It’s been far too long since I’ve posted something here- the useful must come before the useless.

My thoughts are the result of listening to a recent YPU debate about the danger of biotechnology to some notion of humanity, and I was struck by the seemingly universal assumption that “humanity” is something good, great, wonderful, true, and whatever other adjective you’d like to throw at it.  There was precisely one good speech all evening.  People are downright too into being human to be critical about any notion of humanity.

Humanity as anything more than a species distinction is a lie.  At the heart of “eliminative materialist” philosophy is the idea that our intuitive notions of our own psychology must not be taken at face value.  Through the process of evolution, we have been designed to view ourselves in a way that maximizes our probability of reproduction and survival, and there is no a priori good reason why true self-knowledge is an evolutionarily useful trait.  What we believe makes us happy may not make us happy.  Furthermore, our conception of our personal identity need not be connected to reality.

Eliminative materialism can be viewed as an update of the empiricism sometimes associated with Hume.  The most susinct statement of this older philosophy can be seen in the statement: ‘Nothing is in the intellect which was not previously in the senses.’  Eliminative materialism takes this already austere conception and brings it one step further- not only is sensory experience the sole charecterization of the mind and even conciousness, but sensory experience is in some sense isomorphic to the chemical structure of the brain.  On a fundamental level, all of our most powerful feelings are in a reductionist persective “only” the dynamics of brain processes.   This is not to devalue the profundity of conciousness- that would be analogous to calling a house merely a pile of bricks or a symphony merely a series of changes in air pressure.  However, this reductionistic perspective can lead us to some counterintuitive insights.

Nowhere in the dynamics of a physical system is there space for any immaterial essence that defines humanity.  The fact that we are ourselves humans does not change the fact that we must be highly skeptical when studying humanity- subjective experience is one of several sources of information about human beings.  We must proceed from the perspective of what Daniel Dennett has labeled “heterophenomenology”- the phenomenology of another, not oneself.  To understand ourselves, we must move outside ourselves and apply the same sort of methodology we would use to understand any other system. The feeling of something profound which “makes us human” must be viewed skeptically, and we must attempt to connect any such conceptions to the cold, hard facts of sensory perception.

Dennett’s article “Quining Qualia” provides an series of what he calls intuition pumps that question our idea of any kind of subjective experience beyond the sensory.  Can we grow to enjoy the taste of asparagus without changing the taste?   Is phenolthiourea (which tastes disgustingly bitter to about 3/4 of people but is tasteless to others) bitter or tasteless, and is this a propertty of phenolthiourea or a property of our senses?   To push his examples towards the foundations of our concepts of humanity, can we feel the the subjective experiece of joy while actually not being joyful?  If we then extend this reductionistically (and thereby enter the realm of the counterintuitive), can we feel happiness without our brains being filled with dopamine, oxytocin, and/or serotonin?   All of the seemingly natural concepts and distinctions we make when pondering our own conciousness naievely are like quicksand when these sorts of questions are properly asked.

Thus, to return to the initial inspiration for this post, our ability to shape our conciousness through biotechnology will clearly be an assault on the concept of humanity.  If we change our subjective sensory experience, the subjective notion of being human will be on the list of traits which might be modified.  This freedom in and of it self if universally comprehended easily will falsify any folksy or humanistic theory of conciousness.  Indeed, in certain quarters, it already has been.   A conversation with someone who has experimented seriously with hallucinogens is all the evidence you need that serious modifications of our sensory experience can profoundly change our sense of humanity.   It is misguided and arrogant to say that the sensory reality we live in is the “true” one.   If we are to approach this from an empirical/materialist perspective, sensory experience IS reality.  There is no room for anything more.