Episode 91: Transhumanism (Plus More on Brin)

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy, or in this case, science for a living, but then thought better of it. Our main question for episode 91 is would it be good for us as a species to overcome our current human state? We'll be discussing an article by Nick Bostrom called why I Want to Be a Post Human When I Grow up, as well as continuing our last episode's discussion of David Brin's novel Existence. If you haven't yet listened to episode 90, I encourage you to do so before tackling this one. You can join the discussion, get the texts and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer broadcasting chiefly to the alien robots hiding in the asteroid belt from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:49 Seth: This is one of an uncountable number of copies of Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:55 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:58 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, at least the voice of Dylan Casey in Milton, Wisconsin.

1:04 Brian: This is Brian Casey in Fitchburg, Wisconsin.

1:07 Wes: So I have listened to episode 90.

1:11 Dylan: Was it awesome?

1:12 Wes: Am I the first person to listen to it?

1:13 Mark: And your experience listening to it wasn't that different from our experience listening to it?

1:18 Wes: No, actually it's not as bad as he's not as dominating as you. I mean, there's still enough conversation in there to make it interesting, and it's generally interesting all the way through.

1:29 Mark: Seth was commenting me after we. We did it that the format of the show is a conversation among equals. And unless somebody is familiar with that beforehand, even though he was very game to do it and I told him what the format was. So I don't think it really sinks in. You're a celebrity, you're being invited to talk on this thing. Of course people want to hear you hold forth.

1:48 Dylan: I guess I have less and less sympathy for that. I think whether it's a failure due to habit or a failure of character, some people can have conversations and some people can't. And it might be because when you're in that kind of mode, you're in a performative mode.

2:02 Seth: I think that's it. I mean, what would be curious for me would be to see him like on a panel with other people that he considers his peers and see if it's the same kind of dynamic. I just can't imagine that somebody like Dennett or Dawkins or those guys, they're just used to holding forth and that's what they do.

2:19 Wes: Did you get the full of himself vibe that I got. Maybe I was just in a bad mood. And I think listening to it at double speed actually does have an effect

2:27 Dylan: on as extra full.

2:32 Seth: I mean, you know, I think if you felt like you were just brimming over with knowledge and ideas that the world just had to hear, you'd have the same kind of attitude.

2:40 Wes: Yes, glibness.

2:42 Mark: Well, it did convince me, the experience that for the Zizek episode, one of the reasons we haven't done it earlier is because I was thinking, oh, you know, we have this connection to Zizek's publisher. We should have Zizek himself. Come on. Now I'm convinced that would be a bad idea.

2:54 Dylan: No, we have to have Zizek.

2:56 Mark: Come on.

2:57 Dylan: I mean, it would be totally stupid if we could have him on. Not to have him on, but I'm telling you, it could be painful.

3:03 Seth: No, here's the thing. I think what it is, is there's a place for the kind of more interview format. If we have guests that we think aren't going to or can't engage us the way we like to do this in our discursive way, then we don't all need to be on and just sit there and listen in silence. One person can interview somebody like that and just let them go on one or two pel.

3:25 Dylan: The Charlie Rose episodes.

3:27 Seth: Yeah, I think more of Piers Morgan,

3:31 Wes: but I think we should minimize that. And also, it seems like we're having a lot of guests in general.

3:35 Seth: Well, everybody wants a piece, man. We're a hot commodity now.

3:39 Dylan: We should just have more episodes.

3:41 Wes: Okay, well, that's.

3:46 Mark: But let's focus our attention on our guest today, Brian.

3:49 Seth: Brian Casey.

3:51 Brian: I don't count as a guest in that way.

3:53 Seth: What are you talking about?

3:55 Dylan: We should put up on the title Transhumanism with Brian Casey.

3:58 Brian: I'm not sure that's what your listeners want.

4:03 Mark: Well, one of the reasons, and actually, David really did contribute, at least by example, to the kind of thing that I was talking about. One of the reasons that I was interested in having Brian on and talking with David himself was again, this relationship between science and philosophy. And he early on in his discussion, even though he says he's a philosopher himself, that's one of his many talents. And he even told me in an email afterward he didn't mean to be a badmouthing philosophy. He was going to say more good things about philosophy. But then we got distracted by other things.

But still, the fact that he set it up by discussing this famous speech by somebody about dividing CP Snow? Yes. Dividing the academic world into the humanities, which are backward looking, and the sciences, which are forward looking. Even if he then used the rest of his speech and his demeanor to say why that's fundamentally wrong, the fact that he started with that and that you're making minor adjustments to that formula from here on out, or saying why it's okay to be backward looking some of the time, once you make that initial step and make that your starting point, you've pigeonholed yourself into the scientism category that we so often talk about here.

5:06 Wes: In listening to the podcast, I didn't hear enough from him about, first of all, why he thinks he's a philosopher. That's a pretty bold claim. I guess if you can do anything in your spare time, you're a philosopher and you're an artist and you're a scientist and everything you want to call yourself. But how is he a philosopher?

5:21 Mark: Well, in that he writes works like the one that we have posted right now for citizens to download the draft of a just. It's basically an argument contributing to the New Atheist. What do you call that? I don't want to call it the New Atheist debates because that named it for one of the sides, but the current theological hyphen politico debates.

5:40 Dylan: Oh man.

5:41 Wes: Wait, was I supposed to read.

5:43 Mark: No, no, no. Nobody was supposed to read that for this discussion. But the point is that he does write essays that are overtly philosophical, apart from his exemplifying philosophical theories in his science fiction.

5:55 Wes: Well, it'd be interesting to know why he hates Plato. That's one thing he mentioned in the podcast.

6:01 Dylan: I expect that given the other stuff he talks about, he takes Plato's anti democratic tendencies very seriously. He finds him deeply objectionable for those tendencies and the kind of cultural elitism and then the whole notion of I don't know how he would feel about Aristotle. Exactly, but.

6:20 Seth: So just out of curiosity, let's drill into that a little bit. Why could he possibly think that Plato was anti democratic?

6:26 Dylan: Because of the.

6:28 Wes: The Republic.

6:29 Dylan: The Republic.

6:31 Mark: Because if you look up Wikipedia, Plato, it says anti democrat.

6:35 Wes: I mean, what are you.

6:37 Mark: What are you getting out?

6:39 Dylan: It's a perversion in some ways.

6:41 Brian: He has a theme that runs through a lot of his writing, whether it's in his science fiction or the essays that he writes where he has a great deal of disdain for the idea of someone's spous running things, whether it's the Jedi and the Star wars universe, which he doesn't care for because it's just another case of blood, royalty, rulers, to monarchies in our own history, to anything that where sort of the solution of the story is to have a chosen one. He makes fun of and mocks that sort of thing in stories. He likes to have extremely competent, maybe even sort of supremely competent heroes in his stories. But he does not have a kind word to say about people being in charge by virtue of sort of what they are of their elite being, or

7:28 Dylan: they have gold souls and are philosopher kings. That would not fly for him.

7:32 Brian: I would guess not, given what I've read about from him on similar topics.

7:38 Dylan: Even if it really was that their souls came from the ground and that they were golden souls and they rightly ruled over the silver souled and the bronze souled ones. That wouldn't work.

7:49 Brian: Well, I don't know if he would fall in line if you actually set up the world with objectively better souls, you know, gold, silver and bronze and you know, maybe there's a wooden soul out there somewhere that's just out on the edges and can't even get into the whole metallic soul party, but there are actually. I don't know what he would say about that.

8:07 Mark: Well, he seemed very obsessed about levels of intelligence, obviously in an aspirational way. Wouldn't it be great if we were all smarter so that we will survive the coming possible apocalypses? But even just throughout, in him referring to us and referring to himself, the implication that I read off it was smart people are worth listening to. And most people, since 90% of everything is crap, are not smart and don't have anything to say. And so there's an elitism sort of built in right there, which I would be surprised that that then wouldn't lead to some sort of de facto technocratic elitism being on his political agenda.

8:42 Seth: It's an immature elitism. It's the kind of thing I thought when I was in school.

8:46 Wes: Exactly.

8:47 Seth: I mean, junior high school, like why don't the scientists make all the decisions? Because they're object and smart. And why do we have politicians? And why do people don't like each other of different races? It's a naive. I should say.

8:57 Brian: Yeah.

8:58 Wes: Listening to him on the podcast and also reading this post humanism essay, I had the same feeling of there's a kind of naivety to it all. Beyond the elitism. It's almost like a religion of the intelligent or the nerdy nerdism or something. Look at how great we are, we nerds. And let's nerdify the world and hopefully in a thousand years There'll be enough technology to nerdify everyone.

9:22 Mark: Can we just clarify that? The article that we are discussing today is by Nick Bostrom from Oxford, not by David Brin. But you're pointing out a social movement, perhaps. I don't know.

9:31 Wes: It seems to me a weird sort of thing to be fantasizing about and spending your time thinking about the point when, this ideal point in the future when technology is going to somehow make us super beings, emotional and cognitive and perhaps moral super beings. We don't really know what's going to happen, how all that plays out and what's possible there, and the kind of vague account we get in this essay. It seems to me to be playing at having a serious discussion about something that's just sort of a fantasy.

10:00 Dylan: I think Brin's book is a little bit better on the score in the sense of playing out some of the possibilities. He certainly has a point of view on what direction it ultimately would go. And he would be, I don't know, a fellow traveler in transhumanism. He certainly isn't bothered by the idea, and he has a kind of futuristic optimism that there may be conflict, yada, yada, yada, but things will get sorted out.

10:26 Brian: That said, though, while he definitely has a lot of gradual, I guess, enhancements along the transhumanist lines, he scorns the people that think that we're going to be able to download our brains into a computer or live forever anytime remotely soon. He is of the opinion that there are vast complexities to the workings of the brain that we still haven't deciphered yet that will increase by enough orders of magnitude the requirements to simulate it that we're still quite a few doublings out before that's going to be possible. So I would not put him necessarily into the same camp as Bostrom in terms of this is where we're going and it's likely to happen at any knowable time in the future.

11:10 Dylan: I was thinking particularly of appliance enhancements that seem to play a big role in the book in terms of being plugged in in different ways, maybe not going all the way to being downloading yourself into a crystal or something, which

11:24 Mark: does happen in the book, but that's more in the epilogue to the book. So that's what, 100 years past plus alien technology has told us how to do it.

11:32 Dylan: Exactly.

11:33 Mark: So it's not. Whereas most of the book, this kind of stuff you're talking about is supposed to be only 30 years on, where you have the Internet in your ear in your contact lens, etc.

11:41 Brian: But I don't think that's entirely outrageous to consider.

11:44 Dylan: No, it's not. And he has many different levels and is clearly sees effects of the relative accessibility of those enhancements financially and presents a world in which you have haves and have nots that are made more significantly different by the ability to possess those enhancements and that there's a certain level of requirement to play the game to have them. That's the sort of universe that's going on. And the kinds of transhumanist style modifications that he plays with are those not so much the brain downloading and stuff like that. It really is a kind of high order appliance enhancement in his case. I guess the closest thing that Bostrom's article mentions would be things like genetic modifications, where at the end of the book you have genetic modifications of dolphins and the reinstantiation of Neanderthals.

12:35 Mark: Jurassic Parkism, yeah.

12:37 Dylan: While he doesn't talk about this, there would surely be along similar lines, genetic modifications of current humans or legacy humans, I guess, that would be enhanced in ways that their progeny would be distinct from their parents in a way that just having an appliance doesn't stick with you. Just because you get an appliance in your eye doesn't mean your kids are going to have that appliance.

12:58 Mark: Can I maybe just throw out a quick summary of the article and where that stands in relation to Brin? Just a one minute thing to sort of orient folks who are listening. So Bostrom's article, why I Want to Be A Post Human When I Grow Up. So this is one article in the transhumanism movement which various things that I looked at online talked about differences between transhumanism and posthumanism. But they're all, I think the distinctions are not consistently used and I don't think we need to care about them. The point is that, as we've been saying, there are various modifications that could be made to us.

You know, whether it's by adding technical appliances or messing with our genetic code, or downloading our brains or doing various things that could change us. And the philosophical question is, is this a good idea? Is this something that we should resist or is this something that we should actively pursue? Or what? And Nick Bostrom argues that while of course not all transhuman modifications would be positive ones, there are ones that already our current values would seem to favor, like extending our lives, making ourselves more intelligent, making ourselves more effective.

In other words, enhancing our emotional capabilities. Maybe giving us more self control, that kind of thing. And really that's all that the article has. It counters a bunch of shitty objections, but it's making some very narrow claims. Brin's novel throughout the book, as you were saying, Dylan, there's this talk about technological accessories that people have and how this affects their lives. But really the transhumanism thing full blown does not come in until the epilogue where we see like the whole challenge of the book existence is how can we survive the various apocalypses that could happen due to natural things and due to our own fuck ups.

And his solution is make ourselves more diverse. The way we do that is not only by allowing these transhuman modifications on existing people, in fact. Right. I didn't see any specific mention in the end of the book about legacy humans that have been genetically enhanced in various crazy ways. He does talk about. I forget how the. There's an autistic like he identifies an autism as really its own species that this hasn't been recognized. And the autistic guy appears as a bird person. Is that a physical change or is that a virtual change?

15:10 Brian: Well that appears in the, the virtual environment of the crystal that's sent out. So people have.

15:17 Mark: So we're not even looking at the real guy anymore. So.

15:20 Brian: Right.

15:20 Mark: So this doesn't even apply. It's when you get downloaded in the crystal you can choose whatever form you want.

15:24 Dylan: It's the matrix.

15:27 Mark: Yes, pretty much. Except there's no body to wake up to. It's just you've been copied into the thing. So it's not quite the matrix, but it's. Yes, there's a parallel there. But even on Earth you have this plethora that has been created from again maybe making the legacy humans more diverse, but more so reviving these extinct species, recognizing the autistics as their own species, genetically modifying dolphins and chimps so that they are as fully as smart as humans. And that's what he thinks that you know, if you think our own human idiocy will lead, lead to our destruction.

Well the way to get around that is to not just rely on humanity anymore to expand, you know, so the post humans are not just as Bostrom pictures, descendants of current humans, but are this panoply that we've more or less manufactured and somehow with that diversity of intellectual approaches and having, you know, a very democratic approach and a lot of communication between these that we will overcome the power of the mass again we'll overcome. Whereas elites making decisions would probably screw something up no matter who the elites are. Anything to add?

As a summary, as an overview? Good night, everybody.

16:34 Dylan: I don't have anything to add. I have a whole bunch of questions about the Bostrom article, but go ahead. Well, in reading it, my most basic question was there's a boundary that they want to talk about or that's being talked about being crossed, whether you're for transhumanism or you're against it or whatever you mean by it. And I guess I found myself trying to think of what kind of boundary are we talking about and when is it clear we've crossed it for transformations of all sorts. So we routinely talk of transforming ourselves through education or other kinds of personal development, be it spiritual or physical. And we don't teach that child.

17:12 Mark: You're playing God.

17:15 Dylan: Well, education itself actually ran the most true to me as being the technology that's most transformative of human beings and the one in which there's even a history of people politically understanding people who are essentially uneducated as not being sort of fully realized human beings.

17:32 Mark: I know you PhDs are post human.

17:34 Dylan: That's what the P and the H mean, right?

17:37 Mark: And the D is for douche. Oh, I love it.

17:46 Dylan: So what I found myself thinking about in reading the article is what counts as a transformation that is crossing a boundary that we haven't crossed before, that we haven't crossed historically. And the only one that I could sort of come up with would be a genetic transformation that would yield progeny that were species distinct from us. And all the rest of them seem to be different forms of appliance modifications and enhancements that are glorified glasses or changes or modifications that the biggest objection you could make would be the way in which they might disrupt political life, which might be a really legitimate objection, but they didn't seem to be different in kind from the sorts of changes we've been doing to ourselves as human beings.

18:32 Mark: Forever disrupt political life how?

18:34 Dylan: Exacerbating distinctions between classes maybe because as you make technologies more and more sophisticated, they require more and more resources. And so we already have the case that like the technologies of education and healthcare are very unevenly distributed and we have lots of haves and have nots as a result of that. And you would potentially exacerbate those and maybe even make them more bifurcated across more levels of society. So you wouldn't simply have poor people and rich people, but you'd have more chaos in that respect. Or at the very least, you would have a transition period regarding it.

And to the extent that something like democratic rule depends a lot on a certain level of equality, and we see this in the history of democratic countries, that one of the reasons for the success of the American Republic has to do with the relative homogeneity of the people that founded that government over time. Not to say that there weren't all kinds of other problems, but there are preconditions for satisfactory and thriving democracies that might be undermined by having lots of distinctions as a result of certain kinds of technology might lead to certain kinds of authoritarianism and stuff.

But those I don't think are objections in principle to enhancements. I was just trying to think what counts as a transformation that isn't one that we haven't already done in spirit at least.

19:54 Brian: Well, I don't know what would count as a transformation. I mean, the idea of something being inheritable moves it out of the realm of at least partially an appliance, a tool, and into sort of the being of the person. If we get to the point where we can genetically engineer some of the enhancements that are done with drugs or with silicon technology, then that might change. This was sort of a theme of Nancy Kress's book Beggars in Spain. There were a group of people that were born that didn't need to sleep. And it turns out that the genetic tweaks that did that also made them sort of very well adjusted.

They were typically happy, they were all bright, and their bodies didn't break down either, so they weren't going to age normally. And so they were just better than everybody around them. And they got banned from the Olympics because being able to practice for 16 hours a day was unfair compared to everybod else. And all sorts of other social and political things came out of that in the book, as Kress sort of explored the idea of, well, what if we weren't, in a very obvious way, all created equal? And this was one of the things that I sort of mentioned during the Brin podcast, is if we go through the sort of the process of uplift that he has in a bunch of his novels and that he alludes to as a beginning, with the dolphins in existence, there's going to be a period where those not quite fully uplifted creatures are capable of being part of a discourse, maybe, but they're clearly not the same.

They're not at the same level as people, even more so than maybe the distribution from one person to the next. And so how do you deal in a society where you have very obvious differences between the haves and the have nots in terms of capabilities. I don't know what the answer to that is. In Nancy Kress's book, the Sleepless All

21:42 Seth: Got Persecuted, I've lost the thread here. We got started off talking about elitism and then somehow transitioned very quickly to transhumanism.

21:51 Mark: They go together.

21:52 Dylan: What kind of transformation of a person would account to them becoming not a person?

21:58 Seth: Well, I think one of the things that occurred to me when we were reading the book and just in the general the discussion is that there's somebody out there who, and I can't remember who it is that that talks about how the use of things like smartphones and all that, is really an expansion of consciousness in the sense of we're outsourcing tasks that we used to keep in our head to the calendar and phone numbers and things like things we used to have to remember and things we used to have to take account of. And somebody made the point. Well, that's true.

When we had paper and pencil, you know, when you used to write down notes for things you couldn't remember. It's the same concept. And the person who was bringing this up was trying to create a richer idea of consciousness and talk about how our consciousness is not just somehow stuck inside our head, but it's kind of a part of all these things we interact with. And in that same vein, much of what comes up in the book is just really, it's a matter of degree. It's an extension along the same line. And I think the idea that autistics and Neanderthals are somehow a subspecies still to me feels like a matter of degree.

But the idea that we've somehow managed to come up with a way to amplify the intelligence of dolphins and they can communicate with us is maybe a difference in kind. The reason why is I have to kind of believe in maybe a non Kantian way, that the structure of consciousness that comes from being a dolphin, even if you were somehow able to mediate that through language so that dolphins and human beings could participate through communication, that the structure of their brains and the structure of their experience would make them qualitatively something different.

And so the idea that that somehow amplified dolphins become a subspecies of human beings is

23:43 Mark: part of the intelligent community of Earth, is all I was trying to.

23:47 Seth: Ah, okay.

23:47 Dylan: Brin glosses it by changing the name of the term human to not refer to a species but to refer to a kind of class that transcends species. There become, at the end of the book, multiple classes of humans that are Defined by their ability to essentially claim to be humans. So once they become sentient and intelligent enough to essentially say, well, we belong in this group, then there's that discussion. And so what you mean by a human at the end of his book is no longer tied to speciation at all.

24:23 Mark: He's overshooting transhumanism by adding this extra element, as you're pointing out, that it's not just expanding what it is to be human, it's expanding the community using very distinctly non human elements.

24:32 Brian: It's more of a social definition of human, though, than a physical or biological definition. Definition of human.

24:39 Seth: But the criteria for entrance is the ability to communicate in a way that human beings can understand, which he calls sentience. Except it's not. It's somehow human language. There's quite a bit of time devoted to how the beings that are caught in the crystals, not to give anything away, come up with glyphs and a way to communicate that internalizes our culture to some extent. And so what does it mean to say that somebody is a member of this sentient league, Whether it's the word human or a redefined version of the word human, if really all that means is they figured out a way to communicate with us. Dogs do it. You know, my dog goes up to the door and it scratches when it needs to go out, or he noses the bowl around. He's found a way to communicate with me. It's not a good criteria.

25:28 Dylan: Well, but the criteria in his case is higher than mere communication. It rises to the level. Yeah, it rises to language and a more sophisticated. Even if you wanted to say the way your dog communicates to you includes the features of language, you would have to at least say it was minimal. And there's a level of sophistication threshold in Bryn's case, at least in the way the difference between the uplifted dolphins and legacy dolphins is significant in this respect, having to do with the structure of their communication.

26:00 Brian: I also don't think that it was just even language at that level of communication. There was somehow something cultural about it. I didn't get the feeling that he was putting in all of the other alien beings that were in the crystal as being somehow human. They were sort of friends of humanity. But humanity were Terrans. They were people that came from Earth and they shared something. Exactly what that was is maybe vague.

26:25 Mark: They're on our team.

26:27 Brian: Exactly.

26:28 Mark: They're cooperating in the. What our big mission is, which is to save, if not the physical Earth, then at least the culture that has come out of the earth, Right? That's what he sees. That's his whole thing. That's why you should be a scientist by day instead of merely a speculative philosopher, because you need to be doing practical action that will save our children's children's children from extinction.

26:48 Seth: Well, that was actually the most compelling.

26:51 Wes: Really? That's the least compelling?

26:53 Seth: No, no, no. To make a final point about the idea that the teleology always somehow ends up back at the human being. You know, like, they uplifted dolphins because, see what? They're more like us, so they're uplifted. You know, it's like, oh, well, let's just give some pigmentation stuff, you know, to try to make black people lighter and then they'll be more like us and that somehow makes them better. That kind of shit just annoys me. But the idea that he personally felt, and this was kind of articulated towards the end of the podcast, that his mission in life was to try to facilitate or encourage people and things and ideas that would perpetuate life and make things good for or children's children's children.

It's a fairly noble aspiration, but to think that the scientists are the right people to figure that out. It's not even a question of whether you have the right ideas or not. It's just a complete ignoring the realities of human society and the human condition and politics and all these sorts of things to say like, hey, we should just everybody listen to and who are we going to listen to? Since scientists are politically and economically and personally motivated as well. But, but who are we going to listen to? And it's like, oh, well, we should just become some sort of scientific.

I don't even know what the right word is. Autocracy or something like that.

28:07 Wes: Scientocracy.

28:09 Seth: Scientocracy. That's dangerously close to another word that starts with sci. Cyan. And that's the part where I was like, okay, it's noble to have the desire to perpetuate life and perpetuate the species and make things good for generations to come, but to just categorically claim that the right people to do that and in essence make the claim that everybody else on Earth is not contributing to that goal is somehow just put them on an ark and shoot them into space. Fuck you.

28:37 Mark: Yeah, I didn't realize that you, Casey's, who are trained scientists that have given up doing science for your day jobs, that you are bigger moral failures than we are for giving up our mostly useless philosophy dreams anyway. I didn't realize that before that interview.

28:52 Brian: Yeah, I'm apparently a big letdown.

28:56 Wes: I mean, he doesn't seem to understand the division of labor, where there are actually lots of things that the world requires and then there are scientists. There are all sorts of roles required in society, and it's absurd to think that the world would be better if everyone were a scientist by day, and then the rest of it can just be done in one spare time.

29:14 Dylan: Well, he believes in progress, though, and he clearly thinks that genuine progress ultimately is driven by technology, that there's no such thing as political progress unless it's tied with technological and scientific progress.

29:30 Brian: I don't think that he would agree with that.

29:31 Seth: Really?

29:32 Brian: Yeah, because he's fond of. How did he put it? The only known antidote to error is criticism. And he sees that mechanism, in effect in science, where you get peer reviewed articles and a consensus is drawn about the utility of a model and describing the world based on observation and people criticizing each other's models and things like that. But he also sees that working in sort of democracy and in theory, the justice system as well as the free market, when it's not perturbed by monopolies and other problems. And so the idea, I think that he would say, is that progress happens through that sort of reciprocal accountability and criticism process, not just from technology.

30:16 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, it sounded to me like it was this broad worship of the concept of intelligence. What's going to save us is smart people becoming even smarter. That's the evolution. That's where the progress comes in. And to me it sounds very evangelical. It's just instead of one's focus being on Christ, it's on this different. He even used the phrase good news during the podcast at one point. It's this kind of manic optimism. And you can choose whatever sort of idea you want to put that religious feeling into, but it comes across as religious.

I mean, I enjoy science fiction. I have no objection to thinking about future possibilities and how things are gonna change. But the idea that you're gonna have a serious discussion about the moral ins and outs of transhumanism when it's just not on the horizon, it's a fantasy. It's like having a pseudo discussion about which football team is gonna win. Really, you're just savoring a kind of fantasy because you enjoy football.

31:11 Brian: I certainly got that out of the Bostrom arm. Most of the thing was like, hey, wouldn't this be great? And since this would be great, that would be pretty Great. And anybody who says that it wouldn't is not understanding how great it would be when none of it really. I mean, it was a very sort of just so article, I thought that didn't really have a whole lot to argue through, I guess.

31:31 Mark: Wasn't Dylan arguing earlier that most of the things he was proposing and most of the things on the table with transhumanism, putting aside stuff like downloading your brain into a computer, which raises completely different issues, or uplifting dolphins, which is a different thing, but the ones he was talking about, that they're sort of on a continuum with things that are possible today, that even just talking, you know, I could see a lot of the sort of debates that he was mirroring in that. Right. The objections that he was bringing up and answering as already there in the should we use genetically modified food?

You know, that's something that is immediately being argued about today. Which actually making that connection confirmed my uneasiness with this whole topic. Transhumanism has been requested by multiple listeners for us to cover. And obviously looking on the web, there's a wealth of philosophical and scientific literature about this, but it struck me even more so. You know, we don't cover a lot of practical ethics issues because I feel like, are we really going to have a really smart discussion, really contribute anything to the abortion debate or euthanasia?

Like it all kind of seems ho hum or tedious or boring. And it comes down to that. Usually it's a matter of just figuring out, does the thing cause more harm than good.

32:39 Wes: Right.

32:40 Mark: And there could be a little trick in there of, well, who's it hurting? Balancing these things out. But usually it seems like these things are not philosophical enough for me because they're not abstract, distract enough or something. And transhumanism has the same problem as these other practical issues, but yet it's one step removed. It's a contemporary moral problem that's not even yet contemporary.

33:00 Wes: Yes.

33:01 Mark: And so looking at should we have an episode on should we use genetically modified foods? Well, wouldn't that just be a. Well, what are the practical consequences of using that? Like, are they going to screw things up? Are they going to result in more inequality, you know, in corporations owning the world? Are they going to have these unintended consequences and screw up our biology? It comes down to very practical, factual.

33:23 Wes: It's a policy question. It's not a philosophical.

33:25 Mark: It's not a philosophical question at all. And so that's how I saw a lot of this future stuff too.

33:29 Dylan: I think the philosophical question gets Back to the question of transformation and identity and being and not identity in the sense that Bostrom means like, exactly. At least, you know, the question of I recognize myself for what I am.

33:43 Mark: In other words, you being the same you post and pre. The transformation, which I don't think even comes up in most of Brin, because Brin's. And I think a lot of these, you know, if you're talking about should we as a species evolve over time and cause our evolution, that's different than me myself right now changing into this more superhuman thing.

34:02 Dylan: Yeah, I guess it's a little bit more lightweight philosophical topic, but it gets to the question of when we talk about our interaction with technology and whether it's good for us ourselves, we're really talking about whether we become better or not as a result of it. And that's a question of what it means to become and be a human being. And so you have a question of is the activity of being a human being a becoming, or is it a realization of current powers? Or is there a transformation involved such that after I go to college, I'm a different person than I did when I started college. I certainly felt that way. I felt like I was transformed going

34:43 Mark: through college, whether by college or just going through that age. Those are things we can't separate out. Unless you're somebody who went back to

34:50 Dylan: school when you were older, we could have that discussion. But my experience of it was that modulo the fact that I went from being 18 to being 23, it was going to college. I mean, it was the teachers I had, the activities I did, the things I thought about, the. That to me transformed my life and transformed the way I thought about the world and the way I thought about myself in a way that didn't seem to me to have anything to do with getting an inch taller. Right. And you could also talk about all kinds of other experiences a person might have, either by choice or not by choice, and talking about them transforming you. And there's interesting philosophical work to do in that respect. It might be somewhat more practical, certainly not exactly abstract, but it's different than like a policy argument about GMO foods.

35:42 Brian: It's an interesting question about how much of a transformation in terms of going through college or any other sort of experience, and you say, you know, it transformed you, if that means you're a different person at the end of it than you were at the beginning of it. It seems to me there's a continuum there. I mean, you could have an enormous trauma, you know, and people Talk about they looked at life completely differently. And things like after some incident happens is a change in perspective, a change in how you look at the world enough to be a different person or have you just.

Are you looking at things different but you're the same person? You can get that all the way down to changing your mind about something. You read an argument and you go, you know what? I was wrong. Now I think this. Am I a different person that thought that versus the person that thinks this? Now that you've gone through that process, are you now a different person because you've changed your mind? That seems a very small thing, but you're answering differently to a question. You're coming to a different conclusion than you were before from the same input.

36:41 Seth: Yeah.

36:41 Dylan: And another related one is, are you culpable for your actions in your previous self? You are the physical flesh. But if you really believe that you transformed, then are you still culpable for the fact that you killed five people 10 years ago? But if you really transformed or if you don't believe that you can actually transform, I mean, those are questions of being and identity and what it means to have a continuous being or. And whether or not that's rooted in our flesh or in our souls. Those are philosophical issues, it seems to me. We've been treating with philosophically for thousands of years.

37:12 Mark: And so I'll just give the answer that we've come up with, which is that there's no one thing, there's no one criterion for being a continuous person. What Bostrom cites as being the commonly accepted version, which came from John Locke, was continuity of memory. So will I be the same person when I am, if five years from now, I undergo some surgery that makes me able to live 500 more years and be 60 times as smart than I am now? So I would be nearly average and then. And be much more mature emotionally, etc. Well, as long as I could remember the old me as those being my experiences, then I would be the same person.

And I mean, it's a separate question. If I committed crimes before undergoing that change, should I then be prosecuted afterward? I think that's something that we would have to make up as we go along. The default would be, yes, of course you remember committing those crimes, so you are still culpable for them. And maybe even if you didn't remember those, we might still hold you culpable for them. As a social policy, why don't we

38:12 Dylan: just erase your memory then? Why would you be culpable for them? You're A different person.

38:16 Mark: More sci fi. Sure. Yes. Well, that's one of the things.

38:19 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

38:19 Mark: If you could rehabilitate someone and wipe their memory of the crime, depending on what you think punishment is for, then that would work just fine.

38:25 Dylan: So now we have a Foucault episode over again again.

38:27 Unknown speaker: Right.

38:28 Dylan: That punishment is for the punisher, not for the punished.

38:31 Mark: Ah, yes. If you ask what is personal identity over time, the answer, as with so many philosophical questions, is, well, why do you care? Because I want to know whether to punish you or not. Because I want to know whether this is still my soup. And a lot of these are. They come down to social convention or something.

38:48 Dylan: Yeah. Maybe part of the problem is that the article that we read doesn't go down the road of trying to think about what it means to be transformed. They focus on very sort of idiosyncratic technologies regarding transhumanism, along the lines that Wes was complaining about. It's like, well, why would you spend your time thinking about this? On the other hand, Brin's case, you have in fiction the playing out of these kinds of things to sort of mash them against one another.

39:15 Mark: So just what I brought up in the Precog is the way that Brin would deal with a philosophical issue like, is it still me when now there's an image of me in the Christian. Well, according to the image, he still thinks he's you. According to you, who presumably had your image recorded and then went on and did a little more stuff and died, that would not be you. And in fact, you could be duplicated many times, and each of those would think that they're you and that he had a whole other book kiln people that was about that, about people. You make lots of duplicates of yourself,

39:45 Brian: some of which were not quite as good as other copies. A fundamental piece of that book was that you could make cheap copies if

39:52 Mark: they didn't need to do.

39:53 Brian: Literally, it cost less.

39:54 Dylan: A Kmart copy.

39:56 Brian: There were the Kmart copies, and they were all color coded, so the green ones were the cheap ones. And these people would go out to do things and they wouldn't have a full sensory experience, and they wouldn't have all of the pieces of you, but they were sort of an avatar of you, a physical avatar of you, and somehow were a copy of you in a way that could go out and do your business out in the world, and then they could come back and their memories could be merged with the sort of the reality U Prime, I guess. But you could make higher fidelity copies and the really rich people would make super high fidelity copies and send those out into the world so that they didn't have to worry about any dangers or anything like that.

You know, if their copy got killed, it wasn't a big deal because that was just a copy of them and things like that. He definitely explored the idea of one person copying themselves and killing people.

40:45 Unknown speaker: Right, right.

40:46 Mark: The reabsorption thing was the idiosyncrasy of that book. Right. Is that you. Ideally, at the end of the day, because these were very temporary copies. They're from the kiln, where you would suck back into you. So you got to basically multiply your own lifespan by however many times because you get to have all these extra memories soaked up by your copies.

41:06 Brian: Right. And in fact, he had one character in there that she sort of became this hive. And she created hundreds and hundreds of copies that would go out for a day and come back and merge the memories back into her. So she was absorbing all of these memories at a multiplicative rate compared to other people. The other conceit that he had in the book is that most of the copies, they knew they were copies and there was some lack of self in some way, because when they went back and their memories were reintegrated with the original person, the copy died.

I mean, the copy went away. And most of the time this wasn't a problem. But they would have occasional glitches where the copy realized, hey, I'm me, I'm not a copy of him. And the copy wouldn't want to die. And it would take off and not go back to be reabsorbed. And one of the main, I guess, sub characters of his book is this copy that has that property.

42:03 Mark: So what does this all tell us about the philosophy of personal identity? It just seems like.

42:07 Brian: Well, I don't know anything about philosophy. I just read a lot of science fiction books.

42:09 Mark: Well, I think we've said everything that it's continuity memory, and that's what gives you the experience. Right. John Locke was an empiricist. He's all about looking at your experiences. What gives you experience of personal identity is that you have continuous memory. So then we have books and stories and real life events where people have amnesia, they have brain damage, they have something that there's a disruption in memory. And it throws into question that you might not think that this person before the memory loss was you because you don't remember being that person.

But everybody else treats you like you're a continuation of the same person. So that just shows you the continuous memory going, with continuous body being the norm, where that breaks down. And there is no sort of right answer beyond that. That's sort of what experience gives us. And so experience doesn't tell us whether when you split into five copies and they all think they're you, which one is really you?

42:55 Brian: There is no real answer that came up in the movie. Wasn't it the prestige where the teleportation was actually a copy and the guy would kill the copy or one of

43:06 Mark: them would kill the other because they

43:09 Brian: didn't matter that they were the real one and wanted to survive? So that was at least addressed a little bit in that movie.

43:17 Mark: Yes.

43:18 Dylan: I have a question for Wes. Given your stated skepticism about even this kind of conversation earlier, I'm wondering sort of what your take or thought is about even the conversation regarding transformation. Because your reaction earlier was that you saw especially Bostrom, but maybe even Brin as well. Like they were evangelical and. And maybe the kind way to put it was they were a kind of new enlightenment optimists that were overly sanguine about the role of rationality in human life. And then I took you to be saying that they're missing a big chunk of it. And it made me wonder if this discussion of transformation would strike you as just hitting off the mark so that the notion of transforming the soul just doesn't even make sense. You would have have a therapeutic understanding of the soul.

44:08 Wes: Well, for one thing, there's the focus on intelligence. But I guess in Bostrom's article he also talks about emotional transformation. And yeah, if there's a point in the future where someone can. Whether it's curing depression or whether it's more on the positive side of things, helping people fulfill their potential, let's say helping people who are stuck for emotional reasons or are not fulfilling their potential, if you could do that instead of through the long laborious process of human relationships, which can be transformative, but if you could do that through brain surgery or through some sort of technomagic chip.

Yeah. Some sort of technological solution, then I'm all for that. And I think the degree to which that's possible is really, really unclear. So to sit around and fantasize about it and pretend like we have to make tough moral choices about that, when we don't even know if it's possible, since there are more synaptic connections in the brain than there are stars in the universe or something like that.

45:09 Mark: Right. Shouldn't you just be asking, should I be taking antidepressants now or not. That's a real question. And that's sort of like what we're asking.

45:17 Wes: Whether if I wait long enough, maybe someone's going to put something into my magic brain leech or something. I don't know.

45:24 Mark: Just do it yourself, high tech self providing, do it yourself around the house.

45:29 Wes: If it does become possible, then it'll be something very, very specific. And our moral dilemmas, or when I see them more as policy dilemmas or more as practical decision making, those will be quite specific too. What are the drawbacks of the brain implant versus its benefits? So the question of identity does arise, say, for someone who's severely depressed, who worries that an antidepressant is going to change their personality or dampen their libido. Obviously your identity in the strict sense is going to stay continuous. And again, we can leave a certain the technicalities of defining identity.

But I think many people are worried about changes of character and that anxiety about the way we change to whatever degree we think we maintain our identity through our lives, the changes that we undergo, the metamorphoses, that's a constant and that's an anxiety that a lot of great literature has been written about. We don't escape that anyway. We don't escape the fact that in some sense there are parts of ourselves, our past selves, that have died off, even if we have some sort of access to them. It's not the same as that person still being alive.

It's like the memory of a lost loved one that used to be ourselves. So the last point there is that many of these issues aren't really specific to transhumanism. They're just part of the human condition. So those are some of my thoughts about that. But I don't have some reactionary opposition to the idea of technological progress. I'm just sort of an agnostic about it. I struggle daily with certain. I love technology and I've tinkered with it and I've gone as far as becoming a web developer at one point in my life and tinkering with computers and building them.

And of course, like everyone, I worry that technology has taken over my life in some sense at some point, or there's too much Facebook or this or that. Those are sort of everyday sorts of worries. But I don't think technology is escapable. I don't think there's a decision that can be made to stop the intrusion of technology. It just has to be managed, it has to be optimized in some sense. But the problem for Me is this sort of faith that it's all going to be for good, maybe it'll all be for shit. I think in a way it's inevitable. What's going to happen is inevitable, but it's by no means clear that it's going to be all noodle salad and roses.

So I'm not a pessimist, but I'm not just a freewheeling optimist either. And, and even if you are an optimist, that's fine, but it's the use of that optimism in one's approach to the world. I think it colors the way some of these people who are sort of optimists about, let's say, scientific progress, again, it functions in their life in precisely the way religion functions in other people's lives. It has a stultifying effect on their ability to think carefully about things and to maintain an open mind. It's those sorts of effects that I object to.

But it's entirely possible within the next 40 years something will happen that will greatly extend human lives or double them or triple them. And that would be interesting and perhaps wonderful and perhaps terrible. And it's exciting to think about and I don't object to thinking about it, but it's the sort of religious attitude towards that possibility that I object to too.

48:54 Mark: I think in Brin's case, what's shown in the book is we need to in general be pro technological progress, because that's the thing that's going to bring advances is going to come close to saving us. He definitely believes in progress, sort of overall. But yes, technology can have disastrous consequences. And in fact, one of the main characters in existence is a sci fi writer who has made his career just writing story after story about ways that technology has gone wrong and then ends up supporting a political movement for a big part of the book that is sort of the bad guys of the story who are trying to hold things back, but really they're not trying to hold things back, they're just trying to keep all the technological advances for themselves.

So it's an elitist group disguising itself as a conservative group. But I think the idea is that given that he wants a spread out power system, it's not one group of elites deciding do we move forward or not? Not. Then it's going to be very hard to contain any kind of technology. So it's going to just spring up somewhere. So the question is just how do we best manage it that we need to embrace moving forward, but do this intelligently. So I know in some of his other books, there's like a world committee that reviews every given advance that's coming in.

And Joe, should this. Is this going to be good or is this going to be bad and do something? I think he would be actually in favor of policing like that. But that's the best we could do. We can't. You can't just say we're going to

50:15 Brian: stop now even the policing things. I think he would have a lot of caveats about. I think he says quite frequently that it's impossible for sort of the ordinary public to stop people with money and, or power from gaining technological advantages. You know, and he talks about this in the surveillance issue a lot, that we're not going to stop the cameras from getting smaller and we're not going to stop. Stop the elites, whoever they are, from seeing. The best that we can do is try to A, limit what they can do with what they see and B, do the best that we can to look back at what they're doing and all of the things about them. And so I don't know that even the policing of technology is exactly the kind of thing that he would say is possible. And in terms of stopping it from happening.

51:07 Mark: Right. Making sure that the way in which it proliferates does not have disastrous consequences, that is something you can do, right? Like our hospitals, you can't make it so that scientists are not going to learn how to genetically modify people. But you could make it so that hospital administrations are not routinely letting you do sex selection for your kid or something. Those are matters of policy.

51:28 Brian: Right?

51:29 Mark: I have a question for Seth. All right. One of the reasons I got him on the show is because I wanted to have a big celebrity guest, but also because this is a book that I knew I wouldn't mind reading, that this is probably something I might not get around to reading soon, but I kind of wanted to read it. And I'd read other stuff by him, but this was very much out of your comfort zone. Right. So what did you think of this experience?

51:51 Seth: Well, I'm going to say this in the nicest way I can. I was a huge aficionado of science fiction and fantasy when I was younger. And when I say younger, I mean like junior high, high school, even into college. And I've read a lot of very interesting and thought provoking science fiction and fantasy novels that typically revolve around kind of one central idea that they then explore. Whether it's, you know, something like travel to the stars or transhumanism or cyberpunk or whatever the case may be.

52:30 Unknown speaker: Be.

52:30 Seth: And in this particular novel, it seemed to me there were quite a few different things going on and there were quite a few different stories, any one of which might have been sufficient to be an anchor concept. So take for example, the idea that there are how many estates? Nine. Nine or ten estates.

52:49 Brian: I think he said ten at one point.

52:50 Seth: Yeah. That part of the book is that there's some sort of an apocalyptic type event which causes human beings to kind of reevaluate the way in which we organize society.

53:03 Mark: What are they called? The Very Bad Thing or something?

53:04 Brian: Awful Day.

53:05 Seth: Awful Day.

53:06 Mark: Awful, Awful Day. That's very typical of his marketing sense.

53:10 Seth: Yeah.

53:10 Mark: Of coming up with a term for something that every human being would never actually call something.

53:15 Seth: Yes. I mean, well, that's a whole nother thing. I think Dylan made the point about how he tries to slip in the AI as an artificial intelligence, but slip it into all kinds of words that have just a or I as a vowel. But my point is this. There's a whole Game of Thrones type series to be written about a society in which there are 10 estates where human beings self organized into those estates after some kind of catastrophic event because they believed it was the appropriate response to what happened before that somehow the. I don't want to say capitalists, but it has to be capitalists.

Democratic structure that existed somehow resulted in this terrible catastrophe. And what people thought after that is we really need aristocracy and we're okay with a large portion of the population being, you know, essentially serfs. Even though he doesn't quite say it that way. That's just background noise in the book. Right. It's just structure.

54:14 Brian: There were times when the estates seemed more of a sort of a narrative tool to describe the different slices of society. The uber rich versus many different types of working class people, first responders, all these different things. But then the characters would actually use those terms. And as you say, it seems like there was some sort of conscious organization around those that happened after Awful Day. That was almost like a constitutional monarchy where there's some level of representative of government and organization. But it's obvious that certain trillionaires are the ones that are actually in charge, but they have some sorts of policy limits on them.

One character at one point says, just because I'm rich doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to do X and was railing against having to jump through hoops even though she could have just done something directly because she was rich enough to do it. But it was Unclear how exactly that was all supposed to be structured, at least to me reading it. I went back and forth between thinking this was something that happened culturally and socially after Awful Day and I would go back and think that it was just a narrative tool.

55:25 Seth: Yeah, well, my point being that that to me felt like it was maybe too much to just be in the background. That would have been a really interesting book in itself. But it just sets the backdrop to try to talk about all the dynamics that come into play when this maybe alien artifact is discovered and how different groups are all vying for control of it. Although there seems to be a fairly strong, orderly and rational group of people that are very much like scientists who get control of that and that it's universally accepted, it's okay for them to be the ones who are interacting with it. So in a certain way that the whole estate thing is a plot device to make it so that he doesn't have to deal with the ugly and messy realities of what it would be like if there was an actual discovery that was made public about in our current society. Right.

56:20 Mark: Well, he mentions like the rash of suicides and the ra.

56:23 Wes: You know, just.

56:24 Mark: But this is something that somebody's reading in the news.

56:27 Seth: If we discover while any of us are alive, if there's a discovery that there's intelligent life in the universe outside side of Earth, the story is not going to be about that. It's going to be about how it impacts all of us. How does it change our concept of religion? How does it change our perception of ourselves? How does it change our notion of identity, human consciousness and rationality? Like, you know, are all the philosophers going to rush forward to try to apply some kind of Kantian test to see if that, you know, and that to me is really the way things would play out. That's why I'm more interested in Hume and Smith and moral sentiment, I guess, than I am in Futurism.

57:04 Mark: Yeah, definitely the style. We had talked about how this is a very kitchen sink book, that it's not like the tales that the character in his story tells that focus on one technological development and explore the consequences of that. He was trying to give a fully realized world which goes with the. He was talking about how it's really the most demanding genre of fiction because the consistency demands for sci fi are so high. You know, it all has to be actually possible. You can't just use some bullshitty magic thing. You have to be sort of putting forth scientific and political theory while you're doing it and just it's supposed to be very internally consistent and sketch out this whole world in a way that, you know, a fantasy world, even if it is detailed, doesn't have to have that kind of rigor to it.

Anyway, that was the goal. I could see where he was going for. Whether it works as a narrative or not is whether you want to learn more. Whether you're like, wow, that mention of Awful Day was so interesting. I hope he writes a book just on Awful Day. Or whether you're just like, whatever, just. I will not weigh in on the aesthetic question there. It worked okay to me. I think that maybe you have to take his work. It's a little self indulgent for an author, but definitely the dolphins were just thrown in that didn't have to be there at all. And.

But yet this is something he's built up in his other work. So it's sort of like an author that, you know, writes like Terry Pratchett wrote. Most of his novels are in the same world, the same Discworld. And so. And you don't have to read them all, but like you can just learn more and more about the world by. That's what a lot of the authors in these of genres do, is they build these ongoing worlds. I feel like David doesn't do that exactly, but still he recreates many of the same ideas in different variations. He doesn't have to be consistent from book to book.

But still, like if you approached it as a corpus, then maybe you get. Maybe there's some other book that he will write which will be more about Awful Day. Maybe inspired by this discussion, he will feel like he should write that one. Ah, is that an excuse? That's what we use for philosophers. If somebody just refers to something like, oh, well, you got to read this other work by them. But for fiction it seems indulgent, like, no, just tell me the damn story. If you want to know the background of Boba Fett, you have to read.

59:10 Seth: Yeah, I don't necessarily agree with that, although I can say that while I was reading it, I was like, how are we going to have a philosophy discussion about this? And I kept trying to. And that's what I'm saying. I kept coming back to the political thing, you know, speculating about life and the. Okay, there's an identity question. What would it be like if you were able to upload your identity or your consciousness into 10,000 different vessels that then went and all had different kinds of experiences and came back and which one would be you? Or would it all be you or. Okay, I don't need a 600 page book to get that thought experiment off the ground.

59:43 Dylan: 800 page book.

59:44 Seth: Sorry, 800 page book.

59:46 Dylan: 870 page book.

59:50 Mark: My hardback is only in the 500s, I believe.

59:53 Dylan: Little teeny tiny print.

59:55 Seth: Yeah.

59:56 Mark: 553.

59:57 Seth: But I thought the suggestion about the political stuff was an interesting conversation to have about can we imagine political theory or going back to Rawls and some of the other things we're reading where it would make sense to kind of adopt that kind of social structure. But I did skip over the things at the beginning of the chapter where it was all of the plus signs and the.

1:00:17 Dylan: There was the autistics talking.

1:00:18 Seth: Oh, was it?

1:00:19 Dylan: Yeah.

1:00:20 Seth: Oh, I didn't realize that, you bigot. Hey, if it was French, I would have skipped it too.

1:00:28 Mark: In addition to the six or whatever major characters that would have had completely different story arcs going on, you'd have these breaks, the beginning of or the ends of chapters that would be, here's an article from a newspaper that's coming out at this time or here's an Internet communication from one of the autistics or what? You know, and sometimes these things were eventually hooked back up to the narrative and sometimes they were just to provide further background what's going on in the society at the time, provide yet more perspectives.

1:00:53 Dylan: But the ones with the plus signs and the hash marks and stuff like that, I think they were all from the autistics.

1:00:59 Mark: Those were.

1:00:59 Dylan: Yeah. Every chapter practically had anyway.

1:01:02 Wes: Right.

1:01:02 Mark: That's not something that begged for a book by itself like that.

1:01:05 Unknown speaker: Really?

1:01:05 Mark: What is your weird ass theory about autism? Is this a real theory?

1:01:11 Dylan: Seth, when you were talking about the political stuff, it made me think that for me the most interesting character in the whole book was Tor Povlov the journalist. And she was interesting for a couple different things. One was this issue of how much do you change before you are a different entity? Because at the beginning of the book she's this sort of hardscrabble self defined journalist who gets in this terrible accident and then moves on into a life in which she has the barest remnants of her flesh being and interacts with the world through tremendous numbers of sensors and prosthetics and stuff like.

Like that. And in fact, at the end of the book she realizes, a kind of joke to herself, that if someone were watching her and this Android walking across this asteroid, that they would presume that the Android was the real human being and that she, in this sort of hovering box with these mechanical arms was the Android, when actually it was in some important ways the opposite of that.

1:02:17 Mark: She used General Grievous.

1:02:20 Unknown speaker: But what I.

1:02:22 Mark: The spinning lightsaber on.

1:02:24 Dylan: Yes, yes. One of the things I particularly liked about her character was the way in which this sort of crowdsourcing of opinion was brought in. And there were two features of it. And I think for Brin, this was an important lever for the regulation of politics in the future. And one of the reasons for why he's sort of characteristically hopeful about a future that sort of sort of deeply, deeply, deeply technologically laden in a way that makes our technologically laden culture seem positively ancient, is that while you still have problems with people hoarding information and stuff, there's a way in which you can't stop the signal.

And so you have these underground posses of people that have a kind of crowdsourced, unregulated hive coming and going, kind of of emergent cooperativeness that she taps into and that they even have sort of. There are mechanisms that help bring this together, but it's not autocratic in any way. And I guess I found that pretty interesting as a component of political life. It's akin to an expansion of just the newspaper and of the prevalence of information being important for democracy in general.

1:03:46 Brian: Well, and an important piece of that, too, is, you know, with newspapers or other sources of information, the reputation of that information source has a significant impact on how you rate the information that you get out of that source. And one of the conceits that he has in the book is that this vast pseudonymous version of the Internet, you know, where you have everyone on the Internet can be a dog or whatever, but people have reputation scores. And so the amalgam of data that she gets is filtered in some way by some sort of reputation score that is attached to an individual, even if that individual is anonymous in some other ways, there's some sort of continuous reputation that follows them around so that, you know, oh, this is just a crackpot, or, oh, this is actually someone who might know something.

1:04:33 Mark: I also like the parallel between those smart mobs and how her AI is able to get input from all these people talking at the same time and feed her a single stream. And what we were just talking about, the person sending out copies of themselves and then bringing them back and reabsorbing, absorbing their memories like that. This, in effect, creates a hive mind. That's pretty crazy. We don't need the Borg.

1:04:53 Seth: What was interesting about that is that somehow somebody gets anointed as the spokesperson was that the AI or the people self organized.

1:05:00 Brian: It varied because there were some situations where the AI used a voice that was an amalgam of the information that was coming through. And then when the critical mass sort of fell, for example, in the situation where she's on the giant blimp and a bunch of people left her mob, there were some people that were left and they were experts, blimp technology and whatnot. And she ended up speaking to one individual who maybe was gathering information from all of the others. But there was an individual voice there. It was no longer an AI mediated sort of summation voice.

1:05:31 Seth: The idea was, is she was going off investigating things and going places where the mainstream media outlets weren't connecting the dots or weren't incented to go report the story, sort of crowdsourcing news. There was something there that was political and subversive about that.

1:05:47 Dylan: Her character Povlov does become that kind of celebrity news media conduit to the point at which that she has to periodically disconnect herself because she becomes overwhelmed

1:06:01 Mark: by physically being in outer space beyond the reach of any signal. That's the only way she can do it. Well, I have a question for Brian then, to get us back to the Bostrom article. Is this the first legitimate philosophy article we made you read? This is your introduction. What was that experience like?

1:06:17 Brian: Like, does this count as philosophy?

1:06:19 Mark: Oh, yes, it's by a bona fide philosopher. It's like many analytic philosophy pieces trying to counter all possible objections in advance.

1:06:29 Brian: Speaking as someone who has absolutely no training in philosophy beyond, I think, a couple of introductory courses. Way back in the dark ages, when I went to undergraduate, I found it lacking in multiple ways. A lot of what he talks about is just sort of pointless to talk about because it's not going to happen for Earth at least least a year or two. And then there are a lot of things where he's like, well, it's good to study what people's thoughts are on basically dying versus not dying. As though there's like a legitimate question of that. So do you think people prefer to die or to not die? And he spent like a page and a half trying to demonstrate that, well, pretty much people prefer not to die.

1:07:10 Mark: If you ask really old people, would you rather continue living versus asking younger people? You get these different. We can put them on a graph

1:07:17 Brian: and it's like, okay, yes, if you're suffering, yeah, okay, maybe you'll get a different answer. If you're completely debilitated mentally or physically, maybe that becomes an edge case and we can talk about Dying with dignity and what those things might mean in terms of how we approach the fact that we all are going to die. But for a page and a half to even cite surveys of whether people think it's a good idea to die or not just seemed stupid to me. Again, speaking as someone who doesn't have the philosophy training to properly understand the

1:07:48 Mark: written language, if only had been in grad school, you would know that it's actually quite simple.

1:07:54 Brian: And a lot of the rest of it seemed to be basically, suppose you were smarter and more emotionally satisfied and mature and able to appreciate art at a deeper level and just you understood everything better. Suppose everything were better. That would be better. Right?

1:08:11 Mark: Well, right. He comes up with these objections and then just stipulates, well, that's not what I mean. We're sort of referring to sci fi stories where humanity's advanced like the Vulcans, so that we lose our human character. Well, no, that's not the kind of post humanity I mean is his response.

1:08:26 Brian: I mean the good kind where everything is better.

1:08:32 Mark: Or it would be lonely to be an immortal because, you know, you have these stories about Superman being lonely and stuff like, well, but I'm positing a society in which there are many people that are clearly, if we could do

1:08:43 Brian: one of them, we could do more than one, so that wouldn't be a problem.

1:08:47 Mark: Anybody want to heap on this paper? I put it on Facebook and multiple people said, yes, this is the one to go to. And at least it looked a little bit rigorous.

1:08:56 Dylan: It's written by philosophy. Prof.

1:08:58 Mark: Right. Yes.

1:08:58 Dylan: And it was mentioned in that podcast, that rationally speaking podcast.

1:09:03 Mark: And I did like his comparison, sort of like you were referring to before Dylan, to maturation, that you might say, this isn't going to be me after I turn post human. Like, well, when you're a little kid and you become an adult, you change a lot. And in fact, he even brings up the, well, and you Christians, you believe that when you die, you turn into an angel or something. And isn't that a big change? You still think that's you, don't you? So you should be okay with just having some genetic enhancements to make you smarter.

1:09:30 Dylan: What I found a little bit tiresome about the article is that it seemed to step over the most interesting philosophical questions about transformation in general and just go straight to, you know, let's pick these particular kinds and then talk about being a transhuman. And there's a kind of fetishizing of a certain category of human change. And it feels like A strawman desire.

1:09:56 Mark: You'd think that these are all straw men that he's arguing against, but I have every confidence that he's arguing against actual people in the literature, that this is just the level that the literature is at.

1:10:03 Dylan: I didn't mean in the sense that he was making up arguments, he was arguing against them. I agree with you. Yes, I'm certain that they're in fact just looking. I glanced at some of the titles, at least of the reference articles, and he clearly is, as a good analytical philosopher, addressing the literature itself. I understand that. I mean that because it's so ill defined, you know, having the discussion about it just seems to skip the most interesting parts.

1:10:32 Mark: In section nine, he brings up the idea of a telos, you might say, becoming posthuman is against human nature. You know, we've, like in the Anscombe discussion that we just had, she determined, like many virtue ethicists, that we can't figure out what's good for a person until we figure out sort of what the human telos is, whether that means what we're supposed to be doing sort of by our inward nature, or if there is something that our inward nature means we're supposed to be doing and sort of going through the other. Well, maybe you could take the telos to be reproductive fitness.

If you're an evolutionary biologist, that's the way you take it. But clearly that's not what we mean by ethical telos, because then what the best thing for each of us to do is go to a sperm bank as often as possible in the modern world. In some ways it's just sort of ticking off boxes that these are not serious positions he's arguing against. But at least going through the process of refuting so many of them, them, I think, clarifies what his view is.

1:11:28 Brian: I'm not sure that he has a view to be clarified. I lost it partway through this paper. And had did he writes, quote. While the exact numbers are debatable, there is little doubt that most people place a very high value on their continued existence in a healthy state. Now, if you have to write that down in a paper as part of your argument that, yeah, you know, people, they like to continue and they like to not be diseased and sick and damaged. That just seems to me to be. Stating the obvious is beyond the pale. And if that's what philosophy is, then maybe that's why I didn't go into it.

1:12:01 Wes: No, that's not what philosophy is. That's what the worst example of contemporary analytic philosophy Is.

1:12:09 Seth: I have to say that that little rant and comment by Brian makes me feel akin to him. He's clearly one of us.

1:12:21 Mark: This is part of your indoctrination.

1:12:23 Wes: Okay.

1:12:23 Mark: But I think that's how a lot of reading in philosophy classes goes, that the student. Students together read something just like we did on our early episodes. We read Descartes and they are all like, what the.

1:12:34 Unknown speaker: Why.

1:12:35 Mark: Why is he bothering to say this and sort of have a collective righteous indignation against it? And that is part of the indoctrination. It's only over time.

1:12:43 Unknown speaker: Maybe you.

1:12:44 Wes: Descartes is distinctly different than this.

1:12:46 Dylan: And yeah, Nick Bostrom is no Rene Descartes.

1:12:49 Wes: And the Descartes, you know, as counterintuitive, some flaws philosophy, maybe it's motivated. And the experience of reading an early modern philosopher for me is just. It's night and day in comparison to some of these contemporary analytic papers, which are more. They're scholastic in spirit. And it speaks to something larger about academia now and professionalization and all sorts of issues. But it is the kind of thing that drove me away from grad school.

1:13:18 Mark: Yeah.

1:13:19 Dylan: It's representative in a tragic way. Right.

1:13:22 Wes: Yeah.

1:13:23 Mark: Next week we'll have Nick Bostrom on as a guest so he can. No, no, nothing against him. I watched a TED Talk he did. It was fun. You know what?

1:13:32 Dylan: I bet that actually it would be much more interesting to have him on to talk about it than to have read the paper.

1:13:39 Wes: You should get him and Bryn to talk to each other.

1:13:42 Dylan: What I mean is that having had a conversation or two with people who have written papers like this, this is that they really are much more interesting than their papers seem to be. Even Chalmers. Right.

1:13:53 Unknown speaker: Who.

1:13:54 Dylan: That book, while being terribly interesting in many parts, is just. It's so painful in the pedantic nature of it. It's laborious, it's laboriousness.

1:14:05 Unknown speaker: It's just.

1:14:06 Dylan: And he was actually much more lively and interesting to talk to than his book ever felt. And even while appreciating that he had a tremendously high ambition in writing that book.

1:14:19 Wes: It just was insane. Senior. It's hard to tell whether they're a brilliant philosopher, whether they're schizophrenic and have graphophilia or something. So. Did he write that on the walls? On the.

1:14:35 Mark: He's talking about David Chalmers.

1:14:37 Wes: Did he write that on the padded walls of his asylum room?

1:14:41 Seth: Haven't we had this conversation before, though, where we've basically come to the consensus that. That your ability or quality as a writer in some way determines your greatness as a philosopher or your at least long term standing as a philosopher.

1:14:55 Wes: Yeah, I think he should be able to write engagingly and non insanely.

1:15:02 Mark: But what else could you want out of this? Bostrom, he's very clear and tries to

1:15:06 Wes: be lively, but it's about relevance and it's about maybe salience is the word, because yes, this little trick of treating every different possibility as a live option and then knocking it down, down. So many papers are built on that. Right. Let's just exhaustively go through all these different possibilities. Instead of intuitively selecting some path and going down it, you can pretend that all the different paths are of equal weight and then argue about it. And that's why you get this sort of sterile feeling, because intuitively we know, yes, we don't need to establish that people like to go on living and so on and so forth.

1:15:40 Mark: So maybe there's the difference between him and somebody like Berkeley is that Berkeley was writing at a time where you didn't have to read so many things, you know, so he's reacting to a handful to Descartes and Locke and Malebranche and the Scholastics and a handful of other specific things that he studied in depth. Whereas now when you're writing something, you have to do a deep dive into whatever the current literature is on it and sort of answer in a much more picky and specific way. At least if you're trying to write according to the academy standards.

1:16:08 Wes: Yeah.

1:16:08 Dylan: I have to say, while I enjoyed the Berkeley more more it stank of the pre smell of this kind of thing.

1:16:22 Mark: I believe you mean the proto olfaction.

1:16:25 Wes: The difference is Berkeley is dealing with very interesting and fundamental problems. He's advancing a very radical and crazy seeming, yet from another perspective, beautiful solution to that problem. And he's doing, doing it eloquently and clearly and exhaustively. He pretty exhaustively goes through a lot of different counterarguments and whatever you want to say about his theory, any student should come away from that with a much better understanding of epistemology and metaphysics, but also a better understanding of some of the founding concerns that will crop up again and again and again.

It's a preparation reading Berkeley. You should be able to understand Kant better after that and then on and on on both sides of the continental analytic divide. I think it's essential to understand the kind of problems that are motivating Berkeley and the fact that you can head in the direction of that solution or you can head in the materialist direction. It's important.

1:17:23 Mark: Well, at least for someone as steeped in it as you are, that I think it's one of the prototypical texts, like Descartes, meditation of Is the chair really there? Which is exactly the kind of thing that I don't.

1:17:34 Wes: First of all, Descartes is not concerned about whether the chair was really there, and he was never concerned about whether he was dreaming. Those are methodological things to get you to see what your basic assumptions are. If there's a sin there, it's foundationalism. It's not that he was ever actually concerned about those things.

1:17:51 Mark: No.

1:17:52 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:17:52 Mark: It's not an actual skepticism.

1:17:54 Wes: The kind of idealism that's in Berkeley is not some dead thing. There are hints of it in pragmatist epistemology. There are hints of it in analytic epistemology with focuses on sense data. And of course, it's immensely influential in continental philosophy via Hegel. So idealism is something that is still alive everywhere within the discipline of philosophy, whether people admit that or not. Even someone like Quine is a nominalist, because it's hard to be a nominalist and a pragmatist without slipping into some sort of idealism.

1:18:26 Mark: My point was merely that Berkeley was contributing to this overall epistemological project, which is central for people that are interested in philosophy, but is one of the primary things that turns people off who are not interested in in it. Whereas this is supposed to be like somebody. When I announced we're doing transhumanism, somebody posted on our blog, I think in the future you guys should do a few more on transhumanist philosophy. It's a topic close to my heart, one that's very fertile ground for a philosophical examination and of course relates intimately with existentialist themes.

So your recent foray into existentialism provides a good backdrop for it. There's a lot of passion about this transhumanism stuff when I'm looking around on the Web, that people think this is fundamental. What is it to be human, that screw giving an account of whether the chair is a material object or as an idea. That's all academic and abstract. This is real, this is our future and even what we are right now. But yet we don't seem to share this urgency.

1:19:19 Wes: What do you mean we don't seem to share this urgency?

1:19:21 Mark: Nobody here has said, yes, I think this transhumanism thing amounts to an existential crisis. It's very closely related to existentialist themes. I am not hearing that out of anybody.

1:19:32 Wes: I sympathize with the general idea that epistemology and metaphysics are sort of too. I mean, the central concerns are always moral and political and aesthetic. And those are actually the things that. I think those are the central or at least initial motivators for philosophy. And they're the things that are more interesting to me. And then the epistemology and metaphysics are sort of handmaidens to that, because once you start talking about morality, you see, it's a weird thing, and it's hard to say what it is and how any moral statements could be true and so on.

So for someone who thinks of themselves, let's say, as a humanist, they're interested in humanities, and they feel like when you start talking about whether the chair exists, you've wandered away from that. I sympathize with that, but I don't think that transhumanism has anything to do with humanism. It doesn't have anything to do with the project of understanding human beings. It's a fantasy about how great things are going to be in the future because of technological enhancements.

1:20:31 Mark: I should say, brought up a couple times on the other podcast I was listening to about this was that there is talk of post humanism, like in Foucault's sense, which I haven't read Foucault on this. It's a future episode on his the Order of Things book. But just in contrast to humanism, where the human being is taken not as referring to what we biologically are, but as a social creation, the specifics of which were laid down in the Enlightenment. And so post humanism would mean a different idea of humanity that doesn't have the idea of us as a rational animal and everything that entails.

You know, so there's something to say about that that's more sort of traditionally philosophical. It's obviously a very distinct topic from the way we've been approaching it here, but I have heard it associated. Maybe part of the appeal of transhumanism isn't just for future geeks, but it's for the same critical theory people who would be arguing for queer theory and feminism and other stuff like that, that transhumanism has been another way of expanding the idea of what it is to be human and trying to get at what. What are our specifically human biases in approaching this topic or that topic might be, I don't know, just throwing that out there.

I'm not an advocate of that. I don't pretend to fully understand it.

1:21:47 Wes: I'm just thinking about dolphins speaking to me now.

1:21:51 Mark: Yes, well, that would be the kind of thing I guess somebody brought up earlier here was that if the dolphins got smart, then they would think in fundamentally different ways. And so trying to get at what does that mean? What are the ways in which we think that there could be differences from the way we. We think? And without having an actual dolphin there, maybe you could still play that extrapolation game a little bit and then we can all stop being white male, head of the hierarchy.

1:22:17 Wes: Yeah, maybe this is just another form of identity politics, and that's why I feel so averse to it.

1:22:24 Mark: The one last. I remember David Brin brought up in our discussion last time. Neil, the biggest thing that philosophy has contributed is discovery of the logical fallacies. And so the mature way that people argue with each other is they point out their opponent's logical fallacies.

1:22:39 Wes: Yeah, that works really well. That is. Yeah, one of the things that. That is not what philosophy is for.

1:22:46 Mark: Well, but hold on there. Maybe that's what this kind of written philosophy. That's what Bostrom is actually doing in his article as he's pointing out these positions that other people have taken and saying in a very way that's supposed to be irrefutable, why they're wrong, by pointing out he doesn't actually say made an error in modus Tollens, but he's implicitly drawing on that sort of argumentation. Whereas when you do the kind of thing that we do, then, no, you don't do that kind of stuff at all. You sort of express your point of view and elaborate things and communicate so as to reach a common understanding or at least be clear about where you differ about things.

1:23:21 Wes: Philosophical arguments do not rely on logical fallacies. They're different theories which are meant to model some sort of reflective phenomenon better or worse. In some ways, it's more similar to science there. It's just that the data is the data of reflection. That's like saying scientific disputes come down to whether or not someone has made an experimental error. No, they don't. Not the important ones. Did I make sense there?

1:23:45 Dylan: Yes, you did.

1:23:46 Brian: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can have an observation bias or some other problem with the data in a particular study, but the fundamental dispute of whether we live in a Newtonian universe or a general relativity universe or, Or a electrical universe or something like that is broader than that.

1:24:02 Mark: All right, well, maybe the kind of logical fallacies that are often being referred to there is not just you thought you gave a deductive argument, but your conclusion does not actually follow deductively from your premises. That we don't do that so much. But it's that when you're making the kind of bullshit generalizations that pass for philosophy and make people's eyes, you're saying something like all liberals are blah or all conservatives are blah. The kind of thing that was very often said during the live podcast, which are things that I think philosophers themselves don't often say.

But if you are making I say bullshit generalizations, not even because they are all false, it's just because they are sort of necessarily ungrounded. And they can be ungrounded in very specific ways that you could point out by these logical fallacies that if you're doing a sampling error, you're saying most X's are Y's, when actually you've only taken a look at two different X's and we can say something about statistics and why what you've seen is not representative of a wider sample. Something like that. I mean, when I look at that less wrong website, Science anti philosophy or something, that's what they're talking about when they're talking about logical fallacies.

I think maybe he was.

1:25:04 Seth: Yeah. It doesn't work.

1:25:05 Mark: Sucked into that world.

1:25:07 Seth: Who cares? It doesn't work. People. Facts don't matter anymore. Logic doesn't matter. People are not going to be swayed by being told that they're being inconsistent or that the consequences of the position they hold. It doesn't work. What people need to be.

1:25:22 Mark: That sounds like you're just saying that they're not mature arguers.

1:25:25 Wes: You have to subjugate.

1:25:27 Seth: No, you have to either compel them or you have to entice them. It's more important to sway people with emotional appeal nowadays than.

1:25:38 Wes: Well, I think that they're not mutually exclusives. I mean, the classical ideal of rhetoric is this combination of reason and emotional appeal. So I think there are great persuaders out there who are to some extent rhetoricians in what they do. Say, a great essay, like a political

1:25:56 Mark: writer, like Orwell, let's say science fiction writer. Yes.

1:26:00 Wes: That doesn't mean you've excluded reasoning and rationality. You can combine those two things.

1:26:06 Seth: I will buy your middle way. Wes.

1:26:08 Wes: No. Yeah. If you write a sterile essay of the sort of why I want to be a posthuman when I grow up, that's not engaging in any way. That's not, let's say, emotionally connected to its audience in any way. Yeah. I think why you done that?

1:26:22 Seth: Yeah. And by the way, that emotion can be fear too. That's why there are a bunch of parents that Aren't getting their kids vaccinated.

1:26:28 Wes: Yeah. Yep.

1:26:30 Mark: Well, you're being a good advertisement here, Wes, for other writers to have us read their work for our topics. Maybe have them on to do it in person. Well, you had made the conscious choice. I know. Partly because of the reason. The excessive talking that the guest always does to no longer. Longer show up generally on the celebrity guest ones.

1:26:53 Wes: Right. No, I mean, I think in this case I just wanted a break and I wasn't that interested. Although you guys know my view on the whole guests thing. I think we should limit it. But, yeah, celebrity guests are great. And if you can get one, then do that.

1:27:08 Mark: All right, Hulk Hogan.

1:27:12 Wes: But I just think it's a matter of what's our percentage of episodes with guests now?

1:27:16 Mark: It's less than half.

1:27:18 Seth: 600%. That feels like a logic. It feels like an error. But I just. I'm too emotional and stupid to figure out what it is. Damn my marketing background.

1:27:33 Dylan: You saw it on a very flashy PowerPoint slide. 600%.

1:27:39 Wes: I don't know why you weren't a scientist by day and a marketer by night.

1:27:43 Seth: It's true. I do have a hard time expressing myself without power. PowerPoint.

1:27:47 Mark: Well, thank you, Brian, special person.

1:27:51 Brian: Thanks for having me.

1:27:52 Wes: Yep.

1:27:52 Mark: All right, thanks, everybody else. Next time we'll be reading Henri Bergson's essay, An Introduction to metaphysics from 1903. Everybody should go. Hey, you already listened to the previous episode. I don't have to tell you to go to our Twitter account and our Facebook group. You already know that crap, so screw you.

1:28:08 Unknown speaker: All right.

1:28:09 Mark: Good night, everybody.

1:28:10 Dylan: Good night.

1:28:11 Seth: Good night.

1:28:12 Mark: I know it's time to be done.

1:28:13 Dylan: When my filter goes away, you start insulting the audience.

1:28:18 Mark: Good night, motherfuckers.

1:28:23 Unknown speaker: While still in Wago, I dusted my eyes and took out the wall with my fingers and tasted their lies. It started to hit me that clandestine light and sooner than angel I spoke to the knights. I knew of the wall fold I'd heard of the thing that chose your face I wanted to use them to push my way through miles I could feel myself tinging and I knew that before the year was out I'd be able to tell you really tell you what this scratching's all about. And the feeling of softness in my Charged with a mixture of nothing ugly and lust Pushed its way to my window blue and over See me submit myself to trust Someone's bleeding me somewhere.

But it's easy to see that I don't care. Cause I know what's the matter with my thinking? I've been over it for it long enough to death Just ain't nothing in defense of what I am? I to my lips thinking of the after? Let the one go? One more catchphrase done? Sing a symbol to calm you with my thinking? To let you know you won? But you could try fishing or spackle the 10? Get rid of your hunger and count up to 10? Or you could try nothing and just let me in? Kiss me in Effy Darling, don't stop to begin? Babe, you are my godhead and I am your son?

Let's live the disguise that decay? In a meeting of some person version? While still in w go? I dusted my eyes? And sooner than angels I said my goodbyes?