Three cheers for the end of the world?

The strange ideologies of Anti-humanism and Trans-humanism

Image from smithsonianmag.com.

These days most thinking persons are—or should be!—preoccupied with a number of major challenges facing humanity, from international financial crises to cold and hot wars to the big elephant in the room: climate change. Some people, however, are taking a very different approach to these issues, wishing instead for humanity as a whole to go extinct or be so radically changed as to no longer resemble itself.

Welcome to the strange twin ideologies of Anti-humanism and Trans-humanism, two movements that, despite having the word “humanism” in their name, are in fact entirely antithetical to what humanism has been about from the Renaissance to the 21st century.

Anti-humanism can be characterized as an extreme version of the (largely politically leftist) environmentalist movement. Despite some excesses, environmentalism has always held the scientific as well as moral high grounds. It is hard to deny—though plenty of people insist in doing so—that humanity has had an deleterious, even disastrous effect on Earth’s environment, an effect the magnitude of which has increased steadily and rapidly since the industrial revolution.

The standard environmentalist response has been one of awareness, education, and political action aimed at ameliorating, the problem. Not just for the sake of the environment itself, or of other living species, but in order to insure humanity’s own survival and ability to thrive.

Not so Anti-humanists. For them the problem is humanity itself, and more specifically the kind of technology that human reason has been able to produce. The Anti-humanist hope is for a return to a pre-human natural equilibrium which, of course, never actually existed.

Even a cursory look at the actual, as distinct from romanticized, history of our planet reveals a number of massive planetary extinctions, the most recent one occurring 65 million years ago as a result of an asteroid impact off the Yucatan peninsula. And even outside of those extraordinary events, the terrestrial biosphere has never been in any kind of stable equilibrium, always altered—sometimes dramatically—by geological, atmospheric, and even biological events. For instance, the fact that animals, including ourselves, have been able to breath oxygen for the last couple billions of years was made possible by the evolution of photosynthetic cyanobacteria, a development that killed off countless anaerobic (i.e., incapable of metabolizing oxygen) species. But nobody’s been complaining about that massive remaking of the atmosphere!

Adam Kirsch recently wrote a detailed article in the Atlantic about both Anti- and Trans-humanism entitled “The people cheering for humanity’s end.” There he quotes Jedediah Purdy, author of After Nature, as summarizing one of the major tenets of both movements: “The Anthropocene [i.e., the current human-dominated era] finds its most extreme expression in our acknowledgment that the familiar divide between people and the natural world is no longer useful or accurate. Because we shape everything, from the upper atmosphere to the deep seas, there is no more nature that stands apart from human beings.”

But was there ever a Nature distinct from Humanity? Isn’t all that human beings do natural, since we are the evolved products of natural processes? It depends on how we choose to articulate concepts like “natural” and “unnatural.” If unnatural stands for anything that humanity does then the notion isn’t very useful at all. Conversely, there may be some value in—as the ancient Stoics and Epicureans would put it—distinguishing what we do “in agreement with Nature” vs what we do “against Nature.” But that divide isn’t one that is marked by the respective absence or presence of technology. Plenty of other species use (rudimentary) technology, so technology is natural. No other species, conversely, engages in the systematic killing of its own members on ideological grounds, simply because ideologies, so far as we can tell, are a human invention. It’s complicated.

One idea that is closely related to Anti-humanism is another “anti”: Anti-natalism, whose most famous defender is philosopher David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been. In that book, Benatar argues that humanity’s extinction will not deprive the universe of anything of value, saying that “things will someday be the way they should be—there will be no people.”

Should be? According to whose values? To the best of our knowledge values are, again, a human thing. (As well as a thing of any sufficiently complex, intelligent, and social species that may be out there in the cosmos.) They don’t exist otherwise, so to say that the universe would be better off without us is to incur in a gross category mistake, a big no-no for a philosopher.

At the opposite extreme of the humanist spectrum, so to speak, is Trans-humanism. In this camp we find another philosopher, Nick Bostrom, who in a paper entitled “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards,” worries that humanity’s extinction, or bare survival, would mean that we will end up having accomplished “only a minuscule degree of what could have been achieved.”

The objection at this point should be obvious: according to whose standards would humanity have underperformed? Without humans there are no such standards, so what are we talking about?

If Anti-humanists are the ultra-pessimists of our story, Trans-humanists are, in a sense, their ultra-optimist counterpart. Take Toby Ord, author of The Precipice, where he writes that “If we can venture out [of Earth] and animate the countless worlds above with life and love and thought, then ... we could bring our cosmos to its full scale; make it worthy of our awe.”

Where does this come from? As Kirsch summarizes in his Atlantic article, according to Trans-humanists humanity’s “function” is apparently to transform the cosmic “endowment” (i.e., all the available matter and energy) into “computronium,” a programmable information-bearing substance.

Setting aside that this sounds like really bad science fiction, I thought talk of “function,” technically known in philosophy as teleology, had gone out of the window with David Hume and Charles Darwin, and generally with the scientific worldview that replaced the Aristotelian model of how things work.

Yuval Noah Harari (author of Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow) skeptically refers to this sort of thinking as the religion of “Dataism.” Its High Priest is without a doubt futurist Ray Kurzweil and the corresponding Holy Book is The Singularity Is Near. There Kurzweil predicts that “even the ‘dumb’ matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence.” For Kurzweil this is “the ultimate destiny of the universe.”

If you have been paying attention you will be again scratching your head right now and asking yourself: the universe’s destiny according to whom?

Kurzweil is also notorious for being a major defender of the otherwise highly questionable concept of mind uploading, the notion that the human mind is the “software” to the brain’s “hardware,” and as such can, in theory at least, be made platform-independent (or at least not dependent on the specific meaty platform to which it currently seems to be inextricably connected).

There are many problems with the whole idea of mind uploading, not the least of which is that an increasing number of neuroscientists have began to see a number of disanalogies between minds and computers. Minds are best thought of not as objects, but as activities. “Minding,” if you will, is what an embodied brain and peripheral nervous system allows us to do, like breathing is what lungs make possible. As an evolutionary biologist, I think of minding as a particular outcome of evolution, which happened in a small number of lineages for specific adaptive reasons (e.g., better planning, social coordination, problem solving) and that—like everything else in biochemistry—very much requires a specific substrate. So the whole notion of mind uploading is, in my opinion, nonsense on stilts.

This, of course, has not stopped Trans-humanists from talking about the creation of SIMs, Substrate-Independent Minds. Though they are worried that before we get there we may experience a Singularity, when AI will begin to self-program and self-improve until it will quickly replace humanity. Which is another possibility that appears to be conjured out of a bad science fiction movie, rather than of serious scientific research.

If the Singularity happens, Bostrom says, “the world could be radically transformed and humanity deposed from its position as apex cogitator over the course of an hour or two.” Which, he assures us, may not be bad, and indeed morally preferable.

Once more: not bad and morally preferable according to whom, given that values and morality are human inventions? You begin to see a pattern here, I’m sure.

So if Anti-humanists see technology and human reason as the problem, Trans-humanists see them as the solution, with the caveat that AI may beat us to it. Interestingly, and I think this is telling, Trans-humanists appear to be skeptical of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m not sure on what grounds, except psychological: if it turns out that consciousness is out there as well, and maybe even widespread, than truly not much would hinge on humans be able to create the computronium. If we don’t, someone else might. And that would mean we are not so special after all.

There is a common mistake, I think, that conjoins Anti-humanism and Trans-humanism: supporters of both ideologies assume that value and purpose are external to humanity. So far as we can tell, they aren’t. We, Homo sapiens, are the only judges of what is good and what is bad on both our planet and the universe. This isn’t hubris, it’s a fact. The only way this fact might need to be corrected is, as I mentioned above, if we discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and it turns out that these intelligences also invented their version of ethics, because they are also social.

Ethics, after all, is the study of how to live a good, productive, meaningful life as a human being, that is as a social being capable of reason. So talk of how planet Earth, or the biosphere, might be “better off” without us is meaningless. And so is talk of the world being improved if we are going to be replaced by an AI. Unless the AI itself develops a sense of morality. But how would they do that? So far, techno-optimists like Bostrom and Kurzweil aren’t telling, other than gesticulate more and more frantically the more we probe into the evidence and reasoning behind their grandiose and entirely unsubstantiated statements.

The Anti-humanists’ recipe for our problems is to go back to an ideal past that never existed. The Trans-humanists’ solution is to fast forward toward a future that is just as naively idealized as that non-existing past. It would be tempting to dismiss both ideas as fringe and not worthy of our attention, but as Kirsch wisely reminds us, the prophecies of both Christianity (the imminent Second Coming of Jesus) and Marxism (the imminent end of Capitalism) have also gone unfulfilled, and yet the two doctrines have had a huge impact on the world. The same may come true of either or both of Anti-humanism and Trans-humanism.

Both movements see humanity as increasingly separate from Nature, only in one case this is a bad thing, in the other a good one. The far more reasonable answer, however, is that the real problem underlying human woes—including but not limited to environmental destruction—is neither reason nor technology, but lack of wisdom. Over the past two or three millennia, and especially during the most recent century or so, we have made impressive advancements in science and technology. If Socrates came back to life and joined this discussion he would be duly impressed by the means by which we are conducting it (computers!, internet!). But then he would quickly realize that the issues we are concerned with are still the same ones he was dealing with in the Athens of the 5th century BCE: greed for wealth and power, injustice, and easy self-serving moralizing. No AI is going to get us out of that problem. We have to do the hard work ourselves.