Br20 TRANSHUMANISM TRANSCENDED
This piece is a straightforward fundamental criticism of the simple foundational principles of transhumanism.
At an early age many years ago, I flirted with Christian religion. Later came Socialism, then Communism. Humanism followed some time later. For me, all these failed to stand up to critical examination and challenge. Now comes Transhumanism, based upon a welcome respect for pure intelligence per se, but upon a misunderstanding of human intelligence, its function, its capacity, and its true potential. Also upon a misconception of the value of artificial intelligence. Those other 'isms' that have gone before have suffered from being organisations whose members, having joined, become loyally biased towards their chosen faith to the extent that they, with a complicated literature gathered round them, do not suffer criticism gladly. It is to be hoped that this is not the case with transhumanism.
The first concern, of those wishing to change the world for the better, should be truth - fundamental and absolute rather than merely factual truth. My website www.humantruth.org expounds what I find to be true - ie humantruth. This article takes the principles of Transhumanism, extracted from the WTA website, and critically comments on them in the light of humantruth.
Transhumanism - T - is the study of means of overcoming fundamental human limitations.
Humantrue comment - H - Human limitations are not fundamental. They arise from our ignorant or wilful self-limitation to the conscious mind's instinct-related sphere of thinking. Our limitation would be self-overcome by a new awareness of and submission to our own hitherto subdued or ignored postconscious minds - ie by supraconsciousness.
T. affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally altering the human conditioning through applied reason................
H. Applied reason is conscious thought directed by the will which, though capable of dazzling scientific discovery and technical application by simply following its nose from fact to fact, cannot be relied upon for utterly reasoned whole truth. That truth is the function of the postconscious mind (its influence at present limited to the still small voice of conscience) a mind which, in order to fulfil its pure function, must be free and independent. It must not be, and cannot be, applied.
T. The human species does not represent the end of our evolution.
H. We are a spearhead of intellect whose object is the discovery and universal realisation of truth. When that object is achieved, that shall be the end of meaningful evolution. Consciously reasoned progress might then continue but it shall be meaningless, wilful, instinctively automatic evolution, the antithesis of truth which shall produce endless false chaos.
T. We will face the prospect of real artificial intelligence.
H. Allowed and enabled to construct itself, biologically, an artificial intelligence shall no doubt develop which surpasses in sheer capacity the human conscious mind. It might even, eventually but pointlessly, equal the postconscious but could never surpass it because the postconscious mind's potential is absolutely optimum reasoning. The human brain, when fully developed, shall have perfected the postconscious mind as overall moral guide and meaningful representative of the human person and race. As part of that development it shall also have perfected the conscious mind, and any artificial thinking-appendages of that mind, as executive of the supraconscious person and society; as both servant and enricher of society but never as leader or commander. To entrust humanity to any guidance other than postconscious humantruth, reflected in the mind of each and every individual, is to court disaster.
T. ........we can make things better and promote rational thinking, freedom, tolerance and democracy........through the accelerating pace of technological development and scientic understanding......... New cognitive tools will be built that combine artificial intelligence with new interface technology.
H. The first thing we must do is fulfil our own intelligence by opening to our postconscious minds. When we are aware of humantruth, then we can determine what science and technology may be pursued as beneficial and what must be abandoned as unnecessary.
The cognitive tools T would use are developed by rational thinking of the lesser conscious mind, likely to be motivated by novelty, by competition to discover, and by profit. The accelerating pace of technological development and scientific understanding is not true progress; it is autoprogression. Existing society is continually caught on the hop by autoprogression to which it is obliged to adapt as best it can, for both good and ill.
Present society is thus led by basic instinctive drives rather than by true intelligence. If true freedom, tolerance and 'democracy' is to be established in the world, it must be preceded by equality. But the front-runners in the scientific/technological race are the privileged minority. In the present reality it is unlikely that these minority aims and interests shall coincide with those of the underprivileged majority, nor with anyone's basic morality. Though it be governed by the most-wise, an unequal, competitive society shall engender differences which contain seeds of discontent and conflict.
T. Through the redesign of pharmological enrichment of our pleasure centres we may enjoy a richer diversity of emotions, lifelong happiness and exhilerating peak experiences every day.
H. Modern man has already experienced similar 'enrichment'. There is a world of difference between 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' depicted by Robbie Burns and that of the couch-potatoe flopped in front of a television, but it is doubtful whether either of these two is overall happier than the other. If the transhumans were to experience one exhilerating peak experience every day, would they not eventually see this as no more than the expected (perhaps boring) norm, and equate happiness with two such peak experiences?
If we as we stand were transferred to a truly ideal social framework, we would discover, or rediscover in ourselves plenty of capacity for satisfaction and enjoyment, often drawing happiness from the smallest, most ordinary things.
Emotional pleasures (and pains) adjust themselves to experience and activity, so that any creature, of whatever habit may, on balance, achieve happiness. It is not genuine happiness which depends upon adapting to artificial pleasure-sensations and escaping balancing pain. That pain might rightly be felt for the misfortune of others, and even in a world free of war there shall always be natural disasters occurring. To turn a blind eye in order to preserve personal happiness is hardly humane.
So I suggest that transhumanism is fundamentally flawed. It is not, as it claims to be, a desirable recipe for the improvement of the human condition. It shares the common conviction that we are incapable of escaping the Machine (my name for a lost society dependent upon the unreasoned autoprogression of science and technology aided and abetted by the competitive money-economy). Transhumanists may or may not recognise that humanity presently abjectly submits to the Machine as the agent of its blind, unreasoning, accelerating pursuit of mere mathematical targets. But transhumanism does seemingly propose that these all-powerful Machine-drives be somehow harnessed to the cause of human happiness.
This means putting our scientific and technological resources, already in service to the Machine, to the task of developing artificial intelligence superior to our own brains, assuming that this superior intelligence shall take control of the whole situation and persuade the Machine to devote itself to building 'new cognitive tools that combine artificial intelligence with new interface technology', and to 'pharmological enrichment of human pleasure centres so that we may enjoy a richer diversity of emotions, lifelong happiness and exhilerating peak experiences every day'.
Why should it take a superior artificial mind to engineer these boons, and why should such a mind devote itself to the interests of lesser humans? What driving interests would compel this superior regime to serve collective human interest, rather than to some developing interest of its own? Up to the present, most scientific and technological progression has been driven by curiosity, fame, fortune. One can imagine human minds developing, uniting, then co-operating to serve collective human interests. Is it not very unlikely that such a united humanity would then put its chief effort into attempting to construct an artificial mind superior to its own with a view to submitting to it? And for what reason, by what instruction, would that superior mind, if perfected, then presume to be serving human interests by implanting aids that give us the illusion of happiness as we wander in its scientific no-man's-land. ?
I repeat - a superior mind of potentially optimum intelligence already exists within every human head. With encouragement and help each will encompass truth and in this way all humanity will be united in making a humantrue world.
List of Branch articles, in no particular reading sequence:
PREVIOUS :1. The Nature and State of the Human Race: 2 : Truth - No-Go Area : 3. Facing Yourself: 4. Explaining the Mind : 5. Moral Mind : 6. Great Men: 7. Comment Pinker : 8. The Way We Think : 9.Sanity for Humanity : 10. Evolution of Mind:11. Free Thinker View :12. Reality : 13. Understanding Consciousness : 14. Bottom Line : 15. Brain-Mind Relations: 16. Open Letter to Philosophers : 17. The Mind and Philosophy : 18.Self Twixt 2 Minds19. The Holographic Dimension:
CURRENT : 20. Transhumanism transcended.
REMAINING : 21. Mind, Will and Self
Comments? Email : jhnoates@yahoo.co.uk : perhaps for inclusion in End Pages.
For overview, return to Home Page INDEX htm