By Nathan Gardels at Noema: If, through our discoveries, we humans could attain knowledge of the inner truth of how the world works, we would possess the encompassing wisdom of all Being, just like the gods.
In Goethe’s masterpiece, “Faust,” the Earth Spirit describes its omniscience and omnipresence:
In Life’s wave, in action’s storm,
I float, up and down,
I blow, to and fro!
Birth and the tomb,
An eternal flow,
A woven changing,
A glow of Being.
Over Time’s quivering loom intent,
Working the Godhead’s living garment.
When Faust says how close he feels to this “Active Spirit” as a being created “in the image of the Godhead” — a “peer” — the Spirit mockingly reminds the protagonist that human knowing is not divine knowledge. He is not like the gods because of the limits of what he doesn’t know. “You are equal to the spirit you understand. Not me!”
(Note: Various translations render this phrase as “You are like the spirit you understand. Not me,” or “Peer of the spirit you comprehend. Not mine.”)
In Goethe’s tale, Faust’s quest for knowledge, to be equal to what his striving unveils, is what distinguishes the human condition. But the hubris of “the Superhuman,” as the Earth Spirit calls him, seeking to transgress limits set by nature that passeth all human understanding only invites a tragic fate — his “greatest fortunes ruined” in “all the fullness of his doing.”
Some have read the “Faustian bargain” with Mephistopheles to acquire knowledge beyond his reach as a metaphoric deal with the devil where the soul is sold in exchange for the pernicious power of technological prowess.
An amateur botanist, Goethe was writing at the advent of modern science and toward the end of the Romantic Era in the late 18th century. With all the disenchanting advances of the 21st century, from artificial intelligence to synthetic biology and quantum physics, that bring us closer to grasping the secrets of the universe, is the admonition of the Earth Spirit outmoded, or more relevant than ever?
When Men Become Gods
A few years ago, I raised this issue with Yuval Noah Harari in a conversation about his book “Homo Deus.”
His reply:
‘Faust,’ like ‘Frankenstein’ or ‘The Matrix,’ still has a humanist perspective. These are myths that try to assure humans that there is never going to be anything better than you. If you try to create something better than you, it will backfire and not succeed.
The basic structure of all these morality tales is: Act I, humans try to create utopia by some technological wizardry; Act II, something goes wrong; Act III, dystopia. This is very comforting to humans because it tells them it is impossible to go beyond you. The reason I like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World so much is that it plays with the scenario: Act I, we try to create a utopia; Act II, it succeeds. That is far more frightening ― something will come that is better than before.
Pressing the obvious point, I asked the Israeli historian if he worried that “going beyond you” through AI wouldn’t create a world even worse than a brave new one where human autonomy and dignity are extinguished.
“That is an open question,” Harari replied. “The basic humanist tendency is to think that way. But maybe not. … Going back to the Earth Spirit and Faust, humans are now about to do something that natural selection never managed to do, which is to create inorganic life ― AI. If you look at this in the cosmic terms of 4 billion years of life on Earth, not even in the short term of 50,000 years or so of human history, we are on the verge of breaking out of the organic realm. Then we can go to the Earth Spirit and say, ‘What do you think about that? We are equal to the spirit we understand, not you’.”
Ambiguously, he concluded, “Human history began when men created gods. It will end when men become gods.”
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