Posthumans and Extended Life
Robert Pepperell
Robert Pepperell is a writer, artist, and Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews for the journal of the International Society for the Arts, Science and Technology. He has spoken and published on the topics of consciousness, technology, art and philosophy in addition to exhibiting in national galleries and museums. In 1990 he founded Hex, an influential new media collaboration that developed interactive audio-visual systems for performance and installation. His first book, The Posthuman Condition, was published in 1995 and remained in print until a revised version was published in 2003. The Postdigital Membrane, a collaboration with Michael Punt, was published in 2000. He is currently researching the potential for creating self-aware artworks.
Contact address:
School of Art Media and Design
University of Wales College, Newport
Caerleon, Newport NP18 3YH, UK
pepperell@ntlworld.com
http://www.stem-arts.com
http://www.post-human.net
http//:www.postdigital.org
Approximate word count: 3,800 (excluding notes and references)
Posthumans and Extended Life
This essay offers a posthumanist account of the relation between humans and technology, the nature of human existence, experience and the potential for extended life.
Posthumanism
“Man's derived supremacy over the earth; man's power of articulate speech; man's gift of reason; man's free will and responsibility; man's fall and man's redemption; the incarnation of the Eternal Son; the indwelling of the Eternal Spirit — all are equally and utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God, and redeemed by the Eternal Son assuming to himself His nature.” [1]
Although there was vigorous public debate about the origin of humans in the latter part of the nineteenth century there was little doubt about our pre-eminence, as this anti-Darwinian declaration from the populist Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce demonstrates.[2] Homo Sapiens was generally regarded as the supreme species on Earth and, depending on one’s point of view, either the apex of God’s creation or the crescendo of Darwinian evolution. Even for those disposed towards Darwin’s assertion of the historical continuity between humans and animals it would have seemed evident that Man was a vastly superior being, and to that extent a quite distinct creature. After all, in that age of grand empires, burgeoning scientific confidence, accelerating industrialisation, and rapid technological development, no other animal, nor even any god, was able to exert their will so effectively and demonstrate such control over the material of nature as Man. In retrospect it was the climax of the humanist project. [3]
But at the beginning of the twenty first century there seems to be less certainty about the unique status of humans, and whether we will retain this pre-eminent, privileged position in the future. The expectations bound up in technologies like genetic manipulation, xenotransplantation, artificial intelligence, synthetic replication, and biotechnical integration threaten to further close the distance between humans and animals, humans and machines, and humans and the environment. Because of this, a number of commentators have concluded we are entering a new and distinct phase of evolution, one that can now be called ‘posthuman’.
The term ‘posthuman’, along with ‘transhuman’ and ‘post-biological’, has been employed in a number of different, and sometimes incompatible, ways. For some futurologists the posthuman is the technological successor to the soon-to-be-redundant biological human — a cyborgian entity suspended in data-space, enjoying a computationally generated consciousness, unconstrained by the physics of materiality and the pressures of mortality. The robotics researcher Hans Moravec, for example, has been a prominent and influential advocate of the notion that human consciousness is essentially a process of abstract symbolic manipulation, one that in future could be simulated in a disembodied computational medium. In a recent interview he claimed:
“It's not the physical thing itself where the consciousness resides. It's in the abstract interpretation, which, in the case of consciousness, is self-closing. . . I see no reason why you couldn't do exactly the same thing for a robot, or for an abstract simulation. So you have a person who's really just a simulation inside of a computer, but they interpret themselves as having thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and they feel themselves to be real and to experience their existence.” [4]
Although a highly attractive scenario for those wishing to mechanically simulate human beings, this kind of dualism [5] overlooks some important aspects of human existence, not least the fact that we are conditioned by physical constraints without which our experiences would have a very different meaning. For example, our sense of subjectivity — the knowledge we have of ourselves as sentient beings — is not implanted into our brains in the form of some universal data set, but emerges slowly over time as we interact dynamically with the world and other sentient beings occupying mobile bodies — what the philosopher Edmund Husserl referred to as ‘intersubjectivity’.[6] Likewise, our sense of desire for others, or the pleasures of satiation, are physically incarnate as much as they are mentally felt, and cannot be reduced to purely symbolic, disembodied information; they arise from, and gain their meaning from the extended corporeal realm of sensory being. This would be as true of robotic or simulated systems, were they to have anything approaching human experiences, as it is of us.
In her book How we Became Posthuman, N Katherine Hayles gives a comprehensive account of the emergence of the posthuman, and criticises the tendency found in much of the relevant literature to regard human thought in the future as becoming technologically disembodied. Arguing for the importance of “putting embodiment back in the picture”, she writes:
“. . . embodiment makes clear that thought is a much broader cognitive function depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it. This realization, with all its exfoliating implications, is so broad in its effects and so deep in its consequences that it is transforming the liberal subject, regarded as the model of the human since the Enlightenment, into the posthuman.” [7]
If we as posthumans are contemplating the possibility of extended existence through artificially prolonged life spans, or by uploading consciousness into machines, we are in effect contemplating extended experience, and an experience based on the contingencies of embodied existence at that. The real posthuman, then, is properly conceived not as an abstract flow of symbolic information but as a radically extended and embodied being whose experience, I will argue, is potentially boundless.
Extensionism
We live in a age characterized by various kinds of extension: Average life expectancies in developed countries have increased greatly over the last 200 years, and are still rising; we can communicate over immense distances with almost no delay, expanding our purview to an astonishing degree; global trade broadens markets for goods and services across national boundaries, extending once localized commodities and cultures across continents. Our propensity to externalize mental data by the use of recording and retrieval devices has led some philosophers to consider whether the mind extends into the world rather than being, as many have supposed, confined to the brain. The philosophers David Chalmers and Andy Clark have proposed the notion of the ‘extended mind’ to describe how internal mental states ‘in here’, such as beliefs, extend into external physical conditions ‘out there’. They argue that if external objects play a role in constructing or modifying our beliefs then those objects can reasonably be said to form part of those beliefs:
“While some mental states, such as experiences, may be determined internally, there are other cases in which external factors make a significant contribution. In particular, we will argue that beliefs can be constituted partly by features of the environment, when those features play the right sort of role in driving cognitive processes. If so, the mind extends into the world.” [8]
Coincidentally, from another perspective the biologist Rupert Sheldrake has also written and lectured on the ‘extended mind’, suggesting recent experimental evidence demonstrates the mind is not restricted to the brain but extends outwards to the objects we perceive. [9] Whether or not one accepts Sheldrake’s claims, or Chalmers and Clark’s argument, there are many other examples of extended ways of thinking, from the debates amongst ethicists about the degree to which human rights can be conferred on animals to contemporary advances in astronomical remote sensing that stretch our conception of space, time and the universe.
Seen together, these different kinds of extension have a cumulative effect our understanding of what it is to be human. Whereas we imagine human beings to be spatially or temporally localised, increasingly we might think of them as spatiotemporally distributed, in mind and body. The use of communication and recording devices, for instance, undermines our habitual notion of the individual as someone who exists in only one place at one moment. When confronting a person on the phone, radio or television, do you perceive them or an electronic signal that represents them; are the person and the signal identical, or are they separate? And where precisely is a person who’s being broadcast? Surely they are, to some extent, everywhere in the broadcast itself. Following this line, one could reasonably contend that the person being broadcast and the signals that carry their sound or image combine to form a distributed whole through which the original human agent becomes vastly extended across space, and in the case of recordings, across time.
To take another case, think about this text you’re reading. It only makes sense because I use language to express my thoughts in material form, which you can later reconstruct as thoughts in your own mind. In a strange way, my mind has been extended through the medium of text to your mind, and so exists beyond my brain. In an odd sense, the page you are reading is partly human, partly me, and now partly you — a state of affairs that would be a logical outcome of the externalist approach argued by Chalmers and Clark above.
For the sake of convenience, I have borrowed the term ‘extensionism’ to describe this tendency toward extendedness in contemporary thinking. In brief, extensionism looks at objects and events in terms of how they extend from one to the other rather than, as some kinds of analysis tend to do, how they are to be distinguished from one another. In fact, elsewhere I have argued that there are no essential distinctions between any objects or events in the world at all, other than the distinctions imposed by humans. [10] As a consequence, objects and events do not really have boundaries or edges (except the ones we impose upon them) and therefore, being without edges, extend indefinitely.
I can illustrate this with a brief example. Think of a coin. Even though it looks like a discreet object, with clearly demarcated edges, there are a number of dimensions of its existence that extend beyond its apparent boundaries. The value of the coin, for example, is not intrinsic to its material makeup but gained from its currency within a wider financial system; the emblems and symbols it carries refer to, and draw their significance from, an extensive cultural milieu; the elements composing the metal from which it is struck were formed in the crucible of the cosmos, with a history dating back to the beginning of, and with a future as extensive as that of, the universe. What these, and many other possible examples testify to is the wealth of associations, purposes, connections, histories and potential ramifications of each and every object, which we largely choose to ignore for the sake of convenience, or simply because they lie beyond our conception. Yet despite our ignorance of such extended dimensions all objects possess them, and to a degree so numerous as to be effectively infinite. To summarize:
All objects have extended dimensions, but we normally acknowledge only a fractional part of their true extent because of constraints inherent in our perceptual apparatus and the coercive effects of time. Rather than regarding discernible objects in the world as integral and discrete we must recognise that they, and their repercussions, extend indefinitely through space and time.
There are of course many objections and queries that such a statement might raise, not least in the context of this publication the question of death itself. If, as is claimed, all things extend indefinitely then why not life, or to be more precise, experience? To answer this, and come more directly to the question of life extension, we must return to the subject of what it is to be a human.
Extended humans
In many branches of philosophical, medical, legal, and scientific discourse human beings are understood as individual conglomerations of biological tissue, or as particular expressions of a genetic sequence. Such definitions, it could be argued, tend to discount many other dimensions of human existence that not only comprise the active lives of individual people but also the overall phenomenon of humanity. If we can accept, as suggested above, that the repercussions of all objects extend indefinitely through space and time (whether we acknowledge them or not), then the apparent boundaries that delimit each individual human are in fact illusory, since we too extend indefinitely through space and time.
To give some examples: just as with the coin, our physical structure is composed from elements as old as the universe, elements that were once immeasurably dispersed across space, and will be again when our bodies decompose; our genetic code can be traced back to the origins of life on Earth and will be perpetuated indefinitely in some mutated form (barring an unforeseen cataclysm); the contents of our minds are drawn together from widely dispersed environmental stimuli, and can be further distributed through communication, such as by text or phone as mentioned above.[11] The upshot is that individual humans, in the sense of isolated, separate objects, do not really exist, other than in our imaginations. What exists instead are non-contained beings who, in numerous ways, are distributed far beyond their local space and time, caught in an infinite chain of events without beginning or end. Each act I make, whether trivial or expansive, has further consequences that will ripple through infinity, just as each act is the extension of an indeterminate number of prior events.
When extrapolated on a global scale, human being in general becomes the totality of all the repercussions of individual human existences, and it is this totality that constitutes humanity as a whole. The result is that our conception of human beings must include as well as our physical structure our wider cultural environment, and in particular our technological environment, not just as an external adjunct to the human condition, but as an inherent part of what constitutes us in the first place. To put it succinctly:
Humanists might regard humans as distinct beings, in an antagonistic relationship with their surroundings; Posthumans, on the other hand, regard humans as embodied in an extended technological world.
Humans and technology
By including the extended technological world in our conception of what constitutes human being, we radically revise the traditional humanist view in which we are individuated from one another and separated from the world. Posthumans no longer stand out alone, but find ourselves embodied in the very machines we once regarded as distinct.
Yet despite this, there are many futurologists, science-fiction writers and movie makers still attached to the idea of technology as alien predator, a potential impostor with which we are destined to come into conflict. The premise that machines might usurp human uniqueness, or turn on their creators and take over the world has been hashed out in countless plays, books and motion pictures. Even sophisticated writers on technology sometimes assume that the devices surrounding us are somehow ‘other’ than human, almost a self-sufficient living realm with their own laws of evolution and logic of existence. [12] At its worst this leads to ‘technological antagonism’, the belief not only that technology causes change but that it means to threaten us — a view that fails to take account of who creates the technology in the first place.
When technology appears to behave in an intelligent way, we are prone to endow it with a sense of autonomy that obscures its intrinsically human origins. An interesting case in point is that of David Cope, a musician and computer programmer who, over some twenty years, has developed a system called Emmy (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) that creates original music in the style of certain historical composers. This is achieved by sampling a range of their works and identifying within them patterns or ‘fingerprints’ that are unique to that composer’s style. These patterns are then ‘recombined’ to produce new musical pieces bearing the personality of the composer who was sampled. The efficacy of his system is demonstrated by an experiment in which one is asked to listen ‘blind’, as it were, to four short tracks of piano music, at least one of which is composed by a human and at least one by Emmy. This is something akin to a musical Turing test [13] in which the aim is to distinguish the human composition from the mechanical one. Very few people are able to do so. [14]
In Virtual Music, a volume of essays on Cope’s work, several writers, including the eminent theorist Douglas Hofstadter, author of a seminal work on artificial intelligence, Gödel, Escher, Bach [15], express deep anxieties about the implications of Cope’s work for the uniqueness of human creativity. At one point, talking of the pattern-based composition technique used by Cope, he says, “. . . the day when music is finally and irrevocably reduced to syntactic pattern and pattern alone will be, to my old fashioned way of looking at things, a very dark day indeed.” [16] However, in the same book the music theorist Eleanor Selfridge-Field reminds us that, despite those who think of Emmy as an autonomous agent threatening human uniqueness, the whole enterprise is manifestly ‘human-dependent’. She writes, “To consider that what Experiments in Musical Intelligence does is an entirely automatic process is to miss the fact of this [human] dependency. The program’s functional context remains bounded by human values.” [17] One could expand upon her point by arguing that in order for this seemingly autonomous process to occur it requires the integration of at least three dense accretions of human skill and intelligence, including:
a. the musical sensibility of the composer encoded in the work that was originally sampled,
b. the quantity of painstakingly constructed computer code embodied in Emmy (consisting of some 20,000 lines of Lisp written over 18 years), and
c. the accumulated human endeavour bound up in the Macintosh computer system through which the data processing is conducted.
It is only by combining these, and many other materialised accretions of human ingenuity that the musical experience can be generated.
Once machines are regarded as the distributed embodiment of human intelligence and skill, and not as an autonomous or alien force, many of the philosophical dilemmas associated with technological antagonism are dispelled. For the music composed by Emmy is no more composed by machine than it is by a human, insofar as the machine is humanity in extended form. I have the sense that Cope would agree — to an extent. Speaking of Bruce Mazlish’s critique of the ‘fourth discontinuity’ between humans and machines [18], Cope writes, “Machines do not represent another discontinuity. Computers and computer programs like Experiments in Musical Intelligence represent extensions of the human intellect, tools that allow us to achieve yet greater accomplishments.” [19]
In summary, one can think of machines as human, or at least as human in extended technological form, but it makes little sense to claim humans are like machines, as some philosophers and scientists do. [20]
Experience
Admittedly the description of human existence offered so far runs counter to the common-sense view held in daily discourse where we habitually engage with a world composed of discrete objects, creatures and events. Indeed, without such habits we could not sustain an intellectual discourse since the fabric of language itself is composed from a mass of distinctions, each referring to something by a process of exclusion and separation — the cat is not the mat. But it is an error to conclude that such mental distinctions imply correlative distinctions in the world — that the cat is really separate from the mat.
Things in the world, as has been proposed, are inherently continuous with one another, not just because they lack precise boundaries but because they only come into existence, as far as we are concerned, when they impinge upon our awareness. And insofar as any number of seemingly discreet objects impinge on our awareness they form a unity of presence within the mind, a unity of presence that nevertheless contains a diversity of objects. The peculiar character of daily experience, therefore, could be said to arise from the state of simultaneous contradiction whereby we perceive both unity and diversity at once. Although it seems logically implausible, our conventional experience forms a perceptual whole that is also fragmentary, just as the world appears fragmentary whilst in fact being a indivisible whole. But while we are implicitly aware of the whole, with the potential for expansive existence it offers, we remain circumscribed by the conceptual boundaries each perceptual fragment erects.
By its very nature, this experience is neither primarily mental or physical, as neither are the objects in the world of which we are aware. Experience transcends such distinctions to become the mark of human life. Not life as mere biological or material process, but as a the vivid sensation of presence felt in oneself and in the world.
Extended life
I have argued that we are entering a period in which we are coming to recognise the continuities, not just between humans and machines, but between all things that might have previously have been held as separate, and in doing so we are becoming increasingly posthuman, but not in the disembodied sense sometimes implied by the term. Instead we are physically grounded but conceptually extended, driven by material necessity but notionally transcendent, in a way that resonates with some ancient philosophical traditions. Buddhist thinkers have long spoken of the ‘non-self’ or Anatta, the state of grace achieved after much preparation in which the continuities between all things are truly revealed and dualities are erased in favour of ‘no-thing-ness’. At such a point the notion of experience must be entirely transformed in a way few of us could imagine. The condition of simultaneous contradiction referred to above must be suspended, bringing about an state that could be likened to the ‘pre-oedipal’ stage of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, in which the child’s subjectivity is unformed and the boundaries between them and the external world are indeterminate. Yet perhaps our technological evolution offers the possibility of such transformation as we develop so as to radically extend our capabilities, our perceptions and our experience, and by extending so erasing previously held boundaries. Speaking of the techno-fantasies of what she calls “matrix fetishists” and “immortality fetishists”, Amanda Fernbach writes,
“Fantasies of pre-oedipal fetishism involve the disavowal not just of the body’s lack but of the body itself, as the body’s boundaries are no longer recognized, and the self becomes part of a larger entity. These fantasies often evoke a sense of completion of the self in the coming home to bond with a greater whole.” [21]
The bodily disavowal implied here need not be the abstracted, dislocated existence touted by some futurologists, but of a body extended — perhaps by technology; a body that, if it ceases to be a body at all will not be abandoned as a redundant shell, but implicated so widely in its extended biomechanical environment that it can no longer be identified. After all, the machines are human, and through our mechanized selves we may yet find salvation from bounded experience and the means to a fully extended life.
Notes
[1] Wilberforce, 1874.
[2] In Oxford, England in 1860 Bishop Wilberforce famously engaged Thomas Huxley in debate about the implications of Darwin’s thesis on the origins of Mankind. It has since become a legendary encounter in the history of science, in part because Huxley was reputed to have humiliated Wilberforce.
[3] Humanism here refers to the belief “in human effort and ingenuity rather than religion” (Collins English Dictionary) with its tendency towards anthropocentrism — the view that Man is the central and most important entity in the universe.
[4] in Brown, 2002.
[5] The philosophical view that the mental realm is distinct from the physical realm.
[6] In his excellent introduction to Husserl’s later thought, Dan Zahavi writes of Husserl’s analysis of the body in which he claims that: “. . . the experience of another as incarnated subject is the first step toward the constitution of an objective (intersubjectively valid) shared world.” (Zahavi, 2003).
[7] Hayles, 1999.
[8] Chalmers & Clark, 1998.
[9] Sheldrake, 2003.
[10] See, for example, Pepperell, 2003. It should be said that this is a philosophical position held by many, not least by Friedrich Nietzsche (1984) who writes in Aphorism 19 of Human, All Too Human, “The assumption of multiplicity always presumes that there is something, which occurs repeatedly. But this is just where error rules; even here, we invent entities, unities, that do not exist.”
[11] One could also cite in this regard the ‘quantum non-locality effect’ whereby certain individual particles making up matter are known to have ‘pairs’ or ‘twins’ that mirror immediately the behaviour of their other part, regardless of distance. Matter composed of such particles cannot, therefore, be said to have localized spatial co-ordinates. For an accessible exposition see Peat (1990).
[12] As an illustration, in his book about contemporary music and technology, Strange Sounds, Timothy Taylor (2001) criticises technological determinism as “pernicious” (p. 26). Yet in summing up he cites the DJ’s use of the turntable as an example of where “human agency struck back” against technology’s deterministic effects on “peoples’ behaviour with respect to music” (p. 204). Such slips merely reinforce the notion of technology as some malign force emanating from an external domain — precisely the delusion Taylor elsewhere strives to debunk.
[13] The ‘Turing test’ is the general name for the “imitation game”, the test of machine intelligence proposed by the mathematician Alan Turing in 1950 (Turing, 1950).
[14] I have tried this myself and was surprised to discover, along with many musical experts, that there was no obvious mark or feature by which the organic and the mechanical could be easily differentiated. In fact, my guesses were at least consistent: I incorrectly attributed all the human generated pieces to Emmy and vice versa.
[15] Hofstadter, 1981.
[16] Cope, 2001.
[17] Cope, 2001 (My insertion in box brackets).
[18] Mazlish, 1993.
[19] Cope, 2001.
[20] In his book Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett (1992) imagines his reader might reasonably conclude from his arguments about the nature of consciousness that, “Of course we’re machines! We’re just very complicated, evolved machines made of organic molecules instead of metal and silicon, and we are conscious, so there can be conscious machines — us.” But the likening of humans to machines is invalid because, unlike say plants or animals, humans and machines are not distinct ontological categories.
[21] Fernbach, 2002.
References
Brown, D. J. , 2002: An Interview with Hans Moravec, http://norlonto.net/....view/itemID/44. [accessed 05.02.04]
Chalmers, David & Clark, Andy, 1998, in: Analysis (vol. 58), “The Extended Mind”, pg. 10-23
Cope, David, 2001: Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style, MIT Press.
Dennett, Daniel, 1992: Consciousness Explained (3rd edition), Viking.
Fernbach, Amanda, 2002: Fantasies of Fetishism: from Decadence to the Post-Human, Edinburgh University Press.
Hayles, Katherine, 1999: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, University of Chicago Press.
Hofstadter, Douglas, 1980: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (2nd edition), Vintage Books.
Mazlish, Bruce, 1993: The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-evolution of Humans and Machines, Yale University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1984:. Human, All Too Human, Penguin.
Peat, David, 1990: Einstein’s Moon: Bell’s Theorem and the Curious Quest for Quantum Reality, Contemporary Books.
Pepperell, Robert, 2003: The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain (3rd edition), Intellect Books.
Sheldrake, Rupert, 2003: The Sense of Being Stared At, and Other Aspects of the Extended Mind, Crown.
Taylor, Timothy, 2001: Strange Sounds: Music, Technology & Culture, Routledge.
Turing, Alan, 1950, in: Mind (Vol. 54), “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, pg. 433-57.
Wilberforce, Samuel, 1874: Essays Contributed to the Quarterly Review, (Vol. 1), pg. 92-95.
Zahavi, Dan, 2003: Husserl’s Phenomenology, Stanford University Press.
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