How We Will Reprogram Our Physical and Perceptual Reality

If you are not already aware of this fact, our perception of reality is not actual reality. Instead, our sensory organs allow us to essentially render a simple framework of reality. Think of it as an outline, rather than an actual, detailed picture. And historically, this has benefitted us very greatly, as we are instantly aware of any sudden movements, physical objects in our path, noises, etc. Evolutionarily, over time, our bodies have determined and refined the most advantageous perceptual qualities which ensure our survival. If we could actually perceive all of reality, that is, all of the electromagnetic pulses, energy transformations, wavelengths, radiation, etc., we would quickly become overwhelmed with constant arousal of our sensory systems. Because of this, our perceptual system filters out the things that we do not need.  In fact, at a recent TED conference, David Eagleman asserts that we are only actually able to perceive less than one-trillionth of actual physical reality. But because our species is not wired to sustain high levels of arousal for any significant period of time, our perceptual systems serve to filter out the things that we do not need. Thus, we only see what we really need to, in order to survive.

While this has worked perfectly fine throughout history, we are now entering into a new era. After taking a course my sophomore year, the psychology and biology of perception, my thinking on this subject began to expand significantly. Think about it: everything that we think, perceive, feel, all have evolutionary roots to which they are attributed. To illustrate this point more clearly, I will use my own biology as an example. I am a fairly short and skinny individual. In principle, historically, this would mean that I am more susceptible to predation by larger, stronger people. As a result of this, my body has perfectly adapted itself over time to accommodate my survival. Thus, I have very large eyes and I am highly neurotic, because these traits have allowed me to more quickly identify a potential threat. Further, I am very athletic and can run very fast, which allows me to evade the threat. Beyond that even, I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent individual (I would give credentials to validate this but it would seem like I'm gloating when that is not my intention), therefore my cognitive processing has also been adapted to ensure my survival. My ultimate point is this: our physical, mental, and emotional capabilities all stem from an extremely lengthy refining process of evolution. Everything that we perceive or feel has roots in our evolution, and has been very slowly, but efficiently, edited over many generations. 

However, we live in a new day, where these things are no longer necessary, as human progress has afforded us the ability to no longer have to rely on these personal traits in order to ensure our survival. And, for example, as I mentioned that I am fairly neurotic, this leads to increased stress and anxiety, neither of which is either fun or necessary to have to deal with in the modern world, and they serve to inhibit a person's potential to be successful rather than enhance it. 

While our evolutionary systems have been sufficient in the past to produce feelings which consequently indicate our needs, it is nowhere near perfect. For example, our ability to feel hungry indicates to us that we must eat in order to continue surviving, however, as we are all too familiar with, we are unable to detect at what point we are overindulging. This happens because this is the historical foundation upon which our species was created; we are programmed to associate things linearly. So when you are eating and it feels good, our brain associates the two as being connected. More food must mean better feeling, right? No, because, at some point, which our body does not tell us, there is significantly diminishing returns of the benefits of eating. 

This leads to our tendency to indulge too much into our desires for that gratification, most often taking the form of food, water, and sex, because these are some of the most gratifying experiences that we can engage in. Because of the fact that we are hardwired with the idea that feeling good indicates that we are doing something right, in reality, after a certain point of necessity, we are simply increasing our appetite for these things in the long-term. There also becomes decreasing gratification when we overindulge, leading to an inability to reach that same feeling that we had experienced before. This concept is easily understood by anyone familiar with alcoholism. 

Because of all of the aforementioned reasons, I believe that it is time that we reprogram the human body, in the same way that we reprogram software updates. Only, instead of binary code, the language of the software is our genetic code. Currently, with the advent of Big-Pharma, we are simply putting a band-aid on the mental, physical, or emotional tolls that we have to deal with on a daily basis, as a result of our evolutionarily determined traits. And these band-aids have proven to have their own problems, as the side-effects of many of these pharmaceuticals can often outweigh their initial benefits. 

Reprogramming Ourselves to Enhance Our Reality

As you likely already know, other animals evolutionary processes have utilized different perceptual characteristics than humans. There are countless examples to highlight this point, and you probably can think of at least a couple off the top of your head. Snakes have infrared vision, dolphins have SONAR (which is how we learned to create the technology of SONAR), dogs have heightened smell and hearing, and the list goes on (check out this link for a simple, detailed list of many other extraordinary animal sensory systems). 

Enabling Ourselves to Physically "Feel" Big Data

Today, we live in an increasingly quantified world of Big Data, all of which can be very tedious and meticulous to analyze and organize any sense of meaning from without devoting a significant amount of time and energy. 

David Eagleman is seeking to change this, by allowing us to "feel" live, streaming data, so that we are able to effectively utilize it without the need for any focused, strenuous need for cognition. He even demonstrates in the video that a man who has been deaf his entire life was able to utilize the technology in order to feel words, based on a pattern of vibrations. 

To me, these sorts of things are absolutely fascinating. Check out the video using the link below.

Link to 2015 TED talk given by David Eagleman on enhancing our perceptual capacity: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans#t-1030531

Reprogramming Ourselves To Eliminate Disease

Instead of bandaging these issues, we should instead seek to fix the cause of our unnecessary mental, physical, and emotional suffering. And, after spending a few years going to university in Chicago, the alleviation of human suffering has long been a primary concern of mine, as I bore witness to some of the most intense suffering in our country today. All of this has led to my fascination in the field of Gene Therapy. Gene therapy is a field that has the potential to eradicate human disease. Diseases are caused by a network of genes which have began to no longer work properly; thus, gene therapy is dedicated to replacing these faulty genes with synthetic, working genes.

Incorporating Our Physical Self With Technology
If you are lucky (and by that I mean wealthy) enough to afford Google's $1000 glasses, you have already equipped yourself with the first piece of technology which seeks to expand our perceptual awareness with the aid of technology. With Google Glass, you are able to seamlessly interact with the digital world in your physical reality. While I am admittedly unfamiliar with the exact functionality of Google Glass, I know that, at some point in the near future, it will be able to recognize an individual's face and bring up their social media profile, give you their background information, and countless other seemingly intrusive things.

If this makes you apprehensive of the future of technology, there's only one thing that you can really do about it: get used to it. Ray Kurzweil, one of my personal favorite people to listen to speak, as he is incredibly bright and very well articulates his ideas, has a track record spanning 30 years of accurate predictions of the future. That might be one of the reasons that he is CEO of Google (on the contrary, it could be that he has been correct because he has access to the Biggest Data in the history of humanity, but either way).

It would be futile for me to attempt to articulate his ideas here, because he articulates them so well himself. Check out the link below for his discussion on the impending Singularity. It's absolutely brilliant.

Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzWLqxQptnY

Ray Kurzweil on Immortality by 2045 (lengthy but fantastic speech)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlRTbl_IB-s


Update March 28th, 2015
While reading the comments of an article discussing Stephen Hawking's thoughts on the next stage of human evolution, I read a comment that I found to be particularly interesting, and thought it related to this post:

"Whether you believe in the concensus physical and biological sciences or your roots are of a more spiritual nature, you should agree that we human beings are fundamentally "information". The genetic data which was our foundation and the epigenetic (non-DNA affecting) environmental data which has formed us into the person we are can be modeled by a computer system. Yes it's the Matrix for real, and it's coming within most of our lifetimes. Prepare to live within our collective imagination."

Click here for the link to the article.