Will Saletan and the Transhumanists
As promised, here is Will Saletan's slant on the Stanford transhumanist conference. My article is written too, although I don't yet know when it will appear. This is my favorite paragraph from Saletan's recounting, which pretty well nails the scene:
"Remember those kids who played Dungeons & Dragons and ran the science-fiction club in your high school? They've become transhumanists. Their resident immortalist, Aubrey de Grey, walks around in sneakers, a ponytail, and a 14-inch beard that he strokes like a cat. One of the CCLE officials at the conference calls herself Wrye Sententia; the other dresses like an LSD trip. This was the kind of conference where people talked about the Matrix the way Christians talk about the Bible, and where speakers apologized for their discomfort with piercings or tattoos."
And the patriarchy, Will: We mustn't forget how transhumanism can help end the dreaded patriarchy!
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 6:10 PM
12 Comments
12 Comments:
After reading Saletan's article and looking through his links, I'm on the verge of renouncing my comments to Winston Jen this weekend that human dignity can't be lost.
Seriously, did Saletan selectively pick out a bunch of extremist freaks like the media picks out abortionist killing extremists to portray the pro-life movement, or is this really the heart/core of the transhumanist movement?
Uh, actually Don, he didn't tell his readers the half of it. I do, though. Stay tuned.
They are all symptoms, in my view.
BAP,
I'm still thinking about your last comment on "net worth" and kids etc. Good stuff.
I've thought about your question before and my competence is limited but I sense some gnawing sense of despair among people like this, maybe along the line of Pascal's observation of the hole/vacuum in the human heart that longs to be filled, but can't be by human efforts because we have limited resources and powers to fill the heart's infinite longing. The soul has infinite longings, but we have only finite means to satisfy those longings. I think that's what Pascal would say... But then again he's a Dead White European (Christian) Male... So he probably doesn't count. Perhaps cloning, transhumanism and etc are attempts to transcend our human nature to find some kind of satisfaction/fulfillment that cloners and trans/post humanists don't think our bodies and human powers are capable of filling and they aren't now experiencing. Hence we want to go beyond our limits to touch/tap/become the infinite.
Western culture used to look to God to meet the longings/fears of the soul. But if God is dead, or has walked away from the world, then this is all there is and there's no alternative to satisfying those longings except to achieve immortality on our own by living forever by replacing our body parts, augmenting it with machines, or escaping the body-I think a little ancient gnositicism there-and copying our mind's schema into a computer/machine type network where we can then experience all we need to experience to be satisfied. With a large measure of people sensing the death of God-which I don't believe-I think this kind of stuff is natural.
Then I also think there's a psycho-social development aspect. When I was a youth pastor, we'd see the weird hair, the body piercings, ugly, ugly make up, bizarre clothing. These kids were experimenting with or trying to stake out/come up with an identity. I guess that's natural for junior high kids. They also seemed to want be challenge their parents to see if they really loved them no matter what. They wanted that security of being unconditionally accepted. They also seemed to want to be noticed and not get lost in all the mass of humanity they were thrown into at school.
This last observation-that's all it is and I am over my head and beyond my competence, tells me that Saletan is right. These kids never grew up. They missed something.
I think there's an educational/philosophical problem. We've been told all these years that all we are the products of random chance processes and forces that did not have our end in mind and as a result, there is no meaning to being a human being other than what we create for ourselves. We're also seeing the first generation of kids growing up who have NO connection to Christianity and Western Traditions teaching of what Wesley calls human exceptionalism, inherent human dignity. They've been told that to think humans are exceptional is speciesism and etc... They've been told that they are just material and nothing else. So maybe there's an educational aspect too. Maybe ideas have consequences. They just weren't the ones those with the ideas wanted. So I'm guessing what is going on in the western developed nations is about what we should expect. It's the logical outcome of our new world views. I don't know what you think or others think, but that's my best 15 minute try. But that kind of question on the underlying fundamental problem requires people way more expert than me.
My guess is the transhumanist would come back and say that we are settling for too little. This is not of despair. There's a great whole new world out there and we are really excited about it because it is really exciting and ought to be pursued with passion. Who wants to stay in Battle Mountain Nevada when you could live on the beach in San Diego? Maybe, but if these guys Wesley and Saletan introduced to us are the mainstream, then I think we can say that it's not exciting, is pathetically dehumanizing and will never ever meet the needs of the human heart.
Most transhumanists appear to be utter materialists. It strikes me that they are making their movement into a quasi religion. They have prophesy, eschatology, and the idea of eventual immortality.
BAP,
I reread you comments. I agree with Wesley... they are all symptoms. I gave my take instead of answering your question. Sorry. I think your ideas stem from the fundamental problems I see... the death of God, development problems and the logical outcome of new world views about man's nature and purpose.
BAP-nice. If you have thoughts on why we've cut that old wisdom off, that would be interesting.
Wesley, I know this is serious stuff, but it's taken me a few minutes to stop laughing at the fact that out and out materialists have developed their own prophesy and eschatology. That has to be a nightmare for the serious materialists. This is too much.
BAP-nice. If you have thoughts on why we've cut that old wisdom off, that would be interesting.
Wesley, I know this is serious stuff, but it's taken me a few minutes to stop laughing at the fact that out and out materialists have developed their own prophesy and eschatology. That has to be a nightmare for the serious materialists. This is too much.
While I'm probably wasting my words here, the readers of this blog should realize that a) Smith and Saletan are being negatively sensationalistic in their account of the conference, b) it wasn't an explicitly "transhumanist" conference (except that Smith has branded it as such), but rather a gathering of techprogressives and some bioconservatives addressing the issue of enhancement as it applies to issues of human rights, and c) it was an academic conference filled with PhDs, activists, journalists and concerned citizens from around the globe -- not a bunch of "extremist freaks".
For more balanced coverage of the event, may I suggest the following links:
Dale Carrico's retort to Saletan: With Enemies Like Saletan Who Needs Friends?
Brian Alexander of MSNBC: Is there a human right to be superhuman? Special powers aren't just for comic-book characters, some ethicists argue
Ronald Bailey of Reason: The Right to Human Enhancement: And also uplifting animals and the rapture of the nerds
BAP,
I think that's a good answer to your question, is transhumanism and etc a symptom? I think it is.
What happens after the sensate culture collapses? I don't think there's any IS to transhumanism, at least not with the current crop Wesley and Saletan are writing about.
George is George Dvorsky. His paper at the convention suggesting "uplifting" all mammals to human levels of intelligence and during the Q and A, he suggested turning all animal life into a post biological state in order to end suffering.
People will have to decide for themselves whether that is a freaky idea.
Ron Bailey is something of a transhumanist himself, and a radical libertarian, which means just about anythying goes. His book on these issues opens with a 150-year-old woman playing football with her 8 year-old great-great, great grandson, and she is as lithe and young as a 30 year-old.
In any event, George, thanks for contributing to Secondhand Smoke.
BAP,I couldn't post yesterday. Not sure why. Maybe some transhumanist escaped the limitations of the flesh into the infinte pathways of the internet and as the first act of expressing infinite power, scrambled my post. You never know.
When I said there's no 'is' to the transhumanism of the people that Saletan was describing, I meant that there was nothing there that was substantial and going to fill the longings of the heart/soul/human spirit. Like an empty addict needing to get high or should I say, keep getting satisfactorily high, they'll just get more and more extreme and at the end of the day, it will end up as another failed human attempt to find happiness. I suspect the biggest thing is that it is looking to fill those infinite longings with a finite object of worship when the heart requires an infinite object. I think that's an idea of yours. I agree with it.
But I can certainly understand the drive to going there. If there is no ultimate reality outside of ourselves-like God and an eternal immortalizing afterlife-then it may make sense to go where they are trying to go and I'd be tempted to get on board and see where it went.
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