LRinseR,I was responding to this quote from you with my genes question of the soul: <<but you wondered about our inability to deprogram war and other distasteful traits. We will have sovereign control over such things when we become proficient genetic engineers.>>
Do you think by changing genes we can remove greed? Can greed be controlled without removing physical motivation? These aberrations of individuals are each a required continuum of every member of the species. How control dishonesty? Dishonesty has an important social function.
My question still stands: How can we tinker with the fundamental structure of the species when we can not even work one [military] arm of it rationally. We do fine enough with controlling the physical world, we need catchup with the social. Great harm will come. Not a warning with an unless, but a fact.
I did use Soul in the religious sense of idiosyncratic personality, as in Body, Soul, Spirit. Hardly am I reverting to some mystic cabal. Whatever everlasting permanence of the Soul exists was not used in this context, only a group term that I followed with examples. I wish those who find objectionable a religious reference for the religiously interested would note it and address any other comments. I did list 6 aspects of my complaint, not 1.
<<I posit that I AM my body. Change my body, and you change me. >> An amputee is less than he was before, in that intrinsic self-knowledge of me, of himself? But seeing a spouse shot in cold blood has no effect upon what I consider me?
Obviously, without a body, one's >insert alternate group term here< soul becomes quite different. More said is masturbation. But with a body, the changes that affect one are both physical and experiential. Each effect adds to the complexity of the internal, 'real' you. So, I posit there are at least 3 factors that make up one's self--body, external sensations, current internal makeup. Further, I posit that there are aspects of each of these three which are required to be human.
Babies not touched die. Sensory deprivation kills. What experiments will be used to determine how little touch is required? What genes can then be manipulated to extend these limits? In a mechanistic universe, it is only non-moral science, bringing about a greater good, right? Switch off the depression gene and solve suicide, while getting both happy workers and blood-chilled mercenaries. Who determines the uses, the profits?
We can create a successor race that looks better than us but has no need for human growth in understanding the world, each other, nor themselves. We will have succeeded in making the most powerful species, the species most our predator, extinct. We will be gone. Our 'children' will have no problems, and no humanity. They will be perfect; but our imperfections come from our very fundamental structure--lose bad emotions and lose all emotions, etc. This is very fashionable, and very anti-hippie. The mechanistic view of reality won in the 6o's and will not be stopped here.
<<If you can show me that the soul is made of sterner stuff than mere attitude - I'll consider your thesis.>> This IS my thesis: that the soul of a man is made of stuff that nothing physical can improve upon. For one, it is made up of time and unique experience. These become him. Removing these alters both the good and the bad that came with the experience. Removing them removes the power they produce in him. Preventing their incorporation prevents the good, the power, and the experiences that build upon them.
<<Anyone who has taken a proper dose of one of the top-shelf psychedelics or has had a close friend suffer a full-blown psychotic delirium has reason to doubt the continuity or permanence of a soul.>> Leaving sensory reality is odd. Long ago I made many attempts to induce the psychedelic euphoria. How many bad trips does one take before saying enough, 3, 10? More recently I find myself leaving reality simply by pushing my powers of concentration deeper into what I'm studying. [Subject irrelevant. ] Upon return, I have the rational solution to whatever was the problem. Twenty five years of spontaneous, recurring psychoses, have allowed me to sample the strongest treatments, though all came to be admitted to not being applicable. Naturally, my occasional neighbors allowed me additional spectator vantage. Only the faith that what I have witnessed and experienced is not inhuman has kept me repairable, in a landscape of compromised, but happily shallow or drugged or dead, former companions. I will again walk the road of surreal terror, but not today, and when I return, despite the doubts, I will know my own self again - richer for the experience, innocent for more. In the end, it is only the soul that contains matter of importance and permanence. But, now is the test of the boomerang tossed in the night of redeeming: In my 1st post to you, I said something like: There is a Life Logic - as simple and profound as the turning of a plant toward the light. There is a Mental Logic - the tool we use to model and master our environment. They are permanent and unchanging - the mind doesn't break, it hides. It listens to, and responds to, old memories, not paying attention to new input. Suicide is not a life solution, but it is an expedient, intermediary step. Terrorism isn't life, but from a partial perspective, it works. If our minds do not create a different logic, nor our organisms, in total, do not create new ability to live, then the disturbances we see in the drugged, the mad, the asocial, the antisocial, groups and individuals, are not from broken logics. Instead, the distubences are within the 'operating systems' that regulate the inputs to / outputs from these logics. The schizophrenic street person making no sense, doing odd motions is not broken, he listens to the logic he hears. What is broken is the selections that logic has to play for him and the os that tunes in the selections. These operating system defects are rarely caused by the physical, but by the social - the environment in which one finds oneself and the interactions between the people one encounters, including the emotional reactions and the social habits. Then, you said interesting; can you say more now? I do not say, do nothing. I say use what is there. It is good. It is a base to build upon. Physical rearranging often works, but what is the unknown price. Social rearranging is hardly tried.
An alcoholic mother produces a child that is deficient in its 'logical' abilities and receives poor care in its environment and encounters damaged people to interact with so producing a poor operating system as well. Were we to splice in a non-alcoholic gene to the mother before conception, would all these problems disappear, or would we simply add a new risk that what we do to the mother might take away alcoholism and nurturing both? Were we to set up volunteer trials and extensively test the procedure, how would we know the genes wouldn't surface at the third generation as an astute new form of serial killer or intractable madman? The methods we have to change environments for the better, knowing people respond to them positively if inefficiently, are not being used well now, why push into this cataclysmic method? Is alcoholism even bad? Many of our artists have been sodden. To the Irish it is normal, to the English, it is bad. Who decides? Could we be implementing a clean, sterile, efficient way to ethnic cleanse, without all the bother of welfare and foreign aid or without the affront to sensibility of the gas chamber? |
