by Joel Garreau
Transhumanists view human nature as “a work-in-progress: a half-baked beginning that can be remolded in desirable ways through intelligent use of enhancement technologies.” In Web sites, publications and meetings, they advocate enabling those “who so wish, to live much longer and healthier lives, to enhance their memory and other intellectual faculties, to refine their emotional experiences and subjective sense of well-being, and generally to achieve a greater degree of control over their own lives.” Transhumanists say that for them, this positive goal has “replaced customary injunctions against ‘playing God’ or ‘messing with Nature’ or ‘tampering with our human essence’ or other manifestations of ‘punishable hubris.’” They believe it naïve to think the human condition and human nature will remain pretty much the same for much longer. Instead, they believe the GRIN technologies are fundamentally changing the rules of the game.
Hardly knowing what to expect from my first encounter with a couple of hundred transhumanists, I’ve come up to Yale ready for almost anything. And indeed, there is a smattering of sweet but very strange people. Natasha Vita-More, the artist formerly known as Nancie Clark, brings up the possibility of a person someday soon issuing a mental command to make her skin milky white in the morning, tawny brown in the afternoon and a midnight blue to match her gown in the evening. An occasional actress, dedicated bodybuilder (her motto: “Flex my mind, flex my body”) and president of the libertarian Extropy Institute, Vita-More’s interests include future body design. She offers a conceptual model of an optimized human who has built-in sonar, a fiber-optic cable down the spine and a head full of nanotech data storage. Vita-More’s biography suggests she was born in the first half of the 1950s. She has a Left Coast–slender figure, brunette hair that falls below her collarbones, musky perfume, boots, tight jeans, a large mouth painted red, publicity materials that feature glamour portraits, and a face that seems to be on a little too tight. She expertly tosses around the jargon of the genetic, robotic, information and nanotechnology trades with a Santa Monica sense of wonder at all the future possibilities the cosmos might bear. Those of her male listeners who look like they could benefit from less pizza and more time in the sun respond as if they have encountered that celebrated deity, the geek goddess. This is clearly not the first time Vita-More has run into this reaction. She does not seem to hate it. Those who view people like Vita-More as flakes dismiss by association many of the ideas they embrace. Critics of The Singularity, for example, love to brush aside that idea as “the Rapture of the nerds.”
Far more typical of those in attendance, however, are heavy hitters such as Annas and Stock and representatives of formidable organizations such as the American Medical Association and the National Science Foundation. This is a gathering of people who are thinking deeply about what transcendence might mean. “All futurism is black and white. All reality is gray,” says Hughes. Indeed, the gathering will be written up in the sober and scholarly Wilson Quarterly, in addition to lengthy pieces across the political gamut from Reason magazine to the Village Voice. All discuss what would happen if humans engineered themselves into something so very far beyond our current nature.
One of the interesting things that already can be said about this young century: it is the time when the idea of transcending human nature has become controversial. On the face of it, this is striking—first, that earnest and intense people are taking the idea seriously; second, that some equally clearheaded people are against it.
Of course, people who object to fiddling with human nature do not view that program as progress. They ponder what might be lost. They fear that a search for transcendence might instead prove damning. They know what happened when Eve chose to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. They may be right.
Yet it is still a remarkable point in history at which we have arrived. One wonders if there was a comparable debate the last time such a change loomed—when the species for better or for worse faced the possibility of moving out past the capabilities of the chimpanzee, past the Neanderthal, past the Cro-Magnon. Who knows. Maybe there was considerable wailing around the campfire about the new people stealing the spirits of the beasts by painting them on cave walls.
The Transcend proposition rests on three premises:
• The undeniable competitive advantages that the genetic, robotic, information and nano technologies convey on those who embrace them for economic, medical, educational, military, or artistic reasons suggest that these methods will continue to advance at an ever-increasing rate.
• So many of these technologies—“designer babies,” augmented cognition, metabolic makeovers, anti-aging medicine and all the rest—can alter basics of the human condition. If they can modify our minds, memories, metabolisms, progeny and personalities, it seems reasonable to think that these procedures might well have an impact on what it means to be human.
• The history of technologies as disruptive as these suggests that there will be unintended consequences. We will be surprised by many of the outcomes.
If you accept these three propositions as reasonable bets, what you’re looking at is that rare bird, the high-probability, high-impact scenario. Transcend builds on, expands and gives measure to The Prevail Scenario, in which technology does not control us, but we control technology.
If you find it practical to think that the genies of these technologies are unlikely all to be bottled up, you have several choices. One is to be convinced that the future is bleak, in the fashion of The Hell Scenarios of Bill Joy, Susan Greenfield, Martin Rees and others who argue that technology is controlling us and the outcome likely will be catastrophe.
Or you can agree with R. Buckminster Fuller that “we are called to be architects of the future, not its victims,” and take an active hand in shaping human destiny. There are important ethical questions about the desire to engineer better children, for example. What happens if people get to pick the sex of their offspring and the outcome is a socially disruptive and even warlike surplus of frustrated young males, as is the case already in South Korea, Pakistan, India’s Delhi, China, Cuba, Azerbaijan, Armenia and nearby Georgia? If a child is created with genes selected to endow him with the marvelous traits of a Yale valedictorian or an Olympic sprinter, will he face even more oppressive parental expectations than in the past because now he is supposed to live up to his design? Suppose our desire for children who are well adjusted, well behaved, sociable, attentive, high-performing and academically adept is fulfilled by drugs? Will that get in the way of them developing character? These are all good questions raised in Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, the remarkably literate and thoughtful 2003 Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics, of which Leon R. Kass is chair. Kass is a medical doctor, a professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago, and a fellow of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. These questions go to issues of what we want childhood to be.
“Life is not just behaving, performing, achieving,” the report says. “It is also about being, beholding, savoring. It is not only about preparing for future success. It is also about enjoying present blessings. It would be paradoxical, not to say perverse, if the desire to produce ‘better children,’ armed with the best that biotechnology has to offer, were to succeed in its goal by pulling down the curtain on the ‘childishness’ of childhood.”
Even assuming that in our role as architects of the future we pick and choose the elements that we implement, I have yet to encounter a persuasive argument that the advantages conveyed by the GRIN technologies are likely to be stopped worldwide—short of a cataclysm. In fact, the more problems we face, the more rapidly we probably will reach for an ingenious and seemingly miraculous fix. Nor have I seen a case made that convinces me I’d like to live in a world in which human imagination were so entirely blocked.
I do not wish to be cast as an opponent or a debunker of the social critics of technology. I hope I have presented them and their scenarios fairly
. Readers should examine their arguments carefully. They offer important reasoning regarding the cautions we should consider. I wish we’d had such an informed discussion before we embraced nuclear power. It could well have benefited everybody—including the electricity industry.
In the absence of an attractive alternative, however, I elect to light out for the Territory. I choose to examine the possibility that human nature might continue to evolve and be improvable, and to consider what transformation might actually look like and what it might mean. “What is a man? A seed? An acorn unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree?” asks David Zindell in The Broken God.
Exploring the Transcend hypothesis adds specificity, measurements and means to the goal of controlling our evolution in the fashion of The Prevail Scenario. At the very least it casts light on our current age by causing us to wonder about our present definitions of human nature and evolution and the meaning of transcendence.
THE CENTRAL ARGUMENT about the future of human nature is whether it is fixed and immutable, once and forever, or whether it can continue to evolve.
In an e-mail exchange, I asked Francis Fukuyama about his view. He is the author of Our Posthuman Future who sees biotechnology altering the underpinnings of human nature as a Hell Scenario.
Take a human of 10,000 years or so ago, I wrote to Fukuyama. Genetically identical to us, but living before The Curve of change kicked into a new gear with cultural evolution. Before people create writing, reading, and arithmetic, formal logic, world religions, cities, global trade and the whole deal. Before people could go from the first powered flight to a moon landing in 66 years. Your basic subsistence-level hunter-gatherer. Before civilization. Would we regard him as fully human? Why? Do his genes alone do the job? Has the steep ramp of cultural evolution had no effect on what makes us human today? Does civilization have nothing to do with defining what we now consider to be human nature?
“In one sense the answer to this question has to be yes,” he replied. “That’s what we would say about, say, an uneducated member of our own society if we posed the question—does this person deserve to enjoy human rights? The faculty itself is what makes us human, and not what we put into it. On the other hand, part of our nature is to develop those faculties, so the actual human is both the faculty and the faculty’s content.”
I’m not talking so much about rights, I e-mailed back. I don’t expect anyone would recommend treating our 10,000-year-old man like a chimpanzee. What I’m struggling with is a definition of human nature. Does just the container—the physical human vessel—bound it? Or do the contents help define us? Isn’t the container now filled with the distilled wisdom of our billions of forebears as has been captured by civilization? Isn’t part of human nature now man-made? Doesn’t the rise of rigorous logic and increased empathy count? If so, then one might say we have evolved over the past 10,000 years. Therefore, we might continue to do so. If not, then cultural evolution has no importance. Correct? Or am I missing something?
“But the rights are important,” he responded. “If we didn’t feel the uneducated primitive human was really human, we would not give him/her rights. But nobody would be willing to assert that we lose something of our essential humanness by being uneducated.”
Agreed, I wrote back. The rights are important. But here’s the crucial question—is our ancestor’s version of human nature identical to ours? That gets to the nut of it, for me. Let us agree and assume that all versions of human nature are sacred and worthy of reverence, and let us set that aside for a moment. Has civilization produced a more evolved human being or not? Has the new contents in the old container made a difference?
Fukuyama did not respond. But if you agree with Thomas Hobbes that the life of our 10,000-year-old man in nature is nasty, brutish and short—the product of unfettered selfishness—then I think one has to conclude that all these millennia of billions of humans storing and sharing and cooperatively building on each other’s wisdom—the content—has to count as part of evolution. It is inheritable, has variation and contributes to reproductive fitness. Even the least educated among us is not raised by wolves, feral and wild. He grows up shaped by contemporary humans who own televisions, who have been shaped by modern society.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto is no libertarian apologist for technology. The University of London historian believes embryos should be recognized as humans and abortion banned. Nonetheless, in So You Think You’re Human? A Brief History of Humankind, he writes: “We have to face challenges to our concept of humankind and, where they are valid, confront the consequences for some of our dearest concepts: human rights, human dignity, human life—ideas for which, in the recent past, we’ve begun to re-shape states, re-fashion laws, and fight wars.”
He likes the dynamic view offered by the German sociologist Justin Stagl, who says human nature is a shifting combination, changeable over time. This blend includes a “biological heritage” of ill-developed instincts and reflexes. But it also involves our legacy of transformation “from a biologically determined to a socio-culturally determined being” for whom culture has become natural. Above all, it embraces our “utopian potential”—our vocation to transcend our failures and defects, “to strive to attain superhuman goals and avoid the inhuman.” Our human nature may be grounded in our animal nature, but our ability and eagerness to develop our “better nature” are unique.
Fernández-Armesto writes:
There is still no agreement about what “human nature” is—what, beyond trivial or temporary features of our physiologies or our cultures that happen to have been thrown up by history or evolution, is common to and exclusive to the creatures we recognize as human. Human nature, if it is proper to speak of such a thing, is not fixed: it has changed in the past and could change again. Its continuity with the natures of other animals is part of its fluidity. . . . How much our nature has to change before our descendants cease to be human is a question we are not yet ready to answer. In this respect it resembles the question about when, in the course of evolution, our ancestors became human—which is also unanswerable at the present stage of our thinking and knowledge.
That humans are uniquely rational, intellectual, spiritual, self-aware, creative, conscientious, moral, or godlike seems to be a myth—an article of faith to which we cling in defiance of the evidence. But we need myths to make our irresoluble dilemmas bearable. And our claims for our nature are more: not mere myths but also aspirations, still waiting to become true. . . . For now, if we want to go on believing we are human, and justify the special status we accord ourselves—if, indeed, we want to stay human through the changes we face—we had better not discard the myth, but start trying to live up to it.
That’s the most satisfying description of human nature I’ve found. But we probably never will firm up a detailed definition of human nature upon which we can widely agree until we first encounter creatures with a genuinely different kind of intelligence to whom we might compare ourselves. Human nature is certainly not like those guys, we’ll then say, and we’ll start making lists of how that might be so, because making lists of such differences is part of human nature.
Certainly, humans are astonishingly assorted in their behavior and norms. Read the tabloid and supermarket press if you doubt this; the bizarre variety of arrangements humans can come up with is what keeps the penny press in business. In fact, what anthropologists have traditionally done for a living is collect the vast array of variations in our contents. Some bristle like cats confronting a Rottweiler at the very idea something called “human nature” even exists. Mary Catherine Bateson is the distinguished author of Composing a Life and the daughter of Margaret Mead. Mead, author of Coming of Age in Samoa, achieved fame starting in 1928 for advancing the notion that nurture is far more important a determinant of behavior than nature. To this day, to seriously suggest in her daughter’s presence that the phrase “human nature” is meaningful and important is to gain a life experience long to be treasured in memor
y.
Elaborate global ideologies have been founded on varying definitions of human nature. The huge edifice of Christianity is based on the fundamental principle that an all-powerful God creates human nature in his image and likeness. Then in the late 1800s along comes Karl Marx, who says, baloney. He explicitly rejects the notion that there exists some God who has anything to do with our human nature. For Marx, human nature is the sum total of all our social interactions. He proceeds to construct this elaborate, world-moving ideology, saying that if you can alter the social relationships upon which human nature rests, you can change human nature. The historical results are spectacular. Millions die at the hands of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot before it becomes clear that this can’t be how human nature works. In the mid-20th century arrives Jean-Paul Sartre, who says of the social-relationship proposition, baloney. That’s not what human nature is. He and the other existentialists say human nature is not dependent on anything or anyone. Individuals are condemned to be free, asserts Sartre in his famous phrase. Each is free to shape who he or she is going to be; this is indeed the great human challenge. That notion keeps undergraduates busy in late-night bull sessions for two generations. Then, in the late 20th century, sociobiologists come along and say, baloney. Edward O. Wilson in his book On Human Nature scores Sartre’s model as not bloody likely, saying human beings are a product of evolution; sure, you can have tremendous variety, but human nature is fundamentally bounded by our own genetically determined, species-specific patterns of behavior.
Our DNA shows that the human species as we know it is indeed quite new—100,000 years or so old at most—and therefore remarkably unified. We share 98 percent of our genome with chimpanzees—not much less than we share with each other. The genetic difference that makes us human is barely significant, statistically. Humans respond with shared tendencies and behaviors to whatever challenges and opportunities we are offered by geology, geography and the global distribution of wild plants and animals. Few researchers can afford to ignore any longer the thousands of human universals. They include such not particularly deep examples as art, athletics, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organizing, cooperative labor, courtship, dancing, division of labor, education, ethics, etiquette, family, feasting, fire making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving, government, greetings, grief, hairstyles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, language, law, luck superstition, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, modesty, mourning, music, mythology, numerals, personal names, property rights, puberty customs, religion, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting and weather-control rituals.