The Human/Machine Humanities: A Proposal

Abstract

What does it mean to be human in the 21st century? The pull of engineering on every aspect of our lives, the impact of machines on how we represent ourselves, the influence of computers on our understanding of free-will, individuality and species, and the effect of microorganisms on our behaviour are so great that one cannot discourse on humanity and humanities without considering their entanglement with technology and with the multiple new dimensions of reality that it opens up. The future of humanities should take into account AI, bacteria, software, viruses (both organic and inorganic), hardware, machine language, parasites, big data, monitors, pixels, swarms systems and the Internet. One cannot think of humanity and humanities as distinct from technology anymore.

1. Introduction

Your trillions of cells—only 10 percent of which, remember, were yours anyway—will become parts of trillions of things. And even the 10 percent wasn’t really yours to begin with. You were only borrowed. We’ve had it backward all along: the body is immortal—it is the soul that dies.

Jill Sisson Quinn [1].

We are on the cusp of something very dramatic: our relationship to the world is so distorted by science and technology (genomics, AI, Big Data, etc.)1 that it now seems difficult to explore humanity and the humanities without probing and questioning their foundations: What does it mean to be human in the 21st century? What does it mean to be human as we draw closer and closer to what Ray Kurzweil calls the Singularity, that moment in time when technological “gravitation” becomes so strong that it pulls the law of physics, the taxonomy of life, the reality of consciousness and the essence of humanity into it?

2. Rethinking the Foundations

Evolutionary theory is clear: what we believe to be our primary understanding of what and who we are is not based on cognition and consciousness as we may like to believe, but is embodied in our physical body, this strange and awkward device chiselled by and for survival2. This material incarnation of male and female, this “thing” that allows us to exist within a limited, chemically defined environment, is probably the angle from which we primarily and even uniquely apprehend the world. Humans, humanity and the humanities, beyond what we may pretend or believe, appear to be expressed almost exclusively through this biological envelope we call the human body3.

But even this very basic underpinning is now being challenged by the expansion of our notion, not of reality, which we always knew to be subjective, but of the layers of reality. In fact, science and technology have shown that even the very foundational understanding of the fabric of individuality (our evolutionary carved body) is not wrong as much as it is skewed and limited. We are not discrete units, we do not exclusively belong to a species, and we are not well-delineated individuals, science tells us4. The very idea of humanity, this collective of men and women, each slightly different and slightly unique, each thought to be conscious and capable of self-awareness, does not appear to clearly address what homo sapiens truly is5.

Why are we? What are we? What is “we”? How do we understand and conceptualize the world and the very notion of our awareness? Is there any truth, reality, or existence outside of our thoughts and bodies, beyond our codes? We have asked these questions for a long time, probably as soon as signs and symbols materialized from our hands and minds. And while it would be foolish to believe that definite answers could be found here, my goal is to craft a path that may lead to a renewed series of queries and thought processes from which to ponder these critical problems.

This said, my proposal is bound to a specific history, one that includes La Mettrie, sensualists, empiricists and compatibilists. My premise is that seeing and understanding reality is only possible through the material world. Ideas, consciousness, and Being are “material” products of evolutionary pressures. We are molded by our biological desires, thrusts, and functions. We are biologically determined6.

Many, of course, will challenge these notions and suggest, as Stuart Kauffman does [8], that reductionism cannot explain the manyfaceted richness of our world: from the atom, contends Kauffman, one cannot predict morality, culture, ethics and justice. But this, I believe, is a mistake. Trying to predict the emergence of culture using the atom is no different than attempting to forecast traffic by examining a piston. Culture and humanity, acquire meaning after the fact, and are not pre-ordained patterns. While culture cannot be predicted by the atom, it is nonetheless its “natural” result.

Humanity, we all agree, is the product of large natural phenomena (survival; the microcosm; geology; chemistry; physics, etc.). My argument, though, is slightly different: If Being, and consciousness are the products of complex forces, then one must also consider the possibility that machines, technology, data, and non-sentient natural phenomena (such as parasites, viruses, and bacteria) are central to what humanity is and what humanities must examine. Technology, data, and machines have now embedded themselves within evolutionary patterns. Humans are machines, many philosophers have claimed. But machines are also human, I will argue.

3. The Reframing

The microbiome, evolutionary pressures, the reframing of species through permeable and communicative layers of bacteria and viruses7, new understandings of what seems like conscious decision-making by insentient beings (such as social insects, bacteria and viruses) 8, our alleged inability to clearly establish the causational relationship between thoughts and actions (between the desire to do and the actual doing)9, the stunning fact that organisms without brains, such as plants [11], seem capable of intelligent behaviour, the constant mediation of our world by technology (to the point where it is metaphorically becoming the third hemisphere of our brains), all clearly suggest the need for a fundamental examination of our notion of individuality. The sharp, well-defined, distinct and autonomous unit that we perceive to be the individual human, animal or plant, is a temporary, permeable, and malleable phenomenon, resulting from a very basic biological thrust for reproduction and survival, science is clearly telling us10. We “see” individuals only because we can then establish clear behavioural patterns that guarantee reproduction and survival. In fact, current scientific research suggests that the very idea of individuality, the conceptual notion of distinct units, is incorrect. There are no individuals, there is no single will, there is no consciousness capable of pulling away from instinctive physical reactions11, there is not even such a thing as a single species12. We are, it seems, but ephemeral forms in a continuum that extends from the microcosm to the macrocosm13, a fleeting whirlpool that forms out of the endless ebb and flow of the many-layered levels of reality14.

90% of our genes are not ours but bacterial; close to 10% of our DNA is made of viruses; parasites have been shown to manipulate and modify behaviour; even the basic structure of what makes us mammals (the placenta) is now believed to have been created by a virus15. We are nothing, it appears, but layers of microorganisms. In fact, we seem to be doing only what our microbiome tells us to do, in all fields of human endeavours. Free will, love, the arts, our longing for the sublime, the thirst for knowledge, the need for community, language, any and all of these activities, which we once believed to be clear evidence of our humanness, are now alleged to be different pressures and forces thrust upon us, imposed on us, carved in us by both evolution and the microbiome16.

The world we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste is sensory input data being filtered and structured by the brain, itself a complex system of electrical and chemical elements, no different from a bacterial network, a social insect system, the Internet. Could our humanity, our memories, our personality, our ability to express love and act with generosity or cruelty be nothing, then, but mechanical, chemical and physical interactions between our microorganisms and the environment? Are we nothing but fleeting, unconscious, automated swarm systems?17

What about technology, one could argue? Isn’t it the perfect expression of our humanity, the ultimate proof of our ability to act independently, consciously, rationally, beyond evolutionary needs? Isn’t our ability to develop tools, machines and systems to enrich, not nature, not the world, not the structure of evolution and the need for survival, but only civilisation, clear evidence of our extraordinary humanity? If everything is the expression of evolution, if everything is the mechanical crystallisation of our microorganisms, how can one, then, justify technology?

Our mistake, many would suggest, is one of confusing the end with the means. We assume that the expression of our world, its “goals”, its “direction” (if one can use such terms) is the development and expansion of organically-based life forms. But organically-based life forms are a means not an end. We don’t know what the end is, if there is even such a thing. What we do know is that our planet, what we know of outer space, what we understand of the laws of physics and the principles of chemistry strongly suggest that life is the expression of more fundamental laws: that of the complexification, and multiplication of information18; that of movement in time and space; and that of pushing against entropy, laws that have nothing to do with the preservation of organic life forms.

Why, then, would the microbiome drives us to create technology? Only because technology expresses these laws in quicker and more efficient ways than biology (at the expense of resiliency, which is why organic matter is still abundant), computer scientists and evolutionary theorists would argue. In fact, they would contend, machines, computer, and the Internet are nothing but different embodiments of the aforementioned laws. Moreover, if one looks at the world today, one clearly sees patterns of intersection between biology and technology: machines proliferate at a rate similar to those of insects19; they clearly co-evolve with humans, as many microorganisms do; they adapt to changes in the environment; they sculpt the ecosystem to their needs. Ultimately one may argue, machines like organic life, are ephemeral and transient whirlpools embedded in the planet’s continuum.

4. Humanities in the 21st Century

What does it mean, then, to be human in the 21st century?

It probably means that humanity can only be understood through its intertwining with technology and the microbiome. It possibly means that individual men and women are temporary expressions of information, fleeting embodiments of multiplication and complexity, short-lived vortexes of technological and microbiological whirlwinds. It conceivably means, in our case and for the sake of this argument, that one cannot talk of humanities in the 21st century using conventional notions of individuality, free will, and consciousness 20; that one must now consider phenomenology as the product of machines, parasites, bacteria, and viruses; that one probably cannot argue for humanities without arguing for the disappearance of humanity; and that to be human is to live with, in and through, thinking by and with AI, bacteria, software, viruses (both organic and inorganic21), hardware, machine language, parasites, big data, monitors, pixels, swarms systems and the Internet.

The question for us then is the following: If a 21st century human being is a fleeting form made of machines, the microbiome, evolutionary needs and forces, social constructs, strange feedback loops (such as stigmergy22), and large, intelligent swarm systems23 that acts on the world without consciousness on the basis of simple goals and physical laws, what does it mean, then, to explore ethics, aesthetics, the spiritual nature of humanity, humanity itself? What does it mean in terms of education and the way we built our education system? What does it mean in terms of social justice? If we are only systems, if our consciousness is essentially a narrative that act after the fact, after our many different systems have quantified the world, reacted and adapted to it, what then is the pursuit of knowledge? If we are controlled by the microbiome and are only temporary constructs in the ebb and flow of a continuum, what, then, is the narrative of humanity, the storyline of the humanities?

This is our biggest challenge. While quantum physics, evolutionary biology, genomics, neuroscience and epigenetics continue to reframe, deconstruct and shatter our limited, linear, delineated and causal understanding of the world, unhinge our notion of the self, of gender, of species and of free will, the humanities will have to suggest a new narrative, one that makes sense of the (un)natural world. A new chronicle of humanity is now needed, one that expands at the cusps of the event horizon, one that features extreme notions of the world, one that includes radical concepts of what life is, of what the human species is not, and of how parasites power us to act in certain ways [26], with our need to act as if we had free will, to long as if love was more than just chemical reactions to evolutionary clues, to believe we can actually create a better, kinder and more empathic civilisation. This will neither be easy nor quick. But I believe it to be fundamental. My argument is that the most crucial mistake we could make would be to cling to our old notions of humanity and the humanities, to argue against these new perceptions, to deny the almost total control of the microbiome on our behaviour, to claim an unidentifiable exclusiveness to humanity, to use the world of art, poetry, music, and aesthetics (all perfectly explainable as evolutionary systems24) to defend an already broken-through, invaded and burned out fortress.

What would such a new definition of the humanities look like?

Let me suggest the following: The new humanities should speak of, argue for, understand and embrace a new human being, one who is a collective of microorganisms, one who exists as a fleeting evolutionary form, one for whom free-will and consciousness are only part and parcel of a larger continuum, and are only the result and the expression of a system that extends from the microcosm to the macrocosm, a dynamic structure that encompasses the laws of physics and the bonds of chemistry and is the result of phenomena that far outreach the individual and the species.

It is humanities expanded. The human species, it appears, must now be extended to the microcosm, to the microbiome, to technology, and to phenomena that we consider neither conscious nor alive. Ethics, justice, empathy, melancholia, and the drive to understand must now probably include, and take into account the world of viruses, parasites, bacteria, AI, robots, computers, and machines.

It may seem hard to fathom. But if one agrees that these phenomena have a direct and powerful impact and influence on humanity, if one argues, further, that their roots allow for the tree of humankind to exist, grow and expand, one, then, must also agree that to treat them as outside forces that have nothing to do with humanity is a dangerous game to play. If one believes that the ecosystem is worthy of justice and reverence, then one should probably also agree to include other dimensions of the natural world previously dismissed because of size, differences in material, or our inability to categorize their complexity into the circle of humanity.

What does it mean? It means, dramatically and counter-intuitively, developing notions of justice, ethics and respect for our soon to be ubiquitous robots; understanding and treating the Internet as we would any other natural system; accepting that the microbiome is a living ecosystem as important and as deserving of respect as is the Amazon forest; and developing a narrative of what it is to be human which will include these strange phenomena. We are humans, I would argue, because we now experience reality through a third hemisphere, because our bacterial flora is part and parcel of our thoughts, because the intrusion of viruses in our DNA dictates how we behave, because evolution, and its innumerable variables, create the push and the need for love, aesthetics, and beauty.

Soon, machines will make ethical decisions for us, as the Google car is making clear. Soon, machines will have the ability to learn, reflect, pause, and create moving artworks [28]. Soon, machines will be active participants in our ethical discussions and dilemmas [29]. But soon machines will probably also be taken over, modified and deeply influenced by the microbiome. In the near future, machines and the microbiome will possibly merge and be undistinguishable from one another. Soon, distinguishing the inorganic from the organic, the conscious from the seemingly insentient, the neuronally from the algorithmally gifted, species from machines will probably become impossible.

Technology and the microbiome will expand our notion of the innumerable and intertwined layers of reality. Quantum physics already suggests the implausible entanglement of atoms. Soon, the unseen physical material of the universe, what we currently call dark matter, will open up new understandings of the physical world. Already, machines are creating data at a rate that is impossible for the human brain to comprehend, or make sense of. Being human will soon mean being an entangled piece of a large, convoluted, complex and infinitely multifaceted world. Extricating humanities from this entanglement is, I believe, a grave mistake. Humanities in the 21st century could be humanities of men, women, machines, parasites, viruses, bacteria, evolution, dark matter and atomic forces. Humanities in the 21st century could be humanities that understand that if man and woman are but a small but critical piece of a larger puzzle, perfectly integrated into that puzzle, then what man and woman need, hope for, desire, and long for, justice, ethics, and respect are also common to all phenomena, are also the results of mechanisms deprived of what we consider to be free-will. Perhaps, humanities in the 21st century should give credence to the notions that our very basic grasp of consciousness, intent and agency can only be the results of large unconscious systems, that our ability to self-reflect, to contemplate, and to be moved by aesthetics are the results of the innumerable living organisms deep within our fabric, the same living organisms, the same microscopic and macroscopic systems, the same evolutionary forces that permeate all dimensions of reality, all layers of life, all expressions of nature, technology, and the natural world. Our experiences are most probably not specific to our species but universal, expressed and mediated differently, yes but common to all living organisms, all systems, and all expressions of nature. Humanities then, instead of being unique to humans could actually be the universal matrix needed to understand the ecosystem, the framework applied to all expressions of nature and evolution.

5. Conclusions

Pleasure as David P. Barash would say, “is not something that nature doles out without reason and we would expect this reason to be intimately linked to maximising fitness” [30]. If this is the case, then the pleasure of thinking, reflecting, questioning; the pleasure of being moved, touched, saddened; the pleasure of creating, modifying, manufacturing; the pleasure of building a just society, one that constantly expands the circle of empathy, are not unique to humans. In fact, the desire for justice, the needs for ethics, the longing for compassion may be universal traits that all living organisms and all systems share. The humanities of the future could include every organism, every system (organic and non organic), and every technology. Imagine what such humanities would look like, imagine how exciting building such humanities will be, imagine how complex and complicated that task will be, but also imagine how fruitful, how encompassing, and how pleasurable it may be to achieve what we have longed for, for thousand of years: folding the human back into the world.

The humanities of the 21st century is the universe. This, I believe, is its future.