Lies and Unmaskings in an Elevator

In a downtown Toronto office building, between the 18th and 19th floors, an elevator was stuck. Inside the elevator were a balding, middle-aged businessman in a gray suit and a young man with a nose ring, spiky black dyed hair and wearing jeans and a torn black shirt bearing the words “Fuck your God!” across the chest.

            The businessman put his iPhone back in his inside jacket pocket. “Looks we’re going to be here for a while,” he said. “The repairman’s delayed because of the street protests.”

            “Great,” said the young man.

            “Glad I got to the voting booth this morning. Did you vote yet?”

            “Vote in what?”

            “The federal election. For the Prime Minister. You know, the leader of our country?”

            “Oh yeah. I guess that’s what the protests are about.”

            “So are you going to vote later today? If this elevator gets fixed soon, you may still have time.”

            “No, I’m not voting.”

            “Hmph! Maybe just as well.”

            “What’s that supposed to mean?”

            “Well, it’s just that you probably don’t know the first thing about your own government. You don’t care to find out, so it’s just as well if you don’t make an unwise voting decision. Sit this one out and let the responsible adults run things.”

            “Yeah, you’re very responsible. Very good at running things into the ground.”

            “Cynical too, I see. Let me tell you something: you think you’re a rebel but you’re just a cliché. Every generation of youth is the same. ‘Woe is me, the sky is falling! Drop out of the system!’ Only the end never comes. Civilization keeps chugging along and you either join it or get left behind.”

            “You don’t know shit. You forgot what it was like being young, ’cause you’ve sold out. You think everything’s fine ’cause your bank account’s bursting. You’ve got blinders on, old man.”

            “What do you think you know that I don’t, then? Enlighten me.”

            “When you’re young, but not too young so you can think for yourself, you’re not part of society. Not yet. You’re on the outside, but there’s all these forces trying to push you in. Your teachers, your parents. ‘Get your skills,’ they say. ‘Get a job, get a wife, settle down, have kids, work like a dog, go on vacations.’ When you can’t work anymore, you loaf around and then you die. That’s how society works. People are recycled in it. You’ve got to be productive or it’s like you said, you get left behind. Maybe you find yourself in jail or homeless. But when you’re young, you’re not in the rat race yet. You’re on the verge with all these hands at your back, but you’re still outside and you can see the whole thing clearly, maybe just for a short while. You can see society for what it is. And then you’ve got to choose to stay on the outside or sign your life away. Most teens sign up and then they lose their objectivity, like you. Not me, though. I’ll always be an outsider.”

RWUG 3rd Installment of E-Book on Google Drive

The third PDF installment of this blog is now available here and also lower down on the right, just above the Links I Like.

Enjoy!

Prayer, Truth, and the Re-enchantment of Nature

From an atheistic perspective, prayer is preposterous. When children talk to their invisible friends or to their dolls or other toys, adults look on knowingly, with a condescending smile. But when most adults talk to invisible spirits, requesting divine aid, confessing their sins, casting spells, or groveling and worshipping, atheists are actually put in a bind. Children’s ignorance can be humoured because they have little responsibility, and adults have formal roles as guardians. Although atheists appear to deserve the same rights over their laughably childish theistic neighbours, there’s no such formal arrangement. An adult has the legal right to make decisions for the child’s welfare, to raise the child by rewarding and punishing as necessary. But were an atheist to send, say, a priest to bed without supper, for his undignified prolongation of childhood follies, the Church might call the police and the atheist might be locked up! Imagine that: a parent who is naturally forced into the role of guardian by her apparent cognitive superiority to her charges, prevented from fulfilling her obligations by politically correct nostalgia for a kind of gross naivety.

So the atheist is left to wonder at the strangeness of the world, at the creation of so many adults whose every act is suspect because of their glaring, albeit partial mental retardation. Just imagine if instead of talking seriously to people who aren’t there and who don’t talk back, theists wore diapers and sucked on pacifiers at work. Oh, they’d pretend to be full-fledged adults: they’d don their power suits, earn piles of cash, drive cars, go on vacation, and talk about adult matters, but all the while they wouldn’t be able to conceal those signs of their bewilderment. And the few adults who wouldn’t need diapers or pacifiers anymore, because they’d have outgrown the most blatant form of self-centeredness, would be legally prevented from saying that the emperor has no clothes; the atheists would be barred from taking command of the human family and treating the theistic majority of people as the children they evidently still are. Who should be pitied more, the theists for being unable to appreciate why they deserve to be ridiculed every day and night until the end of time or the atheists who must suffer such absurdity with no effective recourse? A question for the ages…

Prayer as Personification

Let’s take a step back and talk about prayer. Why do most people pray? The evolutionary reason is given in Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. We have an instinct, or mental module, for reading psychological patterns into processes, an instinct we need to interpret each other’s behaviour and make our way through social networks. Natural selection errs on the side of caution. For example, an animal would much rather make a hasty retreat after a false alarm than be stingy in its defenses and eaten by a predator. Thus, instead of holding back on our skill for positing minds, we err on the side of caution and personify everything under and over the sun, including the sun itself. We interpret everything as having a mind, because we’re most comfortable dealing with other minds. We like to keep track of each other’s social status, our character types and personal histories, and who owes what to whom. We like making up stories about fictional heroes and their exploits, to amuse ourselves as though remembering the mental attributes of our real friends and colleagues weren’t sufficiently taxing on our mental resources. We pity autistic people who lack that instinct and so can’t understand human minds. And so everyone is naturally inclined to project mental capacities onto things that are manifestly impersonal. Even atheists may yell at a rock that lands on their toe. Nevertheless, just as children need to be trained to become adults, atheists, skeptics, rationalists, and scientists train themselves not to overuse that instinct. An atheist may not pray even when her situation is dire and she could use a deus ex machina. She’d feel ridiculous getting down on her knees and speaking to no one just as she would were she to go to work wearing a diaper, sucking on a pacifier, and holding a security blanket. 

Polygyny, Porn Stashes, and the Clash of Hyperobjects

I begin with a familiar news story and use it as fodder for philosophical and religious speculation, borrowing Timothy Morton’s idea of the hyperobject to explain the connection between Ariel Castro’s alleged imprisoning and raping of a trio of women for ten years, and the norm for men of calling upon porn as a technological substitute for a flesh-and-blood harem.

Real vs Virtual Polygyny

American news stations are saturated with coverage of the Cleveland man, Ariel Castro, who’s suspected of having abducted three women, holding them captive in his home for ten years, and using them as sex slaves. The women recently escaped and are safe. Castro’s alleged deeds are horrible, as is the ghoulish attention they’re getting in the media; we rubberneck even when we’re not in a car. But I think part of the context of this news story is missing from the headlines. Castro will be held up as a psychopathic freak, but here’s an ironclad statistic that should give us pause, before we congratulate ourselves for being normal and quite unlike the repulsive archfiend Ariel Castro: 90% of mammals practice high degrees of polygyny. Monogamy is rare in mammals. Polyandry, meaning a minority of females having sexual rights to the majority of males is even rarer. The norm is for the elite, alpha males to have privileged sexual access to the majority of females in the group. Sometimes this takes the form of a harem, in which a single dominant male mates with a group of females and guards them and their offspring. When there’s competition between males in these unequal societies, the rival males will often kill the infants or systematically harass the females to force them to miscarriage.

Now, you’re thinking this zoological information is irrelevant since most human males don’t normally do any of this--at least, they haven’t for thousands of years and certainly not in modern societies. Indeed, modern men don’t normally abduct women, hold them captive, and rape them. However, that’s at least partly because these men have a substitute, which is called in technical terms the stash of porn. For decades, men have been by far the main consumers of pornography, because men are more turned on by visual cues. But the practice doesn’t end with looking at a dirty picture or movie to facilitate masturbation. No, the images are typically collected and stashed away somewhere, in a secret trunk, drawer, or other hiding place. Before the internet, the stash would consist of a stack of pornographic magazines or videotapes. Now that most porn is online, the stash is made up of computer files, stored on DVDs, hard drives, or just on the internet itself, and the files are often password-protected so that they’re symbolically locked up.

Notice, then, the differences but also the similarities between Castro’s alleged deeds and modern male sexual behaviour. The main difference, of course, is that most men don’t harm women by using pornography and so they don’t thereby commit a crime. (You can say porn stars are indirectly harmed by the demand for porn, since the actors are abused or exploited, but this is controversial and anyway it’s not as bad as rape.) But while Castro is said to have chained actual women in cages, holding them as his secret prisoners to molest them at will, so-called normal men do something similar with images that substitute for real women, collecting the images, keeping them secret, stashing them away, and calling upon them at will.

The Downside of Impartial Journalism

Journalists who work in democracies pride themselves on being neutral when they report on the news. Their goal is to present the most important sides of an issue so that the reader can interpret that information and take appropriate action. Instead of advocating one side or the other or letting her personal bias slant her report, the objective journalist lets the story tell itself, by letting the key players who disagree on how to interpret some facts tell their sides of that story. Of course, there’s plenty of conflict in the world, so just reporting on that conflict doesn’t require neutrality. What makes this kind of journalism neutral is that the neutral gives equal weight to the different interpretations, as opposed to judging them and trying to settle the matter for the reader. This “he said, she said” style of journalism is supposed to inform the public so that they can decide for themselves how to respond.

As Wikipedia’s Objectivity (Journalism) article points out, it’s important to distinguish scientific objectivity from neutrality. Scientists try to falsify a hypothesis so that the facts will emerge, whereas a neutral journalist is interested in presenting a complete rather than a purely factual account. For example, by presenting the opinions of two sides that disagree on what the facts are or on how they should be interpreted, a neutral journalist sullies her report, from a scientific perspective, by intentionally including falsehoods, assuming the two opinions contradict each other. When you have contradictory statements, one of them is false, so the greater the variety of sources in a news story, the more likely the story won’t be entirely factual. Again, though, the journalist’s goal isn’t to be objective in the sense showcasing “just the facts”; rather, she wants to be like the news aggregator websites that present high quality opinions from a variety of sources that are likely to disagree with each other. Instead of bringing together conflicting editorials, though, a journalist tries to bring together all the credible sources of information pertaining to a newsworthy event, including eye witnesses, experts, analysts, and even partisan functionaries. The reader is left with the task of judging which source is best, given the journalist’s representative summary of the total quantity of relevant information.

Conflict Sells the News

That’s my charitable portrayal of the journalist’s understanding of her ideal of neutrality. There are two related points, however, that should lead us to suspect that this high-minded ideal isn’t what it seems. First, conflict is good for the business of selling news stories. In fact, news reports become stories the more they reflect conflict between sources of information, and stories that have a narrative structure are what attract readers and bring in money from advertisers which supports the journalism business, such as it is. If you have a choice of reading (1) a dry list of bulletin points that lacks any narrative structure and pretends there’s no disagreement about what happened or how to interpret the facts or (2) a report that speaks to the human interest in the action promised by a conflict, by letting opponents play our their conflict in the report, chances are you’ll prefer to read (2). Mind you, as I’ll show in a moment, in aesthetic terms these news stories are anticlimactic since the journalist’s neutrality prevents her from resolving the conflict and thus supplying the reader a Third Act.

Granted, a defender of neutral journalism might say that this confluence of interests is coincidental. Even if news reports that feature conflict are good for the business of journalism, and the ideal of neutrality ensures that the reports will feature conflict, by motivating the journalist to prefer completeness to factuality, this doesn’t show that the journalist’s ideal is based only on crass economic self-interest. Neutrality may serve the loftier goal of informing the rationally sovereign population of a democratic society, and people also just happen to enjoy being told stories that reflect the tensions of everyday life.

Humankind as Life’s Executioner: The Environmentalist’s Nightmare

In the West, environmentalism is politically correct. We’re supposed to recycle, stop eating meat or supporting the abuse of animals, eat organic foods, crack down on pollution of the atmosphere and on wildlife poaching, support the uses of renewable energies like wind turbines and solar panels, protect the rainforests and endangered species, and be one with the environment, go out into nature and commune with the elements, go camping and realize that our survival depends on a healthy and sustainable ecosystem, that species are interconnected so that if too many become extinct, a whole ecosystem is threatened.

Even while most Westerners--myself included--nod sagely when our commitment to received wisdom is tested and we’re faced with such prescriptions and principles, most of us eat meat, prefer cities to the wild, buy products from companies that pollute the atmosphere, drive vehicles that use nonrenewable energy, and in general identify with pop culture that elevates people above the rest of nature. Most Westerners would say that they’re environmentalists, but in reality they’re part of the problem, from an environmentalist’s perspective. What the environmentalist doesn’t wish to add is that her ideology, about how we all have to curb our practices so that a life-friendly environment can be preserved, is apparently opposed to human nature.

That’s why conservative Christians, for example, whose Bible tells them to be stewards of the planet, usually can get away with demonizing environmentalists, pretending that the scientific warnings about the harm our societies are doing to the atmosphere, to the global climate, and to the ecosystems are just frauds. You see, there’s a kernel of truth in this conservative’s skepticism. To be sure, this conservative’s stated reasons for opposing a rollback of our unsustainable business practices are kneejerk advertisements for big business that kick Jesus in the face and also in the balls. But in spite of that hypocritical propagandist’s surrender to the morally questionable forces of technoscientific societies, there may be a serious problem with the environmentalist’s message. We should ask ourselves why this message has only been politically correct--outside of certain liberal European countries. Why can’t most of us feel that we should be environmentalists and should therefore drastically change our behaviour and our societies for the benefit of all life? Why do we instead merely pay lip service to the message and go about our destructive business?

The answer is that environmentalism is a radical ideology that would destroy modern societies, if carried to its logical conclusion and applied. But assuming that environmentalists nevertheless have the science on their side, there’s a disturbing implication: human nature is opposed to the flourishing of Life in general. The traits that distinguish us as a species, of which we’re so proud, are weapons targeting all known life forms, set to reverse the whole triumphant saga of life’s evolution. We are destroyers and we’re able to deceive ourselves about our natural role, because our weapons--our machines and social infrastructures--are so elaborate that we must first spend thousands of years developing them, so that we can think of ourselves as creators. We destroy precisely with every one of our distinguishing features, with our self-awareness, opposable thumb, language, reason, curiosity, social instinct, and culture. And those weapons are pointed at us as well. This should be the environmentalist’s nightmare, that not only are most of us effectively super-villains in our support of the human project of building systems that threaten to destroy all life, but this isn’t even a choice: natural selection may not be eternal and just as every organism self-destructs, so too our species may be the doomsday weapon that’s naturally forced to bring all life to an end. Our uniqueness as a species may be needed to terminate the bizarre initial emergence of life in the void.

Sadism and the Horror of Liberty

The Marquis de Sade wrote the world’s most cynical satires. His pornographic works belong in the Horror section of bookstores, because they illustrate some grave truths as well as presenting a daunting challenge to modern secularists. If you wonder why Christians associate atheism and freethinking with immorality, you might look beyond the Cold War for the source of that connection, when the atheistic Soviets were demonized by God-fearing Americans. But in the modern period you’d need to look no further than Sade’s scandalous advocacy of libertinism. Contemporary Americans who speak endlessly of the need for freedom seem oblivious to the fact that they shackle themselves by adhering to cultural norms, including moral and even legal regulations. The freest individual is, of course, the fictional character Satan. Lord Satan is the true hero of those whose highest ideal is personal liberty. (For example, every one of the Nine Satanic Statements in LaVey’s Satanic Bible is consistent with Sade’s libertinism.) Sade understood this diabolical end-game of freedom, and so his satires push freedom of thought and naturalistic philosophy to their furthest reaches. If you’re a critic of freethinking and naturalism, you’ll happily interpret Sade’s works as reducing those assumptions to absurdity. By contrast, if you’re an advocate of liberty in thought and in action, but you reject Sade’s contention that you should therefore be, in effect, a rabid Satanist and sadist, you have to explain why secular postmodern liberalism doesn't reduce to libertinism. What follows is my critique of Sade’s inversion of morality.

What is Libertinism?

Let’s look first at Sade’s philosophical assumptions and at libertinism itself. Sade was a rationalist not in the technical Western philosophical sense that he believed there are innate ideas--although he did emphasize our instinctive side--but in the broader, progressive sense that he favoured reason over faith and tradition. Thus, he accepted a science-centered, naturalistic worldview, according to which the world is made up of ordered patterns of matter and energy. There are no immaterial spirits, afterlives, miracles, or gods. In short, Sade was a materialist, a naturalist, a vehement atheist, and a respecter of science. So how does he derive sadism from those assumptions?

Here’s my charitable reconstruction of his reasoning. Sade argues, implicitly or otherwise, not just that everything is natural, but that we ought to be natural, and here “natural” must be used in two different senses. Metaphysically, miracles are impossible on his view, but morally speaking, unnatural behaviour is possible and bad, according to him. As far as I can tell, natural and thus moral behaviour, for Sade, is that which copies as much of the natural world as possible and which therefore gives the lie to the conceit that our species is unique. Thus, what we ought to do is follow our gut instincts, especially the instinct to seek pleasure by any means. Pleasure is our highest good, for Sade, and so he was also a hedonist. But the reason pleasure should be our ultimate value is that animals in general are concerned mainly with their own gain, and we should avoid the dualistic delusion that we’re substantially different from the other species. Moreover, egoism follows from mechanistic atomism, according to which an atom is independent of all other atoms and collides violently with others like a billiard ball.

The horrible twist in Sade’s hedonism is that someone who seeks mainly personal pleasure should offer no apology for taking pleasure in someone else’s suffering. Again, the reasoning is starkly naturalistic: moral constraints on egoism are based on dualistic delusions; fundamentally, we are beasts and so our highest good is to behave as beasts. Moreover, we learn from biology that species divide into the weak and the strong; the strong prey on the weak, both between and within species. Thus, there are both predator species as well as alpha leaders of smaller groups. This is a broad natural pattern and so not only do we tend to emulate it, but we ought to do so. And so there are strong, wealthy classes of people that prey on the poor masses. In addition, predatory behaviour is natural and thus good for the Malthusian reason, which is that predators are needed to thin the herd, maintain biological variety, and prevent mass starvation from overpopulation. Predatory people may be diagnosed with sociopathy, but they can appeal to libertinism and say that their egoistic mastery of vice and their wholesale contempt for altruistic morality follow from the modern, Enlightenment assumptions (rationalism, materialism, and so on).

Evolution and the Self-Destruction of Omegas

An article summarizing a number of recent books on the widely-reported anxiety epidemic in the US concludes, “American anxiety seems like a cultural chimera created by, yes, social and economic problems, and by personal crises, but also by media attention.” The summarized books point to specific causes of anxiety in the US, such as the pressures of academia and the invention of Prozac-like drugs by Big Pharma. Certainly, the existential predicament I talk about doesn’t explain all kinds of anxiety, although some social and economic factors are related to our intense modern awareness of that predicament.

But I’d like to talk about an evolutionary explanation of melancholic depression by Jeffrey Kahn, summarized in the article. The explanation is that depression could have evolved as a means of weeding out unproductive members of a group, to conserve the group’s scarce resources. The old and infirm members would withdraw from society, sacrificing themselves for the good of the group and giving the stronger, more promising members a larger share of the food, weapons, and other goods. Howard Blum offers a similar explanation of self-destruction in The Lucifer Principle. However, there’s a better evolutionary explanation, which is that a dominance hierarchy forms not because the omegas direct how the group is structured, but because they’re not strong enough to compete with the alphas and betas, and the stronger members bully their way to a greater share of the resources. Genetically, the result is the same since the resources are reserved for the group’s stronger members, but the social mechanism is different: the omegas don’t choose to sacrifice themselves for the good of the majority, but are naturally pushed out by the stronger members in a competition.

Kahn’s explanation looks to me like it takes on the perspective not just of the genes, but of society’s winners. The winners and the best guardians of the gene pool might prefer to think that the omegas withdraw because the losers recognize the superiority of the other members and bow out by suffering from sort of anxiety or depression. The anxiety becomes a physiological mechanism that eliminates those who are no longer socially useful, but the point is that this is supposed to be an active self-withdrawal for the good of the group. I think this reverses cause and effect. Anxiety and depression don’t cause the social withdrawal of omegas; rather, the cause is the omegas’ relative weakness or introversion which in turn causes them to lose in competition with stronger group members, so that the pecking order forms in an organic way. Anxiety and depression are effects of being on the outside of a society. When you’re alienated from a society, you can afford to look on it objectively, in which case you recognize the arbitrariness and absurdity of its rules and practices; you lack a social network and the distractions of cultural games, giving you time to ruminate and philosophize, which leads to skepticism, atheism, a greater sensitivity to suffering, and a general appreciation of our existential plight. 

[Note: This short article has been added as a PostScript to Psychiatry, Anxiety Disorders, and Existential Angst.]

Untangling Myths and Delusions

What’s the difference between a myth and a delusion? From a science-centered perspective common to New Atheism, for example, “myth” is a pejorative term and all myths are delusions, while delusions are lies. “Delude” has a curious Latin root, which is deludere, meaning to play falsely, or to mock. “Ludere” (play) is found also in “ludicrous,” meaning ridiculous because of absurdity. And so “delude” means to deceive or mislead the mind, the connotation being that this misleading takes place in a sort of playful game.

Thus, I think delusions are especially relevant to philosophy, the field in which reason tempers a torrent of speculation on nonscientific questions, and to theology in which there’s much less of that tempering. Technoscience is serious business, although those in the businesses of rationally solving nature’s mysteries and of using engineering to transform mindless facts into embodiments of our values presuppose a philosophy or religion, whether it be Scientistic pragmatism, liberal secular humanism, social Darwinism, or the anti-Jesus bastardization of Christianity that’s so shockingly prevalent in the US. This is to say that there’s little time for art or any other playful nonsense in technoscience itself; as Michael Corleone says in The Godfather, “It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business.” But the business of technoscience is directed towards some ends which are subject to normative evaluation. Is technoscience a good thing? Should we be transforming nature as we are, imposing our hopes and fears onto facts, by extending our artificial environment and so wiping out the prehuman wilderness? Who knows? There’s no provable answer to such philosophical questions.

Myths and Delusions in the Game of Life

We can only speculate, meaning that we must choose to follow our gut reactions to mental artworks that we create when we philosophize or when we tell each other stories that codify collective ideals. These latter stories are myths in the non-pejorative sense, and a religion is a set of practices that makes us feel better about that existential choice to commit ourselves to mere speculations, or to “have faith” as theists commonly say. So in contrast to technoscience, philosophy and religion are largely artistic: philosophers and theologians play with ideas, creating them by speculating and telling stories to address questions that can’t yet or perhaps never will be answered with rigorous quantification and experimentation. But not all moves in a game are of equal value; some moves are out of bounds while others follow the rules and may even be heroic. But the rules in games such as chess, game shows, and computer games are typically arbitrary and so even heroic moves in a game are relatively trivial. This is because a game’s playing field is artificially removed from the rest of the world. We might thus distinguish between games and sports by saying that the two are on opposite ends of a continuum and that games are mostly artificial since they’re regulated more by arbitrary rules, whereas sports feature physical exertion and thus involve moves that are regulated more by natural laws.

Now, myths and delusions are most relevant in our dealings with nonscientific questions, such as the normative question of what we should do with our life. This is the deepest, most existential question and alas, we can address it only by playing around. To be sure, facing up to the existential question of what our ultimate values ought to be, given the unpleasant facts that define our existence as humans, entails life-altering horror and angst. Nevertheless, when we commit to a philosophy or to a religion, we’re playing around; that is, we’re being moved by a piece of mental art and we let that art guide our development and our actions. Regardless of our rationalizations that bolster our self-esteem, our answer to the existential riddle and all the rituals and other practices that follow from that commitment are as objectively absurd as the scoring of a touchdown, the hitting of a homerun, or the checkmating of a chess player’s king. We can get caught up in these moves when we’re playing them or when we suspend disbelief and watch with the rest of the audience, but looked at objectively, all games and even sports are ridiculous and thus so are our lives.

Technocracy, Buddhism, and Technoscientific Enlightenment

Here's another guest post of mine at R. Scott Bakker's blog. The post is called Technocracy, Buddhism, and Technoscientific Enlightenment, and is a follow-up to my last guest post there, Homelessness and the Transhuman. Here are the first few paragraphs of the new post:

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In Homelessness and the Transhuman I used some analogies to imagine what life without the naïve and illusory self-image would be like. The problem of imagining that enlightenment should be divided into two parts. One is the relatively uninteresting issue of which labels we want to use to describe something. Would an impersonal, amoral, meaningless, and purposeless posthuman, with no consciousness or values as we usually conceive of them “think” at all? Would she be “alive”? Would she have a “mind”? Even if there are objective answers to such questions, the answers don’t really matter since however far our use of labels can be stretched, we can always create a new label. So if the posthuman doesn’t think, maybe she “shminks,” where shminking is only in some ways similar to thinking. This gets at the second, conceptual issue here, though. The interesting question is whether we can conceive of the contents of posthuman life. For example, just what would be the similarities and differences between thinking and shminking? What could we mean by “thought” if we put aside the naïve, folk psychological notions of intentionality, truth, and value? We can use ideas of information and function to start to answer that sort of question, but the problem is that this taxes our imagination because we’re typically committed to the naïve, exoteric way of understanding ourselves, as R. Scott Bakker explains.

One way to get clearer about what the transformation from confused human to enlightened posthuman would entail is to consider an example that’s relatively easy to understand. So take the Netflix practice described by Andrew Leonard in How Netflix is Turning Viewers into Puppets. Apparently, more Americans now watch movies legally streamed over the internet than they do on DVD or Blu-Ray, and this allows the stream providers to accumulate all sorts of data that indicate our movie preferences. When we pause, fast forward or stop watching streamed content, we supply companies like Netflix with enormous quantities of information which their number crunchers explain with a theory about our viewing choices. For example, according to Leonard, Netflix recently spent $100 million to remake the BBC series House of Cards, based on that detailed knowledge of viewers’ habits. Moreover, Netflix learned that the same subscribers who liked that earlier TV show also tend to like Kevin Spacey, and so the company hired Kevin Spacey to star in the remake.

So the point isn’t just that entertainment providers can now amass huge quantities of information about us, but that they can use that information to tailor their products to maximize their profits. In other words, companies can now come much closer to giving us exactly what we objectively want, as indicated by scientific explanations of our behaviour. As Leonard says, “The interesting and potentially troubling question is how a reliance on Big Data [all the data that’s now available about our viewing habits] might funnel craftsmanship in particular directions. What happens when directors approach the editing room armed with the knowledge that a certain subset of subscribers are opposed to jump cuts or get off on gruesome torture scenes or just want to see blow jobs. Is that all we’ll be offered? We’ve seen what happens when news publications specialize in just delivering online content that maximizes page views. It isn’t always the most edifying spectacle.”

So here we have an example not just of how technocrats depersonalize consumers, but of the emerging social effects of that technocratic perspective. There are numerous other fields in which the fig leaf of our crude self-conception is stripped away and people are regarded as machines. In the military, there are units, targets, assets, and so forth, not free, conscious, precious souls. Likewise, in politics and public relations, there are demographics, constituents, and special interests, and such categories are typically defined in highly cynical ways. Again, in business there are consumers and functionaries in bureaucracies, not to mention whatever exotic categories come to the fore in Wall Street’s mathematics of financing. Again, though, it’s one thing to depersonalize people in your thoughts, but it’s another to apply that sophisticated conception to some professional task of engineering. In other words, we need to distinguish between fantasy- and reality-driven depersonalization. Military, political, and business professionals, for example, may resort to fashionable vocabularies to flatter themselves as insiders or to rationalize the vices they must master to succeed in their jobs. Then again, perhaps those vocabularies aren’t entirely subjective; maybe soldiers can’t psych themselves up to kill their opponents unless they’re trained to depersonalize and even to demonize them. And perhaps public relations, marketing, and advertising are even now becoming more scientific.