Category Archives: Transhumanist

By Joseph Jankowski

The U.S. Navy has held meetings with American presidential hopeful and TranshumanistZoltan Istvan to discuss thepossibility of implanting humans with microchips fitted with global positioning (GPS) technology, reports The Sun.

AccordingtoVice Admiral Wisecup, who has retired from full-time service to work in a Navy department called the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, the meeting broadened our understanding of the merger of humans and machines.

A bunch of navy officers came to my house and one of the main topics was this chip implant strategy, Transhumanist and Futurist Istvan said.

Zoltan Istvan is currently running for president of the United States as a part of the Transhumanist Party.

The Transhumanist Party aims to uphold the energy and political might of millions of transhumanist advocates out there who desire to use science and technology to significantly improve their lives.

Istvan told The Sun that the Navy is worried that soldiers could enter service with chips already implanted into them and is struggling to create policy around this issue.

You can imagine how challenging that would be if someone had a non-authorized chip implant on a nuclear base, so policy has to be created and created soon, says Istvan.

I helped the US Navy do some policy work on this issue.

The presidential candidate believes that within 10 to 15 years, artificial intelligence will advance to the point of solving all of civilizations most vexing problems, including death, and he has even traveled around America in an immortality bus mocked up like a coffin to promote his ideas.

According to Istvan, themilitary has already experimented with chipping soldiers so they can be tracked.

Its crazy to me that we dont develop it and use it in ourselves (humans) more, and especially in our children, says the Transhumanist.

Istvan believes that GPS microchipping could be beneficial to parents who want to be able to keep track of their children and could have allowed investigators to find the body of Lane Graves, who was killed in an alligator attack, in just a matter of minutes.

As a father of a twoand five-year-old, Im a big believer in the future that all children will get chipped, perhaps like all children get vaccines in the US, Istvan told The Sun.

Joseph Jankowski is a contributor for Planet Free Will.com. His works have been published by recognizable alternative news sites like GlobalResearch.ca, ActivistPost.com, Mintpressnews.com andZeroHedge.com.

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U.S. Navy Held Meetings With Transhumanist to Discuss ...

Welcome to the website of Transhumanist Party (Global); A place where you can get news and information about the Transhumanist Party worldwide. The Transhumanist Party is the primary political branch of the broader Transhumanist movement.

If you are looking for links and information about the various national-level Transhumanist Party groups, please see the links in our wiki (further information on the wiki below).

The largest and most effectively organised Transhumanist Party in the world is currently the one constituted and registered in the UK. As of late 2015, anyone can JOIN the Party as a full voting member, regardless of what citizenship they hold or where they live in the world. You can find the Transhumanist Party here:

In an attempt to share the lessons learned in setting up the UK party, its founders created Transhumanist Party (Global) TPG as an organisation dedicated to supporting Transhumanist Parties around the world and encouraging effective cooperation between them. TPG does not hold any dominion over the national-level Transhumanist Parties, which manage their own affairs, but only exists to help them do so in a spirit of effective cooperation.

TPG MISSION: To facilitate cooperation between national-level Transhumanist Parties and continental TP organisations, and to enable party members worldwide to interact directly regardless of which national parties they support.

TP (Global) does not support individual membership. Instead, it is composed of continental and national-level party organisations, plus a small number of TPG initiatives. You can see all of these listed in the TPG wiki.

The primary, initial function of TPG is to help with the development of new national-level Transhumanist Parties. New parties start as precursor groups, dedicated to laying the groundwork for the establishment of a party, and all that is really needed for that is a single person with commitment, time, and energy.

For advice on establishing and developing new Transhumanist Party groups, please see advice for new groups in the TPG wiki, and if you would like direct help in setting up or developing a new group then please contact TPG: info@transhumanistpartyglobal.org.

The following information is from Using the TPG wiki:

You may be able to see this wiki, but not be able to see buttons allowing you to edit its pages. If that is the case, then you have either not yet requested access (everyone who requests is given editing access without good reason otherwise, for now), or you are not signed in to Google (look for a tiny blue sign in link at the bottom of the page).

If you are having trouble and would like to be sent an invitation to edit this wiki, please email info@transhumanistpartyglobal.org from the email address you would prefer to sign in with.

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Transhumanism - .xyz

Friends, Have you heard off the 22-day push-up challenge? My good friend Mike La Caze nominated me to do it. Basically, one does 22 push-ups a day for 22 days t...o raise awareness for combat veterans (and we record our pushup experiences and share it). There are approximately 22 vets a day that are committing suicide, and this is a small way to raise awareness for that issue. As a journalist who has been to war zones and seen tragedy, I'm especially interested in making sure our soldiers are happy when they return home. The hope here is that awareness of this tragic issue brings more funding, resources, and support to the vets that need it when they face depression.

Everyday, I'm supposed to nominate somone else to do this too. Today I nominate Transhumanist Party officer and friend Chris T. Armstrong.

The rules are simple: * Once you are nominated your 22 days start the following day. * Every day, you record yourself doing 22 push-ups. Try your best to reach 22. If that means doing assisted (from your knees) push-ups or that you have to stop and take a break that's fine but try to get them all done in one video. * Every day you must nominate a different person. Try to choose people you think will want to do this and/or have the ability to do it. * And finally, have fun with this. This is a simple and fun way to get the word out about a matter that more people need to be aware about. **These brave men and women put their lives on the line to protect our freedom and it's sad that so many veterans feel that suicide is the only way out. For more information: http://stopsoldiersuicide.org/about/ #transhumanism #ScienceCandidate #Election2016 #POTUS #22PushupChallenge

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Transhumanist Party | Facebook

This week, it is my honor to be in Seoul Korea as the keynote speaker at a meeting of the Korean Association of Anti-Aging Medicine. Yesterday, I visited my host who runs a longevity clinic in the center of the worlds capital of plastic surgery, Gang Nam, or the tony section south of the Han River where people travel from all over Asia to have their appearances altered, Gangnam style, if you will.

This is just my fourth trip to Korea. As a 10-year-old my parents enrolled me into a first grade class into a summer school session. My classmates must have thought me a gentle simpleton, like Lenny Small from Of Mice and Men, because I didnt speak any Korean and I certainly felt like a mentally-challenged giant among those 6-year-old peers of mine.

In college, I came to Seoul to attend a 12-week course in Korean language studies only to find that I was again the tallest kid in my class. I recall during the 1987 riots for democracy that I felt like one of the tallest people in the country at 510 and could easily see over the lines of student protesters and riot police that clashed frequently in front of Yonsei University.

But eight years ago, when I visited with my family and found that I was just above average height as the post-IMF boom economy of South Korea had brought access to growth drugs and more meat consumption for children. Height may confer competitive advantage so many elected to enhance it and there are countless men over six feet now.

Here is the proof that something related to nutrition and growth-enhancing supplement which are commonly used, are working:

The average height for men living in Seoul reached 173.9 centimeters in 2013, up 10.2 cm from 163.7 cm in 1965, according to data released by the Seoul Institute. Their average weight rose by 15.3 kilograms, from 54.3 kg to 69.6 kg.

This trip, I am most struck by the women. You may know that South Korea has the highest rate of plastic surgery in the world and as you walk the streets, it is exceedingly rare to see any woman who has NOT undergone alterations. Just take a look at the faces of Ms. Korea in recent years (yes, these are all different people):

It is quite eerie to look into the faces of Korean women and not recognize the phenotypes present when I was here in 1987. Those women of matched age simply cant be seen in a relatively affluent urban center.

So what happened? Transhumanism. People using technology to alter their humanity. In terms of game theory, you can talk platitudes of beauty being only skin deep but here it is de rigeure if you want to have self-respect and the acceptance of your culture.

There are a lot of Americans who misunderstand Korean plastic surgery as an attempt to look more Occidental. Others might overlay a moralistic sense and decry the dehumanizing nature of it. But the fact is that for South Korean women and many of the men now, there is no more consideration of the morality of body modification than there would be to wearing clothes or makeup.

Anthropologically speaking, from an emic perspecitive, to NOT have the alterations in Korea would be akin to not wearing makeup, not shaving your legs and armpits, and wearing tank tops and sweatpants around as a young American woman. It is done, but is it really approved of?

Mark Twain said, Modesty died when clothes were born. In Korea, genetically-dictated faces died when plastic surgery was born. Enjoy this gif of different Ms. Koreas and while you shake your head, dont for get that a lot of the statues of antiquity such as David and Aphrodite, look alike; different media, same idea

Think that beauty is only skin deep? Then you may remember this scene from The Eye of the Beholder, The Twilight Zone, which raises an interesting point, albeit one that refutes what we know about symmetry, the golden ratio, and human nature

Postscript:

Some would consider taking telomerase activators and potentially lengthening my lifespan as a form of transhuman modification. That is fair. Even if taking them becomes illegal tomorrow, I believe that my current median telomere length of 14,100 base pairs indicates that I could have added decades to my life expectancy even if I resume aging at the normal rate now.

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Korea: The Transhumanist capital of the world | Recharge ...

Part 1 of the Breakthrough Interview with Catherine Austin FItts on The Transhumanist Agenda and the 2016 Presidential Election - June 24th, 2016

Deep State Transhumanist Agenda in 2016 Political Race In this special part 1 of 2 episodes, Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt welcomes back Former US Assistant Housing Secretary, Financial Expert and Publisher of the Solari Report Catherine Austin Fitts.

Catherine's deep analysis of the socio-political forces working under the radar in 2016 shows that unnerving trends like the engineered rise of autism, GMO proliferation, the expansion of Entrainment Technology, the rise of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and the dumbing down of American students with Common Core are all in place to drive a massive Transhumanist Depopulation Agenda!

She sees a clash of political forces in the 2016 presidential election being pawns in a game run by Deep State forces which are committed to putting a friendly face on totalitarian policies by electing corrupt establishment democrat Clinton to grab a number of initiatives under the facade of social equality and female empowerment with he soft revolution.

On the other side of the coin she sees the Trump phenomena and his role as outsider as a strange contrast to his lifelong insider deal-making and status as a top member of the one percent elite. Together they consider the possibility that he developed his own rogue agenda of exposing issues like Common Core and the Transnational Corporate agenda and to expose the secets of the American establishment in the public domain he is upsetting the insiders that helped his rise in the polls.

We're in for a wild ride with this exciting, unexpurgated and shocking Dark Journalist part 1 episode!

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Catherine Austin Fitts - Transhumanist Depopulation Agenda ...

(Photo: Peter Hapak/New York Magazine; Hair by Kelsey Bauer, Make-up by Amber Doty/Mirror Mirror)

Martine prefers not to limit herself to available words: Shes suggested using Pn., for person, in place of Mr. and Ms., and spice to mean husband or wife. But trans is a prefix she likes a lot, for it contains her self-image as an explorer who crosses barriers into strange new lands. (When she feels a connection to a new acquaintance, she says that she transcends.) And these days Martine sees herself less as transgender and more as what is known as transhumanist, a particular kind of futurist who believes that technology can liberate humans from the limits of their biologyincluding infertility, disease, and decay, but also, incredibly, death. Now, in her spare time, when shes not running a $5 billion company, or flying her new helicopter up and down the East Coast, or attending to her large family and three dogs, shes tinkering with ways that technology might push back that ultimate limit. She believes in a foreseeable future in which the beloved dead will live again as digital beings, reanimated by sophisticated artificial-intelligence programs that will be as cheap and accessible to every person as iTunes. I know this sounds messianic or even childlike, she wrote to me in one of many emails over the summer. But I believe it is simply practical and technologically inevitable.

During our first conversation, in the beige United Therapuetics outpost in Burlington, Vermont, Martine made a distinction between boundaries and borders. Borders, denials, limitsthese are Martines siren calls, pulling her toward and beyond them even as she, a pharma executive responsible to shareholders and a board, must survive every day within regulations and laws. She was sprawled across from me on a sectional couch, her hair in a ponytail and her long legs before her. At times I sort of feel like Queen Elizabeth, she said. You know, she lives in a world of limitations, having the appearance of great authority and being able to transcend any limitations. But in reality she is in a little cage.

Martin Rothblatt was raised by observant Jewish parents in a working-class suburb of San Diego; his father was a dentist. His mother, Rosa Lee, says she always believed her first child was destined for greatness. Days after Martins birth, I was walking back and forth in the living room and I was holding him like a football. And I remember saying, Menashe, honeythats his Hebrew nameI dont know what it is, but theres something special about you. You will make a difference in this world. And she is.

The Rothblatts were the only Jewish family in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood, and Martin grew up obsessed with difference, seeking out families unlike his own. Rosa Lee remembers her child as a fanatical reader, the kind of kid who would spend an entire family vacation with his nose in Siddhartha, and Martine herself sent me a list of the books that as an adolescent had been influential: Exodus, by Leon Uris; anything by Isaac Asimov; and especially Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin. But Martin was an unmotivated student and dropped out of UCLA after freshman year, because he wanted to see the world; he had read that the Seychelles were like a paradise, and with a few hundred dollars in his pocket he made his way there.

The Seychelles disappointed. Cockroaches covered the floor of his hut at night, and when he turned on the light, moths or locusts would swarm in through the open windows. But a friend of a friend was working at an Air Force base tracking satellites for NASA, and one day Martin was invited to visit. Outside, there was a big, giant, satellite dish. Inside, it was like we stepped into the future, Martine told me. Everything was crisp and clean, she said, like a vision out of science fiction made real. It seemed to me the satellite engineer was making the whole world come together. Like that was the center of the world. Martin hightailed it back to California to re-enroll at UCLA and transform himself into an expert in the law of space.

Martin first met Bina at a networking event in Hollywood in 1979. There was a DJ, and the music started, and there was a disco ball and a dance floor, Martine remembers. I saw Bina sitting over there, and I just felt an enormous attraction to her and just walked over and asked her to dance. And she agreed to dance. We danced, we sat down, talked, and weve been together ever since. They were from different worlds: Martin was a white Jewish man on his way to getting a J.D.-M.B.A.; Bina, who is African-American, grew up in Compton and was working as a real-estate agent. But they had much in commonstarting with the fact that they were both single parents. Martin had met a woman in Kenya on his way home from the Seychelles; the relationship had not worked out, but had produced a son, Eli, who was 3. Binas daughter, Sunee, was about the same age.

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Martine Rothblatt Is the Highest-Paid Female CEO in ...

Nick Bostrom Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University

Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 14 Issue 1 - April 2005 http://jetpress.org/volume14/bostrom.html

PDF Version

This paper traces the cultural and philosophical roots of transhumanist thought and describes some of the influences and contributions that led to the development of contemporary transhumanism.

The human desire to acquire new capacities is as ancient as our species itself. We have always sought to expand the boundaries of our existence, be it socially, geographically, or mentally. There is a tendency in at least some individuals always to search for a way around every obstacle and limitation to human life and happiness.

Ceremonial burial and preserved fragments of religious writings show that prehistoric man and woman were deeply disturbed by the death of loved ones. Although the belief in an afterlife was common, this did not preclude efforts to extend the present life. In the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (approx. 1700 B.C.), a king sets out on a quest for immortality. Gilgamesh learns that there exists a natural means an herb that grows at the bottom of the sea.[1] He successfully retrieves the plant, but a snake steals it from him before he can eat it. In later times, explorers sought the Fountain of Youth, alchemists labored to concoct the Elixir of Life, and various schools of esoteric Taoism in China strove for physical immortality by way of control over or harmony with the forces of nature. The boundary between mythos and science, between magic and technology, was blurry, and almost all conceivable means to the preservation of life were attempted by somebody or other. Yet while explorers made many interesting discoveries and alchemists invented some useful things, such as new dyes and improvements in metallurgy, the goal of life-extension proved elusive.

The quest to transcend our natural confines, however, has long been viewed with ambivalence. On the one hand there is fascination. On the other there is the concept of hubris: that some ambitions are off-limits and will backfire if pursued. The ancient Greeks exhibited this ambivalence in their mythology. Prometheus stole the fire from Zeus and gave it to the humans, thereby permanently improving the human condition. Yet for this act he was severely punished by Zeus. In the myth of Daedalus, the gods are repeatedly challenged, quite successfully, by the clever engineer and artist who uses non-magical means to extend human capabilities. In the end, however, disaster ensues when his son Icarus ignores paternal warnings and flies too close to the sun, causing the wax in his wings to melt.

Medieval Christianity had similarly conflicted views about the pursuits of the alchemists, who tried to transmute substances, create homunculi in test tubes, and invent a panacea. Some scholastics, following the anti-experimentalist teachings of Aquinas, believed that alchemy was an ungodly activity. There were allegations that it involved the invocation of daemonic powers. But other theologians, such as Albertus Magnus, defended the practice.[2]

The otherworldliness and stale scholastic philosophy that dominated Europe during the Middle Ages gave way to a renewed intellectual vigor in the Renaissance. The human being and the natural world again became legitimate objects of study. Renaissance humanism encouraged people to rely on their own observations and their own judgment rather than to defer in every matter to religious authorities. Renaissance humanism also created the ideal of the well-rounded person, one who is highly developed scientifically, morally, culturally, and spiritually. A landmark of the period is Giovanni Pico della Mirandolas Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), which proclaims that man does not have a readymade form and is responsible for shaping himself:

We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.[3]

The Age of Enlightenment is often said to have started with the publication of Francis Bacons Novum Organum, the new tool " (1620), which proposes a scientific methodology based on empirical investigation rather than a priori reasoning.[4]Bacon advocated the project of "effecting all things possible, " by which he meant using science to achieve mastery over nature in order to improve the living condition of human beings. The heritage from the Renaissance combines with the influence of Isaac Newton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, the Marquis de Condorcet, and others to form the basis for rational humanism, which emphasizes empirical science and critical reason rather than revelation and religious authority as ways of learning about the natural world and our place within it, and of providing a grounding for morality. Transhumanism has roots in rational humanism.

In the 18th and 19th centuries we begin to see glimpses of the idea that even humans themselves can be developed through the appliance of science. Condorcet speculated about extending human life span through medical science:

Would it be absurd now to suppose that the improvement of the human race should be regarded as capable of unlimited progress? That a time will come when death would result only from extraordinary accidents or the more and more gradual wearing out of vitality, and that, finally, the duration of the average interval between birth and wearing out has itself no specific limit whatsoever? No doubt man will not become immortal, but cannot the span constantly increase between the moment he begins to live and the time when naturally, without illness or accident, he finds life a burden?"[5]

Benjamin Franklin longed wistfully for suspended animation, foreshadowing the cryonics movement:

I wish it were possible... to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But... in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection.[6]

After the publication of Darwins Origin of Species (1859), it became increasingly plausible to view the current version of humanity not as the endpoint of evolution but rather as a possibly quite early phase."[7]The rise of scientific physicalism might also have contributed to the foundations of the idea that technology could be used to improve the human organism. For example, a simple kind of materialist view was boldly proposed in 1750 by the French physician and materialist philosopher, Julien Offray de La Mettrie in LHomme Machine, where he argued that "man is but an animal, or a collection of springs which wind each other up. "[8]If human beings are constituted by matter that obeys the same laws of physics that operate outside us, then it should in principle be possible to learn to manipulate human nature in the same way that we manipulate external objects.

It has been said that the Enlightenment expired as the victim of its own excesses. It gave way to Romanticism, and to latter day reactions against the rule of instrumental reason and the attempt to rationally control nature, such as can be found in some postmodernist writings, the New Age movement, deep environmentalism, and in some parts of the anti-globalization movement. However, the Enlightenments legacy, including a belief in the power of human rationality and science, is still an important shaper of modern culture. In his famous 1784 essay "What Is Enlightenment? ", Kant summed it up as follows:

Enlightenment is mans leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use ones own understanding without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use ones intelligence without being guided by another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence!"[9]

It might be thought that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) would have been a major inspiration for transhumanism. Nietzsche is famous for his doctrine of der bermensch (the overman "):

I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man?"[10]

What Nietzsche had in mind, however, was not technological transformation but rather a kind of soaring personal growth and cultural refinement in exceptional individuals (who he thought would have to overcome the life-sapping "slave-morality " of Christianity). Despite some surface-level similarities with the Nietzschean vision, transhumanism with its Enlightenment roots, its emphasis on individual liberties, and its humanistic concern for the welfare of all humans (and other sentient beings) probably has as much or more in common with Nietzsches contemporary J.S. Mill, the English liberal thinker and utilitarian.

In 1923, the noted British biochemist J. B. S. Haldane published the essay Daedalus: Science and the Future, in which he argued that great benefits would come from controlling our own genetics and from science in general. He projected a future society that would be richer, have abundant clean energy, where genetics would be employed to make people taller, healthier, and smarter, and where the use of ectogenesis (gestating fetuses in artificial wombs) would be commonplace. He also commented on what has in more recent years become known as the "yuck factor ":

The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural.[11]

Haldanes essay became a bestseller and set off a chain reaction of future-oriented discussions, including The World, the Flesh and the Devil, by J. D. Bernal (1929)[12], which speculated about space colonization and bionic implants as well as mental improvements through advanced social science and psychology; the works of Olaf Stapledon, a philosopher and science fiction author; and the essay "Icarus: the Future of Science " (1924) by Bertrand Russell.[13]Russell took a more pessimistic view, arguing that without more kindliness in the world, technological power would mainly serve to increase mens ability to inflict harm on one another. Science fiction authors such as H. G. Wells and Stapledon got many people thinking about the future evolution of the human race.

Aldous Huxleys Brave New World, published in 1932, has had an enduring impact on debates about human technological transformation[14]matched by few other works of fiction (a possible exception would be Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, 1818[15]). Huxley describes a dystopia where psychological conditioning, promiscuous sexuality, biotechnology, and the opiate drug "soma " are used to keep the population placid and contented in a static, totally conformist caste society that is governed by ten world controllers. Children are manufactured in fertility clinics and artificially gestated. The lower castes are chemically stunted or deprived of oxygen during their maturation process to limit their physical and intellectual development. From birth, members of every caste are indoctrinated during their sleep, by recorded voices repeating the slogans of the official "Fordist " religion, and are conditioned to believe that their own caste is the best one to belong to. The society depicted in Brave New World is often compared and contrasted with that of another influential 20th century dystopia, George Orwells 1984.[16] 1984 features a more overt form of oppression, including ubiquitous surveillance by "Big Brother " and brutal police coercion. Huxleys world controllers, by contrast, rely on more "humane means ", including bio-engineered predestination, soma, and psychological conditioning to prevent people from wanting to think for themselves. Herd-mentality and promiscuity are promoted, while high art, individuality, knowledge of history, and romantic love are discouraged. It should be noted that in neither 1984 nor Brave New World has technology been used to increase human capacities. Rather, society is set up to repress the full development of humanity. Both dystopias curtail scientific and technological exploration for fear of upsetting the social equilibrium. Nevertheless, Brave New World in particular has become an emblem of the dehumanizing potential of the use of technology to promote social conformism and shallow contentment.

In the postwar era, many optimistic futurists who had become suspicious of collectively orchestrated social change found a new home for their hopes in scientific and technological progress. Space travel, medicine, and computers seemed to offer a path to a better world. The shift of attention also reflected the breathtaking pace of development taking place in these fields. Science had begun to catch up with speculation. Yesterdays science fiction was turning into todays science fact or at least into a somewhat realistic mid-term prospect.

Transhumanist themes during this period were discussed and analyzed chiefly in the science fiction literature. Authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Stanislaw Lem explored how technological development could come to profoundly alter the human condition.

The word "transhumanism " appears to have been first used by Aldous Huxleys brother, Julian Huxley, a distinguished biologist (who was also the first director-general of UNESCO and founder of the World Wildlife Fund). In Religion Without Revelation (1927), he wrote:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.[17]

Human-like automata have always fascinated the human imagination. Mechanical engineers since the early Greeks have constructed clever self-moving devices.

In Judaic mysticism, a "golem " refers to an animated being crafted from inanimate material. In the early golem stories, a golem could be created by a holy person who was able to share some of Gods wisdom and power (although the golem, not being able to speak, was never more than a shadow of Gods creations). Having a golem servant was the ultimate symbol of wisdom and holiness. In the later stories, which had been influenced by the more Islamic concern about humanity getting too close to God, the golem became a creation of overreaching mystics, who would inevitably be punished for their blasphemy. The story of the Sorcerers Apprentice is a variation of this theme: the apprentice animates a broomstick to fetch water but is unable to make the broom stop like Frankenstein, a story of technology out of control. The word "robot " was coined by the Czech Karel apeks in his dark play R.U.R. (1921), in which a robot labor force destroys its human creators.[18]With the invention of the electronic computer, the idea of human-like automata graduated from the kindergarten of mythology to the school of science fiction (e.g. Isaac Asimov, Stanislav Lem, Arthur C. Clark) and eventually to the college of technological prediction.

Could continued progress in artificial intelligence lead to the creation of machines that can think in the same general way as human beings? Alan Turing gave an operational definition to this question in his classic "Computing Machinery and Intelligence " (1950), and predicted that computers would eventually pass what came to be known as the Turing Test. (In the Turing Test, a human experimenter interviews a computer and another human via a text interface, and the computer succeeds if the interviewer cannot reliably distinguish the computer from the human.)[19]Much ink has been spilt in debates on whether this test furnishes a necessary and sufficient condition for a computer being able to think, but what matters more from a practical perspective is whether and, and if so when, computers will be able to match human performance on tasks involving general reasoning ability. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that many of the early AI researchers turned out to be overoptimistic about the timescale for this hypothetical development. Of course, the fact that we have not yet reached human-level artificial intelligence does not mean that we never will, and a number of people, e.g. Marvin Minsky, Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, and Nick Bostrom have put forward reasons for thinking that this could happen within the first half of this century.[20]

In 1958, Stanislaw Ulam, referring to a meeting with John von Neumann, wrote:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.[21]

The rapidity of technological change in recent times leads naturally to the idea that continued technological innovation will have a large impact on humanity in the decades ahead. This prediction is strengthened if one believes that some of those variables that currently exhibit exponential growth will continue to do so and that they will be among the main drivers of change. Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel, noticed in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip exhibited exponential growth. This led to the formulation of "Moores law ", which states (roughly) that computing power doubles every 18 months to two years.[22]More recently, Kurzweil has documented similar exponential growth rates in a number of other technologies. (The world economy, which is a kind of general index of humanitys productive capacity, has doubled about every 15 years in modern times.)

The singularity hypothesis, which von Neumann seems to have alluded to in the quoted passage above, is that these changes will lead to some kind of discontinuity. But nowadays, it often refers to a more specific prediction, namely that the creation of self-improving artificial intelligence will at some point result in radical changes within a very short time span. This hypothesis was first clearly stated in 1965 by the statistician I. J. Good:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an intelligence explosion, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.[23]

Vernor Vinge discussed this idea in a little more detail in his influential 1993-paper "Technological Singularity ", in which he predicted:

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.[24]

Transhumanists today hold diverging views about the singularity: some see it as a likely scenario, others believe that it is more probable that there will never be any very sudden and dramatic changes as the result of progress in artificial intelligence.

The singularity idea also comes in a somewhat different eschatological version, which traces its lineage to the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist and Jesuit theologian who saw an evolutionary telos in the development of an encompassing noosphere (a global consciousness) via physicist Frank Tipler, who argued that advanced civilizations might come to have a defining influence on the future evolution of the cosmos, and, in the final moments of the Big Crunch, might manage to extract an infinite number of computations by harnessing the sheer energy of the collapsing matter.[25],[26] However, while these ideas might appeal to those who fancy a marriage between mysticism and science, they have not caught on either among transhumanists or the larger scientific community. Current cosmological theories indicate that the universe will continue to expand forever (falsifying Tiplers prediction). But the more general point that the transhumanist might make in this context is that we need to learn to think about "big-picture questions " without resorting to wishful thinking or mysticism. Big-picture questions, including ones about our place in the world and the long-term fate of intelligent life are part of transhumanism; however, these questions should be addressed in a sober, disinterested way, using critical reason and our best available scientific evidence. One reason why such questions are of transhumanist interest is that their answers might affect what outcomes we should expect from our own technological development, and therefore indirectly what policies it makes sense for humanity to pursue.

In 1986, Eric Drexler published Engines of Creation, the first book-length exposition of molecular manufacturing.[27](The possibility of nanotechnology had been anticipated by Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman in his famous after-dinner address in 1959 entitled There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom ".[28]) In this seminal work, Drexler not only argued for the feasibility of assembler-based nanotechnology but also explored its consequences and began charting the strategic challenges posed by its development. Drexlers later book Nanosystems (1992) supplied a more technical analysis that seemed to confirm his original conclusions.[29] To prepare the world for nanotechnology and work towards its safe implementation, he founded the Foresight Institute together with his then wife, Christine Peterson, in 1986.

In the last several years, nanotechnology has become big business, with worldwide research funding amounting to billions of dollars. Yet little of this work fits Drexlers ambitious vision of nanotechnology as an assembler-based, near-universal, construction technology. The mainstream nanotechnology community has sought to distance itself from Drexlers claims. The chemist Richard Smalley (another Noble laureate) has debated Drexler, asserting that non-biological molecular assemblers are impossible.[30]To date, however, no technical critique of Drexlers work in the published literature has found any significant flaws in his reasoning. If molecular nanotechnology is indeed physically possible, as Drexler maintains, the question becomes just how difficult it will be to develop it, and how long it will take. These issues are very difficult to settle in advance.

If molecular nanotechnology could be developed as Drexler envisions it, it would have momentous ramifications:

Coal and diamonds, sand and computer chips, cancer and healthy tissue: throughout history, variations in the arrangement of atoms have distinguished the cheap from the cherished, the diseased from the healthy. Arranged one way, atoms make up soil, air, and water arranged another, they make up ripe strawberries. Arranged one way, they make up homes and fresh air; arranged another, they make up ash and smoke.[31]

Molecular nanotechnology would enable us to transform coal into diamonds, sand into supercomputers, and to remove pollution from the air and tumors from healthy tissue. In its mature form, it could help us abolish most disease and aging, make possible the reanimation of cryonics patients, enable affordable space colonization, and more ominously lead to the rapid creation of vast arsenals of lethal or non-lethal weapons.

Another hypothetical technology that would have a revolutionary impact is uploading, the transfer of a human mind to a computer. This would involve the following steps: First, create a sufficiently detailed scan of a particular human brain, perhaps by deconstructing it with nanobots or by feeding thin slices of brain tissues into powerful microscopes for automatic image analysis. Second, from this scan, reconstruct the neuronal network that the brain implemented, and combine this with computational models of the different types of neurons. Third, emulate the whole computational structure on a powerful supercomputer. If successful, the procedure would result in the original mind, with memory and personality intact, being transferred to the computer where it would then exist as software; and it could either inhabit a robot body or live in a virtual reality.[32]While it is often thought that, under suitable circumstances, the upload would be conscious and that the original person would have survived the transfer to the new medium, individual transhumanists take different views on these philosophical matters.

If either superintelligence, or molecular nanotechnology, or uploading, or some other technology of a similarly revolutionary kind is developed, the human condition could clearly be radically transformed. Even if one believed that the probability of this happening any time soon is quite small, these prospects would nevertheless merit serious attention in view of their extreme impact. However, transhumanism does not depend on the feasibility of such radical technologies. Virtual reality; preimplantation genetic diagnosis; genetic engineering; pharmaceuticals that improve memory, concentration, wakefulness, and mood; performance-enhancing drugs; cosmetic surgery; sex change operations; prosthetics; anti-aging medicine; closer human-computer interfaces: these technologies are already here or can be expected within the next few decades. The combination of these technological capabilities, as they mature, could profoundly transform the human condition. The transhumanist agenda, which is to make such enhancement options safely available to all persons, will become increasingly relevant and practical in the coming years as these and other anticipated technologies come online.

Benjamin Franklin wished to be preserved in a cask of Madeira and later recalled to life, and regretted that he was living too near the infancy of science for this to be possible. Since then, science has grown up a bit. In 1962, Robert Ettinger published the book, The Prospect of Immortality, which launched the idea of cryonic suspension.[33]Ettinger argued that as medical technology seems to be constantly progressing, and since science has discovered that chemical activity comes to a complete halt at low-enough temperatures, it should be possible to freeze a person today (in liquid nitrogen) and preserve the body until a time when technology is advanced enough to repair the freezing damage and reverse the original cause of deanimation. Cryonics, Ettinger believed, offered a ticket to the future.

Alas, the masses did not line up for the ride. Cryonics has remained a fringe alternative to more traditional methods of treating the terminally diseased, such as cremation and burial. The practice of cryonics was not integrated into the mainstream clinical setting and was instead conducted on the cheap by a small number of enthusiasts. Two early cryonics organizations went bankrupt, allowing their patients to thaw out. At that point, the problem of massive cellular damage that occurs when ice crystals form in the body also became more widely known. As a result, cryonics acquired a reputation as a macabre scam. The media controversy over the suspension of baseball star Ted Williams in 2002 showed that public perception of cryonics has not changed much over the past decades.

Despite its image problem and its early failures of implementation, the cryonics community continues to be active and it counts among its members several eminent scientists and intellectuals. Suspension protocols have been improved, and the infusion of cryoprotectants prior to freezing to suppress the formation of ice crystals has become standard practice. The prospect of nanotechnology has given a more concrete shape to the hypothesized future technology that could enable reanimation. There are currently two organizations that offer full-service suspension, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation (founded in 1972) and the Cryonics Institute (founded in 1976). Alcor has recently introduced a new suspension method, which relies on a process known as "vitrification ", which further reduces micro-structural damage during suspension.

In a later work, Man into Superman (1972), Ettinger discussed a number of conceivable technological improvements of the human organism, continuing the tradition started by Haldane and Bernal.[34]

Another early transhumanist was F. M. Esfandiary, who later changed his name to FM-2030. One of the first professors of future studies, FM taught at the New School for Social Research in New York in the 1960s and formed a group of optimistic futurists known as the UpWingers.

Who are the new revolutionaries of our time? They are the geneticists, biologists, physicists, cryonologists, biotechnologists, nuclear scientists, cosmologists, radio astronomers, cosmonauts, social scientists, youth corps volunteers, internationalists, humanists, science-fiction writers, normative thinkers, inventors They and others are revolutionizing the human condition in a fundamental way. Their achievements and goals go far beyond the most radical ideologies of the Old Order.[35]

In his book Are you a transhuman? (1989), FM described what he regarded as the signs of the emergence of the "transhuman ".[36]In FMs terminology, a transhuman is a "transitional human, " someone who by virtue of their technology usage, cultural values, and lifestyle constitutes an evolutionary link to the coming era of posthumanity. The signs that FM saw as indicative of transhuman status included prostheses, plastic surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilization), absence of religious belief, and a rejection of traditional family values. However, it was never satisfactorily explained why somebody who, say, rejects family values, has a nose job, and spends a lot of time on jet planes is in closer proximity to posthumanity than the rest of us.

In the 1970s and 1980s, many organizations sprang up that focused on a particular topic such as life extension, cryonics, space colonization, science fiction, and futurism. These groups were often isolated from one another, and whatever shared views and values they had did not yet amount to any unified worldview. Ed Regiss Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (1990) took a humorous look at these proto-transhumanist fringes, which included eccentric and otherwise intelligent individuals trying to build space rockets in their backyards or experimenting with biofeedback machines and psychedelic drugs, as well as scientists pursuing more serious lines of work but who had imbibed too deeply of the Californian spirit.[37]

In 1988, the first issue of the Extropy Magazine was published by Max More and Tom Morrow, and in 1992 they founded the Extropy Institute (the term "extropy " being coined as a metaphorical opposite of entropy). The Institute served as a catalyst that brought together disparate groups of people with futuristic ideas and facilitated the formation of novel memetic compounds. The Institute ran a series of conferences, but perhaps most important was the extropians mailing list, an online discussion forum where new ideas were shared and debated. In the mid-nineties, many got first exposure to transhumanist views from the Extropy Institutes listserve.

More had immigrated to California from Britain after changing his name from Max OConnor. Of his new name, he said:

It seemed to really encapsulate the essence of what my goal is: always to improve, never to be static. I was going to get better at everything, become smarter, fitter, and healthier. It would be a constant reminder to keep moving forward.[38]

Max More wrote the first definition of transhumanism in its modern sense, and created his own distinctive brand of transhumanism, "extropianism, " which emphasized the principles of "boundless expansion, " "self-transformation, " "dynamic optimism, " "intelligent technology, " and "spontaneous order ". Originally, extropianism had a clear libertarian flavor, but in later years More has distanced himself from this ingredient, replacing "spontaneous order " with open society, " a principle that opposes authoritarian social control and promotes decentralization of power and responsibility.[39]

Natasha Vita-More (married to Max) is the Extropy Institutes current president. She is an artist and designer, and has over the years issued a number of manifestos on transhumanist and extropic art.[40]

The Extropy Institutes conferences and mailing list also served as a hangout place for some people who liked to discuss futuristic ideas but who were not necessarily joiners. Those who were around in the mid-nineties will remember individuals such as Anders Sandberg, Alexander "Sasha " Chislenko, Hal Finney, and Robin Hanson from among the more thoughtful regulars in the transhumanist milieu at the time. An enormous amount of discussion about transhumanism has taken place on various email lists in the past decade. The quality of postings has been varied (putting it mildly). Yet at their best, these online conversations explored ideas about the implications of future technologies that were, in some respects, far advanced over what could be found in printed books or journals. The Internet played an important role in incubating modern transhumanism by facilitating these meetings of minds and perhaps more indirectly, too, via the "irrational exuberance " that pervaded the dot-com era?

The World Transhumanist Association was founded in early 1998 by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce, to provide a general organizational basis for all transhumanist groups and interests, across the political spectrum. The aim was also to develop a more mature and academically respectable form of transhumanism, freed from the "cultishness " which, at least in the eyes of some critics, had afflicted some of its earlier convocations. The two founding documents of the WTA were the Transhumanist Declaration (see appendix), and the Transhumanist FAQ (v. 1.0).[41]The Declaration was intended as a concise consensus statement of the basic principle of transhumanism. The FAQ was also a consensus or near-consensus document, but it was more ambitious in its philosophical scope in that it developed a number of themes that had previously been, at most, implicit in the movement. More than fifty people contributed comments on drafts of the FAQ. The document was produced by Bostrom but major parts and ideas were also contributed by several others, including the British utilitarian thinker David Pearce, Max More, the American feminist and disability rights activist Kathryn Aegis, and the walking encyclopedia Anders Sandberg, who was at the time a neuroscience student in Sweden.

A number of related organizations have also cropped up in recent years, focusing more narrowly on particular transhumanist issues, such as life-extension, artificial intelligence, or the legal implications of "converging technologies " (nano-bio-info-neuro technologies). The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a non-profit think tank, was established in 2004, to "promote the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities ".

Over the past couple of decades, academia has picked up the ball and started to analyze various "transhumanist matters, " both normative and positive. The contributions are far too many to comprehensively describe here, so we will pick out just a few threads, beginning with ethics.

For most of its history, moral philosophy did not shy away from addressing practical problems. In the early and mid-parts of the twentieth century, during heydays of logical positivism, applied ethics became a backwater as moral philosophers concentrated on linguistic or meta-ethical problems. Since then, however, practical ethics has reemerged as a field of academic inquiry. The comeback started in medical ethics. Revelations of the horrific experiments that the Nazis had conducted on human subjects in the name of science led to the adoption of the Nuremberg code (1947) and the Declaration of Helsinki (1964), which laid down strict safeguards for medical experimentation, emphasizing the need for patient consent.[42],[43] But the rise of the modern health care system spawned new ethical dilemmas turning off life-support, organ donation, resource allocation, abortion, advance directives, doctor-patient relationships, protocols for obtaining informed consent and for dealing with incompetent patients. In the 1970s, a broader kind of enquiry began to emerge, stimulated particularly by developments in assisted reproduction and genetics. This field became known as bioethics. Many of the ethical issues most directly linked to transhumanism would now fall under this rubric, although other normative discourses are also involved, e.g. population ethics, meta-ethics, political philosophy, and bioethics younger sisters computer ethics, engineering ethics, environmental ethics.

Bioethics was from the beginning an interdisciplinary endeavor, dominated by theologians, legal scholars, physicians, and, increasingly, philosophers, with occasional participation by representatives of patients rights groups, disability advocates, and other interested parties. [44] Lacking a clear methodology, and operating on a plain often swept by the winds of political or religious controversy, the standard of scholarship has frequently been underwhelming. Despite these difficulties, bioethics burgeoned. A cynic might ascribe this accomplishment to the ample fertilization that the field received from a number of practical imperatives: absolving doctors of moral dilemmas, training medical students to behave, enabling hospital boards to trumpet their commitment to the highest ethical standards of care, providing sound bites for the mass media, and allowing politicians to cover their behinds by delegating controversial issues to ethics committees. But a kinder gloss is possible: decent people recognized that difficult moral problems arose in modern biomedicine, that these problems needed to be addressed, and that having some professional scholars trying to clarify these problems in some sort of systematic way might be helpful. While higher-caliber scholarship and a more robust methodology would be nice, in the meantime we make the most of what we have.

Moral philosophers have in the last couple of decades made many contributions that bear on the ethics of human transformation, and we must limit ourselves to a few mentions. Derek Parfits classic Reasons and Persons (1984) discussed many relevant normative issues.[45]In addition to personal identity and foundational ethical theory, this book treats population ethics, person-affecting moral principles, and duties to future generations. Although Parfits analysis takes place on an idealized level, his arguments elucidate many moral considerations that emerge within the transhumanist program.

Jonathan Glovers What Sort of People Should there Be? (1984) addressed technology-enabled human-transformation at a somewhat more concrete level, focusing especially on genetics and various technologies that could increase social transparency. Glover gave a clear and balanced analytic treatment of these issues that was well ahead of its time. His general conclusion is that

not just any aspect of present human nature is worth preserving. Rather it is especially those features which contribute to self-development and self-expression, to certain kinds of relationships, and to the development of our consciousness and understanding. And some of these features may be extended rather than threatened by technology.[46]

James Hughes has argued that biopolitics is emerging as a fundamental new dimension of political opinion. In Hughes model, biopolitics joins with the more familiar dimensions of cultural and economic politics, to form a three-dimensional opinion-space. We have already seen that in the early 90s, the extropians combined liberal cultural politics and laissez-fair economic politics with transhumanist biopolitics. In Citizen Cyborg (2004), Hughes sets forward what he terms "democratic transhumanism, " which mates transhumanist biopolitics with social democratic economic politics and liberal cultural politics.[68]He argues that we will achieve the best posthuman future when we ensure that technologies are safe, make them available to everyone, and respect the right of individuals to control their own bodies. The key difference between extropian transhumanism and democratic transhumanism is that the latter accords a much bigger role for government in regulating new technologies for safety and ensuring that the benefits will be available to all, not just a wealthy or tech-savvy elite.

In principle, transhumanism can be combined with a wide range of political and cultural views, and many such combinations are indeed represented, e.g. within the membership of the World Transhumanist Association. One combination that is not often found is the coupling of transhumanism to a culture-conservative outlook. Whether this is because of an irresolvable tension between the transformative agenda of transhumanism and the cultural conservatives preference for traditional arrangements is not clear. It could instead be because nobody has yet seriously attempted to develop such a position. It is possible to imagine how new technologies could be used to reinforce some culture-conservative values. For instance, a pharmaceutical that facilitated long-term pair bonding could help protect the traditional family. Developing ways of using our growing technological powers to help people realize widely held cultural or spiritual values in their lives would seem a worthwhile undertaking.

This is not, however, the route for which cultural conservatives have so far opted. Instead, they have gravitated towards transhumanisms opposite, bioconservatism, which opposes the use of technology to expand human capacities or to modify aspects of our biological nature. People drawn to bioconservatism come from groups that traditionally have had little in common. Right-wing religious conservatives and left-wing environmentalists and anti-globalists have found common causes, for example in their opposition to the genetic modification of humans.

The different strands of contemporary bioconservatism can be traced to a multifarious set of origins: ancient notions of taboo; the Greek concept of hubris; the Romanticist view of nature; certain religious (anti-humanistic) interpretations of the concept of human dignity and of a God-given natural order; the Luddite workers revolt against industrialization; Karl Marxs analysis of technology under capitalism; various Continental philosophers critiques of technology, technocracy, and the rationalistic mindset that accompanies modern technoscience; foes of the military-industrial complex and multinational corporations; and objectors to the consumerist rat-race. The proposed remedies have ranged from machine-smashing (the original Luddites), to communist revolution (Marx), to buying "organic ", to yoga (Jos Ortega y Gasset), but nowadays it commonly emanates in calls for national or international bans on various human enhancement technologies (Fukuyama, Annas, etc.).

Feminist writers have come down on both sides of the debate. Ecofeminists have suspected biotechnology, especially its use to reshape bodies or control reproduction, of being an extension of traditional patriarchal exploitation of women, or, alternatively, have seen it as a symptom of a control-obsessed, unemphatic, gadget-fixated, body-loathing mindset. Some have offered a kind of psychoanalysis of transhumanism, concluding that it represents an embarrassing rationalization of self-centered immaturity and social failure. But others have welcomed the libratory potential of biotechnology. Shulamith Firestone argued in the feminist classic The Dialectic of Sex (1971) that women will be fully liberated only when technology has freed them from having to incubate children.[69]Cyberfeminist Donna Haraway says that she would "rather be a cyborg than a goddess " and argues against the dualistic view that associates men with culture and technology and women with nature.[70]

Perhaps the most prominent bioconservative voice today is that of Leon Kass, chairman of President Bushs Council on Bioethics. Kass acknowledges an intellectual debt to three other distinguished bioconservatives: Protestant theologian Paul Ramsey, Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, and German-born philosopher-theologian Hans Jonas (who studied under Martin Heidegger).[71]Kasss concerns center on human dignity and the subtle ways in which our attempts to assert technological mastery over human nature could end up dehumanizing us by undermining various traditional "meanings " such as the meaning of the life cycle, the meaning of sex, the meaning of eating, and the meaning of work. Kass is well-known for his advocacy of "the wisdom of repugnance " (which echoes Hans Jonass "heuristics of fear "). While Kass stresses that a gut feeling of revulsion is not a moral argument, he nevertheless insists that the yuck factor merits our respectful attention:

In crucial cases repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reasons power to fully articulate we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things we rightfully hold dear To pollution and perversion, the fitting response can only be horror and revulsion; and conversely, generalized horror and revulsion are prima facie evidence of foulness and violation.[72]

Francis Fukuyama, another prominent bioconservative and member of the Presidents Council, has recently identified transhumanism as "the worlds most dangerous idea ".[73]For Fukuyama, however, the chief concern is not about the subtle undermining of meanings " but the prospect of violence and oppression. He argues that liberal democracy depends on the fact that all humans share an undefined "Factor X ", which grounds their equal dignity and rights. The use of enhancing technologies, he fears, could destroy Factor X.[74]

Bioethicists George Annas, Lori Andrews, and Rosario Isasi have proposed legislation to make inheritable genetic modification in humans a "crime against humanity ", like torture and genocide. Their rationale is similar to Fukuyamas:

The new species, or "posthuman, " will likely view the old "normal " humans as inferior, even savages, and fit for slavery or slaughter. The normals, on the other hand, may see the posthumans as a threat and if they can, may engage in a preemptive strike by killing the posthumans before they themselves are killed or enslaved by them. It is ultimately this predictable potential for genocide that makes species-altering experiments potential weapons of mass destruction, and makes the unaccountable genetic engineer a potential bioterrorist.[75]

There is some common ground between Annas et al. and the transhumanists: they agree that murder and enslavement, whether of humans by posthumans or the other way around, would be a moral atrocity and a crime. Transhumanists deny, however, that this is a likely consequence of germ-line therapy to enhance health, memory, longevity, or other similar traits in humans. If and when we develop the capability to create some singular entity that could potentially destroy the human race, such as a superintelligent machine, then we could indeed regard it as a crime against humanity to proceed without a thorough risk analysis and the installation of adequate safety features. As we saw in the previous section, the effort to understand and find ways to reduce existential risks has been a central preoccupation for some transhumanists, such as Eric Drexler, Nick Bostrom, and Eliezer Yudkowsky.

There are other commonalities between bioconservatives and transhumanists. Both agree that we face a realistic prospect that technology could be used to substantially transform the human condition in this century. Both agree that this imposes an obligation on the current generation to think hard about the practical and ethical implications. Both are concerned with medical risks of side-effects, of course, although bioconservatives are more worried that the technology might succeed than that it might fail. Both camps agree that technology in general and medicine in particular have a legitimate role to play, although bioconservatives tend to oppose many uses of medicine that go beyond therapy to enhancement. Both sides condemn the racist and coercive state-sponsored eugenics programs of the twentieth century. Bioconservatives draw attention to the possibility that subtle human values could get eroded by technological advances, and transhumanists should perhaps learn to be more sensitive to these concerns. On the other hand, transhumanists emphasize the enormous potential for genuine improvements in human well-being and human flourishing that are attainable only via technological transformation, and bioconservatives could try to be more appreciative of the possibility that we could realize great values by venturing beyond our current biological limitations.

The Transhumanist Declaration

(1) Humanity will be radically changed by technology in the future. We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition, including such parameters as the inevitability of aging, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, suffering, and our confinement to the planet earth.

(2) Systematic research should be put into understanding these coming developments and their long-term consequences.

(3) Transhumanists think that by being generally open and embracing of new technology we have a better chance of turning it to our advantage than if we try to ban or prohibit it.

(4) Transhumanists advocate the moral right for those who so wish to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives. We seek personal growth beyond our current biological limitations.

(5) In planning for the future, it is mandatory to take into account the prospect of dramatic progress in technological capabilities. It would be tragic if the potential benefits failed to materialize because of technophobia and unnecessary prohibitions. On the other hand, it would also be tragic if intelligent life went extinct because of some disaster or war involving advanced technologies.

(6) We need to create forums where people can rationally debate what needs to be done, and a social order where responsible decisions can be implemented.

(7) Transhumanism advocates the well- being of all sentience (whether in artificial intellects, humans, posthumans, or non- human animals) and encompasses many principles of modern humanism. Transhumanism does not support any particular party, politician or political platform.

Annas, G., L. Andrews, and R. Isasi (2002), "Protecting the Endangered Human: Toward an International Treaty Prohibiting Cloning and Inheritable Alterations ", American Journal of Law and Medicine 28 (2&3):151-178.

Bacon, F. (1620), Novum Organum. Translated by R. L. Ellis and J. Spedding. Robertson, J. ed, The Philosophical Woeks of Francis Bacon, 1905. London: Routledge.

Bernal, J. D. (1969), The world, the flesh & the devil; an enquiry into the future of the three enemies of the rational soul. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Bostrom, N. (1998), "How Long Before Superintelligence? " International Journal of Futures Studies 2.

(2002), "Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards ", Journal of Evolution and Technology 9.

(2002), "When Machines Outsmart Humans ", Futures 35 (7):759-764.

(2003), "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? " Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211):243-255.

(2003), "Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective ", Journal of Value Inquiry 37 (4):493-506.

The Transhumanist FAQ: v 2.1. World Transhumanist Association 2003. http://transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/faq/.

(2004), "Transhumanism - The World's Most Dangerous Idea? " Betterhumans 10/19/2004.

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JET 14(1) - April 2005 - Bostrom - Transhumanist Thought

"WINNER" Visionary Fiction - International Book Awards

Zoltan Istvan is the founder of political organization the "Transhumanist Party"and is its 2016 US presidential candidate.

Leading futurist, philosopher, and former National Geographic journalist Zoltan Istvan presents his award-winning, bestselling visionary novel, The Transhumanist Wager, as a seminal statement of our times. His philosophical thriller has been called "revolutionary," "life-changing," and "a masterpiece" by readers, scholars, and critics. The novel debuts a challenging original philosophy, which rebuffs modern civilization by inviting the end of the human species--and declaring the onset of something greater. Set in the present day, the novel tells the story of transhumanist Jethro Knights and his unwavering quest for immortality via science and technology. Fighting against him are fanatical religious groups, economically depressed governments, and mystic Zoe Bach: a dazzling trauma surgeon and the love of his life, whose belief in spirituality and the afterlife is absolute. Exiled from America and reeling from personal tragedy, Knights forges a new nation of willing scientists on the world's largest seastead, Transhumania. When the world declares war against the floating libertarian city, demanding an end to its renegade and godless transhuman experiments and ambitions, Knights strikes back, leaving the planet forever changed.

Link:
The Transhumanist Wager - amazon.com

(( Subscribe )) now for more! http://bit.ly/1QHJwaK Is Johnny Depp's film Transcendence (2014) just a science fiction fantasy, or does it predict the future of the human race and the coming Transhumanist revolution? Media analyst Mark Dice shows you how the film eerily parallels the rapid advances in BMI Brain Machine Uploading and the growth of Artificial Intelligence. 2016 by Mark Dice

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TRANSCENDENCE Predicted Brain Implants, Nanobots, Mind ...

Fred Baumann

The name of the movement known as transhumanism may suggest that it arises out of humanism. At the very least, it is a descendant of what was once known as humanism, and could be seen as just one more utopian humanism. But the trans is the operative part of the term, and it should be taken seriously. Transhumanism is not simply utopian in the same way as the humanisms of Marx or B.F. Skinner; rather, it is qualitatively different in that it goes beyond, avowedly disregarding and leaving behind human beings themselves the very beings that were the central concern of all previous humanisms.

The history of these humanisms is extraordinarily rich and complex. But because transhumanism cheerfully transcends all of it, we can cheerfully omit much of the detail here. In brief, humanism meant looking at the world from the point of view and the interests of the human being, as opposed to the subhuman (that is, the material or natural) or the superhuman (that is, the divine).

In its most utopian forms, inspired by the technical possibilities of applied natural science, humanism sought the utter transformation of the world to fit human needs. Marxs communism, however much he denied that it was utopian, is a good case in point. Marx understood that human beings would change in the new communist world but he believed that the change would be of their own choice and in their own power. The world of communism would in fact be a realm of freedom instead of one in which external necessity ruled: a freely developed culture that would put an end to class war.

But once it was taken seriously and developed further, the prospect of fully using human freedom to conquer nature evolved into another, and in some ways opposite, prospect: the perfect accommodation of human beings to nature. Consider the utopian vision of B.F. Skinner, the mid-twentieth century father of behaviorist psychology. In his 1948 novel Walden Two, Skinner depicted a community of that name completely controlled by operant conditioning. Everyone in it, without exception, is happy. They have all been conditioned so as to respond perfectly to their constraints, and they only face constraints that are necessary. Living in what reminds one of Rabelaiss fictional aristocratic abbey of Thlme, they pursue knowledge, art, culture, and leisure in perfectly governed harmony (rule by experts, no democracy here).

There is an unintentional creepiness about Walden Two not just because the universal sunniness of the testimonials makes one wonder about drugs in the water or inquisitorial dungeons beneath the ground, but, above all, because of the apparent absence in any of the happy Waldensians (with the possible exception of the maladjusted founder) of what we might call inwardness. For Skinner, it appears that the demands of the body can be met by comfort, and the demands of the soul by interesting things to do and find out about. Not just democracy, but also capitalism, the family, and formal education are considered antiquated. Institutional religion, needless to say, is absent as well. Remarkable also in its absence is the whole realm of reflection about ones self, ones expectations of oneself, ones feelings as they conflict with ones reasonings, and so forth, giving the book and its project an air of the overly bright, overly defined unreality that one finds in some of the stranger genres of animated film and TV.

Perhaps this absence of inwardness is just what you would expect from this exponent of behaviorism the basic premise of which is to ignore the existence of inwardness. It seems doubtful, however, that this absence in itself played much of a role in the failure of Skinners particular brand of utopian humanism. Marxs utopianism never got far because the historical process that was to lead to it never materialized: the proletariat just wasnt up to its assigned mission of becoming the salvific, universal class (as Lenin ruefully discovered, its consciousness never got beyond trade unionism). By contrast, the reason that almost nobody attempted Skinners brand of utopia was perhaps because its unnerving creepiness hinted at a violation of normal notions of freedom and dignity notions that Skinner considered outmoded, as he argued in his famous 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Moreover, it seems likely that behavioral conditioning might not have had the power to alter people as deeply as Skinner thought. Stronger tools were needed.

Today, stronger tools than were dreamt of in Skinners philosophy are not only imagined but in common use. Mind control through chemistry is a commonplace. The infertile bearing children sometimes genetically their own, sometimes not raises no eyebrows, and seems to most like unambiguous good news. Mammals can be cloned, and so, in principle, humans may be too. Some crucial bodily fluids, like insulin, can already be synthetically produced. The possibility of advanced nanotechnological machines going inside human bodies, the possibility of linking human brains and nervous systems to computer networks, the possibility, in short, of the complete overcoming of the distinction between the human and the mechanical all of these may be on the horizon, and the most enthusiastic proponents of such projects, like the eminent inventor Ray Kurzweil, keep emphasizing how soon it is all coming. After all, as Kurzweil (whose name in German literally means short time, seeming to imply not only imminence but impatience and mortality) likes to point out, the rate of technological change keeps increasing; we cannot go by our old timelines.

In one sense, the new science is merely a continuation of the old. It continues the Baconian project of control over nature for human betterment. But at the point that it becomes transhumanism, the name indicates that this science has changed its object in the process. When the original humanism allied with science, it did so in order to transform the world to make it suitable for human life. But what if we could, following Skinner, change human beings to fit the world? Even conceiving of this project would, of course, mean treating human beings as material for transformation.

The famous Frankenstein story emerged out of the Romantic, originally Rousseauian, horror at the implications of treating man as mere matter. But the failure of the post-Rousseauian project of moral freedom, by which Kant and others sought to overcome the merely empirical through the power of the will, ultimately seems to have made possible a new science that accepts reductionist materialism as a matter of course, both as an account of nature and of man. Its followers are remarkably free of the kinds of concerns that plagued those who, from the eighteenth century on, were horrified by the notion of Lhomme Machine (man as a machine), popularized by a 1748 book of that title by La Mettrie.

A bit of the flavor of the clash between the older view and the new reductionism can be found in an exchange in Commentary magazine. As part of an April 2007 essay called Science, Religion, and the Human Future, Leon R. Kass, a University of Chicago professor and former chairman of the Presidents Council on Bioethics, challenged the materialist conception of the human being that denies the immateriality of the soul. One of those criticized, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, replied in a letter published in the July/August 2007 issue alongside a rebuttal from Kass. Pinker denies Kasss charge that he reduces mind to brain; mind is, however, what the brain does (his emphasis). Therefore, on Pinkers account, what needs to be studied is the brain, and so is material. Nothing is gained by emotive talk of the soul, he says; if all that archaic term refers to is the software of the brain, then why not say so and be done with it? If we are computers, then so be it.

This reductionism is not in and of itself transhumanism, but it paves the way for it. The new science isnt squeamish about man as machine; transhumanism goes a step further and embraces mans becoming a different machine, or any number of kinds of machines. If that were to come to pass, even if only among elites, it would be a change of world-historical proportions, because it would mean that the new science was no longer merely seeking to transform the world to suit human beings, but rather transforming human beings into whatever they chose.

Contemporary libertarians, viewing society as composed of transactions between autonomous actors, seem to expect that these transformational choices will be individual in nature. But as has been cogently argued by a number of critics, individual choice will probably not be decisive. Once the enhanced set the standards, it will pretty much be impossible for the unenhanced not to have to try to keep up, if only because their life chances, and ultimately even their continuing recognition as members of society, will be at stake. So rather than choices made by independent rational actors, the decisions about radical enhancement are more likely to be either collective or to be imposed from above by an elite, as predicted by Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis, among others. Or it may be that the choice will not be made intentionally at all, but simply imposed by realized technological possibility a progression hinted at by the spread of steroid use among athletes today.

The attachment of some libertarians to transhumanism is deeply misguided, for at least two reasons. First, the phenomenon that Richard J. Herrnstein got so much grief for pointing out in his 1973 book I.Q. in the Meritocracy namely, that true egalitarianism and meritocracy tend to produce, through the marriage of the smart with the smart, a genetic aristocracy, almost a genetic caste would likely deepen dramatically in the future the transhumanists desire, with consequences for the liberty of the unenhanced. At some point, those who celebrate the liberty of human beings will have to face the fact that liberty will look very different when we are no longer merely human. Second, our enhanced offspring might have to confront novel existential threats, such as the problem of an artificial intelligence bent on the destruction of humanity, or of self-replicating nanobots run amuck guarding against which would likely require the governance of some massively powerful and intrusive entity like the World Controller in Huxleys Brave New World. The rule of bureaucrats and experts, which has already started small in Europe and which elites seem to be pushing for throughout the West, would probably evolve apace with the rapidly expanding new science into the rule of experts at all levels.

Still, however one reacts to the transhumanist project and it is probably only a technical question as to how far it can go and how fast it means that the most powerful weapon in the traditional anti-utopian arsenal may no longer have much power. Every utopia that came before was a no-place (the literal meaning of the word utopia) because it abstracted to some degree from human nature as it had always been, and so the perfect world it imagined could not exist. Thus, utopias could be divided, as Leo Strauss has suggested, into two kinds. There were the philosophical and theological utopias, those which knowingly described an impossible world but nevertheless used the narrative to focus on certain aspects of humanity in order to clarify goals and to offer moral encouragement to improve. And then there were the ones like Skinners, modern utopias of social engineering that navely bought into the possibility of radically changing human life by simply ignoring crucial aspects of it as it exists now. Both of these kinds of utopias could be reliably predicted to fail (were they to be tried in practice) because they were contrary to human nature.

Given that limitation, the Baconian scientific project in its liberal form can be considered the most successful of the latter kind of utopia, perhaps because it did not emphasize its potentially utopian ends, but also in large part because it was satisfied with incremental (though unending) gain. Indeed, its dependence on the gradual progress of science required concentrating on the next step rather than the end of the road. But quantitative change can become qualitative, and now the Baconian project offers us the serious prospect of changing humanity in ways that can be seen as beneficial to the beings we are now, but that would likely turn us into quite different beings over time and not necessarily such a long time.

Why not, then? Why not be the best we can be? The reply to this question used to be that the notion of the best human being, by definition, implies limits to what one can seek the limits of the human. But that reply is increasingly regarded as meaningless. The new answer is that the best we can be means the best at doing what we want to do. And what we want will itself be a mixture of what our restless desires want and what the wanting of others compels us to want.

So it is worth looking at the kinds of things that the transhumanists are anticipating us being able to do. For Kurzweil, posthumanity is about extending power and control to the point where we merge into everything non-human. He says, in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, that the essence of being human is not our limitations although we do have many its our ability to reach beyond our limitations. Along the way to the realm outside our limitations, this will mean things like being able to participate in a business meeting in one place while simultaneously participating in group sex in another. But Kurzweils true interest lies in his conviction that the pace of technological growth will explode so rapidly that it will bring about a transformation dubbed the Singularity (after the mathematical point at which a function quickly shoots up to infinity). In this unbounded future, we will increase our power until the entire universe is at our fingertips:

the matter and energy in our vicinity will become infused with the intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty, and emotional intelligence (the ability to love, for example) of our human-machine civilization. Our civilization will then expand outward, turning all the dumb matter and energy we encounter into sublimely intelligent transcendent matter and energy. So in a sense, we can say that the Singularity will ultimately infuse the energy with spirit.

Kurzweils fantastical vision may in fact belong less to science than to a kind of humanistic theology, reminiscent of the last act of George Bernard Shaws 1921 play Back to Methuselah, where humans become mere vortices of pure thought. But the goals of power and of knowledge understood, in a Faustian way, as a means to power are common to the general forecasts of technological evolution. Infertile people want to have babies, unattractive people want to be loved by attractive ones, old people want to live longer and be youthful, sick people want to be cured; all limitations are to be overcome. And this is not to be thought a problem, because it is just our nature to overcome any and all limitations.

Again, as with Skinner, there is in Kurzweils ideology precious little of inwardness. This claim might seem quizzical, given Kurzweils obsession with maximizing the pleasures available to consciousness, and his rhetorical overtures to intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty, and emotional intelligence, not to mention spirit. Yet inwardness arises from reflection on the self; from struggling with the challenges the world presents to you and you present to yourself; from meeting those challenges or failing to meet them; from working to make sense of them; and from the result of all these things: the progressive unfolding of the self over time. Inwardness, then, requires necessities, and arises in no small part from accepting them and reflecting on the difficulties inherent in them. Even the outward push to change the terms of a problem so that it no longer exists as a problem requires accepting that the change will produce new problems. This lesson underlies the latent utopianism of the good-old American pragmatism that directs us forever outward, solving ever new problems. This sort of utopianism can thus present itself as and can indeed mostly just be ordinary, sensible, practice.

And it is just this fact, that a latent utopianism is already a matter of ordinary practice in American society, that makes the intellectual argument about preserving the soul, or the self, or inwardness, or something about us that is more than just control of the outside, so very difficult to make today. If one can no longer insist on the necessity of certain limits, then dialogue over such matters invariably begins to look like a rehash of Mark Twains A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, with the transhumanists as the sensible, enlightened Yankee, and the traditionalists as the superstitious, cowardly Merlin. (Indeed, it is striking that in C.S. Lewiss 1945 novel That Hideous Strength, his polemic against the transhumanists of his day whom he identifies as agents of the Devil, and to whose think tank he gives the wonderful acronym of N.I.C.E., the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments he brings Merlin back from the dead as the wreaker of divine vengeance, as though he were refuting and reversing Twain.)

The incremental character of the changes moving us towards the transhumanist horizon is not a reason for relief but for greater concern. It may seem to be all very well and good to say that we dont want to go to Kurzweilian extremes but would just like to improve mans lot concretely. But it is nearly impossible to stop short when every further step promises convenience, pleasure, and greater physical well-being. Once you say, Whats wrong with curing diseases?, you will be tempted to add, Anyway, isnt a man with a hearing aid already a cyborg? That is, you will have taken the stance of transhumanism while defending some humane application. Moreover, there are always prices to be paid that, however justifiable, nonetheless become increasingly invisible as technologies grow and spread, even as that growth means the prices become ever greater. Thus it is hard to oppose anything that may result in curing diseases, and techniques that once seemed very novel and strange, such as replacing defective organs, become the new normal.

But, again, following Marx, at some point quantitative change becomes qualitative and qualitative change is the professed goal of the self-proclaimed transhumanists, who want us to change into beings entirely different from what we are now. What is the likely nature of this change? And what is the price to be paid for technological growth? Among other things, as our lives become more free and less determined by nature, there is a certain cost that gets paid in terms of the value necessity has for us. (As James Boswell purported Samuel Johnson to have said, if perhaps more pointedly than quite needed for this discussion: When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.) At a certain point, the relation one has to ones self which is certainly in large part a matter of ones vulnerable, mortal, finite body, its moods and appetites and physical capacities, and these things as they come into harmony and conflict with our reasons and longings would necessarily change if it became a consumer option, one that could be ordered up like a car from a dealer. Our progress would loosen that relation and ultimately our sense of our own identity.

Virtual reality and neuroelectronics likewise involve eliminating the limitations that shape our selves. Aside from the narrow therapeutic case for virtual reality and brain implants to help the disabled, the case for these technologies is mainly based on the satisfaction of desires, the overcoming of boredom, and maybe even, once our nervous systems are hooked into computers, increased calculating powers and the ability to multitask like crazy (in perhaps both senses of the word). We may someday approach becoming what George Orwell called, in The Road to Wigan Pier, a brain in a bottle, a being that can ever more control all its feelings and outcomes. Todays video gamers arent there yet, but for those of them who spend most of their waking hours immobile and immersed in their screens, its not for lack of trying.

Today, of course, it is still the case that students need to get away from video games and get to class, and adults need to head off to work, at least if they want to graduate or keep their jobs. But if those requirements can become optional, if reality and virtual reality become increasingly indistinguishable, then that Orwellian dreamlike state will become real long before such Kurzweilian fantasies as a single self inhabiting multiple bodies, or multiple selves inhabiting one body, become real (or virtually real: by that point there will be no difference). It seems certain that this indistinguishability would involve a flattening out, or a relaxation of the tension to use Nietzsches image of the bow that constitutes peculiarly human existence. To be sure, there are challenges in virtual reality, as there are in video games. But they all have the quality that the late sociologist Philip Rieff already notes as present in modern culture: they are heroic myths enacted as diversions, ironically. They divert boredom from itself and thereby paradoxically increase it. And while they do, through this hasty pattern of boredom and distraction, they simultaneously make it almost impossible to transform the time on your hands into the leisure required for serious reflection about the world or the self. This is not only because distraction has an addictive character, but also because as anyone familiar with the phenomenon probably knows it creates a kind of feeling of helplessness and despair.

As an example, I am struck by the enthusiastic descriptions of devotees of the computer game World of Warcraft. Underneath all the Tolkien-esque, quasi-feudal adventure fantasy apparently lies an utterly mind-numbing program of bourgeois accumulation of commercial credits, made all the more tedious by the fact that there are apparently no meaningful risks in the game: death itself just means starting to accumulate all over again, and so amounts to less than bankruptcy. Here is another of the ironies of the transhumanist tomorrow: we are promised that vaunted ability of multitasking, but many of the tasks we will be engaging in will be empty of any meaningful purpose.

The contrast between what we are and what the world around us demands of us, rightly or wrongly, and the question of what we are from moment to moment as we act and fulfill and betray ourselves these make up much of the intellectual life of the human being. That inner life depends on a fairly clear sense of the separation between self and world. The absence of this inwardness, the lack of the capacity for serious self-reflection, characterizes many of the symptoms of what psychologists call narcissistic personality disorder. So it is perhaps not so hard to understand why the incapacity for serious self-reflection is so often accompanied by a lack of consideration for others. If the success of transhumanism means the perpetual expulsion of the self into ever further immersion into the world, then inwardness would be in peril. However great our powers could become, would it really be an improvement for humanity to lose that inwardness, to become narcissistic? Would that really amount to progress? We would be very good at doing things to ourselves and to the world but ultimately in the name of what, other than the doing of them?

For various reasons, the case against these new utopians has had little effect; few people seem to see that our technological motion ought to have some sensible guidance rather than continuing its relentless and blind inertia forward. In order to strengthen that case, let us first examine four of the kinds of arguments often leveled by critics of the transhumanist project and why each of those arguments has less effect than it might deserve. First there is what we might call the practical argument, which seeks to highlight inconsistencies, contradictions, and other failings in the transhumanists vision. For example, reviewing in these pages John Harriss book Enhancing Evolution (see Beyond Mankind, Fall 2008), Charles T. Rubin argues that enhancement will not remain a free choice; or that, if it does, it will lead to a stratification of society between the enhanced and the unenhanced that will make the gulf between Brahmin and untouchable seem like an Elks picnic. Then, he cautions about Harriss claim that we have a moral obligation to participate in enhancement research, showing the opening that Harris allows for experimentation on the non-consenting. Finally, he examines with some psychological care the likely consequences of the extension of the lifespan to millennia, which Harris calls the Holy Grail of enhancement. What would bodily continuity of multiple personalities over time really mean? And if it came down to choosing some arbitrary limit to our lifespan, which Harris calls fair innings and suggests might be in the realm of 5,000 years, would we be any readier to go after 4,990 years than after 70?

Rubins approach of asking the reader to bring the specific consequences to mind has the great merit of slowing down the sense of inevitability for some of the goals of the transhumanist movement. But it faces the classic pragmatist response: We can fix that. The transhumanist will confidently assert that we will somehow work out the practical problems of near-immortality after all, if were smart enough to make those problems, surely well be able to fix them. The effect of this response is to reinstate the sense of inevitability, pushing the hard questions further off toward the bright horizon.

The critics second approach is the appeal to orthodoxy. Here my example comes from political science professor Robert Kraynak of Colgate University. In a volume entitled Human Dignity and Bioethics, published in 2008 by the Presidents Council on Bioethics, Professor Kraynak has an exchange with Daniel Dennett, the Tufts University philosophy professor known for his writings about evolution, the mind, and atheism.In the essay kicking off the exchange, Dennett attempts to deal with the problem that the purely scientific understanding of human beings tends to loosen our grip on our understanding of and adherence to morality. And while Dennett is firm in his contempt for belief in the immortal soul, arguing that there is no more scientific justification for believing in it than there is for believing that each of your kidneys has a tap-dancing poltergeist living in it, he grants that our belief environment is important for human morale and shouldnt just be shattered. Thus he is willing to try to understand what human nature is. Ours is, Dennett writes, the only species with language, and art, and music, and religion, and humor, and the ability to imagine the time before our birth and after our death, and the ability to plan projects that take centuries to unfold, and the ability to create, defend, revise, and live by codes of conduct, and sad to say to wage war on a global scale. Somehow, those qualities, when affirmed reassuringly by life sciences, are supposed to establish the basis for a humane morality that science needs to respect.

Professor Kraynak begins his response by contrasting Dennetts scientific materialism with his idealistic moral principles. Dennett claims that the universe has no purpose, but [that] man still has a moral purpose; if only Dennett had the humility to recognize that he is actually assuming something like a rational soul. Then Kraynak draws out, with great clarity and erudition, the classical Greek account of the rational soul, and updates it by referring to a contemporary scientist, Paul Davies, who thinks that nature is directed toward intelligent life. He then goes on to outline the Biblical account of man as a rational creature made in the image of God. His conclusion points to a preference for that account. Philosophy tells us about the rational soul united to the body; but religion takes us into the mysterious realm of the divine image of eternal destiny in each human being.

In his rejoinder, Dennett says that his acceptance of the rational soul is, contra Kraynak, no problem. Aristotle is just fine by him, it appears. And then Dennett, with a certain glee, launches into a familiar attack on religion, using Kraynaks introduction of the concept of mystery to claim that Kraynak must believe that freedom cannot be natural, must be a sort of magical abridgement of the laws of nature (his emphasis). Dennett here seems to be misunderstanding Kraynak by conflating his separate accounts of Aristotelian thought and the Bible into one, and one might expect that Kraynak would correct this in his final rebuttal. Instead, Kraynak offers the very insightful point that Dennetts materialist humanism is ... a residue of Christian humanism. And he gets later to what it seems that he really wants to ask: Why is [Dennett] so sure that belief in the human soul is discredited? And what alternative does Dennett offer? It seems that Kraynak chooses to pursue the discussion in terms of the soul, rather than by taking up Dennetts claim that we can base morality in the life sciences, because he agrees with Leo Strauss that between reason and revelation, philosophy and faith, tertium non datur: that is, there is no third possibility. To take the clear stand for faith is a position of great intellectual clarity and integrity. In fact, it may well preserve the seriousness of a faith which otherwise becomes diluted to the point of unrecognizability by those who seek to engage in dialogue with hardline atheists.

This choice of revelation over reason was what historically always characterized orthodoxy. The effect of this choice, as Strauss observed in Philosophy and Law, was to create impregnable fortresses that withstood the tide of the Enlightenment. But if they withstood the tide, they did not much impede it. In fact, by a polemic against those silent fortresses, which could by design hardly be answered by those who were within, members of the Enlightenment were able to make their cause appear victimized and heroic. Indeed, as Strauss also said, the mockery of orthodoxy did not follow upon its refutation; it was its refutation. And it seems likely that some of the tart tone of Professor Kraynaks responses to Dennett, a mocker if ever there was one, is because Kraynak knows that full well.

When it comes to the prospect of transhumanism, however, the maintenance of a saving remnant in the fortress may not either be sufficient to answer its attackers, or even be possible. If the orthodox refuse to accept enhancement, they may simply become the slaves or, perhaps worse, the pets of their (avowedly) soulless, enhanced former fellows.

Dennetts apparent openness to classical views might appear to provide an opportunity for finding common ground with those critics of transhumanism who contest philosophically with the moderns by means of the ancients. This is, in fact, the third line of argument some critics take up. These are powerful and compelling Aristotelian arguments on behalf of the human and yet there is a worrisome sense that these arguments are not having the effect they should. One example is Leon Kasss case for the wisdom of repugnance, the famous yuck factor argument. It is an attempt to appeal to that substrate of our humanity that is easily ignored because, as substrate, it is simply taken for granted, never paid attention to. The trouble is twofold, however, as Kass and others have themselves acknowledged from the outset. First, the wisdom of repugnance is heavily culturally conditioned. It is easy for its progressive opponents to show, with some moral indignation, that in previous generations people found interracial marriage or the eating of raw fish yucky. Why should we, they ask, be in the least bothered by the fact that certain things offend our tastes now? Well get used to them. The second problem is that these critics are in a sense right about that last point after all, if we couldnt overcome our innate horror of human cloning (the focus of Kasss original essay) then there wouldnt be much need to invoke the yuck factor.

Properly understood, what the wisdom of repugnance is getting at is that there is some inarticulate wisdom in our tastes and that if we reason them away or habituate ourselves against them, we may well lose what we are. The problem is that this will have no effect on people who say (to borrow a line from one of Bertolt Brechts characters), I dont want to be a human being! Furthermore, the Aristotelian language which classical philosophy uses is qualitative and as such has a hard time getting through to people who have absorbed if not with their mothers milk, then at least from their high school science classes scorn for qualitative language. Such language, the average educated Westerner thinks, is superstitious, unscientific, and even embarrassing. It is hard for him to give the very form of such talk a serious hearing. Yet the whole argument is precisely about the importance of qualities, so that mere incremental, quantitatively increased control over nature can be seen at some point to pose a qualitative and fundamental problem. It is precisely the power of Aristotelian thought that it makes us aware of quality, not just quantity. But it is hard to get past Cartesian prejudices in making the case that way. Arguments like the wisdom of repugnance will only persuade indeed, will only be intelligible to those people not scornful of qualitative language, but they probably dont need convincing anyway.

A fourth line of argument, which also has its difficulties, is the appeal to human dignity. And here, paradoxically, the problem is one of apparent agreement. It isnt exactly as if the transhumanists and their critics are arguing about whether or not there is such a thing as human dignity. In fact, in the view of the transhumanists, they are advocating enhancing not just human capabilities but thereby dignity of a sort that many would still consider human. Taken to its most extreme conclusion, as in the vision of Kurzweil, man will morph into the whole of the universe, now made intelligent. That is, our mission is to become God whether the Biblical one before He creates the world or some Platonic deity that moves in a perfect motion while thinking itself. What greater dignity could one imagine?

Even aside from Kurzweils far-out idea, it is striking that even at the level of contemporary technology, advocates of the new science seem to speak as if they believe they are promoting human dignity. To do this, however, they have to alter older views of human dignity. For Kant, human dignity meant the capacity to transcend the merely empirical by the force of moral will as when Schiller sees the moral sublime depicted in the statue of Laocon, maintaining his poise even while being torn apart by a sea monster. But for the Euthanasia Societies of Great Britain and America, relief is required from the indignity of deterioration, dependence, and hopeless pain. The demand for a dignified death of the body, understood as a death without suffering, is actually predicated on an understanding of man that makes the true dignity of suffering accepted impossible. This is a point made eloquently by Paul Ramsey in his 1974 essay The Indignity of Death with Dignity. Ramsey shows that indignity has come to mean the suffering of the body rather than the defamation of the spirit. There is a concomitant rise of talk of death as a natural part of life, along with the proviso that it be as little unpleasant as possible the same talk parents give their children when the family dog is put down indicating that our understanding of dignity is becoming more about ourselves as bodies and less about what is essentially human. Arguments appealing to older conceptions of human dignity will fail to convince transhumanists, and may sound archaic even to non-transhumanists.

If these four approaches to criticizing the transhumanist project are likely to have little effect, perhaps there may be another way in, via the apparent contradiction pointed out by Robert Kraynak namely that scientific materialists like Daniel Dennett who wish us to think of ourselves as mere potential for transformation still somehow cling to a certain moral idealism, at once denying and affirming human dignity. To draw out this point, we may reflect on the thought of Michel de Montaigne, a non-utopian humanist. As David Lewis Schaefer has shown, Montaigne was very sympathetic to modern science, especially biology and medicine. But he was also deeply interested in understanding what it is to be human. Of course, Montaigne is a notoriously cryptic writer whose Essays can be read in widely differing ways, and so what follows is but one possible (but hopefully useful) interpretation of him.

In the third essay of his first book, Our Feelings Reach Out Beyond Us, Montaigne points out that we human beings are never simply present with ourselves. We are always elsewhere: thinking about the future, about how we look to others, about our past and what it means for our future. We are never in the moment the way an animal is. (We need self-help gurus to teach us to live in the moment; dogs always do.) Montaignes first book of essays explores the implications of the fact that we self-conscious beings are always both what we are and what we are not because in formulating what we are to ourselves, we are also the formulator and as such not formulated in the formulation. The main implication of this idea is for our mortality. Montaigne engages in what seems to be a spoof of the Stoic opinion that we can take a rational view of our own death. Even as one seeks to conceive of the point in time when one no longer exists, one still implicitly imagines the conceiver as the thing in the future grasping at its own nonexistence; the conceiver continues to exist as a given in the mind, and so we fail, and all the Stoic consolations fail to console.

Yet, by the beginning of Montaignes third book, he says that while he is never at home, he is never far from it. We may understand the Montaignean project to be about learning how to come back, to return to the home base of the human situation, while acknowledging that we cannot stay there entirely that we will always, through reason and imagination, go outwards from it. That is, Montaigne acknowledges the inevitability of that pressing eternally outwards that we find in the new science, but he teaches how to return as well. That this is a lifes project, that it is possible for very few, and that it is in many ways dependent on an aristocratic life devoted to contemplation rather than labor, are all true. Nor can or should we all aspire to become Montaignes. His is a version, and a rather Socratic one at that, of the philosophic life, and it is not for most of us. But in Montaignes understanding that we are always, as human, double that we are always problematic in ways that no other being, subhuman or superhuman, is there is a starting point for pushing back against transhumanism.

Like the Aristotelian approach, Montaignes also seeks to reveal and describe the substrate, the part of us that is essentially human, which we all know about because we are human. Yet it does so not by using the sort of qualitative language that Aristotle found appropriate for addressing noble Athenians, but through psychological observation and specific examples that are graspable by contemporaries without much translation from one rhetoric to another.

Moreover, Montaignes approach gives an initial answer to that cheerful historicism of scientific progress which denies there is such a thing as human nature, and which is happy for us to transform ourselves in any way that works. That answer is that, yes, human beings are in part about pushing outwards and struggling with limits, but we are also inward beings that reflect on, worry about, imagine about, and at root understand ourselves in relation to those limits. Indeed, Montaigne enables us to comprehend at least the bare minimums of limitation that are necessary for us to function in the world as humans. Without necessities like death, being one person rather than another, and doing one thing rather than anything, life becomes truly dreamlike: a state of being where all reality is virtual, capable of being changed at will, but where nothing really tells the will what to change. One student of mine said that such a prospect caused him vertigo. It is a different form of nausea than yuck, but it will perhaps do for starters.

In addition, Montaignes teaching about the duality of human beings perhaps provides a clue as to how to take advantage of the scientific materialists lingering high-minded moral idealism. It is one thing to show that their moral idealism contradicts their materialism. But it might be altogether more productive to encourage them to think seriously about their ideals to ask those who still believe in dignity why they are so eager to assure us that we are not simply machines for the accumulation of pleasurable experiences. Perhaps if one could get past the simplistic Enlightenment propaganda about freedom of choice and maximization of control, it might be possible to begin to show how the overcoming of limits is indeed one element of human dignity, but that therefore they themselves in the end really want there to be limits.

It is worth juxtaposing Montaignes humanism with Leo Strausss argument, in Thoughts on Machiavelli, that humanism is impossible because man is the being that transcends himself or falls below himself. Montaignes humanism seems to begin where Strausss rejection of humanism is at its most decisive. It is as though he were to say to Strauss, Your remark makes a wonderful photograph, but an inadequate movie. You are right; man is the being who always transcends, so man cannot be the measure. But man is also the being who always comes back to the original situation of being in-between, semi-determined, of seeking through knowledge or control to free himself from control. Humanism as traditionally conceived the remaking of the world to suit man is, as you say, an impossibility. Pursued in full seriousness, it will actually produce the opposite: It will transform man to suit the world, thereby taking us away from that equivocal, double position that is characteristically human. But humanism properly understood is not a project of world transformation but of human self-understanding.

Montaignean humanism is Socratic but differs from Platos humanism. Montaigne says that, whereas Plato feared our hard bondage to pain and pleasure because it attaches the soul too much to the body, Montaigne himself fears it because it detaches and unbinds it. That is, Montaigne wanted to bring body and soul together into a whole being: the human being. Such a humanism can seemingly be (as it traditionally was) directed against the excesses of spirituality against a Christianity that went further even than Plato in denying the body for the sake of the soul. But it also may be useful against the excesses of the body, the body theorized and mutated, the body seeking to transform the world and thereby transforming itself into mere world.

Curiously, from the point of view of the original humanism, the project of transhumanism looks remarkably theological. After all, Kurzweils ultimate dream is of men made into gods. In this it shares much with the modern, stridently secular humanism that followed Hegels discovery of God in history. And, perhaps more than any of its predecessors, the transhumanist vision makes clear what is at least implicit in all those earlier utopias, even in Marxs apparent celebration of human emancipation and possibility: namely, how profoundly hostile such ambitions are to human life even when they present themselves as liberating, improving, or merely assisting it. Human beings, by their very nature, are never entirely at home in a world of things, much less in a world ruled by gods. To make the world wholly safe for man, as the earlier utopian humanisms sought, turns out to be impossible because man is not univocal and, as Montaigne says, isnt where he is and doesnt believe what he believes. To make human beings wholly suitable to the world, and ultimately to make them merge into each other, all in the name of human liberation, is in fact to reduce man into a beastly godhead. To clearly see that transformation for what it is to see the degradation in the divinization we need to remind ourselves of who we really are and what we really need.

Fred Baumann is a professor of political science at Kenyon College. This essay is adapted from a lecture given at Colgate Universitys Center for the Arts and Humanities.

Fred Baumann, "Humanism and Transhumanism," The New Atlantis, Number 29, Fall 2010, pp. 68-84.

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Humanism and Transhumanism - The New Atlantis