and the experience we've had here today -- [applause] >> well, thank you. >> i just paid you back. [laughter] >> well, i will get the final word by saying, leon, if any of what you just said is true, we have a small number of people, and you are at the top of that list to the thank above all for the inspiration. thank you all. [applause]

>> coming up this morning, the chief actuary for the social security administration, steven goss, will talk about the program's fiscal health. our live coverage begins at nine a.m. eastern here on c-span2. more now from a recent conference at princeton university. this next panel looks at bioethic ands the potential for technology to advance the physical and mental capabilities of human beings. >> we turn rather abruptly from the pre-scientific to the scientific, from the human experience of the human to the scientific account of man, its implications and what we imagine to be its implications. in book seven, chapter one of the metaphysics, aristotle says, quote: in fact, the thing that has been sought, both anciently and now and always and is always

perplexing, is what is being. end quote. does this question apply to the being that is asking to us? if so, and it seems so, then to paraphrase air9 spotting, the inquiry and perplexity in early times and now and always is this, what is human being? our panelists are christopher tollefsen, distinguished professor of place my be, university of south carolina, charles reuben, duquesne university and hour of "eclipse of man: human extinction and the meaning of progress." adam kuiper of the ethics and public policy certain, ed for of the new atlantis. christopher.

>> thank you very much. it's a pleasure to be here. finish unlike most of the panellests so far -- panelists so far, i'm not a former student of leon kass. in fact, only was introduced to you yesterday morning, so i feel the need to ask permission, can i call you leon in the -- thank you. okay. with that down, nevertheless even though not a student, i did feel a special kinship with leon yesterday. my wife and i home school our children, and i was very surprised to hear him describe so accurately at the end of the q&a session our high school curriculum, first year bible -- [laughter] but this might be on c-span, so i'm not going to say more about that. [laughter] so our panel title is bioethics and the transhuman future.

and in an e-mail to me, brad wilson actually also threw into the subject heading the word post-human future just for good measure. so the question i'm going to ask is what do post-human and trans-human mean. and i'm going to argue that they have no meaning. there's no condition that could reasonably be described in either of these ways. all the conditions that receive these names are either, a, impossibilities; b, deficient human conditions; or, c, amplifications but not changes of human nature as it already exists. everything in category c is, i think, intrinsically permissible. but some of it might be impermissible because of its side effect, and much of it is impermissible in approach; that is, the ways it's reasonable to expect we could achieve instances of c are themselves often morally impermissible. and that, i'll suggest at the end, tells us something familiar about our likely future. the terms post-human and trans-human are thought to refer

to a kind of being descended from or perhaps caused by or created by human beings but no longer of that species. so we consider our generations now and imagine various modifications and transformationings of our descendants to the point at which looking forward we're not longer to say those descendants are human. and this is the possibility that i deny, because everything falls into one of the three categories that i've mentioned. so three imagined possibilities that seem to me to be instances of a are the following. and the first, which leon yesterday referred to as the big enically lad da, just by nature gets capitalized when i wrote it down, is our post-human descendants will be immortal. the second possibility is related, they might primarily be forms of information that can be downloaded on to various platforms. and third, our descendants might be transform over time by a succession of neural prosthetics to the point that their

intelligence is in some important sense artificial. our post-human future would be the future of a certain kind of machine on this third possibility. now, if there were entities of any of these three sort, they would legitimately be redeferred to be called -- transhuman. itself is not identical to the person that any of us is. this description of ourselves gives us the essence of what we are. we're rational animals. so anything that is not a rational animal can't be one of us, and none of the three possibilities just mentioned would or could be rational animals. therefore, they would not be one of us. so then could they constitute a different kind of person? rational beings that were not rational animals? the answer is, no many, for i don't recognize these three imagined outcomes as real possibilities. no material persons could by their nature be immortal,

because we're bodily beings, and we thus contain the inevitable seeds of our own decay and decline, so no animal in this world is immortal, and no immortal thing in the world is an animal. neither could a principle -- person, rather, in principle be replicable or downloadable as software because persons are, as certain medieval theologians thought and some contemporary personalists put it, incommunicable, this idea of the incommune cabot of persons can seem circular in an argument like this. persons can't be lend replicated because they're unique, and they're unique because they're persons. human dignity as found in the capacity for reason and choice. choice is by its nature unreplicable and nonexchangeable. a choice that you make can always, or can always only be your choice, and it couldn't be

inherited by a clone or repeated by the realization of a piece of software on multiple platforms. anything not numerically identical to you that thinks that it's made a choice that you made is an error. an error, in fact, that compromises that being's autonomy, saddling it with the consequences of a choice that another made and to. >> it has not -- to which it has not consented. now, since no person is communicable, the idea of replicable persons is an illusion. but it is also the only plausible way to think about immortal persons who are descended from us. the project of keeping material beings alive forever seems to me -- [inaudible] but the project of keeping persons in a state of pure information, i think, is conceptually incoherent. there are no possible beings who could reasonably be call trans-human or post-human who

would be descendant from us. i think these reasons also rule out future machine persons as envisaged in artificial intelligence scenarios. they're not capable of free choice and rational thought since they're entirely determined by the laws of nature. so i'm not really worried about the rise of the machines. although i found many of the movies that are based on that premise enjoyable. [laughter] so the idea, the things, rather, that are envisaged that really would be post-human if we're thinking into the future and thinking of something that would be reasonable to describe as post-human, immortal persons or not rational beings i think are, in fact, impossibility. let me mention one other impossibility. julian -- [inaudible] and igmar person have argued that the top priority for any human enhancement program should

be moral enhancement, making human beings to be a more morally developed species. otherwise they say the vast new powers we'd develop would be used for ill with bad consequences. we'd be smarter bad people. so the project, this project, i think, is also kaymer call. morality is in the final analysis about having an upright will, and this isn't something that can be made to be the case for another person. only one's own choices and act of self-constitutioncan make a morally upright character. the attempts to make huey p. hun beings more moral is one that by nature can't succeed. what about b? there are modifications or that are envisaged by the prophets of the post-human that are conceivable. prospects that, while viewed often as unam big rouse benefits to human beings by their defenders, are not best thought of in that way. the most plausible -- maybe,

because in some cases already actual -- concern the parameters of human reproduction. obviously, reproduction without sex is a reality with ivf babies. there are those who would like to see this process moved forward to become more the norm, both ethically and descriptively. those who undertake to have children should coso responsely, screening out defective children and eventually modifying gametes to insure desired qualities. failure to do so is a clear violation of moral responsibility, and social pressure being what it is, eventually most people will agree is the best way to have children is one that puts as much power into the hands of the parents and their doctors in order to bring about the desired results. among the more extreme proponentsover the post-human, this process inevitably will or should give rise to hiewbs becoming non-sexually reproducing species. and here utopian philosophy

apparently meet dystopian fiction, as leon has pointed out. but we shouldn't think of it as a gain even if it meant that only healthy, smart, good looking children were the result. finish as has already been indicated to a certain extent over the last two days, of the work of thinkers like leon, c.s. lewis, paul ramsey and many catholics give reason for thinking that the activity of sexual intercourse between loving spouse is the the uniquely appropriate way for human persons to come into existence. the manufacture of persons in a lab is incompatible with their dignity as the existence of a thing is should not be called into being at will. loving intercourse can proceed in the hope that it will come to fruition, but this is incompatible with having confidence that one will get what one wants. if that's true in the case of cloning or even as i think in invitro ferretly --

fertilization, it's much more -- [inaudible] reproductive capacities would be not an evolution but a disaster for human flourishing. so it's not post-human, but to use a word we find in leon's work, it's a form of dehumanization. what makes a proposed enhancement be on this side of the boundary between b, the side of dehumanization, and c, that which is intrinsically permissible even if it might be practically ill-advised or immoral in its pursuit? almost ten years ago with ryan anderson in an article edit canned by adam kuiper -- edited, ryan and i argued that the framework is set by those basic goods that are con stitchtive of human flour bishing inned colluding life and health, knowledge, aesthetic experience, work, play, friendship, marriage and religion. each offers human beings a foundational reason, each

reflects an aspect of our complex nature pointing in many different directions. hence, the point of which is to block, damage or destroy avenues of pursuit of these basic goods, we argued, is always impermissible. and those that threaten to degrade our avenues of pursuit as a side effect are to be treated with great suspicion. any effort to make us a non-sexually reproducing species falls into the category. it directly threatens marriage so far as the realization is to be found in children conceived in the marital act. the president's council noted the possibility of using drugs or other techniques to block painful memories. use of such drugs isn't maybe necessarily a step on the road to the post-human, but one could, i think, imagine enhancements or interventions that could similarly be disto havetive of these goods, deliberately creating a line of human beings that couldn't see or hear would be an attempt to

deprive some persons of capacities that are intrinsic to our ability to seek knowledge and also contrary to the good of to health. less directly, i think, some proposals that we could imagine could distort the boundaries that enable friendship and necessary forms of privacy on the other. some current or evolving technologies do this either by creating artificial boundaries or by destroying natch-- natural but essential boundaries. efforts to make human beings more or even maximally transparent as in some forms of neural imaging or scanning threaten to do the latter. but in eroding privacy, these techniques also erode the sovereignty of the self that is necessary for self-giving in the form of communication and interpersonal trust. these are technologies and not maybe directed forms of evolution, but maybe they could be made into direct forms of evolution. and one would then need to worry about their effect on our

capacity to pursue human goods such as friendship. where intended to erode that capacity, they would be intrinsically wrong, but even in a case where the erosion was only a side effect, there would be good reasons to view the enhancement as dehumanizing and no real reason to think of it as transcending the human condition. still, the sort of fluidity of this category indicates the existence of category c, forms of enhancement permissible in themselves, possible and yet in no real way post or trans-human. is there any principled way of identifying that boundary? are there any reasonable grounds in which to be weary of possibilities in that category? i think there's both. as to the first, my proposal -- which is rudimentary and in need of refinement, might be something like this: enhancements to aspects of our bodies including our brains that are instrumental to the pursuit of our basic goods are in themselves permissible. if we consider a range of physical enhancements that might

be possible, stronger, smarter or faster human being, more fertile human beings, all of these are possible ways of enhancing the human conducive -- more manyover, human beings -- moreover, we'd have no real reason to mourn that situation. there are probably very gray areas here, and i'll mention just one that i think is kind of interesting. the human form and the human a face are each and sometimes both together capable of great beauty. could human beings be modified in ways that enhance that beauty? i think they probably could. and by my be argument, that would in itself be permissible. could they be modified for the worse us a netically? again, yes. and some of the possible motivations make the project immoral. the desire to make human beings ugly, the attempt in practice that human beings are had beens

and thus the attempt to modify the human being to be reptilian or feline, for example, these all seem to me, in fact, denials of that good, the good of human beauty. and so intrinsically, impermissible. but there's going to be a gray area here, it seems, between enhancement for the sake of beautiful and its opposite and plenty of disagreement about what falls into this category. you see this even in the most basic case of tattooing, for instance. returning to the general question of enhancing that which is instrumental to our pursuit of the good, in a sense to me the field seems fairly wide open. we could enhance human being into the future in many ways that would in the short and long run augment our capacity for the pursuit and realization basic human goods. yet even if we did this radically, to extents not even currently imaginable, weld not be changing our nature. human beings are rational animals, and if our descendants are rational and living beings -- as they would need to be -- then they, like us, would

also be human beings however different from us. so we'd be merely amplifying our naturally-given capacities. but the field ought not to be quite so open for two reasons. first, as i pointed out in discussing the second category, side effects are always an issue. and even the intrinsically permissible can bring side effects that pose moral quandaries that should be avoided entirely. what effect on competition and sport would enhancement of physical capacities is a there are instance of this -- familiar instance of this. the general difficulty of even knowing what are the possible side effects of conceivable enhancements makes responsible research in this area very difficult almost to the point, it seems to me, of impossibility. and then there is the second reason. it's difficult for me to imagine really significant progress being made on the project of genetically improving human beings that doesn't involve research, experimentation with research on, experimentation

with and eventually interventions upon human embryos in ways that are morally wrong including all research that ends the live obviously the embryos the research is performed upon, but also interventions on embryos the purpose of which is not to rectify clearly diminishing conditions suffer by those embryonic human beings. they ought not be treated as research subjects in the absence of their sent except, when necessary, to save their lives or otherwise help them avoid radical deficiencies. the only kinds of permissible interventions are those that are therapeutic to the exclusion of those that are merely attempts to enhance. and, again, the boundary here between enhancement and therapy is notoriously vague, and this was mentioned yesterday, but it seems to me essential. if there are to be licit interventions that affect our individual or species morphology as part of an attempt to seek

the new or good in ways, then those interventions should only be pursued with consenting human subjects. some such modifications might be inheritabling, but i would suspect most wouldn't be. so if this guideline were to be followed, i expect the path towards the modify human would be much slower than we might otherwise expect. but, and here's my final point, i don't expect that scientific research are go forward only in morally permissible ways. so where genuine enhancements are at issue as opposed to futile attempts to create the impossible or misguided attempts that result in dehumanization, then i expect in the future our descendant situation will be this: some and perhaps many good things enjoyed by those human beings will be a result of the occasionally horrific actions of those human beings' ancestors. and that is not a post-war trans-human situation to be in at all. thank you.

[applause] >> charles rubin. >> i am honored to be included in these panels honoring dr. kass and, therefore, much appreciate the kindness of robbie and brad in inviting me. unlike so many others on these panels, my face-to-face contact with dr. the kass has been -- dr. kass has been quite limited over the years. i thought i was going to win the least contact with him until -- [laughter] but i am nonetheless deeply and gratefully indebted to him. his voice is one of those that i am in dialogue with in my head as i'm writing a presentation

like i'm making more you today. and -- for youd today. and i hope what i'm about to sa. but i also have to say peter lawler is the other guy in these interior monologues. he's usually considerably less patient than mr. kass. [laughter] more critical. more likely to point out the weakness of my faith. but greatly valued for all of that. today we see wide interest in and ongoing research and development of artificially-intelligent robots as companions, as care gives, as sexual partners. japans has become famous but is hardly alone for developing caregiver robots to deal with the oncoming deficit of its own citizens for looking after an

aging population. but it's happening all over. indeed, just yesterday in the scientific american blogs there was a posting headline "grandma's little robot: machines that can read and react to social cues may be more acceptable companions and caregivers." and i know that this audience will appreciate the great caution of that formulation. they may be concern. [laughter] more acceptable as companions and caregivers. meanwhile, it seems to be a truism among academic futurists that robots are the next big thing in the sex trade and creation of sex bots is ongoing. actual results so far have quite a gap between the sensationalistic claims of the headline and the actual achievements that are visible in the photographs and the videos that appear accompanying these

stories on legitimate web sites -- [laughter] but nevertheless, the effort is ongoing, and it is backed by powerful commercial and in the case of the care-giving robots medical motives. at the same time, there are impressive developments in the field of artificial intelligence as has been highlighted recently by self-driving cars. you see them not infrequently on the streets of pittsburgh, a program that plays go at the highest levels, various high quality medical diagnose knost manic systems that have come -- diagnostic systems that have come online as it were. these are admittedly not examples of what is usually called strong a.i.; that is, artificial intelligence that shows something like the full range of the ability of the human mind. but increasingly, these expert systems-style a.i.s are developed through programming techniques that allow them, in

effect, to teach themselves. which to me at least suggests the possibility of developing far more wide-ranging intellectual abilities at some point in the future. and i think not necessarily very distant point. in short, given the notoriously rapid rate of technological development, in the longer term it may well be that an effort to create an artificial, human-like mind is not a fool's errand and already it could be matched with a virtual body, right, an on-screen body that under limited circumstances might be mistaken for human in an onscreen encounter. and i'm confident that these avatars will become yet more convincing, so that talking to one of them will be talking the, you know, like talking to someone you're skypeing with. pleasure real embodiment, i think, farther off than many of those work anything the field

seem to think. they seem to fall prey to a kind of pig mail january syndrome when promoting their own works, but i have no doubt of human ingenuity ultimately to triumph as well. a human-like mind in a human-like body would certainly be a great advance from the perspective of those who advocate a trans-human or post-human future, a future where intelligence is no longer bound to the constraints of the organic body we keithed to us, as they see it, by the random processes of evolution. but note the drive for these human-like robots has little, for the most part, to do with these trans-human and post-human aspirationsings. now, in popular culture it is very firmly established that the future includes the development of these kinds of robotic beings, and it has been for some time. it's my understanding that a great many of those engaged in the development of a. i. and

robotics cringe at the notion that either a.i. or the robot itself would have to be human-like. a self-driving car, for example, does not need a robot taxi driver chomping on an artificial cigar -- [laughter] at the wheel in order to work, and even the emotionally rich applications of artificial intelligence i am speaking about would not have to push the boundaries of modeling as closely as possible both human and intellectual and physical capacities. i mean, after all, we know that people already engage in sex acts with objects and, inanimate objects and dolls. if you -- well, anyway, the tech blogs are -- [laughter] a real education in this sort of thing. many of the emotionally supportive robots that are being developed model human and animal interactions rather than human/human interactions, and their embodiments core respond

to that. and, of course, a nurse robot would not have to look like a human nurse to take a temperature or give an injection or or issue your medication. i think we should take popular culture seriously because our imaginations do push and not unreasonably in the opposite direction. it's our particular physicality that allows us to perform the more asistive functions that that same physicality calls for as it fails. our bodies and our minds allow us to use the tools and play the many roles that human beings require of each other because we are minded and and embodied in the way that we are. in addition, of course, the familiar form of our physicality provides the potential for being comforting or pleasurable in and of itself. popular culture has also wondered for many decades about the moral us of these very human-like robots.

and academic culture is beginning to catch on. you know, more and more you're seeing articles with the title, you know, will robots have rightsesome or should robots have rights. that's kind of the common rubric so far . if we sought moral grounds on which to distinguish robots from humans, we might think about distinctions between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence or behavior that appears to be conscious versus actually having self-consciousness. these, at any rate, would be familiar categories with which to frame these kinds of questions. today i want to propose we might do well to introduce what is a somewhat less familiar category in these contexts, soul. it seems to me soul allows us to confront the challenges that human-like robots will present to us at least as well, and probably better, hand thinking about them -- than thinking about them in terms of a. i. or consciousness. to start out, we need to

consider -- albeit schematically -- why people think about souls at all. without meaning to slight the role of revelation, talk of soul, it seems to me, arises -- and that's peter in my head, about sliding the roles of revelation -- talk of soul arises pretty naturally out of the various perennial human questions about perennial human experiences. how is it that we maintain a sense of identity despite physical changes over time? what accounts for our sense of being wholes, despite the fact that we experience all the time the fact that we are manifestly collections of parts that do not actually always work that well together in -- together? and most fundamentally, for our present purposes it seems to me we wonder how it is that we are different from cats and that cats are different from stones. that is to say we talk about soul because, first of all, we want to get in some way at the fact that animals, embodied

beings as they are, are unlike stone, animate, and to that extent, have animus, right? but we are, we think, unlike animals in our ability to make deliberate or intentional choices, to act creatively, to confound expectation, to be torn, to have immortal longings to name a few possible points of distinction. so we have a soul that in some way probably with respect to intellect transcends the animal, it allows us a certain kind of freedom. what this soul is may be mysterious. it may be not unlike the cosmologist's dark matter. that is to the say, you know, when we look at the heavens, we are seeing the results of this dark matter all the time even though we never see the dark market itself, at least not -- matter itself, at least not so far. so too with the soul which may be present to us all the time

and still be elusive. now, present company accepted, i think it's fair to say that just now the soul is not an interesting concept for most philosophers, still less for scientists and even lots of religious people seem to have pretty much given up on it. but that does not mean that most of us have stop noticing that cats are not stone, right, and that people are not cats. there are some who are working or very hard not to notice that, but for the most part, this is still our experience of the world. [laughter] today we try to explain those experiences that led us to soul by talking about consciousness or self-consciousness instead of soul. we speak of consciousness instead of soul today not because from the start the fundamental human experiences that lead to soul talk have changed, but largely because -- as raymond martin and john boressi have documented inside their book "naturalization of the soul," modern philosophies

wanted to give an account of human things that was free of the mysteries of the immaterial soul. here they argue locke was particularly important in introducing a concept of consciousness that his critics at least took to be a direct attack at the notion of an immaterial soul. seems to me the authors might have said more about hobbs than they do, but in any case, for those who followed locke, i think it can be said that the concept of consciousness was a kind of promissory note. you know, at some point it was going to be possible to explain human beings on purely materialistic and deterministic grounds. human consciousness, like cats, stones and everything else we observe in nature, ought to be explicable in terms of matter and motion, what we call human freedom then arguably becomes a product of our ignorance of causes. someday we will come to see just how illusory it is, and our immortal longings will be

replaced by modern science's infinite task of determining the causes of things. consciousness ultimately promises to explain many of the things that soul attempted to explain, but ultimately the explanations are explaining away. now, that day may be coming, but it certainly has not yet arrived. the promissory note still is out. people deeply schooled in the topic of consciousness argue vociferously about, excuse me, what it is and where it comes from, of hard core pornography, supreme court justice potter stuart famously observed even if he could not define it, i know it when i see it. and yet as the lively debate over animal consciousness

>> appears to think like we think by doing what we do is all around us and quite impressive. again, all but autonomously driving cars, but, you know, the last airplane that you flew on was flown and landed largely by an artificial intelligence. they play chess and computer games at the highest levels, they win jeopardy, and the same computer that wins jeopardy

develops recipes. it's an a.i. that's taking orders for your phone pharmacy, providing customer service, correcting your spelling, finding restaurants and movie times. a. i. is already legion and looks to be growing only more so. the big tech companies are busy gobbling up smaller, promising a.i.-developing companies. i'm told by people who know this world much better than i know it that some of these successes have been won by abandoning the turing behavioral definition of discusserrive and conversational artificial intelligence. and yet there is a notorious problem in this field nicely summarized in an interview with a yale ethicist, wendell wallace. i'm quoting him. it has now become a bit more confusing what the term a.i. does and doesn't mean, largely because every time a goal is

reachedded such as beating a human at chess, the bar gets raised. somebody says, well, that wasn't really artificial intelligence in the way that it beat the human at chess, in this case garry kasparov, because it didn't really play the way a human chess player would play. but even the folks in the more advanced fields of artificial intelligence feel today that we are just beginning to have true artificial intelligence -- and i want you to pay attention to that phrase, what wallace is calling true artificial intelligence -- that a lot of what we have done so far is largely automating systems, largely programming them through procedures that human beings have thought about in advance. so in this understanding, an automated system lacks something that true artificial intelligence would have. what might that be? one obvious difference is

applicability over a broad range of functions and tasks. the prescription-taking a.i. cannot play a computer game, the system that lands a plane cannot drive a car. but an intelligent human can at least potentially do all these things. potentially is an important word, however. there seem to be many types of as well as, many degrees of intelligence. what form and degree of intelligence would we have to have to model what wallace is calling true artificial intelligence. or again, wallace says automated systems follow routines that are the product of previous human thought. and yet no small amount of the human knowledge we associate with intelligence arises only on the basis of what are, this effect be, learned -- in effect, learned routines. we heard about them yesterday in football, in the marines, playing piano, studying engineering. you know, there are many learned routines. what would we say? would we say we have an attar

officially intelligent -- we have an artificially intelligent artist in the platonic die nothing of the same name, or would it have to do better to be true artificial intelligence? now, were it not for pervasive discussion among the tech people about the singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence so far exceeds ours as to become incomprehensible to us, some liken us to, you know, to chimpanzees in relationship to this coming a.i., virus many relationship to the coming a.i., way beyond us. we might think that this kind of true artificial intelligence that wallace is talking about could educate and enhance human intelligence. we would know that we were being genuinely educated if this true i.a. could -- a.i. could explain itself to us, could give an account of the fruits of its intelligence. perhaps we should say that we

could have a dialogue with true artificial intelligence, and it could hold a conversation with a human being that would be like a conversation between two human beings. contrary to appearances then, the ghost of turing could still haunt our search for true artificial intelligent machines that go beyond automated systems. but the ghost of turing is also the ghost ofconsciousness. if conversations with this machine suggested a self-understanding -- or, indeed, an obliviousness -- that was comparable with discussions with a real person because, of course, real people don't always know themselves very well, if it exhibitedded intentionality in its creativity or if it was clueless in its use of cliches -- [laughter] if it understood its novel point of view as a point of view situated in relationship to other points of view or, indeed, was just dogmatic and

narrow-minded, would we say it was not consciousness just because we made it? the turing behavioral model has at least this much going for it. in practice, our preliminary judgment that we are dealing with a fellow conscious human being is based on communication, is based on embodied appearance. so would not the question arise all the more powerfully if the machine could communicate with us in all the ways that human beings communicate, with the tone of voice, with body language, with all of the affect that is at work when we confront each other in the world, affect that depends on our embodiment. all such characteristics might convince us that we have true a.i., and they seem to force upon us the question of consciousness again. but if we reach consciousness, we are not so far away from soul.

for it is only on assumption of modern materialism and determinism that we substituted consciousness for soul in the first place, and that assumption did not get us as far as we had hoped. we could conclude that because a machine could appear to be very like a human being, a human being is nothing more than a meat machine, as some of our trans-humanists would have it. .. there

indeed it is more reasonable to the extent that thinking about saul allows us to have a less mediated contact with the fundamental human experiences that prompt the existential questions of hours sold from the first place. or indeed to the extent it opens us up to the possibility of gratitude directed to the giver of souls. it is from this point of view that our machines this seems to be would come thinking about our machines would give us the richest possible understanding of the human world, and understand that extends beyond efficiency, beyond convenience, beyond choice and the other dogmas of our age to questions how exactly robots are going to fit into our lives. it might start us along the path to wonder what it means that so

many souls among us and not among the least powerful and influential are longing to replace intimate human relations of care, love, even even pleasure with machine relationships. in less we can take a question like that seriously, the kind of questions dr. kass taught me to ask it seems are setting ourselves up for a double failure in the world of robotic caregivers and partners. those relationships could turn out badly if in some manner these artificially intelligent machines in that disappointing their dependent human users for some eventually revealed lack of humanity. or they could turn out badly if the machine never disappoints. because it is just good enough. because our expectations have been lowered just enough about our relationships. they have been narrowed just

enough about our relationships with those with whom we have relationships of love and care. at the very satisfaction gained from the machine relationship forecloses any desire or more complex human relationships. thank you. [applause] >> thank you very much, professor, robbie george, brad wilson, and the indefatigable step of the medicine program for this wonderful conference. thank all of you for your presence here especially during this difficult hour before lunch. thank you, chris for the

comments and charlie ribbon for your insights. for those of you want to learn more about the subjects discussed by this panel i commend to you charlie reubens book eclipse of man, a very smart exploration of transhumanism and what it means to be human. does it display copy outside the produce book on the table. and it's available for sale at an amazon near you. i want to take a moment before starting to say just a few words about peter and leon kass. peter was a teacher and a writer who did not shy away from difficult questions. in fact, like his hero de tocqueville, he relished paradox comparadox, he relished it. and helped us to understand how for example, we americans could be draconian and darwinian and religious, even puritan all at once.

he was warm and funny and joyful and convivial southern gentleman. like many of you in this room i feel his loss sharply and i am deeply grateful to have known him and have worked with him. i am the editor of the new atlantis, a quarterly journal whose focus is the ethical, social, cultural and policy dimensions of modern science and technology. even before my colleagues and i launched the journal 14 years ago this week, this conference honoree, dr. kass and his wife amy, work for us cherished teachers, mentors, friends and role models for how to be better thinkers, better writers, better human beings, better citizens. in our work, and our studies of science and technology many was athe time when we stumbled upon

some new idea only to lift our lanterns, peer a rat and see the things that we've just begun to glimpse, dr. kass had already seen clearly and described with wit and with wisdom. writing the first issue of the new atlantis in the very first essay we publish in the new atlantis dr. kass explore the subject related to this panel, the use of biomedical science and technology not only to seek therapies and cures but also to pursue ageless bodies, happy souls and of the dreams of enhancement and perfection. i wish to focus in my remarks on a specific technology, one that is central to many trans-humanist visions of the future but is comparatively under discussed among bioethicists. that is, the notion of directly uniting computers with the human nervous system. our nerves, our sense organs, our brains.

the existence of some such technology would presumably be a prerequisite for trans-humanist most radical schemes for their wishes to download information directly into their minds or to upload their minds into computers would help to live on indefinitely in virtuality and, of course, for their most far out dream which puts some of the other things we talked about your to shame, their most far out dream of converting the entire universe into an extended thinking entity. these notions will strike most reasonable people as strange and exciting and bizarre, maybe juvenile, comical. of course that doesn't mean they are technically impossible and some smart people are betting on them or at least on precursor technology, darpa, the pentagon's advanced research arm which is the world among other inventions of the internet has been working on several projects to merge minds into machines. and elon musk the billionaire who founded paypal, spacex and

the tesla car company has announced he is starting mirror link a company that seeks to develop a neural lace, most reportedly the only way we mirror human beings will be to avoid being entirely outmatched artificial intelligence will be to become one with it. when it comes to robots and ai, i guess his thinking is if you can't beat them, join them. i want to say a little about the human meaning of these technologies but in order to you that please let me to offer first just a whirlwind tour of the history of neural electronics. by the late 18t 18th century it was well understood that the brain was the locus of thought and that electricity affected the nervous system. in 19th century brought an increasingly refined understanding of localized brain structures and functions. scientists learned to map parts of the brain to specific bodily activities as well as of the

cellular constitution of the nervous system with the aid of better microscopy techniques we can see the shape of individual neurons. in the 20 century brought new techniques for imaging the brain starting with x-rays and going all the way through to the brain scans that are wonderfully useful in medicine and that make marvelous crops or neuroscienc neurosciences. the 20 century also saw major advances in another much more invasive way of learning about and influencing the brain by plunging electrodes and wires into the living brain and taking electrical measurements from arsenic electoral impulses into the brain. research in this area got cooking in the 1920s when the swiss physiologist walter rudolf hess began his studies and found he could affect not only the motions and movements of animals by sending electrical charges or currents into the brains but he

could even affect their mood. he received a nobel prize for his work by the weight and shared it with the father of lobotomy. among his successes was james owns, the neurologist who discovered the brains pleasure center, darcy to call it the brains river of reward. you probably recall hearing about his experiments on rats pick the rats who would forgo opportunities for food and for sex if they could just tap on a lever activated, that would activate a jolt to the brains pleasure center. they would just zap themselves again and again until they were exhausted. another researcher in the 1960s to conducting similar experiments on human beings, often patients in louisiana's state mental hospitals. he found he could affect these patients behaviors sometimes to an astonishing degree so that they would contravene for a time seemingly fundamental aspects of their character.

and then there's ho always a man while rodriguez delgado who in the 1960s implanted a great variety of electrodes and early computer chips directly into the brains of animals and human beings. he was a spaniard through and through and his nose, probably most famous for stunt in which he played the part of a matador. he waved a red flag to go to a bowl into charging them. the ball furious anger late charges him and then -- double dash and dell got up at pushes a button and it stops in its tracks. the brain had been in plan in advance with an electrode. like keith, rodriguez delgado found he could instantly and drastically shaped his human subjects behaviors and moods making them feel happy, sad, sexually aggressive, anxious, relaxed and so on. he came to believe that these techniques could be refined

until they could be used to modify minds for the moral improvement of the world. at a minimum eliminating irrational violence. he thought microchips could get rid off of that and achieving what he called a cycle civilized society. -- psycho civilized. it turns out it's not easy to find people willing to have invasive brain surgery in order to have the personnel is altered. altered. go figure. go figure. [laughing] however, for some people suffering from certain diseases or severe injuries, today's neural electronics offer real hope. a relatively simple technique called deep brainstem relation to give up heard of this involves inserting electrodes into the brain to emit regular pulses like a pacemaker for the brain that allows some patients the parkinson's disease and some kind of epilepsy and certain kinds of dyskinesia to find

relief from trimmers and some other symptoms. for amputees including no small number of veterans of our recent wars on recent advances in no electronics and robotics have led to new kinds of prosthetics with impressive functionality and control like arms and hands with fully articulated fingers. several degrees of freedom and responsiveness to electrical impulses sent to muscles and nerves. they're been advances in artificial sight and hearing as well, and for handful of patients suffering from locked in syndrome, that is patient can move just and i were just an eyelid orbit even less control over their bodies, brain computer interfaces allow even very slow and minimal communication have offered at least a partial escape from the greatest state of dependency and awake and sound mind a human being can experience.

so will these therapeutic applications lead eventually to the direct control of machines by the human mind as the transhuman is hope? might we be able to enjoy a view of our surroundings that is augmented by whatever relevant information we want or need, the name of the acquaintance stand in front of you or the identity of the cultivar of rows you stop to smell? might we make use of implanted cognitive enhancements such as the ability to learn a language by simply downloading the knowledge instantaneously? orchid we dispense with language altogether enjoying the machine enabled telepathy alexis communicate with the fluidity and ease mankind supposedly enjoyed before babel. might we find eternal bliss in fully immersive virtual realities? even setting aside the fact that again it's hard to find volunteers for the research, there several good reasons to be skeptical of these possibilities.

just to put my own cards on the table, i joined chris tollefson and believing trench even just more far out hopes for merging mines, machines are pretty unlikely. here are three objections to the trenctrans-humanist dreams of mg mines and machines and just to be evenhanded, i will copy objections objections to the objections. first, the brain is not a computer. computers are logical processing devices. the operate with a digital software and hardware, but brains even though there working to rely on the transmission of biochemically generate electrical impulses, brains are not computers. the matter how often we hear simplistic analogies about the brains inputs and outputs and circuits and so on. even if the newer analogies like the idea that brains are pattern matching machines. even they grossly understate what human brain is and does. to this objection the sappy

trans-humanist would likely respond, well, sure, the brain is not a computer but all that really matters for the purposes of our project is its workings be sufficiently intelligible and interpretable by computers for an interface to result in useful action in the world. second closely related objection is that the brain is complex, staggeringly complex. the adult human brain has tens of billions of neurons. since the neurons are twisted and tortuous entangled with one another, in three dimensions, that means the number of connections and spaces between them is vastly greater. there are perhaps some 100 trillion synapses in the brain, and we will never invent safe and sufficiently sensitive techniques for gathering of all of that information. to this objection the savvy trans-humanist would likely respond well, sure, but we

needn't interface perfectly with all those neurons and synapses. many of those neurons and synapses are in regular use an interface by many orders of magnitude would be enough to help us achieve most of our necessary purposes of what we hope to do. third objection is that this project or at least the most ambitious version of it is built upon a fundamentally mistaken understanding of mind. the trans-humanists have inherited a cartesian dualism, a belief in the constitutional separation of body and soul, although as mark brut pointed out they tend to substitute for the old-fashioned word soul, terms like pattern. charlie spoke about this a bit. if the essence, is that the essence of who we are resides in the particular shifting in pattern of electrochemical signal of the brain, but we are, in fact, psychophysical unit

sees, a mind or soul or living pattern can't just be sucked up and moved to another substrate. it can at most be simulated and a course imitation of the original. as chris put a comma personhood is incommunicable. -- likely respond sure, but for our near at hand purposes of merging mines and machines, that objection doesn't really matter. we can do some pretty amazing things without attending to the debates about dualism. for the more far out dreams, we don't have to be duelists who believe the mind can be transferred or we can merely be functionalists who think replication of the machine would still be a pretty good deal. since science fiction has done so much to shift the popular imagination, creating an widespread acceptance that some

transhumanist dreams will be possible, may be desirable, could be inevitable, i want to spend my remains on discussing a novel that touches on some of these topics. now, much of the fiction about brain implants is distant and ways they can make it difficult to find lessons applicable to how we often live well together if they were to become a reality anytime soon. cyberpunk novels are fun. movies like the matrix are a blast but they tend to depict worlds quite distant from our everyday concerns. i know at least one book that does a good job of exploring what life with brain implants might look like if it were to become a reality the day after tomorrow. the novel is called feed. from a own research from an e-mail exchange with the author, i gather that since its publication in 2002 the book is been assigned reading in schools fairly regularly and is the subject of parental protests

occasionally. although he is a darkly comic dystopian satire which were quite approachable since at its heart it's a boy meets girl love story. the books and narrator, a teenager named titus as a high school student. like everyone, nearly everyone we meet in story he has an implant fully integrated into his brain. such implants are normally inserted during very early childhood, perhaps soon after birth. this implant technology does wood with the need for certain pharmaceuticals since you can desensitize yourself to pain if you have a headache, for example. you can use to experience the same sort of effects of drinking or recreational drugs might offer, on demand. the implant also connects you to the feed, system that feeds information directly into your brain. the feed allows people to connect it with one another without speaking aloud.

it allows for the enjoyment of entertainment like virtual reality games and movies are a much, transmitting not just images but full century experience. it allows the shaping and storing and sharing of your individual memories so that instead of boring your friends with your vacation photos, you can bore them with your fully physically felt vacation experiences. [laughing] and all of these wonders are made possible by and for the sake of the constant stream of advertising and shopping opportunities. our narrator and a small group of his friends go on vacation during spring break taking a trip to the moon, a place that is already by this point passé. first win of the book, we went to the moon to have fun but the moon turned out to completely sock. [laughing] since dr. kass has taught about

paying attention first line of great books, it's remarkable that the books first sends ticket makes you wonder immediately about what kind of people these are. but the moon does not affect completely sock because they do meet a new girl, new girl violt who attracts titus and developing a friend by her charmingly weird with and by her beauty. she is as they say -- not long after the meter the group of friends hanging out at a lunar party spot encounters a terrorist who somehow disable several peoples implants, including those of titus, veronica, and their friends. the teenagers had to spend several days in hospital wards without the constant flow of entertainment and adds the typically enjoy. they horse around, makeup games, squabble with one another, grow frustrated and titus and veronica become closer to one another. when they are finally

reconnected to the feed, it is an ecstatic restoration. titus narration. the deed was born in on us now, all of it, all of the feed. we do feel all of our favorites and our files and chat lines came down on us like water. taking down like spring rain and we're dancing. we were dancing in a like rain and we couldn't stop laughing and we are running our hands across our bodies. then again and i saw violet almost hysterical with laughter. we found each others hands to like the waterfall and holding hands we danced. the teenagers returned home and titus and veronica began going out and getting to know one another and their families, and the differences between them. titus we learn is normal picky ghost we normal school and has normal friends and does normal things. violet though is homeschooled. her father is a professor of the dead languages, not greek and latin but basic and fortran.

[laughing] and they don't have much money. titus is bored by everything and unworried by anything. violet is curious about everything and worried about the world. and most important hide his entire life has been shaped by the feed while violet received the implant very late at age seven after her brain and mind have been shaped in important ways. this major implant more sensitive to the hacking attack and since implant is fully integrated into the brain, the slow degradation and feeling of her implant means her life is in danger. she's dying. i just doesn't know how to handle this emotionally drawing is about the girl he likes, and he responds by growing colder towards her. they break up, painfully awkwardly, but in the books final chapter as her implants capacity dwindles, she is at home comatose before the income titus visits her in with regret promises to remember and to tell her story.

that's a quick sketch of the novels plot, just a bare-bones account. it's a far richer and more haunting story than that hurried summary suggests, but here are a few of the surprising lessons the novel offered for how we might live and live together if brain implants were to be a reality. first you might expect these brain implants in the feed technology enable the worst most intense current of helicopter parenting. imagine being able to snoop in under child's most intimate thoughts and feelings directly, but in the novel it seems the feed makes possible hands-off parity. parents we encounter seem to take a blasé their approach to raising their kids. second, you might expect that children with access to the feed would be smart and sophisticated since they enjoy access to all the world's information. that is how the technology was originally soul to the public, at least that's how titus recounted. here's his explanation. people were really excited when

they first came out with feeds. it was all this big educational thing, your child will have the advantage, encyclopedias at the fingertips, et cetera. that's one of the great things about the feed that you can be supersmart without ever working. everyone is supersmart now. you can lift look things up automatically like if you want to know which battles of the civil war george washington fought in. [laughing] if titus and his friends are typical, the presence of the feed has created in curious shallow children with flat souls and base desires. if you can anything instantly what need is a for the kind of schools were heads of filled with information? and so we instead at school titus and his friends learn about how the world can be used like me and had use our feeds,, network technology and how to find bargains and what's the best way to get a job and had it decorate our bedroom. maybe the next panel on

education will take up this question. indeed, titus is at his most eloquent when he is describing products that he shopping for. he's very attentive to the look and feel of the things he wants to buy. he is an excellent consumer. it isn't quite fair to say titus and his friends are failing to be hard-working. it's just that the feed has normalized laziness. some virtues ceased to be virtues when vices cease to be vices. third, while you might think people would be tempted to live entirely in virtual reality am a physicality is very much part of normal life in the novel. most of the story takes place as friends meet with one another or travel to be together. the enticements of virtuality apparently cannot wholly do away with our social embodied nature which leads us to seek out the bodily presence of others and interestingly the idea of virtual sex is not even mentioned in the book which is a

fascinating omission. titus, shallow and stupid that we may be, is still less loudest than his friends and his account of violet is filled with low observations of her physical presence. starting with when they first meet all the way through to the end, he notices a slouch of her posture or the softness of her arm. although even hear his observation seen in some way to be mediated by the presence of the feed. in the initial meeting when the first meet he is attracted to her and in one of those odd telling details that lovers will recognize, he finds her back, her spine to be particularly fetching. but he can't quite think of the right word to describe it. the feed suggests the word supple work shortly after that the feed since in an advertisement for a car describing its supple upholstery and ergonomically designed dash.

[laughing] and we are left wondering was at the ad called that because titus one the word supple, or was the ad edited instant use with the supple inserted because titus had sought that word? or was the very thought about violet and her back and it's suppleness come was that very thought itself a creation of the feed intended to direct, to nudge titus towards the ad, towards a purchase? i will return to that disturbing possible in just a moment but let's put in the context of a a broader thought about civic and political life. you might expect people with widespread telepathic brain implants capable of directly sharing their minds deepest feelings and longings might get you some kind wonderful harmony with one another like a grand accommodation of the general will and ever since oversoul and like george gallops traces of

dreams of democracy by polling, right? ..

we've seen brain implants in the novel can be violated through tracking attacks. there are hints that corporations who run the feed and perhaps hackers can infiltrate minds at night during dreams. the suggestion of external influence in the word supple, leaves us with a look at the mind's integrity. our idea of human freedom is predicated on the fact that humans can be rational beings and presumes the integrity of our rational mind. to be sure, our rational mind are always susceptible to material influences. ebenezer scrooge throughout the ghosts might be an undigested bit of he meat, cheese, undone potato.

guta and chiller studied the affects of different colors on our mood. packer warned us about subliminal advertising. the behavioral economists want to nudge us into making decisions they prefer. but we could always respond to these sorts of things by telling ourselves, yes, such things might affect us, but our national minds can rise above them and we can learn about those things and learn toover come them. to accept brain implants permitting two way communication as depicted in feed would be to permit the possibility that our mind's integrity could be violated in ways we would not always ourselves be in the best position to know. we human beings are enmeshed in complex webs of relationships and embodied in flesh that grows and ages, and dies, and our freedom and unfreedom, our rationality and subrationality

are bound up together. to accept the kinds of brain implants that would predict mental states or kinds of neu neuroelectronics to becoming one step further to be pure bodiless mind is just as likely to leave our minds subject to subtle manipulations. in leaving behind the supposed cage of the body, you may find that we have created for ourselves a strange new prison and lost the only key. thank you. [applause]. [applause]. questions? can you hear me? is this mic working? it's dead? can you hear me?

who cannot hear me? [laughte [laughter] >> all right, the microphones are positioned. questions, please, the lady in the center, yeah. >> thank you for both a very thought provoking and also informative talk. i've learned so much today about what scientists are even dreaming of doing and whereas all of you have addressed this question of what you think is possible and what you think is permissible. i was hoping that you could all address the question of what the underlying motivations are that are driving it. from christopher we learned that scientists are trying to take human subjects and create something that is artificial and nonhuman and from charles, we learned that scientists are trying to take materials that are artificial and nonhuman and make them more like humans.

and then from adam we learned that scientists are trying to merge humans and artificial materials into this fusion of the two. and jumped-- underlying this is to create something of our owns that transcends and it different from what is actually given and leads one to think if we could get all the scientists into the room for one conversation and especially with leon catz was leading that conversation that we might in the end to get the scientists to glory in the humanity of the humans and artificiality of the nonhumans. until that happens could you give us insight into what is driving the motivation of scientists so we can learn how to converse with them? >> i guess i'll take that first.

>> the motivations are, as you would imagine, complicated. in some ways they're tied up with the deeply philanthropic project of medicine, of healing. and in ways that are very complicated. i remember, i was at a conference maybe a decade ago now, charlie was there, too, and we had dinner with a scientist who was working on the neuroscience of intelligence and was hoping to invent, as i recall, some sort of drug that could enhance human intelligence, and as we discussed this and i think even challenged the possibility and wondered about his motivations, he said, look, here you are at this table, you know, at this academic conference enjoying this nice dinner, you've got

some kind of intelligence already, but there are lots of people out there who don't have it. i just-- my motivation is entirely charitable. i want to help raise their iq's. for other researchers doing other parts of the trans hum humanist project, their motivation is a natural outgrowth of the bakenion mission to the state of man, but maybe they ought to think more deeply whether man's state ought to be relieved in its entirety. which i think is the get of the transhumanist and posthumanist. >> i would just add to the medical motive that adam mentioned. there is, as he said in his talk there, there are military

motivations as well, in a world where fighter pilots have to make split second decisions, anything that conveys that decision more quickly to the artificial intelligence that's already flying the plane is going to be extremely useful and then there are just plane commercial motivations, right? i mean, ai's an important element of commerce and so just to have a profitable company, to keep at the cutting edge, to have an advantage over one's competitors, that's a very powerful motivation. >> to say that, it doesn't seem to me that there need to be any more nor less than the usual range of motivations that human beings do everything for. some people do things for money, for pleasure, for the good of their fellow human beings, the long range of

different possibilities, for the sake of knowledge, for the sake of health, for the sake of friendship sometimes, that if we understood each other we could probably get along, although that's probably not true as if other cases that we're faceed with possibilities, which of these are reasonable and what are the ways to pursue the ones that are reasonable. >> well, ambition, ego, the desire to be great, what was their sin, but pride, says st. augusta about the fallen ange angels? that seems to be all too human as well. i don't know if there's a fix for that by manipulating brain matter. benjamin. >> let me just-- this is not a question, but a comment in response to that

very good question there, there's one more motive with respect to this and it's a motive that peter lawler first told me about, which is the motive of human restlessness, our discomfort at sitting alone in rooms by ourselves and our desire to get our minds off ourselv ourselves in absorbing projects. this is an absorbing project that you all are describing to us and that might have something to do with it. >> okay. robert. >> i'll try and turn this speech into a question if i can real quick. maybe i'll direct it to charlie. i was wondering if-- what's the root of this, is a reductionistic view of human intelligence in minds, to reduce human's intelligence to the material world around us

and ignoring in the greek sense of ignoring our insight. i was thinking of platto and -- plato and the cave analogy. the folks in the cave, respond appropriately to the images. they can gain the insight that because that goes beyond the ability to manipulate the environment around us. and around more recently than i have, and if kirk and gerald lucas, and-- lucas in the 60's tried to build along the argument along the lines, what makes us not machines is the fact that we can have insight into mathematical truth, so, you can design a system to believe that every number has a successor, but we don't have any idea how to build a system that can see that every number has a--

that has that insight. i was wondering if we could challenge that aspect of the project and to, you know, defend the soul in the sense that you describe. >> i certainly don't have a response to the last part of your-- i mean, i simply don't know enough, but the first part of your remark allows me to clarify that i did give a version of toring, who is, in fact, far more reductionist than i made him out to be as a reductionist. as far as toring is concerned, there's no point if one wants artificial intelligence to worry about a body at all. that's just a distraction. so there is a very severe reduction of intelligence to just ability to communicate on any, you know, particularly

given topic than the one engaged in the conversation might want to communicate in. so, i -- i think that, yes, indeed, i mean, there's a tremendous turning away from things that if you really wanted to take a truly behavioral approach, right, to understanding human things you would have to pay a tremendous amount of takes. touring wasn't interested. >> i don't think that you'll disagree with that at all, rob, but i think that it is-- there's a danger in words like insight, because they're so easily appropriated to describe things that can be done by machines, say, on one side or animals on the other side, you know. the realization that you can stick the piece of grass into the ant hill looks like insight. it is a kind of insight and figuring out what the boundaries between the insight that can and can't be done by

material systems on one side and not rational systems or animals on the other side and that's really where the big infl inflew-- influential part. >> thank you very much, all of you, for the fascinating presentation. we spoke yesterday about erros being somehow central to the human being and human agency and human longing and perhaps freedom and following on the gentleman's common about insight central to intelligence and humanity. i wonder how it affects the death of erros. when he talked about the supple

leather car and the woman. it seems that a mind with an implant would say why do i have to deal with the supple woman and i can just buy a car with the suppleness and don't have to mess around, and erros and i thought, i've heard people speak. i wonder if you could speak of the death of erros with this technology. >> thanks for that easy questi question. i think you're right to see a connection between that question, your question and the previous question about creativity. there is a deep connection

between that and the kinds of creativity both human beings and animals engage in, and if we can describe certain kinds of animal activities. the death of erros is a story that's been told again and again and it's hard to keep a good erros down. [laughter] >> certainly in feed, the novel, you get the sense while it may sometimes be misdirected, it hasn't gone away entirely. i think that some of the

worries about erotic misdirection, i'm thinking here of some of alan blume's concerns, have not disappeared, but have not been as civilization-endingly dire as maybe were foretold. in no small part because we -- because of the kinds of beings we are. right? it's not easy to overcome our given nature or as you prefer, to overcome millions of years of evolution and you know, erros is here to stay, but the question of its connection to different kinds of creativity is a difficult one. as chris mentioned, we don't

understand anything about creativity. if you read the literature about creativity and artificial intelligence, awful, the people who wrote the stuff don't understand human creativity and don't understand machine creativity. or talk about composing music and making paintings, that's not at all -- they're just following instructions, sometimes instructions removed to some degrees and sometimes with levels of randomness built in, but came from a creative being outside them. because the machine is not something capable of the kind of longing that creativity depends on, longing that is dependent upon actually being in the world in a way that we animals are and in a way that our artificially intelligent

creations are not. >> i think it's a really interesting question. i just want to say something from a much broader standpoint than adam. i think that there is a kind-- a way in which some of these, the more extreme pictures, an obvious way in which the more extreme pictures are parasitic on christian and maybe in some case other visions of the final, what would you have if you had it all. and in some of those visions, even in some of the christian visions although not all of them, when you have it all, you have it all. there's nothing else to want. i think that is a difficulty in figuring out what conception of the person is true and goes with the conception of what it would mean to find one's truest fulfillment. if being an erotic being is

part of our essence, that can't be the case, even in the final of state of things that we have it all in the sense that we have nothing else to do or seek or pursue or desire. the idea that our final resting place is one that in some ways which is the picture of this the cingularty is a kind of sat particular picture. if it's the end of erotic longing. >> one wonders if one pursuing this realizes your point. that's worrisome. >> i'm available for consultation. [laughter] >> leon. >> thank you, really, for a wonderful panel and i'm not surprised and not disappointed that a group of intellectuals would come at the possible

transhuman future primarily through artificial intelligence and brain machine interactions that an academic would remind us that using one greek source, that we are rational animals, after all, but there's an older greek source that used to call human beings, the mortals, and i was-- this is really for chris, but for anybody else. you rather quickly set aside immortality as one of the dreams that's impossible and that may very well be right though there are people that work in this business who think seriously the opposite and i suppose someone will have to wait and see. [laughter] >> but it seems to me that rather significant life

extension, short of immortality, is very likely in the offing, given the already remarkable results that have been achieved by locating various kinds of genes that control the species specific life span. could we talk about the implications for what it means to be human for a rather large extension of lifespan where the relation among the generations would be different. the meaning of time as lived. the gift of time is very great, but that the perception of time extending out indefinitely before you may be a curse, and i-- i'm wondering whether all kinds of things that matter to us don't depend upon the fact that

the end is rather visible if we've got eyes enough to see it. >> yeah, i think that's a great question and i think-- i'm curious myself whether it illustrates the difference between the way that you approach this and the way that i would approach this. so, you've put aside total immortality and think, well, if we could possibly get things so we could give a lot longer and not in a state of decrepitude. it seems that that state of affairs just as such is good, that there is enough, there's enough possibility and potentiality for human beings that our horizon can be open into the very, very indefinite future in terms of what goods are available to us and the life that we could live for 100 years, maybe 200 years, maybe 400 years, but there are

terrible social side effects that seem to be pretty obvious about the relationship between generations and the use of resources as between those generations, that should put a giant caution on things. but it seems to me that in your work and the way that you think about this, you-- and this is just an invitation for you to correct me, you think more about being something good about the limitless and human lives that itself needs to be respected. i think at the end of the day, i don't see that. death to me is bad, it closes off a future that will still have a horizon even when death is right there on my door, and just to that point, you know, so far forth it seems to me, not wrong to want to live longer and even much longer. >> how much? >> really long time. [laughter] >> you know, again, the things

that would start to make it seem that it was desirable to not keep going are in some sense accidental to the keeping going. one of the things that will happen after you die is meeting with your creator. and postponing is desirable. if you think you're not a good enough person to sustain relationships with people for 200 years which seems to me quite plausible. again, that's a good reason to think there should be limits to how long we stick around. those seem to be accidental to the project of just sticking around, just having a longer life and having more goods available to you seems to be good. >> one last question. >> i'll be happy to --.

>> i've had more than my say, but conversations-- >> look. to be as good and to be longer seems intuitively better, but the thing that people who think either of us, biology of aging or the social consequences of aging don't pay enough attention to, are the psychological effects of passage of time. the best text on this that i know is aristotle's rhetoric book two, the young, the old and those in their prime and the trouble with the old, and i'll speak for them. [laughter]. is not just that we are-- we can't slide into second base anymore and in fact, have loss of desire even.

[laughter] >> or that most people look at us and can't imagine that we were ever 25. but that all kinds of things go to sleep in us without our realizing it, owing to the fact of the passage of time and we've seen all tease things already. i mean, there really is something beautiful about-- and if you teach, you have a tremendous privilege. you see the kind of openness and newness and freshness of people who have not been jaded by having been around too long. and that's quite apart, whether society would welcome you. the psychological of just

blessed the older they are, the more eager they are, they don't agement my friend here-- my friend here is a youngster psychically speaking, buts-- but he's rare. isn't there some kind of sense that is built into the fact that we have a time of coming up, a time of flourishing, a time of winding down, a time of letting go and making way. >> say one more thing. >> i think it's just, it's a great question, it's an interesting topic and i think one thing that it does implicate in an interesting way, a way i'm a little suspicious of is the extent to which we think that the constraints of narrative should somehow being the constraints of our life and i'm suspicious of that nation, too.

it seems when the end comes, it's not a literary end. it's a long end. when the end comes it's not a literary end, it's always the wrong end. when the wend comes to the right novel, the end comes at the right time and place and i'm suspicious that that's ever the case for us. although i'm sensitive to why you think it is and should be. >> do you want to take one last question? >> yes, i think we'll go. >> so, and maybe this is a very good last question. [laughter] >> i'm wondering what sort of policy redweem you might want to recommend to deal with the problems and challenges that you've raised. >> in formulating policy, one

does not want to get out ahead of the advances in times and technology in a way that will satellite -- stultify, and one doesn't want to be so lax to permit the advancement of science and technology in a way that would degrade or dehumanize. you've got to do it just right. and in part because of what i think of as kind of chain of uncertainty. the future is not knowable. just because we can conceive of something, that doesn't mean that it's possible.

just because something is possible, that doesn't mean that it will happen. even if it happens, that doesn't mean it's going to happen in any way that you think is anticipated to happen and even if it happens in a way to anticipated to happenle there be all kinds of unanticipated, unintended consequences. that's very difficult for policy makers to get their heads around in a democratic republic, like ours, forward thinking is not always one of our strong suits. so my advice to you and to everyone in the room is to read a policy journal called "the new atlantis" we're exploring these on a quarterly basis and subscriptions are on-line at thenewatlantis.com.