In Pursuit of Perfection: The Misguided Transhumanist Vision

Theology and Science ISSN: 1474-6700 (Print) 1474-6719 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtas20 In Pursuit of Perfection: The Misguided Transhumanist Vision Hava Tirosh-Samuelson To cite this article: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (2018) In Pursuit of Perfection: The Misguided Transhumanist Vision, Theology and Science, 16:2, 200-222, DOI: 10.1080/14746700.2018.1463659 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14746700.2018.1463659 Published online: 04 May 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 14 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtas20 THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE, 2018 VOL. 16, NO. 2, 200–222 https://doi.org/10.1080/14746700.2018.1463659 In Pursuit of Perfection: The Misguided Transhumanist Vision Hava Tirosh-Samuelson What Transhumanism Is and Why It Matters In this article I will focus on the topic that has engaged me for the past 15 years—transhumanism. When I tell people that I write about transhumanism, I usually encounter a perplexed look, since most people are unfamiliar with the term. However, here at CTNS the term is well known, and I was very pleased to attend a class that studies transhumanism and that is very familiar with the current literature on the subject. To be sure we all know what we are talking about, let me begin by presenting transhumanism and telling you why transhumanism matters. Transhumanism is not easy to define. According to the leading transhumanist theorist, Nick Bostrom, “transhumanism is a loosely defined movement … [that] represents an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the ethical, social and strategic issues raised by present and anticipated future technologies.”1 In the same essay, Bostrom also refers to transhumanism as a “worldview that has a value component,” and that broader definition is more appropriate. Transhumanism is a vision about the role of technology in the evolution of the human species. There are many facets to transhumanism, but they all cohere into the claim that the human species is on the verge of a new phase in its evolution as the result of converging technologies such as genomics, robotics, informatics, and nanotechnology. According to transhumanism, these technologies will bring about the physiological and cognitive enhancement of human beings that will pave the way for the replacement of biological humans by autonomous, superintelligent, decision-making machines, which will constitute the posthuman age. Whereas biological humans emerged out of the slow, uncontrolled, and unpredictable process of evolution, the process that will bring about the posthuman will be fast, controlled, and directed, brought about by human engineering. Described as “enhancement revolution” (Buchanan), “radical evolution” (Garreau), “designer evolution” (Young), and “conscious evolution” (Chu),2 this futurist scenario turns the human into a design project. By means of new technologies, the human species will be redesigned so as to transcend its biological limits and pave the way for the emergence of a new posthuman species. Numerically speaking, the transhumanist movement is still very small. Only several thousand people worldwide are loosely associated with the organization Humanity Plus, or H+ (formerly known as the World Transhumanist Association), as well as with institutions such as the Foresight Institute, the (now defunct) Extropian Institute, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology (IEET), The Future of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) (the former Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence), and the Mormon Transhumanist Association, to name a few. The Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Trinity College publishes the Journal of Evolution and Technology (originally named the Journal of Transhumanism), where © 2018 Graduate Theological Union (CTNS Program) THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 201 transhumanists interested in “futurological research into long term developments in science, technology, and philosophy” publish their ideas and reflect on their societal ramifications, and Humanity+ produced the H+ Magazine, which published five issues (2008– 09) in print before it became web-only publication Humanity+ Media. Indeed, the Internet is the main vehicle for the dissemination and proliferation of transhumanism, and websites of non-profit organizations such as the Transhuman Policy Center, the Center for Genetics and Society, the Center for Transhumanity-Immortal Life, Terasem, and the Society for Universal Immortalism attest to the robust global discourse that consists of conferences, workshops, publications, posts, and blogs. As we shall see, the internet is not just a means to an end but also an integral aspect of the futuristic vision itself, because cyberspace is where transhumanists experience transcendence, happiness, and perfection. Although the movement is highly decentralized,3 several individuals have emerged as its main spokespersons, including Nick Bostrom, David Pearce, Max More, Natasha Vita-More, James Hughes, Giulio Prisco, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Anders Sandberg, Hugo de Garis, Kevin Warrick, Ben Goerztle, Aubrey de Grey, Martine Rothblatt, Steve Fuller, Robin Hanson, and Andy Clark, to name a few prominent voices. Other famous figures are associated with the movement and contribute to its cultural prestige, even though they do not define themselves as transhumanists. They include the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, the computer scientists Hans Moravec and the late Marvin Minsky, the biologist Gregory Stock, the physicist Frank Tipler, the sociologist and science policy administrator William Sims Bainbridge, the science fiction writer Vernon Vinge, and the science writer Ronald Bailey, among many others.4 Since transhumanism is rooted in scientific research, many proponents of transhumanism hold academic positions, but the movement thrives either on the margins or entirely outside the academy, financed by entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel and Peter Diamantis, and by Ray Kurzweil, currently the chief engineer of Google. In 2009, Diamantis and Kurzweil founded the Singularity University, as a “university for the coming Singularity,” whose curriculum is informed by the transhumanist imagination.5 Other Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs fund basic research through private foundations and the start-up companies that translate that research into marketable products and services too numerous to discuss here. In other words, cutting-edge technoscience, capitalist entrepreneurship, and futurism are closely intertwined. Transhumanism is not monolithic but a cluster of several currents. One identifiable current is Extroprianism, namely those who We develop extropian perspectives on technology, science, philosophy, and art in our journal, Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought, in the Extropy Institute newsletter, e-mail forums, and conferences. Extroprians have a specific conception of transhumanism, involving certain values and goals such as boundless expansion, self-transcendence, dynamic optimism, intelligent technology, and spontaneous order.6 This group has been led by Max More and his wife, Natasha Vita-More, the co-editors of the important anthology of transhumanist thought, The Transhumanist Reader (2013) although the Extropy Institute no longer exists. Another current in transhumanist movement are the Singularitarians, namely, those who believe that the “transition to a posthuman world will be a sudden event, elicited by the creation of a runway machine 202 H. TIROSH-SAMUELSON intelligence,”7 and their guru is Ray Kurtzweil, the inventor and futurist who is revered by many transhumanists, even though he does not define himself as a transhumanist. A third strand consists of those who follow David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative and combine transhumanism with hedonic utilitarianism and who emphasize pleasure and morphological freedom, namely “the right to modify and enhance one’s body, cognition, and emotion.”8 A fourth current can be labeled Democratic Transhumanism and consist of those who emphasize social responsibility and democratic decision making in the use of converging technologies for the benefit of humanity.9 And finally, there are the Survivalists, or those who endorse Aubrey De Grey’s campaign against aging and death and who focus on radical life extension and longevity. In between these currents, there are other variants, reflecting the preferences, expertise, and commitment of individual transhumanist activists who vary greatly from each other. Because transhumanism is so diverse and constantly evolving, it is hard to generalize about it or to debate with its advocates; one can always disavow what another transhumanist has written or said, so that transhumanism is indeed a “work in progress,” which is how transhumanists view human nature. I treat the various strands of transhumanism as themes of one and the same futuristic vision that calls for the transition from biological humanity to mechanical posthumanity. I admit that in so doing, I impose on transhumanism a certain degree of coherence that it may not have. Nonetheless, I argue that treating the various themes of transhumanism together is legitimate because only then can we grasp why it is culturally significant even though it is deeply misguided. I consider transhumanism to be culturally significant because today transhumanism is not a mere speculation on the fringe of mainstream culture, but a presence that shapes contemporary culture as transhumanist themes, vocabulary, values, and style frame contemporary film, science fiction, horror genre, video games, performance art, new media art, literature, and cyberpunk.10 Today all aspects of being human—embodiment, sexuality, subjectivity, emotionality, and sociality—have been thoroughly transformed by the hybridization of the organic and the mechanical, artificial intelligence, new digital and virtualizing media, cyberspace, online gaming, digital collectivities, networked information, and new media arts. If we want to make sense of our contemporary culture, we cannot ignore the transhumanist themes that pervade it. At the same time, we must accept transhumanism without subjecting it to interrogation and critique. That is what I have attempted to do in my work on transhumanism.11 I have examined transhumanism as expression of the contemporary imagination and inquired whether transhumanist futrurism is socially and culturally acceptable. To admit the cultural significance of transhumanism does not entail endorsing it. I join a long list of critics, among them Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama, Michael Sandel, Bill McGibben, George Annas, Betke Elshtain, and others, who view transhumanism as problematic and even dangerous. This group of people has been labeled “bio-conservative,” in contrast to the “bio-liberals” and the “transhumanists.” As Johan A.R. Roduit succinctly put it, the “bio-conservatives” “regard enhancement as morally problematic due to the fact that it involves too many risks and carries the possibility of unintended consequences that could potentially have a negative impact on human dignity or human nature.” By contrast, the “bio-liberals” hold that “some form of enhancement may be morally problematic, but this is not necessarily the case in every instance of enhancement.” And going beyond the “bio-liberals,” the “transhumanists” are those who “seek to use human enhancement as a tool to improve the human condition beyond what is considered normal, even if this THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 203 requires becoming post-human—something other than human.”12 Transhumanism then is not simply an argument in favor of this or that technological intervention for the alleged improvement of human life but a certain view of human perfection that posits the posthuman, superintelligent machine as the ideal human perfection. The debate about human enhancement is ultimately a debate about ideals of human perfection: both sides use the concept of perfection as they argue for conflicting positions about the ability of technology to bring about perfection. The debate is somewhat confusing because the term “perfection” refers to both “type-perfection” and “property-perfection.” Type-perfection is “the thesis that those individuals who best realize the essential properties of the individual type or species best exemplify the ideal of perfection,” whereas property perfection is “the thesis that those individuals who best realize some property or properties best exemplify the ideal of perfection.”13 Roduit, Heilinger, and Baumann shed light on this distinction by saying that the proponents of type perfection approve using human enhancements within the limits of a type, being careful not to enhance too far and risk becoming something other than the type given. Proponents of property perfection will seek to enhance on particular function, without making reference to any given type, even if this means becoming something other than the given type.14 In truth, when one look closely at these matters, one finds that “property perfection” cannot be separated from a certain understanding of “type perfection.” When transhumanists argue in favor of enhancement, they do so in the name of what they regard to be the perfection of the human species. I view transhumanism as an elaborate pursuit of perfection, notwithstanding Nick Bostrom’s claim that transhumanism only seeks the “improvement” of humanity rather than its “perfection.”15 So what is the ideal perfection of the human species according to transhumanism? To be perfect, human beings must cease to be human and transform themselves into presumably more perfect posthuman entities. Max More put it succinctly when he stated that transhumanism marks “a transitional standing between our animal heritage and our posthuman future.”16 The posthuman is regarded as the perfection of the human that will be attained by means of “genetic engineering, life-extending biosciences, intelligence intensifiers, smarter interfaces to swifter computers, neural compute integration, world-wide data networks, virtual reality, intelligent agents, swift electronic communication, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, neural networks, artificial life, off-planet migration and molecular nanotechnology.”17 Transhumanism, then, is the process that will culminate in posthumanism, its telos. The process is deemed inherently good because it consists of the elimination of randomness and chance, the increase of human choice and control over one’s body, one’s mind, and one’s future, the minimizing of pain and suffering, and the postponement of aging and perhaps even death. All of these goods serve the ultimate good: the emergence of a posthuman species. I consider transhumanism to be misguided because its ultimate end is to make the biological human species obsolete. Put differently, I reject transhumanism because it calls for the planned obsolescence of the human species on the grounds that biological humanity, the product of a long evolutionary process, is not only an imperfect “work in progress” but a form of life that is inherently flawed and that has no right to exist. According to transhumanists, human beings must recognize their innate imperfection and do everything they 204 H. TIROSH-SAMUELSON can to bring about the rise of posthuman beings that will eventually displace and replace flawed humans. Transhumanism then is not about how we can flourish as biological, social, and political humans but a vision that denigrates our humanity, calling us to improve ourselves technologically so that we could voluntarily become extinct. As I see it, transhumanism calls us to commit collective suicide as a species. In the following section of my remarks I will flesh out the transhumanist vision by looking at its main themes—human enhancement, morphological freedom, postponement of death, Singularity, and human-machine interface—all of which I find to be problematic. I will conclude my remarks by reflecting on the fact that, despite the robust critique of transhumanism for the past three decades, the cultural appeal of transhumanism has actually increased. Why has the critique of transhumanism failed to diminish its cultural appeal? I will submit to you that transhumanism illustrates the complexities of our contemporary post-secular age in which people across the globe seek transcendence within the “immanent frame.” In our post-secular world, millions of people are seeking to find meaning in life but they cannot return to traditional views of transcendence, happiness, and perfection. While remaining within the “immanent frame,” people invest various dimensions of the secular world with spiritual meaning, thereby giving rise to all sorts of hybrids. This is the case of the technological spirituality characteristic of transhumanism in which technoscience, the primary expressions of our secular age, is invested with salvific meaning. In the transhumanist scenario, technoscience will make us flourish in this world and will deliver us to life eternal. By investing technology with spiritual and even salvific meaning, transhumanism addresses the contemporary quest for meaning and expresses the Zeitgeist of our technological age. The Transhumanist Pursuit of Perfection When we look at transhumanism as an elaborate project for the attainment of perfection, we do so by examining perfection both as a process of self-improvement and as the end state or termination point of the process. This duality in the pursuit of perfection did not begin with transhumanists, but can be traced all the way back to Aristotle and to ancient Greek philosophy. In Book Delta of the Metaphysics, Aristotle distinguished three meanings of the term perfect (teleios), or three shades of one meaning. Perfect is that (a) which is complete, namely, contains all the requisite parts; (b) which is so good that nothing of the kind could be better (c) which has attained its purpose. Note that it is easy to subsume the first meaning within the second, but that between the second and the third meanings there is a difference and even some tension. The first and second meanings pertain to a thing which is perfect in itself, whereas the third meaning refers to that which perfectly serves its purpose. The duality is inevitable because in Greek the word teleios (i.e. “perfect”) is etymologically related to telos (i.e. “end”). In Greek, “to perfect” means not only “to complete” or “to finish” but also “to attain a goal” or “achieve an end.” From Aristotle to our own day, all Western thinking about human perfection exhibits this duality. I cannot give you an account of that complex story now, but I do want to THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 205 note that the transhumanist conception of perfection remains largely Aristotelian because it poses a causal connection between perfection (entelechia) and happiness (eudaimonia). Like Aristotle, transhumanists believe that each being is so constructed in its nature that it acts only according to a single particular pattern. Everything naturally aims toward an end (telos), and that end determines the direction of the individual’s development. A thing reaches its natural perfection when it has all its parts, when the parts function well in their own characteristic activity, and when the thing reaches the end of its proper development and so becomes fulfilled. To know what is the proper perfection of a given thing we need to know not only what is its telos but also what is its characteristic activity or function (ergon). Thus everything in the world, including human beings, acts so as to attain a desired end, and when that end is fully and most completely realized then that given thing reaches its perfection. The transhumanist vision of technological perfection operates within this logic, but, as will become clear, it misses much of the subtlety and depth of the Aristotelian understanding of happiness and perfection: whereas Aristotle understood correctly that, in the world as we know it, human beings can only aspire to the ultimate perfection but never realize it, transhumanists hold that ultimate perfection can be attained by means of technology here and now but with the price of obliterating humans as we know them. Let me explore the ideal of perfection in transhumanist discourse, as both a process and as a termination point and explain why I find them to be problematic. Perfection as a Process: Technological Enhancement A recent survey of the Pew Research Center appropriately notes the connection between perfection and happiness in transhumanist discourse. According to the survey, the proponents of transhumanism predict that the convergence of new technologies will soon allow people to control and fundamentally change their bodies and minds. Instead of leaving a person’s physical well-being to the vagaries of nature, supporters of these technologies contend that science will allow us to take control of our species development, making ourselves and future generations healthier and happier.18 That transhumanism is about the attainment of happiness becomes clear in Max More’s explanation of extropy. Extropy, More tells us, is “the extent of a living or organizational system’s intelligence, functional order, vitality, and capacity and drive for improvement” and “extropic” are the “actions, qualities, or outcomes that embody or further extropy.” He elaborates the point, saying that extropy “is not a real entity or force, but only metaphor representing all that contributes to our flourishing,” in other words, our happiness or wellbeing. More argues that technology will bring about human flourishing through “perpetual progress, self-transformation, practical optimism, intelligent technology, open society in terms of information and democracy, self-direction, and rational thinking.”19 He emphasizes how the pace of change—technological, cultural, and economic—continues to accelerate and to reach deeper so that advances in technologies (including “social technologies” of knowledge management, learning, and decision making), will presumably enable us to change human nature itself in its physical, emotional, and intellectual aspects. More predicts that with better knowledge and decision making, humans could live far longer in better than “perfect” health, improve their self-knowledge and awareness of interpersonal dynamics, overcome cultural, psychological, and memetic biases in thinking, 206 H. TIROSH-SAMUELSON enhance intelligence in all its various forms, and learn to thrive on change and growth. In short, humans will finally be happy because technology will enable them to be “doing better” and “being more.” How will technology make humans happy and even perfect? Transhumanism promises to engineer human perfection by transcending biological limits imposed on us by the messy process of random evolution. Transhumanism takes for granted that evolution has given rise to biological humans, but refuses to see biology as destiny. Precisely because the evolutionary process has given rise to the complex human brain, the “inevitable product of the evolutionary process,”20 human beings are not only permitted to intervene and alter the biological facts through designer genes, designer drugs, and a whole range of enhancement technologies, but should do so in order to improve the human species. As we already noted, transhumanists regard evolution as a slow, random, chaotic, and flawed process that can be improved only when humans take control of it so as to direct evolution to the ultimate destiny of the human species. Doing so, transhumanists promise us, will ensure greater happiness for humanity, both individually and collectively, as well as the fulfillment of human innate ambitions to live forever. Engineering the betterment or improvement of human biology comes in three main strategies: there are “negative” interventions, aimed at curing a disease or eliminating a disability; “positive” interventions, aimed at improving the functioning of a human organism within the range of natural variation; and “enhancement,” … an intervention aiming to take an individual beyond normal functioning of a human organism.21 These strategies enlarge “the capacities for human action” by enabling human beings to be “healthier, more beautiful, more athletic, more intelligent, more creative, more pleasant, and many other ‘mores.’”22 It is no coincidence that the obsession with “being more” has led Max T. O’Connor to rename himself Max More, as did his wife, Natasha VitaMore, whose given name at birth was Nancie Clark. “Being more” or “doing better” than ordinary humans is what human enhancement is all about. Enhanced humans will be happier than ordinary humans and further along in the process of attaining perfection. For the past three decades we have vociferously debated the validity of technological enhancement. Proponents of enhancements view these interventions as “tools that can facilitate our authentic efforts at self-discovery and self-creation.”23 The proponents of enhancement technologies (be they drugs, implants, or prostheses) claim that they not only help us to overcome limitations and deficiencies but that they enable us to authentically create ourselves, choosing for ourselves the kind of life we wish to live. By contrast, the critics of enhancement worry that these technologies threaten our efforts at achieving authenticity and regard enhancement technologies as procedures that separate us from what is most our own and from how the world really is. As Leon Kass, a major critic of enhancement, puts it: “as the power to transform our native powers increases, both in magnitude and refinement, so does the possibility for self-alienation—for losing, confounding, or abandoning our identity.”24 I concur with Kass’ critique, but I am concerned not so much with the issue of authenticity but with other questionable aspects of the transhumanist pursuit of perfection and happiness by means of technology. THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 207 First, even though the use of a given enhancement technology requires a voluntary decision, the incorporation of technology into our bodies eventually reduces our freedom of choice, especially if it involves genetic engineering. The more technologically advanced we become so as to transmit our enhanced state to future generations, the less free we become. Bio-engineering, the crucial means of technological enhancement, removes human choice and limits the scope of available options for future generations. Second, the technological approach to happiness and perfection defines “being more,” or “doing better” strictly in materialist terms, equating being human with having a particular human body. Let us recall that the traditional approach to happiness and perfection, to be happy and flourish as a human being, necessitated the acquisition of virtues through moral training of habituation, practice, and learning. At the center of the traditional approach to happiness stood the concept of character and the effortful cultivation of the virtues by means of education and spiritual exercises. In the transhumanist approach, by contrast, character, virtue, or moral training are meaningless, since happiness is predicated on physical, mechanical, or chemical manipulations. This reductionist, materialist view flattens the complexity of human life and diminishes those aspects that resist reductionist materialism. And third, the technological approach to human perfection is hyperindividualistic, paying no attention to the relational aspects of being human and to the fact that humans require social and political interaction with other humans in order to flourish. In short, the notion that technologically enhanced humans will necessarily live better and happier lives because they will be liberated from biological constraints is open to many challenges. Philosophically, the transhumanist desire to liberate humanity from biological constraints is justified by the appeal to the principle of morphological freedom, which we mentioned above. David Pearce articulated this principle in his Hedonistic Imperative, and Anders Sandberg promoted morphological freedom as an individual civic right.25 Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative presents itself as “a manifesto [that] outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient lives.” He defends this abolitionist project on “ethical utilitarian grounds” and asserts that “genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy wetware of our evolutionary past,” promising that “our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world.” Pearce’s manifesto presents an elaborate project of “hedonic engineering” that will bring about “genetically pre-coded” “generic modes of paradise” in which “native-born ecstatics will flourish.” These strategies will presumably free humanity from “the sick psycho-chemical ghetto bequeathed by our genetic past” and collectively the various interventions “will cure what post-human posterity will recognize as a gene-driven spectrum of psychiatric disorders characteristic of Darwinian life.” For Pearce, Darwinian evolution has rendered human beings profoundly flawed, but thanks to biotechnology, humanity will “emerge from the psychochemical Dark Ages, [and] enriched dopaminergic function in particular will sharpen the sheer intensity of every moment of conscious existence.” Pearce calls for the “neuroscientific mind-making” as a “rational redesign” that will reframe “who and what we want to become.” He concedes that “what we will ultimately turn into is hard to imagine,” but he also ventures to predict that “it will be utterly sublime.” Welcome to the bioengineered paradise! 208 H. TIROSH-SAMUELSON I maintain that Pearce’s technological vision is open to the objections I have already raised and more. The Hedonistic Imperative is misguided because it gives us a strictly materialistic interpretation of utilitarianism and the calculus of pleasure and pain. Unlike J.S. Mill and other Utilitarians who differentiated between types of pleasures and recognized non-sensorial pleasures, for Pearce, pleasure is merely sensory and amenable to chemical control. This aspect of transhumanism makes me most uneasy because it ignores the value of insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty, which are very much part of being human. Human culture (especially art and philosophy) could not have been possible without these allegedly negative aspects of being human. But if chemicals root out these human abilities, what will be the source of human creativity? Hedonic engineering is not a prescription for cultural depth and creativity; it is a prescription for childish shallowness that regards having fun and feeling good above all other values. In Happy-People-Pill for All, Mark Walker provides a philosophical defense of his “bioprogressive” view according to which “happy-people-pills should be used for enhancement purposes in order to make people feel ‘better than well.’”26 Although his defense is philosophically sophisticated, it too is open to all the traditional objections against hedonism. For me, the engineered paradise as depicted by Pearce or Walker does not constitute liberation from the “ghetto” of human biology, but the creation of a much more restrictive pharmacological “ghetto” in which humans become entirely chemically dependent, experiencing no freedom at all. A happy pill will not make us happy, let alone perfect. Those who endorse the hedonistic imperative see the human body as the exclusive source of human misery and suffering. If so, it is incumbent on humans to liberate themselves from the constraints of the physical body.27 This liberationist agenda has been applied to many areas but I want to mention human sexuality in particular. The sexualized body that differentiates between males and females is increasingly viewed as a burdensome aspect of being human, so that morphological freedom is invoked to justify the transition from one sexed body to another. It is no coincidence that leading transhumanists have promoted transgenderism and that transgenderism is very common in the subculture that is suffused with transhumanist ideas. Thus Martine Rothblatt (born Martin Rothblatt): “the greatest catapult for humanity into a new species lies just beyond the event horizon of transgenderism.”28 She claims that the freedom of gender is, therefore, the gateway to a freedom of form and to an explosion of human potential. First comes the realization that we are not limited by our sexual anatomy. Then comes the awakening that we are not limited by our anatomy at all.29 Echoing substance dualism, Rothblatt avers that “the mind is the substance of humanity. Mind is deeper than matter.” I will return to this point later when I discuss the transhumanist human-machine interface, but let me note here that Rothblatt rejoices in the fact that “a movement of ‘transhumanists’ has joined transgenderists in calling for the launch of persona creatus.”30 Transgenderism is but one example of morphological freedom. Nowhere is this creative freedom exercised more than in cyberspace, where avatars, namely, non-biological simulations of the self, choose the form of their self-presentation and change it at will.31 Currently cyberspace is the ultimate “place” where liberation from biology can be experienced because in it there is no connection between gender and genitals, no need for biological reproduction, and no suffering caused by human corporeality. For me this is ironic, because the ability to be free of sexual embodiment is possible only THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 209 because biomedical technologies have actualized in the flesh what previously has been only an unrealizable fantasy. If indeed existence in silico is so much better than existence in corpore, why bother changing the latter? The transition from one gendered body to another makes sense only if life in organic bodies is inherently good, which transhumanists vociferously deny. No less ironic but much more problematic is the transhumanist attitude toward death, which is the next major theme of transhumanist discourse. Given its disdain toward the human body, one could imagine that transhumanists would welcome death or at least accept death with sober calm. But instead, transhumanists are outraged by death and find it an affront and an insult.32 Because of the youthful desire to live forever in healthy bodies, Aubrey de Grey has been leading “the crusade to defeat aging” which for him is “not only morally justified but is the single most urgent imperative for humanity.”33 De Grey has been calling for a new approach to aging that will promise and deliver radical life extension and the perpetual postponement of death through what he calls “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” (SENS), “an umbrella term for a range of biomedical therapies with the ultimate purpose of postponing age-related effects.”34 Since De Grey sees the human body as a machine, indeed a very “resilient machine,” he uses the analogy of the vintage car to speak about his program for radical life extension. As much as a vintage car can function beyond the date of its initial design, provided it undergoes periodic maintenance, so the human body should be able to postpone its own death by undergoing periodic regenerations through genetic engineering. De Grey admits that there is much about the body that we still do not know, but he is convinced that in principle we will be able to know all we need to perpetuate life indefinitely. De Grey, however, concedes that postponing death is not abolishing death, but in the meantime his SENS longevity research is funded through the Methuselah Foundation with generous support from the tech billionaire, Peter Thiel. If death cannot be vanquished, perhaps it could be outsmarted or tricked. Proponents of life extension are afraid that the technological breakthroughs will arrive just after they have died. Therefore, they support cryonics, the program to keep dead biological humans in deep freeze in order to resuscitate them in the posthuman future. Cryonics is a technological project that secularizes the ancient belief in the resurrection of the dead, one of the oldest patterns of transcendence in Western culture. Originating in Zoroastrianism in the third century BCE, this belief entered the religion of ancient Israel about the sixth century BCE and became normative in rabbinic Judaism and in Christianity. Whereas in Judaism, the general resurrection of the dead was postponed to the eschatological future to be brought about by supernatural divine intervention at some undisclosed future time, in Christianity the resurrection of one individual, Jesus of Nazareth, became “the model through which Christians understood their own death.”35 Early Christians (namely, apocalyptically-oriented Jews who thought they were living in the eschaton), considered faith in the resurrection event a necessary condition for inclusion in the Kingdom of God. Most transhumanists are secularists who have no use for the Christian myth of resurrected Christ, but they endorse cryonics because they consider the resurrection of the dead a technological possibility, due primarily to the promises of nanotechnology.36 Eric Drexler, the engineer who is considered the “founding father of nanotechnology,” hailed cryonics as “a door to the future,”37 and his pioneering research into molecular nanotechnology has been the 210 H. TIROSH-SAMUELSON basis of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about the feasibility of the resurrection of the dead.38 If nanotechnology ensures the resurrection of the dead, all we need to do is to live long enough until it becomes possible. How to perpetuate life until technological innovations will enable us to live forever is precisely what Ray Kurzweil advises us in his book, TRANSCEND. The title is an acronym of a practical program of enhancement that consists of the following: Talk with your doctor; Relaxation; Assessment; Nutrition; Supplements; Calorie restriction; Exercise; New technologies; and Detoxification. Kurzweil’s program is offered to all “so that you can live long enough and remain healthy enough to take full advantage of the technological breakthroughs of the Information Age in the decades ahead … to transcend is what we humans do well.”39 In this book, Kurzweil says very little about the transcendence of biology by means of nanotechnology, but the key is that nanotechnology is also an information technology. The nanotechnology revolution will not only re-program and optimize biology, but will involve “applying massively parallel computerized processes to reorganize matter and energy at the molecular level to create new materials and new mechanisms even more intricate and powerful than biology.”40 An inventor who lives by his own wisdom, Kurzweil has promoted himself as “Transcendent Man,” the living proof that the program of TRANSCEND actually works and will keep him alive until death will be obliterated. Kurzweil anxiously awaits that radical transformation, not only because of his own pressing aging but also because he desperately wishes to resurrect his own father.41 In Kurzweil’s hopeful assessment, “the means are almost in reach for extending life indefinitely,”42 but the evidence that presumably supports this claim is presented not as a process for the betterment or improvement of human life but as the attainment of the endstate or termination point of the pursuit of perfection, when the biological human will be replaced by mechanical posthuman. Transhumanists promote an array of technologies to transcend the limits of human biology so as to transition from humanity to posthumanity. The transhumanist process of enhancement culminates in cyborgization, namely, the brain-computer interface that not only augments human capabilities but transforms humans into technological entities. Coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960, the cyborg figure fuses cybernetic and organic features and has become not only a common trope in science fiction, art, and media, but a medical reality in which pacemakers, cochlear implants, retinal implants, and Deep Brain Stimulations improve human life by overcoming disabilities, diseases, and injuries. By erasing the boundaries between organic and artificial life, between humans and machines, cyborgization is the shift from seeking to improve life by overcoming biological limits, to seeking to abolish biological humanity altogether by designing a postbiological, posthuman species. Giulio Prisco, a former physicist and computer scientist in Europe’s space agency, is an Italian transhumanist who hails the merger between humans and machines as “the ultimate realization of the dream to achieve indefinite lifespan, with vastly enhanced cognitive abilities, lies in leaving biology behind and moving to a new post-biological, cybernetic phase of our evolution.”43 When this perfection is achieved, “we will build (and/or) become God(s).”44 Stating this more boldly, he predicts: “someday we may create God. And if we create God, then We are God.” Critiquing the “ultra-rationalist” tendencies of transhumanism, Prisco urges his fellow transhumanists to appreciate and openly endorse the spiritual THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 211 dimension of their futurism. Let me turn now to examine the end state of the pursuit of perfection: the posthuman. Perfection as End-State: The Posthuman Transhumanism offers us a teleological narrative about the perfection of the human species that culminates in the emergence of the posthuman. While rooted in scientific disciplines and practices (especially computer science, informatics, applied cognitive science, and robotics) the transhumanist narrative is not a scientific theory; it is only a myth that expresses certain preferences, as Giulio Prisco himself admits.45 We should note, however, that the transhumanist narrative depicts the shift from biological humanity to mechanical posthumanity as an inexorable, necessary progression which it deems to be progress for humanity. The technological progress of humanity will bring about the demise of biological humans and their replacement by superintelligent postbiological, posthuman entities. This is the ultimate end of human perfection as far as transhumanists are concerned. Futurists such as Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Warrick, Giulio Prisco, Nick Botrom, and Ted Chu describe this process using slightly different terms, but the major stages of the narrative are largely the same: humanity will reach its perfection when it designs and executes its own collective death, its own suicide. The transition from the human to the posthuman predicated on the engineering of one part of the human body, the brain, the organ that make humans most distinct and different from other animals. In the Mechanical Age, humans will use their brain to build Artificial Intelligence (AI), computers whose computational capacities far exceed human abilities. During the Mechanical Age, the one we currently occupy, humans and robots coexist but computers perform all sorts of functions that humans either cannot or do not want to perform, so that computers “serve” humanity. (Not surprisingly, contemporary supercomputers are called “servers.”) Accelerated, exponential progress of AI technology, however, will facilitate the ultimate form of machine-brain interface: the “uploading” of the human mind onto supercomputers. When uploading is achieved, intelligent machines will be able to teach themselves and correct their own mistakes. This constitutes an irreversible turning point—known as technological Singularity, or AI Singularity—in which the superintelligent machines become autonomous and self-aware, inaugurating the third phase of vertical transcendence: the Age of Mind. Because they are self-aware, superintelligent machines will “tire of caring for humanity and will decide to spread throughout the universe in the interests of discovering all the secrets of the cosmos.”46 In the Virtual Kingdom of “Mind Fire,” only Transcendent Mind exists, a cosmic intelligence that thinks itself eternally. The telos of the pursuit of perfection will be finally achieved: death will be vanquished once and for all, and humanity will accomplish its dreams of eternal life, but attaining such perfection will be predicated on the elimination of humanity. Transhumanism is an imaginary narrative about human destiny, and like all social imaginaries, the transhumanist portrayal tells us more about the present than about what will actually happen in the remote future.47 There is no doubt that AI technology has already transformed all aspects of human social life: finance, transportation, communication, energy, defense systems, warfare, education, medicine, labor, leisure, art, and culture. We are indeed living in the Second Machine Age driven by computers, Artificial Intelligence, advanced robotics, and rapid developments in informatics and 212 H. TIROSH-SAMUELSON telecommunication.48 The invention of the World Wide Web provided the way for computers to share and manage information through hyperlinks, giving birth to technologies such as video games, computer graphics, and virtual reality. As digital media technologies merged with computers and telecommunications, physical entities became bits of information, ensuring that in the Information Age, whatever can be digitized, will be digitized. In our contemporary Mechanical Age, material things lose their physicality as they become data, and larger and larger computers store, move, and manipulate the data, and “smart” hand-held machines (e.g. smartphones, tablets, and wearable gadgets) give humans instant access to the entire intricately connected “Internet of things.” The digital revolution has resulted in the emergence of the virtual reality of cyberspace in which humans “exist” and interact with each other without the mediation of their physical bodies. For transhumanists, cyberspace is paradise where “practical immortality” is experienced in the here and now. Robert M. Geraci has shown in great detail how transhumanist ideas have shaped the world of videogames such as World of Warcraft and online communities such as Second Life,49 and Giulio Prisco, the transhumanist I mentioned above, was instrumental in bringing transhumanist ideas to the global gaming community. Prisco is the founder of the game Metaverse in Second Life and the co-founder of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, whose goal is “uploading our consciousness and exploring the universe as disembodied superminds.”50 For gamers and transhumanists, the virtual reality of cyberspace is “a paradise on Earth before Transcendent Mind escapes earthly matter in an expanding cyberspace of immortality, intellect, moral goodness and meaningful computation.”51 Since gamers live both online and offline, their life is bifurcated: the somatic Self still suffers the limitations of corporeal bodies, while the non-somatic, simulated Self—the avatar—lives in “paradise,” controlled by the gamer who acts out his/her fantasies. Not surprisingly, avid gamers and participants in online communities prefer virtual reality over embodied life offline and find social life to be challenging and unsatisfactory. The experience of virtual transcendence (when the gamer feels as if he/she is disembodied) is but an illusion; the gamer still has an extended body in space-time, and the digital avatar is still instantiated in a human-built machine. Those who seek transcendence and perfection through technology, then, depend on what computers can do. Evidently today’s computers are able to perform incredibly fast and complex computations that imitate human thinking, but do these “smart” machines really think? Do they really possess human intelligence? When the question was put to 200 computer engineers, roboticists, astrophysicists, psychologists, neuroscientists, futurists, and inventors, the answers varied greatly, but most have acknowledged that current AI still falls short of human intelligence.52 For transhumanists, building AI with human intelligence constitutes and justifies the next step in the transhumanist futurist narrative: the uploading of the mind of human beings onto human-made computers. Uploading means that “intelligent software would be produced by scanning and closely modeling the computational structure of the biological brain,” and the technical term for it is “whole brain emulation.”53 Bostrom explains the main steps of that process,54 and while admitting that “the emulation path will not succeed in the near future (within the next fifteen years, say),”55 he still contends that whole brain emulation “will eventually succeed,”56 albeit in ways that are yet to be discovered. He cites Hans Moravec, the originator of transhumanist futuristic scenarios, THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 213 who says that a “human level AI is not only theoretically possible but feasible within this century.”57 Mind-uploading is the technological version of the belief in the immortality of the soul, which many strands of Western thought regarded as the ultimate end of human life and the termination point of the pursuit of perfection. Articulated by Plato in the fifth century BCE, the belief in immortality was based on the metaphysical distinction between things that are composed of parts, subject to change, and perishable, and things that are simple, not composed of parts, intelligible, and eternal. The human body belongs to the first class of things and the human soul to the second. This so-called substance dualism was given a Christian interpretation by the Church Fathers, becoming a Church dogma, although interpretations of the belief in personal immortality and its relationship to the resurrection of the dead were hotly debated by Christian theologians and evolved overtime.58 Without rehashing the history of the belief in immortality, let us note that substance dualism and the metaphysics that undergirds it frame the project of building AI. The point is explained with great clarity by George Zarkadakis, and his observation merits a long citation: Platonic dualism has become so deeply ingrained in Western philosophy and science that it sets the agenda for contemporary discourse on Artificial Intelligence and consciousness today. It was Plato who influenced the historical decision of the two cybernetics giants, Wiener and Shannon, to frame the nature of information as something distinct from energy or matter. This distinction has contributed to the disembodiment of information and the false separation of the physical substrate (the hardware, the brain) from information patterns (the software, the self). Information thus became prevalent, the master of everything. Without software, hardware is useless. … This “computer metaphor” for life and consciousness, where the form, or pattern, takes precedence over matter, defines our post-human present, and justifies paradoxical predications about downloading consciousness in computers and achieving digital immortality.59 Zarkadakis surveys the history of AI and its relationship to long-standing philosophical debates between Platonic and Aristotelian positons, but he makes clear that “Artificial Intelligence is a technology unlike any other,”60 and that “our world is entering uncharted waters.”61 However, it is difficult to get clarity about the feasibility of mind uploading (let alone its desirability) because there is no consensus among the builders of AI about key terms such as “mind,” “consciousness,” and “intelligence.” For Zarkadakis, a proponent of cybernetics, it will be possible one day to build machines with human intelligence, but to do so, humans will have to give up Platonic dualism and return to the Aristotelian, more sophisticated, understanding of cognition that realized that “the biological mechanism of consciousness is not localised in the brain but distributed throughout the body.”62 If he is right, ironically enough, true superintelligent machines will have to learn the wisdom of the human body, the very entity that transhumanism denigrates and seeks to abolish. Supercomputers have profoundly changed the quality of human life. But is it for better or for worse? Much depends on how one evaluates the next hypothetical phase in the transhumanist linear narrative of perfection: Singularity. Coined by Vernon Vinge in 1993, the term “technological Singularity” refers to a variety of processes, including accelerated change, self-improving technology, intelligence explosion, emergence of superintelligence, shifts to new forms of organization, or increased complexity and interconnectedness.63 Singularity will commence as a result of an exponential, accelerated process of technological progress, when machines become sufficiently smart to start 214 H. TIROSH-SAMUELSON teaching themselves. Singularity is imagined as an inevitable and irrevocable shift from the biological to the mechanical, which will inaugurate the posthuman phase. The Singularity is presented not simply as a hypothesis subject to philosophic critique and scientific analysis,64 but rather as a fact that accounts for how the future must and will develop. On the basis of his own calculations of the Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR), which links evolution to innovation, competition, and market dynamics, Kurzweil has predicted the Singularity will take place in 2045 (later than the original prediction of 2030). Kurzweil’s Singularity Hypothesis was popularized in his The Age of Intelligent Machines (1992), the Age of Spiritual Machines (2000), and The Singularity Is Near (2005) and enthusiastically endorsed by many transhumanists (known as Singularitarians). The Singularity is the apocalyptic event that will presumably deliver transcendence by means of technology, and the popularity of Kurzweil’s prediction reflects the secularization of apocalyptic Christianity.65 For over two decades, transhumanists have enthusiastically promoted AI Singularity as the telos of their technological project. These techno-optimists have all followed Moravec, who envisioned the process by which robots will become Transcendent Mind, holding entire simulated realities in their vast minds. As physical reality vaporizes into simulation, the emergent posthuman superintelligence, as Prisco describes it, “will not be an inanimate machine, but a thinking and feeling person, orders of magnitude smarter and more complex than us.”66 Ted Chu refers to these superintelligent machines as Cosmic Being (CoBe) and has no qualms calling them gods, describing them as “a new species on the frontier of cosmic evolution that is unimaginably powerful and creative.”67 Echoing Moravec, Chu imagines these intelligent cosmic beings as our “Mind Children” who will be “spontaneously adaptable” and who will have the “will to continuously evolve and push forward the evolutionary frontier in the universe.”68 This new life-form will transcend death once and for all, because it will have no carbon-based body, no sexuality, no desire, and not even an interest in happiness. Engaged in infinite computations, CoBe will move beyond our planet to explore outer space. Hugo de Garis, the Australian transhumanist, is so enthralled with this bliss that he insists “humans should not stand in the way of a higher form of evolution. These machines are godlike. It is human destiny to create them.”69 The termination point of the transhumanist pursuit of perfection is thus the voluntary demise of the human species. But why should this be so? Why should we regard CoBe to be the perfection of humanity? Why shouldn’t biological humans stand in the way so as to prevent the emergence of posthumans who will displace humanity? Why should we knowingly contribute to our own demise? My point is that we cannot foretell the future, and it is misleading to convince us that the transition from the human to the posthuman is necessary and inevitable. We are indeed living through profound technological upheaval, and every day we all experience the negative aspects of living with “intelligent” machines whose algorithms are made by flawed biological humans, and whose very flawed interaction with us make us yearn to talk to a human being who can actually solve problems that elude the algorithms of automated systems. But beyond the discomfort of sharing life with automated systems, even scientists and leading transhumanists who have previously championed Artificial Intelligence as the path to perfection have recently become more pessimistic and worried about what might happen. On December 2, 2014, the late Stephen Hawking, who has greatly benefitted from machine-human THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 215 interface, had sounded the alarm when he stated that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”70 Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent Singularitarian, who has vociferously promoted strong AI, is now busy figuring out what to do if these superintelligent machines will not be friendly and “will possess motivations and goals that we may not share.”71 Yudkowsky now devotes his precious time to building a friendly AI, to protect us from future malevolent AI, confident that it will emerge. And even Nick Bostrom, the transhumanist who has done more than any other to make transhumanism philosophically and culturally respectable, has recently (November 2015) admitted the dangers and risks involved in building computer systems with superintelligence. Nonetheless he urges us to push on “in order to make progress on the control problem and partly recruit top minds into this area, so that they are already in place when the nature of the challenge becomes clear.”72 Ever an activist, Bostrom speaks about the effort “to drive talent and funding into this field and to begin to work out a plan of action.”73 Futuristic venture capitalists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk will continue to support transhumanist futurism because it will definitely yield monetary gains, but for those who value the preciousness of being human, despite and because of human vulnerability and limits, the transhumanist dream of transcendence by means of technology is a nightmare. Transhumanism in the Post-Secular Age I hope that I have convinced you to take transhumanism seriously and become familiar with its major themes and reflect on its social, political, and cultural ramifications. Transhumanism is an important feature of our contemporary culture that places its faith in technology and that invests technology with spiritual significance. While transhumanist writings may be superficial and unsatisfactory, engaging transhumanism seriously leads us to reflect on the meaning of being human, on human well-being and flourishing, and on the purpose of human life. Transhumanism raises a host of fascinating philosophical problems about identity, materiality, embodiment, cognition, and freedom as well as many social, cultural, and political issues that relate to the function of technology in society. Transhumanism raises profound questions about technology: What is technology for? What are the limits of technology? Who has the power to determine the use of technology? What are the social and political consequences of technologizing human life? All of these questions have informed my work on transhumanism. I consider transhumanism to be misguided because it technologizes our deepest values, including our understanding of happiness and perfection, because it is filled with internal contradictions especially in regard to human embodiment, and because it mistakenly approaches perfection as a description rather than a prescription. However, I do maintain that we do not have the luxury to ignore transhumanism and to dismiss it as inconsequential. What puzzles me is the fact that the serious criticism of transhumanism for the past three decades has failed to take root; transhumanism continues to inspire popular culture, and there are no signs that its appeal will diminish. Why? I submit to you that transhumanism is but one expression of our postsecular society that defies the binary dichotomy between the “religious” and the “secular,” between “science” and “religion,” between “immanence” and “transcendence.” By way of conclusion let me say a few words about 216 H. TIROSH-SAMUELSON our post-secular condition in which the technoscientific project is invested with spiritual meaning. Our postsecular society is both the fulfillment of the modern secularity as well as the liquidation (or negation) of it. In the postsecular society, we witness the reassertion of religion in the public sphere and the explosion of numerous spiritual alternatives to traditional religions, alternatives that creatively fuse the presumably “secular” with the presumably “religious.” All over the world, people grapple with the uncertain, unstable, and perplexing situations captured by the prefix “post” (e.g. “post-national,” “postethnic,” “post-metaphysical,” “post-foundational,” “post-Christian,” and most recently even “post-factual”), which denotes that which comes after, as well as a critique of that which came before. In our fluid culture of “posts,” all sorts of hybrids emerge to address the underlying “cross-pressures” that human beings find themselves under. Charles Taylor explained how these cross-pressures came about historically with the collapse of the premodern religious worldview and its replacement by modernist secularism. We can see these cross-pressures operating if we look at attitudes toward death. Our awareness of our own mortality and finitude has given rise to the human desire to transcend death, an important aspect of the pursuit of perfection. Indeed, the pursuit of perfection required reflections about the meaning of being human in light of our pending death. In the premodern world, the reality of death was accepted and experienced as part of the course of life, and the transcendence of mortality (i.e. the finality of death) was constituted a religious belief and a philosophical practice. In the pre-modern Western world, the paths toward happiness and perfection resulted in two main beliefs: the resurrection of the dead and the immortality of the soul. Within the Christian paradigm, belief in the resurrected Christ was a necessary condition for experiencing life after death, and Christian earthly life consisted of the acquisition of virtues. In this paradigm, transcending human mortality and finitude was possible because God revealed Himself in the incarnated Christ, charting the way for humanity to follow through imitation Dei. In the premodern paradigm, the pursuit of happiness and perfection required the acquisition of moral virtues through interaction with other humans in the social sphere. Self-improvement was a moral category which could be demonstrated in the appropriate conduct toward other human being. Knowledge was the intellectual dimension of the virtue and it could be acquired through philosophy, culminating in wisdom. The afterlife consisted of the mystical union between the human soul, or mind, and God, a union that cannot be explained in rational terms, precisely because divine reality is the true Transcendent, ontologically and epistemologically. Who will experience the bliss of immortality (i.e. saints, mystics, theologians, or all believers) and what is the role of the Church in the attainment of transcendence was hotly debated, but it was the quest of transcendence that gave Christian life its narrative arch. Modernity radically challenged the religious pursuit of transcendence and gave rise to the “immanent frame” which entailed among other things a new attitude toward death.74 Ontologically speaking, secularization meant the “domestication of transcendence:” the radical Otherness of God, as well as God’s “mysteriousness and unknowability” of traditional theism were rejected in favor of immanence and knowability.75 For people living within the “immanent frame” there is no meaning to talking about God “out there,” nor does it make sense to accept God as a distant tyrant who intervenes in the world at will. Instead, humanity is believed to occupy the center of the “immanent THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 217 frame,” and human reason alone is deemed sufficient to know all there is to know. In the modern, secular world, nothing is immune to human inquiry, and mystery (or unknowability) is regarded as a logical impossibility. With the denial of the possibility of transcendence, the world became “disenchanted,” to use Max Weber’s term, as humans became “the measure of all things,” the omnipotent replacement of God. The disenchantment of the world brought about a new attitude toward death: death was now “conceived as a scandal,”76 because mortality itself was seen as an “offence against human omnipotence.”77 If human reason is truly omnipotent, there can be nothing that is unexpected, unpredicted, unpredictable, or truly contingent. To the rationalist, modernist mind, death is so offensive because it seems indifferent to human effort; hence death must be resented and seen as a defect that must and can be corrected if we know its causes. This modernist approach, which refuses to accept or even watch death, led to the medicalization of death and the removal of dying people into institutions where only professionals deal with the dying as they conduct a war against it. The transhumanist “crusade against death” I discussed above is the necessary outcome of the modernist denial of death. Presumably human-made technology will make it possible to postpone death indefinitely, thus denying the reality and finality of death. Modernity has deconstructed mortality. The modernist project, however, brought about its own liquidation in postmodernism. Coined by Lyotard, the term “liquidation” denotes “a way of destroying the modern project while creating an impression of its fulfillment.”78 In other words, the postmodern world is both the fulfillment and the destruction of the modern project, and technology had much to do with its emergence. In the postmodern world, as Zigmunt Bauman explains, not only mortality is deconstructed, but immortality is deconstructed as well. The human is no longer a “pilgrim,” as he was seen in the premodern Christian world, but a “nomad,” who has no place to call “home” and who sees all of life as “bridges” that need to be crossed. In the postmodern world of simulation, immortality is promised by all sorts of “immortality brokers,” be they “advertisers, publicity promoting and image grooming companies, critics, gallery owners, publishers, programmers of TV companies and editors of the press.”79 Viewed from that perspective, the engineers of AI technology are yet another group of “immortality brokers” but their control of the path to immortality is not a mere fantasy, but a recipe for the destruction of human life as we know it. The transhumanist vision of transcendence by means of technology entails the integration of the human mind into, and merging with, its own technological productions. Transhumanism is but one response to the “cross-pressures” of our contemporary situation. Transhumanism invests technoscience with religious/spiritual significance, making technology itself the power that will enable humanity to achieve transcendence within the immanent frame. Transhumanism technologizes beliefs in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead, and it makes you feel that human beings now possess the technological power to realize both of these beliefs. According to transhumanism, we will be able to postpone death indefinitely; we will make ourselves (that is, our mind) immortal by uploading our minds on supercomputers, and we will be able to resurrect our bodies by reviving the patterns of our minds. All of these claims are highly problematic both religiously and scientifically, but they cannot be simply dismissed as irrelevant or stupid, because these claims shape so many aspects of our contemporary culture. 218 H. TIROSH-SAMUELSON Ray Kurzweil is right to assert that humans have evolved into beings that have an innate proclivity to transcend themselves, but Kurzweil is mistaken to claim that this pursuit can and must be achieved by technology. Expressing the modernist drive to mastery of the world, transhumanism engineers the age-old human pursuit of perfection and our innate proclivity to transcend limits, but it misguidedly asks us to bring about our own demise by creating superintelligent machines that will make us obsolete. There is no doubt that in the near and the remote future our life will be shaped by the technologies we have created and will continue to create. Human beings are indeed tool makers, and technology is a feature of being human, but the contemporary massive technologization of human life, including human subjectivity, should not be endorsed without critique. There is a huge difference between imagining a certain scenario and bringing it about technologically. Those who are critical of the massive technologization of human life must expose the negative aspects this technological project has brought about as well as its pernicious ultimate goal to make humanity obsolete. While I doubt that the critique will halt the ongoing technologization of our life, I do maintain we have a duty to be critical of the ideology of extreme progress. I was encouraged most recently to read Bill McGibben’s essay “Pause! We Can Go Back!,” which reviews David Sax’s book, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter.80 The book documents the resurgence of interest in cultural products based on analog technologies (for example, LP records) that resist the digitalization of music and allow us to enjoy the physicality of objects, since they fit our embodied existence. If this indeed becomes a widespread trend, perhaps the rush to technologize human existence may slow down, allowing us to honor ways of being in the world that are consistent with our material embodiment and our mortality. Thank you for inviting me to speak at CTNS and I look forward to your questions about the transhumanist pursuit of perfection. Notes 1. Nick Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values” (2001) available on his website http://www. nickbostrom.com. For a fuller treatment see idem, “Transhumanism FAQ, A General Introduction,” version 2.1, available on http://www.nickbostrom.com. 2. Allen Buchanan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Walker, From Change to Choice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002); Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies and What It Means to Be Human (New York: Doubleday, 2004); Simon Young, Designer Evolution: A Transhuman Manifesto (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006); Ted Chu, Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution (San Raphael California: Origin Press, 2014). 3. On the politics of transhumanism movement see James J. Hughes, “The Politics of Transhumanism and the Techno-Millennial Imagination, 1626–2030,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 47:4 (2012), 757–776. 4. The anthology, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology and Philosophy of the Human Future, ed. Max More and Natasha Vita-More (Wiley-Blackwell: Chichester, West Sussex, England, 2013) offers a representative overview of the main contributors, themes, and writings of the transhumanist movement. 5. For a close study of the Singularity University see Margarita Boenig-Lipstin and J. Benjamin Hurlbut, “Technologies of Transcendence at Singularity University,” in Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations, ed. J. Benjamin Hurlbut and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016), 239–267, quote on p. 251. THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 219 6. See Max More, “On Becoming Posthuman,” Free Inquiry, 14:4 (1994), 38–41. For a more recent formulation see Max More, “The Philosophy of Transhumanism,” in The Transhumanist Reader, 3–17. 7. Nick Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values,” available on his website http://nickbostrom.com. 8. David Pearce, “The Hedonistic Imperative,” available on http://www.hedweb.com. This definition of “morphological freedom” is taken from “The Transhumanist Declaration (2012),” in The Transhumanist Reader, p. 55. 9. James Hughes is the main voice of this strand within the transhumanist world. See James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2004). 10. On the proliferation of transhumanist themes in contemporary culture see Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, Cyber Space/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment (London: Sage Publications, 1996); N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Robert M. Geraci, Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); idem, Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life, (Oxford University Press, 20140; Robert Ranisch and Stefan Sorgner, eds., Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014). 11. See Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Kenneth L. Mossman, eds., Building Better Humans? Refocusing the Debate on Transhumanism (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012); Hava TiroshSamuelson, “Transhumanism as a Secularist Faith,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 47:4 (2012), 710–734. 12. Johann A. R. Roduit, The Case for Perfection: Ethics for the Age of Human Enhancement (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016), 24. 13. Mark Walker, “What is Transhumanism? Why Is a Transhumanist?,” http://www. transhumanism.iorg/index.php/th/more/298. Cited in Johann A.R. Roduit, Jan-Christophe Heilinger and Holger Baumann, “Ideas of Perfection and the Ethics of Human Enhancement,” Bioethics 29:9 (2015), 622–630, quote on p. 623. 14. Roduit, Heilinger, and Baumann, ibid., p. 624. 15. See, Nick Bostrom, “Genetic Enhancement and the Future of Humanity,” The European Magazine, retrieved from http://theeruropean-magazine.com/282-bostrom-nick/283perfection-is-not-a-useful-concept.” 16. Max More, “Extroprian Principles 3.0 http://www.maxmore.com/extprn3.htm. 17. Ibid. 18. David Masci, “Human Enhancement: The Scientific and Ethical Dimensions of Striving for Perfection,” PewResearchCenter, available on http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/07/26/ human-enhancement-the-scientific-and-ethical-dimension 19. Cited on the website of the Extropy Institute. CF., More, “The Philosophy of Transhumanism,” in The Transhumanist Reader, p. 4. 20. See Simon Young, Designer Evolution, p. 212. 21. Julian Savulescue and Nick Bostrom, Human Enhancement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 13. 22. Chu, Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential, p. 32, and p. 33. 23. Eric Parens, “Authenticity and Ambivalence: Toward Understanding the Enhancement Debate,” Hastings Center Report 35:3 (May-June 2005), 36. 24. Leon Kass, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Regan Books, 2003), 294. 25. Anders Sandberg, “Morphological Freedom, Why We Not Just Want It, but Need It,” talk given in Berlin on 2001, available in Anarcho-Transhumanism: A Journal of Radical Possibilities and Striving, http://anarchotranshuman.org/post/117749304562/morphologicalfreedom-why-we. Reprinted in The Transhumanist Reader, pp. 58–64. 26. Mark Walker, Happy-People-Pills For All (Malden, MA: Willey-Blackwell, 2013), 12. 220 H. TIROSH-SAMUELSON 27. See Ronald Bailey, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005). 28. Martine Rothblatt, “Mind Is Deeper Than Matter: Transgenderism, Tranhshumanism and the Freedom of Form,” in The Transhumanist Reader, p. 318. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. It seems to me that there is a difference between transgenderism as an expression of “morphological freedom” and transgenderism as a solution to gender dysphoria. The former is a result of choice; the latter is a result of perceived necessity. 31. Rothblatt developed this point in her Virtually Human: The Promise and Peril of Digital Immortality (New York: St. Martin Press, 2015). 32. The attitude is most evident in Nick Bostrom, “The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant,” Journal of Medical Ethics 31 (205), 273–77. For reflections on transhumanist attitudes toward death see Thorsten Moos, “How Transhumanism Secularizes and Desecularizes Religions Visions,” in Perfecting Human Futures, pp. 159–78, esp. pp. 164–166. 33. Aubrey De Grey, “The Curate’s Egg of Anti-Anti-Aging Bioethics,” in The Transhumanist Reader, p. 215. 34. See Sascha Dicke and Andreas Frewer, “Life Extension: Eternal Debates on Immortality,” in Post-and Transhumanism: An Introduction,” p. 120. For the detailed discussion of SENS see Aubrey De Grey, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthrough That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007). 35. David Chidester, Patterns of Transcendence: Religion, Death, and Dying (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002), 169. 36. Eliezer Yudokowsky, for example, believes that “people who haven’t signed their children up for cryonics are lousy parents.” See Barrat, Our Final Invention, p. 50. 37. Eric K. Drexler’s support for cryonics is available on his blog “Metamodern: The Trajectory of Technology;” additional references are available on the blog of the Institute for EvidenceBased Cryonics. Other scientific support for resurrection of the dead by means of nanotechnology is the well-known Frank J. Tippler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology and the Resurrection of the Dead (New York, NY: Anchor, 1994). 38. See David H. Guston, ed., The Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2010), 387. 39. Kurzweil, TRANSCEND, p. 423. 40. Kurzweil, TRANSCEND, p. 404. 41. Kurzweil has expressed his hope for resurrecting his own father in an interview to Rolling Stone. See David Kushner, “When Man and Machine Merge,” Rolling Stone (February 19, 2009), 57–61. The specific reference is on p. 61. 42. Barrat, Our Final Invention, p. 143. 43. Prisco, “Transcendent Engineering,” p. 235. 44. Prisco, ibid., p. 234 45. Prisco, ibid., p. 238. 46. Robert M. Geraci, Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 149. 47. See Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). For close analysis of transhumanism as a social imaginary, see Hurlbt and Tirosh-Samuelson (eds.), Perfecting Human Futures, cited above. 48. See Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2014). 49. Robert M. Geraci, Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in the World of Warcraft and Second Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 50. Geraci, Apocalyptic AI, p. 86. We should note that the other co-founder of the Order of Cosmic Engineers is William Sims Bainbridge, a transhumanist who wields enormous THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 221 influence in the National Science Foundation. Transhumanist fantasies inspire many scientific projects, especially ones funded by DARPA. Geraci, ibid., p. 37 For a debate whether computers think and whether their computation can be considered “intelligence” see John Brockman (ed.), What to Think about Machines That Think: Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015). Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 28. Ibid., 36–38. Ibid., p. 43 Ibid, p. 61 Ibid., p. 28, note 6 Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Earth Western Christianity (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2015); Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). George Zarkadakis, In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (New York and London: Pegasus Books 2015), 189. Zarkadakis, ibid., p. 269. Ibid., p. 265. Ibid., p. 170. See Anders Sandberg, “An Overview of Models of Technological Singularity,” in The Transhumanist Reader, pp. 376–394, quote on p. 377. See Amnon H. Eden, James h. Moor, Jonny H. Soraker, and Eric Steinhart, eds., Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment, ed. (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2012). Diane Proudfoot, “Software Immortals: Science or Faith?,” ibid., pp. 367– 389 offers a powerful and most relevant critique of the Singularity Hypothesis. On the indebtedness of transhumanism to ancient apocalypticism see Geraci, Apocalyptic AI, esp. pp. 8–38; Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Utopianism and Eschatology: Judaism Engages Transhumanism,” in Religion and Transhumanism, pp. 161–180. Prisco, “Transcendent Engineering,” p. 237. Chu, Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential, p. 221 Chu, p. 227. De Garis is quoted by Barrat, Our Final Invention, p. 86. Rory Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could end Mankind,” BBC News, December 2, 2014. Barrat, Our Final Invention, p. 153. Brockman, What to Think about Machines that Think, p. 126 Brockman, ibid., 127. How the “immanent frame” has emerged is analyzed in great detail by Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). William C. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 15. Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality & Other Life Strategies (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 133. Bauman, ibid., 161. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfans: Correspondence 1982–1985 (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 36, quoted in Bauman, ibid., p. 163. Bauman, ibid., p. 172. Bill McKibben, “Pause! We Can Go Back!,” review of David Sax, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter (Public Affairs, 2016), The New York Review of Books, volume LXIV, Number 2, February 9, 2017, pp. 4–6. 222 H. TIROSH-SAMUELSON Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is Regents' Professor of History, director of Jewish studies, and Irving and Miriam Lowe professor of modern Judaism at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ.