Susan Gerstein's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-future-of-the-mind"
“The Swerve” and “The Future of the Mind”
I had been comfortably ensconced in my summer project of reading the entire “Barsetshire Chronicles” by Anthony Trollope, portions of which I had read many years ago but never the entire six volumes chronologically, when in the midst of this enterprise, just between “Dr. Thorne” and “Framley Parsonage”, one of those serendipitous events occurred that had enhanced my reading life so often before: the perfect book showed up at just the right time, though in this case it temporarily interrupted Mr. Trollope. Two books in fact: “The Swerve” written by Stephen Greenblatt, sent by a friend, and “The Future of the Mind” by Michio Kaku, suggested by another. Reading the two in juxtaposition with each other gives one a panorama of the human experience, the Human Experiment, if you will, for one takes you to a crucial moment in the past, a “swerve”, if you will, that altered the world as it was then known, while the other projects into a far distant future and speculates on the eventual fate of humanity.
In “The Swerve” Mr. Greenblatt centers his narrative -- factual, superbly researched and yet reading like a mystery novel -- on the wholly miraculous emergence of a poem written a millennium-and-a-half prior to its re-appearance in the early 15th century. I was constantly reminded of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”, an outright detective tale taking place at the same time and located in much the same terrain – medieval monasteries – as “The Swerve” does. The medieval monastery looms large in both, more specifically the library of the medieval monastery. For it was in these isolated, purposely inaccessible locations that the literature of the Greek and Roman world would hide and sometimes survive, though rarely and against all odds. As the Roman Empire disintegrated while first the invading armies of the barbarians conquered it, and then Christianity overwhelmed it, what had remained of the great achievements of the ancient world gradually disappeared. Buildings crumbled, grass grew on roads, statues that graced public places and luxurious private villas lay on the ground. What was written disappeared even faster and more thoroughly than other objects: the fragile papyri burnt in wars and in deliberate destruction. The rare works that somehow found their way into the sanctuaries were copied for hundreds of years after Rome fell, but even those copies were subject to the repeated mayhem, and when, rarely, they did survive, they were buried in the aforementioned libraries under lock and key, and mostly forgotten. Century upon century passed in the bleakness of the Dark Ages; the glory of Rome, its very language, mostly forgotten.
But somehow glimmers of light had begun to flicker in the 14th and early 15th centuries. There were rumors of treasures turning up in monasteries if one persevered; and a group of “book hunters” did persevere, traveling over impassable territories onto high mountain crags where the deliberately difficult path led to unwilling monk-librarians reluctant to part with their possessions. One such book hunter was the hero of “The Swerve”: Poggio Bracciolini, a papal secretary with a passionate love of unearthing bits and pieces of the literature of the ancients. The Renaissance was beginning, enough works had already been found to whet the appetite of the budding Humanists. The Catholic church was in disarray, the war of the feuding Popes, the corruption of the clergy, the ignorance of the masses had reached an all-time low, and the need many felt for a different world-view was acute.
This different world-view appeared, almost by a miracle, when in the winter of 1417 Poggio Bracciolini had returned to a German monastery where he had found things worthy of notice on earlier journeys and where he had hoped to find more overlooked treasure. This he did indeed: a manuscript, dating from 50 BC, last copied by an unknown scribe around 900 AD, was in his hand: De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, an epic poem by the Roman poet Lucretius. No other work of Lucretius survived, none, indeed, is known to this day, but this one alone is sufficient to put him into the Olympus of writers.
Poggio Bracciolini would have known the name, for several ancient authors, fragments of whose work had, indeed, been slowly recovered, referred it to. But the actual thing in his hand was far beyond anyone’s wildest expectations: a masterpiece of enormous proportions and beauty of language, it presents a world view that, in it its modernity, is hard to believe even today, let alone when it exploded like a bombshell into the medieval mindset of 15th century Christian Europe. The poem proposes a scientific view of life that posits the atom as the ultimate building block of the physical world, denies the existence of Gods, and considers the chief enterprise of humans to be “the pursuit of happiness” here on Earth. It denies “miracles” and attributes some uncanny events (such as the very emergence of “On the Nature of Things” after a millennium-and-a-half of near death) to a disturbance in nature, a swerve in the expected order of things. The audacity of denying an “afterlife”, the emphasis of ethical behavior on this earth for its own sake without bargaining with the Gods for posthumous rewards or in fear of posthumous punishment would be such a radical notion – and so dreaded by the then powers-that-be, namely the all-powerful clergy, that Lucretius’ epic poem, together with other expositions of the Epicurian school of thought dating back to ancient Greece, were at first copied almost in stealth like the samizdat literature during the worst days of Stalin’s Soviet Empire. But copied they were. The passion of Bracciolini and his fellow book hunters only grew; gradually more and more ancient works emerged; humanism in all its glory took hold; and Michelangelo, Cervantes and Montaigne happened. Soon printing on paper was invented, (another swerve!), and Lucretius and company became available to larger and larger groups of readers.
Reading this book leaves one in a state of gratitude for having the appropriate atoms coalesce in the Universe to form us humans, to be able to live on this planet and enjoy its bounty. How fortunate we are, says Lucretius.
*
Michio Kaku is a Professor of physics and a futurist who has several books to his credit that attempt to explain the wild, wild world of the present day science of the of the cosmos to the lay public, books I had not been familiar with. The latest one, “The Future of the Mind” was recommended to me at the same time as “The Swerve”, so I read it immediately afterwards; and what an amazing juxtaposition it had turned out to be! Michio Kaku leads us on a journey through the mind: the development of the brain as it evolved from the primitive reptilian on to the mammalian and finally to the human one. He divides consciousness as Levels 1, 2 and 3, and credits the human brain -- Level 3 -- with the ability to project itself not only in space but in time: no other creature, closely related as some are to us, has the ability to remember the past and, more importantly, project itself into the future. Once he explains the workings of this most wondrous entity we carry around in our skulls, an entity that has more cells, neurons and connections among them than there are stars in the Universe, we are already in sufficient awe. But in the last third of the book he details, step by step, the even more wondrous, or possibly unnerving and dangerous, paths current brain science and physics is capable of taking. He claims that the breathtaking science-fiction-like possibilities he enumerates are all based on currently available science, though extrapolated into a relatively near future: he proposes amazing things to take place within the next hundred years. Robots coursing through our bloodstream working to repair damage? Intelligent robots taking over for us while we poorly designed flesh and blood creatures slowly disappear? The mind, in its entirety, downloaded into a computer? The body-less mind traveling the Universe? These possibilities, and many more, are proposed. Kaku quotes many science fiction movies that he clearly takes seriously enough to discuss as real possibilities of the future.
So here we are, in the midst of another swerve. The Age of the Computer, the explosive development of scientific capability due to the explosive growth of computer capability is putting humankind onto a heretofore unknown path, just like the printing press and the Humanists changed everything in the medieval world. The changes come faster, the road either more wondrous or more disastrous ahead of us, but the status quo is radically changed. The ultimate message I walked away with reading “The Future of the Mind” is similar to “The Swerve”, though: we are an amazing group of creatures, blessed – or cursed – with an amazing mind, curiosity is our greatest asset or greatest danger, take your pick – but while we are here, we should enjoy what the fortuitous chance of random atoms coalescing into Us had given us: this Earth.
*
And now back to “Framley Parsonage”: will the decent but weak Mark Robarts succumb to temptation? Will Lucy Robarts marry the man she loves? Will the Government fall? Will change come to Barsetshire? Stay tuned.
In “The Swerve” Mr. Greenblatt centers his narrative -- factual, superbly researched and yet reading like a mystery novel -- on the wholly miraculous emergence of a poem written a millennium-and-a-half prior to its re-appearance in the early 15th century. I was constantly reminded of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”, an outright detective tale taking place at the same time and located in much the same terrain – medieval monasteries – as “The Swerve” does. The medieval monastery looms large in both, more specifically the library of the medieval monastery. For it was in these isolated, purposely inaccessible locations that the literature of the Greek and Roman world would hide and sometimes survive, though rarely and against all odds. As the Roman Empire disintegrated while first the invading armies of the barbarians conquered it, and then Christianity overwhelmed it, what had remained of the great achievements of the ancient world gradually disappeared. Buildings crumbled, grass grew on roads, statues that graced public places and luxurious private villas lay on the ground. What was written disappeared even faster and more thoroughly than other objects: the fragile papyri burnt in wars and in deliberate destruction. The rare works that somehow found their way into the sanctuaries were copied for hundreds of years after Rome fell, but even those copies were subject to the repeated mayhem, and when, rarely, they did survive, they were buried in the aforementioned libraries under lock and key, and mostly forgotten. Century upon century passed in the bleakness of the Dark Ages; the glory of Rome, its very language, mostly forgotten.
But somehow glimmers of light had begun to flicker in the 14th and early 15th centuries. There were rumors of treasures turning up in monasteries if one persevered; and a group of “book hunters” did persevere, traveling over impassable territories onto high mountain crags where the deliberately difficult path led to unwilling monk-librarians reluctant to part with their possessions. One such book hunter was the hero of “The Swerve”: Poggio Bracciolini, a papal secretary with a passionate love of unearthing bits and pieces of the literature of the ancients. The Renaissance was beginning, enough works had already been found to whet the appetite of the budding Humanists. The Catholic church was in disarray, the war of the feuding Popes, the corruption of the clergy, the ignorance of the masses had reached an all-time low, and the need many felt for a different world-view was acute.
This different world-view appeared, almost by a miracle, when in the winter of 1417 Poggio Bracciolini had returned to a German monastery where he had found things worthy of notice on earlier journeys and where he had hoped to find more overlooked treasure. This he did indeed: a manuscript, dating from 50 BC, last copied by an unknown scribe around 900 AD, was in his hand: De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, an epic poem by the Roman poet Lucretius. No other work of Lucretius survived, none, indeed, is known to this day, but this one alone is sufficient to put him into the Olympus of writers.
Poggio Bracciolini would have known the name, for several ancient authors, fragments of whose work had, indeed, been slowly recovered, referred it to. But the actual thing in his hand was far beyond anyone’s wildest expectations: a masterpiece of enormous proportions and beauty of language, it presents a world view that, in it its modernity, is hard to believe even today, let alone when it exploded like a bombshell into the medieval mindset of 15th century Christian Europe. The poem proposes a scientific view of life that posits the atom as the ultimate building block of the physical world, denies the existence of Gods, and considers the chief enterprise of humans to be “the pursuit of happiness” here on Earth. It denies “miracles” and attributes some uncanny events (such as the very emergence of “On the Nature of Things” after a millennium-and-a-half of near death) to a disturbance in nature, a swerve in the expected order of things. The audacity of denying an “afterlife”, the emphasis of ethical behavior on this earth for its own sake without bargaining with the Gods for posthumous rewards or in fear of posthumous punishment would be such a radical notion – and so dreaded by the then powers-that-be, namely the all-powerful clergy, that Lucretius’ epic poem, together with other expositions of the Epicurian school of thought dating back to ancient Greece, were at first copied almost in stealth like the samizdat literature during the worst days of Stalin’s Soviet Empire. But copied they were. The passion of Bracciolini and his fellow book hunters only grew; gradually more and more ancient works emerged; humanism in all its glory took hold; and Michelangelo, Cervantes and Montaigne happened. Soon printing on paper was invented, (another swerve!), and Lucretius and company became available to larger and larger groups of readers.
Reading this book leaves one in a state of gratitude for having the appropriate atoms coalesce in the Universe to form us humans, to be able to live on this planet and enjoy its bounty. How fortunate we are, says Lucretius.
*
Michio Kaku is a Professor of physics and a futurist who has several books to his credit that attempt to explain the wild, wild world of the present day science of the of the cosmos to the lay public, books I had not been familiar with. The latest one, “The Future of the Mind” was recommended to me at the same time as “The Swerve”, so I read it immediately afterwards; and what an amazing juxtaposition it had turned out to be! Michio Kaku leads us on a journey through the mind: the development of the brain as it evolved from the primitive reptilian on to the mammalian and finally to the human one. He divides consciousness as Levels 1, 2 and 3, and credits the human brain -- Level 3 -- with the ability to project itself not only in space but in time: no other creature, closely related as some are to us, has the ability to remember the past and, more importantly, project itself into the future. Once he explains the workings of this most wondrous entity we carry around in our skulls, an entity that has more cells, neurons and connections among them than there are stars in the Universe, we are already in sufficient awe. But in the last third of the book he details, step by step, the even more wondrous, or possibly unnerving and dangerous, paths current brain science and physics is capable of taking. He claims that the breathtaking science-fiction-like possibilities he enumerates are all based on currently available science, though extrapolated into a relatively near future: he proposes amazing things to take place within the next hundred years. Robots coursing through our bloodstream working to repair damage? Intelligent robots taking over for us while we poorly designed flesh and blood creatures slowly disappear? The mind, in its entirety, downloaded into a computer? The body-less mind traveling the Universe? These possibilities, and many more, are proposed. Kaku quotes many science fiction movies that he clearly takes seriously enough to discuss as real possibilities of the future.
So here we are, in the midst of another swerve. The Age of the Computer, the explosive development of scientific capability due to the explosive growth of computer capability is putting humankind onto a heretofore unknown path, just like the printing press and the Humanists changed everything in the medieval world. The changes come faster, the road either more wondrous or more disastrous ahead of us, but the status quo is radically changed. The ultimate message I walked away with reading “The Future of the Mind” is similar to “The Swerve”, though: we are an amazing group of creatures, blessed – or cursed – with an amazing mind, curiosity is our greatest asset or greatest danger, take your pick – but while we are here, we should enjoy what the fortuitous chance of random atoms coalescing into Us had given us: this Earth.
*
And now back to “Framley Parsonage”: will the decent but weak Mark Robarts succumb to temptation? Will Lucy Robarts marry the man she loves? Will the Government fall? Will change come to Barsetshire? Stay tuned.
