can also account for the evolution of some solar systems that do in fact have life permitting conditions in a universe such as our own.

Origin of Consciousness

The last significant mystery I’d like to discuss involves the origin of consciousness.  While there are many current theories pertaining to different aspects of consciousness, and while there has been much research performed in the neurosciences, cognitive sciences, psychology, etc., pertaining to how the brain works and how it correlates to various aspects of the mind and consciousness, the brain sciences (though neuroscience in particular) are in their relative infancy and so there are still many questions that haven’t been answered yet.  One promising theory that has already been shown to account for many aspects of consciousness is Gerald Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection (NGS) otherwise known as neural Darwinism (ND), which is a large scale theory of brain function.  As one might expect from the name, the mechanism of natural selection is integral to this theory.  In ND, the basic idea consists of three parts as read on the Wiki:

1. Anatomical connectivity in the brain occurs via selective mechanochemical events that take place epigenetically during development.  This creates a diverse primary neurological repertoire by differential reproduction.
2. Once structural diversity is established anatomically, a second selective process occurs during postnatal behavioral experience through epigenetic modifications in the strength of synaptic connections between neuronal groups.  This creates a diverse secondary repertoire by differential amplification.
3. Re-entrant signaling between neuronal groups allows for spatiotemporal continuity in response to real-world interactions.  Edelman argues that thalamocortical and corticocortical re-entrant signaling are critical to generating and maintaining conscious states in mammals.

In a nutshell, the basic differentiated structure of the brain that forms in early development is accomplished through cellular proliferation, migration, distribution, and branching processes that involve selection processes operating on random differences in the adhesion molecules that these processes use to bind one neuronal cell to another.  These crude selection processes result in a rough initial configuration that is for the most part fixed.  However, because there are a diverse number of sets of different hierarchical arrangements of neurons in various neuronal groups, there are bound to be functionally equivalent groups of neurons that are not equivalent in structure, but are all capable of responding to the same types of sensory input.  Because some of these groups should in theory be better than others at responding to some particular type of sensory stimuli, this creates a form of neuronal/synaptic competition in the brain, whereby those groups of neurons that happen to have the best synaptic efficiency for the stimuli in question are naturally selected over the others.  This in turn leads to an increased probability that the same network will respond to similar or identical signals in the future.  Each time this occurs, synaptic strengths increase in the most efficient networks for each particular type of stimuli, and this would account for a relatively quick level of neural plasticity in the brain.

The last aspect of the theory involves what Edelman called re-entrant signaling whereby a sampling of the stimuli from functionally different groups of neurons occurring at the same time leads to a form of self-organizing intelligence.  This would provide a means for explaining how we experience spatiotemporal consistency in our experience of sensory stimuli.  Basically, we would have functionally different parts of the brain, such as various maps in the visual centers that pertain to color versus others that pertain to orientation or shape, that would effectively amalgamate the two (previously segregated) regions such that they can function in parallel and thus correlate with one another producing an amalgamation of the two types of neural maps.  Once this re-entrant signaling is accomplished between higher order or higher complexity maps in the brain, such as those pertaining to value-dependent memory storage centers, language centers, and perhaps back to various sensory cortical regions, this would create an even richer level of synchronization, possibly leading to consciousness (according to the theory).  In all of the aspects of the theory, the natural selection of differentiated neuronal structures, synaptic connections and strengths and eventually that of larger re-entrant connections would be responsible for creating the parallel and correlated processes in the brain believed to be required for consciousness.  There’s been an increasing amount of support for this theory, and more evidence continues to accumulate in support of it.  In any case, it is a brilliant idea and one with a lot of promise in potentially explaining one of the most fundamental aspects of our existence.

Darwin’s Big Idea May Be the Biggest Yet

In my opinion, Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection was perhaps the most profound theory ever discovered.  I’d even say that it beats Einstein’s theory of Relativity because of its massive explanatory scope and carryover to other disciplines, such as cosmology, neuroscience, and even the immune system (see Edelman’s Nobel work on the immune system, where he showed how the immune system works through natural selection as well, as opposed to some type of re-programming/learning).  Based on the basic idea of natural selection, we have been able to provide a number of robust explanations pertaining to many aspects of why the universe is likely to be the way it is, how life likely began, how it evolved afterward, and it may possibly be the answer to how life eventually evolved brains capable of being conscious.  It is truly one of the most fascinating principles I’ve ever learned about and I’m honestly awe struck by its beauty, simplicity, and explanatory power.

Artificial Intelligence: A New Perspective on a Perceived Threat

There is a growing fear in many people of the future capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), especially as the intelligence of these computing systems begins to approach that of human beings.  Since it is likely that AI will eventually surpass the intelligence of humans, some wonder if these advancements will be the beginning of the end of us.  Stephen Hawking, the eminent British physicist, was recently quoted by the BBC as saying “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”  BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said in a recent article “Prof Hawking says the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have already proved very useful, but he fears the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans.”  Hawking then said “It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.  Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Hawking isn’t alone with this fear, and clearly this fear isn’t ill-founded.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that human intelligence has allowed us to overcome just about any environmental barrier we’ve come across, driving us to the top of the food chain.  We’ve all seen the benefits of our high intelligence as a species, but we’ve also seen what can happen due to that intelligence being imperfect, having it operate on incomplete or fallacious information, and ultimately lacking an adequate capability of accurately determining the long-term consequences of our actions.  Because we have such a remarkable ability to manipulate our environment, that manipulation can be extremely beneficial or extremely harmful as we’ve seen with the numerous species we’ve threatened on this planet (some having gone extinct).  We’ve even threatened many fellow human beings in the process, whether intentionally or not.  Our intelligence, combined with some elements of short-sightedness, selfishness, and aggression, has led to some pretty abhorrent products throughout human history — anything from the mass enslavement of others spanning back thousands of years to modern forms of extermination weaponry (e.g. bio-warfare and nuclear bombs).  If AI reaches and eventually surpasses our level of intelligence, it is reasonable to consider the possibility that we may find ourselves on a lower rung of the food chain (so to speak), potentially becoming enslaved or exterminated by this advanced intelligence.

AI: Friend or Foe?

So what exactly prompted Stephen Hawking to make these claims?  As the BBC article mentions, “His warning came in response to a question about a revamp of the technology he uses to communicate, which involves a basic form of AI…The theoretical physicist, who has the motor neurone disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is using a new system developed by Intel to speak.  Machine learning experts from the British company Swiftkey were also involved in its creation. Their technology, already employed as a smartphone keyboard app, learns how the professor thinks and suggests the words he might want to use next.”

Reading this article suggests another possibility or perspective that I don’t think a lot of people are considering with regard to AI technology.  What if AI simply replaces us gradually, by actually becoming the new “us”?  That is, as we further progress in Cyborg (i.e. cybernetic organism) technologies, using advancements similar to Stephen Hawking’s communication ability upgrade, we are ultimately becoming amalgams of biological and synthetic machines anyway.  Even the technology that we currently operate through an external peripheral interface (like smart phones and all other computers) will likely become integrated into our bodies internally.  Google glasses, voice recognition, and other technologies like those used by Hawking are certainly taking us in that direction.  It’s not difficult to imagine one day being able to think about a particular question or keyword, and having an integrated blue-tooth implant in our brain recognize the mental/physiological command cue, and successfully retrieve the desired information wirelessly from an online cloud or internet database of some form.  Going further still, we will likely one day be able to take sensory information that enters the neuronal network of our brain, and once again, send it wirelessly to supercomputers stored elsewhere that are able to process the information with billions of pattern recognition modules.  The 300 million or so pattern recognition modules that are currently in our brain’s neo-cortex would be dwarfed by this new peripheral-free interface and wirelessly accessible technology.

For those that aren’t very familiar with the function or purpose of the brain’s neo-cortex, we use its 300 million or so pattern recognition modules to notice patterns in the environment around us (and meta patterns of neuronal activity within the brain), thus being able to recognize and memorize sensory data, and think.  Ultimately, we use this pattern recognition to accomplish goals, solve problems, and gain knowledge from past experience.  In short, these pattern recognition modules are our primary source or physiological means for our intelligence.  Thus, being able to increase the number of pattern recognition modules (as well as the number of hierarchies between different sets of them), will only increase our intelligence.  Regardless of whether we integrate computer chips in our brain to do at least some or all of this processing locally, or use a wireless means of communication to an external supercomputer farm or otherwise, we will likely continue to integrate our biology with synthetic analogs to increase our capabilities.

When we realize that a higher intelligence allows us to better predict the consequences of our actions, we can see that our increasing integration with AI will likely have incredible survival benefits.  This integration will also catalyze further technologies that could never have been accomplished with biological brains alone, because we simply aren’t naturally intelligent enough to think beyond a certain level of complexity.  As Hawking said regarding AI that could surpass our intelligence, “It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.  Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”  Yes, but if that AI becomes integrated in us, then really it is humans that are finding a way to circumvent slow biological evolution with a non-biological substrate that supercedes it.

At this time I think it is relevant to mention something else I’ve written about previously, which is the advancements being made in genetic engineering and how they are taking us into our last and grandest evolutionary leap, a “conscious evolution”, thus being able to circumvent our own slow biological evolution through an intentionally engineered design.  So as we gain more knowledge in the field of genetic engineering (combined with the increasing simulation and computing power afforded by AI), we will likely be able to catalyze our own biological evolution such that we can evolve quickly as we increase our Cyborg integrations with AI.  So we will likely see an increase in genetic engineering capabilities developing in close parallel with AI advancements, with each field substantially contributing to the other and ultimately leading to our transhumanism.

Final Thoughts

It seems clear that advancements in AI are providing us with more tools to accomplish ever-more complex goals as a species.  As we continue to integrate AI into ourselves, what we now call “human” is simply going to change as we change.  This would happen regardless, as human biological evolution continues its course into another speciation event, similar to the one that led to humans in the first place.  In fact, if we wanted to maintain the way we are right now as a species, biologically speaking, it would actually require us to use genetic engineering to do so, because genetic differentiation mechanisms (e.g. imperfect DNA replication, mutations, etc.) are inherent in our biology.  Thus, for those that argue against certain technologies based on a desire to maintain humanity and human attributes, they must also realize that the very technologies they despise are in fact their only hope for doing so.  More importantly, the goal of maintaining what humans currently are goes against our natural evolution, and we should embrace change, even if we embrace it with caution.

If AI continues to become further integrated into ourselves, forming a Cyborg amalgam of some kind, as it advances to a certain point we may choose one day to entirely eliminate the biological substrate of that amalgam, if it is both possible and advantageous to do so.  Even if we maintain some of our biology, and merely hybridize with AI, then Hawking was right to point out that “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”  Although, rather than a doomsday scenario like we saw in the movie The Terminator, with humans and machines at war with one another, the end of the human race may simply mean that we will end up changing into a different species, just as we’ve done throughout our evolutionary history.  Only this time, it will be a transition from a purely biological evolution to a cybernetic hybrid variation.  Furthermore, if it happens, it will be a transition that will likely increase our intelligence (and many other capabilities) to unfathomable levels, giving us an unprecedented ability to act based on more knowledge of the consequences of our actions as we move forward.  We should be cautious indeed, but we should also embrace our ongoing evolution and eventual transhumanism.

On the Historicity of Jesus Christ: The Euhemerization of a Myth

Not long ago, I finished reading Richard Carrier’s latest book titled: On The Historicity of Jesus, and I must say that I was thoroughly impressed.  For those that are unaware of Carrier’s latest book, here’s a link to a summary as found on the publisher’s website, here’s another link to a great PDF presentation of Carrier’s case, and finally, a link to a YouTube video where Carrier makes his case more clear.  Basically, Carrier re-examines the evidence regarding the historicity of Jesus, after being inclined by some friends and colleagues to read Earl Doherty’s The Jesus Puzzle, which basically makes the case for mythicism.  For those unaware of the mythicist positions (of which there are many), the most basic contention is that Jesus Christ originated as a myth and thus was never an actual historical person.  While most mythicist theories proposed thus far have been poorly researched and arrive at certain conclusions through fallacious reasoning and poor historical critical methodology, Doherty actually presented a plausible case for it.  After Carrier read Doherty’s book, he was asked (and inspired) to write a book on the topic.  Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus is in fact the first academically peer reviewed book to analyze such a topic, and a brilliant work at that.

Carrier dismissed mythicism for a long time and never took the claim seriously until relatively recently.  One of the main reasons for this was that the scholarly consensus was overwhelmingly in agreement that the man referred to as Jesus Christ did exist historically, even though he is believed to have been quite different from the man we read about in the New Testament of the Christian Bible.  However, when Carrier examined the reasons behind the scholarly consensus, he was surprised to see that there was a lot of fallacious reasoning used including the perpetuation of early Christian scholarly assumptions which were taken for granted to be true by later secular scholars.  Once Carrier confirmed this scholarly background information, he decided that he’d have to start from square one and re-examine the evidence from scratch.

Historicity or Myth?

In this new book, Carrier basically tests two hypotheses against one another; a minimal historicity position against one for minimal mythicism.  The two positions can be described as such:

Minimal Historicity

1. An actual man at some point named Jesus acquired followers in life who continued as an identifiable movement after his death.
2. This is the same Jesus who was claimed by some of his followers to have been executed by the Jewish or Roman authorities.
3. This is the same Jesus some of whose followers soon began worshiping as a living god (or demigod).

Minimal Mythicism

1. At the origin of Christianity, Jesus Christ was thought to be a celestial deity much like any other.
2. Like many other celestial deities, this Jesus ‘communicated’ with his subjects only through dreams, visions, and other forms of divine inspiration (such as prophecy, past and present).
3. Like some other celestial deities, this Jesus was originally believed to have endured an ordeal of incarnation, death, burial and resurrection in a supernatural realm.
4. As for many other celestial deities, an allegorical story of this same Jesus was then composed and told within the sacred community, which placed him on Earth, in history, as a divine man, with an earthly family, companions, and enemies, complete with deeds and sayings, and an Earthly depiction of his ordeals.
5. Subsequent communities of worshipers believed (or at least taught) that this invented sacred story was real (and either not allegorical or only ‘additionally’ allegorical).

Religious Trends & Other Background Knowledge

Carrier examined the background knowledge pertaining to the origins of Christianity within the context of the several centuries and cultures surrounding its development, and found that Christianity fit right in to the trend of other Hellenistic mystery religions that had formed prior to Christianity.  Various religions were forming as syncretisms of foreign cult deities and various Hellenistic elements, and in the case of Christianity, it appears to have been a syncretism of Hellenism and Judaism.  There were several other trends as well that were seen with newer religions in the centuries leading up to Christianity, aside from syncretism.  Another trend was the transition from polytheism to monotheism via henotheism, where there could be several gods or demigods (including angels and demons), but that were all subservient to one supreme God.  Yet another trend was that of individualism, where agricultural salvation cults were transformed or retooled into personal salvation cults.  A fourth trend was that of cosmopolitanism, where all races, cultures, and classes were admitted as equals, with fictive kinship (i.e. members were all “brothers”), and where people began to “join” a religion rather than merely being born into it.

Christianity was but one of many other religions that fit in line with these major cultural religious trends of the time.  Additionally, Christianity also shares some fairly specific elements with some earlier as well as contemporary mystery religions.  The concepts of a dying-and-rising Savior god (who is also the son or daughter of a Supreme God) that undergoes a passion or suffering of some kind, often sharing their victory over death by providing an eternal afterlife for their followers, also had a precedent in earlier Hellenistic/Pagan religions and mythologies (e.g. Osiris, Romulus, Zalmoxis, etc.).  Likewise, pseudo-cannibalistic rituals like the Eucharist were practiced by other contemporary and earlier pagan mystery cults whereby the participants would have a communal meal to symbolically eat the flesh and drink the blood of their gods.  Not surprisingly, baptism (whether in water, blood, or other media) was also a practice common to Egyptians, Babylonians, and other pagan cultures (e.g. followers of Mithraism, the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, etc.) for many years before Christianity originated.

So we can see the obvious influence (or at least cultural precedent) that Pagan/Hellenistic religions had on some elements of Christianity during its development.  Obviously there are notable differences between Christianity & other contemporary and prior religions (just as there were many differences between one pagan religion and another) but it goes without saying that the similarities are far more important in analyzing potential influences to Christianity’s origins, and the great number of similarities and evidence of Jewish/Hellenistic/Pagan syncretism is fairly obvious.  So within the cultural and historical context of the geographic regions in mind, Christianity is exactly the kind of religion one would expect to develop.  Likewise, the euhemerization of Jesus Christ, where he was likely taken from myth and only later placed into history, also fits in line with what many cultures did with mythological beings.  In fact, one important element of analysis that Carrier employs is determining where Jesus Christ sits within what is called the Rank-Raglan hero class, which is a selection of hero-type attributes discovered by the scholars Otto Rank and Lord Raglan.  If we make a list of only those that possess at least half of the twenty-two features on the list, there are many mythological beings that meet this criteria (at least fifteen heroes that are well known), but not a single historical person has been shown to make the cut.  Here is the Rank-Raglan hero class to demonstrate the point:

1. The hero’s mother is a virgin.
2. His father is a king or the heir of a king.
3. The circumstances of his conception are unusual.
4. He is reputed to be the son of a god.
5. An attempt is made to kill him when he is a baby.
6. To escape which he is spirited away from those trying to kill him.
7. He is reared in a foreign country by one or more foster parents.
8. We are told nothing of his childhood.
9. On reaching manhood, he returns to his future kingdom.
10. He is crowned, hailed, or becomes king.
11. He reigns uneventfully (i.e. without wars or national catastrophes.
12. He prescribes laws.
13. He then loses favor with the gods or his subjects.
14. He is driven from the throne or city.
15. He meets with a mysterious death.
16. He dies atop a hill or high place.
17. His children, if any, do not succeed him.
18. His body turns up missing.
19. Yet he still has one or more holy sepulchers (in fact or fiction)
20. Before taking a throne or a wife, he battles and defeats a great adversary (such as a king, giant, dragon, or wild beast).
21. His parents are related to each other.
22. He marries a queen  or princess related to his predecessor.

The fifteen people who scored more than half of these twenty-two features (in decreasing order) were:

1. Oedipus (21 features)
2. Moses (20 features)
3. Jesus (20 features)
4. Theseus (19 features)
5. Dionysus (19 features)
6. Romulus (18 features)
7. Perseus (17 features)
8. Hercules (17 features)
9. Zeus (15 features)
10. Bellerophon (14 features)
11. Jason (14 features)
12. Osiris (14 features)
13. Pelops (13 features)
14. Asclepius (12 features)
15. Joseph [i.e. the son of Jacob] (12 feaures)

As we can see, even though the number of real persons in the course of antiquity numbered somewhere in the hundreds of millions, and the number of mythical persons invented within the same time frame only numbered in the thousands at best, every single person on the list is a part of that much smaller group of mythical beings.  Another important point that Carrier makes regarding the people on this list is the fact that “every single one of them was regarded as a historical person and placed in history in narratives written about them.”  That is, they were all eventually euhemerized.  So the probability of Jesus Christ being the only exception on this list, that he alone was a real person in the midst of all others who were mythical, is staggeringly low.  In fact, the gospels of the New Testament look exactly like allegorical fictions, produced to place a Jesus on Earth with mythical tales, miracles, parables and sayings.  Carrier includes this kind of background information, including a literary historical critical examination of the Gospels, in his overall analysis, thus complementing a quite thorough set of background knowledge.

So What are the Odds of an Historical Jesus?

Carrier utilizes a Bayesian probability method for establishing the odds of the two hypotheses mentioned earlier, and this is accomplished by estimating the prior probability of each hypothesis on their own merit, and by noting what the probability of each hypothesis is given the background evidence that exists.  In all cases of probability calculation, an upper and lower range were estimated in order to give a reasonable “best” and “worst” case scenario (with the “best” case being far more generous than is warranted).  After examining both hypotheses against the available evidence, Carrier concluded that the likelihood of the historicity of Jesus Christ (and minimal historicity at that) had the odds of 1 in 3 at best, and around 1 in 13,000 at worst.  In other words, it is very unlikely that Jesus Christ ever existed as an actual historical person.  It seems much more likely that Jesus Christ originated as a celestial being and was later euhemerized, that is, placed into history, just as many other mythological beings were in times past.

This analysis in no way proves that Jesus Christ never existed, but it does establish that the burden of proof is now on those trying to defend historicity, as the analysis has indeed shown that historicity (and minimal historicity at that) is overwhelmingly improbable.  What I find most amazing is that so much of history over the last two millennia and so many different cultures across the world have been so greatly affected by the Christian religion, even up to this day.  Not only have these effects likely been based on the false pretenses of a historical Jesus, but almost all followers of the Christian religion throughout that history have been completely unaware of these likely mythical origins.

For those that wonder why we haven’t found large numbers of early Christian texts that support mythicism, one must realize that the early Christian church was looking for dogmatic stability, and this kind of stability is not as likely with a religion based solely on divine revelation (just look at the revelatory origins for Islam and Mormonism).  If the early church didn’t want someone else coming along saying that they also received revelations from Jesus (changing the dogma that was already in place), they would have better success if Jesus was placed in history, because once historicity is established (or assumed), it’s much more difficult to fabricate new and conflicting information.  Just as with the large number of other Christian sects that we know nothing about, the early Christian church that won the battle over these other sects would have chosen to preserve only those texts that supported their views, and in many cases would have destroyed those that did not.

It’s definitely worth marveling over the uncertainty of history, given the potent artificial selection pressures that largely mediated what has survived to this day.  Had we lost just a few more sources of historical information from antiquity, this analysis of Carrier’s wouldn’t have even been a possibility.

An Evolved Consciousness Creating Conscious Evolution

Two Evolutionary Leaps That Changed It All

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, human biological evolution has led to the emergence of not only consciousness but also a co-existing yet semi-independent cultural evolution (through the unique evolution of the human brain).  This evolutionary leap has allowed us to produce increasingly powerful technologies which in turn have provided a means for circumventing many natural selection pressures that our physical bodies would otherwise be unable to handle.

One of these technologies has been the selective breeding of plants and animals, with this process often referred to as “artificial” selection, as opposed to “natural” selection since human beings have served as an artificial selection pressure (rather than the natural selection pressures of the environment in general).  In the case of our discovery of artificial selection, by choosing which plants and animals to cultivate and raise, we basically just catalyzed the selection process by providing a selection pressure based on the plant or animal traits that we’ve desired most.  By doing so, rather than the selection process taking thousands or even millions of years to produce what we have today (in terms of domesticated plants and animals), it only took a minute fraction of that time since it was mediated through a consciously guided or teleological process, unlike natural selection which operates on randomly differentiating traits leading to differential reproductive success (and thus new genomes and species) over time.

This second evolutionary leap (artificial selection that is) has ultimately paved the way for civilization, as it has increased the landscape of our diet and thus our available options for food, and the resultant agriculture has allowed us to increase our population density such that human collaboration, complex distribution of labor, and ultimately the means for creating new and increasingly complex technologies, have been made possible.  It is largely because of this new evolutionary leap that we’ve been able to reach the current pinnacle of human evolution, the newest and perhaps our last evolutionary leap, or what I’ve previously referred to as “engineered selection”.

With artificial selection, we’ve been able to create new species of plants and animals with very unique and unprecedented traits, however we’ve been limited by the rate of mutations or other genomic differentiating mechanisms that must arise in order to create any new and desirable traits. With engineered selection, we can simply select or engineer the genomic sequences required to produce the desired traits, effectively allowing us to circumvent any genomic differentiation rate limitations and also allowing us instant access to every genomic possibility.

Genetic Engineering Progress & Applications

After a few decades of genetic engineering research, we’ve gained a number of capabilities including but not limited to: producing recombinant DNA, producing transgenic organisms, utilizing in vivo trans-species protein production, and even creating the world’s first synthetic life form (by adding a completely synthetic or human-constructed bacterial genome to a cell containing no DNA).  The plethora of potential applications for genetic engineering (as well as those applications currently in use) has continued to grow as scientists and other creative thinkers are further discovering the power and scope of areas such as mimetics, micro-organism domestication, nano-biomaterials, and many other inter-related niches.

Domestication of Genetically Engineered Micro and Macro-organisms

People have been genetically modifying plants and animals for the same reasons they’ve been artificially selecting them — in order to produce species with more desirable traits. Plants and animals have been genetically engineered to withstand harsher climates, resist harmful herbicides or pesticides (or produce their own pesticides), produce more food or calories per acre (or more nutritious food when all else is equal), etc.  Plants and animals have also been genetically modified for the purposes of “pharming”, where substances that aren’t normally produced by the plant or animal (e.g. pharmacological substances, vaccines, etc.) are expressed, extracted, and then purified.

One of the most compelling applications of genetic engineering within agriculture involves solving the “omnivore’s dilemma”, that is, the prospect of growing unconscious livestock by genetically inhibiting the development of certain parts of the brain so that the animal doesn’t experience any pain or suffering.  There have also been advancements made with in vitro meat, that is, producing cultured meat cells so that no actual animal is needed at all other than some starting cells taken painlessly from live animals (which are then placed into a culture media to grow into larger quantities of meat), however it should be noted that this latter technique doesn’t actually require any genetic modification, although genetic modification may have merit in improving these techniques.  The most important point here is that these methods should decrease the financial and environmental costs of eating meat, and will likely help to solve the ethical issues regarding the inhumane treatment of animals within agriculture.

We’ve now entered a new niche regarding the domestication of species.  As of a few decades ago, we began domesticating micro-organisms. Micro-organisms have been modified and utilized to produce insulin for diabetics as well as other forms of medicine such as vaccines, human growth hormone, etc.  There have also been certain forms of bacteria genetically modified in order to turn cellulose and other plant material directly into hydrocarbon fuels.  This year (2014), E. coli bacteria have been genetically modified in order to turn glucose into pinene (a high energy hydrocarbon used as a rocket fuel).  In 2013, researchers at the University of California, Davis, genetically engineered cyanobacteria (a.k.a. blue-green algae) by adding particular DNA sequences to its genome which coded for specific enzymes such that it can use sunlight and the process of photosynthesis to turn CO2 into 2,3 butanediol (a chemical that can be used as a fuel, or to make paint, solvents, and plastics), thus producing another means of turning our over abundant carbon emissions back into fuel.

On a related note, there are also efforts underway to improve the efficiency of certain hydro-carbon eating bacteria such as A. borkumensis in order to clean up oil spills even more effectively.  Imagine one day having the ability to use genetically engineered bacteria to directly convert carbon emissions back into mass-produced fuel, and if the fuel spills during transport, also having the counterpart capability of cleaning it up most efficiently with another form of genetically engineered bacteria.  These capabilities are being further developed and are only the tip of the iceberg.

In theory, we should also be able to genetically engineer bacteria to decompose many other materials or waste products that ordinarily decompose extremely slowly. If any of these waste products are hazardous, bacteria could be genetically engineered to breakdown or transform the waste products into a safe and stable compound.  With these types of solutions we can make many new materials and have a method in line for their proper disposal (if needed).  Additionally, by utilizing some techniques mentioned in the next section, we can also start making more novel materials that decompose using non-genetically-engineered mechanisms.

It is likely that genetically modified bacteria will continue to provide us with many new types of mass-produced chemicals and products. For those processes that do not work effectively (if at all) in bacterial (i.e. prokaryotic) cells, then eukaryotic cells such as yeast, insect cells, and mammalian cells can often be used as a viable option. All of these genetically engineered domesticated micro-organisms will likely be an invaluable complement to the increasing number of genetically modified plants and animals that are already being produced.

Mimetics

In the case of mimetics, scientists are discovering new ways of creating novel materials using a bottom-up approach at the nano-scale by utilizing some of the self-assembly techniques that natural selection has near-perfected over millions of years.  For example, mollusks form sea shells with incredibly strong structural/mechanical properties by their DNA coding for the synthesis of specific proteins, and those proteins bonding the raw materials of calcium and carbonate into alternating layers until a fully formed shell is produced.  The pearls produced by clams are produced with similar techniques. We could potentially use the same DNA sequence in combination with a scaffold of our choosing such that a similar product is formed with unique geometries, or through genetic engineering techniques, we could modify the DNA sequence so that it performs the same self-assembly with completely different materials (e.g. silicon, platinum, titanium, polymers, etc.).

By combining the capabilities of scaffolding as well as the production of unique genomic sequences, one can further increase the number of possible nanomaterials or nanostructures, although I’m confident that most if not all scaffolding needs could eventually be accomplished by the DNA sequence alone (much like the production of bone, exoskeleton, and other types of structural tissues in animals).  The same principles can be applied by looking at how silk is produced by spiders, how the cochlear hair cells are produced in mammals, etc.  Many of these materials are stronger, lighter, and more defect-free than some of the best human products ever engineered.  By mimicking and modifying these DNA-induced self-assembly techniques, we can produce entirely new materials with unprecedented properties.

If we realize that even the largest plants and animals use these same nano-scale assembly processes to build themselves, it isn’t hard to imagine using these genetic engineering techniques to effectively grow complete macro-scale consumer products.  This may sound incredibly unrealistic with our current capabilities, but imagine one day being able to grow finished products such as clothing, hardware, tools, or even a house.  There are already people working on these capabilities to some degree (for example using 3D printed scaffolding or other scaffolding means and having plant or animal tissue grow around it to form an environmentally integrated bio-structure).  If this is indeed realizable, then perhaps we could find a genetic sequence to produce almost anything we want, even a functional computer or other device.  If nature can use DNA and natural selection to produce macro-scale organisms with brains capable of pattern recognition, consciousness, and computation (and eventually the learned capability of genetic engineering in the case of the human brain), then it seems entirely reasonable that we could eventually engineer DNA sequences to produce things with at least that much complexity, if not far higher complexity, and using a much larger selection of materials.

Other advantages from using such an approach include the enormous energy savings gained by adopting the naturally selected economically efficient process of self-assembly (including less changes in the forms of energy used, and thus less loss) and a reduction in specific product manufacturing infrastructure. That is, whereas we’ve typically made industrial scale machines individually tailored to produce specific components which are later assembled into a final product, by using DNA (and the proteins it codes for) to do the work for us, we will no longer require nearly as much manufacturing capital, for the genetic engineering capital needed to produce any genetic sequence is far more versatile.

Transcending the Human Species

Perhaps the most important application of genetic engineering will be the modification of our own species.  Many of the world’s problems are caused by sudden environmental changes (many of them anthropogenic), and if we can change ourselves and/or other species biologically in order to adapt to these unexpected and sudden environmental changes (or to help prevent them altogether), then the severity of those problems can be reduced or eliminated.  In a sense, we would be selecting our own as well as other species by providing the proper genes to begin with, rather than relying on extremely slow genomic differentiation mechanisms and the greater rates of suffering and loss of life that natural selection normally follows.

Genetic Enhancement of Existing Features

With power over the genome, we may one day be able to genetically increase our life expectancy, for example, by modifying the DNA polymerase-g enzyme in our mitochondria such that they make less errors (i.e. mutations) during DNA replication, by genetically altering telomeres in our nuclear DNA such that they can maintain their length and handle more mitotic divisions, or by finding ways to preserve nuclear DNA, etc. If we also determine which genes lead to certain diseases (as well as any genes that help to prevent them), genetic engineering may be the key to extending the length of our lives perhaps indefinitely.  It may also be the key to improving the quality of that extended life by replacing the techniques we currently use for health and wellness management (including pharmaceuticals) with perhaps the most efficacious form of preventative medicine imaginable.

If we can optimize our brain’s ability to perform neuronal regeneration, reconnection, rewiring, and/or re-weighting based on the genetic instructions that at least partially mediate these processes, this optimization should drastically improve our ability to learn by improving the synaptic encoding and consolidation processes involved in memory and by improving the combinatorial operations leading to higher conceptual complexity.  Thinking along these lines, by increasing the number of pattern recognition modules that develop in the neo-cortex, or by optimizing their configuration (perhaps by increasing the number of hierarchies), our general intelligence would increase as well and would be an excellent complement to an optimized memory.  It seems reasonable to assume that these types of cognitive changes will likely have dramatic effects on how we think and thus will likely affect our philosophical beliefs as well.  Religious beliefs are also likely to change as the psychological comforts provided by certain beliefs may no longer be as effective (if those comforts continue to exist at all), especially as our species continues to phase out non-naturalistic explanations and beliefs as a result of seeing the world from a more objective perspective.

If we are able to manipulate our genetic code in order to improve the mechanisms that underlie learning, then we should also be able to alter our innate abilities through genetic engineering. For example, what if infants could walk immediately after birth (much like a newborn calf)? What if infants had adequate motor skills to produce (at least some) spoken language much more quickly? Infants normally have language acquisition mechanisms which allow them to eventually learn language comprehension and productivity but this typically takes a lot of practice and requires their motor skills to catch up before they can utter a single word that they do in fact understand. Circumventing the learning requirement and the motor skill developmental lag (at least to some degree) would be a phenomenal evolutionary advancement, and this type of innate enhancement could apply to a large number of different physical skills and abilities.

Since DNA ultimately controls the types of sensory receptors we have, we should eventually be able to optimize these as well.  For example, photoreceptors could be modified such that we would be able to see new frequencies of electro-magnetic radiation (perhaps a more optimized range of frequencies if not a larger range altogether).  Mechano-receptors of all types could be modified, for example, to hear a different if not larger range of sound frequencies or to increase tactile sensitivity (i.e. touch).  Olfactory or gustatory receptors could also be modified in order to allow us to smell and taste previously undetectable chemicals.  Basically, all of our sensations could be genetically modified and, when combined with the aforementioned genetic modifications to the brain itself, this would allow us to have greater and more optimized dimensions of perception in our subjective experiences.

Genetic Enhancement of Novel Features

So far I’ve been discussing how we may be able to use genetic engineering to enhance features we already possess, but there’s no reason we can’t consider using the same techniques to add entirely new features to the human repertoire. For example, we could combine certain genes from other animals such that we can re-grow damaged limbs or organs, have gills to breathe underwater, have wings in order to fly, etc.  For that matter, we may even be able to combine certain genes from plants such that we can produce (at least some of) our own chemical energy from the sun, that is, create at least partially photosynthetic human beings.  It is certainly science fiction at the moment, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility of accomplishing this one day after considering all of the other hybrid and transgenic species we’ve created already, and after considering the possible precedent mentioned in the endosymbiotic theory (where an ancient organism may have “absorbed” another to produce energy for it, e.g. mitochondria and chloroplasts in eukaryotic cells).

Above and beyond these possibilities, we could also potentially create advanced cybernetic organisms.  What if we were able to integrate silicon-based electronic devices (or something more biologically compatible if needed) into our bodies such that the body grows or repairs some of these technologies using biological processes?  Perhaps if the body is given the proper diet (i.e. whatever materials are needed in the new technological “organ”) and has the proper genetic code such that the body can properly assimilate those materials to create entirely new “organs” with advanced technological features (e.g. wireless communication or wireless access to an internet database activated by particular thoughts or another physiological command cue), we may eventually be able to get rid of external interface hardware and peripherals altogether.  It is likely that electronic devices will first become integrated into our bodies through surgical implantation in order to work with our body’s current hardware (including the brain), but having the body actually grow and/or repair these devices using DNA instruction would be the next logical step of innovation if it is eventually feasible.

Malleable Human Nature

When people discuss complex issues such as social engineering, sustainability, crime-reduction, etc., it is often mentioned that there is a fundamental barrier between our current societal state and where we want or need to be, and this barrier is none other than human nature itself.  Many people in power have tried to change human behavior with brute force while operating under the false assumption that human beings are analogous to some kind of blank slate that can simply learn or be conditioned to behave in any way without limits. This denial of human nature (whether implicit or explicit) has led to a lot of needless suffering and has also led to the de-synchronization of biological and cultural evolution.

Humans often think that they can adapt to any cultural change, but we often lose sight of the detrimental power that technology and other cultural inventions and changes can have over our physiological and psychological well-being. In a nutshell, the speed of cultural evolution can often make us feel like a fish out of water, perhaps better suited to live in an environment closer to our early human ancestors.  Whatever the case, we must embrace human nature and realize that our efforts to improve society (or ourselves) will only have long term efficacy if we work with human nature rather than against it.  So what can we do if our biological evolution is out-of-sync with our cultural evolution?  And what can we do if we have no choice but to accept human nature, that is, our (often selfish) biologically-driven motivations, tendencies, etc.?  Once again, genetic engineering may provide a solution to many of these previously insoluble problems.  To put it simply, if we can change our genome as desired, then we may be able to not only synchronize our biological and cultural evolution, but also change human nature itself in the process.  This change could not only make us feel better adjusted to the modern cultural environment we’re living in, but it could also incline us to instinctually behave in ways that are more beneficial to each other and to the world as a whole.

It’s often said that we have selfish genes in some sense, that is, many if not all of our selfish behaviors (as well as instinctual behaviors in general) are a reflection of the strategy that genes implement in their vehicles (i.e. our bodies) in order for the genes to maintain themselves and reproduce.  That genes possess this kind of strategy does not require us to assume that they are conscious in any way or have actual goals per se, but rather that natural selection simply selects genes that code for mechanisms which best maintain and spread those very genes.  Natural selection tends toward effective self-replicators, and that’s why “selfish” genes (in large part) cause many of our behaviors.  Improving reproductive fitness and successful reproduction has been the primary result of this strategy and many of the behaviors and motivations that were most advantageous to accomplish this are no longer compatible with modern culture including the long-term goals and greater good that humans often strive for.

Humans no longer exclusively live under the law of the jungle or “survival of the fittest” because our humanistic drives and their cultural reinforcements have expanded our horizons beyond simple self-preservation or a Machiavellian mentality.  Many humans have tried to propagate principles such as honesty, democracy, egalitarianism, immaterialism, sustainability, and altruism around the world, and they are often high-jacked by our often short-sighted sexual and survival-based instinctual motivations to gain sexual mates, power, property, a higher social status, etc.  Changing particular genes should also allow us to change these (now) disadvantageous aspects of human nature and as a result this would completely change how we look at every problem we face. No longer would we have to say “that solution won’t work because it goes against human nature”, or “the unfortunate events in human history tend to recur in one way or another because humans will always…”, but rather we could ask ourselves how we want or need to be and actually make it so by changing our human nature. Indeed, if genetic engineering is used to accomplish this, history would no longer have to repeat itself in the ways that we abhor. It goes without saying that a lot of our behavior can be changed for the better by an appropriate form of environmental conditioning, but for those behaviors that can’t be changed through conditioning, genetic engineering may be the key to success.

To Be or Not To Be?

It seems that we have been given a unique opportunity to use our ever increasing plethora of experiential data and knowledge and combine it with genetic engineering techniques to engineer a social organism that is by far the best adapted to its environment.  Additionally, we may one day find ourselves living in a true global utopia, if the barriers of human nature and the de-synchronization of biological and cultural evolution are overcome, and genetic engineering may be the only way of achieving such a goal.  One extremely important issue that I haven’t mentioned until now is the ethical concerns regarding the continued use and development of genetic engineering technology.  There are obviously concerns over whether or not we should even be experimenting with this technology.  There are many reasonable arguments both for and against using this technology, but I think that as a species, we have been driven to manipulate our environment in any way that we are capable of and this curiosity is a part of human nature itself.  Without genetic engineering, we can’t change any of the negative aspects of human nature but can only let natural selection run its course to modify our species slowly over time (for better or for worse).

If we do accept this technology, there are other concerns such as the fact that there are corporations and interested parties that want to use genetic engineering primarily if not exclusively for profit gain (often at the expense of actual universal benefits for our species) and which implement questionable practices like patenting plant and animal food sources in a potentially monopolized future agricultural market.  Perhaps an even graver concern is the potential to patent genes that become a part of the human genome, and the (at least short term) inequality that would ensue from the wealthier members of society being the primary recipients of genetic human enhancement. Some people may also use genetic engineering to create new bio-warfare weaponry and find other violent or malicious applications.  Some of these practices could threaten certain democratic or other moral principles and we need to be extremely cautious with how we as a society choose to implement and regulate this technology.  There are also numerous issues regarding how these technologies will affect the environment and various ecosystems, whether caused by people with admirable intentions or not.  So it is definitely prudent that we proceed with caution and get the public heavily involved with this cultural change so that our society can move forward as responsibly as possible.

As for the feasibility of the theoretical applications mentioned earlier, it will likely be computer simulation and computing power that catalyze the knowledge base and capability needed to realize many of these goals (by decoding the incredibly complex interactions between genes and the environment) and thus will likely be the primary limiting factor. If genetic engineering also involves expanding the DNA components we have to work with, for example, by expanding our base-four system (i.e. four nucleotides to choose from) to a higher based system through the use of other naturally occurring nucleotides or even the use of UBPs (i.e. “Unnatural Base Pairs”), while still maintaining low rates of base-pair mismatching and while maintaining adequate genetic information processing rates, we may be able to utilize previously inaccessible capabilities by increasing the genetic information density of DNA.  If we can overcome some of the chemical natural selection barriers that were present during abiogenesis and the evolution of DNA (and RNA), and/or if we can change the very structure of DNA itself (as well as the proteins and enzymes that are required for its implementation), we may be able to produce an entirely new type of genetic information storage and processing system, potentially circumventing many of the limitations of DNA in general, and thus creating a vast array of new species (genetically coded by a different nucleic acid or other substance).  This type of “nucleic acid engineering”, if viable, may complement the genetic engineering we’re currently performing on DNA and help us to further accomplish some of the aforementioned goals and applications.

Lastly, while some of the theoretical applications of genetic engineering that I’ve presented in this post may not sound plausible at all to some, I think it’s extremely important and entirely reasonable (based on historical precedent) to avoid underestimating the capabilities of our species.  We may one day be able to transform ourselves into whatever species we desire, effectively taking us from trans-humanism to some perpetual form of conscious evolution and speciation.  What I find most beautiful here is that the evolution of consciousness has actually led to a form of conscious evolution. Hopefully our species will guide this evolution in ways that are most advantageous to our species, and to the entire diversity of life on this planet.

Technology, Evolution, and the Fate of Mankind

Introduction

One could easily argue that human technology is merely a by-product of evolution, or to be more specific, a by-product of natural selection, since any animal possessing a brain and body capable of manipulating their environment to such a high degree is likely to have a higher survival rate than those that do not.  Technology can also be seen as an external evolving feature of the human race, that is, it is changing over time based on environmental pressures that exist, yet it is evolving somewhat independently of our own physical evolution.  Environmental pressures aside, it is clear that our technology has also evolved as a result of our own desire for convenience, entertainment, and pure novelty.  Throughout this post, I plan to discuss our intimate relationship with technology, its evolutionary effects, and also how this may affect the future of our species.

Necessity for Survival?

While technology has provided us with many conveniences, it has also become something that many have come to rely on for their survival (albeit to varying degrees).  Certainly one of our largest problems as a species is our unprecedented reliance on so much technology, not to mention the lack of sustainability for its use.  We have so much infrastructure utilizing enormous amounts of non-renewable fossil fuels, and a host of other interconnected electro-mechanical technologies required for the operation of our civilized world.  We also have medicine and other medical devices that so many depend on, whether to survive an accident, to combat a chronic illness, or to compensate for any number of genetic shortcomings.  Whether it’s a need for prescription glasses, anti-biotics, or a dialysis machine, it is clear that there are a large number of people that couldn’t live without many of these technologies (or would be much less likely to survive without it).

Genetic Change Induced by Technology and Society

I find it interesting to think about how the gene pool has changed as a result of our technology.  There are a considerable number of people living with various life-threatening illnesses, poor eye-sight, obesity, diabetes, sexual dysfunction, etc., due in part to the fact that various synthesized pharmaceuticals and medical advancements have allowed many of these people to live long enough and reproduce.  Not long ago, many people living with these types of impairments would have died young and their genes would have been eradicated.  Now it goes without saying that any advancements we’ve made in terms of genetic engineering or gene therapy, that is, any advancements that actually increase our fitness genetically (and can thus be passed on to future offspring), are not an issue.  Rather, it is all of the other advancements that have merely provided a band-aid approach in order for the genetically less-endowed individuals to survive and reproduce.

Now granted, many of the health problems we encounter in society are largely a result of environmental circumstances (caused by technology or otherwise) transpiring ontogenically as opposed to those which are largely inherited genetically.  There are also a large number of conditions surfacing simply because we’ve increased our life expectancy in such a short amount of time.  Regardless, the gene pool has indeed been affected by a plethora of heritable factors resulting from our technologically pampered society.

It must be said that our gene pool has seen this genetically sub-par influx partly due to the fact that the previous environmental pressures that would have eradicated these genes has been replaced with a technologically savvy super-organism that values human life regardless of how much each life contributes to, or detracts from, the longevity of our species.  Unlike most species, we are at least self-aware, and many of us fully understand the possibility that some of our choices may lead to the extinction of our species (as well as others).  However, I believe that this possibility of extinction hasn’t been taken very seriously and thus there hasn’t been enough invested in evaluating the direction we are heading as a species, let alone the direction we are heading as an entire planet.

Engineered Selection

Now it may be that one day our technology will allow us to understand and manipulate our genome (or that of any other species) such that we can prevent and/or cure any disease or handle any environmental change, effectively eliminating our form of natural selection from the evolutionary equation.  After all, if we could simply modify our gene pool in order to survive any environmental change that is otherwise out of our control, then the gradual course for natural selection and the mutations previously required to make it an effective mechanism, would be replaced by what I would call an “engineered selection”.

We’ve already greatly altered natural selection (relative to other animals) by manipulating our own environmental pressures via technology.  We’ve also created artificial selection (i.e. selective breeding) and utilized this to domesticate various plants and animals, as well as to create breeds possessing traits we find advantageous.  If we actually managed to complement this with a mastery in genetic engineering technology, we would potentially be able to “select” our own species (and the future species we’d become) indefinitely.  The key would be in understanding genetic causal relationships, even if this knowledge required the use of complex genetic evolutionary simulations, supercomputers, etc.

I definitely think that the most significant change for our species lies in this field of genetic engineering, as opposed to any other technological niche.  The possibilities provided by mastering genetic engineering are endless.  We may use it in order to design future offspring with genetic traits that we’re already familiar with (preferably to increase their fitness in the present environment as opposed to superficial motivations), we may add traits from other species (e.g. ability to re-grow limbs, develop wings so we can fly, etc.), or we may even employ some method of integrating communication devices or other deemed “synthetic” technologies into our bodies such that they are biologically grown and repairable, etc.  Humans may use this to genetically engineer brains such that the resulting consciousness has completely different properties, or they may be able to use genetic engineering to create consciousness in a biological “robot”.  If genetically engineered brains result in a more beneficial form of consciousness, higher intelligence, etc., then genetic engineering may end up as a sort of cognitive-evolutionary/technological catalyst thus allowing us to exponentially increase our capacities to solve problems and build ever more advanced technologies.  That is, our enhanced brains and the resulting technology produced would help us to further enhance our brains and technology ad infinitum.  The possibilities are endless if we manage to acquire enough knowledge, acquire the ability to produce engineered DNA sequences, and potentially acquire a way to accelerate the ontogenic evolution of anything produced in order to verify experimental hypotheses/theories in the absence of sufficient computer simulation capabilities.

Fate of Mankind

We are definitely on the cusp of a potentially dramatic evolutionary change for our species.  However, we are also at a very vulnerable stage, for much of our technology has caused our gene pool to regress in terms of physical fitness within a society that could one day be deprived of much of this technology.  Technology has also led to an incredible population explosion, mainly due to agriculture and the fossil-fuel-catalyzed industrial revolution.  This population explosion has helped us in some ways by providing an increase in idea collaboration (thus leading to an exponential increase in technological evolution), but it has also led to much more disastrous effects on the environment including an increased difficulty in sustainability.

Now from an evolutionary perspective, one could argue that currently, our technology is but an extension of ourselves, and our well-developed brains have more than compensated for our physical regression.  While this claim has some truth to it (at the moment anyway), if we lost our ability to mass-produce the technology required for industrialized agriculture, running water, medicine, transportation, sanitation, etc., whether caused by depleting our non-renewable energy sources or even caused by something like a solar-induced electro-magnetic pulse that takes out our power distribution systems (i.e. the entire electrical grid), how many would perish as a result?  In my opinion, the ideal level of evolutionary progression should be such that removing any non-renewable energy source or other vulnerable technology isn’t catastrophic to the survival of our species.  This way our species is less vulnerable to anything that forces us to take a step backwards.  Currently, if we did lose our non-renewable infrastructure, I believe it would be catastrophic and it would be the hunter-gatherers and/or smaller-scale agrarians (i.e. those that are completely off the grid) that would survive, rise up and once again dominate the gene pool as was the case with our ancestors.

Will we survive until an exclusively “engineered selection” is attained?  Or will we simply fall off the evolutionary cusp and potentially extinguish ourselves with the very technology that led to civilization in the first place?  The answer may depend on our level of respect and caution for the technology we so often take for granted.