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.

Hence with all the troubles facing hard science, soft science, the science of clouds and apps that is the stuff of the coming technological rapture, vague as it is, may promise more success.  

For another take on the matter, see The Singularity Hypothesis, a discussion that lays claim to assess the matter scientifically inasmuch as the authors (hi! Eric) are keen on the same.  Rah!

Can’t get Apple and Lenovo (IBM) or some other PC to play right? Buy a Mac, say the experts (and then get ready to buy a lot of software, all the stuff you already have, once more, and innumerable times more, because what Apple really excels in is getting its customers to like buying stuff, apps, upgrades, software, tech time, etc.) Make a virtual machine, dual boot it (at least for the minority still capable of doing that these days).   A recent tech tip for those who wish to sweat the details (most folks would rather switch than fight...) is here (though if you read this PC World article it turns out that it too is all about switching...) or here.  Or because, like the two party system in the US, it is really only a matter of profit (i.e., there is no feud between Apple and Windows) here.


Apple and IBM still won’t play right but you won’t know it.

Linux operating systems are not the answer because Word, which is arguably the touchstone (no one can handle WordPerfect, which has given up and become a Word impersonator as a consequence) is not the same as Open Office. In fact, Word on a Mac and Word on a PC (I bristle at this because what are Macs if they are not PCs, toasters that don't toast? jetpacks without rocket fittings?)  does not give one identical results, although you need to look at the print results to note the difference (so make a PDF and minimize it, it’ll still be there, but coherent unto the file you crafted without the changes introduced by the new platform: WTSIWTG). So let’s all go blame Microsoft as if it were the great evil that besets your technological woes (slow computer? get a Mac!) but the problem is that hardware makes a difference for what software you can use. Your screen makes a difference (as Mac knows all too well), your computer/software settings make a difference (whether known to you or not) and now Google and Facebook and Twitter other bubble protocols to go with your television programming also makes a difference. The trick will be figuring out what kind of difference that difference makes.

Or maybe, owing to our own contouring of our own consciousness to the limits and constraints of the digital interface, be it that of email or of gaming or of the increasingly ubiquitous social networking (Facebook now appeals to the young, and the old and everyone in between, despite the social horror that it is for teens to ‘friend’ their parents), we increasingly find the flatness of computer enhanced experience exactly as charming as its purveyors claim.  

Here we note the very specific (and very popularly Nietzschean) “faith” in science and especially industrial, corporate, capitalist technology, if we read our Sloterdijk aright, or better yet if we read Guenther Anders, Theodor Adorno, or even Ivan Illich, we also know that same industrial, corporate, capitalist technology has been with us since the interregnum between the two wars. But this is again and also to say that such a vision is fascist through and through.  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.

Like Conrad,[1] the object of girl-fan affection in a bygone musical, we “love” our iPhones — O yes we do. Here what matters is not affect as much as brand loyalty — O Conrad, we’ll be true. Even with all its limitations, we are happy to say: O iPhone, we love you.

There is a lot published on this, but see Jonathan Franzen’s op-ed piece, “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts,” New York Times, May 28, 2011.

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[1] I owe this reference to Tracy B. Strong who persisted in singing this for no apparent reason day and night while I was writing this essay. And repetition, any repetition, affords rather the same propaganda effect as a commercial.