Transhumanism as Cargo Cult

Kurzweil, like most rich men, simply would rather not give up the riches of his life, not now, not ever.

The technological singularity is about not dying. Transhumanism is about not dying. 

 Hence when we argue on behalf of transhumanism we argue as very dedicated devotees of a cargo cult that has yet to deliver the goods—which is why it is a cult.
Just because, as the old New York City cum Eastern European Jewish joke argues on behalf of the neurosis of a relative who thinks he is a chicken: “we need the eggs.”

We need, we want what transhumanism promises, and surely it will soon come to pass and inasmuch as we are persuaded that the only thing that holds science back from this windfall of technological add-ons and upgrades is some ethical aversion to, say, stem cell research, we argue for the “value” of transhumanism, just to quell such objections.

All this gives us is another reason to prepare for the coming singularity. 

 And as with other raptures, one does not expect to have a choice. 

 And one thinks this no matter how underwhelming the experience turns out to be -- in fact.

Note the very specific (and very popularly Nietzschean) “faith” in science and especially industrial, corporate, capitalist technology that has been with us since the interregnum between the two wars. That is to say, if we read Sloterdijk aright.  

Of course, and before Sloterdijk all of us should have been reading Sebald's The Natural History of Destruction.

And to be sure, Günther Anders had already analysed this in a locus safely outside of our usual purview, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

As with a little more complexity had Theodor Adorno and in a different fashion Jacques Ellul.  So too, for years now, Paul Virilio along with his colleague the late Jean Baudrillard.

But this is again and also to say that such a vision is fascist through and through. 

Human Enhancement as Fantasy Projection

Machines “project” as the phenomenologists say or, as the techno-theorists put it, they “extend” our human senses and our consciousness. The addictive and phantom effects of the internet have everything to do with this. Using this same phenomenological reading of technology, trans- and post-humanists are fond of speaking of human “enhancement.”  

But a phenomenological analysis of technology would remind us that the augmentation in question is more attuned to the machine than it is (or can be -- and this is in spite of the detours that Latour and actor-network theorists rightly emphasize) cut to human measure. 

Bruno Latour

 It is a reflection of this very attunement that, to speak as the ethnographers and sociologists who study this phenomenon, we are “machine-obedient.” 

Martin Kusch

Harry Collins

Nor are we as mechanically tractable or responsive as we are because we wish to be — because we love our machines, erotically, affectively, as Latour suggests that we do[1] or else as Donna Haraway has also argued (albeit in another way),[2] but and quite simply inasmuch as we have to be machine-obedient simply to use our machines in the first and last place. 

This is true from our autos to our computers and cell phones and cameras, indeed and even Facebook and so on. 

And here there is a network-actor loop (or loophole) at work: for it turns out that the greater our obedience, the more we comply, the better technologically attuned or, just to show our easy familiarity, the better techno-geeked out we are, the “better” the machine “obeys” our every whim.  

Christian Bale’s Batman survives the end of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises not just because of his technology, from his batsuit and its associated gadgets to his humvee (with wings) or tank transporter in the sky, but because of his intimate, second nature, or automatic (done weeks ago) coding prowess.

 

Bruce Wayne not only zen-wills himself out of a physical breakdown, with the aid of chiropractic, a ‘science’ traditionally derided by modern medicine but widely known for its efficacy, but through transcendence of will, he rises, learning fear, becoming like a child, out of the cave of his Jodhpur prison (this ascent is the meaning of the title).

But, and this is the film’s great Lacanian secret, this is the heart, this is the rule of the Symbolic Order, Bale’s Batman in addition to being Batman and having all Batman’s resources (that would be comic book fantasy oodles of money colliding with real-live OWS corruption and the associated economic implosions of the same, and that would also be the star power of Morgan Freeman and the always excellent Michael Caine) also writes software like no one else can. 

And he does it on the fly, there’s that deus ex machina of movie time, a full six weeks ago, always already. 

It is this that “saves” him -- precisely by saving the girl, who, shades of Pretty Woman, “saves him right back.”

Ah, equality. 



Notes

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[1] Latour, Aramis or the Love of Technology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

[2] Donna Haraway, Modest Witness@Second Millennium: Female_Man©_Meets_Oncomouse^TM, London & New York, Routledge 1997 but see also her “A Cyborg Manifesto,” taken from her Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), chapter 8, pp.  149-181. Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html) is an online dissemination of this chapter that works if anything has worked, through the erotic, feminist fantasy cover designed by Haraway and the painter, whose work was originally not attributed, Lynn Randolph. 

As the artist describes her own picture. 

“I placed my human-computer / artist / writer / shaman / scientist in the center and on the horizon line of a new canvas. … A giant keyboard sits in front of her and her hands are poised to play with the cosmos, words, games, images, and unlimited interactions and activities. She can do anything.”  

http://www.lynnrandolph.com/ModestWitness.html 

Donna Haraway

With all the power lent by the imaginary, Haraway remains the go-to reference for writings on the posthuman or human-cyborg techno-hybrid. See for one example, just for a start, Haraway’s interview with Hari Kunzru, “You Are Cyborg,” Wired Magazine, 5/2 (1997): 1-7.

Nietzsche: On "getting oneself a culture"

Nietzsche’s own reflections on
 what is needed for an “education” as such are quite formidable—even as his own education was an extraordinary one. To this extent, we betray something of the limitations of our own formation whenever we find ourselves insisting that Nietzsche took or borrowed  his ideas from other thinkers—what does it mean (and this will be the point here) to “take” or “borrow” an idea?—ranging from Pascal and Spinoza or else Spir and Lange or Emerson, or Gerber, or Stirner or ultimately and of course, from Wagner himself (especially for the Wagnerians for whom no limit to the master’s own cultural prowess can be imagined).  

I am not saying that Nietzsche was not familiar with these thinkers, far from it. I am saying that an education is this familiarity and much, much more. Thus although it is amusing to note that the identity of the supposed origination of (the so-called ‘sources’ for) Nietzsche’s ideas just happens to change in the scholarly literature over time (and not less with the mood and, nota bene!, educational formation of his commentators), it is also noteworthy that the very same set of assumptions applies (negatively speaking) for those who are fond of insisting that Nietzsche could never have read Kant (just to pick one contentious example, contentious given the influence of Kant on the 19^th century, an influence we fail to see in the 20^th as in the 21^st century, at least so far).

The idea that an education, the getting of or the having of one, is a simple affair, and thus that the parallel idea of an upgrade to the more-than-human, that is now: the trans-human would simply be like taking a course, signing up for an instructive module, supposes that one pretend, (as transhumanists do like to pretend) that one can/should set aside questions of cultural inequalities, differences in wealth, “class” differences and so on. In this (an sich inherently optimistic when it is not calculating when it is not deliberately mendacious) regard, the transhumanist movement may be revealed as a humanism, here using the term as Sartre once spoke of Existentialism as a Humanism.

By contrast Heidegger’s “Humanismusbrief” is written against such a presupposition. See Sartre’s L’existentialism est un humanisme and compare both with Sloterdijk’s controversial Elmau lecture: Regeln für den Menschenpark. 

Hence and at least in principle, human enhancement may be regarded, if only for the sake of argument, as corresponding to “enhancement for all,” like “micro-chips for all,” or “airport security searches for all.”  

Transhumanism as the New Future of our Educational Institutions

Many scholars, and nearly all tech related advertising, assume a chirpily upbeat, focus on technology and how it is changing the world, transforming us: the transhuman is the human plus (whatever) technological enhancement.   

As a specific, Stefan Sorger is one scholars who raises the issue of Nietzsche and evolution, an issue that is itself far from straightforward (most readings of Nietzsche and evolution depend upon a fairly limited understanding of Darwin and, not less, a fairly limited understanding of Nietzsche’s own understanding of Darwin). 

We can hardly raise all the relevant questions 
that remain to be explored on the (very, very) complicated theme of Nietzsche and Darwin, but the key issue seems to be the (may we say mildly Lamarkian?) parallel Sorgner constructs between education and genetic enhancement. Nevertheless, and his argument depends on this, education and genetic enhancement are “structurally analogous procedures.”  
This is worth noting as arguments in favor of technogically sophisticated enhancements in a many arenas similarly depend upon such analogies.^[1]  

But what is “education”?   

Shall we understand this in the traditional sense of Bildung or as what counts for the French as formation and where we may speak of either in terms of what Nietzsche also called getting oneself a culture, that is: personal and intellectual cultivation?

Or, and now apart from these traditional  meanings, will an “education” correspond to nothing more than the business (emphasis on the economic or cost-based affair) of acquiring and conferring, i.e., obtaining and selling degrees and certificates — all like such modules, courses, degrees, parallel to many add-ons and upgrades, like iPhone or android apps and the enormous market that there is for cell-phone accessories which same pale in comparison to the market for iPad accessories, Apple and otherwise? 

And yet, it may be that this surface parallel calls for a bit more reflection, especially with regard to Nietzsche who himself reflected quite a bit on educational institutions as well as the idea of education—even if we begin with his very paradoxical, very provocative claim: “There are no educators” [Es gibt keine Erzieher] (HH II, The Wanderer and his Shadow § 267).  
What is certain is that many of us even within the academy do tend to suppose that education is just and only the acquisition of such degrees, especially at the graduate but also at the undergraduate level, and especially as evident in the current debate in England and mainland Europe on the virtues of the privatization of the university—a debate which manages to overlook any review of the actual practice of the same as this can be found in the US.

European advocates focus on Princeton, or Yale, or Harvard, somehow managing to piss paying attention to  the hundreds of thousands of tuition-driven, for-pay or profit institutions as these abound at every level of post-secondary education in the United States. As for me, I’d compare CUNY or SUNY or the University of California system to private schools, even top tier schools, any day—if not of course when it comes to prestige as that is a market and class affair, but indeed and when it comes to education.  Nor would I be the only one.  The more critical point however is indeed that European fantasies about private schools tend to suppose that all private schools work like top tier schools. For a discussion, see Babich, “Educationand Exemplars: Learning to Doubt the Overman” (but I also recommend the other contributions in) Paul Fairfield, ed., Education,Dialogue and Hermeneutics (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 125-149.

No need for factual feedback to sully our models, as Orrin Pilkey, a very practical or applied or hands-on coastal scientist has argued with stunning consequentiality when it comes to beach erosion and the public costs of “maintaining” the same and with very specific meteorological applicability to the debates on global warming.

See Orrin H. Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, Useless Arithmetic:Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) as well as Pilkey’s new Global Climate Change: A Primer.  And see his very practical, timely editorial: “The road ahead on the Outer Banks,” Newsobserver.com, Sat., Oct 08, 2011. I discuss Pilkey’s analysis of modeling further in Babich, “Towards a Critical Philosophyof Science: Continental Beginnings and Bugbears, Whigs and Waterbears,” International Journal of the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 24, No. 4 (December 2010): 343-391.

I.e., no empiricism, please: we’re idealists cum speculative realists.

 

 

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^[1] Sorgner, “Beyond Humanism: Reflections on Trans- and Posthumanism,” Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 21, Issue 2 (October 2010):1-19. Here cited from: http://jetpress.org/v21/sorgner.htm

  

Immortality, Mitochondria, and Media Futures

With the idealized expectation of the technological 'rapture' goes a vision of technological oversimplification that is not quite a result of our being closer and closer to a future we once imagined.

 Said otherwise, talk of 2045 was, once upon a time, talk of some unimaginably distant era, as was talk of 2012. Or indeed 1998—which was indeed and to be sure the supposedly "future" time-period of the 1968 American television series Lost in Space.

  To see this it is worth thinking a bit about Aubrey de Grey, a software developer or programmer who, having learnt sufficient biology for the purpose^[1] has been arguing that we can resist aging if we avoid its causes, to wit the oxidation of cells and the build-up of waste-products in those same cells. 

Having determined that it is the mitochondria that develop problems or ‘damage’ by getting gunked-up (or losing ‘efficiency’), de Gray proposes that we send in little nanobots to clean them out (or indeed, as de Grey also imagines, as so many mechanical replacements for what are clearly less-than ideal organelles). 

 

What de Grey has in mind is close to the miniaturized spaceships of Fantastic Voyage,the 1966 film of Raquel Welch’s travels on a microscopic level, which film title just happens to accord with one of Kurzweil’s first books for his ventures into technological rapture.  

De Grey not only runs an anti-aging foundation (and one supposes that he has all manner of highly motivated and well-heeled investors backing him) but also has an appointment on the faculty of Kurzweil’s Singularity University), straddling as he does both sides of the biotech and computer tech industry.

But for a critical overview that also applies to Kurzweil’s prediction of the coming ‘technological singularity,’ see Richard A. L. Jones, who is a professor of physics at Sheffield University, “Rupturing The Nanotech Rapture,”  IEEE Spectrum (June 2008): 64-67 and see further Jones’s earlier, Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

And yet, as it turns out, de Gray's pitch, like Kurzweil's own, is less about biology than technology and marketing, precisely in the way we relate to technology as those who have, as fully vested heirs of a cargo cult, grown up with devices we know how to use from electric appliances, toilets (to be Illichian here), televisions and computers, cell-phones and coffee-makers, automobiles and airplane travel, but could not ourselves fabricate if our lives depended on it (this is the ominous and recurrent subtext of the future-as-desert film genre, like Road Warrior or Mad Max or Bladerunner and even short story turned film, The Hunger Games). Assuming, as we do, that someone else makes the tool, or writes the code for our app idea, i.e., assuming that some factory actually deploys the technology, the gadgets are what it is all about.  

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^[1] Although de Grey does not have a post at Cambridge University and there was a certain understated scandal associated with the implication that he did have one, he does hold a doctorate from Cambridge for his The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (Austin: Landes Publishing, 1999). See also Denham Harman, “Aging: A Theory Based on Free Radical and Radiation Chemistry,” Journal of Gerontology, 11 (3) (1956): 298-300.