How the Good can be Worse than the Bad

I'm trying to finish a paper that I started a while ago and have not been working on for a while. I don't normally do that. What is different this time, is that I'm struggling to find a solution to the problem that I intended to solve, which is the following: let's say we could make people morally good by applying some simple device, like a morality pill: you swallow it and then you will be free of all anti-social impulses and will never (want to) hurt anyone again. If we gave this pill to everyone, the world would be a much better place, wouldn't it? No crime, no racial killings, no child abuse, no rape and torture. We would all be good simply because we would be incapable of evil. Now what is the problem with that, if any? The problem is that some people, including me, have this weird intuition that something important would be lost in a world in which people were incapable of doing anything bad. As if the very freedom to do terrible things to other human beings were more precious than the state of being good. What I haven't quite figured out yet is why exactly that freedom should be regarded as so precious that it is better to allow the occasional atrocities that humankind is prone to committing than to be without it. My intuition is that it has something to do with human identity and dignity, with the way we understand ourselves, as free agents and moral subjects, as ends rather than means to an end (even if that end is morality itself, or a world without human-caused pain). But at the moment my grasp and understanding of this is fuzzy at best. Has anyone got an idea? Or am I completely on the wrong track when I feel that there is a problem here?

Ray Bradbury on the Real Happiness Machine

Here's another story by Bradbury that I liked. It's called "The Happiness Machine" and it is, I think, about the ordinariness of happiness. Happiness is often thought of as a state of exaltation, or at least some kind of subjective, positive feeling that is desirable in its own right. It is decidedly not normal, out of the ordinary, something to be desperately sought and, when found, jealously guarded. We commonly feel that in order to be happy, we need to be able to enjoy all the good things in life, need to be healthy and fit, young and beautiful and reasonably well-to-do. Then we can rush off, from highlight to highlight and pursue happiness to all those fancy places where it is to be found (or, more likely, to be bought).

This assumption is shared by the protagonist in Bradbury's story. His name is Leo Auffmann, and he has set his mind to construcing a "happiness machine". Finally, after having tirelessly worked on it for some months or so, all the while completely neglecting his wife and children and his own health, he has a result, the machine is finished and it's working. However, to his dismay his wife is not the least interested in the machine, which, in her view, has almost ruined her husband's life, not to speak of their relationship: "Man was not made to tamper with such things. It's not against God, no, but it sure looks like it's against Leo Auffmann. Another week of this and we'll bury him in his machine!" And what's all this artifical happiness good for anyway, she asks, and flatly refuses even to give it a try. "If you died from overwork, what should I do today, climb in that big box down there and be happy?" Then his son uses it and is utterly miserable as a result. Leo doesn't understand. And then his wife finally gives in and decides that she will, after all, try out the machine. We hear her voice from inside. Apparently she sees and hears and smells wonderful places, Paris, Rome, the Pyramids, feels herself to be dancing (not really, of course), gasps "Amazing!", and then - she starts to weep. It's the saddest thing in the world, she says when she comes out. She had never missed any of this, and now she does. Now she wants do see Paris, but knows that she can't and won't. The machine let her feel young again, but she knows she isn't. It's all a lie. Nothing of it is real. The happiness machine is in fact a sadness machine. The problem is that we have to go back to reality, and reality is not like that: there are dirty dishes to be washed, beds to be made, children to be fed.

Moreover, it is not even desirable to have those wonderful experiences all the time and whenever you want to: "let's be frank, Leo, how long can you look at a sunset? Who wants a sunset to last? Who wants perfect temperature? Who wants air smelling good always? So after a while, who would notice? Better, for a minute or two, a sunset. After that, let's have something else." "Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away." When Leo replies that this is actually very sad, this briefness, the ephemeral nature of the good, she says: "No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness."

Then, the machine catches fire and they let it burn until it is no more. They can now go back to their lives, which are very ordinary, but not so bad after all, to "putting books back on shelves, and clothes back in closets, fixing supper" and ordinary things like that. And then Leo finally discovers "the real Happiness Machine", which is a life that is shared with other people, doing everyday things, and being there for each other. Nothing more is needed: "There sat Saul and Marshall, playing chess at the coffee table. In the dining room Rebecca was laying out the silver. Naomi was cutting paper-doll dresses. Ruth was painting water colors. Joseph was running his electric train. Through the kitchen door, Lena Auffmann was sliding a pot roast from the steaming oven. Every hand, every head, every mouth made a big or little motion. You could hear their faraway voices under glass. You could hear someone singing in a high sweet voice. You could smell bread baking, too, and you knew it was real bread that would soon be covered with real butter. Everything was there and it was working."

Ray Bradbury on Life and Death

I've been reading The Stories of Ray Bradbury lately, published in Everyman's Library, and I'm almost through. They make wonderful bedtime reading, and in several of them you can discover a whole philosophy of life. One of the stories that I liked most is called "The Leave-Taking". It is very short and not really much of a story at all. What happens is that an old woman dies. One day she decides that enough is enough and she lies down and stops living. Not that her life is bad in any way. She lives with her extended family, seems to be well-loved and cared-for, and loving and caring herself. She has had a good life, and is still having one. But that does not cause her to cling to her life as long as possible, as we might expect. On the contrary. It is the reason why she finds it easy to go. She has seen everything worth seeing, done everything worth doing, and it's simply time to go:

"Now it was as if a huge sum in arithmetic were finally drawing to an end. She had stuffed turkeys, chickens, squabs, gentlemen, and boys. She had washed ceilings, walls, invalids, and children. She had laid linoleum, repaired bicycles, wound clocks, stoked furnaces, swabbed iodine on ten thousand grievous wounds. Her hands had flown all around about and down, gentling this, holding that, throwing baseballs, swinging bright croquet mallets, seeding black earth, or fixing covers over dumplings, ragouts, and children wildly strewn by slumber. She had pulled down shades, pinched out candles, turned switches, and - grown old. Looking back on thirty billion of things started, carried, finished and done, it all summed up, totaled out; the last decimal was placed, the final zero swung slowly into line. Now, chalk in hand, she stood back from life a silent hour before reaching for the eraser."

When her decision to die becomes known to the family, her grandchildren try to change her mind - they need her, will miss her, don't want to be without her - she insists that there's nothing to be sad about. It's like watching too many movies in a row: "when the time comes that the same cowboys are shooting the same Indians on the same mountaintop, then it's best to fold back the seat and head for the door, with no regrets and no walking backward up the aisle. So, I'm leaving while I'm still happy and still entertained." And anyway, she says, she's not really leaving. It's only a small and insignificant part of her that will disappear. As we don't mourn a clipped fingernail, we shouldn't mourn the passing of a person, because a person is also only a part of a larger whole, which persists even when that particular person is gone, just like the body lives on when it loses some of its cells to be replaced by others. "Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family." It seems to me, though, that even without a family, without children, we can see our individual selves as being parts of a greater, more encompassing self, which lives on and in which we live on even when "we" are dead. The self is not fixed. It doesn't have clearly defined boundaries. It depends on where I see myself ending. I can see myself in you, can identify myself with the whole human community (or even the community of living beings). I can feel one with the universe, and then there's no reason to fear my own death because I will live on in others.

Bradbury's story ends with the death of the old woman, but her death is like a home-coming. It is described as if life had been a brief interruption from something else, something at least equally good: "A long time back, she thought, I dreamed a dream, and was enjoying it so much when someone wakened me, and that was the day when I was born." Now she is trying to pick up the thread of that dream, and then she finds it. "'It's all right,' whispered Great-grandma, as the dream floated her. 'Like everything else in this life, it's fitting.'" And with this glorious trust in the fittingness of all things, of life and death, the story ends. 

The Uncanny Valley

Earlier this week I attended a workshop where someone gave a talk about early animated films. The talk also included a reference to the so-called "Uncanny Valley" hypothesis. Since I had never heard of it before, I had to look it up, which is odd given that the hypothesis has been around for more than forty years now. In 1970 the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Moti published a paper, in which he suggested that our positive feelings towards a robot steadily increase the more human its appearance becomes, until, that is, we reach a point where the robot looks almost human, but not quite. Then sympathy quickly turns into revulsion, that is, the sympathy curve that up to this point had steadily risen falls suddenly below zero, before it rises again with equal suddenness when the robot becomes indistinguishable from a human. The term "uncanny valley" refers to the sudden dip in the sympathy curve. In 2007, Jamais Cascio speculated that we might experience a "second uncanny valley" once we have started to radically enhance human beings. The slightly more than human might be as uncanny as the slightly less than human, while we might be fine with sufficiently distant posthumans.

So if that is correct, then what exactly is it that provokes such a negative reaction to the almost-but-not-quite-human and the no-longer-quite-human? And which entities, aside from robots, are we talking about? The Wikipedia entry on the uncanny valley shows a graph which positions zombies and corpses in the uncanny valley. But I find this not very convincing. Surely zombies and corpses are not uncanny because they so closely resemble real (i.e. living) humans, but because they are dead, and they are rotting, and some of them want to eat you. Perhaps better examples would be the animal people in H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, which the narrator Prendick, when he first encounters one of them, mistakes for human, though he feels that there's something odd about them that disturbs him. Or think of the aliens in Don Siegel's 1956 film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", which look quite human, except that all human emotion seems to have drained out of them, and they, too, come across as creepier than any monster could be. What is it that repulses us here? Is it the transition from the non-human to the human or from the human to the non-human? Is it the ambiguity? Lower down on the rising curve, before the sudden dip into the uncanny valley, we know that the entity is not human, and its efforts to look more human are seen as a kind of hommage paid to humanity. No ambiguity here. But an entity that looks almost human, but not quite, without being human, is like a pretender to the throne. An usurper. Perhaps it also reminds us of the fragility of humanness, which sometimes appears like a thin veneer rather than a deep-reaching and solid identity. It is also interesting that, if the hypothesis is correct, then an entity that, in its appearance, cannot be distinguished from a human, does no longer disturb us, even if we know that it is not human! Why should that be? Does it perhaps have something to do with the fact that we cannot think of someone who in its outward appearance (including the way it moves and acts) is really indistinguishable from a human, as anything other than human? Perhaps that is what we are for each other: animated bodies with a particular, characteristically human appearance.

How the Cuddle Hormone Oxytocin May Improve Your Life

Human enhancement always sounds good on paper, but if you look at how enhancement techniques are actually being used, you may be excused for having doubts about the whole enterprise. Just take the neurotransmitter oxytocin, which has been celebrated as a wonder drug, a "cuddle hormone" and "love hormone". It is supposed to enhance our social competence, to make us nicer and more considerate, more attentive to the needs of others, generally more trusting and at the same time more self-confident. It even increases the sexual drive in men.

All that sounds really wonderful, doesn't it? And sure enough, the pharmaceutical companies have quickly realised the potential of that little hormone, so that meanwhile you can buy it on the internet as a nose spray - which has been welcomed by some enhancement enthusiasts as an important step towards the urgently needed moral improvement of humanity. However, the way such sprays are marketed speaks a different language and makes it very clear what this is really all about. Just take the aptly named 'Liquid Trust Enhanced', which is sold and marketed by Vero Labs (for a handsome amount) as "trust in a bottle" and openly advertised as an extremely efficient tool to manipulate other people. Under the slogan "Trust is Power" it is described what the spray can be used for and how you can benefit from it. For instance, if you happen to be a salesperson, Liquid Trust Enhanced will help you to sell more because, if you spray yourself with it, people will be inclined to trust you: "Close the deal! Sell more of your products and services!" Yet even if that doesn't work out, never mind, you will get a pay raise anyway because your boss, too, will be impressed by you even without a particular reason, and will trust in you if you beguile him with your irresistable oxytocin smell: "Give your career a powerful boost! Ask for a raise - And GET IT!" It is also useful in private matters, because it will make it much easier for you to start personal and especially sexual relationships: "Meet more women because they trust you more." So there can be no doubt that this fantastic product is not only "the ultimate career builder", but also "the ultimate sales tool for relationships".

I think the example shows very nicely how on the one hand the enhanced human may become more capable of manipulating the world around him (including other people), but on the other also more prone to be manipulated by others. It seems that the more extensive the control we gain, the more extensive is also the control that we may be subjected to.

Superhumans in London - an Exhibition

Last week I had some time to spare in London and, prompted by a poster that I happened to come across, visited the Superhuman exhibition in the Wellcome Collection. I hadn't heard anything about it, so was curious what to find. The exhibition was rather small, and the exhibits appeared curiously random. There was a little statue of the flying Icarus, obviously meant to be a potent symbol of human enhancement (a rather unfortunate choice given the disastrous consequences of Icarus's attempt to fly to freedom), various devices that were thought to represent early enhancements, such as glasses, dildos, a set of teeth, and running shoes, pictures of comic book superheroes, prosthetic limbs, a video of a pretty, naked female artist whose body is being marked by a plastic surgeon, other "artistic" films dealing in some way with the human body, its frailty and the possibility of its transformation (providing, among other things, a good view between the wide open legs of another naked female, which seemed of particular interest to the group of college students that also happened to be there), a microchip similar to that implanted in the arm of Kevin Warwick, a robot wheelchair that moves by itself through a room, and last, but not least videoclips showing some of the usual enhancement suspects - Julian Savulescu, John Harris, Andy Miah, Anders Sandberg, Barbara Sahakian and Bennett Foddy - giving speeches about both the desirability and ordinariness (same old, same old) of human enhancement.

Sandberg: "Why should we have to exercise in order to be strong and fit? Couldn't we achieve that using a pill or some other means? (...) Human technology is something natural."

Miah: During the "ancient Olympic Games 2700 years ago (...) athletes were using technologies or natural products to make their products more capable for the sporting environment. Athletes would rub oil on their bodies to protect themselves against the baking heat of Olympia when they do their marathon (...). 2700 years later, not much has changed: athletes are still experimenting with technology to try and push themselves as fast and as hard as they can."

Foddy: "People often think of anti-ageing medicine or lifespan enhancement as somehow being outside the domain of medicine but almost every medical intervention that we've made over the past 150 years has extended human life, and to a lesser degree, human youth. Really it's the project of medicine to extend human life, to enhance life and human youth and to defeat age and death."

Harris: "Enhancement is part of medicine. (...) I'm mystified by the resistance that human enhancement faces. (...) we've got to enhance ourselves; we know we have (...); there is literally no alternative."

Both the exhibits and the comments by the experts strongly suggested that human enhancement is nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary. Enhancing ourselves is what we've always done. That there might be a difference between external devices such as glasses and the permanent transformation of the human body, between the replacement of lost limbs and functions and the attempt to gain superhuman abilities, is clearly denied. Yet it is strange that so little of the actual exhibition has got anything to do with "superhumans". There is no clear idea here what would turn us into better humans, or beings that are better than humans, unless it is the image of the comic book superhero. Distinctions are blurred, everything is the same as everything else, we're all enhanced anyway, so what's the big deal. This appears to be the message conveyed. Just listen to what Emily Sargent, the curator of the exhibition has to say in the introduction to the exhibition brochure:

"While human enhancement might initially seem to be the preserve of science fiction, the exhibition examines the subject through the lens of broader human experience. Initial fears that enhancement might compromise our core values are dispelled as we unravel the subject and face the possibility that it is our very desire to improve ourselves that makes us human. The extraordinary range of objects, artworks and ideas that have been brought together for this exhibition reflects this. Superhuman hightlights the ingenuity displayed in the past to overcome obstacles or conquer new frontiers, while offering a glimpse of what we might look forward to in the future." So there's nothing to fear really and everything to look forward to. Unfortunately, the exhibition itself does not dispel any fears at all, simply because it doesn't even address them. Neither does it show us what we "might look forward to", unless this is looking like a robot (yeah!) or perhaps having prosthetic devices that are indistinguishable from real limbs. And there is certainly nothing there that would suggest, let alone demonstrate, that "it is our very desire to improve ourselves that makes us human".

All in all, it seems to me that this exhibition does not do what a good exhibition should do, namely increase knowledge and stimulate reflection. It is, I'm afraid, ultimately just a piece of pro-enhancement propaganda.

Cormac McCarthy Buries a Wolf

I just finished Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy last night. It took me a while to get used to his style, which most of the time is unusually barren, all bones and no flesh. Things and actions are named in the most general way possible, rather than properly described. Short sentences, hardly any subclauses, lots of "ands", all verbs and nouns, mostly short ones (with Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin roots), very few adjectives, no adverbs, as if the world consisted only of things and actions and not also of colours and sounds and smells. The whole rich texture of the world is absent. Here's a typical sentence: "He took off his hat and passed his shirtsleeve across his forehead and waved her forward and put his hat back on and reined the horse off the road and through the sedge and turned so that he could watch her pass." The frequent dialogues are equally bland:

"What are you doing? he said.
Nothing.
Why don't you come back inside.
I'm all right.
They've offered us to spend the night.
Go ahead.
What do you aim to do?
I'm all right."

Those characters don't explain anything, they don't seem to think much, or feel much, at least we don't get to know their thoughts and feelings and motivations because they don't talk about them, and neither does the narrator. Yet every 100 pages or so we get a philosophical discussion between the main characters and people they chance upon on the road that reveals some deeper concerns. Discussions about fate and free choice, about living and dying, about purpose and chance. All the characters seem to be driven by events that they cannot control, but they somehow manage to hold on to their dignity by being strangely stubborn in their pursuit of certain goals that to the rest of the world make little sense and that usually don't do them any good. Violent death is always close, an integral part of life and no big surprise.

"What did you do?
You aint got a cigarette have you?
No. What did you do?
Didnt think you did.
What did you do?
Lord what wouldnt I give for a chew of tobacco.
What did you do?
I walked up behind him and snatched it out of his belt. That's what I done.
And shot him.
He come at me.
Come at you.
Yeah.
So you shot him.
What choice did I have?
What choice, said John Grady."

People make their choices, and they don't. They are agents, and their actions are also unavoidable. Their history makes them what they are, and what they are shapes their history. But the choices they do make are still important. Their very stubbornness in the pursuit of their aims allows them to hold on to their humanity and to give some meaning to a life that is to be lived in a world devoid of meaning. Thus Billy, the hero of the "The Crossing" starts out hunting wolves that kill cattle, and when he finally catches one in a trap, a pregnant she-wolf, he does not kill her, but tries to bring her to Mexico, intending to set her free once he gets there. Why exactly he does that, is not explained. We can only guess at his reasons. He finally gets to Mexico, but the wolf is taken away from him and, tied to a stake, made to fight against dogs that were bred to kill and to which she must sooner or later succumb. He tries to rescue her, but fails, and is driven away. Yet despite the danger to his life he gets his rifle and once again goes back to the place where the dog fights are being held. He walks in and shoots the wolf: "No one paid him any mind. He made his way through the crowd and when he reached the estacada the wolf was alone in the pit and she was a sorry thing to see. She'd returned to the stake and crouched by it but her head lay in the dirt and her tongue lolled in the dirt and her fur was matted with dirt and blood and the yellow eyes looked at nothing at all. She had been fighting for almost two hours and she had fought in casts of two the better part of all the dogs brought to the feria. (...) He stepped over the parapet and walked toward the wolf and levered a shell into the chamber of the rifle and halted ten feet from her and raised the rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the bloodied head and fired."

The wolf dies, and the crowd turns on him, but he manages to leave unharmed after giving his rifle to the man who was supposed to get the wolf's hide. He takes the wolf and rides with her to a place where he can bury her. And McCarthy's description of this burial is worth all the barren prose that the reader has to wade through to get to this point, suddenly bringing to the open the wonder and beauty that lies hidden beneath the bleakness and brutality of life: "He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the posssible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."