EMPATHY
When scientists realize that they have failed to produce technological advances that improve or assure the most important of our brain’s abilities, empathy, it will start to allow us to accept the actual limitations of our bodies and enable us to accept our physicality.
That the body is our biggest single problem is no doubt. What we have to do to keep it fed, sheltered, clothed and reproducing has shaped everything we have invented, built and killed for.
We are blessed with a mind of extraordinary powers and we are cursed because that mind is housed in a less than extraordinary container. This has been a source of great discomfort to us all along. We have continually invented more powerful devices to enhance our sensory perceptions. We now have eyesight that can see objects billions of light years away. We can see color spectrums way beyond our natural eye’s ability to do so. We can see within as well as out. We can hear almost as far as we can see and we have learned how to throw our voices such great distances that people around the world can hear us. We can fly and we can move about underwater as if we lived there. We have tended to preference transportation and communication over our other sense experiences: touch, smell, and taste. (It probably bears looking into this discrepancy as to why this should be.)
And, of course, there is mortality. Ah, Death, you son of a bitch. You and your brothers, Disease and Aging, have tormented us since we became aware of Time. And we have worked like crazy trying to develop ways of extending Time so as to hold off the inevitable. We have even broken down Time into such miniscule units as to fool ourselves into believing it is endless.
Most scientific advancements focus on rapid repair of malfunctioning parts, most currently using robotic replacements or ever-more precise chemical interventions, or ways of expanding the sensory capabilities through technologies implanted in the brain.
One could say that these "game changers" are technologies for body enhancement. Lower forms of this techno-wish are what fuel the beauty industry.
Leave it to the Scientists, so caught up in their research, to miss the big picture. Either they take for granted that the reasons that motivate the questioning and the technologies they develop will not only contain its original impetus but will make it explicit. Or they believe that technological development will transcend its own impetus and render those expressed needs insignificant.
Will new systems for global education address the content of its courses? If the body can be made better by robotics will it enhance our ability to experience empathy?
The way we feel about the body does not get acknowledged in the way we think about the body. We fetish-ize the idea of systemic and technological developments geared towards dealing with the problems of fixing our bodies but have only managed to obscure the emotional and psychological
