Rambling prose: Can Facebook save us?

Rambling prose: Can Facebook save us?

Can Facebook save us?

We, as a people, have deceived ourselves.  We’re convinced that because we can send men into outer space, tame rivers, build skyscrapers, split the atom, talk with each other from thousands of miles away through a gadget smaller than our hand and even watch television on it, that we have evolved beyond 'Homo erectus.'  I’m of the opinion that we have devolved into a viral plague, and like a virus we invade our host and destroy it from within.  I am a true believer in science.  I have always believed that it represents the highest and purest manifestation of the one characteristic that sets us apart from all other life as we know it, sentience.  Self awareness, that state of being that allows 'Homo sapiens' to look into the heavens and understand that it is not eternity, not God, but only our imperfect perception of the laws of physics.  It is also what allows me to look into myself and write this essay.  But I am beginning to see science as no different from religion, just tools of this virus, not much different from the protein and nucleic acids of all viruses.   They fool the superorganism, this world we live in, into thinking we are just one of its own cells.  But when we gain entry they take over the host’s own machinery to make more virus, eventually destroying it from within.  Religion and science are our tools of viral insinuation, replication and destruction.

I don’t know when it began, how this 'Homo virus' evolved from 'Homo sapiens.'  We were always a violent species.  It is possible the fault, if there is such a concept in evolution, lies in our limbic system, that ancient part of our brain which controls our emotions and our survival mechanisms.  Konrad Lorenz said it 50 years ago:

"All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding
of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical
progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering... tends instead

to favor humanity's destruction"  

We are lions in sheep’s clothing.  Our bodies, designed like those of peaceful herbivores, have no fangs like the sabretooth tigers, no speed like the cheetah, or stealth like the cobra.  From the neck down, we are lumbering sloths and should have become extinct long before now.  Something in our limbic system got programmed to make us hunters and a hunter with no weapon is sure to be killed.  That could have been the end of this story right there.  Evolution has made many wrong turns but we rarely learn the results because there are none.  A limbic system designed for a lion in the body of a lamb.  What a joke.  But in one evolutionary ‘Hail Mary’, we survived.  We learned to use tools.  That moment, for surely it was a moment, maybe no different from a child taking its first step, but one that had not been taken by the species for thousands of years until then, saved us.  That one defining moment is most wonderfully captured by Stanly Kubrik in the movie “2001: A space odyssey.”  In this scene a group of apes are vying for access to a small watering hole.  They behave like any group of apes behave when trying to be aggressive.  They make threatening sounds and hand gestures.  But that’s all they can do until one group gets tired or intimidated and leaves.  That is, until one ape picks up the leg bone of a dead animal and slaps it into his hand.  In that moment he understands that he is not limited to grunts and gestures.  That that bone can break other bones, smash heads and kill animals.  The leap may have taken thousands of years, with baby steps along the way.  But slowly, our ancestors learned they could survive with tools and weapons.  The evolutionary step that prevented our extinction became the means of our own future destruction, and unfortunately that of many more living beings besides ourselves.

But though our limbus may have made us hunters, it is religion and science that are our weapons.  Hunters are biologically programmed to kill prey but not themselves.  Predatory behavior towards other species is crucial to survival but intraspecies combativeness rarely leads to death.  There is a switch, especially in animals equipped to kill easily, that stops the aggressor from delivering the ‘coup de grace’.  Bared teeth around a jugular vein signal the end of the fight, establishing a winner and a loser left alive to fight another day. (Don't get me started on animals bred specifically to kill each other for sport by their human trainers.)  But that impulse for self preservation is less ingrained in more peaceful species, those animals not dependent on killing for their food.  And so it is that humans have less inhibitions toward killing each other than any predatory animal should.  That is where religion and science take over.  With our teeth around the jugular vein of our enemy, religion fools our brain into thinking different people with different beliefs are really different species.  But it is science that gives us the tools to accomplish mass murder, extinctions of entire species of beings and eventually ourselves.

The process that has led us here to this time and this place, possibly the ultimate time and place, has been in the works for thousands of years.  It may be our privilege and our curse that we get to say we were the last of our species.  But whether it is now, next year, next generation or ten generations from then, we are sliding inevitably towards the abyss.  Our cerebral cortex, that wonder of evolutionary adaptation, that mutation which serendipitously saved our skin, has taken over and will be our deathnell in the end. 

If there is a positive note in all this it may come from our cerebral cortex.  I used to believe humans could work out any problem with technology.  If we could send a man to the moon or increase food production by a factor of a thousand, then with enough cooperation we could repair the ozone hole or solve the energy problem.  But our limbus keeps getting in the way.  Agression trumps innovation.  Thus my cynicism.

Now my hope.  Stuart Kauffman has proposed a theory of life.  In short he suggested that there is a realm in any complex system between order and chaos.  Start with a few light bulbs and connect two of them with wire.  Repeat the process and eventually you will end up connecting three and then these will connect with three more and so on.  Eventually the result is a vast network of randomly connected light bulbs.  Turn on the juice and some interesting things can happen.  With no regulation on how the juice flows there is just chaos.  With too many rules there is just repetitive blinking.  But tweak the system just a little, put in some loose controls and gradually, in some bizarre way, we begin to see order emerge just at the edge of chaos.  This may be how life began on earth, how the cerebral cortex developed sentience and how we may dig ourselves out of the mess we have wrought.

Facebook has created a network with over 500,000,000 nodes, each humming along with its own random input.  Maybe, just maybe, as long as we leave it alone, there will someday occur a unifying factor,  an organizing rule, say a movement to foster peace, or to save the environment, or to feed the hungry.  It might not take too much to make this superorganism develop a superconsciousness just at the edge of chaos that will keep us from sliding down the slippery slope to an otherwise inevitable puddle of ‘gray goo.’