Beauty, Transhumanism & The Disease of Ageing

Natasha Vita-More in conversation with Adam Peacock

The following video and transcript are edited from a conversation held via video link at the Vigeland Museum in Oslo, on 6th September 2021 as part of PRAKSIS residency 18, Perfection/Speculation.

2021

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Extended transcript

Natasha: I’m talking to you from Scottsdale, which is calm and serene, life here is easy. That’s good, because my work can get really complex and I can’t have too many distractions. I’m glad to be out of Los Angeles. I stay off Facebook and do hardly any social media, it’s just too much. I think you allude to that in your Genetics Gym³ project.

Adam: I do, you are right! My first question is about biological fragility. You’ve explained that your work is about countering the fragility of the human body and the disease of ageing. However, isn’t that fragility and finite life precisely what we need to savour, the thing that is most beautiful about being human?

Natasha: Here, you are making an excellent point about the need to go through some level of suffering in order to feel good about oneself or achieve a level of happiness. In my view, the beautiful human is someone who strives to overcome difficult odds and is compassionate, rather than someone who has nothing whatsoever to do with being fragile, sick, or suffering. Humanity lives in a world of symbolic language, whether its symbols are visual or conveyed through mythic stories. These symbols carve out our social realities. Tied into these myths, stories and symbols are the realities of suffering and the fragility of the human body.

Adam: If you were to change your physical appearance, what would you change? What does physical beauty mean to you, and what would it look like if we could achieve peak physical beauty? Here I want to reference the uncanny valley⁴; the moment at which the brain can’t tell whether we’re looking at a human or a robot. There is a growing cultural consciousness that is preoccupied by body enhancements and alterations such as cosmetic surgery, fillers or steroids. Being perceived as a modified or enhanced person today has both desired and undesired effects, dependent on culture, society and personal opinion. Do you think that a technologically modified human might want to show their modifications in order to illustrate that they are post-human, or would they want to look as natural as possible? Do you see status cultures arising out of human body modification?

Natasha: That begs the question, what do I conceive of as beautiful? Would I change my body if I could? I would start with the architecture. Being an architect, Adam, you can certainly understand that if the foundation isn’t solid, the mathematical dimensions of that foundation are not accurate. If the materials in which that foundation is cast, on which everything else settles, are not secure and flexible, it will cause trouble. So, I would start with the architecture of my body and my biological functions using the biomedical tool of nano-medicine. Using tiny nanorobots inside my body, I would repair some of the malfunctions of my structure, secure things and make them more flexible, adaptable and mutable. I would also definitely use the natural science of CRISPR, which started in nature. Humans didn’t create CRISPR; it is part of evolution in nature with microbes. I would use the CRISPR tool of Cas9 to re-engineer the genetic mutations that cause disease and ageing. I would keep my body safe and healthy, and I love athletics, so I would continue working out. To me, that is true beauty: a constant regeneration, repair, restructuring, renewing and revisiting. It resides in the process, not in a static image.

I would also want alternative, multiple bodies and selves to coexist in. We have come out of a world of binary ideas; black, white, right, wrong, rich, poor, et cetera. We now live in a world where we identify binary structures as being indifferent to the multiplicity and diversity of all types of bodies and humans. So, I think that having multiple bodies is in sync with that present perspective. The bodies I'm referring to coexist in multiple platforms or substrates: in the biosphere in which we currently exist, the physical, material world, the metaphysical world, cybernetic or artificial worlds, future worlds built out of chemical compositions, or worlds that we haven't begun to conceptualise or engineer. This ties in to my 1996 future body design, Primo Post-Human, which is created with nano-medicine and nanotechnology, and certainly genetic engineering, and involves all sorts of stem cells and mechanistic parts. However, it’s not cyborg, it’s transhuman, meaning that it has self-awareness or sapience and sentience. It wants to build a more enlightened consciousness and learn how to be a better human, how to have a more compassionate understanding of humanity.

With that comes the meta brain, a tertiary brain that I designed at that same time. This design would create the ability to transfer memories onto non-biological platforms outside the brain’s system, or transfer parts of the brain into zeros and ones or a data structure that filters in the data, which can then be CRISPR edited in and out. We need to back up memories, so that’s important. Through the facility of the meta brain, data can be uploaded onto different types of platforms or substrates, and then I can co-exist as an avatar-type body, or an artificial-type body, or one of your bodies or one of my bodies. I want to make it very clear that my vision of what I call beautiful, that process, also includes consciousness. If we have many bodies going around, they have to have some kind of identity or agency in order to function. That can lead to the idea of fractured identities, which is not what I mean.

My view on the second part of your question concerning physical beauty is that while Aristotle and so many other icons in literature, philosophy and the arts tried to come up with a mathematical equation of the perfect rectangle, the perfect angle and the golden mean. And what is beautiful? Beauty is mathematical in some ways, but it’s also epigenetic. It’s outside our genetic assumption of what is beautiful and is encoded in our genes, as well as being psychological. Maybe how a person is brought up will change what they think is beautiful. Maybe an individual’s own size, weight and physical structure will make them identify more with what they have or don’t have, depending on their level of confidence, jealousy or envy. All these different behavioural attributes interfere with the concept of beauty.

Maybe an individual's own size, weight and physical structure will make them identify more with what they have or don’t have, depending on their level of confidence, jealousy or envy. All these different behavioural attributes interfere with the concept of beauty.

However, beauty is in no way perfection, and I know that the idea of perfectionism or perfect is very much afforded into the arts. We look for beauty and perfection in our sculpture, paintings or performances. In science too, there is the idea of finding a perfect breakthrough or perfect identifier. In reality, though, the concept of perfection is elusive and unclear; it’s an ideal that doesn’t exist. In psychological terms beauty is homoeostasis, so I would never want to be a perfect person or perfect being because if I was, I’d have no place to go. Homeostasis allows for no experience, learning, adventure, fun or change. I’d rather become and keep on becoming, achieving a creative and intellectual athleticism.

You have brought up the uncanny valley, an important topic. There’s a lot written about it; it's a bit scary and it gets into areas of science fiction. What interests me about the uncanny valley is that it’s existed for a long time: for instance, in the icons of gods, amulets and effigies that people have carried with them for millennia. These might also be seen as instances of the uncanny valley on a metaphysical, mystical level. If there are robots that look like us, talk like us and act like us, and you can’t tell they are robots, it's almost like the Turing test. Are you there? Are you a machine? Are you human? How do you identify if this being is a machine or a human? I don’t think it really matters. I say that because I don’t think it really matters If you’re gay or straight, black or white, Christian or Jew or Muslim, or atheist or agnostic, as long as you’re a compassionate, kind person. We are on the same ship together.

I think that these codifiers, these ideas of the other that are based in post-modernist rhetoric, are just going to filter out of our consciousness. Today, women are not showing off their breasts so much as wearing falsy butts. The Kardashian ass has become a thing, another symbol of perfection. You can tell that it’s not real because it’s too perfect. It’s almost like a joke, but the person with the falsy ass is also accepting that their body is not perfect. By wearing the prosthetic they are defying reality, but also accepting the symbolic ideal. In the future, the bio-people, in my view, will co-exist with the avatars, robots, post-humans, trans-humans and others. Some people will show off their differences just as we show them off today, while others will not show them off because they don’t want to, or don’t have to.

Adam: What do you think of the argument that transhumanist technology is anthropocentric, and unconcerned with wider technologies and the non-human? It is also arguable that the technology you describe is only for the privileged few, rather than something that could benefit wider global society. Its application could be inequitable: giving unfair advantages to a select few. Would this not make social divisions still worse?

Natasha: I’m more interested in re-considering concepts of privilege or anthropocentrism as ideas (not always, but largely) arrived at through the economy of fear, which is big business. Journalists get paid for their flat page stories and alarmist thinking, and people pay to play in this syndrome or arena of fear, buying the magazines with the biggest headlines and the most obscure or ridiculous statements asserting that transhumanists are elitists who want to be a superhuman race. "Transhumanists don’t care about the environment or global warming, they only care about themselves," and so on. I’ve heard this for decades and I’ve been stoned and thrashed by these false, misconceived journalistic attacks and academic salvos.

The fact is that no human is privileged, we all are dying. COVID 19, in all its variants, shows us that because we’re biological, some of us may have better genes than others. However, this advantage is not visible, so we assume someone is privileged if they live in a big house, or drive a BMW, or are a tenured professor or a Nobel Prize laureate. My idea of privilege is that it is a term manufactured to make some people look bad and to foster an industry or economy of fear that persists not only within the walls of academia but also in politics. The economy of fear requires the existence of adversity, plurality, and simple binaries: yes or no, right or wrong. If the fearmonger is right, someone else must be wrong, so they blame the transhumanist, or anyone who wants to modify or engineer or upgrade. Those people must be wrong because they must have something that their opponent does not. In my view this is about political hegemonic positioning.

Adam: Regarding ethics, "brain backups" and uploading, who would the landlord, gatekeeper or owner of a brain backup service be? Would they extract data from us? Is there a risk of tech companies or governments using this data to sculpt our desires and wants, in order to sell us things that won’t make us happier, but will make us need more and want more?

Natasha: These incredibly important topics have been discussed for over thirty years but they haven’t hit the mainstream. Why is this? I think that’s the issue we need to discuss first. Secondly, let’s move beyond that very quickly and get to the core. We need forums, platforms and discussion groups that are multidisciplinary, and not just involving politicians, who are probably the bottom feeders, or the big corporations who, while they may have the knowledge, expertise and technology, often don’t have social graces or an understanding of compassion, helping others or being benevolent or altruistic. Understanding kindness can be infectious as well, so we need a multi-disciplinary set of groups.

The government ought not own the technology: never trust the government. Corporations ought not own it either. We should not trust either corporations or governments, because the deeper we look, the more we find out that their DNA may not be the healthiest. They are run by people, and people have egos. So, it all boils down to a fundamental human biological system, which is the psychology of the ego. The ego can be driven by compassion and understanding, or by envy, jealousy and greed. Because of this, we need A.I. So to answer your question, the technology should not be owned and run by Google, Big-box or Facebook, or by any government, because we can’t trust them. All we can do is trust our own motivations, but we’re not enlightened enough to deal with this at the level it needs, because our emotions get in the way. This is a big problem.

So who’s in charge? You’re in charge. Adam ought to own his body, his mind, his information, his data and his DNA. As well as Natasha. It’s my property, my right and my body.

Adam: Let’s move from this to the future of transhumanism. This is a challenging field, fraught with social and ethical concerns, but one with great hope and possibility. What would your advice be to a new generation of transhumanists exploring technology and the modifiable body, anticipating the challenges that they might encounter? What do you want for the future of transhumanism and what do you think the big issues of our time might be?

Natasha: Most movements, especially in the art world—the Renaissance, Modernism, Impressionism, Post-impressionism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Fluxus, Neoclassicism, Abstraction—incorporate elements from the past and then deviate into a new area of creation. You also see convergence and symbiotic relationships in philosophical movements and in world-views that also constitute movements. Using this analogy of an evolving movement forwards, I would like to see the future of transhumanism become more engaged with the mind and consciousness. We’re evolving to become bodies that can be engineered. The architecture of the biomedical field in the biosphere, computational systems and avatars and new designs are already upon us, but where consciousness is going and evolving is also very important.

Additionally, if we are to think about the future and understand its changes and economic structures, and also look at equity, the planet and the creation of healthy environments, then it is beneficial to transhumanism to have the healthiest environment possible not only on Earth, but in our solar system and in the periphery of our solar system and beyond, to do everything that is based on a symbiotic relationship with all parts of the system. If any part of the system is failing, we need to help regenerate it, reinvigorate it, and if any part is being abused or misused because we need to seek to resolve it so that there is more environmental well-being.

Adam: Natasha, this has been an amazing interview. It's very generous of you to spend this time with us and share your thoughts.

Natasha: Thank you, Adam. I’m a big fan of your work. I love the setting that we are in, this sculptural universe of hope, desire, fear, suffering and overcoming— the monolith and the symbolic imagery and narrative all around you. This is certainly part and parcel not only of our past but also our future.

Adam: Absolutely. Natasha, thank you. Well, I also think this is probably not the last conversation we’re going to have.

You can find more on Natasha Vita-More’s research at www.natashavita-more.com.

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[1] Vita-More N. (1983) Transhumanist Manifesto. Available from: www. humanityplus.org/the-transhumanist-manifesto

[2] Vita-More N. (1996) Primo Posthuman. Available from: www.natashavita-more.com/innovations

[3] Peacock A. (2016) Genetics Gym: Available from: www.adampeacock.co.uk/genetics-gym

[4] Hughes A. (2022) Uncanny Valley: What is it and why do we experience it? Available from: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/uncanny-valley-what-is-it-and-why-do-we-experience-it/