Phase III – Stealth Is.

The revolution in human thinking that was the Enlightenment partially overthrew the notion that knowledge and productivity should be controlled by authorities acting on behalf of a God that held these things suspect. Of course, in reality, the Enlightenment’s embrace of scientific and technological advances has been engaged in a tug of war with opponents clinging to a fundamentalist, religious suspicion of these things. The ambiguous social and environmental effects of technological civilization have added a third stream of discourse – people who are essentially secular rationalists who find, to varying degrees, some types of knowledge and technology at best suspect and sometimes worth opposing. These social critics of the technological exuberance of modern day Prometheans will likely warn against human “arrogance” as opposed to hubris.

While I have long been a supporter of radical technological change, I see a tendency towards arrogance (and not in a good way) in some aspects of transhumanist culture and as expressed by some (but not all) transhumanist narratives. Broadly speaking, I would say that a faith in God (or gods) which cannot be substantiated has been supplanted by a similar faith in the human brain, its perceptions and the measurements of the instruments those brains devise.

In some ways, this faith in the brain seems directly reflective of a faith in God. If our brains — or the combination of our brains with our bodies and the environment — are a biological accident, an emergent property of a set of patterns that have survived and spread according to Darwinian principles, from whence comes the assumption that these brains can possess anything more than a fragmentary comprehension of reality or existence? I would say, obviously, it comes from an unexamined faith that there is something particularly “blessed” about human thought, even if this goodness or completeness isn’t provided by a benevolent deity.

Well, anything is possible. Because I don’t put my faith in the equipment that I was born into (nor in yours), I prefer to call myself an agnostic rather than an atheist. It’s a linguistic quibble since both atheists and agnostics agree that there is no proof of a God. But really, we all know that an avowed atheist, using reason as a weapon, will hunt down and annihilate any implication that a God is likely. For me, it’s a coin flip. Unknowable is unknowable, period. In fact, rather than putting the possibilities at 50/50, I would put them at 33/33/33. There is or isn’t something that we would call God if we could understand it, or if we could understand everything about existence, we would know that it’s a silly question. Some things may fall outside our language and our logic. Reality, for example.

In a recent essay for H+ Magazine inspired by the film “Transcendent Man,” I wrote, “One of the few things that disturbs me about (Ray) Kurzweil’s theories (and desires) is the notion that we should ‘illuminate’ the entire universe with what we — or the minds that we create — presume to call intelligence.” Several commentators couldn’t imagine why I would find this idea unattractive. It’s not so much the content of the comments that interests me as the “I can’t imagine why” part of it. While I hate this cliché, it does seem to be indicative of a tendency within some transhumanist and Singularitarian circles to be unable to “think (or step) outside the box.” In this case, the box is human reasoning and measurement — a process that rests on the presumably accidental biological equipment located in the human head.

At a recent showing of “Transcendent Man” in San Francisco, Kurzweil was asked about the possibility of the existence of other intelligent beings around the universe. He rejected the notion on the basis that if such intelligences did exist, at least one of them would have gotten smart enough to fill the galaxy with computation and intelligence. Here we have the assumption not only that all intelligence would be biological, but that it would enact Kurzweil’s storyline right up to the grand finale (not to mention the assumption that the universe is not already filled with intelligence and/or computation.)

Of course, this idea of colonizing the universe in our own image comes from a desire to place ourselves back at the center of things, something the great astronomer Copernicus took away from the scientific-minded among us back in the 16th century. But will we — with unimaginably amplified intelligence — still feel the desire or need or compulsion to do this? Is there something so unambiguously wonderful about intelligence and sentience as we know and experience it that we will feel compelled to spread it everywhere?

Maybe. But for the moment, we find manifest a perverse type of faith — a type of certainty — emanating from people who are predicting a plunge into an event horizon, the major characterization of which is supposed to be it’s unknowability, or at least its radical divergence from what we can now understand.

It’s my hope that, if and when we do enter into or produce a radically distinct type of intelligence, that intelligence will be self-aware enough to recognize that all it perceives is based on the abilities and biases built into its hardware and software and not on the way things actually, ultimately, are.