What Do We Want to Want?

This is the question with which Sapiens of Yuval Harari ends.  It goes to the heart of the problem we call the malady of infinite aspirations.  I come back to this issue after reading a column and a book review, both concerning the modern “miracle” of extending human life to almost double what it used to be just 200 years ago.  The book Extra Life calls this the greatest human achievement.  Extending human life is not, of course, the only kind of achievement we like to boast about.

What makes me skeptical about such pronouncements are two nagging thoughts.  First, all declarations about the greatness of progress at each historical point imply that humans knowingly lived worse and less happy lives in previous eras.  But this is just our own presumption.  First, without knowing what they could have in the future the reference point of past generations was only their past and present situation.  Second, even if they could accurately know the future, they might have rejected it as inferior to their present.  It is a case of ex post facto hubris when we claim that our times are the best and happiest of humanity.  Species adapt to their natural and social environments and do the best to survive in them.  If I don’t know what I may enjoy in the future I am content with what I have.  Future generations will pity our own for all the conveniences, advances, and knowledge we don’t have just as we pity past generations.

My second thought is that celebrating this or that as great progress conditions us in two ways: first to reflexively valorize all progress; and second to pay lip service to the consequences of progress. 

Take, for example, the case of mortality.  Living for ever has been the most ancient of our aspirations.  From the Sumerian epic king Gilgamesh who searched for the plant of immortality to the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce De Leon who searched for the fountain of youth, humans have longed for eternal youth and endless life. 

So here we are with the longest life expectancy of any previous generation and we still want longer life.  And when future generations succeed in living longer, they will still long to live even longer. This shows that no matter how happy we may be knowing we live longer than our grandparents we still feel a hole in our happiness because we know that there might be a better possibility in the future.  And that hole gets bigger the more we assure ourselves such possibilities are likely to come.  Like Socrates’s sieve our soul cannot hold anything and thus it always feels empty.

For tens of thousands of years, humans lived with what nature provided them.  But as we entered the agricultural era, we discovered we could tweak nature and breed better domesticated animals and plants.  For thousands of years after that we delegated other more ambitious aspirations to myths, tales and fantasies.  Then something happened that convinced us it was possible to make our dreams come true.  It was the point when we realized that we could gain greater control over the laws of nature and bend them to our desires.  It was the time we realized we could move from the myths, tales and fantasies of previous generations into the realm of possibility.  Aspirations could be realized.

The first step toward this tipping point was when science became less speculative and more empirical, thus instilling greater confidence in our understanding of nature.  The second step was when the discoveries of the new empirical science started to be converted into significant applications that changed human lives in small and big ways.  My choice for the person that became instrumental for the first step is the British philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who is hailed as the father of empiricism.  Among his famous pronouncements were: “Man is the minister and interpreter of nature.” And that “By obtaining knowledge about nature man can reach power over it [nature] and establish an ‘Empire of Man over creation.’”  These are powerful and ambitious words that leave no doubt about the rising human confidence in our ability to not only control but also change nature according to our wants and aspirations.  Within a hundred years of Bacon’s death the industrial revolution was on the move and in time it would spawn the electrical, digital and virtual knowledge revolutions (AI).

And what about the consequences of progress?  If we equate all progress with the betterment of the human condition, then the relentless pursuit of progress and innovation leaves very little room not only to contemplate their consequences but worse to prepare us for them.  As a result, it is only afterwards we discover that we have unwittingly stumbled into new realities that are difficult to manage.  We can think of a whole host of innovations from nuclear power to digital social media that have added angst, anxiety and huge challenges to contain them.  We have reached the point that we no longer live within the laws of natural selection; we have begun to alter them.

But let’s go back to the ultimate aspiration: to fight aging and mortality.  First, to have longer lives without avoiding the decay of aging is a curse disguised as a blessing.   In a Greek myth, Eos (Dawn) convinces the gods to give her lover Tithonus immortality but forgets to also give him relief from the scourge of aging.  Second, there is no guarantee that of all the options open to achieve longer lives we may not choose those that may end our species as we know it.

It may be possible to enhance and extend human life by working within the normal parameters of nature with medicines and cell treatments that leave human nature fundamentally unchanged.  But there are also alternatives with potentially radical and transformative results.  Bioengineering already has succeeded bringing together the human body with computers.  Brain thoughts are directed to manipulate mechanical arms.  Chips in the brain could restore mental functions.  But even more transformative would be the uploading of human brains on computers.  All this is not a Jules Verne fantasy.  The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA is onto these ideas with results to show.  Will brains on robots be human?  Will a robot with your brain be you after it has been hacked?  Will the ultimate artificial intelligence be benevolent to humans?  Is this kind of progress acceptable?

That’s why the question “What do we want to want?” is so relevant and critical.  Wise management of our wants and their consequences is what stands between our human and post-human world. 

* In Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, Socrates rebuts Kallikles, by saying: “Compare the soul of such a person [one with infinite desires] to a sieve, because this kind of soul cannot hold anything and thus can never be full with a finite and limited amount of things’.”