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lligkv · 5 years ago

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damnation follows any attempt to recover paradise

A while ago, I read Mark O’Connell’s 2017 book To Be a Machine, in which he investigates the transhumanist project of achieving a merger of the body and technology that allows the body to live forever—and, essentially and paradoxically, to fall away, to become a nonfactor, so you can experience yourself as pure consciousness. It’s like, if the average human wavers in the Cartesian split between mind and body, uncertain, transhumanists break the impasse by betting firmly on mind.

The book is thoughtfully constructed. All the major transhumanist figures you hear about appear: Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, Zoltan Istvan, Peter Thiel, Nick Bostrom. And O’Connell covers many facets of the transhumanist movement. He discusses life extension and cryonics; “whole brain emulation,” or the creation of a mind independent of any corporeal “substrate,” like the brain, which could feasibly be downloaded into any number of different bodies or substrates altogether; the possibility of artificial ultraintelligence, and the corresponding activism in the face of the existential risk such AI poses to humanity; the augmentation of the human body, as pursued by corporations and the state and military and as pursued by the laypeople and amateur biohackers known as “grinders”; and the idea that we could within our lifetimes reach “longevity escape velocity”—the magical point at which the science of life extension has advanced far enough that it’s easy to access and take advantage of and the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die becomes irrelevant.

It’s all shot through with a few major themes. One is the battle transhumanists wage versus “deathism,” their term for what they believe their critics suffer from, namely a need to protect yourself from death by trying to convince yourself it isn’t terrible. And two, transhumanism as but the latest incarnation of an age-old religious impulse: the desire for transcendence and eternal life—now, through technology, as before through religion.

I had such strong feelings of anger and contempt for the transhumanists after reading it, though. Maybe I’m guilty of being “deathist”: perhaps I mask my terror of death by pretending I’m okay with the fact that I’ll experience it. It’s certainly true I haven’t confronted death as closely as, say, Roen Horn—a young man who accompanies Zoltan Istvan in his campaign bus as his assistant during Istvan’s bid for the 2016 presidential nomination as the Transhumanist Party candidate, who came to transhumanism after a terrible childhood accident made him nearly bleed out. And it’s a clever move on O’Connell’s part to characterize Horn as he does. Initially, Horn seems a textbook incel type—being twenty-eight and so convinced a woman would cheat on him that he’s never pursued a relationship. But then O’Connell reveals the fact of the accident and the “darkness” it reveals to Horn, the “black terror beneath the thin surface of the world,” and that makes you realize why Horn is frightened by death as he is. It’s harder to dismiss him after that.

Transhumanism often seems the result of such extreme near-death experience. Tim Cannon, one of the grinders O’Connell writes about, had experiences of addiction that reduced his lived condition to its animal essence—making him beholden to his body, all urge and impulse beyond his own conscious control—in ways that left him desperate to hack it and transcend it. And Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, a VC firm focused on life extension technology—and all of twenty years old when O’Connell speaks to her—reports being rattled to her core by watching her grandmother die. The experience brought her to understand there’s a bodily decay in store for her and everyone she knows that she can do nothing to stop. And it leaves her obsessed with extending the human lifespan as the “correct” thing to do.

But it's only children who fear death in as total and paranoid a fashion as Deming or Cannon seem to. And at some point, children grow up. They become adults. They come to understand death as an inevitability, even if that’s only in the abstract. They come to realize it’s death that gives the time we are alive its meaning. They don’t need to denigrate the human body by sneering that people are mere “monkeys,” as Cannon does. They don’t live in atavistic terror of aging as do Deming or Aubrey de Grey (who leads the transhumanist group SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). And they devote their time and attention to curing the ills that plague the world now, rather than fixing their eyes on projects like defeating death. Or creating colonies in outer space—which seems driven by a similarly childish zeal on the parts of people like Peter Thiel, if one that’s less terrified—and bringing on the Singularity, the point, predicted by futurist Ray Kurzweil, at which the merger between humans and technology becomes so complete that technology’s evolution entirely supersedes human evolution.

“To the charge,” O’Connell writes, “that such a merger” between human and machine “would obliterate our humanity, Kurzweil counters that the Singularity is in fact a final achievement of the human project, an ultimate vindication of the very quality that has always defined and distinguished us as a species—our constant yearning for a transcendence of our physical and mental limitations.” When I read those lines, I wanted to yell at Kurzweil: The yearning to transcend our physical and mental imitations is not meant to be fulfilled! I remember scribbling that line in my notebook on the train home from work just as I heard a man in the seats across from mine telling his seatmate about the intense cancer treatments he was going through. And that’s bravery to me. That’s what I admire: the ability to face the fact of the body’s fragility, rather than looking to obliterate it.

Sometimes I found myself thinking that the transhumanists, driven by greed (to experience, to colonize) and fear (of death, so childish in its intensity) were deformed people. I know this isn’t a good word to use. But I wasn’t a good person I was reading this book. I could feel my heart turn in revulsion as I encountered all these people who treated being alive, finite, human as a problem to be solved. The chapter on the grinders, “Biology and Its Discontents,” was particularly trying. When O’Connell reveals that Tim Cannon, deep in his alcoholism and spiraling, had once tried to kill himself, for a vicious instant I thought, If only he had succeeded. I just couldn’t take his sneering contempt—his saying, so often, things like, “People want to stay being the monkeys they are. They don’t like to acknowledge that their brains aren’t giving them the full picture, aren’t allowing them to make rational choices. They think they’re in control, but they’re not.”

There’s this moral superiority there. This assumption that you’re better than other people; other people are idiots, and you alone are stripped of illusion. I hate that—that loathing for your fellow man’s fallibilities as though you yourself have none. I hate that more than anything.

What’s more, I hate the apparent lack of regard for consequences on the part of so many transhumanists. In her book Being Numerous, Natasha Lennard writes about Paul Virilio’s notion of the “accident”: that “which is contained within, and brought into the world by, the inventions of progress […] itself.” In other words, when you invent a plane, the possibility of a plane crash follows. Often the transhumanists seem entirely unconscious of the possibilities their tech is bringing into existence. That’s simply outside the scope of their narrow remit. When Randal Koene, who runs the whole brain emulation organization Carboncopies, is confronted with the possibility that the downloading of minds to different substrates might unlock an entirely new level of invasive advertising, he basically shrugs it off. In that, he’s like just about everyone O’Connell talks to, every tech billionaire and devotee of any renown in our horrible historical moment: in love with the possibilities, unconcerned with the consequences.

Just because the possibility of developing a certain type of technology is there doesn’t mean it needs to be done. Where is the restraint? Maybe that’s longer a virtue in a late capitalist society, after the end of history, in a time when we don’t have any overarching societal narrative that would make restraint something to want to practice or that would make some notion of the human something we want to consider before we eradicate it. In this world we live in, everyone, atomized, pursues their own ends. What you want, what’s possible, and what you have the means to make possible are the only standards by which a decision to act is made.

Most of the transhumanists are frighteningly cavalier, to the layperson of a humanist bent like me, about the stages of the revolution they foresee. Ray Kurzweil, for one, talks about the trajectory he’d like to see so casually. “What would be a nice scenario is that we first get smart drugs and wearable technologies. And then life extension technologies. And then, finally, we get uploaded, and colonize space and so on.” And so on. Again, reading that line, I wanted to yell: Nothing entitles you to space! Have we not learned not to colonize?

It all speaks to the experience of reading To Be a Machine, which is this kind of Mobius strip of revulsion (“hell no”) and relenting (“I mean, maybe” or “well I guess” or “am I the problem here?”). At one point, O’Connell drops a quote from D. H. Lawrence: “science and machinery, radio, airplanes, vast ships, zeppelins, poison gas, artificial silk: these things nourish man’s sense of the miraculous as magic did in the past.” And it’s like “miraculous” is one side of a coin whose other side is “horrifying,” and O’Connell spends the entire book flipping that coin as he talks impartially about the transhumanist movement, showing you first one face of it and then the other.

It's a credit to O'Connell that he could stay as evenhanded as he is reporting on these people. I even came to dislike his repeated tendency to express fond, largely tolerant and even feelings toward people who sounded as inhuman and afraid of life as Roen Horn did. Maybe I was disappointed I couldn't be as gracious as he was even though I like to consider myself a kind person who's inclined to empathy.

Or more likely it’s because I lack O’Connell’s proximity to religion. Ultimately, his ethos of impartiality comes from being able to so clearly see the parallels between transhumanist and religious desire. This is a parallel that I, not being a religious person at all, having no real religious instinct, would never have felt so intuitively or described so convincingly. It leads O’Connell to afford the transhumanists the same respect he would the devotees of any other religion. As he’s listening to Tim Cannon share his vision of eventually being not a body but simply a “series of nodes” peacefully exploring the universe for all time, he writes

I was going to say that all of this sounded hugely expensive; I was going to ask who was going to pay for it all. But I thought better of it, in the way that you might think better of making a joke about the central tenets of a person’s faith after they had taken the trouble to explain them to you.

And transhumanism is ultimately a faith: a contemporary reflection of the ancient desire to be delivered of the body, redeemed of its weakness and sin, no longer subject to its curse. The Singularity—however that is defined, whatever particular perfect union between human and machine a particular transhumanist aims for—is the Rapture. The world after this Singularity, affording as it does answers to all scientific questions and cures for all diseases, will be Eden.

And everyone in this book believes themselves to be among the elect.

And if, as the transhumanists believe, humans are effectively computers, in the way their minds operate—just with substrates made of meat—it’s also the destiny of obsolete technology to die. And so it is just for humans to wipe themselves out to usher in cyborgs and AI and superintelligence. It’s just technology, drawing all the way from the first spear a human being ever threw, achieving its teleological end.

But—as O’Connell also points out, the attempts religion has made to make good on its own teleological narratives tell us that damnation always follows any human attempt to recover paradise.

#books #literary #nonfiction #mark o'connell #ray kurzweil #aubrey grey #laura deming #tim cannon #zoltan istvan #peter thiel #transhumanism #the singularity #the end of history

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