Thursday, 20 December 2012

I'm not afraid for the world will end today, I fear the world will continue without changing.

I'm not afraid for the world will end in 2012...I fear that world will continue without changing anything!
  





That is something I feel strongly about.
 About a billion out of 7 billions human beings are living in hunger and billions more in poverty across the world [WFP]. But if you realize the fact that the world produces much more food than we can consume (annually we produce food for about 12 billions people) or the fact that military spending of either US or China is more than enough to feed all the hungry people in the world ,then  you would realize the main problem for all our suffering is us, human beings or more precisely our greed. Before accusing me of being communist, I actually blame on the imperfect way we are made where greed and competition is necessary for the survival of the fittest. That is what evolution is about and it is true to all living and sentient beings on this world and is the basics of all our suffering. 

But life has not always been like that. Some scientists point out the hypothesis of universal common ancestor which is superorganism that share genetic information with all cells.
 " Instead of competing for resources and developing into separate lifeforms, cells spent hundreds of millions of years freely exchanging genetic material with each other, which allowed species to obtain the tools to survive without ever having to compete for anything. That's maybe not an organism as we would comprehend it today, but that's the closest term we have for this cooperative arrangement."  original article

But then some cells break off the arrangement and started endless competition we suffer today.

But situation is not hopeless. we can change that. One of the solutions is to engineer a more perfect human beings free from any suffering with the help of technology like hyperintelligence through singularity (the way transhumanists advocates) or by reimagining our socioeconomic system from sketch (the way Zeitgeist Movement has taken).  
Years ago, I used to think that social engineering is the only way to go for a better society (which is the way all the religions have tried without much success).  But then I realize that you don't really need to teach them to make better humans... We can engineer them!!
For example, there are recent research papers that show that hormone oxytoxins could make us more altruistic[ Ref: http://brainethics.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/oxytocin-the-direct-route-to-altruism/  & http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001128] We could discover many more factors like that in the years to come.

(There are some people who took issue with me for putting Altruism as my Facebook religious view. Here is the reason. Altruism is important aspect of all of the major world religions. But how many altruistic people you find in daily life even in the religious circles? Very few and even then they won't care for people of other religions.
But the good news is that you don't need to preach or teach people of altruism. We could just manipulate the biochemicals in the body to make them more altruistic as research has shown. Hence ,no argument and religious wars are needed just to feed a hungry kid or to do what is right or to be a good person. )

I believe we could do many great things like this by going into genetic or molecular level of us, ironing out the genes that cause the diseases, creating better humans physically, immunologically, psychologically and socially). That is the reason behind this blog title "Engineering The Cure", It doesn't mean as a cure to any particular disease. I mean as the cure for humanity which we are trying to find.

 " Instead of competing for resources and developing into separate lifeforms, cells spent hundreds of millions of years freely exchanging genetic material with each other, which allowed species to obtain the tools to survive without ever having to compete for anything. That's maybe not an organism as we would comprehend it today, but that's the closest term we have for this cooperative arrangement." 
By the way, from the description,  what does that ancient superorganism sound like in modern day?  I would say that is how Open source movement work.  Open source softwares, hardwares and open science are gradually gaining the momentum for good. They are the prime examples of we can do great things and increase overall benefits by freely sharing. This proves competition is not the only way to success.