The Future of the Human Race

Don't worry I'm not going all Nostradamus on you. Recently I watched the film Transcendence, which has Johnny Depp playing a scientist who effectively gets uploaded to the internet and becomes the first truly artificial intelligence. It wasn't really that good. However, the story and main plot points I found very interesting and incidentally I have recently been considering the very ideas the film touches upon and so I thought I better write them down. You know for posterity or something. Please do read on.

The main point of the story emerges from the question of what exactly makes us human. Biologically our minds are just a series of complicated neural interactions. Our brain is an electrochemical soup and nothing more. What the film asks is, if you entirely copy the structure, interactions and connections of someone's brain, is that copy the same as the original person? Is something intangible, something more than just a chemical reaction, lost in between? Does the copy lack an all-important soul? To see my personal take on the arguments of the existence or not of the soul, you need only scroll down and find the post I have already written about it. I'm not sure exactly where I left it but it's somewhere down there. If you can't find it there, check behind the sofa. (If you can't be bothered to find it, basically, I think the whole idea of "souls" is tosh and yes we very much are just electrochemical soup.)

In the film, when Depp uploads his mind, he becomes incredibly powerful. He has the internet at his complete command, he can manipulate the stock market, he can literally do anything because everything is on the internet. Because the character is a scientist, he wants to expand his research and become as powerful and knowledgeable as possible. With his incredibly advanced intelligence and capabilities, he creates new technologies, develops nanobots that can cure any and every ailment, he can create things from effectively nothing. He becomes like a God (and the film doesn't hesitate to bash you around the head with the similarities between these advanced technologies and the divine).

The one advancement he makes (which got surprisingly little coverage in the film) is that the nanobots that he creates, which can literally cure the blind and heal the lame (*cough cough Jesus cough cough*) also connect the people they heal via wi-fi. This allows them to work both as individuals and as a collective unit all working towards the same goal. This idea of humanity being connected together, their brains literally on the internet, could I believe quite possibly humanity's salvation if it is ever developed and implemented.

The internet has connected people like nothing else in the history of the human race and is the greatest invention quite possibly in all of history. Well, fire and the wheel were big deals as well but the internet is right up there. I can, right now, at this very minute, contact someone thousands of miles away from me in real time. For the vast majority of human history this was an absolute impossibility and your best bet if you wanted to contact someone (in the next village let alone thousands of miles away) was a horse and a bit of paper. If you had paper. Or a horse. The internet has connected us as a species and yet...

Nigeria extremists abduct 91 people.
Gunmen fire on Pakistani flight.
Police seek man over Essex murder.
Ukraine army helicopter shot down.
Belfast killing spree revealed.
Libya in shock after activist's murder.

A handful of headlines from some news websites. How can this be? I can find out information instantaneously about things I don't understand, people I have never met. How can there still be so much violence in the world when knowledge and understanding are so readily available? Well the main reasons, I think, are that man may have this knowledge but whether we choose to access it and process it is entirely down to choice and it's still so much easier to hate, fear and destroy others than it is to empathize with them. But perhaps there is a way to bridge these problems.

Imagine a world where everyone's minds are connected to each other over the internet. You would be able to feel everything everyone else feels, hear the thoughts of everyone else and understand their feelings, motivations, desires, wants and needs. You would work as one piece in a collective whole. It would be absolute empathy. You would literally be stepping into every single living human beings shoes. How could you war with your neighbour if you understand all of their gripes, problems and also their hopes and fears. They would be your gripes, problems, hopes and fears just as much as they are theirs.

I personally believe that if this technology was developed (if it is possible) and implemented, including every human mind on the planet, war would be extinguished overnight forever. The human race would be of one mind. Think of all of human progress from fire to the internet. We have come this far whilst fractured and divided, our shared history marred by violence and hatred. Just imagine what could be achieved with every single person working towards the common goal of the preservation and continuation of the human race. Scientific advancements are accelerating at an unbelievable pace right now, united, humanity would develop technologies that would make the most advanced computers of 2014 look no better than an abacus.

7 billion minds all contributing to one great hive mind.

This idea I have actually kind of stolen...

Joe Halderman's book Forever Peace (sequel to the absolutely fantastic and biting satire of the Vietnam War, The Forever War) essentially has this idea as the major plot point. In the future, wars are fought by robot suits that are controlled hundreds of miles away from the battlefields (Remote controlled death machines? That's just crazy...) by soldiers that are all have their minds connected together. The soldiers experience everything their comrades experience, they share their memories and effectively work as a 7 brained organism (I don't know if Pacific Rim stole this idea but if you have seen that film it works in the same way as "drifting". If you haven't seen it, WATCH IT). It is revealed later in the book that there is actually a design flaw with this hooking up. If the soldiers stay connected for too long, they become super empathetic. They know what it is to be another person and so they become entirely unable to harm another living being. It's impossible for them. Now, soldiers that can't hurt people aren't very useful, so of course the military hush it up but anyway if you want to know what happens read the book.

The point is, I think that this could be a realistic outcome of the connecting together of people's brains. So, do I think that this could be a possibility for humanity's future? Yes. Why? Because it has to be.

Homo sapiens, as a species, could have quite easily come to an end during the Cold War. One cross word and the whole world could have turned into a ball of irradiated dust. As Electric Six sang in their song Dirty Looks, "Every nuclear war begins with two, Dirty looks". We are currently facing climate change which may well prove our undoing but if every mind was connected together...

No war.
7 billion minds working towards a common goal.
Infighting and partisanship a thing of the past.

I can't help but feel that we won't last long without this. Currently, we've been lucky, almost unbelievably so considering the near misses our species has had, but our luck may not last forever. If we are to survive into the future, the pooling of resources and ideas is essential but may never be achieved if we continue to be divided by borders, our differences, our cultures, our religions even the few centimeters of skin, bone and blood that separate our brains.

So when do I think this will happen? I have no idea. Possibly thousands of years. Quite possibly tens of thousands. Technology is moving, as I previously mentioned, at a simply phenomenal rate so perhaps it's closer than tens of thousands but it's still way, way off. I do hope I'm wrong and this technology is just around the corner but I somehow doubt it is. I also hope humans last long enough for this technology to become a reality. If they do, I can't even begin to imagine the wonders that this technology will give rise to. Our present would seem to our future descendants to be as barbarous, violent and backwards as parts of our not-so-distant past seem to us.

So if I don't think this will happen until years after my body has been reduced to dust and scattered across the Earth, what's the point in talking about it now? Well if you don't understand why I'm asking a philosophical question that currently has no impact on the world, you don't understand philosophy and you need to read my very first post on this page (Yeah that's right this whole post is actually just a big advert for all my previous posts. It's my blog and I do what I like with it!) but also you're wrong, asking this question can affect the here and now. Stopping to consider the potential, wide ranging effects of "super empathy" should (I hope) inspire you to try your best at every opportunity to empathize with your fellow human beings. We can't see into other people's minds but we can use our reasoning, intelligence, imagination and our imperfect existing empathy to try to understand. It's easy to categorize people as good and bad (For my analysis of why doing this is bad see... ah screw it you probably already read it anyway...) but no-one ever does something randomly. We all have our influences and reasons for our actions and the sooner we recognize that, the closer we get to a peaceful world where we work together to defeat our problems, problems that are universal. Next time you disagree with someone put yourself in their shoes. It's stuff we were told in school but it's something a lot of people forget. I know I forget it at times.

Christ, I sound like a right hippy don't I...

Is Less More?

A little behind-the-scenes peek at how I write these here posts here. I think of something then spend a few days thinking about it, then I write it down, usually in one fell swoop, late into the night. I then, in the morning, look with horror at the jumbled mess of letters and punctuation marks that last night I believed were coherent sentences, rewrite it and then post it. Well this time... It's going to be pretty similar except without the days of thinking about the subject. Yes that's right this is going to have even less thought put into it than usual. I'm sure it will be fine. I came up with the idea for this post around 10 minutes ago in the shower. My hair is still damp. So on with the show!

I just realized I have secretly been a minimalist for quite a while. Its been so secret I didn't even realize myself. Until now!

I believe the artist Ad Reinhardt (who I literally just found out about. I am making this up on the fly) said it best when he said of art:

The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature.

This quote, quite nicely, sums up my rather newly apparent preference. I do like minimalism. I do think that less can be more. For me the most impressive art or music is the one that can do the most with the least, the fewer the number of words, the fewer colours. As is customary for this blog, I shall now poorly quote someone I can't remember the name of. A famous rock musician (I think) said (perhaps) that he thought it was a greater achievement to write a rock song with 4 chords on a guitar than it was for Beethoven to write a symphony with the many thousands of tones and sounds at his disposal and really I agree. Perhaps that is why my favourite band is Melvins. They don't always play around with complicated guitar solos or other "add ons" (although they can and have), they just play good solid music. One of my personal favourites is their song Night Goat (I have lovingly provided a link that I'm sure no-one will want to click):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwSOrd4E7yw

Look me in the eye and say that that opening bass line didn't send a chill up your spine. That bass line is a constant, like a drum beat on a distant hill. I love Night Goat. Another, more recently discovered, band that I think also have appealed to my love of simplicity is Evil Blizzard. Really it's ironic because they have 4 bassists. Their song Slimy Creatures I think could be said to have minimalist elements considering the full lyrics are "Slimy creatures / Ugly features" and the music itself doesn't deviate much throughout the song. Some might say this is a bad thing but to me it comes across as relentless (which is good). It's like a train being driven through your ear. That bass guitar (well all 4 of them) just keeps pounding along :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4OscceBWe0

Now of course I am aware that they are not strictly minimalist and actually are made up of more than one noise but it shows you don't need a million chord changes or a hundred different versions of the chorus to make a good song. The repetitive nature of both of these songs really appeals to me. I have no idea why. Maybe I'm a simpleton. But then again minimalism, as an idea, has been around a long time and there are interpretations of it in essentially every art style from music to literature to video games (Minecraft anyone?). So I am not alone in enjoying "pared-down design elements". But why did I have this sudden realization in the shower? Why have I, the least artistic person in the world, been thinking about minimalist art style? Well, recently, I went and tried to do some art...

Well when I say art...

When I say try...

I kind of became a bit obsessed by a certain blog called Propnomicon. Now, if you are a fan of the writing of H.P Lovecraft, you should also find this site pretty fascinating but you don't need to be a Lovecraft fanboy to think this stuff is legitimately awesome. Essentially it's what you get when you mix a load of artists, sculptors, prop makers and people with time on their hands and an extensive mythos based around eldritch horrors, unearthly beings and alien gods. And it's awesome. Seriously just look at some of the stuff people have made. I can and have spent hours looking at this stuff:

http://propnomicon.blogspot.fi/

Now my personal favourite objects exhibited on this website are the Cthulhu idols. Now if you don't know who Cthulhu is you need to:
1. Read The Call of Cthulhu by H.P Lovecraft.
2. Try to stop weeping in fear.

In the story, a statue of the octopus-headed, dragon-bodied being from beyond the stars, who lies dead in his house at R'yleh, is recovered from a cult gathering in the swamps of New Orleans and it's description and importance in the story, has captured the imaginations of many and so people have created their own versions of this disturbing sculpture, carved millennia ago, on some dark star.

(Just as an aside: This story and character are famous enough for Cthulhu not to be flagged as a spelling mistake but "favourite" and "colour" are. Americans...)

And by God, are these statues good. Browse through them and see the sheer love and craftsmanship put into these images. They are astounding. They are... inspiring....

 Yeah, I had a go at making my own. Now my personal favourites of the statues shown are those that embrace a simple design (Surprise!). There are plenty that have exquisitely carved scales, tentacles that curl around, dripping slime,  monstrous claws and look so incredibly life like that you almost recoil from them, but the ones that really hit home for me are the ones that are simplicity itself. They look like some ancient stone age man carved them with primitive tools in a dark cave, visions of the great beast torturing their mind. They are just a few lines and yet they are weighed down by the lore that surrounds this creature that is instantly recognizable. Stuff like this:

http://propnomicon.blogspot.fi/2013/10/cthulhu-fhtagn-gormly-edition.html

And especially this one (which incidentally was created by a Finnish artist!):

http://propnomicon.blogspot.fi/2013/06/cthulhu-fhtagn-jarvinen-edition.html

They are rough and worn and aged but essentially just clean lines and shapes and somehow all the better for it. They could be polished and detailed, every inch worked over, but the very fact they are simple adds volumes. It adds some mystery, which if you know Lovecraft, is the whole point of his stories. The terror of the unknown, the indefinable.

So I had a go at my own versions and they turned out pretty darn well if I say so myself. I currently have made 2 and a half wooden ones (the half didn't go so well and then went terribly when I managed to slash my finger open with the penknife I was using. Good thing that scars look cool) and one out of a cork. They all consist of 6 holes (the eyes) and some straight lines and that's it (except the half which was more complicated... and caused me to cut my finger. Minimalism is best). Anyone familiar with Cthulhu would (I hope) very easily see the resemblance and I achieved it with almost nothing. I think that's awesome.

(This is where I would add photos of my creations but I have no idea how to add photos to this blog and I feel it will be more effort than it's worth so sorry.)

But anyway enough backslapping of my own creative talent (they are so simple, I really did very little), this is what got me thinking about minimalism and for me it really is true that less is more. To strike fear and dread into people's hearts is easy with a ton of money, years of experience in the prop making world and professional materials but to do it in a simplified, stripped down form can be just as effective. Think about the current trend for über cheap, found footage films, but it's true for all the arts. I'm currently reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy which is also very minimalist and uses very few words to convey a lot of emotion about a man and his son (both of them never named) traveling through post-apocalyptic America and trying not to get eaten by cannibals.

The main point of this blog post (and all of those links I've put up for you) is that the flashiest, most over-the-top, the MOST isn't always the best or the most effective. Just a few lines in the right places can suggest otherworldly beings and conjure up a whole store of imagery.

You also don't need talent to do art stuff.

But you should be careful and wear gloves when working with knives. 

I lied. Scars aren't cool.