It seems like, finally, we have gotten to the core of Dales criticism…. Most transhumanists thinks of AI as one of the tools that may be usable for creating a better future, just like nanotechnology, ”drextech”, mind uploading, genetics, cryonics, etc. These technologies can be criticised, and who knows, maybe none of them will ever bring the results wished for by transhumanists. That would, indeed, be a hard blow in the face of the transhumanists, but it would not hit transhumanism at its core….
Honestly, what does it mean to say that AI or Drextech or cryonics are "tools… for creating a better future"? What does it mean to say "these technologies can be criticized"? There are no tools here to be used, there are no technologies to be criticized. None of this actually exists. Hyperbolic extrapolations from ill-digested results in labs do not constitute actual technologies, nor does discussing them endlessly to the exclusion of actually-existing tools and techniques constitute science, somehow, nor policy deliberation. Nor is it even philosophy, properly so-called, which isn't about "prophetic utterances" but about understanding what is happening and assigning significance to what has happened. The force of references to these non-existent hyperbolizations derives from the rhetorical strategies on which they rely, their citations and elaborations of well-worn figures, frames, narratives, topoi, and so on.Transhumanism is a Humanism! It is a wish for the preservation of human values for as long as possible. It is a wish for mankind’s flourishing in a universe full of dangers. It is a wish for the end of all the unnecessary misery going on earth anno 2009.
I really can’t agree that this is what transhumanism amounts to at all, nor do I agree that I am saying anything like what you seem to be attributing to me, although I think you may be honestly trying to understand me on terms that are more familiar to you. Still, I am rather flabbergasted that you have managed to ignore pretty much both everything transhumanists themselves explicitly say (they endlessly pine after post-humanity, after all, the overcoming all limits, man! and so on) as well as everything I explicitly say when I oppose superlative futurology so as to advocate instead straightforward technoscientifically literate, well-regulated, well-funded equitably distributed progress in the midst of a lifeway diversity of peers engaging in actually informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic self-determination (which is, when all is said and done, a kinda sorta boring secular democratic humanist project, which is why some have accused me here of defending stasis, presumably).
It is, as a wise man once said, simplified humanism.
I don’t happen to agree that the man who said “transhumanism is simplified humanism” was the least bit wise, in fact I think he is something of a charlatan (I daresay he thinks the same of me, and in this room he’ll find a lot of company in that assessment), but one of the reasons I think he is not at all wise is because while it may be true in a way to describe the hollowing out of human experience and then the wished-for amplification of the mutilated remains as a kind of “simplification,” there are better words on offer that the actually wise would use to describe such a devastatingly wrongheaded vision.
In the absence of gods, angels, demons, and magical aliens in UFOs, one must turn the hopes to science and technology. And that is exactly what the transhumanists have done.
Neither do I agree that in the absence of god or aliens or magical UFOs that one must turn to faith-based misconstruals and wish-fulfillment fantasies of technodevelopment. Indeed, I think that when we grow up and grow out of foolish faiths we turn to the worldly diversity of our fellows, to the extent that they are open to collaboration and contestation as peers… not as priests, not as moralizers, not as fundamentalists, not as avatars of future beings not “yet” among us, but as peers.
I would like to see Dales ”ideologiekritk” directed at this, the core of the ”ideologie” in question here. It is, after all, a little too easy to criticise not-existing technologies, one of their major faults is their lack of existence.
Indeed. That is a fault. As for the deeper critique, I have offered up a suggestion of it in this very post. It's not like I don't say this sort of thing endlessly already anyway.
10 comments:
"In the absence of gods, angels, demons, and magical aliens in UFOs, one must turn the hopes to science and technology. And that is exactly what the transhumanists have done."
Actually, this is much closer to the 'core' of so-called transhumanism than the other stuff Hjalte says. It is a modern faith that is spinning fantastic tales usually based on much more modest real things, just as ancient humans did when they invented gods and spirits for the real forces at work in the world around them.
It is the same old stuff dressed up in sci-fi techno drag. Magical science and hoped for technologies are not actual science and actual technologies, any more than ancient gods of wind and fire are actually the means by which real wind and fire work.
Dale wrote:
> A newcomer, "Hjalte" writes:
>
> . . .
>
> > In the absence of gods, angels, demons, and magical aliens in UFOs,
> > one must turn the hopes to science and technology.
Uh oh. I wonder what Bertrand Russell would say about that.
I'm afraid that science **cannot**, of its
very nature, bear the same weight of hope that "gods, angels,
demons, and magical aliens" have traditionally borne.
In fact, to try to rope science into doing that duty is
likely enough to destroy the qualities that make science
any different from religion in the first place.
To pursue anything that deserves to be called "science"
requires a large dollop of dispassionate distance, at least
detachment from any hoped-for outcomes beyond that of satisfying
the desire to understand things as they are.
Science and religion, I'm afraid, are simply incommensurate --
they're like oil and water (and I don't mean you can shake 'em
up together and get salad dressing). If you mix them up,
you'll get bad science (and, for that matter, trivialized religion).
William James stated this clearly more than a century ago:
The fact that we can die, that we can be
ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact
that we now for a moment live and are well
is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need
a life not correlated with death, a health
not liable to illness, a kind of good that
will not perish, a good in fact that flies
beyond the Goods of nature...
This sadness lies at the heart of every
merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic
scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine
healthy-mindedness do its best with its
strange power of living in the moment and
ignoring and forgetting, still the evil
background is really there to be thought
of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
In the practical life of the individual,
we know how his whole gloom or glee about
any present fact depends on the remoter
schemes and hopes with which it stands
related. Its significance and framing
give it the chief part of its value. Let
it be known to lead nowhere, and however
agreeable it may be in its immediacy,
its glow and gilding vanish...
The lustre of the present hour is always
borrowed from the background of possibilities
it goes with. Let our common experiences
be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let
our suffering have an immortal significance;
let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities
pay their visits; let faith and hope be
the atmosphere which man breathes in; -- and
his days pass by with zest; they stir with
prospects, they thrill with remoter values.
Place round them on the contrary the
curdling cold and gloom and absence of all
permanent meaning which for pure naturalism
and the popular science evolutionism of our
time are all that is visible ultimately,
and the thrill stops short, or turns rather
to anxious trembling.
For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological
speculations, mankind is in a position
similar to that of a set of people living
on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over
which there is no escape, yet knowing that
little by little the ice is melting, and
the inevitable day drawing near when the
last film of it will disappear, and to be
drowned ignominiously will be the human
creature's portion. The merrier the skating,
the warmer and more sparkling the sun by
day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night,
the more poignant the sadness with which
one must take in the meaning of the total
situation.
William James, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_,
Lectures VI and VII
"The Sick Soul"
Oh, I have been given my very own post. What an honor.
I totally think the core of transhumanism looks like the one on your pictures. I just don’t imagine it leaking that much….
There are no tools here to be used, there are no technologies to be criticized. None of this actually exists I know that. It just becomes boring to write ”hypothetical technology” and ”hypothetical tool” all the time.
No really, Everybody knows that advanced AI and ”drextech” does not exist. And no one claims otherwise. Why keep repeating this?
Transhumanism is an ideology, and such speculation about the future is what ideologists do. It is like when the communist plan for the happy times after the revolution, when the libertarians take advances of the liberty they will enjoy when they finally have eliminated the fascist over government, and when the islamist dream of the tremendous amount of virgins they will marry in the worldwide sharia-governed caliphate after the return of the 12th imam.
Many scientists throughout history were communist, many prominent economists are libertarians, and likely some decent islamistic engineers and medical doctors are to be found as well. It is possible to have an ideology and still make important contributions in ones chosen field, as long as one does not let the ideology interfere with the science.
I am rather flabbergasted that you have managed to ignore pretty much both everything transhumanists themselves explicitly say (they endlessly pine after post-humanity, after all, the overcoming all limits, man! and so on) I do not think I am ignoring anything, I may just have a slightly different focus.
I dislike the word ”posthuman”. Transhuman is a much better term, since it signals that a process of transition is going on, and such a process have been going on throughout mankind’s history. The first humans back on the savannah would not recognize those beings living in modern cities, as members of their own species. To them we would indeed be transhumans. That process is then extrapolated into the future, and I agree with the claim that we would not recognize the beings populating earth in a thousand years at members of ”Homo sapiens”, don’t you?
These hypothetical beings are what some refer to as posthumans, but there is no reason for the transition to stop there, so why use this eugenics-sounding word.
About overcoming limits: The mentioned transition is driven by a desire to overcome limits. ”Here is an ocean and we want to cross it, but it is limiting us! What to do? Oh, let’s build a boat!” Limit overcome, and I will not even mention the Wight brothers.
Again the process is extrapolated into the future, and the result is that some of what is currently seen as limits will be overcome at some point, and if one extrapolates far enough….
as well as everything I explicitly say when I oppose superlative futurology so as to advocate instead straightforward technoscientifically literate, well-regulated, well-funded equitably distributed progress in the midst of a lifeway diversity of peers engaging in actually informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic self-determination Back in the fifties, when rumors of the horrors going on behind the iron curtain reached the citicens in western Europe, the brightest of the members of the communist parties in these nations, realized that the constant talk of revolution was no longer comme il faut. So they formed new reform socialistic parties that spoke about more realistic short term ways for reaching this social improvement that in fact was the goal for this revolution to begin with. These parties in most cases turned out to be quite reasonable, and they did have a positive impact on the welfare states to be found in Europe today.
Deepest inside their hearts, these guys wanted a good old-fashioned revolution, and discussed it in the cafés, but that did not keep them from making good and serious contributions to actual politics when they were in the meeting rooms.
What should keep a transhumanist from doing the same?
I don’t happen to agree that the man who said “transhumanism is simplified humanism” was the least bit wise, in fact I think he is something of a charlatanHe is a man with a mission. I mission that surely appears more nutty than most at first sight, but not everything is as it appears. If nothing else comes out of it, at least he has produced a lot of interesting blog posts.
(if you by charlatan you mean that he is insincere and knowingly deluding people, I am very sure you are wrong).
it may be true in a way to describe the hollowing out of human experience and then the wished-for amplification of the mutilated remains as a kind of “simplification”Now we are back to the technical stuff. The heretic thought that consciousness is nothing but the way the various reactions going on in the brain feels when that brain happens to be yours (as EY argues somewhere), surly sounds like hollowing out of human experience of the worst kind imaginable.
But that is just how the great reductions known from the history of science must have felt when those who had grown up with the thought that celestial motion or life or flight or fire or rainbows or the origin of species or etc. was something ”special”, not obeying the everyday laws of nature, suddenly were proven wrong by something as mundane and apoetical as science. As I see it, only two reductions of similar caliber are left to future scientists: the origin of the universe, and the origin of consciousness, and I think that EY has a good grab on the latter, (not that he is the first to come up with such ideas).
I think that when we grow up and grow out of foolish faiths we turn to the worldly diversity of our fellows, to the extent that they are open to collaboration and contestation as peers… not as priests, not as moralizers, not as fundamentalists, not as avatars of future beings not “yet” among us, but as peers.Grow up… you said that, not I. This is exactly what transhumanism is about. A wish for mankind to grow up as a species. Human as of today do have foolish faiths, they do preach and moralize. Also a deep fear of that which is different is hardwired in the brain, for reasons that may have made sense some thousand years ago on the previously mentioned savannah. In order to get rid of these unwanted traits, certain limits must be overcome, and this is why transhumanists talk so much about overcoming limits. Also a lot of transitions must be made, maybe so many that the end result can be described as a transhuman.
Also Eric writes:
It is a modern faith that is spinning fantastic tales usually based on much more modest real things, just as ancient humans did when they invented gods and spirits for the real forces at work in the world around them.I don’t disagree. I am well aware that parallels can be drawn between religion and transhumanism. As stated many times on this blog the rhetoric is similar. Only this time no gods or spirits needs to be postulated, since the explanations are already there, in the science. Transhumanism only needs to be an ideology, not an explanation, and here we are the core (as indicated by the very title of this post) of the difference between transhumanism and religion.
> As I see it, only two reductions of similar caliber are left to
> future scientists: the origin of the universe, and the origin
> of consciousness, and I think that EY has a good grab on the latter. . .
Well, he seems to have a good grab on you, in any case.
Hjalte wrote: The heretic thought that consciousness is nothing but the way the various reactions going on in the brain feels when that brain happens to be yours ...[surely] sounds like hollowing out of human experience of the worst kind imaginable.Um, no it doesn't? It doesn't to me, and I'd wager it doesn't to Dale either. The point is more that when one refers to "various reactions going on in the brain", one cannot be assumed in possession of extensive detailed knowledge regarding the nature of those reactions.
Saying "oh, the brain is just chemical and electrical reactions" doesn't cause any diminishment of awesome in my conceptualization of brains, but there's more to knowing how something actually works than merely coming to terms with the fact that it is not made of ghosts or pixies. And I haven't seen any evidence yet that superlative types know more about neuroscience than, say, neuroscientists, who are decidedly more modest (in my appraisal) regarding the actual state of existing knowledge on all things brain-related.
(And for the record, I am an electrical engineer with 6+ years experience working in industry, not an English major.)
AnneC wrote: I haven't seen any evidence yet that superlative types know more about neuroscience than, say, neuroscientists, who are decidedly more modest (in my appraisal) regarding the actual state of existing knowledge on all things brain-related.jimf wrote: Well, he seems to have a good grab on you, in any case.Oh please. It is not like I worship the man as if he was the guru in some sort of robot cult. I said particularly: not that he is the first to come up with such ideas. And those other people I refer to is not (just) the rest of the incrowd at SIAI. It is people like Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, and likely countless other philosophers and neuroscientists of whom I have not heard. (maybe even some of the old Greek philosophers as well, they had moments of good insight).
Also I don’t say that anyone possess full knowledge of these issues, though the state of the art may be a little above ”various reactions going on in the brain”.
The heretic thought that consciousness is nothing but the way the various reactions going on in the brain feels when that brain happens to be yours ...[surely] sounds like hollowing out of human experience of the worst kind imaginable.I am a materialist in matters of mind, I have been a cheerful atheist for a quarter century, I am a champion of consensus science, not a scientist by any means but hardly uninformed about technoscience questions, and my politics are those of secular progressive consensual democracy.
You are simply straightforwardly not understanding my point. I don't agree that it is particularly heretical to attribute consciousness to neurochemistry in an organismic brain.
Indeed, that statement shouldn't be a surprise to you since one of my repeated accusations against singularitarians, as dead-enders in the old school program of Strong AI (and it has even been a repeated accusation of mine quite literally in the very thread to which you are contributing and which I would imagine, then, that you have taken the time to read), is that despite their own materialism they tend to treat the actual substantial form of materialization hitherto associated with intelligence as comparatively negligible, fancying that complex software and the complex behaviors it can provoke can be properly denominated as "intelligence" without arising out of anything like the dynamisms or exhibiting anything like the dynamisms of the actually-existing organismic intelligences from which they are appropriating the term.
Despite these failures, their discourse is nonetheless saturated with the paraphernalia of intelligence as it is actually incarnated in the world. Discussions of artificial intelligence inevitably lead into discussions of intentions, values, optimizations, smartness, personhood, rights, friendliness and so on, none with any good justification.
To a certain extent these figurative borrowings from one domain to another to prop up our understanding a new phenomena and new problems are inevitable and useful. The term in rhetoric to describe this figure is catachresis, in case you're interested, which describes derangements of literal usage to describe phenomena to which they didn't originally apply and also to describe the coinage of new terms to accomplish this (these coinages, after all, typically involve borrowings from other languages and so on).
Usually these borrowings are functionally proto-theoretical, their plausibility builds on the sense, right or wrong, of the analogical or associational propriety of the traffic between the old and the new domain over which the borrowing is taking place. Also, the trace of the older associations of the term reverberate into the new, yielding rich ramifying associations that continue to exert their force on the ways new usages play out in the world.
It would seem to me that the attribution of intelligence to computers and, subsequently, the reduction of intelligence to computation has been an enormously compelling catachresis that has palpably confused far more than it has illuminated and in fact has yielded a poisonous harvest of incomprehension where matters of testifying to the experiences of critical and abstract and empathetic and passionate and imaginative thinking, understanding, and judgment on which distinctively human forms of agency and meaning depend for their intelligibility, force, and flourishing.
It is not materialism that has hollowed out the human understanding of our own freedom, it is an instrumentalization of reason that was never compelled by materialism that has made its advocates insensitive to and dismissive of the difference between persons and robots, the difference between the exercise of freedom in the presence of one's peers and the exertion of instrumental force translating means into ends. Instrumentality cannot provide the ends at which its efficiencies should be aimed, and freedom rewritten in the image of its imperialism is exactly what one would expect of a robot, blind, meaningless, brute-force mistaken as emancipation rather than the radical impoverishment it would be.
> It is not like I worship the man as if he was the guru in
> some sort of robot cult.
Perish the thought!
> I said particularly: **not that he is the first to come up
> with such ideas.**
Well, the implications of this remark are 1) that you think
there are coherent "ideas" here and 2) that you think
they're, um, good ones.
Oh please. It is not like I worship the man as if he was the guru in some sort of robot cult. I said particularly: not that he is the first to come up with such ideas. And those other people I refer to is not (just) the rest of the incrowd at SIAI. It is people like Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, and likely countless other philosophers and neuroscientists of whom I have not heard. (maybe even some of the old Greek philosophers as well, they had moments of good insight). Also I don’t say that anyone possess full knowledge of these issues, though the state of the art may be a little above ”various reactions going on in the brain”.Sam Harris isn't a neuroscientist. Daniel Dennet is a philosopher. It's nice that you like some of the Greeks. I must say that there is a strange mushy amalgam of bestselling authors with a broad family resemblance rather than a program exactly holding them together, mostly involving a rather pointless and hysterical assertion in my view of technical triumphalism through reductionism among them. I always find myself wishing secularists would go back to reading James and Dewey rather than all this facile reductionism misconstrued as respect for science.
It's easy to see why you would connect the Robot Cultists you cherish to this assembly (some of the authors in which I personally find more or less appealing myself in their proper precinct), and probably in a loose sort of way with the Edge.org folks (I tend to gravitate predictably enough more toward the more progressive and capacious Seed Scienceblogs set myself).
This amalgam of insistent scientism (I'm painting with too broad a brush, but you take my point, I'm sure) is more or less what the American Ayn Rand enthusiasm of the 60s mutated into, by way of the L5 society, by the time of the irrational exuberance of the 90s. Wired and Extropian transhumanism were very much a part of that moment. Vinge, Kurzweil, Yudkowsky originated with it or arise out of it. It hasn't changed all that much, apart from occasional terminological refurbishments and fumigations in the name of organizational PR, since Ed Regis offered his arch ethnography Great Mambo Chicken. Brian Alexander's Rapture, years and years later is most extraordinary for the lack of change in the futurological cast of characters, the claims they make, the (lack of) influence they exert in their marginality, and so on.
Be all that as it may, let's have a reality check here, shall we? If you are concerned about software and network security issues (and there are plenty of good reasons to be), you certainly need not join a Robot Cult to work on them, you need not think of yourself as a "member" of a "movement" that publishes more online manifestos than actually cited scientific papers.
Why would efforts to address software and network security issues impel one into a marginal sub(cult)ure in which one finds a personal identity radically at odds with most of one's peers and what is taken to be a perspective on and place within a highly idiosyncratic version of human history freighted with the tonalities of transcendence and apocalypse?
I don't doubt you when you say that you do not literally worship would-be Robot Cult gurus like Yudkowsky or Kurzweil or Max More or whoever (depending on the particular flavor of superlativity you most invest in personally), but the fact remains that these figures are incredibly marginal to scientific consensus, and you locate yourself very insistently outside that mainstream yourself when theirs are the terms you take up to understand what is possible and important and problematic in the fields of your greatest interest.
The fact that this self-marginalization is typically coupled among superlative futurologists with the assumption of a defensive assertion that in fact you represent a vanguard championing a super-scientificity while you actually actively disdain consensus-scientificity suggests there are other things afoot in this identity you have assumed for whatever reasons than simply a desire to solve software and network security problems.
There are, after all, thousands upon thousands of serious, credentialized, published professionals and students working to solve such problems who have never heard of any of the people you take most seriously and who, upon hearing of them, would laugh their assess off. This possibly should matter to you.
Transhumanism, singularitarianism, techno-immortalism, extropianism, might seem to differ a bit from classic cult formations in that they do tolerate and even celebrate dissenting views on the questions that preoccupy their attention. What one notices however is that the constellation of problems at issue for them highly marginal and idiosyncratic yet remain unusually stable, the disputatious positions assumed in respect to these issues are also fairly stable.
The "party line" for the Robot Cult is not so much a matter of memorizing a creed and observing its commandments, but of taking seriously as nobody else on earth does (sometimes by going through the ritual motions of dispute itself) a set of idealized outcomes -- outcomes that would just happen to confer personal "transcendence" on those who are preoccupied with them, namely, superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance -- and fixating on a set of "technical" problems (not accepted as priorities in the consensus scientific fields on which these "technical" vocabularies parasitically depend) standing in the way of the realization of those idealized outcomes.
It is not so much a hard party-line, but a circumscription of debate onto an idiosyncratic set of marginal problems and marginal "technical" vocabularies in the service of superlative transcendentalizing rather than conventional progressive technodevelopmental aspirations.
This marginality is compensated by the fraught pleasures of a highly defensive marginal sub(cult)ural identification, the sense of being a vanguard rather than an ignoramus or a crank, the sense of gaining an explanatory narrative and a location within it as against the ignorance and confusion that likely preceded the conversion experience (or, to be more generous about it, for some, the assumption of the futurological enthusiasm that impelled them into this particular fandom), not to mention offering up a tantalizing glimpse of superlative aspirations, however conceptually confused, however technically implausible.
For some, superlativity functions as a straightforward faith-based initiative, while for others it is a self-marginalizing sub(cult)ural enthusiasm more like a fandom. The fandom may be less psychologically damaging and less fundamentalist and less prone to authoritarianism (or not), but it nurtures and mobilizes the worst extremes in organized superlative futurology all the same.
The True Believers and the Fans will all refer to "the movement" and to themselves as "transhumanists" or "singularitarians" or what have, imagining themselves different sorts of people in consequence of their identification with that movement.
Beyond all that, superlative futurology continues to provide an illuminating symptom and clarifyingly extreme variation on prevailing neoliberal developmental discourse as such, which is saturated with reductionisms, determinisms, utopianisms, eugenicisms, and libertopianisms very much like the ones the find their extreme correlates in superlative futurology. It is as sympton and reductio of neoliberal developmentalism that superlative futurology probably best repays our considered attention.
On their own, the Robot Cultists are a rather clownish collection, even if one should also pay close attention to the ways in which sensationalist media take up their facile and deranging framings of technodevelopmental quandaries to the cost of sense at the worst possible historical moment, and also one should remain vigilant since even absurd marginal groups of boys with toys who fancy themselves the smartest people in the room and Holders of the Keys of History can do enormous damage if they connect to good funding sources however palpably idiotic their actual views (as witness Nazis and Neocons).
I have posted a few comments to the above, elsewhere.
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