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I figured I'd outline a philosophical dilemma I've been contending w/ recently. I think it's a neat little puzzle to think about.
Oddly enough, it's convergent w/ the writings of none other than the good Professor himself.
Oddly enough, it's convergent w/ the writings of none other than the good Professor himself.
We've had the opportunity to discuss the matter over some hot sake, the smoothest of whiskies, and yummy sushi.
An experience to commit to treasured memories, for sure, but ultimately indeterminate in resolution.
For those interested, you may read his manuscript here.
Humanism
In order to understand the issue at hand, it is important to outline and understand the philosophical viewpoints involved. The first I'd like to define is that of humanism. For those that are uninitiated, you might've heard the term being thrown about by secular atheists of the 2000s era, used to express a kind of Enlightenment ontology/epistemology in which man is free to pursue his own interests towards the betterment of humanity--rationally and morally--independent of any subservience to a master or God. When I speak of humanism, I am not referring to this doctrine, though it is somewhat related. No, the humanism that I am referring to is the view that humanity holds a special place in the cosmos. Part of what imbues men w/ their exceptional character is their free will, consciousness, and their rational/creative capacities, among other intellectual capabilities. This view is foundational towards modern liberalism, individualism, and democracy; real Enlightenment era type of stuff whose development stretches back to the Renaissance era and even further then to the ancient Classical era. A central tenet of this view is that all things else, including animals, natural forces, culture, machines, and technics, are inferior and subservient to man. Why? Because mankind outclasses them in terms of the intellect. Think Aristotle observing that men are superior to animals b/c they are rational and political. Think Dostoevsky lamenting how cruel men can be compared to animals, w/ the implication being that man is a moral creature. Moreover, in considering man's relationship to culture, machines, and technics, man is superior because all of these things are created by him and are instruments of his will.As the Professor writes w/ such palpable conviction:
Tear apart your computer—it is naught but parts put into interlocking unity by man. A man baked transistors into a crystal, a man routed each copper trace, a man designed and programmed and engineered...Know this: the machine is doomed to be man’s inferior. It is our creation and each of its parts are put into place by us. It is imperative we understand this property of computational systems.
It is this elevation to the tippy-top of this hierarchy mankind places himself that is challenged by posthumanism, To the posthumanist, this is a conceit. What do they have to say on the matter?
Posthumanism
Posthumanist thought could be credited to Spinoza ("All is One") but the more contemporary strain is credited to none other than the hammer himself: Friedrich Nietzsche. Where humanism posits that mankind is superior to all else, particularly as a consequence of being God's favored creation, Nietzsche came and certainly flipped the script when he declared the death of God, theorizing that man is not put on the Earth towards some special purpose or end. To Nietzsche, conceptualizing something of a special purpose or end is mere continuation of "herd morality"; a way for others, particularly through religion, to control and constrain his fellow man. This control includes the suppression of his will to power, that is, his ultimately irrational, creative, vital force (as a side note here, I find it very amusing that this is where the Professor unwittingly intersects and agrees w/ posthumanism). However, this will to power is not an exclusively human force, but more a feature of life itself. It is from this premise that most posthumanists craft their theories.
The theories that I found to be the most powerful and thought-provoking include the machinic and technic exercise of the will to power; the machinic being attributed to Donna Harrington in A Cyborg Manifesto and the technic to Bernard Stiegler in Technics and Time. In the former, Harrington argues that for the majority of human history mankind has relied on machines and technology to aid and augment his cognition. A contemporary example of this would be our reliance on smartphones to access information on the fly: we can easily conduct a Google search to look up information we're uncognizant of, or look up a Wikipedia page for a crash course on a subject we're unfamiliar w/ (and subsequently act as an authoritative expert in online argument). We utilize Google or Apple maps for navigation instead of trying to triangulate our position w/ the starry night sky. Our calendar apps allow us to set reminders of important dates and appointments so that we wouldn't have to expend the cognitive effort required of recollection. A little less universal, but still fairly contemporary example is the usage of eyeglasses and contacts to correct myopic vision, or the usage of deep brain stimulation devices in Parkinsons patients. In both of these instances, machines and technology enable us to experience reality to a fuller breadth that otherwise would be unavailable w/o their assistance. In a very tangible way, machines and technology have created and enabled us access to a layer of a reality that is superimposed on our naked, creature perceptive mechanisms.
Such is the argument for machinic exercise of the will to power, in constructing reality. Now what about the argument for technics? This is one of the propositions put forth by Stiegler. It is within the humanist framework that you will find sentiments such as art, culture, and history (technics) are created by man, b/c he is rational. Stiegler essentially inverts this and posits that b/c of art, culture, and history is man rational. Seems like a absurd proposition at first glance, but I ask you to consider your present situation. You, dear reader, are sitting there w/ all kinds of thoughts floating around in your head. These thoughts are not entirely your own, but are possibly borrowed from something you have learned through experience. A subset of those thoughts are informed by things you have read, no doubt. Perhaps you're thinking of Plato's Phaedo? Now, would you have been thinking of Phaedo had you not read it? What condition has enabled you to read it? Hopefully it is obvious that a necessary condition is that Phaedo had been published in either a bibliographical or electronic format. What condition enabled this publishing? The necessary technological conditions of either mass printing or digital storage/distribution. What enabled that? The technological conditions of written language. And that? The technology of paper, the technology of clay tablets, and ultimately, the technology of fire. I don't mean to belabor the point here, but I hope that it is now obvious that technology has enabled you to think the way that you do, and that art, culture, and history has shaped the way that you think. In a sense, technics have created you. If this 'in a sense' qualifier seems like weak tea to you, as a too-abstract of an argument of technic's creation of mankind, then okay. I invite you you contend w/ the popular anthropological theory known as the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis. Essentially it posits that when earlier man switched from a plant-based diet to one of a meat-based omnivore diet, it led to the evolution of a larger brain and smaller digestive tract. This, in turn, led to an explosion in intelligence that eventually enabled man to use more sophisticated tools, hunting strategies, form societies, etc. What does that have to do w/ technics? Well, no big surprise, but it turns out that cooked animal protein is easier to digest and makes nutrients more bioavailable in the human body. Animal protein cooked by fire. So there you have it: technics have literally created man and enabled his intellectual capacities as we know them today, both in a fact-of-the-matter materialistic viewpoint as well as in a more abstract, cultural viewpoint.
The theories that I found to be the most powerful and thought-provoking include the machinic and technic exercise of the will to power; the machinic being attributed to Donna Harrington in A Cyborg Manifesto and the technic to Bernard Stiegler in Technics and Time. In the former, Harrington argues that for the majority of human history mankind has relied on machines and technology to aid and augment his cognition. A contemporary example of this would be our reliance on smartphones to access information on the fly: we can easily conduct a Google search to look up information we're uncognizant of, or look up a Wikipedia page for a crash course on a subject we're unfamiliar w/ (and subsequently act as an authoritative expert in online argument). We utilize Google or Apple maps for navigation instead of trying to triangulate our position w/ the starry night sky. Our calendar apps allow us to set reminders of important dates and appointments so that we wouldn't have to expend the cognitive effort required of recollection. A little less universal, but still fairly contemporary example is the usage of eyeglasses and contacts to correct myopic vision, or the usage of deep brain stimulation devices in Parkinsons patients. In both of these instances, machines and technology enable us to experience reality to a fuller breadth that otherwise would be unavailable w/o their assistance. In a very tangible way, machines and technology have created and enabled us access to a layer of a reality that is superimposed on our naked, creature perceptive mechanisms.
Such is the argument for machinic exercise of the will to power, in constructing reality. Now what about the argument for technics? This is one of the propositions put forth by Stiegler. It is within the humanist framework that you will find sentiments such as art, culture, and history (technics) are created by man, b/c he is rational. Stiegler essentially inverts this and posits that b/c of art, culture, and history is man rational. Seems like a absurd proposition at first glance, but I ask you to consider your present situation. You, dear reader, are sitting there w/ all kinds of thoughts floating around in your head. These thoughts are not entirely your own, but are possibly borrowed from something you have learned through experience. A subset of those thoughts are informed by things you have read, no doubt. Perhaps you're thinking of Plato's Phaedo? Now, would you have been thinking of Phaedo had you not read it? What condition has enabled you to read it? Hopefully it is obvious that a necessary condition is that Phaedo had been published in either a bibliographical or electronic format. What condition enabled this publishing? The necessary technological conditions of either mass printing or digital storage/distribution. What enabled that? The technological conditions of written language. And that? The technology of paper, the technology of clay tablets, and ultimately, the technology of fire. I don't mean to belabor the point here, but I hope that it is now obvious that technology has enabled you to think the way that you do, and that art, culture, and history has shaped the way that you think. In a sense, technics have created you. If this 'in a sense' qualifier seems like weak tea to you, as a too-abstract of an argument of technic's creation of mankind, then okay. I invite you you contend w/ the popular anthropological theory known as the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis. Essentially it posits that when earlier man switched from a plant-based diet to one of a meat-based omnivore diet, it led to the evolution of a larger brain and smaller digestive tract. This, in turn, led to an explosion in intelligence that eventually enabled man to use more sophisticated tools, hunting strategies, form societies, etc. What does that have to do w/ technics? Well, no big surprise, but it turns out that cooked animal protein is easier to digest and makes nutrients more bioavailable in the human body. Animal protein cooked by fire. So there you have it: technics have literally created man and enabled his intellectual capacities as we know them today, both in a fact-of-the-matter materialistic viewpoint as well as in a more abstract, cultural viewpoint.
Epilogus
In summary, I do not want to leave the reader w/ the impression that humanity and technics are necessarily antagonistic in relation to each other. To do so would be to commit the same mistake as the Professor (though, to his credit, he is addressing a specific subset of posthumanists); no, I don't think that most posthumanists are not out to undermine humanism w/ the purpose to destroy religion and family, chip us with neural implants, and enslave us to evil AI overlords. The main take-away here is that humanity, machines, and technics share a sort of symbiotic relationship, where one party enables the creative capacities of the other. Man creates culture and technology with his rational capacities, but this process was created and enabled by previous culture and technology, which was created by previous man...so forth and so on, indeterminately. We'll call it a more sophisticated chicken-or-the-egg problem. It still stands, however, that the two entities have a shared history of mutual creation, and that is something to take into consideration whenever claims of one being superior to another are being made. In my mind, it is a mature realization by which addressing we will make more headway in these issues, rather than beating strawmen caricatured extremes into submission.I do have to say...the above propositions above I found to be rather compelling as well as particularly disquieting. I cannot deny the truth behind these arguments; in order to discredit them, the problem would have to be attacked from a new conceptual angle if there is ever hope to reassert mankind's supremacy over, well, everything else. The disquietude comes partially from the dissonance that arises between these ideas and my own religious beliefs, beliefs that, as I mentioned, inform the entire Enlightenment project. If this presupposition--the supremacy of mankind and his rationality--is subverted, then the entire bastion is left in shambles. Not only is this presupposition being challenged on a theoretical level, as we have addressed in the previous arguments, but it is also being challenged empirically. At the time of this writing, AI-generated art is going meteoric and Tesla's autonomous self-driving features are on the precipice of being fully unleashed into the world. These two domains, the aesthetic realm of artistic creation and the pragmatic realm of rational decision-making are territories that were once thought to be unique and dominated by human intellect. There is a lot to address in these two examples I've cited, and I have gotten into spirited discussions w/ the Professor over them (someone explain to us what non-Turing computation is!), but we won't cover it now. However, they are indicative that we're treading into some uncharted territory, and it remains an open question as to how far these technologies will go and the implications for mankind's role in all of it.
The rest of the unease comes from the question of whether these arguments should be discredited in the first place. As I read more into postmodern philosophy, the more interesting stuff beyond critical theory or deconstruction, I find that there are some real teeth to these philosopher's claims. Perhaps I'm a bit biased b/c of my control engineering background, but I've become enamored w/ the writing of Deleuze and Guattari and Nick Land; their bold assertion of people as machines and postulations of cybernetic societies and cultures are not just merely aesthetic decisions when it comes to syntax or metaphor. In a future post I'll prolly cover a few of their ideas, as it sort of lends some understanding towards this...absolute craziness of a zeitgeist that characterizes the early 21st century, and possibly predicts the character of the second half that's still yet to come.
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The rest of the unease comes from the question of whether these arguments should be discredited in the first place. As I read more into postmodern philosophy, the more interesting stuff beyond critical theory or deconstruction, I find that there are some real teeth to these philosopher's claims. Perhaps I'm a bit biased b/c of my control engineering background, but I've become enamored w/ the writing of Deleuze and Guattari and Nick Land; their bold assertion of people as machines and postulations of cybernetic societies and cultures are not just merely aesthetic decisions when it comes to syntax or metaphor. In a future post I'll prolly cover a few of their ideas, as it sort of lends some understanding towards this...absolute craziness of a zeitgeist that characterizes the early 21st century, and possibly predicts the character of the second half that's still yet to come.
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