The Stakes of Transhuman Godhood
The Stakes of Transhuman Godhood
And the ontological divisions between animals, people, and evolved gods
Chances are that if you’ve heard of “transhumanism,” you associate the word with science fiction, the love of technology, or nerdy prophecies about how technological progress will one day turn us into a new species.
Instead of pondering the effects of specific technologies, though, such as genetic engineering, nanotech, or artificial intelligence, we might focus on the existential implications of transhumanism.
The existential depth of subjectivity
Perhaps you associate “existential,” in turn, with pretentious phenomenological tomes written by the likes of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. That would be fair enough since the fad of existentialism some decades ago was overblown, meaning that the key texts were often grandiose and overcomplicated, due to their use of the “phenomenological” method of description, founded by Edmund Husserl.
But what existential philosophy represented, I think, was a secularizing of so-called spiritual discourse. “Spirituality” is tainted by its premodern, supernatural connotations. Yet the kernel of truth in that old religious concept was that there’s a universal set of problems and forms of experience that are foundational to human life. Phenomenological description, or the relatively neutral characterizing of what it’s like to have certain conscious states such as sadness, fear, or freedom is an updated philosophical way of talking about the so-called spiritual dimension. Spirits were always just imaginary containers of qualia, or of the subjective side of experience.
Now, describing that subjectivity, rather than explaining its neurological substrate is more of an art than a science. Indeed, poets provide some of the most striking phenomenological descriptions, which is why Husserl’s inflated claim that phenomenology is more like a rigorous science comes across as pretentious.
In any case, besides the phenomenological descriptions themselves, there’s the recognition that there’s a fundamental set of subjective problems for people, or for subjects that exist with a human mentality. This set of problems transcends sociological, political, economic, and religious parameters, and is also potentially irreducible to the objective sciences that would only be changing the subject in talking about the human body or about natural selection or the quantum mechanical underpinnings.
From animals to people
What transhumanism does, then, is highlight the existential aspect of being a human person, by raising the prospect of our transition into a posthuman lifeform.
First there was a transition from animals to people, and one of the key differences between them is that a person strives to eliminate the natural environment’s alienating indifference by replacing nature with an artificial refuge. It took thousands of years for humans to outgrow the naïve animistic personifications that likely made our later Stone Age ancestors feel at home in the wilderness, and to acquire the wherewithal to conduct the full-scale war on nature with which we’re familiar.
Thereafter, organized religions and autocratic regimes kept civilizations busy with schemes of social domination (with patriarchy, slavery, and feudalism) and with inter-human, territorial wars. In what we call the “modern” period, which is better thought of as the rise of secular humanism or indeed of existential enlightenment, religion and politics gave way to the more universal, scientific, and philosophical pursuit of knowledge and of human empowerment. Immense population growth, rapid technological advances, capitalism, democracy, and the recognition of human rights ensued.
The existential impact of that transition is that humans are self-domesticating animals. Being too intelligent for our natural welfare, we had to adapt by retreating from our dawning awareness that we’re on our own in a horrific, absurd struggle to survive. We had to engineer a habitat that would reflect not nature’s godlessness, but a promise that life isn’t meaningless after all. We programmed our artifacts with purposes that express our cultural ideals, so that our civilizations extend our physical capacities (with tools, machines, and buildings) and our collective mindsets, including our fears, delusions, and aspirations.
We built a world that talks back to us so that the history, at least, of behavioural modernity or of encultured humanity fosters narcissistic anthropocentrism. We can’t help but think highly of our species because we escaped the alien wilderness and retreated to an artificial world that’s meant to serve our whims like an all-encompassing slave.
In short, while we think of us as godlike masters of the planet, people are much more dainty and infantile than wild animals. We depend on our technology because we fear our existential condition of being all-too intelligent animals, of being primates that reasoned their way to understanding natural processes that had once duped them.
We became something other than animals when we took control of our mind and of our environment with cancer-like implacability. But in domesticating ourselves to adapt to these civilized, non-wild environments, those of us leading the way in our “developed” societies became spoiled and decadent in that most of us couldn’t survive more than a few days in the wild. We’re like a stray ant in a house or like an astronaut in space, wholly out of our depth and ill-suited to life in the wider world. We specialize in thriving in artificial spaces because excessive intelligence generates horror for the wilderness due to the latter’s flagrant godlessness (its amorality, inhumanity, and absurdity).
From people to transhumans
But let’s turn to the possible transition from human people to transhumans. The existential hallmark of that transition hides in plain sight. If a person is a domesticated rather than a wild animal, a transhuman is a god rather than any ungainly animal, including a fumbling, myopic humanist. We may already think of ourselves as gods compared to animals, but this would be a conceit, a promise we would have to fulfill not just by flaunting our ingenious technologies, but by improving our minds and societies.
In the science fiction scenarios, a transhuman is a person who’s merged fully with technology. A human person uses technology whereas a transhuman is a cybernetic being. Our bodies and minds would become artificial rather than organic or naturally selected. This would make the transhuman angelic or divine in two respects.
First, the transhuman would be practically all-powerful, with total control not just over the environment but over its body and mind. If transhumanism were to amount to the downloading of consciousness into a virtual world running on computers, the transhuman’s control would be like that of the computer programmer over a role-playing game. You’d choose your avatar and the map of the digital space, and you’d play out your myriad lives as a series of adventures. You could flip a switch and be female rather than male, happy rather than sad, wise rather than dumb.
Or perhaps nanotechnology, 3D printing, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence would turn the physical and neurological worlds themselves into programmable domains. Once again, then, the transhuman’s power would be almost limitless. Perhaps the transhuman couldn’t destroy the entire universe or travel to distant galaxies, but she could create new ones with simulations or perhaps by harnessing solar power, black holes, and quantum effects.
Second, the transhuman would be practically all-knowing. Already, we have the internet at our fingertips, but that enormous body of information consists largely of raw data, dubious conspiracy theories, and infotainments. Much of the internet is the equivalent of a public washroom wall on which anyone is free to scrawl random crudities. Being maximally opinionated is very different from being enlightened with profound insights and actionable knowledge.
Currently, in our state as late-modern domesticated primates, we mistake sophistry for reasoning, conspiratorial speculations for theories, and uplifting propaganda for an existential awakening. Transhuman knowledge, we can extrapolate, would be utterly free from either dogma or delusion.
The transhuman would thus take postmodernity to its self-destructive limit, past the point at which philosophy is like the snake that eats its tail. The transhuman would be crowned with an intellect that boasts an exhaustive understanding not just of all the natural sciences, but of psychology, philosophy, and history. Thus, the transhuman would know itself and its species as well as it knows how nature works.
As is also reflected in science fiction, this dual perfection of human tendencies could be either disastrous or redeeming. We can imagine that such limitless power and knowledge would be corrupting and would deprive this supreme being of the will to live. On similar grounds, monotheistic religions imply that God would be tyrannical — because love is a bond for social beings, whereas a divine person would be metaphysically independent and thus vulnerable to a solipsistic tailspin. The evil, conquering aliens, or pitiless, destructive AIs that science fiction treats as standard villains could be projections of what we expect we’d become if we allowed technoscientific progress to take its course.
Alternatively, we can speculate that evil and destruction would be out of place for the divine being. The transhuman would be free from egoistic illusions and would thus bypass the performances of juvenile pride. Possibly, such a being might dedicate itself to selfless pursuits, to filling the universe with life, as religions also imagine God did by creating our life-sustaining universe in the first place.
Passing the torch of life forever
However that may be, we can return to the existential questions. One paradox here is that the more godlike a lifeform becomes, the less precious its life seems. Precisely because the transhuman wouldn’t be as fragile as an animal or as a human person, this god wouldn’t even be alive in the sense we take for granted. A transhuman would be immortal and would be closer to a personalized force of nature than to a mere agent operating within a neutral environment.
Rather than being just an animal that’s merged with perfected technology, the transhuman’s power and knowledge would merge this being with the environment by means of that total control. The world around the transhuman would come alive, rather like the way an electron can’t be pinned down, according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: at any moment, the transhuman could bend to its will any part of at least its immediate natural or virtual environment. A transhuman’s presence might thus resemble a poltergeist or a white hole.
Whereas human power extends to the artificial frontier and stops at the unconquered wilderness, divine power would make the transhuman as comfortable in nature as was once the premodern human — except that whereas the latter’s comfort was due to naïvety, myths, and delusions, the former’s would be due to masterful knowledge and to wizardly techniques.
Perhaps, then, the full existential significance of the potential for the transhuman’s emergence is that such realistic divinity would once and for all secure the existence of life. The passing of the torch of life from one generation to the next would no longer be precarious or at nature’s mercy because the torch would be encased in the transhuman’s invulnerable form.
Ultimately, then, the questions are whether life is indeed precious, and whether life ought to be preserved for millions or billions of years, even long past the duration of the Earth and the Sun. Should the universe be forever full of life, or should the universe return to its former lifelessness?
Our current organic fragility and the precarity of our neoliberal societies entail an ambiguity. We’re benighted enough to root for life the way we’d sympathize with any helpless baby or naïve child, but for the same reason the continuation of such life might seem blasphemous. Should something so inherently foolish be permitted to continue? Indeed, would the universe blindly preclude such divinity on the same grounds that it might prevent travel to the past, to avoid ontological absurdities such as the grandfather paradox? Our life may be subjectively or existentially absurd, but metaphysically there’s no contradiction in our having naturally evolved.
True, organic life is parasitic on natural processes, and highly intelligent organisms are alienated from and therefore inherently at war with mindless nature. But in so far as we’re fallible and mortal, there’s a balance between our successes at nature’s expense, and nature’s having the last laugh at ours. As mere clever mammals, we still err, suffer, and die.
But the transhuman would amount to a real potential for miracles, to a supernatural force that could enchant the galaxy, filling it with intelligent design. This would be the ultimate in “satanic” rebellion, a potentially irreversible onslaught against the natural order rather than the mere fantastic wish for or mythic fear of such a thing.
Possibly, then, there’s some hidden natural law against the emergence of this kind of godlike life, in which case we could expect to terminate our species relatively soon the way other extraterrestrial intelligent species seem to have done (there being none to speak of, as far as we can tell). If there’s no such barrier, an existential question raised by transhumanity would be whether life is more precious than disenchanted, nonliving nature. This question would be pressing since the universe might not be big enough for both.