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Michael Hauskeller – Lives wonderful beyond imagination

Transhumanists want to create better lives by creating better people, and better people by radically changing our biological composition and structure. They are convinced that we can effect changes that will allow us (or our descendants) to have “lives wonderful beyond imagination” (Nick Bostrom) and to experience “states of divine happiness” (David Pearce). We are going to be so incredibly happy because we will be able to think much better, vastly expand our knowledge, become more able to appreciate great art, control our emotions, understand other people, have (unimaginably) better sex, and much more.

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Now, this all sounds very well. The only trouble is that it is not very likely that we can enhance these specific abilities the way it is imagined. Chances are we will only be able to enhance far more general capacities (if at all) and it is much less obvious that this would be good for us, too. It is far from clear how the capacities we have relate to each other and hold each other in check so that each of them is experienced as a good. It is quite possible, in fact even probable, that by enhancing one capacity we generally find desirable to have, we will diminish other capacities equally desirable. More of a good thing often makes that thing less good. For instance, many of us occasionally wish we had a better memory. But just how much more memory capacity would be good to have? There are, after all, some things we would rather forget, some things that presumably are good to forget. So perhaps not all memories are valuable. But if that is so, how can we make sure that we only remember what we want to remember or what is good to remember? Also, the sheer number of memories might turn into a problem.


In one of his stories, entitled ‘Funes the Memorious’, Jorge Luis Borges describes a man who, as a result of an accident which left him paralysed, found himself equipped with perfect memory and perfect sensuous perception. Funes, as this man is called, meets the definition of a transhuman, defined by Nick Bostrom as “a being that has at least one (…) general central capacity greatly exceeding the maximum attainable by any current human being without recourse to new technological means”, one of these general central capacities being memory. As it happens, the story’s narrator refers to Funes as a predecessor of Nietzsche’s superman. In spite of this, Funes appears to be severely disabled, not because of his physical impairment but rather because of his vastly improved memory and perception. Both present and past are to him “almost unbearably rich and clear”. We ordinary humans can see the sun rise and perhaps spot some details that are unique to this specific sunrise, but the posthuman Funes “knows exactly the forms of the clouds during the sunrise of 30 April 1882″ and in fact any detail of anything he has ever perceived in his life. He is said to have “more memories than all other human beings together”. But this means that his memory is, in his own estimate, “like a garbage bin”. It is anything but a blessing. His unerring perception and memory makes it difficult, almost impossible, for him to abstract from the differences in things and to see what they have in common. He does not understand generalizations. For him everything is what it is and nothing else. Each moment in time is different, nothing is ever the same as anything else. Any two dogs are so different from each other that he can not understand how we can call both of them by the same general name; he even has trouble to accept that a dog at certain time is called by the same name as that same dog one minute later or earlier The narrator comments that Funes was not very talented for thinking, for thinking requires forgetting differences; it means to generalize, to abstract. But “in Funes’s stuffed world nothing existed but singularities.”


We can take this story as a thought experiment that illustrates the possible dangers of single trait enhancements. But it is more than just a thought experiment. There is also ample empirical evidence that Borges’s account of the price one would have to pay for improved memory was surprisingly accurate. Whatever we try to enhance there may be unintended consequences that show themselves only when it’s too late to do anything about them. Nick Bostrom may want to be a posthuman when he grows up but perhaps if he gets what he wants he will, like many adults today, find himself wishing he were a child again. And why would we want to be posthuman in the first place? Being a little more intelligent is perhaps imaginable (and desirable), but being vastly more intelligent is not imaginable and might have implications that are extremely undesirable. Do we really want to comprehend everything? Can one never have enough knowledge? Will our lives become better and better the more knowledge we acquire? I don’t think there is an obvious answer to these questions, but it seems to me that it is rather unlikely.


Francis Fukuyama has argued that biotechnology “mixes obvious benefits with subtle harms in one seamless package” and that the most significant threat posed by biotechnology is that it threatens to alter human nature (p. 7). But why is that a threat? What’s so great about human nature that we should preserve it even if that means to forego certain “obvious benefits”? One important reason is that it is the product of a long evolutionary process that is generally oriented towards adaptive fitness. We may not always like what we are but it’s probably safe to assume that we are, as biological beings, not just a random assembly of capacities but rather an interconnected whole, in which the various functions support each other in such a way that even the very limits of our capacities are important for its functioning. Sometimes we may, for instance, wish that people were less aggressive, but aggressiveness does not only result in people killing each other but also in, for instance, the exchange of philosophical arguments. Can we biologically separate the good aggressiveness from the bad one? How much more of what we take pride in might be lost without aggressiveness? Generally, a trait that has undesirable effects can have other effects that we endorse. Equally, a capacity that strikes us as desirable to have might require the modification and elimination of other capacities that we find equally desirable. If we could sprout wings on our backs, this alone would not allow us to fly because our body is not made for flying. Many other things would have to be changed before we were able to fly, some of which we would not want to miss. The reason why we can train ourselves to run faster but not to fly is that the former is within the range of what our nature allows us to be and the latter is not. Within this range improvement is possible and, depending on what you want in life, desirable. Similarly, we can train our or our children’s minds to improve memory, understanding of literature, or whatever we may find worth improving, without endangering the organic balance of our nature.


Yet if we go beyond this and want to become something else, with capacities that are not normally open to us, then all bets are off. We simply don’t know what we will happen and whether we will gain anything from it. In other words, we don’t even know whether enhancement is at all possible. So Fukuyama is quite right when he answers the question what it is “that we want to protect from any future advances in biotechnology” by saying that: “we want to protect the full range of our complex, evolved natures against attempts at self-modification. We do not want to disrupt either the unity or the continuity of human nature” (p. 172). Yet even if we ignore the possibility of such a disruption and assume that we can single out isolated capacities for enhancement we may still doubt that there are any that are clearly contributory to human well-being whatever one wants to be, do, or achieve. Personally, I can think of lots of things that I like to see improved in myself and whose improvement would, I imagine, increase my well-being or quality of life, or make me flourish more. But are these things the same for everybody? Are there really, as Julian Savulescu suggests, “all purpose means” that are intrinsically desirable no matter what one’s plan of life is? Perhaps this appears plausible to most of us only because we have been educated to have some degree of understanding for the so-called higher pleasures of, say, studying great literature or art. At least we have all been trained to believe that there is some value to these activities. Yet at the same time we find that our understanding is limited and could be deeper so being able to appreciate these things more is intuitively attractive. But can we really assume that it would be good for everybody if they had this improved understanding? Would it be better if we all spent our time reading Proust instead of devouring the latest Tom Clancy novel? Is a happy pig less happy than a happy Socrates, let alone a discontented Socrates who suffers when he does not get sufficient intellectual input? If happiness were all that counted then high intelligence would not necessarily be an advantage, and we would have no reason to promote it. Low intelligence could be very helpful indeed for maximising the enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life. So perhaps when we think about enhancing human traits with a view to well-being we should attempt to make people less intelligent rather than more.

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Special issue: transhumanism
Tags: biotechnology, Michael Hauskeller, transhumanism

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