Metamagician and the Hellfire Club

Another good review for Dreaming Again

2008-07-24T21:39:00.003+10:00

Here's another good review for Jack Dann's anthology, Dreaming Again, this time by Carol Neist on the Specusphere website. My story, "Manannan's Children" gets a favourable mention, though the reviewer's comment left me unsure that she really "got" the ending:

Love of mythology is fed by several tales. Russell Blackford’s “Manannan’s Children”, for example, sweeps the reader up into the world of Irish legend while questioning the value of immortality. Janeen Webb’s “Paradise Designed” also has a mythological base, but with a Jurassic Park twist. Kim Wilkins’s “The Forest” is a near-future take on the Hansel and Gretel story. All three are well-told and very enjoyable.

I guess it's true that the story questions the value of immortality, but so does a lot of other literature and myth. The point is to provide an answer to the question, something that I attempt as the story draws to a close and the moral of the tale turns out to be not what a reader might assume it would be.

Still, I'm always pleased when something I've written is described as "well-told and very enjoyable"; I won't complain. I'm also glad to have my work mentioned in the same paragraph as stories by Janeen Webb (one of my dearest friends) and Kim Wilkins - both people whose work I admire greatly.

World Youth Day

2008-07-21T10:12:00.006+10:00

I've spent the past week resisting an urge to comment on the Cult of Misery's great festival known as World Youth Day, actually a week-long set of activities culiminating in an address by the pope to hundreds of thousands of the faithful. This year, World Youth Day was held in Sydney, and its effects could also be seen in Melbourne where any trip into the city over the past fortnight has involved contact with roaming bands of young "pilgrims" from other countries.

I've avoided the topic for a couple of reasons. One is that I'm just sick of the media coverage and would rather ignore this sorry episode as much as possible. It's not as if my attitude to the Catholic Church, with its sick morality of misery and guilt, is any secret. And, too, I feel genuine good will towards the young people who are guests in my country, much as I abhor the religious morality preached by their religious hierarchs.

I am, of course, appalled by the outrageous attempts to legislate to suppress the freedom of speech of people protesting against the Catholic Church, and I applaud the fact that the worst of this legislative effort was struck down by the courts. Things have come to a pretty pass if governments are even going to think about banning peaceful forms of protest against a highly controversial religious worldview.

I am also appalled that many millions of tax-payers' dollars have been spent promoting that same worldview - I do not want the mechanism of the state promoting ideas that I, for one, oppose and seek to undermine by intellectual critique and satire. Why should the dollars of the citizenry and the might of the state be spent on such blatant, one-sided distortion of the community debate about ideas about metaphysics and morals? The fact that associated tourism may have ended up making the exercise profitable for Sydney, and Australia in general, is beside the point. The issue is not that the expenditure has harmed our economy - it probably hasn't - but that the state has taken sides on a huge scale in an important controversy over the truth of religious doctrine. Imagine the outcry if tens of millions of tax-payers' dollars were spent promoting a major event organised by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to rally the world's youthful atheists (complete with laws criminalising efforts to "annoy" the atheistic pilgrims, such as by handing them religious pamphlets in the street).

Anyway, the whole thing is over now. Hopefully, many of the young Catholic pilgrims used the trip more as an opportunity to see the world, engage in a certain amount of pleasurable sinning, and enjoy Australia's lifestyle ... rather than to imbibe more deeply of the misery, guilt, and so-called "spirituality" on offer from that bloated and monstrous cult, the Roman Catholic Church.

WTA changes its image

2008-07-18T18:28:00.004+10:00

Following a membership vote, the World Transhumanist Association will be changing its image to the extent of trading under the "doing business as" name "Humanity Plus" and using a stylised "h+" as its logo. This decision was made by the Board, which sent it to the organisation's financial members for ratification or rejection. It follows an extensive review by the WTA Board over the past few months.

For the record, I voted in favour of these moves. However ambivalent I am about the word "tranhumanism" and its cognates, I am in broad agreement with the goals of the WTA and am a member in good standing. As I see it, the proposed move is very cautious and may do little either for good OR ill. However, if the Board believes that such initiatives can help it in its wider efforts to make the WTA more attractive as an organisation to fund and support, then, in the absence of some compelling argument to the contrary (and I haven't heard one that seems compelling), then I think the membership should be supportive. Clearly, various soundings were taken, so I'm hopeful that a total public relations overhaul - with a neat logo, a contemporary-sounding trading name, and a revamp of the website and everything else - might make the WTA a more attractive proposition to others who largely agree with its pro-technology emphases.

The new name and logo may themselves cause some confusion and/or have some undesirable connotations, but we can probably live them, and the decision can always be reversed a few years down the track if it has turned out, by then, to have been counterproductive.

There was some very spirited debate, with a wide range of viewpoint, some of which I find congenial - while some sounded bizarre. But that's the transhumanist movement, a very broad one in the ideas that it welcomes. In the end only 108 people actually voted, and the majority in favour of the change was overwhelming.

The breakdown was:

CHOICES AND RESULTS
- Yes, 75 votes, 69.44%
- No, 22 votes, 20.37%
- Abstain, 11 votes, 10.19%

Jenny Blackford getting attention

2008-07-17T09:37:00.006+10:00

No, I don't mean that sort of attention (which she can command any time).

I mean that up-and-coming writer Jenny Blackford has had a good week for critical attention paid to her short stories. "Python", published last year in the anthology Ruins Terra, has made Gardner Dozois' Honorable Mentions in his latest Year's Best SF anthology, which is quite an achievement for Jenny's first published short story aimed at adult readers rather than at children or the YA market. Her second such story is "Trolls' Night Out", in Dreaming Again - which has also picked up early praise. Reviewing Dreaming Again in AurealisXpress, Stuart Mayne says:

The stand-outs for me were Lucy Sussex's "Robots and Zombies, Inc."; John Birmingham's terrific colonial horror show "Heere Be Monsters"; Jenny Blackford's playful "Troll's Night Out" was supernatural fun; Lee Battersby's "In From the Snow"... Oh, this is silly there are too many terrific stories to list. The lovely thing I found about the majority of the stories is the local content; in this respect I particularly like Trudi Canavan's, Jenny Blackford's and Cecilia Dart-Thorton's Melbourne pieces.

(Eek! My own story in Dreaming Again is set in ancient Ireland and retells the Oisin legend from a vaguely transhumanist viewpoint - but (*grin*) never mind about me.)

Meanwhile, Jenny's YA retelling of the Perseus myth, "Andromeda", appears in Paul Collins' new anthology Trust Me - and again her story was singled out for praise, this time in a review in the influential Magpies magazine.

All this in one week. Not bad going.

Listen to Triple J at 5.30 pm

2008-07-15T15:35:00.004+10:00

I just did an interview with Triple J on unreasonable/absurd religious practices. This was conducted in a light-hearted way that involved my being presented with a list of odd practices to rank in order of unreasonableness.

If you have a moment (and see this in time), tune in to Triple J at 5.30 this afternoon and let me know what you thought. And how would you rank the traditional Jewish kaparot ceremony (in which an individual's sins are transferred to a chicken), pentacostals' speaking in tongues, Jehovah's Witnesses' refusal of blood transfusions, Mormon temple garments, and the E-meter beloved of Scientologists? What's the best criterion to use to determine relative unreasonableness? E.g., is it what just seems weirdest or least familiar to you or to someone of your background? What involves the most unlikely understanding of reality? Or what does the most harm (or maybe some weighing up of bizarreness and harmfulness?)?

Tune in for a (hopefully) quick-witted discussion of these issues and more.

At the AAP conference

2008-07-10T21:26:00.002+10:00

I've been a bit scarce all week, as I've been attending the AAP conference. I'm perhaps not getting "into" this as much as if it were held in a different city - with it being here in Melbourne this year, it's tempting to stay home and worry about my paper (on tomorrow) and deal with other things. Still, I've been there most of the time since Sunday evening, and need to give a paper first thing tomorrow. Wish me luck, everyone.

AAP conference coming up

2008-07-06T09:40:00.002+10:00

The AAP conference starts this afternoon and continues through until Friday afternoon - in fact there's social activity on into Saturday. This is the big event in the yearly calendar for philosophers based in Australia and New Zealand. I can't believe that it's already upon us (where did the year go?).

My own paper, which is entitled "Transhumanism and its Critics: Time to Transform the Debate" is scheduled first thing on Friday morning. Hmmm, early in the morning on the last day is not the best time to give a paper if you actually want an audience. In fact, that's putting it rather mildly - I hope someone shows up to it. Never mind, we'll see how it all goes.

Avoidance activities?

2008-07-03T21:42:00.004+10:00

The time has come for me to write the paper that I'm committed to give at the AAP Conference next week. The subject is ... well, I must check what exactly I committed myself to, but I know it was something to do with transhumanism. I even tried to get a transhumanism-related stream on the program, but that didn't come to anything.

I figured earlier in the week that spending most of the week thinking and writing about transhumanism - by immersing myself in the papers published in The Global Spiral, and commenting on them all - might get me in the mood. As a matter of fact, it has, and I hope that all the work that went into it will be of value to someone. But it hasn't actually written my paper for me. Hmmm, maybe I'm not that much in the mood to write a conference paper. what avoidance activities should I try next?

Transhumanist theology

2008-07-03T12:54:00.004+10:00

Lutheran theologian Ted Peters is the author of the sixth and last of the generally hostile articles on transhumanism in the June 2008 issue of The Global Spiral . Despite my own rather anti-religious bias, I actually consider this the best of the six articles. Peters bases many of his claims on theological concepts, but similar claims could have been based on purely secular considerations. He does, however, fall into the usual trap of conflating the transhumanist movement with certain specific ideas that are controversial within the movement, such as proposals for personality uploading and a particular view of inevitable evolutionary and technological progress.

Peters helpfully spells out his general position in a way that is refreshingly clear after the almost-impenetrable style of Jean-Pierre Dupuy's article in the same issue. Here is Peters:

My thesis is this: transhumanist assumptions regarding progress are naive, because they fail to operate with an anthropology that is realistic regarding the human proclivity to turn good into evil. It is my own view that researchers in the relevant fields of genetics and nanotechnology should proceed toward developing new and enhancing technologies, to be sure; but they should maintain constant watchfulness for ways in which these technologies can become perverted and bent toward destructive purposes.

The two long (but, as I said, clear) sentences here merit consideration. The first may well be true of some transhumanists (though, as usual in these articles, it would be helpful if Peters had put it that way rather than in a way that slanders an entire cultural movement). You don't need to think in terms of theological notions of evil and sin to realise that new technologies can be used in dangerous and even malevolent ways, as well as in beneficial one. Most transhumanists are painfully aware of this, but perhaps some do have an overly optimistic view of technology that stands diametrically to opposed to that of contemporary Luddites; i.e. the former are blind to the evils of technology while the latter are blind to the good. While Peters could have been more careful and conciliatory in his wording, the note of caution in this sentence is not itself unwelcome.

What about the second sentence? Peters says: It is my own view that researchers in the relevant fields of genetics and nanotechnology should proceed toward developing new and enhancing technologies, to be sure; but they should maintain constant watchfulness for ways in which these technologies can become perverted and bent toward destructive purposes. It appears to me that this is a perfectly sensible view. It is, indeed, my own view, and I'm sure that most sophisticated transhumanists share it. As I've said so often, with apologies to William Gibson, the street finds its own uses for things. We can't be sure in advance what uses new technologies will put to, and we mustn't proceed on the insouciant assumption that we do know. Pragmatically speaking - not as some kind of law of nature - we are likely to be surprised at how any particular technology ends up being used (of course, doomsayers about new technologies should also keep this in mind before they run off trying to prohibit this and that because it just might be used in such and such a nasty way).

In a sense, that's all that needs saying: the general position advanced by Peters is one that could be advanced within the transhumanist movement, so it can't be a critique of the transhumanist movement.

But there's a little bit more that's worth adding. I can't refrain from commenting on Peters' account of the relationship between transhumanism and theology. He takes transhumanists to task for assuming "that religion will attempt to place roadblocks in their way on the grounds that the religious mind is old fashioned, out of date, Luddite, and dedicated to resisting change." He insists that Christian and "even" Jewish theology are dedicated to the new. "If a theologian would become critical of a transhumanist, it would not be in defense of what has been. Rather, it would be because of a naiveté in thinking that we could accomplish with technology a transformation that can be achieved only by the eschatological act of a gracious and loving God."

With all respect to Peters, with whom I'm in agreement about much, this seems rather disingenuous. It doubtless conveys his own theogical position accurately, and I'm prepared to accept for the sake of the argument that it's even the "correct" position. Obviously, theology is itself a complex discipline within which many views are advanced and contested. However, it's also true that there has been an enormous amount of theologically-based resistance to emerging technologies and their applications, and even the supposedly secular arguments that are so often run (e.g. those of Michael Sandel with his talk about life as a gift) actually make little sense outside of a framework of theological assumptions. To concede, as I do, that some theological positions are compatible with an embrace of emerging technologies does not entail a denial that much of the actual, real-world opposition has been theologically motivated, often motivated by lurking ideas of the sanctity or inviolability of life, the world, or the human genome as "given" to us.

Like Kathryn Hayles, Peters should embrace transhumanism and declare himself an ally rather than an opponent. His actual political position on enhancement technologies is one that a sophisticated and realistic transhumanist could share. He needn't self-identify as a transhumanist, if the t-word word carries too much baggage for him - if it has too many connotations of specific ideas that he really does oppose. But he could certainly adopt a stance in relation to the transhumanist movement as a whole of being a friend - and a friendly critic where he feels he must criticise particular people or ideas.

Pickering on "transhumanism"

2008-07-02T20:03:00.029+10:00

I'm nearing the end of my current blog project of commenting on each of the six articles in June's edition of The Global Spiral , which is devoted to a critique of transhumanism. This time, I will discuss Andrew Pickering's, "Brains, Selves and Spirituality in the History of Cybernetics", in some ways the strangest of the five articles that I have read so far. We'll come to why, but let me step back for a moment to survey the overall terrain.

The five articles that I've read all express hostility to transhumanism, or to what the authors imagine transhumanism to be. Some are more hostile than others. None offers a clear and plausible account of what transhumanism actually is.

Perhaps that last point is not entirely the fault of the authors: perhaps transhumanism, as an international cultural and philosophical movement, is too protean, too contested from within, to be defined adequately. This could make it very difficult to attack or support, because it can be difficult to be sure what, exactly, is being attacked or supported.

Nonetheless, difficult though it may sound, surely it's not all that difficult for critics of transhumanism, particularly people who have been asked to carry out academic research on the subject, to appreciate that they are dealing with a multi-faceted phenomenon - one that may well look different in Italy (say) from how it looks in (say) California or Nairobi, and one that may not always look the same in Italy (or California, or Nairobi) from day to day or from local theorist to local theorist.

It's not unfamiliar that cultural, social, or political movements can be like this. The environmentalist movement would also be difficult nail down as one thing in the naive sense of one set of doctrines to which all environmentalist must subscribe if they are to count as such. Or take the example of feminism: no one would imagine that feminism is just one set of doctrines and that the feminist movement is lacking in internal debates and conflicts - with the views of Andrea Dworkin resembling those of Gayle Rubin, who in turn resembles Wendy McElroy ... and so on.

What might reasonably be said about feminism is that there's a core of concern for the interests of women, and for consideration of women's perspectives and experience, and that there's an agreement that women are not in any way the moral or intellectual inferiors of men. If we define feminism that broadly, then there are few serious thinkers these days who are not feminists - though I suppose there are still some thinkers who should be considered serious who occupy positions out on the more bizarre branches of the political Right where even the broadest idea of feminism is greeted with suspicion.

So, how do you attack feminism if you're inclined to do so? Well, perhaps if you disagree with certain views put forward by some feminists it's better to explain that it's not actually feminism itself that you mean to attack, but certain specific feminist positions that are popular or influential or otherwise worth your efforts. Or alternatively, you need to attack some very broad propositions - e.g. you need to argue that women really are, in some sense, the moral inferiors of men (and should be subservient to them). But you can't attack the views that Andrea Dworkin espoused and claim thereby to have refuted "feminism". Even if your argument is a good one, and you can show that certain of Dworkin's were intellectually untenable, you have not thereby made a dent in the real-world feminist movement, within which Dworkin's views are controversial to say the least. You may have refuted something that you've chosen to call feminism, but in doing so, you have refuted "feminism", rather than feminism. The actual feminist movement marches on.

None of this is meant to deny the legitimacy of arguing that, say, Dworkin's views have become popular within the feminist movement to an extent that is disproportional to the their actual merit, and have crowded out more plausible views. There may or may not be a good argument for that, but the argument has to be made out. You can't just declare, "By feminism, I mean the views of Andrea Dworkin." Well, you can, but your victory over "feminism" will be an empty one: you may become legendary for defeating feminism - but you'll be a legend only in the confines of your own lunchbox.

Incidentally, as I've noted on a previous occasion, no one should imagine that it is a sign of weakness in the feminist movement that it contains so much internal debate and disagreement. Instead, it is a sign of ferment and energy. Admittedly, the very idea of feminism would be pretty useless if feminist positions didn't have some things in common - or at least enough widespread tendencies to enable us to see a family resemblance among the various positions.

All of this is familiar to most educated people whenever they deal with any large idea or any kind of social, etc., movement. So why is it difficult to grasp that this applies equally to transhumanism? It's certainly been difficult for the Global Spiral contributors.

As I remarked to be the case with feminism, there's a great deal of ferment and energy within the transhumanist movement (and among people who stand outside it, but with philosophical positions that are generally congenial to it). In any transhumanist forum or gathering there will be people who are atheists, people who are (in one way or another) religious, people with a wide range of political positions, people who emphasise the importance of different technologies, people who are sceptical about the grandiose claims of others for the recognition of certain novel moral imperatives, and so on. All of this is up for grabs.

So what do transhumanists all have in common? Or if the answer is "Nothing", what clusters of overlapping interests and ideas are there among groups of transhumanist thinkers and activists such that transhumanist views really do bear some kind of family resemblance to each other?

These are not easy questions to answer, though one might have expected the six Global Spiral contributors to have made some kind of attempt to tease out the complexities. So far, with only one article remaining to be read, I can't see any attempt at this at all.

If I had to attempt the task, where would I begin? Probably with ideas of technology being used to enhance human physical and cognitive (etc.) capacities or to redesign the human body (by genetics, prosthetics, and other technologies). I'd mention ideas that involve what are alleged to be self-preserving transfers of personality from our current bodies to other substrates (usually some kind of advanced computational hardware). I'd make clear that there is a wide range of positions that could reasonably be called transhumanist: positions that are sympathetic to various radical uses for the emerging technologies of enhancement. I'd also mention that even the concept of "enhancement" is up for grabs. Nonetheless, I'd probably conclude, there are some general tendencies within transhumanism - a certain willingness to use technology to alter ourselves in direct and powerful ways. Even if we can't find a core group of proposition that every transhumanist believes, we could show something of how various transhumanist positions constitute a "family" of related worldviews, with various patterns of overlapping resemblances among them.

By contrast, every time one of the Global Spiral articles comes close to making such points, with some acknowledgment that the transhumanist movement is complex ... the points quickly get waved away.

This brings me back to the article by Andrew Pickering.

Pickering candidly admits that he knew "almost nothing" about transhumanism when he was invited to give the paper (so why on Earth was he chosen to give a paper on the topic in the first place?). He suggests that tranhumanism raises the question of what does it mean to be human, then adds that he thinks "that transhumanism may not have a single agreed position." However, rather than exploring what varied positions transhumanists might have on this (rather problematically worded) question, he declares that "for the purpose of exposition I’ll narrow my definition of transhumanism down to the goal of 'cybernetic immortality' as a sort of defining outer limit of transhumanist thought."

I have no idea what he means by "a defining outer limit" in this context, so I'm a bit stumped by this - maybe a kind reader can explain what Pickering means. Meanwhile, all I can say is that some transhumanists are keen to pursue something like cybernetic immortality - though not in the precise sense that Pickering goes on to describe in the article - while others are less keen. Some self-described transhumanist are probably even hostile to the notion, or sceptical about it. So we have this situation: Pickering concentrates on a particular position that he imagines (I suppose) to be a popular one within transhumanist circles. He criticises this position as if he were thereby criticising the transhumanist movement itself. It's much as if someone said, "By 'feminism' I mean the view of heterosexuality advocated by Andrea Dworkin" and then went on to attack Dworkin's view, castigate "feminism" for its narrowness, make remarks such as "Yes, I’m starting not to like feminism."

In other words, Pickering is criticising "transhumanism" rather than criticising transhumanism. The real transhumanist movement marches on unscathed.

Note that even transhumanists who subscribe to the idea that we should attempt to achieve a form of immortality by uploading ourselves onto a durable substrate of computer hardware might feel that their position is caricatured by Pickering. It's worth looking closely at his language when he defines the idea of cybernetic immortality like this: "A certain timeless essence of humanity—consciousness, the mind—is to achieve immortality, with all the useless paraphernalia of humanity—the body, even the unconscious and subconscious reaches of the mind—to be sloughed off." I'll dwell on this, since what Pickering is describing is not just a less-than-universal transhumanist aspiration; it is an idea that I have never seen advanced by any transhumanist thinker anywhere!

Now, there may be a transhumanist thinker whom I don't know about who has argued for such an idea. I can't prove a negative, at least not this sort of negative. But uploading, as conceived of by actual transhumanists, is never understood so simplisticly. The idea is to emulate on some other substrate than the original human brain and body, not just the rational mind but the entire personality. This includes unconscious drives, underlying values, and whatever else constitutes or feeds into the personality. If the idea of substrate invariance is correct, then it is possible to recreate an individual's entire personality (including all the relevant inner experience) in an inorganic computerised form. The claim is that the entire personality - not just the reasoning powers and so on - can be transferred to adequately functioning inorganic hardware (or, as one imaginary alternative, inorganic hardware can gradually be used to substitute for however much is required of the person's original organic body).

Far-fetched? No doubt it is, and I am (in various ways and for various reasons) sceptical about it. Such a process may not violate any physical or (if there are such things) psychophysical law, but the theoretical and practical hurdles appear to be so high that the entire idea is off the table as a serious near-future policy option. Or so I'd argue. Those who think that it's just a matter of developing sufficiently powerful hardware are (I argue) naive about the other problems. Nonetheless, their position is not the one that Pickering ascribes to them. Once that's cleared, it can be seen that his entire article misses its target.

Why? Because Pickering's concern is that transhumanism (as he defines it) contains a "narrow" conception of what it is to be human, one that equates our humanity with reason and the conscious mind. This is what Pickering calls an Enlightenment view, though it's not clear that the thinkers associated with the Enlightenment all shared such a view. (Perhaps Kant believed something like this, but Enlightenment thought was varied, complex, and nuanced.) In any event, Pickering is arguing against a position held by no contemporary transhumanist of any note, based on the work of no particular Enlightenment thinker. He then claims that his dislike of this chimerical position is a criticism of transhumanism. It is not; it is not even a criticism of the idea of uploading, which is a somewhat different thing. It is only a critique of "transhumanism", while the real transhumanist movement marches on untouched.

This fundamental error enables Pickering to make the following key statement of his position. It's a fascinating one:

in the history of cybernetics ... curiosity about the performative self has been entangled with all sorts of technologies of the self (including flickering strobe lights and hallucinogens, as well as meditation), and with associated altered states, explorations of consciousness, strange performances, magic, the siddhis, the decentered dissolution of the self, tantric yoga and union with the divine. The self, as revealed here, turns out to be inexhaustibly emergent, just like the world—the antithesis of the given human essence of the Enlightenment and cybernetic immortality. And again, for me, this shows the extent of the freezing and narrowing of the human that transhumanism entails—the severity of its editing of what the human might be. Of course, all of the practices and states that I talk about in my paper are already marginalized in contemporary society—it feels vaguely embarrassing to talk about them in public. But at least the margins exist, and one can go there if one likes. The transhumanists would like to engineer them out of existence entirely and forever. Yes, I’m starting not to like transhumanism.

In other words, Pickering dislikes transhumanism - or, rather, "transhumanism" - because he thinks it leaves no room for such things as the experiences of meditative states, hallucinogenic drugs, and tantric yoga. But there is no reason for the real transhumanist movement to be hostile to whatever merits these things actually have.

Later in the article, Pickering discusses Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which he describes as a vision of the future that offers "open-ended experimentation, emergence and transformation with no fixed end". Then he adds:

I would like to know how it came to be that in the 20s and 30s people were able to imagine radical transformations of the human form, when no evident technological possibilities were at hand. And ... I am struck by the impoverishment of our imagination that has since come to pass. Now we have biotechnology, now we really could dream of equipping ourselves with wings or new senses, but we don’t. Instead of experimentation with the endless possibilities of humanity, we dream transhumanist dreams of purification and the excision of what already exists, of downloading consciousness. Something profoundly sad has happened to our imagination. That, in the end, is what transhumanism brings home to me.

The ignorance of this is breathtaking!

I can only wonder at how an article like this, by someone who clearly does not know what he's talking about, could ever have been published. It is possible to discuss transhumanism in opposition to visions of biologically-transformed bodies "with wings or new senses" only if you define transhumanism in Pickering's bizarre and arbitrary way and only if you are totally ignorant of the fact that real transhumanists - rather than "transhumanists" - do, indeed, imagine transformed bodily morphology, new senses and so on, and are open to experimentation and endless possibilities in just the way that Pickering describes.

Given Pickering's openness to the radical use of biotechnology to alter human powers, he should actually be an ally of transhumanists in the real struggle that has emerged in the early years of the twenty-first century: i.e. the struggle against modern-day Luddites who are adamantly opposed to such possibilities as the transformed bodies with wings, new senses, etc., and who are often opposed even to medical research on human embryos. By all means let us imagine these wild biotech possibilities (while also being realistic about what actually will be possible). But when we wonder at the strange people who may come after us - people with wings or gills, or the radar sense of a bat, or more likely just with longer and healthier lives than our own - let's not imagine that in doing so we are somehow being opposed by, of all things, the transhumanist movement.

Publication prize

2008-07-01T12:34:00.002+10:00

I've just found out that I won the 2007 Faculty of Arts Postgraduate Publication Prize for my article "Dr Frankenstein Meets Lord Devlin: Genetic Engineering and the Principle of Intangible Harm", published last year in The Monist (with a nominal 2006 date on it). Apart from the prestige and recognition, and a certificate to frame, this carries prize money of $1000. Off to have a celebratory lunch now, and I gather there'll be a ceremony in the School of Philosophy and Bioethics later on. I'm grinning from ear to ear about this: the recognition is really nice.

Hayles shadow-boxes with transhumanism

2008-06-30T20:31:00.014+10:00

The fourth of the six articles in the special anti-transhumanism issue of The Global Spiral (June 2008) is "Wrestling with Transhumanism" by well-known critic Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Professor of English and media studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

As with the article by Don Idhe in the same issue, this contains much that I do not quarrel with, though it does seem (despite an explicit disclaimer near the beginning) somewhat naive or presumptuous about what transhumanists do and do not know. As with Idhe's article, the legitimate points that it makes are not especially new and should be familiar to many transhumanists.

At the same time, the article has merit: there's no doubt in my mind that some, perhaps many, transhumanists get carried away with the possibilities ... and it's good to subject their thinking to a reality check. Actually, the same applies to rabidly anti-transhumanist thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama, who seems like a bio-Luddite Chicken Little imagining that transhumanism will make the sky fall in. It would be better if the whole debate about emerging technologies took place within a framework of more realistic hopes and fears.

Hayles gets off to a false start in wondering why transhumanism is still growing in popularity despite what she naively (by her own admission) thought was her knock-out blow to it a decade ago, when she claimed that it rests on an illegitimate over-extension of information theory in imagining the uploading of human minds into advanced computational devices. The difficulty that she faces here is that (as far as I can see) she never did make out her case - indeed, while I largely share her scepticism about the prospect of uploading, I suspect that she is simply out of her depth, as are most literary critics who broach such subjects, when it comes to the philosophy of mind and personal identity.

However, Hayles herself more or less acknowledges that this is a false start. As she says, there are "many versions of transhumanism, and they do not all depend on the assumption I critiqued." This is a pleasing concession for her to make, because it gives an impression that she understands the richness of current debates within the international transhumanist movement and that she will not be insensitive to diversity and nuance. Unfortunately, she immediately adds, dispelling that impression. "But all of them, I will argue, perform decontextualizing moves that over-simplify the situation and carry into the new millennium some of the most questionable aspects of capitalist ideology." This is slightly odd because she never does actually argue the case that "all" forms of transhumanism fall into the trap she identifies. Since many transhumanists, especially in Europe, appear to have anti-capitalist views grounded in socialist or social democratic thinking of one kind or another, it is highly doubtful that anyone could ever demonstrate such a thing.

All this, of course, sets aside the question of whether the "capitalist" views that Hayles dislikes are actually incorrect. She puts no actual argument against them (and nothing about her article suggests that she is particularly well-versed in political philosophy).

Again to her credit, however, she is able to write this, with which I'm pretty much in agreement:

Why then is transhumanism appealing, despite its problems? Most versions share the assumption that technology is involved in a spiraling dynamic of co-evolution with human development. This assumption, known as technogenesis, seems to me compelling and indeed virtually irrefutable, applying not only to contemporary humans but to Homo sapiens across the eons, shaping the species biologically, psychologically, socially and economically. While I have serious disagreements with most transhumanist rhetoric, the transhumanist community is one that is fervently involved in trying to figure out where technogenesis is headed in the contemporary era and what it implies about our human future. This is its positive contribution, and from my point of view, why it is worth worrying about.

Whatever Hayles's limitations, this passage demonstrates that she is no naive neo-Luddite. The assumption of technogenesis, which she endorses, puts her a long way on the path to transhumanism herself. I don't expect her to adopt the label (indeed, my own reservations about the t-word are a matter of public record), but it would be better if she confined herself to saying that she agrees with transhumanist thinkers on this basic assumption, while disagreeing with certain specific aspects of much of the transhumanist thinking that she has encountered to date. That would be more realistic, and more respectful of the people she wants to engage, than dismissing "all" transhumanist thinking as simplistic and decontextualising. Why not take a more tentative and conciliatory approach towards people with whom you share common ground? (Surely Hayles shares more common ground with thoughtful transhumanists than with some of her associates in the special Global Spiral issue.)

Most of the article consists of readings of various well-known science fiction narratives: among them, Nancy Kress's "Beggars in Spain", the novella, and Beggars in Spain, the novel ... with its sequels (not "sequel" as Hayles seems to think); Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children; and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its cinematic version, Blade Runner. Considerable space is also given to James Patrick Kelly's recent novella "Mr Boy", while brief mentions are made of many other sf works, including Greg Egan's Permutation City, cited for its recognition of the horror that could come from knowing that you are an electronic copy of an original personality. She concludes this discussion with the statement that "One need not agree with Francis Fukuyama that transhumanism is 'the world’s most dangerous idea' to appreciate the critiques of transhumanism enacted in these SF fictions."

But this gets complicated for several reasons.

1. I agree with Hayles that it is worthwhile for science fiction writers to attempt to imagine the social and psychological effects of the technological and scientific innovations (the novum as Darko Suvin calls it) that are at the heart of the genre.

2. I also agree with her that sf writers' imaginative efforts may shed light on discussions of the possible social impacts of new technologies and other innovations. Related to that, I agree that the job of a scholar/critic of science fiction is a noble one, and that sensitive, in-depth critical engagement with sf texts is not to be despised. It is helpful for Hayles to report to scholars in other fields on the imaginings of science fiction writers and on how some of these might be interpreted as containing an implicit critique of certain ideas that can be found in transhumanist writings. (However, it's going too far to talk about "the critiques of transhumanism enacted in these SF fictions." The narratives concerned may criticise certain kinds of naive optimism about the future, but they are not in any sense critiques of transhumanism itself, and nor do they, in New Critical jargon, "enact" such a critique.)

3. However, we should all bear in mind that science fiction stands in various complex, and often ambiguous, relationships to technology and social change. For one thing, there is some dystopian pressure on sf writers because the (frequent) requirement for danger and suspense creates a temptation to problematise whatever technology may be depicted. Of course, it is far more complicated than that. For example, there is also a counter-tendency even for science fiction narratives with a dystopian or cautionary streak to accommodate values associated with the depicted technology. Technological innovations that are portrayed as menacing may be, at the very same time, alluring and cool - and acknowledged as such. I'm sure that Hayles is aware of all this complexity, and is simply unable to tease it out in the space available to her, but in the event it is actually Hayles who comes across as rather simplistic. Her account of science fiction and its working is somewhat thin and under-theorised. If we are to find something, perhaps much, of value in the imaginations of science fiction writers, we must engage with the phenomenon of science fiction more critically than Hayles manages to accomplish in this article.

4. The main conclusion that Hayles seems to draw from all this is that transhumanist thinkers have been naive - whereas science fiction writers have been more insightful - about the difficulties that are typically caused by technological innovations. There may be some truth in this: certainly, many of us have had encounters with naive and dogmatic transhumanists. But at the same time, there are plenty of transhumanist thinkers who are flexible in their thinking, open to new ideas, and well aware of the kinds of points that Hayles is making. Thus when she claims that transhumanists have failed to acknowledge such problems as the implications for social justice and social stability from the development of emerging technologies I am simply astounded.

In this last respect, to show that I am not being unfair to Hayles or taking her out of context, let me quote her at length:

Transhumanists recognize, of course, that contemporary technoscience is not an individual enterprise, typically requiring significant capitalization, large teams of workers, and extensive networks of knowledge exchange and distribution, but these social, technoscientific, and economic realities are positioned as if they are undertaken for the sole benefit of forward-thinking individuals. In addition, there is little discussion of how access to advanced technologies would be regulated or of the social and economic inequalities entwined with questions of access. The rhetoric implies that everyone will freely have access (as in the quotation cited above [she refers to a brief quote from Nick Bostrom]), or at least that transhumanist individuals will be among the privileged elite that can afford the advantages advanced technologies will offer. How this will play out for the large majority of people living in developing countries that cannot afford access and do not have the infrastructure to support it is not an issue.

This is correct in part. In the days when I used to take (not very much) part in the discussion on the sometimes celebrated, sometimes derided, Extropians List, I certainly encountered transhumanists who seemed, frankly, heartless when it came to issues such as these. I'm sure that what Hayles is describing exists, perhaps quite commonly.

But at the same time, the issues that she raises, far from being ignored by transhumanists, are the subject of much earnest consideration within transhumanist forums and by thinkers who are broadly sympathetic to transhumanism. If no high-profile (or low-profile if it comes to that) transhumanist thinker has yet produced a definitive answer, it is because of the difficulty of predicting the future and solving the global problems of the twenty-first century, not because the concerns raised by Hayles are new to transhumanists, who are as aware of such issues as global poverty as anybody else.

In her final paragraph, Hayles writes:

I do not necessarily agree with Fukuyama’s argument that we should outlaw such developments as human cloning with legislation forbidding it (not least because he falls back on 'human nature' as a justification), but I do think we should take advantage of every available resource that will aid us in thinking through, as far as we are able, the momentous changes in human life and culture that advanced technologies make possible—and these resources can and should include SF fictions.

No argument there. Most of that sounds fine.

But then she adds:

The framework in which transhumanism considers these questions is, I have argued, too narrow and ideologically fraught with individualism and neoliberal philosophy to be fully up to the task. It can best serve by catalyzing questions and challenging us to imagine fuller contextualizations for the developments it envisions. Imagining the future is never a politically innocent or ethically neutral act. To arrive at the future we want, we must first be able to imagine it as fully as we can, including all the contexts in which its consequences will play out.

I agree with some of this, too. But there is (let me repeat) nothing in Hayles's article to suggest that transhumanism - as opposed to certain strains of transhumanism or certain transhumanist thinkers - is "narrowly and ideologically fraught" with any particular political philosophy.

In the end, then, we can obtain a reasonably large grain of truth from this article: when we think about the future we should never assume that innovations will be introduced without negative as well as positive consequences; and the study of science fiction is of value to people who'd like to consider what those consequences might be. Science fiction is one - though certainly not the only - resource available to people, including transhumanists, who want to think about possibilities for our future.

However, transhumanists can surely acknowledge this. This is the kind of point that could be made in discussions within transhumanism, or among transhumanists and people who are broadly sympathetic, just as much as by entirely external critics. I urge Hayles to put aside her evident prejudices about the entire transhumanist movement and join in that discussion - not as someone who need ever style herself as a transhumanist (if this carries too much baggage) but as someone who shares many of transhumanism's basic ideas and could surely find transhumanist forums in which she feels at home.

Meanwhile, "Wrestling with Transhumanism" seems more like shadow-boxing with an imaginary (or at least simplified) version of transhumanism, rather than grappling with the complexities of the real thing.

Dupuy's "anti-humanism" paper

2008-06-29T17:09:00.027+10:00

The third article (counting Hava Tirosh-Samuelson's introduction/editorial) in the June 2008 special anti-transhumanist issue of The Global Spiral is "Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism: Advanced Technologies and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition", by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, director of the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée at the École Polytechnique, Paris. Of the articles I have read so far, this is far the most blatantly neo-Luddite in its approach and the most intellectually confused.

In yesterday's discussion of Don Idhe's article in the same issue of The Global Nexus, I acknowledged that Idhe makes four familiar but legitimate points:

1. In the real world, technological advances involve compromises and trade-offs.

2. Technological advances take place in unexpected ways and find unexpected uses.

3. Implanted technologies have disadvantages as well as advantages: e.g., prostheses and artificial body parts are often experienced as imperfect and obtrusive, and they wear out.

4. Predictions about future technologies and how they will be incorporated into social practice are unreliable.

Idhe writes with a degree of rhetorical excess and unashamed hostility to his imagined opponents that weaken his article, but all four of these points are worth keeping in mind by transhumanists and others who are interested in the advancement of technology and in the social applications of emerging technologies. Thus, Idhe's article is a useful reminder of some basics that I'm sure many transhumanists really do lose sight of from time to time. That, of course, is hardly an indictment of transhumanism or the impulses that lie behind it (though it might be an indictment of some specific transhumanist positions that have - to be blunt - lost contact with reality). Exactly the same four points could have been made by a sensible transhumanist thinker who sought to give her colleagues (or herself) a bit of a reality check.

By contrast, I find it difficult to discover anything of merit in Dupuy's "anti-humanism" paper. Okay, there's some interesting historical discussion of the views of Heidegger, Norbert Weiner, and others, but this sheds no light on whether or not we should approve of the ambitions of (some or all) transhumanists. That question cannot turn on the kinds of questions that arise from a discussion of Heidegger's response to certain historical kinds of humanism.

Once we get beyond that, there is not one point, as far as I can see, that is actually useful for people engaged in current debates about appropriate moral and regulatory responses to emerging technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Instead, we are treated to rhetorical flourishes that depend more on (perhaps unintended) punning and trickery than on rigorous intellectual examination of the issues. In short, if Idhe's paper is weak on originality,* but at least making some reasonable points, Dupuy's is totally useless to anyone who wants to get some understanding of transhumanism and what might be right or wrong with it.

Alas, it's difficult to know where to begin in demonstrating this, since the paper is so thoroughly permeated by weak reasoning and unsupported claims. It would be a Herculean task to attempt to refute it all line by line - not a task that could be performed in the limited space available for a blog post that anyone is actually likely to read (or in the limited time that I am prepared to give to writing it). Accordingly, I hereby urge readers examine Dupuy's paper for themselves; I'll confine myself to a small number of specific points where I think it goes badly wrong. Even this is made difficult by Dupuy's cryptic, allusive style. It's not difficult to understand that he is hostile towards emerging technologies, but it is certainly difficult to pin down exactly why he is so hostile.

But let's start with an example. At one point, he offers a brief and under-explicated account of the views of German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, which I do not claim to understand (Dupuy doesn't help me, because he alludes to these views, quotes Sloterdijk briefly, comments dismissively on what he quotes, but never actually explains what he takes to be Sloterdijk's position).

In response to Sloterdijk, Dupuy makes the following comment (among others):

"For man to be able, as subject, to exercise a power of this sort over himself, it is first necessary that he be reduced to the rank of an object, able to be reshaped to suit any purpose. No raising up can occur without a concomitant lowering, and vice versa."

He does not explain this any further; nor does he support it with evidence. While the sentences I've quoted have a certain rhetorical ring, I have no reason to think that they say something that's actually true. Taking them as literally as I can, Dupuy seems to be saying that if we are to shape ourselves for our own purposes, we must thereby reduce ourselves from being subjects to being mere objects (note the expression "reduced to the rank of an object" - my emphasis). But why should that be so? He doesn't actually tell us why.

Imagine that I attempt to alter my physical capacities by engaging in a rigorous program of exercise accompanied by a low-fat, high-protein diet. At the same time, I might attempt to be reshape my personality (to a degree) by reading books that give me advice on how to overcome my shyness in company - and by acting on the advice that is given in these books. In carrying out this dual program of self-improvement, I am seeing myself as something that can be acted on and altered. If that is the definition of an object, then - to Hell with it, yes - I am seeing myself as an object and treating myself as one. However, the word "object" can have other definitions. Bearing that in mind, let's say that I am seeing myself, and treating myself, as an Object-1. I am also treating myself as an Object-1 if I drink coffee in the morning to try to rouse myself from lethargy (I don't wake up easily after a night of deep sleep) or if I drink alcoholic liquids in the evening, in part to break down my inhibitions and be more relaxed over dinner with friends. An Object-1 is simply something that can be acted upon and changed in one respect or another.

Another conception of what it is to be an object is to lack various properties that might be thought of as constituting subjectivity. I might think of something or someone as a "mere object" if I imagine that they lack such characteristics as sentience, the capacity for reason and understanding and thoughts about the future, and the ability to reflect on their own values. Or perhaps I can be said to treat someone as a mere object if, despite knowing that they possess these or similar characteristics, I treat them as if they do not possess the kinds of moral considerability that such characteristics seem to involve. Let's say that something which lacks these kinds of morally considerable properties is an Object-2, and that we treat someone as an Object-2 (even though she is not one) if we act towards her as if she lacked these sorts of properties.

The thing is, each of us really is an Object-1. I.e., it is possible to act on us and change us in various ways. I treat myself as an Object-1 if I attempt to alter some aspect of myself (whether temporarily or permanently). However, it does not follow that I thereby treat myself as if I were an Object-2. Nor does it follow, when I treat somebody else as an Object-1, that I am also treating her as a mere object, an Object-2. For a start, she might welcome, invite, or even cooperate with my attempts to produce changes in her (perhaps I am her sports trainer, dietician, physician, teacher, counsellor, or psychiatrist). Moreover, we normally think it permissible to make at least some attempts to change people, even if they don't will it and sometimes even against their will (e.g. by means of persuasion). To treat somebody as an Object-1, which we do all the time, is simply not the same as treating her as an Object-2. Whether or not an act of treating someone as an Object-1 is desirable, commendable, or deplorable will not hinge on the mere fact that she is being treated as an Object-1, but on a whole range of accompanying circumstances, such as whether or not she is also being treated as an Object-2.

Indeed, there is far more to it than this. For example, moral issues arise from the well-known fact that early embryos really are Object-2's: they do not possess such characteristics as sentience, rationality, autonomous self-reflection, and so on. There might still be some moral limits to how we should treat them, but these will need to depend on other considerations. Thereby lies a mountain of bioethical literature on the supposed rights of embryos.

I am not going to assert that Dupuy doesn't understand any of this. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't (though I must say that there's no sign that he does). The point is that careful distinctions need to be made when we explore this philosophical territory, and Dupuy does not make them, preferring, apparently, to throw around emotionally-charged language with an imprecision that verges on irresponsibility. What is clear, though, is that many acts of "raising up" (if this includes acting on ourselves or, in appropriate circumstances, on others, in ways that we see as enhancing) can take place without any "concomitant lowering" (if this means that someone is treated like an Object-2). The "no raising without a lowering" claim sounds impressive - like a line from Heraclitus, perhaps - but there's no reason to give it credence.

Let's take another example of the many where Dupuy appears to be confused. Consider this brief quotation, in which he is complaining about the idea of deliberately redesigning aspects of the world that we find ourselves in:

"One can hardly fail to note the irony that science, which in America has had to engage in an epic struggle to root out every trace of creationism (including its most recent avatar, 'intelligent design') from public education, should now revert to a logic of design in the form of the nanotechnology program—the only difference being that now it is mankind that assumes the role of the demiurge."

Again, where to start with something like this? It is, of course, true that modern biological science is able to explain the diversity of life forms and their functional complexity without resorting to any notions of a supernatural designing intelligence. It is also true that this idea has been resisted on religious grounds, and that rearguard attempts are constantly being made by such bodies as the Discovery Institute to cast doubt on the current evolutionary paradigm - all with the aim of restoring scientific prestige to the idea of intelligent design of living things (by the biblical God, needless to say). It has, indeed, been necessary for genuine scientists to defend legitimate biological science from the well-funded polemics of self-styled Intelligent Design proponents.

But it does not follow from this that nothing is ever intelligently designed. It now seems to be indubitable that the Earth's various life forms (including Homo sapiens) are not the design of a cosmic watchmaker. But it does not follow that watches are not designed by watchmakers. Human beings do, obviously, design many things all the time; it's just that this doesn't entail that other things, such as leaves, eyes, and the flagella of bacteria were designed by a non-human intelligence. The trick is to be able to distinguish which things really are intelligently designed (such as swords, sewing machines, and sailing ships) and which are the products of evolution and deep time (such as livers, lizards, and lorikeets).

Nor does it follow that we are unable to intervene intelligently to modify things that are products of evolution. And nor does it follow that we should not do so when it's in our power, as it often is to some extent. Whether or not we should do so in any particular case will depend upon such considerations as whether the intended modification will really advance our values.

Accordingly, there is no "irony" at all in the idea that we might (1) defend the truth of the claim that leaves, livers, lizards, lorikeets, and Lindsay Lohan are all products of biological evolution, while also (2) defending the desire of transhumanists and others to redesign aspects of the world and themselves to make them nearer their hearts' desires. This is a perfectly consistent position to take. Any irony is entirely in the (evolutionarily-evolved) eye of the beholder - a beholder who is simply not thinking straight in passages such as the one I quoted a few paragraphs back.

Unfortunately, the problems go on from there. As we strive to make sense of Dupuy's paper, we find ourselves struggling with the thoughts of a man who deals in reliance on dubious authorities, long quotations of impressive passages with tangential relevance to the matters at hand, oracular pronouncements (I especially love "In the darkness of dreams, there is no difference between a living cat and a dead cat", whatever that is supposed to mean), false paradoxes, and generally a style with which it's impossible to engage rationally without patiently querying the basis for almost every thought (as I hinted earlier, the level of patience required is considerably more than I can muster on this occasion).

While the paper, taken as a whole, is ornately impressive, its critique of emerging technologies builds dubious point on dubious point to the extent that it has no real foundation. It would, indeed, be easy - and to some extent justifiable - to dismiss the whole thing as X thousand words of high-sounding sophistry, but of course such a dismissal will not convince people who are biased towards Dupuy's neo-Luddite conclusions; hence, it's been necessary to give examples of where it goes badly wrong - to give an indication of why I think it's all a tissue of nonsense.

Near the end, Dupuy offers this paragraph of pseudo-wisdom:

The ethical problem weighs more heavily than any specific question dealing, for instance, with the enhancement of a particular cognitive ability by one or another novel technology. But what makes it all the more intractable is that, whereas our capacity to act into the world is increasing without limit, with the consequence that we now find ouselves faced with new and unprecedented responsibilities, the ethical resources at our disposal are diminishing at the same pace. Why should this be? Because the same technological ambition that gives mankind such power to act upon the world also reduces mankind to the status of an object that can be fashioned and shaped at will; the conception of the mind as a machine—the very conception that allows us to imagine the possibility of (re)fabricating ourselves—prevents us from fulfilling these new responsibilities. Hence my profound pessimism.

I am still not sure where his "profound pessimism" comes from. On close inspection, this passage makes no sense at all. Why are our ethical resources said to be "diminishing"? Surely they are increasing as we obtain a better understanding of the phenomenon of morality and realise the irrationality of clinging to inherited moral ideas that may once have had some pragmatic usefulness in very different cultural, economic, and technological circumstances. We are far better placed than our ancestors to ask whether we really want to live by this or that moral norm under circumstances prevailing today - whether it is really a norm that advances our deepest values (utilitarian, aesthetic, or whatever) and so is worth preserving. Moral philosophy - the rational investigation of the phenomenon of morality - is better placed than ever to make progress; our "ethical resources" are constantly increasing.

As for the claim that "Because the same technological ambition that gives mankind such power to act upon the world also reduces mankind to the status of an object that can be fashioned and shaped at will" ... this seems to make sense only if we confuse the concept of Object-1 (something that we can, to some extent, act upon and change) with Object-2 (a mere object - something that lacks the foundations of moral considerability). It is not at all clear why the idea that we are, in a sense, like machines - i.e. we are physical things in the last analysis, but with an intricacy of functioning - should prevent us from exercising responsibility in how we use emerging technologies. Everything about us can eventually be traced back to physical processes that occurred over the billions of years of deep timeand culminated in the evolution of Homo sapiens, but it does not follow that we lack the characteristics (sentience, rationality, self-reflection, etc.) that we actually have, or that we are wrong to value them. The profound pessimism expressed by Dupuy is based on a series of intellectual confusions. Maybe it's time for him to cheer up a little.

Hopefully, the remaining three articles - which I'll get to soon - will contain arguments of more substance (not to mention lucidity). If this mess by Dupuy is the best argument that the modern-day Luddites can offer, they might as well throw in the towel now.

====
* And don't forget that Idhe has been discussing such issues for many years - going back to the 1970s when his points were (I suppose) less familiar.

Idol worship?

2008-06-28T23:02:00.014+10:00

In my continuing program of reading, and commenting on, the six articles about transhumanism in June's edition of The Global Spiral, I now come to "Of Which Human Are We Post?" by Don Idhe, who approaches the issues from a perspective in philosophy of technology.

This is actually a good article, in many ways, though of somewhat limited ambition. The title is rather misleading, at least to this extent: the overall topic of this group of articles is supposed to be transhumanism, so the title could give the impression that somebody (I don't know who this would be) claims that we are already posthuman.

That, of course, is not a claim typically made by transhumanists. The idea, rather, is that a time will come when there will be intelligent creatures that are, in some sense, our successors - but with capacities greatly different from ours. These are usually imagined as enhanced capacities: these beings might be (for example) smarter, stronger, healthier, and/or longer lived than we are. Their bodily morphology might differ from ours, or, in the extreme, their intelligence might "run" on an entirely different material substrate from our carbon-based bodies. A wide range of possibilities can be identified, but no one that I know of within the transhumanist movement is arguing that such creatures already exist. At most, they argue that we are in the process of altering ourselves technologically to the extent that it makes sense to think of us as now in transition between our evolved human form, nature, and capacities and those of so-called posthuman creatures.

On this view, we are not "post" any kind of human at all ... yet.

But perhaps this is a side issue. Most of Idhe's article does not discuss transhumanism in any direct way, but rather makes more general observations about the development and reception of technology. These observations are far from original to the article, but Idhe has been around for a long time, and perhaps he was saying such things before they became so familiar. Moreover, they are points that are worth bearing in mind - and I'm sure that many sophisticated transhumanists could agree with most or all of them if they were stripped of some slightly nasty rhetoric. Most of them are along the lines of that well-worn cyberpunk catch-phrase (courtesy of William Gibson), "The street finds its own uses for things." Gibson is surely right about this, and there's a large amount of truth in Idhe's analysis.

The significant points that I extract from the article are as follows:

1. In the real world, technological advances involve compromises and trade-offs.

2. Technological advances take place in unexpected ways and find unexpected uses.

3. Implanted technologies have disadvantages as well as advantages: e.g., prostheses and implants are often experienced as imperfect and obtrusive, and they wear out.

4. Predictions about future technologies and how they will be incorporated into social practice are unreliable.

None of these points are laws of nature, but they are useful pragmatic generalisations based on historical experience. One of the features that made early cyberpunk fiction so appealing was its implicit (and sometimes explicit) acknowledgment of such points. Although Idhe argues for each one at considerable length, there was no need for it in my case. Indeed, I made some similar points (citing Gibson as I tend to do) in an article first published in Quadrant magazine ten years ago, "Singularity Shadow". It should not even be necessary to make such points, since anyone who is at all sophisticated in thinking about such issues, is already well aware of them. As with the editorial introduction, I am surprised that so much effort has gone into findings that - to the extent they are true - are rather obvious.

However, I will grant Idhe this much: although the four points I listed above are well known, they are often overlooked, so they probably bear repeating. Some transhumanists and others associated with the transhumanist movement could do with being reminded of them from time to time. Surely there is at least some tempation for transhumanists to imagine perfect, zipless enhancement technologies that are unlikely to come to pass. However, it by no means follows that we should abandon or forbid all attempts to devise enhancement technologies, any more than our inability to emulate the grace and freedom of birds was a reason to abandon or forbid efforts at powered, heavier-than-air flight.

None of Idhe's points - or their combination - entails that attempts to ameliorate the human condition or to enhance human capacities are doomed to futility. At most, such points entail that we should take highly specific predictions, especially those involving short timelines, with a very large grain of salt. I already knew that much, but I don't mind someone like Idhe reminding us all now and then.

However, I do mind some of the rhetoric that Idhe uses. He imagines that his four points are often ignored (well, perhaps they are by people who are too optimistic and need a reality check). However, he is not content to argue that to overlook such points involves error (or even to argue that transhumanist need to inject a degree of realism into their positions, which is often true).

Instead, he characterises people who fail to appreciate his four points as worshipping idols. He describes the so-called idols like this:

The idol of Paradise. This is the idol of much technofantasy which often underlies much of the discussion context we are engaged in.

The idol of Intelligent Design. This is the idol of a kind of arrogance connected to an overestimation of our own design abilities, also embedded in these discussions.

The idol of the Cyborg. Cyborgs, made popular since mid-century, are hybrid creatures of human, machine, and animal combinations, but what do they imply?

The idol of Prediction. Projections of futures are always involved in era shifts, but if past projections are taken into account, this turns out to be a very dicey practice.

I don't believe that I need to comment too much on the language here - the hostility in such word and phrases as "idol", "technofantasy", and "a kind of arrogance" is rather obvious, and there is plenty more of the same. I see no reason why he should adopt such a tone when discussing mistakes that some well-intentioned people may or may not fall into (and which I'm sure that many in the transhumanist movement are well aware of).

Nonetheless, we can draw the more reasonable conclusion that some thinkers associated with the transhumanist movement have a propensity to ignore the gritty realities that cyberpunks such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have always portrayed (whatever the other pros and cons of their work). We needed no ghost come from the grave to tell us that, but it's a fair point, as far as it goes, and it would be churlish of me not to acknowledge it.

On "Engaging Transhumanism"

2008-06-27T21:25:00.017+10:00

As promised, I am examining the articles on transhumanism in the current issue of The Global Spiral , an online magazine published by the Metanexus Institute.

The first article is, in fact, an editorial/introduction by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, a professor of history at Arizona State University ("ASU"), who (according to her linked bio) specialises in such subjects as premodern Jewish intellectual history, Judaism and science, Judaism and ecology, and feminist philosophy. Tirosh-Samuelson had the responsibility of putting together the special issue, based on five presentations given at a workshop held at ASU in April 2008.

Thus, the issue contains a total of six pieces: her editorial plus five pieces by the respective presenters (Don Ihde, Jean Pierre Dupuy, Katherine Hayles, Andrew Pickering, and Ted Peters - I'll describe these people briefly in later posts). As Tirosh-Samuelson puts it:

In this workshop, transhumanism was engaged by a philosopher of science and technology trained in the phenomenological tradition (Don Ihde); a sociologist, cognitive scientist, and cultural critic (Jean-Pierre Dupuy); a literary critic (Katherine Hayles); a philosopher and sociologist of science (Andrew Pickering); and a Christian theologian (Ted Peters). Engaging transhumanism from different perspectives, some more critically than others, the contributors agree that transhumanism merits a serious examination rather than cursory dismissal.

Much of the editorial is given over to a (quite detailed) discussion of the articles that follow. It may be necessary for me to come back to this discussion in later posts, as and when I deal with the merits of the specific articles, but I will not respond to it for now. For the moment, I'll work on the basis that Tirosh-Samuelson conveys the content of the other five articles reasonably accurately. I'm more interested in her own discussion of the phenomenon of transhumanism, some of which strikes me as quite accurate, while other parts appear ignorant or obtuse. I'll pass quickly over the piece's prose style, which is horribly clunky. Please blame her, not me, for the stylistic attributes of any quotes from her piece, such as this one, which will also give a good idea of her (not unexpected) supernaturalist bias:

To properly assess transhumanism, it must be situated historically and culturally and interrogated philosophically and theologically.

Just why it is necessary to interrogate transhumanism "philosophically and theologically" [my emphasis] is not made apparent. Insight can come from strange places, of course, and while theology may be one of the strangest - dealing as it does in speculations about the character and motivations of a non-existent supernatural being - I'm happy to give the theologians their say (as long as they don't try to impose their moral and political views on the rest of us, as is so often the case). So by all means let transhumanism be studied and "interrogated" from a theological perspective - but also from the perspectives of the hard sciences, law, medicine, economics, sociology, mythography, literary criticism, art history, urban planning, ceramic design, tourism studies, sports administration, and so on. Theology is not privileged over any of these. Indeed, theologians are about the last people we should offer any deference to when they criticise the worldviews of others.

However, I'll pass over all that to consider the more specific points made by Tirosh-Samuelson. I must say that she actually starts off quite well, ascribing the word "transhumanism" to Julian Huxley (I believe this is correct), and then adding:

Today the term "transhumanism" denotes a cluster of futuristic scenarios in which science and technology will remediate the miseries of the human condition and usher in a new age in the evolution of humans, the posthuman age.

On one interpretation, this seems about right. Charitably interpreted, she is saying that transhumanism is not one thing but a cluster of logically separate things - even if they are sometimes found together. In fact, it is probably reasonable to think of transhumanism as a broad movement whose members envisage a wide range of scenarios for the future but have in common a strong element of technological meliorism in their thinking - and, more specifically, a positive attitude to the use of technology to alter the human body for the purposes of physical and cognitive enhancement. Whether or not all transhumanist thinkers have specific "scenarios" in mind, Tirosh-Samuelson seems, in the early part of her editorial, to acknowledge the protean nature of the movement. Unfortunately, she tends to forget this later on when she makes many dubious generalisations about what "transhumanists" think - but let's give her credit where it's due. (But perhaps the problem is that it's not really due; perhaps she means something less reasonable and plausible than I have taken her as saying.)

She goes on to observe that transhumanists see the human species as "no more than a 'work in progress'". This, she thinks, is because they see Homo sapiens as in a relatively early phase of evolution in which we are enslaved by genetic programming that destines us "to experience pain, disease, stupidity, aging, and death."

This doesn't seem too far wrong. Anybody who seriously identifies as a transhumanist is likely to envisage that technology can (to some greater or lesser extent) and should (at least to some extent and in some circumstances) go inward, transforming us in accordance with our own designs, and thus enabling something like a technologically-mediated evolution of the species. That idea is, indeed, implicit in the name of the journal that I edit, The Journal of Evolution and Technology. It is, I submit, an idea whose time has come - it is increasingly plausible, defensible, and familiar. However, it is also an idea that merits scrutiny from all possible viewpoints (yes, even theological ones).

So far, so good - but Tirosh-Samuelson starts to go off the rails about here:

Bioengineering and genetic enhancement will [according to transhumanists] bring about the posthuman age in which humans will live longer, will possess new physical and cognitive abilities, and will be liberated from suffering and pain due to aging and disease; moreover, humans will even conquer the ultimate enemy—death—by attaining "cognitive immortality," that is, the downloading of the human software (i.e., the mind) into artificially intelligent machines that will continue to exist long after the individual human has perished.

I must say, first of all, that this is not wildly wrong. Indeed, it may well match the visions of some, or even many, transhumanists. More than that, it may a reasonable description of what could be called "popular transhumanism", the kind that is encountered on many websites and doubtless has a large number of enthusiastic adherents.

However, no elaborate scholarship or massive research program of team research was needed to uncover the existence of such a position. The more interesting point that Tirosh-Samuelson failed to discover was that many people within, or associated with, the transhumanist movement would question the vision of the future that she has sketched. Moderately deep research should, in fact, have led Tirosh-Samuelson to find the wide variety of opinion among transhumanists and their allies. In particular, it should have identified passionate disagreements about the realism of the scenario that Tirosh-Samuelson conveys, particularly in regard to such questions as whether any form of personality uploading (or downloading) onto a computational substrate is ever likely to be technologically possible ... and, even if so, whether it is likely to take a form that preserves personal identity and/or constitutes personal survival (in, say, the sense discussed and elaborated by Derek Parfit).

So Tirosh-Samuelson has now gone wrong in taking what she initially described as a "cluster of scenarios" and transforming it into a particular scenario that is controversial within the transhumanist movement. One possible, or perhaps impossible, scenario is presented as somehow the transhumanist scenario for the future.

After this, it gets worse, so much so that it becomes difficult to take any of the author's pronouncements seriously.

For example, Tirosh-Samuelson gives a garbled account of the much-vaunted technological singularity that some self-described transhumanists hope for. She seems to imagine that this hypothetical development has been labeled the singularity because it "will be so unique" (I warned you about her prose: something is either unique or it isn't - there are no comparative degrees of uniqueness or uniquity or uniquedtude). Of course, the term "singularity" denotes a mathematical concept that is explained in almost any serious discussion. More importantly, many transhumanists and others who discuss the concept do not conceive of the singularity in the way that she describes, as the emergence of a particular group of technologies. For example, some describe it merely as a boundary to our ability to imagine the future with any confidence. Others in the transhumanist camp are sceptical about the whole concept. But Tirosh-Samuelson appears to be unaware of any of this.

Indeed, the main thing that is wrong with the piece is not a lack of familiarity with a certain popular form of transhumanism that could (I suppose) be abstracted from Simon Young's Designer Evolution. The latter is an unpopular book among most actual transhumanists I know, but Tirosh-Samuelson takes it as a kind of bible of the movement. By giving it this status, she produces a distorted view of what the transhumanist movement is all about. But more important is her article's lack of something that the opening paragraph promised: an ability to engage with nuance.

She is led, though who knows why, to such bizarre conclusions as the following:

Placing the unlimited human potential (rather than the human as a currently lived experience) at the center of its outlook, transhumanism is also critical of contemporary environmentalism and its concern for respect toward other species and its resistance to massive human intervention in nature, through bioengineering of plants, heavy logging, industrial pollution, unrestricted consumerism, and many other undesirable activities.

This is so thoroughly wrongheaded that it's difficult to know where to begin. It is, of course, true, that transhumanists don't valorise anything that might appropriately be called "the human as a currently lived experience". That is because they agree that human experience, as it has been known historically, can be improved upon. However, it by no means follows that transhumanists tend to be critical of respect for other species (where on Earth did that come from?). Nor does it follow that they are uncritical of such actions as heavy logging and industrial pollution. It doesn't even follow that they are uncritical of the bioengineering of plants or unrestricted consumerism - though it is difficult to see what these are doing in the same list. They are all separate issues: someone could be in favour of bioengineering plants in some circumstances (it's not obvious why it should be labeled, without any argument, as an undesirable activity), while also opposing the logging of old-growth forests. The issues are largely independent of each other. Someone could accept some aspects of what is known as "unrestricted consumerism" (whatever that tendentious expression really means) while at the same time favouring at least those restrictions that are necessary to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Again, there are independent issues here, even if there are also some links, and transhumanists are as capable of thinking clearly about these different issues as anyone else.

Again, Tirosh-Samuelson claims that the following describes transhumanism:

From a transhumanist perspective, radical environmentalism is misguided because it erases the moral differences between humans and other animals and because it invests nature with inherent moral values. The evolutionary process is not directionless but purposeful, life is not an accident but an evolutionary inevitability, and humanity is "not a twig on the bush of life, but the peak of evolutionary complexification on earth due to the incredible power of the human brain."

The final quote is attributed to Young, and the view she is describing may well be Young's. However, once again, it's difficult to know where to start in sorting out this intellectual mess. Even the expression "radical environmentalism" is ambiguous, so it is not clear just what position Tirosh-Samuelson imagines transhumanists must oppose. The fact is that there are many more-or-less radical environmentalists positions, such the one advocated by Peter Singer, that can be as attractive to transhumanists as to anyone else. Perhaps there is some tension between transhumanism and certain deep green positions that claim the wilderness is objectively and non-instrumentally valuable, but I see nothing in transhumanism that rules out such a position - one could believe such a thing while also believing such core transhumanist propositions as that it is morally desirable to use technology to enhance human capacities and ameliorate the human condition.

If I were to go through all the errors in Tirosh-Samuelson's article, it would take me a long time to list them (and defend my claim that they are errors). For example, transhumanists are not necessarily opposed to religion, even theistic religion involving an interventionist deity. My own view is that organised religion is largely pernicious in its contemporary influence - particularly its political influence - and I do see a definite tension between transhumanist ideas and many traditional religious ones (particularly those that see God as having created an immutable and sacred natural order). Nonetheless, there are many religious positions that are not inconsistent with ideas of (e.g.) enhancing human capacities. It is quite open to transhumanists to adopt such positions.

Nor is transhumanism necessarily opposed to the claim that human beings have a specific evolved nature, as Tirosh-Samuelson appears to think. Perhaps there is some tendency for transhumanists to underestimate how difficult it will be to alter aspects of human nature that they consider undesirable, but nothing about transhumanism demands that its ambitions be capable of easy achievement. Nor is transhumanism committed to such dubious claims as that the development of humanlike intelligence was an inevitable outcome of biological evolution or that the picture of life on Earth as a "bush" with no objectively highest point is wrong. No such claims are required to adopt the radical technological meliorism that is at the heart of transhumanism.

In short, Tirosh-Samuelson has begun her Global Spiral editorial with some (arguably) useful observations about the nature of the transhumanist movement, but quickly fallen into the trap of associating certain quite specific ideas that are controversial among transhumanists with transhumanism itself - something quite protean and contested. As a result, she does a disservice to both the movement and her readers - to the movement because she suggests that transhumanism is incompatible with many popular (e.g. religious) or intellectually supported (e.g. scientific and moral) ideas, and to her readers because she will leave them with a distorted idea of a movement that they may actually want to learn something about.

This editorial doesn't bode well for the rest of the journal issue or the associated research program. Tomorrow, we'll begin to see how much the other contributors know what they're talking about.

Global Spiral special issue on transhumanism

2008-06-27T19:34:00.008+10:00

The Global Spiral, an online publication of the Metanexus Institute, has just published a special issue on transhumanism; this contains six articles that appear to be highly critical of transhumanist ambitions. It's quite possible that I'll agree with some of the criticisms that are made, but it's also likely - judging by the provocative excerpts that I've seen so far - that I'll consider the articles to be based on dubious intellectual foundations and on procrustean understandings of that protean phenomenon, the international transhumanist movement.

The editor of the issue and most of the authors are obscure, at least to me, but Kathryn Hales and Ted Peters have contributed an article each, giving the publication some credibility in the circles where I move.

The project is a spin-off from a massively-funded research program operating under the auspices of the notorious Templeton Foundation. I doubtless have readers with a better knowledge than mine as to how the Templeton Foundation, the Metanexus Institute, Global Spiral, and this particular academic project all fit together, so I won't concern myself with that. The point is that the outcome will be an influential (and seemingly hostile) portrayal of transhumanism. That portrayal merits cool, careful scrutiny, giving whatever credit is due, but pointing out the problems.

Thus, I'm going to commit myself to reading - and briefly commenting on - one article per day over the next six days [edit: now I've done one and realised how big a task it is to do at all satisfactorily, I'll have to add that I won't be able to maintain quite such a cracking pace]. Tomorrow [edit: actually it turned out to be "tonight], I will begin by commenting on "Engaging Transhumanism: The Meaning of Being Human" by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson. I'm always suspicious when I see philosophers and other intellectuals talk about the "meaning" of being human (or of anything else that is not actually an attempt at communication). There are contexts where it makes sense to use the word and its cognates as synonyms for something like "satisfaction" (as in, "I find meaning in my work"), or "value" (as in "To poor Adam, life now seems meaningless"), or "personal significance" (as in "Your love means a lot to me"). I don't demand that we eschew all such language, but it is, at best, a helpful metaphor. Often, it is an unhelpful one. Sometimes, it is simply a category mistake or a mask for confusion.

But we shall see. I'll read the article fairly and give it its due.

There will be opportunities in other forums for more detailed responses to the Global Nexus issue and the Templeton project more generally. But this particular forum will allow for discussion among my (almost) invariably smart readers. Let's see how we go. If you'd like to do the reading with me, and to offer your own insights, they'll be welcome.

Voices of Disbelief update

2008-06-27T18:35:00.003+10:00

The book that Udo Schuklenk and I are editing for Blackwell - working title Voices of Disbelief - is moving along quietly but surely. Over the past couple of days, I've been writing to several of the contributors just to check their snail mail addresses so that we can have a comprehensive list for contracts to be sent to.

Quite a few people have already delivered their essays; others have shown us drafts; still others have promised to deliver well in advance of the 1 September deadline (no one really has to do anything before then, but it's very useful to have a steady of trickle of work to look at). I don't think I'm treading on any toes in mentioning the names of some people who've already given us material: among them are (in no particular order) Michael Shermer, Taner Edis, Adele Mercier, Graham Oppy, Greg Egan, Damien Broderick, Edgar Dahl, and Jack Dann. Before we're through, we'll have more than fifty essays with a wide range of viewpoints and maybe some big surprises.

Dreaming Again now published

2008-06-25T21:45:00.003+10:00

Jenny and I have now received our copies of Jack Dann's new anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories, Dreaming Again, which contains Jenny's "Trolls' Night Out" and my "Manannan's Children". As it turns out, both of our contributions are fantasy stories, well sort of: I could argue that "Manannan's Children" is very close to being science fiction, despite its mythic trappings, and it has what might be considered a broadly transhumanist moral ... while Jenny's story is set very vividly in the present day, and involves (among other things) the scientific investigation of trolls' life cycles. In fact, "Trolls' Night Out" is a wonderful piece - quirky, funny, and (in a good way) horribly vivid.

I'm looking forward to reading Dreaming Again from cover to cover, though I don't know when that will happen because it's a huge book. Meanwhile, I can report that the people at Harper have done a wonderful job of the art work and packaging. It's a very satisfying volume to hold in your hand and admire; and judging by the quality of the writers from whom Jack coaxed material, it's also going to be satisfying to read. For those who are not aware of this project, it's a sequel to the equally monumental Dreaming Down-Under, from ten years ago (where the hell did that whole decade disappear to?), edited by Jack with Janeen Webb. The earlier book and its constituent stories won a slew of awards and many other accolades, and I'm sure we'll see that repeated.

I'm back!

2008-06-24T19:18:00.004+10:00

I was away for a week, visiting family (and people who are close enough to count as family - hi, guys, if you read this) interstate.

Since I got home, I've been a marking machine. My INT2190/3190 (Poverty, Ecology, and International Justice) students had their exam on Friday, and the papers had to be marked super quickly in time for examiners' meetings this week. So I've spent the past four or so days buried under a mountain of exam booklets, from which I've occasionally emerged for cups of tea and/or bouts of mindless activity (since I haven't had much mental space left for ones requiring thought) on the net. Somewhere amongst that, I put a layer of revisions on a new article to appear in a book that will be published in the UK later this year.

Reasonably normal transmission will now resume. There's quite a lot to write about, but it can wait until tomorrow.

There are various other tasks awaiting my attention pretty urgently - work on JET and Voices of Disbelief, an interview with Greg Egan (i.e., me interviewing him) for Aurealis magazine, and the gods alone know what else ... but I'll be getting to it all in the next few days. Then there's a paper that I need to write for a conference the week after next, so it's going to be all systems go.

I am not the government

2008-06-14T21:01:00.002+10:00

I am not the government. I cannot fine you, throw you in jail, or stop you saying whatever you like in any forum that is prepared to publish your thoughts. I can, however, delete any comments that you make on my own blog if they are defamatory, destructive, or just plain tedious ... or even at my whim. This blog is my private domain, and when you publish here it is a privilege, not a right.

I am not moderating the blog at this stage. I will continue to accept a wide range of comments, including comments that take a different view from mine on the issue of the day. I'm happy to engage in debate if the tone is rational, respectful, and constructive.

But my patience has been tested of late by some comments that have combined tedious spamming with blatantly defamatory accusations. As a result, I've already deleted a couple of comments, and I'll delete more as and when needed. If absolutely needed, in fact, I'll introduce comment moderation, but I'd rather not go to that extreme since it's cumbersome for everybody including me.

Use a bit of common sense when you comment here. If you write something on my blog that you wouldn't say in my home (without expecting that I might turf you out), then don't be surprised if it disappears.

And don't come whining to me about free speech ... or accusing me of hypocrisy (since I'm a free speech advocate). I don't exercise the coercive power of the state. But I do exercise a right to decide what sort of language I welcome on my own blog, just as I exercise a right to decide what language is welcome in my own house. You are my guest here, so please conduct yourself like one.

Blog break

2008-06-11T22:25:00.002+10:00

As I hinted at in my last post, I've now reached a blog break point. I'll be away for just over a week - reading my emails and responding as much as I can, but not with enough access to the net to be blogging.