BtF 5: Transhumanism and Sensing the Invisible

(This is the fifth post in a series about our precarious existence “Between the Falls”. If you haven’t read any of the previous ones, you might want to go all the way back and begin with the first, which explains the idea behind this series, but here it is in a nutshell: technological progress and the move towards transhumanism have us on the precipice of a second great fall of man, the first one being that famous, symbolic or literal, bite of apple that drove us out of our primal state of ignorance and grace. I don’t want to give too much away about this week’s post, but there will be talk of echolocation, war elephants, trepanation, chimeras, Rain Man and Wittgenstein’s thoughts on talking to lions.)

What do we gain by embracing transhumanism? 

That’s the question I’ll be attempting to answer, and maybe I’ll even find a way to tie that answer back in to the questions from the end of my last post. In particular, I’ll be focusing on what is being offered to us in exchange for taking the next great fall of man, for becoming a new kind of human being, or a new species entirely. In other words, what’s the appeal or piercing the peel of another morally suspect fruit?

In my early twenties I was fascinated by the idea of radical body modification. I spent dozens of hours with photo-filled books like “Modern Primitives.” Part of this was, clearly, just a matter of gawking at freaks, which as I’ve written I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing. But also, the idea of expanding the range of human experience has always fascinated me. One of the very first intellectual filters I began to notice, and to reject as an unnecessary constraint, was the notion that we had five senses. It blinded us to our other sensory talents like the ability some have to detect changes in barometric pressure, or do echolocation, and of course everyone has a sense of balance and proprioception, which is your ability to know where your various body parts are in space without looking at them. The classic example of this is closing your eyes and touching your nose. How did you do that on the first try without using your eyes or touch to feel around? Obviously you have other senses that we don’t get taught about in grade school, in my option for no good reason.

I’ve often wondered whether our many intellectual layers, the metal filters of language and abstract concepts like there being a fixed number of senses, actually makes us dumber than animals in some ways. Maybe we all have the ability to do math like the people who used to be called “idiot savants”, as in Dustin Hoffman’s character in “Rain Man”, but our own overthinking gets in our way, and we find those filters very hard to turn off. Here’s a sense I seem to have, and maybe you do too, that reinforces this belief of mine. Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night, and with a foggy, half-asleep brain, you decide it must be 3:10am, then when you check the time you were exactly right? Or, after setting your alarm clock to a particular time for long enough, you no longer need to because you begin waking up right before it would go off? Animals have highly precise internal clocks. Maybe we do too, but that information can only be accessed indirectly, without thinking about it consciously. 

Let’s get back to the idea of body modifications. In the early days of that cultural trend, at least in terms of my exposure to it, people were experimenting with ways to augment their senses. I spent some time, with limited success, trying to do echolocation and to orient, which is to say to always know which direction I’m facing on the compass, a skill the Guugu Yimithirr people in Australia excel at. But the mod that fascinated me the most, to the extent that I spent hours reading stories of people who had done it, and tried to find someone who might be willing to do it to me, was embedding a magnet in your body. Usually this was done near the pad of a finger, with one of the small but powerful rare-earth magnets that people were just beginning to play with back then. This mod let you “see” the many and varied electromagnetic fields of our world. An entire invisible universe made visible, or at least sensible, as in able to be sensed. How crazy would it be to have that extra power of perception?

In the end I exited my phase of fascination with body mods without ever slicing up my flesh to insert a magnet, or, for better or worse, getting trepanated, a mod that for a brief period seemed like exactly what I needed, and, to be honest, still does occasionally. Make of that what you will.

All this is to say, I get how exciting modding, or enhancing, our senses could be. I think it’s a basic part of human nature, as tool makers, to create tools that improve our means of perception. Nor do I think there’s anything morally suspect about this, of itself. Yes, any technology can be misused, but thermal imaging devices and night vision googles are nothing but cool. Also, I’d love to be able to see extra colors, the way apparently many women with an extra type of cone cell can. I expect that would be as amazing as going from blind to being able to see, in that right now I can’t even imagine what those colors might look like. That’s like trying to picture a fourth spacial dimension. Where would that even go? Of course, saying I would love to have an ability isn’t the same thing as saying I’d be willing to do surgery to gain that ability, whether through a metal implant under my skin or genetic modification to my eyes. Do I really want to become a cyborg, a chimera, a trans-human?

That’s a different question, though as many have pointed out, to some extent we are already are cyborgs. From contact lenses to titanium hips to Apple Watches, we have a lot of devices we wear or embed that augment our ability to do, and to know. We already walk around looking at Google maps on our phones. Why get squeamish about AR glasses that overlay a map in front of you as needed, or a chip implant that gives you immediate access to full, up-to-date geographic information at all times? OK, maybe there are good reasons to be squeamish about this last one. 

For now, though, I think it’s worth recognizing just how amazing these kinds of augmentations could be, if for no other reason than to understand the temptations we are up against when it comes to the next great fall. 

Let me play devil’s advocate about this in an even deeper way, that goes beyond just noting how cool it would be to have a chip in my brain that not only lets me bypass the filter that prevents me from doing calculations as well as Rain Man, but also embeds into my memory the many spreadsheets I’ve maintained over the years to help track finances, assets, tasks, health info, and all manner of other things. 

Let me suggest that these kinds of mods are not only amazing and practical, but also have the potential benefit of getting us closer to the truth. Stick with me here for moment. Whether or not you believe, as I do, that we live in some kind of “synthetic” universe or simulation, it’s clear that we have evolved, or been given, a perceptual apparatus that filters and distorts as much as it reveals. In some later post I might go into Donald Hoffman’s headset theory of consciousness, which I find problematic, along with his argument that evolution completely hides reality from us, but for now I’ll grant the obvious: in lots and lots of ways, our perception of the world is highly selective and filtered. Maybe it would benefit us, practically and spiritually, if we had access to a truer vision of the universe we inhabit?

For example, until not so long ago we had no idea that elephants were communicating with infrasound, at frequencies much lower than humans can hear directly. Regardless of whether you think crafting legal protections for animals is a good idea, I think it’s unambiguously clear that we have a moral obligation to, at a minimum, do our best to understand the obviously rich mental and social lives of creatures like pachyderms and porpoises and primates. If the best way to achieve that understanding is not just with external tools like microphones and oscilloscopes, but with implants that let cognitive biologists directly talk with elephants, it’s hard for me to argue against that. 

Perhaps there’s a countervailing religious argument to be found, with an analogy to how God punished mankind with different languages, to confound our communication and coordination, and to thwart our hubristic attempt to build a tower that reached up to the heavens. Maybe the God of the Old Testament would find it upsetting for us to chat with elephants, and, who knows, maybe that opens the door to their re-enslavement as war animals, but I think the much more likely result is that we come to appreciate them more as creatures, and, who knows, maybe there are things we can learn from them. I don’t share the skepticism of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously commented that even if lions could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand them. Or, at least, I think Wittgenstein is wrong in the context of certain animals and certain ways we might be able to augment our ability to hear and speak with them.

So maybe certain kinds of transhumanism can help broaden our moral sensibilities, which is always a good thing, right? 

Another spiritually charged argument has to do with the nature of humans, and the universe itself. For better and worse, it’s in our natures as human beings 1.0 to seek deeper realities that aren’t obvious to us through direct observation. This truth seeking often takes a spiritual form, as in meditation or the use of psychedelics or attempts to directly communicate with a creator. But it also has a scientific, analytical mode. That scientific journey has led to the discovery that large solid items like walls are actually made up of invisibly small atoms, which are actually made up of much smaller particles and a bunch of empty space, and those particles themselves aren’t so much solid as probability clouds that only resolve into points when observed. It’s clearly in our nature as humans to try and see nature’s true nature. What we happen to be seeing, the closer we look, is that the universe seems to be running on a source code of pure information, with a set of precisely calibrated tuning parameters like the gravitational constant, and none of this knowledge is directly accessible to us using our native faculties.

If we do live in a synthetic universe built out of code, maybe newer tech, like VR headsets or brain implants, will help us perceive, and thus manipulate reality at a much deeper level. Think of Neo at the end of “The Matrix”, able to see the bullets fired at him as pure encoding, and thus stop them with a gesture. And as with Neo, if we keep going down the rabbit hole of cybernetically augmenting our means of perception and interaction with the universe, the truth may or may not set us free, but it might very well augment our powers in ways that make nuclear power look like caveman technology. 

Of course, this is exactly what the second great fall of man entails. As stated at the beginning of this series, the first fall of man brought us closer to God in terms of knowing good and evil. In the next great fall, if we make it through to the other side, we will emerge with god-like powers to redesign our world, our bodies, and our brains at the most fundamental levels. These great powers, obviously, come with great dangers. 

Which, to me, suggests a very dark answer to the question, If we live in a synthetic universe of some kind, what are we doing here, anyway?