Sex and the Posthuman Condition

Some of the readers of this blog may be interested to learn that I have now incorporated many of my previous blog posts in a book that Palgrave Macmillan are going to publish next month. It is called Sex and the Posthuman Condition. The book looks at the way sexuality is framed in enhancement scenarios and descriptions of the resulting posthuman future and how those representations are informed by mythological and other historical and literary paradigms. I examine the glorious sex life that we are allegedly going to enjoy, due to greater control of our emotions, a vastly improved capacity for experiencing pleasure, and, most importantly, the ready availability of sex robots that are willing and able to fulfill all our dreams and desires. Through a series of philosophical and literary explorations, questions are raised about both the replacement of the real flesh-and-blood human lover with a machine or other kind of artefact (from Ovid's Pygmalion to the soon-to-be-perfected sexbots) and the mechanization of the process of love (from De Sade to neurotechnological manipulations of our love-related emotions and attitudes), as well as the values that underlie such ideas and developments.

Synthetik Love Lasts Forever

One of those who prefer the artificial lover to a real one is the self-declared technosexual and iDollator Davecat, who lives with two $6,000 RealDolls, one of which he regards as his wife and the other as his mistress. His and his “wife’s” wedding bands are engraved with the programmatic statement: “Synthetik (sic!) love lasts forever.” Davecat knows, of course, that his artificial wife does not really love him, that she, literally, couldn’t care less. He is not deluded in that sense. Yet despite being aware that his “wife” is just a doll, that is, a thing, he speaks to her and treats her – as far as that is possible with a doll – as if she were a real person. He speaks about her family history, her interests, likes and dislikes, her moods and thoughts, and strongly resents people who regard and treat her as a mere thing, which he finds disrespectful of her. “If animals have rights, and rightly so, why shouldn’t we treat something that looks and acts like a human with similar rights and respect?” Well, perhaps because if animals do have rights, then this is not because they look and act like humans, but for other reasons. Animals can be hurt. They can suffer and perhaps even be humiliated. They can be killed. A doll or a robot (assuming that they are not sentient) cannot do any of those things.

Yet for Davecat the case is not that clear-cut. For him, his “wife” is, very much like Santa Claus and other imaginary creatures for small children, both real and not real, not part of the real world, but still, somehow, an agent, to be feared or, in this case, loved and cared for. The boundaries between a mere thing and a person have begun to blur, or are simply considered irrelevant. For Davecat, the difference is merely that the one person is “synthetic”, while the other is “organic”. However, the more the synthetic looks and behaves like the organic the easier it is to see it as a person and to sustain the make believe: “Part of the (sexual) appeal of synthetics is how much they look like their organic counterparts. If you have a robot shaped like a refrigerator, that won’t have as much draw as a robot in the shape of a human.”

Thus the blurring of the line between the real person and the simulated one depends on the similarity that the synthetic bears to the organic. Yet the resemblance that is required and desired is confined to the synthetic lover’s appearance. It is a strictly external resemblance. What distinguishes the organic from the synthetic, the real from the made-up, is equally important: “but the much larger part of their appeal is that they’re humans, but they don’t possess any of the unpleasant qualities that organic, flesh and blood humans have. A synthetic will never lie to you, cheat on you, criticize you, or be otherwise disagreeable.” In other words, the synthetic lover will never be a stranger. They will always “have a mindset or a personality that’s compatible with my own.” And if you are someone who, like Davecat, is “not keen on taking emotional chances”, if you want to spare yourself the “enormous investment of time, money, and emotion” that a real human lover requires, if you are not willing to take the huge risk that is unavoidable when you have someone in your life “who may bail at any time, or who transforms into someone unpleasant”, then you shouldn’t think twice: the synthetic lover is exactly what you need. Organic lovers are not really worth all the trouble we tend to have with them. After all, why should we waste time on an organic if “I have a Doll who is in love with me at home”? That would be just silly. Organics are not worth pursuing because they are “far too unpredictable”. Synthetics on the other hand “have a consistency that I’m grateful for.”

They are also immortal in the sense that their bodies can be replaced when no longer usable. It is interesting how this is being described by Davecat. If after a few years the body, from too much usage, is beyond repair, he simply goes and buys her (!) a new one. So although his “wife” isn’t really anything but body, he distinguishes very clearly between her and her body, as if there really were an immaterial and detachable entity, a soul or person, that, perhaps at any given time, inhabits and expresses itself through a particular body, but that can just as well be present in a different body if the old one is no longer suitable or available. The new body does not even have to look the same as the old one. With each new body her appearance can change, but it will still be her, just improved and upgraded in line with the latest technological developments. So as far as her owner is concerned, she is not a machine: she is the ghost in the machine.

Is Davecat happy? He insists he is. Perhaps, he admits, not one hundred per cent, but that is not because his artificial lover is not really real, but simply because there are certain things that it cannot do yet (for instance speak and interact like a human person would). But once the sex doll has given way to the (soon to come) sexbot of the future, there will be nothing left to desire: “your spouse should be easygoing and a joy to come home to. (...) I think the best way to reach that goal is through humanoid robots.” This would be the perfect remedy against loneliness. It would, he says, be like having your cake and eat it. Indeed, it would.

All the quotes are from an interview that Julie Beck did with Davecat last year. It was published as “Married to a Doll. Why One Man Advocates Synthetic Love” on September 6^th, 2013, in The Atlantic and can be found here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/09/married-to-a-doll-why-one-man-advocates-synthetic-love/279361/

The Strangeness of the Stranger

In another of her stories, Nine Lives, Ursula K. Le Guin writes: “It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There’s the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.”

The stranger is a terrifying creature. And every real person is a stranger to us and will always remain a stranger no matter how close we get to them. That’s because they will never be us. They will always be different. In that sense every other is a stranger. The fact that they are different from us makes them dangerous. They refuse to be a mere reflection of our soul (our fantasies and desires, the way we look at the world and think and feel about things). They permanently threaten us with the possibility of an imposed abrupt change. That is why we fear the other.

However, we also fear being alone, being with ourselves. We seek the company of others despite the threat that they pose. We may be psychologically disposed that way simply to safeguard the survival of the species. We need others to reproduce and to protect ourselves against a hostile environment. Our kind is, out of necessity, a collaborative one. We may also fear the stranger in ourselves, the realisation that we have no clear understanding of who and what we are, what defines us, what we are capable of and what not. Being alone with ourselves forces us, in the absence of an other who demands our attention, to revert our inquiring gaze to our own being, which can be quite a disturbing experience. If we look too deeply into the mirror, our reflection dissolves until there is nothing left but a gaping absence. So we are driven to the other, and most of us choose to risk the encounter and face the danger that comes with it. Some, however, decide they’d rather be alone than waste their energy, their affection and trust, on a person that will always remain a stranger, and almost certainly will reveal their strangeness some day, leaving us just as alone as we used to be before we attached our lives to theirs. But it’s never an easy decision. We are constantly being torn between the Scylla of a forever unchallenged life that is immune to hurtful surprises, but also very lonely, and the Charybdis of a life spent in the company of others, which permanently challenges our identity and allows for no complacency.

Automatic sweethearts, from Pygmalion’s living statue to the post-singulitarian lovebots and sexbots that transhumanists dream of, provide a perfect solution to this dilemma. They give us an other who is not a stranger, one who possesses no other voice or soul than the one we lend to it. Attaching oneself to it is entirely risk-free because it is not really an other, but our own self posing as an other. We duplicate ourselves, objectify ourselves in an apparent other, which is ideal because it allows us to only ever confront ourselves without ever having to confront ourselves. The other no longer poses a threat because it is not really an other at all, and the self becomes bearable because it is hidden under the mask (the persona) of the other.

Yet this is a perfect solution only if we assume that the risk of a real encounter with a real other, that is, an encounter with the stranger, is not worth taking, that there is nothing to be gained by it. But is that really so? If the identity of the self is endangered each time it opens up to the stranger, if the stranger brings change and makes our life unpredictable and precarious, if the stranger makes our self fluid, shouldn’t we be grateful to them for the opportunity they give us? Shouldn’t we welcome the possibility of change?

Do Automatic Sweethearts Work?

A couple of weeks ago I briefly discussed, prompted by David Levy’s treatment of the issue in his book Love and Sex with Robots, whether a robot can be said to love a person if they say they do and act as if they did. Today I’d like to continue this discussion.

In his 1909 book The Meaning of Truth, the great William James asserts that a statement is only meaningful if it makes a practical difference whether or not it is true: “if it can make no practical difference whether a given statement be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning.” (p. 52) However, in a footnote later in the same book (p. 189), he corrects a claim that he made in his previous book, Pragmatism, where he declared the terms ‘God’ and ‘matter’ for synonymous “so long as no differing future consequences were deducible from the two conceptions”. Now, however, he no longer believes this, because even if the godless universe were exactly like one in which God does exist, believing the one or the other would definitely make a difference for us. “Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief call for a God on modern man’s part is for a being who will inwardly recognise them and judge them sympathetically.” James then asks us to consider an analogy which he thinks will convince us that there is indeed a relevant, meaningful difference between the two hypotheses:

“The flaw was evident when, as a case analogous to that of a godless universe, I thought of what I called an ‘automatic sweetheart,’ meaning a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her. Would any one regard her as a full equivalent? Certainly not, and why? Because, framed as we are, our egoism craves above all things inward sympathy and recognition, love and admiration. The outward treatment is valued mainly as an expression, as a manifestation of the accompanying consciousness believed in. Pragmatically, then, belief in the automatic sweetheart would not work, and in point of fact no one treats is as a serious hypothesis.”

Yet just a year later, in December 1910, the philosopher Edgar Arthur Singer gave an address before the American Philosophical Association at Princeton, entitled “Mind as an Observable Object” (later published as the first chapter of his 1924 book Mind as Behavior), in which he directly attacks James for his alleged inconsistency. Pragmatically, a soulless person (that is, one that lacks subjectivity and any form of mental awareness) should be regarded as fully equivalent to the usual kind, to a person with a soul. Singer insists that it would not make any difference whatsoever whether the other really feels anything at all or just behaves in a way that is consistent with real feelings, that is, in such a way that we cannot detect any difference between what they do and what a real, conscious and self-aware person would do. Thus, contrary to what James suggests, for all intents and purposes an automatic sweetheart is just as good as a real human lover.

When we occasionally call a lover “soulless”, we do, according to Singer, in fact refer to a certain (already observed or predicted) behaviour, so if there is a difference between the soulful and the soulless it is a difference in behaviour: “If I imagine myself come to believe that my mistress, with all her loveliness, is really without soul, I cannot think what I should mean by this if it be not that I fear her future conduct will not bear out my expectations regarding her. Some trait or gesture, a mere tightening of the lips, hardening of the eye, stifling of a yawn, one of those things we say are rather felt than seen, would have raised in my mind the suspicion that she might not to my fuller experience of her remain indistinguishable from a spiritually minded maiden.” If the distinction between ‘soulless’ and ‘soulful’ means anything, then it is this. “Consciousness is not something inferred from behavior; it is behavior.”

James’s point, of course, was that we wouldn’t be happy with a lover of whom we knew that they didn’t really feel anything for us and that all their seemingly loving actions deceive us to the extent that they indicate some kind of emotional involvement on the part of our lover. Yet Singer could respond that we might well be unhappy with an automatic sweetheart, but that we really shouldn’t be because to react like that is completely irrational, given that a real human lover would do nothing different from the automatic one.

It is interesting, though, to see how neatly Singer’s description of a “soulless” lover (where the term can be meaningfully ascribed) fits with the descriptions that we find in literature of equally unsatisfying women and with the accompanying eulogies on the virtues of the artificial lover (as, for example, in Ovid’s Pygmalion, Hoffmann’s The Sandman, or Villiers’ The Future Eve). Once again, it is the real human lover who is decried as soulless, the one that turns out not to be completely reliable, completely with us, completely there for us. It is the yawn that indicates the lack of soul, a less than interested gaze. That is the danger that always exists when we risk getting involved with real human beings. They might lose interest in us, might grow cold and unresponsive, might stop loving us. If that is an indicator of soullessness, then each and every one of us is soulless, and only an automatic sweetheart, one whose eyes will always gaze lovingly at us and will never lose their shine, whose lips never tighten, but are always soft and welcoming, and who will never have to stifle a yawn, only such a one can be said to have a soul.

Thus it appears that the effect of denying that there is any difference between a real person and a fake person, between a real human lover and an automatic sweetheart, is that the soulless becomes, or comes to be regarded as, the truly soulful, and the soulful the truly soulless.

Animal Nature Disgust in Ovid's Pygmalion

The story of Pygmalion, as it has been related to us by Ovid in the tenth book of his Metamorphoses, is characterised by an astonishing ambivalence towards women and the idea of sexual love. Pygmalion is not just a sculptor who one day creates a statue that he then happens to fall in love with (which is how most people will remember the story), but rather somebody who deliberately sets out to create a being that is worthy of being loved by him. Ovid introduces him as a man who is disgusted by the whole female sex after seeing the daughters of Propoetus prostituting themselves in public (which is not entirely voluntary, but rather a punishment inflicted on them by the goddess Venus for having offended her). They are being described as having “lost all sense of shame” and “the power to blush, as the blood hardened in their cheeks”

This loss of shame is clearly understood as a decisive step in a process of dehumanisation: a little more hardening, we are told, and they would be indistinguishable from flint. (Compare this to Lord Ewald’s claim in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s The Future Eve that Alicia has no “soul” because she is too earthly.) Appalled by so much female depravity, Pygmalion decides (just as many centuries later Celia’s disillusioned lover in Swift’s “Lady’s Dressing Room”) that he no longer wants to have anything to do with women and is determined to stay a bachelor. Yet entirely happy with his wifeless (read: sexless) existence he is not, because soon enough he carves a statue that looks exactly like a woman and is so exceedingly lifelike that one has the impression that she might move any second now and that it is only modesty that keeps her from doing so. And Pygmalion falls in love with his own creation. Here is, finally, the woman that he has been waiting for, that all men (if we take Pygmalion to represent the male sex) have been waiting for: a woman who knows how to behave properly and who is pure and free of all unseemly desires and inclinations, and this purity and freedom makes her much superior to all real women. In Pygmalion’s mind, the statue is actually more human than any real woman could ever be. All real women are ultimately like the Propoetides: natural born sluts, and as such less than human (less than what humans, or at least human females, should be), more like stones, almost like living statues. The actual statue, on the other hand, is as a woman should be. The statue, in its immaculate ivory-whiteness is the true woman.

Curiously, however, Pygmalion has a very sexual relationship with this statue. He clearly desires her: “Often he runs his hand over the work, tempted as to whether it is flesh or ivory, not admitting it to be ivory. He kisses it and thinks his kisses are returned; and speaks to it, and holds it, and imagines that his fingers press into the limbs”. He dresses his new love, gives her presents, gets her jewellery, and most importantly, takes her to bed and sleeps with her. For a while that seems to work, but for obvious reasons (a statue is unlikely to make a good sex doll) it is not very satisfactory in the long run. So Pygmalion approaches the goddess Venus and begs her to bring his ivory maiden to life. She obliges, and ivory becomes human flesh. He kisses her, and she “felt warm: he pressed his lips to her again, and also touched her breast with his hand”. Gradually her body yields to his touch, loses its hardness and becomes malleable under his caressing hands. “The lover is stupefied, and joyful, but uncertain, and afraid he is wrong, reaffirms the fulfilment of his wishes, with his hand, again, and again. It was flesh!” Soon enough, the no-longer ivory maiden becomes aware of what Pygmalion is doing with her, and in the same moment that she becomes fully awake to the world, in the very moment of her birth, acknowledges him as her rightful lover: “The girl felt the kisses he gave, blushed, and raising her bashful eyes to the light, saw both her lover and the sky.” She cannot help loving him back, and since we are told that nine months later she gives birth to a son, she is obviously not reluctant to have sex with Pygmalion, nor he with her.

So why is Pygmalion not disgusted by her? What is it about her that makes her so different from all other women that he can accept her and even have sexual intercourse with her without being repelled by her? It must have something to do with the fact that she is not an ordinary woman, but a statue come alive, and that she carries the modesty, the bashfulness of the inanimate thing, over to her new existence. She doesn’t move on her own. She doesn’t follow her own will. She has no own will. She is a perfect mirror of her lover’s desires, without having any desires of her own that might threaten her purity. She lives only for her lover, who is her one and only. He is, quite literally, her world. She is a supposedly living woman, but without the flaws, a living paradox. She is perfect and pure, but also perfectly usable, obedient and ready to serve her one and only master. She does what she is told. She is the ideal woman, the Eve of the Future, a precursor of today’s or tomorrow’s sexbots, a tailor-made, always-willing, never-tiring sexual companion, a Stepford wife.

Isn’t it odd how little our desires have changed over the last two thousand years?