Crash Cultures: modernity, mediation and the material

meltdown; from Crash to Titanic: from James Dean and Jayne Mansfield to Warhol and

their causes and effects. We approach the crash as a symbolic and material event that

 

The underside of modernity:

Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor and

the philosophy of liberation

Enrique Dussel

(translated and edited by Eduardo Mendieta)

1993

This book gathers some of the essays which are fruits of recent debates and

dialogues that have only just begun. The Philosophy of Liberation that I prac-

tice, not only in Latin America, but also regarding all types of oppression on

the planet (of women, the discriminated races, the exploited classes, the

marginalized poor, the impoverished countries, the old and homeless exiled

and buried in shelters and asylums, the local religions, the homeless and or-

phaned children (a lost generation) of inhospitable cities, the systems destroyed

by capital and the market… in short, the inmense majority of humanity),

velopment out of poverty of the greater part of humanity as a fundamental

Transmodernism, Marxism and Social Change:

ABSTRACT

The author first briefly outlines what he considers to be the defining features of
transmodernism and its relationship both to postmodernism and to Marxism. He then
suggests that transmodern interpretations of the legacy of the European invasions of the
Americas are illuminating, as is Marxism, in providing an understanding of how the
imperialism in which contemporary US foreign policy is currently engaged has a specific and
long-standing genealogy. However, he argues that the Marxist concept of racialisation is
more convincing in explaining the source of violence against the Other than the
transmodern positing of ‘basic narcissism’ as the source. Next, he contrasts the transmodern
perception of liberal democracy with Marxist analyses of democratic socialism. After this, he
challenges transmodernism’s conception of Marxism as an imposed and utopian philosophy
locked within modernism. He concludes with a consideration of the political and economic
choices open to us, and, with respect to these choices, the implications of both
transmodernism and Marxism for sustaining resistance to neo-liberal capitalism and US
imperialism within teacher education.

Transmodern ideas are relatively new to academia in the North. Indeed, it is still relatively difficult
to get copies in English of the publications of its leading advocate, Enrique Dussel. For me,
transmodernism’s defining features are:
• not so much a way of thinking as a new way of living in relation to Others;
• anti-Eurocentrism;
• anti-(US)imperialism;
• analogic reasoning: reasoning from outside the system of global domination;
• analectic interaction: listening to the voices of ‘suffering Others’ and interacting democratically
with suffering Others;
• reverence for (indigenous and ancient) traditions of religion, culture, philosophy and morality;
• rejection of totalising synthesis.

Transmodernism, Marxism and Social Change

Seeing that the literary remains of noted musicians have
repeatedly been collected and published after their death, I
suppose that the first thing I ought to do, in the collected edition
of the products of my authorship, is to justify myself in face of the
reproach, that I still live. What in their case has been welcomed
as an act of piety, might easily, in mine, be reckoned to my
vanity. Whereas those happy dead cared nothing, what might be
thought of their literary jottings : it seems that I am busied for
the earnest consideration of my own. It would be hard for me,
to contradict this. Whosoever thinks necessary to read into this
confession the avowal of a weakness of my artistic works, is welcome
to follow such need to his heart’s content ; for, in the long
run, if my works do not speak out clearly for themselves those
of my art, by correct performances, and those of my literary labour,
by being properly understood it does not really make much
difference whether folk think necessary to lay my weakness in the
one direction or in the other.
Whether the most unusual efforts will succeed in helping my
artistic works to a true life in the nation’s midst, by the constant
guarantee of correct representations, I leave to the decrees of Fate ;
yet I believe that I shall supplement these efforts, if, on the other
side, I take care that at least the labours of my pen shall share in
an advantage common to all literary products, that of lying clearly
and comprehensively before the public. This care has naturally
come to me since I have observed around me a growing earnestness
of interest in my art-writings, while at like time I could not
but see the disadvantages inseparable from the fact, that in these
writings I have not stepped before the public in well-calculated
continuity, but at very diverse times and under the most various
of promptings to their composition. Since, however, even the
most heterogeneous promptings have always woken in me the one
motif, which lies at the bottom of my whole, howsoever scattered
literary exertions, I here felt the need of a carefully-ordered and
complete reproduction of my addresses (Mittheilungen), whereof
many have stayed altogether unknown, and the most have been
only regarded in that fugitive light which attaches to every
” Brochure.”
The wish to arrive at such completeness provided me, again,
with a sort of psychological method of arrangement, by help of
which the sympathetic reader might come to see how it was that
I lit, at all, upon the path of penmanship. Although, eventually, a
correct account of my life itself would be the only thing that could
give full information hereon, yet for the present I have seized on
the advantage of a chronological arrangement, in accordance
wherewith my essays will be laid before the reader in the order of
their origin. By this plan I have also won two other privileges,
in virtue of which I hope to gain a gentle handling at the judgment-
seat both of our art-philosophers and of our poets by profession.
To wit, I have escaped the temptation to cobble together
my piecemeal art-writings in such a fashion that they should
assume the appearance of an actual scientific system a course
that might easily have been treated by our professional aesthetes
as unblushing impudence ; while on the other hand, seeing
that I was making up a kind of day-book of all my labours, I
could thus strew-in my poems in their proper biographic place,
instead, maybe, of binding them up in a separate volume a proceeding
that would certainly have roused the contemptuous wrath
of our professional poets, and drawn down on me the charge of
placing my “opera-texts” on a level with poesies in which the
music (as in that provincial performance of the Dame Blanche) is
replaced by a “lively dialogue and a choice diction.”
What circle of readers it is, that I now shall have to stand
amidst with this collection, cannot but be of the greatest moment
to me, not only for the verdict on my own exertions, but also for
that on the elements which are coming to the front in the present
stage of our German cultural evolution. People have begun to
take me seriously, in a sphere where nothing is really taken
seriously : namely in that of our scientific-posing Belles lettres, in
which philosophy, natural science, philology, and especially poetry
are handled with a flippant wit, excepting when an incomprehensible
reason exists for some measure of unconditional recognition.
I have noticed that this system of valiant calumny bases itself on
the assumption that the writings and books reviewed are not read
by the critic’s readers. On the other hand, those persons on
whom stage performances of my dramatic compositions had
worked with a stimulating effect, felt prompted to an earnest
reading of my writings. Many of these hearers, however, have
not been able to conceive why I should write essays on an art
which I did best to practise as an artist. Only in quite recent
times have I met several persons, and especially among the younger
generation, who have understood this thing too : why I wrote
about my art; for they consider that they have found in my
writings a better explanation of the problems started by my artistic
creations, than in the emissions of such who themselves can make
nothing in the way of Art. Here one or two have come to the
belief, that he who understands a thing, can also speak best about
it ; as, for instance, that he who himself knows how to conduct, is
also the best man to show others how to conduct.
Now it would be interesting, if the verdict upon Art should fall
back into the hands of those who understand Art : whereas the
peculiarity of our present course of education has brought round
the view, that the judgment on a thing must come from a quite
different domain to that of the thing itself; forsooth, from the
“absolute Vernunft” or mayhap from the “self-thinking Thought.”
The analogy has been derived from our modern State, whose
political evolution has brought this curiosity with it, that a statesman
has to justify his success in the eyes of those who before had
never dreamt of its possibility, and to submit his measures to the
judgment of those to whom it must be made clear for the first
time, on such occasions, what the whole matter is about. As in
our case, it is a matter of Music, about which every one has his
own impression, often the most trivial the writer Gutzkow,
indeed (since the time when the art-historian Liibke appears to
have thoroughly ruined his phantasy) for the most part a quite
unseemly one must perceive at once that there can be really no
question viz. judgment on the part of those who do not understand
Art ; and one must either strike Music completely off the
list of arts, or admit that it first becomes an art by the very fact
of its being dealt with in artistic fashion by those alone who
understand music.
Often was it painful to myself, and often bitterness, to have to
write about my art, when I would so gladly have listened to others
on it. When finally I accustomed myself to this necessity, because
I learnt to comprehend why others could not say the thing that
was given to just me to say, neither could it but in time grow
ever clearer to me, that in the insights which had been opened up
to me by my own art-doings there dwelt a wider meaning than is
to be ascribed to a merely problematic-seeming artistic individuality.

Upon this path I have come to the view that the real
question concerns an entire re-birth of Art, which we now know
only as a shadow of its genuine self; since it has quite deserted
actual Life, and is only to be discovered in a scanty stock of
popular remains.
Whoever will permit himself to be led by the hand of one who
has become clear upon this point not on the path of abstract
speculation, but guided by the impulse of direct artistic Need,
to be led to a hopeful outlook upon the possibilities reserved for
the German spirit, I trust will not be vexed to wander with
me over the path on which I reached that outlook. For his
assistance, I have placed my writings of every kind so together
that he can follow me on every side of my development. He will
thus perceive that he has not to do with the collected-works of a
Scribe, but with a record of the life-activity of an Artist who,
disregarding schema, sought in his art itself for Life.
But this Life is naught else than the essence of true Music, in
which I recognise the only real art of the Present, as of the Future;
for it alone will give us back again the laws for a genuine wider
Art. So is it ; and every one must recognise this fact with me,
so soon as ever he compares the effect upon the souls of all, of
the only living power among us, Music, with that of our literaturepoesy
of nowadays, or of any of the plastic arts, which now can
only borrow foreign schemata, for parleying with our so deeply
sunken modern life. But in Drama glorified by Music, the Folk
will one day find itself and every art ennobled and embellished.
This as greeting to the friendly reader!

Artwork of the Future eBOOK

The Posthuman Condition

Kip Werking

The University Of Texas At Austin
Homepage: http://www.ece.utexas.com/~werking

“There is no evil I have to accept because ‘there’s nothing I can do about it’. There is no abused child, no oppressed peasant, no starving beggar, no crack-addicted infant, no cancer patient, literally no one that I cannot look squarely in the eye. I’m working to save everybody, heal the planet, solve all the problems of the world.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Singularitarian Principles 1.0

“How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as if through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?”
—  Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I. INTRODUCTION

This article is my effort to identify the next two anthropocentric beliefs to die. One would not expect Copernicus’s defeat of geocentricism and Darwin’s defeat of special Creation to be the last comforting illusions that science will expose. There is an important difference, however, between the third and fourth anthropocentric conceits that I describe. Whereas the transhumanist community has largely abandoned, to their advantage, the third conceit, I will argue that even transhumanists have ignored the fourth.

My attempt at exposing the fourth conceit shows what transhumanism cannot do. In particular, I will show that while future technologies may remedy part of the human condition, they cannot remedy a remaining part, which I will call the posthuman condition. My article is, in this respect, similar to the critiques by Dreyfus, Searle, and Penrose, which claim to demonstrate what artificial intelligence cannot, even in principle, do. My critique of transhumanism is relevantly different from those, however, because my arguments attempt to undermine, rather than erect, distinctions between human beings and the world.

While preparing this article I considered other possible anthropocentric conceits. One notable possibility, which the transhumanist community has perhaps not abandoned, is the threat that future technologies pose to personal identity. For example, James Hughes considers this possibility in a recent column at the “Betterhumans” webzine. Hughes described the threats that future technologies pose to our sense of personhood. He came to believe, as Hume and Buddha did, that there is no self.

II. THE THIRD ANTHROPOCENTRIC CONCEIT

“The third blow, which is psychological in nature, is probably the most wounding.”
—
Freud

The third anthropocentric conceit is the belief that non-defective human intelligence is relatively unique, qualitative, and optimal. In contrast, I agree with most transhumanists that human intelligence is but an arbitrary mark upon the spectrum of intelligence, that on this spectrum we differ from other intelligent minds in quantity but not quality, and that human intelligence is far from optimal. I feel confident that this distinction is an anthropocentric conceit because I identified myself as a transhumanist well before abandoning it. Even after reading the popular introduction to transhumanist ideas, The Age of Spiritual Machines by Raymond Kurzweil (perhaps because Kurzweil himself had yet to fully abandon the conceit), I failed to appreciate the drastic consequences of superintelligence.

Freud famously claimed to have identified the third conceit. He was correct to draw attention from cosmology and biology to psychology. Freud, however, emphasized the suboptimal nature of man’s mind rather than the optimal nature of future minds. As stupid and confused as Freudian agents were, they were nevertheless the supreme intelligence in the universe. To the best of my knowledge, after abandoning the unpromising research in nineteenth century neurology, Freud settled for talking therapies and never returned to the possibility of using technology to correct and enhance the human brain. So even Freud himself failed to abandon the third conceit.

One approach to understanding the non-unique, quantitative and suboptimal nature of human intelligence is to contrast human intelligence with other characteristics. Human beings have always trembled before the threat of a bear. We have always lost the race to the cheetah. Our vision has never been as sharp as an eagle’s. We can, however, shoot the bear, drive past the cheetah, and use binoculars. Future technologies have the potential to implement these improvements within human biology. But against whom or what can we unfavorably compare the human brain? There is nothing like the human brain within the known universe. Furthermore, with what tool can we complement our intelligence? Giving a person a calculator to improve their intelligence is like giving a person roller skates, instead of a car, to improve their speed. Consequently, while we would expect human minds to have well developed concepts for superior beings with respect to attributes such as speed or strength, we have no such concepts for things that are smarter than ourselves. We fail to appreciate the finitude of our minds because nothing ever competes with them.

Intelligence is also unique among human qualities because intelligence enhancement promises to create a positive feedback loop. Building muscles does not help you build muscle faster. Running faster does not accelerate the improvement. Amplifying intelligence, however, does increase the rate of intelligence amplification. Smart brains design even smarter brains faster than dumb brains. More importantly, this positive feedback loop has yet to even begin. Human beings are not crawling along at the very beginning of this loop. Rather, our species has remained relatively stagnant for tens of thousands of years because we are powerless to alter our own biology. Since the birth of our species human beings have only been able to work with the small amount of intelligence that nature gave us. Only once an intelligence begins amplifying itself will the chain reaction finally begin. So not only is human intelligence quantitative and suboptimal but inherently limited — even frustrated. One can see how artificial intelligence researchers are playing with cosmic matches.

The third conceit will surely, as long as civilization progresses, confront our species. Strong artificial intelligence alone could be the existence proof of superintelligence. We can no longer afford to ignore the quantitative and suboptimal nature of human brains. Our species will be forced to answer questions about how to design and control the first minds that are more intelligent than our own. How will we ensure that these persons are moral? How will we ensure that these programs are not riddled with errors? If we are to survive the twenty-first century, we must answer these questions.

While answering these questions, we must acknowledge that our brains will be as inferior to future minds as the brains of mice are to our own. This is a not a trivial acknowledgement. Truly appreciating the inferiority of our intelligence — the gross limits that our wetware places upon the speed and content of our thoughts — requires an almost religious humility. This explains Freud’s claim that the third is probably the most wounding of anthropocentric conceits. The prospect of superintelligence renders human history into a comedy.

Although Freud did not perhaps fully appreciate the third conceit, Nietzsche did:

“Zarathustra, however, looked at the people and wondered. Then he spoke thus:

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”

The fourth anthropocentric conceit is not as well defined as the others. The definition that I will use for this essay is “the naive answers to the collective hard problems of philosophy”. These problems are simple questions such as “what exists?”, “what should I do?”, and “am I free to do so?” The naive answers would be similar to “the exterior world and I obviously exist”, “I should maximize happiness in the world”, and “Of course I am free to do so.” I do not wish, however, to limit the fourth conceit to these three questions at the expense of other questions that may also be relevant.

The fourth anthropocentric conceit is quite different than the third because the transhumanist community largely still clings to these comforting illusions. Most transhumanist authors, to the best of my knowledge, write about how to move beyond the third conceit, given the fourth. Assuming that the exterior world exists, that happiness should be maximized, and that free will exists, how can we freely use technology to change the world such that happiness is maximized? The prospect of nihilism, hard determinism, or immaterialism never seems to threaten or disturb them. For Singularity enthusiasts, the assumption that the Singularity will solve all of our problems, including philosophical ones, is omnipresent. Indeed, this essay is largely inspired by the tension I find between Singularity activist Eliezer Yudkowsky’s cursory treatment of these questions in his FAQ about the Meaning of Life and the seriousness with which he considers the threat of “philosophical crises” in his Creating Friendly AI.

This essay is also largely inspired by another transhumanist who, unlike the contemporary community, did appreciate the fourth anthropocentric conceit. Friedrich Nietzsche denied the truth of any moral facts, asserted that the real world is a lie, and denied that people possess free will. In stark contrast to Nietzsche is another philosopher who, although she did not consider herself a transhumanist, has strongly influenced the transhumanist community. This influence can be seen in the Principles of Extropy and the writings of Robert Ettinger. The philosophies of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the context of transhumanism, create a fascinating dialogue. Whereas many transhumanists subscribe to Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, Nietzsche’s contribution has been comparatively minor. While the transhumanist community shares Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for the übermensch, a more likely source for this inspiration is Ettinger’s Man Into Superman. Nor would any transhumanist, despite the fears of Luddites such as Francis Fukuyama, claim that ordinary men ought to be the slaves of supermen.

There is a subtle tension here. This tension is further shown by Rand’s fierce commitment to the fourth anthropocentric conceit. She passionately argued that each of the naive answers to the hard problems of philosophy is correct. For example, Rand was once asked if she could present the essence of Objectivism while standing on one foot. To the questions of metaphysics and ethics, she replied without hesitation “objective reality” and “self-interest”. Likewise, Rand insisted that man possesses free will:

“Because man has free will, no human choice — and no phenomenon which is a product of human choice — is metaphysically necessary. In regard to any man-made fact, it is valid to claim that man has chosen thus, but it was not inherent in the nature of existence for him to have done so: he could have done otherwise.”

Rand’s uncritical belief in these comforting ideas largely explain why academic philosophers, unlike transhumanists, have treasured Nietzsche but ignored her.  Yet Nietzsche’s influence upon Rand is patently obvious.  Her love of great individuals and her hatred for dualism testify to the impact Nietzsche’s philosophy had upon her.  So Rand adopted Nietzsche’s philosophy but modified it.  She reinserted what Nietzsche had removed: the fourth conceit.  Nietzsche purchased transhumanism at a price Rand was unwilling to pay.  This tension brings into question the consistency of transhumanists today.  They adopt both Nietzsche’s transhumanism and Rand’s fourth conceit.

III.i ETHICS

“Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena — more precisely, a misinterpretation.”
— Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols

To demonstrate the threat of nihilism one can consider the following dilemma:

The diagram shows how neo-Darwinism has exposed an inconsistency between human intuition and knowledge about values. Throughout history humans have tended to regard happiness as the supergoal of life. If one inspects human behavior, human beings pursue happiness and avoid misery all or most of the time. Some variant of psychological egoism seems to rule human behavior. Furthermore, happiness does not feel to us to be a means to another goal. Rather, we wish to happy for the sake of happiness alone.

The neo-Darwinian synthesis, however, confronts us with a reality that disagrees with our perception about morality. In this century science has shown that happiness, which had the impression of being a supergoal, is only a subgoal to another end: the propagation of genes. Humans pursue happiness because happiness inducing behaviors, such as copulating and eating, are adaptive. The worthlessness of a supergoal, however, renders its subgoals worthless too. So human beings face an inconsistency between two paradigms which they wish to reconcile.

Two alternatives present themselves. In response A, human beings recognize that happiness is a subgoal of gene propogation and choose to henceforth value happiness only to the extent that happiness helps propagate genes. In response B, human beings abandon the apparent purpose of their reward mechanisms, propagating genes, and value happiness for its own sake. I will argue that mankind is split between these two alternatives and that neither solution is satisfactory. We are torn between utility and fitness.

Consider response A. I doubt that any person has ever truly considered adopting response A. However, from a distanced, cerebral perspective, I think that response A is at least not obviously wrong. So response A deserves philosophical attention. Response A is motivated by our commitment to a simple principle. This is the principle that if something was only created to serve as a means to an end then this something only has value to the extent that it furthers this end. If we could obtain the end without the means, the means would become worthless.

Consider this analogy. Imagine a world that is just like this world, except for one small difference. Suppose that in this world, human beings discovered hammers in the earth. Suppose further that, for whatever reason, these human beings valued these hammers. Indeed, they treasured them. Academic philosopher wrote long and complicated articles defending the value of hammers in professional journals. They loved these hammers — even though nails do not exist. Now suppose that an alien race, perhaps our posthuman selves, arrived in a saucer and showed these primitive human beings nails. Suppose that we played for them a humiliating documentary showing how we once made hammers for the sole purpose of hammering nails. How should these primitive human beings feel about their behavior? I would expect them to feel quite embarrassed. But, according to neo-Darwinism, this is exactly the dilemma that our own species faces. We value behaviors that induce happiness but we have no particular commitment to propagating genes — the only reason these behaviors induce happiness. Our intuitions are so strong against the purely intellectual response A, however, that nobody would adopt it.

Alternatively, consider response B. Please note that the ethical system I challenge is utilitarianism. While some will note that utilitarianism is an easy target, transhumanist sympathies belong more to utilitarianism than any Kantian system. Response B is much more attractive and deserves serious consideration. However, response B must survive inspection of its limiting cases. I will show that future technologies involving direct manipulation of the brain’s reward mechanism (BRM) strongly suggest that response B cannot be satisfactory. The brain’s mesolimbic dopamine system (a set of nerve cells that originate in the central tegmental area) is a strong candidate for the BRM but perhaps not the entire explanation. This essay will not inspect the details of the BRM but simply assume that one exists inside of the brain.

Consider the case of wireheading, as described in the transhumanist classic The Hedonistic Imperative [1], in which people “subvert” the happiness treadmill and short circuit the reward mechanisms in their brains. Wireheading surely does not inspire within us feelings of admiration for such moral behavior, but rather, if anything, feelings of anxiety. Yet wireheading is an exemplar of morality according to the utilitarian response B. People who wirehead themselves and others maximize happiness better than those who do not. Transhumanism threatens our utilitarian sensibilities further in the limiting case of “universal orgasm.” If morality requires the maximization of happiness, the final success of moral agents will be the rendering of all matter in the universe similar to that in the reward centers of happy brains. A universe brimming with cheery gray matter, however, does not strike us as a particularly moral and meaningful goal to pursue.

Why does response B fail in the limiting case? Again, neo-Darwinism illuminates the dilemma. Natural selection built the BRM within the context of the ancestral environment and under metabolic constraints. The BRM is not an infallible guide to gene propagation and fails to distinguish between adaptive and nonadaptive behaviors when it can afford to do so. Moreover, the further removed humans are from the ancestral environment the more irrelevant the BRM becomes. Today, the BRM would encourage adolescent boys to sleep with a Playboy Playmate whether or not she is fertile. Likewise, the BRM cannot distinguish between champagne that is poisoned and champagne that is not. The BRM, however, can afford these mistakes. These situations at least resemble adaptive behaviors. Enough adolescent boys sleep with fertile women and enough people drink non-poisoned champagne to justify the BRM’s laziness. In the future, however, the BRM will make mistakes that it cannot afford. In particular, because in the ancestral environment the BRM never needed to distinguish between stimulation by wireheading and stimulation by adaptive behaviors, the BRM will strongly encourage wireheading in the future. Wireheading, however, subverts the entire purpose and intent of the BRM, which is to propagate genes. So BRM manipulation threatens to magnify trivial mistakes into grave errors. Human behavior will become, in the terminology of Stephen Jay Gould, an exaptation.

One interesting fact to note is that weak technologies which already attempt to subvert the BRM are often regarded as immoral. Pornography and birth control have long been regarded as immoral by religious groups. These technologies allow human beings to stimulate the erotic reward mechanisms in their brain without the prospect of gene propagation. Indeed, masturbation, which ameliorates the suffering of adolescent boys, has also been considered immoral and many groups hold that opinion today. Likewise, drugs, which more closely resemble wireheading technologies, are also widely condemned. Indeed, more pleasurable drugs, such as heroin, are illegal around the world, whereas less pleasurable drugs, such as nicotine and caffeine, are not. This is so partly because drugs such as heroin can be more dangerous. However, even considering the hypothetical case of a drug as powerful as heroin but perfectly safe, the consensus that using such a drug is immoral would remain. Humans would feel anxious about such a safe drug because it nevertheless subverts the intent of the BRM. People who take drugs feel rewarded for doing nothing and this strikes us as wrong.

So we can regard utilitarianism as a heuristic that works within a narrow, local scale but fails at a wider, global scale. Most everyone will agree that pursuing happiness for ourselves and others in the near future without manipulating the BRM is relatively moral. However, once we adopt the wider, global scale and consider the limiting cases involving BRM manipulation, response B fails. If both responses A and B fail, however, the ethical dilemma is insoluble.

To further illustrate the threat that future technologies pose, consider the following diagram:

In this diagram CMB stands for Conventional Moral Behavior, X1 and X2 are arbitrary events and X1 causes the respective species to feel happiness. CMB does not necessarily signify the sort of courageous acts that ethicists discuss in moral dilemmas, such as saving drowning strangers, but rather ordinary behavior that people take for granted as moral. That a person wakes up, eats breakfast, goes to work, helps children with homework, has sex with the spouse, and goes to sleep again does not immediately strike us as moral. And yet a rational agent who values being a destitute, anorexic, insomniac, sexually abstinent child murderer is a moral monster. We might say that ordinary people are so moral that we forget to mention it.

I will show that the utilitarian arguments that ethicists use to justify human behavior would just as well justify the behavior of HS2, HS3, and HS4. Yet the behavior of these others is intuitively wrong. First we might consider Homo Sapiens 2. HS2 is exactly like HS1 except that instead of gene propagation, CMB is conducive to some arbitrary event X2. We might suppose that X2 is the collection of a gold coin within some bank account. X2s engage in sexual intercourse but possess no gametes. Newborn X2s happen to grow out of the ground at about the death rate. Every time HS2s would behave as HS1s would to propagate genes, by raising children and grandchildren, one gold coin is deposited. Our first impression is that the change from HS1 to HS2 is trivial and non-threatening. That CMB accumulates gold coins instead of propagates genes does not seem to undermine our intuitions about right and wrong. The saints of HS1 would be saints in HS2.

Next, consider HS3. HS3 is exactly like HS1 except that HS3 do not need to exhibit CMB to propagate genes. Although CMB or similar behavior is perhaps the only method natural selection could discover to propagate genes, one can conjure up examples in which almost any behavior propagates genes. Suppose, for example, that a demon controller has compiled a genetic database of every HS3. Suppose further that the demon outfitted every HS3 with a sensor that detected X1 events and sent a signal to a cloning factory that created a long line of successful descendents for that person. HS3 becomes interesting when we consider the spectrum of possibilities for X1. X1 might be CMB or similar behavior. Alternatively, X1 could be positively maladaptive behaviors at the local scale. For example, the BRM of HS3s might be such that HS3s feel rewarded not for CMB but for being destitute, anorexic, insomniac, sexually abstinent child murderers. HS3s might delight in setting themselves on fire and laugh while their families burn.

At first blush HS3 might strike as extremely immoral people. We must remember, however, that their psychological reward and genetic propogation systems are quite different from our own. We are observing HS3s through the tinted spectacles of our own brain reward mechanism. Although being destitute, starving ourselves, killing children, and setting ourselves on fire would not at all contribute to our utility, it surely contributes to their own. Indeed, utilitarianism would require that HS3s live in poverty, starve themselves, butcher their children, and set their families on fire. According to utilitarianism, the better and more frequently HS3s do so, the more saintly they become. Moreover, if any skeptic were to challenge this conclusion by claiming that happiness is not an end in and of itself, but is only a subgoal to some supergoal, neo-Darwinism has identified this supergoal — gene propagation — and we can remind this person that while the saints of HS3 are kindly respecting their children’s wish to be set ablaze, cloning factories are creating entire new crops of HS3 to colonize the cosmos. The universe will soon be brimming with HS3 DNA. So, although the behavior of HS3 strikes us as profoundly immoral, from a utilitarian perspective their actions are perfectly moral.

If the changes from HS1 to HS2 and HS3 did not invalidate the morality of each species’ respective actions, we must also conclude that a combination of these changes leaves morality untouched. HS4, however, is a species of people who exhibit arbitrary behavior to feel happy and this behavior is conducive to an arbitrary end. Instead of child murdering HS3s sending a signal to the cloning factory, these saints send signals to the bank account which deposits a gold coin. X2 need not be a gold coin deposit. It may just as well be a dirt deposit. The conclusion is that morality, the idea of what actions people ought to take, is itself arbitrary. To support this conclusion, one need only ask how a member of one species could distinguish between others that are moral and others that are not. Each species has its own BRM and none, including our own, would seem to be privileged over the rest. Furthermore, the ethical systems of each species are threatened by the prospect of BRM manipulation and universal orgasm.

From these examples one can generalize about certain ethical crisis that any such species must confront. Our own species has already noted the first crisis, which is the discovery of the supergoal and the realization that happiness is a subgoal. In particular, since Darwin human beings have known that happiness inducing behaviors were selected during evolution not because they promote human happiness but rather because they promote genes. Curiously enough, our species has duly noted this discovery and not felt much anxiety at all. We have yet, however, to confront the second crisis, which is the manipulation of the BRM. Although weak technologies such as illicit drugs already exist, human beings are not yet faced with the prospect of divorcing happiness from adaptive behavior. If technology continues to progress unchecked, we will soon have the ability to feel rewarded for any behavior. Which behaviors will we choose?

One possible objection to the previous argument is that human nature is not necessarily adaptive. The correlation between rewarding behaviors and adaptive behaviors is not perfect. My reply to this objection is not to deny that human beings can exhibit maladaptive behavior. Indeed, human being often delight in being positively maladaptive. Rather, such behavior only signifies noise. Neutral or maladaptive behaviors are not immoral so much as they are confused. Human beings want to found their moral norms upon good reasons, whatever those may be. Noise, however, has no reason. If adaptive behaviors cannot be the source of morality, surely noise can do no better.

Consider the possibilities available to any species that confronts the second crisis. Such a species could alter their BRM to reward them for maladaptive, rather than adaptive, behavior. Our own species could alter our BRM to be like that of child murdering HS3s and HS3s could alter their BRM to be like that of ourselves. HS3 could begin to resemble saints, from our perspective, but at the cost of their supergoal. Alternatively, such a species could fine tune the BRM so that the correlation between rewarding and adaptive behavior approaches one. The adolescent boys who would so readily sleep with an infertile Playboy Playmate now would then find her to be as repulsive as the sickly ogres of today. HS3 could alter their BRM to reward the successful running of cloning factories. So HS3s might abandon their self destructive pyromania and feel delight at raising the next crop of HS3. The possibilities available to species in the second crisis are endless.

Another objection to the previous argument is that objective morality has never existed and no sophisticated, intelligent person claims otherwise. On this view, the previous argument attacked a straw man. My reply to this objection is that these persons admit too much. Indeed, except for a semantic quibble, I feel that I am in complete agreement with the moral relativists. The semantic quibble concerns what the word “moral” signifies. I have used the word “moral” to denote what human beings ought to do. The word “moral” as used by the moral relativists, however, denotes something much closer to what human beings feel they ought to do. I think moral relativists would resist the naturalistic fallacy of arguing that a person ought to do something simply because she or he feels that a person ought to do so. We hesitate to found our moral norms upon things as capricious and uncontrollable as feelings. Moral relativism has shifted the focus from normative to descriptive claims. The semantic ambiguity need not undermine my argument against moral realism, however. Moral relatives and I largely agree about the respective concepts that such ambiguous language denotes.

If, however, moral relativists and I largely agree, what are the consequences? I have shown that human beings do not swear allegiance to either end of the ethical spectrum between subgoal and supergoal. Indeed, although we have the power to know how we feel people ought to act, we can never know how people really ought to act. We can never know, in other words, whether or not our intuitions are correct. The consequence of this discovery is existential paralysis. This paralysis, however, is not simple inaction. The person who refrains from taking any action nevertheless does choose the action to take, namely inaction. Rather, the consequence of moral non-realism is total paralysis. Those agents who suffer from hard paralysis cannot even, in the midst of their doubts, commit to inaction. Their actions, if any, can only signify noise. Hard paralysis, from which the current inability to alter our BRM protects us, awaits posthumans. Morality will die as paradise is born.

III.ii FREEDOM

“The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Munchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.”
— Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Just as modifying the brain reward mechanism threatens to undermine our sense of morality, so too do other future technologies threaten to undermine our sense of freedom. Following Robert Kane, I will define free will as the ability to be the creator and sustainer of one’s own ends or purposes. Free will is a necessary condition of moral responsibility and therefore, if people do not possess free will, they cannot be morally responsible for their actions. According to one view, morality is a hereditary or environmental program that causes an agent to do certain behaviors such as propagate genes. Although this position, which has been labeled hard determinism, was popular among intellectuals throughout history, including Spinoza, Nietzsche, Darwin, and Einstein, today those who deny the existence of free will are a minority. Derk Pereboom and Galen Strawson are two contemporary philosophers noted for their denial that free will exists.

The view that free will is incompatible with determinism but that determinism is false and free will exists is labeled libertarianism. Today several philosophers defend libertarianism with very sophisticated theories which appeal to quantum mechanics. For the purposes of this essay, however, I will assume that Hume was correct to note that any indeterminism within the universe cannot help the libertarian.

One future technology that threatens to undermine our sense of freedom is intelligence enhancement. To see how such enhancement will do violence to belief in free will, consider this telling quote from On Free Will by Albert Einstein:

“If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.” [italics added]

To those who would assert that free will exists, Einstein’s remark smacks of arrogance. He seems to beg the question by assuming that more intelligent persons would agree with him. There is, however, a very good reason for thinking that such mentally enhanced beings would agree with him. This reason is that intelligence enhancement would allow these beings to better predict human behavior. This premise is uncontroversial. Yet predictability strongly offends against our sense of human freedom.

Suppose that you received a letter in the mail today. You open the letter and discover another, smaller letter. This note was self addressed and mailed two centuries ago. You open the note and read the contents which are a precise description of your activities today. Given the premise of intelligence amplification, we live in a world in which such letters can arrive in our mailboxes. Wiser beings could have predicted whether or not you would fall in love — or commit a crime — two hundred years before you were born. A simple letter can abolish our fragile sense of free will. This is so because the decision seems to have been made before you were born. If this were not the case, how could the more intelligent being have predicted your behavior? The simple fact that the being was more intelligence could not suffice. The being would have required evidence. This evidence was written, before you were born, into the fabric of the universe. You are not the author, you are the message.

Note that Einstein had no interest in transhumanism that would explain his focus upon intelligence amplification. Rather, his interest is in the fourth anthropocentric conceit. The fourth conceit led him to consider a future technology, intelligence amplification, which strengthened his case against human freedom. Intelligence amplification just happens to also be one of those future technologies which transhumanists anticipate.

Other future technologies which threaten to undermine our sense of freedom are alternatives to punishment. Although academic philosophers tend to disregard the importance of these technologies today, the psychologist Burrhus Skinner drew attention to them. Skinner described his idea of a utopian community in Walden Two. Punishment is never used in this community. Rather, people modify the behavior of others through therapy and behavior engineering. Crime, on this view, is only a symptom of illness. In principle, these illnesses can be cured without punishment. Today, the best treatment we have for crime is punishment. If we did not punish criminals, there is no alternative which could protect society. The idea that people possess free will, however, and therefore deserve punishment for crime, rests upon this present inability. In the distant future, alternatives to punishment might be available. Perhaps one alternative will be as simple as a pill. When a person commits a crime in the future, society and philosophy will be faced with a choice between two responses. According to the orthodox response, the criminal was sane, freely committed the crime, and consequently deserves to suffer. Surely, this response would continue to work. But according to the alternative response, we would give the criminal a pill and therefore reduce or eliminate the chance of future crime. Given the transhumanist hypothesis that future technologies will radically improve our understanding and control of the brain, this response would also work.

An important distinction exists between the two options, however. Since the birth of our species, we have relied upon the orthodox response and therefore caused tremendous suffering. The alternative solution has no such cost. To maintain the orthodox response despite the availability of such an alternative would be cruelty.

Against this new response to crime, one might object that we are violating the criminal’s autonomy. We are no longer regarding the person as a person but rather as some meat machine to be modified at society’s leisure. The defender of this new response, however, can note that the criminal has already violated the autonomy of another by committing a crime. He has therefore sacrificed a proportional measure of autonomy and this violation is required to restore order. A better reply, however, is that punishment already violates the criminal’s autonomy. Indeed, punishment already alters the criminal’s brain. This is the reason why we punish criminals. If punishment was motivated solely by retribution, and had no deterrent effect, only the cruel would continue to make criminals suffer. The question is not whether or not we should regard a person as a person, but whether or not we should restrict our manipulation of others’ brains, against their will, to that involving the archaic interface of sense perception or, instead, progress into direct manipulation that avoids the cost in suffering.

Note that the future technology of behavior engineering will have its own costs too. Sadists who have a vested interest in the orthodox response to crime, punishment, will have to forego that pleasure. This is a change that transhumanists should welcome. A more disturbing cost, however, is the belief that people are free and responsible for their actions. In our ordinary lives we feel that criminals are not ill. In the future we must note that some people go ill and other do not. Yet we do not feel that illness is something that a person can control in the way that a person can control whether or not to commit a crime. This illusion of control must go.

The future technology of intelligence amplification also compliments this idea that criminals need therapy and not punishment. If we can predict the behavior of others, we can also predict their crimes. The ability to predict crime, however, also helps to prevent crime. Law enforcement officials, instead of only being able to implement behavior modification after a crime has been committed, would be able to do so before the crime ever takes place. This suggests a future world in which not only punishment, but also crime, is absent. In a world without punishment, crime, or responsibility, the antiquated idea of human freedom will become obsolete.

Another perspective that threatens to undermine our belief in free will is the global view of HS4. The focus upon the BRM shows how a controller could manipulate people. Indeed, we do not regard the members of HS4 as free at all. They appear to be slaves of their appetites who unwittingly pursue both base and more sophisticated rewards offered by the BRM. By choosing which behaviors X2 the BRM rewards, the controller, rather than HS4, is free and responsible for their actions. But according to the previous argument, we cannot distinguish between HS4 and ourselves with respect to morality.

To support these claims with evidence and add urgency to the dilemma, consider this famous trial.  In 1924 two young men, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, attempted to commit the perfect murder. While Ayn Rand studied Nietzche at the University of Leningrad, Leopold studied Nietzsche at the University of Chicago. He came to agree with Nietzsche that moral codes do not apply to supermen. Loepold considered Loeb such a superman. After killing a boy named Bobby Franks, the two were caught and Clarence Darrow defended them. He admitted that the two did kill the victim, but argued that they did not possess free will. Leopold and Loeb were victims just as much as the boy they killed. Darrow succeeded in bringing tears to the judge’s eyes and saving the boys’ lives. Thus Nietzsche’s argument against moral facts inspired the murderers and his argument against free will vindicated them.

I am perfectly willing to admit that Clarence Darrow might have argued for hard determinism to save the life of clients whether or not he believed they were morally responsible. My understanding, however, is that he believed they were not. Nor is Darrow’s argument particularly novel — the ancient Greeks appreciated the problem of incompatibilism two millennia ago. Furthermore, Darrow’s argument is confused. If Darrow was willing to deny the death penalty, why not deny them any penalty at all? The boys’ lack of free will would only argue against retributive punishment and not punishment intended to deter. Many have claimed that the death penalty does have such a deterrent effect. Darrow did not address this further point.  Finally, to my knowledge no defense attorney has repeated Darrow’s appeal to hard determinism and the early twentieth century is rather removed from contemporary transhumanism. Nevertheless, transhumanism was born during the early twentieth century in the thoughts of Haldane and Schrödinger. Darrow posited a moral revolution no less astounding than the cosmic revolution of Copernicus:

“No one knows what will be the fate of the child he gets or the child she bears; the fate of the child is the last thing they consider. This weary old world goes on, begetting, with birth and with living and with death; and all of it is blind from the beginning to the end. I do not know what it was that made these boys do this mad act, but I do know there is a reason for it. I know they did not beget themselves. I know that any one of an infinite number of causes reaching back to the beginning might be working out in these boys’ minds, whom you are asked to hang in malice and in hatred and injustice, because someone in the past has sinned against them.”

Posthumans will be victims of fate as much as Leopold and Loeb ever were. As Einstein predicted, when posthumans amplify their intelligence they will discover how futile attempts to deviate from their original programming will be. Self-modifying programs are still programs. The transhumanist community must eventually return and confront Darrow’s challenge. At Cambridge on May 21, 1924—just sixteen months before Leopold and Loeb murdered Bobby Franks with a chisel —John Burdon Sanderson Haldane presented to the Heretics society his paper titled “Daedalus, or, Science and the Future.”

III.iii REALITY

“The apparant world is the only one: the real world is merely a lie.”
— Nietzsche, Twilight of the
Idols

A third problem I wish to explore in this essay is the question of external reality. Perhaps the first description of this problem is Plato’s allegory of the cave. In this allegory, Plato considers the hypothetical world in which human beings are locked inside of a cave and believe shadows to be real things. The founder of modern philosophy, Descartes, described the same problem by imagining an evil demon who deceives him. Descartes asked how a person can distinguish between the real world and the dream world. Only a few years ago, the character Morpheus from the Hollywood film The Matrix, inspired by Plato and Descartes, asked the same question. The movie might not have been so successful if it had been released earlier than the end of the twentieth century. Technology has progressed so far that the public was willing to entertain the transhumanist future depicted in the Matrix.

The Matrix presents an explicit image of the problem that Plato and Descartes identified. This image is that of a brain in a vat:

The brain in a vat image shows how vulnerable all of our beliefs about the exterior world are.  Light might bounce off of objects in the exterior world and into our eyes conveying information about reality.  However, it is also possible that wires stimulate my visual cortex to give this illusion.  Both interpretations are perfectly consistent with our perceptions.  Furthermore, there is no way to distinguish between the two.

In 2001, two years after the Matrix arrived in theatres, Nick Bostrom contributed another image, together with Plato’s Cave and Descartes’ Demon, to this subject.  He calls this work The Simulation Argument [3] The argument attempts to show that:

“at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.”

Note how the image has evolved throughout history. Plato only required the technology of fire. The image of people chained in one place and deceived by shadows strikes one as too implausible to be compelling. Descartes drew attention to dreams. We feel confident, however, that we can distinguish between dreams and reality. Descartes increased the plausibility of his account by considering a global supernatural controller — an evil demon — to deceive us. This deception could be more convincing than that involving shadows or dreams. The brain in a vat image, however, increases the plausibility even further by being naturalistic. The argument that we could be such brains invokes only computers — not demons. Finally, the Simulation Argument presents a reason for thinking not just that such a naturalistic scenario is possible but that in fact one is probable. Perhaps the most telling fact about The Simulation Argument is that the author, Bostrom, founded the World Transhumanism Association together with David Pearce, author of The Hedonistic Imperative.

Consider the article “How To Live In A Simulation” [4] by another contributor to transhumanist philosophy, Robin Hanson. Hanson suggests that, given Bostrom’s premise that we live in a simulation, being entertaining is in our best interest. If our descendents simulated us we need to amuse them to secure our own safety and future. We do not want our descendents to pull the plug. The important — but often unstated — consequence, however, is that the value and significance of human life is diminished. According to Hanson’s argument, humanity might be nothing more than a court jester performing for our cruel descendents. Transhumanist philosophy and future technologies do violence to the fourth anthropocentric conceit.

The Matrix presents another image of the problem that virtual reality technology poses for our sense of reality. This film suggests a distinction between internally consistent and internally inconsistent illusions. Consider the people who live within the Matrix such as Neo. Neo was surprised and alarmed by Morpheus’ revelation that Neo lives within the Matrix. Neo felt surprised because the world within the Matrix does not suggest that technology is sufficiently advanced to create such an illusion. Before Morpheus demonstrated the illusion to him Neo never felt troubled by the prospect of Plato’s Cave or Descartes’ Demon. Consider, however, the people who live in Zion and regularly enter the Matrix. These people do not find the existence of global illusions surprising at all. The citizens of Zion know many people, specifically those trapped in the Matrix, who are victims of such an illusion. Now suppose that someone suggested that Zion itself is a global illusion — a Matrix within a Matrix (MWAM) — without demonstrating the truth of his claim. The citizens of Zion can no longer afford Neo’s incredulity at such mere possibilities. This dilemma would cause the Zionites no small amount of anxiety. Yet, the film never depicts Zionites as being particularly troubled by this possibility.

We can immediately note, however, that this distinction between internally consistent and inconsistent illusions is unwarranted. This is so because any and every illusion is consistent with the notion of brain in vat scenarios. There is nothing that constrains the scientist who manipulates the brain from creating illusions in which global illusions cannot happen. For example, such an illusion need not be like Zion, in which the notion of global illusions are presented as feasible. The scientist may just as well create the illusion that you live in ancient Greece with Plato or in Holland with Descartes. The impression that some, such as those in the Matrix, are the victims of illusions, whereas others, such as those in Zion, are not, does not protect one from this dilemma. The citizens of Zion may just as well be trapped within a MWAM. These citizens ought to wonder whether or not their world is an illusion. So should we.

Considering the previous examples one can see how the Matrix did not present the strongest case against the fourth anthropocentric conceit. The citizens of Zion are never shown to be themselves the victims of illusions. Moreover, the controllers of the Matrix only manipulate their victims’ sense of the external world. The controllers might just as well alter their moral intuitions, as the creator of HS3 did, or decision processes, as future police might. They could manipulate their memories. The Matrix suggests, but does not present, the possibility of human beings that are victims of multiple layers of virtual reality and repeated memory and moral intuition wipes. Such a posthuman future threatens to create a philosophical crisis for the human race. To show that this crisis is already beginning to happen consider this quote from a recent news story with the headline “Matrix makes its way into courtrooms as defense strategy,” [5]. 

“It’s taking people a little further into the future.  For people who are already confused between fantasy and reality, it gives them a framework to articulate it,” she said.  “People who are already on the edge, it can be argued, can be set off by these types of movies.”

The article describes how Hamilton, Ohio resident Tonda Lynn Ansley was found not guilty by citing an insanity defense.  Ansley claimed she was inside of the Matrix.  Vadim Mieseges from San Francisco also successfully defended himself at his murder trial by claiming he was inside of the Matrix.  Joshua Cooke from Oakton, Virginia argued similarly.  Even Lee Boyd Malvo, one of the Washington D.C. snipers, wrote “free yourself of the matrix” while in jail. 

I am not claiming that these situations are common or that these people are sane.  Moreover, I agree that suspects probably find the Matrix defense attractive whether or not they believe what they say.  However, I want to note that before future technologies and ideas made the Matrix plausible and popular, nobody cited this defense.  I submit that these cases are merely the beginning of a future philosophical crisis.  Although we can perhaps afford to ignore this dilemma, posthumans will not have this luxury.  They will find The Human Condition by Magritte to be especially moving for that painting depicts the posthuman condition as well.

IV. CONCLUSION

The anthropocentric conceits that Copernicus and Darwin undermined are not the last. At least two more comforting illusions will be challenged by progress in science and technology. The transhumanist community is familiar with the third conceit and enthusiastic about surpassing the limitations upon human intelligence. The fourth conceit, however, has largely been ignored by the transhumanist community. Future technologies, in particular modification of the brain reward mechanism, intelligence amplification, behavior engineering, and virtual reality, threaten to undermine comfortable or naive beliefs about ethics, freedom, and reality. By exploring these potential threats, one can see how multiple facets of the fourth conceit compliment each other. Furthermore, these philosophical dilemmas have already emerged in courtrooms. In the worst case scenario, our ethical intuitions and choices are manipulated by a controller who keeps us trapped within a virtual reality. Posthumans will be forced to acknowledge that they might be such people. One can never know. This is the posthuman condition.

——————————————————————————–
Footnotes

* I am thankful for valuable comments from Hunter Washburne.

[1] Pearce, David. The Hedonistic Imperative
http://www.hedweb.com/
[2] “Famous American Trials: Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb,”
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/leoploeb/leopold.htm
[3] Bostrom, N. 2003. Are you living in a computer simulation? Philosophical Quarterly 53:243-55.
http://www.simulation-argument.com
[4] Hanson, Robert.  “How to Live in a Simulation.” Journal of Evolution and Technology, vol. 7 (2001).
http://www.jetpress.org/volume7/simulation.html
[5] Bean, Matt. “‘Matrix’ makes its way into courtrooms as defense strategy,”
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/05/21/ctv.matrix.insanity

Link

Structuring Knowledge in a Network of Concepts

Francis Heylighen

PESP, Free University of Brussels

The basic evolutionary-systemic and constructive principles that have been
discussed in my two previous contributions to this volume can be directly
applied to the design of a computer support system that would help
Principia Cybernetica collaborators to develop a coherent system of
philosophical thought. In fact the same type of support system might be
applied to any complex problem domains where on the basis of a lot of
ill-structured, ambiguous and sometimes inconsistent data a more or less
simple and reliable model is to be built. The problem we are speaking about
is one of applied epistemology. A good epistemology, offering a concrete
and general theory of how knowledge develops during individual or cultural
evolution, should also be useful as a guide when a new model is practically
to be developed.
Network representations of knowledge

I start from the assumption that a lot of knowledge is already available,
in literature and in the heads of different (potential) contributors to the
project, but that that knowledge must be integrated into a coherent and
transparent model. The knowledge will be assumed to be written down in the
form of “chunks”, containing text, formulas, drawings, sound, …, whatever
media are most appropriate to express the underlying ideas. I further
suppose these chunks to be split up into distinct “ideas” or “concepts”,
such that one chunk should define not more than one concept.

Of course, these different concepts will be related and one chunk will
in general contain references to several other chunks. For example, the
chunk denoting the concept “dog” might contain the following sentence: a
dog is a carnivorous mammal, with a protruding snout. This means that the
concept dog has associations with a least the concepts mammal, carnivorous
and snout. If these concepts are also available as chunks, then we might
create a link from the dog chunk to the mammal chunk and so on. Computer
applications that allow such an easy representation and manipulation of
chunks connected by links are called hypermedia systems. The chunk with its
text and graphics can be shown in a window on the screen, and it suffices
to click on one of the links to show the next chunk to which the link is
pointing (Heylighen, 1991).

Hypermedia system are useful for storing a large amount of complex,
interrelated information (e.g. an encyclopedia) in a easy to handle way.
However, there is an inherent ambiguity involved, since it is not a priori
clear what a link is supposed to mean: any kind of association, as well
causal, as logical, as intuitive as spatial, …, might be represented by a
link. Therefore we need a better structured system if we want our networks
of concepts to support us more efficiently. By introducing different types
of chunks (nodes) and links we may turn our hypermedia system into a
semantic network: the different types of links will determine (part of) the
meaning of the concept to which they are attached. The problem with
semantic networks for knowledge representation is still that of ambiguity:
there is an unlimited number of link and node types that may seem
appropriate, and their interrelationships will in general be very unclear.
In order to limit the set of types, we need an unambiguous, fundamental
interpretation of what concepts and links in our network really stand for.
I will now propose such an interpretation with the corresponding types, and
show how it can be applied to the structuring of knowledge.

Distinction and entailment types

A concept (node) is supposed to represent a distinction: a way to separate
phenomena denoted by the concept (belonging to its class or extension),
from phenomena that do not belong to its extension. Defining a concept
means proposing a procedure for explicitly carrying out that distinction.
Definition will be assumed to be a bootstrapping operation: a concept is
always defined in terms of other concepts, that are themselves defined in
terms of other concepts, and so on. In general there is no primitive level
of meaningful concepts in terms of which all other concepts can be defined.
This is in accordance with my constructive philosophy, stating that any
foundations of a conceptual system must be empty of meaning in order to be
acceptable as basis for a complete philosophical explanation (Heylighen,
1990b).

One way to define a concept is by listing the set of concepts that it
entails together with the set of concepts entailed by it. By entailment I
mean an “if…then” relation, which is more general than the logical
(material) implication. For example, if a phenomenon is a dog, then it is
also a mammal: dog -> mammal. It means that a phenomenon denoted by the
first concept cannot be present or actual, without a phenomenon denoted by
the second one being (simultaneously) or becoming (afterwards) actual.

In order to derive fundamental types of distinctions (concepts, nodes)
and links (entailments), we will posit two basic dimensions of distinction:
stability (or time) and generality, with the corresponding values of
instantaneous – temporary – stable, and of specific – general. The
combination of these 3 x 2 values leads to 6 types of distinction (see
table).

time\generality | general | specific
—————————————————————–
stable | class | object
temporary | property | situation
instantaneous | change | event

For example, an object is a distinction that is stable (it is not supposed
to appear or disappear while we are considering it), and specific (it is
concrete, there is only of it). A property is a distinction that is general
(several phenomena may be denoted by it, it represents a common feature),
and temporary (it may appear or disappear, but normally it remains present
during a finite time interval). An event is instantaneous (it appears and
disappears within one moment), and specific (it does not denote a class of
similar phenomena, but a particular instance).

With these node types we can now derive the corresponding link types by
considering all possible combinations of two node types. There is one
constraint, however: we assume that a more invariant (stable or general)
distinction can never entail a less invariant one. Otherwise, the second
would be present each type the first one is, contradicting the hypothesis
that it is less invariant than the first one. For example, a class cannot
entail an object, a situation cannot entail an event. Yet it is possible
that concepts with the same type of invariance, (e.g. two objects) might be
connected by an entailment relation. All remaining possible combinations
can now be summarized by the following scheme (the straight arrows
represent entailment from one type to another (more invariant) one, the
circular arrows entailment from a concept of a type to a concept of the
same type):

For example when an object A entails a class B, A -> B, then A is an
Instance_of B. When an object A always entails the presence of another
object B, then B must belong to or be a part of A. When a change A entails
another change B, then A and B “covary” and hence A can be interpreted as
the cause of B. When an event A entails a situation B, then A must be
simultaneous with or preceding B in time.

The advantage of this scheme is that most of the intuitive and often
used semantic categories (objects, classes, causality, whole-part
relations, temporal precedence, etc.) can be directly constructed from it,
in a simple and uniform format. Complementarily, given some of those
everyday categories, we can use the scheme to reduce them to simple
entailment links between nodes of specific types. In fact the types
themselves can be represented as nodes, and each node of a particular type
will have an entailment link to that ‘type’-node. This allows us to reduce
a complicated set of semantic categories to an extremely simple formal
strcuture.

Knowledge structuring

Given that structure, consisting of a list of nodes and entailme nt links
between them, we can now start to formally analyse the network. Define the
input and output sets of a node:

Input: I(x) = { y | y -> x} = “extension” of concept x

Output : O(x) = { y | x -> y } = “intension” of concept x

The meaning (definition, distinction) of x can be interpreted as determined
by the disjunction of its input elements, and the conjunction of its output
elements. Our previous remark about definitions can now be reformulated as
the following bootstrapping axiom (Heylighen, 1990ab):

two nodes are distinct if and only if their input and output sets are
distinct:

x =\ y <=> I(x) =\ I (y), O(x) =\ O(y)

However, such a complete definition assumes that all concepts allowing to
distinguish between x and y are present in the network. In practice, the
network of concepts we are building by writing down our knowledge in the
form of connected chunks, will be incomplete in some respects, redundant in
other respects. Instead of using the axiom as a static description of how a
complete network should be structured, we can use it as a procedure to find
ways to make the network more adequate, by adding missing concepts, or by
deleting redundant ones. We can distinguish the following two main
techniques (cf. Heylighen, 1991; Bakker, 1987; Stokman & de Vries, 1988):

Node identification

When input and output sets of two nodes x and y are identic or similar, the
computer support system may propose the user to either identify (merge) the
two nodes, and replace them by one single node, or to add new nodes or
links that would more clearly differentiate between x and y. An algorithm
may test the identity or inclusion of the input and output sets, and
according to the results, propose the following possibilities to the user:

1) I (x) = I (y):

a) O (x) = O (y) => Identify (or distinguish) x and y

b) O (x) [proper_subset_of] O (y) => Identify x and y, or distinguish I
(x) from I (y)

2) I(x) [proper_subset_of] I(y):

a) O(x) = O(y) => Identify x and y, or distinguish O(x) from O(y)

b) O(x) [proper_subset_of] O(y) => Identify x and y

c) O(y) [proper_subset_of] O(x) => Connect x to y, x -> y

Node integration

When a cluster of nodes have a common set of “external” input or output
nodes (that is to say nodes that do not belong to the cluster), then from
the point of view of those external nodes, the nodes inside the cluster are
indistinguishable. Hence the nodes, though not strictly indistinguishable
according to the bootstrapping axiom, behave indistinguishably from a
certain viewpoint.

From that point of view, the cluster may be called closed (Heylighen,
1990a) and it might therefore be replaced by a single “integrated” node.
The integrated node “summarizes” the cluster nodes on a more abstract
level, and may hence simplify the conceptual model. Similar to the case of
node identification, the external indistinguishability of clustered nodes
may be spurious, and this should prompt the user to add additional
distinguishing links and nodes.

There are different types of closure, with different meanings and formal
properties, depending upon which sets of external input or output nodes are
common among the cluster, for example: transitive closure, equivalence,
cyclical closure, … If the closure is only approximative (the cluster
nodes have several external neighbours in common, but these do not form a
complete set of any specific type), then this method is similar to the one
called “conceptual clustering” in machine learning, where the boundaries
between clustered and non-clustered nodes become fuzzy, and depend on the
treshold chosen for the number of common neighbours.

In conclusion, the present set of concepts and techniques, when implemented
on a computer through a suitable intuitive interface, should enable an
individual or group of users to elicit and structure their knowledge about
a domain under the form of a network of concepts connected by entailment
links, and support them to minimize the redundancy, complexity and
incompleteness of their model.

The introduction of new nodes and links by the user corresponds to a
form of variation by recombination of concepts. The recognition of a closed
cluster of nodes by the system corresponds to the selection of a
distinction that is more stable or invariant than the distinctions between
the internal concepts of the cluster (Heylighen, 1990a), with closure as
fundamental selection criterion. The elicitation and structuring of
concepts in this manner hence follows the general evolutionary mechanism
that was postulated in my previous papers about evolutionary philosophy.

References

Bakker R.R. (1987): Knowledge Graphs: representation and structuring of
scientific knowledge, (Ph.D. Thesis, Dep. of Applied Mathematics,
University of Twente, Netherlands).

Heylighen F. (1990): “A Structural Language for the Foundations of
Physics”, International Journal of General Systems 18, p. 93-112 .

Heylighen F. (1990): “Relational Closure: a mathematical concept for
distinction-making and complexity analysis”, in: Cybernetics and Systems
‘90, R. Trappl (ed.), (World Science, Singapore), p. 335-342.

Heylighen F. (1991): “Design of a Hypermedia Interface Translating between
Associative and Formal Representations”, International Journal of
Man-Machine Studies.

Stokman F.N. & de Vries P.H. (1988): “Structuring Knowledge in a Graph”,
in: Human-Computer Interaction, Psychonomic Aspects, G.C. van der Veer &
G.J. Mulder (eds.), (Springer, Berlin).

This crisis is at the same time what is troubling about Lee’s film. With all that Synthetic Pleasures is able to suggest visually about the scope of this crisis in its depiction of virtual spaces like Japan’s Ocean Dome, to that degree Lee deprives us of any stable or “real” alternative that might counter our seemingly inexhaustible desire for things simulated. The virtue of the film is that it complicates this desire from both ends. It acknowledges the detachment from experience and from the consequences of our actions that follows upon a simulacrul abstraction from the environment, and it intelligently presents the abstraction that the “human” already is for those artists, body piercers, and transsexuals who rebel against the gendered organization of the body, of the “organism” that we are and that never has been “natural” apart from very specific cultural norms.
If there is a shortcoming to the film, it turns on its failure to draw a clear distinction between the two modes this desire takes. To want a virtual reality that suggests abstraction is not the same as refusing the abstraction of a reality that is essentially constructed, even if both modes are possible in the same desire. Indeed, since the difference that needs emphasizing here is not of kind but of modes, Lee cannot say that the desire for the virtual reality of a Las Vegas casino, for instance, differs fundamentally from the desire to change one’s gender, even though one implies acquiescence to a consumerist society and the other a refusal of social norms deemed intolerable. “Synthetic pleasure” is common in both instances, and this central premise of Synthetic Pleasures is compelling as long as one does not also equivocate the modal difference. There are times when the film seems to lose its focus on this point, and the result is a breakdown in its own synthetic logic. Instead of centering for the viewer a world that is intrinsically virtual, even at the level of human biology and the structure of matter, the film in effect fissures the real and the virtual all over again, falls back to a stable definition of nature from which virtual reality can only be seen and entered into as its secondary or derived imitation.
When this happens, the film no longer clearly foregrounds its own most interesting idea that nature is simulated. It can then either criticize or celebrate consumer societies hooked on virtual reality, but it cannot grasp the pleasure of that addiction. And it can either reject or sustain the diagnosis of alienated desire, but it cannot see the way desire in the world it constructs actively resists is own social repression. This is why the film occasionally suggests condescension toward its more marginal subjects–teenagers, clubgoers, transvestites, transsexuals–and also why it might seem to filmgoers an overly optimistic portrayal of “cyberculture.”

In fact Synthetic Pleasures is not an optimistic portrayal. If it seems that way, it is because it wants to understand the virtual character of reality and the synthetic character of pleasure without prying them apart again. When it fails in this respect, it does so by falling back on a social, psychological, or material reality that is only real, and so constructs the virtual as a shadow or double of our experience that we can only passively consume. But the interesting wager of the film is that any reduction of this kind obscures the nature of desire, and indeed constitutes the very technological drive that alienates us from our environment and from ourselves. The balance Lee seeks in This crisis is at the same time what is troubling about Lee’s film. With all that Synthetic Pleasures is able to suggest visually about the scope of this crisis in its depiction of virtual spaces like Japan’s Ocean Dome, to that degree Lee deprives us of any stable or “real” alternative that might counter our seemingly inexhaustible desire for things simulated. The virtue of the film is that it complicates this desire from both ends. It acknowledges the detachment from experience and from the consequences of our actions that follows upon a simulacrul abstraction from the environment, and it intelligently presents the abstraction that the “human” already is for those artists, body piercers, and transsexuals who rebel against the gendered organization of the body, of the “organism” that we are and that never has been “natural” apart from very specific cultural norms.
If there is a shortcoming to the film, it turns on its failure to draw a clear distinction between the two modes this desire takes. To want a virtual reality that suggests abstraction is not the same as refusing the abstraction of a reality that is essentially constructed, even if both modes are possible in the same desire. Indeed, since the difference that needs emphasizing here is not of kind but of modes, Lee cannot say that the desire for the virtual reality of a Las Vegas casino, for instance, differs fundamentally from the desire to change one’s gender, even though one implies acquiescence to a consumerist society and the other a refusal of social norms deemed intolerable. “Synthetic pleasure” is common in both instances, and this central premise of Synthetic Pleasures is compelling as long as one does not also equivocate the modal difference. There are times when the film seems to lose its focus on this point, and the result is a breakdown in its own synthetic logic. Instead of centering for the viewer a world that is intrinsically virtual, even at the level of human biology and the structure of matter, the film in effect fissures the real and the virtual all over again, falls back to a stable definition of nature from which virtual reality can only be seen and entered into as its secondary or derived imitation.
When this happens, the film no longer clearly foregrounds its own most interesting idea that nature is simulated. It can then either criticize or celebrate consumer societies hooked on virtual reality, but it cannot grasp the pleasure of that addiction. And it can either reject or sustain the diagnosis of alienated desire, but it cannot see the way desire in the world it constructs actively resists is own social repression. This is why the film occasionally suggests condescension toward its more marginal subjects–teenagers, clubgoers, transvestites, transsexuals–and also why it might seem to filmgoers an overly optimistic portrayal of “cyberculture.”Synthetic Pleasures presumes this possibility of genuine insight into our technologically sophisticated society, and for this it should be seen and discussed in the spirit Lee hopes it will be.

BY STEFAN MATTESSICH
September 1996 Issue 17Copyright © 1996 by Stefan Mattessich</FONT>

Subject Art & Happiness
Posted Date: October 23, 2007 – Tuesday – 4:53 PM

“The World is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life…”.

           The Informational Revolution fundamentally redefined society: Satellites simulcast worldwide as mankind humbled in homage to the silicon chip. Advertising now defines class and consumer; individuals begin to define themselves digitally. The birth of “cool”, this coca-cola bliss stunted language thereby collapsing culture. In contrast to these messages, artists pursued an identity outside the brand image. Joy and sorrow rediscovered primal paths of expression. Creativity became the call of the wild. Technology captured modern minds.The twilight of the twentieth century saw the rise and fall of independent music artists; American poets used their voice to champion the cultural creative’s cause. The industry then decreed the revolution would not be televised.

Media conglomerates spun a market for neo-pop: mass industrialization of the arts; causing the reversal of value that accompanies the commoditization of creativity. For what value does an original hold when a copy can be made in facsimile? These copies then transmuted into commodity: items with a perceived value, however, lacking cultural capital. The epoch of mechanical reproduction would homogenize art into products of uniform par value. The question of art aesthetic became the cold quandary of the atomic age: the nature of machine.

Solving this post-modern conundrum requires dialectic method and a strategy of social synthesis. Together we must stand on the shoulders of those artists, writers, philosophers that precede us. Wisdom speaks from within true art, integrated beneath spectacle. This is The History: great men and women of insight expressing truth. Our responsibility is reaction. Without response creation is Form, a timeless object that will be because it has been created simply to be. The object exists for its own sake. In this sense, high art is as benign as industrialised art is malignant. Esthetic as the sole aim of creativity is forever unattainable. When the artist finally commands truth, the creative act will proclaim it with passion. The creator and the creation are only realized with reaction. The audience imbues the Art with mortality that may reveal life’s fleeting beauty.

Trans Modern Art will champion global awareness that we must together create a new dynamic form of communication. Art noveau as a social movement will cultivate human potential through total art synthesis. We will entertain, elevate, inform and illuminate. Our generation’s masterpeice will be a never-ending network self-sustaining incorporation whose true purpose is to educate.