Fixing the Animal

Chapter 5: Fixing the Animal In the first chapter of this book I claimed that transhumanists, in contrast to critical posthumanists such as Haraway (1985)1, Hayles (1999), or Wolfe (2010), have a decidedly humanist understanding of the world and our place in it. Transhumanists, I said, do not doubt that humans are special, that reason sets us apart from the rest of nature, and that we all carry the potential in us to ascend the heavens and to be and live like Gods. It is now time to qualify that statement. The term ‘humanist’ does not have an exact definition. Just as there are many ways of being human, there are also many ways of being humanist (and, accordingly, many ways of being post-humanist). Max More, in his introductory chapter to The Transhumanist Reader (More & More 2013) is happy to acknowledge that transhumanism has roots in Enlightenment humanism, but for him that seems to mean not much more than that it is forward-looking, secular, and rational. What is humanist in transhumanism is the “emphasis on progress (its possibility and desirability, not its inevitability), on taking personal charge of creating better futures rather than hoping or praying for them to be brought about by supernatural forces, on reason, technology, scientific method, and human creativity rather than faith” (More 2013a, 4). There is little to argue with here, at least for me: the intention to create better futures for ourselves and others and the reliance on reason rather than faith is pretty much the default position in Western societies today. Most of us would not want it any other way. Yet there may be other forms of humanism in transhumanism that are less innocuous. So what I am going to do in this chapter is determine in what way transhumanists are humanists and in what way they are not. To do this, let us first briefly focus on the role that the idea of autonomy plays in the transhumanist worldview, and then, in more detail, on the Although Haraway has later expressed reservations about being called a posthumanist: “I never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist.” (Haraway 2008, 17) 1 transhumanist attitude towards non-human (i.e. non-rational) animals, which will make up the bulk of this chapter. According to Tamar Sharon (2014, 3), transhumanism - or, as she refers to it, “liberal posthumanism” - is “grounded in the humanist narrative of the human as an autonomous, unique and fixed entity that is separate from its environment in a distinct way”. Yet even if that is the humanist narrative, it does not quite capture the transhumanist narrative, which is rather different. It is true that a transhumanist would typically be someone who believes that individual autonomy is a very important good, perhaps even the highest good, perhaps even the only (intrinsic) good (although the attainment of pleasure – or the absence of pain - may be even more important for some transhumanists). Accordingly, whatever increases individual autonomy is good and ought to be sought and supported, and whatever diminishes or in any way limits or compromises individual autonomy is bad and ought to be avoided and fought. Human enhancement technologies promise to increase individual autonomy and therefore deserve our support. This I take to be a key tenet of the transhumanist mythology. If you don’t think that individual autonomy is particularly important, that there are other things that might be more important, or that people should not be given access to enhancement technologies to improve themselves and actively work on their own self-creation, then you are not a transhumanist. However, what a transhumanist does not have to believe is that the subject already is autonomous. It is precisely because the transhumanist is keenly aware that we are not autonomous, not self-contained, and not separated from our environment, at least not sufficiently so, that they set their hopes on enhancement technologies, the soon-to-beexpected fusion of human and machine, and ultimately the complete digitalization of our existence and identity. Autonomy, for the transhumanist, is a value, not a fact. It may well be a humanist value, but upholding it does not betray any erroneous assumptions about the nature of the human subject, as Sharon believes. Perhaps more importantly, the autonomy that is sought by the transhumanist does not require a commitment to any kind of fixed, unchanging essence. Usually, transhumanists are quite relaxed about personal identity issues raised by their opponents. Will it matter if the posthuman that we eventually transform into is so different from us that it would be difficult to regard us both as the same person? Not really, says the transhumanist, certainly not if we value self-transformation, as transhumanists are wont to do (More 1995). If radical enhancement turns us into something radically different, so be it. Change is good, radical change even better. Personal identity is over-rated anyway. James Hughes wants to discard the notion of the self and imagines future posthuman societies as “post-personal identity societies” (Hughes 2013). Will it matter if the self that exists after I have managed to upload my mind to a computer is not really me, but only in all relevant respects like me? Not really, says the transhumanist. An exact copy of me is as good as me because it is, for all intents and purposes, me. The sameness of the pattern is what counts (Kurzweil 2005). What if, after the singularity, we do not merge with machines, but are actually being replaced by them? Fine, says the transhumanist. We are not partial, and more than happy to regard machines as our legitimate heirs. What if, after we have managed to radically extend our life spans, we are required to periodically restart our lives (and forget our previous ones) to avoid getting bored with ourselves and prevent mental ageing? No problem. The main thing is that we are free to live any life we fancy, and that we are indeed free to be anyone we want to be. Far from clinging to a fixed self, the transhumanist is hell-bent to get rid of it. All determination is a limitation, and all limitations are bad. What Sharon says about radical (and that is, genuinely post-humanist) posthumanism, namely that it shrinks from the “terror of fixed and unified identity” and that it claims “the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis” (Sharon 2014, 151), one could just as well say about transhumanism. Moreover, if in our effort to overcome that fixed self we will eventually merge with everyone else and become part of a group mind, or even merge with a thoroughly spiritualised universe, so that any real separation between ourselves and our environment, between self and other, is effectively suspended, then this is just as it should be, because as long as there is an Other (which necessarily limits our existence) we cannot be truly autonomous and free. So, in sum, I don’t think that, on closer inspection, it is true at all that “liberal posthumanism [read: transhumanism] retains an account of supplemental prostheticity of encounters with technology all the same: some initial, unified self remains intact and essentially unpenetrated by new technologies” (Sharon 2014, 98). In fact, most transhumanists cannot wait to be thoroughly penetrated and transformed by new technologies, both in body and mind. So if by humanism we mean a commitment to an unchanging human essence, then transhumanists are not humanists. Nor are they humanists in the sense that they believe that humans are the only beings worthy of moral consideration, the only ones that have true moral standing. They do not subscribe to the kind of ethical humanism that characterised the philosophy of, for instance, Thomas Aquinas or Immanuel Kant. Instead, most transhumanists follow the utilitarian tradition, which emphasises the ability to suffer as a normatively relevant common ground between humans and animals. Since animals are sentient creatures, they do deserve at least some moral recognition. Thus David Pearce, author of the transhumanist manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative, in which he advocates the biotechnological abolition of all suffering, including that of nonhuman animals (Pearce 1995), states that from “a notional God's-eye perspective, I'd argue that morally we should care just as much about the abuse of functionally equivalent non-human animals as we do about members of our own species - about the abuse and killing of a pig as we do about the abuse or killing of a human toddler.” (Pearce 2007) Along the same lines, the Transhumanist Declaration, crafted in 1998 by Nick Bostrom, David Pearce, Max More, and others, and later officially adopted by the world transhumanist association Humanity Plus, explicitly commits transhumanists to the advocacy of “the well-being of all sentience, including humans, non-human animals, and any future artificial intellects, modified life forms, or other intelligences to which technological and scientific advance may give rise.” (Humanity Plus 1998) Other transhumanists emphasize the fact that at least some nonhuman animals qualify as (Lockean) persons, and demand that human-level legal rights be conferred to them (or in general to all “non-human persons”, which of course also includes, or would include, intelligent, self-aware machines). Under the leadership of George Dvorsky, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies promotes a “Rights of NonHuman Persons” program, which aims at defending “the rights of non-human persons to live in liberty, free from undue confinement, slavery, torture, experimentation, and the threat of unnatural death” (http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/RNHP). So again, if by humanism we mean the belief that only humans count, that only human well-being matters morally and we have no obligations to nonhuman animals, then transhumanists are, as a group, not humanists. However, transhumanists still believe that humans are special in the sense that they alone possess the ability to self-transform under the guidance of reason and in accordance with goals derived from a rational assessment of what matters in life and what is objectively good and worth having and being. We alone can make that assessment, and we alone can use our insight to redesign a suboptimal world, which includes redesigning our suboptimal selves, as well as those of others. This is our main obligation, our mission on earth. Nonhuman animals cannot take on that mission because even the most intelligent animals are stuck in the natural world, forever confined to the specific bodies and minds that they have been given by nature, condemned to accept their various inabilities: their comparative lack of understanding, the shortness of their lives, the inevitability of their deaths, because they have no choice in the matter. But we do. Our ability to reason makes a huge difference. While it does not make us autonomous, it gives us the potential to free ourselves from the confinements of nature. Just like nonhuman animals we are currently still “slaves to our genes” and subject to “the tyranny of aging and death” (More 2013b, 450), but at least we have a good fighting chance to pull free of all that if we only put our mind (and its offshoot, science and technology) to it. To finally take up that fight in earnest is what transhumanists urge us to do. Thus Max More, in a “Letter to Mother Nature”, which starts with an acknowledgement of “the many wonderful qualities” that Nature has bestowed on us and ends in what looks more like an outright declaration of war on her, programmatically proclaims: We will take charge over our genetic programming and achieve mastery over our biological and neurological processes. We will fix all individual and species defects left over from evolution by natural selection. Not content with that, we will seek complete choice of our bodily form and function, refining and augmenting our physical and intellectual abilities beyond those of any human in history. We (…) will not limit our physical, intellectual, or emotional capacities by remaining purely biological organisms. While we pursue mastery of our own biochemistry, we will increasingly integrate our advancing technologies into our selves. (More 2013b) This envisaged act of deliberate self-creation is what, in the transhumanist understanding, marks us as human. What we shall leave behind us by cutting all ties to Mother Nature is precisely everything that we have in common with nonhuman animals, with what is not distinctly human about us. What we shall leave behind, or “fix”, is, in other words, the animal in us. We kill the mother2 so that we no longer have to be her sons and daughters, as all the other animals continue to be. Unless of course we do something about it. If we accept that our lives are poor and unsatisfactory, that we live the life of slaves (to our own biology) Donna Haraway (2008, 79) remarks, with reference to Derrida, that “patricide and fratricide are the only real murders in the logic of humanism”. Matricide on the other hand is permissible. 2 because we are ultimately (still) animals (or perhaps transanimals3), then the lives of nonhuman animals must be judged the same. Severely limited in their possibilities as nonhuman animals are, which is even more limited than we are, their lives must be understood as even poorer than ours. While we at least have some degree of selfdetermination and potential for self-creation, they have none. Yet if we are fixable, then they may be too. And since transhumanism is a philosophy that officially subscribes to the view that all sentient creatures deserve moral consideration and, if needed, our help and support, as transhumanists we have a duty to step in and not only fix ourselves, but also all other animals. Thus, according to James Hughes, we “have an obligation to children to provide them with education and secure homes so they can realize their abilities. We have an obligation to the mentally ill to provide them with treatments that return them to sanity. Alongside the provision of basic needs, education and a caring community, we also are increasingly able to offer technology as a means for people to reach their fullest potentials. (…) I think we have the same obligation to uplift ‘disabled’ animal citizens that we have to disabled human citizens.” (Hughes 2004, 224) The sentiment is noble perhaps, but also quite patronizing. It is not compassion, but pity, that is being shown here, of the kind that we would resent if expressed towards us, because it always involves condescension, the presumption of superiority. Poor brutes, such lowly lives they have; let us take pity on them and lift them up to our own lofty heights! This is a far cry from what Donna Haraway (2008) describes as the meeting of species, which involves the practical recognition of the animal as a companion, as an equal, responsive and active partner in the muddy dance of life. “I am a creature of the mud, not the sky”, says Haraway (2008, 4). Not so the transhumanist, who decidedly leans towards the sky as his (and our) true home. 3 Just as the transhuman is a human who is already in the process of becoming something other or more than human, that is, posthuman, the transanimal is an entity already in the process of becoming more than animal, or postanimal. The extension of these two terms is the same. The transhuman of transhumanism is identical with the transanimal. Accordingly, its posthuman is identical with the postanimal. Animals live in the mud, and children play in it. They know nothing of the sky. For Hughes, animals are like human children who are deficient because they have not developed their full potential yet. But at least children will one day grow up, nearer to the sky, whereas animals will never, or at least not without a little help from their friends, namely us. Animals are in a permanent childlike state, which here does not signify innocence, but immaturity and dependence. Only we can save them from the misfortune of a permanent childhood. And to add insult to injury, animals are also likened to the mentally ill and mentally disabled. Something significant is missing from their constitution, something that they ought to have but cannot acquire by themselves. We need to jump into the breach and help them, restore them to sanity. The human is here figured as the better animal (precisely because we are less animal, or transanimal), just as the posthuman is figured as the better human (because they are less animal even more). What the posthuman is in comparison to us, we are in comparison to nonhuman animals. They are conceived as prehumans (in the same way that we are conceived, teleologically or at least trajectorially, as pre-posthumans). Consequently, we look after an animal’s well-being by helping it to become something that is no longer animal. What is good for the animal (be it non-human or human) is that it disappears as an animal. The enhancement of the animal lies in its elimination; the only good animal is an ex-animal. This is, ultimately, what all proposals for animal enhancement suggest. Transhumanist uplifting simply follows that tradition. What is different is merely the kind of elimination that is suggested. As I have argued in Better Humans? (Hauskeller 2013), there is no such thing as human enhancement, understood as an enhancement of the human as a human, simply because being human is not something one can be good at, better at, or worse at. Humans can of course be better than others in all sorts of ways depending on what we want them to be, but there is no such thing as a human that is per se better, that is, as a human. Similarly, the idea of making animals better only makes sense in the context of a particular set of purposes. Consequently, if an animal is to be made better, we need to know what exactly it is going to be better for or at, or in what respect it is going to be better. Normally, when we hear about enhanced animals, what people mean is animals that are improved in such a way that they better serve particular human interests and purposes. These can be agricultural, artistic, or social interests, or purposes related to any other area in which humans interact with animals. We can intend to make them better at hunting or as pets, for food production or as companions. We can intend to improve their looks, their strength, or their health, or their entertainment value. We can want them to function more reliably as a model for certain diseases (e.g. oncomice), as generators for human pharmaceuticals (“pharming”), or as learning tools. This kind of (human-interest-led) enhancement has been practiced deliberately for a very long time, first through selective breeding and now of course increasingly also by means of gene transfer and other forms of direct genetic modification. Another new possibility of enhancing the animal is through cyborgization, where a mechanical or electronic device is temporarily or permanently integrated into an animal’s organism to render them more suitable to our purposes. One interesting recent example is the roboroach produced and marketed by the small start-up company Backyard Brains. Roboroaches are cockroaches with an electronic device on their backs connected to the neurons in their antennas, which allows the user to control their movements with a mobile phone (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/backyardbrains/theroboroach-control-a-living-insect-from-your-sm): “When you send the command from your mobile phone, the backpack sends signals to the antenna, which causes the neurons to fire, which causes the roach to think there is a wall on one side. The result? The roach turns!” This will work only for a few minutes, though. The roaches quickly wise up and ignore the literally misguiding information. Hailed as “the first commercially available cyborg”, the roboroach is claimed to be very useful to teach students “how our brains work”. However, the main insights to be gained here are, first, that you can actually manipulate animals by messing about with their sense organs and brains and thereby tricking them into believing that things exist which in fact do not, and if that is possible, we may reasonably infer, then it may also be possible to trick the human brain into believing in the existence of things that do not exist. (But does that really come as a surprise? Didn’t we know that already? And aren’t there easier and more direct way to demonstrate this?) The second, and by far more interesting, insight to be gained from the experiment is that it does not take the roaches long to realise that they are being tricked. How did they figure that out? Their senses tell them there is a wall, but after a short while they know there is not, while (presumably) their senses still insist that there is. This is quite remarkable. So what have we really learned from this? How our brains work? Hardly. What we have learned is rather that even the brain of a cockroach – or more simply: a cockroach - is far more complex than our customary disregard for these creatures prompts us to believe. And also perhaps that reality has a way of reasserting itself. However, my guess is that most people will use the technique not to gain or generate that insight, or to learn anything at all, but rather because they are fascinated by the prospect of actually being able to remote-control a living being. This is certainly what the company’s website suggests with the headline: “Control the movements of a live cockroach from your own mobile device!” To subject its will to our will, directly, without recourse to physical violence, that is an experience many may be quite willing to pay for. It is a kind of mind-control, which is more complete than any other kind of control. It is a vision of ultimate power, which promises an excellent opportunity to satisfy what Michael Sandel (2007) has dubbed our drive to mastery. Thus we are probably much more interested in the few minutes during which the cockroach actually does what we want it to do than we are in the power of agency that only all too soon allows it to free itself from our reign. That alone may be a good reason not to promote the widespread use of roboroaches. The power of agency demonstrated by the roboroach is the power of the animal that refuses to be turned into the machine that we want it to be: something that can be controlled and reliably does our bidding. The machine is that which can be controlled; the animal is that which cannot. The purpose of most forms of animal enhancement is to suppress or eliminate everything in the animal that does not directly contribute to its ability to do what we want it to do. A certain function is assigned to it, perhaps based on already existing natural abilities or inclinations, and then we work on it until it has, ideally, become one with that function. Dog breeding is a good, more traditional example. For centuries dogs have been bred and trained to fulfil highly specialised tasks relevant to particular human practices. Thus various kinds of hunting dogs were created, each specialised on a particular type of game. Further specialisations followed. Bird dogs were divided into pointers, flushing dogs, and retrievers, and each were expected, against their natural instincts, to do one thing and one thing only: the pointers to point, the flushing dogs to flush, and the retrievers to retrieve. Their ability to stick to their assigned role and thus to be what we want them to be, and nothing else, is the measure of their goodness. We build machines that way, each for a particular purpose, and we measure their goodness in the same way, too: the good machine is the one that does reliably what it is supposed to do and nothing else. The role assigned to the animal is thus a role that could in principle be filled just as well by a machine. We only use animals because we haven’t quite figured out yet how to build machines that can do what those animals do. Sometimes it is easier to transform what already exists rather than create something from scratch. So we make do with what we have got, until something better comes along, something even more perfectly tuned to our ends, a cyborgized robodog perhaps. Yet animal breeding practices have not always aimed at increasing the usefulness of animals for particular purposes. From the second half of the 19th century onwards, dogs and farm animals were increasingly bred for looks rather than use (Derry 48-66). Even today, strongly encouraged by national kennel clubs, dog breeders are still obsessed with arbitrarily contrived rules and measurements that are brought into action to determine the difference between a good (valuable and desirable) and a bad representative of its kind (Brandow 2015). The slightest deviation from the prescribed ideal proportions – which in most cases are completely unrelated to what an animal’s health or even a sound body structure would require - makes the animal all but worthless. Such Vitruvian animals are only accidentally living and sentient beings. They are treated and regarded as carefully crafted artefacts, attesting to the power, imagination and taste of their breeders and owners. Accordingly, dog breeding is often understood by its practitioners as an art rather than an applied science (Derry 2003, 15). Book titles such as The New Art of Breeding Better Dogs (Onstott 1975) are common. A reference guide on Great Danes informs us that the “breeding of dogs is truly an art. The artist’s medium is living flesh.” (Swedlow 1999) As an art form, dog breeding can, and indeed must, ignore any considerations of usefulness. Some of this fascination with the sheer ability to transform the phantasms of one’s imagination into reality can also be found among transhumanists, for instance when James Hughes (2004, 92) tells us: “When I was reading Harry Potter to my kids they asked if there really were unicorns, elves and centaurs. I told them no … not yet. But in the coming decades and centuries we will be able to create all the creatures that populate our mythologies.” The Baconian utopia where the bounds of the human empire will finally be enlarged to such an extent that we can bring about “all things possible” (Bacon 1924) is here identified with the realisation of a child’s fantasy world. It is a little boy’s dream (or nightmare) come true. Of course Hughes imagines those future fantasy creatures to have “human-level intelligence”, which immediately raises the question whether we will then also have to assign citizen rights to them (yes, thinks Hughes). But just as the wolf has all but disappeared from the pure-bred pooch, the animal has disappeared from Hughes’s vision, to be replaced by the intelligent, mentally human-like creatures that populate our fantasies. At any rate, the enhanced animal is typically considered improved when it has become more like a human-made artefact, either by becoming more machine-like or more like a work of art. In doing so the animal’s well-being is largely ignored, or taken into account only to the extent that it is relevant for its functioning, which in turn is required for its optimal capitalisation. Animal bodies are simply, as Richard Twine puts it, ‘aligned to capital’ (Twine 2012, 509). Even when animal welfare appears to be taken seriously, as something that counts in its own right and that can or should not be ignored, the idea of the better animal as a well-functioning machine often determines in what way the problem is sought to be solved. Thus the American philosopher and animal rights campaigner Bernard Rollin (1995, 169176) has suggested that, in order to increase animal welfare and to alleviate what he calls the “plight of the creature”, we genetically modify farm and lab animals in such a way that they no longer suffer from the terrible living conditions that we force upon them. If there is no realistic hope to change those conditions (which there is not), then we should, if we can, just change the animal so that for instance chickens kept in battery cages are no longer miserable, but instead happily submit to the human goal of “efficient, high-yield egg production” (Rollin 1995, 172). If we did the same with humans, that would, according to Rollin, of course be wrong, but it is not wrong to do the same with animals because values like autonomy supposedly have no relevance here. Autonomy matters to us, not to them. In some cases we even need to consider surgically rendering the animal decerebrate, “to obliterate all subjective experience, to totally eliminate consciousness”, resulting in an animal that is “mentally dead but physically alive” (Rollin 1995, 205). The ethics of this dumbing down approach has subsequently been widely discussed under the label of animal disenhancement by various authors including myself, but I am not going to revisit this debate here.4 What is relevant in the context of this chapter’s focus is that even when the professed rationale for a proposed modification is the interest or well-being of the animal (rather than human interests and wellbeing), the result is still the disappearance of the animal. It is assumed that what is best for the animal is that there is no animal. It is noteworthy that Descartes who, notoriously, denied that animals had a soul and that they actually felt pain or for that matter anything else even when it looked that way, based that denial among other things also (and perhaps even primarily) on an ethical consideration, and many Cartesians followed him in this respect. If animals really felt pain, they argued, we would do them a terrible injustice by treating them the way we do because they clearly do not deserve any of it. Our behaviour towards them would therefore not be justifiable. Yet since God would not allow such an injustice to occur, we must, on ethical and theological grounds, believe that they do not really suffer when we torture and kill them (Rosenfield 1968, ch. 2). It is this kind of argument that Chesterton (1908, 24-5) had in mind when he quipped: “If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.” For us, the Cartesian argument is no longer convincing and today we can no longer pretend that animals do not feel any pain, that there is, as it were, nobody inside them. We know that they are not machines (and that there indeed is a cat). But that does not mean we cannot turn them into machines. If it is not (yet) true that they are machines, then we can perhaps make it true by creating animals, or living things, that really are nothing but 4 See for instance Hauskeller 2007, 117-128; Thompson 2008; Palmer 2011; Henschke 2012; Ferrari 2012. machines in the sense that Descartes imagined they were: functioning, but unfeeling. This is what Rollin’s dumbing down approach ultimately seeks to accomplish: the creation of a fully compliant beast-machine. Cartesian dualism still reigns supreme in this approach: the animal’s consciousness, its ability to feel and its being a subject-of-a-life (Tom Regan) is understood as expendable add-on that can without loss be eliminated from the body-machine, which is all we really need the animal to be. Alternatively, we may soon also be able to eliminate the animal (and thus spare them suffering) altogether by developing new ways of producing what we currently still need animals to produce, for instance by using tissue engineering to produce in-vitro meat. After all, the first lab-grown burger has already been cooked and eaten. If this became possible on a wide scale, then certain species of non-human animals might not only disappear in mind, but also in body. The transhumanist proposal to “uplift” nonhuman animals follows the same trajectory. What it has in common with those other proposed ways to enhance or (disenhance) animals is the determination not to let the animal be what nature has made it. In one way or another the unenhanced animal or the animal qua animal is always a nuisance. Thus David Pearce (1995, sect. 1.10), in his eagerness to free the world and all sentient beings in it of all suffering, outlines his plan to turn all carnivorous animals into herbivores or, if that is not possible, to get rid of them altogether. It is the transhumanist version of the biblical prediction (if taken literally) of a coming golden age, when “the wolf and the lamb shall graze together; the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and dust shall be the serpent's food.” (Isaiah 65:25) Except that is less forgiving and more inclusive. Cats and other carnivores, declares Pearce, are in fact nothing but the animal equivalent of psychopaths (hence insane, once again). They are “preprogrammed killing machines” (which, apparently, is the wrong kind of machine), which we should not allow to continue to exist. In fact, it is our moral duty to make sure that they do not exist. Any desire to preserve them is nothing but a “misguided romanticisation”. “In future”, he says, “the life-forms which exist on this planet will be there purely because we allow them to be so, or choose to create them.” Pearce realises that all this talk about allowing and not allowing living things to exist “smacks of hubris”, but he is fine with that because he thinks it is both true and right that this is going to happen. His fellow transhumanist and fellow animal rights advocate George Dvorsky shares Pearce’s unabashed “technovisionary paternalism” (Ferrari 2015), the conviction that we know best what is good for nonhuman animals, and indeed what is good and desirable in general and for everyone. Besides, we have the power, and with power comes responsibility, which we shouldn’t shy away from. Hence the uplift imperative. Dvorsky defines animal uplifting – a term borrowed from David Brin’s 1980s Uplift novels - as “the theoretical prospect of endowing nonhumans with greater capacities, including and especially increased intelligence” and claims that we “are morally obligated to biologically enhance nonhuman animals and integrate them into human and posthuman society” (Dvorsky 2008, 130, 129). The assumption behind the postulated “ethical imperative to uplift” is that a nonhuman animal’s life generally resembles more a Hobbesian nightmare than a Rousseauian Garden of Eden: it is “nasty, brutish and short”. Also, they lack political participation and what comes with it, namely liberty and justice. By uplifting them to a human (or, if we also uplift ourselves, posthuman) level of intelligence, we would empower nonhuman animals “to participate in the broader social community” (137) and to live “a more dignified and fulfilling life” than is currently, due to the limitations of their nature, available to them (132). Uplifting will allow both us and them to transcend those biological limitations. However, since those limitations are much more severe and inflexible for them than they are (normally) for us, so that they never really reach “minimally acceptable modes of functioning”, nonhuman animals can be “construed as disabled humans” (138). Dvorsky thus adopts and reaffirms Hughes’s disability narrative. He does not say (although it seems to follow logically) that disabled humans can then also be construed as animals. The whole point of the comparison is, after all, to associate animals with a state of disability, and not to associate human disability with an animal-like state. (And, as we will see and explore in the next chapter of this book, disability is in fact a condition that in the transhumanist narrative we all share, whether human or non-human, conventionally disabled or conventionally abled.) The term ‘disability’ suggests not only an absence, but the absence of something that should be there. They lack something important that we have. Dvorsky, however, denies that the uplift project is in any way anthropocentric. If anything, he says, it is “intellicentric and even quasi-perfectionist” (2008, 138). The human is, after all, not the final stage of the uplifting process, but at best a transitional stage. Uplifting is not about making animals more like us, but about not leaving them behind when we move on to a higher level of consciousness and existence. Ultimately, we will all, humans and animals alike, be “post-biological” rather than merely post-human, post-ape, or post-elephant. What we once were will then be irrelevant. This postbiological state is the transhumanist heaven: a state where all traces of our former animal nature have been erased, and hence a state of complete autonomy. It is then that we can finally be what we were always meant to be. It is not going to be a human life, if by human we mean a being with a certain, namely human, biology, a member of the (animal) species homo sapiens sapiens, but it is an actualisation of what we (or at any rate transhumanists) take ourselves to truly be, the ghost in the machine, the sapiens in the homo. It is this ideal humanity, a humanity that is liberated from their mortal shell (the shell that makes us mortal), that we generously allow the uplifted animal to partake in. The expected state of complete liberation from our biological constraints is conceived as intrinsically desirable, which implies that it must be good for nonhuman animals, too. Yet since the animal will no longer be an animal when it is in that state, it follows that what is seen as good for the animal is not to be an animal at all (and for the human qua animal not to be a human). To make sense of this we must of course assume that we can separate the animal from what it is as an individual, or in other words that its being an animal is accidental to its existence so that it can still be itself even when it is no longer an animal. If that is not plausible, then animal uplifting is not an enhancement of an existing animal to a postanimal, but a replacement of the animal with a postanimal. The animal goes extinct to make room for the postanimal - just as the human goes extinct to make room for the posthuman. Nick Bostrom’s quirky tale about a Golden Retriever named Albert who first gets uplifted and mind-uploaded and is then interviewed on the Larry King show (Bostrom 2004) is a case in point. As a post-biological being, the post-dog Albert is nothing like the animal that he used to be. He may still be Albert, but he is certainly no longer a dog. Nicholas Agar (2014) has argued that posthumans will be so radically different from us that they will soon forget what it was like to be us. They will also have very different interests and values. For this reason we have nothing to gain by becoming posthuman, even if being posthuman were intrinsically and instrumentally good. Radical enhancement may be good for the posthuman, but it is not good for us, simply because they will no longer be us. As long as we only enhance ourselves modestly, we will remain the same person, but once we have undergone radical enhancement we will have become something else entirely. For post-dogs and other nonhuman post-animals the gap between what they are and what they used to be will even be larger than the gap between the posthuman and the human, which will only exacerbate the identity problem (although if the posthuman/ postanimal is advanced and remote enough, then the difference between human and animal may become negligible). In this respect animal uplifting is comparable to the, if you will, downdragging that happens to Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s short story “Metamorphosis” (1915), who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach-like creature. Of course, that cockroach is rather unlike the radically enhanced posthuman as we tend to imagine them. But it is definitely the product of a sudden radical transformation of a human being into something that is (in some, though not all respects) very different from what it used to be. The transformation does not only affect Gregor’s body, but also his interests, appetites, sensibilities, and needs. At one point in the story he realises that he finds it increasingly difficult to remember his life prior to his transformation and how it was to be human, and to still care for what he cared for while he was still human. And that is perfectly plausible: the world of a giant cockroach, even one that used to be human, is so different from that of a human that we can understand how everything human must fade away very quickly in such a creature’s mind. A cockroach’s body demands (and creates) a cockroach’s mind. So if the transformation of a human into a radically enhanced human or posthuman, or of an animal into a post-animal is anything like Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a giant insect, then we should indeed expect, as Agar argues, that they will very soon no longer remember much, or anything at all, of their previous existence. This is of course not necessarily a good reason not to pursue such a transformation. I suspect that the reason why we would not want to find ourselves in the same predicament as Gregor Samsa is not that he forgets his humanity, but rather that he has turned into an animal that we tend to find disgusting and that is not known for its superior intellect (although we may have to revise this judgement in light of our failure to fool the roboroach for more than just a few minutes). Perhaps we would not mind much losing connection to our previous self if what we gain in exchange for it is a richer and (intrinsically and extrinsically) more rewarding life. This is of course exactly what transhumanists believe that uplifting would do: give nonhuman animals a better, nobler life. While we may not have it yet, we at least know that there is such a life and that it is worth striving for. Animals don’t even know that there is a better life and certainly cannot appreciate its value. The very word ‘uplifting’ suggests a hierarchy, a difference between lower and higher states of existence. We can only uplift what is on a lower level, and we can only do the uplifting if we are on a higher level already (which does not preclude the possibility of even higher than human levels). Dvorsky (2012) approvingly cites David Brin, the author of the Uplift saga and like Dvorsky and Hughes fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, who in an interview accuses evolution of being “stingy” for not letting nonhuman animals crash through the “firm glass ceiling” of limited abilities under which they are stuck. (We on the other hand have, somehow, crashed through, although we may have a, somewhat less firm, glass ceiling of our own.) It would, he says, be selfish of us to let them stay there and to keep the benefits of enhancement technologies to ourselves. “Imagine dolphin philosophers, bonobo therapists, raven playwrights and poets,” he says, “How lonely, if we turn away without trying.” That we might be lonely without uplifted animals is a curious and telling worry. It assumes that we cannot communicate with nonhuman animals, that they live in one world and we in quite another. That we cannot communicate with them in our language (i.e. a language that we can understand) is clearly perceived as frustrating. It is yet another limitation imposed on us. There are worlds of experience out there that we cannot grasp, that are closed to us. We have no idea at all what it is like to be a bat. Or for that matter a dog.5 Uplifting will change that: it will finally allow us to know what it is like. Except that the uplifted bat is no longer a bat, the dolphin turned philosopher no longer a dolphin, and the raven turned poet no longer a raven. Once they have been enabled to communicate with us in our language they are no longer the kind of otherworldly being that we wanted to communicate with in the first place. “If a lion could speak”, Wittgenstein (1953, 223) remarked, “we could not understand him”. We will, however, understand the post-lion, precisely because he will no longer be a lion, which is just as well. With only post-animals around (since we will not allow any unenhanced animals to exist), we will no longer be constantly reminded of our limitations because there is nobody 5 There is a new device that promises to change that: No More Woof, produced by the Norwegian start-up Indiegogo (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/no-more-woof#/). The device is attached to the dog’s head and uses micro computing and EEG to analyse its thought patterns, which are then translated into English, allowing the dog to inform us that it is hungry, or tired, or wants to go for a walk (just in case their human owners are too stupid to understand the dog’s body language). This is of course thought to be only the beginning. left that we cannot communicate with, nobody who defies our understanding and is beyond our reach, beyond our control. The animal is that which cannot be controlled (and the animal in us, the animal that we are, is everything in us that we cannot control). Giving animals human-like mental abilities is a way to make them less alien and more compliant. The autonomy that is bestowed on them is a form of appropriation. Uplifting is less about giving nonhuman animals a mental form that finally makes them deserving of equal moral recognition (as Hughes seems to think), but about giving them what they need to recognise us: as their creators, saviours and, ultimately, superiors. In Sundiver, the first installment of Brin’s Uplift trilogy (2012), first published in 1980, an argument ensues between a human and an uplifted chimp technician called Jeffrey. When Jeffrey gets mad and physically attacks the human in an ape-like fashion, another human, the novel’s main protagonist, a man called Jacob, intervenes: “Jacob took the chimp’s face in his hands. Jeffrey snarled at him. ‘Chimpanzee-Jeffrey, listen to me! I am Jacob Demwa. I am a human being. I am a supervisor with Project Uplift. I tell you now that you are behaving in an unseemly manner … you are acting like an animal!’ Jeffrey’s head jerked back as if slapped.” When a chastened Jeffrey apologizes to his human opponent, Jacob praises him: “’That’s fine,’ Jacob said. ‘It takes a real man to apologize.’” (Brin 2012, 67) The ex-animal apologises for behaving like an animal. The uplifting process was meant to civilize and discipline it, and when it falls back to its animal ways it needs to be disciplined again by being reminded of its status, its precarious and paradoxical position as the animal-itwas-but-no-longer-is. It is thus not surprising that uplifting can, as Dvorsky (2012) acknowledges, “be construed as being imperialistic and over-domineering — an unfair and unwarranted imposition of ‘humanness’ onto the animal kingdom.” Yet Dvorsky’s concession that “there’s something to be said for living in an innocent state of mind — even if it is in the jungle” rings false. The phrasing betrays the same condescending attitude towards real pre-enhancement animals that informs the whole uplift project. The animal’s “innocence” is just a euphemism for an absence of (human-like) knowledge and understanding, which a transhumanist cannot but find deplorable. For the transhumanist, innocence means ignorance, and ignorance is bad. That kind of innocence is quite compatible with Pearce’s assessment of carnivorous animals as psychopaths. And the “jungle” indicates a nature that is red in tooth and claw, untamed, uncivilized, unpredictable. This jungle is clearly not a paradise. It is a place that we cannot imagine anyone would like to stay in if they had the choice to leave it. I’m an animal … get me out of here. So that is what transhumanists urge us to do: get the beast out of the jungle, make it presentable. I find myself reminded of yet another of Kafka’s stories, “Report to an Academy”, published almost exactly a century ago (1917). In that story, a former ape reflects on his transformation from ape to human-like post-ape and explains why this transformation has occurred. Red Peter – as human society has dubbed him – lived his life as a free ape until he was shot and captured by hunters, who teach him how to drink alcohol and how to spit. He finds himself crammed into a small cage, made fun of, and occasionally tortured. He knows that even if he manages to escape it would do him no good because he would only be captured again. So he reasons that if this is the place that an ape has to live in, then there is only a way out for him if he stops being one, and becomes human. So he observes and imitates, learns to speak like a human, and to act like one, until he is finally human enough to be allowed to live a human-like life in a human world. By adopting human ways he has managed to survive and to get out of the cage. He has not, however, acquired freedom. Freedom, he says, is something that he perhaps had (he cannot quite remember) when he used to be an ape and what some humans may yearn for. That freedom he has not regained by submitting himself to “the yoke” of human civilization. This suggests that there are two different kinds of freedom. One is the self-regulating autonomy that characterises modern human life and that transhumanists seek to expand and extend to non-human animals, ultimately aiming at liberation from all biological constraints. The other is the freedom of the jungle that any wild animal still has and that we humans have mostly lost. This is the freedom to live one’s life as the kind of creature that one is, without the pressure or need to change and become something else. Like Kafka’s Red Peter, animals may only want to choose the former if they have no other way out: if ceasing to be what they are is the only chance they have to be left in peace and not to be subjected to our human needs and wants.