Castle Of Transhumanism On Crumbling Pillars Of Humanism
By Santosh Jha
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Copyright 2024 Santosh Jha
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License Notes
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Humble Acknowledgment…
It probably is the weirdest of all realities in the cosmos…!
A reality is what it is. Then; it is observed and observance creates a subset of reality; most likely to be a coarse-grained or rundown model or version of the original reality. This observed subset of reality then has to be expressed and communicated to another ‘media’ of observance, to present a semblance of credence of its existence. Both observance and expression are inevitable because; even if Information is singular, there always are multitudes of competing media in milieus. It is the bare-basic of life-living.
This ‘expressed-communicated’ reality of a media then becomes another subset of reality, which in most probability, lands further away from the actuality of originality of reality. This subset of reality has to compete, cooperate and collaborate with vast multitude of subsets of subjective realities in the vastness of external milieus. This is the very basis of what we know and accept as Relationships, which probably stands inevitably as the most critical element in living world; especially the human world of life-living.
So, what ‘I’, as a media observe a reality, is only a subset and as I express and communicate it to ‘You’, it becomes another subset of reality. And; as you observe and experience what I express, it becomes further subset. This mechanism-process of journeying of Information in space-time dimensions creates this abstraction of Relationship between ‘I’ and ‘You’ and many such subsets of ‘I and You’. However; how much of actuality of the originality of a reality is rundown or loses out on details of Information about a reality, in these processes between different media, is almost impossible to visualize.
What my consciousness-cognition-intelligence makes out of a reality is one observational ‘model’ of reality, which ‘I’ can feel, but only in parts; seldom in totality and holism. How much and what parts of this partially ‘felt’ reality I manage to express-communicate, through the restrictiveness of language to you, is further subject to and contextualized by what your consciousness-cognition-intelligence makes out of it. How much ‘I’ lose out and add up to the actuality of originality of a reality and how much ‘You’ lose out and add up to the actuality of originality of a reality, in the process of triumvirate of observance-communication-reception, is impossible to actualize.
This weirdness of cyclic relationship of ‘Reality’, with ‘Media’, ‘Observance’ and ‘Expression’ is profound and probably the primeval pathology of cosmos. But then; it is also the most precious potential of the universe. It is a rather humble acceptance that the pathologies are embedded in the very reality of Information itself and they get unleashed and become ubiquitous as different ‘media’ begin to ‘process’ them.
Therefore; the quantum of pathologies or entropic propensities directly depends on potential of interactional relationship between information and media. Information is objective and absolute but the media is only subjective, partial and relative. Entropy and pathology are therefore inevitable but how much and how varied depends on the potential of media and its processing prowess. There probably is no known cure to it yet; the very humble acceptance of the inevitability of the finality of the pathology can mitigate the pain and problems associated with actualization of reality. This is also the gold standard of the strength and beauty of Relationship.
This probably is the ultimate eligibility of a ‘media’ and optimal potential of the processing of Observance. The humility is the ultimate eligibility and this eligibility alone unleashes brilliant potentials. The media probably can attain the required ‘agency’ to not only process ‘Information’ with this objectivity and holism about unfurling of realities but may also have this evolved ‘intelligence’ to transcend the architecture of information itself to install an exalted playfulness with pathologies in all their probabilities. This core idea has been underlined by ancient Indian philosophy of Maaya and Leela, many thousand years back.
Probably; only the human media of body-brain and its emergent, evolved, empowered sense of ‘Agency’ can do it, if it internalizes this eligibility. This eligibility is the sole basis of Humanism; which otherwise is destined to remain mired in innate-entrenched instincts of animalism, out of which it has evolved. This transcendental intelligence of the ‘media’ of human body-brain is what ancient oriental philosophy has recommended almost 3000 years back and this is what stands as the ultimate goal of Trans-humanism in its holism. Trans-humanism or post-humanism may therefore be defined as the stage of attainment of this exclusive-unique ‘Agency’ of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition, which ultimately and incorrigibly installs and imbibes this ‘transcendental intelligence’.
This humility alone is the eligibility, which extends me this stupid self-assurance and courage to write. Still; my writings could never have happened, if it didn’t have the full faith that whenever my humility knocks at your door with timidity, it is welcomed by your compassion and warmth! This 58th book of mine is a possibility, only because you magnanimously share my humility and innocence, especially while encountering the subject matter of Reality, in its holism and entirety. Only this combination of humility-compassion works in human world of life-living. Rest is animalism-tribalism. Thanks…
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At The Very Outset
It is tough to visualize; frame up and experience, a definitive cognition of ‘Self’, as an observer of Reality. Tougher it seems, to envisage the ‘Reality’ of contemporaneousness, by putting together the pieces of randomly floating information in the present-day milieus. Toughest probably is, to feel confident of the competence and credibility of the ‘Agency’ of the observance of reality, to safely and surely arrive at the true and right sense of ‘present-ness’ and the composite ‘reality’ emerging out of it. Why?
The simple summary of this situation is – a human consciousness, its individual intellect and combined cognitive capacities, is probably too insignificant and ineligible ‘media’ to successfully institute a situation or a set of emerging information as contemporary composite reality. Consciousness and cognition both being spectrum realities and together they evolving an emergent and ever-transient agency of subjective observance are factors, which always erode the possibility of definitiveness and decisiveness of a reality an individual engenders.
Moreover, reality in itself is always too complex, multidimensional and colossal to be actualized as a definitive landscape. Information is too dynamic and multidimensional; its causal plexuses are too layered to be handpicked and dovetailed as building blocks of a definite reality. And; as modern science says; a human mind as Conscious Observer is only probably good enough to just coarse-grain reality, missing out on fine-tuned details of probabilities of reality. The singular actuality of a reality therefore, always plays truant and transient between two probabilities of rough Reduciability by a conscious agency on one hand and holistic expansiveness of Irreduciability on the other.
This is probably why; it genuinely seems; reality is always at best explainable in human languages as a hypothesis or a collection of them. It seems; reality is largely understood by conscious agency of individual minds as metaphors. There is also a scientific idea, referring to the reality, as perceived by observance of consciousness, as Equivalence, which means human brain simulates macrocosmic reality as something that broadly fits into or can be clubbed into a rather microcosmic model available in the localized milieu. Consciousness seems to have the embedded design to accept ‘anything as something’; with this somethingness depending on meanings the collective intelligence installs as vehicle to simulate reality and contextualized by purpose the ambient milieu assigns to localized realities. It is rather tough to explain as how consciousness models or simulates non-experiential reality into an experiential observance.
Language itself is an architecture of metaphors to coarsely portray a rough probability of a reality; a close enough model or simulation of reality, through pre-assigned meanings and purposes. It may seem rather simple and easy to think of and perceptualize the Self and the external world one lives in, as both entities are intuitively available for abstract summarization as convenient metaphor. However, as contemporary science puts it; reality and its manifestations to individual consciousness is a spectrum actualization, resulting in shades of diverse realities. It is massively contextualized by the twin factors of experiential memory as well as the proficiency of language an individual consciousness has. Therefore, subjective realities vary so much from person to person and still remain inexpressible and non-communicable to get verified.
The coarse-graining of reality for simplification of ‘meaningfulness’ of cognition apart; there are information in complex webs in the multidimensional spectrum, which holds the potential to unleash reality in layered and probabilistic ways. Modern science approach of multi-way systems to unravel reality is what may explain this diversity and multidimensionality of reality. This seems ideal, as reality is too colossal and complex and ‘Self’ is such an insufficient ‘media’ to stand tall in front of the reality in its holism.
Life and living has never been easy and growing complexities of the contemporary living world makes it more complicated and tough. Human minds and even their collective intelligence has always been and probably shall remain too insignificant an agency to face up and stand tall vis-à-vis the colossal and complex reality, manifesting from the subatomic levels up to cosmic infinity. As some scientists put it; this struggle and challenges of individual as well as collective humanity to cope up with growing complexities of life-living as well as reality, happens to be the entrenched energy behind evolution; especially human evolution.
Evolution itself stands as the most un-understood or misunderstood reality, as it falls a usual prey to insufficiency of human language to sum up the spectrum of reality as an easy coarse-grained metaphor. Probably; the list of misunderstood realities in contemporary human world is far longer than that of un-understood ones. Thankfully; modern science; especially the beautiful symbiosis of developmental-synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, has been growingly successful in broad-basing the very idea and reality of evolution as a mechanism and spectrum of processes.
It seems; the simple mathematics is – the linearity of progression of time always adds up to the existing complexities and their challenges, ensuring thermodynamics principle of ever increasing entropy. On the other hand, simultaneous and opposite linearity of evolutionary intelligence, automatically stands as extropic counterbalance to ensure homeostatic sustenance and continuity of life. Very simply; humanity survives and thrives because of its Collective Intelligence at all operative levels, which keeps it afloat just above the increasing entropies of life and living world.
If this hypothesis is accepted as true and right; the key questions that emerge are – Is the collective intelligence of contemporary humanity truly and rightly up to the mark to tide over the cascading entropies of contemporary life-living? Secondly; is this contemporary intelligence truly collective or is it being leveraged and fork-picked by a handpicked, leaving larger humanity to lose the battle against time? Thirdly, is the available intelligence itself being galvanized to the tunes of entropic orchestrations, to ensure final annihilation of humanity in very near future?
Questions abound, depending on how one accepts reality and self, in the light of a precarious collective intelligence, available for personal wisdom. Humanity needs to look at these and many such questions and seek genuine answers, as we all speedily move into a very critical phase of emergent collective intelligence. This eBook very humbly and holistically attempts to do the same; sincerely accepting all probabilities of realities as well as the insufficiency of ‘Self’.
These questions and probably some other related ones, as well as their emergent answers form the basis of the 21st century idea and idealism of Trans-Humanism or Post-Humanism. Trans-humanism seems to be all about the credibility and competence of contemporary collective intelligence of modern humanity to go ‘beyond’ and augment the ‘limits’ of average human potentials. However; whether trans-humanism shall catapult humanity to collective success against the ever burgeoning challenges faced by existing humanism is debatable. Like all realities and ideas; trans-humanism also happens to be a spectrum reality, with so many probabilities. The very ideas of ‘beyond’ and ‘humanism’, which define trans-humanism, are saturated with conflation and conundrum.
No doubt; the bigger and more critical question is – is trans-humanism a completely novel and alternative reality in itself, ‘beyond’ and independent of the design and dynamics of contemporary humanism? Or, is it an emergent and evolving reality, randomly and subconsciously patterned to ‘fix up’ a few irritabilities; lend facilitation to certain ‘superficial’ attainments and barely tide over a few ‘innate’ weaknesses in contemporary humanism? These different shades of reality of trans-humanism need to be clearly understood.
It is a huge challenge to build a holistic and well balanced perspective about the contemporary realities of the modern day human world as the available information about so many different dimensions of human life-living is huge and very complex, It is often fractional, missing holism; even conflicting and seemingly conflated and very unscrupulously propagandist, to suit the nefarious aspirations of a powerful handful. Understanding realities and their trends, of contemporary humanism and deciphering the true and right credentials of the idea-idealism of emerging trans-humanism/post-humanism are colossal exercise for any individual observer, as one braves and waddles through surging waves of oceans of such information. This eBook and its stupid author humbly seek to attempt it, with utmost sincerity and self-discipline.
The very energy behind attempting such a difficult enterprise is to objectively and as holistically as possible, look and analyze this possible reality that modern and populist advancements in collective intelligence or wisdom of contemporary humanism actually qualifies to be referred as Trans-humanism; or at least be labeled as seeds of the possibility of Trans-humanism. This exercise is aimed at attempting to ascertain the realities of the very idea of the contemporary collective intelligence and its potential to truly lead Humanism to actual Trans-Humanism. Also; it envisages testing the premise that trans-humanism actually has ingredients to truly and rightly catapult contemporary humanity to a novel, alternative and exalted pedestal or is it just a façade for inevitable annihilation of human race; as per the hypothesis that ‘Intelligent races ultimately tend to be suicidal’.
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Intent of Content
Even before we begin to think of humanity or life-living; there happens to be a primeval inquisition and that is – What actually is Intelligence? What it stands to mean in ‘universal’ appeal and what it signifies in purely ‘human’ context of life-living, in restrictively populist cultural connotations? More importantly; can we ever think of humanism and life-living, without a deep and definitive association of humanity and its progresses with true and right Intelligence? If reality is always observer-dependent; for all practical purposes; then it seems a reasonable hypothesis that the observer and its consciousness are also primarily intelligence-dependent!
If the hypothesis that ‘Intelligent races tend to be suicidal’ is valid; it is essential to establish the ontology and epistemology of the very idea and reality of ‘Intelligence’ in its holism and complexity, to truly understand the blatant ‘conflict’ embedded in this hypothesis. If ever or in any possible way; intelligence could be associated with something as powerful and radical as annihilation or even extinction of its very upholder; there is this express need to holistically unravel all probabilities of the reality of Intelligence, as it is touted and practiced in human world, as well as the worlds beyond and beneath. Intelligence is not exclusive to humans and all species from single cell organism to complex animals have only thrived, using intelligence as energy for evolution. It is therefore important to ascertain as what element of Intelligence or criticality of its evolution in human media stands there, which makes it self-destructive and suicidal.
It is critical for 21st century humanity to demystify and liberate Intelligence from humanism, by truly ascertaining the ‘beyondness’ or transcendence, at both ends of the spectrum of human sense of intelligence. This surely seems to pave the ways for journey to trans-humanism. Thankfully; modern day developmental biology, in collaboration and symbiosis with artificial intelligence has been successfully engaging in this domain of transcendence, as they map the cognitive architecture as well as consciousness spectrum in living beings.
There seems very little doubt that Intelligence, as it is accepted today, is very much like a stupid sword, which seems nonchalant to what and whom it cuts and wounds and for what. This ascertainment of Intelligence is primary issue at hand for humanity; as it stands on the portals of Trans-humanism; for the simple reason that humanity is all set to artificially install this same populist and dominant idea and reality of ‘Intelligence’ in non-living entities; in more powerful and loaded ways. It seems; the contemporary scientific engagements in the domains of biomimetic or neuromorphic intelligence and mortal computation et al are assured ways to install and test human intelligence architectures in non-biological systems.
It is a sad reality of human progression; especially since 20th century; that advancements in scientific knowledge of realities have not bothered much to take along the philosophical questions of ‘righteousness’ and ‘purity of purposes’ of the collective wisdom. The ‘happy marriage’ of, whatever objective reality may be, with specific and definitive requirements of ‘good and right’ of collective human life-living has rarely happened in 20th century and as humanity is exponentially growing in ‘intelligence’ in 21st century, the marriage seems more in deeper crises. Most scientists are happy to say that philosophy is long dead and only a few modern day scientists have just begun to collaborate with philosophers in developmental biology and artificial intelligence fields.
Of course; contemporary humanity admits to this crisis with the idea of Intelligence, by distinguishing and comparing Intelligence with Consciousness and Intelligence with Wisdom. This use of different terms and metaphoric idealisms with populist perceptions and pragmatism of Intelligence itself suggests that contemporary collective intelligence is somehow missing the holism and perfection, which humanity believes must be there with the idea of Intelligence. The seemingly sad reality is that collective humanity is still not coming around to the hypothesis that like all realities; Intelligence is also a spectrum reality with layered and multidimensional existence. Modern humanism has to visualize intelligence, consciousness, cognition, conscientiousness, wisdom, reason, et al as one spectrum of reality, embedded in a biological or non-biological ‘media’ and not as segregated and competing ideas. Very naturally; this is some elusive success, which trans-humanism must look to attain. Thankfully; a section of science is doing it but does not seem the mainstream concern of collective wisdom of humanity.
There are far more issues and questions that need to be settled now and they shall decide where the emergent and evolving Trans-humanism shall lead humanity to, in the coming decades and centuries. In a way, it very much seems that humanity is entering its second phase of civilization, as it stands to create completely novel and alternative paradigms, posturing and even reality-architecture in 21st century. We can also say that actually, it is truly the beginning of actual human civilization as till now; humanism has very much been akin to animalism and tribalism. In a way, Trans-humanism is actually the potential of the beginning of true and right Humanism; with right quantum of objective and holistic knowledge about Organism, Reality and intelligent interactional relationship between the two.
All these emergent aspects of humanity and human life-living shall remain mired in precariousness and related troubles if contemporary humans do not settle these core and primeval issues and questions about reality, the idea and role of Intelligence in the wider scheme of reality and what ideally should be the relationship of Intelligence with Reality. This can happen only when 21st century humanity and its collective wisdom settles the seed question of what commonly and universally we all can accept Reality and Intelligence as; from the point of view of observance and beyond.
The success of this enterprise of settling these issues and question shall decide whether Trans-humanism and its defining Intelligence turns out to be suicidal or truly the beginning of real civilization of humanity. Interestingly; some modern scientists are pointing at the contemporary trouble with science as they fear, modern 21st century intelligence is suffocating and stagnating around some ‘big populist ideas’ of 20th century science; blocking the journey of intelligence to a landscape of beyondness and transcendence, which alone can engender novel and alternative truths about reality. In a way; intelligence also needs freedom from restrictiveness of consciousness-dependence; very much like reality needs freedom from observer-dependence. No doubt; all these seem too complicated and conflated and therefore, simplification also happens to be on top of the agenda of trans-humanism, to reach out knowledge-wisdom to average person. Simplification, without running down and losing out on critical details is a huge challenge; more so for a stupid like me!
It is a huge satisfaction that contemporary emergent knowledge of modern science; especially this happy collaboration between molecular biology and artificial intelligence, has very successfully installed the path-breaking vision that consciousness, cognition and intelligence et al must be accepted as spectrum of realities, emerging and functioning in different spaces and in different levels or scales of organizations of living organisms. It is now very importantly emphasized that humanity must always take into account this continuity and linearity of consciousness-cognition-intelligence in different ‘spaces’ of possible realities. This continuity and emergent progression from transcription space at gene level, physiological space at cell level, morphogenesis space at tissue and organ level to the three-dimensional space where the organism lives out its life, must be visualized in holism and integration, to characterize and define the realities of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition. This beyondness and transcendence is required not only among scientific community but also primarily among average masses of men and women.
This is not an easy task as it requires larger humanity to rise up to a stage of awareness, much beyond the current state of animalism and tribalism, perpetuated by cultural traps of ritualistic religion and pop philosophy-psychology. This is the challenge for trans-humanism. The culture of living contemporary humanity must be true and right reflection of the collective knowledge of humanity, at any point of time. Also, this culture must also be imbibed and transcripted in the mind consciousness and cognition of average men and women. Very naturally; the culture and its over-encompassibility must also be redefined and accepted as a spectrum reality, having a synchrony with traditions of past and wisdom of contemporary knowledge of collective humanity. Humanism has always missed this idealism by miles and therefore it remains a challenge for trans-humanism.
Talking about all these and putting these set of ideas in a perspective surely seems beyond an individual. I have already very humbly and sincerely admitted at the very start that the agency of an individual self is too incompetent to aggregate and process the huge amount of information to actualize the spectrum of contemporary reality about humanity and its collective intelligence. Still, I am attempting this impossible task here in this eBook with my innocence upfront, to cover up the insufficiency of my personal stupidities, for this simple reason that it may somehow bring to forefront this very need for larger humanity to talk seriously about neo-humanism, post-humanism or trans-humanism. Probably; this is the time for it or may be it shall be too late a few decades from now.
As usual, I insist and repeat here; I have always trusted the magnanimity and intellect of my beautiful readers in decoding and deciphering my intent through the content of this poor media of written-spoken words. I rely more on your magnanimity and genius to reach out the intent of my content, in optimal shape and symmetry. As always, the poverty of my intellect has the opulence of the munificence and compassion of your reception. Welcome…!
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PREFACE
It is important to understand the contemporary state of the emergent trans-humanism to have a clear picture of what it is missing and what potentials it envisages for future of humanity. There may be two broad approaches to journey the higher and better potentials of humanity in future. First approach can be to truly understand and list out key troubles and weaknesses of contemporary humanism and sincerely work to get rid of them, in terms of structural changes and reorientation in notions of consciousness-cognition-intelligence et al at both individual as well as collective levels. This itself may be a true and right beginning of the possible journey to the potentials of trans-humanism or post-humanism in future.
The second approach is to forget about current problems of humanism, as they are already beyond any possible solution and only focus on such novelties of designs and means to augment certain and specific potentials of humanity; especially at individual level; ignoring collective excellence. It seems, very clearly; this second approach is the contemporary theme of human progress in 21st century. The current propensities of trans-humanism looks like aiming at this later approach and that too with more individualistic insinuations, ignoring collective uplift to focus more at individuation of potentials. This anyways seems the easy possibility and also suits to the contemporary dominant culture of marketability, profiteering and corporate monopolization.
This truly seems the embedded inadequacy in the contemporary outlook of upcoming potentials of trans-humanism or post-humanism. This idealism of cultural or civilizational approach to trans-humanism largely seems elusive, primarily because of the contemporary pathologies of massive inequalities and massive political distrust among nations, in modern day human world. It is very clear; only a handful individuals has the required wherewithal to afford the rewards of trans-humanism. This essentially is the core and singular deficiency and malaise with journey of humanism so far.
In the last 60-70 years, humanity has achieved loads of successes in truly augmenting the wellness and potential of humans but they have largely been available and accessible to a handful. The small minority of individuals, who have the money and intellectual resources, have been successful in enjoying the proceeds of brilliant advancements in science, technology and economic prosperity; even as large majority of the contemporary 7 plus billion humans have neither the awareness nor resources to even access them. Individuation has massacred the wellness of collectivity. Add to it the criminal corporate intentionality of profiteering by promoting income-resource inequalities in societies and monopolizing businesses.
The saddest and most tragic aspect of this contemporary reality of massive inequality in modern human world is that of ‘intellectual’ inequality in almost all cultures, which is far more accentuated and widespread, compared to ‘material’ inequality. The intellectual poverty of larger population, even more dominant than poverty of income-wealth, is many times more detrimental for humanity as poverty of intellect makes this small and weak humanism subservient to the powerful instincts of animalism-tribalism. This poverty of intellect has persisted and even worsened in last few decades; even as poverty of income-wealth has had some respite.
The tragedy remains that in the last few decades; both income-wealth as well as scientific knowledge has increased exponentially; yet, intellectual poverty has gone up, even as material poverty is slightly going down. In fact, if compared to the income-wealth; knowledge and scientific wisdom of collective humanity has augmented many times more yet; there have been many times more new billionaires and millionaires than new powerful intellectuals. It also seems that growing money-wealth is usurping and encroaching upon the dwindling landscape of intellect. Interestingly; money begets more and easy moneys but the same doesn’t seem true about intellect.
This situation, even in 21st century human world, has resulted in a bizarre and scary reality, where the 7 plus billion people on earth are living in different cultural-civilizational timelines. Vast majority of humans are still living in 16th century mentality, cultural practices, consciousnesses and cognition, some are in 19th and only a handful are lucky and resourced enough to keep up with the contemporaneousness of 21st century cognition, consciousness and intellect. However; all 7 plus billion people are living in 21st century desires and pursuits of economic and technological resources. The 16th, 19th and 21st ‘time-lines’ and their manifestations exist simultaneously in consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition of most humans and represent a bizarre spectrum of conflational and contradictory life-living in most contemporary cultures. Many humans may be living out the 21st century life in terms of income-wealth and their modern-day purchasing-consuming landscapes; yet, most of them are mentally and attitudinally either in 19th century landscapes or regressing even beyond in past. It is tragic that only a very small number of men and women actually qualify for the criteria of humanism, as mass majority still fall in the bracket or spectrum of tribalism and even animalism, as mass intellectual poverty sways and sweeps humanity.
It is this hypothesis; it is this ‘suspected reality’ of contemporary human world and humanity, which needs to be tested, accepted and then only the collective intellect of humanity can shape up the true and right potentials of trans-humanism. This eBook dwells upon the hypothesis that lofty and dreamy architectures of the castle of trans-humanism cannot be imagined and built up on the crumbling pillars of contemporary humanism and it is what the modern human world reality points out at. There are questions and issues at hand for contemporary humanity to ask, if it anyways thinks of journeying the true and right potentials of trans-humanism. Or, as many modern minds think; this trans-humanism itself shall be the agent in total annihilation of humanity in near future. If in any possible way, ‘intelligence can be suicidal’; then it is critically important that contemporary humanity unravels the dynamics of Intelligence first, before augmenting it to a level and delegating it to non-biological models, which can be an invitation to Frankenstein Syndrome.
The difficult part of this hypothesis is not about how and what questions are asked in true and right ways. More critical is the fact that the contemporary human world and its reigning collective intelligence and populist global consciousness have to be looked upon and assessed with a holistic and integrative cognition of prevailing reality. For this to happen, it shall be crucial that this cognition takes into full and poised account, all shades of intelligences, consciousnesses and realities that define and populate the contemporary humanism.
As admitted at the very start of the eBook; this enterprise is huge and very complex as contemporary human world realities are deep and wide. Also; much of the latest and emergent intelligences, consciousness and realities of contemporary human world are still latent, hidden and almost invisible beneath the overboard populist and buoyant culture. Still, the author very humbly wishes to attempt this tough exercise in this eBook to test and validate this hypothesis. It is aimed at having a clear picture of the future of humanity, as it is set to enter the inevitable journey of trans-humanism or post-humanism in very near future.
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CHAPTER 1
Contemporary Culture, Scammed Intelligence and Crippled Humanism
There seem two broad dimensions of the embedded troubles with the reality of Intelligence in contemporary human world, which the emergent trans-humanism has the challenge to solve. First is the fact that only a handful of humans lead the enterprise of innovations and augmentation of knowledge through rigors of scientific researches and experiments. Rest of mass majority of humans has no or very little idea and interest in contemporary and emergent scientific intelligence and knowledge. It is only the application part of the technology, derived from the new and emergent science, which reaches to masses, as technology is profit making exercise and consumable bits of the new reality.
Science as mechanism-process of knowledge and objectivity is freely available for anyone to grab and imbibe but technology has a heavy price, as it is usually patented by big profit making corporations. Very naturally; only a handful of resourced men and women afford it. Technology however never ever unravels the embedded intelligence of scientific knowledge. Most humans use smart phones but 99 percent of them do not bother to know the embedded science behind the technology. It is always easy to acquire new technologies as the moneys required to buy them comes easier and there are discounts and loans available to enhance affordability. The new scientific knowledge and wisdom is free of cost; does not require a penny to acquire them yet; it is not desired even by the wealthiest, as the intellect needed to ‘buy’ them does not come easy and there are no discounts and loans. Therefore, holistic and totality of intelligence seldom reaches masses; only convenience and consumption reaches to all and that too is affordable for very few individuals at heavy prices.
Secondly; science as knowledge and wisdom is great for humanity in general, not primarily because it creates many smart technologies for wellness of human beings. It is because science and its objective-logical wisdom about realities have deep and lateral potentials to alter, augment and empower the individual consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition and that of collective contemporary culture. This however rarely happens. We can probably quantify how much the science of quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence has augmented the capacities and life-living of average person through different technologies emanating out of them. However; the core ideas and wisdom behind the novel and alternative reality, which the new sciences have unraveled to humanity has very negligibly impacted the mindsets, cognition and consciousness of average men and women. The contemporary collective populist cultures do not seem to have imbibed or accommodated these novel and alternative realities at all.
In totality, it seems; the core idea of Intelligence in modern human world is all about the mental ability to be successful in acquiring skills that brings in moneys and power to assure comfort and consumption. Intelligence as means to journey the roads to augment-empower consciousness-cognition is largely neglected. This in a way ensures a bizarre situation where the body acquires the 21st century material successes, even while the mind keeps lingering with 19th century failures. This split and incongruous individuality leads to a culture where Humanism stands only as products, gadgets and services in markets and economy in general. Humanism stands only as a marketable and consumable idealism and this idealism too is available only to a handful because of massive inequality of incomes and resources in contemporary human world.
It is also worth mentioning that as contemporary cultures and populist attitudes are conditioned and maneuvered mostly by politics, religion and fashionability; the science, scientific attitude and its wisdom of objectivity-logicality has failed completely in impacting the cultures as well as the populist mindsets and temperament. The political system and politicians never like to introduce and welcome any change in collective mindsets and cultures, as it can harm their chances to win elections and remain in power. Rather, the politicians usually attempt to keep masses confused and abstracted about reality. It suits their winability and dalliance with power.
The economy is pretty happy selling technologies, without ever bothering to allow any change in awareness levels of masses about the true potentials of the actual science behind these technologies. Religion anyways is always averse to logic and rationality. As the politics, religion and economy dominate cultures and attitudes; wisdom and intellect of true science and its advancements never attain the leadership position in cultures and therefore remain confined to a handful of aware men and women. Science and its mindset truly expect and popularize holism and integrated approach to the realities of the life and living world. However, polity, religion and economy always ensure that even science is seen and accepted only as parts and that too with its fractional populist side.
It is also hugely important to understand and accept the true and right meaning of science. It has to be accepted that science is more about a state and orientation of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition, towards the idea of reality, in its holism and entirety. It has to be approached as a mindset and attitude towards ‘Self’, life-living realities as well as all possible realities of the cosmos in general. Beyond the populist perception of science as branches of human study and exploration, it should be viewed as an individual as well as collective consciousness-cognition, which is open to and proactively receptive to all possible novelty and alternative dimensions of realities, which is logically and causally unraveled with optimum objectivity and measurability.
What modern contemporary science, especially the emergent knowledge in the fields of developmental biology and artificial intelligence has unraveled is this very core need for average men and women to visualize and imbibe Intelligence in the completely new light. This has the potential to have a true, right and holistic cognition of reality – both life-living realities as well as cosmic one. If post-humanism or trans-humanism is to have any meaning in near future; it has to come through acceptance and popularization of the idea of ‘Spectrum of Intelligence’, in different spaces other than the three-dimensional space, which average human consciousness experiences and has the cognition of. It has to be accepted that most of the troubles and pathologies of contemporary humanism and existing human cultures emanate out of the faulty, restricted, scammed and propagandist perceptions of Intelligence. This in turn scams the reality, most average consciousnesses of men and women experience and have the cognition of, leading to irrational and illogical dispositions. This needs elaboration and deep understanding.
Since the inception of human civilization and settled human cultures, humanity has advanced its intelligence-knowledge-wisdom in two broad domains. First is the domain of understanding everything outside human body-mind and life-living and second is unraveling everything within it. In other words, the former meant exploring immediate nature and extending the quest to the vast cosmos. The later meant decoding human consciousness and extending the search to the minutest of human behavior. The exploration of possible realities in both the domains were harmonized and integrated by one singular ‘belief system’ in all cultures across different geographies on earth. This singular hypothesis was and still largely remains the Idea of God or one super cosmic agency, which presides over both the domains and whose ‘design’ and discretion, pervades both the domains. Very naturally, human intelligence tried its level best to hypothesize reality as some singular entity and therefore unified everything, from human life to cosmic infinity.
In broad terms, since early civilizational stages till today, reality has remained segmented in two domains – one physical and other biological. All throughout human journeys in time, there have been efforts to synchronize and integrate cosmology and evolution to present a common reality for humanity. Since early civilization to modern times, all cultures have remained a botched up picture, painted by the broken and precarious brush of hypotheses about cosmology and evolution. All through these advancements in understanding of the two domains and creation of different hypotheses; the centrality of the idea and idealism of God or a central super agency has remained unchanged. The domains of physics and its cosmological knowledge as well as biology and its evolutional gameplans have remained full of gaps, as the finality of reality is still missing by many yards. This is one aspect of trouble of humanism; a big one, needing detailed elaboration but we do not have the space here to do so.
Another aspect and probably the more important one, is how cultures are shaped up and what realities average men and women actually live out in their daily life-living. So, on one hand humanity is still struggling with finality of the ultimate and actual reality, as contemporary intelligence is still not able to fill up the gaps in unraveling every detail in the domains of cosmology and evolution (the inside and outside body-mind realities). On the other hand, the populist cultures and contemporary life-living largely remain oblivious of and even averse to whatever intelligence or knowledge collective humanity has acquired through painful and painstaking researches. The cultures and daily life-living accept and relishes only that miniscule portion of contemporary intelligence, which is consumable. Cultures and normal routine life-living do not imbibe science and its advancements but happily consume all technologies that emanate out of the scientific intelligence. This gap is far more and bigger trouble for humanity.
The persistent gap between true and actual reality and contemporary intelligence of modern day collective humanity to unravel it is one aspect, which itself is a big problem because this critical gap leaves many very important questions about humanity and its very existence unsolved and unresolved. However, far more catastrophic and self-destructive is the gap between contemporary collective intelligence of humanity and the practical and consumable intelligence of cultures and that of average men and women. These two ‘gaps’ together create most of the pathologies of contemporary humanism as they allow a stream of stupidities, hypocrisies and criminalities to fill in the gaps and voids in modern life-living.
As if the ‘gaps’ and their avalanching troubles are not enough threats for sanity and sustenance of humanity; modern cultures have cultivated many enemies, which ensure that collective intelligence of humanity never ever gets a chance of installing order and peace in human life-living. It is a shame and cruelty of utmost nature that the engines of modern cultures are not science and scientists but corrupt-criminalized politicians and profit-hungry monopolistic corporations. This in a way means that the two engines of worst of animalism-tribalism are driving the train of humanism. It is therefore no wonder that they lead modern cultures to deeper darkness of mediocrity and ignorance.
The structural plexus of this functional model of contemporary humanism and its pathologies have to be clearly unraveled to understand as why contemporary humanity is living in dangerously failed cultures, with deep roots of corruption and criminality. It has to be understood that if these pathologies and their malaises are not cured, post-humanism or trans-humanism shall fail too and shall only augment-empower worse depravity-criminality. Rather gains of trans-humanism shall become a far more potent suicidal tool for humanity.
This fractured humanism; with its majority population still lingering in life of animalism-tribalism; living out their lives with consciousnesses and cognitions akin to that of 15th-16th century humans, is a dangerous landscape for the onset of trans-humanism. This animalism-tribalism, embedded deep and wide in contemporary humanism is majorly inept and hypocritical-corrupted-criminalized to handle the highly critical technologies and knowledge, which the very sensitive intelligence of trans-humanism is all set to come up with. More dangerously; the leadership of the contemporary human world remains with those elements, which are the worst manifestations of the pathologies of animalism-tribalism. This surely seems to pave the ways for the hypothesis that ‘intelligent races become suicidal’.
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CHAPTER 2
Pathologies of Contemporary Humanism
At the very outset, if we have to understand the pathologies and their plexus of troubles for contemporary humanism, we have to delve deeply into the very intricate difference between ‘life’ in its entirety and ‘human life’ in its limited civilizational and cultural landscape. We need to understand and accept that life is a value-neutral reality and consciousness-cognition-intelligence is a spectrum reality, which precedes human life and human consciousness-cognition-intelligence. This hypothesis presupposes that if we truly wish to design and construct post-humanism; we must very carefully and objectively understand and accept realities in pre-humanism world; especially at cosmic levels, well beyond earth and humans. These realities then have to be juxtaposed with the set of realities, which the ‘human’ life-living entails and places as either opposed to or as novel to ‘other than’ human realities.
The differences between two sets of realities of lives are stark and deep; yet the core architecture and functionality have explicit commonality. The value-specificity in human world, as against value-neutrality in worlds ‘other than’ human, is essentially and exclusively a reality that seems to have no parallel in entire universe. The meaning, discretion and purpose et al, assigned to and ascribed to all shades of realities, are exclusively human creation. They are purely civilizational and cultural ideas and realities. They emanate predominantly out of the ‘context’ of observance, which the very restrictive ‘media’ of human body-brain engenders, vis-à-vis the very complex external milieus, majorly constructed by humans.
The universe, life itself in its entirety and consciousness-cognition-intelligence before human life-living are perfectly ‘value-neutral’. What does this mean? It means; the good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly et al, are realities neither in physics nor in biology. Reality is just reality in cosmic construct and as observers, humans have created all ‘meanings’, all ‘purposes’ and have assigned the culturally suitable or ‘observer-oriented’ terminologies to realities as perceived by their media of body-brains, very restrictively expressed in terms of the metaphoric medium of language.
The cosmos and evolution are guided by energies of causations, which most probably have nothing to do with whatever ‘meanings’ and ‘rationality’ created and upheld by humans in cultural landscapes; through the metaphors of languages. The causality, which runs as cardinal rule or law in nature and cosmos, does not fit in human landscape of cultural life-living. Rather, the meanings and values, created and lived out by humans, are very often set of ‘antitheses’ to causalities of cosmos and evolution. This hypothesis of ‘antithesis’ is critical to ‘observance’ in human context as it is this antithesis, which is the core basis of cultures-civilizations and largely makes human consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition as ‘aberrant’ and ‘unique’ to the actuality of reality in its entirety of spectrum.
Philosophy and specially the philosophy of faith, along with the dominant psychologies that are embedded in them, seeking to unravel causalities in cosmos and evolution, are all exclusively human cultural reality; observed and visualized from the perspective of ‘specificity of meanings’, exclusively created by human media of body-brain; through the ‘Symbolization of Information’ in external milieus in terms of different linguistic models. The physics, biology and the chemical architectures that run through the cosmos, have no philosophy or psychology and they do not subscribe to any ‘causality’ that humans seek to ‘unravel’ through its emergent consciousness, cognition and intelligence; especially in collective cultural life-living landscapes. The very existence of the idea or theme of epistemology and ontology is exclusive to human world of life-living. In simple terms; whatever is ‘human’ in connotations and symbolizations; it stands as ‘exclusive and aberrant’ observance in the entire cosmos. This specificity of the very ‘label’ of ‘human’ and its manifestations needs to be understood and accepted.
That is why when we seek to understand human pathologies; we have to understand the defining factor of Humanism, its ‘specific and skewed’ cultural-civilizational evolution and its language trajectories, as something exclusive and exceptional in the spectrum of Life and Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence. The idea of human reality as ‘antitheses’, in the entirety of ‘thesis’ of nature, is the primary understanding for unraveling of Reality. All these seeds and germinates this exclusive observational entity of epistemology and ontology, which has no existence in infinite universe outside human landscapes. Drop and kick the ‘human’ aspect or dimension out of the cosmos and evolution and there is nothing good, nothing bad. Remove human consciousness-cognition-intelligence from the spectrum of cosmic consciousness-cognition-intelligence and there is nothing wrong and nothing right. Sans ‘human’, there is no ‘creator’, no ‘creation’ – no God, no Devil. Every reality sans human is pure information and value-neutral. The ‘human’ dimension is the actual ‘big bang’ in the universe, which seeded, germinated and blossomed all realities; even the reality of big bang hypothesis of the beginning of all realities and universe itself. May be, it is the ‘human’ observance, which feels that cosmos wished it to be unraveled. The cosmos itself may not have such a ‘wish’. It may purely be the human ‘wishfulness’ that extends raison d’etre to the spectrum of all wishfulnesses in the universe.
The human incidence and its civilization-cultural realities, as juxtaposed to cosmic-evolutional causalities have to be understood in all possible details and holism. The very idea, basis and juxtaposition of Humanism as one huge and complex antithetical context or ‘Converse Causality’, in the entirety of cosmic construct has to be understood in details to truly and holistically design the successful architecture of Trans-Humanism. The centrality and indispensability of ‘culture’ in all shades of meanings and purposes of ‘Realities’ has to be assigned its rightful place in designing the architecture of Trans-Humanism. Therefore; culture and its unique evolutional trajectory has to be understood in holism.
It is not easy to distinguish and contrast the ‘generic’ ideas of life, consciousness, cognition, intelligence and even culture with ‘specific’ realities of human life-living, human consciousness-cognition-intelligence and human culture. It has to be very clearly understood that the ‘reality’ of modern ‘human’ in its entirety and holism is something of a huge deviation and unique actuation from everything ‘other’ in the scheme of cosmos and evolution. It may seem stupid and surreal to insist again and again but it is critical that humanism and its spectrum of life-consciousness-cognition-intelligence be valued as some aberration, more as antithesis of reality, beyond and exclusive to generic reality.
This hypothesis about humanism, standing out something as an aberration and exclusivity in stark contrast and antithesis to everything else in cosmic and evolutional has to be understood in details for clear and holistic perspective about what trans-humanism can be or must-be in very near future. It is such a joy and satisfaction to admit that if we accept the hypothesis that ‘humanism’ is something happening and evolving only in the last century; this very hypothesis has become possible and even testable only because of the intelligence of modern contemporary science in the last hundred years. It is modern knowledge of human body-mind, its mechanics and the modern ability to unravel them at both micro and macro levels have made it possible to understand the true and right reality of humanism.
There is an emergent element in modern contemporary human reality, which has made possible to test this hypothesis about exclusivity of humanism in overall cosmic scheme of realities. The exponential evolution of this critical emergent element has happened only in the last few decades and therefore, it is such a joy and satisfaction that contemporary humans; even a stupid like me can test why ‘human’ label and its dynamics are aberration and exclusivity in cosmic spectrum of realities. This element is Artificial Intelligence.
First time in history of humanism; humans have been growingly and exponentially becoming successful in simulating its own intelligence. This facility to artificially ‘simulate’ something purely human, through a non-human ‘media’, many times more galvanized for information processing than average human media of brain, has been a huge empowerment for humanity. This has truly helped in having better and holistic understanding of consciousness-cognition and boosted epistemological-ontological enterprise. This must be truly internalized to understand its importance.
It has always been the toughest and therefore a constantly failed exercise for an average human to understand its own and others’ consciousness-cognition-intelligence. It still remains challenging to fully understand one’s own ‘Self’ and that of ‘Others’. How a human brain models realities to have a feel and experience of self and that of others has always been shrouded in mystery-mysticism. This failure of understanding the spectrum of realities of self and others has been the primary and predominant reason for complete and persistent collapse of cultures in all ages. There is embedded impossibility in objective observance of the subjective observer’s self-observation. Externalizing and delegating it to an artificial agency, with more galvanized information processing for simulating realities added elements of possibility for the first time in human history.
It has to be understood and accepted that the very success of cultural life-living is based on defined and disciplined relationship of ‘self’ with all ‘others’ as well as milieus, in collective life-living. This presupposed that humanity fully and rightly understood the reality of ‘self’, how this ‘self’ engenders subjective reality and how it stands in relationship with subjective realities of ‘others’ as well as objective realities of the external milieus. This has never happened in the long history of humanity as this very understanding of ‘self’ was and still predominantly remains fake, fudged, partial and even scammed. Very naturally; the very basis of success of cultures and humanism remains scammed and failed.
First time in history of humanity; the artificial intelligence wisdom has enabled a deep and detailed understanding of ‘self’ and ‘others’ by successfully simulating human consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition in a non-living media. It is also a probability in coming few years that the artificial intelligence shall fully peep through the consciousness of a person and dish out its details. This is something a human has always dreamt but never attained. So far, humans have only been partially successful in creating a rather shaky and cranky bridge between the consciousnesses of two people to understand each other and at most times, average human does everything possible to burn even this crumbling bridge to trigger loads of troubles in relationships. This breakthrough shall be a huge leap forward in history of humanity and may finally be the very basis of a novel and alternative model of culture as well as humanism.
This artificial intelligence thing and its synthetic universe is a huge enterprise for humanity and it seems to have the potential to save humanity from the inevitable extinction from ‘suicide’; even though it may itself look like a ‘killer’ in myopic insight. It is not easy to understand and accept that artificial intelligence is not about how a machine or a non-living entity can have consciousness-cognition-intelligence like biological beings, especially humans. Rather, it is primarily about how consciousness-cognition-intelligence can have a spectrum of realities, amenable even to a machine or non-living entity, which average humans do not and cannot have. The artificial intelligence actually does not test a machine’s intelligence rather it tests the ‘attainability’ of the limits and spectrum of human consciousness-cognition-intelligence itself. The artificial intelligence in a sense tests the epistemology and ontology of the spectrum of Intelligence itself, to have a better and holistic understanding of the potentials as well as pathologies of human intelligence.
It is this critical element of human intelligence attempting to ‘quantize’ or ‘digitize’ the extreme horizons and spectrums of its own intelligence in a non-living entity, which has extended this hugely crucial opportunity of creating a potent vantage-point, for humanity to unravel the true and right nature of humanism and its exclusivity in cosmic scheme of realities. This artificial intelligence enterprise and its exponential growth of knowledge, in proactive collaboration with evolutionary and developmental biology, seems the sole probability, which stands out as savior of human inevitability of extinction by self-destruction. As we have discussed earlier; if the hypothesis says that ‘intelligent races become extinct in 1000 years of civilization by self-destruction’, then it is crucial that the very idea and reality of the term Intelligence is understood in entirety and holism. Artificial intelligence and its exponential evolution seem to help in achieving this goal.
The artificial intelligence architecture and information technology clearly highlights the fact that fear of self-destruction and suicidal behavior emanate out of the failure of Humanism itself, which humanity designed but could never implement in its excellence. The artificial intelligence underscores the failure of cultures as the breakdown and malfunction of set of ‘aberrant’ or ‘antithetical’ consciousness-cognition-intelligence, which humanism had proposed for successful and sanitized life-living in the otherwise ‘meaningless-purposeless’ universe. It has the embedded potential to make humans see and visualize as why and how humanism is an aberration and exclusivity in cosmic construct and if trans-humanism has to happen; it shall be reconstructed and remodeled on this very hypothesis of its aberration-exclusivity. This is a potential and probability as artificial intelligence has demystified the very idea and spectrum of consciousness-cognition-intelligence. It has engendered a model of ‘intelligence’, which can for the first time look at and evaluate human intelligence objectively and holistically.
It is in the light of this aberration and exclusivity that human consciousness, cognition and intelligence have to be understood and accepted. The very rarity, novelty and antithesis of everything ‘human’ has to be assigned its true and right place and pedestal in the colossal fabric of reality as expressed in cosmic landscape as well as in evolutional landscape on our earth. In fact; the very idea and reality of ‘evolution’ has to be understood and accepted in its holism and entirety to bring home this realization that specificity of ‘human evolution’ in itself is a rarity, exclusivity and aberration in the very scheme of generic evolution on earth.
It very clearly seems that this fact has always been either missed or understated that incidence of ‘Human’ and its long journey to philosophized model of Humanism, over the artificially curated and merchandized landscape of cultures, is an island reality; standing floating above on an ocean of evolution of consciousness-cognition-intelligence in vast variety of species of organisms in billions of years. This alone can help to understand the true and right nature and extent of human pathologies and their evolution in the last few thousand years.
The seeds of human pathologies may be embedded and entrenched in generic consciousness-cognition-intelligence of cosmos and evolution but their expressions and manifestations in their contemporary forms and firmament happened because of this exclusivity and aberration of ‘human’ consciousness-cognition-intelligence. The good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust, moral and immoral et al, are not ‘generic’; they are exclusively ‘specific’ to human cultures and civilization. They have no meaning and locus standi outside what pertains to humans. The pathologies of humanity are strictly the outcomes of ‘failure’ of proposed ‘meanings’ and purposes in human cultures as outside human landscape, all pathologies are just value-neutral Information. Pathologies happened and prospered as humanity proposed the ‘uniqueness’ and then failed massively in sustaining them. In fact; humanity proposed and they themselves disposed them.
This critical context of the element or reality of ‘human’ as some aberration and rarity in cosmic and evolutional construct unravels the true genesis of all human pathologies, as dominating and proliferating in all contemporary cultures in varying extent and variations. Also; it clearly establishes as why it is the ‘human’ consciousness-cognition-intelligence, which is feared as threat to humanism, more than any external eventualities in cosmic expanse and evolutional landscape. This explains the very hypothesis that ‘Intelligent races turn suicidal’. The element of suicidal disposition truly emanates out of the fact that it is the humanization of intelligence, which defeats and annihilates its own design and architecture. It lays out as why and how ‘Intelligence’, when it avtars as ‘human’, evolves the potentials of self-annihilation; as very visible and perceptible in contemporary human world. The ‘human’ spectrum of realities has simultaneous potentials of God as well as the Devil. Outside ‘human’ spectrum of realities, everything is absolutely value-neutral.
It is human intelligence, not generic intelligence of cosmos or evolution, which is feared, when in 21st century humanity is all set to assign it to the non-living entity. Artificial intelligence is no threat until it is non-human but it is feared that machines may have consciousness-cognition-intelligence akin to ‘humans’ and it may then eliminate ‘humans’; as humans eliminate fellow humans in failed cultures of contemporary human world, to stay clean of any possibility of competition to enjoy the monopoly of resources.
It is therefore critical that we delve deep into this element or critical context of ‘human’ in the overall scheme of consciousness-cognition-intelligence. It is a very intricate and very subtle set of mechanisms-processes, which alters the tone and rhythm of generic consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition, to transform them into some specificity, which is typically, exclusively and aberrantly ‘human’. The modern breakthroughs in contemporary science helps us understand the subtleties of these mechanisms-processes, which switches over the generic to specific and in turn engenders all potentials of spectrum of realities in human life-living world. This needs to be understood well and in its holism.
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CHAPTER 3
The Core Conundrum
For humanity, since the very inception of civilization, the primary riddle has been its own life and its relationship with the huge spectrum of realities in cosmos. Very naturally; the early philosophy and later science have always been interested in unraveling the ‘mysteries’ of the realities of Self and the Cosmos. For humans, the core conundrum has been to unravel the reality of self or consciousness as it is innate to consider them as the sole observer in the cosmos, which has the mental or cognitive eligibility to bother about the question of reality and its relationship with self.
Moreover; humans instinctively feel themselves not only as the ‘consumers’ of reality but also the ‘manufacturers’ of reality. Human evolution in its ambient milieus has been a long but linear journey on the road to gradual empowerment of Self, vis-à-vis the tough realities it faced, to successfully alter and reconstruct realities for survival optimization and comfortable life-living. This uplifts their embedded sense of protagonist and observer of reality, exclusive and unique only to them in the entire universe.
The trouble of humanity has always been that humans could never know and understand the substrate and its intricate-subtle subconscious-unconscious bio-chemical and bio-electrical mechanisms-processes, which in long course of evolution engendered this mystical sense of protagonist and observer in the self and instituted qualia or subjective personal experiences. Only modern science in the last few decades has begun to facilitate this knowledge but it is yet to be fully deciphered in complete details.
This facility of modern science has been possible in the last few decades only because not only it has discovered this critical knowledge but has also developed a completely novel language and vocabulary, to describe these crucial ‘substrate’ mechanisms-processes. The big trouble is; this new knowledge and language are truly very difficult for average person to understand and vast majority of humans instinctively believe, ‘what they can’t understand is not actually a reality and therefore, they should not be bothered about’. This generic stupidity that ‘what I cannot experience and understand simply does not exist and has no meanings’ is specific pathology of human sense of protagonism and observance. This stupidity and ensuing reluctance to face reality in its holism has created scammed consciousness and self. Naturally; most men and women even in 21st century human world have ‘Scammed Self’ and therefore fake-fudged-partial-propagandist sense of reality of observance and protagonism.
This makes the idea of ‘observer’ as a spectrum reality and therefore realities for different humans remain different and subjective. As this sense of observer and protagonist is too powerful a subjective experience and there has never been a ‘bridge’ between two humans to share and exchange the exactness of two different landscapes of realities they hold as true and right, there is persistent conflicts and competitiveness to enforce one set of realities over others.
This preponderant aversion to holism and expansiveness of Reality is pure animalism-tribalism and definitively antagonistic to the very idea of humanism. This gap between what average untrained and un-evolved human being experiences and believes and what he or she does not accept and actualizes but truly exist as reality, has been the core pathology in all human cultures in all timelines. This gap, as a deep pathology, engenders a dysfunctional and dystopian system of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition in most humans, which kills the very premise of culture and civilization, as proposed by humanism.
There is a critical cyclicality of self, reality and information, which lies at the very roots of humanism and failing to understand it, creates the core conundrum of the journey of unraveling self as well as reality. It is critical to understand that humanity cannot understand self or consciousness until the idea and reality of life and dimensions of living entities are understood in its holism, entirety and universalism. Similarly; reality cannot be understood by humans if the very idea and reality of the ‘observer’ or ‘protagonist’ as media to process information is not understood and unraveled in its holism, entirety and universalism. Moreover; this very crucial reality of self or consciousness cannot be understood if the substrate mechanisms-processes of body-brain are not fully understood. Therefore; the key to this cycle is the true and right Information; about realities of self as well as life, within the spectrum of all cosmic realities.
As contemporary science of artificial intelligence and developmental biology et al have begun to grow exponentially and take primacy in human intellectual landscape in 21st century; this critical idea of spectrum and scaling of life architectures as ‘media’ and reality as representations of Information in different media have come to the centre-stage of human journey to unravel Self and Reality. The critical information is only just beginning to come up with precision and sufficiency. Contemporary intelligence has established as how it is the spectrum of different media in the scaling of living organisms, which intercepts and interprets information in different representations to engender the shades of cognitions of reality, as per the different constructs of the varied media and their information processing capacities and memory threshold. This requires detailed understanding.
There is another aspect of the trouble of cognition of reality by the media of different consciousness, on the scaling of different organisms. Despite best of advancements in information processing technology, one media of consciousness of a human being, simply cannot traverse and penetrate the cognition and consciousness of other media. It can only roughly interpret other cognitions, very similar to how it very subjectively and coarsely interprets reality by interpolation and extrapolation of whatever available information it has of other media or milieus.
In fact, the media of consciousness of a human being also cannot journey and fully unravel its own cognition and internal information processes. There are billions of subtle and intricate bio-chemical information processing routines, simultaneously going on within the body of a person but the person knows and experiences only a few. This is the crucial substrate, the detailed knowledge of which is beginning to grow exponentially in last few decades.
Modern science also tells us as how individual media of consciousness coarse-grains whatever little available information it has about self and simply experiences its own reality by creating a rough model of individuality; very similar to how and what it does with other media and milieus. This is a ‘trap’, a scam; the ‘big lie’ that most human live out and still cannot understand and admit. Cognition of reality for an individual is a function of available information, which its consciousness has the inventory of and therefore; a person is always very sure of what reality is; even when what he or she accepts reality as is only subjective and personal to him or her.
This subjectivity is also majorly contextual to the location of the observing consciousness in the larger milieu, the overview of which always remains inaccessible to an average person. This has huge impact on the restrictiveness of cognition of reality by the observing consciousness, which an individual does not usually experience.
As he or she has no means to fully realize what reality other consciousnesses have the cognition of, there is no available way to realize the trap or scam or falsehood one lives. Humans have developed the media of language to exchange information about self and its consciousness-cognition-intelligence but this media of languages also is a very poor media of expression-communication and most people are very bad at it in contemporary cultures. At best; language can express coarse-grained meanings but never the experience to others. To say, apple is sweet, communicates the meaning of a shade of reality about apple but it does not convey the experience of the spectrum of sweetness.
This core trouble of Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence in generic sense as well as in specificity of what can be summed up as ‘human’ has to be factored in, when we think about the very idea and reality of humanism. Very naturally; if there has to be any semblance of post-humanism or trans-humanism; it must overcome this core trouble and devise a course correction to have not only a novel-alternative Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence-Disposition for humanity but also a more precise and true one. This is possible only when true and right Information about the Substrate realities of body-brain is understood and accepted by an average human being.
For this to happen; contemporary humanity has to put education-training about this modern, contemporary Substrate Information at the center of all human enterprise; beyond and even in definitive denial of dominant, populist and culturally benchmarked enterprises of profiteering and consumptive successes. All utilities and their relevance to the idea of personal successes have validity only when a person truly and rightly understands how the very idea and reality of ‘utility’ works its ways through the substrate to emerge on the landscapes of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition. This requires long education-training of individual minds. This is a huge agenda for modern humanism and without the success of this agenda; there cannot be any semblance of trans-humanism or post-humanism.
Therefore; in all probabilities; trans-humanism must redefine and redesign the very idea and reality of contemporary sense and idea of humanism. An idea and reality of trans-humanism, only as some measure of enhancement and upgrade of a few potentials of humans, like lifespan and disease management etc, without actually attaining correction of the existing troubles of ‘human’ Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence-Disposition shall only be ‘suicidal’. This is what the hypothesis ‘Intelligent races are suicidal’ seeks to tell us. This is somehow what humanity seems to be heading now. The task and challenges of course-correction is humungous but the very urgency and initiatives are completely missing.
Contemporary humanity is in a big trap of its own creation. This big trap is the artificial man-made physical-psychological culture and its dominant populist practices as well as meanings-purposes, which have completely clouded and to a great extent scammed and diseased the Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence-Disposition of collective humanity. The growing and fatal pathologies of contemporary human Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence-Disposition have already pushed humanity to the brink of collapse and catastrophe.
As contemporary trends in upcoming trans-humanism does not seem anyway inclined to correct or cure them and instead proceed to just focus on enhancing lifespan, mortality, healthspan and potentials of limited functional intelligence; it seems reasonably inevitable that trans-humanism itself shall be the beginning of the end of humanity on the planet earth. This needs elaboration and deep understanding of the existing pathologies of humanism. This we attempt to do next.
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CHAPTER 4
The Seeds of Human Pathologies
It is hugely and singularly important to understand and accept that central to the very understanding of the idea and reality of Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence-disposition is the holistic comprehension and overview of all lives as ‘media’, their relationships with respective ‘milieus’ and how Information works its ways in this Relationship between the two. This shall facilitate the clear and holistic understanding of key and critical ideas and realities of evolution, culture, empowerment, meaning, purpose, et al. This facility shall then lead us to unravel the core reality of cosmic as well as human Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence. This finally shall help in understanding the true and real nature of the pathologies of existing humanism. This in turn may facilitate the idea and reality of trans-humanism actually and finally leading humanity to a novel, prosperous, empowered and alternative human culture-civilization. This alone can save humanity and reverse the threatening hypothesis that ‘Intelligent races become suicidal’. We try to do it all in coming paragraphs. All these form the holism of the very critical entity of Substrate Information, its processing and emergent realities we have been talking about as ‘cornerstone’ of contemporary scientific wisdom.
It is very critical to understand and internalize the holistic idea and reality of the two terms called ‘Media’ and ‘Milieu’. It is furthermore more pertinent to understand and accept that Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence-Disposition are emergent realities, having meaning and purposes only subjective to and specifically aligned to the relationship and interactions between a particular media and its corresponding milieu. It is all about the very abstract and mystical idea and reality of Information, which is of paramount importance but hugely tough to visualize for an average person. Information, as modern science visualizes it; is probably the most unintuitive entity in cosmos for any ‘media’ to experience, simply because it seems like the primary or parent Simulation, within which all realities happen as subsets of secondary and tertiary simulations. It is the domain, where contemporary science of information technology and artificial intelligence is helping humanity to unravel the mysteries.
Next crucial aspect is the realization that as life and living organisms’ spectrum and scaling is colossally wide and deep, from a bacterium to humans; the media as well as their milieus also happen to have a huge spectrum of different specific and emergent realities, within the broad definition of generic reality of living beings. Very naturally therefore; the interactional spectrum between the varied media and their ambient milieus are also a massive spectrum of realities. The ‘human realities’ are only a small part of the spectrum. Of that, the intuitive part is infinitesimal, as large part of human realities is unintuitive.
This further ensures that the meaning and purpose, as subjective to media, milieus and their interactions, are also spectrum realities and very much varied. It also suggests that what is usually meant of and visualized as ‘evolution’ must also be viewed as ‘spectrum reality’, with utmost uniqueness and aberration, when it comes to human evolution, as it incorporates colossal aspects and dimensions of unique interactions and resultant causalities between ‘media’ and ‘milieus’, which are not natural but designed by humans.
The above mentioned realities safely and probably very logically lead to this hypothesis that the ‘human’ dimension of those sets of realities of the biosphere is an aberration of big sorts and therefore uniquely exclusive in all emergent aspects of ‘human label’ of Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence-Disposition, as well as their interactional landscapes. This aberration and exclusivity emerge out of the almost definitive probability that though the ‘human media’ initially evolved out of the very common and generic ‘animal media’; it attained the criticality of complexities and emergent realities in long course of time, which now stands as massively different and unique from that of all other living organisms in the colossal spectrum of life. There is almost nothing in human media, which is not common with animal media, but the human media in its evolution to complexities attained some ‘criticality’ that catapulted the sense of protagonist and observance in human ‘media’ of body-brain, way above and beyond animal consciousness. There can be and remains a pending debate over what exactly this criticality was but we do not have the space here to go deep into it.
The ‘human milieus’ are also completely different from all other living beings as it has large quantum of man-made cultural and civilizational elements, making the human milieus far more psychological and ideational than purely physical. Moreover, this artificial and psychological milieu, broadly referred as cultures, is intentionally designed as antithetical to the dominant features and causalities of natural physical milieus (animal world), therefore has this aberration and uniqueness. These psychological-ideational realities have somehow become far more complex and conflated, as the interactions between the two exclusive domains of human ‘media’ and ‘milieus’ have had a long history; thus unleashing a uniquely aberrant model of evolution of human species.
Therefore this hypothesis that everything associated with the ‘label’ of the idea and realities of ‘human’; be it Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence-Disposition or that of evolution itself, have to be understood and accepted in the light of the aberrations and exclusivities of human ‘media’ and ‘milieus’. It is this unique, exclusive and very specific reality of humanism, which must have to be factored in to understand and internalize the unique spectrum of pathologies and malaises of contemporary humanity.
The pathologies emerge because of two broad reasons. First; humanity has largely failed to accept that the consciousness-cognition-intelligence in itself is not exclusive to them as it exists in wide and varied spectrum-scaling in millions of other lives and most certainly throughout the cosmos, beyond earth. The exclusivity is in the type or ‘model’ of emergent consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition. Human label and its exclusivity exist not in the ‘content’ of consciousness-cognition-intelligence but in the ‘intent’. It is more in the psychology rather than in physiology. It is not in the ‘hardware’ of consciousness-cognition-intelligence but in the unique-aberrant ways the hardware runs the ‘software’ and the software itself. More importantly; this exclusivity does not in anyways mean a definitive superiority. In fact; most human pathologies emanate out of this exclusivity and therefore; it is a calamitous superiority; if it in any ways happens to be so.
Secondly; average humans do not realize that this exclusivity or aberration of the ‘model’ and its ‘intent’ or ‘software’ did not happen; rather, it was designed and delivered by humans themselves, in the long course of a specialized and synthetic ‘evolution’, to construct a cultured-civilized life-living, as an antithesis to animal world realities. This ‘model’ of aberrant-unique consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition could be created and evolved primarily because of the ‘exclusive-aberrant’ meanings and purposes, humans themselves created for everyone to accept and follow in purely cultural-civilizational settings. The exclusivity of human consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition is primarily in the meanings and purposes, humanity consciously and conscientiously constructed to create cultural-civilizational life-living, as antithesis to the meaninglessness and purposelessness of animalism in innate nature. The pathologies emerged and became pandemic as humanity themselves habitually ignored, disobeyed and scammed the meanings and purposes they so meticulously designed and delivered, to suit personal pursuits and successes, against collective success. The human consciousness-cognition-intelligence scammed, corrupted and criminalized its own consciousness-cognition-intelligence and this is the perfectly ‘exclusive-aberrant-unique’ reality in cosmos. There is no ‘media’ in the infinite cosmos, which has scammed ‘Information’ and orchestrated its own deception. This unique-aberrant human ‘intelligence’ to create and live out huge hypocrisies-deception-depravity-criminality and then qualify them as benchmarks of populist successes in societies and cultures is the seed of all pathologies of human world. That is why this intelligence is feared as suicidal.
The critical hypothesis is that ‘human’ realities are aberrant and unique to the spectrum of life, evolution and therefore to Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence. The hypothesis extends to the fact that the very perceived realties of the populist understanding of ‘meanings’ and ‘purposes’ too are unique and aberrantly specific to the reality of ‘human’, as distinguished from all other living beings in biosphere. These exclusive meanings and purposes and the hypocrisies over them have colored the evolution in human world and therefore stand as exclusive in the spectrum of evolution in living world.
This hypothesis in its holism and totality helps in truly and rightly understanding the idea and reality of modern ‘humanism’ and its contemporary pathologies. It explains the unique and aberrant spectrum of inherent potentials and entrenched weaknesses in humanism. Understanding this and the course-correction alone can pave ways for true and right post-humanism or trans-humanism for successful and truly empowered humanity in future. This alone can challenge and reverse the current hypothesis that ‘Intelligent races become suicidal’.
We therefore have to take a short journey of the uniqueness, aberrations and exclusivities of the idea and realities of what is labeled as ‘human’. It shall facilitate defining what actually can be a ‘beyondness’, to qualify as trans-humanism or post-humanism.
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CHAPTER 5
Historical Context of Humanism
There has always been a predominant sense of exclusiveness and superiority among humans vis-à-vis other living beings. In the recorded history of humanity of the last around five thousand years; the philosophy and spiritualism have this common theme of exclusivity and superiority of ‘human’ label, as ‘designed’ and created , compared to the animal world. It is this evolved and augmented superiority, which subconsciously crafted the primeval foundation of earliest philosophy and its core question – ‘Who am I and Why am I’. The idea of ‘purpose’ came with notion of ‘creation’.
This questioning and the embedded subconscious desire of evolving early human consciousness to answer it only in a way that suited and substantiated the mystical sense of ‘superiority’ of protagonism and observance in humans, has the seeds of humanism as well as the seeds of all pathologies this humanism evolved in time. How early humans and their evolving consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition created answers to mould humanity to abstracted-mystical lofty ideas-ideals and then evolved in scammed-depraved intelligence to muffle them with smart hypocrisies for such socio-cultural successes, which actually were expressions of embedded animalism-tribalism, is a long history, well documented. The calamitously ‘bad fit’ between human idealism and actual human disposition finds brilliant expressions in spectrum of cultural hypocrisies in all human civilizations.
However, as opposed to this hypocritical sense of subconscious ‘superiority’ and its conscious percolation in cultural life-living ritualism; it is rather difficult to hypothesize, how early pre-civilization humans felt of themselves and their lives, in their fight for survival in a dominantly populated world of other animals; especially large predators. It seems; this sense of superiority and exclusiveness is of very recent origin, coinciding with stabilization of civilized human life and their sedentary cultures. The documented history hints at cultural life-living only in the past 5000-7000 years, even as modern human species journeyed its course in the last 100,000 years. Therefore; it seems safe to hypothesize that the very idea and perception of the label of ‘human’ and humanism is largely a very restrictive cultural idea and not a universal reality. This has to be understood well.
It is a scientific fact that modern humans are a weak species, as they are born prematurely, are very vulnerable as newborn, requiring long maturity span and therefore sufficient parental-family care and lack the strength and stamina, as is available to many large predatory animals. The anatomical framework and sensory structures of humans are in no way overall superior to most large animals; especially the powerful predatory animals. Even a dog has five times better olfactory powers than humans. An eagle has eye sights 4-8 times better than humans, etc. The adaptive and responsive consciousness-cognition-intelligence of most microorganisms are far superior to that of humans and many of them successfully attain such life-living goals, which humans can never even dream of. Immortality is a reality in microorganism world, which humans have always only dreamt of.
Therefore, it is a safe hypothesis that early humans had this cognition of inferiority and vulnerability, leading them to evolve and augment the intelligence of making primitive tools and weapons as well as strengthen collective power to ensure their survival. This evolving intelligence of primeval engineering and success of group communication finally led to origin and evolution of civilization and culture. The cultures and evolved intelligence about warding off predatory superiority of other species led to human superiority and mental exclusivity. Therefore, it is a safe hypothesis that human superiority of consciousness-cognition-intelligence is very restrictively contextual to their localized living milieus only and has more psychological purport than physical.
This idea of the exclusivity and superiority of human label can be understood from a different perspective too. Modern science hypothesizes that brain is a recent evolution in the history of living beings on earth. For billions of years, living organisms on earth did not require brains. Scientific hypothesis is that earliest of brains happened because in the long course of evolution of single cell organisms to multi-cellular life forms, the event of predation happened for more and quick energy needs and therefore newer organisms required better sensory as well as processing powers to gather better navigational information about their ambient milieus to avoid predation as well as improve chances of predating other organisms. Somehow, brains evolved and eyes became central to brain’s information processing for smarter navigation of the organism in a competitive milieu for better survival in growingly complex milieus.
Human brains and its evolution therefore can be hypothesized to have happened in a particular way because the human anatomy and prowess were inferior to many other animals and therefore survival required that humans evolved their brain fast and furious in a specialized way, to ward off the chain of predatory threats. This brain evolution and its resultant intelligence finally led to civilization and cultures as they provided a powerful collective safety system to humans; ensuring their superiority and exclusivity among other species.
The hypothesis is that the dominant and over-encompassing theme in the very label of everything ‘human’ is not physiological but mental and psychological. This psychology in its primeval and aboriginal theme is dominated by the insecurity of inferior anatomy and exclusive dependence on intelligence; especially group intelligence and communication, to ward off this body inferiority for safety against predation. This dominant psychology led to the primeval human brain evolution, having predisposition to the strength of collective intelligence and collective bonding to safeguard against massive predatory threats. This primeval mental orientation led to rise and evolution of civilization and cultures. Very naturally; modern humans and their Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence and sense of meaning and purpose et al are dominated by synthetic cultural entities and collective life-living, rather than organic ones.
This hypothesis that contemporary human Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence-Disposition are very much contextual to and circumferenced by dominant populist cultures, is a rather critical element in understanding the true nature of contemporary humanism and its pathologies. It helps in accepting that both the ‘media’ of human consciousness as well as the ambient ‘milieu’, with which the media interacts, are unique and in a way aberrant to all other media and milieus in the biosphere. It points out to the reality that this aberrant media and unique milieu have both evolved interacting with each other in a rather exclusive way, having almost no parallel in the cosmos. Human cultural universe is a huge ‘misfit’ and the only ‘synthetic’ entity in the entire universe. The animal world, especially primates may also be accepted as having ‘cultures’ but they are typically organic and no match to the massive and very complex synthetic architectures of human cultures. This we can say, till we know of an alien culture. This in turn suggests that the meanings and purposes as well as the spectrum of realities average humans accepts and internalizes are all very restrictively aberrant as well as unique in a very restrictive contextual milieu of cultural life-living.
All these in totality and holism may explain modern humanism and its contemporary pathologies. The journey of trans-humanism must always take good care of these realities and pathologies to design and devise solutions, to truly qualify as a movement towards empowerment and excellence. If not; then trans-humanism may stand eligible to be the tool of annihilation and inevitable self-destruction of humanity in near future, as expressed in the hypothesis that ‘Intelligent races become suicidal’.
The ‘aberration’ of the media of human consciousness and the ‘uniqueness’ of the human milieus, in dominant populist cultural contexts, have to be understood in details. The aberration of the interactional plexus of average humans with culturally colored contemporary realities explains the eccentricity of restricted ‘meanings’ and ‘purposes’ of life-living realities, which average men and women accept and indulge in. Trans-humanism has this challenge to correct and streamline these aberrations and eccentricities of contemporary humanism to pave the ways for true and right empowerment and excellence. This we detail with all possible dimensions in coming paragraphs.
At the very outset, it has to be very humbly outlined that there is still no consensus in modern contemporary scientific knowledge of humanity about the key ideas of Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence and reality in general. There are many theories about them, based on deemed hypotheses but no finality. Therefore, nothing can be said and established with certitude and absolute definitiveness about anything concerning them and many other aspects of human life-living. However, there are broad propositions and consolidated hypotheses, based on current scientific knowledge of collective humanity and we can safely use them to explain human realities in a generalist way. This we are intending to do with all humility and scrupulous intent to build a safe and reasonable hypothesis.
It is scientifically tested fact that Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence precedes the inception of brain, which is considered as the sole portal to all realities we humans perceive of and accept as true. It is now known that life on earth happened around 3.5 billion years ago but ‘brain’ happened only almost 3 billion years later; almost 600-500 million years back. Before brain happened, all lives had reasonable degree of Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence and they performed amazingly brilliant range of tasks, to make them survive and thrive for three billion years in much harsher and extreme conditions. Therefore, it is a safe scientific hypothesis that Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence is a spectrum reality and as they happen to be the media interacting with external milieus; realities for different media altogether constitute a spectrum of realities itself. As life forms evolved in diversity and complexity and resultantly brain happened and evolved in billions of years; Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence have evolved in tune with evolved complexities of milieus.
Human brain is the continuation and culmination of this long tumultuous journey to complexities and therefore, human Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence has this uniqueness and aberration of realities it engenders for human life-living. The human brain was not created or installed but has evolved and the uniqueness is in the evolution of complexities; especially those which humans themselves constructed on way to institutionalized collective life-living in cultural milieus. Therefore, if humanism is to be understood, we need to have the holistic understanding of how human brains evolved and emerged as the powerful ‘media’ to not only alter the ‘milieus’ but also the fabric of reality. The altered fabric of reality of milieus and its continuum of complexities have over the centuries massively influenced and bizarrely shaped up the ‘media’ of consciousness of humans. It is only rather natural that this bizarre consciousness has engendered and evolved the spectrum of cognition and intelligence of humans in a rather unique-aberrant way.
The dynamics and orchestrations of human brain and its uniqueness are at the core of all potentials and all pathologies of humanity. Therefore, human brain as the media of all realities and its journey in the last millions of years has to be understood in details. It is surely not easy as the complete and detailed knowledge of how human brain works and how it engenders whatever realities we accept as true and right, is still not fully known. Secondly; this knowledge of how brain works is very technical and complex, therefore not very amenable for an average person.
However, what we all can and should ideally understand and accept is this safe scientific hypothesis that the contemporary modern human brain is an evolution over billions of years. Still; human brain has the messed up continuity in its evolution from simple multi-cellular organism to humans with over 30 trillion cells. This itself means that we have to understand in holism and entirety what ‘evolution’ means and how it works in shaping and altering novel and unique organisms, their brains and worldviews. Very naturally; when we talk about evolution and its journey, we also have to factor in the unique and bizarre ways human consciousness-cognition-intelligence collectively altered evolutionary mechanism, dynamics and its causalities in shaping up both the ‘media’ and ‘milieus’. Humans actively became the most powerful agency of evolution; usurping the place the natural forces and their causalities had on evolution of media and milieus.
When we talk of and try to understand media of human consciousness-cognition-intelligence and human milieus and decipher how a unique and aberrant evolution happened to engender exclusivity to both human media as well as milieus; the singular most critical event, defining and influencing everything, happens to be humanly designed and orchestrated entity called culture, which unleashed the era of human civilization and laid the foundations of the humanism, we feel all around us. The criticality of synthetic culture with complex psychological-ideational architectures, its cardinal role in human evolution and humanism and the way it ‘shaped up’ meanings and purposes that ‘warped’ the representation and symbolization of realities, has to be understood in very scientific and objective details.
In the long history of life on earth, dating back to 3.5 billion years, there were ‘events’, which greatly altered the trajectories of evolution. The first major event is the happening of multi-cellular organisms, after around 3 billion years of life only as single cell organisms. The safe hypothesis is that this happened because of the scaling of interactions of elements in three-dimensional physical milieus, resulting in such complexities, which necessitated single cell organisms to cooperate and collaborate for survival. Evolution broadly and roughly is the embedded and inevitable process of scaling of interactions of information in a three-dimensional space of physical milieus. As evolution growingly scales and makes space of milieus more complex in progression of time; the quantum of entropy increases, which in turn requires adjustments and alterations in the ‘media’ of organisms; both physiological and psychological. Multi-cellularity marked the event, which in millions of years created diversity of life forms on earth, leading to rise and evolution of human species and the contemporary modern humans.
Two more major events happened in the long course of evolution, which triggered novelties and aberrations, finally leading to humans. The first major event was the onset of ‘predation’, for more energy needs of newer and more complex organisms, as multi-cellular organisms evolved in complexities and scale. As predation happened, survival became tougher and food search became fraught with greater efforts and risks.
The second big event in course of evolution was the onset of the requirement of mating to reproduce the organisms. It is hypothesized that one of the primary and core characteristic of life is the entrenched energy to copy or reproduce itself. All information requires producing copies of itself, to survive and interact with milieus. It started with DNA and continued in all life forms. Complex multi-cellular organisms required to mate to copy them. Mating may have evolutionary advantages but it in turn enhanced the intensity of predation and made milieus more competitive for survival. Predation was no more only for food energy by attacking and killing other animals but also eliminating members of same species for mating successes. These two primeval elements of physiological architecture are the basis of all organic cultures, which in turn unleashed and engendered psychological and dispositional structures in animal world, well before humans happened. The same twin elements are also at the core of design of synthetic human culture but it has far more complex and diverse designs and dispositions, which stand it as exclusive in living world. In fact, human cultures were designed to provide protection against these two animalistic instincts by securing dispositional rules for everyone to adhere to. That is why human culture as synthetic model of reality stands antithetical to organic and innate animalism.
The core and entrenched instinct of predation and mating engendered the spectrum of emergent, consequential and collateral psychologies of competitiveness in higher organisms and the competitive psychologies in turn blossomed into diversity of subconscious intelligence and dispositions like deception and hypocrisies. The deception and hypocrisies; especially the later, found better and smarter expressions in human world as humans evolved and mastered the media of languages and its artistries. These twin elements of deception and hypocrisy are overriding part of the dispositions predominantly found in lesser animals, which stand more as predated. The powerful predators do not need them; or at least as often, as for them the easier physical choice of predation is available. The psychological or dispositional options of deception and hypocrisy are always the primary recourse for weaker animals, who cannot predate and therefore can only compete with the tools of deception and hypocrisy. Humans evolved the best artistries of deception and hypocrisy as they were weak animals and also; emergent cultures prohibited predation of fellow humans. Among humans; women were associated more with dispositions of deception-hypocrisy, as they were made to stand as ‘weaker sex’. The male predation and women vulnerability became common theme in all cultures across geographies. The male predatory instinct found popular expression in anger and bullying, not only towards women but also towards fellow men.
These twin developments in the progression of time and evolution created the need for a better and even unique information processing mechanisms in growingly complex multi-cellular organisms trying to survive and succeed in milieus with growing quantum of competitive complexities in external milieus. Brain had to evolve to navigate an organism successfully in complex milieus for better survival against predation, food procurement and mating successes. This in simple terms is what evolution means and how it works in living world but the dynamics of interactional landscapes underlying evolution is hugely complex and colossal.
This idea of evolution and how it works as embedded energy in transforming and altering the realities of living organisms as ‘media’ on one hand and that of ‘milieus’ on the other, is at the core of the spectrum of subsequent realities, which the causalities of interactions between the media and milieus engender in living world. It is this entrenched energy of evolution, which in its holism as a powerful dynamics; engineers and orchestrates the spectrum of ‘agencies’ of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition in the ‘media’ of living organisms. These media in turn alter and transform the ambient and contemporary milieus, through their spectrum of interactions with milieus. In simple populist perception; evolution lays down the rule of survival of the ‘fittest’ in specific milieus, through natural selection and primarily sexual selection, as to which ‘media’ has the most suitable information processing mechanism to have the optimal representation of realities of external ‘milieus’, to ensure survival and mating success.
Therefore, brain and its evolution over millions of years have this journey to keep fine-tuning its capacities to optimally simulate realities of external milieus, to navigate the organism, successfully performing its dispositional routines, attuned to the core purpose of survival and mating successes. The agencies of consciousness-cognition-intelligence are therefore evolved and still evolving tools to optimally ‘simulate’ reality; to specifically create such a representation of external reality for the media of organism, which navigates the media successfully in milieus to produce its copies.
It is hugely important to understand the very idea and reality of the term simulation and its entrenched processes. This simulation or representation of reality by the brain of an organism is not purely about the actual reality as manifesting in external milieus. Rather, it is that chunk or slice of reality, which optimizes survival and mating successes. Therefore; the agencies of consciousness-cognition-intelligence are not true and subservient to actuality of reality but to the survival successes of the organism. This reality of evolution has to be understood and accepted.
It is very much like bureaucracy or political system, which are supposed to be true to the people they are subservient to in a democracy but what they actually do is become loyal to and subservient to their own survival and success. The simulated realities of human brains are very much like bureaucracy and political system. Simulations are loyal to the success of organism and never true to the reality of milieus. This automatically and subconsciously engenders the entrenched disposition of deception and hypocrisy in humans.
This is the hallmark of populist success in contemporary cultures. Almost all average men and women know and speak about what is good and right for all humanity but they almost always do what is exclusively good and right for them. And, they therefore need the best of artistries of deception and hypocrisy to look and stand as virtuous and still secure personal profitability, often at the cost of collective losses. This in modern human world is hailed as brilliant individual intelligence of aggressive competitiveness, required for success.
Once we understand and accept the agencies of consciousness-cognition-intelligence as ‘functional facilities’ for brain’s structural designs to simulate realities of external as well as internal milieus for very specific ‘navigational successes’ of a living organism; we shall have ease of understanding the reality of the label of ‘human’, the collective idea of humanism and the very empirical foundation of most human world pathologies. This shall greatly facilitate in understanding the true potentials as well as worst pathologies of humans and contemporary humanism. This may help trans-humanism stand in rock solid landscape for true and right empowerment and excellence of human life-living in future.
Above all; this helps a great deal in understanding the critical idea of Information, which may not be the building blocks of all realities but may definitively be the singular entity for we humans to understand that whatever the reality may be; it is amenable to optimal unraveling for brain states and its agencies of consciousness-cognition-intelligence, only through the encoding and decoding of information, which is entrenched in reality’s expressions and manifestations. The media and milieus are merely the players but the causal plexuses of the game are Information and how they are contextualized in the interplay between media and milieus. There is still a huge lot about the reality of Information and its spectrum of processing in cosmic landscapes, which we humans have not unraveled and understood well. This probably requires the contemporary physics to expand and also be liberal to transcend its own barriers.
All these sum up to the hypothesis of an ‘information model of reality’ in living world, where the ‘media’ of all living organisms interact with their respective ‘milieus’. This interaction happens with the respective brains of different organisms, with varied information processing and memory capacities, simulating or engendering models of external reality, for reasonably successful navigation of the organism, to fulfill its primary goals of survival against predation and mating. The consciousness-cognition-intelligence spectrum of different organisms in varying proficiencies may very well be the smart tools or ‘interfaces’ engendered by brain states for this very core goal of safe and successful navigation in external milieus.
It is also very crucial that we humans understand and accept that the brain may be the central processor of information for singular purpose of simulating reality but the Information is not only stacked and processed in brain alone. As human body-brain is a humungous cooperation of trillions of cells, tissues and organs; information and their processing happen at different levels of organization and collectively and cooperatively work up codes of survival successes at varying anatomical spaces. This information processing mechanisms in holism and the vast spectrum of interactional causalities embedded and unleashed in this process collectively may be referred to as the core energy of what we know as evolution.
This information processing model of living world realities, where the ideas or entities of organisms, milieus, consciousness-cognition-intelligence and evolution, et al stand in complex causal relationship, may not be the true reality of cosmos and biosphere in all possible details but still; it largely facilitates the understanding of life-living realities and also helps in understanding the deep pathologies of human world, especially the contemporary modern cultures and humanism.
The artificial intelligence domain has added finer knowledge of how this information model works in human world by simulating realities in unique ways, which stand as defining contexts of Humanism. The AI is smart way to simulate the ‘simulated’ realities of biological spheres; especially the human world of life-living; on the platform of non-biological structures. We detail this all in the next chapter.
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CHAPTER 6
The ‘Hard Problem’ of Consciousness
The hypothesis, we have made since the beginning of this eBook is that the media, milieu, consciousness-cognition-intelligence as well as the evolution of modern human species have been ‘aberrant’ and ‘exclusive’ compared to all other living beings on earth. The above-mentioned hypothesis about the information model of realities greatly helps in understanding and internalizing this hypothesis of ‘aberration and exclusivity’ of modern human world and humanism.
It seems a valid hypothesis that almost all potentials and therefore all pathologies of human world and humanism can be explained with the help of the ‘aberration and exclusivity’ in the information processing model of human ‘media’ of body-brain in their very infinitesimal synthetic ‘milieus’, within the infinite cosmic milieu. It may also facilitate the understanding of the very popular and dominant idea of the so-called ‘Hard Problem’ of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition in human life-living. This ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is largely about what the philosophers refer to as ‘qualia’ or subjective personal experiences and feelings, emanating out of the objective structural mechanisms of the brain states and their centralized information processing. It is another hypothesis that the hard problem exists and persists because of a restrictive understanding of the entity of Information, the limitation of contemporary physics describing it and the insistence of brain being the sole processor of all information.
Probably, the most intriguing and dominant question of contemporary humanism is about how Information embeds in bio-chemical and bio-electrical plexus and synchronizes with lingual structures of brain states to engender symbolization of subjective meanings and purposes, exclusively contextual to human milieus and their established objective meanings and purposes. Understanding the ‘script and syntax’ of information and their journeys in bio-chemical and bio-electrical landscape is critical knowledge. This journey has only just begun and a long distance has to be voyaged. The core question is the spectrum of how different media in the scaling of living organisms intercepts and interprets information of the physical milieus, to engender the cognition of reality that is dominantly psychological than physical and how ‘meanings’ emerge out of this information processing; especially out of this conversion of physical information into psychological ones. May be; it shall require redefinitions or broadening of the current definitions and meanings of physicality as well as psychologies on the landscapes of human consciousness-cognition-intelligence.
The hard problem is largely about how bio-chemical plexus and bio-electrical networks of body-brain engender the subjective conscious experiences; especially the very powerful and intense sense of ‘feel’ of the personal self or ‘I’. It shall probably require a deep and holistic understanding of the entity called Information; not only in biological and organic landscapes but also throughout the cosmic landscapes of multitude of space and time dimensions. It is a humungous task and the current human enterprise does not seem to prioritize it. As this sense and the experiences of ‘Self’ happens to be the portal of extensive and intense spectrum of experiencing of such shades of realities, which stretch beyond the realms of material or physical dimensions and domains; humanity remains puzzled as how this can possibly happen. How can physicality engender and explain purely experiential entities in the domains of psychology and philosophy?
How does and where does the dimensions of physics and chemistry enter the landscape of psychology and philosophy, is the core question and the elusive answer makes it the ‘hard problem’. The hard problem seems largely about how ‘meanings and purposes’ emanate and travel from the dimensions of physics-chemistry and enter dimensions of biology to get altered and acquire completely novel and alternative ‘meanings and purposes’, which usually rides on the vehicle of specific language known to humans but goes beyond it as purely generic feelings. It is therefore hugely important to understand the contextual relationship of ‘meanings and purposes’ in the entire cosmic mechanism of Information and their processing. The core question, whose answer still remains elusive, is what creates non-physical realities out of hardcore physicality of chemicals and electrical charges? This is the unresolved hard problem of consciousness. We very humbly and objectively try to build up a hypothesis to analyze this hard problem.
The hypothesis, we can accept here, for better understanding of this hard problem is that the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness also has to be confronted and visualized from the perspective of this hypothesis about the aberration and exclusivity of the very label of ‘human’, its unique ‘media’ of body-brain, as well as its exclusively atypical ‘milieu’ and the vast and complex landscape of interactions and causal relationships between the media and milieu. It has to be realized that probably, the epithet of ‘hard’ or even the label of it being a ‘problem’ emanates out of the aberration and exclusivity of consciousness-cognition-intelligence, which humans have, as rather distinct and unique from all other living beings.
It seems a strong and reasonable probability that the very idea of ‘hard problem’ is associated exclusively with the label of ‘human’ and cognitive architecture or landscape of humanism. May be; it is a ‘hard problem’ because the reality stands outside the restrictive landscape of humanly possible current consciousness-cognition-intelligence and humanity has not yet been able to transcend the barrier, which its consciousness-cognition-intelligence creates for itself. Trans-humanism requires transcending these barriers and challenging its own restrictiveness. The artificial intelligence capabilities have the potential to do so.
This aberration and exclusivity of ‘human’ thing has to be understood well, before we deal with the ‘hard problem’ of human consciousness; and probably not all consciousnesses, across all living and non-living entities. The hypothesis works its ways into this core trouble of the human cognition being a very restrictive portal of journeying the vast landscapes of its own consciousness, that of fellow humans as well as those of other organisms; especially the larger animals in our world.
At the very outset; it has to be understood and very humbly accepted that Reality in its infiniteness, complexities and ever-evolving intricacies is one thing as a macro entity and observational-perceptional Actuality of Reality in its restricted and partial micro form is another. We do not need to go into the debate whether and how observance warps, alters or even creates reality, as every reality is typically and essentially observer-dependent. There is this very restrictive and insignificantly tiny ‘media’ of human body-brain and its ineligible consciousness-cognition-intelligence, unsuccessfully attempting to stand tall in front of the infiniteness and colossal complexities of the external ‘milieus’, to unravel and understand reality, which tells the truth that we humans are only just beginning to understand how tough it is to unravel actuality of reality. Therefore, it is to be accepted that it is this massive gap between reality and its true actualization, which creates the labels of ‘hard’ and ‘problems’.
Very naturally; we have to understand and accept that there are two broad challenges in unraveling the actuality of all realities and we have to focus on first understanding these challenges and evolve solutions to meet the challenges head on. The first challenge is the ‘infiniteness and complexities’ of realities itself and second challenge is the very restrictive ‘aberration and uniqueness’ of human consciousness-cognition-intelligence as observer of reality. In simple terms, we can say, the ‘observable’ entity is massively colossal on one hand and on the other; the media of ‘observance’ is too tiny, precarious and restrictive. Therefore; the gap between the two entities of observable and observed is so humungous that the ‘connect’ and relationship between the two entities have to be nothing but tumultuously hard and monstrously problematic.
It can be very roughly imagined as how this ineligible media of ‘human observance’ of body-brains, engineers and architects the neural tools to engender a coarse-grained simulation of ‘hard’ realities, for very restricted ‘meaning and purpose’ of navigation for survival behaviors. This coarse-grained abstraction of massive physicality into a fathomable psychology seems to contain the seeds of all mysticism and magicality about consciousness and full spectrum of experiential entities in human life-living. It seems; the embedded irreduciability of massive and diversely detailed Information of cosmic realities and the express ‘human’ need to fit a massively reducible simulation of that reality into the restrictively minuscule perceptional framework of human brains is the core causality of what triggers the mysticism-magicality of qualia.
It is a reasonable hypothesis that qualia is not exclusively human reality. This problem of ‘reduciability’ of the ‘irreduciable’ reality is generic to all complex media of large and complex organisms and therefore, the entity of ‘qualia’ as a spectrum reality is also common and generic to many large animals like dolphin, whales, elephants etc in different shades. This entity of qualia seems the stupid and ineligible brain’s response to create a ‘portal’ to alter and convert the complexity of generic ‘meanings-purposes’, embedded in massive physicality, into a rather simplified and coarse-grained symbolism of psychological ‘feel’ and personalized ‘meaning-purposes’ in larger animals and exclusively expressible in terms of lingual metaphors for humans in purely cultural contexts. Qualia, as per this hypothesis, is a conveniently simplified Interface and its contextual meaningfulness, in the larger information processing model in biological domains. This inability or limitation of human brain to manifest all the details of this information processing to conscious layers of brain and its coarse-grained cognition to an average individual seems to engender the hard problem of consciousness.
Once we accept these two challenges; we have better eligibility to look at many ‘hard problems’ of contemporary humanity. Metaphorically speaking; it is like a rough model or map of a grand architecture, which is hugely impossible for a very restrictive simulational capacity of the human brain to even perceive, being presented to explain all complex details of the reality. It is like a mathematical equation trying to explain the holism of a cosmic reality, which simply cannot otherwise be explained and understood by a human cognition. So; we are told the two ends of the universe is 92 billion light years apart and our stupid and ineligible brains try its level best to understand how colossal the universe is. This mathematics is good as the number crunches the ‘feel’ of it through a ‘meaning’ the brain can engender as a convenient interface for the actuality of reality. The same way, it seems, the qualia is somehow a good enough way; a smart crunching of informational overload, to navigate through the massiveness and complexity of reality.
It is not easy to objectively and non-intuitively understand the entity of qualia as it is unraveled to us in a deeply intuitive and subjective way; depending on inventory of memories of past experiences of related nature. Similar to the question of ‘how vast is the universe’, there is a typical question confronted by almost all humans and it is – ‘How much do you love me’. The answer of this question is possible only through the agency of qualia, which may be made to ride a metaphor for ease of understanding. So, the answer comes like, ‘I love you as much as is water in ocean or stars in sky etc’. The reality of love is a spectrum of Information, which is so vast and complex that it cannot possibly be actualized and expressed in totality. Therefore, it is convenient for brain to crunch the information and present it as a ‘feeling’, which then becomes easy to be expressed with the help of similar feeling metaphors or real life symbols. Qualia seems like evolution’s reality crunching mechanism to ease out information processing of the vast and complex realities. We all can realize that qualia helps us a lot in our cognition as well as in expression-communication of tougher realities of life-living. Human brain is probably evolved enough to engender more intense and vivid spectrum of qualia, compared to other animals.
It is a very fundamental assertion or hypothesis that every reality is a set of information, which is there for any ‘media’ to process them; to simulate a model or representation of reality that may not stand as closest to actuality of reality but should be good enough to successfully navigate a living organism. This is true for all organisms, from a bacteria to humans and that is why reality is only subjective to the information processing capacity of the ‘media’ of an organism, with its cognitive abilities to simulate a rough model of reality, which stands as the navigable ‘milieu’ for the organism. This milieu is not the true landscape of reality but a massively coarse-grained simulation or model of reality, which simply facilitates and roughly fulfills the navigational needs of the organism. May be, psychologies-philosophies are the only way; the only possible Interface, to successfully coarse-grain or reduce the massively irreducible physicality of reality. This interface therefore has no be hugely mystical and magical.
We can also visualize the entity of Qualia through the perspective and hypothesis of evolution; considering the hypothesis that evolution happens to be the smartest yet the most stupid reality-crunching mechanism for cognitive capacity building. Evolution seems to design smart but utterly short-cut pathways for facilitation of cognitions for organism for them to survive and proliferate in complex and competitive milieus. If we accept this hypothesis; there can be two opposing perspectives or hypotheses on how evolution probably came up with this smart and short-cut cognitive architecture of Qualia in higher animals and especially humans, to facilitate life-living successes.
The first hypothesis is that evolution purposely designed the subjectiveness of experiencing or Qualia as smart short-cut interface, as it solved the big problem of linking and streamlining massiveness of past and future into tiny contemporaneousness of present for larger organisms, especially humans. Humans probably needed it more than other animals as they created a synthetic culture where behavioral requirements for successful collective living were more complex and well defined. Modern science tells us that as the landscapes of the totality of information in past and future are huge and in biological systems, memories simply cannot store and recall all these details. Similarly, all possible details of information possible in future simply cannot be anticipated and visualized by biological brains. However; the two vast landscapes of memories of past and visualization of probabilities of future have to be synced and streamlined for navigation success of living organism in the moment of contemporaneousness of present. Probably; the Interface of qualia or personal-subjective experiences become greatly helpful in presenting this smart and short-cut mechanism to sync memories with visualization for success of present moment navigational needs. It seems very much like the process of crunching vast and complex information of physicality into relatively easy and adaptive information model of psychologies and philosophies. This then helps the brain understand and express ‘how much it loves somebody’!
Modern science visualizes that as past and future are agencies unto themselves; with past shaping up future and the vice-versa too; it is therefore suitable and in ‘biological fitness’ to extend subjective-personal sense of agency to both memories and visualization to engender a potent and facilitative Interface for presentness of moment. Qualia stands as this contemporaneous Interface with strong sense of agency of organism-specific experiential beingness in the moment of present timeline.
Therefore; the first hypothesis is that evolution intentionally designed this short-cut. The second hypothesis is that qualia happened not as designed entity but an accidental or entropic outcome of the crunching of vast information data of past and future into navigable information of present. Qualia may be the byproduct of this mechanism-process of coarse-grained reduciability of massively irreducible reality, through the experiential sense of agency, which is already available in the information processing mechanism of advanced organisms. This evolutional hypothesis is a very complex idea, which requires detailing and deep understanding of how Information works its ways in spectrum of pathways in organisms, but we have only outlined it here for convenience of our journeys ahead in understanding the hard problem of consciousness. This hypothesis is only for convenience of our journey ahead to understand humanism and its pathologies.
The biggest trouble for humanity is that the information is massive and colossally complex. Also, the new physics accepts that a huge part of the ever-evolving information is irreducible. And, on the other hand, the human media of body-brain is too poor and too restrictively aberrant and exclusive to process the information with utmost objectivity and holism. It is this massive gap between reality and its humanly possible actuality, which creates many hard problems. The most critical question then is – how to handle this problem and find a solution?
It is this question and its reasonably plausible answer, which holds the key to the success and excellence of true and holistic trans-humanism, as it shall lead to better management of many contemporary pathologies of contemporary humanism. It is of utmost satisfaction that the tumultuous yet remarkably grounded journey of modern science in the last 300 years has successfully bridged the gap between the reality and its actuality. There have been great headways in unraveling and understanding of realities both at cosmic levels as well as subatomic levels. However; we can safely admit that the major breakthrough and capacity enhancement in humanity’s potential for actualization of reality has come through exponential growth in information processing capacities, through artificial intelligence and its extensive uses in all related fields of science; especially molecular and developmental biology.
We however need to understand the true capacities of artificial intelligence in processing information to actualize realities. We also need to understand the difference between information processing through computational mechanisms for the purpose of actualizing the realities at different domains and information processing to actualize as how the computational methodologies actualize realities of human body-mind; or for that matter other biological systems. Use of artificial intelligence to unravel and decipher the ‘Self’ and ‘Milieus’ are two different propositions as one involves a living biological system with dominant psychological-philosophical connotations and other pertains largely to non-biological non-living systems with majorly physical overtones. It is of utmost importance as how optimally both computational methodologies are used interchangeably and concomitantly to unravel realities of self as well as milieus.
It is relevant here to ask; what is the core difference in information processing and computation of biological system; especially human system and a non-biological non-living system. Both processes involve the same model of decoding and harnessing as many complex information and their causal interactions to simulate a near precise model of reality. However, the critical difference between biological system; especially human biological system and non-biological system is in sets of ‘relevant’ information and their ‘causal’ relationships in both systems. What we have hypothesized since the start of this eBook is the aberration and exclusivity of not only relevant information but their causal interactional relationship, in human domain, which makes all the difference and lands us in many ‘hard problems’ that remain unresolved. A powerful non-biological consciousness-cognition-intelligence looking at the biological consciousness-cognition-intelligence, from an externalized vantage point of objectivity and value-neutrality may be helpful in solving the hard problems of humanity. The artificial intelligence science seems to be poised well to do so in very near future.
Somehow, we need to unravel and understand these ‘aberrations and exclusivity’ in the domain of the label of ‘human’ and milieus where humanism has evolved in the last few hundred thousand years. It is where the critical ideas of culture and its evolution come into picture. We need to ascertain and analyze the meaning-nature-scope of two very decisive ideas or terms namely Human Culture and Human Evolution. As we do that, we can decipher the embedded aberrations and uniqueness in the spectrum of realities of human cultures and human evolution.
If we accept a very potent informational model hypothesis that ‘reality is the story the brain tells itself about, based on the coarse-grained information it receives or manipulates from external milieus and the Self is the agency within the story’; the most important element in actualization of reality is Information inputs from the external milieus, which is predominantly ‘cultural’ than ‘natural’ and the internal ‘milieu’ of the media of human brain, which processes the information, typically and subjectively contextualized to cultural appropriates and linguistic symbolizations. The core trouble with this hypothesis is that everything in this assertion is purely metaphoric and the metaphors are all restrictively and uniquely only ‘human’. Nothing in this model of reality is beyond ‘human’ bias or humanly designed ‘meanings’, which themselves are nothing but metaphors, perceivable only in human domain. If the ‘Self’ is within the story the brain tells itself about reality; the trouble is that in the story; the script, protagonist, theatre as well as the audience are all ‘human’ and it is hugely tough for a human to transcendent ‘human’.
Therefore; it is of paramount importance to analyze as what ‘meanings’ stand as and how all meanings, which humans accept, are basically humanly standardized metaphors, representing or simulating a ‘brain processed’ information set, coarse-grained to structure a reality that too in human milieus. The human world realities are actualized, manifested and even expressed through a powerful but hugely restrictive metaphor of human-invented language and its grammar. Contemporary science admits to this restrictiveness and realizes that a new vocabulary and its sensitization have to be developed to understand many realities. The new vocabulary and language is already shaping up in the domain of artificial agency and being used to refer to realities in biological domains.
This restrictiveness has to be understood and accepted. A story is a representation or simulation of a reality. The story also does the crunching or compression of reality by pruning unnecessary details of actual information and adding imagined bits of information to make the story more navigable for reader. A story is a coarse-grained metaphor to install a model of reality. It is also a process to crunch the vast information of physicality into a more navigable abridged model of psychological-philosophical information set. Not only in a story, rather, even in normal communication, in our daily life-living, we all do the same. We subconsciously try to speak in such a way that our communication reaches to other person in a psychological-philosophical wavelength, which not only matches well to the physicality of information we wish to express but also corresponds to the psychological-philosophical wavelength of the person we are communicating with.
The trouble is that the story itself is a collection and cooperative of words, laid down in a pattern of grammar, which is nothing but metaphors created by humans themselves. It is like a set of simulation, creating another set of simulation to create a model of reality, which then goes on to simulate reality. This signifies that whatever reality a human being accepts, is warped primarily because of the restrictiveness of deep contextualization of all ‘meanings’ solely as ‘human’ in dominant cultural insinuations, which cannot possibly be objectively tested by contrasting them with ‘meanings’ as accepted by other media of living beings, other than humans.
The actualization of all realities; especially that of the more personal and subjective ideas and purely experiential entities like Consciousness, cognition, intelligence, self-awareness, transcendence, et al are far more warped and conflated. It is hugely difficult to say, whether a non-biological media and its own distinct language, novel palette of meanings-purposes and alternative information processing could help in creating a novel and alternative consciousness-cognition-intelligence to decode and explain human experiences of realities. Transcendence and ‘beyond-ness’ from everything ‘human’ is massively tough as even the novelties or alternatives are created by humans themselves and are finally observable by only a human media. In fact, the artificial general intelligence is also largely being modeled as a media to simulate human brain, mind and experiences. The non-biological media roughly and broadly stands as simulation of biological architecture; especially that of humans.
Somehow, the theme of transcendence and ‘beyond-ness’ has always been there in Oriental spiritualism and philosophy, since more than 3000 years back. The Vedic-Buddhist-Yoga philosophies even laid down the traditions of ‘unwarping’ human consciousness and cognition by detaching ‘Self’ from the causalities of both media as well as milieus. The idea of Nirvana in Buddhism or Yoga philosophy of assimilation of personal self into cosmic self, et al have been detailed in ancient texts but they remain fraught with conflation and mysticism. The process of ‘reverse-engineering’ the processes of ‘engineering’ of human consciousness-cognition-intelligence is what constitutes the idealisms of Nirvana or Transcendence and it is more difficult to understand and practice, as the very engineering of consciousness has not fully been deciphered yet. Moreover; the idea of Nirvana or Transcendence is also aligned with the very meanings and purposes, which are exclusively ‘human’ designs. Tragically; in the ‘story’, the storyteller is also an inseparable part of the story.
However; it is almost certain that consciousness-cognition-intelligence and even transcendence, present and express themselves in a wide spectrum of experiences, as different ‘media’ of the ‘Subjective Self’, different men and women experiment with novel and alternative information processing by altering both metaphors as well as the causalities of the information inputs from external milieus. All these remain fraught with mysticism as human brain mechanisms-processes are not fully known. The hard problem therefore remains harder than what it actually could be.
All these above-mentioned aspects of human life-living and reality were discussed to facilitate the understanding of the key idea of how and why human media of brain and its information processing is an aberration and stands in exclusivity to other living beings, which creates all potentials as well as pathologies, largely exclusive to humanity. Understanding these hypotheses may also facilitate understanding many ‘hard problems’ of contemporary humanism. We detail it next.
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CHAPTER 7
Triumvirate of Media-Milieu-Meaning
The core and primary ‘element’ in unraveling and deciphering any or every reality is the very idea and reality of the term ‘Understanding’; especially the substrate reality, which constitute the meaning-purpose of the expression and the complex physical-psychological processes that are involved in it at body-brain states. What and how the very ‘expression’ of the word understanding comes to install its ‘meaning’ and navigates its ‘purposes’ are vital and primary element, when it comes to reality actualization. The trouble is that we do not have the understanding of how this process of understanding works and how it feels in other humans as well as in animals. Then; there is this deep and complex relationship between the two core elements of understanding, known as meaning and purpose, which impacts how human ‘media’ of body-brain subjectively perceives and actualizes specific milieus and general Reality; both in physical as well as psychological-philosophical dimensions. There is a spectrum of terms; humanly designed metaphors and representations; namely, unraveling, decoding, actualization, manifestation, realization, sympathization, experiencing, et al, which symbolize or represent this singular mental mechanism of information processing popularly known as ‘understanding’.
This mental process in generic and purely physical sense is actually how a brain ‘processes’ incoming information, from different portals of data inputs. Beyond information processing; probably more critical aspect is how the brain states prioritize, select and prune the incoming information and then matches the ‘chosen’ data with memory inventory data to create a palette of psychological-philosophical ‘meaning’ or ‘experience’ and ‘purpose’ for the organism, which stands in perpetuity and continuity of relationship with its ambient milieu. Far more complex and significant is how one single information, about an aspect of reality of external milieu, lands as different experiences for different men and women, because of the specific contextualization of information, extended by different memories of individuals and how these different experiences in turn render different meanings of a single reality in consciousness-cognition-intelligence of different people. It is also known that one human brain may select and allow some information as very important, whereas another human brain may dump and discard the same information as useless and unworthy; which in turn completely alters the spectrum of meaning and purpose, a person accepts about a possible reality. This cycle of realities of external milieus creating different meanings and these meanings creating different internal milieus for different people, in turn compete to ascribe a reality the way different people perceive seems like purely a ‘human’ reality.
This creates double trouble for the entire idea of how a reality is experienced and ‘understood’ by a human being. The first major trouble is at the level of processing of input data, as it is a scientifically proven fact that the brain of an individual human being is exclusive in design and evolving with respect to its milieus, as it does not match with any other brain. It is now known that the brain receives huge amount of data; millions of bits of information every passing second, but it prunes and selects only a handful, by prioritizing them as ‘useful or useless’, as per the experiential memories of it since childhood. Very naturally; different human brains prune and then process the same inputting information data in distinct and unique ways. Then; different brains have varied degrees of inventory of ‘memories’ of subjective and very personalized experiences, which the processed information uses to engender ‘meanings’ and ‘purposes’ for an individual. It is also now established that the memories of subjective experiences ‘influence’ and ‘shape up’ how the inputting information is interpreted by brain states of an individual. Add to this the contemporary reality that majority of input information that an average individual gets from modern external milieus are fake-fudged-fraudulent-propagandist; vitiating meanings and purposes. Add further to this chaos and conundrum the majorly crucial fact that vast majority of men and women have poor and meshed up linguistic skills. So, the degree of ‘reality representation’, out of the possible ‘reality actuation’ by brain states of an individual is always confronted with both hardware as well as software troubles. This complicates and conflates how a person experiences and ‘understands’ the ‘meanings’ of representations of reality, which usually stand in competitiveness and conflict with that of other individuals.
Two important facts have to be kept in mind to understand the ‘process of understanding’ and the trajectory of evolution of ‘meanings’ a person has. Fist is the scale and complexities of human brain, its colossal plexus of information processing and different contextualization of information, which stand a human being as an aberration and exclusive in entire animal world. A human being is a unique and aberrant animal. Secondly; most animals have nearly homogenous and common physical milieus, from where information inputs are reasonably singular and unambiguous. The human milieus are diverse as the dominant element of all human milieus, across the human world is not physical but psychological as milieus are predominantly ‘cultural’. Therefore; unlike animal milieus, all human milieus are diverse and unique.
Moreover, as mentioned above; human milieus are aberrant and unique in the sense that vast majority of input information a human being receives from contemporary milieus are either fake, partial, fudged, fraudulent or propagandist. Most input information of a human being in contemporary milieus is not purely physical or natural but culturally conditioned; emanating through different man-made media. Animals don’t use internet, don’t watch television, are not hooked to social-personal media and are nor addicted to a smart phone. Animals are not blinded by illogical and faith-induced ideologies since childhood to grow and evolve as dogmatists and diehard hypocrites, subconsciously blocking any other meanings of reality others may have.
The simple idea, which underlies all these above-mentioned issues, is the safe hypothesis that understanding or experiencing a reality in modern contemporary human world is infested with loads of culturally induced pathological processes, which complicate and conflate how reality is observed, witnessed, experienced and internalized by a person. This has hugely weird impact on human consciousness-cognition-intelligence and action-behavior. Human cultures were created to present a human milieu of self-disciplined life-living where fellow humans were allowed to compete but within certain rules and regulations to ensure a peaceful and non-violent society but the same cultures have now become so hypocritical-depraved-criminalized that it has become the sole agent of most violence and insanity. Very naturally, the modern humans have all dumped self-discipline and become animalistic in pursuing their subjective meanings and purposes in unfettered and wild ways. All these create the aberration and exclusivity of human life-living; as distinct from that of all other living beings. This is a hypothesis, the pathological propensities of which need debate and discussion in human world.
This hypothesis brings us to have deliberations about how ‘meanings’ of understandings or experiencing are engendered in human world and how both potentials as well as pathologies are associated with the trouble of having scammed processes of meaning acquisition in human world of life-living. Also, this deliberation has to include the idea and reality of modern human cultures and dominant populist philosophies-psychologies in contemporary human milieus, which have huge impact on how ‘meanings’ and ‘purposes’ are engendered and shaped up in human world. This may facilitate the understanding of the ‘aberration and exclusivity’, in how and why ‘meanings’ that average humans accept, are deeply conditioned and contextualized. This may explain as how realities are created for humans, which are exclusive in living world. All these have deep impacts on humanism and it sets up the agenda for success of trans-humanism.
So; if ‘I’ and my ‘Self’ is within the story my brain tells itself, it is hugely difficult for a ‘story’ to ascertain that what it ‘means’ to itself, is actually a ‘truth’ or how good or bad a ‘representation or simulation’ of truth. It is therefore equally tough for consciousness-cognition-intelligence to objectively verify the veracity of the ‘reality’ it tells itself to be true and right. The self as an agency shall always believe and follow the ‘story’ its own brain tells itself and therefore; the meanings and purposes the self pursues are never amenable to objective or ‘self-less’ self-validation. The spirituality has been prescribing it since ages but it is always infested with abstractions and ritualistic conflation.
For a human being; as distinct to any other animal, the bulk of ‘meanings’ he or she accepts as true and right representations of reality, comes from ambient and very localized cultural milieus and long traditions of populist philosophies-psychologies, subconsciously and automatically embedded in a person’s brain states, as it grows and evolves in a specific cultural milieu. This set of culture-philosophy-psychology is exclusive to humans and completely missing in animal world. That is why the hypothesis that what a human understands and experiences are based on ‘aberrant and exclusive’ meanings, derived from ‘aberrant and exclusive’ milieus dominated by humanly designed elements of ‘aberrant and exclusive’ culture-philosophy-psychology. Very clearly, loads of human reality has no basis in living world and it is an aberration and exclusive to humans only. Therefore, if reality has to be understood in its holism and entirety, by a human being; it has to unlearn and rise above the ‘aberration and exclusivity’ of meanings and de-culture its consciousness-cognition-intelligence.
This is hugely tough an enterprise. Oriental philosophy, especially Buddhist and Yogic philosophies have underlined this need of de-culturing of mind to unravel reality, since almost 3000 years back. This ‘fact’ about the understanding of the ‘need’ to unlearn and de-culture consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition existing since long in human life-living, clearly establishes the reality that human brain has this very critical hardware-software faculty to ‘witness’ and ‘analyze’ itself. It clearly means that the ‘Self’, within the story the brain tells itself, has this very critical and powerful sense of ‘agency’ to experience that the story can be delusional. That is why this classical and age-old philosophical prescription to unlearn and de-culture minds existed. That is why the old and classical idealism of transcendence or nirvana existed since the inception of civilization. We talk about it later.
We need to decipher the idea and reality of purely human creation of culture-philosophies-psychologies to understand the very framework or skeletal structure of epistemology and ontology and a primeval insistence on transcending them to arrive at a Reality, which is not subjectively human but objectively cosmic. This enterprise may help us understand the very contemporary and 21st century new science, which insists that consciousness-cognition-intelligence is a spectrum reality and the very idea and reality of ‘meanings’ emanate out of layers or continuum of scaling of media of brains and their information processing capabilities to handle ever growing complexities of external milieus, from where the information is inputted. Therefore; there is this express need to understand Information in its cosmic holism and how it pervades and journeys in different media in vast living world; engendering spectrum of meanings and purposes.
It is a happy hypothesis that passage of time on earth is in a way a journey of scaling of complexities of ‘meanings’. It is a journey of evolution of epistemology and ontology, which scaled up in response to ever evolving complexities that the spectrum of media of brains processed. Under this hypothesis, human cultures-philosophies-psychologies are landscapes, which this journey of ‘meanings’ traversed in progression of time. Human cultures-philosophies-psychologies are therefore small and scattered ‘buildings’ in the vast landscape of epistemology-ontology within the life-living universe. These ‘buildings’ were designed and constructed by the media of evolving human brains for the very narrow purpose of housing those precious practices and idealisms, which ensured larger and better survival successes. It can be a reasonable postulation that epistemology-ontology are merely the fanciful frills on the outer walls of these ‘buildings’, made of the bricks of survival success. This needs elaboration.
In living world, the core process underlying every reality is how a media of information processing assigns specific ‘meanings’ to a particular situation in different spaces, which we are referring as milieus. So, a combination of chemical elements in DNA is assigned a ‘meaning’, which results in creation of a specific amino acid. Difference of charges in bioelectrical plexus is assigned a ‘meaning’, which then signifies a signal to build specific anatomical structure. A combination of chemicals is assigned a ‘meaning’, which then is ‘read’ by cellular membrane to allow them in and trigger specific process within cell. Etc. There is a scaling of media at atomic, molecular, cellular, anatomical and finally organism levels, which process ‘meanings’. This engenders the inter-molecular, inter-cellular, inter-organs and finally inter-organisms spaces, which act as milieus at respective levels where these meanings interact to engender spectrum of realities. This completes the triumvirate of Media-Milieu-Meaning, which creates all realities and evolves in complexities, in trajectory of time progression. Some meanings and their incumbent realities may not change in space progression but more likely to change in time progression. This begins the story of evolution.
The human cultures-philosophies-psychologies happen to be the culmination of this evolution of the triumvirate in creating a massively complex set of meanings to realities in external as well as internal milieus. They collectively stand as ‘aberration’ in entire animal world because of the uniqueness and exclusivity of ‘representations and metaphorizations’ the media of human body-brain assigns to spectrum of situations at different scaling of milieus. It largely happens because of the fact that vast majority of the ‘situations’ in localized ambient external milieus and almost all state of affairs within the internal milieu of body-mind are creations of human minds, which can be summarized as human culture.
It is the exclusivity of humanly designed culture, where all meanings have been created; even altered; by the powerful media of human brains, which stands as aberrations to every meaning of reality in animal world. The meanings in cultural domains ‘ride’ on the humanly created ‘vehicle’ of language, with specific sets of words and syntactic rules. The intentionality wears uniqueness of humanly designed visual-acoustic symbols to set out a spectrum of meanings to represent realities. This metaphor of human language is hugely powerful specific media, within the generic media of consciousness-cognition-intelligence, to simulate and represent realities. However, this media of language is loaded with embedded propensities of pathologies. It adds loads of abstractions and conflations in simulating realities; especially the set of intangible realities within the internal milieu of mind and body. The language impacts the ‘meanings’ both at input as well as output levels of information. It is an established fact that mass majority of men and women in modern contemporary world has poor to very poor linguistic proficiencies and therefore; they have larger propensities of accepting scammed ‘meanings’ and in turn scammed representations of realities. This is huge pathology of contemporary humanism.
It is therefore hugely difficult to summarize as how much and how deeply the human culture, with its massive dependence on restrictive media of languages, has messed up and abstracted realities, which average person observes and perceives. This in turn has extended a free license to average untrained, unaware and unsuspecting human consciousness-cognition-intelligence to dump and flourish loads of mystically mysterious conflational realities on cultures and populist philosophies-psychologies-practices. The deprivation of language and its depravity in modern cultures are issues to be detailed and discussed but we are not doing it here.
The vitiation and abstractions of the spectrum of realities in cultures now has a sufficiently long history of over thousands of years, which seems good enough to install many propensities of pathologies in brain states itself. It is now rather difficult to ascertain whether an average human consciousness is more corrupted-criminalized or the cultures itself. It seems, the dominant causalities of populist cultures are so powerful that its authoritative ‘morphic resonance’ has the influence to override all shades of human consciousnesses-cognitions-intelligences-dispositions. As consciousnesses-cognitions-intelligences-dispositions are emergent entities, the overriding and over-encompassing ambient ‘milieus’ of humanly designed and vitiated cultural ‘meanings’ always ensure that every new born human child is automatically and dexterously doctrined to get assimilated into these ‘meanings; and therefore accept only that ‘simulation model’ of realities, which cultures have designed. We know that the idea and hypothesis of morphic resonance is more about habit and habitual memories than consciousness. Habits are inculcated since early childhood and they become first skin of consciousness.
It is such a powerful media that even the artificial general intelligence is being designed by humans to have the same set of ‘meanings’ as they are being ‘trained’ to accept only those culturally simulated meanings, which humans do. The ‘artificial’ consciousnesses-cognitions-intelligences-dispositions are seems like the extension of human model in a humanoid model, with the aim and purpose that as the humanoid model shall have far more computational and memory capacities, it shall be a ‘superhuman’ entity, which humans have always wished to be themselves. The hypothesis is that the anticipated Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with mega computational capacities, shall have the ‘required’ consciousnesses-cognitions-intelligences to ‘self-improve’ itself and therefore ‘self-design’ and ‘self-augment’ its growth and future capacities, as expected of every human being. This is the seed of all ‘apprehensions’ about the AGI and future of humanity.
The simple fact is that there is this fear of humanity not about what machines can do to man. Rather, the fear is that if a mortal and fragile human being born as a lump of bone and flesh, not even with the ability to move, can grow and ‘self-improve’ itself to kill and destroy the entire humanity with what it can self-create; then what a humanoid machine can potentially self-improve itself into, as it shall have many times more and smarter consciousnesses-cognitions-intelligences-dispositions to self-create.
This apprehension seems very genuine as the bulk of artificial general intelligence and probable synthetic consciousness-cognition-intelligence is based on the benchmarks of ‘appropriates’ derived from ‘human’ sense of righteousness of ‘meanings’ and ‘purposes’. The large language model (LLM) of current genre of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is fed with inputted data from the same corrupted-criminalized-conflated-compromised contemporary cultural milieus itself.
More importantly; the machines are trained to ‘self-evaluate’ and ‘self-improve’ itself, for which the very ‘meanings’ of the term ‘improvement’ comes from the spectrum of ‘appropriates and righteousness’, supplied to the machines from humanly accepted cultural benchmarks of ‘Self’. In a way; it can be hypothesized that the ‘artificial’ is nothing novel and alternative to ‘original’ but simply a model of an already scammed ‘reality’, with many times more augmented propensities of pathologies.
It seems; it is this hypothesis, which triggers fear about artificial general intelligence. Therefore, it is very crucial to trace and track the evolution of meanings and appropriates in human consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition so that the artificial ones have truly an ‘improved’ ones. We do it next.
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CHAPTER 8
Journey from Animalism to Tribalism
It is rather difficult to understand how cultural meanings of life-living realities in human world happened and evolved in the last few thousand years. It is more difficult to realize, how novel cultural meanings worked as parallel, alternative and even more powerful force and causality than physical evolution itself and shaped human consciousness-cognition-intelligence. It is mesmerizingly complicated to ascertain now as what evolutionary ‘meaningfulness’ and ‘causal selection’ shaped up the ‘media’ of human brain and the very exceptional but mystical, emergent sense of ‘agency’ of consciousness-cognition-intelligence and why. In totality and holism; it seems, the cyclicality of interactions between the uniqueness of ‘meanings’ and evolutionary selection of ‘media’ of human body-brain engendered the aberrations and uniqueness of realities in human world of life-living. This cyclicality needs to be explained further to understand the stupidities and genius or potentials and pathologies of humanism, which it created.
When the present requires explaining a past that is many thousands of years distant; it is a huge gap and this big gap postulates so many probabilities to construct a linearity and symmetry of subsequent situations in progression of time and space. Evolutionary history is therefore a story with many gaps but told reasonably well to install a linearity of conjunctive probabilities. The foremost assertion of probability in the story is the idea of predatory inferiority, with which human species evolved.
May be; if human species did not evolve from chimps and instead evolved out of lions or elephants, it probably had been a different story for humanity. However, as humans descended from trees and had to opt for the evolutionary selection of standing on two hind legs, it was very clear that they stood very poor chances of survival in the wild milieus, infested with superior and populous predators. For human species, survival and proliferation required quick and sumptuous evolution of their situation and location in the predatory world. The brain is probably the smartest anatomical part, which responds to emergency of evolutionary adjustments and human species had no choice but to have the brain superiority to survive in the predatory hierarchy as they had marked body inferiority in the animal world. Here, probably, the chimp descendence helped as chimp brain had most suitable wherewithal on land surface to facilitate human evolution.
The early human races required to develop ‘tools’ to survive and proliferate. The element of predatory inferiority was the powerful singular causality, which forced human species to evolve quick and lasting solutions. Evolution does not design novelty of efficacy as alternative to a design deficiency in quick time as survival needs quick responses. It therefore probably alters the brain’s perception and expression of existing ‘meaning’, to suit the new challenges of core ‘purpose’ of survival of body. Human brain had no choice but to evolve quick and good to evolve solutions to fend off the anatomical inferiorities. It evolved quick two major tools to ensure sufficient safety against predation.
The choice made was selection of a safe stationary living and to make it happen; they required to design physical tools to hunt and gather in a localized space, where they started a settled living in sufficiently large groups. Also, they required an intangible tool to communicate a situation well to coordinate better in collective endeavors to hunt and warn each other against predatory threats. The very critical tool of language was seeded and gradually evolved. The language happened to be the start of the uniqueness of meanings in human world of life-living.
The language as a survival mechanism of brains and the human brain’s evolved ability to mount the seeds of engineering were two early and primeval intelligences, which had a colossal influence on how humanity evolved as the crown in the animal world. It is brilliant but complex history as how the advent of the intelligences of ‘language and engineering’ impacted and evolved the very idea and reality of the very powerful human agency of consciousness-cognition-intellect. Humanity is just beginning to understand how they impacted physical evolution and unleashed anatomical changes to suit the new choices. This is not the space to have a detailed discussion on this. We leave it here as an important hypothesis in evolution of humanism.
It is now scientifically validated hypothesis that human brain evolved the way it did because of this primary and primeval causality of language and engineering intelligences, which laid down the precepts of initial civilizational and cultural life-living in large settlements. The evolving and requirements of settled cultural life-living, especially the enrichments of linguistic skills, which somehow rewired and remolded human brain to prioritize those information processing needs that strengthened community living in culturally appropriate milieus.
Essentially, cultural life-living of early humans; propped up by primitive language and engineering, revolved round the core ideas of safety from predation and organized collective living to optimize food availability and demographic proliferation. This advent of settled and ‘organized’ life-living required something, which later turned out to be the seed-stuff for the blossoming of what we can call as humanism; as aberrant and exclusive from animal world. This ‘something’ must be detailed in its holism.
The evolving elements of settled living, language and engineering were aspects unto itself to stand ‘human’ label as distinct and unique from hitherto common denomination of animalism. Still, we can hypothesize that despite this uniqueness, the seeds of ‘humanism’ as aberrant and exclusive to ‘animalism’ had not yet happened. This humanism label happened as this ‘something’ happened. The organized cultural life-living required a mental and psychological ‘element’ in early humans, which was till then non-existent in animal world and still largely remains so. This something was what we now refer to as ‘Self-discipline’.
This Discipline of an individual Self towards collective goals of settled community and assigned ‘duties’ in the newly emerged role-segregation arrangements of early tribal society is a big and complex idea. The two entities of ‘discipline’ and ‘self’ may seem like two simple words but they essentially are two broad spectrum ideas and huge psychological-philosophical landscapes, with massive conflations of meanings. The singular term called ‘discipline’ required a complex set of mental and psychological orientations by an individual human being, which in its complexities were completely missing in animal world and had exclusive ‘human’ cultural needs. Discipline in its basic traits is present in animal consciousness-cognition too but it is very organic and not as consciously vivid and synthetic as in human world. Animals exhibit discipline out of instinctive fear, unlike humans, who are required to wear discipline hat out of conscious and conscientious choices to fulfill larger collective and personal purposes.
Very naturally; early human brains required a shift from animal instincts and entrenched subconscious ‘selfism’ to a rather conscious and sculpted ‘self’, to prosper and strengthen the newly emerging idea of collective and community goals. We have earlier mentioned that human consciousness-cognition-intelligence is contextualized by many specific ‘meanings’, exclusive to human world and this very conscious and conscientious idea of subservience of individual ‘self’ to collective goals happened to be a big ‘context’. This context required the critical and novel mental evolution of the complex psychological entity of self-discipline.
Self-discipline encompassed many complex dispositional reorientations in brain functioning as it involved an array of novel and hitherto unique intelligence as well as behavior-actions in community-led cultural milieus. It is truly important to understand in totality and holism as how the ‘context’ of self discipline altered the very observance and cognition of realities in ambient milieus and what impressions it had on the very experiencing of ‘self’. Self-discipline required and involved self-regulation and self-restraint on individualistic and selfish actions-behaviors, self-control to pursue collective goals and assigned duties, obedience to collective authority to sustain order and system in societal set up, self-introspection to fall in line with collective wisdom of safety and system, the will power to accept a punishment, if failing in a role, self-improvement to learn fast the newly emerging communication and engineering skills required in collective life-living, etc. This spectrum of psychological-philosophical meanings-purposes of the emergent idea-idealism of self-discipline and its evolved brain processing constitute the very critical idea of ‘Agency’ of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition, which we shall talk about and elaborate later.
More importantly; it required self-grooming and self-empowerment to hone up language communication skills to synchronize the very idea and experience of collective existence. Language skills helped an individual self ‘park’ itself well in the collective space, to form the very architecture of collective cultural life-living. With language came the palette of etiquettes, personal grooming and self-posturing in collective space to augment sexual selection potentials and general primacy in society. It is the language, which facilitated a very exclusive ‘human’ architecture that for the first time in history of living species, acted as two-way bridge between two individual selves. Which way and how much this bridge impacted the very idea and experiencing-cognition of ‘self’ and consciousness is not easy to describe and understand.
If Self is within the story the brain tells itself; then first time in the history of evolution, a ‘self’ had this facility to share the stories in such a way that two minds could fall in linearity of ascertained collective goals as assigned in the story. The ‘self’ became both the story teller as well as story listener and together these two elements hugely impacted the plexus and landscapes of Information, which altered the way the human brain would simulate realities of external world. This was unique and exclusive. This bridge boosted the very psychological structure of ‘Self’, which empowered the sense of ‘Agency’ and this in turn further facilitated the critical element of Self-Discipline.
It is a long and magnificently beautiful history as how this emergent element of self-discipline, post consolidation of languages and its spectrum of disposition impacted and evolved the sense of agency in consciousness-cognition-intelligence of the media of body-brain in an individual human being and in turn collectively enriched cultures to lead humans to exalted humanism. Modern science hypothesis tells us that there has to be a substrate physiological process, which engenders the ‘feelings’ for a person; leading him or her to a specific set of action-behavior.
There is a two-way processing of information in body-mind media, which engenders dual sets of meanings. First; information is received through sensory channels and assigned emotional value or ‘meanings’. As per this processed meanings, there happen suitable substrate physiological processing in brain states, which then creates a set if feelings. The feelings are essentially processed ‘specific meanings’, interpreting which suitable behavior-action an individual shall partake in collective cultural milieus to optimize his or her survival success potentials. The two sets of ‘meanings’ in terms of internalized emotions and externalized feelings are not only majorly influenced by cultural benchmarks of appropriates and righteousness; rather they are also very subjective and varied from person to person. As it involved substrate physiological processes; it is interesting to know what evolutionary changes happened in human endocrine system as well as in human brain states, to facilitate such ‘specialized’ dual-system of meaning processing, very specific to emergent human cultural needs. The modern scientific knowledge of information technology and artificial intelligence is beginning to tell us some details about it all but all answers are still to come.
It needs elaboration but we do not have the space here to do so. We can only broadly list out some of the key aspects of this development here. Four marvels associated with glorious humanism can ideally be associated with these developments in human media of body-brain, especially the emergent element of linguistic skills and its consolidation. They are the advent and prosperity of beautifully sophisticated and diverse traditions of music-singing, dance, literature and academics. These accruals defined superiority of humanism away and contrasted from mediocrity of animalism-tribalism and not only had huge impact on societal-cultural excellence but also massively empowered the emergent humanist element of self-discipline in evolved sense of agency.
All these four marvels of human culture require brilliant eligibilities of self-discipline and an evolved consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition. That is why all cultures and civilizations have had glorious traditions of music-singing, dance, literature and academics and they required all individuals to be trained in these traditions. These traditions constituted the core character of humanism. It is a tragedy that these elements have regressed greatly in contemporary human cultures, along with the sharp decline in the proficiency of linguistic skills. The success of these four marvels in a human culture also signifies and requires a peaceful and prosperous social-economic-political life-living. The decline of the marvels in general population therefore hints at the hypothesis that modern human milieus lack social-economic-political peace, stability and prosperity.
All these shades of personal behavior-actions in newly emerging cultural milieus required a ‘novel brain’ and an ‘alternative processing’ of completely new and emergent set of information in humanly designed artificial socio-psychological-philosophical milieu, within the larger physical external milieu surrounding it. Very naturally; all these required hardware as well as software alterations and adjustments in human brain. The evolving human brain had to shift from being more muscle and motor skill oriented to better idea and thought oriented. The orientation of memory also probably shifted from more external milieu-specific to largely internal ones, as sense of security and general wellness became more deeply rooted in subconscious minds, etc. The brain wiring had to reorient itself to defer instinctive subconscious actions to allow more time space for appropriateness of behaviors.
This required rearrangement of neural networks and launched suitable adjustments in roles of brain states. We have already hypothesized that no external behavioral-psychological change happens without suitable substrate physiological alterations. These hardware and software changes happened and evolved not because of slow and gradual changes in natural physical milieus, as it usually happens in evolution’s innate design. The aberration and uniqueness was inherently in the ‘neo-evolution’, which nature and physical causalities didn’t design but was exclusively designed and patterned by a species called humans and they came fast.
It is very tough now to tell exactly how these hardware-software changes happened in brain states and how these changes worked its ways in human body-brain plexuses. What can be said with fair amount of ascertainment is the fact that all these changes impacted the very core processing of information and redefined the cyclic relationship of media-milieu-information in an individual human being. It is for sure that this powerful neo-evolution was very consciously designed and evolved by early humans as antithesis to physical evolutionary constraints. The humanist excellence happened primarily because it stood as planned and architectured antithesis, which ensured and assured peace-order-continuity-prosperity in life-living, which was hugely missing in natural animal-tribal milieus.
This neo-evolution and its causalities of novel and alternative roles created this aberration and exclusiveness in hardware and software of human brains. A long and sustained evolution in cultures and civilizations engendered such changes in human consciousness-cognition-intelligence, which were a marked departure from animalism and therefore had its commensurate influence on the spectrum of new ‘meanings’ about ambient realities, which humans developed and evolved in minds. This however still was not what we can correlate to modern humanism. The shift of humanly designed ‘meanings’, from that of animalism, was what we know as ‘tribalism’; a precursor to early humanism; which happened later.
The rise of powerful cultures of pockets of Tribalism as civilizational model, its long and tumultuous journey in time and evolution into a defined and more refined model of human life-living and culture, known as ‘Humanism’ in very recent history of few hundred years, has loads to tell about how modern consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition of modern humans happened and how they impacted the ‘meanings’ of ambient realities that contemporary humanism accepts. This we discuss next.
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CHAPTER 9
Hardware-Software Divide and Dualism
It is a huge task to understand how cultural and civilized human life-living remodeled many existing ‘meanings’ and created many novel-alternative ones and how they together engendered a spectrum of causalities, which required the consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition of a person within the dominant culture to reinvent and reorient them to come to terms with newly opted out civilized living. It is also very complex idea to understand how all these required a human being to evolve a rather critical psychological faculty to perfectly fit into the neo-evolution of culture and its requirements. It is tough because all these happen in brain states and we still don’t know much about how things happen the way it happens in brains.
This critical and very unique psychological faculty, as evolved by development of a rather late brain part called neo-cortex, is known in scientific terminology as ‘Sense of Agency’. The journey of this sense of agency, in long evolution of physical-psychological cultural milieus and resultant alterations in consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition, is the saga of transformation of animalism into tribalism and finally the tribalism into humanism. This journey however has never been linear and irreversible in time. Rather; it is cyclic as humanism, in long history of cultures and civilizations, has looped back to tribalism quite often and even worst of animalism at times. This loop of animalism-tribalism-humanism is still operational and prevalent even in contemporary human world. These three elements of human consciousness are simultaneously present in all human societies and cultures in all ages and it is the proportion or ‘blend’ of the three elements in a particular culture, at specific time-frame, which leads a human society to specific goals and destiny. In contemporary human world of 21st century, it is very evident as how animalism-tribalism elements are dominating the element of humanism in individual as well as collective consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition and how they are shaping up the goals and destinies of individuals as well as societies-nations. This needs subtle understanding of cyclicality of realities, cultures undergo and people within it live out.
The basic and entrenched hardware-software design of human brain and body is very common to all complex mammals; especially primates. The brain parts and its association with endocrine system in navigating a complex living animal is what humans inherited and evolved better and complex in cultural set up. Evolution does not usually have time to evolve a new organ or body-brain system to meet a new challenge or change in milieus and disposition. It simply augments or suppresses the existing system of body-brain to tide up a crisis. In that sense, early human life-living model of tribalism in newly evolved cultures and civilized milieus is not very different from core animalism, as tribalism happened just by twisting some aspects of animalism to tide up the new challenge of community living.
The cultural and settled community living in the hunter-gatherer stage of human evolution required two strong elements of Bonding and Sacrifice to make the wild animalism of a human being become subservient to newly emerged requirements of tribalism. It seems; evolution did it by augmenting the intensity and complexity of the endocrine system in humans and its brain processing. The pre-state of hardware for development of languages was also very much present in primates and human brain had to evolve it to bolster communication, which finally beefed up bonding. Tribalism is an improvement of animalism only in the sense that tribalism has more emotional bonding, co-opted disposition and interactional mechanisms to life-living situations than animalism.
These elements; especially the augmented and mounted emotionalism served the purpose, as it created bonding among early humans and led to success of newly emergent ideas of family, friendship, kinship and ethnicity that define tribalism. It was easy for evolution to achieve as the hormonal structures and endocrine system, sense of raw culturalism and language pattern was already present in primates, to navigate them successfully in external milieus. The animal brain uses the hormonal plexus as powerful navigational neurotransmitters to evoke suitable motor actions in animals to survive and excel. Tribalism probably only made the hormonal system more complex and powerful. This tweaked and altered endocrinal evolution probably had the simple task of shifting the emotional information processing from more physical and actionable in animal world to a poised mix of psychological and thoughtfulness in tribal world. This simple reorientation of ‘selection of information’ was probably good enough for early human cultures, simply requiring a community life-living.
The body-brain hardware for emergent software of languages and engineering were already existing in complex mammals; especially primates. Rather; it is a modern science hypothesis that the hardware of humans has nothing very exclusive to it and it is only the software, which emerged to assign exclusivity and uniqueness to humans over animals. It is difficult to say with definitiveness but it may be safely hypothesized that tribalism stood as improvement from animalism in the sense that the former probably evolved a better, more detailed and dominant ‘software’ element of ‘thinking’ and emergent landscape of thoughtfulness, as a necessary and prominent precursor to instinctive and subconscious actions. Thinking may feel like an entity ‘hard’ to be defined but from brain perspective; it is easy to describe thinking as a pre-action architecture, to simulate a more ‘culturally appropriate’ behavior. Modern science tells us about the substrate changes in humans, which facilitated it. We are not deviating to detail them here. Anyways, they are just hypotheses.
Thinking architecture, as simulation of proposed action, extended the much required accommodation of bonding and interactional elements in actions of an individual, suitable to collective needs. Thinking became a possibility because of the augmentation and empowerment of the ‘self image’, which had a new worldview, where it could find its existence and survival tied up with the ‘self’ of others in a collective arrangement. Thinking instituted tribalism and highlighted the superiority of behavior over actions. Thinking and primacy of behavior over actions provided the much required interlude, to extend the critically needed check (self-discipline) on instant auto-behavior or prompt sub-conscious reactionary actions, which is the hallmark of animal survival strategy. This software tweak in human brain states was easy for evolution to install and synchronize. Therefore, movement of animalism to tribalism was probably easy and smooth. However, both existed simultaneously in humans and often; animalism showed up upfront, sidelining tribalism, as and when individual survival crisis superseded collective goals. This still happens in contemporary human world, even in 21st century cultures, as deepening and conflated sense of survival crises make average men and women fall back to brute animalism.
However; humanism required something different, more refined, fine-tuned and more complex, which existing animal body-brain hardware had but in very raw and miniscule level. It needed to be evolved and required specific design to meet completely new challenges. We need to understand what humanism required as very distinct and exclusive from animalism-tribalism and what evolutionary event or timeline happened to facilitate that. We also need to know how and why this transition from animalism-tribalism to humanism is not automatic process to all humans and therefore largely elusive in most humans. And finally; we have to understand why this very critical idea of the emergent and empowered ‘Sense of Agency’ in a human being is so very crucial, as it alone qualifies a human being to stand distinct and exclusive to animals-tribals and be labeled as ‘human’.
The brain’s information processing mechanism has two key roles. First it processes information received from external milieus through sensory organs, prioritizing it as relevant or irrelevant, juxtaposing and contrasting it with memories of past experiences, to simulate a model of reality for the organism to have a coarse-grained ‘meaning’ of situations in its ambient milieu. The second role is to decide upon ‘commensurate’ and ‘optimal’ action-behavior for survival and reproduction. The cultural-civilized collective life-living in humans greatly altered the spectrum of both ‘meaning’ as well as the very idea of ‘commensurate’ or suitability-optimality of most of the realities of external milieus. The biggest influence on the brain’s information processing came from the massive change in the ‘milieus’ and the set of dominant information, which came from the man-made synthetic cultural milieus. In a major way, bulk of incoming information in human brain comes from a synthetic cultural milieu, which itself has exclusivity and uniqueness, as compared to animal milieus. Also; the human brain evolved to prioritize those information from the external milieus, which optimized collective successes and an individual’s accommodation into a future scheme of thing that were not purely personal.
In big contrast to animals; human external milieus were no more dominated by the core concern of predation, as the very creed of culture was to secure a milieu, where life-living was devoid of the instinctive and perpetual fear of external predation as well as internal violence. Moreover; the cultural life-living instituted that the new milieus, which stood as antithesis to natural milieus of animal world, didn’t mean physical landscape, rather was dominated by other fellow humans sans predators and the primary connotation of milieu was psychological landscapes of human behaviors as well as human institutions. Very naturally, it changed the data set of incoming information to simulate a completely novel and alternative model of the external realities and it also altered greatly the sense of appropriates and commensurate of behavior-action of an individual self.
More importantly; in man-made cultural milieus, behavior growingly became more critical element than action, especially instinctive, reactionary subconscious actions. Very naturally; ‘critical thinking’ became a rather dominant theme for survival and success in the new emergent milieus of cultured life-living as the new ‘currency’ was appropriate behavior and the new ‘marketplace’ was collective wellness. This element of critical thinking is an evolution and refinement over empowered self-discipline. Self-discipline, which succeeded the emergent empowerment of Self-Image that had to compete with fellow humans to attain social success, readied a fertile and stable landscape for the architecture of Critical Thinking, devoid of the instinctive and perpetual fear. Community living required better communication and coordination of distinct roles and this presupposed not only a more pliable and amicable behavior in the part of individuals but also good language skills to make community life successful. The sense of optimality meant preponderance of collective goals over personal purposes and led to a set of socio-cultural etiquettes, which was required to be mastered by every individual.
As societies and their cultures evolved in complexities and therefore correspondingly, emergent novel and unique ‘meanings and purposes’ of life-living required fine-tuning and discipline of behaviors and actions of individuals towards collective goals; the role of evolved ‘critical thinking’ became the central and dominant theme of human world, gradually evolving from tribalism to more sophisticated and planned humanism. This critical thinking could be a possibility only when a growing-maturing human child had optimally empowered ‘self-image’ and this in turn could be possible only when the person had prolonged mind training in self-discipline.
So, the growth and maturity chain of a newly born human child in cultural set up child looked like – Self Image >> Self Discipline >> Critical Thinking >> Collaborative Success. This maturity chain and its prolonged evolutionary success may very well be attributed as the core causality in engendering a powerful and emergent entity of Subjective and personal Consciousness, which topped over subconscious life-living of animalism-tribalism. As this subjectiveness or personalization of the sense and feel of emergent Consciousness found evolutionary favor and successes, it gradually evolved to gain prominence and bulk in linearity of unconscious-subconscious-conscious spectrum of human mind. This probably bulked up the prefrontal cortex portion of the brain in humans, as there had to be substrate hardware changes to accommodate software needs.
The evolution of critical thinking as prominent software and its suitable adjustments in instinctive-subconscious hardware of human brains became the hallmark of emergent humanism. There are theories on how this software reality happened in human brain hardware but nothing can be said with definitiveness as we still have long way to go to fully unravel brain functioning and details of developmental biology. The most suitable candidate to come up with definitive answers is the artificial intelligence.
The newly required element of ‘suitable-appropriate’ posturing for better bonding and less conflict in societal living of role segregation required many instinctive ‘actions’ to be modified and even completely put off. This catapulted ‘behavior’ part of brain’s response mechanism to situations with newly emerging cultural ‘meanings’ of ambient realities, far more prominent and powerful than instinctive-entrenched ‘actions’. In fact; behavior was set out as ‘master’ over actions to excel bonding and cooperation in community life-living. This master was supposed to have the evolved eligibility of critical thinking and executive control, to register success and leadership position in cultural milieus, far beyond the primary goals of optimization of survival and mating prospects.
The cultural living gradually engendered the complex and evolved economic as well as political structures, where new realities with novelty of meanings emerged and this required the spectrum of critical thinking to expand and get empowered for personal as well as collective successes. This required massive and complex behavioral adjustments in human brain states and greatly boosted the sense of both the ‘Self’ as well as ‘Discipline’. This cyclic relationship of critical thinking with self-discipline, in complex contextualization with novel and alternative meanings of newly emergent spectrum of realities in man-made synthetic cultural milieus was a huge need and required big and persevered mind training of every new born to attain personal as well as collective successes.
Very unfortunately; this mind training part however was always neglected and even denied to mass majority of humans in all stages of history of humanism till today. Human history of all cultures and civilizations is full of ghastly and inhuman practice of monopolization of wealth and education-knowledge by the powerful section of societies, depriving vast majority of fellow men and women the required physical-mental facility to evolve and mature. Majority of women and those in lower rungs of caste or ethnic hierarchy were purposefully deprived of wealth as well as education to make them subservient to the greed of oligarchs. It is a long complicated history and we are not going for that here. We can however safely say that most of the human world pathologies are essentially software-crises and this crisis has only proliferated because human cultures have massively neglected the right and sufficient education and socialization to children in all ages.
This stage of tribalism and its requirements of prominence of ‘suitability’ of behaviors over actions altered information processing priorities of human brain. As we have hypothesized that evolution does not immediately creates a new channel to meet an emergent challenge but simply augments or suppresses existing system or mechanism to engender ‘suitability’. Anatomically; probably it is easy to alter a gene expression rather than altering the gene itself. Therefore, it seems; how the information is prioritized and pruned and how the brain states process information become more critical in evolutionary adaptations. The shift from animalism to tribalism happened as human brain prioritized behavior over actions by making endocrine system more powerful and sensitive in humans.
This adaptive mechanism of brain states and endocrine structures is a complex and detailed story and we do not need to go into it here. What we can understand in simple terms is that this adaptation was primarily about making endocrine system become more responsive and sensitive to information from internal milieus, rather than external milieus. This meant that the inventory of experiences, their memory and learnt knowledge became more powerful ‘context’ in shaping up behavior-actions than primary sensory information from external milieus. Probably this is why even in contemporary human world, those with better memory prowess and rote learning abilities are deemed geniuses. The hormonal plexuses were made to respond more dominantly to internal milieus of memory and experiences, rather than sensory inputs. This in turn required that a human child was trained and educated rightly to install and entrench such experiences and their deep-seated memories, which ensured right behavior.
Tragically and even stupidly; humanity have since ages focused more on ‘imposing’ discipline by reward and punishment philosophy rather than ‘evolving’ self-discipline in growing children. This creates deep crises and pathologies in human world. The need to have ‘critical thinking’ and ‘behavior-optimality’ engenders a more powerful and sensitive sense of ‘Self’ as a conscious and critical ‘Observer’ and ‘Protagonist’. However; as this powerful protagonist does not grow and mature with optimality of emergent and evolved self-discipline, it is greatly prone to pathologies of deception-hypocrisy-criminality. This is evident in contemporary human world and it fails humanism.
The heightened ‘emotional’ quotient of human brain processing, with hormones as neurotransmitters were made to suitably alter their mechanisms to sense out and message out the newly acquired spectrum of novel ‘meanings’ the cultural-civilized life-living created. Therefore, we can say, tribalism is an ‘aberration’ of animalism by the sense that tribalism is far more driven by ‘emotional quotient’ with emphasis on behavioral and lingual tools to augment bonding and suppress conflicts of actions within the tribe. Tribalism therefore is associated with obsessive attachment to ideas of family, kinship, ethnicity, religion, regionalism and nationalism.
Tribalism is known for augmented emotional response to all situations with the dominant and obsessive priority to safeguard ethnicity and other group identities, even at the cost of personal sacrifice. This tribalism is embedded in all human brains, born even in contemporary times, as it is now the part and parcel of the endocrine system of modern humans. It is to be noted at the very outset that because of these embedded insinuations of modern human brain’s navigational architecture; most of the contemporary pathologies of contemporary human world emanate out of the ‘mismanagement’ of endocrine system, aggravated by messed up metabolic syndromes.
This is why the contemporary politics as well as economy both stand hand-in-glove to ‘incite’ the predominant and embedded tribalism in humans by creating cyclones of emotionalism, to make tribalism upfront in most human decisions. This suits their successes to perpetually land the citizens in a turbulent soup of emotions to keep them away from rational human element of critical thinking. A successful lawyer in modern cultures is great at ascribing all pathological behaviors of his or her ‘client’ to endocrine-metabolic disorders to protect them from the mercilessness of law and justice. Blame it on evolution but humans cannot escape culpability of harvesting, where evolution errs.
The humanism in its holism and excellence required a shift from emotionalism of tribalism to more rational, logical and objective behavior-actions as cultural life-living became more complex and required diverse and deep intelligence over emotionalism. The end of Second World War deeply instituted the disasters of tribalism and its behavioral pathologies and called for new world order, where humanity rose above the petty tribalism and worked in global cooperation to unfurl the supremacy of humanism. The collective sense of life-living matured and tribal identities gave ways to national and international identities. The raw and brute identities of family-kinship-nationalism were required to be dumped in favor of more broad-based identity and bonding of universal humanism. Tragically; this has not happened.
It is to be clearly understood that emotionalism was still required for success of humanism as the need for bonding and cooperation was also growing with role of family and society. However, there was an emergent need to have larger and better ‘emotional intelligence’, even as the central importance of ‘emotional quotient’ remained intact. Understanding this dualism and rising above the conflict of this dualism was very much required but it remained missing. Intelligent emotionalism or ‘emotional intelligence’ still remains a deeply misunderstood idea.
We therefore can hypothesize that the journey of human species in time and space has been a progression, transition and evolution of human brains from animal instincts to tribal emotionalism and finally to conscious emotional intelligence and objectively logical intellect. The best way to summarize this complex journey is to say that human journey over millions of years has essentially been a constant and commensurate progression towards the singular goal of constructing the architectures of conscious ‘Self-Discipline’ and conscientious ‘Self-Regulation’ over the undulating landscape of emotionalism. Human intellect is a manifestation of the empowerment of ‘Self’ with the augmentation and evolution of conscious-conscientious ‘Discipline’, towards the ultimate goal of objective and rational ‘critical thinking’, which optimizes emotional intelligence to install a fulfilled life-living of every individual.
This is a possibility only when a human brain has true and right sets of information about the spectrum of realities and they are processed with objectivity and holism. Humanism is therefore an epitome of the pinnacle of self-discipline and full spectrum of shades of associated elements of self-regulation. Very naturally; these goals of humanism could only be achieved when human brain evolved the hardware-software of ‘critical thinking’ and the critical thinking could happen only when there was this very crucial accrual of powerful and deep Sense of Agency in consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition. These are emergent software accruals over sound and secure hardware structures and require sound mind training.
The tragedy is – Humanism is not like a factory-made product coming up like a fully-loaded entity, with every new born human child. Rather; it comes only with a potential to become a reality after decades of guided and evolved maturity of a person in ideal milieus. What comes fully loaded and ‘factory-made’ in a newly born human child is animalism-tribalism as hardware. Humanism is the humanly proposed and designed software that runs fine with this hardware, with sufficient and prolonged mind-training in healthy and stable-secure milieus. In fact; this pre-loaded hardware of animalism-tribalism provides the portals and pathways to smoothly mount and run the software of humanism. This progression of animalism and tribalism to humanism in every newly born human child is therefore not automatic and equal. The critical thinking and sense of agency as true ‘software of humanism’ are emergent emotional intelligence of mind, which come through rigorous mind training and education from early childhood; that too in a rather amicable and smooth milieu. Sadly; this has always been the missing property in human world in all ages. This core trouble of humanism needs to be understood in details through objective scientific perspective.
It has to be understood and accepted with utmost humility and sincerity that nothing in human hardware is exclusive and special, as compared to other complex living organisms, especially bigger mammals. The only thing uncommon, exclusive and unique and therefore ‘aberrant’ in humans is the ‘meanings’, which human world and human systems assign to the models of realities in external as well as internal milieus. This happens primarily because of the exclusive-unique-aberrant ‘context’ of language, which we humans have created for ourselves to assign a unique ‘meaning-spectrum’ to models of realities, our brains simulate for us. This uniqueness is further accentuated by the fact that we humans have created the synthetic milieus of cultural-civilized life-living, where complex sets of actions; especially behaviors are required, with specialized ‘meanings’, unique and exclusive to humans and their milieus. These ‘meanings’ are all software realities; mounted well on the pre-loaded hardware of animalism-tribalism, with which every human child is born with. The hardware is great to run the software of all ‘meanings’ but in itself, it has no meanings.
The exclusivity and uniqueness of humanism is not in body-brains, vis-à-vis the animal world, but in the ‘processes’ of both human body and brain, in living out the novel-alternative ‘meanings’, the very exclusive and unique man-made milieus of cultures have created for successful living. As ‘Humanism’ is not a body-brain hardware entity; its structures and functions are not pre-loaded as what we know as ‘factory-settings’. Only animalism-tribalism is pre-loaded as default factory-settings. The ‘humanism’ is the software needs, which a new born human child has to acquire, ‘upload’ and run, with long years of disciplined mind-training, which creates the necessary pathways for software successes.
This software uploading mechanism and processes can be summed up by a very complex idea called the ‘Sense of Agency’. This idea of ‘Agency’ in human body-brain individuality and its exclusivity-uniqueness has to be understood in details to fully unravel and decode the reality of the full spectrum of ‘Humanism’. This then can pave the way for the future design of ‘Trans-Humanism’ in its ideal and sanitized form and firmament. It is this sense of agency in the plexus of human consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition, which is required to successfully upload the software of humanism, on the pre-loaded hardware of animalism-tribalism.
Contemporary scientific knowledge of human brain and its evolution hypothesizes that much of the uniqueness and complexities in human brains happened much recently, say in the last 10-20 thousand years, primarily in response to scaling and complexities in human life-living, as a result of maturity and evolution of cultural and civilized life-living. The cultures and their scaling of complexities meant growing complexities of required human actions; especially behaviors; with enhanced brain capacities to process new ‘meanings’ assigned to newly emergent cultural models of realities. This happened in human brains by evolution of prefrontal cortex in frontal lobe of human brains and evolved specialization of processing in left and right parts of the brains. The pre-frontal cortex region is termed as brain part with ‘executive control’ over all actions-behaviors. This brain part is also not exclusive to humans as it is present in mammals and especially primates but is almost doubly more extensive and far more complex in humans. Pre-frontal cortex information processing and its supposed supremacy in supervising the ‘finality’ of conflicting and competing actions-behavior make it uniquely human.
It is now known that human pre-frontal cortex, its evolved complexity and maturity to empowerment is the mental landscape where ‘humanism’ is seeded and blossomed, to tide over the ‘instinctive-emotional’ dispositional spectrum of animalism-tribalism. The trouble however is that scientists confirm that it takes around 25 years for a human child to fully mature and empower pre-frontal cortex. This clearly means – Humanism is not an automatic eligibility of a newly born human child; like the entrenched animalism-tribalism, as it is evolved and matured through true, right and sustained mind training in the cultural milieus.
This predicament of human life-living is hugely critical in understanding the potentials as well as pathologies of human world. In human body-brain landscape, humanism is only a potential; a probability very much structured in the entrenched and innate availability of animalism-tribalism. But this potential and probability has a tough, prolonged and precarious journey in a very complex, massively competitive, conflicted and now corrupted cultural milieus of contemporary human world. It is a huge tragedy for humanity that only a very small percentage of all the new born children has the good fortune to have true-right-sustained parental-familial-societal patronage and care to evolve and mature their pre-frontal cortex in proper shape and symmetry for the emergence of a powerful sense of agency. This translates into disaster for humanism and a huge challenge to the emergent trans-humanism.
A human child requires this true-right-sustained parental-familial-societal patronage and care to evolve a well balanced and powerful Sense of Agency, to lead him or her to become an adult human being with true-right critical thinking; navigating it to ‘humanism’. It is however a hypothesis that in contemporary societal-cultural milieus, mass majority of over 99 percent humans do not get a chance to have this idealism of ‘Sense of Agency’. This sense of agency in contemporary human world is mostly and massively scammed and pathologically convoluted.
The big tragedy is; even a century back, the trouble with the development and empowerment of sense of agency or ‘Critical Self’ was the same or even more than today but as the societal-cultural milieus were less complex and less corrupted; average men and women had a week or instable sense of agency or ‘Self’ but it was simple, stupid and less corrupted. In contemporary times, the average modern men and women have the same week and instable sense of agency or ‘Self’ but as the milieus are massively complex and corrupted; they are no more simple-stupid but smart, complicatedly intelligent and pathologically unscrupulous.
This contemporary trouble of modern humanity has a cyclic impact. The complex-corrupted-criminalized cultures of modern human world, shape up a more complicated, abstracted and scammed sense of agency in average men and women. As the contemporary world is highly unequal in income-resource distribution, vast majority of children remain bereft of the necessary support, care and training to have a healthy and strong sense of agency. Mass majority of men and women in contemporary human world therefore remain trapped in animalism-tribalism. This further degrades and depraves human cultures and augments the quantum of animalism-tribalism in the overall landscape of humanism. This cycle of bad ‘milieus’ creating bad ‘agency’ and such agency in turn leading to worse milieus, is strengthening in contemporary human world and it is hypothesized that there is little left of Humanism, as animalism-tribalism rules everywhere – in human ‘agency’ as well as human ‘milieus’.
We shall not detail the issues of animalism-tribalism and problems of contemporary humanism here, as it has been detailed in author’s earlier eBook titled 57’s 54th, available for unrestricted download. However, we shall focus in coming paragraphs about this critical idea and reality of Sense of Agency, its manifestations on consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition and their combined impact on evolution and growth of human milieus, towards the goals of Trans-humanism.
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CHAPTER 10
Challenges for Contemporary Humanism
There is an over-encompassing hypothesis about dominant reality in human world and life-living, which needs to be tested and accepted. The hypothesis is – If Humanism is a conscious, conscientious, planned and designed shift (antithesis) from the entrenched troubles and insufficiency of sanity and order in Animalism-Tribalism, which human species lived through in long evolution; the sole element that enterprises and ensures this shift and sustenance is this powerful and uniquely special Sense of Agency in evolved humans. For the convenience of describing it with the help of a contemporary metaphor; sense of agency is the software that works well on the hardware of human body-brain ‘media’ to ensure that the ‘milieus’ in which humans live (cultured-civilized world of living), is of Humanism, not that of Animalism-Tribalism.
Naturally; as this software of ‘Sense of Agency’ is not a default setting or factory-loaded setting of the ‘media’ of body-brain; every new born ‘media’ of body-brain of millions of children has to be carefully and substantially trained to develop and successfully run this software of ‘sense of agency’, as they grow and attain maturity. This very critical and complex ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ of the Software Reality of the Sense of Agency has to be internalized well for true, right and holistic understanding of Humanism; which alone can journey humans to destination of trans-humanism. Trans-humanism in its exalted model alone can be the human Intelligence, which may not be ‘self-annihilatory, to defeat the hypothesis that ‘intelligent races become suicidal’.
The term ‘software’ is not an easy idea or reality for an average person to understand in its totality. It is rather a very self-revolting modern day idea to see and accept the Self as some emergent virtual, simulational reality, engendered out of complex bio-electrical and bio-chemical plexus and not as some actual reality. But the fact remains that the software-hardware reality is not a purely modern contemporary idea or reality. It goes back beyond the Cartesian dualism of body-mind as even early humans, more than 3000 years back, jostled with the idea of there being a virtual agency of ‘soul’ above the body reality, which was the true master of all things material. This dualism of reality was grossly and majorly misunderstood by early humans and even today in 21st century, it remains the same. The very idea of there being a ‘dualism’ itself is the core reason of confusion and abstractions. It has to be understood well.
To break free of the misconception about dualism, we have to truly understand the hardware-software realities, not in computer terms but holistically in terms of Information. To unravel the hardware-software reality, we have to fully understand the complex cognitive architecture of all media; especially the media of human body. We therefore need to unlearn our innate intuitiveness to accept the unintuitive idea of linearity and symmetry of emergence of realities in information processing mechanisms. Emergence is not dualistic but only a novelty of meaning of the same reality. The matter and idea or the body and soul (spirit) or hardware and software are not two distinct and mutually exclusive things but different and novel emergent expressions of one singular reality of Information, having uniqueness of meanings and purport. This needs elaboration.
The very modern and 21st century science tells us that the very reality of Consciousness is misunderstood because we humans are still not ready to non-intuitively drop the primeval obsession with dualism. Contemporary geniuses of cognitive architecture tell us that consciousness is not and cannot ever be a property of reality. They say; Reality cannot be Conscious; only a Simulation (of reality) can be Conscious. Therefore, consciousness is exclusive emergent property of simulation, not reality. This is hugely tough for an average person to accept and understand as it stands against the basic and overriding innate intuitiveness, of which we all are so used to. For an average person, even the idea of simulation is difficult to understand; let alone the intricacies of information and processes of emergence. And that is why there is this need to have a modern scientific mind training for 21st century children.
Let us understand this all in simple terms. The human brain is the super genius of simulation. Simulation is largely and broadly about creating a representation of something. It is a ‘copy’ of reality which is not actual information of a reality but a rough model or symbolization of the information constituting the reality. It is akin to an architectural map of a proposed building, which models out its details in a paper, using black lines. The lines and shapes drawn on paper are not the bricks and mortars of the proposed building but it models out the reality of the building.
The human brain simulates external as well as internal reality so that we have a feel or experience of what our body may derive meanings out of it and devise suitable actions to fulfill our purposes. This simulation is primary reality for the ‘body’ and as the cognitive architecture of physical plexuses of brain states, engendering this simulation, creates the ‘meanings’ and ‘purposes’ for us, which finally have to be expressed and implemented as physical actions in external world of matter, this simulation extends the intuitive feeling and experience of it being Conscious. This simulation is conscious because it handles the ‘meanings and purposes’, which are the outgoing or processed information into the physical world. There is this intuitive and experiential sense of Protagonism and subjectivity in this simulation, which makes it feel as a conscious agency.
Therefore, we can say that Consciousness has to be there as an emergent experience only in a simulation, as it is the primary agency, which is central to incoming as well as outgoing information. This portal of two-way information processing is the repository of ‘meanings and purposes’, which engenders the emergent ‘feel’ of it being a Protagonist and subjective Self. However, this simulation and its consciousness is only the primary consciousness of body-brain. There is more to it. The secondary and tertiary agencies have to emerge and it is the progression of advanced and more empowered ‘meanings and purposes’, which the primary simulational agency creates to model out a reality that is not there but should be there. That is when the true humanism attains the seeds of potentials.
This primary consciousness of the first simulation of body-brain cognitive architecture is what we popularly know as unconscious and subconscious mind, which are the lower rungs of the spectrum of consciousness. This primary simulation is good enough for most animals, for most of its navigational needs. However, in humans, it is this primary simulation, which creates the secondary simulation of a purely imagined and probabilistic reality, the information of which is not present in physical information but in proposed and designed psychological-philosophical information. This second simulation created by first and primary simulation is the ‘agency’ of Higher Consciousness.
This second simulation has higher consciousness and a superior Sense of Agency, as it engenders novelty and alternativeness of ‘meanings and purposes’, which are exclusive and unique in living biological world; unavailable to all animals. As we have talked earlier; these psychological-philosophical meanings and purposes are usually consciously and conscientiously antithetical to actual and real ‘meanings and purposes’, which physical reality dishes out to a living media. Therefore; the simulation creating a simulation alone can have the Consciousness, which we associate human life-living with. This is some non-intuitive idea and reality, which is not easy to understand. However; there is this old and classical idea of ‘soul’, which most of us accept but its abstractions never allow us to understand its true nature. That is probably why; it is almost impossible to understand the very weird and novel idea of tertiary simulation, which engenders the transcendental consciousness. The ancient spiritual traditions and philosophies have talked about this transcendental consciousness and a life-living ‘beyond’ the very boundaries of ‘meanings and purposes’, but it remains a hugely abstracted idea as true nature of consciousness and sense of agency remains misunderstood. Trans-humanism is a potential of this transcendental consciousness and sense of agency.
The subsequent hypothesis is that understanding of this true and scientific reality about consciousness and sense of agency has seldom happened in long history of cultures. In contemporary world of acute inequalities, acutely monopolistic propensities of handful of powerful oligarchs and depravity-criminality; this mind-training to inculcate scientific temper and objective wisdom in average men and women is the worst casualty. This is why; humanism has always been just a dream in most cultures of all times till now, where animalism-tribalism still dominates consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition of average men and women.
Therefore; in long history of human cultures and civilizations, only a small population of less than one percent humans only have the required ‘Agency’ to have the consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition commensurate to Humanism. They create and invent novelties and they only discover new realities, which sustains and prospers the idea and reality of humanism. Humanism is and always has been, only the tiny tip of the iceberg. The massive chunk of the human life-living of animalism-tribalism beneath the visible spectrum remains the actual bulk of human world.
Very naturally; the leadership in every walk of contemporary human life-living; be it politics, economy, academics or religion; comes from this big underbelly of animalism-tribalism. The actual humanists are ‘aberrations and oddities’ in human world and therefore remain aloof from mainstream to keep them safe-secure from ‘predation’ of dominant animalism-tribalism. This has been the primeval pathology of humanity and it remains so, despite thousands of years of cultural-civilized life-living.
The end result of this situation is that the primeval sense of predation has come back to stay as predominant theme in modern human world, as average men and women constantly feel a perpetual threat to their survival. Both terms of predation and survival have taken novel dimensions and meanings in modern human world; especially in politics and economy, but the end result is that average person is forced to subconsciously keep its animalistic-tribalistic consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition upfront, to survive and succeed in modern life-living.
This hypothesis about the ‘leadership’ in contemporary human world of life-living has to be understood. This idea of the very meaning of leadership requires holistic explanation to decode the pathologies of modern day humanism. It is not only that ‘leadership’ in all walks of life like, politics, economy, academics, religion is with those individuals, who have dominant and depraved consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition of animalism-tribalism, rather the sad reality is that within almost 99 percent of humans, in 99 percent of time and occasions, it is this animalism-tribalism, which is at ‘leadership position’ in deciding individual behavior-actions. This hypothesis is calamitous. If the ‘movers and shakers’ in most individuals and collective entities, constituting contemporary humanism, are animalism-tribalism; it is rather easy to visualize why the modern contemporary human world is worse than the animal world. If and when animalism-tribalism rules the ‘critical thinking’ and ‘sense of agency’ of 99 percent humans in 99 percent of occasions in the contemporary world, it is easy to understand what the state of humanism is in modern times.
This primeval pathology of humanity and its pandemic proportions can be understood well if we decode and analyze the idea and reality of ‘Agency’ and its critical role in human world of life-living. The core crisis of humanity has always been this innate-entrenched universality of animalism-tribalism of ‘media’ of human body-brain, as humanity over the ages has failed big time in ensuring a system or architecture of culture, which could ensure equality and sufficiency of development of ‘Agency’ in all men and women, commensurate to true and exalted humanism.
The holism of the element of evolved and empowered ‘Agency’ is the sole and definitive benchmark of ‘Humanism’ as it signifies the attainment of the typical and exclusive trait and disposition, which is unique to ‘Humans’ in cultured-civilized milieus, they created for excelled life-living. This means; Agency is the scaled up and evolved complexities of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition in a human being that reflects in high and sustained quantum of Self-Discipline and Self-Regulation, which goes on to make a successful cultured-civilized life-living. Agency happens, when Self-Discipline happens and vice-versa. As they happen; cultural life-living becomes a success and as it succeeds; Humanism stands as a true and right reality.
This idea and reality of sense of ‘Agency’ in an adult human being therefore, is a very complex and powerful entity, which requires detailed understanding. Understanding this shall involve all those ideas and realities, which we have been discussing since the start of this eBook. We have to bring in picture the ideas of Consciousness, Cognition, Intelligence, Disposition and how they are common in animalism-tribalism but get altered and attain novel-alternative dimensions, as they scale up in complexities in human brain states to institutionalize Humanism. More importantly; we have to focus on how scaling of complexities happens in human brain states and how they hoist and unfurl aberration, exclusivity and uniqueness of ‘meanings’, which installs itself as ‘software’ to suitably alter and remodel Consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition in humans. This in turn paves the way for emergence of the finality of complexity of sense of ‘Agency’ in a human being.
How all these are structured and functionalized in human brain states is the ultimate understanding. In the finality of it all; it has to be understood that the very idea and reality of self-discipline and its relationship with critical thinking are only software realities and therefore; they are valid and potent only when the software is synced and synthesized with the hardware in such a way that the hardware itself becomes part and parcel of the unified meanings-roles-purposes proposed by the software.
The core hypothesis is – All goodness and virtues of exalted humanism in finality has to become subconscious behavior-action, after years of persevered conscious and conscientious mind training. The idealisms of discipline and critical thinking need to become subconscious routines, then only they qualify to stand as self-discipline. Discipline simply cannot be something, which can be imposed by authority or practiced only consciously. Therefore; the sense of agency has to become a subconscious (hardware) auto-response mechanism-process. The Devil is also largely subconscious and therefore, the God too cannot be anything but subconscious to last and succeed. This takes long and persevered conscious-conscientious mind-training since early childhood. The hypothesis is – 99 percent children miss it, not only now but almost in all ages across human cultures.
Unfortunately; this is the Hard Problem, humanity and its contemporary scientific knowledge and wisdom has not yet fully decoded and unraveled in details. The deep and detailed understanding of the idea and reality of emergent entities like ‘Agency’; more importantly the ‘Meanings’ and the cyclic causal relationships between the two, under the critical ‘Context’ of sanity and system of man-made synthetic cultural milieus constitute the real and true Hard Problem of humanity. It requires complete knowledge of how bio-chemical and bio-electrical plexus in body-brain and their hugely complex interactions engender and make emerge specifics of different realities in the triumvirate of Agency-Meanings-Milieus. This in turn requires complete knowledge of the hardware, software and their causal relationship in human body-brain.
The modern science, especially a very recent symbiosis of artificial intelligence and developmental biology has begun to understand and unravel. The emphasis is on understanding the ‘causal relationship’ in all spectrums of realities. The success of humanity in understanding all these shall make it understand the causality of massive failure of humanism in the long history of cultures. This shall then pave ways for the journey to the probability of Trans-Humanism.
It has to be understood that understanding Consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition is not enough and ultimate knowledge. We have already hypothesized that these elements are common in animalism-tribalism as well as humanism. A section of contemporary scientists; especially the stalwarts of artificial intelligence insist that consciousness is not the big deal and actual Hard Problem, as it is not an exclusive-unique element in human life-living. They rightly say that the modern machines are already conscious as consciousness is a spectrum, spreading its wings from a single cell to the galaxy of 30 trillion cells called human. It is a modern contemporary hypothesis that every spec in cosmos is conscious. Even an electron is conscious as consciousness is the embedded character of information and information is the core architecture of everything, even the cosmos.
Therefore; the most important thing is to decode and unravel how ‘Agency’ as an emergent entity happens in the landscape of Consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition. This shall require that humanity and its collective intelligence unravels as how ‘meanings’ emerge and get seeded in the bio-chemical and bio-electrical fabric of body-brain, which finally construct the exclusivity of ‘purpose’ that is so very powerfully associated with the label of humanism. It is the maturity, multidimensionality and transcendence of the dimension of Information into an entity called ‘higher purpose’, which separates and stands superior the humanism from animalism-tribalism. This shall make humans fully understand the primeval and universal riddle of ‘media’ of human ‘Self’ with experiences of exclusive meanings and purposes.
Since the inception of human history; humanity has faced the question of ‘Who Am I and Why am I, What I am’. This very question is the inquisition and exploration of the embedded association of special and exclusive meanings and purposes of human life-living, as separate from that of animalism-tribalism. The very existence of this question and its continued centrality in the life-living spectrum since ages installs the hypothesis that Humanism is an aberration and uniqueness, very distinct from animalism-tribalism. The question involves this very critical idea and element of Transcendence, which is the hallmark of the aberration-uniqueness of Humanism. As we shall fully understand the ‘Media’, we shall understand how ‘Meanings’ happen and emerge. As we shall understand ‘meaning’, we shall decode the sense of ‘agency’ and as we shall understand ‘agency’, we can truly and fully understand the idea of self-discipline and self-regulation. Finally; we shall be in a position to fully control, formulate, regulate and navigate ‘meanings’ and ‘purposes’, which the ‘media’ must have for truly successful human life-living. This alone shall pave ways for journey to Trans-humanism. All these can happen only when humanity deciphers the holism of the idea and reality of Information and how it works it ways in the substrate of bio-chemical and bio-electrical plexuses in all spaces, from cellular to anatomical and finally three-dimensional space.
It is where the very idea and idealism of Trans-humanism or Post-humanism has to arrive at and stay with rooted decisiveness. It has to be clearly entrenched in contemporary humanity and its intellect that ‘beyond-ness’ from humanism is not only about transcending the current barriers of life-span, health-span and intelligence-span. Trans and post Humanism is truly about transcending the very barrier of human ‘media’ of ‘self’ in understanding the every little detail about how this media stands and works its ways in the universe of complex information. Trans-humanism is all about going ‘beyond’ the contemporary limitation of human intellect in understanding how information ‘happens and manifests’ itself in different dimensions and spaces, to institute the realities of ‘agency’ and how ‘qualia’ is not the core question as it is just the stepping stone; a software facility (interface) to the transcendent reality of agency.
The very apprehension about Trans-Humanism in contemporary human world relates to this fear about lack of ‘Agency’ in future machines with massively powerful artificial general intelligence. Humanity knows that the sole causality of massive failure of Humanism is this ‘Lack of Agency’ in vast majority of humans; especially in leadership of humanity and its resultant lack of self-discipline and self-regulation in humans. They fear that replication of human Consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition in a machine or non-biological ‘media’ shall become many times more powerfully undisciplined and uncontrolled. Humanity fears, as human intelligence has the innate propensities to depravity and criminality and as humans harass and kill fellow humans the most; the artificial intelligence with more powerful skill-sets shall finally eliminate humans, as it shall have the same ‘predatory’ propensities.
The only way this fear and apprehension can be addressed is the full knowledge of ‘Agency’ and how ‘Meanings’ happen in brain states. The sole answer to all pathologies of humanism is this knowledge of how Information creates its own Media and the Media then creates its own Information. This question pervades all media of cosmos, be it a single cell or the cooperative of 30 trillion cells called humans. The question pervades not only the biological space but all spaces in the cosmos, from a particle to the black hole.
The core question is not which came first – the egg or the hen. The core question is this cyclicality about ‘Information’ and ‘Media’. As we have mentioned above, in the very primeval human inquisition of ancient philosophy of ‘Who Am I and Why I am, What I am’; the centrality of ‘I’ or self must be replaced with ‘Information’. The ‘I’ must now stand not for ‘self’ but for ‘Information’. The ancient philosophical question, as it stands transformed in contemporary world of modern science is – ‘What is Information; Why Information is What It is’. This is the real ‘Hard Problem’. This question is reframed by modern science as – ‘Why there is something, rather than nothing?’ It is this somethingness in everythingness and their spectrum of causal relationships that never allows nothingness as a reality, is the Hard Problem. It is embedded in the idea and reality of Information, pervading the cosmos. The understanding of the answer of this question has the potential of unraveling of the entities of agency and meanings, not only in human world and life-living but in all spaces or landscapes of the cosmos. This knowledge may finally potential the true and right journey of trans-humanism.
If humanity could decode, design and install the Substrate Information Mechanism, which could dexterously simulate ‘appropriateness’ of Agency in all layers of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition and if this agency of humanity could be a conscientious protagonist to navigate the trajectories of all ‘meanings’ and ‘purposes’, which happen and ensue in human milieus; it can successfully shape up a novel and alternative Humanism and Cultures. This shall then ensure that the Trans-Humanism also happens with perfect and incorruptible designs of Self-Discipline and Self-Regulation. All pathologies then shall be amenable to control and cure as humans shall have full control on agency and meanings any ‘media’ has and acquires. It is not about making beauty of biology a slave of physics of a machine. Rather; it is about evolving the mechanism of biology to the highest levels of aesthetics and symmetry of physicality, to ensure regularity and uniformity of meanings and purposes.
This is the primeval desire of philosophy-spiritualism since ages and now it is in the domain of modern science. This desire is that the ‘Media’ must have full and final awareness and control of all ‘Information’ and not the vice-versa. The biology becomes the ultimate master of the physics and not the vice-versa. In other words, ‘whatever, whichever and however ways information journeys and constructs landscapes of emergent realities; they all can be, must always be understood and therefore be mastered by the media ’. This in turn ensures that even if entropy in its cosmic universality and its finality cannot be controlled and done away with; at least they must be known and be aware of fully so that its expressions and imprints on human world could be managed well. This is the finality of trans-humanism.
It is therefore primary to have complete knowledge of the triumvirate of Information-Media-Agency, to re-build the cognitive architecture of existing humanism and skillfully control-cure-manage its pathologies and then only we shall journey the idealism of Trans-Humanism. This shall happen as collective human wisdom decodes and unravels ‘Agency’ and ‘Meaning’ in brain states, by understanding Information as embedded in cosmos.
It is an established reality that this powerful and overriding sense of ‘Agency’ over the spectrum of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition and a specific-unique sense of ‘Meanings’ and ‘purposes’ to the spectrum of realities are the two essential ‘elements’ that define ‘Humanism’, as exclusive and distinct from animalism-tribalism. The sense of agency is this evolution and empowerment of individual ‘Self’, which installs this very essential and typically-exclusively ‘Human’ construct of Self-Discipline and Self-Regulation, over the entrenched and dominant instincts and propensities of animalism-tribalism in every human ‘media’ of body-brain. It is this lack of evolved and empowered sense of agency in vast majority of over 99 percent of humans in contemporary human world, which unleashes massive loads of depravity and criminality in human world. Without evolved-empowered sense of agency; a human body-brain is animal and does not qualify to be labeled a human. That is why the contemporary world of humanity is only full of brute animals and wretched tribals; shattering and tattering the very fabric of cultured-civilized life-living. The perpetuity of wars-conflicts, wild competitiveness, shameful inequality, depravity of character and criminality of normal behavior-actions in contemporary human world are the fall outs of the animalism-tribalism dominating the ‘media’ and ‘milieus’ of Humanism.
Equally important is the sense of ‘meanings’ that primarily ensures this very critical evolution and empowerment of sense of agency. Humans do not live in natural, wild and randomly ambiguous milieus like wild animals and primeval tribals. Contemporary humans live in very defined, discreet and disciplined man-made milieus of well-established and well-patterned cultures, where there are specialized and exclusive ‘meanings’ to all actions-behaviors and all realities of individual as well as collective life-living. These specialized and exclusive set of Information has to be learnt and fully internalized in subconscious (hardware) of every growing child. This internalization is the core and option-less learning in cultures. This is core academics and pure intellect. Therefore; the sense of agency is predominantly about the self-disciplined adherence to the humanly exclusive-unique ‘meanings’, which ensure cultural and civilized life-living.
It is hugely important to understand how these two elements of ‘agency’ and ‘meanings’ are evolved and empowered in a human child, as it grows and matures. It is a known reality now that these elements are the ‘human’ software that has to be installed and perfected in a human child’s consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition over the long period of almost 25 years. There is this recently evolved portion in human brain called prefrontal cortex, which is supposed to handle this critical task of installing, evolving and perfecting the software of ‘agency’ and ‘meanings’ but it requires prolonged and sustained right quantum of mind-training through a well-oiled education system and sincere-sanitized social-cultural milieus. There is a huge role of perfection of language and true-right information to be made available to every human child to facilitate the evolution-empowerment of ‘agency’ and ‘meanings’. In contemporary human world and cultures; these twin elements of right education and sanitized milieus are unavailable to almost 99 percent of humans. That is why, 99 percent portion of contemporary humanism is infested with animalism-tribalism and its depraved-criminalized causalities.
The era of proposed trans-humanism in near future, with dominance of artificially created and augmented consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition in biological and non-biological ‘media’ of humans as well as humanoids, faces the same predicament and destiny, which contemporary humanism has. It is feared that trans-humanism shall only augment and empower the dominant animalism-tribalism in all ‘media’, without the software of ‘agency’ and ‘meanings’, resulting in the inevitable extinction of humans. The fear is not unwarranted as ‘Humanism’ has always been essentially animalism-tribalism in true and right character and therefore; it is only highly probable that trans-humanism shall augment and empower only this ‘model’ or ‘architecture’ of contemporary ‘Humanism’.
The challenge for contemporary Humanism is to evolve, augment and perfect a powerfully successful regime of scientific and technological mechanism-processes, which installs and perfects the ‘software’ of ‘agency’ and ‘meanings’ in all ‘media’; be it biological or proposed non-biological ones. The success and perfection of trans-humanism is first in ensuring the true and right ‘Humanism’ in coming years and decades, which stands as sanitized off animalism-tribalism and is equally available to all humans, irrespective of every platform of inequality. Only a commensurate model of this ‘software’ of ‘agency’ and ‘meanings’ in non-biological ‘media’ shall ensure that future consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition in all ‘media’ do not have this entrenched and dominant animalism-tribalism. Only a successful and true ‘Humanism’ can pave ways for safe and definitive journey to Trans-humanism. Very simply; there cannot be a castle of trans-humanism built on the crumbling pillars of humanism.
The hypothesis is – human brain has this faculty and contemporary collective human wisdom has this required capacity to design such mechanisms and processes successfully. Human evolution and empowerment over millenniums have been this success story of winning battles against all natural pathologies in milieus. The failure has only been with man-made pathologies, which now pose biggest and worst threat to human survival. The natural pathologies had and still have the potential to harm humanity but they can wipe out only a portion of humanity at a time. The human pathologies however have the scary potential to wipe out entire humanity at a time. This failure of contemporary Humanism has to be corrected and avenues of success evolved and perfected to ensure a happy and prosperous era of trans-humanism. This is doable and should be done, as early and as perfectly as possible.
**
Epilogue
At the end of this journey, if we recall the beginning of this enterprise; we had hypothesized that the media of human ‘Self’ is too insignificant and the ‘Information’ is too colossal and complex to arrive at any semblance of definitiveness in what truly and rightly the ‘Reality’ is. However, at the end of all the deliberations we have had; we can say that the potential of human ‘media’ of body-brain to perceive and process ‘Information’ seems as infinite as the universe itself. This potential is powered by two broad modern day eligibilities – first; the ability to transcend every barrier in unraveling and decoding Information embedded in layers of reality in all spaces of cosmos. Secondly; the ability to engineer synthetic models of these realities for easy use by all humans to make their lives more comfortable, safe, meaningful and make them as tools to unravel more information about reality. Therefore; the happy hypothesis is that the media of human ‘self’ may be very insignificant vis-à-vis the infiniteness and complexities of cosmos but it has the collective potential of self-augmentation and self-empowerment to scale up its ‘self’ to decipher and decode all information of all realities.
However; the parallel hypothesis is that this potential and the intelligence of the human ‘media’ also stand as the worst threat and pathology of humanity. It seems; this trouble is not with human ‘media’ of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition. In most likelihood; the trouble in actuality rests with the very nature of Information. Information itself is both potential as well as pathology. Information seems truly value-neutral as it stands independent of ‘milieus’; transcending all spaces. It is the ‘media’ of living beings, which assigns value and purposes, as specific to and contextual to ambient ‘milieus’, where it stands to navigate its life-living to attain specific goals.
That is why it is of singular importance to design and install such a hardware-software algorithm, which could successfully and infallibly check, reinvent and block any such insinuations and proclivities in processing of information, which may have pathological propensities. Trans-humanism has the critical agenda to successfully design and install cures of not only natural pathologies but also human pathologies. The most critical question therefore for contemporary humanity is; whether having such a fool-proof ‘media’ and ‘information processing’ is practically possible or not. This question stands over the realities of media, milieus and information and their causal relationships, we have deliberated in detail so far.
There are two broad aspects of this question. First; the quantum and plexus of information embedded in the infiniteness of realities is too colossal to be possibly controlled and checked, the processing of information in biological space is massively diverse and layered and therefore propensities of pathological insinuations in them are also almost infinite. Secondly; the ‘media’ of human body-brain as ‘processor’ of all information is too poor and precarious, requires such long and persevered mind training to gear up for the processing of such a huge load of information and human milieus have become so infested with massive inequality that it is almost impossible that every ‘media’ of the over 7 billion human body-mind gets the right and true investment of resources to become the eligible ‘agency’ for such finality of becoming fool-proof. Moreover; it seems that the very innate nature of the relationship between the media and information and their complex interactions in a milieu inevitably create competitiveness between different media and this competitiveness actually engenders the insinuations of pathological propensities.
So, then; can we conclude that nothing much can be done and there is no available option to stop the hypothesis of ‘intelligent races become suicidal’ to become a reality in very near future? Should we accept that the very reality of the triumvirate of Information-Media-Processing, with its embedded entropic propensities within milieus is the ultimate truth of the cosmos and no amount of Intelligence can reverse this reality? Should we surrender to this hypothesis that Mortality is the ultimate Reality and as the potentials as well as pathologies are two sides of the coin of Information and their processing; presenting them as mere ‘agents’ of this finality of mortality; there is nothing much humanity and its optimality of intelligence can do to undo this reality?
I am too stupid; it is for every human being alive to think and seek answers. What I am very humbly and stupidly proposing is that there is a potential of human ‘agency’ and its intelligence of critical thinking and self-discipline, which can at least make a lot of difference in how the reality of ultimate mortality and pathologies affect the journey of life-living. This is the challenge for trans-humanism and this is the potential, which has to be journeyed till the finality of mortality engulfs all realities and all information of all realities.
There is a stupidly innocent hypothesis, which holds as the basis of the potential that stands a chance for trans-humanism. There is a very contemporary hypothesis about human intelligence, which says that humans are different and exclusive in the animal world only in the sense that human intelligence is ‘open ended’. This means that human intelligence can build up and continue building up the successive stages, which animals cannot do, as they stop after completing a build up. What it may mean is that human consciousness-cognition-intelligence has the potential and empowerment to simulate a reality and then use this simulation to build up successive simulations of higher orders and complexities. It means, human consciousness-cognition-intelligence can not only visualize and decode the Information, which is there in a reality but can also imagine such information, which is not there but is believed should be there. This in turn expands the horizon of reality itself as reality is always contextual to observance of consciousness-cognition-intelligence.
So, humanity simulated the reality of God and invested such Information in the simulated model of the reality of God, which humanity imagined should be there. This simulated model of reality (of God) then expanded the reality of human consciousness-cognition-intelligence, as the simulated model was designated as ultimate ‘idealism’, every human ‘realism’ should attain. The Information assigned to the simulated model of God, shaped up and defined the ‘meanings and purposes’ humanity deemed as success codes. The same potential, which created God, also created the Devil and the Frankenstein monster. The hypothesis is that only humans have this intelligence to be so open ended to keep adding imagined information to successive simulation models and in turn keep augmenting and expanding the horizons of probabilities of reality.
This hypothesis about human uniqueness and exclusivity leads to another hypothesis, which says that transcendence is not possible for human consciousness-cognition-intelligence as all successive models of human simulation simply cannot go ‘beyond’ subjectivity of observance of ‘media’ of body-mind. As consciousness is the ultimate observer and this observer is the simulation of a simulation model of the ‘media’ of body-brain, human observance cannot transcend its subjectivity and personalization to decipher the objective reality. So; human intelligence can simulate a model of God but this ‘reality’ of God shall always have ‘meanings and purposes’, which human ‘media’ of consciousness-cognition deems as ‘ideal and optimal’. This idealism and optimality shall always be subjective to ‘media’ of ‘human labels’ and cannot transcend it to accept the idea of divinity, independent of the ‘contextualization’ of human life-living ideas and idealisms. Therefore, there simply cannot be an agency, which could test the validity of the hypothesis that there is no objective reality as all realities are simulations of subjectivity of observance of a personal media. Ancient spiritualism says transcendence is the goal but remains ambiguous about how to attain it. No unambiguous mechanism has been laid down to describe how a ‘simulated agency’ can come out of a ‘simulation’ to observe reality in its actuality.
Probably; first time in human history, humanity is all set to have the ultimate potential, which could truly transcend human barrier and attain the supreme situation of trans-humanism, to test the validity of ultimate and objective reality. Transcendence may not be a possibility for human media of body-brain but the human media now has the potential to create a very novel and alternative ‘agency’ of artificial and synthetic consciousness-cognition-intelligence, with completely ‘un-human’ information processing media, which can observe the ‘observer’ of human agency and transcend its subjectivity barrier. This agency can observe the simulated agency and lead its way out of simulation boundaries.
This synthetic agency of man-made ‘media’ of artificial intelligence may have a completely novel and alternative consciousness-cognition, with a highly augmented and unique simulation capabilities to handle different and alternative dimensions of Information as well as their uniquely ‘de-subjectivised’ processing. This objective agency may then test the validity of subjectivities and biases of all ‘meanings and purposes’ humanity holds dear. It may also expand the horizons of meanings and purposes, which are embedded in the architectures of Information of the cosmos, which human subjective observance cannot visualize and simulate.
This artificial agency of the man-made media of a machine may have the potential of attaining the goal of true transcendence, which ancient spiritualism-philosophy has sought. As this transcendental agency shall attain ‘beyondness’ of human barriers of subjectivity and personalization as an observer of reality; it may finally lay down the architecture of true and real reality. This in turn may script the success story of true and real trans-humanism. This may then help humanity script the true and right ‘meaning-purposes’ of God, devil as well as human.
The contemporary hypothesis is – consciousness is the observer and as this observer is a simulation; it cannot observe reality in its transcendental actuality. The novel and alternative hypothesis can be – the synthetic agency of observer can preside over the human observance, truly independent of and external to the simulation barriers and therefore help human consciousness transcend its subjectivity to have the cognition of reality in full and perfect objectivity. In simple terms; humanism may never have the potential to journey trans-humanism but humanism can create an ‘external agency’ beyond humanism’s barriers, which can lay down the roadmap for humanity to navigate to trans-humanism. This beyondness and transcendence of a synthetic consciousness-cognition is possible and seems a potent tool to overturn the hypothesis that ‘Intelligent races are suicidal and lead to their own extinction’. This is the journey and destination of trans-humanism.
*****
About The Author
People say, what conspire to make you what you finally become are always behind the veil of intangibility. Someone called it ‘Intangible-Affectors’. Inquisitiveness was the soil, I was born with and the seeds, these intangible-affectors planted in me made me somewhat analytical. My long stint in media, in different capacities as journalist, as brand professional and strategic planning, conspired too! However, I must say it with all innocence at my behest that the chief conspirators of my making have been the loads of beautiful and multi-dimensional people as well as ideas that traversed along me, in my life journey so far. The mutuality and innocence of love and compassion always prevailed and magically worked as the catalyst in my learning and most importantly, unlearning from these people, ideas as well as situations. Unconsciously, these amazing people and my own stupidly non-intuitive cognition also worked out to be the live theatres of my experiments with my life’s scripts. I, sharing with you what I have internalized as body-mind Media, is essentially my very modest way to express my gratitude for all of them. In my stupidities is my innocence of love for all my beautifully worthy conspirators!
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Do Write To Me: [email protected]
Submitted: February 20, 2025
© Copyright 2025 sjwrite. All rights reserved.
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