Nature, Value, and Technology: Anthropocentrism Unchained

by Denis Larrivee

Trending through recent, technology conferences are increasing speculations on the feasibility and extent of human technology mergers. This summer, for example, will see the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers sponsor their world congress on computational intelligence, which will include a spectrum of diverse themes devoted to the intersection of human and machine based intelligence. Concerns over the trajectory that may be taken by these proposed mergers have begun to mark ethical debates on the issue. Since feasibility is premised, ultimately, on the shared materiality of organismal and machine organization, how physical nature is perceived is likely to significantly impact not only the technical achievement, but also the normative presuppositions that guide the course actually taken. Some thoughts on the likely contribution of late 19th and 20th century philosophies of nature to this merger are given below:

Technologizing is a process neither novel nor unconsidered. Its recent intrusion into cognitive performance, however, promises a distinctly new philosophical terrain, altering technology’s instrumentalist role and impacting the ontological distinctions that have traditionally distinguished humans from the products of their creation. Bioethical questions emerging from this new relation concern not the presence of absence of human life, which has dominated the most strident forums, but the anthropological meaning given to it. The significance of intervening in life, which, in these forums, has been normatively premised on life’s ontological definition, will be qualitatively dismissed in this new undertaking by the normative question of how anthropology conditions bioethical praxis.

Traditionally, technology has been conceived in terms of its relationship with human beings. Aristotle first characterized this relationship as instrumental. Technology was understood to serve human purpose; hence, it was configured to human needs and human dimensions. In his view this instrumental nature derived from their fundamental ontological distinction. Per Aristotle, humans, indeed all, living systems, were autonomous, self-initiated beings whose principal of motion lay inside, extending even to reproduction. Technology, on the other hand, was incapable of self-initiated motion, or of generating the processes that would make it so. Human intervention was needed to bring its organized form into being and to configure it to human measure. Conceived as instrumental, technology’s purpose constituted the intrinsic feature by which it was defined and how it related to humans, an understanding adopted even in the modern era, seen, per example, in the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers slogan ‘For the Benefit of Humanity’.

On this understanding technology has never fallen far from its human framing, in which instance it will have lost its intrinsic meaning, and for which reason old and unserviceable technologies are often discarded. This proximity has frequently acquired a symbolic stature, indicative of human mastery over nature’s regularities, mediated through technological variability and versatility. Technology was seen to be of benefit - to provide for basic needs, to confront environmental danger, or to extend social networks - because it instrumentally served to advance a broadly uniform perception of human anthropology. Technology thereby extended human reach, subduing obstacles by the sequential transference of human intent.

Emanating from late modernist movements, however, an intensified pressure on this proximate association has accelerated a merger between the two, fuzzying their originally crisp demarcation, and challenging the rationale on which their distinctions were earlier premised. Emancipatory urges that sprang from the Enlightened era, particularly, sought to bring empiricist conquests to heel, and found ample possibility throughout the 19th century as rampant industrialization amplified the variety of available forms. The progress that technology was seen to confer lay, initially, in satisfying human needs by replacing modes of execution dependent on human effort, transferring laborious processes from humans to technical devices, which then surrounded man with an ever greater range of instruments, at hand, in Heidegger’s term, for ready access. The human ‘technicalization’ brought by industrialization expanded in the biological and information revolution of the 20th, driven by a research enterprise and the need of therapeutic intervention, laying the groundwork for their symbiosis in the 21st.

Concern over the direction of this movement has been present since the industrialist expansion, with progressively strident warnings over the reciprocal impact that shaped the human being whose products his creation had brought into being. Detecting the implicit materialist attribution behind Darwin’s natural selection thesis, Butler’s Erewhon offered an early, significant statement that explicitly linked the product of human conception, a machine race, with a cotransmission of human ontology. Remarkably, Butler’s intended warning was prescient, predating a recent special issue on artificial intelligence and robotics of the Science journal, ‘Made in His Image’, by some 150 years. Heidegger’s well-known critique of technology furthered the portrayal of the essential otherness of technological being that nonetheless constrained the form of their relation. (Commenting on this effect several decades later Charles Taylor attributes the underlying motivations to a temporally downward moral spiral motivated by Enlightenment emancipatory ideals, reaching a nadir in the technologizing of reason and affectivity.) Heidegger’s antipathy notwithstanding, his coincident revision of metaphysics significantly impelled the mutual intersection of human and technology, and corroded technology’s instrumentalist character. In consequence the fundamental ontological distinction that has historically structured its relation to humans has been dissipated. Taken up in modern trends, the ascription of ontological parity has justified the promotion of their merger, and opened the human to radically revised notions of ontological variability that have sprung from recent centuries’, revised notions of material being.

Such modern conceptions of nature are neither uniform nor simple, their understanding having evolved over the several centuries of the scientific era; hence, their influence is likely to be complex. Due to the vast panorama that has been explored since Bacon, which now extends from quantum mechanics to cognition, attempts to extract metaprinciples are burdened by predilection and insufficiency. Overshadowing their perception, moreover, has been the dominant hypothetical-deductive paradigm of experimental praxis, an epistemological view that is often mistakenly taken for the underlying metaphysic. While this has yielded a mosaic of inferences, broader trends have emerged whose presuppositions now yield novel conceptions on the form of natural reality. These trends will significantly influence the shape of humanity’s progressive merger with technology.

Reductive:

The specific revolution inaugurated by Descartes, later reappropriated to the scientific movement, derived much of its impetus from the emphasis that restricted causal influence to contiguous relations, and the asymmetric nature of their mutual associations. The intimacy of these relations ‘naturally’ trended to decompositional quests that disregarded the whole for the part, since the former was viewed as the terminus of this succession and ‘gaps’ necessitated filling. Enticing curiosity, moreover, the unknown has always cavorted promiscuously unseen, hidden within the evident of the exterior.

Recomposition has thus been traditionally viewed by Descartes’ philosophical disciples as the mere reversal of decompositional exploits, rather than a true synthesis driven from above, with little determination on the aggregate assembly. The progressive penetration to simpler and ever more minute forms has therefore left a vanishingly small residue on which to anchor properties that could then be upwardly scaled to entities. In David Lewis’ theory of Humean supervenience, for example, all properties ultimately supervene on space time points which are, intrinsically, propertyless. This sense of empty being has engendered its own ontological inversion, replacing material form with its measure, information. In other words, the progressive simplicity revealed by the natural world is perceived to lack a propensity to particular form and so, like information, its basic particles are regarded as form neutral; hence, objective reality is seen to be arbitrary. Brent Waters points out that the critical consequence of this perception is a loss in the intrinsic stability of objective reality. “Since information has no inherent meaning it can be recast, conveyed, and interpreted in virtually endless arrays. The fluidity of information means that all borders are temporary, and any definition permeable. Reality is a construct of shifting patterns of information within and through various media.” Meaning, and the technology that inscribes it, are thereby epitomized in the digital displays that encapsulate the human, whose relation to technology is left wholly open.

Plasticity and Transience:

Undifferentiated, marked from below, and universally unified, organizational structures are regarded as lacking the incipient predilections needed to govern preferred associations. Thus, a second perception of nature that will influence human technology relations is plasticity, a variability of form, relation, and association that will be unconstrained by organizational principles of synthesis. In the absence of preferred associations, synthesis will be determined by coalescence, a merger of indifferent arrangements incapable of achieving a unity of form identified by holistic, predicable properties.

The lack of individuated entities will mean by default the ascriptive ascendance of physical relations; metaphysically, this will entail the replacement of entities as the mediators of natural reality. In the new metaphysics inaugurated by Heidegger, and developed through a cluster of post-modernist philosophies like that of Alfred North Whitehead, physical reality will thus be configured through the lens of relational independence. Illustrative is Michael Esfeld, a leading philosopher of physical reality, who adopts a moderate position in the current spectrum, committing to relations the oxymoronic of relational properties; by this, Esfeld means that the property of relating retains objective validity nonetheless even in the absence of relatable entities.

The influence of relational emphasis has in turn elicited its macroscopic counterparts, actor network theory for one, that analogize relations to extended and amorphous networks inclusively ‘attaching’ humans to broader, and shifting, ontologically neutralized systems that intentionally redact anthropocentric hierarchies. In a hyperbolic extrapolation taken from Heidegger, Bruno Latour, noted ecological proponent, specifically attaches to human nature binaries the philosophical obstacle that confounds ecological integrity. In his view, human properties are not the province of humans alone, but instead remain latently distributed within broader vistas where human subjectivity is dissipated along a relational arc.

A Plurality or Not of Ends

Drawn from its relational premises, Latour’s ethical conclusions are nothing if not logical, a point David Chandler facetiously emphasises, where every river and rodent assume membership in his kingdom of ends. The deductive counter, however, is the deprivation of significance in the kingdom’s membership, since no object can validate individual meaning. In recalling Descartes’ explanatory severance of teleology, rather, emphases on contiguous interaction, relational precedence, and plasticity, truncate the understanding of purposeful properties. Casualties of this premise are hierarchy and progressive levels of complexity, where interaction is determined by chance. Following this line, John Dewey first proposed the essentially random nature of evolution, a process without direction, occupied by broadening ripples of probable form. In Dewey’s view, anthropocentric trending is reduced to epiphenomenon, the achievement of numerical excess.

For technology the lack of teleology underscores the porous and utterly permeable intersection between human and technology, since in absence there can be no intrinsic centrality that is provisional for ontological meaning. In commenting on the normative need for intrinsic value, William James once famously proposed that in the absence of sentience, whether divine or human, material reality was intrinsically valueless. James query made the evident point that value is conditioned by reference and perceived by subjectivity. When its referent is missing, when the human has been redacted, value lies beyond material reality, and is introduced only by imposition. The world becomes, necessarily, alien.

James might have added that value is native to nature since the human presence is a conciliant outcome of metaphysical reality. What then counts in human technology relations is not their shared materiality, but the natural emergence of their ontological distinction.