Drextech As Superlative, Now With "Existence Proofs"!

Insofar as all of this recent drextech talk hereabouts is connecting up specifically with my Superlativity critique, it is important to note that where "nanotechnology" is concerned I tend to focus on claims that technodevelopment will arrive at a superabundance through which we will presumably circumvent the impasse of stakeholder politics in a world shared by an ineradicable diversity of peers. The aspect that I focus on is the discourse of superabundance as an anti-political wish-fulfillment fantasy.

This "anti-political" discourse, as it happens, tends to function concretely in the service of elitist-incumbent-authoritarian political ends, whatever the professed politics of its adherents.

But like the other super-predicates of superlative discourse, superabundance amounts to a personal investment in a stealthy article of faith proffered up as endlessly-deferred scientific "predictions." The three super-predicates, recall, are superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance, and they correlate to the three theological omni-predicates -- omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. But like the avowed articles of faith of the omni-predicates with which they are correlated, these super-predicates are ultimately incapable of functioning as factual assertions at all, they are self-consuming quasi-factual placeholders for the brute assertion of faith itself.

Confronted with superlative utterances it is entirely beside the point to indulge in what appear to be technical disputes about the validity of the scientific claims that are hyperbolized into rationales for superlative articles of faith or to debate technodevelopmental timelines for superlative "outcomes." To indulge superlative futurologists in these preferred arguments is as little scientific as debating the number of angels who can dance on a pin-head with a monk or pouring over Nostradamus with some disasterbatory enthusiast to "determine" the exact date the world will end. The phenomenological payoff for the True Believer, so long as these conversations play out in real time, is to confer onto their imaginary object of faith a substantial reality that the object itself cannot otherwise attain. It is better for everyone not to indulge this sort of irrationality at all, certainly not to confuse this sort of thing with actual science or actual policy discourse to the cost of the indispensable work these enterprises actually do, or, at any rate, one should understand this sort of thing as an essentially idiosyncratic aesthetic or moral matter on the part of its enthusiasts and treat it (even celebrate it) as one would comparable enthusiasms in their proper precinct.

Anyway, to the extent that the drextech business takes up the faith-based discourse of superabundance it is susceptible to the superlativity critique, but while drextech is exemplary of Superlativity in this way, it is far from essential to it. It seems to me that late-century digital-utopianism and hype about immersive virtualies, as well as quite a lot of mid-century automation discourse also indulged conspicuously in superlative discourse as the anti-political gesture of an aspiration toward the technodevelopmental "accomplishment" of superabundance. I regard Roland Barthes' reading of "Plastic" in his Mythologies as yet another example of the same.

I think all this is related to but not exactly the same sort of thing that I was talking about when last week I discussed the relation of marginal ideas and warranted consensus in the scientific mode of reasonable belief ascription, and similarly related to but not exactly the same thing Richard Jones is pointing to when he delineates the ways in which the claims arising out of drextech fandoms are marginal to consensus science, are overconfident and uncaveated in ways that are uncharacteristic of consensus science, and rely on deeply questionable uninterrogated assumptions that would trouble most consensus scientists, and so on. He's far more qualified to address technical questions at a level of detail my own different training not to mention different temperament ill-suits me for, but I am qualified to know to stick to consensus where I am not qualified to falsify or substantiate candidate assertions for scientific belief and to recognize marginality by the available criteria on hand and treat it accordingly. It seems to me that my modesty is better suited to proper scientificity than the immodesty of the superlative "champions of science" who would deride my muzzy-headed lie-brul elite fashionable nonsensicality.

It does seem to me there is a common tendency in superlative discourse for its adherents to hang their hats on "existence proofs" the generality of which is scarcely substantial enough to bear the weight of confidence in particular outcomes and particular technodevelopmental trajectories that tend to get connected to them.

It is hard to see how biological realities actually substantiate the confidence drextechians seem to have in the technodevelopmental accomplishment of highly-controlled programmable general-purpose self-replicating room-temperature molecular manufacturing when that actually isn't what we find in biology after all. Similarly, it is hard to see how the realities of organismic intelligence actually substantiate the confidence AI-enthusiasts have in the technodevelopmental accomplishment of differently materialized intelligences, let alone bear the weight of confidence "uploaders" have that consciousness can migrate across substrates without loss.

One hears techno-immortalists declaring that because intelligence is material rather than supernatural this means that presently biological intelligence can migrate into imperishable digital networks in principle, when it seems at least as likely that the materiality of consciousness renders the concrete materiality of its incarnation non-negligible and hence less susceptible to "migrations." Indeed, I expect that the "plausibility" of such scenarios of migration (the frame itself is a metaphorical sleight of hand, after all, rather than any kind of lab result) derives more from the deep seated familiarity of mystical framings of insubstantial ensouled consciousness "imprisoned" by the material body more than anything else, however vociferously these superlative futurologists disdain religious faith otherwise.

In a nutshell, I think superlative faith-based initiatives find comfort in these "existence proofs" because they need to find them there, not because there is any reasonable support to be found in them. Skeptics are quite familiar with the faithful who find "proof" of God, and so of the immortality of their souls, in the sublimity of a buzzing blooming sun-drenched natural world without God or immortal souls anywhere on hand. It is a mercy at any rate that the faithful don't try to sell us on the notion that it is in such moments of inspired free-association that they are behaving as model scientists, which is what the galling flabbergasting spectacle of Superlativity too often seems to amount to.

There can be an appealing poetry in esoteric mysticism and in the aesthetic practices of personal perfection in which the faithful indulge -- so long as they don't become hectoring and puritanical I find it as easy to sympathize with their lifeways as I do other creative people, poets, punks, perverts, party-animals and so on. If the superlative futurologists just realized that they are another sf fandom and stopped messing with urgently needed public technodevelopmental deliberation in a time of disruptive technoscientific change, they could be perfectly charming and harmless as well, as better befits their preoccupations.

But to the extent that superlative discourse fancies itself a world-historical movement, whomping up a sub(cult)ural constituency, advocating an ideology from the vantage of an organizational archipelago impacting actual public discourse and actual policy, then I'm afraid it becomes crucial to identify its essentially faithful constitution and critique its mobilization and ramification in the world as such.

That Superlativity is not properly scientific is important to grasp and expose, especially given the tendency of superlatives to sell themselves as a kind of scientific avant-garde, but it matters more to understand not just that Superlativity fails to pass muster as scientific but that it is essentially a faith-based initiative indulging in moralizing politics from a sub(cult)ural vantage and hence constitutes a threat to secular democratic multiculture in much the same ways that perniciously politicized fundamentalist faiths always are.