Category — Books & Writing

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas — whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself. The second edition, for instance, adds a notable “by the Creator” to the closing paragraph, giving greater attribution to a higher power. In another example, the phrase “survival of the fittest” — usually considered central to the theory and often attributed to Darwin — instead came from British philosopher Herbert Spencer, and didn’t appear until the fifth edition of the text. Using the six editions as a guide, we can see the unfolding and clarification of Darwin’s ideas as he sought to further develop his theory during his lifetime.

The Origin of Species is available online here. I have always wanted to read this book, though I would prefer to have it in book form such a classic it is. I don’t think I will ever get used to read a book for a long period of time on a computer screen. It seems so weird to me. I’m just too 20th century. Oooooh.

No matter how many people warn you not to go near the fire, you’ll still approach it. And why wouldn’t you? Have you seen the fire? With blazing red and yellow flames rising up for a spell-binding dance, it’s so beautiful that you can’t help but jump in. And then you burn, torn between pain and desire.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

— Pearl S. Buck

What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Here’s an interesting essay by Paul Graham. It’s long but really easy to read. Paul Graham talks about the importance of doing what you love, how to go about doing it, and the pitfalls you might run into. I find it fascinating and frustrating to see that the problem most people have is just coming to believe that it’s possible for them to do what they love. He explains how as kids, we are brainwashed with the idea that work cannot be fun:

The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn’t, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy [...] Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn’t think he meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that.

Jouissance, and the corresponding verb, jouir, refer to an extreme pleasure. It is not possible to translate this French word, jouissance, precisely. Sometimes it is translated as “enjoyment,” but enjoyment has a reference to pleasure, and jouissance is an enjoyment that always has a deadly reference, a paradoxical pleasure, reaching an almost intolerable level of pleasure and excitation. Due to the specificity of the French term, it is usually left untranslated.

I gave up my job, my career, my clearance, and I staked my freedom on a gamble: if the American people knew the truth about how they had been lied to, about the myths that had led them to endorse this for twenty-five years, that they would choose against it. And the risk that you take when you do that is that you’ll learn something ultimately about your fellow citizens that you won’t like to hear—and that is that they hear it, they learn from it, they understand it, and they proceed to ignore it.

— Daniel Ellsberg

We find ourselves at a very important crossroads in our history, which makes me wonder and believe that we are moving toward a new phase in human evolution. According to technology’s enthusiasts, in the next decades, life expectancy will expend faster than ever, our senses, perception and feelings will be improved. Our control over our emotions and memory will be better. The merging of our biological body with computer processors will enhance our capacities and the limits of the human body will be transcended. The G.R.I.N. technologies (Genetic, Robotic, Information, Nanotechnology) are designed to converge with ourselves. Whether we agree or not with those predictions, human nature is not a fixed condition, but what seems new during the last century is that technological advances accelerated and shaped human evolution in a totally different way. This is truly unique and unprecedented on Earth. Because we, humans, have the inherent desire and capacity to improve and better ourselves, the Darwin theory of evolution do not apply to us anymore. We can now take control of our own evolution, and can shape it the way we want. This distinctive characteristic of human nature might lead us to extinction, as explained in the Hell Scenario from Joel Garreau’s book Radical Evolution, but it might also help us face and survive the numerous dangers of the future.

Samuel Butler wondered in 1863 “Who will be man’s successor? To which Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist, answered: “We are ourselves creating our own successors. Man will become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man; the conclusion being that machines are, or are becoming, animate.” What he was predicting two centuries ago is now becoming more concrete than ever. Humans are on the way to transcend evolution is genetic engineering, as demonstrated in the documentary “Who’s afraid of designer babies?” Every parent wants their child to have the best in life. But would this make them willing to pick the best genes for them? For now, genetic technology has only been used to cure serious disease in children. But as we discover new way to manipulate our DNA, there are some people who thinks that parents will want to choose their children’s genes, and create designer babies. But when we attempt to remove genetic anomalies from fetuses, we are becoming baby designers and therefore we transcend biological evolution. It is for the good cause though. The divide between using this technology to cure and using this technology to enhance is very thin. In The New York Time, H. Lee Sweeney, chairman of Penn’s Department of Physiology declared that, “Anyone who can clone a gene and work with cells could do it [gene doping].” No doubt that in a few decades, those technologies will be ready and developed enough to reach millions of people. For the first time in the human history, our technologies are more and more aimed at modifying ourselves: our minds, memories, metabolisms, and personalities. We have now the ability to become the first species to really take control of who and how we are as living organisms. We have the ability to take control of our own evolution, not in a very long time but in only a few decades. Ray Kurzweil claimed in The Law of Accelerating Returns that, Technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light. Darwin’s deduction that unexpected mutation and natural selection can explain pretty much all of the diversity of life on Earth shook old beliefs that humans are simply superior organisms, uniquely capable of being moral, already fully evolved in a definite way, and built in the image of a perfect creator, god. However, because Darwin lived in a period where technology did not have an impact as big as it has now, he could not predict or even imagine how significant the impact of technology on humans would be. The example of the designer baby is probably one of the most substantial demonstration of the biological transcendence of human evolution because it is already happening.

If we look at humans, what we have created and what we have become over time, it is perfectly clear that we have already transcended evolution in the biological Darwinist sense. With the help of the numerous advances in providing reliable sources of food, medicine, safe environment, the evolutionarily and biologically weak can now survive, when few thousands years ago they were condemned to death. Another example is that nowadays, with dating websites and huge cities, the ones who would not usually find mates are able to do so and procreate. Humans aren’t that constrained by biology anymore, a new form of evolution through technology has appeared. Biological evolution has taken millions of years. However, advanced and complex ideas have only really evolved in the last few thousand years.Those ideas and technologies have advanced at an absolutely tremendous rate which is still accelerating at an exponential rate. We are now clearly evolving under a different mechanism to that which evolved our biological self. It does not really mean that we are no longer evolving in a biological sense  because obviously generations are getting taller, and people are getting somehow smarter if we compare ourselves to people from the middle age. The main difference is that it is no longer the main process of evolution. The biologically weak are still weak but natural selection as we can see it in the animal world does not take place in our lives anymore. Transcendence is not supernatural or divine in any way, it is only the result of scientific development. Transcendence is simply caused by the high level reached by the system of information represented by the nervous system, our brain. We have this unique ability and tendency to rise above our minds about contents. In that way, we can observe and analyze different levels of meaning and relationships from above, from the position of supremacy of the transcendent consciousness in relation to this contents. Once this process had occurred, humans began to pass on ideas from generation to generation in ways other than genetic, through education and books. In fact, the reason why some animal species considered as smarter than others such as octopuses have not yet evolved and ruled the world is that they do not have childhood, so knowledges and ideas do not pass from generation to generation.

The fact that humans shared ideas and knowledges made humans go beyond the biological evolution and its biological needs. At some points in the human history of evolution, humans have had the possibility to stop focusing their lives only on survival because of the development of human societies and communities. It allowed primitive humans to contemplate the world, ponder, create and be more introspective about themselves. While animals’ lives were and are only instinctually focused on survival and procreation, the fact that humans were able to protect each other, share goods, skills and knowledges generated free time and the creation of arts, which are the end product of human creativity and consciousness. But the most fascinating thing about this human transcendence is that it might help us survive the multiples dangers of our future and maybe lead us to eternity as species. Humanity, if it stays at the present rate of development, is rapidly running out of options when it comes to resource management and environmental protection. The debates about global warming, the use of nuclear weapons, the depletion of ozone layer or the possibility that a massive asteroid could crash into Earth, force us to reflect on our own individual mortality and on human extinction. And when we think about the end of humanity, it makes us wonder about whether our efforts have value because if we extinct, all of what we have created in thousands of year will decay and eventually vanish. Some claim that our efforts are pointless because they only think about short-term, but transcendence of ideas and time might be the ultimate solution. In recent years, there has been exhaustive debates about the question of whether we have obligations to future generations such as an obligation to preserve the environment and manage our resources. Discussions about whether it matters how long our civilization and species will last are also going on. A plausible scenario is that if we were completely aware that humanity could slowly or quickly no longer exist within the next few months, then people would start feeling distressed about this because it would cut our short expected life span, therefore depriving us of many experiences. Humans would probably generates the brightest ideas in order to survive such catastrophic ending. An example of such reaction is what happen when individuals or animals feel in danger, their physical capacities are doubled to prevent death or when we look at what happened with the people in fourth plane on 9/11. Also, if we knew that we would be here for the next 10,000 years, we would act differently towards the environment, our community, and the world would be a better place.

Natural disasters are excellent examples that can demonstrate how transcendence of ideas and consciousness could save us.Since the industrial age, human population has grown exponentially without looking at what was going on environmentally. Humans acted like those introduced species in new ecosystems, destroying everything for the only purpose of living and growing – and generating always more money, in this case. In short, we viewed the world with a short term point of view. The results are dramatic: destruction of ecosystems, change in global temperature leading to rapid melting of the perennial ice of the north polar cap. However, humans have the capacity to reduce those effects, or maybe cancel the harm that has been done with according efforts. All together, we could transcend ourselves and make radical change to avoid global extinction that will inevitably lead to our own extinction. We could try to find ways to reduce the possibility of a collision with a massive asteroid crashing into Earth by developing new missile technologies – this might actually already been happening – or some mysterious technologies. Extinctions have been a recurring thing on Earth. Where animals like dinosaurs failed to adapt themselves or find solution to avoid them due to a lack of intelligence and development, we humans could avoid the unavoidable by adopt new way of thinking, long term thinking: transcendence of the way we see time.

In whatever way one views the future, we are moving toward a transformation beyond the human species in our lifetime. For the first time in billions of thousands of years, our technology is not designed to change the way we live, how we connect with each other and how we entertain ourselves. Instead, we are developing technologies such as gene therapy to change what we are, how we look and the way we think. Some of those technologies are already being tested and used in laboratories around the world, and when they will be available at a large scale, the meaning of being an human being as we know it in our present time will definitely change. The use of those technologies will transcend the biological process of evolution that has shaped what we are for thousands of years more than ever before. Our biological evolution alone might lead us to the great 6th extinction, but fortunately this new process of evolution through technologies might be the ultimate solution to immortality as species.

One of our many assigned reading in my English 102 class taught by  Greg Bachar this quarter was the Brian Eno’s essay about The Long Now Foundation and the 10,000 years clock. I find the idea introduced in the essay pretty interesting. The Long Now Foundation created a mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years. It is a an attempt to transcend the way we see time. Indeed, the ultimate goal of the members of the Long Now Foundation is to create some new form of human thinking about Time. The idea is that if we start thinking in a long term way, we will act differently and build up cooperative relationships. This clock is not meant to serve as a clock to check the time and date, it is meant to be an artifact capable of connecting our generation with the future generations. The members of the Long Now Foundation, claim that if the human race can somehow collectively replace short-term thinking with long-term thinking, the world would eventually be a better place now and in the future. But as humans, we are visual creatures. We need a beacon, a constant reminder, which is often the only way to get a point to stick. The clock is here to create this link. The members of the Long Now Foundation believe that the Clock of the Long Now would be something to culturally remind us of old generations and a constant reminder of long-term thinking. For more information about the Long Now Foundation, check out this link.

“You’re not at all like my rose. You’re nothing at all yet,” he told them. “No one has tamed you and you haven’t tamed anyone. You’re the way my fox was. He was just a fox like a hundred others. But I’ve made him my friend, and now he’s the only fox in all the world.”
And the roses were humbled.
“You’re lovely, but you’re empty,” he went on. “One couldn’t die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she’s the one I’ve watered. Since she’s the one I put under glass. Since she’s the one I sheltered behind a screen. Since she’s the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except for the two or three butterflies). Since she’s the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she’s my rose.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince