[p2p-research] Transhumanism and Adorno

Sun Jan 10 17:06:45 CET 2010

absolutely excellent ...

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 1:06 AM, Ryan <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader:
>
>
>  J. Hughes Problems of Transhumanism: The Unsustainable Autonomy of Reason<http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/hughes20100108/#When:21:10:15Z>
> via Ethical Technology <http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/IEETblog> on 1/8/10
>
> Reason is not self-legitimating. Like all Enlightenment advocates for
> reason, transhumanists find that the project of Reason erodes all premises
> including the superiority of reason over unreason. Consequently
> transhumanists, like Enlightenment advocates in general, need to defend our
> values with *nonrational* a prioris. Unfortunately some transhumanists
> continue to advocate a naïve conception of pure rationality as an end in
> itself.
>
>
> The Enlightenment and Reason
>
> Reason was the central value of the Enlightenment. Some historians see the
> beginning of the Enlightenment in the early seventeenth century “Age of
> Reason,” associated with the Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, and
> Berkeley. Historian Dorinda Outram defined the central claims of the
> Enlightenment around its appeal to reason:
>
> Enlightenment was a desire for human affairs to be guided by rationality
> rather than by faith, superstition, or revelation; a belief in the power of
> human reason to change society and liberate the individual from the
> restraints of custom or arbitrary authority; all backed up by a world view
> increasingly validated by science rather than by religion or tradition.
> (Outram, 1995: 3)
>
> When Kant wrote his essay (1784a) “Was ist Aufklärung” or “What is
> Enlightenment?” for the Berlinische Monatschrift, he summed up the slogan of
> the Enlightenment as “sapere aude” or “dare to know.”  Though divided by
> epistemology and theology, these thinkers attempted to ground philosophy on
> uncontestable propositions such as “cogito ergo sum.”
>
> This thorough-going undermining of all irrational a prioris led to a number
> of philosophical dead-ends, however, immediately generating a score of
> post-rationalist movements. In the midst of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques
> Rousseau valorized the primitive and decried the harmful effects of
> hyper-rationalism on morality (Glendon, 1999). After all, as Hume
> underlined, the Enlightenment had severed any connection between the IS and
> the OUGHT. Although Kant and the utilitarians would attempt to re-ground
> ethics on what appeared to be empirical observations about human nature,
> they could never answer the next question: why should ethics be grounded on
> observations about human nature and not something else, like ancient
> religious dogmas?
>
> Eighteenth century Romanticism was also a reaction to the overreach of
> reason in its assertion of the value of aesthetic and emotional experience.
> >From the eighteenth century through World War Two, movements on both the
> right and left turned against Enlightenment rationalism. On the Left, the
> Frankfurt School writers criticized the Enlightenment’s instrumental
> rationality for its complicity in authoritarianism (Adorno and Horkheimer,
> 2006; Marcuse, 1964; Saul, 1992; Gray, 1995). Various strains of feminism
> and anti-imperialism attacked the patriarchal and Eurocentric construction
> of Enlightenment reason (Harding, 1982). These post-rationalist movements
> rejected the autonomy and universality of reason because it came into
> conflict with other values of the Enlightenment, such as respect for the
> rights of persons and for cultural diversity. Meanwhile, theologians and
> philosophers of the Right blamed communism on the totalizing logic of the
> Enlightenment’s assertion of utopian reason.
>
> In the 20th century, Enlightenment rationalism also began to question its
> own first principles. One example is found in Wittgenstein’s turn from
> logical positivism. The logical positivists attempted to ban from
> philosophical discourse all terms and concepts without empirical referents.
> Ludwig Wittgenstein, although an early and influential advocate of this
> position, eventually changed his mind as he further investigated how
> language actually worked. Having turned empirical investigation on the
> process of reasoning itself, and attempting to purify language of all
> irrationality, Wittgenstein concluded that the goal was chimerical
> (Wittgenstein, 1953). Language is a series of word games in which meanings
> are created only in reference to other words and not to empirical facts. The
> positivist project of building a rational philosophy from uncontestable
> empirical observations is impossible.
>
> Foucault, Derrida, and the postmodernists also represent an implosion of
> Enlightenment reason.  Although I believe postmodernist “criticism” to be
> mostly a dead end, the essential insight is true: all claims for
> Enlightenment reason are historically situated and biased by power and
> position. The Enlightenment is just one historical narrative among many and
> there is no rational reason to choose the Enlightenment narrative over any
> other. Reason can only be argued for from metaphysical and ethical a
> prioris, even if those are only such basic assumptions as ‘it is good to be
> able to accomplish one’s intended goals.’
>
> Most tangibly, contemporary neuroscience, also a product of Enlightenment
> reason, now recognizes that reason severed from emotion is impotent. In
> Damasio’s (1994) now classic studies of patients with brain damage that
> severed the ties between emotion and decision-making, the victims were
> incapable of making decisions. The desire to stop deliberating and make a
> decision is not itself rational – it is a product of temperament. Reason was
> built to serve, but is incapable of generating its own commands.
>
>
> Transhumanists and Reason
>
> Most transhumanists argue the Enlightenment case for Reason without
> ackowledging its self-undermining nature. For instance Max More’s Extropian
> Principles codified “rational thinking” as one of its seven precepts (More,
> 1998):
>
> Like humanists, transhumanists favor reason, progress, and values centered
> on our well being rather than on an external religious authority. (More,
> 1998)
>
> The Transhumanist FAQ defines transhumanism as the consistent application
> of reason:
>
> The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and
> desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied
> reason…We might not be perfect, but we can make things better by promoting
> rational thinking, freedom, tolerance, democracy, and concern for our fellow
> human beings… Just as we use rational means to improve the human condition
> and the external world, we can also use such means to improve ourselves, the
> human organism. (Humanity+, 2003)
>
> One of the central transhumanist blogs is Less Wrong, based at Oxford
> University under the aegis of transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom and
> dedicated to “the art of refining human rationality.” A frequent
> contributor there is Eliezer Yudkowsky, an auto-didact writer on artificial
> intelligence and human cognitive biases who also is a co-founder of the
> Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Yudkowsky has said that
> one of his goals is to lead a “mass movement to train people to be
> black-belt rationalists.” The Less Wrong blog highlights Yudkowsky’s
> definitions of rationality <http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/%E2%80%9D> and
> their importance as its raison d’etre:
>
> *What Do We Mean By “Rationality”?*
>
> We mean:
>
> 1. Epistemic rationality: believing, and updating on evidence, so as to
> systematically improve the correspondence between your map and the
> territory. The art of obtaining beliefs that correspond to reality as
> closely as possible. This correspondence is commonly termed “truth” or
> “accuracy”, and we’re happy to call it that.
>
> 2. Instrumental rationality: achieving your values. Not necessarily “your
> values” in the sense of being selfish values or unshared values: “your
> values” means anything you care about. The art of choosing actions that
> steer the future toward outcomes ranked higher in your preferences. On LW we
> sometimes refer to this as “winning.”
>
> But why should we want a map that corresponds to the territory? Where do
> the values that rationality help us achieve come from? What if the valuation
> of instrumental rationality in fact is an obstacle to achieving the things
> we value, as the romantics claim, such as beauty, meaning, contentment, and
> awe? Yudkowsky goes so far as to acknowledge the problem in order to define
> it as something that is simply not to be discussed:
>
> … many of us will regard as controversial—at the very least—any construal
> of “rationality” that makes it non-normative. For example, if you say, “The
> rational belief is X, but the true belief is Y” then you are probably using
> the word “rational” in a way that means something other than what most of us
> have in mind…  Similarly, if you find yourself saying, “The rational thing
> to do is X, but the right thing to do is Y” then you are almost certainly
> using one of the words “rational” or “right” in a way that a huge chunk of
> readers won’t agree with.
>
> Fortunately for Yudkowsky, he has been ceded authority by his readers to
> write off all philosophical debate about the relationship of IS and OUGHT.
> But this will leave his transhumanist rationality experts defenseless
> debating those with different metaphysics, or when they face their own dark
> nights of the soul.
>
> One of the central philosophical debates between bioconservatives and
> transhumanists, and “bioliberals” more generally, over the last two decades
> has been over the legitimacy of emotivist arguments such as Leon Kass’
> (1997) “wisdom of repugnance” (Roache and Clarke, 2009). In 2003, the
> bioconservative Yuval Levin wrote in “The Paradox of Conservative Bioethics”
> of the tragic dilemma faced by conservatives trying to devise rational
> arguments in defense of irrational taboos. Once liberal democracy forces the
> conservative to abandon appeals to tradition or intuition, democratic debate
> naturalizes the new.
>
> The very fact that everything must be laid out in the open in the
> democratic age is destructive of the reverence that gives moral intuition
> its authority. A deep moral taboo cannot simply become another option among
> others, which argues its case in the market place. Entering the market and
> laying out its wares takes away from its venerated stature, and its stature
> is the key to its authority. By the very fact that it becomes open to
> dispute—its pros and cons tallied up and counted—the taboo slowly ceases to
> exist… A conservative bioethics…is forced to proceed by pulling up its own
> roots, and to begin by violating some of the very principles it seeks to
> defend. (Levin, 2003)
>
> Transhumanists and the Enlightenment face the opposite dilemma: how to
> advocate for rationality in a way that avoids its potential for
> self-erosion. Just as the bioconservatives cannot validate their taboos and
> ethical a prioris in the public square, there is likewise no *rational*reason why society should reject taboos and superstition in favor of a
> transhuman future; value judgments in favor of tradition, faith, and taboo,
> or in favor of progress, reason, and liberty both stem from pre-rational
> premises.
>
> Transhumanists need to acknowledge their own historical situatedness and
> defend their normative and epistemological first principles as existential
> choices instead of empirical absolutes somehow derived from reason.  One
> example of a transhumanist acknowledging the pre-rational roots of
> transhumanist values is anti-aging activist and IEET Fellow Aubrey de Grey’s
> 2008 essay “Reasons and methods for promoting our duty to extend healthy
> life indefinitely.” De Grey directly addresses Leon Kass’ emotivist argument
> and turns it on its head. What, de Grey asks, is more repugnant than
> sickness, aging, and death? Those arguing the anti-aging cause, de Grey
> concludes, should start from these shared intuitions and prejudices instead
> of starting from reasoned arguments that presume the “objectivity of
> morality” and the “unreliability of gut feelings.” When I first heard de
> Grey’s argument, I demurred, thinking he had given away too much to the
> emotivists. But that was simply my own fear of letting go of my superior
> rational ethical viewpoint.
>
> When I imagine the project of Reason, I think of building a house in
> mid-air. I look over at the other houses floating in mid-air, the
> pre-Enlightenment houses, and they are ramshackle huts of mud daub and
> random flotsam, tied up with string. To get from one room to another in our
> neighbors’ houses, you have to crawl to the basement and then up a laundry
> chute. They sit in darkened rooms with few windows, and none that show that
> the house is not in fact rooted to the earth.
>
> With the pure, lean precision of Reason we have built our houses of
> Kantianism, utilitarianism, liberal democracy, and other clean architectural
> marvels, Frank Lloyd Wright structures of thought with lots of windows, and
> even glass floors. But most of us steadfastly ignore the fact that, just
> like our neighbors, we are floating in mid-air. Acknowledging that we are
> all in mid-air and don’t know how we got aloft in the first place is damned
> scary, and we have repeatedly seen people defect from our Enlightenment
> houses with glass floors to our neighbors’ houses of faith and dogma where
> they are not forced to look down. We need to learn the courage to
> acknowledge that we got this thing in the air through an act of will—that
> Reason is a good tool but that our values and moral codes are not grounded
> in Reason—or else we will lose many more people to the forces of
> irrationality in the future.
>
>
> References
>
> Adorno, T. W., and Max Horkheimer. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans.
> Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP.
>
> Berlin, Isaiah. 1998. The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays.
> Farrar Straus Giroux.
>
> Damasio, Antionio. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human
> Brain. Putnam.
>
> de Grey, Aubrey D.N.J. 2008. Reasons and methods for promoting our duty to
> extend healthy life indefinitely. <http://jetpress.org/v18/degrey.htm>Journal of Evolution and Technology 18(1): 50-55.
>
> Glendon, Mary Ann. 1999. Rousseau & the Revolt Against Reason. First Things
> 96 (October 1999): 42-47.
>
> Gray, John. 1995. Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close
> of the Modern Age. Routledge.
>
> Harding, Sandra. 1982. Is Gender a Variable in Conceptions of Rationality?
> A Survey of Issues. Dialectica 36: 226-241.
>
> Humanity+. 2003. Transhumanist FAQ.<http://humanityplus.org/learn/philosophy/faq>
>
> Kant, Immanuel. 1784. Was ist Aufklärung<http://www.uni-potsdam.de/u/philosophie/texte/kant/aufklaer.htm>.
> Berlinische Monatschrift Dezember-Heft: 481-494.
>
> Kass, Leon R. 1997. The wisdom of repugnance. The New Republic 216(22):
> 17-26.
>
> Levin, Yuval. 2003. The Paradox of Conservative Bioethics. The New Atlantis
> 1(1): 53-65.
>
> Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of
> advanced industrial society. Boston: Beacon Press.
>
> More, Max.  1998. The Extropian Principles v3<http://www.maxmore.com/extprn3.htm>.
> Extropy Institute.
>
> Outram, Dorinda. 1995. The Enlightenment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
> University Press.
>
> _____. 2005. The Enlightenment, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
> Press.
>
> Roache, Rebecca and Steve Clarke. 2009. Bioconservatism, Bioliberalism and
> Repugnance. Monash Bioethics Review 28(1):4.1-21.
>
> Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953/2001. Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell
> Publishing.
>
>
>
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