The Mind-Technology Problem
Steve Fuller · Postdigital Science and Education · 2021
Humanity as a Constant vs. Humanity as a Value of a VariableClowes, Gärtner and Hipolito (2021) have recently introduced the mind-technology problem.It is a legitimate metaphysical rival to the 'mind-body problem' because 'humanity' is a deeply vague concept.It is 'vague' in two senses: the set of qualities associated with being human is open-ended and the set of beings to which human qualities apply is equally open-ended.Of course, not everyone seems to believe this.Indeed, a broad church of natural law theorists, phenomenologists and evolutionary psychologists-who agree on little else-believe that humanity can be identified with the biological species Homo sapiens, whose brains have remained largely the same for the past 40,000 years, resulting in a robust conception of 'human nature' captured, for examples, as 400 + cross-cultural 'human universals' in the Appendix to Pinker (2002).More generally, this view is represented by such unlikely fellowtravellers as Hubert Dreyfus, John Searle and Luciano Floridi.These philosophers appear to have strong intuitions of what is and is not 'human', on the basis of which they conclude, for example, that machines cannot be intelligent, we are not cyborgs, only humans are entitled to rights, etc.However, their vision of 'human nature' is pure syncretism.It is a pastiche of the mid-eighteenth-century European imagination updated for today.The specific identification of humanity with the upright ape Homo sapiens dates only to Carolus Linnaeus' (1759) famed System of Nature.He tried to translate Christian creationist sensibilities into fashionably naturalistic terms, but at the cost of leaning heavily on a species essentialism traditionally rooted in Aristotle that was already beginning to fall out of favour among natural historians.In particular, species essentialism was being impressively contested in Linnaeus' day by Count Buffon, whose belief in life as a continuum revived a Neo-Platonic sensibility about the 'communication of