Familial Famine

Family is a great thing. I mean having one and being part of it. With the birth rate as low as it is in many Western democracies, millions of people don't have siblings. It is estimated, for example, that in Italy by 2050 two-thirds of the people will have no brothers and no sisters, and since neither of their parents will have had brothers or sisters, they will have no cousins nor uncles nor aunts either. That changes the dynamic of social interaction. It encourages a new context for people's dealings with each other. I don't know all the ramifications of this situation but I am under the impression that a lot of them are not healthy. 

It appears to me that prior to the twentieth century, conversation was a highly developed art, serving as it did as entertainment. Intellects and wit were sharp, and repartee was a pastime. The twentieth century brought a wide variety of entertainments, but they were often shared with family. Social media has now transported people into virtual worlds through which these people can be distracted from the vacuum of ordinary life and immersed in a reality of their own liking. A substitution for family interaction.

By its nature, such a new world can be shut down and turned off like a light switch when a person wants free of it.  Not so easily done with a family. Within a family a person needs to face problems and solve them rather than running away from them. This builds character and broadens personality. 

Some Practical Consequences of Living Forever

The Moody Blues, on their superb To Our Children’s Children’s Children album, have a 40 second track called I Never Thought I’d Live to Be a Million. Perhaps musically it is the least significant track on the album, but the title raises issues.  Now that our race is seriously discussing the transfer of human consciousness into computers or into artificial bodies, it seems to me that these issues are worthwhile pondering.

How much of human personality arises from our bodies and the bio-chemical processes within them? A lot, methinks; otherwise, drugs would have little effect on our moods and motivations. One of the issues surely has to be psychological. Would we even feel and behave like humans if we resided within a practically immortal coil?  What would we feel towards humans who did not elect that path? Would we see them as our brothers?  Or, would they seem as another species to us.  Perhaps they would be pets? Or perhaps we would view them as predators? 

If you are going to live inside a computer, who will control the switch? What steps would you take to secure power intake and preservation of your memory files in the event of a reboot or power outage? Would you feel fear over the risks, or would you even have the capacity to feel fear?

Would you become a procrastinator?  I probably would.  Well, I already am (been meaning to write this post for several days now), but if I was immortal, I think I would be a BIG procrastinator. Why bother doing now what can be done a million years from now?

How would I treat the environment if I was in an indestructible body or a computer?  Would I care about pollution? What would it matter to me if the air was a destructive of lungs and if the water could digest stomach acids? If I really loved nature, I could inhabit a virtual world of gardens and wilderness. What would abandoning being grounded with the earth do to me in that circumstance?

I suspect that an immortality that is currently envisioned by those predicting the Singularity would be the creation of new persons and the destruction of those who think they are gaining that immortality. In short, we would no longer be us.

Ouch!

We can easily lose sight of the benefits of modern civilization. In the mid-1930s there was developed a product about which we don’t think twice ---- splinter-free toilet paper.  No wonder the Sears catalogue and various magazines served the purpose for so very long. 

 

Cause, Effect, and Reality Therapy

We think of time being a convention of our physical universe while in reality the past, present and future all exist simultaneously. I can liken it to a large tapestry.  The bottom is the past, the middle is the present and the top is the future.  Looking at it, I can see it all at the same time. I can take in the whole panorama at once. I might notice how threads connect parts. Though there is this connection, one part doesn’t cause the other. Cause and effect are meaningless in that context.

If one could see all of history as a tapestry, acknowledging that it is all there at the same time, would it make sense to think of cause and effect?  Is that a bit like trying to reconcile to Newton to Einstein? Maybe.

One of the good things about knowing some people throughout a lifetime is being able to see a correlation with choices and events of the past with outcomes much later. That whole sentence implies cause and effect. I chose to call it “correlations” though.  There is a correlation between lung cancer and smoking. Maybe one doesn’t cause the other, or maybe ling cancer causes smoking?  Maybe the wind is caused by the trees swaying? 

I am not a trained psychologist, but I have learned a thing or two about people. I notice that it seems intuitive to want to understand WHY a certain behavior is occurring, as though we can somehow fix it if we know why it is happening.  It doesn’t work!  We can’t reach into the past and change what went down.  It seems to me psychotherapy is based on helping the patient understand why, but it also seems to me that psychotherapy doesn’t cure much. 

What seems to work better in fixing human issues is addressing WHAT and HOW.  When there is a behavior problem, rather than delving into the person’s background to see its origins, it appears to me to be more productive to frame it within the context of reality --- to see what its current effects are and to discover the thought patterns that are keeping the person trapped in their behavior. Many psychologists are aware of this, and it is why Glasser’s Reality Therapy has gained the traction it has.