On the joy and pain of birthing and motherhood: Transhumanism, evolution, and the emotions of being born into

life PAPER Eduardo R. Cruz Introduction In a recent work, I have developed a rationale for the analysis of natality in transhumanism.1 According to the results, the defense of natality, in a future that fosters designer babies, artificial wombs and a childfree and perfectible society, can be marshaled in eight different fronts. Our concern in the present paper is to develop the first one, namely, to analyze transhumanists thoughts on emotions and evolution, the role that child birth and rearing have for human evolution, and how to assess contradictions between biological evolution and the directed one. Our contention is that all these traits and emotions, to the extent that they are adaptive, became deeply rooted in our brains and cannot be manipulated at will. Transhumanism is certainly an umbrella word, and many pro-enhancement researchers do not consider themselves part of the movement. For the sake of simplicity, however, this word will be used throughout the paper do indicate any defender of enhancement in human beings through science and technology.

Transhumanists, evolution and emotions

Transhumanists do care about emotions, be it because humans are emotional beings, and emotions are important in the pursuit of happiness, or because they know that cognition is embodied. Nevertheless, few of them engage in any sustained reflection of what emotions mean, they just point out that to enhance positive emotions is one of their goals (Kraemer, 2012, 436). Nick Bostrom is one of the few that offers us a few glimpses of how to deal with emotions in order to reach enhancement. As it is the case for most transhumanists, he is concerned mainly with the positive emotions, following in some manner the hedonistic imperative (Pearce 2004). When it comes to negative emotions, Bostrom and Sandberg assert that Sexual jealousy, romantic heartaches, status, envy, competitiveness, anxiety, boredom, sadness and despair may have been essential for survival and reproductive
1

Eduardo R. Cruz, Transhumanism and the Fate of Natality: An Introduction (Zygon, vol. 48, no. 4 [December 2013]: 916-35).

success . . ., but they take a toll in terms of human suffering and may substantially reduce our wellbeing. An intervention that caused an upward shift in hedonic setpoint, or that down-regulated some of these negative emotions, would hence meet [the challenge] (Bostrom and Sandberg 2008, 396). Bostrom does acknowledge that such interventions are difficult: It is considerably more difficult to characterize what would count as emotional enhancement . . . (Bostrom 2008, 119). Nevertheless, he is sure that we are able to distinguish unpleasant emotions from the good ones, so we may seek to reduce feelings of hate, contempt, or aggression when we consciously recognize that these feelings are prejudiced or unconstructive (Ibid.).2 There is at present a wide array of strategies to foster good emotions and emotional control (Hope 2011). So we may imagine that the task necessary to reach posthumanity would be to improve on these strategies through better knowledge and technological advances. It is clear from the context that the focus is on the individual, as if emotions would get better only through personal enhancement. The goal is a maximum of possible excellence of emotional capacity (Ibid., 119), including some unforeseen traits of this capacity, that would be enabled by new neurological machinery that are being devised. Then Bostrom continues, now turning to positive emotions: One dimension of emotional capacity that we can imagine enhanced is subjective wellbeing and its various flavors: joy, comfort, sensual pleasures, fun, positive interest, and excitement. Hedonists claim that pleasure is the only intrinsic good, but one need not be a hedonist to appreciate pleasure as one important component of the good. . . .it might be possible for differently constituted minds to have experiences more blissful than those that humans are capable of without thereby impairing their ability to respond adequately to their surroundings (Ibid., 120). As for the neurological machinery, we know that an important chunk of current research in AI is devoted to emotions, be it in robotics or other basis (Minsky 2006). The main assumption behind this research is that what is produced by the brain may be simulated by electronic means under full control (hardware and software, in robotics, virtual reality, or cyborgs). There are questions of feasibility3 and others in the effort to answer: Are these emotions actually human?

2 3

For a view on the contrary, see Spezio (2011), 146, and Baylis (2009), 171. Minsky recognizes, by the end of his book, that we'll never find anyone, foolproof way to choose (for example) between the advantages of immediate actions and the benefits of cautious, reflective thinking. So

Concerning feasibility, we should check if reproduction of human emotions can be developed without regard to prior evolution. Even though most transhumanists are concerned only with future, directed evolution, a few take seriously evolutionary studies.4 Again, Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg (2008) engage in a detailed study of the evolution of the brain. They have a somewhat dismal view of the processes of naturethe genius of evolution is acknowledged, but only to the extent that it points to its own overcoming. According to these authors, There is a discrepancy between the standards by which evolution measured the quality of her work, and the standards that we wish to apply. Even if evolution had managed to build the finest reproduction-and-survival machine imaginable, we may still have reason to change it because what we value is not primarily to be maximally effective inclusive-fitness optimizers (Ibid. 379). In their understanding of evolution (Ibid.), we can improve upon and tinker with mechanisms of nature better than herself for the next evolutionary step: A crafty genetic engineer may be able to solve some of the problems that were intractable to blind evolution (Ibid. 399). Russell Powell and Allen Buchanan agree to some extent with this, but they are even more critical of evolution: The ubiquity of suboptimal design demonstrates that natural selection is a bricoleur, not an engineer, much less a master engineer (Powell and Buchanan 2011, 10). Now, moving from the past to the future, they say: By highlighting the constraints on ordinary unassisted evolution, we show how intentional genetic modification can overcome many of the natural impediments to the human good (Ibid. 6). They argue against Bostrom and Sandberg for their use, even partial, of the metaphor of the wisdom of nature and the resort to adaptationist explanations. Instead, they focus on more elementary mechanisms for evolution. According to them, basic mechanisms would count in favor of intentional genetic modification. What about emotions? No, there is no place for them. As one may see, not much of this reflection has to do with the evolutionary background of human emotions. However, if nature does not care, and leads to no optimization, how come we will use its mechanisms to foster good emotional traits only?

whatever we do, we can be sure that the road toward posthuman minds won't be smooth. (Minsky 2006, 346) 4 See, e.g., the entire issue of Philosophy of Technology, 25 (4), 2012.

This question is advanced by ethicist Felicitas Kraemer. In her analysis of Bostroms arguments, she notices that the fact that emotions are embedded in a complex context and that they cannot simply be increased without bringing about unforeseeable effects . . . Yet, it is far from clear that emotions can be clearly distinguished from each other (Kraemer 2012, 437). She further argues that increasing an emotion can sometimes lead to paradoxical effects. If it remains constant over time, for instance, happiness can become silliness or shallowness . . . A person who becomes unable to experience sadness may well lose her capacity to experience happiness as well, because happiness and sadness are interdependent phenomena (Ibid., 438). If she is right, then in order to improve positive emotions someone has to take the negative ones on his/hers shoulders, otherwise unconscious processes will impede any actual accomplishment. In order to make the point even stronger, let us take an extreme case: that of pregnancy, birthing and nourishing. Transhumanists remind us, quite rightly, that mother nature was not very kind to mothers, due to the difficult compromise between big brains of babies and their coming into the world. Being more specific, we will focus on the birth canal According to Powell and Buchanan, in the same article as above, the birth canal, which passes through the female pelvis thanks to selections hasty re-arrangement of hominid posture, dramatically increasing the risks of childbirth. The list [unfavorable traits] goes on and on (Powell and Buchanan, 2011, 10). This admission is followed by proposals of more speculative transhumanists. David Pearce (1996, 19), for example, suggests artificial extra-uterine environments to correct the problem. In a recent article, he goes even further: Freed from the constraints of the human birth canal, biohackers may re-sculpt the prison-like skull of Homo sapiens to accommodate a larger mind/brain, which can initiate recursive self-expansion in turn (Pearce 2012, 201). Bruce F. Katz (2008, 45) also point out the downside of large brains birthing process is painful and dangerous; babies are born prematurely, increasing the dependency on parents; and they have big and fragile skulls. He highlights the contingency of nature: Some of our strengths as humans do stem from the semiarbitrary nature of the body that evolution has designed for us, but almost all of our limitations derive from this contingency. These limitations are twofold: first and most obviously purely physical constraints in that we can act only in ways that our bodies allow us to act,

and second, and perhaps more essentially, mental, in that our brains are housed in a finite casing, and a rather small one at that (Ibid., 356-57). So for transhumanists the experience of birthing and parenthood seem to be wholly negative. The standpoint is of a generic human or a male fully in control, so womens experiences and emotions are not taken into account.5 However, suffering brought by birth pangs, viewed as senseless by hedonistic and utilitarian considerations, also bring what is distinctive and sublime in the human speciesthe possibility of love. Human emotions come to our minds in pairs that feed each other, precisely because emotions are complexes. So far, we have reached a few conclusions: that some transhumanists do recognize the importance of emotions, but they take into consideration only positive ones; emotions are the product of a haphazard evolution, thus the occurrence of so many bad ones; they are confident that in the next step of evolution, the directed one, emotions can be controlled to promote happiness. Now it is time to see that positive emotions cannot be extricated so easily from the negative ones. Apparently, the wisdom of nature comes together with nature red in tooth and claw. All the happiness we can get comes in the midst of pain and suffering. Historically speaking, we may build a case that directed evolution cannot escape this fate.

Human Evolution and the Emotions around Parenthood

Anthropologist Sarah B. Hrdy, in her works, stresses the role of females and motherhood in human evolution. Moreover, it is the specific form of cooperation and concern for others that made us humans. In a nutshell: Sarah Hrdy explains why she became convinced that the psychological and emotional underpinnings for these otherregarding impulses emerged very early in hominid evolution, as byproducts of shared parental and alloparental care and provisioning of young (Indiana University 2013). This positive mood is balanced by her description of niceties that happen in nature and human evolution. They all have similar evolutionary functions, there is no way that these other-regarding impulses may arise without the bad ones. For that matter, all the inconvenience related to the narrow birth canal for babies with large heads comes together

A conspicuous example of this standpoint is of designer babies, favored by many transhumanists. Parents are even exhorted to control the genetic makeup of their progeny through in-vitro fertilization. See Savulescu and Kahane (2009), and the discussion that followed its publication.

with positive experiences, acknowledged their diversity among women. Sarah Hrdy speaks about the flow of oxytocin out of her own experience: Even doing nothing [during pregnancy], I felt creative. Odd as this may sound to some, birth, too, was a euphoric experience, the pain far more nearly fascinating than unbearable. For me, contractions during labor were an opportunity to find out what it feels like to be totally in the grips of all-encompassing biological forces over which my conscious mind had no say. Thinking back to my first glimpse of the slimy creature who emerged head first, luscious is the word that comes to mind to describe the daughter of my dreams. I was stunned by the sensual responses she evoked in me (Hrdy 2000, xii-xiv) In other parts of the book, she explains more this sensual experiences provoked by Oxytocin and other hormones (Hrdy, 2000, 137-39; 153-54; 536-38; 2009, 212-14). At the same time, she describes the mixed feelings (ambivalence) that accompany all these experiencesit would be too good if nature treated women so nicely, so the downside is always present. From other different quarters, Georges E. Vaillant (2008) explains the evolutionary roots of positive emotions, such as joy and forgiveness, only to show how much pain follow the cultural and individual efforts to nourish these emotions. It seems that the old saying, no pain, no gain, is now being confirmed by evolutionary studiessee also Baylis (2009), 173. Hrdy also has something to say about face-to-face interactions between mother and child, that came in the same evolutionary package (Hrdy 2009, 38-41). Of course, many other authors have studied these interactions, from a variety of disciplines, suggesting that this is an adaptive trait, related as it is to the more general feature of face processing in humans (Keller 2000, 963-64; Lohaus, Keller, and Voelker 2001; Pascalis and Kelly, 2009, 206-207). Psychologist Kim Bard (2009) indicates that recent studies pushes primary intersubjectivity to something like thirty million ybp, indicating that it is deeply rooted in the brain. Psychologist Matt Rossano argues that increased opportunities in the evolution of humans for mother-infant joint engagement, and the development of a complex social world, are important for more sophisticated forms of cognition (Rossano, 2010, 147. As it was the case with emotions in general, AI professionals do care about this particular emotion, in the effort to produce more user-friendly robots (Broadbent et.al. 2013). But the same question remains: are these emotions in the same complex of nasty

emotions, so that every achievement is accompanied by a downside? Is it possible to have full control of the mechanisms of emotion? The same considerations may apply to other features relating parents and infants: storytellingenabled mainly through alloparenting, it is essential in a communal context that takes a long while to rear children. Evolutionary psychologist Michelle Sugiyama suggests that storytelling may be linked to information-gathering, something crucial for human survival in ancestral environments (Sugiyama 2001, 237), and narrative is an assurance that relevant information is properly handed down to the next generation.

(Sugiyama 2001; Boyd 2009; Mehllman 2012). And finally, another feature present in most societies, relating one generation to the next: rites of passage (Alcorta and Sosis 2005; Rossano 2009; Garwood 2011). These rites combine negative and positive emotions (The ability of religious ritual to elicit both positive and negative emotional responses in participants provides the substrate for the creation of motivational communal symbols. [Alcorta and Solis 2005, 338]), and are adaptive. Where all this leads to? When setting their agenda in evolutionary terms, transhumanists overemphasize the negative aspects of evolution, and claim that its mechanisms can be put to the service of directed evolution, which would foster emotions considered good and suffering-free in a utilitarian way, something that runs against an entire evolutionary history that lean over other-regarding impulses. This contradiction becomes more striking when we consider that evolution is not a progressive process. When it comes to the place of children in this picture, for example, there seems to be nowadays a swinging movement, which eventually may lead to a choice, in evolutionary terms, for more children (Aarssen and Altman 2012). In a childfree society, the transhumanist standpoint reinforces an imbalance toward somewhat hedonistic individual considerations. Directed evolution is a decidedly progressivistic, allowing for a childfree future. Is this possible? Our contention has been that it is not, because the specific history of human evolution is so tightly related to child rearing. All the processes described above (the difficulties associated with childbirth, extensive care, with communal support, face-to-face interaction, storytelling and rites of passage), seem to be adaptive, and so they are deeply ingrained in our brains.

On the top of that, there is the insight of psychoanalysis: because the ambivalence of our emotions, we do not know for sure what is exactly our desire!6 There is a lack of clarity and consensus on what good emotions are on an individual and communal level. This is another reason why choosing only emotions that seem good to craft a new human, therefore, does not seem to be a good idea.

Conclusion

Transhumanists themselves say that they seek to accomplish Enlightenment values (such as individual rights and the pursuit of happiness) through deliberate intervention in the genome. The argument is followed by a presupposition: the whole utilitarian project has not been implemented because humans are still tied up to biological constraints, implying that bad emotions unfortunately accompany good ones. To put good emotions to work for the actualization of values so cherished to modernity, therefore, a new human, now trans-biological, is needed. However, as it usually happens, the baby is thrown together with the bath water, literally. Still according to transhumanists, the drive to have and nourish children in the natural way, and to do it in a communal setting, may have had adaptive value in the past, but now it is a nuisance to personal achievement. What our argument has suggested is that, if someone needs the mechanisms of evolution and the workings of the brain to make possible a posthuman, then crucial negative aspects of them will make the efforts backfire. For example, we may achieve through technological means child birth without the suffering associated today with pregnancy, labor and giving birth for a child, but how much more is left behind that provides positive emotions to the parents and the child herself?7 Philosophical considerations are in order now. It does not need a posthuman in order to reach a good level of happiness. Humans are indeed able to reach all the happiness that is possible, and are ennobled by it, especially through free decisions in unfavorable

As Tony Hope argues: We are poor at predicting what will make us happy. The previous three findings add up to making us poor at predicting what will make us happy. Our desires are not a reliable guide; we will adapt to many of the things that bring us temporary happiness; and striving to get ahead of others is likely to end in a treadmill of endless striving. It seems that we are very bad at allowing for all these effects (Hope 2011, 239). He is very hopeful, however, that proper scientific approaches can overcome these constraints imposed by evolution. 7 An illuminating analogy could be done with photography. Film-based photography have a series of limitations, many of them removed when digital photography came around. Now we can take and store thousands of pictures in a fast pace, as well as easily check if they are fine. However, does this means that the emotions associated with taking and sharing in photos dramatically increase? That is very doubtful.

conditions. More happiness than this may, if we recall Kraemer, lead to silliness. Needless to say, this does not mean that technological advances to alleviate human suffering and some improvement of our condition should stop. It only means that the transition to posthumanity may exact a price to many human emotions, in particular those associated with natality. The bittersweet experience of parenthood, the loss of control of our plans and dreams and the feeling of giftedness will be left behind.8 In our previous work, we analyzed at greater length the thoughts of Hannah Arendt and Grace Jantzen on the role of natality in modernity. Indeed, their insights may be buttressed by more empirically oriented studies in an evolutionary perspective. But this possibility will be explored in a future work. For the time being, we may add that there are theological underpinnings to this discussion. Indeed, progressivism and scientifictechnological development is also a fruit of Christianity, and we are positively impressed by the sheer numbers of devices to alleviate human suffering. The succession of generations, on the other hand, may remind us of the words of the Gospel: For whosoever will save his life shall lose it . . .; For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?; Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? (Mk 835a; 36-37).

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