Question the Authority of Your Brain

Question the Authority of Your Brain

By: R.U. Sirius

Published: May 5, 2011

The Greek notion of “hubris” is rooted in the religious idea that humans shouldn’t transgress the “presumption of the gods.” In Greek mythology, hubris was represented by Prometheus, “the bringer of light.” Greek mythology blames Prometheus for bringing science, mathematics, medicine and general productivity into the world. To the Greeks, Prometheus was their greatest sinner. In Western Christian mythology, Lucifer (“light bringer”) most closely resembles Prometheus.

The revolution in human thinking that was the Enlightenment partially overthrew the notion that knowledge and productivity should be controlled by authorities acting on behalf of a God that held these things suspect. Of course, in reality, the Enlightenment’s embrace of scientific and technological advances has been engaged in a tug of war with opponents clinging to a fundamentalist, religious suspicion of these things. The ambiguous social and environmental effects of technological civilization have added a third stream of discourse – people who are essentially secular rationalists who find, to varying degrees, some types of knowledge and technology at best suspect and sometimes worth opposing. These social critics of the technological exuberance of modern day Prometheans will likely warn against human “arrogance” as opposed to hubris.

While I have long been a supporter of radical technological change, I see a tendency towards arrogance (and not in a good way) in some aspects of transhumanist culture and as expressed by some (but not all) transhumanist narratives. Broadly speaking, I would say that a faith in God (or gods) which cannot be substantiated has been supplanted by a similar faith in the human brain, its perceptions and the measurements of the instruments those brains devise.

In some ways, this faith in the brain seems directly reflective of a faith in God. If our brains — or the combination of our brains with our bodies and the environment — are a biological accident, an emergent property of a set of patterns that have survived and spread according to Darwinian principles, from whence comes the assumption that these brains can possess anything more than a fragmentary comprehension of reality or existence? I would say, obviously, it comes from an unexamined faith that there is something particularly “blessed” about human thought, even if this goodness or completeness isn’t provided by a benevolent deity.