Fall 2006 Review

“ASC: The Human & The Humanities” Project Begins
by Phillip Barron

The National Humanities Center launched a new program this September — a three-year study of the ways advances in science are changing the limits of human life and therefore disturbing traditional understandings of what it means to be human. Gathering scientists and humanists together in dialogue, the Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity (ASC) initiative focuses scholars’ attention on the concepts autonomy, singularity, and creativity — concepts historically deployed to earmark the boundaries of the human experience. The first four months of the project have seen a steady influx of distinguished humanistic scholars and scientists looking to share knowledge and perspectives from their diverse fields that together promise to contribute to new understandings of human life.

In September, Ian Hacking visited the Center, leading a seminar composed of local faculty and newly arrived NHC fellows in a discussion of biosocial identity. Hacking, a University Professor at Toronto and Chair of Philosophy and of the History of Scientific Concepts at the Collège de France, is best known for his work in the philosophy of science. Hacking says that while we already fashion our identities through biological characteristics we share with others, advances in gene-based heritage research and genetic engineering will broaden the combinatorial basis for identity with others, challenging our traditional conceptions of race, ethnicity, and even family.

Also on the agenda of ASC events in September was a visit from Nobel Laureate Sir Paul Nurse, president of Rockefeller University, who led a lunchtime seminar on the cultural differences between the sciences and the humanities. Focusing primarily on the epistemological differences scientists and humanities scholars bring to their own training, Nurse wonders — like a previous guest of the Center, E.O. Wilson — whether the study of human life will one day be subsumed under the rubric of biology.

The populist highlight of the fall was a weeklong visit from Michael Pollan, whose The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a New York Times bestseller. While at the Center, the Berkeley professor of journalism discussed his theory of co-evolution – the idea that plants and animals use human beings for their own purposes as often as we use them for ours – adding that the achievements in genetics and other biosciences most accessible to the public at large are also among the most misunderstood and often contribute to social policies with unintended consequences. The agro-industrial policies that have dominated food politics in the United States for the past fifty years value quantity over quality, and food scientists have genetically reengineered our crops to answer those values. “But there is a political movement coalescing around food,” says Pollan, “a movement to demystify food policy and the science behind it.” On a crisp October evening, the standing room only audience who had gathered to hear him speak at UNC-Chapel Hill testified to his claim. “By making an opaque process more transparent, we allow people to make better judgments,” says Pollan.

Rita Raley, who also visited the Center in October, shares Pollan’s belief in the democratization of information. A professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Raley’s work explores the ways digital media are transforming the artists’ canvas. Noting in a lunchtime seminar the impact of digital communications media on performance art, Raley guided a discussion of the democratizing effects of digital technology employing a wide range of examples – from web-based maps chronicling the body count in Iraq to immersive visualization environments.

November 9th through 11th the Center hosted the first of three conferences on the ASC initiative. Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity: The Human and the Humanities brought eleven scholars to the NHC for extended dialogue on their research. N. Katherine Hayles, Hillis Professor of Literature in the departments of English and Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, delivered a keynote address on the feedback loops created when human consciousness and mechanical computation meet, and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center hosted Friday’s panels of speakers. The full day event included presentations by Sir Patrick Bateson (Cambridge University), Terrence Deacon (UC Berkeley), Peter Galison (Harvard), Timothy Lenoir (Duke), Alan Liu (University of California, Santa Barbara), Willard McCarty (King’s College, London), Robert Pippin (University of Chicago), Alex Rosenberg (Duke), Mark Turner (Case Western Reserve),C. Chris Wood (Santa Fe Institute).

“The opportunity both to step back and think on a larger scale about the implications of Darwinism for human affairs, and the chance to listen to those at the frontiers of the Darwinian approach, like Deacon, and Bateson, and Mark Stoneking, is nothing short of unique,” says ASC fellow Alex Rosenberg, the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University.

While the speakers touched on a wide variety of topics, the conference revolved around the themes of computational enhancement of human life and evolutionary biology, mapping significant areas for further discussion among these and future participants in the project. Full videos of conference presentations will soon be available on the National Humanities Center’s new ASC website. The website, designed to include a repository of articles, video lectures, and interviews with ASC participants, will launch this spring. We invite you to check the National Humanities Center’s main website for updates.

Katherine Hayles concluded the fall semester by leading the faculty seminar to look closely at an alternative vision of the concept “singularity.” Hayles, who spent the fall semester at the NHC as an ASC fellow, points out that most of the ASC participants interpret “singularity” to reflect a distinction the human species has in the chain of being; many claim we are the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement and the creator of complex and extensible tools. Hayles invites humanists to reflect on another kind of singularity – an event possibly in the not too distant future.

Technologists predict that building a machine with the computational power of the human brain will be possible. Coupled with anticipated achievements in nanotechnology, it may soon be possible to re-engineer the human, from bones to brain. This unprecedented level of technical ability is known as The Singularity. In light of such a creative capacity, philosophers’ thought experiments like the Ship of Theseus and the Nietzchean dictum to create your own life take on new significance.

What would autonomy mean if we could engineer a human being with the same specificity we have over computers? In light of startling advances in computer technology and evolutionary theory, on what is our singularity premised? In what ways does our dependence on technology enhance and restrict our creativity? Nurse, Hacking, Hayles, Pollan, Rosenberg and Raley aren’t worried about immediately answering these questions. But they and others will be actively discussing them in the weeks and months ahead as the ASC project continues.

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