Head in the Clouds
Butt on Chesterton's fence
While my husband listens to political commentary all day long, I prefer something less immediate and more philosophical. One of the subjects I’ve been hearing much about is Transhumanism. This is the idea that humans can move beyond our biological limitations and that how we exist will be limited only by our imaginations.
At age 13, I started reading science fiction. I found Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters in the school library and read it straight through. After that, I read four books a week on average [Some were Fantasy rather than SciFi but I'll maintain that SciFi is Fantasy with technology. Fight me.] The books were an escape from the nightmare of schooling, and I was a fast reader. I adored Star Trek and saw Star Wars in the theater [That would be Episode 4.]
Those movies were tame compared to some of the things I read. In a collection of short stories by John Varley, I entered a world where humans had been kicked off Earth by mysterious aliens - presumably, so the place could be occupied by whales and dolphins undisturbed - and humans lived a high-tech existence on the other planets in the solar system.
Cloning was perfected as was the transfer of consciousness. A person could have a new body, or a new sex at will. Some characters merged with a biologically co-dependent plant-based life-form that acted as a space suit and kept them healthy. These characters floated around the rings of Saturn and came in to make and sell the art that this inspired. And some altered their bodies so they could live more easily in a gravity-free environment by putting hands where their feet would go. [Yes, that’s four hands and no feet.]
Varley was never as well-known as Heinlein, but his books sold well enough to make their way onto the lists of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Club, of which I was a dedicated member. [That, and Columbia House Records.] Wild as those ideas were, they were readily available. It wasn’t hard for me to sink into Varley’s world. They were interesting and compelling, and he wrote female characters.* [As did Heinlein] Most SciFi writers wrote male characters.
Gen X started our lives without personal computers. Has any single generation seen more change? I spent some time at the local tech school learning COBOL and Fortran and punching the cards that fed lines of code into the mainframe. I watched Star Trek communicators become flip-phones and then something else entirely. I can dictate [badly] into my phone, and become annoyed when Siri gets the words wrong. I forget that the strangeness is that it can be done at all.
How much change can we tolerate without losing our Humanity? This is the question that some podcasters are asking. While someone like Ray Kurzweil is full steam ahead, ‘load my consciousness onto the web,’ it’s self-evident that having done so, he’s going to be something else. I’ve never heard an interview with him, and don’t know if he hates being human. [It seems like a lot of people do now, and would like to make the rest of us suffer with them.]
I’m just not sure that’s the right question. I think we would do better to ask: how do we use technology to support us in being the best of what is human? I don’t even think that using technology to control the less savory bits of our species is a good idea. Those less savory bits were part of our evolution. Eliminating things like our urge to follow authority might create more problems than it solves. [Chesterton’s fence.]
Of course, first, we need to have a conversation about what is best in humanity…
We can pursue virtues: Wisdom, self-restraint, and courage are standards that go back to Plato, who said these were the three aspects of the soul. However, virtue is useless unless practiced in the real world as opposed to inside our heads. How does one do that from inside a solid-state box of circuits? Or isolated outside the rings of Saturn with an alien plant for a space suit? Moral superiority isn’t earned by having strongly held opinions, it’s earned by exposing oneself to the real risk of disagreement, or even violence, because of the opinions we hold or the actions we take.
Our body is part of the language of how we express our well-being, and if we mess with that we destroy our ability to feel what’s good. It isn’t possible to make yourself better by floating free from your physical form.
The best of humanity are those who:
Voluntarily take on the challenges that face us.
Voluntarily engage with other humans, sacrificing current comfort for future gains
Sacrifice emotional and/or material certainty in favor of seeking the expression of deeper truth
Take genuine risks to speak those truths
I’m sure there are other things, these are just what I’ve been able to articulate. Do you have any?
*Men who write female characters - and vice versa - may or may not do a good job, and that might be a post for later, lol.
Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. She lives with her husband and is Mother of Cats; four boyz and one cranky gurl. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy, and the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition.