The Substrate of Consciousness

Athena Andreadis’ article in h+ about the transhumanist fear of biology in general and their underestimation of just how complex and powerful biological systems is deliciously blunt:

And it came to me in a flash that many transhumanists are uncomfortable with biology and would rather bypass it altogether for two reasons, each exemplified by these sentences. The first is that biological systems are squishy — they exude blood, sweat and tears, which are deemed proper only for women and weaklings. The second is that, unlike silicon systems, biological software is inseparable from hardware. And therein lies the major stumbling block to personal immortality.

After an interesting start, Andreadis wanders off into the territory of questioning other aspects of immortality and makes more than a few errors in logic. To more fully consider her argument, we need to understand how the mind/consciousness can be understood in relation to the brain/body.

Among futurists, there seem to be three options for how a person’s consciousness exists in relation to the physical mind.

1. Software: A person’s active consciousness, personality, and memories can be downloaded onto a different substrate, such as a computer hard-drive or other digital memory source.
2. Hardware: A person’s active consciousness, personality, and memories reside in the brain’s physical substrate of neurons. The mind is emergent from this organic matrix and inseparable.
3. Embodied: A person’s active consciousness, personality, and memories reside in a brain that is interwoven and inextricable from the body in which it resides. When you lose a hand, it’s not just your body that changes, you as a person change.

Andreadis discounts option one as an impossibility or, if anything, a process that results in a mental clone that would become different the moment it attained consciousness. I agree with her, if “mind uploading/downloading” is possible at all, in any way, is not a method for immortality. The rest of her article moves between interpretations two and three, using one or the other as it fits her argument. Mostly that’s fine, for her purposes hardware and embodiment are generally the same.

The problem with Andreadis’ article is that this is actually an argument against immortality, not, as it seems initially, an analysis of the complexities of keeping the mind alive indefinitely. Most frustrating is Andreadis’ reliance on the flaw that doesn’t assume “perfect method,” when discussing the ethics of an argument. When she critiques constructions of the brain “in silico” that is, in an artificial body or with artificial neurons, there might be a loss of “pingbacks” and/or “empathy.” This argument is equivalent to saying, “manned flight won’t work because what if we build a plane with wings that fall off or aileron cables made of silly putty?” It presumes a level of technological ineptitude that is ridiculous for ethical considerations. When arguing the ethics you do not say, “Thing X is unethical because a broken or incomplete version of thing X would cause problems Y and Z.” That isn’t an argument, it’s a technique and a distraction.

Even more frustrating, and particularly disappointing from Andreadis, who is eyeballs-deep in transhumanist lit, is her final paragraph, which repeats tropes of the anti-immortalists that have been readily rebutted.

Instead of refuting or critiquing the rest of Andreadis’ argument, I’d just like to forward my own. For a moment, let’s forget all the other enhancements and modifications transhumanists and technoprogressives support and posit, and instead just consider keeping the mind healthy and alive indefinitely. Based on the current trends in science, I largely think that the human body can be maintained indefinitely through purely organic/biological means. The problem is aging, and Aubrey de Grey has me convinced we can take steps to fix or at least slow those problems. Furthermore, I believe progress will be so slow in that field that societal norms and our relationship with life expectancy will adjust to prevent the societal upheaval or existential ennui Andreadis fears.

As for the hardware/embodiment issue, I would still posit that mind transplantation is possible if three criterion are met. If any one of these is impossible, I would argue ethical brain transplantation is impossible.

1. A brain can be severed from one body, taken out, and placed into another (either organic or artificial) without any degradation in brain matter and with all connections necessary for immediate function (blood circulation, involuntary muscle control, immuno-suppression) working.
2. Embodiment happens slowly in a controlled environment. Senses would have to be eased back “on,” control of the body would have to occur in stages, like recovering from paralysis. I imagine body transplantation would happen this way automatically, given the complexity of the re-wiring going on, but if not, it would probably need to be induced.
3. There are extant methods to ensure the legal personhood of a transplanted mind does not alter from body to body. Rights stem from the consciousness and personhood of the mind, not the physical substrate or its body.

In addition to these, there are the obvious requirements of consent on behalf of the transplantee and that the new body is not the result of some other crime (really Athena? de facto murder? No vat-grown or robotic bodies came to you as a possibility?). Number two is likely to be the most overlooked, but Andreadis’ emphasis of the mind’s link to the body is correct. A contiguous consciousness is already adapted to a changing body (aging, injury, exercise, operations, etc), but something as traumatic as a brain transplant would be, well, something with which a mind might need a bit more time.

But ideally, the transplant wouldn’t be necessary, because we’d be able to maintain our bodies as they are, preventing aging internally through a variety of biological modifications to the wetware of the human being, from the DNA up.

Dilettante vs Synthesizer

Malcolm Gladwell’s beat down by Steven Pinker seemed to keep popping up in conversation last week. Anissimov has been tracking the back and forth, I saw Outliers on my friend Drea’s bookshelf, and Alex and I chattered about Gladwell vs. Pinker between mouthfuls of Indian food.  Why does this guy, whose clever, but individually inconsequential essays on pedestrian topics bother so many of us who at least pretend to be serious thinkers?

For one, I’ve always disliked Malcolm Gladwell’s demeanor. He’s like the anti-John Hodgman. Hodgman’s humility and curiosity are, regardless of their amplification for comedic effect, real. His speech at TED about falling in love with his wife and his speech at the TV & Radio Correspondent’s dinner honoring Obama’s nerdiness exemplify Hodgman’s weird blend of self-effacement and unique perspective. Gladwell comes off as the opposite, as if he gets an erotic tickle of pride every time he says something contrary to common logic. The Vanity Fair parody of him is pitch-perfect.

But in the end, Gladwell really is small potatoes. Yes, he’s Famous and Important right now, but Pinker and the NYT effectively lowered the banhammer on his shenanigans. Yet he’s indicative of a larger trend among intellectuals and it is here that the problem becomes more serious. Interdisciplinarity – once shunned as the realm of the ADD scholar who couldn’t cut it as an expert in a single field – is now being popularized by folks like Zizek, Haraway, and Habermas. Literary critics are writing about computer theory. Psychoanalysts are writing about politics. Political theorists are writing about bioethics. Cross-over! Synthesis! By your powers combined- I am Captain Planet!

Thinking about this little problem, Alex made a good point: how do you tell the difference between a real synthesizer (i.e. Elizabeth Grosz’ work on Darwin) and a power-intellectual playing dilettante? What happens when say, oh, Jurgan Habermas decides that – despite having zero background in bioethics (Rawls does not count), a popular knowledge of general science, and being a cantankerous old man – he wants to get into discussing the bioethics of genetic engineering and pre-implantation genetic diagnostics? How would we know if he’s qualified to speak on the topic?

I guess we ask a few questions:

Q: Has he read the core literature?

A: No. Habermas did cite Beyond Therapy, Kass and Fukuyama’s much derided neocon polemic, but somehow managed to miss From Chance to Choice: Genetics & Justice, one of the canonical texts of bioethics.

Q: Does he cite empirical evidence backing his claims regarding body/mind cognitive development or genetic influence on personality?

A: Not really. Weirdly, Habermas insists his arguments aren’t based in genetic determinism and then goes on to rail against how engineered people will be bound by their “programing.” More bizarre is his assertion that the knowledge of one’s creation being “intentional” will somehow lead to a fissure between body and mind. Habermas provides a grand total of zero research studies as evidence and a whole lot of rhetorical hand-waving for that claim.

Q: Does he get basic science correct, such as the significance of environment in phenotypic expression or the difference between genetically based diseases and nebulous traits like intelligence?

A: In several cases, no. Throughout The Future of Human Nature, Habermas treats genetic enhancement as simply the reverse process of preventing genetic diseases or that something like “intelligence” is programmable, and not at least partially a socially constructed category. Ugh.

Infuriatingly, Habermas, a brilliant mind and a wonderful political theorist, has come crashing through the brush to make a very complicated and very overwrought argument that boils down to: genetically engineering people are scary and those people will be different from the rest of us so we should really worry about it and probably not do it. Worse yet, his research barely qualifies him for the pejorative of dilettante.

I’m still picking apart Habermas arguments and trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but so far I’m disappointed. The Future of Human Nature needs one more re-read before final analysis. More to come.