Transhumanism

Transhumanism is an intellectual movement centered around fundamentally transforming the human condition by using technology to enhance intellectual, physical, and psychological abilities. The development of superhuman intelligence and the end of death by old-age are two common focus-points in transhumanism.

• If you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into primates, suddenly you might transform primates into something that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human – speech or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to a human. These possibilities, at the moment, are largely being explored in fiction but we need to start thinking about them now.
  • Tom Baldwin in "Medical research warning over human cells in animals", by Alok Jha, The Guardian, (21 July, 2011).

• Francis Bacon and those who followed in the intellectual current of modernity were wrong to believe that man would be redeemed by science. Such an expectation asks too much of science; this kind of hope is deceptive. Science can contribute greatly to making the world and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it... It is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by love... If this absolute love exists, with its absolute certainty, then—only then—is man "redeemed"...
  • Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (2007) 25-26.

• Where people worry is when you get to the brain, the germ cells and the sentinel features that help people recognize what is a person, as opposed to a rat or a rabbit. Things like skin texture, facial shape, speech, replacing brain cells with human cells, allowing the development of human germ cells in animals. And particularly where there is any possibility of fertilisation within an animal.
  • Martin Bobrow in "Medical research warning over human cells in animals", by Alok Jha, The Guardian, (21 July, 2011).

• Changing animals by putting human genes or cells into their structure is one way of making them more resemble the bit of the human condition you're interested in studying.
  • Martin Bobrow in "Medical research warning over human cells in animals", by Alok Jha, The Guardian, (21 July, 2011).

• Transhumanism is defined as: The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities;
  and the study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.
  • Nick Bostrom, in Transhumanism and Transcendence: Christian Hope in an Age of Technological … (29 September 2011), p. 11.

• It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.
  • Arthur C. Clarke, Selected Quotes.

• What it really means is pro-human-life. Abortion clinic bombers are not known for their veganism, nor do Roman Catholics show any particular reluctance to have their suffering pets 'put to sleep'. In the minds of many confused people, a single-celled human zygote, which has no nerves and cannot suffer, is infinitely sacred, simply because it is 'human'. No other cells enjoy this exalted status. But such 'essentialism' is deeply un-evolutionary. If there were a heaven in which all the animals who ever lived could frolic, we would find an interbreeding continuum between every species and every other. For example I could interbreed with a female who could interbreed with a male who could ... fill in a few gaps, probably not very many in this case ... who could interbreed with a chimpanzee. We could construct longer, but still unbroken chains of interbreeding individuals to connect a human with a warthog, a kangaroo, a catfish.
  • Richard Dawkins, "Richard Dawkins Chimpanzee Hybrid?", The Guardian, (January 2, 2009).

• The more we learn about what we are, the more options we will discern about what to try to become. Americans have long honored the “self-made man,” but now that we are actually learning enough to be able to remake ourselves into something new, many flinch. Many would apparently rather bumble around with their eyes closed, trusting in tradition, than look around to see what’s about to happen. Yes, it is unnerving; yes, it can be scary. After all, there are entirely new mistakes we are now empowered to make for the first time. But it’s the beginning of a great new adventure for our knowing species. And it’s much more exciting, as well as safer, if we open our eyes.
  • Daniel Dennett (1999) We Earth Neurons.

• I not only think that we will tamper with Mother Nature, I think Mother wants us to.
  • Willard Gaylin (1997) Gattaca.

• Buddhism is a faith tradition and set of spiritual practices whose core idea is that human beings can become more than human by application of mental technology and self-discipline. As such it is probably the most compatible of the older faiths with transhumanism. But it is also quite challenging for many transhumanists in its insistence that there is no discrete, continuous ego that could be protected and perpetuated. Many of the immortalists, for instance, find that a threatening idea, but I think we will increasingly see the truth of the emptiness of the self as we apply neurotechnologies and life extension.
  • James Hughes 2006 interview

• I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.
  • Julian Huxley Transhumanism New Bottles for New Wine (1957) p. 13-17.

• The human species can... transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way... there in another... but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.
  • Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine (1957) p. 17.

• The bold code of the transhumanist will rise. That's an inevitable, undeniable fact. It's embedded in the undemocratic nature of technology and our own teleological evolutionary advancement. It is the future. We are the future like it or not. And it needs to molded, guided, and handled correctly by the strength and wisdom of transhumanist scientists with their nations and resources standing behind them, facilitating them. It needs to be supported in a way that we can make a successful transition into it, and not sacrifice ourselves—either by its overwhelming power or by a fear of harnessing that power. You need to put your resources into the technology. Into our education system. Into our universities, industries, and ideas. Into the strongest of our society. Into the brightest of our society. Into the best of our society So that we can attain the future.”
  • Zoltan Istvan, in (1 August 2013).

• If a reasoning human being loves and values life, they will want to live as long as possible—the desire to be immortal. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to know if they’re going to be immortal once they die. To do nothing doesn’t help the odds of attaining immortality—since it seems evident that everyone will die someday and possibly cease to exist. To try to do something scientifically constructive towards ensuring immortality beforehand is the most logical conclusion.
  • Zoltan Istvan, in Everyone Faces a Transhumanist Wager.

• The idea that a child will belong genetically to one race when that same child has been significantly genetically modified is no longer valid. Transhumanism will overcome this hurdle and many others that have sadly embroiled many countries and communities into longstanding enmity.
  • Zoltan Istvan, in ^[1]

• In leading laboratories, academic and industrial, new creators are confidently amassing their powers and quietly honing their skills, while on the street their evangelists are zealously prophesying a posthuman future. For anyone who cares about preserving our humanity, the time has come to pay attention.
  • Leon Kass, Life, liberty and the defense of dignity: The challenge for bioethics (2002) p. 4.

• Evolution moves towards greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, infinite love, and so on. Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably towards this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal. We can regard, therefore, the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form to be an essentially spiritual undertaking.
  • Ray Kurzweil (2005) The Singularity Is Near.

• Whereas... critics see problems with transhumanism being insufficiently attuned to divine grace and God’s plan, secular critics find fault with it for being too influenced by Christian eschatology. David Noble... advanced the thesis that Western science and technology were inspired by Christian millennialism and... remain... religious endeavors... by men motivated by a quest for transcendence. Noble asserts that Newton, Boyle, Priestly, Faraday, Maxwell, Babbage and many other notable scientists and technologists were believers and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the fields of nuclear physics, space exploration, artificial intelligence, artificial life, and genetics were launched by men inspired by Christian eschatology. Allegedly, religious and non-religious scientists and engineers in these fields today continue to be obsessed with the quest for perfection: "Often displaying a pathological dissatisfaction with, and deprecation of, the human condition, they are taking flight from the world, pointing us away from the earth, the flesh, the familiar".
  • Stephen Lilley, Transhumanism and society: the social debate over human enhancement (2013) p. 20, citing David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology; The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (1997)

• Individuals must be persuaded to believe in an apparent paradox, that something is gained through selflessness and something is lost through self-fulfillment. ...The four cardinal virtues from Greek philosophy are prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. Islam recognizes those, as well as, righteousness, respect, sincerity, and honesty. Christianity adds faith, hope, charity, and love. Buddhism's Divine States are loving kindness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity. Practicing these virtues requires self-restraint and generosity towards others. Vices, for example, pride, avarice, and gluttony are typically described as manifestations of selfishness. ...[E]xcellence of character or proper living is said to be achieved through practicing virtue (which is self-effacing) and avoiding vice (selfishness).
  Is personal transcendence consistent with this formula? “No,” assert the critics of transhumanity. It is egotistical, too grasping, and may result in new forms of injustice. Living a good life accepting of human mortality... has intrinsic value and it helps promote the greater good.
  • Stephen Lilley, Transhumanism and society: the social debate over human enhancement (2013) p. 21-22.

• Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children. We owe our minds to the deaths and lives of all the creatures that were ever engaged in the struggle called Evolution. Our job is to see that all this work shall not end up in meaningless waste.
  • Marvin Minsky (1994) Will Robots Inherit the Earth? in Scientific American.

• Once we know what we need to do, our nanotechnologies should enable us to construct replacement bodies and brains that won't be constrained to work at the crawling pace of "real time." The events in our computer chips already happen millions of times faster than those in brain cells. Hence, we could design our "mind-children" to think a million times faster than we do. To such a being, half a minute might seem as long as one of our years, and each hour as long as an entire human lifetime.
  • Marvin Minsky (1994) Will Robots Inherit the Earth? in Scientific American.

• Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low, and all names of values: weapons shall they be, and sounding signs, that life must again and again surpass itself!
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Tr. Thomas Common, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1909)

• Genes and culture have co-evolved. But crudely, natural selection "designed" male human primates to hunt nonhumans and build coalitions of other male human primates in order to wage territorial wars of aggression. Nature didn’t design us to become a scientific community and collaborate to overcome aging. It’s difficult to imagine that any human enemy could inflict such gruesome damage on the victims as growing old. The ravages of aging strike down combatants and civilians alike. So the trillions of dollars that humans currently spend on ways to harm and kill each other (“defence”) would be more fruitfully spent on defeating our common enemy. We should work together to build a "Triple S" civilisation of superlongevity, superhappiness and superintelligence.
  • David Pearce, "Transhumanism 2017: Towards a 'Triple S' civilisation of Superlongevity, Superintelligence and Superhappiness", February 2017.

• [...] true hedonic engineering, as distinct from mindless hedonism or reckless personal experimentation, can be profoundly good for our character. Character-building technologies can benefit utilitarians and non-utilitarians alike. Potentially, we can use a convergence of biotech, nanorobotics and information technology to gain control over our emotions and become better (post-)human beings, to cultivate the virtues, strength of character, decency, to become kinder, friendlier, more compassionate: to become the type of (post)human beings that we might aspire to be, but aren't, and biologically couldn't be, with the neural machinery of unenriched minds. Given our Darwinian biology, too many forms of admirable behaviour simply aren't rewarding enough for us to practise them consistently: our second-order desires to live better lives as better people are often feeble echoes of our baser passions.
  • David Pearce, "Utopian Neuroscience", BLTC Research, 2019

• You are in physical existence to learn and understand that your energy, translated into feelings, thoughts and emotions, causes all experience. There are no exceptions.
  • Jane Roberts, The Nature of Personal Reality, p. 22, Session 614.

• A small, but significant, minority in the body modification community sees body modification as the first steps in transhumanism. The connection is easy to see: in casting off the genetically-mandated exterior form of a standard human, we are breaking our minds of the belief that a human must look a certain way. Once the body of a human is modifiable for aesthetic reasons not tied to spirituality or tradition, it is possible to begin to modify that body in hopes of improving it.
  Beyond the abstract connection, there are very concrete connections. The aspect of transhumanism generally seen as most immediately viable is the the merging man and machine — indeed, it is so widely seen as viable, that dozens of major Hollywood films have been made about it, and the word "cyborg" is a household word. The most immediately visible way of merging man and machine is to simply implant useful machines into the human body.
  • "Sauterelle" on the BMEZine.com wiki.

• Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It’s a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity — a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied — and the world will pass beyond our understanding.
  • Vernor Vinge (1987) True Names and Other Dangers, p. 47.

• I was born human. But this was an accident of fate - a condition merely of time and place. I believe it's something we have the power to change.
  • Kevin Warwick "Cyborg 1.0", Wired, pp.145-151, February 2000.

• There is nothing in transhumanism but the same common sense that underlies standard humanism, rigorously applied to cases outside our modern-day experience. A million-year lifespan? If it’s possible, why not? The prospect may seem very foreign and strange, relative to our current everyday experience. It may create a sensation of future shock. And yet – is life a bad thing? Could the moral question really be just that simple? Yes.
  • Eliezer Yudkowsky, Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism.

• And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star, they won't tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they're old enough to bear it; and when they learn they'll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed!
  • Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

• "What is a human being, then?"
  "A seed"
  "A... seed?"
  "An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree."
  • David Zindell (1992) The Broken God.

• To be what you want to be: isn't this the essence of being human?
  • David Zindell (1988) Neverness.

• Eugenics
• Artificial intelligence
• Cloning
• Cybernetics
• Genetic engineering
• Immortality
• Nanotechnology
• Technology