Robot Cultist Rebrands Torture And Dreams of Futuristic Prisons As Virtual Hells

The Telegraph:

Philosopher Rebecca Roache is in charge of a team of scholars focused upon the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment. Dr Roache claims the prison sentence of serious criminals could be made worse by extending their lives... "There are a number of psychoactive drugs that distort people’s sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence," she said. A second scenario would be to upload human minds to computers to speed up the rate at which the mind works... "If the speed-up were a factor of a million, a millennium of thinking would be accomplished in eight and a half hours... Uploading the mind of a convicted criminal and running it a million times faster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000 year sentence in eight-and-a-half hours. This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time."

Of course, uploading a organismically incarnated human mind into a computer program is a profoundly biologically ignorant and conceptually incoherent notion. Although it would be a pity to interrupt the obvious enjoyments "philosopher" Rebecca Roache takes from her contemplation of the prospect of prisoners subject to centuries in virtual hells -- abandon hope all ye who enter here! and just think of the tax savings! -- one notes that the whole litany of techno-transcendental robo-cultic wish-fulfillment fantasies is unspooling in Dr. Roache's penal ruminations, from flogging software-expert/ amateur-genrontologist Aubrey deGrey's SENS elixer of life, to hawking nootropic and nutritional "enhancement" like a boner pill muscle powder krill-oil snake-oil salesman on a Vegas showroom floor, to cyberangel uploads in Holodeck Hell. There is absolutely nothing new in any of these stale futurological proposals -- although, as usual, we are expected to gasp at the audacity of such Big Thinking -- only the modest innovation of their punitive application to would-be criminals rather than the usual effort to seduce wannabe consumers.

"To me, these questions about technology are interesting because they force us to rethink the truisms we currently hold about punishment. When we ask ourselves whether it’s inhumane to inflict a certain technology on someone, we have to make sure it’s not just the unfamiliarity that spooks us," Dr Roache said. "Is it really OK to lock someone up for the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free? When we ask that question, the goal isn’t simply to imagine a bunch of futuristic punishments -- the goal is to look at today’s punishments through the lens of the future."

Although Dr. Roache declares these to be "questions of technology," none of the "technologies-in-question" exist or are likely ever to do so -- not in the forms on which she would fixate our attention. Clearly, "the technological" is functioning here in the usual futurological way, as a placeholder for an amplified fantasy of efficacious agency -- an instrumentalization and hence implementation of individual will that dreams of breaking the impasse of lifeway diversity that yields the frustrations of stakeholder politics and ethical responsibility.

It isn't true that anybody is "spooked" by virtual hell prisons, because none do or will ever exist. But when Dr. Roache admonishes us to overcome the timidity we feel because her proposals are "unfamiliar," she is indulging in the all-TOO-familiar cadences of the entrepreneurial innovative disruptive novel fresh bleeding edge hot tech boosterism of the "thought leader" repackaging the same old stale useless shit as New! and Improved! I'm sorry to break it to Dr. Roache, but of course the "thought leaders" of the CIA beat the transhumanoids to the punch this time around. We are all already quite acquainted with "enhanced interrogation" and the use of "psychoactive drugs" "to tinker with... brains." As usual, looking at political and ethical dilemmas through "the lens of the future" tends to take us on a reactionary trip to authoritarian retro-futures bathed in pastels and promising magickal powers. Let's ask somebody who has spent time in the torturer's chair "whether it's inhumane to inflict a certain technology on someone." A certain technology... really, it's hard not to shake your head at the sheer obtuse obviousness of it all. Everything new is old again.

Now, nothing is more commonplace than futurologists rebranding their own rebranding projects (in the service of stale goods and incumbent interests) as "philosophical speculation." I ask my readers just what is presumably clarified by Dr. Roache's "thought experiments"-cum-wish-fulfillment fantasies here, apart from symptoms of what look to be some ugly desires... hey, maybe that's what she means by "spooky"? Although Dr. Roache comes by her philosophy title honestly, I cannot say that I think the business she is in really is better described as "philosophy" than as PR. I should point out that she is a Research Fellow at transhumanist Nick Bostrom's Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, a scarcely stealthed Robot Cult outfit. From its birth in peddling market futures with just-so stories futurism has been making bets (usually with other people's money) and calling the result thinking, and usually Thinking Big. I'm not a futurist, but I'll venture the prophesy that we'll be hearing more Big Thoughts from the likes of Dr. Roache in... the future!

Why So Many Transhumanists and Digital Utopians Are Incapable of Imagining There's No Heaven

Upgraded and adapted from an exchange in the Moot "JimF" commented:

You know, I had (or attempted to have) [an] argument (or "civilized discussion" ;-> ) with a very smart person (a computer programmer I've known for decades) and it was impossible for me to get the subtle distinction to register. In his view, saying "the brain is not a computer" is tantamount to being a mystic, or a vitalist -- equivalent to claiming that life, and intelligence, must have a supernatural or non-material basis. I could **not** get past that impasse. So it is, I would guess, with many naive Transhumanists, Singularitarians, and AI enthusiasts. And that's true at the highest levels of what passes as the intelligentsia. I suspect you might see the same misunderstandings spun out if you were to witness a conversation between, say, Gerald M. Edelman and, oh, Daniel Dennett.

Mind has been metaphorized as a cloud, as a mirror, as the inscription of a tablet, as a complex of steam-pipes, and on and on and on. Setting that platitude aside, it is also true that many GOFAI ("Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence")-deadenders and techno-immortalists of the uploading sect (subcultures with more than a little overlap, I might add) seem to reject supernaturalism about mind only to replace it with a kind of techno-transcendental sooper-naturalism of robotic-AI, in which the mind-body dualism of spiritualism is re-erected as an information-meat dualism invested with very specifically false, facile hopes for techo-transcendence.

Of course, any consistent materialism about mind will necessarily treat seriously the materialization of actually-existing minds in biological bodies, and will recall that all information is non-negligibly and non-dispensably instantiated in actually-existing material carriers. The non-negligible, non-dispensable material substantiation of intelligence and mind forcefully argues against the pseudo-science and bad poetry of Robot Cultists who depend instead on inapt metaphors of "translation" and "uploading" and "transfer" to wish away these material realities the better to indulge in infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies about invulnerability from error, contingency, disease, or mortality by techno-transcending the hated meat body as digital cyberangel avatars in Holodeck Heaven and then peddling that priestly con-artistry and New Age woo as science.

Anyway, it makes no kind of sense to pretend materialism justifies dualism but once that irrational leap has been made it becomes perfectly predictable that those for whom the denial of traditionally religious mind-body dualisms does justify robo-cultically religious info-meat dualisms will treat as an entailment of their sooper-naturalist anti-supernaturalism that those who reject their enabling incoherence must somehow be common or garden variety pro-supernaturalists. The "vitalist" charge is just a variation: for the robo-soopernaturalist any materialism that is a barrier rather than a prop for their wanted techno-immortalizing informationalism about mind must be some kind of stealthy supernaturalist luddism. The point to grasp is that for the futurological faithful, one is either a believer in spirit stuff that might live on in Heaven or a believer in info-stuff that might be uploaded in Holodeck Heaven: Actual, this-worldly, secular-progressive, technoscientifically-literate materialisms don't hold much interest for Robot Cultists, you know.

Comments On and Critiques Of Existenz Volume on Humanism, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Futurism Solicited

Existenz itself has now linked to my Forum Page on its issue, "The Future of Humanity and the Question of Post-Humanity" to encourage further conversation there. Comments and critiques of the volume as a whole, or of individual contributions to the volume, whether sympathetic or unsympathetic are all welcome. If you write such a response or come upon one elsewhere, please let me know so that I can link to it. And I am also willing to publish substantial responses as guests posts here on Amor Mundi.

Forum on the Existenz Journal Issue, "The Future of Humanity and the Question of Post-Humanity"

The Journal Existenz has published an issue (Volume 8/2, Fall 2013 ISSN: 1932-1066) entitled The Future of Humanity and the Question of Post-Humanity. I contributed an essay to the volume, Futurological Discourse and Posthuman Terrains. On this page I mean to post critical discussions of and responses to the issue and the individuals essays included in it, both my own and substantive critiques by others. If you come upon any such discussions or write one yourself, please let me know and I will read it and link to it here. Existenz itself has linked to this page to encourage the conversation. I will be happy to publish substantial critiques here on Amor Mundi as guest posts and may upgrade forceful criticisms in comments from the Moot as entries here as well. Substantial critical engagements with my own arguments are especially welcome, of course.

Table of Contents

Index and Editor's Introduction

Discussions of and Responses to the Volume as a Whole:

Comment from Athena Andreadis and discussion.

Gregory J. Walters, Saint Paul University, Canada, Transhumanism, Post-Humanism, and Human Technological Enhancement: Whither Goes Humanitas? 1

Discussions and Responses:

Max More, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Hyperagency as a Core Attraction and Repellant for Transhumanism, 14

Discussions and Responses:

Natasha Vita-More, Humanity+ Contested Culture: The Plausibility of Transhumanism, 19

Discussions and Responses:

Francesca Ferrando, Columbia University, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations, 26

Discussions and Responses:

John P. Sullins, Sonoma State University, Transhuman Express: Are we Ethically Required to be Transhumanists?, 33

Discussions and Responses:

Stephen A. Erickson, Pomona College, Posthumanism, Technology, and Education, 40

Discussions and Responses:

Dale Carrico, University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains, 47

Discussions and Responses:

Comments from "jimf" and "JD Tuyes" with responses.

Richard Jones, Does Transhumanism Matter? April 17, 2017. I respond here.

Michael Hauskeller, University of Exeter, UK, Human Nature from a Transhumanist Perspective, 64

Discussions and Responses:

Here is a recording of the original panel discussion organized by the Karl Jaspers Society of North America that took place at the 87th Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Society in San Francisco, in March 31, 2013.

Existenz Publishes "The Future of Humanity and the Question of Posthumanity"

Existenz has published its volume on The Future of Humanity and the Question of Post-Humanity, which includes what is probably my own most fully elaborated published critique of transhumanism Futurological Discourse and Posthuman Terrains. When I find the time -- probably over the week-end since I'll be preoccupied with teaching later today and all day tomorrow -- I will be creating a forum here linking to the original panel discussion from which the volume originated, linking to all the pieces themselves, as well as to various online responses to the essays (please let me know about any such responses and discussions you discover, and not only for responses to my own essay but to any and all of them) and facilitating such responses (the best of which I will consider publishing here as guest posts if you like), and eventually my own responses to each of the contributions as well.