SISYPHUS is a magazine that focuses on contemporary issues surrounding art, culture, and language.
For a few individuals, awakening is a sudden occurrence that lasts either a lifetime or for many years. With most of us, awakening is a gradual process, rewarded by the fruits that leaving a trance state offers us on a moment-to-moment basis. An example of such a reward is dreaming less of how great it will be when we get off work, go on vacation or retire, and instead resting in a place within ourselves that feels good right now. In this way, we shift from a polarized state of perceiving our world to a radiant state of perceiving it, without desire or fear.
Often, we don’t know how far we have come along the path of increasing our presence. This is an individual journey, and there is little or nothing against which to compare our personal progress toward increasing closeness to our true self. Still, the dream state of our imaginings lures us away from beholding whatever is before us by offering us mental-emotional spoils. These alluring abilities act as time travel, through desires, where we imagine ourselves to be somewhere other than where we are and in some other time/space. Fear may offer us a heads-up on something that lies in our imagined future, which we are clever enough to prepare ourselves for or escape from. In this way, desire and fear lure and frighten us away from beholding the present moment as it is. It is the task and pleasure of the artist to lure the viewer back to beholding, that is, drinking in whatever is before us with our eyes and our senses. Imagine a person who is crossing the street but is so preoccupied that he does not know that he is crossing a street. There is great danger. Yet, if he is aware that he is crossing the street, and looks at what is taking place, he will be able to cross any street without danger. If we are focused on emotions and past/future realities, we are in danger, simply because we are not paying attention to where we actually are and what is really going on.
Painting and awakening are naturally the same thing. The act of painting lures us into the present moment, which is the doorway to awakening. It is for this reason that many creative individuals find it difficult traveling a prescribed, spiritual path. Being creative means that one has already seen that life is a dream come true, and one wishes to create expressions of one’s own, and to remind others of this amazing possibility. Being creative means that one has already gone through the realization that ‘it is not what we see, but that we see’ that is the miracle. This is what many artists celebrate, and this is also where some artists get their courage to live so near to the edge. Artists who have already seen to the core of Being also see that artistic expression is a wondrous phenomenon that allows us infinite self-expression. In this spirit, we begin to try our hand at Creation itself. We have seen that our awareness is the creative force. This realization haunts us, until expressed.
When we commit to a spiritual path, such as attending a meeting of teachings by an Awakened Master, it is possible for artists to become confused. We are asked to let go of our minds. Yet, to do so implies to artists that we should let go of all of the marvelous ideas that flood our minds with new possibilities. This is a mistaken conclusion that creative people are prone to make. Many artists, when they are in the act of painting, have already discarded the mind that fills us with polarized concepts. The actively creative mind is not polarized. It is the polarized mind that we revert to that we are being asked by spiritual teachers not to identify with and not the creative mind. The mind that a creative person uses during the act of creation is the aspect of mind that expresses this infinite potential that we see everywhere, symbolically or metaphorically, as a painting, a poem, a song, a dance, a play or a story.
In view of this misconception about mind, we try and try to discard our creative mind, but it keeps filling us with visions of things marvelous to paint, write, or express, and we are swept away once more. Artists may see this as a failure because the Masters say to witness and dis-identify with the mind. We fail to see that the great Masters are not talking to those who have already seen this truth. To rise above the polarized mind is the only way there is to become creative. Therefore, creativity is, in and of itself, a spiritual path. One need only shift the perception that comes with the creative process to daily life in order to be on a coherent spiritual path. Creativity can be a celebration of having awakened, and the practice of offering that "awake-ness" to others through our art. As Paul Klee once said, "Paint, painter, paint."
I want to say at the outset that I’m not one of those nutcase skeptics who don’t believe in global warming. I believe it’s happening and it worries me. But I see no need for getting all worked up about limiting our carbon use as proposed by global warming alarmists. We can easily fix the problem with three solutions based on chemistry and mathematics.
Solution I. The buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been linked to global warming. This has led to attempts to regulate carbon output. But carbon is not the biggest part of carbon dioxide. Oxygen is. Carbon dioxide is made up of one atom of carbon and two atoms of oxygen. Therefore, oxygen is twice as big a problem as carbon. The Periodic Table of Elements (even though it’s just a theory) claims the atomic weight of carbon is only 12, compared to a whopping 16 for oxygen. Using these data in sophisticated mathematical models shows that carbon makes up 38% by weight of the carbon dioxide molecule. Therefore, oxygen accounts for 100% – 38% = 62% of the global warming problem. So let’s stop trying to fix the wrong problem. We need to focus our attention on reducing atmospheric oxygen. One way to do this is to produce more humans, who will breathe in more oxygen. Another is to cut down more trees, which are putting oxygen into the atmosphere. We’re already doing a pretty good job at these two things, but more effort is needed. I’m optimistic we can do it. I’m not one of those the-world-is-coming-to-an-end kinds of people.
Solution II. The solution to taking care of that 38% of the problem that does come from carbon is ridiculously simple: sequester the extra carbon in human biomass. Humans are 18% carbon by weight. Multiplying that by 155 lbs, the average weight of an adult human, and by the 6.8 billion humans on Earth today = 95 million tons of carbon currently stored in human flesh, blood, and bone. The beauty of this solution is that humans are wildly expanding their numbers, gaining about 75 million people every year. By 2050, it’s estimated we’ll have 2.1 billion more humans, sequestering another 29 million tons of carbon. To make room for all these people, we must convert more natural areas and wilderness into prime human habitat; namely, subdivisions and malls.
But we can do even better. Encouraging the current trend toward obesity would help sequester more carbon per person. About two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. If all 305.6 million Americans were overweight, say 20% overweight on average, that would be 281 thousand tons of carbon more. We should ban all known agents of keeping people fit and thin such as diets, yoga, YMCA gyms, bike paths, and sidewalks. Make sure people have to use a car for commuting and shopping. Incidentally, it’s important that dead humans not be cremated. That turns human flesh into carbon dioxide, which defeats the whole purpose. By the simple procedure of injecting deadly toxic formaldehyde into their bodies and placing them in the good clean earth, their carbon will be sequestered eternally. Lastly, a little-understood fact is that short inter-generational times is a great way to increase the size of the human population. Not only should women have more babies, they should start having them at a younger age. Mothers by age 20, grandmothers by 40.
Solution III. The third way to solve the global warming problem has to do with anoxic areas of oceans. Anoxic means water that is devoid of oxygen for fish to breathe through their gills. Extensive anoxic areas exist in places like the bottom of Chesapeake Bay and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. These areas are mostly caused by too much nitrogen from human waste and agriculture, which cause algal blooms, which suck up all the oxygen. Only certain kinds of slimy bacteria can live in these waters; all the fish go belly-up. But we can’t use emotional arguments just because animals are cute and have big doe eyes. We have to use science. Water is H2O, so anoxic water is simply H2O – O = H2, which is the chemical shorthand for hydrogen, a very clean fuel. Let’s pump all this anoxic water (hydrogen) out of the oceans and use it as fuel in our cars and power plants. The more anoxic water we can burn, the healthier our oceans, so we should make cars and trucks that get even fewer miles per gallon of fuel than they do now. To keep this all sustainable, we’ll have to make more anoxic water. That should be easy to do just by making more humans (see Solution # 2). Do you see how everything on Earth is inter-connected?
An important side benefit is that sucking all that anoxic water out of the oceans would solve the problem of a rising sea level. Reversing sea level rise would give us new dry sea floor so we could constantly pack in more people. Right now, two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is ocean (interestingly, that’s exactly the same proportion as that of Americans that are overweight; must be some sort of magic ratio like pi). But we need to turn that proportion around. If humans are the favored species, with dominion over all other beasts, why did we get only one-third of the space and some of that frozen wasteland?
In closing, I’ve shown three ways how science and technology and unrestrained sex and eating can solve the global warming problem, one of the major crises of the day. My ideas are so obvious I’m surprised no one has proposed them before. Now I expect I’ll hear from the skeptics.
Choices in Ecology
Beyond the light of my desk lamp and computer screen, and the hum of my air conditioner, there exists a coastal hardwood swamp of great mystery. Though I live in the old settled East, not far from Providence and Boston, even closer to Fall River and New Bedford, my garden and lawn connect to a greenbelt teeming with wild life. Coyotes cry to the stars at night, hunt the deer in corridors of wet green, and raid sheep farms in town. Foxes visit my deck when it’s late and quiet, delicately feasting on sunflower seeds I’ve spilled for the birds. In daylight, red-tailed hawks float above the treetops, searching for rabbits and songbirds in the dense growth below. Sometimes eagles drift up there as well.
The life surrounding us appears as a matrix of information, presenting some events which fit our expectations, and others which do not. In order to focus on one set of relationships, we must exclude others. An ecological study of coyotes in my county must leave out earthworms; as a biologist friend wades the coastal waters collecting invading crabs, and examines their stomach contents to explore impacts on prey species, she ignores ospreys circling above, and mosquitoes grazing her ear. Choices must be made before the first hypothesis can be tested.
What then gets chosen? How are some species selected and highlighted? Why are others consigned to the background of scientific attention? These are aspects of ecology’s observer problem. We are used to such a concept in physics, where we understand that spatial and temporal measurements are relative to an observer’s position. And we may realize that in anthropology, the attitude of an ethnographer shapes interviewee responses. But we’re so accustomed to viewing familiar scenes of park or garden, or the turns of a local trail, as nature that exists with or without us, that we’re tempted to imagine all nature in such static pictures. What has this tableau to do with us? Wouldn’t it be the same whether we observe it or not? And shouldn’t it be possible to inventory all species present in such an elegant, well-ordered scene?
In their book, Toward a Unified Ecology, Timothy F.H. Allen and Thomas W. Hoekstra discuss what we might call an open secret at the heart of ecology. This is that a human observer determines what is recognized and studied, and in this sense valued. The same person who includes certain animals and plants within a frame of reference necessarily excludes other species from the framework.
In Physics, we recognize that measurements of the position and speed of subatomic particles are relative to the observer’s position. By contrast, Allen and Hoekstra write, “The things we study in ecology seem very real. Nevertheless, ecology is a science and is therefore about observation and measurement more than about nature independent of observation.”1
Even at the grossest level of decision making, when the ecologist chooses what to study, that act influences the outcome of the investigation. When one chooses to study shrews, there is an implicit decision not to study everything else. In that implicit decision most other things ecological, such as trees, rivers, or ants, are excluded from the data.
Allen and Hoekstra remind us of the story that the entire army of Alexander the Great slept beneath a single Banyan tree. Is this true? It depends upon the observer’s viewpoint: the Banyan extends thin rootlets which touch the ground and begin to thicken and spread roots. Eventually they appear as new trunks. Genetically identical to the original tree, they become either its spatial extensions or an entirely new forest, depending upon one’s perspective. Perhaps for a biologist they would be a single tree, while for the army being sheltered beneath the many trunks and branches, they would be a forest.
These examples show that the concept of the observer’s position includes more than spatiotemporal location. It encompasses interests, needs, and a way of focusing attention. This way implies a cultural matrix, a language, and a community of investigators.
Every project proposed by developers rests upon a framework which includes implicit claims about which species matter. To the timber corporations of the American northwest, pine, fir, and cedar are interesting, while spotted owls are a nuisance. All our activities take place within frames of ecological reference; by attending to how ecologists, developers, planners and others specify these, we may learn to see our role as decision-makers about the ecosystems around us. After all, while local nature is ‘out there’ in an objective sense, frames of ecological reference are the stage sets upon which environmental debates are dramatically enacted. Scale within the framework is determined by grain and extent of the data. Grain determines how small the observed data will be, while extent determines their largest possible size in time and space. Scale in this sense is not about ‘the world out there,’ but is about our measuring conventions. Scientific stories are limited in this way, as are all stories.
Allen and Hoekstra point out that definitions are primary. Before we can discuss change, we must identify static frames of reference within which change occurs. (For example, if we study change for one year on a farm, we must first draw a line at the edge of the farm property, and another at the end of the year, and pretend not to notice what happens outside this zone.) But as the example about shrews, ants, trees, and rivers shows, specifying an ecological frame of reference always leaves much out, and hence is relative to personal/cultural observer positions. These choices of what to focus upon are subjective in the sense that other options exist initially, but once the choices are made the observations which follow are objective.
The Observer Problem in Conservation
Which species claim our attention determines what we see at a given place and time. The knowledge we eventually generate helps determine how others act there, and what environmental policies are adopted. A study of bears might bring hunters; a discovery of rare plants might halt development. If we ignore a species, its uniqueness may be lost in the ethos of change and transformation that grips our time.
Cultural and political interests are involved. Scientists often specialize in organisms which the wider society has blessed with funding: mountain lion, condor, elegant osprey. In these cases beauty and scarcity lead a biologist to describe a place, on a certain day, as the habitat of this creature alone. Selection of a few organisms from a rich matrix is necessary before ecological study can begin.
A parallelism holds in the field of conservation. Whether one looks at planet Earth from a satellite 40 miles high and sees exploding cities eating green space alive, or takes a drive around one’s own town and counts the white ends of plastic pipe (percolation tests for new house sites) it is evident that development continues rapidly. Conservationists can save less territory now because land prices have risen so dramatically. It has become critical to pick one’s battles. Out of the surrounding matrix of environmental problems, upon which shall I focus my energy and time?
Ecology and conservation arise within cultural and political situations. A complex weave of factors brings scientist or conservationist to subject and site. These factors will include society’s long-term interests in educating people one way rather than another, and local, shorter-term urgencies concerning bulldozers, chain saws, and the disappearance of species. Ecologist and conservationist, by professional custom, respond to slowly deteriorating conditions in the informational matrix. (Without this general situation their roles would hardly have arisen at all.) Within this framework, each project they undertake will address limited windows of opportunity for knowledge or protection. In short, they respond to dynamic, unstable situations, in which effective storytelling holds a key to success.
Both ecologist and conservation writer frame particular species within a limited region of time and space for a study. But whereas a scientist contrasts known factors (constants) with unknown ones (variables) in an effort to discover whether a specific relationship exists, a conservationist seeks to preserve or restore a status quo. This does not mean a no-change zone, where evolution is halted, but rather a slow-change zone, where humans interfere minimally with species relations.
Just what choices must be made before a slow-change zone can be responsibly defined? At a fairly abstract level, a common prime directive for conservation work is ‘protect diversity.’ This principle alone does not tell us what to do in a specific situation, because there are different kinds of diversity, and because reasonable people can disagree about strategy and tactics. But in its very generality, the principle ‘protect diversity’ may allow stakeholders in an environmental discussion to proceed toward an agreed goal. This convergence is part of the urgency conservationists feel about the world today; it is also connected to the words ‘conserve,’ ‘conservationist,’ and ‘conservative’: all arise in relation to a valued state of affairs in which diversity is threatened.
Proceeding from this common point, we must ask in any given case whether the best path is ‘hands off’ an ecosystem, or whether we ought to take actions to encourage some species and discourage others. Even small, unobtrusive actions, like filling a bird feeder with seed, or opening the door to release a cat for the day, have dramatic effects when combined with the similar actions of millions of people.
One way of describing this situation is to say that almost every part of the natural world is a landscape for somebody. And landscapes are cultural and political entities as well as ecological ones. As J.B. Jackson has put it, “A landscape is… a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature. As Eliade expresses it, it represents man taking upon himself the role of time.”2
If we viewed Earth from the space shuttle we would be frightened by the spreading of cities. From an airplane over the American Midwest, one is amazed by vast fields of cropland — monocultures for food and profit. On foot, walking in parks or even wilderness areas, we respond emotionally to large trees with open vistas beneath — landscapes encouraged for their scale, which is to say our scale. Each approach to Earth reveals humans in control of nature, human time imposed upon, and altering the processes of, evolution.
When we think about what is happening to Earth as a whole, we recognize the need to plan conservation actions with several different timescales in mind. For example, ecologists distinguish three kinds of diversity: alpha, beta, and gamma. Alpha diversity means species diversity within a patch of land; beta diversity indicates diversity between several patches in the same area; gamma diversity indicates diversity on a regional scale, which includes many mosaics of land patches.
Clearly we need to know as much as possible about the gamma-diversity situation of species. Lacking this knowledge we might attempt to maximize diversity within a single patch, which might have reverse effects from the ones desired, because many species, such as deer, grouse, and crows, thrive on diversity within patches, and other species, such as the Florida Scrub Jay, can only thrive in relatively nondiverse plant communities, and then only in small numbers. So even though a patch of earth over which we have influence (like the woods and marsh behind my house) might be a tempting framework for a conservation plan, a wiser perspective would encompass my entire town and the watershed beyond.
Alpha, beta, and gamma diversity are concepts applicable to nature at many scales. Within these, choices must be made regarding grain and extent. Even then, once a region and its critical species are listed, the principle ‘protect diversity’ requires us to imagine different management strategies. In imagining policies for my wetland, differences appear depending whether I advocate for the deer or the coyotes, the rabbits or the foxes. From a logical point of view, an infinite number of perspectives on a single ecosystem are possible. This infinity of choices can seem bewildering, even debilitating. But this is true only if one clings to a simple model of nature and culture, or hopes for a simple metaphor like those which guided our ancestors, such as nature is divine order, nature is an organic creature, and nature is a great machine.
Every choice within ecology and conservation, just as those within development activities, requires creativity. Every action, and every restraint upon action, requires design decisions. This design ultimately includes physical treatment of land, but it begins with the writing process, where old metaphors are analyzed and new ones tried out.
Suppose I wish to make a narrow trail through the easternmost acre of my woods. Here the land is spongy and mossy, and the vegetation is dominated by Shad Blow, Haw, Holly, and shrub-sized bushes and trees growing in thickety profusion. A human can’t walk through most of this, and a deer doesn’t often choose to. If I cut a trail for my own exploring, and to draw the large mammals through, this will favor them but harm species which need shelter from them. Probably the deer, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, opossums, and neighborhood dogs have enough paths from which to invade tangles and swampy patches. In the past few years pheasant, quail, and woodcock have become scarce, and I’m sure members of these species would appreciate (if they could) my not cutting such a path. I reach for a new metaphor like home is foxless, to clarify a woodcock’s interests and to guide my action. Here I combine the connotations of home (the warm modern sense of which only arose in 18th Century Holland3), with ecological knowledge about a specific place.
Consider a habitat which includes ‘edge effects,’ as most do. This is a concept promoted in 1933 by Aldo Leopold as beneficial to wildlife, and widely adopted as a management strategy. Leopold thought junctures of fields and forests, streams and uplands, even trails and thickets, provide advantages to many species. This is true for some, but not for all. By defining ‘wildlife’ as ‘game species,’ managers often rationalized breaking up uniform habitats into diverse patches; more deer and grouse were frequently the predictable and desired result, but lost in this ‘edge effect’ planning were many unnoticed, non-game species.
If one imagines a boundary between habitat types, it may be tempting to think of this line as a ‘real’ feature of nature, but as biologists William S. Alverson, et al, point out, such a line can only be defined by the experiences of particular organisms. Nearness to the line will produce a range of events of varying intensity.
Ecological field studies sometimes record the number of times particular organisms approach such a line. From these data points, an ‘isoacme’ map can be drawn to show average intensities at the same average densities from the line. Such displays are different for each species considered. Perhaps this is a useful way of illustrating how differently each species ‘evaluates’ edge effects in its habitat. This underscores the critical importance of being chosen as a key species for a study. It’s unlikely that creatures omitted from study will have their interests considered in plans resulting from the study.
Species numbers are greater than we are accustomed to thinking. In the 43 year period from 1940-1983, five new bird species were discovered every two years.4 New species of mammals are now found at the rate of about five per year. Oceanic exploration for new life forms has just begun, bringing news of new whales and sharks, and deep-sea communities of sulfur- and methane-eating organisms. Biologist Terry Erwin and colleagues, working with associates in the 1970s studying rain forest trees, discovered each individual tree contained huge numbers of anthropod species, the spiders—and each tree contained unique species. Extrapolations from his data have led to estimates that the undiscovered anthropod species on Earth number from five to 30 million.
If we turn to smaller organisms the surprises are even greater. Studies of bacterial DNA in a single gram of beech-forest soil in Norway turned up between four and five thousand species. Examination of a gram of soil from the shallow seas off Norway’s coast revealed an equal number, but virtually all of them were different from those in the forest sample.
These examples remind us that Earth’s biological diversity is largely unknown, and that we miss whole realms of life by operating within many of our ordinary frames of reference. It’s not only beetles and spiders that go extinct through massive rain forest burning — cases we hear about but may find emotionally distant. What about the newly discovered life forms around oceanic vents? Are these impacted by ocean dumping? What of the new bird species discovered every year? Are we destroying their habitats before we see them?
Birds are often omitted from our ecological planning considerations because of their migratory habits. We know that continued suburban development destroys habitats and encourages predatory species like Bluejays, Brown-Headed Cowbirds, and Seagulls. Small, beautiful warblers are often the losers as ‘edge effects’ spread across the planet. Yet birds receive little consideration in many planning decisions, simply because they ‘pass through’ and their relation to a particular site may be difficult to establish.
All this indicates that every choice of an observer’s position is fraught with consequences. And yet without such a choice there can be no observations, data-gathering, theorizing, or planning — for development or research or conservation. Once an ecological frame is chosen, and specified in both extent and grain, a discussion can begin about appropriate goals for this part of the natural world. And eventually diverse goals can find their way into a plan. But plans never spring from a void. They arise in response to threats and opportunities for conservation. Selecting a frame in space, including valued organisms within it, leads directly to concern with time — both the time of evolution past, which produced the place, and the cultural time which affects it now.
The next question is what target event the conservation writer has in mind. Sometimes this will be a vote (in a small community, a congress, a parliament, or another organization); at other times it will be an executive policy decision. Such pivotal moments determine whether ecosystems are protected or lost. Conservation work, like science, requires that a writer frame a region of space-time (extent), specify entities within that region (grain), and point to events projected into the future. For science, the effort is to observe these events; for the conservation writer, to influence them. (This is simplistic, of course: conservation biology as well as conservation writing require both descriptive and prescriptive components.)
The observer problem is a purely formal one: any story must begin with a specification of what is to be talked about, and with exclusions from the discussion. This means that conservation writers, like ecologists, must make choices before they can begin their work. Sometimes these involve ethical and aesthetic commitments, and always they involve practical and cultural commitments.
Choosing Landscape Values
In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold proposed that we extend ethical thinking and action from fellow human beings to nature. “An ethic, ecologically,” he wrote, “is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence.” Limiting our activities for the sake of other species, and their habitats, he called “a land ethic.” When Leopold wrote these words they sounded strange, but some sixty years later many people embrace the idea. In our wetlands and woods, in our gardens and ponds, we take pleasure in restraint to protect nature.
The land ethic is widely embraced, as is the land aesthetic — guiding our efforts to promote landscape beauty. Yet these are only the starting points of land protection activities. How do we make practical decisions about when to leave a site completely alone, and when to introduce mowing or planting, for example? And what happens when the needs of different species conflict — how can we choose between them?
Cultural Values
When management strategies like mowing, thinning, and stream-clearing are undertaken for aesthetic goals, one must choose the historical moment whose ‘look’ is sought. Consider two brief cases which illustrate this:
On Cape Cod, state park rangers needed a policy and management plan to protect a new acquisition for the park system. The landscape included fields, woods, and several historic houses. Planners chose the date of origin of a single one of these houses, then sought to make the surrounding landscapes conform to the way they had looked in that period. It wasn’t possible to preserve the landscape aesthetics of all the houses; the attempt to do so would have resulted in a patchwork of views and ecological states lacking coherence. As Elizabeth R. Lehr has pointed out6 by selecting a single period for guidance in landscape practices, the rangers achieved a measure of ecological and aesthetic unity. This example shows how historic preservation is subtly entwined with, and often guides, nature conservation.
Consider the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Some areas of this park are maintained so that a canoeist may glide along beneath huge trees with an open understory. To the uninitiated, this experience seems to touch ‘true wilderness.’ But actually management practices have created and sustained the forest in this ‘climax stasis’ condition; it mimics the ecosystem and aesthetics of the historical moment when European fur trappers first contacted the indigenous people of the region. The forest is magnificent, visually satisfying, and offers the visitor a sense of travel back in time to an unspoiled day. Although reserve designers made a good choice in their historic date for landscape practices, their cleverness in erasing subsequent history — power lines and cleared fields, for example — might tempt the visitor to imagine there was no previous history. In other words, the canoeist might believe these park-like forest banks embody a natural ideal which persists indefinitely. In the 18th Century and before, they were probably shaped by Native Americans through seasonal burning.
When one first embarks on a land conservation project it is tempting to imagine one is saving nature ‘as it ought to be.’ But usually this goal includes an aesthetic component —nature ‘as it ought to look.’ And the first question is: When? Any answer involves cultural history. This, in turn, requires choices: not every moment of past succession, or landscape configuration, can be represented.
An important part of the conservation task is historic preservation; to achieve this consistently, one must choose a date and manage for the ‘correct look of that history.’ Such choices shouldn’t discourage us. They are part of the creative challenge of conservation, and they give us a meaningful role to play in the unfolding of nature.
Natural Values
Some conflicts cannot be evaded. For example, recently Massachusetts land managers had a painful choice between actions to support seagulls or piping plovers. A ‘no action’ policy would support the gulls.
Similarly, in western Massachusetts, managers had to face the fact that domestic dogs were killing numbers of deer. ‘No action’ would have supported the dogs.
With regard to any piece of property one can choose:
Just as in the case of cultural values, the stewardship of natural values requires choices.
States of Nature versus Rates of Change
Early in this century ecologists came to believe in the idea of forest succession: that every forest goes through stages until it reaches a grand ‘climax’ state. This idea was applied to all sorts of ecosystems, with the result that each one was believed to have a proper, final, long-lasting, and most favorable stage. It became the goal of conservation to identify and protect such climax states of nature.
Recently ecologists have realized that much of the focus on preserving climax states was really driven by aesthetics, as in the case of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area discussed above. In the real world, climax states change eventually, perhaps in response to hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, volcanoes, diseases, or invasion by exotics; they often shift dynamics, restarting the clock and beginning a new succession, in response to influences like bulldozers and chainsaws.
What this means for conservationists is that we should protect slow rates of change, rather than no change at all. We need an historical account of each parcel including intelligent guesses about where it will trend with, and without, our interventions. Our goal should be wise stewardship of slow rates of change. Toward this understanding, some land trusts have begun to compile histories for the places they protect.
The Grand and the Pretty
In her 1997 book Placing Nature, landscape ecologist Joan Iverson Nausauer discusses the need for conservationists to appeal to aesthetic tastes and principles shared by their audiences. Americans are deeply committed to two distinct ‘looks’ for the natural world, which Nausauer calls ‘grand’ and ‘pretty.’ Grand landscapes feature broad rolling green fields framed in the distance by tall trees. They mimic 18th Century English estates, the sort designed by Humphery Repton and Capability Brown. Such landscapes, beyond the financial reach of most citizens, grace campuses, parks, golf courses, and grounds of the wealthy.
The other ideal, ‘pretty,’ lies within everyone’s grasp. This is the look of a small but carefully tended lawn, garden, or window box. The pursuit of such landscapes often leads to faithful mowing, weed whacking, pruning and raking.
Two common features should be noted about these styles: first, they express care for nature, and signal that their owner is a careful person. We’ve all heard stories about people who ‘let their place go’ — refusing to mow, or make other concessions to a community’s customary look. Despite good intentions, say to provide habitat, in the end such people are regarded much like those who never cut their hair. They lose their place at the table of community conversation about how landscapes should be treated.5 In order to have standing to contribute to decisions about landscapes, people must signal, through their treatment of nature, key facts about themselves.
The other common feature of these two styles, grand and pretty, is that they can enhance, or destroy, environmental values. That is to say, neither style is inherently good or evil, from a conservation perspective. To decide whether our gardens, lawns and woodlots, in conforming to these aesthetic ideals, are helping or hurting species, and encouraging a particular balance of nature, requires careful attention to each site.
When we appeal to our neighbors for a certain look for a conserved landscape, we will have deeply-rooted culture on our side if we cast our argument in terms of one of the dominant styles. If we can find a way to combine either, or both, with such practices as leaving some areas entirely alone, audiences will feel more comfortable.
Conclusions
These are some of the kinds of information one needs to form clear and consistent conservation goals, strategies, and management plans. Not to discuss such matters leads to ‘no action,’ which of course is an action — one which supports current trends, whatever they are.
We might approach each parcel in two stages: the first to gather information of these kinds, and the second to discuss and choose goals, strategies, and plans. Ideally, we need information from many sources, such as neighbors of the property, oral histories of the town, stories from hunters and fishers, and so forth. We also need the perspectives of professional ecologists, biologists, landscape planners, and others.
Initially, each stage might be approached thus:
All this takes time, and many of us have to make decisions about our landscapes without the rich information we desire. But no matter how much information we have, creative decisions will be necessary. The process which leads to conversations and decisions must begin with a point of view from which a story is told. That point of view selects the grain (smallest units in space and time) and extent (largest units) of the part of nature in question. This is a purely formal requirement of both science and storytelling, and thus of ecology and conservation. Once the domain, or informational grid, of the place is specified, both science and storytelling about cultural values have roles in filling in detail. In order to rationally apply a land ethic or a land aesthetic to a particular place, historic and current patterns of species coexistence there, as well as historic and current patterns of cultural valuations there, must be specified. Much of this information, such as the alpha, beta, and gamma diversity, and the valuations expressed in historic land use patterns, is objective. Yet underlying the entire conversation, from the first description to the last vote, are issues of viewpoint and choice. ‘No action’ is a choice to favor current trends, so it isn’t really no action at all. Writers and other citizens can influence the outcomes of conservation decisions by gathering the science and cultural history of a place, then using appeals to values like the grand, the pretty, and the protection of diversity to influence actions and policies. Opposing cries of “sacred nature” versus “relative values” oversimplify matters. Writing and speaking from within one’s considered point of view, in a manner which celebrates what is there in both natural and cultural senses, can gently persuade others. That is how Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Rachel Carson changed the world.
This piece is adapted from Luke Wallin’s Conservation Writing: Essays at the Crossroads of Nature and Culture, published in 2006 by the Center for Policy Analysis; to download or order this book please see http://www.lukewallin.com/cwriting.htm. Wallin teaches in Spalding University’s brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing program.
1 Allen, Timothy F.H., and Hoekstra, Thomas W., Toward a Unified Ecology, NY: Columbia University Press 1993.
2 Jackson, J.B., Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, New Haven: Yale University Press 1984.
3 Rybcinski, Withold, Home: A Short History of an Idea, New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.
4 Alverson, William S., Walter Kuhlmann, and Donald M. Waller, Wild Forests: Conservation Biology and Public Policy, Chicago: Island Press, 1994.
5 Pollan, Michael, Second Nature, New York: Grove Press 2003.
6 Private communbication wih the author.
the green tea steeped and a word
came to mind but slid out again
there was steam and dark French
chocolate with an essay, all after lunch
it started with L, if I recall correctly
and had a sense of ease to it unlike
the black hole concept which could rip
someone apart through a time warp
maybe it was languorous but that’s doubtful
because there were too many people to treat
for anything to stretch itself across thought
and despite the steam there wasn’t much heat
lynch doesn’t work in these beheading days
with real time being collapsed and inserted
through electronica which used to be considered
hooey as much as any bedangled medium hum
until the thrust of neuro-juice propels the recall
forward, these meager place holders will have to do
stand-ins all for that one linguistic specificity which
when said, or read, like lust will resonate nature
Part 1: Medical Care in the U.S.
A. Medical Care & Treatment Models
I’ll be examining Western medicine and seeing how its present position could lead us into channels where familiar waters grow very choppy, and even skilled boatmen may not make it through unscathed.
I will first discuss the medical model, and the treatment model, and show how these reinforce each other. Then, we consider the philosophical implications of the high tech transformation of the human body and mind, on the issue of human identity.
The current treatment model promotes the view that people are composed of mechanical parts and systems which can be repaired or replaced, sometimes by biological replacements and sometimes by non-organic mechanical ones.
In the U.S the medical model is a for-profit system, and one that is not single-payer based. In other words, it is privately run and is designed to generate profits to the owners or shareholders. Except for Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ care benefits, generally speaking, the government does not provide health care as a single payer. In Western Europe, Japan and S. Korea, the main features of the medical plans are publicly run and are not for profit, though supplemental care is for-profit.
By way of comparison, local fire and police departments in the U.S. are not for-profit, i.e. they are not designed to make money. (The corrections system, on the other hand, has been increasingly privatized and is for-profit. Water rights have also been privatized in some communities in the U.S. and throughout the world, though water is generally regarded as a public utility).
By its very nature as a for-private-profit medical model, the current model treats people as commodities. In the U.S. there is no intrinsic right to free, government-provided health care. Americans expect the government to aid them in the event of a “natural disaster” or to provide fire protection or protection from crime. However, unlike in other industrialized Western countries and Japan and South Korea, free health care is not provided by the American government as a right of citizenship (let alone provided free to visitors, as in the case of at least some Western countries, and perhaps in Japan and S. Korea as well).
B. The Issue of Privatization
Let’s examine philosophically what happens if we combine this medical model, which is oriented to privatized, single-payer patient care with its treatment model, which views the body as a mechanism with repairable or replaceable parts taken from other bodies or grown in the laboratory or sometimes made of non-organic materials. We immediately see that these medical and treatment models are not oriented toward preventative care, which focus on the health of the whole mind and body of the person. I’ll return to the last point near the very end of this multi-part discussion.
Let’s focus now on what is, from the perspective of patient health care, a particularly pernicious aspect of the present American medical model, the issue of pre-existing conditions.
It is widely acknowledged by people on the whole political spectrum that the present system is increasingly breaking down. Many people cannot afford coverage, while many who pay for coverage are being denied it for various reasons, including the fact that they actually have the medical conditions for which they need treatment. So, we have:
Huge managerial costs associated with denying people treatment for varying reasons, including the fact that they suffer from “pre-existing conditions,” which precede enrollment in the particular private health care system. In contrast, Medicare/Medicaid, which is part of the Social Security system, provides treatment as the single-payer (which reimburses actual medical care providers). It does not spend money to exclude people from treatment, but it is designed to pay for actual treatment . (The right wing disdainfully refers to this as Socialized Medicine (italic).)
Expensive treatment, particularly during terminal illness during the late stage of the patient’s life, accounts for a large percentage of total medical costs for treatment in the U.S. Often the quality of a person’s life is sacrificed for the sake of the quantity of extra time lived, which appears to be regarded as a good, in and of itself, by the medical establishment. Living wills and health care proxies could be used by patients and their representatives to exclude so-called heroic high-tech medical interventions such as the use of ventilators and tube feeding, which are often painful, require pain killers, and often extend the sufferingof patients during terminal conditions.
Expensive drugs are used, with the government not allowed to buy large amounts of various drugs to supply to hospitals, etc., at lower costs (with the general exception of the Veterans Administration). This is undoubtedly a boon to the drug companies, literally at the expense of medical consumers.
2 and 3 are based on the repair or replace model, delivered not on the basis of need but on the basis of one’s individual health care policy or whether it is a Medicare reimbursable expense.
In general, too much emphasis is placed on the quantitative aspects of patient care and the extending of life for its own sake and the sake of continued profits that are generated by patient care, rather than qualitative aspects of treatment, i.e. how the quality of people’s lives is affected in terms of how comfortable they are in their daily life activities, etc., based on people’s individual wishes.
Fundamentally, in a for-profit medical care system, patients are literally regarded as the raw material that is processed, (i.e. treated) into final health care commodities, whose care and treatment continues to generate profit (not unlike prisoners in for-profit prisons.
Part 2: Western Medicine and Its Possible Future (which is right around the corner).
A. The Medical High Tech Revolution
Let’s go the next step and look in on the next stage to which the medical care delivery system is headed. It is shifting from treating human beings as commodities to treating human beings as commodities–beings, who may no longer be what we define as human.
As a species we are moving rapidly toward the ultimate expression of the repair and replace model of medicine. We are in a polygamous marriage with computer technology, robotics, genetic engineering and nanotech, particularly when applied to the human body. As part of genetic engineering, new organs may be grown from stem cells as replacement parts for the host being and possible other beings as well. Already ova are housed in wombs not of their biological mothers, but of women who are biological carriers. Down the road the ova may be allowed to mature into fetuses and babies in vitro in external environments for ultimate control and manipulation.
Consciousness itself and its biochemical components may, like software, become transferable to new physical vehicles <3>. Conscious beings may be able to view multiple vistas simultaneously, as viewing a room or a wide area filled with images from video screens. It may become the norm for human beings to be composites of mechanical and biological organs, or to have their consciousnesses housed in something other than what we call physical bodies. These types of experiments are undoubtedly going on at the present time. We may cease to be human beings and become beings that are no longer human, in the conventional sense of what we mean by mind and body. In the future we may not be treated as patients by physicians and health care practitioners, but instead receive maintenance, not unlike our cars now. Our life (no ital) expectancy might be that of our service contracts. Ultimately, if being repaired like computers replaces being healed by health care practitioners, and if being updated with software enhancements replaces the eating of food, then we will be living in the Matrix of the the Matrix film trilogy. This raises the issue of the role of sensation and perception in experience, which I will be discussing shortly. I’m pushing the envelope of credibility here a bit, but this hypothetical is not too far out in the future.
B. The Body and Consciousness
The concept of body as vehicle is an interesting one, and I mentioned this earlier. In Buddhism the body is sometimes described as a vehicle, in the sense that it is a conveyance. Spiritual doctrines are often conceived as vehicles, in the sense that the teachings themselves are like vehicles or conveyances (from the Latin vehiculum, to convey) that lead one from a state of ignorance to the state of wisdom. Hence, the main schools of Buddhism, the Mahayana and Theravada, contain the Sanskrit root, yana meaning vehicle. In Buddhism, the body is not a vehicle for a disembodied “soul” in the religious sense of a disembodied essence — Buddhism, rather, affirms the doctrine of anattman, or no-self, that there is no abiding self, or any substance that does not change.
There is another sense of the word vehicle. Most spiritual traditions conceive the body as a temporary housing for consciousness. (This is apart from the question of the concept of soul as a disembodied essence in a particular spiritual tradition). This teaching dovetails with the view of body as vehicle in the high tech sense.
C. Sensation, Reason and Knowledge in Western Philosophy- Some Thoughts
The connection between mind and body, or the relationship among the faculties of sensation, reason, imagination and feeling, has historically been the subject of much analysis and speculation by philosophers, starting with the Classical Greek philosophers.. Much human mental activity is based on sensory experience. What is the connection between the body and brain? What is the connection between the brain and consciousness? These questions are not quite as simple as they might appear.
Rene Descartes, the famous French mathematician and philosopher of the 17th century, was a rationalist who focused on the importance of the faculty of reason in human knowledge. In his famous analogy he writes that the mind inhabits the body, like a pilot in a ship.
Other philosophers emphasize the role of sensation in knowledge, as do the English empiricist philosophers writing in the late 17th and 18th centuries. (The root of the word is empiricus, from the Greek meaning experience, in the sense of one who relies on practical experience.) David Hume, the last of this particular group of philosophers, regards the mind as nothing more than, in his famous phrase, a bundle of sensations.
The famous German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, writing at the end of the 18th century in Germany into the early 19th century, tries to combine elements of rationalism and empiricism in his analysis of the components of the knowing process. He writes that reason as a faculty exists (unlike Hume’s assessment) but in order for knowledge to occur, it must act on sensation. He writes: (emphasis is his), Understanding and sensibility, with us, can determine objects only when these are employed in conjunction. <1>.
Earlier in his famous Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes: Without sensibility no object would be given to us; without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions (by which Kant means sensations) without concepts are blind. <2> I like to rephrase this in modern terms as, Sensation without the mind is blind; the mind without sensation is dumb.
D. Consciousness and the Brain – the Cybernetic vs Neural Network Models
There is a cybernetic model of the brain as computer. If your computer is getting old and you know that it may crash, you transfer its documents to another computer (and from one vehicle to another, as it were). Similarly it is held that, in theory, the physical equivalent of consciousness (the “data” of the brain) could be transferred to another medium, thus providing a kind of removable storage for consciousness, which would ensure personal immortality as long as this process continues.
Eventually, the genome of the brain (which has an estimated six trillion cells – from wikianswers.com ) may be constructed, much as the human genome project mapped the chromosomes and genes of the human being. However, recent study of the brain and consciousness shows that learning is not localized to particular portions of the brain, for people can have high functioning even with sizeable portions of their brains removed or injured. The brain seems not to function as an adding or calculating machine, but as a learning machine, which continually redirects impulses through different neuron networks in different portions of the brain. In the neural network impulses are continuously rewritten with new data. This model of the brain would need much more study before one could attempt to transfer electrical neurological activity from a human brain onto a different medium.<3> So, at least for a while, we won’t need to directly address the question of whether consciousness would experience the world differently when housed in a non-organic vehicle other than the physical human brain.
E. Consciousness without a Human Body – Some Further Thoughts
People have used aspects of technology for probably thousands of years, trying to repair or improve on the body in some way. Eye glasses were developed a few hundred years ago, and now infra- red technology allows human beings to have night vision. Artificial limbs and organs from human donors are already part of present-day treatment, particularly in the context of the mechanistic model of the body which views it as composed of replaceable parts. Apart from consciousness itself and the brain, which, as we’ve noted above, presents special technical problems, what are the implications of the human physical organism being increasingly replaced by organic transplants from other people or by mechanical replacements and enhancements? Is one’s connection to the physical world drastically altered?
We might miss our bodies more than we think. Scenes could be captured by cameras that would display images on video screens. If we didn’t have eyes or ears, then visual and auditory images would have to be conveyed to a device that could interpret such data. Without a receptive device such as ears, for instance, one could not perceive or hear an MP3 file even though it is a sound file, or perceive or see an object without a device for visual perception such as an eye. And what other things that people enjoy through their senses would be lost, particularly eating and sex? Physical pleasure is sensory based, though the mind contributes to it. For instance, for many people the thought of sex can produce sexual arousal in the body. Could mechanical bodies and minds experience sensory pleasure?
Perhaps there is a kind of magnetic attraction between sensation and reason. Kant writes, as we described earlier, that human beings use both in perception. The life of the senses might either have great appeal or cause great revulsion to beings whose existence is the life of the mind. There were episodes on Star Trek that probably reflected both of those attitudes. Remember, too, the difficulties that Mr. Spock had with understanding human emotion? The attitudes in which such beings engage in these activities become important. Such beings play chess-like games but then, presumably for the “excitement,” start to wager on the results. Could there be excitement without sensation or bodies? What about the famous wager between God and Lucifer in the Old Testament, testing Job’s patience?
Perhaps our conception of what it means to be human will evolve, as technology evokes. Our definition seems to be subject to a time lag, one step behind humankind’s physical evolution as a species, and its evolution via technology. But now we are in hi- tech land. Perhaps non-organic consciousness could don a kind of temporary mantel, a virtual reality- type apparatus, in order to experience sensation. Then once again we find ourselves in the Matrix of the Matrix film trilogy.
As we expand the range of our experience through computer technology, robotics, genetic engineering and nanotech, en toto, does this risk making us into hybid beings, at once human and non-human? Or, perhaps, as we extend the range of our sensibility through these new enhanced avenues for sensation, we are evolving toward our full humanity as self-aware beings, who experience more of the possibilites of existence. Then, we would be evolving toward ever higher level of self-awarenesss or self-consciousness, in Hegel’s sense of the term, based on experience not just thought.
As we evolve as a species, and as a species which develops technology, the question arises whether hybrid human/cybernetic/animal beings, could write poetry or fiction, or create other works of art? We earlier described the connection between sensation and reason in human perception. Could such hybrid experience emotions?
As Martin Heidegger describes, we try to experience the being of the other, whether it be a person or animal or object in the world. Through language, we stand in what calls the Clearing or the Open with the being or essence of the other, and art is our attempt to describe this connection. He considers poetry as the most fundamental and expressive medium for this communication with the other, since language is the most pliable substance of art. <4>
NOTES to Part 2:
<1>ed Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, unabridged, Norman Kemp Smith,ed. and trans. 1965, sec. B314, p.274
<2> Ibid., secs B 76, A52, p. 93)
<3> Dr. Michio Kaku, noted author and Professor of Physics at City College of New
York, described the differences between the cybernetic vs. neural network model of the brain on Coasttocoastam.com, 4-22-09
<4> . See Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter, Harper and Row, 1971.For more on Heidegger’s view on poetry and art, see this author’s essay, The Role of the Artist in Modern Society with Particular Reference to Martin Heidegger’s Conceptions of Art and Technology,on http://www.poeticmatrix.com/letteRon-line7/L7EditorsPage.html
Part 3: The Knowledge Process for Humans and Non-Sentient Beings
A. Sense Knowledge and Moral Judgments
We’ve previously considered sensation and reason in the theories of knowledge of Hume and Kant. These thinkers also present moral philosophies that are based on these theories of knowledge. Sensation generates the perception of the world as an affect, as feeling. David Hume, the famous British empiricist philosopher of the 18th century, considers sensation as the basis of knowledge. In a similar way he regards fellow feeling or sympathy as a basic feature of human beings and as part of our basis for morality.
Following in the tradition of Aristotle, John Stuart Mill in the 19th century saw the purpose of morality as being to produce happiness.
The pursuit of pleasure assumes more intellectualized forms for human beings, in contrast to animals, as befits humankind’s nature as a rational being. Nonetheless, happiness includes sensory pleasures and those offered by the imagination. Mill famously quipped that it’s better to be like Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
B. Reason, Robotics, and Moral Judgments
As the physical nature of the human being changes, perhaps sensation would figure less, or not at all, into the idea of happiness, or happiness itself. Physical pleasure, or the sensory side of happiness might be replaced by an ethos that is more religion-oriented, or it might be replaced by a system based on abstract rights and duties, or “the ought.” Some moral systems don’t necessarily involve sensation at all – treating your neighbor as you’d have them treat you, is part of the Judeo-Christian Golden Rule and the moral teaching of Immanuel Kant.
Kant sought to make the Golden Rule universally and categorically true (i.e. true in each and every situation) and to make it the basis of morality, rather than the production of happiness. The concepts of “don’t do to other beings what you’d not have them do to you,” and “will the universal” (as when one says, it is always wrong to steal) form the basis of Kant’s moral philosophy.
Because it is not based on sensation, the categorical imperative might be useable by machines/robotics. An interesting illustration of this can be found in the work of the famous scientist and science and sci-fi writer, Isaac Asimov, namely, his famous Laws of Robotics, which actually are written as categorical imperatives:
The following paragraph was quoted from Roger Clark’s essay on Asimov’s laws:
Asimov detected as early as 1950 a need to extend the first law, which protected individual humans, so that it would protect humanity as a whole. Thus, his calculating machines "have the good of humanity at heart through the overwhelming force of the First Law of Robotics" (emphasis added). In 1985 he developed this idea further by postulating a "zeroth" law that placed humanity’s interests above those of any individual, while retaining a high value on individual human life.
Zeroth law: A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.<2>
C. Human and Machine Interaction
As the human body changes, would the nature of sensory- based experience change, namely, the feelings and thoughts that human beings have of love of nature and their feelings of connectedness to nature?
Would mechanical beings be more or less likely than human beings to regard the world of nature – organic and inorganic – just as raw material for utilization or exploitation? In a sense that question is the basis of Asimov’s laws of robotics, described above. A being need not be composed of metal and plastic parts in order to exploit the world of nature. It was a plain old human being who, as the singer Joni Mitchell described, made the park into a parking lot.
On the other hand, as humans become more machine-like, might not machines become more human-like, or animal-like, (combining human, animal, plant, insect qualities, as in the movie, The Fly), or combine these qualities with those of mechanical sensitivity (the being in the movie, Predator)? On another part of that scale, might not machines try to pass themselves off as human, as in the famous Turing test, formulated by the famous mathematician and WW II cryptologist, Alan Turing? Perhaps machines or robots could be developed that could easily pass the Turing test.
In the Turning test, a human interrogator questions a human being and a machine and must determine which is the human and which is the machine. Each is in a separate room. Each tries to convince the interrogator that it is the human. The machine passes the test if the interrogator mistakes it for a human, based on its responses and the way it behaves over the phone. <3>
NOTES to Part 3:
<1> Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics are ascribed to his short short story called "Runaround," which was published by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. in 1942. This reference appears in http://www.androidworld.com/prod22.htm
<2>See Roger Clark’s essay, http://www.rogerclarke.com/SOS/Asimov.html#Zeroth , as cited in http://www.androidworld.com/prod22.htm
<3> Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950), cited in http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/
Part 4: At the Fringes- When Humans and Machines Meet
A. The Sphere of the Between for Human and Machine-Beings
It’s not hard to imagine situations in which one’s parents, in whatever sense this term develops, choose the particular model of their child – physical characteristics of different races of humans, species of animal, or characteristics drawn from an assemblage of animal, plant, bird and insect features (with may be monthly specials here) combined with mechanical enhancements and other features. In a very short time, we’d have an assembly of mythological beings which might become prototypes for the new composite being, formerly known as the human being (by then an archaic term perhaps).
The starting point for production of this composite human-animal-mechanical hybrid being might be in vitro. This would supply the biological portion of the composite being. Then — just as a person now might surround herself with various human, various animal and bird companions — these characteristics could be included in this new being’s own composite nature..
Sex has been a very popular human diversion throughout history, and sex adapts well to the age of technology with video and sound recording. So if we have human sexual companions, why not robotic ones? What about robots who, for some reason, want to experience human emotions such as love, but the feelings are not regarded as authentic because they are not sensory based? (We have outlined here a good part of the theme of A.I. (the futuristic film directed by Steven Spielberg, 2001)
At the fringe of human and machine interaction, we‘d have such questions as how would one derive the pleasures of eating and sex when one doesn’t have a sensory body? Alternatively, could a non-organic mechanical being practice meditation, or create works of art, including such language oriented art as poetry? Would s/he have streams of thoughts, would free association exist, could s/he quiet their minds, and, if s/he has thoughts, is s/he not already one-pointed in her/his thinking? There presumably wouldn’t be bio-energetic fields around such beings, but there certainly would be electrical fields, as with humans. Since these beings would not be distracted by jump-around monkey- mind thoughts in the way that human beings are, maybe they would already be Enlightened in the Eastern sense of the word, and one with the larger community of inorganic and organic beings?
Technology develops in the context of society, and in turn, is promoted by one social class or another, often for its own class interests. Technology in the West is promoted for the purpose of profit—helping people is often secondary, except in the case of workers in various fields who specifically want to help people, such as charities and philanthropic enterprises.
Historically, the search for private profit has been the main motor of the development of science and technology. Extraordinarily promising technology often fails to be implemented for lack of financial support. One thinks of Nicholas Tesla, Edison’s famous rival, in the early years of the 20th century, who died in poverty, and of innovative fuel saving automotive technology in the late70’s and early 80’s, which wasn’t promoted by the big auto companies at that time.
If the search for short term profit at all levels of society continues to direct the science of the day, with the great power it wields, the future of the human species, and this very planet, becomes more problematical. This may be the tragic flaw of the species, regardless of how much wealth or scarcity exists in the society as a whole. Human beings are face- to- face with both their possible evolution and extinction as a species.
B. A Holistic Approach To Medicine, Technology & Possible Human Evolution
I’d rather let the preceding account of humankind’s possible evolution remain in the province of fiction and science fiction writers rather than the domain of sociologists and psychologists. Therefore, let us try the opposite approach.
Let’s imagine an economic system that is not totally for profit and does not treat human beings as commodities in order to keep “production” costs as low as possible and profits as high as possible. In our alternative approach, we would treat people as people, with intrinsic value as human beings. In terms of medicine this treatment would also focus on treating the whole human being via preventative medicine rather than treating parts through the repair- and- replace mechanical and mechanistic treatment model. Instead of the repair and replacement of mechanical parts – arms , legs, hearts, kidneys, etc, — the focus would be on keeping the whole human organism and natural world healthy, by producing healthy organic food without preservatives and genetically modified products. Ultimately, this is the view that preventative medicine, healthy food and lifestyle in a sustainable environment, are the best medicine for human beings and the planet as a whole.
Interesting indeed that the same natural and wholistic approach for healing human beings works quite well when applied to other beings on the planet and to the planet as a whole. Mountain top mining, as in West Virginia and other states, attacks the physical earth which is both organic and inorganic, and the contamination of the streams is enormous. Modern agribusiness, with its compartmentalization of agriculture, has several dire effects– (a) cows, chickens and other animals are raised off the soil, resulting in generation of manure that has no use. Removing the manure provides profits to the waste removal industry. But the manure winds up contaminating waterways throughout the world with so-called dead zones, in which aquatic life cannot live; (b) the loss of manure as natural fertilizer requires artificial nitrogen- based fertilizers be added to the soil, which both depletes the soil and contributes to global warming.
Another approach to futurism. Do people need to actually make themselves into composite beings that exist in physical form, like a combination of body of horse, head of human? This can be done with the imagination alone. These particular beings are actually centaurs in classical Greek mythology. They were revered as healers, but they liked to drink, get drunk, get rowdy and sometimes got killed. In the Greek myths, Hercules, the hero, gets drunk with some of the centaurs and winds up in a brawl with several others, killing Chiron, the leader and the great healer and benefactor of humankind.
That myth opens an interesting lesson here, for us, at this time in human history. Could one become intoxicated on knowledge and try to make what appears to be impossible, possible? Could humans temper knowledge with wisdom? Humans have always made mistakes, usually resulting from lack of knowledge or desire for short term profit. Now, new technological things can be done, but they get harder to undo.
In the world now, there is an increasing polarity between the rich and the poor, with the middle classes being increasingly ground down by the difficulties of securing right livelihood. Despite the inequities, wealth created through the use of technology percolates downward. We have things that only kings and nobility might have had—like hot and cold running water, sanitation, central heating, music of any kind on demand, and things that even the wealthy of earlier eras could not have– the ability to fly through the air, to pluck images, words and songs from the air with a device, to converse with other people throughout the world in a few minutes or instantaneously, to experience space flight and the moon voyage. As Neil Armstrong declared in 1969, as the first human to touch down on the moon, this was a small step for man, and a giant leap for mankind (ital).
All of these have become real human achievements and are more than just creations of the imagination. But because of poverty throughout the world, many people still don’t have basic goods and services, and the planet itself is very off balance due to humanity’s lack of foresight as a species. In short, it’s a good time for people to pause and ponder on the future of science and of the planet.
C. Greed At The Top, and the Future of Humanity: Some Final Thoughts.
As of this writing, in April 2009, there has been a groundswell of environmental concern because of global warming. But this awareness is taking place in the context of the tsunami of the world financial crisis, originally set in motion by the U.S. It was caused by unregulated leveraging of assets based on mortgage loans, which defaulted to an incredible extent, causing huge amounts of debt to accrue to the major banks and brokerage houses, which limited their ability to lend money to businesses. This, in turn, caused unemployment and more mortgage defaults.
There have been many banking crises over hundreds of years. Many banks, in many countries, such as Iceland, have been driven to the very brink of bankruptcy, being saved only by the bailouts by central banks and governments of numerous Western countries. Competition amongst the banks for short term profit and positioning basically fueled the leveraging and the bad loans on which it was based. At the heart of it is greed for money and the power which money buys. These are the bankers to the very people who basically run the Western societies. They are willing to leverage the future for short- term profits.
What will happen if this crew (ie. whoever is currently running the planet) continues to rule and directs the future of science, as we’ve described, in the area of humankind’s possible evolution as a species? Does it make us feel very comfortable about the future? If we think that we have evolved socially as a species because peace, not war, is now regarded as the basic norm, let us remember that the Nazis were defeated only about 65 years ago. If they had won, they most certainly would have set up some type of new imperial Roman type of empire, based on hi-tech and slavery. Slavery, let us remember, was part of the ancient world and extended through the 19th century and right into the present time, too.
If we want to regard peace as the basic norm among nations, let us remember that it must be guarded and defended from those who would subvert it, including the ruling classes of societies. So the evolution of Society from slavery to freedom and democracy is still in process. How science and the model of Western medicine affects this process still remains to be seen.
In a globalized world, policy decisions affecting the environment and those affecting human beings have enormous import. Humans would be well advised to consider carefully our physical transformation into whatever our imagination and desire — including desire for profit — conspire on for us. Let’s keep in mind the importance of balancing reason, the imagination and desires within ourselves, as described by Plato and Aristotle at the dawn of Western civilization. And let us rebalance this planet. Gaia will always be our home planet, but we are, as a species, its most reluctant caretaker.
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NOTE ON THE AUTHOR: Paul Dolinsky holds a Ph.D in Philosophy, which he taught for several years in the classroom and still tutors, online. He also works as a free lance writer, and editor. He edits www.thegoldenlantern.com, a poetry submission site. He’s written collections of poems on Western philosophy, on Buddhist thought, and most recently, Study Guide Based on Red Mountain, a novel by Charles Entrekin His websites include www.historyofphilosophy.org, www.buddhistpoems.com, & www.technopoems.com