FROM HOMO SAPIENS TO HOMO DEUS

Yasuhiko Genku Kimura

From: TECHNOLOGY, ART, & SCIENCE OF HOMO DEUS

We homo sapiens (or homo sapiens sapiens), the only extant species of the genus homo, has evolved over the period of over 300 millenniums to create cultures and develop civilizations that are completely unique and singularly advanced amongst all living creatures inhabiting our planet, our solar system, and our galaxy.

Technology, art, and science are three of the spheres where homo sapiens has expressed its evolution in culture and civilization. Of the three, technology and art are as old as homo sapiens, and for milleniums until the time of the Renaissance, there was no real differentiation between the two. Etymology shows that the Greek root of techno-, tekhne, means 'art, skill, craft in work' while the Proto-Indo-European root, teks-na, means 'craft' and its root, teks, 'to weave'.

Technology and art are thus pre-linguistic and pre-scientific in their origin, both originating and evolving as an aspect of the mimetic culture of the primitive humans from which emerged the oral culture of language and myth, and then evolved the literary culture of science and philosophy, weaving the luxurious tapestries of culture in the loom of evolution.

Technology and art are both expressions of creative imaginational human intelligence. This creative dimension of homo sapiens is captured by the designation homo faber, 'man the maker'. The first known use of this term was by Appius Claudius Caecus (c. 340 BC - 273 BC), a Roman censor and politician. In his Sententia (maxims) he writes: "Every man is the maker of his destiny ('Homo faber suae quisque fortunae')."

In Creative Evolution (1907) Henri Bergson defines human intelligence as the faculty of creating artificial objects, and claims that humanity is essentially homo faber. Umberto Eco echoes Bergson in The Open Work (1989), stating that homo faber describes a manifestation of the innate being of the human being in nature. Homo faber thus captures an essential feature of humanity as the maker of artificial objects as well as of its own destiny.

Homo sapiens with its creative imaginational intelligence is also named homo ludens, 'man the player'. In Homo Ludens (1938) Johan Huizinga argues that the element of play has been essential for the creation of civilization, stressing the critical importance of the play-element of culture in culture for the development of a healthy and vibrant culture. When we are absorbed in a creative activity, we freely exert ourselves to please and delight ourselves.

This voluntary act of self-pleasing or self-delighting is the essence of playfulness, which not only does not contradict but also includes the 'intentional suffering and struggle' that accompanies our effort at improving our skills for finer expression of our creative ability, imagination, and vision.

Creativity (homo faber) and playfulness (homo ludens) are evolutionally mutually conducive and reinforcing, culminating in the being of the Ecstatics among us. In the playful act of creation, homo faber and homo ludens evolve ever closer towards deus faber ('god the maker') and deus ludens ('god the player'). Homo sapiens thus teleogenetically (purpose-generatively) evolves towards homo deus ('man the god').

SIVA STRIPPED OF DIVINITY

The potential of human creativity is immense, but the potential of imperilment is also enormous. As the model of the Trimurti demonstrates, the cosmic process of creation includes the phase of creative destruction without which the eternal regeneration of the universe is not possible.

Siva represents this creative destruction phase, which is at once the transformative phase. However, devoid of this creative context, Siva stripped of divinity and wholeness, the force for transformation and regeneration becomes only devolutionarily destructive. This devolutionary destruction is what is meant by the concept of 'evil', which is curiously 'live' spelled backward.

That is, homo sapiens can become homo diabolus ('man the devil").

Where there is a recognition of beauty as beauty, ugliness comes to be. Where there is a recognition of good as good, evil comes to be. — Lao Tzu

In the world of duality, without transcendence, evil, actual or potential, will always be with us. As James Carse reminds us in Finite and Infinite Games (1986), however, our desire for wanting to eliminate evil is essentially the same as the evil desire of homo diabolus to extirpate the unwanted such as political dissidents or religious infidels.

The creative pursuit of technology, art, and science are three of the ways in which homo sapiens of today, and homo deus of tomorrow, can outwit the devil through wisdom.

Theodore John Kaczynski, the mathematical genius and domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber, wrote in his infamous 35,000-word "Unabomber Manifesto" (1995):

The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system... (This) is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.

A psychopathic killer and diabolical menace to society, i.e., a homo diabolus, astutely identified the imperilment that is inherent in our modern technological society: "The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system." That is, the creator becomes subjugated to its own creation that has its independent logic for its systemic survival and perpetuity.

The creative human context becomes lost to the systemic necessity of the human creation, which becomes the new context to which the human context becomes subsumed.

What Kaczynski described is the predicament of the modern age— a trapping that we have set up for ourselves inside of the system of our own creation. Recognizing this trapping, the postmodemists made an attempt at resolving the predicament, but ended up producing yet another predicament, another trapping, which is the dissolution of the self and the system - of the creator and the creation in the voidance of a creative context or constructive framework. Deconstruction without reconstruction leads only to destruction.

Postmodernism is essentially reactionary; it is a psychoepistemological reaction to modernism and therefore it is fundamentally of the same mindset as modernism. For instance, for the contemporary modem-postmodern mindset, the predominant image of the human mind is that of a computer. The human mind has become an information processor, which is a function that can be performed in principle by other computing machines.

We have become excessively obsessed with the idea of developing artificial intelligence precisely because we have first made intelligence artificial: "If the mind is like a computer, why can't a computer be like a mind?"

T. S. Eliot asks, in the opening stanza of The Rock: A Pageant Play (1934): "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" In order to fulfill the immense potential of homo sapiens and homo deus, humanity needs not only to regain the lost wisdom but also to gain a new kind of wisdom, if it is to survive and thrive in the future. What would that new wisdom be?

TOWARDS NEW WISDOM

The English word 'information' is derived from the Latin root, informare, which indicates a transmission of intelligible content. The intelligible content that constitutes information is defined by, and thus limited to, what can be conveyed across a distance and into other contexts. This tends to imply a breaking down of a whole into movable bits, that is, into as simplified a form as possible so as to be able to be conveyed and transferred into new arrangements and contents.

Information is knowledge about something, as distinct from knowledge as direct acquaintance. There exists a fundamental separation between a reality and the variety of information that can be recorded about it. This separation between information and reality is the difference between information and presence, which lies at the heart of the decline of meaning that characterizes the modern and postmodern age.

Wholeness is indivisible (analog). In order to convert a whole intelligible content into movable bits (digital), the whole must be first reduced to a divisible totality (digital aggregation), and then the totality must be reduced to various aggregates of bits. In this two-step reduction process, the wholeness becomes lost, while, when bits of information become rearranged in another context, the best that can be achieved is constructing a totality, but not a wholeness, unless we bring to the knowledge assembled an invisible element that transforms a divisible totality to a wholeness, undivided and indivisible. What is that invisible element?

Information is inherently partial. Knowledge as a totality, comprehensive knowledge, can be achieved through a coherent structural integration of information. Wisdom is that intelligence which emerges when knowledge is held in the heart of wonderment where the eternal quest quickens.

Wisdom is that intelligence with which what is known is enlivened by the unknown and enlightened by the unknowable. Wisdom is that intelligence which is the transcendental consilience, or the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum), forming the cosmic conscience (con-science) that transcends paradoxes.

The unknowable is fundamentally irreducible to the known, and yet it transforms the knower. That invisible element that transforms a divisible totality to a wholeness is this irreducible element, the unknowable. That which is irreducible to anything else defines what the sacred is. Knowledge is thus transformed to wisdom with the infusion of the sacred into our intelligence.

When the sacred is infused into our intelligence, and then when our intelligence becomes suffused with the sacred, we become intimately connected to the higher source. We become 'spiritual' in the true sense of the word. Therefore, the Ecstatics are by nature and by definition spiritual.

As the Ecstatics, homo sapiens will be able to fulfill its evolutionary potential and destiny as the 'man (homo), the wise (sapiens)'. Homo sapiens, integrating homos faber and homo ludens, will then be homo deus of cosmic wisdom.

We may designate the homo sapiens aspect of humanity primarily as the scientist, the homo faber aspect as the technologist, and the homo ludens aspect as the artist. Through this holistic evolution of homo sapiens, these three aspects will become three integral constituents of the consciousness and being of homo deus of the future.

To imagine the unimaginable future of science, technology, and art is therefore to imagine the science, art, and technology of homo deus that is the teleogenetic integral of homo sapiens, homo ludens, and homo faber. The seed of homo diabolus will be continually transmuted to be a Siva, the creative destroyer and transformer who ushers in a regeneration, a renewal.

That future is the culture and the civilization that homo deus will be able to create as a Trimürti incarnate who as the scientists, the technologists, and the artists embody the sacred Brahmä, Vispu, and Siva in their regenerative creative expression.