Homelessness and the Transhuman: Some Existential Implications of Cognitive Science (by Benjamin Cain)
by rsbakker
If science and commonsense about human nature are in conflict, and cognitive science and R. Scott Bakker’s Blind Brain Theory are swiftly bringing this conflict to a head, what are the social implications? After explaining the conflict and putting it in the broader contexts of homelessness and alienation, I contrast the potential dystopian and utopian outcomes for society, focusing on the transhuman utopia in which, quite ironically, science and technology make the fantasy of the manifest image a reality, by turning people into gods. I use the sociopathic oligarch and the savvy politician as models to try to understand the transhuman’s sophisticated self-conception.
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Our Self-Destructing Home
Richard Dawkins called the genetically-determined, artificial transformation of the environment–for example, the spider’s web, beaver’s dam, or human-made shelter–an organism’s extended body. So to see why alienation is part of our destiny, compare a person’s situation with that of a web-spinning spider. Remove the spider entirely from its web, deprive it of its ability to weave a new one, and the spider would be discombobulated from its homelessness. The spider that spins webs can’t function without them. This creature’s body evolved to walk on silk threads, to eat the prey that can be caught in that net, and to sense threats through vibrations in the web. To the extent that a spider thinks of the world, its viewpoint is web-centric. The spider surely feels most at home in its web where it’s lord of the land; from its perspective, the world beyond is webless and out of its control. So a spider has external and internal means of reorganizing the world, although its internal means are indirect. Its body crafts a tool, the web, for transmuting part of the world into a form that’s compatible with the spider’s way of life, and its brain states lump the world into categories so that the spider can deal with threats and opportunities.
A typical person likewise has a home in the world, although a person’s home is much more flexible. When someone takes a broom to a spider’s web, the spider must weave a new one and once woven, the spider is committed to that location. The web isn’t portable, although it can withstand minor disturbances. By contrast, a person adapts her outer home to suit the environment, and so in a snowy climate a person builds an igloo, while in a rainy place she adds a roof that causes the rain to roll harmlessly down the roof’s slope. And we add a wide variety of buildings to achieve our many purposes, building not just houses but towns, cities, and civilizations. The relevant difference between a spider and a person is that the spider’s body is highly specialized whereas a person’s physiological capacities are more open-ended. All of the web-spinning spider’s physical traits are put to optimal use in the web which the spider must build for itself, whereas a person’s main outer advantage is her opposable thumb which gives her a capacity for infinite manipulations of the environment. Thus, we’re not so committed to just one kind of artificial home, but can adapt our extended body to suit the natural circumstances. To do this, we must understand those circumstances, and so the main web we weave, as it were, is inside rather than outside us. We weave this with our mind or more specifically with our brain. This web is made not of silk threads but of electrical currents which pass between neurons. The web of our thoughts allows us to make many subtle distinctions and so to exploit much more of the environment. Whereas a spider requires an outer web to feel at home and even to live as a spider, a person requires a mind made up of an inner web of memories, imaginings, feelings, categories, speculations, and inferences.
But there’s a paradox. A person’s mind accesses the world through the five senses and processes the information received. That task is what the mind is mainly for in evolutionary terms. But those senses don’t similarly access the mind itself or the brain. The senses are all pointed outward. They could conceivably be extended by technology and then directed inward to observe the brain as it processes the information generated by its activities. In fact, this is what dreams or psychedelic drugs may do; the hallucinations you perceive when sleeping or stoned may reflect deeper mental processes than those with which ordinary consciousness is familiar. In any case, observation doesn’t suffice for understanding, so the impressions of what the brain does while it’s thinking would have to be interpreted, and we don’t yet have as much experience of the brain’s intricacies as we do, say, of elements in the outer world like earth, water, and fire.
The paradox, then, is that our primary shelter and source of comfort is internal and yet this shelter dissolves itself.
We belong not so much to the brick and concrete homes we build–those are not the worlds we truly live in–but to the cherished beliefs of our religious, political, and other ideologies. The degree to which we live in our heads is the degree to which we live as persons, as mammals that are highly curious and reflective not just about the physical environment but about our capacities for understanding it. Self-awareness is a necessary condition of personhood. But the more we look at ourselves, the more we shrink from our withering glare until the self we imagine we are is lost. We’re most at home in the world when we feel free to fill the unobserved void of our inner self with speculations and fantasies. They form the so-called manifest image, the naive, intuitive picture of the self that we dream up because we’re extremely curious and won’t settle for such a blind spot. We replace ignorance about the brain and the mind with fanciful, flattering notions such as those you find in religious myths and in other social conventions. But the more we think about our inner nature, the more rigorous and scientific our self-reflections become until we discover that the manifest image is largely or perhaps even entirely a fiction; certainly, that image is a work of art rather than a self-empowering scientific theory.
We learn that there is no inner self in the ordinary, comforting sense, but we’re not adapted to identify with our body because our body is pitifully weak. Again, our main physiological advantage is our opposable thumb, and it’s our brainpower that permits us to reinforce our body, to engineer an airplane because we have no wings, a saw because we have no claws, clothes because we have no fur, and so on. In effect, we’re most proud of our brain–except when we learn what the brain actually is and does. As cognitive science and BBT in particular show (and as the philosopher Immanuel Kant maintained), the mind prefers delusion to a humble admission of ignorance. As those who attempt to still their thoughts in meditation will testify, the mind loves to think and won’t shut up unless the thinker exerts herself in ignoring its spontaneous ramblings. We fill our head with chitchat, with rumours and all manner of mental associations, often on the basis of scarce input. We take that input and run with it and we’re drawn especially to those speculations that flatter us. Like a hermit crab, we climb inside the net of those speculations and we live there, meaning that we identify our self with them. Most of us don’t know exactly what the inner self is, but we surmise that the self is rational, conscious, free, unified, and even immaterial and immortal. Then we take a closer look, with science, and we find that we can look past the illusion. Of course we’re not as we naively picture we are: look at the brain, see what it does, and notice that there’s no ghost inside! If we were hermit crabs, we’d learn that our shell isn’t so sturdy after all, that it dissolves on contact. The difference is that whereas the crab needs that shell to protect it from others, we need the manifest image to protect us from ourselves, or rather from our capacity to discover that we have no self.
Mind you, we erase not just the naive image of the self, but that of the outer world as well. The senses and the brain present a colourful, three-dimensional world that’s relative to each viewer’s perspective, thus effectively flattering the ego. Moreover, we perceive all events as having a past, a future, and a present moment in consciousness. Einsteinian physics teaches, though, that space and time are not as we so intuit them. Again, we think of causes and effects as mechanisms, as though the cosmos were a machine, but that’s a naive, deistic conception. We think of the universe as governed by laws even though the scientist no longer assumes there’s an intelligent designer to issue them or to ensure that the universe follows them. We perceive the environment as made up of whole, solid things even though matter at the quantum level isn’t solid or neatly divided. Modern science thus undermines all intuitive conceptions, both those of the self and of everything else. This is just to say that the brain’s spontaneous chatter about this or that which happens to mesmerize us isn’t likely to be the brain’s last word on the subject.
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The Horror of Alienation
The paradox of reason, which makes reason an evolutionary curse rather than just a gift, is that we live mainly in the ideational home we make in our heads, but those ideas eventually lead us to recognize that our heads are empty of anything with which we’d prefer to identify ourselves. Reason thus evicts us from our homes, kicking us to the curb, whereupon we may wander the cultural byways as outsiders, unable to lose the selves we cease to believe in in the cultural products that cater to the mass delusions. As least, that’s one path for the evicted to travel. Another is for them to sneak back into their homes, to forget that they don’t belong there and to pretend that they’re full-fledged home owners even though they know they’re dressed in rags and smell like urine. That’s an illustration of the difference between existential authenticity and inauthenticity.
To understand what I mean by that distinction, we need to consider the idea of alienation. The way I like to approach this is through the melancholic philosophy that Lovecraft dramatized in his cosmicist short stories. And it seems to me that this philosophy is analogous to the philosophical upshot of BBT. So what BBT contends is that scientific truth is opposed to personal truth, that what a self actually is is very different from what is naively presumed. This opposition raises the likelihood of cultural apocalypse and of the intriguing possibility of transhumanity to which I’ll turn in the next section. But what Lovecraft realized is that there’s a more general opposition, between the potential science of a superhuman species and even our supreme rational output. Just as the manifest image is inadequate to our scientific image, so too our scientific image may be inadequate to the superhuman conception of the world. To get an idea of the relevant sort of superhuman, picture Superman, the fictional hero whose superpowers are confined to his physiological and perhaps moral capacities, and now add superhuman intelligence plus the important levels of reality that may be exposed only to someone of that mental caliber. Of course, Lovecraft stressed that this more general scenario of what philosophers call mysterianism, which is a plausible result of atheistic naturalism, makes for psychological horror. Whereas BBT and cognitive science kick us to the curb, Lovecraft removes the curb, the street, and the whole planet and leaves us floating in a void that only a hideously indifferent alien could comprehend and use to its inhuman advantage.
What, then, is alienation? It’s just the futile feeling of homesickness, of not belonging somewhere you’d like to be or indeed of not belonging anywhere at all. Science alienates us from our preference to see ourselves in terms of the manifest image. We’d prefer to identify with that naive conception of the ego or of the immortal spirit, but informed people with intellectual integrity or perhaps with the foolishness to take human knowledge so seriously as to upset their chance for a happy life, are estranged from that conception. Married people who get divorced may feel terribly awkward when they’re then forced to be together, say, in some legal hearing. Likewise, science and especially cognitive science seem to push us towards a reckoning with the naive self-image so that even if we’re forced to project that image onto the brain, we’re sickened by or bored with that particular painting. In this context, alienation is the fear that that reckoning leaves us nowhere, or at least unsure of where to go next. And an existentially authentic, self-evicted mammal stays true to that homelessness, whereas an inauthentic one settles for a delusion rather than the reality.
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Home for the Transhuman
I want to consider some possible refuges for those who are existentially homeless. The most likely scenario, I fear, is the dark one that RSB speaks of and that is in fact a staple of dark science fiction. In this scenario, most people are reduced to the inauthentic state. What may happen, then, is that the majority either aren’t permitted to understand the natural facts of human identity or they prefer not to understand them, in which case they become subhuman: slaves to the technocrats who perfect technoscientific means of engineering cultural and mental spaces to suit the twisted purposes of the sociopathic oligarchs that tend to rule; automatons trained to consume material goods like cattle, whose manifest image functions as a blinder to keep them on the straight and narrow path; or hypocrites who have the opportunity and intelligence to recognize the sad truth but prefer what the philosopher Robert Nozick calls the Happiness Machine (the capitalistic monoculture) and so suffer from severe cognitive dissonance and a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. These aren’t dubious predictions, but are descriptions of what most people, to some extent, are currently like in modern societies. The prediction is only that these dynamics will be intensified and perhaps perfected, so that we’d have on our hands the technoscientific dystopia described by Orwell, Huxley, and others. I should add that on a Lovecraftian view, it’s possible that human scientific control of our nature will never be absolute, because part of our nature may fall within the ambit of reality that transcends our comprehension.
Is there a more favourable outcome? Many transhumanists speak optimistically about a mergence between our biological body and our extended, technological one. If we aren’t immaterial spirits who pass on to a supernatural realm after our physical death, we can still approximate that dualistic dream with technoscience. We can build heaven on earth and deify ourselves with superhuman knowledge and power; cast off our genetic leash/noose, through genetic engineering; overcome all natural obstacles through the internet’s dissemination of knowledge and nanoengineering; and even live forever by downloading our mental patterns into machines. In short, even though the manifest image of a conscious, rational, free, and immortal self is currently only an illusion that conceals the biological reality, the hope is that technoscience can actually make us more rational, conscious, free, and immortal than we’ve ever imagined. Of course, there are many empirical questions as to the feasibility of various technologies, and there’s also the dystopian or perhaps just realistic scenario in which such godlike power benefits the minority at the majority’s expense. But there’s also the preliminary question of the existential significance of optimistic transhumanism, granting at least the possibility of that future. How should we understand the evolutionary stage in which we set aside our dualistic myths and merge fully with our technology to become more efficient natural machines? Indeed, how would such transhumans think of themselves, given that they’d no longer entertain the manifest image?
I think we should conceive of this in terms of a natural process. Atoms bond to become molecules, molecules join to form macroscopic things like rocks, animals, and planets, and some animals incorporate their handiwork to become creatures that can interact more fully with the rest of nature. There’s the mereological process of complexification and the temporal process of evolution, and these may come together to produce transhumans. Lacking the manifest image and the vanity but also the moral limitations which that image subserves, a transhuman would have to conceive of itself as strictly part of some such natural process. The universe changes itself, and the transhuman can bring about many more of those changes than can a deluded, self-limited mammal. Currently, we transform much of our planet, whereas a transhuman who accepts only the scientific image of human nature may acquire the power to transform star systems, galaxies, or untold dimensions. A transhuman wouldn’t think in normative or teleological terms; such a natural god would have no goals or individualistic hallucinations, and would take to heart the Joker’s lines in the movie, The Dark Knight, “Do I really look like a guy with a plan?…You know, I just…do things.”
We have a model of such a transhuman god and that’s the oligarch. An oligarch is a very powerful person who’s reached the top of a national pecking order and is either sufficiently sociopathic to have reached that position with finesse or is naturally corrupted by the power he thereby acquires, in which case he conditions himself to be sociopathic. What I mean by “sociopathy” in this context is that power corrupts in the specific sense that the very powerful person tends to lose not just a sense of morality but the capacity for empathy. A transhuman would share that incapacity, since morality is part of the illusion of the manifest image. However, a transhuman and a corrupted ruler would differ significantly in that the latter would still act egoistically; indeed, such a person is a megalomaniac who believes he’s entitled to so much wealth and power because of his personal magnificence. By contrast, the transhuman would have no illusion of personhood: a transhuman would be only an instrument that ushers in galactic transformations; these wouldn’t be intended or preferred, but would be understood as just meaningless, natural evolutions of the cosmic landscape.
Another model that can help us get a sense of what transhuman life would be like is the democratic politician. I may be slightly more cynical than the average person living in a democracy, but I just take it for granted that a politician never speaks the truth in public. More precisely, the politician never tells the people at large exactly what she’s thinking. This is because when a politician speaks publicly, she’s on the job and so must carry out the functions of her office. As is said in the business, the politician–and the lobbyist, political handler, public relations expert, spin doctor, partisan, and so forth–speak publicly only in “talking points,” never leveling with the public or having anything as pedestrian as a conversation or a dialogue with a presumed equal. This is to say, then, that the politician eliminates semantics in her side of the public discourse: the meaning of her statements is irrelevant to their function, and the politician is interested only in that function, which is to say in the statements’ shaping of public opinion to the politician’s advantage. In other words, a politician’s public statements are guided only by what we might call their political syntax, which is the set of social scientific laws that make plausible various Machiavellian strategies for manipulating people, for exploiting their weaknesses and biases as a means to some end. The ends of the politician’s purely instrumental use of language are usually the limited ones of maintaining the politician’s privileged position and of stroking her ego, but may rarely include the purpose of benefitting the country at large according to the politician’s principles.
Again, there are interesting differences between this politician and the transhuman. A politician has goals whereas the transhuman has none. We might prefer to say that the transhuman has “implicit purposes,” but this would be sheer personification, since anything in the universe can be interpreted as acting towards some end point that isn’t mentally represented by that which is so acting. This would just amount to reading intelligent design into everything and positing some transcendent designer that does so represent the goals which that designer’s creations would be built to achieve. No, a transhuman who has fully embraced the scientific image and so abandoned the crude conception of personhood wouldn’t conceive of herself as mentally representing anything, which is to say that she would understand her mental states to be meaningless pseudo-instruments, as elements of a natural process. She would have neither beliefs nor desires in the ordinary sense and so she wouldn’t seek her enrichment or even the continuation of her life (although her vast technoscientific knowledge and power would render her invulnerable, in any case). The transhuman would be a new force of nature, as blind, deaf, and dumb as the wind or as sunshine. By contrast, a politician’s instrumentalism is petty, the scheme of a child playing at being a god. A politician may flatter herself that in her political role she acts as a savvy machine that sees past the delusions of the herd and can manipulate the masses at will by pushing their proverbial buttons, uttering a code word or two to initiate the news cycle, and so forth. But as long as the politician labours under the quaint delusion that she personally plans or desires anything, she’s better thought of as a wannabe god, as a child who hasn’t yet grown into her shoes. At best, the cynical politician would be the harbinger of the god to come, the Silver Surfer to the future Galactus.
Where, then, would the transhuman call home? The universe would be the transhuman’s playground, just as a force of nature works wherever it’s naturally able. A transhuman identifies not with a figment of its imagination, with a particular mind or consciousness, but with all of nature, since the transhuman’s knowledge and power would encompass that whole domain, or at least enough of the universe that the transhuman would effectively be divine. The transhuman’s reach would extend very far in space and time, and her body would be the extended one of technology that only morally-neutral science could unleash. And the transhuman would understand natural processes at a highly technical level; she’d be immortal, fearless, and enmeshed in the universe’s course of self-creation, as opposed to being limited, alienated, and homeless. Perhaps technoscience is the means of building gods, of ironically turning the manifest image, which is currently a fantasy, into a reality, and we are mere strands in the cocoon that will birth that new form of life. This transhumanism seems to me the most uplifting way of imagining the outcome of the clash between science and commonsense, but of course this doesn’t mean the scenario is plausible or likely. At any rate, if BBT is correct, we are primarily not individual persons with private agendas, but are stages of some natural process that we can’t yet see clearly, because our vision is obscured by smoke and mirrors.
Three Pound Brain 
Far more insightful to read your thoughts while wrestling with this subject matter than to experience my own, Cain.
Once again – a shameless opportunity to say, “[i]Bring on, Semantica[/i]” :).
[b]The transhuman would be a new force of nature, as blind, deaf, and dumb as the wind or as sunshine.[/b]
This seems the heart of your piece here, Cain, and I wonder if I might consider this as analogous rather than literal? For instance, can I take this to include the following amendment?
“The transhuman would be a new force of nature, as blind, deaf, and dumb to the concerns of the neurocommons, as the wind or the sunshine.”
Neurocommons being the average neural configuration, thus experience, of consensual, or manipulated, society.
The transhuman would still experience some sense of internal state, wouldn’t they – barring purposeful, selective loss of that function – albeit one as far removed, if not further removed, from the experiences of the cattle, as you’ve defined most of us, as we are from existing neuroanamolous configurations – such as Asperger’s or Autism.
Good read. +1 for Thoughts.
You ask a good question. I was actually trying to push the stronger line, but the difference may be semantic. It depends what we want to mean by “thinking.” I think the shift involved in incorporating the scientific image into our worldview to such an extent that we lose the dualistic intuitions would be sufficiently radical to warrant my more extreme speculation. The question is whether we want to call mental states that aren’t assumed to have any meaning or purpose “thoughts” or even “mental” in the first place. Of course, we can extend our labels as we like, but I wonder whether a transhuman wouldn’t have a more Taoist self-conception. On a fully naturalistic view it’s all just natural processes, whether they’re outside or inside us. So a transhuman “thought” would be more like one of God’s thoughts: a very powerful process or Word (Logos) that has instantaneous and otherwise tremendous effects.
The idea of the transhuman as a new force of nature is indeed, for me, central to this article. Another idea I’m curious about is that there’s some irony here: cognitive science may be realizing rather than just falsifying our naive self-conception, by helping to make us gods. The manifest image may be just a glass through which we currently see our future darkly (to naturalize Saint Paul’s assertion).
But we concede that the transhuman, barring selective loss, has a sense of self-conception? Interestingly enough, you’re treading Neuropath ground…
I don’t advocate birthing artificial intelligences or transhuman gods, Cain – to highlight one aspect of my dogmatism in these of conversations. I hazard its pertinent for someone philosophically form-bound to oppose these efforts, neh?
I do understand your conception better now, thanks for clarifying. Big thoughts, for sure. Cheers.
Thanks! You’re right that, strictly speaking, a force of nature would have no self and thus no self-conception. But we’d need some bridge between us and the transhuman to understand the latter, if only by weak analogy. You might have to stand on a bridge to see beyond it.
I’m not sure I advocate this kind of transhumanism either, but being a god would be better than being a slave in a totalitarian technocracy, for example.
🙂
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/188843001.html
You really channel Spinoza in this piece, Ben. Would it be fair to say you see the posthuman as a kind of ‘becoming one’ with conatus? Or in Nietzschean terms, with the will-to-power stripped of its vitalistic overtones, as the actualization of the Ubermensch? Given that BBT interprets the first person via various losses of dimensionality, the expansion of capacities promised by the transhuman program, for instance, suggest a kind of ‘dimensionality regained’ model of posthuman consciousness, the possibility of a thought no longer alienated from its concrete materiality.
I tried to go beyond Nietzsche here, since his Ubermensch is still egoistic. As I recall, Nietzsche does say the posthuman merely expresses his power, his joy of being alive and so on, as opposed to scheming and choosing, but I don’t think his vague descriptions of the next order of humanity are terribly helpful. Spinoza would be more influential here, although Spinoza said the ultimate mental task is to understand the rational order of nature, whereas I suspect a posthuman would hardly be so passive. I like the idea of a new force of nature, since this suggests a great transformation or further evolution of nature. If we think of the process of turning the natural into the artificial as driven by personality (by an agenda, choice, and so on), we’re not yet thinking as posthumans. Instead, we should think of lower-level, biological processes changing themselves by higher-level feedback, via the posthuman instrument, as it were.
I wonder about the semantic issues here. Should we still say the posthuman thinks at all if her “thoughts” merge with their concrete materiality? I think folk psychology is so bound up with all nontechnical ways of speaking of the mind, that we’d need to come up with new ways of speaking of what the depersonalization of human nature would amount to, to avoid confusion. That way, we wouldn’t have to speak “under erasure,” as you like to say (if I’m getting the phrase right; is it from Derrida?). How about a translation manual, matching up every folk psychological notion with the impersonal, posthuman replacement?
But yes, I assume a posthuman would be at one with her material causes and effects in just the way God is assumed to be at one with his Creation, when his words are said to become reality. God said “Let there be light,” and there was light, etc. Perhaps intentionality is just a weak creature’s way of relating to the world. Our words have mere meaning because we can’t automatically impact the world. Instead, we have to plan in our minds what we’d like to do if given the chance, and so our symbols are thought to reach out and touch things, as poor substitutes for our physical interaction with the world. A posthuman god would have no need of such substitutes with their mere ethereal, pseudo-connections with referents. The posthuman body would just reach out and change whatever this body is inspired to change.
A third model of the posthuman I might have talked about, then, is the young child, since this child likewise doesn’t represent its world but just does whatever it wants. We’re speaking here not just of amorality but of a return to infancy, except that the infant’s instincts would differ from the posthuman’s.
For Nietzsche, ‘egoistic’ simply is the direct expression of our nature, but since its our revised nature you’re discussing I take your point. Nietsche’s ‘will’ must still be refracted through the intentional prism, whereas you’re postulating a new entity so transparent to nature that it must be utterly opaque to us. I agree with you on the ‘new force of nature’ point as well: I now think this is literally the case, that the posthuman effectively marks a biological (as opposed to merely historical) revolution as profound as multicellular life. Check out: https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/the-posthuman-as-evolution-3-0/ It’s short, but it still makes my head spin.
You’d also probably dig David Roden’s stuff.
It’s starting to sound like BBT’s poison has found it’s way to a couple of veins, Ben!
Yes, there is some common ground between those two articles of our ours on posthumans. But I wonder what you think about the possible irony that the magic of folk psychology anticipates the “miracles” that posthumans might be capable of, so that instead of opposing the manifest image, cognitive science (and the rest of technoscience) may be in the business of realizing it. For example, what is the intentional relation between a symbol and its referent, but a promissory note or a wish that the speaker could have a royal road to everything she perceives? The posthuman wouldn’t need to pretend she’s above nature, like the immaterial souls we naively take ourselves to be, since she’d be an actual god.
There’s a challenge in this view of posthumanity, which is that maybe there’s more to the manifest image than an illusion born from naivety. Maybe the manifest image is a sort of blueprint we keep in our heads to envision where we want to go, to unconsciously help direct society to produce the posthuman race. Just as a boxer will envision having his hand raised in the ring, to help him unconsciously bring the victory into being, so too we may collectively have a rough idea of where nature’s taking us. All just speculations, of course.
http://xkcd.com/1163/
Sooo, gunna write that article for TPB, och? 🙂
Benjamin,
On your latest point above, I personally see too much blah within the “manifest image” to think it was approaching something useful. From God to Sin to the movement of the sun to . . ., a better understanding is to explain it with evolutionary induced emotional structures combined with the phenomenological presentations combined with conceptual theories that played out of previously flawed theories. Thus, the manifest image is somewhat a mess. That is not to say that it does not shift, which I think we have to accept that it does. We update our image of our selves as we gain new knowledge, realize certain concepts are absurd postulations and even understand why our past selves may have believed such things; and then, thus, create a new “manifest image” of our self. The idea that we can mark the “manifest image” as stable seems problematic to me, but I have mainly understood the idea through Owen Flanagan’s rendering, so if there is some narrower definition that thoroughly limits the idea of the “manifest image” to a narrow and unwavering conception, then perhaps once and for all we can just write it off.
But the idea that it is struggling to realize a hidden desire, that it itself cannot articulate, given the problematic phenomenological presentations at the current moment minus an improved (scientific) understanding of that phenomenology, which is what I see the “manifest image” as; the idea that it is secretly driving us to its “real desire” of transhumanistic power seems bizarre.
On a different note, I’ve tangled with the thought that “epistemology” needs to be obliterated. That everything can, on some level, be described ontologically. The only reason we see it useful to speak in epistemological terms is because we mistook what “reason” and “representations” and knowledge are. There is nothing more to epistemology, ultimately, than asking why this system begets this next system, of positing some relational structure and some given brain, say, and why it will move into the next state. Where on this account does epistemology make sense? I am somewhat of a tame realist and accept the usefulness, the pragmatic potency, of our knowledge and science and technology, but think it necessary, in the least, to deflate the conception that epistemology is a separate category that should not be fully encompassed by ontology, that is an epistemology that is different from the explanation of the system and its processing. But maybe someone can explain some basic philosophy to me.
In other words, I think that epistemological conceptions are a relic of our manifest image, and maybe one that your all-knowing-transhumanist has seen through and stops thinking that epistemology, as a separate category, would be a useful categorization.
The idea is bizarre, although I think it becomes more bizarre when you personalize it in terms of a struggle to satisfy a desire. The idea becomes slightly less bizarre if we can compare it to the practice of visualizing a future state. We often do this while lying in bed, running through in our mind what we have to do tomorrow. Athletes do this too when they stay optimistic even though they face a stressful competition. There must be some psychological process here.
Really, though, there are two choices. The manifest image can be an accidental byproduct or part of a process. Now, I wonder whether there can metaphysically be any accidents at all, given philosophical naturalism. What an accident would be is a phenomenon that’s irrelevant to a particular scientific theory, but the accident would become part of a process from some other scientific perspective. This makes the distinction between accident and process relative to our interests (and thus, paradoxically, not so interesting).
The question I’m raising–and it may be just a wild speculation–is that the manifest image serves role in the process of creating posthumans. Now, we’d need freewill to justify the thought that there’s a matter of choice as to whether we’ll ever drop the manifest image and evolve into a more enlightened species. If there’s no choice, there’s just a process one way or the other. The manifest image may kill us off because of the ignorance and delusions the image entails or the image may have some more constructive role.
As to epistemology, the key issue for me is the role of normativity. Epistemology is about how we rationally justify our statements. If we get rid of epistemology, the question is whether we can live without the concept of “truth” or the distinction between better and worse statements or theories. So say you have two ontological pictures of Being. On what basis do we select one or the other? We could say the selection is pragmatic: we just pick whichever picture is more efficient in achieving some purpose, and as our purposes change, so too may our selections. But the notion of purpose is part of the manifest image, and “efficiency” is also normative. So without the manifest image, all we have are natural processes, and it’s hard to see what would make any of them mental. We can describe organic and psychological processes objectively, from the third-person viewpoint, but any phenomenon that would be grist for that mill would likewise fall under the categories of the manifest image, from an internal perspective of what it’s like to be subjected to that phenomenon.
One thing that puzzles me–and I’ve talked about this with RSB–is the question of how to explain the very idea of an illusion, such as the idea that the manifest image is one, without the idea of normativity, which is part of that image. We want to say that the scientific, third-person perspective is “better,” “more useful” or “healthy” or “empowering” than the naive, folk psychological one, but it’s hard to think of any basis for favouring one perspective over another without the naive concept of value. (Of course, BBT explains this in terms of the illusion of sufficiency owing to the mind’s blindness.)
But would the godlike, impersonal posthuman have motivations at all or would such a being literally be a force of nature? Would we still want to call such a being alive? Would any of us want to become posthuman if giving up our illusions meant giving up the experience of being alive? What would truly alien life be like? RSB explores this question in his dialogue between a super-intelligent alien and a human materialist, but I got the impression that the alien presupposes the doctor’s normative distinction between health and sickness, the thesis being that our illusions make us weak and sick whereas the alien is healthy and strong. But how should we make sense of that distinction without the manifest image? These are puzzling questions for me.
Hi Benjamin,
And an existentially authentic, self-evicted mammal stays true to that homelessness, whereas an inauthentic one settles for a delusion rather than the reality.
I’m not sure what the context of delusion is here – there’s enjoying a magic show Vs thinking it’s actually magic.
And it seems such delusions (in the former sense) can be beacons to navigate by. Exactly what do you navigate by in this genuine homelessness? Is authentic homelessness the new upbeat word for various acts that fall well outside those beacons?
Also I don’t know how the ‘absence of manifest image’ is being described? Is it being described like as if our reading is seeing colours and our thinking is the regular colour spectrum, while a transhuman is in ultra violet or something?
Otherwise tell me, do guided missiles assign new targets (or activities) for themselves? Ala Scud?
How does a unit make up a new target and affirm that?
Sounds like the stuff manifest images are made of.
If you want to argue ultra violet, I’d agree there’s alot of issues there.
Hi Callan. It’s not easy describing the absence of the manifest image. Negatively, we can say it means goodbye to personality, morality, meaning, and purpose. Doesn’t sound so great. There are semantic issues here, though, which I’ve been trying to get at. Do we want to say that a posthuman, for example, who lacks the manifest image, thinks in an impersonal, non-normative way or that she doesn’t think at all? How far do we want to stretch the word “think”? Do we want to stretch it to cover what a missile does when it selects a target?
This really is just a semantic issue about whether some phenomenon falls under a certain category. We can always devise new labels, but the tricky thing is coming up with a new concept, and that’s what I tried to do in the last section of this article. It’s easy to say the mere words “impersonal, non-normative, amoral and posthuman viewpoint,” but it’s much harder to understand the concept and the mindset of such a posthuman. I use the metaphors of homelessness, God, oligarch, and savvy democratic politician to shed some light on that mindset. I think a posthuman would be some kind of mix between an organism and a new force of nature, but I myself am only trying to wrap my mind around what that would entail.
As for the delusion, I like my metaphor of the homeless person who sneaks back into the house and pretends to be a home owner. The theist is the easy example: this is someone who’s really existentially homeless in nature, but who pretends to be the owner of a happy destiny in heaven, according to the rules of the theist’s fantasy world. As I say in the article, we make both outer and inner homes for us (homes for our bodies and for our minds). Delusion enters the picture when we have an existentially inauthentic, misleading worldview, a home we don’t own but try to live in nonetheless.
In some ways this makes me think of plato’s cave, but more in terms of how others are stuck directly beside you, seeing the shadows. It’s like you’re trying to turn your eyes hard left or right, to see them. Particularly the word ‘mindset’ is indicative of trying to see sideways. This makes them so very other.
A perspective of mine comes from mulling over how to make an Artificial Intelligence.
How do you make a unit that will pursue an objective? If you were to say you’d make it desire something – get good feedback from something, how does one make desire with wire and electricity?
The answer is…well, ideally one comes to the conclusion oneself. But for the sake of discussion, let’s assume the answer is: one doesn’t. Good feedback would be a +5 volt signal on a wire.
Depending on how much you engage this, it affects how much you cease to try and look sideways at a mindset.
The difficulty in finding any kind of kinship with a transhuman mind (or a very smart smart bomb) is probably to do with not framing oneself within these terms.
Of course they look mechanistically unnatural given one can only really see what they do, which is what is exuded forward from them and are no longer perfectly sideways, actions which are within the arc of the visible. Whilst trying to look sideways so as to look directly at them leaves question marks aplenty.
Being aside is kind of a home as well.
If you mull over how to make your own intelligence, with wire and sparks, the question arises of how much a trans human can actually differ on the base principles for unit that can survive to any degree. Though granted, to think afore is also a kind of home, too.
Maybe there is some way of breaking out of the rule of pursuit of desire. But that doesn’t come to exist simply because one can’t see much when one attempts to see sideways at ones fellow cave occupant.
I like my metaphor of the homeless person who sneaks back into the house and pretends to be a home owner.
I think you might mean actually believes themselves the home owner. What’s wrong with pretending? People who play boardgames pretend – does that not work out? Or does it feel to distanced from the authentic to do so?
Also you describe it as ‘but try to live in’ at the end – this doesn’t distinguish whether it’s pretend or believe?
Really it begs the question of if you’re homeless, where are you now then?
What if you’ve simply defaulted to another house you believe you own? But cannot see that?
In such a case it’d be worth pretending to own the house that you can see, to avoid imperceptably believing real ownership of another unseen (unseelie?) house, imperceptably retracted into as the hermit crab makes its retreat.
The question of how to build an AI is somewhat outside the scope of my article, since I lay aside the issue of whether transhumanism is technically feasible. But you’re right that this question is relevant to our attempt to imagine what being a transhuman would be like.
If all we had was a very powerful computer inside a body that acted intelligently, we’d probably give it the benefit of the doubt and imagine that the machine is alive. But for me, this is a problem with Turing’s Test since it leaves out what Daniel Dennett makes clear in his idea of the intentional stance and in his book Breaking the Spell: we’re biased towards seeing things as having minds, because we’re hardwired to socially interpret each other’s mind, and so we tend to anthropomorphize things even when we know they’re inanimate. The dualist likes to raise the possibility of the zombie, of a body that acts halfway intelligent, at least, but that’s dead inside. Of course, if consciousness is separate from the brain, you might be able to have one without the other and so just because you have the wires, the circuit board, and so on, doesn’t mean you have a mind or a mindset. But if consciousness is dependent on the brain, this wouldn’t be possible as long as you have the right setup of hardware.
The key thing here seems to be the illusion of mentality based on what RSB calls the brain’s blindness to itself. Just looking at the brain, there doesn’t seem anything at all about it that we’d call conscious, rational, or emotional. The brain’s just a squishy mess of stuff. But somehow the brain creates the illusion of personhood, based on precisely that ignorance of its functions, according to BBT. This raises the question of whether we’d call a posthuman sentient if that being were to dispense entirely with the manifest image. If we identify with the illusory categories of personhood (the experience of consciousness, freedom, alienation or immateriality, etc), I don’t know how impressed we’d be with a being that acts intelligently but that claims not to suffer from those illusions.
But this issue gets more complicated and I think one way to clarify it is to compare a posthuman with a Buddhist. That’s what I’m working on now, so hopefully you’ll see this article up here soon.
Thanks for your reply, Benjamin.
I think the pursuit of survival and it’s impact is pivotal in forming an estimation of the transhuman.
Though I’ll grant that a fresh brain modification is free of immediate survival implications – ie, it might be quite abberant to self survival, yet continue to exist for some period of time. See Niel Cassidy from Neuropath.
So I can see some room for thinking of a unit without a manifest image.
But the problem is then, who is there to save?
A thought in reading the threads of conversation: how does anyone find “manifest image” relates to neural representation of proprioception & “body image?”
It strikes me that the Transhuman, as Cain’s pushed the descriptive envelope, will never have an advent – Semantica happens first, as a circumstance. While society reacts notoriously slow to legislating novel technologies, there will be attempts – nootropics and physiological/neurological augmentations will quickly become pervasive in certain industries, for instance – but no matter how far that control extends, there will always be Tweakers and Normies, among other outliers forming the gradient.
Sorry, I use these terms for metaphorical heuristic – at least, some of TPB’s readership have been exposed to them before.
All these intervening iterations between us and the Transhuman would still experience a manifest image, a philosophic self?
Let’s say, I want to attach a novel prosthetic to my amputated appendage.
Proprioception and its neural structures become an issue with phantom limbs where, instead of changing its structure to reflect the new body’s form, the missing appendage gets “brain-locked,” or frozen in the architecture, possibly by the trauma, as it was. This is why Ramachandran’s Mirror-Box is so damned ingenius as he uses the illusion from other senses, primarily vision, but tactile sensation as well, to trick the brain into restructuring itself.
Theoretically, there are equivalent issues when deciding to augment proprioception to [i]include[/i] a novel limb, especially one that’s going to interact with existing neural architectures – it helps that we could hijack nature’s structures and attach my former architecture for moving my forefinger of my missing hand to launch grenades from my rocket arm?
Elysium!
Sometimes I think TPB is the Herald, Harbinger, & Midwife. Never be Neil ;).
Just thoughts. Cheers.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/the-human-race-will-come-to-an-end
Benjamin, I was floored the entire way through this article. I feel like I learned a lot and am far less confused about certain issues surrounding what I see as the Humanist/Transhumanist paradigm. I have just started my journey learning about this and have 3 articles out featuring a philosophy that I’d like to try and introduce to the world. Perhaps naively and out of some sort of delusion that I can some how help matters, but it helps me in realizing the truth of things. Please take a look and let me know where you think I can improve my understandings. I am very interested in this topic and plan on writing a lot about it in the future. I will definitely pay close attention to any articles you write on the topic. Thanks for the post!
Thanks very much! I’ve read through your articles on transhumanism. If I have them right, you’re optimistic about the prospect of enhancing our biological bodies with technology, although you’re aware of potential drawbacks. In particular, you think this enhancement will be conducive to peace and may even be necessary to save us from our mammalian tendencies to destroys ourselves with aggressive wars, irrationality, and so forth.
One thing I’m puzzled by is the mechanism that’s supposed to connect the techno-enhancements with the desired outcome of a peaceful society. In your Part One you talk about a global society as a sorting device for ideas, the principle being that two heads are better than one. So we just introduce more input, getting more and more people to put their heads together and ponder some issue, and then their ideas will compete and the answer will somehow be selected while the false ideas will fall by the wayside.
But there’s a distinction that needs to be made here between empirical knowledge and normative, more value-driven ideas, or what some universities call The Arts. Science is the best known mechanism for acquiring empirical knowledge, and the competition of ideas wouldn’t suffice since you’d have to test the ideas against reality and observe the results. As for more subjective knowledge, like philosophy, religion, historical interpretation, and other cultural areas like painting and music, I’m not sure how competition would necessarily generate excellence. You might be thinking of Richard Dawkins’s meme theory of culture here. But I tend to be more of a romantic about the arts: great art requires a genius’s vision, which in turn requires that the genius suffer from alienation and from being antisocial or mentally unbalanced. Great art is hardly the result of compromise or of agreement by some committee. Just look at Hollywood. You need a dictatorial director who has a vision for the whole film. The movies made by committees of producers with no artistic vision are hackneyed and insulting to movie fans.
I’m more pessimistic about competitions, because I take to heart the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which I write about on my blog. The problem is that any sufficiently large group of social beings is going to have to be managed to prevent social collapse, and that management will require a concentration of power that will corrupt the managers and still bring down the system. Look at the cyclist Lance Armstrong or doping in the UFC. These sports are competitions so you might expect them to be meritocratic, and to some extent they are. But they also tend to be corrupted because they’re large organizations. In particular, the owners look the other way when the players take steroids to enhance their abilities, because they know the steroids make for more exciting competitions. These sports are regulated, so the players are subject to punishment, but either way the competition is highly unstable just by requiring a complex management system. Is the solution to legalize the drugs? But those drugs have detrimental effects on the players, so the sports would eventually burn out or turn into Ponzi schemes requiring a stream of new, naive players to replace the older ones who’ve been damaged by the drugs. Or look at the rampant corruption in the Olympics or in professional soccer (football) leagues.
So I don’t see how enhancing our intelligence or our emotions with technology and just getting us all to think about our problems would lead to peace. I think the global society would have to be managed, which would concentrate power and so naturally corrupt the managers. The powerful managers would distort the process of selecting the ideas. Perhaps Wikipedia, though, is an example in your favour. Lots of people work on Wikipedia articles and the editors don’t seem to corrupt the whole thing. Your articles talk about anarchy as the solution to tyrannical governments, the idea being, I think, that techno-enhanced people could more easily take care of themselves.
But again, there’s the technological side of transhumanism and then there’s the normative side. Enhancing our bodies is one thing, figuring out the rules to produce social peace is another. Even if we could be made to take care of ourselves, why would such independent beings necessarily respect each other? If we’re talking about anarchy in the sense of a free market of ideas, as in letting free individuals go where they may with no regulation, I think that creates dominance hierarchies run by monopolists/predators who, again, become corrupt by the power they need to run the great systems (corporations, governments, NGOs) that win out in the competition. But you seem to want there to be rules to regulate the competition. Even if we could figure out what those rules would be, a regulated society wouldn’t really be so anarchical.
Anyway, these are just my thoughts on the matter. I’ll try to post this message in the comment section of your blog too.
Enjoyed the post.
“By contrast, the transhuman would have no illusion of personhood: a transhuman would be only an instrument that ushers in galactic transformations; these wouldn’t be intended or preferred, but would be understood as just meaningless, natural evolutions of the cosmic landscape.”
Without intent, why would the transhuman do anything at all?
“Natural Evolutions” implies a sense of fate, or a deterministic world in which all intent is irrelevent anyway, so the distinction would be moot. If we assume free will as existing then some intent such as the will to live, or will to understand would have to remain. If these “aims” become meaningless then suicide would be as likely an action as any.
Thanks! When you ask why a transhuman would do anything at all, since she’d have no intent, that’s exactly the question I address in my follow-up to this article. Hopefully, you’ll see it here soon. In short, I think Buddhism is relevant here.
cool on the buddhism, I was thinking that there were intersections with buddhism, though I think that about a lot of bakkers stuff too, although I am not sure if he agrees on that.
I really enjoyed the article; not sure if the transhuman would be good or not or neutral for a projected future, interesting ideas.
I don’t know much about buddhists, but if it’s that related to this subject, then they are becoming creepy for me!
Perhaps buddhists are creepy in a way, but generally I think of them as the most human a human can be.
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