The War Within - Between Good and Evil, Bheemeswara Challa [books for 7th graders txt] 📗

unhappiness in the world. Unable to
accept, we turn on others as a reflux. When this ‘better-bitter-balance’ is severely
out-of-balance in the mass of mankind, Lord Krishna avers in the Bhagavad Gita,
God will intervene to restore a reasonable dharmic ‘balance’. But it still does not
mean that ‘evil’ will be, or should be, erased from the earth. That is because there
is nothing intrinsically and absolutely good or bad, positive or negative, and it
is the intent and purpose that makes the difference. Even the smallest, tiniest,
insignificant happenings in the world have an effect on this ‘struggle’, a struggle
that has no end, despite periodic divine intervention.
The irony is that while man now claims to be the master over other
forms of life and nature, he is too willing to surrender it all to a contraption
made by his own mind. Although its import and implication is wholly hazy at
this time, what is happening is this: modern man has convinced himself that to
fulfill his destiny, he must be at war with nature, mate with the machine, and
attain a kind of existence that will be what is being dubbed as Life 3.0.5 His
new creation, the machine, promises to acquire a ‘mind’ of its own, and mimic
human brains in pace and processing capability.6 For all we know, it might then
outclass us, and possibly, even be able to have sex with an other of its kind, or
with humans, like in The Matrix, if it so chooses, to evolve and spawn a superior
species. The human of the present kind, if anyone still manages to linger and live,
will then be an adjunct or acolyte of the machine. And by then, humans will be
imitating machines to be more successful in life. In any event the nature of our
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nexus with technology in general, and with the machine in particular, will be
the most fateful in human life, perhaps even more than between the divine and
human. The euphoria is such that technology will, according to transhumanists
and technophiles, allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy of our evolutionary
past, usher in the ‘naturalization of heaven’, eliminate aversive experience from
the living world, and completely eradicate the biological substrates of suffering,
and replace malaise by the biochemistry of orgasmic bliss.7 And the divine
connection could become marginal to human life. Intelligent machines would
then be the new godhead, perhaps, the very avatar of Vishnu prophesied in
Hindu scriptures to contain the rise of evil on earth in this Kali Yuga or Dark
Age.8 Whether the machine will turn out to be a ‘Vishnu’ or a villain, the ground
reality is that the rate at which machines are evolving in capability may far
exceed the rate at which society is able to deal with them. Moreover, as
philosopher Herbert Marcuse noted, technology creates new, more ingenious
and effective, even more pleasant forms of social oppression, making classical
totalitarian control through terrorization unnecessary. It obliterates the
opposition between private and public existence, and between individual and
social needs. The wish to preserve life as we know it, even at the cost of dying, is
quintessentially human and timeless. In an elemental sense, we are all dying all
the time, but what we want to avoid is immediacy and inevitability. And dying,
as Sylvia Plath said, is “an art, like everything else”. We can leverage it to liberate
us from the restraints of the realities of living. Mark Twain, for instance, begins
his autobiography with the words, “I speak from the grave rather than with my
living tongue, for a good reason: I can speak thence freely”. We are encoded with
the determination to remain exactly as we are, forever; and having hit a wall so
far in that quest, we now feel that we have finally found not only the path but
even a scientific short cut... We are so mesmerized by our cognitive creativity
that we almost instinctively look for ‘technical’ solutions to complications
created by that very technical capability, whether it is the nuclear arms race or
climate change or artificial intelligence, something that Einstein foresaw and
warned against.9
Technology is not static—it is a showpiece of human ingenuity. It can
take any form we want it to. So then, why does the ever-increasing number of
technological devices around us give us so little contentment and confidence?
Musings on Mankind
115
What we need now is not so much ‘technical’ empowerment but moral
empowerment, not technological fixation but ethical, endogenous capacitybuilding.
In an ironic twist, those who are rooting for the machine say that it is
the only way man can be more moral, that once the machine becomes self-aware
and self-learning,10 free from human programming, it might be able to more
judiciously distinguish between what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’, and act more
humanely—not humanly. With full command over what machines do, it will
be free from one of our age-old helplessnesses: as a good man, why do I do bad
things? The essential point to ponder over is that the value of any life lies in the
kind of choices the ‘being’ (whether it is wholly human or hybrid or humanoid)
makes with it, not only with what intention, but with what result and how
that result affects others. That point now is even more critical, since science
has exponentially expanded the sweep and span of human choice-making. We
might soon be able to ‘choose our baby the same way we pick a new outfit from
a catalogue’.11 And we can choose whether or not to continue to live, if we want
to end our life, choose when to die, and choose if we want to come back, and
if so when… If we can do all such magical deeds while still being human, why
then do we need a machine as our mate? And what could possibly be the yield of
such a union? Some say that our decision to dissolve into machine is perhaps the
most enlightened and humanitarian of all decisions man has ever made, precisely
because it could entail our early extinction. But, what is the expected pay-off
of this mating or cross-breeding? Is it a signal that man has finally given up on
himself and on God? And is the perennial aspiration of God-realization now
going to be off the human agenda? Is it to save the human from implosion and
extinction? Is it to give us jelly-fish-like immortality? Or is it really to unwittingly
pave the way for the advent of a morally more mature form of life? What is
the expected outcome here? What it translates into is that we will no longer be
burdened or bothered by flesh, blood, or bones, but be just a scan of our brain
on a machine, enabling it to will any form, and then live ever after. It is being
predicted that before the end of this century we will be able to upload our brains
to the ‘cloud’ or internet, essentially preserving our minds as a form of software
for eternity. For long, human longing has been to rise above the animal nature;
now it is to rise above human nature itself. It means we are prepared to, de facto,
give up ‘being human’ to be something different—but what that should be, we
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don’t think is important enough to know or at least be clear about. It raises a
most fundamental question: what constitutes the core of being human? Is it our
physical appearance and body build, our minds and our capacity to think, or is
it our feelings and capacity to love or to hate, or is it something less tangible, our
values and character, or is it the soul or spirit?
The brain is ‘what makes me me’. In the words of the acclaimed
neuroscientist, David Eagleman, “you are your brain”. Logically, therefore, to
understand human nature we only need to understand the human brain. If
that be the case, why do we want to go beyond the brain for what we want to
get from life? The answer again is the ease of convenience, which is what most
millennials and the so-called Generation Y want in life. By opting to mate our
‘brain-selves’ with a machine, we probably hope to beget a super-intelligent and
immortal generation—which can colonize another home in the cosmos, when
our Earth, in about a hundred years or so, becomes unlivable. Such a storyline
for so complex a phenomenon as human nature is not only simplistic but, even
more, it paralyzes us from looking into the root causes. It is not just the chemistry
of the brain, but that desire to cater to every craving, no matter how harmful it
could be to the body, mind, society, and the planet. If there is one thing that we
must do urgently, it is to move away from this storyline. When it is becoming
increasingly clear that the kinds of thoughts, perceptions, misconceptions, and
biases that the brain germinates, incubates, and nourishes, are not necessarily
the kind that give us an accurate picture of reality, it is cockeyed to put all the
eggs of humanity in the basket of the brain. And that, we must note, carries a
consequence with a thick theological tone. What we have steadfastly denied to
God—prapatti or saranagati, or complete surrender, as it is called in the Hindu
Vaishnavite tradition—we are now prepared to offer on a platter to the machine,
just when science has made us more mighty than ever before. While earlier we
used to measure up a mechanism against man, now in a weird twist, we measure
ourselves against a contraption like the computer. Some say that in about twenty
years, there will be no such thing as a computer, since there will be nothing that
is not a computer. An ironic reversal of roles, “We’re like the thing that used to
be like us. We imitate our old imitators, in one of the strange reversals in the long
saga of human uniqueness”.12
Musings on Mankind
117
The Mood of the Moment
As a result, most people feel deep within, even if only fleetingly, a sense of despair,
that things are not what they ought to be, that life has become both shallow and
surreal, materialistic and meaningless, and that no man can be trusted in any
relationship. We wonder if the ‘problem’ is an endemic ‘design’ deficiency or an
exogenous ‘development’ default. Framed differently, are we made that way or
have we made ourselves this way? Put in theological terms, is it the machinations
of a ‘mischievous’ God or the masterwork of a malevolent mind? In more
practical parlance, would man have been a ‘better being’ had he been left to his
own ‘nature’, wit and whim, without the influence of any external ‘knowledge’,
religious, metaphysical or ethical? And finally, in a strategic and spiritual sense—
what should be the direction of our travail? This is a critical niche of inquiry,
having a vital bearing on human behavior and destiny. Whatever resources,
faculties and energy we can muster, on what should they focus upon? We know
the problems; but what should we do in a way that is socially compatible and
spiritually progressive? This is not a new dimension or debate in the history
of human thought. For long, scriptures, sages, mystics and philosophers have
grappled with it. Of late, science has joined the fray. It has acquired new or
added urgency because the crisis has reached a critical point and the stakes are
escalating almost daily. We know that we begin our life with a built-in ‘handicap’;
a design-default, one might term it. Our sense organs are designed to let us relate
with the outside world; and we are told that we use but a small percentage of
their potential. That has made us who we are. Aldous Huxley said that ‘man is
intelligence in servitude to his organs’. What is ‘inside’, what goes on ‘down
there’ is the deepest mystery but it is what determines our behavior.
We must never forget that all through the trials and travails of life, our
beliefs don’t make us a better person; it is our behavior that is crucial. We use the
words ‘belief ’, ‘disbelief ’, ‘unbelief ’ and ‘non-belief ’ to signify the state of the
certitude or uncertainty of our knowledge. ‘Belief ’ has come to be the defining
divide in life and that is why we put the whole of humanity in two warring
camps: believers and non-believers in God. ‘Belief ’ is personal; behavior is social
and spiritual and the link between man and God. Finally we are judged—indeed,
we should judge ourselves—on how we view and treat other living beings, and
how we weigh in their well-being, their rights as equal co-creations of God,
The War Within—Between Good and