It has become a more and more popular idea to amend or replace living organisms with technology. More so, living things are increasingly managed and optimized with methods derived from technological fields. That affects plants, animals and also humans. This makes philosophy and epistemology so relevant today. It is one of the issues that started my interest in philosophy.
That something is wrong with the idea of managing living things like machines has become more and more obvious for me in the past. There is a lack of understanding what life actually is, and how it should evolve. As a result, both our society and most individuals lack orientation and get lost. There is a high demand for purpose, tasks are given to us and we adopt them, often including a solution approach and seemingly clear targets.
Here and there we can observe that sub-areas are optimized regarding a certain key figure, without much consideration for the impact on anything around them. This happens not only with living organisms, but generally. Often we use a superficial concept, barely attached to reality, to decide where we are going, and to determine how the world as a whole is affected by it. This is then dressed up scientifically with paid studies.
When a goal is translated into the optimization of a single key figure, which must be calculated in some way, then human creativity will be used to optimize this number. All possibilities to affect the number will come to use, and the goal itself will get out of sight quickly. Instead, the number of rules and measures for optimizing the key figure keeps growing. You may decide yourself whether this happens in an effort to get closer to the actual goal again, or is a result of other interests making use of this optimization process. At some point maybe someone will take stock and notice what anyone who took a closer look had already seen: the optimization of the key figure did not help to achieve the goal at all or it did so insufficiently, and for an unnecessarily high price. That we do it like this anyway could be a result of our preference for solutions that can be measured and mathematically described. An assessment or a gut feeling is considered subjective and not scientific. So when solving a problem, we come up with a way of getting a number that we can then optimize as we do in control engineering. Unfortunately, that is usually not the best approach for complex issues and especially not for living organisms.
What position each individual takes in this situation also depends on how much we use our ability to observe and find truth. It would not be helpful to demand an identical position that must be right for everyone. It is my wish that everyone finds freedom of thought and makes use of it. The decision to walk down a path must be done voluntarily.
Today, many efforts around health and society are based on a materialistic worldview. This dictates the approach that gets chosen when we need to come up with a strategy. Methods that are not based on a measurable change in a physical body cannot be taken serious, get excluded or even penalized. With a materialistic worldview, we must judge such methods as ineffective, as a fraud. The assumptions of this worldview logically result in the conclusion that those methods cannot work and are not worth any further attention. However, with logic we can justify anything, as long as we start with suitable assumptions that we refuse to question. At this point, materialism is standing on vey loose ground. The assumptions of this worldview are not as untouchable as their popularity can make us believe.
The development of today’s materialistic worldview is a great and important achievement. We learned a lot in the process. We established a good method. We used and trained our logical thinking, our intellect was educated and sharpened. The description of the physical world is a perfect task to achieve this, because we can observe it, manipulate it, and observe it again. It always gives us measurable feedback. That way we get a good model, a good understanding of reality. But we cannot explain everything with this approach. The laws of physics can describe some activity of a living body, but cannot explain its existence. Neither the origin of life nor the growth of a single plant can be traced back to the forces between the smallest particles. Our understanding, our worldview will remain incomplete if we do not learn to observe and research beyond the physical world. Only then can we learn how the living things come into existence.
As soon as we begin to observe life, and stop treating ourselves, our society and other living things like machines, we will get a significant improvement in both physical and mental health. Technology and engineering can certainly get improved further. But we should take care not to completely forget about us and about life in that process.