I’m excited for what technological advances the future will bring, but I worry that we humans won’t be equipped to deal with the weighty philosophical implications of said advances.
“I’m excited for what technological advances the future will bring, but I worry that we humans won’t be equipped to deal with the weighty philosophical implications of said advances.”
Sure. The technologies that are mentioned in this video—the technologies that will afford us superhuman capabilities—will likely be expensive and only accessible to the wealthy. This, then, would only serve to further the disparity between the rich and the poor. That’s my primary concern, but there are others. I mean, how wouldn’t our ability to live forever in machines and store our life memories on hard-drives have potentially dangerous philosophical consequences?
One issue that might have been discussed on this blog last year was brain-scanning technologies. I believe that within our lifetimes, we will have technologies able to pretty reliably read minds. I can envision police and military forces in the future using this technology to extract information from interrogation subjects, for example. That’s a scary thought—that we may no longer even have privacy in our own mind.
I’m sure Dr. Kleiner would do a better job articulating the philosophical implications of the technologies mentioned in the video.
I don’t have time to list all of the philosophical implications. Jon identifies a few of the ethical issues that might be raised. I think CS Lewis makes a nice point about this in the Abolition of Man. Man’s conquest of nature without the “Tao” [moral law] must necessarily become nature’s conquest of man. This because man’s conquest of nature will always concretely mean the power of some men over others (using nature as an instrument of power).
I think there is also a more general worry concerning the alleged ‘end of human nature’: What happens to human beings, families, and societies if/when we largely overcome natural mortality? I am as interested in the “meaning of the human condition” question as I am in the ethical quandaries. I think this is what Heidegger is talking about in Question Concerning Technology: technological thinking is not per se bad, but a tyranny of technological thinking results in losing the “essential nature of man”. When Heidegger then says that “only a god can save us”, I don’t think he means that in any obviously religious way. Rather he means that only a kind of thinking about a kind of thing that is not reducible to technique can once again reveal man to himself.
Sometimes I wonder, does being “pro-science” mean that science should have absolutely no limits? Just because we can do something, does that mean we should? Shouldn’t we step back and say, ‘Wait, is everything that science and technology might deliver to us actually good?’ I don’t think that is an ‘anti-science’ view.
I might try to post more on this later. I’ve had a book on my desk called “Is Human Nature Obsolete”, edited by Harold Baillie and Tim Casey. It explores ethical and anthropological (in the philosophical sense) questions that arise from bioengineering, genetics, etc. http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10360&ttype=2
I’d be surprised if humans really want to give up “that coded message sound wave” way of communication. Communication between brain states would be cool, of course, but I’m not sure it would be any clearer than communication by language anyway. My way of thinking “dog” might be different enough from your way of thinking “dog” that it would be easier for me to just say dog. What I’m trying to say is that our mental thumbprints might not line up in such a way that we could transfer thought directly without some interpolator to interpret. Of course, I don’t know and I’m eager to find out.
In my opinion, the coolest thing about technology like this is that the advances necessary to make it happen should clarify what’s going on inside our brains. I have an irrepressible sense of optimism that convinces me (quite without evidence) that humans will be OK as we adapt to these new technologies. Some technologies might end up as things we wish we never had invented (like the atom bomb), but their possibility will teach us things and guarantee that someone would someday invent them.
I’d love to hear Sherlock’s take on what ethical dilemmas biotechnology is posing now and will likely pose in the future. That’s his expertise, right? Maybe he’d be interested in speaking before SHAFT on the subject.
That part with his wife was a little weird, but those ratbots were awesome.
Sign me up. I think a good series that deals with many of the moral and ethicals concerns mentioned in this blog is Ghost in the Shell. I personally would love to download myself into a computer, or better yet have my brain housed in a shell and be attached to a mechanical body. Some fear change but i think that it’s going to happen one way or another.
Neal – it is interesting that you say you would “love” to do this. I can understand thinking it interesting, morally permissible, and such things but you are quite eager. It is one thing to not fear change because “it’s going to happen one way or another”, but that does not explain loving the idea. Care to explain? Specifically:
Do you experience yourself as a mind in a mechanical body already? If so, then I can see being eager to upgrade the mechanical body to a “better model”. What upgrades would you most look forward to? Why do you want those upgrades (why are you so unhappy with the “current model”)?
Are you a dualist? What of psychosomatic unity?
Here is my concern: modern man hates the gift. We hate the givenness of human nature and its given limits. We refuse obedience to anything (including our given nature) and insist on being the master of everything. We are so intoxicated with freedom and power (which is all that is left once you proclaim “God/metaphysics is dead” – see Nietzsche) that we want the power to choose our own nature! I suspect that this is what is “cool” about imagining a cyborg/human existence – we can imagine breaking free of the givenness of human nature. This is exactly what Heidegger is warning us about in Question Concerning Technology – the “challenging-forth” of nature when we enframe everything, including ourselves. The danger, though, is that we lose our “essential nature” when we think of ourselves in this way. And, as Heidegger says, “only a god can save us from this” – that is, only by stepping away from the reductionist thinking that led us to these issues can we recover ourselves.
I don’t mean to make this sound too theological. For Heidegger that which is irreducible may just be the Being which is not itself a being. Perhaps it is “the Other”. Perhaps “nature” (disclosed in a non-technological way). I actually think we find the irreducible everywhere because the question of reduction does not have to do with the object of thought but the manner of thinking.
Point is, this is not meant as a theological point. By most measures, Heidegger is an atheist.
The history of medicine tells us that “somatic traditionalism,” for want of a better term, is really just another prejudice. Artificial limbs are soon enough reintegrated into our being and then found indispensable. At the same time the science of mind/body integration is slowly being teased apart, and bizarre discoveries are being made, from the experience of phantom limb to other, even stranger phenomena. There is a very curious disorder that I read about in some pop magazine like Time or Newsweek a couple years ago. There are actually people who live much of their lives convinced that a body appendage is not their own. No amount of psychotherapy seems able to dissuade them from the desire to be separated from it, to the point that surgeons must repeatedly reject requests for elective amputations. I’m not making this up. The matter often ends with the subject finishing the matter for themselves with a meat clever or other device, to their own great fulfillment.
If mind/body integration is that prone to dislocation, somehow I think we will survive transplant into robot bodies…er, once we get the facts under hand.
Kleiner, I’ve asked you this before, but since it’s come up I’ll ask again.
What do you consider to be “dualism”? Coming from computer science and information theory, I subscribe to some sort of loose form, possibly.
“Information” is actually a fundamental term in physics now, in the same way as “force” and “energy”. Information can be copied, rearranged, and transmitted (requiring an input of energy in each case), but isn’t tied to any specific chunk of matter. However, it still needs to be encoded in something, whether that’s a pattern of bits in transistors, the distance between a group of wave maxima, the arrangement of neurons in tissue, or a pattern of photons traveling through space. So in a sense, information isn’t “tied down” to matter, but it still must rely on matter to exist (including photons under “matter” here).
Modern neuroscience is working under the assumption that the mind is an emergent property of the arrangement of neurons (and possibly glial cells as well) in the brain.This arrangement can be described in a finite amount of information, and given some encoding scheme, this information could be stored on a hard drive, broadcast over radio, or written on (an enormous amount of) sheets of paper. There’s no reason to think that a human brain, with all the neural connections, the patterns of activity, and even the interior behavior of individual neurons (if that becomes important) could not be simulated on a supercomputer cluster. There’s no reason to think that this wouldn’t produce some type of mind. (Which raises some totally sci-fi ethical questions for AI researchers)
With enough work, it would likely become possible to do a scan of an individual brain and simulate it in its entirety. There are already highly-detailed scans of brain networks that were produced destructively (scanning thin slices of frozen brains, mostly). It may become possible to do real-time, nondestructive scans of living brains and reproduce them entirely in software. This will likely happen just as a really awesome diagnostic tool, but if the software brain was simulated with enough detail (and probably provided with sensory input to keep it stable/not crazy) there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t be a simulation of a mind in software.
There are theoretical results from computer science that show a type of hardware/software duality. Any computation that can be done in hardware can be done in software and vice-versa. There are also theoretical results about simulations, and it being possible to create a simulation that is “good enough” as to be indistinguishable. If a scan is made of my brain (hardware) and the simulation was detailed enough (software, but still running on hardware), is it me? Can we tell?
I don’t know. But it should be entirely possible to scan, upload, copy, download, and transmit minds just like we currently do with DVDs or music or software programs.
Does this make me a dualist? Probably not in the way you think, because this software “soulfile” is not immaterial, as it exists in matter (even if it’s in transit over a communications network) and must be running on some hardware somewhere.
To be honest, I’m more comfortable with a gradual replacement or upgrade with cybernetic parts than I am with a brain scan and upload into a robot body or virtual world. In the second scenario, I would still have the experience of sitting here in my meat body, because what really happened was a copy. A duplicate “me” was created that would immediately have distinctly different experiences and diverge as an entirely new person.
But if I get my existing body slowly improved (some muscle enhancements here, a memory upgrade there, a 7G communications brain chip thrown in) I would have a continuity of experience and would be adding and integrating new tools into my current self, rather than just making another person with (up til now) my same memories and personality.
He really didn’t need to make that white skull look like a Terminator.
“I’m excited for what technological advances the future will bring, but I worry that we humans won’t be equipped to deal with the weighty philosophical implications of said advances.”
Do you want to expand on that?
Sure. The technologies that are mentioned in this video—the technologies that will afford us superhuman capabilities—will likely be expensive and only accessible to the wealthy. This, then, would only serve to further the disparity between the rich and the poor. That’s my primary concern, but there are others. I mean, how wouldn’t our ability to live forever in machines and store our life memories on hard-drives have potentially dangerous philosophical consequences?
One issue that might have been discussed on this blog last year was brain-scanning technologies. I believe that within our lifetimes, we will have technologies able to pretty reliably read minds. I can envision police and military forces in the future using this technology to extract information from interrogation subjects, for example. That’s a scary thought—that we may no longer even have privacy in our own mind.
I’m sure Dr. Kleiner would do a better job articulating the philosophical implications of the technologies mentioned in the video.
I don’t have time to list all of the philosophical implications. Jon identifies a few of the ethical issues that might be raised. I think CS Lewis makes a nice point about this in the Abolition of Man. Man’s conquest of nature without the “Tao” [moral law] must necessarily become nature’s conquest of man. This because man’s conquest of nature will always concretely mean the power of some men over others (using nature as an instrument of power).
I think there is also a more general worry concerning the alleged ‘end of human nature’: What happens to human beings, families, and societies if/when we largely overcome natural mortality? I am as interested in the “meaning of the human condition” question as I am in the ethical quandaries. I think this is what Heidegger is talking about in Question Concerning Technology: technological thinking is not per se bad, but a tyranny of technological thinking results in losing the “essential nature of man”. When Heidegger then says that “only a god can save us”, I don’t think he means that in any obviously religious way. Rather he means that only a kind of thinking about a kind of thing that is not reducible to technique can once again reveal man to himself.
Sometimes I wonder, does being “pro-science” mean that science should have absolutely no limits? Just because we can do something, does that mean we should? Shouldn’t we step back and say, ‘Wait, is everything that science and technology might deliver to us actually good?’ I don’t think that is an ‘anti-science’ view.
I might try to post more on this later. I’ve had a book on my desk called “Is Human Nature Obsolete”, edited by Harold Baillie and Tim Casey. It explores ethical and anthropological (in the philosophical sense) questions that arise from bioengineering, genetics, etc.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10360&ttype=2
I’d be surprised if humans really want to give up “that coded message sound wave” way of communication. Communication between brain states would be cool, of course, but I’m not sure it would be any clearer than communication by language anyway. My way of thinking “dog” might be different enough from your way of thinking “dog” that it would be easier for me to just say dog. What I’m trying to say is that our mental thumbprints might not line up in such a way that we could transfer thought directly without some interpolator to interpret. Of course, I don’t know and I’m eager to find out.
In my opinion, the coolest thing about technology like this is that the advances necessary to make it happen should clarify what’s going on inside our brains. I have an irrepressible sense of optimism that convinces me (quite without evidence) that humans will be OK as we adapt to these new technologies. Some technologies might end up as things we wish we never had invented (like the atom bomb), but their possibility will teach us things and guarantee that someone would someday invent them.
I’d love to hear Sherlock’s take on what ethical dilemmas biotechnology is posing now and will likely pose in the future. That’s his expertise, right? Maybe he’d be interested in speaking before SHAFT on the subject.
Yes, it is an area of specialization for him. And he teaches a class on ethics and biotechnology. Can’t hurt to ask him!
I’ll be honest, that video messed with me.
That part with his wife was a little weird, but those ratbots were awesome.
Sign me up. I think a good series that deals with many of the moral and ethicals concerns mentioned in this blog is Ghost in the Shell. I personally would love to download myself into a computer, or better yet have my brain housed in a shell and be attached to a mechanical body. Some fear change but i think that it’s going to happen one way or another.
Neal – it is interesting that you say you would “love” to do this. I can understand thinking it interesting, morally permissible, and such things but you are quite eager. It is one thing to not fear change because “it’s going to happen one way or another”, but that does not explain loving the idea. Care to explain? Specifically:
Do you experience yourself as a mind in a mechanical body already? If so, then I can see being eager to upgrade the mechanical body to a “better model”. What upgrades would you most look forward to? Why do you want those upgrades (why are you so unhappy with the “current model”)?
Are you a dualist? What of psychosomatic unity?
Here is my concern: modern man hates the gift. We hate the givenness of human nature and its given limits. We refuse obedience to anything (including our given nature) and insist on being the master of everything. We are so intoxicated with freedom and power (which is all that is left once you proclaim “God/metaphysics is dead” – see Nietzsche) that we want the power to choose our own nature! I suspect that this is what is “cool” about imagining a cyborg/human existence – we can imagine breaking free of the givenness of human nature. This is exactly what Heidegger is warning us about in Question Concerning Technology – the “challenging-forth” of nature when we enframe everything, including ourselves. The danger, though, is that we lose our “essential nature” when we think of ourselves in this way. And, as Heidegger says, “only a god can save us from this” – that is, only by stepping away from the reductionist thinking that led us to these issues can we recover ourselves.
I don’t mean to make this sound too theological. For Heidegger that which is irreducible may just be the Being which is not itself a being. Perhaps it is “the Other”. Perhaps “nature” (disclosed in a non-technological way). I actually think we find the irreducible everywhere because the question of reduction does not have to do with the object of thought but the manner of thinking.
Point is, this is not meant as a theological point. By most measures, Heidegger is an atheist.
The history of medicine tells us that “somatic traditionalism,” for want of a better term, is really just another prejudice. Artificial limbs are soon enough reintegrated into our being and then found indispensable. At the same time the science of mind/body integration is slowly being teased apart, and bizarre discoveries are being made, from the experience of phantom limb to other, even stranger phenomena. There is a very curious disorder that I read about in some pop magazine like Time or Newsweek a couple years ago. There are actually people who live much of their lives convinced that a body appendage is not their own. No amount of psychotherapy seems able to dissuade them from the desire to be separated from it, to the point that surgeons must repeatedly reject requests for elective amputations. I’m not making this up. The matter often ends with the subject finishing the matter for themselves with a meat clever or other device, to their own great fulfillment.
If mind/body integration is that prone to dislocation, somehow I think we will survive transplant into robot bodies…er, once we get the facts under hand.
Yep. Oliver Sacks’ books talk about these very types of disorders. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat is really weird reading.
There’s also a bunch of musical disorders someone can have.
Kleiner, I’ve asked you this before, but since it’s come up I’ll ask again.
What do you consider to be “dualism”? Coming from computer science and information theory, I subscribe to some sort of loose form, possibly.
“Information” is actually a fundamental term in physics now, in the same way as “force” and “energy”. Information can be copied, rearranged, and transmitted (requiring an input of energy in each case), but isn’t tied to any specific chunk of matter. However, it still needs to be encoded in something, whether that’s a pattern of bits in transistors, the distance between a group of wave maxima, the arrangement of neurons in tissue, or a pattern of photons traveling through space. So in a sense, information isn’t “tied down” to matter, but it still must rely on matter to exist (including photons under “matter” here).
Modern neuroscience is working under the assumption that the mind is an emergent property of the arrangement of neurons (and possibly glial cells as well) in the brain.This arrangement can be described in a finite amount of information, and given some encoding scheme, this information could be stored on a hard drive, broadcast over radio, or written on (an enormous amount of) sheets of paper. There’s no reason to think that a human brain, with all the neural connections, the patterns of activity, and even the interior behavior of individual neurons (if that becomes important) could not be simulated on a supercomputer cluster. There’s no reason to think that this wouldn’t produce some type of mind. (Which raises some totally sci-fi ethical questions for AI researchers)
With enough work, it would likely become possible to do a scan of an individual brain and simulate it in its entirety. There are already highly-detailed scans of brain networks that were produced destructively (scanning thin slices of frozen brains, mostly). It may become possible to do real-time, nondestructive scans of living brains and reproduce them entirely in software. This will likely happen just as a really awesome diagnostic tool, but if the software brain was simulated with enough detail (and probably provided with sensory input to keep it stable/not crazy) there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t be a simulation of a mind in software.
There are theoretical results from computer science that show a type of hardware/software duality. Any computation that can be done in hardware can be done in software and vice-versa. There are also theoretical results about simulations, and it being possible to create a simulation that is “good enough” as to be indistinguishable. If a scan is made of my brain (hardware) and the simulation was detailed enough (software, but still running on hardware), is it me? Can we tell?
I don’t know. But it should be entirely possible to scan, upload, copy, download, and transmit minds just like we currently do with DVDs or music or software programs.
Does this make me a dualist? Probably not in the way you think, because this software “soulfile” is not immaterial, as it exists in matter (even if it’s in transit over a communications network) and must be running on some hardware somewhere.
To be honest, I’m more comfortable with a gradual replacement or upgrade with cybernetic parts than I am with a brain scan and upload into a robot body or virtual world. In the second scenario, I would still have the experience of sitting here in my meat body, because what really happened was a copy. A duplicate “me” was created that would immediately have distinctly different experiences and diverge as an entirely new person.
But if I get my existing body slowly improved (some muscle enhancements here, a memory upgrade there, a 7G communications brain chip thrown in) I would have a continuity of experience and would be adding and integrating new tools into my current self, rather than just making another person with (up til now) my same memories and personality.