The Mind-Body Problem, Restated

Human beings have long been fascinated b the strange bifurcation that they find in themselves. Their bodies have immediate sensations, pleasures, pains, tfears, limitations of space and time. At the same time their minds may be re-experiencing memories of past place and events or imagining future places and events, or those that never existed. Philosophers have called this the mind-body problem and have compiled a large body of thought about it. In what follows I want to consider a societal expression of this bifurcation, especially with regard to one rapidly developing technology.

It has been a phenomenon of societal development since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. At that point the power of human thought began to be felt. What Francis Bacon observed in the 17^th century, namely, that “knowledge is power,” evidenced its transforming impact in the Industrial Revolution of the 18^th century. Ever since, mam’s mind has increasingly outpaced the rest of its organism. We have, unfortunately, behaved as though this increasing gap between what our minds created and what our bodies could deal with, did not matter. Of late, more and more people are pointing out that little matters more than this fault line in us and in out societies.

We now see that our minds have developed and implemented technologies that threaten our existence as a species. Using our technologies we have altered the planet’s climate system and we have unleashed the power of nuclear fission and we do not know how to put it back in the bottle.

The latest and perhaps the most threatening of these technologies is known as synthetic biology.

In his book Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, George Church describes and discusses the relatively new and rapidly developing field of synthetic biology. Generally this refers to the process of removing parts of DNA and combining them with other DNA to produce a different form of life.

Church equates synthetic biology with other foundational shifts in human evolution such as the discovery of fire and the movement from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. If he is right, and he presents considerable evidence that he is, then humanity is faced with a monumental opportunity to improve itself and an equally monumental opportunity to destroy itself in a multidimensional chaos that boggles the mind because this technology will eventually offer human beings the ability to restructure themselves. We will increasingly become the subjects of technology, not just the applicators of technology.

A few examples that come to mind: What happens when the demand for designer children takes hold? We have already seen the phenomenon of selling the semen of very intelligent men to those seeking artificial insemination. Will an existing generation seek to fashion the subsequent generation to its desires?  Aldous Huxley in his book Brave New world describes a society that breeds its  citizens to meet the society’s requirements for the skills it needs thereby avoiding unsatisfied desires and the social disruptions and violence prevalent in today’s violence ridden societies. Conversely, will existing societies use this technology to breed future generations to pursue existing antagonisms or megalomania as currently powerful segments of the Christian and Muslim religions vie to outbreed each other and thereby make their religion dominant?

As Church points out in some detail, synthetic biology is spreading rapidly beyond the laboratories of government, academia, and corporations. It has entered a phase similar to that of the Home Brew Club and garages s of the early phases of the semiconductor-microcomputer revolution of Silicon Valley. In gatherings in Cambridge Massachusetts, students and others from Harvard and MIT are using startup labs that charge fees such as $200 a month to use the lab and its equipment and get a discount on the reagents used in DNA manipulation. The same thing is happening in Silicon Valley itself. This means the technology to manipulate life itself is spreading under all the motivations and interests of human beings with little or no oversight or control. We may be witnessing yet another wave of fundamental change and a problematic future.

The bottom line to all of this is that mankind will make itself the subject of the same experimental and technological development that it has made of the rest of the natural world. Do we have the faintest notion of what that mindset will mean for the future of our species?

Dilemmas of this kind and this magnitude, i.e.  multidimensional in extremis, effecting every life form including its present and its future generations, should give humanity great pause.

We badly need an early warning system for technological development and it’s potential. The United Nations has produced a document titled Early Warning Systems: A State of the Art Analysis and Future Directions aimed at identifying existing advance warning systems and identifying areas of need for such systems. This document can be found at http://grid2.cr.usgs.gov/siouxfalls/publications/Early_Warning.pdf. The document deals with shorter term disasters such as oil spills and earthquakes and long-term “creeping” disasters such as global warming, soil erosion and other forms of environmental degradation. Imperative though development of technological early warning systems are, I was unable to find any reference to this need in the platforms of the National Democratic Party, Green Party or the Socialist Party USA.  This want of concern speaks volumes about the mind set of American politics, especially its unwillingness to take the lead in using government and law to make the human predicament clear enough to permit society to deal with faster rates of change than mankind has previously had to deal with.

Technology as the product of the human brain is, if left to the capacious greed and lust for power all too common to mankind, the societal mind-body problem that must be solved or at least greatly ameliorated if our species is to survive.

Bob Newhard