The Opening of the Transhuman Mind

by MP-Infinity

I am convinced that in a few hundred years the words of Shakespeare…will interest us no more than the grunting of swine in a wallow…Not only will his work be far too weak in intellect, and written in too vague and puny a language, but the problems which concerned him will be, in the main, no more than historical curiosities. Neither greed, nor lust, nor ambition will in that society have any recognizable similarity to the qualities we know. (Ettinger 1964: 156.)

While recently reading The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom’s notorious indictment of American education, I was struck by a fundamental weakness in his argument for the traditional Western paideia. Namely, Bloom assumes that humans have always been and will remain the same indefinitely.

For some examples, consider Bloom’s assertions that (my emphasis) ‘What each generation is can be best discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns of mankind;’ ‘There is, of course, literature that affects a generation profoundly but has no interest at all for the next generation because its central theme proved ephemeral, whereas the greatest literature addresses the permanent problems of man;’ and, Man has always had to come to terms with God, love and death’ (Bloom 1987: 19, 108, and 230 respectively).

While to an ordinary person these ideas may seem self-evident, to an extropian they simply will not do. Not only does Bloom promote an anti-Darwinian view of the human past (humans having evolved from organisms incapable of abstract thought), but he also completely ignores the extropic scenario where we can transcend our current selves through technology. The prospect of trans- and posthumanity will radically transform the kinds of art we potential transhumans will find satisfying.

To help my discussion, I shall borrow Ayn Rand’s definition that ‘Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments’ (Rand 1971: p.19). Current art, which reflects the value-experiences of mere human beings, is properly called the ‘humanities.’ Because for millennia humans have struggled for survival in highly entropic environments, the humanities bear the scars of Ignorance, State, Religion, and Death. Even at their best they promote entropy. For example, Schiller’s poem ‘An die Freude,’ sung in Beethoven’s otherwise exalting Ninth Symphony, paradoxically celebrates joy and advocates groveling before ‘God’ in the same context.

Numerous other examples could be given, but the point is that the humanities are a heritage of adulterated

quality which we shall eventually have to abandon as we rise to transhuman status. They do not and cannot embody the value-experiences of the transhumans we wish to become, simply because we will no longer have simply human problems. Even now our extropic thoughts and emotions are outgrowing the satisfactions provided by traditional art. Perhaps without knowing it we are looking for the ‘transhumanities’, which we are only beginning to create.

Before suggesting what sorts of values the transhumanities might teach, it must be emphasized that this rather theoretical discussion has practical consequences. Specifically, cryonicists have been struggling against the cultural inertia induced by the example of the ‘Mythic Hero’ in the humanities. Supposedly only the Mythic Hero can conquer death, and only for himself and a few followers (Harris 1988a: 20-28). Because most people refuse to view themselves as heroic, in accordance with the humanities’ teachings, they consequently refuse chances for self-acquired immortality. It has been proposed to co-opt the mythic hero into cryonics by freezing a well-known and respected person, but the chances of this happening soon are small (Harris 1988b: 14-15).

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A more rational counter-proposal is to democratize the Mythic Hero. Under this plan everyone who chooses cryonic suspension would become heroic. It is not clear whether such a transhuman mythology could be made competitive with the deeply entrenched human mythology, though the history of feminism, which challenged male-dominated myths, offers some suggestive parallels (Donaldson 1988: 35-36). Nevertheless the unquestioned authority of the humanities is killing people through perpetuation of deathist models of ‘right’ behavior.

In spite of this deathism-through-example, the art scene is not totally hopeless. Glimpses of proto-transhumanities may be found in the novels of Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein, Vernor Vinge, and others; in the motion picture Things to Come, Cocoon, and the January 4, 1990 episode of L.A. Law; and in illustrations of outer-spacial exploration and living. (EXTROPY readers are free to offer additional examples.) The dominant values of the transhumanities seem to be exhilaration over the prospects of endless growth in life, freedom, happiness, pleasure, intelligence, success, competence, wealth - in short, all the things extropians want, and more, more, more!

But we are only at the dawn of the transhuman era. Barring a catastrophe, this age will rapidly mature into the posthuman Singularity as our powers grow without bound. Who can foresee what we will find meaningful then?

A brief tour of the wonders ahead may be experienced vicariously through Marc Stiegler’s story “The Gentle Seduction”. Perhaps certain readers may identify with the simple female character who fears change yet allows herself to grow into a superbeing of unimaginable complexity - artistically a case of the average person attaining superheroism (Stiegler 1989: 10-34).

Ultimately if the extropic Weltanschauung is to spread, the artists among us will need to create more and better art in this genre to lead people towards increasingly extropic goals. It is not enough to be intellectually correct - we must be emotionally, morally, and aesthetically engaging if we wish to maximize our own chances for aeonic life. The challenge is to open the transhuman mind in as many people as possible - a ‘gentle seduction’ into improvement without end.

POSTSCRIPT: A few days after I mailed Max my essay on the transhumanities, I belatedly received the Fall 1989 (#7) issue of Mondo 2000 - a magazine of very uneven quality, I must say. Nevertheless, one of the best articles in that issue is “Hurtling Towards the Singularity”, an interview with Vernor Vinge conducted by Michael Synergy. Condensing some of his thoughts on art relevant to my essay, Vinge argues that:

When a race succeeds in making creatures that are smarter than it is, then all the rules are changed. And from the standpoint of that race, you’ve gone through a Singularity. That’s because it’s not possible to talk meaningfully

about the issues that are important after that point…

So I have found a big barrier in writing hard science fiction. When I try to do a hard science fiction extrapolation, I run out of humanity quickly…

…I personally think, if we don’t blow ourselves up that, in twenty to a hundred years, we will go through this technological Singularity. And that there may be humans afterwards - they will not be the principal players - and it’s essentially impossible to talk about what’s going on with them. So to me, that’s the hard reality… So, I think that all writers who intend to write realistically are up against the same wall. And it is producing a lot of real neat stories. Real pyrotechnics. But there really are some limits there, until we actually fall through the Singularity, and then their art, presumably, can continue, but it would not be the art that you or I, at this time, could understand.

Clearly Vinge thinks we would find “Singularitarian” or posthuman art incomprehensible. But this incomprehension is asymmetric. Posthumans, and especially those evolved from current cryonicists, would probably understand human art - but they (and, optimistically, we) will find it boring, trivial, or childish, much as adults tire of the Santa Claus stories which captivate children.

Thus the Singularity will mark a sharp discontinuity in the history of art, resulting from the appearance of superhuman intelligences on this planet. But, as Vinge complains, creating meaningful transhuman art for the pre-Singularity period is extremely difficult because we cannot expect to remain human for very many more decades!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bloom, A. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Donaldson, T. “Cryomyths.” Cryonics, November 1988: 34-35.

Ettinger, R. The Prospect of Immortality. New York: Doubleday. 1964.

Harris, S. “The Day the Earth Stood Still: Cryonics and the Resurrection of the Mythic Hero.” Cryonics, September 1988a: 14-28.

Harris, S. “The Mythic Hero (Continued)”. Cryonics, December 1988b: 13-15.

Rand, A. The Romantic Manifesto. New York: New American Library, 1971.

Stiegler, M. “The Gentle Seduction.” Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, April 1989: 10-34.

EXTROPY #6

16

Summer 1990