Man or Machine? THPVP: a vital regeneration

Here you can find out more about

•  Population and data growth
• Artificial intelligence
• The natural universe

The world’s population is growing by 112,000 every day (now more than 8 billion). Every single day, USD 17 billion is spent on health, USD 11.2 billion on education, USD 5 billion on the military and USD 320 million on video games; 300 billion emails and 920 million tweets are sent daily.

Currently, 870 million people go hungry, 19,000 of whom die of hunger every day, and 1.8 billion people are considered obese, spending USD 650 million a day to lose weight. 780 million people have no access to clean drinking water.
Every day, 60 million barrels of crude oil are produced (enough for another 40 years) and 18 trillion  MWh of solar energy hit on earth every day. Not to mention environmental destruction, global warming, species extinction and so on and so forth.

What can we conclude from this?

The world is out of joint

In view of the statistics that are collected every day on all sorts of things, the zettabyte era that we have entered since around 2012, when we processed 1021 bytes of data volume, or 1 ZB, for the first time (the volume is estimated to be 180 ZB for 2025), and the fact that humanity’s stored knowledge still only doubled every 100 years in 1900, but is already estimated to double every 12 hours in 2020 … nobody does understand anything anymore.

We have to find our way through the increasingly complex jungle of information with the help of machines, which can only find the paths they are given if they are sent out into the world of big data.
The tremendous increase in digital and statistical knowledge, captured in words and images, increasingly determines the human experience of the world in a similar or even more dramatic way than the book did, when it abstracted what was previously only experienced directly with the senses and described with a human voice in ever new stories and sounds into mental imagery.

The statistical-digital, scientific-ideological world view

Unlike books, which still allowed scope for the “cinema in the head” and for thoughts and feelings to wander, the statistical-digital world of knowledge and images drives an artificial, simulated and calculable representation of existence into people’s psyches and bodies via its communication channels, devices and sensors. The perfection of the simulation or imitation of biological thought and perception processes in humans is proceeding at a similarly rapid pace as the accumulation of knowledge.

This simulation not only takes place in the form of 360-degree video or with augmented and virtual reality techniques, but is also conceptualised, i.e. through certain conceptualisations, emotional stimuli, reinforcements and at the same time simplifications of experiential horizons, etc. In doing so, the simulation ontologically draws on the premises of a mechanistic, materialistic, patriarchal and scientific-ideological world view.

At best, the latter is based on Occam’s razor: “The simplest theory very probably explains a phenomenon of reality best” or it immediately qualifies everything as irrelevant or non-existent that cannot be explained, measured, repeated or cannot be utilised economically.

The statistical-digital, scientific-ideological world view has not only taken over the natural, material and electronic environment of human life, but has also infiltrated the more subtle biological, physical, psychological and spiritual areas.

The biological-human and the digital-electronically based power of action in all areas of human existence are becoming increasingly indistinguishable.

There’s a boy on TikTok who explains quite naturally how to “make money” by having ChatGPT (more on this later) write a script from a few keywords, then converting the text on DALL-E 2 into a video with digitally generated avatars that move and speak according to the script, and finally monetising the whole thing on YouTube.

These processes are underpinned by the constant media bombardment from the 360 million newspapers (print+digital) published worldwide every day, which largely convey “scientific-ideological” or “state-ideological” explanations of the world and instructions on how to manage social, physical and psychological phenomena based on a flood of “studies” and statistical “findings” (which are drawn from the aforementioned global pool of knowledge).

Cyborgs and artificial intelligence

These processes are now taking on a heightened transhumanist dimension with the emergence of artificial intelligence and the implantation of devices in human bodies – for cognitive or physical enhancement or improvement. However, experiments to create so-called cyborgs are still rather limited: So, people like Neil Harbisson, who was officially recognised as a cyborg in 2004 and has an antenna implanted in his brain to also see in the dark, for example, remain the exception for the time being.

Salto-flipping robots and robot dogs for military use such as those from Boston Dynamics now owned by Hyundai, have a brighter future and can already be found in hospitals and retirement homes in Japan.

However, the biggest leap into the transhuman future simulation has so far been made by artificial intelligence, such as the phenomenal ChatGPT from OpenAI. To get an impression, I had a chat with the chat bot:

Author: Can I converse in German with you?
ChatGPT: Yes, we can speak to each other in German. I understand and speak German quite well. What would you like to know?
Author: Great.
ChatGPT: You are welcome. What would you like to know?
Author: What would you say is the main difference between electronic systems with artificial intelligence and organic systems with biologically embodied intelligence?
ChatGPT: The main difference between electronic systems with artificial intelligence and organic systems with biologically embodied intelligence lies in the way they process and learn information. Electronic systems with artificial intelligence use algorithms and data to recognise patterns and make decisions.
Organic systems with biologically embodied intelligence, such as the human body, use biological processes and neuronal networks to process and learn information. Another difference is that electronic systems with artificial intelligence are developed by humans, while organic systems with biologically embodied intelligence arise naturally.
Author: To what extent does the information processing of biological systems differ from electronic systems, since in the former all information is coloured by emotions?
ChatGPT: It is true that biological systems such as the human body are capable of feeling emotions and that these emotions can influence the way information is processed. The human body uses biological processes and neural networks to process information, and emotions can influence the behaviour and decisions that are made as a result of this processing.
Electronic systems with artificial intelligence, on the other hand, use algorithms and data to recognise patterns and make decisions, and they have no ability to feel emotions. However, progress is also being made in electronic systems with artificial intelligence towards the integration of emotions, for example by developing emotion recognition algorithms.”

87 Feelings

“Electronic systems with artificial intelligence use algorithms and data to recognise patterns and make decisions, and they have no ability to feel emotions,” – the AI told us. Which leads to the question of where this leads and whether we want it? Do we really want to let machines “decide” our feelings and lives? Because it is so practical, cost-saving, fast and “effective”?

Because we humans think and act with feelings. Emotions are the stuff we are made of, the stuff that drives us, that gives our lives meaning, that blesses us with joy, pleasure, sadness, despair, melancholy, courage, creativity, closeness, security, and so on. Every human activity is clothed in feelings, every action can give pleasure and satisfaction.

In her current bestseller Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown lists 87 emotions and life experiences alone that define what it means to be human, and it is important to recognise, name and understand them; the American author writes:

“If we want to find our way back to ourselves and to each other, we have to trust and find the words to tell our stories. And we must be the custodians of the stories entrusted to us by others. This allows us to create and walk through a new frame of reference in which a meaningful human connection emerges.”

However, AIs are also already practising emotion recognition algorithms, so ChatGPT listed the following 19 emotions that it is currently practising to recognise: Anxiety, loneliness, anger, jealousy, guilt, shame, sadness, joy, pride, gratitude, love, fear, confusion, disgust, surprise, curiosity, excitement, satisfaction, disappointment. It is quite conceivable that AIs will soon also want to help with these self-knowledge processes in a “health app”.

However, Brené Brown is more interested in the collective process of telling and listening to stories among people and the connection that this creates.

Evolution to Homo sapiens sapiens

On the long evolutionary path to Homo sapiens sapiens, we have succeeded in developing sophisticated strategies, techniques and procedures to ensure our survival, from mastering fire, storage, preservation and communication methods to all kinds of levers with which we have unhinged the natural world. Above all, in this way we have stored a great deal of useful (and equally useless) knowledge in ever better ways, on which the next generations could build.

However, this endeavour to dominate the “environment”, which is inherent to every species, has led us – for reasons of utility – to remodel the ecological niche in which we live according to criteria that disregard the overall events in the biosphere.

Modern science and the possibilities of electronic data processing enable us today for the first time to get an idea of the complexity and interconnectedness of the biosphere and to recognise the sometimes absurdly misguided developments of our civilisation on a global scale.

In the course of its history, mankind has also discovered a lot about the inner physical and spiritual dimensions of human beings. However, the utilitarian and economistic character of industrial world civilisation has dismissed many findings and experiments of historical civilisations and cultures in this area, just as it only grants relevance to the research of modern humanities if their findings are economically exploitable.

Humanity is rooted in the natural universe

The decisive factor is what Rachel Carson, author of The Silent Spring one of the most important books of the 20th century published in 1962, summarises it in the following words:

“We come from the earth. And so there is a deep-rooted responsiveness within us to the natural universe that is part of our humanity.”

It’s obvious, and everyone can feel it: We have reached an impasse. Our understandable striving for control of our living conditions, the utilitarian expansion, has led to the destruction of these very conditions. We must fundamentally question what has driven human evolution so far, and over the last 200 years in a tremendous exponential acceleration.

We are part of the biosphere, that is where our destiny lies, and it determines the fate of our species and our being. True transhumanism would be the realisation that our body and our consciousness are not a separate, encapsulated entity from the environment, but a symbiotic system that is closely linked to the biological environment on a molecular, energetic, cellular, microbiological, chemical and macrobiological level and cannot exist without it.

Our inner worlds, which are expressed in the prism of feelings described by Brené Brown, are also integrated into this interwovenness.

Today we have the knowledge and the means to form a new, more comprehensive and more accurate picture of the psycho-physical system that is the human being and how this is embedded in the biosphere and the cosmos. And we need to rebuild our civilisation in line with these findings.

We need to redirect all the knowledge, all the technologies (including AI) and economic resources that we have at our disposal into a humanistic project that actually recognises and focuses on the concrete human, their true fundamental needs and the dimensions of their reality of life and existence. A project that breaks down the cold, crazy, anti-human and anti-biosphere global structures into clear oases of human warmth.

Today’s world has developed the tools to build small-scale, cellular structures that do justice to both the biosphere and the human condition. All the achievements of modern civilisation can be continued humanely and ethically in order to unfold the evolutionary potential of humanity in its full range – instead of using them destructively in a purely economic and/or primitive way to realise fantasies of power and grandeur, to ward off psychopathologically generated threat scenarios or transhumanist (nightmare) dreams of eternal life through fusion with machines.

The Human Purpose Village Project offers a conceptually open framework for creating such structures under a wide variety of conditions, true to Albert Einstein’s call:

“Our ideas about reality can never be final. We must be prepared to change these assumptions at any time.”

If you feel that you would like to contribute to this project in whatever form, by whatever means and to whatever extent, just get in touch:
info@human-purpose-village.earth