Culture Wars.Edu #5 Engineering New Humans Without Ever Knowing the Original.
Limits are what make us human.
Recently, Elon Musk asked that we have a six-month pause in AI and transhuman research and applications. I don’t believe we should continue any of it for both the sake of our wonderful species and the planet as well. I agree with critics like philosopher Benjamin Ross whose critique on transhumanism The Philosophy of Transhumanism, A Critical Analysis 2020 is spot on. You can judge for yourself from the following first words in his introduction.
Human beings are already enhanced. We slurp psychostimulants called “coffee,”
sport carbon-based body modifications called “tattoos,” replace worn out joints with ceramic alloy equivalents, and augment our brains with smartphones and data clouds. There are those who would say that these technologies signal that we are not just enhanced, but transhuman. Transhumanists claim that to be transhuman is to be in transition to a posthuman evolutionary phase where any aspect of humanity could potentially be enhanced and replaced by its technological equivalent. Transhumanism as a cultural movement advocates creating a being that
possesses general capacities greatly exceeding what is currently attainable without
recourse to technological means. Their goal is the creation of a new human species
using technology to transcend the limits imposed by our biological heritage. For some this possibility is exciting, for others these prospects evoke only anxiety.
While this may sound like speculative science fiction, transhumanist philosophy
is not a fringe concern. For example, opportunities to invest in radical life extension
technologies already abound in Silicon Valley. Google was an early investor in the
secretive biotech start-up Calico, which aims to devise interventions that slow aging. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel has invested millions in parabiosis: the process of “curing” aging with transfusions of young people’s blood. Another biotech firm, United Therapeutics, has recently unveiled plans to grow fresh organs from DNA. The firm’s Nick Bostrom, “Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up,” in The Transhumanist Reader, founder has stated that her company exists to use technology “to make death optional.” Transhumanism wishes to engineer human beings into posthumans who not only possess vastly extended lifespans, but can also access potentially unlimited intelligence, and continuously experience psychological well-being.
I am creating and advancing what I call Essential Learning because more than any other time in human history what has been wrong since the seventeenth century with Western Education, the philosophy that drives it could not be any more clear. I say it as it is as an educator but even more as a biological anthropologist, a historian and a man of faith, that to learn and to educate we must reawaken a knowledge of who we are as humankind, as a amazingly gifted, as well as limited species.
It is not about school choice or homeschooling either.
Those states and municipalities that have instituted policies of school choice, allowing parent/taxpayers to take their children out of failing public schools envisioned that it would create competition and force failing schools to improve in order to survive. True to their impervious nature, the failing schools did not change and demand for education alternatives had demand exceeding supply.
The author of Essential Learning contends that the whole philosophy and practices that are education in the West which includes the United States, a philosophy and practice exported to cultures and countries around the world have never matched who and what we are as a species. Essential Learning is a totally new approach to learning designed based on the knowledge of how humans learn. It acknowledges human capabilities as well as human limits. Essential learning nurtures and teaches based on who we are, and rejects the false and maladaptive view that “man is the measure of all things” as well as it is all right to create technologies when the consequences of those technologies are unknown or unpredictable. These two views that dominate in Western ideology and education have brought humankind to the brink of annihilation and not the pinnacle of progress and advancement as promised.
Keeping an Eye on the Prize
Somehow societies have lost sight of the purpose and the goal. Why do we pay so much attention to public education? What is the desired outcome? Over the past decades after I retired from teaching, I have noticed a shift from community to an emphasis on the individual. If four million years of human evolution have taught us anything, it is that we are dependent as individuals on the group. Since 1977, I have reflected on the following quote by Wendell Berry. I had it posted prominently in all my classrooms. Simple and eloquently stated, it provides the direction for the coming education reform. It provides the nature of a healthy culture.
A culture is not a collection of relics and ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration, It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other.
While Kentucky farmer/poet Berry has been a distinctly American voice, his understanding of the relationship between a people and the land can extend to the four corners of the world. Essential Learning is a solution that is applicable to any culture and place on the planet. That said it affirms that because culture is specific to an environment and not an abstract thing, our species cannot as many assert today, think and act globally. Globalism has no basis in reality and actually distracts specific cultures from completing the needed work to be whole and healthy. The truth of this can be found in the etymology of the word global, first ever used in 1960 by Marshall McLuhan
Can We Afford to Trade Off Four Million Years of Evolutionary Trial & Error?
What serves as the basis of Essential Learning is biological anthropology. Rather than the biased, subjective, and racist cultural anthropology or its Marxist cousin sociology, biological anthropology is the study of the human species. It is essentially a trustworthy and objective science about the human species. Rather than relying on the subjectivity and imagination of five centuries of European thought, biological anthropology is a hard look at who we are. Essential Learning uses biological anthropology in formulating both the nine key strands that run through the lifetime learning and the “curriculum”/ subject matter as well. The 9 strands:
Literacy
Communication
Risk-Taking
Cooperation
Mindfulness
Spirituality/ Reverence
Productivity
Critical Thinking
Creativity and Aesthetics
Biological anthropology supplies the simple and profound philosophy that underlies all learning. This is a philosophy that guided my teaching from day one.
Memory + Emotions = Learning
To demonstrate how totally different Essential Learning is from any prior education system of learning. If you think back to when you took a course in World History. If you recall there was a very short chapter that talked about early man in prehistory. It was but a few pages and then you were in a Chapter on Mesopotamia, the first civilization, and off and running. You learned very early that there was nothing much to see there. The truth of the matter is there is more to see there than in the totality of all the other chapters. In that chapter that covers some 400,000 years, you become aware of who you are as a human. The last 5800 years when viewed in that light tell the story of humankind ignoring all of that.
Humankind’s brains have not changed over time. We have the expanded neocortex, which has two hemispheres that perceive and know very differently. We have always retained the lower brain, I think of it as energy and where the emotions reside. If you think of things in the past that you still remember to this day, it is stored and can be retrieved because of an emotional tag. All critical information and lessons when I taught, I cranked up the emotions. Often it called for my theatrics, or I might incorporate film or music, but students retained all of what I taught.
Today there are high expectations for artificial intelligence (AI) and that includes education and learning. You do not need to be a genius, only need a solid understanding of how humans are wired. The unpredictability of our organism which has a mythic mind, imagination and a wide range of emotions that computers can never possess. Today’s movement toward technology learning is just another failure of the Western scientific mind to grasp not only who we are, but who we are in relationship to all life.
A human-engineered version of us when the tinkerers start placing with emotions, you have scenes like the one with Hal killing the astronaut in Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey.