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.