Transhumanism: Critical rationalism, not omniscient reason or scientism

True Transhumanism Part 3

Plenty of my readers enjoy more philosophical pieces but if you prefer data-driven pieces about making the world better, hang on for my next piece.

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Critics writing books and papers on transhumanism have a few favorite terms they like to throw around. One of those is the claim that transhumanists believe in “omniscient reason”. Usually, they do not bother to explain what that means. It sounds ominous. It makes transhumanists sound arrogant and perhaps scary.

For those of you new to transhumanism, here is a simple definition: It is the view that it is possible and desirable to use reason, science, and technology to overcome human limitations. “Human limitations” includes previously unalterable aspects of being human such as aging and severely limited reasoning capabilities.

Notice that “possible” does not mean “guaranteed to happen” and “desirable” does not mean “make everyone do it” nor “do it at all costs.” The critics slide from the actual meaning to their implied but unjustified claim or implication. The omniscient reason criticism breaks down into two related yet fairly distinct points. One has to do with the nature and scope of reason and science. The other relates to the application of reason to a society or economy. I will explore the second of these in a future post. Before I get to those, we need to consider the meanings of “rationalism” since transhumanists consider themselves rationalists of some kind. I certainly do.

Types of rationalism

When I talk about rationalism I mean a commitment to reason, evidence, and logic rather than to acquiring knowledge through authority, emotion, tradition, revelation, or faith. In essence rationality means apportioning the strength of one’s belief to the evidence and being open to revising one’s beliefs in light of new evidence.

To indulge in a bit of self-quoting:

The importance of explicitly committing to reason and to continually striving to be rational make it as much a core part of transhumanism as it is to humanism. Like humanists, transhumanists reject faith as a source of knowledge. We reject the claim by religious believers that reason is just a form of faith and we reject the claim that faith is as valid as reason in determining what to believe. Perhaps more so than humanists, transhumanists also reject emotions as a source of knowledge and are sensitive to the tendency of emotions to bias thinking.

Historically, rationalism has been tied to more specific claims. Anyone who takes introductory epistemology will be familiar with the battle between the rationalists and the empiricists. On the rationalist side we usually hear of Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. On the empiricist side we have Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. This use of the term is misleading. A better term, sometimes used for this form of rationalism is “innatism.” “Continental rationalism” also helps by clarifying the point that rationalism can take other forms. Given the technical meanings of the terms, especially as they revolve around 17^th century arguments, both rationalists and empiricists are rationalists in a broader sense. The two sides disagreed over whether knowledge is primarily innate in the human mind or gained through observation of the physical world through sense experiences.

More recently, a loose grouping of people associated with the LessWrong community and Scott Alexander’s spinoff have become closely associated with the term. Adding further confusion, the rationalism of these people is frequently conflated with another position they favor: effective altruism (EA). But this form of rationalism is tied to specific approaches to thinking, and EA is tried to one moral philosophy – that of utilitarianism. Critics like the incredibly annoying Timnit Gebru slide from the rationalism of this particular community to rationalism as a whole.

Rationalism is sometimes used to refer to rational planning on a society-wide basis. This blends into scientism. This is the second of the two major points I mentioned at the outset. I will tackle that below.

Contrary to both rationalists and empiricists, reason does not yield certainty. The search for absolute foundations of knowledge has been and will remain fruitless. As I wrote in an earlier essay:

Another crucial aspect of this kind of rationalism was the desire to base beliefs on indisputable foundations. True knowledge was certainty. The opposing philosophers who are known as “empiricists” instead emphasized the crucial role of knowledge. But they had the same desire to found knowledge on foundations of certainty. Instead of “clear and distinct ideas” the empiricists of the 17^th and 18^th centuries and sometimes later were more likely to appeal to supposedly incorrigible sense data. Sensory experience was to provide the fundamentals of knowledge, being the undeniable building blocks of belief. In both cases, we can see a drive for knowledge-as-certainty.

The alternative to rationality as a quest for certainty is critical rationalism or, my preferred version, pancritical rationalism (PCR). In PCR, there are no absolute foundations to knowledge. Even reason itself is provisional and not self-justifying.

A sensible version of rationalism will also acknowledge that not every choice or decision can rightly be labeled as rational or irrational. One dear friend of mine –heavily influenced by Ayn Rand’s Objectivism – once declared (in the middle of a party) that dancing is irrational! Dancing is something you enjoy or you do not. It is a personal preference and neither rational nor irrational, It is non-rational. Of course, a particular instance or habit of dancing may be rational or irrational given someone’s own goals and objective facts.

You might say someone’s dancing is irrational if they are dancing to bring rain or to placate a god. Even there, it is probably better to say that it is the belief that is irrational rather than the dancing. Dancing can be rational if it is a physical activity that promotes health and health is an important personal value. Similarly, my dislike of Brussels sprouts is non-rational. If you love country music I am not going to call you irrational, just baffling. Depending on your philosophy, you may also consider some areas of life to be beyond settling by reason, including moral and aesthetic questions.

The limits of formal thinking

A major source of confusion is to define rationality in terms of following explicitly stated rules, formalized technical procedures, and general abstract principles. Explicit rules and formal procedures can be an important part of rationalism in many contexts but rationality is deeper than that. A person being rational will use rules when they have reason to expect them to work better than alternatives and otherwise not. Rules are not rational when not well-grounded or sensitive to the context in which they are applied. It is not rational to take a fix view of a problem or issue and then bull-headedly apply existing rules.

This all sounds pretty abstract. But this conception has been put into practice with mixed results in form of “scientific management” –a  form of scientism. Scientific management established itself through the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Taylorism’s four principles as published in his 1909 book, The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor was followed by Frank and Lillian Galbreth, Herbert R. Townes, and Henry L. Gantt, whose charts you may have used. This management philosophy reflects technocratic scientism. In an excellent essay on “The China Convergence”, N.S. Lyons defined technocratic scientism as follows:

The belief that everything, including society and human nature, can and should be fully understood and controlled through scientific and technical means. In this view everything consists of systems, which operate, as in a machine, on the basis of scientific laws that can be rationally derived through reason. Humans and their behavior are the product of the systems in which they are embedded. “Social science” functions in the same way as the physical sciences. These systems can therefore be socially engineered to be improved. Good and bad, like everything else, are scientifically quantifiable. Those with superior scientific and technical knowledge are thus those best placed to understand the cause and effect governing society, and therefore to run it. Ignorance, and the ignorant, are in contrast ultimately the cause of all dysfunction and harm.

To quote Taylor himself:

Under scientific management, the managers assume…the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, formulae… Thus all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workmen, must of necessity under the new system be done by management in accordance with the law of science.

It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.

When this approach is applied to an entire society or economy we end up with technocracy. This introduces additional considerations so I will leave it for a future post.

A sensible rationalism encompasses formalistic thinking – logic being a core element – but does not elevate formal thinking above all else or exclude all else. Explicit, rules-based reason is a valuable part of the rationalist toolkit but is far from the only one. Good ideas and solutions can come from imagination, intuition, random association, and dreams. None of those sources are especially reliable and should be evaluated and checked by other, often more formal approaches, when feasible, but they should not be devalued and rejected as sources of insight.

Metrics mania

This formalist, pseudorationalistic approach has strongly affected the business world through an over-dependence on metrics. On this topic, I recommend Jerry Z Muller’s book, The Tyranny of Metrics. Muller notes that thinkers including Oakeshott, Polanyi, and Hayek have distinguished between abstract and practical or tacit knowledge, with metrics failing to allow for or include the latter. “practical or tacit knowledge is the product of experience; it can be learned, but cannot be conveyed in general formulas. Abstract knowledge, by contrast, is a matter of technique, which, it is assumed, can be easily systematized, conveyed, and applied.” (p.32)

Perhaps the most extreme, single-minded abuse of metrics can be seen in the Soviet Union’s Stakhanovite movement. When Aleksei Stakhanov supposedly personally mined 102 tons of coal in his six-hour shift, a push by the Soviets was made to stimulate other works to maximum productivity. The sole metric was productivity. This was problematic enough even in a job so easily quantifiable but even worse when applied to other tasks with more nuanced inputs and outputs. When a metric is all that is counted and rewarded everything else get pushed aside and people do what they can to look more productive – often by faking it and by causing collateral damage.

You can see the baleful influence of misapplied metrics in many areas. In education it can take the form of “teaching to the test.” In police work it may mean boosting the crime “clearance rate” by arresting small-time crooks instead of focusing on the major problems. (This was a theme of the much-loved TV show The Wire.) Under the pressure of success metrics, a surgeon might take on easier cases that could be handled by others while ignoring patients who will almost certainly die without surgery.

In the area of health, the Body Mass Index (BMI) is often used as a measure of healthy weight. The BMI ignores differences between ethnic groups and ignores muscle mass. A lean, muscular person with a low body fat may have a BMI over 25 or even 30 and therefore gets classified as unhealthily overweight.

The form of “rationalization” involved in poorly applied metrics leads to a collection of commonly occurring flaws. As Muller enumerates, these include: Measuring the most easily measurable. Measuring the simple when the desired outcome is complex. Measuring inputs rather than outcomes. (The Marxist labor theory of value.) Degrading information quality through standardization. Gaming through creaming. Improving numbers by lowering standards. Improving numbers through omission or distortion. (China’s youth unemployment rate before they stopped publishing it last year.) Cheating.

Science and reason are crucial to our success but they are not the only source of knowledge nor of inputs to knowledge. As a philosopher, I am familiar with wrestling with problems that are not amenable to scientific, empirical solutions. (In an optimistic scenario, philosophers help to clarify problems so that they can be broken into parts, some of which may be open to scientific analysis.) There may be and probably are problems that science cannot solve. We cannot say that science can never solve a particular problem because that would require omniscience and is an arrogant statement. But neither can we be sure of purely rational or scientific solutions. For example, morality. Science alone cannot answer the question: “What should I do?” or “What sort of person should I be?” Nor can it answer the question: “What is the meaning or purpose of my life?”

As a transhumanist, I look to science, reason, and technology to play a huge role in transforming the human condition and its context for the better. But reason and science are not infallible, they do not provide certainty, and they are not the only way of gaining knowledge and organizing our affairs. The idea of transhumanism has spread so widely that there surely are transhumanists who fall into the “omniscient reason” of “scientism” errors but there is nothing inherent in transhumanism leading there. Omniscient reason is not part of true transhumanism. If you do not accept that there is such a thing, I will then say that omniscient reason is not part of O.G transhumanism.