‘In Defence of the Human Being’ (Part 2*)

The museum in Ernst Barlach’s home town Güstrow (Germany) houses the sculpture ‘Reading Monks’ from 1932. Barlach was an opponent of war and was considered ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. In 1932, he sculpted two monks reading together, sharing a common spiritual world and symbolising the spiritual nature of man, which finds its meaning in community. Barlach thus created an image of deep humanity that reminds the viewer of who we humans are.

Spiritual decimation
in the human sciences

The two men reading together also recall the suppression of education by the Nazis from 1932 onward by means of the eradication of the image of humanity, which Barlach experienced oppressively.
  Anyone who has witnessed the intellectual cuts and slashes in the human sciences since the 1960s and 1970s and who has had to watch in horror as the human being has completely disappeared (been made to disappear) in some areas of our human science disciplines will be very grateful for the book ‘Defence of Man’ published in 2020 by the philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs, who teaches as Karl-Jaspers Professor of Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the Ruprecht Karls University of Heidelberg. Here speaks an educated man from the times before the education ‘reforms’.

Ideologues with
shallow nihilistic theories

When reading this excellent book, it will be painful to think back to and to remember your own student days in the early seventies: wherever the humanistic view of man, which was still part of the educational canon when I was a student, has gradually disappeared since then, ideologues with shallow nihilistic theories have emerged – such as the historian Yuval Noah Harari, quoted by Fuchs, whose 2017 book ‘Homo Deus’ is now celebrated by global power elites as ‘posthumanism’. There the human being, born free and equal in rights and dignity, is replaced by biology, cybernetics and ‘artificial intelligence’ – can anyone still disagree with the firm belief that the prevailing science is the science of those in power? Harari’s nihilistic theory dehumanises us humans into a “collection of biochemical mechanisms that are constantly monitored and controlled by a network of electronic algorithms.” The ‘idea of an autonomous self’ and the human self as an inseparable part of our dignity, is cynically consigned by Harari to the ‘realm of the Easter bunny’. Man is ‘an obsolete algorithm’, he says. Delete.

The global power elites’ lust for power

Little does it surprise the politically minded thinker that Harari was a speaker at the World Economic Forum in 2018, after his book ‘Homo deus’ was named ‘Wissensbuch des Jahres’ (Knowledge Book of the Year) by the magazine Bild der Wissenschaft in 2017 and Harari received the German Business Book Prize – a prize awarded by the German business newspaper ‘Handelsblatt’, Goldman Sachs and the Frankfurt Book Fair! And finally, it is hardly surprising that Harari gave the opening speech at the annual conference of the German Ethics Council in Berlin in 2018. Kurt Marti expressed his extreme annoyance with Harari’s book in the Swiss online newspaper Info Sperber on 30 January 2018: “According to Harari, the mass murderers Hitler and Stalin were ‘humanists’ who ‘worship man’ and who are convinced that ‘Homo sapiens has a unique and sacred essence’”¹. Fuchs emphasises that Harari’s nihilistic view of humanity reflects the desire for domination of global power elites: Digital surveillance systems are being created worldwide using artificial intelligence, and these dominate people by means of social technology.
  When Harari so cynically denaturalises man as a means to his ends and thus denies us our human dignity, there is only one thing left to do: man is ‘an end in himself’, says Kant, representing the centuries-old tradition of European humanism: man has no price, as Harari’s neoliberal backers suggest, but man has dignity, and everyone is of infinite value. Everyone. Kant therefore demands the following ethical maxim: “Act in such a way that at all times, you see the humanity both in your person and in the person of everyone else as an end, never merely as a means”.

‘Digital’ brain –
sheer biological nonsense

From the very beginning, a strange campaign has concealed the real dangers of computer misuse behind a nice-sounding fairy tale: Already the first electronic computer, still powered by tubes (!), was presented to the US public in 1946 as if it were a machine with human characteristics. In the film ‘A Machine Changed the World’ (BBC 1946, written and directed by Fiona Holmes), an enthusiastic US civil servant raved to the camera that the

gigantic electronic brain has begun to think. With tubes like in any radio. The world’s first computer is able to add up metre-long columns of numbers every second. It is currently pondering the mathematical problems of the army. But one day it might also think about our tax returns.²

In 1950, the leading German magazine Der Spiegel, for example, raved even more uninhibitedly than the aforementioned American that the computer was a ‘machine brain’. Yes, it was more than just a machine. It was a ‘thinking monster’ whose ability ‘resembles the human power of judgement’.³ Like a human being, it had a ‘brain box’ in the ‘middle’ of which was a ‘centre of will’: “a centre from which the numbers go into the machines. Together with the commands as to what should be done with it”.⁴ In the following decades, human characteristics were attributed to the computer in this same style, and today this widely characterises our misconceptions of the ‘electronic brain’: the human characteristic of being able to think was attributed to the machine. And conversely, people attributed machine characteristics to humans, namely that our brain works ‘digitally’ like a computer – sheer biological nonsense. But the comparison caught on: the machine was upgraded to a living being in the consciousness of broad sections of the population. And humans and their brains were devalued as machines. Yet the American atomic bomb and computer developer John von Neumann, for example, knew exactly what a computer could do when he praised the computer as a ‘new mathematical machine’ to the North Rhine-Westphalia Research Association in 1955 with the words, “when we say that machines think, learn, etc., this is to be understood symbolically. Of course, they only do what has been minutely pre-chewed for them beforehand”.⁵
  Consequently, however, the myth that electronic computers were ‘electronic brains’ that could ‘think’ became popular among the general public. When I went to school in the 1960s, there was already a debate in Germany about whether teachers could be replaced by such ‘electronic brains’. Back then, the Christian Democrats were still protesting, and back then they still knew that you cannot replace people with machines …

As in mass productions
of science fiction novels

The idea that the computer calculates and thinks like an ‘image’ of a human being was, however, only the first chapter of the fairy tale served up to the public, wrote Erhard Tietel in 1995 in his book ‘Das Zwischending. Die Anthropomorphisierung und Vermenschlichung des Computers’. (The thing in-between. The anthropomorphisation and humanisation of the computer). The second step was that the computer-human relationship was gradually reversed in its representations and in the public consciousness: The computer had already been glorified as the ‘image’ of the human being. Now the additional fiction was begotten that this machine had ‘outgrown its role model’, the human being, and had now itself become the ‘pre-image’, ‘against which the human being threatens to remain merely a faint reflection, a tired reflection’.⁶ Now it looked as if the computing machines had begun to ‘set the standards’ and as if the ‘servants’ [the computers] had potentially become the masters of events’, ‘to whom man must now try to do justice, indeed, to do it right’.⁷
  In the mass-produced science fiction novels and booklets, TV space series and much more, this line of thinking has been widely disseminated ‘to the common herd’ year after year; it now characterises the image of humanity in many areas of our societies and is constantly being refreshed: in the Swedish TV series ‘Real People’, for example, robot people (‘humbots’), who are indistinguishable from real people, live among real people and eventually fight to be allowed to marry and have children. A genre of popular science novels has emerged that deals with the rise to power of machines and computers in ever more fantastical ways. Intellectuals have speculated about ‘the consciousness of machines’.⁸ And today we talk about ‘artificial intelligence’ as if it were (reasonable) thinking.

Human intelligence –
linked to self-awareness

But after reading Thomas Fuchs’ book, the reader is literally back in reality: computers are stupid, they are machines condemned to blind obedience, and they only ever do what others tell them to do, even if it is wrong: nonsense in, nonsense out – but only as long as it suits the (human) person who created the machine and who can switch it off again. The computer can neither correct mistakes nor think about itself. It has no religion, cannot kill itself or empathise with (other) people. The computer cannot imagine what a person thinks about it. Does not intelligence also mean that Moritz can imagine what Max thinks about Moritz? And Moritz can also form a picture of what Max imagines that Moritz thinks about him, i.e. Max, what Max wants to do – we can go on and on in this way! The machine cannot do anything like this. It cannot defend itself against being destroyed, upgraded, repaired or even disposed of by humans. By the way, how would you educate a computer? How could a computer ever become a computer through a computer? Our psychology professor, enthusiastic about cybernetics, wanted to build a ‘neurosis computer’ in the 1980s. He said that if you ‘fed’ this machine with all the symptoms of a neurotic person, the smart machine would spit out the right form of therapy. Nota bene: this was a trained intellectual, a student of Konrad Lorenz. To my question how a computer could calculate love, he did say that it was not yet able to do this …
  It cannot be explained away: human intelligence is ‘linked to self-awareness’. Artificial intelligence has no awareness. It is therefore not intelligent. In all decisions, human intelligence is “always a reference to yourself; the ability to consider a complex situation from a higher point of view, so that it will be possible for new and different solutions to come into view”.⁹ And: Fuchs reminds us not to forget that intelligence is always ‘situated’, i.e.: I never think in isolation, but

always in a social context with other people and in a familiar environment, I view the world from a specific situation. This situation is always one I feel, one I sense, one that provides values that I need in order to make decisions in a complex world in which life, including survival, as well as life together with others are at stake. I can only make decisions on the basis of values. [...] There are no purely rational decisions.¹⁰

The computer can therefore at best simulate human intelligence, but only after humans have programmed it to do so. Humans, however, can use their intellect ‘without outside help’. It is actually very simple: a creature cannot be smarter than its creator, as the famous Basel zoologist Adolf Portmann once succinctly commented on the question of how computers think.
  What has happened to us contemporaries that we are barely able to think any longer? Lack of education? The need to be where the others are? A wish to be recognised? Delusions of grandeur? Enthusiasm for technology?

We humans do
not have a price, we have dignity

In view of these easily recognisable facts of life, why is there no general outcry when paltry intellectuals hired by the powers that be, like Harari, want to replace us humans with computers – thereby degrading us as a means to an end and robbing us of our human dignity?
  Despite all this, man is ‘an end in himself’. Kant and European humanism are right: we humans do not have a price, we have dignity. Therefore, the following applies to all people: “Act in such a way that at all times, you see humanity both in your own person and in the person of everyone else as an end, never merely as a means”.
  This is valid, pre-state and supra-temporal, and solely because we are human beings. And all theories can be judged on their merits by this. Full stop. To conclude, let Thomas Fuchs have his say once again:

Machines have no (moral) values. We can only pretend they have them and act as if they do. We forget that we ourselves have already chosen our preferences. We can see this, for example, in the questions that ethics committees are discussing in connection with electric cars. Should electronic cars be programmed in such a way that, if two road users are at risk, they are more likely to kill an elderly person or a child? Here you can immediately see that an electronic car will never make a decision. It will simply follow the algorithm according to which it has been programmed. And this algorithm is decided by humans. So if we pretend that we are leaving decisions to an artificial intelligence, then we are lying to ourselves and hiding the fact that it is us or powerful groups in society who are actually making the decisions.¹¹  •

* Part 1 appeared in Current Concerns No 8 of 23 April 2024

¹ Marti, Kurt. ‘Homo Deus’: ‘Humanisten’ Hitler and Stalin. In: Info Sperber of 30 January 2018
² See Holmes, Fiona (writer and director). ‘A machine changed the world”, BBC 1946
³ Der Spiegel, No. 28, 1950, p. 37
⁴ Der Spiegel, No. 28, 1950, p. 38
⁵ Neumann, John von. Entwicklung und Ausnutzung neuerer mathematischer Maschinen (Development and utilisation of new mathematical machines ), published by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen. Cologne and Opladen 1955, p. 8
⁶ Tietel, Erhard. Das Zwischending. Die Anthropomorphisierung und Vermenschlichung des Computers. (The thing in-between. The anthropomorphisation and humanisation of the computer.) Regensburg 1995, p. 7
⁷ Tietel, 1995, p. 7
⁸ Günther, Gotthard. Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen. (The consciousness of machines.) Krefeld & Baden-Baden 1963
⁹ Fuchs, Thomas. Die Verteidigung des Menschen (In Defence of the Human Being), Frankfurt/Main 2020, p. 72
¹⁰ Fuchs, 2020, p. 73
¹¹ “Verteidigung des Menschen. Ein Gespräch von Magdalena Hegglin mit dem Philosophen und Psychiater Thomas Fuchs über Menschheitsträume, den Humbug digitaler Unsterblichkeit und die Bedeutung der Leiblichkeit”. (In Defence of the Human Being. A conversation between Magdalena Hegglin and the philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs about human dreams, the humbug of digital immortality and the importance of corporeality). In: Melchior No. 14/2021, p. 68-73