Do We Want to Get Rid of Human Nature?
We can choose to be human and by making that choice we affirm the existence, relevance and importance of our human nature.
While most philosophers and theologists agree we can meaningfully talk about human nature, they often disagree when it comes to defining what its essence is. Those differences in opinion are to a large extent due to different perspectives.
According to Aristotle, reason, the ability to think and to use language, is the key factor distinguishing humans from other animals.
Religion often stresses the moral limitations of humans, how despite being created in God’s likeness, we are imperfect, sinful creatures.
Our conscience, coupled with our reason, is then the means by which we overcome our moral limitations.
With the rise of the mechanistic view of the world we have seen a growing tendency toward explaining away both morality and reason. From the mechanistic viewpoint, our actions are not guided by our free will, they are simply a consequence of the interaction of particles in the material world. Our reason is then irrelevant and our idea of moral responsibility too. And some philosophers even deny the existence of human nature as such.
With the increasing power of artificial intelligence, we are now at the point where outsourcing our thinking is fast becoming a realistic option. And the inconveniences of sinful behaviour might soon be fixed by medicine, which according to Adam Cifu and Michael Ostacher may soon eliminate the seven deadly sins.
Perhaps, in the end, the existence of human nature is all about choice. We can choose the option to be medicated in order to remove our moral imperfections, making our own conscience irrelevant. We can choose to outsource our thinking to machines, giving up our autonomy for the convenience of not having to think. Or we can choose being human, choose to think for ourselves, choose to deal with our imperfections, choose to take responsibility for our decisions and our actions. We can choose to be human and by making that choice we affirm the existence, relevance and importance of our human nature.
Transhumanism offers "no" guarantees that'll eradicate human imperfections without replacing this undesirable behavior with far greater idiosyncrasies.
It depends on the perspective chosen.
We see ourselves as an end-in-itself (I. Kant), because thanks to our (kantian) Rationality, we are also the origin of an understanding of the world.
That understanding of the world cannot be delegated
AI's are not truly autonomously intelligent because their understanding of the world belong to us
And if we continue with Kant, we can discredit any reductionism (among other of human beings) by pointing out that any phenomenological knowledge will hopelessly miss the noumenal reality.
Occam's razor sculpts out "uninteresting" details from reality, to leave only some bare principles.
But you could rightfully claim that the uninteresting details were just as real as the rest, so dismissing them is equivalent to simplifying reality until we get something we can possibly understand.
Is it possible to reduce human beings to computable models?
Well, in the first place, reductionism makes no sense because there is always a point of view in knowledge, there is an interest that makes us cut out some details rather than others (see above) and find some principles instead of others.
In the second place, the existence of computable models of reality implies the existence of the humans that created them out of a free will.
But of course, humans can commit many crimes against other humans, and anti-humanism is one of them
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