New Scientist video featuring de Grey, Bostrom and Sandberg

Check out this New Scientist video featuring Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom and Aubrey de Grey. Topics discussed include transhumanism, whole brain emulation and radical life extension.

New Scientist covers TransVision 2007

In the 'better late than never' category comes New Scientist's review of TransVision 2007. The article, titled "Death special: The plan for eternal life," was written by my friend Danielle Egan who I met at Yale during TransVision 2003.

Sadly the entire article is not available online (subscription required), but I can reproduce several paragraphs here for your reading pleasure:

They don't look very threatening, though perhaps not very diverse either. Most WTA members are white, middle-aged men, but WTA secretary and former Buddhist monk James Hughes (see "Essay: The end of death?") hopes to attract a wider range of people by highlighting the organisation's democratic aims. The WTA insists that any new technology is used in a fair and ethical way, he says, with global treaties set up to regulate progress. Some transhumanists campaign for equal access to healthcare and for safeguards on new technology.

AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky also believes the movement is driven by an ethical imperative. He sees creating a superhuman AI as humanity's best chance of solving its problems: "Saying AI will save the world or cure cancer sounds better than saying 'I don't know what's going to happen'." Yudkowsky thinks it is crucial to create a "friendly" super-intelligence before someone creates a malevolent one, purposefully or otherwise. "Sooner or later someone is going to create these technologies," he says. "If a self-improving AI is thrown together in a slapdash fashion, we could be in for big trouble."

The theme of saving humanity continues with presentations on cyborgs, cryonics and raising baby AIs in the virtual world of Second Life, as well as surveillance tactics for weeding out techno-terrorists and a suggested solution for the population explosion: uploading 10 million people onto a 50-cent computer chip. More immediate issues facing humanity, such as poverty, pollution and the devastation of war, tend to get ignored.

Danielle is a supporter (she's written about cryonics in the past), and considering the publication I think she did a decent job conveying the nature of the conference.

The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is ...".

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

*You can leave them exactly as is.

*You can delete any one question.

*You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...:, or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".

*You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...”.

You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the "parent" blog you got them from, e.g. Sentient Developments to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

-----------------------------------------------------

My grandparent is Pharyngula.
My parent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.

1. The best post-Singularity novel in SF/Fantasy is...
Diaspora by Greg Egan

2. The best romantic movie in fictionalised biography is...
Shakespeare in Love

3. The best sexy song in rock is...
Magdalena by A Perfect Circle

4. The best cult novel in American non-fiction is...
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

I shall attempt to disseminate my seed to:

Accelerating Future
Astroroach
Neurophilosophy
Open the Future
The Red Scare
Strizblog

Anyone else who wants to accept my meme can also join in the game.

John Harris: Enhancing Evolution

Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People
by John Harris
Book Description:

Decisive biotechnological interventions in the lottery of human life--to enhance our bodies and brains and perhaps irreversibly change our genetic makeup--have been widely rejected as unethical and undesirable, and have often met with extreme hostility. But in Enhancing Evolution, leading bioethicist John Harris dismantles objections to genetic engineering, stem-cell research, designer babies, and cloning to make a forthright, sweeping, and rigorous ethical case for using biotechnology to improve human life.

Human enhancement, Harris argues, is a good thing--good morally, good for individuals, good as social policy, and good for a genetic heritage that needs serious improvement. Enhancing Evolution defends biotechnological interventions that could allow us to live longer, healthier, and even happier lives by, for example, providing us with immunity from cancer and HIV/AIDS. But the book advocates far more than therapies designed to free us from sickness and disability. Harris champions the possibility of influencing the very course of evolution to give us increased mental and physical powers--from reasoning, concentration, and memory to strength, stamina, and reaction speed. Indeed, he supports enhancing ourselves in almost any way we desire. And it's not only morally defensible to enhance ourselves, Harris says. In some cases, it's morally obligatory.

Whether one looks upon biotechnology with hope, fear, or a little of both, Enhancing Evolution makes a case for it that no one can ignore.

John Harris is the Sir David Alliance Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester School of Law, joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics, and a member of Britain's Human Genetics Commission. His many books include On Cloning and A Companion to Genethics. Enhancing Evolution is based on keynote lectures Harris delivered at the James Martin Institute at the University of Oxford in 2006.

Read this review from the Times Online, "Enhancing the species." Excerpt:

Likewise, if pills could make children smarter in a safe way, he thinks we would be dumb not to use them. He says: “You have good moral reasons to advantage your children if you can, and good moral reasons to avoid failing to do so. I see enhancing a child as on a continuum with, say, taking folic acid and avoiding alcohol during pregnancy. These are things that decent, sensible parents do to protect their children.” He points out that we are already enhanced humans – by such advances as vaccination, which prevents us from succumbing to diseases that decimated our forebears. This is now lumped under the label of “medicine”; ditto for Ritalin, which modifies behaviour, and modafinil, a drug used to help people to stay awake. Even opera glasses are an enhancement, helping us to see farther than we can naturally. Genetic-based enhancements are simply another stop on the road to improving the lot of humankind.

Of course, the consequence of banishing the diseases of old age is a dramatic extension of lifespan. So be it, Harris says: “To quote a friend, I’d willingly sample a few million years and see how it goes.”

The idea, he believes, is not that enhancements – such as gene therapy to remove the threat of cancer, or so-called “smart pills” – give some a competitive advantage over others. The technologies should be available to all and should raise the baseline of human welfare just as compulsory schooling and public health policy aim to do.

“Certainly, sometimes we want competitive advantage – but for the enhancements I talk about the competitive advantage is not the prime motive. I didn’t give my son (he has a grown-up son, Jacob, to whom the book is dedicated) a good diet in the hope that others eat a bad diet and die prematurely. I’m happy if everyone has a good diet. The moral imperative should be that enhancements are generally available because they are good for everyone.” The only other route to equality, he says, is to level down so that everyone is as uneducated, unhealthy and unenhanced as the lowest in society – which is unethical. Even though we can’t offer a liver transplant to all who need them, he says, we still carry them out for the lucky few. Much better to try to raise the baseline, even if some are left behind.

Russell Blackford also chimes in.

One way to become a cyborg

Now that's what I call a radical body modification.

Frank Stratford: Tapping humanity's potential through space exploration

From Frank Stratford's Space Review article, "Our potential in space":

So why would humans want to explore or live in such places? The one argument that has often been glossed over or ignored is, in my opinion, the most important, and many others are beginning to see this. This motive for sending humans into space comes down to rediscovering the importance of realizing our potential as a people. If scientific discoveries and resource utilization or spin-offs are not enough to get our governments and businesses interested in investing more in space, perhaps it’s time to take a different approach
.......
When I think of what the colonization of space could achieve for us I only have to look at what we have achieved here on Earth to understand what could be our future in space. Yes, we will always carry the negatives with us wherever we go. There will still be problems here on Earth as long as we exist, but growing onto new worlds and new horizons is in our genes. All societies that ceased to look outward have ceased to exist, from the records we have of great civilizations of the past. When apathy, internal politics, and agendas take over, that’s when we lose sight of our potential for greatness.

Read Stratford's entire article.

Around the Web

Some items that recently caught my attention:

The Do-It-Yourself Home of the Future -- Nanobots Included (WorldChanging)

Buzzwords for the Future (CRN)

Mother defends hysterectomy for disabled daughter (Guardian)

Imaging the vegetative state (Neurophilosopher)

Marijuana Laws Cost Taxpayers Billions (Mother Jones)

Rocket powered X-Wing launched, disintegrates in mid-air (via Gizmodo)

Dancing uplifted monkeys

This could actually be used as an argument against animal uplift ;-)

Enter the cybrids

Technology Review talks to biologist Ian Wilmut about his cloning plans for the future:

Research mixing human and animal eggs and sperm has garnered considerable ethical concern and been banned in several countries. The banning was started in part by fears that scientists will create animals with human genes or other ethically questionable organisms, and in part by concerns that mixing animal and human materials diminishes the sanctity of human life. But researchers say that public outcry has largely failed to distinguish between important medical research, such as therapeutic cloning, and more dubious experiments. For example, in the United Kingdom, proposals to use animal eggs for human cloning sparked outcry from an overzealous media portending half-human creatures.

Last month, after a lengthy debate, the U.K. authority overseeing such research overrode a previous ban, approving specific projects to generate these cells. Much like other embryonic stem-cell research, the embryos the scientists generate--dubbed cybrids rather than hybrids because only the cell cytoplasm from the animal is used--are not allowed to develop beyond 14 days.

Ian Wilmut, the biologist who spearheaded the cloning of the now renowned Dolly the sheep, plans to submit his own proposal for cybrid research in the next few months. Wilmut, now director of the Scottish Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, ultimately wants to use stem cells cloned from a patient with ALS, a degenerative movement disorder, to develop a model for studying the disease.

Read the entire interview here.

Cyber-warfare? Martin C. Libicki says don't believe the hype

Martin C. Libicki of the RAND Corporation has written a report about the potential for conquest in cyberspace. Libicki argues that many fears about cyber-warfare are overstated, but he also considers the threat of social engineering and the use of computers to persuade. Here's the abstract:

The global Internet has served primarily as an arena for peaceful commerce. Some analysts have become concerned that cyberspace could be used as a potential domain of warfare, however. Martin C. Libicki argues that the possibilities of hostile conquest are less threatening than these analysts suppose. It is in fact difficult to take control of other people’s information systems, corrupt their data, and shut those systems down. Conversely, there is considerable untapped potential to influence other people’s use of cyberspace, as computer systems are employed and linked in new ways over time. The author explores both the potential for and limitations to information warfare, including its use in weapons systems and in command-and-control operations as well as in the generation of “noise.” He also investigates how far “friendly conquest” in cyberspace extends, such as the power to persuade users to adopt new points of view. Libicki observes that friendly conquests can in some instances make hostile conquests easier or at least prompt distrust among network partners. He discusses the role of public policy in managing the conquest and defense of cyberspace and shows how cyberspace is becoming more ubiquitous and complex.

The dumbing down of America continues

Ugh, I can't believe this: NBC is about to air a new special called Phenomenon that will feature "mystifier" Criss Angel and "mentalist" Uri Geller:

Mystifier/artist Criss Angel ("Criss Angel MINDFREAK") and famed mentalist Uri Geller will host this mysterious live competition series in which they will conduct an intensive search for the next great mentalist. The series tests 10 hopeful mentalists who must compete each week to demonstrate a wide spectrum of mystifying talents for a panel of weekly celebrity guests and a studio audience. Geller and Angel will assess the contestants but ultimately the winner's fate will be determined by the viewers at home. In addition to voting, each episode will also contain an interactive component to engage the at home audience.

You can catch a preview here.

Or, you can watch Geller's infamous performance failure on the Tonight Show:

As P.T. Barnum once said, "There's a sucker born every minute."

Strange how things haven't change since Barnum's day.

Science & Spirit: Will men and women ever agree?

The latest edition of Science & Spirit takes a look at modern gender politics and potential future sociological and medical issues.

Topics:

The Gender Debate: Timing is Everything
by Beryl Lieff Benderly
The way that science talks about male and female has dramatically changed over the past twenty years, leaning toward equality today, as told in the adventures of our correspondent, then and now.

Biology May Be Our Destiny
by Steven E. Rhoads
For all the power academic “gender studies” have today, evolution and biology may have the final word in why men and women are different and why society should take this to heart.

The End of 'Man'
by Pat Craig
Although some scientists say the Y chromosome that produces boys may evolve out of existence, others don’t see the curtain dropping yet, if at all. The Y may have the remarkable power of self-repair—and ‘man’ will survive.

'Is It a Boy or a Girl?'
by Milton Diamond
The intersex child, born with sexual ambiguity, is a heart-wrenching issue glossed over by society until now. A new medical view urges letting the child, guided by science, decide future sexual identity.

Q&A: On Doing the Math
David C. Geary
For all the debate on how boys and girls compare in math and science, these differences are small compared to the gap between Americans and other countries. One expert on the brain, evolution, and math offers his views.

Male and Female Mystics
by Carol Lee Flinders
Religious mystics have always been creative in their male and female images of God and their own gender roles in society. They show that although roles and traditions exist, they are transcended as well.

I'm voting Green

The Greens seem to be the only party in Ontario that gets it right now.

Oh, and if you're in Ontario, vote MMP (Mixed-Member Proportional).

Hitchens gets it wrong about Buddhism

"Don't believe me, don't believe anybody, don't accept anything based on tradition. Don't believe anything based on the fact that your community believes this or your country believes this or the people that you are around believe this." - Buddha

I’ve never really paid much attention to Christopher Hitchens, renowned and reviled critic of all things religious. But when my brother recently brought his anti-Buddhist sentiments to my attention I had to take a closer look.

As it turns out, he does indeed have some very uncomplimentary things to say about Buddhism.

Hitchens essentially believes that the West has been duped by what he regards as just another religion filled with all the usual trappings. He regards Buddhism as a “faith” that “despises the mind and the free individual." He says it preaches submission and resignation, and that practitioners come to regard life as a “poor and transient thing.”

In his book, God is not Great, Hitchens writes,

"Those who become bored by conventional "Bible" religions, and seek "enlightenment" by way of the dissolution of their own critical faculties into nirvana in any form, had better take a warning. They may think they are leaving the realm of despised materialism, but they are still being asked to put their reason to sleep, and to discard their minds along with their sandals."

Wow. Pretty harsh stuff. Hitchens doesn’t mince words and slams into Buddhism like he would any other religion.

That's all fine and well, except that Buddhism isn’t just any other religion.

What Buddhism is

Yes, Buddhism has the characteristics of religion, but it offers much more than that.

It’s an epistemological philosophy and an intrapersonal approach to perception, self-awareness and self-regulation. It’s an aesthetic. It’s a non-anthropocentric ethical viewpoint that places an emphasis on meaningful, compassionate and genuine relationships. It's a type of Humanism. It encourages meditation and a mindful approach to living. It’s a worldview and methodology that promotes skepticism, rationality, empiricism and even non-conformity. It is the practical acknowledgment of the unavoidable perceptual subjectivity that is part of the human condition. It is the recognition that the mind matters and that conscious awareness can and should be optimized.

Buddhists believe that by paying close attention to moment-to-moment conscious experience it is possible to move beyond the sense of “self” in favour of a new state of personal well-being. And if this can be incorporated within the framework of formal scientific investigation, then all the better.

And all this without the usual baggage and expectations of most religions, namely belief in God, the soul, judgment and the afterlife. It does not promote any fixed dogma, nor does the practice result in feelings of guilt or shame. There are no 'sins' to be committed in Buddhism, nor are there highly polarized notions of right and wrong; practitioners simply do the best they can to mete out as little suffering to the world as possible.

But like all Big Ideas, Buddhism can be prone to abuse and misunderstanding -- and as Hitchens has correctly noted, even tribalistic tendencies.

Institutionalized Buddhism

Indeed, a big part of Hitchens’s grief with Buddhism is its questionable history and how it has become highly ritualized and filled with other-worldly beliefs. As he has said, “Buddhism can be as hysterical and sanguinary as any other system that relies on faith and tribe.” Hitchens has railed against the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Buddhists. He condemns the Burmese dictatorship as a Buddhist one (which seems a suspicious claim to make these days seeing as thousands of monks have recently stood up against this regime). Hitchens dips deep into history and blames Buddhism for a number of misguided practices and atrocities.

While I agree that Buddhism has been used in this way and that blood has been shed in its name, I can’t agree that Buddhism is the cause of these things. What Hitchens is describing is the failure of human nature, the perils of insular groupthink, and politics itself. It is the same phenomenon that has led to the bastardization of the teachings of Jesus and the rise of such monolithic institutions as the Catholic Church (along with its sordid history of conquest and persecution). Consequently, Hitchens’s ire should be directed at the phenomenon of tribalism and not religion itself.

Buddhist faith?

Hitchens also makes the claim that Buddhists rely on faith. Undoubtedly, beliefs in reincarnation, karma and transcendence run deep within various Buddhist strains. This is currently a point of great contention among Buddhist scholars, some of whom, like the secular Buddhist Stephen Batchelor, contend that these precepts are unnecessary and that when it comes to metaphysics Buddhists should actually be agnostic. More traditional Buddhists, on the other hand, argue that belief in rebirth is absolutely necessary to the practice.

Interestingly, the Dalai Lama himself – a believer in reincarnation – maintains that science should take precedence over these sorts of notions. He once said, “My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”

Easier said than done, of course. Deeply embedded and ritualized religions have an incredibly hard time adapting to change -- including Buddhism.

As for the accusation that all Buddhists rely on faith, that's clearly a generalization. Most Buddhists, I would say, likely take nothing on mere faith alone.

Alternative perception

Hitchens also critiques the aims of Buddhist practice itself. He makes a number of suspicious claims -- that Buddhists despise the mind and the free individual, that Buddhism teaches submission and resignation, and that practitioners regard life as a fleeting thing full of suffering. He contends that Buddhists require a surrendering of the mind.

This is mostly nonsense. These claims have been countered elsewhere, so I won’t replicate them here, but there are a pair of issues I wish to address.

First, Hitchens appears to be confused. He seems to be conflating transcendental meditation (or something like it) with the more traditional practice of Vipasanna meditation and its focus on mindful awareness. There is nothing escapist or transcendent about this practice; rather, it's very much about focusing on the here-and-now and correcting the processes of a conditioned mind.

Second, Hitchens complains that Buddhists favour subjectivity over objectivity. “[Y]ou're supposed to be the subjective judge of what you're experiencing, are you not?,” he asks. Hitchens, being the uber-materialist that he is, is concerned that Buddhists don’t believe that anything can be accepted at objective face-value, that Buddhists merely see existence as some sort of grandiose illusion.

Hitchens's special claim into the true nature of reality aside, he is a bit off course here and his concern is exaggerated. Buddhists do not deny the presence of the material world or the value of objectivity – far from. What they assert is that the Universe will always be perceived through the lens of an observer and that our comprehension of reality must always take this into account. The only way the world can be observed is subjectively; there can be no such thing as a truly objective observer. We can and should strive towards an objective frame, but the world will always be perceived by an observer, which is by definition a subject.

It’s okay to be spiritual, really it is

What irks me most about Hitchens’s critique of Buddhism is the sense I get that what he is really complaining about are personal quests for spirituality. In fact, some of his arguments are so pithy (like making fun of Buddhist koans and Steven Seagal) that I'm inclined to think he is slamming into Buddhism just for the sake of it -- because it's just another "religion" on his hate list.

But Hitchens hasn't done his homework and it shows. Moreover, his limited acceptance as to what kind of worldview and perceptual lens is acceptable is extremely limited and narrow-minded.

Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with spirituality. Or, if you hate that word, a sense of existential awareness. In fact, I wish more people would consider the philosophic implications of existence and look deeper within themselves. There is far too much daydreaming going on today with people living way outside their heads.

On the issue of spirituality I’ll give Sam Harris the last word:

"There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life...[I]t must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith."

Sources:
"An Interview with Christopher Hitchens," C. P. Farley.
"Christopher Hitchens reduces Buddhism to a phrase," True Ancestor.
"His material highness," Christopher Hitchens.
"Christopher Hitchens: Religion Poisons Everything," Jon Wiener
"Hitchens - Zen is not Great?," Flapping Mouths.
Wikipedia and Wikiquote.

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."

Sure, but can it wash the dishes?

Oh, wait a minute, this one can....well, sorta:

The Director's Cut of the Director's Cut of Blade Runner

Wired's Ted Greenwald interviews Ridley Scott about the upcoming re-release of Blade Runner.

Excerpt:

Wired: Some of that ambiguity got squeezed out of the original version. It seems like you've been making up for it ever since.

Scott:I read an article recently saying that one of the reasons the film has found an ongoing audience is that it was incomplete. That's absolute horseshit. The film was very specifically designed and is totally complete. In those days, there was more discussion than was welcome, as far as I'm concerned. [Screenwriter] Hampton Fancher, [producer] Michael Deeley, and I talked and talked and talked — every day for eight months. But at the end of the day, there's a lot of me in this script. That's what happens, because that's the kind of director I am. The single hardest thing is getting the bloody thing on paper. Once you've got it on paper, the doing is relatively straightforward.

Wired: It was never on paper that Deckard is a replicant.

Scott:It was, actually. That's the whole point of Gaff, the guy who makes origami and leaves little matchstick figures around. He doesn't like Deckard, and we don't really know why. If you take for granted for a moment that, let's say, Deckard is a Nexus 7, he probably has an unknown life span and therefore is starting to get awfully human. Gaff, at the very end, leaves an origami, which is a piece of silver paper you might find in a cigarette packet, and it's a unicorn. Now, the unicorn in Deckard's daydream tells me that Deckard wouldn't normally talk about such a thing to anyone. If Gaff knew about that, it's Gaff's message to say, "I've read your file, mate." That relates to Deckard's first speech to Rachael when he says, "That's not your imagination, that's Tyrell's niece's daydream." And he describes a little spider on a bush outside the window. The spider is an implanted piece of imagination. And therefore Deckard, too, has imagination and even history implanted in his head.

Here's my review of Blade Runner.

Canada's poor effort in dealing with climate change

Ronald Bailey's recent article, "Climate Change Confabs," brought to my attention Canada's rather lackadaisical and irresponsible response to the global warming crisis. Bailey writes,

How are the Kyoto signatories—chiefly the European Union (EU), Japan and Canada—doing at meeting their emissions targets? Emissions from the EU-15 have dropped by 1.5 percent since 1990, which is still well above their agreed target reduction of 8 percent below what they emitted in 1990. A report last year from the European Environment Agency projected that the EU-15 would not likely reach their 2012 Kyoto Protocol emissions target unless they adopt more stringent policies. Nevertheless, the EU jauntily declared that it would cut its GHG emissions by 20 percent below its 1990 level by 2020.

Canada committed to reducing its GHG emissions by 6 percent below its 1990 level, but as of 2004, Canada emitted 27 percent more GHG than it did in 1990. Japan is supposed to cut its GHG emissions by 6 percent, but recent projections suggest that it may emit 2 percent more than it did in 1990. For comparison, U.S. GHG emissions are up over 16 percent of what they were in 1990.

At the U.N. meeting on Monday, the EU, Canada, and Japan all came out in favor of a binding target of cutting GHG emissions by 50 percent below their 1990 levels by 2050. The Bush Administration is against binding reductions targets, preferring to focus on research to develop clean energy technologies that do not emit GHGs—e.g., nuclear, wind, solar and carbon capture and sequestration technologies. Carbon sequestration means burying carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuels by injecting it into underground reservoirs. At the U.N. climate confab, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice declared, "Ultimately, we must develop and bring to market new energy technologies that transcend the current system of fossil fuels, carbon emissions and economic activity. Put simply, the world needs a technological revolution."

Entire article.

Embarrassing. Canada has got to get its act together on this.

As for the U.S. "solution", they are hand-waving in order to justify inaction. Instead, we need to a) reduce emissions now and b) work towards the development of cleaner technology. It's not an either/or scenario.

Related article: "Canadian shame at the UN's conference on global warming (2006)."

The 'Islamic Fascism' claim

The controversy surrounding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent visit to the United States reminded me of an article I wrote a little over a year ago called "Islamic fascism? Actually, yes."

Sovereignty and the problem of political relativism: Why we need a world without borders

A number of SentDev readers put me to task on my claim that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should have been arrested upon his recent entry into the United States. As I stated in the comments section, the post was largely rhetorical, but I meant it; I wanted to show how absurd it was that this political criminal is allowed to travel at will and be afforded diplomatic courtesies.

Arresting heads of state or inhibiting their mobility is not unheard of. Slobodan Milosevic was indicted in 1999 while he was the leader of Yugoslavia. The French failed to arrest Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe back in 2003 when they were thwarted by judicial authorities who ruled that, as a serving head of state, he had immunity from prosecution. Since that time the European Union and the United States have imposed a travel ban on Mugabe and over 90 members of his government. A similar ban is currently in effect for Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko.

The travel bans, which are more bark than bite, are stern messages sent to wayward leaders and their regimes. Given Ahmadinejad's track record, there’s no reason why he and his cronies shouldn’t have the same travel restrictions applied.

Murky territory

This is a very murky area of international law. Traditionally, heads of state are entitled to immunity from prosecution anywhere, even after they are no longer in power. This all changed when the United Kingdom attempted to extradite head of state Augusto Pinochet to Spain on charges of presiding over systematic torture in Chile while he was in power. As established by the British Courts, heads of state can now be subject to indictment once an international law is put into place -- in this case the UN Convention Against Torture which dates back to 1988.

Ahmadinejad’s regime is known for using torture, and is thus in violation of international law. So, too, are members of the Bush Administration for that matter. But there’s currently very little will or power to enforce these laws. Typically, only the disgraced and displaced get put to task for their crimes.

The issue of immunity brings to mind issues of sovereignty and political relativism. By what authority can the United Nations impose laws on sovereign states? And by what right can the ‘international community’ require nations to adhere to external political conventions?

Ultimately, if the goal is to reduce international conflict and strife, the concept of national sovereignty must be abandoned, along with notions of political relativism. Countries have no “right” to go it alone; today, given the catastrophe of climate change, resource pressures, economic and cultural globalization, and the burgeoning threat of apocalyptic technologies, there is far too much at stake for this petty convenience. Moreover, the imposition of a minimal yet standardized set of international laws is not too much to ask for; human rights violations are human rights violations no matter where and how they occur.

Man, the State, and War

Back in 1959, political theorist Kenneth N. Waltz wrote his seminal work, Man, the State, and War. In this book, Waltz argued that there is a tripod of despair which can account for much of human conflict. When it came to war, the primary factors included human nature (i.e. the actions of individual men, or outcomes of psychological forces), the presence of sovereign nation states, and the international system (or lack thereof, what Waltz dubbed "international anarchy"). Waltz posited that states' actions can often be explained by the pressures exerted on them by international competition, which limits and constrains their choices.

Combined, these three ingredients create a volatile mixture that typically results in geopolitical tensions and often all-out war.

Currently, there is not much we can do about human nature, although the transhumanists are busy working on that problem. As for the existence of nation states and a weak international governing system, those are problems that are immediately addressable.

What is required is the elimination of the sovereign nation state and the subsequent construction of an accountable world federalism.

The sovereignty myth

The key assumption of sovereignty is that a nation state has exclusivity of jurisdiction. Countries claim to have exclusive right to complete political authority over an area of governance, people, and itself. Consequently, what goes on within the borders of a sovereign nation is often considered its own business.

The claim to sovereignty, which has a rich historical context, forms the basis of the nation state model of global political organization. This model, however, is outdated and has been for some time, as witnessed by the catastrophic World Wars of the 20th century, the collapse of economic protectionism, the rise of cultural globalization, and even such things as the advent of virtual presence and the metaverse.

Sovereignty continues to be a problem because is often leads to a country’s exaggerated sense of importance and the notion that they are absolved from any kind of external standard. This is particularly problematic in authoritarian and despotic regimes where there are few democratic processes and virtually no accountability. This in turn leads to a misguided sense of political authority by their leaders, as exhibited by the heads of state in Iran, Zimbabwe, Belarus, and so on.

The negligence of political relativism

A politically criminal act is still a criminal act regardless of country. The issue, therefore, aside from enforcing the law, is to determine what is law given a richly multicultural planet. But while we tend to shy away from moral and cultural relativism, we should also be wary of political relativism – the idea that different people can and should be ruled by different political systems.

Supporters of political relativism argue that different political arrangements are acceptable in different countries given different precedents, traditions and realities; it is a denial of the assertion that there is only one or a truly fundamental means of governance.

One can interpret this is an apology for inaction and isolationism. Moreover, it is an abrogation of the larger global community’s humanitarian obligations. The “that’s their problem, not ours” mentality has arguably empowered some of the worst atrocities in recent times, including the genocide in Rwanda. Nation states allow people to cower under the shield of conceited isolationism and deny the presence of a larger human community. The is the fuel that allows renegade countries to ‘go it alone.’

Driving these sentiments are nativistic urges and over-the-top cultural identification. These orientations tread ominously close to far-right politics and have definite quasi-fascistic overtones. Other apologists for the nation state worry about a domineering global regime. They fear that all the political eggs will be in one global basket.

This concern doesn’t hold after closer scrutiny. First, for those of us living in popular sovereignties (i.e. democracies), we have conceded authority to our individual governments, so we are already making ourselves politically vulnerable. Given the onset of a despotic system, however, political change and insurgency would have to come from within; we would never hold out for liberation from outside sources. Second, democracy, as imperfect as it is, appears to be the best political system available to humanity. A world federalism, with minimal influence on individual regions (aside from the basics like security and enforcement of human rights), would be established and maintained by democratic processes. This is no Orwellian nightmare.

Destroy all nations!

The idea of a United Nations is hardly new. The same sort of thing was attempted in 1899 and 1907 with the international Hague Peace Conferences, and again in 1919 with the League of Nations. The United Nations is the most recent failed attempt to unify the global community.

Until national sovereignty is dissolved, however, these kinds of global models will not work. Powerful nations like the United States will continue to use the UN when it pleases them, and ignore it when it does not. Sadly, there is no effective prescription outside of coercion to compel a country to give up its sense of exclusive authority.

How this international system could actually come about is still a mystery. My own suspicion is that it will come through the maturation and merging of large political and economic entities like the the European Union. There is already talk of an African Union, with South American, North American and Asian unions not too far behind. Eventually these bodies will fuse into one large federation. Membership in these unions will be an attractive proposition. The benefits of a shared infrastructure will be substantial.

Ultimately, however, a world federalism would go a long way in reducing conflicts. Civil wars, localized violence and asymmetric threats would likely still emerge; no one is claiming utopia. But given this kind of arrangement, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that common security, an end to arms races, and the alleviation of cultural, political and economic isolationism would be a good thing. It’s part of the larger humanitarian mission.

It would be applied political Humanism.