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.

And Write in the New Style, Composing, 05/10/2015

You know, I never really liked Jacques Derrida’s stuff for the longest time. I still have a lot of issues with his presumptions, his starting points, and definitely his writing style. But I think my biggest issue with him was the way people talked about him and his ideas.

Imagine you’re a writer whose job it is to come up with new ideas and explain them relatively sensibly. That's writing philosophy. It’s a style of writing that requires you to push a little bit at the limits of what your language can do. That's why philosophy is sometimes written in such weird, inaccessible ways.

I hope what I do in my books, my philosophy essays, and on this blog is explain some very strange ideas in increasingly accessible ways. I’m not sure that I always succeed. 

But the best part about having a writing blog like this is that you can be experimental, try new things, some folks will enjoy it or not, and there’ll be another set of ideas in a day or two. The lead time on trying out new things is shorter than it's ever been before. 

So as long as you get the proper style of a blog down (casual, if slightly nerdy conversation), you can spin around as many trippy ideas as you want. It ends up making your language more accessible, less needlessly technical, a little more seductive, and more clear. 

I tried to do this in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. And I aim for Utopias to be even better at this style of philosophy. I’d like to write philosophy in a style about as accessible as a nerdy listicle, but with the conceptual rigour of the classics of the tradition.

Sometimes, I think people find
Derrida's writing so difficult to
understand, because they first
approach it presuming that it's
going to be difficult and
confusing. Because I always
have the ego when I'm reading
that, of course, I'll understand
this book decently, I can
overcome difficult parts better.
At least, I think I can.

Sometimes, like this weekend on an inter-city train, I’m reading a book by Derrida. And I think about this eventual goal of mine for writing philosophy. It gets frustrating.

When I was a student, I knew a few professors who studied the books Derrida wrote in his Spectres of Marx period, from the 1980s until his death. One of the ideas he explored was a conception of the messianic – thinking about the world as though it were leading up to a profound transformation into a new framework that would be paradise compared to the way things are now.

The idea’s pretty common. Derrida took the term from the theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, religions where profound transformations of reality are central to the belief system. The appearances of God to humans in Judaism, the incarnation of God as human in Christianity, and the revelation of God’s final word in Islam. 

And from a secular perspective, you can hear it from transhumanist discussion and any cyberpunkish talk of The Singularity, following Ray Kurzweil. 

Derrida talks about experiencing time in your life as if existence were moving toward a time-to-come. And I heard a lot of people use this phrase without really being able to explain it to me. They’d just say that it wasn’t the future, but a time-to-come. 

I remember being 22 years old and completely turned off Derrida because people would talk about his ideas this way, unable to explain even in a simple sense what was actually going on. 

Now that I’ve started reading some of the books where he uses this term, I can say that I actually found it pretty simple to understand. Maybe I'm deluding myself, thinking that I can easily understand a writer famous for being difficult and obscure out of a bizarre fit of egomania. 

Maybe, because I haven’t had access to university library paywalls in years, I haven’t had my reading confidence broken by contending with a deluge of poorly written academic journal articles on the same subject. But it seems pretty clear to me.

Time to come. It means you don’t really think of a clear distinction between present and future as such. Ironic for a perspective that expects a radical transformation of reality in the future.

But not really. Because you live your life in constant anticipation of the messianic moment when the world is transformed. So the present becomes this rush toward a magic point. Call it a singularity if you want. The real distinction in time isn't between then, now, and later. It’s between the time leading up to the transformation, and after it.

When you live and understand your life in terms of anticipating that transformation, that's time-to-come. I don’t think anyone ever explained this to me, but that's what I read in the book this afternoon.

Announcing the World’s Slowest Radical Book Tour, Composing, 27/07/2015

Today is a simple post. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is out in about three weeks, and I've already started outreach to some places to promote it. That’s why the world's slowest radical book tour has begun to take shape.

When you convince your university's
library to carry my book, you'll be
able to read it for free (as long as
you're a student). By the time you
graduate, the softcover should be out.

I should clarify this obviously premature release to start. I have yet to book a single promotional event. I’ve only just begun outreach to some folks I know who work at different universities around the world about ordering some copies for their campus libraries and departments. 

I’m also preparing a presentation on the book, specifically its key political ideas, that I’d present. I plan to give talks at campuses as a guest speaker of departments and classes, as well as less formal locations like public meeting spaces or galleries, around Toronto and the wider region. And I’ll also arrange remote presentations at locations farther away to promote the book without spending too much of my travel budget.*

* Which at the moment, are passes for the TTC and GO Transit, as well as an internet connection.

All these talks, whether remote or in the same room, however long they'll eventually proceed, add up to the World’s Slowest Radical Book Tour.

I have no idea whether it's actually the slowest book tour in the world, but I can claim the label if only as a matter of branding. 

Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is for people who like books that make them think, who care about environmental issues, and are fascinated by science, philosophy, politics, and social movements. It helps you draw connections between all these different areas of human knowledge in a way that helps you understand our collective condition. 

What must humanity be to have landed ourselves in this ecological mess we've turned the Earth into? What must humanity become to crawl ourselves out in one piece?

These promotions focus on universities right now because EEFH is being published in Palgrave's academic stream, their series labelled Studies on the Future of Humanity and Its Successors. It’s a series on transhumanism, and my peculiarly ecological take is sure to make the series stand out in the field. 

Transhumanism has been dominated by visions of technology transforming humanity into a form that overcomes all its problems, an escape from the messy reality of life as biological beings. We'll live forever in worlds of absolute pleasure and fulfillment and never go hungry again. Literally, that’s what typical transhumanists write.

Not that there aren’t more sensible transhumanists in the West’s intellectual world. The most sensible one I know is my formidable opponent who introduced me to Palgrave in the first place. Despite that, transhumanist discourse needs a firm kick up the rhetorical backside.

And the best foot for it is a Green one.

More than that, the World Slowest Radical Book Tour is my first tentative step to bring creative philosophy out of the academy and into a popular space. This is why the book tour will take so long. The university-based phase over the 2015-6 academic year will promote Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity to the academic markets that can afford its launch price. 

After that comes the softcover, which will be more accessible and ride on some of the initial buzz around campuses that the university phase of the tour will create. Philosophy is, and always was, a tradition of thought and discussion as well as an academic discipline. It was a tradition long before it was in the academy, and philosophy will continue long after the academy changes so much that there's no longer a place for it there.

It won’t continue, however, unless all of us who care about it put some effort and ingenuity into taking a few of the tradition's eggs out of the campus basket. Some have started it, but the movement can grow. One person's efforts at a time.

• • •

Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity will be available from Palgrave MacMillan on August 19. Philosophy students, graduate workers, temporary and permanent faculty, ask your departments and libraries to carry a copy or three. The tradition isn’t over.

Knowing Knowledge IV: Humanity as Pinnacle, Dialogues, 20/03/2015

My discussion yesterday with Steve Fuller ran for so long that we didn't get a chance to cover two more interesting issues that came up in Chapter Two of his Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History. So we talked about them here, Fuller's thoughts on David Hume and a central concept of modern evolutionary theory.
• • •
Dear Steve;

Two other ideas in this week's chapter struck a chord with me, but I wanted to explore them separately from the larger discussion about theodicy that we've gotten into. Nonetheless, I think they're genuinely important. One is a quibble in the history of philosophy, and another has some lessons for the modern revival of theodicy concepts in science and politics. 

Films like Roman Polanski's The Tenant explore the
horror of a fragmenting personality, but the
freakiest aspect of Hume's philosophy is the prospect
that all personality is always already fragmented.

The smaller question is about the hate you get on for David Hume. You describe him, if I could use your economic epistemic terms from a previous chapter, as a supply-side theorist of knowledge. Your account of Hume also fits with the traditional interpretation of him as an epistemic skeptic that was canonical for so long in Analytic philosophy, particularly thanks to the influence of Bertrand Russell.

Hume also embodies what appears in your text as a fundamental contradiction. He's part of a tradition of secular liberal political philosophy thanks to his skeptical writings on religion and the existence of God. But his conception of how individual humans are actually built precludes the strong notion of the discrete individual person that political liberalism needs to function. 

A person is not a discrete, unified individual in Hume's thought, but a fluctuating jambalaya of different and mutually inconsistent forces and processes (which Hume called passions), whose unity is retroactively constructed through an exercise of memory. And that memory can get quite faulty.

What's more, Hume's own explicit everyday political beliefs were retrograde by our standards, and even some of the standards of his day. Essentially, he was a monarchist and a racist. 

But Hume's theory of subjectivity was, in its substance, a major crack at an assemblage conception of personality. From this philosophy, its contemporary form arising from the work of Gilles Deleuze, the subject is a singular contingent formation of particular kinds of forces. A complex machine constituted from the continuing collision of other complex machines. 

The political articulation of this theory of subjectivity is an experimentalist anarchism that encourages trying out new ways of making subjects. I make this connection of political philosophy with the ontology of subjectivity in my own upcoming book, Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, available this August from Palgrave McMillan.

Artist John Barker's depiction of the Battle of
Marston Moor, a brutal event in the English Civil
War. I sometimes think that most of our stereotypes
about Britain would be very different if more
people understood the long-term cultural heritage
of the English Civil War. I don't fully understand it
myself, but I know it's significant.

It's really quite unfortunate for Hume that he had come to the political conclusions he did, but he was unlucky to have lived in a time whose social climate just didn't offer the political articulations of his theory of subjectivity. 

If he had lived in continental Europe during the medieval period, he would have seen how well his anarchic conception of the subject fit with the communitarian, locally-networked politics of free cities like Mainz and Worms. As it is, his political culture was shaped by the authoritarian statism of the aftermath of the English Civil War and the unification of the United Kingdom.

The other point I wanted to discuss is about evolutionary theory, particularly your philosophical interpretation of convergent evolution. You're right that straight Darwinian natural selection doesn't have the conceptual capacity to cope with the fact of convergent evolution. 

But convergent evolution isn't quite enough to preserve an account of biological evolution that accords directly with theodicy. An essential idea of the specifically Christian theodicy is that humanity is made in the image of God. As such, humanity is something of a pinnacle of life. Creation does take on something of a purpose, a telos, whose embodiment is humankind.

Convergent evolution just doesn't get you there. It's more of a pragmatic scientific principle, as I understand it. Living creatures will face similar problems throughout a planet's evolutionary history, and similar problems will have similar optimal solutions. 

For example, the problem of how to get around an environment soaked in light is an issue wherever the sun can shine. Developing photoreceptive abilities is an optimal solution. The camera model of the eye in particular is the optimal model of a photoreceptive organ in an animal that needs detailed focus on objects at various long-ish distances. That's why camera eyes have developed independently in vertebrates, cephalopods, and annelids. We all have to solve similar problems of quickly adjusting our vision while we move.

Knowing what humanity shares with worms is
remarkably instructive in learning about the
processes of evolution.

There's a further political problem with the concept of humanity as the image of God in theodicy, which is that it blinds us to our own species-level maladaptive behaviour. If humanity, as the closest creatures in nature to God Herself, is the pinnacle of creation, and our powers and existence are essentially entwined with the telos of being itself, then it becomes difficult to conceive how anything in our nature could harm nature as a whole. 

Human behaviour, no matter what it is, could never harm the natural order of God's universe because we are its material culmination. And if we do harm it, then we do so as culminations of God's order, bringing the order of Earth's creation to its purposive end.

This denies the central motive of environmentalist thought, which I describe in more detail in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, still forthcoming from Palgrave McMillan this August. The environmentalist idea is that humanity is currently the most maladaptive imbecile of a species on Earth, stumbling into accidental species suicide by covering the planet in so much pollution that we cause a new mass extinction.

Environmentalism asks us to take responsibility for our own industrial actions, not for the sake of God, but for the sake of ourselves and everything else that we share the planet with. To do that, we must accept that human existence is contingent, and that we, like many other species in our world's history, have prioritized our immediate prosperity but jeopardized our long-term survival in doing so. 

A theodicy where we are the image of God holds us off from our collective forehead smack of humility because it privileges humanity's being. That privilege keeps us from understanding how God could allow our extinction, how God could permit the pinnacle of His creation to, as my favourite Clinton* once said, drown in our own shit. 

* That would be George Clinton, and the track would be the spoken-word introduction to Funkadelic's masterpiece "Maggot Brain."

Theodicy's concept that existence is the ordered expression of God or the Divine generally speaking makes perfect sense to me. I think I've held such a belief about existence and divinity for some time now, though I never thought to call it a theodicy. But a theodicy where humanity occupies a privileged place in nature strikes me as even worse than simply untrue. It's maladaptive.

• • •

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y'all have knocked her up
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit

Dear Adam,

Thanks originally to T.H. Huxley (who recast Hume as a proto-Darwinist) but more influentially to Bertrand Russell, David Hume has become contemporary philosophy’s go-to guy to show that you’ve got the angels on your side. 

I first noticed this as a teaching assistant to Annette Baier, who taught one of Pitt’s introductory philosophy courses in the early 1980s. She was then touting Hume as a virtue theorist comfortable with multiculturalism, not Russell’s radical sceptic who might prove a nuisance in mixed company. 

In recent times, as you point out, the continentals have gotten in on the act, with Deleuze – and more to the point, Anglophone Deleuzians – honing in on Hume’s ‘bundle of perceptions’ theory of the self as a precursor to the protean idea of ‘assemblage’. Moreover, considered in light of the relatively little use that empirically minded philosophers like Mill made of Hume prior to Huxley’s makeover, I conclude that Hume has been overused and quite possibly overrated.

Thus, I see you as going against the grain of Hume’s own thinking – and not simply because he didn’t live in the right times. The bundle theory is basically designed to demonstrate the illusory nature of any sense of a substantial self, which includes a self that is capable of experimentation in the sense you suggest. 

You are already attributing too much autonomy (or will) to the bundled self, which Hume denies. Any sense of self that we think we have is a product of faulty memory and wishful thinking, and once we recognize these in-built liabilities we’ll be able to live saner lives. Here Hume is really like Epicurus and Buddha – and Wittgenstein. The Humean self may be open to a wide variety of experiences that result in various personal reconfigurations but it is not one that would take responsibility for having initiated those experiences.

John Locke wrote when the concept of
consciousness was literally a new idea.

My own view is closer to Locke’s, who also had doubts about the idea of a substantial self. Indeed, he identified the self with the legal concept of the ‘person,’ an entity constructed for ‘forensic’ purposes, which is to say, to attribute responsibility. Locke didn’t deny the sort of psychological complexity that Hume highlighted but concluded that our ‘consciousness’ (a neologism in Locke’s day for second-order divine-like awareness) intervenes and we just draw a line and take – and are recognized as having taken – ownership for a range of thoughts and actions. 

The physical body provides the default locus for defining the jurisdiction of such interventions – i.e. the self that is mine versus the selves that belong to others. As the American founding fathers demonstrated, you can then get some serious politics out of what would otherwise be empiricist vagaries.

Now, the point you raise about convergent evolution is correct, I’m afraid to admit – namely, that it need not eventuate in our species as the crown of creation. However, there is a strong chance that it will eventuate in a species that might be reasonably called Humanity 2.0, leaving open just how much of Homo Sapiens it will actually incorporate. 

Figures in the Lamarckian tradition promoting convergent evolution seem to have thought this way, not least one of my schoolboy influences, that renegade Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw in the anticipated convergence the Second Coming of Jesus, or the Omega Point.

But we don’t need to go this far. The man who most effectively contested Stephen Jay Gould on his own palaeontological turf, Simon Conway Morris, has observed that over the course of evolution, the basic morphologies of organisms have become fewer and more similar. 

There is no need to postulate a divine hand or even natural selection to suppose that symbiosis and cross-species mimicry are playing a significant role here. In fact, one might even go so far as to suppose that the ultimate state of convergence will realize something like James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, whereby humans (when ecologically well-behaved) function as the brain of the superorganism called ‘Earth.’ My guess is that this line of thinking would be quite congenial to you.

A brief rebuttal to Steve on my environmentalism.
I'm uncomfortable thinking of humanity in the
stewardship role as I see here. I don't see how we
can make the progress required to do it right at least
until Humanity 8.0. The ideas I have for science-
fiction literature featuring my character of Alice
can explain better than a photo caption.

However, being more humanist than you, I don’t see things panning out quite this way. Much of the history of technology has been based on biomimicry at varying levels of abstraction from the organisms imitated (e.g. airplanes do what birds do but rather differently). 

The Bible certainly exhorts people to learn from nature, but what happens to nature afterwards is an open question. After all, scientists are also developing an ability to freeze-dry DNA for future use, which would allow us to keep various species ‘on tap’ should we need or want them around. So the exact normative role of ‘Nature’ in our thinking needs to be made clear, especially as we are clearly developing godlike powers. 

For me it means that ‘Nature’ should not function as a static – euphemistically called sustainable – vision of the ecology. Such a move is little more than environmental fetishism, since various combinations of known organisms might well live well together under radically different environmental conditions. 

And even when this turns out to be false, we will have learned something and our capacities for generating organisms will permit us to try again. The corollary of ‘No pain, no gain’ is ‘Life is a hypothesis.’

Grounding the Right to Oppress: Taking Ability for Quantity, Composing, 15/12/2014

This weekend, I wrote up a review of a book that will be appearing at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective later this month. The book I’m talking about is an essay collection called Post and Transhumanism, which is a general introduction to the topic through chapters that examine a couple of key historical figures or specific subjects.

This is something of a preview and a little more paratext on my review. The short version of what I actually think about the book is that it had some good essays, and some bad essays, with some interesting insights, but nothing really to write home about. I think one flaw is that everything maintained a very introductory focus, as if all the writers wanted to show how much they knew, but didn’t really want to challenge the reader to think on her own.

However, that’s not what I focussed my review on. It isn’t what I’m going to talk about today either. I wanted to mention a curious little argument that came up in one of these essays, which implied a conception of how moral standing works that I find genuinely perplexing to discuss. I consider it a mistake in thinking that interferes with the ability to do productive philosophy. 

The arc of my formal review tended to a different direction. I concentrated directly on the problems of conceiving transhumanism (philosophical speculation and preparation for the utopian improvement of human life through biological enhancements) and posthumanism (the set of philosophies from Nietzsche onward that focus on a general issue of overcoming humanity) as basically the same thing. Short version of this theme: Don’t do that.

If Steve Buscemi got cybernetic enhancements,
would he have the right to control me, as
someone without such enhancements?

The argument about moral standing goes like this. Robert Ranisch, the co-editor of this collection, includes an essay in the book called “Morality,” where he discusses different moral ideas and problems that occur in transhumanist thinking. This includes a discussion of how human enhancement will affect the moral standing of the human race. In particular, how differences in moral standing between the enhanced and the non-enhanced (or among gradations of superficially to deeply enhanced) will affect the moral standing of different people within humanity.

It’s a common argument in Western philosophy to ground moral standing in cognitive capacity: intelligence, a sense of self-consciousness, the intellectual ability to engage in moral discourse, empathetic and sympathetic powers. The sense of the term ‘enhanced’ in transhumanist discussions is usually very vague, but in the context of Ranisch’s argument (or rather, this small part), it refers to an enhancement of these powers that ground the moral weight accorded to a person.

If enhanced people have greater moral powers and abilities, then they’ll have greater moral standing than non-enhanced humans. The higher moral standing of the enhanced means that they could legitimately oppress humans who are still like us today. He is literally describing the technological advancement of personhood itself, such that an enhanced human would be more of a person than you or me.

Even though this wasn’t a major element of his piece, which was more about general moral issues and indicating problems with some of them, it stuck with me as having made a fundamental error about the nature of how morality really works. Well, let me rephrase that. Ranisch’s conception of morality works just fine in the context of philosophical discussions about ranking people’s moral standing on a chart and calculating what suffering can be inflicted upon them without it being morally relevant.

Being ethical operates entirely differently. Whatever kind of weird technological enhancement would make a human “morally superior” to another wouldn’t grant the superior a right to oppress the inferior. If someone, no matter how enhanced they are, was genuinely morally superior, then the thought of oppressing or controlling someone who was already above whatever minimal threshold of powers was necessary make their suffering immoral under the old regime wouldn’t even occur to them. That’s what moral superiority is.

It’s why I find so much talk about ‘enhancement’ among transhumanist speculation unproductive. It’s a vague way to make philosophical problems of no import. The question “What if there were a class of humans with the moral right to oppress other humans?” isn’t relevant for technological enhancement discussions. It’s relevant for discussions of the legitimacy of monarchies or workers’ rights. 

Moral standing isn’t the kind of thing that you gain when you add a cybernetic implant. One is more moral when you change your character such that the desire to harm someone for your benefit becomes abhorrent to you. The problem of philosophy that uses terms like ‘enhancement’ so vaguely is that it makes you think moral standing is something like aerobics capacity, which biological or technological enhancements can presumably improve by various degrees. 

You end up fundamentally misusing and misunderstanding important ideas, so you end up talking in circles about nothing of any substance.

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 . . . 

Overcoming the All-Too-Human: Response to the Technoprogressive Declaration, 25/11/2014

I’ve never really gotten all that excited about transhumanism as a philosophical or political movement, but it seems that it’s been thrust upon me over the last few months. I’m taking part in a review and a critical discussion on the subject at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, and a promising publication venue for my Ecophilosophy manuscript is as part of a series of books on the general topic of post-humanism.

The Ecophilosophy manuscript was originally conceived as a contribution to environmental moral and ontological philosophy, which it still is. But the opportunity to pitch the manuscript as a discussion in a post-humanism context gets to a central meta-philosophical point in the project itself, my vision of what philosophy is actually for, and what constitutes philosophical progress. 

The transhumanist stereotype: man becomes technology
in a vision where man is the only life.

I consider philosophy an intellectual tradition based upon the creation, refinement, and critique of concepts, new frameworks and approaches to thought. So philosophical practice is essentially theorizing new ways to be human, overcoming existing limitations of human thought and life. This would appear to put me clearly in the transhumanist camp.

But I’m not, really. Steve Fuller should consider this one of the early critiques of the recently published Technoprogressive Declaration. This set of principles for the politically progressive employment of human enhancement technologies emerged this weekend from Transvision 2014, a conference on transhumanist ideas organized by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Take a few moments before I continue my introductory critique* of the statement to actually have a read of it.

* I say introductory critique because I don’t want to spoil too many of the ideas that I’ll discuss in my upcoming joint review of the essay collection Post- and Transhumanism, edited by Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, which will be up on SERRC over December.

The goals of the Technoprogressive Declaration are admirable. As technology to improve human life through increasingly amazing ways develops, it should be deployed to maximize human benefit and overcome the inequalities that exist in our world. I certainly hope that the Technoprogressive Caucus puts some concrete action into its activism and either reaches out to the people developing these technologies, or develops ways to liberate them from what will likely be their first home in the luxury goods market. If technology is genuinely able to liberate humanity from its material chains, then the restrictions of economic disenfranchisement have to fall first.

So the Technoprogressive Declaration is certainly right to call for the radical transformation of our economic system. Technological growth has removed the need for human labour from much of our manufacturing processes, but our mainstream morality says that income should only be earned in exchange for work. Extreme technological progress combined with the morality that you must work to live will eventually create a society of permanently destitute unemployed.

The trick will be developing a morality where all people find pleasure in self-improvement. This is a transformation of human nature that transhumanist doctrine often does not touch. In fact, several key historical arguments in favour of transhumanist transformation of the human condition is couched in the notion that radical technological enhancement of the human organism will result in a life of great pleasure and practical immortality to experience that pleasure.**

** Not to mention other problems that maintaining our current economic morality will create for a society of practical immortals.

This hedonism is precisely what proponents of work-to-live moralities decry: the lazy pleasure-seeker whose profane lifestyle is subsidized by the state. The only way to convince moralizers of the principle that one must deserve one’s income through labour to join the transhumanist train is to combine it with a post-humanist principle: that we must overcome the tendency in our nature to rest content with a purely pleasurable environment.

Transhumanism requires an ethical transformation of the human condition, which technology alone is inadequate to achieve. An economy of guaranteed incomes resting on machine labour will only sustain itself if the human race finds its most profound and satisfying pleasure in the independent pursuit of the sciences and arts, and other means of individual self-improvement. Our mythic role models for this future would be figures like Doctor Who and Jean-Luc Picard.

I’m also disappointed that ecological knowledge plays no explicit role in the Technoprogressive Declaration. A secure civilization, especially one so intimately dependent on technology as transhumanist visions, requires an ecologically sustainable technology at every stage of the material production process. It sorely disappoints me that I have so rarely come across transhumanist discussions that take seriously the ecological health of Earth (or whatever planets we settle upon in addition) as the foundation of any sustainable technological progress at all.

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.