Chimera 2

Mood: sleepy and thoughtful
Music: Led Zeppelin - IV

A while back I mused about the attempt humans make of defining themselves. Even without the blurred boundaries of science, religion, politics and arrogance, humanity is very hard to define. Jose Ortega Y Gasset supposes in his Dehumanization of Art that the condition of being unsure what humanity is, is what humanity is. That is to say, if you're wondering if you are human, then you are human. This is particularly eye-opening when you realize that we are indeed the only species of creature that seeks to define our existence. We have been charged (by God or by ourselves) with the task of defining. It pervades everything humans do. When we run up against the task of defining the definer we have all sorts of trouble... it's like a feedback loop.

The chimera in the NYT story is allegorical. The boundary between human and not-human is so blurred that the creature itself is not one thing, but many, like the mythical Chimera. She brought chaos with her wherever she went and so does this primate with human brains. The debate is hard to frame because it reaches secretly into all manner of hot topics. No decision sits well with anyone so the Chimera does set the country ablaze. If we claim that the human tissue makes it partially human and worthy of some human treatment then we must admit that a foetus is partially human and worthy of some human treatment. If we refuse it humanity then we open up the possibility of arbitrarily determining who is human and who isn't by imperfect criteria. For example, is a man with artificial arms and legs enough human to have some human treatment? The problem is that we have absolutely no idea where to draw a line that one of us might find ourselves on the wrong side of one day. The great anime theme of cybernetic ethics continually asks how much of a human being can you take away before you are left with a machine? In the case of the primate, how much human brain goes in before a monkey becomes a man? Or in Phillip K. Dick's short story, The Prepersons, at what age is an embryo, foetus, child an actual person?

The target is moving because we have no good tools for making it hold still. That, I believe, is because we persist in asking the wrong questions about humanity. We continually attempt to ask ethical questions in terms of biology. This is the invisable threshhold of science. Science can provide us data to inform an opinion, but cannot form opinions on its own. We can ask many scientific questions about human beings, but none of these will lead us to a definitive test for determining personhood. This is mostly due to the fact that science is a fabrication of personhood... a system of organizing data and divining a shadow of the reality it hints at. Personhood belongs to something bigger than the world of human thought. It exists in a sphere which does not intrude into the microcosm of human experience. Everything we know is inside a bubble called human perception. Perceiving personhood from without requires that we not be within humn perception... in other words: a clear definition of personhood requires that we not be persons at all.

This is why Bellerophon on Pegasus's back succeeds where men on foot had failed. He is lifted above mere human action and given a vantage point that is super-human. Thus Bellerophon is able to immobilize the moving target and destroy it. To answer the question of the Chimera in the NYT article or find the end of the debate on abortion, euthanasia, cybernetics, genetic engineering, or cloning, we must give up our humanity somehow and answer to a superhuman paradigm. Believing that any person can tell you what is or isn't human is laughable. A higher authority is necessary. We are no more capable of determining what's human than a computer is of determining what is a computer.