From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Jun 27 2001 - 08:53:25 MDT
This Saturday I, like many of the other participants of the TransVision
conference here in Berlin, attended the exhibition Körperwelten.
Professor Günter von Hagen has developed a method of plastinating organs
and entire bodies, so that the water in the tissue is replaced by solid
plastic. This turns them into dry, solid objects that can be handled and
exhibited. Had he just done the standard specimens I guess the
exhibition would have been merely yet another anatomy exhibition,
visited by a few. But he went back to the classical anatomic drawings of
Vesalius and other renaissance artists, and created complex lifelike
dissections. Some merely show standing bodies with various organ systems
revealed. Others are artfully dissected to reveal more complex
relationships, including exploded views where all organs are separated
and hanging in wires, various slices or the muscular system has taken a
step ahead from the skeleton. The most interesting and controversial
exhibits include a man holding his own skin aloft, a body with exposed
nervous system pondering a chessboard and a dissected rider on a
dissected horse, holding their brains in his hands. In these cases there
is a definite aesthetic component, making people debate whether it is
art or not. Günter von Hagen claims it is just anatomy, but deliberately
made as lifelike and accessible as possible. If people want to call it
art, then it is their problem. This might be a hedge, since while it may
be allowed to donate ones body to science, at present it doesn’t seem to
be legal to donate one’s body to art.
In my own opinion, it was definitely good art. The bodies expressed not
just anatomical information, but also a celebration of the human body as
an aesthetic object. The runner body, where different parts of the same
body outruns themselves, is in many ways a pastiche of the futurist
paintings of last century and expresses what they sought to express in a
radical three-dimensional authentic way. The woman holding out her
metastasised liver towards the viewer has a both plaintive and proud
expression – ”yes, this thing killed me, but look at how beautiful I
still am!”. In a way this is a kind of transhumanist art. If you can’t
automorph forever, you can at least leave a beautiful and meaningful
corpse that expresses something. While I would prefer to be cryonically
preserved, if that is not possible for me I wouldn’t mind being
literally turned into art.
I bought the exhibition catalogue, and it contains some interesting
essays by various people on anatomy as an art or craft, how people have
reacted to the exhibition and the ethics of it. So far the exhibition
has been a huge success, while at the same time plenty of critics have
railed against it (no art critics to my knowledge, but much clergy and
even some anatomists). The main issue seems to be whether this treatment
of bodies is an affront to human dignity. A bioethicist came to the
conclusion that it was OK, and that the real ethical issues were more in
the media coverage. A Lutheran bishop opposed the exhibition and thought
that it eroded human dignity. A philosopher gave a lengthy analysis of
the concept of human dignity and in the end concluded there was no
problem. I really recommend the catalogue for an accessible debate on
the human dignity issue. It got me thinking about posthuman dignity.
Human dignity is one of those powerful big words that everybody uses
like a trump card to win a discussion – “But that is against human
dignity!” How do you respond to that? Most people can’t define it, and
it is one of those really tricky concepts. Apparently the first sentence
of the German constitution puts human dignity as the central value: “The
dignity of man is inviolable” but it was deliberately left undefined as
the constitution was formulated!
The original conception of human dignity among the Athenians and Romans
was that it was something you earned through achievement and social
respect. The term we use today is more related to something everybody
has. Cicero introduced the idea that human dignity was something
everybody had intrinsically, and this idea flourished when Christianity
was introduced. Humans were created in the image of God, and hence even
the most wretched human had an intrinsic dignity that mustn’t be
violated. Enlightenment thinkers didn’t buy the God argument, but based
intrinsic human dignity on that humans alone among all animals possessed
the faculties of reason and moral self-determination (Kant).
Professor Franz Josef Wetz argues in his piece in the catalogue that
this kind of definition runs into trouble when we try to apply it as a
global ethical guideline in a liberal democratic society. If we have
freedom of religion and thought, how can we put a certain conception of
humanity above any other and from this derive human dignity? He also
thinks that the dethronement of man as the pinnacle of creation removes
any scientific basis for giving him special status, further undermining
the concept of an intrinsic human dignity. At the same time we obviously
need this concept when setting an ethical basis for our laws and
constitutions. His solution is to base human ethics instead on our
shared vulnerability and need for each other: it is an objective to aim
for, rather than some property we automatically have. I have problems
with this position, although it might do for setting up constitutions in
less ambiguous ways.
But what about a transhumanist position on human dignity?
We can do far worse than simply inheriting the enlightenment ideas of
human dignity. It is a nice and solid concept, although it is being
attacked from all sides by postmodernists, romantics, cognitive
neuroscientists and religious people. But I think it is possible to
construct a more transhumanist “posthuman dignity” that is in better
accord with what we today know about our development and ourselves. Here
is my attempt:
We are weak and vulnerable beings, but we are constantly striving to
retain our existence and grow according to our goals. Not only that, but
we are aware of our own existence and can put it in relation to the
world and rationally plan for our mutual future. We can change our minds
and hence our behaviour as we learn more about the world and ourselves,
making us ethical subjects. In fact, by using our rationality we can, if
we so chose, remake not just our immediate surroundings but the Earth or
the visible universe. The same goes for our bodies, minds and culture –
there are few limits on how much they can be transformed or extended.
Hence, we are paradoxically weak and powerful, limited and unlimited, at
the same time.
We come into existence through a complex interaction between our genes
and the environment, creating at first a simple entity that gradually
grows. This growth is a dialectic not just between genes and
environment, but also our own choices – by acting we affect and create
ourselves. Instead of being merely objects, we are processes that grow
through time. We cannot be predicted with less effort than simulating
our entirety of being, and we are highly contingent systems. Hence each
human is unique and can never be recreated.
These reasons fit together in a concept of human dignity where humans –
and other systems sharing these properties – have an innate dignity as
being unique seeds for potentially infinite growth and creation. We need
to safeguard our dignity since we are vulnerable (and even posthuman
gods will be vulnerable in their own way) and our potential or
uniqueness can be hurt.
In order to set up working multicultural societies we need as simple and
widely acceptable notions as possible. But it seems to me that this
dignity model would be acceptable to a wide range of views, and in the
worst case one can rely on the minimalist ideologically neutral
interpretation of Wetz which is included inside it, and within the
transhumanist community focus on the more positive aspects of human
dignity.
Note that this concept of human dignity generalises well, and also
suggests what other entities to protect (lets call it posthuman
dignity). Biospheres may not be rational entities, but can give rise to
them and are in themselves processes creating the new (one might argue
whether they are self- perpetuating or not; even if one does not buy the
Gaia theory the tendency of individual lifeforms to fight for survival
will produce an epiphenomenal tendency for biospheres to persist).
Living beings in general might not fulfil many of the properties above,
but becomes worthy of respect although not as ethical subjects. AI with
sufficient general abilities would also be subject to posthuman dignity,
as would likely any intelligent alien life we encounter and most
proposed posthumans. We might have problems with intelligent lookup
tables and their ilk, but any definition has its limiting cases.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:08:18 MST