Cybernet David

If the function and purpose of a philosopher is to philosophize, the designation as such must be characterized as a verb, that is to say, a state of active doing, which would also seem to suggest that philosophy is “for” something and that it produces results. The transhumanist philosophers occupy a special niche in that they are the thinker-facilitators of the use of technology to transcend human limitations, echoing the humanist ideals of progress and excellence. This is a profound and increasingly important field of contemplation as we continue forward into the age of acceleration with many different facets.

To become a successful transhumanist philosopher, we must make use of the best of all philosophical traditions. It is time for a “great scramble” of human knowledge, where we need to check the relevance of every knowledge system to the great project of the singularity and merging with ASI. It is important in this respect to draw from the motivations of both the analytic and continental philosophical traditions. Armed with facts, logic, and hard reasoning on one hand, we explore just what technology is and how it has progressed, seeking to draw clear definitional boundaries that produce workable results for scientists. For example, philosophy of mind and consciousness is no longer an airy, pompous pontification on the nature of cognition, but has direct applications to the scientists and patients currently involved in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). The continental side comes in when we want to look at the subjective: what does it feel like to be a person with a BCI or a scientist working on such a project? What does it say about our identity, our personhood, our liberty? Here also there are results produced, in the realm of the law. Our subjective attitudes towards technology shape the policy that governs its growth.

We have no choice but to think about technology and how we feel about it. We are hunter-gatherer creatures living in an age of acceleration governed by Moore’s law, where computing power doubles roughly every two years. It is always possible that these laws change, so we understand them to be conceptual tools that enable us to form a more clear image of what is going on in the present, but which cannot determine the nature of reality forever. These conceptual tools are important for any transhumanist philosopher’s toolkit and are born out of inquiry into the nature of what’s going on, but they cannot be relied upon as solid tools of analysis for all of time: they serve a purpose here and now to understand the present more, and from our understanding of the present, informed by the past, we intuit and project into the future. What does remain constant is change itself, and this force of creative transformation active on the planet shows no signs of slowing down. How we respond to this change shapes both subjective and objective realities.

We are, today, living in the world born out of the aspirations and efforts of our ancestors. So, if we care about the future as transhumanists devotedly claim to do, we have to ask what kind of ancestors we would ourselves like to be. This, along with progress and excellence, is the “humanist” root of “transhumanism”. We look at ourselves, self-evaluate, self-direct, and self-improve. The question is a rather important one because our answers to it will help to determine the very nature of the future itself. It brings us back to the core questions posed by classical civilizations: what does it mean to live a good life- especially in light of rapid technological transformations and developments? What is true, good, and beautiful in a world defined by the acceleration of technology and its merging with the human form? What is just and unjust in the applications of these technologies? And so on…. while tomes could be written on these questions, we can only hope to start by asking them, which is the defining act of the philosopher: to question.

Questions need to be posed at both the abstract and the material, but also need to be asked from first principles. In transhumanism, the first principles may be said to be: the inextricability of the human being from their tools; the function of tool-making to transcend limitations as a defining characteristic of the human being; the growing inviability of distinction between tool and human, which results in the singularity, a situation where there is no longer any viable distinction whatsoever between tool and what was once the human form.

Each of these tools or technologies that we create can be considered under the lense of the transhumanist critique, from holding a hammer to hosting a BCI in your brain… in each case, identity and possibility are both effected, effectively transcending what was previously available to the subject in question. If you are holding a hammer, you can now hammer nails, and potentially build a little chicken hut so you can have eggs. Your identity is changed from someone who cannot do things with a hammer (by virtue of not having one) to someone who now can do things with a hammer, because a hammer is had… In this way, an object is included in the subjective identity of the holder. This is a simplification of the complex interplay between identity, ability, and the presence or absence of certain tools. Obviously this becomes more complex in the case of a BCI, and many more different strains of thought are needed to form a theoretical approach to the philosophy of human-computer intermingling. Perhaps there is something in the non-duality of Advaita Vedanta that could present itself as a serviceable metaphor, and with the AI of today we are much more empowered to scour the shelves of human knowledge with specific inquiries such as these in mind. In this way, the tool of artificial narrow intelligence (what we have today) amplifies and enhances the task of the transhumanist philosopher in its contemplation, showing further our inextricable contextualization by tools and technology that we have, ourselves, created.

Let us look at the tool-powered transformation of identity a bit further. With the hammer, by understanding and using it, we can become a builder. Without the resulting shift in ability from using that specific tool, we wouldn’t be able to claim that title for ourselves. Like this, engagement with tools of the material realm help to produce conceptual tools, even though they are derived from concepts in the first place. In this way, we can see a feedback loop between tools and concepts which results in ever more sophisticated manifestations of each. Socially, this tension between tool and concept (and remember, concepts themselves can be tools) manifests as institutions. Institutions are present to mitigate the psychic (or mental) tension between tools and concepts, which rely on each other in a kind of feedback loop. The singularity, however, represents a complete merger of subject and object, of tool and concept, to create a symbiotic expression of being referred to as “posthuman” based on both the human form and the instruments and computing power of an ASI. This expression of being and intelligence, which hasn’t happened yet, represents a new category of entity, as there will be no identifiable distinction between tool (ASI) and individual, subjective cognition. So, in short, the feedback loop of increasing complexity between tool and concept (aka history) results in a category of identity (the posthuman) that we barely have words for.

It may be, at this point, tempting to stray into the sociological, to look at the social consequences of the development of the posthuman and its corresponding technologies. While interesting, I don’t regard this as being strictly adherent to the tast of the transhumanist philosopher, which is not to anticipate social and political consequences but to catalyze them. So, let it be said clearly: the posthuman is happening, and we need to inject concepts into extant and novel institutions to facilitate its development. THAT is the core of what is going on, and all this talk of telomeres and longevity which seems so in vogue is merely a constituent component of the larger discussion: how we are transcending ourselves through technology, and how we can arrive at a coherent understanding of this transcendence. The painting hasn’t been completed yet, but the underlayer has already been sketched. How we take it from here will determine the outcome of the final picture.