Psychoengineering was Re: [extropy-chat] The existential threat ofinternational law

[Hughes, James J.]

> ### As if building a world-spanning apparatus of enforcement, 
> ...would stop torture, rather 
> than leave no sanctuary for the victims.

Some believe the best way to protect human rights is to eliminate
states, and some (like me) believe it is to build political cultures and
states that can protect human rights. Since I only see empirical
evidence for the latter, and not the former, I think the burden of proof
is on the anarchists. I would rather have the rights enjoyed by Swedes
than those enjoyed by Somalis.

> Maybe we will be even able to live symbiotically with 
> borgans, like intestinal bacteria live in us. 

I'm very impressed with your description of the borganismic evolutionary
possibility, and agree with you. I've talked about the erosion of
discrete, autonomous, continuous individuality as the coming "political
Singularity" since it would be an end of the consensual illusions that
undergird liberal individualism.  Our values - such as "one person, one
vote" or "free, fully informed choices" - would become meaningless. Nick
Bostrom has gestured at Borganisms as a "whimper" version of an
existential threat.  

I'm also disturbed by this prospect, as you are, because social
democrats and anarchists share the autonomous individual as a starting
point, even if we come to different conclusions about ideal political
order. As you also suggest, our understanding of the way Borganisms
might work, and what values they might manifest, have been
overly-determined by our experiences with fascism, theocracy and
totalitarianism. (The fear of psycho-engineered totalitarianism is what
led Frank Fukuyama to decide there had not in fact been an "end of
ideology.") It is equally possible that there might be liberal
borganisms, hierarchial or non-hierarchical borganisms, borganisms
devoted only to imperial "self interest" and borganisms that have
"selfless" goal structures.

Some of the fiction that I think is helpful in imagining these varieties
is:

- John C. Wright's Phoenix series, which imagines a society in which
humanity has been borged, and de-borged, and now has borganisms and
individuals in co-existence;

- Alastair Reynolds' idea of the Conjoiners, among whom there is a great
deal of individual identity, although other species fear being absorbed
into their collective; 

- Stephen Baxter's Convergence, which suggests that the evolution of
human collectives into vole-like insectile borganisms is an ever-present
evolutionary dead-end that future individualist posthumans will have to
stamp out like rat nests

Bringing it back to world governance, I don't think it would be a step
towards borganism. In fact, since I believe emergent borganisms, like
religious cults and totalitarian states, are likely to be seen as
threats to the rest of us, and global governance will likely be
necessary to suppress borganisms and protect the global individualist
majority as long as possible. 

J.