Doing better than we think (Sunday Reflections for April 25, 2010)

"We have made remarkable progress in our scientific knowledge and technological expertise. We have not done anywhere near as well in the advancement of human relationships."

This quote from anthropologist Herbert C. Taylor was posted recently by a Facebook friend as a "thought for the day" (which I enjoy). It’s the kind of quote that will cause many to nod slowly and grimly. “Sad but true.” It sounds wise and somewhat profound. I’ve heard similar ideas before. I think it’s baloney.

We’re all aware of the dramatic improvements in quality of life brought by science and technology, though we often take them for granted. We also forget how recent most of these developments have been. We tend to think about whiz-bang electronic devices but advancements much more basic really show how our world has changed.

Steam and gas engines and electric motors made possible activities no human or animal strength could accomplish. Electric light illuminated better and more safely countless dim interiors as well as nighttime exteriors. Electric wired and wireless communication brought people together in ways previously unimaginable. High speed transportation did the same, fulfilling the dreams of generations. Antibiotics conquered diseases, modern agriculture dramatically reduced the resources needed to feed the world, birth control gave people and especially women new freedom and control over their lives, as did a host of household appliances. Man-made materials like steel, aluminum and plastics resulted in safer, cheaper and more efficient products of all kinds. And let’s not forget indoor plumbing.

All this and more have improved the quality of life of people around the world. These improvements continue to spread and continue to grow in number and quality. We do not exaggerate in describing these changes in industry, agriculture, transportation, and communication as “revolutionary.” Professor Taylor’s quote above implies, however, that human relations have somehow lagged behind. Yet just a little reflection shows that the changes in human relationships have similarly upended our world.

Here again we take so much for granted. Our historical myopia has caused us to forget how people in the past treated and related to one another. Part of this may be the fault of Hollywood which is often our primary window into the past. Being entertainment, it’s not surprising that much of that past is highly romanticized. Movies and TV also get most of their material from the lives of history’s “rich and famous” while ordinary people get little screen time.

The simple reality is that for much of Western history, at least, only one category of people had anything approaching the rights and freedoms we now take for granted: free, skilled or property-owning males. Often this group was a very small percentage of the population. In many ancient civilizations, slaves accounted for up to a third of the population. Many who were free nonetheless still lived in poverty or close to it, often as tenant farmers indebted to rich land owners. Women were often viewed and treated literally as only partially human, since their gender was thought to be an incomplete version of the male norm. Children were simply potential humans, mouths to feed until they could perform useful work.

In his book Leviathan (1651), the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described human existence as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes’ point, however, was that this was “the life of man” in the absence of civilization and just government. From his Enlightenment era forward, the world has been on an unrelenting quest to establish and extending human rights for all. We forget how revolutionary was Thomas Jefferson’s simple assertion in the Declaration of Independence, memorized by school children the world over: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….”

In 1776, many would certainly not have seen human equality as “self-evident.” Yet less than two centuries later this principle was enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and thus officially recognized by all the nations of the world. Of course, its implementation is still highly flawed but we cannot underestimate how far civilization has come in establishing this rule as the norm by which individual and societal behavior is to be judged.

The notion that every human life is uniquely and inherently valuable would have been laughed at in most periods of human history. Today it is one of the primary standards for judging human relations. The story of how we came to this point is important and fascinating and needs to be told often. With seeds from the Bible, ancient Greece and elsewhere, the idea began to take hold in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Its origins involve theologians, philosophers, painters, writers, composers, politicians, merchants, and scientists. Crucial events include the Magna Carta, the Reformation, the American and French Revolutions, and the scientific and industrial revolutions.

Unfavorably comparing our technological progress with that of human relations is not only misleading. It also misses their vital interrelationship, for the two have developed in tandem. Science and technology grew in parallel with a belief in the value and dignity of human beings. Further, the spread of human rights became possible as the basic necessities of human life became more easily attainable by ever larger portions of humanity. Today new and expanding global communication networks make oppression ever more difficult (as most recently with the use of Twitter by Iranian protesters).

There is no question that modern life is much more complicated and the modern world more dangerous in ways our ancient ancestors could not have imagined. That is the price of freedom and equality and the consequence of being on a journey still far from completion. Recognizing that, however, should not diminish our awareness of how primitive was our beginnings or our appreciation of how far human civilization has come. In short, we need to remember that the past was not all that great and the present is a whole lot better than we often realize.

Dream big (Sunday Reflections for March 14, 2010)

Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. (Joel 2:28)

A little after 8 am, five days a week 52 weeks a year, I get in my “In Box” an email newsletter from KurzweilAI.net. This is a web site created by inventor, author and futurologist Ray Kurzweil. (If you’ve ever used an electronic keyboard or voice-recognition software, you’ve probably made use of something he has a patent on.)

Kurzweil is a dreamer but, as his life has shown, he also has the ability to turn dreams into reality. Now in the latter part of his life (or maybe not “latter” if one of his dreams comes true) he is focusing most of his attention on creating dreams, big dreams—visions of the future both near and distant. Many of his futuristic visions have been dismissed by others as fantasy but not all. And given his past accomplishments many hesitate to dismiss anything he imagines as “impossible.”

Each of the little e-newsletters he sends out has about a half-dozen story summaries, with a link to click on to find the full story if it interests you. These stories are all about things happening right now in countless fields of research and technology. The topics include biology, medicine, nutrition, energy, computing, transportation, physics, astronomy, climatology, communication, robotics, and more.

Many of the stories are truly amazing but for me what’s most impressive is simply the sheer volume of the stories. They arrive day-after-day so that you can’t help but thinking, “Wow, there’s a lot going on in the world.” And the result of that is to make me really—hopeful.

That’s important because we live in what can be a very discouraging time. We can be discouraged by our own personal circumstance or by the economic gloom that has covered much of the developed world. I know it affects me. It’s obvious that—unlike the TV commercial—there is no Easy Button to get us out of the financial and economic mess we’ve gotten into. We’re going to be here for awhile.

Yet as this newsletter shows, around the world people are working to solve problems and make our lives better. Most of these people are working with little recognition—they fly below the media’s radar. Yet they are doing truly remarkable things, many of which someday (and in many cases it isn’t far off) are going to make this world of ours a better place to live.

In many ways Kurzweil provides little glimpses of humanity at its best, of human beings fulfilling what we imagine is our ideal function and purpose: helping each other to live better and happier lives. It brings to mind those early and simple instructions in the Bible: "till the garden and keep it" and “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Obviously, however, that isn’t all that’s going on in our world. Indeed, what makes these newsletter articles stand out is that they are often so unlike what is in the news much of the time. Yet one other hopeful thing is that we seem to be asking serious questions about why that is. We are wondering about the ways we are spending our time and talents, energy and resources. We are asking serious questions about our collective values and priorities.

The 2008 financial meltdown has caused a harsh spotlight to fall on Wall Street and for good reason. Certainly the causes of the Great Recession are varied and complex but the Wall Street investment “too big to fail” mega-banks must take a lot of the blame. Their ever more complicated, multi-trillion dollar financial schemes and products (financial weapons of mass destruction Warren Buffett has called them) collapsed like a house of cards, very nearly bankrupting the country and much of the rest of world. The reverberations and repercussions are not over yet nor, apparently, are many of the risky bank practices that got us into this mess.

While not necessarily justifying their previous behavior, bank leaders have argued that these institutions provide a vital service to the country and the world. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has gone so far as to say they are doing “God’s work.” The importance of banking services, especially making available investment capital, is not disputed. What is in doubt, however, is whether these banks are, in fact, providing those services. Rather, their top priority seems to have become not making loans but making money and lots of it—mindboggling amounts of it—however they can.

Wall Street’s banks are the most extreme examples but they are causing many to ask some basic questions about our economy and our society, our needs and priorities. For instance, there are many enormously talented people at these banks. They and their talents are a great resource—is what they are doing really the best use of that resource for our society?

Even more basic: what values are we teaching our children? What should their priorities be? Do we still believe making money and being happy are one and the same? What should be the goal of their education? If we say it is to be able to get a job, how do we deal with the fact the many of today’s jobs will cease to exist in the near future and many of the future’s best jobs haven’t even been imagined yet? And with our ever-increasing productivity and efficiency, is “having a job” even going to be the best way to think about adult life for future generations?

It has perhaps always been true that one of humanity’s greatest obstacles has been lack of imagination. We are creatures of habit. Those who ask “what’s over that hill?” or “what if we did it this way?” have more often been laughed at or scared off than listened to. What is remarkable about the world’s recent history is that such people have been given much more credibility and opportunity. Still, changing habits and ways of thinking are hard for all of us.

My daily e-newsletter from Ray Kurzweil tells me, however, that countless, mostly nameless, people are asking questions and searching for answers in a quest for a better life for all of us. Are they being encouraged? Are there enough investors willing to take a chance on their research and to make their discoveries reality? Are there other talented people who could be doing such things but who got misdirected into jobs or life paths that really aren’t benefiting themselves or the rest of us—or are benefiting themselves without consideration for the rest of us?

Great things ARE happening. Great discoveries are being made. Great problems are being solved. Imagine now if these weren't just stories in a newsletter but it was everyone’s daily reality? A dream? Perhaps. But dreams are where great things always begin. And this dream is based on belief in the greatness and goodness of the creation in which we live and of which we are a part.

It's all in your head (Sunday Reflections for July 12, 2009)

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one was there to hear it, did it make any sound?” We’ve all heard this teaser question—how would you answer it? According to a new book, Biocentrism,the answer is clear and unambiguous: there was no sound. Why not? Because sound only happens in our heads. And that’s because, says author and medical doctor Robert Lanza (assisted by astronomer and popular science writer Bob Berman), all of our experience of the universe is only in our heads.

I was a philosophy major in college and have always appreciated people who made me look at the world around me, and at myself, in a different way. Biocentrism certain does that. The book’s subtitle gives a clue to what it’s about: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.

Robert Lanza is not some kind of New Age quack. He is, in fact, a very accomplished scientist. A Fulbright Scholar, Lanza was on the team that cloned the first human embryo, among a long list of achievements, awards, papers, and books.

What is consciousness? It’s our awareness of our self and of the world. But how does it happen? Where is it? Those have been much more difficult questions to answer, though humans have been trying to figure them out since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. We know consciousness is in the brain (isn’t it?) and we know quite a bit now about how the brain works. Just where exactly in the brain consciousness happens, and how the brain does it, are still mysteries, however.

For Lanza, this isn’t just a medical or physiological curiosity. Rather, it’s where it’s all at—literally. And affirmation of that judgment has come from—of all places—the realms of physics and astronomy. Einstein’s theory of relativity was the first to demonstrate that human perception affects our experience of the universe. Time, for example, moves at different rates for objects moving at different speeds.

Then came quantum mechanics, which has shown that human perception actually determines at least some aspects of the universe. Moreover, perception is even required to make some parts of the universe “happen.” This is one aspect of the famous Heisenberg “uncertainty principle” which says that the location or momentum of a subatomic particle is not determined until it is observed.

For biocentrism, the strangeness of these discoveries is the result of the fact that our experience of the universe happens only in our head. The universe happens in our consciousness. Sound, for example, is purely a biochemical process in our brains. That’s why that unobserved tree fell in silence. Sound isn’t “out there” for our ears to grab. Rather our ears collect vibrations which are transmitted to our brains and where they are then interpreted as sound. No ears, no brains, no sound.

Consider this question: What color is that daisy in your garden? White with a yellow center? What about at dusk? What about at midnight? What about at night under the garish light of the amber street light in my alley? All of these experiences of that daisy are just as real as when we see it in broad daylight. It’s only by convention that we agree that only under that condition do we see its “true” colors. In fact, the colors of that daisy are only happening in our brains and will vary with conditions and with the observer (as when someone is color blind). No experience is any less real than another.

Or how about a rainbow? We’ve all seen them. Have you ever found one? Where is a rainbow? You know the answer by now: it’s (only) in your head. Yet it’s not a “figment of your imagination.” Someone standing next to you would also see it. But find someone outdoors at the same time even just a few blocks away and they may not have seen it. That’s because seeing a rainbow is a function of an observer’s angle to the rain drops and the light passing through them. In fact, everyone looking at a rainbow actually sees it slightly differently because their angle is different. The rainbow in your head is not the same as the rainbow in mine.

What value is biocentrism? For one thing, Lanza says, it helps steer us away from false questions and fruitless pursuits. He thinks much of physics’ search for a “grand unified theory” (GUT for short) falls into this category. But consider this simpler example. With astronomers able to tell us with some precision the size of the universe we inevitably wonder, “What’s beyond the universe? What’s the universe inside of?”

From the perspective of biocentrism this is a meaningless question. “The Universe” is a model we use to make sense of our conscious experience, which we then make the mistake of imagining as a “thing out there.” The universe’s “out-thereness” is only a convention which enables us to interact with it and with one another. Our sensation of the universe, however, is only in our head.

Is your “head” spinning yet? This is what it means to experience a genuinely new idea, especially one that runs counter to what everyone “knows” to be true. I think we are in a time when we are getting bombarded with a lot of new ideas. They can make us giddy and give us a headache. It’s understandable that our immediate reaction is to say “Nonsense!” and go on with our lives. It’s why times of transition like we are in now often feel so unsettled and even threatening. While they may not be particularly fun times to live in they often result in dramatic advancements over time in the quality of life. The Reformation and Renaissance are well known examples. So, for that matter was the rise of Christianity.

Is biocentrism “the next big thing” to alter human life and the way we see the world? Perhaps, but it’s way too early to tell. I actually think Lanza may be onto something important here. He also has some interesting spiritual speculations at the end of his book. To me biocentrism seems to be a strong affirmation of the incredible value of human beings, both individually and as a species. And it gives a whole new dimension to Jesus’ statement that “the kingdom of God is within you.” In any case, biocentrism will be something to pay attention to, even as we continue on with our everyday lives in the world (we think is) “out there.”