“Posthuman” is a concept that has taken a beating because some of its proponents look juvenile. You know the story: big ol’ Singularity sweeps down soon (surely before I have to wait to much longer and get old and decrepit — Ray Kurzweil proved it!) and raptures all the mind-uploaded nerds into a virtual reality paradise full of…well, I guess I don’t really need to specify what it is full of. I guess no one should be too surprised if the notion gets a bit of a bad reputation among grown-ups.
Nonetheless for two reasons I shall articulate below that Good Posthuman Condition is a concept worth developing. We should understand it as a triple negation:
- No more involuntary death. Pretty much the only thing any sentient dies of is suicide.
- No barriers to suicide. Not only are there no more social prohibitions on suicide, the but psychological barriers to it have been knocked down, the fear of death eradicated from sentient consciousness. No one goes on living just because she is scared of dying.
- In spite of (1) and (2), there just aren’t that many suicides.
Achieving either (1) or (2) suggests an extraordinary level of technological mastery. Really doing (1) either means molecular-level control of everything that goes on in some sort of metazoan body or some sort of complete replacement for one, and probably would also require some sort of “backing up” for individual persons (even the posthuman have no guarantees against accidents). Doing (2) would mean understanding at a pretty deep level how sentient minds work. It won’t be enough just to be able to emulate minds: we would have to really, really understand how the wires run in the vast spaghetti-tangle to be able to pull out the dangerous ones — such as the ones that make us so afraid of death — without wrecking the rest of the mechanism.
I don’t think any of (1) or (2) is particularly near, though I see no reason to think that they are in principle impossible.
Satisfying (3) would mean that the existence of sentients would be happy and fulfilling, with very little sadness or boredom. Again, very challenging and very different from anything in human experience. Remember: these would be people who would only exist if they really find a reason to. If there is no reason to, nothing will bind them to life because unlike human beings if they determine that life is no longer worth it, they will calmly and rationally exit it. Unlike human beings, they do no have the option of waiting for death either. For them, death will not come of its own. If death is what they want, they must choose to embrace death. An external observer, knowing that they do not so even if they do not fear to do so could legitimately infer — as he could not legitimately infer about human beings — that their choice not to embrace death means that they are really getting something out of life.
Or to put things another way, (1) and (2) together constitute a bare minimum pair of conditions under which we can infer from the behavioral observation of the rareness of suicide among sentients that those sentients really do find life worth living.
(Note that I am here bracketing an issue which has been rightly raised by estnihil recently, which is that concern of a sentient for existing loved ones might constitute a reason for not committing suicide even if that sentient miserable, and I can obviously see that reason standing independently of the sentient’s fear of that sentient’s death. I’m afraid I’m going to have to handwave on this one for the time being or maybe always, for the reason pointed out by JasonSL in a recent comment, that it’s hard to have anything resembling accurate intuitions about how people might organize their lives under radically different conditions.)
I take seriously the argument that I’m not making good use of my time in thinking about posthumanity in this context. Shouldn’t we just focus on antinatalism and bringing human suffering to an end instead? I’ll advance two claims in my defense here.
(1) I have the intuition while it’s very hard to readily come up with alternatives that strike me as superior to human extinction sooner-rather-than-later, the posthuman condition herein described might be one of these. There’s obviously a huge magnitude of difference in utility between a good posthuman condition and the actual human condition. I’ll also admit that I think the probability of achieving a good posthuman condition is — forgive the lack of precision — small. However it doesn’t require (I hope) a great deal of sophistication in decision theory to see that in instances where the effects are huge, even very small probabilities matter. By my own estimate, the probability of achieving a successful good posthuman condition is small but not so vanishingly small as to make the possibility unworthy even of investigation. I admit that other intelligent and reasonable people facing the same evidence available to me might come to a different conclusion. (Ken Binmore has argued, I think correctly, that in large worlds with uncertainty, rationality alone does not endow us with common priors.)
(2) Even if a good posthuman condition is impossible, or so remote as to not even merit rational consideration as such, it is a useful mental exercise to think about how great the contrast is been a life that would actually be good, and the life that we actually have. Thinking through how life might be helps defeat smug parochialism about how things are, in the way that visiting a foreign country shows that things you thought were just natural really aren’t so. It’s sad that a good posthuman is somewhere that now and maybe always we can only visit in our imaginations, but travel there like travel generally broadens the mind.
13 Responses to “What would be a good posthuman condition?”
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The best fictional representation of what you’re describing comes in Michel Houellebecq’s novel ‘Atomised’ where a society of beings like you describe frame the novel’s central narrative of ordinary human suffering. Well worth reading if you haven’t picked it up, as it is possibly the greatest zeitgeist novel of our times.
This is an excellent suggestion — I think I have read this, albeit under a different translation title The Elementary Particles, albeit very long ago. Probably it’s worth my re-reading.
I love where you point out, comically, that there isn’t really anything to do in a utopia but be happy (“full of…well, I guess I don’t really need to specify what it is full of.”) I think, myself, that quite a lot of people would probably opt for suicide in such a world, as long as their inherent fear of death were dispelled. Why? Because there would literally be no difference between life and death. Life – no suffering and no meaning. Death – no suffering and no meaning, When any posthuman life-form gets bored of being happy, or just decides that since they will die eventually (when the universe dies out), they might as well do it now, they should inevitably edge towards suicide. This is also because the only thing to do in such a world would actually be suicide – if you are constantly happy, then there is never going to be much change in your existence, and the only thing to change is the constant burden (that I doubt can be alleviated) of being conscious. Of course I agree that posthumans could have a varying amount of pleasure other than the baseline, but the point is, without suffering, there is no motivation to actually do anything at all. You could act almost as if you were in a vegetative state and still be happy – so no search for anything to alleviate the happiness that is already there.
When people tell me that a posthuman existence would be meaningless, my response is to say “That’s entirely right…[beat]…and that’s one respect in which it would be exactly like human existence.”
But I have some doubts as to whether this would make existence not worthwhile for the people living through it: “meaning” somehow doesn’t seem necessary to me to be worthwhile. Michael Drake, in a short, awe-inspiring blogpost, made the point better than I think I could.
James, I read Drake’s entry and, to be honest, I found it to be merely another reiteration of mindless hedonism. It essentialy amounts to the old carpe diem tag (as he admits). Hedonism is fine if you can close your eyes to the horrors of the world, but I must admit that I find people who can do so to be pretty repugnant. The other element of the hedonistic imperative that is highly questionable is that “it’s ok to do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone”. Given that just about every action we can perform impinges on someone else, I don’t really think that holds either. In essence, the transhumanist movement is an attempt to acheive Buddhistic Nirvana through technology. Given that most people cannot sit still for five minutes without getting restless, I just can’t see it ever becoming a reality.
What about someone who is, to use Sidgwick’s terminology, a universal hedonist rather than the character you seem to have in mind, an egoistic hedonist? Is a universal hedonist — someone who wants to maximize everyone’s pleasure-over-pain, not just his own — repugnant?
Fine in theory, I guess, and in a certain sense we’re all universal hedonists, but what does it amount to in reality? Transhumanism? Then we’re just back to the philosophical dilemmas of that areana.
We might be drilling down to philosophical bedrock here, but I’ll venture at least this:
Meaninglessness, mindlessness, frivolity, absurdity — somehow none of that bugs me. If that were all there were to observe in the human scene I would be inclined just to shrug, ask along with H.L. Mencken “Why do men go to zoos?” and order another beer. I find it easy to take pleasure in pleasure, whether mine own or others’. What bugs me is that the human scene is full of suffering; that’s whence my own repugnance at our existence. Suffering is something to eliminate. If we can get more pleasure into the picture, then so much the better.
Now does that lead us to trans- (or, as I tend to prefer post-) humanism? It might. There are two important caveats. One is technical. It might just not be possible to make any technology of suffering-elimination work. Many things just fail, and the project of using technology to make suffering go away (while still having people be alive), is surely one of the most difficult possible projects to undertake. And failure is very common with technology.
Then there’s another objection, this one philosophical. If it’s a problem that life is absurd, meaningless, mindless, etc., then going posthuman isn’t going to solve it. You can’t build a machine to pump out meaning. For me it’s not a problem. But it seems to me that other well-meaning and intelligent people disagree.
Well for me, it is a problem. In fact, I’d venture to say it’s been the big problem of my life since I lost my religious faith as a teenager. I’m all for feeling good over feeling bad, but the knowledge that human existence is ultimately meaningless and that the unwarranted and unredeemed suffering of billions is utterly pointless makes it difficult for me to watch that Hollywood movie and munch on my popcorn with complete carefree abandon. Add the knowledge that it could just as easily be oneself undergoing the horror and you get a pretty awful scenario. The whole hedonist project (regular hedonism, not trans or post humanist objectives) strikes me as akin to being locked in a big warehouse, forced to sniff coke and drink booze while you can hear the screams of the wounded outside. Fine if you can manage it, but just not my scene.
I see this, but my intuition is that “absence of meaning” and “presence of suffering” are conceptually distinct, although I can easily see them as being closely linked psychologically: the suffering which we must undergo is much harder to bear in the absence of meaning.
It’s harder to carry out projects in the absence of meaning — especially projects that cause oneself suffering or diminish one’s pleasure or joy. So how do those of us who don’t really mind absurdity and meaningless motivate ourselves to make a difference and go out there and help diminish suffering?
Can we borrow the trappings of meaningfulness without actually *believing* in meaning? That is, can we adopt a sort of meaning or purpose fictionalism, akin to modal fictionalism (talk as if other worlds exist, even if we don’t believe they really do) and moral fictionalism (talk as if we were moral realists, even though we aren’t)?
Obviously one needn’t be a moral realist to have sympathies for other people, and perhaps it’s good to begin with those, and perhaps cultivate them. (It’s certainly a good Humean thing to do.) I don’t know whether that’s enough, but it would be a start.
As for fictionalism, I think this is a genuinely hard problem and I can’t claim to know the answer. Fictionalism does have a certain appeal, since it grafts onto ways of talking we’re already familiar with, but I also feel the pull of arguments made by people like Ian Hinckfuss about the dangers of moralism — basically, that when combined with our inevitable self-serving biases, it can make conflicts between different people’s interests less tractable than they would be otherwise. If you just think someone has different preferences than you do, then splitting the difference with him in a peaceable compromise will often seem a very reasonable thing to do. But if you think he’s evil, well, then, not so much.
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