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Is Transhumanism scientifically plausible? Posthuman Predictions and the Human Predicament
Abstract
The debate about transhumanism frequently revolves around whether such a vision is desirable or detestable but typically glosses over the question of whether it is actually feasible. The plausibility of the transhumanist vision is a scientific question, not an ethical or aesthetic question. Can we realistically expect the creation of super-intelligent machines, enhanced brains, and immortal bodies? Can we realistically anticipate the supersession of the human by some kind of superhuman, spiritual artificial intelligence? If we extrapolate the technological advances of the last century into the future, then we are in for some big changes in the coming decades. But is such an extrapolation really appropriate? We can imagine such possibilities, but that does not mean they are credible. Both sides of the transhumanism debate seem to assume the technological feasibility of some of these bold predictions – it is only a matter of applied effort or the prevention thereof. The scientific claims of transhumanism, however, need to be examined critically because some of these technoscientific prophecies may not be plausible. Of course, our ability to predict the future is always limited. The sciences involved in transhumanism are also incredibly complicated. The point of this essay is to raise some scientific doubts about our posthuman future.
Weird tales are rooted in gothic, science and speculative fictions but they also engage real science. Rob Guillory's comics series Farmhand (2018-ongoing) depicts a discordant relationship between science, perception and ideology through themes related to contemporary farming and bioengineering. This article explores how Guillory's comic utilises weird qualities through realism, creation of atmosphere, and the use of layout and seriality. Further, this analysis considers the ways in which the comics form enables open-ended and multi-perspective storytelling. Weird devices invite a questioning, reflective but unresolved engagement with contemporary issues, which enables Guillory's comics to imaginatively reconsider normative social structures, ideologies, and the frames which reinforce them.
This chapter focuses on the major subdivisions and events in the terrestrial sequences of the Pleistocene and Holocene, with correlations to the marine record. Current proposals for formal subdivision are outlined. PLEISTOCENE SERIES Evolution of terminology The classification and interpretation of the youngest stratigraphic sequences, variously known as Pleistocene, Holocene, and Quaternary, have been, and still are, a matter of debate. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, many of the sequences were attributed to the biblical flood (the “Diluvial” theory). This theory could account for unconsolidated sediments that rested unconformably on “Tertiary” rocks and capped hills, and that commonly contained exotic boulders and the remains of animals, many still extant. This origin for the “Diluvium” was accepted by most eminent geologists of the time, including Buckland and Sedgwick. Floating ice had frequently been seen transporting exotic materials, providing an explanation for the transport of the boulders, and reinforcing the Diluvial theory. This explanation lead to adoption of the term “drift” to characterize the sediments. However, geologists working in the Alps and northern Europe had been struck by the extraordinary similarity of the “drift” deposits and their associated landforms to those being formed by modern mountain glaciers.
Using astronomical telescopes and biological microscopes, among a virtual arsenal of other tools of high technology, modern scientists are weaving a thread of understanding spanning the origin, existence, and destiny of all things. Now emerging is a unified scenario of the cosmos, including ourselves as sentient beings, based on the time-honored concept of change. From galaxies to snowflakes, from stars and planets to life itself, we are beginning to identify an underlying, ubiquitous pattern penetrating the fabric of all the natural sciences—a sweepingly encompassing view of the order and structure of every known class of object in our richly endowed Universe. We call this subject "cosmic evolution."
Recent advances throughout the sciences suggest that all organized systems share generic phenomena characterizing their emergence, development and evolution. Whether they are physical, biological or cultural systems, certain similarities and homologies pervade evolving entities throughout an amazingly diverse Universe. How strong are the apparent continuities among Nature's historical epochs and how realistic is the quest for unification? To what extent might we broaden conventional evolutionary thinking, into both the pre-biological and post-biological domains? Is such an extension valid, merely metaphorical, or just plain confusing?
For many years at Harvard University, starting in the 1970s and continuing to the present, I have taught, initially with George B. Field, an introductory course on cosmic evolution that sought to identify common denominators bridging a wide variety of specialized science subjects—physics, astronomy, geology, chemistry, biology, and anthropology, among others. The principal aim of this interdisciplinary course explored a universal framework against which to address some of the most basic issues ever contemplated: the origin of matter and the origin of life, as well as how radiation, matter, and life interact and change with time. Our intention was to help sketch a grand evolutionary synthesis that would better enable us to understand who we are, whence we came, and how we fit into the overall scheme of things. In doing so, my students and I gained a broader, integrated knowledge of stars and galaxies, plants and animals, air, land, and sea. Of paramount import, we learned how the evident order and increasing complexity of the many varied, localized structures within the Universe in no way violate the principles of modern physics, which, prima facie, maintain that the Universe itself, globally and necessarily, becomes irreversibly and increasingly disordered.
Beginning in the late 1980s while on sabbatical leave at MIT, and continuing for several years thereafter while on the faculty of the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University, I occasionally offered an advanced version of the introductory course. This senior seminar attempted to raise substantially the quantitative aspects of the earlier course, to develop even deeper insights into the nature and role of change in Nature, and thus to elevate the subject of cosmic evolution to a level that colleague scientists and intelligent lay persons alike might better appreciate. This brief and broadly brushed monograph—written mostly in the late 1990s during a stint as Phi Beta Kappa National Lecturer, and polished while resuming the teaching at Harvard of my original course on cosmic evolution--is an intentionally lean synopsis of the salient features of that more advanced effort.
Some will see this work as reductionistic, with its analytical approach to the understanding of all material things. Others will regard it as holistic, with its overarching theme of the whole exceeding the sum of Nature's many fragmented parts. In the spirit of complementarity, I offer this work as an evolutionary synthesis of both these methodologies, integrating the deconstructionism of the former and
the constructivist tendencies of the latter. Openly admitted, my inspiration for writing this book has been Erwin Schroedinger's seminal little tract of a half-century ago, What is Life?, yet herein to straighten and extend the analysis to include all known manifestations of order and complexity in the Universe. No attempt is made to be comprehensive in so far as details are concerned; much meat has been left off the bones. Nor is this work meant to be technically rigorous; that will be addressed in a forthcoming opus. Rather, the intent here is to articulate a skeletal précis—a lengthy essay, really—of a truly voluminous subject in a distilled and readable manner. To bend a hackneyed cliché, although the individual trees are most assuredly an integral part of the forest, in this particular work the forest is of greater import. My aim is to avoid diverting the reader from the main lines of argument, to stay focused on target regarding the grand sweep of change from big bang to humankind.
Of special note, this is not a New Age book with mystical overtones however embraced or vulgarized by past scholars, nor one about the history and philosophy of antiquated views of Nature. It grants no speculation on the pseudo-science fringe about morphic fields or quantum vitalism or interfering dieties all mysteriously affecting the ways and means of evolution; nor do we entertain epistemological discussions about the limits of human knowledge or post-modernist opinions about the sociological implications of science writ large. This is a book about mainstream science, pure and simple, outlining the essence of an ongoing research program admittedly multidisciplinary in character and colored by the modern scientific method's unavoidable mix of short-term subjectivity and long-term objectivity.
In writing this book, I have assumed an undergraduate knowledge of natural science, especially statistical and deterministic physics, since as we shall see, much as for classical biological evolution, both chance and necessity have roles to play in all evolving systems. The mathematical level includes that of integral calculus and differential equations, with a smattering of symbolism throughout; the units are those of the centimeter-gram-second (cgs) system, those most widely used by practitioners in the field, editorial conventions notwithstanding. And although a degree of pedagogy has been included when these prerequisites are exceeded, some scientific language has been assumed. "The book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics," said one of my two intellectual heroes, Galileo Galilei, and so are parts of this one. Readers with unalterable math phobia will benefit from the unorthodox design of this work, wherein the "bookends" of Prologue-Introduction and Discussion-Epilogue, comprising more than half of the book, can be mastered without encountering much mathematics at all.
What is presented here, then, is merely a sketch of a developing research agenda, itself evolving, ordering and complexifying—an abstract of scholarship-in-progress incorporating much data and many ideas from the entire spectrum of natural science, yet which attempts to surpass scientific popularizations (including some of my own) that avoid technical lingo, most numbers, and all mathematics. As such, this book should be of interest to most thinking people—active researchers receptive to an uncommonly broad view of science, sagacious students of many disciplines within and beyond science, the erudite public in search of themselves and a credible worldview—in short, anyone having a panoramic, persistent curiosity about the nature of the Universe and of our existence in it.
-- Summary Abstract of This Work --
The essence of this book outlines the grand scenario of cosmic evolution by qualitatively and quantitatively examining the natural changes among radiation, matter, and life within the context of big-bang cosmology. The early Universe is shown to have been flooded with pure energy whose radiation energy density was initially so high as to preclude the existence of any appreciable structure. As the Universe cooled and thinned, a preeminent phase change occurred a few hundred centuries after the origin of all things, at which time matter's energy density overthrew the earlier primacy of radiation. Only with the onset of technologically manipulative beings (on Earth and perhaps elsewhere) has the energy density contained within matter become, in turn, locally dominated by the rate of free energy density flowing through open organic structures.
Using non-equilibrium thermodynamics at the crux, especially energy flow considerations, we argue that it is the contrasting temporal behavior of various energy densities that have given rise to the environments needed for the emergence of galaxies, stars, planets, and life forms. We furthermore maintain that a necessary (though perhaps not sufficient) condition—a veritable prime mover—for the emergence of such ordered structures of rising complexity is the expansion of the Universe itself. Neither demonstrably new science nor appeals to non-science are needed to explain the impressive hierarchy of the cosmic-evolutionary scenario, from quark to quasar, from microbe to mind.
This book is an extensive rewrite of an earlier one, Cosmic Dawn: The Origins of Matter and Life, that I authored some twenty-five years ago. That original book, based on an interdisciplinary course that I cocreated at Harvard University in the 1970s (and that I still teach there), was wonderfully received by both students and public alike. Even colleagues uncharacteristically acknowledged it, despite its popularized account, awarding it several literary prizes. Yet much has occurred in the world of science in the intervening decades. Researchers around the globe have acquired vast amounts of new observational data and have gained more theoretical insight into many aspects of cosmic evolution. The intellectual framework has remained much the same, but the details have become richly enhanced.
Astronomers now have intricate models of the early Universe and of the galaxies that formed long ago but have not yet solved some of the most formidable cosmological puzzles. Biologists now better understand
the rate and tempo of life’s evolution while reaffirming the essence of neo-Darwinism, yet they still debate the mechanisms of change that might supplement the principle of natural selection. Environmentalists
have greatly improved their ability to monitor Earth’s biosphere yet are unable to predict the adverse long-term trends in climatic change. Chemists now more accurately simulate conditions that likely gave rise
to the origin of life, geologists build exquisite maps of Earth’s interior to aid comparative planetology, and anthropologists have accumulated a wealth of bones and artifacts from which to unravel our human past—but problems remain everywhere among those devilish details.
Of equal importance to those advances made in the particular disciplines, science during the past decade has also become more interdisciplinary. Highly focused researchers now talk to colleagues across specialized
boundaries—astronomers to paleontologists, cosmologists to particle physicists, biologists to mathematicians, neurologists to computer scientists. The breakdown of academic barriers is long overdue, as “thinking out of the box” is increasingly valued today. And with many fields now moving from reductionist to integrationist approaches, multidisciplinarity is in vogue for the twenty-first century. We are entering an age of synthesis, when the drive toward unification is once again at the fore.
That said, my attempted unification concerns what is empirically observed “out the window” in Nature—mainly, detectable things in the world around us, such as atoms, stars, plants, and animals. I see no evidence for cosmic strings, eleven dimensions, or multiple universes. Nor do I feel the need to embrace anthropic reasoning. The weak anthropic principle—that sentient beings eventually emerge in the Universe--is hardly more than cosmic evolution at work, whereas the strong principle—that the Universe is made for us—seems nothing more than teleology at play. Rather than appealing to Providence or “multiverses” to justify the numerical values of some physical constants (such as the speed of light or the charge of an electron), I prefer to reason that when the laws of science become sufficiently robust, we shall naturally understand the apparent “fine-tuning” of Nature. It’s much akin to mathematics, when considering the value of π. Who would have thought, a priori, that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter would have the odd value of 3.14159 . . . ? Why isn’t it just 3, or 3.1, or some other crisp number, rather than such a peculiar value that runs on ad infinitum? We now understand enough mathematics to realize that this is simply the way geometry scales; there is nothing mystical about a perfect circle—yet it surely is fine-tuned, and if it were not it wouldn’t be a circle. Circles exist as gracefully rounded curves closed upon themselves because π has the odd value it does. Likewise, ordered systems in Nature, including life, likely exist because the physical constants have their decidedly odd values.
Gratifyingly, the concept of pervasive change on all scales remains much as I initially envisioned in Cosmic Dawn. If anything, the story of cosmic evolution has been strengthened by advances in nonequilibrium
thermodynamics, a frontier subject that models the flow of energy through open, complex structures—whether those structures are galaxies, stars, planets, or life. To be sure, a great deal of new meat has been
placed on the bones of the skeletal structure first outlined more than two decades ago.
Much revising, updating, and enlarging has gone into this new book. While still preserving the broad scope, chronological sequence, and literary style that made the original book accessible to a wide audience, I
have:
• overhauled completely the science content, bringing everything up
to date and thus bolstering the scenario of cosmic evolution with the
latest scientific findings;
• supplemented the pencil-sketch drawings of the central ideas with
two dozen photographs that provide much observational evidence
for those ideas;
• reorganized entirely the chapters on chemical and biological evolution
to give each more coverage and to incorporate recent scientific
advances;
• provided a glossary of key terms, which are especially helpful for such
a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary subject that crosses so many scientific
boundaries.
∞
To make the scenario of cosmic evolution readable for a general audience,
I have avoided referring in the text to any living authorities. To
cite each of the specialist researchers now contributing to the subject
would detract from the clarity of the concepts stressed throughout; the
apportionment of credit to individuals is less important than the big
picture granted by the sweep of the subject writ large. Suffice it to say
that the narrative described here is based on countless scientific results
advanced by legions of specialists working across the entire spectrum of
human knowledge. The bibliography at the end of the book, which
may be consulted for further reading, lists a sampling of many fine
works that I found useful while synthesizing this survey from big bang
to humankind.
Many colleagues have helped mold my views on the grand themes
and intricate details of cosmic evolution; some of them have influenced
the way I teach, write, and research this highly inclusive subject. I remain
especially indebted to George Field and the late Harlow Shapley, both
former directors of the Harvard College Observatory—the first for inviting
me to join him in exploring this interdisciplinary subject at the
start of my professional career a quarter-century ago, and the second
for inspirationally paving the way in cross-boundary teaching and research
(which he called “cosmography”) more than a half-century ago. I
am grateful to my wife, Lola, who, in drawing all the freehand illustrations
in this work, has beautifully combined the thought-provoking aesthetics
of an artist with the technical accuracy of a scientist. Michael
Haskell, Fred Spier, and an anonymous reviewer offered close reading
of the manuscript that improved its content and style. Above all, I
thank the nearly four thousand students who have taken my course on
cosmic evolution during the past generation and who, by embracing its
only prerequisite—“persistent curiosity”—have helped crystallize my
thoughts and insights on this powerful worldview for the twenty-first
century.
--Eric Chaisson
While Darwinism has successfully resisted reduction to physics, the authors point out that it has from the outset developed and applied its core explanatory concept, natural selection, by borrowing models from dynamics, a branch of physics. The recent development of complex systems dynamics may afford Darwinism yet another occasion to expand its explanatory power.
Darwinism's use of dynamical models has received insufficient attention from biologists, historians, and philosophers who have concentrated instead on how evolutionary biology has maintained its autonomy from physics. Yet, as Depew and Weber observe, it is only by recovering Darwin's own relationship to Newtonian models of systems dynamics, and genetical Darwinism's relationship to statistical mechanics and probability theory, that insight can be gained into how Darwinism can successfully meet the challenges it is currently facing.
Drawing on recent scholarship in the history of biology, Depew and Weber bring the dynamical perspective to bear on a number of important episodes in the history of the Darwinian research tradition: Darwin's "Newtonian" Darwinism, the rise of "developmentalist" evolutionary theories and the eclipse of Darwinism at the turn of the century, Darwinism's struggles to incorporate genetics, its eventual regeneration in the modern evolutionary synthesis, challenges to that synthesis that have been posed in recent decades by molecular genetics, and recent proposals for meeting those challenges.
Bradford Books imprint
This book proposes a theory of human cognitive evolution, drawing from paleontology, linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, and especially neuropsychology. The properties of humankind's brain, culture, and cognition have coevolved in a tight iterative loop; the main event in human evolution has occurred at the cognitive level, however, mediating change at the anatomical and cultural levels. During the past two million years humans have passed through three major cognitive transitions, each of which has left the human mind with a new way of representing reality and a new form of culture. Modern humans consequently have three systems of memory representation that were not available to our closest primate relatives: mimetic skill, language, and external symbols. These three systems are supported by new types of ''hard'' storage devices, two of which (mimetic and linguistic) are biological, one technological. Full symbolic literacy consists of a complex of skills for interacting with the external memory system. The independence of these three uniquely human ways of representing knowledge is suggested in the way the mind breaks down after brain injury and confirmed by various other lines of evidence. Each of the three systems is based on an inventive capacity, and the products of those capacities - such as languages, symbols, gestures, social rituals, and images - continue to be invented and vetted in the social arena. Cognitive evolution is not yet complete: the externalization of memory has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think. This is changing the role of biological memory and the way in which the human brain deploys its resources; it is also changing the form of modern culture.
