[extropy-chat] A brief discourse on transhumanity -- of death and persons

[Greg Burch]

A friend of mine is lucky enough to teach honors English students and this semester is teaching a unit on transhumanism, with texts such as "Brave New World" and the works of Fukuyama and Kass.  I've been involved in a dialogue with him, some excerpts of replies by me I pass on here:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: _________
> Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2004 8:11 AM
> 
> In a message dated 10/14/2004 7:46:11 AM Central Daylight Time, 
> gregburch at gregburch.net writes:
>> Ultimately -- and unfortunately -- yes, although Fukuyama is more 
>> graceful and indirect in his position; ultimately yes.  And I 
>> think I know where this is going, Socrates, but that's OK.
>
> Then let's digress.
> What makes you think that there's any realistic choice to be 
> made? That death can be evaded? That all men (and wymn) are not 
> essentially mortal?
> And a second question, are all men ESSENTIALLY anything at all? 
> (With whatever philosophical take you make on the all-caps word.)
> fp

The answer to the first question is in two levels.  On one level, it seems -- for now --that death cannot ultimately be avoided, because ultimately -- and it's a distant ultimate -- all information seems to be destined for entropic dissolution.  If, as I and many others maintain, meaningful life is ultimately a matter of informational organization, then the dissolution of the universe as we know it will mean the death of any life forms then extant.  Whether this view is correct is, though, for now a matter of near guess-work, since it depends on fundamantal physical questions that are beyond our current certain knowledge.
 
But then there's a more immediate level to the first question, one dealing with our imminent mortality.  About that, one can entertain far more vigorous hope.  We know so much more about the nature of our selves than we did just a mere 50 years ago.  That human life as we know it now could be extended significantly seems beyond serious doubt to anyone who will give the matter serious consideration.  Thus the Kassian and Fukuyamic backlash against transhumanism: Were our ideas about near-term life extension mere fantasy, such serious-minded folks wouldn't be devoting so much ink to opposing us and urging our deaths upon us.
 
Beyond that, it requires only a slight extension of analysis about what human life is (which is the subject of your second question) to conclude that even further extension and augmentation is possible, so that the term of meaningful life (although I don't here use the word human) could be extended to scales that current humans would consider to be vast, indeed -- Tens of thousands or tens of millions of years, at least.
 
But this leads to the second question, because that life would in many respects be quite different from what we might now consider to be "human."  About that -- which is the more fundamental question -- I will write further this weekend.

 * * * * * * * *

Having addressed death, then, let me address life, or rather, your question: "are all men ESSENTIALLY anything at all?"  By this, I take your question to mean, "What is human" or "What does it mean to be human or *A* human."  There is a linguistic problem with this question, which is often not clearly identified: "human" as an adjective is really quite different from "human" as a noun.  A severed finger is clearly human, but also it is clearly not *A* human.  Herein, I think, lies much of the problem encountered in the abortion "debate." (I put the word "debate" in scare quotes because most discussion of the problem is really little more than the vomiting forth of feelings and the trading of insults.)  The tissue that makes up a fetus is clearly "human", but the question is, is it *A* human.  (Even worse, by the way, is the locution "when life begins" -- the microbes in my feces are examples of "life", but they certainly aren't something that requires a constitutional amendment to protect...)

I much prefer the term "person," because it avoids this confusion -- and also clarifies the moral pathway to what I think is the necessary conclusion of transhumanism.  If we simply test our feelings, we can clearly conclude that there is nothing sacrosanct about human tissue: We have no moral qualms about discarding the flesh that is removed in, say, a surgical operation on a bone or a muscle.  But even where no flesh is discarded, we have great moral feelings about, for instance, a lobotomy.  Why?  Because a lobotomy impacts the PERSON, not simply the flesh.

So, what is a person?  Clearly it is more than flesh, because we do not consider a corpse to be a person.  No, it is a combination of *properties* of flesh.  It must be animated with life, and it must have something else, as well, because most people have come to the moral conclusion that a completely and truly brain-dead but otherwise living human body is not a person.

Now we enter into the realm of scary feelings, because once one realizes that a person is different from a human body, one takes on the moral responsibility of making judgments about things that are not so tangible as bodies.  Thus, by the way, I believe that those who draw a moral bright line at the conception of the human fetus do so because it is a simple moral heuristic to identify the person with the living body.  If one leaves the question at that, then one need not face the troubling moral questions of *what* lies below, and *who* above, the line of personhood.  Ironically, though, many (if not most) of those who would fix the point of personhood at the conception of the fetus also believe that there is an intangible thing called a "soul" which carries with it a load of moral baggage.  To my mind, this is a strange kind of mental gymnastics, indeed.

At any rate, having concluded that the object of our moral sentiments are "persons" rather than "humans," then it is incumbent upon us to define what a person is.  This is a large field to traverse, but let me sketch out the survey of the landscape.  There are functional and moral elements to the definition of a person.  Functionally, we must conclude that a person is an agent capable of *intention*.  This distinguishes persons from non-teleological agents such as bacteria and thermostats.  The moral dimension to the landscape of personhood follows, I find, from the element of intention.  A person is an agent who can be held morally accountable for its actions.  We do not judge the lion a murderer when he mauls the lamb.  Why is this?  I believe it is because, while the lion may exercise some rudimentary intentional thought relative to the *means* by which he will kill the lamb, he is incapable of making the *end* or goal of killing the subject of intention.  Thus, it is the reach of the scope of intention to ultimate, or at least remote or deeper, goals that raises an agent above the moral line of personhood.

At this point I should note I have long ago resolved for myself the so-called dilemma of "free will versus determinism" through the route of complexity theory.  While all things are in a physical sense determined by ontological natural causes, the impossibility of prediction in sufficiently complex systems creates a wall of ignorance beyond which no mind can penetrate.  This is in fact a moving barrier up to a certain point: Just as the speed of light determines an absolute angle of 45 degrees on the observer offset within a time-space light cone, but angles of less than 45 degrees (approaching oblique at Newtonian velocities and masses) are possible, so the quality of self-knowledge of internal mental causes and external physical causes is possible -- up to a theoretical limit vastly greater than that of the current human mind.  Thus one can see a "continuum of personhood" reaching from the most rudimentary self-knowledge in, for instance, lower primates or other advanced non-human animals, passing through the current natural human and then on up to some theoretically possible "maximum person" which would consist of the greatest possible concentration of thinking matter that is commensurate with the physical limitations of matter and energy to instantiate thought.  This "maximum person," though, could not have the attributes traditionally bestowed upon the Judeo-Christian deity, because it's ability to know itself and its environment would be limited by the computing power of its substrate within the confines of relativistic and quantum physics.  Thus computing faster than light or with physical elements smaller than the Planck scale is impossible, imposing absolute limits on the reach of personhood.  Beyond those limits even the theoretically possible "maximum person" must be a moral, teleological being because it could not predict exactly the outcome of its actions nor know precisely the state of its inner being and would therefore have to devolve into the realm of hierarchical teleological goals.

That detour into the realm of the least persons and the greatest possible persons points, I conclude, to the ultimate definition of personhood: An agent capable of intentional action and self-directed goal redefinition through internal processes.  Such agents are moral subjects and objects, which is a handy shorthand for judgment about persons.  Thus, for instance, lower animals are proper moral objects (because they experience pain), but are not moral subjects, because they do not engage in meaningful self-directed goal redefinition through internal processes.  Note that I have sidestepped the "problem of consciousness" here, although I do not believe I have really ignored it.  Instead, I believe we will ultimately discover that consciousness *is* the process of self-directed goal redefinition, or rather, what that process *feels* like.

Of course, all of this is too abstract and will seem too cold to throw into the rhetorical fray against the likes of Fukuyama and especially Kass.  Kass has explicitly enshrined "the ethics of disgust," after all; a conscious choice to reject reason in the pursuit of answers to the moral questions posed by the looming prospect of meaningful augmentation of the human animal.  In fact, the philosophical odyssey that has brought me to these conclusions also makes me recoil from the prospect of engaging in a productive debate with those who oppose the transhumanist agenda.  They are so far from being willing to take the first steps down the road that has led me to my conclusions, that I honestly fear that no rational discourse is possible.  Instead, the public policy that will govern the outcome will be a terrible thing made up of ad hoc compromises on an issue-by-issue basis.  The final result will be a misshapen abortion, I fear ... pun intended ....

GB, THHotA