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Two Questions for Extropians

by Charles Platt

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1. The Non-Word-Driven Mind

Various attempts have been made to subdivide mental activity. In Freudian terms we have the ego and the id; in physiological terms we have lower and higher brain function; and so on. Most of these schemes seem an attempt to articulate something which we vaguely sense about ourselves: the difference between our animal inheritance of needs and fears, and our evolved, verbalized, conscious human intelligence. To draw the line as clearly as possible and minimize semantic quibbling, I will distinguish these functions by referring to them here as word-driven and non-word-driven brain activity.

I make a living as a writer. When I am working, my thoughts exist primarily as streams of words. Perhaps because of this, I always used to assume that a lot of mental activity in everyday life falls into this same category. However, some brief introspection showed me that I was wrong. Everyday tasks such as measuring ingredients for a meal, sealing envelopes, or dialing phone numbers seem to require no silent mental verbalization at all. (In fact, they can take place while the brain is running some other word-script entirely.) If my experience is typical, most of the thinking that we do, in order to function on a daily level, is not word-driven.

This seems to apply even in tasks that are highly evolved or complex, such as driving a car, composing music, doing carpentry, cleaning the house, or painting a picture.

Well-known signing experiments with chimpanzees have confirmed (reluctantly, in some cases) that language is probably the decisive attribute dividing human beings from animals. Since animals do not have language as we understand the term, by definition, none of their actions are word-driven.

However, rats can still learn mazes, and in my own home, I have seen our three cats “figuring out” problems such as opening a door or perfecting a hunting strategy.

From this I conclude:

1. Everyday human activity is similar to animal activity in that it is not word driven, even though it may be complex and demanding.

2. Learning a task may be faster if we use words to define and control it; but even here, language is inessential, and deductive reasoning can occur without words.

How does this affect the Extropian desire for transcendence?

Suppose we contemplate an idealized Extropian model: a human brain replicated as data. This appeals to me personally (provided the replication is complete and accurate) because it implies unlimited life and an unlimited range of experiences. When I wrote my novel The Silicon Man, I presented it as an optimistic vision; a form of liberation.

Other writers have extended this scenario. In a chapter that I have seen from a forthcoming book by Hans Moravec, he points out that since the mind does not easily tolerate being deprived of sensory input, information entities (or “infomorphs,” as I like to call them) will need the active, sustained illusion of sights, sounds, and other sensation. Maintaining this illusion will require a heavy overhead of processing power; and therefore, if there is such a thing as a non-human infomorph operating as “pure” intellect without need for the sensory-simulation overhead, Moravec suggests this entity will have a competitive evolutionary advantage relative to ourselves.

This concept of “pure intellect” as being

word-driven processes may constitute the primary activity of the brain and may be the key aspect of being human, without which we would be unable to function at all.

I suggest the desire for “pure intellect” may be a contradiction in terms, and may derive much more from wish-fulfilment than from a rational understanding of what it means to be alive.

However, as I mentioned at the beginning, I earn a living as a writer. I trust word-driven thought more than non-word-driven thought. Therefore, I hope my conclusion is wrong.

2. First, Do No Harm

The libertarian ideology, which recurs frequently in visions of an Extropian future, argues that individuals should be unconstrained so long as their actions cause no harm to others. I propose that this ideal is unrealistic, since some degree of harm is inevitable; and ethical individuals should acknowledge this and accept limits to their behavior, especially if we acquire greater personal power.

Consider the specific issue of free speech. Libertarians are understandably discontented when courts rule that some speech is unprotected by the First Amendment. I share their discontent, because as a writer, I want to write whatever I feel like writing. (In my British homeland, one of my raunchier books was seized by the police, and I narrowly escaped a fine or imprisonment under the Obscene Publica-

tions Act. This kind of experience makes a durable impression.)

The principle that some speech is not constitutionally protected goes back to World War I, when agitators were jailed for distributing leaflets advocating pacifism (which supposedly endangered the nation by threatening to undercut the war effort). As patriotic fever declined and rationality reasserted itself, the Supreme Court reached a compromise articulated by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who argued that speech should only be unprotected if it posed a “clear and present danger.” This principle has survived to the present day.

The commonly understood implication is that you should be free to shout “Impeach the president!” in a crowded theater, but if you shout “Fire!” (another test invented by Holmes), that speech creates a clear and present danger; therefore, it is not protected by the

I suggest the desire for “pure intellect” may be a contradiction in terms, and may derive much more from wish-fulfilment than from a rational understanding of what it means to be alive.

somehow “superior” recurs implicitly in many Extropian writings. It seems that Extropians are so conscious of physical human limitations, they are eager to jettison not only the unreliable biological support system of the human body, but also the “messier” features of the human mind. As Max More remarked to me recently, when he was asked what he was going to be doing later in the evening, “I have to go to sleep because, unfortunately, I am human.”

I tend to share this instinctive bias. However, as I have suggested above, word-driven, “higher” brain activity takes a less active role even in logically deductive tasks than we might like to imagine. Non-word-driven or “intuitive” functions may be much more than background noise interfering with a nice clean thought-signal. This noise may, in fact, be an integral part of the signal. In other words, non-

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first amendment, and you may be sued for damages by people who are injured in the stampede. At first glance this seems to fit the libertarian ideal, since speech is unconstrained so long as it does no harm to others. But as soon as we allow the underlying principle that speech has the power to do harm, logic leads us to some difficult conclusions. At one extreme, Dworkin and McKinnon have proposed that men may be encouraged to assault women if they view a lot of erotic magazines in which women are depicted as sexual victims; therefore, women should be able to claim damages from people who produce the magazines.

Is this argument as extreme as it seems? Do magazines depicting the torture of women create the “clear and present danger” of violence against women? The ACLU refuses to accept that this linkage can occur. However, undeniably, art has power, and there are certainly cases of “copycat crimes” based on fiction. I myself have written at least one book which I believe could tempt an unbalanced person to murder or rape. Do we blame the person for being unbalanced, or do we blame the writer for indulging his fantasies with no concern for potential consequences? If I shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater and an “unbalanced” person has a heart attack, isn’t that a similar situation? Just what is a “clear and present danger,” anyway?

Having thought about this extensively, I conclude that creative artists have a moral obligation to consider the effects of their work; but their position is not so different from that of any citizen who interacts with other people. After all, almost any speech has the potential for harm. I can go out around town and be surly, obnoxious, and insulting, angering people and raising their blood pressure, which will be bad for their health and may encourage them to take out their anger on others in turn. Or, I can spread good karma wherever I go.

The same principle applies to other social freedoms. We can use them, or we can abuse them. But the potential for harm is there, and it’s all just a matter of degree.

How does this apply to Extropian thought?

Extropians seem to accept the libertarian principle that it is possible to enjoy greater freedom without doing any harm at all. However, as I have argued above, in the case of at least one freedom (freedom of speech), the potential for harm is always present. A writer has more power than average, to create that harm. By extension, in an Extropian future where technology has enhanced personal power much farther, the potential for causing harm will be greater still.

I sense that this is an unpopular train of thought in Extropian circles because it involves community considerations and threatens to inhibit us. As individuals who seek to transcend most forms of inhibitions, the last thing we want to hear is, “You shouldn’t do that, because other people might not like it.”

However, in the words of an old Frank Zappa lyric, we are the other people, and you’re the other people too. Few of us can genuinely claim that we look forward to living out an unrestricted lifespan in total isolation. Unless we somehow rewire our brains at a very fundamental level (which may be desirable, but presents some practical problems), we tend to need social interaction.

I would like to see the development of an “Extropian Ethic” addressing the issue of interpersonal harm on a more realistic level. This will be all the more urgent if individuals turn into infomorphs, since an information entity would be more vulnerable in some ways than a physical human being.

I suggest two guiding principles for those who want to transcend limits and indulge their freedoms:

“Two Questions”

1. The Non-Word-Driven Mind

Charles Platt states that a concept of “pure intellect” as superior recurs in many Extropian writings. I can see some ground for this assessment, especially in the writings of Hans Moravec and a few others who have discussed the idea of uploading their selves to better hardware (becoming uploads, or “infomorphs”, to use Charles handy term). However, my experience doesn’t suggest to me that most Extropian-minded thinkers take this view. I find it difficult to assess Charles claim since he cites only Moravec’s writings and my half-joking reply implying frustration with my human biological and neurological limits. Though I doubt that many Extropians assume this view of pure intellect in the way Charles suggests, I thank him for bringing this issue out into the light where we can examine it explicitly. I welcome others to respond to Charles’ concerns from their own perspective; my own comments will be brief.

True, we Extropians dislike the “messier features of the human mind” (and body), but that isn’t a rejection of the unconscious or less conscious aspects of mind. In my view, this dislike is the flipside of a desire to fine-tune the mind or self – to eliminate unnecessary aspects and to replace inefficient processes with more efficient means. Eliminating sleep (or compressing its useful functions into a shorter duration) is one thing, but this doesn’t imply a desire to eliminate all the machinery underlying and supporting our conscious mentation. We need to distinguish the goal of transcending our human biological limitations from a rejection of the unconscious or less-conscious.

Related to Charles’ concern, I worry that some uploading enthusiasts will leave behind important parts of themselves if they attempt to simulate only the top level of their thinking – just enough to produce plausibly similar behavior to their previous human selves. Only further research into the nature of cognition and sensation will tell us how deep down we need to go in simulating the brain (and endocrine system) if we are to conserve all that matters to us about our selves and our experiences. Just how deep we need to go has been debated on the Extropians e-mail list a number of times; there is no space here to get into the topic.

To illustrate the difference between abandoning the richness of our human experience and expanding and refining it, let us look at the case of emotions. Although emotions can (according to the cognitive psychologists) be modified by conscious thought, generally our emotional responses emerge from unconscious mental activity. Below the level of awareness, or at a dim and nonverbal level, we evaluate perceived events as harmful or beneficial, appropriate or inappropriate, rewarding or frustrating. I – in common with most Extropians, I believe – do not share the Mr. Spock-style dichotomy and antagonism of reason and emotion. Rather than eliminating emotions in favor of an imaginary (and perhaps inconceivable) pure intellect, we seek to bring them under more control. We wish to be able to intervene more effectively in our emotional responses, by means both psychological and technological, to overcome unhelpful urges and responses built into us by evolution or absorbed unwittingly from our environment. We wish to open ourselves fully to positive emotional experience, while moderating, eliminating, or transforming negative emotional experiences when they serve no useful purpose.

Again, although I don’t think most Extropians are pure intellectualists, Charles’ concern may be supported by noting that creativity is largely unconscious, and perhaps has to remain that way. It may be that being fully conscious of creative processes may stifle them by interfering with the flow of thoughts. Creativity seems to be one of those non-word-driven aspects of mentation, but I don’t recall any Extropian writer rejecting unconscious mechanisms of creativity in favor of purely conscious, linguistically-based creativity.

So I agree that the desire for pure intellect is unrealistic, but I don’t believe that many Extropians have proposed this. Most Extropians of my acquaintance clearly enjoy the less-conscious and the non-rational (not irrational), sensual

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Platt cont.

1. Admit that any action may cause harm, and assess this harm before taking the action, using the old ‘Golden Rule’ principle.

2. Never intentionally corrupt data.

At first glance it may seem that the second principle has nothing to do with the first, or with any of my preceding argument. But in its broader, most general terms, the second principle actually subsumes the first principle.

Chemical states in the brain constitute data. Suppose we measure human behavior in terms of efficient operation, just as we would measure the performance of a computer. A contented individual who does not feel threatened will almost always be more mentally productive and will live a longer average natural lifespan as a result of reduced stress. Child abuse, threats by authority figures, frightening events of all kinds, disappointments, abandonment, loss – all these experiences degrade mental performance by disturbing the electrochemical balance of the brain. In this sense, then, such harmful experiences can be seen as corrupting mental data. True, hardware, software, and data are not cleanly separable in the brain; but if we envisage human beings converted to infomorph status, the principle becomes a lot clearer.

Using this model, the ‘harm scale’ can now be defined as follows:

Maximum harm: total loss or corruption of data, as occurs in biological death.

Minimum harm: Alteration of one bit of data in such a way that mental performance is likely to be degraded.

We can now attempt to construct a more detailed ethical code based on the quantity and the quality of data corruption. (Not all data bits are equal; some are more vital than others.) Erasing an infomorph – destroying all data – would be tantamount to murder. Rewriting a few bits in an emotion register would be perhaps similar to shouting at someone and making him flinch. Other forms of harm will be located between these extremes.

I find it interesting to wonder how a society of infomorphs might implement these ethical principles as laws. I also wonder how ‘sociopath’ infomorphs would be dealt with.

Here in the everyday world, convicted criminals face punishment, restitution, or rehabilitation.

Punishment supposedly serves as a disincentive, though many criminologists doubt that it works, and it tends to dehumanize or corrupt the people who administer it. A strict disciplinarian outlook, being fundamentally repressive, seems at odds with the Extropian ideal. I would hope that an infomorph society would find more civilized ways of coping with sociopathic behavior.

Restitution seems to make better sense — except that it forces juries to place a money value on human suffering, with unpredictable results. Also, in an information universe, the concept of wealth becomes rather nebulous. Voltage, processing power, and storage will be cheap, and physical wealth, being located outside the system, may seem irrelevant.

As for rehabilitation, it hasn’t worked very well in the physical world; but if the brain processes of infomorphs became readily accessible and adjustable, there would be obvious opportunities for behavior modification. This, however, seems the most frightening scenario of all: a golden opportunity for thought control implemented by info-police.

I conclude that the popular vision of a transcendent libertarian society populated by creative entities moving freely and doing no harm to each other is unrealistic, since some degree of harm is inevitable, and it will become a greater danger as personal power increases. A society of information entities would also be more vulnerable to damage, and would have a difficult time controlling sociopathic behavior without quickly degenerating into a fascist dystopia.

I think it would be useful to devote some more thought to these problems. ♣

More cont.

aspects of life. A few may look forward to existing as purely conscious intellects, devoid of emotions, occupying themselves throughout eternity with mathematical and logical explorations. Most of us anticipate enjoying life more richly than ever, supplementing our logical and rational cognitive activities with enhanced and refined physical, emotional, sensual, and aesthetic experiences. We will cautiously trim away some of the unnecessary biological and neurological features of our human inheritance, but we will see that other, treasured aspects of our nonverbal, non-rational selves blossom into a glorious posthuman panoply.

2. First, Do No Harm

I’ll be even briefer in this part of my response, leaving the issue open to others to respond. While I agree with Charles in terms of overall sentiment and in his view that an artist, writer, or other communicator has a responsibility to consider the effects of their work, I disagree on several specifics.

Stating the libertarian thesis as recommending that ‘individuals should be unconstrained so long as their actions cause no harm to others’ strikes me as incomplete at best. The notoriously vague term ‘harm’ is given a specific interpretation in libertarian theory. Most libertarians hold that the only forms of harm that may be legally restricted are nonconsensual physical harm and its threat, fraud, and damage to property. Disregarding this private property rights-based understanding of harm gets us into trouble with issues like free speech.

The Supreme Court’s view that speech is unprotected if it poses a ‘clear and present danger’ will be only a secondary heuristic to libertarians. The reason why you can’t shout ‘fire!’ falsely in a crowded theater is because, unless the owner has stated explicitly otherwise, such an ejaculation amounts to violating the rights both of the theatre-owner and her customers. Each person buying a ticket is agreeing to generally accepted conditions (again these may be overridden by a statement from the property owner). The clear and present danger may help us know when implicit conditions have been contravened, but they are secondary to the property rights involved. If the owner placed a big sign at the entrance saying that patrons were free to shout ‘fire!’, no one would have a legitimate complaint, even if such behavior did pose a clear and present danger.

As stated at the outset, I agree with Charles’ underlying sentiment that creative artists should pay attention to the effects of their expression on others. Taking refuge in ‘artistic freedom’ is simply an evasion of responsibility. I had occasion to think about this recently, while watching a documentary on legendary film-maker Leni Reifenstahl. Reifenstahl, who made excellent movies for the Nazis, adamantly held to the view that she was only doing her job and had no interest in politics. While I believe it mistaken to condemn as just like the Nazis, she can reasonably be criticized for reckless pursuit of her career.

I worry that Charles does not make a clear distinction between our ethical responsibilities and the laws we should seek to enforce (or to buy in a polycentric legal system). For instance, he wonders how, in the future, we ‘might implement these ethical principles as laws’. As I see it, no matter what you write or say, if you do not directly cause harm (in the above sense) and do not organize those who cause the harm, then you may be subject to ethical sanction but should not be subject to legal sanction. Everyone can choose how they respond to the utterances of others; one person can be another’s tool only by choice.

Though I cannot tackle the question here, I hope to see more discussion of the problem Charles raises of: what are we to do with sociopathic infomorphs or other posthumans in the future? I loathe the idea of giving any agency, governmental or private, the power of life and death or that of involuntary personality alteration. Exile seems a possible option; another might be offering the offender a choice between indefinite incarceration and personality modification. ♣

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