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A peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN 1541-0099 22(1) – November 2011 |
Vulnerable Cyborgs: Learning to Live with our
Dragons
Mark Coeckelbergh
Department of Philosophy
University of Twente
Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 22 Issue 1 – November 2011 - pgs 1-9
Abstract
Transhumanist visions appear to aim at invulnerability. We are invited to fight the dragon of death and disease, to shed our old, human bodies, and to live on as invulnerable minds or cyborgs. This paper argues that even if we managed to enhance humans in one of these ways, we would remain highly vulnerable entities given the fundamentally relational and dependent nature of posthuman existence. After discussing the need for minds to be embodied, the issue of disease and death in the infosphere, and problems of psychological, social and axiological vulnerability, I conclude that transhumanist human enhancement would not erase our current vulnerabilities, but instead transform them. Although the struggle against vulnerability is typically human and would probably continue to mark posthumans, we had better recognize that we can never win that fight and that the many dragons that threaten us are part of us. As vulnerable humans and posthumans, we are at once the hero and the dragon.
Introduction
Transhumanists have articulated visions that seem
to aim at invulnerability and immortality. Consider the writings of two
well-known proponents of human enhancement: Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil. Bostrom
has written a tale about a dragon that terrorizes a kingdom and people who
submit to the dragon rather than fighting it. According to Bostrom,
the “moral” of the story is that we should fight the dragon, that is, extend
the (healthy) human life span and not accept aging as a fact of life (Bostrom 2005, 277). And in The Singularity is Near (2005) Kurzweil has suggested that following
the acceleration of information technology, we will become cyborgs, upload
ourselves, have nanobots in our bloodstream, and enjoy nonbiological experience.
Although not all transhumanist authors explicitly state it, these ideas seem to
aim toward invulnerability and immortality: by means of human enhancement
technologies, we can transcend our present limited existence and become strong,
invulnerable cyborgs or immortal minds living in an eternal, virtual world.
Given these aims, the mythical and religious
language used in transhumanist fables and visions is entirely appropriate. For
instance, many ideas about human enhancement appear to fit a Gnostic way of
thinking: we should leave the material world, transcend our earthly bodies, and
resurrect into the eternal life of non-material existence. And just as (other) religious
ideas, transhumanist visions have created much ethical controversy. Is it right
for humans to enhance themselves?
However, in this paper, I will ask neither the
ethical-normative question (Should we develop human enhancement techniques and
should we aim for invulnerability?) nor the hermeneutical question (How can we
best interpret and understand transhumanism in the light of cultural,
religious, and scientific history?). Instead, I ask the question: If and to the extent that transhumanism
aims at invulnerability, can it – in principle – reach that aim? The following
discussion offers some obvious and some much less obvious reasons why posthumans
would remain vulnerable, and why human vulnerability would be transformed
rather than diminished or eliminated.
Note that this is a different problem from asking
about the value of vulnerability,
that is, the value of human vulnerability. For instance, based on Nussbaum’s
work one could set up a post-Stoic defence of human vulnerability: the same
external realities that make us vulnerable can also be a source of human value,
and valuing makes us dependent (Nussbaum 1986) (I will return to this point below).
More generally, in response to transhumanism one could offer objections based
on what one thinks is valuable in current human existence. The discussion below
is relevant to such a project. However, to focus only on a defense
or rejection of what is valuable in humans would leave out of sight the
relation between (in)vulnerability and posthuman possibilities. It would lead
us back to the ethical-normative questions (Is human enhancement morally
acceptable? Is vulnerability something to be valued? Is the transhumanist
project acceptable or desirable?), which is not what I want to do in this paper.
Moreover, ethical arguments that present the problem as if we have a choice
between “natural” humanity and “artificial” posthumanity
are based on essentialist assumptions that make a sharp distinction between “what
we are” (the natural) and technology (the artificial), whereas this distinction
is at least questionable. Perhaps there is no fixed human nature apart from
technology, perhaps we are “artificial by nature” (Plessner
1975). If this is so, then the problem is not whether or not we want to transcend
the human but how we want to shape that posthuman existence. Should we aim at
invulnerability and if so, can we? As indicated before, here I limit the
discussion to the “can” question. In my conclusion, however, I will return to
the issue of how to formulate the ethical question concerning human
enhancement.
Sources of
vulnerability: Some posthuman dragons
Let me list and discuss some sources of posthuman
vulnerability. The categories are not meant to be mutually exclusive or to mark
strongly distinctive domains; by using them I highlight different aspects of
posthuman vulnerability in order to show that in so far as transhumanism aims
at invulnerability, it must necessarily fail.
Note that the same arguments can be made for
current humans “enhanced” by contemporary technology, for instance, as compared
to early humans and other biological ancestors. I will often refer to human
vulnerability and make comparisons between humans and posthumans, but the focus
will be on posthumans.
Physical vulnerability
As transhumanists will agree, no form of human
enhancement ensures full protection against physical threats: posthumans can
always be harmed by other posthumans or by external forces that are not within posthuman
control. Of course human enhancement would offer new protections against
specific threats. There would be new immunities. Not only could human
enhancement make us immune to current viruses; it could also offer other “immunities,”
broadly understood. For instance, we might consider changes that enable us to
deal better with threats to our emotional well-being. (I will return to
psychological vulnerability below.) However, the project of total vulnerability
or even overall reduction of vulnerability is bound to fail. If we consider the
history of medical technology, we observe that for every disease new technology
helps to prevent or cure, there is at least one new disease that escapes our
techno-scientific control. We can win one battle, but we can never win the war.
There will be always new diseases, new viruses, and, more generally, new
threats to physical vulnerability. Consider also natural disasters caused by
floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and so on.
Moreover, the very means to fight those threats
sometimes create new threats themselves. This can happen within the same
domain, as is the case with antibiotics that lead to the development of more resistant
bacteria, or in another domain, as is the case with new security measures in
airports, which are meant as protections against physical harm by terrorism but
might pose new (health?) risks. Paradoxically, technologies that are meant to
reduce vulnerability often create new ones. This is also true for posthuman
technologies. For example, posthumans would also be vulnerable to at least some
of the risks Bostrom calls “existential risks” (Bostrom 2002), which could wipe out posthumankind.
Nanotechnology or nuclear technology could be misused, a superintelligence could take over and annihilate
humankind, or technology could cause (further) resource depletion and ecological
destruction. Military technologies are meant to protect us but they can become
a threat, making us vulnerable in a new way. We wanted to master nature in
order to become less dependent on it, but now we risk destroying the ecology
that sustains us. And of course there are many physical threats we cannot
foresee – not even in the near future. Posthumans will remain vulnerable to at
least some existing physical threats, but they will also face new risks and
create new vulnerabilities.
Material and
immaterial vulnerability
Physical vulnerability is not limited to
threats to the human body. We have always extended that body with technology.
This process of “cyborgization” is likely to increase
in posthumans, who would extend themselves with information technology and
other technology to a much higher degree than contemporary humans. But whether
or not we want to use the term “cyborg” for this, as Haraway and
Bodily vulnerability
Fantasies about immaterial and invulnerable
existence in the infosphere do not generally try to cancel out the body. This
is because we need one. Minds need
bodies. This is in line with contemporary research in cognitive science, which
argues that “embodiment” is necessary since minds can develop and function only
in interaction with their environment (Lakoff and
Johnson 1999 and others). This direction of thought is also taken in contemporary
robotics, for example when it recognizes that manipulation plays an important
role in the development of cognition (Sandini et al. 2004).
In his famous 1988 book on “mind children” Moravec
argued that true AI can be achieved only if machines have a body (Moravec
1988). This is also acknowledged by Kurzweil, albeit for a different, more
superficial reason which seems to assume that posthumans must resemble humans:
If
we are truly capturing a particular person’s mental processes, then the
reinstantiated mind will need a body,
since so much of our thinking is directed toward physical needs and desires. […] The human body version
2.0 will include virtual bodies in completely
realistic virtual environments, nanotechnology-based physical bodies, and more. (Kurzweil 2005, 199)
Thus, uploading and nano-based cyborgization would
not dispense with the body but transform it into a virtual body or a nano-body.
This would create vulnerabilities that sometimes resemble the vulnerabilities
we know today (for instance virtual violence) but also new vulnerabilities. For
instance, no one knows what kinds of risks would emerge if we had nano robots in our blood stream. Our bodies would be
transformed in ways that are hard to imagine, and so would our vulnerability.
Metaphysical
vulnerability
According to an influential metaphysical
doctrine, bodies are organizations of matter, in particular organizations of elementary
particles. The particular combinations of matter are always temporary since they
are vulnerable to disintegration. The Greek philosopher Democritos, known as
the founder of atomism, claimed that whereas atoms are eternal, the objects composed
of them are not. Worlds come and disappear again. And while contemporary
physics and metaphysics are no longer atomist in the common sense of the word (“atoms”
turned out not to be the smallest particle), physics is still after elementary
particles and the natural sciences embrace an atomist metaphysics concerning
the relation between systems (or organisms) and their elements. Even the “infosphere”
(Floridi 2002) has its “information objects,” which might
be interpreted as compositions of “elementary particles”: bits.
With this atomism comes that atomist view of
death: there is always the possibility of disintegration; neither
physical-material objects nor information objects exist forever. Information
can disintegrate and the material conditions for information are vulnerable to
disintegration as well. Thus, at a fundamental level everything is vulnerable
to disintegration, understood by atomism as a re-organization of elementary
particles. This “metaphysical” vulnerability is unavoidable for posthumans,
whatever the status of their elementary particles and the organs and systems
constituted by these particles (biological or not). According to their own
metaphysics, the cyborgs and inforgs that transhumanists and their supporters wish to create would be
only temporal orders that have only temporary stability – if any.
Note, however, that recently both Floridi and contemporary physics seem to move toward a more
ecological, holistic metaphysics, which suggests a different definition of
death. In information ecologies, perhaps death means the absence of relations,
disconnection. Or it means: deletion, understood ecologically and holistically
as the removal out of the whole. But in the light of this metaphysics, too,
there seems no reason why posthumans would be able to escape death in this
sense. Whether they are seen as composed of elementary particles or as
relational nodes in a network-ecology, they remain vulnerable and “mortal,”
however virtual they might have become.
Existential and
psychological vulnerabilities
Vulnerability has its source not only in
material-ontological reality, but also in existential experience, psychology, and
perception. We are not only directly vulnerable as bodily, material, and (meta)physical entities; as humans we can also know and experience those vulnerabilities. This gives rise to what we may
call “indirect” or “second-order” vulnerabilities. For instance, we can become
aware of the possibility of disintegration, the possibility of death. We can
also become aware of less threatening risks, such as disease. There are many
first-order vulnerabilities. Awareness of them renders us extra vulnerable as
opposed to beings who lack such an ability to take
distance from ourselves. From an existential-phenomenological point of view
(which has its roots in work by Heidegger and others), but also from the point
of view of common sense psychology, we must extend the meaning of vulnerability
to the sufferings of the mind. Vulnerability awareness itself constitutes a
higher-order vulnerability that is typical of humans. In posthumans, we could
only erase this vulnerability if we were prepared to abandon the particular
higher form of consciousness that we “enjoy.” No transhumanist would seriously
consider that solution to the problem. Therefore, if posthumans were to have a
higher form of consciousness not too dissimilar to ours, then they would have
to cope with second-order vulnerabilities as well as first-order ones.
Social and emotional vulnerability
We do not live in isolation: we are social beings
who depend on each other for fulfilling our physical, emotional, and other
needs, and this makes us vulnerable in many ways. For example, we tend to form
relationships, groups and communities and along with the many advantages that this
offers, it also produces plenty of possibilities for suffering and violence. If
I depend on you socially and emotionally, then I am vulnerable to what you say
or do. Unless posthumans were to live in complete isolation without any
possibility of inter-posthuman communication, they would be as vulnerable as we
are to the sufferings created by the social life, although the precise relation
between their social life and their emotional make-up might differ.
An interesting vision to study in this respect
is the one suggested by Houellebecq in his novel The Possibility of an Island (2005). In the story, genetic and
other enhancement interventions abolish society as we know it. Instead, the
novel projects posthumans spending their lives in
isolation, as hermits living in “compounds” that are
fenced off from the harsh natural world and from “degenerated” humans who
revert back to “primitive” and violent forms of group life. However, the posthumans
can still communicate and relate to their “ancestors” through reading and
writing. (If this is a “transhumanist” vision at all,
it is still humanist in the sense that it preserves the reading/writing of
humanism understood as a writing movement,
a movement that centers on the technology of writing.
Moreover, “ancestors” takes on a different meaning since their “descendants” are
clones.) Thus, the tension we modern humans know between trying to reach
immunity and experiencing being caught up in social-relational dependency, remains
in place. Only fiercely anti-humanist enhancement would abolish social
relations entirely.
Of course even in a non-isolationist vision, posthumans might be changed in such a way that they would have
a different emotional life. For example, in Houellebecq’s
novel the posthumans have a reduced capacity to feel sad, but at the cost of a
reduced capacity to desire and to feel joy. More generally, the lesson seems to
be: emotional enhancement comes at a high price. Are we prepared to pay it?
Even if we succeed in diminishing this kind of vulnerability, we might lose
something that is of value to us. This brings me to the next kind of
vulnerability.
Ethical-axiological
vulnerability
Humans are not just witnesses and interpreters
of physical and social processes. They also evaluate the processes and engage
with them. But the very activity of valuing
renders us vulnerable. We value not only people and our relationships with
them; we are also attached to many other things in life. Caring makes us
vulnerable (Nussbaum 1986). We develop ties out of our engagement with humans,
animals, objects, buildings, landscapes, and many other things. This renders us
vulnerable since it makes us dependent on (what we experience as) “external”
things. We sometimes get emotional about things since we care and since we
value. We suffer since we depend on external
things. Valuing is a source of joy but also of harm. The Stoics knew this and
followed a particular strategy of immunity: they tried to disarm the emotions
and the vulnerability by not caring about the externalities, that is, by trying
to cut the ties, the dependencies.
Posthumans could be cognitively equipped to
follow this strategy, for instance by means of emotional enhancement that
allows more self-control and prevents them forming too strong ties to things. If
we really wanted to become invulnerable in this respect, we should create posthumans
who no longer care at all about external things – including other posthumans.
That would be “posthumans” who no longer have the
ability to care and to value. They would “connect” to others and to things, but
they would not really engage with them, since that would render them
vulnerable. They would be perfectly rational Stoics, perhaps, but it would be
odd to call them “posthumans” at all since the term “human” would lose its
meaning. It is even doubtful if this extreme form of Stoicism would be possible for any entity that possesses
the capacity of valuing and that engages
with the world. Again, transhumanists could render
this possible only if they were prepared to give up axiological and emotional
ways of engaging with the world. If they wanted to avoid this consequence, they
could propose more modest forms of “fine-tuning” to our existing cognitive
make-up, without compromising the human capacity to care and value. However,
this implies that posthumans would retain a large
degree of their ethical-axiological vulnerability.
Relational
vulnerability
In sum, because our imagined posthumans remain relational beings, operating in a web of
dependencies without which they could not exist, they remain vulnerable in
various ways. They are dependent on their physical environment, on their
bodies, on the technological and biological systems that embody and extend
their minds, on other posthumans and on the people and things they value. The
only way to make an entity invulnerable, it turns out, would be to create one
that exists in absolute isolation and is absolutely independent of anything
else. Such a being seems inconceivable – or would be a particularly strange
kind of god. (It would have to be a “philosopher’s” god that could hardly stir
any religious feelings. Moreover, the god would not even be a “first mover,”
let alone a creator, since that would imply a relation to our world. It is also
hard to see how we would be aware of its existence or be able to form an idea
about it, given the absence of any relation
between us and the god.) Of course we could – if ethically acceptable at all –
create posthumans that are less vulnerable in some particular areas, as long as
we keep in mind that there are other sources of vulnerability, that new sources
of vulnerability will emerge, and that our measure to decrease vulnerability in
one area may increase it in another area.
If transhumanists accept the results of this
discussion, they should carefully reflect on, and redefine,
the aims of human enhancement and avoid confusion about how these aims relate
to vulnerability. If the aim is invulnerability, then I have offered some
reasons why this aim is problematic. If their project has nothing to do with trying
to reach invulnerability, then why should we transcend the human? Of course one
could formulate no “ultimate” goals and choose less ambitious goals, such as
more health and less suffering. For instance, one could use a utilitarian
argument and say that we should avoid overall suffering and pain. Harris seems
to have taken these routes (Harris 2007). And Bostrom
frequently mentions “life extension” as a goal rather than “invulnerability” or
“immortality.” But even in these “weakened” or at least more modest forms, the
transhumanist project can be interpreted as a particularly hostile response to
(human) vulnerability that probably has no parallel in human history. Making
people less vulnerable remains an important goal of transhumanists, in spite of
their likely acknowledgment that absolute
vulnerability is impossible. This means that the limitations discussed
above remain highly relevant to their project and cannot be dismissed as
obvious or off the mark. They help to answer the question: Is invulnerability
one of the aims of transhumanist human enhancement, and if so, how invulnerable do we want to become
and what kind of invulnerabilities do
we want to achieve?
Conclusion: Heels and
dragons
There is a Greek myth that tells us about
Achilles who was made invulnerable in his youth – invulnerable except his heel.
Tragically, he is said to have died from a heel wound caused by an arrow shot
at him. In this paper, I have given several reasons why posthumans would not be
unlike Achilles in this respect and why we had better take seriously the
ancient Greek sparkle of wisdom when reflecting on human enhancement. In so far
as posthuman heroes and their creators might try to transcend vulnerable
existence, they would be bound to fail because there would be many heels, and
as we create new technology new heels are created. In facing these tragic
cycles of trial and failure, posthumans would be
remarkably similar to their human ancestors, who also struggle against their
vulnerable condition and have no choice but to live with that condition.
Furthermore, this paper suggests that if we can
and must make an ethical choice at all, then it is not a choice between
vulnerable humans and invulnerable posthumans, or even
between vulnerability and invulnerability, but a choice between different forms of humanity and vulnerability. If
implemented, human enhancement technologies such as mind uploading will not
cancel vulnerability but transform it. As far as ethics is concerned, then,
what we need to ask is which new forms of the human we want and how (in)vulnerable we wish to be. But this inquiry is possible only
if we first fine-tune our ideas of what is possible in terms of enhancement and
(in)vulnerability. To do this requires stretching our
moral and technological imaginations.
Moreover, if I’m right about the different
forms of posthuman vulnerability as discussed above, then we must dispense with
the dragon metaphor used by Bostrom: vulnerability is
not a matter of “external” dangers that threaten or tyrannize us, but that have
nothing to do with what we are; instead, it is bound up with our relational,
technological and transient kind of being – human or posthuman. If there are
dragons, they are part of us. It is our tragic condition that as relational
entities we are at once the heel and the arrow, the hero and the dragon.
Finally, perhaps it is a consolation for both
humans and posthumans that, as Nussbaum suggested, vulnerability
is not only a source of suffering but also of joy and value. If flourishing or
meaning is what we seek rather than invulnerability, then it seems that now and
in the posthuman future we can only find these goods in the very dependencies that may sometimes hurt or even destroy
us.
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