Superlativity Is Neither Enlightened Nor Scientific

Upgraded and adapted from a response of mine in the Moot:

There is nothing in current technique that "implies" the arrival at the superlative outcome in which you are personally invested.

What I see is humanity discovering things and applying these discoveries to the solution of shared problems (and usually creating new problems as we go along) where you seem to see a "trend," a series of stepping stones along the path to an idealized superlative outcome. This time, you are calling it "control of matter with atomic precision." What you probably really mean by this is something like the arrival of "drextech," or the "nanofactory," a robust programmable poly-purpose self-replicating room-temperature device that can transform cheap feedstock into nearly any desirable commodity with a software recipe.

I call this superlative outcome "superabundance," and this particular superlative aspiration is also familiar in a great deal of digital utopianism and virtuality discourse of the last decade, just as it suffused discourses of automation and plastic in the post-war period before that, just as it drove the alchemical project of turning lead into gold for ages before that.

The aspiration to superabundance is the infantile fantasy of a circumvention of the struggle with necessity, ananke: in psychoanalytic terms a pining for a return to the plenitude represented by the Pleasure Principle and renunciation of the exactions represented by the Reality Principle. Or, in different terms, it is an anti-political fantasy of a circumvention of the struggle to reconcile the ineradicable diversity of the aspirations of our peers with whom we share the world (where all are satisfied, no personally frustrating reconciliation is necessary).

In both of these aspects, it seems to me that this superlative aspiration is an irrationalist repudiation of the heart of what Enlightenment has typically seen as its substance -- the struggle for autonomous adulthood (as against subjection by parental, priestly, or otherwise unaccountable authorities) and for the consensualization, via general welfare and the rule of law, of the disputatious public sphere. It is worth noting that many superlative futurologists like to sell themselves as exemplars of "Enlightenment" while indulging in this infantilism, anti-politicism, and irrationalism. In a word, they're not.

It is not the available science that inspires your superlative aspirations, but science that provides the pretext and rationalization for your indulgence in what is an essentially faith-based initiative.

We are talking here and now about superabundance and in particular superabundance in its nano-Santalogical variant, but the same sorts of moves are taking place in the other variations: in which Singularitarians, for example, indulge the wish-fulfillment fantasy of either personally achieving or at least of bearing witness to the arrival of post-biological superintelligence, the Robot God Who, if Friendly, solves all our problems for us, or Who, if Unfriendly, ends the world in an ubergoo apocalypse, in either case constituting a history-ending Singularity (hence the name of their particular variant of the Robot Cult); or in which techno-immortalists indulge the wish-fulfillment fantasy of personal immortality -- or superlongevity, or "indefinite lifespan" or whatever term that is currently fashionable among them to try to sounds less religious while pining after the quintessentially religious promise of eternal life.

Common to these discourses is the divestment of a familiar phenomenon (like personhood, intelligence, or life) of the actual organismic, social, and biological substance and context in which it has always hitherto been intelligible, very likely to the fatal cost of the coherence of the resulting ideas of these familiar phenomena, but then providing a compensation for this divestment of substance with an investment of radically hyperbolic aspiration. According to the terms of my Superlative critique, these hyperbolic aspirations function more or less as pseudo-scientific correlates to the conventional omni-predicates of theology -- omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence -- translated from the project to apprehend the supernatural divinity of God to the project of a personal transcendence into a differently super-natural demi-divinity via technoscience, characterized by superlative aspirations to superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance.

Now, quite apart from all that, you go on, in the usual way, earnestly to recommend to me that the cutting edge of superlative futurological discourse has abandoned this or that particular formulation, has taken up this or that "technical" variation, that I have failed to distinguish the position of Robot Cultist A from that of Robot Cultist B, and so on.

You will forgive me, but there is no need for those of us who confine our reasonable technoscientific deliberation to beliefs that are warranted by consensus science to lose ourselves in fine-grained appreciation of differences that fail to make the difference that actually makes a difference in such matters. You rattle off the handful of preferred figures who tell you what you want to hear, barnacled up in who knows what baroque jargon and ptolemaic epicycles, as though these are widely respected widely-cited figures outside your sub(cult)ure.

But they are not.

As a very easily discovered matter of fact, they are not.

It isn't a sign of discernment but of its opposite, as it happens, that you can recite the minute differences that distinguish three disputants on the question of how many angels can dance on a pin-head, when the overabundant consensus of relevant warranted belief has become either indifferent or hostile to the notion of angels dancing on pinheads as such.

It is the extraordinary assertion of belief that demands extraordinary proofs and patient elaborations. You are invested in a whole constellation of flabbergastingly extraordinary claims -- expectations of superhumanization and near-immortalization and paradisical plenitude -- and yet seem to demand as the price of skeptical engagement with your discourse that critics become conversant with disputes the relevance of which depends on the prior acceptance of the whole fantastically marginal and extraordinary enterprise in which they are embedded. Meanwhile, the public life of your discourse, whatever the technical details you believe to undergird it, continues to proceed at a level of generality and hyperbole built up of metaphors, citations of myth, activations of infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies, and supported, at most, with vague conjurations of inevitable progress, triumphalist reductionism, and a handful of "existence proofs," usually from biology, that aren't actually analogous at all in their specificity to the idealized outcomes that drive superlativity, at least not at the bedeviling level of detail that concerns consensus scientists and accountable policy-makers but not so much ideologues, priests, and scam artists.

We are offered up claims built upon claims built upon claims, few of which have excited the interest or support of a consensus of scientists in the relevant fields, and fewer still of which invest these claims with the idealized outcomes that are the preoccupation of those who indulge most forcefully in superlative discourses as such.

Superlativity, in a word, is not science. It is a discourse, opportunistically taking up a highly selective set of scientific results and ideas and diverting them to the service of a host of wish-fulfillment fantasies that are very old and very familiar, dreams of invulnerability, certainty, immortality, and abundance that rail against the finitude of the human condition.

They are a distraction and derangement of those aspects of Enlightenment that would mobilize collective intelligence, expressivity, and effort to the progressive democratization, consensualization, and diversification of public life and the practical solution of shared problems.

Progress is not transcendence, nor is enlightenment a denial of human finitude.

There is more than enough sensationalism and irrationalism distorting urgently needed sensible public deliberation on, for example, the environmental and bioethical quandaries of disruptive technoscientific change at the moment.

The Robot Cultists and their various noise machines are not helping. At all.