Altamira, Spain – Before the Common Era
Perched high on the edge of the cave wall, small reddish-brown birds watch with curiosity from their nests and observe the outline of twelve silhouettes huddled around a smoky but tender fire. The smoke from the fire rises, softening the angular light of the sun setting in the distance. The intense and vibrant color of the sunlight mixes with the light from the fire, exposing the inside of the cave walls and illuminating them, revealing the animal drawings in rich ochre yellows, burnt reds, charcoal black lines, and carefully articulated shapes.
Slowly, the twelve congregate in a half circle before their sacred wall of animal drawings. Unlike the static pictures, the evening swallows fly in a swirling spiral column in and out of the cave’s opening, filling the cavern with echoes of their songs. Two members of the group begin to animate their arms and body movements, modulate their vocalizations, and incorporate the animal drawings into the theater of their making. Here, at this moment, humans refer to the reality of their experiences to form an instinctive and intuitive ritual to explore the unknown world of the human imagination.
History: The Second Sibling of Reality
Our human DNA has a long memory, rich in ritual experience. The most important rituals are documented in the historical records of classical Western civilization, where the ritual experience merged with the early Greek ritual theater. The ritual-theatrical experience was a stable discourse and was embraced as a tradition in ancient Greek society, as participation was an essential part of citizenship in the city-state.
The nature of classical Greek theater encompassed various social threads, including festive, religious, political, musical, poetic, athletic, marriage, and funeral aspects. The theater was an integral part of ancient Greek society’s communion with life, as they understood it. The Hellenization of the theater and culture has had an indelible mark over the ages. The theater has since evolved into a network of imaginative works about the ritual experience, shaping the human story, influencing cultures, religions, and politics.
In Aristotle’s literary work, Poetics, dramatic theory expanded and defined the theater to include spectator participation, in contrast to the rituals of the sacred mysteries. In Poetics, Aristotle sets the rules, similarities, and limitations for comedy, tragedy, satyr plays, and epic poetry. The Greeks believed that the similarities between ritual and theater brought both purification and healing to spectators by employing an imaginative experience. The Greek poet Arion transformed the Greek theater, or the dithyramb, through literary composition to incorporate the beauty of words into the performance, thereby adding sophistication to the ritual nature of the theater.
Arion is best remembered for his ability to play the kithara, and, as legend has it, pirates kidnapped him for his prize money. The pirates gave Arion two options: to commit suicide and have a proper burial on land or be tossed out into the sea to perish. Arion gave the pirate’s offer some thought, so he stalled by playing his kithara and began singing praises to Apollo, the god of poetry. The singing attracted many dolphins to the ship, and at the end of his song, Arion threw himself off the boat into the sea rather than face the certainty of death at the hands of the pirates. One of the dolphins approached Arion and carried him safely to the sanctuary of Poseidon at Cape Tainaron. At the end of the heroic journey, the dolphin sadly expired, but Apollo, the god of poetry, did not forget the dolphin’s heroic kindness and gave the dolphin a place in the stars. Delphinus is a constellation in the northern sky, close to the celestial equator.
Spiritualism or Contempt of Reality
The story of Arion is a myth, yet historically part of the human narrative, in that many of the elements of the story are not impossible or outside the realm of mathematical probability. However, in the story of Arion, as with all imaginative narratives, the lines between reality and imagination begin to blur. The relationships between fact and ritual descriptions, as interpreted by the human imagination, then become synonymous when presented to the recipient through the lens of past, present, and future tenses.
As humans, we are curious by nature, and our imagination may be analytical, convergent, deductive, divergent, or purposeful, allowing us to deviate from the sphere of the real or empirical worlds into the field of the imaginable, where all things are possible. The long twisting road of human history is one of many inhumane, cruel, and barbaric episodes; yet, we humans find opportunities in struggles and conflicts to imagine new patterns of human migration and culturalization that sometimes produce seeds of essential ideas throughout the human narrative. Out of conflicts and struggles, the human imagination can overcome the obstacles that hinder humans from being free, productive, and contributing to the betterment of all humanity.
Such was the case in the Elizabethan period, when the human imagination was capable of harnessing the power of words and creating vivid images. The distinguished historian Simon Schama cites the birth of the Protestant Reformation and the changes it brought to Great Britain in the 1500s. The visual imagery and vestiges of Catholicism were whitewashed away with the Protestant Reformation, transforming the Catholic ritual use of visual imagery into the sacrosanctity of the word, the absolute word of the scriptures.
The human imagination sought new venues to fill the gaps in the rich imagery of the Catholic ritual experience with what it knows best: sensory perception and representation, which were restrained during the Reformation’s engagement and the institution of the Protestant ritual. As a result, the Elizabethan Catholic ritual experience of representation evolves into the development of a new secular theater, marking the birth of modern theater. From this theater, the literary works of Greene, Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare came to life, evoking images, emotions, and thoughts that have entered our collective imagination and will forever transcend the world of the theater.
Religious rituals and the secular theater are the same when it comes to the appropriation of believers and spectators alike. Each shares more similarities than differences in the art of theatrics, but departs and divides sharply for cultural purposes. As religion is about socialization, fraternalism, and spiritual order of the individual, where the theater of the secular is more a fleeting, and poetic space, emulating life, and the nature of human character to tell a narrative about human follies or consequences, in rare instances, may reach the level of high art of significant socialization, and cultural change. Works of Shakespeare and Cervantes are easy reaches.
Yet, the theaters of religion and the secular must both seek an audience for validation; both must compete for their audience’s minds and imaginations. Here, in this reclamation of the spectator’s imagination, the theater in all its forms, social, political, religious, poetic, and literary uses all the faculties of persuasion at its control to suspend the spectator’s moment of reality with vignettes, sketches, manipulations, replications, or retreaded realities. The human mind knows the differences between actual and what is not, but can accept that both can coexist for what they are, which is the mechanism that allows ritual and secular narratives to be plausible, part of the fabric of culture, where one requires faith, while the other involves suspension of reality, or sometimes both.
The mingling of factual circumstances and imagined intent can distort the perception of reality, and we can observe this in social and political propaganda, mass media, television, movies, books, and so on. The effects can have either calculated risks or unintended consequences, seeping into societies and cultures, and altering the perception of social values, critical thinking, and emotional acumen. The outcomes can be contemptuous of reality, dangerous, misleading, hurtful, deadly, life-embracing, celebratory, spiritual, heroic, or reciprocal of the entire spectrum of the human imagination in a world that evolves into light and darkness among the heavens and constellations.
Epilogue
The Theater of Machine and Artificial Intelligence
The theater and evolution of technological history are like a red-wing blackbird flying over the long line of fence posts that run across a pasture, with each post representing a new milestone of technological change and then disappearing out of view into the distance of the horizon line.
With history on our side, we know that technological changes will occur, but we do not know when or how they will emerge, or what the ethical and legal ramifications will be for humanity.
Today, at least six countries are at the crossroads of technological change in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The impact on the rest of the modern and emerging countries alike will be a sea change that the world has never witnessed historically. Machine learning and artificial intelligence will influence every institution, from physical and digital infrastructures such as manufacturing, banking, medicine, the military, aerospace, and mass media. The human imagination resides in all tenses, past, present, and future, but the most intriguing is the imaginative sensibilities in the future tense.
Autonomous not Anonymous
Everybody wants to rule the future, but let us hope Google (Alphabet) lives up to its unofficial motto, ‘Don’t be evil,’ as one of, if not the most, technologically powerful entities shaping the future. Google is investing its billions in the theater of the future, putting its money to work by gathering social data, leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence, and exploring deep learning through tactical triangulation and Return on the Future to define its stake and position itself forward. Sebastian Thrun, former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, leads the way forward with Google’s investment in autonomous automobiles. This marks the beginning of the next technological revolution, but do not be misled; it is not so much about Google’s Chauffeur future concept car, but rather the rich intellectual capital of patents, machine source codes, and algorithms.
The predictive data suggest that autonomous technology introduced into the markets will evolve more quickly as more players, such as Apple, Google, Tesla, and Uber, enter the machine learning and artificial intelligence space. This is more than just another trend, as some of the brightest artificial intelligence talents have migrated to the private sector, with the likes of Regina Dugan of Google and Gill Pratt of Toyota, who aim to continue developing the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence. The largest automobile manufacturer, Toyota, has recently announced a $50 million U.S. R&D Artificial Intelligence collaboration with Stanford and MIT. Some polls indeed portray a skeptical public outlook about autonomous technology, with some research suggesting that about twenty percent of the population in the U.S. is fearful of artificial intelligence.
Nonetheless, autonomous technology and automobiles will become a reality. The first phase will not be fully autonomous. Still, most industry experts agree that establishing a safety framework around autonomous machines and artificial intelligence to enhance automobile safety will be the first required step forward. This safety framework will be the key for obvious reasons. New federal and state regulations must be developed and rendered to necessitate a regulatory foundation on behalf of the autonomous industry and the public trust. California has already begun drafting autonomous machine legislation and will likely serve as a model for such a legislative framework for the rest of the nation. Before autonomous automobiles can be marketed, the acceptance of early adopters, product liability, and risk assessment requirements remains unfinished. Still, your children’s children will inherit an autonomous future that is only now beginning to take shape.
The Theater of Warfare
The first shot of the electronic technological war was not a weapon but an artificial satellite named Sputnik. In 1958, President Eisenhower created DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to expand the frontiers of technology and science. DARPA plays a more significant role in Artificial Intelligence, with a focus on security, defense, and warfare. So severe are the efforts and scientific accomplishments that have prompted the likes of Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak to sign an open letter calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons. Warfare and intelligence gathering will never be the same again; they are more computational and predictive than logistical. The Pentagon has a long historical involvement with advanced technology and is no stranger to the digital age.
This year, CIA Director John Brennan announced a significant reorganization to embrace the digital age. Brennan is creating a fifth directorate, the Directorate of Digital Innovation, focusing on the new world of computer networks. We are changing how intelligence gathering is conducted with digital sensing, staging, and appropriation.
Imagine digital teams having the ability to disrupt both digital and physical infrastructures, creating selective disinformation, accessing and tagging targets, utilizing disruptive bots, viruses, and micro-robotics, performing digital swarming, setting up honeypots, employing both digital and physical brute force strategies, and all augmented programmatically by source code, thereby enhancing cyber warfare. Warfare has, and will always include, a human side of diplomacy. However, staging in future warfare will be programmatic, computational, still thematic, scalable, and logistical, with concepts such as supercomputing analyses, behavioral science, deep learning, and digital delivery requiring minimal human intervention, except for specialized tasks.
The Terminator concept is not far from becoming a reality in the theater of warfare; expect to see more highly advanced propelled stealth robotics that can quickly take an offensive position and easily adapt by air, sea, and rough terrain, remotely programmable and controlled with precision in neutralizing targets while keeping soldiers and civilians safer. Research and development platforms are investigating source code and electro-mechanical engineering to develop robotics that can learn and understand behavior science. Concurrently, there is research examining whether artificial intelligence machines/networks, programmed to protect themselves from being deprogrammed, can indeed be deprogrammed.
DARPA is intellectually rich and has a deep portfolio. Here are a few publicly known projects: the Atlas Project-Humanoid, Remote-Controlled Insects, and the Mind’s Eye Project, among many other technologically advanced systems, which are too numerous to list. The point is made. Here is our future tense, where the human imagination forges a path with the most eloquent technology of demise, which will evolve into the ritual and theater of warfare. Only in the human imagination can such eloquent and deadly machines evolve and transpire in a way that only Leonardo da Vinci could appreciate and Francisco Goya could despise as a historical reference to the collective consciousness of warfare technology and humanity.
The Theater of Healing and Medicine
The theater of healing arts has a long path back in the human story. The human imagination has been fascinated with the nature of healing as long as humans’ fascination with the supernatural, spiritual, and afterlife, as such power to heal, resolve, or manage diseases, injuries, wounds, dislocations, tumors, and perform surgeries are gifts unparalleled and extraordinary acts of the human imagination. To make a comparative contrast between the theater of healing and medicine, it is essential to distinguish between healing as pseudoscientific and medicine as scientific, as this epilogue will survey the past as it relates to the future of the theater of medicine. The oldest cultures that delved into healing rituals began with the early Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians (from India), Chinese, and Greeks. The past tense lays the basis for our understanding of history and imagination of healing.
The Egyptians introduced healing as a practical art as early as 3000 BCE. The earliest recorded surgery dates back to approximately 2750 BCE. Most of the information we know about the Egyptians’ knowledge of healing comes from the medical treatise known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus, named after the antiquities dealer who purchased the Egyptian artifact. The document details 48 injuries, fractures, wounds, dislocations, tumors, and surgeries. It primarily focuses on surgery and trauma, detailing patients’ cases with the type of injury, patient examination, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus is the oldest medical document that focuses on women’s medical complaints and treatments.
The oldest Babylonian texts on healing date back to the first half of the second millennium BCE. The most extensive Babylonian medical text is the Diagnostic Handbook written by the ummânū, the chief scholar of the Babylonian King Adad apla iddina between 1069–1046 BCE. The Babylonians, like the Egyptians, employed a similar logical approach to healing, utilizing diagnosis, prognosis, physical examination, and remedies. The Diagnostic Handbook was an in-depth, rational set of clinical rules and assumptions based on the patient’s examination and inspection related to the patient’s complaints.
The Indian tradition of early healing practices can be characterized by the use of empirical thought and imagination, as early Indian healing concepts combined logical observations with magic. The Susruta Samhita, written by Sushruta, dates back to the 6th century BCE. This text is distinguished for its description of procedures on various forms of surgery. Notable for its scientific classification, the medical treatise comprises 184 chapters and covers 1,120 conditions, including injuries, illnesses related to aging, and mental health issues. The Sushruta Samhita describes 125 surgical instruments and 300 surgical procedures, classifying human surgery into eight categories. It is one of the foundational texts of Ayurveda healing and has eight branches.
Traditional Chinese medicine encompasses a range of healing practices developed over 2,000 years, including herbal medicines, acupuncture, massage, exercise, and dietary therapies. The historical records of therapeutic activities in China date back to the Shang dynasty, spanning the 11th and 14th centuries BCE. Many traditional Chinese healing concepts are imagination-based, such as the concept of vital energy channeled through meridians, which is not supported by logical observations or scientific methods but instead has a philosophical approach. Not much emphasis was placed on the anatomical structures, but on breathing, digestion, and aging. The traditional Chinese approach involves measuring the pulse and inspecting the tongue, skin, and eyes. Investigate the patient’s eating and sleeping habits and look for disharmony attributes.
Like theater, the European Western healing tradition has its roots in the early Greeks. An early account of the theater of healing comes from the ancient Greek epic poem, The Iliad, by Homer, where Eurypylus asks Patroclus, “to cut out this arrow from my thigh, wash off the blood with warm water, and spread soothing ointment on the wound.” The Greeks created temples of healing and dedicated them to the healer-god Asclepius. These healing temples, known as Asclepieia, became centers of medical advice, prognosis, and healing for the early Greeks. Patients seeking treatment would be induced into a sleep-like state by sleep-inducing substances. Patients would ask for help from their deity or, if required, have surgery in the Asclepieia while in a dream-like state.
At the Asclepieion of Epidaurus, the names, case histories, complaints, and cures of patients are preserved. Surgical details are at the opening of an abdominal abscess or the removal of traumatic foreign material dating back to 350 BCE. The first known Greek medical school was established in Cnidus around 700 BCE. The theater of healing would not be complete without Hippocrates of Kos, who is considered the father of Western medicine and the first to describe many diseases, including lung and heart diseases, as well as their symptoms. Hippocrates also created much of the terminology or language used to describe illnesses, including acute, chronic, endemic, epidemic, exacerbation, relapse, resolution, crisis, paroxysm, peak, and convalescence. Many of Hippocrates’ findings remain valid today, from pulmonary medicine to surgery, as well as the Hippocratic Oath.
Throughout the ages, the theater of healing has progressed tremendously. It has evolved into the science of medicine in all its forms, encompassing investigations, classifications, and the implementation of managing diseases, illnesses, and trauma. The future of the theater of medicine will transition from human-based scientific findings to the technological-based science of precision medicine. From all the lessons of the past, the future of the theater of medicine will integrate the physical, material, and biological sciences with computer sciences, as never before, yielding outcomes such as advanced rDNA technology, 3D bio-printing, transfer, and surgical precision implants on a cellular and molecular scale.
To gain a glimpse of the future theater of medicine, the work of Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the Los Angeles-based surgeon, physician, medical researcher, and business executive, is one of medicine’s leading innovators. At best, his work is a vignette of the future. To get an idea of Soon-Shiong’s penchant for innovation, Soon-Shiong performed the world’s first full pancreas transplant in 1987. He invented the nation’s first FDA-approved protein nanoparticle delivery technology for treating metastatic breast cancer, improving patient response rates.
His resources for innovation stem from his successful development and sale of two multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies, American Pharma Partners and Abraxis BioScience. Soon-Shiong’s current companies are NantHealth and NantWorks, which were started in 2007 and 2011, respectively. Both companies utilize various IT technologies, including fiber-optic and cloud-based data infrastructure, to share healthcare information. Three years ago, Soon-Shiong announced NantHealth’s supercomputer-based system, a network that can analyze genetic data from tumor samplings.
The intent of developing such infrastructure and digital technologies is to share genomic information among sequencing centers, medical research hubs, hospitals, and advanced cancer research. Soon-Shiong had Blackberry build the first DNA browser based on his design and data requirements.
In the future, advanced DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) and rDNA (recombinant Deoxyribonucleic acid) technology will help augment patients’ family histories of diseases and, most importantly, aid in determining the most effective use of pharmaceutical therapy to treat diseases. Today, pharmaceutical companies are collaborating closely with DNA, rDNA, and 3D bioprinting research companies to beta-test drugs and assess their efficacy. The goal is to determine the effectiveness of drugs and the patient’s response to drug therapy based on specific, discrete DNA sequencing and mutations.
Mutations or SNPs are, in essence, signatures or fingerprints of who we are, and such mutation markers are created along the way during our historical lineage over time. The patient’s genome map will help determine which drugs to use with greater precision based on such research, and this type of outcome becomes particularly important for patients with very short life expectancies and terminal diseases.
The theater of medicine will become synonymous with input, signal processing, and output as time passes. The medical establishment will transition to more centralized hubs and spokes to embrace the technological and economic changes brought about by advanced medical input capture technology, signal analytics, and precision output plans, with the outcome being the next stage of medicine: the technological science of predictive health.
Imaginable Rituals
Although, as humans, we cannot escape our ritual past or counteract the future, like our ancient ancestors, we embrace our collective imagination to create and live in the theaters of our making. In this age and time, we humans refer to the reality of our experiences to form a technological ritual of an instinctive and intuitive nature, exploring the unknown world of the human imagination —the earthly sphere of luminous light amidst the veiled shadows of human capacity.
#RitualTheater
All Rights Reserved, Theater: Reality, Rituals, and the Human Imagination © Richard Anthony Peña 2015