I am really contemplating these days. Therefore, I decided to write some of my thoughts here and use steemit perhaps as a CBT psychoanalytic diary where someone writes her thoughts as a form of 'catharsis' and then reflects on them. This way I won't feel that I am just writing for the sake of cashing-out.
I am following some posts of friends on facebook and I see a deep fascination with Futurism and Transhumanism.
I am not going to argue; our lives are significantly better than in the past. People live more, violence is declining (I would go with Steven Pinker on this one even though some 'liberal-minded' friends might disagree).
Overall, violence is declining and the planet is becoming more peaceful, as absurd this might sound. We can communicate with everyone faster, we have treated most diseases and we are treating AIDS and most forms of cancer. Women have more rights, gay people have more rights, racial discrimination is decreasing, etc, etc.
What I can really conclude is that half of the planet is living in 2100 with 'Fringe' science projects planning to colonize Mars, promising scientific immortality whereas the rest of the planet is living in the Middle Ages with no access to clean water or a roof over their head.
We can all appreciate science and technology and stand in awe in front of their achievements. We are creating a new technological reality which is far from our basic 'Nature'. But maybe this creates a double-edged sword. One might argue that humans are 'evolving', creating their own 'Nature' but at the same time someone might argue as well that we we are evolving so fast technologically that are losing the ability to 'catch-up' and adapt.
And this is evident in the fact that half of our brain is stucked in 'jungle logic' in the sense that we tend to think in shortcuts, heuristics, an auto-pilot of pre-programmed physiological and psychological responses while the rest of our brain, manages and tries to balance the input with logical, controlled- effortuful responses, self-control, critical thinking and analytical reasoning. We have a fast and a slow mind, according to Daniel Kahreman.
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I understand the enthusiasm of science fans when they post about flying cars, when they want to explore the galaxy, when they want to keep us from dying by uploading our brains on microchips, cryonics, when they create sex dolls with emotions to replace human companionship. One the one hand, I go 'wow' but on the other hand I wonder if all these people are replacing the ideas of Christianity and Communism for creating the perfect human without 'flaws' or imperfections in Paradise, where everyone is equal achieving a 'Nirvava' state of being. Futurists are obsessed with genetic engineering, and they are trying to create genetically engineered humans who all fo them will be beautiful, symmetric, rejuvenated, young, strong, intelligent, fertile, no different from the concepts of 'Eugenics' that Hitler was trying to apply.
In a sense, we can say that the 'religious' Mind is not dying at all, the religious instinct is still there and scientific minds are still prone to the same cognitive mechanisms that religious people use, despite the fact that most of them, and their crowds, try to convince us about their atheism, irreligiosity, critical thinking, intellectual and moral superiority and that religions are dying. Religions apparently are dying. What about the religious instinct or the mechanisms of wishful and magical thinking or superstitious behavior?
What I can conclude is that science's purpose is not the overall happiness of human beings. We are technologically excelling but at the same time this aleniates from what it means to be a human being and be happy with what we have. Otherwise, clinical depression would not be listed as the no.1 disease by 2020.
Science simply satisfies an embedded and deep-rooted 'selfish' need for survival, expansion, procreation and nothing more than an 'immortality' project no different from the attempts and efforts of religion to keep Man immortal in a higher state of Being.
"Overall, violence is declining and the planet is becoming more peaceful..." WRONG!!!
I agree, it gets diversified into lesser acts of economic manipulation and lesses armed conflicts. Physical violence can take the form of depriving another human being from a good livelihood, aka starving them to death by manipulating entire countries economy.
If we take in consideration the gap of wealth increasing (even though overall livelihood improves for all) then more and more people experience indirect market violence. 75% of people in this world have no clean water, shelter and food on a daily basis. Sure, no banker caused that directly but one can make the argument that violence has not at all decreased. it just shape-shifter into something different.
Steven Pinker wrote a whole book about why this is true.
why is it wrong? It might be counterintuitive but why is it wrong?
'Science simply satisfies an embedded and deep-rooted 'selfish' need for survival, expansion, procreation and nothing more than an 'immortality' project no different from the attempts and efforts of religion to keep Man immortal in a higher state of Being.'
╔═ Very poignant, thanks for sharing! On the other hand, shouldn't we consider depression itself, as the very symptom of this 'embedded and deep-rooted 'selfish' need for survival, expansion, procreation', and its inherent inability to be actualized to a sufficient degree? ═╝
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The ideas themselves, in large part, were never wrong. Wanting a perfectly just God to punish evil and reward good wasn't wrong. Wanting to live forever wasn't wrong. What was wrong was the notion that these deities existed. That's the difference between religion and transhumanism: the latter is real. We can actually direct effort toward it, instead of just praying and waiting for things to happen.
So perhaps we needed religion back when there was no way for us to achieve our dreams of immortality etc., and so religion kept us from feeling everything is futile. But now we can rid ourselves of our religious shackles, because finally we see a way for us to realistically make things happen.