Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (feel good fiction books .txt) 📕

293 John Brockman (ed.). What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Creativity. 2005. The Free Press. UK. p 41.

294 Cited in: Steven Swinford. I’ve Found God, Says Man Who Cracked the Genome. The Times. UK. 11 June 2006. Accessed at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article673663.ece

295 Cited in: Mahidol University. Approaching the Frontiers of Mind: the Limitations of Scientific Knowledge. Buddhist Scriptures Information Retrieval. Bangkok, Thailand. Accessed at: http://www.mahidol.ac.th/budsir/Toward/5_approaching_1.htm

296 Cited in: Mahidol University. Approaching the Frontiers of Mind: the Limitations of Scientific Knowledge. Buddhist Scriptures Information Retrieval. Bangkok, Thailand. Accessed at: http://www.mahidol.ac.th/budsir/Toward/5_approaching_1.htm

not of convenience but, in Wilber’s words, an ‘agreement acceptable in their own terms’. Historically, the relationship between religion and science has followed four paths: irreconcilable antagonism; interdependence (no overlap); complementarity through dialogue; and integration or enforced takeover of one of the two.

The stark reality is that science and religion have never made easy bedfellows, because science, in exploring the universe, time, and space, or how humans have come about on earth, has not found either the evidence or the need for God, thus cutting away at the very root of religion. Moreover, more avowedly religious and spiritual persons are willing to acknowledge the fact that scientific inquiry has a legitimate role in the search for the Truth, than there are scientists prepared to extend the same courtesy and accommodation to religion. The raison d’être of religious faith is its allure of healing the wounds of human existence and of elevating man to the higher realms of ethereal existence. Yet, the history of religions is soaked in blood, sacrifice, and vengeance. The brutal facts of the history of religions pose stark questions about the intertwining of religion and violence. Some historians like Rene Girard even claim that in that intertwining lies the origin of human culture. For centuries, religion and science have been circling each other, gingerly and suspiciously courting with intermittent episodes of amity and hostility, love and hate. The British mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead wrote that more than anything else, the ‘future of civilization depends on the way the two most powerful forces of history, science and religion, settle into a relationship with each other’.297 But what kind of ‘marriage’ should it be — one of convenience, sort of cohabitation, each retaining its identity and individuality, sharing common space and coming together to mutual advantage? Or should it be like science and technology, a kind of merger, complete surrender to each other, becoming altogether a different personality? Some even argue that forcing an artificial rapprochement and cohabitation could do more harm than good; each, being distinct, should be left in its own natural territory. The scope and the undercurrents of this question are huge and have been the subject of hundreds of books and articles. Be that as it may, no one can argue that humanity will gain anything by the total isolation or breakdown of communication. Furthermore, although some diehard scientists still deny everything that religion is supposed to stand for, fields like quantum physics are validating some ancient beliefs. While the union of science and technology has been a mixed blessing, the prospect of bridges, not necessarily betrothal, between these two can be nothing but a blessing. Some sort of belief system (we call it religion, organized or unorganized, informal or implicit) has always been a part of human presence on earth. And whether in killing or in cohabitation, in making love or in waging a war, humans have almost always used scientific tools and machines.

Man has been called a tool of tools and a complex machine. The machine has made man both a master and a vassal; both creator and the terminator. Technology and transformation have almost become interchangeable. Pundits debate if change is inherent in technology or in people. Some say that technology changes; that people do not; and that the human animal is the same. Some believe that the change comes not from the nature of technology per se, but by what technology allows people to do differently. Others argue that technology is simply another knife in your hand; what you do with it depends on your state of mind at that moment. For some, more specifically the so-called Generation Y, technology is integral to their everyday lives, entertainment and socializing; something that allows them to lead, as they say, a ‘full life’. But that ‘fullness’ conceals gnawing emptiness. It opens the

297 Cited in: Huston Smith. Religion in the Twenty-First Century. 2000. Vedanta Society of Southern California, USA. Accessed at: http://www.vedanta.org/reading/monthly/articles/2000/11.21st_century.html

door not to the world within, but to the brewing apocalypse within, an implosion triggered by enfeeblement in the garb of enhancement. Thus far, man has managed a reasonable balance between adapting to the external environment and cultural change. Now, he is trying to become a ‘new and improved’ product through biological, especially genetic interventions.

Again, some see this is as a way to ethically ameliorate human nature and transform man into a better being; others see this as the final affront and assault on Nature — and God.

Since the first use of stone tools by Paleolithic man around two million years ago, man has been inseparable from some kind or other of an artificial prop. In one sense, man survived because he became a ‘handyman’, able to make and use a range of tools, not only to survive but to also prevail. The story of human evolution is the story of tools. The man- machine relationship has changed but mostly in one direction: towards the dominance of the machine, and the subjugation of man. We are at a stage when robots might take over the tasks of men, when humans might have ‘brain implants’ that would allow them to think at the speeds of today’s microprocessors. And information technology is hurtling towards a point where machines will become smarter than their makers. We read about scientists creating a ‘Frankenrobot’, a robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue, stitched together from cultured rat neurons.298 Clearly all scientific ‘advances’ have far-reaching implications for human future, but much of it takes place away from the public gaze, and the lay public also behave as if it is a ‘scientific’ issue and of no particular consequence to their lives. Although scientific advances more directly impact our lives than religion, we are more cognizant of religion than science. While we try to regulate the minutest things of daily life, we are totally complacent about matters that could fundamentally alter the context and content of human life on earth. It is not as though science is all bad; even if it is all good, those who are the intended beneficiaries, the public at large and the civil society, must be made participants in setting its agenda and direction.

Many philosophers have commented upon the technological character of the modern world and on the dominance of the technological way of thinking, what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger called ‘machination’, which is ‘the challenging-forth of nature and the making of nature as a by product’. ‘Machination’ leads to the ‘loss of enchantment with the world’, what Einstein called the ability to ‘stand rapt in awe’. On the one hand, science is trying to qualitatively enhance brainpower, and on the other hand, technology is marshalling that power to increase machine power. The basic assumption is that the human brain is a marvelous ‘neutral’ machine, much like a computer hard drive, that it simply gathers, stockpiles, and processes data to be tapped as and when we need it. But this theory, we are told, does not hold water because every time “we recall it, our brain writes it down again and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned.”299 So, if ‘the brain lies to you’ and our decision making is inherently flawed, what do we do? But then of course, who is the actual decision maker? In the race between the powerful but ‘lying’ brain, and a robot that can ‘think’ and become a ‘partner’, what could be the outcome? No one has a clue how all this will impact on the consciousness, culture, and creativity of future generations. Man could either be another ‘endangered species’ or become a machine with a mind, akin to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), where the ‘victor’ runs

298 The Times of India. With Rat’s Brain, Experts Develop a ‘Frankenrobot’. Hyderabad, India. 16 August 2008. p.14.

299 Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt. Your Brain Lies to You. The Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 5 July 2008. p.14.

the risk of losing his own life, if not his very soul. Mary Shelley’s Victor (the scientist in the novel) carries an uncanny resemblance to what modern man is attempting. Victor’s quest is for God-like power and glory. He tries to create a new species that can defy disease and death; he thinks natural laws are not immutable. What he gets is loneliness, desolation and complete failure, and in the end he is terrified of his own creation. Our dependence on machines is such that if the machine succeeds, we are supermen, and if it fails, we are sub- animals in the sense that we cannot do what even animals can. Man is like a domesticated pet unable to survive in its own natural habitat. What we have for company, as we ‘brood on the brink’, is a machine which perhaps knows its ‘mind’ more than we know our own. For, contrary to what we think, the ‘things’ around us, while being transient and ephemeral, have a ‘life’ of their own; once created, they acquire a self-sustaining momentum and they may, in certain cases, outlast their creator.

Transhumanism and technology

Goethe’s Faust sells his soul to the devil in return for power over the physical world. This is often interpreted as a metaphor for the tyranny of industrial technology. Few issues divide some of our best minds as does the question how science-based technology is likely to transform the human condition. For example, Nick Bostrom, philosopher and advocate of transhumanism, says that human nature is “a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways.”300 Transhumanists believe that progress, understood as betterment over time, is inherent in Nature and innate in culture; and that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase. Evolution is tantamount to progress in biology. Technological advances amount to progress in culture. The direction of ‘progress’ is set, and the task of the transhumanist technology is to press on the pedal of progress. The other term sometimes used synonymously is posthumanism, a state or a condition in which basic capacities so radically exceed those of present-day humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current norms. It begins when man begins to overcome his own limitations, but is still identifiable as a human person. It could be a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence, or uploaded consciousnesses, or the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound technological augmentations to a biological human. Others argue that we will never have sufficient wisdom to make ourselves fundamentally different from what we are. The Japanese-American philosopher Francis Fukuyama describes transhumanism as one of ‘the world’s most dangerous ideas’. But whatever be the ultimate outcome, we are on the threshold of changing human nature by direct biochemical intervention. The synergies and confluence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science (NBIC) can either enhance man beyond recognition, or extinguish human life as we know it. Serious concern is being expressed by scientists like Raymond Kurzweil that the