Quick Links: Fake Ray Kurzweil, 30 Rock, Avatar

• Don't miss tweeting alter-Ray Kurzweil:

All I'm saying is that if Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof read my books they would know how to write complex hypothetical narratives

His bio reads, "While my physical self remains cryogenically preserved in Yucca Mountain, I maintain an active VR life where I blog in anticipation of the singularity." Which reminds me of a great moment in last night's episode of 30 Rock, in which fictional GE CEO Don Geiss's eulogy is delivered by Alec Baldwin's character at his "Episcopal cryogenic freezing service," which looks like this:

• Speaking of Twitter: We recently launched a New Atlantis Twitter feed, for more frequent updates on our work.

• Avatrocious: Futurisms readers might enjoy the essay about Avatar by James Bowman in the forthcoming issue of The New Atlantis. Caleb Crain's take from a few months back is also worth a read.

"The Geek's Guide To Getting Girls"

H+ Magazine's "humorist" Joe Quirk (author of "The Meaning of Life Lies in Its Suckiness," which we discussed here) has penned another literary triumph. Watch out, Voltaire:

It wasn’t until her bikini thong hit me in the face that I recognized her. It was the sophomore from Holy Cross College I’d interviewed yesterday who had said her deepest desire was to marry a mature gentleman who would see her not just as a piece of flesh but as the intelligent entrepreneur she planned to be. I didn’t recognize her up on that stripper pole on the beach amid all this Spring Break mayhem. She had complained it was difficult to land a good man with all these loose girls sending the wrong impression.

He goes on to weave the latest evolutionary/social psychology/biology research into a story about how he "headed to Spring Break in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, so I could observe these principles at work in the courtship behavior of drunken beach apes." Wherein he indeed describes what he sees as if viewing primates, complete with descriptions of how women's menstrual cycles alter their mating preferences, etc.

Here's the kicker: the main principle Quirk wants to relate (perhaps with the aim of lending some reassurance to the self-image of the magazine's likely readers) is that women are attracted not to alpha males but to men with social respect and intelligence. "Female primates can tell the difference and boink accordingly." Classy.

From this, he assures us, "At Spring Break in 2011, science nerds will get more sex than jocks and cheerleaders, because science nerds will understand the biology of human desire." (Which sounds hilariously if probably unintentionally like the response in Revenge of the Nerds to the cheerleader's query "Are all nerds as good as you?": "Yes. Because all jocks think about is sports. All we ever think about is sex.")

Maybe I'm missing something here, but this seems to conflict a bit with all of that social respect and intelligence stuff. If there's one thing I know about women, it's that talking about how hormonal and easily manipulated they are isn't likely to endear you to them.

It doesn't speak well of H+ Magazine that they would publish this sort of thing. There's the question of the scientific validity of these claims, not to mention the article's apparent ignorance of the "Seduction Community", which has been attempting a similar (if arguably more respectful) project for decades. And then there's the writing itself, which should make anyone with even a shred of respect for women and women's rights shudder. Some of the commenters on the piece try to defend it as just a joke, but it sounds a bit more like the rantings of a few bitter science/engineering students I knew in college who tried to couch their misogyny in supposedly humorous or scientific language.

Appropriateness aside, I'd like to suggest that this piece is indicative of a deeper tension within transhumanism between the ev/social science outlook that wants to view humans as little more than animals and the Enlightenment outlook that wants to raise humans to the level of equal beings endowed with supreme individual rights and wills. The application of the former outlook to ethics leads to some attitudes that are directly in conflict with the latter. To put it another way, treating people in practice as little more than animals leads to some pretty un-Enlightened ideas and behavior. More about this later.

Update: Elana J. Clift, author of the work on the "Seduction Community" I linked to, adds in an email that the H+ article "sounds similar to a lot of the (b.s.) pop psychology/anthropology that people in the Seduction Community blather on about.... [I]n addition to women's rights and sexism against women you might mention how this kind of crap is harmful to men and how they are taught to view themselves, their intentions, their bodies, etc."

Now you can ignore the Singularity while checking Facebook on your laptop

The Singularity is coming this summer to a new course available at Rutgers University. The instructors are father-son duo Ted and Ben Goertzel (respectively), and a cabal of guest speakers will make appearances, including James Hughes, Aubrey de Grey, and Robin Hanson, as well as a variety of other colorful characters, including one possibly from a cartoon. According to H+ Magazine, this is the first-ever accredited college course on the Singularity, although it's certainly been at least a subject of discussion in college courses before.

Naturally enough, the course will be conducted entirely online, and will feature virtual classroom discussions. All well and appropriate, and I'm actually really thinking of registering, except you still have to "attend" classes two nights a week just like a regular class, and that's a big time commitment. If only there were some way for me to absorb all that information without all the hassle.

Also of note: the official textbook for this first-ever accredited college course on the Singularity is Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near. Which I have it on good it authority makes the course unserious and unacademic, so consider yourself warned.

An Ambiguous Utopia

Following up on my last post about artistic depictions of human life post-progress, the gentle reader is directed for his edification to our colleague Alan Jacobs’s New Atlantis essay on the “Culture” novels of Iain M. Banks. The novels are plainly meant first and foremost to be compelling science fiction, and Banks openly describes their universe as a sort of utopia in which he would gladly live (“Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it’s my secular heaven”) — but even so, Jacobs indicates that the problems of utopian alienation still crop up in characters “who try to restore unpredictability and drama to their lives”:

What I find fascinating about the anatomy of the Culture novels is the dissonance between Banks’s straightforward statements about the Culture and certain recurrent features of the stories he writes. Banks talks about how “nice” the Culture is, and yet we see hidden cruelties and open desires for universal domination. He clearly envisions the overcoming of scarcity as the signal achievement of the civilization made by the Minds, and yet he focuses time and again on objects of unfulfilled desire. He is aware that the very language of the Culture is a subtle but immensely powerful training in “correct” ideology.

To some extent these oddities are ... the inevitable consequence of the decision to write novels about the Culture. It is not possible to come up with stories as such about people who are perfectly nice and can have everything they want instantly. But one might also say that people of whom no stories can be told are not really people in any sense recognizable to us; and the lives that they experience are not lives in any sense recognizable to us.

Read the whole thing.

Why Hope?: Transhumanism and the Arts (Another Response to James Hughes)

In another of the series of posts to which Professor Rubin recently responded, James Hughes argues that transhumanism has been marked by a tension between “fatalistic” beliefs in both technological progress and doom. Hughes’s intention is to establish a middle ground that acknowledges both promise and peril without assuming the inevitability of either. This is a welcome antidote to the willful blindness of libertarian transhumanism.

But conspicuously absent from Prof. Hughes’s post is any account of why techno-fatalism is so prominent among transhumanists — and so of why his alternative provides a viable and enduring resolution to the tension between its utopian and dystopian poles.

I would suggest that the prominence of techno-fatalism among transhumanists is closely linked to how they construe progress itself. Consider Max More’s description of progress, which is pretty well representative of the standard transhumanist vision:

Seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an indefinite lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities.

What is striking about this and just about any other transhumanist description of progress is that it is defined in almost entirely negative terms, as the shedding of various limits to secure a realm of pure possibility. (Even the initial positive goods seem, in the subsequent quote in Hughes’s post, to be of interest to More primarily as means to avoiding risk on the path to achieving pure possibility.) The essential disagreement Hughes outlines is only over the extent to which technological growth will secure the removal of these limits.

Transhumanists, following their early-modern and Enlightenment predecessors, focus on removing barriers to the individual pursuit of the good, but offer no vision of its content, of what the good is or even why we should want longer lives in which to pursue it — no vision of what we should progress towards other than more progress. Hughes seems to acknowledge this lacuna — witness his call to “rediscover our capacity for vision and hope” and to “stir men’s souls.” But in his post he offers this recently updated Transhumanist Declaration as an example of such “vision and hope,” even though it turns back to the well that left him so thirsty in the first place:

We need to carefully deliberate how best to reduce risks and expedite beneficial applications. We also need forums where people can constructively discuss what should be done, and a social order where responsible decisions can be implemented.

This, along with much of the rest of the Declaration, reads as a remarkably generic account of the duties of any society — putting the transhumanists decisively back at square one in describing both social and individual good.

For transhumanists — or anyone — to articulate the content of the good would require an embrace of the discipline devoted to studying precisely that question: the humanities, particularly literature and the arts. Hughes is right when he suggests elsewhere the postmodern character of transhumanist morality. The triumphant postmodernist is a cosmopolitan of narratives and aesthetics, a connoisseur who samples many modes of being free of the binding power of any. Because the postmodernist redefines the good as the goods, he is compelled even more than his predecessors to be a voracious consumer of culture and cultures, particularly of narratives and aesthetics.

The transhumanist vision of progress begins from this postmodern freedom to function in any mode of being. But, seemingly paradoxically, transhumanists tend to be indifferent to the study of literature and the arts as a means of knowing the good(s) (with the notable exception of science fiction). If they were not indifferent, then they might be aware of the now-lengthy tradition in the arts dealing with precisely the postmodern problem of maintaining “vision and hope.” Near the middle of the last century, the novelist Walker Percy wrote of the subject of postmodern novel:

How very odd it is ... that the very moment he arrives at the threshold of his new city, with all its hard-won relief from the sufferings of the past, happens to be the same moment that he runs out of meaning!... The American novel in past years has treated such themes as persons whose lives are blighted by social evils, or reformers who attack these evils.... But the hero of the postmodern novel is a man who has forgotten his bad memories and conquered his present ills and who finds himself in the victorious secular city. His only problem now is to keep from blowing his brains out.

Postmodern art moves from abstract theories to realized depictions of how the heroically actualized self lives. Inevitably in such depictions the triumphant victory of theory gives way to the unsustainable alienation of postmodern life, and the problem theory has shirked becomes pressing: Why hope? How to keep from blowing your brains out?

For the likes of the Beats, the solution could be found in a frantically earnest embrace of the postmodern imperative to move from one mode of being to the next. For Percy’s protagonists, the solution lies partly in embracing the same imperative, but ironically. For the readers of The Catcher in the Rye, the viewers of American Beauty, and the listeners of Radiohead, there is a consoling beauty to be found in the artistic depiction of alienation itself. For the French existentialists, the solution might just be to go ahead and blow your brains out.

That transhumanists have not grappled with the hollow and alienating character of their vision of progress could be taken as evidence of their historical and philosophical myopia. But of course their uninterest in depictions of the good(s) is not simply an oversight but an underlying principle. Whereas the postmodernist’s freedom from all modes of being is constitutionally ironic, the transhumanist is gravely serious about his freedom. His primary attitude towards discussions about the relative merits of different value systems or ways of life is not playfulness but wariness — or sometimes, as we have seen in the comments on this blog, outright hostility and paranoia.

Whereas the postmodernist takes the freedom from and to choose any mode of being as inherent, the transhumanist believes that it must be fought for — else there would be no gap between here and transcendence. Indeed, it is the effort to bridge this gap that constitutes transhuman teleology; the feat of the earning itself is the central end of transhuman progress. Transhumanism takes the lemons of postmodern alienation and makes the will to lemonade.

Hence the essential insatiability of the transhumanist project. It has as its goal not some fulfilled form, but a constant seeking after transgressive will and power which, once secured in some measure, surrenders its transgressiveness to the quotidian and so must be sought in still greater measure. The transhumanist, unlike even the theoretical postmodernist, can never fully actualize.

And hence the unsexiness Prof. Hughes bemoans in his project to split the difference between fatalisms, for his “pessimism of the intellect” appears only as a dreary accidental impediment to transcendence. A transhumanist project versed in the arts might be able to provide a more unified and compelling vision of its quest for progress — but it would also have to confront the everyday despair that lies at its heart.

[Images: "Transhuman DNA", courtesy Biopolitical Times; Walker Percy; Radiohead.]

The Transhuman and the Postmodern (A Further Response to James Hughes)

My previous post on transhumanism and morality elicited a response from James Hughes, whose recent series of essays was my prompt. I thank Prof. Hughes for his response, although it seems to me to confirm more than not the main point of my original post.

I’m confident that Prof. Hughes understands that what we are calling for the sake of shorthand “Enlightenment values” did not present themselves as “historically situated” but as simply true. Speaking schematically and as briefly as possible, it took Hegel (no unambiguous fan of the Enlightenment) to historicize them, but he did so in a way that preserved the possibility of truth. It took Nietzsche’s radical historicism in effect to turn Hegel against himself, and in so doing to replace truth with willful, creative overcoming. That opens the door to postmodernism.

It looks like it is almost axiomatic to Prof. Hughes that all “truths” are historically situated and culturally relative, so in that postmodern manner he is rejecting “Enlightenment values” on their own terms. Nietzsche, shall we say, has eaten that cake. But why then “privilege” “Enlightenment values” at all? Prof. Hughes wants to keep the cake around to the extent it is useful to pursue a grand transformational project (a necessary one, according to at least some of his transhumanist brothers and sisters). But why (assuming there is a choice) pursue transhumanism at all as a grand project, or why prefer one version over another? To this question Prof. Hughes’s axiom allows no rational answer (“Reason,” he writes, “is a good tool but ... our values and moral codes are not grounded in Reason”) although the silence is covered up by libertarian professions, the superficiality of which Prof. Hughes understands full well.

What Agnes Heller calls “reflective postmodernism” describes a response to the dilemma Prof. Hughes is facing that to my mind is not without problems, but at least seems intellectually respectable. Armed with Nietzsche’s paradoxical truth that there is no truth, the reflective postmodernist is alive to irony, open to being wrong and playful in outlook. But above all, the reflective postmodernist is an observer of the world, having abandoned entirely the modern propensity to pursue the kind of grand, “necessary,” transformational projects that made the twentieth century so terrible. Absent such abnegation, I don’t see how the postmodern-style adherence to “Enlightenment values” Prof. Hughes recommends for transhumanism can be anything more than anti-Enlightenment will to power.

Transhuman Morality 2.0 (Responding to James Hughes)

I don’t know if I’d take his intellectual history to the bank, but James Hughes is dealing with some serious issues in a series of blog posts about internal tensions within transhumanism as they relate to the Enlightenment ideas out of which he wants to claim it springs. In this post, for example, he notes how transhumanism is torn between a universalistic and a particularistic streak; this question is important because of its connection to the moral framework within which we should be thinking about the rise of transhuman diversity and the relationships between seriously advanced forms of posthuman intelligence and such merely human beings as might still be around in the future. To put the problem somewhat more bluntly than Professor Hughes does, the issue is whether posthumans will be under any ethical obligation to be nice to their human forebears. On the one hand, Prof. Hughes sees clearly that transhumanism’s stress on diversity, and the libertarian moral relativism that goes along with it, provides no good grounds for any such obligation. On the other hand, transhumanists, Hughes notes, seem to want to be right-thinking liberals when it comes to extending the sphere of egalitarian concern (a good, universal Enlightenment value) and being on the right side of contemporary human rights issues. It’s a puzzlement.

Prof. Hughes diagnoses that “transhumanists, especially of the libertarian variety, have retreated too far from Enlightenment moral universalism, towards moral relativism.” His concluding prescription:

We need to reassert our commitment to moral universalism and the political project of equality for all persons and institutions of global governance powerful enough to enforce world law and individual rights.... [But] we partisans of the Enlightenment cannot defend moral universalism by re‑asserting that rights are God‑given, natural, or self‑evident. We have to acknowledge that rights and moral status are social agreements, shifting daily with the balance of political forces seeking to limit and expand them. Moral universalism needs to be tempered with respect for diversity and, where meaningful, respect for individual consent and collective self‑determination. Our moral universalism needs to acknowledge the limits of our current perspective, the possibility that some of our universals may in fact be parochially human, and that our descendants may come up with better ethical and political models.

There is a technical term for what Prof. Hughes suggests here: having your cake and eating it too. Unless he is imagining some kind of neo-Hegelian universal and homogenous state, in what sense can rights and moral status be universals if they are a matter of social agreement and choice? (I’ll try to take up in a later post the question of what Prof. Hughes has to say elsewhere about powerful global governance.) At the same time, what are respect for diversity, individual consent, and collective self-determination (an interesting tension is surely possible between the last two) being presented as except putative universals, despite the fact that Prof. Hughes introduces them as ways to temper moral universalism?

Prof. Hughes’s hopes for the future seem equally confused. When he suggests that what we think of as universals might really just be expressions of the “parochially human,” that might seem to open the door to the progressive uncovering of genuine universals based on a less limited perspective. But in fact all he will commit to is that our descendants may come up with “models” for behavior that are “better.” The way he has framed the issue, he can really only mean better for them, according to whatever balance of forces will operate in their world. That may or may not look better, or be better, for us.

It is surely true that there is an irreducible element of Enlightenment thinking in transhumanism, but it has little to do with transhumanist politics and morality per se, and is to be found rather in the topic of another of Prof. Hughes’s posts: scientific and technical progressivism. For the most part, though, transhumanism seems to rely on thinkers who reacted against Enlightenment liberal universalism, as is the case of Mill, whose utilitarian libertarianism explicitly eschews any rights foundation. Indeed, the éminence grise behind transhumanism may well be that great anti-liberal and anti-Enlightenment thinker Nietzsche. Too few transhumanists, if any, have fully come to grips with the significance of a crucial point of agreement with Nietzsche: that mankind is nothing other than a rope over an abyss, a rope leading to the Superman.

“Transhumanists Have a Problem”

In a post that went up on his blog over the weekend, Michael Anissimov sketched out what he considers a potentially serious problem in transhumanist thinking, and he credits this blog, and particularly an important essay by Professor Rubin, with spurring his thinking.

There is much in Mr. Anissimov’s post that we disagree with. There is also a heap of, shall we say, odd reasoning. (To pick just one example, he finds it “unacceptable” that the human body cannot withstand “rifle bullets without severe tissue damage.” But of course bullets hurt us; that is what they are designed to do.) But all in all, we’re happy to help set Mr. Anissimov on the right path, and it is encouraging to see him concede that there are valid criticisms of transhumanism and that there are problems in transhumanist thinking. Here’s hoping that more of his ideological comrades follow his lead.

Will it Blend?: Apples and Philosophy of Mind

If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all. But philosophy, you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.

-Steve Martin

Anyone who sticks with a philosophy major long enough to take a philosophy of mind course will be familiar with some of the field’s classic thought experiments, typically involving zombies, identical twins, molecular clones, teleportation, amoeba-people, etc. And while these thought experiments can be quite useful for clarifying and constructing proofs about our concepts of mind, they are just as often used in fallacious attempts to destroy them.

Take the following scenario, a distilled version of one offered by Oxford professor Derek Parfit: Two molecularly identical copies of your body (including your brain) are created, and your original body is destroyed. Each copy thinks it is you, but which one really is? If one kills the other, is this suicide or murder? This experiment is supposed to prove that personal identity does not really exist, or at least that our understanding of it is illusory. Many similar arguments purport to dissolve related concepts such as selfhood and agency.

It should hardly need stating (but it does) that our concepts do not survive such scenarios because the scenarios are so wildly outside the realm in which those concepts arose. We shouldn’t expect personal identity to survive such violence intact. But we can’t draw from this gedankenexperiment the conclusions that Parfit proposes. Parfit’s aim is to prove that our notion of personal identity is wrong or unimportant, and that what really matters is psychological continuity. This attempt at conceptual demotion rests on the confusion wrought by the fact that some aspect of personal identity does survive in Parfit’s examples, even though related aspects, such as embodiment, do not.

Consider another thought experiment: Take an ordinary apple, drop it in a blender, and hit “frappé.” Pour the results into a glass and take a gulp. What you’re drinking still tastes like an apple, and still has the same nutrients. But we can’t really call it an apple. Conclusion: apples do not really exist. Appleness is defined by those chemical components that survive the trip through blender.

Of course, the fact that an apple is destroyed when you put it through the blender doesn’t mean that our concept of the apple is illusory. The redefinition down to the chemical components is impoverished, missing traits such as texture, shape, viability in producing apple trees, etc. Moreover, the aspects of appleness that do survive the blender can similarly and just as easily be “proven” illusory.

This apple-in-a-blender thought experiment is comparable to Parfit’s. Just because neither personal identity nor the apple has quite the ontological fortitude of, say, the electron, doesn’t mean they do not exist. One conclusion to draw is that made famous by Wittgenstein, which is that our concepts depend on certain conditions, and we should not expect our concepts to remain intelligible in scenarios where those conditions do not hold.

But there is a related practical conclusion, too: If we want to maintain things like personal identity, selfhood, and agency, we should avoid situations where the conditions upon which they depend no longer hold. This is why we rightly consider people with brain injuries and certain mental illnesses to suffer some loss of these faculties, and why we work medically to heal them — not because the notions themselves have broken down, but because the patients have lost the necessary conditions for maintaining them.

And the same warning holds about the efforts to make realities of some of these wilder thought experiments: For example, it is certainly true that if Alice surgically swaps brains with Bob, each resulting person would have a partial but not complete claim both to be Alice and to be Bob, as Alice’s-brain-in-Bob’s-body would probably maintain aspects such as Alice’s original memory, but would inherit Bob’s bodily continuity, including Bob’s sex, the neurophysical influences of Bob’s body on personality and the attitudes that come from looking like Bob looks, and so forth. All this, however, is less an argument for why you don’t actually have personal identity than an argument for why you might not want to swap brains with another person.

(Thanks to Futurisms friend Brian Boyd, from whose paper “Derek Parfit is a Zombie” this post cribs rather immodestly.)

“The Visible Mark of Earthly Imperfection”

A while back, BoingBoing featured photographer Philip Toledano’s portraits of “extreme” plastic surgery, “A New Kind of Beauty.” After posing some stock questions about the nature of beauty in his introduction to his portraits, Mr. Toledano asks, “Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and popular culture? And if so, are the results the vanguard of human induced evolution?”

A look at the portraits suggests that if the answer to this last question is “yes,” women will evolve in the direction of having very large, perhaps in some cases enormous, breasts and very poofy lips. Men will evolve to have poofy lips, elfin looks, and/or enormous pecs. If Toledano is indeed portraying a “vanguard,” his photos are just one more reason to wonder what transhumanism’s promise to liberate us all to be just what we want to be will really mean. As a group, his subjects portray but a tiny fraction of the multiplicity of forms of human beauty that the so-called “natural lottery” already produces on a daily basis. On the other hand, maybe the extraordinary lack of imagination, diversity, and creativity shown by those Toledano has chosen to portray is really the fault of mainstream plastic surgeons, who are just too hidebound to try anything really interesting. We await the Giacometti or Brâncuşi of the human body.

But taken as a whole, the portfolio brings to mind a point made many times on this blog and well summarized by despair.com’s classic “Conformity” demotivational poster picturing a herd of zebras with this caption: “When people are free to do as they please, they generally imitate each other.”

Olympics in Space

I recently mentioned Ed Regis’s lively Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition in a couple of posts here on Futurisms, and I thought I’d mention one final item from the book — a very minor one. One of the people Regis profiles is Dave Criswell, who as a child became enamored of a vision of civilization in space. By the 1980s, Criswell was promoting “star lifting,” the sort of project that makes geoengineering look like Tinkertoys. But Criswell didn’t stop there. In 1988, Regis reports, Criswell dreamed up something new:

He proposed holding the 2008 Olympic Games in space.

Criswell first presented the concept at a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; later, both Omni and the Smithsonian Institution’s Air & Space magazine ran stories about the scheme. [Note: Regis himself wrote the Omni article.] The idea was to build a two-mile-wide space station up in orbit, a structure big enough to hold ten thousand people.

Criswell had everything figured out: once around the ring would equal a ten-kilometer run; new zero-gravity sports events could be developed. He even invented a type of aircraft — a swing-wing space plane — that could get sports fans up there and back for the price of a typical ocean crossing....

Robert Helmick, president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, was actually quite impressed by the Olympics-in-Space concept. “It’s a fantastic idea, very creative,” he said. “The Olympic Games have a universal appeal throughout the world, and I think it would be great to hold them in space and for there to be some visible insignia up there that everyone could see.” [pages 287-88]

Cynics and curmudgeons might say that the Olympics and human spaceflight are perfectly paired since both involve exorbitantly expensive spectacles that, although tremendously impressive, seem to leave many people bored.

More seriously, I’m confident that human beings will someday settle other worlds, and that the old sports and games they bring with them will be complemented by new ones suited for their new civilizational footholds. But Criswell’s proposal was for the year 2008. It wasn’t just an open-ended aspiration — someday, the Olympics should be in space! Since he chose a specific year, we can assume that he truly believed that we could have a two-mile-wide space station capable of holding thousands of people and hosting a major sporting event. Mind you, he proposed this in 1988 — more than fifteen years after the last man had walked on the moon, and a decade before assembly of the real-life International Space Station began. (By way of comparison, the longest dimension of the delay-plagued ISS is today 0.067 miles.) How wonderfully and optimistically out of touch with reality.

Now, if Criswell had suggested Space Olympics in the year 3022, that would be a different story:

Anything is possible: The Singularitarian's trump card

In response to the previous post here, asking what humanity might be like today if transhumanists had remade man in the 1950s, Michael Anissimov asks, “if we modified ourselves into this based on the ideology of the 50s, couldn't we just then change it again if we didn't like it?” This comment merits some attention because it exhibits one of the most common transhumanist tropes — a supposed discussion-ender.

Sure, one can claim that all such morphological decisions will eventually be completely reversible. One can claim that we will be able to change our forms just as easily as flipping a light switch. One can claim that people will be able to make choices without the slightest effect on other people, and that each generation can make choices that don’t impinge on the next.

But what reason is there to believe any of these things are possible? And even if they were possible, what are we to do in the meantime with a world in which they are not? And more to the point, why bother discussing futurism at all if we can supposedly do anything we want without any necessary consequences or limitations?

A defining feature of Singularitarianism is its basis in a fantasy world in which anything is possible (or at least, in which we have no way knowing for sure what isn't). This gives Singularitarians a way of wriggling out of any argument by saying that no matter what the potential problem, we'll be able to find a way around it (or at least, we don't know for sure that we won't).

I'm not sure if this is an argument from eventual omniscience/omnipotence that is tantamount to an argument from present infallibility, or if it is just an argument from the impossibility of proving a universal negative. One way or another, this is something to the effect of: Hey, why not jump off this cliff? I can't see the bottom, but it sure looks great, and if we see any problems we can course-correct in mid-air. Which doesn't make for great conversation.

If Sterling Cooper remade man

Think for a moment of the common critiques of 1950s American culture — of the era’s conformism and repressiveness, its denial of brewing social discontent, its spiritual emptiness and shallow view of human good, and the gosh-golly attitude toward social life that led one astute commentator to dub it “the sunny synthetic fifties.” Much as those critiques can be prone to lapse into Pleasantville-style caricature, there is surely still something to them. Now imagine if scientists had attempted, in the era of all those peculiar neuroses, to biologically remake man.

A 1956 article in Mechanix Illustrated asked scientists and engineers to propose redesigns of the human body. Among the offerings were:

• Making the spine a solid column.
• Placing the brain in the chest cavity, because “Nearness to fuel supply is a fundamental principle in industry.”
• Replacing the rib cage with a sort of giant clamshell easily opened for surgical purposes.
• A wider pelvis to decrease the risk of hernia and make childbearing easier.
• Extra eyes in the back of the head or the end of a finger (a very Guillermo del Toro image).
• Antennae on the head, like a grasshopper’s.
• Making the nose a long snout to reduce sinus troubles.
• Elimination of the toenails and the little toe.
• Pockets like a kangaroo’s or a food storage compartment like a camel’s.
• Hooks on the head for straphangers on subways.
• Detachable arms for comfort while sleeping.
• Baldness to eliminate the cost of maintaining hair. (Note that this proposal came from a dermatologist.)
• Folding ears like an old-fashioned ear trumpet, for catching low-pitched sounds. (This one came from a radio engineer.)

In the previous post here, I wrote of the danger of tinkering with complex systems we did not create due to the impossibility of controlling and predicting the outcome. But there is an additional cost in tinkering with some of these systems. At the dawn of the age in which the Mechanix Illustrated article was written, C. S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man:

In order to understand fully what Man’s power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them.

When examining transhumanism, we need not go nearly as far as Lewis in describing the power one generation asserts at the expense of its descendents. We can accept that each generation has some limited power to correct, through changes in theories and institutions, the errors of their predecessors.

But the transhumanist form of change is of quite a different kind. Whereas before successive generations remade their understanding of a human nature that itself remained effectively constant, the transhumanist project is to remake human nature itself to match its novel understanding. The effects will be immensely more difficult for successor generations to change — if they can be changed at all — than the previous process of change at the social level, itself a very brittle process.

Put another way: You might foresee a freer and better future if transhuman powers come to pass within your lifetime — but would you be freer and better off today if transhumanism had begun reshaping human biology in the 1950s? (I wonder in particular what transhumanist feminists would say to such a question. Would women today come with rocket-cone breasts and built-in kitchen appliances?) Gizmodo blogger Wilson Rothman says that “if 1950s men redesigned the human form, we’d be horrors.”

One might object that our cultural ideas today are better than those of the 1950s, but this objection only makes the point. We could not alter our culture nearly as easily had a previous one remade human nature to match its own. The “freedom” promised by transhumanism is in fact the license to grab power for our generation at the expense of future ones. As Lewis says:

There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.

Transhuman Ambitions and the Lesson of Global Warming

Anyone who believes in the science of man-made global warming must admit the important lesson it reveals: humans can easily alter complex systems not of their own cohesive design but cannot easily predict or control them. Let’s call this (just for kicks) the Malcolm Principle. Our knowledge is little but our power is great, and so we must wield it with caution. Much of the continued denial of a human cause for global warming — beyond the skepticism merited by science — is due to a refusal to accept the truth of this principle and the responsibility it entails.

Lake Hamoun, 1976-2001,

courtesy UNEP

And yet a similar rejection of the Malcolm Principle is evident even among some of those who accept man’s role in causing global warming. This can be seen in the great overconfidence of climate scientists in their ability to understand and predict the climate. But it is far more evident in the emerging support for “geoengineering” — the notion that not only can we accurately predict the climate, but we can engineer it with sufficient control and precision to reverse warming.

It is unsurprising to find transhumanist support for geoengineering. Some advocates even support geoengineering to increase global warming — for instance, Tim Tyler advocates intentionally warming the planet to produce various allegedly beneficial effects. Here the hubris of rejecting the Malcolm Principle is taken to its logical conclusion: Once we start fiddling with the climate intentionally, why not subject it to the whims of whatever we now think might best suit our purposes? Call it transenvironmentalism.

In fact, name any of the most complex systems you can think of that were not created from the start as engineering projects, and there is likely to be a similar transhumanist argument for making it one. For example:

• The climate, as noted, and thus implicitly also the environment, ecosystem, etc.
• The animal kingdom, see e.g. our recent lengthy discussion on ending predation.
• The human nutritional system, see e.g. Kurzweil.
• The human body, a definitional tenet for transhumanists.
• The human mind, similarly.

Transhumanist blogger Michael Anissimov (who earlier argued in favor of reengineering the animal kingdom) initially voiced support for intentional global warming, but later deleted the post. He defended his initial support with reference to Singularitarian Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “virtues of rationality,” particularly that of “lightness,” which Yudkowsky defines as: “Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own.” Yudkowsky’s list also acknowledges potential limits of rationality implicit in its virtues of “simplicity” and “humility”: “A chain of a thousand links will arrive at a correct conclusion if every step is correct, but if one step is wrong it may carry you anywhere,” and the humble are “Those who most skillfully prepare for the deepest and most catastrophic errors in their own beliefs and plans.” Yet in addition to the “leaf in the wind” virtue, the list also contains “relinquishment”: “Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs.”

Putting aside the Gödelian contradiction inherent even in “relinquishment” alone (if one should not hesitate to relinquish one’s beliefs, then one should also not hesitate to relinquish one’s belief in relinquishment), it doesn’t seem that one can coherently exercise all of these virtues at once. We live our lives interacting with systems too complex for us to ever fully comprehend, systems that have come into near-equilibrium as the result of thousands or billions of years of evolution. To take “lightness” and “relinquishment” as guides for action is not simply to be rationally open-minded; rather, it is to choose to reflexively reject the wisdom and stability inherent in that evolution, preferring instead the instability of Yudkowsky’s “leaf in the wind” and the brash belief that what we look at most eagerly now is all there is to see.

Imagine if, in accordance with “lightness” and “relinquishment,” we had undertaken a transhumanist project in the 19th century to reshape human heads based on the fad of phrenology, or a transenvironmentalist project in the 1970s to release massive amounts of carbon dioxide on the hypothesis of global cooling. Such proposals for systemic engineering would have been foolish not merely because of their basis in particular mistaken ideas, but because they would have proceeded on the pretense of comprehensively understanding systems they in fact could barely fathom. The gaps in our understanding mean that mistaken ideas are inevitable. But the inherent opacity of complex systems still eludes those who make similar proposals today: Anissimov, even in acknowledging the global-warming project’s irresponsibility, still cites but a single knowable mechanism of failure (“catastrophic global warming through methane clathrate release”), as if the essential impediment to the plan will be cleared as soon as some antidote to methane clathrate release is devised.

Other transhumanist evaluations of risk similarly focus on what transhumanism is best able to see — namely threats to existence and security, particularly those associated with its own potential creations — which is fine except that this doesn’t make everything else go away. There are numerous “catastrophic errors” wrought already by our failures to act with simplicity and humility — such as our failure to anticipate that technological change might have systemic consequences, as in the climate, environment, and ecosystem; and our tremendous and now clearly exaggerated confidence in rationalist powers exercised directly at the systemic level, as evident in the current financial crisis (see Paul Cella), in food and nutrition (see Michael Pollan and John Schwenkler), and in politics and culture (see Alasdair MacIntyre among many others), just for starters. But among transhumanists there is little serious contemplation of the implications of these errors for their project. (As usual, commenters, please provide me with any counterexamples.)

Perhaps Yudkowsky’s “virtues of rationality” are not themselves to be taken as guides to action. But transhumanism aspires to action — indeed, to revolution. To recognize the consequences of hubris and overreach is not to reject reason in favor of simpleminded tradition or arbitrary givenness, but rather to recognize that there might be purpose and perhaps even unspoken wisdom inherent in existing stable arrangements — and so to acknowledge the danger and instability inherent in the particular hyper-rationalist project to which transhumanists are committed.

Our Doppelgängered Future?

David Foster Wallace → Russell Crowe?

The gentle Facebooking reader will likely have noticed the news-feed trend of last week. No, it’s not posting the color of your bra in ostensible support of breast-cancer awareness (older readers will remember that one). I first noticed it myself when the faces on my news feed seemed both more familiar and more attractive. It turns out that it was all due to the latest Facebook fad: updating your profile picture to match your “celebrity doppelgänger.”

One friend’s doppelgängered profile picture was accompanied by a comment that she suspected the trend to be a product of “wishful thinking.” And how. David Foster Wallace’s words from the dawn of the 1990s seem truer than ever:

Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we find appealing.... When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day [of TV watching] is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it’s less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with.... This very personal anxiety about our prettiness has become a national phenomenon with national consequences.... The boom in diet aids, health and fitness clubs, neighborhood tanning parlors, cosmetic surgery, anorexia, bulimia, steroid-use among boys, girls throwing acid at each other because one girl’s hair looks more like Farrah Fawcett’s than another ... are these supposed to be unrelated to each other? to the apotheosis of prettiness in a televisual culture?

One wonders how the transhumanist is to contend with such a problem. The libertarian transhumanist, especially, admits into his moral vocabulary little beyond the individual will. It is the locus of all human action; any collective action is only properly constituted contractually.

What then of the influence of popular culture — whether in average people’s everyday anxiety over the gulf between their looks and the looks of the pretty people they almost could be but are not, or in their actual efforts to bridge that gulf? The libertarian can deny such anxiety by proudly affirming that the individual will exercises itself autonomously, but as Wallace indicates, this is a woefully inadequate account of the way people think and make choices about their appearances (see: Nadya Suleman/Angelina Jolie).

The only other option is to affirm the supreme rights of the individual will in exercising its personal choices of expression, irrespective of whether those choices are truly autonomous. Every person can and should make himself — including his body — into whatever he freely chooses to be. This is the mantra behind morphological freedom. The numbers of people who go to drastic measures, starving themselves, going under the knife, etc., are surely then by virtue of their expressiveness the freest of all, and cosmetic technology a force for their liberation. Jocelyn Wildenstein is to be heralded as the Frederick Douglass of the morphological emancipators.

Because the libertarian transhumanist view admits of no normativity, neither can it admit of pathology. Libertarian transhumanists must claim to celebrate all morphological choices equally. In practice, of course, they do not celebrate them equally, for their ideology has its own qualitative distinction in the virtue of choice: It favors those “expressions” that seem to be freer — that is, those that have departed more from the given. Libertarian transhumanists seem vaguely aware of and mostly fine with this internal contradiction. But there is a deep irony in the fact that their embrace of morphological autonomy as liberation from cultural conformity commits them to celebrating choices that are so transparently made by unhealthy wills succumbing to the grip of cultural norms.

(See also this wonderfully-titled post by blogger Miss Self-Important: Your radicalism bores me and your liberation weighs me down.)