Unless you have nothing left to lose of course
One athena wrote a very charming criticism of the current state of transhumanism, here, and I did feel the immediate and urgent need to respond to that.
So here it is -
“..Those who know my outermost layer would consider me a science geek. I’m a proponent of genetic engineering, an advocate of space exploration, a reader and writer of science fiction. However, I found myself unable to warm to either transhumanism or its literary sidekick, cyberpunk. I ascribed this to the decrease of flexibility that comes with middle age and resumed reading Le Guin’s latest story cycle.
But the back of my mind gnawed over the discrepancy. After all, neither transhumanism nor cyberpunk are monolithic, they come in various shades of… and then it hit me… gray. Their worlds contain little color or sound, few scents, hardly any plants or animals. Food and sex come as pills, electric stimuli or IV drips; almost all arts and any sciences not related to individual enhancement have atrophied, along with most human activities that don’t involve VR….”
Anetha dear, your perception puzzled me. I reread these sentences above and my mind gnawed over the discrepancy – after all, what is transhumanism other than typical science fiction with all conclusions taken to extreme. And then it dawned on me – you are … prejudiced.
Let’s clarfy that a little. If I were to travel back to the late 1970s and talk with someone typical about the future, that person would probably ask me all kinds of stuff, such as “do people live in the moon in 2009, did we cure wars, did humanity solve pollution and nuclear weapons..” and all those classics. In most cases, I’d have to say – no, all that didn’t pan out, but we did get something almost as good – internet. Now visualise if you will the arduous process of trying to explain not just the basic idea of internet, but the complexities of internet over the years – things such as spam, 3D virtual realities, internet memes, browser wars, vista and all that. Many people from the 70s (or even the early 90s) would be able to perceive the sense in all that. Most 70s people I’d engage in discussion about the internet would blank out, regard it as “drab” and “unhealthy” and “unimaginative”. Grey if you will. I suppose a thorough explanation of world of warcraft might actually decide internet is not something “we should want to have”.
Sometimes, when things are really revolutionary, the proof of the pudding is in eating it.
I have found, through repeated observation, there is a category of things, “talking epistemologically here” that is intransparant unless you are deep inside them. That sounds like a religious argument, or a cult argument, but I assure you it isn’t. Some things cannot be perceived from the outside, as people tend to lock up when trying to appreciate the intracies of what transpires inside the phenomenon. Thats common with certain types of art or sport. I certainly didn’t have a clue what was so special about fitness untill after years of torture I did 4 legpress reps and wham, I was high as a kite. Trying to explain that to my (at the time slightly overweight) slacker friends could count me on degrees of abuse.
I am not accusing you of lack of imagination love – I am warning you of lack of imagination. .. Prejudice by any other name.
And I finally realized why I balk at cyberpunk and transhumanism like an unruly horse. Both are deeply anhedonic, hostile to physicality and the pleasures of the body, from enjoying wine to playing in an orchestra. I wondered why it had taken me so long to figure this out. After all, many transhumanists use the repulsive (and misleading) term “meat cage” to describe the human body, which they deem a stumbling block, an obstacle in the way of the mind.
I did actually hear a few people use the phrase “meat cage” and I am sure I have used it a few times, especially when I have migraines (or clusters). But where in heck to you get the idea that “transhumanism” is hostile to physicality? This is just not true. In fact the idea is so deeply odd to me it confuses me where you might have gotten such an idea.
This is hoary dualism disguised as futuristic thinking, augmented by healthy doses of queasiness and power fantasies. Ascetics of other eras tried to diminish the body by fasting, flagellating, abstaining from all physical gratification from washing to sex. Techno-monks want to discard it altogether. The goal is a disembodied mind playing World of Warcraft in a VR datastream. If a body is tolerated at all, the ideal is a mixture of metal and ceramic, hairless and poreless, though it still retains the hyper-gendered configurations possible only in cartoons.
There is a duality at play here, but it is not in transhumanism – it is a duality between what you perceive as transhumanism, and what is really transhumanism. Well, let’s me frank – I mentioned my migraines just now…. one of the reasons I am openly sympathetic to the (all) core goals of transhumanism (and singularitarianism) is because I acutely feel the inadequacies of phyical existence. Cluster Headaches are just one argument, and there are many.
… But that is not me saying I loathe physical existence. Likewise if I curse the idea of traffic jams I do not automatically say I abhor cars and traffic. If I curse spanish society for being barbaric, it doesn’t mean my favorite food is not paella. I speak only for myself here and say that I experience the relative and undesirable qualities of the mortal coil I do not seek death or ascetic abstinence. Far from it – by all people I know I am universally regarded as the most shameless epicurian pervert.
I wallow in life. In fact, most of life hits me so hard I may assert that if my neurology were to be scrutinized at some time in the future neuroscientists might conclude I have been living my life connstantly and unknowingly under the effect of an unbalance of some natural psychedelic or narcotic brain chemical. My mountains and valleys of existance are deep and high, extremes of exaltation and ecstacy, deep dark despair and intense terror.
Does that precipitate me to mortalize or scourge the flesh from my bones in an urge to exorcize all passion from my world?
Not by a long shot.
Is abandonment of the body such a bad thing? As anyone who lost a limb or went through a major illness can attest, it’s a marvelous instrument whose astonishing abilities become obvious only when it malfunctions. On the other hand, it’s undeniably fragile and humans have lost patience with its shortcomings as technology has overtaken nature. Transhumanists extol such prospects as anti-aging medicine; advanced prosthetics; radical cosmetic surgery, including sex changes; nootropic drugs; and carbon-silicon interfaces, from cyborgs to immersive VR.
I don’t know a single woman who, given the choice, would opt to retain menstruation, pregnancy or menopause (though few would admit it openly). And very few people, no matter how stoic, can face the depradations of chronic disease or age with equanimity. The neo-Rupturists who prophesy the coming of the Singularity can hardly wait to exchange their bodies with versions that will never experience memory lapses or fail to achieve erections at will.
The nice thing about perspective is that it gives you a choice. That aforementioned person in the 1970s who could choose whether or not a world with internet was the future he or she wanted (irregardless of the question whether or not he or she would have a choice in the matter – maybe internet would be an unavoidablefuture development in 1980, other than nuclear armageddon). Likewise would this beautiful woman be able to say no to these options if she were offered them? Would it be immoral to choose for such a world, or would it be moral to not have such a world? Do you judge future paths because you saw this, or because you failed to see this?
Well there is the mention of Rapturism, and I do agree, the vision usually overheard in transhumanist circles (as opposed to “proclaimed by transhumanists” – there is a difference) is rather grande and pretentious, if no mythological. But it is no eschatological. There are three ways of looking at the future in my book -
I- ‘from the roots up design road’; you want a solution to a problem. Say, you want to traverse distances faster. So, you build a train and lay down train tracks. Before you know it things have changed and you end up in the future. So, in predicting that future you infer trends you see in whats happening in the railroad business and speculate. Thats what Jules Verne did. This tends to be a bit Utopian.
II – ‘the good look at the innards road’; you look at over-all trends in society, technology, recurring, patterns, from a detached, somewhat cynical perspective. That’s what William Gibson did when he projected forward, and his approach was markedly Dystopian.
III – you look at the essence of things, and ask yourself, what is good, what is bad, what is really happening. That is what Ray kurzweil is doing, and his approach is neither dystopian, utopian, rapturian or eschatological.
Say, if I had a serious desire to get rid of any cluster headaches I had been suffering for, say 5 weeks in a row, nonstop, every single day, then I might have to find me some pretty impressive solutions. I might end up with a borderline moral neurosurgeon who offered me a treatment involving implacing a brain pacemaker, a programmable device that sends an electrocurrent into key areas of the brain, allowing me to trigger release of all major brain neurotransmitters (seratonin, dopamine, noradrenalin, melatonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, vasopressin and oxytocin) according to programmed algorithms, I’d probably end up a very happy addict. My migraines would be gone, but so would the capacity for any meaningful action as a human being.
…But one look in my eyes.. If you hadn’t met me before, you’d dismiss this experiment with disgust in your voice. You might not even want to meet me, with the shave head and the wires trailing into my skull. But if you did, and after the event, you would be unable to shake the realization I were feeling something no human being ever feels? That might haunt you, forever. It might also threaten the assumptions of many people – the realization that all structure of underlying human meaning and value is in the end something that can be synthesized, engineered, edited – and improved.
… that they didn’t in fact lead good and optimal lives. That someone with better information could do it far better.
There is something annoyingly conceited with most people when they enter their thirties and fourties and are starting to face the idea that they are going to die pretty soon. I have heard this being romanticized and glamorized in poetic terms as ”I am finally settling into harmony” and all that. But what if it isn’t? What if the acceptance of this world and all its inherent flaws is nothing but a neurological feedback mechanism where key brain neutotransmitters create a false opiate sensation of spirituality, acceptance, grace and surrender?
I’m no Luddite, bio or otherwise. I am glad that technology has enabled us to lead lives that are comfortable, leisured and long enough that we can explore the upper echelons of the hierarchy of needs. However, we demean the body at our peril. It’s not the passive container of our mind; it is its major shaper and inseparable partner. If we discard our bodies we run the danger of losing context to our lasting detriment – as we have already done by successive compartmentalizations and sunderings.
Athena my dear, here is where we see your prejudice. I might even label it superstition. I’d say “(S)he who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.”
Darling, change is certain and there are sure arguments change (if not progress) is speeding up. And there is certainly room for improvement. Myself, I will not find it all meaningful without massive, sweeping improvement. When you introduce some new type of technology, anyone under 15 will play with it, and find new uses for it, whereas some people over 50 will find arguments to go traumatized and futureshocked over it. In what you say, are you accusing progress, technology (despite of the obligatory “I am openminded” disclaimer when you say you are not a luddite) causing societal ills
- or do you fail to lay the blame where the blame really lies?
What if (and I am speculating here) the blame does NOT lie with implementation of technology – but with a generation of aging people that are terrified of losing their grip of the world, their grip on existance and exert whatever force and contrivance they can to own things, make other people as they will and ‘make thing more stable’ … what if when you say the body ‘is not a passive container’ you are doing something you don’t see yourself – projecting a lingering subconscious resentment against the prospect of becoming a biological dead ender? Marilyn Manson said it best “One hates what one fears“.
Humans are inherently social animals that developed in response to feedback loops between the environment and their own evolving form. Like all lifeforms, we’re jury-rigged. Furthermore, humans are mediocre across the entire spectrum of physical prowess, from range of vision to maximum running speed. Yet this mediocrity probably enabled us to occupy many environmental niches successfully before technology allowed us to impose our wishes on our environment. Optimizing in any direction may push us into dead-end corners, something that has happened to many species we engineered extensively.
And I vehemently agree!
But who is saying evolution is done, and we’re finished and we can rest and sit on our laurels? Is this middle class existance where historical accident earned you a reprieve from having to dodge the plague, enemy tribes, poverte, famine and large predators suddenly the culmination of the road of existence? That’s so nice about Science Fiction, isn’t it? It’s so deliciously remote… a sequence of genocides or exploding stars or an evil ming the merciless which don’t disturb placid suburban life, drinking squeezed orange juice, reading the morning newspaper on a lazy sunday morning, while the sprinkler waters the lawn… However that whole perception completely disregards the fact that many humans still aren’t in any place they’d label as acceptable. You may think it is as acceptable and “pretty much jolly good’ , as you consider the odd occasional glass of wine and concept as the epithome of existence.
I assert you simply confuse it to good and sound, because you mistakenly think you got the best hand on the table.
Humans become satisfied and lazy when they think they made it, and pretty aggressive to anything that might disturb their complacency and status quo. If someone rears up its head as a dealbreaker, those scorned and ousted from the ivory towers rage in indignation. They’ll even go to war to get what they mistakenly think is theirs.
Change of a fundamental character is threatening, because it disrupts entitlement fantasies. Some person tweaking their eyeballs and inserting cybernetic eyes isn’t just …”unnatural” or “dead-end” or “radical” or… “grey” . Something one certainly wouldn’t want to happen. Or, as Fukuyama said – “the most dangerous ideology in the world”.
This also holds true for our brains. It’s a transhumanist article of faith that intelligence can and must be augmented – but there are many kinds of intelligence. A lot of learning is mediated through the body, from using a screwdriver properly to gauging complex social interactions. Short-circuiting this type of learning results in shallow knowledge that may not become integrated into long-term memory. There is a real reason for apprenticeships, despite their feudal overtones: people who use Photoshop, CAD and laboratory kits without prior “traditional” training frequently make significant errors and often cannot critically evaluate their results. Furthermore, without corrective “pingbacks” from the environment that are filtered by the body, the brain can easily misjudge to the point of hallucination or madness, as seen in phenomena like phantom limb pain.
Intelligence to me is a valued asset, but as a concept it is woefully outdated. To me augmenting intelligence is akin to a discussion about augmenting the phlogiston. I’d say, let people decide for themselves whatever it is they want to augment and see what happens. I don’t mind seeing a whole generation of “slightly panicked pre-transhumanists’ waddle down viagras for whatever perceived incapacity. I personally use my mobile phone rarely, but I love seeing the millions around me implement the damn things with a speed and infectiveness that would have been called epidemic a few decades ago. Try predicting the adoption rates, level of complexity and derivative behaviors of mobile phones to aforementioned petson from the 1970s, and you’d get blank stares in reurn.
Or the archetupical ” I wouldn’t want ti live in such a world“. But many do anyways, despite off, irregardless, and in ten years we’ll all be laughing at the idea that in the past people didnt have access to headset GPS-linked augmented reality, and your (grand?)children will say things “I don’t understand how you lived without them?”
Or unless you demand that proper use of augmented reality requires a slow, disciplines process of training, conditioning and mentorship? I bet you know a guy who would be willing to teach, if shown proper respect and a cheque?
I’d regard such statements as pretty outdated in the post-YouTube era. “Short-circuiting this type of learning results in shallow knowledge that may not become integrated into long-term memory” – in ten years most human beings (or the ones that matter) will have magically aquired the capacity to aquire and retainpractical and functional knowledge from 30 minutes watching it being done on some poser animation. Maybe not to the exacting standards of shaolin masters, but “good enough” or “JIT”. I suppose that kind of knowledge isn’t the real thing, would contribute to the collapse of civilization and the degeneracy of morals?
What next? Who know people will one day be “reading books without uttering a sound“.
Another feedback loop is provided by the cortical emotions, which enable us to make decisions. Two prominent side effects of many nootropic drugs are flattening of the emotions and suppression of creativity. Far from fine-tuning perception, the drugs act as blunting hammers. Finally, if we evade our bodies by uploading into a silicon frame (biologically impossible, but let’s grant it as a hypothesis), we may lose the capacity for empathy, as shown in Bacigalupi’s disturbing story People of Sand and Slag. Empathy is as instrumental to high-order intelligence as it is to survival: without it, we are at best idiot savants, at worst psychotic killers.
Ah, the old metaphor – all those moral weaklings who turn to that new religion of christianity will certainly come under the disfavor of the Gods and be turned into baby eating murderers. The final resort of those who reject the emergence of a new culture, a new virulence of memes, a new survival strategy – the end and merciful dispatching of the old tribal order, and the old tribal leaders muttering angrily the young are “possessed by evil spirits”. Nothing good can come of that railroad business, it’s an ungodly contraption, it moves so fast the soul can not possibly keep up, And the same goes for that damn radio, suffrage, television, rock n roll, flying through the air, psychotherapy, inoculation, women working, free sex, reefer madness, computers and all that.
It’s all prejudice, it’s all people who don’t want their world changed.
(updated)
Ditto for “leaving biology behind”. We may be able to create other minds, very different from ours (silicon, animal uplift, what have you). But our own minds go where our brains go. Mind uploading is an article of faith for believers. As a biologist, all I can tell you is that it cannot be done.
And I can say with equal insistence it can be done. I am not saying it can be done without loss. I don’t assert that an “capture” or “scan” of a functional mind in another substrate will be able to survive transition in any way functionally or sane. I am not even claiming a xox will be anything like the original – the best metaphor I have may be that a character rolled up in 3.5 translates with difficulty to 4rd edition. Simulations of a human mind may be constructs that are so contrived they wouldn’t count as “people” in a court of law. Heck, I’d even assert that the first decades some sort of translation of brain data into computational data isn’t even appealing to potential clients.
If you didn’t catch it, that era has started – we can capture visual data from a mammalian cortex and translate it into visual data. When I saw that, I seriously considered that “ahead of schedule” and far more implausible than I would have anticipated.
But insofar I am a transhumanist (some doubt that) I am not much interest in this type of treatment anyway. To me “uploadism’ isn’t part of my core belief structure or ideology.
What I would want is a number of discrete recording devices that would allow me to control an AI secretary or agent with finely grained precision. If I’d be able to do that anyone who knows me would know I wouldnt make these tools (familiars?) anything like me. I’d give them my values, or “my values v2.o”. These wouldn’t even be consistent with one another – the simulate I’d call my secretary would have different values, presentation style and appearance than the one I’d have as my bodyguard or personal assistant or lust slave. Nevertheless I’d all have them function based on data that is intimately derived from the workings of my brain.
The whole uploading concept is a silly fantasy construct. That much is exceptionally clear. It’s like a clerical spell, “create golem’ and a simplification. Likewise, the spell “fly” didn’t involve broomsticks in reality either – but when it did emerge in the real word it involved a number of costly, complex, contextual tools. It wasn’t much like the old mythological reference of magical flight, but maybe it was better. I mean – what’s more glamorous; flying in a lear jet or dangling midair in chilly halloween weather on a wooden stick? Give me flight attendants with bubbles anytime.
That brings me on the belief that technology does in fact follow fantasies and projections. So much of our technology derives from visions, which in turn derive from faerie tales, which in turn quite often derive from religious parables. These are all things or entities we’d like doing or being. The monumental figure of Odin begat the more tame stories of a father christmas barelling over houses on a sledge pulled by reindeers. Nick was in turn infected by Coca Cola commercials and recast in billboard red as a multicontinentally charismatic nanofac on fast forward. It;s no surprise that nanoreplication are labelled “christmas machines’.
My curiosity makes me ask if any aliens, if there are any out there, would have markedly different belief systems (if any!), markedly different mythologies, and if so, would they aim for different avenues of technological progress? Would intelligent squids in time generate complex mythologies we wouldn’t understand, or fail to see the point, which would instill in them the capacity and desire to make technology we would find “bizarre” and “incomprehensible” and “oddly magical” ?
Giulio Prisco: “transhumanism is about leaving biology behind”To echo Athena’s point, you can’t escape biology-as-substrate. No matter where your consciousness is, or what physical media houses it, it will be housed on something, and that something will matter whether or not you acknowledge it. By splitting your perception of existence from your physical existence you’re just ignoring the physical, not making it disappear.
Let me state once and for all, going on the record here, that the process of creating incremental recordings of bit of meaningful information of the mammalian (or human) brain will in fact me an industry producing so much fall-out and spin-off and side effects and societal disruption that before we even get anywhere near an actually marketable (one anyone would want to pay a few million euro for) product, we will have found lots more interesting avenues that “that mere upload”. Upoading research will have so many deeply disruptive and corrosive implications it will be one big desillionment getting there.
It would be as if Mohammed the prophet, commanding the very djinn to make all devout muslims able to fly into the Heavens and (randomly picking a spot) go there (pointing to the moon) – on which the djinn would say “fine, when you want that – will two centuries be ok?” , Mohammed, peace be on his ballsack, said “sure, but I want yo be there”, and the Djinn would squeeze twothousand years of scientific progress, mechanization, agriculturization, imperial conquest, steam engines, petrol engines, airplanes, rockets and finally lunar landers in two centuries – incidentally thrusting all devout stone age muslims into a modernist, highly liberal lifestyle, leaving Mohammed deeply annoyed and rather disappointed.
What extra-transhumanist critics apparently appear to think is that transhumanists are a kind of unrealistic nincanpoops who assume the transhumanist fundamentals won’t arrive without a cost, fall-out, massive pain and sacrifice, abuse, violence.
The point is however – faith. Not faith in magic, or that things happen by themselves. But faith that what we currently have is horrible, and what we might have should be a lot better. That is why I personally don’t care much for specifics such as the idefix of “mind uploading” – I just want to press the radically fast forward button, because I have a lot to gain and very little to lose.
That incidentally, is why I urge various transhumanism critics, ‘cautious technoprogressives ‘ (luddites if you will) to maintain some caution in all this. To me the most transhuman thing I have seen in the last few years was some stuff that resulted because of the internets. Specifically, the collapse of IP ownership. That happened largely because people could, they didn’t have anything to gain with the current status quo, and because they could they did. Look it it this way – most advances, especially revolutionary changes, happened because a bunch of unwashed barbarians thought they had nothing to lose. Now, even if the faerie godmother won’t come along and turn us all into furry avatar uploads in some wonderland virtual reality, there are a serious amount of people “who have very little to lose” and who can’t stand the established status quo by now, and who are willing to do whatever it takes to get a better deal. Where rich nation transhumanists will be largely left talking about all this for at least a decade, a few billion people in the third world might in fact be living transhumanism, and very soon. Their treshold for implementing lateral new techmologies is very low, since they have a lot less to lose, and see every day on commercial messages what they have to gain.
Denial or dismissal of revolutionary changing technologies might bite us all in the ass, far sooner than we anticipate. The third world is a pretty big petri dish and its being incubated faster and faster.
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