[tt] [technoliberation] Allenby: H+ and the New Enlightenment

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu>
-----

As usual, I can't really make heads nor tails of what Allenby is trying to
say. If someone wants to translate please do. - J.


http://www.garreau.com/docs/upload/Brad_Allenby,_asu,__FROM_HUMAN_TO_TRANSHUMAN1.doc

Templeton Research Lecture

Arizona State University

October 22, 2007


FROM HUMAN TO TRANSHUMAN: TECHNOLOGY AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE WORLD


Brad Allenby

Introductory Words

In 2001, the philosopher Andy Clark published a book entitled Natural Born
Cyborgs, in which he argued that humans had always been cyborgs.  In fact, he
and others claim that our major competitive advantage as a species lies in
our brain's unique and innate ability to couple to external social, economic,
information, and technological systems in such a way as to evolve distributed
cognitive networks.  He is one of a growing number of scholars arguing not
that we will become transhuman, but that we already are.  


	But what is it we already are?  The World Transhumanist Association
(www.transhumanism.org) defines "transhumanism" as: 

1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and
desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied
reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to
eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and
psychological capacities. 

(2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of
technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations,
and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using
such technologies.

There are significant and growing arguments over whether "transhumanism" is a
desirable direction for humanity to be going.  Some argue in favor of human
enhancement and a continuation of medical progress, others against it on
equitable grounds, and even on the basis that it constitutes blasphemy, a
primordial sin against the order that God has established, the Great Chain of
Being that gives us all our place.

I will not suppose to answer the values questions here; that is for each of
you to decide.  Indeed, I would like to suggest that the primary benefit of
the discussion about values is how it so wonderfully illustrates how all of
us - intellectual elite, working educated, undereducated and falling behind -
are increasingly incapable of framing the world we already have created, much
less that which is even now coming into being around us.  Even as technology
and its concomitant social, economic, organizational and, yes, cognitive
changes evolve around us, we fall back into classic European Enlightenment
terms: human liberty, egalitarianism, the Christian Great Chain of Being and
thus the blasphemy of engineering ourselves, the individual as the meaningful
unit of cognition.  All around us is the evidence of our first terraforming
adventure - and it is not Mars, it is the Earth.  And yet we know it not.  We
are strangers in our own strange land; homeless because we have been turfed
out by our very successes.  As Stewart Brand put it in his first Whole Earth
Catalog in 1968, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it."  So far,
we fail that test, and we do so for reasons that Heidegger stated succinctly:

So long as we do not, through thinking, experience what is, we can never
belong to what will be. . . .  The flight into tradition, out of a
combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself
other than self deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment. 

We are as gods.  The pivotal moment this became clear was 1945, in the
deserts of New Mexico, when a human sun burst into being for the first time.
Robert Oppenheimer, standing in the stark shade cast by a nuclear bomb,
reacted, ""Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."  Note the profound
shift in perspective, from Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita to a mere mortal in
awe not of what God or Nature had visited upon us, but what we had built for
ourselves.  We have since gotten used to, almost blasé about,  nuclear
winter, almost the way a two year old gets used to a loaded .357 magnum lying
on the floor within easy reach.  We are as gods?  No, for we have created the
power but not yet the mind.  And with accelerating technology, we have little
time to waste.

So in this lecture, I will try to do several things.  First, I will briefly
discuss the fundamental aspects of this Age of Humans, this Anthropocene as
scientists are calling it, which have so profoundly undermined our old and
comforting Enlightenment assumptions.  Second, I will touch on technology,
and the truly transformative wave which towers above us, ready to crash down,
always, I hope, remembering that technology is a cultural, even an
existential, force, not just things.  Thirdly, I will suggest the need to
reconstruct our world.  In this, I am not just suggesting that we are moving
to a level of complexity and integration of human, natural, and engineered
systems that we at present can at best barely glimpse through the fog of our
outdated preconceptions and ideologies.  That, I take to be a given.  Rather,
I am suggesting that, without a new and difficult ascension to a rationality
suitable for a world in which "all that is solid melts into air," (in Marx's
words), we forfeit our already tenuous hold on responsibility and on ethics.
Indeed, we forfeit our right to be considered sentient beings. 

The Anthropogenic Earth

We live in a world that is fundamentally different from anything that we have
known in the past.  In one sense, we have simply begun to perceive that which
thousands of years of human history have created, although the Industrial
Revolution undeniably accelerated the process.  It is a world dominated by
one species and the activities and products characteristic of that species,
from automobiles to cities to the creation of vast new cyberspaces.  It is a
world where the critical dynamics of major earth systems, be they
atmospheric, biological or radiative, or for that matter cultural, economic,
or technological, increasingly bear the imprint of the human.  


I cannot in a short lecture begin to weave an understanding of the complex
adaptive systems that increasingly characterize this anthopogenic planet, but
a small set of examples might provide a glimpse of what we have already
wrought.  


1.  Every planetary body has a characteristic radiation emissions spectrum .
The Earth's spectrum, however, is not just a matter of reflections from
clouds, emitted infrared radiation, and the like.  Rather, it includes
television and radio broadcasts, and leakage from all sorts of technologies.
Remember that picture of the Earth from space at night, and the electric
lights spread over North America, Europe and Asia.  In the Anthropocene,
perhaps the most fundamental physical aspect of our planet, its radiation
spectrum, carries our signature on it.    



2.  Virtually everyone is aware of global climate change, which vies with
terrorism for existential catastrophe billing.  Stand away from the Kyoto
Treaty and the surrounding hysterics pro and con, however, and take a little
longer perspective.  What that process represents, fitful and ad hoc as it
is, is the dawning of a realization that, regardless of what we do with
Kyoto, our species will be engaged in a dialog with our climate, our
atmospheric chemistry and physics, and the carbon cycle so long as we exist
at anywhere near our current numbers on the planet.  We can reduce - more
likely, redistribute - some of our impacts on these complicated and
interrelated systems, but we will not eliminate the growing human influence.
Moreover, these particular perturbations are all part of interconnected
global systems, and a population of over six billion humans, each seeking a
better life, ensures that our overall role in global systems will increase
absent some sort of population crash.  And be careful if you wish for this
under your breath, for such a catastrophe, whether from nuclear winter,
terrorism and response, or other source would create havoc among all systems,
human, natural, and built.  



3.  Among the most recognized truths of our age is the idea that we are
experiencing a "crisis in biodiversity" as human activity causes extinction
levels to skyrocket.  But some note that even if the decrease in evolved
biodiversity is as steep as alleged - something that the underlying data are
surprisingly sketchy on - this may not be true given the rise of what
scientists call "synthetic biology."  Over the past decades, scientists and
engineers have begun the project of understanding and designing new forms of
life.  These efforts, from genetics to agricultural science, have coalesced
into a new field called "synthetic biology".  Synthetic biology merges
engineering with biology by, among other things, creating standard biological
components that can be mixed and matched in organisms to provide desired
functions.  This allows researchers to treat biological pathways as if they
were components or circuits, and to create organisms from scratch - not to
mention extending beyond existing biological systems by, for example,
creating life based on different genetic codes than those found in the wild.
MIT, for example, has established a Registry of Standard Biological Parts
("BioBricks") that can be ordered and plugged into cells, just like
electronic components.  The 2005 Intercollegiate Genetically Engineered
Machine (iGEM) competition held at MIT in November 2005 attracted 17 teams,
with designs that included bacterial Etch-a-Sketches, photosensitive
t-shirts, and bacterial photography systems, thermometers and sensors.
Somewhat controversially, a number of viruses have been assembled from
scratch, including the viruses for polio and the 1918 flu epidemic.  Other
researchers have engineered the genes of Escherichia coli to incorporate a
21st amino acid, opening up an option space for design of biological
organisms that has been unavailable to evolved biological systems for
billions of years.  Commercialization of these biotechnologies continues to
accelerate, led by the introduction in agriculture of genetically modified
organism (GMO) technology.  But GMO technology extends far beyond
agriculture; according to the Economist, in 2004 some 5% of world chemical
output was estimated to derive from genetically engineered technologies.
Reflecting the on-going commoditization of life, figures for biotechnology
patent filings in OECD countries continue to rise sharply.



Synthetic biology does not just reconfigure the biological sciences; the
potential implications are far more profound.  To begin with, biodiversity
becomes a product of design choices, and industrial and political imperatives
(security issues, for example), rather than evolutionary pressures.  More
broadly, the behavior and structure of biological systems increasingly
becomes a function of human dynamics and systems, so that understanding
biological systems increasingly requires an understanding of the relevant
human systems.  In short, biology increasingly becomes a cultural science.  

One important implication of this anthropogenic biology is that the
contingency that characterizes human systems comes to characterize biological
systems.  To take an obvious marketing example from conservation biology, in
an arbitrary and profoundly cultural process some species are preserved
because they are charismatic megafauna: pandas, tigers, or whales.  Many,
many others go extinct because they are only insects, or plants, or ugly, or
unknown; a few, like smallpox, because humans detest and fear them (with the
important proviso that, in an age of biotech, national security and
terrorism, extinction, at least for viruses and bacteria, is never forever).  

These, then, are just examples of the anthropogenic - the human made - Earth.
As the journal Nature put it in an editorial in 2003, "Welcome to the
Anthropocene," roughly translated, the Age of the Human.   But it is not just
that our technologies construct a human Earth; it is far more complicated.
For technologies are more powerful than we generally recognize, and those
technologies are now not just ever more powerful means to integrate
previously natural systems into human systems, but also to make the human
itself a design space.  Accordingly, I now turn to a brief discussion of
technology.

Technology and Creation

Any meaningful discussion of technology in the age of the Human Earth must
begin by making one critical point: technology is an integrated cultural
process, not a collection of things.  For example, in the middle 1800's as it
began its rapid expansion phase, the railroad was not just the most
impressive piece of machinery most people ever saw: it was a sociocultural
juggernaut.  Among the changes the railroads brought in their wake:



1.	Railroads required a uniform, precise system of time, and thus
created "industrial time" and its associated culture 2.	3.	Railroads
created the need for, and co-evolved with, national scale communications
systems (telegraph); 4.	5.	Railroad firms created modern managerial
capitalism (modern accounting, planning, and administration systems); 6.
7.	Railroad firms created the modern capital and financial markets
(railroad construction was the single most important stimulus to industrial
growth in Western Europe by 1840s); 8.	9.	Railroads in the United
States became a potent symbol of national power, and, more subtly,
instantiated and validated the US integration of religion, morality and
technology, both pro and con: "If God had designed that His intelligent
creatures should travel at the frightful speed of 15 miles an hour by steam,
He would have foretold it through His holy prophets.  It is a device of Satan
to lead immortal souls down to Hell." (Ohio School Board, 1828); 10.	11.
Railroads transformed landscapes at all scales: Chicago existed, and
structured the Midwest economically and environmentally, because of
railroads; 12.	13.	Like most major technological systems, railroads
fundamentally changed US economic and power structures, validating the US
nation-state and Manifest Destiny and restructuring the economy from
local/regional business concentrations to trusts (scale economies of national
markets); and, finally; 14.	15.	Railroads dramatically changed the
underlying teleology of American culture, changing it from Jeffersonian
agrarianism, an Edenic teleology, to a technology-driven New Jerusalem, a
cultural schism that replays itself today in the continuing environmentalist
challenge to technology.  16.	This last point, the shift from technology as
challenge to Agrarian Eden, to technology as means to achieve the New
Jerusalem, is a critical step in both the relationship between technology and
theology, but also in the embrace of technology in the New World.  Consider
some selected sections from Walt Whitman's 1868 "Passage to India":

Singing my days,

Singing the great achievements of the present,

Singing the strong light works of engineers,

Our modern wonders (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)

In the Old World the east the Suez Canal,

The New by its might railroad spann'd . . .



I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad

	surmounting every barrier,

I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying freight and
passengers,

I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the 

	shrill steam-whistle,

I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world . . .



After the seas are all cross'd, (as they seem already cross'd)

After the great captains and engineers have accomplish'd their work,

After the noble inventors, after the scientists,

	the chemists, the geologist, ethnologist,

Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,

The true son of God shall come singing his songs.



Then not your deeds only O voyagers, O scientists and inventors, shall be
justified, . . . .

This whole earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless earth, shall be completely
justified, . . . .

Nature and Man shall be disjoin'd and diffused no more,

The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them . . . .


"The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them" - thus comes unity between
God, human and Nature, the Second Coming, in the form of New Jerusalem, to
the New World - and it comes on rails of steel.  This is not technology as
economic value, or as guarantor of national security, this is technology as
salvation.   

And railroads are only an example of what economic historians call technology
clusters that power so-called "long waves" in economic and social history.
Railroads and steam technology powered a wave from about 1840 to 1890; steel,
heavy engineering and electricity, from about 1890 to 1930; the automobile,
petroleum, and aircraft from about 1930 to 1990; the information cluster with
its computerization of the economy, from about 1990 to the present.  While
the dates are somewhat imprecise, the general idea of clusters of technology
- which, it cannot be emphasized enough, always carry with them
institutional, organizational, economic, cultural and political changes - is
a useful one.  Thus, specialized professional managerial systems and
associated "Taylorism" industrial efficiency techniques characterized the
heavy industry cluster, while a far more networked, flexible structure began
to evolve during the information cluster.  

But the railroad example makes several general principles of technological
evolution crystal clear.  First, a technology of any significance will
destabilize existing institutions and power relationships and thus, to some
degree, cultural assumptions.  Accordingly, it will be opposed by many.
Second, projecting the effects of technology systems before they are actually
adopted is not just hard but, given the complexity of the systems, probably
impossible.  Thus, for example, the time structure that we moderns take for
granted was not the time structure of pre-railroad American agrarian society;
it is a product of our technology.  This raises a more subtle, but equally
important point: we are able to perceive our world, and create our cultural
constructs, only through the lens that our technology provides.

If the history of technological evolution is a warning, it is an inadequate
one for the wave bearing down on us.  Technological change, as suggested by
the example of the railroads, is always potent, but now we have not just one
or two enabling technologies undergoing rapid evolution, we have five:
nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, information and communication
technology (ICT), and applied cognitive science.  These technologies in some
ways are the logical end of the chapter of human history that began with the
Greeks.  Nanotechnology extends human will and design to the atomic level.
As for biotechnology, J. R. McNeill, an environmental historian, notes that 



By the twentieth century, our numbers, our high-energy technologies, and our
refined division of labor with its exchange economy made us capable of total
transformation of any and all ecosystems. . . .  In the twentieth century we
became what most cultures long imagined us to be: lords of the biosphere. 



ICT gives us the ability to create virtual worlds at will, and facilitates a
migration of functionality to information rather than physical structures.
Thus, money used to be coins and paper bills, themselves mere symbols of
value, but now even that physical premise is gone.  Money is electrons
somewhere in cyberspace, and financial instruments have become so
mathematical that no one can figure out anymore which shell the risk is
hidden under.  That, not a sub-prime market for mortgages, is why we are now
quietly trying to sneak out of a financial crisis.  Meaning in an information
dense world has become contingent on belief and noise level, which is why Fox
News and blogs proliferate, and the great globe itself, yea, all which
inherit, become media.  



Consider for a brief moment some of the implications of the NBRIC wave in
just one area, human biology and cognition, as an example of some of the
possibilities.  At one extreme, some predict the achievement of "functional
human immortality" within fifty years, either as a result of continuing
advances in biotechnology, or as ICT and computational power enable
downloading of human consciousness into information networks.  This latter
should not, however, be confused with the growing power of human/Internet
cognitive networks, which arguably give rise to such a different form of
extended cognition that it might be considered the first varietal of post
human humanity.  While such predictions are viewed by most experts as highly
unlikely, there is a growing consensus that substantial extensions of average
lifespans, with a high quality of life, are achievable in the next few
decades. For example, the IEEE Spectrum, a mainstream technical journal, ran
a series of articles in 2004 on engineering and aging which concluded that
using "engineered negligible senescence" to control aging will allow average
ages of well over 100 within a few decades.  What is interesting, of course,
is that, even though the scientists and technologists are perceiving such
possibilities as age extension as increasingly probable, those in other areas
of science, and in policy, and in the environmental and sustainability
communities, remain unaware of these possibilities, despite their obviously
challenging implications (for pension and old-age systems, and material and
energy consumption patterns, for example).  Equally challenging, it is
becoming apparent that not just the Earth, but the human, is in the process
of becoming a human design project and that substantial changes in what it
means to be human are probably inevitable (although specifics are
unpredictable).  N. Katherine Hayles, for example, in her aptly named book,
How We Became Posthuman, traces the evolution of the posthuman through the
concepts of homeostasis, then reflexivity, then, finally, virtuality.  While
Hayles is cautious about the implications of this on-going and accelerating
process, some foresee enormous potential: Roco and Bainbridge in an NSF
report entitled Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, for
example, conclude: "With proper attention to ethical issues and societal
needs, converging technologies could achieve a tremendous improvement in
human abilities, societal outcomes, the nations's productivity, and the
quality of life."  They continue:





Examples of payoffs may include improving work efficiency and learning,
enhancing individual sensory and cognitive capabilities, revolutionary
changes in healthcare, improving both individual and group creativity, highly
effective communication techniques including brain-to-brain interaction,
perfecting human-machine interfaces including neuromorphic engineering,
sustainable and "intelligent" environments including neuro-ergonomics,
enhancing human capabilities for defense purposes, reaching sustainable
development using NBIC tools, and ameliorating the physical and cognitive
decline that is common to the aging mind. 



Effects of technological convergence on the human is only one small area of
research and speculation; similar suites of possible scenarios are being
developed in many other areas.  It is obviously premature to regard most of
these predictions as anything more than possible outcomes.  Indeed, much of
the thinking of technological futures is marked by a strong tendency to focus
on a particular aspect of a technology or its implementation, implicitly
holding other social, technological, or environmental systems fixed.  This
almost automatically assures that the scenarios are implausible, because
technological change, especially at this fundamental level and across
virtually the entire technology salient, is integrated with most other human
systems and under such conditions they too will be evolving and contingent.
Additionally, except for the easy cases where particular applications of
these core technologies are already in the process of being commercialized,
it is very difficult to determine how probable even the most outré scenarios
might be.  The line between science fiction and tomorrow's headlines has
seldom been quite so blurred, in part because technologies frequently tend to
follow cultural precedents, which are often established in science fiction.
Thus, for example, the structure of virtual realities shows a strong
resemblance to the work of writers such as Gibson and Stephenson . . . and,
accordingly, not only is it hard to tell the difference between fiction and
soon-to-be fact; the latter are constructed in fact by the former.

We have thus far made four critical points regarding technology and the
human:

1.	Technological change is not an isolated event.  Rather, it represents
movements towards new, locally stable, earth systems states.  These states
integrate natural, environmental, cultural, theological, institutional,
financial, managerial, technological, built and human dimensions, and even
construct our sense of time.  Technologies do not define these integrated
earth system states, except by convenience, but technological evolution can
destabilize existing clusters and create conditions leading to the evolution
of new ones.  2.	3.	Technology is the means by which humans have
expressed their will to power.  This is not just an academic observation.
Cultures that develop technology, and, importantly, create frameworks within
which it can react upon itself and so accelerate its own evolution, thereby
gain cognitive power over competitors.  Because technologies create such
powerful comparative advantages as between cultures, those cultures that
attempt to block technology will, all things equal, eventually be dominated
by those that embrace it.  Thus, it is likely that technological evolution
will be difficult, if not impossible, to stop, as some argue.  Whether and
how it can be moderated in the age of global elites becomes an important
research question.  4.	5.	The rate of technological change is not
slowing, but rather accelerating dramatically.  In doing so, it is stretching
the bimodal distribution between those who constitute the global elite and
who, primarily through education and culture, are able to prosper under such
conditions, and those who are left behind.  The latter have a strong tendency
to seek stability in outmoded ideologies and fundamentalist movements.  These
movements are desperate responses to a world that, for such individuals, has
become irrational, and, as it destabilizes patterns of belief and behavior
they invest with meaning, profoundly challenging and frequently evil.  6.
7.	Current technological evolution is unprecedented.  Previous
technology clusters revolved around one or perhaps two evolving technologies
- say, rails and steam, or automobiles and petroleum.  The constellation of
nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, ICT, and cognitive science, however,
marks a culmination of sorts of traditional technological evolution, for
among other things it extends control of materials to the atomic scale, and
lays the groundwork for the complete integration of the human and the
technological.  The Earth, biology, and indeed even the human itself become
design spaces and, in doing so, render contingent virtually all of what we
have taken to be fixed.  8.	The Undermining of the Enlightenment



To summarize where we are at this point: the integrated cluster of technology
that is rapidly beginning to redefine our world - NBRIC, or nanotechnology,
biotechnology, robotics, ICT, and applied cognitive science - is both
providing the scientific and technological basis for dramatically
accelerating transhumanism, and obsoleting the mental models and cultural
constructs through which we attempt to understand transhumanism.  In
particular:



1.	We face radically increasing complexity of at least four different
kinds: a) static complexity (increasing numbers of components, stakeholders,
interactions among different infrastructure, and linkages among them, for
example); b) dynamic complexity (as these factors interact in new and
unanticipated ways, especially given the fundamentally changing nature of ICT
systems); c) "wicked" complexity (arising from the need to engineer and
manage integrated human/natural/built systems increasingly displaying the
reflexivity and intentionality of human systems and institutions); and d)
scale, as we realize we must begin to design, engineer and manage integrated
human/natural/built earth systems at not just national, but regional and
global scales.  This complexity has already had profound institutional
implications in our era: Marxism in the Soviet Union and China collapsed not
from external conquest or even from Reagan's vaunted spend race, but rather
because the centralized economic model adopted by large Marxist societies
simply became incapable of managing the complexity inherent in a modern
industrial economy.  And please note that our economies, financial networks,
and technologies have become far more complex since then.  We cannot
centrally control the global economy anymore; indeed, it may be impossible to
centrally conceptualize it for much longer.  More fundamentally for many of
us, the complexity in which we are now all embedded is eroding the unitary
sense of self that was one of the principle gifts of the Enlightenment: not
only are we fragmenting our memory across various Internet systems, but as we
build avatars that represent different aspects of our personalities to play
in different virtual realities, we create a multidimensional self that would
have been simply impossible a hundred years ago, in a small town environment.
Thus does the complexity that makes transhumanism possible at the same time
invalidate the framework that we have previously associated with the human.
The mental model of the human expressed in concepts such as the Great Chain
of Being and the Enlightenment focus on the individual has not been displaced
by an alternative formulation, but rather rendered obsolete by accelerating
complexity that it was unable to frame.  2.	3.	An important element
of this complexity is that it confirms an unavoidable relationship between
observer, frame of reference, and derivation of partial and contingent truth
from underlying complex systems.  Consider a simple example.  If I am
interested in the rates of crime in Phoenix, I am also implicitly defining
the urban system by its political boundaries.  If, on the other hand, I am
interested in water and Phoenix, I am implicitly defining the system as
including the Colorado River basin, not to mention American water law,
patterns of tourism that make golf courses popular in Scottsdale, and
xeriscaping initiatives.  Yet in both cases the relevant marker is "Phoenix."
What is happening, simply, is that my query to the system calls forth from an
underlying complex noumenal world a particular network that is responsive to
my query (in Kantian terms, the query acts to define an appropriate
phenomenal structure from a complex pattern of "things in themselves" that is
not directly accessible).  In short, complex urban systems can be thought of
as interconnected, evolving networks of networks, covering not just the
familiar subjects of urban engineering - built environments and
infrastructure - but less physical ones such as technology states,
lifestyles, cultural constructs, economic evolution, and the like.  Thus,
while it is true that Chicago is a collection of buildings, roads, stores,
and so forth, it is also true that Chicago is the mechanism by which much of
the American Midwest was commodified.  The networks that are of interest in a
particular situation will generally be determined not by the system being
evaluated, but by the particular questions being asked about it.  There is a
similarity to quantum mechanics here: what you perceive when you look at the
system is determined by the purpose for which you are observing it.  The
system itself always remains more complex than you are able to capture at any
one time.  And the important corollary is that a complex system can only be
defined in terms of the reasons for which a definition is desired.  The query
identifies the particular networks of the system that are relevant, and they
in turn define the boundaries of the system for the purpose of the inquiry.
This reflexivity complicates any discussion of a complex system, of course,
and reduces the value of standardized or ideological approaches.   Equally
important, these integrated systems are completely built by humans, but their
dynamics and evolutionary paths are not planned, nor determined, by humans,
and their effects ripple broadly across many human, natural and built systems
at many scales.  They are thus excellent examples of systems that, like the
Internet, are completely anthropogenic, but are not understandable or
transparent.  When we design the human, to paraphrase Marx, humans will make
themselves, but they will not make themselves just as they please, for our
understanding and the complex nature of reality are not congruent, but
coupled weakly through our queries to the latter.   4.	5.	The
accelerating evolution of technology systems, especially ICT, combined with
the postmodern fragmenting of time, space and culture, dramatically decreases
the stability of all cultural constructs.  In our particular case, it has two
profound effects: it renders not just the social and cultural landscapes that
we look out on more unstable, but it renders that which looks out - the self
and our individuality - more contingent as well.  The dramatic increase of
fundamentalism across most belief systems and in most societies reflects, in
part, an effort to create a stable ground; it is an effort that will fail, at
least for the elite for whom transhumanism is already a reality.  Marx's
prediction - or curse, depending on your viewpoint - comes true: all that is
solid melts into air.  Note that this does not mean that the postmodern
solutions of absolute solipcism and relativism are valid; it simply means
that if our mental models and cultural constructs are to be adaptive, they
must embrace, and manage, their own contingency.  6.	7.	Transhumanism
is often viewed, particularly by opponents, as some sort of victory of
technology over the human, as if each were a separate domain.  The
Enlightenment Romantics had their Frankenstein model, and it remains powerful
today (as in Greenpeace's Frankenfood PR campaign).  If history is any guide,
this is at best a temporary opposition.  Thus, the dialectic process proceeds
by a thesis giving rise to an opposing antithesis, which after conflict
create a new and more powerful thesis.  In this case, then, what we can
anticipate is not that the human and the technological will clash, and one
will emerge victorious; rather, what is already happening is that the two are
merging.  This does not mean profound changes won't occur, especially in
older concepts of what constitutes "the human."   Nor does it mean that we
won't see varietals of humans - as, indeed, the "digital natives" that are
comfortably embedded in their ICT networks may already be.  At the level of
"nature," it means that we should expect integrated human/natural/built earth
systems, rather than those we currently idealize.  Indeed, some current
"mashups," where representations of the real world are mixed on-line with
virtual representations of data sets or imaginary spaces, are already going
in that direction.  8.	9.	Many groups, from deep greens (ideological
environmentalists) to Marxists to religious conservatives opposing modernity,
cling to ideologies and older worldviews implying necessary and foundational
conflict between the human and technology, in the shape of the transhuman,
for obvious reasons.  It engages their base; it turns complex questions of
fact into simplistic black and white scenarios; and, in many cases, it both
reflects and validates their rejection of modernity.  But ideological
approaches of all kinds are particularly problematic at the dawn of the
anthropogenic world, which as we have seen is characterized by exceedingly
rapid and profound change in fundamental relationships and systems, involving
natural, built and human systems of extraordinary static and dynamic
complexity.  In such a context, there are four aspects of ideology that
render it especially dysfunctional.  First, any ideology is necessarily a
simplification of reality; in fact, that's usually an important part of its
mass appeal.  Second, the elements and structure of this simplification
necessarily lie in the past, not the future, and thus embed assumptions and
implications that are necessarily increasingly anachronistic in a period of
rapid and discontinuous change.  Third, ideology creates an "ends justify the
means" mentality; almost by definition the power of the Idea trumps the messy
and contingent real world. Thus, it is characteristic of many ideologies that
they posit a vision of utopia, the achievement of which is worth the
sacrifices, usually imposed by the ideological group on others - think of
Marxism, or of the poverty in this country because of our powerful anti-tax
ideology, or the millions of people who have died from malaria in developing
countries because environmentalists blocked access to DDT.  Regarding
transhumanism, ideology can lead some opponents to glorify suffering and
denigrate modern medicine - almost always imposing the costs of their beliefs
on other, conveniently impersonalized, groups.  Finally, as part of the
elevation of the Idea over the real, ideology also cuts off information
transfer and dialog, and is profoundly anti-democratic, anti-intellectual,
and anti-rational (although, ironically, ideologies are creatures of the
intelligensia).  It is not, then, just that ideologies are generally bad,
although many of them seem to be in application, as any familiarity with the
20th century would confirm; rather, it is that ideologies are especially bad
in a period of rapid, discontinuous, and fundamental change at a global,
multicultural scale.  Because ideologies, with a quasi-rational and thus
Enlightenment mien, have over time become a convenient way of simplifying a
complex environment, their failure not just in practice but in principle is a
further weakening of the original Enlightenment project.  10.	11.	It is
difficult to argue, especially for classic liberals, but it may well be the
case that perhaps the changes we are currently beginning to experience mark,
in fact, the end of the great Enlightenment project of radical democratic
power.  To begin with, it is clear that the rates of change we are now
experiencing has already created a fundamentalist backlash that is
increasingly potent around the world.  This is occurring in virtually all
major religions, as well as those belief systems - environmentalism,
sustainability - that for many people, especially in secular societies, now
begin to serve theological purposes.  This is not random opposition to
modernity, but generated by the fact that, as rates of technological change
accelerate, increasing numbers of people in every society are
disenfranchised.  They are incapable of keeping pace with continuing change,
unable to integrate into the information webs that increasingly define human
cognition, and aghast at the changes in lifestyle, income distribution,
relative power relationships, and  changes in sexual and family roles and
structures that have resulted.  And, importantly, these groups have not yet
understood the degree to which their fundamental values are rendered
contingent by that self-same progress.  Thus, accelerating technological
change can only increase opposition to itself, and yet it is an important
component of technological dominance.  For those for whom Enlightenment
representative democracy is an important value, then, transhumanism creates a
difficult conundrum, for the more it succeeds, the more it creates an
activist opposition which hobbles it in democratic cultures, giving the
advantage to cultures where the elite, who benefit from technological
evolution generally and transhumanism specifically, are able to exercise
control.  Thus, what has been a world marked by international patterns of
inequality is increasingly becoming a world where an elite skilled in
navigating complex and information dense environments dominates, and more and
more others sink into a global proletariat.  12.	13.	The political
implications of transhumanism do not just suggest the undermining of
democratic structures as authoritarian societies become increasingly
competent because of greater willingness to support technological change
regardless of the cost.  There is an obvious and dangerous destabilizing
effect associated with foundational technological changes in general, and
transhumanism in particular.  Most importantly, perhaps, the evolution of
human technological competency such that virtually the entire material world
(nanotechnology), including the biological world (biotechnology), is
potentially subject to human design clearly challenges cultural assumptions
about appropriate boundaries between the sacred and the human.  This is
particularly true for those for whom "nature" has become the repository of
the Sacred, a reflection of the Romantic project to protect God from science
by shifting the Sacred to the wilderness.  This is, indeed, an important
foundational belief for many environmentalists, ranging from English Royalty
who perceive biotechnology as blasphemous because it is "playing God," to
environmental writers such as McKibben, who implicitly frames technological
and cultural evolution in Nitzschean terms when he first places God in
"nature" and then bemoans the human impacts on the latter: 14.	


Wild nature, then, has been a way to recognize God [of the Christian
tradition] and to talk about who He is.  How could it be otherwise?  What
else is, or was, beyond human reach?  In what other sphere could a deity
operate freely? 



More specifically, the transhumanism project, by making the human contingent
(indeed, a reflexive design space, as humans and their institutions begin
designing humans at the molecular to the cognitive network scale) is the
final rejection of the roles assigned to deity, human, and beast in many
religious traditions (as in the Christian Great Chain of Being).  This does
not, in itself, imply a necessary theological conflict, for rebalancing
theological interpretation and scientific advance has in some ways been the
critical discourse of the last several centuries and authorities dating back
to St. Augustine offer the applicable guidance (the necessarily unitary truth
of science and theology under an omniscient God).  Consider, for example,
Pope John Paul II's comments in the encyclical letter, Fides Et Ratio (1998;
introduction and paras. 34, 43, 48):



Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the
contemplation of truth. . . . the two modes of knowledge lead to truth in all
its fullness.  The unity of truth is a fundamental premise of human
reasoning, as the principle of non-contradiction makes clear. . . .  Both the
light of reason and the light of faith come from God . . . hence there can be
no contradiction between them. . . . It is an illusion to think that faith,
tied to weak reasoning, might be more penetrating; on the contrary, faith
then runs the grave risk of withering into myth or superstition.



It can be argued, therefore, that transhumanism is only another step in
redistributing responsibility between categories.  But this is a theological
argument, and the most active conflicts in religion today are not
theological, but social and more specifically class, as those who are
increasingly powerless in a technological, information dense (and hence free
market) environment, whether because of lack of education, or cultural
weaknesses in such a competition, strike back through fundamentalism.  As
these groups begin to understand that transhumanism is already here, and that
technological evolution generally and transhumanism specifically is strongly
correlated with cultural and economic power, the reaction that has started
will intensify, perhaps dramatically.  It bears remembering that the
invention of printing enabled the spread of literacy and democratization of
the Bible, and thence was the technological foundation required for the
Reformation - and the result was 500 years of religious conflict across all
of Europe.   



If my musings are correct, then, transhumanism and the broader technological
wave of which it is only the most personal indicator constitute a period of
unprecedented and fundamental physical, emotional, psychological, and
cultural change.  What it means to be human is in play, in ways that it has
never been before - and, importantly, in ways that undermine most of the
mental models, cultural constructs, and institutional systems we have created
to structure our relationships with our selves, our institutions, our
politics, and our conceptualization of our role in the universe and
relationship to our deities.  We and our world are contingent in a way that,
despite the massive changes we have experienced in past waves of technology,
we have never been before.  Clearly, we will need to reconstruct our world on
the run, as it were, and a necessary part of that project will be to
reconstruct ourselves as contingent but grounded beings.  To that challenge,
then, let us turn. 



Personal authenticity and the Reinvention of the Enlightenment



Begin by observing that complexity and radical contingency have undermined
the Enlightenment as it is now constructed, and as it now underpins global
culture.  In some ways, this is desirable, as it opens new options spaces for
continued evolution of cultures, the species, and individuals.  Moreover,
this is only an extension of the dynamic that has always characterized the
Enlightenment, and, arguably, must characterize any cultural system that
successfully evolves.  Thus, the Enlightenment as global culture has
succeeded, ironically, because it uniquely carries within it the seeds of its
own negation as a uniquely "true" or "valid" culture.  Indeed, the strongest
critics of the Enlightenment have been internal, from Rosseau (whose
criticism has become internalized to much of the environmental discourse), to
Marx, to the postmodernists of all stripes.  Thus, thinkers from Rorty to
Adorno have emphasised two paradoxical observations: 



1.	Only a structure which, like the European Enlightenment, contained
its own critique and negation within itself could possibly become the basis
for a globalized cultural framework in a multicultural world; and, 2.	3.
The Enlightenment framework succeeds only to the extent it continues to
negate itself as a unique source of "truth." In these cases, the
Enlightenment tradition has not only been the source of the negation, but has
itself been transformed, transcended, and made more universal and
encompassing, by the dialectic generated by the negation.  This dialectical
process, perhaps most closely associated with Marx and Hegel, is itself an
important and self-conscious facet of the Enlightenment; in fact, much
Romantic thought, with the important exception of Rousseau, saw the dialectic
as the process by which human progress towards a reintegrated high
civilization (in religious terms, recovery from the Fall, which was itself
seen as introduced by intellectualization) occurred.  4.	


As the original Enlightenment evolved through modernity, the relatively
integral worldview it entailed shattered against the increasing complexity of
the cognitive networks that it enabled: so now must we transcend - not deny
or oversimplify, but internalize and transcend - that complexity anew.  The
Enlightenment as explicit framing has been transcended yet again by the
Enlightenment as process.







This, then, is our challenge: a new Enlightenment, one born not of a single
culture or tradition; one that embeds uncertainty, dialog and change, not
artificial stability; one that seeks not just authentic individuals, and
authentic institutions, but an authentic world; one which, over the decades
and centuries and millennia to come, reflects the best of human aspirations.
This new Enlightenment arises from, but cannot be sought, in the past, in
obsolete and increasingly dysfunctional ideologies or fantasies, for the past
defines the boundaries of our path, but it does not therefore define our
future.  It cannot consist of cultural constructs and mental models that are
already anachronistic, even if we can't bring ourselves to admit that just
yet.  It cannot be simple, for simplistic solutions and visions are
dysfunctional in a world that is uncertain, unpredictable, and complex, a
mélange of cognitive networks in dances and patterns that, for the most part,
we don't even perceive yet.  That future we - as individuals, as
institutions, as a species - are designing, and will continue to design, even
if we don't know what that means, or how to do it - and even if, given a
chance, we would try to reject that power.  Our choice is not the
anthropogenic world, for that is already upon us.  Rather, it is whether to
grow into our responsibilities, to be rational, ethical and authentic within
a contingent and constantly evolving framework.  It is to raise the
contingent rationality of the Eurocentric Enlightenment that is passing into
the wisdom of a new global, multicultural Enlightenment.  It is perhaps our
most profound challenge as a species - but, if we meet it, if we can grow to
create a truly authentic world, we will have validated our promise as
sentient beings.



Thus, it is fitting that I end with observations on the individual, for it is
there that the first and most difficult demands of this age of radical change
fall.  Current comfortable whimseys, simplifications, and romantic ideologies
fail in the face of a complexity that they have contributed to, but are
unable to comprehend.  Moreover, each individual is, as a matter of
existence, defined in contingent and idiosyncratic terms, inherently limited
in perceptual capabilities, and characterized by imperfect rationality.
Nonetheless, we have created this world together, and have reached the stage
where we must now demand a reconstruction of personal authenticity.  Let me
then close by attempting to identify at least some characteristics associated
with the authenticity that the rise of transhumanism and the current state of
the anthropogenic Earth calls forth:



1.	Following the existentialist formulation (and, for that matter, going
back to Socrates' injunction to "know thyself"), an authenticity necessary
for our times will require as a first element a recognition and acceptance of
the world as it is, not as various ideologies would wish it to be.  2.	3.
This in turn implies acceptance of the human condition, in that the
anthropogenic earth requires each person to accept the validity of their
condition and cognitive networks for themselves, while simultaneously
recognizing them as contingent and stochastic in a world characterized by
mutually exclusive but equally valid ontologies.  4.	5.	It also
requires acceptance of the epistemological and existential implications of
complex adaptive systems, in that any perceptual or cognitive network, or
understanding of a complex system, is created by the query posed to the
system, and thus embodies unavoidable reflexivity between the system and the
cognitive network, and implies the contingency and incompleteness of any
particular perspective on a complex adaptive system.  6.	7.	Given
proposition 3, authenticity demands that we must have the integrity to create
appropriate queries, since they will structure the cognitive networks within
which we operate.  Substituting wistful fantasies for honest query and thus
construction of our local realities, or gameplaying the query process to
create ideologically predetermined local realities, must be rejected as
profoundly inauthentic.  8.	9.	Authenticity requires that we accept
the condition that meaning, truth, and values do not arise from first
principles, but are functions of network state, and thus are contingent and
continually regenerated in a reflexive dialog between cognitive systems
posing queries to, and thus generating configurations of, external complex
adaptive systems.  10.	11.	Following propositions 4 and 5, authenticity
requires accepting as the human condition the challenge that, that which you
most believe, you must distrust the most.  Meaning, and truth, arise from the
dialectical process of their continued rejection.  12.	13.	Authenticity
requires accepting rationality as partial and constructed, an interplay
between different and contingent ontologies and partial structures of
underlying complex adaptive systems, congealed intentionality and cognition,
and institutional and network dynamics.  A similar stance must be taken
towards institutions, or, indeed, any cognitive network.  In doing so,
however, the mistake of slipping into a solipsistic relativism must be
avoided, for that goes too far, and becomes its own form of inauthenticity.
14.	15.	Even though the macroethics of complex adaptive systems are
beyond the level of the individual, authenticity requires that each
individual, operating in good faith, participate in establishing
institutional capabilities to dialog with such systems, be they
technological, environmental, biological, cultural, or social.  16.	17.
As a reflection of the increasing human role in, and responsibility for,
integrated human/built/natural earth systems, authenticity requires
thoughtful rejection of ideologies and frameworks characteristic of the first
Enlightenment, and active movement toward reinvention of the Enlightenment
for a profoundly multicultural, and much more complex, world.  Thoughtful,
for out of the first Enlightenment must be created a second that embodies the
best elements of the first while enabling responses to new conditions, but
there must also be rejection of those elements which now constitute cultural
or temporal imperialism, or are too simplistic for the systems that
characterize the Anthropocene.  18.	19.	Finally, authenticity
requires understanding that the individual is a contingent framework that has
worked well in the past, but is increasingly dysfunctional in a complex world
characterized by cognitive networks extending across technological,
biological, and human systems, and the evolution of transhuman variants,
already well underway.  Thus, authenticity demands  acceptance of cognition
as increasingly involving production of emergent systems characteristics at
levels higher than the individual.  20.	21.	This authenticity does not
reject theology, but redistributes domains between the theological and the
human in ways that culturally may be very difficult for many individuals to
accept.  The strength to accept such shifts, while at the same time not
succumbing to mere relativism, is an important element of the authenticity
required.  22.	


With knowledge of the anthropogenic Earth comes an existential crisis as the
honest perception demanded by authenticity reveals a chaotic, unpredictable,
highly problematic planet in the throes of anthropogenic change, with a
complexity that neither existing intellectual tools nor language itself is
adequate to address.  Each individual is profoundly ignorant, and strives
hard to remain ignorant even of their ignorance; naiveté and willful
perceptual and intellectual blindness become comfortable characteristics of
discourse.  And the result is a fleeing into ideology, random myths, and
stories, the creation of mental models that simplify reality into manageable
fantasy, and reduce perception until it no longer threatens.  This is
understandable, but it is cowardice; it is bad faith; it is profoundly
inauthentic.  It is a flight from freedom, from responsibility, from
integrity.  As Sartre said in the context of the individual, "Man is
condemned to be free."  And this is a far more daunting challenge in the
context of an anthropogenic world that, having created, we now want to
pretend not to see.  For now this freedom, from whence rises moral
obligation, is neither comfortable, nor, sometimes, even bearable.  But it is
the freedom demanded by the historical moment, and it is non-delegable.



"He, only, merits freedom and existence

Who wins them every day anew."



(Goethe, [1833] 1984, Faust, lines 11,575-76)