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.

---

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.

Against "Against Happiness"

But should alienation always be eliminated? Some lives are better than other kinds of lives, regardless of the psychological well-being of the person who is living them. And some kinds of lives are so soul-deadening that we might worry more about a person who was not alienated. Is the happy slave really better off than the alienated slave? Is a medicated Sisyphus obviously better off than an unmedicated Sisyphus? Is there not something disturbing about trying to medicate that alienation away?

Kramer seems to miss this point. He argues that in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus had imagined Sisyphus happy, despite the fact that the gods had intended Sisyphus to suffer. But the happiness or unhappiness of Sisyphus is not the issue. What is the issue is the wisdom of making psychological well-being the sole measure of a successful life. It is not hard to see why a psychiatrist would put Sisyphus on Prozac. Prozac might well help Sisyphus push the boulder up the mountain more enthusiastically. Sisyphus might even appreciate the prescription. Yet this would not mean that Sisyphus had a mental health problem. Sisyphus is in a predicament, and to understand his predicament you cannot simply look at his internal psychological state. You must also understand his circumstances. Given the fact that he will be pushing the boulder up the mountain for eternity, alienation seems like an appropriate response. [emphasis added]

This moving passage is from Carl Elliott's poignant review, entitled "Against Happiness", reviewing Peter Kramer's book Against Depression. Kramer is well known for his Listening to Prozac, an early account of the impact that antidepressants could have on people's lives, well Elliott is the author of the excellent Better Than Well, a "diagnosis" of the American cultural anxiety surrounding the tension between ideals of authenticity and self-improvement. I've read all 3 of these works and I would recommend all of them to individuals interested on this issue.

Elliott finds that Kramer's polemical new book, which tries to argue against people who romanticize depression, is aimed for an audience that scarcely exists. And insofar as it is targeted at an American audience, this is to a large extent right. When I read Against Depression, this did not occur to me, because as an academic in the humanities, I encounter people who try to justify depression all of the time, along with those who decry the overuse of antidepressants and other psychopharmaceuticals.

Regardless of whether the book has an audience, it does address a serious issue. Elliott gets at the heart of the matter in the portion I emphasized above: Should psychological wellbeing--happiness as most Americans understand it--be "the sole measure of a successful life"? This is a question I have struggled with for a few years now--perhaps since I started taking antidepressants myself--and the only response that makes sense to me is "yes".

Even though Elliott does a better job than most in his attack on the "medicalization" of what were once considered character traits (drunkenness as alcoholism, awkwardness as social anxiety, sadness as depression, etc.), the force of his appeal must ultimately be an emotional one. In fact, it's the very same appeal that you find in all kinds of arguments against the use of enhancement technologies on humans. Elliott asks, don't we find this whole business a little disturbing?

A lot of people do. I for one don't. Yes, sadness does have a function in human life. Yes, widespread alienation in the developed world is likely a consequence of the ways in which these societies are organized. Yes, it's a luxury that we even have the opportunity to think about questions of happiness--I was recently reminded of how, for so many, practical matters associated with survival and making a living rule out consideration of such things--let alone to choose many of the conditions of our lives according to whether we think we'll find them fulfilling.

But what does that matter to me as a depressed individual? I cannot change the fact--or at least, I would certainly not want to--that I live in an affluent society that allows me to pay little attention to basic issues of survival. Right now it's unfair, but I think this is a better way to live and I would love to see it more prevalent throughout the world, because it's a way of life that allows us to ask questions of how we ought to live. Moreover, we now live in an age in which we can inquire not only about the requirements of living and of living well, but also of the possibility of living "better than well".

Of course this makes a lot of people uncomfortable. One reason I think this is so, although Elliott doesn't explicitly raise it, is that the existence of this possibility depends on a lot of social conditions which are unjust and produce a lot of unnecessary suffering. Besides America's various underclasses, there are many developing nations in which persons are ruthlessly exploited to produce cheap consumer goods. Similarly, many of us lack awareness of the sordid and bloody history of attaining and sustaining this affluence.

I think that this is an excellent point. In focusing on one's own individual contentment, it's easy to lose track of the massive amount of unjust suffering in the world. However--and this is my central argument against a position like Elliott's--while in a state of extreme sadness, one simply lacks the motivation and the energy to do something about that.

As Spinoza understands it, and rightly so I think, sadness is a recognition of our impotence, of the ways in which we are limited. Nothing is gained by feeling sad about something that cannot be changed--such as the past--and something is lost or at least endangered, viz., our capacity to do something positive, if we feel sad about those things which we might be able to affect.

While sadness might have some evolutionarily adaptive value, it is simply a counterproductive feeling and is by no means a necessary prerequisite of bringing about positive social change. Sadness is the real luxury, not happiness. Alienation may be "reasonable" or "appropriate" in our society, but it sure as hell won't change anything.

Let us return to the example of Sisyphus. Keeping in mind that his situation is fantastical, I think that especially for him what matters is happiness. He is stuck in a situation he has no power to change. What does it matter if he, as Elliott interprets Camus, is happy, not in the sense of emotional wellbeing, but only in the sense of being conscious of the absurdity of his predicament? In other words, what does it matter if he is alienated? Perhaps it makes us feel better that his is an "appropriate response" to his "predicament", but it does little for Sisyphus except perhaps give him some feeling of moral superiority, a slim consolation indeed compared to the tragedy of his infinite torment.

As Wittgenstein so aptly puts it, somewhere in his notebooks, "The world of the happy man is not the same as the world of the unhappy man." And the difference between the happy world and the unhappy world can be the only one that matters in our nihilistic age. (This last point I recently wrote a paper about, so I will not develop it further for right now. By nihilism, I mean something like recognition of the contingency of all structures of meaning. In other words, every belief or value is simply regarded as a choice among numerous others, with no criteria upon which to choose. Picture life in the existential shopping mall, to use philosopher James Edwards' analogy.)

I am not convinced that medicalizing life's woes is incompatible with social critique. The suffering that depression brings about is as real as the suffering of malnutrition, although different in kind. It is certainly tragic that so many ignore the latter kind of suffering, but the cure for this is not to be found in the former. In short, this is why I am against "Against Happiness" and for Against Depression.

Problems with Technology

In preparation for a paper on Critical Theory and the critique of "Instrumental Rationality", I've been reading a number of articles in the philosophy of technology. As might be suspected from a discipline that has virtually eschewed any technological innovation--aside from the word processor, I can scarcely think of any concrete examples--most of them are critical, with some even celebrating their "Luddism".

Just today, I came upon a review for yet another book against genetic engineering by philosopher Michael Sandel, who I think I used to like. Called "The Case Against Perfection", it's typical of a certain class of problems that I'll explicate below. At least his critique seems somewhat novel, according to the reviewer, who calls it "half right".

Reading these various pieces has helped to clear up, in my own mind, what my general advocacy of technology more specifically entails, and where I am in agreement with its critics. To that end, I've been experimenting with a simple typology of problems, which I present in a draft form now.

I see two basic categories of problems, which I call "Problems of Destruction" and "Problems of Transformation". With respect to the former, I am on the same page with the most rabid of Luddites; it is the latter that I am less inclined to think of as problematic. Of course, these categories are not likely to be exhaustive--I can think of some examples which seem to fit into neither--nor mutually exclusive; they are simply schematic.

I) Problems of Destruction, as might be inferred, are those that deal with issues of survival. These include various threats to individuals, species, the environment, civilization, even life itself.

Certain fields like the recently emergent "synthetic biology"--a name I only came across days ago, but which already seems ubiquitous on the net--along with other sectors of biotechnology and nanotechnology have the potential to unleash massive devastation on par with nuclear holocaust (but without all that messy radiation). The engineering of a super-virus not found in nature or something like the infamous "gray goo" scenario (in which self-replicating nanobots are let loose and convert the entire biosphere into copies of themselves) would be examples of this.

(Artificial intelligence and robotics pose different kinds of threats, such as replacing human beings, which are considered by some as instances of the other class of problems. Insofar as an artificially intelligent civilization might mitigate the risk of other kinds of destruction, I find myself potentially sympathetic. This is an area I'll have to return to.)

Less destructive examples include pollution and other industrial processes which contribute to global warming, as well as more locally situated contaminations. The development of biofuels--undoubtedly the stupidest way of trying to resolve the energy crisis so unsurprisingly one championed by our president--poses significant dangers which have largely gone unrecognized. According to a recent report human beings already consume a quarter of nature's productive capacity, a figure which would be made even worse if fossil fuels were simply exchanged for biofuels.

Threats to the survival of human beings and other life would be regarded seriously by all but the most misanthropic. Efforts like the green energy movement and oversight of the most dangerous areas of research would be in our best interest. Those who resist these measures are simply not examining long-term consequences. Unfortunately, some major corporate players fall into this camp as a consequence of our brand of capitalism which is incapable of looking ahead more than a couple of years, usually being focused on this quarter's earnings and whatnot.

II) Problems of Transformation are more problematic in their problematicity. (As ugly as that last sentence is, it conveys what I want to say tersely.) Sandel's diatribe against genetic engineering is but one of a broad range of examples. In essence, what I'm calling "transformations" involve significant alterations to established ways of life, some more profound than others.

Since at least the industrial revolution, we have undergone a number of significant transformations. We live very differently than did our ancestors. The more conservative elements of society are likely to lament this as a loss, but most people are happy to call this "progress". I use the more neutral term "transformation" to avoid overt bias, even though I tend more often than not to fall into the latter camp. (Also, it's foolish to view a change as progressive simply in virtue of the fact that it is novel.)

The largest areas of concern today seem to be the potentially radical transformations to human beings that come from "enhancement technologies" such as genetics and cybernetics. Many critics contend that the blurring of boundaries occasioned by such interventions threaten our "humanity", "dignity", "meaning", or whatever other romantic buzzword one cares to use. In the very least, I grant them that not all "enhancements" will necessarily be improvements.

The more sophisticated critics realize that humans will (by and large) adapt to changes and take them for a new "normal"--and see this as part of the problem. However, it is difficult for such critiques to find purchase; either they rest on some dubious metaphysical ground, or they rely on the equally dubious strategy of taking certain characteristics of human beings--like the way that certain things disgust or frighten us--as essential. Quite frankly, I think "postmodern" intellectuals have no basis for criticizing transhumanism except their individual prejudices, which are only valid to those who share them.

Other examples of this would include heightening of the gap between technological elites and those without access. I'm inclined to think that such partitions are more a function of capitalism than a necessary consequence of technology. In fact, I see no way of finding positive alternatives to capitalism without significant technological change. Proponents of technology like to see this gap as more of a "lag"; the poor eventually do get access, as can be seen, e.g., in the spread of cell phones in the developing world.

I think that this Transformation category probably requires some greater specification since it covers such a broad range of issues. What's important to note is the way in which they tend to effect not merely our material circumstances, but also our beliefs, attitudes, and structures of meaning. The latter is what is most scary to people, but as an anti-essentialist, I am unconcerned.

Social critics will always find ways to complain of deficits of meaning in a society; conservatives will always long for the good old days that never were; but most people will adapt. Clinging to the old ways of life I see as a consequence of a couple of factors. Often, it's just greater fear of unknown evils than of known ones. When it's opposition to ostensible improvements, it's a way to make people feel better about the unnecessary suffering that they had to endure ("suffering is just a part of life!", "pain is what gives human existence meaning", "our imperfections constitute our humanness", and other such drivel).

Most likely, the intelligent inhabitants of earth a century from now (if there are any) would not appear "human" to most people today. As for me, I see no reason to cling to an evolutionary accident. What matters are things like rich experience, intelligence, reason, happiness, meaningfulness, benevolence, and so forth. Whether or not such beings think of themselves as "human", perhaps as some nostalgic sentiment, is to me entirely inconsequential. (I think an extension of the category of speciesism would be appropriate here.)

Why do I call myself an atheist?

In researching this paper on Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion, I've been coming upon some really fascinating ideas. My understanding of what faith is and what it means to be religious has changed, and I think it valuable to attempt to apply this to my own particular faith, or lack thereof.

To begin, just like religion is many different things to many different people, so too is atheism. Thus, the answer I give will be above all a personal one. Other people may choose to take it up, and that might give me some measure of satisfaction, but by and large I'm indifferent.

In practice, I think the differences that I have from many religious believers, particularly those who are reflective and philosophically-inclined, are really not so great. A lot of it amounts to differences in the use of language.

I have no problem speaking in religious terms--I talk about God all the time, particularly when teaching. However, I feel no need to understand my life in terms of such categories. If I were to use the word "God" in speaking about my Weltanschauung, I would probably either follow Spinoza's usage and treat it as equivalent to nature (i.e., all that is, was, and ever will be), or use it as another way of talking about myself. I, of course, recognize that I am finite and imperfect, but nothing requires that God be otherwise except the conventions of particular faiths.

So, in short, I am an atheist because I have no need of God. In fact, I find very admirable the figure of Lucifer in Christian mythology. Not insofar as he as anything to do with human suffering--here, I'd be much more sympathetic to Jesus--but because he refuses to submit to God.

Following Wittgenstein, I see faith as, for the most part, an act of submission to authority. (It is no coincidence that Islam, for instance, is a word meaning "submission".) I submit to no one but myself, and so I am proud, but I see this as a virtue and not a sin (so long as the pride does not become overweening).

Incidentally, this is one reason I love the series His Dark Materials. Pullman does more than undermine traditional religion with this work. I see him as actually putting forth another ideal, which we might call the Republic of Heaven.

Most of us do not deal with God on a face-to-face basis, so the act of submission is in practice to worldly authorities--priests, politicians, religious communities, and so forth. Their invocation of God as ultimate authority is meant to put an end to questioning and independent thought; again, it is a call for submission. But why submit to God? Or if this is too objectionable, why submit to those who claim to speak for him?

In my own case, there is no good reason for unthinking obedience (under ordinary circumstances, but I can imagine exceptions). But I don't think this is by any means true of everyone. Nor do I condemn them for it. From some perspectives, reasoning and questioning authority only causes problems, leading people away from God and salvation, etc. It would be cruel of me to try to force people who are otherwise happy in their beliefs (however misguided I may find them) into another mode of thinking.

This point, in particular, is something I have wavered on. I've had my periods of militant, evangelical atheism. But why should I care about what other people believe? Unlike some, I have no salvation to offer. Nor have I access to some absolute truth or knowledge of some correct way of living. Religious tolerance is, to me, the only reasonable option.

In fact, it would be hypocritical of me to try to proselytize, since it is an activity that I find objectionable when practiced by others. Certainly, I can see why people do it, but here is a place where they cross the line between living in their own worlds of constructed meanings and attempting to infringe on mine.

But one can't help but wonder, what motivates proselytizing atheologians like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens? I can't speak for them, but I know in my own case, the reason is primarily emotional. I just do not care for religion. At times, I even hate it.

Here now we must tread with caution. What exactly am I saying when I say that I hate religion? Case in point: I watched, for the first time, the movie Gandhi last night. In this instance, we have religion serving as a means of uniting people and overcoming injustice. It would be inhuman of me to want to rid the world of examples like Gandhi. Here is a case where, unambiguously (because there's no question here, unlike in so many other cases, of an individual justifying the violation of the very rules his religion provides with the excuse that the end justifies the means) where religion is a boon to humanity.

That is an atypical example. More commonly, we find individuals who perhaps do no great goods for the world, but do affect the people in their communities positively with support from a religious worldview. These more neutral cases I am tempted to dislike, but only because of association. In all honesty, I have no good reason for experiencing the irritation I sometimes do when encountering the typical, harmless believer.

If I am to be reasonable, I must distinguish between the cases where religion is harmful, and those in which it is positive or neutral. I don't really hate religion, per se, but only those cases in which people use it to justify violence or some other form of oppression, or when it is used as the basis for making decisions which would better be made on the basis of scientific evidence and critical reasoning.

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I've become sidetracked. Really, there are just a few key points that I see as distinguishing me from most religious believers.

1. I grant the existence of genuine loss, of meaningless, unnecessary suffering in the world. Things do not always turn out for the best. No cosmic being has a "plan" that will make everything okay in the end. Life is tragic.

Of course, I think granting this is not simply a cause for despair. The world may not be as we like it to, but sitting around and crying about it does no good. Instead, we should do the best we can to make things better, for ourselves and everyone else.

2. I recognize meaning as a human construction. In itself, the universe lacks purpose or direction. All that can be said of nature outside of the human world is that it is. It is not good or bad, beautiful or ugly, comic or tragic. It simply is.

However, this does nothing to undermine all our structures of meaning. Even though I recognize any way of understanding the world as ultimately contingent, I do so within my own structures of meaning. One can never step outside of these--or if one could, one can say nothing about it, nothing meaningful (this should be self-evident).

There is no Archimedean point, no ground for neutral criticism of any worldview. If I take objection to someone's way of looking at life, if I call it unreasonable, I am presupposing a standard of reasonability (and, moreover, presupposing that reasonability is something valuable itself) that is, perhaps regrettably, not shared by everyone.

3. Lastly, as I have said before, but almost as a consequence of the previous two points, I have no need to use religious language in my own case. No cosmic being has my back, or cares in the slightest about me. The only support is that which I receive from other human beings. But this is enough for me.

In saying that, I realize that I am fortunate and that many people are not able to live this way. (Personally, I see this newly discovered strength as a consequence of the mental health treatment I've been receiving over the past several years.)

I also reject other religious conceptions without negative consequence. I deny freedom of the will, and yet I feel freer than before, insofar as I feel more self-determined (granting that I am only in this position as a result of contingencies totally beyond my control). I deny personal immortality, and yet death does not concern me, but only encourages me to make the most of the life that I have. I deny transcendent ethical categories, but feel no less committed to leading a life that is ethical by human standards.

I may be living proof that one does not need to be religious to lead a decent life (and I am not alone; many in the 17th century were perplexed by the case of Spinoza, a man who led a virtuous and happy life--he saw these two as coextensive--but who was regarded as an atheist).

I feel confident and self-sufficient, able to live without consolation. I'm perhaps happier than I've ever been, including those times when I was a believer (if for no other reason than I no longer am plagued by doubts about the truth of my worldview).

Moreover, I am not exempt from ethical concerns. Even though I recognize that no one is keeping score and that I stand to gain nothing from it directly, I still strongly desire to diminish suffering in the world. Watching the story of Gandhi really made this hit home for me. I felt more keenly the suffering of others than I have in quite some time.

Usually, I maintain a certain kind of distance, a general coping strategy that I tend to employ often (and unconsciously), to keep me from getting caught up in all the world's pain. Last night, I felt it. But even though it hurt, I ultimately felt the better for it.

I know now--and this is something I had doubts about before--that deep down I am a compassionate person. If I can care for my fellow living creatures when I stand to gain nothing from it, that can only mean that I am a good person. I hope this to be a countervailing force to many of my self-centered tendencies.

I can see firsthand how Spinoza can ground ethics in (enlightened) self-interest. Part of my self-interest is an interest in others. Regardless of the circumstances of my own life, I could not be fully satisfied in the face of rampant injustice and suffering.

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If I had more time, I might organize these thoughts more coherently. I may incorporate some of them into the paper I'm writing, although they are on the personal side. I don't know that I've answered my initial question (I neglected to mention the strategic/prudential considerations, e.g., in the circles I run in, being an atheist is viewed favorably), but it is good to write out one's thoughts.