Infinite Lock-In, part 11

Are we facing a death of subjectivity? In digital heaven, what will apples taste like? And could people be forced out of biological existence?

The first section below, “Aphantasia and Apples,” makes several references to ideas by a few people (Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier, Elon Musk) examined in earlier installments of “Infinite Lock-In.” I believe you can follow the gist, dear reader, but if you’re a bit lost, check out the series page (link above) to see what you’ve missed.

Aphantasia and Apples

The Australian writer Jonathan Craig was the first person to remark on anything I’ve published to Singular Dream. He remarked on “Immortality and Its Malcontents,” in which I cited the struldbrugs in Gulliver’s third voyage to critique the transhumanist project of immortality. Craig had been reading Kurzweil, too. He’d recently written an essay pondering his own misgivings about the Singularity.

We discussed it by email. I brought up my examples of operating systems and traffic lights as triumphant paradigms, then expounded on my concerns about a loss of variety in paradigms of mind. Here’s an intriguing excerpt from Craig’s reply, where he thinks about what experiences we might “translate” into virtual reality:

Another good example is aphantasia, or the inability to visualise imagined objects clearly. I can see this being anomalous enough not to survive translation.

It has also occurred to me that one of the least processor-intensive ways to recreate taste would be through drawing on memory recordings. So we might get to a point where you can taste an apple in VR, but it’s the default and/or democratically agreed taste of apple, rather than an individual experience of one. I don’t know how people would feel about that. I guess it’s better than the lifeless VR I depicted? But I definitely think the death of subjectivity is an alarming prospect.

I love apples but not all apples. My favorites are Pink Ladies, Envies, and Cosmic Crisps. I give the so-called Red Delicious apple a wide berth. It tastes like cardboard to me. A virtual reality in which “the default and/or democratically agreed taste of apple” is the Red Delicious would be my special hell.¹

Are we to be deprived of whatever experiences don’t get “recorded” and uploaded? Do Kurzweil et al really think we’ll manage to upload the whole universe of experience? What of experiences no one’s ever had? The foregone conclusion is “there’s nothing new under the sun.” Only a fool really believes that!

Lanier is similarly disturbed by the potential death of subjectivity. Sadly, strangely, he seems to be one of only a few people ringing alarm bells about it. And that group of people looks ever more marginal, especially now that large language models like GPT have come along. People have begun wringing their hands over whether AI is gaining subjectivity. Whether humans lose it seems to be the last thing on anyone’s mind.

I’m baffled by this. I’m especially baffled to hear the issue treated flippantly by Elon Musk, e.g. “You obviously won’t be quite the same as you are today.” He knows how much sway he has. It’s irresponsible of him to minimize the issue.

And folks like Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil know better than nearly anyone how the tech industry works. It’s inexcusable for them to pretend the industry will work some other, contrary way in the future — that the future’s tech companies will succeed in digitizing every paradigm, every possible model of the human mind, and they’ll succeed in digitizing existence, damn the costs. Unless these folks aren’t as smart as we think they are, I have to wonder if they really know mind-uploading in a technological singularity can eradicate an untold swath of experiences.

Even aphantasia, which at first blush sounds like a cognitive impairment that people would be glad to lose, offers something unique in the way of experience. Being unable to visualize imagined objects clearly may mean you can think about them in usefully abstract ways, more readily reifying them as ideas. It’s not necessarily something we need to get rid of. Only an unimaginative person would just assume it is.

Do Kurzweil and other Singularitarians realize mind-uploading can destroy whole worlds of experience as well as the paradigms of mind those worlds inform? Do they realize that, with the loss of each paradigm of mind, we will lose its perspectives, history, ontology, and contributions to human culture and civilization? Do they know discarding paradigms threatens to lock us into a narrower, shallower, poorer world?

If they know, are they not admitting it because, with so much money to make in the transhuman future, they want mind-uploading to happen anyway? Or do they just not give a damn because they think their paradigm will triumph?

Retiring Early

On that bleak note, we now arrive at the part of my critique of cybernetic totalist transhumanism where I have to bring up the icky topic of eugenics. Singularitarians have heard this objection before. They may protest all day it will never happen, but there’s a nightmarish possibility latent in the cybernetic totalist worldview.

With a digital heaven at hand, certain people may be at first gently nudged, then vigorously told, and at last legally forced to “retire early” from biological existence. You know, for the good of the species, and incidentally for their own good, too.

This scheme’s advertisement is aimed at narrower audiences, for instance the parents of severely disabled children. A Sarah McLachlan song plays over a montage of the unfortunate — kids in hospital beds, kids in wheelchairs, stick-thin kids riddled with cancer, kids with Down’s syndrome — as a universally beloved celebrity lends his heartfelt endorsement, imploring parents to “do what’s right for your child.”

You get the picture.

Lest I be accused of reductio ad Hitlerum, let me point out that the madness of the Holocaust didn’t emerge from nowhere. Philosophically, it fed on Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch and on the Enlightenment idea that people could be “rationally and scientifically” categorized in amoral schemes of social engineering — the idea Swift satirizes in “A Modest Proposal.” Nietzsche meant well. The Enlightenment thinkers meant well. But all it took was a lost war, an economic depression, and unscrupulous, power-mad people willing to scapegoat other people, and those ideas hatched by well-meaning philosophers took on a terrifying, genocidal power.

Today, it’s mind-boggling to see transhumanist thinkers blithely float ideas with just as much dystopian potential, as if they think history can’t repeat itself.

For a better argument than I can offer about the potential for eugenics (though that’s not all he addresses), I suggest you read Jonathan Craig’s essay “In Heaven, I’d Be Blind.” There, he contemplates what transhumanism offers to the visually impaired, what it doesn’t offer to people blind from birth like him, and what he thinks its long-term implications for disabled people could be.

Craig isn’t an overreacting Luddite, either. He bases his ideas on legal precedent and history. According to a 2018 fact sheet, “Forced sterilisation of people with disability, particularly women and girls with disability, and people with intersex variations, is an ongoing practice that remains legal and sanctioned by Governments in Australia.”

Several of the observations about mind-uploading in Craig’s essay have parallels in Quibble. I leave it to you, dear reader, to intuit what they are.

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rem

One is welcome to comment.

1. The Matrix at least got this much right. Remember Mouse’s spiel about Taystee Wheat and chicken? It’s a pity the movie didn’t have more such moments. But, as I said, it’s really just an action flick, not a thoughtful examination of the Singularity.