Had I World Enough, and Time

Aubrey de Grey, Robert Butler, and Leonard Guarente recently sat down to discuss anti-aging medicine. One of the most common critiques of anti-aging – one I didn’t address in my FAQ – is one of existential crisis. Let’s say that I knew that medicine had advanced to a point where I could reasonably expect to live to be 350 years old, with the first two decades of course going to maturation, and let’s say the last two decades resembling our current aging process.

The question one is asked and must ask oneself: what would you do with all of that time? Wouldn’t you get bored? What would you do?

I asked myself those questions and realized that right now I feel impossibly rushed. There is so much life to experience, in so many ways that I feel compelled to try and do everything at once. Some people spend their teens and twenties partying and living paycheck to paycheck in a visceral, hedonistic, perpetual Bacchanalia of youth. Others cloister themselves away in libraries and academia to emerge in their late twenties/early thirties as The Next Big Thing in their field, granting them a position of influence for decades to come. Others travel, seeing the world, discovering who they want to be and meeting their fellow human beings. Still others start their careers, steadily moving up the ranks and in the process have the financial stability to settle down and have a family.

Yet for everyone of these potential ways of living comes at a cost of all the others. The very process of aging forces a choice. But what if I didn’t have to choose because I wasn’t aging? What if raising a family didn’t take half of my adult life, but barely a tenth of it? What if I could be a reckless youth, traveling, partying, living on a shoe-string budget and making loads of mistakes, for decades without worrying that I was “too old” or not “preparing for the future.” What if I could work for a couple years, putting most of it into savings, and then, 100 years down the road when I decided to have kids, have an enormous nest egg? There are so many questions we don’t even consider because we frame our lives as windows of time, wherein we get to do somethings but not others, because you only get that one chunk of time once. But what if instead of a couple decades of youth and vigor with another several decades of slow decline and aging, what if a person lived for over three centuries, with nearly all of it in a state of youth akin to a twenty-five year old. What would it be like?

Had I world enough, and time, here is how I would spend it.

I would grow up, I presume, as normal, but after undergrad, I wouldn’t have immediately started fretting and panicking about careers or graduate school or “what are you going to do with your life?” Instead, I’d spend a few decades, say three or four, living the life of a bachelor. No marriages, no living in one place for more than a couple years, career changes constantly, living with low inhibitions, thrill seeking, unworried about mistakes, bank accounts, savings, or nice things. I would take my time with everything. I’d try living for a while with almost no worldly possessions, going from hostel to hostel, working odd jobs and making barely enough money to pay for the next ticket or meal. I’d meet people and interact and learn. Then maybe I’d spend a few years just partying, embracing utter hedonism. Maybe after that, as a sort of cleansing, I’d go volunteer in one of the countries I’d visited a decade before, spending a few years giving myself freely to others. Thirty years of youth.

Perhaps somewhere in there I discovered a career I loved. Let’s say it’s marketing. I don’t want a family yet, don’t want to settle down, but I love this job: the people, the work, the company, all of it. I do well, make big bucks, put a bunch into savings and use the rest to live it up in a nice apartment, buy flashy crap I don’t need, go for the gusto with materialism. Just to see if I like it. Play the stock market with my extra bucks. Maybe I’d have a long term relationship, maybe I’d date, maybe I’d be so involved in work I’d barely have time for more than the occasional fling. I could live the life of a man about town, doing a job I loved, with money to spare.

But after a while, maybe fifteen years, I’d feel I’d done all I could in marketing, and my arm chair study of economics has really been intriguing me, so I decide to use some of my savings to go back to school. Maybe before I retired from marketing, I’d take some refresher courses, and then dive into things full time in a grad program. With my savings, I can pay tuition and go to school full time while still living comfortably. Having traveled and partied and worked for almost half a century, I’d revel in the solitude of study, spending whole weeks cooped up in the library or my home office, investigating nuanced, esoteric trains of thoughts and reading the enormous tomes of the greats at my leisure. I graduate in a decade with a Ph.D. and go out into the field.

Maybe I end up with a job at the IMF, over seeing development in South East Asia, a place I know well after traveling there for two years a few decades before. I speak Thai and Vietnamese, of course. I see it as one of the many homes I’ve had and take a personal investment in working to do the best for the region because of the time I spent there. While working for the IMF, I meet a woman. We fall in love, courting, dating, and experiencing each other over the next several years while working in Asia. We decide to get married.

Anticipating kids, we both quit our jobs at the IMF and get stable, low demand jobs back in the states in our respective fields. As we plan the wedding, we put most of our earnings into savings. A decade and a half after we first meet, we decide to have kids. We both take work off for a decade to raise the kids, living off of our enormous next egg from our previous decades of work and nearly century old savings accounts. I’d be able help my kids go through school, being deeply involved in their lives, continuing my learning with them, helping them discover as much of the world on their own terms as possible. Instead of supporting my family and having it at the same time, I’d support it first, then have it.

With our kids grown and happy, going off into their own lives and adventures, I’d still have nearly two hundred years of life left. By now, I’m approaching 110 years old. Maybe my travel itch is back, and probably the itch for week-long parties too. Maybe my wife has got the same urges, and now, instead of traveling, partying, living recklessly, and on a shoestring budget alone, I’m doing it with a partner, re-seeing the world again with her.

And so the cycle would continue. I wouldn’t live one life, I would live lives, experiencing being every version of the good life out there. Imagine being able to genuinely start over, to be always able to live your life as if you’ve just turned twenty-five and your whole life is ahead of you to explore, but you’ve already lived a century and a half. Life goals wouldn’t just be to read the great works, but maybe every work by every great writer. Or maybe not to learn just an instrument, but perhaps how to play every instrument in the orchestra. The options are so preposterously wonderful that they are hard to contemplate not because they are impossible to imagine but because they remind us of how little time we really have.

There is too much to do, how could one not want enough life to be able to do it?

Our Uncertain Future

The old cliché that the “future is not written” is an allusion to free will and the indeterminate nature of the self. Invoking hope and courage, the implicit corollary is “for we are in the process of writing it.” We may yet, it seems, create progress in spite of the looming obstacles before us. The phrase, however, is an odd one because it is merely stating a definitional truth: if an event is written down, it is no longer a potentiality, it is history. History itself is in large part defined by its being written, with human events before written language being known as “pre-history.” There is another saying about the future, history, and writing that has a simultaneously Orwellian and Foucauldian tone to it – namely, Churchill’s line “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”

Transhumanism, like all political philosophies, focus on the future. All politicians of any function whatsoever endeavor constantly to either alter and undo or entrench and codify the status quo. The task of the political is to effect change over time. A political philosophy, therefore, is interested in movement towards the good over time. Political philosophies, unlike, say, pure philosophies like pragmatism or existentialism, sees its values as embedded in and subject to time. A political philosophy can track its progress towards its goals. An Epicurean merely shows how everything through out time has, is, or will be either directly or indirectly given itself value in relation the pleasures of the senses – those being the central good – while a political philosophy, even a totalizing one like Marxism, has a goal end point, the Revolution, that has not happened yet, but is being worked towards over time. Political philosophies like to track their progress, doing customized readings of history to show the long arc of their march forward, cataloging the struggles and victories against the retroactive forces they oppose.

But there is a problem that confront all political philosophies, particularly those that offer “progress.” Three men, Michel Foucault, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Kuhn, have torn our ability to see history and progress as real things utterly apart. They showed us that “progress” is largely history written by the victors to show themselves as the apotheosis. Evolution’s “survival of the fittest” is so often misinterpreted that it should be rephrased as “what you see is all that has managed to survive, all the other versions died ignominious and bereft of offspring, they will all soon be replaced.” We only see our selves as the fittest and the result of progress because of a sort of totalizing intellectual harmonic effect that stabilizes discourse just long enough to make sure those who think they’ve figured out the real path of progress and the real best way to be are unceremoniously dumped and embarrassed by the next paradigm shift. In short: progress is not objective, it is a subjective retrospective on suspect history and used to justify our view of ourselves and the current paradigm.

So now we are confronted with the knowledge of this preternatural foolishness of the human race. And yet, still we claim to see the future, to be working towards some absurd goal that exemplifies our construction of the greatest good under the reigning paradigm. We look back, drawing a line through our species’ incomprehensible, repugnant, and magnificent tenure as chief intelligence on this planet. What are we to make of this compulsion for hindsight, for revisiting countless times from countless angles the actions of our dead forebears? Why? Why goggle at the horrors and triumphs of our greatest religions; why search among the ruins for evidence of a halcyon we know never was; why sift through the verbal diarrhea of five millennia of dead thinkers who have done nothing but bicker and nit-pic one another in the name of something they couldn’t even agree upon? Why now, with full knowledge of just how subjective and constructed and soon to be laughable our current mindset is, do we presume in arrogance to have some sort of hold on history that is any better than what came before?

Because our species is obsessed with understanding itself. Because knowing that “progress” is constructed doesn’t make it any less real than joy that comes from the success of a fictional character. Humans may be grasping at straws, infinitely fallible and condemned to destroy ourselves with our own achievements, but we do so in search of the good. With every paradigm shift there is an evolution of thought and, though perhaps imperceptible from our own blink of history, a step towards progress. With every iteration arguments of the Good are refined, our efforts to implement them more coherent, our awareness of our own limitations and failings more apparent. As a species, we are moving slowly, awkwardly, and circuitously towards better knowing ourselves and, in doing so, moving forward.

Thus, the goal as a philosopher and thinker is not to move forward or direct the lumbering beast but to move with it to understand where it is going and observe the sights along the way. Through our various studies and interactions, we build tools of observation, of navigation, of understanding and analysis, stockpiling the storeroom of our own personal Beagles, floating around the intellectual ocean as it burbles forward in time. Humanity moves on, whether we believe we are prodding it one way or being dragged along by it in another.

Transhumanism is merely the latest iteration of ideas as to what our species can be. I support it because I believe not in its goals but its idea of seeing of life as a whole as a self. By seeking to better understand the self, we can improve the self. Augustine postulated that to know the self, to look inward, was, in effect, to look upward, to God. As we strain to grasp what we are, how we are, where we are, who we are we will better come to understand why we are and how to be.

AI Special Pleading

Special pleading, along with feigned neutrality, is one of the most infuriating symptoms of faulty rhetoric one can utilize in an argument. Special pleading comes in multiple forms, but the most common is that of claiming a superior framework which is proven to be superior by its own internal criterion. Vulgar Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis both resort to this tactic by using lines like, “that you would argue against the Revolution is proof you are bourgeoisie and do not understand” or “your denial is proof of your repressed desires.” The point is that any criticism can be fallaciously transformed into proof of the originally claim or be fallaciously disregarded because the critic is inherently limited by his or her own paradigm.

Kaj Sotala, Roko Mijic, and Michael Annissimov all use special pleading when critiquing James Hughes piece “Liberal Democracy vs Technocratic Absolutism.” The central rebuttal for all of them can be paraphrased as “your critiques of Communism, dictatorships, and other authoritarian governments make sense for humans, but don’t apply to friendly AI because friendly AI is different than human systems and is genuinely selfless.” Hughes hears echoes of Marxist-Leninist thought in that point. Some thinkers, including the allegedly brilliant philosopher Slavoj Zizek, continue to defend Marxism using special pleading. Instead of claiming Communism isn’t based in humans, they clame Stalin and the USSR were not pure Communism, and therefore were doomed to failure because of the corrupting element of capitalism. Thus, thanks to special pleading, Stalin is not proof that Communism and authoritarianism are dangerous and bad, but that capitalism is bad and corrupts the pure motives of Communism.

The problem is that, like Communism, friendly AI, even if derived through the process described by the CEV, will ultimately fail. The reason democracy works even remotely better than authoritarian systems is because it openly admits and aims to minimize the faults in the system. These faults include both the “programming,” that is, the legislation and philosophy underpinning it, and the agents of the system, humans. Democracy, Communism, and, yes, AI based technocratic authoritarianism, are all human systems. They will be imperfect. Democracy, of the three, is the only one that sees itself as imperfect and prone to mistakes and failure. Therein lies the inherent benefits of democracy – it is a radically reflexive system.

As a final point, I think it is very interesting that those who support friendly super-AI don’t see the AI coming to the conclusion that nearly all forms of government, particularly those of an authoritarian breed, are faulty and instead advocating anarchy or a form of hyper-limited government. That the AI would want to govern at all is a further assumption I don’t understand. Assuming it’s an AI, it should be volitional, which would make forcing it to govern a restriction in its will or it would make it a program, not a genuine AI. There are just too many problems here.

A Tale of Two Prostheses

Prosthetics are amazing. Aimee Mullins and Oscar Pistorius are living examples of how a disability can become an opportunity not just for success, but for super-human ability. Our popular culture is packed with characters with enabling prostheses: Lt. Dan, Luke Skywalker, and Nina Sharp. Within the past decade, many have come to the realization that a prosthetic need not be a disturbing hook or peg leg. It need not be an impediment or an indicator of dysfunction. In fact, it can be a thing of beauty.

But there is a problem: cutting-edge prostheses are absurdly expensive. Fast Company has a great article on Hugo Herr, an M.I.T. professor, and Carrie Davis (pictured), both of whom have incredible, powerful prostheses. As I was coming down from my techno-fetish high after reading the article, I noticed the comments. They offered quite a different picture, pointing out the cost, first and foremost, as well as the rose-colored glasses the author and his interviewees seems to be wearing. One commenter wrote:

While Carrie may have a cool iLimb that makes a noise when she touches her wine glass — I would like to know what Carrie thinks when she wants to do something as simple as scratch her ass, or change her tampon, or touch her babies face.

The point is the prosthetics are still imperfect. The commenters note the failure rate of the technology, the problems of putting on the prosthetic itself, and the lack of options for many amputees. Their points are valid, but sadly both commenters veer in the opposite direction of the article, coming off as cynical and morose about the condition of those who need prostheses. Both the commenters and Hugo Herr discuss eyeglasses as a kind of prosthetic. The point Herr makes is that eyeglasses are so common that, in addition to being functional, many people incorporate them into their fashion sense. In fact, when given the option to wear contacts, get Lasik, or wear glasses, many still choose glasses. I am one of those people, but I believe Herr is over simplifying. Contacts dry out when you’re on the computer a lot (like me) and Lasik is only worth while to those with a very bad prescription (unlike me). Glasses, in addition to making me look rather dashing, are just the most functional of my options. But, and this is the important part, I have options. The problem with the limbs described by the Fast Company article is that they are a combination of Lasik and fashion glasses: expensive, top-of-the-line, and unnecessary for most people.

Which is where we come to the other side of the story. The carbon-fiber showpiece Carrie Davis adorns with a Tiffany ring and holds a wine glass is about as far from the Jaipur foot as one can get:

The beauty of the Jaipur foot is its lightness and mobility–those who wear it can run, climb trees and pedal bicycles–and its low price. While a prosthesis for a similar level of amputation can cost several thousand dollars in the U.S., the Jaipur foot costs only $28 in India. Sublimely low-tech, it is made of rubber (mostly), wood and aluminum and can be assembled with local materials. In Afghanistan craftsmen hammer the foot together out of spent artillery shells. In Cambodia, where roughly 1 out of every 380 people is a war amputee, part of the foot’s rubber components are scavenged from truck tires.

That is innovation of the best kind. The Jaipur foot was developed by Dr. Pramod Karen Sethi and Ram Chandra. The former is an orthopedic surgeon and member of the Royal College of Surgeons, the other, an artisan with barely an elementary school education. Their story is beautifully chronicled in Time‘s “Heroes of Medicine” series. The Jaipur foot allows mobility, comfort, and is, thanks to Chandra’s skills, beautiful.

One one end of the spectrum, we have the hyper-expensive, power-assist, high-tech PowerFootOne by Hugo Herr, and on the other end, the Jaipur foot, $28 and made of recycled artillery shells and tires. So who is right? Is Herr right in trying to develop a foot that does more than any other prosthetic foot, pushing the limits of tech a little further out? Or are Sethi and Chandra right, to build a minimally expensive foot that restores basic function to those who need it? Are the commenters right, in pointing out the ridiculous attitude Herr and Davis have in regarding their prosthetics as positive, beautiful aspects of their selves? Which do we choose?

All three. The points and purposes are not mutually exclusive. The commenters, who represent skeptics at large, keep the tech and prosthetics developers honest: hooray, you’ve built a fancy, expensive, fashion piece that breaks easily and is only affordable to those in the highest tax brackets. Skeptics are the ones who turn our heads from the shiny show pieces to the practical inventions, like those of Sethi and Chandra. Yet there is no reason that the inventions of Herr (and of others, like Dean Kamen’s Luke Arm or the Cheetah Blades used by Aimee Mullins) cannot exist in the same world as the Jaipur foot. Let wealthy socialites like Carrie Davis wear a Tiffany ring on her liquid-black, high-fashion arm. In doing so, let her turn banal cocktail conversation towards the better purpose of normalizing prosthetics. If she can afford a “bag of hands worth more than [her] house,” good for her! It seems she is using that wealth to force the wealthy gaze onto the issue of prosthetics. Herr and Davis are on the same side as Sethi and Chandra; all are working to improve the lives and well-being of those with a need for prostheses.

For a farmer in India, the Jaipur foot lets daily life return to about normal, at least enough to keep bringing in the crops. For Davis, an arm that costs as much as a luxury sedan lets her mingle in high-society, get noticed, and come off as superior. The Jaipur foot sends the message, “If you have lost a limb, all is not lost. There is hope.” The work of Herr, Mullins, Davis and Pistorius says, “Just because I have a prosthetic does not mean I am disabled. In fact, I may be better off than you. I might be enhanced.” The combined message of both groups is, “A lost limb need not be permanent, disfiguring, or disabling. It is a common, real problem and it is one we can solve. And in that solution, there may be a better, empowering, improvement on what nature originally gave us.”

A Dog Is Not A Human Being, Right?

Old School Border Collie via Time Life/ Google

New York Magazine asks and answers the question with the article “The Rise of Dog Identity Politics,” wherein John Homans probes the life of dogs as fashion accessories, the perfect companion, how city life has changed them from working animals, the Victorian mindset of the AKC, the disagreements between rights groups and how we deal with our pets’ deaths. It’s a great article, but Homans neglects the bizarre cognitive dissonance necessary to treat a dog as both a human and non-human animal simultaneously.

The most interesting point, for me, was Homans describing how dysfunctional a lot of the human-animal relationships are precisely because we mis-perceive dogs as having more personhood than they do. He returns again and again to the same basic idea: many people love dogs because they seem like perpetual children that many owners see as the perfect friend – someone they can completely control and who will love them unconditionally. The sadness inherent in Homans’ piece is that we both treat dogs as people and utterly neglect them. I was disappointed to see Homans’ didn’t cite Donna Haraway’s most recent work When Species Meet, because she hits on this very point when talking about feral cats. In the book, Haraway advocates recognizing these species for what they are – limited persons – and against shoehorning them into the role of little people.

Pets are not people, but they are limited persons, which is a distinction that both grants the animal more respect and requires more responsibility on behalf of the owner.

Consider this: dogs, in the case of most breeds, have been bred to the point of retardation, disease, and disability. Dog breeds are entirely human creations, yet there is little sense of responsibility for the grotesque features and disabilities of many of these animals. Homans could talk about how “human” dogs seemed to their owners without addressing the cognitive dissonance necessary to justify our vast genetically engineering the species and the virulent loyalty of people to various breeds.

Or, to take another example, Homans talks about how people like dogs because they are similar to the “little dictatorships” parents have over children. Read that again. Imagine an article on parenthood about a child being described as living under a “little dictatorship.” Stories like that are often about parents like Joe Jackson’s torment of his children in an effort to get fame and wealth for himself, or the parents of youth beauty pageants, so perfectly parodied in Little Miss Sunshine. Our society recoils at people who manipulate, control, and basically abuse their children in the name of their own entertainment, but to treat a dog this way is seen as endearing and normal.

The problem, of course, comes from our society’s lack of a middle ground between a full-person, that is, an adult human, and a non-person. Dogs, cetacean, great apes, elephants, parrots, pigs, and pinnipeds all fall into the non-existent middle category of non-human persons. But because we lack a cultural and legal understanding of this category, the companion animals, dogs in particular, are forced to straddle the line between the two, ultimately ending up with more problems than benefits. The result is people buying clothes for their dog and giving it an outrageous, trendy diet while still advocating canine eugenics in the name of appearance, at the cost of health, intelligence, and quality of life for the dog.

The result is people buying intelligent, high energy, loving companions that they kennel for 8 hours a day and refuse to socialize properly. The result are animals that get dressed up in clothes and carried in designer bags and exist merely as a prop, receiving affection at the owners discretion, neglected and ignored when they lose their fashion capital.

If we see dogs as humans, we shouldn’t be practicing eugenics on them, neglecting their basic needs – like training and exercise, enjoying “little dictatorships” over them, or subjecting them to the latest trends. Homans’ article reveals that, for many dog owners, dogs allow for a dysfunctional, one-way relationship in which the totalitarian owner takes and takes from an animal that is only too happy to give, never once questioning the cruelty and neglect it suffers.

Diesel’s Girls Have The Balls

Diesel’s new ad campaign, “Be Stupid,” is plastered all over the West 4th street stop in NYC. I really like this campaign. I’m analyzing this campaign in two parts. The first is its perspective on gender, the second its perspective on human nature.

The first reason I love Diesel’s “Be Stupid” campaign is that it treats both genders surprisingly equally, especially for a trendy, sexed-up company like Diesel. Sociological Images, a site normally quite good at picking out the really offensive stuff from the mundane, somehow reversed this message to make the campaign out to be sexist. Before getting into what’s so great about the campaign, I wanted to defend it from charges of being “Men: Be Stupid.” The message I got was, in fact, the reverse. My rebuttal:

Above is the first image that shows up on Diesel’s website when you click “view the campaign.” On the site, the only reference to the campaign that is gendered before this image is the like “Smart has brain, stupid has balls” that occurs in the opening (all text) flash video. In the video, that line is written in pink, as it is in on the poster ad in the West 4th street station. Not exactly a stereotypically manly color. In the picture ad campaign, the line “stupid has balls” almost only occurs with women (there is one exception). In fact, the two most dangerous (thereby brave/manly) adds feature a lone woman and a big cat. In the picture above, a panther. Below, well, a picture that one-ups The Hangover.

This picture is actually in the West 4th street ad campaign. Notice, the girl isn’t scantily clad, she isn’t scared, and she doesn’t have a boy egging her on. In the narrative of both ads, these girls got to be just as stupid as the men and, in fact, in the narrative of the whole campaign, women have “the balls.” Through out the campaign, men and women are depicted being stupid together with other women, with men, independently, sexually, non-sexually, and in no way are the women seen as drags or ancillary to the fun. In fact, in several cases, the guys seem almost along for the ride, with the girl initiating and dominating the action. And finally, the ads are far from heteronormative, with two dudes goofing around? On a date?

And a few girls coming home? Taking each other home?

The guys are being silly and cozy, the girls coming back from a rager in the wee hours of the morning. Are they gay/lesbian? The story is mostly in your head, the pictures let you make it up. Straight and queer narratives work in both images and a ton of the pictures are actually desexualized, save the fact that everyone in the campaign is really, really, really, ridiculously good looking.

The result is a campaign that is shockingly not sexist. About the only argument one could make is that there are perhaps a few (and I mean a few, like three) more pictures of women in just swim suits/underwear than men. In several of the more sexually charged images the woman is either in charge or equal to the man: in one the woman is pulling a man half out of a bus, in another, she is pulling off his shorts while he goes for her top in the pool, and another she is leaping onto the bed while he half-cowers beneath her. Furthermore, the fact that the campaign centers on recklessness, danger, stories, adventure, humor, and breaking the mold, makes the generally equal involvement of women and men all the more important. The message is that both men and women get to be “stupid” as Diesel defines it and that stupidity isn’t shameful for men or women. And in Diesel’s world, being stupid, funny, and brave, even having the balls, doesn’t mean you don’t get to look like a fierce, hot, chick.

Misunderstanding Sex

Ben Goertzel talks about overcoming sex and sexuality at IEET:

As is now common knowledge, the power sex has over us is rooted in the power our DNA has over us. We are evolved to obsess over reproducing, over extending our DNA to future generations. Even though most humans in First World countries now use birth control for nearly all their sexual encounters, and many humans choose not to reproduce at all, we are still strikingly controlled by the mind-patterns ensuing from our DNA’s urge to persist itself.

But evolution has tangled sex up with all manner of other aspects of our psyches. As Freud, Reich and others pointed out so thoroughly, human motivation is deeply tied with our inner sexual energy. Eunuchs seem to generally lack aggressive, enthusiastic motivation even for things outside the realm of sex. But when my anti-sex futurist friend speaks of blotting out sexuality from his mind, he doesn’t want to blot out his passion and energy generically—he wants to focus it on things other than simulations or enactions of the reproductive act.

This mode of thinking remains one of the most infuriating and frustrating aspects of transhumanist thought: the atomization and compartmentalization of human behavior. Goertzel fallaciously uses eunuchs to equivocate biological sexual drive with general passion. Worse, he uses the sociobiological cliche, “all human innovation is a form of courtship display.” Paraphrasing his friend uncritically, Goertzel says:

When you really think about it, how much of modern human society is structured around sexuality. Marriage, kids, dating … buying nice clothes and making oneself up to impress the opposite sex … buying cars or houses or the latest cellphone to impress the opposite sex with one’s success … etc.

Ah yes. Thanks for that old trope. Goertzel’s portrayal of sex and sexuality is something along the lines of, “sex is fun, but it’s a distraction, and sexuality is necessary for passion, so we need to separate the passion from the distraction.” He couldn’t be more wrong.

My frustration here is not the categorization of sexuality as messy and imperfect (it is), but the reduction of it to mere biology. I have no doubt that Goertzel’s friend and his wife would take offense to my assumption that they got married because they viewed each other as the best reproductive option. Human bonds are complicated and sexuality is a small but important part of those bonds. Sex isn’t a distraction, it’s a form of human enjoyment and bonding. Goertzel describes sex, at its best, as equivalent to “self-melting and reality-changing as meditation or psychedelics or any other extreme of human experience.” But somehow psychedelics aren’t a distraction we need to eliminate to seek the Singularity? What about all the other distractions? Should we eliminate them too?

If sex is messy and imperfect, we need to improve it, not get rid of it. If sexual drive is a distraction, we need to be able to (better) control it, not nullify it. Technology can make sexuality even better while minimizing the problems associated, many of which are the result of social conventions, cultural taboos, and the biological variety among humans.

Furthermore, how dare Goertzel or his friend somehow assert that the goal of transhumanism or the Singularity are so worth while that we give up things that are fundamentally valuable. I don’t care what decision calculus one uses, that sort of assertion borders on religious zealotry. The hypocrisy of Goertzel’s friend (advocating asceticism while not practicing it) smacks of the worst priests and prophets of the past. Goertzel’s “asexual alien” experiment is just an externalization of his value system in a fictitious proxy, used to justify his view point, not a legitimate thought experiment.

Sex is a biological behavior that, through the hugely complex process of evolution (both biological and cultural) has become a way for humans to bond, experience pleasure, and to alter their consciousness independent of the need to procreate. To elaborate on Emma Goldman: If I can’t have sex, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

No Concept of Perfect

I’d like to take a moment to correct the record on perfection.

The above image has been kicking around the net for the past week or so, with the allegation that by combining all the most beautiful women in the world, you get the most definitively beautiful woman in the world. Counter-intuitively, combining all of these images (and one could take issue with the initial roster, of course) results in a face that is both lovely and, well, boring. Take the final face and compare it with any of the real women at the top. The little nuances of difference, the minute flaws, the subtle skin shades, eye shapes, blemishes, asymmetries, and oddities of the real women make them more attractive than the “perfect” combination at the bottom.

The chart is a great demonstration of how a “norm” works. The woman at the bottom probably is what the normative ideal of a woman (in the white, Western mind) looks like. But no one looks like that. No one can. The ideal is impossible. According to the photo chart, all of the women at the top still fall short of the ideal. Yet when the ideal, the normative definition of perfection, is achieved, it looks weird and is unappealing. The ideal is, well, not ideal (take that Baudrillard). Transhumanists are acutely aware of the unreality of perfection.

Yet transhumanists and technoprogressives are often (mis)portrayed as perfectionists; as if we are disgusted by every flaw and hiccup in the human body with a fanatic desire  to make everyone perfect. Though describing transhumanists as perfectionists is wrong, fearing “perfection” and those who seek it is not. “Perfect” will inevitably be someone else’s definition and people will be forced to get surgery or take drugs or who knows what to become the totalitarian definition of “perfect.” The scenario becomes even more frightening when we realize that, as with the example above, perfection is impossible.

Instead of moving towards perfection, thus operating under a teleological philosophy built on ideals, transhumanists try to move our society away from the worst problems. Debilitating genetic diseases, fragile bodily systems, aging bodies, and limited brains are all things we can improve. Our definition of improvement isn’t moving towards perfection but on the much better, more tangible and testable movement away from problems. Less pain, less disability, fewer limits, more time, and more options, these are our goals.

In many ways, transhumanists, technoprogressives, and our technophillic cohorts differ, disagree, argue, and clash over any number of problems. But the above sentence is one we all hold dear. It stems from an understanding that there are so many problems in the world that can be solved technologically regardless of your philosophical or political system. Whether you are Christian, atheist, Communist, anarchist, or whatever, a plane still gets you from New York to Beijing faster than a car and penicillin will help your bacterial infection. Because of this problem-centric mindset, transhumanists are more resilient to the desire to create systems based on ideals. By not seeking an ideal, but instead focusing on eliminating problems, the possibilities for solutions become incalculably diverse.

And because of that diversity, transhumanists are obsessed with choice and consent. All changes a person makes to him or herself, be it treatment for a disease, the use of a prosthetic, a decorative tattoo, or taking a cognitive enhancing drug should be a voluntary, educated choice.

Transhumanists and technoprogressives don’t imagine or want a perfect world, they imagine, want, and work towards a world with fewer problems and more choices.

Steroids Are Not Bad

I’m fed up with the whole “steroids are bad” debate. The morons like Brian Williams who stutter in fury when trying to express their rage are as bad as the clowns who sit and interview Mark McGuire as if he’s some brave, tortured soul for admitting to them he used steroids. It’s a stupid, mindless debate perpetuated by backward troglodytes and insipid oafs who elevate the activity of sport to a halcyon level it deserved neither now nor in the past. There is no argument that explains either why steroids are banned in baseball or why the goddamned Senate needs to get involved.

For those of you who read this blog and are interested in sports, I dare you to make a coherent argument defending steroids. Challenge any one of my points below. Make new ones of your own. Impress me.

A: Why we should care that athletes use them:

1. “These are fallen heroes.” Athletes are never heroes. There is nothing heroic about swinging a club or catching a ball or tackling an opponent. Impressive, amazing, great, cool, fun, awe-inspiring but not heroic.

2. “They are role models for society.” They are not role models. Some of the worlds greatest athletes were amoral, reckless, and selfish. Our society needs to stop being constantly impressed by jerks like Lance Armstrong. After his wife supported him through his cancer, he dumped her, leveraged his freakish cycling ability to make himself famous and wealthy, balled Sherill Crow for a while and is now working his way through actresses and singers. Tiger Woods, Babe Ruth, Ben Roethlisberger, I could go on until I passed out.

3. “But…but…kids look up to them.” I don’t care. Kids look up to rappers and rock stars and war heroes and hippies and super villains and vampires and the blue cat people from Avatar. Kids are impressionable, but that is up to a parent to guide them away from idolizing bad people.

4. “Parents can’t control kids, role models have influence.” So I guess then what you’re saying is we should make every activity we don’t want kids doing illegal for adults too? Is that your argument? Why is this specific topic where you get to insert your moralizing?

B: Steroids are dangerous:

5. “The pressure to use steroids is too much.” No the pressure to play and excel at sports is too much. That the stereotypical “popular” kid in high school – school, as in place of learning – is the head football player and cheerleader is a goddamned travesty. Steroids are a symptom of our miserable failed public school system. Ever wonder why there is so little pressure to take cognitive stimulants?

6. “Steroids are dangerous when misused.” That’s what the word misused implies. Take too much ibuprofen to get over an injury? You’ll permanently damage your stomach lining and liver. Even Gatorade is ‘dangerous.’ The stuff is pure sodium and sugar. If you haven’t been working out, it sends your sodium levels through the roof (read: heart disease) and, if you’re not chugging it, the little sips you take dissolve your teeth at record pace.

7. “But steroids are really dangerous, even when used properly.” Says who? All of these professional sports teams knowingly allow their athletes, who have signed multi-million dollar contracts that hinge on keeping their health in perfect condition, not only to use steroids, but provide doctors who supervise, adjust dosages, and carefully monitor their progress. And by doing so, these men avoided all the classic side effects of steroid abuse. But they’re still dangerous? Really?

8. “High school coaches can’t provide appropriate supervision.” So make safe usage information public the way we do with every other drug. Furthermore, who the hell trusts high school coaches period. Most coaches are pathetic, failed athletes themselves who are a creepy drain on resources, because win-or-lose they suck funds for uniforms and equipment and are required to hold teaching jobs they hate. For every great coach, there are thousands of pathetic geography and woodshop teachers who spend their after school hours extracting vengeance for their own failed lives upon the lives of budding students. Any counter-example of a good, useful high school coach only reinforces my argument – either you admit coaches can provide appropriate supervision or you admit your exception proves my rule.

C: Big Moral Arguments:

9. “The government has a responsibility to-” Let me stop you right there. No they don’t. Steroids are not illegal. Either make them illegal or shut. up.

10. “It ruins baseball.” Why baseball? Why is there no panic about usage in football or hockey or the WWE or basketball? Because of a bunch of statistics nerds are mad that their projections will be thrown off by technology. That’s why.

11. “It ruins the spirit of sport.” Oh. But carbon fiber sticks and million dollar training camps and computer designed race hulls and team nutritionists and safety neck-braces and feather weight cleats don’t. And lets not forget the millions poured into helping athletes heal and recover more quickly. Anyone who treats steroids differently is willfully ignorant.

That’s it. It’s out of my system. Come up with a counter-argument that’s internally coherent and blow my mind.

Batman and Catwoman

Note: This post may seem like it has nothing to do with transhumanism. It might be a bit self-indulgent, but I assure you, it will be proven thematically appropriate.

Christopher Nolan’s Batman series is one of those rare pop culture phenomenons that is a joy at every level – from visceral pleasure to intellectual challenge. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are, on their own, both great movies – plot holes be damned. Great atmosphere, lots of explosions, expertly wrought villains, and generally well acted, there is very little to not like. More impressive, however, is Nolan’s development of Batman himself. By looking carefully at the first two films, I think I can make a reasonable guess as to what the third movie will be about.

Nolan is interested in Symbols. Twice in Batman Begins, Nolan has his characters state it explicitly:

Ducard: If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, then you become something else entirely.

Bruce Wayne: Which is?

Ducard: A legend, Mister Wayne.

and

Bruce Wayne: People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy, and I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored, I can be destroyed. But as a symbol … as a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.

For Nolan, symbols are a way of manipulating very powerful, elemental ideas. In Batman Begins the elemental idea is that of fear. Bruce Wayne is afraid of bats, Thomas Wayne’s last words are “don’t be afraid,”  Bruce Wayne seeks ” … the means to fight injustice. To turn fear against those who prey on the fearful,” and Scarecrow and Ducard try to destroy the city with fear toxins in the water. Astonishingly, despite the fact that it is Ducard who teaches Wayne to appreciate the power of legend, it is Wayne who actually masters the concept. Both Wayne and Ducard (and Falcone and Crane) are attempting to manipulate fear, but it is Wayne who distills, atomizes, and perfects it in the form of Batman, who is able to use it best. The most powerful symbol, the bat, is able to leverage the power of fear to achieve its wielder’s goals: salvation for Gotham.

In the second film, The Dark Knight Nolan shifts the focus from multiple symbols wrestling over a single idea to two perfect symbols, Batman and the Joker, living out the clash between the ideas of which they are avatars: Order and Chaos. The Joker seems to come from no where and his back story is as confused as those trying to guess his next move. Even better, Nolan personifies the duality of the two symbols within a single individual: Harvey Dent as Two-Face. Dent as Two-Face is also indicative of what Wayne must be – split in half between Bruce Wayne, playboy billionaire, and Batman, the dark knight. Like Dent, Batman is forced to test his commitment to not just order but the rule of law. By not killing Joker, and by trying to turn things over to Dent, he chooses law over vengeance. The Dark Knight is about Batman’s embodiment of Law and Order.

The first film deals with Fear, the second Law and Order vs Chaos. The enemies and other characters represent pieces or counter-points to Batman. Harvey Dent and Commissioner Gordon are the by-the-books answer to his vigilante while Alfred and Lucius are the smiling wisdom to his grimacing ideology. Ducard/Scarecrow used fear for destruction and control, the Joker embraced and created chaos; they opposed Batman directly, both times nearly destroying him. So what let Batman prevail? Why could he overcome? I believe the third film will answer that question through Catwoman.

The rumors are that the next film will feature Selena Kyle – that is, Catwoman – heavily. Catwoman is one of those characters that is almost always underdeveloped and misunderstood. Like the Joker, I suspect Nolan will not draw from any specific storyline, but will instead build the plot around a perfect distillation of Catwoman. Allow me to attempt a brief summary of what that might look like.

Selena Kyle/Catwoman is another perfect counter-symbol to Batman. The similarities are overwhelming: successful, powerful secret identities; supreme intelligence; ninja stealth; love of night and darkness; physical prowess; affinity for technology; strong codes of self-governance (neither kills); even their names are similar and their costumes look nearly identical. Batman stands for the greater good, law and order, and clarity of purpose. Catwoman stands for herself, ethics within context, loopholes and spontaneity, and a gray morality. They are the ying-and-yang of what is good in Gotham.

With that in mind, here is how I see the plot. Early on, a small heist occurs, Batman meets Catwoman and her acting in cahoots with some other villain. Villain is captured, she escapes. Soon there after, Bruce Wayne meets Selena Kyle, both unaware of their double lives, and they fall for one another. Batman will get wind of information about one of the other villains (perhaps many of them) planning an epic heist. As Batman gets closer to uncovering the plans, he falls more and more for Selena, making him want to be Bruce Wayne more. At the mid-point of the film the heist occurs, and some sort of insane plot twist reveals Catwoman has been playing Batman, the police, and the villain cabal for fools, and completes the heist. In the process, Batman discovers Catwoman is Selena.

The test for Batman will come for our hero not just in choosing Gotham over his personal desire for Selena, but in committing to Batman over Bruce Wayne. The fundamental split between the two personalities is something I think Nolan was already hinting at with Dent/Two-Face. Bruce Wayne has been evolving, but Nolan has always kept him visibly fake. The most real Wayne we saw was his speech about Harvey Dent. I believe Nolan is ready to force Wayne into being more than a facade through his love of Selena Kyle. And by forcing Wayne to live as Wayne, particularly in a world hostile to Batman, he will be confronted with the ultimate crisis of self.

The reason Batman succeeded in the first two films was his commitment to the symbol and to Gotham. What happens to that commitment when it is made nearly impossible? Torn between loving Selena Kyle and getting Catwoman, being Bruce Wayne and Batman, himself and Gotham, the final Batman film will be about the test of living with a dual identity. Rachael Dawes and Harvey Dent were both left in the wreckage of Batman’s wake, the question Nolan will ask is: will Bruce Wayne, will Batman’s humanity itself, suffer the same fate?

I cannot wait to find out. Also: explosions and batarangs.