Annihilation from Within Read online

  NOTES

  1. Mankind’s Cultural Split

  The epigraph lines at the beginning of this chapter from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! In meiner Brust, die eine will sich von der andern trennen; …) are followed by a passage suggesting that the “two souls” represent the struggle between the desire for earthly pleasures and a striving for higher values. Although this is not exactly my theme in the present chapter, the central theme of the Faust legend—as developed by Goethe, Christopher Marlowe, and other authors—is highly relevant to this book. Significantly, this legend gained popularity at the dawn of the scientific-industrial revolution. The legend speaks to man’s pursuit of ever more scientific knowledge that will bring ever more power over nature and with it more material pleasures, even at the risk of causing fatal damage to one’s traditional moral values—a gamble known as the Faustian bargain with the devil.

  1. Jon Turney’s Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics, and Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) offers an engrossing account of the literary premonitions that preceded Mary Shelley’s book, and the sequel of science and science fiction since then. Turney notes that Mary Shelley “belonged to a society seeing the first real effects of industrialization, when whole landscapes marked by ‘dark satanic mills’ were becoming visible. And she was witness to the growing power of science” (19).

  2. A recent book on China’s short-lived naval triumph is Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). My quote above of Wen-yuan Qian is from his The Great Inertia: Scientific Stagnation in Traditional China (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 106; and of Donald J. Munro from his The Imperial Style of Inquiry in Twentieth Century China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies, 1996), 7–8. Joseph Needham’s The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), although based on his magistral study of early Chinese discoveries and inventions, fails to reach a convincing answer to “the fundamental question” (finally posed on page 150!): “why did modern science not arise in China?”

  3. According to Paul Mantoux, “science came later [in the emergence of the Industrial Revolution] and brought its immense reserves of power to bear on the development which had already begun, thus giving at once to partial developments in different industries a common direction and a common speed.” Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1961; original French edition in 1906), 475.

  Joel Mokyr observes that “the fruits of the Industrial Revolution were slow in coming. Per capita consumption and living standards increased little initially, but production technologies changed dramatically” (The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress [New York: Oxford University Press: 1990], 83). Mokyr also notes that after 1850, “science became more important as a handmaiden of technology” (113.)

  Many scholars have offered explanations for the intriguing question of why industrialization and modern science first arose in Western Europe. For a richly documented overview, see Jack A. Goldstone, “The Rise of the West—or Not? A Revision of Socio-economic History,” Sociological Theory (July 2000): 175–94.

  4. I am in agreement here with Samuel P. Huntington’s list of characteristics of “Western” society: the classical legacy, Catholicism and Protestantism, European languages, separation of church and state, social pluralism, representative government bodies, and individualism; but not science and technology. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York; Simon & Schuster: 1996), 69–72.

  The contrary argument—that modern science and “Western” culture are organically linked—has been advanced both by scholars who are optimistic about the future of “the West” and by those who dwell on its decline. In his famous The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler maintained that the concept of numbers is culturally conditioned: “eine Zahl an sich gibt es nicht” (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 23d ed., Munich, 1920), 85. Arthur Herman in his book The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Free Press, 1997) discusses several connections between declinist interpretations of Western culture and an interpretation of modern science and technology as something specifically lodged within Western culture (228–29, 401–402). The optimistic view of the linkage between Western values and modern science is alluded to in Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992)—for example, his observation that “scientific inquiry proceeds best in an atmosphere of freedom” (93).

  5. Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, first published in 1963 in France as Le Monde actuel, histoire et civilizations, here quoted from Richard Mayne’s translation (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 9. As Braudel points out, the noun culture has been appropriated by anthropologists to denote primitive societies in contrast to the “civilizations” of more developed societies. But he adds that “the useful adjective ‘cultural,’ invented in Germany about 1850, suffers from none of these complications. It applies, in fact, to the whole of the content of a civilization or a culture” (9).

  6. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking, 1970), 52. Perhaps the best known of Jacques Ellul’s many writings is The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1970); first published in 1964 as La Technique: L’enjeu du siècle.

  Some readers might recall C. P. Snow’s lecture The Two Cultures and a Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), and because of the title might assume that it is related to this chapter. It is totally unrelated. The gravamen of Snow’s lecture is that those Western “intellectuals” who are interested in literature, history, and art fail to learn anything about hard science.

  7. The distinguishing characteristics of a nation are not self-evident. A sophisticated exploration of the meanings of nation and nationalism is Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Other important contributions are Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); and E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  8. The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History is the title of Geoffrey Blainey’s book about the history of Australia (Melbourne: Macmillian, 1975). The evolution of Australia’s society, culture, and economy illustrates dramatically the transforming impact of technological advances in the means of transportation.

  The Battle of New Orleans, actually a series of battles ending on January 8, 1815, was fought between British and American soldiers with the commanders on both sides unaware that a peace treaty had been signed in Ghent two weeks earlier.

  9. On the coordination of an international telegraph system, see Daniel R. Headrick, The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 13. On the synchronization of time zones, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 12–13.

  10. John Gray, Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), 110.

  2. Science Pushes Us Over the Brink

  1. Letter of John Paul II to the Elderly (1999), §9. It is difficult to arrive at a practical definition of natural death. See Stuart J. Younger, Robert M. Arnold, and Renie Shapiro, eds., The Definition of Death: Contemporary Controversies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Various experiments have been reported where scientists tried to keep an animal’s head alive by substituting artificial devices for the heart or lungs (24–25). Had these experiments kept the head alive indefinitely, would veterinary science have made the animal immortal?

  2. The beliefs regarding mortality vary among different faiths. The ancient Greeks and Romans understood immortality as a privilege reserved for go
ds. In Christianity, Islam, and other religions, human mortality is foreordained, and the vision of “eternal life” refers to a transcendental existence, a state of being after death that lies beyond the earthly matrix of time and space. This transcendental life-after-death is seen as a continuation of one’s personal identity in Christianity, and (less explicitly) in Judaism. In Asian religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism), the final stage after life on Earth is an impersonal oneness with all beings. How the views and teachings about death by philosophers and religions have changed through the ages is well documented in Jacques Choron, Death and Western Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1963).

  3. Some minimal adjustments in the retirement age have been found politically acceptable. In the United Sates, the retirement age of 65 will be raised two months per year until 2008, when it will reach 66. In France in 2003, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin courageously pressed the parliament to accept legislation raising the retirement age some three years. Yet in regional elections a year later, Raffarin suffered a crushing setback (the voters’ revenge for having to work past age 55?).

  A dramatic treatment of the economic implications of aging is Peter G. Peterson, Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America—and the World (New York: Times Books, 1999). Ten years earlier Peter G. Peterson had alerted the country to this problem in a book coauthored with Neil Howe, On Borrowed Time: How the Growth in Entitlement Spending Threatens America’s Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).

  4. That positive consequences can flow from serious social or political crises is a point made by Yehezkel Dror in his study on governance and policymaking: The Capacity to Govern: A Report to the Club of Rome (London: Frank Cass, 2002). Yehezkel Dror is professor at Hebrew University (Jerusalem) and has written creatively on policy planning and broad strategic problems.

  5. William F. Ogburn, “Cultural Lag as a Theory,” Sociology and Social Research (January–February 1957): reprinted in Otis Dudley Duncan, William F. Ogburn on Culture and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). For legislative remedies from the 1960s and 1970s to mitigate the harmful effects of technology, see Edmond W. Lawless, Technology and Social Shock (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977).

  6. Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development distinguishes eight stages, from infancy to late adulthood, according to their emotive tendencies or moods. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 2d ed., 1963), 269–74.

  7. A broad treatment of the ethical issues of biotechnology innovations, illuminated by a profound understanding of political philosophy, is Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002).

  8. Mikhail Heller, Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man (New York: Knopf, 1988). The “Soviet man” idea was satirized by Yevgeniy Zamyatin’s anti-utopian novel We (1924), a precursor of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In Zamyatin’s novel, a surgical intervention in the brain makes the conversion to “Soviet man” irreversible.

  9. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, online edition, May 30–June 3, 2005.

  10. On the genetically induced memory enhancement, see Joe Z. Tsien, “Building a Brainier Mouse,” Scientific American (April 2000): 62–68. On the learning-related plasticity: Z. Josh Huang et al., “BDNF Regulates the Maturation of Inhibition and the Critical Period of Plasticity in Mouse Visual Cortex,” Cell 98 (September 17, 1999): 739–55. Although the totality of intelligence appears to be polygenic, the same genetic factors influence different intellectual abilities (Robert Plomin, “Genetics of Childhood Disorders: Genetics and Intelligence,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 38 [June 1999]: 786–88).

  11. Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg wrote in 1963 that “it would be incredible if we did not soon have the basis of developmental engineering technique to regulate, for example, the size of the human brain by prenatal and early postnatal intervention” (in Lederberg’s chapter in Gordon Wolstenholme, ed., Man and His Future [London: J. and A. Churchill, 1963], 266, a Ciba Foundation volume). Forty years later, research on the genetic determination of the human brain size has, of course, shed more light on this question. A gene that helps determine brain size has been discovered from its disrupted form associated with microcephaly. University of Chicago geneticist Bruce T. Lahn decoded the sequence of this gene in apes and humans and identified changes attributable to natural selection. (This and related studies are summarized by Nicholas Wade, “Evolution of Gene Related to Brain’s Growth Detailed,” New York Times, January 14, 2004.)

  Some studies suggest that in Albert Einstein’s preserved brain the region supporting mathematical and spatial reasoning was unusually large. See Sandra F. Witelson, D. L. Kigar, and T. Harvey, “The Exceptional Brain of Albert Einstein,” Lancet 353 (1999): 2149. Steven Pinker, professor of cognitive science at MIT, noted in an Op Ed in the New York Times (June 24, 1999) that this finding seemed to conform with Einstein’s own observations about the workings of mathematical and spatial reasoning. Since then, however, several neurologists have cast doubt on the findings of the Lancet article.

  Arthur R. Jensen notes that eight MRI studies of children and adults found significant correlations, close to + .40, between IQ and total brain size, after removing variance due to different body size (The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability [Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998], 147). However, M. Henneberg (“Evolution of the Brain: Is Bigger Better?” Clinical and Experimental Pharmacological Physiology [September 1998]: 745–49) believes that the correlation between brain size and intelligence might be weak.

  12. Ray Kurzweil wrote in The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999) that electronic and photonic “machines” will, by the end of this century, be more intelligent entities than humans. He also envisages “virtual bodies” that would provide environmental context and “virtual feelings” for these machines. In his most recent book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005), Kurzweil moves further into his computer world and asserts the dispensability of the human body.

  A good overview of ongoing scientific research, science-informed speculations, and unscientific science fiction is Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing our Minds, Our Bodies—And What It Means to Be Human (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 2005). Garreau points out, as I do in this chapter, that China might move ahead of the United States in intelligence enhancement (173).

  13. Hubert L. Dreyfus is an early critic of the assertion (made by many proponents of Artificial Intelligence) that lifeless computers can reach, or even surpass, all the important qualities of human intelligence: What Computers Can’t Do (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). Dreyfus has since authored a new edition of this book: What Computers Still Can’t Do (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). Daniel Crevier, The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1994) also deals with the ambitious advocates in this field and the battles with their critiques. Roger Penrose, a renowned mathematical physicist at the University of Oxford, presents a mathematical argumentation why human consciousness lies beyond computational processes (and hence beyond the capabilities of computers): Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  Neuroscience and related disciplines continue to expand our understanding of emotions and their relationship to memory. Eric R. Kandel’s recent book offers many examples—for instance, on conscious and unconscious processes of emotion and memory which can be related to different parts of the brain. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (New York: Norton, 2006), 341–50 and passim.

  14. The human brain, by formulating new concepts, can begin to understand new subjects and relate them to previous experience. Computers can establish relationships among subjects in an existing archive
but are not effective in forming new concepts. I am indebted to Oleg Favorov, a neuroscientist based at the University of North Carolina, for a memorandum on this aspect of concept formation.

  The World Wide Web brings together computer technology and the social (and linguistic) interaction of large numbers of people. It might thus be seen as a step in the direction of a global Superbrain. Tim Berners-Lee, the principal creator of the World Wide Web, writes: “The analogy of a global brain is tempting, because Web and brain both involve huge numbers of elements—neurons and Web pages—and mixture of structure and apparent randomness.” Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 204.

  15. An overview of some of these projects can be found in the book by cognitive scientist Andy Clark: Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  Attempts have also been made with brain-computer links to overcome blindness from damaged retinas. These experiments have so far been unsuccessful. Fred Hapgood, “Computer Vision and the Dream of the Cyborg,” Cerebrum (Summer, 2004): 19–32.

  16. Even those who work creatively in both neuroscience and computer science seem hesitant to explore linkages between computers and the human brain, linkages that might achieve a higher level of intelligence by bringing human emotions into the mix. For example, Jeff Hawkins—a successful computer scientist and entrepreneur with a keen interest in neuroscience (he created the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in California)—wrote the engaging book On Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 2004). Yet he dwells on the possible dangers of intelligent robots and seeks to calm the unwarranted fears that intelligent machines might take over the world. To this end, he assures us that intelligent machines will not have the emotional faculties of humans (213–16). Why keep this barrier between the emotionless machine-intelligence and the emotion-nourished human intelligence?