More Human Than Human

[rinue]

We've reached day two of Romie is busy and cross-posts an e-mail instead of writing an entry. This is an excerpt from an exchange with my friend Robert Loeser, who recently attended a Director's Guild talk that was probably funded by one of the grants mentioned in my last entry, trying to get filmmakers to think about the storytelling potential of real advances in current science. We were batting back and forth a few of the hypotheticals they raised.

>> Will we see a brain implant controlling the legs of paralyzed soccer players in Brazil 2014?

The reason I think we won't any time soon has nothing to do with advances in prosthetics and implants, which are getting amazing. It's linked to the performance-enhancing drug scandals and related areas. A lot of things are getting labeled as cheating which to my mind dramatically narrow how we define what is human.

I look at the nastiness surrounding runners Caster Semenya (Olympic long-distance runner who competes as a woman, but who may be hermaphrodytic or have a chromosomal birth abnormality, who a lot of people want to block for not being a "real" woman and having "unfair" testosterone levels) and Oscar Pistorius (a runner who is a double leg amputee who is fast enough he could cross over from the Paralympics to the regular Olympics. Supporters say he has to work harder than other runners and would be even faster with his own legs, and the added muscle that comes with that; detractors say he has an artificially lengthened stride, which is cheating).

Broadening it out to the current scandals around Lance Armstrong and around A-Rod, I look at the drugs Lance was using - a little testosterone (which is normal for someone who had testicular cancer, and which is being looked into as a hormone replacement for older men in the same way some post-meopausal women take estrogen and progesterone), a drug that increases your red blood cell count (again normal for someone in cancer recovery), and "blood doping," which is being injected with transfusions of your own blood (again to raise your red blood cell count). With A-Rod, he's using human growth hormone (which mainly makes you feel younger) and testosterone. Maybe a low dose of steroids under medical supervision. All of it was legal.

I'm not saying that stuff isn't cheating - it's against the rules, they knew it was against the rules, and they lied about doing it. They're jerks. But it says something about the way we define cheating. Both of these guys didn't cheat to take it easy; they trained like hell.

I could look at Lance Armstrong and say, here is somebody who could have gotten most of the same results by living at a high altitude, who instead wanted to live in Austin. I can look at A-Rod and say: here is a guy who fought to keep the body of a 20-year-old when he was 40. There are real 20-year-olds. There are plenty of people who live on mountains. Are they cheating by being 20 or living on mountains? Is it cheating to be richer or taller or have better shoes? Is it cheating to have sponsorships that allow you to train full time without needing a full-time job to put food on your table? No? Why not? Why is it ok to use caffeine, but not HGH or your own blood?

I think we've gotten caught up in an idea that there is "natural" and "unnatural," but that's a shifting line that says a lot about how we define things like masculinity, femininity, and youth. It reminds me of the way people in cities tend to romanticize pastoral life, and how we tend to look at the pre-technological past as a time that was "pristine" and free from stress. This kind of thinking has a dangerous tendency to reinforce the status quo power structure.

I expect it will take at least a decade of debate to straighten this out, but there's no question the debate is coming, and court cases with it. On the pro-athlete drug-testing side, there's a battle on the horizon between anti-doping agencies and the ACLU. Why are these athletes forbidden from using legal drugs available to the general population? Is this a discriminatory violation of their civil rights? Or is it just fair play, disincentivizing off-label uses with potentially lethal or debilitating side effects? Do we think medical decisions should be between us and our doctors or not?

On the paralympic side, you have a lot of amputees and paralyzed vets coming back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have personalities that make them want to train hard and compete at an elite level, and there's been a push by the VA medical community and DARPA to get them the best techonological help possible. At the same time, you have federal guidelines coming down as an expansion of Title 9, telling schools they have to make reasonable accomodations to allow disabled athletes to play at all levels, without discrimination. What is that going to mean? What is going to be fair?

My own feeling as a transhumanist and as a feminist is that biology should not be destiny, and we should be having different debates about "fairness" that revolve around huge wealth gaps. But I think we're hitting a wall that will force us to redefine what is a "human limit" and that's very exciting.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

All I'm a gonna say is tech's the next relevant stage in human evolution, and if they don' like it, well ... they gon' die!

[rinue]

I find it impossible at this point to seperate myself from my technologically enabled self. I would have died at birth without a c-section for my mom. I've got loads of vaccines. I've had various surgeries. I drink coffee like a mofo. I eat processed foods. I use forks and knives and cars and pens and screwdrivers and shoes. I live in a house. With electricity.

[valancy_jane]

This is actually my longest and probably most serious argument with C. He defines humanity very narrowly. I'm always astonished (somehow) when the vampire/android/whatever in a story dies or is hurt or something, and I get upset, and C says something like, "but he's a [vampire, robot, etc.]."

I'm always grateful to read your journal. It often feels like my only intelligent thought all day.

[rinue]

Aw, thanks. I get where you're coming from, I think; I'm pretty homebound, although not quite to the same extent, so I don't tend to want to talk about my day as much as get to be incisive for a minute. Which is weird, because what I really like is reading funny anecdotes about people's days.

Incidentally, I don't know if you had a chance or even interest in reading the SF poems I longlisted; if you wanted a shorter list, my top five are here. But really I wanted to point out to you a poem that's not on my list (because honestly my favorite poems are in Strange Horizons, and I wasn't allowed to pick SH poems; that was against the spirit of the list. I can't take credit for the great SH poems though, because what we published in 2012 was bought before I came on staff.) Here that is. It's very you.

P.S. I think you're going to really like the "ghosts in the machine" article I'm working on for Arc now, as well as the cryosleep one I have planned after that. I'll send when I have something worth sending.

[liquidmorpheme.livejournal.com]

You might when you get the chance pass C along to Donna Harraway's Cyborg Manifesto. It manages to orient transhumanism in a feminist context (or vice versa) and makes it clear that you cannot have one without the other. The feminist human is necessarily post-human—

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto/

[rinue]

Yeah; my feminism and transhumanism are not really seperate or seperable. Which often puts me in an interesting position when cosmetic surgery comes up.

[rinue]

I keep going back to baseball, because it's what I know, and because it has more stringent testing requirements than even the Olympics, and is proud of it. It's cheating to take HGH so you don't feel your age; it's not cheating to take painkillers so you don't feel your pain. It's cheating to take testosterone and steriods so you can build extra muscles and hit the ball harder; it's not cheating to have Tommy John surgery and replace the ligaments in your elbow so you can throw harder.

Why? What's the line? Nobody has ever articulated it. I think it comes down to "gut feeling" moral judgements, which are cultural and say more about in- and out-groups than any rational division.

[knaveofstaves]

The only thing I could think of there is that Tommy John surgery is meant to repair an injury that would otherwise take the pitcher out of the game? It's sort of a repairing an injury vs. "repairing" a "deficiency" thing?

[rinue]

20-year-old rookies are getting it. I could argue that if at 20 you've already blown out your elbow, your pitching mechanics don't work and you're not suited to pitching, unless you cheat by replacing your elbow.

Meanwhile, older pitchers are getting it to extend their careers. And just coincidentally, they throw even faster than they used to. How is that different from older hitters trying to extend their careers, and just coincidentally hitting harder than they used to?

Deterioration is deterioration. We're allowed to compensate in some areas but not in other areas. That's crap. Why wouldn't we want to be awesome all the time?

[knaveofstaves]

Point. Though I guess part of what I was trying to get at is that (at least as far as my understanding up until now has gone) Tommy John isn't something you just get to make yourself better. It takes massive amounts of rehab to recover from it, and there's no guarantee you'll be better when you do.

That may, considering my limited sources, be inaccurate. Plus, you could say there are associated risks with taking HGH and steroids, so what do I know?

[rinue]

There are definitely risks from taking HGH and steroids. Steroids, notably, can make you irrationally violent. Not my favorite side effect. Yet for instance Val takes them regularly in low doses for her asthma, and I have taken them occasionally when recovering from surgeries or to stave off an allergic reaction from a mosquito bite. HGH can totally screw up your face; that's why both Stalone and Mickey Rourke look so weird now. But Patrick was prescribed them as a teenager when puberty wasn't kicking in right. Low doses of testosterone increase your risk for some cancers, but lower it for other conditions. (And like steroids, can make you violent.)

I'm not exactly saying wooooo everybody drugs all the time. If there are good reasons to say "nope, not this dose, and not for this person" and they're safety reasons - either for protecting the person or the people arround them - I'm all about it. But that doesn't have anything to do with cheating.

[knaveofstaves]

So I just looked at some images of Rourke when he was younger and WHAT THE HELL???

Also? Totally hot.

[rinue]

I have literally seen news stories mourning the loss of his face.