“Human Nature” and its alterability

Past, present, and future of human becoming

March 13 & 14, 2009
Einsteinsaal, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Workshop of the research group Neuroscience in Context (http://www.nic-online.eu)

within the European Platform of the Life Sciences, Mind Sciences and the Humanities
funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (Hannover)
Organisation: Jan-Christoph Heilinger, Lambros Malafouris, Saskia K. Nagel

Programme

Friday March 13, 2009=

9.00 Registration
9.30 Opening, introduction
Section I: Human Evolution
9.45 Human Nature and its Alterability: The Human Lambros Malafouris/
Enhancement Continuity Thesis (HECT). Saskia Nagel/
Jan-Christoph Heilinger
10.45 Human Nature: Work in Progress? Andy Clark
11.45 Coffee break
12.15 Brain Plasticity and Mind Technologies Andreas Roepstorff
13.15 Lunch break
14.30 Material Tensions – the Plasticity of the Human Body Chris Gosden
versus the Stability of Artefacts
15.30 Coffee break
16.00 Super-plasticity: Implications for the Definition of Human Merlin Donald
Nature
17.00 End of first day
Saturday March 14, 2009
Section II: Current ethical issues
9.30 Anthropological Arguments – Can they be useful in the Jan-Christoph Heilinger
Moral Debates about Human Enhancement?
10.30 Schools vs. Recombinant DNA as ways of enhancing John Dupré
the human genome
11.30 Coffee break
12.00 What Do—and Should—the Two Sides of the Debate Erik Parens
about Technologically Shaping Humans Share?
13.00 Lunch break
14.00 Human Dignity as a Criterion of Neural and Other Forms Dieter Birnbacher
of Human Enhancement
15.00 Coffee break
15.30 Final discussion Nicholas Humphrey
(comment)
16.30 End of event
17.00 (Internal meeting, Neuroscience in Context-group)
“Human Nature” and its alterability
Past, present, and future of human becoming

March 13 & 14, 2009

Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Einsteinsaal
Jägerstr. 22/23, D-10117 Berlin

Workshop of the research group Neuroscience in Context (http://www.nic-online.eu)

within the European Platform of the Life Sciences, Mind Sciences and the Humanities
funded by Volkswagen Foundation (Hannover)
Organisation: Jan-Christoph Heilinger, Lambros Malafouris, Saskia K. Nagel

berlin2009@nic-online.eu

Recent developments in the brain sciences and new applications in biotechnologies

such as neuroprosthetics and brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) offer new possibilities for
altering and manipulating human biology and brain functioning. This rapid growth of
neurotechnologies and cognitive enhancement not only raises many ethical and social
concerns but also challenges our understanding of what it means to be human, or, in
other words our idea of “human nature”. What, however, is “human nature” and how
precisely, if at all, can it be changed or threatened by neurotechnologies and cognitive
enhancement?

The task of the workshop will be to explore the concept of “human nature” from an
interdisciplinary perspective. Our aim is to set the notions of human nature and
(cognitive) enhancement in their appropriate anthropological dimension and
coevolutionary background. To this end, in the workshop, we will consider what happens
at the intersection of cultural developments and biological evolution. Tool use and
cultural practices have permanently and directly influenced modern human development.
Current biotechnologies might just add another step to this. Or are the new technologies
qualitatively different, and if so, what are the implications?

Given the accelerated developments, the need for critical, “anthropological” self-
reflection rises, ultimately adding to the question “What is a human being?” the aspect of
“What sort of people should there be?” We hope our workshop will help us elaborate
new ways of balancing scientific, sometimes overly reductionist explanations of human
behaviour and biology, with richer, cultural self-interpretations of human beings.

Speakers
Dieter Birnbacher (Dusseldorf), Andy Clark (Edinburgh), Merlin Donald (Case Western),
John Dupré (Exeter), Chris Gosden (Oxford), Jan-Christoph Heilinger (Berlin), Nicholas
Humphrey (London), Lambros Malafouris (Cambridge), Saskia K. Nagel (Osnabrück),
Erik Parens (New York), Andreas Roepstorff (Aarhus)
 “Human Nature” and its alterability
Past, present, and future of human becoming
March 13 & 14, 2009
Einsteinsaal, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Workshop of the research group Neuroscience in Context (http://www.nic-online.eu)

within the European Platform of the Life Sciences, Mind Sciences and the Humanities
funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (Hannover)
Organisation: Jan-Christoph Heilinger, Lambros Malafouris, Saskia K. Nagel

ABSTRACTS

Andy Clark
Human Nature: Work in Progress?

I have argued that we humans are profoundly embodied agents: creatures for whom body,
sensing, world and technology are resources apt for recruitment in ways that yield a perme-
able and repeatedly reconfigurable agent/world boundary. For the profoundly embodied
agent, the world is not something locked away behind the fixed veil of a certain skin-bag, a
fixed reasoning engine and a primary sensory sheath. Rather, it is a resource apt for active
recruitment and use, in ways that bring new forms of embodied intelligence into being. Such
agents are not helpless bystanders watching the passing show from behind a fixed veil of
sensing, acting and representing, but the active architects of many of their own bounds and
capacities.
In this talk, I!ll briefly present that perspective, and raise some questions concerning its impli-
cations for the very idea of human nature. Just what does it mean for a kind of agent to have
extensive plasticity as one of their most distinctive traits, and what (if anything) determines
the scope of that plasticity?

Dieter Birnbarcher
Human dignity as a criterion of neural and other forms of human enhancement

1. The first steps towards Cyborgization

An article in Science, entitled “Part man, part computer” of February 2002 reports Kevin
Warwick!s project to have a computer chip implanted in the nerves of his wrist and to connect
the impulses detected by the chip to a computer. The operation was carried out in March
2002. The background of this and similar experiments is the vision of a symbiosis between
man and computer that allows for a substitution, compensation, or enhancement of bodily
functions by a machine. Among the voices commenting on the project was also a sceptical
voice, that of the New York based political scientist Langdon Winner. Winner objected to the
experiments on moral grounds. His argument was that a technology enhancing man!s natural
capacities for information processing by connecting the central nervous system to a com-
puter would be wrong because it would constitute a fundamental change of “man!s essence”.
With these reservations, Winner does not stand alone. There have been quite a number of
voices in the last years who think that it is morally wrong, and even incompatible with human
dignity, to deliberately change the nature of man, either by manipulations of the genotype or,
if substantive, of the phenotype. Among the group of “bioconservatives”, as they are called,
there are well known authors like Jeremy Rifkin, Frances Fukuyama and Leon Kass, the
chief bioethical advisor of the American government.
 March 13 & 14, 2009, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Is there anything morally problematic about attempts to enhance natural human functions by
artificial means? Or should we follow philosophical “transhumanists” like Jonathan Glover
who simply cannot see why we should refrain from making use of the possibilities of biotech-
nology in the same way we have traditionally made use of the possibilities of education and
mental training to improve our own lives and the lives of our children?
2. The natural and the artificial
There is striking discrepancy between the way the “natural” is valued by philosophy and by
the general public. In modern moral philosophy, naturalness has lost most of its ethical cre-
dentials. Metaethical naturalism has been successfully criticised by Hume and G. E. Moore,
and normative naturalism hardly fares better. The moral deficiency of naturalism is that only
certain pre-selected aspects of nature can successfully serve as models for human behav-
iour. The theoretical deficiency of naturalism is that it is circular because the pre-selection
simply projects antecedent valuations on to nature. Even a theory of natural teleology is no
help because the attribution of purposes to nature is likewise problematic. Furthermore, even
if purposes could be attributed to nature, the crucial question remains why we should follow
these purposes. In contrast to philosophical scepticism, everyday moral thinking continues to
rely heavily on the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial. Negatively valued states
regarded as artificial are regularly disvalued more intensely than corresponding natural
states, natural dangers are feared less and are more easily accepted than corresponding
anthropogenic risks. This asymmetry is manifested also in the attitudes towards innovative
procedures in biomedicine, especially in genetics and reproductive medicine. In this field,
human interventions are often thought to be illegitimate not although but because they aim at
states which would be welcomed if brought about by the spontaneous working of natural
forces.
3. Human dignity and the “yuk factor”
One of the symptoms of this positive valuation of the “natural” in biomedicine is the increas-
ing “naturalization” of the concept of human dignity, especially in German speaking countries.
The core of the concept of human dignity is increasingly identified with the biological aspects
of human existence and no longer with the intellectual, moral and emotional capacities by
which humans differ from other animals. By this tendency, the problem of the semantic emp-
tiness of the concept of human dignity (identified by Schopenhauer in his criticism of Kant) is
exacerbated. It seems that the invocation of “human dignity” is little more than an
“apotropeic” gesture keeping anything uncanny, monstrous, degenerate, or simply “unnatu-
ral” at a distance. Psychologically, it might be interpreted as a symptom of emotional stress
and loss of orientation caused by too rapid dislocations of the dividing line between the natu-
ral and artificial.
4. What does human dignity mean?
In this chapter, I argue that the concept of human dignity (as well as the principle to protect
human dignity) is in fact closely connected to biological givens. Each of the three concepts
used in current bioethical debate refer to biological factors and not to intellectual, moral or
emotional qualities: the normatively strong concept applicable to born humans, the norma-
tively weak concept applicable to all stages of human existence, and the generic concept
applicable to the human species as such. I argue, however, that this does nothing to satisfac-
torily answer the question why an artificial substitution of (part of) these factors should be
rejected as a violation of human dignity.
5. “Artificial”, adverbial vs. predicative
Artificiality in the adverbial sense means that something has been produced by artificial
means. Artificiality in the predicative sense means either that something differs from its natu-
ral analogues by being of a different substance or by having different functions. A paradigm
of an artificial man in the adverbial sense is a potential clone resulting from an artificial proc-
ess of nuclear transfer. A paradigm of artificial man in the substantial sense is a prosthetic
man or half-robot (the substantial variant), paradigms of artificial man in the functional sense
an athlete enhanced by gene doping, a superbrain realised by systematic breeding, or a line
of offspring with a resistance gene introduced by germ-line intervention. Why is it that only
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 “Human Nature” and its alterability – Past, present, and future of human becoming

the first and the last variants of artificial humanity are rejected with reference to the principle
of human dignity? The answer seems to be that only in these cases man is overstepping
natural limits and not only substituting natural functions. Only in these cases is he “playing
God”.
6. Artificial production of human beings and human dignity
The principle of human dignity underlies most of the arguments by which reproductive clon-
ing is at present rejected all or over the world. The Additional Protocol to the Convention on
Biomedicine of the Council of Europe rejects cloning as contrary to human dignity for the fact
that it involves an “instrumentalization” of human life. I argue that this argument is inconclu-
sive for each of the three concepts of human dignity distinguished.
7. Is technological self-transcendence a violating of human dignity?
It seems difficult, if not paradoxical, to base a rejection of technological enhancements of
human nature on human dignity because one of the constituents of human dignity is man!s
relative independence from biological constrains. The freedom of the Freigelassene der
Schöpfung (Herder) consists, among others, in the freedom to make his own nature an object
of systematic change and intentional design. There seems to be no reasonable sense of “es-
sence of man” that justifies a categorical verdict on human self-improvement. Neither an em-
pirical nor a normative explication of “man!s essence” supports such a verdict. The leading
normative definition of man since the Enlightenment is based on the ideals of autonomy, in-
dividuation and responsibility. Technical ways of self-improvement cannot be morally objec-
tionable as long as they respect these ideals or even open up new avenues to their realisa-
tion.
8. Risks of discrimination
There are, however, risks in technological self-improvement, and some of these risks might
go so far as to jeopardise human dignity. One of these risks is discrimination by heightening
the standards of what counts as “normal”. Heightened levels of normalcy have in their wake
heightened risks of failure, of social discrimination, and of reduced self-esteem. Relevant
examples are, in many industrialised societies, high standards of physical fitness, physical
attractiveness, and achievement motivation. Thus, the social effects of further human self-
improvement might be a mixed blessing. These risks, however, do not justify the bioconser-
vatives' categorical verdict on changing human nature.

Merlin Donald
Super-plasticity: implications for the definition of human nature

Human beings have evolved a highly plastic brain that is capable of adapting to an infinity of
possible cultural environments. When compared to other species, the term "super-plasticity
seems apt in the human case.
Plasticity has two aspects in human cognition: life-long adaptive learning, and massive cul-
tural variation. Both individuals and societies can learn and adapt, but in this regard, there
are very large differences between different societies. This suggests that the full exploitation
of super-plasticity is to a degree dependent on cultural factors.
The implications (and possible limitations) of human super-plasticity are discussed in the
context of fast-changing modern high-tech societies.

John Dupré
Schools vs. Recombinant DNA as ways of enhancing the human genome

There is a good deal of debate nowadays about the ethical implications of 'enhancing' hu-
mans by making changes to their genetic structure. My main point in this talk is that much of
this debate assumes a view of genetics that has been thoroughly refuted by contemporary

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 March 13 & 14, 2009, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

molecular biology. In this view, the nature of the adult organism is more or less determined
by its inherited DNA sequences. As we learn to interpret this sequence, it is imagined, we will
be able to use recombinant DNA technologies to alter the genome sequence, and thereby
produce different, and preferable kinds of adult organisms.
This view assumes a linear chain of causes running from a fixed genome to a mature pheno-
type. But in fact the genome is in constant two-way interaction with the rest of the cellular
environment. Changes to the genome will either have little effect--the most likely effect as the
organism is a highly robust system--or multiple cascading effects that will be extremely diffi-
cult to predict or control.
The good news, however, is that the organism is extremely plastic and development can re-
spond adaptively to the environment. This is especially true of the human organism, which
has acquired the ability to evolve very rapidly through capacities for social and individual
learning. Creating appropriate and well-designed environments, therefore, can be expected
to produce individuals that come closer to ideals we may construct. It may even be that such
changes to the environment will produce adaptive changes to genomes. At any rate, better
schools are a far more promising route to enhanced humans than is deliberate manipulation
of genomes.

Chris Gosden
Material Tensions – the plasticity of the human body versus the stability of artefacts

A combination of recent work in neuroscience and older research in archaeology has re-
vealed a key tension in human life. On the one hand the human brain (and its body) are
shaped by life experience and activities, so that the neural connections in the brain are laid
down in part through our activities. The combination of brain-body-world means that these
neural connections depend in turn on the use of material culture, spaces and landscapes
through which people act. On the other hand archaeology has shown that artefactual forms
can change over decades and centuries, at a timescale way beyond the biographical span of
a human life. Although the human organism is capable of rapid change, this is muted to a
considerable degree by slower changes in the artefactual world. In my paper I shall look at
the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43, which might be seen as a sudden event bringing
about rapid change, but from a long-term perspective which shows some continuity in arte-
factual forms from the Iron Age into the Roman periods. In this case and possibly many oth-
ers, sudden change is mediated and dealt with through continuities in the nature and use of
material culture. I shall balance the definite changes that occurred in the ways in which peo-
ple acted in the world due to the Roman invasion with the elements of life which gave stability
and continuity. I shall finish by making some brief remarks on the implications of this scenario
for understanding change in the present.

Jan-Christoph Heilinger
Anthropological Arguments – Can they be useful in the moral debate about Human En-
hancement?

In my paper I will examine the role of “anthropological arguments” in the bioethical debate
about human enhancement. Anthropological arguments take a normative understanding of
what it means to be a “human being” as a starting point for ethical judgements. Criticising
any directly normative conception of “human nature”, I want to try an alternative way of un-
derstanding the normativity of the concept: quasi-democratic deliberative processes, based
on factual information and mutual engagement, could provide a well-founded normative idea
of being human. At the center of this notion stands the human capacity of self-determination.

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 “Human Nature” and its alterability – Past, present, and future of human becoming

I will ask whether this conception allows anthropological arguments to play an important role
in the moral debates about human enhancement, even if the anthropological layer of the dis-
cussion is only one among others (and needs to be completed by risk-assessments and a
reflection on the societal outcomes of any intervention). I will conclude my paper with an ex-
ample.

Lambros Malafouris / Saskia Nagel / Jan-Christoph Heilinger

Human nature and its alterability: The Human Enhancement Continuity Thesis (HECT).

The rapid growth of neurotechnologies and cognitive enhancement not only challenge our
conventional understanding of what means to be human but also raise many ethical con-
cerns about what is safe, fair and otherwise morally acceptable. Some critics would even
claim that many forms of cognitive enhancement – in allowing human beings to deeply alter
their physical functioning, their phenomenal experience and the material basis of their body
and mind – pose a threat to “human nature”. This sort of criticisms and fears are rooted, we
argue in this paper, on a number of deeply entrenched and misconceived assumptions about
the human mind and human evolution and the concomitant vision of cognitive enhancement
that those assumptions entail. Thus one of the aims of our paper is to attempt a cross-
disciplinary reframing of our conventional understanding of the concept of human nature and
to develop some basic consensus about which analytic scale better encapsulates the dis-
tinctiveness of our species (genetic/biological, social/cultural etc.). Moreover, we want to ask
what, if anything, is so special about cognitive enhancement and try to embed this notion in a
more appropriate anthropological and coevolutionary background. It is certainly the case that
anatomically modern human brains are different in important ways from the brains of any
other present or past primates. But at least part of the reason that Homo became sapiens
lies in its unique ability to alter, modify and change what for other species remained more or
less fixed and stable. More simply, if we accept that tool use and enhanced working memory
was part of the reason that humans came to develop language and symbolic thinking, then
why should we perceive neuro-engineering as a threat rather than as the new stone industry
of the 21st century? No doubt a memory enhancing drug or a silicon chip implanted to replace
a damaged part of the human hippocampus differ in many important respects from a Middle
Stone Age abstract engraving or a Mycenaean Linear B tablet or a Mesopotamian clay token.
But their obvious differences need not obscure the far more interesting question about how
they resonate. Rethinking just what traits mark the origin and major changes of our species
will place us in a better position to identify the traits that mark current changes in human cog-
nitive becoming thus gaining a better understanding about the evolutionary significance and
implications of cognitive enhancement. By rethinking the past our aim is to understand the
present and project into the future of human evolution. To this end, focusing on the broad
category of cognitive and sensory enhancement that we describe as Brain-Artefact Interfaces
(BAIs) we survey over different forms and cultural interventions of this type, from the Palaeo-
lithic period to the present. We compare and examine the impact of these alterations on the
human organism and their consequences for the meaning of “human nature”. These consid-
erations form the basis for developing what we call the Human Enhancement Continuity The-
sis (HECT). That is, the thesis that human becoming necessarily is and has been based on
the possibility of alterations (be it through conventional or recent biotechnological interven-
tions). We argue that much of what we call "modern human cognition! is enhanced human
cognition and we suggest that the notion of cognitive enhancement works best as a means to
blur rather than reiterate the boundaries between brain, body and culture.

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 March 13 & 14, 2009, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Erik Parens
What Do—and Should—the Two Sides of the Debate about Technologically Shaping Hu-
mans Share?

This workshop seems to react to the concern of some that new neurotechnologies may “chal-
lenge our understanding of what it means to be human” or challenge “our idea of human na-
ture.” Specifically, the workshop conveners want to discuss if these technologies may be
“qualitatively different” from technologies that have come before. Furthermore they raise the
question, whether – if we embrace them – we may impoverish our understanding of our-
selves as humans, and thereby may ultimately impoverish our experience as humans.
This sort of concern has of course been derided by many (perhaps especially Anglo-
American) philosophers. First, enthusiasts about neurotechnologies suggest that the idea of
human nature is empty—and that even if were not, even if we could know what is natural for
humans, we would not then know what we should do with a given technology. Second, they
answer flatly that these technologies are not qualitatively different from earlier technologies,
and thus pose no greater threat to our humanity than earlier technologies. Moreover, they
answer that there is no in-principle reason why these techs will impoverish our understanding
or experience; indeed, they believe that these technologies can allow us to become more
fully human.
At the workshop, my (tentative!) plan is to try to offer suggestions for improving the debate
between critics and enthusiasts, by simultaneously respecting the real differences that distin-
guish the two sides and calling attention to the commitments that the two sides do—or
should—share.

Andreas Roepstorff
Brain Plasticity and Mind Technologies

The brain in the 21st Century appears a plastic brain: mutable, open to changes and struc-
tured by practices. No matter whether the mind is what the brain does, or the brain becomes
what the mind does, this perspective suggests a dynamic brain, which interfaces the mind,
the body and the surroundings.
This approach apparently obviates a rigid distinction between the mental and the material. In
my talk, I will explore a few fields that have traditionally been placed either in mind or in the
world. I will ask of them the question: should they simply be considered mind technologies?