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

and the elite. That is why we spend tens
of billions of dollars on space exploration and on colonizing the Moon and Mars
at the expense of socially far more critical priorities like access to clean water for
the billions of people who, despite breakthroughs in agriculture and farming
and sanitation, are still starving or dying of dysentery. According to a new report
by UNICEF and the World Health Organization, despite significant progress,
2.2 billion people around the world do not have safely managed drinking water
services, and 4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation services.
The fact of the matter is that we are facing serious issues here on earth, and
they are only getting worse. These include climate change, and more particularly
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the disappearance of the rainforests, the pollution of the oceans, and galloping
desertification on a catastrophic scale every year. What we are losing sight of is
that the world is a network of interpermeable systems. As Jedediah Purdy tells us,
“What comes out of a smokestack can travel through wind, rain, groundwater,
and soil, and end up in flesh”.86 Today, more than 23% of the earth’s landmass
has been degraded by desertification, and 1.5 billion people are affected. The
other side of the dismal picture is that we read about astonishing technological
breakthroughs that benefit the common man, like ‘making it rain where and
when we want it’, or using human poop as a renewable energy source, and
extracting unlimited water from the air. But they fade away for want of patronage
and funding. Research on eradicating extreme poverty is grossly underfunded.
What we fail to realize is that erasing abysmal poverty is a more humane way to
extend the average human life span. It is the best investment one can make for a
healthier and happier humanity, a better alternative to mass suicide or merging
into the machine. One estimate (Jeffrey Sachs) puts the cost to end poverty at
$175 billion per year for 20 years, a fraction of what we spend on high-profile
projects like space exploration, silicon immortality, and artificial intelligence,
even excluding military R&D.
Our ever-growing fascination of AI and biological immortality, and the
disproportionate attention and resources, human and financial, expended in that
direction, offers us a snapshot of human insatiability and technological hubris,
and of how much we are off-course, as a self-proclaimed spiritual species, in
answering the fundamental questions of human life. Hermann Hesse once wrote,
“The true profession of man is to find a way to himself ”. What we are doing has
nothing to do with finding a way to ourselves; instead we are too eager to give
up on ourselves. We don’t accept who we are and view our vulnerabilities as
liabilities and weaknesses to be overcome. Our very vulnerability—our capacity
for doubting, getting hurt, softness, tenderness, sacrifice, love, spirituality,
sensitivity—is our true strength. Vulnerability, it has been said, is an act of
courage because you merge with your authentic self, instead of hiding behind
a façade to appease others. It is this misconception—that we must exorcise
our softer side in order to be strong, smart, and successful—that has led us
to the machine. The machine now is viewed as the ‘city on the hill’, the gold
standard, our role model; it is pure, it has come to symbolize the sufficiency
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we miss and seek in ourselves, it never fails or lets us down. Some say that the
next neo-biological civilization will be the one where we grudgingly accept that
humans are the random ancestors of machines, and that as machines we can be
engineered and augmented ourselves. We have come to implicitly accept that,
unlike the machine, the human is simply incapable of not just clinical efficiency,
but also fairness, impartiality, and justness in his interpersonal interactions. This
is also an indirect backlash in the face of one of our greatest failures: our innate
inability to reconcile the personal and interpersonal in any kind of trade-off. The
machine will then be a way not only to overcome our cognitive and corporeal
inadequacies, but also to serve as a hedge against our moral failings. The human
could then become akin to the ancient Greeks (of the time of Homer’s Iliad)
who thought of themselves as ‘physical vessels for the will of the gods’; it will
then be the whim of the machinic-machine. Or would we become, as Freud
once predicted, prosthetic gods? It is at the same time a statement of surrender
and of haughtiness. Surrender, because we have thrown in the towel, as it were,
conceded that we are not good enough to be who we want to be. Haughtiness,
because we think that we can still get what we want not through the spiritual
route, but by ‘cyborgization’—that is, using technology to modify and enhance
our bodies and brains and merging with our supplements, our technological
appendages. The result, as philosopher Philip Torres puts it, “could be beings
with completely novel cognitive architectures (or mental abilities), emotional
repertoires, physical capabilities, lifespans, and so on”.87
There are some very worried people who think that we have virtually
reached the vanishing point, beyond which one will not know what is human or
not human, producing in the process the erasure of the human in the inhuman.
Long ago, we ‘discovered’ that the easiest way to treat another person horribly,
even to get rid of him, is to learn to view him no longer as ‘human’. Once we cross
that line, whatever we do is no more a crime or sin or inhuman in our mind. This
is a momentous shift, which some describe as the ‘zero-point’ of humanity, in
human perception, and deserves our fullest attention. In the name of perfection
and excellence, we cannot renounce or denigrate our own integrity and then try
to find solace in someone else’s bosom, hoping that that will empower us to get
what we want from the world. Our quest for immortality is also a part of our
unquenchable thirst for perfection. The Buddha once said that ‘affection is always
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greater than perfection’. And reviving the living is better than reviving the dead,
as Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk once said. And, it is not all technology’s
fault. It is human nature. If not technology, we will invent something else not
to do what we can and must do. In fact, that is what we do with God too. And
no wonder we want to our technology in His place. We have chosen to ignore
what the 20th-century Indian spiritual teacher Swami Vivekananda exhorted
us to always bear in mind: “All power is within you; you can do anything and
everything. Believe in that; do not believe that you are weak”. The problem is
that we have never had access to what we already have within. Furthermore, we
really do not know what ‘adequacy’ or ‘perfection’ mean in human terms. What
some derisively dismiss as nature’s mistakes in our making could be part of a
grander and greater plan of life on earth. Different forms of life have different
traits integral to that kind of earthly existence. Nature exquisitely balances the
skills of both predator and prey so that both survive in the game of outsmarting
each other. If every part, every organ, every faculty is ‘fool-proof ’, independently
of others, the sum of all these would be hideous, not pretty or perfect.
Let us remember what our central problem is, and what the only lasting
solution could be. The problem is not AI or the algorithm or nanotechnology.
All of them have the potential to do immense good if properly directed and
channeled. Even in the worst-case scenario in which a kind of reversal of roles
takes place between man and machine, the machine then will do what man
does and vice versa… man still will matter. The problem is the state of our
consciousness, which depends on the state of the war within. With the right kind
of consciousness, even man plus machine can be a force that can transform both
the human condition and the fortunes of the planet. We need a consciousness
in which the ‘intuitive intelligence’ of the heart plays a much more assertive role
than now. GK Chesterton once wryly said, “You can only find truth with logic
if you have already found truth without it”, which means mind-driven logic is
irrelevant and superfluous to anything serious in life. We have to accept ourselves
as we are, and strive to use more holistically what nature has thought fit to equip
us with. Godly powers without godly-consciousness could make us not a wellmeaning
Frankenstein-monster, but a monster in nihilistic mode. Through her
portrayal of her hideous but good-natured monster, Mary Shelley tells us that
our society, past and present, focuses too much on our external characteristics.
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Whoever a person may be on the inside and however great and generous he or
she may be is altered by that person’s physical self. It shows the superficial nature
of man. Without upgrading or enhancing our consciousness, any ‘upgradation’
or ‘augmentation’ or enhancement of our body or brain could be risky. Let us not
forget that it is brain-based, linear, sequential, and reductionist thinking that has
destroyed the synergistic system of the earth’s biosphere, with its many intertwined
parts interacting in complex and unfathomable ways. Yet, once society accepts, as
we now do, that humanity needs upgradation from what nature has left us with,
means and morality become dispensable, wherein lies the greatest danger.
The merging of man with machine, an ‘upgradation’ that science is
currently pursuing, really is tantamount to integrating the human mind—all of
humanity in fact—with superfast, supersmart computers. In a practical sense,
we already have merged ourselves with machines in our daily life. What is new
is what might happen when the much-discussed technological singularity comes
calling—and super-intelligent machine creations become self-aware. When they
have a mind and agenda of their own, and may even be able to create copies of
themselves that are more intelligent than themselves. The D-Day is said to be the
year 2045, by which time, we are told, humans on an average will live up to 100
years and will change the way they live, mate, work, and play in the future. But
what kind of change will that be? What will not change, but what must change,
is how we will be with each other, and the intelligence that drives and determines
what we will do with that long or unlimited life span, and with the body or ‘shell’
that we would have made for ourselves by merging with a machine.
Lest we forget, as mentioned earlier, however advanced machineintelligence
might be, it will remain essentially human brain-intelligence. There
is no denying that. The means we are planning to employ, to upgrade ourselves
into a far different and far more powerful being, are rooted in the same genre
of cognitive power that is based on the neural network of the human brain,
and that is ‘mind-infected’. It means that the dynamics of our choice-making
and decision-making will not change, without which nothing else will change.
Decision-making in today’s taxing times often involves weighing tangled nuances
in increasingly complex situations and involving intricate motivations. And yet
so ordinary that any of us can be a ‘Sophie’88 anytime. The moral dilemmas we
confront are not very different in the ‘post-modern’ world than those faced by
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inmates of Nazi camps. What is it that we must not give up, and what can we
give up to get what in return? What is the moral minimum and non-negotiable
and what is the larger utilitarian good? Indeed, as Adam Kirsch reminds us, “It is
possible to think of the [concentration] camps as what happens when you cross
three disciplinary institutions that all societies possess—the prison, the army,
and the factory”.89 There are a lot of people who feel that a ‘prisoner’ is more
free than they are in the ‘free’ world; that their lives are more regimented than
in an army, and that they are not very different from exploited factory-workers.
It is this crushing feeling that finds utterance in so many ways. The hard moral
trade-offs and choices we have to wrestle with will not change even if we are able
to ‘remove the brain from our heads, preserve it for eternity, clone it or send it
through space’ and become a ‘silicon-immortal’. And our inherently inadequate
brain-based ‘intelligence’, even if it becomes a ‘digital brain’, cannot better our
behavior, much less turn us into a divine being or a super-suave superhero. And
whatever we become and wherever it leads we will still fall short or go astray.
The Upanishads categorically proclaim that by realizing his true divine identity
man attains immortality. Jesus voiced the same thought when he