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Life in the Fourth Millennium
http://www.sina.com.cn 2002/02/07 15:21  《英语学习》

  By Steven Pinker-时锋选注

  如果说科学技术日新月异不算太夸张的话,千年以后的情形似乎就很难想象。其实,我们真正关心的是科技对人类生活会产生什么样的影响,或者更直接地说,会使人类生活变成什么样子。既然以千年之隔无法想象那时的科技,是否因此也就无法推知千年后的人类生活图景呢?据本文作者说,不管科技发展如何匪夷所思,在下一个千年里的人类生活也不至于与现在相比面目全非,理由是人性的恒常决定了人类生活的本质。在很大程度上,这种观点是令人信服的。人性的确是坚实的堡垒,但再坚实的堡垒也须维护、加固才不致于被攻克(科技的异化力量不容低估)或自行颓败。而维护的方式之一,在我看来也可以是作者在文中批评的一些未来学家们耸人听闻之言,其荒诞、恐怖不正可以成就新的醒世恒言吗?

  People living at the start of the third millennium enjoy a world that would have been inconceivable to our ancestors living in the 100 millennia in which our species has existed.<注1> Ignorance and myth have given way to an extraordinarily detailed understanding of life, matter and the universe. Slavery, despotism, blood feuds<注2> and patriarchy have vanished from vast expanses of the planet, driven out by unprecedented concepts of universal human rights and the rule of law. Technology has shrunk the globe and stretched our lives and our minds.

  How far can this revolution in the human condition go? Will the world of 3000 be as unthinkable to us today as the world of 2000 would have been to our forebears a millennium ago? Will our descendants live in a wired Age of Aquarius?<注3> Will science explain the universe down to the last quark, extinguishing mystery and wonder?<注4> Will the Internet turn ussintosisolates who interact only in virtual reality, doing away with couples, families, communities, cities? Will electronic media transform our minds?

  Obviously it would be foolish to predict what life will be like in a thousand years. We laugh at the Victorian experts who predicted that radio and flying machines were impossible. But it is just as foolish to predict that the future will be utterly foreign—we also laugh at the postwar experts who foresaw domed cities, jet-pack commuters<注5> and nuclear vacuum cleaners. The future, I suggest, will not be unrecognizably exotic because across all the dizzying changes that shaped the present and will shape the future one element remains constant: human nature.

  After decades of viewing the mind as a blank slate<注6> upon which the environment writes, cognitive neuroscientists, behavioral geneticists and evolutionary psychologists<注7> are discovering instead a richly structured human psyche. The mind has a toolbox of concepts for space (millimeters to kilometers), time (tenths of seconds to years), small numbers, billiard-ball causation,<注8> living things and other minds. It is powered by emotions about things—curiosity, fear, disgust, beauty—and about people—love, guilt, anger, sympathy, pride, lust. It has instincts to communicate by language, gesture and facial expressions.

  We inherited this standard equipment from our evolutionary ancestors, and, I suspect, we will bequeath it to our descendants in the millennia to come. We won't evolvesintosbulbous-brained, spindly-bodied homunculi<注9> because biological evolution is not a force that pushes us to greater intelligence and wisdom; it simply favors variants that out-reproduce their rivals in some environments.<注10> Unless people with a particular trait have more babies worldwide for thousands of generations, our biological constitution will not radically change.

  It is also far from certain that we will redesign human nature through genetic engineering. People are repulsed by genetically modified soybeans, let alone babies, and the risks and reservations surrounding germ-line engineering of the human brain my consign it to the fate of the nuclear-powered vacuum cleaner.<注11>

  If human nature does not change, our lives in the new millennium may be more familiar than the futurologists predict. Take education,swheresmany seers predict a revolution that will make the schoolroom obsolete. Some envision Summerhillesque free schools,swhereschildren interact in a technology-enriched environment and literacy and knowledge will just blossom, free from the drudgery of drill and practice.<注12> Others hope that early stimulation, such as playing Mozart piano concertos to the bellies of pregnant women, will transform a plastic brain<注13>sintosa super learner.

  But an alternative view is that education is the attempt to get minds to do things they are badly designed for. Though children instinctively speak, see, move and use common sense, their minds may be constitutionally ill at ease with many of the fruits of modern civilization: written language, mathematical calculation, the very large and very small spans of time and space that are the subject of history and science. If so, education will always be a tough slog,<注14> depending on disciplined work on the part of students and on the insight of a skilled teacher who can stretch stone-age minds to meet the demands of alien subject matter.

  Our mental apparatus may also constrain how much we adults ever grasp the truths of science. The Big Bang,<注15> curved 4-D space-time<注16> and particles that act like waves—all are required by our best theories of physics but are incompatible with common sense. Similarly, consciousness and decision-making arise from the electrochemical activity of neural networks in the brain. But how moving molecules should throw off subjective feelings (as opposed to mere intelligent computations) and choices for which we can be held responsible (as opposed to behavior that is caused) remain deep my steries is to our Pleistocene psyches.<注17>

  That suggests that our descendants will endlessly ponder the age-old topics of religion and philosophy, which ultimately hinge on concepts of matter and mind. Why does the universe exist, and what brought itsintosbeing? What are the rights and responsibilities of living things with different brains, hence different minds, from ours—fetuses,<注18> animals, neurological impaired people, the dying? Abortion, animal rights, the insanity defense and euthanasia<注19> will continue to agonize the thoughtful (or be settled by dogma among the unthoughtful) for as long as the human mind confronts them.

  One can also predict that the mind will shape, rather than be reshaped by, the information technology of the future. Why have computers recently infiltrated our lives? Because they have been painstakingly crafted to mesh better with the primitive workings of our minks. The graphical user interface (windows, icons, buttons, sliders, mice) and the World Wide Web represent the coercion of machines, not people.<注20>

  We have jiggered our computers to simulate a world of phantom objects that are alien to the computer's own internal workings (ones, zeroes and logic) but are comfortable for us tool-using, vision-dependent primates.<注21> Many other dramatic technological changes will come from getting our machines to adapt to our quirks—understanding our speech, recognizing our faces, carrying out our desires in accord with our common sense—rather than from getting humans to adapt to the ways of machines.

  Our emotional repertoire,<注22> too, ensures that the world of tomorrow will be a familiar place. Humans are a social species, with intense longings for friends, communities, family and spouses, consummated by face-to-face contact.

  E-mail and e-commerce will continue their inroads, of course, but not to the point of making us permanent antisocial shut-ins; only to the pointswheresthe increases in convenience is outweighed by a decrease in the pleasure of being with friends, relations and interesting strangers. If our descendants have spaceports and transporter rooms,<注23> they will be crammed at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  But human relationships also embrace conflicts of biological interests, which surface<注24> in jealousy, sibling rivalry, status-seeking, infidelity and mistrust. The social world is a chess game in which our minds evolved as strategists.

  If so, the mental lives of our descendants are not hard to predict. Conflicts with other people, including those they care the most about, will crowd their waking thoughts, keep them up at night, animate their conversation and supply the plots of their fiction, whatever the medium in which they enjoy it.<注25>

  If constraints on human nature make the future more like the present and past than futurologists predict, should we sinksintosdespair? Many people, seeing the tragedies and frustrations of the world today, dream of a future without limits, in which our descendants are infinitely good, wise, powerful and omniscient. The suggestion that our future might be constrained by DNA shaped in the savanna and ice ages<注26> seems depressing—even dangerous.

  Admittedly, many declarations of ineluctable human nature turned out to be wrong and even harmful—for example, the "inevitablility" of war, racial segregation and the political inequality of women. But the opposite view, of an infinitely plastic and perfectible mind, has led to horrors of its own: the Soviet "new man," re-education camps and the unjust blaming of mothers for the disabilities and neuroses<注27> of their children.

  Many leaps in our quality of life came from the recognition of universal human needs, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and of universal limitations on human wisdom and beneficence, which led to our government of laws and not men.

  Universal obsessions are also the reason that we enjoy the art and stories of peoples who lived in centuries and millennia past: Shakespeare, the Bilble, the love stories and hero myths of countless cultures superficially unlike our own. And the mind's foibles<注28> ensure that science will be a perennial source of enchantment even as it dispels one mystery after another. The delights of science—of the Big Bang, the theory of evolution, the unraveling of the genes and the brain—come from the surprise triggered by a conclusion that is indubitably confirmed by experiment and theory but that contradicts standard human intuitions.

  Third-millennium futurologists should realize that their fantasies are scaring people to death. The preposterous world in which we interact only in cyberspace, choose the endings of our novels,<注29> merge with our computers and design our children from a catalogue gives people the creeps<注30> and turns them off to the genuine promise of technological progress. The constancy of human nature if our reassurance that the world we leave to our descendants will be one in which scientific progress leads to delight rather than boredom, in which our best art and literature continues to be appreciated, and in which technology will enrich rather than dominate human lives.




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《英语学习》2002年1期 专题

Annotation

1. 当今人们所享受的世界,对生活在人类已存在的10万年里我们的祖先来说是不可想象的。
the third millennium:即从2000年到3000年的千年。

2. despotism:专制君主统治;
blood feuds:民族或家族之间的血仇。

3. 大同时代,指占星术士所谓的在世界新纪元,以人类征服宇宙空间、享受高度自由和博爱为特征。
wired:指通讯化的。

4. 科学是否会发展到能以夸克解释宇宙,使宇宙再也没有神秘和神奇而言?
quark:夸克,为基本粒子之一,源自乔伊斯小说Finnegan's Wake中 "three quarks for Muster Mark"一语,由美国物理学家M.Gell-Man (1929- )用作核物理名词。

5. domed cities指太空城市(美国在亚利桑那州建有太空城市实验模型);
jet-pack commuters:背着伞包或飞行器上下班的人。

6. blank slate:心灵“白板”说由英国哲学家John Locke (1632-1704)提出。
他在其《人类理解论》中阐述了这一观点,原文为:The human mind at birth is like a blank tablet on which the environment writes the individual's understanding and beliefs. Human development is therefore determined by education and social institutions, for good or for evil.

7. 研究认知活动的神经系统科学家、行为遗传学家和进化心理学家。

8. 以台球击撞而喻的因果关系。

9. 我们不会演变成长着球形大脑、身体细溜的矮人。
homunculi是homunculus:的复数形式。

10. 生物进化只是偏袒在某些环境中繁衍力超过对手的变体。

11. 此句意为很难想象人们会用微生物工程技术改造人脑,因为其风险和所遭异议远非生产核能吸尘器的情况可比,而即使是后者的命运(是否要生产)现在也很难料定。

12. 未来学家们所憧憬的是一种华兹华斯式的自然主义加高科技的教育,虽则极富浪漫色彩,但没有多少现实性。

13. 指婴儿的具有可塑性的头脑。

14. a tough slog:艰苦的努力。

15. 创世大爆炸(一些学者认为这次爆炸发生于100至150亿年前,宇宙由此形成)。

16. 弯曲的四维时空。

17. 这里以地质学用语形容人类古老沉积的心灵。
Pleistocene:[地]更新世(沉积岩)的。

18. fetus:胎儿。

19. 安乐死,为结束不治之症患者的痛苦而施行的无痛苦致死术。

20. 图表式的用户界面(窗口、图像、按纽,滑行条、鼠标)和万维网所表现的是让机器就范,而非让人就范。

21. 我们摆布计算机,偏要它模拟出一个与它内部系统(那些1和0的数字以及逻辑)大相径庭的幻像物体世界,但这一幻像世界却让我们这些惯于工具操作和依赖视像的灵长类觉得舒服。
jigger为俚语用法,原意是“把……搅乱”,因此在句中颇具幽默效果。

22. 情感蕴存,指长久以来积淀下的人类情感内容。

23. 太空港、运输式房间,均为幻想中的未来之物。

24. surface: 表现在……。(用作动词)

25. 小说的传统媒质是纸张,现在又有了光盘、网络等电子媒质,将来也许还会有新的发展,但是是什么还不得而知,所以作者说“whatever the medium"。

26. 指远古时期。
savanna = savannah:热带稀树草原。

27. neurosis的复数形式,意为“神经官能症”。

28. foible:癖好。

29. 意思是说我们的生活不再能够引人入胜,因为我们可以选择生活的结局。句中的novels暗喻生活。

30. <口>毛骨悚然的感觉。


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