TIMO P. KYLMÄLÄ /LIHRI$UWL¿FH Ontology beyond the human condition Tampere University Dissertations 40 7DPSHUH8QLYHUVLW\'LVVHUWDWLRQV 7,023.</0b/b /LIHRI$UWLILFH Ontology beyond the human condition $&$'(0,&',66(57$7,21 7REHSUHVHQWHGZLWKWKHSHUPLVVLRQRI WKH)DFXOW\&RXQFLORIWKH)DFXOW\RI,QIRUPDWLRQ7HFKQRORJ\ DQG&RPPXQLFDWLRQ6FLHQFHV RI7DPSHUH8QLYHUVLW\ IRUSXEOLFGLVFXVVLRQLQWKH3DDYR.ROLDXGLWRULXP RIWKH3LQQL$EXLOGLQJ.DQVOHULQULQQH7DPSHUH RQ$SULODWR¶FORFN $&$'(0,&',66(57$7,21 7DPSHUH8QLYHUVLW\)DFXOW\RI,QIRUPDWLRQ7HFKQRORJ\DQG&RPPXQLFDWLRQ6FLHQFHV )LQODQG Responsible 3URIHVVRU6HLMD5LGHOO supervisor 7DPSHUH8QLYHUVLW\ and Custos )LQODQG Pre-examiner(s) 3URIHVVRU%UXFH&ODUNH 3URIHVVRU(PHULWXV-XNND6LKYRQHQ 7H[DV7HFK8QLYHUVLW\ 8QLYHUVLW\RI7XUNX 86$ )LQODQG Opponent $VVRFLDWH3URIHVVRU-RKDQQD 6XPLDOD 8QLYHUVLW\RI+HOVLQNL )LQODQG 7KHRULJLQDOLW\RIWKLVWKHVLVKDVEHHQFKHFNHGXVLQJWKH7XUQLWLQ2ULJLQDOLW\&KHFN VHUYLFH &RS\ULJKWDXWKRU &RYHUGHVLJQ5RLKX,QF ,6%1 SULQW ,6%1 SGI ,661 SULQW ,661 SGI KWWSXUQIL851,6%1 3XQD0XVWD2\±<OLRSLVWRSDLQR 7DPSHUH Human, all too human Friedrich Nietzsche ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to express my utmost gratitude to my advisor Professor Seija Ridell for her continuing guidance, insight, enthusiasm, critique, and immense patience through all the years. Without Professor Ridell’s supervision this work would not have seen the light of day. All credit goes to her for disentangling the concept of artifice in Finnish as teknotaito. I would also like to thank my thesis examiners Professor Bruce Clarke from Texas Tech University and Professor Emeritus Jukka Sihvonen from the University of Turku for their very perceptive and encouraging feedback and criticism. I gained crucial insights from their respective assessments. Guidance provided by Dr Pentti Raittila and Dr Heikki Heikkilä in my early days as a researcher at COMET was greatly appreciated. My thanks also go to Professor Emeritus Tarmo Malmberg and Simo Pieniniemi for the many stimulating discussions and debates on all things theoretical. Finally, I want to thank my mother and father, Liisa and Seppo Kylmälä. Without their love and support none of this would have been possible. This work is dedicated to them. ABSTRACT The starting point of this work is the observation that the boundaries of the human condition, as delineated by the German political theorist Hannah Arendt in her major philosophical work, The Human Condition (1958/1998, HC), have begun to show in the geometrically advancing technological development of the past decades. Since the publication of the HC, there is increasingly reason to suspect the artificial world the human has built and continues to build will upend the modern-age frame of the human condition that still made sense six decades ago. In my work, Arendt’s tripartite formulation of the human condition with its three fundamental, analytically separate but in actual practice interrelated dimensions, labor, work and action, serve both as a stepping stone and a point of critical investigation for looking at human existence within specific, inalienable boundaries and how these boundaries may be surmounted. For Arendt, none of these three dimensions alone could define what it is to exist as a human (among other humans). She insisted all three are necessary to create a specifically human condition. Yet, the last few decades of technological and scientific development that have culminated in such blanket terms as synthetic biology and artificial intelligence have shown there is no reason to doubt the human capacity to finally find ways to enhance even its own biological organization, thereby creating wholly new boundaries, hierarchies and dimensions of existing and acting in the world. However, the discussions concerning this potential, ranging from actual roadmaps to enhancement to bioethical debates concerning enhancement, tend to disentangle ontological questions from epistemological ones. Consequently, human enhancement is observable as a procedure whereby the enhanced organism’s identity would remain relatable to our current values and predispositions, even if its condition of existence had in the process become something altogether different. It is this perplexing prospect of enhancing the biologically given affordances of the human that in the end challenges the explanatory force of Arendt’s tripartite formulation and the interrelations of its dimensions. I interpret the three dimensions in Arendt's formulation as ontologies based on their preconditional nature in defining a specifically human condition of existence. However, I posit each dimension with slightly different meanings and emphases from Arendt and rename them accordingly as organicity, artifice and plurality. In my discussion, I draw on the basic ideas that underpin these concepts without seeking to reinterpret them in the context in which Arendt operated. I will first probe the human condition and its limitations in the contemporary sociotechnical context by using Arendt’s tripartite formulation as a platform for thinking, and second, rework Arendt’s tripartite formulation relative to the present situation. In addition to Arendt, my approach draws heavily from second order cybernetics, most notably the theory of autopoiesis developed by the Chilean neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela. In my interpretation, their theory of living systems (Maturana and Varela1980) resonates with Arendt’s notion of labor (organicity) and its separation from work (artifice). Maturana and Varela posited a clear division between the given biological affordances, within which the human organism as an autopoietic unity in the physical space is bounded, and the ontologically discrete, artificial entities, which, regardless of human purposes, gradually construct their own, systemic couplings to the environment. Despite resonances with Arendt, this so-called onto-epistemological approach to how life is organized and structurally manifest at the level of the human leads me to question the tenability of the human condition, as demarcated in the HC, in relation to the role of contemporary and future artifice. The key problematic of this work thus concerns the process through which artifice becomes a self-reinforcing artificial circumstance that escapes the boundaries of the human condition as formulated by Arendt. I suggest this circumstance can be captured by the notion of the post-human, which I employ in the hyphenated form to emphasize both its conceptual difference from the posthuman of post- and transhumanism and its ontological distinctiveness from the human. In conjunction to the post-human, I will consider the challenging parallelisms drawn by many varieties of philosophers, futurists and transhumanists between Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Übermensch and the contemporary arguments for human enhancement. Based on the arguments made in this discussion, the existential question of our age concerns the new and qualitatively different conditions of being and acting that would follow the enhancement of the autopoiesis of the human organism. I address this problematic concerning the human condition in three interrelated senses in my work. First, I discuss how the ontologies of organicity and plurality open a path to a life of artifice and, at the same time, enable its emergence as the paradigm for existence. Second, I focus on the ways in which artifice, understood as an ontology in itself, involves the power to fundamentally alter the human condition and open the door to the so-called post-human, which eventually demands a completely new conception of existing and acting that the human, as a plural creature, cannot fully appreciate. Third, and finally, I bring forth the problem of the post-human as an explanatory category in both philosophical and media theoretical contexts. Keywords: autopoiesis, Arendt, artifice, cybernetics, human condition, media theory, onto-epistemology, philosophy of technology, post-human, posthumanism, transhumanism TIIVISTELMÄ Väitöskirjani luotaa ihmisenä olemisen ja toimimisen luonnetta ja rajoja 2010-luvun lopun maailmassa käyttäen kiinnekohtanaan Hannah Arendtin vuonna 1958 ilmestyneessä The Human Condition -teoksessa esittämää jäsennystä uusintamiseen, valmistamiseen ja toimintaan. Lähtökohtani on, että tätä kolmijäsennystä on sen perustavuudesta huolimatta välttämätöntä arvioida uudelleen teknologian kehittyessä ja puuttuessa ihmisen edellytyksiin olla orgaanisesti olemassa, ymmärtää ja toimia tavoilla, joita Arendt ei voinut ottaa huomioon. Vaikka hän osasi ennakoida ensimmäisiä edistysaskeliaan ottaneiden avaruus-, ydin- ja geeniteknologioiden seurauksia terävästi jo The Human Conditionin kirjoittamisaikana, viime vuosien harppaukset synteettisen biologian, tekoälyn ja geenimanipulaation kentillä ovat synnyttänet olosuhteita, joita kuusi vuosikymmentä sitten ei ollut mahdollista edes kuvitella. Uusimpiin ihmisen kehittämiin teknologioihin kytkeytyviä eksistentiaalisia ja yhteiskunnallis-poliittisia kysymyksiä on puntaroitu parin viime vuosikymmenen aikana muun muassa transhumanistisissa ja posthumanistisissa teoretisoinneissa. Tutkimukseni osallistuu myös näitä lähestymistapoja koskevaan viimeaikaiseen keskusteluun esittäen, että eroistaan huolimatta kumpikaan teoriasuuntaus ei saa otetta ihmisen ja tämän kehittämien teknologioiden välisten suhteiden monitasoisesta mutkikkuudesta. Esitän tämän johtuvan siitä, että molemmat sivuuttavat ihmisen erityislaatuisuuden tietynlaiset affordanssit omaavana