Transhumanism, a philosophy for the third millennium
This is the English version of my article in Spanish ”Transhumanismo, una propuesta filosófica para el tercer milenio”, published on TENDENCIAS CIENTÍFICAS.
Francis Fukuyama, member of the President's Council on Bioethics and author of "Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution" recently published an article on "The World's Most Dangerous Ideas - Transhumanism" on Foreign Policy. Replies to Fukuyama's dark views of technology enabled human enhancement have been issued by Ron Bailey and Nick Bostrom. Needless to say, to me the replies make much more sense than Fukuyama's article, and I wish to encourage you to read the sources and make up your own mind.
So what is transhumanism, this dangerous idea that so scares respected mainstream intellectuals like Fukuyama? In very simple terms, transhumanism can be defined as acknowledging the fact that we can use technology to radically enhance humans (as individuals, as societies, and as a species), and making the value judgment that doing so is good. Though these days there is no real disagreement among experts on the first point (we can), the debate on the second point (we should), is becoming more and more heated, Fukuyama's article being but one of the last examples.
Arguments against technology enabled human enhancement frequently appeal to ill-conceived and nebulous notions of "human dignity", "humility" (what a stupid word), and "reverence for nature". They are easily recognizable as old religious arguments (e.g. "if God had wanted us to fly, he would have created us with wings") in disguise. Yet today "self-styled bioethicists, who have nothing useful to contribute, find a comfortable parasitical niche complaining about the ethics of extending and improving human life". The quote is from the forthcoming book of Robert Ettinger, Youniverse, see also my review of this excellent book.
What does "enhancing" mean? One very significant enhancement will be enabling people to live much longer and healthier lives. What does "much longer" mean? This is a medical engineering issue, and the answer is "as long as it can be". Perhaps, hundreds of years. Perhaps, thousands of years. Perhaps, and this is the amazing truth that we are slowly beginning to see, an indefinite number of years: barring fatal accidents, forever. This is the subject of the last book of Ray Kurzweil: "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever". In a recent talk covered by the Washington Post he said "Nanotechnology will allow humans to radically rebuild and extend their bodies with help from "nanobots," itsy-bitsy robots smaller than human blood cells that will slip into our bloodstreams to fix DNA errors, fight pathogens and expand intelligence. At that point, humans may be able to live forever."
A protection against fatal accidents may come from a future technology known as "mind uploading": making a "backup copy" of the information content of your mind, in such a way as to permit reloading it to a new biological or cybernetic brain. Though this notion may present some philosophical problem related to the concepts of "self" and "identity", its feasibility is object of active analysis and preliminary investigations.
Ray Kurzweil sees such radical life extension options becoming available in a few decades. This means that your children may leave forever. Yes, you got it right: your children may live forever. For our generation, and if the development of life extension technologies were to proceed at a slower pace, an option available is the procedure known as "cryonics": freezing your body after death at liquid nitrogen temperature (to stop all biologic degradation processes) with the hope that in a few decades medical science will be able to restore it to life and permanent youth. To achieve this dream, a couple of hundred "temporarily dead" patients have already been frozen and many more are signed up. Please see the websites of Alcor and the Cryonics Institute for more information.
Radical life extension, cryonics and uploading are the transhumanist themes more frequently picked up by popular media, but they are just the tip of the transhumanist iceberg. Transhumanism is now a comprehensive and intellectually sophisticated worldview, whose supporters are slowly but steadily building up the foundations of a workable philosophical system for the third millennium.
In today's world, transhumanists support the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better minds, better bodies and better lives. See the website of the World Transhumanist Association for more details. Another transhumanist association is the Extropy Institute, and the mailing lists run by these two organizations are the main forums where the transhumanist worldview is discussed and refined.
Is transhumanism a dangerous idea? It most certainly is for those who value abstract concepts more than the actual welfare of their fellow human beings. For the rest of us, transhumanism is a beautiful vision and a natural extension of classical humanist thinking. It is all about freedom, the freedom to choose what kind of person you want to be. Sometimes transhumanists are accused of neglecting the social consequences of their proposal, and critics warn of a dark "Brave New World" with a unacceptably high divide between haves and have-nots. Such negative views, that stem from a perhaps deliberate misunderstanding of the transhumanist message, could not be farther from the truth (see, for example, the "Frequently Asked Questions" section on the World Transhumanist Association website..
Perhaps the first writer to use the word "transhumanism" explicitly was Sir Julian Huxley. From Wikipedia: "Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (June 22, 1887 - February 14, 1975) was a British biologist and author. He was a brother of the writer Aldous Huxley, his father was Leonard Huxley, and his paternal grandfather was the biologist T. H. Huxley. He was also a friend and mentor of the biologist Konrad Lorenz. Huxley was the first Director General of UNESCO and a founder of the World Wildlife Fund. He wrote popular science books, including Essays of a Biologist and Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. He was knighted in 1958."
In "New Bottles for New Wine" (London, Chatto & Windus, 1957), Huxley wrote: "The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself - not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature." A much longer excerpt of this fascinating book, unfortunately not available online in full text, can be found on the "Transhumanism, by Julian Huxley (1957)" article on the World Transhumanist Association website.
Using technology to radically enhance human capabilities is considered as a realistic medium term option by the NBIC initiative : "the convergence of nanoscience, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science ("NBIC") offers immense opportunities for the improvement of human abilities, social outcomes, the nation's productivity and its quality of life; it also represents a major new frontier in research and development" and similar initiatives in Europe.
Despite "dismiss transhumanists as some sort of odd cult, nothing more than science fiction taken too seriously", which used to be the mainstream attitude, Fukuyama now acknowledges that "the new procedures and technologies emerging from research laboratories and hospitals-whether mood-altering drugs, substances to boost muscle mass or selectively erase memory, prenatal genetic screening, or gene therapy-can as easily be used to "enhance" the species as to ease or ameliorate illness". And he provides a very precise and compact definition of the transhumanist worldview: "as transhumanists see it, humans must wrest their biological destiny from evolution's blind process of random variation and adaptation and move to the next stage as a species".
The issue of technology enabled human enhancement will probably someday move to the center of a stormy political debate whose outcomes will impact on the future of the biotechnology and advanced IT industries, as well as on the future of society at large. Everyone should start thinking where (s)he stands in this debate. In the words of the Canadian writer Christopher Dewdney "What will happen during the transhuman era is that mind and matter will blend" (Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era). And this is really all that we can say with certainty at this moment: mind and matter will blend, in other words with "tools" implanted or grown in our brains each one of us will enjoy a much higher degree of control over her or his (or who knows, who said that there will be only two sexes) immediate material environment, there will be new cultural, social and economic systems that we cannot even begin to imagine today, and posthuman lives may bear very little resemblance our limited lives. Seeing such enormous changes coming, some speak of an approaching "Singularity": the moment where exponential growth of technology and culture becomes so fast to create a catastrophic rupture with the past and the sudden appearance of a completely new world. Others, including myself, believe that humans will comfortably adapt to future change as we have always adapted to change in the past, and that things will always appear as "business as usual" to those living through the change.