One of the many interesting turns in yesterday’s A&P discussion came when someone suggested that it’s presumptuous of nonbelievers to assume the ultimate explanation of life and existence must necessarily be scientific. How do we know we’re not so low on the evolutionary escalator that all our big categories (including “scientific” and “religious”) won’t eventually be swallowed up by forms of intelligence we can’t begin now to fathom? Perhaps our heated debates about god and cosmology will all be left in the dustbin of natural history.
I think that’s an intriguing suggestion. Pride does goeth before a fall, and while we have come a long way from stone knives and bearskins we still need to eat our humble pie. Is anyone besides John Horgan still talking about the “end of science” these days, let alone the end of inquiry? It’s thrilling to think of the human adventure as only the “beginning of infinity.” (That’s Isaac Asimov‘s phrase in End of Eternity, lately exapted by David Deutsch [On Point].) Maybe a wholly different spectrum of light will be shed, when our great- great-whatevers find a way to see through all that opaque Dark Matter. But of course that’s going to take awhile.
The transhumanists think we can speed the process along, through the adept deployment of new life technologies. In his “Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy” Mark Walker (reported Bill McKibbben in Enough) says we should
create beings who are as far removed from us in intelligence as we are from apes,” and then wait for them to provide the answers… They would, he writes, be godlike. And then they could provide the theory of everything.
In Remaking Eden Lee Silver imagines posthuman philosophers of the remote future finally answering the Big Questions:
- Where did the universe come from?
- Why is there something rather than nothing?
- What is the meaning of conscious existence?
Will those philosophers be scientists or religionists? Will they have a pious bone in their bodies, or a reverential electrode in their neural nets, or…? Will anything to them be sacred?
It’s impossible to say, and for some of us it’s hard to care what they’ll say. We’re the ones asking those questions right now. We have to fashion our answers with the conceptual tools we’ve got, not the ones we’d like to imagine. (Is that the philosophical analogue of the Rumsfeld Doctrine?)
And so it’s entirely predictable that mere humans will continue to choose sides between science and religion, theism and atheism, etc., and will continue to be tone-deaf or just indifferent to the other side. I just hope we’ll all continue to be as agreeably disagreeable as the students in A&P have been, so far. Let’s make those posthumans proud.
Tags: Bill McKibben, David Deutsch, Isaac Asimov, transhumanism
