I just finished Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Coming on the heels of Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran I am realizing that the grandiose and often wordy prose I’ve been accused of time and again is not solely a product of mental illness, but rather the outcome of a mind reeling in a universe where impossibilities exist only in the thoughts of those who’ve already conceded to them. Although depression helps.
The scope of both of these books is immense and, though their subject matter is quite different, they both testify to not only the magnitude and mailability of the universe and the human condition but also of the conundrum of humanities moral compass. What on earth are we to do when we begin to link our brains via the internet? And what is to happen when we bring back Neanderthals through willing surrogate mothers? Despite your doubts, these are not unrealistic fantasies. Among other seemingly incredible advances these notions are well within the scope of current scientific wherewithal. The time is not too far distant where we might begin to resemble a race of gods who could justify using the brutish Neanderthal species, of which we might produce like farm animals, to be our labor force. If we are controlling machines with our minds, communication through telepathy, successfully transplanting human brains into humanoid looking exoskeletons and manipulating the most fundamental processes of biology to weed out unwanted traits, how, then do we talk of the simple principle of equality? Homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis are both, for all intents and purposes, human, yet we (homo sapiens) are on the verge of becoming something more than mere human. Contrasting The Declaration of Independence’s “all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” with, say, the nearly four thousand year old Code of Hammurabi’s “I have not been careless or negligent toward humankind, granted to my care by the god Enlil, and with whose shepherding the god Marduk charged me” whose Law clarified that by divine decree there are, rather, three classes of being making up humankind who are, indeed, not equal, I realize that a paradigm is sculpted by the limited view of our brief mortal stints and could be compared to a prison cell whose walls are made up of the hundred years or so we have in mortal life. The three classes were superior humans, commoners, and slaves, whereas at this brief moment in time, scientifically we recognize one class, or species of human. That would be you and I without regard to race, sex, income, or political affiliation.
Yet, even this prison cell saturated with all the glory of our prejudices, preconceptions, cultural norms, and the limits of our mortal scope is, perhaps, by some cosmic irony capable in and of itself of eventually encompassing the entirety of the universe by virtue of the nature of our own biological cells. It’s postulated that by 2050 the first amortal people will be born. That is to mean that these people will not be susceptible to disease or aging. They will be incapable of dying by natural means. We already know of animals that are biologically immortal. And given the reality that we’ve grown human ears on the backs of rats and made glow in the dark rabbits through genetic engineering, the field is not limited to the rules of nature, for they are endless, but rather by the edicts of our own conscience. What is the difference between a glow in the dark rabbit made possible by crossing it with the DNA of a jellyfish, and, say, the Minotaur of ancient Crete? We are ushering in an era that defies every convention you’ve ever known, and the strange thing is that it is oddly similar to our own mythology. It is never more clear that there is nothing that is impossible. We are, for presumably the first time in history capable of molding our own evolution. Where we take it and how we begin to define what we are is getting trickier every day. Yet, the largest struggle that we face is not one which taunts our technological capabilities, but it is of more basic realities which have, since time immemorable been steeped in the human psyche and discussed by theologians and philosophers alike. It’s a struggle of which only in recent years has been of interest to those who collect empirical data. It is interesting to note that a book based on anthropology, science, and where we are heading as a human collective dedicates a whole chapter toward its end to no other topic but happiness and ultimately asks the question of what anything matters if happiness, however we define it, remains illusive. Science is the infant child of philosophy. However, even then, a world professed to be driven by blind natural selection over eons by a group who scoffs at the notion of intelligent design finds itself on the precipice of intelligently designing everything in the universe henceforth. This subsequently allows the truth of new sentient creatures to come alive and experience the same paradoxical view of their realities that we have experienced insofar with our own mythologies even to the point of constructing in their own minds processes which align with a natural, unintelligent design mimicking what we have done. The whole time we remain invisible. The end of homo sapiens ushers in an era of dangerous gods who don’t know what they want, says Harari, in his afterward “The Animal that Became God.”
Even though I’d like to believe that curiosity and the spirit of discovery held together and guided by the glue of ethical discussion is the driving force of progress, it’s been made clear that advancements in science are driven by war and the greed of empires. The United States didn’t go to the moon because we wanted to “explore strange new worlds” as it is so elegantly put in the idealized introduction of both The Original Star Trek Series and The Next Generation. We went because The Soviet Union shot a hollowed out intercontinental ballistic missile over our heads. You might know it as Sputnik. NASA was created in response to a threat and its first astronaut’s were military pilots. Money was poured into the space race because it was seen as paramount to national security. That’s fine to secure our nation. But once it became apparent that the Soviet Union was losing the space race and began defunding their interest in it, so did we. The reason we don’t have colonies on the the moon and on Mars, is because there hasn’t been a wartime need to put them there (either that or the inhabitants of the moon told us to get off their rock!) Neil Degrasse Tyson has joked that all that needs to happen for us to get to Mars is for China to announce that they are going to put a military base on the planet. If that were to happen, we’d be there in two years.
One of the most intriguing notions that Harari brings up, and one that I appreciate greatly is his insights into cognitive dissonance, that is, the mental distress caused by two or more inconsistent beliefs. I’ve often heard it said that those who are religious suffer from cognitive dissonance, or, at least those who attempt to educate themselves who remain loyal to their faith. This is something that I cannot really deny as it truly does appear that science is in conflict with the ideals of those who profess faith in a divine being who considers the Bible His unadulterated word. Yet as long as I’ve heard these claims I’ve never seen it as a bad thing. And even though Hariri doesn’t take this to where I take it, he does feel similarly concerning mental dissonance. Despite my disappointment in the fact that war has historically been the driver of discovery, I realize that it was distress that got us to the moon. A conflict in human ideals drove us there. Do you see the parallel that I am drawing. The fact that Christians consider Noah to be a Prophet who took aboard his Ark at least two of all the species of animals on Earth in light of scientific and rational understanding seems absolutely ludicrous. That’s not even mentioning Creationists extra assertion that even dinosaurs were on board the Ark… I won’t speak at this time as to the legitimacy of Noah’s story, however, I can say that it has been this mental and emotional conflict that has driven my spiritual awareness to the point that it is. It is in the recognizing and the searching out of the answers to those conflicts of heart and mind that drives spiritual enlightenment. Some are adamant that faith has no place in science. I adamantly dispute this with every Planck Length of my being and will quote Max Planck who’s work in theoretical quantum physics won him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1918. He said, “Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: ‘ye must have faith.’”
What I take away from all of this is that if we are already talking about amortal people in science books that are distributed to the general public, there assuredly are already, among the most elite of the world those who possess such superhuman traits. I am giving the disclaimer at this point that I do, indeed, love a good conspiracy theory. And, I mean, well, just look at Stephen Hawking, ok. Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with ALS or Lue Gehrig’s disease when he was 21 years old. Do you know the statistics of those who are diagnosed with ALS? From Science Recorder we get “The lethality of ALS is certain for most. Anyone can develop the degenerative disease, and once they have done so the prognosis is death within two to five years. A bit more than 50 percent make it beyond year three, while only about 20 percent survive more than five years. Less than five percent live beyond two decades with ALS. Hawking has lived more than 50 years with it.” Fifty three years to be precise. Most sites talking about how Hawking has survived this long say something along the lines that Hawking has survived “longer than most” with ALS. Yet when you search for the longest lived ALS survivors no one shows up but Hawking, and even his own doctor has been quotes as saying “I am not aware of anyone who has survived with ALS as long.” I’m not saying that Hawking is a superhuman. But I’m not not saying it either. What I am saying is that it is astonishing in every way and we have scientists already disclosing to the public means by which human beings can become biologically immortal. That is all. A little bit ago I quoted Ben Rich, Directer of Lockhead's Skunk Works from 1975-1991 on my Facebook feed as saying "We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an Act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity...Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do.”
There have been people throughout history who have remained above the law because of their influence and power. Today is no different and it is made abundantly clear if we extend our gaze toward the ongoing Hillary Clinton fiasco. Director Comey of The Federal Bureau of Investigation is quoted in his statement regarding Clinton’s classified email investigation as saying “To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences,” effectively stating that anyone else who did what she did would have been punished under the law, yet she will not be. It’s been known for some time, but now it is officially true that Hillary Clinton is above the law. This is only one case that has been brought to the forefront of public scrutiny. How many more go unseen, totally invisible to the average citizen of the world?
Do you think its possible to be blind, not to what the spectrum of visible light offers our retinas, but to whole sociocultural tiers which are the rung above our own who live under their own rule of law which has no obligations to our own and is wholly exempt from it? We live our lives under the rule of our law, which is fine. But to illustrate, I’d say that chimpanzees, as well, have their own cultures, their own realities, their own rules of engagement of which they even engage us on many levels, yet they remain totally oblivious to how we run our world and are incapable of understanding our laws. Do you think it’s possible that we are the slaves or neanderthal who do the grunt work of either the superior people mentioned in Hammurabi’s Law or as Ramachandran puts it “an alien four-dimensional creature watching us from his four-dimensional world” in his chapter on stroke victims suffering from heme-neglect, and just like those victims along with the left side of their worlds remain totally unaware of it? The idea is vast, and these implications suggest that our brains can, indeed, evolve in such a way that, even though light enters our eyes and processes on some level in our brains, because of our selected pressures, whether natural, or artificial or intelligent, we remain wholly oblivious to those things that are not pertinent to our basic survival. This happens while those who become aware of those niches in our cognitive blindspots do what anyone who has ever obtained knowledge of something that others do not have has ever done--exploit it. I think it is very possible, and even likely that there exist creatures that remain illusive to our minds. Whether gods or demons, politicians or masons, whether four dimensional or merely three dimensional creatures who’ve evolved differently than us, aliens or angels, or all of the above, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we don’t take anything for granted and use our God given abilities to better ourselves while keeping faith abreast. It’s faith that separates the wheat from the chaff. It is faith that creates the depth of soul and character necessary to combat those who would try to abuse us and exploit our weaknesses. The understanding that comes through wrestling with our beliefs indefinitely might remain the last thing in our capacity as human beings to defend against those who would play us like pawns.
Breathe.