Apathy

Apathy bothers me more than anger . When I'm angry, I understand the cause, see it coming on, and see it dissipate. Apathy is more elusive. Sometimes I get stuck in an apathetic mindset and I don't know how I got there and worse - how to get out. 

Apathy ties in with desensitization - and we are desensitized in so many ways. Video games desensitize us to rampant violence. Comedy on TV desensitizes us to racist, vulgar humor and makes us critical of others. Lack of healthy outlets to release frustration and anger desensitize us to screaming at one another to get a point across. Impersonal communications such as text or social media desensitize us to how we really connect with others. 

And a personally poignant one - school desensitizes us to learning. 

I was navigating through 'apathy' in Wikipedia and I came across Robert Maynard Hutchins, who I hadn't been previously familiar with. Aside from become the Dean of Yale Law School when he was 30 years old, he has a laundry list of impressive life achievements. As an educational philosopher, he spoke about apathy and the disintegration of our generation. 

His book, The University of Utopia, speaks about a world where students learn about the intellectual concepts behind their majors rather than just the skills to simply 'get it done' - where children are first taught how to communicate with one another and then given the ability to choose for themselves what their school of thought will contain. He talks about having a full range of educational classes which focus on comprehension, rather than just 'getting through the class'. He talks about giving degrees to students who prove masterful comprehension, not just show their 120 credits. 

Utopian, indeed.

There is no question that while going through school my main focus was on getting good grades and getting through it. Not to say that I didn't learn anything, but I was more interested in the simple achievement of crossing the finish line than I was with gathering a deep understanding of the topic which so fascinated me - philosophy. I love philosophy and I loved it then - but it's only now that I'm devoting myself to getting to know it better. 

I'm sure those reading this can remember taking a class because it was pre-requisite credits you needed and you heard it was easy. Did it matter what the subject was? Minimally. And it never becomes as full of an experience as it could have been, and you never learn as much as you could have. 

There are so many distractions outside of class - video games, drinking, social scenes, social media, TV, movies - it's hard enough in this generation to keep focused on school. If the emphasis to really cherish the ability to learn isn't there in the professors, how will it be in the students?

Our culture needs to re-sensitize. Not that we have to become blubbering babies or anything, but we need readjust our grip on reality. If we keep pulling ourselves farther and farther away from reality, there's only so much we can handle before we shut off and ignore it all. 

I think the digital culture is a major culprit, but it doesn't have to be. Technology can aid in our evolution and connection to one another - but people struggle to see the reality that surrounds them when a device is in their midst. It seems more important to type what they are doing, in Facebook, than to actually live it. And the motto for the media and corporations, who keep making more and more and more, seems to be, "if it makes money, who cares what it does to our human culture?" 

Ah, I get apathetic just thinking about it. 

Slov

Soul-Searching

As a sort of continuation of my previous post on Science and Spirituality, I've been thinking more about the way the brain functions. Fascination with the idea that people can re-wire their brain just by habitually thinking in a different way led me to look online and see what sort of research is happening in neuroplasticity. And I found something interesting:

At Stanford University, a study was done whereby they intentionally placed two genes of distantly related organisms into the brain of a mouse. They placed them on the neurons which controlled the motor functions of the mouse. These specific genes were triggered by light - yellow turned one off, and blue turned another on. The study was meant to see if the brain could be controlled if the proper 'on-and-off' switches were placed in the brain.

And what do you know?

A wired.com article

So you could theoretically put these genes on any part of the brain and control its functioning. In humans, you could theoretically put these genes on the mood center of the human brain and make someone feel happy when they previously weren't happy before. An interesting consideration...

The consideration of humanity. If you can control the way a person feels, what at that point truly makes them THEM? Maybe it's not a question of whether or not they are still considered human, but are they the same individual if they aren't thinking the way the 'previous' individual thought? 

If the way they think, and therefore their behavior, is not in their complete control, is that the true definition of a person at all? Or is that an automaton, a hybrid-human that is controlled by external manipulation? Good question for Nazi Germany, hey? 

And as for the spiritual component - scientists such as the ones performing this experiment are likely under the impression that the mind exists only in the synapses of the brain, in the electrical impulses of the brain. More spiritual people, with a more dualistic mind-body sentiment, wouldn't agree with these assumptions, but what would be their explanation of this sort of experiment?

I'm conflicted, still. I can't imagine that the body and 'soul' are only a physical entity. Energy is visible in some ways, but also feels intangible in others. So it doesn't seem likely that we are only a physical body and we exist in no fashion other than being a physical corpse when we die. However, it also doesn't seem feasible that we are a completely separate soul and body, and our soul just evacuates our body when the physical self dies, and goes off to another type of existence. 

It definitely seems as though the character traits of the person would remain and be lost with the physical body, since the tangible neurons have created that personality, no matter the wiring or re-wiring. But that isn't to say something doesn't escape the body, in an energetic form. Maybe that's compatible with some people's view of the soul, though there may be a discrepancy on the level of consciousness believed to remain with that energy. 

Science is developing amazing technology more rapidly, specifically in regards to neurological manipulation. I can't wait to see, as technology increases and spirituality becomes less isolated and more integrated, what exactly this world is on the brink of. I wonder, as it becomes more imperative that we define the individual and the human, if this energetic entity called the soul will be 'found' with such clarity that it becomes a major, valid player in defining our Humanity - valid to the spiritual as well as scientific minds. 

Hybridizing

It's becoming more and more important, as we globalize and dive deeper into the web community, to improve our capacity to see things from multiple vantage points. It's not so simple as it once was to have a single tradition that is not influenced or altered by another, as we have exponentially increasing interactions with other cultures and countries. 


I think it's really beneficial for people to feel encouraged to experiment with the possibilities of assimilating other perspectives/morals with their own. That's not to say that we need to become one hive mind or global community, but since we have access to one another in ways we never have before, consideration of alternate values should be prioritized.  It would be just as acceptable to me for someone to consider all of the other options and still decide they want to go the way of their ancestoral traditions, as it would for someone to decide that they want to incorporate different cultural elements into their lives, creating something of a 'hybrid culture'. The thought process of consideration in and of itself opens the mind to a way of thinking that enhances human development. And, of course, it increases tolerance. 


It would be better to take the reins and have a say in how our lives fit into this expanding community and consequently smaller and smaller planet, rather than resist and lose faith in a stubborn refusal to see other possibilities.


I've been speaking culturally, so far. But now I want to shift the conversation completely and go the sci-fi angle (I've been reading a lot of sci-fi lately). One of the major science fiction considerations has always been - what makes a human, human? Is it our empathy and complex mental processes? Is it our physical bodies? Our cultural diversity? Our technological intelligence? A question that is becoming more and more important to answer.


It's clear that on average, our society (and I'm talking about the Human Society at this point, not just one country) is willing to accept technological advances. The Internet and cell phones are the two major indicators of this. On the Internet, we are exposing ourselves to the rest of the world - learning everything we can about everyone else, and allowing our information to be available to whoever wants to search for it. Cell phones connect us instantly face-to-face with whoever we desire, and they now contain all the information we previously could only get from computers. If we are willing to embrace these sorts of technological advances that are ever-increasingly controlling our day to day functioning, we are opening the door for the soon-to-come technologies that will not only be a part of our lives technically, but literally. 


When we start to introduce chips and implants that can connect us to other people or the world in different ways, this is where the question of humanity will begin to really take shape. Instead of these machines being able to respond to our word and do our necessary tasks for us, what if those machines were inside of us and we could control them internally? 


Or even more simply, what about people with robotic limbs? Those that have lost limbs and have a machine in place of what used to be flesh and bone? Are they still human? What if there was a chip that could be placed in the brain that could cause functionality in a person with disabilities? Are they still human? What about clones? Are they human? Are the the same human? And the toughest question yet - if a person could somehow put their personality or DNA into a chip that was then placed in another body (perhaps robotic)- are they still human? Are they the person in the chip, the combination of person and body, or no longer human at all? 


I love thinking about this issue, and it can be fun since it's mostly theoretical right now. I still have a lot of reading to do, of Kurzweil and others regarding the Singularity, so I will continue this discussion as I go deeper and deeper. But when this all becomes reality, the weight and seriousness will increase significantly. 


As our western culture tries to stay the same and live as long as possible, while doing as little as possible (for example- not needing to know where anything is because the GPS will take me where I need to be) we are asking technology to take the reigns for us. Not only does this seem like a dangerous step towards making ourselves dispensable in the universe, but when we succeed in AI technology and really begin to question what is a 'human-like' being, I see slavery becoming a tough issue once more as well. We keep fighting the same battles to define our humanity, just in different forms. Are we coming any closer to a conclusion, or are we meant to repeat the same histories and eventually be succeeded by our creations rather than our offspring?  


I just finished a book series by Dan Simmons - Endymion and the Rise of Endymion - and they are just incredible. One of the things it discusses is that in order for the human species to survive, we must evolve the nature of our evolution. The human species, as it has been defined for so long, must change completely. In fact, we need to adapt and become different species, not just different cultures and different races. 


It’s pretty great to think of many human species instead of just our current one.  Of course, active space exploration would really be the starting point for this, since that's when we would have many different atmospheres and lifestyles to adapt to. Right now we can only evolve so much - but hybridizing ourselves by placing computers in our bodies is a start, on our single planet. 


Since we aren’t looking at a long enough timeline it’s easy to pretend that we are suited for survival and we don't need to consider other species or forms of the human, and don't need to worry about defining what makes us human. In reality, denying this need is making it less and less likely that our species can survive on its own. 


For now, we’ll keep musing, talking, inventing, and calibrating our moral compasses. Hopefully, after enough consideration and open discussion, we will be able to extend our timeline out to where we can boldly stand up and face the survival of our humanity. 

www.mondolithic.com