From Homo sapiens praedator to H. s. philosophus.

”Intelligent design”, ID, is out. But may soon ID by ”co-thinking Superbrains” be in?

Let us start with the most basic of all philosophical questions: Whence, from where do we come?

Judge John E. Jones III in Dover, Pennsylvania, USA, recently decided that we do not come from any “intelligent design”. We come from blind biological evolution. That is what the Pennsylvania schools should teach, the judge decided. (see http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/.)

I personally agree. Behind my beloved parents, in my family album, I also have chimpanzees, dogs, rats and mice. Modern genome research has shown that these, too, are my forefathers. My latest book, in Swedish, has the title: “Memoirs by an Inflated Bacteria”. This is a scientifically correct way of introducing myself. Which does not exclude the possibility that the first bacteria was created by God.

Most people are interested in the origin of life. The “creator” of the Capri Philosophical Park is also interested in the origin of life, but especially in the origin of life for those nine tenth of humanity who have come after 1700. In that year the globe had less than 650 million human inhabitants. 300 years later we are more than 6,500 millions, ten times as many.

This tenfolding of mankind surely is a miracle. About six million years have passed since we left the chimpanzees behind us. 300 years in 6,000,000 is as 1 in 20,000. That is, in the latest one single 20,000-part of our existence as non-chimps we have created the daily bread necessary for ten times as many fellowmen and -women than our forefathers succeeded to do in the 19,999 previous 20,000-parts. It is as if you had baked equally much bread in one day as you had done in all the days of the fifty preceding years!

This is, I insist, a miracle! How do we explain it? It surely does require a special “whence?” or an answer to the question: “From where did these six new billions get their daily bread?”

Like Judge Jones my answer is that we must go to blind natural evolution. It has lately created what I call “co-thinking Superbrains”. These new organisms are the ones who have produced the bread that has fed the new billions and thus permitted them to live. At least so I believe!

Just like your own brain unites billions of cells or neurons into one individual thinker, the Superbrains unite thousands, even millions of individual human brains into co-thinking networks or Superbrains. The three most common types I have baptized into Supercerebrum religiosum, politicum and  oeconomicum. (Readers of Swedish can study the book-on-line above, Superhjärnornas kamp from 1996 or the Inflated Bacteria book from 2003, p. 189.)

In the competition, or the “arms race”, for survival between them, it is these growing units who have created all those weapons, all those tools, all those productivity-increasing inventions in the agricultural sector and all these gadgets which make life easy and pleasant for the rich and which, at the end of the line, also give bread to the poor.

Some seventy million new human beings in this year – a new Italy - testify to the truth of this saying!

My explanation for this miracle of life is not to be found in any metaphysical “intelligent design”. We are the result of nature’s sex urge in combination with a blind Darwinian competition between co-thinking Supercerebrums.  By recombining the most intelligent individuals out of the given global Mendelian material, these organisms have created the miraculous flow of ever more daily bread.

This is the good side of it. But, is there also another? “Whither”, the second part of the classical philosophical question, to where do these Superbrains now take us?

This is what might be contemplated in the Philosophical Park, on Capri or here, on its website. The process of natural selection surely continues, but now between these Superbrains. Unfortunately, it sometimes also seems to follow the same old, blind and brutal Darwinian laws, ruling the behaviour of wolves and hyenas.

Does this blind struggle, as we sometimes fear, also have a truly bad side? Might for instance the unlimited desire for luxury drive us towards ecological disasters? Can the already absurd and growing gaps in wealth and power lead the lucky ones to such an arrogance that they provoke the unlucky ones into new cycles of envious hate, revolutions, terror and tyranny? And may our leaders really be so primitive still, that they even can take us towards a final war of atomic annihilation?

Or will mankind, lest such things might happen, by some conscious “intelligent design” finally be able to modify and guide the Darwinian evolution into one single peaceful “co-thinking Superbrain”, acting as a good Father for each and everyone of its global fellow-citizens?

Utopian? Perhaps. Problems do exist! But I am anyway optimistic. Because in the new book on Zoopolitology, which I am writing on this very website, I hope to show that much of the tragedies in our world are based on a faulty world view which could now be corrected. The old one has been useful for those of us who have survived until now. But with today’s weapons it is turning suicidal.

A new “Mendelian” world view should be capable of helping us. Such a “Weltanschauung” is the unavoidable companion to modern genetic research. If handled with responsibility by the elites it should, indeed, give mankind a chance to “muddle through” all our problems and, in spite of their seriousness, also look forward to a better and more peaceful future.

Dear Visitor, such are some of my thoughts behind this Philosophical Park. But if you do not want to trouble your brain with such crazy questions, you are most welcome just to go up to the King’s Benches and, without worrying about who created it, simply enjoy the beauty of Nature and of your own existence!

 Welcome to visit the Capri Philosophical Park !

  Gunnar A-K

 www.philosophicalpark.org