Human Flourishing: Science and Technology

• Human Flourishing in terms of science and technology is the lesson.

Flourishing

• Flourishing is a state where people experience positive emotions.
• It involves positive psychological and social functioning most of the time.
• It is living within an optimal range of human functioning.

Human Flourishing

• Human flourishing is an effort to achieve self-actualization and fulfillment within a larger community.
• Individuals each have the right to pursue their own efforts to reach their full potential.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

• Self-fulfillment needs are at the top, including achieving one's full potential and creative activities.
• Psychological needs include esteem needs (prestige, feeling of accomplishment) and belongingness & love needs (intimate relationships, friends).
• Basic needs include safety needs (security, safety) and physiological needs (food, water, warmth, rest).

Rational Use of Potential

• Human flourishing involves the rational use of individual human potentialities.
• It involves including talents, abilities, and virtues in the pursuit of freely and rationally chosen values and goals.

Humans and Technology

• The human person considered both the bearer and beneficiary of science and technology.
• Humans flourish and find meaning in the world they build.
• Humans may unconsciously acquire, consume, or destroy what the world has to offer.

Science and Technology

• Science and Technology must be regarded as part of human life, which needs reflective and meditative thinking.
• Reflective people look back at things that have been done or said to think calmly and quietly about them.
• Meditative people focus on the present moment and a single thought or activity, often thoughtful, compassionate and kind.
• Science and Technology must be examined for its greater impact on humanity as a whole.

Martin Heidegger

• Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition of philosophy.
• He is widely acknowledged as one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century.

Essence of Technology Concepts

• Two common concepts of the essence of technology are "Means to an End" and "A Human Activity."
• Means to an end can be considered everything manufactured to serve specific ends and needs, called the instrumental definition of technology.
• A human activity can be considered humans use technology to "posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them," called the anthropological definition of technology.
• Heidegger suggests these concepts belong together.

Heidegger’s view on technology

• Heidegger opposes the view that technology is solely "a means to an end" or "a human activity."
• He calls the "means to an end" the "instrumental" definition and the human activity, the "anthropological definition".
• While correct, they do not go deep enough and are not yet "true."
• Technological objects are means for ends and are built and operated by human beings, but the essence of technology is something else entirely.
• The essence of technology is not anything technological, similar to how the essence of a tree is not itself a tree.

The Question 'Why'

• It prompts consideration of what technology is.
• Technology must be understood as “a way of revealing.”

Un-concealment

• Revealing translates the Greek word alètheuein, meaning 'to discover', so to uncover what was covered over.
• Related to this verb is the independent noun alètheia, which is usually translated as “truth,” though Heidegger insists that a more adequate translation would be “un-concealment."

Reality

• Reality is not given the same way in all times and all cultures.
• It is not something absolute that human beings can ever know once and for all.
• It is relative and exists only in relations.
• Reality is inaccessible for human beings as soon as we perceive or try to understand it, it is not 'in itself' anymore, but 'reality for us.'

How Technology Reveals

• Everything perceived or thought of or interacted with "emerges out of concealment into unconcealment.
• By entering into a particular relation with reality, reality is 'revealed' in a specific way.
• Technology embodies a specific way of revealing the world that characterizes our time, a revealing in which humans take power over reality.

Generational Technology

• The Greatest Generation (GI Generation) were born 1901–1927
• The Silent Generation were born 1928-1945
• Baby Boom Generation were born 1946–1964
• Generation X were born 1965-1980
• Millennial Generation or Generation Y were born 1981-1996
• Generation Z or iGen Generation were born 1997-2010
• Generation Alpha were born 2010-2024
• Generation Beta were born 2025-2039

Greeks and Technology

• The ancient Greeks experienced the 'making' of something as 'helping something to come into being'.
• Heidegger explains that modern technology is a 'forcing into being'.
• Technology reveals the world as raw material, available for production and manipulation.

Technology as a Human Activity Per Heidegger

• According to Heidegger, something is wrong with modern, technological culture.
• In our 'age of technology,' reality can only be present as a raw material (as a 'standing reserve').
• This state of affairs has not been brought about by humans; the technological way of revealing was not chosen by humans.
• Our understanding of the world (our understanding of 'being', of what it means 'to be') develops through the ages.
• In our time, 'being' has the character of a technological 'framework', from which humans approach the world in a controlling and dominating way.
• It is important to remain open to the possibility of relying on technologies while not becoming enslaved to them.
• Seeing them as manifestations of an understanding of being is important.