John G. Messerly's Blog, page 107

Cryonics and Kim Souzzi

A recent New York Times article chronicled 23-year-old Kim Souzzi’s decision to cryonically preserve her brain. Kim, who died recently of cancer, raised the money for her cryonic preservation by soliciting donations with this post at the subreddit “atheism” at the online site reddit—yes atheists can be generous people. Here is the video that accompanied the post:

(The New York Times with Kim’s permission produced a great video that chronicled the last few months of her life; it can be found here.) http://www.nytimes.com/video/science/...

Cryonics is controversial, but for those of us who don’t believe that dying is like moving to a better neighborhood, it is a reasonable choice. We might call it the cryonics wager, which would go like this.

What happens if I preserve my whole body or my brain? The continuum of possibilities looks like this:

I——————————————————l—————————————————————-I

awake in a great reality                       never wake up                      awake in an awful reality

I might be awakened by post-human descendents as an immortal being in a heavenly world. I might be awakened by beings who torture me hellishly for all eternity. Or I might never wake up. Should I make this wager? Should I get a cryonics policy? I don’t know. If I don’t preserve myself cryonically, then I might die and go to heaven, hell, or experience nothingness. If I do preserve myself, as we have just seen, similar outcomes may await me.

In this situation all I can do is assess the probabilities. Does having a cryonics policy, as opposed to dying and taking my chances, increase or decrease my chances of being revived in a good reality? We can’t say for sure. But if the policy increases that chance, if you desire a blissful immortality, and if you can afford a policy, then you should get one.

Personally I believe that having a cryonics policy greatly increases your chance of being revived in a better reality than dying and taking your chances. I place more faith in my post-human descendants than in unseen supernatural beings. Still I can understand why others would make a different choice, and we should respect their autonomy to die and hope for the best. In the end we just can’t say for certain what the best move is.

As for Kim Souzzi I admire that she had the courage of her convictions. I hope she is conscious again.

Cosmic Evolution, Transhumanism, and the Meaning of Life

Cosmic Evolution and the Meaning of Life 

Earlier this year I published a piece in Scientia Salon entitled “Cosmic Evolution and the Meaning of Life.”  Then a few days ago I wrote about my friend Larry Rifkin’s beautiful video about evolution and the meaning of life.

All of this got me to thinking about the many online comments about my paper and the many emails I exchanged with other academics who responded to it. In the paper I concluded, roughly, that while cosmic evolution leaves me awestruck, we have good reasons to doubt that a more meaningful reality is unfolding. And this implies sobriety and skepticism regarding the claim that cosmic evolution provides meaning for our lives.

Generally my peers thought I had been too cautious in linking cosmic evolution and the meaning of life, as did this prominent European philosopher:

I agree that the best rational strategy is to oscillate between hope within a cosmic vision, tempered with skepticism. However, to maximize well-being, I’d rather argue that most people should believe in something like a grand cosmic vision (e.g. à la Teilhard de Chardin), and to leave the critical, skepticism, to the more learned, curious and academic scholars. I don’t think it makes any good to people to preach the heat death of the universe.

The best email I received was from an English psychologist who said, “I might go so far as to say it was almost a religious experience reading your essay.” When I asked him to further explain he replied:

The things I liked the most about your “cosmic vision” were that it removed both God and Man from centre stage while still providing the genuine possibility for personal meaning and that is genuinely cosmic in scope looking forwards more than backwards. I found it to be more optimistic than skeptical. It allowed the possibility that progress is a real thing through biological evolution (and whatever comes next) I thought the ending was more about sobriety than skepticism.

All our small attempts to make our world and ourselves better might amount to naught and people are free to think that. But they might well amount to something more. We can never know for sure but ‘meaning’ or progress seems to provide a heuristic by which to steer our own baby steps on the long path into the far, far future.  It doesn’t bother me that I won’t be there. But it does inspire me to think that it is important to that future that enough of us are striving towards it. It’s a bit like Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker without recourse to a Star Maker.

Then, after seeing Rifkin’s video, I asked myself again: Can I find meaning as a part of cosmic evolution? Is there something about being a part of this larger thing that gives my life meaning? Can I take comfort knowing that the future might be better than the past?

There is a lot to say about all this but let me begin here. While the story of cosmic evolution reveals the emergence of consciousness, beauty, and meaning, as well as the possibility of their exponential increase, it doesn’t imply that a more meaningful reality will necessarily unfold or that a state of perfect meaning will inevitably ensue. For example, we don’t know if our science and technology will bring about a utopia, a dystopia, or hasten our destruction. We don’t know what the future holds. This is reason enough to be skeptical about cosmic evolution providing a meaning to life.  

Still we can hope that our lives are significant, that our descendants will live more meaningful lives than we do, that our science and technology will save us, and that life will culminate in, or at least approach, complete meaning. These hopes help us to brave the struggle of life, keeping alive the possibility that we will create a better and more meaningful reality.

Transhumanism and the Meaning of Life 

The possibility of infinitely long, good, and meaningful lives brings the purpose of our lives into focus. The purpose of life is to diminish and, if possible, abolish all constraints on our being—intellectual, psychological, physical, and moral—and remake the external world in ways conducive to the emergence of meaning. This implies embracing our role as protagonists of the cosmic evolutionary epic, working to increase the quantity and quality of knowledge, love, joy, pleasure, beauty, goodness and meaning in the world, while diminishing their opposites. This is the purpose of our lives. 

In a concrete way this implies being better thinkers, friends, lovers, artists, and parents. It means caring for the planet that sustains us and acting in ways that promote the flourishing of all being. Naturally there are disagreements about what this entails and how we move from theory to practice, but the way forward should become increasing clear as we achieve higher states of being and consciousness. As we become more intellectually and morally virtuous. 

Nonetheless, knowing the purpose of our lives does not ensure that they are fully meaningful, for we may collectively fail in our mission to give life more meaning; we may not achieve our purpose. And if we don’t fulfill our purpose, then life wasn’t fully meaningful. Thus the tentative answer to our question—is life ultimately meaningful—is that we know how life could be ultimately meaningful, but we do not know if it is or will be ultimately meaningful. Life can be judged fully meaningful from an eternal perspective only if we fulfill our purpose by making it better and more meaningful. 

Meaning then, like the consciousness and freedom from which it derives, is an emergent property of cosmic evolution—and we find our purpose by playing our small part in aiding its emergence. If we are successful our efforts will culminate in the overcoming of human limitations, and our (post-human) descendents will live fully meaningful lives. If we do achieve our purpose in the far distant future, if a fully meaningful reality comes to fruition, and if somehow we are a part of that meaningful reality, then we could say that our life and all life was, and is, deeply meaningful. In the interim we can find inspiration in the hope that we can succeed.

Evolution and The Meaning of Life

My friend and fellow author, Larwence Rifkin M.D., frequently writes about cosmic evolution and the meaning of life, a primary focus of my own research. His articles have appeared in: The Huffington Post, Scientific American, Contemporary Pediatrics, Free Inquiry, The Humanist, Medical Economics, and The New Humanism, among others.  His piece, “A Matter of Trust,” was the Grand Prize Winner, of their 2008 Doctors’ Writing Contest.

Dr. Rifkin has just produced the following video, “Evolution Will Change How You See The World.”  It may be the single most beautiful and profound video I have ever seen.

Here is a recap of the main ideas.

Every living thing owes its existence to evolution; thus every living thing is connected to other living things and to the world. So we are not strangers in this world, but products of it. Evolution has produced the human consciousness which seeks meaning, imagines the future, and which knows truth, beauty and goodness. Our ideas and actions transform the world, which makes us “the most wonderful and the most despicable animal on earth.” We are significant, but we should be humbled by the fact that we are cosmic accidents. The odds that we were born at all are astronomical.

Still we are part of something larger than ourselves, born into a universe which precedes us, and which will live on after we are gone. And while it is astonishing that any one of us exists at all, we will determine the future course of evolution; we are the protagonists of the great evolutionary epic to which we all past, present and future life depend. As Rifkin concludes, “We perform our solos with passion, but we are playing in nature’s grand symphony.”

What Rifkin sees clearly is that cosmic evolution provides the only true narrative that may give our lives meaning. I don’t know if life is ultimately meaningful, but if we do exist as links in a chain leading upward toward higher levels of being and consciousness, then cosmic evolution will have made our lives meaningful.

I would like to publicly thank Dr. Rifkin for his most moving video. It provides a vivid contrast to the vacuous, petty and mean-spirited discourse that dominates so much public discourse in America today.

Evolution Will Change How You See The World

My friend and fellow author, Larwence Rifkin M.D., frequently writes about cosmic evolution and the meaning of life, a primary focus of my own research. His articles have appeared in: The Huffington Post, Scientific American, Contemporary Pediatrics, Free Inquiry, The Humanist, Medical Economics, and The New Humanism, among others.  His piece, “A Matter of Trust,” was the Grand Prize Winner, of their 2008 Doctors’ Writing Contest.

Dr. Rifkin has just produced the following video, “Evolution Will Change How You See The World.”  It may be the single most beautiful and profound video I have ever seen.

Here is a recap of the main ideas.

Every living thing owes its existence to evolution; thus every living thing is connected to other living things and to the world. So we are not strangers in this world, but products of it. Evolution has produced the human consciousness which seeks meaning, imagines the future, and which knows truth, beauty and goodness. Our ideas and actions transform the world, which makes us “the most wonderful and the most despicable animal on earth.” We are significant, but we should be humbled by the fact that we are cosmic accidents. The odds that we were born at all are astronomical.

Still we are part of something larger than ourselves, born into a universe which precedes us, and which will live on after we are gone. And while it is astonishing that any one of us exists at all, we will determine the future course of evolution; we are the protagonists of the great evolutionary epic to which we all past, present and future life depend. As Rifkin concludes, “We perform our solos with passion, but we are playing in nature’s grand symphony.”

What Rifkin sees clearly is that cosmic evolution provides the only true narrative that may give our lives meaning. I don’t know if life is ultimately meaningful, but if we do exist as links in a chain leading upward toward higher levels of being and consciousness, then cosmic evolution will have made our lives meaningful.

I would like to publicly than Dr. Rifkin for his most moving video. It provides a vivid contrast to the vacuous, petty and mean-spirited discourse that dominates so much public discourse in America today.

Karl Marx for Dummies

In yesterday’s post, I discussed Professor Barry Schwartz‘s recent New York Times article “Rethinking Work.” I concluded that post by noting that no discussion of the nature of work is complete without a consideration of the economic conditions of the society or societies in question. And no such discussion is complete without considering the thought of Karl Marx.

Marx would say that what Schwartz was talking about was alienated labor. Most workers aren’t happy with their work because it does not express or elaborate their being. Workers in modern capitalistic societies are alienated from the process and products of their labor, and ultimately from other people too. They work for money, but derive little satisfaction or meaning from their work. This short video provides an excellent introduction to the basic ideas of Marx’s philosophy. (I also recommend Terry Eagleton’s excellent book, Why Marx Was Right.)

Rethinking Work

Swarthmore College Professor Barry Schwartz just published an op-ed in The New York Times, “Rethinking Work.” The essay begins by noting that a “survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs.” So 9 out of 10 “workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be.” But Why?

Perhaps human are lazy and just dislike work as Adam Smith maintained. This idea has been so influential that today most “work is structured on the assumption that we do it only because we have to.” Thus workers are monitored to ensure they are actually working, and that they are as efficient and productive as possible. But Schwartz objects that this approach “is making us dissatisfied with our jobs — and it is also making us worse at them. For our sakes, and for the sakes of those who employ us, things need to change.” (Now doubt this attitude has also been informed by the Protestant work ethic.)

Schwartz believes that Smith was wrong. First of all, people want more from their work than money; they want challenging, engaging and, most importantly, meaningful work that makes a difference to others and makes us feel better about ourselves. And many people willingly accept less money for such work. Studies show that even workers in low-paying jobs do work without compensation in order to find  more meaning on the job.

About 15 years ago, the Yale organizational behavior professor Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues studied custodians in a major academic hospital. Though the custodians’ official job duties never even mentioned other human beings, many of them viewed their work as including doing whatever they could to comfort patients and their families and to assist the professional staff members with patient care. They would joke with patients, calm them down so that nurses could insert IVs, even dance for them. They would help family members of patients find their way around the hospital.

The custodians received no financial compensation for this “extra” work. But this aspect of the job, they said, was what got them out of bed every morning. “I enjoy entertaining the patients,” said one. “That’s what I enjoy the most.”

Schwartz also cites studies that show how people work harder if they think their work is meaningful. (To be fair, Schwartz doesn’t mention that many work harder for more money too.) So there is a cost to what Karl Marx called alienated labor. “Too often, instead of being able to take pride in what they do, and derive satisfaction from doing it well, workers have little to show for their efforts aside from their pay.”

But is there an increase in efficiency that makes monotonous, unfulfilling worth the loss of satisfaction we might from our work, as Smith thought? Schwartz notes that the evidence doesn’t support this claim. For example, Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer’s has “found that workplaces that offered employees work that was challenging, engaging and meaningful, and over which they had some discretion, were more profitable than workplaces that treated employees as cogs in a production machine.” (For more see his book, The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First. Similar results were also found by Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer in his book High Commitment High Performance: How to Build A Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage.)

It seems then that “When employees have work that they want to do, they are happier. And when they are happier, their work is better, as is the company’s bottom line.” But as this is almost self-evident, Schwartz wonders why we embrace Smith’s view of work. Schwartz answers that Smith’s view creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The world of work is often so gloomy that people do hate it. For example physicians, lawyers or teachers may want to do good work, but find out that only satisfying the bottom line matters to their employers. They are actively discouraged from spending time with patients, clients, or students. After a while, they start to work only for the money. But this is contrary to our nature.

Studies show that people are less likely to help load a couch into a van when you offer a small payment than when you don’t, because the offer of pay makes their task a commercial transaction rather than a favor to another human being. And people are less likely to agree to have a nuclear waste site in their community when you offer to pay them, because the offer of compensation undermines their sense of civic duty.

If people were always paid to load couches into vans, the notion of a favor would soon vanish. Money does not tap into the essence of human motivation so much as transform it. When money is made the measure of all things, it becomes the measure of all things.

Of course people do deserve adequate compensation for their work. So things like raising the minimum wage represent social progress. But we should still try to make work satisfying. We might do this, for example, by giving people more autonomy in their jobs, as well as by giving them a chance to learn on the job. Most importantly we need to make work meaningful so that people feel good about doing it. As Schwartz puts it, “Work that is adequately compensated is an important social good. But so is work that is worth doing. Half of our waking lives is a terrible thing to waste.

Reflections – One can’t read this article without thinking about Karl Marx’s famous work “Alienated Labor.” And one can’t respond adequately to this without at least considering Marx’s insights. That’s what I’ll do tomorrow.

Oliver Sacks Died This Morning

I have written previously (here and here) about the impending death of the great author and neurologist Oliver Sacks. Now his death is no longer impeding. Sacks died this morning at his home in New York City. (Here is the link to the story from the front page of the New York Times.)

In both of my previous post I commented briefly on opinion pieces Sacks had written in the Times. His last piece, which I read with great interest, was published in the Times just a few weeks ago and I almost wrote about it yesterday. It had a simple and yet surprising title for an atheist. He simply called it “Sabbath.”

Sacks had an Orthodox Jewish upbringing so childhood memories of the sabbath were vivid. How special the Sabbath was, with the ritual of the evening meal and the sound of the Hebrew prayers in the Synagogue. How his entire extended family met after the service at an aunt or uncle’s home. But after the Second World War members of that extended family emigrated to other parts of the world or became more secular. “Our synagogue, which would be packed to capacity when I was a child, grew emptier by the year.”

Sacks found that he too was losing his faith. And at age 18 made a shocking revelation to his father—he was attracted to other boys. He asked his father not to tell his mother.

He did tell her, and the next morning she came down with a look of horror on her face, and shrieked at me: “You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born.” … The matter was never mentioned again, but her harsh words made me hate religion’s capacity for bigotry and cruelty.

After becoming a doctor in 1960, Sacks moved to the United States where he eventually he found meaningful work in a chronic care hospital in the Bronx.  (He is referring to the hospital that he wrote about in his 1973 book Awakenings, which was made into ayhr wonderful film Awakenings starring Robin Williams and Robert Di Niro. ) As Sacks put it:

I was fascinated by my patients there, cared for them deeply, and felt something of a mission to tell their stories — stories of situations virtually unknown, almost unimaginable, to the general public and, indeed, to many of my colleagues. I had discovered my vocation, and this I pursued doggedly, single-mindedly, with little encouragement from my colleagues … It was a lonely but deeply satisfying, almost monkish existence that I was to lead for many years.

Many years he became good friends with his cousin Robert John Aumann who received the Nobel Prize for economics in 2005. Aumann spoke frequently of  how observing the Sabbath improved the quality of one’s life. When Sacks found out he had cancer that same year, Aumann came to visit. As Sacks recalls: “He … made a point of saying that, had he been compelled to travel to Stockholm on a Saturday, he would have refused the prize. His commitment to the Sabbath, its utter peacefulness and remoteness from worldly concerns, would have trumped even a Nobel.”

And then just last year “hearing that my cousin Marjorie — a physician who had been a protégée of my mother’s and had worked in the field of medicine till the age of 98 — was nearing death, I phoned her in Jerusalem to say farewell.” She asked him to come to her 100th birthday and Sacks agreed, going back to his roots after almost 60 years.  He was embraced by all, as was his partner. The two were invited to the family Sabbath meal where he found a peaceful nostalgia. I’ll let the last few published lines from his prose speak for themselves.

In December 2014, I completed my memoir, “On the Move,” and gave the manuscript to my publisher, not dreaming that days later I would learn I had metastatic cancer, coming from the melanoma I had in my eye nine years earlier. I am glad I was able to complete my memoir without knowing this, and that I had been able, for the first time in my life, to make a full and frank declaration of my sexuality, facing the world openly, with no more guilty secrets locked up inside me.

In February, I felt I had to be equally open about my cancer — and facing death. I was, in fact, in the hospital when my essay on this, “My Own Life,” was published in this newspaper. In July I wrote another piece for the paper, “My Periodic Table,” in which the physical cosmos, and the elements I loved, took on lives of their own.

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.

Thank you Dr. Sacks for living a good life. Your well-lived life has enriched many others.

___________________________________________________________________________

On the Move: A Life

The Mind’s Eye

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

A Leg to Stand On

Hallucinations

Oaxaca Journal

Awakenings

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition

Essays of the Dying: More From Oliver Sacks

I have written previously about the impending death of the great  neurologist and author Oliver Sacks. Recently he published another moving piece in the New York Times. In it Sacks writes that his most moving recent experience was when “…  far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky “powdered with stars” … My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death.”

And while he has been comforted by hundreds of letters from well-wishers,  none comforted him as much as seeing those stars. Sacks attributes this to the comfort he has always found in the non-human. As a little boy, numbers were his friends, and later the periodic table became a source of good cheer. I have never read anyone who wrote so movingly of the periodic table.

And now, at this juncture, when death is no longer an abstract concept, but a presence — an all-too-close, not-to-be-denied presence — I am again surrounding myself, as I did when I was a boy, with metals and minerals, little emblems of eternity. At one end of my writing table, I have element 81 in a charming box, sent to me by element-friends in England: It says, “Happy Thallium Birthday,”a souvenir of my 81st birthday last July; then, a realm devoted to lead, element 82, for my just celebrated 82nd birthday earlier this month. Here, too, is a little lead casket, containing element 90, thorium, crystalline thorium, as beautiful as diamonds, and, of course, radioactive — hence the lead casket …

NEXT to the circle of lead on my table is the land of bismuth: naturally occurring bismuth from Australia; little limousine-shaped ingots of bismuth from a mine in Bolivia; bismuth slowly cooled from a melt to form beautiful iridescent crystals terraced like a Hopi village; and, in a nod to Euclid and the beauty of geometry, a cylinder and a sphere made of bismuth.

Bismuth is element 83. I do not think I will see my 83rd birthday, but I feel there is something hopeful, something encouraging, about having “83” around. Moreover, I have a soft spot for bismuth, a modest gray metal, often unregarded, ignored, even by metal lovers. My feeling as a doctor for the mistreated or marginalized extends into the inorganic world and finds a parallel in my feeling for bismuth.

I almost certainly will not see my polonium (84th) birthday, nor would I want any polonium around, with its intense, murderous radioactivity. But then, at the other end of my table — my periodic table — I have a beautifully machined piece of beryllium (element 4) to remind me of my childhood, and of how long ago my soon-to-end life began.

For Sacks molecules transcends our ephemeral lives—for him molecules are Platonic forms. Sacks has found solace in something real but eternal, in the very elements of our universe. This is something both profound and wise. For where else but in the universe of which we are part might we find hope?

I hope that I can face death with as much equanimity.

The Supposed Dangers of Techno-Optimism

(This article was reprinted in the online magazine of the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies, August 21, 2015)

In his recent article, “Why Techno-Optimism Is Dangerous,” the philosopher Nicholas Agar argues that we not should pursue radical human enhancement. (Professor Agar has made the same basic argument in three recent books: 1) The Sceptical Optimist: Why Technology Isn’t the Answer to Everything; 2) Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits; and 3) Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement.)

Agar says that when we imagine a better future, assuming that there is one, most of us believe that better technology will play a key role in bringing that future about. Agar dubs such believers techno-optimists, and their ranks include: Matt Ridley, David Deutsch, K. Eric Drexler and Peter Diamandis. Techno-optimists acknowledge the dangers of technology, but they believe that technology’s potential to improve human life makes them worth the risk.

Hedonistic Normalization

Agar is skeptical of the power of new technologies to improve individual well-being because “hedonic normalization aligns our subjective experiences to our objective circumstances.” Humans living a thousand years ago were hedonically normalized to live in their environment, as will beings living a thousand years hence be normalized to theirs. From our perspective living in the middle ages seems terrible, and living in the far future seems incredible, because we are normalized to life today. But that does not mean that individuals living in the past were more unhappy than we are, says Agar, or that individuals living in the future will be happier than we are. So even if technology in the future is great from our vantage point, our descendents will take such things for granted.

Agar also argues that “overlooking hedonic normalization leads us to exaggerate the joyfulness of the future and to overstate the joylessness of the past.”  We would hate to go back in time before dentistry and inedible food, he says, but for our ancestors bad dentistry and food were normal. Our descendants may look back with horror at our death and suffering, but we don’t feel that level of disgust. Now Professor Agar is correct that we become accustomed to the technology that surrounds us. I don’t think daily about how modern medicine eliminated many childhood  diseases, that antibiotics cure my infections, and that the dentist can fix my teeth, whereas people of a century ago would be unimaginably happy at those prospects.

But Agar is mistaken that we become completely normalized to the advances that technology provides. I am happy that dentists use Novocaine, that I can communicate instantly over long distances, that I can be warm when it is cold outside, and that antibiotics treat infections and enabled me to forgo amputation! I may not be as awed by such things as people from the past would be, but I am happy to have these technologies nonetheless.  It only takes a bit of reflection about the past and I’m counting my lucky stars. So Agar’s “your descendants won’t be as happy as you think they will” argument doesn’t provide sufficient reason to abandon the pursuit of new technologies.

Objective Goods

It also does not follow from Agar’s argument that preventing physical pain or  infant mortality aren’t good things. They are. It is better from an objective perspective not to live and die in pain. The fact that we become somewhat accustomed to modern medicine may cause us to overestimate how happy our descendents will be when technology improves their lives even more, but those descendents will still be thankful that we pursued those technologies that helps them live better and longer lives. I know I am happy not to die young and miserable.

Technology Is Risky 

Agar’s other main argument against techno-optimism is “that technological progress comes with risks.” There are many unintended consequences of advancing technology, he says, and we can’t just assume that future generations will be able to solve the problems we leave them. We may even destroy ourselves.

Agar is correct, new technology poses risks, but there is no risk-free way to proceed into the future. If we don’t pursue new technologies, then asteroids, nuclear war, environmental degradation, climate change or deadly viruses and bacteria will eventually destroy us. We should not be reckless, but we should not be conservative either. For if we are too timid, we will die just as surely. In the end, only science and technology properly applied have the power to save us.

The Supposed Dangers of Techno Optimism

In his recent article, “Why Techno-Optimism Is Dangerous,” the philosopher Nicholas Agar argues that we not should pursue radical human enhancement. (Professor Agar has made the same basic argument in three recent books: 1) The Sceptical Optimist: Why Technology Isn’t the Answer to Everything; 2) Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits; and 3) Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement.)

Agar says that when we imagine a better future, assuming that there is one, most of us believe that better technology will play a key role in bringing that future about. Agar dubs such believers techno-optimists, and their ranks include: Matt Ridley, David Deutsch, K. Eric Drexler and Peter Diamandis. Techno-optimists acknowledge the dangers of technology, but they believe that their potential to improve human life makes them worth the risk.

Hedonistic Normalization

Agar is skeptical of the power of new technologies to improve individual well-being because “hedonic normalization aligns our subjective experiences to our objective circumstances.” Humans living a thousand years ago were hedonically normalized to live in their environment, as will beings living a thousand years hence be normalized to theirs. From our perspective living in the middle ages seems terrible, and living in the far future seems incredible, because we are normalized to life today. But that does not mean that individuals living in the past were more unhappy than we are, says Agar, or that individuals living in the future will be happier than we are. So even if technology in the future is great from our vantage point, our descendents will take things for granted.

Agar also argues that “overlooking hedonic normalization leads us to exaggerate the joyfulness of the future and to overstate the joylessness of the past.”  We would hate to go back in time before dentistry and inedible food, he says, but for our ancestors bad dentistry and food were normal. Our descendants may look back with horror at our death and suffering, but we don’t feel that level of disgust. Now Professor Agar is correct that we become accustomed to the technology that surrounds us. I don’t think daily about how modern medicine eliminated many childhood  diseases, that antibiotics rid me of infections, and that the dentist can fix my teeth, whereas people of a centuries ago would be unimaginably happy at those prospects.

But Agar is mistaken that we become completely normalized to the advances that technology provides. I am happy that dentists have Novocaine, that I can communicate instantly over long distances, that I can be warm when it is cold outside, and that antibiotics treat infections and enabled me to forgo amputation! I may not be as awed by such things as people from the past would be, but I am happy to have these technologies nonetheless.  So Agar’s “your descendants won’t be as happy as you think they will” argument doesn’t provide sufficient reason to abandon the pursuit of new technologies.

 

Objective Goods

It also does not follow from Agar’s argument that preventing infant mortality or death from infections aren’t good things. They are. It is better from an objective perspective not to live and die in pain. The fact that we become somewhat accustomed to such things may cause us to overestimate how happy our descendents will be when technology improves their lives, but they will still be thankful that technology helps them live better and longer lives.

 

Technology Is Risky 

Agar’s other main argument against techno-optimism is “that technological progress comes with risks.” There are many unintended consequences of advancing technology, and we can’t just assume that future generations will be able to solve the problems we leave them.

Agar is correct, new technology poses risks, but there is no risk-free way to proceed into the future. If we do nothing, asteroids, nuclear war, environmental degradation, climate change or deadly viruses and bacteria will eventually destroy us. Or perhaps the machine intelligences we create will replace us. I can’t know for sure. But I do know that only science and technology have the power to save us. I do know that either we evolve or we will surely die.