Back ... for the moment

Well, here I am - safely back from Newcastle - but I'll be driving to Canberra in a couple of days.

I'll post a few photos from the Newcastle trip when I get a chance. Some of them look pretty good.

Running round the countryside

I spent a few days in Canberra for Conflux, and now I'm driving up to Newcastle with Jenny in a two days' time. I seem to have a rare free week, which means I must make use of it to catch up with my folks, whom I haven't seen for months (and Jenny is in pretty much the same boat).

After that, I get back on 30 June, but need to turn around pretty quickly and zoom straight back up to Canberra on 2 July for another week (for various reasons I do want to touch base at home ... inefficient as all this seems). I'll be attending the AAP conference, where I'll be delivering a version of my "sinning against nature" paper. I'm tempted to fly for some of this, but I don't mind driving these relatively short distances, and I find it's so much handier to have my own car at the other end, crammed with all the odds and ends that I like to take with me.

So many books, so little time

I'm reading about four books at once, right now. "About" four because I'm more than halfway through Simon Young's Designer Evolution and Stephen Wilkinson's Bodies for Sale, and a bit bogged down in Jeff McMahan's The Ethics of Killing. I'm just about to start Bruce Sterling's new collection, Visionary in Residence, which I've been asked to review. I'll need to concentrate on it before I can finish the others. There are actually some others that I need to get back to, but I'll probably have to start from the beginning.

The books by Wilkinson and McMahan are treasure troves, but they demand slow, thoughtful reading and copious note taking.

Walters and Palmer on genetic enhancement

LeRoy Walters and Julie Gage Palmer's The Ethics of Human Gene Therapy (1997) includes one of the best discussions of the prospect of genetic enhancement that I've encountered to date. I've been rereading this over the past few days, and found this passage which really says it all, and highlights the difference between people who broadly favour changing human nature, and human capacities, and those who "don't get it". Here is what they say (it deserves quoting at some length):

"... a particular perspective on human nature clearly underlies our moral judgments about genetic enhancement. We are dissatisfied with and critical of certain aspects of the human condition as we see it reflected in the world around us and as we experience it. In the physical sphere, we regard disease and disability as evils that should be overcome as quickly and efficiently as possible. In the intellectual and moral sphere we have also identified serious problems that should be addressed in multiple ways, one of which is the judicious use of genetic technologies. We think that a certain dissatisfaction with human nature as it has developed and as we have inherited it is a prerequisite for intervention to improve human nature. Also implicit in the notion of genetic enhancement is a dynamic rather than a static view of human nature. While there are historical and evolutionary reasons for human nature's being as it is, we do not view the human race as being fated to accept the current state of affairs. Rather, we accept the possibility of change in human nature and have tried to argue for the ethical acceptability of certain kinds of planned changes in the characteristics of future human beings. In our view, such genetic enhancements are an important part of the overall task of attempting to provide a better life and a better world to our descendants." (page 133)

Unusually for me, I find I totally agree with this passage. Note that nothing here denies that we might, in practice, need to be very cautious about attempting genetic enhancement, or that there might be practical and ethical problems that are crucial barriers to particular experiments. The focus of the passage is on the big picture: that we do not have to take human nature as we find it.

I often make the point that we can never entirely step out of our own nature. This applies at both the individual level and the species level. If, for example, I am dissatisfied with some aspect of my own personality, and find it a barrier to achieving my goals, that is because it conflicts with desires that are themselves a product of my personality. As it happens, I am rather shy in social situations, a trait which I find annoying and frustrating - other aspects of my personality would better suited if I were less self-conscious and wary of others, a bit more extroverted, more relaxed about how others see me, and even able to be a bit more "pushy", etc., without embarrassment and the awkwardness that can go with it. However, all this is a problem only because it conflicts with the desires I actually have (although I find it difficult, I actually want to be gregarious and find social occasions energising, rather than emotionally draining, and to have the advantages of finding it easy to "network", and so on). I don't wish to jettison my entire personality and start again, just tweak aspects that don't fit well with my conscious desires - desires to be a certain way and to do, and enjoy, certain things.

There is no standard entirely external to us by which we are compelled to make changes to ourselves, but nor have our natures (as individuals or as a species) been designed for perfect harmony. At the individual level, we are the products of the genetic lottery and more-or-less chance occurrences in the process of socialisation as we've individually encountered it. There is no reason why our abilities and personalities should be expected to line up neatly with our desires or purposes. At the level of the species, we are a product of biological evolution that had no conscious goal. We have simply inherited genes that happened to confer more reproductive fitness than did their rivals in the environment of human evolutionary adaptedness. There is no reason to believe that they were the best genes for our ancestors' conscious happiness, let alone that they are best for our conscious pursuit of happiness, or whatever other conscious desires we have, in modern environments.

What we must concede is that it will be difficult to improve on what evolution has given us - not because we are perfectly designed by its processes but because we still have so much to learn about ourselves. For example, the underlying biological bases of our social nature need to be understood in much more depth before we take action that might hinder their operation. Accordingly, I am all for proceeding with caution and accepting that we may not see much change to human nature in our own lifetimes.

That acknowledged, it remains to be emphasised that we are conscious beings whose desires, purposes, and values go far beyond, and may even conflict with, reproductive fitness and with some aspects of our natures that once served it. If there is a genuine choice between maintaining our evolved physical and psychological nature as it is and tweaking it to something more conducive to getting what we consciously want for ourselves, then I'm all for doing the tweaking. On that point of principle, I am in good company with Walters and Palmer.

Back from Conflux

Last night, I returned to Melbourne from the Canberra science fiction convention, Conflux. I've been gradually getting better over the last few days, despite the temptation to dance and party in the evenings. I even had some good vibes and energy for the disco on the last night - at which Sean Williams did the DJ thing with his usual enthusiasm.

It was great to catch up with lots of people from the sf/fantasy part of my world, especially Ellen Datlow, whom I hadn't seen since 2003 (though there are never enough chances to talk at these things, at least not unless you're better than a relatively shy and non-pushy person like me at grabbing people and making time).

The reading on Saturday night was a highlight. Ahem, shameless self-congratulation follows. I sometimes forget that my own fiction, which I tend to be modest about, does have its strengths. The textures, images, and rhythms come out strongly - at least for me - when I read it aloud. I wonder how many of my readers ever actually notice how much trouble I go to in that sense. I may draft and redraft a paragraph literally dozens of times to (try to) achieve the effect I want. Jack Dann is about the only person who has commented on the rhythms, though Simon Brown has been very kind about my attempts to make characters pop out of the page. That's what you want as a writer - to use language to make character, and the viewpoint characters' streams of inner experience, vividly present to your audience. Make it real, and make 'em care.

But perhaps it's not such a good thing if readers are too consciously aware of the linguistic construction by which it's achieved - as long as the poetry of the language is working for them at some level.

Tough week here

I've been sick as a dog all week - a savage attack of the bacterial chest infection that has hit me on and off since 1989, when a whole bunch of us first came down with the same thing at a convention in Perth. I've spent most of my time in bed, coughing up seemingly unlimited quantities of Exorcist-style green slime, and generally feeling sorry for myself. It's even triggered off some Grover's Disease - a nasty skin rash that I used to get but haven't suffered for two or three years. Damn it!

Thankfully, a lot of rest and antibiotics have got me in reasonable shape to drive to Canberra today for the sf convention Conflux, for which I am fairly heavily programmed. There's no way I could have done that a couple of days ago.

I did manage to drag myself out of bed at 3.30 a.m. this morning (bear in mind that I live a lifestyle that normally allows me to indulge the "I am not a morning person" take on life to the hilt). This was to attend the virtual-reality Uvvy Island launching. Unfortunately, I wasn't up to staying for long, and we were still having some technical problems with the sound when I left. I guess I'll hear how it all ended up. I did take a couple of pics, which I just published in a separate blog entry.

Okay - now to brace myself for the seven-or-eight-hour drive (and Jenny will share the driving, so it won't be that bad really). I do feel a lot better now, after going back to bed and getting a few more hours of sleep, and a helluva lot better than just a couple of days ago. Thank the gods for modern medicine.

Uvvy Island launching- a couple of pics

Transhumanism featured at Wikipedia

The article on transhumanism, which I worked on heavily as one of the three main contributors in recent months, is today's featured article on the main page of the English language version of Wikipedia. It's nice to see the article finally making it there.

I wonder how many people actually look at the day's featured article each day. A lot of people might read about transhumanism for the first time as a result of this, though they may also have very varied reactions to what they read.

What do I get out of this?

∞ As I've been writing about life extension, a cure for aging, etc., over the last few weeks I've been struck (again) by the fact that I personally am now too old to have much prospect of benefiting from any truly radical technological breakthroughs that would greatly extend human capacities or the maximum human life span.

I'm very grateful for the modern techniques of medicine and dentistry (as well as good nutrition and moderate exercise) that have kept me relatively youthful into middle age, now I find myself here, and I expect to obtain some benefits from further technological developments when I reach later middle age and old age. But I'm under no illusion of being in the first generation of immortals. More likely, I and the baby boomers and GenXers who make up most of my friends are not even the last of our world's mortal generations.

My intellectual opponents seem consistently unable to grasp how radically things will change in the next 100, and certainly the next 1000 or 10,000, years. They massively underestimate the cumulative effects of scientific, technological and economic change. There is a failure of imagination here. I envisage that humankind will be radically transformed by technology, in different ways, over each of those time frames and beyond; this seems inevitable, unless there is some global catastrophe, and it is also (generally) desirable. The point is to try to influence how it starts to unfold. But at least some transhumanists and other futurists seem to be fooling themselves by massively overestimating what will be possible in their own lifetimes.

Surely, if we are realistic, we should not be too focused on narrowly selfish benefits from technological change. I see nothing wrong with getting whatever opportunistic benefits we can - I don't advocate any theory of impartial, self-denying morality. Yes, selfishness gives us one good motive to defend, say, embryonic stem cell research against irrational attacks. But the gains for me, personally, will be relatively marginal - perhaps a few extra years, perhaps a few extra good ones. The main thing is to have a positive effect on the probability that those who come after me will enjoy a smooth takeoff to whatever strange future awaits them.

That's really what I'm in this for. That's why I'm a philosopher and a futurist. That's what gives the satisfaction. ∞

More thoughts on killing and life extension

I still owe an explanation for my rejection, in a previous discussion, of the strong claim that it is always wrong to shorten the life of a human person.

This claim might also be expressed by saying that human persons have an absolute right to life - meaning, I take it, that each of us is under a comprehensive moral obligation not to take the life of any human person. On this formulation, any such action would be the wrongful infringement of someone's right to continue living (and no such action would be, for example, a morally permissible infringement of a right, analogous to a necessary act of theft to save somebody from great and imminent danger).

Note, at this point, that I am confining my discussion to a relatively plausible class of cases - those involving human persons, i.e. beings who possess such properties as rationality, self-consciousness, and a sense of themselves as existing in time, with a past and a future. If the class of cases under discussion were defined by mere species membership, rather than personhood, any claim of absolute rights to life, or inflexible duties not to kill, would be implausible from the beginning.

However, even if we confine ourselves to human persons and develop the discussion in terms of rights, the claim that there is an absolute right to life cannot be sustained. There are too many easily-imaginable situations, such as in some of the notorious "Trolley cases", beloved of philosophers, where most of us would judge that killing a human person is the morally right action, perhaps to save others, or to achieve some other great utilitarian benefit.

At the same time, utilitarians and other consequentialists do not accept the existence of rights at all, except as conventions or rules of thumb; nor do they normally accept inflexible rules. For them, everything depends on what course of conduct will have the best consequences, seen by utilitarians as the maximisation of happiness or preference satisfaction. Even rule-utilitarians will adopt only those rules that have a prospect of producing the best consequences within a specified social, economic, etc., context.

To the extent that I put particular weight on a moral rule against killing, it is in response to the widespread human fear of death, particularly sudden, violent death at the hands of other human beings. This fear is deep in our nature. When we sense this fear in other people, it tugs at our sympathies, while the reality of others' capacity for violence in the service of social or economic gain necessitates laws against the kinds of acts that we categorise as murder. It is unsurprising that murder is forbidden - or at least drastically restrained and regulated - in all cultures.

But these sorts of utilitarian, Humean, or Hobbesian reasoning get us a rule that is less than absolute, and which is always subject to specification and qualification according to the relevant historical circumstances. Indeed, all of our recognised moral rules are useful only in so far as they meet important human interests and needs in the sorts of circumstances that shaped the rules in the first place. Until now, those circumstances have universally included such facts as that we are mortal, that most people who live into their 80s become very frail, however robust they formerly were, that it is almost unheard of for people to live to 120, and so on.

If we are now considering technological changes that could greatly alter the human condition, and with it the context within which moral rules evolve and moral intuitions are shaped, it is not at all obvious that the existing moral rules can be retained in their entirety. On the contrary, it is easy to imagine science fictional societies in which killing people when they reach the age of 300, or even at the age of 100, is justifiable on utilitarian grounds - though whether such scenarios actually seem at all plausible might depend on fiercely contested perceptions of human nature, such as conflicting beliefs about the inevitability of ennui and despair if one lives long enough.

Even before we find ourselves in such a futuristic setting, all bets may be off. If we are now in a world where anti-aging technologies are a real prospect, that is already a different world from the one in which our intuitions about the wrongness of killing were formed. If historical assumptions about human decline and mortality can no longer made, our moral norms may need to change. We cannot take a radical view of what changes are possible, while taking a conservative view that our current norms remain appropriate to the altered situation. This makes moral and policy debates about emerging technologies very tricky.

Assume for the sake of argument that failing to provide the general population with an immortality drug, if one became available, could be considered equivalent in some sense to killing the individuals who are so deprived. Even if we get to that point, it is not clear that this sort of killing would be morally wrong. It depends on what would be the actual effect of having a population of people who use an immortality drug. If the outcome would be some kind of disastrous conflict for resources, or some kind of widespread, catastrophic unhappiness, withholding the drug might be justified.

Thus, bioconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama, who evidently expect dreadful outcomes are being rational, in their fashion, in claiming that society and the state are morally entitled to tell us how long we may live. Of course, it is a shocking kind of rationality. I immediately want to add that the last thing I want to do is join Fukuyama in handing such a power to the state - any state, no matter how democratically accountable. To be clear, I am suggesting that there is no absolute right to an immortality drug, even if we had one, or for some more plausible "cure for aging". But at the same time, I want to stress what kind of argument has to be run if there is to be an intellectually credible case against technologies that would extend human life.

It appears to me that the burden lies heavily on the opponents of life extension to develop such a case, because nothing I've said above (or anywhere else) denies that longer, healthier lives, and particularly the radical extension of our times of physical robustness and mental clarity, are all very attractive. In fact, that is just the point. We should be supporting technological advances that will give us these things - basing our case squarely on the fact that they are things which really are attractive to beings like us, that it is rational for us to want them, and conversely that it is rational to struggle against the process of ontological diminution (David Gems's useful term) that comes with aging. Indeed, supporting research that could deliver these benefits would be a rational and appropriate use of public funds.

Opponents of life extension have little prospect of success unless they can make out a case that the probable result is something horrible. I am not afraid to concede that such a case could be made in principle, but let's see if it can be sustained in practice. Transhumanists and life extension advocates won't have everything their own way in a debate over this issue, but that's because it is far easier (and far easier to be be taken seriously) to present as a pessimist about the future, referring to valued things that could change or be superseded, than to be an optimist, attempting to picture a better future in convincing detail.

In the end, however, I expect that the bioconservatives' case will not be made out intellectually and will have only short-term success in gaining converts. Perhaps ironically, their problem is that their aims run against that thing they hold sacred - human nature - for it is in our nature to change things, including ourselves if we can, to bring them closer to the heart's desire.