[p2p-research] Transhumanism and Adorno

[Michel Bauwens]

Thanks Dale,

I guess I was pleased to see someone in the TH movement at least
acknowledging that they have a problem ... at least hughes is a
social-democrat ...

I know you see no potential in them, and neither do I, as a movement, but, I
have no choice than to compose with th individuals on specific p2p projects,
as there is definitely a wing of people who are both active in floss/open
manufacturing, and sympathetic if not enthusiastic to technological promise
of the TH variety,

Michel



On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 1:02 AM, Dale Carrico <dalec at berkeley.edu> wrote:

> At the risk of seeming pedantic and cranky, what exactly is "excellent"
> about this piece?
>
> What's more commonplace than claiming your pet marginal movement speaks
> for "Reason"? Ayn Rand's dumb-dumb legions are forever declaring that they
> are champions of "enlightenment" against "irrationalists" in *precisely*
> this same way.  The correspondence is not accidental.
>
> There are lots of laundry lists of philosophers and critics in Hughes'
> piece, but none of them are actually cited nor their arguments even
> paraphrased for the most part, and many are treated as though they
> advocated planks in some shared "Official Enlightenment Program."  As
> someone who has read Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant I find it rather
> flabbergasting to find them thrown in the same drawer as Hughes does. I
> see no signs that Hughes has actually read any of these figures.
>
> Why even mention Wittgenstein or Adorno at all if you are going to reduce
> them to the sort of thing one can find on the panel of a cereal box?
> Similarly, "postmodernism," we are told is an "an implosion of
> Enlightenment," which is a metaphor corresponding to what exactly? Why is
> Spinoza assigned a place of pride in the "Age of Reason" column while
> Foucault is described instead as a presumably "anti-reason" postmodernist
> "dead-ender"? You know, Foucault wasn't exactly ignorant of Kant's "What
> Is Enlightenment" (Foucault wrote about Kant's essay *famously*) nor was
> his criticism (a word which Hughes scare-quotes when he connects it to
> postmodernists for who knows what reason, especially given that the
> closest he ever comes to actually ascribing a critical thesis to
> postmodernism he seems to agree with it) operating in a completely
> different plain with Adorno. Foucault and Derrida are treated as saying
> the same sorts of postmodern things (anyone who has read either knows this
> is like pretending Plato and Aristotle were saying the same thing).
>
> I certainly agree with Hughes that beloved transhumanist luminary and
> would-be guru Eliezer Yudowsky has a laughably facile view of human
> reason, culture, discourse, history -- but the fact remains that far more
> transhumanist-identified people find Yudkowsky's idiotic reductionism
> sympathetic than Hughes' views here (and to be honest, Hughes' own refusal
> to endorse "postmodern irrationalism" is closely akin to Yudkowsky's own
> know-nothingism, despite the fact that Hughes is laying out the same sort
> of case -- even if in an awfully flat-footed and elementary variation --
> folks excoriated as "postmodernists" by self-appointed champions of
> "Enlightenment" -- exactly like Hughes -- also often make before they move
> on to more interesting claims), just as far more trasnhumanist-identified
> people find market libertarian political views sympathetic than Hughes's
> own.
>
> Hughes is forever trying to peddle transhumanism as something it is not. I
> mean that both in the sociological sense of how actual people who actually
> participate in "transhumanist" organizations and idenitfy publicly as
> "transhumanists" demonstrably behave in the real world, but also in the
> critical sense of what is logically, topically, and tropologically
> entailed by the arguments made by and in the name of transhumanism.  The
> result is that he provides cover for facile reductionist methodologies and
> reactionary politics even while making qualified cases for their
> contraries himself.
>
> In this piece, to be completely honest, Hughes looks to me to be
> pretending to knowledges he shows no real sign of knowing or even really
> caring about on their own terms, and all in the service of a deceptive
> project to peddle his "transhumanist" movement as a more reasonable one
> than it is so that his position within it can in turn seem more reasonable
> than it is.
>
> But all of that is a distraction in my view.  The gesture of the
> futurological more generally is of a piece with [1]
> promotional/advertizing hyperbole on which consumer culture depends to
> distract potential peers from the fact that we have arrived at a
> technoscientific level which could provide for sustainable and equitable
> prosperity the better to preserve in place the hierarchies of authority
> and property of incumbent interests [2] the promissory discourses of
> neoliberal financiancialization (promises mistaken for assets) and
> industrialization (development as progress as freedom) [3] the emergency
> discourses of neoconservative insecurity (existential threats of terror,
> WMD, pandemic, singularity as proxies for disavowed militarized
> administration of and preparation for resource descent and climate
> change).
>
> As you know, I regard futurology in its most extreme sub(cult)ural
> formations -- as one finds in "movement" transhumanism, extropianism,
> singularitarianism, cybernetic totalism, techno-immortalism and so on, the
> formations with which Hughes is explicitly connected himself -- as a
> constellation of profoundly dangerous faith-based fundamentalisms (it is a
> commonplace, by the way, however paradoxical, to find adherents of
> marginal movements declaring themselves uniquely indispensable champions
> of Enlightenment against the forces of irrationalism).  "Futurology" is a
> prevalent mindset suffusing development and policy discourse, and that is
> the level at which it is most important to intervene in it.
>
> Transhumanists are an extreme and marginal variation of that more
> prevalent neoliberal/ neoconservative developmentalism -- they are
> dramatically photogenic and compelling in their extremity, and they also
> reveal with special clarity the paradoxes and contradictions that are more
> muddled in the more prevailing developmental discourses, only because,
> again in their extremity, transhumanists push these contradictions to
> their breaking point.
>
> But it is a mistake -- of which I have been guilty myself -- to take the
> superlative futurologists more seriously than their futurological kin in
> more mainstream technocratic and developmentalist policy and public
> discourses.
>
> Best to you, d
>
> > 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.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>  Things you can do from here:
> >>
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> > --
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> > thank:
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> >
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>
> --
> Dale Carrico, PhD
> Lecturer, Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley
> Visiting Faculty, San Francisco Art Institute
> http://amormundi.blogspot.com
> --------------------------------------------------
> "The Queen Is Not A Subject" -- Oscar Wilde
>
>
>


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