Blade Runner appreciates what makes Frankenstein disturbing: not the Creature’s difference from but his similarity to human beings. In the language of the Enlightenment, the Creature is humane—essentially human. He displays humanity and pathos, mostly through his speech, which always strikes new readers as disturbing in its very dignity (mileage remains in the languages of personhood). His disgusting features contradict his noble eloquence. Frankenstein is a novel for our ecological times, more so than ever as we enter an age of genomics and nanotechnology. The common misreading of Frankenstein is that it warns against tampering with the “laws of Nature” or playing God.48 This is how the arrogant Frankenstein would like to see things. The focus of the novel is in the gauntlet the Creature throws down to human beings. You think you are ethical? You think you are the wisest, smartest beings on Earth? Can you love and treat kindly a being as ugly as me, as uncertain in his status as a person as me? Can you forgive another being’s violence, you who execute and torture in the name of justice and reason?
The uncanny truth is not that we’re all the same, that underneath humans are not different from the working-class replicants who perform their dirty work. In their very humanity, humans are already replicants: beings with artificial cores, just a sum of memories. What if we could make artificial people? When does a human being become a person? Mary Shelley, Philip K. Dick, and Ridley Scott dramatize these questions, by taking them absolutely literally, in the best tradition of thought experiments. Philosopher Derek Parfit exploits science fiction’s popularization of the thought experiment, when he imagines having his personality teleported into another body on another planet.49 Even if we never teleport ourselves, even if artificial intelligence is strictly impossible, these are phenomena with which to think the ecological thought. They are like Milton’s exploration of extraterrestrial life. We may never make contact with life on other planets. It’s highly likely that alien life exists, however, and thinking about it is a significant aspect of thinking interconnection. As Levinas said, “the idea that I am sought out in the intersidereal spaces is not science fiction, but expresses my passivity as a self.”50
FORWARD SCIENCE
Posthumanism (a current trend in the humanities) too glibly combines (1) a deconstruction of humanness—and animal-ness, and life form-ness—into sets of machine-like, algorithmic processes; and (2) decidedly nonreductionist, holistic, quasi-mystical systems theory.51 In effect, posthumanism asserts, “There is a nonself” and “There is a non-nature.” The ecological thought reserves a special place for the “subject”—the mind, the person, even the soul. Posthumanism seems suspiciously keen to delete the paradigm of humanness like a bad draft; yet “Humanism has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human.”52 Even worse is the Skinnerian behaviorism that says “Good riddance” to “man.”53 This is turning reductionism into a religion. It probably would be nice actually to have achieved something like humanness in the first place. What if being human is the encounter with the strange stranger—in other words, at a certain limit, an encounter with the inhuman?54 Isn’t this the very “posthumanism” for which some are yearning? Human beingness is already fissured from within.55 Is the ecological thought an antihumanist or even antihuman thought? Posthumanism and deep ecology make strange bedfellows—the first believes in non-nature, the second in Nature—but they might find common cause on this: two legs bad, four legs better. Even though the ecological thought appears at first glance to have things in common with posthumanism, it ends up seeping through posthuman ideological barriers.
Finding out what all this means might imply more than installing a minimally functioning, though ultimately papery, ideological fantasy between ourselves and the void: though of course we should confront this void, it would also be helpful if we could know why to get up in the morning. So what we do as humanists isn’t just about providing better PR for science. Along with figuring out what implications science has for society and so on, we should be in the business of asking scientists to do things for us. Humanists should create Web sites listing experiments they want done. My top suggestion would be exploring the question “Is consciousness intentional?” Negative results would provide a pretty good reason not to hurt life forms. If we could show that consciousness wasn’t some lofty bonus prize for being elaborately wired but a default mode that came bundled with the software, then worms are conscious in every meaningful sense. A worm could become a Buddha, as a worm (paging Lowly). Are we sure nonhumans don’t have a sense of “I”? Are we sure that we do?56 One possible conclusion to be drawn from the difficulties of AI theory is that human brains are “too weak” to understand themselves.57 In weakness is solidarity with strangers.
Humanists forging ahead with the ecological thought should step up and suggest experiments, based on their varied, complex, radical, and interestingly divergent ideas. And scientists should at least take a look. Here are some this book has proposed:1. Can animals enjoy art?
2. Can animals self-reflect? Can humans self-reflect? Is self-reflection important regarding suffering?
3. What is awareness? Is it a “higher” (less frequent) or “lower” (more frequent) cognitive capacity?
4. Did Neanderthals have imagination? Do we? Does it matter?
5. Does AI suffer? Can bacteria suffer? What are the “lower” limits for suffering?
6. Is consciousness intentional?
7. Are thinking and perceiving discrete?
To get “ahead of the curve” enough to ask sensible questions, humanists must get over both atomism (especially the sort that thinks of atoms as hard little ping pong balls) and holism (especially the sort maintaining that wholes are different from their parts). This means rejecting, or putting on serious hold, most theories of Nature and post-Nature. Humanists must play the irritating Columbo-style guy at the back of the room, the one who asks the unanswerable question.
The profound implications of ecological theory present obstacles to their full acceptance. Materialism suggests that if the mind is reducible to the brain, then the brain is capable of being explained in terms of its physical causes—its “environment.”58 Cognitive abilities thus evolved like fingers or lungs. Your mind is an assemblage of duplicated and reduplicated processes that evolved unevenly. There maybe no unified model for brain and mind. For instance, the human brain appears to be a kluge, a good-enough assemblage of different gadgets from different life forms.59 Classical models of minds are transparent but may not work or are highly arbitrary, while “connectionist” models (advocated here) work, but they aren’t transparent.60 This may be because of something to do with the mind itself. The mind may not have hardwired rules for parsing reality. In order to understand the mind, we may have to make one first.
There might be “less” to consciousness than we suppose. AI theory tends to set the bar really high for poor computer programs. If I had to access a sense of self every time I did anything, my mind might freeze, or I might wind up in a mental hospital. You might not need a good picture of the world somewhere inside your head, or even a picture at all, to walk or play games or even think. Why is this relevant to the ecological thought? Cognitive science claims that cognition is about the mind’s interaction with its world. Cognizing is fundamentally environmental. You wouldn’t need to do it if you weren’t in an environment. (This is almost tautological: you wouldn’t exist at all if you didn’t have an environment.) Jakob von Uexküll was onto this with his extraordinary hypotheses concerning the worlds (Umwelten) of animals such as ticks.61 Yet as seen in Chapter 1, the world is “less than” rather than “greater than.” Forget holism, organicism, and Heidegger, who maintains that human beings have a world, unlike the other poor saps who live here.62 What a relief. This is excellent for the ecological thought, because it means isn’t mystification. It also implies that the distinctly (and disturbingly) Germanic type of environmental language, sounding suspiciously like an anti-Semitic peasant during the Crusades, has been barking up the wrong tree
. And in every sense that matters, living beings (and DNA, for that matter) have a world—just not much of one.
There are problems with connectionism, which is the cognitive-scientific view I’m outlining. The devil is in the details. Connectionism maintains that mental phenomena arise from interconnected processing systems. That is to say, there is no mind as such, because mind always emerges from interacting networks, at least one of which must be a system for processing inputs such as sensations and perceptions. But does this really add anything to our understanding? Saying that organisms “enact” their environment by interacting with it could be a simple inversion of saying that organisms have organs. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. One could say, “The world has become hammerable” instead of “I am using a hammer.” This already sounds a bit Heidegger-ish: it merely shunts our problems into a different area. An inside-out sock is still a sock.
Connectionist AI is excited that cognition may be reducible to an algorithm. But it’s hard to resist imagining this algorithm as a tiny being, a sort of homunculus, already floating in an environmental “soup” of information—an infinite regress.63 The explanation for organisms and environments is tinier organisms and tinier environments. If we can make sense of organisms as algorithms at this level, suggests Francisco Varela, just imagine the possibilities when we scale up to the level of brains, colossal sets of algorithmic calculating machines. Varela’s argument implies that although we can reduce mental phenomena to mechanisms, the whole (brain) is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a both-and logic operating here. We can have tiny components and a big self: reductionism and holism at the same time.
The ecological thought must hesitate here. What is a person? I agree with Varela that if we are to find out, we shall require a new kind of science that takes contemplative practices such as meditation seriously. For two and a half thousand years, Buddhism has shown that consciousness doesn’t depend upon an integrated, solid, “truly existing” self. Since the ecological thought appears to point this way, there may be a fruitful convergence somewhere down the line.
FORWARD PHILOSOPHY
There is a deeper problem for the hapless reactionaries we met at the beginning of this chapter—a problem for all of us, as a matter of fact. Pointing out the snow in your neighborhood suddenly becomes a mystifying, fetishistic operation in an era of global warming. Something seemingly real and cold and wet is less real, and pointing to it is less realistic, than something we can’t directly sense. Reality as such has been upgraded so that phenomena you can see and hear and palpate have become less real than ones you can’t. Reality seems to have a hole in it, like realizing that you’re floating in outer space (which, of course, technically, we are). This affects our sense of orientation, which traditionally depended on a background of some kind, whether we called it Nature, lifeworld, or biology: whatever seems to lie beyond our ken, outside of our responsibility, or outside of the social. When there is no background, there is no foreground. This lack of a world is a real problem, a big problem—we have about five minutes for Schadenfreude as we watch the righties struggling with all this, and then we realize we are also spinning in the void. When there is no world, there is no ontology. What the hell is going on?
We can’t nestle in a nice holistic burrow now that we’ve defeated the evil individualists. There is no burrow, therefore no nestling. So at the very same time as our world is really melting, our idea of what “really” and “real” mean also melts. The global warming crisis is also an opportunity to point that out, to notice that reality is a naked emperor.
There is global warming; there is an ecological emergency; I’m not a nihilist; the big picture view undermines right-wing ideology, which is why the right is so afraid of it. However, the melting world induces panic. This is a problem, philosophically and otherwise. Again, it’s a paradox. While we absolutely have complete responsibility for global warming and must act now to curb emissions, we are also faced with various fantasies about “acting now,” many of which are toxic to the kind of job humanists do. There is an ideological injunction to act “Now!” while humanists are tasked with slowing down, using our minds to find out what this all means.
There is a meme that theory is the opposite of practice. I’ve been accused of not wanting to help Katrina victims because I’m so busy theorizing with my head in the clouds: “Your ideas are all very well for a lazy Sunday afternoon, but out here in the real world, what are we actually going to do?” Yet one thing we must do is precisely break down the distinction between Sunday afternoon and every other day, and in the direction of putting a bit of Sunday afternoon into Monday morning, rather than making Sunday a workday.
The injunction to act now is ultimately based on preserving a Nature that we are finding out never existed. So the injunction has real effects that may result in more genuine catastrophe as we tilt at the nonexistent windmills of Nature. I’m definitely not saying, “Let’s not look after animals because they’re not really natural.” I’m trying to find a reason to look after all beings on this planet precisely because they’re not natural.
There have been a number of Copernican revolutions in human thinking about mind and society, revolutions that displaced human agency. Marx argued that the network of economic relationships underpinned the superstructure of beliefs and ideas. Freud showed that a field of unconscious processes structured conscious thinking. Saussure and, even more strongly, Derrida demonstrated that meaning took place within a structure that had strange properties independent of conscious intention. To this list we must add Darwin: a sprawling system of tiny, incremental differences in phenotypes, brought about through random DNA mutation, accounts for the existence of living organisms. We bear these massive “humiliations,” these wounds to our narcissistic sense of importance.64 It’s the rigorous, structural quality of these Copernican ideas that the ecological thought must accept. The ecological thought has been trapped in a sticky web of “embedded and embodied” ideology—beliefs that we exist in a “lifeworld.” These ideas impede—sometimes they even encourage us to feel proud about impeding—the big picture. Carriers of the lifeworld idea falsely hold rationality to be the problem, rather than the social forms in which reason emerged.
We can’t go to the other extreme and take refuge in a transcendental mind. Imagining infinity might be easier, and more gratifying, than imagining very large finitudes such as 1084 cm3—the volume of the Universe (according to Manfred Eigen).65 Try this one: animals are a tiny finger of a small arm on a giant wheel of life forms mostly made up of bacteria and other single-celled forms.66 The shock of very large finitude pertains to aesthetics: the awesome is easier than the truly disquieting. A blue whale is easier on the eye than a slime mold. Consider the political implications of climate disruption. What if it’s not a huge catastrophe worthy of a Spielberg movie but a real drag, one that goes on for centuries? What if the disaster isn’t an imminent cataclysm but has already occurred? What if this is how it looks? Humiliation rubs our face in this side of reality. There is no beyond, no depth, and no comforting background. No Being, only beings.67
The ecological thought will explore reductionism, the philosophy of “less than.” It’s not so much that we need to know exactly what a “person” is, but rather that we need to know exactly what a person isn’t. It might be important to figure out whether persons really are solid, single, lasting, and independent beings. This has huge implications for ethics and politics. We need reasons for acting that aren’t bound up with self-interest. Derek Parfit’s extraordinarily prescient book Reasons and Persons (first published in 1984) begins to forge a non-self-interest-based ethics. Parfit demolishes the idea that persons are single, lasting, and independent. We need something like a “no-self” description of states of mind—“anger has arisen here” says enough of what is meaningful about “I am angry,” without fixing emotions in the amber of identity.68
Selfishness may have no basis in the real. “Selfishness” only tru
ly matters at the genomic level, where there isn’t much of a self to go around.69 We could argue that altruism, not selfishness, is hardwired into reality, since we are made of others: we’ve literally got them under our skin.70 Darwin’s idea of species resembles the Buddhist–Parfitian self: it exists, but not that much. Since we live in the mesh, because “we are the world” (that song has its uses), and because we are now conscious of ecological, evolutionary, and geological timescales, we must justify action by more than appeals to ourselves or to our immediate kin. Actions such as choosing to build, or not to build, a nuclear power station have consequences that can’t be measured in consequentialist or utilitarian terms, because we have no idea how big the goalposts are.71 Including big space and time, the ecological thought prevents us from establishing the size of the goalposts in advance. The future is one of those things like Nature, set up as a thing “over yonder”: something else that the ecological thought dissolves. If there is no world, there is no future, since we can’t assume a fixed temporal horizon, just as we can’t assume a fixed spatial one. We can’t throw empty cans into the ocean anymore and just pretend they have gone “away.” Likewise, we can’t kick the ecological can into the future and pretend it’s gone “away.”72 There is a pc version of this pretense in some humanities’ scholars insistence that non-Western people don’t or can’t (or even shouldn’t) care about global warming, since they look to their own survival interests (perhaps down the road about two generations, but no more), and to their immediate phenomena, immersed as such scholars believe non-Western peasants to be in a rich lifeworld. The implication is that only certain privileged westerners care about global warming. This is nothing more than dangerously patronizing, assuming that non-Westerners can’t hold more than one idea in mind at a time.
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