A Really Elegant Aplogia For Transhumanism

"A Really Elegant Apologia For Transhumanism"

(c) 2007, 2011 by Jordan S. Bassior

It's here:

I advise anyone who has ever thought about this issue, from any perspective, to read the original post (and the comments are also fascinating), but to summarize:

The essential argument being made is that "transhumanism" is simply "humanism" (or humane-ness) extended to deal with new technological possibilities. One would, all other things being equal, rather save or improve life, rather than take or degrade it? In that case, then it is moral to apply new technologies (again, all other things being equal) to save and improve life as much as possible. There is no difference in essence between carrying someone out of the path of a train, giving them penecillin to treat an infection, employing gene therapy to cure a hereditary disease, or employing nanotechnology to render someone immortal. There is no set point of life or happiness at which the value of further life or happiness switches from positive to negative.

I have always believed this, intuitively: Mr. Yudkowsky has explained it logically, and put it better than could I.  The core of his argument is outlined here:

Transhumanism is simpler - requires fewer bits to specify - because it has no special cases. If you believe professional bioethicists (people who get paid to explain ethical judgments) then the rule “Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad” holds only until some critical age, and then flips polarity. Why should it flip? Why not just keep on with life-is-good?

...

As far as a transhumanist is concerned, if you see someone in danger of dying, you should save them; if you can improve someone’s health, you should. There, you’re done. No special cases. You don’t have to ask anyone’s age.

You also don’t ask whether the remedy will involve only “primitive” technologies (like a stretcher to lift the six-year-old off the railroad tracks); or technologies invented less than a hundred years ago (like penicillin) which nonetheless seem ordinary because they were around when you were a kid; or technologies that seem scary and sexy and futuristic (like gene therapy) because they were invented after you turned 18; or technologies that seem absurd and implausible and sacrilegious (like nanotech) because they haven’t been invented yet. Your ethical dilemma report form doesn’t have a line where you write down the invention year of the technology. Can you save lives? Yes? Okay, go ahead. There, you’re done.

and he deals elegantly with the obvious objection from most people

But - you ask - where does it end? It may seem well and good to talk about extending life and health out to 150 years - but what about 200 years, or 300 years, or 500 years, or more? What about when - in the course of properly integrating all these new life experiences and expanding one’s mind accordingly over time - the equivalent of IQ must go to 140, or 180, or beyond human ranges?

Where does it end? It doesn’t. Why should it? Life is good, health is good, beauty and happiness and fun and laughter and challenge and learning are good. This does not change for arbitrarily large amounts of life and beauty. If there were an upper bound, it would be a special case, and that would be inelegant.

and he sums it up beautifully

So that is “transhumanism” - loving life without special exceptions and without upper bound.

Which was always my sense of things.  If it's ok for you to live at age 25, then it's ok for him to live at 50, or 100 or 200, or 400, or for that matter since the Big Bang until the heat-death of the Universe.  Life is of value, and it does not cease to be of value when it is extended.  If it is good to have the mind of a dog, then it is better to have the mind of an ape, and still better to have the mind of an average human, or an average genius, or average supergenius, or Transcendent being.  Intelligence is of value, and its value does not turn negative above a certain level.

As Yudkowsky points out, there may be physical limits to life extension or intellectual augmentation.  If so, that is simply the nature of the Universe.  But if we can extend a person's life or increase his intelligence, then (with the person's extent, of course) all other things being equal it is better to do than not to do it.

It's simple humanity to value transhumanity.

END.

The Promise of Boundlessness

(this started as a comment to a post of akilika at http://akilika.livejournal.com/1072154.html)

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All existing human cultures are deeply founded on a pre-Newtonian and pre-Copernican world view, in which the Earth is "special" as the stage for life and human activity, amd the rest of the Universe is merely a background. This prejudice is reinforced by our ignorance: the Earth is, in fact, the only part of the Universe about which we possess much detailed knowledege, so it is easy for us to imagine that it is the only place of any importance.

If we bother to seriously think about it, this attitude is obviously absurd, but it is an easy opinion to return to, and we return to it at every chance, finding new excuses in each case. The implicit excuse of the Mundane SF movement is that we have serious ecological problems on the Earth and that thinking about colonizing other places "distracts" us from solving them.

The first fallacy, of course, is a variant of that of the Excluded Middle. "We" (Mankind) are not a unitary entity which can only think about colonizing other worlds or problems on Earth, one or the other. Indeed even "we" in the sense of each separate nation are not so bound: it is quite reasonable to envision some people in each country working on Earth-based ecological problems while others work on colonizing other worlds.

A deeper error lies in the assumption that activities "in space" and activities "on Earth" must compete in the long run for resources: that effort we put "into space" is somehow lost to "the Earth." The reason why this is an error is that progress is synergistic and often serendipitous: advances made in one field often are prerequisites or triggers to advances made in another field, as explored in the classic series Connections http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) .

We've already seen this, more than once, in regards to this very issue. When we were first able to see the whole Earth from space, we realized that she was a planet and a unitary thing as we never had before, which gave impetus to the environmental movement. And the development of Landsats made it possible for us to monitor global processes on a global scale, without restrictions created by the accident of accessibility to ground and air expeditions.

We can expect further advances in the future. As the cost of Earth-to-orbit and orbit-to-Earth travel drops, Earth will become economically connected to extraterrestrial resources -- first to terrestrially rare ones such as tri-helium and certain uncommon metals, eventually to others as the cost drops even further. Mining and industry will increasingly move off-Earth, enabling Earth to become a garden planet.

But the truth is starker than this, because I've just described it from Earth's perspective. Though there will long be a practical, and still longer be a sentimental human tie to the motherworld, in the truly long run, Earth is only one planet among literally trillions in our Galaxy, and quintillions to sextillions in the Universe as a whole.

If Man is successful as a sapient species, we will expand out into the Solar System, the Galaxy, and the Universe beyond, and one day Earth will be at best only a distant memory, an echo of long ago and far away. And if Man is not successful as a sapient species, then we will perish, and one or more of the unknown number of other sapient species in the Universe will succeed in our place, and to then Earth will be at best an archaeological dig site, possibly not even that, if they don't discover the planet before the Sun expands into her red giant phase and whiffs her into vapor.

This is the true root of the Mundane SF movement: not just Fear of Boundlessness, as I argued before (http://fantasticworlds-jordan179.blogspot.com/2011/01/fear-of-boundlessness-explanation-for.html) but the Fear of Insignificance. We recoil at the chasms of deep space and deep time in our future; we fear that everything we hold dear may mean less to the Cosmos than the little worlds of the Two Rivers or the Nile -- in which our fundamental moral system evolved -- meant to the Earth as a whole.

To this fear I can offer two counters and a hope. The counters are that it doesn't matter -- reality is whether we choose to pay attention to it or not, and more trivially that places beyond the Earth exist and will be expanded into by other human cultures and subcultures, even if any particular human culture (yes, even America!) chooses to squeeze her eyes firmly shut and chant "you're not there, you're not there!"

The hope is simple.

The Universe is out there. We may be worthy of it. And if we are sufficiently worthy, then Man -- rather than being insignificant, as the insignificance of our birthworld might make us imagine -- might be one of the most significant productions of the Cosmos, as the entity destined to become at least part of the great stream of sapient life which will organize the Cosmos and bring it consciousness. Earth in this view would merely be like a single fertilized human egg, a tiny insignificant thing which can produce the most momentous consequences in the form of a new human being, if it succeeds.

A baby can't succeed if it spends its whole life in the womb. And Man can't succeed if we spend our whole life as a species on Just One Earth.

There's a whole big Universe out there. Let's grow into it.

The Seminal Status of "Doc" Smith's Lensman series

"The Seminal Status of "Doc" Smith's Lensman Series"

(c) 2007, 2011 by Jordan S. Bassior

E. E. "Doc" Smith is today sometimes dismissed as "merely" a pulp science fiction writer who produced "cliche" space operas. What is not commonly realized is the extent to which he actually originated many ideas which were so widely copied by other writers that they became "cliche." Here is a quick listing of some of his most important ideas


I.  Most importantly, the Lensman series was the first to put forward and explore in detail (1) the concept of a multi-species interstellar federation as a future civilization. (2) This idea is very common today, largely because of the near universality of its acceptance by both science fiction fans and mundanes as a plausible model for an interstellar civilization. It's the clear inspiration for the Federation of Star Trek, Central Control of Andre Norton's space opera stories, Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League, etc. Even when you have something nastier (such as Anderson's Terran Empire) it exists in an auctorial awareness that better things are possible.

Before "Doc" Smith, it usually was TAKEN FOR GRANTED that if different species met the only possibilities would be (a) genocidal warfare, as in Wells' War of the Worlds or (b) domination of most species by a "master race," as in the situation on Barsoom and by implication in most 1930's multi-racial Solar Systems (for that matter, Smith's first two Skylark novels tended to assume that humanoid oxygen-breathers couldn't get along with non-humanoid or non-oxygen breathers).  This concept was part and parcel of the rise of illiberal philosophies starting with 19th-century Romanticism, darkening with Marx, Gobineau, Spencer and Nietzsche, and reaching its full horrible depths in the decades from 1914 through 1976, leading to the rises of Lenin,Stalin, Hitler and Mao, and systematic murder on the most massive scales.

When reading the science fiction of the interwar era it is important to realize that the (non-Commuinist) dominant intellectuals of that age considered some sort of fight for racial supremacy to be normal and historically necessary.  (The Communist ones considered some sort of fight for class supremacy to serve the same role).  "Doc" Smith was bucking the intellectual trends of the 1930's by asserting that the applciation of a liberal idea of racial equality, even across species, was possible.

Smith was one the first science fiction writers to see that there was, inherent in sapience, the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the struggle for survival between species, and was most certainly the first science fiction writer to make this the theme of a major work. Note that one BIG reason Civilization triumphs over Boskone is that Civilization can make use of the talents of all its races, while Boskone (which is strictly hierarchical) keeps most races in such subjection that they cannot fully develop their capabilities.

II.  Smith was one of the first writers (3) to grasp the immense scales of energy, time, and distance which were inherent in cultures with atomic power and interstellar spaceflight. In the Lensman series, fleets comprised of thousands and eventually millions of large warships (made possible because they are produced by two warring cultures each of which contain dozens of major and thousands of minor production planets) clash in campaigns which span tens of thousands of light years and battles which sprawl out across whole solar systems.

They attack and defend with energies and explosives utterly dwarfing anything producible by planetbound, 20th century Man. Against their awesome forces, no more primitive culture could hope to last for an instant (in The Vortex Blaster, Cloudd ends a lower-tech interplanetary war by using a Civilization lifeboat's engines offensively) (4)

III.  Smith was one of the first science fiction writers to grasp the inherent (i.e. institutional and systematic) advantages which free societies have over unfree societies (5). As such, he can be argued to be the true father of not only space opera but also of libertarian science fiction (6).

This is a major theme of the series, and one which is implicitly and explicitly repeated in every book. Time and time again, whether conceptually (as in the case of the repeated underestimation of the rising Civilization by Boskone) or physically (as in the negasphere duels) Boskone's rigid and hierarchical nature dooms the Boskonians to defeat. Time and time again, whether on the grand scale (Virgil Samms' willingness to regard the Rigellians and Palanians as fit partners for the Triplanetary League) or the most personal (Kinnison's mercy towards Ilona of Lonabar), the essential humaneness and tolerance of Civlization gives it major advantages and wins it new allies and vital information.

I'll note here that Smith's ideas in this regard were very advanced -- most Western intellectuals wouldn't come around to his point of view until 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall exposed the rottenness at the heart of the 20th century's greatest totalitarianism -- and ended the long nightmare the West had been in since 1914.  Smith's own universe had the Cold War end in World War III, but it is obvious that Civilization itself is far more descended in terms of culture, economy, and political system from the Free World than it is from the Communist one, and one may assume that the "Tyrant of Asia" (actually an energized flesh-form of Gharlane of Eddore) ruled as some sort of Communist.

IV.  E. E. "Doc" Smith was one of the first sf writers to realize the tremendous potential capabilities of propaganda, subversion, terrorism, and psychological operations in large scale warfare. You could argue that he was merely copying the real-life events of World War II here, except that the series originated conceptually as a future police story, and Galactic Patrol (copyright 1939, and hence written before the Second World War started) already has drug dealing subversion and terrorism as major elements of the Boskonian attack on Civilization. In his stories, both sides make extensive use of this sort of warfare -- Boskone inflitrates Civilization repeatedly from the start, and Kinnison repeatedly infiltrates Boskone (most importantly in the last part of Second Stage Lensman). In the conquest of the Second Galaxy, Civilization repeatedly converts Boskonian worlds to Civillized norms by intensive propaganda, and in the last phase of the war, Boskone uses systematic terrorism to destablize numerous Civilized worlds.

V.  E. E. "Doc" Smith was one of the first sf writers -- or indeed military affairs writers! -- to recognize the immense importance of what is today termed C3I (command, control, communications, and intelligence) in large scale military operations. His concepts of the plotting tank and of the "Directrix" were not only revolutionary in fiction, they have been credited by the US Navy as seminal influences in the development of REAL-LIFE ship-board Combat Information Centers!

His fiction in general stresses the importance of intelligence (both intellectual and espionage) in warfare, and in battle after battle, Civilization prevails owing to a superior command structure -- which in turn, as I've noted before in this mini-essay, comes from its superior social structure.

VI.  E. E. "Doc" Smith was one of the first (though not THE first) science fiction writer to realize that, owing to the escalating energies present on the battlefield, it would eventually be impossible for unprotected and unaugmented humans to survive combat. All his combatants wear at least "space armor" (which note, by the time of the main story cycle, includes duralloy armor and a personal force field) if there is a serious fight brewing, and specialized combatants (such as the Valerian Space Marines) are fighting in what amounts to man-portable legged tankettes. He was one of the first sf writers to predict powered armor, which Kinnison develops first for his personal use. (7).  At several points in the series, power-armored combatants are able to defeat much larger soft-skinned enemy forces.

Smith was one of the first sf writers to realize that, if psychic powers were really possible, they could be scientifically studied and utilized in large-scale "psi-tech" type applications (8) (the most obvious example being the Lens itself, and some lesser ones being Worsel's handy-dandy miniaturized death-ray, the Triplanetary Service's meteor badges, and the Patrol's tele-projectors). Note that in Smith's world, it was possible for the utterly materialistic and mechanistic Eddorians to deduce and employ both psionics and (if you take Kyle as canon) necromancy on a large scale. Note the essentially materialistic description of the climatic psionic attack of Civilization against Eddore, at the close of Children of the Lens.

This is one of the sources of virtually every science fictional use of psionics since.

Conclusion

Well, that's all I can think of at the moment. I'll note that even ONE of these achievements would be enough to win any other science fiction writer fame for life -- and we're talking here about SEVERAL such achievements in just ONE of the series of an author who wrote several series in his lifetime.

E. E. "Doc" Smith was one of the greatest minds the genre has ever known -- a giant in his field, and the originator of many ideas in our genre -- and even some in our civilization as a whole.

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Notes:

(1) - Aside from being really good adventure stories, the various episodes involving Kimball Kinnison's undercover missions are vehicles for exploration of Civilization itself -- we learn a lot about the various planets, races, cultures and subcultures of Smith's world from the bottom up (sometimes literally as Kim starts a mission as a street bum or ordinary worker and wiggles his way up through the levels of an enemy organization).  The high command strategic scenes display important features of the politics and economics of Civilization, giving a top-down view.  In Second Stage Lensman, we get to see the Boskonian culture as well. 

Edmond Hamilton created something like Civilization as early as the late 1920's, but he used it merely as a backdrop for world-wrecking adventures of alien invasion; he did not go into detail about his universe the way that Smith did. Nevertheless, he must have strongly inspired Smith, a fact I learned after the first publication of this essay.

One could argue that Olaf Stapledon's Galactic and Universal Minds worked sort of like Civilization, except that in Stapledon's universe a race had to be incredibly superhuman AND able to move itsr whole planet to engage in interstellar travel or to get along peacefully with sapients not of your own species. Note that the super-moral Second Men and the Martians couldn't get along, even his Fifth Men had to exterminate the Venusians, and the ultimate (and passionately sympathetic) Eighteenth Men, who were each superhumanly intelligent, routinely formed 98-fold thinking-and-mating groups, and could on occasion form a World Mind, didn't have the jets to swing to flee their dying Solar System -- and they DID try to launch starships, they just weren't up to the job.

By contrast, Civilization easily incorporates something like half a dozen sapient races in the Solar System alone (especially if you take Spacehounds of IPC to be in the continuity at least in terms of its description of the Jovian System) before even developing FTL travel and concludes its first interstellar war with a rational peace treaty, incorporating its former foes into its own culture. (all in Triplanetary!) By the time of Kimball Kinnison and the Children, exceedingly alien races like the Rigellians and Palanians cooperate with the more humanoid races smoothly and as a matter of course.

(2) - Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson wrote early stories of the naval and military forces of interstellar civilizations, of which Edmond Hamilton's was a peaceful multi-racial federation along the lines which Smith would later draw his Civilization, and Williamson's a more humanity-centered culture protected by the Legion of Space.  Neither provided much detail about their cultures, compared to Smith. 

Olaf Stapledon, who was working under the handicap of his own snobbish refusal to read the science fiction magazines, which meant that he was insulated from many of the best ideas of his era, depicted interstellar federations but only of vastly superhuman beings and only on the broadest scope.  Unsurprisingly, 1930's and later science fiction writers mined Stapledon's novels for ideas.

(3) - The others, obviously, were Olaf Stapledon (who was working under the handicap of his own snobbish refusal to read popular sf, which meant that he was insulated from many of the best ideas of the pulp and Golden Age eras) and Edmond Hamilton (who was nicknamed "World Wrecker" for this reason).  "Common sense" notions of the limits of the application of energy were based on our familiarity with merely chemical energy sources:  our culture was slow to grasp the difference in quality when one can convert mass to energy.  To be fair, we only learned that it was possible in 1905:  in the 1930's, the mass-energy equivalence was as recent a discovery as is, say, quark dynamics today.

(4) - Smith was one of the first sf writers to see that the scale of energies required to enable spaceflight would be utterly devastating compared to unaugmented humans. And in real life, the Apollo missions lifted off atop rockets each of which contained about as much energy as an atomic bomb.  Cloudd's lifeboat was capable of greater levels of thrust.  H. G. Wells' movie Things to Come may have anticipated the point with the classic scene where a whole rioting mob is (presumably) blown to bits by standing too close to the firing of a Moon-capable Earth-based launch cannon.

(5) -  And note: he began writing the series in the late 1930's, at a time when most intellectuals were wondering not if liberal democracy could survive (they ASSUMED it to be doomed) but rather whether it would be Communism or Fascism that would dominate the world. Reading the series today, his arguments for the inherent superiority of freedom over totalitarianism seem very modern; by contrast Stapledon's slavish worship of socialism seems very old-fashioned.

(6) - While Civilization seems very authoritarian and militaristic in the stories, this is because they focus on an interstellar WAR -- it is explicitly stated in one of the books that under normal circumstances the tax rate is something like 1% and in another that most citizens of Civilization go throughout their lives without ever seeing anything more violent than a fistfight).  The extreme hostility of Civilization to drug production and smuggling is in part derived from the propaganda Smith read growing up, and in part from the fact that narcotics are being used against Civilization as a Boskonian tool of subversion to crash Civilized cultures.

(7) - Robert A. Heinlein, who immensely respected and was was immensely inspired by "Doc" Smith, would of course be the first sf writer to develop this notion in detail, in Starship Troopers. John Ringo, in his Posleen vs. Terran novels, has recently taken the whole notion a lot further.

(8) - To be fair, the concept of "psi-tech" could also be said to date back to the "Lost Race" science fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "Vril powered" Atlantean airships were a staple of these tales, Lovecraftian "magic" worked on this principle (see especially "The Dreams in the Witch House" and "The Shadow Out of Time"), and Stapledon's "psychic gravity" could be viewed as (accidental and disastrous) terraforming on a very large scale!

Also, an even earlier example of fictional psi-tech comes from Hodgson's The Night Land, in which much about the human soul is scientifically understood. Hodgson may have pioneered this notion, in this work and in his Carnacki the Ghost-Finder stories.

Smith himself used the concept of psionics, as a higher-order energy form, in his earlier Skylark series.  In the later books it becomes utterly vital to the plot.