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| Image courtesy Benedict Campbell |
A note about the title of this post: it is just a play on an old saying - there is no hell, or heaven for that mater. Transhumanism and atheism seem to go hand in hand. In a recent post about head transplantation, renowned neurosurgeon Dr. R.J. White talks about how the Soviets were interested in his work, because as atheists, they had no belief in the immortality of the 'soul', so keeping a brain alive was their alternative remedy.
Now, Philip Ball's commentary for the Guardian titled, Is Nanotechnology Going to Send Us All To Hell?
According to Ball:
Transhumanism and Kurzweil's Singularity are just delirious dreams, and on no serious scientist's agenda. One Christian writer admitted to being shocked by what he heard at a transhumanist conference. Quite right, too: these folks determined to freeze their heads or download their consciousness into computers are living in an infantile fantasy.Two points here - first there are plenty of 'serious scientists' working on life extension and brain computer interfaces. Second, there does not exist on our planet a more 'infantile fantasy' than the belief in god, gods or other 'supreme beings.' Or consider how an Evangelical Christian counters the argument for Transhumanism, quoting that old standby and rock-solid foundation of an argument, The Book of Revelation. With this being 2012, Ball could have mentioned the Mayan calendar as another reason why thinking about a post-human future is an act of fantasy.
Ball, in this statement seems to be taking issue with nearly every field of scientific enquiry including medicine, materials science, computer science and more, as they will all be a part of the Singularity. He takes issue with the likelihood that a technological singularity is possible, and with the moral reasons for the pursuit at once. Of course like all other areas of human pursuit, there are fringe elements that make seem extreme, however on the whole, scientific enquiry is leading humanity towards undeniable accelerating progress that will cross a threshold within a predictable time frame.
Ray Kurzweil has a staggeringly accurate record in predicting the future as as far as the Singularity is concerned and Kurzweil’s prediction that machines will become equal to and exceed human levels via the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Bear in mind that even if Kurzeil is wrong and it is beyond 2029 when we reach the stage where machines become aware the introduction of non biological intelligence into ourselves within the next couple of decades is inevitable, first through simple neuro-implants and through nanotechnology. Whether The Singularity arises or not we will still achieve a rate of progress which is incomparable to anything we have ever seen before.
Consider that in the nineteenth century more technological breakthroughs were made than in all of the nine centuries preceding it. Were scientists in the 1800's just pursuing delirious dreams? Skip ahead and in first twenty years of the last century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century combined. In this century we will achieve 1000 times more than we achieved in the whole 20th century which was itself a period of progress never seen before. The merging of human and machine intelligence is a virtual inevitability.
As Christopher Hitchens wrote, "That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence." However, unlike a Transhumanist, Hitchens also wrote,
Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
-Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
Death, perhaps, does not necessarily have to be certain, or at the very least a final conclusion to a life. With greater integration of brain-machine interfaces, combined with a complete thorough mapping and simulation of the brain's connectome, downloading, backing up, merging and copying brains is well with the realm of possibility.
Moreover, staggering advances in genetics, bio materials and medical life extensions are under way that will make Aubrey de Gray's longevity escape velocity a reality. Repairing ourselves, at the cellular and genetic level, combined with body and mind improvement technologies will make us different species (plural) in the future.
Ball does conclude his article fairly when he writes,
...religious groups were better able than secular ones to articulate their ethical concerns because they possessed a vocabulary and conceptual framework for them. The researchers suggested that religious groups might therefore take the lead in communicating public perceptions. I'm not so sure. Articulacy is useful, but it's more important that you first understand the science. And just because you can couch your views eloquently in terms of souls and afterlives doesn't make them more valid.Basically since the Singularity movement does not have the multi-thousand year history of organized religion it does not have the rhetorical actors (and brainwashed followers) of organized religion. It is up to those involved with the Singularity movement to show that this in not fringe science, rather it is expression of our core nature as thinking, reasonable and technological creatures on this planet (for now).
Note - a condensed version of this post appears in the comments on the Guardian site.
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Reposting this from Philp Ball at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/13/nanotechnology-religion-secular-moral-acceptance?commentpage=2#start-of-comments
ReplyDeleteOK, in short: you’ll be very hard pushed to find a single good neuroscientist (Nick Bostrom is no fool, but he’s not a neuroscientist), however rigidly materialist, who really believes that our conscious experience is just a matter of lots of bits of data being pushed around between wet logic circuits in a way that can be obviously and directly copied and mapped into silicon circuits. For goodness’ sake, we don’t even have anything like a robust, universally accepted theory of what consciousness is. I’m not making any strong claims about how our minds do or don’t work – I’m just saying that the scientifically proper position is to accept that there is a huge amount that we simply don’t understand, so that we have nothing like a sound reason to believe that we can download our minds. Indeed, one thing that is becoming increasingly is that it is meaningless to imagine that the conscious ‘we’ is some disembodied collection of information that happens to be lodged in neurons. There is an irreducible somatic element of our experience and identity – see Damasio, and e.g. current work by Anil Seth at Sussex.
I think that John Gray has done a good job of dismantling the transhumanist fantasy. My view is also very close to that espoused by John Horgan, who has said of the Singularity, “part of me—the grown-up, responsible part—worries that so many people, smart people, are taking Kurzweil's sci-fi fantasies seriously. The last thing humanity needs right now is an apocalyptic cult masquerading as science.”
As for Kurzweil’s “staggeringly accurate” record of predicting the future: he’s had a few hits, but read Carl Zimmer’s excellent piece in Scientific American to get real on that score: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=e-zimmer-can-you-live-forever. Carl is particularly good on Kurzweil’s almost parodic 2010 book Transcend – for example, “you can page through 66 pages of Singularity-friendly recipes, like Fiesta Omelets and Cajun Salmon Fillets. Whether you'll have to eat them for eternity, Kurzweil doesn't say.” His piece is, I think, a very fair-minded analysis of the Singularity notion. The conclusion: in the foreseeable future, machines themselves are going to be (in more significant ways than at present) a lot cleverer than us (I agree), but “uploading your mind is science fiction.” Sorry, folks.
Besides, the hysterical suggestion in several of these comments (see, e.g. 33rdsquare) that to be sceptical of transhumanism and the idea of a Singularity both as a technological possibility and a desirable goal, you necessarily have to be anti-science and anti-technology, indeed probably some religious extremist, shows just how divorced supporters of this idea have become from mainstream scientific thinking.