Transhumanism and the Christian Hope

Alice C. Linsley

The evidence for human development is not in technology, or spirituality, or higher consciousness. It is evident in families, caring for the sick and the elderly, taking pride in our work, protecting animals, cultivating plants, sustaining our natural resources, working in community. Yet in the strange Gnostic world of transhumanism our humanity is independent of any physical instantiation.

As an anthropologist I find the transhumanist agenda disturbingly inhuman. Read what some transhumanists are saying:

James Hughes, Executive Director of the IEET: People are a bit afraid of living forever, so we need to encourage people to accept the awesome future of living long lives.

David Orban: hackers are very important to help implement the system of a society for the human, not for the State or a corporation.

Max More: mind uploading is mainly a philosophical idea but it is possible. The best option for immortality is cryopreservation.

George Dvorsky: With moral and intellectual enhancement on the horizon, people are referring to it as "the rapture of the nerds".

Ben Goertzel: The future will bring mind reading. If there is no filter and you can have access to another's emotions and information you can feel what they feel, then learn what it was like for them to experience it.

David Dalrymple: "uploading": means transferring a mind from a biological implementation to a digital one. This is difficult in humans at the moment; let's try with the nematode worm C. elegans.

David Pearce: the coming evolutionary transition could have three stages. In the first biological humans will rewrite their genetic source code and bootstrap their way to super-intelligence. In the second, cybernetic brain implants will allow us to fuse our minds with artificial intelligence and to "upload" ourselves onto less perishable substrates. In digital nirvana, the distinction between biological and non-biological machines will effectively disappear. In the third there will be an ultra-rapid "Intelligence Explosion" and an era of non-biological super-intelligence. Post-human super-intelligence may or may not be human-friendly.

Randal Koene: Substrate independent minds (SIN) assume that the brain is a physical system that can be uploaded and manipulated on a computer.

(From here.)
 

The best paper I've read on the Transhumanist worldview is "Transhumanism-Christianity Diplomacy: To Transform Science-Religion Relations" by David C. Winyard, Sr. He writes:

"Transhumanism is an emerging philosophical and social movement that aims, through technology, to extend human life and radically expand intellectual, physical, and psychological capabilities. Many of transhumanism's goals overlap the eschatological hopes of Christians, such as the elimination of sickness and death. Yet observers who see transhumanism and Christianity in monolithic terms often portray them as adversaries. Against this view, I argue that within each community are factions that have comparable, but contested, views on God, the divine attributes, and human origins, responsibility, and destiny. As a result, an emerging dialog between particular transhumanists and Christians seeks to shape the future of humanity by integrating the basic commitments of transhumanism and Christianity.

Bruno Latour's concept of modes of existence offers a framework for both developing and analyzing diplomacy between and within Christian and transhumanist communities. Specifically, Latour's work allows for the identification of category mistakes that set the terms of intermodal conflicts and dialog. Some transhumanists and most Christians hold beliefs about the nature and meaning of God. Christians believe in a Trinitarian God that is the preexistent, eternal, and personal creator of the universe. By contrast, elements of the transhumanist movement believe that in the future an artificial God will inevitably emerge as an omniscient and omnipotent supercomputer. The attributes, concepts and purposes of God and, by extension, nature lend a basis for developing diplomatic relationships between factions of transhumanism and Christianity. 

Diplomacy between transhumanism and Christianity exists via social media and virtual meeting places. At the forefront of this movement is a new Christian Transhumanist Association that I analyze in some depth. It is only a couple of years old, but its leaders have already attracted international attention. Their strategy of theological minimalism seeks to reduce friction among stakeholders. I show that this strategy sacrifices the insights that Christian theology and philosophy could bring to the development of transhumanism. I conclude that in order to affect transhumanism Christians must find ways to apply their insights into personal creator-creature relationships to the challenges of safely developing artificial superintelligence.

Is Peter Singer Joining the Transhumanism Movement?

Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer has hopped onto the anti-ageing bandwagon. Writing in Project Syndicate, he says that he has been convinced by Aubrey de Grey, the world's most prominent advocate of anti-aging research. De Grey contends that since 90% of deaths in developed countries are ultimately due to ageing, ageing - not cancer or diabetes and cardiac disease - is the real enemy.

De Grey believes that even modest progress in this area over the coming decade could lead to a dramatic extension of the human lifespan. All we need to do is reach what he calls “longevity escape velocity” – that is, the point at which we can extend life sufficiently to allow time for further scientific progress to permit additional extensions, and thus further progress and greater longevity. Speaking recently at Princeton University, de Grey said: “We don’t know how old the first person who will live to 150 is today, but the first person to live to 1,000 is almost certainly less than 20 years younger.”

Singer has said, "De Grey might be mistaken, but if there is only a small chance that he is right, the huge pay-offs make anti-aging research a better bet than areas of medical research that are currently far better funded."

There are ethical questions here. Is it better to spend scarce research money on saving poor people with short life expectancies from dread diseases or on making rich people in developed countries healthier and longer-lived? As Singer points out, "If we discover how to slow aging, we might have a world in which the poor majority must face death at a time when members of the rich minority are only one-tenth of the way through their expected lifespans". However, de Grey seems to have persuaded him that extremely long life spans are imminent. As the science develops, its price will plummet and the poor will be able to share in the benefits of living longer, possibly as long as 1,000 years.

Greater longevity would bring social benefits. All over the world, populations are ageing and the proportion of younger, tax-paying workers is shrinking. If we have more years of youthful energy, this could help to alleviate the demographic problem.

Singer also poses an interesting ethical question about the future of a world where people can live hundreds of years:

"The population objection raises a deeper philosophical question. If our planet has a finite capacity to support human life, is it better to have fewer people living longer lives, or more people living shorter lives? One reason for thinking it better to have fewer people living longer lives is that only those who are born know what death deprives them of; those who do not exist cannot know what they are missing."

Related reading:  Max Moore's Transhumanism

Max Moore's Transhumanism

"If immortality should not be a goal, indefinitely long lifespan can be. If, one day we find ourselves drained, if we can think of nothing more to do and our current activities seem pointless, we will have the option of ending our lives. Alternatively, we might change ourselves so radically that, although someone continues to live, it’s unclear that it’s us. But we cannot know in advance when we will reach that point. To throw away what may be a vastly long stretch of joyful living on the basis that forever must bring boredom and stagnation would be a terrible error."--Max Moore, from The Myth of Stagnation


America's leading transhumanists gathered this month in San Francisco. Speakers at Humanity+ included gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, designer and theorist Natasha Vita-More, futurist Jamais Cascio, science fiction author David Brin, philosopher and proactionary principle advocate Max More, artificial general intelligence researcher Ben Goertzel.

The theme of this year's conference was "Writing the Future". Its focus was communicating transhumanist ideas -- advances in robotics, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, human enhancement, brain-computer integration, regenerative medicine, and radical life extension - so that the public is prepared for the future.

Here are a few highlights culled from live-blogging posts at the conference by Kris Notaro of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies:

James Hughes, Executive Director of the IEET: People are a bit afraid of living forever, so we need to encourage people to accept the awesome future of living long lives.

David Orban: hackers are very important to help implement the system of a society for the human, not for the State or a corporation.

Max More: mind uploading is mainly a philosophical idea but it is possible. The best option for immortality is cryopreservation.

George Dvorsky: With moral and intellectual enhancement on the horizon, people are referring to it as "the rapture of the nerds".

Ben Goertzel: The future will bring mind reading. If there is no filter and you can have access to another's emotions and information you can feel what they feel, then learn what it was like for them to experience it.

David Dalrymple: "uploading": means transferring a mind from a biological implementation to a digital one. This is difficult in humans at the moment; let's try with the nematode worm C. elegans.

David Pearce: the coming evolutionary transition could have three stages. In the first biological humans will rewrite their genetic source code and bootstrap their way to super-intelligence. In the second, cybernetic brain implants will allow us to fuse our minds with artificial intelligence and to "upload" ourselves onto less perishable substrates. In digital nirvana, the distinction between biological and non-biological machines will effectively disappear. In the third there will be an ultra-rapid "Intelligence Explosion" and an era of non-biological super-intelligence. Post-human super-intelligence may or may not be human-friendly.

Randal Koene: Substrate independent minds (SIN) assume that the brain is a physical system that can be uploaded and manipulated on a computer.