Introduction¹

What is Transhumanism?

The term ‘transhumanism’ denotes a relatively young and still changing ideology that posits a new vision of humanity as a result of the confluence of advancements in the life sciences, neurosciences, genomics, robotics, informatics, and nanotechnology. These developments include new kinds of cognitive tools that combine artificial intelligence with interface technology, molecular nanotechnology, extension of human life span, genetic enhancing of human mental and physical capacities, combating diseases and slowing down the process of aging, and exercising control over desires, moods, and mental states. Those who enthusiastically promote these developments in biotechnology and bioengineering maintain that the accelerating pace of technological development and scientific understanding will usher in a new age in the history of the human species during which people will live longer, will possess new physical and cognitive abilities and will be liberated from suffering and pain due to aging and disease. In the transhuman age, humans will no longer be controlled by nature; instead they will be the controllers of nature.

The term ‘transhumanism’ was coined by Julian Huxley in 1957,² although the meaning of the term was quite different from the way it is now being used. Today the term means a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase. Some of the ideas and characteristics of transhumanism today can be traced to the 1920s and early 1930s in the works of J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal and Aldous Huxley. The horrors of WW II invalidated the goal of creating a new and better world through a centrally imposed vision and they also discredited the eugenics movement of the 1920s.

In the 1960s, however, more optimistic futuristic scenarios were articulated by science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Stalislaw Lem, and later Bruce Sterling, Greg Egan, and Vernor Vinge who speculated about the new, transhuman future. In the 1960s the futurist Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, who later changed his name to FM 2030 (the year of his 100th birthday) began to identify “transhumans” as persons who behave in a manner conducive to a posthuman future. In the late 1980s, philosopher Max More formalized a transhumanist doctrine, advocating the “Principles of Extropy” for continuously improving the human condition. At that time various organizations began to advocate life extension, cryonics, space colonization, and other scenarios while advances in biotechnology, neuroscience, and nanotechnology began to make their mark. Eventually Marvin Minsky, an eminent artificial intelligence researcher, articulated many of the themes of the transhumanist vision and he was joined by other famous scientific visionaries such as Ray Kurzweil, Eric Drexler, Frank Tipler, and Hans Moravec.

In the late 1990s a group of transhumanist activists authored the “Transhumanist Declaration” stating various ethical positions related to the use of and planning for technological advances. In 1998 the World Transhumanist Association was founded by philosophers Nick Bostrom and David Pearce and its membership today is about 4000 people world-wide with several geographically divided chapters and special-interest affiliates.³ Other contemporary organizations, such as the Extropy Institute, the Foresight Institute, the Immortality Institute, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, also play a role in the transhumanist movement. In 2006 the World Transhumanist Association voted to recognize the Mormon Transhumanist Association as its first religious, special interest affiliate. All of these organizational activities have been facilitated by the communication revolution of 1980s and 1990s with instant communication world-wide. The Internet is not just a means of communication for transhumanist ideas, but functions as part of the transhumanist eschatological vision. In short, transhumanism is the ideology that attempts to give coherence to a range of disparate ideas based on the technological advancements in the second half of the 20th century.

Transhumanism and Transdisciplinarity

It is instructive to note the relationship between the emergence of this new ideology and larger cultural trends that have contributed to the collapse of disciplinary boundaries. The division of knowledge into the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, has a long history but it was consolidated with the professionalization of the European universities (especially in Germany) during the 19th century.⁴ While the Enlightenment discourse of progress prevailed, each discipline expanded in its own domain, claiming for itself a distinctive methodology and ensconced in its own institutional setting of academic department. Knowledge in each discipline of the natural sciences, the social sciences and even the humanities expanded while Europe’s nation-states fought each other for control of resources in the presumably under-civilized world, which had to be saved from its own inadequacies and backwardness through enlightened modernization. This modernist self-understanding legitimized less than noble treatment of large sections of the world at least until the middle of the 20th century, when it finally collapsed as the horrors of World War II exposed the dark side of modern science and technology.

In the post-WW II world, postmodernism, post-colonialism, globalization, and the confluence of science and technology spelled the end of traditional disciplinary boundaries. Postmodernism has made us all more aware of the role that language plays in construing our perception of reality, our knowledge claims, and our self-justifying individual and collective narratives. Post-colonialism has made us conscious of the negative legacy of the colonial and imperial past which has destroyed many indigenous cultures in its relentless pursuit of progress. Globalization has given rise to multi-national corporations that trade commodities, services, and intellectual properties across national borders through instant communication systems. Nowadays, nation-states still exist and fight for their collective goals, but large scale migrations (be it forced or voluntary) as well as the communication and transportation revolutions entail that people of diverse cultures and traditions constantly interface with each other. By the same token, in academic institutions departments still exist as a structural feature of the institutions of higher learning, but increasingly their disciplinary boundaries are becoming meaningless. At ASU in particular a deliberate attempt to break down disciplinary boundaries is under way with the commitment to create transdisciplinary schools, institutions, and centers. It is thus quite fitting that ASU was awarded the Templeton Research Lectures on transhumanism, since the vision of the transhuman mirrors the breakdown of disciplinary, political, and national boundaries. Transdiciplinarity, therefore, captures the new state of affairs in human knowledge as much as transhumanism captures the new human condition.

 
Engaging Transhumanism Critically

Like all ideological movements, transhumanism has diverse concerns and does not speak in one voice about all issues. However, we can identify several main themes: a view of evolving human nature, the emergence of enhanced humans who will exceed ordinary human physical and cognitive traits, a preoccupation with human well-being or happiness that can be perpetuated indefinitely, and a vision of cybernetic immortality. A brief explanation of these features is in order.

Transhumanism and Human Nature

The main feature of transhumanism is the claim that human nature is not fixed and that the future of humanity is malleable because of the “dramatic progress in technological capabilities.” It is technology that will enable humans to transform themselves gradually into persons whose capacities will exceed what we today recognize by the term “human.” For the advocates of transhumanism such development is entirely welcome.

Nick Bostrom, who heads the Institute for the Future of Humanity at Oxford University, defines transhumanism’s view of human nature as follows:

“Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means, we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with vastly grater capacities than present human beings have.”⁵

Bostrom’s view of human nature is shared by Gregory Stock, who heads the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life in UCLA, who similarly states that “the human species is moving out of its childhood.” According to Stock,

“it is time for us to acknowledge our growing powers and being to take responsibility for them. We have little choice in this, for we have begun to play god in so many of life’s intimate realms that we probably could not turn back if we tried.”⁶

As Langdon Wiener already noted, Stock equates “taking responsibility” with “recognizing the inevitability” of the development of a new species and advocates the use of genetic engineering to move the human organism beyond what he depicts as “its present decrepit condition.”⁷

The revolution in genetics and the advent of genetic engineering is the reason for the transhumanist vision. The unlimited prospects of biotechnologies, especially those related to reproduction, has led Lee Silver of Princeton University to hold that the ongoing developments in scientific laboratories will produce a revolution in society, an upheaval whose consequences will include a radical division of the species into superior and inferior genetic classes. Silver speculates that by the end of the third millennium, the two groups will have become “entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee.”⁸ Since, the genetic revolution would enable us to treat defects in and make enhancements to our biological state with treatments in the form of new drugs and gene therapies, Silver had concluded that “for better and worse, a new age is upon us.”⁹

A different approach to the notion of enhanced humans in the transhuman future comes from computer scientists and specialists in robotics and artificial intelligence such as Marvin Minsky, Raymond Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, and Kevin Warwick. They focus on the revolution in robotics and the merger between information technology and biology. By 2030 computing power should readily exceed the computing power of the non-enhanced human brains. As understanding of and control over biology increases, humans would also learn to integrate biological and information technology. Robotics would become so sophisticated that humans would transfer their experience and knowledge to one another or to non-biological substrates to enable indefinite extension of life. The emergence of strong artificial intelligence, in non-biological or enhanced biological forms, would lead to the advent of “The Singularity.” Kurzweil defines The Singularity as “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.” In Kurzweil’s prediction, while The Singularity is neither utopian nor dystopian, it will change our nature and our world in unprecedented ways. In these future scenarios, “our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits.”¹⁰ As a result, humans will no longer be the ultimate beneficiaries of technological development and will probably be destined to obsolescence.

In line with this type of futuristic thinking, Hans Moravec, for example, predicts the eventual replacement of humans by intelligent machines, analogous to ongoing innovations in the business world in which the quest for better services at lower prices has brought about the replacement of many human functions by intelligent machines. Eventually super-intelligent creatures, “Ex-Humans” or “Exes,” would grow weary of the limitations of Earth and would seek their fortunes elsewhere in the universe. When robots will produce all foods and manufactured goods “humans way work to amuse other humans.”¹¹

The critique of the transhumanist project of enhancing humans comes from the relatively new field of evolutionary psychology whose practitioners argue that human nature is a reality that has emerged from the long evolutionary process. Steven Pinker, the best known proponent of evolutionary psychology, defines human nature as “the endowment of cognitive and emotional faculties that is universal to healthy members of the Homo sapiens.”¹² According to Pinker, all human beings share a universal human nature despite differences among individuals, races, and sexes, since these differences too are also in our nature. Other evolutionary psychologists such as ASU’s Templeton Co-Fellows, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby,¹³ hold that the normal make-up of human minds is a result of evolution by natural selection. The major finding of the Cosmides-Tooby team is that the human mind “has evolved a specialized machinery that is designed to carry out specific tasks.” For this reason, Cosmides objects to germline genetic engineering which will alter “what defines a human personality… [because it] affects the control system of the body and alters complex, exquisitely well-designed mental mechanisms that have been engineered by the evolutionary process to solve problems of survival and reproduction.”¹⁴ Human intervention in the evolutionary process may produce humans with greater-than-human intelligence, but we do not know what will be the unintended consequences of such intervention.

Given their understanding of human nature, evolutionary psychologists tend to be quite skeptical about and even critical of the transhumanist project. Tooby identifies two strands within transhumanism: the Enlightenment strand and the Romantic strand. The former is an extension of the 18th century Enlightenment Project and it involves the attempts by science and technology to improve the human condition.¹⁵ Viewed from this perspective, transhumanism is not as novel as it seems, since all of us are already augmented beings if we take into considerations the many technological advancements over the centuries that have transformed who we are. Thus agriculture, writings, postal services, navigation, calculus, antibiotics, radio, television and photography, computers, are all technological innovations that has shaped who we are, and it is reasonable to assume that we will continue to be augmented by future technologies. So long as transhumanism simply advocates the 19th century commitment to progress and alleviation of human suffering, it is hard to critique it.

However, transhumanism becomes much more problematic from an evolutionary perspective when it predicts a dramatic change in the human species, due to technological enhancement. It is this claim, which evolutionary psychology disputes, because of the way in which the human brain has evolved to perform certain tasks and because we are still largely ignorant about the operation of the brain. Tooby thus urges us to ask the simple but crucial question: “what is the goal of technological change?” and he correctly warns us to be careful not to confuse “evolution” with “progress.” Tooby notes that evolution is also capricious, cruel, and random, and that we are the effects of biochemical natural selection that has produced things we hate (for example, infanticide). The case of infanticide shows that human nature is real: the mind is not a blank slate but rather a computational structure that is full of mechanisms that have been selected over a long evolutionary process of adaptation. Therefore, Tooby encourages scientists to continue to map the mechanism of the adapted mind and its specific programs before we naively embrace the projects of transhumanism. At present, we do not even know what does it mean to have a thought, and therefore it is very unlikely that the transhuman vision of uploading the thought content of our personality should be taken too seriously.

The difference between evolutionary psychologists such as Tooby, Cosmides and Pinker and the proponents of transhumanism is that the latter take more seriously the notion of “radical revolution” as a result of exponential growth of knowledge, or what Joel Garreau defines as “The Curve.” Garreau illustrates The Curve in human evolution as follows:

From the formation of the Earth to the first multi-cellular organisms it took perhaps 4 billion years. Getting form tiny organisms to the first mammals took 400 million years. Getting from mammals to the first primitive monkeys took 150 million years. Getting from monkeys to hominid species such as chimpanzees took something like 30 million years. Getting from hominids to walking erect took 16 million years. Getting from walking erect to humans paintings on cave walls at Altamira, Spain, took 4 million years. Getting from cave painting from settlements to the invention of writing in Sumeria took about 4000 years. At that point, biological evolution was trumped by cultural evolution. We could now store, recall and widely share our thought and insights. Intelligence became less the property of isolated bands and more the sum of civilization. As humans increasingly became capable of acting collectively they could make advances in the arts, sciences and economics far beyond the capabilities of any individual, and the Curve started to take off. Four thousand years to the Roman Empire, 1800 years to the Industrial Age, 169 years to the moon and 20 more years to the Information Age, where we now find ourselves.”¹⁶

Garreau’s dramatic retelling of the story of human evolution coheres with the sense of urgency in the transhumanist vision, which foresees humanity on the verge of radical change. But Sander van der Leeuv, the head of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU, who reflects on transhumanism from the perspective of anthropology, provides a much less dramatic and less sensational view of the information revolution.¹⁷ Prof. van der Leeuw ponders why did it take so long to “invent” and accelerate innovation? And why did it go so fast, once we reached that point? His account of human development highlights how humans were able to invent causal sequences, acquire dimensionality, conceptualize scale, composite tools, conceptualize space, learn to take risks, settle and develop agriculture, control time and space, intervene in nature, control motion and energy, create social organizations and trade. All of these developments involved technology, but the most important of all is the development of information because it facilitated communication channels and the emergence of culture. Energy and matter are subject to the laws of conservation; they can be displaced but cannot be shared. In contrast, information systems are not subject to conservation and therefore can be shared. Societies are held together by a shared culture, shared ways of doing things. Biological systems transmit information genetically, but social systems transmit information through learning and energy and information networks reciprocally interact.

According to Prof. van der Leeuw, human beings have already experienced deeper revolutions than the one posed by transhumanism, for example, the rise of towns. Van der Leeuv demonstrates his point by looking carefully at the case of Rome in terms of relationship between energy, population, and innovations. In his assessment of transhumanism, it is our human nature that generated the challenges we face, and these challenges are no worse than the earlier transitions. The difference is one of a-priori and a-posteriori perspectives. We are still human and will continue to be so, but transhumanism raises the challenge how to master the very process of innovation itself. Because information is now independent of its substratum, all fantasy worlds are potentially possible. The emergence of nanotechnology entails that we no longer have an intuitive grasp of the world. Transhumanism is so challenging because of the accelerating rate of change, the potentially negative impact on the environment, and most importantly the lack of focus on values. While van der Leeuv holds that we need more self-restraint (as illustrated in the debate about sustainability), he concedes that there is no answer to the question how to adjudicate between conflicting values. The debate about values is the core element in facing the challenges of transhumanism. That aspect becomes clearer once we consider transhumanism as a pursuit of happiness.

Transhumanism and Human Happiness

Transhumanism is an outgrowth of modern humanism: it is secular, rationalist, individualistic, and concerned with the attainment of individual happiness. The pursuit of happiness, of course, has been a major concern of humanity and a major feature of western thought, at least since ancient Greek philosophy.¹⁸ Happiness, or human well-being and flourishing, was understood by Greek and Hellenistic philosophers to be an objective standard that organizes all human activities into a meaningful pattern for the duration of one’s life. According to premodern philosophers, happiness is not an affect or a subjective feeling but an objective state that expresses human nature and to be happy means to flourish and experience well being in accord with the nature of the human species. Aristotle, who provided the first systematic analysis of happiness in his Nicomachean Ethics, regarded reason as the distinguishing marks of humanity, and concluded that to be happy, or to flourish as a human being, necessitates the actualization of the human potential to know abstract, necessary, and eternal truths. The highest kind of reasoning, according to Aristotle, is the kind of reasoning that belongs to God, a thought thinking itself eternally.¹⁹

When Greek and Hellenistic reflections on happiness were integrated into monotheistic religions, first Judaism, later Islam, and finally Christianity, the pursuit of happiness was given a decidedly religious interpretation even when analyzed philosophically, illustrating the integration of science and religion characteristic of the premodern era. In the modern period, however, the secularization of the Christian West and the scientific revolution, gave rise to materialism and naturalism and the dissociation of science and religion. In the 17th and 18th centuries, happiness came to be identified with well-feeli