Augmentation or Argumentation
Written by Jim Prentice
If also closely linked in our historical context both political and cultural questions arise from this discussion about Transhumanism as do those about subjectivity.
Our progress such as it is, we might characterise as us lurching forward through rivers of blood. I think we must take that image on board unsavoury as it is. I say that because its latest proposed technological iteration, Transhumanism will most likely be in the same territory. Yet I outline here positive possibilities with grave reservation for nothing is fixed other than the frequency of our connection to the 'dialectic of the Enlightenment'. That means that reason applied wrongly as technology, creates inestimable damage as does religion or power. Technology should have no such to hide as practice.
Technology and progess have helped create partial democracies with gaping injustices and structural corruption It is war that is the greatest agent of invention in our recent history and we have transhumanist (robotic) warfare already in sight. Shiny new technology does not wash away the blood and leave humanity clean. It contributes ever more to the blood. Still, some of us are grateful if we look at the long road and stay mostly in the West and often in the bounds of material progress. Will this next technical revolution offer the same or better possibilities? Can we learn from the mistakes of the past or are they structural requiring conflict and uprooting.
Still, some of us are grateful if we look at the long road and our focus stays mostly in the West and more often than not, in the bounds of material progress. Will this next technical revolution offer the same or better possibilities? Can we learn from the mistakes of the past or are these structures, one requiring conflict and uprooting, before a consideration of Transhumanist implementation?
Further, there is the distraction of Transhumanism's aura. it offers an 'out' from the looming resource and migration wars so seemingly inevitably on the horizon. An 'out' also for our clear disenchantment with democracy in globalised society and in third world countries where wealthier democracies have preferred subservient client and corrupt states as conduits of power, leaving the independent delivery of stable democracy rare. These create chaos that Transhumanism is unlikely to resolve nor intend to resolve. As well Transhumanism may be just an out opposed to doing something urgently about the real world of these problems about which we already know and chose to ignore to some degree. Our current circumstances demand that we do, with great foresight and with the gravity of their implications in mind, something now about climate change, resources, and populations. Can we combine both rather than seeing one as a distraction?
As well Transhumanism may be just an out opposed to doing something urgently about the real world of these and other problems about which we already know and chose to ignore to some degree. Our current circumstances demand that we do, with great foresight and with the gravity of their implications in mind, something now about climate change, resources, and populations. Can we combine both rather than seeing one as a distraction?
Perhaps an embedded, democracy driven, culturally complex, socially subservient Transhumanism is the answer? We haven’t got many others. I have outlined the need to make parallel political and cultural and personal adjustments to pre-empt these crises. Perhaps we might also morph to smaller, shorter- lived happier creatures, but ones with more empathy. Such a proposed being, a post –human, might apply to us all and joined in understanding by the internet of things reading and understanding each others' thoughts. If that is the new utopia it also sounds like a dystopia. I would like at least raise the objections or the necessary qualifications.
Perhaps if we might morph to smaller, shorter- lived happier creatures, but ones with more empathy, programmed to a carbon rich and hotter atmosphere and breathing out oxygen in the hope we can reawake the now cryogenic beings we once were or look back with fondness to humanoids -backward befuddled and cuddly when asleep- nasty when awake, the world would be a better place.
Transhumanism and Democracy
Let me indulge my human suspicions - earthy robust, yet sensitive I hope. Transnational Corporations making these or any other post-humans threaten us, as they combine in pursuit of human production (production of humans). Corporations present very deep challenges because of their economically based requirements and secretive dispositions. The transition to such beings ironically needs open, transparent, internationally governed in a way that is almost inconceivably complex and of the same order of many other attempts to reign in potentially rogue practices. Nevertheless, that is our lot and we see progress and failure here in many examples from slavery to war to nuclear weapons proliferation.
I have argued in this series, that the transhumanist, post -object economy will force itself on us by transgression rather than overcoming the problems in its path that arise from asking about democracy, justice, inclusion, tyranny, fairness and rights: overcome them, that is, through public engagement and argumentation and evidence of technical success or denial of the right to proceed.
Economic, political or technological dictatorships will come in the wake of human production if we don’t find some more modest idea of the realisation of such a project, which involves democracy ─ deeper and more robust.Only a more inclusive and deeper democracy can resist this and it would be that such democracy best attuned to working with Transhumanism. With such orientations to suspicion of the object worshipping world, we would have a humanist, equity and sensitivity and solidarity driven democracy, armed by society, not the rather lame legislatures and electorates of failing object, trade obsessed liberal democracies under the potent leadership of degenerated populism driven by absolute frustration.
Transhumanism appears to assume it can readily conquer the complexities of self and society, knowledge, and democracy which appear intractable. The only solution to this intractability is to recognize it. It is this, that the Enlightenment of progress has found so difficult if, at the edges, our forefathers initiated liberal democracy with other influences of rights. The Enlightenment required freedom and justice in the hands of its middle-class advocates bringing thereby a swathe of dissatisfied persons who had few of these themselves and saw something thereby to gain.
The pursuit of science and knowledge needed freedom, as did of trade. All needed a democracy of sorts but the full recognition of our individuality, complexity and sensitivity is not usually imagined nor enshrined in this type of democracy. Nor will this democracy of sorts provide a brake on transhumanist production because the ideological synergies of a materialism and 'free' economics and object production are the deeper rhythms of democracy. Even as these economies transition to identities and knowledge as focuses they seem to have the mark of the object or this gaze of an object oriented materialism.
I believe that is because Transhumanism's adherents fail to reflect on those challenging, yet vital questions of knowledge and life. Rather they prefer to hide behind the cloak of neutrality, progress, and science. I adduce both sinister explanations as in “this is a dream of powerful men who are not want to negotiate with society” and the not- so- sinister hubris of the technological dream which drives medical discoveries as much as warfare. The Enlightenment, its agents and their democracy have given us something worth knowing more often only worth buying.
If the progressives prefer to hide behind the cloak of neutrality, progress, and science, I adduce both sinister explanations as in “this is a dream of powerful men who are not want to negotiate with society” and the not- so- sinister hubris of the technological dream which drives medical discoveries as much as warfare. Men in 'white coats' as Latour would have it emulating God in their perceptive and ours as above us. Very few people believe this, if science might accrue higher standards of verification in specific areas.
Perhaps for Transhumanism'e advocates, there is no such thing as society as Maggie Thatcher thought. I suspect also the blind power of technology fuels their optimism. Yet, at best we are a long way from resolving the inevitability and impenetrability of subjectivity or the criteria of our augmentation for values we recognise as incontrovertible like rights, freedom from tyranny and the like already. Rather we capitulate to programs for superiors to resolve, assuming thereby, a superior being. Unless we are all beneficiaries at the same time and none dissent and all realise a claim to equity, we will only cause the augmentation of terror.
I hold this is technological optimism unwarranted because we are foundationally organic e.g. in emotional, physical, cultural, familial and ecological ways. These also are the soft but potent and fundamental realities of self less amenable to augmentation despite the improving plethora of psychoactive drugs and optimism about brain function substitution and augmentation even our better understand of self in some transhumanism. I think we should try to achieve this goal in our own society with humans. We have not tried this rather another democracy I have described while underwrites Transhumanism or remains neutral.
However in one sense Transhumanism has democratic implications: Should we develop the multiplicity of life forms imagined by it rather than see one (us) as superior.
Transhumanism has cultural implications: There are strong cultural context questions and cultural insight questions raised by Transhumanism. Part of this is who we are, part, what do we know? My argument suggests, however, that this step, this Transhumanist project is basically a long way from convincing because of all the material I have mounted under the rubric of subject and object.
Transhumanism has implications for what we mean by ‘progress’: Progress maybe is the
Transhumanist hope, however, we have competing cultural traditions dealing in great depth with that issue including the separation of self and world. What if we breach, subject and object separations? To do that we would also breach the deepest cultural reservoirs of the Romantic and Enlightenment traditions, the key confluences of democratic thought. Post modernism ironically does the same.
These traditions are characterised by the accepted specificity or individuality of each of us and our potentially rational and emotional capacities to manage ourselves wisely and democratically. Democracy, society, culture, and self would have to be rethought.
Transhumanism’s interaction with consciousness, by fixing it at one point of invention and investing that as the ground of greater capacity and complexity in augmentation may benefit some processes or ultimately constrain if we miss basic process even unknown ones. The need for synergies with the body and need to a listener for thinking to develop and trust of peers by ignoring the great steps of cultural recasting of this self and society in permanent conflict, threatens to solidify a certain ‘logic’ and thereby our view of ourselves with over simplification and paralysis.
Transhumanity has implications for the Subject-Object economy: A Post object economy rests on the technical mastery of ourselves at a time when nature has been largely shifted from known patterns found in older ecologies. Our environment that feeds back to “natural selection” which now is largely technologically mediated. It is not natural because of this historical shift. Yet we are not much less composed of subjectivity, mind or body, if we take our pills and use our computers in ways that alter us even significantly but not fundamentally. Nor are we any less dependent on a biosphere that functions.
Yet I cannot pretend with all our subjecting and objecting that we haven’t ended in a world about to disintegrate, or at least change profoundly - an epoch shift - if its course goes unchallenged. Our all- so- well- informed or known systems appear under great strain, due in part to their actual rapacity on human, plant, beast, sky and water, indeed Gaia. Neither impulse alone ─ current Democracy nor Transhumanism ─ can serve, or save, us well in the future.
If you think it’s rather bizarre to spend so much time negating Transhumanism to end in saying it must remain an option, I can only say those negations found throughout my work are preconditions. We live in extraordinary times. This is no excuse to jettison such pre-conditions but an incentive to find the best solution, given their substance - dare I say their cultural materiality. I believe we have about 30 years to sort this mess out – let’s start NOW – that’s what this issue of craft/EPOCHFUTURE is about, an attempt to get the ball rolling with reference to all the options. I think that is one of the ways that movements fail. Of course we cannot forever hold with equal weight all options. However, we can avoid allowing the movements we are in, closing down options unnecessarily, for the purpose of simplified proselytising. I don’t think simplicity or singularity individually all are going to work. Debate and action, if a clear delineation of Transhumanism’simplications for a great many dimensions of our lives, remain a necessity. Equally we should look to our own cultural and historical understandings emerging through insight, mixed with tragedy, for they may have richer veins of wisdom for the future.
We certainly need to get involved in the future for it is already getting involved with us.
Readers Note: References for all of Dr Jim Prentice’s articles are included in one document under the tile ‘references’.