What`s to Become of Us? The Posthuman Person

What’s to Become of Us? The Posthuman Person

By Jeph Holloway, Professor of Theology and Ethics, East Texas Baptist University

“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” (Hamlet, Act IV, Scene V)

While some have sought to raise the alarm,¹ others announce with eager anticipation that the time for the “Singularity” is at hand—that techno-apocalyptic moment when through the combined use of robotics, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence human consciousness can leave behind its limited, frail, and mortal embodied condition and seize control of personal evolution so as to experience any “virtual” reality imaginable—to become Posthuman.² What we may be in this posthuman era will indeed be up for grabs. “It is difficult,” says Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, “for us to imagine what it would be like to be a posthuman person.” What is evident among posthuman aspirants, though, is the quest for limitless intellectual power, indefinite youth and vitality, and absolute control over emotions and consciousness—goals theoretically attainable through increasingly sophisticated and powerful bio- and computer technologies.³ In the meantime, “transhumanists” will take advantage of the accelerating pace of technological development and scientific understanding to improve radically the human condition and to lengthen its durability to the point where a person could in some way survive to see the arrival of the posthuman era. Such technologies as genetic engineering, artificial organs, psychopharmacology, and human-computer interfaces might provide prolonged life and enhanced experience enough to enable a person to survive to that point when, for example, consciousness might be up-loadable into a cloud of self-replicating nanobots which could take any shape or form wanted and could live forever in a world matched to any and every desire.

One immediate response to the posthuman agenda is that its adherents have watched too much Star Trek. While that may or may not be the case, transhumanist and posthumanist visions of a cybernetic future for humanity profess simply to extrapolate from the accelerating rate of technological innovation and argue that by the mid-point of the 21^st century we will have already seen fundamental changes in the human condition toward its posthuman destiny.⁴ Such claims demand scrutiny and for Christians the entire agenda calls for evaluation in light of fundamental convictions concerning human nature. A first task, though, is simply to ask how some could have come to the point that a hoped for digital future appears more attractive than present embodied existence. How might we account for the primacy given to an arbitrary, disembodied will that refuses to recognize any boundaries separating nature from artifice?

A full genealogy of Transhumanism and Posthumanism is beyond what can here be offered. Certain broad movements in the sweep of Western thought, however, certainly have contributed to an outlook that, when combined with ongoing technological developments, go far to account for the transhumanist/posthumanist vision.⁵

Bostrom himself asserts that Trans/Posthumanism “can be viewed as an outgrowth of secular humanism and the Enlightenment.”⁶ While those influences are not to be denied, a fuller assessment will have to recognize “the complicity of Western metaphysics in a cybernetic agenda, especially the role played by Christian volunteerism and Neoplatonism” in elevating an immaterial soul over a material order that could and should be mastered by the human will.⁷ As far back as the 12^th century Europe’s monastic orders provided the setting in which, according to David Noble, there developed “a connection between the mundane and the celestial, between technology and transcendence.”⁸ The “mechanical arts” were even conceived as a divine bestowment aiding humanity in the recovery of its lost estate. The late middle ages and into the early modern period saw an increasing sense of the “mechanization of nature” above which there reigned a free human consciousness which could turn its rational skills toward the technological mastery of nature for the sake of humanity’s improvement. One pivotal figure joining “applied science” to a millenarian view of humanity’s growing dominion over nature was Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon considered the “useful arts” of technology and engineering to be essential to humanity’s dominion over creation and thus “rehabilitation of past glory and primeval bliss.”⁹ What this would look like, according to Gerald McKenny’s account of the “Baconian project,” would be two-fold: the elimination of suffering and expansion of the realm of human choice—“in short, to relieve the human condition of subjection to the whims of fortune or the bonds of natural necessity.”¹⁰ It hardly needs stressing, though, that Bacon’s biblically inspired vision was one of ameliorative recovery, not of heedless transformation. The mechanical arts—technology—would serve humanity’s restoration, not boundless revolution.

It fell to René Descartes (1596-1650) to strengthen the account of a distinct and free mind over against a subordinate and inferior material order that includes the human body. For Descartes, what is essential to human existence is a mind, the res cogitans (“thinking thing”), fundamentally distinct from the body, the res extensa (“extended thing”). The immortal mind is godlike, incorporeal, and exists strictly to think: “What then am I? A thing which thinks” And what is more, “I am not a collection of members which we call the human body” (Meditations II). And yet for Descartes there is still some sort of relationship between mind and body, “For the mind depends . . . on the temperament and disposition of the bodily organs” (Discourse on Method, VI). The distinction and relationship between the two makes possible and necessary for Descartes his own extension of the Baconian project, now specifically applied through medicine. While current medical knowledge is limited, there remains the confidence that “we could be free of an infinitude of maladies both of body and mind, and even also possibly of the infirmities of age, if we had sufficient knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies with which nature has provided us” (Discourse on Method, VI). For Descartes, the divine mind of humanity has the task of investigating nature through a “practical philosophy by means of which, knowing the force and the action of fire, water, air, the stars, heaven and all other bodies that environ us . . . we can . . . render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature” (Discourse on Method, VI). Included in this mastery of nature would be the human body, which Descartes considers “as being a sort of machine . . . built up and composed of nerves, muscles, veins, blood, and skin” distinguishable from the mind so as to come under its sovereignty (Meditations, VI).

This Cartesian dualism of a free and independent mind imposing its sovereign will over a mechanized nature—including the human body—provides many of “the assumptions that underlie the dream of mind transfer” cherished by Posthumanism.¹¹ Of course, Descartes had to address the question of whether this free and independent mind has any genuine acquaintance with the external world of nature and bodies. While his belief in a good God that would not deceive permits for Descartes the confidence that the mind’s perceptions of external reality are accurate, not all were so trusting. David Hume (d. 1776) raised the specter of a break in any relationship between mind and external world and occasioned an all-out skepticism that stirred the thinking of Immanuel Kant (d. 1804). Kant’s insistence that we can and do know the world of appearances came, though, at the price of admission that we know such a world, not in spite of, but because of our minds’ active participation in its creation. Our minds, according to Kant, do not passively receive sensory impressions that grant a direct representation of an objective reality. Instead, they actively organize, interpret, and arrange sensory impressions according to universal categories of thought (cause and effect, number, time, etc.) that provide all humans with sufficient knowledge of the world in which we live. Kant believed he had adequately addressed the epistemological crisis created by Hume’s skepticism. His solution would work so long as there remained wide agreement that the mind with its universal categories of thought (the Transcendental “I”) still possessed a measure of independence from the material order it actively constructed. It would not be long, however, before such confidence was challenged.

The nineteenth century would see a steady “process of the naturalizing of the soul,” challenging the Cartesian notion of a human mind that stood free and independent of the material order. “At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most progressive intellectuals still held that humans had been made in the image of God. By the end of the century . . . most held that humans had been made in the image of biology and society.”¹² With Charles Darwin on the one hand and Karl Marx of the other, we have the insistence that not only are humans completely immersed in the natural order, but every aspect of human consciousness, “including not only mundane, day-to-day reflections, but law, morality, religion, and philosophy, is but a reflection of underlying social relations, which are wholly material.”¹³ The total impact of this shift in human self-understanding is certainly beyond narration here, but its affect on any tendencies toward Posthumanism can be tracked to some degree.

For one thing, to submerge human nature totally into the wider natural order is to deprive humanity of what had for some time been denied the material realm—a telos. Study of any material object had long been guided by Aristotle’s account of causality. Investigation would proceed with search for the object’s material cause (for a statue, marble), its formal cause (the design in mind), its efficient cause (the sculptor), and its telos, goal, or final cause (beauty). The search for final causes in the material order is a key ingredient of any natural theology that claims to discern divine purpose and design in the universe. At the very origins of modern science, however, is a dismissal of such a search as outside the boundaries of empirical inquiry. Any concern for such is entirely unfruitful for study of the material order. Bacon spoke of final causes as “barren virgins,” while Descartes demanded concentration “on the immediate mechanical causes of natural phenomena.”¹⁴

If humans are placed strictly within the material order, then they can only be evaluated and assessed in light of human nature as it is and without regard to any notion of a telos or any grand narrative of a purpose for human existence. It is precisely this loss of telos that Alasdair MacIntyre says lies behind the moral fragmentation and emotivism of our age. Without a sense of what humans are for, there is no frame of reference for judging what counts for the human good or what qualities of life can be said to reflect the ultimate trajectory of human existence. If the notion of what a watch is for is entirely up for grabs, then to insist that a watch keep accurate time is simply one arbitrary preference among many possibilities.¹⁵

It should be no surprise, then, that the naturalization of the human would also ultimately lead to the loss of the very idea of a fixed, stable self or of the idea of the normatively human. If the “natural” world is constructed, then so is the “self” that does the constructing. With his reliance upon a thoroughly biological account of all life, Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900) insists that any sense of a unity of consciousness that would account for the human subject is a useless fiction. The notion of a unitary self represented by the little word “I” is simply the result of the bewitchment of language, and we do not need to mistake grammar for reality. “It may even be said that here too, when we desire to descend into the river of what seems to be our own most intimate and personal being, there applies the dictum of Heraclitus: we cannot step into the same river twice.”¹⁶ The absolute rejection by Nietzsche of any sense of teleology—whether theological (e.g., Christianity), philosophical (e.g., Hegel), or biological (e.g., Darwin)—leaves only a world of constant and purposeless motion, the Dionysian whirlwind of pure natural energy overwhelming any and all stability, boundaries, and subjectivity.¹⁷ Without purpose or goal there is no stable self in the world any more than there is a stable world beyond what language falsely creates.¹⁸ While this loss of telos and subjectivity might be the occasion for nihilistic despair by some, unbridled rage and lust by others, for the Nietzschean Übermensch the loss of a false equilibrium provides every opportunity for life’s realization, its “instinct for growth, for durability, for an accumulation of forces, for power.”¹⁹ It must be remembered, however, that this growth and accumulation is completely without purpose, guidance, direction, or intent. It is simply the will-to-power. Indeed, “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides.”²⁰ The only “given” in this world is the world of “our desires and passions.” According to Nietzsche, “We can rise or sink to no other ‘reality’ than the reality of our drives.”²¹

While Nietzsche would not likely approve of the posthumanist agenda, Posthumanism cannot likely be explained apart from him. From Nietzsche we have thrust in our faces the arbitrary self, ever-seeking power in a world artificially constructed and entirely without inherent meaning, a world that can and must bend to the demands of the will-to-power. The posthuman vision of an arbitrary self unconstrained by the boundaries of nature, because it is totally immersed in boundless nature, is but a technological innovation away from realization.

This innovation, however, is not yet that of some advance in genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, or nanotechnology that permits a farewell to embodiment. It is of a new role for technology that no longer functions as a tool used by humans, but now as an agent, a determinate possessing the capacity to constitute human experience.²² It is no longer a question of asking how humanity will employ advanced technologies in genetics, robotics, and nanoscience. Rather, the question is, according to Elaine Graham, “To what extent is technology reshaping our experiences and understandings of what it means to be human?” In a Baconian/Cartesian world of sovereign mind over matter, technology simply provides “tools, devices, and procedures to assist human living.” But in a world where mind and matter, humanity and nature, the real and the constructed have all merged, “technologies . . . are more than mere appendages to autonomous human reason. They actually affect our experiences and apprehensions of what it means to be human so that we cannot conceive of ourselves independent of our tools and technologies.”²³

Already a “posthuman sensibility” operates, certainly in any context where technology is no longer “other” but has been fully “assimilated into everyday human functioning.” Whether the talk is of prosthetics, cochlear implants, heart pacemakers, MP3 players, lap-tops, the Internet, gene therapy, or assisted reproduction, “biological humans are everywhere surrounded—and transformed—into mixtures of machine and organism.” In this environment “what we call ‘nature’ has [already] been significantly reshaped by technology, and technology, in turn, has become assimilated into ‘nature’ as a fully functioning component of organic life itself.”²⁴

Trans/Posthumanists eagerly anticipate those technological advances that promise increased longevity, heightened intelligence, direct human-computer interface, and eventually the grail of an “up-loadable” consciousness into a virtual reality where perceptions of time and space are entirely programmable. That anticipation is fostered and sustained, however, by a disposition that no longer simply seeks ease from suffering and expansion of human choices, but sees formal notions of human being as arbitrary and sees no reason why choices cannot include new combinations or constructions of the relationship between the organic and the non-organic, even if such combinations are not recognizably “human.” While such combinations are not yet entirely possible, culturally the Posthuman has already arrived.

This present disposition expectantly awaits imminent realization of its grandest dreams. The World Transhumanist Association’s web site asserts in its vision statement: “Humanity will be radically changed by technology in the future. We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition, including such parameters as the inevitability of aging, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, suffering, and our confinement to the planet Earth.”²⁵ One critic detects in this agenda “levels of self-indulgence and megalomania that are simply off the charts” and wonders how such “tawdry notions could have attracted such a large audience at all.”²⁶ Others appeal to the dystopic depictions of a posthumanist future in science fiction literature and film to ask if perhaps technology is not already out of control.²⁷ Perhaps posthumanist aspirations are nothing but the visions of an adolescent male sense of invulnerability seeking license for perpetual self-indulgence, and all this dressed up in the language of technological innovation.²⁸ It is tempting to dismiss the transhumanist/posthumanist agenda as geek testosterone on a jump drive. We should not be quick to do so.

While many of the goals of Trans/Posthumanism might seem farfetched, aspirants point to 1) the already remarkable achievements of biotechnology, robotics, information technology, and nanotechnology and 2) the ongoing acceleration of such technological advancements, the pace of which will only proceed at an exponential rate. To make his point about the pace at which technological innovations proceeds, Ray Kurzweil cites a quaint prediction from a 1949 volume of Popular Mechanics: “Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons.”²⁹ Of course, many digital watches today possess more computational power than did the room-sized computers of the 1940s. Given the accelerating pace of computational performance, Kurzweil projects that personal computers will match human brain capacity by around 2020.³⁰ While computational performance alone does not guarantee the promise of a posthumanist future, advances in information technology, Kurzweil argues, will support the acceleration of innovations in other areas—genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics—that will result in “interplay and myriad synergies” as a consequence of “multiple intertwined technological advances.”³¹ Given sufficient artificial intelligence the other required posthuman technologies will certainly follow.

It is the prospect of the up-loadable mind, however, that occasions the most skepticism, as it begs affirmative answers to the most debated questions. Is human consciousness reducible to a digital format? Is the mind essentially software? Are the operations of a living, working brain reproducible in a non-organic environment? How these questions are related to one another and how they might even be independently answered are fiercely debated. In any case, what Transhumanism hopes and what Posthumanism assumes is that the essential core of personal identity can be scanned using advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques and all its “salient details” reinstated “into a suitably powerful computer substrate” capturing “a person’s entire personality, memory, skills, and history.”³² Sticklers might wonder what counts for “salient details,” but the question of whether such an up-loaded mind would fully correspond to the current embodied mind is somewhat irrelevant for the true Posthumanist, since the self at any moment is an artificial construct to begin with. Besides, such indeterminacy is part of what puts the “Post” into “Posthumanism.”

Question of “self” and “personality,” however, perhaps occasion the greatest disquietude for the Christian and call for serious reflection on Posthumanism in light of fundamental convictions concerning human nature. In some ways, the posthumanist agenda shares many points of correspondence with the Christian faith. Brent Waters has identified several key areas of agreement between Posthumanism and Christian theology: 1) Posthumanists and Christians agree that the current state of the human condition is less than ideal, 2) both agree that it is important to seek release from this condition, 3) both Christians and Posthumanists see death as the final enemy, and 4) both place their hope in a future that lies beyond the reach of human mortality.³³ If there are similarities, however, it is because Posthumanism represents a current expression of what John Milbank has traced throughout the history and aspirations of modernity. While Nick Bostrom and others would assert the secular character of Trans/Posthumanism, Milbank insists that what we call the secular “. . . does not just borrow inherently inappropriate modes of expression from religion as the only discourse to hand . . . , but is actually constituted in its secularity by ‘heresy’ in relation to orthodox Christianity, or else a rejection of Christianity that is more ‘neo-pagan’ than simply anti-religious.”³⁴ The technologies feeding posthumanist aspirations might be very this-worldly, “their true inspiration,” however, “lies elsewhere, in an enduring, other-worldly quest for transcendence and salvation.”³⁵

Noreen Herzfeld summarizes the paired sense of self and salvation maintained by Posthumanists: “When one becomes pure data, one can transform oneself at will, becoming nearly anything at any time, transcending all limitations.”³⁶ This quest for self-transformation generally embraces certain themes. The Extropy Institute’s Max More offers a common set of trans/posthuman beatitudes: through biological and neurological augmentation the Transhumanist will transcend the “natural” limits imposed by humanity’s biological heritage, culture, and environment and enjoy perpetual expansion of “intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an unlimited lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization.” Further, “When technology allows us to reconstitute ourselves physiologically, genetically, and neurologically we who have become transhuman will . . . transform ourselves into posthumans—persons of unprecedented physical, intellectual, and psychological capacity, self-programming, potentially immortal, unlimited individuals.”³⁷ Cyber immortality offers limitless choice in limitless space and time. It promises the unencumbered self, the realization of the serpent’s offer of a shedding of the constraints of Creatureliness for divine-like existence beyond the boundaries of history and embodiment. As Herzfeld observes, the trans/posthumanist vision of virtual immortality in cyberspace assumes perspectives on human nature and the character of eternal life that “are quite different from those of most Christians.”³⁸

The great differences between these two contrasting visions of self and salvation raise the troubling question of whether resistance is futile. For many reasons (not least the commercial and military interests involved) it will be the case that, whether the up-loadable consciousness is ever achieved, many transhumanist technologies will continue to develop rapidly so that greater mastery over our genetic disposition, for example, might be attained. Human life expectancy will increase for many. We might eventually manufacture drugs that heighten human intelligence and memory. We will continue to develop artificial organs that offer some a new lease on life. We will fashion prosthetic limbs that out-perform present appendages. Research will continue in various fields whereby independently pursued projects, seeking solutions to therapeutic needs, will serve the concerns of enhancement in other contexts and ultimately combine to alter basic features of human physiology and psychology.

I acquired my copy of Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near at a brick and mortar Barnes and Noble book store. When I opened my copy, out fell a small pamphlet announcing “The Gift of Eternal Life.” Someone had no doubt placed the tract in the book to inspire my revival. While the view of the gospel in the pamphlet is somewhat truncated, I appreciate the implicit recognition that Kurzweil’s tome offers a fundamentally different account of self and salvation than does the Christian faith. Will today’s Christian community note and observe the contrast? Already dominant trends of our culture have blurred the lines between humanity and technology; already we offer uncritical welcome to every innovation that promises health and longer life; already many Christian commitments have been rewritten in light of powerful market and military interests. The challenges of any resistance need to be made clear. Such would include the explicit willingness to be “left behind” in terms of the advantages sought and promised by the trans/posthumanist agenda. As Casey suggests, “We will need to learn, as odd as it may sound, to be at home in our homelessness.”³⁹

The Christian community will also need to develop greater capacities for discernment so as to distinguish better between what can be welcomed as affirming human well-being and what must be resisted as a threat, however attractive such might initially appear. That line of distinction can only be drawn if there is deep affirmation of what God intends for humanity. Jean Elshtain responds to the “messianic project” offering limitless choice in limitless time and space by insisting, “We need powerful and coherent categories and analyses that challenge cultural projects that deny finitude [and] promise a technocratic agenda that ushers in almost total human control over all the natural world including those natures we call human.”⁴⁰ For Christians, a biblical view of self and salvation might be a good place to begin such analyses. Such celebrates a vision of human purpose and calling that stands in strong contrast to the trans/posthumanist agenda. It remains to be seen which of these two rival versions of human hope will capture Christian imagination and commitment.