Eclipse of Man

PROLOGUE: IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE

At the age of 75, Adam Newman is deeply satisfied that with the onset of middle age he is reaching the full height of his operatic powers. He has always been thankful for the genetic endowment his parents arranged for him: the propensities for musical abilities and language skills, of course, but also the fact that they had enough foresight to keep him a bit over the average in height. His 6’ 6” frame can carry with ease the expanded lung capacity and musculature that have made him such a powerful singer, and being big along with handsome still has substantial social and stage advantages.

Not that Adam has failed to make some improvements of his own. It was no picnic training to use his new optimized vocal cords, but well worth it in the end; many audiences still appreciate that it is really him they are hearing across his full six-octave range, and not some processed sound coming out of speakers. Of course the biomechanical cords also allow him to play the more traditionally minded houses that won’t synthesize at all. His language and vocal-style memory implants are another matter; here again he can hardly fail but be grateful to his parents. For his innate skills in these areas mean that unlike many of his peers, who need a minute or two to reorient, he can “switch gears” seamlessly from one language or musical style to another, no matter how exotic. Since stylistic and linguistic eclecticism have run riot among composers (why not say what you want to say in whatever language that it sings best in?), this ability puts him in great demand. He does not need the contrived off-stage moments that librettists often have to supply for singers to recover after they have switched over. Adam feels it just adds to the realism.

He’s never happier than when he is on stage; indeed, Adam can hardly imagine a different life for himself. Still, even in the very enjoyment of full summer Adam is sometimes reminded that fall will come. Lately, he’s found that he really benefits from a couple of hours of sleep a week. (His folks once told him they had to stretch a bit to afford the sleep-optional mod, but thought in the end it was worth it—what great people they were!) And his metabolism has needed a bit of tweaking to optimize his nanotech waste-minimization feature. But, thank Gentech, so far it’s nothing that remotely affects his voice. Adam has reached the point where he has no real concerns about his legacy; after all, his great performances are already available in full-def 3D VR, and he is under contract for a series that includes the new emotional track, having finally found a producer who shares his contempt for the crude work of much that is done in this area and is willing to listen to his suggestions about whom to use as his emo-dubber. (It never occurred to Adam that anybody would want to feel what he is actually feeling as he sings, which to be honest is not very much beyond a desire to please the audience.)

But he’s beginning to wonder why he should have to think in terms of a “legacy” at all. Adam has never been what you would call an early adopter. He has all the innate conservatism you’d expect from an opera singer, but he has watched with interest the developing debate between the cyborgs and virtuals—those who have left birthbodies behind and uploaded their minds to biomechanical bodies and those who have chosen virtual instantiations. They both make good cases for their choices, although when the virtuals were just holograms, cyborgs seemed to have the better life. But then smartdust came along. Intellectually he knew Daphne Morgan wasn’t a hologram anymore, but he never got over his surprise at how solid she was in that final embrace in The Golden Ass, when just a moment before she had been a tree. No more need to mime body-resistance with her! Still, the virtuals tend to get a bit . . . weird. Adam had been content with their collegial relation, but then she started giving him what he thought were signals that she wanted more. So he invited Daphne out to dinner to test the waters. He supposes he should be grateful that she came as a baby rather than adult giraffe. But having her standing across the table from him, with her big eyes, long lashes, and baby-doll lisp; it aroused in him feelings he did not quite know what to do with. Although it was supposedly impolite to ask them, everybody knew that the virtuals are multitasking their avatars when they are dealing with the very slow-paced solid world. The rumors about how virtuals like to mess with actuals, and about the strange things that virtuals get up to in cyberspace didn’t help matters; he’d had a sense a couple of times that they were not exactly alone at the table. After that, he was content that they just work together.

So Adam wants to see how things shake out before he gives up entirely on the body that has been so good to him—just another way of showing gratitude to his wonderful parents. He wouldn’t be a bit surprised if by the time he’s ready, you won’t even have to choose between virtual and cyborg; there will be something better than both! What would it be like to sing with a full cast of Adam Newmans?

DEHUMANIZATION IS central to contemporary transhumanism. A skeptical reader of this book’s first chapter might have concluded that the advocates of the eclipse of man discussed there—Bernal, Haldane, and the rest—represent little more than historical curiosities. But if their ideas remain in some way curious, at least they are not simply historical curiosities. As we saw in Chapters Two and Three, the themes they explored are alive and well today: scarcity and competition, remaking our bodies and extending our lives, merging minds and machines, mankind’s destiny in space, and more. These are some of the dearest hopes of today’s transhumanists. Ray Kurzweil, the most prominent popularizer of transhumanist ideas, imagines we will have multiple virtual avatars, so that “I” can at the same time be attending various meetings and sharing a stimulating simulated sexual encounter that will be better than the real thing because I will be able to feel not only my own sensations and emotions but also those of my partner(s).¹ Hans Moravec, a prominent roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University, has enthused about how we will be able to speed up our thought processes so that “You will have time to read and ponder an entire on-line etiquette book when you find yourself in an awkward social situation.”² (Of course, that seems to assume that one’s fellows are not similarly “speeded up.”) The transhumanist Simon Young looks forward to being able to eliminate the need to eat or excrete or sleep.³ James Hughes, another booster of transhumanism, thinks we will have cybernetic brain implants that we will “undoubtedly” use for “watching and advising our behavior,” to make sure we are acting morally by whatever standard of morality one might choose.⁴ A 2006 conference at Stanford University Law School organized by some of the top figures in transhumanism featured a panel discussion about people like Cat Man and Lizard Man, who have had themselves surgically and otherwise altered to resemble their namesakes.⁵ The list of alterations to our bodies and brains, our minds and morals, that the transhumanists envision goes on and on, becoming ever more strange.

Hence, many of the new abilities made possible by this progress will, taken one by one, hardly be controversial in themselves.6 But taken together, these ever-increasing powers over nature will converge on the ability to redesign our minds and bodies, opening the door to the more strange and radical possibilities mentioned above. There need be no dedicated research program to make these dreams a reality; the necessary technologies will appear on their own, regardless of transhumanists’ hopes for the future.⁷ The technologies that cure disease and restore lost functionality open the door to enhancement of our abilities; indeed it seems to be agreed by both transhumanists and many of their critics that there is no bright line between therapy and enhancement.⁸ So transhumanists readily imagine using our increasingly sophisticated understanding of the human machine to create novel capacities.

If there are atavistic aesthetic objections to a third eye, why not construct an eye that has better-than-normal vision, one that can see more sharply at greater distances, or can see better in low light?¹¹ Why not an eye with a zoom lens, or one that can extend the range of human vision into the ultraviolet or infrared? We are told that the eye is a kind of camera, and we already make cameras that do all these things. The brain “processes” electrical impulses from the eye, and we now also make cameras whose outputs are electrical impulses.

It does not take much imagination to see how such artificial, enhanced eyes could provide a competitive advantage to soldiers, pilots, police, sportsmen, contractors, repairmen—the list could be as long as the kinds of additional vision that someone might find useful. And once some people adopt the new ability, others in their line of work will be faced with competitive pressure to keep up by using the same enhancement or risk falling behind. While doubtless early versions would be quite expensive, why not experiment on wealthy early adopters? Just as the price of LASIK surgery has plummeted, so too we can expect that some kinds of artificial eyes will eventually come to be affordable by nearly all—even if the cutting-edge models continue to be high-priced.¹²

The transhumanists can point out that all you have to do is look around you today to see that if you leave people free to make their own choices about what kind of vision or any other sort of enhancement they wish to have, things will settle out in a way that favors their ever-increasing use, even if the distribution of benefits remains in-egalitarian.13 This argument, of course, tacitly acknowledges both that there will be winners and losers in a transhumanist future, and who the losers will be: the unenhanced or even the less-enhanced.¹⁴ Should we consider that a problem? Many (though by no means all) people accept that there will be winners and losers in an economy based on just the kind of free choice that the transhumanists advocate in relation to enhancements. So it seems as if anyone already accepting such inequalities would have to do so also in relationship to enhancements.

But there is a difference. The present inequalities are generally accepted to the extent that we believe winners and losers are not graven in stone, that there is dynamism and mobility such that winners are not entirely self-perpetuating—for example, there are reversals of fortune, or successful people can have stupid and profligate children who fritter away the fruits of their success. Beyond that, mortality is a great leveler. But transhumanist success aims precisely to be self-perpetuating to a far greater degree and takes perpetuity of some sort to be a reasonable aspiration. Hence, the prospects for entrenched inequalities seem to be dramatically improved as the logic behind how an artificial eye might be used is applied to just about any aspect of our bodies: senses, limbs, or organs, including our brains.

Nevertheless, in relation to all such technologies of enhancement, a great many transhumanists stand foursquare behind the principle of consumer choice. Most are willing to concede that enhancements ought to be demonstrably safe and effective. But the core belief is that people ought to be able to choose for themselves the manner in which they enhance or modify their own bodies. If we are to use technology to be the best we can be, each of us must be free to decide for himself what “best” means and nobody should be able to stop us.¹⁵

There is another kind of necessity that transhumanists can adduce to support their case for the free choice of enhancements. Recalling a theme introduced by Condorcet, they assert that human beings are practically by definition the beings that enhance themselves, or that human beings are the beings who overcome their own limitations and the limits of the naturally given—including the sorts of limits that Malthus had in mind. According to British bioethicist John Harris, who for no good reason objects to being called a transhumanist,

It is doubtful that there was ever a time in which we ape-descended persons were not striving for enhancement, trying to do things better and to better ourselves. . . . I am personally pleased that our ape ancestor lacked either the power or the imagination, or indeed avoided the errors of logic and/or morality, which might have led her to preserve herself at our expense. I hope that we will have the imagination, the power, and the courage to do better for ourselves and our descendants than the combination of chance, genes, and environment has done for us.²⁰

Yet by calling attention to this self-overcoming aspect of human nature, the transhumanists create another kind of problem within their argument. Starting from their assumptions, evolution is the only way in which human beings could have gained their ability to overcome natural limits; that we have this capacity is ultimately a matter of chance. The ability to control our own evolution going forward, then, has at least this much of an irreducible foundation in natural evolution. That foundation would seem to represent a limit on what parts of our nature we would seek to modify, lest we compromise this all-too-human drive to self-overcoming. Or, to describe this paradox in another way, our descendants would only genuinely be “posthuman” if they reached the point where they were no longer engaged in the self-overcoming that is our presumed essence. Whether such a result would ever be desirable is unclear, unless lurking somewhere in the transhumanist argument, as it did in Drexler’s, there is a tacit belief that at some future moment our descendants will have reached some limit of the possible with respect to what can be done to themselves. Only at that point would this drive for enhancement become counterproductive and have to be rooted out at last. Short of this outcome, a remnant of our nature remains in whatever kind of beings come after us.

Still, perhaps the transhuman future need not be quite so dire. David Pearce, a cofounder of the World Transhumanist Association, has what at first glance seems to be a considerably more benign outlook. He returns us to the prosaic, seeing the transhumanist effort to control evolution as being driven by what he claims is a completely rational and undoubtedly moral desire to maximize happiness and minimize suffering and pain:

We would of course first make every effort to get our own house in order, making sure that human beings are all happy all the time, but there is also pain and suffering in other parts of the animal kingdom, and eventually we would face up to the moral necessity of dealing with that by the appropriate changes in genes and ecosystems to put an end to animal predation. Pearce goes on to consider what happens when we discover life on other worlds, and has no compunctions about extending his principle, and hence posthuman efforts, in that direction. “So long as sentient beings suffer extraordinary unpleasantness—whether on Earth or perhaps elsewhere—there is a presumptive case to eradicate such suffering wherever it is found.”²⁴ When the posthuman Earth fleet arrives on an alien doorstep, it is only with the most benign and unselfish intention of completely restructuring their world so that all its beings can share in such happiness as we make possible for them. In Pearce’s account of the posthuman future, our descendants become the aliens we have feared or hoped for. Yet if we imagine an alien fleet arriving on Earth with the same intention of rebuilding nature from the ground up, we are entitled to wonder if it would be taken as good news.

Moravec assumes that at least at first, efforts at uploading would have to destroy the brain bit by bit in order to expose each neuron for scanning. He asks us to consider someone hooked up to a device that would read and replicate each neuron. Suppose that as each cellular layer is scanned, the subject could switch back and forth between the organic brain and the simulation; if the system works correctly he could not tell the difference, so that each layer could be destroyed and the next scanned. As the process continued, more and more of the subject’s thinking would be going on in the computer, until finally it would completely replace his old brain.²⁶

The bush robot was not the end of his imaginings. Computerized minds could communicate with and access each other with all the ease of networked hardware and software. They could be duplicated, or optimized to run in various configurations. Beyond that, just as one might merge electronic documents, why not merge one electronic mind pattern with another? Since any brain could be scanned, why shouldn’t a human pattern be merged with an animal pattern?²⁸

Moravec points out that this computerized mind could be effectively immortal (assuming sufficient provision for backups), which might seem like a very appealing prospect. But he recognizes that this immortality might not end up being precisely what someone might have originally hoped for. Competition and scarcity (“changing conditions,” “external challenges”) mean that the I that sought immortality will not actually get it:

Note how the desire for personal immortality is such a small thing from Moravec’s point of view, a sentiment to be coddled, a kind of temporary error. Here is surely Olympian detachment! It is as if the gods in the full enjoyment of their immortality would wonder why mortals make such a big deal about death. And yet somehow this small thing drives us on to great things.³⁰

Given the speed with which computing technology developed since Moravec first published his thoughts on uploading in 1988, it did not take long for the idea to be modified to conform to new ideas and capacities. The rise of virtual reality made some wonder why the uploaded mind would require a physical instantiation at all when it could occupy whatever kind of virtual realities it wished. For those who might want to insist on continuing to be able to interact in the “real world” but find robotic bodies too constraining, the theoretical nanotech “smart dust” provides an imagined solution, promising “real” virtual bodies that would have none of the messy inconveniences of actual living things—very much along the lines that Fedorov imagined. And there is the added benefit that were such bodies ever to be disrupted in some way, they could always simply be rebooted.³¹

What exactly happens to humanity at that moment is an important and to some degree divisive issue for transhumanism. The issue is framed by the concept of “the Singularity.” While the very meaning of this term is contested, it is fair to think about it in the way it was first systematically presented by mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge:

If this hyperintelligence, like human intelligence, is routinely dissatisfied with its own capacities, it will surely turn its attention to finding the matter and energy for the ever-increasing computer processing power it will presumably demand. As Moravec puts it, “Our speculation ends in a supercivilization . . . constantly improving and extending itself, spreading outward from the sun, converting nonlife into mind.”³⁴ Matter and energy are not in short supply; what already exists just needs to be used to some purpose. Think of all the mass wasted in asteroids, moons, lifeless planets, or indeed in organic bodies of all sorts that do not need to live in biological form when they could just be simulated. Think of all the radiation that streams pointlessly into space from stars, but could be captured by enclosing them in gigantic spheres.35 Just as, from the transhumanist point of view, the human body is sub-optimally designed, so too there may be a great deal of work to be done to reconstruct our own and other solar systems to make them happier homes for intelligence. Whatever hyperintelligence is in its own way is, like the human mind, simply a pattern of information, a pattern that can be replicated in a variety of forms. The deconstruction of our solar system to turn dead matter into mind, and any other solar system hyperintelligent posthumanity may be moved to encounter,³⁶ would not have to mean the loss of the information it represents.³⁷ It was J. D. Bernal who said that “the desirable form of the humanly-controlled universe” is “nothing more nor less than art”—but in the vision of today’s transhumanists, that desirable form is not, as it turns out, actually controlled by humans.³⁸

Ray Kurzweil takes the argument about the capacities of hyperintelligent posthumans one step further. He wonders whether our understanding of the constraints imposed on us by the laws of nature may just be an artifact of our limited intellectual abilities. For the sake of “saturating” the universe with intelligence, which he (like Haldane) believes is “our ultimate fate,”³⁹ Kurzweil hopes that the speed of light may not after all prove to be a cosmic speed limit.⁴⁰ Along with Moravec he would like to believe that efforts will be made to overcome the entropy that will eventually cause the universe to “run down.”⁴¹

And perhaps we should be happy about that. If we take posthuman hyperintelligence and the Singularity seriously, we are saying that the successors we are being asked to open the door to will be alien to us far beyond any change possible in natural evolution. Vinge from the start understood that one of the greatest unknowns would be how hyperintelligent beings would treat human beings. Would we be seen as revered progenitors or as inconvenient pests? Such a question is hardly new to science fiction, of course, but now there are no few transhumanists and AI proponents who think that the question of “friendly” or “moral” AI needs to be brought to the fore of serious, real-world efforts.⁴³ What “friendly” or safe or moral AI would look like is anybody’s guess, but it is very hard to see why the net result would not look very much like Childhood’s End, given the radical lack of a common framework of judgment between us and hyperintelligent life. Kurzweil likens it to the gap between us and bacteria, and yet no one claims seriously that we share a common moral universe with bacteria.⁴⁴ Hence the transformation of supposed hyperintelligent benevolence into perceived malevolence remains a live issue. It does not seem likely that these otherwise incomprehensible beings will be more moral than we are in terms that we could appreciate.

So if this kind of posthuman hyperintelligence were to arrive on our doorsteps tomorrow, it is hard to see how it would look different from a hostile alien invasion of the sort classically depicted in science fiction. Separated from them by their Singularity (forget about mere biological or cultural differences), we would be incapable of understanding their needs and motivations beyond noting that they seemed to have an insatiable appetite for transforming matter and energy into forms useful to them but inimical to us. The opportunity to be absorbed (assimilated?) into whatever mode of life they will have created for themselves, to have our patterns preserved, would seem to be about the most we might expect.

Beyond Therapy focuses in a general way on the use of drugs to head off the impact of likely traumatic memories, or reducing their subsequent emotional consequences.46 Grounded in present medical realities, the report does not speculate at any length on the consequences of developing less blunt approaches to adding or subtracting specific memories as we understand the neuro-chemistry of the brain with increasing precision. While it is always easy to understate the difficulty of such efforts, there is nothing in our present understanding of the brain that definitively shows that precise interventions in memory will be impossible.

The consequences of selective forgetting have been a literary theme since long before science become seriously interested in the topic; think of magic potions in tales ranging from Homer to Wagner, or the elaborate deception practiced on the title character in Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s opera Sly. Here we will look at two stories about memory alteration. The first is Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process by Edward Bellamy, who would some years after writing it become internationally famous for his utopian novel Looking Backward. The second is the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which provides a corrective to the generally positive position taken on memory alteration by Bellamy.

Bellamy’s 1880 novella Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process is hardly great literature, but it nevertheless contains a well-thought-out moral defense of selective memory obliteration. If the story is Victorian in its operatic sentimentality, its effort to think through the moral consequences of Dr. Heidenhoff’s process for elimination of troublesome memories exhibits likewise a Victorian intellectual thoroughness.

The plot is simple enough. Henry Burr loves Madeline Brand unrequitedly. Just as it seems she might be returning his feelings, the flashier Harrison Cordis comes to town, and Madeline and Harrison begin a flirtation. As their relationship deepens, Henry leaves town to work in Boston, unable to bear the loss of Madeline. However, “there was a scandal” and Harrison “deserted her.”⁴⁷ A fallen woman, Madeline flees to Boston. Henry finds her and offers marriage, but in her shame she keeps putting him off; she cannot ruin him as she has been ruined. One day, she seems to relent, and even allows Henry a not-so-chaste kiss prior to their parting, promising to settle the matter the next day.

Dr. Heidenhoff is no shrinking violet when it comes to explaining and defending his invention. In the full enjoyment of what he himself regards as the powers of a god, Heidenhoff is only too happy to explain the medical basis for his process; his hopes for “amusing experiments” that will confound the “thicker-headed” and “foggy-minded,” whose false moral assumptions will be exposed; and the “good tidings” that his invention brings the world.⁴⁹

Indeed, Heidenhoff is so obnoxiously full of himself that it is tempting to think that Bellamy might be interested in exposing scientific hubris. Yet while that possibility cannot be entirely eliminated, it seems unlikely given the fact that the story is framed by two suicides stemming from their perpetrators’ inability to forget shameful events. Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process suggests that neither love nor Christianity nor conventional moral ideals are adequate to the problems created for us by the memory of the misdeeds we do or those done to us. Bellamy evidently had some hope that science could step into the breach.

Dr. Heidenhoff believes that memory has a physical basis in the brain 50—hardly a controversial proposition today. He admits that, for the time being, his process, which applies electricity to the brain, can only extirpate memories that have been so dwelled upon as to create “a morbid state of the brain fibres concerned.”⁵¹ But he expects that in twenty years, having established “the great fact of the physical basis of the intellect,” “the mental physician will be able to extract a specific recollection from the memory as readily as the dentist pulls a tooth, and as finally.”⁵²

Heidenhoff acknowledges some further problems with his process, admitting, for example, that there may be “shreds and fragments of ideas, as well as facts in his external relations” which are unaccountable without the eliminated memory.⁵³ But these things are no more a problem than the challenge faced by a drunk or a sleepwalker who has done things he no longer remembers.⁵⁴ Heidenhoff also acknowledges that the patient will know that he forgot something, which may create “slight confusion.”⁵⁵ We see both problems arise in Madeline’s case, and observe her filling in the blanks by creating plausible stories to account for matters which otherwise do not make sense to her.

Dr. Heidenhoff believes that his process has wide-ranging moral implications. On Henry’s first visit the doctor notes that he finds patients generally come to him out of

very genuine and profound regret and sorrow for the act they wish to forget. They have already repented it, and according to every theory of moral accountability, I believe it is held that repentance balances the moral accounts. My process, you see then, only completes physically what is already done morally.⁵⁶

Heidenhoff is not content to beat religion at its own game; he believes that understanding the physical basis for memory and intellect, hence of all human actions, leads to the need for moral revaluation even beyond the specific consequences of his own technique. Some people, he says, may mistakenly think that sin must have painful consequences, whether physical or mental. They may believe that Nature is supposed to punish physical “vice and violence” with “diseases and accidents,” and God is supposed to provide “moral retribution” via shame and sorrow. But in fact, both forms of retribution are essentially “blind, deaf and meaningless.”⁶⁰ Nature does not care and Providence is unreliable, so human beings must step in. Just as no doctor would refuse to set the broken leg of a drunk, just to make an example of him, so we should be equally willing to relieve mental suffering by forgetfulness.⁶¹

Heidenhoff holds that because all suffering ultimately has the same physical basis, all suffering can and ought to be relieved. But in a manner familiar to arguments today about the difficulty of distinguishing between curing disease and enhancement, Heidenhoff’s assumptions lead him to speculate that the world might be better off “if there were no memory” at all.⁶² For without memory, we would still have “congenitally good and bad dispositions,” but the bad would not, as they do, grow “depraved” by the demoralizing effects of memory.⁶³ “Memory is the principle of moral degeneration. Remembered sin is the most utterly diabolical influence in the universe. . . . more sin is the only anodyne for sin, and . . . the only way to cure the ache of conscience is to harden it.”64

Heidenhoff’s apparent insistence on the objective existence of sin will doubtless strike oddest those who most share his materialist assumptions, but in response to an objection by Henry, he develops his argument in a fashion that suggests it is not sin which is the problem, but the idea of sin. For Henry argues that even without memory, people will still be just as responsible for their acts as with it. Heidenhoff agrees, but with a twist: “Precisely; that is, not at all.”⁶⁵ For “human beings are not stationary existences, but changing, growing, incessantly progressive organisms, which in no two moments are the same.”⁶⁶ Hence, while crimes can be punished for prudential reasons—as a matter of “public policy and expediency”—they can never be punished justly, for it is never just to punish people for what they cannot help.⁶⁷ Why should I be punished for what I did yesterday, when I am not the same person who I was yesterday, and the person I am today has no control over what the person I was yesterday did?

In short, for Heidenhoff the self only exists moment to moment; by disconnecting the present from past and future the self becomes extremely thin. The moral implications of this thinness are clarified when Henry points out what he believes to be a flaw in Heidenhoff’s argument. A person holding Dr. Heidenhoff’s views would never need to erase any memories, since such a person would never feel guilty or remorseful about an act committed by an earlier version of himself. The doctor agrees that his process is indeed only for those who do not have the strength of mind independently to “attain” his philosophy.⁶⁸ In fact, we are born anew each day, each moment. “Is there not sorrow and wrong enough in the present world without having moralists teach us that it is our duty to perpetuate all our past sins and shames in the multiplying mirror of memory,” the doctor exclaims.⁶⁹ Just as it is “only fools who flatter themselves on their past virtues, so it is only a sadder sort of fools who plague themselves for their past faults.”⁷⁰

Yet the movie demonstrates several plausible ways in which the process remains imperfect (after all, “technically, the procedure itself is brain damage”71). For example, we can understand why Joel would turn in a coffee mug with Clementine’s picture on it, but how does he get away with not getting rid of the foldout bed that figures prominently in so many of his memories of her? Another problem created by the association among memories works the other way. Joel loses all memory of the cartoon character Huckleberry Hound apparently due to the association with the song “Darling Clementine.” Or again, he is evidently a bit confused by waking up in the new pajamas that he bought for the procedure, but does not give them much thought. More troubling is the car damage he discovers the morning after the procedure. Clementine crashed it before their last fight, but, failing to recall that, Joel must construct a plausible story for himself that accounts for the now-unexpected dents. So he is upset but not confused.

All these examples fade in significance compared with Joel’s discovery, inveterate diarist that he is, that two years of diary entries are missing. Surely it is only because he is so emotionally withdrawn in the first place that he is not more consciously concerned to understand this inexplicable loss. By contrast, the acute distress which Clementine increasingly feels, while doubtless exacerbated by Patrick’s mimicking of Joel, shows another possible result of losing memories, more or less incompletely, without conscious awareness that one has lost anything at all. In short, there does not seem to be a consistent ability to predict what memories and associations will create problems when lost, or what exactly will be lost—hardly surprising given the rich associational and emotional character of our memories. Joel and Clementine have shared the world, and they cannot turn the whole thing over to Mierzwiak. Perhaps it is the fact of such ongoing associations along with the habits created by their dispositions that draws the two of them back together even after their memories of each other have been erased.

The same dynamic is at work between Joel and Clementine. From a purely prosaic point of view, if all had gone as expected their mutual erasure would simply have opened the door, should they meet again, for them to repeat all of their past mistakes. The same things would attract each about the other, the same things would eventually drive them crazy. Mary’s intervention in sending out the patient files⁷⁴ opens the door to something new and different in their relationship, but this deus ex machina paradoxically merely restores the possibilities inherent in normal life: “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.” At the movie’s end, for Clementine and Joel to reunite they must forgive each other for doing and saying things they have no memory of doing and saying. Granted, that may be an easy kind of forgiveness. But some forgiveness would have been possible had they simply resolved to get together again after a normal breakup—which is not to say they have much of a future in any case.⁷⁵

Still, Joel’s motive gives the lie to Heidenhoff’s claim that patients will come to him out of sincere repentance. We see Joel make his decision on the basis of that combination of anger and sorrow and desire for revenge which is not atypically a result of failed relationships. (Clementine, typically for her, is said to have undertaken the procedure impulsively.) Where Heidenhoff thought no one could want to revenge himself on an ignorant wrongdoer, Joel exhibits animosity not in spite of but because he knows that Clementine no longer has any knowledge of the wrongs he thinks she has done him. Joel’s revenge is typically passive-aggressive; we are reminded of how fortunate that is by the disturbing fact that in happier days he and Clementine apparently played murder/suicide games together, their thin souls toying with complete dissolution. Were Joel’s “disposition” different, Clementine’s choice to undergo Mierzwiak’s process could have resulted in tragedy rather than romantic comedy.

Finally, Heidenhoff’s own argument about the moral meaninglessness of psychic pain is shown by the movie to lower the bar for what kind of pain is tolerable. Perhaps it is simply moral progress that sexual relations outside of marriage no longer ruin a woman’s life. But at least Madeline is portrayed as seeking out drastic measures because her life was indeed, by the standards of the day, ruined. Is it equally progress when one employs such drastic measures for a rather routine breakup such as Joel’s and Clementine’s—or, as we see with another patient, for the loss of a dog? Or is it rather once again an indicator of the difficulty these thin selves have in finding any meaning in their own actions and choices?

What can we learn from these fictional sources about the moral challenges we may face in a world of transhumanist enhancements? Enthusiastic advocates of enhancements don’t like to think seriously about the practical inevitability that the enhancements will work imperfectly, and that those technical imperfections will combine with human imperfections (for we will not make decisions to be enhanced from an enhanced position) to create opportunities for people to take advantage of one another. That this is not a new problem does not mean it is not a serious problem. To the contrary, its persistence over time exposes the utopianism of any who think that the sine qua non for the proper deployment of enhancement technologies is more technology plus the maximization of individual freedom of choice.

There is of course something to this line of argument. Our desires are restless, and hard to control. Genuine Stoic resignation about the ills of the world has only ever been genuinely possible for a very few. It becomes all the more difficult in a world where it is manifestly possible to meliorate ills that once called for resignation, even if so doing has been known to create new problems. In any case, change seems to be in our blood. Those who even try to use the rhetoric of technological stasis, let alone rollback, are few and far between, and it is yet harder to find those living in a manner consistent with such beliefs.

Finitude is, of course, all around us and in comparison to this reality transhumanism offers what is ultimately a kind of nothingness, be it in the form of mere negation or the unknowability of the Singularity. From this point of view, limits don’t look so bad. If we go back to the common-sense beginnings of transhumanism in the admittedly extraordinary potential that modern science and technology hold, how might we begin to think about a future within limits—a human future?