Category: Seven Impossible Modern Possibilities

At the end of this article you might be able to tell that as I have navigated down my list of IMPs, posted here, I went from refuting 100% to refuting with less strength. The more I go down the list the more nuances I have to make about my claims. In my last IMP article, about teleportation, I ended up coming to a very scary conclusion that we might create terrible animalesque humans that comes straight out of a dystopian nightmare, but never achieve the goal of true teleportation.

In this article I will address superpowers. If you follow Edward Feser you will know that he has addressed the ideas of humans having superpowers, and you might check out of this conversation, then, and I wouldn’t be terribly offended. But even if you know his arguments, you may still find a point of relevance here in how we react to his arguments.

Superpowers are, of course, of super interest to us humans. By their very name they mean that they are abilities beyond our normal means, something to make us special and something that allows us to overcome normal difficulties with great ease. What kid growing up watching Avatar: The Last Airbender didn’t want the ability to bend one of the four mystical elements?

“Yeah sure, but no one thinks superpowers are real or could be real”

Are we sure? Why are people working on jet packs? Are you telling me scientists aren’t working on cellular regeneration? What is DNA manipulation about if not this? Telepathy is a very real technology that the startup world is already taking advantage of. These things may not end up looking exactly like the Marvel characters so many of us are familiar with (or not, if you’re lame), and we may not be talking about Avatar levels of power, but these technologies and manipulations of the human body are exactly used for the same purpose that superpowers have. Hello, Iron Man is a superhero, too.

Just thinking from your own experience, and especially if you’ve been reading my other articles, you can guess that something like Marvel or Avatar levels of superpowers are not something coming down the pipeline. Why do you think science is so focused on the technology side of our ability to overcome nature? Changing things with your thoughts, or adding some supernatural physical ability like flying, is not something that just happens for a human.

This is an impossible modern possibility: humans will never have superpowers.

So there…that’s…it, right? Wow, short article.

Except not so much.

There are two situations that we need to contemplate with regards the supernatural side of our imagination.

1. The value of discovering and incorporating super technologies into our lives, essentially granting us supernatural abilities.
2. The deeper reality of our will, and what a perfected will looks like. Would we even want superpowers?

So, first. The value of getting all of these super technologies. It’s a fascinating point.

What if we could live forever?
What if we could fly?
What if we could see what other people were thinking?
What if we could have an advantage over everyone else?

There’s some fascinating answers to these questions. You could think about the innumerable material benefits that these powers would grant us, but what value would it have for us? That we could possess more of the material world? That we could get more…social power? Possessions? Comfort? Security?

Aristotle, when reviewing the notions of what true happiness consists, looks at all of these things. He ultimately comes to the conclusion, though, that nothing in the material world could be a true source of happiness, because anything gained in the material world ultimately goes on to serve some other purpose. There is nothing in the world that leads to true happiness, that is based primarily in itself, that does not lead to some other end.

Money cannot be the source of happiness, because it’s inherent design is to acquire other goods. The other goods cannot be the source of happiness because they inherently serve to cause you pleasure. Pleasure cannot be the source of happiness (via food, drink, or diversion), because, as Aristotle says, ‘that is the life of a fatted cow’ (Nicomachean Ethics, Chapter 5)- a human can have all of those things and still be sad. Power cannot be the source of happiness because it inherently serves to leverage the later possession of other goods or other peoples’ pleasing you.

All superpowers could do is provide us with more leverage within the worldly domain. Extend our time or other peoples’ time on earth, delaying the inevitable doom of death, of which all people suffer. In other words, superpowers cannot provide us with something that we do not already have – opportunities to seek good, truth, pleasures and evils within the world.

In short, I must ask you to reflect, what’s the value of pursuing superpowers? Why even care about manifesting them in real life? Additionally, I ask you to reflect on the wonderful superpowers that you already have access to: video calling, internet, electricity (the most advanced form of firebending), plumbing (waterbending), etc. Have those superpowers landed us with some amazing form of life that has resolved our problems? Or has it just left us hungry or more, putting us on a path of constantly seeking for more worldly things to satiate a hunger for happiness and goodness?

Now, second. If you have read Feser’s article on superpowers (forgive me, I cannot find it for the life of me), you will know that he does allow for the possibility of superpowers…just…with an interesting nuance.

If you follow with the logic for the existence of the Aristotelian human form, you know that there are the intellect and will as integral parts of the human form, or soul. Now, St. Thomas Aquinas argues that because the intellect and will are part of their own cycle of act and potency, the soul itself is capable of persisting beyond death and into eternity. It does not exist in an ideal way, since our form is meant to co-exist with materiality (i.e., our bodies), but it does keep existing.

Now, if you aren’t a Christian and you don’t enjoy the idea of an afterlife…well…I’m sorry for you. But bear with me here.

As far as the Christian life is concerned, we are promised a future Heaven. The Unmoved Mover of the universe, God, the reason for which we exist and the reason we exist at all, has revealed Himself to us and promises that, should we believe in His divinely revealed message, sent through His son Jesus Christ, then we will have eternal life. Just as Christ was raised on the third day with a perfected material body that was capable of co-existing with His eternal soul, so one day we will also be given a material body that does not deteriorate as our current bodies do.

On this future Earth, things will be a bit different. One of the principal causes of disorder in the world is that humans became inherently disordered, starting back with Adam and Eve. They were created perfectly, but chose sin (chose away from God). One of the consequences, St. Thomas Aquinas believes, is that the hierarchy of nobility within the human person (intellect and will, rational faculties, are more noble than sensory faculties) became inherently disordered. Whereas Adam and Eve had a perfectly ordered existence (suffering no physical ills, their rational powers having complete and proper domain over their other powers) they chose sin and lost that order.

In the restored Earth, Christ has promised us bodies that are perfectly restored. This means that our wills and intellects will have complete and proper domain over the rest of our bodily powers.

So, what’s the point of this?

Feser’s point is that a perfected will would have complete domain over the perfected body. Should we will ourselves to float? Well, the body should just comply. Should we will ourselves to move incredibly fast? The body should just comply.

Now, I’m not saying this is some sort of perfect argumentation, but I wanted to mention all of this to come to this main summary point: if we are in a perfected and restored Earth, and basically had every manner of using superpowers, we wouldn’t want to use them. What would be the point? We would need no advantages, we would need no increased material gain. We would have everything we needed and wanted. Even in this distinct possibility in the existence of having superpowers, there would be no point for them.

In conclusion, fantasizing about superpowers does no one any good, just like the rest of these impossible modern possibilities. So we gain a couple more years of life, so we live a little more comfortably, but what then? Nothing much more at all.

Just like the reasoning for the rest of the IMPs appeals to, we have much better things to focus on and much more important things to attend to than trying to make possible these modern impossibilities.

Here we are already at number five! Can you believe it?

So, how do I plan on trying to thwart science today? By talking about teleportation. This is, once again, one of those things that we see in nearly everything science fiction. From Star Trek‘s ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ to Stargate‘s Stargates, we see all sorts of variations and assumptions of how teleportation might pan out.

If you’ve been paying attention to my past few articles, and especially the articles surrounding my Thomistic Linguistics thesis, then you may be predicting my every word as I go through this article. But that’s okay, let’s see if you get it right.

Let’s start with how we might assume the inevitability of teleportation. Humans have an innate desire to move, to get from place to place. As time has gone on since the industrial revolution, our methods of transportation have gotten faster and faster and faster. We did just see the SpaceX craft Dragon reach something like 12,000 km/h (7,500 mph)? And that’s not even the fastest that human artifacts have traveled. The point is that our desire to move and get about is intense. Especially recently in our history humans have desired to make this transportation as efficient as possible. But, we ask ourselves, why worry about moving at superlight speeds when we could just transport there instead?

We can conceptualize it quite easy. Humans have a specific composition, a finite reality. My body is only so many feet wide and only so many meters tall. There is a limitation to my corporeal reality that means we can fit in some theoretical ‘box’ of some kind. Think, for example, about 3D printers. This technology, which improves all the time, only needs to print complexly enough our organic material, and it could theoretically compose a human person. We just need a 3D printer big enough.

How could teleportation work, theoretically? Well the main idea would be transmission. It could use electric transmission, light transmission, literally beaming atoms out of some atom gun that shoots from one place to another, but the essential point would be transmitting data. Since humans have material limits, we would just need sensitive enough scanners to pick up on the finest points of our reality and compile it into a transmissible package. Then we send that data from one terminal to another and boom, the second terminal is a 3D printer that pops out the human that entered at the first terminal.

In many ways this kind of technology already exists. We have the capacity of scanning a 3D object, of computing the finite limits of an object in 3D art programs, sending that data file to another terminal across the internet, and printing the same exact object at the second terminal. Sure, it might take a long time to refine the technology, especially scanning a specific object (wherein the scanned object becomes technically destroyed) and transmitting it in whatever state it was scanned, but with what we already have it just seems like a matter of time before we can pull it off. But, of course, you shall see me say:

This is an impossible modern possibility: we will never be able to materially transport a human being from one place to another.

Now, I would like you to take careful note of how I articulated the IMP. I said it will never be possible to materially transport a human being. The reason for articulating this is because of how someone might perceive teleportation as occurring. In the actual conceived teleportation process, doesn’t the person become immaterial? This is somewhat true, but the reality of every explored teleportation concept is that it somehow rests on the idea of transmitting the person, or parts of the person, through material reality. Either the person’s atoms are collected and redistributed or the specific composition of the person is maintained through computer transmissions. In any case, the transportation of the person never leaves the realm of the material, it is always material.

Before getting to the main objection, I would like to look at a minor one. As demonstrated in the recent Netflix series Living With Yourself, where Paul Rudd’s character thinks he is just getting a really rejuvenating massage and ends up getting cloned by accident. This is essentially the same technology we’re talking about, where even if the technology eventually gets developed, we run into the issue of potentially creating two of one person instead of transporting. The idea here, of course, is that we’re talking about recreating a human person every single time they transport. If the original that gets scanned isn’t properly destroyed, then two of that same person end up running around, wreaking havoc. While this dilemma does not prevent the technology from working, it at least presents a complicated philosophical question that should give everyone pause.

But, ultimately the minor objection doesn’t need to hold up any weight, because the main objection makes it obsolete. If you remember from any of my articles where I dissect the composition of a human person, you will know that I explicitly deny the notion that humans are solely composed of matter. Remember that my statement about that which is impossible is the material teleportation of the human person. All of the ideas about human teleportation, of course, are material in nature because the same people that conceive of teleportation being possible are also people that conceive of humans being solely made of matter.

If humans were indeed solely material beings, I would yield in a heartbeat the inevitability of human teleportation.

But humans aren’t. We are not just matter, but form and matter. While our form is immaterial, it is still a reality, a thing that has existence. In Thomistic language we say that forms have substance (meaning they have being, not that they are composed of matter in some way). If teleportation would ever be possible, it would not be a simple matter of transmitting matter, it would be a matter of transmitting an immaterial reality from one physical point of reality to another.

By its very nature, you cannot use material and physical means to modify something that is immaterial. It just doesn’t work that way. They exist at different levels of reality. No matter what sort of teleportation device you might theoretically engage with, the form of the person will never move along the mechanics of the teleportation device, meaning that people can never be teleported.

“But Robert, what if we do create a sophisticated enough 3D printer that can re-print a human person?”

I would not deny that science could eventually produce a 3D printer with such abilities. It seems highly improbable that we could ever really produce technology that handles physical material in such a delicate manner on such a large scale, but far be it from me to say what could be done in the realm of physical reality. Who would have ever thought that we could split an atom? Not to mention, 3D printed organs are expected to soon be a reality, and a whole human body is only a few steps away from that.

My friends, this actual possibility, the ability to print a whole human body, scares me. To print organs to save lives is a beautiful thing, but the ability to recreate human bodies is asking a living nightmare on us. If someone were to truly develop a technology that could painlessly and effortlessly destroy a human and then transmit their data only to have it 3D printed, we’re talking about a corporate or governmental monolith with the world’s most efficient weapon.

For this technology would, make no mistake, kill the person currently living, leaving their soul behind, obliterating their body, only to recreate that body somewhere else. That recreated body has two potential ways of turning out:

1.  Dead.

The body, soulless and lifeless, appears at the other side of the teleportation equipment. All of the organic components are properly reprinted together, but it is not the same person, just a copy of that person, whose mind has now been separated from the body.

2. As an Animal.

This is probably the scariest option. If the scanner was so delicate to pick up on the quantum-level realities of a human person, it is likely able to pick up everything, such as neurons mid-fire and the heart mid-pump. If the 3D printer is so efficient that it re-creates that person in an instant, then we’re talking about a moment to moment success of the heart pumping pre-teleport and finishing the motion of that pump on the other side of the teleportation equipment, and leaving the body alive. But if I can admit this, then what about the mind?

It gets left behind.

Human forms have multiple powers, but some of those powers are inherently tied to a physical reality. If you remember in my article #1 – An Argument for Aristotelian Forms, forms like triangles exist when we create a material triangle and then cease to exist one the triangles disappear. If we create technology that can re-create a human body, it would be akin to us creating a triangle. All of the physical side of humanity would be present – organs, the brain, sensation, appetite, etc. But we can’t manipulate immaterial reality. We couldn’t introduce the rational side of the mind, the purely immaterial part of our reality. It would be the totally animalized version of whatever person got scanned.

That’s freaking terrifying.

So remember folks:

This is an impossible modern possibility: we will never be able to materially transport a human being from one place to another.

And please, don’t try. The consequences (raging evil corporations and governments to the existence of animal people or the abuse of animal people once they could exist) are terrifying.

Wait…what? I have to write a whole article about this? Nobody thinks we can actually teach animals to speak, how absurd!

…Okay, so we’ve had fictional ideas about animals talking, but obviously that’s a ridiculous thing to think about.

Or at least, that’s what I want to say.

The notion that animals might speak has been a fascinating subject of investigation in the past century.

I could speculate on all of the reasons why humans started investigating, in serious and uncomfortable ways, the possibility of animals using language, but the most convincing to me is where the focus of the field of psychology was in the past century. At the beginning of the 20th century a lot of psychology was built up around behaviorism, the notion that all of human behavior is nearly equivalent to animal, only that we for some reason have developed more advanced behaviors than animals. Behaviorism might say that language is a result of an acquired behavior that humans developed over time in our social groupings, relating to nothing that happens with any sort of human ‘mind.’ Later psychology would bend in a different direction towards cognitive pyschology. Here psychologists would almost flip their narrative and say that human behaviors are a result of complex neurological workings inside the brain. More recent psychology has settled somewhere in between.

In each camp, though, most would agree that human abilities are first and foremost based in materialistic elements of human nature. Language, resulting from either a learned behavior or a complex neurological structure, would happen as a result of physiological means.

Someone smart along the way must have asked the question “well what about animals?” For, you see, if you say that human behaviors result from bodily structures that chimpanzees, gorillas, and dolphins also have, then who’s to say that chimpanzees, gorillas, and dolphins can’t also do what humans do, given the right circumstances?

Most modern pet owners will talk about the complex feelings of their animals, their personalities and silly quirks, and will even talk about how those animals might communicate to them about needs, likes and dislikes, and desires. Nowadays I’m even observing that pet owners will attribute mental disorders such as depression and anxiety to their pets.

The fact of the matter is that, for some reason, people in the modern time are extremely preoccupied with the idea about animals speaking. While I don’t see a huge interest in developing technology to achieve animal use of language, or a huge interest in research around training, the fact of the matter is that it does exist as a course of study by a selected few. Ultimately it remains as a subject of interest, especially when it comes to trying to prove exactly how animal humans actually are.

This is an impossible modern possibility: animals will never learn to use language.

Koko and Michael are two gorillas that learned a robust system of signs from American Sign Language (ASL). These gorillas learned to use these signs to communicate with researchers and, since ASL is a language, it was deemed that these gorillas could speak just like humans do.

This is the closest evidence that anyone has ever come to try and present the idea that animals could achieve language like humans. There is a huge flaw to this thinking, however. Most researchers have investigated these claims looking into whether the gorillas used complex syntactic and grammatical structure with their signs, or whether the gorillas’ use of language superseded that of a child, but these are not the right questions to ask when investigating the claims.

At one point I had read, God forgive me for I do not remember who said it, a point that at no point do any of the gorillas ever ask about something. That is to say, no animal has ever wondered about the way that something simply is. From the earliest stages of childhood development not only do children build up an ability to speak and communicate, but they also investigate and wonder about things. A gorilla has never done this.

So what? What is the significance behind that? The point is that at no point in time has any animal ever demonstrated a significant capacity to reason. Koko and Michael may have accepted how to use signs around a banana, but they had never asked ‘what is a banana?’ or ‘why is it yellow?’ or even ‘what is yellow?’ There is no evidence to ever suggest that animals are capable of separating abstract and generic knowledge from the particular knowledge of their experiences. This, compared to humans, who are capable of abstraction from the earliest times of their lives. This is an inherent difference between animals and humans, one that makes us stand apart in a grand way. Humans learn and know things, apart from their experiences, while animals only remember things sensorally.

“Well Robert the science on this subject has only started recently in the past century, we can’t possibly conclude this subject right now. There’s a lot more science needs to research before we could possibly come to the conclusion that animals can’t use language.”

Fun fact, going back as far as Aristotle, we have some good philosophical logic that actually supports what I’m talking about. Aristotle himself came to the conclusion that while animals do share certain traits with us, they cannot possess this element of reason. When pondering the subject of happiness, and explores the possibility of finding happiness through good food and drink, he says that ‘no, a human could never be happy through food and drink. This would be the life of a cow.’ What he meant by this is that cows can be plenty happy if they have enough food and drink and sensory pleasures that accompany them all their lives, but even when a man has plenty of access to physical pleasure and satisfaction, he always yearns for more.

In my article #2 – The Formal Cause of Man, I explore the idea of a hierarchy of forms that Aristotle and his subsequent philosophers discuss. The notion is that there are forms that have very little substance to them, but that there are other forms that have a lot more substance, that contain other little forms in a virtual way (possessing forms in an integrative way, not as distinct sub-components). The more widely encompassing a form is, the nobler it is. The most noble form is the form that precedes all other forms, that cannot be possessed by another.

Plants are noble than rocks. Plants have virtual forms that make it possible for plants to grow and reproduce. Animals are more noble than plants because they can do all that plants do, but on top of that can sense (yes, Aristotle said animals have feelings, too) and can use locomotion. Yet humans are more noble than animals, because humans can do all that animals can do and yet further possess the capacity for reason. For Aristotle, the capacity for reason, the intellect, is the defining feature of humanity.

As is the bulk work of my thesis Thomistic Linguistics, reason is the necessary ingredient to make language possible.

Now, let’s be clear about what animals can do: Animals can feel! That time Fido was sad you left for work and happy when you came back? Totally valid. Probably actually sadness and happiness. Sadness and happiness are feelings, elements of our existence based in the ability to feel or to sense, something animals are clearly capable of doing. Furthermore animals can communicate! It’s a ludicrous job to try to deem Koko and Michael as some obscure conspiracy theory. Obviously the researchers were successful in teaching the gorillas to use sign language to communicate. What is doubt-worthy is the notion that it was fully language. This, not because I question the use of grammar or syntax, but because the gorillas never used reason alongside the signs. Using signs to communicate feelings, needs, and motions of their sensory desires is indeed a feasible task (albeit complicated an impressive), but is not actually language. The gorillas never learned to gather abstract anything further than what was directly presented to them and remembered through their sensory organ (the brain). Your dog, clearly, is in fact communicating with you when you teach it a trick, but it doesn’t learn words as abstract notions – it associates sounds of words with specific sensory responses, and moves accordingly.

Until humans gain the power to magically alter someone’s form, no animal will be learning to use language.