A Continuous World of So Many, A History Boy, 13/02/2018

One of the most important insights a person should have in the 21st century if you want to settle yourself, and give yourself come perspective, is this – Accept the continuity between humanity and other species.

Now, I’m not just talking about human-ape proximity. Though I am. All too often we forget how close we are to primates, how similar they are to us. All too often, we know how close we are to primates, and acknowledge it in the worst way. All too typical of us, I should say.

Seeing the continuity of your own life with that of an orangutan
isn't all that hard – they're laughing, silly, joyful, and quietly
experience such an enlightened wisdom of knowing that a loving,
silly, joyful life is the best one for creatures like us.
They're what we aspire to be.

The continuity I’m talking about today has much earlier roots, and much deeper in our bodies. Literally and figuratively.

I spent quite a few years studying philosophy of mind, and one reason I walked away from that as a major research focus was frustration – Frustration that so many researchers ignored the obvious answer to so many of their problems.

So many discussions I had and papers I read about the “hard problem” of consciousness fell to dust to me as I accepted that the human mind is a perceptual field. Our thoughts aren’t just in our heads. Our brains and nervous system develop through environmental interaction. They continue to function through complex feedback loops that we’ve been refining for our entire lives.

Henri Bergson was on to a similar way of thinking. He just expressed it in a totally different way.

The tragedy of Bergson is that he so radically misapplied true and valid philosophical principles of becoming. In the most notorious* example from his work – No Henri, the cause of life getting more complicated isn’t a force of life energy constantly struggling against the inertia of matter’s torpor.

* And simplest to explain.

But yes, large amounts of matter interacting in complex systems that constantly generate energy – say, from giant balls of gas falling in on themselves until they become nuclear fusion furnaces that can be stable for billions of years – tend to become more complex over time.

Here's the life story behind that set of links. At 21, mystified why Chalmers
thought consciousness was a hard problem at all. At 22, puzzled why Putnam
even had to argue that meaning was more than thoughts or neuronal flickers.
At 23, Merleau-Ponty gave me a wonderful vocabulary to let me walk away
from Chalmers’ limited point of view. At 24, learning the biological ground
of that wonderful vocab from Varela. At 25, learning the power and ubiquity
of life and memory to grow, refine, and develop a creature thanks to Allen
and Hofstatder. If you let the problems be your guide, you’ll figure them
out. Don’t specialize too early.

Bergson’s ideas are much more useful today – better applicable to the current state of human science, where we understand that complexity really is everywhere. And his concepts of what consciousness is, and what its roots are, matter today too.

Think about Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness – that a scientific understanding of consciousness will never help us understand the experience of consciousness. An essential premise of that concept is unspoken, but necessary for someone to arrive at that concept at all.

Consciousness is exclusively human, and only humans experience the world as a phenomenal sensory field. Absolutely untrue.

Everything that is capable of action in response to external stimuli – whose reaction to fields of force and affects in its environment – is conscious. That covers every organism. Humans have peculiarly complicated and complex perceptual fields, because we’ve refined our powers of communication and memory with language and technology.

But all those actions are mechanisms. They aren’t deterministic in the most strict sense, because organic responses are based on feedback loops – previous responses condition future responses. The feedback loop is the most rudimentary form of memory.

Even the simplest organisms perceive because their responses are actions – the movement of response itself originates internally and kicks off a feedback loop of the organism with its environment which couples them into a single dynamic field.

Add Bergson to the history I’ve strung together. Even if he might not have realized he’d become a member.

How Far Could Animal Rights Go Anyway? Jamming, 18/04/2016

The other day, I got a link to an essay by my friend, colleague, and long-form argument partner Steve Fuller, which he’d recently published in the journal Sociology of Science and Technology. It was quite interesting and provocative.

It does have Steve’s typical overstuffed style, which can be either a detriment or a benefit. I think it’s usually a benefit, though it can tip into detrimental at a moment’s notice. 

Fuller writes with such a density of knowledge on display that you can easily see real links that exist between some intuitively far-distant ideas. So reading his work is a good way to blow your typical intuitions about human knowledge to bits. But a reader can also be overwhelmed by all the parallelisms and connections that he can make between so many different domains of knowledge. 

Steve’s essay is called “Political and Legal Prolegomena to an Extended Republic of Humanity, or Transhumanity: Lessons from the Difficult History of Human Rights.” A bit of a long one. But it is a fascinating piece, and if you want a really trippy, densely packed long-read today, do check it out. 

I’m thinking of writing a longer-form reply at the SERRC later this Spring. But I’m still packed with deadlines and obligations. Here are some initial thoughts, jumbled and scrambled, after reading Steve’s essay over the weekend.

An uplift strategy for animals that humans have treated
as property – whether as pets, prey, or livestock – would
have some political consequences that, when uplift
advocates discuss them, I feel are not taken as seriously
as they should be. The entry into human political life
isn't relations of property rights or granting any
recognition. It's the demand itself for equality.

I’ve never really been a fan of what’s called “moral extension” in animal rights theory. I devote a few pages to mocking it and Peter Singer’s general perspective and politics in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. In a way, I think it doesn’t go far enough to build a truly ecologically sustainable, harmonious, and prosperous human civilization.

In another way, moral extension and the broader animal rights perspective go too far in the wrong direction. Steve is on target with his own critiques in this essay. I say so, because he seems to agree with my own point – there’s a frustrating category mistake in animal rights thinking.

In my own perspective, the whole point of building an ecologically-informed ethics (and any moral systems that develop out of that ethical foundation) is to create and share a self-conception of being integrated with the whole world. Being unable to separate yourself from any act of ecological destruction, absolve yourself of responsibility, and numb yourself to its pain.

Animal rights thinking, as Steve and I contend in our different ways in our different publications, tends to keep humanity and non-humans in categorically separate places. Animals remain our Other, segregated in their wilderness sanctuaries so they can live in peace. 

On top of that, animal rights philosophies make animals an inferior Other because we’re the only creatures capable of enough ethical thought and moral reflection to opt out of relationships of predation – ecological cruelty. We can’t make wolves and pigs into vegans, so we separate them from humanity in places where they can roam free and live according to their own natures. 

Steve also addresses the transhumanist approach to animal rights, centred around uplift – the cognitive enhancement of animals, whether through mechanical technology or genetic engineering. Uplifted animals can join the human community in a more active sense, and so we can extend humanity to a true confederation, of a sort. 

And I’ve never been too big on transhumanism either, for a wide variety of reasons that I don't really have the space to go into right now. But this question of animal rights and uplift makes the reasons very clear. Steve says so himself, which is another area were we agree.

Animal uplift is a kind of new cross-species imperialism. It’s the contention that you can only be intelligent or civilized in one very particular and singular way, and that all other forms of intelligence are inferior. Who says that in becoming more like humans, a creature is being “uplifted?” Well, humans do most of the time. Sounds a bit egotistical if you ask me.

So what might I do with these jumbled thoughts over the next couple of months? All I’d really want is to add another perspective to the mix. Animal rights theory and transhumanism are both very humanistic, and both are narratives of progress. 

I’d like to express some of the ideas that I brought up in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity to present a narrative of progress that’s decidedly not humanist, but that is thoroughly optimistic and hopeful. Mixing in all these ideas critiquing animal rights and transhumanism that I’ve brought up here.

It might be interesting to read. Which is the best any writer can do, really.

The Human Limits of History, Research Time, 17/09/2015

If you want to write a universal history of humanity – and I mean a history that’s genuinely universal – it has to include a good chunk of the evolutionary history of Earth. From the bacterial biosphere to the modern era of animals with ideas above our station. Humanity alone isn’t all that matters.

How we conceive of history is a big part of Francis Fukuyama’s analysis of democracy as utopia. He adopts a conception of history that’s explicitly eschatological. The flow of human history, the narrative of our species and global civilization, has a natural endpoint.

When the world ends, it's an event, like any other. Like
the Doctor said, it's so easy to miss.

More than just an end, though. Everything comes to an end. Ecological thinking wonders about the end of humanity all the time. But that environmentalist frame of mind conceives of the end of humanity as our stumbling toward destruction. 

The pollution and ecological effects of our industry eventually makes our own planet uninhabitable for us, and we’ve neglected the space race for so long that we don’t have the resources to try to get it right on another planet. The end of humanity, in the context of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, is a contingent matter. The fatal mistake of our accidental mass suicide.

I’m very much an environmentalist thinker. I wrote a book on the subject, after all. So it’s a refreshing strangeness to walk into such a humanist world-view as Fukuyama’s. For him, it isn’t just that history at one point will end, but that the human story has a plot, and most importantly, a culmination.

Because the idea that history as a culmination is strange to me. It not that I’ve never encountered it before. I’ve read Georg Hegel, after all, and taken university courses on his work. Fukuyama’s read Hegel, and explicitly positions himself as a follower of Hegel. More on that tomorrow.

I find it strange because I find it ridiculous. Egotistical, even. To those who Hegel has influenced, history is a peculiarly human thing. History is only possible with self-consciousness, the ability to reflect on what’s happened and understand it somehow. 

In other words, the only creatures that can have history are those who can think about the meaning of their pasts. Creatures who are capable of philosophy, basically.

But I’ve spent the last few years getting out of this mode of thinking about history, to the extent that I’ve ever been in it at all. Even if you stick to human self-consciousness, we’ve had self-consciousness for millions of years, long before anything like civilization or the recording of history came along. 

One day, I hope we'll all recognize the special peer-hood
that exists between humanity and elephants. We'll have
a lot to answer for, I think, if we make it to a more
ecologically enlightened future.

The recent discovery of another ancestor species of humanity, homo naledi, was most likely of a graveyard of the species. A species that lived two million years ago. For that long, even before there were hominid species, our biological ancestors were able to understand themselves spiritually, a mind-set that we normally associate with great cognitive advancement.

I see no reason to drop that premise, so I conclude that for at least the last two million years of humanity’s evolutionary history, we’ve been advanced enough to think of the world in spiritual terms. Elephants are another type of creature that has graveyards and ritualistic burial behaviour, indicating spiritual thinking. 

It’s a fairly common, and sensible, idea to consider that whales may have comparable intelligence to humans. Cetacean and ape sign language abilities are at a level of sophistication that I feel more uncomfortable with their suffering than many other species of animal. I’ve even seen demonstrations of octopus intelligence – maze running, puzzle solving – that make me especially queasy of eating them.

If intelligence is so prevalent in our world, it’s a sign that we shouldn’t be so humanist about the nature of history. Even if you do associate history with self-consciousness.

Yet because intelligence seems so frequent in the world, I see more continuity between the human and non-human world. This was a key idea in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. The world is made of many interconnecting processes, a single, continuous flux. Everything that happens is a part of history because everything is continuous.

Don’t think that I’m saying that continuity means the universe as a whole is intelligent. I’m not going that far into pantheism. 

What I mean is, coming up with a conception of history that restricts it to humanity alone isn’t actually legitimate. It makes a categorical distinction that isn’t real: between humanity which has history, and nature to which stuff happens. Accept the continuity, and at least give material causality the dignity of the term “history.”

The whole world is just as real as we are.

Angry PostHumanism III: “How Dare I Eat Meat?! I Almost Cried,” Research Time, 01/12/2014

Those of you who remember Scrubs will know that the
person usually in charge of bioethical decisions in
practice rarely prioritizes purely moral motives.

Continued from previous . . . The longest essay in Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? collection is a complicated critique of bioethics philosophy. I’ve heard plenty of critiques of bioethics, both as philosophy and as practice. 

The practice criticism is fairly simple: a hospital bioethicist has been trained in a philosophical context of dense arguments and to act as an emotional caregiver to families and friends of patients going through intense life or death issues, but the biggest pressure on their jobs is often handling situations such that the hospital avoids liability.

Wolfe’s essay on the subject, “Flesh and Finitude,” concentrates on the philosophical critique, being a philosopher. It’s a sprawl of an essay, and I think it suffers from that sprawl, setting up a problem in one context but never really returning to it by the end of its conceptual journey. It begins with the subject of bioethics and drifting away to consider how more fundamental aspects of human subjectivity impact how we think of our rights. 

It can be difficult to critique the language of rights, practically speaking, because almost all civil, criminal, and international law is conceived in terms of rights. The entire institution of tort law, for example, depends on a person’s claim to standing against another to make an accusation for redress. So much of our moral thinking is about the nature and reach of our rights to make claims against each other. 

Animals are often cut out of this, intuitively speaking, because they physiologically can’t speak to make claims upon their rights. Even Bruno Latour, a thinker who’s often considered a radical post-humanist and whose writings on science are nefarious in some circles for destabilizing public faith in the infallibility of scientific knowledge,* has written that there can only be a just relationship of humans and non-humans when scientific instruments have enabled non-humans to express their interests linguistically. This is the key idea behind his parliament of all species in The Politics of Nature.

* Latour himself now belongs in that camp. Over the last ten years, as he has engaged with the politics of climate change deniers, he has openly expressed regret that he carried out any of the anthropological studies of scientists and scientific institutions that defined his early career. Even though his research showed the humanity of science as an institution, he now wishes that he could convince people that scientists were infallible possessors of pure and perfect truths about the world again, because it would cut off the viral skepticism that drives the popular denial of climate change.

The language of rights in our culture has a powerful gravity. Even writers who have tried to theorize ways to conceive of animal ethics beyond the old-fashioned scope of civil rights and standing end up just creating more lists of demands and claims that basically are rights, but under a different name. One of Wolfe’s central examples of this is Martha Nussbaum’s list of animal capabilities: she pitches it as having moved beyond the rights-based approach of cataloguing standings and demands, but it practically amounts to a list of standings and demands that a wider range of organisms can claim.

The approach of creating lists of claims based on some clear criteria (rights, capabilities, or some other) is an approach to philosophy that sees its goal as crafting specific problems to deal with well-defined issues by producing definitive answers that ends the inquiry. I’ve never liked this approach to philosophy precisely because it tries to settle problems that motivate countless writers across the world and across centuries in neat little packages. It treats difficult questions as if they had easy answers. 

Wolfe considers literature better suited to engaging with the core issues of what our attitudes should be to the animals on which we depend to live. Literature depicts difficult situations, undecidable moments, suspension in an existentially powerful tension. He refers to J. M. Coetzee, who has written about the existential terror of realizing that we must consume creatures with which we’re evolutionarily continuous. 

By showing how the problems of rights and standing to make claims against those who harm them can apply to the situations of animals, Wolfe tries to problematize the bioethics of hospital practice. When not only humans, but many kinds of life, can provoke the ethical unsettling of an existentially problematic encounter, a lot of the core presumptions that ground our everyday moral practice are shaken along with ourselves. 

Angry PostHumanism II: The Continuity of All Life, No Matter How Different, Research Time, 28/11/2014

Continued from last post . . . Cary Wolfe’s “Event-Machine” essay is published again in his What Is Posthumanism? collection, in a slightly expanded form from the version I first read in Emergence and Embodiment, which came out the year before. It’s my favourite kind of expansion, which changes the title a little (to “Meaning and Event”), and adds some paragraphs and deletes others at different points throughout. So you don’t just get the original essay with an extra section, but the more detailed work of reconsidering some aspects of the argument and updating it. 

Part of what he’s updating it with, aside from some improvements to the expression and the order of some of the arguments, is attempting to link the essays together. Very few collections of previously published essays do that, and as a result, they’re often quite repetitive, as essays originally published in different journals years apart will be smashed in a book within a few pages of each other. And reading through marginally different iterations of the same introductory conceptual material can get damn annoying sometimes. 

Although Wolfe sometimes refers to the same texts in different articles, and even sometimes the same quotes from the same texts (I’m thinking about a particular line from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Eating Well”), the context of each occurrence is different enough to make it land on a reader differently each time. 

Really, just coming to grips with the fact of our ecological
evolution must adjust you to your continuity with animals.
Any process as slow as humanity's evolution, while involving
thresholds, can only be continuous.

Derrida’s “Eating Well” is his engagement with the ethics and morals of animal rights and vegetarianism, and his conclusion amounts practically to the same brand of not-quite-quietism that most of his ethical engagements end in (unendability, that is). There are several essays in this book about the question of human continuity with non-human animals, an issue that conventional transhumanism usually ignores in its gleaming visions of a humanity that is ultimately stripped of all that could be called organic. It makes for a wonderfully multifaceted critique of all conceptions of humanity that radically separate us from all other forms of life and ecologies.

This makes Wolfe’s essays on the human conception of ourselves regarding animals a welcome addition to the Ecophilosophy manuscript. Because he frames their inclusion in the book using a conception of post-humanism, the new introduction to the manuscript would explicitly link the ecological and geo-historical continuity of humanity to all other life on Earth now and throughout the distant past to the planet’s beginning. 

Wolfe is also very good at calling up the ethical squishiness of our mainstream conceptions of the animal in the context of his own inquiry. I could tell that an essay called “Language, Representation, and Species” originally appeared as a direct attack on Daniel Dennett’s conception of mind, and used the actual mental complexity of animals to expose that Dennett’s concept of mind just begged the question of what exactly mind is. 

Basically, Dennett’s argument that the human mind is special because its self-consciousness (that only we can think reflexively, experiencing our own experience) is unique depends on having postulated at the beginning that non-human animals can’t think reflexively. He doesn’t prove that non-human animals are deficient in this way. He just presumes it, and argues for it in a way that makes it feel like a conclusion, when it’s been a premise all along. So I’d like to thank Cary Wolfe for finally putting a finger on why I’ve felt so iffy about Dennett’s ideas ever since I first encountered them late in my undergrad.

So there is no categorical separation between humanity and the rest of the organic world.* Once we’ve established this continuity, we end up in a very difficult spot. A lot of the moral distinctions that allow us to treat animals so poorly (medical and scientific testing, factory farming and industrial slaughterhouse practices) depend on the premise that they can only think in a fundamentally inferior way.

* Thinking in terms of this radical duality also commits the blindness of collapsing all the differences among non-human species of organism into a single category and treating them as if they were all a single type of thing, organisms-that-are-not-human. 

Recognizing the continuity now introduces the ethical issue that moral dialogue with non-humans is possible where all participants are moral agents. Standing on a moral platform, if not in strict moral equivalence or sameness because of our important physical and epistemic differences in kind, means that we have to take our cruelty to animals in a profoundly serious sense. It’s more than just immoral because humans are bad when they’re cruel. A non-human’s cries, when we think authentically in terms of our natural continuity, should touch our soul. To be continued . . .