Latest post in my blog on popular science:
Productivity measures for the increase in life expectancy
http://populscience.blogspot.com/2019/11/productivity-measures.html
Regards,
It is clear that the assumption that we are about to achieve immortality thanks to explosive advances in medicine is quite far from reality.
…which any Christian who understands his Bible should be able to tell you.
But both your prior post and this have reminded me that history repeats itself. Around the turn of the 20th Century, it was near-universally believed, at least in the west, that man’s progress was inevitable; that science, industry, and man’s enlightenment would solve all our problems; and that we would never again deal with the curse of war. Then a little fracas broke out in Europe, which resulted in the deaths of about 40 million people. One might have thought this would have put the lie to such presumptions (See Loconte, Joseph, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War). Sadly, it seems we never learn.
But what about just preserving the head of someone… might that be a form of immortality?
See Futurama and a science fiction novel by an Inkling that I can’t mention due to that being a “spoiler.”
I wrote about it in another post in my blog:
http://populscience.blogspot.com/2017/03/brain-transplant.html
Regards,
Of course, a Christian knows, but there are many people (including readers of my blog) who may have swallowed what Ray Kurzweil and the media are saying every other day. The final phrase in my post was addressed to them.
You are right. History repeats itself in several different ways. At the end of the nineteenth century there was the feeling that we already knew everything that could be known in physics. Then came the twentieth century with the discovery of radioactivity, quantum physics and relativity. At the end of the twentieth century the same mistake was repeated (now it was called the theory of everything). I wrote about it in this post in my blog:
http://populscience.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-theory-of-everything.html
Regards,
Well, That Hideous Strength meets the description you gave, though the Inkling in question is in fact the subject of this forum, and I wouldn’t expect much concern over spoilers for a 74-year-old book. Or did you have something else in mind?
Edit: As a side note, you can hide spoilers in your posts here on the site. Click the little gear in the editor toolbar, and from the drop-down, click Hide Details:
It will enter text that looks like this:
With a result that looks like this:
Summary
This text will be hidden
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot, 2010) is a popular account of a line of Lacks’ cervical cancer cells which do not die (but can be killed). How those
cells have been (and presumably continue to be) used in science and the fortunes made from the cell line is the topic of the book. Since the cells were taken and used without Mrs. Lacks’ or her family’s consent, the book deals with ethics and social justice
as well.
The title takes poetic liberties: anything which can be killed is not immortal and a few cells from our bodies do not constitute our “life.” But it does illustrate the grip the idea has on our imaginations. It’s
important to remember that immortality without godliness would be a horror beyond imagining: it was why our first parents were prevented, in God’s severe mercy, from eating of the tree of life.
I don’t think the “head” in THS represents immortality or continued existence of the “life” of the man whose head it had been any more than do cervical cancer cells. Presumably, the mechanism of speech residual
in the head’s anatomy was exploited by the “macrobes” to communicate with Withers, Frost, etc.
Ruby
I’d agree, although it’s initially presented as though it is. It’s also presented as a scientific achievement, when it later appears that all the science-y stuff was pretty much just for show.
The same concept was the basis of the 1962 B-movie The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, though in that case the head was actually kept “alive” by the various machines. But even supposing that were possible, how much of a life would that really be?
Yes, they had all kinds of tubes and equipment bubbling as a sort of life support for the brain in THS. But it became “possessed” much as Weston is possessed in
Perelandra.
THS has often been characterized as a fictional working out of the main ideas in AOM. While I have no argument with Lewis’s and Tolkien’s aversion to “scienticism” or “evolutionism,” I do think their semi-Luddite
position of representing technology as nearly always “bad” and a simpler, less-mechanized way of life as nearly always “good” needs qualified a bit.
Technology, like anything humans invent and use can be used for good and bad. I keep being grateful that we are past the days when removing a diseased gallbladder required a huge incision, drains and dressings
and a 10 day hospital stay. Not to mention the technology I am enjoying this moment in communicating with all of you.
Lewis and Tolkien were both in the humanities, after all (she says with a patronizing sniff—that’s supposed to be funny) and fresh from the technologically amplified destruction of the wars. Had they been in medicine
or agriculture or any of the other applied sciences, their views might have been a little bit more nuanced.
Ruby
It’s been some time since I read THS, but I’m wondering whether the tubes and equipment were ever doing what they were presumed to be doing–my suspicion is no, rather the apparent life was always the result of what they called the macrobes.
Most definitely, and it has brought great improvements to both length and quality of life, not to mention communication capabilities that weren’t even being dreamed of as recently as 30 years ago. But it’s a mistake, IMO, to take the next step from there to believing that technology is value-neutral–T. David Gordon argues pretty convincingly to the contrary in Why Johnny Can’t Preach, and possibly other places.
Likely so.
It’s one of my favorite books. Scary close to reality…
(Dan) Most definitely, and it has brought great improvements to both length and quality of life, not to mention communication capabilities that weren’t even being dreamed of as recently as 30 years
ago. But it’s a mistake, IMO, to take the next step from there to believing that technology is value-neutral–T. David Gordon argues pretty convincingly to the contrary in
Why Johnny Can’t Preach, and possibly other places.
I suspect it is correct to think that technology is value-neutral but there are different ways of assessing the values it impacts. There are always trade-offs in terms of winners and losers in skills and vocations
when new technology makes an existing set of skills obsolete. That happened with the invention of writing and printing: society lost some of the memory and story-telling skills and the illuminator’s art-craft it had enjoyed in the centuries before, for example.
Technology can cause other sorts of skill decay or atrophy, of course. It can also disseminate propaganda and pornography more widely and quickly (but the gospel can be spread more widely and quickly, too).
Recently, I watched a video (A Return to Grace: Luther’s Life and Legacy) about the life and impact of Luther: his famous 95 theses were being distributed in Spain about 10 days after he had nailed them to
the gates according to this video. That was lightning speed for that time, the late 15th -early 16th centuries. Luther was tech-savvy: he took advantage of the printing press and neither the Reformation nor the Counter-Reformation would likely have
happened without its invention. According to the video, at one time about 25% of all printed material in Europe was written by Luther.
Now it is true that the Reformation set loose complex forces that brought both good and evil to the world; I am definitely not trying to make the case that technology is value-positive, either. How technology
overall tips along a value neutral fulcrum (if there is such a thing) is more than I can judge.
Ruby
I meant “correct to think that technology is NOT value-neutral….” So sorry.