Transhumanism

The intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment ushered Europe into the modern era. One idea that was central to the Enlightenment was humanism, which held that human beings were the primary agents as well as sources of ethics and meaning in society. This was in contrast to the prevailing worldview of the day, which placed religion at the center of all meaning and culture. Humanism ultimately gave rise not only to the concepts of human rights, but also to numerous movements in art, culture, and even science. In the contemporary era, however, critiques from traditionalist, feminist, postmodernist, naturalist and other viewpoints have called a human-centric worldview into question. One philosophy that arose from critiques of humanism is transhumanism, which aims to promote overcoming of human limitations and weaknesses that have traditionally been considered intrinsic to the human condition through increasing connections with technology and non-living or non-human objects.

Overview

Transhumanism is closely related to posthumanism, a broader term that encompasses all views critical of a purely human-centric worldview. Posthumanism addresses concerns with humanism that arise from numerous concerns, including the European-centric way in which “human” has traditionally been defined to viewpoints sympathetic with medieval worldviews that existed prior to the Enlightenment. Transhumanism, specifically, is concerned with the way that new technology will change or replace the concept of being human.

Key concepts in transhumanist thought include human enhancement, machine intelligence, and the technological singularity, although not all transhumanists focus on or acknowledge all of these ideas. Human enhancement refers to the idea that technology will allow humans to overcome previously inescapable aspects of human experience, such as disease and death. Both proponents and critics of human enhancement point out that medical technology promises access to conditions of life that were previously thought to be possible only through divine intervention, such as a new lease on life due to organ transplantation and powered exoskeletons that will enable the paralyzed to walk and move more freely. Some thinkers refer to people who have been technically or socially modified through human enhancement as cyborgs, rather than humans. Machine intelligence refers to the development of machines that can think, and includes not only the prediction that computers will someday achieve a kind of artificial intelligence that will be equal to or even surpass humans thought, but also the more radical suggestion that existing non-human and non-living systems may already function as a kind of thought. Theorist Bruno Latour, for instance, suggests that computer networks, systems of roads, and anthills can all be thought of as agents in the same way that a thinking human can be. Some transhumanists also promote the development of “uploading,” in which physical human brains may achieve immortality through conversion into computer code.

Transhumanism’s most radical concept, the singularity, refers to the idea that technological development may reach a crest at which machine intelligences and other technologies that increase the rate of further development make the rate of progress exponential. The singularity is the point in time when those living prior to it will be completely unable to predict changes to society and life afterward. Critics of transhumanism point out that according to this definition, the singularity has already occurred countless times, whenever previously unanticipated scientific developments—including fire, the printing press, and the wheel—have been introduced to a society. Others argue that the singularity is a religious belief, akin to the belief in an apocalypse anticipated by many faiths.

Transhumanism has been criticized for fetishizing technology to the detriment of acknowledging its impact on the environment, human rights, and economic equality, and for encouraging social reformers to wait for technology to solve problems that exist today. Transhumanists, however, argue that anticipating upcoming developments will help society cope with changes to human experience that they argue are inevitable. Some of the bioethical ideas within transhumanism include the abolition of all human suffering, immortalism, postgenderism, and technogaianism (the use of technology to protect and restore the Earth's environment).

Bibliography

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