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

Unless, of course, that species can acquire a ‘planetary brain’, a ‘global
soul’, or even, in the vocabulary of the war within, a cathartic ‘consciousnesschange’.
Let alone a ‘planetary brain’, we don’t even use our ‘whole-brain’; we
rely almost wholly on the left-brain repertoire. Recent neurological findings,
according to David O’Leary,60 tell us that ‘without the contextual resources of the
right hemisphere, the calculating, instrumental mind can nonetheless function
as an irresponsible automaton’. That precisely is what we will become through
our impending merger with the machine. We may berate our behavior for all
and sundry of our ills, but the fatal flaw in our approach to resolve any of our
daunting problems is that we really don’t want to change, while believing that
everything else must change. We don’t want to change because it requires us to
step out of the cocoon of our comfort zone, and that means risking our whole
world turning topsy-turvy. For instance, it is hard to tell if we are ‘willfully blind’
or ‘dangerously dumb’, or if we are driven by a death-wish not to realize that
the climate crisis is deadly serious and potentially putting human civilization in
clear and escalating peril. Underscoring the gravity of the crisis, a new study says
it could be similar to the mass extinction that happened 252 million years ago.
And yet, our efforts so far, as someone said, are ‘like an effort to put out a house
fire with a water pistol’. We will keep on hoping, Micawber-like, for miracles or
‘deified markets’ or magical technologies to deliver us from disaster. We cannot
be shaken out of paralyzing passivity in the face of moral precariousness by our
conscience. Because, as Pope John Paul said, the fact is that conscience itself is
finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between good and evil in what
concerns the basic value of human life.61 That is because on the one hand, the
boundary between good and evil is getting blurred and, on the other hand, the
two are the principal foes in the war within. What we need now is to transcend
both conscience and the very source of thinking. In the words of Stephen
Talbott, “Man is he who knows and transforms himself—and the world—from
within.”62 Many thoughtful observers say that a radical transformation and rise
to a new level of consciousness is the only way to reverse the moral decline
brought about by the delusionary dominance of man’s materialistic mindset.
Rather than treading such a measured path, modern man has chosen technology
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as the means—and machine as the model and ideal—to achieve this aspiration.
But that is due to our ignorance, or inadequate appreciation of what we ourselves
are made of, and what nature has equipped us with. We are wholly innocent that
‘in our own being we are enough’, and that, in order to travel on the spiritual
path, we only require learning how to embrace our inner buzz and harness our
inner strength.
The ‘inner buzz’, is “our personal idiom of experiencing our bodies, other
people, the animate and inanimate world: imagination, dreams, phantasy, and
beyond that to ever further reaches of experience”.63 For it is possible to be a wellfed
man on the outside, but an impoverished infant on the inside. To nourish
the ‘infant’ requires what spiritual seekers call ‘inner work’, diving deep into
our inner self, a motley mix of our hidden feelings, memories, thoughts, beliefs,
prejudices, wounds, and shadows. Without it, there can be no purging, no selfemptying,
and no cleansing, healing, or true transformation. That kind of work
horrifies us, and looking for easy options, our mind chooses the primrose path of
merger with the machine.
Our intimacy with the machine is predicated by a huge hope—that the
machine, even after being made smarter than man, will stay fair and loyal to
him, as it is his creation, a kind of loyalty man himself seldom shows. The fact
remains that man and, in Stephen Talbott’s phrase, his ‘mechanical offspring’,64
are bound together in an increasingly tight embrace. Yet, we have never been
able to, in whatever we do as a trade-off, ‘guarantee our sense of the human’,
to borrow the words of Teju Cole.65 Man has always turned to technology for
help when needed. The dark side of technology is also emerging into public
view. A stark example is reports of recent research concerning implanted heart
pacemakers. It is said that by tinkering with the software it is now possible to
remotely alter the functioning of these devices using a mobile phone, possibly
inducing instant death. It means that the specter of personal grudges translating
into seemingly ‘perfect’ remote killings is no longer the stuff of fiction. Modern
technology can make everything possible: make the false true and the unreal
real. It at once empowers our capability and enfeebles our capacity. It enables us
to cross over from the human realm, but erodes the core of being human. We
turn to technology so much for our day-to-day living, to perform such ordinary
tasks, that some, like Charlie Brooker,66 fear that there will be very little room
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for free will—our flawed but still important decision-making capacity—that is
a big part of being human. We are also at the same time trying to augment our
dysfunctional capability by harnessing ‘intelligence’ external to us, like artificial
general intelligence (AGI), virtually handing it over to the machines. In addition,
our ‘decision-making’ ability has got greatly compromised by our exposure to
media and propaganda designed solely to short-circuit our better judgment. We
now have to factor in more people and considerations into our ‘decision-making’
than ever before, and our brains seem ill-prepared for that. Some fear that when
singularity comes, AGI-powered beings might well, like in the Netflix show
Altered Carbon, conclude that humans ‘are not like us… they are a lesser form of
life’. In that event, they, not us, will be at the helm. We must remember that, as Ian
McEwan says, “if a machine seems like a human or you can’t tell the difference,
then you’d jolly well better start thinking about whether it has responsibilities
and rights and all the rest” (Machines Like Me, 2019). We must also factor in
another aspect. We think of artificial intelligence (AI) as external only because
it is not internal. But that is not true. In practical terms, AI is another version
of human intelligence, because it is created by humans and they can only create
what their intelligence is capable of. Although we think AI is incorruptible, the
reality is that AI systems might well result in replicating the biases ingrained in
human judgements, rather than aborting them. Supposedly ‘neutral’ machinemade
decisions often end up augmenting existing social inequalities. Like about
everything else, experts disagree on the potential impact of AI. Some say it could
usher in a peaceful, prosperous world, and help solve our daunting issues. Some
like Stephen Hawking have said that it could eventually lead to our extinction.
We now have more information, if not knowledge, and choices, than ever earlier,
but our brain-damaged intelligence and skills seem hopelessly out of their
depth to arrive at informed and enlightened decision-making. The bedrock of
modernity is the epistemic line of thought that views the use of pure reason
as the foundation of truth, and as the sole measure and means for uncovering
reality. In reality though, our brain fights our attempts to be ‘really rational’ at
every turn. It has a tendency to see what it wants to see, or listen to what it wants
to hear, rather than what is really there. It hates being wrong so much, in fact,
that it will adjust our memories to make us right in retrospect.67 Not only that,
our brain’s ability to meet our needs, according to philosopher Bertrand Russell,
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could get worse. In this view, “we must expect, at any rate for the next hundred
years, that each generation will be congenitally stupider that its predecessor”.68
The essential point is not whether machines will be benevolent or turn
malevolent; it is that even if they do remain ‘loyal’ to their creator, human
malevolence could get a huge boost from ‘merging’ with AI-driven machines.
To prevent that from happening, what we need to do is not go back to the pre-
Industrial Age; we need to change the human mindset. We need not stop all
research on AI; we have to ‘demilitarize’ it, and channel it towards the needs of
the impoverished and the disempowered. Clearly we do need to do something
radical and drastic. The trouble is that instead of marshaling the other sources of
inherent intelligence like heart-based intuitive intelligence—which some call our
spiritual wisdom and the gut instinct; or the third heart or primal wisdom—we
are trying to mobilize alien intelligences. Cutting-edge research on the human
heart has shown that the heart is also an independent source of intelligence,
that it has its own nervous system and actually sends more information to the
brain than the brain sends to the heart. Even more startling is the finding that
the heart’s electromagnetic field is thousands of times more powerful than that
of the brain. This is, in fact, scientific validation of age-old insights. More than
two millenniums ago, Aristotle believed in a ‘cardiocentric’ model of human
anatomy, where the heart was the true center of human intelligence and not
the brain. Joseph Murphy writes, “Within your subconscious depths lie infinite
wisdom, infinite power, and infinite supply of all that is necessary, which is
waiting for development and expression” (The Power of Your Subconscious Mind,
1963). Contrary to what we assume, everything we think is external, is also,
in its deepest sense, internal. It is brain power that science is focusing on to
achieve its ambitious agenda. One report says attempts are being made to
develop technologies that bridge the gap between computers and the brains of
humans and animals. Another report says a project is in the offing “to build
conscious robots using insect brains”. The concern and disquiet is about not
just what robots might do to us, but what we might do to them, not to speak
of what they might do to us because of what we already do to one another.
Excessive reliance on artificial intelligence to save us or help us to evolve could be
an invitation for ‘double-jeopardy’—we will be relying on that which we think
has been found wanting and, in addition, run the risk of, in the so-called Tech
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Mogul and futurist Elon Musk’s phrase, summoning the ‘demon’, or the dragon
within. The conundrum is that the problems we want to address are brain-made,
the intelligences we mobilize, internally and externally, are brain-based, and the
decisions that intelligence arrives at cannot be any better. What science should
be focusing on is how to activate or awaken the other two ‘brains’ or sources of
intelligence—the heart and the gut, to bring to bear on our daily life.
The Way Forward is the Way Inward
At a practical level, we have to strive to practice empathy and compassion—the
capacity to share, understand, and care about what others feel—in our everyday
lives, as a part of bringing about contextual-change. The world we have built is
poorly suffused with the caring and sharing instincts that allowed us to build it
in the first place. It is these instincts that saved us when survival was at stake,
and now, we need them once again when our very survival is under serious
threat. But all is not lost; these are not frozen traits—something we are born
with or not—but rather skills, as recent research reveals, that we can all augment
through effort. It is also not automatic and entails making a choice to engage
with others’ emotions. And our choice about choosing empathy, not staying
away from other’s suffering, in turn, is not a ‘free choice’; it depends on the state
of the war within. If kindred forces call the shots, we choose ‘empathy’, and if
not, we avoid it. Everything in life is ‘contextual’. To truly understand something
requires attention to its context. We must be clear about how, through our own
lives, we can contribute to the change of the ‘right kind’. There is no magic
wand, no supreme effort, nor a single titanic thing to do or not do, to trigger
empathetic contextual-change. Every day, we do multiple things and all those
trillions done by billions add up as context. And it all boils down to how we
view, treat, and interact with another human being, because there is always
another person involved whatever and wherever we do anything, at home, on
the street, at office, at play or while having fun or making money. Everything is
interpersonal: the good or bad we do, the help we render and the hurt we inflict.
In life, many things we do