Mythologies of Transhumanism

Michael Hauskeller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319397405
• eBook ISBN: 9783319397412
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book examines the dependence of transhumanist arguments on the credibility of the narratives of meaning in which they are embedded. By taking the key ideas from transhumanist philosophy – the desirability of human self-design and immortality, the elimination of all suffering and the expansion of human autonomy – Michael Hauskeller explores these narratives and the understanding of human nature that informs them. Particular attention is paid to the theory of transhumanism as a form of utopia, stories of human nature, the increasing integration of the radical human enhancement project into the cultural mainstream, and the drive to upgrade from flesh to machine.

© The Author(s) 2016

Michael HauskellerMythologies of Transhumanism10.1007/978-3-319-39741-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: From Logos to Mythos

Michael Hauskeller¹

(1)

Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

End Abstract

The Saturday edition of the British newspaper The Guardian comes with a magazine, the Guardian Weekend, which always contains a standardised interview with some public figure. It is called “Questions & Answers”. The questions are always the same, except that not all of them are asked each time. Among them are: “What is your greatest fear?”, “Who would play you in the film of your life?” and “What is the worst thing anyone’s ever said to you?” The answers are often quite telling and can reveal a lot about the person who gives them. But my favourite question is this one: “What would your superpower be?” I am always disappointed when it is not asked.

The answers that people give to that question do not merely tell us something about them, but also about the dreams and fears that are prevalent in our culture. Here is a small selection of the answers that people have given to that question. At the top of the list is “immortality”, just one word, without further explanation. The answer betrays a firm belief in one’s own significance. Death is seen as a personal affront. Interestingly, immortality is the superpower of choice for the singer Tom Jones, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, and the founder of Playboy magazine, Hugh Hefner.

Then there are the do-gooders like the former German tennis champion Boris Becker: “To make the world a better place.” The same desire is expressed, in less general terms, by the former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in his answer: “Magic medicine. I’d love to be able to fix things for the sick and injured. The NHS is the closest thing to it – that’s why I’m such a passionate advocate of our system and its doctors and nurses.” No wonder he didn’t get re-elected. In comparison, the former British leader David Cameron and his erstwhile sidekick Nick Clegg appear refreshingly honest and surprisingly unanimous when it comes to their secret dreams. Cameron: “Teleporting – it would save a lot of travel time.” Clegg: “Easy. Teleporting.” What an interesting mixture of boyish romanticism (Beam me up, Scotty!), pragmatism, and professionalism, which expresses perfectly both their character and the role they chose to play.

More sinister dreams are voiced by Danny DeVito (“To have people do things the way I want”) and Lisa Marie Presley (“I’d be a witch”), and more realistic and modest ones by an ageing Roger Moore (“Being able to get out of a chair without clicking knees or an aching back”) and the British actor and political activist Tony Robinson, who, in days of yore, brilliantly portrayed Rowan Atkinson’s servant Baldrick in Blackadder (“Having to wee only once a day”).

Then there are the cultured ones like the conductor Daniel Barenboim (“To travel in time – in order to spend a day with Mozart”) and those who are—how shall I put it?—more at home in the flesh like the late singer Amy Winehouse (“Super sexuality”).

Very popular is also yet another form of easy locomotion. Bruce Willis: “Flying.” Cuba Gooding Jr.: “I dream about flying.” And, last but not least, my absolute favourite, with an unbeatable dry irony, Margaret Atwood: “The flying-around thing. With a cape.”

These are the things we dream of: having the ability to live without end, to never have to face the annihilation of our self that awaits all human beings, and indeed, all living creatures; living in a world from which all the bad things that plague us have disappeared and everything that is broken can be fixed; gaining full control over space and time so that spatial and temporal distances no longer stand in the way of our desires; having the power to do whatever we want, always, and to make others do what we want them to do; no longer having to put up with our ageing and frail bodies; being able to remove ourselves from the down-dragging weight of our earthbound existence; and, last but not necessarily least, having a more fulfilling and less demanding sex life.

All these dreams echo through our culture, and have been doing so since we began to reflect and tell stories about ourselves and our place in the world, and they all find a natural home today in the philosophy that is known as transhumanism. Transhumanism promotes the use of biotechnologies to modify and improve our nature, to transform us into a different kind of being. Guiding ideas are the desirability of human self-design, the elimination of all suffering and expansion of human autonomy, immortality, and ultimately the complete defeat of (human) nature. Transhumanists believe that we are finally on the brink of making the ancient dream of transcending the human condition come true. However, it has not been sufficiently noticed and appreciated yet that transhumanist arguments in support of radical human enhancement rest on certain narratives about what it means to be human and what a good human life consists in. The discussion usually proceeds on the level of the surface arguments and largely ignores the storytelling (mythos legein or mythologies) that surrounds them and on which their plausibility crucially depends. In this book, we are going to explore those narratives of human nature that inform the transhumanist discourse because it is only by uncovering the, in that sense, mythological foundations of transhumanism that we can properly assess its plausibility as a philosophy.

I use the term “mythology”, which combines the Greek words mythos and logos, to signify not the learned study of ancient myths, but rather the telling of stories that carry a deep cultural or spiritual significance and provide an explanation and justification for certain practices that are either already established, in the process of being established, or desired to be established. By using this term, I also wish to emphasise the fact that seemingly rational philosophical arguments are rarely, if ever, self-sufficient. The concepts that are employed in those arguments are “embodied in myths and fantasies, in images, ideologies and half-beliefs, in hopes and fears, in shame, pride and vanity. Like the great philosophers of the past who helped to shape our tradition, we need to start by taking notice of these.” (Midgley 2011, 128). They are, in other words, embedded in narrative structures of meaning. All philosophies tell a story: about what it means to be human; about what is worth doing, desiring, and fighting for; about good and evil; and, ultimately, what life is all about. As Steven B. Harris has pointed out, myth “is not only religion, of course; it is something more inclusive, broadly encompassing such things as rituals and beliefs. But myth is especially the collection of stories we tell to give ourselves a narrative psychological framework with which to deal with the world. In that larger sense, myth includes (but is not limited to) any story that answers the difficult questions of life: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is the far future going to be like? What is expected of me? Who are the heroes? (What is the Good? What defines Cool?) What is going to happen to me when I die?” (Harris 1996, 45).

What we commonly see as the progression from mythos to logos, story to argument, emotion and intuition to reason and rational thinking, and subjectivity to objectivity is not, and can never be, complete. Logos always remains firmly rooted in mythos, which gives logos its direction and purpose. In this sense, logos always points back at mythos. Myth, says Neil Gillman, is “an imaginative way of shaping complex data into a structure of meaning. Myths of this kind can neither be verified nor falsified. They can only be challenged by an alternative myth, and they can be testified against.” (Gillman 2004).

Some years ago, in summer 2012, I had some time to spare in London and, prompted by a poster that I happened to come across, visited the Superhuman exhibition in the Wellcome Collection. I hadn’t heard anything about it, so was curious about what to find. The exhibition was rather small, and the exhibits appeared curiously random. There was a little statue of the flying Icarus (without a cape), obviously meant to be a potent symbol of human enhancement (which struck me as a rather unfortunate choice given the disastrous consequences of Icarus’s attempt to fly to freedom); various devices that were thought to represent early enhancements, such as glasses, dildos, a set of teeth, and running shoes; pictures of comic book superheroes; prosthetic limbs; a video of a pretty, naked female artist whose body is being marked by a plastic surgeon; other “artistic” films dealing in some way with the human body, its frailty, and the possibility of its transformation (providing, among other things, a good view between the wide open legs of another naked female, which seemed of particular interest to the group of college students that also happened to be there); a microchip similar to that implanted in the arm of Kevin Warwick; a robot wheelchair that moves by itself through a room; and, last but not least, video clips showing some of the usual enhancement suspects—Julian Savulescu, John Harris, Andy Miah, Anders Sandberg, Barbara Sahakian, and Bennett Foddy—giving speeches about both the desirability and the ordinariness (same old, same old) of human enhancement:

Sandberg:

Why should we have to exercise in order to be strong and fit? Couldn’t we achieve that using a pill or some other means? (…) Human technology is something natural. (Wellcome Collection 2012, 30)

Miah:

During the ancient Olympic Games 2700 years ago (…) athletes were using technologies or natural products to make their products more capable for the sporting environment. Athletes would rub oil on their bodies to protect themselves against the baking heat of Olympia when they do their marathon (…). 2700 years later, not much has changed: athletes are still experimenting with technology to try and push themselves as fast and as hard as they can. (Wellcome Collection 2012, 32)

Foddy:

People often think of anti-ageing medicine or lifespan enhancement as somehow being outside the domain of medicine but almost every medical intervention that we’ve made over the past 150 years has extended human life, and to a lesser degree, human youth. Really it’s the project of medicine to extend human life, to enhance life and human youth and to defeat age and death. (Wellcome Collection 2012, 37)

Harris:

Enhancement is part of medicine. (…) I’m mystified by the resistance that human enhancement faces. (…) we’ve got to enhance ourselves; we know we have (…); there is literally no alternative. (Wellcome Collection 2012, 38)

Both the exhibits and the comments by the supposed experts strongly suggested that human enhancement is nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, enhancing ourselves is what we have always done. That there might be a difference between external devices such as glasses and the permanent transformation of the human body, between the replacement of lost limbs and functions and the attempt to gain superhuman abilities, is vehemently denied. Yet oddly enough, little of the actual exhibition had much to do with “superhumans”. There was no clearly articulated idea of what would turn us into better humans, or into beings that are better than humans, other than perhaps the image of the comic book superhero. The main objective seemed to be to blur distinctions, to make us believe that everything is the same as everything else, that we are all enhanced anyway, so that the envisaged technological enhancement of the human is nothing we have reason to worry about. On the contrary. This message is reinforced by an appeal to human nature, to what being human is all about, in the introduction to the exhibition brochure provided by the exhibition’s curator Emily Sargent:While human enhancement might initially seem to be the preserve of science fiction, the exhibition examines the subject through the lens of broader human experience. Initial fears that enhancement might compromise our core values are dispelled as we unravel the subject and face the possibility that it is our very desire to improve ourselves that makes us human. The extraordinary range of objects, artworks and ideas that have been brought together for this exhibition reflects this. Superhuman highlights the ingenuity displayed in the past to overcome obstacles or conquer new frontiers, while offering a glimpse of what we might look forward to in the future. (Wellcome Collection 2012, 6)

So there is nothing to fear really and everything to look forward to. Unfortunately, the exhibition itself did not dispel any fears at all, simply because it did not even address them. Neither did it show us what we “might look forward to”, unless this is looking like a robot or perhaps having prosthetic devices that are indistinguishable from real limbs. And there was certainly nothing there that would suggest, let alone demonstrate, that “it is our very desire to improve ourselves that makes us human”. This claim, however, is the myth at the centre of the argument that is being made here, a bit of storytelling that helps us to make sense of it all, to give a particular meaning to the rapid social and cultural changes we experience and envisage. It is a claim that cannot be verified nor falsified. It can only be, as Gillman says, challenged by an alternative myth or testified against.

Here is an alternative myth: four years ago, during the same summer the Superhuman exhibition took place, London also hosted, with a huge hullabaloo, the Olympic Games as well as its supposedly ugly little sister, the Paralympics. To promote and kindle interest in the latter, various TV channels broadcast a 90-second video promo, produced by a Channel 4 team, advertising the event. In the video, we see a number of disabled athletes, training hard, faces full of determination, visibly ready to kick ass, and get a glimpse of the events that caused them to be what they are today: terrible accidents, war, genetic defects. Yet the film is made in such a way that those athletes do not come across as disabled at all. On the contrary, they appear to be immensely abled, despite the fact that they have got a limb or two missing or are confined to a wheelchair. There is no weakness to be seen, nothing that is apt to arouse compassion, or worse, pity in us. What we feel instead, and are meant to feel, is admiration, or even more than that: something more akin to awe. This impression is reinforced by four lines of text superimposed over the pictures: “Forget everything you thought you knew about strength./ Forget everything you thought you knew about humans./ It’s time to battle./ Meet the superhumans.” It was thus suggested that we regard the athletes competing at the Paralympics not as disabled, but on the contrary, as superabled, not as less than human, as deficient in some way, but as more than human. I find this utterly remarkable, because it turns the usual perspective on its head. Superhumans are normally pictured as gifted with special physical or cognitive abilities that allow them to do things that no mere human can do. They can fly or have X-ray eyes or read minds or bend time or are indestructible, or what have you. This is the kind of fantasy that informs much of our current thinking about human enhancement. The radically enhanced human or post-human that transhumanists and others envisage is really not much different from a comic book superhero. Both are able to do things that mere humans cannot do for the simple reason that, for them, the boundaries that determine our human existence no longer exist. They have overcome those boundaries by making them disappear. What the Channel 4 video spot about the Paralympics suggested, though, is that real strength does not show itself in a limitless existence, in the creation of an environment that no longer presents any obstacles to the satisfaction of our will, that is, in other words, in virtual omnipotence. Rather, real strength consists in the spirit. Instead of leaving behind all boundaries, we become more than human by deciding to live with them, but at the same time refusing to let ourselves be bullied by them. We prove both our humanity and superhumanity by refusing to buckle, by putting up a good fight, and by accomplishing great things despite our limitations. Thus, it is not human enhancement, at least not the kind of human enhancement that is commonly discussed as such, that will make us superhuman. If anything, it is resolve, and courage, and related virtues of the mind and heart.

Clearly, this is not a story that we would expect a t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: From Logos to Mythos
• 2. Anxious Dreams of a Better World
• 3. Birds Don’t Fly
• 4. Shitting Ducks
• 5. Stealing Fire from the Gods (and the Weak)
• 6. Fixing the Animal
• 7. The Disease of Being Human
• 8. The Unfairness of Nature
• 9. Gods Rather than Cyborgs
• 10. Automatic Sweethearts
• Backmatter