Prophets of the Posthuman: American Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Ethics of Personhood

Notes

190 Notes Preface 1. Previous works include Raymond Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); and Raymond Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999). 2. Transcendent Man, directed by Barry Ptolemy (Ptolemaic Productions, 2009). 3. Kurzweil also speaks about using technology to eventually bring his father , who died at age fifty-eight from heart disease, back to life. 4. Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World (New York: Avon Books, 1997), 17. 5. Thus my thesis opposes that of David Noble in The Religion of Technology , who argues that there is a fundamental continuity between the medieval conception of transcendence and the desire for transcendence through technology. As this book will demonstrate, the goals are categorically different precisely to the degree that the means are profoundly different. David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Knopf, 1997). 6. According to Marilynne Robinson, evolutionary theory thus argued produces “a conception of humanity that is itself very limited, excluding as it must virtually all observation and speculation on this subject that have been offered through the ages by those outside the closed circle that is called modern thought.” Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness Notes to Pages xiii–xiv 191 from the Modern Myth of the Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), x. 7. This is why the mantra “Only evolve!” can make sense only when one fully accepts Darwin’s assumptions about how the universe did evolve: that is, by random mutation and not intelligent design. See Allen Buchanen, “Why Evolution Isn’t Good Enough,” in Better Than Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 26–51. 8. As I will outline in chapter 5, Hannah Arendt described this change as the ascent of homo faber—human as maker—which replaced the ancient emphasis on the vita contemplativa: the contemplative life. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 9. Eric Cohen, In the Shadow of Progress: Being Human in the Age of Technology (New York: Encounter Books, 2008), 21. 10. The family of Ted Williams, for example, reportedly had his head cryogenically preserved for future use. David Hancock, “Ted Williams Frozen in Two Pieces,” CBS News, February 11, 2009, http://www.cbsnews.com /stories/2002/12/20/national/main533849.shtml. 11. Brent Waters, From Human to Posthuman: Christian Theology and Technology in a Postmodern World, Ashgate Science and Religion Series (Burlington , VT: Ashgate, 2006). 12. Surfdaddy Orca and R. U. Sirus, “Ray Kurzweil: The h+ Interview,” h+, December 30, 2009, http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/12/30/ray-kurzweil -h-interview. 13. “Greenfield v. Kurzweil: The Great Debate,” ITConversations, March 28, 2006, http://www.podfeed.net/episode/Greenfield+v.+Kurzweil+Biotech +Will+it+Save+Us+or+Hurt+Us/185841. 14. As I will discuss in chapter 1, John Brockman, the personality behind Edge.org, writes: “in 1975, [scientist Edward O.] Wilson . . . predicted that ethics would someday be taken out of the hands of philosophers and incorporated into the ‘new synthesis’ of evolutionary and biological thinking. He was right.” “The New Science of Morality,” Edge, July 20, 2010, http://edge.org. 15. Arendt, The Human Condition, 2–3. Bill McKibben put it more bluntly: “Understanding which chromosomes are responsible for the expression of which proteins doesn’t give you any added insight into whether designer babies are a good idea, any more than figuring out how to make an atom bomb turns you into an expert on when or where you should drop it.” Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (New York: Times Books, 2003), 182. 16. A good place to begin is with Alvin Kernan, What’s Happened to the Humanities? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 192 Notes to Pages xiv–xvii 17. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Beneath and Beyond the ‘Crisis in the Humanities ,’” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 36, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 21–22. 18. Brian Stock, “Ethics and the Humanities: Some Lessons of Historical Experience,” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 36, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 11. 19. Ibid., 15. 20. Ibid. 21. Martha Craven Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 21. See also...