Brain Gyms

Imagine a place where all ages and types of people go after work to exercise their brains as well as their bodies. Usually we think of brain exercises as computerized-type IQ tests or games that have no relationship to reality, but brain gyms could also be times and places where we connect and play with vast amounts of knowledge. Create your own brain gym utopia: How will advances in science and technology change the way we use our brains?

For just as fire technology allowed humans to solder, forge, melt, and heat objects for particular ends, genetic engineering now enables us to stitch, splice, edit, program and delete living beings. Instead of depicting nature in mechanistic metaphors and locating its intelligence in a divine mind ( the Renaissance view) or speaking of it in terms of human progess and evolutionary process (the modern view), near-autonomous science and technology have begun to reduce the natural world to mere pieces of information and to characterize it in the language of cybernetic feedback loops, self-organizing programs, and the like."

-- in Minding Nature, 1996

According to Plato, the four characteristics that make a "good man" are wisdom, courage, discipline and justice. For Jesus, all you need are humility and faith (and preferably, few cognitive abilities.) The Baby Boomer's ideal human qualities are egotism, selfishness, materialism and ruthlessness (and imperturbable nasal passages.) Sartre says one must have nerves of steel to face the ugly truths about the world and yourself. As if that weren't bad enough, he demands that we do more than just take up space on the planet--- we must design our lives and actually make a contribution.

If I could create the perfect human being or superhuman, she (would of course be female) would have integrity and decency. She would revere wisdom and passionately pursue knowledge. She would honor human life by seeking to improve the conditions of those people currently living on the planet, not worrying about those who are either dead or who have not yet gotten themselves born.

The advancement of the welfare of mankind is a most intricate problem: all ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children; for poverty is not only a great evil, but tends to its own increase by leading to recklessness in marriage. On the other hand, if the prudent avoid marriage whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members will tend to supplant the better members of society. Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence consequent on his rapid multiplication; and if he is to advance still higher he must remain subject to a severe struggle. Otherwise he would soon sink into indolence, and the more highly gifted would not be more successful in the battle of life than the less gifted. Hence our natural rate of increase, though leading to many and obvious evils, must not be greatly diminished by any means. There should be open competition for all men; and the most able should not be prevented by laws or customs from succeeding best and rearing the largest number of offspring. Important as the struggle for existence has been and even still is, yet as far as the highest part of man's nature is concerned there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, etc. than through natural selection; though to this latter agency the social instincts, which afforded the basis for the development of the moral sense, may be safe attributed.

The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly organised form, will be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians. The astonishment I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind-- such were our ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint, their long hair was tangled, their mouths frothed with excitement, and their expression was wild, startled, and distrustful. They possessed hardly any arts, and like wild animals lived on what they could catch; they had no government, and were merciless to everyone not of their own small tribe. He who has seen a savage in his native land will not feel much shame, if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more humble creature flows in his veins. For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs-- as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitutions of the solar system-- with all these exalted powers-- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.