Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

My "Deathist" Zealotry

Giulio Prisco alerts his readers to my "narrow minded" views of technology, to my "well known condemnation of imagination," and, of all things, to my "Deathism."

The broad-minded visionaries with whom he would contrast me here are, mind you, the coterie of Superlative technocentrics who think the imminent arrival of a post-biological superintelligent Robot God is a matter of grave concern for all, who think programmable self-replicating nanoscale robots are about to deliver superabundance for all (or, possibly, you know, reduce the world to goo), and who think genetic and prosthetic medicine (or, failing that, "uploading" their disembodied consciousnesses into apparently imperishable digital formats or robot bodies) may deliver superlongevity to some lucky people now living.

My critique of these sorts of flabbergasting Superlative aspirations -- and more to the point, of the prevailing hyperbolic, reductive, elitist techno-utopian discourses for which they provide, in their stark extremity, a particularly clarifying example and symptom -- Prisco derides as a matter on my part of "abstractness" and "vacuity" (one would almost think mortality were some zany fanciful notion I had invented), as "bullshit" and also "chickenshit" (Prisco entertainingly has much to say about my rudeness elsewhere in his piece), as "political correctness" (I have no idea what that one is all about), and, of course, as an expression of my "Deathism."

This "Deathism" seems to involve the fact that I expect to die like everybody else and don't lose sleep over this particularly, even though, again like pretty much everybody else on earth I'm not exactly thrilled at the prospect and think things like universal healthcare is a good thing because longer healthier lives are a good thing. The evidence Prisco offers up of my "Deathism" consists of this comment of mine: "[W]e people are all of us finite beings, forever prone to disease, accident, violence, betrayal, novelty. [A]nd fantasies about shiny robot bodies or angelic digital ones and so on rest on deep confusions about the actually embodied status of mind."

I quite cheerfully stand behind every word there.

I will also cheerfully admit that my “PC zealot thought policing” along these lines also extends to ridiculing self-proclaimed inventors of perpetual motion machines and folks who have convinced themselves they have squared the circle.

Against my "Deathist memes," so-called, the broad minded Guilio Prisco, well-known champion of Imagination against the likes of me, offers up as his contrasting vision: "Aging is like farting, and dying is like diarrhea. Both are unchosen biological accidents waiting for a good engineer with a good screwdriver. The sooner we can live without shitting our pants, the better. This is transhumanism in a nutshell, as I see it." One may as well take his word for it (Prisco until very recently was Director of the World Transhumanist Association, after all).

But I'm here to tell you, anybody who comes at me with a screwdriver claiming to have a miracle cure for diarrhea, I'm calling 9-1-1.

Prisco also quotes this passage of mine:
It is crucial to disarticulate the basic irrationality of The Denial of Death for embodied sociable narratively coherent beings in a finite universe from things like informed, non-duressed, non-norma[l]izing consensual healthcare in an era of unprecedented emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapy.

In that passage I tried to make clear that I do indeed grasp and take enormously seriously the potentially unprecedented nature of modification medicine, and tried to capture in just a few words the difference between superlative as opposed to technoprogressive responses to such techniques. I realize that the sentence is a bit dense -- but it was off the cuff, just a stab at some kind of substance amidst all the snark. To spell out the point a bit:

Already contemporary medicine has called into question a number of conventional expectations concerning when lives can properly be said to begin and to end, the quality of life we can expect as we cope with various medical conditions (among them conditions that were once too simply subsumed under headings like "aging" or "disability"), and so on. Under such circumstances it becomes crucial in my view for democratically minded people to offer up formulations that facilitate values like equity, diversity, and informed, nonduressed consent in the face of these emerging medical interventions rather than hyperbolic formulations that skew our sense of the actual problems and stakes of the technodevelopmental terrain with which we are coping, fraudulent misinformation playing on people's fears and fantasies in the service of profit or political advantage, "well meaning" eugenic impositions of parochial visions of healthy optimality, maldistributions of the costs, risks, and benefits of therapy as an expression and exacerbation of global injustice, and so on. Superlative talk about "living forever" or "uploading selves into computers" fails to contribute to that necessary work and functions instead as a direct barrier to it, no less than does bioconservative fearmongering about "clone armies" and "human-animal hybrids" when the questions at hand actually involve increasing budgets for medical research and providing access to cures for treatable diseases.

Prisco responds: "I am not going to waste too much time trying to understand what all these elegant and big words mean…. I believe I must have said a few times what I think of this nonsense." Quite apart from the patent anti-intellectualism of this response (I feel as though I'm about to be decried as a Hollyweird Leebrul), it is hard to understand how one can dismiss as "nonsense" what one refuses to understand in the first place. I waded through a whole hell of a lot of Superlative Technology discourse before I felt qualified to delineate its tendencies and assess them. Although I am sure that Superlative technocentrics (being, True Believers after all) would insist that the very fact that I have failed to find their vision compelling is proof enough that I have failed to understand their vision in the first place. Is it any wonder that, under such circumstances, I make recourse instead to ridiculing the ridiculous?

19 comments:

VDT said...

That was hilarious! :)

jimf said...

Dale wrote:

> Against my "Deathist memes," so-called, the broad minded
> Giulio Prisco, well-known champion of Imagination against
> the likes of me, offers up as his contrasting vision:
> "Aging is like farting, and dying is like diarrhea.
> Both are unchosen biological accidents waiting for a
> good engineer with a good screwdriver. The sooner we can
> live without shitting our pants, the better. This is
> transhumanism in a nutshell, as I see it." . . .
>
> But I'm here to tell you, anybody who comes at me with
> a screwdriver claiming to have a miracle cure for diarrhea,
> I'm calling 9-1-1.

You just need to get your optimism turbocharged, Dale!

http://www.transhumanist.biz/ad.htm
--------------------

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.............................................


corrosion by irritability, ........ turbocharged optimism
envy, depression

Intelligence capacity: ............ Intelligence capacity:
100 trillion synapses ............. 100 quadrillion synapses

Embedded high-throughput
contradiction detectors.

Elimination messy ................. Recycles and purifies waste
and gaseous waste

Dynamic hair management

--------------------


100 quadrillion synapses, dynamic hair management,
**and** a catalytic fart converter.

And your premises will be lined up all nice and neat
like Ayn Rand's.

Anonymous said...

Strip out all the techno-utopia terms and these Robot God Botherers sounds exactly like the US garden variety 'angry white male' wingnut.

The classics are all there:

You are "PC"!

Your words are fancy and fruity (read: you are a gay homo).

You you don't deal with reality and are abstract (read: you think and therefore you are a gay homo).

You are rude, you stupid ass!

Culture of Death! (a new favorite smear, replacing the older charge of nihilism, probably because that word is too 'fruity' and they don't seem to know what it actually means anyway).

And just like the wingnuts they are in essence propelled by the same basic fears...scared of uncertainty and scared of death.

Then they wonder why they get compared to fundamentalist religious nuts so often when they'e taken what exists there and swapped out Sky Daddy God for Robot God and Rapture for Singularity.

jimf said...

Eric wrote:

> Strip out all the techno-utopia terms and these Robot God Botherers
> sound exactly like the US garden variety 'angry white male' wingnut.
>
> . . .
>
> Your words are fancy and fruity (read: you are a gay homo).
>
> You you don't deal with reality and are abstract (read: you think
> and therefore you are a gay homo).

"Queenishness" is unextropic. Make a note of it.

Literary advice from Mike Lorrey to Damien Broderick, on
the Extropians' mailing list:

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2005-May/015809.html

> Individuals who see personality as those characteristics which we find
> unextropic (self pity, modesty, inner doubt, etc) due to a pessimistic
> view of humanity are generally going to see your characters thus no
> matter what you do. . . [You] would likely find much sympathy from
> such reviewers if you slathered on enough angst and turmoil and
> melodramatic queenishness.

jimf said...

Not to deny, of course, that some of us **are** -- well -- gay homos!

;->

jimf said...

BTW, my absolute **favorite** insult thread from the Extropians' is:
BTW, my absolute **favorite** insult thread from the Extropians' is:

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2007-April/034450.html
-------------------------------------------------------
From: Eugen Leitl

>> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 01:53:25PM +1000, Brett Paatsch wrote:
> >John Grigg wrote:
> >
> > Attempting to impeach the current president is not a realistic plan
> >
> > Why would you think that?
>
> Folks, killthread. This is completely off-topic for the list.

Eugen, just so you and I are absolutely clear. If you kill this thread, or call
for it to be killed again. If you are that censorious, I will remember it and
hold it against you whilst you and I live. I would oppose your reanimation.
I will regard you as in the aggregate an entropic vector.

I am willing to be censored off the list, it is a private list after all, but
actions (like censorship) are facts that shape reactions. Being a person
in a world of persons, I take things personally. Fair warning.

If I am censored off the list I would take that as diagnostic of the
degeneration of the list. It is one thing to take issue with a person's
arguments and say so. It is another to stop other people from hearing
those arguments and expressing their reactions which may include
opposition to them. I regard censorship as a form of killing - as do
you by the use of your word killthread.

You are yourself a transient information thread that the universe
has yet to rule on.

Sincerely,
Brett Paatsch
-------------------------------------------------------

Golly, Batman! I've never been **that** rude to anybody,
have I? Michael? Have I?

;->

Anonymous said...

Superlative talk about "living forever" or "uploading selves into computers" fails to contribute to that necessary work and functions instead as a direct barrier to it

While I generally think arguments about uploading are peripheral and unproductive, I'd be interested in hearing sometime why you think it's an incoherent or detrimental-to-rationality idea comparable to "living forever", as opposed to just a difficult technical problem.

jimf said...

Nick Tarleton wrote:

> While I generally think arguments about uploading are peripheral
> and unproductive, I'd be interested in hearing sometime why you
> think it's an incoherent or detrimental-to-rationality idea
> comparable to "living forever", as opposed to just a difficult
> technical problem.

The pure idea isn't necessarily "detrimental to rationality".

The "Moravec transfer" (from _Mind Children_, 1988)
is a very interesting thought experiment (which even makes
intuitively plausible the notion that a human mind could undergo
an exchange of physical substrates without duplication or even
interruption of consciousness).

Greg Egan has made stylish use of similar concepts in _Permutation
City_, _Diaspora_, and other works of SF from the 90s. Egan certainly wasn't
the first to use uploading as an SF plot device -- Gene Wolfe's _The Fifth Head
of Cerberus_ (1972) has an "unbound simulator" named "Mr. Million",
and the original '66-'69 _Star Trek_ had several episodes with such
"uploaded" entities (the android "Roger Korby" in Robert Bloch's episode
"What Are Little Girls Made Of?", "Landru" in "The Return of the Archons",
and "M5" in "The Ultimate Computer").

This is all great fun, and even potentially useful in
philosophical explorations of notions of personal identity, etc.

So far, so good.

The "irrationality" comes from eliding the "difficulty" of
"difficult [perhaps impossible -- no one knows for sure] technical
problem" into something quite astonishingly and unjustifiably
akin to the "real soon now" of a future Windows release
(by recourse to the putative "exponential growth" of the putatively
relevant technologies).

The irrationality comes from the emotional charge exemplified
by a certain on-line >Hist when s/he said "Tears ran
down my face" while she was reading Drexler's _Engines of
Creation_.

The irrationality comes from jumping to conclusions and begging
questions about whether anything akin to or likely to develop
from current digital computer technology could in reality
be the substrate for a "Moravec transfer".

The irrationality comes from allowing this sort of SFnal
quasi-science to be the "shtick" (just as psychiatry was for
Scientology back in the 50s) justifying the guru-like
posturings of self-styled "experts" (and "ethical prodigies"),
the existence of tax-exempt "institutes" and "associations",
a PR apparatus that both panders to True Believers (who
want to save the world, save themselves, or maybe just save
themselves the trouble of coming to grips with a serious
field of study) and acts as a sort of "force field" that
both zaps away criticism and projects the strange illusion
that the role-playing apparatus invented by
the on-line participants in this fannish collective
hallucination is somehow more deserving of "belief" than
mainstream scientific and scholarly views of the
matter(s).

Anonymous said...

"Prisco responds: "I am not going to waste too much time trying to understand what all these elegant and big words mean…. I believe I must have said a few times what I think of this nonsense." ...it is hard to understand how one can dismiss as "nonsense" what one refuses to understand in the first place. I waded through a whole hell of a lot of Superlative Technology discourse before I felt qualified to delineate its tendencies and assess them."

An excellent point. The total length of all your superlativity posts is small in light of the amount of pleasure reading that many transhumanist types will do in a week and the time commitment some have made to combating you on mailing lists, not to mention that they are now indexed. Given that, the time required to analyze your writings is not so great as to be a waste. Indeed, I have recommended them to various consequentialist thinkers and Singularitarians, although I disagree on several empirical and ethical questions.

However, I must note that many of your writings are ambiguous and don't make clear what you are targeting: discourse and semantics (people using language like 'immortality' to refer to a situation in which progressive aging can be effectively treated, neglecting accidents, war, resource depletion, heat death, etc), ad hominem and meta-arguments to discount the opinions of proponents of Superlativity (e.g. discussions of Extropianism or signals of True Believer status among Singularitarians), political naivete (talk of 'post-scarcity' nanotech economies), and predictions about the future (e.g. your views on the infeasibility of strong AI, and the relative feasibility of the nanotechnologies discussed by CRN).

You could write in ways that more precisely pinned down your views without requiring the reader to read the rest of your work and make assorted queries for clarification. Of course, you can choose to write as you wish, but there is a grain of truth behind the silly criticism of convoluted sentences, large vocabularies, or idiosyncratic jargon (all sins that many transhumanists are guilty of).

"Superlative talk about "living forever" or "uploading selves into computers" fails to contribute to that necessary work and functions instead as a direct barrier to it, no less than does bioconservative fearmongering about "clone armies" and "human-animal hybrids" when the questions at hand actually involve increasing budgets for medical research and providing access to cures for treatable diseases."

I think that there's a lot to this, but efforts to increase funding for stem cell and cancer research seem to have actually benefited from exaggerated claims of efficacy and near-term benefits, e.g. convincing voters that stem cell research will soon allow quadruplegic individuals to walk, or talking about a 'cure for cancer' in the context of Texas increasing global spending directly targeted on cancer by a couple percent. A political campaign to increase funding for aging research should certainly not talk about 'immortality,' but I don't know with great certainty that it would be counter-productive to talk about eventually restoring youthful health to older people. I'd prefer to rely on political scientists working from polls, surveys, focus groups, etc, and think that such an investigation would be a worthwhile project for anyone with substantial resources supporting the more grandiose rhetoric.

Dale Carrico said...

I must note that many of your writings are ambiguous and don't make clear what you are targeting: discourse and semantics (people using language like 'immortality' to refer to a situation in which progressive aging can be effectively treated, neglecting accidents, war, resource depletion, heat death, etc), ad hominem and meta-arguments to discount the opinions of proponents of Superlativity (e.g. discussions of Extropianism or signals of True Believer status among Singularitarians), political naivete (talk of 'post-scarcity' nanotech economies), and predictions about the future (e.g. your views on the infeasibility of strong AI, and the relative feasibility of the nanotechnologies discussed by CRN).

Fair enough, actually. In many of these pieces I have been clarifying ideas for myself in the writing of them, puzzling through unexpected ramifications, and no small amount of the confusion of audience you rightly detect is a straightforward consequence of the birth of many of these more settled pieces in actual argumentative confrontations with specific conversational partners who bring their own issues and terminologies in tow. I do feel that my Superlative Summary is still very much a matter of blogging rather than a matter of producing a complete case for publication.

Dale Carrico said...

[E]fforts to increase funding for stem cell and cancer research seem to have actually benefited from exaggerated claims of efficacy and near-term benefits.

Okay, I'll admit it: even so -- if so -- that sort of thing just leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

Anonymous said...

"[E]fforts to increase funding for stem cell and cancer research seem to have actually benefited from exaggerated claims of efficacy and near-term benefits.

Okay, I'll admit it: even so -- if so -- that sort of thing just leaves a really bad taste in my mouth."
Would you endorse it in some cases nevertheless?

Al Gore talks about sea levels rising by 20 feet due to global warming, rather than using the IPCC estimates. He tends to imply that the *probable* outcome is utterly disastrous so as to activate public passions on global warming and mobilize support to deal with a relatively unlikely chance of severe catastrophe (since most voters will not respond well to a probabilistic argument based on expected value). However, despite irritating some scientists with misleading statements, he has been massively successful in getting people to attempt to counteract global warming. [While the parallels to the Singularitarian AI-risk crowd are obvious, I strongly oppose such a 'Noble Lie' strategy in that context, both because the threat is more uncertain, and because any threat that does exist should be addressed in a clear-headed fashion.]

Anonymous said...

"He tends to imply that the *probable* outcome is utterly disastrous so as to activate..."
Any sort of Pascal's Wager "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing" reasoning is suspect. There's no such things as "gain all" or "lose nothing" in the first place, unless we're in the realm of teology. So, we need _proper_ analysis of risks and benefits before making any "bets". And substituting that analysis for something that is "good" for agitprop (not embellishing it, but substituting) is not quite moral. That's how those who invented term "agitprop" have fallen, after all...

And betting on a chance of "Techno-immortality Now!"(tm) is not only that, but not vere smart thing to do. Buying insurance policy you are very unlikely to need (against, say alien abduction) is one thing. Gambling on your last dollar, being sure that you would win a jackpot is another one.

Anonymous said...

My point about Gore was mainly an effort to understand the interaction between Dale's desire for P2P interaction and political effectiveness.

To take an example with less decision theoretical baggage, if every Democratic Congressional candidate who is in fact a closeted atheist admitted this when questioned about religion, while Republicans lied, the balance of power in the United States would probably swing back to the latter. If John Edwards or Barack Obama is nominated for President and is secretly an atheist, should he answer honestly whether he believes in God in a debate?

jimf said...

Dale wrote:

> ["Utilitarian" wrote:]
>
> > [E]fforts to increase funding for stem cell and cancer research
> > seem to have actually benefited from exaggerated claims of efficacy
> > and near-term benefits.
>
> Okay, I'll admit it: even so -- if so -- that sort of thing just leaves
> a really bad taste in my mouth.

Matilda told such dreadful lies,
It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes;
Her aunt, who, from her earliest youth,
Had kept a strict regard for truth,
Attempted to believe Matilda:
The effort very nearly killed her,
And would have done so, had not she
Discovered this infirmity.
For once, towards the close of day,
Matilda, growing tired of play
And finding she was left alone,
Went tiptoe to the telephone
And summoned the immediate aid
Of London's noble Fire-Brigade.
Within an hour the gallant band
Were pouring in on every hand,
From Putney, Hackney Downs and Bow,
With courage high and hearts a-glow
They galloped, roaring though the town,
"Matilda's house is burning down"
Inspired by British cheers and loud
Proceeding from the frenzied crowd,
They ran their ladders through a score
Of windows on the ball-room floor;
And took peculiar pains to souse
The pictures up and down the house,
Until Matilda's aunt succeeded
In showing them they were not needed
And even then she had to pay
To get the men to go away!

It happened that a few weeks later
Her aunt was off to the Theatre
To see that interesting play
The Second Mrs Tanqueray.
She had refused to take her niece
To hear this entertaining piece:
A deprivation just and wise
To punish her for telling lies.
That night a fire did break out-
You should have heard Matilda shout!
You should have heard her scream and bawl,
And throw the window up and call
To people passing in the street-
(The rapidly increasing heat
Encouraging her to obtain
Their confidence)-but all in vain!
For every time she shouted "Fire!"
They only answered "Little Liar!"
And therefore when her aunt returned,
Matilda, and the house, were burned.

-- Hilaire Belloc,
"Matilda, (Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death)"

Anonymous said...

[i] should he answer honestly whether he believes in God in a debate?[/i]

Well, maybe. But think about that: if one really wants those "religious" votes, people would expect that senator would act on his ostensible faith. So, his freedom of action in concert with his real beliefs is diminished.

And so he needs to lie even more, and more,and more to maintain that cover. Which increases risk of being debunked, or blackmailed, or simply making his conscience so "tactically flexible" that he'd serve party interests much better by NOT being a Democrat. And these kinds of probabilities do grow exponentially.

Or, to put it another way: even if enemy's top general is really utterly loyal to you, he can't do much on his own. You still need some openly hostile army to capitalize on that fact.

Dale Carrico said...

My point about Gore was mainly an effort to understand the interaction between Dale's desire for P2P interaction and political effectiveness.

I think when people have open access to information in p2p formations characterized (as per Benkler) by peer credentializing practices of polycentric linking and fact-checking norms that the professional/elitist intuitions about noble lies make less and less sense. (I'm a humanities PhD from a prestige institution and obviously a beneficiary of some of these elitist intuitions, so please don't think I am casting aspersions or am oblivious to my own complicity in this.) I think Gore is pretty good with his facts in general though not perfect. I have always thought Chris Mooney was good on the subject of Gore's flaws and virtues. There are always perils in popularization and marketing, but I think p2p provides occasion for overcoming some of the worst of them. But p2p brings our my Inner Mouseketeer somewhat, so I appreciate skeptical interventions.

To take an example with less decision theoretical baggage, if every Democratic Congressional candidate who is in fact a closeted atheist admitted this when questioned about religion, while Republicans lied, the balance of power in the United States would probably swing back to the latter. If John Edwards or Barack Obama is nominated for President and is secretly an atheist, should he answer honestly whether he believes in God in a debate?

I think the Candidate should answer the question "Do you believe in God" with the true answer "I'm a Baptist" or an "Episcopalian" or whatever, and leave questions of divine ontology to theologians. I doubt that church-going Presidential candidates are much different from most Americans in our secular nation, using belief in god as a shorthand to express their embeddedness in moral communities.

I think if you really have to lie about something that is important to you in order to obtain public office that your political priority should probably be direct advocacy for the stigmatized thing itself rather than in obtaining public office, to be honest.

Anne Corwin said...

Okay, this exchange cracked me right up:

Giulio: "Aging is like farting, and dying is like diarrhea. Both are unchosen biological accidents waiting for a good engineer with a good screwdriver. The sooner we can live without shitting our pants, the better..."

Dale: "But I'm here to tell you, anybody who comes at me with a screwdriver claiming to have a miracle cure for diarrhea, I'm calling 9-1-1."

The mental imagery, it burns! :D

Anonymous said...

"I think when people have open access to information in p2p formations characterized (as per Benkler) by peer credentializing practices of polycentric linking and fact-checking norms that the professional/elitist intuitions about noble lies make less and less sense."

So-called 'noble lies'/stupid arguments for positions whose real justification is difficult to rapidly convey in an era of internet research are like open secrets: they are relevant in determining the responses of the apathetic majority but can easily be penetrated by the interested/informed (who can then learn and follow the more sophisticated arguments for a position).

"I think the Candidate should answer the question "Do you believe in God" with the true answer "I'm a Baptist" or an "Episcopalian" or whatever, and leave questions of divine ontology to theologians."

But this is deceptive and misleading *to the audience in question*. Politicians do use such equivocating tricks, as did the stem cell and cancer advocates: 'scientists say that stem cell research could let me walk again' (years or decades in the future), 'a cure for cancer would save Texas billions of dollars per year in medical expenses.' Similarly, a theoretical description of 'longevity escape velocity' or the economic benefits of 100 year olds with the workplace productivity of 50 year olds could be made up of only true statements while (intentionally) instilling mistaken optimism about timelines and motivating support for increasing aging research funding among those who do not study the issues carefully.

If experiments indicate that such a rhetorical approach is effective in motivating funding for medical research (that can be defended logically and honestly to experts and interested/informed individuals), I would tend to think that utilizing it would be no more objectionable than a misleading statement of 'Baptist.'

[Again, I will state that I am not convinced that experiments would show superiority to the Longevity Dividend approach, and will note that this argument does not apply without modification to areas of greater expert uncertainty. Increasing peer-reviewed NIA aging research or establishing a $100 million M-Prize is very different from funding SENS.]

Anne,

Agreed.