I'll be giving a talk, "Vulgar Biocentrism Among the Technophiles," Saturday, August 7, at the University of Toronto as part of a Conference, "Art and Life in the Posthuman Era."
In the talk I discuss the figurative content of biological science and technology, and the argumentative work these figures commonly do in the imagination and advocacy of radical technophiles.
Here's a longer description of what I'm up to in the talk:
"The first half of the twenty-first century is likely to be shaped most conspicuously by scientific interventions into biological processes, from ever more powerful genetic medical therapies and enhancements, bio-informatics, and bioengineered and superorganic foodstuffs, to the emergence of molecular manufacturing.
"The sweep and scope of biotechnological intervention already reverberates into the language and culture of the societies that are witness to them.
"Biology has a second life beyond its scientific content and technological applications. It is a rich field of metaphors and tropes to which thinkers and advocates and critics in diverse fields make separate recourse in their efforts to make sense of the world and anticipate and shape its futures.
"I argue that it is important for progressive technology advocates and critics to be conscious of our occasional reliance on this figurative dimension of biology, from our use of 'existence proofs' from biology to justify our faith in particular technological outcomes (for example, projected versions of molecular nanotechnologies the specific details of which would often be in fact different in key ways from existing biology) or the way we understand public life (for example, understanding culture through the problematic metaphor of the 'meme') or the way we justify or champion particular organizations of society or the economy (for example, the selective embrace of biology in the market naturalist formulations of 'bionomics').
"It is not my view that the embrace of a biological imaginary across culture is a negative or distortive development, and in fact I consider it practically inevitable and embrace aspects of it myself.
"But I recommend special care about the selective deployment of congenial aspects of biology to underwrite as objectively preferable what ultimately amount to subjective judgments of value. To the extent that 'transhumanism' is suspicious of the normative and ideological force of the 'natural' as a category, one would expect transhumanist discourse and criticism to resist the use of 'naturalizing' metaphors drawn from biology to underwrite its own judgments."
Friday, June 25, 2004
Saturday, June 19, 2004
Must We Put the Self on the Shelf?
My friend and fellow progressive technology advocate, the socialist-feminist bioethicist James Hughes wrote an interesting column in BetterHumans a while back, expressing his skepticism about much of the rhetoric of “extreme life extension.” I re-read the article, entitled “The Illusiveness of Immortality,” just this morning and it still has me thinking.
Hughes’s skepticism emerges from a somewhat unexpected direction. Like me, he has little doubt at all that medical knowledge and pharmacological, genetic, and prosthetic techniques may well soon overcome many of the diseases and conditions that afflict human organisms, especially the diseases of aging that afflict our normatively “later” stages of life, as well as ameliorating or intervening altogether in the more fundamental biological processes that constitute what we somewhat superstitiously call “aging” in the first place.
“No,” he writes “my problem with immortality is simply that I don't exist." He continues on: "You don't either. Our so-called personalities are just roiling masses of evolving impulses, memories, thoughts and sensations. There is no central chip, no core thought, no essential memory, that makes you you.”
Too often the rhetoric of "life-extension" seems to imply an hysterical dedication to a monolithic or stable personal selfhood, but one that is simply indefinitely extended or rendered in its supposed invulnerability to the infirmities of decline somehow a more perfectly self-sufficient self. William Burroughs savages this sensibility in his hilarious incandescent rant-poem “Immortality,” when he writes: “The tiresome concept of personal immortality is predicated on the illusion of some unchangeable precious essence: greedy old MEEEEEEEE forever. But as the Buddhists say, there is no MEEEEEEEE, no unchanging ego.”
Of course, it is hard to imagine how selves so construed could survive indefinite extension “intact” any more than they could the more brutal truncation of mortality they currently face. And as Hughes goes on to suggest, the same medicine that will preserve and enhance the healthy lifespan and so would inspire such fancies of stable prolongation will likely provide opportunities for radical modifications and augmentations of human organisms in the service of their unimaginably proliferating projects of personal perfection, any number of which would scramble beyond recognition the current narrative organization we denote as the “self.”
What worries me is that we can recognize a radical dynamism of the self, we can recognize the naivete that would affirm the “self” as some kind of unchanging substance – and yet still recognize the viability of “selfhood” as a way of organizing personal experience and intentions.
Hughes proposes a future with “more life, less selfishness” and I applaud the sentiment wholeheartedly. But we should take care to remember that neither is “life” an abstract substance that deserves to be produced and augmented monomaniacally as an end in itself, in the way of an impersonal utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number,” as Hughes puts it later in his article. The life that interests me is still lived in lives, and lives are lived in the real but insubstantial selves that incarnate them.
When I propose that selves are real but insubstantial, I do not mean to imply that selves inhere in spirits or souls, but in stories. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has said of the self that it is a “center of narrative gravity.” He proposes the intriguing hypothesis that the Platonic dialogue of the “I and the me” that constitutes the uniquely human way of having selves, arose from a habit of subvocalizing -- in the interests of strategically useful secrecy -- the human organism's linguistic exploration of her ongoing options. Whatever one wants to make of that, what remains for me is the compelling figure of the self as a kind of narrative organization of experience, memory, and desire. Such a self may be, as Richard Rorty would insist, absolutely contingent, but nonetheless profoundly worthy of respect, and indeed still the source of the very notion of respect.
Life, it seems to me, is no more to be respected in the abstract than any other process. It is when we find in life our likeness that we find it respectable. Selves are the flavors that “life” takes on, and we affirm them in their kinship and yet their unrepeatability, their irreplaceability, and in the incomparable riches and lessons they hold for us. Hughes writes that "[a]t best, we need to pretend there is a continuous discrete self so that we can have an orderly society and an orderly life.” He is right that there is much that is damaging and pathological in the insistence on perfect continuity, independence, and self-evidence in the ideology of selfhood, but I think he is wrong to consequently dismiss the self as a “pretense.”
However long our lives, however enriched our capacities, we will most of us still need selves and all of us an abiding respect for them, although likely much more capacious ones, to make sense of the proliferating and diverging demands of beings who are transformed by technology and yet share a world as peers. However transformed by technological development, a culture of rights must long remain a culture of selves. Perhaps what Hughes highlights in his provocative article is less that the self is an illusion, so much as that the self largely amounts in the end to a public goods problem.
Hughes’s skepticism emerges from a somewhat unexpected direction. Like me, he has little doubt at all that medical knowledge and pharmacological, genetic, and prosthetic techniques may well soon overcome many of the diseases and conditions that afflict human organisms, especially the diseases of aging that afflict our normatively “later” stages of life, as well as ameliorating or intervening altogether in the more fundamental biological processes that constitute what we somewhat superstitiously call “aging” in the first place.
“No,” he writes “my problem with immortality is simply that I don't exist." He continues on: "You don't either. Our so-called personalities are just roiling masses of evolving impulses, memories, thoughts and sensations. There is no central chip, no core thought, no essential memory, that makes you you.”
Too often the rhetoric of "life-extension" seems to imply an hysterical dedication to a monolithic or stable personal selfhood, but one that is simply indefinitely extended or rendered in its supposed invulnerability to the infirmities of decline somehow a more perfectly self-sufficient self. William Burroughs savages this sensibility in his hilarious incandescent rant-poem “Immortality,” when he writes: “The tiresome concept of personal immortality is predicated on the illusion of some unchangeable precious essence: greedy old MEEEEEEEE forever. But as the Buddhists say, there is no MEEEEEEEE, no unchanging ego.”
Of course, it is hard to imagine how selves so construed could survive indefinite extension “intact” any more than they could the more brutal truncation of mortality they currently face. And as Hughes goes on to suggest, the same medicine that will preserve and enhance the healthy lifespan and so would inspire such fancies of stable prolongation will likely provide opportunities for radical modifications and augmentations of human organisms in the service of their unimaginably proliferating projects of personal perfection, any number of which would scramble beyond recognition the current narrative organization we denote as the “self.”
What worries me is that we can recognize a radical dynamism of the self, we can recognize the naivete that would affirm the “self” as some kind of unchanging substance – and yet still recognize the viability of “selfhood” as a way of organizing personal experience and intentions.
Hughes proposes a future with “more life, less selfishness” and I applaud the sentiment wholeheartedly. But we should take care to remember that neither is “life” an abstract substance that deserves to be produced and augmented monomaniacally as an end in itself, in the way of an impersonal utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number,” as Hughes puts it later in his article. The life that interests me is still lived in lives, and lives are lived in the real but insubstantial selves that incarnate them.
When I propose that selves are real but insubstantial, I do not mean to imply that selves inhere in spirits or souls, but in stories. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has said of the self that it is a “center of narrative gravity.” He proposes the intriguing hypothesis that the Platonic dialogue of the “I and the me” that constitutes the uniquely human way of having selves, arose from a habit of subvocalizing -- in the interests of strategically useful secrecy -- the human organism's linguistic exploration of her ongoing options. Whatever one wants to make of that, what remains for me is the compelling figure of the self as a kind of narrative organization of experience, memory, and desire. Such a self may be, as Richard Rorty would insist, absolutely contingent, but nonetheless profoundly worthy of respect, and indeed still the source of the very notion of respect.
Life, it seems to me, is no more to be respected in the abstract than any other process. It is when we find in life our likeness that we find it respectable. Selves are the flavors that “life” takes on, and we affirm them in their kinship and yet their unrepeatability, their irreplaceability, and in the incomparable riches and lessons they hold for us. Hughes writes that "[a]t best, we need to pretend there is a continuous discrete self so that we can have an orderly society and an orderly life.” He is right that there is much that is damaging and pathological in the insistence on perfect continuity, independence, and self-evidence in the ideology of selfhood, but I think he is wrong to consequently dismiss the self as a “pretense.”
However long our lives, however enriched our capacities, we will most of us still need selves and all of us an abiding respect for them, although likely much more capacious ones, to make sense of the proliferating and diverging demands of beings who are transformed by technology and yet share a world as peers. However transformed by technological development, a culture of rights must long remain a culture of selves. Perhaps what Hughes highlights in his provocative article is less that the self is an illusion, so much as that the self largely amounts in the end to a public goods problem.
Saturday, June 12, 2004
The Politics of Progressive Technology Development: Arguments From Stage Management Versus Arguments From Superlative States
Many people are initially inspired (or appalled) by the sensawunda conjurations by radical technophiles of what I call Superlative State Technology: replicative nanoscale machinery nudging us into a post-scarcity gift society, genetic and prosthetic medicine delivering physical immortality, a hedonistic imperative that eradicates any unpleasant sensation for the sentients who could suffer one, a universe-wide diaspora via traversible wormholes, sprawling consensual (or not) hive-minded communities, quasi-transcendental "Omega Point" apotheoses, abrupt totalizing developmental discontinuities in history like the Vingean "Singularity" (either in its common acceleration of acceleration variant, or in the more rarefied arrival of more-than-normatively-human post-biological intelligence variant), replicative upload and/or AI arms races (what I call "boomergoo" scenarios), etc.
Of course, what makes these heady confections especially breathtaking is that the technophiles who propound them are no longer content to confine their projections to far-flung Stapledonian-scaled futures we could scarcely reach ourselves, but often confidently insist (they have pie charts) that millions now living will live themselves through the sweeping transformations they delineate.
I'll admit that in my time I've enjoyed the same delighted and deranging rush at these speculations as most technophiles have. However, I think that there is in fact little we can say now from our pre-Superlative locations to clarify beyond a certain basic point the special quandaries that would arrive with such Superlative States.
Once you "get" the fact that technological development will likely make things quite unexpectedly different quite unexpectedly soon, it is not clear to me there's much benefit beyond the pure exhilarating entertainment value in dwelling on such Superlative States.
More to the point, Superlative States would inevitably arrive at the end of developmental trajectories consisting of multiple stages, each one of which will involve their own quandaries and debates and difficult problem-solving.
I think it will almost never be the case that these "intermediary" problems and issues would be much eased or clarified or even tangentially addressed by contemplating projected Superlative developmental end-points.
In fact, I would expect that too keen a focus on Superlative States would tend, on the contrary, (one) to distract technology advocates from the urgent complexities of these intermediary stages and their problems, would inspire too many advocates and critics (two) to trivialize the intermediary stages in their "modesty" compared to the Superlative States, and (three) would tend to make technology advocates impatient and incomparably more vulnerable to hype, careless in the face of the delicate and necessary efforts at negotiating the contending claims of multiple stakeholders at every stage, and disastrously less critical in general.
It is too easy to confuse projected Superlative States with teleological end-points that will then be read as expressing the deeper essence or ultimate "meaning" of particular trajectories of technological development. Bioconservatives hostile to the ongoing emergence of genetic medicine and techno-immortalists who champion genetic medicine in fact share a distressing tendency to act as though the actual meaning of finding a cure to Parkinson's Disease through genetic medicine would somehow be that this marvellous achievement would be a milestone along a developmental road eventuating in either (depending on your ideological positioning) an incomparably triumphant or disastrous technoconstituted human "immortality".
But, honestly, how on earth are we better able to assess the promises and costs of remediating particular diseases by bringing into the discussion the abstract fears and fantasies associated with the idea of eternal life, whatever that's supposed to mean? What would it clarify exactly about the historical impact of the printing press to say of its invention and use that it was a step along a developmental path that eventuated in the Internet, or might one day eventuate in the Holodeck?
My own expectation has come to be that whatever the special quandaries of Superlative State technological capacities, like extreme longevity or morphological freedom or uncontrollable replication, we will more likely address these with the very problem-solving resources we will have acquired through and in consequence of the developmental stages that lead up to their emergence themselves, rather than turning our attention to abstract speculations that took place when these forces first were set in motion.
Now, I have to say I don't think it is exactly fair to characterize this emphasis of mine as "conservative," "stealthy," or somehow "dishonest" -- though other progressive technology advocates have accused me occasionally of all of this.
Definitely I think that there are a host of obvious pragmatic considerations that suggest anyone interested in an effective progressive politics of developmental technology advocacy is better served by focusing on the proximate before the distant, the intermediate problem before the end-state problem. If this has the secondary effect of making radical technology advocacy more moderate and hence less threatening and hence easier to make common cause with as advocates marshall the forces they need organizationally to struggle for the outcomes they claim to desire, well, I mean, obviously, so much the better -- surely?
Of course, what makes these heady confections especially breathtaking is that the technophiles who propound them are no longer content to confine their projections to far-flung Stapledonian-scaled futures we could scarcely reach ourselves, but often confidently insist (they have pie charts) that millions now living will live themselves through the sweeping transformations they delineate.
I'll admit that in my time I've enjoyed the same delighted and deranging rush at these speculations as most technophiles have. However, I think that there is in fact little we can say now from our pre-Superlative locations to clarify beyond a certain basic point the special quandaries that would arrive with such Superlative States.
Once you "get" the fact that technological development will likely make things quite unexpectedly different quite unexpectedly soon, it is not clear to me there's much benefit beyond the pure exhilarating entertainment value in dwelling on such Superlative States.
More to the point, Superlative States would inevitably arrive at the end of developmental trajectories consisting of multiple stages, each one of which will involve their own quandaries and debates and difficult problem-solving.
I think it will almost never be the case that these "intermediary" problems and issues would be much eased or clarified or even tangentially addressed by contemplating projected Superlative developmental end-points.
In fact, I would expect that too keen a focus on Superlative States would tend, on the contrary, (one) to distract technology advocates from the urgent complexities of these intermediary stages and their problems, would inspire too many advocates and critics (two) to trivialize the intermediary stages in their "modesty" compared to the Superlative States, and (three) would tend to make technology advocates impatient and incomparably more vulnerable to hype, careless in the face of the delicate and necessary efforts at negotiating the contending claims of multiple stakeholders at every stage, and disastrously less critical in general.
It is too easy to confuse projected Superlative States with teleological end-points that will then be read as expressing the deeper essence or ultimate "meaning" of particular trajectories of technological development. Bioconservatives hostile to the ongoing emergence of genetic medicine and techno-immortalists who champion genetic medicine in fact share a distressing tendency to act as though the actual meaning of finding a cure to Parkinson's Disease through genetic medicine would somehow be that this marvellous achievement would be a milestone along a developmental road eventuating in either (depending on your ideological positioning) an incomparably triumphant or disastrous technoconstituted human "immortality".
But, honestly, how on earth are we better able to assess the promises and costs of remediating particular diseases by bringing into the discussion the abstract fears and fantasies associated with the idea of eternal life, whatever that's supposed to mean? What would it clarify exactly about the historical impact of the printing press to say of its invention and use that it was a step along a developmental path that eventuated in the Internet, or might one day eventuate in the Holodeck?
My own expectation has come to be that whatever the special quandaries of Superlative State technological capacities, like extreme longevity or morphological freedom or uncontrollable replication, we will more likely address these with the very problem-solving resources we will have acquired through and in consequence of the developmental stages that lead up to their emergence themselves, rather than turning our attention to abstract speculations that took place when these forces first were set in motion.
Now, I have to say I don't think it is exactly fair to characterize this emphasis of mine as "conservative," "stealthy," or somehow "dishonest" -- though other progressive technology advocates have accused me occasionally of all of this.
Definitely I think that there are a host of obvious pragmatic considerations that suggest anyone interested in an effective progressive politics of developmental technology advocacy is better served by focusing on the proximate before the distant, the intermediate problem before the end-state problem. If this has the secondary effect of making radical technology advocacy more moderate and hence less threatening and hence easier to make common cause with as advocates marshall the forces they need organizationally to struggle for the outcomes they claim to desire, well, I mean, obviously, so much the better -- surely?
Friday, June 04, 2004
Meless'Ambaren
My friend James Fehlinger just offered me his translation into Quenya (for me the most beautiful of J.R.R. Tokein's realized languages of the Middle Earth universe), of my blog's name Amor Mundi. Everything is prettier in Quenya, it really is. Screw Esperanto, I think we would have world peace in no time at all if we all just switched to Quenya (although the actual content of the stories in the Middle Earth universe gives me pause in making that prediction, come to think of it).
This reminds me of the story that Professor Tolkein claimed to believe that the prettiest phrase one would ever find in the English language was "cellar door," which one has to admit has an elvish air about it. Interestingly enough, Gertrude Stein was once asked what the most beautiful word in the English language was and, if my memory serves me correctly, she proposed her own very elven candidate: "celery." Namarie...
This reminds me of the story that Professor Tolkein claimed to believe that the prettiest phrase one would ever find in the English language was "cellar door," which one has to admit has an elvish air about it. Interestingly enough, Gertrude Stein was once asked what the most beautiful word in the English language was and, if my memory serves me correctly, she proposed her own very elven candidate: "celery." Namarie...
Ghosts of Futures Past: Arcosanti
Alex Steffen over at WorldChanging shared a passage snipped away from his upcoming book which he’s now pruning and polishing. If something this beautiful hits the cutting room floor, I can only imagine how stunning the book that remains will be. I’ll admit to prejudice, though. Arcosanti has been a focus of wistful imagination for me since I was a little kid, like Paris is for some people. I still mean one day to see it, and despite the sadness of Steffen’s piece there’s quite a lot in what he says that renews my eagerness to check it out myself. Here are a few tastes of the larger piece:
“Arcosanti… is now funded almost entirely through the sale of bells. It is essentially one big crafts guild. Which is a fine thing to be. Indeed, sitting there in the evening light, with birds chirping, and [a] young potter smiling my way, I can see the appeal: fuck it, let's all throw aside our worries and make bells. It'll be a good life. But it's not the City of the Future. [Actually, this seems to me among the pleasanter plausible futures I can think of, this side of the goo bestiary.]....
“We continue our walk. We pass a couple apartment buildings. The buildings themselves are a bit weathered and, well, not my architectural preference (very 70's, very blobject, very Planet of the Apes), but they are well-designed (they all employ passive solar, many have "sky theaters" built into the roof for sitting out and viewing the stars at night). The public space is great. There's an amphitheater with a waterfall running down the middle of the seats.... Sometimes the entire community gathers at night on the roofs of buildings overlooking the canyon, and lights are shone against the cliffs of the other side, and dancers perform in front of them, sending huge shadows writhing on the basalt walls....
“Arcosanti's half life is long over, and it is headed for it's own tiny heat-death. Sure, it's still growing, but the vision and the reality have too long diverged, and my sense was that the True Believers needed desperately to convince themselves that the dream was still alive. Maybe it is. Who am I, really, to say otherwise? Let them build their utopia in the desert, if they can pull it off.
“But Arcosanti isn't the future anymore. It smells too much of museum dust. It's the embalmed husk of a future, and a future that's older than I am, at that. I get in my car, and drive back down the rutted road, and wonder if I'll find some fresher dream ahead.”
A lovely piece, thanks to Alex Steffen for sharing it!
“Arcosanti… is now funded almost entirely through the sale of bells. It is essentially one big crafts guild. Which is a fine thing to be. Indeed, sitting there in the evening light, with birds chirping, and [a] young potter smiling my way, I can see the appeal: fuck it, let's all throw aside our worries and make bells. It'll be a good life. But it's not the City of the Future. [Actually, this seems to me among the pleasanter plausible futures I can think of, this side of the goo bestiary.]....
“We continue our walk. We pass a couple apartment buildings. The buildings themselves are a bit weathered and, well, not my architectural preference (very 70's, very blobject, very Planet of the Apes), but they are well-designed (they all employ passive solar, many have "sky theaters" built into the roof for sitting out and viewing the stars at night). The public space is great. There's an amphitheater with a waterfall running down the middle of the seats.... Sometimes the entire community gathers at night on the roofs of buildings overlooking the canyon, and lights are shone against the cliffs of the other side, and dancers perform in front of them, sending huge shadows writhing on the basalt walls....
“Arcosanti's half life is long over, and it is headed for it's own tiny heat-death. Sure, it's still growing, but the vision and the reality have too long diverged, and my sense was that the True Believers needed desperately to convince themselves that the dream was still alive. Maybe it is. Who am I, really, to say otherwise? Let them build their utopia in the desert, if they can pull it off.
“But Arcosanti isn't the future anymore. It smells too much of museum dust. It's the embalmed husk of a future, and a future that's older than I am, at that. I get in my car, and drive back down the rutted road, and wonder if I'll find some fresher dream ahead.”
A lovely piece, thanks to Alex Steffen for sharing it!
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