Embodiment, Compassion and Secular Ethics

Does championing Enlightenment values require complete rejection of collaboration and dialogue with the religious? Could technoprogressives even learn something from Easter about how to design moral machines?

I just got off the phone with a young theologian writing on Donna Haraway’s cyborgology and transhumanism, and she has inspired me to set down my belated Easter homily. As I may have mentioned I was raised a Unitarian Universalist and my family and I attend the local Unitarian Universalist church. The minister is a smart young graduate of Harvard Divinity who wants to reclaim the Judeo-Christian heritage for us “religious liberals,” so he gave a more passionate reflection on the rebirth and hope symbolism of Easter than the usual academic discussion of its pagan origins.

As I was listening I reflected on the latest research released this week from Antonio Damasio’s shop, a paper on the “Neural correlates of admiration and compassion.” They report on scanning the brains of people viewing or hearing descriptions of other people’s physical and psychological pain, and seeing what parts of the brain are used to register compassion. Basically it’s a lot more immediate to empathize with physical pain of others than their psychological pain because the same parts of your bran register their physical pain as when you experience that pain yourself. Like the mirror neuron research, it illustrates how deep in the mammal brain our moral sentiments run, how they are part of our evolutionary heritage.

For those of us who want to see the creation of “moral machines,” “friendly AI” and uploaded personality it is yet another caution about the importance of embodiment. We will eventually create a machine mind or uploaded personality with virtual mirror neurons, virtual gut instincts, floods of virtual oxytocin and dopamine in response to a smile, or a sinking sensation in its virtual gut and virtual face-flush when shamed. But it’s going to be a lot more complicated than many neo-Gnostic body-loathers, aspiring to create pure compassion in code, imagine it will be.

One of the reflections for Christians in the Easter story is why an omnipotent deity would force a part of itself to be embodied, and then be tortured to death. I don’t believe the supernatural parts of the story of course, but the theological lesson is one we can learn from and relate to: if you want something to have real compassion for the human experience it has to have human experiences. 

Does talking theology then help us with the techno-ethical challenge of building safe, beneficial machine minds? Perhaps not, but I think open dialogue with theologians and the lay religious is important for different reasons. While I share a visceral sympathy with the new atheists, and am a militant partisan of Enlightenment rationality and secularism, I’m too much of a sociologist not to see the parallels between the questions we transhumanists, technoprogressives and progressives grapple with and those that have been struggled with in the world’s religions.

The “religious” efforts of our ancestors are reflected in our secular Enlightenment attempts to find meaning and purpose, to parse right and wrong, and to imagine catastrophic risks and a better world, just as we inherit our empathetic pangs in the posterior cingulate cortex from our squirrely ancestry. Some of that inheritance, such as intuitions about the moral wrongness of category transgression - a central point in Donna Haraway’s work, newly illuminated by Jon Haidt’s work on the five moral intuitions - needs to be suppressed or re-purposed by our superior, neocortical, Enlightenment values. Other intuitions, such as the importance of feeling pain oneself to sympathize with the pain of others, are still valuable.

Many of us at the IEET are non-theists and some quite militantly so. Our raison d’etre is the promotion of Enlightenment values and the prospects for a better, freer, more equal world, and that necessitates championing reason over superstition, the separation of church and state, and the rights of those oppressed by conservative religious mores. But there are many people with religious views and deeply spiritual lives who are our allies in these causes, and with whom we want to work. So, in the spirit of this season of rebirth, let’s recommit to keep in mind how much we share with our fellow flawed primates, whether they find their inspiration in a tortured god-man or a transcendent human future, and work together from there.

Blessed be.