Transhumanism

Today I found an interesting couplet of links. Political Theory Daily posts dozens of links a day and made my head spin, but I'm including it exactly because it makes my head spin: there's a staggering amount of interesting reads collected, and visiting the site is a cold reminder of all the interesting questions in the world and the fact that a persons intellectual energies are finite--sometimes you have to just say no, and for me this is one of those times.

Instead, I'm going to put my energy into Sci Tech Daily, a science copy of Arts & Letters Daily. I'm going to add both of them to the sidebar ("blogroll").

Through the latter I ended up at www.betterhumans.com, a site devoted to promoting transhumanism (it seems as though this has become the definite word for the concept, beating out post-humanism, cyborg, etc.). I read two thought provoking columns there, Human Enhancement on the Agenda by James Hughes, and Is Transhumanism the World's Most Dangerous Idea? by Nick Bostrom, a "British Academy Research Fellow" at Oxford, formerly of Yale.

I started writing a commentary of the pieces, but it wasn't happening. Instead I'm just going to discuss the ideas generally. Transhumanism is coming, and I have no idea how the world is going to receive it. And I feel it's one thing to support enabling technology that allows disabled persons to regain control of their life, but it's another to advocate for over-enabling technology, where humans recieve upgrades. I feel as though these guys don't know what they're asking for. What will become of life as we know it? I don't want to live in that world, I just want to live as a human being. As Francis Fukuyama says, "transhumanists are just about the last group that I'd like to see live forever."

The conflict here is at the very heart of the oldest written word, the Epic of Gilgamesh. You can't escape death, nor should you. As Camus so eloquently once put it, "in order to exist just once in the world it's necessary never to exist again." [xxxxxxxx] Death is part of life, without it life is nothing, and so on.

To continue this idea of embracing humanism, in a class titled "Literature and Philosophy of Love" that I took at Deep Springs, I wrote a short paper on Ovid's Pygmallion myth as deeply tragic and the very essence of what love isn't. Some excerpts.

Pygmalion is "blessed" with an incarnation of his ivory girl, his realized ideal, which is free from the imperfections of natural creation.
...
love is most present in the incongruent interactions between two lovers where their difference of being is most accented.
...
To draw a parallel to the physical/mathematical duality in science, these surprises are quite like surface texture found in the physical world. Without texture, there would be no friction, and without friction, interactions would be severely limited. Objects would only be able to transfer energy through collisions. Because of friction, we can touch, we can walk, and the surface of the Earth refuses to level itself out into one eternally flat surface. There is no texture in mathematics, just as there are no surprises in ideal love. Friction releases energy as heat into the interacting bodies. Appropriately, scientists actually understand very little about the details of friction.

I feel that an idea like love exists in that humanity of imperfection, the inclusion of something beyond oneself ("the other" for all you psychoanalysis types). My favorite part of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera was the bathtub scene in the first part of the book, where Marquez bombards the reader with all these harsh, inorganic, yuckities--most memorably the smell of stale urine on an unwashed toilet. These are the things that make us human. Or rather, in this already cleaned up version of humanity, those are the parts of our humanity that we have not yet escaped. The western toilet really is a invention of incredible significance. Robin Williams even chimes into all this in Good Will Hunting with his discussion of his wife's farting habit. I'm a big fan of humanity. I don't want to be perfect, I don't want to be a lithium barbie doll.

So...how do I defend my interest in neuroelectrophysiology and artificial limbs? Well, that's a question of enabling, not 'over-enabling'. I feel that assistive technology will be one of science's greatest gift to humanity over the next century, eliminating the vast majority of physical disabilities. But I also see the evil twin of this sort of technology, namely the military applications and the 'culture of humanity' that it threatens through over-enabling.

It's something that I'm wrestling with. I put some stock in the 'people don't want to be better than well' argument, but that doesn't solve the military question. Time will tell.

I'm going to conclude with a reprint of an email I serialized last fall.

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Howdy y'all,

There is a very interesting article summarizing a recent report by the President's Council on Bioethics: Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Human Happiness [warning: 350 pages, thus the summary article]. Yes, the council is spiced with some unfortunate Bushist 'academics,' but for the most part consists of highly respectable researchers and scientific figures. (Michael Gazzaniga among them, whose 'Cognitive Neuroscience' textbook is within arms reach as I write this.) [Edit: I'll admit to not knowing that much about the other figures, and the articles above do sound damning, but then again I generally disagree with the stance of the authors.]

While the article focuses mostly on gene manipulation, there are many examples of technologically assisted over-enabling that are much more imminent and less 'controversial.' Many of these things are only a matter of time, and do not involve any rogue researching--they simply have legitimate goals that can be misused (terribly).

A good example that I'm fond of discussing is artificial sight, essentially the act of connecting a digital camera to the visual cortex. Sure, it's a blessing for the blind. It is also immensely desirable for military special forces. Imagine your 'human' troops battling troops with zoom-capable, infra-red capable artificial eyes. Such a 'high-tech' troop is going to be on every general's wish-list. In the end, who isn't going to want one of these installed? Where to go from here? Is it possible to promote a culture of humanness? Where will it end? It's going to be difficult (I'm not saying you should) to tell blind individuals to forgo the research. Is there any way to have to best of both worlds, help the blind and not make this the next Botox?

The article makes a good point of the following: "persuading people to do anything that might make them 'better than well' is like persuading a cat to swim. That is why so many people take up exercise only after their heart attack. Most people will do almost anything to become well, and practically nothing to become better than well." People aren't getting gratuitous hearing aids, this is true. But that's a small jump. Imagine qualitative improvements of 'life,' such as night vision and 100X zoom at will. People might not want to be 'better than well', but what about an offer of great?

Many of you have received this sermon from me before. Apologies.

So anyways, read the article. It'll make ya think.

human for the time being,
johan