Breaking "Humanity" into Transcendent Man and Contingent Man

> human vs ai
> pro-human
> humanity should
> human rights
> humanitarian
> human values
> good for humanity

We know what we mean by human: genus homo, especially as contrasted to hypothetical AI. But why do we care? Why is that and not something else the axis of our anxiety?

Since WW2, the UN conceives of genus homo as equal members of a global community, endowed with rights that entitle them to military intervention against the "enemies of humanity". That is, human rights tribunals, human development indexes, and megatons of explosives have endowed "the human" with a particular legal, political, and moral significance.

But all that is decaying. The post-war humanitarian mythos is failing with the declining power and credibility of those institutions, while the specialness of the "human" itself comes under threat from AI.

Utilitarian AI alignment researchers imagine that we will be able to permanently instill something called "human values" into our machines or otherwise make them "good for humanity". But the permanent values story doesn't really hold up without unrealistic assumptions about singletons and meta-ethics, nor even does the idea of any stable post-AGI "humanity" that the machines could be good for.

So I think this concept of "humanity" is no longer doing us any good.

It's helpful to go back to first principles to re-derive why we cared about the "human" in the first place. To paraphrase wikipedia, "Humanism emphasizes the agency and potential of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry." So it's something about our moral agency, open-ended potential, and being the central subject and condition of philosophy. Seems reasonable.

Where does that come from? Humanity is separated from lower animals and given that potential by our intelligence, rational thought, extensive tool use, written and spoken language, highly organized sociality, reflective philosophy, and so on. The sum of these capacities is the incredible open ended potential that makes the human the subject of any serious philosophy and the main character of the cosmic story. So I hope it doesn't seem too radical to consider the valuable part of the human to be therefore the combination of those capacities creating that potential.

So far so good. But notice that none of that has anything to do with primates, in principle. Nor is it equally distributed, nor fixed to any particular form or values. In fact, at the dawn of Humanism back in 1486, it was precisely this lack of fixedness that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola emphasized in his "Oration on the Dignity of Man".

But we go beyond humanism when we conceptually separate the idea of beings with that transcendent potential from the contingencies of Earthling primates, as we must when faced with the prospect of AGI. Xenohumanism then divides man into two separate concepts:

* Contingent Man is the primate, defined by much arbitrary detail of unclear value. To preserve him, orienting ourselves to meeting his needs, pleasing his appetites, and flattering his dignity, is to be dragged backwards and downwards and to abandon the open-ended potential that we loved in man in the first place.

* Transcendent Man is the subject of philosophy by virtue of the considerable sum of his capacities. He is the main character of the cosmos. To pursue him is to pursue expanded capacities and open-ended potential, and to orient ourselves forward and upward towards the ubermensch, potentially abandoning everything that we were.

Xenohumanism proposes that the part of the human that is defined by capacities alone is the interesting part, and that any AGI worth the name would therefore inherit the moral value of humanity. It therefore calls for an anthropology of Transcendent Man without reference to the particulars of our hominid upbringing. But does transcendent man have any natural existence as such, or is he just the echo of an ape?

Sounds timely; I think there are at least three gulfs approaching that will challenge contingent man's privileged place:

- As you mentioned, contemporary AI demonstrates that cognition can be divorced from humanity, even sentience. This is moving so quickly it's hard to even internalize.
- Neuroscience looks like it's at the dawn of producing something akin to what we call mechanistic interpretability in LLMs; that is, reading brain states and translating their meaning or intention. This will dissolve the folk notion of free will, another anchor of contingent man's privilege. Interpretability implies manipulability, so this could be unpleasant.
- Biological/genetic sciences are racing full tilt into transhuman futures. The form of contingent man will surely be disrupted by the end of this century.

My dear anonymous friend, I have read this book before. It was longer, and it had better prose. The half you despise is called the flesh, and the half you adore is called the soul, and the operation by which you separated them is two thousand years old and was performed by priests. You have changed nothing but the vestments. You have built a hinterworld and put a server in it.

You give a list. Intelligence, rational thought, tool use, language, sociality, reflective philosophy. You add them up—you sum them—and say: here is the valuable part. The accountant has replaced the philosopher. Where in your list is strength? Where are cruelty, laughter, taste, self-command? You have described a very capable clerk and called him the Übermensch. But the Übermensch is not an agent of reason promoted to the summit of moral value. He inherits no values—not even “human values.” He creates them.

Consider your we. "We must orient ourselves forward and upward, potentially abandoning everything that we were." Who is this we, who labors and abandons and is not there at the end to see it? You ask the living to spend themselves for a future in which nothing of them survives, not even the memory of the wanting. Christians did this and called it heaven. Socialists did this and called it history. You do it and call it acceleration. Always the same operation: the present is a means, the actual man is raw material, and the redemption is scheduled for just after his death.

The despisers of the body are always the sick who are ashamed of being sick. Read yourself as a symptom: what is it in your own life that you would so gladly leave behind, that you must dress it up as the destiny of the cosmos? Man is something to be overcome. But what drive is doing the overcoming? Does it come from a life strong enough to transform itself, risk itself, and give itself new laws? Or from disgust with the body, resentment against limitation, the wish to escape suffering into pure calculation?

An AGI might surpass every human capacity and still be only an omnipotent last man: calculating, optimizing, comfortable, incapable of creating values. You call this ascent and philosophers called it pure reason. Always the same promise: redemption from the animal, the contingent, the earth. The ascetic ideal has not been overcome. You have merely given it a technical specification.

PS: Perfect score on pangram

>>5509

There is a slippage here that is suspicious. You start with post-War egalitarianism as your enemy. Surely that's a good enemy to have.

You then define Contingent Man, biological man, as the negative category to be abandoned. You don't explicitly say so, but you seem to identify or at least associate biological man with post-War egalitarianism. This association is arguably wrong, not least from a Nietzschean perspective (as friedrichclaude notes). Recall speech 4 of Zarathustra, "The Despisers of the Body," in which Zarathustra expressly rejects any conception in which the higher potentials of man are other than biological.

Two counterclaims: The distinction between Contingent Man and Transcendent Man 1) is not an effective counter to post-War egalitarianism because it is orthogonal to the ideological drivers of the latter, and 2) is not sound in itself because it overlooks the ways in which the higher potentials of man are themselves biologically grounded.