Technology in the New Oxford American Dictionary is ” the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes…”. For thousands of years, dating back to Paleolithic age men used simple technological tools like axes and shovels for their personal needs like hunting, and farming. Since then technology as evolved and served humanity gratefully. Now in the 21th century, we use cars, planes, boats, trains to travel far distances, we use cell phones and computers to be connected virtually and to be omnipresent, and use other advanced technological tools that give us our daily needs like food, water, clothes, electricity, etc. What technology does is it gives us the ultimate convince in our daily lives. As technology advances, areas of entertainment, like video games, incorporate one type genre: science fiction. Science fiction is speculative fiction that deals with imaginative concepts. One of these concepts that is presented in this genre is advance technology.
There is one particular video games series that is my personal favorite, which is Assassin’s Creed. The whole series is about two ancient societies, Assassins and Templars, who fights for freedom, while the other fights for domination. The descendants of the Assassins enter into the animus, a machine that allows them to hear, see, and feel their ancestors through their genetic memories. The descendants go back to past in the purpose of finding pre-human civilization artifacts and using them to gain an advantage to win the war against the Templars. This sound pretty far-fetched but also very fascinating to incorporate science fiction. The animus is basically a time traveling machine. The creators of Assassin Creed, Ubisoft, has an interesting motto: History is our playground. Though players go back in past, they also experience historical events and meet famous people. This is truly advance technology that can easily tap into your ancestor’s memories and relive their lives. However, I want to focus on the part about tapping in our genetic memory, how it can benefit us.
According to Wikipedia, in a psychology term, genetic memory is a memory present at birth that exist in the absence of sensory experience. For example, if before a mother has her child and she experiences and a traumatic experience her life, its stored in her memories. Then, she has her child and maybe sometime in her child’s life, he/she experiences the same traumatic experience but was more resilient and less affected by that experience. The reason why the child was more resilient was because it’s a natural survival instinct that is caused by the heredity of the mother traumatic experience. In the virtual world, Ubisoft extrapolated the idea of genetic memories, as the animus could instantly send a person to the past to relive their ancestors lives, especially gaining their skills and abilities.
In an article written by Katherine Gillespie and published by VICE, she interviews Dr. Berit Brogaard, a University of Miami philosopher specializing in the areas of cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind. She asks if there were more research in this field of study how could it benefit humans. Brogaard say we as scientist need to see if events in our life can impacts our DNA, and if true, we could tap into it and create a more resilient offspring. “What we need to find out is whether something that occurs during your lifetime can impact or imprint the DNA that’s being passed on. There are certainly some changes to the DNA within our lifetimes—we see how the human body changes in different environments. We know which genes are expressed or locked out. We know that we can impact our DNA for sure, and it would be useful to do that to say, make more resilient offspring.” said Brogaard.
Bibliography:
Gillespie, Katherine. Can We Access the Memories of Our Ancestors through Our DNA. VICE, 2016, www.vice.com/en_au/article/ypv58j/genetic-memory. Accessed 30 Nov. 2018.
Assassin’s Creed and Genetic Memory: Science Based or Total Fiction. Ancestry.com, 2016, blogs.ancestry.com/cm/assassins-creed-ancestral-memory-science-based-or-total-fiction/. Accessed 30 Nov. 2018.
I used these cites help me to understand the field of genetics and to help understand it form a philosopher and scientist point of view.
Ubisoft. Assassin’s Creed. 2007, www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/assassins-creed/. Accessed 30 Nov. 2018.
Assassin’s Creed. Wikipedia, 2007, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed. Accessed 30 Nov. 2018.
I used these two cites to give the backdrop of the story and the technology that’s used.
Technology. Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology. Accessed 30 Nov. 2018.
I used this cite to give the basic technology that humans use in their daily lives.