Transhumanism is a Humanism

Bit rich of the Derb to get all righteously huffy about how liberals and the cultural elite - humanist types - are so anti-science. If you are so sad to see science and objectivity and inquiry suffer, sir, then you shouldn't have voted for Bush!

I'll just search in Brian Leiter's archives under 'war on science'. Lordy, look at all the posts. That oughta stuff yer gob. (I could also go search at Pharyngula. P.Z.? You out there? What's the horriblest thing the Bushies have done to the cause of science, do you think?)

I should also, at this point, reach over to my bookshelf and pull down a couple volumes and quote chapter and verse from canonical conservative thinkers about the dangers of the attitudes Derb praises - "driven by a kind of hypertrophied curiosity, by an innocent urge to understand the inner secrets of the world".  That's bad, because it leads to rampant rationalism, scientism, Englightenment hubris. Conservatives are very big on standing out in front of that train and shouting halt! Respecting the inviolable mysteries of the human spirit, human nature, not mucking with such clinical presumption. This is, at any rate, the official line. Leon Kass, anyone? The wisdom of repugnance?

Actually, there ought to be an addition, in Kass's honor, to the philosopher's proofs that P. -P -> ick. Therefore, P.

Let's just take as read that the Derb is the tipmost taper on the candelabrum of hypocrisy for presuming to jingle the science stick at the left. (I'm not saying he isn't pro-science, either. Just he could have the simple honesty to admit he's bucking his own party more than he is the opposition.)

That said, I suspect there is a tendency - more on the right, where there are explicit arguments to support it; but also from the left - to assume that something ethically inconvenient couldn't possibly be true. It's an oddly Panglossian twist of thought. (If you asked people whether they can deduce the way the world is from the way it ought to be, mostly they would say no.) What do you think?

Moving right along ...

... I'm done with my Philosophy and Film module. I did SF film. My main theme was a question: SF is often identified as 'the literature of ideas'. Is this just a Slannish promotional slogan, or can it be taken with any analytic seriousness? (I did a good bit about Plato as the first slan. Also, Plato's quarrel with William Gibson. Maybe I'll post about that later. Or you can poke around in my module blog, which has now done it's job.) In what sense can films - SF films, in particular - be about the same things that philosophical arguments are about. (Are they thought-experiments? If so, are they any good?  ...)

I found myself generally uncomfortable trying to coordinate stock, standard problems of philosophy with SF films, because the fit was never perfect. The argument would suffer a little (or a lot) in translation. And trying to view the films through an argumentative lens often seemed a bit perverse. I would find myself saying: this tool doesn't do the job. But I'm the one looking silly, because the thing is made of gothic conventions, with tinfoil on the outside; not premises and conclusions. So no wonder it doesn't turn out to be a perfect argument.

As Myles writes: "Some people are chronically incapable of appreciating a thing in terms of itself. (My wife thinks I am a husband, for example - whereas, of course, I am a philosopher.) Show a cobbler a cow. Note his trade union obtuseness in relation to all kine! He simply cannot see how fine they are! 'Ah yes,' he will say, 'there's many a fine pair of shoes in that animal.' ...'" I felt obliged to not appreciate things in terms of themselves all semester. But I still had fun. 

A bit late in the game I came to realize that at least one philosophical issue - 'transhumanism', so-called - worked pretty well. I see that Nick Bostrom has a new 'essay' - The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant - which I believe I shall use next time around. Perfect form and function for my pedagogic purposes.

Once upon a time, the planet was tyrannized by a giant dragon. The dragon stood taller than the largest cathedral, and it was covered with thick black scales. Its red eyes glowed with hate, and from its terrible jaws flowed an incessant stream of evil-smelling yellowish-green slime. It demanded from humankind a blood-curdling tribute: to satisfy its enormous appetite, ten thousand men and women had to be delivered every evening at the onset of dark to the foot of the mountain where the dragon-tyrant lived. Sometimes the dragon would devour these unfortunate souls upon arrival; sometimes again it would lock them up in the mountain where they would wither away for months or years before eventually being consumed.

I know H. G. Wells would be approving of this fairy tale parable's uncompromising Things To Come [skip past the Roger Daltry/Huey Lewis stuff] conclusion and moral. Plus there is a fiery rocket launch! I'll just quote the film dialogue again:

“Oh, God. Is there never to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?”

“Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this planet and its winsome ways, and then all the laws of the mind and matter that restrain him … then the planets about him! And at last, out across immensity to the stars! And when he has conquered all the deeps of space, all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.”

“But we are such little creatures. Poor humanity. So fragile - so weak.”

“Little animals, eh?”

“Little animals.”

If we are no more than animals—we must snatch at our little scraps of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more - than all the other animals do - or have done.” [He points out at the stars.] “It is that - or this? All the universe - or nothingness …. Which shall it be, Passworthy?”

CHORUS: “Which shall it BEEEE? Which shall it BEEEEE?”

Except maybe we can overcome death, too. Here's another short Bostrom piece on transhumanism, a response to Fukayama.

“What idea, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity?” This was the question posed by the editors of Foreign Policy in the September/October issue to eight prominent policy intellectuals, among them Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

And Fukuyama’s answer? Transhumanism, “a strange liberation movement” whose “crusaders aim much higher than civil rights campaigners, feminists, or gay-rights advocates.” This movement, he says, wants “nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints.”

The left just can't avoid guilt by association, can they? Bostrom's got lots of other pretty interesting stuff on the subject. I'm thinking it would be fun to write an essay with the title of this post, an homage to the famous Sartre essay. The defeat of the dragon-tyrant is a good way of getting the humanistic heroism in there.

Obviously the issue of describing the way we are, really, is distinct from the issue of advocating that we become something new. But I take it you see the connection between actuality and possibility.

Comments

[foo]

You guys give the best post. Thank you.

[belle waring]

have I said "fuck a bunch of John Derbyshire" lately? no? well, fuck a great big bunch of John Derbyshire. yeah, PC liberals are keeping us all from doing science because they don't want to face how negroes are inferior to white people. damn you, liberals!!!

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

I love science fiction. I edit science fiction for a living. I've spent much of my life reading science fiction.

However, as AnneLaurie Logan pointed out nearly three decades ago, the correct answer to "science fiction is a literature of ideas" is "yeah, about three of them."

Science fiction is an aesthetically and emotionally productive method of framing stories about the world. With its deficits it pays for strengths that no other narrative genre quite achieves. But the claim that it's somehow uniquely "a literature of ideas" is insider boosterism. Literature is a literature of ideas.

[PZ Myers]

You mean, like disbelieving global warming, gutting stem cell research, opening up old-growth forests to clear-cutting, packing scientific advisory panels with unqualified ideologues, the NCLB act...oh, I could go on and on.

Derbyshire is a moron, as is his bioinformatics pal (who sounds an awful lot like those guys Tom Friedman always finds, who are 'experts' but conveniently say exactly what a dilettante thinks is the truth about a subject.) He's wrong. There's a lot of interesting research being done right now by pharmaceutical companies on tailoring drugs to accommodate specific genetic backgrounds. It's not the kiss of death, as he claims: it's not value-loaded. It's not "hey, you black people are statistically proven to be dumber", but "hey, this drug doesn't work well in people with this isoform of an enzyme, and African-Americans have a higher frequency of the enzyme. We should mention that in the literature."

And yeah, all the stuff about human variation coming out of the human genome project? It's published right up front in journals like Nature and Science. What isn't published is crap supporting the old-fashioned, simplistic, wrong bigotry that Derbyshire wishes were real.

[BAA]

Derb's secret informant sounded full-o-hooey to me as well. PZ Myers explains how the work is being done, and guess what: pharmacogenomics sucks. There's a whole company just trying to figure out who should get what statin, and they can't even do that. We're miles away from the brainitude allele.

That said, you gotta admit the left response to IQ science in any domain (testing, genetics, whatever) is usually hysterical and wrong. That's not to asy there aren't fields where the right freaks out and denies science, but "so's your mother" seems like a non-scientific response.

I think I've said this before in this thread, but Derb's novel is really excellent. Every dark cloud, etc...

[des von bladet]

I'm thinking it would be fun to write an essay with the title of this post, an homage to the famous Sartre essay.

I wouldn't want you to do this without having been warned that I would promptly write a Letter on Transhumanisme.

(For very relaxed values of "promptly", at least.)

[jholbo]

Hehe. Well, I knew there would be consequences of my actions. It's actually funny to think what Heidegger would think of the Bostrom fable. Dasein firing a big, fat rocket at the possibility of death.

[Neel Krishnaswami]

First: John Derbyshire is a troll; both in the ethical sense and the Usenet sense. Disregard him!

Second, this is really funny: That said, I suspect there is a tendency - more on the right, where there are explicit arguments to support it; but also from the left - to assume that something ethically inconvenient couldn't possibly be true.

The reason it's funny is that I see you here falling prey to confirmation bias about confirmation bias. Only seeing (and seeking out) confirming evidence for your views is a fundamental part of the human condition, and pervasive everywhere along the political spectrum. Observe how many liberals are willing to say that economics cannot possibly be a science, in the main because they think it suggests that many of their preferred policies aren't good ideas.

Getting back on to your main point, I suspect that being able to get people to be more nearly Bayesian assessors of the evidence would have more radically transhuman effects than immortality would. I can imagine a world in which most people don't die, but I find it very difficult to imagine a world in which people are honest (even just to themselves) about the true strength of their beliefs.

[jholbo]

That's probably right, Neel. Fair enough.

[PZ Myers]

I wouldn't say pharmacogenetics sucks: it makes sense, there are some well-documented cases where it makes a difference, and it's a promising field for the future. But it does fall into the category of a hard problem, and it's guaranteed to disappoint the scientific racists because it won't support their simple binary classification schemes. And if it's really going to work, it's eventually going to have to get down to individual genetic assays, because it doesn't fit traditional racial classifications of black, white, brown, yellow, red, and purplish-green.

[Abiola Lapite]

"his bioinformatics pal (who sounds an awful lot like those guys Tom Friedman always finds, who are 'experts' but conveniently say exactly what a dilettante thinks is the truth about a subject.)"

Oh, but you already know who his pal is - you've crossed swords with him in the past (as have I) ...

[PZ Myers]

I know of the speculation about who he is, and if confirmed, it just shows that Derbyshire has really been chatting with a clueless poseur.

[Matt Weiner]

Is it unfair to quote this passage from Derb and then ask for the biologists to comment?

My genome is not identical to yours. If it were, we should be physically indistinguishable.

(My response: Yes we would: I would be the one who didn't have John Holbo's foot up my ass.)

[ben wolfson]

'Snot true. Environment plays a role too.

[Jacob T. Levy]

tendency - more on the right, where there are explicit arguments to support it; but also from the left - to assume that something ethically inconvenient couldn't possibly be true. It's an oddly Panglossian twist of thought. (If you asked people whether they can deduce the way the world is from the way it ought to be, mostly they would say no.)

Yet again, John elegantly states something I stumbled over (a href="http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_07_00.shtml#1089132048">here and here). Yes, that's it, and yes, people do it rather a lot...

[baa]

Abiola, who is this biogenetics guy?

PZ myers: I totally agree that pharamcogenomics is a promising field, wave of the future, etc. I just meant it's not there yet, at all (I take it you would concur). We're at the stage of "African Americans respond poorly to interferon for some reason." The companies trying to get rich on pharmacogenomics aren't, to put it mildly.

[Abiola Lapite]

"Abiola, who is this biogenetics guy?"

A contributor to this site. He doesn't believe in "god", but he does believe in capitalism ...