Random thoughts on Abstractions in life and how they will lead to a bad end.

There is some relationship between complexity, abstraction, and future of mankind in general.

Civilization seems to be running a course from primitive animal with basic survival instincts and evolutionary traits to the self-reflecting and self-modifying mental creature that we are today…and on to something else altogether.
This is a re-occurring science fiction theme, where man re-invents mankind and treads where he knows not.

In actuality:

• The industrial age replaced some labor with machines freeing up leisure time.
• The information age automates cognitive activity involved with data acquisition, organization, and storage freeing up mental attention for analysis and decision making.
• Modern medicine and bio-sciences focus on augmenting human activities through enhancement or generation of replacement physiology such as joints and organs. The understanding and manipulation will soon be on the nano particle level, far more precise than historical blunt stick approaches to health care.  The purpose seems to be to outwit the aging process and sometimes to improve human capacity beyond what nature provides.

The result of all of this seems to be to abstract the Human Being from the person.

In some future time,  the “brain in the jar” or more likely, “brain in a computer” will rid us of all the inconvenience of actually sensing the world around us.  Instead, we will (much more efficiently) program our life experience with just the stimulus and sensation that we want to experience.   Our cost to the material world will be a few milliamps of current.

The arguments for this situation will reference the

• relief of physical trauma
• the natural (unstoppable) trend of civilization
• necessary efficiency required of sustaining a population of trillions of people(?)

There are the counter arguments that we have

• lost our humanity, that is our capacity to produce basic emotional responses in the form of art, music, literature, foods
• mocked the cultural distinctions between groups in society, such as race, ethnic and geographic (how is an eskimo different than a nomadic tribes man in Africa?)
• violated Gods will (and all negative outcomes are the consequences there of)
• given over to some other form of species which we created ourselves.  A modern Frankenstein.

There is plenty more to be said about this, whether it be alarmist, fantastically paranoid, or obvious and re-assuring,  This is just my initial observation.