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Surpassing Man - Part V

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 5/24/2006

Dear RCM,

Long time no heard. I was busy publishing my latest graphomania ("After the Rain - How the West Lost the East").

The big flaw in the arguments of philosopher-anthropolgists (from Montaigne to Nietzsche) - whether prescriptive or descriptive - is that they didn't seem to have asked themselves what was it that they were studying. I am not referring to a phenomenology of humans (their physiology, their social organization, their behavioural codes). There is a veritable mountain ridge of material composed based on evidence collected from observations of homo sapiens. But what IS homo sapiens? WHAT is being observed?

Consider the following: would you have still classified me as human had I been transformed to pure (though structured) energy, devoid of any physical aspect, attribute, or dimension? I doubt it. We feel so ill at ease with non-body manifestations of existence that we try to anthropomorphesize God Himself and to materialize ghosts. God is "angry" or "vengeful" or (more rarely) "forgiving". Thus He is made human. Moreover, He is made corporeal. Anger or vengeance are meaningless bereft of their physical aspect and physiological association.

But what about the mind? Surely, if there were a way to "preserve" the mind in an appropriate container (which would also allow for interactions) - that mind would have been considered human. Not entirely, it seems. IT would have been considered to have human attributes or characteristics (intelligence, sense of humour) - but it would NOT have been considered to be an HUMAN. It would have been impossible to fall in love with IT, for instance.

So, an interesting distinction emerges between the property of BEING HUMAN (a universal) and the TROPES (the unique properties of) particular human beings. A disembodied mind CAN be human - and so can a particularly clever dog or robot (the source of the artificial intelligence conundrum). But nothing can be a particular human being - except that particular human being, body and all. This sounds confusing but it really is a simple and straightforward distinction. To be a particular instance of Mankind, the object needs to possess ALL the attributes of being human plus his tropes (body of a specific shape and chemistry, a specific DNA, intelligence and so on). But being human is a universal and thus lends itself to other objects even though they do not possess the tropes of the particular. To put it differently: all the instances of "being human" (all humans and objects which can be considered human - such as disembodied minds, Stephen Hawking, Homo Australopithecus and future Turing Tested computers) share the universal and are distinguished from each other only by their tropes. "Being Human" applies to a FAMILY of objects - Man being only ONE of them. Humans are the objects that possess ALL the traits and attributes of the universal as well as tropes. Humans are, therefore, the complete (not to be confused with "perfect") embodiment of the universal "being human". Intelligent robots, clever parrots and so on are also human but only partly so.

Isn't this scholastic rubbish? thus defined even a broom would be somewhat human.

Indeed, a broom IS somewhat "human". And so is a dolphin. The Cartesian division of the world to observer and observed is a convenient but misleading tool of abstraction. Humans are part of nature and the products of humans are part of nature and part of humanity. A pacemaker is an integral part of its owners no less than the owner's corneas. Moreover, it represents millennia of accumulated human knowledge and endeavour. It IS human. Many products of human civilization are either anthropomorphic or extension of humans. Mankind has often confused its functional capacity to alter ELEMENTS in nature - with an alleged (and totally mythical) capacity to modify NATURE itself.

Why all this sophistry? Because I think that it is meaningless to discuss the surpassing of Man (the "next" human race) in ideal isolation. We need to discuss (1) the future of nature, (2) the future of the biological evolution of Mankind (genes), (3) the future of social evolution (memes) as well as (4) the future of other - less complete or comprehensive - members of the human family (like artificial intelligence machines) - and then we need to discuss the interactions between all these - before we can say anything meaningful about the future of Mankind. The two common mistakes (Man as another kind of animal - the result of evolution - and Man as the crown of creation - unrelated to other animals) lead us nowhere. We must adopt a mixture of the two.

Let me embark on this four chaptered agenda by studying biological evolution.

With the advent of genetic engineering, humans have acquired the ability to effect phyletic (species-forming) evolution as well as to profoundly enhance the ancient skill of phenetic (or ecotypic) evolution (tinkering with the properties of individuals within a species). This is a ground shaking development. It changes the very rules of the game. Nature itself is an old hand at phyletic evolution - but nature is presumed to lack intelligence, introspection, purpose and time horizons. In other words, nature is non-purposive in its actions - it is largely random. It is eternal and "takes its time" in its "pursuit" of trials and errors. It is not intelligent and, therefore, acts with "brute force", conducting its "experiments" on entire populations and gene pools. It is not introspective - so it possesses no model of its own actions in relation to any external framework (=it recognizes no external framework, it possesses no meaning). It is its own "selection filter" - it subjects the products of its processes to itself as the ultimate test. The survivability of a new species created by nature is tested by subjecting the naturally-fostered new species to nature itself (=to environmental stimuli) as the only and ultimate arbiter.

Man's intervention in its own phenetic evolution and in the phenetic and phyletic evolution of other species is both guaranteed (it is an explicitly stated aim) and guaranteed to be un-natural. Man is purposive, introspective, intelligent and temporally finite. If we adopt the position that nature is infinitely lacking in intelligence and that Man is only finitely intelligence and generally unwise - then genetic engineering and biotechnology spell trouble.

Luckily, two obstacles stand in the way of rampant experimentation with human genetics (with the exception of rogue scientists and madmen dictators). One is the consensus that Man's phyletic evolution should be left alone. The other is the fact that both human phenetic and phyletic evolution is on-going. Man's phenetic evolution has been somewhat arrested by human culture and civilization which rendered ecotypic evolution inefficient by comparison. Culturation is a much faster, adaptable, adaptative, efficacious and specific set of processes than the slow-grinding, oft-erring, dumb phenetic evolution. To use Dawkins' terminology, adaptation enhancing "memes" are more easily communicable and more error-free than mutating genes. But evolution IS on-going. As Man invades new ecological niches (such as space) - his evolution into a general-purpose, non-specific animal is likely to continue apace.

Of course, the real menace lies in the breakdown of the current consensus. What if certain people did decide to create a new human sub-species or species? Philosophically, they would just be accelerating Nature's labours. If the new-fangled species is suitably adapted to its environmental niches it will survive and, perhaps, prevail. If not - it will perish. Yet, this is an erroneous view. Accelerating Nature is not a mere quantitative issue - it is also a qualitative one. Having two concurrent speeds or "clocks" of evolution can lead to biological disasters. Polynesian islanders were wiped out by diseases imported from Europe, for instance. The whole of humanity can and will be wiped out by a new organism if not properly (=genetically) protected against it. Hence the contemporary mass hysteria with genetically modified food. Culture will be the first to adapt to the presence of such an ominous presence - but culture often reacts dysfunctionally and in a manner which exacerbates the problem. Consider Europe's reaction to the plague in the 14th century. Genetic mutations will occur but they require thousands of years and do not constitute an adequately adaptative response. Genetic engineering unchecked can lead to genetic annihilation. The precedent of nuclear weapons is encouraging - people succeeded in keeping their fingers off the red button. But genetic mutations are surreptitious and impossible to control. It is a tough challenge.

I will await your response before continuing to discuss the other three issues (the evolution of nature itself, of other human species and of culture).

Sam

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