"We will be able to reprogram our biology and ultimately transcend it." (And who said the future is not predictable?) This quote appeared in an article by Ray Kurzweil, originally published in New Scientist, and reproduced in Next, The Age newspaper's IT section on 25 October 2005, just prior to release of his most recent book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. In making this statement, Kurzweil draws a rather sharp line between what he calls "we" and what he calls "our biology". But is it reasonable both to assume such a divide and to then proceed without further reflection on it?
Elsewhere in the article, Kurzweil refers to "an intimate merger between ourselves and the technology we create" and the "non-biological portion of our intelligence". At the heart of this view is a concept of self and mind in which these are separate to and separable from the self's biophysical embodiment. But where does this idea that there is a "non-biological portion of intelligence" come from? This separation of "biological" from "non-biological" seems to be treated as a common sense observation, but is this actually the case? That is, would everyone who reflects on their own experience as intelligent beings necessarily reach a similar conclusion? At the very least, developments in cognitive science, cognitive psychology, linguistics and related fields over the past thirty years (see, for instance, Varela, Thomson and Rosch's The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience; Bruner's Acts of Meaning; Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By) make the certainty of Kurzweil's position rather problematic; at worst, these leave gaping holes in his coverage of the field for which he is probably the most widely recognised popular commentator (a glance over the list of Big Thinkers on kurzweilAI.net begs some big questions here).
Kurzweil goes on to write that "to understand the principles of human intelligence we need to reverse-engineer the human brain" and that by "the mid-2020s, it is conservative to conclude that we will have effective models of the whole brain". Issues of prediction and predictability aside, the implication seems to be that we should expect to abstract the essence of what is "us" from our manifest embodiment in the world, and that this will be done simply be focusing on the brain. There seems to be little attention to the contexts in which this brain exists: either in terms of the whole human organism, or the human organism's physical and cultural environments. But what is Kurzweil's basis for assuming that such abstraction, either of "us" from our brains, or our brains from their physical and cultural contexts, could possibly yield some coherent and recognisable entity that we could still call "us"? This is unclear, and seems to be overlooked. If I ever have the chance to meet Ray Kurzweil, the first question I would want to put to him is: how much of reality is so redundant that it can be reduced to a simplified model represented by ones and zeros in a silicon substrate without completely disfiguring that reality?
OK, so by now it may seem that all I am interested in is deconstructing the Kurzweilian view, with nothing offerred to address its partiality. So to head off at the pass any perceptions that I am being rather too tough on Ray Kurzweil while not leaving my own perspective open to critique, here is the completely radical and way-out-there suggestion that I offer in place of the transhumanist quagmire: The only model of the reality that we inhabit day-to-day that could ever go close to doing justice to that reality, is that reality itself.
Perhaps a more pressing pursuit than the one suggested by Ray Kurzweil is that of enquiring into why it is that we should want to escape from this reality into transhumanism in the first place.
I titled this post "Disembodied minds, ecological disasters". So far the focus has been on the disembodied mind aspect. In part 2, I will develop this further to address the ecological disaster aspect.