BLURRED BOUNDARIES OF HUMANITY What does it mean to be human when science mixes us with animals and technology?
Speakers include: Oron Catts (SymbioticA) and Mike Alder (UWA). Has technology and censorship revolutionised the terror game?
Ran in just as it started – so I’ll have to fill in the gaps regarding the live-blogging later if needed! Bright-red haired vibrant lady introducing the show, with large banners for 720ABC and iinet around the room - certainly the sponsorship makes it look pretty snazzy (I’ve picked up maybe a handful of flyers and keyrings from the front desk before entering the room).
The room? It’s the Velvet Lounge, so it’s mostly floorspace and couches, footstools being used as seats. There’s quite a bit of technology, with Mac laptops at the front of the room and a large PowerPoint screen which is showing a Tweet-stream using the #profsandpints hash-tag.
The first speaker, Catts, talks for about ten minutes about his experience at SymbioticA – upon attending a human engineering lab in China – ‘a chill ran down my back’. What happens when you engineer life? As an artist working with living tissue for 15 years – what he sees is that it’s not humans that are of interest, but life itself. Overall, not a particularly optimistic look and only begins to touch upon the problem of ethics involved.
The Tweet-stream has been considered to be ‘distracting’ – I can see why. Some of them regarding ‘do engineers have a monopoly on megalomania?’ Overall, it’s a little tending towards the ‘artists are going to be the saviors’, so I’m intrigued to see how he’s going to justify that later.
Second speaker – Adler – starts with one of the least optimistic openers I’ve heard for a while: ‘I’m not used to speaking except for 45mins on slabs of mathematics…’ Well, he’s certainly making an effort by dressing up – very much the Doctor Who ‘bow-ties are cool’ school. He’s also admitting to be totally stuffed by not having access to chalk and whiteboard markers. So, he’s talking about himself and his early interest in astronomy, et al. The influence of Harry Seldon, a character by Asimov, on his learning.
Grendels just tweeted ‘How many of us here have been inspired by Asimov?’ Another commented: ‘Prof Adler mesmerised by the dark symphony of Doppler shift in his childhood’.
Having confronted the fact that Adler couldn’t be Asimov’s Seldon – he narrowed his scope to just understanding human beings rather than society: ‘That’s worse’. He got down to ants, eventually. ‘I thought I could understand ants, I’d be doing pretty well.’
So what is he doing here, if he doesn’t have the foggiest about humans? What does it mean to be human? ‘I’m not sure. I’m relying on the fact that you might get pretty pissed by the end of the night.’ Talking about vision and perception, he compares it to video-cameras, touching again on the allusion of humans as robots – the behaviour of our eyes like any other organisms’ eyes. ‘It should be possible to write a program that can distinguish images – follow an algorithm.’
Will the benefits of understanding humanity just lead to people profiting from that knowledge in a way that doesn’t benefit humanity overall? ‘I don’t understand people, they’re much, much, much too complicated… being a deeply confused person is perfectly acceptable – but over in the Arts they’re even MORE deeply confused because they don’t KNOW they’re deeply confused!’
‘So long as there’s human beings – coming up to maybe a quarter of a billion years – we have been meddling and don’t see any reason why we will stop?’
Third speaker, Professor Allan Harvey – ‘we have no idea what he’ll bring to the table!’ He says that he’ll change the tenor of the discussion somewhat – because he wants to find out what we think, by posing a bunch of questions. He’s from a Human Bio school at uni and trained as a neurophysiologist.
He points out that the definition of ‘human’ hasn’t been defined yet and that it’s one of the more dangerous ones – ‘you can define it spiritually, from a cultural perspective or biologically. But is it merely the genome? Or is it something cognitive, behaviour/activity?; And if you’re not sure how you define it, you can end up in all sorts of places that are problematic. Genocide, embryonic stem-cells, experimentation, infanticide, euthanasia, et al.
There are no thousands of spare embryonic cells in this state – what to do with them? Refers to Peter Singer’s book ‘Rethinking Life and Death’, and how on balance, you make judgments about preferences. ‘Preferences are either sought or avoided and bring satisfaction or frustration’. He argues that fetuses do not have preferences as they do not experience satisfaction or frustration and thus only at the point of 16-18 weeks is when they develop this ability to distinguish.
Therefore asks the audience to help define ‘human’ – because from that, flows all the other decisions and discussions that should be had.
A break to go through the tweet-stream – ‘surely trying to attempt to define humanity can only limit it?‘
‘Both genome and cognitive definitions run into problems as there are people who we now consider human, but who are atypical?’
From the audience – ‘it’s not the engineers who are at fault – they are generally good at what they do but don’t take the initiative to profit – more politicians and the church. To be human is an issue of consciousness. For me it is a sentient state where you know who you are and have values you believe in.’ Unfortunately he then proceeds to define a baby as not being human and it starts to get jumbled from there.
I stand up and asked about the possible use of the term ‘personhood’ rather than ‘human’. Is this an issue of the use of terms that are being used that is posing a problem in this discussion (particularly in reference to the previous ‘question from the floor’ where they ended up defining as a baby as not human)?
Alder responds – Is an alien a person? An intelligent octopus? If it shows sentience, is it given rights, what about artificial life? Catts says that he’s taking from the title of ‘human’ – and how language, semantics and syntax takes a part – and how ‘”human” is what they have to talk about’
Catts then WEIRDLY says ‘Who here is in favour of abortion?’ – I’m immediately infuriated and besides, that’s not addressing my point, I think… ‘Under what criteria?‘ I shout!
‘I was involved in a council in regards to creating life – which we know now are creating humans that have a greater risk of defects than otherwise… my wife is GP and is in favour of abortion… the imbalance of males to females and infanticide in other countries’… at this point I wonder whether he’s really getting to a point, particularly after he rather controversially raised ‘who is pro-abortion’ of the crowd!
One of the Tweeters writes: The specter of ‘ethics’ – the moral high ground – always end up producing a bad dance floor.
Someone else from the floor claims ‘We have an understanding of our own mortality and religion’… honestly, I think it’s more complicated than that!!
Another commenter quotes GK Chesterton from the floor in regards to ape-like creatures and the discovery of stars – ‘you could go to the furthest nebulae but won’t find anything as interesting as free-will’ – [I couldn't quite see how it ties in fully, but the notion of free will is then taken on board as a factor]. Another asks about the human brain being placed in a mouse and where the notion of technology changing animals to be part-human… is that a better redefining of the topic? To look as it as
Catts – how many think we are animals? ‘We are always intermingling at a genomic level,’ and he suggests reading ‘When Species Meet’ by Donna Haraway.
Alder – problem of definitions. Where does red stop and orange start? What does it fundamentally mean to be human is a dumb question in the same way!
The problem of species – even if you read Darwin, that there’s some interesting issues in terms of relation and man, in terms of comments about humans and civilisation and show that he had some other socially-based attitudes towards what made someone ‘human’. A continuum and a contextual one, whether law, morality and ethics – in relation to engineering, that once a person has a consciousness and knows themselves and their mortality and their free-will – in that context that you would remain human if significant parts of you were engineered by artificial means (prosthetics, botox, et al).
Harvey refers to Cassandra, the last human in Doctor Who – nothing more than a piece of stretched skin, or someone trapped as merely a memory-download. You can absorb all kinds of changes to your structure – you wouldn’t have problems with getting new limbs that are moved by robotic adjustments to your brain, for example. Therefore, why be so limiting?
An audience member suggests ‘is it just the brain then?’ – without a brain, we don’t exist as a body, responds Catts – if I consider myself being human without the brain? Would you as just a brain be human? To those who are not fully modified, just how far do you go before the continuum breaks down? I mutter ‘GATTACA‘ and someone Tweets it onto the big screen *snap!*.
Audience member again raises there is no computer program that can convincingly fool someone into thinking it is human (the Turing test – Searle’s Chinese Room comes to mind too) and it is dismissed by Catts not being well defined.
Another audience member: are we so far removed from animals? Other than that, we consider ourselves not part of the natural world? We should see ourselves as animals more and part of the natural world and take responsibility for it. ‘We shouldn’t meddle too much – you meddle with the original state, if you’re still born human, is that enough?’
They touch upon Grendel’s Tweet about ‘If we change our form, those changes are likely to be gradual enough to allow societal definitions of humanity to keep pace’ – another participant mentions the film ‘Moon’, as an example of how and how much empathy do we have with those who are on the less evolved scales and that there’s a certain ‘empathic’ relationship that we have with each other.
A debate about haploid-types and the possible existence of Mitochondrial Eve strikes up momentarily, before the discussion of altruism arises and is argued by Harvey as ‘an unique outlier in all of evolution’ – ‘without altruism and social networks, a species doesn’t thrive’. The moderator raises the point that there’s an Art Gallery of Western Australia exhibition by Patricia Piccinini that is highly relevant.
Harvey raises the situations in World War II and experiments on achieving immortality – the field of tissue culture and how genocide was the goal of some and whether it was legally possible to get away with in regards to seeing some as ‘not human’ – they do not fit our ‘engineering principles’ in a sense.
Is it just definitions that are agreed upon that allow us to be seen as human? It’s society that defines and it’s a constantly moving target. Is altruism really central to being human? In a genetic sense, but a bigger sense, a social sense – is it really important?
Someone tries to argue that a ‘dog thinks they’re a dog and a human thinks it’s human’ – but misses my point that maybe a dog thinks of a human as a member of its dog pack. Someone else raises that Asimov’s first law of robotics is the best example of altruism, and is programmed into the robots. It then starts to turn again to definitions – ‘humankind’ as different to ‘humans’.
What we are and what we could be – extrapolating into the future – is it our curiosity and desire to understand that helps? By the time my battery begins to run out at the event, it returns to ‘At what point do we progress to the next species?’ If it being human is indeed a continuum that we can continually debate upon, is there ever going to be consensus that technology that alters what it means to be human will really improves situations for humans? It’s something that ends up being the plot of science fiction…’
The evening closes, but not before I manage to get a Monty Python reference up on the PowerPoint screen in regards to ‘Yes, but what have the Romans ever done for us??’
BIG HELLOS to – Grendels, the wonderful Tara who has volunteered to help out with some future events, my former student Yvonne who (WAHOO!) is an engineer, Madge and Paul and Paul’s parents, and Mike who I briefly met before being interrogated by some random gentleman as to why we don’t tax stupid people so they become skeptical (sorry Mike!) 
- speaking of the religion/science aspect – if you haven’t checked out ‘Big Think’, you really should. Even features James Randi and Prof Richard Dawkins!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
How everyone on the tweet stream kept calling him Adler?
Ah, the Turing test was mentioned. Badly, I see.
This is a misconception lots of people – including poor old Alan – have. The argument is basically that we have achieved true artificial intelligence when we have achieved something that can fool a human into thinking it, too, is a human. (I’m simplifying, but that’s the gist).
They are only two problems with this. Firstly, it’s bollocks. Secondly, it’s bollocks. I realise that this is technically only one problem, but it’s such an important one I felt it was worth mentioning twice (apologies to Kryten).
Let us assume for the moment that it’s hard to construct such a program. In such a case, we haven’t really proven anything except that we can deceive – perhaps it is a genuine case of artificial deception, but I hardly think it is appropriate to hold forth lying as the ultimate test of sentience.
And of course the bigger problem is that fooling humans in this way is trivial, and we’ve been able to do it for decades. Eliza is the prototypical example – many laymen have been fooled by this and similar programs. Of course there are programs around now that are much more sophisticated than that, but the principle is the same: fooling laymen is easy, and the Turing Test specifically does not require the tester to be conversant with psychology or computer science.
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