“Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a Czech author of fiction, born in Prague, who was unfortunately only successful posthumously. He wrote in German, so that quote is merely a translation: an incredibly accurate and astutely-observed deduction that he only reached

That quote will be the basis for this article. I will expand it out and try to apply some of my own wisdom. I will try to explain why a world once so beautiful is now drab and dreary. Surely it is painfully obvious that the world we live in is still beautiful: those photos in National Geographic, or those TV shows of weird, otherworldly panoramas — they’re not lying. Those places are real and this world is still beautiful.  Objectively, we must be able to agree that the world is full of beauty. You might gripe and balk, claiming things ‘aren’t what they used to be’. You might claim that the world is a scarier place than when you were younger, fearless, running through a field of tall grass to escape your mother’s clutches.

These are subjective views of the world, a view of the world through your jaded eyes.  A view interpreted by your bitter brain. It’s not rational. The world is not ugly or dysfunctional. The world still is beautiful. We just don’t see it that way any more.

I was so easily pleased as a child. An ice cream or a new rattle would make me grin like a fool. Something as simple as a casette tape that I could grab with my pudgy hands and gnaw with my new teeth could keep me entertained for hours. Everything back then was so new and shiny; you really can’t leave any stone unturned when you’re a kid, the curiousity would eat you alive! What happens when you stick your finger in there? Why does the cat scratch me when I put it under the tap? Who comes running if I scream as loudly as I can?

Where does that wide-eyed look of amazement go? Why don’t adults jump out of bed, look out the window and smile? Perhaps they smile, but only until self-awareness returns and reality snaps back into sight. The mantle of stress settles back down upon your shoulders and the smile disappears.

Why, as adults, are we so damn hard to please? Why can’t we find pleasure in the simple act of surviving, or discovering something new? Why does being an adult like feel like nothing more than 60 years of receiving socks for your birthday?

Go back to when you were younger. Shut your eyes, if that helps, and recall a time when you were a child. A time when you were reckless; stomping around the garden, running away from your parents at an amusement park, stealing candy from the cupboard. You probably can’t remember the exact details, but you can probably recall the emotion you were feeling, or perhaps a strong smell or visual memory. You’re grinning now, right, in recollection?

Our childhood is simply full of those memories — the memories of first-time experiences. Adult life is a little more sparse, but you probably still remember your first kiss, or the first film you saw at the cinema — they are probably even more intense, undulled by the passage of time. You also remember the bad first times: when you fell from your bike and scraped your knee, or when your best friend dumped you for someone else.

These experiences (and thus memories) are so intense and so memorable that they inevitably form the basis of who you will become. This is, in fact, nurture. Nurture isn’t just being slapped for eating candy before dinner, or being told that you’ll get hairy palms if you continue so fervently. Nurture is everything that happens to you, from birth through to death. Nurture governs, through good experiences, what will become the love and passion of your life. Conversely, and this is the important bit, your bad experiences dictate what will become your fears and distrusts.

It is through bad experiences — the presence of pain, both mental and physical — that we learn what to avoid in the future. When we are stung by a bee as a child that nearly always develops into a fear of bees when we’re older. When we’re scolded by our mother for running around the house, we’re unlikely to grow into Olympic athletes.

This isn’t a new thing — it’s incredibly ancient, probably going back millions of years. Even the most basic of animals do the same: they avoid pain at all costs. It’s a survival trait! You do something wrong, it causes pain, you don’t do it again in the future. This is basic, basic stuff to ensure the continued existance of your race.

And that’s what causes us to become dull. Eventually, with enough painful experiences, we become jaded. Our decision making is so clouded by every single one of those pains that it becomes very hard to simply have fun. You can’t go skydiving because you fell and hit your head when you were younger. You can’t stand under a waterfall because you almost drowned when you were a child. It’s a survival instinct, but it’s not necessarily rational.

We’re living in a world with an infinite number of possibilities and an infinite source of beauty. Our ability to see that beauty — and reach Peter Pan’s Never Land, if you believe Kafka — is impeded only by our fears. As children we were endlessly energetic and reckless because we didn’t know of the pains that awaited us. The only difference is that now we approach everything with such boring cautiousness.  We don’t pick it up and shake it around — we’re afraid it’ll blow our hands off!

A world composed of people living in fear, unable to see the innate beauty of our surroundings is a world devoid of creative inspiration. When everyone is afraid of getting their hands dirty, or doing something just to see what happens, that’s a dead world.

Just remember, next time you have a wild idea — something fun, something awesome — don’t let what occurred 20 years ago get in the way. Just do it!

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law

In 1968, Clarke and Stanley Kubrick finally finished 2001: A Space Odyssey – the book, and the film. It would change the way the world looked at evolution and ethics; artificial- and extra-terrestrial life. Religion and genesis.

But those are meaty topics that I couldn’t hope to cover in a simple blog entry. Instead, I want to talk about all of them combined, magic. Events that leave you so mystified, so jaw-droppingly nonplussed that you can only call out in disbelief that’s impossible! Perhaps you mumble it incredulously, wiping away an emotional tear, your raw nerves leaving you overwhelmed. It’s the same thing, though, magic: the impossible, in the blink of an eye, becoming possible.

When magic occurs, it’s like the world has been re-written. You have one moment in time, the past, where it seems impossible. Snap. You’re in the future, impossibility split asunder and replaced with a new reality. Magic occurred before your very eyes. The world changed around you. The flat line blips and shows a pulse. The Great Wall of China disappears. Poof.

And that’s all magic is, whether it’s performed by Harry Potter or Gandalf, a heroic doctor or David Copperfield. Now, the fun bit, and the tie-in to religious ‘miracles’ — magic is based on what we, by consensus agreement, deems impossible. We agree that it’s impossible for a man to disappear. We agree that, really, you shouldn’t be able to step through a plate glass window.

Once upon a time we agreed that being chained and helplessly dumped, submerged in a tank of water spelled certain death. And then Harry Houdini did it, and it wasn’t quite so magical any more; it’s only magic once, afterward it simply becomes a talking point, a fantastic improbability. The magician moves us from an impossible past, to a future full of possibilities where his ‘magic’ continues to occur around us, unabated. The cat’s out of the bag. Pandora’s can of worms hasn’t just been opened — it lies broken upon the floor, exposed, the world looking on in wonder — so that’s how it’s done! – our decision of what constitutes reality is rewritten in that moment. Magic becomes mundane.

It’s by this logic, sadly, that you disprove the existence of magic. The last 200 years have more than adequately proven that declaring something ‘impossible’ is stupid and counterintuitive. It’s not impossible, someone just hasn’t done it yet! It’s not a miracle, it’s just utilising mechanics that you didn’t know existed. Perhaps someone close to Jesus invented the sterile bandage and handed one to Our Lord — ‘Here, try this, mate’ — maybe he didn’t actually cure people with the power of God.

That’s what Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law is all about. Technology — a sterile bandage — is magic. Magic changes history, redefining our universal axioms, redeclaring what can and can’t be done. The impossible, as the cliche goes, becomes possible. Stone Henge, the Great Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower — pure impossibilities, paper-only pipe dreams, fabrications only extant in the minds of great thinkers until someone actually devised a way to make them. Technology allows engineers to transport ideas from the realm of fantasy to reality. Imagine bringing a Roman forward through time to modern-day and showing him a computer. Magus he would say. Magic.

It is for this reason that inventors and scientists belong in a higher echelon. Without them, we’d still be in sitting in a cave, lamenting the taste of raw meat.

What happens when you die?

If you’re not spiritually-inclined, death is just a moment in time. You’re alive and then, a moment later, you’re dead. There is a cessation of all that makes us physically alive: we stop breathing, our blood circulation halts and finally our brain activity flat-lines — we are deceased.

And medically speaking that is true. Your time is up; the grains of sand have emptied and the ticking has ceased.

On the other hand, if you believe in some kind of soul, something beyond the world that we can see and measure scientifically, death is more of a way-point on your travels.  You might believe that heaven awaits, or that your soul takes a little trip before returning back to the physical realm, but it doesn’t really matter: you believe that death isn’t the end of your story.

What we really have to do is define ‘death’, a task that many people would claim is very easy: it’s body death; a flat line on both the ECG (heart) and EEG (brain) machines. Someone whispers into our ear or shines a light into our eyes and there is no response, no reflex — that’s body death. But then why are there billions of people that believe that we’re not actually dead, that our soul has simply left the building in search of other stomping grounds or greener pastures? Death is meant to be the end! And it is for every other animal and plant in the world! Why does it have to be so tricky when it comes to humans, why do we persist in refuting death? Why do we insist that we ‘live on’?

Maybe, just possibly, there’s something to it. Perhaps there is a soul. Perhaps body death isn’t the end! What if we are just poorly-equipped to define ‘death’ scientifically? What if science simply refuses, by definition, to acknowledge something that is impossible to measure and define?

But then why is more than half of Earth’s population so strongly opposed to the finality of death? Why, for thousands of years, have we tried to define life after death? For millennia we have struggled to elucidate what really goes on after death as we traverse the great unknown — and curiously, after 6,000 years of modern civilisation, we still don’t even know how to get there! Attaining spiritual immortality in ancient history and religion reads like a hilarious list of scatter-gun, maybe-this-will-work approaches. First, right at the cusp of recorded history, there were deified statues and bloody rituals. Then with the first great civilisations we had burial rites and coins on our eyelids to ensure our safe passage into the afterlife. The Dark Ages saw a change from polytheism to monotheism and it became more about repentance, seeking forgiveness for our sins and regimented worship. Finally, with the Middle Ages and the glorious, opulent lives of feudal nobility and merchant oligarchies, immortality could be obtained by paying someone that’s close enough to an Almighty Being — i.e. buy some new stained-glass windows and you’re in.

The problem is: they can’t all be right. Is obtaining life after death simply a matter of mentally flagellating or prostrating yourself before the eyes of a suitably-powerful deity? Almost all religions claim that that they are correct and infallible, their scriptures often divined or prophesied from a god. They don’t all claim that other religions are false but most do — my god is more goddy than yours! — which causes a little problem: who’s right? Are they all right? Or, as I’m inclined to believe, are they all wrong? I won’t turn this into a theological discussion, but I do want to work out which religion got it right because the concept of everlasting life must be pretty enthralling if five billion people want to believe in it.

In fact, the concept that we might simply cease to exist, both body and soul (if it exists!), is a relatively new concept. An enlightened concept that we’ve been scared of acknowledging all along, just in case it’s true. We’ve finally arrived back at the stage where challenging or disproving religion doesn’t end up with you being burnt at the stake. We’re finally at the point where we can question our existence in this universe with some semblance of objectivity. Pure and absolute rationality is still a little way off — maybe quantum mechanics has the real answers? — but we can still revisit with a critical eye, unfettered by either dogma or tradition, the concept of allaying or postponing our ultimate death.

Science has gone a long way to explaining many things we’ve historically considered ‘magical’ or ‘miraculous’ but there are still many unknowns. There are a whole slew of phenomena that can be explained by the existence of a ’spiritual universe’ too — in fact, it’s a very good way of explaining away almost anything that remains a mystery to us. Eventually though — and this is guaranteed — someone will get to the bottom of near-death experiences and the continued consciousness that people experience throughout brain death. In a truly ‘eureka!’ moment a scientist will discover exactly what happens, if anything, when we die.

It’ll feel like the unravelling of the greatest of magic tricks: one of the few remaining mysteries of human existence ripped apart and laid bare for all to see. And then, like all exploited magic — or technology — it’ll just become a ubiquitous part of everyday life: if we do have souls, we’ll make glorious plans for the afterlife; if we don’t we’ll be able to finally stop wasting our time trying to earn and validate our ticket to the afterlife.

I hope people won’t be too disappointed when they find out that all those years of prayer and sacrifice and unwavering belief were for nothing. The Norse and Greek had the right idea: perform amazing deeds of strength and bravery, kindness and mercy. Achieve immortality through renown alone. Of course, they also knew that if any gods just happened to be watching they were hitting two birds with one stone.

What with all the excitement of my holiday on Monday I have to admit that I haven’t had a chance to sit down and write. Which is annoying because I really like writing! And I won’t get to write properly until after my trip. I hope I can survive (and satisfy you guys) with just lots and lots and lots of photos. Here’s hoping!

Anyway… I caught an episode of a fantastic series that’s airing in the UK on Channel 4 at the moment: Inside Nature’s Giants. The first episode featured an elephant (which I missed!) but this week they autopsied a massive Fin Whale (second only in size to the Blue Whale, the largest creature on the planet) — and as the Faroe Islands have lots of Fin Whales, I was obviously very interested! This poor girl had beached itself in Ireland and died — but not to waste such a golden opportunity, a crack team of biologists and veterinary scientists flew in to cut the beastie into little pieces –  in the name of science and commercial TV! (Here’s a video clip which I hope you can view outside the UK.)

I won’t lie: it was pretty damn grim to see the whale’s coroner knee-deep in whale bits (there’s no other word or words that can suitably describe the pink, wobbly mass she was wading through). ‘If I can just reach a little bit further up here into this cavity I can free its heart, but it’s tied down by all of these blood vessels…’ She’s hacking away with a machete! Chopping away at a dead whale!

The heart of this leviathan is a cubic meter! The main scientist (the one with the sharpest knife) held up a segment of its aorta (the main output artery of the heart) and it was about the size of your head! And its heart only beats three times a minute! (Which is how it stays underwater for so long.) The whole whale weighs 60 tons (55,000kg) and is 65 feet (20m) long! When feeding it swallows 70 cubic meters (18,000 gallons) of water and then spits it back out through its filters, capturing fish and crustaceans. It can empty and fill its 3000-litre lungs in one breath — which it only needs to do once every 40 minutes!

But the amazing bit? They’re mammals, just like you and I! They originally started off as dog-like creatures with hoofed feet. 53 million years ago these ‘pakicetids’ jumped into the water and never looked back. It took 15 million years for them to lose their legs and become fully marine. 8 million years more and they had learnt to echolocate (the ’sonar’ that they use to locate food and obstacles). 10 million years later they diversified into dolphins and porpoises — and that’s where we are today.

‘Just’ 53 million years to mutate from average-sized land-dwelling mammal to the largest species this planet has ever known — the Blue Whale (which are bigger than commercial jets, by the way). Their new-born children weigh 6,000lbs (2,700kg) and drink 400 litres of milk a day! But as weird and foreign and huge as they are, they’re still mammals. These monsters are genetically more similar to a mouse than a fish.

And that made me think about where we’d be in 53 million years.

Humans are incredibly young in the grand scale of things. We — Homo habilis, our very, very primitive ancestors — started using tools around 2.5 million years ago, which set us apart from our chimpanzee brethren. And look how far (or not?) we’ve come in just 2.5 million years! In another 51.5 million years what could we possibly evolve into?

I’ve talked a tiny bit about the future of the human race but hardly touched on the topic of evolution.Will we even live long enough to experience tangible evolution? And if we do evolve significantly, what form will it take? Looking at that little dorky dog-like creature above, and then at the Blue Whale it’s almost impossible to fathom what we might become if given enough time! What environmental condition or external stimulus will have the biggest impact on our evolution? Will we develop a 6th finger on each hand to help us type faster? Will evolution instead take the form of transhumanism: bionic arms and eyes, and cybernetic implants?

The problem is, evolution is slow. You can forget ruggedised skin to survive global warming (or impending ice age if you’re that way inclined). You can forget wings to fly around with (though that might happen if we move to a planet with less gravity!) In fact… I really have no idea what we might evolve into. It’s like being asked ‘what do you think the world will be like in 100 years?‘ but exponentially more difficult to answer.

Looking at history we’re actually more likely to wiped out by a meteor before we evolve into something new and exciting. With us obliterated, the whales might sneak back onto land and spend another 53 million years transforming back into dogs:  speaking dogs with opposable thumbs capable of using tools.

Hmmm…

For as long as we’ve been human one resource has always been valued above all others: knowledge. The success and progression of civilisation is measured in just one way: the extent of our knowledge.

We pride ourselves on how developed we are. How much more more civil we are compared to our barbaric ancestors. We sure have come a long way from the grunting, cave-dwelling proto-human. Guns. Medicine. Democracy, equality, liberty; these concepts, these inventions are fine examples of our ever-expanding body of knowledge, our scientific research and the evolution of thought.

Civilisation is like a machine, with each and every one of us playing the role of cog or spring in the great, universal machine. It spans the complete evolution of humanity through time and space and, if we avoid extinction, it will be everlasting.

And that’s how we power this machine: knowledge. Knowledge goes in one end: ‘metal conducts electricity’ — and out the other end comes invention: ‘computers’. Grossly simplified but you get the idea. This machine needs to be fed constantly. It doesn’t differentiate between new data or rehashed, time-worn knowledge: that’s what makes it so devastating! It creates and destroys with ambivalence. Cultures, ideologies, religions; all have fallen or been cut down into their constituent parts only to be reabsorbed — reconstituted.

It seems to do OK with regurgitated, reabsorbed data as long as there’s something new being added from time to time. Imagine a big cauldron of soup — wouldn’t it get a little boring if you never added a new ingredient? The soup would probably dry out even. Our greatest gains definitely come from pouring new knowledge in.

And where to find the new knowledge? Exclusively within the domain of exploration. Pushing the boundaries is the greatest thing we can do to perpetuate the machine of civilisation, of humanity.

That’s the crazy thing: all of the knowledge we need to survive is already out there waiting to be discovered. It’s like turning over rocks and finding wriggly worms and millipedes. It’s like turning over a rock and finding data that solves an unknown — ah, so that’s the solution… Eureka! But these rocks might be at the top of the highest peaks or the trough of the lowest marine trenches. These figurative rocks might be in the petri dishes of science labs or on the whiteboards of a particle physicists.

Wherever they are, these rocks need to be turned. It doesn’t matter by who, ultimately, as it all becomes part of our great machine. The magic becomes mundane and the entirety of civilisation surges forward, simply by flipping a stone and reporting your findings.

Problems arise when people stop exploring, when we cease pushing against the boundary. The machine continues to churn — it can’t stop — but with a lack of new data errors begin to appear. Our world-view begins to stagnate. Data is re-analysed and new, erroneous, contrived conclusions are drawn. False progress, bureaucracy, fads and pseudo-science can grip society in a stranglehold.

Before our very eyes exploration has become the black sheep of governmental spending: Research, science, space travel and the like all shunted onto the back burner and the back of our mind. There is knowledge out there just waiting to be discovered and assimilated into our culture, knowledge that will propel our civilisation into the next era. But it’ll have to wait. We have more pressing issues at hand apparently.

Following on from last Tuesday’s ‘ponderable’, I have another one that has been bouncing around in my head. Yet again, it’s one of those problems that can’t be solved internally because it needs empirical data. Good and evil are such fundamentally nebulous ideas. Depending on who you ask, they can either be defined in absolute terms — or they are totally undefinable. Is ‘Good’ merely an act that helps more than it harms? Is ‘Evil’ the logical inversion of that? Is ‘Good’ strictly defined by cultural and societal norms? Is ‘Evil’ merely breaking the law?

Would you kill one person to save ninety-nine others? Does it matter who that one person is? Gandhi? Hitler?

Would you feel Evil by giving the order to go ahead and kill that one person, to save the ninety-nine? Or Good?

Perhaps it’s better to look at this from the angle of whether you feel justified in your action (or inaction).

Justification is the act of internal rationalisation. And being rational is basically what we we humans do. That’s what we’re inputting, processing and outputting, every minute of every day: rational decisions. Input data, process, rational output.

But here’s the kicker: we can only be as rational as our nurture and nature allows. But within those boundaries and limits, we are rational. 2 + 2 = 4, unless you’ve been told that it’s not. But even if the result is ‘wrong’, we continue to process the data in exactly the same way, because how could we ever exist if we doubted our own calculations? We must assume we’re right. We must assume our actions are rational. How can we possibly know an answer’s wrong anyway? After 30 years of doing it one way, should we listen to someone that says we’re wrong? Or that new-fangled ’science’ thing — should we trust that? But wouldn’t that mean we’ve been wrong all our lives? That sounds like a bitter pill to swallow. We can perform actions ‘the wrong way’ or jump to the wrong conclusion for an entire life time and not realise!

So with that in mind… I started thinking about psychopaths. Are they rational? The term ‘psychosis’ defines a malady of the mind that causes irrationality. But is the psychotic aware of their irrationality?

As they drown a bag full of kittens and cackle maniacally, do they know they’re being evil? Is it even possible to be aware of their evilness? Could anyone ever be rationally evil? Can you be rationally evil? Is evil only someone else’s point of view? Have you ever felt really evil? I haven’t…

I’m trying to get my head around this one. Did Hitler think he was being mean, nasty or evil when he signed off on the Jewish ghettos and executions? I bet he didn’t. Perhaps it takes a good person to be willfully evil? Hmm…

I know this one is pretty vague. I’m curious if anyone’s ever actually felt evil though — and I don’t mean in a passing, fleeting way, like when you ignore a hitchhiker or put your pet down. Don’t think about it too much though, because chances are you are rationalising and convincing yourself of weird/maligned actions hundreds of times a day. What are you doing that is actually wrong? Ugh! An entry on ethics might be necessary, if I can even hope to do that topic justice.

[Welcome to Thoughtful Tuesday! You know the format by now: I rant, I rave, I reveal thoughts that bounce around in my head that don't necessarily make sense yet, but may do with a little more thought... This week, a particularly meaty subject that pops up on the blog fairly regularly: Transhumanism.]

It’s a long word that sounds a lot more complex than it actually is but the most important part of its definition, as defined by the Transhumanism Declaration (2002), is thus:

Humanity will be radically changed by technology in the future. We [Humanity+] foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition, including such parameters as the inevitability of aging, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, suffering, and our confinement to the planet Earth.

I know. This is serious business! But let’s not get bogged down with long, complex words and ideology. Transhumanism is, basically, the next step in human evolution; in enlightenment.

For the longest time imaginable we’ve been limited by our body. We push its boundaries, we perform feats of extraordinary endurance and power, but at the end of the day it is limited. Eventually, something snaps: a bone breaks, we grow senile — and, sooner or later, we die.

Progress in the areas of humanism and enlightenment are all about prolonging (and improving!) our mental, physical and and spiritual well-being. Thus, that’s exactly what transhumanism is all about: we’ve reached our current, imposed-by-our-physical-body limits; now it’s time to let technology do its thing. It’s time to modify our bodies to take us to the next level!

Let me just throw out some possible modifications (upgrades!) that are covered by transhumanism:

• Biotechnological implants/replacements. Strength, speed, eyesight and endurance limits/thresholds raised way beyond current human bottlenecks.
• Modification of our genetic makeup. This is the one that’s currently under scrutiny from the media. This area deals with the modification of ourselves (or our progeny) to make us inherently more resistant or to damage/pathology. Immunity to disease, removal of short-sight — that kind of thing (though obviously ‘designer babies’ with blue eyes and perfect, beautiful appearance would be quite popular…)
• Prevent ageing (aging). Transhumanism covers the slowing of aging, or even prolonging life until we’re effectively immortal (Who wants to live forever?). Cryogenics also come into play here, though the real ‘philosopher’s stone’ is immortality, of course. This will probably take a biotechnological form — replacement organs, repairing cellular damage, etc.
• A lot more that hasn’t been invented yet…! As a general rule, most things that are speculated or appear in sci-fi novels later appear in real life. We can expect to see some really crazy technologies appear in the future. Artificial intelligence (think Terminator), proper virtual reality (think holodeck in Star Trek) and my favourite — mind-uploading, ala The Matrix: ‘I know kung fu…’

Obviously, along with such awesome abilities come a seriously large number of issues, most of which are of an ethical nature:

You can’t play God!

You’ll turn… into a Frankenstein!

Perhaps it is the existential issue that is most worrisome: When do we stop being human? It’s certainly not when we replace the heart or any of the limbs. It’s the brain, right…? Or is it? How do we know until we try? Do we really trust Bible-thumpers that, let’s face it, know absolutely nothing about cybernetics? That’s why we’re afraid: we have absolutely no idea what we’re getting into. But if history has shown us anything, is it ever beneficial to shy away from, instead of facing, the oncoming torrent of technological progress?

As with any technology there are good and bad uses — as to what defines good or bad, I won’t attempt to state — using transhumanist technology is a two-edged blade. You could enhance only yourself or the genetics of your progeny — a selfish act? — or, with the same technology, you could genetically modify those living in sub-Saharan Africa so that they could live without food.

It’s not guns that kill people…

The thing is, I could go into the ethical repercussions, and whether transhumanism should be allowed or not… but… really, it’s inconsequential. We’re going to do it anyway. Of course there will be devout naysayers — sociologists, psychologists, humanitarians, Christians — (the whole gamut!) — but there always is. The truth — the technology – will out. You can’t stop everyone from kite-flying in thunderstorms.

There is something about technology. It’s all there, just waiting to be discovered. As I’ve already covered, we really like turning over stones. We really like uncovering mysteries. This is the biggest of them by far. What makes us human?

This is going to happen in the next decade, by the way. If you have moral, ethical or philosophical disagreements, you probably want to settle them now, before upgrades for your bionic eyes and ears start appearing in the supermarket.

You probably know by now that I’m a bit of a pragmatist. I don’t totally discount the possibility of the paranormal, and pragmatism is a little too strict really, but I’m definitely of the scientific, that-which-can-be-proven mindset. I think there’s more to life than eight decades of faffing about and then decomposing in the ground. I just think it might be a little premature to assume we have a soul, an entity tethered to us in some indescribable, untenable way.

I don’t rule out the possibility of the soul, the spirit or gods, because that would be stupid. How can you claim something without proof? I sometimes wonder about those scientists and cartographers that declared our Earth to be flat. Were they sane? Were they frickin’ scientists? How about the shaman and philosophers that decreed that gods reside in the cosmos — or better yet, that stars are actually gods? Did they just pull that kind of stuff out of their ass, or did it really make sense back then? When did science actually become science, i.e. empirical? [That's another topic for another day I think.]

This is one of those situations where I wish I could be more objective. From my seat (surrounded by three computers and four screens) of power, I can glance back to the dawn of modern civilization, and scry forward to some crazy, potential futures. Were the philosophers of Athens graced with such foresight or hindsight?

How many scientists, philosophers or engineers had ideas beyond their time? Leonardo da Vinci is one example, but I can’t think of many others. Our thoughts are generally held back by the framework that supports the body and mind: society and culture. Is a tribal elder going to contemplate cryogenics? No. Is Aristotle going to think about superconducting super colliders that expose the base units of existence itself? No. If Jesus was born in the 1600s, would Christianity occur? No.  Eminent thinkers are of their time and very rarely anything more.

And then there’s me, and any of my contemporaries that stop to think about the future. We’re in a position now where we can actually think about what the future might bring with some measure of accuracy. We’re about to finally get a glimpse of the universe’s building blocks. Science, at its most basic form, transforms things we don’t know into things we do know. We point a camera into deep space to find out what’s there — we split an atom to find out what’s inside. From the outside, with our weak human eyes, there’s nothing to be had from either, but science proves otherwise. The most basic action in science is measuring, quantifying. Until something is seen, it doesn’t exist: electrons didn’t exist until we measured them and their flow.

What if one day we can point some kind of imaging device at a fellow human and see their soul?

Why is that a totally crazy idea?

Right now, God and the soul can only be experienced through some kind of internalisation — through the mind’s (…) eye. Why do miracles and divine inspiration (or the deification thereof) occur only within our head? Will we one day be able to see those images and feel those experiences with some kind of artificial device? And if we can’t, why not?

Is it because the god, the spirit, your soul doesn’t actually exist?

You have two possible answers:

a) One day, we will be able to see the soul and interact with it, without the brain. We’ll be able to photograph it, stretch it, test it. The inexorable march of science means that eventually everything in the universe will be ours to play with.

And now, as we live in a universe with laws, where science rules supreme, there must be the other option:

b) The soul doesn’t exist. Gods don’t exist. They are both constructs of an incredibly powerful machine — the brain.

I wish the fellows over at CERN would hurry up and smash some protons together in that large collider of theirs. I really want to know the extent of these three dimensions we inhabit.