Bostrom, "Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up," 2, Setting the Stage

by Corry Shores
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What's our capacity to expand our capacity?

Nick Bostrom

"Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up"

II. Setting the Stage

As we noted before, humanity will become posthuman as new forthcoming technologies raise our capacities beyond what we can even now imagine. Right now humans have certain general capacities that posthumans will possess at far greater amounts. Bostrom distinguishes threegeneral central capacities:

1) healthspan: our capacity to persist in our mental and physical health, activity, and productivity.

2) cognition: our general intellectual capacities, including our memory, reasoning abilities, attention, as well as capacities to understand and appreciate more specialized things like music, humor, eroticism, narration, spirituality, mathematics, and so on.

3) emotion: our capacity to enjoy life and to show appropriate affective responses to the situations and people we encounter in life.

These are our general capacities. A posthuman capacity would be a general capacity that exceeds the maximum level that any human may normally achieve, without the help of advanced technologies. Finally, a posthuman is a 'being' who has at least one posthuman capacity.

So posthumans show incredibly heightened general capacities. Bostrom does not mean to limit all the many diverse but interwoven capacities to just these simplified categories. He merely wants to give a rough idea of what he means in general by our "capacities."

We saw before that Bostrom will be arguing his two basic claims. One was that some possible posthumanizing technological advances would be good for us to adopt. He now emphasizes that he really means some and not all. For, some possible ways of living posthumanly would be utterly wretched. However, the others that are good we should pursue.

The second claim is that it would be good for humanity as a whole to advance to a posthuman stage. Bostrom does not mean that every single person would benefit from posthuman developments. There are always exceptions. Nonetheless, most humans would be better off as posthumans.

Bostrom will address attacks on posthuman philosophies. He begins by distinguishing five different "levels" that posthuman opponents may use as the basis for their objections.

Level 0: "It cannot be done"

These objections claim that there is no empirical evidence to believe that posthuman technological advances will ever be feasible.

Level 1: "It is too difficult" / "It is too costly"

These objections recognize that posthuman technologies are at least possible. However, they argue that it is not worth the difficulty or the cost to pursue them. Instead we should use our resources for other more familiar scientific aims.

Level 2: "It would be bad for society"

Such objections argue that empirical evidence suggests posthuman advances would lead to such social consequences as social inequality, discrimination, and conflicts between posthumans and humans.

Level 3: "Posthuman lives would be worse than human lives"

These arguments base their objections on normative claims regarding the value of normal human life as compared to posthuman life.

Level 4: "We could not benefit from posthuman advances"

These arguments grant that a posthuman life might be better than a human life. Nonetheless, becoming posthuman will create complications in one's life, and cause complications in other people's lives. So it could be that we are living better, but we are not benefiting, because of all the added difficulties and complications that would arise as indirect results from posthuman lifestyles. [Please consult the original text. There is likely a better interpretation. Bostrom writes of level 4: "Objections based on agent-relative reasons against human beings transforming themselves into posthuman beings or against humans bringing new posthuman beings into existence. Although posthuman lives might be as good as or better than human lives, it would be bad for us to become posthuman or to create posthumans."]

When articulating his two theses, Bostrom previously used an expression that he now explains. His first thesis was articulated this way:

First, some posthuman modes of being would be very worthwhile

Bostrom does not mean "modes of being" in a Heideggerian sense, for example. It is more scientific in meaning. A mode of being is a set of capacities and other quantifiable parameters found in human or posthuman life. So a posthuman mode of being is one that includes at least one such posthuman capacity.

Bostrom will explain how we evaluate modes of being, specifically in terms of their "values." This is a complex issue, so let's first consider an example. We have good health and some money. We would say that it is valuable to have these things. Yet, neither is guaranteed to make a positive difference in our lives. For instance, a person with money might for that reason be robbed and murdered. Or, imagine that you are a writer. If you never experienced any mild short diseases, then perhaps you would not able to write rich stories about interesting characters. [Bostrom might also mean that you might not live a rich life story as an interesting character. He says specifically: "because you were always in rude health you lacked a particular (short, mild) disease experience that would have transformed your mediocre novel into an immortal masterpiece."] So the values of particular modes of being are context-dependent. In some contexts these values are higher than in others. Nonetheless, money and health for example are valuable in most cases, even though they may be disadvantageous in some exceptional instances. So Bostrom means value in a general sense that considers all possible exceptions.

One might lead a good life if for no other reason that one benefited society or other specific people. Bostrom here is focusing more on how good or bad it is for any one subject to lead a posthuman life. So in other words, he is concerned with one's own "well-being" in these considerations.

To explain what Bostrom might mean by one person's life being more valuable, he has us consider this example. One person dies at 15 after suffering a painful illness in extreme poverty. Another person dies at 80 after a long life full of joy, creativity, worthwhile achievements, love, and friendships. We might assign an equal moral status to both people's lives. But in the context of our conversation, we would say that the second person leads a more valuable life.

And yet, we might conceive of very different lives. But, for various reasons, we may have difficulty deeming one more valuable than the other. Bostrom rests with his claim that some cases are clear, like his example of the 15 and 80 year-olds.

Bostrom will now tell a little story to illustrate how becoming a posthuman might unfold.

[Next entry in this series.]

[Directory of other entries in this series.]

Nick Bostrom. "Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up." Forthcoming in Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, eds. Bert Gordijn and Ruth Chadwick (Springer), 2007.

PDF available at:

http://www.nickbostrom.com/posthuman.pdf