"The key to our future as a species is already inside of us."
May 21, 2018 11:11 AM Subscribe
We Are Made of Meat: Imagining An Embodied Future. Kameron Hurley presented the keynote speech at the 2018 McMaster University Embodiment in SFF Interdisciplinary Conference.
Kameron Hurley previously on MeFi:
Yes, llamas sure are scaly!
"There was never a call for suppression. There was a call for respect."
"we’re not used to seeing fat people represented positively in media"
Story is powerful
Endless self promotion to sell a few hundred more copies
In Defense of Unlikable Women
Kameron Hurley previously on MeFi:
Yes, llamas sure are scaly!
"There was never a call for suppression. There was a call for respect."
"we’re not used to seeing fat people represented positively in media"
Story is powerful
Endless self promotion to sell a few hundred more copies
In Defense of Unlikable Women
Gamera is really sweet...
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 11:54 AM on May 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 11:54 AM on May 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
Ooh, exciting! The Stars are Legion is fantastic and super biopunk squishy so looking forwards to reading this.
posted by Artw at 12:02 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Artw at 12:02 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Mod note: Couple comments deleted, chaining off a deletion requested by the initial commenter. Y'all are fine, just be sure to reload.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:02 PM on May 21, 2018
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:02 PM on May 21, 2018
I would love to hear a discussion between Watts and Hurley.
posted by Omnomnom at 12:09 PM on May 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Omnomnom at 12:09 PM on May 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
Oh Jesus, I think between the two of them they could come up with some absolutely terrifying nightmares. Not sure Hurley is quite as relentlessly bleak in outlook though.
Also: have read the peice and the peice is good.
posted by Artw at 12:28 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Also: have read the peice and the peice is good.
posted by Artw at 12:28 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Not a close reading but my impression is that the first link is a diatribe against transhumansim, eugenics, objectivism and techbro's. This is good and right.
posted by sammyo at 1:16 PM on May 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by sammyo at 1:16 PM on May 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
Does go a bit contrary to a tweet I saw this morning and an idea I’ve seen around a couple of times that trans people are actually the ones out there doing the most transhumanist stuff, in terms of taking biology into their own hands, and that involves an accuse awareness of bodies and meat, b ut that’s probably orthogonal to the techbro notions of transhumanism.
posted by Artw at 1:23 PM on May 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Artw at 1:23 PM on May 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
trans people are actually the ones out there doing the most transhumanist stuff
I wonder, without meaning to give offence by inappropriate linkages, whether there is now a wider phenomenon of people taking the freedom to rethink themselves in various ways, which might include furries and others who have varying commitments to chosen identities.
posted by Segundus at 1:47 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
I wonder, without meaning to give offence by inappropriate linkages, whether there is now a wider phenomenon of people taking the freedom to rethink themselves in various ways, which might include furries and others who have varying commitments to chosen identities.
posted by Segundus at 1:47 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Wait, what's wrong with transhumanism? Other than the fact that it is relentlessly oversold by its proponents, I mean. I'd love to be freed from the born-in limitations of this squidgy meat machine I'm inhabiting. I don't expect it's going to happen, but I'm all for it in principle.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:51 PM on May 21, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:51 PM on May 21, 2018 [4 favorites]
The hats.
posted by Artw at 2:10 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Artw at 2:10 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
> Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The:
"Wait, what's wrong with transhumanism?"
That it's gleefully oblivious of its own internalized biases regarding race, class, gender, etc.
posted by signal at 2:11 PM on May 21, 2018 [6 favorites]
"Wait, what's wrong with transhumanism?"
That it's gleefully oblivious of its own internalized biases regarding race, class, gender, etc.
posted by signal at 2:11 PM on May 21, 2018 [6 favorites]
I agree with a lot of the points in this article. Consciousness separate from body is a weird dualist idea that I think goes hand in hand with the pseudo-apocalyptic mindset of those who believe in the singularity. The speech seems to suggest we probably can't just plop our consciousness in a computer, and that even if we could we shouldn't because... eugenics? I mean, if we can do it we're going to do it, the only question is how it's done. Humans have been modifying their bodies since we realized we had bodies. Tattoos, head shaping, foot binding, scarification, amputation, and hell even clothing, tools, and weapons are all about modifying or augmenting the thing we were born with. If we can replace more and more body parts with artificial ones, it seems pretty reasonable to think that you can essentially have a human as a brain in a jar. How that jar-brain experiences the external world is another question. A human as a totally digital thing is another question entirely. But, if we could show that you can replace parts of the human brain with a digital equivalent, then digital brains would be possible.
Some nitpicks. We've known about antibiotic resistance since the discovery of antibiotics. We did think it through we just ignored the problem until it was too late. Here's Alexander Fleming's Nobel lecture talking about how the proliferation of antibiotics could destroy their usefullness because of resistance (the relevant bit is on the last page). The bit about "quantum", which always seems to crop up in discussions of consciousness for some reason, is just a non-sequitur. It has nothing to do with the topic other than that quantum is hard to understand and so is consciousness.
posted by runcibleshaw at 2:15 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Some nitpicks. We've known about antibiotic resistance since the discovery of antibiotics. We did think it through we just ignored the problem until it was too late. Here's Alexander Fleming's Nobel lecture talking about how the proliferation of antibiotics could destroy their usefullness because of resistance (the relevant bit is on the last page). The bit about "quantum", which always seems to crop up in discussions of consciousness for some reason, is just a non-sequitur. It has nothing to do with the topic other than that quantum is hard to understand and so is consciousness.
posted by runcibleshaw at 2:15 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Is that a problem with the transhumanist ideal though, or just a problem with the people who make up the transhumanist community?
Like, The Culture is in many ways a transhuman society. Its human members are free to choose different bodies, alter their birth bodies as dramatically as they desire, change their genders at will, and invoke a level of conscious control over their bodily functions (shutting off pain at will, for instance) that an "unamended" human could only dream of. As portrayed, this sounds very liberating!
It would be markedly less liberating in a less equal society and in our society I could certainly see it exacerbating rather than eroding existing inequalities (especially since access to these abilities would doubtless be predicated on having the wealth to buy them) but that seems like more of a cultural problem than a problem with transhumanism per se. Am I missing something?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:17 PM on May 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
Like, The Culture is in many ways a transhuman society. Its human members are free to choose different bodies, alter their birth bodies as dramatically as they desire, change their genders at will, and invoke a level of conscious control over their bodily functions (shutting off pain at will, for instance) that an "unamended" human could only dream of. As portrayed, this sounds very liberating!
It would be markedly less liberating in a less equal society and in our society I could certainly see it exacerbating rather than eroding existing inequalities (especially since access to these abilities would doubtless be predicated on having the wealth to buy them) but that seems like more of a cultural problem than a problem with transhumanism per se. Am I missing something?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:17 PM on May 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
I think the article is better on this than I’m ever going to be, but the main thrust is there’s a bunch of faulty assumptions underlining a lot of the consciousness uploading variety of transhumanism specifically.
posted by Artw at 2:26 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Artw at 2:26 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Ah, well, if we're talking consciousness uploading then that's all handwavey magical stuff to begin with. Might be cool if we can ever do it, depending on the specifics, but it's always seemed unproductively speculative. Makes for some fun SF but that's about it.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:29 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:29 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
> Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The:
"…that seems like more of a cultural problem than a problem with transhumanism per se. Am I missing something?"
Transhumanism is embedded in the current culture, and shares and in some cases extends its problems, but acts as if it didn't. That's the problem.
posted by signal at 2:31 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
"…that seems like more of a cultural problem than a problem with transhumanism per se. Am I missing something?"
Transhumanism is embedded in the current culture, and shares and in some cases extends its problems, but acts as if it didn't. That's the problem.
posted by signal at 2:31 PM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Well, OK… I agree with you, but still say that that's more a problem with transhumanism the movement than transhumanism the concept. Like, an implementation problem, or really a cultural problem. Transhumanism doesn't fix the fact that we live in a grossly unfair society, or the fact that maybe people on the whole are just kind of a bunch of asshole monkeys who happened to grab power because they could. It doesn't make society better, or people better.
But we're splitting hairs at this point; I understand where you're coming from and agree with your criticisms.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:35 PM on May 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
But we're splitting hairs at this point; I understand where you're coming from and agree with your criticisms.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:35 PM on May 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
This was a good speech. My perspective as a neuroscientist concerning the meatiness of our brains and the consequences that has for the possibility of "uploading your brain" is much the same as hers.
posted by biogeo at 6:30 PM on May 21, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by biogeo at 6:30 PM on May 21, 2018 [4 favorites]
My take is that she's overestimating how much things would be simplified if people could upload enough about their brains for their consciousness to be transferred. The result would still be complex and quirky and probably dependent on a functioning society.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:05 PM on May 21, 2018
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:05 PM on May 21, 2018
I'd love to be freed from the born-in limitations of this squidgy meat machine I'm inhabiting.
Comments like these break my heart, cheapening as they do our sojourn in the house of being. At some forty nine years, eleven months and two weeks old, believe me I am acutely aware of the limitations of the physical body — from the encroaching cognitive/linguistic slowness to the dodgy digestion to the trash garbage knees — but cherish those limits as stark reminders of the bounding condition I share with every other human being that has ever lived.
In particular I have no desire whatsoever to transcend mortality, and ultimately think of the aspiration to do so as fundamentally egotistical and adolescent. This is why it's been so refreshing to see the embodied turn progress, both in speculative writing/thinking and in academic philosophy. Its fundamental recognition — that we don't "inhabit" our bodies, so much as constitute an emergent (and maybe even epiphenomenal) outcome of the process of being a body — strikes me as a long overdue correction to human egotism and self-centeredness.
Like, an implementation problem,
No. Consciousness is not an engineering problem, not simply an abstract computational process that can be lifted up and bedded into another substrate or runtime; what we are learning is that, to an extent that may or may not surprise you, consciousness is nothing more or less than the human body bodying. I don't believe we've acquired anything like the subtle understanding of how it arises, how it functions, and what benefits and indeed disadvantages it may confer to intervene usefully in its production. ("Disadvantages"? Popular writers from Tor Nørretranders to Peter Watts to N. Katherine Hayles, working from more recent research, have suggested that conscious awareness is much less central to our ability to survive in the world than we've previously understood, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.)
Having said all of this: I do believe trans people are, at this very moment, legit furthest along the trajectory toward anything like a lived posthuman experience, and anyone who claims to care about posthumanism ought to be paying close and respectful attention to you.
posted by adamgreenfield at 12:32 AM on May 22, 2018 [4 favorites]
Comments like these break my heart, cheapening as they do our sojourn in the house of being. At some forty nine years, eleven months and two weeks old, believe me I am acutely aware of the limitations of the physical body — from the encroaching cognitive/linguistic slowness to the dodgy digestion to the trash garbage knees — but cherish those limits as stark reminders of the bounding condition I share with every other human being that has ever lived.
In particular I have no desire whatsoever to transcend mortality, and ultimately think of the aspiration to do so as fundamentally egotistical and adolescent. This is why it's been so refreshing to see the embodied turn progress, both in speculative writing/thinking and in academic philosophy. Its fundamental recognition — that we don't "inhabit" our bodies, so much as constitute an emergent (and maybe even epiphenomenal) outcome of the process of being a body — strikes me as a long overdue correction to human egotism and self-centeredness.
Like, an implementation problem,
No. Consciousness is not an engineering problem, not simply an abstract computational process that can be lifted up and bedded into another substrate or runtime; what we are learning is that, to an extent that may or may not surprise you, consciousness is nothing more or less than the human body bodying. I don't believe we've acquired anything like the subtle understanding of how it arises, how it functions, and what benefits and indeed disadvantages it may confer to intervene usefully in its production. ("Disadvantages"? Popular writers from Tor Nørretranders to Peter Watts to N. Katherine Hayles, working from more recent research, have suggested that conscious awareness is much less central to our ability to survive in the world than we've previously understood, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.)
Having said all of this: I do believe trans people are, at this very moment, legit furthest along the trajectory toward anything like a lived posthuman experience, and anyone who claims to care about posthumanism ought to be paying close and respectful attention to you.
posted by adamgreenfield at 12:32 AM on May 22, 2018 [4 favorites]
FWIW I see a major ontological difference between a set of data and a real human being. Data is abstract and has no particular identity (a copy is the same data); a human is a real, one-off animal. No matter how well you copy it, a copy is just a copy.
The belief that the actual identity of a mind can somehow be captured in a set of numbers is, I think, an example of a prevalent academic cognitive error, the tendency to mistake the description or the theory for the reality of the thing itself. It’s that clerkish outlook, IMHO, that makes people come to think that the cosmos is literally governed by mathematics or that the world consists of all possible true statements, and similar bollocks.
posted by Segundus at 1:49 AM on May 22, 2018 [1 favorite]
The belief that the actual identity of a mind can somehow be captured in a set of numbers is, I think, an example of a prevalent academic cognitive error, the tendency to mistake the description or the theory for the reality of the thing itself. It’s that clerkish outlook, IMHO, that makes people come to think that the cosmos is literally governed by mathematics or that the world consists of all possible true statements, and similar bollocks.
posted by Segundus at 1:49 AM on May 22, 2018 [1 favorite]
Metafilter: Freed from the born-in limitations of this squidgy meat machine.
posted by dancestoblue at 2:02 AM on May 22, 2018
posted by dancestoblue at 2:02 AM on May 22, 2018
The concept of digital consciousness is flawed in the same way that star trek transporters are flawed. Any system that could create a copy isn't transporting squat, even if the original ceases to exist at the same time... and this saddens me a little. I love the idea of transporters. The "sleeve" idea in Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books is also a lot of fun, but it's basically killing an individual to create a different individual somewhere else. Digital consciousness would be the same.
posted by trif at 3:12 AM on May 22, 2018
posted by trif at 3:12 AM on May 22, 2018
I feel like we’re conflating two very different ideas: keeping our human bodies going indefinitely (and in doing so, perhaps changing them profoundly over time) seems much more plausible (and requires fewer conceptual breakthroughs) than digitising our consciousnesses and uploading ourselves to the cloud. We already have experience of what it’s like to live, for a time, without suffering the thousand natural shocks of aging; it doesn’t seem at all strange to me to want to keep that going.
posted by michaelhoney at 4:11 AM on May 22, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by michaelhoney at 4:11 AM on May 22, 2018 [2 favorites]
Comments like these break my heart, cheapening as they do our sojourn in the house of being. At some forty nine years, eleven months and two weeks old, believe me I am acutely aware of the limitations of the physical body — from the encroaching cognitive/linguistic slowness to the dodgy digestion to the trash garbage knees — but cherish those limits as stark reminders of the bounding condition I share with every other human being that has ever lived.I disagree, if only because I have so few experiences of this body, as an adult, free from pain or illness or physical distress generally, and I have a very deep desire to experience a version of this life, even temporarily, that is free of those things. I don't think that cheapens my experience at all; it might be the only thing that actually acknowledges the reality of it. We all fall apart eventually, and that some of us will come hard against that bounding condition faster than others--faster than most, perhaps--can feel as distancing from our shared humanity to some as it appears to bind us to it for others.
As for the question of transcending mortality, I'm of two minds. Egotistical, most likely. Selfish, certainly. Adolescent? I don't know about that, so much. Man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for, and all that. Given that I don't believe in an actual heaven, I don't think it's adolescent to prefer limping over the next horizon to oblivion, as comfortable and inviting oblivion has sometimes seemed at certain times of my life. To fear the endless, unknowing Nothing is not inherently childish.
Consciousness is not an engineering problem, not simply an abstract computational process that can be lifted up and bedded into another substrate or runtimeThis I agree with entirely. I'm not interested in the version of transhumanism that turns us all into glorified Google Docs until the sun goes cold; it smacks of bullshit, if nothing else. But I wouldn't be averse to a new ankle, a more robust lower intestine, and an immune system that doesn't constantly attack my own body by mistake, a few years to run without pain.
posted by Fish Sauce at 7:45 AM on May 22, 2018 [2 favorites]
Thing is, as soon as it's useful and not part of the glorious transcending-the-meat future it gets called something else.
posted by Artw at 10:16 AM on May 22, 2018
posted by Artw at 10:16 AM on May 22, 2018
It's not just that we're made of meat ... it's that we are meat, and the attempt to separate the self from the body is the root of the problem.
posted by spindrifter at 10:36 AM on May 22, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by spindrifter at 10:36 AM on May 22, 2018 [3 favorites]
I liked the speech so much that in the two days since the OP I bought and read Stars are a Legion.
And it was so great, and super meaty!
And now I need to go read all of her books. Thanks for the OP!
posted by Omnomnom at 11:08 AM on May 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
And it was so great, and super meaty!
And now I need to go read all of her books. Thanks for the OP!
posted by Omnomnom at 11:08 AM on May 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
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posted by Faint of Butt at 11:45 AM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]