BEYOND ENHANCEMENT: ANTHROPOLOGICALLY BOUNDED POSTHUMANISM

David Roden, Open University

Posthuman Possibility Space (PPS)Impossible Posthumans

Possible Posthumans

Comprehending {PPS}

Nick Bostrom:

A posthuman is a being with:

“a central capacity greatly exceeding the maximum attainable by any current human being without recourse to new technological means”

Nick Bostrom, “Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up’, in Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, ed. Bert Gordijn and Ruth Chadwick (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), pp. 107-137.

{PPS} Set of possible posthumans

Posthumanism: Alteration vs. Enhancement II

DE) P is an F-enhancer if and only if

• Some S has function F.

• Doing P makes S a better F’er

Brains have the function Learning.

If taking Ritalin makes brains better learners, Ritalin is a Learning-enhancer.

Posthumanism: Alteration vs. Enhancement III

1) Doing P makes S acquire a new function F*.AND S loses F or gets worse at Fing.

2) Doing P creates a new system S* with a new function F*AND S loses F or gets worse at Fing.OR S* replaces S

Neither 1) nor 2) constitute enhancements.

Posthumanism: Alteration vs. Enhancement III

Technology as “Dangerous” supplement

• Real examples: Language, submarines, symbolic search, rocketry, etc.

• SF examples: The Borg, Instrumental Elimination of the Folk

Instrumental Elimination of the Folk

Once the channel is opened between two or more people they can learn (learn) to exchange information and coordinate their behavior with the same intimacy and virtuosity displayed by your own cerebral hemispheres. Think what this might do for hockey teams, and ballet companies, and research teams! If the entire population were thus fitted out, spoken language of any kind might well disappear completely, a victim of the "why crawl when you can fly?" principle. Libraries become filled not with books, but with long recordings of exemplary bouts of neural activity. These constitute a growing cultural heritage, an evolving "Third World," to use Karl Popper's terms. But they do not consist of sentences or arguments.

Churchland, Paul 1981. “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes”, Journal of Philosophy 78(2): 67-90.

Posthumanism: Alteration vs. Enhancement IV

“Enhancement” does not comprehend all of {PPS}

But, then what does it meant to be “posthuman”

and how (if at all) do we delineate PPS?

Posthumanism: Speculative and Critical

Speculative Posthumanism (SP) • Concerned with the implications of possible successors to

humans brought about by technological agency.

Critical Posthumanism (CP) • Interrogates the foundational status of the human in ethics,

politics and epistemology.

Are SP and CP antithetic or complementary?

Speculative Posthumanism

(SP) Wide Descendants of current humans could cease to be human by virtue of a history of technical alteration.

Exclusive consideration of biological descendants of humanity as candidates for posthumanity would be excessively restrictive. Future extensions of NBIC technologies may involve discrete bio-technical modifications of the reproductive process such as human cloning, the introduction of transgenic or artificial genetic material or very exotic processes such as personality uploading or “mind-cloning”. Thus entities warranting our concern with the posthuman could emerge via modified biological descent, recursive extension of AI technologies (involving human and/or non-human designers), quasi-biological descent from synthetic organisms, a convergence of the above, or via some technogenetic process yet to be envisaged.

“The Disconnection Thesis” (forthcoming in the The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment).

The Disconnection Thesis

A Wide Human Descendant is a posthuman:

1) If it has ceased to belong to the Human Social/Technical Network as a result of technical alteration.

2) Or if it is a wide human descendant of a posthuman.

Critical Posthumanism

Q: What are Critical Posthumanists critical of?

A: Humanism . . .

. . . or, rather, anthropocentrism. A humanism is just a philosophy with an anthropology and not all humanisms are anthropocentric!

A humanism qualifies as anthropocentric if its anthropology privileges humans or some notional human standpoint.

CP enjoins the evaluation, critique and rectification of anthropological assumptions in order to overcome anthropocentric thinking.

Sampling the Diversity of CP

The “subject” of writing does not exist if we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of writing is a system of relations between strata . . . the psyche, society, the world. Within that scene, on that stage, the punctual simplicity of the classical subject is not to be found (Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference).

Naturalism is, among other things, the metaphysical hypothesis that the objective world is not constrained by any reasons or standards of reasonableness (James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go).

[The] posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may once have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice. (N Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman)

Inspired ultimately by Immanuel Kant, correlationists are devoted to the human-world correlate as the sole topic of philosophy . . . this has become the unspoken central dogma of all continental and much analytic philosophy. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux

Anthropological Bounds on SP

• Not all conceivable posthumans belong to PPS (i.e. some conceivable posthumans may be impossible).

• Given any WHD, anthropology plausibly constrains the scope for disconnection.

How Anthropology Bounds Posthuman Possibility

• A disconnection requires a posthuman difference-maker (e.g. a technological singularity)

• Anthropology bounds the posthuman by constraining possible difference makers.

Thesis: There needs to be Synthesis

Speculative Posthumanists must evaluate CP claims about the deficiencies of humanisms to understand the scope for disconnection.

Axes of Constraint

The ontic axis specifies distinguishing human attributes: having a human essence, belonging to a natural kind or a historically differentiated population

The transcendental axis specifies conditions of possibility for subjectivity, objectivity, Being, value, etc

(Transcendental Humanism, Agent Instrumentalism . . .)

Ontic Constraint: Dualism and Mind-Uploading

I was reading Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, enjoying the ingenious variety of his robots, when I happened upon the passage where he argues it will soon be possible to download human consciousness into a computer. To illustrate, he invents a fantasy scenario in which a robot surgeon purees the human brain in a kind of cranial liposuction, reading the information in each molecular layer as it is stripped away and transferring the information into a computer. At the end of the operation, the cranial cavity is empty, and the patient, now inhabiting the metallic body of the computer, wakens to find his consciousness exactly the same as it was before.

How, I asked myself, was it possible for someone of Moravec’s obvious intelligence to believe that mind could be separated from body? Even assuming such a separation was possible, how could anyone think that consciousness in an entirely different medium would remain unchanged, as if it had no connection with embodiment? Shocked into awareness, I began to notice he was far from alone. (Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman)

Hayles is no doubt right. (Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism)

Ontic Constraint: Dualism and Mind-Uploading

• If Hayles is right, uploaded persons do not belong in posthuman possibility space.

But increased substrate dependence widens the scope for disconnection through morphological variation.

Transcendental Humanism

An object is a possible object of human experience. Any object of human experience is knowable (transcendental phenomenology)

That p entails that p is knowable (verificationism)

Given TH, there can be no unknowable facts or things in themselves.

It is conceivable that there would be facts about posthumans humans cannot know.

TH rules out such posthumans.

Agency Instrumentalism (Davidson/Brandom)

1. The ability to have beliefs (thus desires, intentions) requires a grasp of what belief is since to believe is also to understand 'the possibility of being mistaken'

2. Believers must understand that others might have true or false beliefs about the same topic.

3. Thus no belief can be adopted by someone not already involved in evaluating her own and others’ attitudes according to shared standards and norms.

4. Language is the only intersubjective framework in which beliefs can be assessed.

5. Only language users are believers.

• Since intentions and desires presuppose belief, only language users are agents.

• Since knowing that p entails belief that p, only language users are knowers.

Agency Instrumentalism and Nonhumans

• Ascribing belief/agency to non-language users is only a predictive strategy, implying zero ontic commitment.

• There are currently no non-human agents/knowers, anywhere.

• Agency Instrumentalism rules out non-language-using posthumans.

Conclusions:

• Posthuman possibility is anthropologically bounded.

• SP’s metaphysical scope varies according to CP’s critical hits and misses.

• SP/CP are not antithetic projects.

• The enhancement debate does not address “our” future in PPS.