Biological Limitations

Phillipe Verdoux has an illuminating post up on IEET about how we define “limitations:”

Take a closer look at what sort of things transhumanists identify as falling within the extension of “biological limitations.” In my perusal of the literature, I have often come across transhumanists complaining about such things as: the slow speed of cerebration, the mind’s limited data-storage capacities, the unreliability of love and other interpersonal relations, our inability to “to visualize an [sic] 200-dimensional hypersphere or to read, with perfect recollection and understanding, every book in the Library of Congress,” and so on. While I am not (at least not necessarily) arguing against the claim that such features are limitations, I am urging special caution in labeling them as “limitations.” Why? Because, as far as I can tell, many of the values hiding behind the transhumanist’s list of limitations derive from (the domain of) technology itself—or at least it is not unreasonable to be suspicious of the origin of such values.

There is nothing more exciting than people saying “this philosophy is interesting, here are all the problems I see, let’s get to fixing them!”

On Transhumanist Debate

There have been a lot more dust-ups than usual among the transhumanists and that is an exciting thing for me. J. Hughes’ series and my AI post (btw Hughes just delivered a hay-maker) have drawn heavy fire. A few of the comments have often wondered why I and others get snarky, acerbic, and borderline harsh with our comments. I have a few things to say on that, but Andrew Sullivan beat me somewhat to the punch. Here he is on blogging, friendship and debate:

But I’m not in this game to make friends. I have my friends and their friendship is not about politics or argument, but about life and love and present laughter. In my personal life, I always try to be civil. On the blog, I write more like a British parliamentary debater – and anyone who has watched Prime Minister’s Question Time can see how brutal the rhetoric can become. That’s how I was trained. It’s how I love to fight.

But I also try to ensure that the arguments of those I attack are also represented on this blog; I post real dissents; I admit errors when necessary; I engage in more introspection than some online; and I link to a wider variety of other writers from different perspectives – known and unknown – than many other bloggers.

Sullivan is my model for blogging and thinking. He’s got a few degrees and two decades of experience on me, so forgive me for not living up to him quite yet. It’s a work in progress. But let me say a small bit more on the nature of debate.

In high school the activity I loved was debate. I was a policy debater, which meant I hauled around four rubbermaid tubs coated in offensive bumper stickers and crammed to the brim with evidence: on everything from how close Iran was to getting a WMD, to how to disassemble a Foucauldian critique, to distillations of pure rhetorical theory. In debate you learn quickly that if your argument is a claim sans warrant, you will be destroyed. You learn that little rhetorical tricks you think are clever are, in fact, not, and you will be destroyed. Not just destroyed, but laughed at. Debate is a game, a battle even, and you don’t walk onto the field wearing your helmet backwards and wearing penny loafers.

But rhetoric and debate training are not standard issue. If I hadn’t learned from experience what a brink and a brightline were – if I hadn’t had it beaten into me by the salvos of insults and the accompanied shame of stumbling out of a tournament with a 1-6 record, I never would have learned. Debate is the martial arts of the mind – a trained practitioner can disarm and disable you no matter what piles of evidence and which Ph.Ds you have backing your claims. And just as in martial arts, when you make a mistake, you get beat up. I, frankly, could give a shit who you are and who you have backing you up. If your argument is incoherent, fallacious, erroneous, or self-contradictory, I will point it out.

And then, I will probably mock you. Just a little, but enough to make the loss sting. In martial arts, what sticks in your memory is not only landing on your back on the mat, but the punch that put you there. In debate, it’s just not the winning argument, but the insulting tone that helps you remember. Debaters – real, good, talented debaters – respect and often admire their opponents. Debaters are the only people I really love to argue with, because the only way to tear your argument apart is to really listen to it and understand it. If your argument can be beaten not because of some microscopic error or minor miscalculation or previously unknown fact, but because of a glaring mistake or common fallacy, then beating your argument gives the winner no pleasure, no satisfaction. You were an unworthy opponent and deserve scorn.

On the other hand, if you’re trained to dismantle and undermine and ruin arguments all day long, and suddenly you come across one from a person you respect that you have a lot of trouble taking apart, it’s like a big red blinking sign telling your brain, “HEY MAYBE THIS IS RIGHT.” That’s how I first came to transhumanism. The more things I threw at it, the more robust it looked, the more deftly it handled my critiques. I’m a transhumanist because I spent my first semester at NYU trying to dismantle it with the best tools bioconservatism had to offer and, when those turned out to be inert or self-defeating, ended up becoming a convert. Now that I defend it, the panoply of intellectual weaponry I can utilize, the sheer vastness and magnitude of assaults I’ve parried, only builds my confidence that this is a good and worthy philosophy.

Snark, scorn, anger, and playful banter is a sign of passion. Carefully reiterating your position when it was articulated correctly the first time is a sign that you care. Debate, within any community, is a sign of health. Within the transhumanist community, debate is a sign of what our community needs most: growth and maturation.

Moral Universalism vs Relativism

Dr. Hughes is back with a new post in his “Problems of Transhumanism” series. The debates that have come out of these postings, both in the comments and in the larger intellectual sphere, make them some of the most productive transhumanist writing this year. Check out his newest “Moral Universalism vs Relativism.” Money quote:

For instance in Citizen Cyborg I argue that just as we currently formally acknowledge the different capacities and rights of adults without violating universalism, we could protect the basic equality of the enhanced and unenhanced while carefully acknowledging their differences. To drive cars, fly planes, possess weapons and hold certain occupations we oblige people to take specific courses of education, testing and licensure, and then subject them to special rules and obligations. It is possible to imagine that some cognitive and physical powers would be so dangerous that we would similarly require licensure for their possession.

My favorite sentence in the whole essay is the end of that paragraph. It consists of thinly-veiled reference to a dictatorship of hillbillies:

Just as people who own monster trucks and automatic weapons have not established themselves as a dictatorial aristocracy in democratic societies careful regulation of enhancements could diminish threats to legal and political equality.

The national anthem would be dueling banjos and the national animal would be a dead opossum. The essay is great, covering everything from animal uplift (and it’s criticisms) to Hume and Burke.

Epoché

Kris Notaro has an interesting post up at IEET, “Transhumansim and Phenomenological Reduction,” that is something of a meditation on a Singularity scale intelligence observing itself observing itself. For those not elbows-deep in phenomenology (Notaro cites Husserl, I prefer his successor, Merleau-Ponty), the definition of epoché is quite useful:

Those who study Existentialism or Phenomenology should be familiar with the idea of epoche which is the action of doing phenomenological reduction by “bracketing” out everything you know about the world to reach pure consciousness and then understand the nature of being conscious of the things around you. Wikipedia explains it clearly as “the act of suspending judgment about the natural world that precedes phenomenological analysis.The concept can be most easily understood as “unpacking” phenomena, or, in other words, systematically peeling away their symbolic meanings like layers of an onion until only the thing-in-itself remains. Thus, one’s subjective perception of the bracketed phenomenon is the truest form of experience one can have in perceiving it.” The action of phenomenological reduction also allows your brain/mind to experience experiencing, to be aware of awareness, to be conscious of being conscious.

Good stuff. I might enjoy phenomenology more than I should because every time I hear the word “phenomenon” I think of the Muppets’ song, “Mana Mana.” For your enjoyment:

Democracy vs Technocracy

J. Hughes has another one of his excellent posts up from his “Problems of Transhumanism” series. As usual he does a great job giving the discussion context and summarizing the variety of the Enlightenment mind:

In fact, Enlightenment philosophers were intensely conflicted about the virtues of powerful monarchies and technocratic elites versus popular democracy. Some believed an absolute state was the best form of governance. Thomas Hobbes argued that political absolutism was necessary to prevent the war of “all against all.” Voltaire said that he “would rather obey one lion, than 200 rats of [his own] species.”

Other Enlightenment thinkers argued against absolutism and the divine right of kings, but held out for the desirability of “enlightened despots” who had political legitimacy because they were pursuing their people’s interests. Free peoples, as individuals and democracies, often do not choose the ends that are in their best interests. As Spinoza said, “the masses can no more be freed from their superstition than from their fears…they are not guided by reason” (Spinoza, 1670: 56). The benevolent rationale for authoritarianism has always been that rulers and their advisors understand the needs of the people better than the people do themselves.

Hughes goes on from a great historical summary to a survey of the various strains of political belief within the futurist, transhumanist, and technoprogressive communities. The comments are as enlightening and entertaining as the article itself. Read it.

["Problems of Transhumanism: Liberal Democracy vs Technocratic Absolutism" - IEET]

Hughes on Natural Theology

James Hughes has another great post up from his “Problems with Transhumanism” series. This time he’s tackling atheism and natural theology. The results from their survey of transhumanist beliefs didn’t exactly surprise me, but it was startling to see the results all the same:

Self-identified transhumanists today are mostly secular and atheist. In a survey conducted in 2007 of members of the World Transhumanist Association (Humanity+, 2008), 93% answered ‘yes’ to the statement “Do you expect human progress to result from human accomplishment rather than divine intervention, grace, or redemption?” Ninety percent denied “clear divinely-set limits on what humans should do,” and ninety percent affirmed that their “concept of ‘the meaning of life’ derived from human responsibility and opportunity, not than from divine revelation.”

Hughes does a survey of the various strange cosmologies transhumanists have proposed as alternatives to theistic views of the universe. Personally, I think William James had it right when it comes to ideas like these. On the question that matters, “are your actions or beliefs restricted by religious dogma or convictions?” all the cosmologies outlined by Hughes answer, “no.” So what’s the point? Is there a difference that alters the way ethical systems are constructed? Why split hairs?

Problems of Transhumanism at IEET

Dr. Hughes has a great summary of his upcoming series on the Enlightenment and transhumanism up on IEET. I am really excited to see where he goes with it. A taste:

My position here is that transhumanism—the belief that technology can transcend the limitations of the human body and brain—and techno-utopianism—the idea that humans can create a progressively better future through the rational mastery of nature—are part of the family of Enlightenment philosophies. Transhumanism and techno-utopianism can be traced back to the original Enlightenment thinkers 300 years ago, and transhumanists need to understand how the ideological conflicts within transhumanism today are the product of these 300 year-old conflicts within the Enlightenment.

This exercise is also an attempt to make clear which criticisms of transhumanism are internal contradictions, and which start from external, non-Enlightenment predicates. In other words, saying that transhumanism is bad because it threatens the human soul is a criticism from a non-Enlightenment position. Arguing that transhumanists are being anthropocentric or “human-racist” when they preference particular kinds of intelligence and feeling as the basis for moral standing is an intra-Enlightenment argument.

I cannot reiterate enough how indebted the transhumanist movement is to Hughes and Bostrom for giving it a coherent foundation. It isn’t always the most fun stuff to write, but it’s some of the most important.

Poll From the Future

Treder tinkers with a Pew chart with some pretty cool results:

I think his guesses are pretty spot on, both in terms of where we’ll be technologically (I hope) and people’s opinions. If this is what the world looks like when I’m 40, I’m pretty psyched. Now where’s my jetpack?

Ideas in the Rear View

Richard Eskow has a great post up on IEET about the Singularity Summit and the hurdles still faced by the transhumanists.

Objects in the rear-view mirror—those artifacts of human history that may seem archaic to some in the Transhumanist community—are likely to be sources of substantial public resistance. The artifacts in question include religion, patriotism, attachment to old family structures, and the other quotidian pleasures of many people’s lives. Confronting those artifacts with derision will not be an effective strategy for selling the enhancement vision. Even relatively simple “enhancements” like birth control and other reproductive technologies have been met with a firestorm of religiously-based resistance. In fact, this country has actually moved backwards from the widespread acceptance these techniques enjoyed had in the 1970s.

That fact was brought home for me when I was researching Spider-Man as an example of what I call “zero-sum” enhancement characters from religion, legend, and popular culture. (“Zero-sum” figures are those who receive special talents or gifts, but pay an equivalent price in other parts of their lives to preserve the balance of nature. Think Icarus, Iron Man, or Dorian Gray.) I learned that Marvel Comics released a pamphlet for Planned Parenthood in the 70s in which Spider-Man explains why teenagers should not get pregnant and explaining the services available to them. If Marvel did that today they’d face a nationwide boycott—so much so that there’s little chance they would even try.

I agree. The threat of old social norms and institutions is precisely why I focus on critical theory and gender studies as much as I do. The battles already being fought by feminists, liberaltarians, and progressives are indicative of the enormous power of entrenched culture. I agree it’s going to take a lot of work, but the recent sobriety and mainstreaming of the transhumanist/ human-enhancement philosophies is an extremely good sign. More and more discussions are shifting from “what might be” and “what if” to questions of rights, autonomy, personhood, justice, and self. I, for one, am excited.

["Objects in Mirror are Closer than They Appear" at IEET]

Gender and Mental Differences

An IEET poll result:

I have a lot of qualms with this poll. I know it was done in good faith, but the IEET’s take on gender has always been slightly, mmm… irksome.  They write an essay on postgenderism on one hand and then, in reference to the poll question “If you could have a personal robot that did just one thing, what would it be?” post an image like this:

I just kind of shake my head at this sort of stuff now; I know it isn’t malicious and it isn’t worth the effort to work myself into the tizzy necessary to really get upset.

This poll on what IEET readers say about gender is really worth some further analysis, mostly because it’s split in such an interesting and, well, even way. If you round the numbers, you get a quarter of respondents going full bio, a quarter going full society, and half saying a mix, even if they don’t know what the mix is. Given the materialist critique underpinning Dvorsky and Hughes white paper Postgenderism, I would have guessed at least half of the poll takers would have gone with “mostly from biology.”

Anywho, the poll seemed as good excuse as any to put my thoughts on the matter out there. I’d love to sit down and just deconstruct the hell out of the question – which begs so many questions of its own I wouldn’t even know where to start – but instead I’ll just take it at face value and address the “spirit” of the question: how closely related are biological sex and performed gender? If one is born female/male, how much does that influence one’s feminine/masculine behavior?

In short: I have no idea. There is almost no way to test this concept empirically and, if there is, it hasn’t been done on a large enough scale or with enough rigor to merit serious scholarly attention. There are simply too many variables and a control sample is damn near impossible. All we have are anthropological comparisons of cultures and those provide tenuous connections at best. My intuition, however, is that all of biological influences combined (from actual genetic code up through average phenotypic expression), account for less than a third of male/female behavior as such.

In particular, the question is focused on mental processes (the specific, redundant mention of “emotions” is odd, given that emotions are a mental process, but I digress) so in that consideration, I would argue less than 5% biological influence. Again, I have zero evidence to back this up, besides lived experience. Then again, that’s better than some crap science you see out there, so I’ll trust my instincts. The thing is, I have met so many people with so many varied ways of behaving, that to say “females generally act X way and males generally act Y way” would actually be more difficult and more confusing. The less influence biological sex one grants over people’s behavior, the more actual, observed behavior makes sense.

Mental processes are so heavily influenced by environment, life experience, and nuanced fluctuations in genetics that even identical twins have very different mental lives and behaviors, despite growing up with similar parents and the same genome. On the other side of the coin, opposite sex siblings, tend to have lots of similar behaviors and personality dispositions that are reflective of their parents’ behavior and personality. In both examples, the influence of genetics, both in general and the possession of an X or Y chromosome, seem to have far less influence than the social and environmental factors in a person’s life.

In that sense, I’d say the answer to the question is that the “apparent mental differences” between males and females are the result of observer error. As much as we are conditioned to perform within social norms, we are conditioned to observe based upon them, hence the tenacity of norms and their powerful influence. Sex is one of so many variables that it becomes largely inconsequential in a survey of genetic influences on conscious personality.