|
A peer-reviewed
electronic journal published by the Institute
for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 19(1)
– September 2008 |
A Moral Vision
for Transhumanism
Patrick D. Hopkins
Department of Philosophy
Millsaps College
Journal of Evolution and Technology -
Vol. 19 Issue 1 – September 2008 - pgs 3-7
http://jetpress.org/v19/hopkins.htm
Abstract
All worldviews
have some sort of moral vision for why and how they pursue their goals, though
these moral visions may be more or less explicitly stated. Transhumanism is no
different, though sometimes people forget that transhumanism is not the alien
dream of a posthuman mind but is instead a very human ideology driven by very
human interests and moral ideals. In this paper, I lay out some of those ideals
in very general terms, advocating a high-minded moral vision for transhumanism
that is born of and extends the desire for human flourishing. Though taken to
new heights, transhumanism coheres with age-old views of ourselves as our own
projects. What the end and direction and scope of those projects can be,
however, is generated by, but not limited to, human nature.
Changing ourselves.
Transforming ourselves.
Becoming something so different, the word “human” no
longer clearly satisfies.
Why do this? Why think this? What are we running
towards? What are we running from?
There is a tendency to forget that transhumanism is a
human ideology, a human movement motivated by human desires, hopes, and dreams.
There are as of yet, no significantly enough transformed humans to count as
having a constitutionally different moral perspective than humans. So when we
ask the question, What is the moral vision of transhumanism?, we are not
asking, What is the moral vision of transhumans?, and certainly not, What is
the moral vision of posthumans? Rather, we are asking, What is the moral vision
of humans who have imagined transforming themselves?
I. What we begin with then, in thinking clearly
about transhumanism and posthumanity is, ironically, human nature and the
natural world and the natural history in which we are embedded. Numerous ideas of what makes humans special
have been proffered: the presence of souls, the use of language, the use of
technology, the existence of self-consciousness, the existence of second order
thought. All these have been criticized, some disproved, some rendered
incoherent. What they tend to share in
the motivation for setting them forth however, is a desire to show that humans
are unique, to guarantee us some singular place in the world, or in the telos
of the universe, or in the mind of God. I think however, that the important
thing in thinking about human nature is not to find out what makes us unique,
because we may not be unique, but rather just to find out what makes us the
kind of creatures that we are (including perhaps our intense desire for
uniqueness). What makes us, us, rather than something else? Irrespective of
whether there are other organisms that share some or all of our traits in part
or in whole, what is it about humans that gives us our specific place in the
world, our sense of self, our particular existential experience? No doubt there
are many things in our evolutionary, cultural and cognitive history that
contribute to our species nature, and even though something must be lost in
coming up with pithy summaries of what human nature is, there is also sometimes
wisdom to be gained by condensing our observations into a slogan. Therefore I
give you my preferred summary of what makes humans psychologically interesting,
metaphysically curious, and culturally conflicted beings. Humans are creatures that can imagine themselves to be other than what
they are.
So if we can and do imagine ourselves to be other than
what we are, what are we? We are specific things, in ways that are fundamental
if not final and which can be variably, yet truthfully described. We are
bipedal, binocular, sexually dimorphic, story-telling, hypothesis-generating,
resource-exchanging, opposable-thumbed social primates jockeying for social
position, searching for nutrition and reproduction. We are short-lived,
thinking bags of saltwater. We are partially conscious, feeling sheaths of
cellular organisms.
But these dispassionate ways of describing human
beings, though crucial, do not do much to describe our resulting subjectivity,
our experienced life. For the thinking and feeling and social parts of the
descriptions are the phenomena that humans actually experience and which
actually motivate us to act. They generate our values. They generate the
conditions under which we can be said to flourish or fail. For example, we are
social animals, so sociality and relationships with others are crucial for our
flourishing. We are curious beings that rely on accumulating information and
generating and testing everyday hypotheses, so the pursuit of knowledge is
valuable for us. We are creatures that can feel pain and pleasure and be
motivated to pursue relief, happiness, and satisfaction, so the pursuit of
happiness and the removal of unnecessary suffering is an everpresent goal. We
are creatures that can feel anxiety and weakness, so we seek security and
empowerment and freedom. Many have claimed that we are also somehow spiritually
damaged creatures, so we seek healing and unity with God.
While these are the things that we seek, however,
obviously we often do not find them. Our lived lives, then, are filled with
frustration—seeking what we value, trying to hold on to what we value, losing
what we value. We are then, also, fundamentally beings that suffer and want. We
experience loss, death, unnecessary pain, a life too short and too powerless to
achieve what we can desire. These are
the things that make us who we are; these are the things we want to run away
from; these are the things we want to confront. This is the human condition.
And what humans want most of all is to cope with the human condition, to cope
with the conflicts that the kind of creatures we are experience in the kind of
world in which we live.
So the initial motivation of transhumanist morality,
being a human ideology and a human project, will be to address the human
condition and human problems – to solve or to alleviate ignorance, insecurity,
isolation, suffering, and despair – perhaps not just for ourselves but for all
sentient beings. Improve the world. Improve ourselves. This is nothing new.
What is new is how transhumanists respond to the fact that many of these
problems are not merely the result of environmental or cultural situations, but
are grounded in the biological and psychological limitations of the human
creature itself. For transhumanists, solving these problems involves changing
the human body, the ground of the human condition. We fear death? Then
eliminate it. We want more knowledge?
Increase our cognitive capacity and processing speed. We want security? Make us
invulnerable to disease and injury. We need social connection? Make us capable
of directly sharing information, emotion, cognition. We want wisdom? Engineer
the faculties for producing and reflecting on radically wider and nobler
experiences. We want to grow through challenges and to better ourselves? Then
let us really, truly, and deeply magnify our very capacity for self-improvement.
In this sense, the first
element of a transhumanist moral vision is that the effort to address the human
condition requires that we change the physical facts that in part generate the
human condition. Curing the human condition requires altering the “human” part
of the equation.
II. But humans do not only want to alter the
basic frustrations of the human condition. For we are imaginers and the things
we can imagine often lie beyond merely the mitigation of suffering. We not only
imagine ourselves not dying, or learning far more of the secrets of the
universe, we imagine ourselves pursuing creative projects that require more
radical changes. From antiquity to the 21st century we have imagined
ourselves breathing under water, walking through walls, exploring hidden
worlds, flying through the heavens, contemplating pure wisdom. We have imagined
ourselves as gods, hero-fools, wizards, monsters, demons, angels, and cyborgs
living in heavens and in hells, in Hogwarts and hyperreality. We experience
constraints laid on us by nature that interfere with the kinds of beings we
would like to be, the kinds of projects we want to pursue. Though always
limited by our cognitive capacities and often merely resulting in dull
exaggerations of our ordinary selves, we can imagine being creatures that
permit us to engage in these humanly-desired-but-more-than-human projects. In
short, many desire, crave, or yearn to resolve the anxiety between our actual
selves and our conceivable selves – and perhaps to some extent even our
currently inconceivable selves.
Once, when I was rambling on about my utopian hopes
for the perfectibility of humanity, a philosopher friend said to me, “your
ontological eyes are bigger than your ontological stomach” –a metaphor that
meant I wanted more than what was possible and that that want was the cause
of my discontent. An incisive diagnosis that suggests pruning back desire
rather than scaling up ability – and a diagnosis relevant to myriad outlooks.
For many worldviews have dealt with this conflict between the actual and the
ideal, directly or indirectly – some by offering us fulfillment in an afterlife
realm, some by offering us distraction in the dizzying pleasures of the mundane
world, some by offering stern recognition and acceptance of limits, some by
offering a way to extinguish desire itself. But what if we dealt with the
conflict by revolutionizing our actual selves to be able to more closely pursue
our ideal selves? What if we could reengineer our ontological stomachs to be able
to hold what our ontological eyes can already see? This is the fundamental
approach of the transhumanist worldview. Transhumanism teaches that we can
solve, or at least address, our existential anxiety, our discontent over our
imaginable and actual selves, by changing the constraints of our selves.
In this sense, the second
element of a reflective transhumanist moral vision is to permit human bodies
and brains to catch up with the human mind’s projects, to fulfill the human
desire for its own idealized construction and pursuits.
III. In seeking technological solutions to human
predicaments however, we run into a paradoxical problem – as paradoxical as the
definition of human beings as creatures that can imagine themselves as other
than what they are. Our transhumanist approaches to alleviating the human
condition are shaped by human visions of perfection, of utopia. In envisioning
of what life could be like, humans have imagined heavens, or dreamworlds, or
states of mind that count as perfection – places or conditions with no pain, no
suffering, no adversity, no ignorance, nothing lacking at all. This is largely
the ideal that informs our hesitant and incremental work in politics and
science and morality. However, humans are creatures that evolved in an ancestral
environment in which our bodies, our psychologies, our very cognitive natures
were directly shaped by adversity. We lived surrounded by struggle, and in the
process of natural and sexual selection, our species was organized and
structured to deal with adversity, to learn from adversity, and in an ironic
twist of a side effect, to be bored and restless and itchy without adversity.
What a strange but understandable existential place we find ourselves. Driven
to escape struggle and driven to need it. Look at what our species does when it
is not actually fighting battles or
struggling to survive. We spend our leisure time participating in or observing
simulated battles and struggles to survive – sports, literature, theatre,
movies, television, games, contests. We are a species that spends the time it
has not struggling, pretending to struggle. It seems as though we are trapped
by our evolutionary histories. We imagine ending struggle, but we are addicted
to it.
This means we can long for what we are not actually any good at –
existing in a perfect state. We are not adapted to live in our very own ideal
world. We are not suited for heaven. So what does this mean for our moral
vision? Perfection is not for us, but perhaps we can change ourselves into something
that perfection (or at least a closer approximation) suits. Perhaps we can, or
should, change our own natures so that we do not crave conflict or violence or
struggle. It may not be enough to change the world because that is only one
part of the equation. It may be necessary to alter our own cognitions in order
to flourish in a world that ironically meets with our human ideals. This can be
a terrifying thought. What are we defying and what are we risking and what are
we inviting when we talk about changing ourselves so? But it also makes sense.
Is this not something of a common strain of thought in religion and philosophy
and psychology – that we must in some respect shed our old natures in order to
become a new man, a free spirit, a true philosopher, an enlightened one, an
actualized, healthy self? The extent to which we should or could do this must
certainly be debated, but what is the alternative? If in the presence of
body-changing biotechnology, we seek to keep our old human cognitive natures,
with all its primate impulses, we will become not transhumans, but only
superhumans. Human psychologies with the added traits of superhuman abilities –
intelligence, lifespan, strength. Supermen. Superprimates. Still angry,
lustful, hierarchical, but with greater capacity to effect our desires and play
out our conflicts. Without changing the self, without changing or at least
nurturing certain aspects of character and will, we will not change the human
condition, but only magnify it – bad elements as well as good.
In this sense, the third
element of a reflective transhumanist moral vision is that our very psyches
themselves, our very moral natures, are not finished projects but can be
altered as well. As we are, we are not suited to be as good as we can be. Our characters and wills themselves, as
age-old religions and philosophies have taught, are to be transformed into
something better.
IV. But all this talk about changing or
transforming ourselves has a conceptually problematic element to it. If you
“change” your “self”, does your “self” continue? Have you not altered what the
self was to start with? If we use technology (or perhaps even ordinary
psychological techniques) to transform ourselves, have we simply created
something new or is there enough of ourselves left to think “we” still exist?
This is an important question of motivation. What motive could I have to change
myself if there were not enough of my self left to experience the new as a
change? While this problem of personal identity is a serious one, it is not of
a different kind (though perhaps of a different magnitude) than the question of
identity that arises between our adult selves and our children selves, or
between old and wise selves and our young and foolish selves. While exact
identity is not preserved in any of these cases (thank goodness or we would
never grow and develop) there is generally enough memory, enough of a
psychological trace, enough of a causal history for us to think that more or
less “we” exist as continuing phenomena.
There is eventually however, a limit in what we can
imagine that we might know, hold dear, learn, or desire in “our” future. The
three-year old child cannot imagine that in the future, the man he will become
will be fascinated with questions such as, What is truth? Similarly, we as
humans cannot now conclusively say what the posthumans we might become will
find it good to pursue. Of course,
human nature is fascinating in this regard as well because human history is
replete with examples of hoping for, praying for, and working toward literally
ineffable states that we think will be far more rewarding than the ones in
which we live now. Whether it is Plato’s form of the good, heaven, the beatific
vision, or nirvana, we talk about modes of existence (though usually through
the via negativa) in which we are
changed, but somehow have perfect knowledge, achieve the ultimate good, and
have perfected experience. In this way, we have human moral and ontological
ideals that speak to an existence so different from our mundane ones that we
quite literally lack the cognitive or linguistic tools to understand those
states – and yet we hope for them. In this way, even human nature lets us talk
about changing human nature so much that an analog to posthumanity may be
conceived. And what do we think is the nature of the posthuman state? We do not
know, but the human hope for a posthuman state is driven by the assumption that
greater knowledge of the truth will lead to greater clarity and more accurate
pursuit of the good. In its highest expression, what human nature has pursued
historically is the ideal of a mode of existence in which our transformed
selves see truth, know truth, are freed from bondage to mere appearances, and
attain the good. There is no reason why transhumanism, as a human ideology,
cannot have and share this goal. What a greater understanding of Truth will do
to us cannot yet be known, but it is only in knowing this truth that we can
find out whether it will help us to pursue that which is worth pursuing or not.
In this sense, the fourth
element of a reflective transhumanist moral vision is to seek Truth and pursue
the Good – using technology as a tool to change
ourselves in such ways that we can learn more, see more, experience more, and
understand more, including even more radical ways to change ourselves to seek
truth and pursue the good.
V. Of course, these elements of a transhumanist
moral vision – namely that we alter ourselves in order to pursue the humanly
imagined and unimagined good that we cannot achieve given our current
limitations, only speaks to the grander picture, the ultimate motivation, the
search for the summum bonum of the
fully sapient creature. It does not address the dirty and daily details of the
transition from human to posthuman and especially the complicated and
distressing issues of how transhumans are to relate to humans. Remember that
transhumanism is a human ideology and motivated by human concerns and values.
As such, the person who transforms themself using technology may have a variety
of moral visions of the good life, from the high philosophical and transcendent
(which I’ve announced my allegiance to above) to the low and sybaritic. So, we
should expect an unsettling array of relationships between transhumans and
humans. Some transhumans will be nothing more than superhuman warlords, seeking
to magnify their own power in a poisonous failure of vision. Some transhumans
will be bodhisattvas, seeking transcendence for all sapient beings. Some
transhumans will be mystic ascetics, seeking truth and leaving the world and
its other beings to their own devices. And no doubt there will be many more
variations.
All this will be worked out in fear and trembling as
the relevant technology begins to arrive. There is neither space nor need here
to begin the detailed work of adjudication between the H+ and the H, between
the H+ ideology (which is a human one) and the anti-H+ ideology (which is also
a human one). I merely want to add to the discourse of transhumanism in this
venue. To be present at the beginning of a movement that promises and threatens
to change so much. To recognize transhumanism as fully human, and to offer a
version of it that seeks out the noblest ideals of transcendence.
So this is my moral vision of transhumanism. An emphatic
resistance to the notion that transhumanism is completely new. An emphatic
adoption of the notion that transhumanism in its best form is an approach to
the age-old human desire to know the truth and pursue the good.
Is this vision fanciful, utopian, outrageous,
premature, arrogant? Probably.
And that is precisely what makes it so quintessentially human.