The War Within - Between Good and Evil by Bheemeswara Challa (e book reader online .txt) 📕

to solve every problem created primarily because of that very
machine—which we now call android, cyborg, robot, biorobot, etc.—, to make
us ‘immortal’, to take us to the next level of evolution. Cyborg might sound
new and novel, but as Andy Clark points out, “human beings already are—
and have been for quite sometime—cyborgs”, but “not in the merely superficial
sense of combining flesh and wires but in the more profound sense of being
human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and
selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry”.77 And he
goes on, “we cannot see ourselves aright until we see ourselves as nature’s very
own cyborgs: cognitive hybrids who repeatedly occupy regions of design space
radically different from those of our biological forebears”.78 We are now at a crest
of time facing a critical choice: to tread the path of the machine or the path of
what we might call ‘evolution from within’.
But what foxes us most is this: ‘But WHY?’ Why are we so persistent to
make the machine our problem-solver, as the vehicle for achieving all that we
want to achieve as human beings? We must get one thing straight: without the
‘human’, we are not human beings, whether it is good or bad is another matter. It
is sometimes characterized as a ‘great social calamity of our time’.79 The growing
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role of the machine is not new. It started with the Industrial Revolution. It was
well captured by Samuel Butler in his classic work Erewhon (1872). In that he
wrote, “There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical
consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A
mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance
which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly
the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized
machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so
to speak, in comparison with past time”. The same thing was also anticipated by
Alan Turing in his 1951 paper Intelligent Machinery: A Heretical Theory. John
von Neumann later talked about “approaching some essential singularity in
the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could
not continue”. Because the capabilities of artificial intelligence exceeding
human intellectual capabilities and control are impossible to comprehend, the
technological singularity is an occurrence beyond which events are unpredictable
or even unfathomable. None of such warnings or forebodings have had any effect
on the march of the machine or on the mechanization of human community.
When we think of technology we usually mean industry, or manufacture,
or mechanization. But it is also equally agriculture, particularly mechanization
of farming. The philosopher Martin Heidegger went to the extent of comparing
the mechanization of the food industry with the “fabrication of corpses in gas
chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starving of
the peasantry, the same as the fabrication of the hydrogen bomb”.80 While most
would agree that it was a huge stretch and a wild exaggeration, the fact should
not be ignored that it was a watershed even in man’s harnessing of the power of
science-based technology. After the industrial revolution, technology has become
the preeminent force in human life and has virtually pushed aside every other
factor and force to the sidelines. Birth and death are no longer what they were a
century ago. It is already possible, through a variety of prenatal tests to determine
whether a child will be a boy or a girl, retarded or crippled, or the victim of some
fatal genetic disorder. The question is: what does one do with that knowledge?
As for death, now we do not know when we are officially ‘dead’, and—if science
has its way—we could ‘die’ when we want to and come back to life in the same
body at a time of our choice. Medical technology is re-sculpting the human
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body, and mechanization is marginalizing the role of humans in human life.
One of the ‘realities’ that man has long been uncomfortable with has been his
own body. He thinks and feels he is different, but his body is not. Ernest Becker
puts it this way: “Man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he
is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed
in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still
carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is
alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that
it aches and bleeds and will decay and die”.81 That is what we are trying to
undo. We can now transplant almost every organ in our body. Since the first
heart transplant done by Dr. Christiaan Barnard in 1967, it is now no longer
so novel. Every year, it is estimated that more than 5,000 heart transplants are
performed annually worldwide. Science, we are now told, might cross the final
frontier—human-head transplant. In 2016, two surgeons, Dr. Xiaoping Ren and
Dr. Sergio Canavero, wrote about full human head transplants being within the
realm of the possible.82 As for the goodies of ‘mechanization’, we are told that we
can engage a Rosie83 at home who can be ‘primarily a personal assistant but also a
photographer, security system, and household efficiency monitor’. Some reports
say that it would soon be possible to have with us a ‘Mother’ robot that could
build babies out of mechanized blocks, and then create new ones that evolve
from the previous generation; robots would then be able to evolve on their own,
in the same way in which animals and humans have done.84
It might be possible, in the not-too-distant future, to envision machines
being made of bones, muscle, and skin tissue, and possessing all the capabilities
of normal humans, while being man-made, with programmed brains. ‘Brain’,
maybe, but how about, as they say, ‘having a heart’ and a consciousness and
conscience? And let us not forget that, as John Bernal pointed out, “the human
mind evolved always in the company of the human body, and of the animal body
before it was human. The intricate connections of mind and body must exceed
our imagination, as from our point of view we are peculiarly prevented from
observing them. Altering in any perfectly sound physiological or surgical way the
functionings of the body will certainly have secondary but far-reaching effects on
the mind, and these secondary effects will be still unpredictable at the time when
the physiological changes take place”.85 The so-called ‘mind-body’ problem, the
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‘relation between conscious experience and the physical world’, has long been
beyond our grasp, but some strides have been made in the past decade or so.
Although it may require “revision of some deeply-held presuppositions” the
obstacle to a breakthrough is, it is said, “not in our genes but in our suppositions”,86
and with that as a point of reference, some cognitive scientists and observers are
hopeful of solving this riddle soon. Two other factors we must also grasp. Our
‘fatal attraction’ to the machine is also an adverse off-shoot of the state of the
‘war within’. Two, it is not, as commonly presumed (at least not only) to relieve
or replace human labor or to have workers who do not ‘throw down their work
and gnash their teeth’, or not go on sick leave or to make our life less burdensome
or boring. It goes much farther and deeper, and that is why the machine was
so irresistible. Even those who are not ‘replaced’ are exhorted to become more
machine-like, compliant, obedient, tireless, temperament-less, single-minded, or
more accurately, mind-less. We are ‘mechanizing’ not only the workplace and
offices, but also our homes, hotels, hospitals classrooms, communications and
commerce, colleges… everywhere where human beings interact with other such
beings.
Such a trend is in line with one of the fantasies that man for long has
entertained—about mindless, self-propelled helpers to relieve their masters of
‘toil’. It is rooted in the very core of human nature, our almost pathological
drive and desire to control, no matter who or what the object is. It is to extract
‘obedience’ from our partner, children, fellow-humans, other species, the earth,
even the skies. The human is, in his mind, a control freak. Given a chance, we
obsessively try to dictate how others, particularly the vulnerable, are supposed
to be, to think and to feel, and impose our views on others. We try to dictate
how everything is done around others. We all, in different degrees, are ‘selfobsessed’
and afflicted or infected, with what psychologists call the ‘narcissistic
personality disorder’. The greatest temptation we cannot resist is to find fault
with and ‘control’ every one else, except our own selves. In fact, it is our utter,
pathetic inability to have any control over ourselves, over what we say or do,
that makes us so aggressive in our desire to control others. The latest ‘advance’ in
this direction is something man has long wanted: to ‘control’ the other animals.
And scientists say that a new brain-interface device that helps translate brain
waves into commands could let us ‘control animals with our thoughts’.87 It is the
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desire and ability to influence or direct people’s behavior or the course of events.
It is almost pathological, this temptation. Few of us are devoid of this desire.
And much of the trouble in the world comes from this obsession to control:
of individuals over other individuals; of groups over other groups; of races over
other races; of nations over other nations. And technology is promising a ‘future
where everything around you can be controlled’. Needless to say, for the good of
our own future, we must try to ‘control’ our power of control. Power and control
are the two legs on which modern man walks. They are a part of everyday life,
that we, in some measure or the other, exercise in every situation and setting
and in every relationship. Power makes us feel superior to others, freeing us
to shift our focus away from others to our own goals and desires. It can be
heady, intoxicating and once tasted, or exercised over another, be it a spouse or
colleague, or stranger, it can become even involuntary and addictive. Sometimes,
‘being controlled’ can also be compulsive, we may even derive ‘pleasure’, as in the
Stockholm syndrome. But, properly focused, power and control can empower us
to make a moral difference for the greater good.
There is no denying that technology has also given us the power to
exterminate all other species on earth. We are doing this on the mistaken premise
that they are of no use or consequence. As the Norwegian philosopher Arne
Naess put it, “We are dependent on every, practically every kind of… every
species. We don’t know which species are of no consequence for us. So, the
more seriously you take the non-living… the non-human beings, the better”.88
We have no control over ourselves, our desires, our passions, our prejudices,
our avarice or anger but we want to control and conquer everything else. The
master-slave relationship gives us another form of control. Even though formal
slavery stands abolished globally, some sort of soft or subtle slavery is very much
a part of human life everywhere. We just can’t give it up, slavery in spirit; it
is good for our oversized ego, only those who cannot do not. And man, even
‘slave’, is turning out to be too unreliable, too temperamental, too demanding,
particularly when they close their ranks. And then, any sort of slavery raises
‘prickly’ issues like human rights, labor laws, unions, and minimum wages and so
on. Now, with a machine no such issues arise. That is why we are trying to create
a new class of ‘new and improved’ mechanized slaves, who are more ‘efficient’,
and who, we assume, will be more compliant and devoted to our whims. The
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‘female’ might even be prettier, and the ‘male’ more masculine than the human
one, experts assure us. Slavery will stage a comeback; but no one will protest.
For governments, it will give more muscle to make ‘war’ without human cost;
for corporations it will mean more profit, more productivity, less labor trouble,
and haggling with unions; for individuals, it will offer more comfort, safety,
and more robust and trustworthy domestic ‘help’, with the likes of ‘android
servants’. Maybe we might then be able to clean up the environment! Our choice
of the word robot is revealing and a give-away. The word robot comes from the
Czech word robota, which means servitude, forced labor. We are indeed making
‘progress’ in that dubious direction. Thousands of patients are already reported to
be using