Surviving Progress Page #7

THA PLANETARY BRAIN

It's easy now to see kind of a giant

social brain or planetary brain

'cause it's in a physical form of the internet, it looks so

much like a nervous system, you almost can't miss the analogy.

You might say that there always have been a lot of little social brains around the

planet getting bigger, starting to form little interconnections among themselves.

Now more than ever you could tell

that there is a unified social brain.

Even if the overall arc of history is toward an expended moral

horizon, more and more people acknowledging the humanity

more and more different kinds of people, there is always

the risk of backsliding and it can be catastrophic.

From a point of view of strict self-interest it

is imperative that we make further moral progress

that we get more and more people to

acknowledge the humanity of one another

or it will be bad for

pretty much all of them.

If we don't develop which you might

call a moral perspective of god

than we'll screw up the engineering part of playing god

because the actual engineering solutions depend on

seeing things from the point of view of other

people, insuring that their lives don't get too bad

because if they do it

will come back to harm us

so, you know, half of being god is just

have been handed to us and the question is

whether we'll master the other

half of being god, the moral half.

The bad news is the enlightment

is sometimes hard to come by

because of human nature in

some cases, because you know,

we've got these kinds of animal minds,

desgined for very different environment

facing novel problems, so enlightment part is going

to require some real education and reflection

and self-discipline and

may not come natural

I think what were up against

here is human nature,

we have to reform ourselves, remake ourselves in a way that

cuts against the grain of our, our inner animal nature,

and transcend that Ice Age hunter, that all of us are,

if you, if you strip off the thin layer of civilization.

We always have been the initiators of this experiment,

weve unleashed it but weve never really controlled it.

But now its more likely that were going to

come to grief because of environmental problems.

If we do, then that is really nature saying the experiment

of civilization is a failed evolutionary experiment,

that making apes smarter is a, is a dead end. So,

its up to us to prove nature wrong, in a sense,

to show that we can take control of our own destinies and behave in a wise

way that will ensure the continuation of the experiment of civilization

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