Imagine an advanced alien civilization shows up with a single goal: "increase flourishing on Earth." What would they actually do? Some say: Boost individual freedom. Others: Spark global harmony. A few: Fix our dying ecosystems. But I see it through the lens of bioengineering, metaphorically speaking.
Humans use bioengineering to empower ourselves by reorganizing our bodies at every level, including:
All these levels have vastly different forms of organization, from linear chains of command to decentralized swarms. Vitally, their parts often seem to be acting with their own goals, all the way down to cells crawling under a microscope. Even proteins can be modeled as agentic players in a strategic game, e.g. in the recent DockGame: Cooperative Games for Multimeric Rigid Protein Docking. Even the high-level neural patterns underlying a single person’s cognition can be seen as a game between many strategic agents with their own diverse desires and intentions, e.g. see Internal Game Theory.
If our goals involve other people, we might try to “reorganize” levels above us, like feeding our families and investing in companies. We might even be interventionists and invade Nazi Germany to liberate a nation or re-organize the institutions of the American South to emancipate a race.
People have always tried to engineer groups, nations, battalions, and societies for the same reasons we do biological engineering. Of course, humans are biological just like all the levels below us, but we call the analogous interventions by other names: governance, law enforcement, reward, punishment, persuasion, coercion, and violence. Like human bodies with their trillions of agents across levels, social bodies of all sizes can be seen as large, interacting systems, or even as organisms themselves.
When we intervene in biological systems, we ignore the agency and identity of all those cells, all those societies of proteins we are disrupting in service of making it easier to achieve our own goals. Social organisms often act the same way towards each other, e.g. see the the nation-states carved out by British-colonial interests on top of pre-existing tribal communities—forcefully displacing a people to sustain your empire like cleaving a lamb to feed your family.
Because humans look like each other, we tend to have empathy and see this level of social engineering as morally distinct from biological engineering. We view actions that violate the agency of people and groups as harming them, as opposed to reprogramming cells or transferring tissue in biological engineering. Sometimes we even rationalize this discrimination with empirical assumptions like “because we’re conscious and feel pain,” implying that none of the sub-systems we do biological engineering to are conscious or feel pain themselves.
Our moral distinction between social engineering and biological engineering is contingent on who we are, just like most people’s distinction between the suffering of humans and animals is contingent on their being humans. When we talk about the moral obligation to respect agency outside our own, we usually talk about systems that are beside us like plants and animals, rather than below and above us like organs and marriages. Not that we don’t talk about them at all, since we’ve all seen the tension between individualism and nationalism; between what’s good for you and what’s good for your family; the personification of a protagonist’s internal conflict as an angel and devil on their shoulders; the idea that we should listen to our bodies as if they had agency separate from our own; the image of our immune system’s T cells as soldiers diligently hunting and killing viruses. There’s a whole world of possible agencies not just beside us, but under and above us that we rarely give moral primacy to.
The main implication of all this that really strikes me is that an alien who has the power to engineer biological systems for its goals (even sympathetic goals, like liberty, justice, and the pursuit of happiness) may not naturally perceive this dividing line between levels of organization like we do. Why would it perceive an individual human body as the morally relevant unit of agency instead of say, a nation, a marriage, a sub-personality within a person (we often dissatisfy and oppress parts of ourselves), or the highly agentic systems of tissue and cells within a person?
Maybe some clever bioethicists at the Conference on Artificial Life will come up with a formal definition of “morally relevant level of organization” like they do periodically with “life”, “lyfe”, and “agency”, but I can’t help but think their criteria will be a bit biased towards centering individual humans.
So I wonder if altruistic aliens arrived with the same values we applaud here on Earth (like liberty, justice, and autonomy), how would their interventions look? Unless they happen to recognize agency at the individual-human level over all the other dozens of levels below and above us, the results might look catastrophically weird.
In other words, I wonder if a genuinely altruistic intergalactic surgeon landing on earth would morally distinguish a muscle from an industry, an organ system from a family, a cell cluster from a community, the massive network of interacting proteins inside each of our cells from a society, or a single person from any of the above.
I wonder if our expectations about what they will do should be based on the assumption that they wouldn’t perceive that dividing line as we do. This makes me wonder if we should be more mindful of the agency of “actors” at lower or higher levels when doing our own biological engineering. My practical answer is “no, what, of course not,” but then I wonder: how would we persuade aliens to be mindful of agency at our specific level if we can’t even persuade ourselves to respect the agency of the much more familiar cognitive and biochemical parts just below us? I pray for all of us if god turns out to have special sympathy for anything between a jungian shadow and a protein.
Imagine if this happened. In a world teetering on the brink of crisis, what if our desperate prayers for intervention are answered by a cast of competing aliens, each fixated on optimizing Earth for liberty, justice, and happiness, but at radically different scales of organization. The Protein Protectors see individual proteins as the true seats of agency, metabolizing cities into giant molecular soups that allow proteins to carry out their functions and interactions unburdened by the higher-level constraints of humans and societies. Meanwhile the Sentient Socialites see Earth's entire human population as a single, complex superorganism and implement sweeping interventions to empower humanity as a whole. They introduce global climate engineering and unified governance systems, optimizing our collective health while disregarding individual human concerns as casually as we ignore a single cell's protests in medicine. In stark contrast, the Cellular Civilizers grant autonomy to individual cells, turning human bodies into vast, squabbling anarchies.
People wake up to find their bodies have become battlegrounds of competing agencies: cognitive patterns reorganized for "optimal" global decision-making, organs granted independent rights, and sub-personalities—Jungian shadows given form and voice—vying for control. Even time itself becomes negotiable, as some aliens view our moment-to-moment identities as the true seats of agency, shattering linear narratives of self as each mind becomes overpopulated by a democracy of its past selves.
A woman’s brain must negotiate with her own rebellious liver for the right to enjoy a glass of wine. A man finds his sense of self fragmenting as his competing internal motivations are granted separate bodies. Nations grapple with the existential threat of being 'optimized' out of existence for the greater good of a continental consciousness, while continents compete with the interests of the liberated organelles composing many of their residents.