Against the reification of man

Originally posted on: https://invertedwheel.wordpress.com/2019/08/18/against-the-reification-of-man

Reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, I was compelled to write a sort of rejoinder to it and go through some of the main problems I have with Harari’s thinking. I don’t intend this as a book review or as an extensive critique of the book, but as a think piece dealing with similar themes, issues and questions as Harari’s book. Specifically I hope to formulate my general concerns raised by Homo Deus and Harari’s reductive materialist worldview. My aim is to provide an argument that Harari’s line of thinking is actually one of the main causes driving the world towards those outcomes he writes about and seems worried by. My claim is that the reductive materialism adopted by Harari ends up strengthening and ratifying the technocratic transhumanist narrative, and is itself based on multiple philosophical errors. These errors have been part of the western thought and culture for some time now, leading us gradually towards the reification of humans. Reification is a process in which an abstract idea or fantasy is transformed into something real and vice versa. The concept has been applied to humans by characters such as Karl Marx and psychologist Erich Fromm, whom used it to describe how human beings are becoming more and more like things.

Humankind has made many mistakes throughout history. Many of these mistakes reveal themselves to be mistakes only after a significant time has passed and the data for their detrimentality has piled up high enough. Good examples of such mistakes are many dietary choices like apparently sugar and wheat, political ideologies like communism and national socialism, and technological applications like lead in benzene or asbestos. Then there are the mistakes which we do not recognise or of which it is hard to say whether or not they are mistakes. Our world is probably full of these even now and in all likelihood their number will only increase as technology progresses. This is largely because of both the economic imperative driving human action, as well as our tendency not to analyse in any particularly vigorous fashion the consequences of our actions in advance. This tendency gets more and more dangerous and worrying as technology advances and this is especially true in relation to alterations concerning the human biology.

We are fast approaching the time of body modifications. Of course body modifications have already been with us for some time. Things like tattoos, piercings, breast implants and laser eye surgery are body modifications, but these are all fairly surface level things. What I want to address here are the incoming deeper and in my opinion more pathological body modifications. As our technological and scientific acumen increases, so too will our worldview understandably change. Owing to this we have, at least in the west, largely jettisoned the old beliefs in spiritual realities and in things such as God and the soul. Many would argue that this is a good thing, liberating man from archaic and naive tales and releasing him from the clutches of these stories, giving him in the process a chance to imagine new possibilities, invent new realities, and try out different alternatives. This certainly has happened in a myriad of ways and analysed haphazardly it may seem as only positive. But in tandem with this development we have also been severed from nature, lost our understanding of the sacred and flung ourselves into a state of meaningless existence. It has become painfully clear that progress and technology are a double-edged sword and a very sharp one at that.

The most radical form of the ethos prevailing in the west today is the reductive materialism worldview, according to which all things, including but not restricted to consciousness, can be explained by reducing it down to its most basic physical components of atoms, molecules, quarks and perhaps Planck lengths. Also according to this position, no other things outside this scheme exist. So everything is basically just matter, simply put. However, there is at least one very big philosophical problem with this vision of things. Namely, that it undoes the adherents of this view themselves. The enthusiasm at which anyone would proclaim or promulgate this belief system is hard to understand once you go through its implications in a deeper way. This is because of the inherent determinism in the universe so described. In this system everything must be derived from earlier happenstances in an endless chain of events leading up to it. The process is completely mechanical and so leaves no room for true freedom of will since what happens happens and can’t happen in any other way. So in the end your consciousness matters very little in this causal chain, which actually means that you really decide nothing.

So then, whom do the reductive materialists write their books and declare their insights to and why? There is no spirit animating the dead matter to whose conduct can you have any impact on. Everything just goes as it goes and it can’t be interrupted or acted upon by any true operator. Why worry about climate change, political developments, relationships, morality or humanity? Why write a book and declare reductive materialism to be true? Why do anything at all? There is no actor to have an effect on anything or to be acted upon!

The reductive materialists purport themselves to be scientific and logical. They usually claim to be progressive and not to believe in any gods or spiritual entities, but hidden in their deterministic worldview is actually the old divine right to rule argument. This likely surprises many, including the reductive materialists themselves, so let me explain it more specifically. The counterargument of the reductive materialists to my earlier criticism concerning the pointlessness of their actions and efforts to acquire adherents is that there is no other way that things could be because of the endless causal chain of events and that they themselves have little to no influence on the matter. This is explicitly an argument that things can’t be in any other way than the way that they currently are because of the uninterrupted causal chain of occurrences and that this unbroken chain can’t be affected upon by any influence that is not part of the same chain. Any influencer, a person for example, therefore is where they are because of predetermination. This is a secular version of the divine right to rule argument, which argues that a king is king because he’s ordained by God. Similarly the reductive materialist himself, and not some other person with a different doctrine, is in a position of power capable of preaching their philosophy because of the predetermined causal chain of earlier incidents and things can’t be in any other way. This is a philosophical cul de sac, a psychological trick that cleverly removes all other actors from any discussion except those who do not live by the reductive materialist logic.

Telos in nature

We live at a time when all novel things have a momentum of their own simply by being novel. This creates a sort of cultural tilt towards everything new, which is seldom questioned. It also causes a mild disdain for the old and traditional, likewise rarely questioned. But it would seem to me that before we rush to change something or replace it with something new, shouldn’t we at least know and know well, why the (old) thing was there to begin with? We appear not often to be interested in this. We just want the new. This attitude points a finger at the fundamental difference in the two classical ways of looking at the world, progressivism and conservatism. The gulf separating these two philosophical stances is a lot wider and deeper than just the familiar distinctions in peoples reaction to social issues or economic imperatives. It goes all the way to the most fundamental questions we have about life, living, morality, meaning and being human.

These questions are so fundamental and all encompassing that obviously it is impossible to deal with them all here, but what I can and intend to address is one important and overarching theme which aptly encapsulates great many of them. This theme is the subject of teleology in philosophy and is known as telos (Greek for ”end”, ”purpose”, or ”goal”). Telos simplified, is the purpose for which a thing exists. It also entails the discussion whether a given telos exists at all, or rather, whether there is a purposiveness behind a thing. Here I limit the deliberation to two things, telos in nature and telos in the biological body. Why these two things? Because considering future technologies and their impact on man, these and whether there is a telos in relation to them, are some of the most important questions and issues that we should consider and find answers to. Also given the current sorry state of western philosophy, these questions are not receiving the attention and importance that they deserve.

Is there a purpose in nature? Can we know this? And if we contend that there is no purpose in nature, how certain of it can we be? Of course we can see that there is some purposiveness in nature. Biological systems develop by predetermined sets of principles and life strives to go on. But why is this? This becomes especially mystifying once you take into consideration that according to mainstream science this whole endeavour is completely hopeless. In the materialistic universal scheme of things no life form or species is going to make it. They are all going to become extinct. Even the technocratic dream of synthetic immortality would eventually be thwarted by entropy. So what is it all for? Why is there such a system as life, trying to continue on when there is no chance of it doing so? Even if it is able to continue for a thousand billion millennia, what difference does it make once it’s over? What is the difference between ten seconds and ten millennia after the fact? All these questions may initially seem silly but they have their purpose in exposing the mind to the absurdity of mechanistic materialism from the standpoint of life itself. If there is no hope or point to it, why is it there?

Also, how has this desperate and contradictory sublogic (life) come to be in a system (universe) that doesn’t in the end allow it? Naturally the universe doesn’t allow it only from the materialistic perspective, but if there is some higher purpose with a greater permanence that this temporary embodiment is serving, then we are delivered from this conundrum. This is of course precisely the religious sentiment by which the material world is simply a cauldron for spiritual development. According to the religious there are two existencies, the impermanent material one and the permanent spiritual. The former serving the latter. From this logic flows also an explanation for the secreted nature of God, an issue of contention for many nonbelievers. Why is there no concrete proof for the existence of God?

If the function of the world is for the being to advance spiritually, then morality and building of character are obvious goals for it too. The reason for this follows from God’s promise of immortality since immoral immortal beings would represent a grave danger for any eternal system. Immoral immortal beings would most definitely eventually destroy all such systems as well as themselves. Exactly like humans are currently in a process of doing to themselves and to the planet. This is why immortality and the perfection of ones moral character are so closely linked. However, true advancement of the spiritual sort would be quite difficult for a being that was aware of the requirements set up for its advancement. It would also lessen the need for humans to discover moral truths themselves through vigorous self analysis and application of reason. This is not all. Knowing for certain that your world and life are so contrived by God would probably likewise increase the temptation to go against Him on purpose. Human beings are complicated and weird creatures, easily seduced by senseless things.

An all knowing and all powerful Creator is a difficult concept for the atheist types to accept but we have an allegory for such a being in our modern world. A game designer is pretty much all knowing and all powerful in relation to his creation. It is also quite unlikely that anyone from the game world, an NPC (non-player character) lets say, could ever figure out the true nature of their situation without the game designers consent, no matter how intelligent the NPC. For this to happen there would have to be a revelation from the game designer. Barring such an event the poor NPC would just have to listen to others, the gurus, the priests, the philosophers, the critics and skeptics and so on. Many of them would undoubtedly be charlatans, but even in the presence of charlatans the situation wouldn’t change. There would still be a creator. The creator would know all things about the world. The creator would be all powerful in relation to the creation. The creator could be reached only through ”supernatural” means. Also there could actually be some ”prophets” to whom the game designer really has revealed himself. This would also be the original source for the ideas of the charlatans. Regardless of this it would still be obviously very difficult for our NPC to discern who the charlatans are and who the true wise men. But here’s the kicker. There is no fundamental reason why our situation in the real world could not essentially be the same as with this NPC.

Telos in the body

There has been a deep ideological and philosophical struggle going on for a long time between two modes of being. One of them posits that there is no fundamental telos behind anything. Everything is just a coincidental mechanistic accident without any real meaning, purpose or direction. All meaning is subjective, springing forth from man’s own imagination. All morals are relativistic, representing only a particular sentimental view on ethics. No matter how horrible or virtuous an act is, there is no possibility in any objective terms to condemn or condone it. The axiom ”Nothing is true, everything is permitted” from the game series Assassin’s Creed describes this sentiment quite well. The problem with such a clause is obviously that it is self refuting. If “nothing is true” then the theorem itself is also not true.

This somewhat nihilistic way of looking at things causes big problems with limit setting. This difficulty comes well into view whenever someone brings up the question of naturality. For the reductive materialists (usually) there are no unnatural things. The existence of a thing or an action is sufficient enough to make it natural. This conclusion results from the position that reality, nature and the body don’t exist for anything. Because of this there is also no ultimate need to protect nature or human biology from perversion. In their view, as long as existence can continue without major suffering, the form doesn’t matter. This outlook conveniently gives man, and especially those with power, carte blanche to transform reality into their own image.

Competing with this is the religious view, its metaphysics being in stark contrast with the materialists. Actually materialists often claim that they are not interested in or believe in metaphysics. This is a rather facetious misdirection, knowingly or unknowingly. In reality you can’t avoid metaphysics. The materialists just position the physical as their metaphysics. Without going too deep into the different metaphysical concepts present in religion, lets just say that in religion the good in the physical is informed by the desirable in the metaphysical. This is exactly the concept of telos, meaning that there is a purpose, function and reason for the physical not necessarily apparent from the physical. And the actions in the physical should be induced from the higher goals of the metaphysical. This is true of all religions and in monotheistic ones the telos of nature is personified in God, whereas the telos of the body is encapsulated in the concept of the soul.

Continuing with this line of thinking the human body is seen as a completed process while the human character (or soul) is considered to be a work still in progress. This is why the body is not to be corrupted (or modified) since it will also impact the souls development and pervert it. This is not such a radical claim as it might initially seem. We all know that far smaller changes than what for example the transhumanists are advocating for have massive effects on peoples mentality, character development and personality. Things like being rich, getting fired, losing a loved one or being bullied at school can have a huge influence on ones psyche and none of them are nowhere near as drastic as becoming a cyborg. The potential for disassociation and alienation among other psychological disorders in body modification is on a level wholly on its own.

One mistake the empirically and mechanistically minded usually make concerning humans is that they equate the mind with the being. This is an understandable mistake but it is a mistake nonetheless. Actually we are not our minds. We have minds. The mind is a tool meant to be put under the dominion of the heart according to most if not all spiritual doctrines. Though it might at first seem that you are the tool (mind) because of the great subtlety of the thing, it is not so. Just as you have an arm and that arm is part of you, you are not your arm. Similarly you are not your mind and because of this you can’t be liberated from the moral responsibilities of your actions simply because the thoughts in your head appear to pop in there out of nowhere. If your character develops into something that cultivates unwholesome and wretched things, you haven’t been applying the tool of your mind correctly. You are responsible for that. You have been entertaining the less than stellar things, allowing them to take over your mind. You have given these thoughts weight and let them fester in your mind, forming connections that are very hard to shake off later on. The mind is not you but it is a powerful mechanism, dangerous in indolent hands. Taming the mind under the tutelage of the heart is one of the main purposes of physical existence in the true religious view.

Still another mistake one often encounters with the mechanistic and reductive materialist camp is that they entirely leave out one level of human awareness. The deepest level. One could even argue that this is the level which most clearly separates humans from other animals. This is the level beyond experiences, wants and needs. The level of the one having the experience beyond the experience. Who or what it is that observes and perceives itself as experiencing a thing? Who or what it is that thinks of itself as being a being? Again, it is not entirely surprising that this level of analysis is easily overlooked, if not anything because it is actually theoretically possible, though not very popular to say or think so, that not all people even have this level. I’m not going to dwell on that any more than I have to but this is the level which makes it possible that we are not slaves to our wants and needs, not even the most fundamental ones like sex. Sex is definitely a primal drive but we are not completely at its mercy. Throughout history there have been people who have denounced sex and sexual relations. Of course you can contend that they have been charlatans not actually able to shed sexuality from their being but if we give them the benefit of the doubt then this goes completely against the evolutionary logic of nature. I’m not alluding here to not having kids but to not fulfilling the sexual needs of the body in a sexual act. If this is possible then surely it is possible for human beings to discern their inner drives and decide whether or not to follow them. This of course does not mean that you shouldn’t follow the body’s inner needs. Indeed, the theological view does not see the body as an enemy but as a necessary companion. You are not to be released from the body or to ”perfect” it through technological means. The body is already perfect. Not for all of man’s misbegotten desires but for the purpose it was created for. For the perfection of the soul.

Conclusion

Now we have come full circle and return back to the reification of man or making human beings into a thing. This is where the reductive materialist claptrap leads. It leads to you trying to turn yourself into an iPhone because you have started to view yourself as an object. This objectification is wrong. The materialists cite pioneering experiments which support their reductionist worldview but the experiments always deal only with the mind, nothing else. They claim that because scientists can measure the neural activity in a patients head formulating their decision about a given action a few hundred milliseconds before the action is taken, that this means the decision is not free. How is it not free? Do we have to be aware of all the reasons behind our choices for them to be free? Why? They are still our choices are they not? Of course. Whose else’s choices could they be? They are simply not the choices of merely our minds. The action starts somewhere beyond the mind. Somewhere deeper. This does not negate it being ours. Quite the opposite.

Another class of tests the reductionists point towards to undermine our value as something greater than mere meat puppets are those in which researchers have been able to produce actions and feelings by stimulating specific areas of the brain. As expected, once again they declare this to mean that we do not have free will. And yet again they are incorrect. This does not rob us of our free will anymore than a doctor hitting our knee with a doctor’s hammer robs us of our nervous system. It’s just a subtler form of forcing one’s hand. It doesn’t matter that the mechanism used to produce the effect is more refined than gripping someone’s arm with both of your hands and forcibly making them do what you want. It’s essentially the same thing. You are applying an outside pressure on the biological system and overriding its normal functioning. That’s just force. And I am willing to bet that any sufficiently self aware individual will recognise the manipulation and realise that something is amiss.

Now back to Harari and Homo Deus. I have my suspicions that Harari is actually secretly a transhumanist introducing these technocratic ideas to the wider public. This suspicion stems from the observation that Harari’s worldview is precisely the seed needed for transhumansim to get going. He doesn’t question any of the liberal corporatist talking points and holds all the attitudes that work only to fortify technocracy. Even his feminism goes so far that he sees childbearing as a severe trauma cast upon women by callous nature. Harari doesn’t go there in his book but this of course immediately lends credence to the corporate feminist idea of artificial wombs. I say corporate feminist because there indeed are less transhumanistic feminists out there called TURF’s or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists who are not given the light of day in any mainstream media outlets, probably because their cause goes against the global corporate agenda of human cyborgisation.

My problems with Harari are similar to those I have with modern progressives in general. The issue was formulated quite beautifully by philosopher Sir Roger Vernon Scruton when he asked what do the progressives love. This is a justifiable question when you take into consideration the fact that the modern progressive wants to do away with pretty much everything that gives a person meaning. They have a peculiar contempt for the church, the nation, the family, marriage, gender roles, having children, mainline sexuality and on and on. This also happens to be exactly what Harari goes to town on in his book Homo Deus. He destroys everything even though, as I’ve tried to show here, it’s not required. This is most concerning and in my opinion hides a very deep seated hatred for the world, and particularly human world, and for life itself. It cloaks itself in caring language and empathetic expressions but constantly attacks the basics of life and what gives it meaning. It’s a high time we begin to pay attention to this, stop falling for it and start penetrating the more profound intentions, motivations and goals people have behind their actions. This is called discernment in religion and it deals with the essences of things, not just the surface level appearances.