Hasta La Vista, Baby!

By MIKE GOMEZ

Unlike many of our cohabitants on this planet, we human beings are not endowed with impressive natural hardware like tooth or claw to inflict serious damage on other living creatures. Yet, no other creature comes close to the savagery displayed by some human beings. With some rare exceptions like the perpetual lion and hyena blood feud, humans are the only creatures that purposefully kill other species without the intention of eating them. 
     At the same time, humankind is also bestowed with the great responsibility as the species with the power and, hopefully, the will to make a positive change in the world. We are the ones who have mastered fire, harnessed the forces of wind, water, earth, and even the nuclear furnace of the cosmos. While we could be the meanest suckers from hell, we could also be the most wondrous angels of the earth.
     What makes people good or bad? Such query has been the subject of sociological, psychological, philosophical, and moral scrutiny for as long as humans have had the faculties to reflect on their own existence. Hard science had sought to pinpoint clear-cut and replicable causes for human behavior, whether in the form of brain physiology, past experiences, chemical receptors, or genetically-carried traits. 
     Personality, behavior, and the propensity to do good or evil are regarded as attributes that could either be developed through education and environment, or be inescapably innate, whether due to biological heredity, intergenerational lineage, or the very nature of the human species. Psychiatrists perpetually teeter on various fulcrum points between the two schools of thought-engendering in the process the biopsychosocial model of regarding the human mind. Psychotherapy and counseling can never wholly replace or be supplanted by empirical science that deals with chemicals, electrical impulses, and mechanical functions of the biological brain. 
     Yet, the research along these lines seems more exciting, particularly now when the idea of artificial intelligence seems less and less heretical. But the problem is that no laboratory or engineering team can come close to developing either hardware or software that can vaguely approximate the most rudimentary capabilities of the amazingly complex human brain. 
Animal studies and invasive exploratory cranial procedures on test animals have succeeded in isolating areas in the brain that correspond to specific sensations, actions, and behavior. Electrodes affixed to specific spots on the brain of an animal have been able to conduct electrical impulses to make it experience desired brain functions. 
     A gruesome demonstration of this breakthrough featured a laboratory rat given access to a push switch wired to a pleasure center in its brain. The rat never tired from inducing the pleasurable feeling, and kept on pushing the switch-till it died from exhaustion. 
     Invasive procedures in human brains have also been effective in altering behavior. Some physicians have rekindled the interest in that abominable act called lobotomy. 
     Chemical approaches to altering human behavior are all the rage in pharmaceutical circles-with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors taking the world by storm. Much closer to home, Sen. Loi Ejercito brazened out the potential flurry of jokes that could be generated around her husband when she proposed a penal measure against sex offenders in the form of castration. Dr. Ejercito was recommending the procedure not merely as a deterrent, but as an endocrinological intervention that has been proved to work not only in animals, but in selected men throughout history.
     The latest technology that deigns to defy conventional psychiatry is the implantable chip or probe meant not merely to monitor soldiers or prisoners' locations, but permit the wearer to interact with a technological environment. To date, the self-experimenting guinea pig, British scientist Kevin Warwick, has done little more with his implants than switch room lights on and off. He aims, however, to transform himself, and God knows who else, into cybernetic organisms, or those refugees from Joe's Garage known as "cyborgs." 
     While science fiction is fraught with numerous plots involving humanity's struggle against machines that seek to overthrow their biological creators, Warwick seems to even herald such overthrow as he acknowledges the advantages of man becoming more like a machine. A populace equipped like this Borg-Collective would no longer be plagued by crimes, violation of laws, dishonesty, or other social ills since the central command simply has to prohibit it by digital edict. 
     But that would be like placing the cart before the horse, as it would mean having to destroy humanity in order to save it. Alas, our species has already begun to careen down the slippery slope as the idea of making everyone electronically wired to each other has already manifested itself in the form of our ubiquitous, always-within-earshot telephone handsets.