Transhumanism and the need for realist ethics

Last time I talked about ethics, and claimed that the realism/antirealism debate is especially important to transhumanists. I should note that at least two different people have cited something along these lines as a serious objection to the transhumanist project: Marika writes (via email):

“What, according to transhumanism, gives human life meaning and purpose, and if there isn't anything, then how are people supposed to let go of what seems to be a pretty deeply ingrained habit of wanting meaning?”

Stann writes, in the comments to a previous post:

“We may know one day how it all works, but if we can't discern any "value" to go with the motions, what do we have? After all, everything is just matter and energy, why is any form of it superior to another?”

These are not easy questions to answer, and there’s no way that I can provide a full analysis in a few blog posts. But I’ll try to elucidate why I think the transhumanist project needs to pay a lot of attention to these kinds of questions, and propose some solutions.

The average person in, say, Britain, has a fairly good intuitive idea of what counts as a “good outcome” in his/her own life.

1. Having a prestigious education and getting a prestigious, well paid job are both good.
2. Having money is good.
3. Having friends is good.
4. Having a nice house with suitable décor is good, as is the possession of an expensive car/watch/[insert gadget here].
5. Having a good time at parties, discos and social events is good, as are sexual experiences [with attractive people, and not too many sexual partners, especially if you are female].
6. Having an attractive partner and [once you reach a suitable age] a spouse and kids are good. Love (commitment and genuine care for your partner) is good.
7. [for some minority] Worshipping a god is good, as is converting people to your religion.

I will refer to these commonly held good outcomes as commonsense values, in analogy with commonsense morality. The notion is relative to a particular culture: I have described the commonsense values of the UK as I see them, one could describe the commonsense values of other countries and get a somewhat different collection. An honest examination of the list (1-6) in the light of evolutionary psychology reveals that, in the absence of any scientific theory of what to do with our lives, we have simply stuck to the inbuilt motivations that our selfish genes give us, even though we have no interest in the ultimate aim that our desires were designed to achieve – namely maximizing our inclusive genetic fitness. If my aim were to maximize my genetic fitness, I would go around donating to sperm banks and generally try to have as many children as I could. Eliezer Yudkowsky expressed this by saying that we are “Shards of Godshatter":

"Yet when the blind idiot god created protein computers, its monomaniacal focus on inclusive genetic fitness was not faithfully transmitted. Its optimization criterion did not successfully quine. We, the handiwork of evolution, are as alien to evolution as our Maker is alien to us. One pure utility function splintered into a thousand shards of desire."

(1-6) may not be an entirely bad set of motivations to have: for example love may be a good thing even though it was originally “invented” by our genes for the purposes of making a man and a woman co-operate to bring up a child. We should, however, question our commonsense values and be prepared to abandon or modify them.

Transhumanism asks people to reconsider what they think of as good outcomes in life – to move somewhat away from their commonsense notions of what counts as valuable. (E.g. See Nick Bostrom “core transhumanist values”) We ultimately want to convince people that existence as an uploaded personality on a computer could be as valuable as existence in a moving piece of meat called a human body. We want to convince people that there is value in letting people change the fundamental properties of their bodies, for example by interfacing themselves with computers or by altering the way the reproductive process works [germ line genetic modifications come to mind]. We want to convince people that death is a bad thing at any age, and that there is nothing wrong with wanting to live for many hundreds or thousands of years. Most of us want to convince people that obtaining one’s notion of what counts as good from religion is a mistake. In fact there isn’t actually a huge amount of agreement amongst transhumanists as to exactly what we should replace commonsense values with, which is a bit of a problem!

If transhumanism is to be successful in convincing large numbers of people to move away from commonsense values towards other values, we need to have a scientifically or mathematically compelling argument which points to what people ought to value instead. Wordy arguments of philosophy are clearly not going to be enough, and it is unlikely that people will be convinced to change what they value if you tell them that all things are equally valuable/valueless, or that the notion of “objective value” makes no sense: in the absence of any serious ethical guidance, people will stay exactly where they are – status quo bias. This effectively says that transhumanism is either a realist theory or a failure from the start.

But a compelling realist theory is more than just a rhetorical device. We, the transhumanists, cannot say exactly what is going to be good or bad in the far future, or even what the relevant considerations are.

Would it be better if all minds were merged into one big mind, or are individual personalities a good thing? Would it be ethical to destroy the entire human race to build computer power for a really big, really intelligent AI? Is it ethical to upload someone without their permission? What kind of motivations should we give to an AGI? Can there be such a thing as an AI slave, and should we give human rights to nonhuman intelligences? How much freedom should people be given to alter their own minds and motivations – should we have something like “thought police”? Is privacy (of thoughts or of acts) a good thing or a bad thing? Do we have an ethical obligation to colonize the entire universe?

Transhumanists are advocating radical changes from the current norm [or at least we are the ones thinking about radical changes that are probably going to happen and how we might sway things one way or another], so we must carefully examine our underlying assumptions about what is good and what isn’t. The neo-luddite value-stance that things are OK the way they are and that we should avoid meddling doesn’t need as much careful justification as the transhumanist value-stance that we should radically change things: if the luddites turn out to be wrong, we’ll just have wasted some time by listening to them; if the transhumanists turn out to be wrong, there might not be a second chance. [Of course the neo-luddite value stance, as appealing as it might be, is probably practically untenable]