our trans-humanist future

The real thing I wanted to write about was a talk I saw last Monday by a guy called David Pearce, who's one of the leading thinkers in the trans-humanist movement. Trans-humanists seem to combine a factual, predictive claim with a normative one. The factual/predictive claim is that humans are increasingly developing technologies--from gene therapy to cybernetics--that allow us to tamper with "human nature" and design the humans (or trans-humans) of the future rather than leaving it up to biology and fate. The normative claim is that this is a great thing and that we ought to get on it pronto.

You can read a nice, brief manifesto from Pearce, which pretty much covers the talk he gave, here: http://abolitionist.com/. The upshot is this: suffering is bad and when we have an opportunity to alleviate suffering--either our own or that of others--we should do it; we will soon have the means to abolish suffering of all sentient life on earth; we should do what we can to speed the arrival of this abolition of suffering. In terms of abolition, he offers things like wiring up our brains so that our pleasure centres are always activated (an option he thinks isn't that feasible since it would remove our incentive to do anything else, so any community that chooses to do this would soon become extinct and other, less happy communities would persist), designer drugs that make us happier without dimming cognitive capacity (he's not just interested in alleviating suffering but also heightening our cognitive abilities), and genetic engineering. He looks forward to a future where beings will experience bliss and cognitive abilities on a level that dwarf the upper ceiling for contemporary humans. He also wants to extend this to animals. He's a vegan and thinks that animal suffering is terrible. Not only does he think we should stop using animals for food, but also we should stop carnivores from eating other animals. We could do this either by growing vat food that we can feed to them or re-wiring their brains so that they no longer have a bloodlust or whatever.

My first reaction to all this was an aesthetic one. I could imagine Nietzsche sitting next to meet pulling his hair out. One of the things I admire about Nietzsche is that he's pretty much the only philosopher who manages to make responsible use of ad hominem arguments. In essence, Nietzsche's arguments usually aren't along the lines of "A says x, but x is wrong for these reasons," but rather "A says x; now what would make someone say x? Is that the sort of person we should want to be?" I think an ad hominem argument is quite appropriate in the case of the abolitionist movement: what kind of a person are you that you think suffering is so absolutely awful that we should go to obscene lengths to eliminate it? I mean, I'm not fan of suffering myself, but come on, man up a little!

This is particular interesting to me as someone who's quite interested in Buddhism. Pearce claimed his arguments were very much in keeping with Buddhist thought, but I disagree. Buddhism famously preaches that all life is suffering and preaches the way to bring about the end of suffering, so in that sense you might see a connection (ignoring for the moment the subtle but important differences between the Pali word dukkha and the English "suffering"). But the Buddha also preaches equanimity in the face of not just suffering but pleasure. The idea is that both suffering and pleasure are impermanent and so we need to learn to greet them with equanimity rather than react to them with intense aversion or craving. It seems to me that the abolitionist movement reacts with intense aversion to suffering. Buddhism might be criticized for its complacency in that it aims to accept the world as it is rather than to change it, but in this sense it's definitely not in keeping with abolitionism.

The talk also seemed to blush over some of the sticky points. For instance, Pearce claims that eradicating suffering isn't a matter of becoming contented vegetables, but on the contrary allowing us to pursue our projects at a much higher level. But I question whether my aims and ambitions would be the same if I lived without suffering. Suffering isn't just a contingent matter of things going badly and suffering bad moods. It's a necessary feature of wanting things. If I want something, there's always the possibility that I won't get it. If I don't get it, I'll be upset. Often, I'm willing to risk that distress because striving for things when there's no guarantee of success is part of the challenge in life, and a great deal of the pleasure in life comes from overcoming obstacles. If the obstacles are taken away, so is the pleasure of overcoming them. I'm not saying Pearce wouldn't have an answer to this, but I think answering it isn't as easy as he seemed to suggest.

Part of the challenge for me, though, is to explain why I might be against abolishing suffering. Surely, whenever I see someone suffering, I would like to ease their suffering if I could, and I wouldn't want to increase their suffering (I speak from my own case here). That's true, though that's also a response to a world where suffering is inevitable and pervasive. I don't know if saying that I want to alleviate any suffering I encounter entails that I want all suffering to cease. And it's also true that I don't want to alleviate all suffering, not even in myself. There are certain kinds of unhappiness and pain I really could happily do entirely without. But, for instance, I think I'd lose my interest in philosophy and writing if I didn't find myself questioning the world and my place in it in ways that aren't always cheerful.

My last, cheeky though was inspired by Douglas Adams. Pearce proposes that we re-wire carnivores so that they don't kill herbivores. If the aim is to eradicate suffering, isn't it morally just as acceptable to re-wire the herbivores so that they enjoy being eaten?