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Biography |
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Dr. Susantha Goonatilake was first trained in electrical engineering in Sri Lanka, Germany and Britain and later in sociology in Sri Lanka and Britain (Ph.D.; M.A; B.A; B.Sc; A.M.I.E.E.
Dr. Goonatilake’s books include: A 16th Century Clash of Civilizations: the Portuguese Presence in Sri Lanka; Cultural Consequences of the Shift to Asia (forthcoming); Anthropologizing Sri Lanka: A Civilizational Misadventure; Recolonisation: Foreign funded NGOs in Sri Lanka; Toward a Global Science: Mining Civilizational Knowledge; Merged Evolution: the Long Term Implications of Information Technology and Biotechnology; Technological Independence: the Asian Experience; Evolution of Information: Lineages in Genes, Culture and Artefact; Aborted Discovery: Science and Creativity in the Third World; Crippled Minds : an Exploration into Colonial Culture; Food as a Human Right; Jiritsu Suru Ajia No Kagaku-Dai San Sekai Ishiki Karano Kaiho (Japanese translation of writings by Goonatilake); and Al-Iktishaf al-mujahad; al-‘ilm wa-l-ibda’ fi al-‘alam al-thalithSuzantha Ghunatilik Tarjamahu ‘afif al-Razaz (Arabic translation of writings by Goonatilake)
Dr. Goonatilake has taught or researched among others at the Universities of Exeter and Sussex, UK; Columbia University; and New School for Social Research, New York; Institute of Developing Economies , Tokyo; Universities of Philippines, Manila; of Trondheim, Norway; of Linkoping, Sweden, of Malaya; the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. He has worked at the UN. He has also being a senior consultant for all the UN organs dealing with knowledge and science and technology issues (such as UNU, UNESCO, UNDP, ILO, FAO, ESCAP, APDA).
Dr. Goonatilake is a former General President of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science and is the President of the country's oldest academic body, the 167 year old Royal Asiatic Society, Sri Lanka. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Abstract |
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Exploring Asian ethics for new technologies |
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Ongoing developments are transforming the very basis of our physical and mental being. For example:
mental activities are being projected onto computing artifacts; artifacts themselves at times outperform humans as mental processors, human senses are artificially projected outward and extended beyond human boundaries, the body is projected outward and introjected inward by artificial means; "Synthetic Biology" would redesign existing genomes and create new life forms; the Human Connectome Project would give a picture of the neural structure of the human brain opening the door to changes in the very apparatus through which we perceive the world; we could in theory change the windows for our physical perceptions; we could introject brainstem cells and rewire ourselves, so that we could switch from one frame of knowing the world to another; brain cells in Petri dishes have been connected to robotic devices to do some human-like tasks with "some sense of what is going in themselves"; mind reading technology is creating consumer goods controlled by the mind and is making possible in principle to remotely access the visual content of mental processes.
The above list can go on and on. What 3 billion years of evolution has crystallised into the human body and mind, and their environment is being re-made and has to be re-thought.
When we and our surroundings are thus constructed and reconstructed, from new developments in biotechnology, neurology, information technology, and nanotechnology as say in clone or robot or admixtures of both, deep questions are raised that challenge existing ethical systems.
Currently dominant, Western ethical systems for these new technologies are derived from presumably "secular" roots or from Christianity, Judaism or Islam (the “Abrahamaic” religions). Western "secular ethics" are ultimately derived from the idea of "humanity”, a Eurocentric concept of humans as sacred that probably derives from the ideas of the Humanists as Europe emerged from the late Middle (the Dark, Christian) ages. But in an increasingly non-human and post-human world, humanity has to be transcended in search of ethics. The ethical system in the Abrahamaic religions is presumed to be “revealed” and to be “God’s word” which the new developments where humans and artifacts do "play God" challenge some of the core revealed Abrahamaic ethical assumptions. As, in the coming decades, the production, consumption and creative bases of the world increasingly shift to Asia, there has to be Asian thought on these culture impregnated issues.
A major trans-Asian cultural approach, Buddhism, is not revealed, and shorn of the unobservable (rebirth etc.), it has both a strong core of observations and a strong philosophy. Buddhist observation and philosophy has change and process as its core. Some core Buddhist approaches have direct relevance to a future where both the human and his/her environment is constructed and reconstructed. The paper describes the central Buddhist position on both the human person, including his body and mind, as well as the environment he operates in, as not given or sacred but constructed and changing. The paper suggests that an orientation from this core Buddhist perspective of continuous change, no permanent self and both human and nature as constructed would fit better as a cultural orientation to examine and live in a future world under continuous change, and where man and nature are continuously reinvented and reconstructed. It also suggests that Buddhist ethics derived from such a perspective (which unlike the revealed religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is not absolute but contingent and situational) may better fit as a means of navigating the coming interconnected world of the clone, the robot and the cyborg.
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