Anarcho-Primitivism or Transhumanism?

[JackRiddler]

There is no way to avoid the problem of diminishment of subjective experience over time. If a body could be made to live 200 years - a triviality to transhumanists - or 2000 years, the person would become more and more distant from their own experiences as these piled up. Nothing would have the impact of the first or 30th time. They would increasingly become unfeeling zombies. If this was counteracted by some kind of memory erasure or combined group mind experience, they would no longer be the same person. If this was counteracted by some kind of mind expansion, they would no longer be the same person. If this was counteracted by some kind of consciousness transfer to another medium, that wouldn't be the same person. All physical immortality scenarios are illusory. Uploading a consciousness to some other medium is at best on a par with creating great art that people still receive dozens or hundreds of years after your death. Something of you lives on, but it's not you the person.

[Simulist]

There is no way to avoid the problem of diminishment of subjective experience over time. If a body could be made to live 200 years - a triviality to transhumanists - or 2000 years, the person would become more and more distant from their own experiences as these piled up. Nothing would have the impact of the first or 30th time. They would increasingly become unfeeling zombies. If this was counteracted by some kind of memory erasure or combined group mind experience, they would no longer be the same person. If this was counteracted by some kind of mind expansion, they would no longer be the same person. If this was counteracted by some kind of consciousness transfer to another medium, that wouldn't be the same person. All physical immortality scenarios are illusory. Uploading a consciousness to some other medium is at best on a par with creating great art that people still receive dozens or hundreds of years after your death. Something of you lives on, but it's not you the person.

I submit that identity itself is elastic.

Are we really the exact same people we were when we were seven? Or twenty-one? Or thirty-five? If it's true that the cells in the body fully regenerate every seven years, then how many times have we literally and physically become very different people?

And this is to say nothing of the impact our many learning experiences have had on us, which have altered "who we are."

It seems to me that in the final analysis, "who" we are — even "what" we really are — defies all conventional explanation.

[JackRiddler]

There is no way to avoid the problem of diminishment of subjective experience over time. If a body could be made to live 200 years - a triviality to transhumanists - or 2000 years, the person would become more and more distant from their own experiences as these piled up. Nothing would have the impact of the first or 30th time. They would increasingly become unfeeling zombies. If this was counteracted by some kind of memory erasure or combined group mind experience, they would no longer be the same person. If this was counteracted by some kind of mind expansion, they would no longer be the same person. If this was counteracted by some kind of consciousness transfer to another medium, that wouldn't be the same person. All physical immortality scenarios are illusory. Uploading a consciousness to some other medium is at best on a par with creating great art that people still receive dozens or hundreds of years after your death. Something of you lives on, but it's not you the person.

I submit that identity itself is elastic.

Are we really the exact same people we were when we were seven? Or twenty-one? Or thirty-five? If it's true that the cells in the body fully regenerate every seven years, then how many times have we literally and physically become very different people?

And this is to say nothing of the impact our many learning experiences have had on us, which have altered "who we are."

It seems to me that in the final analysis, "who" we are — even "what" we really are — defies all conventional explanation.

Nothing against what you are saying, which has its truth - we are all verbs, not nouns - but I am much more the person I was at seven than I would be in two hundred years under any of the transhumanist immortality scenarios I've seen described.

And if we go further, into millennia, whatever being survived would no more represent my personal immortality than would a pyramid heaped over my mummified remains. Or a portrait. In this case, it might be a 3-D portrait that people could not distinguish from the original me, but it would still not be me.

I would argue that most of the transformations I've undergone since seven were inherent among the potentials from that time and did not represent a break or an end of my prior identity and its replacement with a new one, which I believe immortality would bring about over time.

As for the physical continuity of the 7-year-old with the man in his 40s, what counts is not the identity of the atoms over time but the continuity of the mass/energy configuration that is a body. That also changes as one eats, moves and ages, of course, but again I would argue retains a single spine of identity throughtout a lifetime, one that a transhumanist immortal being would eventually lose after a century or two at most. I doubt you would argue that the old man is a simulation of the young one; but after enough time the immortal transhumanist man will indeed be a simulation of the original.

[Simulist]

I tend to agree. The transhumanist approach seems pretty nightmarish to me.

I doubt you would argue that the old man is a simulation of the young one...

I tend to think of both "the old man" and "the young one" as simulations of an evolving Identity we have neither the science in place nor even the philosophical language yet to describe in any adequate way at all.

[JackRiddler]

.

Reviving. Or reuploading. First, a prize for this post:

Sure: transhumanism is based up on the totally insane idea that 21st Century human beings have any fucking clue what we're doing to ourselves, our environment, and the cosmos in general. We can't even manage the world we actually live in, let alone create new ones that match it in richness and complexity (sorry, English: virtual reality is pretty fucking boring compared to the real world). Anarcho-primitivism, for all of its romantic idealism (sorry, English again: crunchy-granola-hippy-dippiness), is at least based on something that actually worked for 100s of 1000s of years.

Better?

New article on TH conference and its DARPA bona fides:

http://counterpunch.org/correia09152010.html

September 15, 2010
The Singularity Movement
If Only Glenn Beck Were a Cyborg

By DAVID CORREIA

While the media and blogosphere spent their August obsessively reporting and debating Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, D.C., a more important gathering with far greater political implications took place two weeks earlier yet went totally ignored by the media. The fifth-annual Singularity Summit was held in San Francisco this past August 14-15. The conference featured a roster of entrepreneurs and futurists and who led the conference goers in a celebration of the transformative power of technoscience and the coming technorapture of what they call The Singularity. The term, Singularity, coined by Vernor Vinge in 1993 and popularized by Ray Kurzweil, an author, entrepreneur and more recently the high priest of futurism, refers to the coming transcendence of science and technology in society.

The singularity movement, made up of university scientists, technocapitalists and military funders, organizes itself around a unbounded faith in exponential advancements in computing technology, nanotechnology and bioengineering that will, they claim, inexorably lead to The Singularity: the moment when technoscientific progress will send both technology and humanity past a profound threshold where life as we know it will take on a new form. This technogenesis, as many call it, will usher in a world where, in its most fantastic elaborations, we can create clones of ourselves and upload our consciousness as a way to achieve immortality; a world where we can genetically engineer ourselves around the biological constraints that currently make use human; where we can become not only cybernetic organisms but an entirely different species.

The millenarian, tent-revival fervor of many of the devotees is a product of the constant preaching coming from a growing priesthood of futurists and technologists who anticipate a world of rapid but controlled techno-human coevolution. The annual summit, a strange ceremony of the coming Singularity, is one of many outlets that express this enthusiasm. The journal, H+ (Humanity Plus), along with a host of institutions, centers and even universities advance a research agenda many refer to as “transhumanism” in which the problems of human intelligence and immortality are primary subjects.

Despite the social and scientific significance of such research, popular coverage of the event and the movement has been either nonexistent or has adopted the techno-claims of transhumanists with an uncritical zeal that matches the enthusiasm of the participants. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, aren’t the benefits of science and technology obvious and self-evident? The signs of material progress are everywhere. Technological advances, particularly medical technologies, have delivered important improvements to life expectancy, child mortality and disease eradication to name just a few. And isn’t criticism of technology always a form of backward looking, fear-based nostalgia?

Well, not entirely. The long held progressive view of technology took hit after hit in the twentieth century. Barbaric world wars, the possibility of nuclear apocalypse, and the failure of either industrial capitalism or state communism to resolve social problems such as poverty and inequality combined to throw the progressive view of technology into doubt. But instead of a new skepticism of technology and science taking root, a reenergized theology of technology emerged instead. The singularity movement reflects the peak of this shift. Its claims of human perfectibility resonate with a new view of social progress rooted not in social institutions but rather in the individual. In a post-communist, post 9/11 world, social progress, it seems, has become a function of cumulative acts of self-improvement. Progress, disconnected from collective social projects, has been reorganized and harmonized with the new faith in the individual. In this new world-view, the individual is the agent of social change and H+ serves as the Oprah Magazine of this new faith. The erosion of faith in social institutions as a path to progressive change has left the individual, in Ayn Rand-like glory, at the center of progressive politics.

First, some history. In 1998, the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) was founded, according to one member, "to defend the right of individuals in free and democratic societies to use new technologies that overcome the limitations of the human body…” So WTA works to guarantee “safe, universal and voluntary access to [transhumanist technologies]. Because ultimately, it's all about the little guy finally having a chance to not only overcome the biological limitations we all have as human beings but also the social limitations imposed on him."

Despite the democratic rhetoric, the interest in the singularity by corporate and military interests provides a clue as to the direction and social implication of transhumanist technology. In 2006, Stanford University hosted the first Singularity Summit and brought science fiction authors, start-up CEOs, scientists and speakers, like Bill McKibben and others, to examine the social implications of Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of a “coming merger of human and machine intelligence [that] will mark the next stage in the evolution of life.” Google, along with a host of other corporate sponsors, created Singularity University, where students can pay tuition of more than $25,000 for a 10-week program where they can get “really excited about the idea of biology as the new it industry.” Transhumanism, it seems, is really more about corporatism.

Indeed as Katherine Hayles has pointed out, “transhumanist rhetoric concentrates on individual transcendence; at transhumanist websites, articles, and books, there is a conspicuous absence of considering socioeconomic dynamics beyond the individual.” And platitudes about inclusiveness aside, the Transhumanist road is not one traveled by “the little guy.”

And corporations aren’t the only institutions driving the transhumanist agenda. Futurists like Kurzweil admit that the breakthroughs of the kind they anticipate require huge commitments of money and resources. And so alliances are hatched among scientists and corporate and military funders in pursuit of technological advances that they claim are undertaken for the sole benefit of individual self-improvement. Kurzweil for example envisions the Singularity as a techno-advance that will serve the general social good of society, and toward this end he pursues an enthusiastic research collaboration with the U.S. Army.

And while the progressive media refused to buy Beck’s self-serving religious piety in his “Restoring Honor” rally, they have bought the singularity silliness without questions. Instead of wondering how military-funded technologies will somehow become egalitarian, the Huffington Post is charmed by the “unbounded optimism and realism” of the movement. Instead of noting that the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency (DARPA), the venture capitalists of military violence, funds dozens of the techno-dreams drawn from the movement, The Daily Kos is instead “stunned at the reactionary attitudes” of the skeptics.

The truth is not the techno-utopia described at the conference or in the pages of H+. The singularity movement is encouraged and sponsored by a malevolent coterie of military and corporate interests in search of a technotranscendence that serves to reinforce inequality rather than the dream of human transcendence. Those who should be offering skepticism are blinded, it seems, by the truth claims and seemingly self-evident goodness of technoscience. But the singularity movement is far from progressive and the appealing possibility of technosolutions to our most intractable social and environmental issues masks frightening social and ecological implications.

The “wildly improbable dreams of the ‘perfectibility of Man’” as Leo Marx put it has a long and disturbing history. The scientists behind the Human Genome Project and the corporations profiting from genetic engineering, and the militaries interested in bioengineering are not the first to express techno-enthusiasm for the possibilities of technology and science to transform what it means to be human. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, eugenicist scientists celebrated the power of science and technology to cleanse the human genome and produce a new pure human race.

Eugenicist “scientists” convinced state and local authorities throughout the U.S. to sterilize tens of thousands of Americans. Thousands more were institutionalized and the “science” of eugenics came to serve as the central scientific principle in Nazi Germany. The coordinated campaign of “scientific” eugenics in the pursuit of human perfectibility produced tens of thousands of victims in the U.S. and millions worldwide who were guilty only of being poor, rural, uneducated or “unfit” according the “scientific” criteria.

The dark side of eugenics hid behind the edifice of science and the scientists who advanced the goals of eugenics policed the building. They painted their critics as uniformed technophobes who lacked the necessary scientific background to comment or criticize. Arrogant claims of technotranscendence are being elaborated once again, this time by singularity movement scientists who ignore the social costs and inequalities of an emerging military-led technocapitalist version of progress.

And more troubling still is that, despite the disturbing and violent history of science and technology applied to the question of human perfectibility through racial and class superiority, the singularity movement enjoys nearly universal praise from both conservative and progressive media outlets. Their futurist claims charm bloggers and reporters from across the political spectrum, from Forbes to the Daily Kos, from Wired Magazine to the Huffington Post.

There are those, however, for whom the claims of human perfectibility give pause. But to the singularity crowd critics who question the wisdom of, say, human genetic engineering are uninformed “neo-Luddites and technophobes.” And to those concerned that the technology could serve to reinforce existing social inequalities by, for example, increasing the power of the corporations and militaries that control the technologies, they declare, “transhumanists… all share the value of rational thinking, freedom, tolerance, democracy and concern for our fellow human beings.”

We believe them at our own risk. The inventors and popularizers of any technology are rarely the best judges of the social implications and future applications of technologies. As the cultural critic Lewis Mumford warned, technological progress is not a function of any essential quality and inherent driver within technology, but rather reflects a deliberate effort by individuals and institutions to drive technology as a means to achieve certain economic and political ends. As “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord” wrote Karl Marx in the Poverty of Philosophy, “the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.” What kind of society does science and technology directed and controlled by military and corporate interests give us?

Mumford concluded that when technology was developed, controlled and rationalized by capitalists, it served class interests and capitalist accumulation. Despite the optimism of scientists, he came to realize that faith in the “serviceability of the machine” was really about service to capitalist enterprise. Progress in technology was not an inexorable force, and certainly not an egalitarian force of social change, but rather progress in technology, he concluded, could be charted in the United States for its ability to serve the needs of capital over the needs of society.

The most important scientific institutions, the largest U.S. corporations, and the most prominent academics gave legitimacy and momentum to the long eugenic nightmare in the U.S. In 1902 Stanford President David Starr Jordan elaborated a eugenics visions in which human perfectibility through science offered the only path to human liberation. Today, Stanford University once again celebrates human perfectibility through the Singularity Institute. Once again prominent academic scientists contribute to the fiction that technology is somehow always autonomous, benevolent, and to the benefits of everyone.

Eugenics was, among other things, a profitable industry for IBM. And once again the dream of human perfectibility is proving to be the new “it” industry. It is bankrolled by venture capitalists and military interests who anticipate super profits. The Singularity does not anticipate human liberation but offers the conditions of permanent capitalist social relations and the bioengineering of bourgeois values. The singularity movement is old-fashioned eugenics with better techniques passing itself off as pragmatic postmodernism.

While there are those interested in developing a politics of technology that interrogates the social and environmental costs of technological change, it’s rarely the critical version offered by Mumford but more often one that ignores the political economy of technological change and instead focuses on a superficial politics of pollution or negative externalities. But the pressing political need made evident by the rise of the singularity movement is the necessity of a politics of technology that considers the social costs of military technologies of human perfectibility.

Technological change transforms society but never in the way its enthusiasts predict. Technological change works to reconstitute the conditions not just of production but of survival in capitalist society in ways that transform the structure of our interests. What kind of society is created, for example, when human genetic engineering is controlled by corporate interests? For whom does that society serve if not those who control the technologies for profit? This is a particularly germane question for the singularity movement given who’s funding and profiting from the technologies whose praises the singularity movement sings.

The silly musings of singularity’s futurists and technologists make their utopian visions sound like episodes of the Jetsons. But the bourgeois dream of class domination and faith in technoscience hide its corporate face with scientific fact, military control with techno-enthusiasm, and ruling class ideology for general human benefit.

So why the lack of skeptical consideration? The silly Techno-capitalist-transcendent language of the singularity movement finds broad social acceptance because of a remarkably underdeveloped politics of technology on the political left. To the easily fooled, The Singularity looks like a) a good idea, b) a baffling idea beyond the ability of radical politics to critique, or c) a silly science-fictiony idea not worth addressing. But it’s none of the above. Instead it represents the highest aspirations of reactionary politics to foreclose the possibility of radical social change.

So, what would such a critical politics of technology look like? And how can a radical politics of technology overcome the widely held belief that technology is always and everywhere a progressive force? First, we need to take “things” seriously. As Langdon Winner has argued, the artifacts of technology, once unleashed, advance a politics the reveal the inner logic of their design. The ridiculously low bridges Robert Moses constructed on the Long Island Parkway were designed to exclude the poor and people of color. The low bridges excluded all but single passenger cars and reserved the beaches for middle and upper class New Yorkers. Moses’s bridges were technological tools of racist city planning.

Many of the technologies that singularity movement scientists celebrate are funded by corporate behemoths and the U.S. military. If the costs of the benefits of technology are paid with our own techno-dependence, then the technologies of the singularity movement promise to intensify corporate control and military authority in society.

Second, SM draws its intellectual force from a long history of technoscience claims to human perfectibility, such as the eugenics movement. Just as the language of science and the “inevitability” of technological progress blinded millions to the darker side of eugenics, the arrogant, uncritical celebration of technotranscendence disguises the reactionary logic of The Singularity. The transcendence implies an eclipse of biological limits and therefore of social relations thus foreclosing the possibility of social and political struggle. The sparkling promise of technoscience blinds even the most obvious critics to this frightening premise. The Singularity does not anticipate human liberation but instead announces the zenith of bourgeois values like efficiency, productivity and standardization germlined into the human genome.

But is all off this even possible? Isn’t this all just technological pie in the sky? Probably, The Singularity moment is after all not science, but rather ideology. But that’s just the thing the left refuses to say.

David Correia is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico. He teaches classes in Environment, Science and Technology and writes about environmental politics, science and New Mexican history. He can be reached at dcorreia(at)unm.edu

[tazmic]

Thanks for posting this Jack.

In a post-communist, post 9/11 world, social progress, it seems, has become a function of cumulative acts of self-improvement. Progress, disconnected from collective social projects, has been reorganized and harmonized with the new faith in the individual. In this new world-view, the individual is the agent of social change and H+ serves as the Oprah Magazine of this new faith. The erosion of faith in social institutions as a path to progressive change has left the individual, in Ayn Rand-like glory, at the center of progressive politics.

From here:

Pool, who defined himself as a "soft technological determinist," also thinks that technology "will promote individualism." On the contrary, the evidence points to the dwindling of autonomous selfhood under the superficial signs of privatism and lifestyles—styles bought and discarded like ready-made fashions. In the tradition of William Morris and Patrick Geddes, Mumford argues that "technological civilization destroys the individual’s capacity to take part in the craft of fabricating his world."

(Makes me think of the sheer genius of the American constitution having people relate their freedom to their individual rights, thus supporting a system that abhors community rights and everything that would make our freedom meaningful, self supporting and let’s not forget, powerful.)

Mumford concluded that when technology was developed, controlled and rationalized by capitalists, it served class interests and capitalist accumulation. Despite the optimism of scientists, he came to realize that faith in the “serviceability of the machine” was really about service to capitalist enterprise. Progress in technology was not an inexorable force, and certainly not an egalitarian force of social change, but rather progress in technology, he concluded, could be charted in the United States for its ability to serve the needs of capital over the needs of society.

I think Ellul takes things a bit further than Mumford who seems to think that things would be different without those damn capitalists, but whilst I don't think this subject should be wholly embedded within a left/right debate I can't ignore the economic machine being perhaps our first (and continuing) subjugation of life to technique.

Many of the technologies that singularity movement scientists celebrate are funded by corporate behemoths and the U.S. military. If the costs of the benefits of technology are paid with our own techno-dependence, then the technologies of the singularity movement promise to intensify corporate control and military authority in society.

We invent tools and adapt ourselves to their needs - except 'we' aren't the ones inventing the tools.

The Singularity moment is after all not science, but rather ideology. But that’s just the thing the left refuses to say.

Why does the left refuse to say this? (And do they so refuse?) What then is 'the left' saying about it?

[Wombaticus Rex]

I had no idea the Singularity was a leftist issue. WTF?

I'm surprised by how often I get asked by Brainsturbator readers about...when I think the Singularity will happen, what I'm doing to prepare for the Singularity, if I've ever talked to Kurzweil....it's been good. It's given me a lot of reason to reflect on who I was when I was working on that site vs. who I've evolved into now. (I'd like to thank Nordic and JackRiddler for some of the information and the questioning that catalyzed and continued the change, btw.)

I have a lot more respect for the work of Aubrey de Gray -- at least THAT guy is going to actually be alive at the end of HIS immortality quest. Kurzweil is going to die pretending that having a computerized copy of himself on a server is going to save him from the void, and will get re-educated pretty quickly. Aubrey at least has the sense to stay in his own body, if he plans on any kind of meaningful "life extension."

[brainpanhandler]

There is no way to avoid the problem of diminishment of subjective experience over time. If a body could be made to live 200 years - a triviality to transhumanists - or 2000 years, the person would become more and more distant from their own experiences as these piled up. Nothing would have the impact of the first or 30th time. They would increasingly become unfeeling zombies. If this was counteracted by some kind of memory erasure or combined group mind experience, they would no longer be the same person.

This is in fact my favored metaphysical explanation for our existence here. I think we're all actually the equivalent of unfeeling god zombies that became utterly bored with perfect knowledge of everything and realities such as we inhabit now are just vacations from that divine ennui.

[tazmic]

If a body could be made to live 200 years - a triviality to transhumanists - or 2000 years, the person would become more and more distant from their own experiences as these piled up.

No, eventually they'd all become enlightened and consequently free of the cycle of rebirth, and then spend eternity in a constant state of irony.

[Allegro]

... transhumanism is based up on the totally insane idea that 21st Century human beings have any fucking clue what we're doing to ourselves, our environment, and the cosmos in general. We can't even manage the world we actually live in, let alone create new ones that match it in richness and complexity (sorry, English: virtual reality is pretty fucking boring compared to the real world). ... [Refer this page.]

Agreed.

You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing. [Refer.] [Walker Percy]

[FourthBase]

ANYTHING, literally ANYTHING but transhumanism.

viewtopic.php?p=207815#p207815

[Luther Blissett]

That article is TERRIBLE. I counted at least a dozen broad, unfathomable leaps from eugenics and capitalism to 'futurism' as a broadly-defined article. I can assure you that I am a human rights advocate and a futurist. Maybe it's because I'm just creative and 'good with computers'?

[justdrew]

I recently found in my archives (ok, old suitcases) an old Extropian magazine from 97. I wonder what those malarkey artists are up to these days?

hmm, looks like a website not updated in three years and he/they've moved to Dallas, TX. Though as per typical bogosity, they list their phone number with a 011 prefix, as if people from all over the world are calling so frequently, and so unaccustomed to dialing the US, they need to be reminded how to. awesome!

Jack - "no longer be the same person" ? Is the 50yo really the same person he or she was when they were a 15yo?

[Simulist]

Jack - "no longer be the same person" ? Is the 50yo really the same person he or she was when they were a 15yo?

I think that's a very important question.

In the more immediate sense, no, I don't think a 50 year-old is the "same person" s/he was when s/he was 15.

But in another very important sense, I think we're all part of a much larger creature we don't even have a very good name for yet (Jung tried by talking about the "collective unconscious" — even St. Paul may have tried when he wrote about "the body of Christ"). I think we're all "neural nodes" of sorts within this creature, and that when viewed from that Totality, there is a sort of "trans-humanism" going on already, and always has been.

[Luther Blissett]

That article is so bad that I want to know on whose payroll David Correia is. Seriously that or he's seriously misinformed. 90% of futurist thought revolves around open, democratic, free education and rights-for-all ideologies and is what I'd classify as fervently anti-corporatist as this place. Someone out there has a stick up their ass for the 'singularity' and I'd like to know who and why. Clearly it frightens someone and that person isn't concerned with civil rights in the least.