Humanity's Identity Crisis
A major theme of this present century will be the pursuit of our collective identity. We are on a search for who we are. What does it mean to be a human? Can there be more than one kind of human? In fact, what exactly is a human?LinkOn average science unveils a new invention every day, and almost without fail these days, that daily invention disrupts the notion of ourselves. Every day we are getting news that challenges our identity. Stem cell therapy, genetic sequencing, artificial intelligence, operational robots, new animal clones, trans-species hybrids, brain implants, memory enhancing drugs, limb prosthetics, social networks -- each of these tools blurs the boundaries between us as individuals and among us as a species. Who are we and who do we want to be?
We get to play with answers to these questions online. In Second Life, or in chat rooms, we can chose who we want to be, our gender, our genetics, even our species. Technologies gives us the means to switch genders, inhabit new forms, modify our own bodies.
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Definition of human: first attribute:
capacity for love, compassion, empathy
Freeman Dyson, in 1971 or so:
"The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: 'Shall we be one species or a million?'"
. . .
The expansion of life over the universe is a beginning, not an end. At the same time as life is extending its habitat quantitatively, it will also be changing and evolving qualitatively into new dimensions of mind and spirit that we cannot imagine. The acquisition of new territory is important, not as an end in itself, but as a means to enable life to experiment with intelligence in a million forms."
Someone tell this guy that postmodernism is dead and that crit-lit naval-gazers got bored with calling themselves cyborgs in the Nineties.
The kid screaming "No you have to be fingerprinted! Everybody has to be fingerprinted!" in Cory's recent Disneyland post is a harbinger of the real conflict that will define what it means to be human.
What if the singularity had already occurred and some of our peers that we posted and emailed with here on the net were AI, the Hive Mind, God, Skynet, call it what you will?
"intelligence in a million forms". Oh yes, ,that is already looking easy, inevitable even,
"Human" intelligence? I do not think A.I.s are far fetched, I believe they will come to pass , certainly more likely than anti-gravity or world peace.
Back to "what is human", is a human without a conscience (pure clinical psychopath) "human"? Is an A.I. with empathy not "human"?
sidebar on Freeman Dyson, his son makes a mean baidarka - or "made"..... time, time.............
Kudos to Takuan, great quote Stefan, wtf are you talking about 0XDEADBEEF?
Being human means so many different things to different people and always will, but I think Takuan hit the nail on the head with where we should start the definition. But I would be interested to see a comparative study on the answers to "What does it mean to be human/What is a human" from such wide sources as a child in Somalia, a businessman in Japan, a teenager in the US, a "businessman" in Columbia, and etc. We might be surprised at the intersections and divisions.
p.s. off-topic, but is the .org TLD failing to resolve for anyone else? No Wikipedia and no Slashdot make Zuzu something something.
Whoever we want to be in matter of a life role, and I speak also of Second Life, it only matters how we feel. If we are esteemed we feel good, this means to be human. I'm working on this topic, esteem: httP://www.sikantis.net/blog
I'm only a naval-gazer during Fleet Week.
The Human does not exist. It's just artifact of the language we use to describe a particular moment in time of the vast life form that inhabits this planet.
I don't know why one would restrict love to humans. I'd like to think it's a universal good though biologists tell me it's just a hormone. Perhaps vast AI's will have no need of such things.
The Human does not exist. It's just artifact of the language we use to describe a particular moment in time of the vast life form that inhabits this planet.
That's almost exactly what I was thinking. The least weed in my garden has as much innate value as me.
i doubt it will be a major theme, it wouldn't make good television.
Will the "collective identity" be increasingly tribal/ethnic/religious/national rather than human? I expect a lot of divergence along these fault lines regarding how these technologies are approached and applied.
definition continued:
self awareness?
will to live?
will to reproduce?
capacity for fear?
capacity for anger?
Empathy is an instinct, it is only necessary for intelligence in the sense that modeling the behavior of others is necessary to predict their actions.
If I explained wtf I'm talking about it would be much longer than Kelly's little essay. I'll try to summarize -
Self and other, autonomy and control. What distinguishes the individual from the culture that informs everything that person knows. What are the boundaries of the myriad loyalties that define that person's identity. How is all this affected by the technological arms race between individualists and authoritarians. What is going to happen now that geography is no longer a hindrance to the spread of culture, and how it determines a person's ethos and their hierarchy of loyalties. Will always-on, instant communication and the breakdown of privacy facilitate a "hive mind", and will that increase freedom by heightening empathy, or decrease it by creating new avenues of coercive conformity. And how does all this come together when paranoid governments keep going bug-fuck crazy over real and imagined terrorist threats, increasingly scarce resources, and the rise of new economies at the expense of failing superpowers?
Our identity politics are going to be far more material, and far more traditional, than they have been in the recent past. What's going to blow the minds of people like Kelly is just how readily people accept radical technology when it gives them an advantage in a world where it seems like enemies are everywhere.
Will the "collective identity" be increasingly tribal/ethnic/religious/national rather than human?
Why should there be collective identity? Why not purely individual? If we could agree to some sort of Prime Directive allowing an ever-expanding maximum amount of personal freedom, each of us could become almost a self-species, endlessly modifying according to need, desire and available means. That would be cool.
That's almost exactly what I was thinking. The least weed in my garden has as much innate value as me.
So, when you have a heart attack in your weedy garden, the paramedics are justified in putting down their equipment and picking up your watering can? Good luck to you, #12, but I certainly hope you aren't MY paramedic, doctor, or anything else I need other than a ... well, not even a gardener, really. You'd not pull my weeds and argue they're just as valuable as my herbs.
Translation: "A major theme of this present century, and last, and the last, and the last, will be the pursuit of our collective identity."
"One must have noisy celebrations for the populace. Fools love noise, and the masses are fools." - Napoleon
"Reality is obsolete." - Graduate student declarations, year after year, from the underfunded, under-fun "MIT MEDIA LAB."
"What luck for the rulers that people do not think." - Hitler
"Lord, what fools these mortals be!" - Shakespeare
COLLECTIVE?
COLLECTIVE?
Co-FUCKING-LECTIVE?
F U, AND YOU AND YOU AND YOU AND YOU TOO.
Hey, let's call a "crisis" instead of have a cocktail party, using the Internet.
COLLECTIVE?
"If you decide to wage a war for the total triumph of your individuality, you must begin by inexorably destroying those who have the greatest affinity with you. All alliance depersonalizes; everything that tends to the collective is your death; use the collective, therefore, as an experiment, after which strike hard, and remain alone!" - Salvador Dali (The Secret Life of Salvador Dali 1942)
"Myriad loyalties that define that person's identity."
"Increased freedom by heightening empathy."
DOUBLE SPEAK ALERT.
TEXTOOK cases no longer set off (any) alarm bells?
HELLS BELLS.
"An advantage in a world where it seems like enemies are everywhere."
You mean like a bad camping trip? Mosquitoes? Local drug stores have solutions for that. Pure DEET. You stick it on your ankles and neck. Sure, your heard the buzz of being eaten alive, but never actually get stung.
WAR IS GOOD.
COLLECTIVE IDENTITY (i.e. loss of personal identity) is war. War against you, as a person who decides when to eat, or get so drunk you puke, or write a book, or take acid when you are 17, or not become a lawyer like your dad hopes for, badly enough to do anything, including buying "home drug tests" at the drugstore.
You'd not pull my weeds and argue they're just as valuable as my herbs.
One man's weed is another man's purslane.
I didn't say that I wouldn't save myself. I do eat food. I merely have no illusions of being superior to the weeds.
"The kid screaming "No you have to be fingerprinted! Everybody has to be fingerprinted!" in Cory's recent Disneyland post is a harbinger of the real conflict that will define what it means to be human."
I think the more conservative & constructive version of the point that is latent in this statement is the one Larry Lessig made in one of his videos that (if memory serves) was linked on boingboing at some point: that, given really easy and simple decisions, our legislators tend to choose the starkly wrong one. Like copyright term extensions, like giving telcoms retroactive immunity (as may easily happen), like recommending that some ridiculous proportion of daily calories be got from sugar, and so on.
Voters are now forced into a position analogous to the screaming boy: the platform on which a presidential candidate runs is so large that pro-lifers (for example) by voting for the last cycle's republican candidate, inadvertently 'scream' their mandate for warrantless surveillance, environmental exploitation, aggressively uncompromising policymaking, the global war on 'terror' and all the rest.
As the world gets smaller, its humanity does too: my local government would not so easily make the same constellation of mistakes that the federal government makes so industriously. Time was when this view would have made me a republican... now, probably disenfranchised.
To be HUMAN is to be FREE. Look at how vacuous the word "freedom" has become, and you will see how vacuous humanity is as well.
our legislators tend to choose the starkly wrong one
You've heard the expression, "I don't pay the hooker for sex. I pay her to leave when we're done."
What if we elect our legislators specifically to express the worst in us so that we don't have to take responsibility for doing it ourselves?
how about a democracy where any leader must set his reserve price - and when his crimes have provoked the people to pay it,he must take it and go?
"Technologies gives us the means to switch genders, inhabit new forms, modify our own bodies."
Imagine how crazy THAT'S gonna get when the Holodeck eventually comes along... I can't wait. Second Life: The Next Generation
Gainclone, Meh... it's not as exciting in reality. For some things and for some people it is the fantasy that is the pay off, not having it actualized is the whole point. Brush up on your Lacan.
While I thought that the PK Dick essay/lecture was great, Kelly's own post seems a bit rambling and vague. I understand that it's just a short blog entry, but would he care to give any examples to back up those sweeping proclamations of our great identity crisis?
I understand the basic PoMo Transhuman yadda yadda, and I think that there's some validity there. Clearly, technology is allowing us to extend our abilities into new and unexplored realms of experience. But is this going to lead to any kind of massive upheaval of human identity?
The human sense of self has already been "extended" by language, fire, agriculture, cities, commerce, astronomy, medicine, electricity, automobiles, mass communication, computers, biotechnology and the Internet, to say nothing of guns, drugs and religion. All of these things have redefined the way that individuals interact with the "outside" world, but we've always assimilated new technology into our bag of tricks with surprisingly little "crisis" compared to the magnitude of the change.
It seems like the claims of an identity crisis are built upon the notion that we will reach some point where our built-in sense of self-awareness just "breaks" and can no longer handle all the extensions that we've added on. I'm probably mis-characterizing Kelly's argument (such as it is), but I just don't buy that.
We're malleable critters, we are. New ideas and technologies will crop up, and these will challenge those who grew up under older ideas and technologies. But are we going to have a species-wide identity crisis? My intuition and my Magic 8-ball both say "doubtful."
-lessreal
"A human is an animal with no fur and two legs."
"What about ducks?"
"Correction: A human is an animal with no fur, two legs and an upright gait."
Simple, really.
So, just us and the dinosaurs then.
Phew! Thatis simple.
@28
What about Tom Selleck?
Ah, now this is something I know a thing or two about! (Unlike the other BS I spout on other topics.) This is my academic specialty. I happen to be, in real life, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy, and I teach a course on this very question, "Technology and Human Identity".
A lot of my background is in the history of philosophy, and these identity questions go back a long time. I begin my class with a survey of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, and others who write on the question of what is human in two ways: one is an ethical approach (what is an ideal life for a human being? how much does this differ between people? what is our purpose? is it just the ones we give ourselves or is there something larger? how do we distinguish persons, i.e., those deserving full moral and legal rights, from non-persons? should individuals be defined by the groups they are members of? etc.).
The other is a descriptive or metaphysical approach, which seems to be what Kevin emphasizes in his post (what is the self? what is consciousness? how do we know if other beings have it? do human beings possess free will even as it seems their actions are determined by natural laws? when does a person come into being, e.g., conception, birth, the age of reason, and end, e.g., death, senility, a vegetative state?).
What's interesting about issues of human identity is how they underlie so many of the most controversial issues today: abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia, animal rights, race/gender/identity politics, human evolution (or design), the status of mental illness (real disease, social construct, or something else?), and above all concerns about the permissibility of enhancement technologies.
This last question is my particular focus, and coupled with issues about artificial intelligence, I imagine it to be the biggest philosophical and practical issue of the 21st century. Should people be allowed to take psychopharmoceuticals (Prozac and other SSRIs, beta-blockers, Ritalin and other ADHD drugs, etc.) when they're not diagnosed with a mental disorder? Should we be able to choose the genes of our children? Should artificial intelligences be granted rights? Should people be allowed to have sex with robots? (The last is one of my favorite to discuss in class. :-) )
It's all very exciting and there's much more to it than I could write in a single comment. If anyone would like to learn more, I'd be happy to share some of my sources or general thoughts on the matter.
I wanted to respond to this comment by "lessreal" (I also hope that my note above gave some examples of ID crisis issues that Kevin may have neglected to include):
"It seems like the claims of an identity crisis are built upon the notion that we will reach some point where our built-in sense of self-awareness just "breaks" and can no longer handle all the extensions that we've added on."
You're right that people have adapted to changes over time. The problem, I think, is that the accelerating rate of major changes produced by technology is not going to give people enough time to adapt. A lot of futurists have written on this and while many of their claims are far-fetched, there is a trend of major new technologies arising and being integrated into society at a faster rate (telephones, cars, televisions, air travel, computers, Internet, cell phones, etc.--each took up less time).
Here's where I suspect one real problem to be: think about how annoying it is to have to upgrade computers, cell phones, iPods, and our other fun toys every couple of years. What happens when we start having to do that for the technologies we integrate into our bodies? In order to compete with other people, we'll constantly be needing to upgrade ourselves. (It's like the steroids problem in baseball... on steroids.) More than just an annoyance, it means a fundamentally different way of understanding what we are.
And, if as I imagine likely, the EU and the US ban a lot of these technologies, SE Asia will not. For some reason, countries like India, S. Korea, Thailand, and Japan are much friendlier to things like designer babies and humanoid robots being integrated into society. (Not 100% sure about Chinese views, but I suspect it's similar there.) I predict that this will accelerate the rise of that part of the world over the West. If the 20th was "the American Century", the 21st will be "the Asian" or perhaps "the Chinese Century", and for more reasons than most expect.
What does it mean to be human?
Meat, around bones on a bipedal frame descended from monkeys through the most hilariously elaborate game of trial and error we've done theorized. there's also the body odors/excretions and sex thing.
What we should be asking is "What does it mean to be aware of one's self and one's environment in the traditional homo sapien sense?"
We stress too much emphasis on "being human" when it's our awareness that is really the intriguing part. It's also the part that's not likely to change(grow, maybe) no matter how many fancy toys we weld onto our calcium and organic goop frames.
We're still trying to comprehend the universe with monkey brains and communicate complicated emotions and concepts with a method developed to tell each other where the ripe fruit was. Tell me when science comes up with a solution for those basic design flaws.
There's a big difference between being a human and being human.
(#3)I need a definition of Human that leaves the door open to include sufficiently advanced AI but lets me exclude the kid screaming "No you have to be fingerprinted! Everybody has to be fingerprinted!" and the sheeple who obey without question.
(#11)That's a very interesting way of looking at it. I'm adding that line to my quotes.>H/=H
This mostly applies to netcitizens, most of people outside our little bright world usually just have to mind the basic stuff: food, clothing and shelter. And that's all the crisis they need.
If I were a total Dawkinsite, I'd say something like:
"'What it means to be human' is a vague, undefinable question. A human is the particular species of Homo Sapiens, an arrangement of DNA created just so. The unease we feel at the fact that a chimpanzee is only a few lines of codes different from us is of no import - we have classified ourselves by this taxonomy, and we cannot retain our old territoriality with this new knowledge."
But I don't really like that answer. It's the same subroutine they call when they say that defining God is impossible. It's basically literalists ignoring the lessons of Wittgenstein. People are looking for something different other than a strict definition when they ask what it means to be human.
In response to #1 who wrote, "Definition of human: first attribute: capacity for love, compassion, empathy"
My dogs display these "first" attributes. They are human. They also loathe squirrels while befriending cats. Kind of like people.
There's another, cloaked force that comes into discussion of identity on the web, and may have an unwitting role in any upcoming identity crisis: the programmer.
If you think of it, programmers have a pivotal role in the development of our electronic identities; they write the social networking and blogging software we use, they define the interfaces we build our identities in on a daily basis. We shape our electronic identity based on the tools we use -- we're a web diarist because we use LiveJournal; we're a photographer because we use Flickr. The tool we use points our electronic identity in a set direction. And the programmer builds the tool. It's so interesting that the decisions a programmer makes when building a piece of social software can have a great impact on the way you develop your identity based on that piece of software. Think of the addition of categories to a blog post. By adding categories to a blog post, the blogger is prompted to think of their life as something that is categorizable -- she's associated with work, nerdcore, make blogs.
The thing is, I don't know that people have really figured that out yet. Electronic identity is external to the body; it lives among IP addresses and domain names. Historically, identity has been internal, shaped by external forces (church, culture, state, education). With social media we're distributing our identity (electronic or otherwise) across a huge area, externalizing it and giving control over its shaping to a host of players. If Blogger X spends 3 years of her life building her identity in LiveJournal, what happens to that identity if LiveJournal disappears without notice?
where do the ripples go after the stone sinks?
#40 asks, “Where do the ripples go after the stone sinks?”
Good question. Can we peek at immortality with this question? Can we scratch at the edge of the universe?
If sound waves are truly immeasurable, is that tangible proof that we go on forever? indefinitely? Maybe in this case “forever” is defined by a geographic expanse and the time it takes to travel this area.
And do the sound waves that I have already shed remain contributing to me “the sunk stone”? What good to ones dead coil is it’s still ringing sound waves?
Just because a sound wave goes forever in this life, does not prove that there are other lives or that time is transcendent of flesh.
Only time will tell.
A human is an animal with no fur and two legs.
You obviously hang out in different bars than me.
Freshfromdetox: You think there might be some emergents out there, just playing along and learning how to be human? Humans are so messy, I hope this new Being/s can learn from our mistakes. To err is human. I hope our new illuminati are forgiving.
Takuan #40 -- Outward, and bouncing off any hard edges, losing energy all the while until they're subsumed into the medium through which they were propagating.
this too, shall pass.
So, enjoy the ride.
"On average science unveils a new invention every day"
Source? Citation?
@Patrick Dodds (#46)
That actually reminds me of my favourite student writing ever, courtesy of my partner:
"Throughout time, many people have had opinions on things."
Humanity is a taxon; a species Homo sapiens. There is, however, no designated holotype.
Now y'all can start sparring over just what a species is.