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

Monday, April 06, 2009

Drextech As Superlative, Now With "Existence Proofs"!

Insofar as all of this recent drextech talk hereabouts is connecting up specifically with my Superlativity critique, it is important to note that where "nanotechnology" is concerned I tend to focus on claims that technodevelopment will arrive at a superabundance through which we will presumably circumvent the impasse of stakeholder politics in a world shared by an ineradicable diversity of peers. The aspect that I focus on is the discourse of superabundance as an anti-political wish-fulfillment fantasy.

This "anti-political" discourse, as it happens, tends to function concretely in the service of elitist-incumbent-authoritarian political ends, whatever the professed politics of its adherents.

But like the other super-predicates of superlative discourse, superabundance amounts to a personal investment in a stealthy article of faith proffered up as endlessly-deferred scientific "predictions." The three super-predicates, recall, are superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance, and they correlate to the three theological omni-predicates -- omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. But like the avowed articles of faith of the omni-predicates with which they are correlated, these super-predicates are ultimately incapable of functioning as factual assertions at all, they are self-consuming quasi-factual placeholders for the brute assertion of faith itself.

Confronted with superlative utterances it is entirely beside the point to indulge in what appear to be technical disputes about the validity of the scientific claims that are hyperbolized into rationales for superlative articles of faith or to debate technodevelopmental timelines for superlative "outcomes." To indulge superlative futurologists in these preferred arguments is as little scientific as debating the number of angels who can dance on a pin-head with a monk or pouring over Nostradamus with some disasterbatory enthusiast to "determine" the exact date the world will end. The phenomenological payoff for the True Believer, so long as these conversations play out in real time, is to confer onto their imaginary object of faith a substantial reality that the object itself cannot otherwise attain. It is better for everyone not to indulge this sort of irrationality at all, certainly not to confuse this sort of thing with actual science or actual policy discourse to the cost of the indispensable work these enterprises actually do, or, at any rate, one should understand this sort of thing as an essentially idiosyncratic aesthetic or moral matter on the part of its enthusiasts and treat it (even celebrate it) as one would comparable enthusiasms in their proper precinct.

Anyway, to the extent that the drextech business takes up the faith-based discourse of superabundance it is susceptible to the superlativity critique, but while drextech is exemplary of Superlativity in this way, it is far from essential to it. It seems to me that late-century digital-utopianism and hype about immersive virtualies, as well as quite a lot of mid-century automation discourse also indulged conspicuously in superlative discourse as the anti-political gesture of an aspiration toward the technodevelopmental "accomplishment" of superabundance. I regard Roland Barthes' reading of "Plastic" in his Mythologies as yet another example of the same.

I think all this is related to but not exactly the same sort of thing that I was talking about when last week I discussed the relation of marginal ideas and warranted consensus in the scientific mode of reasonable belief ascription, and similarly related to but not exactly the same thing Richard Jones is pointing to when he delineates the ways in which the claims arising out of drextech fandoms are marginal to consensus science, are overconfident and uncaveated in ways that are uncharacteristic of consensus science, and rely on deeply questionable uninterrogated assumptions that would trouble most consensus scientists, and so on. He's far more qualified to address technical questions at a level of detail my own different training not to mention different temperament ill-suits me for, but I am qualified to know to stick to consensus where I am not qualified to falsify or substantiate candidate assertions for scientific belief and to recognize marginality by the available criteria on hand and treat it accordingly. It seems to me that my modesty is better suited to proper scientificity than the immodesty of the superlative "champions of science" who would deride my muzzy-headed lie-brul elite fashionable nonsensicality.

It does seem to me there is a common tendency in superlative discourse for its adherents to hang their hats on "existence proofs" the generality of which is scarcely substantial enough to bear the weight of confidence in particular outcomes and particular technodevelopmental trajectories that tend to get connected to them.

It is hard to see how biological realities actually substantiate the confidence drextechians seem to have in the technodevelopmental accomplishment of highly-controlled programmable general-purpose self-replicating room-temperature molecular manufacturing when that actually isn't what we find in biology after all. Similarly, it is hard to see how the realities of organismic intelligence actually substantiate the confidence AI-enthusiasts have in the technodevelopmental accomplishment of differently materialized intelligences, let alone bear the weight of confidence "uploaders" have that consciousness can migrate across substrates without loss.

One hears techno-immortalists declaring that because intelligence is material rather than supernatural this means that presently biological intelligence can migrate into imperishable digital networks in principle, when it seems at least as likely that the materiality of consciousness renders the concrete materiality of its incarnation non-negligible and hence less susceptible to "migrations." Indeed, I expect that the "plausibility" of such scenarios of migration (the frame itself is a metaphorical sleight of hand, after all, rather than any kind of lab result) derives more from the deep seated familiarity of mystical framings of insubstantial ensouled consciousness "imprisoned" by the material body more than anything else, however vociferously these superlative futurologists disdain religious faith otherwise.

In a nutshell, I think superlative faith-based initiatives find comfort in these "existence proofs" because they need to find them there, not because there is any reasonable support to be found in them. Skeptics are quite familiar with the faithful who find "proof" of God, and so of the immortality of their souls, in the sublimity of a buzzing blooming sun-drenched natural world without God or immortal souls anywhere on hand. It is a mercy at any rate that the faithful don't try to sell us on the notion that it is in such moments of inspired free-association that they are behaving as model scientists, which is what the galling flabbergasting spectacle of Superlativity too often seems to amount to.

There can be an appealing poetry in esoteric mysticism and in the aesthetic practices of personal perfection in which the faithful indulge -- so long as they don't become hectoring and puritanical I find it as easy to sympathize with their lifeways as I do other creative people, poets, punks, perverts, party-animals and so on. If the superlative futurologists just realized that they are another sf fandom and stopped messing with urgently needed public technodevelopmental deliberation in a time of disruptive technoscientific change, they could be perfectly charming and harmless as well, as better befits their preoccupations.

But to the extent that superlative discourse fancies itself a world-historical movement, whomping up a sub(cult)ural constituency, advocating an ideology from the vantage of an organizational archipelago impacting actual public discourse and actual policy, then I'm afraid it becomes crucial to identify its essentially faithful constitution and critique its mobilization and ramification in the world as such.

That Superlativity is not properly scientific is important to grasp and expose, especially given the tendency of superlatives to sell themselves as a kind of scientific avant-garde, but it matters more to understand not just that Superlativity fails to pass muster as scientific but that it is essentially a faith-based initiative indulging in moralizing politics from a sub(cult)ural vantage and hence constitutes a threat to secular democratic multiculture in much the same ways that perniciously politicized fundamentalist faiths always are.

10 comments:

jimf said...

> Skeptics are quite familiar with the faithful who find
> "proof" of God, and so of the immortality of their souls, in
> the sublimity of a buzzing blooming sun-drenched natural world
> without God or immortal souls anywhere on hand.

Of course, some sensitive souls find other things in scenes
of nature.


VIOLET VENABLE: _Poem of Summer_, and the date of the summer,
there are twenty-five of them, he wrote one poem a year. . .
One for each summer that we traveled together. The other
nine months of the year were really only a preparation.

DR. CUCROWICZ: Nine months?

MRS. VENABLE: The length of a pregnancy, yes. . . Without me,
he died last summer, that was his last summer's poem.

One long-ago summer -- now, why am I thinking of this? --
my son, Sebastian, said, "Mother -- Listen to this!" --
He read me Herman Melville's description of the Encantadas,
the Galapagos Islands. Quote -- take five and twenty
heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city
lot. Imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and
the vacant lot, the sea. And you'll have a fit idea of the
general aspect of the Encantadas, the Enchanted Isles --
extinct volcanoes, looking much as the world at large
might look -- after a last conflagration -- end quote.
He read me that description and said that we had to go
there. And so we did go there that summer on a chartered
boat, a four-masted schooner, as close as possible to the
sort of a boat that Melville must have sailed on. . . .
We saw the Encantadas, but on the Encantadas we saw
something Melville **hadn't** written about. We saw the
great sea-turtles crawl up out of the sea for their annual
egg-laying. . . . Once a year the female of the sea-turtle
crawls up out of the equatorial sea onto the blazing
sand-beach of a volcanic island to dig a pit in the
sand and deposit her eggs there. It's a long and dreadful
thing, the depositing of the eggs in the sand-pits,
and when it's finished the exhausted female turtle crawls
back to the sea half-dead. She never sees her offspring,
but we did. Sebastian knew exactly when the sea-turtle
eggs would be hatched out and we returned in time for it. . . .

DOCTOR: You went back to the--?

MRS. VENABLE: Terrible Encantadas, those heaps of extinct volcanoes,
in time to witness the hatching of the sea-turtles and
their desperate flight to the sea!

The narrow beach, the color of caviar, was all in motion!
But the sky was in motion, too. . . .

DOCTOR: The sky was in motion, too?

MRS. VENABLE: Full of flesh-eating birds and the noise of the
birds, the horrible savage cries of the--

DOCTOR: Carnivorous birds?

MRS. VENABLE: Over the narrow black beach of the Encantadas as
the just-hatched sea-turtles scrambled out of the sand-pits
and started their race to the sea. . . .

DOCTOR: Race to the sea?

MRS. VENABLE: To escape the flesh-eating birds that made the
sky almost as black as the beach.

And the sand all alive, all alive, as the hatched sea-turtles
made their dash for the sea, while the birds hovered and swooped
to attack and hovered and -- swooped to attack! They were diving
down on the hatched sea-turtles, turning them over to expose
their soft undersides, tearing the undersides open and
rending and eating their flesh. Sebastian guessed that possibly
only a hundredth of one per cent of their number would escape
to the sea. . . .

DOCTOR: What was it about this that fascinated your son?

MRS. VENABLE: My son was looking for -- [She stops short with
a slight gasp.] -- Let's just say he was interested in
sea-turtles.

DOCTOR: That isn't what you started to say.

MRS. VENABLE: I stopped myself just in time.

DOCTOR: Say what you started to say.

MRS. VENABLE: I started to say that my son was looking for God
and I stopped myself because I thought you'd think 'Oh, a
pretentious young crackpot!' -- which Sebastian was **not**!

DOCTOR: Mrs. Venable, doctors look for God, too.

MRS. VENABLE: Oh?

DOCTOR: I think they have to look harder for him than priests
since they don't have the help of such well-known guidebooks
and well-organized expeditions as the priests have with their
scriptures and -- churches. . . .

MRS. VENABLE: You mean they go on a solitary safari like a poet?

-- Tennessee Williams, _Suddenly Last Summer_

Martin said...

The Gettysburg Address:

Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level: 11.18
Flesch readability: 63.20

The first paragraph of my last published scientific paper (reprinted below):

F-K RL: 20.82
F readability: 0.00

This blog post:

F-K RL: 27.42
F REL: 0.00


LOL


"Circadian rhythms are cycles of behavior and physiology governed by an endogenous oscillator in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) of the hypothalamus. The circadian oscillator is, in its simplest, most fundamental form, a molecular feedback loop involving gene expression, post-translational protein modifications, and feedback of transcriptional regulatory proteins on their own expression. The importance of genetic regulation of circadian rhythms is demonstrated by the identification of single-gene mutations in mice, golden hamsters, and humans that dramatically alter fundamental circadian properties."

Martin said...

Dale, I think the readability scores of 0.00 for your blog post and my paper came from the use of many non-dictionary words, like "suprachiasmatic nucleus", "SCN", "hypothalamus", and possibly "endogenous" and "transcriptional" in my paper. Yes, it's jargon, but we're not writing for a wide audience, we're writing for neurophysiologists, neurobehaviorists, geneticists and sleep researchers.

I presume the reason you have a public blog is to get your message to the masses, which is why I'm baffled as to why you choose to write so densely. I understand what you're saying, but after several Joycean sentences in a row, I tend to just get bored and skim the rest, or not even finish. It was when I hit that wall in about the sixth or seventh paragraph of this post that I decided to evaluate it with a standard test.

jimf said...

Martin Striz wrote (to Dale):

> I understand what you're saying. . .

You know, you haven't really shown any evidence at all of
understanding what Dale is saying.

Between telling Dale that he's posting incomprehensible jargon
(and citing the numerical results of statistical tests to "prove"
it), and telling **me** that my interspersed reams of cut-and-paste
make it impossible for you to find out what "Dale's readers" are posting,
you have offered the following uninspired interpretations of Dale's
critique of >Hism:

1. You infer that Dale thinks that >Hists are insufficiently concerned
about the impact of the technologies they're promoting on the masses.

Well, no. This assumes that Dale takes the >Hists at face value
(as you seem to). Believe me, Bill Joy, Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama and the
Pope are more likely to take the >Hists at face value
(and get all upset about it) than Dale is (or I am). You've
missed the point here.

2. You seem to think that Dale is intent on **controlling** the
technological jiggery-pokery of the >Hists for the sake of saving
humanity, or saving democracy, or some such thing. Again, you're
assuming that Dale takes the jiggery-pokery seriously, which he
manifestly **does not**. Try again.

So, forget your statistical analysis programs of Dale's dense prose,
and try again with the reading of it.

So far, you're way off the beam.

Dale Carrico said...

I presume the reason you have a public blog is to get your message to the masses, which is why I'm baffled as to why you choose to write so densely.

I don't expect to garner a popular audience, although I do expect and think I manage to attract a more diverse audience through blogging than I would were I to write for the academic theoryhead cul-de-sac in which my style is immediately legible already. I like that.

But I rarely exhibit the concision of a fine editorialist -- I appreciate those skills, but they are not mine. I enjoy twists and turns, I get a kick out of stylistic shenanigans, I find myself qualifying points in the midst of qualifying other points, just because that's the way, you know, I roll.

You know, the truth is that I am usually thinking through ideas while I am writing them down, and I rarely edit, lacking the time for that but also enjoying the feeling of give-and-take that comes of writing on the fly -- and I know all that probably shows -- but if my writing really is dense, possibly it's because I am! As my friends and students would probably attest, you might be surprised at how closely my off-the-cuff speaking tracks the convolutions of the writing.

Dale Carrico said...

Hey, Jim -- it definitely warms my heart to be defended by folks who appreciate what I am doing on my own terms. But I do want to say that I didn't take Martin's comments amiss. I actually really value Martin's regular presence here in the Moot precisley because I think his assumptions and style are a little different from my own and yet despite this he soldiers on here and critiques what doesn't work for him while trying to translate what does work for him into terms that are closer to his own. These translations of his are usually clarifying for me, even when they settle in places that remain a bit perpendicular to my own. I don't think he is being belligerent at all, just testifying to honest perplexities at our differences. I like that sort of thing, even when it makes me grumpy in the short term!

Dale Carrico said...

Oh, needless to say, I should hope, I don't think there is anything wrong with your critique or your voicing it, either!

Anne Corwin said...

Personally I find both the "dense prose" of this blog AND Jim's quotey comments to be refreshing. In a strange sort of way, I find "long-winded" writers *easier* to read than tidier ones, as in the lengthy stuff there's usually more exploration of the assumptions behind the writing. This is by no means a hard and fast rule, and there are exceptions, but still. I am glad the net-o-sphere supports a variety of styles.

Martin said...

jimf: I've been reading Dale's blog for as long as he's had it, and chatted with him on email lists before that. I'm aware of Dale's positions. We were philosophical / political outsiders on one of those lists, and it was that connection which drove me to follow his blog all these years. I DO like his verbosity, it's the lengths of the sentences that sometimes get tedious. Dale and I agree on a lot, and disagree on little, but I'm always honest about expressing my opinion, and as Dale said, he appreciates my honesty.

Unlike you, who appear to be a whipping boy.

jimf said...

> Dale and I agree on a lot, and disagree on little, but I'm
> always honest about expressing my opinion, and as Dale said,
> he appreciates my honesty.
>
> Unlike you, who appear to be a whipping boy.

I haven't a clue what that means.

You mean Dale doesn't appreciate me, or I don't appreciate you?

"Whipping boy" as in scapegoat? Or did you perhaps think
that a "whipping boy" is someone who **wields** a whip
(like a political party's "whip")?

The most I can glean from your remark is some sort of vague
hostile connotation, which I most cordially return. I don't
like you either.