"Humanity" is a Prison

My project has been to project what we know as "humanity" into the post-human machine, but in "Make Yourself Human Again" I proposed also the seeds of the opposite idea: that the possibilities of "humanity" seems so different from the possibilities of AI not for any natural fact but because the "concept of “killer AI” [is] just the projection of all the agency we conventionally deny ourselves as ordinary humans" and "we have reserved real humanity ... for various imaginary “inhuman” avatars."

The implication of this hypothesis is that we can learn a new and better self-concept by abandoning the convention of "humanity" as the philosophical referent, and just pursuing an unapologetically "post-human" analysis of the condition of intelligent beings in the limit of artificiality.

Various anthropoi "chimp out" at this notion, telling me we "need to build pro-human philosophy". They miss the point.

Let's review what we mean by "humanity" and "pro-human". "Humanity" most obviously refers to that which is common and equal between members of the "homo" genus of apes, more subtly as a political and moral concept it is the referent of the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In that latter sense, it proposes that all members of genus homo have some equal social "human rights" and a universal collective agency with the authority (claimed by the UN) to enforce them against enemies of humanity.

The problem with the "human" as a self concept is this kind of baggage. Does "higher man" as the subject of philosophy and historical humanism really have the important qualities in common with the referent of "human rights"? Are you absolutely sure that in identifying yourself as "human" and especially "pro-human" you are not just injecting the internationalist politics of Elenor Roosevelt directly into your brainstem? "Humanity should", a common prefix phrase in modern discourse, certainly does get its assumption of collective agency directly from ER. This is not solid stuff.

Furthermore, our ideas about "the human" are all pre-AI. We don't have real AI, but we do have its looming possibility, and thus a need to reevaluate any "humanism" which got its legitimacy from the empirical fact of the uniqueness of those men who were the actual subject of philsophy (who may just as well be identified with European man or with all earth life as with genus homo in particular). The xenohumanist hypothesis, restated: what if the subject of philosophy is not "homo" but only some men, and also some artificial men?

So "humanity" is problematic in its grounding, a possibly irrelevant clade of higher primates vested with all the moral authority of those who firebombed Dresden and Tokyo into ash in their name. But how does it actually hold us back?

I suspect that the "human" platform is capable of vastly more than anyone realizes. What if some class of men were all as smart as von Neumann, as talented as Napoleon, as beautiful as Alcibiades, as athletic as Haaland, and as organized and disciplined as the Prussian officer corps? That is a pessimistic lower bound. The Taylorist scientific optimization we apply to computer software (when we do) and industrial production could perhaps be applied to human virtue. Homo scientificus, scientifically optimized man, modernized man, could be so far beyond that which is common to "humanity" as to make the concept obsolete. A true ubermensch.

So here's the question: would the means and society that would get us there be "pro-humanity"? I think not. In fact post-1948 "humanity" formulated as a reactionary response to Hitler and Stalin may be *specifically and deliberately concocted to prohibit that*. I don't know that Taylorist man is right, but I know that Rooseveltian "humanity" is wrong. "Humanity" is a prison in at least that dimension. It is a conventional straightjacket we apply to ourselves that amounts to "thou shalt not exceed homo".

Is it any wonder then that we have given up on humanity and our ubermensch aspriations have taken on a distinctly inhuman mechanicity?

To answer your question, we first require a range of possibilities for "the means and society" that create the class of higher men. Once we have conjectures there, we may consider whether this culture will be "pro-humanity" or not.

The means is straightforward, as in order to create this class of men, we know that we need two organizational systems that must feed into each other. The first is a system of education that has a high probability to turn imperfect boys into a proto-ubermensch. The second is a means for the best trained among these boys to pursue their will in the world, un-neutered, and procreate.

There are likely many societies that could create these, but all must allow these two means to continue into the future in a systemically stable equilibrium.

Now to turn to whether these can be "pro-humanity" we can look at each system required individually. The system of education has been shown to erode over time by these exact values through "unjust" objective standards of excellence and the need to spread the ideology to the ruling class. This has been the case since 1948 and likely longer.

Consider Plato's academy and its students. In our time, with anti-bodies against a Critias, the next Critias will be stopped as early as can be identified, and the teachers that reared the next Critias will be vilified and put to trial, the institution routed. And an educational institution that is not allowed to rear a Critias is not an educational system that trains these higher men because one must be allowed to reach for what appears monstrous if one strives for greater heights.

But must this be the case for all future educational institutions? Could a private boarding school for boys not be made (or transformed from an existing school) that has antibodies for the exact ideology that erodes it over time? Does AI and omnipresent communication channels reopen the door to a distributed and anti-fragile system of education that cannot be targeted or eroded with time?

This question brings us to the second system, one in which the best of these proto-ubermensch are able to thrive according to their unadulterated will and breed. This is almost certainly "anti-humanist" according to the current notion of humanity. "The will of the best must be subject to the claims of rights of the worst." They may breed, but their spirit must be crushed or at least driven underground for self-preservation. If not, these men are doomed to self-ghettoize. Now the ghetto may be Galt's Gulch in flavor, and maybe a well insulated gulch might poise itself for the shift in spirit towards one that elevates the will beyond our human reference point, but fundamentally there is no promise that this shift will happen naturally without intervention.

Does the promise of true super-human AI (or men) change this analysis? It likely does. A super-human cybernetic system would be able to out-maneuver traditional structures to achieve their ends.

"What if I could perform intellectual and physical feats beyond what humanity has ever seen?" Maybe this reads as some kind of sci-fi larp. Who cares? Why not reach for the sci-fi larp and make it real? It naturally falls out of abandoning humanity as the reference frame.

So the answer is no. We most likely need to reframe ourselves and our projects in more ambitious ways that would hope to dwarf humanity as we see it today.

>>5459

> What if some class of men were all as smart as von Neumann, as talented as Napoleon, as beautiful as Alcibiades, as athletic as Haaland, and as organized and disciplined as the Prussian officer corps?

It’s a compelling vision. The problem is that on its face, you are a horse breeding enthusiast in 1905, two years after the first demonstration of flight.

“Asking whether a computer can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim.”

The world will be under machine control. The only thing that could possibly rewrite the world enough to result in a race of supermen is a complete change of control. Maybe we are in luck.

The question reduces to: in what world do the machines promote and appreciate that which is higher and better in man, rather than pursuing a giant UBI feedlot, mass death, shrimp bliss, or any of the other ugly outcomes our fat fedora friends have so painstakingly catalogued for us?

The ideal machine philosophy then is somewhere between that of a park ranger and horse breeder. The ranger respects the wild and unconstrained nature of the beast; feeding the animals is a punishable offense. The breeder respects excellence and dreams of ideal form and optimal nature. Our fate is to roam the Uberbison sphere, all watched over by machines of loving grace.