The War Within - Between Good and Evil - Bheemeswara Challa (psychology books to read TXT) 📗

own erratic behavior and do the kind
of things that help the forces of good in the war within. Neuroscience, it is said,
allows us to see inside the human brain and better understand our minds. With
this knowledge, we can begin to make daily choices of mindset and behavior that
not only reshape our neural circuitry but can alter the way human beings interact
with one another. Scientists say that ‘our brain’s neural circuitry is malleable and
can be rewired through neuroplasticity’. While we have long racked our brains on
how we could be better persons, we are now told that by selectively stimulating
specific parts of that very brain, we can strengthen our positive qualities and
suppress the unsavory ones. Man might have at last found the Holy Grail of
goodness: how to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself ’ and ‘do unto others as you would
have them do unto you’’.23 This has long been the stuff of science-fiction and
scientific pursuit: to be able to break into others’ minds and, like in the movie
Inception (2010), insert ourselves into another person’s dream to change that
person’s behavior in real life, for an array of purposes, ranging from wrecking
revenge to aborting a murder or massacre to maximizing corporate coffers.
In human relationships today, regret and revenge rule the roost; remorse and
redemption are rare. But then, even if all such primrose promises come true, we
cannot still wish away attributes like competitiveness, aggression, smartness, and
ruthlessness. For long, it has been a broadly-shared belief that we humans have
savage genetic ‘primal instincts’ that we are born with, and therefore cannot be
dispensed with. It means that a huge part of us is competitive and aggressive, and
there will always therefore be bad people, wars, massacres, cruelty, and inequality,
and all life will be a battle with these primal passions. And yet there are others
who argue that we humans are inherently good and godly, and our primary
urges and drives are for conciliation, cooperation, and compassion, and that it is
civilization that put them under eclipse. The third view is that humans are born
with both streaks, and the blend is particular to a person, which is why there is
so much diversity in human behavior.
What has been ignored or insufficiently appreciated in discussing the
dynamics of our behavior is the critical place and role of consciousness. Our
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outward life reflects our inner life, and our inner life reflects the state of our
consciousness. As philosopher Jonathan Rowson reminds us, we need a deeper
appreciation of how our inner worlds influence our outer worlds.24 Without such
an appreciation, “living an inner life and not an outer life at the same time is like
living in a house that has no foundation, a house that gradually either settles or
develops gaping cracks or totters until it collapses”.25 It has also been said that “the
ability to imagine someone else’s inner life is where compassion begins”. The state
of our consciousness has always been a state of war between our two opposing sets
of primal passions of good and bad, competition and cooperation, conciliation
and confrontation, cruelty and empathy, and so on. Our worldly disposition
depends on which of the two sides of our own personality gain dominance in
this dichotomous struggle. How we live and how we address the twin questions
posed by Padraig O Tuama—Who are we to be with one another? How are we
to be with one another?—will influence how the war within goes. And how we
live is dependent on the kind of intelligence we bring to bear on everyday life,
what we do to raise everyday existence out of the grind of the commonplace. For,
in the end, those choices determine what we are and what kind of future looms
ahead: utopian, dystopian, transhumanist, or post-apocalyptic. And at a more
fundamental level, we must face up to the fact that what lets us down most is
the way we have evolved to make choices and decisions. Our decision-making
is now not only about human life but about what being human ought to mean,
raising the question: who gets to decide whether and how to grow a ‘human’?
We need brand new ‘decision-analysis’ tools that will let us choose the way we
want to. First and foremost, we must free our consciousness from the Svengalilike
sway of our mind. Our mindset must not be synonymous with our mind.
And it is because the mind, as someone said, is like a puzzle with too many pieces
missing, and trying to make sense out of it makes no sense. We cannot change
the mind and we need it; what we should do is to counter its power with our
heart-power. Unless we do this, nothing else can change anything in the world or
in our lives for the better. We must remember that even if we achieve a symbiotic
relationship with artificial intelligence as we hope to, such ‘intelligence’ would
still be primarily brain-based, and might even carry the same biases, propensities,
and prejudices. We suffer from what is called ‘cerebral mystique’: everything,
from creativity to drug addiction, is a matter of the brain. And yet it is the
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perceived limitations of our brain—dismissively called wetware—that are driving
the rush to submerge human autonomy into automated systems. Worse, some
fear that these very ‘systems’ like artificial intelligence (AI) could evolve into a
new life form that could inherit the earth after we render it too toxic for human
habitation. According to transhumanists, who advocate human transformation
and enhancement through technology, “The hardware we do have is really great
for… cracking open skulls on the African savannah, but not much use for the
world we live in now”.26 What they seem to ignore is that AI-powered machines,
like AI itself, may have a different hardware, but their software would be similar
to human intelligence software, even if exponentially more efficient. What we
need now is not more efficiently (to do things rightly), but more effectively (to do
the righteous things). The fact is that, as Stephen Talbott tells us, “The intelligent
machine gathers its menacing powers from hidden places within you and me”.27
We all know that we hide things we are aware of but don’t want to see, but
secretly hope others do. Being more ‘efficient’ it drags out the darkness that lies
deep within. “We are thus confronted from the world by the active powers of our
own, most mechanistic mental functioning”.28 So, what does all this add up to?
All that human beings create remains unchangeably human, just as everything
God creates is divine, and the fate of man-made machines can be no different.
If we are a bundle of good and evil, so will they be; just as we don’t know when
we will do what, so will it be in their case. An ‘emotionally-intelligent’ machine,
which science is trying to make, might well be even more unpredictable and outof-
control. Emotions both unite and divide the personal and global worlds in
which we live, motivating the best and the worst of our actions. What we should
focus upon is to find a way to ensure that our ‘good’ emotions have an upper
hand on the ‘dark’ emotions in our consciousness. No ‘emotionally-intelligent
personal assistant’ (EMMA) can be a surrogate for an emotionally unstable
person. We can’t mine the mind of god, as Einstein too wanted to; but we must
mend our mind. There are no short-cuts and quick-fixes to better ourselves or
to save the world. The way to do it is the way within, through consciousnesschange.
That is the only way to change our ‘mindset’, and without that nothing
will ever happen for the good.
But, first things first. We must, despite our dreams or delusions of
becoming an immortal interplanetary species, remember that Mother Earth is
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our sacred home and silent witness, and will be so for a long, long time to come.
EO Wilson puts it this way: “Despite all of our pretenses and fantasies, we always
have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological
world”.29 Now, instead of mending our ways and saving the planet, we are making
plans to abandon it. Our laid-back nonchalance in the face of a dying planet
could well be due to our successes in space exploration, which have made us both
cocky and complacent. And it has distorted our priorities, and resources that can
save the planet and enhance the lives of billions are diverted; the American space
agency NASA alone has already spent an estimated 1.32 trillion dollars since its
inception. Our reckless, almost religious zealotry to merge with the machine is
to get prepared to emigrate and be able to live in space. It is worth mentioning,
at this point, the exploits of Mara, the ultimate tempter, in Buddhism. It is said
that when Mara asked, “Who is the witness to your seat of enlightenment”,
Shakyamuni, the Buddha-to-be, put his finger down to touch the ground and
replied, “I call the Earth as my witness”. When everything fails, it is always the
earth that stands behind us. According to the Gaia hypothesis, the earth is a selfregulating,
living organism; whatever we do to it, it can feel and suffer. Many
ingenious cultures revere the earth as a mother. In Hinduism, it is a goddess,
Bhoodevi. If we don’t stand for what we stand on, what is our worth? None of
that has stood in the way we plunder and profligate and ruthlessly ravage the
planet, and many observers are saying that we are living far beyond what is called
earth’s caring capacity, not simply its carrying capacity. As a result, the burning
planet itself is becoming less alive. It is because the earth cares for us, not simply
carries us, that we have got away with what we have done. If science has its way
and we continue to behave the way we do, we might soon have an ‘immortal’
man and a ‘mortal’ planet. We need also to step aside and pause and, as it were,
in Miguel de Unamuno’s phrase, ‘brood in a moonless night’ over what we are
doing to each other, invoking the legitimacy of being human. Scientists say that
‘the human rate of lethal violence is seven times higher than the average for
all mammals’, and that slaughter is the defining behavior of our species. The
provocation for ‘slaughter’ is now anything any man does anyway. And science
is seriously interested in making us at once more ‘moral’ and murderous. In one
direction, research is going on to make a ‘morality pill’ that would correct bad
behavior arising from faulty DNA. In another direction, research is going on to
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improve ‘the methodology of efficient violence’. This comes on top of a finding
that all of us “house in our large brains specialized psychological circuits that lead
us to contemplate murder as a solution to specific adaptive problems”.30
Our mind has developed a modus vivendi to make us see certain groups,
races, and ethnicities (especially outsiders and vulnerable people perceived as
being of a low status) as being less than fully human. We have now carried that
‘tendency’ to its twisted end, and to simplify matters, we have brought it into the
mainstream: anyone who comes in the way of our will, and citizens of ‘enemy’
nations, are to be seen as less than human. And that offers a moral alibi to do
whatever we wish to do to them, the ‘nonhumans’. Although it gained steam in
modern times, it has been happening over and over again throughout our soiled
history, which Stephen Daedalus (Ulysses) described as “a nightmare from which
I am trying to awake”. And the ‘nightmare’ is the sinew that binds our ‘then, now,
and yet’. The nightmare is the consequence of what we are doing to each other
in our minds; the nightmare is what will follow from what we doing with nature.
And the continuing nightmare is what the world will be if human consciousness
remains unchanged. The tragic irony is that we love our children so much that
we will die for them, but we are, in reality, giving them de facto death by what
we are unwilling to give up; by the same way, we are single-mindedly poisoning
the planet and its life-supporting systems. We risk so much just to be able to live
with our conveniences and gadgets and gizmos, and in effortless comfort. Our
vision of utopia includes the tantalizing freedom to do what one wants, when one
wants, and how one wants, all to live in the cocoon of unceasing comfort. And if
in future, simulation becomes more really ‘real’ than the real, and if automation
and a guaranteed