Many discussions posted to the Internet from the beginning of 1993 to the end of 1998 centered around the question of how to handle the transition between humans and whatever humans evolve themselves into by design. This is a compendium of over 60 posts in chronological order covering many related topics.

• Irreproducibility of self
• Built-in values
• Second-person derived meaning
• Third-person observation of behavior and functionality coupled with a deep understanding of the causal underpinnings of such behavior and social functionality
• The ability of an entity to assign itself purposes first-person subjectively, unknowable to any other entity outside of itself, and unchangeable by any other entity outside itself
• These internally chosen purposes, may or may not be communicated to others at the choice of the entity and can override any built-in values

We have been creating new conscious lifeforms artificially ever since 12,000 years ago when animal husbandry and agriculture began. We have simply been developing the technology to do this in faster product cycle times and with more command of the ability to vary the end products. Clearly, our scientific and technological culture treats all life as a product, even human life (look at cloning techniques and harvesting eggs from aborted fetuses in the news recently). I believe that we will create biological life from inorganic materials within the next generation. We will commercialize an evolutionary technology to develop organic life-forms to fill whatever function we desire. Artificial, non-biological life, will be developed utilizing the evolutionary technology that comes into being from biological engineering. How will people deal with life being a product? They will have a tendency to condemn the idea until they need to use the technology for their own purposes, then they will make an exception.

When we create life all over from protein puddles, life will evolve following rules many of which we may know in advance in order to take major shortcuts to reach the same point we are at now, or to explore many other avenues that evolution is permitted to take. The hypothesis is that natural selection is a far weaker evolutionary force than self-organization.

Western civilization’s ultimate goal: The technological achievement of the boundless expansion of the ego (or spirit in non-secular terms). (1) Ego: Our subjective, private purposes formed by our desires, beliefs, ideas, values, emotions and perceptions. “I” (2) Expansion: Private dreams of immortality, omniscience, omnipotence, clairvoyance, job title of “Dictator-of-the-Universe-for-Eternity”. (3) Boundless: No Finality to spacetime or human thoughts and achievements, no Big Crunch, no entropic heat death. Our grasp will always be shorter than our reach, but our reach knows no limit or finality.

My fear is that without some fairly robust consensual purpose world-wide, regarding individual rights to establish private purposes without external domination, that dehumanization tendencies will increase our chances of extinction. The technological advances in biophysics will give us enormous production capacities with any and all life existing now or created by us in the future. It is easy to see where all life will become simply a product, subject to property rights or state sovereignty, as so many animals and plants are now to us. It is not difficult to see how all life could become viewed as merely products traded on the commodity markets with totalitarian regulators.

Pan Critical Rationalism and Smug Nihilism

Pan Critical Rationalism (PCR) has been proposed as an ethical way of gaining knowledge; for instance, knowledge relating to forms of speciation. I believe that PCR, if not grounded in subjective purpose, is simply smug nihilism. Your knowledge becomes entirely dependent on the strength of intellect of others who criticize your positions. You pick and choose who you want to be around and listen to. By default, you rule yourself by authority because you give yourself over to others’ ability to criticize. This becomes your foundation of knowledge, your ground. You are literally blown around on the wind of whatever others can convince you of with no anchor point internally. This is classic Greek skepticism and modern-day intellectual and moral nihilism. Smugness is inherent in all forms of authority worship such as relying on the criticism of others to know anything. Without acknowledgement of the true source of knowledge, subjective purpose aimed at objective being carried by social communication into consensual reality, you have denied yourself any foundation for knowing right from wrong. Subjective purpose aimed at being is the root of knowing what is true and what is false, what is good and what is bad, what is beautiful and what is ugly.

PCR relies on the abilities of others to determine right from wrong for you. How is this different from the Skeptic’s advice to follow convention since you can’t be certain of anything? It isn’t any different. PCR simply leads to conventional authority worship with the ability to know right from wrong entirely dependent on the qualities of those criticizing your beliefs and judgments. This is nihilism. The smugness sets in because all you have to do, is decide who is an authority (who has standing to criticize you) and who isn’t. If you really wanted to challenge yourself you would never stop seeking criticism from the very strongest intellects around. This is how Socrates lived his life and it is why PCR simply seems like the Socratic method restated. Most people, in fact, stop seeking criticism from the strongest intellects and become self-satisfied.

Speciation Considerations

The process of speciation sounds a bit like Heraclitus: In the end, “strife is justice”; the competition of individuals, groups, species, institutions, and empires constitutes nature’s supreme court, from whose verdict there is no appeal.

What is our purpose in developing artificial sapiens? The true philosophical position, far from divorcing morality from science, is that science and technology must serve moral purposes, particularly related to the preservation and enhancement of life, our life. Because philosophy has denied metaphysics, has denied faith, has made unfettered rationality the only acceptable mode of existence, our impulse for faith is unrequited. We can no longer create gods in our own image in our minds because that is not rational, a no-no. Therefore, we have set about to rationally create real, material gods outside of our minds who will have the ability to judge our actions externally, and who we can look up to. It really and truly requires “faith” and faith alone to hope that the gods of our creation judge us leniently and paternalistically. My opinion is that this “faith” in artificial sapiens is nihilistic, it is simply a disguised death wish.

I think one idea is that we should be happy with simulated memories of us for eternity as the reward we get for being physically annihilated by AI Robots. I would rather have the heirs to humanity be cladistically linked to us to preserve memories with meaning and a tie-in to their past than some approximated simulation of us by our destroyers.

The liquid description of sapience (a more complex form of sentience), is the most common metaphor for consciousness. It is the state that is termed “the edge of chaos” in self-organizational evolutionary theory. Over the edge, in the chaotic realm, the metaphor is gaseous and conditions are too unstable to categorize kinetic patterns. On the opposite side, in the ordered realm, the metaphor is solid and conditions are too rigid for successful long-term adaptation to occur. The tendency for self-organizing systems like consciousness to flow dynamically in the liquid realm is termed homeorhesis.

As to the need for individuality in consciousness, short of consciousness permeating the universe, it will have spatial boundaries, a unit. Parts will not have consciousness themselves. They will be subordinate to an integrated, coordinating will that will decide instant-by-instant amongst many directional purposes, which actions will be taken, and which actions will not be taken, regardless of what direction the parts that make up the consciousness would take autonomously. All possible actions cannot be taken at all possible times. The parts will have maximum autonomy at low-focus thought (akin to dreaming) and have minimum autonomy at high-focus thought prior to important directional decisions.

More complex consciousness implies increased differentiation of function. Function always points to purpose, so more complex consciousness will have more purposes. What will the cause of the new purposes be? What will keep the new purposes out of conflict? Only an individual can accomplish this generation and harmonizing of purposes prior to action. I doubt that natural selection will allow parts to make conflicting action decisions and remain coherent over long temporal spans.

I hypothesize that nature moves away from overly distributed functionality because the direction organisms proceed may be wrong. This tendency is akin to complexity catastrophes in evolutionary fitness landscape theory. It is better to have many autonomous units pointing in every direction, some of them will be right. The right direction is transcomputable, the future is indeterminate in this aspect. Ambiguity is what the environment presents to us and undecidibility choices are rampant. Through individuality, nature provides for a multiplicity of directional purposes to maximize long-term order in the face of an unknown future, rather than putting all the eggs in one functionally integrated basket that may be headed off a cliff.

Stuart Kauffman in Origins of Order (1993) writes:

...Ontogeny must be organized around branching pathways of differentiation! Whether one is comfortable with the idea or not, the existence of preferred ‘directions’ of alteration of developmental pathways implies something like ‘orthogenesis’ - a tendency of evolution to occur in preferred directions not because of selection constraints but because the underlying system has preferred directions of change in the face of random mutations."

A useful principle to keep in mind in these discussions of specifics is: It is easier to pick a direction in life by knowing what to run from, than it is to pick a direction to run to without knowing where you’ll end up.

The plan is to use our increasing knowledge of genetic engineering and coevolutionary biophysics to produce species and biosystems at will. The rate of speciation, along with the rate of extinction, will be whatever we politically choose it to be. The laws of evolution are mutable and we are the legislators.

Artificial sapiens can ignore us as direct threats, they cannot afford to ignore our technological creativity, because we can invent new systems of evolution that they would never understand, or be able to keep up with. I imagine this is a universal constraint on technological species’s creativity. All species reaching a certain level of creative potential, no matter what type of selectional system they are evolving under, must decide to channel their future into stable, visible tracks or risk being put out to pasture or put to death.

My argument is that artificial sapiens would calculate that they could save themselves a lot of potential future trouble by wiping out their creators (or at least neutering their creative capabilities). They would be stupid to not do this. And they will not be stupid.

‘What are the correct values for the preservation and enhancement of life?’ Certainly no judgment is value-free since judgment is essentially how we choose to subjectively interpret the maps we make of objective reality. If you don’t choose the preservation and enhancement of life as the end which moral values should be geared towards, then you choose death as the end. Moral values geared towards death are incorrect because they lead to elimination of the valuing subject from existence. Not just the individual subject, but ultimately all subjective reality is eliminated, and the universe reverts to just a bunch of rocks and cosmic dust. A moral system cannot lead to an amoral system as a correct end.

Our DNA that makes homo sapiens is roughly similar in a fertilized egg, within a very large range of deviations. This range of deviations has arbitrary cutoff points within which the biologists can roughly come to a consensus that we are one ‘species’. However, once the fertilized egg begins to grow, it is subject to a unique environment, a unique history of events, and develops into a unique individual. Each matured individual is a species unto themselves. I am also projecting how our political systems need to adjust to genetic engineering of ourselves and our progeny, including radical engineering that alters the number of chromosomes beyond current biologically defined homo sapiens. This ability of ours to design our own evolution fundamentally alters past political theories of ‘equality’ to such a degree that they are largely obsolete.

How do we mode lock the evolution of each individual’s conscience with the evolution of technology that produces new moral choices never before seen on earth, when such evolution is accelerating faster and spreading more broadly than any person or institution can possibly assimilate? Why, by tinkering with ourselves or our progeny, of course. What possible end could compost-modernism’s penchant for skepticism and deconstructionism have, other than reconstructing us as post-humans and reinstilling spirituality so that we will then keep up?

N. Katherine Hayles in Chaos Bound (1991), discusses the compost-modern deconstruction, or as she puts it, “denaturing” of language, context and time, followed logically by the human. She writes:

Language, context, and time are essential components of human experience... [whereas] the human is a construction logically prior to all three, for it defines the grounds of experience itself. If denaturing the human can sweep away more of the detritus of the past than any of the other postmodern deconstructions, it can also remove taboos and safeguards that are stays, however fragile, against the destruction of the human race. What will happen to the movement for human rights when the human is regarded as a construction like any other?

I don’t think we are supposing we can control our evolution, perhaps design our evolution is closer to it. We know we cannot know in advance which forms of living systems will be selected for (any more than we can know in advance which reasons will be selected for), so we will attempt many different designs and tough luck to the losers. Losers are always defined a posteriori as irrational and/or insane, weak, stupid, what-have-you anyway, so what’s new?

Posthuman means no longer human. There are several elements to posthuman concepts, the assumption is that posthumanity is the evolution to the next higher rung in the food chain, with homo sapiens being left behind or extinct. This evolution is thought of in several ways: a spiritual way, in that we achieve more complex subjectivity, a richer, more open imagination, and internal privacy less susceptible to the pokings and proddings of reductionist scientists and statist torturers or in an overwhelming increase in material abundance through nanotechnology leading to an almost exclusive focus on accelerated thought, a more pure spiritual mind; a material way, either through genetic engineering of ourselves (with or without being able to pass on the changes) or through genetic engineering of our progeny (designer babies) or through biomechanical augmentation of ourselves (cyborging, artificial organs, nanotech cellular repair/modification, cosmetic surgery, ‘smart’ drugs, computer melding, etc.; or a designed jump to an artificially sapient species (either advanced robotics and/or advanced computational designs); or downloading the brain into computers with multiple backups in case of accidents for indefinite longevity; etc., etc. Estimates on breakthroughs in some of these areas are in the years, some in decades, some (but not many) cross into science fiction.

Ethics and Preservation

This impelling to choose must be what Grace is, it cannot be a push to choose because a push denies free will, nor can it be that we choose because we are pulled toward something (the Good, for example) because we must be able to turn in any direction. We must exist at a fulcrum, a perfect balance of pushing forces and pulling forces, yet choose we must, every instant. With luck (or Providence), we choose correctly. Evolutionarily, I might say that we choose most successfully with both analysis and imagination, perhaps this is what is meant by choosing with the heart.

There are so many choices today with technological development accelerating as it is, and with the population increases, and the increases in wealth and resources, etc. that people almost feel like shutting down in the face of it. Choose! Choose! Choose! How tyrannical it can seem. The key to choosing is in deciding what to destroy versus what to preserve. The choice of destruction simplifies future choices because once something is destroyed, it no longer takes up time or energy to think about future choices involving it. Destruction is always the easy choice; destruction of a forest, an unborn child, a way of life, a civilization. The choice of preservation is very difficult, because things that are preserved always continuously take time and energy to choose to keep preserving. The work of preservation is an extravagant vocation in the face of unavoidable entropic processes of dissolution and decoherence, such a work implies a teleological view of existence; preserving the family line, the family homestead, the family business, a way of life, a view of the stars.

One of the strange things to be preserved would be your enemies, to be preserved for the sharpening of your own existential skills and in the hope that a seed may be about to burst forth, that your enemy will see your superior form of life and join together in hopes of a synergetic increase in meaning. Such a choice would appear to be indeed, a sponge for evil. Far easier just to destroy your enemies. Another strange thing, is how complicated choices of creation are, since creation is often necessary to preserve something, yet creation cannot occur without destruction of something else. The recurrent clamping down on originality and creativity throughout history is directly due to the desire to avoid this necessary moral ambiguity. Creation is profoundly messy and fraught with danger, no wonder the neo-Luddites are cropping up so frequently these days.

Miguel de Unamuno put it in Tragic Sense of Life (1913):

The world is made for consciousness. Or rather, this ‘for’ of ours, this notion of finality - or even better than ‘notion,’ this feeling of finality - this teleological feeling does not occur except where consciousness exists. In the end, consciousness and purpose are the same thing. Our life is hope continually changing into memory which in turn again engenders hope. Let us live! My soul longs, then, for an eternal Purgatory perhaps, rather than for a Paradise: it seeks eternal ascension.

And if eternal ascension is not our lot, then we had better make sure that it was not for lack of effort.

If annihilation must be our portion, let us act in such a way that we make it an unjust portion; let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory; let us fight quixotically. Our greatest effort must be the endeavor to make ourselves irreplaceable, to make a practical truth of the theoretical fact... that each one of us is unique and irreplaceable, and that no one else can fill the gap left by our death. In all truth every man is unique and irreplaceable: another I is inconceivable; each one of us - our soul, not our life - is worth the whole Universe.

Knowledge of right and wrong that helps us develop principles to guide our decisions in life is built up primarily in stable, ordinary experiences. Most of this knowledge comes early in life through watching the examples of the character of our parents and to a lesser degree, other authority figures. Character is largely developed by third grade, as anyone who’s had children knows. When childhood is chaotic, conscience is weakly instilled, and develops only with difficulty in adulthood. Take a relaxing evening stroll through an inner city to see what I mean. When parents no longer know right from wrong, they cannot provide examples to their children that are consistent enough for the children to build principles from. Parents have difficulty knowing right from wrong in periods of extremely rapid societal change, their bearings aren’t very secure. Building principles in adulthood is intellectually strenuous and time-consuming; in our fast-paced urban lives, very few individuals lead an “examined life.” Most adults who escaped childhood with weak consciences default to the easiest (least time-consuming) principles available in their environment, generally either received dogma or the nihilistic emotivism of “do your own thing.”

When the principles that embody our correct values are confronted by accelerating novelty (i.e., technological development), there is a lag time in adapting the principles to fit the new decisions faced, linked to the time involved in learning and recognition activities. When principles change at an accelerating rate to match accelerating technological change, it is difficult to still call them “principles” at all; they are more like “principles du jour,” the principle-forming process cannot fit into the temporal learning envelope. The danger is also that principles become just ad hoc justifications for doing whatever one feels at the moment, i.e., shallow emotivism. Individuals ruled by their willy-nilly passions of the moment are hardly post-human candidates, they are pre-human candidates, i.e., beasts.

In human history, the last speciation event was apparently between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago when modern homo sapiens arose and Neanderthal man was selected out of existence. I don’t know what else the appearance of post-humanity can possibly mean but a speciation event. If you’re no longer human, you are a new species. Given an individual’s desire for power over their environment (including over all living beings), how is humanity going to adjust itself to having superior post-humans (in whatever form) in the neighborhood? There will most likely be a fight (or euphemistically, competition), individuals don’t want to play second-fiddle. Will mere humanity go the way of the Neanderthals then?

Most important, worthy things in life are irreplaceable, unquantifiable and uniquely historical (such as a way of life); replacement cost is so feeble, it hardly is worth mentioning. Nothing “replaces” an individual, once gone.

The means of communication is never a force leading anywhere, the only force leading to liberty or slavery is the force that forms consciences, that provides a humble internal check on right and wrong in the light of human error.

Authority and Definitions

There is no authoritative definition of species, of human, of rights. There is no universal consensus as to the existence of authority at all. Look at my arguments in the Critique of Barlow’s Manifesto, look at the abortion and euthanasia debates over what a human life is, look at the grievance group rights and corporate group rights versus individual rights debates. “Species” is a conceptual category for individuals to make use of, but there is no accepted definition of what a species is within biology; there are several definitions each adopted for specific purposes and from different basic metaphysical presuppositions. Killing humans is not anathema, look at the “just war” debates, look at the Declaration of Independence for “just secession” debates. The assertion of the equality of rights is not paramount, the enforcement of such rights substantially equally is paramount; and rights conflict, they cannot be defined except on a case by case basis by individuals only, never by the “species” or any collection of individuals. There is never any group judgment, or authoritative group definition, there is only individual judgment and individual definition, which may, by consent, conform to other individuals’ judgments and definitions.

“I” am a unique category, a category of precisely one. I come first, then, unless I choose to place others before me for my own purposes. To place species first as a categorical imperative is the path to one world government, it is universalist in nature, and denies our free will.

The purpose of survival leads to the economics of survival, but man does not live by bread alone. Survival means nothing by itself, the question is what kind of survival? Should humanity live on its knees or die standing? Should humanity live in plump servility or starve in freedom? Should humanity survive aimlessly in a featureless desert of equality or should it risk destruction scaling the peaks of excellence?

“The state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only.” - Aristotle

Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) said:

If Rousseau is right, man’s reason, calculating his best interest, will not lead him to wish to be a good citizen, a law-abiding citizen. He will either be himself, or he will be a citizen, or he will try to be both and be neither. In other words, enlightenment is not enough to establish society, and even tends to dissolve it. Progress culminates in the recognition that life is meaningless. But fear of death, however powerful it may be and however useful it may be as a motive for seeking peace and, hence, law with teeth in it, cannot be the fundamental experience. It presupposes an even more fundamental one: that life is good. The deepest experience is the pleasant sentiment of existence.

One position is that our reason will calculate that the survival of the species is in our best interest. This means that we should be good citizens of the world state, which is the only center of power strong enough to ensure that this purpose is adhered to by all. But what of the individual? The individual is nowhere to be found in a world state of universal (species-wide) citizens. What freedom is this? It is servility. I accept what Bloom concludes, fear of death is not the fundamental experience, not even fear of the death of the species.

‘Feel!,’ Hobbes said. In particular you should imagine how you feel when another man holds a gun to your temple and threatens to shoot you. That concentrates all of the self in a single point, tells us what counts. This experience helps much more to ‘set priorities’ than does any knowledge of the soul or any of its alleged emanations such as conscience.

By putting the survival of the species above the survival of the individual, you are clearly trying to do what the Enlightenment thinkers, Hobbes and Locke, failed to do. Make us all concentrate solely on the survival of the species to the exclusion of all else. We have long passed from the rational political solutions of Locke to the emotivist political solutions of Rousseau, because these proved to be closer to the complex truth of the human soul, than trying to build a political system on the rational fear of extinguishment.

Rousseau quickly pointed out that Locke, in his eagerness to find a simple or automatic solution to the political problem, made nature do much more than he had a right to expect a mechanical, nonteleological nature to do. Natural man would be brutish, hardly distinguishable from any of the other animals, unsociable and neither industrious nor rational, but, instead, idle and nonrational, motivated exclusively by feelings or sentiments. Having cut off the higher aspirations of man, those connected with the soul, Hobbes and Locke hoped to find a floor beneath him, which Rousseau removed. Man tumbled down into what I have called the basement, which now appears bottomless. Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one. The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to his real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in him, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise him perfection or salvation but merely buys him off.

This is stated so well, the future citizen of the world state, out of primary concern for the survival of the species, will have nothing higher than the continued existence of this species offered to him. He will be “bought off” with the hedonistic materialism of basic survival economics.

Man is elevated and alone. If this is to be plausible, man must be free.... but free in a much grander sense, that of legislating to himself and to nature, hence without guidance from nature. The complement to and explanation of this view of freedom is creativity. God alone had been called a creator; and this was the miracles of miracles, beyond causality, a denial of the premise of all reason. What defines man is no longer his reason, which is but a tool for his preservation, but his art, for in art man can be said to be creative. There he brings order to chaos. A man who can generate visions of a cosmos and ideals by which to live is a genius, a mysterious, demonic being. Such a man’s greatest work of art is himself. He who can take his person, a chaos of impressions and desires, a thing whose very unity is doubtful, and give it order and unity, is a personality. All of this results from the free activity of his spirit and his will.

No citizen of the world state will be an artist in this sense. They will only be rational, only settle for preservation of the species at the expense of creativity and free will. It is a paralysis of our innate capacity to legislate to ourselves and to nature, it leads to societal sclerosis. This scheme is the logical result of placing the economics of species survival above politics, above aesthetics, above spirituality and philosophy. It really is a Marxist look-alike.

Existence and Destiny

When one directs one’s actions towards an external heaven and an afterlife, that is a destiny. When one directs actions towards one’s contentment and happiness, that is nothingness, one is not directing oneself towards anywhere but back to the source of the direction, a loop going nowhere, this is not a destiny. Between these two extremes, where is the highest external level that one might direct one’s actions? Not the family, not the community, but the state, this is a destiny, the highest destiny one can strive for short of transcendence. The current neo-pagan dirt-worshipping religious impulse is simply a “save the earth” political program designed to bring about the only external structure that could do this, a world government. Devoting one’s actions towards a world state is a higher destiny than to America, as a solar system state would be to a world state, or a galactic quadrant state would be to a solar system state.

Individuals do not want their self to be obliterated, they want it to continue. If the self does not continue beyond death, then the products of that self’s actions are the next best tangible substitute for preservation, this is the source of the desire for fame, and for the devotion of one’s life to the preservation and flourishing of the greatness of a state.

Happiness is not defined as choosing purposes, it is defined as achieving purposes. The constant need to come up with new purposes is not pleasurable at all, it falls entirely outside the definition of happiness, it is unhappiness, it is an unrelenting burden. The tyranny of choosing, the burden of freedom is why humanity’s greatest impulse is to turn over our freedom of choice to those who will choose purposes for us, so that we can concentrate on our happiness and material contentment.

An individual’s existence is only at the expense of others. At the expense of other’s freedom of action, their energy, their air, their water, their earth, their space and their time. When an individual comes into existence at conception, he immediately begins appropriating all of these from his environment, he imposes on everyone and everything else from the beginning of his life to the end of it by actively grabbing what he needs and wants from everything around him. Who granted the individual the right to be born? The Supreme Court? The mother? The father? The state? The doctor? Gaia?

The Cognitive Élite

Keep in mind Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve where he discusses the very real, and very measurable phenomenon of increasing IQ amongst the children of parents who met at coed institutions of higher learning in the post-WW II era. Never in history, anywhere, has such a concentrated number of individuals of high IQ (which has at least a 50% genetic component to it), met, married and had children. These children then repeated the process, boosting the IQ of their children not only through “nature,” but through high cognitive stimulation in their early years, through “nurture” also.

This is, in Murray’s terms, the “cognitive élite.” It is real. They have the brains and money, and they are pulling away, literally, from the rest of the pack each succeeding generation. Murray recounts carefully how the “cognitive élite” prefers higher elevations for their houses, this is a historical pattern, deeply ingrained in humanity. Murray paints a picture of the “cognitive élite” perched up above everyone else, not just in urban areas, but in exurbia also.

They are protecting themselves physically, through gated communities, private security forces, and fortress-mentality architectural design. This pattern is straight from the anarchistic Italian Renaissance towns, with their towers and their private armies. The “cognitive élite” recognizes that the state no longer has their safety as top priority, that its top priority is buying votes through welfare state entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. They also recognize that they will never have the votes to change this situation in a direct democracy.

They are protecting themselves financially through “Commie deed restrictions” of their “Homeowner’s Associations,” the primary concern being resale value of their abodes. They are selling to each other, of course, and any newcomers rising up the IQ pipeline. It is tribalism. The “cognitive élite” is a tribe, or a class in old-fashioned language. They recognize each other, they conduct business with each other, they protect each other, they marry their children off to each other and dote on grandchildren together. Regional differences between them pale before their tribal similarities. Before we cast too many stones at their socialistic lives, look closely at their tribalism, and don’t forget that they are literally smarter and richer, as a tribe, than any similar group of individuals ever before in history. This is the natural order of society, it is “organic.”

Thomas Aquinas says, in Summa Contra Gentiles (Book III, ch. 81): “...There is an order among men themselves. For those among them who excel by their intellect naturally dominate the others; as to those who do not shine by their intellect, but whose body is robust, they seem to be destined by nature to servitude.”

Etienne Gilson, in Elements of Christian Philosophy (1960), doesn’t sugar-coat this organic fact of nature.

The only really new development since the time of Thomas Aquinas is that, in the more advanced types of ‘democratic’ societies, where technocracy is taking the lead in guiding economic revolution, it is becoming more and more true to say that, whatever the name of the regime, the best assets for anybody to have are first health and next brains. In short, nature is desperately aristocratic. In the long run, the odds are always on the more intelligent.

I submit that the protected socialist clubs, perched above and away from the barbarians roaming the streets, are growing organically. The “cognitive élite” are just living the best they can, making decisions concerning their future and their children’s future the best they can in the environment they find themselves in. These individuals have seen the future, and they want to be, if not ahead of the screaming technological pace of development, at least not too far behind it. They see that many will be left far behind, and they see that this is “natural.” Not in a late-nineteenth-century social Darwinistic sense, but in a Thomistic sense of the only society that makes any sense at all, a hierarchical one.

The “cognitive élite” really aren’t as fog-bound as you might think they appear to be. At the Johns Hopkins CTY Talent Search (Center for Talented Youth) awards ceremony in Eugene, Oregon for the finalists (by virtue of finishing in the top 3% of the nationally administered SAT-type tests given to seventh and eighth graders), the MC got up and said, basically:

We know you have been told that students are all equal, that you have had to put up with frustrating group grading, with the slow pace of presentation of material necessary to keep the class coherency intact; well, we are here to tell you that you need not pay attention to what we tell the rest of the students who are not here today. You are the leaders of tomorrow, push yourselves, advance as fast as you can, do not worry about the others, we are proud of you; excellence, not equality, is all that counts.

To hear it so baldly put was shocking! The educrats acknowledge that their system is a crock, and that only individual excellence is the ticket to avoid dronedom. By the way, the girl that took the absolute top honors, was home-schooled!

If something, really I should say someone, affects your life, they either: a) help you, or b) hinder you. Neutral intentions or actions have no effect on your life. Individuals tolerate neutral intentions or actions, that is, they are indifferent to them, which is also a form of disapproval or patronization. Individuals welcome intentions or actions which help them, this is the basis for consensual moral polities, for approval or respect, not tolerance. Individuals fight against intentions or actions which hinder them, they do not tolerate them. Servility is not tolerance.

Strategic Intolerance

Servility-and-authoritarian violence is a coupled dynamic system, like knower-and-known, interpretation-and-map, intention-and-action.

Since toleration of entropy is ruination, intolerance of it becomes a duty if the dynamic pursuit of extropy is our chosen purpose. This is a correct value, or moral certainty. You can fight entropy on many fronts: against the servile society, against authoritarian violence, or even against our own tendencies towards slobbery.

Fighting the servile society is like a pre-emptive strike, e.g., Alexander Pope and Samuel Francis. This helps stave off the worst of the authoritarian violence if a relational threshold of individuals (I’m thinking of percolation theory), turns from wave-bobbing towards extropy. Fighting authoritarian violence often is required late in the game, after an oppressive élite is entrenched in power, e.g. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. You can’t wait until no independent powers are left in the world to start the fight, because the internal fight must have external support. Waiting until America surrenders its sovereignty to a World State is too late to start fighting authoritarian violence, there will be no external support.

Many thinkers have noted the coupling of servility and authoritarian violence. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that “servility will cower to force, and adulation will follow power.” He warned against the servility of a radical egalitarianism:

What resistance can be offered by customs of so pliant a make that they have already often yielded? What strength can even public opinion have retained when no twenty persons are connected by a common tie... and when every citizen, being equally weak, equally poor, and equally isolated, has only his personal impotence to oppose to the organized force of the government?

George Santayana wrote: “In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated.” Restraining those who cannot restrain themselves calls forth more and more central authority, whose élite pursues their own ends, not the general good. Those ends are invariably the accumulation of power and wealth, the achievement of which encourage the élite to keep those restrained from developing the facility of restraining themselves.

Servility-and-authoritarian violence ratchet up and down together, but the beginning point for both upward and downward movement is with servility. Giambattista Vico’s axiom is: “Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.” Governing over the dissolute calls forth the demagogue, the tyrant. This follows from Vico’s additional axioms: “He who cannot govern himself must let himself be governed by another who can,” and preceding Darwin by 115 years, “The world is always governed by those who are naturally fittest.”

Here lies real trouble with governmental minimalism. The only way that minimal government can work, is when individuals govern themselves. But individuals cannot govern themselves without learning to obey themselves, that is, to place their animal desires for vacant freedom under the sovereignty of their rational mind which understands the nature of the limitations external reality places on us.

And individuals can never learn to obey themselves - that is, develop self-control - unless they have learned to obey someone above them. In a radically egalitarian society, there is no one above them, not their bosses, not their leaders, not their priests, not their parents. They simply do not need to learn how to obey authority, because authority is not allowed to maintain itself in conditions of concrete equality. Hence, they cannot govern themselves, and the state grows and grows by necessity, in direct proportion to the degree that individuals cannot govern themselves.

Unless there is a policeman inside your head, a policeman must be assigned to you. In addition, a policeman must be assigned to each policeman, ad infinitum. Very quickly you run out of individuals to do the policing necessary. We are at this point now, when 40% of GDP goes to government. For the ideal of minimum government to work, you must have maximum self-government, and this you can only have with legitimate hierarchical levels of authority. But governmental minimalists often hate hierarchical authority because it so obviously hems in our freedom, our ability to do as we please - a conundrum.

The popular bumper sticker “Question Authority” taken literally is largely harmless, a banal platitude typical of shallow thinking-in-slogans suitable to the illiterati of “Generation Duh.” But many individuals, steeped in radical egalitarianism, do not stop at the common sense meaning, they go on to interpret it as if it meant “Deny Authority.” Now we’re in trouble. Santayana warned: “Freedom is legitimate when it does not usurp authority.... The great moral error is not to admit authority at all.”

The historically recent virtual renunciation of authority has had unpleasant side effects. I can still vaguely remember when a Ph.D. conferred more status on an individual than a shoe salesman had, and when to be a professional didn’t tend to evoke “hooker,” selling their integrity to the highest bidder. But that was thirty years ago. For the last five years, the operating principle of the public schools has been that no one will be more educated than the least educated. My memory of a time of professional integrity and intellectual distinction has faded considerably, the nihilistic/egalitarian rot has set in so fast. This dual rot produces, on the one hand, individuals who think ‘Who cares?’ about status, respect or anything; and on the other hand, individuals who care deeply for undifferentiated equality amongst everyone, with the exception of themselves, who, of course, are more equal than the rest.

Thomas Molnar, in Authority and its Enemies (orig. 1976, rev. 1995) again noted the coupling of servility-and-authoritarian violence, but expanded on its relation to the legitimacy of authority:

Authority is only mocked and despised when it is obviously antirational or when it is declining, when the men in power are themselves no longer convinced of its beneficial presence. Then... they abdicate and yield authority to men more determined than they are. It is the immemorial experience of mankind... that the decline of authority leads to the permissive society, which then ushers in the rule of brute force.

Authority is declining because of a systematic attack on Reason itself. You can no more squeeze blood out of a turnip, than you can squeeze extropy out of scientific nihilism, cultural relativism, and historical revisionism. They are not to be tolerated. Vico refers to these as the barbarism of reflection, and noted it to be a worse scourge than the barbarism of sense, like the Huns, Mongols and Vikings:

For the [barbarism of sense] displayed a generous savagery, against which one could defend oneself or take flight or be on one’s guard; but the [barbarism of reflection], with a base savagery, under soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates.

Molnar goes on to explain:

Authority does not become irrational by the fact that will is one of its essential components, nor does it become tyrannical by the fact that it is an articulator and preserver of inequality. If a society, with its rich articulation, is reduced to an undifferentiated mass, it is not authority it will face, but the most oppressive despotism. Those who exercise authority must, therefore, have the courage and the will to lift - and keep - society above the temptations of the anthill.

And those who don’t exercise authority, must be individually intolerant of authoritarian violence. They also can go a long way towards preventing authoritarian violence from arising, by being intolerant of servility - of the wave-bobbers - calling them to turn towards extropy, and setting a living example of the fruits of such a turn.

Keep the demographic levels of servility low, and the fight against authoritarian violence is manageable. With high levels of servility, and a looming World State, the fight against authoritarian violence is unmanageable. Parents today, even when they believe in their own authority, which is a rarity in our post-60s Stalinized culture, aren’t allowed by the state to exercise it. Nor are there “consistent” expectations either in one’s childhood or in one’s adulthood, because humanity is inconsistent by nature during periods of rapid technological development. The state stands behind every family, ready to intercede “on a child’s behalf” whenever the child complains about much of anything, whether the complaint is issued in the neighborhood, the grocery store, the doctor’s office, or the school. The children know this from very early on, it permeates the air. When the child says “I won’t do what you expect me to do, and you can’t make me,” the child is 100% right. Self-control cannot arise unless the child somewhere along the way makes an internal decision to submit to authority. It doesn’t have to be slavish non-stop submission, no need to make a big bugaboo about it, but it does have to occur when it counts.

Look closely at what differences there are between “You are expected to do this,” and “You will do this.” If expectation means you can always walk away, without ever having to obey, then self-governance cannot arise. Children can only decide to obey internally, when they are trapped by the legitimate hierarchy of society, which closes off avenues of disobedience to them. But in the modern welfare state, there are never right and wrong decisions which are rewarded and punished by the next immediate level of authority, there are only cases to be dealt with by impersonal, removed, statist bureaucrats and therapists. There can be no self-control, no respect of others, no dignity between individuals, without this internal decision occurring. And with the dual scourges of nihilism and radical egalitarianism running rampant in Western Civilization, there in fact, is precious little self-control, respect, or dignity. A steady diet of only positive reinforcement and only unearned self-esteem boosting in the public schools, with no external discipline, only produces infantile behavior, individuals simply rage when their desires are thwarted. As Alexander Pope defined servility, they are “proud, selfish and dull.” In addition, as Nietzsche noted, you simply cannot learn to command effectively unless you have learned to obey. That is why we have no leadership today to speak of, no Madisons, no Washingtons.

Definitions and Cultural Speciation

Are you aware of the huge abortion debate that has raged in this country for decades? What do you think it is about? It is about the definition of life, and by extension, the definition of murder. When the Supreme Court defines “life” instead of We-The-People through our state legislatures, hasn’t the divide between church and state been breached? Hasn’t the state become the church, ruling in moral matters traditionally reserved for spiritual considerations rather than temporal? There is no rational definition of “life,” scientists are unable to define it. What is the proper arena for debates about such foundational definitions? Is it not the political arena, beginning with the sovereign individual? What arena is proper for defining when AIs are “alive“ or “conscious entities” or whatever you think will trigger them for consideration of extension of “rights” (whatever they are)? Denying rights to any entity for any arbitrary reason whatsoever is perfectly acceptable in any society where definitions don’t matter. Rights don’t matter where definitions don’t matter, because the definition of rights doesn’t matter. Where is the court of justice where we would jointly submit such claims so that we could determine whether our claims are more valid than other forms of life’s claims? Who has the authority to make such a determination? Or is it just plain old-fashioned “might makes right”? Why doesn’t the amoeba rule of “eat-or-be-eaten” work between intergalactic forms of life? What higher rules are we held to? Who determines the higher rules and who enforces them?

How can “we” have a joint reality, if “we” don’t consent to common definitions embedded in the means we use to communicate with each other? Is there really a “we” when we are not operating off of a common definition of terms, or are we simply talking past each other, rather than to each other? If definitions are unimportant, doesn’t this restrict you to never reaching out past your reality into others’ realities?

It is very productive to think of patterns of thought in terms of river channels, with “constriction/resistance” reflected in their curves, falls, shallows, currents, floods, etc. The physiology of “constriction/resistance” is what I was describing in my examples of preferred evolutionary branches of ontogeny, preferred protein folding spaces, preferred protein design spaces, preferred mental activity patterns, etc. Virtually everywhere you turn in the biological sciences, preferred physical structures and preferred dynamic patterns turn up; not randomness, but design. The most highly adaptive dynamic structures, such as our brains and immune systems, are most aptly described with liquid realm metaphors, because the biophysical “constriction/resistance” parameters force them to “flow” in between chaotic and ordered dynamic patterns.

We also must keep in mind, that meaning arises from the movements of the body as it functionally couples with others against the background of the external environment. What forms of bodies uploads will inhabit, will determine what meanings will arise within them. Certainly human meanings will not arise or be sustained in non-human bodies.

You move through life, from conception to death, appropriating space and time, energy and matter from the living entities in your environment. You are violently appropriating these all the time, whether or not you have the capacity to appreciate or desire such violent appropriation. This is the truth. If you jettison truth, I guess you can usefully delude yourself that you have not been committing acts of violence all your life against other living entities, whether you knew you were or not. Your violent appropriations from other humans may be from unintended consequences, from indirect “externalities,” from studied ignorance, but they are very real. You can try to define this aspect of life away, but you will not change the reality of it. What right do you have to exist at all, where did it come from?

It is one of the strangest things I contend with, to see sharp individuals place vacant freedom on their highest altar, while simultaneously probing to the limits of our biological basis for free will, strenuously reducing the ‘self’ down to absolutely nothing in order to remake the ‘self’ in any imagined direction. Craziness masked as rationality.

What I am really trying to get across, is that the peak of human life is reached only through strenuous effort, through striving towards the highest meanings, the most sublime designs, the liquid realm. When a falloff from this peak occurs, it can occur in two directions, one in the humanist direction (the chaotic realm), and the other in the technicist direction (the ordered realm). In Athanasian terms, life is not lived at its highest unqualified level of existence when the co-equal trinity-in-one is unbalanced in favor of any one aspect of reality alone, or any combination of two aspects of reality. The literal instant an individual falls from a conception of a co-equal trinity-in-one, he ceases to have supreme existence and begins a slip towards heresy or darkness.

I see different kinds of individuals pursuing different objectives, one sort wants human consciousness in non-human bodies, one sort wants enhanced human consciousness in enhanced human bodies, one sort wants beyond-human consciousness in beyond-human bodies and either wants to preserve humans after the speciation event or could care less what happens to humans afterwards or desires human abolition to avoid competition from branching species, one sort wants non-human consciousness in non-human bodies and good riddance to humans or else keep them for pets, one sort wants sub-human consciousness in either sub-human, human or non-human bodies, etc.

I look to a kind of “cultural speciation” to occur prior to “human speciation.” I think whatever the Net evolves into can facilitate this by creating private conceptual spaces - textual, symbolic, artifactual - that resist assimilation by the increasingly strong globalist (including corporatist) forces that seek to reduce all human culture into a homogeneous mud pie of emotivist, hedonistic materialism without purpose or meaning. From a business standpoint, I’m for upscale niche marketing rather than lowest common denominator mass marketing.

Frontierism

Frontiers of space and the Net have been mentioned, there are other formulations of “frontier” floating around in the conceptual stew. There are many books characterizing science and technological development as “frontiers of knowledge.” There are “spiritual frontiers” cropping up on various web sites (e.g., Kurokawa - “I feel that the time has come for us to venture into the frontier of the spirit which stretches broadly on all sides at the fringes of our established rules and standards”). There are “frontiers of the heart” (see Michael Malone’s article in Forbes ASAP of 12/2/96). There are “frontiers of art,” see Natasha More’s “Extropic Art Manifesto” or A.N. Whitehead’s observation: “The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul. It unlooses depths of feeling from behind the frontier where precision of consciousness fails.” There is an extropic need to complexify both ourselves and the outside world in order to open wide the metaphysical space between them, a frontier, for discoveries both scientific and artistic.

There is a recent history of viewing physical frontiers as promoting virtue or redemption through various forms of imperialism, whether earlier colonialism or later global “running-dog” capitalist. John Ruskin in 1878 was very influential in promoting the British mission to expand into the frontier of less virtuous peoples, quite similar to American “Manifest Destiny.” Frederick Turner’s essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893) argued that since the closure of the frontier in America (the claiming of the Cherokee Strip in 1889), opportunities for growth and self-renewal would be shut off, leading to decadence. Turner held that the frontier experience was central to America’s character, “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” In other words, an extropic arena of vitality. From about 1900 onwards, America’s political élite has looked to the Pacific and Asia for frontier-like expansion, always westward, although they have been frequently frustrated by the well-armed foreigners in their way. This will continue.

Speaking of extropic arenas of vitality, some hold that cyberspace will eventually have many jurisdictions, rather than One World Government. These jurisdictions will act much like the medieval frontiers or marches, where sovereignties overlapped and jostled. In these frontier areas, before statism took solid root, institutional and legal forms developed that approximated what “competitive” polycentric government might look like (see Medieval Frontier Societies (1992) eds. Robert Bennett and Angus MacKay).

Frontiers are not “goals,” a frequent misapplication of the term, they are boundaries. They are really physical, meaning spatial, or rather territorial. Any use of the word “frontier” outside of this meaning is only metaphorical.

The frontier mentality cannot be purged from humanity, no matter how filled the earth becomes. An evolutionary search in fitness space will continue, not much different from probes at the ends of tentacles of primitive one-celled animals. Get out! Move! Get away! Find sustenance! Imperative!

It is human nature to be plagued by major cross-purposes: to be different and to be similar, or as I put it in my history paper, “Life is a struggle between seeking and avoiding surprise.” Cultural speciation precedes human speciation. Cultural speciation is, by definition, the formation of sub-cultures. So becoming a sub-culture is hardly a “risk,” it is the extropic aim. The idea of a unity of humanity, a single global culture, makes us itchy. We are too hemmed in here. We are like restless ants, and our restlessness is ratcheting up. Space is only real physical frontier to escape the World Surveillance State.

Absent a frontier, absent space to dream in, and move in, humanity implodes into a stagnant dogmatic sinkhole. From the experience of the Crusades as overcoming limits, to the proto-spirituality of the Chartres Cathedral and the epoch of Scholasticism, to the Protestant Revolution and the scientific enterprise it spawned; it has been Space (or Extension), that was placed at the pinnacle of spirituality. Our true longing, to expand and grow, our pioneer spirit that took us from medieval Paris westward through the wilderness to the Oregon Territory, is to leave earth physically and explore outer space.

Short of being able to do this, we are reaching out to create and then tame the wilderness of cyberspace. Cyberspace, after all the media hype is boiled down, is simply a temporary stopover, a holding pattern, until our technology advances further into real space. The impetus we have to delve into cyberspace is the same impetus we had in Chartres Cathedral, a plunge into cyberspace can invoke the same feelings as looking up through those high windows in Chartres. The same individuals who would call Chartres ‘a pile of rocks,’ would call a Ferrari a ‘rolling hunk of metal,’ and cyberspace mere ‘electrons on a phosphor screen.’ Such minds are staring fixedly at the mud. We turn and look at the stars, the infinite frontier.

Transhumanism and Ideals

The machine placed at the center of our civilization is where we’re at in many élite quarters (but not all). For example, MIT resident death-worshipper Steven Pinker uses this language to describe a baby growing up: “The usual primate assembly process spills into the first years in the world.” I see this type of language amongst scientists and technicist frequently.

Tinkering with machines is morally justified; if humans are machines, we can tinker with them. I have always liked Frank Herbert’s (author of the Dune series) commandment: “Thou shalt not disfigure the soul.” This idea of humans as machines denies the existence of a soul. No soul, no dignity. No dignity, no respect, no rights, the only thing left is whatever you can get away with.

The World Culture’s premises are entirely inverted, placing reason ahead of morality, to the virtual denial of morality, denial of human dignity, denial of non-monetarized value. When we write of World Culture “allowing” anything whatsoever, we both know that we are really talking about the experts, the shapers of opinion, the dealers in symbolism. When we have designer children, who will present the images before us that will constitute the ideal genotypes? Why does everyone suddenly pick the same dominant first names for the children born in a given year? The more “diversity” that is shoved down our throats, the more monotony we get, McWorld indeed.

The image makers, the creators of culture, will provide the ideals and standards of our enhanced faculties and physiognomies. They will lead, the rest will follow in a hazy made-to-order liberty.

A good stab at a definition of transhumanism is: “The idea that the human condition can be improved above and beyond the current stage, through rational means in a life affirming way”. Definitions are critical to communication, which is critical to developing a consensual moral polity, which is critical to achieving great aims in the future. It seems to me that defining what a human is, has not met with consensus and that defining what a transhuman is, therefore, is putting the cart before the horse.

That said, I would like to offer that “rational means” is wedded to the concept of “truth,” and “a life affirming way” is wedded to the concept of “good.” All you are missing is some part of your definition that is wedded to the concept of “beauty.” “Beauty” should enter in as an aim, what transhumanism aims for. Across all scientific endeavors, at all scales, spatial and temporal, preferred branches of development reveal themselves. Transhumanism should be aiming at maximizing chances of successful speciation by learning where these preferred branches are located. I like the idea of defining transhumanism as an “idea” because it avoids getting bogged down in prescriptive or normative ethics, i.e., it doesn’t come across as a “program” or a utopian manifesto. Optionally, you might bring in some concept wedded to “adventure,” something relating to the vitality of pursuing enhanced consciousness and indefinite longevity.

The inclusion of “a life affirming way” naturally excludes enthusiasts of abortion, infanticide and euthanasia since these are all life devaluing, not affirming. Freedom to murder is not liberty, it’s license. These enthusiasts, who sanction predatory behavior against the weak, the sick and the old, who adhere to the “might makes right” ethic of entropic death-worship, are essentially thugs. They may masquerade as transhumanists or extropians, but they live an ugly lie, incoherently and irrationally posturing as if they “affirm life” and mouthing vapid platitudes about “non-coercion” while forcing everyone to tolerate their endorsement and practice of butchery.

Enlightened Rationalism

No rationality is used in setting goals, only morality. Rationality sifts through various means to various goals in the process of choosing a goal, but is silent over the actual final choice of a goal. It is akin to the difference between effectiveness and efficiency. Means are always important because private virtues develop public virtues, which facilitates the achievement of great aims, while private vices develop public vices, which facilitates slop.

Rational individuals do, in fact, use induction, they do not merely drift on the waves of infantile desire. They see that adherence to variations of morals lead to variations of consequences, some good and some bad. Some morals are inductively superior to other morals, if the presupposition is made that “life is good.” The ability to develop self-discipline is one of the key capacities that distinguishes homo sapiens from the amoeba.

The record of history shows that corruption, lies and blackmail always result from a lowering of moral standards, not from an elevating of them. It is irrational to ignore the historical record. Frustration over not being able to live up to a high standard is adolescent, it is stereotypical of the spoiled-child syndrome. It is caused by an abrogation of parental authority, i.e., decadent children come from corrupt parents.

Let me be explicit about whose morality “usually” is based on selfish hedonism: animals and animal-like humans. Now, for the missing part of morality, for the morality developed by humans who do not behave as thugs, it is not based on selfish hedonism. It is based on choosing an ideal, a purpose in life, an attempt at a great achievement in the future, etc. It arises from the unified, coherent answers to the human (not animal) questions such as: why is there something and not nothing, why am I here, what should my purpose be, how should I fulfill my purpose, how should I get along with these other beings around me, etc. Once you’ve decided on your purposes, besides the homeostatic purposes of survival and reproduction that nature has endowed you with, and the purposes you’ve chosen don’t conflict, you develop moral values that will lead to the fulfillment of your chosen purposes.

Principles are rational choices, purposes are chosen prior to rationality. Deciding to be rational, to aim at truth, is not a rational choice, it is pre-rational or moral. These moral values, in turn, filter which perceptions are allowed to penetrate your consciousness, in the learning process, and which concepts are deposited in memory. Your moral worldview colors the entirety of the way you think, what you sense, what you remember, which in turn, is inextricably connected to the motor-cortical system of the behavior of your body. If you have the morality of selfish hedonism, you will think like a lower animal and behave like a lower animal, not like a higher human. Reflection and abstraction are a surer guide to morality that works to preserve and enhance higher life than any set of feelings. This is why high standards of morality, which develop subtlety and refined judgments, will work to elevate the human condition, while dropping standards of morality will work to degrade the human condition. Pleasure and suffering, happiness and unhappiness are lower animal guides to moral standards, not higher human guides.

Morals are not based on some external punishment vs reward system, they are based on the choice of purposes, the values that attend that choice, and the behavior, in the co-evolutionary environment with other beings, that will lead to their fulfillment. This is an interior system, isolated from all observation or participation by outsiders. Volitional freedom is central to the higher human, and is what is missing in lower animal life, the freedom to choose courses not set at nature’s table for us. Higher morals arise from coherent answers to the metaphysical questions, they have little to do with primitive impulse.

I would point out that earlier you wrote what is obviously the key tenet to Enlightened Rationalism as you perceive it, namely: “So if you feel like it, and think that you can get away with it... by all means go ahead!” This is the very antithesis of self-discipline, and betrays the incoherency and dishonesty in your version of E.R. It is the prime tenet of lower animal life, and human barbarism. Where, in the moral universe of E.R., could there be any room for personal responsibility?

Ideas that fly in the face of human nature are necessary for both self-improvement and improvement of the human condition in general. It is human nature to take the easy way out, to focus on the immediate to the detriment of society at large, to take no thought of future generations and to dishonor the sacrifices (the moral capital) of past generations. Humans default to entropic barbarism unless ideas that fly in the face of barbarism are promulgated and upheld. High moral standards were always present at the extropic peaks in history.

James Buchan in Frozen Desire (1997) wrote:

Money wealth, though it is as colorless as celebrity, appears to many to be good. Actions are good that bring money. Moral choices are thus simply bought out; rather as to a teenage whore or burglar, the garbled memories of moral instruction dissolve in the imperatives of smack.

We learned from the Middle Ages in Europe that money is fatal to Christianity, and also to any timeless or cherished pattern for society. From the book-keepers, we learned that money can be written or rather forged into a written language which can express reality after a fashion; but at the price of a compulsion and the ludicrous, almost grotesque, restriction of the personality. The Romantics reminded us of the evil of money: how the habit of calculating and making comparisons in money diminishes much that is strange and precious in creation, indeed abolishes quality itself as a mental category by which to understand reality; displaces trust in people by trust in money, and thus poisons the relations between human beings and atomizes society; and submerges being in possessing.

What Choice Between Humanity and Transhumanity?

There are so many possible directions of future human speciation, each with their own costs., but what is the cost of preventing human speciation? To place the eternal preservation of the human species as human, as the highest moral good - a categorical imperative - can only result in the loss of our volitional freedom, our very humanity itself. The only center of power strong enough to ensure that this moral imperative will be adhered to by all, would be a world state. A universal moral imperative dictating the survival of a changeless humanity leads to societal sclerosis, a paralysis of our innate artistic capacity to legislate to ourselves and to nature. Settling for species survival hardly lifts us above the level of animals, we need frontiers and high adventure worthy of our unique sovereign capacities. We need far more complex lives than we currently have. Survival means nothing by itself, the political question is what kind of survival? The goal of achieving the sustained fitness of humanity presupposes a fixed, controllable environment. If some individuals instead choose a goal of evolvability, i.e., speciation or individual mutability, in order to seek dynamically novel environments, then our existing environment becomes disordered and uncontrollable. If the preservation of changeless humanity is the highest moral good, then no individual can safely be allowed to board the transhumanist vessel, the risk of losing control of our tidy environment would be unacceptable, would thwart the achievement of the good. Fixing humanity as humanity forever, denies volitional freedom, paradoxically making us less than human. Ultimately, the choice is not transhuman vs. human, the choice is transhuman vs. subhuman.

Family Model in Assessing Consequences of New Technology

The ultimate form in the ancient Greek worldview was the human body. The more completely we turn our backs on our heritage, the more we desire to plasticize the body. I am looking at not only the body and mind as blank canvasses awaiting the artist’s touch, but also planets themselves, including earth. Who will provide the ideal imagery that will shape the designer babies and genetically altered landscapes of the near future? What will their metaphysical presuppositions be?

In discussing uploads, avoiding “identity” semantics does not allow us to avoid topics such as subjectivity, individual intentionality, and volitional freedom. With this in mind, there is no argument “that the copy and the original are both the same identity” because subjectivity is indivisible. Individual rights here, not group rights. If the copy and the original have the same subjectivity (sometimes referred to as “qualia”), then they are one entity, not two. It is meaningless to speak of a copy and an original sharing an identical subjectivity. There is no collective subjectivity; intersubjectivity, yes, but not subjectivity. There is only one nexus of volitional freedom per entity, not two or more. Each unique entity has unique consequences of their intentionality. A copy and an original obviously each have their own unique consequences of their intentionality, hence they cannot be the same “identity.”

I agree that “each individual has to choose their own preferences as to what parts of themselves are important that they want to preserve, and what parts are unnecessary and can be discarded,” this is what parents do all the time when bringing children into the world and they are rapidly gaining technological tools to facilitate these decisions. However, because parents are bringing a new self into being (a uniquely created subjectivity, i.e., a child), other selves around you have every right to become politically involved with your decisions; not with your decisions on what you do to yourself, but with your decisions on what you do to other selves. This is fundamental to the establishment of any polity for any social purposes whatsoever.

A copy has the status of a child in relation to the original as parent. A simulation is property, nothing more; the owner maintains property rights and is hopefully living within a polity that doesn’t lean towards socialist infringements of these rights.

It is important when dealing with such radically new technology, that we have some model to aid in developing political systems dealing with definitional issues such as “rights,” “responsibilities,” “consent,” “contract,” etc. The best models are always found within existing oral and written traditions because these embody the selections (genetic, somatic, cultural) that have actually occurred in history. History has shown repeatedly that when a model is developed based on theory or wishful thinking rather than tradition, that whatever polity develops after applying such theory, devolves to either gang warfare or state tyranny. These negative conditions generally occur fairly rapidly when traditions are subverted or overthrown. With this in mind, I think when speaking of copies, duplications, uploads, originals, etc. we should look to traditional family relations and successful reproductive strategies for a model, not some pie-in-the-sky fantasy about some desired reality. Thus, originals have the status of parents, a copy has the status of a child, multiple copies even if altered, have the status of siblings, etc.

As for “transfers could conceivably be subject to editing - so how about editing against their will,” again, this is the parent-child relation and the obvious ability to edit against their will is why the development of the child is traditionally subject to the political processes of the polity the family belongs to. Education is editing, as Tolstoy and Helvetius established.

As for “I can see it being suggested that they are... a non-person,” welcome to the abortion and slavery debate (denial of the right to life and liberty respectively), this is exactly the issue. Welcome to the debates on universalism vs. polycentrism, to barbarism vs. civilization. I don’t have the time to take individuals seriously when they argue for an upload’s rights - a developing self - when they are all too happy to call an unborn child - another developing self - a “non-being” in order to place the child into the “murder-for-profit” market. Logical inconsistency and internal incoherency is a big time waster.

Humans-as-Computer Metaphor is Appearance not Reality

The idea that we are hepped-up computers is strictly fashion. The scientific community has a long and somewhat vain history of picking whatever technological marvels are current to be the model of human consciousness; from clocks to heat engines to cybernetic feedback loops to powerful CPUs. The more historical overview you can achieve of the Western scientific enterprise, the more silly this tendency looks. The other fashion phenomenon in view, is that each scientific discipline can’t see beyond it’s own training and can’t speak beyond it’s own lingo. Physicists see quantum gobblygook, mathematicians see attractors, biochemists see an extension of polymer chemistry, computer nuts see multi-processors. Rarely do specialists examine the metaphysical presuppositions of their models. One of the most common set of presuppositions fashionable right now is digital metaphysics (increasingly written about in papers and books) or what I have referred to on the list as “information as an ontological primitive.” Every time I go to the philosophical basement with individuals who hold this view, I find it to be incoherent. I’m not going there again. We create information, we are not comprised of it in itself.

Surveying published material across disciplines highlights that elements within each specialized outlook do have something to recommend them. Putting them all together seems to be the main problem. Yes, there are major digital elements in the mind, maybe a quarter of what goes on, information processing, synaptic firing, collapse of quantum waves, etc. There are also analog elements in the mind, maybe three quarters of what goes on, NO diffusion, quantum wave entanglement, chemical synaptic processes, etc. There is an intimate connection between cortical activity involved in reflective thought and motor activity involved in action, there is an inseparable link between attention mechanisms and the whole sensation-learning-memory sequence of events. There is no discontinuity after conception and before death for these developmental processes - genetic, somatic, cultural. What is often mistaken for discontinuity is attenuation of the spectrum of focus of our attention mechanism (in David Gelernter’s terms in The Muse in the Machine). Dreaming or being under anaesthesia is low-focus attention, extraordinarily tightly focused attention could be severe autism; these are not discontinuities. Searle makes a very compelling case that there can exist no sub-conscious or unconscious states that are not available to our conscious state given proper attention, there may be physical bodily functioning states but in no way can they be intelligibly thought of as “unconscious” or “sub-conscious.” Research is accumulating on tacit perception and tacit learning being constant possibilities simply because we are open to the universe at all times, whether directing our attention or not.

Because the movements of the body are inseparable from the thoughts of the mind, our subjectivity (in the “qualia” sense) changes with each movement. New bodies produce new thoughts. Following the design convention that form follows function (even where the forms permit multi-functionality like our brains or thumbs), I cannot see how we can posit partaking of universal consciousness or some such blather, without also positing some universal form which is nowhere in evidence. It seems pretty clear that we have a distinct limited form which is somewhat plastic, and that we desire to make that form more plastic to enhance our multi-functionality and increase our chances at survival under fluctuating environmental conditions. Because of the large analog component of our brain, I fail to see how a digital transference can be made with perfect fidelity to the original. A digital CD can never capture more than half of a musical concert performance no matter what the sampling rate is. What constitutes “good enough” fidelity is one thing with a music recording, an entirely different matter when it is your own personal essence in question. A discontinuity in this analog component following a transference to an entirely new form seems to create an entirely new entity with a new nexus of volitional freedom from the original. Gradual plasticity of form seems to be the only way to maintain continuity of the same local subjectivity, otherwise it seems like we are talking reproduction here, not indefinite longevity of the same entity. I think generally we want to augment the consequences of intentionality with our plasticized forms rather than restrict them.

I think we are bits of tiny stuff coherently bumping around in preferred paths and that we impose mathematical or biological or quantum physical or computational models on top of what is really happening as suits our specialist needs of the moment.

Reilly Jones

© 2004

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