Our advanced technological and scientific efforts aimed at protecting us from the clutches of nature's law are futile because they are all controlled by the very same nature's law, or daivi maya. Therefore trying to utilize mundane science to overpower nature's law is like creating a Frankenstein.
[Posted
Oct 17, 2010]Singularity controlled by laws of nature
Annalee Newitz: "If history, real history, teaches us any lesson it's that new technologies do not cause us to transcend. They fix some things, and then cause new problems we hadn't anticipated."
BoingBoing Oct 14, 2010
- CORY DOCTOROW
The Singularity won't be heaven: Annalee Newitz
IO9's Annalee Newitz takes aim at the idea of the Singularity in an essay called "Why the Singularity isn't going to happen." Newitz's objection to the idea that technology will allow us to transcend human limitation and misery boils down to this: the vision of technological utopia is insufficiently weird. It is a "[vision] of tomorrow [based on] on fantasies from the past rather than what we can glean from factual accounts of history." It assumes that technology will solve problems but doesn't consider what new problems will emerge.
"What people of the industrial age didn't bargain on - didn't even know about - were all the ways that byproducts of industry would destroy the environment. And I don't just mean in a save-the-Earth kind of way: I mean that when Friedrich Engels walked through industrial Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century he was completely blindsided by how destroyed people's lives were by pollution and life in cities built around factories. In response, he wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, a document that would have stunned reformers fifty years earlier, many of whom believed that industrialization would solve every social problem and remove the burden of physical labor from the shoulders of even the poorest people.
"There's no denying that industrialization laid the foundations for a better, more productive society. It has led to countless innovations, and has improved the lives of many working people. But it also destroys life in ways that Adam Smith and Eli Whitney could never have imagined. It has transformed our entire planet, from its ecosystems to its atmosphere and beyond. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that we do not live on the same planet that people lived on in 1750. The environment - from megacities to airborne particles and space junk - has changed that much.
"Singularity-level technology changes the world to the point where the things our ancestors wanted are not the same things we want. Today, we are trying to roll back the effects of industrialization. We are trying to undo the damage that penicillin did. If history, real history, teaches us any lesson it's that new technologies do not cause us to transcend. They fix some things, and then cause new problems we hadn't anticipated." go to story
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Although one follows the dictations of material nature, he happily thinks himself the master or husband of material nature. Scientists, for example, try to be the masters of material nature, life after life, not caring to understand the Supreme Person, under whose direction everything within this material world is moving. Trying to be the masters of material nature, they are imitation gods who declare to the public that scientific advancement will one day be able to avoid the so-called control of God. In fact, however, the living being, unable to control the rulings of God, is forced to associate with the prostitute of polluted intelligence and accept various material bodies. more
Nature's laws undefeated
excerpt from Renunciation Through Wisdom
Millennia ago the Bhagavad-gita comprehensively discussed the same topic the editor of Amrita Bazar Patrika writes about in a despondent mood: "If one kind of trouble goes, another quickly follows." In the Gita (7.14) Lord Krishna says, "This divine energy of mine, consisting of the three modes of material nature, is difficult to overcome." The Sanskrit words daivi maya used here can be translated into modern terms as "nature's law." This natural law is so stringent that it is impossible to overcome it, in spite of our prolific articles in the newspapers or our big conferences tabling motions that run into volumes. Our advanced technological and scientific efforts aimed at protecting us from the clutches of nature's law are futile because they are all controlled by the very same nature's law, or daivi maya. Therefore trying to utilize mundane science to overpower nature's law is like creating a Frankenstein. Efforts to extirpate human suffering through advanced technology and bring about lasting happiness have brought us to the Atomic Age. Western thinkers have become gravely concerned about the extent of destruction an atomic explosion can cause. Some leaders are trying to calm the alarm with platitudes about how atomic energy is to be used solely for peaceful purposes, but this is another form of deception caused by daivi maya, or nature's law.
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