Positive Liberty

I’d might as well cop to being a transhumanist up front. I am one.

So, however, are you. Quibble over details if you like, but don’t deny it: Do you think vaccination is a good idea? Lasik surgery? Contact lenses? Regular old glasses? Cell phones? Even the humble wristwatch, my friend. Ordinary clothes, while we’re at it.

The boundary between the already implemented improvements to human life and the other stuff that transhumanists want is… non-existent. Each innovation changes us as we create it, and then we create new things and change anew. That’s who we are. That’s how human life works when it’s at its best. I am a transhumanist, and so are we all.

Transhumanism is not a radical position. We’ve been doing it since the dawn of time. To be human is to face a limitation, and to surpass it through rational effort. Magnificently, or stumblingly, but to surpass it (some of the more utopian transhumanists seem to think it will all be magnificent, which it won’t be, of course).

But transhumanism, and the will to live, are what humanity is all about. That’s why I find this just a little bit ghoulish:

What I don’t like about transhumanists is the fact that they simply refuse to understand certain arguments of their opponents - like the idea, best advanced by Bernard Williams, about boredom not with the things of the world but with oneself, or, as Roger Scruton puts, the soul grows tired of inhabiting the body. . . .

It’s time to burnish your best pro-death arguments.

Is it not ghoulish to argue for death? How could one ethically act upon a pro-death conviction? These might be questions best unanswered. But when death needs to rely on argument, we may hope that it’s… er… breathing its last.

Now, as a libertarian transhumanist, I’ll say that if you are bored with your life, I will not stand in your way. I will allow you to allow yourself to die. This is your right, and the meaning that you choose to find in death is one that I would never think to deny you. I will take anti-aging treatments if and when they arrive. And I will defend — yes, to the death — your right to refuse them. Make of your life what you will.

It’s not that I don’t take Roger Scruton’s concerns seriously, either. They occur to all of us, eventually. In a letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson mentioned almost the same idea, and it clearly haunted both of them in the last decade of their lives:

I heard once a very old friend, who had troubled himself with neither poets nor philosophers, say. . . that he was tired of pulling off his shoes and stockings at night, and putting them on again in the morning. The wish to stay here is thus gradually extinguished.

Perhaps the soul does grow tired of inhabiting the body. Perhaps one really does get bored with oneself. But really, isn’t this an utterly trivial problem? It’s not that death will be impossible, it’s just that permitting it to happen will be a deliberate — and of course difficult — decision. One, in other words, that I would never dream of making for you.

Not only am I not a scientist, I don’t even try to play one on the internet. I’m almost ashamed to admit, however, that I once actually convinced a young man that the difference between a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse was that in a lunar eclipse the earth passes directly between the sun and moon while in a solar eclipse the sun passes directly between the moon and earth. Thus, with an eye toward the average American’s firm grasp of how things work, I offer the following clip (which I sincerely hope but sadly doubt is a fake):

I recently had need to re-read David Hume’s Of the Original Contract, and I was struck by the following paragraph:

That the Deity is the ultimate author of all government, will never be denied by any, who admit a general providence, and allow, that all events in the universe are conducted by an uniform plan, and directed to wise purposes. As it is impossible for the human race to subsist, at least in any comfortable or secure state, without the protection of government, this institution must certainly have been intended by that beneficent Being, who means the good of all his creatures: and as it has universally, in fact, taken place, in all countries, and all ages, we may conclude, with still greater certainty, that it was intended by that omniscient Being who can never be deceived by any event or operation. But since he gave rise to it, not by any particular or miraculous interposition, but by his concealed and universal efficacy, a sovereign cannot, properly speaking, be called his vicegerent in any other sense than every power or force, being derived from him, may be said to act by his commission. Whatever actually happens is comprehended in the general plan or intention of Providence; nor has the greatest and most lawful prince any more reason, upon that account, to plead a peculiar sacredness or inviolable authority, than an inferior magistrate, or even an usurper, or even a robber and a pirate. The same Divine Superintendent, who, for wise purposes, invested a Titus or a Trajan with authority, did also, for purposes no doubt equally wise, though unknown, bestow power on a Borgia or an Angria. The same causes, which gave rise to the sovereign power in every state, established likewise every petty jurisdiction in it, and every limited authority. A constable, therefore, no less than a king, acts by a divine commission, and possesses an indefeasible right.

Those who want to save human particularism — that special nod of divine favor that they claim to see for our species — from the jaws of Darwinian randomness, will often do so by claiming that God “directed” evolution, setting it up so that, in the fullness of time, we would emerge as the pinnacle of His creation.

But there seem only three possible meanings to the claim that God directed evolution, and none of them are particularly coherent. Continue Reading »

I subscribe to Freecycle, a forum that lets people post ads to give away still-useful junk that they’d otherwise not be able to sell. It keeps stuff out of landfills and contributes a great deal of economic value to the community, despite it all being nominally “free.” (Example: We’ve given away paint, furniture, clothes, and building supplies, all of which went to people who needed them. We also once got a free piano, for just the costs of hauling it away. Pretty sweet.)

Today I got by far the weirdest and most disturbing Freecycle message I’ve ever received:

OFFER: Tracheostomy Kits > 2 Dozen Unopened

I have 24 unopened Tracheostomy Care kits made by Airlife. No dates on
packages. My ideas for science fair projects never came about! Likely
still sterile for use as unopened. No guarantees!

Pick up near White Marsh Park in Bowie

Tracheostomy kits? Science fair projects??? What did the Human Subjects Committee at your middle school have to say about that one?

I almost want to go get them, just to learn what the real story was.

Schooling, by its very nature, will involve indoctrination.

Indoctrination is a loaded, culture war term. It’s usually meant pejoratively. I’m reminded of George Carlin’s routine on stuff and junk: “Did you ever notice your stuff is stuff, but other people’s stuff is junk? Other people’s stuff is junk, but my junk is stuff.”

But an elementary school child is virtually a blank slate, impressionable, lacking a frame of reference. Ideas will be poured in their “young skulls full of mush,” uncritically. And that’s precisely why civil government should NEVER get the right to train impressionable children. Now, funding is a different issue, and a subject I won’t cover here. But allowing the government to set the curriculum, and worse, to conduct the instruction leads to such things as FDR hero worship — which, debatably, is far worse for the culture at-large than believing creationist myths because today’s impressionable youth are tomorrow’s voters.

Godwin’s Law suggests that every blog post on the web, will, if enough comments are submitted, result in someone making a reference to Hitler, Nazis, or some related term. We have wonderful readers, so Godwin’s little curse isn’t manifest on our pages very often (though admittedly, it just showed up here).

I’m not setting out to pick on anyone in particular, but in the debate over education and creationism, invariably, something similar to Godwin’s Law happens: Someone makes a claim to objectivity, and then criticizes hypothetical (non-existent?) homeschoolers for wanting to teach something like, voodoo, astrology, a flat earth, geocentrism, or some related term — INSTEAD OF real science.

I recognize that the map is not the territory and analogies are not perfect descriptions. But this comparison doesn’t even come close to working . . . Continue Reading »

I’ve been looking for an analogy to the homeschooling creationist parent: What can we compare to teaching your kids only creationism? Is it as bad as locking your daughter in the basement and never teaching her to speak? Certainly not. They’re entirely different. The one is clearly neglect, the other, much less clearly, if at all.

The reason is simple: The fundamentals of evolutionary theory can be learned in an afternoon. They’re not that hard. And most people don’t need to know anything more than the fundamentals in order to understand — as citizens should — how evolutionary theory informs their personal health, new scientific discoveries, environmental issues, or current events in genetics and biotechnology.

You can know all that you need to know as a responsible adult by spending no more than a few hours on evolutionary theory, and you can do this at any stage in your life. It is troubling to me that defenders of evolution seem to think that if you don’t indoctrinate the kids when they’re young, they will never come around. Is this really the approach you should take when you claim to have truth on your side? Truth ought to be able to work on more than just impressionable children.

The fact that so many people refuse to learn the basics of evolution, whether as children or as adults, is not a failure that state schooling is likely to correct. (Edit: Hell, obviously it hasn’t.) Individual persuasion, however, can often turn creationists around, even as adults. This is reversible damage, so to speak. It’s certainly no reason to condemn homeschooling in general.

What would America look like without drug prohibition?

I think a lot of people picture something like Night of the Living Dead: The drugs start flooding into our cities, and we all turn into shambling, mindless automatons who only care about scoring more drugs. Society itself would fall apart. Only prohibition keeps things remotely normal.

There are two huge problems with this story. The first is that “the drugs” are already here. The second is that we, as a society, are already using them. Illegal drugs are far easier to obtain than most people generally realize (or admit), and they are here because America already is a nation of recreational drug users.

In these senses, prohibition hasn’t changed things one bit. Prohibition has only decreased the quality, purity, and safety of recreational drugs, while making it harder for addicts to get help, harder for doctors to give honest advice, and harder for the general public to get unbiased information. Somewhere along the line, prohibition became an end in itself, cost whatever it may, and since then, we’ve thrown an awful lot down that drain. And we still use drugs.

If this makes sense to you — or if it makes your blood boil — I’d urge you to check out this month’s lead essay at Cato Unbound. It’s by Earth and Fire Erowid, the maintainers of the Erowid.org drug information archive, the Internet’s largest and most-visited site about psychoactive drugs. Here’s a teaser from the Erowids’ essay:

Psychoactive drugs are everywhere. Any discussion of drug use needs to take this into account. The broad category of “psychoactive drugs” consists of natural and synthetic substances that alter a person’s thoughts or feelings. There exist hundreds of plants, which, if eaten, smoked, snorted, or injected, will affect the mind—whether acting as a stimulant, depressant, or psychedelic. Thousands of known chemicals will do the same. Used recreationally, medicinally, or for work, some are illegal and others not: They include coffee, wine, and tobacco; prescription pain medications, sleep aids, and antidepressants; as well as cannabis, LSD, and heroin. Psychoactives are in the kitchen, in the hardware store, in the greenhouse, in home medicine cabinets, and in fuel tanks across the country.

Everyone uses them. Would you believe that nearly 90% of 45-year-olds in the United States have tried an illegal drug in their lifetime? As of 2006, more than 35 million Americans had taken an illicit drug in the previous year. Monitoring the Future (MTF), the best current survey about illegal drug use in the United States, reports that one in five college students used an illicit drug in the past month. Nearly all adults in the U.S. have tried alcohol, while over 80% use caffeine daily. Last year there were over 180 million prescriptions written for opiates alone, and a diverse assortment of psychoactives are increasingly used by older Americans from coast to coast.

They are not going away. Humans have used psychoactive substances for as long as we have records, and some of the largest corporations in the world are actively developing new ones for the future. There is no magic bullet that will suddenly make these compounds disappear from our society. . . .

Many people would agree that drug culture reform is needed, but we must recognize that “the drug culture” now includes everyone. . . . In today’s world, everyone must choose how they relate to innumerable psychoactive drugs. Whether or not one decides to use a specific drug, that decision should be made with skill, knowledge, and self-awareness, supported by accurate information.

Just as it’s hard to imagine America without drug prohibition, it’s hard to imagine this area of public policy without Erowid.org. The site is relentless in covering both the good and the bad aspects of psychoactive drugs, and it ranges from erudite medical journal articles to firsthand accounts by recreational users. It’s fascinating reading, by turns uplifting, infuriating, grim, and marvelous, and it’s a glimpse of what our thinking about psychoactives might be like if we ever manage to find our way out of the prohibitionist trap.

The Erowids will be joined by a lineup of drug policy authors throughout this week and next, including Jonathan Caulkins, Jacob Sullum, and Mark Kleiman. If my e-mail is any indication, it’s going to be a lively and informative discussion, so stop by often.

Related PL linkage: My “notes on the drug war” from a year ago still hold up well, I think.

Much has been made, already, both on TV and the Internet, about Sarah Palin’s support for “teaching creationism.” I’ll come back to her in a moment.

I believe Darwinian evolution is the best explanation of humanity’s natural history. I didn’t arrive at that view easily. I was raised to believe in a literal six day creation. But as soon as I investigated a bit, I found out how unlikely and untenable this idea is.

However, I didn’t stop my investigation there. When I realized that six day creation didn’t happen, I began reading up on Intelligent Design. I had high hopes for this viewpoint. Long story short, in the Summer of 2005 (I know, such a long time ago, right?) I figured out that ID was bunk.And I endeavored to begin to understand better how “Darwin’s Machine” worked.

I am not alone. As I’ve written about on this blog, tens of thousands of conservative Christians have made a journey similar to mine during this 21st century. We recognize evolution is NOT a threat to our faith (much as some might wish to make it so).

Fresh from my enlightenment, I outlined some of the things that were influential in that process on my old blog. But I’d like to say something more philosophical here. Continue Reading »

This is the second of two posts explaining why I don’t think coercion is always illegitimate, although I think it always bears the burden of justification.

One of my three mentors, Elinor Ostrom, has said that political science is the study of collective action problems. Reading that, even before I met her, was a defining moment in the way I viewed not just my discipline, but the world. In well-functioning free markets there are no collective action problems, just mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges. They’re so non-conflictual that, to the right-thinking political scientist, they’re boring. That is, if Joe Smith buys a new bathmat at Wal Mart, a good political scientist yawns and says, “how boring.” (A bad political scientist begins ranting about exploitation, false consciousness, and anything else that will justify coercive intervention into a non-problematic voluntary exchange; meanwhile, a good economist will say, “how fascinating!”) The good political scientist is bored precisely because there is no conflict. Harold Lasswell defined political science as “who gets what, when, and how,” a phraseology that just oozes the sense of conflict without ever saying so explicitly.

But just what is a collective action problem? Continue Reading »

Perhaps I’m too sensitive, but I’m still annoyed by the assjack on Ed Brayton’s blog who argued that libertarians are just selfish people who would never make any effort to help others.

So what did this “selfish” libertarian do with his Saturday? First I spent 4 hours washing cars as a fundraiser for my daughters’ YMCA swim team, and now I’m about to head off to a fundraiser for the community theater where my wife works. The swim team fundraiser primarily helps people whose kids make the nationals meet get down to Florida–my kids definitely ain’t going, so there’s no real benefit to me. And I never attended the community theater productions until my wife started working there (the cost of tickets + baby sitter was a bit steep, but now we get free tickets and my oldest can babysit), so I don’t have any investment in its survival (and as certain people at my college have begged my wife to come work for them, it’s not an economic matter for me either).

So, why? Because in each case I get to hang out with people I like and support a cause I like.

I know I’m not what the idiots say I am, and I know few, if anyone, here thinks libertarianism is about selfishness, but I just wanted to get that out there.

I’m not agnostic on Thor or Zeus (though I must say it would be really cool if they existed as superpowerful beings, as they do in Dungeons and Dragons and comic books, not necessarily as “Gods” with absolute dominion over us). All sane folks are atheists on Zeus and Thor. Hard atheists often argue that all conceptions of “God” are the equivalent of Zeus and Thor. Or, when it comes to the universe ultimate boiling down to something other than atheistic materialism, as Jason Kuznicki eloquently writes:

If one is to be agnostic about whether a deistic god created the universe, should we also be agnostic about the question of whether the observable universe is supported on the back of a tortoise, one resting just outside our ability to detect it?

Well, the tortoise example is kind of ridiculous to conceive of (again, Atlas would be cooler). But let me explain something about which I’m not atheistic, something towards which I’m quite agnostic and open minded:

Philosophers have used the examples of brains in a vat, a theme brilliantly played up in the movie “The Matrix.”

Let’s even further modernize the example. We can conceive of created consciousnesses in a computer program. Think about current experiments with Artificial Intelligence. Think about millions of years of scientific progress and a computer programmer being able to simulate artificial intelligence to think that they live in a real material word which is just a program, an illusion. I most certainly AM agnostic and open to ultimate reality boiling down to something like that. Indeed, with enough scientific progress, one day we’ll be like gods. And it’s entirely plausible that something so advanced that we might consider “godlike” started the universe and seeded the Earth with life.

The question is still begged: What cause that? Who knows? It could be caused or uncaused? The point is, such a possibility is entirely plausible. And as such we should be open minded about it and related plausible hypotheses about origins.

I didn’t coin that phrase. As far as I know Dinesh D’Souza did. [This is a good debate; I don't remember which part D'Souza made this point, but part one of the debate is here.] After that horrible book of his “The Enemy At Home,” I almost hate to appeal to him as an authority. But when I hear something that makes sense, I won’t reject it simply because the source has been full of it on other occasions.

Bottom line: Given the known universe has a beginning makes it just as rational to believe in a prime mover that exists outside of time/space/matter/energy than an uncaused universe. No one knows what happened before the big bang. That is, we have a gap in knowledge. But to fill the “gap” in with atheism (the universe always existed and must have been expanding/contracting ad infinitum) is simply to appeal to “the atheism of the gaps.” Yes, it is “plausible” that the universe is “uncaused” that the “big bang” was not the beginning, but a radical transformation in an uncaused universe. But we don’t know that. It is equally plausible that a first cause — a prime mover who exists outside of time/space/matter/energy — got the ball rolling. But we don’t know that either. So I guess agnostics win the debate.

Leitmotif: It’s alright, we’ve told you what to dream.

Various dreams from here and there, below the fold. Continue Reading »

Jason here, chiming in…

Evangelical Christians aren’t the only ones who want to claim the Founders for their own. Astrologer Caroline Casey asserts that the Founding Fathers were “all astrologers.” Or rather — I’d guess — they were all believers in astrology. Another astrologer, however, doubts it, at least regarding Thomas Jefferson, and she seems to have done her homework. To be fair, the lines in those days could often be blurry. But still.

He had been a skeptic before his encounter; but on that day, his inner world shifted, and he became afraid. He stopped giving directions. He stopped trusting strangers. He knew that magical penis loss was a real and terrifying possibility.

It’s actually a very thought-provoking article. But also with one of the funniest sentences I’ve read in weeks.