I’ll make three quick points.

1. Humanist/Enlightenment standards of “goodness” have not changed, but have been consistently reinterpreted over the past 300 years. I can guarantee that no humanist in 1750 would have argued that all human beings are equal and have understood it the same way a humanist would in the year 2010. For example: the concept of “homosexual” didn’t even exist, so how could inclusion/exclusion goodness/badness even be considered in 1750.

2. The focus has never been “human beings” so much as it has been intelligent, rational adults. For a long time, only white, landowning, men could be considered intelligent, rational adults, with everyone else being too simple to be morally responsible/autonomous. All transhumanism does is expose the original criterion – intelligence, rationality, and sentience – and point out that the boundary isn’t drawn by DNA but by something emergent. Rights are a case by case situation.

3. The “goodness” of Hepburn is an interesting case because no mention is made of what makes Hepburn so good she can’t be better. She was a fantastic human being and remains iconic, but why? Is it because she is beautiful? Smart? Kind? A humanitarian? Because she was a great actress? Her fashion sense? She was a smoker, is that good? She had miscarriages, would remedying that situation lessen her? Not only would there be a debate over what actually makes her good, any agreement (say, her fashion) would lead to debates over someone who is better at that aspect (Jackie O, Gaga, Coco Chanel).

I agree that moral relativism is a problem. I also agree with Anissimov’s point that our morality and sense of goodness are innately connected to how our minds evolved (not each individual mind, but the whole species), and neuroscience has been kinda-sorta proving the Categorical Imperative.  But for the writers of Futurisms to come to the conclusion that ah! the late 20th century version of humanism is THE version to stick with, is willfully ignorant.

But I struggled. I read post after post and simply could not find a coherent strain of philosophy. Citations to earlier philosophers were non-existent and the rhetorical and logical quality of any given post was dubious at best, atrocious at worst. Yet Goertzel wrote with such confidence and, so far as I could tell, no one had really challenged his assertions or beliefs that I doubted myself. Maybe I was the idiot, too simple to grasp the complex nature of the argument. And then it happened:

Cosmism is a philosophy that has more in common with The Secret and The Purpose Driven Life than it does with Critique of Pure Reason. The arguments and examples used are so artfully facile, so empty and baseless that they actually unhinge the reader, causing an intellectual crisis where a reasonably smart person comes to doubt anyone could articulate something so preposterous. Ben Goertzel is the Sarah Palin of the futurist and philosophy community. There is nothing to engage, nothing to grasp onto, no warranted arguments or justified statements, just New Age gibberish, mysticism derived from cherry-picked pragmatism and idealism, and a moving target core that prevents any real criticism from occurring.

Cosmism is unbelievable garbage. As it stands, that is.

Now, Goertzel and Prisco are my colleagues at the IEET and both are intelligent men. I challenge either of them to write a boilerplate for Cosmism that does the following.

1. Cites philosophical lineage and explains why antecedent philosophies were insufficient.

2. Doesn’t use cutesy rhetorical questions as the entire basis of argument.

3. Define “justice” “rights” or any such essential philosophical term to show how Cosmism functions as a philosophy.

4. Give us a reason to care. What advantages does Cosmism provide that other philosophies cannot?

I look forward to the responses.

Her four points, summarized:

1. We will no longer be human.

2. Whatever body you’re in, there you are.

3. Our augmented bodies and minds will be hackable.

4. We’ll have to deal with the immortality divide.

Newitz is about as far as one can get from being uninformed or dismissive of the topic of immortality and transhumanism, so to treat her arguments as such would be a major mistake. The central point Newitz is making with her argument is not that immortality/extreme life-extension is immoral or unethical, but that the technology required to make it a reality open up a huge number of other ethical conundrums.  For example, regarding the “immortality gap” (I can walk, mein furer!) Newitz was clear that we shouldn’t be limiting tech to the lowest common denominator but doing our best to make sure “everyone is up to the highest common denominator.” A tall task, but her arguments are in many ways akin to mine against the Singularity: don’t get so lost in the goal that you forget all the steps in between.

I was originally going to single out some comments, but the way the thread ended up working out, it’s almost more fun to just read through all the “featured conversations” (don’t forget to expand the replies). Some of Newitz’s retorts are clarifying.

In response to tetracycloide, who stated “The social argument is pretty tired as well. Pretty much every piece of advanced technology enjoyed today started out as something only a handful of mega-elites could afford.” Newitz wrote:

My point is that we need to allocate time and funds to innovations that will lead to species immortality as well as personal niftiness. Right now I think the system is off-balance – just look at the difference between the pharmaceutical industry and environmental/sustainable industries. I’m not saying we shouldn’t aim to make human life last longer, or forget about augmentation. I’m just saying that we need to put just as much energy into extending the lives of people who will live after us. And after them, to something approaching infinity

SupaChupacabra made the point that immortality wouldn’t be boring, Newitz responded:

I agree. I’m not worried about boredom. I’m worried most about the immortality divide and being hacked by a neuro-virus that makes me go Stepford.

And adding a point to the discussion that I actually haven’t heard yet, JetRink (whose comment Newitz promoted) gave the whole thing a North-vs-South (as in hemispheres! not union/confederacy) twist:

One possible upside: war will suddenly look less desirable. Just as wealthy, happy countries are much less likely to sacrifice their quality of life by making war on each other, countries inhabited by immortals would be much less likely to go to war when they had been planning on living for 1000 years.

I’m sure some third world countries will drag the wealthy countries into conflict, but the rich nations will just fight them with robots. It will be even less symmetric than it is now.

All good stuff. Give it a ponder.

A blog for The New Atlantis, entitled Futurisms, is one of those refreshing sites. Nearly every blog post they put up makes me bang my head against the desk, but at least I’m doing it out of respect and not fury. I’m so used to finding people spew bile that I got all hot-and-bothered by one of their posts that I snarkily retorted. Adam Keiper responded and, instead of starting a comment ping-pong, I’m going to give this argument a full blog post. MAYBE TWO IF I’M FEELING LONG WINDED.

The article in question was Charles T. Rubin’s response to Hughes’ essay on Democracy vs Technocracy. For those who lack perfect memory, that one had a pretty awesome comment thread and I ended up posting about the rhetorical failings of many A.I. worshipers supporters. The essay is accompanied by what I must admit is a handy bit of photoshoppery with HAL 9000 wearing a crown – askew no less. Futurisms has been faithfully commenting on each of Hughes posts and making their own counter-point essay series in parallel. Ever so briefly, I want to point out the core failing of the, well, conservative (?? Is that fair, Futurism writers?) arguments made against Hughes.

The core failing is that… well, for Futurisms at least, the arguments made by the authors don’t lead anywhere. Every time one of their writers seems to be on the scent of some great critique of transhumanism, they just end up with something like “they’re moral relativists” or “the logical extreme of liberal values” or something else. The most recent critique of Hughes is telling. Rubin reads Hughes’ essay and comes to the conclusion that transhumanists would like a despot, but that some of us managed to retain juuuuuust enough American Government 101 to be wary – but really, we’d love a despot, especially a robotic one, because it’s from the future. I retorted by quoting Hughes’ admonition of despotism found within that very same essay, demonstrating the cherry-picking done by Rubin. Adam Keiper responded with:

To answer your question: All three of us have read Mr. Hughes’s series in its entirety. I don’t think Mr. Rubin’s post is an example of inappropriate cherry-picking. The Tocqueville quotation is a response to Mr. Hughes’s penultimate paragraph. And the line you seem to be objecting to in Mr. Rubin’s post is in response to Mr. Hughes’s last paragraph, where a reader would expect Mr. Hughes to state most clearly his deeply felt conclusions. Are you implying that Mr. Hughes simply didn’t mean what he wrote in his last paragraph: “If I could convince myself that turning our fate over to [an enlightened despot] was the only way forward I also would be tempted”?

I’m implying that Hughes didn’t mean what Keiper and Rubin construe him to mean. “If I could convince myself” is shorthand for “I just spent 10 paragraphs trying to convince myself that there is any real justification for despotism. In spite of the existence of Enlightenment despots as well as well respected apologists for despotism, I cannot convince myself despotism is ever justified, therefore I reject it. I, however, recognize the tantalizing nature of such arguments” Thus, he cannot even tempt himself. The reason I cited the more polemic paragraph made earlier by Hughes is that reflects the climax of his argument, his revelation and central point, while the line quoted by Rubin occurs in the denouement of the argument.

So in the end, what we’re left with is half an argument from Rubin – that transhumanists like Hughes might want a robotic despot even if they say they don’t – and to show how obviously bad it is, he quotes Tocqueville. Wow, what a crusher of an argument, Tocqueville’s “despots are bad” paragraph. Rubin’s retort to Hughes argument that despotism was bad is a quotation describing how bad despotism is. And that’s it. There is no “but an A.I. despot would be uniquely bad because X” or “Hughes wants democracy, but has trouble getting beyond generic platitudes. The big conflicts of liberalism show up in his microcosm of democratic transhumanism here and here.” But that doesn’t happen. There is no follow up.

The whole blog reads that way. It’s either “liberalism bad” or “libertarians bad” using the most worn-out generic arguments, like “libertarians want everything celebrated and allowed,” as they make against Mike Treder’s “Getting Used to Hideousness” piece. In short, I don’t know what the writers for Futurisms stand for, merely what they stand against. I mean, I’m not saying their not doing a good job being conservative, because what better exchange represents the conservative mind than “I’m going to do this!” “No.” “Why not?” “Because, we don’t do that.” Give me a why, writers of Futurism, give me some meat. Do you oppose cognitive enhancement? Why? Don’t just write cutesy blog posts about how dewy-eyed transhumanist goals are, hit us hard and hit us where it hurts. Pull out the Fukuyama cannons! Make it a Kass-tastrophe!

Here is an example: Futurisms and its writers don’t actually hold to any real values, which is why they are unable to import any of the transhumanist ideas into their value structures or effectively show why transhumanist ideas don’t fit. In fact, they have to use our own criteria against us, and they don’t do that very well. Alternatively I, for example, believe in natural rights, but that those natural rights are emergent and explain why a single human cell does not have the same rights as a child, and, furthermore, why a child does not have full citizenship but an adult does. Though our legal system doesn’t say it explicitly, this form of rights codification implies that rights stem from a specific level of cognitive aptitude allowing autonomy, sentience, empathy, and reflexivity allowing one to function in a polis. When I stumbled across transhumanism late in my senior year at George Mason, I was able to incorporate ideas like uplift and non-human rights into my value structure without compromising other beliefs, such as that many animals are justly treated with fewer rights than humans because of their lower cognitive capacity. Alternatively, the writers at The New Atlantis have shown time and time again their ability to be reactionary and aggressively defend the status quo without needing to actually disclose what their values are or what the Good is, merely what exists in violation of it.

I’m tired of reading critiques of our arguments or eye-rolling posts about some future-hype scenario. Throw a punch TNA writers, I’ll take it on the jaw.

Also, stop leaning on Nietzsche for your arguments. What is it with conservatives obsessing over him? I will smear you across the table with Foucault if you pull that mustachioed lunatic out again. Seriously, stop beating a dead horse, you’re making me crazy (GET IT?).

[update: misspelled Adam Keiper's name originally as "Kepler." Apologies]

Thus while Dale Carrico has been largely disregarded as a petulant non-entity by those within bioethics and science studies communities, I offer the following refutation of his claims for three reasons.

1. His claims about me personally and about the nature of my argument are false.
2. The few minor arguments he makes are self-defeating and irrational.
3. His rhetoric students deserve an example of what good debate actually looks like.

First, let me address the ad hominems Carrico uses to bolster his argument. As a professor lecturer of rhetoric at Berkeley (one of my old debate stomping grounds, love me some Top Dog) Carrico is well aware of what he is doing; his insults are both a means to intimidate his opponent and to lower his opponent’s value in the eyes of a neutral observing party. Neither contributes to the quality of the debate or actual arguments. To wit:

1. Carrico refers to me as “very young and palpably foolish.” I’m 24 and an NYU graduate student. My professors and colleagues have never found me to be “palpably foolish.” Let my arguments stand on their own ground, regardless of age.
2. Carrico refers to me as having a “quotidian kind of intelligence.” How does one even reply to that kind of tripe?
3. Carrico uses a general tone of disdain. In the first sentence, Carrico has positioned himself as the adult lecturing the jejune child. After that, Carrico labels me in turns as paranoid, insane, foolish, an “impressionable underexperienced youngster,” silly, a cultist, and batshit crazy.

Second, lets get my politics and allegiances with the IEET and other transhumanists out in the clear. I am a bioethics, gender politics and critical theory student. My primary interests were initially in Grosz, Merleau-Ponty, Darwin, Butler, Rawls, Noszik, Habermas, and Foucault. Since completing my first year of study, I have found the work of Nick Bostrom, Julian Savulescu, Anders Samberg, James Hughes, George Dvorsky, John Harris, Ronald Bailey, Alan Buchanan and Nicholas Agar relevant to my studies.

I am on friendly terms with the IEET and they enjoy publishing my blog posts as they see fit. I find Singulitarians (Robot Cultists, in Carrico’s terms) to have valid points of interest, but I simply do not think they have provided evidence to warrant, at a minimum, theoretical support many of their ideas, including cryogenics, friendly A.I., robotic bodies, uploading, and the associated technologies and events. Furthermore, I find the philosophies and arguments that Singulitarians construct to be underdeveloped, both in terms of rhetorical form and of philosophical foundation. As for the aspects of human enhancement I study: cognitive enhancers exist, assisted reproductive tech and birth control exist, genetic engineering and cloning exist, prosthetics exist, organ transplants exist, transgender, transsex, and intersex individuals exist and it is upon those ideas I focus. Nothing about my studies is fanciful or speculative.

My blog, a fun corollary to my academic work, is written in the entertainment and thought-experiment range of things. I recognize it as such. Lady Gaga comprises a fair bulk of the posts, do you really think I take it that seriously? Carrico’s spittle-flecked rage against Robot Cultists (Prisco, Goertzel, Anissimov I presume?) who drove him from the IEET is misdirected and ultimately wasted on me. If you want an accurate picture of my politics outside of our tiny nerd world, I tend to float among Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, and Will Wilkinson.

In short: Anywhere Carrico refers to me as a Robot Cultist is false. Any argument built on that premise is false. My writing uses science fiction and futurism to consider ethical possibilities, but in no way presumes or demands a transhumanist future. Carrico likely knows these things to be true, but hides his facile thoughts behind a barrage of churlish bile.

On to Carrico’s argument proper. I quote him at length to give his arguments full context. The remainder of this post is tedious, long, and will likely accomplish nothing. I suggest continued reading only if you have any interest in just how feeble and odious Carrico is as a debater and an intellectual. Here we go:

A very young and palpably foolish transhumanist fellow named Kyle Munkittrick—who very likely will in the fullness of time, poor mite, grow out of his present foolishness in the way that folks his age who are presently earnestly quoting Ayn Rand novels will also mostly grow out of all that embarrassing nonsense as well—has written an essay in which he asks a question superlative futurologists of the transhumanist and techno-immortalist sects often like to ask, namely: Why Do We Accept Aging?

There is a very easy answer to the question “Why do we accept aging?” which relates closely to the answers to such questions as “Why do we accept having lungs?” or “Why do we accept the occasional need to pee?” and that is that sane people tend to accept things that are facts, especially when these facts are not seriously under contest anywhere at any time by anybody at all.

The assertion “Why do we accept aging = Why do we accept having lungs/ the occasional need to pee” fails on multiple levels.

• 1. The conditions of “having lungs” and “the occasional need to pee” are not analogous to aging. Aging is a process of decay and the ultimate result is death.  A better version of my question, and I pose it to Carrico, is why do we reject disease, but not aging?
  • 1a. Breathing and digestive processes are a result of the system functioning properly, both functions bring in nutrients and excise waste. Aging is the name for the collection of damages to the system that occur over time, in part by the inefficiencies of the aforementioned processes. That’s why people who age have trouble using their lungs and why old men struggle to pee.
  • 1b. People ask “why do we age” all the time. Kids ask it when they see a century old turtle or a thousand year-old redwood. Artists ask about aging as an industry standard. See Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the slightly older Epic of Gilgamesh. I think you’ll find less meditation on breathing and pee, though.
• 2. To assert we should accept something because it is a basic process is irrational on multiple fronts.
  • 2a. Despite Carrico’s assertion that supporting anti-aging is insane, I’m sure he has no problem with curing the symptoms of it. Why would we reject the natural results – disease, pain and suffering – put not the natural cause – aging?
  • 2b. Natural “basic fact” does not equal moral. There is no inherent value or justice in a natural system.
  • 2c. We attempt to liberate ourselves from species-typical conditions like violence, patriarchy, and racism through artifice (i.e. law and philosophy) why wouldn’t we do so with a physical ailment that seems basic to the human condition?
• 3. Carrico gives no reason as to why we should accept any of these conditions, including breathing air and having to pee. His argument is the equivalent of saying, “We don’t question that homosexuals are immoral and that blacks are not human, why would we question that men are superior to women?” As point (1) shows, aging is in fact different from breathing and the need to pee, but Carrico’s argument is frivolous and lazy.
  • 3a. To claim “basic fact” is some how unquestionable or to do so is an aberrant behavior is to make a normative value claim on “basic fact” as well as to make the normative claim that aging is, indeed, one of those “basic facts.”
  • 3b. Aging is one of the most complex and misunderstood processes within a living body. Respiration and digestion are well understood, whereas we are only now just beginning to understand what aging is and how it occurs. Telomeres, free-radicals, and general cell function have only recently been connected to aging in a meaningful, scientific way.

Carrico then uses his fallacious analogy to attempt to show the absurdity of my original question:

It does not occur to many people to ask the question “Why do we accept the breathing of air?” when the air is all there is to breathe. Nor is there any reason at all that such questions would sensibly occur to many people. This is especially so when we recall that there are far more urgent questions on hand that do need asking, such as, “Why do we accept the pollution of the air so that more or more folks are now suffering from life-threatening and quality-of-life-diminishing respiratory conditions?” when the air is all there is to breathe.

1. That a question does not normally occur to people means that asking that question is good and important, not bad and ridiculous. Since when has asking safe, normal, average questions the desired behavior?
2. ”There are better things we could be talking about” is a pretty hilarious thing for Carrico to write before going into a ten-paragraph rant, but I digress.
3. ”There are better things we could be talking about” is not an argument, it’s a rhetorical device meant to insult the opponent to make the speaker seem better informed and more moral.
4. ”There are better things we could be talking about” is a canard. If one were to pick and choose arguments based on their value to be argued, things would never get resolved. “Heath care is more critical, we should debate that!” “No. Foreign policy is more important, we should debate that!” There are enough people for these arguments to go around.
5. Environmental policy, world poverty, and capitalism are all issues that are heavily debated by people much better informed and more passionate than I on all sides. The question of aging does not take away from those debates.

Carrico, still trying to convince us that nobody is making these arguments, that anti-aging advocates like myself are yelling into the abyss, continues:

Munkittrick writes that “we tell ourselves curing aging will cause too many problems and that aging has a lot of natural beauty to it and creates a lot of meaning and that all of that is good.” But of course almost nobody in the world is really telling themselves seriously that curing aging will cause too many problems because almost nobody in the world thinks some kind of blanket treatment of all the conditions we associate with the aging process is remotely on offer and so there isn’t really much reason to start rattling off the problems that might eventuate from this non-existing non-proximate aging cure, especially when there are so many actually-existing actually-proximate problems for us to be thinking about instead.

• 1. Notice the sweeping generalizations. Carrico has zero evidence to back up his claims and, by staying general, he can disassociate from any specific counter-examples I give. If I say, “people X, Y, and Z have discussed anti-aging ethics in prominent forums A, B, and C,” Carrico can discredit those as fringe, therefore still “nobody.”
  • 1a. This argument form is equivalent to Sarah Palin saying “Nobody in real America wants socialist health care.” To Carrico, I’m not a “real” person, and anyone who disagrees with him will be outside his circumscription of the “real.” Additionally, Carrico misrepresents his opponent’s stance just as Palin does (Obama doesn’t advocate socialist health care, I don’t advocate magic robot bodies), creating a doubly disingenuous framing of my position.
  • 1b. I’m not nobody, I think anti-aging might cause problems we need to investigate (as illustrated by the post in question), therefore Carrico’s claim is false.
• 2. For examples of other nobodies talking about the problems caused by anti-aging I suggest you pick up a copy of Our Posthuman Future, The Future of Human Nature, Enough, Liberal Eugenics, Human Enhancement, Beyond Therapy, and From Chance to Choice, or any of the above mentioned academic journals. They’re veritable compendiums of frivolity and nonsense.
  • 2a. It is important to note that critics of anti-aging, for example Massimo Pigliucci, most of the Bush Presidential Council on Bioethics, including Leon Kass, Michael J. Sandel, Fukuyama, and others all oppose long-life technology for lots of complex ethical reasons, disprove Carrico’s argument more effectively than proponents. Critics demonstrate that they believe anti-aging is possible despite disapproving of it.
  • 2b. Alternatively, journals like Science, Nature, Bioethics and Cell have all published articles and/or editorials explicitly endorsing the real potential for super-longevity, both dealing with the practical hard science issues and the ethical ramifications. I base my rational belief in the possibility of anti-aging science progressing in those arguments.

Carrico then goes on to make the standard “merely talking about anti-aging is bad” argument:

This point [“nobody is talking about anti-aging”] has even greater relevance to the question at hand than you might think, inasmuch as many of those actually-existing actually-proximate problems are real-world healthcare problems, problems of getting more people access to available treatments in a timely cost-effective way, or to discover more effective treatments for neglected diseases in the overexploited regions of the world, or providing more public funding for medical research and development, or transforming the intellectual property regime through which multinational pharmaceutical companies increase their profits by restricting access to treatments, and so on.

Carrico’s claim that my discussion with others about anti-aging and other human enhancement technologies somehow hinders solving “actually-existing, actually proximate…real-world healthcare problems” is false. Discourse is not a zero-sum game. Not to mention the banality of Carrico’s lip-service to those who are “overexploited” (is he ok with those who are just “exploited?”) as if he is some sort of freedom fighter. His very use of the phrase “and so on” after a litany of problems indicates the rehearsed and repeated nature of his point. What pap.

Carrico’s statement that “nobody in the world” is critiquing because no one believes it will happen or cares is not an argument for not discussing it. Dismissing a given intellectual exercise as rare, probably irrelevant, and detached from reality is to dismiss intellectual exercise in general.

Average people might not think about anti-aging all the time, but when it comes up in conversation, people love to talk about it. And most react with skepticism about it being moral or good for society, not its possibility. And as my professor’s thought experiment demonstrates: when confronted with the idea, people start thinking of problems and explaining why it is dangerous, not dismissing it as “batshit crazy.” The human mind is exceedingly good at justifying the status quo, but not closed to the potential power of science.

We move on to Carrico’s one concession:

I actually think it would be a very good idea to take such dislocations seriously, to ensure that medical treatments of some conditions hitherto associated with aging were not rendered moot by subsequent death by starvation or the like—just as I think it is a very good idea to take dislocations introduced by therapeutic interventions like the pill or the overprescription of antibiotics seriously here and now—but I am quite as sure that the clamor for access to such a treatment (I would very likely be among the clamorers) would far exceed any chorus of prohibitionism.

1. People do clamor for good solutions, but Carrico mentioned The Pill, and it is worth noting that good ideas that people want can still be painted as immoral and destructive. Ever heard this argument: Want to take the pill to keep from getting pregnant? You must be a slut and cheat on your partner and have diseases. To make sure, you better be married and show you really love one another to take it.
2. Also, it’s noteworthy that Carrico has allowed himself to indulge in considering what might happen if anti-aging tech came to be. Just saying.

After this point Carrico’s wild-speculation truly detaches from my arguments. He muses:

I really have to wonder why techno-immortalists so regularly seem to think they would be denied access to the aging cures they pointlessly pine for. This is especially weird inasmuch as so many techno-immortalists are educated privileged white guys in relatively democratic societies who are the least likely people on earth ever to be denied any actually available medical treatments at all.

Perhaps this paranoid delusion of some persecutorial denial to them of techno-immortalization treatments involves the belief that the actual factual non-existence and non-proximity of techno-immortalization therapies itself somehow represents a denial of treatment uniquely made possible by the refusal of the majority of people with whom they share the world to share in their delusive hope that techno-immortalization is actually in the developmental pipeline.

1. I never argue that I will be denied access. Nowhere do I claim some illusory evil cabal is preventing my imminent immortality. The only delusion I suffer from is that more than Carrico or myself is going to read this blog post – and maybe not even Carrico.
2. Moral progress and intellectual debate are not undermined by my sex, ethnicity, or socio-economic status, be it “privileged” or not. If they are, Carrico – a white, well-educated, male – is as boned as I am.
3. My post is an ethical exercise that doesn’t hinge on anti-aging: any problematic but commonly-accepted norm will do. I was examining my professor’s initial point that people reject offers that seem too good to be true, because that’s generally a good rule of thumb. Anti-aging was his example, I was using it to investigate why people might not think about aging though they do spend a lot of time thinking about cancer and heart disease and to think about how built-up value systems can prevent benefits when those benefits are the result of a radical shift.

But Carrico seems intent to drive his argument completely off the rails:

Transhumanists often seem to resent and decry those who refuse to share in their hilarious techno-utopian faith-based wish-fulfillment fantasies, as if one need only find more techno-utopians to clap louder to bring tech-heaven into fruition.

I’m not utopic and I’m not faith-based. My blog and writing are about representations of transhumanism in culture and entertainment. My more academic writing focuses on phenomenological body schemas and rights of those with prosthetics and those who consider themselves transgender, transsexual, or intersex, as well as personal autonomy and reproductive rights. That said, there is considerable overlap between transhumanism and these specific issues, so it is a great test-bed for ethics considerations. I have never stated transhumanism or its associated technologies are inevitable, unquestionably good, that if we can just get X the world would be perfect and happy, or that group A, B, or C is preventing us from a non-existent tech.

At this point in the argument, Carrico starts building a strawman out of me by caricaturing and decontextualizing various phrases and points I made in the post:

Munkittrick also implies that anybody who would claim that “aging has a lot of natural beauty to it and creates a lot of meaning and that all of that is good” is somehow responsible for the non-existence of the aging cure the techno-immortalists seem to believe in utterly in defiance of sense. The first thing to say is that there are plenty of foolish embarrassing Boomers so hysterically hostile to the aging process that they throw billions of dollars into cosmetic surgeries that, as often as not, make people look like livid horror masks, not to mention falling for the siren-song of crap creams and pills and exercise-torture apparatuses and so on in the pursuit of the latest anti-aging “science.” So, it doesn’t seem to me the techno-immortalists are being particularly honest when they paint themselves as a vanishingly small avant-garde minority of folks in brave denial about the inevitability of the aging process. Quite to the contrary, it seems to me that there are all sorts of pampered privileged sad superficial idiots who are very much on board with the whole transhumanist aging-and-death denialist program. Just because futurologists don’t want to think of themselves as boner pill hucksters and personal-motivation seminar carnival barkers doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t know who’s who and what’s what.

1. No, my claim was not that those who value aging are responsible or that views opposing anti-aging were in our current context were irrational or wrong.
2. My claim was that humanity, as a whole, is incredibly good at making virtue of necessity. Grotesqueries of our existence such as war, stratified society, gender roles, and minority abuses, not to mention aging, are almost always codified in cultural systems with concepts like “honor” “propriety” and “duty.”
3. As humanity slowly inches forward, and I do believe we actually make progress, small and painful as it may be, we revise these notions of honor and duty. My claim was that the very way in which our civilization portrays aging would seem to indicate humanity is trying to find value and goodness of some aspect that deeply saddens and concerns us. That we have to justify the suffering attached to aging to ourselves, so we talk about “honoring ones elders” and take pride in those who have aged well.

Straw-man constructed, Carrico simply beats on a thing only tangentially derived from my arguments. Carrico plays the role of the rational martyr, at peace with his humanity, wise beyond his years:

But I do suppose I do have to concede that I am indeed one of those awful people who has been inspired and comforted by what I take to be the beauty of human bodies that no longer pass for teen-aged, that I do indeed think that many people in coming to terms with the vulnerability of their aging bodies have seemed to acquire wisdom they lacked when they were young, dumb, and full of come, as it were, and fancied themselves invulnerable and irresistible…

However, I disagree that it makes any kind of sense for techno-immortalists to pretend that it is somehow because some have been able to find resources for growth and beauty and meaning in the nearly universal journey of living human beings from youth to adulthood to age, that these Robot Cultists don’t have access to the toypile of god-goods they think they want so much.

Further, I really do think it is profoundly disrespectful and frankly deeply disturbingly misanthropic to deny the measure of growth and beauty and meaning that human beings—every single one of whom always has indeed aged and died and is likely always ever after to continue to so age and certainly will die—have indeed found their way to some measure of wisdom and meaning in living their lives on the terms actually on offer on the earth that actually exists.

Humanity, human life and the routes people take through it are sublime. I make no denial that growth and beauty and meaning comes with human beings as they spend more time on this earth and meet and experience new things, or come to more deeply appreciate and understand old aspects of their lives. My denial is that aging is essential to that process of human growth. People grow, learn, and become wise, deep, meaningful, and beautiful in defiance of aging, not because of it.

I accepted I was going to die long ago. I am not a robot cultist. One can consider an idea without believing it: in fact, that is how thinking works.

Carrico almost makes a concession here, but his myopic take on the debate prevents him from doing so:

It is certainly unfair to saddle Munkittrick with the weird ravings of a commenter on his piece—but it seems to me there is a profound continuity in the spirit of the arguments I am seeing from them both.

Thank you for not saddling me with Prisco. I promise, our ideas are only confluent in the broadest interpretation.

Carrico then proceeds to attempt to saddle me with Prisco:

Needless to say, that [Prisco’s] argument [“our justification of aging prevents us from trying to treat it”] is, er, implausible in the extreme. As with Prisco, Munkittrick seems to be lost in a rather fantastic paranoid delusion in which he is being persecuted by those who refuse to indulge the flabbergasting fantasy that “we [will] suddenly discover we can cure aging… [i]ts [cure will be] simple, cheap, universal[ly available], and we [will] manage to quickly adapt society to deal with an undying population… and [a]ll of the impacts described by [current critics of such daydreams simply] don’t exist [by fiat], anti-aging is a glorious and beautiful time [anti-aging is a time? okay, whatever that means] and everyone lives for centuries,” and that we who refuse to pretend that all of these hyperbolically implausible eventualities are possible in any relevant sense of the word are somehow through that refusal making the death-denialist techno-immortalist daydream not come true, we are the ones who are snatching the immortality god-capsule from Kyle Munkittrick’s mouth just by refusing to join in with the Robot Cultists and clap louder and louder about its perfect plausibility, nay, inevitability.

That was not my argument and to read it as such is a display of ignorance at best and disingenuous and malicious intent at worst. Nowhere in my piece, or elsewhere, do I suggest anti-aging is inevitable. The whole point of a thought experiment is to skip certain unavoidable real-life problems – in this case actually creating anti-aging tech, distributing it on a massive scale, allowing society to adjust in terms of space, reproduction, resources, and a million other variables that are worthy of debate – so that one can discuss some other relevant philosophical point. My point was that, even if every criticism of anti-aging were solved for, there would still be tremendous problems and social ramifications with which humanity would have to deal, and that these would largely be of social consciousness.

Just as one can be honorable in war does not make war honorable, so too does the fact that one can age beautifully and happily does not make aging happy and beautiful. My point is that these mentalities of duty and honor tend to reverse themselves, no longer honoring the person being tried but the trial itself, which is precisely what I was investigating.

Here is a line that highlights Carrico’s inability to grasp context:

On a side note, I strongly disapprove Munkittrick’s insinuation that the only people who criticize transhumanists are bioconservatives.

That was not my insinuation. Bioconservatives frame their argument against a given transhumanist technology as “it will probably happen, but here are reasons why it is wrong (usually human nature/ human dignity) and we should prevent it.” Bioconservatives make a certain type of argument, so I used that moniker to denote that specific type of argument. Alternatively, arguments like Carrico’s, that anti-aging medicine will not exist, ever, period, and that people who believe it are insane, naive, and offensive, are not the arguments I was responding to. I am well aware that reasonable people like Jaron Lanier and Nicholas Carr and Bill Joy and a pile of other people are not bioconservatives, but their arguments are not the arguments I was summarizing in that point. Unlike Carrico, I am all-too-aware of how diverse and nuanced the bioethics and technoethics fields are.

After an enormous, unrelated anti-Prisco tirade, Carrico gets back to me:

But to Kyle Munkittrick and to all the other impressionable underexperienced youngsters publishing their earnest embarrassing Robot Cult e-pistles at the IEET website I want to offer a friendly word of advice. Even though you aren’t making a whole lot of sense in these arguments you’re making in this Robot Cult phase of yours, the truth is that almost everybody believes a foolish thing or two when they are young and you do seem to possess at least a quotidian kind of intelligence, and, well, it isn’t too late for you guys. Have a good long look at Giulio Prisco and Natasha Vita More and understand where this futurological foolishness is taking you. You really can still enjoy science fiction and be a healthcare policy geek without being in a Robot Cult.

Advice noted, considered, rejected.

Dale, your argumentative style is shameful for an academic in general and of appalling quality for a lecturer of rhetoric. The actual arguments you make require you to misinterpret me, falsely categorize me, and take me out of context. Over half the post is an excuse for you to excoriate Giulio Prisco, with whom I have almost zero interaction or interest. The remainder is an execrable substitute for debate. I pray you teach the art of rhetoric better than you practice it, for the sake of your students.