Renelio Studio: A Mind - Body- Machine Odyssey

"2001. A Space Odyssey", by Stanley Kubrick. Scene 1. The Dawn of Man

Scarcity. Fight for natural resources or the lack of. Hominids versus quadrupeds.

A leopard killing a primate. The stronger wins.

They have to be together in groups so that they share sentinel tasks and feel stronger, compensating for their individual weakness.

But in the group, individuals emerge and fight each other.

Different groups or hordes fight among themselves for control of natural resources and territory, in this case for access to water: War

Night time: Fear. Magic. Paranoia.

The stronger element stays separated from the group. Is an antisocial.

At dawn; aesthetic perception of nature and beauty.

Technology allow to kill a stronger animal. Meat consumption provoke biological changes. Brain capacity expands as well as physical strength.

More food means a lower rate of child mortality; thus increase in population.

The one who posses technology wins the war for natural resources

The conquest of inner nature and outer nature leads to the conquest of the universe.

It may be that there is a relation between fear of darkness and intelligence. The stronger the fear of natural forces in the shape of carnivorous beasts, the more intense the quest to use reason to overcome nature and physical weakness.

Paranoia is technically different from reality testing in that the foundation of paranoid fears and suspicions are irrational or fantastic, nevertheless there is a core truth of primal fear and of survival instinct in paranoia, developed by intelligence against an hostile environment.

A hostile environment creates alertness and suspicion. Paranoia feeds intelligence and back. The more intelligence the more paranoia and those who have both are more fit for survival than those who lack it. Take this to the political realm and is no mere coincidence that there are high levels of paranoia in subjects born and raised in totalitarian regimes.

Not only there is a relation between paranoia and intelligence; there is also a relation between paranoia and creativity. Since paranoia is an activity of the imagination is easy for the person who imagine things to endow them with a material body. The one who has the capacity to cook unknown fears also has the capacity to create the characters that populate them, the tools that they use and the objects that they surround themselves with. History is full of creative paranoid and anti-social types that see danger everywhere, who are prone to isolation and alienation.

Reason symbolically appears in the form of a squarish monolith, a tri-dimensional geometrical form, an abstraction that is the product of the mind, non-existent in nature.

Awe and worship appears as a product of reason. God is a rational creation. (Feel free to doubt that statement; I sometimes doubt it too).

Reason gives way to the perception of certain objects as tools. Tools are an extension of the body and compensate for the body's weakness. Technology is power; power over nature as well as destructive power. But technology is not born of the mere use of a stick or a stone as a weapon. Technology is born when man by rational thinking is capable of tying the polished dart to the stick, making an arrow. As I read somewhere, the first real technological genius of civilization was not the one who invented the wheel, but the one that added the other three.

The lack of natural resources and control over it generates war. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in war since war generates technology and its never ending perfecting it. He who has developed the best technological weapon wins. It is not fortuitous that the link between the military, the academic and the industrial, on what is known as the industrial-military complex or the "iron triangle", has built the greatest military superpower in the world. The military is behind every major technological and scientific breakthrough in the US, from DARPA and the ARPANET giving birth to the Internet, to the ENIAC, Whirlwind and SAGE which were the precursors of the modern personal computer.

" Whirlwind and SAGE where responsible for a vast array of major technological advances. The very long list includes the following inventions:

magnetic core memory

video displays

light guns

the first effective algebraic computer language

graphic display techniques

simulation techniques

synchronous parallel logic (digits transmitted simultaneously rather than serially, through the computer)

analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion techniques

digital transmission over telephone lines

duplexing

multiprocessing

networks (automatic data exchange among different computers)

Readers unfamiliar with computer technology may not appreciate the extreme importance of these developments to the history of computing. Suffice to say that much-evolved versions of all of them remain in use today. Some, such as networking and graphic display. comprise the very backbone of modern computing" (Edwards 99-100).

The right political climate, which is the one that uses freedom as it ideological foundation, propitiate individual creation and entrepreneurship. " The rationalist who desire to submit everything to human reason is thus subjected to a real dilemma. The use of reason aims at control and predictability. But the process of the advance of reason rest in freedom and the unpredictability of human action. Those who extol the powers of human reason usually see only one side of that interaction of human thought and conduct in which reason is at the same time used and shaped. They do not see that, for advance to take place, the social process from which the growth of reason emerges must remain free from its control" (Hayek 38), It is not mere coincidence that winners are symbolic of the type of individual that is valued more in American society, they push forward innovation in the race for conquest.

The lack of peril and and possibility of annihilation results in a freeze of scientific and technological development, with the paradoxical correlation that enemy entities and enemy states are needed for survival and growth. In concrte terms, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, and the ideological-political enemies of American democracy are needed and bound to remain as long as they represent a real danger. Once the danger they pose to the system ceased to be real, they tend to disappear out of irrelevance. That's how the USRR ceased to exist and the Castro regime will too soon due to lack of credibilty as an real enemy.

Conquest lies at the heart of every major political formation. The Greeks new this better than anyone else. Thucydides wrote about it in his account of The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians. He said that "The Athenians add that they are not the first to yield to the temptation of empire, but that it has always been established for the weaker to be kept down by the stronger, and that no one with a chance to acquire something by force has ever yet been dissuaded by the argument from justice" (Bolotin 13). This line of argument is before social contract theories, is pre-modern but expres the truth of humankind facing natural forces. In this context conquest means survival. Thus there are no moral qualms for the Greeks to accept war and to value the warrior Achilles as the greatest social type.

There is nothing shameful about war. What is shameful is that at this stage in human history people and governments are still waging war among themselves. With the actual development of science and technology food scarcity and necessity should have been a thing of the past. Either a group of people and its culture will prevail among the others and unify the world population in a world government or people will rationally achieve an agreement of social harmony, a sort of global social contract that would lift humankind above the state of nature in which still live. When one of the two solutions happens man will be in condition of allocating every bit of human intelligence and creativity, and the tools of science and technology to the conquer of the cosmos and the universe. Extraterrestrial civilizations will be discovered and new wars would start.

These new wars would propel humankind into a new scientific and technological revolution, one that has already started and that will culminate with the fusion of the human and the machine or with the overcoming of the body by the machine, what Hans Moravec calls the next genetic takeover of the process of evolution that started about 100 million years ago. "Today billions of years later, another change is under way in how information passes from generation to generation. Humans evolved form organisms defined almost totally by their organic genes. We now rely additionally on a vast and rapidly growing corpus of cultural information generated and stored outside our genes -in our nervous system, libraries and most recently computers. Our culture still depends utterly on biological human beings, but which passing years our machines will become knowledgeable enough to handle their own maintenance, reproduction and self-improvement without help. When this happen the new genetic takeover will be complete. Our culture then will be able to evolve independently of human biology and its limitations, passing instead directly from generation to generation of ever more capable intelligent machinery" (Moravec 4).

" We might conceive of a civilization coming to a stand still not because the possibilities of further growth has been exhausted, but because men has so completely succeeded in subjecting all his actions and his immediate surroundings to his existing state of knowledge that there would be no occasion for
new knowledge to appear" (Hayek 38).

Humans will find extraterrestrial intelligence when they are ready; after they solve their differences and become sufficiently technologically savvy and powerful to survive an encounter of the third kind. And if humans don't solve their religious, economic and political conflicts they will perish when that encounter occurs. A hostile environment found in other galaxies or planets, and everything that comes with it, will be beneficial to a further development of human intelligence, which at that time will be fused with the machine and not dependent on human bodies. Adverse and hostile environments enforce survival skills, increasing alertness and predictability. The need to stay a step ahead of terror mobilize and expands intelligence and creativity.

Machines are not the enemy and they are not going to kill humanity. Machines are an extension of ourselves, they are ourselves at another stage of evolution. Robotic, cyborg and computer development will liberate man from his/her biological limitations.

Paul Krugman: Space Aliens Invasion Will Fix U.S. Economy

Works Cited:

Edward, Paul N. The Closed Worlds: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. The MIT P.

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Constitution of Liberty. The U of Chicago P.

David Bolotin. Thucydides. Strauss, Leo and Cropsey, Joseph. History of Political Philosophy. Third Ed. U of Chicago P.

Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Harvard UP.