[extropy-chat] Bailey on HETHR Part 2: The Right to Human Enhancement

[Hughes, James J.]

http://www.reason.com/rb/rb060206.shtml

June 2, 2006

The Right to Human Enhancement
And also uplifting animals and the rapture of the nerds.

Ronald Bailey

Palo Alto-Last week an exhilarating and perplexing mixture of
visionaries, philosophers, transhumanists, legal scholars, and
technophiles along with some crackpots and naysayers gathered for a two
day meeting at Stanford University's Law School to ponder the future of
human enhancement and posthumanity. The occasion was the Human
Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights (HETHR) conference. HETHR
featured lectures ranging from sober discussions of the parental rights
and the consent of the unborn and future generations, to the use of
steroids and gene enhancement in sports and constitutional rights to
enhancements, to uplifting animals to human level intelligence and
uploading our personalities and memories into computer networks.

I was invited to participate on the opening plenary panel to argue over
human rights in the enhanced future with William Hurlbut, a member of
the President's Council on Bioethics and culture critic Erik Davis,
author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of
Information.

Briefly, I came out full force for a biotech enhanced future. I argue
that there are no ethical reasons for forbidding people in the future to
use safe biotech enhancements to alter their personalities, abolish
sleep, increase their physical strength, boost their intelligence and
memories, change their sex, live much longer healthier lives, and even
change the number of their chromosomes. I also argued that in general it
would be ethical for parents to use safe biotech to enhance their
children in these ways as well.

Erik Davis offered the Matrix metaphor in which Morpheus offers Neo
either a blue pill or a red pill. Davis' apparent implication is that
refusing the new biotechnologies is like taking the blue pill-the human
condition, the cycle of birth, life and death continues as it always
has. Going forward with biotech progress is the equivalent of taking the
red pill, ushering humanity into a posthuman future in which the
verities of birth, life and death are up for grabs. Davis hinted that
perhaps choosing the red pill of biotech will reveal unpleasant truths
about the world that we would rather not know. (In contrast, I believe
that there are no dangerous truths.) Davis pointed out that the choices
before us catch us in a confused balance between nostalgia and
exhilarating expectations. Davis worried that postmodern humanity has
lost the grand narratives that used to give meaning to life for most
people.

William Hurlbut fulfilled his role as naysayer. He sourly asked,
"Biotech progress will give us freedom for what; enhancement for what?"
He suggested that the sorts of enhancements people would choose would
not be ennobling, but instead "draw us down the gradient of our
appetites." Desires, explained Hurlbut, are purposeful passions that
drive us to meet the essential needs of the body and of species
continuity. True enough, but he warned that desire liberated by biotech
from the constraints of nature could lead to lives of empty pleasures
and/or intensified competition in the name of selfish ambition.

Actually, Davis had earlier essentially answered Hurlbut's fears about
meaninglessly "enhanced" lives. Davis acknowledged that biotech progress
will produce a multiplication of choices including more trivial choices,
but real challenges are not going to go away. The events that arise out
of fate are not going to stop-random events, good and bad, to which we
must respond will not stop coming just because people are healthier,
smarter and longer lived. All of us will still have to confront things
we do not choose. In other words, the shape of the human narrative will
change, but there will always be new hardships and life will not be
drained of meaning. In any case, humanity will progress with biotech as
it has with all past technologies-by trial and error-and if it turns out
that some new biotech treatment actually is an apathogen, that is, it
induces a sense of purposelessness or meaninglessness, then people will
not choose it.

The HETHR meeting was a big tent affair drawing representatives from a
wide spectrum of political ideologies. As such it is a hard event to
cover, so let me briefly touch on just some highlights. As a libertarian
I was as exotic as a kangaroo to many of the more leftish participants.
As an example of the tone, several of the male speakers ostentatiously
began their talks by insisting that they were feminists. Most agreed
with the politically correct bioethical position that the United States
desperately needs universal government health insurance. Never mind that
the countries that have it are lagging behind in biomedical research.
And of course, there was the obligatory ritual of rhetorical
self-flagellation over the fact that there were not enough women and
ethnic minority participants at the conference.

Nevertheless, a lot of interesting philosophical and legal analysis
concerning the right to use enhancing technologies was presented at the
conference. One of the conference organizers, James Hughes, executive
director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET)
pointed out that some bioconservative ethicists are arguing that making
inheritable changes to the human genome should be declared a crime
against humanity. He pointed out that arguments that we must preserve
the "integrity" of the human genome sound eerily familiar to
old-fashioned racist arguments against miscegenation.

Representatives from another sponsor of the HETHR conference, the Center
for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics (CCLE), organized several sessions
arguing that we have fundamental right to control our own brains. Of
course this principle stands in stark opposition to the failed War on
Drugs. CCLE senior fellow Richard Glen Boire played a video of a violent
police raid on an electronic dance party in Utah. Their crime? Some of
the dancers were apparently using the empathogen Ecstasy.

Boire warned that the Drug War would pale in comparison to the looming
war on neuropharmaceutical enhancements. Boire also pointed out that
biotech is already being used to devise "neurocops" that is, compounds
that will police the blood/brain barrier for improper molecules-say,
molecules of cocaine or alcohol Such treatments clearly have a place for
people who choose to use them to help regain control over their drug
use, but should the government have the power to impose them on its
citizens? It depends.

I offer three cases for your consideration. Case One: Someone caught
driving recklessly drunk-the court gives this person a choice-a year in
jail or a regimen of naltrexone. Case Two: A parent decides to vaccinate
her child with an anti-cocaine vaccine at age 10. Case Three: Public
health officials mandate that every child receives an anti-cocaine
vaccination with her mumps, measles and rubella vaccinations.

The HETHR conference was not devoted to just defining and defending
human and posthuman rights-some visionary and, some might say, really
eccentric proposals were also on offer. For example, George Dvorsky,
deputy editor of Betterhumans, argued that using biotech to enhance just
human consciousness is not enough-humanity has the moral responsibility
to use biotech to lift the veil of brute ignorance from the animals. "It
would be negligent of us to leave animals behind to fend for themselves
in the state of nature," declared Dvorsky.

In uplifting animals, Dvorsky explained, we must avoid creating
subhumans. Specifically we must not use biotech to create happy slaves,
creatures with constrained or predetermined psychologies, or beings to
be used for demeaning or dangerous work. His project is reminiscent of
sci-fi novelist David Brin's The Uplift Wars in which throughout the
galaxies one sapient species after another uses genetic engineering to
uplift non-sapient species to sapiency. In Brin's books, humanity
uplifts dolphins and chimps. In his talk Dvorsky was pretty catholic in
wanting to spread sapiency around, even suggesting that cows might be
uplifted if we gave them hands. Even if Dvorsky's project were possible,
I fear that well-meaning would-be uplifters are much more likely to
create simulacra of diminished humans rather than creatures that are the
moral equivalent of humans. And I shudder to think what might happen if
the uplifters overshot and created cows that are smarter than we are.

The feasibility of the so-called Rapture of the Nerds-uploading our
consciousnesses into cyberspace-was also discussed at the conference.
One proponent is Martine Rothblatt, who is a genuine visionary. She has
helped launch several satellite networks, including the satellite radio
network Sirius, and also founded the biotech company United
Therapeutics. She is also proudly a postoperative transsexual and author
of The Apartheid of Sex.

Her talk entitled "Of Genes, Bemes and Conscious Things" outlined a
future in which human consciousnesses are uploaded into computers. Her
neologism "beme" is modeled after Richard Dawkin's meme. Memes are units
of cultural transmission and Rothblatt's bemes are "fundamental,
transmissible, mutable units of beingness." Heideggerian bytes if you
will. Bemes consist of smiles, the taste of lasagna, the memory of a
first bike ride and so forth. According to Rothblatt, just as genes
spell out matter, bemes spell out mind.

Rothblatt suggested that bemes could be eventually captured and stored
by more sophisticated wearable recording systems like the MyLifeBits
project being developed at Microsoft by Gordon Bell. Researchers are
also working on creating a bouquet of nanowires that could be threaded
through the capillaries of the brain to monitor and record the
activities of individual brain cells. Rothblatt proposes that the output
of those brain cells could be stored and retrieved later for uploading
as bemes. Rothblatt acknowledged that bemes would need to uploaded into
mindware to become conscious. Of course, mindware doesn't yet exist, but
she's pretty sure that computer guru Ray Kurzweil's prediction that
machines with human-level intelligence will be produced over the next
couple of decades is accurate. Thus we will be able to "beme" ourselves
up into cyberspace. How will we know that the uploaded "bemans" are
conscious? Rothblatt has no doubt: "Consciousness is like pornography;
we know it when we see it."

In the end, telling visionaries from crackpots is never an easy task.
But I find mingling with people who are wildly hopeful about the future
is intellectually invigorating. Transhumanists are the sort of folks who
eagerly embrace 19th century British chemist Michael Faraday's maxim:
"Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws
of nature." And some of the visions painted at the HETHR conference are
wonderful-they foresee a future filled with smarter, happier, and more
creative people.

Erik Davis is wrong about the demise of grand narratives. As a nascent
philosophical and political movement, Transhumanism epitomizes our most
daring, courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations. The
Transhumanist quest to liberate future generations from the immemorial
curses of disease, disability and early death is a new grand narrative
worthy of humanity and posthumanity.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation
Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now
available from Prometheus Books.