Читать книгу The Meaning of Thought - Markus Gabriel - Страница 10

The human being is the animal that doesn’t want to be one. This is because, at some point or other, it began to wonder who or what it really is. Insofar as we have an implicit or explicit image of ourselves as human beings, we also make claims about the nature of the good life. Ethics^* is the discipline that asks what a good life looks like. It is therefore based upon anthropology, the discipline tasked with figuring out what precisely distinguishes the human both from other animals and from the lifeless expanses of the inanimate universe.¹

Our image of the human being is closely intertwined with our values. A moral value is a yardstick for human behaviour. It distinguishes between actions that ought to be performed – the good ones – and those that ought not to be carried out – the bad, morally deficient ones. Every value system should also have room for actions that, at least in most cases, are neither good nor bad (driving on the left-hand side of the road rather than the right-hand side, twiddling your thumbs, taking a deep breath, buttering bread, and so on), as well as for actions that are utterly unacceptable – that is, evil (torturing of children, for example, or poison gas attacks on civilian populations).

Not every morally wrong action is automatically evil, because not all morally wrong action causes far-reaching harm to the value system itself – think of those occasional white lies told to protect a friend or of cheating at a board game. Evil, by contrast, completely undermines the value system in which it arises. Thus, the prototypical sadistic totalitarian dictator, of which the previous century has provided us with all too many examples, subverts his own value system. Unable to trust anyone or anything, he has to create a total surveillance apparatus.

For as long as we remain mired in deep uncertainty as to who or what we are as human beings, we will not be able to calibrate our value systems properly. If the very nature of the human is in question, ethics too is at stake. This doesn’t mean, I hasten to point out, that other living beings (including plants) or even lifeless, inanimate matter are morally irrelevant – far from it. But, in order to determine what we owe both to ourselves and to the rest of the reality we affect, we have to ask ourselves the question of who we really are and, in the light of the truth of who we are, who we want to be in the future.²

Unfortunately, it is very difficult, impossible even, to determine who the human being is from a neutral standpoint. For it is necessarily a matter of self-determination to attempt to determine what the human actually is. This self-determination cannot simply consist in naming natural facts, because the human is a specifically minded animal, where human mindedness (or Geist, as we say in my neck of the woods) is the capacity to lead a life in the light of a representation of who the human being is. More concretely, this capacity finds expression whenever and wherever we develop stories and images of our lives and of the conditions under which we deem them a success. We thereby aim to be happy, but without being able to give anything like a universally valid account of what happiness is.

From a philosophical point of view, happiness designates nothing other than a successful life. There are no universally valid standards for this; neither is there a set of principles of which we might somehow draw up a definitive catalogue. At best, we can state the framework conditions that are valid for any successful pursuit of happiness – namely, human rights. Yet this does not mean that philosophy or any other discipline could come up with a recipe for happiness.

Today, however, the concept of the human being hangs in the balance. The digital age has already brought about a world in which what was previously the privilege of humans – that is, solving problems in an intelligent fashion – is now carried out, in a range of situations at least, with far greater speed and efficiency by the machines that we have built in order to make our life and survival less burdensome.

Ever since the initial flourishing of philosophical thought in Athens, where it developed simultaneously with the first democracy, one of its central tasks has been to point out confusions circulating in the marketplace of ideas. Today’s marketplace of ideas is the internet, the central medium of the digital age. The slogan of this book is: think first, digitalize second. This is just a version of Kant’s famous Enlightenment motto: ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’, but tailored to our own times. This is an urgent necessity in an age in which global digital propaganda systems, with their continual bombardments of newsflashes and posts, hurl our thinking into turmoil and confusion.

The first key thesis of this book states that thought is a sense, just like our sense of hearing, touch and taste, our sense of balance, and everything else that we nowadays count as belonging to the human sensory system. This thesis runs counter to the now widespread idea that thinking is basically a matter of information processing and therefore a procedure which can essentially be re-created in silicon or some other non-living material. In short: computers ultimately think just as little as do the good old ring binders familiar from our analogue bureaucracy. Programs are simply systems of data management, which we can use to solve problems far quicker than we ever could without their help: booking flights, solving equations, translating foreign languages (more or less adequately), writing books or sending emails.

At the same time, I want to argue that our human intelligence is itself a case of artificial intelligence – indeed, the only real one we happen to be acquainted with. Human thought is not a natural process governed by the laws of nature, like the dynamics we find in the sun or in sandstorms. Unlike the moon’s orbiting of the Earth or the expansion of the solar system, we cannot understand our thinking if we abandon mentalistic vocabulary – i.e. language designed to articulate the meaning of thought – which typically includes words such as intelligence, thought, belief, hope, desire, intention and the rest.

The human being is the creature who is conscious of this very fact. And, accordingly, it orients its life around its ability to make targeted interventions into the conditions of its own life and survival. This is why humans elaborate sophisticated technologies in the form of systems for improving and simplifying their survival conditions. The human is thus networked with technology in its very self-understanding. In my view, the deep root of this interconnection lies in the various ways in which we are the producers of our own intelligence. The ways in which we think are formed by socio-economic framework conditions that human civilizations have been developing and transforming over millennia. This is how our artificial intelligence comes into being: by way of the self-determination of our human mindedness.³

Our mindedness, our self-determination as human beings, was first set down in written form many millennia ago. Before the development of writing, our ancestors passed on various possibilities for self-determination in other media (such as oral traditions, artworks and rituals). These traditions continue to shape us, because they confront us with the question of who we want to be in the future.

Over the millennia, human life has revolved around the question of who or what the human being really is. One of the oldest known answers is that the human being is a rational animal. It is to Aristotle that we owe the corresponding designation of the human as zoon logon echon, the animal that – depending on translation and interpretation – possesses language, thought or reason.

Yet it is precisely this (supposedly) distinguishing characteristic and privilege of us human beings which the digital age brings into question. The Italian philosopher Luciano Floridi (b. 1964) goes so far as to see contemporary developments in AI research as a deep affront to our sense of our humanity, comparable to such seismic revolutions in our self-image as the heliocentric worldview, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious.⁴

Of course, it has long been the case that the computers we carry about with us pretty much all the time – such as smartphones, smart watches and tablets – can outsmart most human beings in simulated situations. Programs can play chess better than humans, beat us at Go and at good old Atari games. They are better travel agents, can search the entire internet at lightning speed, immediately report the temperature in every corner of the globe, and find patterns in gigantic data sets which would take humans an age even to notice. As if that weren’t enough, they also carry out mathematical proofs that even the very best mathematicians can understand only with considerable effort.

In the light of these advances, scientists, futurologists, philosophers and politicians like to engage in speculation about how long it will be before the infosphere, as Floridi calls our digital environment, attains a kind of planetary consciousness and liberates itself from its dependence on us humans. Some fear that a digital worstcase scenario, known as the singularity or superintelligence, will occur in the not too distant future. This position has found a prominent salesman in Raymond Kurzweil (b. 1948), himself inheriting ideas from pioneers of AI research such as Marvin Minsky (1927–2016). Even such famous personalities as Bill Gates (b. 1955) and Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) have warned of a fast approaching intelligence explosion, in which intelligent machines will take control and potentially exterminate humanity.

Others think all of this is only so much humbug, believing that the infosphere is no more intelligent than our shoes. One of the pioneers of the philosophy of artificial intelligence, the American philosopher John Rogers Searle (b. 1932), has long been arguing that the computers manufactured by humans cannot really think and that the likelihood of their ever attaining consciousness has not increased a bit over the last decades, that it continues to lie at exactly 0 per cent.

The truth certainly lies somewhere in the middle. The infosphere and the digital revolution aren’t leading us towards a dystopian future, such as the world depicted in the Terminator films or in novels such as Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island; nor does the latest leap forward in technological progress lead towards the solution to all of humanity’s problems, contrary to the hopes that the German tech entrepreneur Frank Thelen (b. 1975) expressed in a dialogue between the two of us in the German Philosophie Magazin.⁵ We will not solve the impending crises of food and water shortages through better algorithms and faster computers. Thinking we will is really to get things back to front: it is technological advancement in the digital industries – i.e. attaining higher computing power through more efficient hardware – which contributes to resource scarcity and world hunger – and not only because of the alacrity with which we bin our ‘old’ smartphones and tablets so that we can buy the latest versions with their ever higher processing power. Computers do not solve our moral problems; they aggravate them. We mine the earth in poorer parts of the world to extract rare metals for our smartphones, use plastics for our hardware, and waste untold quantities of energy in order to keep digital reality running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Every click and every email uses energy. We tend to notice this only indirectly, but that doesn’t make things any better.

To be sure, technological progress can mean rapid improvements in medical science and living conditions in industrialized countries. But, at the same time, we are currently experiencing the collateral damage wrought by the digital transformation of our infrastructure, in the form of cyber-warfare, fake news, large-scale cyber-attacks and the rest. And that’s not to mention the varieties of social alienation caused by social media’s erosion of the distinctions between public and private, between times when we’re available and times when we’re not. Then there are the obviously very real phenomena of phone-tapping scandals (in the Obama era); Twitter propaganda (in the Trump era); bots that undermine democracy; terror attacks hatched online; a terrifyingly extensive surveillance apparatus in the People’s Republic of China, which monitors and sanctions the population’s online behaviour; and so on and so on.

In order to untangle the conceptual knot, I will be working in what follows with two anthropological principles, both of which will come up time and again. I mentioned the first anthropological principle at the outset: the human being is the animal that doesn’t want to be one. This principle explains the presently widespread confusions that go by the names of post-humanism and transhumanism. Both movements are built on bidding farewell to the human being and welcoming the cyborg, a hybrid combining both animal-human and technological components.

Post- and transhumanism, both especially rampant in California, propagate the view that the human being can be overcome, surpassed. The place of the human is to be occupied by the infamous Übermensch, first conjured up by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). In a society in which an ever-expanding collection of superheroes has become a staple of popular culture, in which Hollywood propagates the fantasy that we might shake off the earthly shackles that tie down us normal mortals and propel ourselves into a superior future, it is no accident that technology and scientific research find themselves in thrall to the Nietzschean fantasy of the Übermensch.

In this connection, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) reminds us of the notorious rumour that Walt Disney tried to have himself cryogenically frozen, hoping to be awakened one day in order to witness the technological wonders of the future.⁶ One of the main problems animals have to face is that they are mortal. Everything mortals do revolves around life and death, whereby we find life for the most part good and death for the most part bad. For a long time now, technology has been bound up with the fantasy of overcoming death on Earth. Today, this (pathological) wish finally to discard our animality and to become an inforg, a cyborg consisting purely of digital information, affects every level of society.

If we can dissolve ourselves into information, it is seemingly possible to install our minds onto some superior hardware, to upload consciousness and our personality onto digital devices. This idea is brilliantly explored in the American TV series Westworld. The series is set in a futuristic theme park called Westworld, in which visitors encounter robots indistinguishable from humans. The humans can use them entirely for their own pleasure. In the second series (spoiler alert …) it transpires that the firm operating the theme park extracts behavioural data from the visitors, which they then use to perfect the robots. Behind the entire enterprise is the mind of Westworld’s creator, which has been uploaded onto a server and plans to co-opt one of the perfected robot bodies, thus merging inforg and cyborg. But this whole fantasy could never in fact be realized. Let’s not forget that the TV series Westworld does not show us a single robot. What we actually see are human actors playing robots who at some point begin to play humans! This is the reality displayed by Westworld: the human wish to become a robot who becomes human.

To combat this flight from reality, I make the case for an enlightened humanism. Enlightened humanism is based on an image of the human that, from the very outset, allows no room for doubt that everyone, whether foreigner, native, friend, neighbour, woman, child, man, coma patient or transsexual, counts as human in the full sense. This is important to emphasize, because the classical humanist positions developed since the Renaissance have usually, implicitly or even explicitly, taken white, European, adult, politically significant and well-to-do men as the standard of being human. Even Kant’s writings are unfortunately filled with racist and misogynistic assumptions, which is why in practice he denies people who were deeply foreign to him, such as the inhabitants of the southern hemisphere, their humanity, explaining for example how ‘humid warmth is beneficial to the robust growth of animals in general and, in short, this results in the Negro.’⁷ Yet Kant is by no means just a racist. He is above all a theorist of the universal dignity of human beings, which raises the question of how he could combine both sets of views in a single personality. The good news is that we enlightened humanists of the twenty-first century need not follow him, as we are the heirs of moral progress and of insights into the disastrous shortcomings of the first-wave enlightenment project – a project that was deeply implicated in other pathologies of modernity (such as colonialism). However, none of this entails that moral universalism is flawed, as one of the verdicts of universalism is precisely that colonialism, violent Eurocentrism, racism, and so on, are morally unacceptable forms of radical evil.

The second anthropological principle says that the human is a free, specifically minded animal (freies geistiges Lebewesen). This means that we humans can change ourselves by changing our image of what it means to be human. The specific freedom of the human mind lies in how our human life form is self-determining. We define our being human, and on the basis of our self-definitions we discover the moral values around which to orient our actions. Other animals have only a dim understanding of morality, and they certainly do not participate of their own accord in the enlightenment project of moral progress. There is absolutely no gender equality in most animal societies, and there is not even a hint of the notion that they should cooperate in order to help foster other species. Cooperation in the animal kingdom is typically a matter of symbiosis and not of rule-governed moral thought designed to enhance the living conditions of everyone. Lions do not consider becoming vegetarians, and we do not blame them for their culinary preferences, because we know that they lack a sufficiently explicit grasp of the standing possibility of moral insight and perfectibility.

This is not to say that humans always act as their values dictate, or even that there is a high probability that they will. Freedom means precisely being able to act in this way or that way – morally or immorally. Yet our freedom also means that we cannot do anything at all without regulating and directing our behaviour. In modernity, therefore, the ultimate horizon of our self-determination, the highest value, is given through our conception of the human. We no longer seek the highest value beyond the human being, in a divine sphere, but we look within ourselves. This does not mean that we are steered around by the voice of conscience; rather, it means that we can steer and control ourselves, by recognizing that we are all united in being human. In this way, modernity is oriented around humanity as the bearer of reason and, if it is to be consistent, naturally has to recognize the value of non-human life too. Enlightened humanism therefore also demands the recognition of animal rights and the careful cultivation of the environment, to sustain the conditions of human and animal life quite generally on our planet.

Nothing less than this already lies in the expression Homo sapiens, which was introduced by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus (1707–1778) in his Systema naturae. In Linnaeus’s classification, the human differs from all other life forms in being the creature subject to the Delphic oracle’s demand: ‘Nosce te ipsum, know thyself’.⁸ Wisdom (sapientia) is the capacity to determine oneself. The problem is that wisdom does not automatically entail that one does the right thing. This is why the Delphic oracle, whose dictum is quoted by Linnaeus, designated Socrates as the wisest of all men.⁹ For Socrates understood the structure of the oracle’s invocation: to the question of what the human being is, the answer is not fixed by pointing to any norm set by God, the gods or the cosmos; rather, it is determined solely by how we determine ourselves. We are condemned to be free, as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) put it, somewhat misleadingly.¹⁰

This book is an act of self-determination. Human self-determination occurs at two levels: at one level, what matters is that humans – whether we like it or not – are animals of a certain kind. It is only thanks to our being the animals we are that we are in a position to know reality in the first place. Cognition is not a process that takes place in some ethereal realm; it is one that is tied to ineliminable biological parameters. We are neither gods, nor angels, nor computer programs run on wetware, the slimy matter of our nervous systems. At another level, though, we are not just animals of a certain species. Unlike the ‘last pre-human mammals of evolution’, as the German poet Durs Grünbein (b. 1962) puts it, we are not ‘creatures halfway between humanity and the rest of the zoo’.¹¹ As minded beings who, thanks to language and reflection, have a particularly developed sense of thought, we humans are in contact with infinitely many immaterial realities.

As the American philosopher Saul Aaron Kripke (b. 1940) rightly notes, reality shouldn’t be confused with the ‘enormous scattered object that surrounds us’.¹² Reality as we know it is just not identical with the material-energetic system of the universe. The real is what we can be wrong about and what – for that very reason – we can grasp as it truly is. Our thinking belongs to reality. It is itself something real – just like our feelings, unicorns (in films such as The Last Unicorn), witches (in Goethe’s Faust), stomach aches, Napoleon, toilet bowls, Microsoft and the future. This was the idea I set out and defended at length in my book Why the World Does Not Exist.

Because of the globalization of commodity production and the digital interconnectedness of our news services, we are currently experiencing a dangerous ideological shift. By an ideology, I understand a distorted conception of the human that fulfils a socio-economic function, usually the implicit justification of an ultimately unjust distribution of resources. These days we are continually encouraged to believe that reality could be entirely different from how we believe it to be. And this notion is only nourished further by political sloganizing about a ‘post-factual age’, fake news and alternative facts, right through to ‘post-truth’.

We have thus arrived in an age of a new metaphysics. By metaphysics, I here understand a theory of reality as a whole, which distinguishes between a real world (being) and the appearance and deception that supposedly has us humans caught in its snares. Our age is metaphysical through and through. It builds on the illusion that, in its most important facets, our entire life is an illusion, one we can see through only with great difficulty, if at all.

Yet the illusion that reality is an illusion is ultimately a distraction from what’s really going on: the digital revolution of the past decade is a consequence of the modern knowledge-based society. In the age of first-wave enlightenment, the combination of all forms of knowledge was still the priority, the aim being the ‘education of the human race’.¹³ In the second half of the nineteenth century, positivism came to prevail, with its doctrine that all relevant human achievements can and should be sought in the sciences of technology and nature. Today, the metaphysics that sets the tone is materialism, where this encompasses both the doctrine that everything that exists consists of matter and the ethical conception that the meaning of human life ultimately consists in the accumulation of goods (cars, houses, sexual partners, smartphones) and their pleasurable annihilation (burning fossil fuels, ostentatious luxury, gourmet restaurants).

From a socio-political perspective, materialism corresponds to the idea that the primary function of a government is to develop and enforce the regulations necessary for material resources to be distributed in such a way that as many citizens as possible can experience the enjoyment of squandering them. This in turn serves to foster the preservation of our materialistic image of the human.

The digital revolution is closely connected with the surveillance apparatuses of modernity. As depicted in the TV series The Americans, it famously emerged on the back of military research projects in the Cold War. The major internet companies of our time are advertising platforms whose existence places traditional media under ever more pressure, forcing them to compete for the attention of the reading public with opinionated coverage and titillating scandal.

Yet my aim here is to provide not so much a sociological description as a philosophical diagnosis of the intellectual mistakes that underlie the materialist ideology of our time. In particular, we will be concerned with our own thinking. An ideology is a kind of intellectual virus circulating through the bloodstream of our thought; at first, it strikes here and there at the foundations of our health, without our so much as noticing, before finally overwhelming us. To take up a formulation of Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947), I’ll be looking to develop a co-immunism – that is, to improve our mental immune system.¹⁴ We have to vaccinate ourselves against the false notion that we cannot know the truth and that, in the age of the internet, reality may no longer exist at all.

This means entering (in thought at least) right into the lion’s den: into the age of reality shows and the ever-expanding and encroaching online society. The task will be to reclaim a sense for our own thought, which will protect us from the error of believing that we are on the brink of abolishing humanity and stepping into a paradisiac age of total digitalization.

The first key thesis, as I’ve already said, is that our thought is a sense. Besides the familiar sense modalities – which are hearing, sight, taste, smell and touch, but also the sense of balance and a few more besides – we have a sense of thought. I will expand this thesis into the nooscope thesis: our thought is a sense that we can use to scout out the infinite and then represent it in a variety of different ways – mathematically, for example. Our thinking is thus unlike our other senses: it is not restricted to our proximate environment but can – in the form of quantum mechanics, say – even refer to other universes or grasp the foundational mathematical structure of our own universe in the language of theoretical physics. Our nooscope therefore surpasses corporeal reality and connects us with an infinity of immaterial realities.

This thesis is directed against the currently popular idea that our mental apparatus consists merely of perceptions and cognitions, out of states triggered in us by the external world on the one hand and states that arise from the internal linkage of perceptions on the other. But it’s simply false to believe that an external consciousnessand mind-independent world first tickles our nervous system, triggering chains of internal processes, at the end of which stands an image that has nothing further to do with the external world. Our mental life is no hallucination arising within our skull. Rather, on account of our sense of thought, we are in contact with far more realities than we’d think at first glance.

This book does away with the foundational error of modern epistemology: the subject–object divide. This consists in the false notion that, as thinking subjects, we confront an alien reality, a world into which we don’t really fit. Hence the widespread impression in modernity either that we cannot know reality at all or that we can never know it even approximately as it is in itself. However, as thinking, perceiving creatures we do not face a reality that is somehow separated from us. Subject and object are not opposed parts of an overarching whole. Rather, we are part of reality, and our senses are media that act as contact points between the reality that we are and the reality that we are not. These media do not distort a reality that is fully independent of them. Instead, they themselves belong to the real, as interfaces or points of intersection. And thinking, exactly like all the other senses, is just such an interface.

Interfaces enable communication over various fields of sense. Take our visual experiences, for example. I can currently see a Berlusconi voodoo doll, which I bought in the shop of a Portuguese museum. I see the doll from my standpoint. I couldn’t take up this standpoint if I didn’t possess an intact brain, if I were currently sleeping, or if I no longer recalled the doll. But the fact that I can recognize the doll in the first place is also a component of my standpoint. And the real presence of the voodoo doll is just as essential for my perceptual mental state as my brain.

I perceive in colour. And I have a specific colour palette at my conscious disposal only because I am an animal whose colour receptors were selected over millions of years of evolution. The human sense of sight is an interface enabling communication between physical fields (containing light rays, for example, which can be measured and investigated by physics) and the field of my conscious experience (in which I can purchase and see voodoo dolls). Our visual sense and our subjective standpoint are not one jot less real than the light rays, the voodoo doll, and the elementary particles without which there wouldn’t be any voodoo dolls at all.

As we will see, the same goes for our thought. Thought is a real interface connecting us up with countless immaterial realities – numbers, justice, general elections, truth, facts and much more besides. Yet thought also stands in direct contact with material energetic systems, which is why we are able to think about these too.

In this context, a further thesis is that what we think (i.e. our thoughts) is not material. The view that there is not only a material energetic system, the physical cosmos, is what I call immaterialism. Thinking is the grasping of immaterial thoughts. Thoughts are neither brain states nor any form of information processing that we measure physically. Yet humans cannot have any thoughts without being living creatures who find themselves in certain brain states – or, more generally, in certain physiological states.

Combining these theses, we get to our second key thesis: biological externalism. Biological externalism maintains that the expressions we use to describe and understand our thought processes are essentially related to something biological (see p. 141). With this thesis in place, I’ll argue that there can be no artificial intelligence in the generally accepted sense. Our modern data-processing systems, including of course the omnipresent internet, do not really think, because they lack consciousness. But this doesn’t make them any less dangerous or the debate surrounding digital transformation any less urgent.

We have to regain the sense of thought and defend it against the wild notion that our thinking is a computational process taking place within the cranial vault – a process of which we could, in principle, make an exact re-creation or simulation. Simulations of thoughts are just as much real thoughts as a Michelin map of France is identical with the territory it maps (see pp. 57ff.). Yet what we call AI is utterly real. Only it’s not intelligent – and that’s why it’s dangerous.

One of the underestimated sources of danger in our digital age is that our self-understanding as humans is oriented around a misleading model of thought. For, insofar as we believe that advanced data technology must automatically conquer the realm of human thought, we create a false self-image. In indulging this belief, we attack the very core of being human.

In every epoch that has witnessed technological breakthroughs, the idea has taken hold that our artefacts could someday take control. Animism is the belief that nature as a whole is ensouled. Today this belief is also called panpsychism. AI research, however, is an internal rather than an external attack on the human being: for it’s not just that our artefacts might attack us; instead, by propagating a false, essentially animistic picture of them, we attack ourselves.

Since time immemorial, the human has regarded its thought as something that comes to it from outside, be it from the gods, from the one God, or possibly from extra-terrestrials, as in films such as Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or, more clumsily, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012), which unambiguously depicts aliens as our creators. Thanks to layer upon layer of our culturalhistorical practices, we therefore find it easy to image that our own thought processes might also be found in non-living systems. But this is an unwarranted superstition and we need to overcome it. Many people today would be more willing to ascribe intelligence to a smartphone than to an octopus or a pigeon. But that is a mistake with fatal moral consequences – for humans, for our fellow creatures, and for the environment. It is therefore high time that we let ourselves be guided by realism rather than misguided by science fiction and that we re-establish contact with our human, all-too-human sense of thought. The first step is to recognize it as such.