Transhumanist Resources

• Legacy Systems and Functional Cyborgization of Humans
  

  © 1995 Alexander Chislenko

  This is my short essay suggesting parallels between technological enhancements of humans and current work on “legacy” information systems. The essay is aimed at a [relatively] wide audience. When I have more time, I will turn it into a more serious work on general evolution of functional structures, exosomatic personality architectures and other such things. 

• Principia Cybernetica: Super- and/or Meta-being(s)
  

  [Node to be completed]

  The integration of human beings will proceed in another dimension than that of human culture, a dimension of depth. We conceive of a realization of cybernetic immortality by means of very advanced human-machine systems, where the border between the organic (brain) and the artificially organic or electronic media (computer) becomes irrelevant. Such hybrid organisms would survive not so much through the biological material of their bodies, but through their cybernetic organization, which may be embodied in a combination of organic tissues, electronic networks, or other media. With communication through the direct connection of nervous systems to machines and to each other, the death of any particular biological component of the system would no longer imply the death of the whole system. Such metasystems will be evolutionary selective, in that they will have advantages for survival in an evolving environment. This is a cybernetic way for an individual human person to achieve immortality.

• Principia Cybernetica: Cybernetic Immortality
  

  The successes of science make it possible for us to raise the banner of cybernetic immortality. The idea is that the human being is, in the last analysis, a certain form of organization of matter. This is a very sophisticated organization, which includes a high multilevel hierarchy of control. What we call our soul, or our consciousness, is associated with the highest level of this control hierarchy. This organization can survive a partial --- perhaps, even a complete --- change of the material from which it is built.

• Erich Fromm’s “Credo” (1962)
  

  Erich Fromm. “Credo” in Beyond the Chains of Illusions. New York: Simon and Schuster,
  1962, pp. 174-182.
  

• Extropian Principles 3.0
  

  The Extropy Institute has been codifying its Extropian Principles since the early 1990s. A full set of versions 1.0-3.0 are available here.

• “Transhumanism” by Julian Huxley (1957)
  

  In New Bottles for New Wine, London: Chatto & Windus, 1957, pp. 13-17

  Reprinted with permission of PFD, the rights-holder.

• 2004 Haldane Award Paper: The Posthuman Condition by Kip Werking
  

  The Posthuman Condition

  Kip Werking

  The University Of Texas At Austin
  Homepage: http://www.ece.utexas.com/~werking
  
  

  “There is no evil I have to accept because ‘there’s nothing I can do about it’. There is no abused child, no oppressed peasant, no starving beggar, no crack-addicted infant, no cancer patient, literally no one that I cannot look squarely in the eye. I’m working to save everybody, heal the planet, solve all the problems of the world.”
  — Eliezer Yudkowsky, Singularitarian Principles 1.0
  
  “How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as if through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?”
  —  Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  I. INTRODUCTION

  
  This article is my effort to identify the next two anthropocentric beliefs to die. One would not expect Copernicus’s defeat of geocentricism and Darwin’s defeat of special Creation to be the last comforting illusions that science will expose. There is an important difference, however, between the third and fourth anthropocentric conceits that I describe. Whereas the transhumanist community has largely abandoned, to their advantage, the third conceit, I will argue that even transhumanists have ignored the fourth.

  My attempt at exposing the fourth conceit shows what transhumanism cannot do. In particular, I will show that while future technologies may remedy part of the human condition, they cannot remedy a remaining part, which I will call the posthuman condition. My article is, in this respect, similar to the critiques by Dreyfus, Searle, and Penrose, which claim to demonstrate what artificial intelligence cannot, even in principle, do. My critique of transhumanism is relevantly different from those, however, because my arguments attempt to undermine, rather than erect, distinctions between human beings and the world.

  While preparing this article I considered other possible anthropocentric conceits. One notable possibility, which the transhumanist community has perhaps not abandoned, is the threat that future technologies pose to personal identity. For example, James Hughes considers this possibility in a recent column at the “Betterhumans” webzine. Hughes described the threats that future technologies pose to our sense of personhood. He came to believe, as Hume and Buddha did, that there is no self.