Response to Lynch: Fuller Transformed—Back to the USSR

We thank Lynch for his extensive and critical review of our book (Remedios and Dusek 2018). Lynch’s review of our book is well informed and generous. Lynch disagrees with our reading of Fuller’s move to transhumanism and suggests that Fuller (1988) reverts back to his pretranshumanist stage of Social Epistemology and Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents (Fuller 1993) in which knowledge is materialist and “in and about the world” (Fuller 1991, 292–93). The rest of Lynch’s review is based on this disagreement including his criticisms of Fuller’s view of Darwin and intelligent design. We suggest that Lynch misreads Fuller on knowledge and misdirects his criticism of Fuller’s turn to agency. In Remedios’s interview with Fuller in the Postscript section of our book, Fuller (1988) notes his turn to agency is a change of emphasis in that the agent as knowledge policy maker was emphasized in Social Epistemology. In Fuller’s (1993) earlier works including Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents, Fuller’s view of agency was that the epistemic agent was limited in her capacities because she is human. Fuller’s notion was to improve knowledge by making recommendations to make humans smarter and to increase capacities of humans for knowledge. This is where Fuller’s question of how knowledge should be organized based on his early work fits because organized knowledge will make humans smarter since it is a more efficient to access knowledge. In Humanity 2.0 (Fuller 2011), Fuller focuses on the knower and asks a different question: “what kind of being should knowers be?” Fuller’s view is that the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), computer technology, and synthetic biology on the epistemic agent transforms the ontology of epistemic agent, who is extended by these technologies and sciences to become transhumanist, a Godlike being. Fuller makes this move because with science if we want to know and understand the entire nature of reality and the cosmos then the question is: who would then knowers be: humans as Homo sapiens or transhumans? For Fuller, personhood is a legal notion in which the university can be considered a person and hence is a corporate agent. Based on Herbert Simon’s (1969) The Sciences of the Artificial, Fuller holds that the difference between the natural and the artificial is blurred. Cyborgs, which are a combination of the natural and artificial, can be considered to have personhood and agency.

Fuller notes that Russian Cosmism, which was a movement with the notion of theosis in which a person goes through moral development to fuse with God, anticipates transhumanism. The founder of Cosmism is Federov, who lived his life like a saint by giving away his possessions, and took the view that the dead can be resurrected by reconstituting their bodies through reassembling their atoms. Federov inspired the astrophysicist Tsiolkovsky, who influenced Werner Von Braun. Our view is that Fuller’s turn to agency from his early position in Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents is not a radical turn such as Wittgenstein’s turn from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations.

Lynch insightfully notes that J. D. Bernal (1969), whom we neglected to mention, held views very similar to Fuller in his projections of domination of the universe through technology. What Lynch does not mention is that Bernal as a teenager was a Catholic whose devotion seemed excessive to his religious teachers, but he transformed into a Stalinist technocrat. Although Bernal became an atheist, vestiges of his early Catholicism had continuities with his later technocratic Gnosticism. Indeed, the title The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, even if now metaphorical, suggests the link.

Lynch refers to Hegel as an example of an agent-based theorist, who offers a dialectical theory of science and Lynch argues that Fuller is insufficiently dialectical. Although Fuller has sympathies with Hegel, Fuller’s view of science is not full-blooded Hegelianism (Nuzzo 2013). Fuller’s view that the epistemic agent constructs knowledge to do something in the world is unlike Hegel’s view in which the individual expands her knowledge to become the whole. For Hegel, knowledge and action are not constructed but they evolve to the whole. For Fuller, unlike Lynch and Hegel, there is no overcoming or aufhebung of the opposite to achieve knowledge of the whole. For Fuller, the epistemic agent is active in and about the world to make knowledge to achieve something in the world. For Fuller, the key is to have a minimal notion of the epistemic agent because the agent can be transformed to transhumanism. Lynch’s and Hegel’s maximal notion of agency will not work for Fuller because the epistemic agent is not being transformed to the whole Objective Spirit but to be transhumanist.

Lynch appeals to group selection and biocultural evolution and not selfish gene-juggling and the more sexist sociobiology. (David Barash [1981] in a textbook claimed, “Ironically mother nature is a sexist.”) Highlighting free market aspects of sociobiology, Michael Ruse spoke of genetic portfolios and Berndt Heinrich spoke of Bumble Bee bond brokers, while E. O. Wilson “joked” that “Marx was right about Communism, but had the wrong phylum.”

However, besides Fuller’s Imago Dei (image of God) account and the evolutionary psychology account (even including group selection and evolution) of the difference between humans and other animals, there are other possible alternative accounts. Although traditional mind-body dualism has been almost universally rejected, there are various accounts of emergence not so tightly tied to evolution: classical dualism and issues about the emergence of mind from biology. There can be nontheistic theories of mind as distinct to different degrees from matter or material qualities. Michael Ruse and Norwood Russell Hanson (1962) have rightly said that “materialism” has lost most of its meaning with quantum mechanics as the theory of matter.

Lynch criticizes Fuller’s criticism of contemporary philosophers of science as “underlaborers,” and notes that some philosophers of science (in particular philosophers of biology who have collaborated with Richard Lewontin) have worked to modify the content of science rather than restricting themselves purely to the justification of actually existing science. Certainly, there are a minority of non-underlaborer philosophers of science, who suggest changes in scientific theories, but there are many more in physics and biology who are pure underlaborers, not working to modify actually existing science but to justify it, Kantian style, or simply formally clarify it.

In our book, we missed one major aspect of Fuller’s Gnosticism, not in the sense of secret knowledge, of which Fuller accuses the biological critics of the race concept, or the Prometheanism of which Mark Shiffman (2015) accuses Fuller, but in the doctrine in most Gnosticism of the total evil of the natural world and the body and the desire to escape from the both, escaping from flesh to silicon and escaping from this planet by space travel.

This rejection of the natural world for an all-conquering mind is connected with Fuller’s rejection of ecology as pagan or else “karmic.” Lynch helpfully brings in Carolyn Merchant’s (1990) Death of Nature thesis about the rise of classical science devaluating as well as identifying to a large extent nature with the female. The early Gnostics’ escape from the world is replaced by Fuller with Star Ark (Armstrong 2017) and technological escape from this planet through space travel.

This aspect of Fuller’s Gnosticism is also related to his rejection of Michael Polanyi’s tacit knowledge and of Dreyfus’s phenomenological claims about the limits of AI for a full techno-hype appreciation of it, assuming future vast improvements. There seems to be present an extreme Cartesian rationalism that rejects any sort of unconscious processes. All is rational and logical. Perhaps this is connected to Fuller’s admiration of logical positivism (though his style of writing being somewhat different from Rudolf Carnap’s formalism). Symbolic processing AI, or GOFAI (good old-fashioned AI) would seem to fit with Fuller’s futurism, not neural networks or evolutionary programming. Fuller’s highly critical stance to actually existing science contrasts with his totally uncritical acceptance of projections in what Bob Seidensticker calls Futurehype (Seidensticker 2016). Fuller’s account of humans strongly contrasts with the phenomenological approach, particularly with the notion of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty of the “lived body” as distinct from Descartes’s dichotomy of pure mind and purely mechanistic body. In one sense, Fuller is a Cartesian, treating the body as purely mechanistic, preferably capable of being totally replaced by a computer. Leibniz, in contrast, though an extreme rationalist, did admit the unconscious. One might say that postmodernists after Foucault overemphasized the body (perhaps a product of 1970s health clubs) but Fuller vastly underemphasizes it.

Fuller defends the race category in opposition to what he frequently dubs “political correctness,” a term used for this purpose by neo-conservatives in the National Association of Scholars in the 1980s and since successfully propagated in mainstream media to disparage opposition to racial or gender abuse.

Skin color differences are obviously real, but the association of skin color with personality and cognitive traits (or even other biological traits such as blood types) is mistaken. The history of change of classification of Irish in the United States and Britain and Jews in the United States as nonwhite; and Ben Franklin’s classification of most Germans and Scandinavians as nonwhite, show how racial categorization changes in terms of majority social acceptance.

Fuller in his longer, more detailed discussion of Gnostic biology in his reply to Lessl writes the following:

. . . I refer here to those Darwinists— . . . (for example, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin)—who are keen to discredit and prohibit research in the broad areas covered by “sociobiology” and “evolutionary psychology. . . . discouraging a deepening of our knowledge of the relationship between human inheritance and achievement. (Fuller 2002, 721–2)

Later in the same article utilizing group selection, ironically, also used by Lynch, Fuller refers to “species-like races” (Fuller 2002, 722).

Fuller, surprisingly, does not go into any detail or specifics concerning the social/biological account of race he advocates, other than to criticize those who reject biological race as a valid social scientific category. As Fuller wishes to consistently treat race as an intersection of the social with the biological, one would think he would make use of the vast literature on the sociology of race, whether concerning African Americans in the United States, or people from India in South Africa, Britain, or the Caribbean, or other topics. Given Fuller’s amazing ability to digest and assimilate a huge number of writings in a variety of fields, this is a surprising gap. It would be good if Fuller clarified his position on the biosocial status of race beyond criticizing opponents of the use of the race category in science.

Overall, Lynch’s review valuably raises a number of issues about our book and about Fuller’s recent trajectory.