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On a Study of Steve Fuller, Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson

SERRC — July 12, 2018 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson, Humber College, alci.malapi@outlook.com

Malapi-Nelson, Alcibiades. “On a Study of Steve Fuller.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 7 (2018): 25-29.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3Za

Steve Fuller, seen here just under seven years ago in New York City, gave a name to what is now the sub-discipline and community of social epistemology. Like all thriving communities, it’s gotten much more diverse and creative with time. As has Steve Fuller.
Image by Babette Babich, courtesy of Steve Fuller

Francis Remedios and Val Dusek have written a thorough and exhaustive account of Steve Fuller’s work, ranging (mostly) from 2003 to 2017. Fuller’s earlier work was addressed in Remedios’ previous book, Legitimizing Scientific Knowledge (2003) – to which this one is the logical continuation. Back then Remedios introduced the reader to Fuller’s inaugurated field of research, “social epistemology”, encompassing the philosopher’s work from the late 1980’s until the turn of the century.

Given that Steve Fuller is one of the most prolific authors alive, having published (so far) 30 books and hundreds of articles, Remedios & Dusek’s book (as Remedios’ previous book), fill a practical need: It is hard to keep up with Fuller’s elevated rate of production. Indeed, both the seasoned reader and the neophyte to Fuller’s fairly overwhelming amount of writing, will need a panoramic and organic view of his breathtaking scope of research. Remedios & Dusek successfully accomplish the task of providing it.

The Bildung of a Person and His Concepts

Remedios & Dusek’s book starts with a Foreword by Fuller himself, followed by an Introduction (Ch. 1) by the authors. The bulk of the monograph is comprised by several chapters addressing Fuller’s ideas on Science and Technology Studies (Ch. 2), Social Epistemology (Ch. 3), the University & Interdisciplinarity (Ch. 4), Intelligent Design (Ch. 5), Cosmism & Gnosticism (Ch. 6), and the Proactionary principle (Ch. 7).

There is some connective overlap between chapters. In each one of them, Remedios & Dusek provide an articulated landscape of Fuller’s ideas, the occasional criticism, and a final summary. The book ends up with an appropriately short Conclusion (Ch. 8) and a PostScript (Ch. 9) – an interview’s transcription.

It is worth pointing out that the work is chronologically (and conveniently) in sync with Fuller’s own progressive intellectual development, and thus, the first part roughly focuses on his earlier work, whereas the second part on his later writings.[1]

The first chapter after the Introduction (Chapter 2, “Fuller on Science and Technology Studies” (STS), already provides a cue for a theme that would transfix the arc of Fuller’s thoughts spanning the last decade. As I see it, Steve Fuller is arguably going to extents that some may deem controversial (e.g., his endorsement of some type of Intelligent Design, his backing up of transhumanism, his gradual “coming out” as a Catholic) due to one main reason: A deep preoccupation with the future of humanity vis-à-vis pervasively disrupting emerging technologies.

Accordingly, Fuller wants to fuel a discussion that may eventually salvage whatever we find out that being human consists of – even if this “human” will resemble little the “humans” as we know them now. At this point, the “cue” is not self-evident: Fuller does not like Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory. In Fuller’s view, Latour’s framework triggers both an epistemological and an ethical problem: it diffuses human agency and by extension, responsibility – respectively. Equating human agency with the causal power attributed to the “parliament of things” ultimately reverberates in an erosion of human dignity. Here the cue becomes clearer: It is precisely this human dignity that Fuller will later defend in his attack of Darwinism.

Humanity Beyond the Human

Chapter 3, “Fuller’s Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency”, provides a further clue to Fuller’s agenda. Remedios & Dusek coined a sentence that may constitute one of the most succinct, although fundamental, pillars in Steve Fuller’s grand framework: “For Fuller, humanity would continue if homo sapiens end”.[2] This statement ingeniously captures Fuller’s position that “humanity” (a “project” started during the Medieval Ages and developed during Modernity), is something that homo sapiens earn – or not. Biology might provide a compatible receptacle for this humanity to obtain, but it is by no means an automatic occurrence. One strives to get it – and many in fact fail to reach it.

In the context of this theme, Fuller steers away from an “object-oriented” (social) epistemology to an “agent-oriented” one: Instead of endlessly ruminating about possible theories of knowledge (which would render an accurate picture of the object – social or not), one starts to take into account the possibilities that open up after considering transforming the knowing agent itself. This transition foretells Fuller’s later view: a proactionary approach[3] to experimentation where the agent commits to the alteration of reality – as opposed to a precautionary stance, where the knower passively waits for reality’s feedback before further proceeding.

In chapter 4, “The University and Interdisciplinarity”, Remedios & Dusek treat Fuller’s views on the situation of institutions of higher education currently confronting the relentless compartmentalization of knowledge. Fuller praises Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reinvention of the notion of the university in the 19^th century, where the individual would acquire a holistic formation (bildung), and which would produce in return tangible benefits to society out of the growth of knowledge in general and science in particular.

This model, which catapulted Germany to the forefront of research, and which was emulated by several Western nations, has been gradually eroded by neoliberalism. Neoliberal stances, spurred by an attention to clients’ requests, progressively severed the heretofore integral coexistence of research and teaching, creating instead pockets of specialization – along with their own idiosyncratic jargon. This fragmentation, in turn, has generated an overall ignorance among scientists and intellectuals regarding the “big picture”, which ultimately results in a stagnation of knowledge production. Fuller advocates for a return to the Humboldtian ideal, but this time incorporating technology as in integral part of the overall academic formation in the humanities.

Roles for Religion and God

Chapter 5, “Fuller’s Intelligent Design” (ID), deals with the philosopher’s controversial views regarding this position, particularly after the infamous Dover Trial. Remedios & Dusek have done a very good job at tracing the roots and influences behind Fuller’s ideas on the issue. They go all the way back to Epicurus and Hume, including the strong connection between these two and Charles Darwin, particularly in what concerns the role of “chance” in evolution. Those interested in this illuminating philosophical archeology will be well served after reading this chapter, instead of (or as a complement to) Steve Fuller’s two books on the topic.[4]

Chapter 6, “Fuller, Cosmism and Gnosticism” lays out the relationship of the philosopher with these two themes. Steve Fuller recognizes in Russian cosmism an important predecessor to transhumanism – along with the writings of the mystical Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin.

He is lately catering to a re-emergence of interest among Slavs regarding these connections, giving talks and seminars in Russia. Cosmism, a heterodox offspring of Russian Orthodoxy, aims at a reconstruction of the (lost) paradise by means of reactivation of a type of “monads” spread-out throughout the universe – particles that disperse after a person dies. Scientific progress would be essential in order to travel throughout the cosmos retrieving these primordial “atoms” of people of the past, so that they could be one day resurrected. Russia would indeed have a cosmic ordering mission. This worldview is a particular rendition of the consequences of Christ’s Resurrection, which was denounced by the Orthodox Church as heretical.

Nevertheless, it deeply influenced several Slavic thinkers, who unlike many Western philosophers, did have a hard time reconciling their (Orthodox) Christianity with reason and science. This syncretism was a welcomed way for them to “secularize” the mystical-prone Christian Orthodoxy and infuse it with scientific inquiry. As a consequence, rocket science received a major thrust for development. After all, machines had to be built in order to retrieve these human particles so that scientifically induced global resurrection occurs.

One of the more important global pioneers in rocket engines, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (who later received approval by Joseph Stalin to further develop space travel research), was profoundly influenced by it. In fact, increasingly more scholars assert that despite the official atheism of the Soviet Union, cosmism was a major driving force behind the Soviet advances, which culminated in the successful launch of the Sputnik.

Chapter 7, “Proactionary and Precautionary Principles and Welfare State 2.0”, is the last chapter before the Conclusion. Here Remedios & Dusek deal with Fuller’s endorsement of Max More’s Proactionary Principle and the consequent modified version of a Welfare State. The proactionary approach, in contradistinction with the precautionary principle (which underpins much of science policy in Europe), advocates for a risk-taking approach, justified partly in the very nature of Modern science (experimentation without excessive red tape) and partly in what is at stake: the survival of our species. Steve Fuller further articulates the proactionary principle, having written a whole book on the subject[5] – while More wrote an article.

The Roles of This Book

Remedios & Dusek have done an excellent job in summarizing, articulating and criticizing the second half of Steve Fuller’s vast corpus – from the early 2000s until last year. I foresee a successful reception by thinkers concerned with the future of humanity and scholars interested in Fuller’s previous work. As a final note, I will share a sentiment that will surely resonate with some – particularly with the younger readers out there.

As noted in the opening remarks, Remedios & Dusek’s book fill a gap in what concerns the possibility of acquiring an articulated overview of Fuller’s thought, given his relentless rate of publication. However, the sheer quantity to keep up with is not the only issue. These days, more than “the written word” may be needed in order to properly capture the ideas of authors of Fuller’s calibre. As I observed elsewhere,[6] reading Fuller is a brilliant read – but it is not an easy read.

It may be fair to say that, as opposed to, say, the relatively easy reading of an author like Steven Pinker, Steve Fuller’s books are not destined to be best-sellers among laymen. Fuller’s well put together paragraphs are both sophisticated and precise, sometimes long, paying witness to an effort for accurately conveying his multi-layered thought processes – reminding one of some German early modern philosophers. Fortunately, there is now a solid source of clarity that sheds effective light on Fuller’s writing: his available media. There are dozens of video clips (and hundreds of audio files[7]) of his talks, freely available to anyone. It may take a while to watch and listen to them all, but it is doable. I did it. And the clarity that they bring to his writings is tangible.

If Fuller is a sophisticated writer, he certainly is a very clear (and dare I say, entertaining) speaker. His “talking” functions as a cognitive catalyst for the content of his “writing” – in that, he is returning to the Humboldtian ideal of merged research and teaching. Ideally, if one adds to these his daily tweets,[8] now we have at reach the most complete picture of what would be necessary to properly “get” a philosopher like him these days. I have the feeling that, regardless of our settled ways, this “social media” component, increasingly integrated with any serious epistemic pursuit, is here to stay.

Contact details: alci.malapi@outlook.com

References

Fuller, S. (2007). Science Vs. Religion?: Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Fuller, S. (2008). Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design’s Challenge to Darwinism. Cambridge, UK: Icon.

Fuller, S. (2014). The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Malapi-Nelson, A. (2013). “Book review: Steve Fuller, Humanity 2.0: What it Means to be Human Past, Present and Future.” International Sociology Review of Books 28(2): 240-247.

Remedios, F. and Dusek, V. (2018). Knowing Humanity in the Social World: The Path of Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

[1] With the exception of the PostScript, which is a transcription of an interview with Steve Fuller mostly regarding the first period of his work.

[2] Remedios & Dusek 2018, p. 34

[3] Remedios & Dusek 2018, p. 40

[4] Fuller 2007 and Fuller 2008

[5] Fuller 2014

[6] Malapi-Nelson 2013

[7] warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/sfuller/media/audio

[8] Some of which are in fact reproduced by Remedios & Dusek 2018 (e.g. p. 102).

Transhumanism and the Catholic Church, Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson

SERRC — May 10, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson, Seneca College, alci.malapi@outlook.com

Malapi-Nelson, Alcibiades. “Transhumanism and the Catholic Church.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018): 12-17.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3WM

You don’t become the world’s oldest continuing institution without knowing how to adapt to the times.
Image by Lawrence OP via Flickr / Creative Commons.

Most accounts on transhumanism coming from Catholic circles show a mild to radical rejection to the idea of a deep alteration, by means of pervasive emergent technologies, of whatever we understand as “human nature”. These criticisms come from both progressive and conservative Catholic flanks. However, as it is increasingly becoming evident, the left/right divide is no longer capturing ethical, political and philosophical stances in an accurate manner.

There are cross-linked concerns which transcend such traditional dichotomy. The Church, insofar as it also is a human institution, is not immune to this ongoing ‘rotating axis’. The perceived Catholic unfriendliness to transhumanism stems from views that do not take into account the very mission that defines the Church’s existence.

Conceptions of Human Dignity

To be sure, there are aspects of transhumanism that may find fundamental rejection when confronted to Church doctrine—particularly in what concerns human dignity. In this context, attempts for accomplishing indefinite life extension will not find fertile ground in Catholic milieus. Needless to say, the more vulgar aspects of the transhumanist movement—such as the fashionable militant atheism sponsored by some, or the attempt to simply replace religion with technology—would not find sympathy either. However, precisely due to an idiosyncratically Catholic attention to human dignity, attempts at the improvement of the human experience shall certainly attract the attention of the Magisterium.

Perhaps more importantly, and not unrelated to a distinctly Catholic understanding of personal self-realization, the Church will have to cope with the needs that a deeply altered human condition will entail. Indeed, the very cause for the Church to exist is self-admittedly underpinned by the fulfillment of a particular service to humans: Sacrament delivery. Hence, the Magisterium has an ontological interest (i.e., pertaining to what counts as human) in better coping with foreseeable transhumanist alterations, as well as a functional one (e.g., to ensure both proper evangelization and the fulfilling of its sacramental prime directive).

The Church is an institution that thinks, plans and strategizes in terms of centuries. A cursory study of its previous positions regarding the nature of humanity reveals that the idea of “the human” never was a monolithic, static notion. Indeed, it is a fluid one that has been sponsored and defended under different guises in previous eras, pressed by sui-generis apostolic needs. As a guiding example, one could pay attention to the identity-roots of that area of the globe which currently holds more than 60% of the Catholic world population: Latin America. It is well documented how the incipient attempts at an articulation of “human rights”, coming from the School of Salamanca in the 16^th century (epitomized by Francisco Vitoria, Francisco Suárez—the Jesuit who influenced Leibnitz, Schopenhauer and Heidegger—and indirectly, by Bartolomé de las Casas), had as an important aspect of its agenda the extension of the notion of humanity to the hominid creatures found inhabiting the “West Indies”—the Americas.

The usual account of Heilsgeschichte (Salvation History), canonically starting with the narrative of the People of God and ending up with the Roman Empire, could not be meaningfully conveyed to this newly-found peoples, given that the latter was locked in an absolutely parallel world. In fact, a novel “theology of charity” had to be developed in order to spread the Good News, without referencing a (non-existent) “common history”. Their absolute humanity had to be thus urgently established, so that, unlike the North American Protestant experience, widespread legalized slavery would not ensue—task which was partly accomplished via the promulgation of the 1538 encyclical Sublimis Deus.

Most importantly, once their humanity was philosophically and legally instituted, the issue regarding the necessary services for both their salvation and their self-development immediately emerged (To be sure, not everyone agreed in such extension of humanity). Spain sent an average of three ‘apostolic agents’ – priests – per day to fulfill this service. The controversial nature of the “Age of Discovery” notwithstanding, the Spanish massive mobilization may partly account for the Church being to this day perhaps the most trusted institution in Latin America. Be that as it may, we can see here a paradigmatic case were the Church extended the notion of humanity to entities with profoundly distinct features, so that it could successfully fulfill its mission: Sacrament delivery. Such move arguably guaranteed the worldwide flourishing, five centuries later, of an institution of more than a billion people.

A Material Divinity

Although the Church emphasises an existing unity between mind and body, it is remarkable that in no current authoritative document of the Magisterium (e.g., Canon Law, Catechism, Vatican Council II, etc.) the “human” is inextricably linked with a determinate corporeal feature of the species homo-sapiens. Namely, although both are profoundly united, one does not depend on the other. In fact, the soul/spirit comes directly from God. What defines us as humans have less to do with the body and its features and more to do with the mind, spirit and will.

Once persons begin to radically and ubiquitously change their physical existences, the Church will have to be prepared to extend the notion of humanity to these hybrids. Not only will these entities need salvation, but they will need to flourish in this life as self-realized individuals—something that according to Catholic doctrine is solidly helped by sacrament reception. Moreover, if widespread deep alteration of humanoid ‘biologies’ were to occur, the Church has a mandate of evangelization to them as well. This will likely encourage apostolic agents to become familiarized with these novel ways of corporeal existence in order to better understand them—even embrace them in order further turn them into vehicles of evangelization themselves.

We have a plethora of historical examples in related contexts, from the Jesuit grammatization of the Inka language to Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic expertise in human communications—having influenced the Second Vatican Council’s Inter Mirifica document on the topic. Indeed, “morphological freedom” (the right and ability to alter our physical existence) might become for the Church what philosophy of communication became for McLuhan.

Thus, chances are that the Church will need to embrace a certain instantiation of a transhuman future, given that the institution will have to cope with a radically changed receptacle of the grace-granting devices – the Sacraments. Indeed, this shall be done in order to be consistent with the reason for its very existence as mandated by Christ: guaranteeing the constant flow of these efficacious means which collaborate towards both a fulfilled existence in this life and salvation in the next one. Steve Fuller foresees a possible scenario that may indeed become just such transhuman ‘instantiation’ favoured by the Church:

A re-specification of the “human” to be substrate-neutral (that is to say, a “human” need not be the descendant of another member of Homo sapiens but rather could be a status conferred on any suitably qualified entity, as might be administered by a citizenship test or even a Turing Test).

Judging from its track record, the Church will problematically but ultimately successfully raise up to the challenge. A substrate-neutral re-specification of the human may indeed be the route taken by the Church—perhaps after a justifiably called Concilium.

An homage to a legendary series of portraits by Francis Bacon.
Image by Phineas Jones via Flickr / Creative Commons

Examining the Sacraments

The challenge will be variously instantiated in correlation with the sacraments to be delivered. However, all seven of them share one feature that will be problematized with the implementation of transhumanist technologies: Sacraments perform metaphysically what they do physically. Their efficacy in the spiritual world is mirrored by the material function performed in this one (e.g., the pouring of water in baptism). Since our bodies may change at a fundamental level, maintaining the efficacy of sacraments, which need physical substrata to work, will be the common problem. Let us see how this problem may variously incarnate.

Baptism. As the current notion of humanity stands (“an entity created in the image and likeness of God”) not much would have to change in order to extend it to an altered entity claiming to maintain, or asking to receive, human status. A deep alteration of our bodies constitutes no fundamental reason for not participating of the realm “human” and thus, enter the Catholic Church by means of Baptism: The obliteration of the legacy of Original Sin with which humans are born—either by natural means, cloned or harvested (A similar reasoning could be roughly applied to Confirmation). Holy water can be poured on flesh, metal or a new alloy constituting someone’s forehead. As indicated above, the Church does not mention “flesh” as a sine qua non condition for humanity to obtain.

On the other hand, there is a scenario, more post-human than transhuman in nature, that may emerge as a side effect out of the attempts to ameliorate the human condition: Good Old Fashion Artificial Intelligence. If entities that share none of the features (bodily, historically, cognitively, biologically) we usually associate with humanity begin to claim human status on account of displaying both rationality and autonomy, then the Church may have to go through one of its most profound “aggiornamentos” in two millennia of operation.

Individual tests administered by local bishops on a case-by-case basis (after a fundamental directive coming from the Holy See) would likely have to be put in place – which would aim to assess, for instance, the sincerity of the entity’s prayer. It is a canonical signature of divine presence in an individual the persistent witnessing of an ongoing metanoia (conversion). A consistent life of self-giving and spiritual warfare could be the required accepted signs for this entity being declared a child of God, equal to the rest of us, granting its entrance into the Church with all the entailing perks (i.e. the full array of sacraments).

There is a caveat that is less problematic for Catholic doctrine than for modern society: Sex assignation. Just as the ‘natural machinery’ already comes with one, the artificial one could have it as well. Male or female could happen also in silico. Failure to do so would carry the issue to realms not dissimilar with current disputes of “sex reassignation” and its proper recognition by society: It might be a problem, but it would not be a new problem. The same reasoning would apply to “post-gender” approaches to transhumanism.

Confession. Given that the sacrament of Reconciliation has to be obligatorily performed, literally, vis à vis, what if environmental catastrophes reduce our physical mobility so that we can no longer face a priest? Will telepresence be accepted by the Church? Will the Church establish strict protocols of encryption? After all it is an actual confession that we are talking about: Only a priest can hear it—and only the Pope, on special cases, can hear it from him.

Breaking the confessional seal entails excommunicatio ipso facto. Moreover, regarding a scenario which will likely occur within our lifetimes, what about those permanently sent into space? How will they receive this sacrament? Finally, even if the Church permanently bans the possibility of going to confession within a virtual environment, what would happen if people eventually inhabit physical avatars? Would that count as being physically next to a priest?

Communion. The most important of all sacraments, the Eucharist, will not the void of issues either. The Latin Rite of the Catholic Church (the portion of Catholics who are properly ‘Roman’) mandates that only unleavened bread shall be used as the physical substratum, so that it later transubstantiates into the body of Christ. The Church is particularly strict in this, as evinced in cases were alternative breads have been used (e.g., when stranded for years on a deserted island), not recognizing those events as properly Eucharistic: the sacrament never took place in such occasions.

Nevertheless, we will have to confront situations were the actual bread could not be sent to remote locations of future human dwelling (e.g., Mars), nor a priest will be present to perform the said metaphysical swapping. Facing this, would nanotechnology provide the solution? Would something coming out of a 3D printer or a future “molecular assembler” qualify as the actual unleavened bread?

Marriage. This sacrament will likely confront two main challenges; one fundamentally novel in nature and the second one an extension of already occurring issues. Regarding the latter, let us take in consideration a particular thread in certain transhumanist circles: The pursuit of indefinite life extension. It is understood that once people either become healthier longer (or stop aging), the creation of new life via offspring may become an after-thought. Canon Law clearly stipulates that those who consciously made a decision not to procreate can not enter this sacrament. In that sense, a children-less society would be constituted by sacramentally unmarried people. Once again, this issue is a variation of already occurring scenarios—which could be extended, for that matter, to sex-reassigned people.

The former challenge mentioned would be unprecedented. Would the Church marry a human and a machine? Bear in mind that this question is fundamentally different from the already occurring question regarding the Church refusing to marry humans and non-human animals. The difference is based upon the lack of autonomy and rationality shown by the latter. However, machines could one day show both (admittedly Kantian) human-defining features. The Church may find in principle no obstacle to marry a human “1.0” and a human “2.0” (or even a human and an artificial human—AI), provided that the humanity of the new lifeforms, following the guidelines established by the requirements for Baptism, is well established.

Holy Orders. As with Marriage, this sacrament will likely face a twist both on an already occurring scenario and a fairly new one. On the one hand, the physical requirement of a bishop actually posing his hands on someone’s head to ordain him a priest, has carried problematic cases for the Church (e.g., during missions where bishops were not available). With rare exceptions, this requirement has always been observed. A possible counter case is the ordination of Stylite monks between the 3^rd and 6^th century. These hermits made vows to not come down from their solitary pillar until death.

Reportedly, sometimes bishops ordained them via an “action at a distance” of sorts—but still from merely a few meters away. The Church will have to establish whether ordaining someone via telepresence (or inhabiting an avatar) would count as sacramentally valid. On the other hand, the current requirement for a candidate for priesthood to have all his limbs—particularly his hands—up until the moment of ordination might face softening situations. At the moment where a prosthetic limb not only seamlessly becomes an extension of the individual, but a better functional extension of him, the Church may reconsider this pre-ordination requirement.

Extreme Unction. The Last Rites will likely confront two challenges in a transhuman world. One would not constitute properly a problem for its deliverance, but rather a questioning of the point of its existence. The other will entail a possible redefinition of what is considered to be ‘dead’. In what refers to the consequences of indefinite life extension, this sacrament may be considered by Catholics what Protestants consider of the sacraments (and hence of the Church): Of no use. Perhaps the sacrament would stay put for those who choose to end their lives “naturally” (in itself a problem for transhumanists: What to do with those who do not want to get “enhanced”?) Or perhaps the Church will simply ban this particular transhumanist choice of life for Catholics, period—as much as it now forbids euthanasia and abortion. The science fiction series Altered Carbon portrays a future where such is the case.

On the other hand, the prospect of mind uploading may push to redefine the notion of what it means to leave this body, given that such experience may not necessarily entail death. If having consciousness inside a super-computer is defined as being alive—which as seen above may be in principle accepted by the Church—then the delivery of the sacrament would have to be performed without physicality, perhaps via a link between the software-giver and the software-receiver. This could even open up possibilities for sacrament-delivery to remote locations.

The Future of Humanity’s Oldest Institution

As we can see, the Church may not have to just tolerate, but actually embrace, the transhumanist impulses slowly but steadily pushed by science and technology into the underpinnings of the human ethos. This attitude shall emerge motivated by two main sources: On the one hand, a fundamental option towards the development of human dignity—which by default would associate the Church more to a transhumanist philosophy than to a post-human one.

On the other, a fundamental concern for the continuing fulfilling of its own mission and reason of existence—the delivery of sacraments to a radically altered human recipient. As a possible counterpoint, it has been surmised that Pope Francis’ is one of the strongest current advocates for a precautionary stance—a position being traditionally associated with post-human leanings. The Pontiff’s Laudato Si encyclical on the environment certainly seems to point to this direction. That may be part of a—so far seemingly successful—strategy put in place by the Church for decades to come, whose reasons escape the scope of this piece. However, as shown above, the Church, given its own history, philosophy, and prime mandate, has all the right reasons to embrace a transhuman future—curated the Catholic way, that is.

Contact details: alci.malapi@outlook.com

References

Fuller, Steve. “Ninety Degree Revolution.” Aeon Magazine. 20 October 2013. Retrieved from https://aeon.co/essays/left-and-right-are-over-the-future-is-up-and-down.

Fuller, Steve. “Which Way Is Up for the Human Condition?” ABC Religion and Ethics. 26 August 2015. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/08/26/4300331.htm.

Fuller, Steve. “Beyond Good and Evil: The Challenges of Trans- and Post-Humanism.” ABC Religion and Ethics. 20 December 2016. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/12/20/4595400.htm.

La Nouvelle Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, Mark West

SERRC — February 8, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Mark West, University of North Carolina, west@unca.edu

West, Mark. “La Nouvelle Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes: The Analytic and Critical Tendencies in Social Epistemology.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 2 (2018): 36-41.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3TU

The newcomer to the domain of social epistemology who wishes to ‘get up to speed,’ so to speak, finds themselves in an interesting situation. An awareness that the epistemic venture is not conducted in a vacuum must surely occur to most philosophers who attempt to navigate the ‘linguistic turn,’ or who come to some sort of ‘conceptual relativism’ via Putnam or Goodman. A quick Internet search turn up Social Epistemology, then the SERRC, and then, one hopes, The Future of Social Epistemology (Collier, 2016).

Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency: Decentralizing Epistemic Agency, ed. Patrick Reider. Rowman & Littlefield International

Our newcomer might well wonder at this point just what is afoot. The domain is clearly active, with not only frequent articles but the occasional querelle on the pages of the SERRC. Additionally, there are articles which appear to be canonical. But the authors seem to have little consistency in their interests or approaches. Necro-waste, transhumanism, and a variety of vaguely futuristic concepts occupy one end of the domain, and ‘freedom’ as a goal is used in a manner consistent with European ordoliberal theorists.

A second cluster of scholars seems more concerned with analytic philosophy. The Gettier problem, and, sometimes, the use of empirical methods to examine questions of interest is dominant within this cluster of scholars; here, questions of freedom are construed within a Rawlsian ‘veil-of-ignorance’ model in which Kantian synthetic a prioris are understood to be the desiderata. One might find some sympathy with our hypothetical scholar if she imagined our domain to have fallen into some sort of schizophrenic delirium.

The recent collection of articles entitled Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency: Decentralizing Epistemic Agency, edited by Patrick J. Reider (2016), who at the time of writing was a visiting lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh (USA), might not exactly serve as a panacea for our imaginary scholar, nor for our domain. What this volume of essays does that is long overdue, however, is to go straight to the heart of the matter; it asks the champions of the two major standpoints within the domain of social epistemology to lay out their arguments, and then asks proponents of those views to discuss their understandings of those key articles.

As did his previous edited volume on Wilfred Sellars (2017), this book fills a heretofore-empty niche in the graduate student or professor’s library of go-to books. It raises, without answering, an important question; has a nouvelle querelle des anciens et des modernes broken out, and if so, who are the anciens, and who the moderns? Are we social epistemologists, as representatives of a new domain of scholarly inquiry, bringing forward a new and liberatory expansion of the philosophical venture, or has our enterprise become contaminated with the schisms which are so evident in the quotidian world all around us?

Fundamental Insights

In highlighting this question, I contend that this volume indicates that the domain of social epistemology has arrived at an important crossroads. The beginning of social epistemology was the abandonment of the individualistic framework implicit in epistemology since its beginning, as Paul Faulkner suggests; as is ably discussed in a number of articles here, at the heart of the notion of social epistemology is the idea of broadening the concept of epistemic agency.

The question, though, is how, exactly, the concept of epistemic agency is to be broadened. Those scholars coming from the analytic tradition have seen progress within their domain stall in the wake of what Zagzebski suggests is the transformative breadth of the Gettier problem (1994); almost all the attempted solutions to the problem have, in some sense, involved multiple perspectives and hence, multiple agents through which epistemic agency is distributed. Similarly, science after the Manhattan project has increasingly involved massive group efforts, despite the popular fixation on ‘heroic’ figures like Marc Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin; and hence scholars studying STS as a group phenomenon have increasingly argued that many forms of knowledge upon which modern societies rely arose in group settings and are too complex for any single individual to hold.

At the same time, the epistemic domain can no longer remain the province of a privileged few. The general emancipatory movement within society has meant that the we can only hope that the broad body of scholars have come to understand that the critical understanding of the world includes all of us and our domains; we can no longer fail to look at our own house, so to speak. Who have we, as scholars, been denying agency? Whose epistemic needs and insights have been denied by those of us who have gained, in whatever manner, the ability to speak and be heard, and thus to have our understanding of what constitutes ‘knowing’ to be taken as correct?

There are three fundamental insights which distinguish those who think of themselves as social epistemologists, as Finn Collin suggests in this volume. The first is that epistemology involves both multihuman and non-human (or, as some have it, transhuman) entities in the creation of knowledge.

These entities may be social (as in business firms, which are fictive persons but which are factually social collaboratives of humans along with exosomatic repositories of information) or they may be machine intelligences which are now capable, or may soon be capable, of creating something which will, in some manner, be knowledge. We humans, either somatically or exosomatically augmented by machine and biological appurtenances, will soon enough come to a general understanding of the need for redefining knowledge in a manner that takes into account the ongoing blurring of the boundaries of what is human will become a necessity, whether we desire it or not.

A second insight is that epistemology is, or ought to be, normative, or critical. The goal of a given epistemic stance is to produce knowledge, and hence if a given epistemic stance fails to produce knowledge (it produces instead something taken to be knowledge but which is not knowledge) it is incumbent upon those that hold that stance to seek a better mode of knowledge production, and it is incumbent upon those who study such things to describe both faulty and correct epistemic stances for what they are.

Truth is a goal of epistemology (David, 2001) social epistemology seeks to counter the errors of standard analytic epistemology in which what is given primacy is the considered judgments of a small group of people, notably white male academics (Bishop & Trout, 2005).

The Emery Angel Memorial in Spring Grove, Cincinnati, Ohio. Image by elicefeliz via Flickr / Creative Commons

Since – and this is the third insight presented in this volume – the naturalistic approach to epistemology seems to be the approach most applicable to the first two insights, it is unclear how the evaluation of how effective any given approach to knowledge generation might proceed at the social level except for being conducted through empirical means. As such, the social empiricists turn to the methods of the social sciences for the evaluations of epistemic methods. Here, we have a working definition of social epistemology – the notion that epistemic agency need not inhere in the individual, often inheres in groups, and may inhere in entities which are not strictly or are not in fact at all embodied humans. As a result, it may be needful to apply social research methods to the social collectives from which knowledge may arise.

As this superbly focused volume demonstrates, however, social epistemology, for all its knowledge of the dilemmas that befall disciplines as the move from their evolutionary origins to phases which are more ordinary, can still fall victim to the pathologies its practitioners decry.

Our subdiscipline has its own boundary objects (tell someone what an ‘ordoliberal’ and a ‘transhuman’ is, and they will know whether you adhere to the Fuller or Goldberg schools of thought). Our sub-discipline has analytic social epistemologists and critical social epistemologists who can be identified as members of Team Goldberg and Team Fuller. In this light, Reider’s notion of setting this, the third book in the “Collective in Knowledge Societies” series as a querelle, is a very good choice indeed.

It is of no use to pretend that there are no differences between the different schools of social epistemologists; a few days online, or (for those of the ‘old school’ left among us, in the stacks) among us will demonstrate the truth of that assertion. The depth of the split between analytic and critical schools in social epistemology has been clear for some time. There are some, like Collin in this volume, who see the two camps as working from different perspectives, perhaps using different methodologies, but pursuing the same goals.

There are those, who, like Remedios and Dusek, see the critical tradition, and in particular Fuller’s commitment to the liberatory possibilities of inclusive construals of epistemic agency, and the breadth of his conceptualization of entities which might create knowledge, as a powerful antidote for the forces afoot in Western Civilization in our time which seek to thwart the idea of broadening the notion of who and what might be human.

Others, however, who are perhaps less represented in this book, might hold that the analytic tradition, with the intellectual rigor of its methodology, can ask fundamental questions such as “is epistemic agency even a possibility?” (Engel, 2013) or “how do we propose to aggregate sets of judgments?” (List and Pettit, 2002).

The Gettier problem, such analytic social epistemologists might argue, holds whether knowing agents are singular or plural, and whether they consist of tissues or of silicon or of some hybrid thereof; and to wave one’s hands and plow ahead on a critical program defined as liberatory neither makes it certain that all projects defined as ones which ’maximize freedom’ truly emancipatory, nor does it make the questions raised by the Gettier problem go away. Nor do the futuristic vistas opened to our imaginations by transhumanism and related ventures in experimentation in what makes humans human of necessity increase ’freedom;’ the questions raised by Hans Jonas and those who follow in similar modes can be ignored, but does that mean they are not of concern?

Happily, the Reider volume does not shy away from Fricker’s argument (1988) that when knowledge is a social good which enables coordinated actions through networks of trust (Shapin, 1994), it inevitably becomes an aspect of power relationships. These webs of trust have individuals as their subjects, individuals who themselves are constituted via social relationships, whose relationships are fundamentally understood and felt to be power relationships (Fricker, 1988, p. 67).

With politics, which itself is the study of power relations as a focus, it seems reasonable to argue that definitions of knowledge are a fundamental aspect of political relations — and, in an era where politicians regularly differ not only on policy questions tout on matters of fact, there can be little doubt that epistemology has become politicized, as well as having entered the realm of the social.

And when the two schools of social epistemology concern themselves with conceptualizations of human flourishing which entail programmatic concerns involving normative conceptualizations of the best way to manage (or to not manage) the distribution of resources, our domain has indeed become politicized. To be clear, as Schram (1995, p. xxv) suggests, the social sciences have long since needed a reorientation away from institutional and policy needs and directives; the orientation of the new epistemic movements represented in this volume can only be seen as healthy. But at the same time, they are clearly oppositional, and how to — or whether to — seek some sort of rapprochement between them is a question left to the future.

Conclusion

There is an old Yiddish joke that tells of a pious man who was stranded for many years on a desert island. His rescuers were surprised, when he was found, to see that he had built an elaborate model of his village from conch shells. There was a post office, a town hall, a restaurant — and two synagogues. Mystified, the rescuers approached the man. “The restaurants, the tennis courts, the town hall. This we understand. But two synagogues?” The man nodded. “One synagogue I pray in, every Sabbath. I’m observant. The other? In that other synagogue you wouldn’t catch me dead.”

In the world of philosophy, the same principle holds: two philosophers, two schools of thought. Whether this is the natural progression of the dialectic, an essential aspect of intellectual progress, or as the Yiddish jokes suggests, a vice of the human wish to make in-groups and out-groups, is a matter of debate. What we can say about the Reider volume is that it has taken the brave and humanistic approach to the dialectic in both its structure and in its overall cast; the editor asked for foundational articles from the flag-bearers of what we might call the analytic and the critical approaches to social epistemology, and then solicited thought-provoking responses to them.

The approach was not to synthesize, which would have been to bring a premature closure to the dialectic. As the querelles in the pages of the SERRC suggest, the analytic and critical schools of social epistemology only seldom engage each other on more than peripheral concerns, such as whether or not ordoliberalism is a beneficial approach to social justice. While such a debate is important, it doesn’t seem to approach the real heart of the matter — which is a fundamental conceptualization of epistemic matters, and even more to the heart of things, of philosophical matters.

The question “what is knowledge” strikes at the heart of what we do, and can, know; and, by extension, the question of who we understand ourselves to be. As such, social epistemology offers a novel way of thinking about that question in that it seeks to distribute agency, and in so doing, enables the effort of multiple minds (not all of them strictly, or at some future date even remotely, human) to be brought to bear upon the question. As such, social epistemology can, and should, be understood to be a domain with a profound emancipatory which I think is the case for all those concerned.

As the Reider book suggests, we are of two minds about how to conceptualize our field, and speaking among ourselves is increasingly difficult. What a book like this, with well-written and articulate syntheses of both stances, and with sympathetic and lucid extrapolations of both does, is to make possible understanding of the position of the other side without the oppositional approach often taken in the pages of the SERRC.

Taken with the Collier (2015) volume, this book represents the best possible introduction a field in the process of growth — and perhaps, sadly, of fission. What we might keep in mind, as Riggio (2017, p. 66) eloquently argues, is that “an important purpose of philosophical writing for public service is to prevent important ideas from slipping into empty buzzwords.”

We must avoid, as Latour (1999) argues, becoming so fond of our notions of the ‘play of heuristics’ that we lose sight of the real damages done to embodied people (Baker and Oreskes, 2017), thus losing Riggio’s battle for public trust. This volume sets the chess pieces upon the board; it is left to us to play out the game. Let us speak openly of truth in ways that benefit the actual embodied humans we see about us, whose suffering is manifest. As Lobo (2017) points out, in our actually-existing world,

being a homo sapiens does not mean you are seen as, recognized as, a human being, a member of the community, and it is in this sense that a homo sapiens/human being can be said to both possess and be denied their human rights (p. 16).

The situation described above by Lobo is contrary to the “existence of universal human rights and the encouragement of cultural, ethnic and gender diversity throughout society,” as Riggio (2017) puts the matter; as Wolfe (1989) argues, one of the confounding aspects of prosperity is that it creates an intelligentsia which has never known hunger and which can therefore promulgate anti-liberal social scientific viewpoints, and which hence come to be viewed as irrelevant or ‘pie-in-the-sky’ by the populace. The battle for public trust that Riggio describes will be lost, or won, on the basis of how we choose to conduct the negotiations between the insights and arguments advanced by the analytic and critical social epistemologist, arguments clearly outlined by the authors presented in this important volume.

Contact details: west@unca.edu

References

Bishop, M., & Trout, J. D. (2005). The pathologies of standard analytic epistemology. Nous, 39(4), 696-714.

Collier, J. H. (2015). The Future of Social Epistemology: A Collective Vision. New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.

David, M. (2001). Truth as the epistemic goal. Knowledge, truth, and duty: essays on epistemic justification, responsibility, and virtue, ed. Matthias Steup. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 151-69.

Engel, P. (2013). Is epistemic agency possible? Philosophical Issues, 23(1), 158-178.

Fricker, (1998, January). Rational authority and social power: Towards a truly social epistemology. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (pp. 159-177). Aristotelian Society.

Goldberg, Sanford C. 2013. “‘Analytic Social Epistemology’ and the Epistemic Significance of Other Minds.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (8): 26-48.

Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope: essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

List, Christian, and Philip Pettit. “Aggregating sets of judgments: An impossibility result.” Economics & Philosophy 18, no. 1 (2002): 89-110.

Lobo, Gregory J. “Back to Basics: Straw Men, Status Functions, and Human Rights.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 11 (2017): 6-19.

Reider, P. J. (2016). Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency: Decentralizing Epistemic Agency. New York: Rowman & Littlefield International

Reider, P. J. (2016). Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism, and Realism: Understanding Psychological Nominalism. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Riggio, Adam. “Subverting Reality: We Are Not ‘Post-Truth,’ But in a Battle for Public Trust.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 3 (2017): 66-73.

Schram, S. (1995). Words of welfare: The poverty of social science and the social science of poverty. U of Minnesota Press.

Shapin, S. (1994). A social history of truth: civility and science in seventeenth-century England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Zagzebski, L. (1994). The inescapability of Gettier problems. The Philosophical Quarterly 44(174), 65-73.

Conservatism: The End of An Idea, Bernard Wills

SERRC — December 7, 2017 — 3 Comments

Author Information: Bernard Wills, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, bwills@grenfell.mun.ca

Wills, Bernard. “Conservatism: The End of An Idea.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 12 (2017): 7-16.

The pdf of the article refers to specific page numbers. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3R9

Image from Carnaval.com Studios via Flickr / Creative Commons

I recently noticed that conservatism as a political stance is definitively dead. Truth is it has been on life support for decades. This has not stopped all sorts of people from using the term both positively and negatively. All sorts of people proudly proclaim themselves to be conservatives while others angrily denounce people as conservatives. The death of conservatism means, for starters, that neither group fully grasps of the term they are using. The word has become utterly detached from the thing. Another thing it means is that an individual may have conservative opinions but only in the sense that an individual may worship the goddess Artemis in her back yard or live like a 17^th Century Puritan. It is a private eccentricity with no public institutional reality. The death of conservatism is then something like the death of God.

A New Classification of Politics: Three Ideologies

There is no significance to taking any public stand as a conservative. This is for one basic reason. This reason is that the victory of ideology in contemporary politics is now total and that conservatism is not an ideology.[1] Our political discourse is now divided between three ideological stances: the progressive, the neo-liberal and ethno-nationalist stances. So called social conservatives used to exist but they have utterly disappeared into the third stance as is plain with the rise of Trump in the United States and the rise of similar populists elsewhere.[2] There are now no social conservatives of any note who are not also ethno-nationalists and indeed primarily ethno-nationalists.

This is absolutely evident from their obsession with a purported clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. By and large Muslims share the values of social conservatives when it comes to things like family, modesty, the centrality of religion and so on. Yet social conservatives despise and fear Muslims all the same making it plain that by family values they mean white Anglo-Saxon family values and by piety they mean white Anglo-Saxon piety. That is the core of the ethno-nationalist position: that western Christian values are cherished not for their supposed universality but as the foundation of a tribal identity. From time to time the neo-Liberal stance is classified as ‘conservative’ though for no reason I can fathom: as Marx pointed out predatory capitalism rips the veil form all traditional pieties by reducing everything to a cash value. The proposition that limitless accumulation is the aim of life and indeed the primary duty of a citizen is consistent with no ancient wisdom I know of religious or otherwise.

Conservatism then is no more. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It is hardly my place to say: conservatism itself advises us that like all human constructions it is finite and imperfect. However, at this point the reader may well be waiting, impatiently, for a definition of conservatism. What is it that I say has died?

I will proceed to offer if not a definition then an account of what conservatism is in the root sense of the word: an attitude to the world which seeks to conserve or protect those principles, values or institutions on which genuine human flourishing has always and will always rest. It will then be evident that people who use the term most loudly haven’t the faintest interest in conservatism or conservative values and perhaps never have. Of course, I run the risk of baffling people (both boosters and knockers) who will not recognize their version of conservatism in anything I say. I ask such people to be patient until I finish my exposition.

How Were We Able to Drink Up the Sea?

I said above that conservatism is not an ideology: from writers labelled ‘conservative’ it would be difficult to cull a doctrinal statement. This means that it has no definition in the sense of a core statement of doctrine or set of prescriptive demands: it is, if like, the position which is not a position but rather an attitude and a practice. However, I can give you a living example of it from a much despised source.

I find an excellent description of conservatism as a life stance expressed in the five pillars of the Islamic faith.[3] Soi-disant ‘conservatives’ who are shocked and angered by this should ask themselves why as these values seem to me core to any conservative stance towards the world. The first of these pillars is the shahada or profession of faith: There is no god but god and Mohammed is his prophet. Now conservatism does not inherently care about the latter part of this assertion: it is happy to recognize a multitude of other prophets who have taught in other parts of the world such as Siddartha, Jesus, or Confucius.

The first however is essential: conservatism is theocratic in orientation. Humans are first and foremost unconditionally responsible to a divine order: to the standards which are ultimate because they are founded in the unchanging nature of God. No human being is to place any finite value, such as family, clan, party in the place of God. The regard the finite as infinite in value and as an absolute end is to commit the arch-error of shirk. On this basis conservatism attaches only a qualified value to the goods of this world: it does not absolutize the relative. No movement, no passion, no interest which is merely human or temporary can trump our duty to god and his sovereign will. Order is prior absolutely to freedom and in fact it is true freedom to recognize this.

Of course this whole position is pointless if we do not know God’s will. Fortunately, it is of the nature of god to reveal himself in scriptures, historical events, the exemplary deeds of prophets and saints and so on. God is present and active in the world. His will is manifest in the sacred teachings and philosophies (the philosophia perennialis) of the world as in the depths of our own conscience.[4] Indeed, his will is present even in those conscious non-believers who nonetheless enshrine the eternal verities (the good, the beautiful and the true) within their hearts.

For this reason, the second pillar enjoins us to prayer. Humans must remember and acknowledge both internally and externally the absoluteness of God. This is important because it cuts against the grain. Our tendency is to lose focus in the midst of the world’s distractions. We wander away from our final end and our ultimate good. We put wealth, or lust, or power or anger at the center of our lives instead of the union with god we all intrinsically long for. We miss our happiness by seeking it in things that cannot, of their very metaphysical nature, supply it.

This is why prayer, both personal and liturgical is central to a well lived life for in prayer we re-collect our ultimate aim, the peace that comes of divine union. This peace is the aim of all prayer even when expressed in its lowest manifestation which is petitionary prayer. Conservatism calls us to recollect those spiritual values that make for true fulfillment against everything faddish and temporary. It calls to put the eternal always before the merely modish and to this extent prayer is one of its liveliest manifestations as it a call to remember god in the midst of this world.

A Union of Materialism and Faith

Yet our lives are in this world too. Conservatism rejects the pessimism of the millenarian and gnostic. It does not long for an immanent millennium to destroy the present world order but waits patiently for the fulfillment of things in the fullness of time. Thus, when faced with the worldly Gnosticism of the secular revolutionary or the religious despair of those who simply wish to be raptured into eternity as the world burns it counsels skepticism. Thus, as our status in the next world is determined by how we live in this one our duty to god is also our duty to community. Almsgiving is then a conservative value. Wealth exists to be shared. It is not an idol and not an end. It is a means to community and those who are blessed with it in turn bless others. Wealth selfishly hoarded is not wealth at all and thus zakat is enjoined on all believers.

This is especially important as we tend to the selfish and misguided view that our wealth is the deserved result of our special virtue whereas in truth all good things come from god and god alone. As it comes from god it is given back to god as god is present in the neediness of our neighbors and the needs of our community. How vulgar then is the so called ‘prosperity gospel’ preached by certain Christians who claim to have Jesus in their hearts when they do not even have Mohammed! There are many displays of vulgar wealth in the Islamic world as in ours. People in the East and the West need constant reminding that the needs of the community outweigh the wants of the individual.

This is part of our human fallibility, our tendency to forget our ultimate end for merely proximate ones. The principle of almsgiving is, however, particularly salutary for those of us living in the Christian west as our societies have made the endless accumulation of personal wealth their over-riding principle even at the expense of the very soil we live on and the air we breathe. I should note though entirely in line with conservatism zakat assumes that differences between people entail differences in wealth and that this will not be abolished but equalized through giving.

The fourth pillar counsels fasting on the sound conservative principle that we do not live for the gratification of the senses but for the fulfillment of the spirit. Fasting reminds us that the primary struggle in life is with ourselves and that the demands of the moral and communal life are at odds (often) with the gratification of the senses. Indeed, there is no substitute for the feeling of hunger as those who never feel it have no conception of the suffering of those who do. This is why great wealth so often goes with poverty of the spirit and why it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

Yet fasting is only one letter away from feasting. As there is a time to curb the senses there is a time to release them particularly in the context of communal celebration. As Aristotle said long ago, proper self-control involves not just self-denial, knowing when to say no to our desires, but also knowing when to indulge them: one does not gorge at a funeral or fast at a wedding. Still, as giving free rein to our desires must be choice and not compulsion our moral training will tend to focus on self-denial so that our indulgence may be unconstrained by evil habit.

Finally, the fifth pillar enjoins on us pilgrimage to Mecca and why not as life itself is a pilgrimage? T. S. Eliot prays: “help us to care and not to care” and this is the core of the notion that we are pilgrims in this world. The world of time and space we inhabit is both affirmed and transcended. We give ourselves over to finite ends yet leave the fruit of our action in the hands of providence. The finite passes over to the infinite as we give over our worldly projects and passions, releasing them into the eternal will of God.

On practical level this is a powerful inoculation against despair as the world does not bear all the weight of our expectations (which of its creaturely nature it can never bear). Consider as an example the old expression “better dead than red”. Those who uttered this expression meant that the Western Bourgeois form of freedom was freedom absolute and that its potential loss justified the nuclear annihilation of the planet. Of course, Western Bourgeois freedom (though admirable in many ways) is a provincial form of freedom. It does not exhaust every possibility of human good. Only a whig-history-on-steroids view of western institutions as the inevitable and only culmination of human history could justify such nihilism.

Conservatism will have no truck with this sentiment. History is an arena of struggle subject to advances and retreats. Yet possibilities for good remain in the darkest of times and the insanity of history can never destroy or even affect in the slightest the eternal essence of God source and ground of all good. In a godless universe, where this world is the only locus of good, history becomes a battleground in which the stakes are absolute and compromise unthinkable: hence the vicious ideological battles of those who think they have solved the riddle of history and claim to be bringing about the final human good.

When Opposition to the Radical Falls Away

Of course it can be objected that conservatism as I have described it here has no more been tried than Christianity or communism. Conservativism, one might say, has never really existed outside the elegant, wistful prose of conservatives. There is much truth to this charge yet it is, of course, true of all moral stances that their instantiations are very far indeed from their archetypal forms. Hence we get the characteristic vice of the conservative: the tendency to forget fundamental values for external privileges and the inability to identify what it is that ought, in fact, to be conserved.

Still, on the plus side of the ledger, the conservative might well ask whether his or her own view is comprehensive of all its rivals. Conservatives share with progressives a concern for justice and equity especially for the poor and marginalized. Conservatives share with ethno-nationalism a concern for the particularities of language and culture over against the homogenizing tendencies of globalism and technocracy. Conservatives even share with neo-liberals a suspicion of totalitarian power, planning and control.

However, conservatism, in the west at least, may well be dead for a more fundamental reason. This is because there is a powerful alternative to the conservative tradition and that is the radical tradition. All three of our contemporary ideologies have their roots in radicalism and are closer to each other than they can readily imagine given their current conflict. For the radical tradition the constraints imposed by tradition are in almost all cases artificial. What the conservative tradition would constrain the radical tradition would release. Radicalism envisages a flowering of human diversity, a host of new avenues in which self-hood can be explored beyond the stale platitudes of convention. This radical principle has routed conservatism (much of which expressed itself as cheap nostalgia anyway) and is the default position of all North Americans.[5]

This spirit can express itself as radical egalitarianism or its opposite. For instance, among ethno-nationalists it is assumed that the will of the demos embodies the wisdom and good sense of the people. This wisdom would readily express itself were it not for the constraints imposed by various ‘elites’ whose abstract intellectualism has lost touch with the community and indeed with reality. These elites constantly invoke the authority of science, or education or expertise or data against what ‘simple folk’ can see with their own eyes. When the demos seeks to express its will this is declared ‘unconstitutional’ or ‘against the rule of law’ by lawyers or advocacy groups or other ‘elite’ institutions.

The demos however, holds all such institutions in contempt and seeks to impose its will through a ‘great leader’ who is willing to flout them and indeed is willing to flout moral convention altogether (even moral conventions like marital fidelity to which the demos remain sentimentally attached). Thus, we have a kind of direct democracy outside of constitutional and legal constraints such as conservatism has forever warned against. That these radicals sometimes espouse ‘conservative’ seeming policies or points of view is irrelevant as they espouse them lawlessly and in a manner contemptuous of the very traditions they claim to value.

Why, for instance, is it conservative to despise the opinions of the educated and even pour contempt on the intellect itself? Such things are an expression of a rebellious and anti-authoritarian spirit. The demos trusts only in its collective judgment and not only rejects but actively despises any other principle. That this attitude is over-determined by socio-economic factors is plain but that does not make it any easier to deal with on a day to day basis especially as the scapegoating of immigrants, prisoners and others is high on the populist wish-list and the populace resents institutional constraints on its will to revenge especially.[6]

There is of course the other side of this coin and that is the populism of progressive movements such as the occupy movement, black-bloc radicals and so on.[7] These movements, it must be said, have aims that seem overall nobler and better than the beefs and resentments of populists. However, this is a weakness as much as a strength: as I said above every stance struggles with its shadow. Noble ideals are a proven danger when not accompanied by political and moral pragmatism and relentless self-examination. Moral crusaders have a distressing tendency to fumble badly when actually called upon to run things: this is because sweeping moral denunciations are a form of cheap grace while actual governance (self-governance included) is slow, patient work.

Return to Innocence Lost (or Imagined)

There is also a false innocence that can maintained simply by never facing the temptations of power. William Blake (a far deeper radical) was a persistent critic of any form of abstract moralism. For him no political or theological order could be the basis of freedom that did not overcome the problem of self-righteousness: our tendency to identify ourselves with an abstract principle of goodness and others (inevitably) with an abstract principle of evil. In a powerful image he tells us that blood sacrifice and war are the culmination of the moral law, the categories of good and evil unrelieved by charity, solidarity, or forgiveness.[8]

Moralism is for Blake a form of violence. (see for instance plates 47-51 of Jerusalem) Our care must embrace the ‘minute particulars’ of humanity: no ‘humanism’ can be liberating that puts an abstraction like ‘Humanity’ before flesh and blood human beings. We all have encountered people who virtue signal on every conceivable ‘issue’ but have little but venom in their hearts: one danger of the progressive stance lies, then, in the monsters of self-righteous zeal that it breeds.

At any rate, such people envisage (after some difficult to specify revolutionary event) a world in which a host of sexualities, ethnicities, personalities and identities flourish without constraint and (though this is surely impossible) without mutual contradiction.[9] As the economic discipline of Capitalism lies behind all other forms of oppression the current economic order must be overthrown. The suggested alternative is often some form of anarchism.

Like the populists, anarchists distrust and despise constitutionalism which after all only serves to protect the oppressors. Indeed, the anarchists despise traditional civil liberties as a form of constraint and mock those who espouse them as ‘liberals’. In particular, they resent the fact that such liberties prevent them from waging all-out war against their eternal adversary the populists. The populists heartily agree. Both sides fantasize about epic street confrontations or cyber battles that will issue in a final rout of the forces of evil. In other words, they are secular (and indeed religious) millenarians.

Each believes in a great battle, an apocalyptic convulsion that will only happen if liberals and other idiots get out of the way. A significant minority of each group considers this not just as a ‘culture war’ but as a ‘war’ war with brickbats, fires and vandalism of property. At any rate both agree on the Manichean position: the world and everything in it is hopelessly vitiated and corrupt and must be purged by fire whether this be the literal fire of Armageddon or the flames of secular revolution.

Finally, we have the technological dreamers. They do not dream of an unconstrained populist will or an unconstrained flowering of genders and sexualities but of the unconstrained power of technical and economic innovation. The enemy is, again the state and its institutions. Regulation of industry and common sense controls over heedless technological advancement are as bizarre and repellent to them as constraints on abortion or sexuality are to progressives. They, after all, represent the creative energy behind all forms of human advancement, all growth and prosperity. Technological or business imperatives cannot be questioned without questioning prosperity and progress themselves: the two things which for this ideology are non-negotiable. Such people see nothing ironic or odd in the fact the demands of progress and the spread of prosperity never conflict with their own self-interest.

The self- interest of the entrepreneur or innovator is the interest of the community. In a seeming parody of the Marxist utopia where the freedom of each is the freedom of all the neo-liberals and libertarians do not see the economic freedom of the individual as ever conflicting with the good of the community. This is, of course, the dream of anarchists as well: that individual wills can exist in immediate and natural harmony once the power of the state is gone. The technophiles go even further however: for them this harmony can be achieved and maintained in the midst of unrestrained competition.

The magic of the market will smooth out all inequities and bring prosperity and balance to all (or, if the libertarian leans also to vengeful populism, to the deserving). At any rate the neo-liberals have one ace in the hole that it is difficult to imagine anyone overcoming: this is the fact that almost all acts of rebellion can be appropriated and monetized. This is particularly true of physical vandalism. Capitalism does not fetishize physical property the way some anarchists think it does: burn a bank to the ground and you will find only that stock in private security companies has gone up.

Liberation as Consuming Fire

For all three groups the enemy is clear as is the goal: the repressed must be liberated. The demos must be free to enact its vengeful fantasies on immigrants, prisoners or gays. The libertarian must be free to innovate and make more money than anyone can find a use for. Sexual and ethnic minorities must be free to express their forms of life to whatever limit logic implies. All must be free and all must be free especially of the enemy of freedom, the state and its laws and institutions.[10] This is the core of each position quite apart from the fact that within each there may be many demands reasonable in themselves.

This indicates that the radical stance is the stance where our politics is concerned. Everything must be liberated though conservatives may warn again and again that liberation may mean the freedom of everything awful as easily as the freedom of everything good. Lamentation however is pointless (with apologies to Canada’s lamenter-in-chief George Parkin Grant!). This is because the radical principle is our principle and is, indeed, along with conservatism, a fundamental human option. Moreover, it has great achievements to its credit even as conservatism has many disgraces.

At the same time radicalism imposes its own constraints: most of us would rejoice if anti-vaxxers stopped being such fools yet they are acting on an impeccable radical principle, that of personal autonomy, as well as a suspicion of institutionalized medicine that many of us share. In fact, this example raises a vexing problem: vaccination can only be carried out on a population, all must buy into it for it to work. How would an anarchist society founded on a principle of radical freedom (whether anarcho-communist or right wing patriot) handle a question of this sort? Will radical stances license such appalling disorder that conservatism will become a living option? Are Clinton and Trudeau after all the best we can hope for?

Blake certainly painted a dark vision of the hellish cycle of rebellion and reaction: the perpetual alteration between sanguinary radicalism and stultifying conservatism. Is this our future? Philosophy, alas, does not deal with the future. It counsels only that we temper hope as well as fear and judge all things sub-specie-aeternitatis. It is with this stoic sentiment, as boring as it is true, that I will conclude. We seem at an impasse though the author would certainly be happy to learn from others that he is unduly pessimistic about the world.

Contact details: bwills@grenfell.mun.ca

References

Aristophanes. The Clouds trans. C.D.C. Reeve, from The Trials of Socrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002)

Blake, William. Complete Poems ed. Alicia Ostriker. London: Penguin Classics, 1978.

Girard, René. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning trans. J.G. Williams. (Ottawa: Novalis, 2001)

Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind. trans. J.B. Baillie. (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1967.

Reno, Robert “Why I Am anti-anti-Trump” First Things. Retrieved from https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/05/why-im-anti-anti-trump.

Smith, John Huston. The World’s Religions New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

[1] A fundamental problem with conservatism is that as soon as it defines itself vis a vis its ideological rivals it itself becomes an ideological construct rather than an assumed form of life. At that point conservatism turns into reaction. This problem was noted as long ago as Aristophanes the Clouds. One ace in the hole of the radical tradition is that as soon as traditional norms are questioned and have to be self-consciously defended the conservative standpoint is lost. At that point conservatism becomes a position duking it out with the other positions scoring the odd victory here and suffering the odd reverse there.

[2] The fatal weakness of social conservatism as a political movement was that it never articulated a positive vision of society leaving this work first to neo-liberals and now to ethno-nationalists. Its politics was simply oppositional: devoted to blocking actions against abortion or homosexuality or other things deemed decadent, conflicts that were and are unwinnable. On this basis it forged its foolish alliance first with corporate kleptocracy and then with strident populism culminating in ludicrous defenses of Trumpism from previously reputable conservative publications like First Things. (e.g Robert Reno https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/05/why-im-anti-anti-trump)

[3] For a rich introduction to Islam and indeed to other major faiths see The World’s Religions by John Huston Smith.

[4] This notion of a ‘perennial philosophy’ is central to writers we might place on the conservative spectrum from traditionalist writers like Rene Guenon to more eclectic figures like Aldous Huxley or Simone Weil who, while influential in some conservative circles, defy easy categorization. These metaphysically inclined thinkers contrast with the more pragmatic strain of conservatism stemming from the tradition of Burke and Swift. The American Russel Kirk may be taken as one of the last influential exponents of this view. One can add to this list the disciples of Leo Strauss (a far deeper thinker than Kirk), Canadians like George Grant as well as pure reactionaries in the tradition of Joseph de Maistre. What any of these figures would have thought of Donald J. Trump, a wealthy vulgarian straight from the pages of the Satyricon, one can only guess. Ironies abound here however: Guenon, a western convert to Islam, seems to have influenced the volcanic anti-Islamic rage of Steve Bannon. The paleo-conservatism of the genteel Russel Kirk also spawned the nativism of Pat Buchanan. Every stance has its shadow, the embodiment of its darker tendencies and ethno-nationalism seems to stand in this relation to conservatism.

[5] Any defense of a conservative principle in politics and society in the west can only be a highly qualified one for the reason that there are (in my view at least) a plurality of moral languages with claims on our attention and one of these is indeed that of the radical tradition. For Westerners this problem is acute for, as far as I able to determine, the roots of radicalism are in the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul. These are not Conservative documents in my reading of them precisely for their doctrine of radical solidarity with the poor which undermines the binaries on which traditional human societies are built (and sometimes subverts those texts themselves). It was not for nothing that the Emperors of Rome thought Christianity a fundamental threat to civilized standards. In the West, then, the radical principle is already present in its primary theological constitution (however much it tries to ignore or forget that fact).

[6] Indeed, conservative Christianity is, with some honorable exceptions, becoming a pharisaical revenge cult. Behind all the rhetoric around ‘security’ (Canada remains one of the securest societies on planet Earth where terrorism is concerned) and the ‘Muslim threat’ one will find the simple will to retaliate in kind against anyone who represents the hated ‘other’ no matter how guilty or how innocent.

[7] I have before me the online Anarchist Library compiled by the Green Mountain Collective. (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anti-racist-action-the-green-mountain-anarchist-collective-black-bloc-tactics-communique). These sources give the inescapable impression of an abstract ideological rage consuming itself in an intellectual and historical vacuum: pretty much as Hegel saw the French revolutionaries. (The Phenomenology of Mind, 604) Talking to proponents of these views online (if talking is quite the word for it) only deepens this impression. Perhaps I am being harsh however: if the reader is curious, she may peruse Hegel’s chapter ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ and judge for herself if the comparison is apt. Those curious as to why the revolution always eats itself and why revolutionaries must at last turn on themselves may find Hegel’s analysis helpful.

[8] That ‘progressives’ will verbally disembowel each other over ideological differences barely discernible to outsiders shows that they are far from immune to the mimetic violence described by René Girard (2001; 24-31) Just as Blake said, moral abstraction enacts ritual violence. Progressivism is far from alone in this of course and indeed the ethno-nationalist stance is even more Manichean and violent. Still, the fact that it is over all the most humane of the current stances only makes the trap deeper: without what theologians once called a sense of sin it is difficult to imagine any politics escaping the scapegoating impulse and the self-righteous violence it manifests. Considering the ridicule and anger one provokes from many progressives by defending a stance of non-violence things do not seem hopeful.

[9] This is a deeper problem than many realize. The total liberation of one standpoint is the suppression of another: unconditional solidarity with ALL standpoints at once seems a chimerical notion. This is why in practice progressives (for instance) must always favor some oppressed people over others: aboriginal people in Guatemala, say, over outlandish folk like the Copts in Egypt. This why the radical stance may, for all protestations to the contrary, be implicitly totalitarian. Consider the following problem: A adopts the deep narrative about himself that he is the one true prophet of God. A desires not only the liberty to adopt this self-description but demands the universal recognition of this deep description by others. It is, to him, a fundamental denial of his personhood should anyone question his foundational narrative as, in his mind, he IS this narrative. However, trouble arises if B also adopts the deep story that SHE is the one true prophet of God as others cannot offer unconditional affirmation of both narratives. Here is where the currently much maligned standpoint of liberalism steps in. The liberal defers the eschaton by imposing articles of peace on A and B while each prosecutes their claim to be the one true prophet. With this peace imposed A and B come to the realization that, whatever differences divide them, they share a common nature as rational agents. They can now differ on each other’s deep story, neither one need be forced to accept the other because neither party is reducible to their narrative. With that they can go about their affairs. The alternative is playing the zero sum game of establishing my narrative as the dominant one through the suppression of the other contrary narrative. A simply destroys B. This is the totalitarian stance. Its dangers are evident yet the liberal stance costs as well. By entering that stance, we forgo universal recognition for the sake of peace and subordinate our deep story to the common good, at which point we cease to be simply our story, we assume a common public narrative as our own somewhat as we give up our private religious perceptions to join a church. I tend to think that is a cost worth paying though others may differ.

[10] This is why the most embattled principle of all is the centrism espoused by the Democratic party in the U.S. and the Liberal Party in Canada. As in the thirties it seems “the center cannot hold” (to quote W.B. Yeats). The basic problem seems to me that no centrist government can impose discipline on the fossil fuel-industry. Nor can it impose any discipline on the speculators and financiers who hoard badly needed funds offshore: a miserly activity contrary to the very nature of the capitalism they are said to espouse. That said, if there is anything which can be said to be ‘conservative’ in the current context it is belief in a social democratic state with traditional civil liberties protected by a strong constitutional framework. This, if I would hazard a guess, would be the best polity currently on offer. I have given short shrift to the phenomenon of political centrism in this piece, a deficiency I hope to make up in a subsequent essay.

The Promethean Escape, David C. Winyard

SERRC — September 1, 2017 — 1 Comment

Author Information:David C. Winyard, Mount Vernon Nazarene University, winyard.david@gmail.com

Winyard, David C. “The Promethean Escape.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 10 (2017): 1-3.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3Kd

Image credit: The New Atlantis

Eclipse of Man: Human Extinction and the Meaning of Progress
Charles T. Rubin
New Atlantis Books, 2014
186 pp.

People obsessed with novel big ideas can find a lot to like in the transhumanism movement. It imagines technoscience solutions to all manner of worldly ills, and technical challenges are of little concern to transhumanists. Things that are too difficult now (e.g., immortality) will, the thinking goes, inevitably yield to super-intelligent artificial minds that will emerge after Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity.

Charles T. Rubin’s Eclipse of Man is a big picture analysis and critique of transhumanism’s big ideas. It examines how enlightenment conceptions of progress have given way to visions of a dehumanized future. In clear and artful ways, Rubin exposes the movement’s unwarranted assumptions. He concludes that transhumanism’s long-term consequences are incomprehensible, and as a consequence, they are not worthy of rational pursuit. Anyone interested in transhumanism—critics and advocates alike—may benefit from considering both the logic and art of Rubin’s arguments.

The Moral Vision of Transhumanism

To start, Rubin justifies his broad-brush look of transhumanism, with its assorted religious persuasions: atheist, Mormon, Christian, emergent, and many more. Although they differ, Rubin notes that they “often aim to adopt a ‘big tent’ outlook that seeks to minimize the sectarian differences implicit in the different designations.” By focusing on central themes, he does not get bogged down in factional details but presses on toward his goal: to examine “transhumanism’s moral vision of the future.”

Rubin’s begins his story of dehumanization with the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794). Condorcet’s enlightenment rationalism focused exclusively on improving the lot of human society. Like Francis Bacon before, and transhumanists today, Condorcet thought human reason could greatly extend lifespans, but he did not believe immortality could be attained. He did hope that “our power over nature will soften the hard edges of the human condition by improving the material conditions of life,” and this would improve “moral conditions.” Generally, Condorcet’s vision of the future is uncontroversial. Who would not want better and longer lives?

Next, Rubin considers Condorcet’s progress in view of Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) and Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Malthus held that “our future holds great misery and scarcity” because “finite resources limit what human beings can ever hope to accomplish,” but Darwin spins “natural competition as a force for change over time.” According to Rubin, today transhumanists attempt to “reconcile and assimilate these ideas by advocating the end of humanity.” Is Rubin right? Are enlightenment humanism and evolutionary metanarratives leading toward dehumanization?

Transhuman or Inhuman?

Rubin considers the descent into dehumanization to begin with William Winwood Reade (1838–1875), and continues with Nikolai Federovich Federov (1829–1903), Nicolas Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), J.B.S. Haldane (1892–1964), and finally J.D. Bernal (1901–1971). They increasingly diverge from Condorcet’s humanism, and in the end, the goal of progress is redefined: from “better humans” to a paradoxical move “beyond humanity.” Rubin mourns that society is embracing this vision, so “the eclipse of man is underway.”

Through the next three chapters, Rubin considers recent developments. Chapter Two examines the ongoing Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), including a review of its associated science and science fiction. Chapter Three focuses on nanotechnology, comparing Eric Drexler’s nanotechnology visions with Neal Stevenson’s novel The Diamond Age.

In the process, inconsistencies emerge between nanotechnology’s promise and its potential to disrupt human lives and relationships. Chapter Four looks to other transhumanist aspirations and their mysteries. The upshot is that logically transhumanism’s assumptions lead to a dehumanized future. Why? Galactic evolutionary competition requires human beings to evolve into technological artifacts. Can we not hope for something better?

Unfortunately, Rubin’s powerful analysis and critique falls flat in Chapter Five, entitled “The Real Meaning of Progress.” It can be summarized in five words: there are no easy answers. Instead of solutions, Rubin points toward attitudes (e.g., humility) that can help society deepen its understanding of what human life means, and also what can be lost by forging ahead without maintaining continuous attention to such matters.

Spectres of Icarus

Rubin frames his conclusions by interpreting three paintings of Icarus. The first shows him being launched into the sky by his father. In the second, Icarus realizes the consequences of his disobedience and is struck by terror. The last shows Icarus crashing into the sea, even as common folk go about their business nearby. The paintings effectively illustrate Rubin’s argument. Reality exists between optimistic and pessimistic views of the future, and the meaning of life today must shape the future. Ignoring or diminishing human life as we know it today will surely take us in wrong directions.

Rubin teaches political science, but he does not offer politics as the answer to transhumanism’s challenges. He notes that transhumanism is often sold in techno-libertarian terms, but this may be to distinguish it from eugenics. Freedom of choice is promised, but anyone not adopting technological enhancements would be left behind or forcibly eliminated. The force of evolution cannot be resisted.

By not reducing transhumanism to politics, Rubin differs from Steve Fuller. His transhumanism interests began with history and theology, but he has ended up settling for risky political solutions (e.g., the rehabilitation of eugenics) that can only have near-term effects. Surely, Rubin’s long view of the big picture befits transhumanism’s grand narrative. Perhaps his insights will, in Rubin’s terms, help transhumanism overcome its “peculiar farsightedness?”

In Books and Book Reviews Charles T. Rubin, David C. Winyard, Eclipse of Man: Human Extinction and the Meaning of Progress, transhumanism, transhumanism and religion

Transhumanism in the Context of Social Epistemology, Lyudmila Markova

SERRC — June 28, 2017 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Lyudmila Markova, Russian Academy of Science, markova.lyudmila2013@yandex.ru

Markova, Lyudmila. “Transhumanism in the Context of Social Epistemology.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 7 (2017): 50-53.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3EQ

Please refer to:

Frodeman, Robert. “Anti-Fuller: Transhumanism and the Proactionary Imperative.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 4 (2015): 38-43.
Fuller, Steve. “Twelve Questions on Transhumanism’s Place in the Western Philosophical Tradition.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 19 April 2017. http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3yl.

Image credit: Ingmar Zahorsky, via flickr

Robert Frodeman (2015) and Steve Fuller (2017) discuss the problem of transhumanism in the context of history. This approach to transhumanism—a subject now studied actively by many specialists—clearly shows us the focus of current investigations. A virtual world, created by humans and possessing intelligence, demands a special kind of communication. But we are not the only ones changing. Humans programmed robots to perform calculations at a speed we cannot match.

Still, we remain certain that robots will never be able to feel a sense of joy or disappointment, of love or hatred. At the same time, it is difficult to deny that robots already know how to express emotions. Often, we prefer to deal with robots—they are generally polite and answer our questions quickly and clearly.

Even though we are unable to produce particular operations at a certain speed, we still use the results of the robots’ work. But the senses remain inaccessible to robots. Yet, they have learned many of the ways humans make their feelings known to others. A common ground is forming among humans and robots. People use techniques for communication with one another and with artificial intellects based on the laws of the virtual world, and artificial intellects use signs of human feelings—which are only signs and nothing more.

As we debate transhumanism as something that either awaits us, or does not, in the future we fail to consider the serious transformations of our current lives. To some extent, we are already trans-humanoids with artificial parts of our body, with the ability to change our genome, with cyber technology, with digital communication and so on. We do not consider these changes as radically transforming our future selves and our current selves. We do not notice to what extent we differ already from our children and, consequently, from the next generation.

Until recently, we relied first on our knowledge of the laws of the material world. We studied nature and our artificial world was material. Now, we study our thinking and our artificial world is not simply material—it can think and it can understand us. Its materiality, then, is of a different type. The situation in society is quite another and, in order to live in it, we have to change ourselves. Perhaps we have not noticed that the process of our becoming transhumanoids has already begun?

We have a philosophical basis for the discussions about transhumanism. It is social epistemology, where some borders disappear and others appear. Steve Fuller frequently refers to the topic of transhumanism in the context of social epistemology.

“Sociality” in Social Epistemology: The Turn in Thinking

As we speak of both the technization of humans and humanization of machines, the border between humans and technology becomes less visible. In social epistemology, the sense of “social” is important for understanding this turn in thinking during the last century. You can find without difficulty (long before the emergence of social epistemology) the adoption of phrases such as the “social” history of science, the “social” organization of scientific institutes, the “social” character of the scientific (and not only scientific) knowledge, “social” character of the work of a scientist and so on. People created science and everything associated with it is connected to our world in one way or another.

Nobody denies the existence of these relations. The problem resides in their interpretation. Even if you want to see the advantage of your position in striving to eliminate traces of the scientists’ work and conditions under which the results were obtained, you have to know what you want to eliminate and why. In social epistemology, on the contrary, sociality remains in scientific knowledge. Still, serious problems follow as a result.

It is important to understand that anything we study acquires human features because we introduce them into it. We comprehend nature (in the broadest sense of this word) not as something opposed, or even hostile, to people. We deal with a thinking world. For example, we want to have a house that protects us from rain and cold. It is enough to know physical characteristics of materials in order to build such a house. But now we can have a “smart” house. This house alerts you when you return home in the evening that there is no kefir in the fridge and the cat needs food you must buy. You like your new car, but you want to have a navigator. We now have driverless cars. And drones are widely used for military and economic purposes. I have listed just a very few cases when robots help us in our daily lives. We are built into this world and we are accustomed to it.

Still, electronics can complicate and hinder our lives. For instance, you drive the most recent Mercedes model. Your car automatically brakes if you follow too closely and your steering wheel turns in an unexpected way. At the same time, if you drive an old car without any electronic equipment, you feel in control of the situation. The behavior of the machine depends entirely on your actions.

Classical and Non-Classical Logic

Thinking in the context of social epistemology is plugged into empirical reality. This fact is considered usually as an abandonment of logic. But this is not so. The fact is that classical logic has exhausted itself. A new logic, radically different from the classical one, is just emerging. What is the difference?

David Hume, one of the founders of the classical philosophy, wrote about the British and French. They are different people, of course, but philosophically they have a common feature—they are humans. Take another example. You are talking to the same person in different situations. In the office, this person is not the same as they are at home or in the street. As a rule, it is not important to you that you deal every time with the same person, this is obvious without any justification. The person is interesting from the point of view of their characteristics as a member of work team or as a family member. Every person manifests themselves in a specific way in a concrete situation. And this fact is taken into account in a new type of logic. This logic is rooted in specific frameworks.

We can see the attention to specific sociality in the formation of social epistemology. It is necessary to understand, in Fuller’s opinion, why scientists receive different results when they generally have the same set of books, the same knowledge, and the same conditions of work. Fuller pays attention to what surrounds the scientist here and now and not in the past. The history and the process of scientific knowledge development is understood by us with our logical means. As a result, they inevitably become some part of our present.

The notion of space becomes more important than the notion of time. Gilles Deleuze wrote about this in his logic. Robert Frodeman identifies his approach as “field philosophy”. This name identifies features of our current thinking. Russian philosopher Merab Mamardashvilly thought that in order to understand emerging scientific knowledge it is necessary that it be considered outside the “arrow of time”.

The former connection between the past and future, in order to deduce a new result from previous knowledge. is not suitable. In the last century, dialog became more widespread. Its logical justification in science was given in the scientific revolution of the beginning of 20^th century physics. For us, it is important to notice that quantum mechanics replaced classical physics on the front lines of the development of science. But classical physics was not destroyed and its proponents continue to work and give society useful results. This feature of the non-classical scientific logic is noteworthy: it does not declare its predecessor as not scientific, as not having the ability to decide corresponding problems. Moreover, this new logic needs its predecessor and dialogical communication with it. In the course of this dialog both sides change, trying to improve their positions in the same when two people talk.

That is why I do not agree with <a href="http://” target=”_blank”>Justin Cruickshank (2015) when he writes that Karl Popper’s idea of a fallibilism is connected in some way with dialog. For Popper, the main aim is to criticize and, in the end, to destroy to falsify a theory, in order replace it with a new theory. As a result, dialog becomes impossible because for it we need to have at least two interlocutors or theories. For Popper, an ideal situation is when we deal with one person, a winner. In Russia, the topic of dialog was studied by Mikhail Bakhtin and Vladimir Bibler.

Context

Dialog is one of the forms of communication between different events in the history. If we consider, as an ideal, all studied events from the point of view of their common characteristics, we then deal with one person and we have nobody for dialog. The differing conditions of a scientist’s, or any other person’s, work is not taken into consideration. We have classical thinking—one subject, one object, one logic.

As I understand Ilya Kasavin (2017), he does not investigate the construction of Kara-Kum Canal as an inference from the Peter the Great’s plan. A connection exists between these two projects. Yet, each of them is considered as unique, as having its own context. So, it is not correct to ask Kasavin: “What traces and records were left of the project imagined by Peter the Great, how were they interpreted and reinterpreted over the course of hundreds the years, and how, if at all, did they influence Stalin’s project?” (Bakhurst and Sismondo, 2017). The “arrow of time” as a coherent chain of events from Peter the Great to Stalin exists. But it is not important in the frame of non-classical thinking to study first, and in all detail, this chain for the understanding the situation with the construction of Kara-Kum Canal.

The same may be said about the emergence of transhumanism as a scientific area. It is created in the context that is formed from the outside world by choosing those elements which would be able to help us to comprehend some problem. One of the most important features of the context is the presence of both ideal elements (the past scientific knowledge, for instance), and the material elements in world existing around us. Context, as a whole, is the beginning of a new result when we think, and it is not surprising that we have a notion of transhumanism containing the ability of thinking and material carrier of a thought. Robotics corresponds to this understanding of transhumanism and that helps us to see the border between human and robot as less defined.

Conclusion

We see the current signs of human transformation which were seemingly impossible just a few decades ago. Even those who are against such changes do not object to them when they seek medical help or when they have the opportunity to facilitate their everyday life. In many cases, then, radical changes go against our will and we do not protest against them.

We are creating our artificial world on the basis of the knowledge not only of the material world, but also of our thinking. We put this knowledge into the surrounding world in the process of investigation, and we cannot imagine it without the ability to think. The world is becoming able to think, to understand us, to answer our questions.

As our thinking becomes different, we notice its turn. It is directed not at nature, at the world around us, but at humans. At the same time, nature acquires certain human characteristics. This turn is the basis of many serious problems connected initially with notions of the truth and objectivity of scientific knowledge. But these problems are not the topic of this comment.

References

Bakhurst, David and Sergio Sismondo. “Commentary on Ilya Kasavin’s ‘Towards a Social Philosophy of Science: Russian Prospects’.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 4 (2017): 20-23.

Cruickshank, Justin. “Anti-Authority: Comparing Popper and Rorty on the Dialogic Development of Beliefs and Practices.” Social Epistemology 29, no. 1 (2015): 73-94.

Frodeman, Robert. “Anti-Fuller: Transhumanism and the Proactionary Imperative.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 4 (2015): 38-43.

Fuller, Steve. “Twelve Questions on Transhumanism’s Place in the Western Philosophical Tradition.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 19 April 2017. http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3yl.

Kasavin, Ilya. “Towards a Social Philosophy of Science: Russian Prospects.” Social Epistemology 31, no. 1 (2017): 1-15.

In Comments human and machine, Lyudmila Markova, Robert Frodeman, Steve Fuller, transhumanism

Between Poison and Remedy: Transhumanism as Pharmakon, Ben Ross

SERRC — May 15, 2017 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Ben Ross, University of North Texas, benjamin.ross@my.unt.edu

Ross, Ben. “Between Poison and Remedy: Transhumanism as Pharmakon.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 5 (2017): 23-26.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3zU

Please refer to:

Fuller, Steve. “Twelve Questions on Transhumanism’s Place in the Western Philosophical Tradition.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 19 April 2017. http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3yl.

Image credit: Jennifer Boyer, via flickr

As a Millennial, I have the luxury of being able to ask in all seriousness, “Will I be the first generation safe from death by old age?” While the prospects of answering in the affirmative may be dim, they are not preposterous. The idea that such a question can even be asked with sincerity, however, testifies to transhumanism’s reach into the cultural imagination.

But what is transhumanism? Until now, we have failed to answer in the appropriate way, remaining content to describe its possible technological manifestations or trace its historical development. Therefore, I would like to propose an ontology of transhumanism. When philosophers speak of ontologies, they are asking a basic question about the being of a thing—what is its essence? I suggest that transhumanism is best understood as a pharmakon.

Transhumanism as a Pharmakon

Derrida points out in his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” that while pharmakon can be translated as “drug,” it means both “remedy” and “poison.” It is an ambiguous in-between, containing opposite definitions that can both be true depending on the context. As Michael Rinella notes, hemlock, most famous for being the poison that killed Socrates, when taken in smaller doses induces “delirium and excitement on the one hand,” yet it can be “a powerful sedative on the other” (160). Rinella also goes on to say that there are more than two meanings to the term. While the word was used to denote a drug, Plato “used pharmakon to mean a host of other things, such as pictorial color, painter’s pigment, cosmetic application, perfume, magical talisman, and recreational intoxicant.” Nevertheless, Rinella makes the crucial remark that “One pharmakon might be prescribed as a remedy for another pharmakon, in an attempt to restore to its previous state an identity effaced when intoxicant turned toxic” (237-238). It is precisely this “two-in-one” aspect of the application of a pharmakon that reveals it to be the essence of transhumanism; it can be both poison and remedy.

To further this analysis, consider “super longevity,” which is the subset of transhumanism concerned with avoiding death. As Harari writes in Homo Deus, “Modern science and modern culture…don’t think of death as a metaphysical mystery…for modern people death is a technical problem that we can and should solve.” After all, he declares, “Humans always die due to some technical glitch” (22). These technical glitches, i.e. when one’s heart ceases to pump blood, are the bane of researchers like Aubrey de Grey, and fixing them forms the focus of his “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.” There is nothing in de Grey’s approach to suggest that there is any human technical problem that does not potentially have a human technical solution. Grey’s techno-optimism represents the “remedy-aspect” of transhumanism as a view in which any problems—even those caused by technology—can be solved by technology.

As a “remedy,” transhumanism is based on a faith in technological progress, despite such progress being uneven, with beneficial effects that are not immediately apparent. For example, even if de Grey’s research does not result in the “cure” for death, his insight into anti-aging techniques and the resulting applications still have the potential to improve a person’s quality of life. This reflects Max More’s definition of transhumanism as “The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities” (3).

Importantly, More’s definition emphasizes transcendent enhancement, and it is this desire to be “upgraded” which distinguishes transhumanism. An illustration of the emergence of the upgrade mentality can be seen in the history of plastic surgery. Harari writes that while modern plastic surgery was born during the First World War as a treatment to repair facial injuries, upon the war’s end, surgeons found that the same techniques could be applied not to damaged noses, but to “ugly” ones, and “though plastic surgery continued to help the sick and wounded…it devoted increasing attention to upgrading the healthy” (52). Through its secondary use as an elective surgery of enhancement rather than exclusively as a technique for healing, one can see an example of the evolution of transhumanist philosophy out of medical philosophy—if the technology exists to change one’s face (and they have they money for it), a person should be morphologically free to take advantage of the enhancing capabilities of such a procedure.

However, to take a view of a person only as “waiting to be upgraded” marks the genesis of the “poison-aspect” of transhumanism as a pharmakon. One need not look farther than Martin Heidegger to find an account of this danger. In his 1954 essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger suggests that the threat of technology is ge-stell, or “enframing,” the way in which technology reveals the world to us primarily as a stock of resources to be manipulated. For him, the “threat” is not a technical problem for which there is a technical solution, but rather it is an ontological condition from which we can be saved—a condition which prevents us from seeing the world in any other way. Transhumanism in its “poison mode,” then, is the technological understanding of being—a singular way of viewing the world as a resource waiting to be enhanced. And what is problematic is that this way of revealing the world comes to dominate all others. In other words, the technological understanding of being comes to be the understanding of being.

However, a careful reading of Heidegger’s essay suggests that it is not a techno-pessimist’s manifesto. Technology has pearls concealed within its perils. Heidegger suggests as much when he quotes Hölderlin, “But where danger is, grows the saving power also” (333). Heidegger is asking the reader to avoid either/or dichotomous thinking about the essence of technology as something that is either dangerous or helpful, and instead to see it as a two-in-one. He goes to great lengths to point out that the “saving power” of technology, which is to say, of transhumanism, is that its essence is ambiguous—it is a pharmakon. Thus, the self-same instrumentalization that threatens to narrow our understanding of being also has the power to save us and force a consideration of new ways of being, and most importantly for Heidegger, new meanings of being.

Curing Death?

A transhumanist, and therefore pharmacological, take on Heidegger’s admonishment might be something as follows: In the future it is possible that a “cure” for death will threaten what we now know as death as a source of meaning in society—especially as it relates to a Christian heaven in which one yearns to spend an eternity, sans mortal coil. While the arrival of a death-cure will prove to be “poison” for a traditional understanding of Christianity, that same techno-humanistic artifact will simultaneously function as a “remedy,” spurring a Nietzschean transvaluation of values—that is, such a “cure” will arrive as a technological Zarathustra, forcing a confrontation with meaning, bringing news that “the human being is something that must be overcome” and urging us to ask anew, “what have you done to overcome him?” At the very least, as Steve Fuller recently pointed out in an interview, “transhumanism just puts more options on the table for what death looks like. For example, one might choose to die with or without the prospect of future resurrection. One might also just upload one’s mind into a computer, which would be its own special kind of resurrection.” For those sympathetic to Leon Kass’ brand of repugnance, such suggestions are poison, and yet for a transhumanist such suggestions are a remedy to the glitch called death and the ways in which we relate to our finitude.

A more mundane example of the simultaneous danger and saving power of technology might be the much-hyped Google Glass—or in more transhuman terms, having Google Glass implanted into one’s eye sockets. While this procedure may conceal other ways of understanding the spaces and people surrounding the wearer other than through the medium of the lenses, the lenses simultaneously have the power to reveal entirely new layers of information about the world and connect the wearer to the environment and to others in new ways.

With these examples it is perhaps becoming clear that by re-casting the essence of transhumanism as a pharmakon instead of an either/or dichotomy of purely techno-optimistic panacea or purely techno-pessimistic miasma, a more inclusive picture of transhumanist ontology emerges. Transhumanism can be both—cause and cure, danger and savior, threat and opportunity. Max More’s analysis, too, has a pharmacological flavor in that transhumanism, though committed to improving the human condition, has no illusions that, “The same powerful technologies that can transform human nature for the better could also be used in ways that, intentionally or unintentionally, cause direct damage or more subtly undermine our lives” (4).

Perhaps, then, More might agree that as a pharmakon, transhumanism is a Schrödinger’s cat always in a state of superposition—both alive and dead in the box. In the Copenhagen interpretation, a system stops being in a superposition of states and becomes either one or the other when an observation takes place. Transhumanism, too, is observer-dependent. For Ray Kurzweil, looking in the box, the cat is always alive with the techno-optimistic possibility of download into silicon and the singularity is near. For Ted Kaczynski, the cat is always dead, and it is worth killing in order to prevent its resurrection. Therefore, what the foregoing analysis suggests is that transhumanism is a drug—it is both remedy and poison—with the power to cure or the power to kill depending on who takes it. If the essence of transhumanism is elusive, it is precisely because it is a pharmakon cutting across categories ordinarily seen as mutually exclusive, forcing an ontological quest to conceptualize the in-between.

References

Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, 63-171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Fuller, Steve. “Twelve Questions on Transhumanism’s Place in the Western Philosophical Tradition.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 19 April 2017. http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3yl.

Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. HarperCollins, 2017.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell. Harper & Row, 1977.

More, Max. “The Philosophy of Transhumanism,” In The Transhumanist Reader, edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More, 3-17. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Rinella, Michael A. Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.

In Articles, Comments Ben Ross, pharmakon, poison and remedy, Steve Fuller, transhumanism

Twelve Questions on Transhumanism’s Place in the Western Philosophical Tradition

SERRC — April 19, 2017 — 5 Comments

The following are a set of questions concerning the place of transhumanism in the Western philosophical tradition that Robert Frodeman’s Philosophy 5250 class at the University of North Texas posed to Steve Fuller, who met with the class via Skype on 11 April 2017.

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3yl

Image credit: Joan Sorolla, via flickr

1. First a point of clarification: we should understand you not as a health span increaser, but rather as interested in infinity, or in some sense in man becoming a god? That is, H+ is a theological rather than practical question for you?

Yes, that’s right. I differ from most transhumanists in stressing that short term sacrifice—namely, in the form of risky experimentation and self-experimentation—is a price that will probably need to be paid if the long-term aims of transhumanism are to be realized. Moreover, once we finally make the breakthrough to extend human life indefinitely, there may be a moral obligation to make room for future generations, which may take the form of sending the old into space or simply encouraging suicide.

2. How do you understand the relationship between AI and transhumanism?

When Julian Huxley coined ‘transhumanism’ in the 1950s, it was mainly about eugenics, the sort of thing that his brother Aldous satirized in Brave New World. The idea was that the transhuman would be a ‘new and improved’ human, not so different from new model car. (Recall that Henry Ford is the founding figure of Brave New World.) However, with the advent of cybernetics, also happening around the same time, the idea that distinctly ‘human’ traits might be instantiated in both carbon and silicon began to be taken seriously, with AI being the major long-term beneficiary of this line of thought. Some transhumanists, notably Ray Kurzweil, find the AI version especially attractive, perhaps because it caters to their ‘gnostic’ impulse to have the human escape all material constraints. In the transhumanist jargon, this is called ‘morphological freedom’, a sort of secular equivalent of pure spirituality. However, this is to take AI in a somewhat different direction from its founders in the era of cybernetics, which was about creating intelligent machines from silicon, not about transferring carbon-based intelligence into silicon form.

3. How seriously do you take talk (by Bill Gates and others) that AI is an existential risk?

Not very seriously— at least on its own terms. By the time some superintelligent machine might pose a genuine threat to what we now regard as the human condition, the difference between human and non-human will have been blurred, mainly via cyborg identities of the sort that Stephen Hawking might end up being seen as having been a trailblazer. Whatever political questions would arise concerning AI at that point would likely divide humanity itself profoundly and not be a simple ‘them versus us’ scenario. It would be closer to the Cold War choice of Communism vs Capitalism. But honestly, I think all this ‘existential risk’ stuff gets its legs from genuine concerns about cyberwarfare. But taken on its face, cyberwarfare is nothing more than human-on-human warfare conducted by high tech means. The problem is still mainly with the people fighting the war rather than the algorithms that they program to create these latest weapons of mass destruction. I wonder sometimes whether this fixation on superintelligent machines is simply an indirect way to get humans to become responsible for their own actions—the sort of thing that psychoanalysts used to call ‘displacement behavior’ but the rest of us call ‘ventriloquism’.

4. If, as Socrates claims, to philosophize is to learn how to die, does H+ represent the end of philosophy?

Of course not! The question of death is just posed differently because even from a transhumanist standpoint, it may be in the best interest of humanity as a whole for individuals to choose death, so as to give future generations a chance to make their mark. Alternatively, and especially if transhumanists are correct that our extended longevity will be accompanied by rude health, then the older and wiser among us —and there is no denying that ‘wisdom’ is an age-related virtue—might spend their later years taking greater risks, precisely because they would be better able to handle the various contingencies. I am thinking that such healthy elderly folk might be best suited to interstellar exploration because of the ultra-high risks involved. Indeed, I could see a future social justice agenda that would require people to demonstrate their entitlement to longevity by documenting the increasing amount of risk that they are willing to absorb.

5. What of Heidegger’s claim that to be an authentic human being we must project our lives onto the horizon of our death?

I couldn’t agree more! Transhumanism just puts more options on the table for what death looks like. For example, one might choose to die with or without the prospect of future resurrection. One might also just upload one’s mind into a computer, which would be its own special kind of resurrection. I think Heidegger and other philosophers have invested such great import on death simply because of its apparent irreversibility. However, if you want to recreate Heidegger’s sense of ‘ultimate concern’ in a post-death world, all you would need to do is to find some irreversible processes and unrecoverable opportunities that even transhumanists acknowledge. A hint is that when transhumanism was itself resurrected in its current form, it was known as ‘extropianism’, suggesting an active resistance to entropy. For transhumanists—very much in the spirit of the original cybernetician, Norbert Wiener—entropy is the ultimate irreversible process and hence ultimate challenge for the movement to overcome.

6. What is your response to Heidegger’s claim that it is in the confrontation with nothingness, in the uncanny, that we are brought back to ourselves?

Well, that certainly explains the phenomenon that roboticists call the ‘uncanny valley’, whereby people are happy to deal with androids until they resemble humans ‘a bit too much’, at which point people are put off. There are two sides to this response—not only that the machines seem too human but also that they are still recognized as machines. So the machines haven’t quite yet fooled us into thinking that they’re one of us. One hypothesis to explain the revulsion is that such androids appear to be like artificially animated dead humans, a bit like Frankenstein. Heideggerians can of course use all this to their advantage to demonstrate that death is the ultimate ‘Other’ to the human condition.

7. Generally, who do you think are the most important thinkers within the philosophic tradition for thinking about the implications of transhumanism?

Most generally, I would say the Platonic tradition, which has been most profound in considering how the same form might be communicated through different media. So when we take seriously the prospect that the ‘human’ may exist in carbon and/or silicon and yet remain human, we are following in Plato’s footsteps. Christianity holds a special place in this line of thought because of the person of Jesus Christ, who is somehow at once human and divine in equal and all respects. The branch of theology called ‘Christology’ is actually dedicated to puzzling over these matters, various solutions to which have become the stuff of science fiction characters and plots. St Augustine originally made the problem of Christ’s identity a problem for all of humanity when he leveraged the Genesis claim that we are created ‘image and the likeness of God’ to invent the concept of ‘will’ to name the faculty of free choice that is common to God and humans. We just exercise our wills much worse than God exercises his, as demonstrated by Adam’s misjudgment which started Original Sin (an Augustinian coinage). When subsequent Christian thinkers have said that ‘the flesh is weak’, they are talking about how humanity’s default biological conditions holds us back from fully realizing our divine potential. Kant acknowledged as much in secular terms when he explicitly defined the autonomy necessary for truly moral action in terms of resisting the various paths of least resistance put before us. These are what Christians originally called ‘temptations’, Kant himself called ‘heteronomy’ and Herbert Marcuse in a truly secular vein would later call ‘desublimation’.

8. One worry that arises from the Transhumanism project (especially about gene editing, growing human organs in animals, etc.) regards the treatment of human enhancement as “commercial products”. In other words, the worry is concerns the (further) commodification of life. Does this concern you? More generally, doesn’t H+ imply a perverse instrumentalization of our being?

My worries about commodification are less to do with the process itself than the fairness of the exchange relations in which the commodities are traded. Influenced by Locke and Nozick, I would draw a strong distinction between alienation and exploitation, which tends to be blurred in the Marxist literature. Transhumanism arguably calls for an alienation of the body from human identity, in the sense that your biological body might be something that you trade for a silicon upgrade, yet you humanity remains intact on both sides of the transaction, at least in terms of formal legal recognition. Historic liberal objections to slavery rested on a perceived inability to do this coherently. Marxism upped the ante by arguing that the same objections applied to wage labor under the sort of capitalism promoted by the classical political economists of his day, who saw themselves as scientific underwriters of the new liberal order emerging in post-feudal Europe. However, the force of Marxist objections rest on alienation being linked to exploitation. In other words, not only am I free to sell my body or labor, but you are also offer whatever price serves to close the sale. However, the sorts of power imbalances which lay behind exploitation can be—and have been—addressed in various ways. Admittedly more work needs to be done, but a time will come when alienation is simply regarded as a radical exercise of freedom—specifically, the freedom to, say, project myself as an avatar in cyberspace or, conversely, convert part of my being to property that can be traded from something that may in turn enhance my being.

9. Robert Nozick paints a possible scenario in Anarchy, State, and Utopia where he describes a “genetic supermarket” where we can choose our genes just as one selects a frozen pizza. Nozick’s scenario implies a world where human characteristics are treated in the way we treat other commercial products. In the Transhuman worldview, is the principle or ultimate value of life commercial?

There is something to that, in the sense that anything that permits discretionary choice will lend itself to commercialization unless the state intervenes—but I believe that the state should intervene and regulate the process. Unfortunately, from a PR standpoint, a hundred years ago that was called ‘eugenics’. Nevertheless, people in the future may need to acquire a license to procreate, and constraints may even be put on the sort of offspring are and are not permissible, and people may even be legally required to undergo periodic forms of medical surveillance—at least as a condition of employment or welfare benefits. (Think Gattaca as a first pass at this world.) It is difficult to see how an advanced democracy that acknowledges already existing persistent inequalities in life-chances could agree to ‘designer babies’ without also imposing the sort of regime that I am suggesting. Would this unduly restrict people’s liberty? Perhaps not, if people will have acquired the more relaxed attitude to alienation, as per my answer to the previous question. However, the elephant in the room—and which I argued in The Proactionary Imperative is more important—is liability. In other words, who is responsible when things go wrong in a regime which encourages people to experiment with risky treatments? This is something that should focus the minds of lawyers and insurers, especially in a world are presumed to be freer per se because they have freer access to information.

10. Is human enhancement consistent with other ways in which people modify their lifestyles, that is, are they analogous in principle to buying a new cell phone, learning a language or working out? Is it a process of acquiring ideas, goods, assets, and experiences that distinguish one person from another, either as an individual or as a member of a community? If not, how is human enhancement different?

‘Human enhancement’, at least as transhumanists understand the phrase, is about ‘morphological freedom’, which I interpret as a form of ultra-alienation. In other words, it’s not simply about people acquiring things, including prosthetic extensions, but also converting themselves to a different form, say, by uploading the contents of one’s brain into a computer. You might say that transhumanism’s sense of ‘human enhancement’ raises the question of whether one can be at once trader and traded in a way that enables the two roles to be maintained indefinitely. Classical political economy seemed to imply this, but Marx denied its ontological possibility.

11. The thrust of 20th Century Western philosophy could be articulated in terms of the strife for possible futures, whether that future be Marxist, Fascist, or other ideologically utopian schemes, and the philosophical fallout of coming to terms with their successes and failures. In our contemporary moment, it appears as if widespread enthusiasm for such futures has disappeared, as the future itself seems as fragmented as our society. H+ is a new, similar effort; but it seems to be a specific evolution of the futurism focused, not on a society, but on the human person (even, specific human persons). Comments?

In terms of how you’ve phrased your question, transhumanism is a recognizably utopian scheme in nearly all respects—including the assumption that everyone would find its proposed future intrinsically attractive, even if people disagree on how or whether it might be achieved. I don’t see transhumanism as so different from capitalism or socialism as pure ideologies in this sense. They all presume their own desirability. This helps to explain why people who don’t agree with the ideology are quickly diagnosed as somehow mentally or morally deficient.

12. A common critique of Heidegger’s thought comes from an ethical turn in Continental philosophy. While Heidegger understands death to the harbinger of meaning, he means specifically and explicitly one’s own death. Levinas, however, maintains that the primary experience of death that does this work is the death of the Other. One’s experience with death comes to one through the death of a loved one, a friend, a known person, or even through the distant reality of a war or famine across the world. In terms of this critique, the question of transhumanism then leads to a socio-ethical concern: if one, using H+ methods, technologies, and enhancements, can significantly inoculate oneself against the threat of death, how ethically (in the Levinasian sense) can one then legitimately live in relation to others in a society, if the threat of the death of the Other no longer provides one the primal experience of the threat of death?

Here I’m closer to Heidegger than Levinas in terms of grounding intuition, but my basic point would be that an understanding of the existence and significance of death is something that can be acquired without undergoing a special sort of experience. Phenomenologically inclined philosophers sometimes seem to assume that a significant experience must happen significantly. But this is not true at all. My main understanding of death as a child came not from people I know dying, but simply from watching the morning news on television and learning about the daily body count from the Vietnam War. That was enough for me to appreciate the gravity of death—even before I started reading the Existentialists.

In Interviews H+, Robert Frodeman, Steve Fuller, superintelligence, transhumanism

Robert Frodeman Syllabi Spring 2017

SERRC — April 10, 2017 — 3 Comments

Editor’s Note:

The following are elements of syllabi for a graduate, and an undergraduate, course taught by Robert Frodeman in spring 2017 at the University of North Texas. These courses offers an interesting juxtaposition of texts aimed at reimagining how to perform academic philosophy as “field philosophy”. Field philosophy seeks to address meaningfully, and demonstrably, contemporary public debates, regarding transhumanism for example, given attention to shifting ideas and frameworks of both the Humboldtian university and the “new American” university.

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3xB

Philosophy 5250: Topics in Philosophy

Overall Theme

This course continues my project of reframing academic philosophy within the approach and problematics of field philosophy.

In terms of philosophic categories, we will be reading classics in 19^th and 20^th century continental philosophy: Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. But we will be approaching these texts with an agenda: to look for insights into a contemporary philosophical controversy, the transhumanist debate. This gives us two sets of readings – our three authors, and material from the contemporary debate surrounding transhumanism.

Now, this does not mean that we will restrict our interest in our three authors to what is applicable to the transhumanist debate; our thinking will go wherever our interests take us. But the topic of transhumanism will be primus inter pares.

Readings

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface
Hegel, The Science of Logic, selections
Heidegger, Being and Time, Division 1, Macquarrie translation
Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’
Nietzsche, selections from Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil

Related Readings

Boyle, The Relive Box
Douthat, The Virtues of Reality
Frodeman, Marley’s Ghost and the Loss of Order
Frodeman, Sustainable Knowledge, Introduction
Fuller, The Fork in the Road for Homo Futura
Fuller, Humanity 2.0, Introduction
Fuller, Proactionary Manifesto
Fuller, Stephen Hawking is Wrong
Kaczynski, Letter to Gelernter

Grading

You will have two assignments, both due at the end of the semester. I strongly encourage you to turn in drafts of your papers.

A 2500 word paper on a major theme from one of our three authors.
A 2500 word paper using our three authors to illuminate your view of the transhumanist challenge.

Philosophy 4750: Philosophy and Public Policy

Overview

This is a course in meta-philosophy. It seeks to develop a philosophy adequate for the 21^st century.

Academic philosophy has been captured by a set of categories (ancient, modern, contemporary; ethics, logic, metaphysics, epistemology) that are increasingly dysfunctional for contemporary life. Therefore, this is not merely a course on a specific subject matter (i.e., ‘public policy’) to be added to the rest. Rather, it seeks to question, and philosophize about, the entire knowledge enterprise as it exists today – and to philosophize about the role of philosophy in understanding and perhaps (re)directing the knowledge enterprise.

The course will cover the following themes:

The past, present, and future of the university in the Age of Google
The end of disciplinarity and the rise of accountability culture
The New Republic of Letters and the role of the humanist today
The failure of applied philosophy and the development of alternative models

Course Structure

This course is ‘live’: it reflects 20 years of my research on place of philosophy in contemporary society. As such, the course embodies a Humboldtian connection between teaching and research: I am not simply a teacher and a researcher; I’m a teacher-researcher who shares the insights I’m developing with students, testing my thinking in the classroom, and sharing my freshest thoughts. This breaks with the corporate model of education where the professor is an interchangeable cog, teaching the same materials that could be gotten at any university worldwide – while also opening me up to charges of self-indulgence.

Readings

Michael M. Crow and William B. Dabars, Designing the New American University
Crow chapter in HOI
Clark, Academic Charisma
Fuller, The Academic Caesar
Rudy, The Universities of Europe, 1100-1914
Fuller, Sociology of Intellectual Life
Smith, Philosophers 6 Types
Socrates Tenured: The Institutions of 21^st Century Philosophy
Plato, The Republic, Book 1

In Uncategorized field philosophy, meta-philosophy, Robert Frodeman, Steve Fuller, transhumanism

Trust and Transhumanism: An Analysis of the Boundaries of Zero-Knowledge Proof and Technologically Mediated Authentication, Jason M. Pittman

SERRC — March 6, 2017 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Jason M. Pittman, Capitol Technology University, jmpittman@captechu.edu

Pittman, Jason M. “Trust and Transhumanism: An Analysis of the Boundaries of Zero-Knowledge Proof and Technologically Mediated Authentication.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 3 (2017): 21-29.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3tZ

Please refer to:

Special Issue 4: “Social Epistemology and Technology”, edited by Frank Scalambrino.

Image credit: PhOtOnQuAnTiQu, via flickr

Abstract

Zero-knowledge proof serves as the fundamental basis for technological concepts of trust. The most familiar applied solution of technological trust is authentication (human-to-machine and machine-to-machine), most typically a simple password scheme. Further, by extension, much of society-generated knowledge presupposes the immutability of such a proof system when ontologically considering (a) the verification of knowing and (b) the amount of knowledge required to know. In this work, I argue that the zero-knowledge proof underlying technological trust may cease to be viable upon realization of partial transhumanism in the form of embedded nanotechnology. Consequently, existing normative social components of knowledge—chiefly, verification and transmission—may be undermined. In response, I offer recommendations on potential society-centric remedies in partial trans-humanistic technologically mediated realities with the goal of preserving technological trust.

Password based authentication features prominently in daily life. For many us, authentication is a ritual repeated many times on any given day as we enter a username and password into various computing systems. In fact, research (Florêncio & Herley, 2007; Sasse, Steves, Krol, & Chisnell, 2014) revealed that we, on average, enter approximately eight different username and password combinations as many as 23 times a day. The number of times a computing system authenticates to another system is even more frequent. Simply put, authentication is normative in modern, technologically mediated life.

Indeed, authentication has been the normal modality of establishing trust within the context of technology (and, by extension, technology mediated knowledge) for several decades. Over the course of these decades, researchers have uncovered a myriad of flaws in specific manifestations of authentication—weak algorithms, buggy software, or even psychological and cognitive limits of the human mind. Upon closer inspection, one can surmise that the philosophy associated with passwords has not changed. Authentication continues to operate on the fundamental paradigm of a secret, a knowledge-prover, and a knowledge-verifier. The epistemology related to password-based authentication—how the prover establishes possession of the secret such that the verifier can trust the prover without the prover revealing the secret—presents a future problem.

A Partial Transhuman Reality

While some may consider transhumanism to be the province of science fiction, others such as Kurzweil (2005) argue that the merging of Man and Machine is already begun. Of notable interest in this work is partial-transhumanist nanotechnology or, in simple terms, the embedding of microscopic computing systems in our bodies. Such nanotechnology need not be fully autonomous but typically does include some computational sensing ability. The most advanced example are the nanomachines that are used in medicine (Verma, Vijaysingh, & Kushwaha, 2016). Nevertheless, such nanotechnology represents the blueprint for rapid advancement. In fact, research is well underway on using nanomachines (or nanite) for enhanced cognitive computations (Fukushima, 2016).

At the crossroads of partial transhumanism (nanotechnology) and authentication there appears to be a deeper problem. In short, partial-transhumanism may obviate the capacity for a verifier to trust whether a prover, in truth, possesses a secret. Should a verifier not be able to trust a prover, the entirety of authentication may collapse.

Much research does exist that investigates the mathematical basis, the psychological basis, and the technological basis for authentication. There has been little philosophical exploration of authentication. Work such as that of Qureshi, Younus, and Khan (2009) developed a general philosophical overview of password-based authentication but largely focused on developing a philosophical taxonomy to overlay modern password technology. The literature extending Qureshi et al. exclusively builds upon the strictly technical side of password-based authentication, ignoring the philosophical.

Accordingly, the purpose of this work is to describe the concepts directly linked to modern technological trust in authentication and demonstrate how, in a partial transhumanist reality, the concepts of zero-knowledge proof may cease to be viable. Towards this end, I will describe the conceptual framework underlying the operational theme of this work. Then, I explore the abstraction of technological trust as such relates to understanding proof of knowledge. This understanding of where trust fits into normative social epistemology will inform the subsequent description of the problem space. After that, I move on to describe the conceptual architecture of zero-knowledge proofs which serve as the pillars of modern authentication and how transhumanism may adversely impact such. Finally, I will present recommendations on possible society-centric remedies in both partial trans-humanistic as well as full trans-humanistic technologically mediated realities with the goal of preserving technological trust.

Conceptual Framework

Establishing a conceptual framework before delving too far into building the case for trust ceasing to be viable in partial transhumanist reality will permit a deeper understanding of the issue at hand. Such a frame of reference must necessarily include a discussion of how technology inherently mediates our relationship with other humans and technologies. Put another way; technologies are unmistakably involved in human subjectivity while human subjectivity forms the concept of technology (Kiran & Verbeek, 2010). This presupposes a grasp of the technological abstraction though.

Broadly, technology in the context of this work is taken to mean qualitative (abstract) applied science as opposed to practical or quantitative applied of science. This definition follows closely with recent discussions on technology by Scalambrino (2016) and the body of work by Heidegger and Plato. In other words, technology should be understood as those modalities that facilitate progress relative to socially beneficial objectives. In specific, we are concerned with the knowledge modality as opposed to discrete mechanisms, objects, or devices.

What is more, the adjoining of technology, society, and knowledge is a critical element in the conceptual framework for this work. Technology is no longer a single-use, individualized object. Instead, technology is a social arbiter that has grown to be innate to what Idhe (1990) related as a normative human gestalt. While this view is a contrast to views such as offered by Feenberg (1999), the two are not exclusive necessarily.

Further, we must establish the component of our conceptual framework that evidences what it means to verify knowledge. One approach is a scientific model that procedurally quantifies knowledge within a predefined structure. Given the technological nature of this work, such may be inescapable at least as a cognitive bias. More abstractly though, verification of knowledge is conducted by inference whether by the individual or across social collectives. The mechanism of inference, in turn, can be expressed in proof. Similarly, on inference through proof, another component in our conceptual framework corresponds to the amount of knowledge necessary to demonstrate knowing. As I discuss later, the amount of knowing is either full or limited. That is, proof of knowledge or proof without knowledge.

Technological Trust

The connection between knowledge and trust has a strong history of debate in the social epistemic context. This work is not intended to directly add to the debate surrounding trust. However, recognition of the debate is necessary to develop the bridge connecting trust and zero-knowledge proofs before moving onto zero-knowledge proof and authentication. Further, conceptualizing technological trust permits the construction of a foundation for the central proposition in this work.

To the point, Simon (2013) argued that knowledge relies on trust. McCraw (2015) extended this claim by establishing four components of epistemic trust: belief, communication, reliance, and confidence. These components are further grouped into epistemic (belief and communication) as well as trust (reliance and confidence) conditionals (2015). Trust, in this context, exemplifies the social aspect of knowledge insofar as we do not directly experience trust but hold trust as valid because of the collective position of validity.

Furthermore, Simmel (1978) perceived trust to be integral to society. That is, trust as a knowledge construct, exists in many disciplines and, per Origgi (2004) permeates our cognitive existence. Additionally, there is an argument to be made that, by using technology, we implicitly place trust in such technology (Kiran & Verbeek, 2010). Nonetheless, trust we do.

Certainly, part of such trust is due to the mediation provided by our ubiquitous technology. As well, trust in technology and trust from technology are integral functions of modern social perspectives. On the other hand, we must be cautious in understanding the conditions that lead to technological trust. Work by Idhe (1979; 1990) and others have suggested that technological trust stems from our relation to the technology. Perhaps closer to transhumanism, Levy (1998) offered that such trust is more associated with technology that extends us.

Technology that extends human capacity is a principal abstraction. As well, concomitant to technological trust is knowledge. While the conceptual framework for this work includes verification of knowledge as well as the amount of knowledge necessary to evidence knowing, there is a need to include knowledge proofs in the discourse.

Zero-Knowledge Proof

Proof of knowledge is a logical extension of the discussion of trust. Where trust can be thought as the mechanism through which we allow technology to mediate reality, proof of knowledge is how we come to trust specific forms of technology. In turn, proof of knowledge—specifically, zero-knowledge proof—provides a foundation for trust in technological mediation in the general case and technological authentication in the specific case.

The Nature of Proof

The construct of proof may adopt different meaning depending upon the enveloping context. In the context of this work, we use the operational meaning provided by Pagin (1994). In other words, the proof is established during the process of validating the correctness of a proposition. Furthermore, for any proof to be perceived as valid, such must demonstrate elements of completeness and soundness (Pagin, 1994; 2009).

There is, of course, a larger discourse on the epistemic constraints of proof (Pagin, 1994; Williamson, 2002; Marton, 2006). Such lies outside of the scope of this work however as we are not concerned with can proof be offered for knowledge but rather how proof occurs. In other words, we are interested in the mechanism of proof. Thus, for our purposes, we presuppose that proof of knowledge is possible and is so in through two possible operations: proof with knowledge and proof without knowledge.

Proof with Knowledge

A consequence of typical proof system is that all involved parties gain knowledge. That is, if I know x exists in a specific truth condition, I must present all relevant premises so that you can reach the same conclusion. Thus, the proposition is not only true or false to us both equally but also the means of establishing such truth or falsehood is transparent. This is what can be referred to as proof of knowledge.

In most scenarios, proof with knowledge is a positive mechanism. That is, the parties involved mutually benefit from the outcome. Mathematics and logic are primary examples of this proof state. However, when considering the case of technological trust in the form of authentication proof with knowledge is not desirable.

Proof Without Knowledge

Imagine that you that know that p is true. Further, you wish to demonstrate to me that you know this without revealing how you came to know or what it is exactly that you know. In other words, you wish to keep some aspect of the knowledge secret. I must validate that you know p without gaining any knowledge. This is the second state of proof known as zero-knowledge proof and forms the basis for technological trust in the form of authentication.

Goldwasser, Micali, and Rackoff (1989) defined zero-knowledge proofs as a formal, systematic approach to validating the correctitude of a proposition without communicating additional knowledge. Extra in this context can be taken to imply knowledge other than the proposition itself. An important aspect is that the proposition originates with a verifier entity as opposed to a prover entity. In response to the proposition to be proven, the prover completes an action without revealing any knowledge to the verifier other than the knowledge that the action was completed. If the proposition is probabilistically true, the verifier is satisfied. Note that the verifier and prover entities can be in the form of machine-to-human, human-to-human, or machine-to-machine.

Zero-knowledge proofs are the core of technological trust and, accordingly, authentication. While discrete instances of authentication exist practically outside of the social epistemic purview, the broader theory of authentication is, in fact, a socially collective phenomenon. That is, even in the abstract, authentication is a specific case for technologically mediated trust.

Authentication

The zero-knowledge proof abstraction translates directly into modern authentication modalities. In general, authentication involves a verifier issuing a request to prove knowledge and a prover establishing knowledge by means of a secret to the verifier. Thus, the ability to provide such proof in a manner that is consistent with the verifier request is technologically sufficient to authenticate (Syverson & Cervesato, 2000). However, there are subtleties within the authentication zero-knowledge proof that warrant discussion.

Authentication, or being authenticated, implies two technologically mediated realities. First, the authentication process relies upon the authenticating entity (i.e., the prover) possessing a secret exclusively. The mediated reality for both the verifier and the prover is that to be authenticated implies an identity. In simple terms, I am who I claim to be based on (a) exclusive possession of the secret; and (b) the ability to sufficiently demonstrate such through the zero-knowledge proof to the verifier. Likewise, the verifier is identified to the prover.

Secondly, authentication establishes a general right of access for the verifier based on, again, possession of an exclusive secret. Consequently, there is a technological mediation of what objects are available to the verifier once authenticated (i.e., all authorized objects) or not authenticated (i.e., no objects). Thus, the zero-knowledge proof is a mechanism of associating the prover’s identity with a set of objects in the world and facilitating access to those objects. That is to say, once authenticated, the identity has operational control within corresponding space over linked objects.

Normatively, authentication is a socially collective phenomenon despite individual authentication relying upon exclusive zero-knowledge proof (Van Der Meyden & Wilke, 2007). Principally, authentication is a means of interacting with other humans, technology, and society at large while maintaining trust. However, if authentication is a manifestation of technological trust, one must wonder if transhumanism may affect the zero-knowledge proof abstraction.

Transhumanism

More (1990) described transhumanism as a philosophy that embraces the profound changes to society and the individual brought about by science and technology. There is strong debate as to when such change will occur although most futurists argue that technology has already begun to transcend the breaking point of explosive growth. Technology in this context aligns with the conceptual framework of this work. As well, there is an agreement in the philosophical literature with the idea of such technological expansion (Bostrom, 1998; More, 2013).

Furthermore, transhumanism exists in two forms: partial transhumanism and full transhumanism (Kurzweil, 2005). This work is concerned with partial transhumanism exclusively. Furthermore, partial transhumanism is inclusive of three modalities. According to Kurzweil (2005), these modalities are (a) technology sufficient to manipulate human life genetically; (b) nanotechnology; and (c) robotics. In the context of this work, I am interested in the potentiality of nanotechnology.

Briefly, nanotechnology exists in several forms. The form central to this work involves embedding microscopic machines within human biology. These machines can perform any number of operations, including augmenting existing bodily systems. Along these lines, Vinge (1993) argued that a by-product of technological expansion will be the monumental increase in human intelligence. Although there are a variety of mechanisms by which technology will amplify raw brainpower, nanotechnology is a forerunner in the mind of Kurzweil and others.

What is more, the computational power of nanites is measurable and predictable (Chau, et al., 2005; Bhore, 2016). The amount of human intellectual capacity projected to result from nanotechnology may be sufficient to impart hyper-cognitive or even extrasensory abilities. With such augmentation, the human mind will be capable of computational decision-making well beyond existing technology.

While the notion of nanites embedded in our bodies, augmenting various biomechanical systems to the point of precognitive awareness of zero-knowledge proof verification, may strike some as science fiction, there is growing precedent. Existing research in the field of medicine demonstrates that at least partially autonomous nanites have a grounding in reality (Huilgol & Hede, 2006; Das et al., 2007; Murray, Siegel, Stein, & Wright, 2009). Thus, envisioning a near future where more powerful and autonomous nanites are available is not difficult.

Technological Trust in Authentication

The purpose of this work was to describe technological trust in authentication and demonstrate how, in a future partial transhumanist reality, the concepts of zero-knowledge proof will cease to be viable. Towards that end, I examined technological trust in the context of how and why such trust is established. Further, knowledge proofs were discussed with an emphasis on proofs without knowledge. Such led to an overview of authentication and, subsequently, transhumanism.

Based on the analysis so far, the technological trust afforded by such proof appears to be no longer feasible once embedded nanotechnology is introduced into humans. Nanite augmented cognition will result in the capability for a knowledge-prover to, on demand, compute knowledge sufficient to convince a knowledge-verifier. Outright, such a reality breaks the latent assumptions that operationalize the conceptual framework into related technology. That is, once the knowledge-verifier cannot trust that the knowledge is known by the prover, a significant future problem arises.

Unfortunately, the fields of computer science and computer engineering do not historically plan for paradigm shifting innovations well. Such is exacerbated when the paradigm shift has rapid onset after a long ramp-up time as is the case with the technological singularity. More specifically, partial transhumanism as considered in this work may have unforeseen effects beyond the scope of the fields that created the technology in the first place. The inability to handle rapid shifts is largely related to these fields posing what is type questions.

Similarly, the Collingridge dilemma tells us that, “…the social consequences of a technology cannot be predicated early in the life of the technology” (1980, p. 11). Thus, adequate preparation for the eventual collapse of zero-knowledge proof requires asking what ought to be. Such a question is a philosophical question. As it stands, recognition of social epistemology as an interdisciplinary field already exists (Froehlich, 1989; Fuller, 2005; Zins, 2006). More still, there is a precedent for philosophy informing the science of technology (Scalambrino, 2016) and assembling the foundation of future looking paradigm shifts.

Accordingly, a recommendation is for social epistemologists and technologists to jointly examine modifications to the abstract zero-knowledge proof such that the proof is resilient to nanite-powered knowledge computation. In conjunction, there may be a benefit in attempting to conceive of a replacement proof system that also harnesses partial-transhumanism for the knowledge-verifier in a manner commensurate with any increase in capacity for the knowledge-prover. Lastly, a joint effort may be able to envision a technologically mediated construct that does not require proof without knowledge at all.

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