Verse 1Be sure to check out the lyrics to F*uck the Creationists :-)
Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it,
to have you all jumping, shouting saying it.
Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder,
in a system that is closed, like with a border.
It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness,
proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress.
"What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming,
it seems I gotta start the explaining.
You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break?
You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake.
But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true,
if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.
That's entropy or E-N-T-R-O to the P to the Y,
the reason why the sun will one day all burn out and die.
Order from disorder is a scientific rarity,
allow me to explain it with a little bit more clarity.
Did I say rarity? I meant impossibility,
at least in a closed system there will always be more entropy.
That's entropy and I hope that you're all down with it,
if you are here's your membership.
Chorus
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me! (x3)
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!
Verse 2
Defining entropy as disorder's not complete,
'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat.
So my first definition I would now like to withdraw,
and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law.
First we need to understand that entropy is energy,
energy that can't be used to state it more specifically.
In a closed system entropy always goes up,
that's the second law, now you know what's up.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about,
you're now down with a discount.
"It's very simple," [Brian] Feeney said in a telephone interview Friday morning. "We have some pieces of equipment that haven't arrived." Specifically, he said the da Vinci team needed a four-axis filament winder -- a device used in fabricating fiberglass and carbon-fiber parts -- to complete work on a key spaceship component.Well, from what I understand, Feeney is not being entirely honest. A friend of mine close to X-Prize happenings recently told me that the Da Vinci project is all hype, and that any attempt to beat Rutan's SpaceShip One any time soon would be "suicide." They're simply not ready.
Besides optimistic and even utopian reports, there was also some questioning and debate with, for example, both scornful criticism and tentative support of the US President's Council on Bioethics and its cautionary stance. One WTA member identified as a Catholic was Tihamer Toth-Fejel, a US research engineer. In his view, "enhancements that degrade our humanity are not good for us because they contradict who we are as persons and, therefore, should be prohibited and discouraged. Our difficulty is in recognizing which enhancements are degrading us, discovering how this degradation occurs, and finally, finding the strength to resist the alluring promises they make," - an opinion he wrote for the Summer 2004 issue of The National Catholic BioethicsDaly continues,
Quarterly.
Perhaps because the transhumanist message is largely disseminated by the Internet, and perhaps also because of their call for total freedom in scientific exploration and technical engineering, many of the non-member participants in the Toronto weekend were university students preparing for high-tech careers. This conference made the faith views of the transhumanists easily accessible to these students. As they move their 2005 conference to Caracas, Venezuela, the tiny band of transhumanists will continue to challenge all larger faith communities to review what they have to say to such groups, and how best to say it.
One post-Vatican II challenge for Catholics, especially lay specialists in science and technology, is to enter "interfaith dialogue" with transhumanists, perhaps especially via the Internet, searching for "those seeds of the Word which lie hidden among them," while rejecting "nothing that is true and holy" in what they have to say.
Scientists have known for nearly 70 years that calorie restriction extends the life spans of mammals by as much as 50 percent, but just how it works has remained a mystery. Guarente believes he has found the answer, and that it could potentially lead to extended life spans for people, too. For more than a decade, Guarente has been gradually solving the puzzle with the ambitious goal of discovering how to slow the aging process in humans without imposing a thousand-calorie-a-day diet. In 1999, he came to the surprising conclusion that manipulating just one gene, SIR2, could affect longevity. Guarente became so convinced that his findings could lead to antiaging pills that in 1999 he cofounded Cambridge-based Elixir Pharmaceuticals to commercialize them. In June, Guarente and his colleagues published a paper in the scientific journal Nature that detailed how a version of the SIR2 gene in mice releases fat from storage tissue, which seems to have a direct effect on how fast the animals age. Although Guarente’s lab has yet to determine exactly why a reduction in fat allows animals to live longer, he’s confident that medicines that cause the mechanism to spring into action aren’t too far around the corner. “I think there’s going to be an ever growing clamor to take advantage of this,” Guarente says. And he believes life-span-lengthening medicines will be available within a decade.
The strike would have come out of nowhere: One second, the fish was swimming placidly, no danger in sight, a moment later it was lunch.
Scientists have discovered what may have been one of the first stealth hunters, a long-necked swimming dinosaur that could sneak up on prey and attack without warning.
“The long neck would allow it to approach prey without the whole body becoming visible,” said Olivier Rieppel of the Field Museum in Chicago, co-author of a new report in Thursday's issue of the journal, Science.
If, as many suspect, the 21st century ends up being the Asian Century, two movies from 2004 will be remembered as early auguries. The first film bodes poorly for the US; the second film bodes well for Asia. In watching "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," Americans thrill to the simple comic-book glories of 1939. At the same time, the Japanese, watching "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence," think ahead to the cyber-future of 2032, pondering its potentialities and pitfalls.Pinkerton continues:
A culture which prefers the languorous comfort of a quasi-mythic past to the rigors of confronting the hard-edged future is complacent, maybe even decadent -- and out of decadence comes defeat.
So is "Ghost" director Mamoru Oshii guilty, after all, of the same retro-mindedness as "Sky Captain" director Conran?There are many other very good insights, and the entire article can be read here.
No, not at all. "Ghost" director Oshii is on a mission to instruct. In an interview with The Washington Post, he observed, "People are very different from animals. We don't accept our original bodies. Humans wear clothes, have earrings and tattoos, do cosmetic surgery, take vitamins. If they are sick, they get organ transplants. And now we have radios, telephones, microphones, watches, computers, microchips outside the body now, but soon we will utilize these machines inside our bodies and then we will be part cyborg. This is inevitable. The process has already begun."
Dig that: It's inevitable. The process has already begun. Welcome to the machine, as Pink Floyd would say.
Going further, Oshii predicted, in terms not entirely complimentary to his countrymen, that the pioneers of body mechanization "will probably be Japanese. That, and human cloning… because we do not have the same taboos." He added, "Japan is a really weird country without any religion. We take ideas from everywhere. We don't really care about what is lost and what is acquired."
It's worth pausing over Oshii's "no religion" point. Most Americans probably think that the dominant faith in the US, Protestantism, has been an asset -- the upwardly mobile "Protestant Ethic," and all that. Yet some citizens, in the name of faith and morality, are seeking to put stumbling blocks in the path of their progress. The Bush administration seems perfectly prepared, for instance, to say "sayonara" to rivals across the Pacific, as the Asian Tigers pull ahead in the Great Game of Human Techno-Destiny.
Given the liberal intelligentsia’s high tolerance for the use of traditional religion in progressive causes, it’s not surprising that hardly anyone questions the political influence of Earth-worshipping environmentalism, which novelist Michael Crichton has called "the religion of choice for urban atheists." This environmentalist "spirituality" pervades Gore’s 1992 book Earth in the Balance...
...Yet the faith-based presidency is genuinely troubling. This is not only because of the public policies justified by invoking God’s name. No less important is the symbolic message that one must be religious in order to be a part of the body politic -- in order, perhaps, to be a "real" American. It’s a message that goes hand in hand with a good deal of secularist bashing and particularly atheist bashing: In some of the Republican attacks on Democratic financier George Soros, atheist was used as a term of opprobrium.
The public’s views on this subject are more complex than the champions of religion in the public square often make them out to be. For instance, a recent Time poll found likely voters evenly divided on the question of whether the president should allow his personal faith to be his guide in making political decisions. The vast majority of Americans consider themselves religious, but about a third do not consider religion very important in their lives and attend religious services once a month or less. That’s a pretty large segment of the population to reduce to the status of political pariahs.
As impressive as the scope of world-enders' thinking these days is its overwhelming detail. Everything from events in the Middle East to the technology of cloning has been worked into one end-times commentary or another.
As one might expect, 9/11 has acquired apocalyptic dimensions of its own, explained at Boston University's Center for Millennial Studies website. In that specific context, the level of detail may extend even to the frequency of individual words in the book of Revelation. A pious acquaintance, apparently aware of Manhattan's equation with mystery Babylon, tried to relate the fall of the WTC's two towers to the repetition of the two words "is fallen" in Revelation 14:8:
"And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication."
Being no biblical scholar, and certainly no eschatologist, I can only make a guess (albeit uninformed) that the words are repeated for emphasis and not to represent a specific number of buildings destroyed.
The detail of these scenarios reflects more than just zeal and fascination. It also serves two important purposes. One, to overwhelm the reader or listener with information. Presented with countless particulars and tiny specifics, one simply cannot investigate, much less evaluate, all of them one by one. Potential critics are swamped. That effect accounts, at least in part, for the success of many end-times models. Doomsday artists are well aware of this principle: The more detail, the better, for the same reason that a hurricane is more powerful than a single raindrop.
Now for the second, less evident but equally important purpose of abundant detail: It provides a doomsday scenario such as a conspiracy hypothesis about the "last days" with countless points of attachment to other scenarios. Together, they support and reinforce one another in the same manner as the interconnected girders of a building.
"The main argument in my dissertation though, is whether Human beings will use mechanical augmentation to move further away from the Human blueprint (as designers re-interpret the Human form), or try to achieve a new level of cosmetic beauty? - If you could offer your current opinions on this specific statement it would benefit my investigation immensely.My response:
"I am a perfectly healthy Human being, but I would personally choose to move further away from the Human form - having never really felt 'complete' as a mere Human being. Maybe for me this would be a more spiritual transformation - something of self discovery - allowing me to challenge the form I was born into - and the subsequent understanding of the world created by that form."
"Many people believe that those who plan to vote for President Bush in the upcoming election are crazy, while a large number of other people think those who plan to vote for Sen. John Kerry are nuts. Whichever view best describes your position, it's all too easy to dismiss those who disagree with you as unfit to vote.
While Americans may joke that the voting preferences of those on the other side of the political spectrum are indicative of mental illness — humor aside — has our country actually come to grips with the question of cognitive impairment and the right to vote?
We all remember stories from Palm Beach County and other areas of Florida during the last presidential election in which older voters complained that the ballots were too confusing to use. Do the current methods used for voting block access for those with mental or cognitive impairments? And do those living in institutions, particularly the elderly in nursing homes, always get to exercise their right to vote even if they have a bit of memory loss or suffer from depression? And what are the standards for disqualifying someone from voting because of cognitive impairment?"
"Many readers probably don't know exactly what black holes are and, frankly, the best I can do is to imagine them like the pike in Yellow Submarine that devours everything around it until it finally swallows itself. But in order to understand the news item from which I am taking my cue, all you need to know about black holes is that they are one of the most controversial and absorbing problems in contemporary astrophysics.Entire article
Recently I read in the papers that the celebrated scientist Stephen Hawking has made a statement that is sensational, to say the least. He maintains that he made an error in his theory of black holes (published back in the 70s) and proposed the necessary corrections before an audience of fellow scientists.
For those involved in the sciences there is nothing exceptional about this, apart from Hawking's exceptional standing, but I feel that the episode should be brought to the attention of young people in every nonfundamentalist or nonconfessional school so that they may reflect upon the principles of modern science."
Polyphenols are the compounds in plants that help prevent UV damage from the sun and make the plant cell wall strong. They are believed to have antioxidant benefits when consumed by the human body. Even though red wine contains more polyphenols than beer, this study showed the body absorbs about equally effective amounts of bioactive molecules such as polyphenols from beer and wine. Beer, wine, stout, and matured spirits (rum, whisky, sherry and port), which extract tannins from the oak casks they are matured or stored in, all contain significant amounts of polyphenols.But before you all go rushing out to become alcoholics, realize that while studies have shown one daily drink of almost any alcoholic beverage can help reduce the risk of many aging diseases, larger daily intakes (three drinks per day) actually increases the risk of these diseases. This particular study suggests the risk is increased because three drinks result in the blood becoming pro-oxidant -- a phenomenon known as “hormesis”, the concept that small doses of a toxic substance can have beneficial effects while a large amount is harmful.
Given all these ontological categories, we may now position the human mind as being: singly-embodied, singly-body-centered, tool and socially dependent and language-enabled, and conservatively-structured. Furthermore, while it may possibly utilize quantum effects in some way, it is clearly very limited in its ability to do quantum-based reasoning.The article is quite fascinating--one that reminds me of Barry Dainton's "Innocence Lost: Simulation Scenarios: Prospects and Consequences" in which he speculates about different kinds of simulations. I strongly recommend both articles for those with an interest in such futurist speculations.
The Novamente AI system, is intended to be a somewhat different kind of mind: flexibly embodied, flexibly body-centered, tool and socially dependent, language and telepathy enabled, and radically self-modifying, and potentially fully quantum-enabled. Also, Novamentes are explicitly designed to be formed into a community structured according to the "telepathic BOA mindplex" arrangement.
It might seem wiser, to some, to begin one’s adventures in the AI domain by sticking more closely to the nature of human intelligence. But my view is that some of the limitations imposed by the nature of humans’ physical embodiment pose significant impediments to the development of intelligence, as well as to the development of positive ethics. Single embodiment and the lack of any form of telepathy are profound shortcomings, and there seems absolutely no need to build these shortcomings into our AI systems. Rather, the path to creating highly intelligent software will be shorter and simpler if we make use of the capability digital technology presents for overcoming these limitations of human-style embodiment. And the minds created in this way will lack some of the self-centeredness and parochialism displayed by humans -- much of which, I believe, is rooted precisely in our single-bodiedness and our lack of telepathic interaction.
But how about things that have evolved only once, or not at all? The wheel, with a true, freely rotating bearing, seems to have evolved only once, in bacteria, before being finally invented in human technology. Language, too, has apparently evolved only in us: that is to say at least 40 times less often than the eye. It is surprisingly hard to think of "good ideas" that have evolved only once.
I put the challenge to my Oxford colleague the entomologist and naturalist George McGavin, and he came up with a nice list, but still a short one compared with the list of things that have evolved many times. Bombardier beetles of the genus Brachinus are unique in Dr McGavin's experience in mixing chemicals to make an explosion. The ingredients are made and held in separate (obviously!) glands. When danger threatens, they are squirted into a chamber near the rear end of the beetle, where they explode, forcing noxious (caustic and boiling-hot) liquid out through a directed nozzle at the enemy. The case is well known to creationists, who love it. They think it is self-evidently impossible to evolve by gradual degrees because the intermediate stages would all explode. What they don't understand is that the explosive reaction requires a catalyst: gradually increase the dose of catalyst, and you gradually escalate the explosion, from nothing to lethal.
Next in the McGavin list is the archer fish, which may be unique in shooting a missile to knock prey down from a distance. It comes to the surface of the water and spits a mouthful at a perched insect, knocking it down into the water, where it eats it. The other possible candidate for a "knocking down" predator might be an ant lion. Ant lions are insect larvae of the order Neuroptera. Like many larvae, they look nothing like their adults. With their huge jaws, they would be good casting for a horror film. Each ant lion lurks in sand, just below the surface at the base of a conical pit trap which it digs itself. It digs by flicking sand vigorously outwards from the centre - this causes miniature landslides down the sides of the pit, and the laws of physics do the rest, neatly shaping the cone. Prey, usually ants, fall into the pit and slide down the steep sides into the ant lion's jaws. The possible point of resemblance to the archer fish is that prey don't fall only passively. They are sometimes knocked down into the pit by the particles of sand. These are not, however, aimed with the precision of an archer fish's spit, which is guided, with devastating accuracy, by binocularly focused eyes.
With its heady dialog and intricately detailed 3-D animation, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is dense -- the kind of film you can spread with a putty knife.
That's no criticism -- great films come in a range of viscosities, from light-as-air comedies to experiments thick with symbolism. But the denser a film is, the more likely it is to alienate a substantial chunk of any audience.
Will the density of this film drive away viewers? Who knows? But the style of Ghost in the Shell 2, which is packed with textual and visual information, is certainly intended to reflect its content.
Filmmaker Mamoru Oshii has built an elaborate, claustrophobic world, circa 2032. A thick web of technology has engulfed the earth, and those who have installed the latest version of mechanical "brain" -- they retain just a "ghost" of organic material -- are left to cope with the remnants of humanity, which exist only as faint neurological impulses.
In the next fifty years, life spans will extend well beyond a century. Our senses and cognition will be enhanced. We will have greater control over our emotions and memory. Our bodies and brains will be surrounded by and merged with computer power. The limits of the human body will be transcended as technologies such as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering converge and accelerate. With them, we will redesign ourselves and our children into varieties of posthumanity.Here aresome interesting editorial reviews:
This prospect is understandably terrifying to many. A loose coalition of groups-including religious conservatives, disability rights and environmental activists-has emerged to oppose the use of genetics to enhance human beings. And with the appointment of conservative philosopher Leon Kass, an opponent of in-vitro fertilization, stem cell research and life extension, to head the President's Council on Bioethics, and with the recent high-profile writings by authors like Francis Fukuyama and Bill McKibben, this stance has become more visible-and more infamous-than ever before.
In the opposite corner a loose transhumanist coalition is mobilizing in defense of human enhancement, embracing the ideological diversity of their intellectual forebears in the democratic and humanist movements. Transhumanists argue that human beings should be guaranteed freedom to control their own bodies and brains, and to use technology to transcend human limitations.
Identifying the groups, thinkers and arguments in each corner of this debate, bioethicist and futurist James Hughes argues for a third way, which he calls democratic transhumanism. This approach argues that we will achieve the best possible posthuman future when we ensure technologies are safe, make them available to everyone, and respect the right of individuals to control their own bodies.
Hughes offers fresh and controversial answers for many other pressing biopolitical issues-including cloning, genetic patents, human genetic engineering, sex selection, drugs, and assisted suicide-and concludes with a concrete political agenda for pro-technology progressives, including expanding and deepening human rights, reforming genetic patent laws, and providing everyone with healthcare and a basic guaranteed income.
A groundbreaking work of social commentary, Citizen Cyborg illuminates the technologies that are pushing the boundaries of humanness-and the debate that may determine the future of the human race itself.
"A challenging and provocative look at the intersection of human self-modification and political governance. Everyone wondering how society will be able to handle the coming possibilities of AI and Genomics should read Citizen Cyborg." (Dr. Gregory Stock, author of Redesigning Humans)
"A powerful indictment of the anti-rationalist attitudes that are dominating our national policy today. Hughes brings together ideas from religion, history, science, bioethics, and politics in a unique way. The book sparkles with insights, challenges, and new ways of looking at the problems our society is facing today. He is a worthy guide to a more humane future." (John Lantos M.D., author of Do We Still Need Doctors)
"James Hughes is a sober, insightful, useful and optimistic thinker about the astonishing changes in store for human nature. Citizen Cyborg is an important contribution to the rapidly moving debate on human enhancement." (Joel Garreau, author of While God Wasn't Watching: The Future of Human Nature)
"A fascinating tour of the coming intersection of politics, nanotechnology, and biology, by the leading champion of Transhumanism. Anyone who wants to understand the tumultuous bio-politics of the next decade should read this book." (Gregory Pence, author of Who's Afraid of Human Cloning, Professor, Philosophy and School of Medicine, University of Alabama Medical School.)
For many years the federal government funded the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), later popularized by Carl Sagan's novel Contact and the movie starring Jodie Foster. Though in actuality SETI never did make contact with signals from an alien civilization, the search continues to this day through privately funded endeavors. How likely is it that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe? This is the intriguing question that has prompted William Burger's illuminating and absorbing exploration of the unusual circumstances surrounding life on earth.
Examining the critical episodes in our planetÆs early history and the peculiar trajectory of life on our world, Burger shows that the long odyssey of planet Earth may be utterly unique in our galaxy. For example, he describes features of the sun that are far from average. By some estimates, 95 percent of the other stars in the Milky Way galaxy are smaller, and it is unlikely that any of them could supply the energy requirements for a life-sustaining planet such as our own. Earth, as the third planet from the sun, sits within the Goldilocks orbit: it is in the perfect position to receive not too much heat (like Mercury and Venus) and not too little (like more distant planets of the solar system) but just the right amount to foster the development of life.
Turning to the evolution of life itself, Burger points out a host of amazing accidents (for example, the extinction of dinosaurs and the proliferation of flowering plants) that make the steps along the way to Homo sapiens seem like very rare events indeed. He also calls attention to the curious fact that the early hominid brain tripled in size over the relatively short time period leading to the appearance of modern human beings. Finally, he notes aspects of humanity's cultural evolution that seem unlikely to have been duplicated anywhere else.
Some questions are hard to formulate — but you carry them around inside you, like Confucius overlong in the womb, waiting for a way to ask them. I wanted to know about the quality of life in the future. I wanted to know about our political life; the scope of our freedom. I wanted to know what it was going to be like on a daily basis for my son and my grandson — I wanted to know if perhaps my son would do better to have no children at all. Those are general yearnings, more than specific questions. The questions I came up with still seem too general, and approximate. “I think it helps to use Raymond Williams' concept of 'residual and emergent,'” Kim Stanley Robinson told me, “...and consider the present as a zone of conflict between residual and emergent social elements, not making residual and emergent code words for 'bad and good' either.” Residual and emergent: yes. But what will reside and what emerge? From here, the future is just that unfocused. So I simply I asked the only questions I had... and six science fiction writers answered.
American democracy, he feels, is threatened by "free-market fundamentalism," "aggressive militarism" and "escalating authoritarianism." It will be saved, if it can be, by recourse to "the Socratic commitment to questioning," "the prophetic commitment to justice" and "tragicomic hope." West believes that in the fight against imperialism, the black experience may be a crucial resource, because blacks relied on tragicomic hope in their struggle for freedom, and it remains legible in their history and audible in black music, from the blues to hip-hop.He also believes that the political nihilism of the nation's elite also comes in three varieties, namely "evangelical nihilism," "paternalistic nihilism," and "sentimental nihilism."
He offers to remind readers of democratic resources in America's cultural heritage, assess the obstacles and contributions to democracy of Judaism, Islam and Christianity and suggest ways of reaching young people. But he doesn't subject the concept of nihilism to further analysis. If you accept his descriptions, the argument is won. But he makes no effort to persuade anyone not yet a believer.In closing the review, Craine writes,
West's intellectual catchment area is enormous -- he touches on topics as disparate as rap history, the Islamic novel in the 20th century and the latest thinking on postmodern Christian theology and the public sphere. But if he wants to address the people, he needs to give them more than just unfamiliar facts. He needs to give them reason to believe him, even if they don't really want to. At the perilous task of disillusionment, journalists, however sentimental, have been doing a better job.
Nick Bostrom (2004)
“What idea, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity?” This was the question posed by the editors of Foreign Policy in the September/October issue to eight prominent policy intellectuals, among them Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.
And Fukuyama’s answer? Transhumanism, “a strange liberation movement” whose “crusaders aim much higher than civil rights campaigners, feminists, or gay-rights advocates.” This movement, he says, wants “nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints.”
More accurately, transhumanists advocate increased funding for research to radically extend healthy lifespan and favor the development of medical and technological means to improve memory, concentration, and other human capacities. Transhumanists propose that everybody should have the option to use such means to enhance various dimensions of their cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being. Not only is this a natural extension of the traditional aims of medicine and technology, but it is also a great humanitarian opportunity to genuinely improve the human condition.
According to transhumanists, however, the choice whether to avail oneself of such enhancement options should generally reside with the individual. Transhumanists are concerned that the prestige of the President’s Council on Bioethics is being used to push a limiting bioconservative agenda that is directly hostile to the goal of allowing people to improve their lives by enhancing their biological capacities.
So why does Fukuyama nominate this transhumanist ideal, of working towards making enhancement options universally available, as the most dangerous idea in the world? His animus against the transhumanist position is so strong that he even wishes for the death of his adversaries: “transhumanists,” he writes, “are just about the last group that I’d like to see live forever”. Why exactly is it so disturbing for Fukuyama to contemplate the suggestion that people might use technology to become smarter, or to live longer and healthier lives?
Fierce resistance has often accompanied technological or medical breakthroughs that force us to reconsider some aspects of our worldview. Just as anesthesia, antibiotics, and global communication networks transformed our sense of the human condition in fundamental ways, so too we can anticipate that our capacities, hopes, and problems will change if the more speculative technologies that transhumanists discuss come to fruition. But apart from vague feelings of disquiet, which we may all share to varying degrees, what specific argument does Fukuyama advance that would justify foregoing the many benefits of allowing people to improve their basic capacities?
Fukuyama’s objection is that the defense of equal legal and political rights is incompatible with embracing human enhancement: “Underlying this idea of the equality of rights is the belief that we all possess a human essence that dwarfs manifest differences in skin color, beauty, and even intelligence. This essence, and the view that individuals therefore have inherent value, is at the heart of political liberalism. But modifying that essence is the core of the transhumanist project.”
His argument thus depends on three assumptions: (1) there is a unique “human essence”; (2) only those individuals who have this mysterious essence can have intrinsic value and deserve equal rights; and (3) the enhancements that transhumanists advocate would eliminate this essence. From this, he infers that the transhumanist project would destroy the basis of equal rights.
The concept of such a “human essence” is, of course, deeply problematic. Evolutionary biologists note that the human gene pool is in constant flux and talk of our genes as giving rise to an “extended phenotype” that includes not only our bodies but also our artifacts and institutions. Ethologists have over the past couple of decades revealed just how similar we are to our great primate relatives. A thick concept of human essence has arguably become an anachronism. But we can set these difficulties aside and focus on the other two premises of Fukuyama’s argument.
The claim that only individuals who possess the human essence could have intrinsic value is mistaken. Only the most callous would deny that the welfare of some non-human animals matters at least to some degree. If a visitor from outer space arrived on our doorstep, and she had consciousness and moral agency just like we humans do, surely we would not deny her moral status or intrinsic value just because she lacked some undefined “human essence”. Similarly, if some persons were to modify their own biology in a way that alters whatever Fukuyama judges to be their “essence,” would we really want to deprive them of their moral standing and legal rights? Excluding people from the moral circle merely because they have a different “essence” from “the rest of us” is, of course, akin to excluding people on basis of their gender or the color of their skin.
Moral progress in the last two millennia has consisted largely in our gradually learning to overcome our tendency to make moral discriminations on such fundamentally irrelevant grounds. We should bear this hard-earned lesson in mind when we approach the prospect of technologically modified people. Liberal democracies speak to “human equality” not in the literal sense that all humans are equal in their various capacities, but that they are equal under the law. There is no reason why humans with altered or augmented capacities should not likewise be equal under the law, nor is there any ground for assuming that the existence of such people must undermine centuries of legal, political, and moral refinement.
The only defensible way of basing moral status on human essence is by giving “essence” a very broad definition; say as “possessing the capacity for moral agency”. But if we use such an interpretation, then Fukuyama’s third premise fails. The enhancements that transhumanists advocate – longer healthy lifespan, better memory, more control over emotions, etc. – would not deprive people of the capacity for moral agency. If anything, these enhancements would safeguard and expand the reach of moral agency.
Fukuyama’s argument against transhumanism is therefore flawed. Nevertheless, he is right to draw attention to the social and political implications of the increasing use of technology to transform human capacities. We will indeed need to worry about the possibility of stigmatization and discrimination, either against or on behalf of technologically enhanced individuals. Social justice is also at stake and we need to ensure that enhancement options are made available as widely and as affordably as possible. This is a primary reason why transhumanist movements have emerged. On a grassroots level, transhumanists are already working to promote the ideas of morphological, cognitive, and procreative freedoms with wide access to enhancement options. Despite the occasional rhetorical overreaches by some of its supporters, transhumanism has a positive and inclusive vision for how we can ethically embrace new technological possibilities to lead lives that are better than well.
The only real danger posed by transhumanism, it seems, is that people on both the left and the right may find it much more attractive than the reactionary bioconservatism proffered by Fukuyama, Leon Kass, and the other members of the President’s Council.
I'm a bit of a science fiction movie junky, so it was with great interest that I recently came across the results of a poll conducted by the Guardian about the best science fiction movies of all time. Sixty leading scientists were asked to rank their favorite science fiction films, a group that included such thinkers as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, quantum physicist David Deutsch, psychologist Steven Pinker and Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer with SETI.Entire Article
As a futurist and transhumanist, I looked at their results with great anticipation and seriousness. The science fiction genre, sometimes referred to as speculative fiction, is a particularly valuable medium for engaging in prediction and foresight. It's an effective and entertaining way in which to portray plausible futures.
In fact, I often assess the successfulness of a science fiction film based on its ability to do exactly this. Movies such as Star Wars are fine from an entertainment perspective, but offer little in their exploration of the human condition. In my mind, the most important science fiction films are the ones that speak to humanity's relationship with its science and technology, and the risks and benefits they hold for the future. Really, it's future-realism that I'm after rather than fantasy.
Thus, given the prominence of the scientists asked, it was with great delight that I discovered my own personal favorite ranked at number one: Ridley Scott's 1982 classic, Blade Runner. Today, given the potential for radically redesigned humans, cloning and artificial intelligence, Blade Runner has never been more relevant nor more important.
In fact, we might come to understand that the really dangerous idea is Davies’ insistence that we must believe (or pretend we believe) in free will as he defines it, while ignoring or suppressing the science-based truth that we don’t have type 1 freedom. It’s dangerous because the idea that we are little gods, that at bottom we just choose ourselves in some respect independently of genetic and environmental circumstances, arguably helps to motivate such things as ethnic conflict and genocide, to use Davies’ examples. After all, that’s what allows us to deeply blame and resent the “other”: they could have risen above their circumstances and been good people like us if they’d only chosen to using their type 1 freedom. Retribution, retaliation, and revenge all find their footing in the idea that our enemies are not ultimately subject to causes, but are instead self-created in some crucial respect. That way all the blame attaches to them as individuals, and little or none to the conditions that created them, a perfect prescription for inciting conflict.By the way, Clark is referring to an article that Davies had published in the most recent edition of Foreign Policy. This is a particularly notorious edition in that it lists the most dangerous ideas currently facing humanity, of which Francis Fukuyama lists transhumanism. The WTA Board is currently working on a rebuttal to this piece. I'll post more details as I get them.
On the other hand, were we to appreciate that our ideological, ethnic, and religious antagonists are fully caused to believe and act the way they do, then we cannot demonize them in the way often justified by belief in type 1 freedom. They, like us, are functions of a host of conditions and causes, according to science. If we give up belief in Davies’s free will, we would see that had we been in their exact circumstances, we would have been them, holding their beliefs and acting as they do. This insight can help undo the rigid us-versus-them polarization that’s at the root of so much violence. So, far from being a dangerous idea, undermining free will as Davies defines it is exactly what the doctor ordered for bringing the world to its senses.
Not that this will happen any time soon, partially because apologists for type 1 freedom do so much to retard appreciation of the real, science-based alternative to imagining we are nature’s chosen exceptions to causality. That’s the unfortunate thing about Davies’ thesis: it says we can’t live with the scientific truth about ourselves, when in fact seeing that truth is key to countering the arrogance, the self-righteousness, and the unforgiving vengeance and brutality justified by the supernatural supposition that we and our opponents are self-caused selves. If we can drop the idea that we humans are metaphysically special, and see that morality, dignity, and the law needs only the type 2, natural freedom of being rational agents, then we’ll be in a position to appreciate the ethical significance of naturalism: I see my enemy as myself, since there but for circumstances go I.
Lonely Planets is a funky natural philosophy of life in the universe written with authority and edge. Dr. Grinspoon uses the topic of ET life as a mirror in which we view human evolution, history, present, and future in cosmic perspective. With an accessible, breezy and often whimsical style, he presents an authoritative scientific narrative of cosmic evolution along with provocative ruminations on how we fit into the story of the universe. In illustrating how we - scientists and nonscientists alike - have projected upon alien life our own philosophies, biases and preconceptions, he exposes the assumptions we make about extraterrestrials, and how these illuminate science and its limitations.
Writing from the perspective of a working scientist who has helped to shape modern planetary exploration, he does not shy away from the spiritual dimensions of the question of ET life. Rather, he shows how both scientific research and "new age" searching on the topic of aliens serve the same deep spiritual urge. Lonely Planets concludes with an impassioned and hopeful description of how a synthesis of our scientific and spiritual capacities can insure our survival into an attainable and wondrous future.
