Is civilization the mind’s attempt to commit suicide? Via the Institute for Emerging Ethics and Technologies, Piero Scaruffi writes:
Ultimately, the most structured society will be a society in which every action has to comply with some rules, i.e. its citizens will de facto be robots with no brains. Why does brain/mind want to get rid of brain/mind?
Every animal tries to create some order around its natural environment. Likewise the history of human civilization is largely the attempt to control nature and structure life. Human societies are environments in which the chaos of nature is greatly reduced. This allows for humans to predict the future and therefore minimize threats to their survival.
One chaotic component of nature is humans themselves, the interaction among them. Societies invent rules and regulations to order and structure the interaction among humans. The process of turning children into adults is largely a process of forcing them to obey rules, from “good manners” to language itself.
Rules help make society stable and predictable, i.e. safe and efficient. However, rules also restrict what people can think of doing. The more structured your society is, the less often you need to use your brain. When we install a traffic light in front of a school, we are creating a safer and more efficient environment for children. The price to pay is that those children won’t need to use their brain to cross the street.
The safest society is one in which what is not forbidden is mandatory. Ultimately, the most structured society will be a society in which every action has to comply with some rules, i.e. its citizens will de facto be robots with no brains.
Civilization seems a process to remove the brain from the decision process, to turn life into a simple sequence of rules that must be obeyed. Those rules are, of course, designed by brains. Therefore the ultimate function of brains within a society of brains seem to make sure that brains don’t run the society, i.e. to commit a sort of suicide.
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