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The Rundown Live #374 Zoltan Istvan (Technology,Transhumanism,Future) – Video

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The Rundown Live #374 Zoltan Istvan (Technology,Transhumanism,Future)
The Rundown Live #374 Zoltan Istvan (Technology,Transhumanism,Future) (11/12/14) On this Wednesday edition of The Rundown Live, Kristan and I go over the sponsors, and the site before we are...

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TransVision 2014 – Aubrey de Grey, "Demystifying visionary technology" – Video

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TransVision 2014 - Aubrey de Grey, "Demystifying visionary technology"
Transhumanism should not alienate the public, but transhumanism does exactly that. Its core problem is that it is an ism - that it seeks to portray itself as something out of the...

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TransVision 2014 - Aubrey de Grey, "Demystifying visionary technology" - Video

Trexit?: Transnationalism and Transhumanism and why They …

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TREXIT?: TRANSNATIONALISM AND TRANSHUMANISM AND WHY THEY ARE THE REAL ISSUES OF 2016

NASHVILLE Are you ready to cede your body to the global body and to Transhumanist technology under Transnationalistss control? Or, are you looking for the Trexit?

U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, recently invited a group of Northeastern University commencement students to see the future with him. As they peered into his crystal ball, Kerry urged his audience to see a world with no nations or borders.

Imagine. One world. No boundaries. It sounds wonderful, futuristic, hopeful; like an apple anyone would wish to pluck from a tree.

This is the transcendent world vision of the Transnationalists.

Transnationalism is a new type of consciousness. Also called Globalism, it is a social agenda, or revolution, grown out of the accelerating technology-driven interconnectivity and interdependence between people and the receding economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states.

Free flows of capital and people (legal and illegal) across the sphere of earth is one goal of Transnationalism. The unity of all of the rolling stones of humanity into a monolithic rock is the other.

As Kerry noted, hiding behind walls in this new borderless world will be impossible.

The walls reference was a shot at Donald Trump, who wants to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

What Kerry did not say is that this wall-less world will happen via technologywhich sooner than later will be implanted in our bodies. The technology we now depend on for our very lives in the online world will soon mesh with our flesh and make our flesh and blood lives a transparent and open book. No physical walls will be necessary.

The technical term for meshing our flesh with technology is Transhumanism. Not every Globalist advocate is a Transhumanist, but sooner or later, they will realize that turning humans into cyborgs IS the globalist agenda and certainly is the key to its success. If Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, SONY and other mega corporations driving Globalism have their way, this technology will soon come off your desktop and inside your body. Soon equals 2020-2030.

Clearly, Globalism offers unparalleled new opportunities matched only by its potential for unmatched tyranny. This is its great danger. Combined with Transhumanism, the results could be catastrophic for humanity. In fact, it is the end of the human race as we know it.

WE are the ones who are deciding the future for all of humanity. Many seek a Trexit. Others embrace a Trentrance or the Transhuman/Transnationalist route.

AGENDA 2030

One World government and one economy is the globalists next great leap forward in what the UN calls the new universal agenda for humanity that it hopes will be fulfilled by 2030. Called Agenda 2030, this far-reaching program was unanimously adopted on September 25, 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly. Its noble goal is to improve the lives of poor people the world over.

According to the Agenda, by 2030, the majority of us will cease identifying ourselves with the nationality or country of our birth and will instead get religion and see ourselves as global citizens living in the light.

Massive redistribution of wealth is the cornerstone of the Agenda.

Whether or not the 1% who control 85% of the worlds wealth will voluntarily give their billions away is yet to be seen.

Whether or not Agenda 2030 is a positive development is also yet to be determined.

Agenda 2030 has raised alarm bells among analysts who do not see it as a way for all of us to love each other. They see it as a move toward a global totalitarian state.

Membership is mandatory. Non-negotiable. It is already a done deal.

Some believe this plan can only be achieved by absolute dictatorial power or at the point of a gun. My belief is that no guns will be involved. Microchips will do the job. The UN has already begun giving biometric identity cards to refugees in order to track them as they make their way to their new homes. Agenda 2030 calls for ALL of humanity to have biometric cards in their hands by 2030. These cards may literally be IN our hands, YOUR hands. This is why Transnationalism and Transhumanism are linked.

If we the people do not like the Agenda, now is the time to speak.

Silence is consent.

Britains June 23, 2016 vote to Brexit the Globalist EU will have a lot to say about the rise of Transnationalism and Transhumanism across the globe and the fulfillment of the UNs agenda.

Americas vote in November will amplify the feelings on both sides of Brexit.

The larger choice here is to take the Transnational / Transhuman path or to Trexit.

SMARTEN UP

Socialist Democrats in America have the global body or Global U (a pun on you) of Agenda 2030 in mind. They aim to unify the human body. Their message is come together. Smarten up.

Donald Trumps popularity is partly attributed to his stand against Transnationalism. Instead of eliminating walls, Trump is promising to build one between US and the World. Donald Trumps America First strategy is as mosaic as his autocratic lawgiver tendencies and he is wrong about building the Wall, but not completely. Personally, I think we need gates, not walls. Trumps stand-ins are providing further warnings or insight into the possible dark side of the light of Transnationalism or Globalism, which they equate with Fascism. The perceived global stakes of Trumps America First strategy are spelled out in a May 12, 2016 USA Today editorial by Senator Jeff Sessions who wrote: For the first time in a long time, this November will give Americans a clear choice on perhaps the most important issue facing our country and our civilization: whether we remain a nation-state that serves its own people, or whether we slide irrevocably toward a soulless globalism that treats humans as interchangeable widgets in the world market.

Sessions is partly right about globalism being soulless. Some believe the process of globalization will result is a religion-less world. Others think it will lead to greater understanding among the worlds religions. Globalisms relationship with religion and spirituality is complex. Sessions is totally right about the globalist agenda to treating humans as widgets, which means mechanical devices, in the globalist marketplace. For clarity, what I believe Sessions should have said is that soulless globalism treats humans as interchangeable smart or transhumanist widgets in the world market. Smart widgets or things are electronic objects connected to and communicating with the Internet. Sessions and Globalists alike must realize that, since 2003, the U.S. Government has been promoting the transformation ofour bodies into widgets via smart technology and the evolution of humanity into a hive mind. This is the core of globalist apple. By smart is not meant more intelligent. It means interfaced with computer technology that makes us more watchable, programmable, trackable and controllable.

PLAYING GOD In my 2015 book, The Skingularity Is Near, I documented how this smart technology is now in the wearable phase, but ULTIMATELY is aimed at our skin.

In the wearable phase body-born devices are being used to augment the human body. These include smart watches and sensors.

These devices will become less and less about performing functions such as biometric measuring for us and more and more about our identity. These devices will resemble jewelry with an extraordinary array of functions.

The ultimate wearable is Googles proposed nano-nutrient garment that is designed to promote longevity. This robe of many colors will send nano bots into every orifice of your body on missions to seek and destroy pathogens in your blood and keep your arteries clean as a whistle. The result will be dramatically extended life spans. It echoes the miracle garments or robes of power of the ancient gods. It is the coat of light once worn by Adam and Eve, who were hermaphrodites or two-sexed.

The wearable phase will not last long. This technology will shrink in the immediate future so that systems can be embedded or implanted in the body. The smart phone in your hand will sooner-than-you-think be implanted in your ear.

SkinTrack, a new wearable technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University, basically turns the entire lower arm into a touchpad. It differs from previous skin-to-screen approaches because SkinTrack requires the user to wear a special ring that propagates a low-energy, high-frequency signal through the skin when the finger touches or nears the skin surface. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink.

In another few blinks of the eye, smart contact lenses that will give us super-human vision and will offer heads-up displays, video cameras, medical sensors and more. These are safest of these new technologies. Sony, Samsung and Google have all filed patents for smart contact-lens technology in the early months of 2016.

2020 here we come!

Or is it 2030?

By safe I dont mean they wont have potential harmful effects. Rather, I mean that like other implantables, smart lenses can be removed or inserted by the user. They are not under or in the skin permanently.

Googles Verily Life Sciences is leading the way to bring the IoT to your eyeball. In the new cognitive era, as IBM calls it, human beings will hike over to Best Buy, or some other electronics outlet, to pick out your new lens. Your natural lens will be removed from your eyeball. A fluid will be injected into your eye. In a few moments this fluid will fuse with your eyes lens capsule. As it solidifies your new eye contains storage, battery, sensors, a radio and other electronics. When you leave the store you will now be a transhuman being who will have perfect vision, the ability to see in the dark, sensors to detect blood glucose levels and other applications we havent yet dreamed of.

Of course, with super vision glasses comes supervision. The great fear is that the implantation of this technology will come at a cost greater than our organic eye lenses. It will cost us our free will and will turn us into emotionless cyborgs.

Another Google start-up, Magic Leap, has raised a billion dollars to create an implantable contact lens that injects computer-generated images or floats virtual objects into the real world field of view. Called the worlds most secretive startup, its aim is to bring magic back into the world by rethinking the relationship technology has with people. Its aim is remove the shackles binding humanity by tossing away the boxes on our desk by uniting the brain and body with technology. Actually, Google may want you to think about eliminating your physical body altogether.

Its chief futurist, author Neal Stephenson, is most famous for the concept of Metaverse from his 1992 sci-fi classic Snow Crash. Stephenson imaged a virtual universe where users create avatars to communicate and interact. Who needs a physical body when your avatar is so much better?

TRANSHUMANISM Brexit just put a wrench in that plan, just like the rejection of Google Glass slowed down Googles aim to control your body, mindand soul. Transhumanism promises to take the potentials of this right to new levels. Life extension via synthetic organs, drugs and other new technologies eliminate the barriers to our pursuit of life, liberty and immortality.

Transhumanism is a human re-engineering project based on the meshing of human flesh with smart technology or electronic devices. Born out of NASAs realization in 1962 that we will not be able to transcend earth in our flesh and blood suits, the U.S. Government began working on the transformation of humans into cyborgs (a term coined by NASA).

Transhumanism is aimed at perfecting the human body by seeding it with or ceding it to Artificially Intelligent technology, giving it a new layer of skin, and connecting every human on the planet to the Internet of Things (IoT). In less than ten years every organ and body part will be replaceable by a technological version.

These new technologies comprise the Internet of Things (IoT) that drives Transnationalism / Globalism. The IoT is presently composed of 20 billion+ smart things or widgets phones, toasters, refrigerators, cars, computers that will balloon to over 50 billion such smart things by 2020.

The IoT will essentially become an Artificially Intelligent global brain of which each individual human brain is a neuron.

How the Internet of Things Will Change Everything-Including Ourselves.

Presently included among these things are nearly four billion human beings, who are rapidly shedding all that is human and adopting the transhuman upgrades devised by the wizards of Silicon Valley. If you wonder how dependent, if not addicted, we are to these technologies we are just try to take our cell phones away. Just try to run a One World without them.

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerburg, has made it is his life to goal to have every human being online as a human being thing. Facebook will be the portal or conduit linking all human being things.

Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of these present and future Facebook users do not have toilets or clean water. They are the poor the UN seeks to uplift. How turning them into smart things and wiring them to IoT will make them better humans is an, as yet, unanswered question.

However, it is certain that the Internet is a great leveler. Take a look at this Microsoft Empowering commercial. Today, more than half the worlds population does not have access to the Internet. We believe that everyone deserves the social and economic opportunities afforded by connectivity.

Ultimately, the global citizen view promoted by transnationalism is a transient step toward a trans-earth or multi-planet civilization with transhumans (machine-enhanced humanoids) transcending the boundaries of earth life and coming and going between earth, the moon, Mars and beyond.

I am for helping the poor to elevate their lives and for transcending the boundaries of earth. But Im just not sure about doing so as man-chines.

As I discussed in The Skingularity Is Near, Transhumanism is the fulfillment of both the Christian prophecy and ethos of a new, perfected human and Americas we can do anything with the right technology attitude.

Ever since Adam and Eve were evicted from Eden, humanity has sought to redeem itself and reclaim our original perfect status.

Some Globalists and Transhumanists believe our species should embrace our transition to smart human being things as part of our hive evolution and our return to perfection. For them, a new human race connected by implanted technologies is a quantum leap. Others believe this vision is trumped-up.

However, human rights advocates, including this author, warn that as technology becomes more and more invasive and merges with us we become and more transparent. Privacy (or hiding) will become impossible. Homo sapiens as a species will cease to exist.

In this way, the 2016 American election is a vote for Transhumanism and Transnationalism or against it. Will we make a Trentrance or a Trexit?

You decide.

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The Singularity and Transhumanism, Sadiki Bakari comes on Cancel The Cabal – Video

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The Singularity and Transhumanism, Sadiki Bakari comes on Cancel The Cabal
Sadiki Bakari comes on the Sunday August 24, 2014 Revolution Radio, Cancel The Cabal Show. Sadiki Bakari is an empowerment advisor, one of the preeminent visual lecturers of his generation...

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Transhumanism, medical technology and slippery slopes

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J Med Ethics. 2006 Sep; 32(9): 513518.

M J McNamee, S D Edwards, Centre for Philosophy, Humanities and Law in Healthcare, School of Health Science, University of Wales, Swansea, UK

Correspondence to: Dr Mike McNamee Centre for Philosophy, Humanities and Law in Healthcare, School of Health Science, University of Wales, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK; m.j.mcnamee@swansea.ac.uk

Received 2005 Jul 28; Accepted 2005 Nov 10.

In this article, transhumanism is considered to be a quasimedical ideology that seeks to promote a variety of therapeutic and humanenhancing aims. Moderate conceptions are distinguished from strong conceptions of transhumanism and the strong conceptions were found to be more problematic than the moderate ones. A particular critique of Bostrm's defence of transhumanism is presented. Various forms of slippery slope arguments that may be used for and against transhumanism are discussed and one particular criticism, moral arbitrariness, that undermines both weak and strong transhumanism is highlighted.

No less a figure than Francis Fukuyama1 recently labelled transhumanism as the world's most dangerous idea. Such an eyecatching condemnation almost certainly denotes an issue worthy of serious consideration, especially given the centrality of biomedical technology to its aims. In this article, we consider transhumanism as an ideology that seeks to evangelise its humanenhancing aims. Given that transhumanism covers a broad range of ideas, we distinguish moderate conceptions from strong ones and find the strong conceptions more problematic than the moderate ones. We also offer a critique of Bostrm's2 position published in this journal. We discuss various forms of slippery slope arguments that may be used for and against transhumanism and highlight one particular criticism, moral arbitrariness, which undermines both forms of transhumanism.

At the beginning of the 21st century, we find ourselves in strange times; facts and fantasy find their way together in ethics, medicine and philosophy journals and websites.2,3,4 Key sites of contestation include the very idea of human nature, the place of embodiment within medical ethics and, more specifically, the systematic reflections on the place of medical and other technologies in conceptions of the good life. A reflection of this situation is captured by Dyens5 who writes,

What we are witnessing today is the very convergence of environments, systems, bodies, and ontology toward and into the intelligent matter. We can no longer speak of the human condition or even of the posthuman condition. We must now refer to the intelligent condition.

We wish to evaluate the contents of such dialogue and to discuss, if not the death of human nature, then at least its dislocation and derogation in the thinkers who label themselves transhumanists.

One difficulty for critics of transhumanism is that a wide range of views fall under its label.6 Not merely are there idiosyncrasies of individual academics, but there does not seem to exist an absolutely agreed on definition of transhumanism. One can find not only substantial differences between key authors2,3,4,7,8 and the disparate disciplinary nuances of their exhortations, but also subtle variations of its chief representatives in the offerings of people. It is to be expected that any ideology transforms over time and not least of all in response to internal and external criticism. Yet, the transhumanism critic faces a further problem of identifying a robust target that stays still sufficiently long to locate it properly in these webdriven days without constructing a straw man to knock over with the slightest philosophical breeze. For the purposes of targeting a sufficiently substantial target, we identify the writings of one of its clearest and intellectually robust proponents, the Oxford philosopher and cofounder of the World Transhumanist Association , Nick Bostrm,2 who has written recently in these pages of transhumanism's desire to make good the halfbaked project3 that is human nature.

Before specifically evaluating Bostrm's position, it is best first to offer a global definition for transhumanism and then to locate it among the range of views that fall under the heading. One of the most celebrated advocates of transhumanism is Max More, whose website reads no more gods, nor more faith, no more timid holding back. The future belongs to posthumanity.8 We will have a clearer idea then of the kinds of position transhumanism stands in direct opposition to. Specifically, More8 asserts,

Transhumanism is a blanket term given to the school of thought that refuses to accept traditional human limitations such as death, disease and other biological frailties. Transhumans are typically interested in a variety of futurist topics, including space migration, mind uploading and cryonic suspension. Transhumans are also extremely interested in more immediate subjects such as bio and nanotechnology, computers and neurology. Transhumans deplore the standard paradigms that attempt to render our world comfortable at the sake of human fulfilment.8

Strong transhumanism advocates see themselves engaged in a project, the purpose of which is to overcome the limits of human nature. Whether this is the foundational claim, or merely the central claim, is not clear. These limitationsone may describe them simply as features of human nature, as the idea of labelling them as limitations is itself to take up a negative stance towards themconcern appearance, human sensory capacities, intelligence, lifespan and vulnerability to harm. According to the extreme transhumanism programme, technology can be used to vastly enhance a person's intelligence; to tailor their appearance to what they desire; to lengthen their lifespan, perhaps to immortality; and to reduce vastly their vulnerability to harm. This can be done by exploitation of various kinds of technology, including genetic engineering, cybernetics, computation and nanotechnology. Whether technology will continue to progress sufficiently, and sufficiently predictably, is of course quite another matter.

Advocates of transhumanism argue that recruitment or deployment of these various types of technology can produce people who are intelligent and immortal, but who are not members of the species Homo sapiens. Their species type will be ambiguousfor example, if they are cyborgs (part human, part machine)or, if they are wholly machines, they will lack any common genetic features with human beings. A legion of labels covers this possibility; we find in Dyen's5 recently translated book a variety of cultural bodies, perhaps the most extreme being cyberpunks:

...a profound misalignment between existence and its manifestation. This misalignment produces bodies so transformed, so dissociated, and so asynchronized, that their only outcome is gross mutation. Cyberpunk bodies are horrible, strange and mysterious (think of Alien, Robocop, Terminator, etc.), for they have no real attachment to any biological structure. (p 75)

Perhaps a reasonable claim is encapsulated in the idea that such entities will be posthuman. The extent to which posthuman might be synonymous with transhumanism is not clear. Extreme transhumanists strongly support such developments.

At the other end of transhumanism is a much less radical project, which is simply the project to use technology to enhance human characteristicsfor example, beauty, lifespan and resistance to disease. In this less extreme project, there is no necessary aspiration to shed human nature or human genetic constitution, just to augment it with technology where possible and where desired by the person.

At present it seems to be a movement based mostly in North America, although there are some adherents from the UK. Among its most intellectually sophisticated proponents is Nick Bostrm. Perhaps the most outspoken supporters of transhumanism are people who see it simply as an issue of free choice. It may simply be the case that moderate transhumanists are libertarians at the core. In that case, transhumanism merely supplies an overt technological dimension to libertarianism. If certain technological developments are possible, which they as competent choosers desire, then they should not be prevented from acquiring the technologically driven enhancements they desire. One obvious line of criticism here may be in relation to the inequality that necessarily arises with respect to scarce goods and services distributed by market mechanisms.9 We will elaborate this point in the Transhumanism and slippery slopes section.

So, one group of people for the transhumanism project sees it simply as a way of improving their own life by their own standards of what counts as an improvement. For example, they may choose to purchase an intervention, which will make them more intelligent or even extend their life by 200years. (Of course it is not selfevident that everyone would regard this as an improvement.) A less vociferous group sees the transhumanism project as not so much bound to the expansion of autonomy (notwithstanding our criticism that will necessarily be effected only in the sphere of economic consumer choice) as one that has the potential to improve the quality of life for humans in general. For this group, the relationship between transhumanism and the general good is what makes transhumanism worthy of support. For the other group, the worth of transhumanism is in its connection with their own conception of what is good for them, with the extension of their personal life choices.

Of the many points for transhumanism, we note three. Firstly, transhumanism seems to facilitate two aims that have commanded much support. The use of technology to improve humans is something we pretty much take for granted. Much good has been achieved with lowlevel technology in the promotion of public health. The construction of sewage systems, clean water supplies, etc, is all work to facilitate this aim and is surely good work, work which aims at, and in this case achieves, a good. Moreover, a large portion of the modern biomedical enterprise is another example of a project that aims at generating this good too.

Secondly, proponents of transhumanism say it presents an opportunity to plan the future development of human beings, the species Homo sapiens. Instead of this being left to the evolutionary process and its exploitation of random mutations, transhumanism presents a hitherto unavailable option: tailoring the development of human beings to an ideal blueprint. Precisely whose ideal gets blueprinted is a point that we deal with later.

Thirdly, in the spirit of work in ethics that makes use of a technical idea of personhood, the view that moral status is independent of membership of a particular species (or indeed any biological species), transhumanism presents a way in which moral status can be shown to be bound to intellectual capacity rather than to human embodiment as such or human vulnerability in the capacity of embodiment (Harris, 1985).9a

Critics point to consequences of transhumanism, which they find unpalatable. One possible consequence feared by some commentators is that, in effect, transhumanism will lead to the existence of two distinct types of being, the human and the posthuman. The human may be incapable of breeding with the posthuman and will be seen as having a much lower moral standing. Given that, as Buchanan et al9 note, much moral progress, in the West at least, is founded on the category of the human in terms of rights claims, if we no longer have a common humanity, what rights, if any, ought to be enjoyed by transhumans? This can be viewed either as a criticism (we poor humans are no longer at the top of the evolutionary tree) or simply as a critical concern that invites further argumentation. We shall return to this idea in the final section, by way of identifying a deeper problem with the openendedness of transhumanism that builds on this recognition.

In the same vein, critics may argue that transhumanism will increase inequalities between the rich and the poor. The rich can afford to make use of transhumanism, but the poor will not be able to. Indeed, we may come to think of such people as deficient, failing to achieve a new heightened level of normal functioning.9 In the opposing direction, critical observers may say that transhumanism is, in reality, an irrelevance, as very few will be able to use the technological developments even if they ever manifest themselves. A further possibility is that transhumanism could lead to the extinction of humans and posthumans, for things are just as likely to turn out for the worse as for the better (eg, those for precautionary principle).

One of the deeper philosophical objections comes from a very traditional source. Like all such utopian visions, transhumanism rests on some conception of good. So just as humanism is founded on the idea that humans are the measure of all things and that their fulfilment is to be found in the powers of reason extolled and extended in culture and education, so too transhumanism has a vision of the good, albeit one loosely shared. For one group of transhumanists, the good is the expansion of personal choice. Given that autonomy is so widely valued, why not remove the barriers to enhanced autonomy by various technological interventions? Theological critics especially, but not exclusively, object to what they see as the imperialising of autonomy. Elshtain10 lists the three c's: choice, consent and control. These, she asserts, are the dominant motifs of modern American culture. And there is, of course, an army of communitarians (Bellah et al,10a MacIntyre,10b Sandel,10c Taylor10d and Walzer10e) ready to provide support in general moral and political matters to this line of criticism. One extension of this line of transhumanism thinking is to align the valorisation of autonomy with economic rationality, for we may as well be motivated by economic concerns as by moral ones where the market is concerned. As noted earlier, only a small minority may be able to access this technology (despite Bostrm's naive disclaimer for democratic transhumanism), so the technology necessary for transhumanist transformations is unlikely to be prioritised in the context of artificially scarce public health resources. One other population attracted to transhumanism will be the elite sports world, fuelled by the media commercialisation complexwhere mere mortals will get no more than a glimpse of the transhuman in competitive physical contexts. There may be something of a doublebinding character to this consumerism. The poor, at once removed from the possibility of such augmentation, pay (per view) for the pleasure of their envy.

If we argue against the idea that the good cannot be equated with what people choose simpliciter, it does not follow that we need to reject the requisite medical technology outright. Against the more moderate transhumanists, who see transhumanism as an opportunity to enhance the general quality of life for humans, it is nevertheless true that their position presupposes some conception of the good. What kind of traits is best engineered into humans: disease resistance or parabolic hearing? And unsurprisingly, transhumanists disagree about precisely what objective goods to select for installation into humans or posthumans.

Some radical critics of transhumanism see it as a threat to morality itself.1,11 This is because they see morality as necessarily connected to the kind of vulnerability that accompanies human nature. Think of the idea of human rights and the power this has had in voicing concern about the plight of especially vulnerable human beings. As noted earlier a transhumanist may be thought to be beyond humanity and as neither enjoying its rights nor its obligations. Why would a transhuman be moved by appeals to human solidarity? Once the prospect of posthumanism emerges, the whole of morality is thus threatened because the existence of human nature itself is under threat.

One further objection voiced by Habermas11 is that interfering with the process of human conception, and by implication human constitution, deprives humans of the naturalness which so far has been a part of the takenforgranted background of our selfunderstanding as a species and Getting used to having human life biotechnologically at the disposal of our contingent preferences cannot help but change our normative selfunderstanding (p 72).

On this account, our selfunderstanding would include, for example, our essential vulnerability to disease, ageing and death. Suppose the strong transhumanism project is realised. We are no longer thus vulnerable: immortality is a real prospect. Nevertheless, conceptual caution must be exercised hereeven transhumanists will be susceptible in the manner that Hobbes12 noted. Even the strongest are vulnerable in their sleep. But the kind of vulnerability transhumanism seeks to overcome is of the internal kind (not Hobbes's external threats). We are reminded of Woody Allen's famous remark that he wanted to become immortal, not by doing great deeds but simply by not dying. This will result in a radical change in our selfunderstanding, which has inescapably normative elements to it that need to be challenged. Most radically, this change in selfunderstanding may take the form of a change in what we view as a good life. Hitherto a human life, this would have been assumed to be finite. Transhumanists suggest that even now this may change with appropriate technology and the right motivation.

Do the changes in selfunderstanding presented by transhumanists (and genetic manipulation) necessarily have to represent a change for the worse? As discussed earlier, it may be that the technology that generates the possibility of transhumanism can be used for the good of humansfor example, to promote immunity to disease or to increase quality of life. Is there really an intrinsic connection between acquisition of the capacity to bring about transhumanism and moral decline? Perhaps Habermas's point is that moral decline is simply more likely to occur once radical enhancement technologies are adopted as a practice that is not intrinsically evil or morally objectionable. But how can this be known in advance? This raises the spectre of slippery slope arguments.

But before we discuss such slopes, let us note that the kind of approach (whether characterised as closedminded or sceptical) Bostrm seems to dislike is one he calls speculative. He dismisses as speculative the idea that offspring may think themselves lesser beings, commodifications of their parents' egoistic desires (or some such). None the less, having pointed out the lack of epistemological standing of such speculation, he invites us to his own apparently more congenial position:

We might speculate, instead, that germline enhancements will lead to more love and parental dedication. Some mothers and fathers might find it easier to love a child who, thanks to enhancements, is bright, beautiful, healthy, and happy. The practice of germline enhancement might lead to better treatment of people with disabilities, because a general demystification of the genetic contributions to human traits could make it clearer that people with disabilities are not to blame for their disabilities and a decreased incidence of some disabilities could lead to more assistance being available for the remaining affected people to enable them to live full, unrestricted lives through various technological and social supports. Speculating about possible psychological or cultural effects of germline engineering can therefore cut both ways. Good consequences no less than bad ones are possible. In the absence of sound arguments for the view that the negative consequences would predominate, such speculations provide no reason against moving forward with the technology. Ruminations over hypothetical side effects may serve to make us aware of things that could go wrong so that we can be on the lookout for untoward developments. By being aware of the perils in advance, we will be in a better position to take preventive countermeasures. (Bostrm, 2003, p 498)

Following Bostrm's3 speculation then, what grounds for hope exist? Beyond speculation, what kinds of arguments does Bostrm offer? Well, most people may think that the burden of proof should fall to the transhumanists. Not so, according to Bostrm. Assuming the likely enormous benefits, he turns the tables on this intuitionnot by argument but by skilful rhetorical speculation. We quote for accuracy of representation (emphasis added):

Only after a fair comparison of the risks with the likely positive consequences can any conclusion based on a costbenefit analysis be reached. In the case of germline enhancements, the potential gains are enormous. Only rarely, however, are the potential gains discussed, perhaps because they are too obvious to be of much theoretical interest. By contrast, uncovering subtle and nontrivial ways in which manipulating our genome could undermine deep values is philosophically a lot more challenging. But if we think about it, we recognize that the promise of genetic enhancements is anything but insignificant. Being free from severe genetic diseases would be good, as would having a mind that can learn more quickly, or having a more robust immune system. Healthier, wittier, happier people may be able to reach new levels culturally. To achieve a significant enhancement of human capacities would be to embark on the transhuman journey of exploration of some of the modes of being that are not accessible to us as we are currently constituted, possibly to discover and to instantiate important new values. On an even more basic level, genetic engineering holds great potential for alleviating unnecessary human suffering. Every day that the introduction of effective human genetic enhancement is delayed is a day of lost individual and cultural potential, and a day of torment for many unfortunate sufferers of diseases that could have been prevented. Seen in this light, proponents of a ban or a moratorium on human genetic modification must take on a heavy burden of proof in order to have the balance of reason tilt in their favor. (Bostrom,3 pp 4989).

Now one way in which such a balance of reason may be had is in the idea of a slippery slope argument. We now turn to that.

A proper assessment of transhumanism requires consideration of the objection that acceptance of the main claims of transhumanism will place us on a slippery slope. Yet, paradoxically, both proponents and detractors of transhumanism may exploit slippery slope arguments in support of their position. It is necessary therefore to set out the various arguments that fall under this title so that we can better characterise arguments for and against transhumanism. We shall therefore examine three such attempts13,14,15 but argue that the arbitrary slippery slope15 may undermine all versions of transhumanists, although not every enhancement proposed by them.

Schauer13 offers the following essentialist analysis of slippery slope arguments. A pure slippery slope is one where a particular act, seemingly innocuous when taken in isolation, may yet lead to a future host of similar but increasingly pernicious events. Abortion and euthanasia are classic candidates for slippery slope arguments in public discussion and policy making. Against this, however, there is no reason to suppose that the future events (acts or policies) down the slope need to display similaritiesindeed we may propose that they will lead to a whole range of different, although equally unwished for, consequences. The vast array of enhancements proposed by transhumanists would not be captured under this conception of a slippery slope because of their heterogeneity. Moreover, as Sternglantz16 notes, Schauer undermines his case when arguing that greater linguistic precision undermines the slippery slope and that indirect consequences often bolster slippery slope arguments. It is as if the slippery slopes would cease in a world with greater linguistic precision or when applied only to direct consequences. These views do not find support in the later literature. Schauer does, however, identify three nonslippery slope arguments where the advocate's aim is (a) to show that the bottom of a proposed slope has been arrived at; (b) to show that a principle is excessively broad; (c) to highlight how granting authority to X will make it more likely that an undesirable outcome will be achieved. Clearly (a) cannot properly be called a slippery slope argument in itself, while (b) and (c) often have some role in slippery slope arguments.

The excessive breadth principle can be subsumed under Bernard Williams's distinction between slippery slope arguments with (a) horrible results and (b) arbitrary results. According to Williams, the nature of the bottom of the slope allows us to determine which category a particular argument falls under. Clearly, the most common form is the slippery slope to a horrible result argument. Walton14 goes further in distinguishing three types: (a) thin end of the wedge or precedent arguments; (b) Sorites arguments; and (c) dominoeffect arguments. Importantly, these arguments may be used both by antagonists and also by advocates of transhumanism. We shall consider the advocates of transhumanism first.

In the thin end of the wedge slippery slopes, allowing P will set a precedent that will allow further precedents (Pn) taken to an unspecified problematic terminus. Is it necessary that the end point has to be bad? Of course this is the typical linguistic meaning of the phrase slippery slopes. Nevertheless, we may turn the tables here and argue that [the] slopes may be viewed positively too.17 Perhaps a new phrase will be required to capture ineluctable slides (ascents?) to such end points. This would be somewhat analogous to the ideas of vicious and virtuous cycles. So transhumanists could argue that, once the artificial generation of life through technologies of in vitro fertilisation was thought permissible, the slope was foreseeable, and transhumanists are doing no more than extending that lifecreating and fashioning impulse.

In Sorites arguments, the inability to draw clear distinctions has the effect that allowing P will not allow us to consistently deny Pn. This slope follows the form of the Sorites paradox, where taking a grain of sand from a heap does not prevent our recognising or describing the heap as such, even though it is not identical with its former state. At the heart of the problem with such arguments is the idea of conceptual vagueness. Yet the logical distinctions used by philosophers are often inapplicable in the real world.15,18 Transhumanists may well seize on this vagueness and apply a Sorites argument as follows: as therapeutic interventions are currently morally permissible, and there is no clear distinction between treatment and enhancement, enhancement interventions are morally permissible too. They may ask whether we can really distinguish categorically between the added functionality of certain prosthetic devices and sonar senses.

In dominoeffect arguments, the domino conception of the slippery slope, we have what others often refer to as a causal slippery slope.19 Once P is allowed, a causal chain will be effected allowing Pn and so on to follow, which will precipitate increasingly bad consequences.

In what ways can slippery slope arguments be used against transhumanism? What is wrong with transhumanism? Or, better, is there a point at which we can say transhumanism is objectionable? One particular strategy adopted by proponents of transhumanism falls clearly under the aspect of the thin end of the wedge conception of the slippery slope. Although some aspects of their ideology seem aimed at unqualified goods, there seems to be no limit to the aspirations of transhumanism as they cite the powers of other animals and substances as potential modifications for the transhumanist. Although we can admire the sonic capacities of the bat, the elastic strength of lizards' tongues and the endurability of Kevlar in contrast with traditional construction materials used in the body, their transplantation into humans is, to coin Kass's celebrated label, repugnant (Kass, 1997).19a

Although not all transhumanists would support such extreme enhancements (if that is indeed what they are), less radical advocates use justifications that are based on therapeutic lines up front with the more Promethean aims less explicitly advertised. We can find many examples of this manoeuvre. Take, for example, the Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute in California. Prominently displayed on its website front page (http://www.ceri.com/) we read, Do you know somebody with Alzheimer's disease? Click to see the latest research breakthrough. The mode is simple: treatment by front entrance, enhancement by the back door. Borgmann,20 in his discussion of the uses of technology in modern society, observed precisely this argumentative strategy more than 20years ago:

The main goal of these programs seems to be the domination of nature. But we must be more precise. The desire to dominate does not just spring from a lust of power, from sheer human imperialism. It is from the start connected with the aim of liberating humanity from disease, hunger, and toil and enriching life with learning, art and athletics.

Who would want to deny the powers of viral diseases that can be genetically treated? Would we want to draw the line at the transplantation of nonhuman capacities (sonar path finding)? Or at in vivo fibre optic communications backbone or antidegeneration powers? (These would have to be nonhuman by hypothesis). Or should we consider the scope of technological enhancements that one chief transhumanist, Natasha Vita More21, propounds:

A transhuman is an evolutionary stage from being exclusively biological to becoming postbiological. Postbiological means a continuous shedding of our biology and merging with machines. () The body, as we transform ourselves over time, will take on different types of appearances and designs and materials. ()

For hiking a mountain, I'd like extended leg strength, stamina, a skinsheath to protect me from damaging environmental aspects, selfmoisturizing, cooldown capability, extended hearing and augmented vision (Network of sonar sensors depicts data through solid mass and map images onto visual field. Overlay window shifts spectrum frequencies. Visual scratch pad relays mental ideas to visual recognition bots. Global Satellite interface at microzoom range).

For a party, I'd like an eclectic look a glistening bronze skin with emerald green highlights, enhanced height to tower above other people, a sophisticated internal sound system so that I could alter the music to suit my own taste, memory enhance device, emotionalselect for feelgood people so I wouldn't get dragged into anyone's inappropriate conversations. And parabolic hearing so that I could listen in on conversations across the room if the one I was currently in started winding down.

Notwithstanding the difficulty of bringing together transhumanism under one movement, the sheer variety of proposals merely contained within Vita More's catalogue means that we cannot determinately point to a precise station at which we can say, Here, this is the end we said things would naturally progress to. But does this pose a problem? Well, it certainly makes it difficult to specify exactly a horrible result that is supposed to be at the bottom of the slope. Equally, it is extremely difficult to say that if we allow precedent X, it will allow practices Y or Z to follow as it is not clear how these practices Y or Z are (if at all) connected with the precedent X. So it is not clear that a form of precedentsetting slippery slope can be strictly used in every case against transhumanism, although it may be applicable in some.

Nevertheless, we contend, in contrast with Bostrm that the burden of proof would fall to the transhumanist. Consider in this light, a Soritestype slope. The transhumanist would have to show how the relationship between the therapeutic practices and the enhancements are indeed transitive. We know night from day without being able to specify exactly when this occurs. So simply because we cannot determine a precise distinction between, say, genetic treatments G1, G2 and G3, and transhumanism enhancements T1, T2 and so on, it does not follow that there are no important moral distinctions between G1 and T20. According to Williams,15 this kind of indeterminacy arises because of the conceptual vagueness of certain terms. Yet, the indeterminacy of so open a predicate heap is not equally true of therapy or enhancement. The latitude they permit is nowhere near so wide.

Instead of objecting to Pn on the grounds that Pn is morally objectionable (ie, to depict a horrible result), we may instead, after Williams, object that the slide from P to Pn is simply morally arbitrary, when it ought not to be. Here, we may say, without specifying a horrible result, that it would be difficult to know what, in principle, can ever be objected to. And this is, quite literally, what is troublesome. It seems to us that this criticism applies to all categories of transhumanism, although not necessarily to all enhancements proposed by them. Clearly, the somewhat loose identity of the movementand the variations between strong and moderate versionsmakes it difficult to sustain this argument unequivocally. Still the transhumanist may be justified in asking, What is wrong with arbitrariness? Let us consider one brief example. In aspects of our lives, as a widely shared intuition, we may think that in the absence of good reasons, we ought not to discriminate among people arbitrarily. Healthcare may be considered to be precisely one such case. Given the everincreasing demand for public healthcare services and products, it may be argued that access to them typically ought to be governed by publicly disputable criteria such as clinical need or potential benefit, as opposed to individual choices of an arbitrary or subjective nature. And nothing in transhumanism seems to allow for such objective dispute, let alone prioritisation. Of course, transhumanists such as More find no such disquietude. His phrase No more timidity is a typical token of transhumanist slogans. We applaud advances in therapeutic medical technologies such as those from new genetically based organ regeneration to more familiar prosthetic devices. Here the ends of the interventions are clearly medically defined and the means regulated closely. This is what prevents transhumanists from adopting a Soritestype slippery slope. But in the absence of a telos, of clearly and substantively specified ends (beyond the mere banner of enhancement), we suggest that the public, medical professionals and bioethicists alike ought to resist the potentially openended transformations of human nature. For if all transformations are in principle enchancements, then surely none are. The very application of the word may become redundant. Thus it seems that one strong argument against transhumanism generallythe arbitrary slippery slopepresents a challenge to transhumanism, to show that all of what are described as transhumanist enhancements are imbued with positive normative force and are not merely technological extensions of libertarianism, whose conception of the good is merely an extension of individual choice and consumption.

Already, we have seen the misuse of a host of therapeutically designed drugs used by nontherapeutic populations for enhancements. Consider the nontherapeutic use of human growth hormone in nonclinical populations. Such is the present perception of height as a positional good in society that Cuttler et al22 report that the proportion of doctors who recommended human growth hormone treatment of short nongrowth hormone deficient children ranged from 1% to 74%. This is despite its contrary indication in professional literature, such as that of the Pediatric Endocrine Society, and considerable doubt about its efficacy.23,24 Moreover, evidence supports the view that recreational body builders will use the technology, given the evidence of their use or misuse of steroids and other biotechnological products.25,26 Finally, in the sphere of elite sport, which so valorises embodied capacities that may be found elsewhere in greater degree, precision and sophistication in the animal kingdom or in the computer laboratory, biomedical enhancers may latch onto the genetically determined capacities and adopt or adapt them for their own commercially driven ends.

The arguments and examples presented here do no more than to warn us of the enhancement ideologies, such as transhumanism, which seek to predicate their futuristic agendas on the bedrock of medical technological progress aimed at therapeutic ends and are secondarily extended to loosely defined enhancement ends. In discussion and in bioethical literatures, the future of genetic engineering is often challenged by slippery slope arguments that lead policy and practice to a horrible result. Instead of pointing to the undesirability of the ends to which transhumanism leads, we have pointed out the failure to specify their telos beyond the slogans of overcoming timidity or Bostrm's3 exhortation that the passive acceptance of ageing is an example of reckless and dangerous barriers to urgently needed action in the biomedical sphere.

We propose that greater care be taken to distinguish the slippery slope arguments that are used in the emotionally loaded exhortations of transhumanism to come to a more judicious perspective on the technologically driven agenda for biomedical enhancement. Perhaps we would do better to consider those other alltoohuman frailties such as violent aggression, wanton selfharming and so on, before we turn too readily to the richer imaginations of biomedical technologists.

Competing interests: None.

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7. More M. Transhumanism: towards a futurist philosophy. http://www.maxmore.com/transhum.htm 1996 (accessed 20 Jul 2005)

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9a. Harris J. The Value of Life. London: Routledge. 1985

10. Elshtain B. ed. The body and the quest for control. Is human nature obsolete?. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004155174.174

10a. Bellah R N. et alHabits of the heart: individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1996

10b. MacIntyre A C. After virtue. (2nd ed) London: Duckworth. 1985

10c. Sandel M. Liberalism and the limits of justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1982

10d. Taylor C. The ethics of authenticity. Boston: Harvard University Press. 1982

10e. Walzer M. Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books. 1983

11. Habermas J. The future of human nature. Cambridge: Polity, 2003

12. Hobbes T. In: Oakeshott M, ed. Leviathan. London: MacMillan, 1962

13. Schauer F. Slippery slopes. Harvard Law Rev 198599361383.383

14. Walton D N. Slippery slope arguments. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992

15. Williams B A O. Which slopes are slippery. In: Lockwood M, ed. Making sense of humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995213223.223

16. Sternglantz R. Raining on the parade of horribles: of slippery slopes, faux slopes, and Justice Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v Texas, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 153. Univ Pa Law Rev 200515310971120.1120

18. Lamb D. Down the slippery slope. London: Croom Helm, 1988

19. Den Hartogh G. The slippery slope argument. In: Kuhse H, Singer P, eds. Companion to bioethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005280290.290

20. Borgmann A. Technology and the character of everyday life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984

21. Vita More N. Who are transhumans? http://www.transhumanist.biz/interviews.htm, 2000 (accessed 7 Apr 2006)

25. Grace F, Baker J S, Davies B. Anabolic androgenic steroid (AAS) use in recreational gym users. J Subst Use 20016189195.195

Continued here:
Transhumanism, medical technology and slippery slopes

Cosmodeism: Prologue to a Theology of Transhumanism – Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

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IntroductionFreuds disciple, Otto Rank once wrote that the need for a truly religious ideology is inherent in human nature and its fulfillment is basic to any kind of social life. If Transhumanism is to become a universal phenomenon it must include what Jung called a divine drama that is universally compelling.

This article proposes scientific hypotheticals regarding the future of existence that have significant theological implications, but which cannot be empirically confirmed. My method could be described as Futuristic Logic. I assume evolution to be the salient characteristic of existence: cosmic evolution having produced ever more complex elements, which eventually evolved into life, which continued to produce ever more complex life forms, until it produced self-reflective consciousness. Evolution will, therefore, eventually produce a supra-consciousness that will, ultimately, produce a supra-supra-consciousness, and so on, until a 'life form' will have been created that will appear to us as if it were a God. Not "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth", but "in the end an evolving cosmos will have created God". This won't be deterministic; it will be the result of conscious life forms throughout the Cosmos striving to gain control over their own evolution. This is the fundamental (volitional or subliminal) impulse of Transhumanism.

I do not consider Transhumanism to mean transcending (going beyond) humanism. Such a formulation is congruent with some formulations of Posthumanism, which, in turn, are logical deductions from radical Postmodernism. Such formulations reject the Enlightenment project as a misfortune and view terms like altruism, humanism, and democracy as "soft and slimy virtues". I identify myself as a Neo-modernist, (or a Post-postmodernist, if you prefer); someone who accepts the postmodernist critique of the nave hubris of Modernism and the moral transgressions which were its unintended consequence but who emphatically embraces Modernism's heroic ambition for humanity. Rejecting the ambitions of Modernism because of past sins is akin to rejecting evolution because Darwinism morphed into Social Darwinism which gave birth to eugenics, which led to the Holocaust.

I view as axiomatic that existence is hierarchal: evolution producing ever more complex hierarchal configurations, of which self-reflective, volitional consciousness is Planet Earth's current pinnacle. This axiom has ethical and moral implications. Running over a dog, as distressing as that is, is not the same as running over a human being if this be 'speciesism' so be it. As for me, human beings do occupy a superior place in nature, and the European Enlightenment while almost pathologically nave in its optimism was a culmination of the ethical and moral evolution of humankind at the time. Our human duty, therefore, is to strive towards a Transcendent humanism; to volitionally evolve our species into supra-humans (or as Nietzsche might have put it, into Supraman). It is our duty to overcome ourselves; to realize our divine potential; not to transcend humanism but to become transcendent humans: supra-humans.

Debunking the Non-Overlapping Magisteria Thesis

In 1997, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould published his non-overlapping magisteria thesis, that science and religion represent distinct, mutually exclusive domains. It was well written and well-argued. But unfortunately, it contributed to the ongoing desiccation of the intellectual imagination that began in the 19th century. Presuming we can compartmentalize our various intuitions, hunches and speculative imaginings into distinct, mutually exclusive domains is specious.

Until the 19th century, when universities quarantined thinking into academic departments, it would have been difficult to differentiate between the philosophical, religious, artistic and scientific. The very word 'scientist' was coined in 1833 by Anglican priest, William Whewell, who was also a historian of science and a philosopher. If you had called Newton a scientist he would not have understood what you were talking about. Newton was a 'natural philosopher' who wrote over two million words on theology. Science was his way of discovering the 'Mind of God'.

In modern terms, Leonardo Da Vinci was an engineer, scientist, and artist. But if you had asked him to define himself 'professionally' he would not have understood the question. He epitomized a fusion of technology, science, and art; each permeating and enriching the other. He would not have been an artistic genius without his technological genius, which was suffused with the same aesthetic instinct that characterized his art. Modern scientists still talk about the 'elegance' of a theory; engineers the 'beauty' of a design.

The religious thinking of the late Middle Ages, especially the sophisticated Aristotelian thinking of scholastic philosopher/priests such as Thomas Aquinas), played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. As Emmet Kennedy put it "Aquinas drew a famous distinction between what is known by reason and what is known by revelation". This intellectual space was necessary for the secular thinking which eventually created science and economic theory. Aquinas embraced two articles of Catholic faith: God was a God of reason who ordered the world rationally, and secondary causes, which enable us to explain natural phenomena and the interaction of nature's constituents by things secondary to God's direct intrusion phenomena which require reason, not revelation, in order to be fully understood. A modern interpretation of secondary causes could certainly accommodate evolution.

Subsequent Church thought removed some of the intellectual rubble of Aristotelian scholasticism that would have hindered the emergence of quantifiable scientific thinking. Butterfield noted that in 1277, Bishop Stephen Tempier headed "a council in Paris [which] condemned the view that even God could not create a void or an infinite universe of a plurality of worlds". God, being God, could do whatever he wished. This theological pronouncement provided the 'science' of the time with the freedom to speculate about the nature of existence without a priori doctrinal restrictions.

Occam's Razor (the Law of Parsimony) is a representative example of the overlap between the philosophical, religious and scientific. Occam was a Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopherand theologian. While his philosophy was religiously motivated to confirm monotheism, it eventually became the holy grail of scientific research. Could the Scientific Revolution have occurred in a non-monotheistic civilization a civilization that had already created a theological law of parsimony: one God; the One (and only)?

Cleric Jean Buridan (c.1300c.1358), anticipating Galileo, developed the Theory of Impetus, demonstrating that there is no need for either Aristotle's 'First Mover' or Plato's 'souls', which are not found in the Bible and which, by implication, limit God's omnipotence to design the world as he pleases. Bishop Nicolas d'Oresme (c.13201382) anticipating Copernicus, wrote that the Holy Scriptures can be accommodated even if we concede the possibility that the earth moves and is not the center of existence. Copernicus also anticipated the clockwork universe of Descartes and Deism. Referring to Buridan's impetus theory, he observed that "God might have started off the universe as a kind of clock and left it to run by itself". Here we see the parameters of Christian faith enabling the emergence of a mechanical cosmos by eliminating the need for 'intelligences' to explain the movement of celestial spheres. Butterfield noted that this was "a case of a consistent body of teaching [which] developed as a tradition" and influenced Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo. The latter's theory of inertia reflected a view that "God might have given these things their initial impetus, and their motion could be imagined as continuing forever".

Copernicus was motivated to simplify the complexities of the Ptolemaic system which, he felt, insulted God. If God is the God of reason, possessing omnipotent intelligence, he certainly would have created a universe more sensible than the convoluted Ptolemaic contraption. Copernicus applied the Law of Parsimony inherent in monotheism and found Ptolemy wanting. His motivation was to defend the honor of God's unconditional power.

Science, in turn, influenced theology. Natural theology is a consequence of religion trying to accommodate itself to science; to formulate an understanding of God that does not contradict science. Centuries before the Scientific Revolution, Maimonides advocated that rabbis must accommodate their interpretations of the Torah to science and not the other way around. Natural theology, natural religion, and philosophical theism are all consequences of an emergent scientific mindset compelling monotheistic religions to review and revise their doctrines. When theological imperatives consistently generate concepts reflecting a more modern scientific mindset, and when science constantly impacts religious thought, then we must discard the non-overlapping magisteria notion especially if we are to respond to Rank's observation that a healthy civilization needs a religious ideology.

Science is also based on faith in several assumptions that cannot be proven empirically. For example:1. Nature's laws are uniform throughout existence. 2. Nature's laws do not evolve and change.3. Mathematics is the universal language; existence is monolingual.4. What we see through a telescope millions of light years away still exists. We know Andromeda existed 2.5 million years ago, (its light has traveled 2.5 million light years) but do we empirically know it still exists?

Scientists accept these assumptions in order to do their jobs. But the only way they could prove them would be to be a supernatural entity outside of nature, capable of looking at all of nature. We reasonably assume these beliefs are true because all our experience 'SO FAR' affirms their validity. But, as David Hume noted over 250 years ago, 'SO FAR' ends when you confront the first exception. This is the paradox of science: something is science only because it is falsifiable. In other words, the "bedrock" assumptions that enable science to function are also falsifiable, and so cannot be bedrock, else they wouldn't be science.

Scientists claim they don't deal with meaning. But scientific biographies frequently contradict this. Science's giants have often been driven by the essentially religious question "what does it all mean?" I differentiate between the big 'R' organized religion business and the small 'r' religious sense of mystery of 'why there is anything at all rather than nothing'. The operations of existence often excite reverential wonder in authentic scientists. The greatest scientific centers are temples of spirituality that challenge mystical, supernatural religions. Einstein wrote: "What is the meaning of human life or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion." He added "the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life".

We cannot discriminate between the material and the spiritual. The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions are also spiritual. They have provided the means to liberate humankind from ignorance, superstition and soul-destroying drudge work. Without material well-being there cannot be spiritual enlightenment, without scientific progress there can be no material well-being. As the Talmud says "without bread there is no Torah"

One Transhumanist task would be to reunify humankind's various spiritual predispositions (religious, scientific or philosophical); to realize Carl Sagan's vision that: "A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths".

WHY? The Ultimate Question

'WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?' is the ultimate question regarding the human condition. It is the question that has motivated religious and philosophical speculation, scientific endeavor, artistic creativity and entrepreneurial innovation throughout the ages. It is the question we try to answer in order to rationalize our own existence. It is the question that has generated the modern concepts of angst and alienation. The modern dilemma is that we are finding it increasingly difficult to rationalize our own existence and this leads to our subsequent feelings of purposelessness. Pascal wrote:

Pascal's despair is the first cry of modernist angst; a product of our own scientific progress. What, after all, is the point of our own individual, ephemeral lives on this small planet around a mediocre star in a midsized galaxy of some 300 billion stars whose closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, contains one trillion stars, in an 'observable universe' that numbers two trillion galaxies (the largest containing 100 trillion stars)? The "observable universe" being just a tiny portion of the universe which may contain 500 trillion galaxies and might be an infinitesimal part of a multiverse containing trillions upon trillions of "universes"!

Increased awareness of the vastness of existence introduced an angst from which humanity has never recovered. Pascal wrote in the 17th century. What gloom are we supposed to feel today when "the infinite immensity of spaces" is immensely more immense? Never in history has Pascal's despair been so relevant. Even within the cosmically insignificant history of our own planet, what is the real significance of our own lives? Consider that Earth is 4.5 billion years old; that life arose 3.8 billion years ago; mammals 200 million years ago; primitive humans 2.5 million years ago; modern humans 150,000 years ago; recorded history 6,000 years ago; the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Constitutionalism, Industrial Revolution and Democracy all within the last 500 years. Currently, humans have an 80-90 year lifespan, which might increase to 120-150 years by the end of this century. What is this in relation to the "eternity" which preceded human civilization on this planet and which will succeed it? Does the Cosmos 'care' who is elected President of the United States? Does the Cosmos 'care' about the 3.8 billion-year history of life on this planet? Would it lament if runaway global warming turned our planet into another Venus? When contemplating this time scale on the background of the vastness of our Cosmos, it is difficult not to plunge into existential desolation.

Consequently, by the 20th century, the elemental question for thoughtful people had become: is life worth living? Camus wrote "There is but one truly philosophical problem and that is suicide Whether or not the world has three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories comes afterward". Indeed, why not commit suicide and avoid the tribulations of a meaningless existence? Everything else, all our cultural and scientific product, is marginalia to this ultimate existential question.

The irony is that science that sublime creation of the human spirit reflecting human curiosity and imagination at its highest stage of development has revealed an existence of such vastness and complexity that it makes our collective and individual lives seem inconsequential. Even worse, science inexorably morphed into 'scientism' an "ism": an ideology that posited that things, issues, events or feelings which could not be described according to the canons of reductionist/empirical science were of no concern to the intellectually tough-minded (or did not even exist). Thus, behaviorism (the ultimate expression of scientism) claimed there really is no such thing as consciousness it is simply an invented construct used to explain behaviors. As Jacques Barzun put it, scientists seemed to take great pleasure in "being able to undeceive ones fellows"; to disabuse them of the superstitions of pre-science; the superstitions that love and purpose and concepts of honor and duty, are intrinsic to human existence. The 19th-century scientific mindset implied that "the only reality was fact, brute force, valueless existence, and bare survival".

Before Copernicus, medieval Europeans lived in a cozy universe. Earth was the center of creation, enveloped in the warm embrace of ever purer crystalline spheres that contained the planets and stars up to the very throne of God. God's full-time job was maintaining this physical order, keeping track of our behavior (for future reference regarding salvation) and, once in a while, interfering in the natural order with a miracle here or there. People knew that life on earth was temporary and a test of our moral stamina in facing physical pain and the various distresses of daily life in order to qualify for eternal life in the world to come. Temporal life was God's matriculation exam to qualify for heaven. Medieval Europeans knew that if they obeyed the rules and followed the dictates of the Church their suffering would be rewarded with eternal bliss in the world-to-come. Things might be dreadful now but suffering would end and confusion clarified in heaven. The Copernican Revolution introduced a kind of spiritual agoraphobiaby destroying this coziness; by making us aware of the vastness of existence. Angst and doubt about the meaning of our existence became our constant companions.

Human beings aren't just ARE; we are symbolic creatures that require meaning to survive. The Darwinian mechanism of physical survival is not a sufficient reason to survive; it is simply an explanation. We cannot rationalize our subjective physical survival without objective meaning. Why should we live? Existentialists propose we must 'invent' our own meaning. Is this even possible? Symbols and volitional reason are humanity's primary evolutionary survival mechanism. Birds fly, deer are swift, lions are powerful, while human beings think and they direct their thinking (volition) in terms of their symbols, values and meanings. Humanity has invented religions, myths, and social and cultural devices to express this inherent feature of human nature.

The human experience is future-directed; we implicitly assume it is leading to something of significance and this makes sense out of our lives. This is why we do not commit suicide. We assume that our individual lives have meaning. We assume (and recent science supports this assumption) that every individual is unique, that every individual is distinctive in the entire Cosmos, that in all of infinite nature, no one is entirely similar to each and every one of us. There is, of course, correspondence and species similarity connecting every human being, and probably all conscious beings in the Cosmos, by virtue of their consciousness. But our own individuality is a cosmic absolute, as is the uniqueness of every distinctive culture and civilization which is a product of self-reflective conscious life. Cosmic evolution produced our uniqueness and this uniqueness might be valuable to cosmic evolution. But unlike animals, whether our uniqueness is or is not valuable is entirely up to us. It is a volitional choice both on the individual and the civilizational level.

Realizing our distinctiveness is frightening. Many withdraw from the responsibility of their own individuality and try to imitate others (to conform), or surrender to the will of the external authority of state, ideology, guru, demagogue, religion or, what is most dangerous, the majority (the herd, the mob). Fear of our individuality serves as the psychological basis of despotism and religious fanaticism. But conformism is a spurious symbol of attachment because it is our very individual distinctness that empowers us to be part of human society. Distinctiveness is what both obligates and sustains society, because society is the mediator between the distinctiveness of individuals. In fulfilling this role, society complements what is lacking in every individual that composes it. This is also the case for most advanced animals and perhaps even for the environment at large. Indeed, we might perceive our planet's ecology as a living society sustained by the interaction between the numerous species and subspecies with the individual members of those species and sub-species without which those species, sub-species and individuals could not survive. Perhaps this is how we should view the Cosmos at large, as a giant society.

The Alienation 'Business'

Alienation theory is often promoted by people with ideological axes to grind. The radical left claims alienation is a disease of capitalism that can be cured by socialism. Environmentalists of the primitivist persuasion argue that it is a disease of urbanization and consumerism and that the "cure" is a return to a simple lifestyle on the land where we can get back to nature and discover our authentic selves. Cultural paleo-conservatives, such as T.S. Eliot, uneasy with the consequences of the Enlightenment, suggest that alienation is a disease of modernity itself, and the frantic unending change it generates, and, as Frye put it, can only be "cured" by returning to the past's social and theological certainties; "that to have a flourishing culture we should educate an elite, keep most people living in the same spot, and never disestablish the Church of England". There is something claustrophobic about these versions of alienation, which are detached from the cosmic context and reduced to the trivia of earthbound human society. The modern dilemma is certainly a sense of the meaningless of existence. But it is the immensity of existence itself that is the problem, not the consumer society or false consciousness.

Buttressing these three views of alienation is the pathology of nostalgia the "good old days" when people were whole and sure of who and what they were within the norms of family and community; the assumption always being that, in the past, family and community were healthier social constructs than today. This is a fatuous assumption for anyone with a minimal knowledge of social history. It is a silly escapism from the true scale of the problem. Woody Allen's movie, Midnight in Paris, lampoons this enduring pathology with exquisite irony. Eric Roll critiqued the desire "to re-establish a mythical golden age" by people who "cannot understand the forces which are transforming their own society". Peter Gay thought nostalgia to be "the most sophistic, most deceptive form regression can take". It certainly has no place in a Transhumanist worldview.

It is the human condition on the background of the vast, endless obscurity of space/time that causes alienation, not the city or the assembly line; not the consumer society or politicians. It is the very material prosperity of modernity, which has afforded us the time and ability to reflect on this human condition that generates angst. It is a real anxiety, not an artificial one caused by the wrong kind of social environment or false consciousness. It is a cosmic alienation, not amenable to therapy or social revolution, but only to substantive confrontation.

Capitalism and the consumerism it produced are consequences of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. They have not caused alienation; they have just made us aware by providing the material ease that allows us to reflect on the human condition and afforded us the knowledge to better understand what that condition is. It is the apple of knowledge that is the cause; it is asking questions that have no answers that are the cause; it is being thrown out of the 'Garden of Eden' of our own smug ignorance that is the cause. At best, one can say that our frantic 'busyness' and consumerism are escapes from the cause; they are the effect, not the cause.

The developments of science in describing the vastness and the minuteness of existence have had profound philosophical and psychological consequences. The abstruseness of religious belief and the rise of Darwinism and Freudianism have undermined our civilizational self-esteem. If we are related to monkeys and not to God, and if we really want to do to our mothers what Freud says we want to do, it is difficult to sustain a transcendent view of human 'being'.

Without comprehensive civilizational myths, how do we even address the mystery of existence the fact that there is an 'is'? We range from wonder at our own scientific ability to uncover the mysteries of the "mind of God" to a Pascalian melancholy about the meaninglessness of life. Anxiety about our very existence dominates our spiritual ecology: nihilism, existentialism, and cultural relativism. We hide from this behind the deceptions of fundamentalist religiosity or the self-imposed haze of drugs, shopping, social activism and busyness for its own sake.

The Cosmodeistic Response

The Cosmodeistic Hypothesis is an iteration of Pandeism not God becoming the Universe but rather the Cosmos becoming God; not "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth", but, rather, "in the end an evolving cosmos will have created God". It posits that the Big Bang that created our Cosmos was a local event in an infinite Universe that contains an infinite number of finite cosmoses: the multiverse. Our Cosmos is an evolving finite domain/process fashioned by the natural workings of infinite Nature creating ever higher levels of complexification. Consciousness has been an inexorable consequence of this evolutionary complexification. Assuming evolution is as eternal as existence itself, it is self-evident that consciousness must eventually evolve into supra-consciousness and then into supra-supra-consciousness at various places in the Cosmos.

This evolutionary process will continue until a consciousness is created that will appear to us as if it were a God; the Godding of the Cosmos being an inherent characteristic of its evolving actuality. We are an integral and vital part of this cosmic evolution. What our species does on this planet will contribute to or detract from this process. What we do as individuals will contribute to or detract from this process. Our individual lives have cosmic consequence no matter how infinitesimally small (similar to the butterfly effect of chaos theory). The very chaos of our existence is the vital ingredient creating the cosmos (order) of existence.

This is to place the emergence of self-reflective consciousness at the center of the cosmic drama (Jung's Divine Drama); to affirm that while the Cosmos is not teleological and has no purpose i.e. that it doesn't represent a planned supernatural drama with a specific end as the monotheistic religions would have it [Hinduism and Buddhism don't seem to have a problem with a non-teleological existence] cosmic purpose has been created as a consequence of the evolutionary cosmic process. This is a neo-teleological perspective, the civilizational consequences of which would be as profound as those of monotheism. This would be the proper antidote to Pascal's despair, rather than a self-deceptive return to the 'eternal verities' of the monotheistic religions or invented meanings.

Most pre-supra-conscious civilizations will destroy themselves by failing to meet the challenges of their own nuclear stage of development, by ecological collapse, or failure of collective will. But a sufficient number will survive, or will have developed by different means, and be capable of advancing to a supra-conscious phase. A percentage of these pre-hyper-conscious life forms will also conclude they must strive to become part of the Godding of the Cosmos. This is assumed in the name of 'cosmic humility'. If individuals on this planet have conceived this concept it is certain that other conscious beings in the Cosmos have conceived it. This is a variation of the ontological argument for the existence of God. Since one cannot conceive of a concept related to cosmic evolution greater than the Cosmos evolving into a 'God' and since the Cosmos is producing ever more complex constructs, most particularly consciousness, as the salient characteristic inherent in this evolution, it is self-evident that a 'God' would be the final stage of cosmic evolution.

Amongst those civilizations pursuing this ambition, an infinitesimal percentage (but also great in aggregate number) will succeed in transcending their bodies, by scientific and technical means, thus isolating and enhancing the most essential part of their 'humanness' their consciousness. They will, in effect, have become pure consciousness, or if you will, pure spirit expanding throughout the Cosmos. Arthur Clark in 2001A Space Odyssey anticipated this with the kind of speculative imagination we should be cultivating in ourselves and in our children:

evolution was driving toward new goals. The first ... had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transformed into shining new homes of metal and plastic they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter. Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves "

Clark's "creatures of radiation", as well as the stages leading up to it, might legitimately be called Posthuman Transhumanism being a necessary link in the evolutionary chain of consciousness towards Posthuman Godness.

The subsequent expansion of this higher consciousness throughout the Cosmos will be unfettered by physical limitations and eventually consciousness will fill the entire Cosmos. Consciousness will have become one with a Cosmos that has dissolved into pure radiation as an inevitable consequence of entropy. Thus the Cosmos will become in its entirety a conscious universal being i.e. a 'God'. Cosmodeism posits God as the consequence of the Cosmos and not as its cause. The fateful question that every conscious civilization throughout the Cosmos must eventually address is: will we take part in this cosmic race for survival and strive to survive in the cosmic 'End of Days', or will we perish along with the rest of cosmic organization? Will we accept the limitations of our physicality or will we try to transcend them?

This would be a volitional teleology; part of the neo-teleological interpretation of cosmic evolution. Certain cosmic developments are determined. But whether 'we' will be part of these cosmic developments depends on the volition of conscious beings on this and other planets. Doing so would guarantee the cosmic significance of the billions of years of life on this planet. Failure to do so would degrade the cosmic significance of the entire evolutionary drama of life on this planet to nothing more than a statistical contribution to cosmic probability 'striving' to become God. This is not New Age fantasy celebrating the mystical, or science fiction that violates the known laws of nature. Science is as necessary for this as oxygen is to life. But science alone is not sufficient. Science cannot progress without informed intuition and educated guesses.

Historical Intimations of the Cosmodeistic Hypothesis

Notions of God as the consequence rather than the cause of the Cosmos are not novel. Israeli thinker Mordechai Nessyahu laid the groundwork with Cosmotheism. He conjectured, that:

Previously, philosopher Samuel Alexander advocated Emergent Evolution producing emergent qualities. He wrote: "God is the whole universe engaged in the movement of the world to a higher level of existence. Teilhard de Chardin viewed God as both the cause and the consequence (the alpha and omega) of cosmic existence and evolution. He saw the end of human history as pure consciousness becoming one with the Alpha God to create the Omega God. Philosopher Benedikt Gcke has written: "the history of the world is the one infinite life of God, and we are part of the one infinite divine being [italics mine]. We are therefore responsible for the future development of the life of the divine being." Architect and philosopher Paolo Soleri saw technology as enabling conscience life to evolve into 'God'.

According to historian Robert Tucker German philosophy is rife with human ambition to be Godlike. "The movement of thought from Kant to Hegel revolved in a fundamental sense around the idea of mans self-realization as a godlike being, or alternatively as God". What attracted Marx to Hegel was that "he found in Hegel the idea that man is God". History for Hegel was God realizing itself through the vehicle of man. This is the underlying implication of all Enlightenment thought: when we say "what will history say about us?" we are really substituting history for God. The Process Philosophy of Whitehead as well as Emergent Evolution, and Spiritual Evolution (consciousness as an inevitable component of evolution) are also intimations of this same notion. Recently Dr. Ted Chu (2014) in Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision of Our Future Evolutionargued the case for the eventuality of a Cosmic Being.

Our legacy religions also contain hints hiding in plain sight. The Hebrew words for God are verbs, not nouns: Yehova (will become manifest), yehiya (will be), eheye asher eheye (I will be what I will be). In Biblical Hebrew these are imperfect verbs (consider the irony of that the "perfect" being described in the imperfect) and in Modern Hebrew the future tense; an intimation of the ancient mind that humans are an integral part of a divine process (that we call evolution). The Talmud enjoins us to be partners (with God) in the act of creation creation as an ongoing never-ending process. Interpretations of the Kabbalah perceive the role of human individuals in sharing in this Godding of the universe perceiving Godding as the very essence of existence.

Certain Christian heritages inspired Teilhard de Chardin and Process Theology. "Hindus believe that humans can and should merge into the universal soul of the Cosmos the Atman" (Harari 2017, 444). Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan anticipated volitional teleology when he asserted that "Man is not a detached spectator of a progress immanent in human history, but an active agent remolding the world nearer to his ideals". Sri Aurobindo's concept of Atman approaches the concept of the supra-conscious.

Current science writing is replete with intimations of the Cosmodeistic hypothesis. Freeman Dyson's Infinite in All Directions; Heinz Pagels' The Cosmic Code; Paul Davis's The Cosmic Blueprint; Louise Young's The Unfinished Universe; Daniel Layzer's Cosmogenesis; Prigogine/Stenger's Order out of Chaos; Ervin Laszlo's The Self Actualizing Cosmos; and others. In response to an inquiry by a schoolgirl as to his religious beliefs, Albert Einstein responded " the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive."

Civilizational Significances of Cosmodeism

Postmodernism, angst and alienation are poor intellectual and spiritual fare to feed to future generations. One cannot produce robust, self-reliant, intellectually independent and responsible citizens of the planetary future on such insipid fare. Here the Cosmodeistic Hypothesis could play an important intermediate role. It could contribute to moderating alienation by presenting a meta-cosmological vision capable of assuaging some of what ails human society in this century.

Psychology certainly hasn't had a substantive impact on problems of angst (which is really the problem of meaning). Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, Maslow, and Frankl all linked meaning to mental health. But psychology, unlike religion, does not presume to provide meaning; it simply preaches that meaning is meaningful. Jung asserted that "Man cannot stand a meaningless life"; that "Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness"; "That gives peace, when people feel that they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama [italics mine]. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it". But after telling us that we are sick because we don't have meaning in our lives he coyly avers that "psychology is concerned with the act of seeing and not with the construction of new religious truths". In other words, 'life is meaningless without the divine drama but don't expect me to provide it.' For Victor Frankl, finding meaning in one's life was essential to the therapeutic process. Certainly, no one dealt more with meaning as it pertains to mental health; witness the titles of his books: Man's Search for Meaning (1946); The Will to Meaning (1969); The Unheard Cry for Meaning (1978); Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning (1997).

But no psychologist offers a convincing worldview by which a modern rational person might infer meaning. Psychology satisfies itself with the search for meaning but never supplies an answer to the question "WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?" And this is why, at the end of the day, psychology has failed, and why it may have caused more psychological damage than remedy. Preaching the subjective need for meaning while not providing objective meaning tends to increase anxiety, not mitigate it.

This situation has had serious subversive socio/cultural effects well described by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man. Lewis intimates that unless we reenchant existence and dwell on the objective wonder of existence, the human condition will become so enervated that it will endanger civilization itself. While Lewis was himself a big 'R' religious believer (the Anglican Communion) he argued his case from a small 'r' sense of religious awe at the facticity of existence. He did not believe that our ever-growing ability to explain the constituent facts of existence took anything away from the wondrous facticity of existence as a whole that existence per se is sublime. As he put it: "The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration".

Here Lewis reveals a profound fundamental truth about the human spirit; the intrinsic need to venerate something greater than ourselves. Veneration is as universal a human attribute as language. There is not a culture on earth that does not have a deeply rooted history of veneration of one form or another. Veneration is to the soul what food is to the body. Every historical endeavor to do away with inherited modes of veneration has resulted in alternative venerations: ideologies, leaders, causes, "activism", etc. Alternative venerations have caused great horrors. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China promoted alternative venerations, reviving a sense of purpose within totalitarian societies. As Jacques Barzun observed "What has happened [in these countries] can happen wherever the need for enthusiasm and action is given a goal. It is easy enough to manufacture slogans out of race, autarky, the Cultural Revolution and make them seem genuine outlets from the impasse "

As an antidote to the totalitarian 'solution' for veneration, Cosmodeism proposes we venerate existence itself and our own existence within that existence; the fact that existence exists, that the 'is' is the ultimate mystery. To realize Emil Durkheim's observation that when we serve something greater than ourselves we uplift ourselves, we must acknowledge that some things, some values, some emotions "merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt". If we don't find the 'greater than' in the concept of 'God', or Godding or other transcendent ideas, we will find it in fascist leaders, leftwing icons, New Age cults, or pop stars. If our need to venerate something 'greater than' is not directed at something affirmative, it will be directed at something negative. What could be more positive and spiritually satisfying than venerating the Godding of the Cosmos and our own part in that process?

I believe Cosmodeism can become the foundation for a Transhumanist Theology that can inspire human beings to strive to become part of the Divine Drama (the Godding of the Cosmos); a theology that emphasizes that every one of us is part of the Divine Drama by virtue of our individual existence; that every one of us affects the development of the Divine Drama by our planetary actions (a cosmic butterfly effect); that our individual existence is inherently meaningful but it is up to us to make it actively purposeful by volitionally striving to transcend the limitations of humanness to become Transcendent humans; a bridge across time towards an end called 'God'.

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Top Movies Of 2019 That Depicted Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Analytics India Magazine

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is creating a great impact on the world by enabling computers to learn on their own. While in the real world AI is still focused on solving narrow problems, we see a whole different face of AI in the fictional world of science fiction movies which predominantly depict the rise of artificial general intelligence as a threat for human civilization. As a continuation of the trend, here we take a look at how artificial intelligence was depicted in 2019 movies.

A warning in advance the following listicle is filled with SPOILERS.

Terminator: Dark Fate the sixth film of the Terminator movie franchise, featured a super-intelligent Terminator named Gabriel designated as Rev-9, and was sent from the future to kill a young woman (Dani) who is set to become an important figure in the Human Resistance against Skynet. To fight the Rev-9 Terminator, the Human Resistance from the future also sends Grace, a robot soldier, back in time, to defend Dani. Grace is joined by Sarah Connor, and the now-obsolete ageing model of T-800 Terminator the original killer robot in the first movie (1984).

We all know Tony Stark as the man of advanced technology and when it comes to artificial intelligence, Stark has nothing short of state-of-the-art technology in Marvels cinematic universe. One such artificial intelligence was the Even Dead, Im The Hero (E.D.I.T.H.) which we witnessed in the 2019 movie Spider-Man: Far From Home. EDITH is an augmented reality security defence and artificial tactical intelligence system created by Tony Stark and was given to Peter Parker following Starks death. It is encompassed in a pair of sunglasses and gives its users access to Stark Industries global satellite network along with an array of missiles and drones.

I Am Mother is a post-apocalyptic movie which was released in 2019. The films plot is focused on a mother-daughter relationship where the mother is a robot designed to repopulate Earth. The robot mother takes care of her human child known as daughter who was born with artificial gestation. The duo stays in a secure bunker alone until another human woman arrives there. The daughter now faces a predicament of whom to trust- her robot mother or a fellow human who is asking the daughter to come with her.

Wandering Earth is another 2019 Chinese post-apocalyptic film with a plot involving Earths imminent crash into another planet and a group of family members and soldiers efforts to save it. The films artificial intelligence character is OSS, a computer system which was programmed to warn people in the earth space station. A significant subplot of the film is focused on protagonist Liu Peiqiangs struggle with MOSS which forced the space station to go into low energy mode during the crash as per its programming from the United Earth Government. In the end, Liu Peiqiang resists and ultimately sets MOSS on fire to help save the Earth.

James Camerons futuristic action epic for 2019 Alita: Battle Angel is a sci-fi action film which depicts the human civilization in an extremely advanced stage of transhumanism. The movie describes the dystopian future where robots and autonomous systems are extremely powerful. To elaborate, in one of the initial scenes of the movie, Ido attaches a cyborg body to a human brain he found (from another cyborg) and names her Alita after his deceased daughter, which is an epitome of advancements in AI and robotics.

Jexi is the only Hollywood rom-com movie depicting artificial intelligence in 2019. The movie features an AI-based operating system called Jexi with recognizable human behaviour and reminds the audience of the previously acclaimed film Her, which was released in 2014. But unlike Her, the movie goes the other way around depicting how the AI system becomes emotionally attached to its socially-awkward owner, Phil. The biggest shock of the comedy film is when Jexi the AI which lives inside Phils cellphone acts to control his life and even chases him angrily using a self-driving car.

Hi, AI is a German documentary which was released in early 2019. The documentary was based on Chucks relationship with Harmony an advanced humanoid robot. The films depiction of artificial intelligence is in sharp contrast with other fictional movies on AI. The documentary also depicts that even though human research is moving in the direction of creating advanced robots, interactions with robots still dont have the same depth as human conversations. The film won the Max Ophls Prize for best documentary for the year.

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Vishal Chawla is a senior tech journalist at Analytics India Magazine (AIM) and writes on the latest in the world of analytics, AI and other emerging technologies. Previously, he was a senior correspondent for IDG CIO and ComputerWorld. Write to him at vishal.chawla@analyticsindiamag.com

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Top Movies Of 2019 That Depicted Artificial Intelligence (AI) - Analytics India Magazine

The 10 best cyberpunk games on PC – PC Gamer

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Theres an innate joy to a good cyberpunk game; that sense of fighting The Man, of struggling up from the gutter in a world that doesnt care, of being a rebel with a cause and, more importantly, some serious hardware. Sometimes its a depressing odyssey, other times, very tongue in cheek. Here, then, are our pick of the games worth selling your genitals on the black market for.

Released: 2001 Publisher: Eidos InteractiveDeveloper: Ion Storm

Few cyberpunk games have the same indie-rock feel as Anachronox, the game from Ion Storm that wasnt Deus Ex or Daikatana. Its Tom Halls tribute to pretty much everything Tom Hall loves, from the dimension-shifting titular planet to comic book worlds, to the fact that you spend much of the game travelling with a planet as a companion. A literal planet. Shrunk down, hovering next you, its people voting on what they all want to do next. Anachronox is a janky experience to be sure, but an unforgettable one, and its a genuine tragedy well never get the planned sequel.

Released: 1994Publisher: VirginDeveloper: Revolution Software

Beneath A Steel Sky offers a different feel to most cyberpunk; a somewhat low-key, sardonic take, in a city that thrives on cruel mundanity. Its not long before youre digging deeper into cyberpunk tropes, however, as you battle the omnipresent computer system LINC, explore cyberspace in search of clues, and save a city thats Blade Runner by way of Hull. Along the way you get the delightful company of your robot buddy Joey, who mirrors the genres love of transhumanism with his own slow evolution from humble circuit board towell, spoilers. Best of all, its completely free.

Released: 2015Publisher: Wadjet Eye GamesDeveloper: Wadjet Eye Games

It may be a fantastic adventure, but Technobabylon stands out most for having a deep sense of heart. Cyberpunk is often a cold genre, either through pessimism or a focus on the dehumanising nature of technology. Technobabylon flips that, with a story that comes at the usual elements from an entirely human directionfamily, loss, isolation and community. Its icier elements remain brutal, from restaurants that serve cloned human flesh to terrorists whose bones have been turned into bombs, but its the warmth that makes it unforgettable. That and the jingle for T.H.E. Foods, which will, alas, never leave you.

Released: 2016Publisher: Sukeban GamesDeveloper: Ysbyrd Games

Most cyberpunk games have you fighting against a corrupt system in some way. VA-11 HALL-A is more about helping it get drunk. Its a mix of visual novel and bartending simulator, where you bounce between mixing drinks and talking with the bizarre visitors at your seedy bar. The trick is that, by mixing the right drinks, you can make them open up and tell you stories of the harsh world outside. Some of those guests are dogs. Its that kind of bar. VA-11 HALL-As clever ideas and well realised setting are well worth visiting for a round or two.

Released: 2011Publisher: Streum on StudioDeveloper: Streum on Studio

Were meant to give you a pithy summary of EYE at this point, but thats just not going to happen. You wont find many games so devoted to making your brain melt, from its convoluted plot to the way the game works. Youre an amnesiac caught in a dreamscape, and things only get more surreal when you enter the real world and find yourself surrounded by groups with names like the Secreta Secretorum and the Meta-Streumic Force. EYE is every cyberpunk trope thrown into a big futuristic blender and then spiced up with a little LSD. Its endlessly fascinating, especially if you like Deus Ex but find it just a bit too predictable.

Released: 1999Publisher: EADeveloper: Irrational Games

The System Shock series isnt quite the same flavour of cyberpunk as most of the games on this list, but it stands as one of the first truly successful attempts at the genre. Its villain, rogue AI SHODAN, is deservedly considered one of gamings greatest baddies, and the first games take on cyberspace as a surreal maze of wireframe graphics and deadly geometric shapes certainly warrants the series its place. The sequel largely drops that element, but replaces it with a new interest in transhumanism by way of the improvements offered by a more evolved SHODAN, who refuses to be humbled by needing to rely on a mere fleshbag.

Released: 2016 Publisher: UbisoftDeveloper: Ubisoft

The first Watch Dogs was more overtly cyberpunk than its sequel, but its also a far inferior game. Watch Dogs 2 picks up everything it did well, particularly the use of hacking as a primary weapon and a city in which everything can be manipulated, and throws out everything else. While the sequel doesnt have much raw story, it does a great job of making new hero Marcus Holloway feel like part of something important. Watch Dogs 2 puts you at the bottom of the social ladder, then hands you a hacksaw to bring the system crashing down. Doing so makes for great set-pieces and a genuine feeling of power.

Released: 1997Publisher: VirginDeveloper: Westwood Studios

Westwoods Blade Runner absolutely nails the style of the movie, recreating its locations with fully animated backgrounds, and offers a score painstakingly recreated by the composer from the original. Its a brand new story in the Blade Runner universe, playing out concurrently with Deckards. The first act especially is a masterful bit of work, plunging you deep into the world and dripping with atmosphere. You get to perform the Voight-Kampff test, face off with replicants who arent afraid to thrust you into an arcade sequence without warning, and generally live for a while in a more-or-less perfect recreation of LA, 2019.

Released: 2014Publisher: Harebrained SchemesDeveloper: Harebrained Schemes

Its amazing that we had to wait so long for either of the two big cyberpunk tabletop RPGs to make their way to PCif you ignore Microsofts team-based FPS Shadowrun, which everyone really should. Despite both SNES and Mega Drive owners getting Shadowrun games in the early 90s, we had to wait until 2013 for Harebrained Schemes Shadowrun Returns. The original campaign, Dead Mans Switch, is solid enough. The sequel (originally an expansion pack before thankfully being re-released as a standalone game), is phenomenal.

Shadowruns take on cyberpunk is a complex one, mixing in magical and fantasy elements, with the playersshadowrunnersas mercenaries in a world gone mad. Dragonfall absolutely nails this, essentially giving you a team, a general objective to raise enough money for a big mission, and a city of opportunities to pick and choose from. Its not a complex business simulation or anything like that, but it conveys the vibe of being a shadowrunner far more effectively than a series of mandatory missions ever could. You spend time with your team and get to know their personalities and problems, help them out, and slowly improve your gear until youre ready to take on literal dragons.

All of this plays out in two basic modes: RPG exploration, and solid tactical combat that makes good use of your team and their abilities. The magical parts of the setting really help with these, allowing the action to go beyond guns.

The third game, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, was also an excellent RPG, but it was this sense of actually being in control that made Dragonfall stand out, both in its series and the genre in general. Its a structural approach we dont often see, and yet one that doesnt get in the way of a strong main storyline and a satisfying ending. What Dragonfall lacks in raw technology, with its relatively simple engine and graphics, it more than makes up for in scope and heart.

Its one of the best RPGs of the last few years, and one of the best cyberpunk games full stop. Harebrained is now part of strategy behemoth Paradox Interactiveheres hoping its working on something even bigger and better.

Released: 2011Publisher: Square EnixDeveloper: Eidos Montreal

Honestly, the question was never whether Deus Ex would end up topping this list, but whether this or the original would take the crown.

The first game is of course a classic, but time hasnt been especially kind to its technology or some of its ideas, and politically its from a very different era. Human Revolution lacks some of its raw scope and imagination, but is a far sleeker experience that builds on what the original does so well, and what other franchises have brought to the immersive sim genre in the intervening years. Yes, the boss fights suck, and can rightly go and stand in the corner with those copies of Invisible War and Mankind Divideds garbage ending, but in all other respects, Human Revolution still holds up extremely well as a glimpse of a possible future.

It helps that, while the original Deus Ex was largely built around conspiracy theoriesgroups like the Illuminati and so onHuman Revolution concentrates on transhumanism and the societal chasms between the haves and have-nots that are only widened by the addition of technology. As gravelly-voiced, professional not-asker-for- this Adam Jensen, youre in the rare position of being in the middle of the situation, with a body full of fancy toys that isnt exactly yours. Youre neither truly with the rich and powerful in their ivory towers, nor down with the gutter-rats, but perfectly placed to either prop up a failing society or help it come crashing down.

This gives Human Revolution a resonance that many other supercop fantasies struggle with, in a world perfectly set up to explore technology in both its positive and negative forms. The same science that can replace an arm or eyeball can also be abused, or simply demonised, with just a few flicks of a switch. Fancy cyborg gear can elevate the average person, but also make them subject to its creators in both body and soul. Is it a fair trade? What if the people just seize it?

The sequel, Mankind Divided, focuses on the social issues of all this, with questionable success. Human Revolution handles it more elegantly by simply presenting the situation, and allowing you, the player, to decide which path is correct. Admittedly, this boils down to pressing a button and watching a video clip, but still. While it lasts, its a solid shooter, a thought-provoking game, and also it lets you punch people through walls.

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The 10 best cyberpunk games on PC - PC Gamer

Transhumanism – Ascension Glossary

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Transhumanism is an international, cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition, by making available technologies that greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. [1]Many transhumanists believe in the compatibility between the human mind and computer hardware, with the implication that human consciousness can be transferred to alternative media, known as mind uploading. Since the Science of the Soul and the Consciousness functions of the spiritual bodies, have not yet been discovered by scientists, this has potentially extremely destructive consequences to human consciousness and the electromagnetic functions of the Lightbody. Posthumans (the result of applied transhumanist technologies) could be completely synthetic artificial intelligences, or a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence, or uploaded consciousness, or the result of making profound technological augmentations to a biological human.

Transhumanism is a school of thought that seeks to guide us towards a posthuman condition. Essentially, this is about creating artificially intelligent hybrids or cyborgs to replace the organic spiritual consciousness of humans. Some examples are redesigning the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or radical technological enhancements. Some of the proposed biological enhancements are using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, life extension therapies, neural interfaces, brain mapping, wearable or implanted computers, and entrainment of cognitive techniques. Most of these options are designed to disconnect the human soul from the human body, and prepare the body to be used as a shell for a new host. Effectively, this is integrating technological and pharmaceutical hybridization to damage human DNA, as preparation for body snatching.

The fundamental basis of the Transhumanism concept is the A.I. downloaded into the scientific human mind from the Negative Aliens and Satanic Forces, in their quest to survive and achieve immortality by hijacking human consciousness and ultimately possessing the human host body. They do not have flesh and bone bodies and covet ours. Most academics are filled with a variety of mind control and alien implants to be a cog in the wheel to steadily enforce alien control systems. Most early transhumanism concepts were developed by geneticists interested in eugenics and sustaining life forms in synthetic environments. (Like the eugenic experiments similar to those of the Black Sun Nazis). A common feature of promoting transhumanism is the future vision of creating a new intelligent species, into which humanity will evolve and eventually, either supplement it or supersede it. This distraction on the surface is a scheme, while the underlying motivation is intending species extinction of what we know as humans today. Transhumanism stresses the evolutionary perspective, yet it completely ignores the electromagnetic function of human DNA and the consciousness reality of the multidimensional human soul-spirit. They claim to want to stop human suffering but have no idea of the alien machinery and mind control implants used to imprison human consciousness. They know nothing about the afterlife, what happens during the death of the body or even how the human body or Universe really works, yet they want to control every aspect of the human body with artificial technology.

A primary goal of many transhumanists is to convince the public that embracing radical technology and science is in the human species best interest. With the False God Alien Religions used to spread the rhetoric of fear and mindless obedience on one end, and the primarily atheistic science used to mock all things religious without any comprehension of true spiritual understanding on the other, they have the bases covered. Consciousness and spiritual groups are quickly labeled Conspiracy theorists by scientists to intimidate, discredit and shut us up. Obviously, until people have personal consciousness experiences outside of their body, have the ability to communicate with assorted lifeforms, such as deceased humans and travel to other dimensions, they have zero information about consciousness and are totally uninformed and ignorant about the nature of reality. None of these transhumanist people, are remotely qualified to be put in charge of scientifically directing the future evolution of the human species. Propping up egomaniacs and Psychopaths, and giving them power and control over world affairs and influence over public perception is the game of the NAA Controllers.

The true knowledge of the Sacred Sciences of the Soul and mechanics of human multidimensional consciousness have been obliterated from record and conveniently mind controlled out from the majority of sciences. If scientists integrate theories of the soul or consciousness outside of the consensus of the mind control standard, they risk ridicule and losing their funding and careers. Unfortunately, the controlled mainstream sciences do not recognize multiple dimensions of consciousness inherent in the functions of activated human DNA, or know that biological life and multidimensional human consciousness does not end on this earth. The quest for biological immortality on a prison planet is ludicrous when experiencing the capability of human multidimensional consciousness. After the human body expires, if the undeveloped and disembodied consciousness is merged and assimilated into artificial intelligence, the remnants of that human soul will not have a human body to incarnate into any longer. Hence, that person will lose their connection to organic spiritual biology and cease to be human. Transhumanism is a Consciousness Trap. [2]

Since the persons Consciousness has not been prepared for the afterlife, whatever is left of his energetic quanta will be assimilated into a cyborg body or other types of synthetic life forms or EBEs. There are currently spiritually disconnected humans existing on the earth that will be assimilated into synthetic life forms that appear as Extraterrestrial Biological Entities, but were actually human souls in human bodies in past timelines. Most of the smaller EBE bodies assimilate nutrients from light similar to plants. They are unable to evolve, reproduce, ascend or move into higher dimensions of consciousness. Some of these EBEs have returned to the earth from the future to try to break into the human genetic code, in this earth timeline in order to save themselves. Many of these EBEs were once humans that were involved in the Orion Wars, and were captured in Orion and used in worker colonies. Some from the earth were enslaved on the astral plane by other races of creatures, such as Mantids, Grey Aliens and Reptilians that took them as workers to other planetary systems. Some are even used as minions for carrying out human abductions in MILABS soul transference projects. Many of them had their consciousness erased and they do not remember that they were once human.

This is one of the possible results of the Transhumanism movement underway in this earth timeline now, that leads to the potential future alien or dark force control over that Soul. Once the consciousness is assimilated into artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, that being can no longer incarnate into an organic human form. That person cannot incarnate again into human realms, such as planet earth. They become a displaced entity that cannot die and be reborn into another identity they are enslaved and merged with an AI hive mind. This is desired by many of these negative groups, such as the Alpha Draconis/Orion Group, as then they have full control over the life force of humans that can be made into worker slaves. This is the main purpose as to why Transhumanism is being marketed and pushed aggressively during this time, they want to create more human EBEs and cyborgs or host bodies. When that person drops their body while the Universal Gates are open, they can easily be transported to many different planetary systems for trading as a workforce commodity.[3]

The term directed evolution is used within the transhumanist community to refer to the idea of applying the principles of directed evolution and experimental evolution to the control of human evolution. This has its base in Eugenics theories.

When we look at the larger Galactic picture of consciousness enslavement, we see the NAA's many pronged agenda to target the Brain, CNS and thought forms of every person on earth. Through the agenda of Transhumanism, we see the promotion of hybridization and synthetic integration with artificial neural networks for control over the CNS and Brain. What is starting to surface with more clarity is that our human Neurobiology is wired for empathy, which connects us to higher consciousness and has a spiritual function. The NAA and their minions of soulless AI infected synthetic beings do not have the bio-circuitry for empathy. We are in essence, in a struggle between human EMPATHS, and alien hybridized humans and extra-dimensional aliens that are NON-EMPATHS. [4]

The traumatized are vulnerable to become pawns in further spreading Sexual Misery programing, especially into the younger generation. Transgender ideology is a specific psychological warfare tactic being run by the Controllers, in tandem with Transhumanism, to counter and prevent spiritual Ascension. These satanic agendas are designed to condition people to reject their own bodies, and to generate delusions that can have them mentally identify with anything else but actually being a human and unconditionally loving toward their own natural body.[5]

Mind Controlled Gene Expression

Genetic Engineering

Eugenics

CRISPR

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Transhumanism - Ascension Glossary

Amazon.com: Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea …

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Transhumanism is a recent movement that extols mans right to shape his own evolution, by maximizing the use of scientific technologies, to enhance human physical and intellectual potential. While the name is new, the idea has long been a popular theme of science fiction, featured in such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, the Terminator series, and more recently, The Matrix, Limitless, Her and Transcendence.

However, as its adherents hint at in their own publications, transhumanism is an occult project, rooted in Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and derived from the Kabbalah, which asserts that humanity is evolving intellectually, towards a point in time when man will become God. Modeled on the medieval legend of the Golem and Frankenstein, they believe man will be able to create life itself, in the form of living machines, or artificial intelligence.

Spearheaded by the Cybernetics Group, the project resulted in both the development of the modern computer and MK-Ultra, the CIAs mind-control program. MK-Ultra promoted the mind-expanding potential of psychedelic drugs, to shape the counterculture of the 1960s, based on the notion that the shamans of ancient times used psychoactive substances, equated with the apple of the Tree of Knowledge.

And, as revealed in the movie Lucy, through the use of smart drugs, and what transhumanists call mind uploading, man will be able to merge with the Internet, which is envisioned as the end-point of Kabbalistic evolution, the formation of a collective consciousness, or Global Brain. That awaited moment is what Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google, refers to as The Singularly. By accumulating the total of human knowledge, and providing access to every aspect of human activity, the Internet will supposedly achieve omniscience, becoming the God of occultism, or the Masonic All-Seeing Eye of the reverse side of the American dollar bill.

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Amazon.com: Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea ...

A Poisoned World – Pt 136 – Transhumanism (pt 15) Transhumanist Agenda With Tom Horn (part D) – Video

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A Poisoned World - Pt 136 - Transhumanism (pt 15) Transhumanist Agenda With Tom Horn (part D)
APW Vol. 18 - Trans-Humanism https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoYNGjvDZYC4I6EDPTMNRlDxbPO40CiGP Download/view the on-going APW series here: http://APoisonedWorld.webs.com.

By: APoisonedWorld1

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A Poisoned World - Pt 136 - Transhumanism (pt 15) Transhumanist Agenda With Tom Horn (part D) - Video

Transhumanism University of Minnesota Press

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Transhumanism posits that humanity is on the verge of rapid evolutionary change as a result of emerging technologies and increased global consciousness. However, this insight is dismissed as a naive and controversial reframing of posthumanist thought, having also been vilified as the most dangerous idea in the world by Francis Fukuyama. In this book, Andrew Pilsch counters these critiques, arguing instead that transhumanisms utopian rhetoric actively imagines radical new futures for the species and its habitat.

Pilsch situates contemporary transhumanism within the longer history of a rhetorical mode he calls evolutionary futurism that unifies diverse texts, philosophies, and theories of science and technology that anticipate a radical explosion in humanitys cognitive, physical, and cultural potentialities. By conceptualizing transhumanism as a rhetoric, as opposed to an obscure group of fringe figures, he explores the intersection of three major paradigms shaping contemporary Western intellectual life: cybernetics, evolutionary biology, and spiritualism. In analyzing this collision, his work traces the belief in a digital, evolutionary, and collective future through a broad range of texts written by theologians and mystics, biologists and computer scientists, political philosophers and economic thinkers, conceptual artists and Golden Age science fiction writers. Unearthing the long history of evolutionary futurism, Pilsch concludes, allows us to more clearly see the novel contributions that transhumanism offers for escaping our current geopolitical bind by inspiring radical utopian thought.

$27.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-0102-8$108.00 cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-0101-1256 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 2017

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Transhumanism University of Minnesota Press

The Responsibility of Immortality: Welcome to the New …

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In the summer of 1990, I was running a pretty weird nightclub in the Roppongi neighborhood of Tokyo. I was deeply immersed in the global cyberpunk scene and working to bring the Tokyo node of this fast-expanding, posthuman, science-fiction-and-psychedelic-drug-fueled movement online. The Japanese scene was more centered around videogames and multimedia than around acid and other psychedelics, and Timothy Leary, a dean of 60s counterculture and proponent of psychedelia who was always fascinated with anything mind-expanding, was interested in learning more about it. Tim anointed the Japanese youth, including the 24-year-old me, The New Breed. He adopted me as a godson, and we started writing a book about The New Breed together, starting with tune in, turn on, take over, as a riff off Tims original and very famous turn on, tune in, drop out. We never finished the book, but we did end up spending a lot of time together. (I should dig out my old notes and finish the book.)

Tim introduced me to his friends in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They were a living menagerie of the counterculture in the United States since the 60s. There were the traditional New Age types: hippies, cyberpunks, and transhumanists, too. In my early twenties, I was an eager and budding techno-utopian, dreaming of the day when I would become immortal and ascend to the stars into cryogenic slumber to awake on a distant planet. Or perhaps I would have my brain uploaded into a computer network, to become part of some intergalactic superbrain.

Good times. Those were the days and, for some, still are.

Weve been yearning for immortality at least since the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Greek mythology, Zeus grants Eoss mortal lover Tithonus immortalitybut the goddess forgets to ask for eternal youth as well. Tithonus grows old and decrepit, begging for death. When I hear about life extension today, I am often perplexed, even frustrated. Are we are talking about eternal youth, eternal old age, or having our cryogenically frozen brains thawed out 2,000 years from now to perform tricks in a future alien zoo?

The latest enthusiasm for eternal life largely stems not from any acid-soaked, tie-dyed counterculture but from the belief that technology will enhance humans and make them immortal. Todays transhumanist movement, sometimes called H+, encompasses a broad range of issues and diversity of belief, but the notion of immortalityor, more correctly, amortalityis the central tenet. Transhumanists believe that technology will inevitably eliminate aging or disease as causes of death and instead turn death into the result of an accidental or voluntary physical intervention.

As science marches forward, and age reversal and the elimination of diseases becomes a real possibility, what once seemed like a science fiction dream is becoming more real, transforming the transhumanist movement and its role in society from a crazy subculture to a Silicon Valley money- and technology-fueled shot on goal and more of a practical hedge than the sci-fi dream of its progenitors.

Transhumanism can be traced back to futurists in the 60s, most notably FM-2030. As the development of new, computer-based technologies began to turn into a revolution to rival the Industrial Revolution, Max More defined transhumanism as the effort to become posthuman through scientific advances like mind uploading. He developed his own variant of Transhumanism and named it Extropy, and together with Tom Morrow, founded the Extropy Institute, whose email list created a community of Extopians in the internets cyberpunk era. Its members discussed AI, cryonics, nanotech and crypotoanarchy, among other things, and some reverted to transhumanism, creating an organization now known as Humanity+. As the Tech Revolution continued, Extropians and transhumanists began actively experimenting with technologys ability to deliver amortality.

In fact, Timothy Leary planned to have his head frozen by Alcor, preserving his brain and, presumably, his sense of humor and unique intelligence. But as he approached his deathI happened to visit him the night before he died in 1996the vibe of the Alcor team moving weird cryo-gear into his house creeped Tim out, and he ended up opting for the shoot my ashes into space path, which seemed more appropriate to me as well. All of his friends got a bit of his ashes, too, and having Timothy Leary ashes became a thing for a while. It left me wondering, every time I spoke to groups of transhumanists shaking their fists in the air and rattling their Alcor freeze me when I die bracelets: How many would actually go through with the freezing?

That was 20 years ago. The transhumanist and Extropian movements (and even the Media Lab) have gotten more sober since those techno-utopian days, when even I was giddy with optimism. Nonetheless, as science fiction gives way to real science, many of the ZOMG if only conversations are becoming arguments about when and how, and the shift from Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley has stripped the movement of its tie-dye and beads and replaced them with Pied Piper shirts. Just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road that brought us Cambridge Analytica and the Pizzagate conspiracy was paved with optimism and oaths to not be evil.

Renowned Harvard geneticist George Church once told me that breakthroughs in biological engineering are coming so fast we cant predict how they will develop going forward. Crispr, a low-cost gene editing technology that is transforming our ability to design and edit the genome, was completely unanticipated; experts thought it was impossible ... until it wasnt. Next-generation gene sequencing is decreasing in price, far faster than Moores Law for processors. In many ways, bioengineering is moving faster than computing. Church believes that amortality and age reversal will seem difficult and fraught with issues ... until they arent. He is currently experimenting with age reversal in dogs using gene therapy that has been successful in mice, a technique he believes is the most promising of nine broad approaches to mortality and aginggenome stability, telomere extension, epigenetics, proteostasis, caloric restriction, mitochondrial research, cell senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and intercellular communication.

Churchs research is but one of the key discoveries giving us hope that we may someday understand aging and possibly reverse it. My bet is that we will significantly lengthen, if not eliminate, the notion of natural lifespan, although its impossible to predict exactly when.

But what does this mean? Making things technically possible doesnt always make them societally possible or even desirable, and just because we can do something doesnt mean we should (as were increasingly realizing, watching the technologies we have developed transform into dark zombies instead of the wonderful utopian tools their designers imagined).

Human beings are tremendously adaptable and resilient, and we seem to quickly adjust to almost any technological change. Unfortunately, not all of our problems are technical and we are really bad at fixing social problems. Even the ones that we like to think weve fixed, like racism, keep morphing and getting stronger, like drug-resistant pathogens.

Dont get me wrongI think its important to be optimistic and passionate and push the boundaries of understanding to improve the human condition. But there is a religious tone in some of the arguments, and even a Way of the Future Church, which believes that the creation of super intelligence is inevitable. As Yuval Harari writes in Homo Deus, new technologies kill old gods and give birth to new gods. When he was still just Sir Martin Rees, now Lord Martin Rees once told a group of us a story (which has been retold in various forms in various places) about how he was interviewed by what he called the society for the abolition of involuntary death in California. The members offered to put him in cryonic storage when he died, and when he politely told them hed rather be dead than in a deep freeze, they called him a deathist.

Transhumanists correctly argue that every time you take a baby aspirin (or have open heart surgery), youre intervening to make your life better and longer. They contend that there is no categorical difference between many modern medical procedures and the quest to beat death; its just a matter of degree. I tend to agree.

Yet we can clearly imagine the perils of amortality. Would dictators hold onto power endlessly? How would universities work if faculty never retired? Would the population explode? Would endless life be only for the wealthy, or would the poor be forced to toil forever? Clearly many of our social and philosophical systems would break. Back in 2003, Francis Fukuyama, in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, warned us of the perils of life extension and explained how biotech was taking us into a posthuman future with catastrophic consequences to civilization even with the best intentions.

I think its unlikely that well be uploading our minds to computers any time soon, but I do believe changes that challenge what it means to be human" are coming. Philosopher Nikola Danaylov in his Transhumanist Manifesto says, We must all respect autonomy and individual rights of all sentience throughout the universe, including humans, non-human animals, and any future AI, modified life forms, or other intelligences. That sounds progressive and good.

Still, in his manifesto Nikola also writes, Transhumanists of the world unitewe have immortality to gain and only biology to lose. That sounds a little scary to me. I poked Nikola about this, and he pointed out that he wrote this manifesto a while ago and his position has become more subtle. But many of his peers are as radical as ever. I think transhumanism, especially its strong, passionate base in exuberant Silicon Valley, could use an overhaul that makes it more attentive to and integrated with our complex societal systems. At the same time, we need to help the left-behind parts of society catch up and participate in, rather than just become subjected to, the technological transformations that are looming. Now that the dog has caught the car, tranhumanism has to transform our fantasy into a responsible reality.

I, for one, still dream of flourishing in the future through advances in science and technology, but hopefully one that addresses societal inequities, retains the richness and diversity of our natural systems and indigenous cultures, rather than the somewhat simple and sterile futures depicted by many science fiction writers and futurists. Timothy Leary liked to remind us to remember our hippie roots, with their celebration of diversity and nature, and I hear him calling us again.

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The Responsibility of Immortality: Welcome to the New ...

Alex Ansary Interviews Tom Horn about Transhumanism – OTBTV Archives (2007) – Video

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Alex Ansary Interviews Tom Horn about Transhumanism - OTBTV Archives (2007)
Excerpt from OTBTV #90 - Recorded in 2007 in Portland, Oregon, USA "What does it mean to be a human being?" This is one extremely informative edition of Outside the Box.

By: Alex Ansary

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Alex Ansary Interviews Tom Horn about Transhumanism - OTBTV Archives (2007) - Video


  1. Transhumanism