From Human to Transhuman: Technology and the Reconstruction of the World Templeton Research Lecture Arizona State Univer

1. From Human to Transhuman:Technology and the Reconstruction of the WorldTempleton Research LectureArizona State UniversityOctober 22, 2007 Brad Allenby Templeton Research Fellow Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Engineering Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor of Law

2. So long as we do not, through thinking, experience what is, we can never belong to what will be. The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment. Source: M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translation by W. Lovitt (New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1977), “The Turning,” p. 49; “The Age of the World Picture,” p. 136.

3. “We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it.” Stewart Brand, 1968, Whole Earth Catalogue “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.” William Gibson “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” Vishnu, Bhagavad Gita, Robert Oppenheimer at Trinity Test, 1945, White Sands, New Mexico

4. What Is Transhumanism? • From the World Transhumanism Website: • 1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. • (2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.

5. We Are Already Transhuman • The evolution of human varietals better suited to niche conditions (e.g., “digital natives” with brains hardwired for complex information environments) • The distributed self (e.g., high percentage of males experimenting with female avatars in virtual realities) • Integration of individual cognition with distributed information/technology structures (e.g., google as substitute for factual memory) • Augcog: information dense environments, such as combat, require AI consciousness protection active filters (AI as subconscious) • Life extension through redesign of the human platform

6. Where Are We Now? • The world is entering the “Age of Humans,” the Anthropocene: • Global climate change • Biodiversity shift from “evolved biodiversity” to “engineered biodiversity” • Technology, especially the converging foundational streams of nanotechnology, biotechnology, cognitive science, robotics, and information and communication technology, is critical locus of accelerating evolutionary pressures. • There is an extraordinary flight from ethical responsibility. It is based on a profound misunderstanding of the world as we have created it.

7. Key Concepts • “Earth systems” include economic, technological, and cultural systems, not just physical systems. Moreover, the human/natural/built integrated systems of the Anthropocene cannot be understood through just one worldview, be it scientific, theological, or postmodern. • Complexity and focus on systems • Mutually exclusive but equally valid ontologies • The world as design space (e.g., shift from “withdraw from using fossil fuels” to “designer atmosphere”) • The human as design space • Result: radical contingency

8. Technology Clusters as Integrated Systems: The Railroad Example • Railroads required a uniform, precise system of time, and thus created “industrial time” and its associated culture • Railroads created the need for, and co-evolved with, national scale communications systems (telegraph) (all technology systems have coupled infrastructures); • Railroad firms created modern managerial capitalism (modern accounting, planning, and administration systems); • Railroad firms created the modern capital and financial markets (railroad construction was the single most important stimulus to industrial growth in Western Europe by 1840s);

9. Technology Clusters as Integrated Systems: The Railroad Example • Railroads in the United States became a potent symbol of national power, and, more subtly, instantiated and validated the US integration of religion, morality and technology; • Railroads transformed landscapes at all scales: Chicago existed, and structured the Midwest economically and environmentally, because of railroads; • Like most major technological systems, railroads fundamentally changed US economic and power structures, validating the US nation-state and Manifest Destiny and restructuring the economy from local/regional business concentrations to trusts (scale economies of national markets); and, • Railroads dramatically changed the underlying teleology of American culture, changing it from Jeffersonian agrarianism, an Edenic teleology, to a technology-driven New Jerusalem, a cultural schism that replays itself today in the continuing environmentalist challenge to technology.

10. Case Study: The Autonomic City • Trend 1: increasing integration of ICT at all scales in urban systems: smart materials, smart buildings, smart infrastructure, regional sensor systems of all kinds – and all interconnected. • And increasingly virtual: highly complex Net-based systems (e.g., Google Earth) are being mashed against these evolving “smart urban components” to create far more complex information topographies. • Trend 2: ICT itself evolving to be qualitatively more complex: • autonomic ICT at all scales, from chip, to PC/assembly, to global communications networks • Piggybacked on Net, an auto-catalytic, self-designing system • Result: The Autonomic City, already here, profoundly different from anything we know, but essentially invisible to us

11. The Autonomic City: Portents • Remember October 19, 1987 – “Black Monday” – Dow Jones dropped 22% in one day. Main reason: internal systems dynamics (multiplying independent computerized trading programs with “sell” floors working in an integrated system), not major changes in market fundamentals. • This was simple system: What happens at much more complex urban systems level? Who’s even looking? • Note that the trick is in the interplay of technology with cultural and economic systems at many different scales.

12. Case Study 2: The Human as Design Space • Leon Kass, Chair of President’s Council on Bioethics: “Victory over mortality is the unstated but implicit goal of modern medical science.” (Nature editorial, 2004, 432:657). • Some consider significant lifetime extension probable within decades, with “synthetic biology” approach that applies engineering models and systems to biology. ICT view: “Engineering and Aging” – using “engineered negligible senescence” to control ageing will allow average ages of well over 100 within a few decades (IEEE Spectrum, 2004, 41(9):10, 31-35). • Two separate discourses – bioengineering and ICT - claim “functional immortality” within 50 years (beyond horizon where most observers feel able to predict at all)

13. Changing The Human:Evolution of Cognitive Networks • Cognition (including memory) dispersed over Net, enhancing individual cognitive power and changing nature of wetware-based cognition (“intelligence” changes from fact-based to “navigate different realities gracefully” based). How do we educate for this change? • Drugs: “At least 40 potential cognitive enhancers are currently in clinical development” (The Economist, Technology Quarterly, September 18th, 2004). • MRIs (brain hardwiring) of young developed country “digital natives” different than that of their parents, or non-Net youth. The real digital divide is already biologically based. • Nicolelis at Duke: monkey with brain implants moves mechanical arm in next room; Schwarz at U. Pitt: monkeys with implants use mechanical arm to feed themselves.

14. Changing The Human:Evolution of Cognitive Networks • Kennedy at Neural Signals: cone implant entirely sealed within brain enabled completely paralyzed patient to move cursor; Donoghue at Cyberkinetics: implant multiple needle electrode in patient, who within two months could open email, change television channels, switch lights on and off, and operate robotic arm (Braingate to be on market 2007). • Wolpaw/McFarland – external cap allows paraplegic control of cursor • DARPA and DoD?

15. THE HUMAN AS DESIGN SPACE: IMPLICATIONS • Given economic, national security, cultural competitiveness, psychological and other drivers, it is highly unlikely redesign of human and nature will be stopped • “Meaning” will become clearly contingent, deliberately constructed phenomenon (by elite? By democratic choice?). Think Fox News. • “Truth” will be replaced by contingency and constructed behaviors and networks at perceivable timescales: “All that is solid melts into air” (Marx).

16. THE HUMAN AS DESIGN SPACE: IMPLICATIONS • Baseline terms and assumptions – including ethical and religious concepts and values - are becoming contingent within the cycle times of decisionmaking, political action, and cultural perceptual horizons. • What will it mean to have to be facile in a number of different “realities” – many “Digital Natives” already are. • What happens when humans become integrated combinations of technology and biology, with designs dictated by whimsy, fashion, money or industrial demand (note much initial genetic work is being done for professional athletics; plastic surgery as fashion). • Major social conflict when religions realize that all components of the human are contingent, and it becomes clear that meaning is manufactured and historically/culturally contingent, and wholly anthropogenic.

17. FIDES ET RATIO: JOHN PAUL II • Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth [introduction]. • This truth, which God reveals to us in Jesus Christ, is not opposed to the truths which philosophy perceives. On the contrary, the two modes of knowledge lead to truth in all its fullness. The unity of truth is a fundamental premise of human reasoning, as the principle of non-contradiction makes clear. [para 34] Encyclical Letter, FIDES ET RATIO, of the Supreme Pontiff JOHN PAUL II to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Relationship Between Faith and Reason, 1998.

18. FIDES ET RATIO: JOHN PAUL II • Both the light of reason and the light of faith come from God, he [St. Thomas Aquinas] argued; hence there can be no contradiction between them. . . . More radically, Thomas recognized that nature, philosophy's proper concern, could contribute to the understanding of divine Revelation. Faith therefore has no fear of reason, but seeks it out and has trust in it. Just as grace builds on nature and brings it to fulfilment, so faith builds upon and perfects reason. [para 43, references omitted] • It is an illusion to think that faith, tied to weak reasoning, might be more penetrating; on the contrary, faith then runs the grave risk of withering into myth or superstition. By the same token, reason which is unrelated to an adult faith is not prompted to turn its gaze to the newness and radicality of being. . . . This is why I make this strong and insistent appeal—not, I trust, untimely—that faith and philosophy recover the profound unity which allows them to stand in harmony with their nature without compromising their mutual autonomy. [para. 48, references omitted] Encyclical Letter, FIDES ET RATIO, of the Supreme Pontiff JOHN PAUL II to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Relationship Between Faith and Reason, 1998.

19. Science and Religion, II This is our way of seeing how God created the universe, and [the Vatican] wants to make a strong statement that truth doesn’t contradict truth; that if you have faith, you’re never going to be afraid of what science comes up with. Because it’s true. “Guy Consolmagno, curator of the Vatican meteorite collection describes how Catholicism has nothing to fear from the discoveries of science.” quoted in NewScientist 196(2624):12 (6 October 2007).

20. Undermining the Enlightenment • Radically increasing complexity: • a) static complexity • b) dynamic complexity • c) “wicked” complexity • d) scale • Implications can be profound: Marxism in the Soviet Union and China collapsed not from external conquest or even from Reagan’s vaunted spend race, but rather because the centralized economic model adopted by large Marxist societies simply became incapable of managing the complexity inherent in a modern industrial economy.

21. Undermining the Enlightenment • Accelerating evolution of technology systems, especially ICT, combined with the postmodern fragmenting of time, space and culture, dramatically decreases the stability of all cultural constructs: • Externally, the social and cultural landscapes that we look out on; • Internally, that which looks out – the self and our individuality • Fundamentalism is the reaction to radical contingency introduced by accelerating change

22. Undermining the Enlightenment • Transhumanism is often viewed, particularly by opponents, as a conflict between the human; rather, what is already happening is that the two are merging. • Failure of current modes of simplification: • Many groups, from deep greens to Marxists to religious conservatives opposing modernity, cling to ideologies and older worldviews • But ideological approaches of all kinds are particularly problematic given rapid change: • Oversimplification; • Based on past verities, and thus embed assumptions and implications that are necessarily increasingly anachronistic in a period of rapid and discontinuous change • They create a utopian vision validating an “ends justify the means” morality; • They cut off information transfer and dialog, and are profoundly anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, and anti-rational.

23. Undermining the Enlightenment . • Transhumanism and technological change may well mark the end of the great Enlightenment project of radical democratic power. A world marked by inter-national patterns of inequality is increasingly becoming a world where an elite skilled in navigating complex and information dense environments dominates, and more and more others sink into a global proletariat. • This proletariat opposes technological evolution in increasingly effective ways in democratic states, but can be finessed in authoritarian states. This rapidly growing base is incapable of keeping pace with continuing change, unable to integrate into the information webs that increasingly define human cognition, and aghast at the changes in lifestyle, income distribution, relative power relationships, and changes in sexual and family roles and structures that have resulted. • Because accelerating technological change can only increase opposition to itself, and yet it is an important component of cultural dominance, technology generally and transhumanism specifically enhances cultural competitiveness only where democratic mechanisms do not enable activist opposition that increasingly hobbles technological evolution

24. A New Authenticity • We must recognize and accept the world as it is, not as various ideologies would wish it to be. • We must accept that the new human condition requires each person to accept the personal validity of their cognitive networks, while simultaneously recognizing them as contingent and stochastic in a world characterized by mutually exclusive but equally valid ontologies. • We must accept the epistemological and existential implications of complex adaptive systems, in that any perceptual or cognitive network, or understanding of a complex system, is created by the query posed to the system, and thus embodies unavoidable reflexivity between the system and the cognitive network, and implies the contingency and incompleteness of any particular perspective on a complex adaptive system. • Given proposition 3, we must have the integrity to create appropriate queries, since they will structure the cognitive networks within which we operate. Substituting wistful fantasies for honest query or gameplaying the query process to create ideologically predetermined local realities must be rejected as profoundly inauthentic. • We must accept the condition that meaning, truth, and values are functions of network state, and thus are contingent and continually regenerated in a reflexive dialog between cognitive systems posing queries to, and thus generating configurations of, external complex adaptive systems.

25. A New Authenticity • That which you most believe, you must distrust the most. Meaning, and truth, arise from the dialectical process of their continued rejection. • We must accept rationality as partial and constructed, an interplay between different and contingent ontologies and partial structures of underlying complex adaptive systems, congealed intentionality and cognition, and institutional and network dynamics – without, however, slipping into a solipsistic relativism, which is its own form of inauthenticity. • Even though the macroethics of complex adaptive systems are beyond the level of the individual, authenticity requires that each individual, operating in good faith, participate in establishing institutional capabilities to dialog with such systems, be they technological, environmental, biological, cultural, or social. • We must thoughtfully reject the ideologies and frameworks characteristic of the first Enlightenment, and actively participate in the reinvention of the Enlightenment for a profoundly multicultural, and much more complex, world. • Authenticity requires understanding that the individual is a contingent framework that has worked well in the past, but is increasingly dysfunctional in a complex world characterized by cognitive networks extending across technological, biological, and human systems, and the evolution of transhuman variants, already well underway. Thus, authenticity demands acceptance of cognition as increasingly involving production of emergent systems characteristics at levels higher than the individual.

26. “He, only, merits freedom and existence Who wins them every day anew.” (Goethe, 1833, Faust, lines 11,575-76)