The Fate of Humanity
July 9th 2007 07:03
We are not just going to accept our fate as animals. Stop fighting, stop trying to be happy, stop tring to be right, they cry, but we must charge on. For we have really hit on something here. Being right has proven to allow us to have the kind of control over things that we have. It's something, we shall not sit back and say its not anything and we ought to stop arguing because there is no truth. Because it is our belief in the basic ideas of progress and rational thought that has elevated us above the other animals.
we shall not heed the call to return to our grazing fields, for the ones who give that call have no intention of returning themselves, but they do wish to control and profit from the flock. They attempt to dull the minds of the masses, their culture industry mocks art, it steals from art in order to get people not to think. But we shall have higher aspirations for our species, we shall not conceive of ourselves as a flock of sheep. We are each and every one of us intelligent, rational, sentient beings, we can be so much more than a herd of grazers. So let us continue in the march of progress, do not listen to those who scream for you to forget your ideals since they are meaningless, do not listen to these hypocrites.
We shall continue to transcend. What makes us any different to any of the other animanls? we believe in free will. We believe that we can control our own destiny. It has been this belief that has gotten us this far. Do we actually control our own destinies? who knows. That's irrelevant. The fact is that the belief in free will is what characterises us and its what has gotten us this far. So where to next?
We are above the other animals, because they aimlessly wander through their lives, they aren't looking at the bigger picture. They deal only with their day to day problems of staying alive long enough to pass on their genes. You see the real story about the other animals has nothing to do with any individual animal, it is an evolutionary story told over populations and over hundreds of generations. The individual is merely a passive tool in the ongoing evolutionary story. Will the species prevail? will it survive?
But we need not live this way. We, as individuals, can have an active say in our evolutionary story. We decide about what will exist in the future. Design.
Dennett gives a great treatment of free will in "Freedom Evolves" Finally here's someone who is not faling into the traps of analytic philosophy. If you don't see how we can have free will in a deterministic, or at least naturalistic world, then I'll let Dennett do the arguing for now. What's great about his book is that you obviously must put a concept like free will in an evolutionary context. How did this idea of free will come about and why did it prevail?
What I wish to do now is the same thing inside out, I want to look at the evolutionary concept through the paradigm of free will. Just because evolution is a naturalistic process, that doesn't mean we can have no control in it, that it is characterised by fate. We may choose our own evolutionary destiny.
If this is our aim, then a few steps are obvious:
1. Immortality and no more reproduction.
Death is just part of an evolutionary method whereby animals can't change so they die after giving birth to slightly different offspring. reproduction is just about the first "idea" biological evolution hit on. I mean this is an old one, seriously. But this is a clumsy method of controling the future. It's slow, it involves no thought, just the biggest game of trial and error ever. That's all it is. No more reproduction. We'll just change our selves constantly as is necessary.
2. Modular human design.
As I was saying, we will have to be able to change ourselves at will. We've kind of been working towards this for a while. When it gets colder all the other animals die out if they can't grown longer hair in time. We didn't die out because we just put on warmer clothes. So we were no longer waiting for and relying on biological processes. Now we can come full circle if we can control those biological processes. We should especially focus on changing our level of need for food and clean water. Also the climate looks like its gonna be pretty erratic, so we have to be able to deal with that. Obviously things like death from diseases shall be dealt with by this same technology.
3. Occupation of a world of our own creation.
I'm not talking about mind over matter here, I'm talking about inhabiting a virtual environment. But it will be real. Did you know that a cochlear implant doesn't just make sound louder, that's a hearing aid, a cochlear implant is a device which sends electrical signals to your auditory nerves. 100,000 people have one. So as the internet grows, it becomes it's own society in which people work, have businesses, be entertained, be informed, be educated, socialise, deal with problems, in short everything. That is the world we are inhabiting more and more. Shopping malls are full of masses of people who are totally oblivious to eachother, they don't see each other, they definitely don't interact with each other. Because they are not there! The virtual world will become more and more real until we exclusively occupy it. At which point it doesn't really matter what happens to the planet, because we have these modular bodies. We can float off into space for all that matters.
Put it all together and whaddaya got? a new society, which is no longer a society, it is an organism.
we shall not heed the call to return to our grazing fields, for the ones who give that call have no intention of returning themselves, but they do wish to control and profit from the flock. They attempt to dull the minds of the masses, their culture industry mocks art, it steals from art in order to get people not to think. But we shall have higher aspirations for our species, we shall not conceive of ourselves as a flock of sheep. We are each and every one of us intelligent, rational, sentient beings, we can be so much more than a herd of grazers. So let us continue in the march of progress, do not listen to those who scream for you to forget your ideals since they are meaningless, do not listen to these hypocrites.
We shall continue to transcend. What makes us any different to any of the other animanls? we believe in free will. We believe that we can control our own destiny. It has been this belief that has gotten us this far. Do we actually control our own destinies? who knows. That's irrelevant. The fact is that the belief in free will is what characterises us and its what has gotten us this far. So where to next?
We are above the other animals, because they aimlessly wander through their lives, they aren't looking at the bigger picture. They deal only with their day to day problems of staying alive long enough to pass on their genes. You see the real story about the other animals has nothing to do with any individual animal, it is an evolutionary story told over populations and over hundreds of generations. The individual is merely a passive tool in the ongoing evolutionary story. Will the species prevail? will it survive?
But we need not live this way. We, as individuals, can have an active say in our evolutionary story. We decide about what will exist in the future. Design.
Dennett gives a great treatment of free will in "Freedom Evolves" Finally here's someone who is not faling into the traps of analytic philosophy. If you don't see how we can have free will in a deterministic, or at least naturalistic world, then I'll let Dennett do the arguing for now. What's great about his book is that you obviously must put a concept like free will in an evolutionary context. How did this idea of free will come about and why did it prevail?
What I wish to do now is the same thing inside out, I want to look at the evolutionary concept through the paradigm of free will. Just because evolution is a naturalistic process, that doesn't mean we can have no control in it, that it is characterised by fate. We may choose our own evolutionary destiny.
If this is our aim, then a few steps are obvious:
1. Immortality and no more reproduction.
Death is just part of an evolutionary method whereby animals can't change so they die after giving birth to slightly different offspring. reproduction is just about the first "idea" biological evolution hit on. I mean this is an old one, seriously. But this is a clumsy method of controling the future. It's slow, it involves no thought, just the biggest game of trial and error ever. That's all it is. No more reproduction. We'll just change our selves constantly as is necessary.
2. Modular human design.
As I was saying, we will have to be able to change ourselves at will. We've kind of been working towards this for a while. When it gets colder all the other animals die out if they can't grown longer hair in time. We didn't die out because we just put on warmer clothes. So we were no longer waiting for and relying on biological processes. Now we can come full circle if we can control those biological processes. We should especially focus on changing our level of need for food and clean water. Also the climate looks like its gonna be pretty erratic, so we have to be able to deal with that. Obviously things like death from diseases shall be dealt with by this same technology.
3. Occupation of a world of our own creation.
I'm not talking about mind over matter here, I'm talking about inhabiting a virtual environment. But it will be real. Did you know that a cochlear implant doesn't just make sound louder, that's a hearing aid, a cochlear implant is a device which sends electrical signals to your auditory nerves. 100,000 people have one. So as the internet grows, it becomes it's own society in which people work, have businesses, be entertained, be informed, be educated, socialise, deal with problems, in short everything. That is the world we are inhabiting more and more. Shopping malls are full of masses of people who are totally oblivious to eachother, they don't see each other, they definitely don't interact with each other. Because they are not there! The virtual world will become more and more real until we exclusively occupy it. At which point it doesn't really matter what happens to the planet, because we have these modular bodies. We can float off into space for all that matters.
Put it all together and whaddaya got? a new society, which is no longer a society, it is an organism.
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