Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, November 05, 2007

More on Technological Immortalism

Friend of Blog Anne Corwin writes:

The[re is a] dialogue between two philosophical positions: one in which death is defended as a kind of social/economic/spiritual "good", and one in which death is decried as a kind of enemy.

I think this framing is profoundly misleading. There are of course many general discussions of benefits of generational mortality, the influx of new ideas, the personal meaning that is always available in any profoundly transformative experiences, especially widely shared ones, the call to responsibility mobilized by the need of cherished people for caregiving and so on. To affirm such things is far from the same thing as expressing that one is personally thrilled at the prospect of extinction, or of the marginality, diminishments, and suffering that too often freights it. Nor is it to deny that there are surely alternate ways of arriving at these values, nor that there are other values than these that one might well value more than these. I do think one risks disrespect to deny the meaning and real good that many (though certainly not all) are able to make out of the experience in making do with death. One can recognize all of this at once while still seeing enormous value in the therapeutic address of customary impacts of aging, in finding ways of living longer, healthier lives. Not only is this possible, in fact, but I daresay it is a completely mainstream attitude on this question. One finds in the writings of some Deep Ecologists and Anarcho-Primitives very strong defenses of Death, I suppose, but it seems to me even in these writings what might seem the perverse "championing" of unnecessary suffering and death often functions as a polemical intervention to demand rethinking of the enormous risks and costs to ourselves, to our communities, and to our environment we have come to take on altogether uncritically in pursuit of selfish and superficial satisfactions, wasteful vanities, and so on. I personally think it makes no sense at all to decry death as an enemy any more than to celebrate it as an ally: I regard it as a fact, as fundamental a condition of finitude as there is, and as such I find it prior to enemies and allies in the sense you seem to mean.

We were talking about how important it is to focus on the practicalities of getting solid research going, as opposed to on what might be termed "intellectual sparring".

Be careful not to drift into anti-intellectualism here. That is the last thing in the world an intellectual with enormously unconventional convictions should be embracing. There is a strong tendency in default technocentric discourses and social formations to denigrate the political, to pretend to apoliticism, or to indulge in anti-political dreams of a technocratic circumvention of political debate. This anti-politicism has an obvious politics, of course, however much it disavows them: among its features, a tendency to accept given sociocultural terms uncritically (and so to naturalize and undermine the actual contestability of those terms, however irrational or unfair they may be), a tendency to embrace elite (technocratic, expert, professional) understandings of public decision-making, a tendency to retreat into highly rarefied interpretative communities with little communicative connection to the public of which they are still a part, and so on. Understanding the impact of these tendencies requires critical engagement, and often what will look like "intellectual sparring."

The longevity-oriented futurism discourse that took place in the 1970s serves as a fine historical record of what happens when people focus on the intellectual sparring and the feel-good qualities that ensue from "winning" debates or publicly cheerleading for a favored cause -- that is, people write books and articles, and get together for coffee and stimulating conversation, but not a whole lot actually gets done in the practical sense.

Funny, I think the failures of 1970s Technological Immortalism are precisely the same as the failures of Technological Immortalism today: they are selling moonshine. Few will bite the hook, but a few fervently will do so. Actual technodevelopmental social struggle is not properly understood in analogy to an elite artistic movement or in analogy to the struggle of a marginalized identity for recognition. It is the struggle of an abiding diversity of stakeholders to shape the distribution of ongoing, emerging, and proximately upcoming technoscientific costs, risks, and benefits according to their different aspirations. Grasp this and Superlativity loses its purchase altogether.

I do have strong philosophical sympathies toward the exuberant "call to arms" against the idea that people "should" die of old age (because of some outmoded notion of "normality" or "naturalness").

I must admit a certain perplexity at this. It seems to me one hasn't earned the assertion that it is "outmoded" to describe death by old age as natural, until one has good reason to think there are actually existing people who are not so dying. There just are not, and this really does matter. It also seems to me that there are any number of poor and otherwise marginalized people suffering and dying here and now from actually treatable conditions and that they deserve the "call to arms" more urgently than anybody else at the moment, since at least they seem likely to benefit from such a call. As for the idea that people should die, I must admit that the question is utterly unintelligible to me, rather like asking the question should people be embodied, should they be language-users, should they be immersed in history. These look to me to be fundamental conditions of human experience, certainly open to rearticulation in their concrete specificity and resignification in their present meaningfulness, but basic facts. For me, "calls to arms" involving demands that we should not be mortal seem rather hysterical than exuberant, and so possibly that accounts for why I have less personal sympathy for them than you seem to do.

But: (and feel free to ridicule this assertion if it needs it, or if it would amuse you to do so :P) I am not sure what you mean by the "fact of human mortality."

I hope you will not think that I am ridiculing you (which is the last thing in the world I would want to do given my indebtedness to your writing on neurotypicality and disability) when I respond that literally every human being on earth historically almost certainly has died, and every human being now living is almost certain to die, and that this looks to me rather as fact-like as facts can get.

I emphatically don't think there's any way out of vulnerability to annihilation, and present-day physics seems to suggest that the universe isn't immortal by any means.

If you emphatically do not believe in technological immortality or invulnerability then it will repay close scrutiny why you would continue to speak of immortality, defeating aging, overcoming mortality, and so on contrary to this emphatic belief (if you do so).

Is it "superlatively technocentric" of me to imagine that pathology-inducing age-related bodily changes might someday be mitigated on a very wide scale? Or would the "superlative" formulation of this imagining have to include unlikely promises or assertions that this mitigation is going to happen soon! and via this particular path?

Wide-scale mitigation of pathology-inducing age-related bodily changes is healthcare, not technological immortalism. Discourses that frame this complex, little understood, unpredictable, and likely open-ended constellation of desired therapeutic outcomes as a matter of overcoming human finitude, mortality, vulnerability, sociability, history and so on are certainly Superlative and activate many of the pernicious and pathologizing tendencies I have delineated in my critique. Claims that such outcomes are now proximate or that we know enough now to know which developmental paths will surely best accomplish them seem to me to constitute a rather hilarious and clumsy line in hype.

5 comments:

jimf said...

> Actual technodevelopmental social struggle is not properly
> understood in analogy to an elite artistic movement or in
> analogy to the struggle of a marginalized identity for recognition.

And neither, surely, is actual scientific research, in
biochemistry, molecular biology, and medicine.

Dale Carrico said...

By the way, I don't mean to deny the power of books like Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death, or Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, or the enormous outpouring of ecstatic poetry, painting, and film dedicating itself to a certain construal of life against death -- But I can scarcely imagine transhumanists reading Ginsberg or Genet or watching Maya Deren or Kenneth Anger and connecting up these projects to their Superlative engineering outcomes... No doubt I am overgeneralizing somewhat, I mean no offense, but this just doesn't seem to be at all the sort of thing they are talking about.

jimf said...

Dale wrote:

> I personally think it makes no sense at all to decry death
> as an enemy any more than to celebrate it as an ally:
> I regard it as a fact, as fundamental a condition of finitude
> as there is, and as such I find it prior to enemies and allies
> in the sense you seem to mean. . .
>
> As for the idea that people should die, I must admit that
> the question is utterly unintelligible to me, rather like
> asking the question should people be embodied, should they
> be language-users, should they be immersed in history. These
> look to me to be fundamental conditions of human experience,
> certainly open to rearticulation in their concrete specificity
> and resignification in their present meaningfulness, but
> basic facts. For me, "calls to arms" involving demands that
> we should not be mortal seem rather hysterical than exuberant,
> and so possibly that accounts for why I have less personal
> sympathy for them than you seem to do.

Yes. Not to minimize the loss he experienced, but Eliezer Yudkowsky's
stage-dramatic defiance of Death in his Web-eulogy for his
deceased brother ("Yehuda Yudkowsky, 1985-2004",
http://yudkowsky.net/yehuda.html ):

"How **dare** the world do this to us? How **dare** people
let it pass unchallenged?

. . .

Religion does not forbid my relatives to experience sadness and pain,
sorrow and grief, at the hands of their deified abuser; it only forbids
them to fight back. . .

Human beings resisted the Nazis at the risk of their lives, and at the
cost of their lives. To resist the greatest Enemy costs less, and yet the
resisters are fewer. It is harder for humans to see a great evil when
it carries no gun and shouts no slogans. But I think the resisters will
also be remembered, someday, if any survive these days. . .

You do not make peace with darkness! You do not make peace with Nazi Germany!
You do not make peace with Death!"

(echoed, BTW, in Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar's recent Web novel,
_Post Mortal Syndrome_[*], Chapter 17:

------------------------------------
"Come away, Dr. Treadwell. He's passed."

Roberta looked up angrily. "Don't say that!"

"I'm sorry dear, but—"

"I know he's gone. But he hasn't 'passed' anywhere. My father has died.
He's **dead**. I'll never see him again." Her voice broke.
"Damn it, this has to stop. This has to goddamn **stop**."
------------------------------------

strikes me as somehow hollow. In the same eulogy, Yudkowsky
wrote:

"I used to say: 'I have four living grandparents and I intend to have four
living grandparents when the last star in the Milky Way burns out.'"

But what about that last star? Would death, even
after a trillion years (putting aside the staggering
assumption of any significant continuity between a
human mind and a consciousness that could encompass
a trillion years), be any easier to bear?

(I leave aside the fact that **some** folks' deaths come as
a blessing for those around them, a fact that few feel
comfortable in discussing.

LADY BRACKNELL: I was obliged to call on dear Lady Harbury.
I hadn't been there since her poor husband's death. I never
saw a woman so altered; she looks quite twenty years younger. . .
[She] seems to me to be living entirely for pleasure now.

ALGERNON: I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief.

LADY BRACKNELL: It certainly has changed its colour.
From what cause I, of course, cannot say. )

Nor can I quite bring myself to believe that such exaggerated
petulance at the limits of existence increases the likelihood
of finding ways to overcome them.

I can't imagine Aragorn's last words to Arwen, "I speak no comfort
to you, for there is no comfort for such pain within the
circles of the world." ever really being gainsaid, at least
not "within the circles of the world."


[*] In the first chapters of this fantasy, set in the present
or near future, a molecular geneticist has invented a serum that
will 1) cure cancer 2) reverse aging 3) boost intelligence and
4) regenerate limbs, all in one swoop, and with no side effects.
This miracle is accomplished off-stage -- it's just there for the taking,
dontcha know, because of the wonderfully accelerating biotech
we're in the midst of.

The talented geneticist falls for the charms of a divorced mom,
whose little boy is dying from a brain tumor.

An inevitable plot device causes the mom, the little boy, the
geneticist, and a crazed gunman all to get injected with the
serum.

After that, the primary problems seem to revolve around
such things as pesky government regulations that make it illegal
to perform genetic modifications on humans, etc., etc.

jimf said...

Framing "maturity":

"In the fullness of time, he knew, he would come to terms with
this. Redemption and recovery, the acquisition of maturity in men
and women cruelly damaged by history's poisons and limits."

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/fiction/online/serials/post_mortal_syndrome/56

A few lines earlier:

"Estella frowned, rotated one end of the strip, held both ends parallel,
pressed the glued tips together. . . [B]oth children gazed in satisfaction
at the famous puzzling shape. . .

'The road goes ever on,' Alex sang in a melodious soprano."

Broderick quotes Tolkien. How droll.

jimf said...

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/fiction/online/serials/post_mortal_syndrome/51
------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Chang and Dr. Gibson have created a profoundly Promethean
moment in history, a crux, a watershed between past and future
like no other, greater in significance, I think, even than
the taming of fire and the emergence of language."

"The end of dying," Jill said. . .

"The world has been standing for twenty years on the verge of
a major population crisis, getting closer and closer to the edge of
unsustainability—"

"Sorry, Paul," Maureen said, face flushed. "That's Green bullshit. . .
We can feed and house and clothe a hundred billion if we have to,"
she told him angrily. "In twenty years time we'll have nanotechnology
to take care of food and everything else we need to get by. The analysis
is on the web. . ."
------------------------------------------------------------