Transhumanism: too human?

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he human species," wrote Julian Huxley in 1957, "can, if it wishes, transcend itself." This is a definition of transhumanism (TH) whose conciseness hides a multiplicity of origins. Today, the essential promise of transhumanism, to go beyond the human species, is supported by scientific advances inconceivable a century ago: biomedicine, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and neuroscience combine to present the emergence of a superior humanity as a mere matter of time. The transhumanism program counts among its participants scientists of more than proven talent; however, not everyone believes that this program is possible, or desirable, and among the critics of TH are equally recognized scientists and philosophers. The point here is not to find out who is right, but only to suggest that both the promises offered by TH and the objections presented to it force us to reflect on the very foundations of our condition and our role in the world.

TRANSHUMANISM AND TECHNICAL PROGRESS

While TH appears indissolubly linked to technical progress, not all technological advances are oriented towards the program's objective. It is therefore appropriate to distinguish three levels of relationship between technical progress and transhumanism proper: that of medical engineering and biomedicine; that of cognitive psychology and neuroscience; and a third, more speculative level, which sets as its goal a new relationship between machine and man that gives rise to a superior consciousness. There is no need to highlight here the enormous advances achieved at the first level, whether it is about improving medical diagnoses, treating diseases or even preventing their appearance, or expanding the perception, mobility or ease of interaction of people considered both normal and disabled. The objective of these advances is, like that of conventional medicine, to improve the quality of life and expand the capabilities of current humanity rather than transcend it; therefore, the relationship between these disciplines and the TH program is tangential, although it is legitimate to think of beneficial reciprocal relationships. In no case does it seem to be about "radical alterations in the nature and possibilities of our lives" that defined, according to Max More, the core of the TH program.

A closer relationship is that between disciplines such as artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. For them, what differentiates man from the rest of creation is his brain, considered a product, like all creation, of an evolutionary process that combines fortuitous alterations and adaptations to changing circumstances. From this consideration of man, it is deduced that knowledge of what is specifically human is achieved through the study of his brain. A colossal project, the Brain Activity Map, which is part of the Brain project launched by the White House in 2013, aims to identify, at a neuronal scale, all activities of the human brain: perception, action, cognition. On the other hand, the exponential growth of computing techniques and the possibilities of connecting the brain with calculation instruments allows imagining a superman who uses the progress of biomedicine to keep his body in shape while his brain has a mental capacity—information processing and calculation—superior to that of Deep Blue, the computer that defeated Kasparov playing chess; superior and in constant improvement. At the third level of the relationship between technology and humanity, that drawn by Raymond Kurzweil in The Age of Spiritual Machines (1998), computer and brain are united through cybernetic implants, man and machine become inextricably linked, and a new intelligence takes control of the universe.

Algorithms will be responsible for carrying out many of our tasks, because even the most creative jobs have many routine elements and all of that can be done better by a computer than by a human being

It is idle to speculate whether the promises of transhumanism can ever materialize. It is preferable that we ask ourselves if such a program, if feasible, implies transcending human nature as we know it. What does the program essentially offer? An extraordinary development of computational capacity. Computers that are not only capable of assimilating enormous amounts of data of all kinds, and of obeying increasingly complex sets of instructions, but also of generating new instructions themselves, what we call algorithms, without human intervention, in such a way that their capabilities grow, as Kurzweil states, at an exponential rate. There is no doubt that these algorithms will be responsible for carrying out many of our tasks, because even the most creative jobs have many routine elements: texts must be reviewed once written; a complex demonstration must be checked; scientific experiments follow very rigid protocols that require exact repetition, and all of that can be done by a computer better than the human being who writes, discovers, or experiments. McKinsey estimates that, while less than half of current jobs can be occupied by machines, 95% of the tasks that define a job can be. A computer will be able to predict what we will do tomorrow better than ourselves, because our ordinary behavior is largely made up of routine habits, many of them unconscious. Chess championships will cease to exist, because they will be competitions between machines: when a great Dutch master was asked how he would face Deep Blue, he replied: "With a hammer."

KNOWLEDGE AND HUMAN NATURE

But does all this lead us to think of a change in human nature, or is it just more, even if much more, of the same? In other words: the TH offers us, in essence, the possibility of enormously expanding our information processing capacity. But are we sure that our mind is just a very complex architecture of algorithms, of computer programs? Are we sure that knowing is, in essence, calculating? Defenders of AI in its most radical version say yes, but scientists, philosophers, or even artists no less solvent disagree. Roger Scruton's objections are very solid. If there is more to knowing than calculating, what could it be? The ancients spoke of intellectual intuition, which manifests itself in that intimate conviction that many will have felt at some point that something is true before reason—the computer—confirms it; an intuition that, for traditional thought, was the manifestation of a direct link between human consciousness and reality. There are many known examples of this intuition: that of the mathematician Henri Poincaré, who, at the moment of getting on a bus, knew he had found the solution to a problem he had been working on for a long time, a certainty he confirmed upon his return from his excursion; the testimony of Mozart, who saw one of his works as a whole, and not as a succession of scores; in the field of rigor par excellence, that of mathematics, Hadamard states that invention is governed by the sense of scientific beauty, and the mathematician Roger Penrose states that "a theorem, before it can be proven, must have been seen."

There are many examples that suggest that our mind has a non-algorithmic part, that is, incomprehensible to any computer. These are nothing more than examples, and a follower of TH may not grant them any validity; at this moment, it is enough for those who do not like the prospect of transhumanity to know that there are serious arguments to doubt its possibility. "I am a small world, subtly formed / of elements and an angelic spirit." This allows us to think that this "angelic spirit" is not only what is specifically human, but that it must forever remain outside the TH program.

THE NEED TO TRANSCEND

Every human activity has a purpose: nothing serious is done just because. Mallory's phrase when asked why he wanted to climb Everest ("Because it's there") is an ingenious way of not answering. When observing transhumanism, we can ask ourselves what its objective is and speculate, with due circumspection, about what the motives of its participants may be. At first glance, the stated goal of TH, to go beyond today's human species, seems to want to answer a longing as old as humanity itself: the search for transcendence, for something, or someone, that is above man and attracts him: for some, this longing is expressed as the search for being, for the "really real" that is hidden behind the veil of appearances; for others, it is about coming to contemplate the face of divinity, to delight in its love, to even merge with it. For others, who consider themselves exiles in our world, it is simply about finding the path that will lead them to their true home. Different ways of expressing something that escapes language, paths that start from distant points to reach the same place. In our culture, the most common form of this longing is the desire for salvation, and religion the most familiar path—though not the only one—to achieve it. How many of our great works are stories of salvation! The Divine Comedy, the autos sacramentales, Shakespeare's tragedies, Goethe's Faust, even our very modest Quixote: "I now have free and clear judgment, without the caliginous shadows of ignorance," he exclaims on his deathbed.

It is already clear, however, that we are facing different concepts of transcendence: TH, with the theory of evolution as its starting point, considers the longing for something transcendent to man and creation as a residue of the primitive ignorance of the species; although it admits that it fulfilled a function by reassuring man and favoring social cooperation, scientific knowledge considers that longing not only false, but above all unnecessary. Only what is accessible to scientific knowledge is real. Those questions about the meaning of existence or the why of the existence of the world, questions that man insists on asking himself and that science cannot answer because they are not in its territory, many scientists usually consider them meaningless, "idols of superstition and imposture," in the words of Francis Bacon. Others offer circular answers: "The meaning of our existence is the epic of the species," writes biologist E.W. Wilson.

In this way, the TH program appears as a reflection, an inversion, of the search for true transcendence: transhumanity is nothing more than a stage in the evolution of a universe always determined by the same laws. There is no true transcendence because there is no solution of continuity: nature does not make leaps, Linnaeus said. Of course, the transhumanism program has a great incentive for its participants: it does not need anyone's help. It has to expect nothing, fear nothing from anyone, nor be accountable to anyone. It is man alone, master of his destiny, who decides to go beyond himself: "We are in an exalted position, we have become the mind of the biosphere: our spirits are capable of increasingly breathtaking leaps of imagination," writes Wilson. Manifestations like this make one suspect the presence, in the ideological composition of TH, of a pinch of that substance that is so difficult to separate from the human condition: pride. Let us conclude, then: transhumanism is human, yes; perhaps too human.