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Thursday, February 09, 2012

The Transhumanist War on Brains

Robot Cultist Hank Pellissier declares the human brain a "flawed, forgetful, feeble-minded, under-achieving blob... laughably dysfunctional, teeming with weaknesses" and to prove it writes this article with his. As often happens in works of "Serious Futurology" Pellissier masturbates for paragraph after paragraph talking about how awesome it would be if we could do things with our brains that we cannot: "I mean, telepathy, right? How cool would that be?" Somehow, when a middle aged white guy does this -- rather than, you know, a four year old talking about how cool comic books would be if they were real -- we are supposed to treat this as philosophy or policy analysis or science, somehow.

I have news for Hank Pellisser: You say you "want a god-like brain"? (That's the title of his, er, "essay.") You're in luck. All mortals are on the road to god-likeness. In not so very many years you will die, Hank, and you won't exist any more either, after all, and then your brain will in that moment arrive precisely at god-likeness. (Atheist joke -- puhDUM bum.)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but given the so-called omnipredication of the god-like brain -- a brain that is omniscient and hence seems to know everything in advance including everything it will will, but also presumably omnipotent and hence can will anything but somehow in a way that isn't limited by what its omniscience already knows it will have willed, and is also omnibenevolent but somehow knows all the awful evil in the world and can do anything it wants including things to ameliorate all that awfulness and evil but doesn't and yet still is good... I mean, I daresay daydreams of god-like brains are quite as befuddled by ineffectuality and paradox as are the brains with which we are already gifted.

One might be tempted to declare that theology in discerning such paradoxes has stumbled into contemplation of a condition of consciousness and conscience itself, and to wonder whether techno-fetishists pining to bulldoze away all that mess in a robotic reduction coupled with a bunch of amplified adolescent appetites (guns! girls! gold! as C.S. Lewis once scolded the idiot techno-transcendentalists of his day), peddled as a kind of transcendence into godhood, amounts to little more than another sad sociopathic infomercial to artificial imbecillence.

6 comments:

jimf said...

> . . .techno-fetishists pining to bulldoze away all that mess
> in a robotic reduction coupled with a bunch of amplified adolescent
> appetites (guns! girls! gold! as C.S. Lewis once scolded the
> idiot techno-transcendentalists of his day). . .

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition3.htm
-----------------------------
Nothing I can say will prevent some people from describing this
lecture as an attack on science. I deny the charge, of course. . .
I even suggest that from Science herself the cure might come.

I have described as a `magician's bargain' that process whereby
man surrenders. . . himself to Nature in return for power. . .
The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed
has put. . . a wide contrast between them in popular thought. . .
You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century
as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing
that came in to sweep it away. . . The serious magical endeavour
and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly
and died, the other strong and throve. But they. . .
were born of the same impulse. I allow that some. . . of the early
scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But. . .
we can discern the impulse of which I speak. . .

For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue
reality to the wishes of men. . .

If we compare the chief trumpeter of the new era (Bacon) with
Marlowe's Faustus, the similarity is striking. You will read in
some critics that Faustus has a thirst for knowledge. In reality,
he hardly mentions it. It is not truth he wants from the devils,
but gold and guns and girls. . . Bacon condemns those who
value knowledge as an end in itself. . . He rejects magic because
it does not work; but his goal is that of the magician.

-- C. S. Lewis, _The Abolition of Man_

jimf said...

> Robot Cultist. . . declares the human brain a "flawed, forgetful, feeble-minded,
> under-achieving blob... laughably dysfunctional, teeming with weaknesses". . .

It's an odd thing about >Hism and Singularitarianism, this contempt for
the human brain (and by extension, biological brains and nervous systems
in general -- they're all elaborations on the kinds of intercellular
signalling systems that bacteria started using to "talk" to each other
three and a half billion years ago, or whenever it was).

I mean -- yeah, it's possible to trick people into giving wrong answers
to carefully controlled questions, just as it's possible to trick
various sensory and perceptual systems via well-known optical
illusions, and so on. So, just as we have machines to extend
physical capabilities, and instruments to extend sensory capabilities,
people have invented symbolic logic and mathematics to extend
reasoning capabilities to circumstances and levels of abstraction
and complexity where the unaided human intellect would be
completely lost. Computers are among the instruments that extend
brute-force calculational abilities without having to employ
ranks of pink-collar workers chained to ledger books or
mechanical adding machines. All well and good.

But there's a **contempt** for biological intellection, among
the >Hists, that goes beyond acknowledging its limits to gloating
over its supposedly fundamental and irremediable inadequacies, which can
only be "repaired" by making a total break from the past --
ceding intellection to the godlike super-AIs which are going
to take over come the singularity.

This is a **very** firmly-held dogma among the Singularitarians --
you can see the celebration of supposed human cognitive deficiencies
in blog names like "Less Wrong" and "Overcoming Bias".
It seems to be of a piece with the contempt for the squishy,
aging biological bodies we're all stuck with. It **also**, not
to beat on a dead horse, harks back to movements like
Scientology, with the latter's rejection of the "reactive mind" (the "id",
as the Freudians called it) in favor of the "analytical"
(i.e., computer-like) mind. Or the followers of Ayn Rand,
who basically pursued the same thing. Or the classical science-fictional
trope of the superiority of the cool-headed, emotionless,
Spockian hero (or alien, or AI). And that idea, of the conflict
between fully-conscious, emotionless "rationality" (masculine,
advanced, superior), and animalistic,
instinct-and-impulse-driven emotionality ("hysterical", feminine,
primitive, inferior), of goes back centuries of course, as pointed
out by George Lakoff, Antonio Damasio, and
others. The truth, as always, seems to be more complicated.

But don't tell that to the >Hists! They're stuck in the old "golden-age"
SF paradigm, when SF writers and publishers like John W. Campell
and A. E. Van Vogt were celebrating L. Ron Hubbard's "Dianetics",
and having their heroes practice the "cortico-thalamic pause".

If you want to see what happens when this dogma is questioned,
have a look at the contributions of Richard Loosemore to the
SL4 mailing list, from a few years ago (and the reactions
thereto, which eventuated in Loosemore's being banned outright
by the list owner). There are links at the end of the
comment thread of:
http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2009/03/from-futurological-confusions-to.html

jimf said...

> "I mean, telepathy, right? How cool would that be?"

I think this must be a typo. But it's a funny one:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121331769665370259.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today
-------------------
The Wall Street Journal: Books
The Shape of Things to Come
by John Horgan; June 13, 2008

[Review of]
_Year Million_
Edited by Damien Broderick
(Atlas & Co., 330 pages. . .)

. . .

Most of the authors agree. . . that if we survive we will become
very, very smart. The IQ gap between our descendants and us,
one essayist estimates, will be greater than the gap between us
and tiny worms called nematodes, which can't even balance
a checkbook. . . Not only will our cyborg descendants be immortal;
they will also enjoy telepathic broadband communication with one
another via wi-fi-equipped brain chips, resulting in a global
mind-meld that physician Steven Harris describes as
"the Internet on crank."
-------------------

Well, well.

jollyspaniard said...

Where do you get the idea that our intelligence traces a line of ancestry from the Quroum behaviours of bacteria? That seems like a stretch to me, but if there's research to guggest a link I'd be quite interested in reading up on it.

jimf said...

> Where do you get the idea that our intelligence traces a line of ancestry
> from the [quorum?] behaviours of bacteria?

I don't know anything about "intelligence" -- in fact, I was just watching a YouTube
video interview with Gerald Edelman ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvbbnelnDcA )
in which he demurs when asked to define "intelligence". ;->

But as far as nervous systems go -- well, you know, there were nervous
systems before there were brains -- cnidarians like hydra have distributed
nerve nets, but no brains. And sponges have no nervous systems at all,
but are multicellular (though they can be disassociated into individual
cells and then re-aggregate -- quite a trick!). But sponges do use
intercellular communication molecules called eicosanoids -- precursors
of the endocrine hormones in us -- and it is interesting that the
endocrine system and the nervous system in higher animals are closely
entwined -- it isn't always easy to tell where "hormones" end and
"neurotransmitters" begin. So it's not much of a stretch to link
coordinated activity of cells via messenger molecules to the stuff
that goes on among bacteria. (And of course, there isn't even a
sharp dividing line between multicellularity itself and single-celled
life. I already mentioned the strange capabilities of sponges.
And slime molds are "really" just aggregations of amoebas.)

But no, I know of no "research" I could point you to. But nature is
incredibly conservative -- biological "tricks" are used and re-used over and
over again in different arrangements and circumstances, always
building on top of what came before. Most of
the basic biochemistry (itself incredibly intricate) is shared
by all life on earth.

Oh, and by the way, I wrote above:

> If you want to see what happens when this dogma [that the human
> brains is a "flawed, forgetful, feeble-minded,
> under-achieving blob... laughably dysfunctional, teeming with weaknesses"]
> is questioned, have a look at the contributions of Richard Loosemore to the
> SL4 mailing list, from a few years ago (and the reactions
> thereto, which eventuated in Loosemore's being banned outright
> by the list owner). There are links at the end of the
> comment thread of:
> http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2009/03/from-futurological-confusions-to.html

If you're interested, be sure to start at the **last** link and
work backward, if you want to see the stuff relevant to the quote
above.

jimf said...

> The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour
> are twins. . . For magic and applied science alike the problem is
> how to subdue reality to the wishes of men. . .

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/01/a-far-green-country.html#more
-----------------------
And if you think we're beyond believing in magic, you've got
another thing coming. . .

When I read SF, I am always delighted by the old, old magic in it.
And the Singularity is such a glittering, magical thing.
When I listen to discussions about the Singularity, when
I read stories about it, I hear: one day we will all wake up
and turn into fairies. One day we'll all go to Fairyland together.
White shores and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
I hear visions of a world whose technology accomplishes the
exact actions that magic strove to: transmutation, transmigration,
immortality, altering the body, the granting of wishes,
the reading of minds. Something out of nothing, lead into gold.
A world whose folk dwell in so much plenty and ease that they
might as well be fairies, their countries Fairyland. I hear
the same longing for these things that I hear when fantasy
authors write about dragons and potions and magic from before
the dawn of time.