From Jay White : ” what do you think technology (logical as well as hardware) can do in bettering ecology and humanity? what role do you think it has and how?”
Thanks for asking this question. In my answer, ‘ecology’ includes relationships among humans, as well as relationships between humans and the countless non-human life forms of Earth.
Your question is related to my claim that, thru reason, (as distinguished from superstition ), humans can do a better job of reducing suffering and promoting well-being. ——We get distracted via religion. For example, if we believe that God wants us to kill infidels in a holy war, the suffering we might cause in ‘this world’ might seem not so bad in comparison to all the good we’re bringing about in the eternal kingdom of God. Some of the people burning heretics expressed such ideas —–But as for technology, it’s complex. On the one hand, maybe we can use technology to build decentralized networks for a less hierarchical approach to creating knowledge and socio-political action. ——In this vein, internet-related communications technology might revolutionize society on par with how the invention of the printing press with movable type led to social phenomena such as the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the spread of literacy. ——- Maybe only a few of us alive today can even imagine how the communications developments in the past 30 years might affect human social organization 100 or 200 years from now. ——-Though there are the more obvious affects of communications technology such Arab Spring revolutionaries using social media, there are too many variables impeding a rational, long-term prediction, such as how climate change might affect civilization. —-But with a short-term assessment of the affects of communications technology on society, it seems reasonable to suspect that people who are strategic about it can use these new tools to both (1) mitigate the concentration of political and economic power; and (2) organize locally and globally a body of knowledge, philosophy, and practice with which to meet our human needs in ways that do minimal harm to each other and other life forms.
But technology factors into ecological impact, where I = PAT (Impact = Population + Affluence + Technology), acccording to Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren. Some people don’t just ask what problems we can solve via technology. Instead they ask if humans create more problems thru technology than we solve. Anarchoprimitivist writers such as John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen go so far as to say technology is the main cause of human destructiveness toward the ecosphere.
But as for me, I don’t see how technology could be done away with anytime soon. If it did go away from some sort of collapse of industrial society, it’d take much of the world population with it. ———Some hard core deep ecologists or some anarcho-primitivists might be happy (theorectically ) about that, saying that it’d enable nonhuman life forms to thrive.—- But here are a few more things about anarcho-primitivist beliefs. Those beliefs involve romanticizing ‘primitive’ cultures, and some anarcho-primitivists even go so far as to claim to be against written language and other forms of symbology such as mathematics. ——To me, such an extreme view is irrational, and a sort of secular form of religion whereby the human ‘fall from grace’ occurred as we acquired systemic knowledge of how the world works. —–The propensity to create symbols is a function of the human brain, developing thru millions of years of evolution. Except for somehow removing or disabling the neocortex of every human being, there is no way to return to the pure state that anarcho-primitivists seem to imagine. —–So I don’t share their (professed though not practiced) rejection of technology in and of itself). If I had to take a guess, I’d say there are responsible ways to use technology. While it’s true that thru technology, human population and other factors of ecological impact have intensified, it’s also true that humans have been using technology to get a better sense of those ecological crises. —-Yet, a deep ecologist or an anarchoprimitivist might say that the high technology humans are using to detect and mitigate ecological crises only seems a counter balance to the destructiveness of technology when we think of things from the vantage point in which human interests far outweigh the interests of nonhumans.——Yet, this poses a question which I already mentioned in another thread you were part of. To what extent is it possible that the human mind can conceptualize, let alone act on, a set of priorities whereby the interests of human beings are given equal weight to the interests of other life forms ? —–This, in turn, leads to another question. What does it mean to give equal moral consideration to the interests of all life forms on the planet ? To illustrate the difficulty, consider the extent to which it’s possible to ‘give equal weight to the interests of all human beings’ or even to ‘give equal weight to the interests of all US Americans.’ ——Deep Ecology seems to involve the idea that the human mind can comprehend a set of priorities whereby human interests don’t predominate among the interests of other life on Earth. ——But maybe the human mind doesn’t work that way. Maybe the ‘evolution of collective human consciousness and morality’ (if that makes sense ) is a matter of graduating to more enlightened levels of self-interest, instead of being a matter of somehow thinking and acting from some sort of basis of motivation that isn’t self-interest. ——-
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