Will Saletan and the Transhumanists
As promised, here is Will Saletan's slant on the Stanford transhumanist conference. My article is written too, although I don't yet know when it will appear. This is my favorite paragraph from Saletan's recounting, which pretty well nails the scene:
"Remember those kids who played Dungeons & Dragons and ran the science-fiction club in your high school? They've become transhumanists. Their resident immortalist, Aubrey de Grey, walks around in sneakers, a ponytail, and a 14-inch beard that he strokes like a cat. One of the CCLE officials at the conference calls herself Wrye Sententia; the other dresses like an LSD trip. This was the kind of conference where people talked about the Matrix the way Christians talk about the Bible, and where speakers apologized for their discomfort with piercings or tattoos."
And the patriarchy, Will: We mustn't forget how transhumanism can help end the dreaded patriarchy!
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 6:10 PM
19 Comments
19 Comments:
After reading Saletan's article and looking through his links, I'm on the verge of renouncing my comments to Winston Jen this weekend that human dignity can't be lost.
Seriously, did Saletan selectively pick out a bunch of extremist freaks like the media picks out abortionist killing extremists to portray the pro-life movement, or is this really the heart/core of the transhumanist movement?
Uh, actually Don, he didn't tell his readers the half of it. I do, though. Stay tuned.
I think the dizzying array of would-be posthumans described in Saletan's article indicates a basic tendency in the transhumanist movement. In general, we hear the idea that transhumanism is all about enhancement, but judging from the examples in the article, there seems to be also a great deal of modification for variety's sake. Apparently, not all transhumanists desire enhancement, but all seem to desire modification. It's as if there's something to prove in transhumanism, that humans can master themselves and change into whatever they want. In that light, the movement seems not unlike the supporters of assisted suicide and euthanasia, taking as a fundamental presupposition that man is autonomous, capable of willing and enacting such modifications without moral or ethical baggage.
Wesley and/or Don, do you consider the transhumanist movement to be one of many fruits of some more fundamental problem in our culture? In your view, would animal liberationism and the euthanasia/assisted suicide promoters as well as other groups also be fruits of a fundamental problem?
They are all symptoms, in my view.
BAP,
I'm still thinking about your last comment on "net worth" and kids etc. Good stuff.
I've thought about your question before and my competence is limited but I sense some gnawing sense of despair among people like this, maybe along the line of Pascal's observation of the hole/vacuum in the human heart that longs to be filled, but can't be by human efforts because we have limited resources and powers to fill the heart's infinite longing. The soul has infinite longings, but we have only finite means to satisfy those longings. I think that's what Pascal would say... But then again he's a Dead White European (Christian) Male... So he probably doesn't count. Perhaps cloning, transhumanism and etc are attempts to transcend our human nature to find some kind of satisfaction/fulfillment that cloners and trans/post humanists don't think our bodies and human powers are capable of filling and they aren't now experiencing. Hence we want to go beyond our limits to touch/tap/become the infinite.
Western culture used to look to God to meet the longings/fears of the soul. But if God is dead, or has walked away from the world, then this is all there is and there's no alternative to satisfying those longings except to achieve immortality on our own by living forever by replacing our body parts, augmenting it with machines, or escaping the body-I think a little ancient gnositicism there-and copying our mind's schema into a computer/machine type network where we can then experience all we need to experience to be satisfied. With a large measure of people sensing the death of God-which I don't believe-I think this kind of stuff is natural.
Then I also think there's a psycho-social development aspect. When I was a youth pastor, we'd see the weird hair, the body piercings, ugly, ugly make up, bizarre clothing. These kids were experimenting with or trying to stake out/come up with an identity. I guess that's natural for junior high kids. They also seemed to want be challenge their parents to see if they really loved them no matter what. They wanted that security of being unconditionally accepted. They also seemed to want to be noticed and not get lost in all the mass of humanity they were thrown into at school.
This last observation-that's all it is and I am over my head and beyond my competence, tells me that Saletan is right. These kids never grew up. They missed something.
I think there's an educational/philosophical problem. We've been told all these years that all we are the products of random chance processes and forces that did not have our end in mind and as a result, there is no meaning to being a human being other than what we create for ourselves. We're also seeing the first generation of kids growing up who have NO connection to Christianity and Western Traditions teaching of what Wesley calls human exceptionalism, inherent human dignity. They've been told that to think humans are exceptional is speciesism and etc... They've been told that they are just material and nothing else. So maybe there's an educational aspect too. Maybe ideas have consequences. They just weren't the ones those with the ideas wanted. So I'm guessing what is going on in the western developed nations is about what we should expect. It's the logical outcome of our new world views. I don't know what you think or others think, but that's my best 15 minute try. But that kind of question on the underlying fundamental problem requires people way more expert than me.
My guess is the transhumanist would come back and say that we are settling for too little. This is not of despair. There's a great whole new world out there and we are really excited about it because it is really exciting and ought to be pursued with passion. Who wants to stay in Battle Mountain Nevada when you could live on the beach in San Diego? Maybe, but if these guys Wesley and Saletan introduced to us are the mainstream, then I think we can say that it's not exciting, is pathetically dehumanizing and will never ever meet the needs of the human heart.
Most transhumanists appear to be utter materialists. It strikes me that they are making their movement into a quasi religion. They have prophesy, eschatology, and the idea of eventual immortality.
BAP,
I reread you comments. I agree with Wesley... they are all symptoms. I gave my take instead of answering your question. Sorry. I think your ideas stem from the fundamental problems I see... the death of God, development problems and the logical outcome of new world views about man's nature and purpose.
Thanks for your comments, Wesley and Don. I suspect that there is a universality of human longing in all of this and that the trasnhumanists and others have misidentified its nature. I would expect greater similarity between the various attempts to fulfill that longing if it were really as simple as each group individually would claim. The fact that people tend to be so adamant in their measures indicates the universality of longing more than it indicates a particular solution.
Don, I strongly agree with the notion that there is an educational component here. In terms of the history of human thought, in the West at least, all the way back to the classical world there has been a basic idea of what the Greeks called paideia, of the cultivation of the fullness of humanity through education and culture. (This is also true of the East to some extent, although with different manifestations.) Only in recent centuries, accelerating in the recent decades, have we as a civilization attempted so widely to cast off that age-old wisdom. In that vein, the contemporary movement in the U.S. toward classical (Christian) education is extremely relevant in that it bears on the issues underlying all of these bioethical issues through its exploration of thought across the ages.
BAP-nice. If you have thoughts on why we've cut that old wisdom off, that would be interesting.
Wesley, I know this is serious stuff, but it's taken me a few minutes to stop laughing at the fact that out and out materialists have developed their own prophesy and eschatology. That has to be a nightmare for the serious materialists. This is too much.
BAP-nice. If you have thoughts on why we've cut that old wisdom off, that would be interesting.
Wesley, I know this is serious stuff, but it's taken me a few minutes to stop laughing at the fact that out and out materialists have developed their own prophesy and eschatology. That has to be a nightmare for the serious materialists. This is too much.
Wesley and Don, thanks again for your comments. I was in the middle of typing mine when your last ones showed up.
I do think that there is an uncanny religious aspect to the contemporary anti-Western materialistic movements. We're in what Harold O.J. Brown (in his book The Sensate Culture) called a late-stage sensate culture, in contrast to an ideational or even an idealistic culture. The loss of prior ideational or idealistic views, transcending ideals that undergird the forms of a culture, seems to have left our culture scrambling for a replacement. Because of materialist presuppositions, by definition a non-material ideal cannot exist. As a result, we seek an ideal that can be known and characterized in entirely material terms. We 'know' ourselves and the material world. So the ideal must be located somewhere within them.
An ideal is rightly the object of our ultimate concern. Hence the 'worship' of some material entity, such as the human body or some other materialistically interpreted element of the world. It is not worship that is the problem; the problem is idolatry that reveals worship of something other than the Ultimate.
Moral and ethical considerations are can then be viewed in part as a sort of dwelling upon that which is transcendent, upon an Ultimate against which people throughout history and across cultures have measured themselves. The attempt to exchange that Ultimate for something less-than-ultimate is probably the nihilism and despair that Wesley has noted previously.
While I'm probably wasting my words here, the readers of this blog should realize that a) Smith and Saletan are being negatively sensationalistic in their account of the conference, b) it wasn't an explicitly "transhumanist" conference (except that Smith has branded it as such), but rather a gathering of techprogressives and some bioconservatives addressing the issue of enhancement as it applies to issues of human rights, and c) it was an academic conference filled with PhDs, activists, journalists and concerned citizens from around the globe -- not a bunch of "extremist freaks".
For more balanced coverage of the event, may I suggest the following links:
Dale Carrico's retort to Saletan: With Enemies Like Saletan Who Needs Friends?
Brian Alexander of MSNBC: Is there a human right to be superhuman? Special powers aren't just for comic-book characters, some ethicists argue
Ronald Bailey of Reason: The Right to Human Enhancement: And also uplifting animals and the rapture of the nerds
BAP,
I think that's a good answer to your question, is transhumanism and etc a symptom? I think it is.
What happens after the sensate culture collapses? I don't think there's any IS to transhumanism, at least not with the current crop Wesley and Saletan are writing about.
George is George Dvorsky. His paper at the convention suggesting "uplifting" all mammals to human levels of intelligence and during the Q and A, he suggested turning all animal life into a post biological state in order to end suffering.
People will have to decide for themselves whether that is a freaky idea.
Ron Bailey is something of a transhumanist himself, and a radical libertarian, which means just about anythying goes. His book on these issues opens with a 150-year-old woman playing football with her 8 year-old great-great, great grandson, and she is as lithe and young as a 30 year-old.
In any event, George, thanks for contributing to Secondhand Smoke.
Don, by Brown's account, a late sensate culture collapses because of the dissonance, cognitive and otherwise, caused by its self-conscious rejection of a transcending ideal. Historically speaking, he identifies a tendency for a new ideational culture to arise, salvaging something of the collapsed sensate culture but with a dogmatic twist in favor of a new ideal. If his analysis is correct, then it would be relevant to consider what might serve as such a new ideal should the current philosophical trends continue in the West.
I'm not exactly certain what you mean that there is no 'is' to transhumanism. However, I can imagine saying that myself if I mean that there may be no 'persistent self' or identity for the movement. What I would mean is that the movement might be best characterized by specific applications of technology, thereby taking on certain forms, despite the potentially wide divergence of world view among those we collectively call transhumanists. In that light, to say that there is no 'is' to the movement would be to say that it is not itself a sufficient transcending ideal but that it may along with other correlated ideologies reflect a new ideal on which many of the contemporary social movements may be converging. In the end, this ideal would have to be transcendent in that it must be at least in part metaphysical in nature. Otherwise, such a large variety of movements would not be able to claim that ideal as a foundation.
Whether or not there is any sensationalism occurring, positive or negative, and whether or not George's links can offer balanced coverage, sensation in itself is not an evil to be avoided. If the senses are not aroused, how can one truly know?
Regardless whether or not the conference itself was explicitly transhumanist, I notice that George's website is explicitly transhumanist in that he clearly identifies transhumanism is an integral part of his philosophy. In that light, any 'branding' of the conference serves to clarify at least one of the motivating factors. Techprogressivism and bioconservatism are at least in part philosophical in nature, so the identification of the transhumanist element in the conference is important.
Apart from any statements I'd read, I actually assumed that a conference of this type would be attended by all of the people George mentioned, not just journalists. Whether or not they are 'extremist freaks,' I can't say other than by comparison to the majority of humanity as a whole and by consideration of the 'extremeness' of their ideologies. However, I do know that ideas are manifest in people's lives.
Contrary to most erroneous applications of the popular saying, all books can be judged in some sense by their covers, but no book can be judged entirely on that basis. If there has been error in accentuating certain 'surface' features of the conferees, there may also be error in minimizing or masking the ideological underpinnings of the conferees.
BAP,I couldn't post yesterday. Not sure why. Maybe some transhumanist escaped the limitations of the flesh into the infinte pathways of the internet and as the first act of expressing infinite power, scrambled my post. You never know.
When I said there's no 'is' to the transhumanism of the people that Saletan was describing, I meant that there was nothing there that was substantial and going to fill the longings of the heart/soul/human spirit. Like an empty addict needing to get high or should I say, keep getting satisfactorily high, they'll just get more and more extreme and at the end of the day, it will end up as another failed human attempt to find happiness. I suspect the biggest thing is that it is looking to fill those infinite longings with a finite object of worship when the heart requires an infinite object. I think that's an idea of yours. I agree with it.
But I can certainly understand the drive to going there. If there is no ultimate reality outside of ourselves-like God and an eternal immortalizing afterlife-then it may make sense to go where they are trying to go and I'd be tempted to get on board and see where it went.
It seems neurotic to me that people would even engage in the kind of activity we call enhancement, probably because it implies some firmly held foundational beliefs that are so contrary to my own. The very term enhancement is a telling reminder of the shoddy philosophical foundation of transhumanism. The word is thought to be derived from a Latin phrase having the sense of elevating, heightening, or intensifying. What exactly is being elevated, heightened, or intensified? If there is no transcending ideal, what is the meaning of elevating, heightening, or intensifying? If human control over circumstances, including the various biological or non-biological elements of our bodies, is the sole (oddly but significantly, not soul) means of human fulfillment, what imparts order and wholeness to those human-altered circumstances?
In principle, we will never be able to find true peace and fulfillment in an endless quest for such enhancement because the dissatisfaction with circumstances that gives rise to transhumanism is not itself simply a circumstance. People are more than their circumstances, more than bodies or random assortments of material entities. There must be something non-circumstantial (spiritual, if you will) involved. Otherwise, there would be no basis for the reaction of dissatisfaction. We have spiritual longings in the midst of non-spiritual circumstances. We will not satisfy those longings simply by playing with the circumstances.
We might wonder whether or not the 'typical' transhumanist senses any gap in such a philosophy. There may not be a typical transhumanist, but George Dvorsky lists among his beliefs on his website a mixture of atheism and spirituality (spiritual technologies?). Perhaps one of the real issues underlying transhumanism and other correlated movements is the misapprehension, willful or otherwise, of certain first principles. Without proper first principles and the presuppositions they engender, the more practical moral and ethical issues may only be something of an 'arms race' to see who can gain greater influence first.
This is probably the origin of a lot of the repetitive arguments that seem to consume so much time. As we argue endlessly about things that have been known for thousands of years, only without the metaphysical basis that has accompanied that knowledge, we may only be demonstrating our inability or unwillingness to trace a path back to the first principles in the light of which our moral and ethical debates might be seen as the folly they often are.
kids who played Dungeons & Dragons . . . science-fiction club . . . sneakers . . . ponytail . . . 14-inch beard . . . calls herself Wrye Sententia . . . dresses like an LSD trip . . .piercings or tattoos
gnawing sense of despair . . . psycho-social development aspect . . . weird hair . . . body piercings . . . ugly, ugly make up . . . bizarre clothing . . . experimenting . . . trying to stake out/come up with an identity . . . challenge their parents . . . These kids never grew up . . . missed something . . . educational/philosophical problem . . . We've been told all these years that all we are the products of random chance . . . forces that did not have our end in mind . . . no meaning . . . NO connection to Christianity . . . inherent human dignity . . . just material and nothing else . . . pathetically dehumanizing . . . the needs of the human heart
they are all symptoms
utter materialists . . . quasi religion [sic]
Given the complete lack of engagement with what any of these people actually said or believe, amidst this orgy of quaint adjectives and psychological propoundings, would it be reasonable to conclude you actually have no rational opposition to their ideas?
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