Transhumanists Are Afraid of the Future
Instead of avoiding the cycles of life, we can embrace them for all they offer
The highest ideal in an unrestrained digital environment is to transcend one’s humanity altogether. It’s a straightforward logic: If humanity is a purely mechanistic affair, explicable entirely in the language of data processing, then what’s the difference whether human beings or computers are doing that processing?
Transhumanists hope to transcend—or at least improve upon—biological existence. Some want to use technology to live forever, others to perform better, and others to exit the body and find a better home for consciousness. Following through on mechanomorphism, transhumanism holds that people can be upgraded just like machines. By blurring the line between what we think of as biological and technological, transhumanists hope to ease our eventual, inevitable transition to life on a silicon chip.
As proponents will argue, our journey into a transhumanist state of existence has already started, with dentures, hearing aids, and artificial hearts — all synthetic extensions that change what it means to be human. Would we call contact lenses antihuman? Of course not. So why scoff at brain implants that enable us to speak new languages? Or why reject an offer to clone one’s consciousness and…
