The above tagline is from the new “Futurisms” blog over at The New Atlantis. If you haven’t had the chance to check it out, I highly recommend you do. The blog engages techies who reduce human cognition to the material processes of the brain and who hope to harness technology to transform human nature, among other Faustian dreams.
While these “futurists” are a fringe group, the founders of the blog (Charles T. Rubin and Ari N. Schulman), argue that they are nevertheless worth debunking because they “are not unconnected to the central aims of the modern scientific project.” While I think the phrase “central aims of the modern scientific project” is a bit too general, they are certainly connected to a reductive materialism that characterizes a number of current scientific projects, including the Daniel Dennett camp of the cognitive sciences, which is still somehow very much the fashion in certain circles.
In English, for example, there are a number of literary critics who have attempted to “reread” humanity, to borrow Futurisms’ tagline, in great works of literature by reducing every emotion expressed in literary texts to certain capacities of the brain, which, in turn, are said to have been formed by that nebulous but convenient god-like force of social evolution. Not too long ago I heard a visiting literary scholar explain things such as love and justice in terms of the evolution of empathy. The care one feels for another, it was posited, was developed in packs of Neanderthals who learned that mutual aide led to increased individual benefits. Among numerous other things, I was struck by this “selfish” definition of love, which seemed to me, and still seems to me, to be very different from the sort of love depicted in most great works of literature, which in its idealized form is almost always self-sacrificial. As is all too often the case, efforts to “reengineer” or “reread” humanity turn out to be efforts to destroy what is distinctly human about it.
Anyway, by all means check out “Futurisms.” And speaking of all things human, be sure to check out Salvo‘s interview with First Things contributor and blogger Wesley J.
Smith.
October 13th, 2009 | 1:41 pm
Futurism, is simply the next logical stage of society’s evolution. To borrow from Martin Buber, first we started with I and Thou (i.e. God). Then we moved to I and You (i.e. God is a super E.T.). Then we moved from I and it (i.e. God is just impersonal evolution). Futurism moves us one step onward, it and it (i.e. we aren’t people. We’re just processes).
Satre raised the question, “Why not suicide?” since the answer to that question can form the meaning of a life. But he was still operating under an “I and it” philosophy, so he exists and was thus able to create some sort of subjective meaning in his life (even if it wasn’t perfect).
The futurist isn’t able to even do that. If you “upload” your consciousness into a machine, all you’re doing is copying your thoughts. *You* won’t actually inhabit the machine since you’re tied to your body. But even if you do that, you’re just an “it”, so life is just a replicating processes, no different from a bacterial infection. Why is it important that this process replicates? If sensory experience is just inputs into the replicating process, why do they need to connect to reality? After all, reality causes pain and infinite pleasure is possible to program into the process. Why should this process do anything at all? To have some meaningful purpose? Meaning is just an it and it can programmed in like pleasure. Ultimately futurism leads to one of two things, to be an ecstatic vegetable or to be the most virulent virus that exists or both.
November 1st, 2009 | 12:44 pm
The answer to your questions, Ronald, is evolution. The process involves a wide variety of things, some of which are repeats of what was previous and some of which are novel mutations, and some of which are rejected and some of which replicate to varying degrees and extents. What we are talking about now is recognizing this process and our role (now that we have recognized it) in attempting to shape it in a meaningful way — rather than in the inconsistent, piecemeal way we have unconsciously tried to do so in the past. The painting continues, but now we have some control over the paintbrush.
Your assessment of futurism is dead wrong. Meaning does not dissolve into subjective meaninglessness; rather, it becomes more potent, because we get to CHOOSE rather than simply be swept along by the processes. It’s really about us becoming conscious and smarter on a large scale that echoes the individual scale this has happened as people have become educated after the Enlightenment, exchanging myth for the best facts as we can figure them out.
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