Understanding the structure of the brain and how it functions can help us see the constraints on consciousness, much as, to use another metaphor, the banks of a river constrain its flow and are integral to its being a river at all, without themselves being sufficient to cause the river, or being themselves the river, or explaining it away. All experience in this life as we know it (and this applies whether we conceive the brain as the originator, or as a transducer, of consciousness) comes to us through the brain, and is therefore inevitably constrained, and shaped, by it.
It is not the changes in the brain itself that matter, but the way in which we use it. An analogy might be with a radio set: to begin with you try different channels, but after a while you begin to tune into only one. The other channels are still there – it’s just that you are no longer listening to them.
Even if we avoid oblivion, the result would be a dark age whose darkness would be roughly proportional to the extent of the overshoot. To avoid such a fate, humanity must either achieve a total technological mastery over nature via the perfection of artificial intelligence and robotics, an outcome that has been dubbed the Singularity, or make a relatively fast transition to a high-level agrarian civilization, precisely the options posited many years ago by Harrison Brown.
[A] state of total technological mastery is probably not achievable owing to basic physical and biological laws, such as the Entropy Law and the Law of the Minimum. Technology cannot sustain a “machine civilization” or even a “digital civilization” out of thin air.9 In addition, as noted by Brown, the Singularity would be a regimented, collectivized dystopia. (The digital panopticon of today is but the merest harbinger of such a future.)
According to John Rawls, for example, pursuing our own interests may be necessary, but only those acts that are motivated purely for the interests of others can be recognized as intrinsically moral.
Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.
This is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going; it is a philosophy of not making where one is going so much more important than where one is that there will be no point in going.
As informed physical trainers will tell their clients, you cannot outrun a bad diet.
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