Science, Immortality, Head Transplants, Cryonics and the Like

“But is it, conceptually, possible? Probably not. The body doesn’t really work on electricity. It mostly works on chemical energy, generated by enzymes in the process of breaking down sugars. Nerve cells manage to transmit messages across the body via electrical impulses, which is probably what you’re thinking of.

“Contrary to your statement, DNA isn’t eternal. There are certain types of enzymes in the body, called DNAases, that chop DNA up into little tiny bits. They defend the body against inappropriate DNA activities. Your DNA is usually kept safe inside the nucleus of the cell (think of it as the Bastille), where there are no DNAases. But maintaining that sort of barrier takes energy, which your cells get from sugar. And they get sugar from your blood, which gets to your cells ‘cause your heart pumps it there.
Starting to get the picture? You die, heart stops, blood flow stops, cells run out of energy, and things fall apart. The walls of the Bastille come tumbling down, and in come the DNAases, with pitchforks and torches, and they lynch your DNA, chopping it up into tiny bits. This is also why you aren’t going to visit Jurassic Park any time soon.”

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1869/would-frankensteins-monster-be-possible-today

It’s been nearly two hundred years since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein came out. Her book popularized the reanimation of the dead in fiction, but the purpose of the story is cautionary. It was written during the romantic era as a sort of broadside against Faustian attempts to become godlike using science, to unlock the ultimate mystery of the production of life.

Shelley described the process Victor Frankenstein used for reanimation as galvanism. Galvani’s theory was that the life force was electricity. Passing electricity through a dead body made it reflex, the frog legs kicking from an electrical charge. The 1930s film depicted Doctor Frankenstein using lightning to bring the monster to life. Galvani did public demonstrations of his theory, famously with a dead man who opened his eyes to the horror of the crowd.

The body doesn’t actually work on electricity however. Life is actually a chemical process, of breaking down sugars with enzymes. The nervous system however does operate with electricity, which is what Galvani’s experiments demonstrated. So we can’t do what Victor did in the book and the movie and get the same results.

There are other proposed means of reanimation of dead matter. The most “popular” for those who want to be reanimated and have a lot of money is cryonic freezing, in which the body is frozen to an inanimate state to be unfrozen in the future. Some organisms, like the frog can be revitalized after being frozen. Nobody yet however has been unfrozen from a cryonic chamber, so it remains to be seen.

A more plausible means of extending life, though not reanimation, is through the transplant of vital organs, particularly the brain. No successful human brain transplant has been performed, but that may change. In 2017, Italian surgeon Canavera will attempt a head transplant with a Russian programmer who has a debilitating body disease.

I think that such attempts at immortality are doomed to failure. We can only learn by copying nature which exists independently and is more powerful than us. Whatever we produce is secondary to nature. The reality is that the good is determined by limits. Human nature determines what activity leads to flourishing. Our physical existence imposes certain demands on us which constrain us to certain ends, which are the standard of excellence. This is a fundamentally Aristotelian view, though more limited, which is supported by scientific realism. Health is good, friendship, love, learning, and recreation are all good in moderation.

Artificial Intelligence:Rethinking Human Nature

Evolutionary theory has rendered the non-sensibility of animals absurd. We are related to these animals from a common ancestor, and since we have feelings why shouldn’t they?

Artificial intelligence has rendered reasoning so far as we can model it as not uniquely human. What makes human thought unique is the subjective (qualia), the introspective, willing, desiring, thinking, choosing, questioning. And really the intentionality of machines is really derived from us intentional beings. Does acting intelligent equate true intelligence as we know it? No. Artificial intelligence could be just that, artificial.

The fourfold critique of strong AI:
Gödel impossibility theorem of representing all statements in a single logical system.
The Chinese Room thought experiment which denies semantical understanding through syntactical understanding.
Mary’s Room. There is knowledge which cannot be found through physical knowledge.
Multiple realizability of mental states and second order identity theory. Basically the problem of induction establishing a necessary relationship as well as identity, as mental functions may be performed by different states of matter. collapse of straight identity of mind with brain

Nevertheless, it seems that what makes humans unique in the universe as Aristotle’s zoon logikon, the rational animal, is the conjunction of rationality and animality. It seems to be what we share with animals, some sort of subjective awareness, that is harder to explain than how reasoning works.

And of course our reasoning is not separate from our emotional functioning. See my review of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt:
“The philosophers preceded the cognitive psychologists and so their views still set the debate today. A very popular view has been that reason is separate from emotional functioning, which has its adherents from Plato to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s metaphor was that of the two consuls of the Roman Republic who shared duties domestically and outside the country.

“This view has been undercut by neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio who point toward two pieces of evidence. 1) brain damage to the prefrontal cortex affects emotional functioning. This was demonstrated by railroad worker Phineas Gage in the 19th century who was struck by a railroad spike in his left frontal cortex. He survived with his memory and intelligence intact but his behavior radically changed. He became more impulse and obstinate to the point where he was fired. 2) Split brain operations reveal how stimuli from one half affects the operation of the other half. The left half of the brain is involved in language and abstract reasoning and the right half is involved in spatial and recognition tasks. If a word is flashed to the left eye (controlled by the right hemisphere) the left side of the body (controlled by the left hemisphere) can act without any conscious awareness.

“Even more evidence against the separation of reason and emotion came from behavioral economics. The work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the late 1970s challenged rational choice models of decision making with bounded rationality. Individuals make shortcuts to decision making called heuristics, rules of thumb. Humans are cognitive misers, meaning they economize their own expenditure of reasoning and available data to patterns of thinking which are familiar. A common heuristic is availability: a preference for information readily available is preferred to what isn’t. Heuristics are essentially intuitive and not rational and yet are a regular part of mental functioning.”

David Hume won the debate.

I checked out two years ago or so Edward Feser’s Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide again to read the parts I didn’t finish about intentionality when I read the chapter on consciousness which I also missed (I really just wanted the bare basics).

Feser suggests that consciousness in terms of feeling is actually harder nowadays to explain than reason is, at least for the materialists. The intro said that what we share with animals, the capacity to feel, is what makes us unique from material automatons. A position Feser said Aristotle would find very strange. For thousands of years the mystery of human nature has been that we are the only species capable of language, manipulating symbols to represent something outside of our immediate environment.

This mystery began to unravel after Darwin, after all some of the primates have some means of communication and complex behavior. Since we evolved from a common ancestor ape, our intelligence should be able to be explained in evolutionary terms. And in fact this is what evolutionary psychology and neuroscience have been excelling at the last 20-30 years. There are now very plausible theories explaining how intelligence evolved. One is Machiavellian, that a big brain allows us to deceive others and predict their actions to control them to enhance our survival, particularly of our genes. Another one which I learned in a class called The Evolution of Mating Behavior is that human intelligence is the product of sexual selection. Being intelligent signals fitness, as having a big brain and intelligence is physically demanding, which would help males compete with other males for sexual access to females, who in turn would become more intelligent to recognize it in men. I think that the mechanism for this would be increasing parental investment in offspring from the male side and increasing female choice. In any case, the evolution of intelligence is most likely due to functioning in social groups.

That our minds differ in degree from the apes still bothers people. That there isn’t an absolute barrier between human beings and animals as we exist under the same laws and share common ancestry, even though we are qualitatively different. But it is artificial intelligence that worries me, and I think a good number of other people, because it suggests that what has been thought to be the mark of human uniqueness can be imitated by inorganic automatons. Darwin’s theories began and ended with organisms, describing how they branched off to the diversity of life we see today. It’s the field of psychology, a rather young field, that is relevant to the state of consciousness with artificial intelligence.

David Hume figured this out centuries ago.
“Man is a reasonable being, and as such he gets appropriate food and nourishment from the pursuit of knowledge; but so narrow are the limits of human understanding that we can’t hope for any great amount of knowledge or for much security in respect of what we do know…It seems, then, that nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable for the human race, and has secretly warned us not to tilt too far in any of these directions and make ourselves incapable of other occupations and entertainments…Be a philosopher, but amidst all your philosophy be still a man.’

Hume also knew that learning is an organic process, not like a Turing computer going by logical steps but constantly adjusting itself by trial and error.

Most importantly,
"our wonder will perhaps cease or diminish when we consider that the reasoning from experience which we share with the beasts, and on which the whole conduct of life depends, is itself nothing but a sort of instinct or mechanical power that acts in us without our knowing it, and in its chief operations isn’t directed by any such relations or comparisons of ideas as are the proper objects of our intellectual faculties.”

Artificial intelligence will succeed because it is artificial, it mimics the behaviors that go into performing tasks. But what tasks ought to be performed and why and for whom is largely unknown to us in conscious and especially reflective life. It turns out that our commonality with animals is what is most important for us.

Hume’s philosophy is the refuge for skeptics. Hume argued basically that causal knowledge cannot give us necessary/certain knowledge about different things. If thinking comes to be completely logical, there will be a gap between fact and value.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

Causality is known to philosophers as the principle of sufficient reason, that everything has a reason or cause for its existence, from nothing nothing comes. A reason is sufficient as opposed to necessary if no other cause is needed for explanation (see necessary vs sufficient conditions logic). The only sufficient reason for all things is that they must have a reason, hence the name. The PSR is a law of thought along with identity, noncontradiction and the excluded middle. 

The PSR has several classes of causes such as Aristotle's four causes: 

Material- what the cause is made of. "Wood." 

Final- the end or purpose to which a cause occurs. "Write on"

Formal- what is the essence, nature, of the cause. "Rectangle."

Efficient- what brought the cause into existence. "Carpenter." 

Together we get the causes of "table."

There are also four different roots of the PSR which relate to Aristotle's causes from by Arthur Schopenhauer which distinguish valid uses for phenomena as opposed to objects (Kant): 

Becoming (material) - physical cause and effect

Knowing (final) - representation of causal relationships

Being (formal) - relation of representations

Acting (efficient) - internal motivation of causal agent

Schopenhauer's roots, I think, also relate to the four basic laws of thought.

1) Law of Identity- Becoming- Material

2) Noncontradiction- Knowing- Final

3) Law of the Excluded Middle- Being- Formal 

4) Principle of Sufficient Reason- Acting- Efficient 

Gottfried Leibniz came up with the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic relations from his pioneering predicate logic, as opposed to Aristotle's syllogisms. A subject either contains its predicate or is predicated of another subject. If a predicate is contained in the subject, its existence is necessary, if the predicate is contained in another subject, its existence is contingent, dependent on the existence of something else. A necessary being is self-caused, causa sui, and a contingent being is caused by something else. Thus there are two fundamental sufficient reasons. Reason is different from cause, the former intrinsic to something's nature and the latter intrinsic. Leibniz used this distinction to criticize the mechanical philosophy 

For the purpose of conducting science, efficient causality applied to the phenomena of becoming (being individuated in time and space) is the most appropriate.  

Nowadays in science causal language is used more carefully. The mantra is correlation does not equal causation, thanks to Hume's skeptical doubts about induction. Instead of cause and effect we have an independent variable and a dependent variable. The DV is supposed to be changed in the presence of the IV, and the IV isn't. A causal relationship is a "change in the IV means a change in the DV." Causality as distinguished from correlation is a logical argument, giving some reason for a relationship between the variables. 

“[A]ll causes are of the same kind, and that in particular there is no foundation for that distinction, which we sometimes make betwixt efficient causes, and formal, and material … and final causes” (Treatise of Human Nature, I.iii.14)

Dual Aspect Monism of Will and Idea

My own metaphysic is dualistic (though ultimately dual aspects of the same world). I take the existence of matter which has rest mass to be in opposition to light which has no rest mass. Having rest mass means our ordinary matter cannot travel the speed of light or any faster, which means the existence of material beings is trapped in causality, inherently finite and limited. For light everything happens instantaneously, relatively as light has a speed limit, but still travels faster than anything else because of the lack of rest mass. Remember the famous E=MC^2, energy equal mass times the speed of light squared. It would take an infinite amount of energy to overcome rest mass to travel the speed of light given Newton’s equation F=MA, force equals mass times acceleration. The speed of light is the speed of causality, the limit by which everything else occurs, approaching the speed of light results in time dilation and length contraction to obey special relativity. Light is energy, it is information. Energy is mass, times the speed of light squared. Unfortunately for us the existence of rest mass, our body, is the physical analogue to desire as the source of suffering. Because of rest mass we don’t live in the present. We can imagine different states of affairs, but not always act in accordance with them. We have to choose among alternatives presented and not created by us. We form expectations about the future and fixations about the past which do not reflect the present. Thus for us the idea is different than reality, creating duality and opposition between things. The meaning of the idea is only in the transient individual forms. Individuality and suffering are bound into the nature of conscious existence. Because of this, I don’t see evil as due to free will or sin like Pauline Christianity, but due to the nature of reality like Buddhism. And of course my philosophical hero Schopenhauer was influenced by both Buddhism and Gnosticism. The world as will and idea. 

Recapitulation and the Law of Progress

raglanphdIf you've followed my posts, you can see I hold these gentlemen in very high regard. Two of the greatest thinkers of evolution and the nineteenth century. Haeckel and Spencer sold more more books than Darwin, yet they are not as well known today and are somewhat notorious. Spencer the "social darwinist" and Haeckel the proto-Nazi. These reputations are respectively due to 20th century leftists Richard Hofstadter and Stephen J Gould. The great sin of Spencer and Haeckel was to see evolution as capable of progression and being relevant to human nature and society. 

Spencer's law of progress stated that evolution goes from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from the simple to the complex. Single cellular to multicellular organisms, invertebrates to vertebrates. All life shares a common ancestor, but through different environments and reproductive isolation select different traits which over time result in a diversity of different species. Just because we evolved from a common ancestor with apes doesn't make us apes. 

Haeckel's law of recapitulation stated that the individual's embryonic development (ontogeny) repeats the evolutionary development of their species (phylogeny). This would mean that evolutionary change builds on what came before, and older traits are more primitive since new organisms develop them earlier in life. Such as the gill pouches in the human embryo which are traces of our common ancestry with fish. I do believe evolution can be progressive. That is how we get the diversity of life from a single protoplasm, adapted to different circumstances where they are superior or inferior in. 

Ultimately man comes to be able to learn the laws of nature and comes to understand the universe and attempt to shape it to his own betterment. And yet man is still subject to the laws of nature. Man is but an individual manifestation of the universe's drive towards understanding itself. Some men are more adept at this task and becoming something greater than others. Among man are higher and lower forms, and higher and lower societies. A misunderstanding of Hume's is-ought problem erected a wall between fact and value which really is philosophical in nature and not practical

Nietzsche on the Synthetic A Priori

¨How are synthetic judgments a priori POSSIBLE?" Kant asks himself--and what is really his answer? "BY MEANS OF A MEANS (faculty)"--but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether loses sight of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer."

"But such replies belong to the realm of comedy, and it is high time to replace the Kantian question, "How are synthetic judgments a PRIORI possible?" by another question, "Why is belief in such judgments necessary?"--in effect, it is high time that we should understand that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they still might naturally be false judgments! Or, more plainly spoken, and roughly and readily--synthetic judgments a priori should not "be possible" at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as plausible belief and ocular evidence belonging to the perspective view of life."

Friedrich Nietzsche- Beyond Good and Evil

Friedrich Nietzsche takes on Kant's attempt to derive universal laws of thought from which we can derive new knowledge about the world, in response to Hume's skepticism.

A priori knowledge is before experience, a posteriori is after experience. 

Analytic truths are those which are true by definition and synthetic truths are true by their relation to the world. 

Hume had only analytic a priori and synthetic a posteriori truths: only knowledge from experience tells us about different things in the world. 

Kant's response was that mind has universal conditions which make knowledge possible and so enter into all judgements, making a priori synthetic knowledge possible because we, "by a means", always use them with regards to experience so there's no absolute wall between reason and experience. And so there are universal necessary truths from which we derive knowledge about the world, even if we have to restrict them to what humans can perceive of the world in itself. 

Nietzsche's response is that such necessary conditions of thought are only necessary for our purposes as living beings and it doesn't matter if they relate to the real world. It is our activity which makes the a priori synthetic, as we are ultimately sensual beings in the world. The a priori itself is only our belief in our own judgements. We need synthetic a priori knowledge to serve our own purposes and it doesn't matter if it is universal either to our thoughts or to the world. It is relevant to our specific needs. 

We need not consider this a form of truth though, and so Hume is right.

David Hume on Necessary Existence

"I shall begin with observing, that there is an evident absurdity in pretending to demonstrate a matter of fact, or to prove it by any arguments a priori. Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable."

Hume's argument against attempts to demonstrate the existence of God through reason from Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

The only thing one cannot conceive of as not existing and be in contradiction is existence itself, but everything else can be conceived not to exist without contradiction if there is no matter of fact to its existence.

Something either exists or it doesn't. Any notion we have of something is derived from sense experience or is an idea culled from sense experience, and so to infer the existence of something from our ideas will only give us another idea of something which can either be detected in the sensual world or it can't. Just because one conceives of a being doesn't mean it exists, just that an idea exists which is a synthesis of ideas from sense experience.

When it comes to existence, one either experiences something or not, but anything more cannot be inferred with necessity. That something exists rather than nothing at all is the only necessity in the universe. The universe exists and it couldn't be otherwise, but the existence of anything else is contingent on facts.

Notice Hume says distinctly conceivable, which implies some self-fabrication or some particular contingent thing.