Demanding the Impossible Read Online Free PDF

example, when I was in New York, I saw on TV that crippled people in wheelchairs can control the movement just by their mind. You don’t even need Stephen Hawking’s proverbial little finger: with my mind, I can directly cause objects to move; that is to say, it is the brain itself that will serve as the remote-control machine. It is literally a realization of the Orwellian notion of “thought control.” If you just think strongly about moving forward, the wheelchair moves forward.
    Now this sounds very nice. We feel like we are God. We can move objects with our thoughts. But the problem here is that, first, if this can go on outside, it could also go on inside. This is to say, maybe someone could also control your thoughts from the outside. I mean what is clear is that our very sense of identity – “what are we?” – is based on this gap. This very gap between my thought and the world out there is the basic foundation of our senses of personal identity, where freedom is being undermined. We don’t know what this means, what really is happening. We are entering such a new world. We don’t know.
    Some leftists like to say: “We know what is happening. But we just don’t know how to mobilize people.” No! For example, what is happening today in China? Is it simply an authoritarian form of capitalism? Is it a new form of communism? Is it something totally new? We have old Marxists and old liberals who agree about one thing, simply that the old form of communism is even more triumphant. But they don’t have a good theory. We have many of these new slogans – postindustrial society, reflective society, postmodern society, information society – but I think these are just journalistic names. We don’t yet know what is happening. So we need theory and philosophy more than ever.
    Today is the time for theory . Why? Look at the debates about abortion and so on. You cannot simply apply old religious wisdom, because it is a totally new situation. Should we or should we not allow genetic research? Do you notice how confused the debates are? It totally shocked me how in Europe Catholics and Christians oppose biogenetic interventions, claiming that humans have an immortal soul, and they are not just machines, so we shouldn’t mess with them. But I ask them a very naive question: If you believe that humans have an immortal soul, which is independent of matter, why then are you afraid of biogenetic interventions? They just take place in the brain; they cannot attack the immortal soul. We are all aware that we are touching on something that is very dangerous.
    I don’t think either of the standard solutions works. On the one hand, there is a conservative solution (Jürgen Habermas / the Catholic Church), which simply urges that this should be stopped, that it should be prohibited. It’s dangerous to mess with it, so let’s set up a limit. On the other hand, you have this man Ray Kurzweil, a main representative of techno-digital apocalypticism, an ultra-optimist, who says that we are moving to a stage of technological singularity, human species and its transmutation into the “post-human.” Both are obviously wrong. There is hard work to be done. It is a unique task.

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Parallax View on Postmodern Globalization
    Can postmodernism tell us something about today?
    SŽ: The good thing is – I may sound like a Eurocentric – that the Western world is losing its privilege. It’s open to everyone. One thing I like about what we fashionably called postmodern society is that it no longer works with this sense of old status. Look at Singapore. About 60 or 70 years ago it was a backward village state. Now it’s a state with maybe the highest income per capita. Generally, we think of Lichtenstein, with its banking system, as being one of the richest, but I think it lost its reputation during the financial crisis, while Singapore did very well. Even in the crisis of 2009, it grew by 15 percent. These are, and not just in a