From: fuchs@michaelfuchs.org
Subject: Suicide / Technology Curve / Important (Insoluable?) Problems
To: ryan_canolty@yahoo.com (Ryan Canolty),
        cpoplawski@yahoo.com (Chad Poplawski), sc@ewav.com,
        alex@heublein.net (Alexander Heublein),
        jfk@stanfordalumni.org (Jeremy Kassis),
        jlaltrel@us.ibm.com (Joe Laltrello),
        ali.henry@talk21.com (Alison Henry), theman@followryan.com (Ryan Fife),
        cal@enteract.com (Cal Lott), homonculous@mindspring.com (Matt Grabowy),
        snitch@zonker.stanford.edu (Shawn Tseng),
        allison.best@alumni.duke.edu (Allison Best),
        mmoore@digital-impact.com (Mandy Moore)
Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 08:16:13 -0700 (PDT)


Thanks to Ryan and Cal for two really stellar pieces, on the cognitive
science/philosophy of science/extropianism side of things. I'm going to
try to emulate their laudable practice of writing good stand-alone
pieces, quoting where appropriate--but not quoting madly inline,
Usenet-style. Feh.

I think I will begin, in the immortal words of 'Nice Guy' Eddie, with
"first things fucking last. Who's got the stones?" Or, well, in this
case, who's got the answer to the question "Should we or should we not
commit suicide?"

Perhaps not at all coincidentally, CAMUS does. His essay, "The Myth of
Sisyphus" is a (slim) book-length meditation on precisely that topic.
I'm tempted to try and summarize, but I fear the violence I will do to
his gorgeous thesis. Suffice it to say, he concludes that existence here
in the sublunary realm is in fact "absurd"--a term he uses to mean that
human life is rendered ultimately meaningless by the fact of death and
that the individual cannot make rational sense of his
experience--however, life does have "value" *without* having meaning. In
other words, he accepts the premise of nihilism (as Vonnegut put it,
"life is crap"), while rejecting its conclusion (that morality and
responsibility are bunk, and nothing we do matters). That's important
progress, in my view.

Though, as feared, I've done violence to a work that I've long felt it
is the closest thing to prose poetry I've ever seen. Brief sample:

	"A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a
	thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this
	condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and
	to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls
	that defy its assaults?"

I could quote all day (if I had my volume . . .) Anyway, get thee to a
bookstore. It ain't easy stuff, but it shoor is purty.

This question of death/rationality of suicide is also germane in that I
got the pleasure of having lunch with Chad, in S.F., on Friday. I had
driven my motorcycle up, and was direly afraid of dying beneath a truck
on 101 going back. Chad admitted that the initial "crunch" would be
unpleasant--but then my problems are over. We disagreed on this, i.e.
whether death is something to be rationally feared. Chad feels (if I
may) that there can be nothing unpleasant about the *absence of
experience*. I maintained that I would, as a result, miss out on a lot
of cool subsequent experiences. Chad pointed out that, in my new state,
I wouldn't miss a thing. Touche.

We agreed to disagree.  8^)  And I survived the ride home . . .


###


I heartily agree with Broderick, as related by Ryan, that there is an
effective "technology event horizon" beyond which we cannot even
postulate. (And thus I disagree, in part, with Gibson when he noted,
"The future has arrived; it just isn't evenly distributed.") Our
technology curve is, I believe, a hockey stick--and we just now, right
this second, hit the kink. Ignoring immortality on the one hand, and
artificial expansion of consciousness on the other, I might harp on my
earlier theme: I truly believe we are in the dark ages of medicine.
Anybody ever had a chronic health problem, requiring lots of visits to
various clinics, hospitals, pharmacies? If you had, you're encountered
*an entire race of people* who do little more than deal with their
chronic health problems all the time.  

Point being, we just don't know how to fix the vast majority of shit
that goes wrong with the human body. Our two principal technologies for
health care are A) bombarding the blood stream with drugs, and hoping
they find their way to the problem area, or B) chopping our way in and
cutting some things, sewing other things together. [As Drexler posed in
_Engines of Creation_], think about what a scalpel looks like to cell:
"Holy fuck! Ouch!"

Aside from our technical limitations, which presumably nano-medicine and
gene therapy are going to eventually fix, I'm just aghast from a
functional point of view: "Oh, shit, I fell down the stairs wrong . . .
NOW I'M NEVER GETTING OUT OF THIS WHEELCHAIR FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE." I
mean, come on people--running a spinal cord and nervous system are just
electrical engineering issues. Why can't we fix that shit by now? "Hmm,
feels like a breast lump . . . WHOAH, GOODBYE IN 12 WEEKS TO EVERYONE
WHO LOVES ME." It's just a cellular process, for God's sake; where has
cellular biology dropped the ball?! Peoples' whole lives are at stake!
"Oh, you're born without eye site? Hey, get ready to dodder around
poking at street curbs with a cane FOR ALL THE REST OF YOUR DAYS!" We
understand optics; we understand electrical transmission of data. Why
are we not making eyes? Who's responsible for this?!

All that said, I'm in no position to bitch--because I've chosen not to
work in medical research. As I suggested in an earlier mail, maybe we
should all drop what we're doing and go back and study that. But I will
predict that 45 years from now, everyone will look back on the
above-noted health care failures (and hundreds of others) of the
twentieth century and be exactly as aghast as I am now. In 2001, we're
moved past leaching people; but not very far past it.

I invite Dr. Snitch to correct me here.

So radical enhancement of human cognition might be coming, but it had
better queue up behind a whole lot of other more important shit.
Including, on another topic, all the babies starving and dying of
vaccine-preventable diseases. It's also, by definition, not getting in
front of a decent *understanding* of how our brains work *now*. How do
our onboard neural networks function? What are they capable of?
Cognitive science is another discipline in its bumbling infancy . . .


###


Ryan introduced the the idea of theoretical limitations on our cognitive
hardware, to wit, "We like to think that we humans have the capacity for
full rationality (if only we try harder), but what if we are only
minimally rational?  Just rational enough to gain a survival edge, while
a vast domain of higher rationality exists waiting to be explored by
creatures with the right computational tools?" BINGO. Let me put this in
a particular context: There are certain important philosophical problems
that echo, answerless, through the ages. Philosophy, religion, science,
and art all fail to adequately address these problems. They include:


	* CONSCIOUSNESS, or sentience. How did we come to have
self-awareness? Is it just from having a really complex brain? And does
that mean computers will become sentient any year now? Or is it because
of a God-granted soul, something only people get? And how do we get
immediate experience as part of the deal? How can I actually feel a
toothache, or have the immediate experience of seeing a patch of purple?
Can a computer have a toothache? Can a worm?

	* The SELF, or seat of identity. Where is this thing I think of
as me? Is it in my brainpan? In some invisible aura that floats over my
head? Where does it go when I'm blown up in a bizarre gardening
accident? What happens to it if my body's destroyed, then rebuilt
exactly . . . say, when I beam up to the Enterprise? Can it still
possibly be me? When does a sperm inside an egg acquire a self? At the
first mitosis? If I'm just in my brainpain, and we duplicated it, and
the body around it, down to the atom, there'd be two of me? What would
that be like?

	* TEMPORALITY. How does time actually work? Is it like common
sense says it is (A-series time), with the present the only reality--and
the past only memories, the future only hopes and fears? Or is it like
Einstein said (B-series time), a four-dimensional matrix with all times
always present and real and us just moving through them, down the time
axis? If so, where does that leave free will--if everything that's to
happen is already all laid out for us?

	* FREE WILL. How can I be responsible for my actions, legally
and ethically, when they are presumably caused by my genes, and my
parents, and the arrangement of atoms in my brainpan, if that's what you
think it is? If I choose to do something, what does it mean to say I
could have done something else? For whatever reasons, I didn't do
something else--and in this world, events only unfold one time. No, I
couldn't have done something else, because I didn't. I only did the one
thing--presumably for some sufficient reason. And if the circumstances
were the same again, I'd do the same thing again.

	* MORALITY. Whatever I just did--say it was the 'wrong' thing.
Say it was recreational torture. [In philosophy, a lot of the time
you're examining grey areas, and it helps to have clear examples on
either end of the spectrum--something everyone agrees on, as a starting
point. So, recreational torture is supposed to be something everyone
agrees is wrong no matter what.] But why is it always wrong? Who says?
What does it mean to say I 'ought' not to have done it? Where's 'ought'
in a universe of particles and brainpans? If you believe in ethical
utilitarianism, where the goal is the greatest happiness for the
greatest number, is recreational torture okay if it makes me happier
than it makes my victims sad? Can I swing my recreational torture device
just as far as the next guy's nose, but no further? [I know we addressed
morality previously, and even made some good progress; but I include it
for the sake of completeness.]

	* WHAT ARE WE HERE FOR? (This needs, I believe, no annotation.)


It's not that philosophy, and religion and science, don't have any
solutions to these problems. They have tons of them. But none are good
enough. We could sit here all night while I (fumblingly) recount the
history of philosophy. But the important thing is: Someone comes up with
a very detailed, and usually very convincing, solution, to one of these
problems. And then the next guy comes along and refutes the first one,
just as convincingly. That's what the philosophy journals are full of,
every month, every quarter. It's great fun to read. But the next
refutation is always just around the corner. And nothing ever gets put
to bed.

WHY IS THAT?

Ryan, and before him the cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker, and
before HIM the contemporary analytical philosopher Colin McGinn, all
say: maybe we just don't have the kinds of brains you need to solve
these kinds of problems. It's not very human to think that there are
things we can't figure out. But maybe that's our problem. Monkeys can't
do calculus, and never will, no matter how long they think about it. Why
do we think we can figure out anything if we think long enough? Our
minds evolved, just like our bodies--to (as Pinker noted) solve very
specific problems of hunting, gathering, and surviving on the African
Savannah. And our bodies can't do everything--like split in two parts,
or jump a hundred feet. On the other hand, maybe the Martians have
better brains, and can understand free will and sentience and whatnot.

Or maybe, as Cal suggests, our silicon bastards--sentient
computers--will. But I'm not holding my breath. 8^)


<deep breath>,
Michael

-- 
              Michael Fuchs     "It is necessary to go farther. The
     fuchs@michaelfuchs.org      executioners eye each other with
http://www.michaelfuchs.org      suspicion." Camus, _L'Homme Revolte_