On Transhumanism

Commonplace Newsletter #64

I can remember being a teenager, sat on the sofa in the lounge, pontificating about something or other. I had a way of calling out the cant and hypocrisy on the evening news, the inanity of advertising, the synthetic and saccharine nature of the music that we as stupefied, tired viewers were all collectively told to enjoy. I guess I have always been a curmudgeon, an old man in waiting, and the passage of years brings me closer to congruence if nothing else. But anyway. I recall mouthing off about something or other- some politician on tv, some new bit of legislation that was being floated- and like all know-it-all’s with scant life-experience I snarled out some heartfelt, fanciful, unworkable solutions to all of the ills of the world.

Now, my Dad- who up until now had had his head buried in the local newspaper as part of his daily post-work ritual- glanced up from the sports pages and almost as an aside said this devastating rejoinder. He said ‘You know, Tom, for a smart lad you don’t half talk stupid sometimes.’

At the time I took that as ignorant, as parochial, as closed minded and maybe a little cruel even, but the passing of years has convinced me of its fundamental rightness. And also its rightness as a wider principle. Because it is always the smartest people who have the stupidest ideas. And as I write this the stupidest idea of all- which consequently is being floated by the smartest of people- is the idea of transhumanism. The idea that via technology we can become immortal beings and shake off the tragic human birthright that is death.

Now, I would like to think that I live in a world where the wrongness of something like the quest for immortality would be so self-evident in a bone-deep, shudder-of-revulsion-inducing way that I would not need to argue against it. In the same way that you shouldn’t have to talk about the increased likelihood of brain diseases like kuru when trying to dissuade someone from giving cannibalism a try. Some things shouldn’t need to be defeated by so-called rationality and logical argument. Even approaching such things in these terms can feel like a concession, like you are legitimising something which should by rights be beyond the pale.

But sadly, here we are, in a world where actual adults- and adults with prestige, authority, credentials and corporate backing, no less- believe that transhumanism is not only a good idea, but that it is inevitable. Which is why I feel compelled to say a few words on the matter.

The How

Fortunately- and I have to remind myself of this occasionally lest I give in to the sin of despair- immortality is impossible. Scratch beyond the big-game-talking Silicon Valley gurus with their ‘soon we will be able to upload your brain into the cloud’ pitch and you will find there is little of substance there. To upload consciousness first you need to know what it is, which no one does exactly. You would also need to know where it is, which again no one does. We assume it’s in the brain, in the head, but there is zero actual proof of this. There was a vogue for a while for neuroscience and fMRI scans but this discipline, for all its bells and whistles, can’t really offer us much that is actually concrete on the matter. Surprising, I know.

Though over a decade of increasingly ubiquitous smartphone use may well lead a neural observer to believe that we are capable of becoming cyborgs, we forget that this is not actually the case. The brain as computer is merely a metaphor, and we always draw our metaphors from the technology of the day. Read Victorian accounts of how the brain operates and you will find that all of the imagery is in terms of cogs, levers and steam. Industrial brains for an industrial age.

And so in this Information Age we are told that our brains are computers, that they work like hard drives, that what fires together wires together. Now that might be all well and good for drilling concepts into the heads of recalcitrant undergraduates but it doesn’t mean that we can actually fuse the human brain and machines. Or that we will ever be able to. Again, at the risk of redundancy, what is consciousness and where do you find it? You have to be able that definitively and provably before you can even truly begin the task of transcending the human form and the human lifespan. And I personally believe it is unanswerable, now and forever.

But let’s say that I’m wrong. Let’s say the seat of consciousness is found and thus our brains- so to speak- can be uploaded into a computer. Who’s to say it will work. Whose to say the experience of being an immortal ‘mind’ floating in an eternal computer world isn’t identical to hell. Whose to say that putting your consciousness into some sort of humanoid cyborg type entity doesn’t carry the risk of it crashing or it glitching out such that the entirety of your eternal existence consists of being frozen in place while the hook from Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows by Leslie Gore plays in your head in an endless loop. Have you ever owned a piece of tech that didn’t crash, freeze or succumb to some other catastrophic system failure the second its warranty expired. Maybe our Silicon Valley overlords should tackle the problem of planned obsolescence and the spinning beachball of death before they decide to look for angel investors to fund their schemes to outwit the grim reaper.

The Why

Which brings us to the question of why. Why would you want to live forever- whether it involves brain upload, vampire bite, pact with the devil or whatever else? Why? Surely death- terrifying as it may well be- is what gives life meaning. I’ve only gotten down to the business of writing this essay because there is a deadline attached to it, and surely life itself runs by much the same mechanism. We have things we want to do, we have finite time in which to do them, and so we at least make attempts towards following the direction of our dreams and inclinations. Remove finitude and what is to stop us becoming listless, disaffected, apathetic? We might wave away our desires as time is meaningless. ‘Manana, manana’ we could justifiably say, century after century. Or worse, being immortal and not bound to the constraints of finitude whose to say we wouldn’t find ourselves committing more and more extreme and deviant- even evil- behaviour out of nothing more than the boredom that surely comes with eternity. If there is no death there is no consequence, no limits, and without these restrictions- let alone the doing away with all ideas of traditional human mortality that cyber-immortality would surely bring about- then surely all bets are of. In trying to end death and thus make gods of ourselves, I don’t see how we would turn our world into anything other than hell.

Such ethical speculations aside, without death the planet would fill up to a trillion people (or robots or humanoids or whatever you would call what was once mortal humans) or conversely the desire to have children would diminish entirely. Stripped from the so-called limitations of our humanity we would cease to be human in all the ways that matter.

This all seems fairly obvious to me. Doesn’t take a Mensa IQ or a philosophy doctorate to figure some of these things out. So why do the Silicon Valley guys persist in their immortality projects?

Fear. That’s the only reason I can come up with and I have been puzzling this out for a while now. You could say that there is the Edmund Hillary ideas if ‘I climb Everest because it was there’ i.e. we want to permanently cheat death because death has always been there to be overcome, but I don’t think this quite cuts it. This would leave enough room and neutrality for the philosophical objections above to creep in and take the air out of the project. There is too much zeal, too much fervour for this to be the reason.

Look at Kevin Kelly and Ray Kurtweil and all of these guys. These are not neutral people. They are believers. Not believers in God or in the limitations on constrictions that such a belief necessarily entails. They are the opposite. They believe in no limits, no reflection, no morality beyond the technocratic pushing forward and removal of all boundaries be they cultural, historical, biological of anything else.

It’s fascinating to me, simply because it is so alien. It’s he opposite of all my experience has taught me to be true. I believe this worldview holds the potential for much evil. I believe related aspects of this instrumental, technology over nature worldview have led to the mess we are in today. And I believe fear is at the root of it. Fear of death, which when denied and repressed and led to grow pathological leads to the kind of blinkered schemes that cause more death. Or worse, that lead you to spend your one and only finite mortal life in trying to device fanciful technological ways of cheating death which in the end mean that you never get around to the actual business of living.

I hope, at least, that such cases can prove to be cautionary lessons for the rest of us, who have accepted, however reluctantly, that our time on this Earth is ticking away.

Until next time,

Live well,

Tom.

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