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CHAPTER IV
Tokyo or Johannesburg that means we ll be places in
minutes, not hours. It won t be long before we look
at each other while we talk on the phone. Right now,
you can reach some people anywhere they re never
 away, if they don t want to be. I m just talking about
the technology we have, not the technology that s com-
ing. Maybe we ll fly to work in our  cars ! Maybe we ll
press buttons to shop well, we already can do that. Is
there a point that we ll reach when we ll be over-
whelmed, when our bodies, our brains, say  no, it s
more than we can take? I guess things come just slow
enough the new technology for us to get used to the
latest breakthrough. But I wonder whether our ability
to invent and discover won t outreach, surpass our abil-
ity to live with what we ve done [built, designed, and
manufactured].
 I guess if we try to imagine what it ll be like a couple
of centuries from now, or at the start of the fourth mil-
lennium, we should try to think about our limits as well
as our ability to overcome limits: I mean, the difference
between what we can do with our brains in the way of
figuring things out and building technology that will
take full advantage of what we ve figured out [on the
one hand] and [on the other hand] what our brains can
 take. I mean, I can imagine some neurophysiologist
discovering why we need to sleep, what sleep does for
the brain, and then discovering some substance that  re-
places sleep do you see what I mean? and then we d
all be strutting around, telling each other that we ve just
added on a third of our lives to our  living time, be-
cause sleep isn t necessary any more. Just think of that!
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WHERE WE ARE HEADED
You re shaking your head and smiling, but that could
be happening sometime in the future and then time
itself will change: we ll be living so much longer, and
we ll be awake so much longer. I wonder how it will
affect us, the way we are, not the way we live, or is this
kind of question, this kind of thinking, going to be ob-
solete, because we ll be able to  get rid of it,  control
what we think as well as control  craziness,  bad
thoughts, depression and anxiety?
We are now both speechless and, in a way, exhausted
with respect to our ability to think further about what
has just been thought! Her mind (I do think) has raced
so far into the future, tried to imagine so vividly where
we are headed, that we have gone beyond our practical
ability to fill in the blanks, so to speak catch up with
the fantasy by dealing concretely with the details, the
day-to-day consequences of such an outcome. Can we
eventually  program our behavior, so that our emo-
tions recede in significance to our cognitive life, as it
connects with technology, becomes not only the heart
of what we do, but the very essence of who we are? This
medical student was worried about being  lost, and
as she kept telling me that, I recalled Walker Percy s
phrase  lost in the cosmos, a title he gave to a book of
essays he wrote, but also a phrase he used to describe
our sense of our situation, our condition: this creature
of consciousness who through language tries to compre-
hend the mysteries of time and space, those two infini-
ties in which we for a while are immersed. But one day
words such as  consciousness and  language will also
yield their meaning to biological investigation, and who
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can know for sure what the implications and the results
of such inquiry will be for us; that is, how our sense of
the world, and of our ourselves, and how our capacity
to connect with others, to communicate, to ask and to
tell, will all be altered!
As that student prepares to leave my university office,
she asks me, casually, whether I  still believe in psycho-
analysis. She is smiling, knows the irony of the inquiry,
given our hour-long leap into both the darkness and
light of the time ahead of us. I respond with a demurral,
insist that psychoanalysis is not something to be  be-
lieved in ; rather, it is one more way of seeing things in
a long chain of such that extends over the many cen-
turies, millennia of our thinking, reflecting life. But
then, she shrewdly amplifies her question and, by more
than implication, corrects me. She wants me to think of
psychoanalysis as a  metaphor, rather than a psycho-
logical theory, or kind of  therapy. A metaphor for
what?  For people trying to get to know each other, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]