Guest post: Until the machine in which they’re a ghost gets unplugged by some janitor
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on It’s a holy confusion.
Their dream is to achieve “immortality” by storing their consciousnesses in digital form, existing eternally as ghosts in the machine.
And if someone was an asshole in life, then they’ll be an asshole forever. Or at least until the machine in which they’re a ghost gets unplugged by some janitor.
Whether this sort of extreme transhumanism motivates any significant portion of Genderism’s supporters notwithstanding, a fundamental mind-body disconnect is shared between them.
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Godalmighty. What do they think would be the point without a body? I can’t imagine anything more horrendous.
Yeah, what’s the point? The elevation and privileging of mental and intellectual pleasures, whenever and wherever it is indulged, is almost always done in conjunction with the denegration and disparagement of “mere” bodily pleasures. There’s no evidence that any kind of pleasure is possible without a body; bodily pleasures are a part of the package, so why not enjoy them? You need a body to do that, or anything; why is that a bad thing? Metaphysical sour grapes if we have no choice, but if we do, what makes us think that having the choice is necessarily good? A longer life is no guarantee of a better one. It’s not necessarily any one person’s choice either, as we shall see.
The belief that one’s personality and conciousness has an existence independent of the body, and that it can be removed and transferred to some material substrate other than the body in which it arose, is a technological version of the belief in a soul that lives on after death. Transhumanists might fool themselves into thinking they’ve changed things by describing this entity as a “pattern of information,” or somesuch, but it’s still much more a religious conviction than anything one might call “scientific.” They don’t want to know that consciousness might simply be an emergent property of a particular arrangement of matter, and that that property cannot be abstracted from that arrangement and “installed” in another one, that consciousness, personality, whatever, is something that is a product of biology, and that it must be evolved and grown, rather than designed and built. I know it smacks of vitalism, but what if consciousness is actually dependent upon biology, and that the messiness of bodies, and blood & guts existence, is the only way you can get it?
The whole idea that you can download or upload your consciousness into a machine (or anything else) feels like a category error, like believing the journal into which you write your thoughts and feelings not only thinks your thoughts and feels your feelings, but that it will continue to think thoughts and have feelings just like you, in perpetuity. Sure, it’s a pattern of information, but it’s an inert one, a dead end; it can’t write out its (or should I say your) thoughts and feelings in turn. But if someone else picks it up and reads it, then some of those thoughts and feelings, in a way, are repeated, preserved and perpetuated. But the journal can’t read itself, it can’t pick up and continue the story beyond the point where you set down your pen and closed the book.
I’m a materialist; I don’t think there is any other existence than a material one, nor that there is an “afterlife” or “immortal soul” that continues after we die. The only afterlife in which we can partake is the recycling of our briefly borrowed atoms back into the grand dance of biophysical processes from which they and we sprang in the first place. I’ve come to think of “religion” or “spirituality” as the “narrativization” we devise that sets out the way in which (we believe) we are connected to the rest of the universe. That connection does not require any supernatural agents whatsoever; it doesn’t need any overarching “plan” or “direction,” no overarching principle, personification or embodiment of Good or Evil. Maybe I’m being naive or hypocritical in my “belief” that biology is necessary for consciousness. But there’s just something desperately sad and pathological about the desire to dispose of biological embodiment altogether. Now there might come some time, with the inevitable decline of health (assuming I avoid all other, earlier manners of death) that I might feel more interested in finding some way to escape my own personal “best before” date. But I hope not. I enjoy life, but once I’ve had my turn, it’s time to go, and if that’s what my physical, biological, animality decrees, then so be it. Death will be just another non-negotiable force to which I will have to yield, like gravitation and the need to metabolize. It’s just the way things are. There’s no fault or blame for its occurrence; there’s no shame in the inevitable. It just is. And then, we just aren’t. And that’s fine. I’m under no illusion that the world needs any more of me than it’s going to get: a little goes a long way. And just as I’ve come to think that the last people you should be handing power to are the ones actively seeking it, I’m not inclined to believe that the world would benefit from the immortality of those seeking immortality. Sure, everyone is unique, but nobody is indispensable. Anyone chasing immortality is labouring under the narcissistic delusion that they’re both needed and wanted, that their desire to continue should prevail over, and that they rest of the world should be obliged to accommodate that continuation, as if they are owed it.
Talk of the folly of transhumanism reminds me of something I read about the Fermi Paradox a long time ago. I just looked it up: it’s from Sean Carroll, from over a decade ago! The Fermi Paradox asks, where is everyone, given that we’ve failed to find evidence of intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos, despite it being almost 14 billion years old.
Maybe it’s the nihilist in me, but I always thought the most appealing answer was, maybe sufficient intelligence leads people to stop caring anymore, so civilizations just… kinda… stop. It turns it I’m not the only one to fancy this hypothesis. Carroll calls it the EBH — the Enlightenment/Boredom Hypothesis:
That’s just it: the transhumanists want to “overcome the petty drives of the material world” but they fail to grasp the possibility — the likelihood, if you ask me — that they’ll find that without them, they’ll encounter a natural rest, a good place to just stop. The desire to keep going is itself a part of our material selves: it’s an instinct — a behavioural trait that’s built into the physical hardware of our brains. Overcome the physical hardware, and you overcome the survival drive itself.
AI’s rapid advancement has put me onto existential trains of thought a lot lately: the nature of work, the nature of art, the nature of creativity, the nature of meaning… a lot of big questions arise when we’re faced with the possibility that machines might be able to solve all our problems. “It’s the journey, not the destination” is one of the the hoariest lines (hilariously memed with Miley Cyrus’s vocal fry on TikTok), but if we solve too many of the challenges in life, it ceases to be a life worth living. More journey; less destination.
There has to be a balance: on the one hand, we don’t want to suffer or struggle too much — suffering and struggling are things that might not even be possible without having a material embodiment — and on the other hand, we don’t want to just exist forever, disembodied. (Forgive me if I’m getting too out-there with existential half-baked college-dorm-ery.)
To my surprise, the TV comedy The Good Place addressed this rather well. That was the show about (spoiler alert) a bunch of hilarious assholes who think they’ve gone to heaven only to find that the blissful afterlife is actually just a creative division of hell: the hell of Sartre’s No Exit — as in, “Hell is other people.” After four seasons of bargaining and struggles with God — “The Judge and arbiter of human fate” (the very worshippable Maya Rudolph!) to get into real heaven and find eternal bliss, our protagonists finally discover that there can be no such thing as eternal bliss: utopia can’t exist without the possibility of dying and ending one’s consciousness forever. All we can do is nourish our senses and relish moments of happiness and joy for a while, until we’re ready to call it a day and say goodbye. (I cried for days after that series finale.)
A lot of media out of Japan, interestingly, has reckoned with existential questions around AI and transhumanism. The Japanese embraced technology in a major way post-WWII (the birthplace of Sony Walkmans and bullet trains and digital watches), and of course their love affair with high-tech gadgetry is haunted by trauma from the bomb. Ghost in the Shell (the original 1995 film, not the garbage Hollywood remake) involved a pair of characters who both found their lives incomplete: a cybernetically enhanced human who became nihilistic and lost her drive to live and her sense of purpose following her acquisition of robotic, superhuman body parts, and an emergent artificial intelligence born on the Internet who struggles to make meaning of its life without a physical, material body to inhabit, in order to face the struggles and and sufferings, and the possibility of death, of a material existence. (Spoiler: the transhuman woman and the AI “man” merge their consciousnesses and create a “child” to solve each others’ complimentary existential crises.)
I guess I’m a lot more fascinated by transhumanism than I’ve let on. But I’m fascinated by it in the way that I’m fascinated by religion or gender identity ideology: a fascination that comes from strong disagreement with the underlying worldviews, and the antihumanistic values that they entail.
I’m first and foremost a humanist, and humanism cannot be separated from the human body.
I think about and read about AI as little as possible for that very reason. I like chattering here and I don’t want to pause to notice that AI would do it better.
I’ve read that we’re an experiment to see whether or not intelligence is a useful survival trait. Looking around at all the other species with whom we share the planet and we are in many ways the oddball of the bunch. Sure we’ve got language, culture, tool use, and so on going for us (or against us, as the case may be), but other creatures share some aspects of some of those characteristics to some degree. (I believe that Roger Payne once noted that whales (who have languages of a sort, and cultures of their own) have been around for tens of millions of years without destroying the planet. (Perhaps it’s a lucky combination of an absense of cetacean hegemonic ambition, the lack of opposable thumbs, and the comparative difficulty of domesticating fire under water.)
I’d like to narrow our particular uniqueness down to our complicated, extra-somatic culture: our propensity to make so much stuff out of the materials around us, to the extent that we disrupt the natural, planetary, biophysical cycles of material and energy, both in the extraction employed in the production of stuff, and the wastes we spew in making, using and disposing of it. No other creatures make stuff in this way; all of their tools are found objects, which are minimally processed, if at all, and which are then returned to their surroundings for immediate recycling. No scarred landscapes, no toxic wastes, no enduring structures or objects that require long term erosion and degradation in order to be erased or reabsorbed. These animals face the world with nothing but their bodies, living singly or communally, building very little any more permanent than beaver dams or wasp nests. We are the odd ducks, and it’s our proclivity to mess about with stuff that has got us into much of the trouble we’re in. Without the benefit of so much material culture (underwritten in the last couple of centuries by the huge, one time boost of fossil fuels), our numbers would be much smaller, and our collective impact would be much less.
The idea of a planet-wide city has appeared occasionally as a concept in science fiction, signifying the pinnacle of technological achievement, notably with the Galactic Imperial capital world of Trantor in Asimov’s Foundation series. In reality, without a biosphere, such a world would be dead. I would argue that a truly advanced, long-lived civilization would probably live very lightly on its planet because it would have learned to exist within the material limits imposed upon it, rather than monopolistically appropriating all and everything to its engrossment, burning itself out in an brief, spectacular, orgiastic spasm of mindless, planetary exploitation. Instead of looking to see how much it could extract without destroying its biosphere, such a resilient, enduring society would determine how little it could get by upon, looking to ensure its survival and prosperity over the long haul. Its population would be small, but healthy and materially safe, and well nourished. The biosphere of its world would be robust and vibrant, evolving unhindered upon its own track, without risk of extinctions fueled by thoughtless, short-sighted greed of the civilization-building species.
This does not seem to be the spirit that animates transhumanism. Restraint, proportionality, and humility aren’t exactly their strong suits. They are no fans of the constraints of material reality on their own bodies; if they’ve abandoned biological existence, they will be much less heedless of the fates of other species, having cast aside their own. If transhumanism (or even just the attempts to attain it, however futile) is as energy intensive as cryptocurrencies, then they will be throwing more gasoline on the fires of environmental degradation. But that’s okay, because they won’t need food, water or air, just solar power, right?
Some might argue that without suffering there is no advancement, no progress without dissatifaction. But climbing out of poverty and suffering should not require climbing over others; keeping up with the Joneses does not necessitate enslaving or starving the Joneses in the process. Even more so if we expand our vision and concern to the rest of the living world. The price of our civilizational adolescence has not been borne by humans alone (which cost has been dear enough), but by the rest of the living Earth as well. We are the original bull in the china shop, but the things we’ve broken have been species and ecosystems. If we are not careful, the desert surrounding our Ozymandian ruins is likely to be planetary in scale, with few Earthly candidates for the chance future traveler coming upon them.
Artymorty @1
Reminds me of a classic from The Twilight Zone: A Nice Place To Visit.
That’s the one where the thief, Valentine, dies and wakes up in a world where he has his every wish. He spends a lot of time gambling, surrounded by beautiful women. He always wins.
Sebastion Cabot plays Valentine’s guide, Mr. Pip. When Valentine gets sick of his new life, he begs Mr. Pip to send him to “the Other Place.” “I don’t belong in heaven,” he says.
Mr. Pip laughs and says
Damn (pun intended.) Sorry for the blockquote fail.
Your own private hell :-)
I think a good antidote to ridiculous dreams of some sort of immortality is Karel Capek’s play, ‘The Makropulos Affair’, which was first performed in 1922, or the opera based on it by Janacek (first performed in 1926). I certainly don’t want to live for ever, or for much longer than usual sort of human life-span. One certainly begins to feel ‘Enough is enough’ in age. Particularly these days.
I also recall a short story by Roald Dahl (a writer I have no great fondness for) which I read hundreds of years ago. It is about a man who is reduced by a scientific friend to a brain (with eyes! – but no mouth) in a vat. His wife, who loathed him in life, comes into the laboratory and gets her own back by telling him what a rotten bastard he is and blowing cigarette smoke into his lidless eyes.
Possible correction: on reflection, I think the brain was only allowed one eye.
Another aspect of ‘transhumanism’ is provided by those neo-utilitarian philosophers who, seemingly convinced by Bentham’s arguments, assert that the greatest happiness of the greatest number means we should take into account all those billions and billions of people who might be born in the future and find ways of letting them be born – and that even if the individuals in a population of, say, ten million has an extremely high level of happiness , it would be morally better to have a population of 1,000,000,000,000,000 whose individual level of happiness was very low, but add the individual figures up and it comes to a sum of happiness far greater than that of the small population! I think such philosophers should be abandoned on the flying island of Laputa, or shot off into space in an Elon Musk rocket..
Ophelia#3: AI wouldn’t do it better, and almost certainly never will.
Once again, what this reminds me of more than anything is the famous “teleportation problem”. Assuming true teleportation were possible, such that a person could be disassembled in one place and perfectly (down to the last atom) reassembled somewhere else with all thoughts, feelings, memories etc. intact, would “Reassembled You” really be the same as “Disassembled You” or just a perfect copy? What does it matter to Disassembled You that Reassembled You is out there thinking, feeling, and responding to input etc. exactly like the original if Disassembled You is no longer around to think or feel or experience anything?
Likewise, assuming it were possible to perfectly model the activities of your brain, complete with all its thoughts and feelings, memories, consciousness etc. (of course this would require a Laplace’s Demon level of knowledge and understanding), would “Digital You” really be the same as “Biological You” or just a perfect simulation? What does it matter to Biological You that Digital You is out there thinking, feeling, and responding to input etc. exactly like the original if Biological You is no longer around to think or feel or experience anything?
I have had notions of living as a disembodied intelligence i.e. still able to read history & listen to podcasts & watch documentaries (yes, I see that does need eyes and ears) – as being taken away from life means not seeing how events turned out in one respect or another, whether nuclear war in Europe or total fascism in the USA or a giant volcano blowing the whole thing up. Still, I suppose that would be something like being a paraplegic with no sensory experience at all – which would be discombobulating in the extreme – or like locked in syndrome, when you cannot communicate – unless there is a way of communicating with other disembodied intelligences – which are likely to be Elon Musk or similar.
Hahahaha great punchline.
I’ve enjoyed reading the comments in this thread. Much of the best SF of the last 3-4 decades deals with exactly the various ideas above. I could write a book about it, or for those who prefer, bore you senseless over a glass of Scotch. As far as the Fermi paradox goes, my view is that the appearance of life is a lot rarer than has been presumed, that most of what life does arise doesn’t develop the ability to ever send signals into space, and that the duration of life, especially complex life is brief on a galactic scale because the universe is a deeply callous and dangerous place. On the ghost in the machine topic, it depends how you define human. Many (most?) people alive today or previously would struggle to pass the Bene Gesserit definition of Human, and I’m not sure that it’s possible to be truely Human without a biological body. Then again, every time I look at the news or social media I have to remind myself that I’m no true Scotsmanning again.
The authors of the book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe came to several conclusions in the course of their argument. They suspect that wherever life can arise, it likely will. Given the right conditions, life happens all by itself. The evolution of complex life depends on additional, less likely conditions that are required for the enduring stability needed for that to occur; the existence of giant planets like Jupiter in outer orbits that help to prevent or reduce periodic cometary bombardment of your prospective abode, plate techtonics to help recycle crustal and atmopsheric materials, a large satellite to help maintain rotational stability and prevent chaotic axial tilt, etc. Once you start adding these requirements, candidate planets for complex, intelligent life start to get weeded out rather quickly. On worlds whose life is forever limited to algal matts or stromatolites, very few radio transmitters will be built. (Which is not to say that they will dsend no signals; once we can obtain the atmosheric spectra of extra-solar planets, we might very well find the signature of gases that are the result of metabolic action, requiring constant replenishment in order to be present at detectable levels. They might not be lively conversationalists, but they will be life nonetheless.)
The longevity of intelligent life might be more dependent on the temperament of the intelligent species itself, rather than the brutal indifference of the universe. Evolved, collectivist “bee politics” or “naked mole rat politics” might give rise to a more harmonious, long-lasting, and less self-destructive civilization than that which seems to be the result of evolved “chimpanzee politics.” It’s hard to tell from a sample of one, especially whilst the experiment is still running.
YNnB, that’s a good summary of some of the things that make life, especially complex life, less likely than many supposed. As noted elsewhere in this discussion complex life evolved for life in water is a lot less likely to discover and use fire and embark on the journey to utilisable electricity. Although the universe is old, it hasn’t always provided all the necessities we assume life requires, which lowers the chance of life, especially complex life, and especially externally communicative life arising. This paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.08448.pdf) for instance suggests that the probability that we could have arisen before current cosmic time is just 0.1%, and suggests that for a range of star types the likelihood of life arising is greater in the (far) future). Part of the brutality of the universe is the little random events (comet bombardment and that scale of thing). Part is the effect of supernovas. It used to be that I’d read the estimates of sterilisation volume was on the order of a radius of 20-30 light years. More recent research is suggesting 120-160 light years. That is definitely significant if true.