Humanity+ @ Parsons recap: Posthumanism and posthumanism

I knew this would happen eventually, and it finally did at the recently concluded Humanity+ @ Parsons conference in NYC: mass confusion over the term "posthumanism."

You see, there are actually three legitimate but subtly different definitions of the term. And at the Parsons conference, an event that brought designers and transhumanists together, this created an interesting problem that resulted in consistent misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Not to mention a wide differing of opinion.

For most transhumanists, posthumanism is the general idea that we should strive to become posthuman, namely human beings who have been augmented and modified to such a degree that they can no longer be classified as such. A posthuman could be a hyper-genetically modified person, a cyborg, or even a completely non-corporeal uploaded consciousness.

The roots of transhumanist thinking come from the Enlightenment era and is very much informed by secular Humanism. A general premise that drives the quest for a posthuman condition is that steady and significant progress is attainable through the application of science and reason and that we ought to take a human-centric approach to our endeavors (i.e. "If we don't play God, who will?"). And it's not enough to work towards social, political and institutional reform, argue the transhumanists, we should also work to modify and improve the human mind and body itself.

But to many in the design community and European academia (excluding Nick Bostrom's crew at Oxford), the term has its roots in postmodernist thinking. Its focus is more conceptual than practical, more external than internal. Also known as philosophical posthumanism, it is an area of inqiry that is concerned with the blurring lines between the human body and its environment and how our external tools have become extensions of our selves. Posthumanists in this context are interested in exosomatic possibilities, such as extended selves and remote presence. They tend to argue that the skin barrier is an increasingly poor dividing line for determining where the human begins and ends. For more on this approach, I recommend The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness beyond the Brain by Robert Pepperell (2003). And be sure to read my review.

In addition to this, there is an ancillary school of thought which suggests that posthumanism implies post-Humanism (as in "after Humanism"). This is the suggestion that humans have no inherent rights to destroy nature or ethically set themselves above it. Human knowledge is also reduced to a less controlling position, which tends to be seen as the defining aspect of the world. These posthumanists admit limitations and fallibility of human intelligence, even though they do not suggest abandoning the rational tradition of humanism.

While I don't necessarily agree with this line of thinking, I do find the idea of human primacy a bit outdated in consideration of human enhancement, the presence of nonhuman animal persons, and the potential for artificially intelligence persons. But I don't agree that Humanism implies human domination over nature or an indifference to it.

At any rate, these are all very different approaches to posthumanism. Transhumanist posthumans are concerned with the internal world as they look to modify minds and bodies, often in relation to a complexifying and changing environment. Academic/philosophical posthumanists, on the other hand, are interested in identity and interaction – and they're certainly not too keen on the human-redesign front.

Transhumanists definitely faced some criticism from these folks at the Parson's conference. This differing of opinion and perspective resulted in some interesting, provocative and at some times heated moments. But it was all good as it provided some needed passion and contradiction into an otherwise consensual and agreeable gathering of minds and ideas.

Daniel Dillard: "Thoreau, Embodiment, and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of Humanity" [CFI conference on biomedical enhancement]

Florida State graduate student Daniel Dillard now discussing his paper, "Thoreau, Embodiment, and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of Humanity."

Dillard discusses the intellectual history of the perception of the human as an embodied creature. The posthuman requires a re-thinking of the human.

Thoreau quote: "What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip -- labium, from labor (?) -- laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther."

Thoreau pre-conceived the idea of the posthuman and is thus a transitional figure: information is embodied; and that there is a connection between the body and environment (animate with inanimate). Collapse of subject and object; artificial vs. natural. Who and where are we? We are material nature. Moving past the transcendence model toward a material one.

Martin Rees on our posthuman future—and avoiding catastophe

Thomas McCabe, writing for Kurzweil AI, recently reported on Sir Martin Rees's address to the Long Now Foundation. McCabe notes,

Over the truly long term, our posthuman descendants will become — not just second-generation intelligences — but thousand-generation or million-generation intelligences. He quoted Darwin on how no species can pass its likeness into the distant future unaltered; in a billion years of biological evolution, we’ve gone from bugs to humans, and technological evolution is a lot faster than biological. Our distant descendants will be not just strange, but completely alien to us.

According to Rees, we not only have unprecedented opportunity, but unprecedented responsibility. If the new technologies we build have a high chance of causing civilization-wide catastrophe for the first time in history, we are responsible for actively preventing that from happening, not just trying to predict it or understand it.

Link.

The intersection of transhumanism and space travel

Athena Andreadis, author of To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek, has penned an article about the implications of transhumanism on the future of space travel. In the article, titled "Dreamers of a Better Future, Unite!," Andreadis correctly observes that most transhumanists with a "a socially progressive agenda" have very little interest in the whole idea of space travel and interstellar colonization.

Indeed, outside of humanitarian efforts, most transhumanists would rather explore inner space than outer space.

But Andreadis argues that transhumanists should take space travel more seriously. She writes,

Consider the ingredients that would make an ideal crewmember of a space expedition: robust physical and mental health, biological and psychological adaptability, longevity, ability to interphase directly with components of the ship. In short, enhancements and augmentations eventually resulting in self-repairing quasi-immortals with extended senses and capabilities – the loose working definition of transhuman.

Coordination of the two movements would give a real, concrete purpose to transhumanism beyond the rather uncompelling objective of giving everyone a semi-infinite life of leisure (without guarantees that either terrestrial resources or the human mental and social framework could accommodate such a shift). It would also turn the journey to the stars into a more hopeful proposition, since it might make it possible that those who started the journey could live to see planetfall.

Ultimately, she makes the case that human intelligence, if it is to survive and prosper, needs to get off planet. Andreadis concludes by saying,

Despite their honorable intentions and progressive outlook, if the transhumanists insist on first establishing a utopia on earth before approving spacefaring, they will achieve either nothing or a dystopia as bleak as that depicted in Paolo Bacigalupi’s unsparing stories. If they join forces with the space enthusiasts, they stand a chance to bring humanity through the Singularity some of them so fervently predict and expect – except it may be a Plurality of sapiens species and inhabited worlds instead.

Read the entire article.

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In this episode I discuss the Toronto Transhumanist Association, nanotechnology, Denis Diderot, Microsoft's bid for Yahoo!, and Marin Rees's belief that we should take the posthuman era seriously.

Martin Rees: We Should Take the 'Posthuman' Era Seriously

Edge.org's big question this year is, "What have you changed your mind about?" Sir Martin Rees answered, "We Should Take the 'Posthuman' Era Seriously." Excerpt:

Human-induced changes are occurring with runaway speed. It's hard to predict a mere century from now, because what will happen depends on us - this is the first century where humans can collectively transform, or even ravage, the entire biosphere. Humanity will soon itself be malleable, to an extent that's qualitatively new in the history of our species. New drugs (and perhaps even implants into our brains) could change human character; the cyberworld has potential that is both exhilarating and frightening. We can't confidently guess lifestyles, attitudes, social structures, or population sizes a century hence.

Indeed, it's not even clear for how long our descendants would remain distinctively 'human'. Darwin himself noted that "not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity". Our own species will surely change and diversify faster than any predecessor -- via human-induced modifications (whether intelligently-controlled or unintended), not by natural selection alone. Just how fast this could happen is disputed by experts, but the post-human era may be only centuries away.

These thoughts might seem irrelevant to practical discussions - and best left to speculative academics and cosmologists. I used to think this. But humans are now, individually and collectively, so greatly empowered by rapidly changing technology that we can, by design, or as unintended consequences - engender global changes that resonate for centuries. And, sometimes at least, policy-makers indeed think far ahead.

The global warming induced by fossil fuels burnt in the next fifty years could trigger gradual sea level rises that continue for a millennium or more. And in assessing sites for radioactive waste disposal, governments impose the requirements that they be secure for ten thousand years.

It's real political progress that these long-term challenges are higher on the international agenda, and that planners seriously worry about what might happen more than a century hence.

But in such planning, we need to be mindful that it may not be people like us who confront the consequences of our actions today. We are custodians of a 'posthuman' future - here on Earth and perhaps beyond - that can't just be left to writers of science fiction.

Rees is the President, The Royal Society; Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics; Master, Trinity College, University of Cambridge; Author, Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival.

Overcoming gender

Your gender is a constraint. This is an inalienable truism, regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman.

We can no longer deny that males and females are profoundly different. The hallucination is over. Scientists and behaviorists are discovering that men and women differ not just physically, but cognitively and emotionally as well. These differences are not merely the result of gender-specific socialization; they are innate—the result of thousands of years of sexual competition and selection.

Your gender assignment and sense of sexual identity is an imposition. Like many of your other characteristics, you are largely the result of a genetic lottery that happened beyond your control. Consequently, you are in no small way predetermined. Your physical and psychological capabilities are very much constrained and dictated by your genetic constitution.

Sure, the environments that we find ourselves in and the ways in which we are socialized play a contributing factor to our health, personalities and broader perspectives. But let’s not fool ourselves, each and every one of us has characteristics that are forever limited by our genetic code.

Barring the application of enhancement biotechnologies, I will never be able to conceptualize music as profoundly as Beethoven, nor will I ever be able to visualize numbers like Pierre de Fermat. No amount of studying, hard work or dedication will ever change this. I am physiologically incapable of acquiring these capacities.

Similarly, my gender plays an integral role in determining who I am, what my preferences are, and ultimately what I’m capable of.

And that bothers me.

Gender is a disease

Like the work being done to bring about a radical life extension revolution, and whose proponents argue that aging is a disease, we likewise need to change our perceptions about gender. There are a number of areas where we can see how our genders work to our disadvantage and why we would want to do something about it.

Men have the double-edged sword of being, in general, physically advantaged. While this tends to contribute to male dominance over women, it has also placed men in dangerous situations and environments. Males are conventionally the members of society who are sent into combat and are expected to perform hazardous—and sometimes sacrificial—work.

Aside from the overtly obvious physical dimorphism that separates men from women, there are also a number of cognitive and behavioral differences that work to stratify humans along gender lines.

Threats, physical assaults and homicides are an indelible male feature across all cultures and typically the result of male-male competition over resources that work to increase reproductive fitness. Males tend to have more accidents than females across their entire life spans. For every girl that is injured on a playground, four boys are likewise injured. Boys burn themselves more than girls. Roughly twice as many females across all ages suffer from significant levels of anxiety and depression than their male counterparts; women are more prone to suffer from eating disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Looking at latent cognitive abilities, boys and men have slightly higher average IQ scores than girls and women. Females across all ages consistently outperform boys and men on tests that assess the speed of matching arbitrary symbols to numbers. In measures of sensitivity to verbal cues, females almost always outperform males.

Needless to say, these gender differences are general tendencies. Men and women do not all fall within these parameters. But what these statistics reveal is that across the entire population males and females are stratified in a non-trivial way.

Sex differences also impact on occupational interests and achievement—differences that contribute greatly to the wage and social status advantage that men enjoy in most (if not all) industrialized nations. The acquisition of the educational credentials required for a lucrative career in a field such as engineering – a math intensive field – is made easier for men by virtue of cognitive factors that are less pronounced for women.

And of course, as long as women carry, give birth, and nurture their offspring, they will be set at a social disadvantage and even face subjugation. As cyberfeminist Donna Haraway noted in her Cyborg Manifesto,

"...control strategies applied to women's capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical."

Consequently, Haraway saw true female liberation occurring through the application of cybernetics and the subsequent alleviation of biological pressures on women. As Haraway famously noted, "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess."

The end of immutable sexual characteristics

While reproductively necessary, the ongoing presence of gender has proven problematic over time. Humanity is far removed from its evolutionary heritage and environment. Moreover, evolution makes for a poor moral compass. We value fairness, non-arbitrariness and egalitarianism -- even in the genetic sphere; the ongoing presence of gender should therefore trouble us. We should strive for a post-Darwinian condition.

We are, often at a subconscious level, working to become postbiological. Most of us are in denial about or in opposition to this, but the level of control that we seek over our minds and bodies is in tune with this goal. We are perpetually working to transcend our biological vulnerabilities and constraints. This will eventually get us to the oft spoken and quasi-mythological posthuman condition.

Most efforts to achieve a postgendered state have largely focused on non-biological solutions, namely through social, educational, political and economic reform. While environmental strategies can be effective and important in their own right, they will continue to experience limited results on account of their inability to address the root of the problem: human biology.

Transhumanist postgenderism, as differentiated and further elucidated from mainstream feminism and postmodern/deconstructionist cyberfeminism, calls for a more equitable distribution of gendered traits across the two sexes and the elimination of those gendered characteristics that are deemed disadvantageous. Postgenderism in this form calls for actual reproductive and medical interventions for the achievement of these ends.

People deserve access to biotechnologies that will help them control their morphological, cognitive and reproductive characteristics. In a postgendered world, individuals will have the option to remain gendered, to experiment with their sex and sexuality, to mix and match gendered characteristics, or to reject gender altogether. The idea is to exact control over our bodies and minds. A postgendered condition does not necessarily imply the end of all gendered characteristics, it merely signifies the end of fixed and traditional gender assignments wrought by evolutionary processes. In this sense, persons who have undergone sexual reassignment surgery are humanity's first postgenderists.

There are other postgender biotechnologies in existence today. Birth control pills are a well established method that thwarts our reproductive natures, and menstruation suppression has all but arrived. Other physiological factors, such as hormonal influences and neurotransmitters, will soon be addressable.

Looking ahead to the future, there's the possibility for male pregnancy and neurological interventions to normalize male and female cognitive functioning. More radical solutions to help persons become truly postgendered include the advent of artificial wombs, virtual reality and whole brain emulation.

At the social level, the broader suppressive and controlling social megastructure that exists and thrives on gender differences will be undermined by the postgenderist agenda. It will mark the end of sexual politics.

Thus, it is through the application of substantive and real biological interventions that the problem that is gender will most meaningfully be addressed. Postgender-tech will be an integral component to the larger collaborative struggle to achieve a genetically egalitarian, posthuman, and postbiological condition that works to the betterment of both individuals and society in general.

What does transhumanism mean to you?

I like the going definition of transhumanism which proclaims that human beings can and should seek biological enhancement, whether it be physical or cognitive traits, and/or the advent of new capacities all together.

I find this definition inadequate, however, in that it does not hint at the developmental inevitability of human enhancement. This is where I and many other thinkers diverge -- and that's fine; it's a locus point for debate. For me, being a transhumanist is not so much about promoting an enhanced or post-biological existence -- it's about raising awareness and working to manage the process such that the outcomes will be both predictable and desirable.

So, what does transhumanism mean to you?

Please use the comments section to share your thoughts.

Steven J. Dick: Biological intelligence is the exception, not the rule

"Biologically based technological civilization...is a fleeting phenomenon limited to a few thousand years, and exists in the universe in the proportion of one thousand to one billion, so that only one in a million civilizations are biological." -- Steven J. Dick, NASA Chief Historian

In a post-biological universe, says Steven J Dick, machines are the dominant form of intelligence.

From the Daily Galaxy article:

This worldview of the cosmos as a biological universe is a revolutionary perspective as profound a revision in our way of thinking as the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. It is a worldview that believes that "planetary systems are common, that life originates wherever conditions are favorable, and that evolution culminates with intelligence."

Stelarc's third ear

Stelarc has been talking about this for years, and now I see that he's actually done it:




Marcelo (aka k0re) writes: "Stelarc [is] going to implant a mic that will connect to a bluetooth transmitter to connect the ear to the internet! and another surgery to give the ear more definition."