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[ROUGH DRAFT]Technology and Our Epistemic Situation: Two Problems of IgnoranceIn this paper, I argue that there are two distinct problems of ignorance: a problem of size and a problem of type. Both are more pressing today than ever before, given the extraordinary expansion of collective human knowledge, and both pertain to epistemic limitations intrinsic to our evolved cognitive systems. After delineating these problems in detail, I examine one possible way of overcoming our “relative” and “absolute” ignorance about the universe: enhancement technologies. I then argue that, given our epistemic situation, resources currently being spent on normal research would be far better spent on developing cognition-enhancing technologies – technologies that promise to help solve the size and type problems previously sketched.1. Distinguishing Between Size- and Type-Ignorance

Knowledge is like a sphere, the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown. – Blaise Pascal

While the concept of knowledge has held center stage in the theater of Western Philosophy for some twenty-five thousand years, ever since Plato articulated his tripartite analysis of it, considerably less has been said about its epistemological antagonist: ignorance. The issue of ignorance is, I believe, more germane today than ever, not just because of well-known studies concerning scientific illiteracy and uninformed voters (Mooney and Kirshenbaum 2009; Skenkman 2008), but because of the extraordinary expansion of collective human knowledge. But note a difference between these two phenomena: the former is entirely contingent, since the sort of nescience about “elementary” facts of the universe and all it envelopes is clearly rectifiable, for example, by ameliorating the educational system, instilling in students a passion for learning, and so on. In contrast, the second is an issue of necessitation, since it is no longer possible, given limits intrinsic to the human mind,i for even the most erudite of individuals to fully comprehend even a single domain of scientific or humanistic inquiry. There is simply too much to know.

In addition to (principled) reasons why a single individual can no longer internalize more than a relatively tiny sliver of the knowledge spectrum, there is a further issue complicating our epistemic predicament. Consider the case of cognitive neuroscience: tremendous advancements have led to a fairly sophisticated understanding of how the brain works. But while there are promising solutions to what some philosophers, specifically David Chalmers, have labeled the “easy” problems of consciousness, e.g., the problems pertaining to how our nervous systems “discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli” (Chalmers 1995), there remains the so-called “hard” problem: subjective

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experience. The crucial point here is that, given the peculiarity of consciousness – a phenomenon apparently unlike anything else in the universe – several notable philosophers have argued that understanding conscious experience may indeed be possible but not by us humans. That is to say, limitations intrinsic to our evolved primate brains may forever preclude us from grasping the various concepts necessary to make sense of conscious experience. We are thus said to be “cognitively closed” to the solution of consciousness.

The notion of cognitive closure also applies to the first problem of ignorance described above, although the issue there is not an inability to grasp the relevant concepts (if the concepts involved were not graspable by humans, then the theories containing them would not be constitutive of collective knowledge). Rather, the issue pertains to the human ability to remember, synthesize, make proper connections between, and so on, bits of information from a rapidly growing multiplicity of sub-sub-sub-disciplines (recursively insert ‘sub-’ here as necessary), the totality of which comprise the human intellectual enterprise. Thus, this issue is not conceptual, but it is nonetheless cognitive. To be explicit, then, the above discussion suggests a distinction between two (non-mutually exclusive) reasons why a given problem might be abstruse: first, it might be conceptually easy to grasp but involve too many component parts for the human mind to keep in order; and second, it might be componentially simple but involve concepts too difficult for the human mind to grasp. Call the former the problem of size and the latter the problem of type.ii

In this paper, I argue that each source of abstruseness could potentially be overcome through the creation of cognitive enhancement technologies. Such technologies seem to offer the (only reasonable) possibility of not just quantitatively augmenting the mind – enhancing our capacity to remember informational items, increasing the speed of cerebration,iii and so on – but of qualitatively changing it as well – making cognitively accessible concepts that are currently beyond our epistemic reach. Given this possibility in combination with our epistemic situation (as here depicted), I argue that present resources would be far better spent on projects to develop cognition-enhancing technologies rather than on further expanding the already vast territory of human knowledge. iv Indeed, if there are problems that involve concepts with respect to which our species is cognitively closed, then such technologies would need to be developed at some point anyway. In terms of a spatial-geographical metaphor used throughout this paper, further horizontal growth will likely require us to expand our conceptual capacities (the problem of type); but we also desperately need vertical growth as well, that is, we need to acquire the ability to peer back down at the epistemic landscape, to better understand where we were, where we are now, and where we

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are going (the problem of size).v Let us consider these issues in turn, and then consider the possibility of a technological solution.2. The Problem of Size

When one examines the brain, one finds a vast manifold of hierarchically organized processes, the sum total of which forms a complex causal network (Torres 2009). Considered individually, each of these processes is accessible to the human mind with relative ease. The phenomenon of long-term potentiation (LTP), for example, involves just a few different entities that engage in only a few different activities (Craver 2007). It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand LTP, one might say. The same goes for many other mechanistic phenomena, including synaptic transmission, synaptogenesis, and so on. But when one attempts to understand a whole ensemble of neurons, acting and interacting through waves of temporary electrochemical disequilibria, the details become immediately overwhelming. Indeed, the brain is said to be the most complex object in the known universe, with around 100 billion neurons (and 10 times more glial cells), each of which makes at least 10,000 connections to neighboring neurons. The problem here is, therefore, one of extraordinary complexity – one of size.vi

An exactly similar point could be made with respect to the vast mosaic of increasingly specialized micro-disciplines in academia today (both the sciences and the humanities). As one author recently put it, summarizing Woolfolk and Lehrer, “it was possible as recently as three hundred years ago for one highly learned individual to know everything worth knowing. By the 1940s, it was possible for an individual to know an entire field, such as psychology. Today the knowledge explosion makes it impossible for one person to master even a significant fraction of one small area of one discipline” (Jacobs 2003, 22). Or, in a more sententious form: everyone today knows almost nothing about most things.vii The reason for this pertains to two ostensible facts: first, human knowledge understood as a collective phenomenon appears to be growing at something like an exponential rate. (Whether or not the growth is actually exponential is immaterial for present purposes.) And second, despite this rapid expansion of collective knowledge, the capacities of the individual remain in some crucial sense fixed and finite.viii

Thus, if one relativistically defines individual ignorance as the difference between what the collective whole of humanity knows (contained in textbooks, academic journals, individual minds, internet websites, and so on) and what the individual person knows, it is irrefragable that ignorance is growing at an accelerating rate.ix And again, this is not just because of contingencies like laziness, poor education or rampant anti-intellectualism in the U.S., but because of limitations intrinsic to human cognition: even if everyone were perfectly studious all of the time, individual ignorance would still be rapidly expanding.

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There is probably not much need to argue for why ignorance of this sort is undesirable.x Most academics today would probably concur that, for example, interdisciplinary work is a good thing: just as polyglotism is correlated with enhanced creativity and intelligence, since individuals who speak two or more languages can linguistically (re-)formulate problems in different ways, so too can the individual familiar with multiple disciplines approach a given problem from different angles or perspectives.

Unfortunately, though, interdisciplinary work is often restricted to domains of inquiry that are more-or-less contiguous. When one ventures out beyond the small cluster of disciplines surrounding one’s field of expertise, one quickly encounters the obstacle of what we might call – borrowing from Kuhn (1996) – disciplinary incommensurability.xi This incommensurability may be not just methodological but observational and semantic in nature as well: people trained in different intellectual traditions often see the world in radically different ways, and indeed the further one gets from “home base” the more radical differences in the argot used by distant disciplines become.xii This makes communication between individuals from different knowledge-areas extremely arduous, if not impossible. On a personal note, I have often been frustrated – as a neuroscientist and philosopher trained in the analytic tradition – by discussions with individuals of a postmodernist bent. This is not in the least because of any prior bias against their preferred tradition: I am genuinely interested in understanding the postmodern approach. The problem is that my Po-Mo interlocutors and I each use terms, such as ‘epistemology’ and ‘ontology’, in different ways, we each employ significantly different methods in our research (Analytic Philosophy is mostly centered around conceptual analysis, not deconstruction), and indeed our most basic orientations toward reality often fail to align well enough to permit an intelligible exchange of ideas.xiii

Interdisciplinarity thus ends up being for the most part limited to (sub-)disciplines not too distant on the globe of intellectual inquiry (with each of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” located at the poles). And as the many specialized fields of academia continue to rapidly ramify, the very possibility of making significant connections across large areas of knowledge becomes less feasible in proportion: there is simply too much to know for any one individual, or even any small team of individuals exhibiting some division of cognitive labor (Weisberg and Muldoon forthcoming), to master the relevant domains of human knowledge.

There are several specific reasons for this.xiv Consider, on the one hand, the issue of time: no individual lives long enough to master more than one, if one, knowledge-domain, even if she wants to. We are perennially trapped in, to borrow a term from Christopher Cherniak, our “finitary predicament” (Cherniak 1990).

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This predicament yields what I will call the breadth-depth tradeoff: the more one knows about any single topic, the less topics one knows about; and the more topics one knows about the less one knows about any single topic. Fortunately, this vexatious problem is more practical than principled, and indeed the development of life-extension technologies (see de Grey et al. 2002) may significantly mitigate it as a source of epistemic boundedness. What is not superable, though, is the cosmic issue, studied by physical eschatologists, of a dying universe: the second law of thermodynamics necessitates that the universe will eventually die an “entropy death,” at which point matter and energy will be evenly distributed throughout an eternally cold, dark and lifeless cosmos. This puts a nonnegotiable temporal constraint on how much we humans could know, and indeed on how long our progeny might be alive and kicking.

Putting cosmology aside, though, there is another notable source of the breadth-depth tradeoff already alluded to above, a cognitive source: the size and complexity of human knowledge today far transcends the individual’s ability to remember, synthesize, make proper connections between, and so on, bits of information from the quickly growing multiplicity of micro-disciplines out there. That is to say, even if de Grey and company succeed in cracking the immortality code, our cognitive limits would preclude us from making the sort of interdisciplinary connections we would ideally like to make. This leaves each one of us, so to speak, epistemically blind to the terrain of collectively acquired knowledge surrounding each one of our tiny fields of expertise. Thus, not only can the contemporary thinker not master even a single sub-domain of knowledge, as Jacobs notes above, but one cannot even properly locate or orient oneself on the broader map of human inquiry.

What the human intellectual enterprise needs now more than ever is a way to rise above the topographical micro-features peculiar to one’s own locale and see in sufficient detail the surrounding environs, with all its epistemic contours. But this requires thinkers and theorists with greater cognitive capacities to remember bits of information, synthesize them together in meaningful ways, learn new facts with greater efficiency – ultimately, to acquire something like a “God’s eye” view of the epistemic landscape so far mapped out. At present, though, all we have are busily working cartographers marking down every minute detail of their increasingly small areas of research: here is a pebble, and there is a blade of grass. But how much different the world looks when peering down from an airplane or skyscraper, or from outer space!3. The Problem of Type

The issue discussed in the above section concerns the vertical growth of human knowledge – that is, the ability of individual humans to look down on and

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make sense of the intricate topography of collective human knowledge. But there is another issue that concerns the very possibility of further horizontal growth. Consider the task of science, crudely couched in a Rumsfeldian terminology: scientific advancement proceeds via the conversion of “unknown unknowns” to “known unknowns” to “known knowns.” There are, of course, many things we don’t know about; our Homo ancestors from the Pleistocene were ignorant of dark matter, just like we are. The difference between us and them is, of course, that we have positive knowledge about our negative ignorance – following the apophatic

i This pertains to the “breadth-depth tradeoff” that I discuss below.ii I borrow this distinction, made in a slightly different context, from McGinn 2006, 331.iii Thus, allowing one to learn more per increment of time.iv Note: I will bracket a number of extremely important issues concerning the ethicality of cognitive enhancement (Bostrom and Sandberg forthcoming; Allhoff et al. 2009), cognitive enhancement and personal identity (Schneider 2008), etc. What concerns me at present is only the possibility of solving the size and type problems of ignorance via cognition-enhancing methods. Further discussion would indeed examine the ethical and philosophical implications of cognitively enhancing the human mind.v Note that the term ‘vertical knowledge’ has been used in a number of different disciplinary contexts, such as contemporary digital humanities. The definition in this field, though, is almost exactly opposite the way I use the metaphor of verticality in this paper: someone who has “vertical knowledge” has tremendous knowledge about a single topic – he or she is an expert. My sense refers more to wide knowledge, to interdisciplinarity or, at the ideal extreme, the ability for one “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (Sellars 1956, 37). That is verticality.vi This problem is typically approached in the sciences through abstraction and idealization. See Godfrey-Smith 2009 for discussion.vii This has led to a theory in economics and decision theory called “rational ignorance theory.” See, e.g., Caplan 2001.viii Ronald Wright quotes an unidentified person who “once defined specialists as ‘people who know more and more about less and less, until they know all about nothing” (Wright 2004, 29). Another memorable witticism comes from Robert Theobald, who contends that “when information doubles, knowledge halves and wisdom quarters” (Theobald 1996). According to a calculation made by Kevin Kelly and the Google economist Hal Varian, in fact, “world-wide information has been increasing at the rate of 66% per year for many decades” (Kelly 2008). Yet another datum to add to the heap.ix As the critic of technology Langdon Winner writes: “If ignorance is measured by the amount of available knowledge that an individual or collective ‘knower’ does not comprehend, one must admit that ignorance, that is relative ignorance, is growing” (Winner 1977, 283).x There are, of course, the obvious political and social costs of ignorance – costs that are in no way trivial.xi Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability applies diachronically to single disciplines. In contrast, the sense used here applies synchronically to multiple disciplines. Of course, all that is needed to overcome this kind of incommensurability is greater familiarity with the methodological, observational and semantic peculiarities of those disciplines foreign to some individual – but therein lies the problem!xii Consider the case of ‘faith knowledge’, a term I came across in Daniel Migliore’s book Faith Seeking Understanding. Migliore specifies as a principle of Christology that “Knowledge of Jesus Christ is not simply ‘academic’ or historical knowledge; it is faith knowledge” (Migliore 2004, 167; emphasis in original). Similarly, the Vatican Council, III, iv, states that “the Catholic Church has always held that there is a twofold order of knowledge, and that these two orders are distinguished from one another not

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theologians (such as Nicholas of Kusa), one might call this a kind of learned ignorance. (Or, in keeping with the “dark matter” metaphor, call it a kind of enlightened benightedness). The next step then is to convert this state of semi-knowledge to one of genuine knowledge by constructing an explanatory theory that adequately accounts for this mysterious and ubiquitous substance.

The point is that the tripartite distinction made above falls entirely within the supercategory of knowables. By definition, this supercategory contains truths that we human beings can come to know in principle. In contrast, there almost certainly exists another (species-relative) supercategory of unknowables.xv Also by definition, this supercategory contains truths that we cannot come to know in principle. Using a more philosophically respectable (and non-Rumsfeldian) phraseology, token puzzles falling within the former category may be called “problems” and those falling within the latter “mysteries.” Consider, for example, the case of the bat.xvi While the bat has been evolutionarily optimized to navigate caves via its sonic sense of echolocation, no matter how hard it might try it could never learn to do basic arithmetic, nor could it ever form the concept of (e.g.) a black hole. This is a modal claim: it concerns what is and what is not in principle possible for the bat, given its particular cognitive apparatus.

As finite beings with an evolutionary history of our own, it stands to reason that there (may) exist entire constellations of facts, phenomena, theories, or whatever, that we Homo sapiens could never come to know no matter how hard we might try, since we lack the right mental machinery to form the requisite concepts (despite our flattering binomial self-description as “wise men”).xvii In the

only in their principle but in their object; in one we know by natural reason, in the other by Divine faith; the object of the one is truth attainable by natural reason, the object of the other is mysteries hidden in God, but which we have to believe and which can only be known to us by Divine revelation.” From the perspective of analytic philosophy, though, the collocation of ‘faith’ and ‘knowledge’ is utterly oxymoronic – a nonsensical locution, since faith and knowledge are exact epistemological opposites.xiii One almost feels as if she were in the Quinean predicament of radical translation, with her interlocutor gesturing at rabbits, or undetached rabbit parts, or time-slices of rabbits, and so on, shouting “Gavagai!” But which of these disjuncts is the “real” referent seems, at times, inscrutable.xiv That is, there are several senses in which the human situation is fixed and finite.xv Truths within this supercategory are, of course, unknown to us humans because they are unknowable.xvi I allude here to Thomas Nagel’s (1974) famous paper on the phenomenology of bat echolocation – a “what it is like” that seems to permanently lie outside the realm of purely objective science.xvii As Dawkins insightfully writes: “[I want to pursue the point] that the way we see the world, and the reason why we find some things intuitively easy to grasp and others hard, is that our brains are themselves evolved organs: on-board computers, evolved to help us survive in a world – I shall use the name Middle World – where the objects that matters to our survival were neither very large nor very small; a world where things either stood still or moved slowly compared with the speed of light; and where the very improbable could safely be treated as impossible. Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn’t need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive” (Dawkins 2006, 367-368).

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transcendental naturalism, or “New Mysterianism,” of Colin McGinn, we are said to be cognitively closed to such facts, phenomena and theories as the result of limits intrinsic to our minds.xviii As alluded to in section one, McGinn argues that the venerable mind-body problem (i.e., What exactly is the connection between minds and bodies, given that each seems so profoundly different from the other?) falls within the class of mysteries, and other cognitive scientists, such as Noam Chomsky, have tentatively suggested that the “causation of behavior” might also be permanently insoluble (Chomsky 1975, 157), as well as the origin of the language organ (see Dennett 1996, 389). Whether or not these particular claims end up being veridical or not, though, is completely independent of the more general claim that cognitive closure is a real feature of our biological situation.

Thus, there appear to be areas of knowledge that are accessible to some possible minds but inaccessible to the actual human mind.xix And from this it follows that, even if we had unlimited time to conduct research in the sciences and humanities, the horizontal expansion of human knowledge would eventually have to stop: it would encounter regions – maybe vast regions – of the epistemic landscape that are forever unexplorable, given the limits of our mental software and neural hardware. To put this point a more philosophical way, consider the proposition that if physicalism (the metaphysical view that everything in the universe is physical) is true, then there exists a complete explanatory description of the cosmos, or final theory. Many philosophers held this to be true. But the consequent of the above if-then construction contains an important ambiguity in the term ‘theory’: if a theory is something “finitely stateable in a language we can understand,” then it clearly follows that physicalism does not entail the existence of a final theory (Stoljar 2009). There may indeed be concepts that one must grasp to make sense of the complete theory that are beyond our ken – maybe concepts relating to the ten dimensions posited by superstring theory, or concepts relating to the link between qualitative experience (“qualia”) and the electrochemical activity of neurons.

If one defines ‘theory’ more loosely, though, as something stateable in some possible language, then there may indeed exist a final theory of the universe – though it might be epistemically off-limits to us humans. It is in this sense that

xviii In a slightly different terminology, Jerry Fodor (1983) labels this same idea “epistemic boundedness.” Thus, we are epistemically bounded from exploring certain regions of possible knowledge about the cosmos.xix Interestingly, McGinn distinguishes between relative and absolute cognitive closure. He writes: “A problem is absolutely cognitively closed if no possible mind could resolve it; a problem is relatively closed if minds of some sorts can in principle solve it while minds of other sorts cannot” (McGinn 2006, 329). For the purposes of this paper, I want to avoid getting entangled in the net of abstruse issues concerning the possibility of absolute cognitive closure.

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regions of the knowledge-terrain may be permanently inaccessible to our species, but not to all possible cognitive agents. With the right conceptual resources and mental make-up, a sufficiently intelligent being (organismic or machinicxx) may be able to explore these regions and thus discover truths about the universe that we could never understand, no matter how assiduous and organized our efforts. We are to such truths as the bat is to basic arithmetic, or the chimpanzee is to natural language. This is the second principled problem of ignorance, a problem that concerns the types of questions that could be asked rather than just their size.xxi

4. Cognitive Enhancement as SolutionBefore continuing, we should note an important difference in the meaning of

‘ignorance’ as used in the second and third sections above: while ignorance is explicitly understood in section two as the difference between what the collective whole and the individual knows, the third section takes ignorance to be the difference between what would be known by an omniscient being and what is actually known by us humans, as a collective whole, at any given point in time. That is, the latter sense of ignorance pertains to the difference between the theories we have thus far devised of the universe and the so-called final theory. If classificatory terms help, the first sense of ignorance is relative and – according to our spatial metaphor – corresponds to the vertical axis, while the second is absolute and corresponds to the horizontal. Or, at the risk of belaboring the point, the first leads one to ask the question “How much can any one of us make sense of what we, the collective whole, already know about the cosmos?,” while the second leads one to ask the grander question “How much can any one of us, or the collective whole of humanity, ever know about the cosmos?” In both cases we have identified principled constraints on our individual and collective capacities to know arising from our evolved cognitive apparatuses – constraints that preclude us from making certain progress along either of the two aforementioned axes.xxii

I would now like to look at possible solutions to this epistemological conundrum. Although I am rather pessimistic about the technological future of humanity, given the explosion of types (not to mention tokens) of existential risks

xx Note the semantic origin of ‘organism’: it comes from ‘organ’, which derives from the Greek etymon organon. In Greek, this word meant “tool, instrument, engine of war, …” (OED). Thus, from the etymological perspective, the metaphor “organisms are artifacts” is analytically true.xxi In fact, McGinn conjectures that the mind-body problem might be rather simple, even though completely opaque to us humans.xxii See [author citation] for a thorough critique of techno-progressionism, especially as it manifests itself in the contemporary transhumanist movement. Obviously, if there is a final theory, then any movement towards this end would indeed count as scientific progress in the strongest sense. But one should always be weary of the millennialist accretions that build up around notions of absolute progress. See also Ruse 1996 for a thorough discussion of progressionism.

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anticipated in the twenty-first century ([author citation]), when one focuses parochially on the knowledge-problem at hand there seems to be a single salient and promising solution: technology. Before exploring this possible fix, though, consider first the only other solution available: good old-fashioned Darwinian evolution. On the assumption that evolutionary change is gradualistic, it follows that humans acquired (the ability to grasp) highly abstract concepts like electron and social justice – concepts that are, apparently, only available to us – through a naturalistic process of piecemeal cognitive development.xxiii Thus, it stands to reason that further cognitive development of this sort may make available to our phylogenetic descendants knowledge of our world that is, at present, permanently beyond our ken. If “encephalization” were to continue, in other words, our descendants might be able to explore at least some regions of the epistemic landscape that we Homo sapiens cannot traverse (nor, in some cases, even see are there: we can’t recognize what we can’t even cognizexxiv).

The problem with this possibility is that there is – or at least there appears to be – no significant pressure in our highly artificialized selective environment for the development of a “more advanced” neocortex (although this was not always the case, as I discuss below).xxv That is to say, the more intelligent individuals among us are not any fitter than those who are less intelligent.xxvi Thus, it follows that such evolution would have to occur through the analogous intentional process that Darwin termed “artificial selection” (as observed in the case of many domesticated animals). But, when applied to human beings, artificial selection is nothing other than eugenics, and eugenics has long been rightly relegated to the trash bin of ethical opprobrium.xxvii So, we can cross the Darwinian option of cognitive enhancement off the list of acceptable possibilities.

The only remaining option, aside from humbly accepting our circumscribed epistemic condition, is technological in nature. To begin, then, let us underline that the idea and practice of cognitive enhancement is not as radical and revolutionary as it may initially seem. As Bostrom and Sandberg write:

Most efforts to enhance cognition are of a rather mundane nature, and some may have been practiced for thousands of years. The prime example is education and training, where the goal is often not only to impart specific

xxiii See also the “Baldwin effect.”xxiv Any allusion here to Donald Davidson’s “Swampman” is merely incidental.xxv See Dawkins’ 1992 article on evolutionary progress.xxvi In fact, there appears to be a negative correlation between measured intelligence and fertility rate. See, e.g., Retherford and Sewell 1988. The well-known Flynn effect appears to be the result of environment rather than genes.xxvii Today, a “softer” kind of eugenics is finding expression in the growing field of reprogenetics – a portmanteau of ‘reproductive’ and ‘genetics’. See Kevles 1992 for an informative overview of eugenics.

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skills or information, but also to improve general mental faculties such as concentration, memory, and critical thinking. Other forms of mental training, such as yoga, martial arts, meditation, and creativity courses are also in common use. Caffeine is widely used to improve alertness. Herbal extracts reputed to improve memory are popular, with sales of Ginko biloba alone in the order of several hundred million dollars annually in the U.S. (Bostrom and Sandberg forthcoming)

The authors contrast such “conventional” approaches to enhancement with more experimental methods “such as ones involving deliberately creating nootropic drugs, gene therapy, or neural implants” (Bostrom and Sandberg forthcoming). The take-home point is that, despite what one might think prima facie, enhancement strategies have been around for a long time – if anything, the means might be changing, but the end is nothing new and out-of-the-ordinary. (If the reader would like, he or she may devise a mnemonic device to help remember this point.)

It is also worth making explicit two additional points: first, technology has, since the Homo genus first made its appearance on the evolutionary scene, played a wholly integral role in the development of our cognitive systems. For example, the earliest technologies – stone tools or “lithics” – had a significant enhancing effect: as our ancestors became increasingly dependent upon such lithics for survival, the invisible hand of natural selection began to “pick out” those individual organisms who exhibited a higher aptitude, relative to their conspecifics in the population, for fashioning such tools. As a result, nature established a powerful positive feedback loop such that increased intelligence led to an increase in intelligence, with each positive gain in intellectual ability resulting in an even greater subsequent gain. This brought about the “Great Encephalization,” as some have called it.

And second, there is an increasingly influential movement within cognitive science that rejects the traditional notion that minds are physically contained within the intuitive boundaries of “skin and skull.” According to Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who inaugurated the extended cognition tradition with their 1998 co-written paper, the physical “vehicle” of the mind (Baker forthcoming) is not confined to any region in space, but is actually extendible beyond the cranium and integument. On this model, cognitive extension occurs when entities initially located in one’s externality come to reliably (even if transiently) instantiate a functional role such that, if this artifact were located inside the head, it would normally be considered internal to the individual’s cognitive system. (This is the so-called “parity principle.”) For example, Clark and Chalmers argue that the notepad of an individual with memory problems might come to have the exact same function as the corresponding neural structures in a health individual’s brain. And because of this isomorphism – that is, because the notepad can store

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dispositional beliefs about the world just like (say) the hippocampus normally does – the notepad should count as literally part of the individual’s “coupled” cognitive system.xxviii Furthermore, Clark and Chalmers argue that such couplings, or biotechnological hybrids, are far more common than one might think. In fact, extensions of cognition are traceable back to the very first humans many millions of years ago. This leads Clark, in a separate publication, to assert that Homo faber (“man the maker”) has always been to some degree technologically-constituted: we are, as he puts it, “natural-born cyborgs” (Clark 2004).xxix

Thus, with this attempt to normalize both the technological and enhancement aspects of technological enhancements,xxx let us return to the two problems delineated above: size and type. As an issue of size, the former problem is quantitative in nature: what we need to overcome it are cognitive capacities different from what we already have only in degree. In contrast, as an issue of type, the latter problem is qualitative in nature: what we need to overcome it are cognitive capacities different in kind. This means, essentially, that a solution to the latter problem would entail a redefinition of the venerable boundary between mysteries and problems, as understood by the New Mysterians. Thus, while science is busy converting “unknown unknowns” to “known unknowns” and then to “known knowns,” the aim of enhancing the quality of the human mind would entail gentrifying, so to speak, the supercategory of “unknowables” (with all of its “unknowns”) such that truths once domiciled within it would subsequently find their home in the alternate supercategory of “knowables.” With the right sort of techno-change to the brain, such truths would be catapulted within our epistemic reach.

Now, I need not, for the present purposes, provide any strong argument to support the prognostication that, if pursued, future technology will effectuate a change in the boundary separating mysteries and problems (the qualitative problem of type), or for that matter will significantly increase our capacity for memorization, or the speed of cerebration, and so on (the quantitative problem of size). All one needs to accept is that the artifactual products of the inchoate genetics, nanotechnology and robotics revolutionxxxi might very well bring about

xxviii Clark and Chalmers also argue that their thesis entails that the self is itself extendible beyond traditional organismic boundaries – that is, if one takes the self to be constituted not just by occurrent beliefs (those beliefs one has right now) but by dispositional beliefs too.xxix Don Ihde (1990) has much to say about the phenomenological relations between human users and the technologies used; there are connections to be made between Ihde and Clark/Chalmers, no doubt, though no one has yet made them.xxx Of course, to say that technology has, as a matter of fact, played a part in our evolution is not to say that it ought to have played such a role, or that it ought to play such a role in the future. The transhumanist project must be justified.

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changes in our cognitive systems as extraordinary and profound as those brought about by Darwinian evolution – say, in the past 2.6 million years, since Homo habilis first began manufacturing tools around Olduvai Gorge.xxxii This relatively “weak” assertion about technological possibility is perfectly adequate as a first premise in an argument for “enhancement” technologies.xxxiii More formally put, this argument goes as follows:

Premise 1: Future technologies offer the serious possibility of unlimited, or at least less limited, knowledge-growth along both the vertical and horizontal axes;Premise 2: Our epistemic situation is such that (a) individual ignorance is growing rapidly as the territory of collective human knowledge expands exponentially, and (b) the human mind itself imposes more-or-less significant conditions of permanent ignorance with respect to particular domains of possible knowledge (some of which we can glimpse no more than a bat can glimpse the operations of basic arithmetic);Conclusion: Resources – including time, money and intellectual energy – would be far better spent on developing safe and effective cognition-enhancing technologies than on further mapping out the topographical minutia of those regions of the epistemic landscape that are already accessible to us: not only are we bound to encounter vicinities of knowledge that are forever off-limits to us, but we are rapidly losing – indeed, have already lost – the ability to meaningfully locate ourselves on the vast map of collective human knowledge.

The telos here is, of course, to solve the two formidable problems discussed in sections two and three. Directing resources away from the quotidian, business-as-usual sort of research that typically occurs in the sciences (and humanities) and instead towards the realization of effective cognitive enhancement technologies

xxxi See Kurzweil 2005 and [author citation] for more on the “GNR” revolution.xxxii As Dennett writes in a hostile review of McGinn: “His thesis about the likely limitations of our brains would be uncontroversially true if it weren't for our clever trick of expanding the powers of our naked brains by off-loading much of the work to artifacts we have designed and built just for this purpose. The brains we were born with are no doubt quite incapable of grasping long division--let alone calculus or photosynthesis--without the aid of pencil and paper or chalk and blackboard. We have to work to acquire some of our concepts, but we don't have to do all the work in our heads, thank goodness. One might think, then, that in order to defend a thesis about the outer limits of our powers, one should at least take a peek at the concepts made available to those who have armed themselves with the new technology” (Dennett 1991). Note that Dennett’s target is not cognitive closure per se, but the claim that the mind-body problem is off-limits for us humans. The present thesis is actually defended in the spirit of Dennett’s critique.xxxiii That is, we can’t know for sure until we’ve tried. And the argument here is that resources would be far better spent trying than continuing to work on the profusion of micro-problems that currently occupy our minds.

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promises not only to change the truth-value of the claim that ‘everyone today knows almost nothing about most things’, but to place within our epistemic reach the ideas and concepts necessary for us, as a collective body or individually, to grab hold of a (more) complete theory of the cosmos. In the terminology here developed, the former effort would (aim to) mitigate or eliminate what we have called relative ignorance, and the latter would (aim to) eliminate absolute ignorance. As Bostrom notes, “a ‘superficial’ contribution that facilitates work across a wide range of domains can be worth much more than a relatively ‘profound’ contribution limited to one narrow field, just as a lake can contain a lot more water than a well, even if the well is deeper. No contribution would be more generally applicable than one that improves the performance of the human brain” (Bostrom 2008).

Without committing to any utopian illusions in which technology constitutes a catholicon, or universal remedy, for all our epistemic woes, the argument put forth here attempts to ground itself in reasonable expectations, empirical observations and pragmatic considerations.xxxiv It is an argument for a change in practice based on perceived limitations in principle. Unless we as a species are willing to humbly accept our state of multiple cognitive closure (one need not be a rabid anti-intellectual or technophobic Luddite to respect this option, by the way), cognitive enhancement technologies appear to be the only viable option.

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[author citation]

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xxxiv These roughly correspond, of course, to the three premises above.

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