If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution!
(incorrectly but fittingly ascribed to Emma Goldman, feminist, activist, trouble-maker)
Those who know my outermost layer would consider me a science geek. I’m a proponent of genetic engineering, an advocate of space exploration, a reader and writer of science fiction. However, I found myself unable to warm to either transhumanism or its literary sidekick, cyberpunk. I ascribed this to the decrease of flexibility that comes with middle age and resumed reading Le Guin’s latest story cycle.
But the back of my mind gnawed over the discrepancy. After all, neither transhumanism nor cyberpunk are monolithic, they come in various shades of… and then it hit me… gray. Their worlds contain little color or sound, few scents, hardly any plants or animals. Food and sex come as pills, electric stimuli or IV drips; almost all arts and any sciences not related to individual enhancement have atrophied, along with most human activities that don’t involve VR.
And I finally realized why I balk at cyberpunk and transhumanism like an unruly horse. Both are deeply anhedonic, hostile to physicality and the pleasures of the body, from enjoying wine to playing in an orchestra. I wondered why it had taken me so long to figure this out. After all, many transhumanists use the repulsive (and misleading) term “meat cage” to describe the human body, which they deem a stumbling block, an obstacle in the way of the mind.
This is hoary dualism disguised as futuristic thinking, augmented by healthy doses of queasiness and power fantasies. Ascetics of other eras tried to diminish the body by fasting, flagellating, abstaining from all physical gratification from washing to sex. Techno-monks want to discard it altogether. The goal is a disembodied mind playing World of Warcraft in a VR datastream. If a body is tolerated at all, the ideal is a mixture of metal and ceramic, hairless and poreless, though it still retains the hyper-gendered configurations possible only in cartoons.
Is abandonment of the body such a bad thing? As anyone who lost a limb or went through a major illness can attest, it’s a marvelous instrument whose astonishing abilities become obvious only when it malfunctions. On the other hand, it’s undeniably fragile and humans have lost patience with its shortcomings as technology has overtaken nature. Transhumanists extol such prospects as anti-aging medicine; advanced prosthetics; radical cosmetic surgery, including sex changes; nootropic drugs; and carbon-silicon interfaces, from cyborgs to immersive VR.
I don’t know many women who, given the choice, would opt to retain menstruation, pregnancy or menopause (though few would admit it openly). And few people, no matter how stoic, can face the depradations of chronic disease or age with equanimity. The neo-Rupturists who prophesy the coming of the Singularity can hardly wait to exchange their bodies with versions that will never experience memory lapses or fail to achieve erections at will.
I’m no Luddite, bio or otherwise. I am glad that technology has enabled us to lead lives that are comfortable, leisured and long enough that we can explore the upper echelons of the hierarchy of needs. However, we demean the body at our peril. It’s not the passive container of our mind; it is its major shaper and inseparable partner. If we discard our bodies we run the danger of losing context to our lasting detriment – as we have already done by successive compartmentalizations and sunderings.
Humans are inherently social animals that developed in response to feedback loops between the environment and their own evolving form. Like all lifeforms, we’re jury-rigged. Furthermore, humans are mediocre across the entire spectrum of physical prowess, from range of vision to maximum running speed. Yet this mediocrity probably enabled us to occupy many environmental niches successfully before technology allowed us to impose our wishes on our environment. Optimizing in any direction may push us into dead-end corners, something that has happened to many species we engineered extensively.
This also holds true for our brains. It’s a transhumanist article of faith that intelligence can and must be augmented – but there are many kinds of intelligence. A lot of learning is mediated through the body, from using a screwdriver properly to gauging complex social interactions. Short-circuiting this type of learning results in shallow knowledge that may not become integrated into long-term memory. There is a real reason for apprenticeships, despite their feudal overtones: people who use Photoshop, CAD and laboratory kits without prior “traditional” training frequently make significant errors and often cannot critically evaluate their results. Furthermore, without corrective “pingbacks” from the environment that are filtered by the body, the brain can easily misjudge to the point of hallucination or madness, as seen in phenomena like phantom limb pain.
Another feedback loop is provided by the cortical emotions, which enable us to make decisions. Two prominent side effects of many nootropic drugs are flattening of the emotions and suppression of creativity. Far from fine-tuning perception, the drugs act as blunting hammers. Finally, if we evade our bodies by uploading into a silicon frame (biologically impossible, but let’s grant it as a hypothesis), we may lose the capacity for empathy, as shown in Bacigalupi’s disturbing story People of Sand and Slag. Empathy is as instrumental to high-order intelligence as it is to survival: without it, we are at best idiot savants, at worst psychotic killers.
I do believe that our bodies can be improved. Nor does everything have to remain as it is now. I wouldn’t mind having wings that could truly lift me; even less would I mind living without fear of cancer or diabetes. Yet I’m fairly certain that we have to stick with carbon if we want seamless form and function. When I hear talk of “upgrading” to silicon or to ether, I get a strong whiff of cubicleers imagining themselves as Iron Man or Neo. Being alone inside a room used to be a punishment. Being imprisoned inside one’s head is a recipe for insanity. Without our bodies, we bid fair to become not exalted intellects but mad(wo)men in the attic.
Images: Top, still from Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell. Bottom, Jump by Sergey Kravtsov.
Note: This post first appeared on the author’s blog and on Sentient Developments last May.
It does seem odd that a primarily atheistic group so readily embraces dualism.
In fact, transhumanism is very similar to evangelical Christianity in two crucial ways: it has a strong messianic streak (the Singularity is a version of the Apocalypse, substituting AI for a deity) and it’s explicitly based on attaining perfection from a current “fallen” state.
In other words it’s wishful thinking, though there are “currents” of transhumanism other than the Singularitarianism that has come to characterize the movement.
Except that transhumanism is closer to gnosticism and its desire to attain perfection by leaving behind the imperfect, corrupt body. Gnosticism has been considered a heresy for over 1600 years; though to be honest, many self-professed Christians don’t really understand orthodox theology.
Gnosticism, like transhumanism, is interesting to read about, but like you I dislike their rejection and abhorrence of physicality. (Actually, I find gnosticism more interesting; most SF stories beyond the Singularity are difficult to get into. And I don’t believe the Singularity will happen.)
Calvin, Zarpaulus — I’m with you on the wishful thinking. It’s another case of a concept in an SF novel turning into a religion.
I’m also of the opinion that the Singularity will never happen, at least not the Rupture variety. Other variants won’t be unique, because several events in humanity’s evolutions have also been singularities: writing; plant and animal domestication; etc.
The Singularitarians acknowledge that the advent of the “Big Bang” variant of the Singularity would lead to the end of humanity as we know it — but they hope to be “uplifted” like the Righteous at the Second Coming.
Gnosticism is fascinating because it’s older than Christianity and continued to evolve as a set of syncretic beliefs long after Christianity came into existence.
This is one of those topics that there is so much I could say that I hardly know where to begin. My undergrad degree is a B.A. in Religion — not b/c I’m a fan of organized religion (my own beliefs are my own self-invented amalgamation of stuff that works well for me… as I would hope is the case for any person), but b/c religion is in generally about people’s ultimate concern: what are we? why are we here? what’s the purpose of life? & all that kinda stuff.
In that sense, as “ultimate concern,” that this post is about a profoundly “religious” question. And lo! comments have immediately brought that to the fore in comparing transhumanism to evangelical Christianity, gnosticism, etc. I would say, though, not only to evangelical Christianity, but lots else that we see of the dysfunctional & sick way that religion manifests when it claims the superiority of “spirit” over physicality, & demands that its adherents abhor the body — & so “celibate” Catholic priests sexually abusing kids, & so “family values” evangelicals like Ted Haggard & his ilk self-tortured by internalized homophobia, etc.
Religion & science both go off the deep end when they loses track of “the ground of being” — the phrase Paul Tillich used to describe the foundation of existence (ontology). If you take it literally, “ground of being” for us humans is the ground we walk on, substance of the planet, our physicality. How did people ever decided that “spirit” was somehow separable from the body? “Spirit” from Latin spiritus meaning “breath” — but we can’t breathe without lungs (not to mention the rest of the respiratory & circulatory system), which are physical. Duh.
Just because atheism doesn’t acknowledge belief in “god” doesn’t rule out a sensibility of “religion” in the sense of the ultimate concerns about existence (ontology again). In that sense, seems to me that transhumanism is bad science & bad religion rolled into one. I still like a lot of cyberpunk, but it loses me whenever it turns into “true believer” about this removal of spirit from the body it can’t breathe without.
Mel, I think that your (and my) definitions of religion, spirituality etc. are far from the mainstream. Science, done right, actually discovers and validates the ground of being. For example, it’s clear that a mind cannot be separated from the brain — and hence all these ideas of auras/souls/uploadings in new frames are literally fantasies. Here’s the concluding sentence of another article of mine:
“I’m often told that science strips away comforting illusions or the mysteries that add beauty and meaning to life. Yet which is a more potent (let alone true) image – stars as glittering nails in crystal domes, or as incandescent engines that create life? Science needs no pious platitudes or sloppy metaphors. Science doesn’t strip away the grandeur of the universe; the intricate patterns only become lovelier as more keep appearing and coming into focus. Science leads to connections across scales, from universes to quarks. And we, with our ardent desire and ability to know ever more, are lucky enough to be at the nexus of all this richness.”
I discuss the “separability” issue further in my H+ Magazine article Ghost in the Shell: Why Our Brains Will Never Live in the Matrix.
I think your (and my) definitions of religion are not mainstream.
Absolutely not mainstream.
In a comment to a prior SIMF post I mentioned The Religious Case Against Belief (I wrote a little about it here) — essentially a critique of the view that religion = belief system… as in the kind of closed-door belief system or ideology that insists it has a complete & inerrant explanation for everything. From Carse’s POV (& mine) fundamentalism, for example, isn’t “religion” — it’s belief system. Because belief systems claim to have “all the answers,” they have no questions — no sense of mystery, & a rejection of any new knowledge that might contradict the belief system.
As an example for the difference between religion & belief system, Carse discusses the case of Galileo v. the Pope of his time. Galileo was a Christian, but also a scientist who was always working to refine the truths he found in his method — i.e., scientific methodology — which is more “religious” than claims that “the Pope in inerrant” or “the Bible (or whatever text) is inerrant” ideologies of religion-inspired belief systems.
As my calculus tutor in high school taught me, “no system can contain a metasystem.” Religious belief systems get that ass-backwards. Real religion, & real science, don’t.
P.S. A poem that Carse helped me right, in dealing with crap involving religious ideology last year — “No Questions, Questions”. I get claustrophobic just thinking about any of these “I have all the answers” ideologies.
oops — that Carse helped me write.