I didn't realize I hadn't made this obvious, but seeing as I've had two people over the past few weeks refer to me in some way as a "transhumanist", apparently my disconnection from that subculture has gone somewhat under the radar.
So anyway. I am not involved in "transhumanism" at this point.
I do not call myself a transhumanist anymore.
I used to, but then I got tired of the baggage associated with it.
I also got really tired of the constant (boring, distracting) arguments over "What is transhumanism?", in addition to the stealth-eugenics stuff that some (not all, but enough to be a problem for me) transhumanists were trying to defend all the time.
I actually started feeling cognitive dissonance pretty early on, when I got involved in discussions where it seemed I was expected to dismiss the arguments of, say, disability-rights advocates (who I saw as making really good points) as "disability extremism".
But I stuck around hoping that maybe I could help some of the people calling themselves "transhumanists" (who I did find myself also agreeing with on some points) see how their own strident defenses of morphological liberty in the direction of permission/enablement to self-modify as desired actually converged with the disability advocates' long history of similarly defending atypical, nonstandardized bodies and brains and their existence in the world.
But I was up against too much. I had a few apparent allies, but not enough.
And eventually I couldn't find any good reason to keep calling myself a transhumanist -- not when I was at the point of feeling like if certain people on some of the mailing lists I was on had had their way, I'd never have even been born in the first place.
Mind you, I know that different people are at different points on their individual philosophical existential learning-about-the-world journey. I do not immediately reject the views of people who happen to be calling themselves transhumanists now (and am thankful for those who did not reject my views or assume I had nothing to say when I was calling myself that).
And I don't have any problem being friends with someone who still calls xyrself a transhumanist, or engaging in respectful discussion with such a person. With very few exceptions (e.g., Nazis, Raelians, Amway salespeople), I don't care a lick what someone's associations are -- I am very much about taking people on their own terms, probably to a fault.
But, the bottom line is that I am most definitely not self-identifying as "transhumanist" these days.
There's nothing about being interested in biogerontology and robots and cyborg body parts and whatnot that beholds anyone to a highly self-referential (and sometimes irritatingly insular and hypersensitive) subculture such as transhumanism.
And I am not a "pessimist". (See blog title? Yeah, I really mean that.)
Just because I think superlativity tends to distort dialogue and make it difficult to focus on what can actually be done in the real world does not mean I disparage the power of human imagination or our capacity to change things for the better.
When I say that superlativity is annoying and damaging to longevity-medicine dialogue, I am saying that no, it will not in any way, shape, or form help your grandmother live longer if you go around spouting off and gesticulating about how someday super-AIs will be able to extract the molecular patterns of people long-dead out of the atmosphere and reconstitute those people in some strange zombie homeopathy.
What will help is advocacy to improve elder care so that people don't end up wasting away in nursing homes. What will help is good, solid research. What will help is a shift in attitude away from judging people on the basis of how many hours they can put in in the cubicle farm and toward greater valuation of all kinds of people, regardless of age or disability or anything else.
I'm sorry if that sounds plodding and boring, but I actually want people to live, and I am not getting the sense from actually looking at reality that engaging in homeopathic zombie and upload fantasies in any context outside science fiction or salon philosophy is going to help anyone actually live.
And anyway, my interests themselves haven't changed.
I am still advocating for actual morphological freedom (that is, the right to control one's own configuration regardless of whether that means modifying or not modifying one's various aspects).
I am still absolutely in favor of and eager to support good, solid, biogerontological research. I still volunteer for the Methuselah Foundation and plan to keep doing that for as long as I can be of help.
I haven't suddenly decided that it's great to die of probably-preventable things at ages when you'd much rather be writing novels or stargazing.
I haven't stopped thinking robots and AI and cool science-fiction stories about parallel universes and Vast Amazing Futures are really nifty.
I've just realized that I don't owe anyone anything for having the interests I have, nor do I need to be a "member" of any transhumanist organization in order to have the kinds of interesting discussions that I've always been interested in having.
If that's somehow not okay with you -- well personally I don't care, but you might want to seriously examine your thinking. I can't survive cognitively in environments that force everything into false dichotomies, and nobody should feel hurt, slighted, or bitter because of my doing what I need to do for the sake of being able to actually use my brain.
17 comments:
Excellent post Anne, also as usual I'm left with lots to think about.
I've been lucky enough that the transhumanists I know personally are much of what you desrcibed yourself as in the last part of your entry - cyborg fans, interested in "true" morphological freedom, supporting biogerontological research, etc. It's only through the internet that I've met (or have been added on facebook by) those interested in extreme dogma I don't identify with, such as an anti-autistic sentiment or other such eugenics which in my circles is considered the far periphery of transhumanism and one of it's fatal trappings if I choose to carry that label at dinner parties, etc - that like you, I find myself on the defensive when all I really want is for them to pass the damn hummus for my pita bread.
I'll be reading your blog no matter what you are or aren't labelling/identifying with.
Tim: Thanks for commenting. Glad to know there are still some reasonable folks out there. And I've definitely met some transhumanist-identified folks who seem more or less convergent with me as far as interests and issues go -- the problem there is not the dogma thing, but the attachment-to-the-ideological-machine thing. And the way I see it, why bother attaching myself to something I don't need and that only serves to make it *harder* to explain what I actually think?
"What will help is advocacy to improve elder care so that people don't end up wasting away in nursing homes. What will help is good, solid research. What will help is a shift in attitude away from judging people on the basis of how many hours they can put in in the cubicle farm and toward greater valuation of all kinds of people, regardless of age or disability or anything else.
I'm sorry if that sounds plodding and boring, but I actually want people to live, and I am not getting the sense from actually looking at reality that engaging in homeopathic zombie and upload fantasies in any context outside science fiction or salon philosophy is going to help anyone actually live."
I do like the way you think. I'm not sure anyone in the robot cult has any idea what human life means anymore - nor do they care.
I never do get along with engineers . . .
Be at peace.
ddjango: Well, I am an engineer...
It's been a long time since I read any Vonnegut--at one point I had read everything that Vonnegut had written--so thanks for the grandfalloon reference (not surprised that he came up with such a pithy term to represent a concept that really NEEDED to be represented!).
I find your position utterly reasonable. I'm not a transhumanist at all, just a person who finds some of the personalities in this movement (if it is a movement) fascinating in a larger-than-life sort of way. It's interesting to see so much intellectual spark flying off the wheel, even when some of it is fundamentally misguided.
Mike said:
Well a transhumanism is just a label/meme that means different things to different people. You have given up on using this meme because it has taken on a negative connotation that makes you uncomfortable (Dale Carrico's writing perhaps?).
I've given up on the term/meme (but NOT on my various interests, which I've noted time and time again and which should be apparent from looking at my blog) because it turned out to be something both more and less than what I'd initially thought. That is, initially I thought it was just a convenient, neutral term that one could use to concisely express areas of particular interest. However, I eventually came to realize that (a) some people -- not all, but enough for it to irritate me -- were bizarrely emotionally invested in using the term, promoting the term, and trying to "win members" (which I just frankly found boring), and (b) by using the term I was actually making it harder to express what I actually thought on certain issues.
It was like -- there was this expectation that I would conform to various party lines in ways that I didn't, and I didn't agree with how some transhumanist-identified folks were claiming certain things were essentially foregone conclusions (such as, the idea that anything presently classed as a "disability" is intrinsically "bad", regardless of what people actually so configured may have to say on the matter).
And I remember wanting, and trying, to have sensible conversations about longevity medicine with some folks, only to have them keep saying things like, "But what about uploading? Would you agree that since there's nothing magical about mind and consciousness that it's only a matter of time before humans can transfer themselves into computers?"
And it bothered me that in cases where I was verbally led into "agreeing" with this kind of thing (I have a problem with that sometimes especially in speech-based interactions, due to verbal processing weirdness), people would sort of give me "brownie points" and act like I was showing myself to be a smart and rational person. When really I didn't know what I was talking about.
And I didn't find that flattering or confirmatory -- I found it bizarre and kind of disturbing that there wasn't much, if anything, in the way of fact-checking going on. I ended up with the distinct impression at a certain point that some ideas were so utterly beloved in the subcultural community that anyone who showed any sign of concurring with one or more of those ideas would start getting "recruited" as a kind of spokesperson. And I was definitely not comfortable with that.
And all of that, while it didn't congeal in my head right away, started occurring to me long before I started becoming able to understand superlativity critiques.
Some people have a much more benign definition of transhumanism.
"glasses are an example of “transhumanist” technology invented centuries ago."
Yeah. I've heard that one. It's sort of similar to my original "working definition" of transhumanism. But eventually I realized that using the word "transhumanist" to describe things like, say, eyeglasses and clothing and artificial organs was not only totally unnecessary, but obfuscatory. Most people I encountered outside fora distinctly marked with the word "transhumanism" have never even heard the term, so it wasn't actually communicating anything useful to employ it when I attempted to do so.
However any meme is ultimately going to be fuzzy in its definition. Memes can often take on more negative connotations over time (Sort of like how the term idiot morphed from a psychological clinical term to just a plain insult).
Yes this is true. And I struggle with vagaries and definition-morphing in many areas in life. To the point where in order for me to find a term useful, it has to have a certain level of coherence. Transhumanism lacks coherence for me as a term. It might not for some, but for me it was almost as if the harder I tried to figure out what it was, the more elusive it became. And I got tired of chasing that, and found I could get along much better, cognitively speaking, without it.
(I'm getting tired so I will respond to the rest of your comment tomorrow).
Mike said:
When 90% of the population spends so much of their lives believing in so many absurd ideas that probably don't exist (ghosts, angels, aliens), I don't really see the harm in speculating about futuristic scenarios even if they are implausible.
If people really are putting their favored futuristic scenarios in a similar mental category to the one where some folks store "ghosts, angels, and aliens", then when they try and bring those scenarios into serious policy discussion (such as muddling human rights discussions with interjections of, "But what about the civil rights of uploads?"), does that not seem a bit sketchy? It does to me.
I don't get why people are interpreting what I've written as indicating disdain for speculation. Speculation can be quite a fun and intriguing exercise. The whole book Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowldge (in which I co-wrote a chapter, somewhat annoyingly titled Do You Want To Live Forever?) is made of speculation. One of the editorial reviews on Amazon describes the book as sometimes sounding like "a bunch of dudes tossing around what if's", and I have no argument at all with that description -- as long as speculation is aware that it's speculation, there's nothing wrong with it. It's fun, you can be silly with it if you want, and you can let your imagination follow all kinds of fascinating paths.
It's when speculation is hailed as prophecy, or when particular speculations start being held up as "things you have to believe in if you want to be considered Smart and Rational" I start getting leery and irritated.
In the neurotechnology field alone, there is so much stuff that was science fiction 30 years ago, but is increasingly becoming a reality. Stem cell trials to replace missing brain matter in stroke patients, computer brain simulations, deep brain stimulation implants, brain computer interfaces, ultrasonic non-invasive brain modulation, microscopic robots to probe brain cells and the list goes on.
Indeed, and all that (and other) stuff is tremendously cool and interesting! I'm totally intrigued by brain research and implantable interface technologies and whatnot. I don't object to people discussing that sort of thing, and I certainly discuss it myself on occasion.
The thing I take issue with is when people will look at existing technology X (say, for instance, systems which allow people to control a cursor on a screen with their thoughts) and try and claim that this somehow points to the inevitability of humans managing to "disembody" consciousness. When in fact the body is still a huge factor in permitting existing neurotechnologies to work, because you can't currently have a brain without a body and its accompanying systems.
And -- the main difference I see between regular, fun, nerdy discussions of this kind of thing and "transhumanist" discussions of this kind of thing is that the "transhumanist" angle tends to handwave the body away as if it doesn't matter, as if somehow we will "soon" be able to just not deal with all that messy viscera, when there's just no evidence of this.
This doesn't mean it's wrong or impossible to have hypothetical philosophical discussions about what it might be like to exist without a body -- that kind of thing can provide very interesting creative thought-experiment pathways, after all -- but it does mean people ought to be careful of suddenly jumping from an appropriate domain into an inappropriate one without even realizing they're doing it.
The thing I see some folks doing when talking about the potential for this or that technology is, by analogy, looking at an Escher painting and insisting that because you can draw a scene like the one in Relativity, humans will inevitably be able to build such a scene in real life and have it work exactly the way it appears to in the picture, gravity-defiance and all.
(And no, building it out of Lego, while impressive, doesn't exactly count.)
(To be continued in my next comment)
Wouldn't it be better to defend and focus on the actual core idea of transhumanism, which is self-directed evolution of human beings, and just additionally include all the different topics and the subculture (subcultures always have been kind of suspicious too me) associated with it, stressing on the difference until it's common sense? I mean correcting the term, promoting its original meaning. Concentrating on the philosophical transhumanism rather than on the definition of some folks labeling themselves transhumanists and talking in superlatives without actually any clue or intention to seriously work on it (although it can be a good way to grab peoples initial attention about the topic, and someone has to cover that end of the spectrum).
I understand your decision, but this would be the real challenge in a world like this.
Besides this, happy new year (i know i'm late) and may you and your blog enlight this universe until the end of time...and continue in another one we hopefully find or create and travel to (Superlative-Alert! ;-)
Yipe I am remembering yet another reason I decided I was better off not dwelling on "transhumanism" -- the endless round-and-round exhausts me. So for now I have no more to say on this subject -- I've said everything I want to say for now, and will be moving on to other things. Comments are henceforth closed.
OK, comments re-opened -- just don't be surprised if I don't spend very much time here saying things I've already said over and over again.
a great post, anne! realism and trying to change something instead of just talking about how everything will be wonderful soon is the way forward imho.
also, really really like your new layout - hadn't been on your blog for too long..
very good post
Excellent post. As an extension of some of the arguments other commentators have voiced: I have made similar arguments as you, but ended up deciding that I am a transhumanist. Subsequently, not the type of transhumanist you are mentioning in your post, so I can be your ally if you decide to label yourself as transhumanist again :-).
http://www.disabled-world.com/disability/statistics/us-disability-stats.php
Great blog. Personally, I don't see the point in caring much about labels. They are most often inadequate or just plain silly. Well, I suppose I like them for that. :P
on superlativity: thank you. i do self-identify as H+, so i probably come across as horribly biased/self-referential, but that hyperbolic, anime-show dreamerhood is one of the main contributors to us being seen as nothing more than idle dreamers.
luckily, i've yet to meet someone who thinks that as an autistic, i should be euthanised, or that disability rights advocates are fools (hell, i worked a quality-of-life improvement research post last summer and didn't hear snap), but it means that people who're actually willing to jump in with us and start soldering some implants together are few and far between, since the dreamers make everyone think that H+ is about sci-fi and mouthing off about robot bodies.
this gets to the point where people have to physically feel my hands before they'll believe that there's metal under the skin. oy vey... more articles like this would be far more useful than any more from people who want to be the star of their own SF novel. please do keep blogging, Anne - the practical H+ really appreciate it. (sorry bout the rant.)
L
sapiensanonym.blogspot.com
Mostly agree. What makes me question my transhumanist affiliations the most is the cognitive dissonance, not in their ideas but in practice.
People are more than willing to donate hundreds -- Or even thousands of dollars -- to SIAI so the Great and Venerable Eliezer Yudkowksy can continue writing fan fiction and calling himself an 'AI researcher'.
In the meantime, the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing has received no funding (And I can't hope for mechanosynthesis experiments since the NNI was hijacked) at all, and these people expect to have nanotechnology fairly early on under some pretension of technological determinism, "Even if nobody is pursuing the Drexler vision of nanotechnology, nanotech research will eventually converge in molecular assemblers. Obviously, that is the only valid end." A popularity contest disguised as 'rationality'.
It seems most transhumanists are more interested in talking about AI and uploading than, well, any of the technologies required to achieve most of those dreams, or even the down-to-Earth technologies that are possible *right now*. Though thankfully I've found a niche of non-nutjobs I can talk to.
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