The Problem of the Transhuman in Science Fiction

Date: 1 Nov 2020

*Note: This is a heavily rewritten and edited version of an essay I drafted and abandoned about six years ago (2014).*

There is something oddly disappointing about science fiction that deals with transhuman themes -- one would expect other genres to stumble over a lack of familiarity, but science fiction in particular seems like it should be the right vehicle to investigate questions of what it might mean to be human, and what the prospect of technological augmentation might do to our sense of humanity, of being human, and our ability to communicate as a human to other humans.

There are basically two main strategies I've noticed in my extensive, wide, and copious reading of science fiction (I say this with heavy irony, because I am in fact a mere fool) and neither of them really satisfies. These two approaches can be summed up in the following theses:

They Are Like Us After All

They Are Unknowable and Mysterious

It's worth adding that these two are not mutually exclusive, and you can find works where both of these are used for different characters. But we should really get into what these two mean first before diving in any further.[1]

Basically Us, But Shiny

In the first approach, depictions of transhumanism focus on the addition of new physical and/or mental capabilities, but do so in much the same manner as one might give someone a pair of glasses.

A great example of this would probably be the Conjoiners, a transhuman faction in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space setting. Everyone has (and children are born with) networked neural implants. A bunch of interesting things flow from this, including a brief exploration of how the relationships between the individual and the group might change as the barriers between members of a community become more porous, or how strange protocols of thought might prove more efficient and precise than crude natural language (a thought to which I can only respond to by pointing, wryly, to lojban and Ithkuil) but the key thing is that once the story is over one realises that the Conjoiners are basically people with turbo-smartphones and mind-memojis.

I'm being somewhat flippant here, but the key thing about this approach to transhuman characters is that it treats them as regular people with a new tool. This can provide enough material for a satisfying science fiction story -- the introduction of a new tool can be enough to radically transform both society as a whole and how we live and experience our life as individuals, as the combination of smartphones and ubiquitous Internet access demonstrates -- but as an exploration of what it might mean to be transhuman? Stories following this strategy can explore superintelligence, for instance, but can't conceive of what superintelligent agents might be like without drawing on existing and reasonably familiar models of how such characters might behave. Since pretty much all our models of intelligence right now are human, that can only leave us right where we started from.[2]

I think the same could be said for many examples of the transhuman in science fiction. The Lobsters from Bruce Sterling's *Schismatrix Plus* are a particular favourite of mine. The other factions (Shapers, Mechanists, and the various smaller clades) can certainly do incredible things, but the Lobsters are the ones who carry the clearest stamp of strangeness: individually sovereign, semi-solipsistic, withering kernels of original humanity completely hidden in an armoured technological shell. This is a vision of humans as hermit crabs, riding on skeletal ships made of nothing but spars and engines in the deep black. It's fascinating, and I love it... but it's also basically People with Fancy Spacesuits that can Live Like Space Hermits, if we get reductionistic about it.

Basically Incomprehensible

The second approach, I suppose, goes further by making transhuman characters largely Other... and for that reason I think it makes more sense to describe this approach as being less transhuman than posthuman, because the term suggests that the posthuman has gone further and left humanity behind altogether.

There are a couple of suitable visual images here I want to call to your mind. The Star Child at the end of *2001: A Space Odyssey* (the film) is a benign version of this, but the image from *Watchmen* of the only genuine superhuman in the book, Doctor Manhattan, sitting on the surface of Mars alone is probably the better one: the only true superhuman in the story, cut off from his humanity and from his links with the rest of us. But these are not enough; we must go further, because both of these have not yet fully taken on the character of something totally Other.

One of the more interesting works in this vein, and one which I would recommend in any case, is Charles Stross' *Accelerando*. The relevant bit I wanted to highlight is best described with an extract from Stross' own description of the plot:

> "...Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource -- like the dodo."

There's a bunch of other interesting ideas in the plot, but the key here is that posthuman intelligences (referred to as the "Vile Offspring" in the book) become the main participants in what is called "Economics 2.0" which is described briefly as "some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parametrized desires and subjective experiential values of the players", incomprehensible to mere humans "without dehumanizing cognitive surgery". The posthuman here is not *better*, and it's certainly not *comprehensible*, it's just... something *Other*.

But this too is not enough; we can still go further. And at this point I would like to detour away from science fiction entirely, because the kind of literature that may best be able to depict posthumanity as wholly other is not science fiction but horror. Which is only natural, when you think of it, since by our definition the posthuman is something that has left humanity behind and become something other, and the other is something unknown. The image I want to point to here, fittingly, is from Mike Mignola's BPRD comic series: the "final race of man" that the Ogdru Jahad seem to be working towards is a race of monstrous frog-men, providing lots of opportunities not just for body horror but also for a glimpse at a human world overtaken by alien creatures, descended from us yet not of us.

And perhaps it is better to think of the posthuman as, in fact, alien, not in the sense of "extraterrestrial life" but in the sense of anything other, something that is irresolvably Not One Of Us.

The Limits of our Imagination

I think both of these approaches are really two sides of the same coin, namely that we don't know and can't imagine what transhuman agents might be like. One tries to fill the gap with what we do know, and we end up with They Are Basically Us But With Extra Shiny, while the other leaves the gap unfilled and we end up with They Are Completely Other.

Underlying this is the simple idea that the posthuman is by definition beyond us, and so it is only natural that we would struggle to think of what it would be like. There are two dimensions to this, the first being that it's rather difficult for us to imagine something that is, by definition, beyond us. (And indeed one might as well try to imagine the kind of concerns or thoughts that an angel might have, without treating them as basically fancy humans.) But the second is more philosophical, which is to say, fundamental. Thomas Nagel argues that while we can try to imagine what it would be like to be a bat by taking the bat's point of view, it is impossible "to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat".[3] By much the same token, if to be posthuman is to be other than human, it would seem to be impossible for us to understand the subjective experience of being posthuman.

And yet this is not to say that we can't meaningfully write characters that are transhuman or posthuman. It's one thing to say that we might never know what it is like to be a cat (Natsume Soseki's *I Am A Cat* notwithstanding), and another to say that it is not possible to write stories involving meaningful interactions with cats. I would argue that this is the limit of what we can do right now in writing such characters -- and, not coincidentally, that the closest model we might have to what our interactions with transhuman agents might be like is probably best found in our interactions with the other species we share a planet with.

Such relations always have an element of unknowability to them. What is it like to be a cat? Can we ever know what it is like for dogs to see the world through scent? (Even the phrasing is awkward, which to me suggests the difficulty of asking such questions without implicitly framing them in human terms.) But it works the other way as well. Some animals are incapable of recognising themselves in a mirror. Are there things our minds can do that are simply impossible for even those nonhuman creatures most integrated into our lives? Are there ideas or concepts which they are simply unable to think? If we tried to explain actuarial science to a cat, would they be capable of understanding? Despite the impossibility of knowing for sure, I think we can only imagine a posthuman communicating with a regular human to be in much the same position as someone trying to explain plastics to a cat.

Pain, Loss, Care, and Love

In truth, this is not so bleak a picture as it could be, and perhaps it is also a better one than we, as a species far down the road of mass- and perhaps even self-extinction, have a right to. We may never fully understand the others we share our planet with and who will always be at least partially Not Like Us, but we know that many of them also seem to share our comprehension of pain, loss, care, and love. The love of a cat or of a wolf may not come in the same form as that from another human, and vice-versa, but it is not difficult for human or animal to recognise it as such from one another, and that in turn gives me hope.

Perhaps that can be enough.

Footnotes

[1] A good example would be Peter Watts' *Blindsight*, which deals not just with really interesting questions of consciousness (i.e. what's the point of it), but also with different types of transhumanity. Isaac Szpindel is "basically like us" while Jukka Sarasti, aside from being a genuinely creepy and interesting character and the most interesting take on vampires I've ever seen thus far, has flashes of "basically incomprehensible" -- as when he, at one point, tells the protagonist that he wouldn't understand a deduction because it was based on "vampire logic", i.e. a chain of reasoning that could not be followed by baseline humans.

[2] The tangent into superintelligence, rather than transhumanism, is also useful to show the limits of our imagination here. Consider the Minds of Iain M. Banks' Culture series. In-universe, they're classic examples of superintelligence, albeit basically benevolent. But while their capabilities and their level of sophistication might be beyond our comprehension, their motives are not, and in *Excession*, which is the story that goes most in-depth on the Culture's Minds, their motives are regrettably all too understandable.)

[3] He does this in an paper from 1974 appropriately titled "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"

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