For philosopher Yuk Hui, reducing everything to data reduces our humanity. And we can turn to Chinese thought for an alternative
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
A great theme of A/UK from the start has been about technology - whether “things are in the saddle and ride mankind”, as the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, or the other way round.
We don’t deny the power of (say) computation to improve the quality of our common life together - improving efficiency, automating services we rely on. But only if we can reap those benefits in time and resources for workers and citizens, not just filling the rentier coffers of the elite powers that own the machines.
Yet we should recognise that this struggle between human and machine may have deep and possibly lethal roots. Could concieving of technology as an instrument of control be the basis of how we have come off the rails - resulting in our polluting industrial systems, or annihilating weapons systems?
Can the West learn from other cultures about how technique and technology might generate harmony and balance with others and our environment, rather than alienation? And are soft communication networks - or “cybernetics” generally - the meeting point for this challenge?
Such are the questions raised by the Chinese (and Berlin-based) philosopher (and ex-computer programmer) Yuk Hui. His recent books - including The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2016), and Recursivity and Contingency (2019) - ask big questions about the Eastern contribution to thinking about technlogy.
From two recent interviews - one from the LA Review of Books, and the other from Noema - we’ve pulled a series of fascinating quotes and themes:
Computer networks, Chinese thought (and medicine)
YUK HUI: The modernizers of China during the last 150 years have enthusiastically embraced the Western meaning of technology — tools to establish human dominion over all else. However, in order to go beyond Western modernity and the current mode of global modernization, we have to reflect on how non-European thought can affect the development of technology.
I have attempted to understand Chinese cosmotechnics [technology that implies a world-view] through the dynamic relationship between two major categories of traditional Chinese thought. “Dao,” or the ethereal life force that circulates all things (commonly referred to as the way), and “Qi,” which means tool or utensil. Together, dao and qi — the soul and the machine, so to speak — constitute an inseparable unity.
Throughout Chinese history, the understood unity of dao and qi constituted the morality and form of life proper to each successive epoch. This unity has both motivated and constrained the development of technology in China compared to the West. There, technology has been driven by instrumental reason, through which tools are fashioned as a means to overcome rather than to harmonize with nature.
One clear manifestation of this that remains today is the difference between traditional Chinese and modern Western medicine. Modern Western medicine heals by applying science to the body mechanistically. Traditional Chinese medicine heals by trying to foster harmony within the body.
… I grew up in Hong Kong. My father had a Chinese pharmacy where he sold plants and herbs. Chinese pharmacists walk mountain paths collecting herbs to be made into medicines. Making medicine is a complicated procedure: some plants must first be treated, to extract the poisonous substances they contain, before they can be made beneficial to human health.
Chinese medicine is based on Daoist cosmology, with Yin, Yang, and five kinds of Qi. If, from a Western perspective, you approach a Chinese doctor and ask, “Can you please show me your Qi and prove that this energy exists?” the answer would have to be no. If you can’t prove the existence of the energy at the base of your practice, how can you say that you practice a science? Here lies the problem.
But this doesn’t mean that Chinese medicine isn’t scientific. As an empirical science, it has functioned for 2,000 years based on a different epistemology. For a long time in Hong Kong, Chinese medicine has been ranked lower than Western medicine. If you go to a Chinese doctor, it won’t be covered by your health insurance because Chinese medicine is seen as unscientific.
Chinese Thought Is Relational
…What the ancient Chinese called morality wasn’t the obligation to follow rules governing behavior. For the ancients, morality— or in Chinese, “de” (virtue) in harmony with dao — means the affirmation and appreciation of the kindness of heaven and earth.
This is evident in the “Book of Changes,” where heaven and earth, or “qian” and “kun,” both condition and model a great personality. One way of interpreting the beginning of the “Book of Changes” is: “The Heavens are in motion ceaselessly, the enlightened exert themselves constantly. While the Earth is supportive and natural, only the virtuous can bear the utmost.”
For Confucians, to be a sage is to recognize the mandate of heaven because, despite heaven’s constant changes, the enlightened sage is able to interpret its moral connotations and thus recognize its mandate.
Daoists affirm this creative antinomy as dao and de, which, for them, actually bespeaks innocence, as in the status of a newborn baby who has a kind of uncontaminated openness.
Dao is neither nothing nor Being, but rather the principle according to which an oppositional continuity is maintained. It is a recursive movement that maintains the continuity between a set of oppositional pairs.
In cosmology, the continuity between “wu” (nothing) and “you” (being/having)
In metaphysics, that between “ti” (body) and “yong” (use)
In the philosophy of life, that between “tian” (heaven) and “ren” (human)
And in social and political life and cosmotechnics, that between dao and qi
Like the Chinese, the ancient Greeks also saw these oppositions in existence. The fundamental difference, however, which still echoes all these centuries later, is that the Greeks saw a discontinuity or contradiction instead of continuity or harmony in these forces.
At risk of oversimplification, one may say that Chinese thought is fundamentally relational, while Western thought, beginning with the Greeks, is fundamentally about being as substance… Eastern thought is rooted more in relationality than in the quest for the absolute or the essential.
The British biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham, in his study of China and technology, translated this relational sensibility (“ganying”) as a “resonance.” This resonance between the subject and the cosmos is the ground of morality; if one doesn’t follow this resonance, then he or she is acting against nature.
Here, nature doesn’t mean the environment outside of me but rather the way things are — the natural order. It is dao plus qi rather than either alone.
…In Chinese philosophy, there is no search for being or eternal form that we see, for example, in Plato’s “eidos,” the permanent reality that makes a thing what it is, or Aristotle’s more empirical “morphe,” or form. It is all the relational flux of becoming, not an arrest into a defined form of some essential being.
In the West, we can think of the absolute as some kind of finality or ultimate reality… but it is difficult to find any such absolute in Chinese thought.
The Daoists think that it makes no sense even to wonder what is the biggest, the smallest, the absolute, the endpoint, because there is always something beyond all this: the dao, the way, the constant creation and re-creation of something larger and smaller than what we can know.
Chinese thought is thus less teleological than Western thought — less teleological in the sense that it is always subject to the change of heaven and earth. It is never something that can be realized as such.
The end is in the noumena of the constantly regenerative cosmos, not in the defined phenomenal world that we can discover through our senses.
The transhumanist threat
That the conception we have about our technological future really matters in the present day is something I can illustrate with a personal experience. I recently gave a course in the philosophy of technology in Germany that had 25 students, mostly from the humanities. I asked them: “How do you see the future given the latest developments in artificial intelligence and genetic engineering?”
Ninety percent of them said they found our future prospects despair-inducing. The reason is obviously that they have very determined ideas about the future — for instance, that they will be replaced by machines. They will have to upgrade themselves to find a place in society.
Personally, I don’t think this needs to be the answer. We shouldn’t give in to such perspectives but rather actively resist them.
…The worst is Ray Kurzweil, of course, who says that that the so-called singularity is near and by 2025 we will become immortal. I say it in all my books: we must not give in to this kind of deterministic propaganda from Silicon Valley.
…It is very vague, if not illogical, to say that we need to be ahead of technology, since if the “we” is humanity, then it is constituted by technology itself. “We” will only find ourselves always being late.
Human-machine interface research has existed for a long time, and the desire to perfect the human being (including intelligence, emotion, and lifespan) has been a major motivation for that research, also known as transhumanism.
In the past, perfecting the human being was done through education — aesthetic training, physical discipline, intellectual development, et cetera. In Elon Musk’s vision, education will be replaced by a brain-microchip apparatus.
This undermines the idea of Enlightenment humanism because microchips, instead of reason, are to mediate between the human mind and its world.
Human beings have created a problematic decision for themselves: “to cut” or “to connect.” Biotechnology is introducing a new eugenics, which is at the core of 21st-century biopolitics. Enhancement of intelligence suggests better chances for employment and success.
If you remember the famous Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell (1995), the anarchists who decided to cut were finally raided and transformed into cyborgs.
… The ideology of Silicon Valley increasingly sees freedom and democracy as irreconcilable goals. This is the case, in particular, for the investor Peter Thiel: for him, there is no doubt that freedom first and foremost means economic freedom, freedom for multinational corporations.
The enormous investments in biotech are a preparation for a time when ethical limitations will be overcome or set aside so that technologies of biological intervention can freely circulate in the market.
This is a gigantic force that everyone feels, but nobody knows how it will manifest or how people will react. To me, this is the point where technodiversity becomes important and decisive. If we don’t manage to demonstrate that there are other alternatives, the transhumanist ideology will conquer the whole world.
We haven’t woken up Gaia yet - and we probably don’t want to
James Lovelock was a former NASA employee. He had worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory doing research on the atmosphere of Mars. Comparing the lifeless desert environment of Mars to the living Earth inspired him to develop his Gaia theory, which says that our planet works like a cybernetic system stabilizing itself through organic processes.
He added another point: through technology we can “wake up Gaia.” Satellites and antennas, for instance, are technical extensions giving Gaia new senses and technological unity. We can start to understand its workings through intelligible feedback mechanisms. The early Lovelock was a cybernetician.
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
Yet even with all of our satellites and antennae, we have yet to wake up Gaia. We have only just begun the technification of the Earth. Since cybernetics seems to transcend the divide between technology and nature, it is tempting to see it as a universal solution — a new universalism.
If we really were to understand the Earth cybernetically, we would need to experiment with it, like a black box. Where we find out, through trial and error, what works and what doesn’t. But how many times can we flirt with destroying the Earth in an effort to make that work?
If we try to use cybernetic theory to solve environmental problems, we lose sight of the fact that our relationship to nature is integrally related to human sensibility—for which there is little room in cybernetics. When we think of humans and the Earth as a cybernetic system, we have already lost the world.
…Reducing the world is losing the world….Because we think that the whole world is transparent and penetrable to our understanding—we think that everything can be calculated.
The first thing we need to do is to reconsider the distinction between what is calculable and what is incalculable. Then we must learn anew how to approach the world as the Unknown.
Composed from interviews with Yuk Hui in the LA Review of Books, and Noema.
For a South-Korean/German philosophical take on technology, see our excerpts from an essay by Byung Chul-Han.