Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Man, Machine, God - What's the difference??

A few days back, I was watching a show on TV about a group of Neuropsychologists
in the U.K who have induced Near Death Experience (NDE)
in a number of volunteers as a part of research on the subject. Being an aspirant of Psychology myself, I should have been 
thrilled at the news, but
all it did was to make me realize that advancing Science is only taking us farther
and farther away from the essence of being Humans, into a realm of androids.

Near Death Experience, for those who have had it, is a spiritually transforming event.
By making it a purely biological phenomenon, under conditions of high blood
pressure and some sort of chemical proportions gone awry that sometimes subsume 
when a person is critical, researchers are equating it with an illness. 
Before we know it, NDE will be rechristened as a horrifying
disease, like Thenatodelusionophrenia, and people who experience it will be put on 
medication for life, and be advised therapy to prevent any 'undesirable'
consequences of the event, for undesirable is what humanness is becoming to Science and its accomplices. 

Nietzsche said God is dead. We have killed him; you and I. True, we have, a million times. When Dolly was cloned, when test tube babies were 
conceived, when Genetic Engineering was invented, when hybrids were bred, 
when leather was invented, and now when NDE was slacked away as a physical 
phenomenon. 

I am not anti-Science, as it may seem. I regard the fact that Science and Technology
have made life a lot more convenient. However, I do feel that we have
invented all we need to. What we need is equal approachability of what is already 
known to us, 
to one and all. We don't need a couple of richest people in the world buying 
made-to-order babies, while scores of tribes don't even know how a child is
conceived. We don't need an air-conditioned nation, while hundreds of villages in
another part of the world have never seen a bulb glow. We are polarising into 
two extremes, one that is primitive and with every discovery or invention, is 
retracted deeper into deprivation. The other, where Man is becoming 
omniscient, and is fostering a will to control the rest of the world and its workings. 
In short, where Man is becoming God. Sadly, this latter world is the one that is dominant.
Sadly, we are headed to a world where no person will need to talk to another because
we will have invented a way to store every little thing a man needs in a chip. In a way, we are becoming primitive again, primitive among 
machines in lieu of plants. 
Primitive because we are disavowing the conventions of civilization; 
solidarity, compassion, humanity. 
Because we are becoming breathing machines. 

1 comment:

Rohan Solomon said...

Nice ..... Good to see people thinking along these lines. "Thenatodelusionophrenia" ???? Try to google it, hehehehehehehehe, the ONLY result you will find is your blog. ;-)