The Abject Humanism of It All II: The Problem With People, Composing, 20/07/2017

You want to know my problem with humanity? The poverty of our vision is the foundation of the poverty of people. Human vision is poor when, in this context, it collapses into a humanism.

Now, you can’t write in a philosophical context that you’re critiquing humanism without someone in the audience mentioning Martin Heidegger.* His “Letter on Humanism,” the most famous text where he engages with this concept. He spent virtually his entire career critiquing humanistic ways of thinking, in different words at different times.

* Usually an academic specializing in writing commentary on Martin Heidegger.

But Heidegger’s thinking can’t go far enough in the critique of humanism. His quietism, piety, and fatalism get in the way of understanding the most profound aspects of what humanistic thinking does in the world.

We consume our whole world as if it were a fancy meal in a restaurant.
This is humanity at its most pathetic – turning the cosmological into
a petty pleasure. Image by Brittany Jackson.

Consider this post a stab at my own critique of humanism. It’ll likely be translated into my full manuscript for Utopias eventually.

Humanism is, quite literally, understanding all experience as ultimately related to human ends. It universalizes human ends to all things.

That’s part of what Heidegger has to say. But his concerns are to restore a proper relationship between humanity and being in a sense very disconnected from the problems of suffering and destruction. Destruction – social and ecological – is for Heidegger a symptom of a greater ontological failure.

For me, the priorities are reversed – Actually no, not reversed. Merged. The Heideggerian way of thinking merges questions of being with social and ecological questions. But it subsumes the social and ecological into questions of being, because for him being is the paramount question of philosophy.

For me, screw that. If I could give my philosophical perspective a label – at least for today – I’d call it a pragmatist anti-humanism. We destroy our societies and our ecologies with self-absorbed humanist ideas that our chauvinist priorities are the only ones that matter for human action.

You want an example? Okay, go back to Friedman’s words about national parks. You can think of many reasons to create national parks and wilderness reserves.

As far as I’m concerned, the best reason to conserve significant tracts of wilderness is to keep complex ecosystems functioning. There’s a humanistic angle to this, because humans need complex ecosystems to maintain all the processes that keep us alive – atmospheric balances, dealing with air pollution, cleaning water, preventing erosion of our land, preserving the processes that keep our soil arable and our food growing.

But there’s also the priority of wanting more complex ecosystems because ecological complexity builds a robust biosphere. The complexity of our ecologies are literally what keeps the Earth alive. Earth is a body that literally dwarfs humanity, no matter how powerful we’ve become.

We’re one recently-evolved, self-destructive species on a remarkable planet 4.5 billion years old. Earth is a body with far greater dignity and majesty than humanity. Humanity are pests compared to the Earth. And we tend to be pests on the Earth as well.

Take seriously the material existence of cosmological majesty. Humans are petty, small creatures. We can do amazing things, and we have a lot of potential. Our science-fiction can be the vehicle of our ambitions to achieve our greatest potential. But we won’t achieve that potential until we understand our pettiness and purge ourselves of it.

Pettiness like Milton Friedman writing that the purpose of national parks and nature reserves is to provide good customer service to campers and hikers.

The Nuclear Bombs of Criticism, A History Boy, 19/12/2015

The discussions I took part in at Jockey Club, the flat hierarchy philosophy club of Memorial University's philosophy department, were tremendously influential on a lot of my life, the way I think, and the way I approach teaching and educating. 

They taught me to be open-minded and interested in whatever came my way, that there was value and something to learn from every tradition and style of thought. But it also taught me that critique was equally necessary for a thinker and an approach to maintain itself. Neither close yourself off, nor accept everything without forethought.

University of Chicago's Lisa Ruddick

I remembered those lessons when I was reading this article about the ethical dissonance that many young practitioners in literary theory experience. The whole article by Lisa Ruddick lays out the problem quite comprehensively.  But here's my short version.

Even on top of the institutional pressures of the insane academic labour market and university research funding economy today, they feel pressure to write using a particular theoretical framework. And that framework leaves them anxious, adrift, and a little terrified.

The intense humming of literary theory. Literary criticism’s tools have become nuclear bombs, weapons of political mass destruction that – no matter the progressive aims of its users – destroys everything in their wake.

Sounds crazy, but have a look at Ruddick’s article and I think you’ll see what I mean.

Ruddick even starts her article describing how many young practitioners of literary theory sense “an immorality they can’t put their finger on” in professional discourse. This immorality is in the fundamental presumptions of the analytic framework. The major publications require sticking to a particular model.

Ruddick calls such a theory an anti-humanism that “make[s] ruthlessness look like sophistication.” In the name of destroying old moral and political idols like essential gender identity, disciplinary cultural critics let theoretical analysis blind themselves to real cruelty.

She sticks to examples, hoping that the concept will be clear from the cases. Ruddick describes an essay by Judith Halberstam that describes Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill as a heroic figure for his deconstruction of binary and essentializing gender identity.*

* I encourage you to read Ruddick’s entire essay, as it contains examples that are even more disturbing when you think them through.

Ruddick wants us to understand how inherently horrible
it is to venerate a fictional serial killer as a hero for
his transgressions against essentializing conceptions
of gender and identity.

Murdering women, flaying their skin from the corpses, and wearing them as his own deranged gender transition is analyzed as a heroic act because of how it breaks down a human gender binary that’s oppressive when it’s taken as essential, eternal, and unchanging. Yes, it’s a fictional story, but . . . . 

Western culture’s liberal mainstream of political philosophies and presumptions has many problems, and many vectors of oppression. Most of these are rooted in liberalism’s veneration of the individual: 

a) entirely self-possessed, a stable personal identity;

b) freedom as the total autonomy from community (to the point where moral obligation itself is oppressive);

c) an uncritical embrace of the free market (which ignores the problems of venerating greed and understanding only individual injustice instead of the systemic as well).

But this anti-liberal attitude that sees any assault or critique of essentialist individualism as good also blinds you to real injustice. In the case of Halberstam’s essay, it turns a fictional serial killer into a heroic figure in the crusade against the oppression of gender essentialism.

The notion that people have any kind of genuine psychological self-cohesion is understood as a control mechanism. Attacks on essentialism of the individual can be useful in many circumstances. Trans people, for example, have benefited greatly from popular understanding that gender isn’t an essential binary.

But applied to all circumstances requiring liberation, such a principle can blind you to real injustices, and worse, justify real material violence as liberation.

Theory becomes a form of silencing. Instead of listening to the narratives of people who’ve suffered violence that assaulted or shattered their identity, the uncritical critic praises that violence as having attacked and eroded the oppression of essence itself.

While we sit proud of our theory’s power, a real victim weeps, ignored.

We’ve Built a World Beyond Humanity, Research Time, 03/11/2015

That’s a portentous and a pretentious title if I ever wrote one. Today, I want to talk a little about Marx, one last argument that I read as I finished Spectres of Marx last week. 

From the time I first thought of the Utopias project a few years back, I knew I'd have to deal with Marx in some fashion. And I knew it would be a world of pain. 

This is what I see when I close my eyes and think
about studying the sum total of Marx and Marxism.

Not just the depth and breadth of Marx scholarship and successor theory out there, but the maze of modern left-wing politics alongside the minefield of the last century of totalitarian inspiration and general chaos. I had to choose which Marxisms and Marxes were appropriate for the philosophical story I wanted to tell.

Derrida’s last few arguments illuminated why I needn’t lean on Marx to talk about political utopian politics. There's a fundamental sense in which how we each understand the world oppose each other. And it’s not even political. At least not directly.

This is going to get weird.

So Derrida gives an account of Marx’s concept of exchange value. One of the basic facts about Marxist economic theory that you learn in Marx 1000 is the difference between use value and exchange value.

They’re what they say on the tin. One is the material usefulness of a product. The other is whatever price you can talk someone into paying for a product. It’s based on a lie. Use value is the authentic value of a product, what material difference it can make to someone's life. 

One facet of Marx's critique of 19th century international capitalism was that its trade and production regimes were based on inauthentic exchange value. There’s some value to this idea. One of the reasons behind Iceland's financial sector crash in 2007 was that traders exponentially inflated the value of a stock just on the force of a handshake.

His concept of exchange value is also part of his critique of the science of economics. This argument goes like so.

The global economy is dominated by relations of exchange value. Each exchange value relation is based on a specific and conscious human act: a lie that obscures the genuine worth of a product. 

The image comes from this story at
Bloomberg news from 2013, about
the revelation of the lies at the heart of
hedge fund culture which unravelled
during the 2008 financial crisis. I
suspect that Marx's critique of
economic science as a whole, when
restricted to apply only to hedge funds
and similar business models that
manipulate the stock market, will
be pretty accurate.

But economics takes these relations as the real constituents of a system. And it takes those relations to exist beyond the actions of humans. Exchange value is the bedrock of the impersonal systematic forces that economic science considers the driving force of commerce and productivity.

Market forces.

A proper economics, says Marx,* would understand the falsity of these emergent relations, and understand that the only real economy was authentic human trades and negotiations based on the use value of objects. 

* According to Derrida, at least in that chapter. This is one interpretation of Marx I’m rolling with here, one ghost among many. Even in just the one book about him, there are a ton. That’s Jacques for you.

And this is where I depart from this Marx. It’s a humanist Marx, who turns away from the material reality of properties, relations, and flows that emerge from aggregates. The economy is a realm where activities that humans generate grow beyond the powers of human intention and control.

Economic flows are dynamic systems, huge material flows of money and goods that – once they reach a particular size – behave systematically. They’re not intentional and directed anymore, but an autonomous movement from human activity, even though human actions constitute them at their cellular level.

This is my place in the theoretical tradition that comes out of Gilles Deleuze, Manuel Delanda, and chaos mathematics. Pure Marxist visions are trapped in a humanism that keeps them from facing their most profound difficulty.

Once they get big enough, the material forces and flows of the global economy overwhelm the perception, intentions, and purposes of the individual humans who make it up. What Marx thought was a fiction becomes more real than we are.

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.

So About This PostHumanism Thing Again, Research Time, 27/11/2014

When I first got word that my Ecophilosophy manuscript would be considered for a slot in a book series broadly about posthumanism, I started looking into works that explicitly engaged with the concept. This is where my series of posts about Rosi Braidotti’s work this April and May came from. 

When I first discovered The Venture Bros.,
I thought it was a sign that we as a culture
had finally gotten over our techno-futurist
dreams. I guess not.

As I said a couple of days ago, my thoughts about transhumanism are noteworthy mostly because I so rarely think about transhumanism. I always found the philosophy played better as science-fiction concepts, and most of the straight philosophy of transhumanism ends up stuck in techno-futurist dreams that I thought we had gotten over. The techno-futurist dreams of the 19th and 20th centuries all blew up in our faces when the totalitarian regimes of Europe and Asia nearly destroyed humanity’s moral sense, and this was followed by the global ecological crisis hitting us with pollution phenomena so enormous and strange that you have to be crazy just to understand them. 

The Pacific Trash Vortex is a thing that is real, and we made it. That’s just my personal favourite example of this terrifyingly surreal ecological crazy of our civilization. So the idea at the heart of transhumanism that a whole-hearted embrace of technology will save us from ourselves is kind of laughable to me.

Posthumanism is an amorphous collection of philosophical perspectives that basically acts as a variety of rejoinders to this freakish optimism of the transhumanist vision. And at the moment, I’m looking into an essay collection by Cary Wolfe called What Is Posthumanism?, a title and a jacket description that made me think it would be quite useful for the new introduction to the Ecophilosophy project that sets it in the posthumanist context.

Wolfe’s book doesn’t quite do that; I think Braidotti’s work is best suited to forming a ground to a new introduction. Wolfe is a little too much of a Derrida fan for that. I first came across his work in the initial research when I was composing the manuscript in 2011, in my doctoral program at McMaster. He wrote a very illuminating essay, called “Meaning as Event-Machine” that closed the multi-author collection Emergence and Embodiment, which was about philosophical explications and implications of systems theory.

Wolfe’s “Event-Machine” essay helped me see the core problem with mainstream systems theory, that it isolates perceiving bodies from each other and the world semantically, even while they do perceive the world’s affects. If meaning is idiosyncratic to the perceiver, then communication is impossible. So the fact of communication is either an illusion or a paradox, which Wolfe illuminates with a parallel to Jacques Derrida’s ideas.*

* Yes, you can illuminate an idea with a reference to Derrida. Now put away your snark and be nice or go back to work for philosophical Buzzfeed.

Basically, we affect each other, but all we manage to do is hopefully harmonize our mutual irritations. It really helped me understand perception and language as a field of affects. Yes, we basically just create fields that disrupt each other, but those fields can interact harmoniously, and the patterns in those affects actually constitute meaning, like the patterns of fluctuations in radio waves making the content of our transmissions. Semantics emerges from syntax. It’s only a mysterious paradox if you don’t think that’s possible. To you people I say, go learn how radio works.

But I’m not really a fan of Derrida precisely because he sticks with the pessimistic view. Because all we do is affect and irritate each other, he mourns the loss of the more profound communion that we all thought communication really was. So I was a bit disappointed to see what a devotee Wolfe is of Derrida’s fundamental frameworks. 

Even so, he does much more interesting things with Derrida than I expected to see. To be continued . . . 

The Most Profound Changes to Humanity, Research Time, 22/10/2014

I finished reading The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man by Karl Jaspers yesterday. It took a while, as my currently rather busy lifestyle finds me without the same amount of time per day of pleasure reading that I used to have. Still, it let me savour this strange artifact of another era. 

I mean it seriously when I say that Jaspers’ book, originally published in 1958, is a creature from an alien time. So many of the presumptions that animated the details of Jaspers’ conceptual investigation no longer apply. For one, the post-colonial movement, which was still in the process of liberating African states from European possession as he was writing, has flowered into a thousand different strains of economic co-optation, political interference, and internecine war. 

When Jaspers wrote, it was a popular opinion that the
human race would be destroyed in a nuclear war within
a single generation. That itself is quite foreign to a
contemporary ear, to say the least.

Let alone the economic colonialism now perpetrated by Chinese state-owned corporations building their own mines throughout the continent. Jaspers’ invocation to let the newly independent peoples of the world find their own paths have gone unheeded. His own analysis of the end of imperialism was quite accurate about the harms colonial institutions had done to Africa and Asia, but didn’t seem adequate to the challenge of the incredible economic inequities that remained between the exploited and former direct exploiters.

Jaspers’ analyses of politics we can now see to be sadly inadequate. He discussed the politics of the nuclear era in terms only of states and polities. His slipping from direct relevance here can’t be said to be his fault. The politics of his own times were still dominated by the importance of states, and it was difficult to conceive of how agitation against the state per se could be progressive, given the era of the welfare state and the military-industrial complex.*

* For a writer in 1958 whose life had been dominated by the rise of nationalist barbarism that created a totalitarian firestorm, I can definitely understand why the relation of a free and rational citizenry to their state would be the primary political consideration. Anarchism as a serious political movement had disappeared, its last serious advocates never surviving the Spanish Civil War. Its ideas wouldn’t return until the abortive revolutions of popular discontent in 1968, and remain on the margins of political life.

The globalized economy of the era of the internet and unfettered capital have blown the presumptions of decades of political thinking into uncertainty, and we’re still as a society trying to grip the realities of the liberating and enslaving effects of a networked world.** However, the centre-less communication and community-building possibilities of network politics give a central concept of Jaspers’ analysis here more serious breathing room than it did in the days when all political thinking languished in the inevitability of the state in every argument.

** Understanding the decentralized nature of network politics opens one’s mind, however, to a return to central anarchist concepts. The context is new, of course, but the basic message that there can be more to political organization than the state remains the same.

The last chapter of Jaspers’ book expresses the high idealism that philosophy can change the world. It does so when the profundity and rigour of philosophical thinking brims forth and is expressed in every person. One at a time, thinking according to the ethical path of reason results in a world where the spontaneous action of countless individuals acting on their own in communication with each other articulates fear of universal destruction in nuclear bombardment as the resolve of a global peace movement that organizes all people to help each other in a spirit of human friendship.

It sounds so saccharine, doesn’t it? Yet this is the central faith of the philosophical tradition, even as we saw all the countries of the world fall away from this ideal. Our politics are now dominated by hysterical fear and bullying nationalism. Name whatever example you want: a Russian leadership on the path to restore Czarism destabilizes and threatens its neighbours, the media of an industrial country with advanced state medical infrastructure soars into panic over ebola, a whole region from Libya to Iraq and Turkey collapses into a fractally sectarian civil war. Jaspers’ ideals have failed.

The global environmental movement is a giant advocacy
campaign for mass lifestyle change, and proceeds one
person at a time.

Yet the ideal that individual-scale activity can change the world one person at a time is absolutely necessary to any political activity that seeks genuine change. That’s precisely what a social movement is: individuals communicating to discover their common frustrations and reaching, in their aggregate and collective actions, the critical mass necessary at least for the political mainstream to notice them. The size of a movement in society that transforms us all, at least indirectly through the echoes of their ideals and their rage. 

This assessment of the power of philosophy to change the world is at the centre of my own work, especially my Ecophilosophy manuscript. It’s a philosophical analysis that stretches across source material from environmental activism and moral thinking, scientific principles from ecology, systems theoretical biology, and ethology, as well as a meta-philosophical argument of how philosophical reasoning functions in psychology and social movements. 

That’s a mouthful, but its ultimate point is that philosophical reasoning in its various forms can change people’s minds about how they live. The changing character and priorities of their lives can constitute a social movement that changes the consumption and production patterns of the world, I hope along more ecologically mindful lines. While the precise character of our global conflicts have changed, in this, Jaspers still has much to say. Philosophy can change how we think, and thereby how we live. When enough people transform how they live, they have changed the world.

Learning Philosophy With Mr Data, A History Boy, 10/05/2014

I would definitely say that the first episode of Star Trek that really stuck with me was “The Measure of a Man,” and it’s only come to mean more to me over time. Those of you who know me personally probably don’t find it surprising that one of my favourite Star Trek characters, and one who I identified with myself as a child, was Mr Data. My favourite episodes of TNG as a child featured Data, and a lot of them are still personal favourites today. I first saw “The Measure of a Man” when I was five years old, and while I didn’t understand everything that was going on at the time, I knew I was watching some amazing television.

I don’t think a discussion of an episode of TNG that’s nearly thirty years old can be spoiled, though I’ll still add my 

SPOILERS!!!

sign for the sake of politeness. After all, Vaka Rangi and TARDIS Eruditorum don’t worry about spoilers, so neither will I. Starfleet robotics scientist Cmdr Maddox visits the Enterprise with a request that Data take part in an experiment to replicate his positronic brain, which would require that his memory banks be downloaded to an external hard drive and his brain and body disassembled. When Maddox can’t guarantee that he’d be able to put Data back together again, the android rightfully refuses, at which point Maddox produces a transfer order, and refuses to let Data resign to escape the experiment on the grounds that, as a machine, he is property of Starfleet and has no rights. 

When Picard asks the local starbase JAG for a trial to decide Data’s fate, he’s pressed into service as defence advocate, and Riker is ordered to be the prosecutor. Although Riker successfully proves that Data is a machine, Picard and Data successfully demonstrate his sentience and self-awareness. Maddox justified his desire to build a race of thousands of Data androids so they could be probes sent into dangerous environments to do the dangerous and dirty work that organic beings could not be rightfully pressed into. And because this hearing will have ruled them machines, they’d have no right to object. Since it would go against all the basic ethical principles of the Federation to build a race of robotic slaves, the JAG grants Data his rights, and he immediately refuses, formally, to participate in Maddox’s work.

Cmdr Maddox is certain that a bundle of electrical nets and
gears is incapable of true thought, of understanding
anything but the syntax and functions of poetry.

One aspect of the philosophical issues that inform this story is terribly obvious: the basic questions of philosophy of mind. All of the explicit conversation throughout most of the episode revolve around whether Data, as a machine, is really capable of thinking. At one point, Maddox thumbs through Data’s copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, and asks him, both fascinated and pathetically pleading with the android, if they are just words to him, or if he genuinely understands their meaning and significance. Data responds with a chipper affirmative, but Maddox still calls him ‘it’ for the rest of the episode.

This is the oldest issue in philosophy of mind. Indeed, it’s probably the definitive question of the whole sub-discipline. The sub-discipline was founded as the philosophical wing of the cybernetics research community, where the possibility of creating a genuine artificial intelligence with computer technology was paramount. For decades, its major problems revolved around what constituted the mind, because answering this ontological question would constitute a response to whether the Turing Test would succeed.

The Turing Test was a thought experiment, named after its first formulator Alan Turing, of course, that a machine would have achieved genuine intelligence if it was capable of pulling off a lie to a person about what it was, via exchange through a medium like text message that would keep the human from seeing it. The lie is usually depicted as the computer convincing a human conversation partner that it’s a human too. So a lot of the debate revolved around whether external activity was enough to guarantee the existence of a mind. Many thought experiments produced in response to this question attempted to pose this question with computers, (very technically specified) zombies, non-human animals, extra-terrestrials, convoluted translation apparatuses, and, naturally, androids. 

John Searle, a philosopher for whom I have distaste,
devised the Chinese Room thought experiment, in which
a simple translation and phrasebook algorithm achieves all
the Turing Test asks to prove sentience. Therefore, artificial
intelligence is impossible. His lack of imagination saddens
me.

Maddox treats Data just as some philosophers have conceived of mind: if it isn’t human (or at least organic) then it’s just a bundle of gears and mechanisms that spit very convincing responses to stimuli. Unfortunate for Data. But fortunately for Data, this is based on a premise that itself is up for philosophical debate: whether there is any aspect of the physical human organism (our squishier gears and mechanisms) which produces all that we call mind, or whether there is some immaterial aspect to the human mind’s constitution. If we’re all material, then a creature like Data could exist, if a machine (like the fictional positronic brain and neural net) could accomplish all that the human brain and perceptual apparatus does, or more.

Since all of the empirical evidence for the existence of human minds is our behaviour, Data’s behavioural demonstration of sentience and self-awareness is enough to declare him truly self-aware and sentient.

And the best part is, these ontological arguments are thrown out entirely for an ethical question. If we had an army of androids available to do terrifyingly risky tasks and labour, to be treated as disposable people, they would essentially be slaves, demarcated by their race: android. For people who know the horror of slavery, creating such a system with full knowledge of what you were doing would be intolerable in the deepest sense.

There is another ethical question in this episode, though, one that constitutes an idea that animates my own ideas for fiction work about my Alice character. She is an android that has overcome the human morality of resentment, who feels no impulse to punish for offence or wrongs, and seeks only to repair the damage to the wronged and the wrongdoer. Well, at least in this episode, Data is the one to do it first. 

Will Riker is forced to argue that one of his best friends is
not even a person.

Remember that Cmdr Riker was drafted to play the part of the prosecution, and he played it so well that if Picard and Guinan hadn’t thought of switching the case from an ontological to an ethical ground, Data would have been taken apart and died. By the end of the episode, Riker is miserable, because his actions almost cost the life of his friend. But Data is not offended; he’s grateful. If Riker had refused to prosecute the case, or do his level best to prove the Maddox’s case, the JAG would have ruled against Data’s having rights to self-determination. So Data says, “That action injured you, and saved me. I will not forget it.” 

That’s a greater wisdom than most humans possess, the ability to see past the immediate appearance of acts to their larger consequences and results. And with these in mind, he takes no offence, and praises his friend for the openly offensive acts that the situation had made necessary to save his life. His morality is guided by his knowledge. Data the character often spoke of his desire to become more human. Well, in this episode at least, he became more than human, better than human.

The Most Productive Possible Research Priorities, Composing, 05/05/2014

The last major chapter of Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman is about what a post-human research program would look like. She lists some examples of existing works of philosophy and critical theory that constitute a post-human perspective, and describes what the university institution would look like with post-human priorities.

With regard to the content of this new mode of knowledge, post-humanity, I feel as though I fit in quite well. The central ontological ideas of my Ecophilosophy project are that the world is primarily constituted through relations and networks, that the significant motor of change in the world is dynamic tensions among systems and bodies, and that the mathematics best suited to describe these dynamics are non-linear, of a type most commonly arising in probability and complexity theory. 

Fractal geometry and complexity mathematics do more
than create beautiful images. But the images are also
beautiful.

That’s pretty much what Braidotti says a post-human theory would do, particularly her vision of post-human critical theory. So I would fit in well among her collection of fellow travellers, which includes feminist epistemology (such as Evelyn Fox Keller, Henrietta Moore, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway), Peter Galison’s embrace of “the end of grand systematic theoretical discourse” regarding science, the philosophical elaborations on complexity theory that have flowed from Deleuze and Guattari to Karen Barad and Luciana Parisi, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s historicist approach to the development of climate change science, not to mention Katherine Hayles’ approach to the digital humanities. 

Of course, we have important differences in our visions, as her own philosophical vision is shaped by the background framework of critical theory: the conception of problems as texts to be interpreted, common in the critical theory context, doesn’t really appeal to me. In one way, this is a personal preference. My own background and education has been through self-identified philosophy departments, and my first years of philosophical education was in a department that was very historically-oriented in its research and teaching. So I have a strong background in that canon of dead white male Europeans (and some Americans at the end). 

If studying the history of philosophy teaches you anything (aside from a head for details and anachronistic language), you learn that there are many different ways to engage with conceptual creativity. Critical theory is just one set of approaches, one school of style, in a history that includes many different ways to develop new ways of thinking. It gave me that taste for pure conceptual thought that isn’t necessarily wedded to a single style of expression. Yes, most contemporary philosophy has a fairly standard form of the academic essay, putting forth arguments and responding to them, piece by piece. But consider some of the innovations in form. 

I’m not just talking about Heidegger or Derrida’s games with language, or even the way Deleuze and Guattari pack countless layers of signification into so much of their writing that uncharitable readers almost think it all nonsense. Look at Russell and Whitehead’s masterpiece of symbolic logic, the Principia Mathematica, and especially their early drafts and dead-ended attempts. How Kripke and Lacan crafted brilliant books from intricate lectures. Marx’s monstrous interdisciplinary beast, Capital. Hegel’s dialectic via aufheben. Spinoza's geometrical argumentation. The first-person narration of Descartes’ Meditations has more in common with the stream-of-consciousness experiments of Virginia Woolf than most of the scientific writing of his day. Kierkegaard’s army of conceptual personae. The ancient Greeks used forms of writing that have no modern analogue: the aporetic dialogue that obscures even the author’s own beliefs; the philosophical poem that expresses philosophy as praise to the gods. Nietzsche.

I’m no innovator in the form of philosophy. The Ecophilosophy manuscript is a pretty clear extended, multi-part essay making an argument for what kind of ethic and self-conception a person would have to hold to live authentically according to an ecocentric morality, and that we should start thinking of ourselves this way for the sake of our species’ survival. But I’m glad I don’t wed myself to a particular style straight out of the gate. Who knows what I’ll be writing in ten years?

Ethical Posthumanism: Why Nietzsche Is My Hero, Research Time, 23/04/2014

Rosi Braidotti’s work is fascinating, and I think some of her ideas will be important figures in new drafts of my Ecophilosophy project, and will likely join the flow of ideas taking shape on my back burner in the Utopias project.* For one, admittedly superficial, point, she and I share the same general view of Georg Hegel’s philosophy of history. Because he reads European culture as uniquely expressing self-reflective reason, Hegel gives the most profound justification of Eurocentrism. Rationality itself privileges Western man over other paradigms of culture and thought. Braidotti and I both call shenanigans on this entire project.

* For those of you wondering how I can so quickly shift projects from the front to back burners as contingent events like feedback from consulting colleagues, conference deadlines, or upcoming job opportunities assail me — I’m a professional. We work on multiple projects at once and have a lot of priorities to deal with. This is the life of the modern intellectual and writer. So get used to it.

I touched yesterday on what precisely transhumanism is, the philosophical engagement with the possibility of transcending or overcoming the limitations of the human organism through technology. I’ve only recently become interested in it because it strikes me as a more whitewashed iteration of the brutal Futurism of Marinetti, the vision of humanity remade through industrial machinery. While I was researching the Ecophilosophy project, however, I just thought of the transhumanist project or perspective as naive. It was barely worth my engaging with the scene because not even a critical thought about whether technological progress is ethical or ecological progress even appeared to me. But the transhumanists I knew of were the most obnoxious, like Max More. And even their role in the Utopias project will be minor at best — modern transhumanism seems a pale shadow of the real first technological utopian, Filippo Marinetti.

It is frankly a beautiful cover, which
reflects its fascinating content.

Braidotti arose from a tradition that combined feminist political philosophy with the ontology of difference of Gilles Deleuze. And when I say she’s part of that tradition, I really mean that this is a basic account of how she approaches philosophy herself. I like to think of good philosophers as constituting their own traditions, even if in the next generation, we don’t find too many self-professed Braidottians. Her posthumanism doesn’t have the violent thrust of the transhumanist vision of progress, instead asking a subtler question of what in our current conceptions of humanity needs to be overcome. More will come on this notion as I read more of her book last year on the subject.

My own encounter with this notion of posthumanity came from engaging with Nietzsche, which is why I consider Braidotti a fellow traveller, now that I’m growing familiar with her work. In the proliferation of academic writing, she is another voice that is worth reading, which is more than can be said for many (quite possibly myself included, and I write this project, of all things). The problem with the technological forms of transhumanism is that they are closely integrated with economic factors. As far as I'm concerned, it's of no use creating a new cybernetic iteration of humanity if only the super-rich will be able to invest in the enhancements, if only those who can afford it can enter cryogenic sleep, or enhance their lifespan and perceptual abilities with technological additions. Most people will be left behind in a technological transhumanism. But an ethical posthumanism, which Nietzsche was really the first to develop, or at least the most influential single figure to do so, is democratic. Reconsidering one's ethics and self-definition is a task that has no price tag. All it takes is to think about your life in a particular way that calls the moral values you have long taken for granted into question, and develop new practical priorities in the face of problems to which those old values are inadequate. The transvaluation of values sounds like an epic cultural shift, and in fact constitutes one. But such a shift is so mundane that it happens all the time, as moral priorities change with every generational changeover.

More to come.

Ethical Posthumanism: That There Can Be More, Composing, 22/04/2014

It’ll take a while to get there, but it’s coming.

Some of the people I’ve recently consulted with on my Ecophilosophy project have given me very interesting, but unexpected feedback. Most of the unexpected feedback I’ve gotten about the project has to do with suggestions to include particular ideas that seemed natural to them, and as I think about them, they have a curious origin.

The most common kind of feedback I get on my article and book manuscripts are questions about why I didn’t include some particular philosopher. Some of the first editorial feedback I got on the Ecophilosophy project was a suggestion that I read Nicholas Agar. He’s a New Zealander professor who specializes in environmental moral and political philosophy, and wrote a short book that I quite enjoyed. I incorporated some ideas of his 2001 book Life’s Intrinsic Value into the first chapter of the manuscript. 

Nicholas Agar wrote a later book that
critiqued philosophical transhumanism,
which I'd probably enjoy, and I'd agree
with a lot of it. I haven't read it, though.

But I found his ideas couldn’t take on the more central role to the argument that my consultant felt they should. While my own project engages with the long-standing debate over the intrinsic value of nature, it isn’t a work of value theory as such. Really, the manuscript only touches on value theory long enough to describe its tools as inadequate to a task that requires a larger redefinition of how we understand the world and act in it. The core conceit of the Ecophilosophy manuscript is that people who think as we do are never going to be able to accept that nature itself has some form of value intrinsically, or at least without necessary dependence on human evaluation. But the manuscript isn’t about to resurrect any imagined Edenic perspective of semi-vanished indigenous people. Pretty much anytime an indigenous person shows up in environmental moral philosophy as an idealized figure, the atmosphere gets way too racist for me.

The basic point of the Ecophilosophy manuscript is developing a conception of humanity and its place in the universe that encourages environmentalist activity while also preserving productive aspects of scientific and technological knowledge and practice. This was the point that my most recent consultant made when he pointed me toward the posthumanists, particularly Rosi Braidotti. I’ve only just started exploring her work, but I already find it rather fascinating. I can understand why I had never discovered her work before — it’s rooted in the feminist philosophical traditions that I rarely exposed myself to in my undergraduate years, and that after those years I felt too embarrassed until now to plunge into for the first time. However, because we both lean on Gilles Deleuze as a significant conceptual influence, so in this regard at least, she’s a fellow traveller. Instead of incorporating her into an early chapter for the sake of criticizing, as I did with Agar’s work, she can instead supplement my final conclusions. Precisely how, I’m still figuring out, but I think this is the direction I’m going in.

I didn’t know it when I started the project, but I suppose it makes me a transhumanist of a sort. I say ‘of a sort’ because, as with most labels I temporarily adopt, my own version of it is so singular and, to a degree, idiosyncratic, that describing myself with that term misleads you about what I actually think instead of helping explain it. Transhumanism often revolves around embracing technology to overcome our human and organic limitations, essentially to become supermen. That’s the cartoonishly simple version, anyway. 

My own work is better characterized as posthuman. As a slogan, I could call it ethical post-humanism. The typical transhumanist conceives of human transformation using technological modification. I consider it important for humanity to change how we understand ourselves, to begin an ethical transformation.