Loss Of Purpose In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

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Scientific advancements help us go through life more easily and fluidly, making life less stressful and overall better. These advancements come in the form of technology like mobile phones, cars, and the internet, but they also come in natural forms such as dietary supplements; helping us maintain better nutrition. It’s obvious that we rely on technology for daily activities and pleasures but the question is how far can we go before it becomes bad. Now, we see through literature and modern technology, the capabilities of scientific advancement. They portray a world so advanced that humans become gods; that scientific advancements are ever growing the complexity of technology and artificial control of nature. However, complexity brings more …show more content…
If we continue to make everyday life more complex and god-like, eventually society will crash on itself. You see, humans have emotions and need a feeling of purpose, when we lose the feeling of purpose, we start to question existence and this brings disorder in how we function in society. The loss of purpose can easily be obtained from philosophies and assumptions, especially in a world with immortality, high population, and god-like abilities. In Frankenstein, it was described, “One by one, her brothers and sister died; and her mother, with the exception of her neglected daughter, was left childless. The conscience of the woman was troubled; she began to think that the deaths of her favourites was a judgment from heaven to chastise her partially”(Shelly 59). As it is described, her assumptions and self-explanations of the incident brought a feeling of loss of purpose as the book emphasizes the individual’s role in society. Furthermore, since the loss of purpose is unhealthy in a society where people have to part take in some influential role, it will also bring disorder in society. As Hobbes stated in chapter 2 of The Social Contract, “A Natural person, is one who uses his own words, while an Artificial person, is one who represents the words or actions of another person”. Portraying that when an artificial person, or in other words a civilized person, loses their purpose, they become a …show more content…
The increased complexity of reality would be too much to handle and people’s mental well-being will degrade in illusion. People will know how it feels to be a god and this will inevitably challenge spiritual belief. They will lose site of religion and spiral into philosophy and assumption. Philosophy that will fail to regain one’s sense of purpose in society and reality. As people lose sense of purpose, society will be in a state of disorder or it could be taken over by machines depending on who is in control. Scientific advancement has no end, it is dangerous as one’s imagination; it possesses the ability to inflict endless amounts of pleasure or pain. However, we humans have limits to how much pleasure or pain we can handle and biologically can not handle the amount technology can offer. Some would say that we could adapt to this reality by making ourselves part machine, however this makes us not human anymore, it makes us cyborgs, but it's possible. Others believe that scientific advancement could make us adapt to this state of reality naturally, but nature is limited to what it can offer. We use complexity to solve complex problems but at the source, complex problems arise from changing simplistic functions in nature; if we change DNA artificially, this will change the whole function of that DNA and hence have a cascade effect that can and will reveal a more complex problem. Overall scientific advancement
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