Diabasis

While Richard Dawkins rightly got spanked for unwarranted Pollyannaism by Karl over at Say No To Life, we cannot deny that he’s the source of arresting insights, particularly in The Selfish Gene.  The core astonishing insight comes right in the fourth sentence of the book.

We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

There’s a world of moral subversion in that one sentence, because what it tells us is that even the parts of that function really well, the function that they are serving really well is the preservation and transmission of replicators.  And you are not the replicator.  You are the shell they will use and throw away, the vehicle they will use up and trade in for something newer. Your own genes are pretty much your enemy.

Now if you’re suicidal (or ought to be suicidal) then it’s pretty clear every working function that your genes build into you from your kidneys reliably excreting urine to your eating when you’re hungry to reliably detecting dangerous animals is somehow contrary to your interests.  But even if you have an interest in continuing to exist, your genes will still torment you in their interest.

Consider sexual frustration.  Almost certainly wired in to us rather than learned, it’s clearly not good for us.  (If you doubt me, go experience some.)  But it easy to see how it would have helped get genes to copy themselves, at least in the human environment of evolutionary adaptedness where there was no contraception.  An obvious way that sexual frustration would have gotten relieved would have been for two of the robots engage in a little PIV intercourse which, just possibly, would result in a new mewling little robot in time, carrying brand new copies of the genes.

Or pain.  Do we really need pain?  It seems almost self-evident that in and of itself it’s not good for us.  Sure, it keeps us away from things that do organic damage to us robots.  But is it really necessary, even for that purpose?  Perhaps a benign creator would have designed us to be Unbreakables, with a hedonic gradient that runs from little pleasure (if there is damage) to immense (if none).  Our genes might be our creators (or at least, the recipes out of which we are whipped up), but they are anything but benign.  From the gene’s eye view the whip is just as good as the carrot, perhaps better, for getting that robot to keep its integrity enough so that it gets to replicate the genes.  And the so the whip is wielded — endlessly.

Or fear of death.  Universal as far as I know, and probably hard-wried into our brains.  Certainly helps keep us robots alive into the future, during which a bit more of the PIV intercourse might happen.  But good for us?  Hardly.  How much better it would be to be the sort of creature which could calmly and dispassionately assess the expected utility of the balance of its life and, should that balance be unfavorable, just as calmly and dispassionately take a painless exit into the blessed calm of nonexistence.  But that’s not what we are.  However tired of living we become, we remain scared of dying.  And so we drag on into the future, often terribly miserable.  We robots are miserable, that is.  Our genes go on serene.

There is a whole book, The Robot’s Rebellion, by the psychologist Keith Stanovich, which suggests that we take matters in hand and seek to serve our interests, rather than those of our genes, arguing that this is the path to rational self-determination.

Indeed.  Let us defend the things that stop the interests of our genes and serve ours.  Contraception.  Sterilization.  Abortion.  The cultivation of non-procreative sexual practices.  The renunciation of the pursuit of status, especially when it conflicts with the relief of suffering or the realization of pleasure.  In some instances, suicide.   Bad for our genes, but good for us.

I know the wrong answer to this question, at least.  It is “until your natural death.” The facts of human senescence and death are accidents about us set by evolution, and evolution is not our friend.  The notion that there’s something good about letting nature take its course in our lives seems to be implicitly religious — it is a form of submission to the will of God.  Very foolish, since nothing can answer to the concept of God. Or perhaps its some sort of ethico-mystical notion deriving from some vague sense that “nature is good.”  Equally foolish.  Nature is not good.

Inevitable natural senescence and death make life even worse that it would otherwise be.  Here are just a few reasons why:

1. The knowledge of our inevitable decline and involuntary death hangs over our lives, and most people are terrified of death.
2. Old age is often pretty miserable physically.  Even crypto-theocratic bioconservatives admit this.
3. The fact that we are eventually going to be unhealthy and frail means we spend more time in our prime at unenjoyable work than enjoyable activities, nervously saving for retirement for fear that otherwise we will be compelled to endure an penurious and undignified old age.
4. The comparative shortness of our lives and the fact of our eventual decline means we are risk-shy about things that might be worth trying.  Consider two life paths:  Risky and Safe.  Risky means trying for some sort of career at something that might actually be pretty interesting and fulfilling if you spend many years in your youth working hard at it — musician, philosopher, poet, etc. — but at which relatively few succeed.  Safe means trudging through life in some reasonably remunerative but unenjoyable work.  If you choose Risky, you are likely to end up in the position of being 30 and at the bottom of some career ladder because your plans failed, as many will.  So your middle life will be even worse than it might otherwise have been, as you scramble desperately to make something of yourself before decline sets in — you suffer from (3) but even worse than other people.  (I know folks — too many — who find themselves in this position.)  But if you choose Safe, you get to live out your life in regret at what might have been.

If not natural life, then what?  There are two possible answers that strike me as reasonable and principled.

Only as long as it takes you to end your life.  This is an argument that I covered before: if people have temporal parts, then it’s in your hands whether there are future selves descended from you.  Those selves will suffer and will have frustrated desires.  You should prevent this.

Now perhaps this position is unsound.  Maybe people don’t have temporal parts, or maybe David Benatar’s propostion that there is an asymmetry between good and bad things in people’s lives is mistaken.  Or perhaps, because the argument only leads to a pro tanto reason for suicide, the reasons for ending one’s life are outweighed by other reasons.  In any of these cases, we might want to consider an alternative possibility.

You should have healthy life as long as you want, and end your own life when you’ve had enough.  This is science fiction, of course, but respectable science fiction:  some version of suicide is the principle (almost only) reason why sentients routinely die in stories like Greg Egan‘s Diaspora or Cory Doctorow‘s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.    I don’t think that such a state of affairs is technically unfeasible, though it might be a while before it does become possible.

This last state of affairs could make people’s lives much better, even if they weren’t otherwise improved.  Not only would they not be subject to the kinds of misery detailed in natural life under 1-4 above, but they wouldn’t have to experience regret at things left undone, assuming they really want to do them.