Obama's Speech on Race

Race is an issue that I don't often talk about. Like a lot of white men, I tend not to think of myself in racial terms (or gender terms for that matter) while I generally try my best to treat everyone as equals regardless of the color of their skin or any other physical characteristic.

The metaphor of navigating a minefield here is as apt as it is frequently invoked. When I have discussed matters related to race in the past, I have no doubt that I've made an occasional misstep, uttering remarks which may have been racially insensitive. I honestly regret the offense I may have caused anyone at those times.

Despite the dangers involved, it would be a mistake never to speak about race, because it is clearly something that plays a significant role in American life, whether we like it or not. This is why Barack Obama's speech on the issue, an extremely powerful statement that did not shy away from tackling it head on, is so important and so necessary.

I strongly encourage you, if you have not already done so, to take a look at the speech, or at least read the transcript. I will offer my thoughts as I do in this forum, but I think it best for people to form their own opinions by going to the source without the distorting influence of pre-given interpretations by others. Of course we always carry with us preconceptions and prejudices, but there is nevertheless a value in trying to approach things with an open mind.

From here on, I will assume the reader has experienced the speech firsthand.

As I perused the Internet after reading it, looking at editorials and analyses as well as comments on these pieces from anonymous netizens, I found that most people's responses fell into one of two groups. In one, there was the expression of a kind of ecstatic hope, an almost religious feeling of being uplifted and deeply touched by his sentiments. The other consisted of vociferous anger directed at perceived contradictions accompanied with disgust that so many people could be "duped" by Obama's rhetoric. Given such strong and opposite reactions, what are we to make of this speech?

It should go without saying that one's prior feelings about Obama play a significant role here. Those who support his candidacy will almost invariably find his words inspirational, while those who oppose him will more than likely be upset and dismissive. These two groups hear in Obama's oration what they want and expect to hear, and by and large would react in a similar way even if it had taken any number of other forms.

(This is not to suggest that there aren't people who defy these expectations. A substantial number of people offered good reasons to justify their emotional responses. In taking up the stance I am now, I'm writing as though I did not fall into either of these groups. This is not entirely true, however, because I decided a few weeks ago, albeit with some reluctance, to back Obama. This speech put a number of my worries about him to rest, but I can't deny that I went into the experience with a generally positive outlook.)

At any rate, the most informative responses, I believe, will be those coming from people who, up until now, did not feel strongly one way or another. I came across a few of these. Some who were undecided said they were touched and that this made the decision for them. Even some previously ardent Clinton supporters seemed to find themselves torn between the two candidates after hearing Obama's moving words. At the same time, I saw reports of others who reacted with discomfort, who were uneasy about dwelling on these difficult contradictions in American life. Some thought race was not really an important issue and were unhappy that this much attention was being focused on it.

Even though I saw fewer of these, the variety of responses from people in this group was significantly greater, and unsurprisingly I was unable to discern any general trends from the small, unrepresentative sample I encountered. In the coming days and weeks, we'll see polls and eventually primary results which will give us a better sense of the larger impact.

Right now, it's anyone's guess what shape that impact will have. It's clear that Obama took some serious risks--he wrote the speech himself and delivered it without vetting it before focus groups or taking polls to see how people would react--and decided to communicate what he actually felt with a candor almost unprecedented in the politics of our time.

He defied the expectations of many "savvy" political commentators and reporters (many of whom seemed to entirely miss the central points of the speech) and actually addressed the issues with a degree of subtlety and nuance that presupposed that Americans are intelligent and reasonable enough to make complex judgments about almost intractable moral and political problems. Perhaps he overestimated the ability of most Americans, but it's painfully obvious that too much of the news media and far too many politicians underestimate it, perhaps grossly.

I found Obama's speech to be both brilliant and inspirational, and perhaps one of the greatest speeches in modern American history, for at least three reasons, which I'll share.

First, he was able to draw parallels between black experience and white experience, showing how both groups are capable of racist thinking, while giving an account of why such thinking occurs and acknowledging that it won't disappear over night. At the same time, he called on both groups to take responsibility and not to blame members of another race for the problems they face.

Instead, he deflected the blame to the unchecked greed and unregulated excesses of corporate America. This was a master stroke, both because it acknowledges that human beings need to blame someone for their problems, and because more people now are being pressed economically and are all too aware of Wall St.'s misdeeds with the recent financial bail-outs making the news. In addition to being strategically brilliant, it has the added virtue of being true.

Second, Obama showed, once again, how the politics of hope can overcome the politics of fear. Spinoza, in addition to penning the highly relevant quotation I cite in my header (the one that acknowledges that reason alone is insufficient to sway people, but must also have an affective, emotional dimension), rightly argued that hope and fear are the two most powerful emotions politically. Reason will get us nowhere, he teaches us, if we ignore the fundamental realities of human psychology. It's difficult, but one can influence people without being manipulative, and I think Obama does just that.

Obama's campaign has become a broad-based social movement because he knows how to wield hope skillfully and because people are sick of the fear that has disastrously guided this country's actions for (at least) the past seven years. He doesn't talk down to people as does President Bush, and is far more transparent about the motivations for his policy preferences. In short, he treats others equally as rational moral agents, regardless of how much they may disagree with him. Applying these strengths to the race issue, one in which fear of the Other plays all-too-dominant a role, is not only appropriate; it is of potentially tremendous benefit to this country's future.

Finally, Obama eschewed many of the pretenses and rhetorical flourishes of some of his earlier speeches and tried to connect to citizens on a personal level. Having come from mixed ethnic background, he was able to tell both blacks and whites, I think credibly, that he knows what we're going through. As he has often done, he was able to use specific examples of real people's lives powerfully, ending with a story of how Americans from very different worlds, a young white woman and an old black man, were able to come together over a common political purpose.

In some ways, this is the most important quality of this speech and the one that demands firsthand exposure. It made me think to my own experience. I of course have never been the victim of racism firsthand, but I happen to have a member of my immediate family for whom this is a very real possibility.

Several years ago, my parents decided to adopt a little girl from Guatemala. She's of mixed ethnicity but has the features and skin-tone to appear as an African American. She is also one of the most delightful people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. Even though she has been on this earth not much longer than a decade, she has been able to make astounding connections with other people of all walks of life--my parents joke that she has more adult friends than they do. Her affability and empathy, coupled with a flair for occasional theatrics (although that could just be a product of youth), make her unlike anyone else in my family (we tend to be bookish and on the shy side).

That she could be the victim of racial slurs and slights, of discrimination and prejudice, is a matter I prefer not to think about, because it deeply saddens and angers me. But I look to the example of Barack Obama and what he has been able to do both to transcend racial divisions personally and to inspire others to come together across this divide, and it literally brings tears to my eyes. It gives me hope at a point in my life when cynicism comes all too easily.

Perhaps Obama cannot deliver on his promises and will turn out to be a politician like any other. Perhaps. But I've seen what American politics looks like in the past quarter century and I know that I don't like it. I think he deserves a chance.

To be able to inspire people with his eloquence is more than just rhetoric; to effectively instill hope in others is to increase the likelihood that those hopes will be realized. When people are motivated to pursue a common good, they can do far more than they could isolated in the world of distraction that capitalism has created for us.

That's why his words matter and that's why he should be the next President of the United States.

UPDATE: This article in the NY Times on the impact of Obama's speech and the way it actually is opening up a conversation in America on race is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about (see also my response to another commenter below). Today, in fact, I myself had a very productive discussion with fellow grad students about this very topic.

Some people complain that he is all talk and no action, but they fail to understand how a skilled orator like Obama is acting in profound ways when he speaks. (Those familiar with "speech act" theory might consider extending its insights to an example like this.) That he is able to inspire people with his words, to motivate them to take further action--this is perhaps his greatest asset as a presidential candidate (and president, much of whose power is, as one of my friends pointed out, largely symbolic, directing the national conversation and so forth) and why I feel quite confident now in supporting him.

The Abolition of Intellectual Property

Information should be free.

Music, movies, books, software, and other intellectual or artistic products should be a source of income only to the extent that something physical is being sold (e.g., a CD as opposed to its songs, a physical book as opposed to its chapters). The very notion of intellectual property is, in our digital age, no longer tenable; this turns out to be yet another aspect of life that shows there are limits to the capitalistic model that maintains that self-interest (profit) is the only feasible human motive.

I suspect that most of the people who read this blog are sympathetic to the idea, for instance, of free music. But even if you regularly use BitTorrent or some other P2P sharing, you probably have some reservations. You might think that what you're doing is stealing in some sense, or at least that there's something vaguely wrong about it (just not wrong enough to prevent you from doing it).

I would suggest that there is absolutely nothing wrong with it, that in fact trying to charge somebody money for an idea is the real theft. It seems the other way only because this absurd notion, "intellectual property", has been institutionally imposed on these older legitimate concepts: ideas, images, theories, words, artworks, songs, films, etc.

Let me back up these claims with arguments. First, consider the consequences of abolition. Imagine, tomorrow, that all copyright laws were to be purged from the books. Industry groups like the RIAA and MPAA would vanish in a puff of smoke and sulfur (along with a good many lawyers). Would this mean that artists, authors, entertainers, and so forth, would also cease to exist, no longer having the means to support themselves? By no means--here's why:

Let me use an analogy, by looking at a case where ideas still exist free of the notion that they are property. Scientists conduct experiments and publish the results but this data is freely available (especially as more academic journals are going online). This relatively free distribution (I'm skipping some of the details, but bear with me) is not only not a problem, it is of tremendous benefit to scientists everywhere. Indeed, this openness is a prerequisite of the success of the sciences; it is necessary for innovation and progress.

There's a system in place so that credit is given where it is due--i.e., by citing sources--but these citations do not function as a source of income. Imagine what it would be like if we had to pay a fee every time we cited someone else's research results or theories: it would destroy the institution of science as we know it.

How is it, then, that science is a sustainable practice if people aren't directly profiting from their ideas? Simple: they support themselves by other means. Most scientists are either academics--making a living by also being educators, teaching classes, supervising dissertations, and the like--or are private researchers working for companies that sell other goods and services that put these ideas to work.

The same can apply to the music industry and by extension to movies, television, and other areas. Musicians can make a living by selling the kinds of things that aren't information-based and can't be freely copied, say, by performing live shows for money and by selling CDs and T-shirts and other physical media just as they do now. If they are good and develop enough of a following, they can make a decent living.

As an example, I need only cite my two favorite bands, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, who are moving to a model like this--and quite successfully, I might add. Now, of course, not every musician has the popularity that these groups enjoy. It will be hard for new artists to emerge and establish a name for themselves, but this is already the case under the current regime. Unfortunately, not everyone has the talent to make a living off of music. (This of course doesn't mean that they can't still play music in their free time; they may just have to take up another vocation to support themselves.)

There'd be other advantages to eliminating copyright and similar laws. Consider remixes and the practice of sampling in genres like hip-hop. This has almost become impossible because of the idiocy of intellectual property--contrary to the corporate propaganda, trying to charge money for every sample, no matter how brief, has severely stifled creativity and innovation in music.

Art has a long history of artists "citing" famous images produced by other artists without paying some absurd fee to them. (I'm not an art historian, so I can't offer tons of concrete examples, but it's a long recognized practice in the art world. One example: Marcel DuChamp's famous rendition of Mona Lisa with a mustache.) As long as we give people credit and don't try to pass off their artistic or intellectual creations as our own, we are not doing anything morally objectionable.

See, I'm not entirely opposed to capitalism (I'm not for the abolition of all property as is, say, Marx), but we should reassess our assumption that people can own ideas, words, images, and the like. These belong properly to the public domain and constitute a common good--something which the rampant reign of capitalism has practically destroyed.

In the spirit of this alternative proposal, I must give credit to Wired's Chris Anderson, in particular, who wrote an article in this month's issue of the magazine outlining something very much like this. I've just expanded on his arguments and extended their scope. I will gladly recognize my indebtedness to his thinking, but don't expect me to send him a check!

---

Addendum: Some further support for this position just occurred to me. I'm going to try to articulate this dialogically by invoking an imaginary objector--I will do my best to prevent turning him into a straw man.

"What you say is all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that it's against the law, and is therefore wrong."

I grant that it is currently against the law. This is a question of fact, or at least of legal interpretation. My argument is that the law does not have a solid ethical justification here. Whether that merits breaking the law is a question I'll remain neutral about. If nothing else, my conclusion would warrant trying to change the law.

"But there is some justification to the law. If I write a poem or make a sculpture or compose a song, assuming I already legitimately possessed the tools and materials used, shouldn't I own that thing that I've made?"

To answer this I think requires looking at the institution of property more generally. Unless you are someone like Locke that thinks that property is somehow a natural right--a view I won't contest here, but one I doubt is commonly held today--you recognize that it is a social institution. It's a matter of convention, so there are no facts to determine whether an idea is "really" a piece of property or not aside from the social facts, i.e., the laws and implicit norms of a specific culture.

Now let's consider the kinds of justifications given for property laws. There are numerous practical advantages to be able to have exclusive control over certain physical objects. Since these are obvious I won't go into details or try to provide further justifications, but take this exclusive control as a recognized good. Now, it would be bad if someone took one of those objects from me without my permission, because I would no longer have that object under my control.

But what if, hypothetically, he could just make a facsimile of that object for his own use? I would keep my object and he would have one of his own to control as he saw fit. In fact, when I wasn't using my object, it would just be selfish of me not to make it available for that process of copying, although it would be nice if the guy gave me credit if someone asked him, "hey, where did you get that?" I think you can see how this hypothetical case is roughly how things stand with ideas, which can be shared without anyone losing anything.

"But what if, say, I put a lot of hard work into making that item while this other person skips all that and just takes the finished product for his own use? Isn't this unfair?"

I think you are getting at something here having to do with issues of relative status. I'm not hurt by losing the object, but if I'm in competition with this other individual I am now at a disadvantage, because he benefits from my work without having to put forth the effort himself (aside from the relatively easy act of the copying). So, to employ a useful distinction: in absolute terms, I am no worse off because I have lost nothing; in relative terms, however, I am worse off because someone else has gained something without paying the costs I paid to make that object.

"Precisely. The same thing applies to issues of prestige or fame. It would be wrong to profit from someone else's efforts like that. Isn't this a sufficient justification for intellectual property?"

I would say it's a justification but not a sufficient one, and one that happens to be overruled by the following considerations. The problem with status competitions and the like is that they are zero sum games. In order for someone to be rich or famous, most people have to be relatively poor or unpopular. Now, this is good to the extent that it can motivate people to produce things that everyone can benefit from; you do your work, I do mine, we trade, etc., etc., you have the foundations of a market economy.

But, there are plenty of non-zero sum games whose benefits for all of humanity can outweigh the benefits that are accrued by playing according to the rules of zero sum games only. Hence, with cooperation, you have a good which is greater than the sum of its parts.

(If this isn't obvious take the following example. Let's say we're both farmers in a relatively simple culture and we're trying to prepare our land to raise food, but there are a couple of large rocks that we each have on our property. Neither of us is strong enough to move the rocks alone, but if we join forces and take turns, first I help you move your rock then you help me move mine, we can move them. The same level of effort, roughly speaking, is able to be more effective because it's redistributed more sensibly.)

So, the question we need to ask is this: are the consequences from losing the motivation that relative status offers (i.e., the "profit motive") sufficient to eliminate the goods that we recognize and enjoy from having a wide assortment of intellectual and artistic creations at our disposal? In other words, it again comes to the issue of how we can encourage people to put serious effort into producing ideas and images, how we can foster a culture in which arts and sciences and other intellectual disciplines flourish.

But most good artists and writers and so forth do what they do because they enjoy it. The issue is not, "How can we motivate people to become artists?"--because the motivation is already there. The real question is rather, "How can we ensure that people can be artists and still be able to make a living?" And I've answered that above. They can sell things other than their ideas, such as live performances and physical objects that "put their ideas to work".

These artists are doing their part by creating goods that people enjoy, so they aren't mooching off of society, but if they lack sufficient talent (i.e., not enough people are interested in what they're producing), then they will just have to find other ways to support themselves. Them's the breaks.

"You have thoroughly convinced me. I was foolish not to see the larger picture. You truly are a great thinker and wise person and probably also an excellent dancer."

Thank you, imaginary interlocutor, you yourself have proven to be a formidable opponent (since you're my creation after all ;-) ).

---

To summarize: because ideas and information can be copied easily, they can be shared among individuals without causing any absolute losses. The relative losses, in terms of prestige and so forth, pale in comparison to the goods that are produced by free sharing because we are dealing with a non-zero sum game. The profit motive is able to operate in other ways and there is no serious danger of losing the goods of rich artistic/intellectual communities.

With respect to music, which all along has been the main example I have in mind, the only people who stand to lose are industry groups, lawyers, and perhaps the big record labels themselves. They invoke the artists for support (the really outspoken artists tend to be the ones who make a lot more money than they deserve, but society doesn't owe them the perpetuation of an extravagant lifestyle) only as a cover to promote their own interests. Humanity as a whole would be better off without these institutional monstrosities. They are no longer necessary and the people who constitute them should look for other lines of work. The RIAA is the real thief here, not music downloaders.

Why I want to move to Japan...

Here.

At this point, I think it's pretty much inevitable that, some time after I finish my Ph.D., I will have to move there. Unlike the West, Japan gets it. Here's what I mean:

Besides financial and technological power, the robot wave is favored by the Japanese mind-set as well.

Robots have long been portrayed as friendly helpers in Japanese popular culture, a far cry from the often rebellious and violent machines that often inhabit Western science fiction.

Robots are our friends and will only become our enemies if we make them that way (are you listening, proponents of robotic warfare?). I recently came across an interesting paper by Nick Bostrom on the ethics of what he calls "superintelligence" (i.e., smarter-than-human AI) that argues this point persuasively:

It seems that the best way to ensure that a superintelligence will have a beneficial impact on the world is to endow it with philanthropic values. Its top goal should be friendliness. How exactly friendliness should be understood and how it should be implemented, and how the amity should be apportioned between different people and nonhuman creatures is a matter that merits further consideration. I would argue that at least all humans, and probably many other sentient creatures on earth should get a significant share in the superintelligence’s beneficence. [...] One risk that must be guarded against is that those who develop the superintelligence would not make it generically philanthropic but would instead give it the more limited goal of serving only some small group, such as its own creators or those who commissioned it.

If a superintelligence starts out with a friendly top goal, however, then it can be relied on to stay friendly, or at least not to deliberately rid itself of its friendliness. This point is elementary. A “friend” who seeks to transform himself into somebody who wants to hurt you, is not your friend. A true friend, one who really cares about you, also seeks the continuation of his caring for you. Or to put it in a different way, if your top goal is X, and if you think that by changing yourself into someone who instead wants Y you would make it less likely that X will be achieved, then you will not rationally transform yourself into someone who wants Y. The set of options at each point in time is evaluated on the basis of their consequences for realization of the goals held at that time, and generally it will be irrational to deliberately change one’s own top goal, since that would make it less likely that the current goals will be attained.

If friendliness can be assured, then the benefits of superintelligence are profound. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that it could help us solve every human problem (or at least those which admit of a technical solution, which are probably most of them). Read the remainder of Bostrom's essay (it's short) if you're not convinced.

Since the Japanese will be the first to harvest the bounty of this robotic golden age, perhaps you can see why I'm so eager to join them.

A Milestone and a Proposal

This is post #100! It's taken me long enough to get here, but it's still a bit surprising to see that my occasionally insightful rantings have hit the century mark. I've actually been thinking about this post for a while, and I wanted to do something distinctive. An idea came to me last night, so I will take this opportunity to flesh it out somewhat, albeit in the rough and sketchy way that characterizes most blog entries.

A Proposal for "Future Studies"

In the last couple of decades, multiculturalist sympathies have spawned a veritable smörgåsbord of interdisciplinary "Studies" departments, programs, and majors. From women and gender studies to east Asian studies to disability studies, these things have become ubiquitous. (One might also point to similar projects with less of an explicit political motivation, such as cognitive studies, consciousness studies, medieval studies, etc., etc.)

While I do not uncritically applaud all such developments, nevertheless I believe there's a value in interdisciplinary work in which a central theme is the organizing factor rather than a set of methodologies or a traditionally accepted body of texts. Toward that end, I wish to suggest a project to organize a vitally important body of research which has established itself on the internet, in a slew of popular books, and in a number of independent organizations but which has no real presence in academia.

I'm of course talking (as I often do) about the future. The researchers in this loose field, now variously called futurology or futurism, are often people with practical experience as programmers, inventors, engineers, roboticists, and various other technicians and technologists. Some academics are among them, even a few philosophers and historians, but by and large they tend to draw more from the sciences and applied fields than from the humanities.

Now here, I have in mind organizations like some of those to which I link in my sidebar (the WTA, IEET, and so forth). The problem with these think-tanks and other groups is that they tend to have an explicit political or practical agenda. I think this may not be appropriate for academia, which ought to have a mix of committed advocates and outright opponents with many in between.

Here's why this is so necessary. If there is any ability which elevates humanity above the rest of nature, it is our capacity for foresight. The ability to predict the future with at least some degree of success has long been deemed crucial to human societies, from the various prophets, oracles, soothsayers, and diviners of antiquity to the meteorologists, astronomers, economists, and technologists of today. While the world has become increasingly complex, nevertheless our ability to predict and control has only gotten better, even though it remains pitifully feeble. Really, all the various enterprises of contemporary science depend to some degree on mechanisms of prediction, albeit often local and short-term.

The ante is upped because of the extent of human power today. Our impact on the earth is unquestionably significant and rapidly growing. We now have the power not only to destroy civilization, but to take a significant chunk of the ecosphere with us. Less catastrophically, the effect of government policies on the lives of citizens can mean the difference between widespread satisfaction and destitute poverty.

But who is making decisions today on the basis of long-term effects? Markets seem unable to see beyond the profits of the upcoming fiscal quarter and modern democracies beyond the next election cycle. Meanwhile, it does not take a genius to see that this emphasis on making decisions based only on relatively immediate results is leading us toward disaster in the not-too-distant future, whether it be an economic crisis caused by the US's skyrocketing debts or an environmental crisis in the form of climate change. Greater foresight is of paramount importance for the well being and the very survival of our species.

While scientific prediction might seem the logical model to adopt for a broader study of tomorrow and the day after, I envision future studies also by another analogy: a counterpart and complement to the study of history. Now, of course, there is a central disanalogy to history in terms of the material being studied. History primarily works with texts and to a lesser extent with artifacts and other cultural traces. While always partial and imperfect, the historical record is far more concrete than what students of the future have to work with.

At the outset, I see three primary types of "materials" available for future studies. First, there is that same material of the historians. Not only can we learn from the past to try to avoid its mistakes, we can also take lessons from previous efforts at predicting the future. So, for instance, a variety of scientific practices tend to have far better track records than the oracular and prophetic traditions of the world.

Second are the conclusions of the social sciences. This virtually follows from my previous observation about the predictive successes of the sciences. The future with which we are concerned is of human beings and what they create, so a good understanding of human nature (both individual and social) and its cultural variations is a vital asset.

Third, and not entirely separate from the previous two, is the study of trends. Perhaps the most famous example that futurists tend to provide is Moore's Law (roughly, that the number of transistors which can be fit onto a computer chip of constant size doubles every 1 - 2 years). This has been shown by Ray Kurzweil (whose more far-fetched predictions need to be taken with a grain of salt, if not a salt mine) to apply to other aspects of computing (memory size, processor speed, cost of computing, etc.) but also more generally to new technologies.

For instance, Kurzweil uses the example of US railroads in the nineteenth century. The number of miles of track roughly doubled every few years, until it hit a saturation point, where it began to slow its growth and reach a plateau. While supportive of the general point about technology's tendency to grow exponentially, it also demonstrates that trends do not last forever. So while Moore's Law has been going strong for over half a century, and is expected to continue for at least a couple more decades, it will eventually reach a point where physical constraints prevent further growth.

Thus, the study of trends needs significant supplement by other efforts to get a sense of how long they can continue. Their relative simplicity and statistical/mathematical character is a great draw for researchers, and thus far too much importance has been placed on them (for reasons not unlike why the study of external behavior dominated psychology for decades: it's just easier to work with). We need also to look at social movements and other forces which are not so easily modeled mathematically.

With that caveat though, I think it is important to recognize that mathematics is probably the most powerful tool that we have here. I envision a lot of the sounder predictions as ones generated by complex computer analyses which can weigh more data than can any team of researchers. This is the norm in meteorology, oceanography, climatology, and other sciences of the environment and I don't see why it would be any different for a broader study of what is to come.

Nevertheless, insofar as it is interdisciplinary, there is a place for academics in the humanities (like myself of course), a need for discourse on appropriate methodologies and for critiques of the limitations of mathematical modeling.

Now I don't anticipate that my proposal is entirely novel--I imagine I could find similar ones if I did a bit of research (googling "future studies" just now, I even see a handful of programs at places like the Universities of Hawaii and of Houston). And it's good that I'm not the only one with this idea, especially since no one listens to me. But, in any case, I think it is well past time for the study of the future to become respectable, rigorous, and visible in the academic world.

The future comes whether we want it or not, so we'd best make ourselves ready and direct it to our advantage so far as we are capable. Excelsior!

UPDATE: Perhaps I should have done this prior to writing this post--I was so excited about what seemed to me a novel idea--but I did decide to read up a little on the subject. As it turns out, futures studies (which sounds too awkward to me) had more of a place in academia in the 60s and 70s but now only Houston and Hawaii remain as distinct programs. This is from the University of Houston's account of the history of the field:

The current state of futures studies is more extensive yet more muted than during the Golden Age of the 1960s and early 70s. The world today is more ready to consider the future explicitly than it was then. The future is not left to a small band of marginal writers and teachers. Business people, government officials, and educators are all waking up to the fact we better focus on the future if we want to be successful there. They are making strategic plans powered by visions and informed by scenarios.

At the same time, formal programs of education and training in futures have shrunk rather than expanded. New concentrations like competitive intelligence and strategic management have adopted many of the tools of the futures field without necessarily adopting its theoretical or ideological positions. In the end, futures may end like many of the social sciences. Having sparked the society's interest in a subject of immense importance (e.g., human and social relations) and having developed many tools to deal with that subject, the social sciences today are almost purely academic while the applications are being pursued in business and government agencies without their continued involvement.

I think this project is now more important than ever, and I wonder if the shrinking of the field since its heyday is the result of a backlash against optimistic predictions which never came true. In any case, I hope this is one trend which can be reversed. A more even-handed approach (neither utopian nor apocalyptic) should have a place in academia and not left to government and the private sector (institutions of which I am far warier).

The Future of Medicine

In his New Organon, Francis Bacon writes: "...it is utterly obvious that in any major work that the human hand undertakes, the strength of individuals cannot be increased nor the forces of all united without the aid of tools and machines."

I'm reading Bacon for my now-ongoing qualifying exams, and he is simply delightful. Many say his optimism is unwarranted but I think the historical record of scientific and technological accomplishments shows he largely had the right idea. If he did not anticipate the problems that would arise in a technological society with science established as a powerful institution, he nevertheless foresaw the power of the systematic, controlled observation of nature.

One case in point is found here in an article aptly titled "Biotechnology Builds a New Heart". As many of you know, I follow a lot of tech news so I read stuff like this all the time. However, I've paid special attention to a few areas, particularly in medicine.

The growth or regeneration of human organs (without the use of clones as walking organ banks as stupidly portrayed in popular films and books) is one such example. This development with the heart (in this case, it's a pig heart) is nothing new; individuals have actually been walking around with artificially generated bladders for several years now (see, e.g., here). We are already in the age of artificial organs, perhaps within a decade of growing any part of the body on demand.

(This includes nervous tissue; recent advances in neuromedicine such as this, not to mention the research involving neuron-computer interfacing, indicate that my prediction that paralysis will be cured within a decade is by no means far-fetched. The one exception, of course, would be growing a whole brain, although parts of one could probably be replaced. And who knows what may yet happen?)

Perhaps it's not all roses and lollipops, but I'd much rather live now than in the primitive times of Bacon (or Aquinas or Aristotle, etc.). Wouldn't you?

The Ethics of the Interesting

There's a claim I've found myself making often recently, but have not sufficiently examined nor attempted to justify. It is this: "The 'interesting' is the most important normative category." To most, this will seem to be an utterly bizarre statement, whereas others might wonder about the role "importance" plays in a statement like this.

(To be consistent, ought I not to say that the "interesting" is the most interesting normative category? Of course I don't say this because it is circular and sounds silly. Another way of saying what I mean to say might be that I rank the interesting as first and foremost among value categories.)

What I mean by this claim is not apparent in any "literal" interpretation of the sentence. Part of the problem is that "interesting" is perhaps the most boring word in the English language. The way it is said conveys far more information than the use of the term itself. I mean, what do you say when someone makes totally outrageous claims that make them seem like a nut, or when you're forced to endure a painfully boring account of the mundane details of their utterly trivial existence? "That's interesting." Yet, it may just be the vagueness of the term itself that for me is a source of its value.

So far I have probably made little sense, so I will try to explain in the only way I know how. A question that underlies my statement here is this: "What are the preconditions for value of any kind?" Let's assume for a moment, as some physicists suppose, that there are many, perhaps infinitely many, different universes existing in parallel. Some of these may be close to our own, but I imagine the vast majority of them take simple forms such as fire (high energy, highly unstable, devoid of anything resembling stars, planets, atoms, and other such things) or ice (virtually static, no energy, highly entropic).

In these universes, I contend, there is nothing of value. There's no sense in saying things should be one way rather than another because there's nobody to make such claims. Perhaps we can make claims about them from the outside, but within them the normative simply does not apply.

What makes our universe capable of supporting us, of supporting life, stars, molecules and atoms, quarks and neutrinos, etc., is that it is neither purely Heraclitean nor simply Parmenidean. To continue the Presocratic allusion, our universe is Empedoclean, locked in a battle between forces, with relatively stable and regular but also mutable components. To use a mathematical analogy, it is like a fractal, an intricately complex thing that is generated by something relatively simple (say the basic laws and constants of our particular universe, or the intricate arrangement in space/time of otherwise indistinguishable particles).

And, were it not so, it would be valueless. (Yes, I am presupposing that to be of value, something must be of value to someone, but even many unimaginative absolutists suppose that God is the someone who ultimately sets values.) Quite simply, most universes are probably utterly boring and utterly valueless. Or, they're not even boring (except maybe to us), because they lack anything like a point of view within them. They might as well not exist.

But our case is different. There is value, or at least apparent value (to me, there is no difference between these two). There are components of the universe like you and I for which some things are better than others. We have interests. And here, I would include things like animals that feel pleasure and pain, although there may be other possibilities we have never encountered (perhaps future computers will have interests?).

(Incidentally, I am primarily indebted to William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Richard Dawkins for formulating the problem in this light.)

In short: There is no good or bad, no beautiful or ugly, no pleasant or painful, no true or false (!), unless there is first something interesting. (This is why the idea of a God that is absolutely simple yet also a person is utter nonsense.)

Now, this view has consequences. On the one hand, it rejects the central premise of utilitarianism (that pleasure and the lack of pain are the sole source of values). If this were the case, then logically we should go about turning the universe into something like a continuous, gigantic orgasm. However, such a universe (in which there was only pleasure, if such a thing is even possible) would be a boring universe--there would be no way to discern between the actual and the ideal, because really, there would be no difference. More than the annoying truism that "there is no pleasure without pain", this is a statement about the necessity of points of view that are only parts of the whole for the generation of value.

Now, the real question behind the first question about the source of value is the simple one of why is (my) life worth living? Other than the instinct to survive, or the force of habit, or the irrational fear of nonexistence, what is it that makes my life worthwhile? I think this is a question that can only be answered from an individual point of view.

Unfortunately, I do not have an answer to this question. I do not know what kind of world I would like to see emerge nor even what kind of person I should be. I'm no existentialist (although this particular post may be misleading on that front), but this just seems to be one of those things that is purely arbitrary.

As it stands, since I am wary of making unreasonable commitments (even though an ultimate commitment, as Kierkegaard shows, could never be reasonable [since reasonableness presupposes something else, a reason, that is appealed to as justification, which would make it not an ultimate commitment]), I feel as though I am just "slid[ing] along the surface of things" (to quote Bret Easton Ellis).

In practice, of course, I constantly make arbitrary value judgments based on my affective habits. I'm not convinced that one needs to have anything like an ultimate ground for value, or one final, overarching commitment. Yet, I find myself still desirous of something like that.

So, for the time being, I go with the interesting, because I believe that is important for the reasons(?) I've tried to put forth here. But that's not enough because there are many varieties of interesting things, some of which produce a lot of suffering for those involved. As I have set things up, I don't see that there is a resolution to this dilemma, and it still leaves me with the very real question of what to make of myself and of the world around me.

Perhaps you don't find all this interesting, but I do.

Links

This series of articles on Slate, written by William Saletan, and a response here, might be of interest to some people, centering on an issue that recently came up in the news. Personally, I cannot endorse what Saletan says, and I hope by all accounts that he is mistaken.

Fun with Technology

One of these days (today?), I'm going to redesign my sidebar to match up more with my new trajectory. But for now, here are a couple of interesting pieces of technology news.

First, is an opinion piece from PC Magazine rightfully complaining about the primitive attitude that American consumers have about robots. We're too obsessed with robot uprisings and worries about sex robots to take home robotics seriously, the author rightly complains. This is why Japan and other parts of SE Asia are years ahead of the curve here--and further fuel for the inevitable 21st century ascendancy of East over West. (Also, largely why I'd like to move to Tokyo one of these days.)

Second should be something even idiotic American Luddites could appreciate: growing organs from scratch! We're not quite there yet, but according to this article, we may only be a decade or so away, because nature already does so much of the work for us. It's extremely promising, showing how (again, stupidly misguided) American fears about raising clones to harvest organs are totally misplaced. I wonder what Biblical verses the fundamentalists will be wrangling up to oppose this particular advance...

Informal Review of John Harris's Enhancing Evolution

This evening/morning I finished one of the latest books on human enhancement (HE) by renowned bioethicist John Harris. Enhancing Evolution aspires not simply to argue for the permissibility of HE, but also to defend a moral obligation to use such technology, particularly with respect to procreation, and to help foster research which could lead to it.

I'll be frank. Harris is not a particularly gifted author--if enhancements to writing ability emerge, he would be wise to use them. His sentences can be long and digressive, and his organization of arguments is a bit jumbled. He also has an annoying tendency to rely on citations of his past publications in lieu of developing more elaborate arguments.

Despite these shortcomings, there is much of value in the book. He does a nice job of showing that the arguments against enhancement are largely based on prejudices and intuitions that result from fear and limited imagination. His treatment of Leon Kass--if I had to choose an archenemy, Kass would certainly be the odds-on favorite, so great is my hatred for him--is pointed and downright hilarious.

His main argument--although not explicitly suggested as such--is perhaps decisive on the issue. It's essentially the same argument for a woman's right to choose abortion, or an individual's right to take psychotropic drugs in the privacy of his own home. It begins with what Harris calls "the democratic presumption":

One of the presumptions of liberal democracies is that the freedom of citizens should not be interfered with unless good and sufficient justification can be produced for so doing. The presumption is that citizens should be free to make their own choices in the light of their own values, whether or not these choices and values are acceptable to the majority. Only serious real and present danger either to other citizens or to society is sufficient to rebut this presumption. If anything less than this high standard is accepted, liberty is dead. [72]

As Harris notes, this is essentially the principle that Mill defends in On Liberty. It puts the burden on those who would restrict research into or employment of enhancement technologies. The issue is not, are enhancements morally right, but rather, is there a good enough reason to forbid those who judge them to be desirable from developing or using them?

This emphasis on individual choice (and parental choice in the case of germline genetic engineering and other reproductive technologies) is what distinguishes contemporary proponents of genetic enhancement from the much maligned eugenicists of the previous century. Equating the two is nothing but guilt by association.

What was problematic in eugenics is not the motive to better humanity--indeed, any society which enforces compulsory education has such a motive--but the totalitarian imposition on individuals that would compel them to undergo selective breeding or participation in dangerous experiments. Indeed, if anyone is close to the totalitarian spirit here, it is those who would restrict me from using the enhancements I desire to use on myself or my offspring.

I love this argument often employed by HE proponents (especially its nifty reversal of totalitarian roles--who's the Nazi now, Luddite?)! With the exception of certain conservatives, virtually everyone subscribes to this democratic presumption. The problem is that they are inconsistent in its application, especially when it comes to technology and HE.

On top of this central argument, Harris does an admirable job of showing how a right to individual self-determination as suggested here can be extended to include choices over offspring. The primary reasons given for denying such reproductive interventions, when teased out, amount to mere fears and prejudices.

For instance, the harm that might be caused to a child who grew up knowing they were designed is seen as compelling enough to restrict liberty. Potential psychological harm (of which there is no evidence; children of in vitro fertilization certainly seem to adept well enough despite the "artificial" process which generated them), especially when we're talking about children who are hopefully designed to be more resilient to such things, is by no means decisive.

Moreover, his consideration of the moral status of embryos is perhaps the best discussion I've seen of the subject (although admittedly I am not well versed on the extensive literature here). The most ingenious point is his discussion of embryonic splitting and recombination. An embryo of four cells can be split into four separate single cells, each of which can develop into a fetus (indeed, identical twins are the result of this kind of process). However, they can also be brought back together into a single embryo that will develop as normal.

So what has happened if we split an embryo into four and then recombine them (a process in which no matter is created or destroyed, but only rearranged in space)? Have we spawned four lives from one, and then killed off three of them (in which case we might also ask, which of the four would survive)? Applying the doctrine of ensoulment at fertilization only makes things more absurd; can souls split and recombine too? (Incidentally, even if it is the most popular view, ensoulment is a vulgar prejudice that I don't take too seriously; the kind of people who advocate it are not likely to be the kind that respond to reason.)

This example is also useful in addressing those who try to argue for value in potentiality. If each embryo can actually develop into many different individuals, do we have an obligation to split every embryo as much as possible in order to realize their full potential? Similarly, with the right technology, virtually any cell in the body could become a distinct individual (all that is necessary for this is the genome that every cell contains).

Embryos are just (collections of) cells. They have no intrinsic worth or value. Deal with it.

Lastly, I like his treatment of the issue of disability in relation to enhancement. He uses a simple distinction to show how the rights of the disabled have no moral force for preventing HE. Just because we value a certain trait in ourselves or our offspring by no means entails that we disvalue individuals who lack this trait.

For instance, if I were to lose my hearing, I would strongly desire to restore it through whatever technological means necessary. This reasonable desire is totally consistent with regarding the deaf as individuals who deserve the same legal and ethical status as anyone else. The same applies to distinctions between the enhanced and non-enhanced; a kind of egalitarianism can be maintained here, should one desire to do so.

In the end, I give Enhancing Evolution a half-hearted recommendation. Some of its arguments and discussions are excellent, but others are the usual fare of HE proponents, and all the while one has to deal with Harris's sometimes garbled prose. However, I would strongly recommend reading chapter 8 for his vicious and entertaining take-down of Kass (and Habermas, to boot!).

Something unexpected...

Last night, I inadvertendly induced in myself what might best be described as a mystical experience. I won't say how I did so, but I must say that it was very educational. I've had experiences somewhat similar, but nothing quite this intense.

This is a subject I actually wrote my undergraduate thesis on, looking at James' Varieties of Religious Experience and at later research in what is sometimes called "neurotheology". As can be expected, the firsthand account cannot be captured in words, but I can see that the terms often used make some limited sense of it.

There's a sort of feeling of oneness, a sense of unique insight into the world and a profound feeling of certainty, and a kind of sublime awareness so intense that it led me alternatively to cry, laugh, and then do both at the same time--at least, I was unable to tell at one point which it was.

I felt like I finally understood what the Greeks tried to capture in their tragedies; I experienced a confirmation of the Heraclitean hypothesis "panta rhei" (everything flows; all is in flux; there is no being only becoming); and I realized that the solitude I have recently been trying to celebrate comes at a heavy price, that is, I saw with clarity how necessary it is that I connect to others and end this partially self-imposed loneliness. This last insight has provided a much needed remedy to the cynicism which has been dominating my thoughts of late.

What is remarkable about these experiences is how open they are to interpretation. At no point did I ever get the sense of a divine presence--which is one thing that people often talk about but which still remains foreign to me. Indeed, the experience was intensely solipsistic in a certain respect. I even felt that reflecting upon my prior knowledge of the causes of such experiences actually enhanced it in a unique way.

I, of course, recognized that the scientific account is no more adequate than the self-reports of mystics. I even saw more clearly than before how both traditional religion and scientific dogmatism are on the same self-defeating page here, denying that which is directly in front of them for the sake of something not immediately experienced.

I think Sam Harris, who I wrote about relatively recently, is dead on about the importance of such kinds of experience and the practices that surround them. The atheist who denies this aspect of life is throwing the baby out with the bath water. In fact, I saw with such clarity how such experiences are nothing but a natural side effect of all the various modules that make up that "experience machine" that is constituted by various parts of our brain.

If you think about all of the aspects of experience that we take for granted--the feeling of our bodies in space (proprioception), the distinction between our self and the rest of the world, the differentiation of the world into individual objects that persist over time, the capacity for intense emotional responses, etc.--you can see how messing with this subtle chemistry by meditation (or other more direct means) can produce amazing results that, to the uninitiated, could suggest contact with some supernatural force.

As for me, I had a very "naturalistic" kind of mystical experience. I still believe the universe to be utterly indifferent (and almost entirely outside of our grasp), but I see how value, worth, meaning is real despite the fact that it can only be created by tiny parts of the world that, like cosmic mirrors, reflect the universe back on itself. We may just be ephemeral modes of being, but we do constitute something qualitatively different.

If there is such a thing as the "divine", it's a distinctly human divinity (or, to be open to the possibility of other kinds of beings capable of the same, a finite divinity). If there is anything like immortality, it is the immortality of the singular moment, the kind of eternity that I think Wittgenstein recognized which made him see it as irrational to fear death.

I am still grappling with the recognition that everyone who undergoes these experiences emerges from them with a feeling of profound certainty about whatever knowledge they gained from them (such so that I am skeptical about any such knowledge claims), on the one hand, and the possibility that the reason they are so sure is that they actually did see some truth, on the other. (As Spinoza suggests, truly adequate knowledge is incapable of being doubted.) I also don't know whether I wish to try to induce further such experiences in the future. But, at least I'm feeling pretty good today, in the wake of all of this.

There are other things, more personal things, that I won't say here. I'm still not exactly sure what to "do" with these memories now. I at least wanted to have some written record so that when the less intense aspects fade further, I might be able to recall them some other time. And, I must admit, I find some value in sharing this experience with others (pretending for a moment that people actually read my exhibitionistic logorrhea).

Now what?

So I gave my paper on "robocracy" last night. I think it went quite well. I got some great questions from my peers, who actually took it seriously, and in light of their criticisms, I think I'm going to abandon the idea.

(The basic premise: Plato's Republic w/ superintelligent machines serving as the guardians, i.e., rule by [hopefully benevolent] AI experts.)

I think I'm going to try to take a more "descriptive" approach to these issues. It's difficult enough to lay out what the future is going to look like. I want to wait and see what forms artificial life and intelligence takes in the future before I advocate making them part of the political structure.

Generally speaking, I think I'm going to put some of this AI stuff on the back burner, and focus more on the issue of human enhancement. I am more or less convinced now that ordinary, unmodified humans will go extinct this century. But human extinction is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if we are replaced by something better.

For a nice intro to the subject, I highly recommend this lecture by Michael Bess. He lays out some of the expectations and a lot of the relevant moral concerns. Even if you have no background at all on human enhancement, it should make sense (it was written for a popular [educated] audience).

If there is one thing I lament about losing confidence in the AI-ocracy schema, it's that now I come very close to being perceivable as a "prophet of doom". I frankly don't see anyway humanity can be saved. Our creations are already out of our control, so how could we possibly hope to prevent weakly godlike intelligences from destroying our species? Our best bet is probably to enhance ourselves, but that may result in a different kind of loss of humanity.

And I'm just not sure whether that's good or bad. So much of what humanity takes itself to be is simply the product of ignorance, chance, and wishful thinking. It's mere pretense, flight-of-fancy, romantic sentimentalism. I'm not even sure what I value about our species, except perhaps the ability to recognize this (that our reason has some power over our affects) and our creativity and innovation.

But, these things are the province of a slim minority. On this logic, it makes no sense for me to be anything other than an elitist. I'm content to put the rest of humanity on a par with the bulk of mammalian life. That's not to say they don't warrant moral concern--we should not be cruel to animals--but they certainly don't deserve any reverence or respect. I suppose I shan't miss them when they're gone.

The End of "Atheism"?

This is a fascinating piece from the recent conference of the Atheist Alliance in D.C. by Sam Harris who--along with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett--is regarded as one of the "four horsemen" of the new atheism. However, in this speech he argues, I think cogently, that we should abandon atheism both as a term and as a structured viewpoint.

(He makes analogies with "non-racists" and "non-astrologers" and points out how claiming to be an atheist lumps one in with nasty people like Stalin, at least in the minds of the religious.)

The speech apparently caused quite a stir, with one woman even vowing to throw away Harris' books in the Q&A session, but it reflects well on his author that he chose to be frank with an audience that was hoping for something quite different. I particularly like what he says about meditation and other such practices, in defiance of atheistic conventional wisdom.

My days of being a militant, anti-religious atheist are in the past, but I have tended to still use the term, even writing about it in a recent post. I think that I may continue to use it when forced to select among options for "religion" on various websites (it's the shortest answer for me to that question), but I have no reason to go around advertising myself as one.

On Facebook, where they allow you to type in a response to the religion question, I've called myself an "unbeliever", a description which is both apt and less problematic. I am also fond of the terms "materialist" and "naturalist"--although I also like to call myself an "unnaturalist", but with a different sense of the term "nature".

(If, by "nature", we understand the universe [or if you prefer, multiverse] and everything in it, I am a naturalist [as opposed to a supernaturalist], but if we instead mean that which is opposed to civilization, artificiality, and technology, I am an unnaturalist. Incidentally, if by "god", we understand the totality of all being, I am not an a-theist, because that "god" exists by definition. In short, a lot of this stuff is just a question of the meanings of words, but since these are always manifold, labels can be misleading.)

Untimely Reflections

Every time I read Nietzsche, I get the sense that all of 20th Century philosophy (the interesting stuff, not all-too-clever "analytic" claptrap) is, to twist Whitehead's phrase, a footnote to Nietzsche. It has become impossible for me not to be inspired as I pore over his words, especially his last few books.

Many of the social maladies that he was the first to diagnose have only continued and worsened. We live in such a thoroughly mediocratized age that even the elite are afraid to be elitists. People of superior intelligence and creativity are made to feel guilty for their talents. (And while it can hardly be said that we "deserve" such things, since they are parceled out by chance as it were, we should certainly not feel bad for possessing them.)

I think Nietzsche is wrong to the extent that he ties some of his valuations to gender and race (of course, this may be a bad interpretation of his use of "types"). Indeed, it is an advancement that our age strives to look past superficialities like sex and skin color. However, we have thrown the baby out with the bath water. Evaluating individuals on account of group identity is a mistake; evaluating individuals per se is not.

The mediocratic spirit is virtually uncontested in America today. The one area in which we allow the flowering of productive conflicts and the ascendancy of the victors--the business world--is corrupted by its extreme short-sightedness (profitability in the upcoming fiscal quarter as guiding ideal). The race to the bottom that is called "politics" in America today disgusts me, to be sure, but when we go behind the scenes--looking at those who control money, media, power, the fabrication of reality--the stupidity of the corporate world just becomes more nauseating.

The temptation when reading Nietzsche is to want to cast oneself as a master, as a free spirit, a true philosopher. But most of us don't have the stomach for it; we are too much the product of our anti-elitist culture. So, let me be frank. It is impossible to have democratic or socialistic sympathies and to be Nietzschean. This may not be a problem, of course (who wants to be merely derivative of some previous thinker?), but let's at least not lie about it.

Perhaps it's the years of living alone, a lifelong paucity of friendships and other close relationships, the tendency to drift apart from my peers when I do discover them--in short, my solitude--that has allowed me to read Nietzsche differently than when I was a naive undergraduate. I complain of loneliness, sure, but I need solitude, time to reflect, to talk to myself, to take a break from the hell of other people (and exchange it for the purgatory of my own mind). I've had more than my fill of it lately, to be sure, but I should not be ungrateful for the effects it has had on my development. Still, it makes it even harder to resist that temptation...

As I begin to embrace my more meritocratic, even aristocratic, sentiments, I find that I have a lot of assumptions to rethink. The unidimensional range of acceptable political opinions--not simply in political theater, but in academia in particular--is especially constraining. The issues I care about don't fit anywhere on a left-right axis.

If I had to summarize my ideals, I would say that I want to see the improvement of humanity--but what does this mean now?

Contrary to prevailing tendencies, I think we should, as far as possible, make nature--and especially human nature--submit to our will. This, I think, can be the ultimate triumph of humanity: the recasting of the world in our image. But not "our" in the sense of just anyone. Those individuals who are truly exceptional--and I think these will eventually be, for the most part, those we call "posthuman"--should be the ones to do this. If we must have democracy to keep the masses in line, then let us also have a Solon, let us have lawgivers who can craft the appearance of popular sovereignty. And among those lawgivers let there be real equality.

And now we come to the real difficulty in espousing such opinions. My intense desire for honesty, and not simply directed toward myself, leads me to make public what might better be kept private. But I am not ashamed of my radical ideas (and for the time being they remain relatively unthreatening, drowned out in a sea of other voices) and sometimes I want to invite trouble, to make life a little more interesting. In any case, I change my mind often enough that I have no problem distancing myself from previous assertions if necessary. Old opinions get boring after a while anyway.

Nevertheless, I should tame my vanity and recall Descartes' parting maxim: Bene qui latuit, bene vixit (or, better yet, Spinoza's Caute!). Perhaps reinvigorating an old custom and writing in Latin would be worthwhile (because not writing is simply not an option). That would just leave me with the task of learning it... (Damn these American public schools!)

Depression and Human Enhancement (HE)

Here's something really neat but possibly scary to the uninitiated. The article, "Happiness is a Warm Electrode" in Popular Science details a new treatment for depression that involves, as you might expect, implanting electrodes in certain parts of the brain.

Called "Deep Brain Stimulation" (DBS), it does exactly that, and has been effective for about 2/3 of the couple dozen who have undergone it, and apparently a larger trial involving 100 patients is in the works. Most notably, the patients who are undergoing the surgery are ones who have not responded well to drugs or even ECT (electro-convulsive therapy). (Incidentally, DBS was first used on patients with Parkinson's disease, and has proven to be an effective treatment there.)

Of course, the usual suspects are comparing this to the lobotomy and other sense nonsense. I think such an assessment evinces a crass misunderstanding of what depression is and what treatment of it entails. An effective therapeutic intervention for depression should produce what Spinoza calls "joy" (laetitia), that is, not merely happiness but an increase in an individual's power to act.

And in the case study examined in the article, DBS does precisely that. A woman who could not even muster the energy to get off of her sofa and clean her house has her life turned around by the procedure. She finds herself able to communicate more effectively with friends, family, and even strangers and is able to get out and exercise more. The transformation is rather extraordinary.

When I think of human enhancement, this is precisely the sort of thing I have in mind. This woman has changed who she is, but what she was before was essentially a defective human being. People are afraid to make value judgments like that, and they try to skirt around the issue, but it's the truth. This is a good that technology can allow: HE as an enhancement of our humanness.

Of course, it can move us above the human level as well (and this is what is typically distinguished as "enhancement" in contrast to "treatment", although I obviously question such a distinction). But isn't becoming something greater than what one is "naturally" a distinctive part of what it means to be human? To me, that's the part that matters, not the biological substrate.

I'm beginning to get a clearer sense of what I want to write my dissertation on. I want to challenge the simplistic, sometimes positivistic value judgments that proponents--and in a different way, opponents--of HE implicitly or explicitly make. However, instead of merely criticizing the notion of HE, I want to put forth an alternative formulation that draws on ethical thinkers like Aristotle, Spinoza, and Nietzsche (my philosophical triumvirate, as it so happens).

In other words, I want to develop a richer conception of what it would mean to improve humanity through the use of technology, one that is responsive to the criticisms coming from, for instance, Adorno and Horkheimer, certain strains of feminism and environmentalism, and so forth.

(The criticisms coming from the religious are of little philosophical interest to me; they are based on a fundamental disagreement not simply in premises but, as Wittgenstein reminds us, in ways of life. In other words, there's no point in arguing against them. Religion will have to be defeated by other means. [I'm thinking robots. :-) ])

I have many details to work out, but I think this project is quite workable and certainly worthwhile from my standpoint. It's unpopular and perhaps even offensive to many academics in the humanities, but as far as I'm concerned that's a plus. (Haven't all great ideas been initially regarded as distasteful, foolish, crazy, and downright dangerous?)

Assorted Musings, Political, Technological, and Otherwise

After many months of actually working hard, I've finished all of the papers that I was working on, and now have additional free time on my hands to do, among other things, some blogging. Have written something like 150 pages just over the course of the summer, I'm more confident about finishing this program on time so that I can move on to better things, such as locations outside of the South.

I wrote on a variety of subjects, many of which went to the heart of my interests, and sustained reflection and research on these matters has led me to question old opinions and values. But there have also been some unanticipated side effects.

For instance, having abstained from reading political blogs for the past several months in an effort to use my time more productively, I think I've discovered that I enjoy not being engaged in politics. If nothing else, I'm less angry than I used to be. I've been reading snippets in the news here and there, but blogs have been excluded almost entirely.

Instead, I find myself reading more about technology. I recently purchased a subscription to Wired, a magazine run by techno-libertarians, but nonetheless one which addresses issues I believe important. The nice thing about technology news is that--with the notable exception of apocalyptic forecasts and so forth--it's on the whole positive.

The kinds of discoveries and inventions emerging in science and engineering are often astounding, and it's one area in which something like progress can be identified. (Speaking on the descriptive level here; the repercussions of new advances reside in far murkier waters.)

(For instance, I read in Wired just today that researchers at Wake Forest have successfully grown human bladders as replacement organs by extracting muscle and other tissue cells from, I assume, individuals in need of a transplant. This is a huge breakthrough that could totally revolutionize medicine if it could be extended to regenerate other organs and body parts.

The very same technology should, in principle, allow us to "grow meat" by cultivating muscle tissue from various animals. Thus, not only could we replace the horrific practice of factory farming with something probably more cost effective [at least, in the long run] and cruelty-free, but we could also have more control over things like fat content, I imagine, to make for healthier meat. Perhaps people will be uneasy about eating meat grown "in a vat" or whatever, but eventually we'll get used to it.)

But, really, my politics have changed, and I find myself now concerned with emerging issues that transcend our current simplistic political divide. I still detest the Republicans, if for nothing else than their anti-science ideological tendencies, but I identify less with the American left now. It's not as though I've ever strongly identified as a Democrat (I've registered to vote either as independent or as Green), but I am now more wary of the Ludditism all too often found in the left (especially among academics in the humanities; just because they can't do math they have to take it out on the whole scientific enterprise!).

While I still have a lot of interest in human enhancement, I've been reading up more on artificial intelligence. I feel more confident about a few predictions for the future (leaving aside the timescale issue). The 21st Century will, more likely than not, result in the end of human civilization as we know it. Either we will enter a new dark ages, make ourselves extinct (and take quite a few other species with us), or in the worst case eradicate virtually all life on earth (I suspect some strains of bacteria will survive). There is a slim chance, though, that we will be able to control our technology well enough so that it makes life for us a paradise.

It all hinges on the development of hyperhuman intelligence (to use the terminology of researcher J. Storrs Hall, whose excellent Beyond AI has been my pleasure reading of recent). Autogenous, that is, self-developing, AI could quickly grow many times more intelligent--or at least more powerful--than any human government. They might seize control of world affairs, but this is not necessarily a bad thing, because they could try to organize the world to make life better for us, and they might be able to stop the existential threats posed by rogue bio- and nanotechnology.

Our best bet is to develop strong safeguards, a kind of conscience for our machines, that would prevent them from viewing us as a threat. If done right (a big "if", mind you), I think it could result in almost godlike beings that would have possess wisdom orders of magnitude greater than could be found in any human being. (I've been working on an argument re-casting AI as the Platonic philosopher-kings of a Cyber-Republic.)

My thinking is that to be a capital-D Democrat, it is probably necessary to at least be a small-d democrat, and it is questionable whether I fall into the latter camp anymore. In a world growing in complexity at an exponential rate, why should a mob of bigoted, mouth-breathing yokels have any say at all in how affairs are conducted, and why should I entrust non-expert politicians who neither stand for nor understand anything of significance to make national decisions?

I should be clear. I am still interested in many of the values I espoused when I more readily affiliated with the left. I would like to see effective freedoms (within reasonable limits), basic provisions (guaranteed life necessities, medical coverage, access to advanced technology [free wireless internet for all!]), and justice (that is, everyone getting what is appropriate for them) for everyone. I just don't think popular sovereignty is an effective way of bringing this about. The prejudices of the vulgar are just too strong--and when it comes down to it, we are all vulgar.

I think I agree with Winston Churchill's apocryphal description of democracy as the worst form of government except for all of the other ones. Indeed, it is a lesser evil (although a hybrid form of democracy and aristocracy like, say, Madison preferred, might be an even lesser one). But new technology brings new possibilities and we should ask ourselves whether there are not better ways of achieving the goals we have when we settle for democratic governance.

For now, I think I might just call myself a non-traditional democrat, if for no other reason than the ostracism that someone who said they were opposed to democracy would likely face in today's political climate. But really, this is not a stretch, because I have strong Enlightenment values that lead me to favor democratic outcomes, just not procedures based on popular sovereignty. (Perhaps I will write more about this later.)

And now for something completely different...

Let's talk about a topic I almost never consider: sports.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't care about something like Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron's record. (Back in the day, when I was in my early teens, I was a huge baseball fan for some reason. Now I find the game painfully boring and would never watch it on TV.) However, I was taken aback by this article by some sports writer named Dan Wetzel.

Bonds has hit 756 home runs, the most ever, but it isn't just the number that comes with a performance-enhancing-inspired asterisk. It's Bonds himself, it's baseball as a whole, it's an era of sports where rule-breaking is rampant and honest heroes such as Henry Aaron are in the shortest of supplies....

If this was supposedly the making of history, then realize history isn't going to make much of this. Ten, 30, 50 years from now, it will be looked upon with bewilderment – did people really celebrate a phony number that punctuated a fraudulent era of the game? No one will give much credence to what happened in Major League Baseball from, say, 1996 to the advent of mandatory steroids testing.

The truly naive one here, however, is Mr. Wetzel if he thinks that baseball will be the same game in 50 years. Steroids is only the tip of the human enhancement iceberg. What happens when you start having genetically modified players or cybernetically enhanced ones?

You can disallow these things (so long as they are detectable) but eventually they will become so common that you might have a repetition of the split that took place in bodybuilding, in which an "anything goes" level of competition was implemented to allow for a separate "natural" series of events.

I find sports a diversion, but it will likely undergo even more radical changes in the future at just about every level. It is absurd to think that the performance enhancement era is at a close because of steroid testing. If this is a problem now, it's only going to get worse when more and more drugs and procedures become available.

But really, what is particularly naive is the simplistic natural/unnatural distinction that Wetzel unthinkingly reiterates. Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, there's a gene that can be modified to allow for enhanced pitching ability, hyper-fastballs and so forth. What difference does it make whether a mutation occurs randomly in some gamete or whether it was induced in a lab?

Moreover, are the training regimens that players use today "natural"? Aren't they also a type of technology that enhances performance?

Of course, when you start to ask questions like these, you begin to see how silly the competitiveness of sports is--perhaps even human competitiveness in general. When we see a record being broken what we have is the confluence of certain biological dispositions and a developmental history that allows greater expression of the potential(s) in question.

Perhaps someday the world will, say, see someone run a 3 minute mile--perhaps this person will even be born "naturally" and not take any drugs or have any special surgeries or anything like that. Given enough time and enough people (along with greater recognition of natural talents and better training programs designed to exploit them) you could see just about any record broken. But what of it?

And if it is so thrilling, how would "unnatural" record breaking be any less thrilling? Isn't that still some amazing human accomplishment? If certain games became too easy, new challenges are always waiting to be found.

And in team sports like baseball, enhanced batters would have to be up against enhanced pitchers and fielders, for example, so that you'd have the kind of "arms race" you see in nature between predators and prey. There'd remain some equilibrium that would allow for the "excitement" of competition. (Here, it'd be going a bit too far perhaps if I simply said the cure for performance enhancement was... more performance enhancement. But I'd like to say that.)

Sports may be dumb, but sports writers can be even dumber. (That might be a fun final line, but even I recognize it's grossly unfair. This issue of enhancement is a serious one in which there are many implications and much room for reasonable disagreement. It would be interesting if Bonds' achievement provoked dialogue in this direction.)

Pain

(Forgive me for the rambling and verbose nature of this post; I may write another later with a more concise statement of what I'm trying to say, but right now I am thinking as I write. Even more than in my usual habit of posting, this is an exercise done for the sake of aiding in reflection. I highly recommend the post immediately previous to this one, if you're looking for something coherent.)

Utilitarianism functions on basically two simple premises: "pain is bad" and "pleasure is good". Combined with a kind of reductive mechanistic conception of the universe, its logical conclusion is found in the example of Dave Pearce and his Hedonistic Imperative, about which I have written before.

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life.

The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture - a motivational system based on heritable gradients of bliss. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event.

Mr. Pearce is just about the most consistent person I've ever had the opportunity to speak with. While the value of consistency is debatable, I think it important that individuals who are sympathetic to utilitarianism realize what their ideals would lead to--and I have had my utilitarian moments.

Recently, I have been working on a paper on Nietzsche and the value of pain and suffering which has exploded for me the simplistic stance of the utilitarian. Upon further reflection, there is far more taken for granted than the pain=bad/pleasure=good equivalence.

One possibility I hope to open up with my investigations is a more refined utilitarianism, one with a more sophisticated understanding of pleasure and pain. With such a view, a precise hedonistic calculus would be impossible--but, of course, not even Bentham was able to come up with an applicable instance.

Let me venture this: the appeal of utilitarianism today is due to the difficulty with which we moderns have with the assignment of intrinsic value. A plurality of conceptions of the good--to use the classical language of liberal political theory--leads us to doubt that anything is simply valuable in itself. All goods are instrumental, it seems, only good for certain other purposes. Under such a formulation, though, the real questions of morality are dodged--this is a valuable insight to be taken from critical theory--because an instrumental logic can foster any purpose, from ending poverty to systemic genocide.

So what does the liberal or pragmatist or modernist have to fall back on? I think there are actually two slightly different but related answers to this question. First is the obvious case of pleasure and pain. If anything is intrinsically good or bad, these seem to be the most likely candidates. Second is a notion taken from William James' oft-cited "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life", in which demand--desire--is what is taken as primary. Something is desirable only if it is desired--and indeed John Stuart Mill uses this proposition to argue for the validity of his system.

Even here we can start to see that pain and pleasure are a bit more complex than they might at first seem, because of their relation to desire (not to mention other human affect). Allow me to leave pleasure to one side, because I think pain is the more interesting case, and much of what I say about it applies to pleasure.

As far as I can discern, there are at least 3 aspects to any pain: 1) the "hurt", the raw visceral feel of pain, pain as sensation; 2) nociception, i.e., the information that pain conveys, such as the report of (potential) tissue damage; and 3) a desire, viz., that one not be having the experience that one is having, a demand that things be otherwise.

There is a significant question about how separable these different aspects are. Individuals who are unable to experience 1, also do not experience 3, and fail with respect to 2. These individuals tend not to live very long because, so it seems to me, nociception is the adaptive aspect of pain, its evolutionary raison d'etre. This is one example, in which a mutation led to the incapacity to feel pain. Perhaps it is the case that 1 & 3 are inseparable, that it is the very nature of pain to desire that things be otherwise, or that the hurt of pain inevitably leads to this desire. It's hard to say precisely. A good test would be if people are capable of feeling pain but "not care" so to speak. I think I've heard of such examples, but I can't seem to find any medical/scientific references right now.

What Pearce wants to do, basically, is find an alternative pathway for nociception that doesn't "hurt". In other words, if possible, he wants to find a way that allows for the transmission of information about tissue damage that causes--and this is vital--the body to react in the appropriate way. We could think of it as something like a more advanced reflex. Does this mean he wants to eliminate 1 or 3 or both? For the sake of argument, let's say both, since we know that movement can be caused by things other than desire.

But when we start to advance this analysis, we see that what is taken to be valuable is not simply pleasure and the absence of pain, but also something like survival, self-preservation. If this were not the case, then it would be just as desirable that there be no conscious life at all, or that there only be organisms that are in a constant state of bliss with automatic systems working to prolong this capacity.

Nietzsche's reflections further complicate this picture. In The Gay Science he says a number of remarkable things about pain, e.g., that violent stimuli as such are neither painful nor pleasant but must be interpreted one way or the other by the body, that those who complain the most about pain are the ones who experience it the least--a brilliant insight almost certainly true--and that pain has value insofar as it produces individuals who are not simply mediocre. Contrary to what might be argued, he doesn't simply replace pleasure with "health" or "life-affirmation" or something like that; he even suggests that his notoriously erratic health has value because of the insight and different perspectives that it affords.

Moreover, there is not just one kind of health, or one kind of suffering, for that matter. Utilitarianism is essentially a universalistic approach to ethics, which assumes that the pain/pleasure experienced by different beings is comparable and interchangeable.

Personally, I think that I must give up utilitarianism's ambition to find a source of intrinsic value in an otherwise instrumental world. Let us ask the question, what is pain good or bad for? I don't want to be romantic or sensualist here, and take any kind of experience as worthwhile simply for being something new and different, but it seems to me that even the undesirable aspect of pain, whatever that may be, has effects we would consider positive.

I think one of the biggest problems with America today is its relative isolation from suffering, death, poverty, and all the various unpleasantnesses of the world. There is something to the idea that suffering builds character. Yet part of me wants to say, what's so great about character? Would it be bad to be extremely sensitive to pain in a world in which pain scarcely existed?

What if it were possible to transmit the memory of pain w/o the pain itself? We could learn the lessons of pain without having to feel it. A real question that Nietzsche raises is whether a diminution in the capacity for pain entails a similar reduction in the ability to feel pleasure. I think this is a more complicated question than could be answered by saying something like, "the neural pathways/specific brain chemicals/genetic determinants of pain and pleasure are distinct".

What about other unpleasant affects? Personally, I detest fear, probably even more than I do pain. Is fear painful? Not exactly, but I doubt that Mr. Pearce would be satisfied with a world that abolished pain but let fear remain. What about anger? Righteous anger can be a pleasant feeling, but one can get burnt out feeling angry all the time--one reason why I've practically stopped following American politics, at least for a while.

What about desire itself? Doesn't any kind of desire demand something different? Would we want all desires instantly to be satisfied? Stoicism and Buddhism agree in seeing desire as the source of all suffering, but most of us would not want to minimize our desires as they advocate--and it's certainly foreign to the consumer capitalist spirit. Desire is a great example because it is, by its nature, a source of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

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What I'm hoping to do is raise some questions about the moral status of pain and suffering. While a world without either is still entirely fantastical, it is helpful to reflect on what we think makes life valuable or disvaluable.

I would like to suggest that what is least desirable--in the ethical sense--is sadness, in the Spinozan sense. Sadness is simply the feeling that accompanies a diminution in power. It is, in a sense, the counterpart of eudaimonia. Unlike other kinds of suffering--that is, undergoing, experiencing--sadness makes the individual less open to experience and less inclined to action. Sadness slows the speed of thought, and focuses the mind on a small number of fixed ideas; it reduces motivation and colors the entire world.

But even here, I cannot help but wonder if there isn't a beauty in sadness? Or is this simply a pretense? Would we not do well to take to heart another teaching of Nietzsche's, that what human beings truly cannot stand is the meaninglessness of suffering? Do we make sadness beautiful to make it easier to bear?

I feel like Descartes at the beginning of the 2nd Meditation. When you begin to ask questions not simply concerning the satisfaction of desires but about what ought to be desired in the first place--particularly in this nihilism-inducing postmodern world--you are going to run into trouble.

It seems to me I have come up against a reason why the social engineering of utopianism is problematic. Value is the creation of a historical process. There is simply no ground to stand on if you try to start from scratch. I think there is some truth to what James suggest about desire as the only possible source of desirability, except that desires should be differentiated more than just according to their intensity. Some desires, like self-preservation and self-development (self-enhancement?) are more important because they make other desires possible.

Nietzsche asks the question of the value of systems of valuation. Is value itself valuable? Should we desire more desire? Is not the quiescence and perpetual satisfaction of the utopian ideal--not to mention the ideal of heaven--indistinguishable from death? Is life anything more than conflict, suffering, desire, will to power?

I have no clue. To continue to speak in Nietzschean terms, my will to truth here is effectively trumping all of my other drives. Maybe I should just pick some value scheme and go with it. I mean, whose judgment do I really care about here, other than my own? I think I might just go with the whole transhumanism thing, because it's interesting and unpopular.