Man as Matter of Engineering: Ethical, Epistemological and Technological Boundaries of Transhumanism

Anthropological horizons – the epochs and approaches

A historically flexible anthropological horizon is an imaginary “line” in approaches and definitions of the human, where the sphere of the human immediately adjoins the modern socio-technological transformation or planning with the human social regulation and human’s shaping practice. This is the peculiar line or the zone where the human theory ideas are focused and directed to this or that epoch. The ideas reflect the qualities and issues relevant and important for the social technologies the development of which is the characteristic of the definite epoch. Usually, the anthropological theories are not inclined to look beyond the horizon; they emphasize the sides and qualities in the human’s reality that are effective to be influenced on. The theory makes attempts to bring the notion of a human closer to the horizon, to make the notion of a human be an operating notion. Some distortions of the view are possible: things that are close and practically important may seem too important whereas the fundamental essence of the being can be blurred. For the anthropological theories, the experience of the priority active influence on a human is extremely important. Under the priority active influence, we understand social and humanitarian technologies amongst which the communication and social memory technologies are of immediate concern.

The book-printing can be given as an example. Its phenomenon affected not only the standardizing of all spheres of society life but it entailed the changes in the role of the text. The text becomes the “message to the humanity”, the content of which has to curve back on to itself, to self-organise as a theoretical system, the complete self-consistency. This might be one of the reasons for science to advance. Abookbecomesthespecialcommunicativetechnologywhichcanbecomparedtoa “mirror of a consciousness” and the main information technological basis for classical type culture formation (Lankin, & Grigorieva, 2009).

The distinctive turn in the view on the reflection of a human and his awareness of the epoch is the epistemological turn. The change in the view on human’s abilities is connected with the epistemological turn. The cognition becomes a privileged and a core aspect. The transformation of the consciousness – a notion into a cognition-notion-is identified unambiguously. A man is now viewed as a rational creature. It does not mean that the moral senses have stopped, the divine mystery has been exhausted or the heroic deeds have worn out. It all exists but the desire for it looks as a nostalgic transport of a human’s being: too sentimental or excitedly romantic.

In the XIX century, the efficacy of humanitarian practices shifts towards other modality: the sensitivity of art and the revelations of the mass media. Consequently, the anthropological horizon moves and covers the areas of irrational and then the unconscious in a human. The issues of will, ethics, calling, meaning-making reason are replaced by the issues of reflexes, desires and reactions. Considering a human’s being in the light of unconscious is the true sign of mass media and the corresponding technologies domination in the human reality impact. The inculcating power of the radio, the hypnotizing power of the cinema, the involving power of television, the seducing power of advertisement and the agitating power of sensations are appealing to the unconscious as if bypassing the consciousness.

The mass companies of the XX century, their highly technologized practices added to the transition of the anthropological horizon to a wider, qualityless, reduced sphere, which, from the methodological point of view, should have been named the sphere of human circumstances. The crowd effect becomes the major subject of all social technologies of that epoch.

The anthropology of the post-person implies the absolute amenability of a human being to the effective technologies in their direct impact on every person as an element. Regarding a human being, it becomes possible only if basing on the sphere of irrationality through expansion of it as opposed to the influence of the consciousness being deprived of the power and activity. This is the reduction of a human to his irrational reinforced technically, and the reduction of a society to the net of the links being similarly technologized. While studying the human nature, the attention is transferred to the cognitive theories in psychology. Now the anthropological horizon lies in the sphere of cognitive sciences where the theme of artificial intelligence is closely connected with the theme of human abilities. The significant changes of technological sphere are always preceded or followed by the realignment of the coordinates of the human setting his new status – the status of the creature subjected to changes. A “man-machine”, a “man-animal”, a “homo economic”, a “moduledman”, a “machine of desire”, a “post human” are the prerequisite notions of this field.

A modern configuration of the world net is the configuration of a machine system with its peculiarities of the rate of response, accuracy of formal analytics and infinite memory. A man, working in the system, has to answer this configuration: he has to create more complex and senseless information-intensive formal texts preparing the data for the machine memory: for example, various funds and data banks which formal-analytical structure corresponds to the machine programme configuration but not the human mind. A man has to serve the system with its constantly growing memory and the rate of variations whilst the man himself is not inclined by the nature of his mind to the ongoing reskilling and changing of standards. These all are the noticeable attributes of the de-humanized trend into which the human mind, more and more closely connected and dependent, is being involved.

Extrapolating the tendency to the future and imagining the next stageconnected with the intracorporeal digital elements, the elements with the intrusion of machine system into the human’s brain, with the corresponding alterations of the work structure, it is possible to trace the edge where the shift to the de-humanisation and de-subjection of the system man-technology, as well as the system society-social technology, starts.

The technological advances of the recent decades are generally aimed at the man and his activity modalities enhancing. IT-technologies and the social technologies connected with it play the main role here. While developing, this transforming intention has to face with the structure of the human in that regard where it is generally sacred. Similarly to the progress that has come still in the deadlock when the constructive fantasies met with the unexplored structure of human nature, the social engineering is lost if its basic perception of a society and a human would be pragmatically shallow. Psychologism is a shallow anthropology. Not only because it starts from the non-specific status of a man and pays attention to the abilities similar to that of the animals – that is memory, attention and reactions, in order to affect them. The other reason is that the psychological is only the procedural aspect of the human structure whereas the social is only the contextual aspect of it. The criticism of social and humanitarian technologies is connected with the fact that the system based on psychological and digital factors faces the essential nature of human existence, tries to reduce it and malforms it. Meanwhile, the principle of human reality is essentially different from that of the animal one, as well as the principle of amachine. It is the principle of reflection as opposed to the principle of reaction or the chain of commands. Consequently, this is the principle of sense as opposed to the meaning, creative synthesis to rational analytics, discourse of meaning to the principles of memory and recognition. The human activity, adding new entirety in its meaning making quality, is overbuilt to the factors of memory and reactions common for all flesh and modelable in machine programming. In this quality, the human activity cannot be controlled according to the technological schemes.

Cognition and transformation

At the stage when practice is oversaturated with the skills of transformation, the search for truth can neither help nor prevent it from altering the being. Having the alteration as the aim, the knowledge of the laws “how it is and how it should be” becomes the obstacle. It encourages the knowing of technologies to eliminate the truth of cognition.

These tendencies are the characteristic of many fields of knowledge. These tendencies of knowledge technologizing are becoming more transparent in social sciences: this is where the radical constructivism revives. According to the radical constructivism, the sense and the aim of social cognition fully coincides with the sense and the aim of social constructing in this field. It should be mentioned that today social science is developing according to the principle of the sum of social technology development but not the principle of society organization comprehension.

The correlation between the cognition and transformation reasonably lead to a new instance appearance. The instance is the humanitarian expertise of projects and innovations. The humanitarian expertise must be guided by the criteria of objective alteration constructivity measured by fundamental theories, but not the criteria of effectiveness embedded into the fascinating project logics. The philosophical ethical principle comes the first here. It should be aligned with the principle of searching truth about a human (Siskind, 2015). Nevertheless, theideaofthehumanandpost-personrealityequivalenceisseeninthemodern management and expertise practice analysis (Sage, 2016).

Human Consciousness and “artificial intelligence”

Human consciousness and “artificial intelligence” differ in structure and are not similar in modality. It is impossible to narrow one to the other basing on the modern models of programming while creating the artificial intelligence. The issue whether the artificial intelligence needs the research of the genuine one is still urgent (Anochkov, & Murat, 2014). There are two points of view: the one prioritizing the technical modeling and the other claiming the necessity and the priority of the genuine intellect research. There are a number of studies aimed at the bilateral rapprochement of the methodologies of human consciousness cognition and its machine analogue projecting. There is the possibility to start from the psychophysiology and to approach its ideas to the formalized and computative machine intelligence (e.g. the project of the neurodynamic codes of subjective reality deciphering). In artificial intelligence creation, this is the characteristic of studying the cerebrum microstructure as the conductor (Siskind, 2015).

It is possible to move from the position of the computer discussing the possibilities of identification of the consciousness of the digital calculating machines.

There exists the approach which develops the idea of the structural and the essential distinguishing of the consciousness and artificial intelligence while corresponding to only separate functional properties. But these are the properties that make the analogue valid for practice. There appear the theories of irrational systems that are behaviorally and functionally similar to the conscious creatures but do not claim the quality of the conscious: this sort of systems can be compared with a “philosophical zombie”. There are many questions that need further consideration.

Conclusion: Consciousness as the act of meaning-making is the function which cannot be handed to the machine intelligence, digital systems or analytical procedures no matter how powerful they are. The consciousness functions as a unity, as the correlation of a whole with a whole making a new discrete unity but not as the correlation of one element with another one or an element with the preassigned whole. Consciousness as the constitutive ability of meaning-making – the making of new entitiesenables one to have the discourse of aims and values not only the discourse of the means the narrowness of which is so typical of technological thought. The creative status of conscience is the new entity creation – the high – the above-nature one. This is the model of consciousness as the reflexive meaning-making act. Technical simulation of it is basically possible but not in the way the work of digital devices is programmed today. In the field of cognitive science, the idea of multiactors neuro nets corresponds the paradigm of the neurophysiological models structure of consciousness as an act. This model is the most remote from the concept of reductionism and allows one to view the consciousness phenomenon not as the sum of direct reactions but as the sphere of mediated emergent effects run in the system as a whole (Anchokov, 2014).

It is possible to study the consciousness in the focus of the anthropological horizon defined by the practice of creation of artificial intelligence. This study makes the aspects of thinking models more definite and contributes to the specification of psychophysiological concepts. The threat lies in the incautious projection of the modern technological models onto the image of conscience. Here the cognitive science works on the diminishing of the ontological status and garbling the system-making structural facets of consciousness by means of the methodology of reduction. This, in its turn, can lead to the practice of degradative dehumanization. A comparative correlation being implied, the image of consciousness,as it is projected in the cognitive sciences, as well as it is programmed in the modern digitalsystems, is more the animal thinking analogue with its reaction-and analyticabilities, rather than the human’s consciousness analogue with the principle of the united reflection over the reactions typical for it. The factors of the capacity of the systems designed, their velocity, accuracy or the memory space do not change this principal system-structural discrepancy.

One cannot deny the possibility to design artificially the consciousness itself but not the cognitive substitute of the modern digital models. To make it happen, it is necessary to start with the consciousness cognition and only then to move to the technical models. If we imagine this model to be realized, then it would be a peer for a human – the device that is able to understand the human as the author of the meanings, the device able to create similar meanings for the interaction rather than a machine actor combined with a humanand controlling him.

Nature and technology: amends or transformation

It helps to determine the limit of goal-setting while impacting technically on a human. The claim to alter the human’s nature is not justified. The nature of a human is a complex microcosm with the system-forming core of the nature of consciousness. Transforming the man’s mentation into a series of commands and analytical transactions, as it is done in the digital systems programming, is fraught with demolishing of this nature. In this regard, it is important to distinguish between the aims connected with the compensation of the natural human’s deficiencies with the help of technical devices from that of the human’s nature transformation as the specific aim claimed as the basis for transhumanism strategy. This aim seems to be destructive.