Hyderabad, once a center of a vibrant diamond and pearl trade and a center for culture, is now the home of the Institute of Ancient Philosophy 1, registered as a Trust in Telangana State, India, from 2021. In April of this year, philosophy will once again slip its yoke of scholasticism to embrace harmony with an international event to be held in and organized by the Institute of Ancient Philosophy. It will discuss and debate the function of science and the essence of spirituality for Global Peace and Harmony” from April 9-12, 2025; scientific theory evolves in a deductive logical framework, whereas spiritual paradigms are conceived through an intuitionistic logical framework. Both science and spirituality need better understanding in a spherical manner.

The value of science lies in its philosophical potency. Life on earth is largely driven by events both in science or religion or by natural events and of a kind called nonlinearities, which are radical breaks from what is or from the status quo. Among them are technological, climatic, societal, and natural or manmade disasters that cause earth-shaking disruptions. One response to nonlinearities is to deny them. Small inputs can mean large changes or outcomes. I suggest that social dementia is a distinctive nonlinearity.

According to Igor Kondrashin and Leonard H. Le Blanc III, the Doomsday Clock shows a near-midnight apocalypse, and humanity has never witnessed a greater need for global citizens than at present with impending disasters of climate change and greater global warfare. As other colleagues like to tell me, historians have cataloged—recorded 10,624 conflicts since 2500 BC across the globe, and civilization’s 5000 years have been taken up 90% plus by war. Humanity’s long history of warfare does not provide much space for peace. Even though sporadic peace was distinctively and dramatically different from war while the latter's aftermath and wake could be long, the difference today between them seems much more fuzzy and provides a much more fertile soil for the growth of social dementia.

This conference aims to create awareness among various segments of societies about understanding science, religion, spirituality, and governance holistically and to explore possibilities of developing functional procedures aiming at international cooperation. Having been invited by the Trust and specifically by Professor E.G. Rajan, Conference Chair who spends his time between England and India, my contribution will relate to what I call social dementia, which is a state that individuals, groups, and societies can assume as a result of less-than-refined behavior. Maybe it can fit into a session on brain-computer interface and neural feedback systems.

As an aside, there will be sessions covering such controversial issues as teleportation and mind control techniques. Loss of more refined behavior comes from decision-making being relegated from the higher cortex to lower levels. Such changes result from experiences undergone in an early stage of development. The neural centers of the cortex, which should normally be used for exercise, do not receive the necessary stimuli for their development. Social dementia is an exceedingly complex and nonlinear problem space. It is a dominant world experience that threatens peace and harmony. As yet we have no clear understanding of its underlying autonomic and neurophysiological mechanisms, and consequently, it is lacking in theoretical underpinnings.

However, according to Hippocrates, we suffer when the brain becomes unhealthy. By this same brain, we are mad, we become deranged, we are visited by fears and terrors—some by night and others by day—we have nightmares. It has many dimensions and is expressed on many levels. It occurs both in the halls of power and in all populations. It is not necessarily criminal, but it can be self-serving or cruel and criminal. It gives rise to what I will term generalized delinquency, leading to delinquent or deviant behavior as well as changed mental states or mindsets in individuals, groups, and communities.

Social dementia implies a regression in gains that have resulted from evolution demonstrated by a refined culture as well as in a reversal of human brain development and decision-making processes from higher levels of the cortex to a lower level and designated reptilian. A polarised literary metaphor can be found in Paradise Lost; the coming of social dementia with its defeat in Paradise Regained, where evil has its role in both realities. Reality and fake reality are both composed within the brain, and outcome behavior is shaped by them. The neural forces driving the rise of social dementia can be mitigated by two forces resulting from a more adequate level of education of the world’s population and reduced influence of the fear centers of the parasympathetic nervous system propagated by dominant power centers in the name of self-interest.

Consequently, the two mutually reinforcing avenues to the current status of social dementia are an improved system of education with an emphasis on civic learning and a better understanding of the brain with an emphasis on empathy.

Life-long learning conveys a status of perpetual learning and dynamic erudition throughout working life, career, and beyond to maintain the needs and demands for skills, competencies, knowledge, and know-how to meet contemporary problems. Let’s not forget that scholars have always known that the world is round; just as today they know that the spherical earth is in the clutches of climate change and that politics and the international community have lost sight of philosophy. Denial of planetary heating, side stepping of science and rejection of philosophy provide a cover for geopolitical forces that accelerate planetary warming. Consequently, denial is useful to downplay growing poverty and universal inequality.

Once again, and now in Hyderabad, the World Philosophical Forum, Athens, calls upon the thinkers of the world to proclaim Socrates, if only symbolically, as the de facto father of lifelong learning. When awaiting Hemlock, he heard a soldier singing and asked him to sing the song again. Why, old man? Tomorrow, you will be dead. That is the point! I have some little time left to learn just one more thing! Socrates also discerned both the demographic problem of his homeland then, which is greatly aggravated today, and the need for philosophical thinking in a global arena. We should today reiterate his advice to young people: fall in love, get married, and have children; if marriage works, perfect!

Eric Schwitzgebel says it clearly: philosophy needs no excuse, for there is nothing else so intrinsically valuable. Philosophical inquiry makes the entire planet better than it would otherwise be and helps us to stand in awe at the awesomeness of Earth. Nothing is more worthy of reverence and awe.

The task of education is to make reality known. Civic education must be an ongoing process in which hope is expressed. Science has the purpose of looking into reality and inquiring into its workings and, by doing so, expanding knowledge. It explains natural phenomena to establish what are. It cannot run the government, but the government needs science.

The brain is the center of imagination, thinking, and creativity, and without it, there would be no religion, mythology, literature, science, or philosophy. It is the space where reality is created by environmental engagement and can be made collective. Mind flowers in freedom, peace, and as a result of experience modulated by civic education. Hippocrates wanted us to know that from the brain, and from the brain alone, come our pleasures, our joys, our laughter, and our jests, as well as our sorrows, our troubles, our grief, and our tears.

With it in particular, we think, we contemplate, we look, we listen, and we judge between which things are ugly and which are beautiful, which are bad and which are good, which are pleasant and which are unpleasant, deciding in some cases on the basis of convention, judging in other cases according to what is advantageous [and sometimes discerning what is pleasure and what is displeasure according to what seems opportune, since it is not always the same thing that appeals to us.

In 1998, the French National Bioethics Committee warned that “neuroscience is being increasingly recognized as posing a potential threat to human rights.“ Guided by Asclepios and his disciple Hippocrates, father of Western medicine, who acted as rational and wise change agents when they proclaimed, We have an opinion; let’s discuss it. If the evidence warrants keeping it, it’s OK. If not, let’s change it.

Notes

1 Institute of Ancient Philosophy.