Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

More on My Apparent "Deathism"

Transhumanist Giulio Prisco continues to perplex me utterly, writing: "Dale DOES think this [death] is a good thing. Read again the Eganesque ““we people are all of us finite beings, forever prone to disease, accident, violence, betrayal, novelty, and fantasies about shiny robot bodies or angelic digital ones and so on rest on deep confusions about the actually embodied status of mind.”

Maybe there is a language issue here, because it is utterly mystifying to me that anybody would see this as a statement of exaltation on my part.

I honestly don’t know anybody who thinks death is a particularly enticing prospect, and to the extent that so-called "Technological Immortalists" seem to have convinced themselves that the primary barrier standing in the way of their achievement of imperishable techno-bodies or whatever is some prevailing “Deathism” in mainstream culture I must say this seems to me a rather flabbergasting (not to mention ultimately rather elitist) misreading of the world.

Obviously, I don’t think death is a “good thing” so much as, you know, a factual thing... like our social interdependence and the inherent vulnerability of that interdependence is a factual thing, like finitude is a factual thing.

I definitely think consensual healthcare is a good thing in general and I think such healthcare is a matter of providing people longer healthier lives. I have stated this truism so often by now (honestly, this seems to me to be the sort of utter commonplace that should go without saying in the first place, but clearly with Superlative technocentrics certain things must be said over and over and over again) I will admit it has become a bit befuddling at this point to confront stubborn incomprehension about my position at such a basic level still happening even with people with whom I have painstakingly and joylessly danced endless turns of this particular dance already.

I will say that denialism about death is a bad thing, like all forms of irrational denial tend to be. And there is no way for me to sugarcoat my honest judgment that there is a widespread denialism about mortality in much of the techno-immortalist sub(cult)ure or “movement.” My various commenters may indignantly insist that they do not personally suffer from such deranging and diminishing attitudes, and I'll have to just take their words on it, I have no interest in arguing about it at the moment. (These arguments tend to take the form "I know you are, but what am I," and are not necessarily very illuminating after all.)

Prisco says that living 120 years is good but 121 years is better. (No one ever has lived so long and so this is a matter of speculation, as it happens, but we'll just bracket such niceties for the moment.) Be all that as it may, I must admit that I don’t see things quite the way he seems to do. And perhaps this attitude is the one that is getting decried as "deathism" by my critics.

You see, it seems to me that a year well lived is worth a dozen lived in bitterness or regret. It seems to me there are far worse things in the world than dying, chief among which for me would be killing (but there are others). The rather brute organismic prolongation of lifespan that preoccupies no small amount of techno-immortalist discourse ultimately seems to me a rather shallow and fearful business.

No doubt I will be passionately assured by commenters that there are richer variations of techno-immortalist robot cultism available and for all I know these commenters may indeed have found their various ways to such perspectives. Come what may, I do think it is simply weird to attribute a dastardly “deathism” to me simply for my relatively cheerful reconciliation to the fact of my mortality, to the meaningfulness of actually lived mortal lives, and to my judgment that many things are worse than mortality, and so on.

Finally, about the phrases “immortality,” “living forever,” “killing death,” and so on. Giulio Prisco insists that he means by these terms something he is calling "indefinite lifespan." All I will say is that if you don’t actually mean "immortality," "living forever," "killing death," and the rest, then I honestly recommend you stop using those words to say whatever it is that you do mean. If “indefinite lifespan” isn’t supposed to mean immortality (even possibly on the sly) then it is actually utterly bewildering that you would use a word so freighted with transcendental religiosity and irrational passion to describe what you take to be a proximate practically achievable engineering outcome. (An assessment that puts you at odds with scientific consensus.)

I think techno-immortalists should take a hard look at what work their terminological choices are really doing for them psychologically, culturally, and from a promotional standpoint. Believe me, I have taken such a long look, and (obviously!) I don’t like what I see.

11 comments:

jimf said...

Dale wrote:

> I will say that denialism about death is a bad thing,
> like all forms of irrational denial tend to be. And there
> is no way for me to sugarcoat my honest judgment that
> there is a widespread denialism about mortality in much
> of the techno-immortalist sub(cult)ure or “movement.”

A "scientifically" based denial of death certainly pre-dates talk
about the "Singularity" (or even talk about Moore's Law, which
dates from 1965, according to Wikipedia).

C. S. Lewis recounted, in an interview given just 7
months before his own death:

"I find it difficult to keep from laughing when I find
people worrying about future destruction of some kind
or other. Didn't they know they were going to die anyway?
Apparently not. My wife[*] once asked a young woman friend
whether she had ever thought of death, and she replied,
'By the time I reach that age science will have done
something about it!'"

(interview with Mr. Sherwood E. Wirt of the Billy Graham
Evangelistic Association, Ltd. on 7 May 1963)

Now Lewis, of course, may have been able to "afford" to
take this line because he could fall back on his own form
of denial -- i.e., Christianity (if you consider that
a form of denial; I **do**).

I quote him not because I myself am a Christian, or because
I think his logic was always water tight (I certainly don't),
but because he was an independent thinker intimately aware
of the "scientistic" tendencies ("Wellsianity", etc.) of
the times in which he lived, and he reported on them with
a sharp (and humorous) wit both in non-fiction and fiction.

[*] Lewis was married to Joy Gresham from March '56 until
July '60 when she died of cancer. So the conversation reported
by Lewis probably took place before 1960.

jimf said...

http://www.mental-health-matters.com/articles/article.php?artID=78
--------------------------------------------------------------
The Narcissist believes that he will live forever.
"Believe" in this context is a weak word. He **knows**.
It is a cellular certainty, almost biological, it flows
in his blood and permeates every niche of his being.
The Narcissist “knows” that he can do anything he chooses
to do and excel in it. What the Narcissist does, what he
excels at, what he achieves, depends only on his volition.
To his mind, there is no other determinant. Hence his rage
when confronted with disagreement or opposition - not only
because of the audacity of his, evidently inferior, adversary,
but because it threatens his world view, it endangers his feeling
of omnipotence. The narcissist is often fatuously daring,
adventurous, experimentative and curious precisely due to
this hidden assumption of "can-do". He is genuinely surprised
and devastated when he fails, when the Universe does not
arrange itself, magically, to accommodate his unlimited powers,
when it (and people in it) does not comply with his whims
and wishes.

He often denies away such discrepancies. . .

-- Sam Vaknin


Vaknin also recommends the following book:

_Live Forever or Your Money Back - How We Age, How We Die, and How Not To!_
by Gary Clark
http://www.amazon.com/Live-Forever-Your-Money-Back/dp/184685430X

;->

Anne Corwin said...

Just a minor technical correction: you said, ...Prisco says that living 120 years is good but 121 years is better. (No one ever has lived so long.

However, Jeanne Calment lived to be 122. (No idea how she would have rated her 121st year versus her 120th, though .)

I definitely don't see your own mortality-acceptance as "deathism"; as far as I know per the usual subcultural vocabularies, "deathism" generally amounts to some sort of cheerleading for death , combined with assertions that all persons ought to eagerly march off to the glue factories once they've worn out their apparent usefulness in the world.

And...that doesn't exactly sound like anything I've ever heard you suggest.

Anyway, though, I think that a lot of what is going on here comes down to a disagreement over (a) the flexibility of certain bits of vocabulary, and (b) the cultural significance and PR impact of using these bits of vocabulary.

I think that some folks simply don't think it really matters all that much what "baggage" a given word may carry, and that others of similar ilk probably believe they can work to "reclaim" and redefine words they feel express the spirit of what they want to achieve even in light of obvious and apparent baggage.

I don't know exactly how this particular communication gap can be resolved, if at all, since it seems to be a fundamental disagreement over the inherent power of language . That is, some people do not believe that cultural context is important as far as using vocabulary goes.

This is common in people who talk about "intelligence" and claim that comparing it between people has nothing to do with value judgments -- of course it shouldn't, but the fact of the matter is that there are cultural pressures that act to conflate, say, IQ scores with particular value judgments.

I've been torn on the "immortality" thing for a while now because of this. I used to think, probably like Giulio, that it was a harmless way of expressing the sentiment that longevity was a good thing and that maximizing it was the logical "ultimate" goal of medicine.

However, the fact that the word seems to send off so many people's "crank alarms", whereas the idea of simply "improving healthcare for your grandparents" is generally accepted as a good idea without question, has me figuring that "immortality" is a useless word when you're talking about the real world and trying to figure out how to improve healthcare for people of all ages in the real world. If a word is unnecessary, incoherent, and possibly damaging to the very goals one is trying to promote in using it -- well, I don't really know why anyone would want to use it.

I think that longevity medicine has a much, much better chance of actually being developed (and developed sooner) if we start from what exists now in medicine and work forward, rather than if we try to make "proving the eventuality of immortality" a condition of longevity discourse. That's the part that sometimes has me befuddled these days. Healthcare is well worth improving regardless of whether or not it is possible to project superlative eventual benefits from it, and I don't see how those superlative projections in any way stand to beneficially alter the course of medical and social progress.

I've become generally sensitive to the "cultural context of language" thing through engaging with autistic self-advocacy -- basically, I have seen firsthand how language can be used to effectively make or break the very lives of individuals so described by it. I've frankly had my metaphorical socks knocked off by the power of language, particularly when it is used by powerful majorities or privileged groups, to shape public opinion about vulnerable, atypical, and minority groups. So in light of that, I've been trying to pay more attention to cultural context stuff in other areas, and I am beginning to get vaguely frustrated with how difficult it is, sometimes, to communicate why it is important to consider such a thing.

Maybe a person first has to be in a position of lesser sociopolitical (or even physical) power in order to "get" how important it is to define terms and discard terms that become useless or damaging. I'm beginning to suspect as much.

jimf said...

Anne Corwin wrote:

> However, the fact that the word seems to send off so many
> people's "crank alarms", whereas the idea of simply
> "improving healthcare for your grandparents" is generally
> accepted as a good idea without question, has me figuring that
> "immortality" is a useless word when you're talking about
> the real world and trying to figure out how to improve healthcare
> for people of all ages in the real world.

I have no doubt that there are **some** people in the world
who would be prepared to use any means to divert resources into
"exotic" research avenues if they thought it offered a chance
of "immortality" for themselves and a handful of others,
**regardless** of whether this could "improve healthcare for
people of all ages in the real world."

In fact, I strongly suspect there are some >Hists who feel this way.

I still think they're misguided (not to say "cranks" ;-> ), even
from the point of view of their own agenda (i.e., politics aside),
just as much as the people who think they're going to cook up "Friendly AI".

> Maybe a person first has to be in a position of lesser sociopolitical
> (or even physical) power in order to "get" how important it is to
> define terms and discard terms that become useless or damaging. I'm
> beginning to suspect as much.

Maybe you'd enjoy some of George Lakoff's books -- e.g.,
_Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate_
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Think-Elephant-Debate-Progressives/dp/1931498717/

jimf said...

Dale wrote:

> [S]o-called "Technological Immortalists" seem to have convinced
> themselves that the primary barrier standing in the way of their
> achievement of imperishable techno-bodies. . .

Perhaps they should blame NBC for taking _Star Trek_ off
the air back in 1969.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Android "Alice 263": These are our Barbara series.
The body is covered with a self-renewing plastic
over a skeleton of beryllium-titanium alloy.

McCoy: Very impressive.

Kirk: I should say so.

Chekov: I like the styling.

Harry Mudd: They were, of course, made to my
personal specifications, as indeed were
the Maizie series, the Trudy series,
and particularly the Annabelle series.

McCoy: How long does a body like that last?

Alice: None of our android bodies has ever worn out.
However, the estimated duration of this model
is 500,000 years.

Uhura: 500,000 ... **years**?

Alice: Our medi-robots are able to place a human brain
within a structurally compatible android body.

Mudd: Immortality ... and eternal beauty. Hmm?
-------------------------------------------------------------
Original _Star Trek_ episode, "I, Mudd"
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/I,_Mudd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Mudd

jimf said...

Dale wrote:

> [A]bout the phrases “immortality,” “living forever,” “killing death,”
> and so on. . . [I]t is actually utterly bewildering that you would
> use a word so freighted with transcendental religiosity and
> irrational passion to describe what you take to be a proximate
> practically achievable engineering outcome. (An assessment that
> puts you at odds with scientific consensus.)

Poofing out:

[From the blog of "Mark Plus" (Mark Potts)]
http://transsurvivalist.blogspot.com/
-----------------------------------------------------
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Waking up from the evangelical fantasy world?

. . .

The Nth Great Disappointment: Many evangelical preachers and leaders
went out of their way over the past generation to propagandize their
churches with this "end times" nonsense. But Jesus stubbornly refuses
to "return," assuming he even "arrived" as a historical figure on Earth
in the first place circa 2,000 years ago. Everyone (well, except me)
wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die first to get there.
It reminds me of the faltering of the infinitesimally smaller Extropian
movement, which pretty much poofed itself out of existence when Extropians'
middle age and the underperformance of the 21st Century so far showed
the infeasiblity of their futuristic visions. (I speak as a former Extropian
myself.)

People can live in fantasy worlds for only so long. Eventually reality
has a way of reminding us of its existence. The decline of the christian right
suggests to me that at least some evangelicals have started to wonder about
their Matrix, even if they haven't swallowed the Red Pill of atheism yet.
-----------------------------------------------------

ZARZUELAZEN said...

Cutting (I hope!) to the heart of the issue, the real problem with the superlative formulations lies in the fact that they're a style of communication which is disruptive and disconnected with most people's concerns.

I should try to explain. I have spent some time developing a custom 'language of archetypes' for use with my own crack at AI - (this can be thought of as a 'high level programming language' or more acucrately as a data modelling language).

In my custom language, superlative formulations are what I call:

'Fragmentation bubbles'

also (in terms of reflection)

'Confusion Sparkles' and
'Contrivance Sparkles'

They do not result in harmonious connections with most people's world views, causing (as my names suggest..thought fragmentation... resulting in confusion and what appears to the listener to be nothing more than intellectual contrivances)

Superlative terms are thus a disruptive communication style.

By far the worst offender on transhumanist lists in this regard was (at least in the old days) E.Yudkowsky, who used to keep talking over every-one's heads for no other reason than to pump up his own ego. By firing off terms and reasoning so far removed from most people's thought processes, he caused constant *fragmentation bubbles* in people's thoughts.

Effective communication cannot leap too far ahead (in terms of inferential steps and cultural formulations) of the cultural gestalt, or else the only result is these *framgentation bubbles* in thought.

Superlative terms all too ften cause *fragmentation bubbles* in thought.

Effective communication needs to rephrase such terms so as to speak to current cultural concerns, thus generating *integration bubbles* in thought - resulting in what I call

*understanding sparkles* and
*unification sparkles*

in the minds of the listener. I hope this post has succeeded in producing such thought sparkles in readers :)

jimf said...

Marc Geddes wrote:

> [S]uperlative formulations are what I call. . .
> 'Fragmentation bubbles' . . . resulting in confusion
> and [appearing] to the listener to be nothing more than
> intellectual contrivances. . . [and] are thus a
> disruptive communication style.
>
> [T]he worst offender on transhumanist lists in this
> regard. . . used to keep talking over everyone's heads
> for no other reason than to pump up his own ego.


"The Weapon of Language"
"Narcissists... never talk to others - rather, they
talk at others, or lecture them. They exchange subtexts,
camouflage-wrapped by elaborate, florid, texts. . .
Theirs is a solipsistic world - where communication is
permitted only with oneself and the aim of language is
to throw others off the scent..."

[L]anguage is put by narcissists to a different use - not
to communicate but to obscure, not to share but to abstain,
not to learn but to defend and resist, not to teach but to
preserve ever less tenable monopolies. . .

http://samvak.tripod.com/journal34.html

Anne Corwin said...

Marc said: Superlative terms all too [o]ften cause *fragmentation bubbles* in thought.

Effective communication needs to rephrase such terms so as to speak to current cultural concerns, thus generating *integration bubbles* in thought - resulting in what I call

*understanding sparkles* and
*unification sparkles*


Um...is this supposed to be a parody or something?

I'm not "siding with superlativity" here or anything, but if you're going to start invoking terms like "unification sparkles" in the context of explaining how people need to communicate more clearly and meaningfully...well, I guess I just hope you're making a joke and I'm not getting it. Wow.

jimf said...

Anne Corwin wrote:

> I guess I just hope you're making a joke and I'm not getting it. Wow.

It is true that there are multiple levels of irony here. ;->

Believe it or not though, Marc does have a point, even if
he's making it in a form that leaves him all too open to
an accusation of "tu quoque".

ZARZUELAZEN said...

>It is true that there are multiple levels of irony here. ;->

Yes, it was a bit ironic. Sorry it wasn't clear Anne but I would have thought readers could discipher the metaphorical terms I was using fairly easily. *shrugs*.

By 'sparkle' I just meant 'conscious experience'. So for instance an 'anger sparkle' - you feel angry. A 'fear sparkle' - you feel fear and so on.

Superlative terms don't connect with the thought processes of listeners. That's what I meant by 'fragmentation' of thought. Listeners are being asked to make leaps of thought which have no logically connected steps to what they currently know.

'Understanding sparkle' would mean that the listener has a conscious feeling of having understood something... they understand in concrete terms what a speaker is saying... they can describe a series of connected logical steps which make sense.

'Unification sparkle' would mean that the listener has a conscious feeling that a term used by a speaker connects in an integrated way with knowledge they currently understand... the listener would understand how a term used fits into the context of their own world-view.

Superlative terms generally don't produce feelings of understanding or unification in most people.