The Future of the Mind (52 page)

Technology has changed everything. We no longer have to hunt for our food; we simply go to the supermarket. We no longer have to carry back-breaking supplies but instead simply get into our cars. (In fact, the main threat we face from technology, one that has killed millions of people, is not murderous robots or mad nanobots run amok—it’s our indulgent lifestyle, which has created near-epidemic levels of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer, etc. And this problem is self-inflicted.)

We also see this on the global level. In the last few decades the world has witnessed hundreds of millions of people being lifted out of grinding poverty for the first time in history. If we view the bigger picture, we see that a significant fraction of the human race has left the punishing lifestyle of sustenance farming and entered the ranks of the middle class.

It took several hundred years for Western nations to industrialize, yet China and India are doing it within a few decades, all due to the spread of high technology. With wireless technology and the Internet, these nations can leapfrog past other, more developed nations that have laboriously wired their cities. While the West struggles with an aging, decaying urban infrastructure, developing nations are building entire cities with sparkling, state-of-the-art technology.

(When I was a graduate student getting my Ph.D., my counterparts in China and India would have to wait several months to a year for scientific journals to come in the mail. Plus, they had almost no direct contact with scientists and engineers in the West, because few if any could afford to travel here. This vastly impeded the flow of technology, which moved at a glacial pace for these nations. Today, however, scientists can read one another’s papers as soon as they are posted on the Internet, and can electronically collaborate with other scientists around the world. This has vastly accelerated the flow of information. And with this technology comes progress and prosperity.)

Furthermore, it’s not clear that having some form of enhanced intelligence
will cause a catastrophic splitting of the human race, even if many people are unable to afford this procedure. For the most part, being able to solve complex mathematical equations or have perfect recall does not guarantee a higher income, respect from your peers, or more popularity with the opposite sex, which are the incentives that motivate most people. The Caveman Principle trumps having a brain boost.

As Dr. Michael Gazzaniga notes, “
The idea that we are messin’ with our innards is disturbing to many. And just what would we do with expanded intelligence? Are we going to use it for solving problems, or will it just allow us to have longer Christmas card lists …?”

But as we discussed in
Chapter 5
, unemployed workers may benefit from this technology, drastically reducing the time required to master new technologies and skills. This might not only reduce the problems associated with unemployment, it could also have an impact on the world economy, making it more efficient and responsive to change.

WISDOM AND DEMOCRATIC DEBATE

In responding to Joy’s article, some critics pointed out that the debate is not about a struggle between scientists and nature, as portrayed in the article. The debate is actually between three parties: scientists, nature, and society.

Computer scientists Drs. John Brown and Paul Duguid responded to the article by stating, “
Technologies—such as gunpowder, the printing press, the railroad, the telegraph, and the Internet—can change society in profound ways. But on the other hand, social systems—in the form of governments, the courts, formal and informal organizations, social movements, professional networks, local communities, market institutions, and so forth—shape, moderate, and redirect the raw power of technologies.”

The point is to analyze them in terms of society, and ultimately it is up to us to adopt a new vision of the future that incorporates all the best ideas.

To me, the ultimate source of wisdom in this respect comes from vigorous democratic debate. In the coming decades, the public will be asked to vote on a number of crucial scientific issues. Technology cannot be debated in a vacuum.

PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS

Lastly, some critics have claimed that the march of science has gone too far in unveiling the secrets of the mind, an unveiling that has become dehumanizing and degrading. Why bother to rejoice at discovering something new, learning a new skill, or enjoying a leisurely vacation when it can all be reduced to a few neurotransmitters activating a few neural circuits?

In other words, just as astronomy has reduced us to insignificant pieces of cosmic dust floating in an uncaring universe, neuroscience has reduced us to electrical signals circulating within neural circuits. But is this really true?

We began our discussion by highlighting the two greatest mysteries in all of science: the mind and the universe. Not only do they have a common history and narrative, they also share a similar philosophy and perhaps even destiny. Science, with all its power to peer into the heart of black holes and land on distant planets, has given birth to two overarching philosophies about the mind and the universe: the Copernican Principle and the Anthropic Principle. Both are consistent with everything known about science, but they are diametrical opposites.

The first great philosophy, the Copernican Principle, was born with the discovery of the telescope more than four hundred years ago. It states that there is no privileged position for humanity. Such a deceptively simple idea has overthrown thousands of years of cherished myths and entrenched philosophies.

Ever since the biblical tale of Adam and Eve being exiled from the Garden of Eden for biting into the Apple of Knowledge, there has been a series of humiliating dethronements. First, the telescope of Galileo clearly showed that Earth was not the center of the solar system—the sun was. This picture was then overthrown when it was realized that the solar system was just a speck in the Milky Way galaxy circulating about thirty thousand light-years from the center. Then in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble discovered there was a multitude of galaxies. The universe suddenly got billions of times bigger. Now the Hubble Space Telescope can reveal the presence of up to one hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe. Our own Milky Way galaxy has been reduced to a pinpoint in a much larger cosmic arena.

More recent cosmological theories further downgrade the position of humanity in the universe. The inflationary universe theory states that our
visible universe, with its one hundred billion galaxies, is just a pinprick on a much larger, inflated universe that is so big that most light has not had time to reach us yet from distant regions. There are vast reaches of space that we cannot see with our telescopes and will never be able to visit because we cannot go faster than light. And if string theory (my specialty) is correct, it means that even the entire universe coexists with other universes in eleven-dimensional hyperspace. So even three-dimensional space is not the final word. The true arena for physical phenomena is the multiverse of universes, full of floating bubble universes.

The science-fiction writer Douglas Adams tried to summarize the sense of being constantly overthrown by inventing the Total Perspective Vortex in
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
. It was designed to drive any sane person insane. When you enter the chamber, all you see is a gigantic map of the entire universe. And on the map there is a tiny, almost invisible arrow that says, “You are here.”

So on one hand, the Copernican Principle indicates that we are just insignificant cosmic debris drifting aimlessly among the stars. But on the other hand, all the latest cosmological data are consistent with yet another theory, which gives us the opposite philosophy: the Anthropic Principle.

This theory states that the universe is compatible with life. Again, this deceptively simple statement has profound implications. On one hand, it is impossible to dispute that life exists in the universe. But it’s clear that the forces of the universe must be calibrated to a remarkable degree to make life possible. As physicist Freeman Dyson once said, “The universe seemed to know that we were coming.”

For example, if the nuclear force were just a bit stronger, the sun would have burned out billions of years ago, too soon to allow DNA to get off the ground. If the nuclear force were a bit weaker, then the sun would never have ignited to begin with, and we still would not be here.

Likewise, if gravity were stronger, the universe would have collapsed into a Big Crunch billions of years ago, and we would all be roasted to death. If it were a bit weaker, then the universe would have expanded so fast it would have reached the Big Freeze, so we would all have frozen to death.

This fine-tuning extends to every atom of the body. Physics says that we are made of star dust, that the atoms we see all around us were forged in the heat of a star. We are literally children of the stars.

But the nuclear reactions that burned hydrogen to create the higher elements of our body are very complex and could have been derailed at any number of points. Then it would have been impossible to create the higher elements of our bodies, and the atoms of DNA and life would not exist.

In other words, life is precious and a miracle.

There are so many parameters that have to be fine-tuned that some claim this is not a coincidence. The weak form of the Anthropic Principle implies that the existence of life forces the physical parameters of the universe to be defined in a very precise way. The strong form of the Anthropic Principle goes even further, stating that God or some designer had to create a universe “just right” to make life possible.

PHILOSOPHY AND NEUROSCIENCE

The debate between the Copernican Principle and the Anthropic Principle also resonates in neuroscience. For example, some claim that humans can be reduced to atoms, molecules, and neurons, and hence there is no distinguished place for humanity in the universe.

Dr. David Eagleman writes,
“The
you
that all your friends know and love cannot exist unless the transistors and screws of our brain are in place. If you don’t believe this, step into any neurology ward in any hospital. Damage to even small parts of the brain can lead to the loss of shockingly specific abilities; the ability to name animals, or to hear music, or to manage risky behavior, or to distinguish colors, or to arbitrate simple decisions.”

It seems that the brain cannot function without all its “transistors and screws.” He concludes, “
Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.”

So on one hand, our place in the universe seems to be diminished if we can be reduced, like robots, to (biological) nuts and bolts. We are just wetware, running software called the mind, nothing more or less. Our thoughts, desires, hopes, and aspirations can be reduced to electrical impulses circulating in some region of the prefrontal cortex. That is the Copernican Principle applied to the mind.

But the Anthropic Principle can also be applied to the mind, and we then reach the opposite conclusion. It simply says that conditions of the universe make consciousness possible, even though it is extraordinarily difficult to create the mind out of random events. The great Victorian biologist Thomas
Huxley said, “
How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.”

Furthermore, most astronomers believe that although one day we may find life on other planets, it will most likely be microbial life, which ruled our oceans for billions of years. Instead of seeing great cities and empires, we might only find oceans of drifting microorganisms.

When I interviewed the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould about this, he explained to me his thinking as follows. If we were to
somehow create a twin of Earth as it was 4.5 billion years ago, would it turn out the same way 4.5 billion years later? Most likely not. There is a large probability that DNA and life would never have gotten off the ground, and an even larger probability that intelligent life with consciousness would never have risen from the swamp.

Gould wrote, “
Homo sapiens
is one small twig [on the tree of life].… Yet our twig, for better or worse, has developed the most extraordinary new quality in all the history of multicellular life since the Cambrian explosion (500 million years ago). We have invented consciousness with all its sequelae from Hamlet to Hiroshima.”

In fact, in the history of Earth, there are many times when intelligent life was almost extinguished. In addition to the mass extinctions that wiped out the dinosaurs and most life on Earth, humans have faced additional near extinctions. For example, humans are all genetically related to one another to a considerable degree, much closer than two typical animals of the same species. Although humans may look diverse from the outside, our genes and internal chemistry tell a different story. In fact, any two humans are so closely related genetically that we can actually do the math and calculate when a “genetic Eve” or “genetic Adam” gave birth to the entire human race. Moreover, we can calculate how many of us there were in the past.

The numbers are remarkable. Genetics shows that there were only a few hundred to a few thousand humans alive about seventy to one hundred thousand years ago and that they gave birth to the entire human race. (One theory holds that the titanic explosion of the Toba volcano in Indonesia about seventy thousand years ago caused temperatures to drop so dramatically that most of the human race perished, leaving only a handful to populate Earth.) From that small band of humans came the adventurers and explorers who would eventually colonize the entire planet.

Repeatedly in the history of Earth, intelligent life might have come to a dead end. It is a miracle we survived. We can also conclude that although life may exist on other planets, conscious life may exist on only a tiny fraction of them. So we should treasure the consciousness that is found on Earth. It is the highest form of complexity known in the universe, and probably also the rarest.