True Transhumanism Part 2
Transhumanism is about continual improvement, not about perfection or paradise
And life itself confided this secret to me: “Behold,” it said, “I am that which must always overcome itself. Indeed, you call it a will to procreate or a drive to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold…”
Thus Spake Zarathustra II 12
The concepts of perfection, utopia, or paradise have no place in transhumanism. “Perfection” is usually defined in two related ways. 1. “Perfection is a state, variously, of completeness, flawlessness, or supreme excellence. The condition, state, or quality of being free or as free as possible from all flaws or defects.” 2. “The action or process of improving something until it is faultless or as faultless as possible.”
Whenever critics of transhumanism – or human augmentation – bat around the terms “perfect” and “perfection”, they are not talking about transhumanist concepts. We instead use terms such as “enhance” and “improve” and “augment”. There are good reasons for this. When people say we want to perfect something (a skill or an outcome), they might mean that we want to improve it and keep improving it over time. That sense of the term is compatible with the transhumanist emphasis on self-transformation and perpetual progress.
In everyday life, we might say “perfect!” when asked whether we enjoyed a meal or whether a proposed meeting time works for us. In those cases, rather than claiming true perfection we are usually saying something like: “This is excellent and I can’t immediately think of how it could be better.” With more consideration, perhaps the meal could be made slighter better still by adding or removing a spice. “That’s perfect!” is more of an emotive utterance than a factual claim of perfection.
But someone might also be using it in a Platonic sense, where we imagine there really is a state of perfection to be reached. Outside the realms of pure mathematics and logic, it is not clear whether the concept of perfect or perfection makes sense. That concept is certainly not one meant by transhumanists. We do not speak of a perfect technology, a perfect body, or a perfect society. Aside from the implausibility of the term taken literally, the goals and means of enhancement are far too variable among individuals and groups and will almost certainly change over time. There is no single goal toward which all enhancement is directed.
Perfection as a state is antithetical to transhumanism
Perfection as a state is antithetical to transhumanism. This is especially apparent in the concept of extropy. Extropy represents the continual pushing back of entropy. Extropy is a process of self-overcoming, of growing intelligence, capability, opportunity, and vitality. There is a less than subtle clue in the first of the Principles of Extropy, that of perpetual progress:
Perpetual Progress — Seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an indefinite lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self‑actualization and self-realization. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities. Expanding into the universe and advancing without end.
Extropians seek continual improvement in ourselves, our cultures, and our environments. We seek to improve ourselves physically, intellectually, and psychologically. We value the perpetual pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Extropians question traditional assertions that we should leave human nature fundamentally unchanged in order to conform to “God’s will” or to what is considered “natural”. Like our intellectual cousins, the humanists, we seek continued progress in all directions. We go beyond many humanists in proposed fundamental alterations in human nature in pursuit of these improvements. We question traditional, biological, genetic, and intellectual constraints on our progress and possibility.
We value perpetual learning and exploration as individuals, and we encourage our cultures to experiment and evolve. We are neither conservatives nor radicals: we conserve what works, for as long as it works, and we alter that which can be improved. In our search for continual improvement we steer carefully between complacence and recklessness.
Note what this does not say. It does not say “solving all problems,” “achieving perfection,” building paradise, or “becoming God.” In the first version of the Principles, instead of Perpetual Progress, the first principle was Boundless Expansion. This was the same thing. I changed the name because “expansion” might be mistakenly understood as referring only to physical, spatial growth.
Critical confusion
Anti-transhumanist critics such as Don Ihde, Michael Sandel, Leon Kass, and Erik Davis all confuse the goal of continual improvement or enhancement with the longing for a state of final perfection. These are radically different. The former is essentially a process of perpetual change whereas the latter is a state of stasis. Kass misfires when he talks about perfectibility in his book, Beyond Therapy. Sandel goes wrong from the start with the title of his book, The Case Against Perfection.
Aside from the easy appeal to a straw man, I suspect much of this comes from inappropriately trying to force transhumanism into older religious and philosophical frameworks. When Leon Kass talks of pro-enhancers as seeking perfection of mind and body, he has it backward. The religious opponents of enhancement are the ones who believe in a heaven of passive perfection – a realm where nothing changes, no one develops, and everyone rests forever. As Zarathustra put it: “Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want anymore: this created all gods and other worlds.”
Religious traditions often contrast a state of perfect good – embodied in God and found in Heaven – with a state of evil – embodied in Satan and found in Hell. Eastern religions are different but contrast the suffering of the physical world and the misery of our attachments with the liberation and enlightenment of samadhi (union with the divine) and moksha (liberation from attachments). Others try to force transhumanism into the mold of Gnosticism with its Manichean roots of a pure, uncorrupted non-material world and the corrupt, fallen world in which we live.
Similarly, others try to position transhumanism as a form of Platonism. Plato divided reality into the perfect, unchanging world of Forms on one hand, and the perceived world of imperfect. Platonism and Neoplatonism have powerfully influenced western thought, especially philosophy and religion. Neoplatonism’s core goal is to leave behind the phenomenal world and return to the Eternal and Supreme, the transcendent, absolute One from which issues an eternal, perfect, essence (nous, or intellect).
See accurately, transhumanism reflects the Enlightenment commitment to meliorism and rejects all forms of apologism—the view that it is wrong for humans to attempt to alter the conditions of life for the better. Nothing about this implies that the goal is to reach a final, perfect state. As I wrote in “On Becoming Posthuman” (1994):
Life and intelligence should never stagnate; it can re-order, transform and transcend its limits in an unlimited progression. Let our goal be the exuberant and dynamic continuation of this boundless process. The goal of religion is communion with, or merely serving, God—a superior being. A true humanist goal—an extropian goal—is our own expansion and progress without end. Humanity must not stagnate: to halt our burgeoning move forward, upward, outward, would be a betrayal of the dynamic inherent in life and consciousness. Let us progress on into a posthuman stage that we can barely glimpse.
God was a primitive notion invented by superstitious people, people only just beginning to step out of ignorance and unconsciousness. The concept of God has been oppressive: a being more powerful than we but made in the image of our crude self-conceptions. Our own process of endless progression into higher forms should and will replace this religious idea. Humanity is a temporary stage along the evolutionary pathway. We are not the zenith of nature’s development. It is time for us to consciously take charge of ourselves and to accelerate our transhuman progress.
It does not help clarity when one major Enlightenment thinker favors the use of the term “perfectibility” despite meaning improvement and not a static, final state. The culprit is the Marquis de Condorcet who saw our species ability to be limitless and unconstrained by nature, and concluded, “that this perfectibility of man is truly indefinite.”
“Such is the object of the work I have undertaken; the result of which will be to show, from reasoning and from facts, that no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; that the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the control of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.”
Only a lazy reading of Condorcet leads to a static view of perfection. The static conception conflicts with Condorcet’s statement that “the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite” and that the process of improvement has no limit other than the length of time that we live.
I’ve got two tickets to paradise extropia
In 1977, Eddie Money famously sang, “I’ve got two tickets to paradise.” Critics such as Don Ihde who characterize transhumanists as looking forward to a future posthuman world that would be a utopia (what he calls “The Idol of Paradise”) read transhumanist writings with cognitive blinders on, distorting what they read to fit their preconceptions. This and similar criticisms confuse the goal of continual improvement or enhancement with the longing for a state of final perfection. These are radically different. The former is essentially a process of perpetual change whereas the latter is a state of stasis.
Transhumanists seek not utopia
In my own formulations of transhumanism, I found the Idol of Paradise and the idea of a Platonically perfect, static utopia, to be so antithetical to true transhumanism that I coined the term “extropia” to label a conceptual alternative. Transhumanists seek not utopia, but perpetual progress—a never-ending movement toward the ever-distant goal of extropia. If the transhumanist project is successful, we may no longer suffer some of the miseries that have always plagued human existence. But that is not reason to expect life to be free of risks, dangers, conflicts, and struggle. Outside, perhaps, of David Pearce’s goal of eliminating all suffering, you will have to search far and wide to find any suggestion of utopia or perfection in transhumanist writing. This is why such a mischaracterization typically is not supported by quotations from relevant sources.
Critics who impose terms like “perfect” or “utopia” on transhumanism are particularly odd and frustrating given the rather heavy emphasis on risks in modern transhumanist writing. the impression that transhumanists are careening into a fantastically imagined future, worshipping before the idols of Technology and Progress while giving the finger to caution, risk, trade-offs, and side-effects.
These critics cannot have actually read much transhumanist writing—certainly not anything written in the last decade. If they had, they would have immediately run into innumerable papers on and discussions of advanced artificial intelligence, of runaway nanotechnology, of “existential risk.” They would have come across risk-focused worries by organizations such as the Foresight Institute and the Council on Responsible Nanotechnology. They would have come across my own Proactionary Principle, with its explicit and thorough consideration of risks, side-effects and remote, unforeseen outcomes, and the need to use the best available methods for making decisions and forecasts about technological outcomes.
Perfect technological solutions?
In keeping with these mischaracterizations of transhumanism, critics sometimes assert that we are guaranteeing perfect technological solutions to human problems. For example, Ihde refers to the Idol of Intelligent Design as “a kind of arrogance connected to an overestimation of our own design abilities, also embedded in these discussions.” Again, he provides no referents for “these discussions.” He contrasts this idol with a “human-material or human-technology set of interactions which through experience and over time yield to emergent trajectories with often unexpected results.” This idol is indeed a problem. But Ihde’s discussion implies that it’s a problem among transhumanist thinkers. Given the absence of actual examples, it’s hard to evaluate this implicit claim. His loaded term “arrogance” doesn’t help. When does confidence become arrogance? Were the Wright brothers arrogant in their belief that they could achieve flight?
What really distinguishes transhumanist views of technology is expressed by what I called “Intelligent Technology” in the Philosophy of Extropy. I declared that “Technology is a natural extension and expression of human intellect and will, of creativity, curiosity, and imagination.” I expressed the transhumanist project of encouraging the development of ever more flexible, smart, responsive technology. I spoke for practically all transhumanists in suggesting that “We will co-evolve with the products of our minds, integrating with them, finally integrating our intelligent technology into ourselves in a posthuman synthesis, amplifying our abilities and extending our freedom.” As bold and unapologetic a statement as this is (befitting a transhumanist declaration) it says nothing about expecting perfectly reliable technologies that have no unintended consequences or outcomes that may trouble us.
NEXT TIME: Challenging false critical comments on transhumanist views of the body.
Further reading:
Beyond Caution
True Transhumanism
Letter to Mother Nature
Hyperagency as a Core Attraction and Repellant for Transhumanism
The Philosophy of Transhumanism, in The Transhumanist Reader
The Principles of Extropy 3.0
On Becoming Posthuman
Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy (1990)
Over the summer I finally took the plunge, and decided to look into what appeared the darkness of 'transhumanism'. I had overcome my initial response (part religious programming, part pro team human) to be afraid, and choose ignorance over truth and knowing.
Now having move into camp pro-progress and development (what I am now describing as an end to the 20th centuries self-improvement/personal development, into the 21st centuries self-enhancement/personal evolution), I found myself talking about recreating the Garden of Eden here on earth. Or at least providing a north star to aim for.
This post has provided me with a necessary critique of the pitfalls in my thinking in terms of paradise and the slippery slope of perfection and stasis.
Lots of useful and interesting stuff here. Just one quick observation for now. Not all Gods (not all theisms) are Platonic. And not all theistic accounts of perfection are Platonic. For example, God could be perfect simply by the grace of attribution — perfection, from the perspective of the devotee, can be that which God is, even in dynamicism. And to say such perfection isn’t really perfection would be merely to privilege competing theologies. Sometimes the “perfect” lunch is less about conceivable capacity to imagine better and more about altogether different concerns — more esthetic rather than epistemic.