Although many Americans don’t realize it, a major debate is under way over transhumanism - a movement that endorses using new technology to expand the capabilities of the human mind and body.
Supporters say that we’ve always sought ways to extend life and improve the human species and that to do otherwise would be to cede our destiny to the slowly grinding wheels of evolution.
As James Hughes, executive director of the non-profit Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, put it: “We’re not doing anything natural these days. Modern life is entirely different from what life evolved to be. We evolved to wander the savanna for four hours at a stretch.
“You can either try to live as if we’re still on the savanna, or try to design the human body to live in the circumstances we’re in now.”
The May/June issue of the venerable bioethics journal The Hastings Center Report meanwhile is publishing a very nice review, by New Zealand philosopher Nicholas Agar (who we interviewed in 2006), of the growing literature on transhumanism, from Greg Stock’s Redesigning Humans and Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future to Ron Bailey’s Liberation Biology and my book Citizen Cyborg. Agar is generally appreciative of the H+ POV but takes us to task for giving insufficient attention to the conflicts between valuing both enhancement and procreative liberty (what if parent’s use their liberty to not enhance, or even to impair children?), and for positing that a non-anthropocentric valuing of personhood as the basis of citizenship is incompatible with valuing humanness for other reasons. The article, “Whereto Transhumanism? The Literature Reaches a Critical Mass” should be available on the Hastings Center website in a couple of weeks.
“I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years,” claims Vernor Vinge (1993: 1), mathematician, computer scientist and Hugo award-winning novelist. But what is the point of having more neural transmitters firing off connections if those connections do not promote wisdom?
The recent indirect discovery of a planet orbiting red dwarf Gliese 581 raised strong ripples of interest and speculation. The smallest exoplanet yet discovered, it has been called earth-like based on three attributes: its calculated radius is one and a half times that of earth; its orbit appears to be inside its star’s habitable zone (by definition, the region where water can remain liquid); and its conjectured temperature falls within terrestrial norms.
There’s been a lot of fuss over the past week or so about the discovery of an Earth-like planet “only” 20.5 light years away - detected by the European Southern Observatory’s telescope in La Silla, Chile.
Wow, the blogosphere has been absolutely gushing these past few days over the news that an Earth-like planet may have been discovered in the ‘hood. This planet may boast a moderate climate that could conceivably support life and is only 20 light years away.
The basic argument is simple: when you propose an enhancement, someone is bound to ask “if that’s such a good thing, why hasn’t nature already given us the trait?” And it is a relevant question: evolution is a great engineer in the sense that it produces organisms that function well (never mind the piles of bones on the workshop floor). It might be hard to improve on quasi-perfection.
Ben Goertzel, Onar Aam, F. Tony Smith, Kent Palmer
Abstract. Recent neurological and psychological research suggests that the individual human mind is effectively modeled as involving a group of interacting social actors: both various subselves representing coherent aspects of personality; and virtual actors embodying “internalizations of others,” often biologically associated with collections of mirror neurons. Taking up this theme, we study the mathematical and conceptual structure of sets of inter-observing actors, noting that this structure is mathematically isomorphic to the structure of physical entities called “mirrorhouses.” Mirrorhouses are naturally modeled in terms of abstract algebras such as quaternions and octonions (which also play a central role in physics), which leads to the conclusion that the presence within a single human mind of multiple inter-observing actors naturally gives rise to a mirrorhouse-type cognitive structure and hence to a quaternionic and octonionic algebraic structure as a significant aspect of human intelligence. Similar conclusions would apply to nonhuman intelligences such as AI’s, we suggest, so long as these intelligences included empathic social modeling (and/or other cognitive dynamics leading to the creation of simultaneously active subselves or other internal autonomous actors) as a significant component.
From an article yesterday in the Dallas Morning News:
Jeff Wacker, a futurist with Plano-based Electronic Data Systems Corp., said the evolution of nanotech into the consumer arena will be marked by three phases. “I think there’s the mild, I think there’s the wild, and I think there’s the magical,” he said.
Looks like increased use of virtual presence and distance learning is considered the leading likely innovation, followed by earlier ability tracking.
New poll: Is the economic cost to society from disability relevant? See for discussion Anne Corwin’s commentary on the relevance of the costs associated with autism.
I recently picked up the DVD of Jesus Camp and I let it sit on the shelf for a couple of weeks. I was reluctant to watch it because I knew how upset it would make me.
A confluence of factors makes this the perfect time to ask questions about how neurotechnologies that influence behavior, moral cognition and religious experiences should be used in the future. People on the Christian Right are embroiled in a debate about whether to accept scientific evidence for a biological basis for sexual orientation, and if they do, whether parents should “fix” their gay children in utero. Psychologists and economists are researching the genetic, life course and environmental factors that influence well-being, yielding findings such as cosmetic surgery being as strong a contributor to happiness as religious participation. Bioethics have created the subgenre of neuroethics to examine brain fingerprinting, memory modification and other neurotechnologies.
Devices are being tested to measure empathy and vulnerability to temptation. Resistance is growing internationally to the disastrous policies of “warring” on psychoactive drugs, and in the process on cognitive liberty itself. Neurophilosophers are arguing for a thorough grounding of philosophy in neurology and evolutionary psychology. People of faith are increasingly entering into dialogue with human enhancement advocates about the theological significance of the transhumanist project.
Here at the IEET we have another interesting survey up, this one asking which of a number of past, ongoing, or possibly upcoming technodevelopments is the one that nudges “we humans” into the status of “posthumans.”
Describing anything as ‘Buddhist’, including in this case a distinctively Buddhist bioethics, is fundamentally problematic from both a historic and Buddhist point of view. Historically, the Buddhist tradition has evolved in dozens of countries for 2500 years, with no one tradition having clear doctrinal authority over the others. Internally, even if a common Buddhist ethics was implicit in the practices of the dozens of Buddhist cultures or the exegetics of their traditions, the core philosophical insight of Buddhism is that all things are empty of essential, authentic being, including the Buddhist tradition. So, starting from the understanding that there is no authentic Buddhist bioethics to explicate, and only a constellation of practices and ideas related to
medicine and the body among Buddhists throughout history, which may or may not be tied to core ideas of the Buddhist tradition, we can interrogate the tradition for the lessons it may hold for contemporary bioethics.
On March 5th I was invited to discuss transhumanism with Dr. Brent Waters of Garrett Theological Seminary and the students and faculty of the East Texas Baptist University. I’d like to thank the very kind hospitality of ETBU. These are an edited version of the short prepared remarks from that morning (view video here) in which Dr. Waters and I were asked to address whether it was important to have a body to be human.
Despite being a transhumanist who wants to transcend my boundaries, I agree strongly with the need for limits and constraints as we move towards increasingly transformative technologies. For some, “no limits, yay!” is the rallying call, but I look at the situation from a thermodynamic, not political, perspective.
The February-March issue of Cosmos contains my long-awaited review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, a book that has been the subject of massive international controversy.
Second Life, the immensely popular 3-dimensional virtual world, is really starting to take on a life of its own. There are things going on in there that have undoubtedly gone beyond the wildest expectations of its developers.
The latest issue to grab my attention is the phenomenon of in-world terrorism and the rise of self-professed freedom fighters. These folks aren’t your run-of-the-mill hackers or griefers looking to cause mischief. Rather, these are ‘activists’ who are working subversively within Second Life (SL) to achieve political ends.
The Blogisattva Awards were announced today and George Dvorsky‘s Sentient Developments blog was the winner of two awards: Best Achievement Blogging on Matters Philosophical or Scientific and Best Achievement in Wonderful, Remarkable, Elegant Design. You can read about all the winners and why they were chosen here.
I’m flattered by Richard Hayes’ latest intervention in the debate over human enhancement, “Our Biopolitical Future: Four Scenarios” (Worldwatch, March/April 2007 - free after registration). Its clear that he feels the need to throw some counter-spin to Citizen Cyborg, and the growing set of progressive transhumanist and technoprogressive voices reflected here at the IEET. His essay is an engagingly science fictional propaganda effort, reflecting a serious engagement with technoprogressive arguments, even as he refuses to use the term.
Environmental architect William McDonough is said to have asked, “If a person described her relationship with her spouse as merely ‘sustainable’ wouldn’t you feel sorry for both of them?”
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