Human Extension
Before and After Socio-Cultural Evolution
By Dr. Gregory Sandstrom
Smashwords Edition, Licensed Notes
Copyright © Gregory Sandstrom 2011
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Chapter I. Introducing Human Extension in M-Dimensions
Definition: The General Extension Salad Bowl
Language as a Way of Mediating Time and Space
Human Extension in 3-Directions
Chapter II. On the Origins of Human Extension by Means of Teleological Choices
Origins and Development of the Concept
Integrations, Clarifications and Sovereignty of Existing Concepts
Chapter III. Human Extension: Probing into ‘Neo-Intelligent Design’ Social Science
Human Extension as a Neo-Intelligent Design Approach?
Non-ID Uses of Human Extension
The Future, Past and Present of Human Extension
Chapter IV. The End of Human Evolution and the Beginning of Human Extension
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Images on Front Cover:
Modelled on ‘Tree of Life.’ In Darwin, Charles (1859), On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray. (Right)
‘Flechas.’ In McLuhan, Marshall (1967), The Medium is the Massage. New York: Signet. (Left)
Tetrad. In McLuhan & McLuhan (1988), Laws of Media: A New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (Left)
Book Cover Design:
Dan Cogan
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Foreword
Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, University of Warwick
Gregory Sandstrom must count amongst the most intellectually ambitious social theorists of his generation. Most notably he challenges the great ideological idol of our age, ‘evolution’, which he aims to replace with ‘extension’. At first, this looks like a rather oblique strategy, given the multiple meanings that both terms have had in the histories of philosophy and science. However, Sandstrom clearly intends ‘extension’ to oppose the Darwinian sense of ‘evolution’, whereby life-forms are the products of chance-based processes, both in terms of the statistical variation in a species population and the relationship of that fact to the limits on survival and reproduction imposed by natural selection. ‘Extension’ implies by contrast a more teleological – indeed, human-directed – process. But more than that, ‘extension’ involves thinking about natural history in a vector space, whereby specific organs and perhaps entire populations of organisms are seen as locally stable instantiations of various meaningful dimensions that humanity may extend indefinitely. Indeed, the mark of our humanity may lie in this capacity to extend meaningful dimensions indefinitely.
Although Sandstrom himself does not raise the topic, I find that his idea is most easily understood in the context of biomimetics, the branch of engineering dedicated to abstracting, simulating and often improving upon naturally occurring properties in humanly relevant ways. (The leading scientist who has championed intelligent design theory in the UK, Andrew McIntosh, Professor of Thermodynamics at the University of Leeds, is an expert in this area.) Although the set of terms surrounding biomimetics – from ‘biomimicry’ to ‘bionics’ – are no more than a half-century old, the activities they reference are plausibly seen as spontaneous expressions of the human condition. For example, self-propelled flight is a desirable quality of birds that humans have always aspired to emulate. There are many possible ways of extending that quality to enhance the human condition, ranging from the design of wings that would enable individual humans to fly just like birds to the design of aircraft that involves the development of proxies that enable large numbers of humans to fly as one for much greater distances (without rest) than birds in their natural state ever could. Now, imagine what a natural history of humanity would look like, were it to take our capacity to organize into cities, states and flight patterns – our ‘extended phenotype’, as Richard Dawkins would have it – as a literal ontological extension of our species identity. The plot of this alternative natural history would have the individual human coming to be seen (and to see him/herself) as a negotiable part of an overall project with which she completely identifies but which may be ultimately realized by beings quite unlike him/herself. For, just as aviary flight provides a crude prototype for airplanes, our own carbon-based intellectual prowess may provide a crude prototype for the sort of super-machine into which, say, Ray Kurzweil would like us to upload.
Here Sandstrom recovers the ultimate source of Marshall McLuhan’s sloganistic definition of media as ‘the extensions of man’, namely, the great US transcendentalist preacher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who compared the human body to a patent office awaiting its capacities to be transformed into indefinitely extended inventions for the benefit of some ever extended conception of humanity. McLuhan was right to observe that the best way to cash out what Emerson had in mind was in terms of ‘media’ as we came to understand the term over the 20th century, from ‘mass media’ to ‘social media’. The ascent of the first truly global medium – telegraphy – had been already very much in Emerson’s 19th century existential horizon. But here it is worth observing the difference – if only in emphasis – between Emerson’s patent office idea and the Swiss army knife image advanced a century later by the logical positivists to account for the multiply yet imperfectly empowered human. As most diligently pursued by Rudolf Carnap, the positivists’ aim was an explication of inductive inference, but nowadays we would cast their project in terms of the ‘fast and frugal heuristics’ favoured by cognitive psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky. The Swiss army knife is the optimal solution to the problem of simultaneously satisfying several dimensions of utility in one thing. By analogy, then, that problematic thing is Homo sapiens, who is beset by the carbon-based constraints of its birth. Perhaps this is simply an anthropomorphic way of talking about the workings of Darwinian natural selection. But as one of the originators of artificial intelligence, Herbert Simon, believed, it may also pose the ultimate engineering challenge, whereby we make the world more ‘artificial’, which is to say, more like ‘us’, who are in turn (so the Bible says) created in the image and likeness of God. In that respect, the very attempt to realize complex intentions in potentially resistant media is a mark of our divinity. After all, however one parses the chronology in Genesis, the deity did not bring Creation to fruition in a single moment.
Indeed, it may be that the rise of humanity marked a decisive breakpoint that enabled a fuller realization of the divine plan across the entire material world. The perspective I have in mind is that of what John Stuart Mill originally called the ‘limited liability god’, which in today’s political science terms might be understood as the ultimate version of ‘principal-agent theory’. In short, God delegates to us the outworking of things that s/he is in no position to do because it requires attention to material contingencies, where God is understood to know the consequences of any such contingency but not necessarily which one will occur. To be sure, this way of looking at things requires our second-guessing what God might want. If, say, our computational capacity took precedence over our other capacities in our physical design, then our energy consumption would probably not require such an elaborate digestive system. Moreover, to believe the philosopher of science Paul Humphries, were we to take science as humanity’s signature achievement, we should do all we can to find a medium of self-expression less easily compromised by its biology, even if it meant uploading ourselves into indefinitely reproducible Kurzweilian machines.
Sandstrom’s concept of extension is helpfully indifferent to the material substrata in which we might pursue the more valuable dimensions of our being in the future. Indeed, I would hope that one consequence of taking seriously Sandstrom’s project is that we come to identify ‘spirituality’ not with immateriality but alternative materiality. In this respect, the fundamental error of Darwinian evolution is its dogmatic path dependency, which looks at the evolution of life and mind exclusively from the standpoint of propagating the carbon-based beings we call ‘organisms’. Darwinists who like to trump their theologically inspired opponents that life arose by chance should also be prepared to admit that part of the cosmic accident may be that life happened in a specific carbon form rather than in some other, perhaps even non-carbon form that once discovered might more fully realize the potential of what interests us a ‘life’. Here we might start by imagining Homo sapiens as a Swiss army knife, whose various utilities are extended through various media that take us far beyond our carbon inheritance but enable us to identify with the rest of the material world. In a manner not unlike that suggested by the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the planet – if not the entire universe – may be ultimately re-fashioned as a ‘noösphere’ by indefinitely extending the most desirable dimensions of ourselves and other natural creatures so as to converge upon some maximally rational comprehension of reality.
In academic philosophy, especially in light of the US pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce, this ‘convergence’ is normally seen in purely epistemological terms. But of course, it might involve instead an ontological orchestration. This would be much more in keeping with what I have called ‘social epistemology’, which has never been concerned merely with the pursuit of knowledge as a quest for ultimate accuracy but rather for ever more imaginative forms of empowerment – the so-called ‘ends of knowledge’. From this perspective, the world’s ‘intelligent design’ is something that is not merely understood (as a downstream effect of divine creation) but is outright enacted as humanity collectively explores the limits of our being in the world in the course of fulfilling our divine potential. In that respect, the label of ‘bio-conservative’ often attached to intelligent design theorists by transhumanists is woefully mistaken – and there is no better guide than Gregory Sandstrom to this alternative world of intelligent design.