The Delusions of Certainty

by Siri Hustvedt

  A leap back to the seventeenth century is in order. When Bernard de Fontenelle (1657–1757) was confronted with Descartes’s idea of the animal as machine, he had a witty rejoinder: “Do you say that Beasts are Machines just as Watches are? Put a Male Dog Machine and a Bitch Machine side by side, and eventually a third little Machine will be the result, whereas two Watches will lie side by side all their lives without ever producing a third Watch.”280 Watches still can’t propagate. Kismet will never grow up and choose to or accidentally become a parent.

  What is going on here? Why are the complexities of actual biological neurons regarded as so much irrelevant detail? Even if, let us say, information (defined in one way or another) trumps biology, wouldn’t actual neurons still be crucial to understanding how the whole business works? Are these cells inferior because they die? Is this a rejection of the mortal body for a better model? In the Western tradition, hasn’t woman always been understood as more body and less reflection than man? Isn’t this still the case? Doesn’t the young, beautiful, voluptuous woman who reveals herself to be a formidable intellectual continue to create surprise and amazement? Do people harbor the same prejudices when the young, beautiful intellectual is a man? In his essay on medieval misogyny, R. Howard Bloch notes the same division I discussed in relation to Aristotle in Saint Augustine’s thought: “Herein lies one possibility of reading misogyny: if man enjoys existence (substance), being, unity, form, and soul, woman is associated with accident, becoming (temporality), difference, body, and matter . . . That is, man is form or mind, and woman, degraded image of his second nature, is relegated to the realm of matter.”281 Information is the pattern, the immaterial essence, which can be beamed here and there. It is the computing mind of Descartes. It is pure and untouched by sordid matter, those natural gels and oozes that threaten it with contamination and the forces of time.

  I have returned to Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, written by the social anthropologist Mary Douglas, over and over since I first read the book as a graduate student. In her introduction, Douglas writes, “Reflection on dirt involves the reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death.”282 Douglas’s argument is that pollution appears when the boundaries of any structure, form, or body are threatened—in the murky not-one-not-the-other places. Therefore all transitional blurry states are risky, including the stuff that leaks across corporeal boundaries.

  Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolize its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. So also have bodily pairings [sic], skin, nail, hair clippings and sweat. The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins.283

  As Douglas points out, pollutants vary depending on culture. In some cultures, menstrual blood is toxic; in others, excreta or saliva are to be shunned. Rituals surrounding reproduction and birth in every society are significant because one body enters another in heterosexual intercourse, an embryo is created, and one body emerges from the body of another in birth. All mingling bodies are potentially impure and dangerous. If, however, a man can be disembodied, translated, and reproduced as information, all pollution concerns are eliminated. The man literally dematerializes.

  One evening over dinner, I was describing this concept of information to my sister, the scholar and writer Asti Hustvedt. She looked at me and said, “It’s the soul.” Indeed, it is—the soul for a new age. The ancient belief in the soul with its attendant fears of the pollutions of the body, the senses, and desire, which influenced Pauline Christianity and were reconfigured in Cartesian philosophy, remain with us. After the body has withered, the immortal, rational, computational soul remains.

  Phantasy Land in Its Sincere and Ironic Modes

  The idea that immortality is just around the bend via machine intelligence has been avidly promoted by Ray Kurzweil, scientist, inventor, and best-selling author, a person repeatedly described as a “genius” in the popular press and the subject of a documentary fittingly titled Transcendent Man. Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology was something of a sensation. “The singularity,” although used in physics, is a term first coined for technology by the mathematician Vernor Vinge in 1983. According to Kurzweil, the singularity will arrive in 2045. There will be an intelligence explosion. Human beings and computers will merge. The jacket copy for The Singularity Is Near tells the reader that we humans are poised for a revolution “as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity.”284 The admittedly eclectic Journal of Consciousness Studies has dedicated two entire issues to the singularity and has published not only Kurzweil but other thinkers who are eagerly anticipating the imminent transformation when we will be freed from our mortal bodies, a science or science fiction version of what fundamentalist Christians call “the rapture.” David Chalmers, an analytical philosopher, wondered in an essay why the singularity had not created more interest among “philosophers, academic scholars, cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers.”285 The rhetorical tone of its proponents may be one reason some thoughtful persons have chosen not to “go there.”

  Some believe that although biological reproduction and birth will disappear after the singularity, sex will remain, and according to one of its boosters, it will be bigger and better, enhanced and freed by technology. All impediments to ecstasy will be eliminated. David Pearce in his Internet essay The Hedonistic Imperative (1995) writes:

  Erotic pleasure of an intoxicating intensity that mortal flesh has never known will thereafter be enjoyable with a whole gamut of friends and lovers. This will be possible because jealousy, already transiently eliminable today under the influence of various serotonin-releasing agents, is not the sort of gene-inspired perversion of consciousness to be judged worthy of conservation in the new era.286

  Serotonin was a high-fashion neurochemical in the midnineties when the essay was written; its role as a panacea has diminished significantly since then. SSRIs, the miracle antidepressants of that moment, have lost their otherworldly glow. Whether or not their placebo effect is what made drugs such as Prozac successful, there is no scientific evidence that low serotonin levels cause depression.287 What seems certain is that the reputation of these drugs as cure-alls is over. Jealousy is an emotion that involves strong attachment to another person and the desire to have that person all for one’s own. Surely, it grows out of our earliest attachment and love for our mothers and fathers or important caretakers. I vividly remember my own infant daughter playing peacefully by herself at my feet when she was not yet one year old. The moment I picked up the phone to make a call, however, her mood turned, and I had a whining, protesting little person clinging to my legs. Pearce and his colleagues hope to rid us of this annoying “gene-inspired” feature of our emotional repertoire. In fact, in this techno paradise of no jealousy and perpetual orgasm, all sexual suffering will vanish. I offer a film title as illustrative of the hidden fantasy: Revenge of the Nerds.

  Hans Moravec, an important AI scientist, is another figure who became interested in embodied models for robots. The idea named after him, Moravec’s paradox, articulates the irony that what is hard for human beings—performing an elaborate mathematical calculation, for example—is a snap for a machine. What machines can’t do well is to perform highly sensitive motor-sensory tasks: snagging a piece of lint with one’s fingernails and flicking it away, for example. Dreyfus saw this problem early on when he wrote about “know-how.” Moravec is an interesting character because, despite his embrace of the importance of motor-sensory systems in artificial intelligence, he clings to an informational model of the mind that anticipates the end of that pesky impediment to immortal life, the
human body. His science is also science fiction.

  In his prologue to Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, published in 1988, a book written for a popular audience, the scientist looks forward to a future that is “best described as ‘post biological’ or even ‘supernatural.’

  It is a world in which the human race has been swept away by the tide of cultural change, usurped by its own artificial progeny. The ultimate consequences are unknown, though many intermediate steps are not only predictable but have already been taken. Today our machines are still simple creations, requiring the parental care and hovering attention of any newborn, hardly worthy of the name intelligent. But within the next century they will mature into entities as complex as ourselves, and eventually into something transcending everything we know—in whom we can take pride when they refer to themselves as our descendants. Unleashed from the plodding pace of biological evolution the children of our minds will be free to grow to confront the immense and fundamental challenges in the larger universe.288

  Moravec’s diction and his use of metaphor are striking. Note the eagerness in the man’s tone, his conviction that the brave new world is almost upon us, and his undisguised love for his disembodied mind progeny. These kids are at once Cartesian and Hobbesian. Like Descartes’s cogito, they are mind only; like Hobbes’s brain, they are mechanical, and yet, unlike the Hobbesian machine brain, they churn away with no help from nature. Elsewhere in his book, Moravec predicts this transformation will all happen in fifty years. If these mental spawn are mere infants at the time of the author’s writing, not worthy of the adjective “intelligent,” if they are still helpless beings who need their programmer-dad hovering over them, this sorry and dependent state of affairs will not last long because soon, like HAL, they will take off on their own and, unlike us, they will not plod but run. We, the mere biological, resemble Vico’s giants, undeveloped, ignorant primitives.

  Note, too, Moravec’s confidence in prediction and his use of the word that appears again and again in AI texts, “steps.” These logical steps forward will eliminate the problem of the messy bodies normally involved in procreation. The body is swept aside in a transcendence of nature itself or, one might say, nature herself. In this passage, the desire to erase the female body from reproduction is, to use yet another appropriate metaphor, “naked.” Is this womb envy, as it has sometimes been called, a masculine fantasy of self-reproduction without women? In a public debate with Kurzweil, moderated by Rodney Brooks, David Gelernter made the following comment: “Believe it or not, if we want more complete, fully functional people, we could have them right now, all natural ones. Consult me afterwards, and I’ll let you know how it’s done.”289 It seems to me Gelernter’s humor cuts awfully close to the bone.

  Is the eagerness for transcendent man a horror or fear of universal early dependence on someone else’s body, a mother’s body in utero and a subsequent need for that body’s milk or the body of someone else for food and comfort? Isn’t it true that without another body, all of us mammals would be dead? Is Moravec also indulging in a fantasy of the eternal grown-up, the wish never to have been subservient to big people, perhaps especially big women? Won’t his machine kids throw infancy away forever once they become smart enough to avoid it, even though at the moment he is acting as proud father to his supernatural offspring? Moravec’s optimism is untouched by time. In 2009, while acknowledging the failures of AI’s early predictions, he makes another one himself: “By 2040, I believe, we will finally achieve the original goal of robotics and a thematic mainstay of science fiction: a freely moving machine with the intellectual capabilities of a human being.”290

  Utopian thinking is nothing new. It has taken many forms, from Plato’s just Republic (with women admitted as rulers but no poets anywhere) to Rousseau’s happy man in a state of nature to Fourier’s phalanxes, in which everyone works for the collective good, and of course the Communist paradise. In a famous passage near the end of Literature and Revolution, Leon Trotsky predicted the new world of Communist man: “Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”291 When I first read this passage, I was sitting in a cubicle in my college library. I was writing a paper on socialist realism, the sorry art form sanctioned by the Soviet Republic. I was twenty-one years old, and I remember even then, hopeful as I was about improving the world, I thought the man was nuts. Next to Moravec’s rhetoric about our postbiological future, however, Trotsky’s language sounds almost tame. Although I risk sounding like a sourpuss, I am hardly alone in making the comment that although utopian fantasies have taken many different forms, what they share is failure. Not a single utopian experiment in the history of the human race has met with success.

  Two years before Mind Children, the biologist and philosopher of science Donna Haraway published “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” a text that may be compared to Moravec’s as an alternative vision of a transhuman future. Unlike Moravec, who is nothing if not sincere about his baby computers, Haraway announces from the outset that her text is ironic. Irony is by its nature a difficult mode of communication. It is a form of disguise that immediately complicates reading. In Haraway’s fantasy, which she announces as a myth, the arrival of the hybrid machine-organism is heralded as “a world-changing fiction,” in which traditional hierarchies are blurred in new slippery perceptual categories. Like Elizabeth Grosz’s Darwin, Haraway’s utopia avoids the sharp divisions of absolute category. The binary opposition nature/culture becomes “fields of difference.” Sex becomes “genetic engineering.” “A cyborg world,” she writes, “might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”292 For Haraway, fiction has power to direct thought and open new possibilities.

  Unlike Moravec’s supernatural future, Haraway’s utopia does not transcend the biological. Rather, it is a future in which the biological mingles with technology and with other species to a degree that explodes the ideological oppositions that create the rigid identities, which she identifies with capitalist oppression. Trotsky’s heroic average man who rises to the heights of Aristotle, Goethe, or Marx is replaced by a hybrid being whose identity is indeterminate. The elimination of fixed hierarchies among species takes us back to Margaret Cavendish’s insistence on the material body. Her text The Blazing World is a hybrid, a book of uncertain genre, which mingles romance, natural philosophy, theology, and a critique of optics and the microscope well before the modern novel was born. And it is populated with hybrid characters. The Empress heroine of the Blazing World rules over fox-men and bear-men, as well as bird-ape-spider-and-lice men. (There is no mention of animal women.) Each species of animal-men belongs to a different discipline, to philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, and politics, and they argue furiously among themselves. By giving her “men” animal characteristics, Cavendish insists on their bestial or bodily character, their likeness to all other creatures. She is toppling the hierarchy. The Empress’s men are made of matter and only matter. They are not ethereal creatures whose rational souls will take wing and lift them above all others. They are instead, as Dickens once beautifully put it, “of the earth, earthy.”

  Both Moravec’s and Haraway’s fantasies are born of a desire for a posthuman age. Moravec prefers no biological body at all, and Haraway looks toward bodies of mixed materials. After the liberation, they or we or the new nonhumans we shall become will be truly free. Technology will liberate men from their dependency on and fear of women. It will free women not just from the drudgeries and pains of pregnancy and birth but from the fact that pregnancy and birth and motherhood have d
efined them. Let watches beget watches.

  History moves both quickly and slowly. Ancient ideas of body and soul endure, despite the fact that so many people insist that we have traveled far beyond them. I do not believe that in 2038 or 2040 or 2045 a postbiological, supernatural age of brilliant, immortal robots will dawn. I do not believe it because I think the paradigm for these predictions is wrong. I also think that until the biological mysteries of molecular genetics, embryogenesis, and the immensely complicated doings of billions of neurons in the brain and the brain’s function in terms of the whole nervous system, and that whole nervous system’s relation to a world inhabited by other people, animals, vegetables, minerals, and manufactured objects, has been sorted out, such predictions are wildly premature. They are wish-fulfillment dreams. Time will tell, but time is running out.

  I also believe that such ideas are possible only among people who have rarely stepped outside the narrow tunnel of their own fields. There are many scientists who find these predictions as absurd as I do, even some who are working in artificial intelligence, but the fact that I continually run into people who insist that AI is on the brink of producing persons like us with feelings and imagination and sophisticated language abilities like ours, only perhaps better than ours, suggests either that the failures of GOFAI are not widely known or that the very same wish-fulfillment dreams are part of a collective waking consciousness among significant numbers of educated people.