Forget about listening to ourselves. In the age of
data, algorithms have the answer, writes the historian Yuval Noah Harari
© Janne
Iivonen
Yuval Noah Harari
AUGUST 26 2016
https://www.ft.com/content/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c
For
thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during
the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau summed up this revolution in Emile, his 1762 treatise on
education. When looking for the rules of conduct in life, Rousseau found them
“in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can
efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I
feel to be good is good, what I feel to be bad is bad.” Humanist thinkers such
as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate
source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority
of all.
Now, a
fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimised by
religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist
ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new
universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data.
This novel creed may be called “Dataism”. In its extreme form, proponents of the
Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms
as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic
vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then
merge into it.
We are
already becoming tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really
understands. Every day I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls
and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails,
phone calls and articles. I don’t really know where I fit into the great scheme
of things, and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions
of other humans and computers. I don’t have time to find out, because I am too
busy answering emails. This relentless dataflow sparks new inventions and
disruptions that nobody plans, controls or comprehends.
But no one
needs to understand. All you need to do is answer your emails faster. Just as
free-market capitalists believe in the invisible hand of the market, so Dataists
believe in the invisible hand of the dataflow. As the global data-processing
system becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, so connecting to the system
becomes the source of all meaning. The new motto says: “If you experience
something — record it. If you record something — upload it. If you upload
something — share it.”
Dataists
further believe that given enough biometric data and computing power, this
all-encompassing system could understand humans much better than we understand
ourselves. Once that happens, humans will lose their authority, and humanist
practices such as democratic elections will become as obsolete as rain dances
and flint knives.
When
Michael Gove announced his shortlived candidacy to become Britain’s prime
minister in the wake of June’s Brexit vote, he explained: “In every step in my
political life I have asked myself one question, ‘What is the right thing to
do? What does your heart tell you?’” That’s why, according to Gove, he had
fought so hard for Brexit, and that’s why he felt compelled to backstab his
erstwhile ally Boris Johnson and bid for the alpha-dog position himself —
because his heart told him to do it.
Gove is not
alone in listening to his heart in critical moments. For the past few centuries
humanism has seen the human heart as the supreme source of authority not merely
in politics but in every other field of activity. From infancy we are bombarded
with a barrage of humanist slogans counselling us: “Listen to yourself, be true
to yourself, trust yourself, follow your heart, do what feels good.”
In
politics, we believe that authority depends on the free choices of ordinary
voters. In market economics, we maintain that the customer is always right.
Humanist art thinks that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; humanist
education teaches us to think for ourselves; and humanist ethics advise us that
if it feels good, we should go ahead and do it.
Of course,
humanist ethics often run into difficulties in situations when something that
makes me feel good makes you feel bad. For example, every year for the past
decade the Israeli LGBT community has held a gay parade in the streets of
Jerusalem. It is a unique day of harmony in this conflict-riven city, because
it is the one occasion when religious Jews, Muslims and Christians suddenly
find a common cause — they all fume in accord against the gay parade. What’s
really interesting, though, is the argument the religious fanatics use. They
don’t say: “You shouldn’t hold a gay parade because God forbids homosexuality.”
Rather, they explain to every available microphone and TV camera that “seeing a
gay parade passing through the holy city of Jerusalem hurts our feelings. Just
as gay people want us to respect their feelings, they should respect ours.” It
doesn’t matter what you think about this particular conundrum; it is far more
important to understand that in a humanist society, ethical and political debates
are conducted in the name of conflicting human feelings, rather than in the
name of divine commandments.
We are
already becoming tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really
understands
Yet
humanism is now facing an existential challenge and the idea of “free will” is
under threat. Scientific insights into the way our brains and bodies work
suggest that our feelings are not some uniquely human spiritual quality.
Rather, they are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order
to make decisions by quickly calculating probabilities of survival and
reproduction.
Contrary to
popular opinion, feelings aren’t the opposite of rationality; they are
evolutionary rationality made flesh. When a baboon, giraffe or human sees a
lion, fear arises because a biochemical algorithm calculates the relevant data
and concludes that the probability of death is high. Similarly, feelings of
sexual attraction arise when other biochemical algorithms calculate that a
nearby individual offers a high probability for successful mating. These
biochemical algorithms have evolved and improved through millions of years of
evolution. If the feelings of some ancient ancestor made a mistake, the genes
shaping these feelings did not pass on to the next generation.
Even though
humanists were wrong to think that our feelings reflected some mysterious “free
will”, up until now humanism still made very good practical sense. For although
there was nothing magical about our feelings, they were nevertheless the best
method in the universe for making decisions — and no outside system could hope
to understand my feelings better than me. Even if the Catholic Church or the
Soviet KGB spied on me every minute of every day, they lacked the biological
knowledge and the computing power necessary to calculate the biochemical
processes shaping my desires and choices. Hence, humanism was correct in
telling people to follow their own heart. If you had to choose between
listening to the Bible and listening to your feelings, it was much better to
listen to your feelings. The Bible represented the opinions and biases of a few
priests in ancient Jerusalem. Your feelings, in contrast, represented the
accumulated wisdom of millions of years of evolution that have passed the most
rigorous quality-control tests of natural selection.
However, as
the Church and the KGB give way to Google and Facebook, humanism loses its
practical advantages. For we are now at the confluence of two scientific tidal
waves. On the one hand, biologists are deciphering the mysteries of the human
body and, in particular, of the brain and of human feelings. At the same time,
computer scientists are giving us unprecedented data-processing power. When you
put the two together, you get external systems that can monitor and understand
my feelings much better than I can. Once Big Data systems know me better than I
know myself, authority will shift from humans to algorithms. Big Data could
then empower Big Brother.
This has
already happened in the field of medicine. The most important medical decisions
in your life are increasingly based not on your feelings of illness or
wellness, or even on the informed predictions of your doctor — but on the
calculations of computers who know you better than you know yourself. A recent
example of this process is the case of the actress Angelina Jolie. In 2013,
Jolie took a genetic test that proved she was carrying a dangerous mutation of
the BRCA1 gene. According to statistical databases, women carrying this
mutation have an 87 per cent probability of developing breast cancer. Although
at the time Jolie did not have cancer, she decided to pre-empt the disease and
undergo a double mastectomy. She didn’t feel ill but she wisely decided to
listen to the computer algorithms. “You may not feel anything is wrong,” said
the algorithms, “but there is a time bomb ticking in your DNA. Do something
about it — now!”
Authority
will shift from humans to computer algorithms. Big Data could then empower Big
Brother
What is
already happening in medicine is likely to take place in more and more fields.
It starts with simple things, like which book to buy and read. How do humanists
choose a book? They go to a bookstore, wander between the aisles, flip through
one book and read the first few sentences of another, until some gut feeling
connects them to a particular tome. Dataists use Amazon. As I enter the Amazon
virtual store, a message pops up and tells me: “I know which books you liked in
the past. People with similar tastes also tend to love this or that new book.”
This is
just the beginning. Devices such as Amazon’s Kindle are able constantly to
collect data on their users while they are reading books. Your Kindle can
monitor which parts of a book you read quickly, and which slowly; on which page
you took a break, and on which sentence you abandoned the book, never to pick
it up again. If Kindle was to be upgraded with face recognition software and
biometric sensors, it would know how each sentence influenced your heart rate
and blood pressure. It would know what made you laugh, what made you sad, what
made you angry. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them. And
whereas you quickly forget most of what you read, computer programs need never
forget. Such data should eventually enable Amazon to choose books for you with
uncanny precision. It will also allow Amazon to know exactly who you are, and
how to press your emotional buttons.
Take this
to its logical conclusion, and eventually people may give algorithms the
authority to make the most important decisions in their lives, such as who to
marry. In medieval Europe, priests and parents had the authority to choose your
mate for you. In humanist societies we give this authority to our feelings. In
a Dataist society I will ask Google to choose. “Listen, Google,” I will say,
“both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in a different
way, and it’s so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do
you advise me to do?”
And Google
will answer: “Well, I know you from the day you were born. I have read all your
emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA
and the entire biometric history of your heart. I have exact data about each
date you went on, and I can show you second-by-second graphs of your heart
rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or
Paul. And, naturally enough, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all
this information, on my superb algorithms and on decades’ worth of statistics
about millions of relationships — I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per
cent probability of being more satisfied with him in the long run.
“Indeed, I
know you so well that I even know you don’t like this answer. Paul is much more
handsome than John and, because you give external appearances too much weight,
you secretly wanted me to say ‘Paul’. Looks matter, of course, but not as much
as you think. Your biochemical algorithms — which evolved tens of thousands of
years ago in the African savannah — give external beauty a weight of 35 per
cent in their overall rating of potential mates. My algorithms — which are
based on the most up-to-date studies and statistics — say that looks have only
a 14 per cent impact on the long-term success of romantic relationships. So,
even though I took Paul’s beauty into account, I still tell you that you would
be better off with John.”
Google
won’t have to be perfect. It won’t have to be correct all the time. It will
just have to be better on average than me
Google
won’t have to be perfect. It won’t have to be correct all the time. It will
just have to be better on average than me. And that is not so difficult,
because most people don’t know themselves very well, and most people often make
terrible mistakes in the most important decisions of their lives.
The Dataist
worldview is very attractive to politicians, business people and ordinary
consumers because it offers groundbreaking technologies and immense new powers.
For all the fear of missing our privacy and our free choice, when consumers
have to choose between keeping their privacy and having access to far superior
healthcare — most will choose health.
For
scholars and intellectuals, Dataism promises to provide the scientific Holy
Grail that has eluded us for centuries: a single overarching theory that
unifies all the scientific disciplines from musicology through economics, all
the way to biology. According to Dataism, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a
stock-exchange bubble and the flu virus are just three patterns of dataflow
that can be analysed using the same basic concepts and tools. This idea is
extremely attractive. It gives all scientists a common language, builds bridges
over academic rifts and easily exports insights across disciplinary borders.
Of course,
like previous all-encompassing dogmas, Dataism, too, may be founded on a
misunderstanding of life. In particular, Dataism has no answer to the notorious
“hard problem of consciousness”. At present we are very far from explaining
consciousness in terms of data-processing. Why is it that when billions of
neurons in the brain fire particular signals to one another, a subjective
feeling of love or fear or anger appears? We don’t have a clue.
But even if
Dataism is wrong about life, it may still conquer the world. Many previous
creeds gained enormous popularity and power despite their factual mistakes. If
Christianity and communism could do it, why not Dataism? Dataism has especially
good prospects, because it is currently spreading across all scientific
disciplines. A unified scientific paradigm may easily become an unassailable
dogma.
If you
don’t like this, and you want to stay beyond the reach of the algorithms, there
is probably just one piece of advice to give you, the oldest in the book: know
thyself. In the end, it’s a simple empirical question. As long as you have
greater insight and self-knowledge than the algorithms, your choices will still
be superior and you will keep at least some authority in your hands. If the
algorithms nevertheless seem poised to take over, it is mainly because most
human beings hardly know themselves at all.
Yuval Noah
Harari is the author of ‘Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow’, published by
Harvill Secker on September 8. He will be speaking in London, Cambridge,
Manchester and Bristol. For more information go to po.st/HomoDeusEvents
Illustrations
by Janne Iivonen
TRANSFORMATION
The unacknowledged fictions of Yuval Harari
Replacing one set of myths with another is no basis
for confronting the earth’s existential problems.
Jeremy Lent
6 January
2019
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/unacknowledged-fictions-of-yuval-harari/
When Yuval
Noah Harari speaks, the world listens. Or at least, much of the world’s reading
public. His first two blockbusters, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, have sold 12 million copies globally,
and his new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, is on bestseller lists
everywhere. His fans include Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg,
he’s admired by opinion shapers as diverse as Sam Harris and Russell Brand, and
he’s fêted at the IMF and World Economic Forum.
A
galvanizing theme of Harari’s writing is that humans are driven by shared,
frequently unacknowledged fictions. Many of these fictions, he rightly points
out, underlie the concepts that organize society, such as the value of the US
dollar or the authority of nation states. In critiquing the current vogue topic
of “fake news,” Harari observes that this is nothing new, but has been around
for millennia in the form of organized religion.
However,
though apparently unwittingly, Harari himself perpetuates a set of
unacknowledged fictions that he relies on as foundations for his own version of
reality. Given his enormous sway as a public intellectual, this risks causing
considerable harm. Like the traditional religious dogmas that he mocks, his own
implicit stories wield great influence over the global power elite as long as
they remain unacknowledged.
Fiction #1:
nature is a machine.
One of
Harari’s most striking prophecies is that artificial intelligence will come to
replace even the most creative human endeavors, and ultimately be capable of
controlling every aspect of human cognition. The underlying rationale for his
prediction is that human consciousness -including emotions, intuitions, and
feelings - is nothing more than a series of algorithms, which could all
theoretically be deciphered and predicted by a computer program. Our feelings,
he tells us, are merely “biochemical mechanisms” resulting from “billions of
neurons calculating” based on algorithms honed by evolution.
The idea
that humans - and indeed all of nature - can be understood as very complicated
machines is in fact a uniquely European cultural myth that arose in the 17th
century and has since taken hold of the popular imagination. In the heady days
of the Scientific Revolution, Descartes declared he saw no difference “between
the machines made by craftsmen and the various bodies that nature alone
composes.” The preferred machine metaphor is now the computer, with Richard
Dawkins (apparently influencing Harari) writing that “life is just bytes and
bytes and bytes of digital information,” but the idea remains the same -
everything in nature can ultimately be reduced to its component parts and
understood accordingly.
This myth,
however attractive it might be to our technology-driven age, is as fictional as
the theory that God created the universe in six days. Biologists point out
principles intrinsic to life that categorically differentiate it from even the
most complicated machine. Living organisms cannot be split, like a computer,
between hardware and software. A neuron’s biophysical makeup is intrinsically
linked to its behavior: the information it transmits doesn’t exist separately
from its material construction. As prominent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio
states in The Strange Order of Things, Harari’s assumptions are “not
scientifically sound” and his conclusions are “certainly wrong.”
The dangers
of this fiction arise when others base their actions on this flawed foundation.
Believing that nature is a machine inspires a hubristic arrogance that
technology can solve all humanity’s problems. Molecular biologists promote
genetic engineering to enhance food production, while others advocate
geo-engineering as a solution to climate breakdown - strategies fraught with
the risk of massive unintended consequences. Recognizing that natural
processes, from the human mind to the entire global ecosystem, are complex,
nonlinear, and inherently unpredictable, is a necessary first step in crafting
truly systemic solutions to the existential crises facing our civilization.
Fiction #2:
“there is no alternative.”
When
Margaret Thatcher teamed up with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to impose the
free-market, corporate-driven doctrine of neoliberalism on the world, she famously
used the slogan “There Is No Alternative” to argue that the other two great
ideologies of the twentieth century - fascism and communism - had failed,
leaving her brand of unrestrained market capitalism as the only meaningful
choice.
Astonishingly,
three decades later, Harari echoes her caricatured version of history,
declaring how, after the collapse of communism, only “the liberal story
remained.” The current crisis, as Harari sees it, is that “liberalism has no
obvious answers to the biggest problems we face.” We now need to “craft a
completely new story,” he avers, to respond to the turmoil of modern times.
Sadly,
Harari seems to have missed the abundant, effervescent broth of inspiring
visions for a flourishing future developed over decades by progressive thinkers
across the globe. He appears to be entirely ignorant of the new foundations for
economics proffered by pioneering thinkers such as Kate Raworth; the exciting
new principles for a life-affirming future within the framework of an
Ecological Civilization; the stirring moral foundation established by the Earth
Charter and endorsed by over 6,000 organizations worldwide; in addition to
countless other variations of the “new story” that Harari laments is missing.
It’s a story of hope that celebrates our shared humanity and emphasizes our
deep connection with a living earth.
The problem
is not, as Harari argues, that we are “left without any story.” It is, rather,
that the world’s mass media is dominated by the same overpowering transnational
corporations that maintain a stranglehold over virtually all other aspects of
global activity, and choose not to give a platform to the stories that
undermine the Thatcherian myth that neoliberalism is still the only game in
town.
Harari is
well positioned to apprise mainstream thinkers of the hopeful possibilities on
offer. In doing so, he would have the opportunity to influence the future
that—as he rightly points out—holds terrifying prospects without a change in
direction. Is he ready for this challenge? Perhaps, but first he would need to
investigate the assumptions underlying Fiction #3.
Fiction #3:
Life Is meaningless - It’s best to do nothing.
Yuval
Harari is a dedicated meditator, sitting for two hours a day to practice
vipassana (insight) meditation, which he learned from the celebrated teacher
Goenka. Based on Goenka’s tutelage, Harari offers his own version of the
Buddha’s original teaching: “Life,” he writes, “has no meaning, and people
don’t need to create any meaning.” In answer to the question as to what people
should do, Harari summarizes his view of the Buddha’s answer: “Do nothing.
Absolutely nothing.”
As a fellow
meditator and admirer of Buddhist principles, I share Harari’s conviction that
Buddhist insight can help reduce suffering on many levels. However, I am
concerned that, in distilling the Buddha’s teaching to these sound bites,
Harari gives a philosophical justification to those who choose to do nothing to
avert the imminent humanitarian and ecological catastrophes threatening our
future.
The
statement that “life has no meaning” seems to arise more from the modern
reductionist ontology of physicist Steven Weinberg than the mouth of the
Buddha. To suggest that “people don’t need to create any meaning” contradicts
an evolved instinct of the human species. As I describe in my own book, The
Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, human
cognition drives us to impose meaning into the universe, a process that’s
substantially shaped by the culture a person is born into. However, by
recognizing the underlying structures of meaning instilled in us by our own
culture, we can become mindful of our own patterns of thought, thus enabling us
to reshape them for more beneficial outcomes - a process I call “cultural
mindfulness.”
There are,
in fact, other interpretations of the Buddha’s core teachings that lead to very
different distillations - ones that cry out “Do Something!” - inspiring
meaningful engagement in worldly activities. The principle of ‘dependent
origination,’ for example, emphasizes the intrinsic interdependence of all
aspects of existence, and forms the basis for the politically engaged Buddhism
of prominent monk and peace activist, Thích Nhất Hạnh. Another essential
Buddhist practice is metta, or compassion meditation, which focuses on
identifying with the suffering of others, and resolving to devote one’s own life
energies to reducing that suffering. These are sources of meaning in life that
are fundamentally consistent with Buddhist principles.
Fiction #4:
Humanity’s future Is a spectator sport.
A
distinguishing characteristic of Harari’s writing, and one that may account for
much of his prodigious success, is his ability to transcend the preconceptions
of everyday life and offer a panoramic view of human history - as though he’s
orbiting the earth from ten thousand miles and transmitting what he sees. Through his meditation practice, Harari
confides, he has been able to “actually observe reality as it is,” which gave
him the focus and clear-sightedness to write Sapiens and Homo Deus. He
differentiates his recent 21 Lessons for the 21st Century from his first two
books by declaring that, in contrast to their ten thousand-mile Earth orbit, he
will now “zoom in on the here and now.”
While the
content of his new book is definitely the messy present, Harari continues to
view the world as if through a scientist’s objective lens. However, Harari’s
understanding of science appears to be limited to the confines of Fiction #1 -
“Nature Is a Machine” - which requires complete detachment from whatever is
being studied. Acknowledging that his forecast for humanity “seems patently
unjust,” he justifies his own moral detachment, retorting that “this is a
historical prediction, not a political manifesto.”
In recent
decades, however, systems thinkers in multiple scientific disciplines have
transformed this notion of pristine scientific objectivity. Recognizing nature
as a dynamic, self-organized fractal complex of nonlinear systems, which can
only be truly understood in terms of how each part relates to each other and
the whole, they have shown how these principles apply, not just to the natural
world, but also our own human social systems. A crucial implication is that the
observer is part of what is being observed, with the result that the observer’s
conclusions and ensuing actions feed back into the system being investigated.
This
insight holds important ethical implications for approaching the great problems
facing humanity. Once you recognize that you are part of the system you’re
analyzing, this raises a moral imperative to act on your findings, and to raise
awareness of others regarding their own intrinsic responsibilities. The future
is not a spectator sport - in fact, every one of us is on the team and can make
a difference in the outcome. We can no longer afford any fictions - the stakes
have become too high.
We Must Not Accept an Algorithmic Account of
Human Life
To a certain extent, living organisms are constructed
according to algorithms, but they are not algorithms themselves. Every
component is a vulnerable living entity of its own. They are not simply lines
of code.
By
Antonio
Damasio, Contributor
Dornsife
Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy at USC
06/28/2016 01:05pm
EDT | Updated December 6, 2017
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/algorithmic-human-life_b_10699712
One
remarkable development of twentieth century science is the discovery that both
physical structures and the communication of ideas can be assembled on the
basis of algorithms that make use of codes. The genetic code helps living
organisms assemble the basics of other living organisms and guide their
development. Verbal languages provide us with alphabets (with which we can
assemble an infinity of words that name an infinity of objects, actions,
relationships and events) and with grammatical rules that govern the sequencing
of the words so as to construct sentences and stories that narrate events or
explain ideas.
Many
aspects of the assembly of natural organisms and of communication depend on
algorithms and on coding, as do all aspects of computation as well as the
enterprises of artificial intelligence and robotics. These solid and
interesting facts, however, have given rise to the sweeping notion that natural
organisms would be reducible to algorithms or fully explainable by algorithms.
The worlds
of artificial intelligence, biology and even neuroscience are inebriated with
this notion. The thoughtful historian Yuval Harari echoed it in a recent
interview published in the The WorldPost. Asked to pick one idea that would
prove most influential in the next 50 years, Harari responded, "It's
definitely the algorithm" and added that current biology can be summarized
in three words: "Organisms are algorithms." Not only that, biology
and computer science are converging because the "basic insight that unites
the biological with the electronic is that bodies and brains are also
algorithms." The fact that "we can write algorithms
artificially" enables the convergence.
Needless to
say, I am not blaming Harari for voicing ideas that have gained currency in
technology and science circles. I am only interested in the merit of the ideas
and because ideas do matter, this is an opportunity to consider if they conform
to scientific fact and how they fare in human terms. From my perspective, they
are not scientifically sound, and they suggest a problematic account of
humanity. Why so?
Saying that living organisms are algorithms is, in the
very least, misleading and in strict terms, false.
Saying that
living organisms are algorithms is, in the very least, misleading and in strict
terms, false. Algorithms are formulas, recipes, enumerations of steps in the
construction of a predicted result. As noted, living organisms, including human
organisms, use code-dependent algorithms such as the genetic machinery. But
while, to a certain extent, living organisms are constructed according to
algorithms, they are not algorithms themselves. They are consequences of the
engagement of algorithms. The critical issue, however, is that living organisms
are collections of tissues, organs and systems within which every component
cell is a vulnerable living entity made of proteins, lipids and sugars. They
are not lines of code.
The idea
that living organisms are algorithms helps perpetuate the false notion that the
substrates of organism construction are not relevant. This is because embedded
within the label "algorithm" is a notion of context and
substrate-independence. Applying the same algorithm to new contexts, using
different substrates, is presumed to achieve similar results. But this is
simply not so. Substrates count. The substrate of life is organized chemistry,
a servant to thermodynamics and the imperative of homeostasis, and to the best
of our current knowledge, that substrate is essential to explain who we are.
Why so?
First,
because the particular chemical substrate of life is necessary for the
phenomena of feeling, and, in humans, reflection and elaboration on the
experience of feelings is the basis for much that we hold as humanly
distinctive and admirable, including moral and aesthetic judgments as well as
the experience and notions of being and transcendence. While there is plenty of
evidence that artificial organisms can be designed so as to operate
intelligently and even surpass the intelligence of human organisms, there is no
evidence to date that such artificial organisms can generate feelings without
an actual living substrate (I note that the counterhypothesis, i.e. that
certain designs might allow artificial organisms to simulate feelings, is well
worth investigating).
In brief,
there is no evidence that pure intellectual processes, which lend themselves
well to an algorithmic account and which do not appear to be as sensitive to
the substrate, can form the basis for what makes us distinctly human. Throw
away the chemical substrate and you throw away feelings along with the values
that humanistic cultures, from the axial ages forward, have been celebrating in
the form of arts, religious beliefs, justice and fair governance. Once we
remove suffering and flourishing, for example, there is no natural grounding
for the logical conclusion that human beings deserve dignity. Of note, none of
this implies that the higher functions of living organisms are not amenable to
scientific investigation. They certainly are, provided the investigations take
into account the living substrate and the complexity of the processes.
The
implication of these distinctions is not trivial as we contemplate a new era of
medicine in which the extension of human life will be possible by means of
genetic engineering and the creation of human-artificial hybrids.
There is no evidence that pure intellectual processes
can form the basis for what makes us distinctly human.
Second, the
abundant presence of conscious feeling and creative intelligence in humans
guarantees that the execution of the native algorithms can be thwarted. Our
freedom to run against the impulses that the good or bad angels of our natures
attempt to impose on us, is limited; but the fact remains that we can act
against such impulses. The history of human cultures is in good part a
narrative of our resistance to native algorithms by means of inventions not
predicted by those algorithms. One can argue that all of these departures from
native algorithms are in turn open to an algorithmic account. The scope of an
algorithm may be expanded to capture a system at an arbitrary level of detail,
but by then, what are the advantages of using the term algorithm?
Third,
accepting an algorithmic account of humanity is the sort of reductionist
position that often leads good souls to dismiss science and technology as
demeaning and bemoan the passing of an age in which philosophy, complete with
aesthetic sensibility and a religious response to suffering and death, made
humans soar above the species on whose biological shoulders they were riding.
But of course, denying the value of science as a reaction to problematic accounts
of humanity is not acceptable either.
Science and
philosophical inquiry can proceed side by side, not always in synchrony but
often feeding off each other. Science needs to continue, in spite of the
enthusiasts who reduce the sublime power of life to engineering and
entrepreneurial successes, and in spite of the nervous Jeremiahs who are afraid
that science will not honor the humanist traditions of the past. Both science,
as honest knowledge-seeking, and philosophy, as serious debate and love of honest
scientific knowledge, will not only endure but prevail.
Transhumanism
Transhumanism
is a philosophical movement, the proponents of which advocate and predict the
enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available
sophisticated technologies able to greatly enhance longevity, mood and
cognitive abilities.
Transhumanist
thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that
could overcome fundamental human limitations as well as the ethics of using
such technologies. Some transhumanists believe that human beings may eventually
be able to transform themselves into beings with abilities so greatly expanded
from the current condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings.
Another
topic of transhumanist research is how to protect humanity against existential
risks, such as nuclear war or asteroid collision.
The
contemporary meaning of the term "transhumanism" was foreshadowed by
one of the first professors of futurology, a man who changed his name to
FM-2030. In the 1960s, he taught "new concepts of the human" at The
New School when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles
and worldviews "transitional" to posthumanity as
"transhuman".[6] The assertion would lay the intellectual groundwork
for the British philosopher Max More to begin articulating the principles of
transhumanism as a futurist philosophy in 1990, and organizing in California a
school of thought that has since grown into the worldwide transhumanist
movement.
Influenced
by seminal works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a transformed
future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range
of perspectives, including philosophy and religion.
In 2017,
Penn State University Press, in cooperation with philosopher Stefan Lorenz
Sorgner and sociologist James Hughes, established the Journal of Posthuman
Studies[9] as the first academic journal explicitly dedicated to the posthuman,
with the goal of clarifying the notions of posthumanism and transhumanism, as
well as comparing and contrasting both.
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