The Two Faces of Janus
Where is High-Technology Leading Human Society?
A KEYNOTE LECTURE
Presented at the Intersymp’97
The 9th International Conference
on Systems Research, Informatics, and Cybernetics
August 18-23, 1997
Baden-Baden, Germany.
by
Winfried K. Rudloff
Governors State University, USA
Published in
Advances in Socio-Cybernetics and Human Development
Volume IV, pp. 92-97
Figure 2. Two-Faced Janus
The Two Faces of Janus
Where is High-Technology Leading Human Society?
A KEYNOTE LECTURE
Presented at the Intersymp’97
by
Winfried K. Rudloff
Governors State University
PREFACE
At the dusk of the twentieth Century, it is appropriate to reflect on the extraordinary one hundred years just past and contemplate the future. Over the many decades of our lives, we have seen it all: the ugly and the beautiful; the two faces of Janus. These faces are human; “zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust”, as Goethe said eons ago; “two souls are wrestling in my chest”.
There was the industrial revolution that led us into terrible wars during this century with instruments of mass destruction; that is the ugly. But there were also the Wright Brothers and their magnificent flying machines that has brought people and peoples closer together; that is the beautiful. The dualism in nature is exemplified in the Einstein equation where energy and mass are just two seemingly different forms of the same phenomenon and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle the fuzzy connection between them.
In the middle of the knowledge revolution, we observe the ascendance of Homo Technicus, a new humanoid species that has his (or her?) roots in Homo Sapiens, the often not so ”wise” ancestor of present-day humanity. A close cousin is Homo Scientificus who started it all. Like the Einsteins and Newtons, Homo Scientificus has not lost the infantile curiosity of what the world is all about. He probes into the unknown abstracting crazy ideas into mathematical formulas that are eventually translated by Homo Technicus into machines of enlightenment and machines of destruction.
Today, we experience the proliferation of computers literally over night. They are our toys, they are our tools. They are the extension of our brains as the steam engine was the extension of our brawns.
Unfortunately, there are also Homo Politicus and Homo Bureaucraticus, the black sheep in the family of humankind who want to manipulate us with their self-serving goals. To them computers are means for control, control over our money and control over our bodies and souls.
In this lecture we will make the connections, the connections that are often lost in the turmoil of our technological society. We will talk about intelligence and our brains which has been declared the last frontier. We will attempt to link our intelligence, the natural, with that of our machines, the artificial, and in the process of comparison, we will try to understand both. We will pose again crazy questions such as, is intelligence, perhaps, virtual reality? And: how can we use our computers and multimedia, the tools of high technology, to advance the knowledge of our existence?
There is a new creation in our midst that has erupted into a powerful tool of science, technology, and commerce. We call it the Internet which means connection; connection to our friends, connection to the world. Its chaotic evolution is reminiscent of the infant brain where a chaotic beginning develops into structure, the structure of thought, of memory, and of creative ideas.
Finally, we should make the connection between our cortex, the outermost shell of the brain where our logical thinking takes place and the limbic system, the seat of our emotions, in order to bring into balance the cold neutrality of high technology and science, and our human spirituality as it is reflected in the arts and our social relationships. Thus, we will have arrived at the ultimate question which returns us to the two faces of Janus: what will be the impact of high technology on human societies, will it destroy them or will it lead to wisdom, prosperity, and peace on earth where universal knowledge as the final goal is literally at our fingertips?
Janus: The Ancient God of the Romans
Janus, the two-faced god (or is it gods born as Siamese Twins?) of the ancient Romans looked with an old face into the past and with his young face into the future.
Figure 2. Two-Faced Janus
According to J. M. Hunt on the Internet, Janus is the “Ancient Roman God of beginnings and activities related to beginnings. January is named for him as it is the beginning of the year. Janus is listed first in prayers. His name is invoked when sowing grain as this is the beginning of the crops. His blessing is asked at the beginning of the day, month, and year.
Figure 1. Four-Faced Janus
He is also the god of entrances, of going in and coming out. Which means he is the god of doorways, bridges, ferries, harbors, and boundaries.
In early statues of Janus, he has four faces (Fig. 1). In later depictions two faces looking in opposite directions (Fig. 2). His main temple at the Forum in Rome has two doors, one facing the raising sun, the other the setting sun. Inside the statue of Janus has one face looking out each door. The doors to this temple are closed only at times of peace. During Rome's first 700 years the doors were closed three times. Opening the doors may be symbolic of the way drawbridges were opened in time of war to protect the early city of Rome.
Janus was in general a rather passive god. However, it is said that when the Sabines captured Rome they were kept out of the Forum by fountains of boiling water that gushed from the temple's statue of Janus.”
Figure 4. Janus Motor Glider
Figure 3. Saturn Moon Janus
Over the years, the meaning of the two faces of Janus have changed drastically. Indeed, the Internet lists under the keyword “Janus” among others, Mutual funds, religious sects, ancient gods, coin collections, a moon of Planet Saturn (Fig 3), an internet site of the University of Alabama on brain tumor research, and, my pet peeve, a two-place sailplane, the Schempp-Hirth, “Motor-Janus” (Fig. 4). The latter is two-faced: With the engine exposed, it can take off under its own power; when the engine is retracted, it becomes a high-performance sailplane.
In the following Chapters, we will discuss the two-faced Janus as a bridge between the past and the future, as a view at good and evil that may arise in our human behavior. We will look with one face to the East where new powers are emerging, and with the other to the West where cultures seem to be on the decline. We will try to understand intelligence that has two faces; the physical one we call brain, and the esoteric, our mind. We will attempt to make connections; the connection between our cortex where logic is born, and the limbic system, the seat of our emotions. We will draw connections between science and technology – mostly cortex-guided - on one hand, and the arts – mostly born from the limbic brain - on the other, and try to reconcile them as part of our holistic human experience.
The Faustian Dilemma
Goethe’s “Faust” is a classical example of the human dilemma. “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust”, or; “two souls are wrestling in my chest”. The good as well as the bad is all part of our human condition. It is with us to turn to the devil or to accept the heavens. This is reflected in all our creations, in all our artifacts.
During this century, we observed the ascendance of Homo Technicus, a new humanoid species that has his (or her?) roots in Homo Sapiens, the often not so ”wise” ancestor of present-day humanity. A close cousin is Homo Scientificus who started it all. Like the Einsteins and Newtons, Homo Scientificus has not lost the infantile curiosity of what the world is all about. He probes into the unknown abstracting crazy ideas into mathematical formulas that are eventually translated by Homo Technicus into machines of enlightenment and machines of destruction.
There was the industrial revolution that led us into terrible wars during this century with instruments of mass destruction; that is the devil in us. But there were also the Wright Brothers and their magnificent flying machines that have brought people and peoples closer together; that is the true human spirit which literally elevated us towards the heavens. We created the atom bomb with all its destructive power that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in one strike, yet the same energy was harnessed to heat our homes and run our machines. Our chemical plants are producing medicine to help us fight diseases but they also mixed poisons that murdered millions during the holocaust.
Unfortunately, there are always Homo Politicus and Homo Bureaucraticus, the black sheep in the family of humankind who want to manipulate us with their self-serving goals. To them machines, in general, and computers, in particular, are means for control, control over our money and control over our bodies and souls.
It seems that homo politicus whose legalistic mind institutes more and more rules to have more and more of the species homo bureaucraticus place more and more obstacles in the path of human happiness: There are about 85% lawyers in the US legislature who concoct laws that manipulate 240 or so million people and keep their buddies in the legal profession (5% of the total population) busy on both side of the bench and on the bench. If the young face of Janus looks into the future it has a terrible vision: Half the population will be employed to watch over the other half in prison because of our screwed-up legal system. The politicians in their quest for power lie to the people, exploit them for their own unholy goals, and send them into wars.
In the midst of the knowledge revolution, we experience the worldwide proliferation of computers literally over night. They are our toys, they are our tools. They are the extensions of our brains as the steam engine was the extension of our muscles. But they are also our nemesis.
They solve many problems of living in a complex society: Spreadsheets tackle the chores of everyday math; word processing has delivered us from the drudgery of handwriting and in the process, we have become more creative in our expressions. They have made life easier for the writer, the architect, the designer, and have opened up new vistas for the artist. Synthesizers can create music on the fly that sounds galactic and out-of-this-world. For the pleasure seekers, computers are a source of recreation.
Unfortunately, they are also used as tools of human control and bureaucratic terror. We can no longer enjoy the anonymity of our private lives. Somewhere, somehow, our foibles and weaknesses have become public domain as it is reflected in the flood of advertising that reaches our homes. The secret organizations of the powerful snoop into every aspects of our existence and collect what they call “Intelligence” (another Orwellian distortion!). They are the faceless descendents of Fouche, the shady French minister who survived kings, revolutionaries, and Napoleon, and collected information about his friends and his enemies that helped him survive the good times and the bad. Stefan Zweig, the immigrant writer from Vienna, composed one of the most fascinating novels about Fouche.
Relativity and Dualism in Nature
The dualism in nature is exemplified in the Einstein equation:
E = mc2
where energy and mass are just two seemingly different forms of the same phenomenon and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle the fuzzy connection between them:
DxDpx ³ h/4p or DEDt ³ h/4p
The Uncertainty Principle stipulates that it is impossible to precisely fix the position, x, of a small particle and, at the same instant in time the momentum, p. If experimentally we determine correctly the momentum, there remains a fuzziness in precisely fixing its position. The fuzziness is related to Planck’s constant by the above equation. This led Pascal Jordan who wrote a book on quantum biology, to the bold statement in one of his lecture at the University of Hamburg, “how do we know if electrons don’t have free will or even sexual feelings?”
There is dualism in classical physics. We observe negative and positive charges and deduce that there must be electrons and positrons, anions and cations, and it is speculated that there are negative and positive worlds, which, upon collision, destroy each other. One hypothesis even stipulates that the 1908 Siberian disaster may have been such an event.
We observe dualism in biology; there is the male and the female principle. Yet even with humans, there is often uncertainty: The ancient Greeks talked about hermaphrodites and modern psychology thrives on homosexuality. Certainly plants can be bisexual.
Here again are the two Janus Faces, the two souls with uncertainty between them; uncertainty of what is positive and what is negative; what is good or what is evil. We talk about political correctness and mean that only ours is the absolute truth forgetting that all is relative. Under Hitler, the Nazi ideology was the only, the absolute truth. In modern times, there are the fanatic fundamentalists of many religious persuasions who claim possession of God’s truth, the only and the absolute. They even kill in the name of their “absolute” truth. Indeed, in recent years, a keyword has crept into our everyday language that is so pervious that it is used almost in every sentence, “absolutely”. Anytime someone wants to make a strong statement, he or she is “absolutely” correct. No latitude is given for the uncertain, the relative, the “I know that I don’t know”.
But then, it is, perhaps, all in our minds?
The Cerebral Connection: The Brain and the Mind
At this point, we will make the connections, the connections that are often lost in the turmoil of our technological society. We can talk about intelligence and our brains, which have been, declared the last frontier (R. M. Restak, 1982). We will attempt to link our intelligence, the natural, with that of our machines, the artificial, and in the process of comparison, we will try to understand both. We pose again crazy questions such as, is intelligence, perhaps, virtual reality? And: how can we use our computers and multimedia, the tools of high technology, to advance the knowledge of our existence?