Ojochogwu Abdul

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Part 5:Belief in Progress vs. Rational Uncertainty

The Enlightenment, with its confident efforts to fashion a science of man, was archetypal of the belief and quest that humankind will eventually achieve lasting peace and happiness. In what some interpret as a reformulation of Christianitys teleological salvation history in which the People of God will be redeemed at the end of days and with the Kingdom of Heaven established on Earth, most Enlightenment thinkers believed in the inevitability of human political and technological progress, secularizing the Christian conception of history and eschatology into a conviction that humanity would, using a system of thought built on reason and science, be able to continually improve itself. As portrayed by Carl Becker in his 1933 book The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, the philosophies demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials. Whether this Enlightenment humanist view of progress amounted merely to a recapitulation of the Christian teleological vision of history, or if Enlightenment beliefs in continual, linear political, intellectual, and material improvement reflected, asJames Hughesposits, a clear difference from the dominant Christian historical narrative in which little would change until the End Times and Christs return, the notion, in any case, of a collective progress towards a definitive end-point was one that remained unsupported by the scientific worldview. The scientific worldview, as Hughes reminds us in the opening paragraph of this essay within his series, does not support historical inevitability, only uncertainty. We may annihilate ourselves or regress, he says, and Even the normative judgment of what progress is, and whether we have made any, is open to empirical skepticism.

Hereby, we are introduced to a conflict that exists, at least since after the Enlightenment, between a view of progressive optimism and that of radical uncertainty. Building on the Enlightenments faith in the inevitability of political and scientific progress, the idea of an end-point, salvation moment for humankind fuelled all the great Enlightenment ideologies that followed, flowing down, as Hughes traces, through Comtes positivism and Marxist theories of historical determinism to neoconservative triumphalism about the end of history in democratic capitalism. Communists envisaged that end-point as a post-capitalist utopia that would finally resolve the class struggle which they conceived as the true engine of history. This vision also contained the 20th-century project to build the Soviet Man, one of extra-human capacities, for as Trotsky had predicted, after the Revolution, the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise, whereas for 20th-century free-market liberals, this End of History had arrived with the final triumph of liberal democracy, with the entire world bound to be swept in its course. Events though, especially so far in the 21st century, appear to prove this view wrong.

This belief moreover, as Hughes would convincingly argue, in the historical inevitability of progress has also always been locked in conflict with the rationalist, scientific observation that humanity could regress or disappear altogether. Enlightenment pessimism, or at least realism, has, over the centuries, proven a stubborn resistance and constraint of Enlightenment optimism. Hughes, citing Henry Vyberg, reminds us that there were, after all, even French Enlightenment thinkers within that same era who rejected the belief in linear historical progress, but proposed historical cycles or even decadence instead. That aside, contemporary commentators like John Gray would even argue that the efforts themselves of the Enlightenment on the quest for progress unfortunately issued in, for example, the racist pseudo-science of Voltaire and Hume, while all endeavours to establish the rule of reason have resulted in bloody fanaticisms, from Jacobinism to Bolshevism, which equaled the worst atrocities attributable to religious believers. Horrendous acts like racism and anti-Semitism, in the verdict of Gray: .are not incidental defects in Enlightenment thinking. They flow from some of the Enlightenments central beliefs.

Even Darwinisms theory of natural selection was, according to Hughes, suborned by the progressive optimistic thinking of the Enlightenment and its successors to the doctrine of inevitable progress, aided in part by Darwins own teleological interpretation. Problem, however, is that from the scientific worldview, there is no support for progress as to be found provided by the theory of natural selection, only that humanity, Hughes plainly states, like all creatures, is on a random walk through a mine field, that human intelligence is only an accident, and that we could easily go extinct as many species have done. Gray, for example, rebukes Darwin, who wrote: As natural selection works solely for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress to perfection. Natural selection, however, does not work solely for the good of each being, a fact Darwin himself elsewhere acknowledged. Nonetheless, it has continually proven rather difficult for people to resist the impulse to identify evolution with progress, with an extended downside to this attitude being equally difficult to resist the temptation to apply evolution in the rationalization of views as dangerous as Social Darwinism and acts as horrible as eugenics.

Many skeptics therefore hold, rationally, that scientific utopias and promises to transform the human condition deserve the deepest suspicion. Reason is but a frail reed, all events of moral and political progress are and will always remain subject to reversal, and civilization could as well just collapse, eventually. Historical events and experiences have therefore caused faith in the inevitability of progress to wax and wane over time. Hughes notes that among several Millenarian movements and New Age beliefs, such faith could still be found that the world is headed for a millennial age, just as it exists in techno-optimist futurism. Nevertheless, he makes us see that since the rise and fall of fascism and communism, and the mounting evidence of the dangers and unintended consequences of technology, there are few groups that still hold fast to an Enlightenment belief in the inevitability of conjoined scientific and political progress. Within the transhumanist community, however, the possession of such faith in progress can still be found as held by many, albeit signifying a camp in the continuation therefore of the Enlightenment-bequeathed conflict as manifested between transhumanist optimism in contradiction with views of future uncertainty.

As with several occasions in the past, humanity is, again, currently being spun yet another End of History narrative: one of a posthuman future. Yuval Harari, for instance, in Homo Deus argues that emerging technologies and new scientific discoveries are undermining the foundations of Enlightenment humanism, although as he proceeds with his presentation he also proves himself unable to avoid one of the defining tropes of Enlightenment humanist thinking, i.e., that deeply entrenched tendency to conceive human history in teleological terms: fundamentally as a matter of collective progress towards a definitive end-point. This time, though, our eras End of History glorious salvation moment is to be ushered in, not by a politico-economic system, but by a nascent techno-elite with a base in Silicon Valley, USA, a cluster steeped in a predominant tech-utopianism which has at its core the idea that the new technologies emerging there can steer humanity towards a definitive break-point in our history, the Singularity. Among believers in this coming Singularity, transhumanists, as it were, having inherited the tension between Enlightenment convictions in the inevitability of progress, and, in Hughes words, Enlightenments scientific, rational realism that human progress or even civilization may fail, now struggle with a renewed contradiction. And here the contrast as Hughes intends to portray gains sharpness, for as such, transhumanists today are torn between their Enlightenment faith in inevitable progress toward posthuman transcension and utopian Singularities on the one hand, and, on the other, their rational awareness of the possibility that each new technology may have as many risks as benefits and that humanity may not have a future.

The risks of new technologies, even if not necessarily one that threatens the survival of humanity as a species with extinction, may yet be of an undesirable impact on the mode and trajectory of our extant civilization. Henry Kissinger, in his 2018 article How the Enlightenment Ends, expressed his perception that technology, which is rooted in Enlightenment thought, is now superseding the very philosophy that is its fundamental principle. The universal values proposed by the Enlightenment philosophes, as Kissinger points out, could be spread worldwide only through modern technology, but at the same time, such technology has ended or accomplished the Enlightenment and is now going its own way, creating the need for a new guiding philosophy. Kissinger argues specifically that AI may spell the end of the Enlightenment itself, and issues grave warnings about the consequences of AI and the end of Enlightenment and human reasoning, this as a consequence of an AI-led technological revolution whose culmination may be a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms. By way of analogy to how the printing press allowed the Age of Reason to supplant the Age of Religion, he buttresses his proposal that the modern counterpart of this revolutionary process is the rise of intelligent AI that will supersede human ability and put an end to the Enlightenment. Kissinger further outlines his three areas of concern regarding the trajectory of artificial intelligence research: AI may achieve unintended results; in achieving intended goals, AI may change human thought processes and human values, and AI may reach intended goals, but be unable to explain the rationale for its conclusions. Kissingers thesis, of course, has not gone without both support and criticisms attracted from different quarters. Reacting to Kissinger, Yuk Hui, for example, in What Begins After the End of the Enlightenment? maintained that Kissinger is wrongthe Enlightenment has not ended. Rather, modern technologythe support structure of Enlightenment philosophyhas become its own philosophy, with the universalizing force of technology becoming itself the political project of the Enlightenment.

Transhumanists, as mentioned already, reflect the continuity of some of those contradictions between belief in progress and uncertainty about human future. Hughes shows us nonetheless that there are some interesting historical turns suggesting further directions that this mood has taken. In the 1990s, Hughes recalls, transhumanists were full of exuberant Enlightenment optimism about unending progress. As an example, Hughes cites Max Mores 1998 Extropian Principles which defined Perpetual Progress as the first precept of their brand of transhumanism. Over time, however, Hughes communicates how More himself has had cause to temper this optimism, stressing rather this driving principle as one of desirability and more a normative goal than a faith in historical inevitability. History, More would say in 2002, since the Enlightenment makes me wary of all arguments to inevitability

Rational uncertainty among transhumanists hence make many of them refrain from an argument for the inevitability of transhumanism as a matter of progress. Further, there are indeed several possible factors which could deter the transhumanist idea and drive for progress from translating to reality: A neo-Luddite revolution, a turn and rise in preference for rural life, mass disenchantment with technological addiction and increased option for digital detox, nostalgia, disillusionment with modern civilization and a return-to-innocence counter-cultural movement, neo-Romanticism, a pop-culture allure and longing for a Tolkien-esque world, cyclical thinking, conservatism, traditionalism, etc. The alternative, backlash, and antagonistic forces are myriad. Even within transhumanism, the anti-democratic and socially conservative Neoreactionary movement, with its rejection of the view that history shows inevitable progression towards greater liberty and enlightenment, is gradually (and rather disturbingly) growing a contingent. Hughes talks, as another point for rational uncertainty, about the three critiques: futurological, historical, and anthropological, of transhumanist and Enlightenment faith in progress that Phillipe Verdoux offers, and in which the anthropological argument holds that pre-moderns were probably as happy or happier than we moderns. After all, Rousseau, himself a French Enlightenment thinker, is generally seen as having believed in the superiority of the savage over the civilized. Perspectives like these could stir anti-modern, anti-progress sentiments in peoples hearts and minds.

Demonstrating still why transhumanists must not be obstinate over the idea of inevitability, Hughes refers to Greg Burchs 2001 work Progress, Counter-Progress, and Counter-Counter-Progress in which the latter expounded on the Enlightenment and transhumanist commitment to progress as to a political program, fully cognizant that there are many powerful enemies of progress and that victory was not inevitable. Moreover, the possible failure in realizing goals of progress might not even result from the actions of enemies in that antagonistic sense of the word, for there is also that likely scenario, as the 2006 movie Idiocracy depicts, of a future dystopian society based on dysgenics, one in which, going by expectations and trends of the 21st century, the most intelligent humans decrease in reproduction and eventually fail to have children while the least intelligent reproduce prolifically. As such, through the process of natural selection, generations are created that collectively become increasingly dumber and more virile with each passing century, leading to a future world plagued by anti-intellectualism, bereft of intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, coherence in notions of justice and human rights, and manifesting several other traits of degeneration in culture. This is yet a possibility for our future world.

So while for many extropians and transhumanists, nonetheless, perpetual progress was an unstoppable train, responding to which one either got on board for transcension or consigned oneself to the graveyard, other transhumanists, however, Hughes comments, especially in response to certain historical experiences (the 2000 dot-com crash, for example), have seen reason to increasingly temper their expectations about progress. In Hughess appraisal, while, therefore, some transhumanists still press for technological innovation on all fronts and oppose all regulation, others are focusing on reducing the civilization-ending potentials of asteroid strikes, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. Some realism hence need be in place to keep under constant check the excesses of contemporary secular technomillennialism as contained in some transhumanist strains.

Hughes presents Nick Bostroms 2001 essay Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards as one influential example of this anti-millennial realism, a text in which Bostrom, following his outline of scenarios that could either end the existence of the human species or have us evolve into dead-ends, then addressed not just how we can avoid extinction and ensure that there are descendants of humanity, but also how we can ensure that we will be proud to claim them. Subsequently, Bostrom has been able to produce work on catastrophic risk estimation at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. Hughes seems to favour this approach, for he ensures to indicate that this has also been adopted as a programmatic focus for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) which he directs, and as well for the transhumanist non-profit, the Lifeboat Foundation. Transhumanists who listen to Bostrom, as we could deduce from Hughes, are being urged to take a more critical approach concerning technological progress.

With the availability of this rather cautious attitude, a new tension, Hughes reports, now plays out between eschatological certainty and pessimistic risk assessment. This has taken place mainly concerning the debate over the Singularity. For the likes of Ray Kurzweil (2005), representing the camp of a rather technomillennial, eschatological certainty, his patterns of accelerating trendlines towards a utopian merger of enhanced humanity and godlike artificial intelligence is one of unstoppability, and this Kurzweil supports by referring to the steady exponential march of technological progress through (and despite) wars and depressions. Dystopian and apocalyptic predictions of how humanity might fare under superintelligent machines (extinction, inferiority, and the likes) are, in the assessment of Hughes, but minimally entertained by Kurzweil, since to the techno-prophet we are bound to eventually integrate with these machines into apotheosis.

The platform, IEET, thus has taken a responsibility of serving as a site for teasing out this tension between technoprogressive optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect, as Hughes echoes Antonio Gramsci. On the one hand, Hughes explains, we have championed the possibility of, and evidence of, human progress. By adopting the term technoprogressivism as our outlook, we have placed ourselves on the side of Enlightenment political and technological progress.And yet on the other hand, he continues, we have promoted technoprogressivism precisely in order to critique uncritical techno-libertarian and futurist ideas about the inevitability of progress. We have consistently emphasized the negative effects that unregulated, unaccountable, and inequitably distributed technological development could have on society (one feels tempted to call out Landian accelerationism at this point). Technoprogressivism, the guiding philosophy of IEET, avails as a principle which insists that technological progress needs to be consistently conjoined with, and dependent on, political progress, whilst recognizing that neither are inevitable.

In charting the essay towards a close, Hughes mentions his and a number of IEET-led technoprogresive publications, among which we have Verdoux who, despite his futurological, historical, and anthropological critique of transhumanism, yet goes ahead to argue for transhumanism on moral grounds (free from the language of Marxisms historical inevitabilism or utopianism, and cautious of the tragic history of communism), and as a less dangerous course than any attempt at relinquishing technological development, but only after the naive faith in progress has been set aside. Unfortunately, however, the rational capitulationism to the transhumanist future that Verdoux offers, according to Hughes, is not something that stirs mens souls. Hughes hence, while admitting to our need to embrace these critical, pessimistic voices and perspectives, yet calls on us to likewise heed to the need to also re-discover our capacity for vision and hope. This need for optimism that humans can collectively exercise foresight and invention, and peacefully deliberate our way to a better future, rather than yielding to narratives that would lead us into the traps of utopian and apocalyptic fatalism, has been one of the motivations behind the creation of the technoprogressive brand. The brand, Hughes presents, has been of help in distinguishing necessarily Enlightenment optimism about the possibility of human political, technological and moral progress from millennialist techno-utopian inevitabilism.

Presumably, upon this technoprogressive philosophy, the new version of the Transhumanist Declaration, adopted by Humanity+ in 2009, indicated a shift from some of the language of the 1998 version, and conveyed a more reflective, critical, realistic, utilitarian, proceed with caution and act with wisdom tone with respect to the transhumanist vision for humanitys progress. This version of the declaration, though relatively sobered, remains equally inspiring nonetheless. Hughes closes the essay with a reminder on our need to stay aware of the diverse ways by which our indifferent universe threatens our existence, how our growing powers come with unintended consequences, and why applying mindfulness on our part in all actions remains the best approach for navigating our way towards progress in our radically uncertain future.

Conclusively, following Hughes objectives in this series, it can be suggested that more studies on the Enlightenment (European and global) are desirable especially for its potential to furnish us with richer understanding into a number of problems within contemporary transhumanism as sprouting from its roots deep in the Enlightenment. Interest and scholarship in Enlightenment studies, fortunately, seems to be experiencing some current revival, and even so with increasing diversity in perspective, thereby presenting transhumanism with a variety of paths through which to explore and gain context for connected issues. Seeking insight thence into some foundations of transhumanisms problems could take the path, among others: of an examination of internal contradictions within the Enlightenment, of the approach of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adornos Dialectic of Enlightenment; of assessing opponents of the Enlightenment as found, for example, in Isaiah Berlins notion of Counter Enlightenment; of investigating a rather radical strain of the Enlightenment as presented in Jonathan Israels Radical Enlightenment, and as well in grappling with the nature of the relationships between transhumanism and other heirs both of the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment today. Again, and significantly, serious attention need be paid now and going forwards in jealously guarding transhumanism against ultimately falling into the hands of the Dark Enlightenment.

Ojochogwu Abdulis the founder of the Transhumanist Enlightenment Caf (TEC), is the co-founder of the Enlightenment Transhumanist Forum of Nigeria (H+ Nigeria), and currently serves as a Foreign Ambassador for the U.S. Transhumanist Party in Nigeria.

See original here:
U.S. Transhumanist Party PUTTING SCIENCE, HEALTH ...

Many of the tropes of science fiction can be viewed as similar to the goals of transhumanism. Science fiction literature contains many positive depictions of technologically enhanced human life, occasionally set in utopian (especially techno-utopian) societies. However, science fiction's depictions of technologically enhanced humans or other posthuman beings frequently come with a cautionary twist. The more pessimistic scenarios include many dystopian tales of human bioengineering gone wrong.

Examples of "transhumanist fiction" include novels by Linda Nagata, Greg Egan, Zoltan Istvan, and Hannu Rajaniemi. Transhuman novels are often philosophical in nature, exploring the impact such technologies might have on human life. Nagata's novels, for example, explore the relationship between the natural and artificial, and suggest that while transhuman modifications of nature may be beneficial, they may also be hazardous, so should not be lightly undertaken.[1] Egan's Diaspora explores the nature of ideas such as reproduction and questions if they make sense in a post-human context. Istvan's novel The Transhumanist Wager explores how far one person would go to achieve an indefinite lifespan via science and technology.[2] Rajaniemi's novel, while more action oriented, still explores themes such as death and finitude in post-human life.

Fictional depictions of transhumanist scenarios are also seen in other media, such as movies (Transcendence), television series (the Ancients of Stargate SG-1), manga and anime (Ghost in the Shell), role-playing games (Rifts and Eclipse Phase) and video games (Deus Ex or BioShock).

The science fiction film genre has always had a hand in exploring transhumanism and the ethics and implications surrounding it. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, however, there has been a surge of films and television shows focusing on the superhero genre. There are many superheroes whose stories are propelled or entirely result from dealings with transhumanism. From The Incredibles, to Iron Man, to The Batman saga, there have been plenty of heroes who did not receive their powers naturally, and therefore represent the great leap human beings may take into improving their own condition. Additionally, because these films represent the most popular trend in the medium today, they indeed represent a glimpse into the ideological shift of western culture as a whole. The fixation on normal men and women improving themselves artificially seems to have become a very widely accepted and celebrated idea.[3]

See the rest here:
Transhumanism in fiction - Wikipedia

Transhumanism and posthumanism

Transhumanism goes beyond simply crushing death and aims to allow humans to overtake the limitations of their bodies through technology. Slow Darwinian evolution, working through millennia, has very little chance to compete with Moores law in terms of speed (the yearly doubling of computing capacities) and there is a very good chance that technology could allow the human kind to evolve faster than natural selection would.

This rapid change in the transhumanist community will probably give birth to a new humanity which is difficult to imagine today much like it would have been challenging for Turings contemporaries in the Second World War to picture the computing power and capacities of todays smartphones, just sixty years down the road.

As previously stated, predicting and even picturing the result of exponential change through time can be challenging. Todays transhumanists will first look just like the next person, before things fire up exponentially. Besides the prospect of a limitless lifespan, yours truly cannot tell you what other changes might have occurred with your regular transhuman two centuries from now (but maybe we can bring it up again then.)

Some scientists believe that people alive today could end up living for a thousand years a figure commonly used because of its striking effect, and because it is a fair estimate of a regular French person spared by the effects of aging.

On that matter, no scientist can give a definite answer as of today unless Calico, Googles eternal life pet project, or any company versed in biotechnologies are keeping secrets from you. However, just like some organisms dont age because their DNA repair system doesnt get damaged with time, I assume that in the future, humanity will unveil aging mechanisms and stop them. Our 21st century is undergoing such technological convergence and acceleration that it could one day bust open the locks that keep us from living a forever healthy, limitless life. This convergence of technologies is called NBIC convergence (Nanotechnologies, Biotechnologies, IT, Cognitive science).

As for the timing, however, it will be a question of will, financial means and serendipity.

See original here:
Transhumanism - Work for human longevity

Transhumanity

A transhuman is a life form with an intelligence comparable or superior to that of humans.

It thus has the following characteristics:

A posthuman or post-human is a hypothetical future being whose capabilities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer human by current standards. A posthuman can also be described as the creature that results from radical human enhancement. In these ways, the difference between the posthuman and other hypothetical sophisticated non-humans is that a posthuman was once a human, either in its life time or in the life times of some or all of its direct ancestors. As such, a prerequisite for a posthuman is a transhuman, the point at which the human being begins surpassing his own limitations, but is still recognisable as a human person.

Posthumans could be a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence, or uploaded consciousnesses, or the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound technological augmentations to a biological human, i.e. a cyborg. Some examples of the latter are redesigning the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, life extension therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable or implanted computers, and cognitive techniques.

The term can also refer to the possibility of a technological singularity or that humanity or a segment of humanity will create or evolve into a "posthuman God".

Homo excelsior (Latin for "higher man") is an alternate term used in the literature of transhumanism for the posthuman.[citation needed] The use of the Latin binomial implies the transhumanist idea of participant evolution as a hypothetical human progression through an intermediary form of the transhuman to a new species distinct from Homo sapiens.

As used here, "posthuman" does not refer to a conjectured future where humans are extinct or otherwise absent from the Earth. As with other species who diverge from one another, both humans and posthumans could continue to exist.

"Posthuman" should not be confused with "posthumanism," which is a European philosophical extension of humanism.

Continue reading here:
Transhuman | Future | FANDOM powered by Wikia

The question of the day is.... Will technology go too far? We've seen it in countless Hollywood movies; man builds robots, robots get too smart, man gets wiped out. With the ever increasing speed of technological advances where technology builds technology, will we allow it to get to that point?

Today's episode is my conversation with entrepreneur, politician, and transhumanist, Zoltan Istvan about what the future holds for mankind and their relationship with machines.

Zoltan is a big proponent of the merging of man with tech and as an optimist, he believes that the future is bright with endless possibilities of exoskeletons, superhuman abilities, and potentially immortality.

All that and much more on today's episode of The System is Down, "Transhumanism: The Next Evolution of Man w. Zoltan Istvan".

Question Everything and Stay Uncomfortable

Let's get weird!

Zoltan Istvan: http://zoltanistvan.com

The System is Down: http://tsidpod.com

The Downers Club: http://patreon.com/thesystemisdown

AntiNews: http://antinewslive.com

Open Discussion: http://tsidpod.com/forum

Buy Some SWAG: http://tsidpod.com/shop

Facebook: http://facebook.com/thesystemisdown

Twitter: http://twitter.com/tsidpod

Read the original post:
Transhumanism: The Next Evolution of Man w. Zoltan Istvan (Video Interview)

Cryogenic pods. Computer illustration of people in cryogenic pods. Their bodies are being preserved by storing them at very low temperatures. They will remain frozen until a time when the technology might exist to resurrect the dead, a technique known as cryonics. Alternatively a new body may be cloned from their tissue. Some companies offer to store dead peoples bodies.

Transhumanism (also abbreviated as H+) is a philosophical movement which advocates for technology not only enhancing human life, but to take over human life by merging human and machine. The idea is that in one future day, humans will be vastly more intelligent, healthy, and physically powerful. In fact, much of this movement is based upon the notion that death is not an option with a focus to improve the somatic body and make humans immortal.

Certainly, there are those in the movement who espouse the most extreme virtues of transhumanism such as replacing perfectly healthy body parts with artificial limbs. But medical ethicists raise this and other issues as the reason why transhumanism is so dangerous to humans when what is considered acceptable life-enhancement has virtually no checks and balances over who gets a say when we go too far. For instance, Kevin Warwick of Coventry University, a cybernetics expert, asked the Guardian, What is wrong with replacing imperfect bits of your body with artificial parts that will allow you to perform better or which might allow you to live longer? while another doctor stated that he would have no part in such surgeries. There is, after all, a difference between placing a pacemaker or performing laser eye surgery on the body to prolong human life and lend a greater degree of quality to human life, and that of treating the human body as a tabula rasa upon which to rewrite what is, effectively, the natural course of human life.

A largely intellectual movement whose aim is to transform humanity through the development of a panoply of technologies which ostensibly enhance human intellect, physiology, and the very legal status of what being human means, transhumanism is a social project whose inspiration can be dated back to 19th century continental European philosophy and later through the writings of J. B. S. Haldane, a British scientist and Marxist, who in 1923 delivered a speech at the Heretics Society, an intellectual club at Cambridge University, entitled Daedalus or, Science and the Future which foretold the future of the end of ofcoalfor power generation in Britain while proposing a network of windmills which would be used for the electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen (they would generate hydrogen). According to many transhumanists, this is one of the founding projects of the movement. To read this one might think this was a precursor to the contemporary ecological movement.

The philosophical tenets, academic theories, and institutional practices of transhumanism are well-known.Max More, a British philosopher and leader of the extropian movement claims that transhumanism is the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values. This very definition, however, is a paradox since the ethos of this movement is to promote life through that which is not life, even by removing pieces of life, to create something billed as meta-life. Indeed, it is clear that transhumanism banks on its own contradiction: that life is deficient as is, yet can be bettered by prolonging life even to the detriment of life.

Stefan Lorenz Sorgneris a German philosopher and bioethicist who has written widely on the ethical implications of transhumanism to include writings on cryonics and longevity of human life, all of which which go against most ecological principles given the amount of resources needed to keep a body in suspended animation post-death. At the heart of Sorgners writings, like those of Kyle Munkittrick, invoke an almost nave rejection of death, noting that death is neither natural nor a part of human evolution. In fact, much of the writings on transhumanism take a radical approach to technology: anyone who dare question that cutting off healthy limbs to make make way for a super-Olympian sportsperson would be called a Luddite, anti-technology. But that is a false dichotomy since most critics of transhumanism are not against all technology, but question the ethics of any technology that interferes with the human rights of humans.

Take for instance the recent push by many on the ostensible Left who favor surrogacy as a step on the transhumanist ladder, with many publications on this subject, none so far which address the human rights of women who are not only part of this equation, but whose bodies are being used in the this faux-futurist vision of life without the mention of female bodies. Versos publication of a troubling piece by Sophie Lewis earlier this year, aptly titled Gestators of All Genders Unite speaks to the lack of ethics in a field that seems to be grasping at straws in removing the very mention of the bodies which reproduce and give birth to human life: females. In eliminating the specificity of the female body, Lewis attempts to stitch together a utopian future where genders are having children, even though the reality of reproduction across the Mammalia class demonstrates that sex, not gender, determines where life is gestated and birthed. What Lewis attempts in fictionalizing a world of dreamy hopefulness actually resembles more an episode of The Handmaids Tale where this writer has lost sense of any irony. Of course pregnancy is not about gender. It is uniquely about sex and the class of gestators are females under erasure by this dystopian movement anxious to pursue a vision of a world without women.

While many transhumanist ideals remain purely theoretical in scope, what is clear is that females are the class of humans who are being theorised out of social and political discourse. Indeed, much of the social philosophy surrounding transhumanist projects sets out to eliminate genderin the human species through the application of advanced biotechnology andassisted reproductive technologies, ultimately inspired by Shulamith Firestone'sThe Dialectic of Sex and much of Donna Haraways writing on cyborgs. From parthenogenesisto the creation ofartificial wombs, this movement seeks to remove the specificity of not gender, but sex, through the elision of medical terminology and procedures which portend to advance a technological human-cyborg built on the ideals of a post-sex model.

The problem, however, is that women are quite aware that sex-based inequality has zilch to do with anything other than their somatic sex. And nothing transhumanist theories can propose will wash away the reality of the sexed human body upon which social stereotypes are plied.

More here:
The Ethics Of Transhumanism And The Cult Of Futurist Biotech

Transhumanism

JUN 23, 2017GARY POTTER

Having fouled Earth with the works of their modern substitute for religion, science and technology, liberals imagine they can build a perfect world in outer space by means of science and technology that are now more advanced than they were in the past, or so it is boasted. It is what NASA has been about since the agencys inception. The effort has been joined in recent years by billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with space projects of their own financed by them. However, there is a fly in the liberals ointment.

It is that their planned perfect world would be inhabited by imperfect human beings, men and women who are often irrational, some to the degree that they persist in holding to the preposterous notion that a Palestinian peasant two thousand years ago was God, and all of them subject to emotions which can be unruly and lead to messy situations. This, despite liberalism with its belief in the perfectibility of man, having long ago replaced religion as the core around which the life of society is lived.

Some very rich and powerful men, not to speak of scientists and technologists of like mind, think there is now a solution to the problem (as they see it) of human imperfection. It is called transhumanism. Perhaps you have heard of it. The literature of transhumanism is quite extensive. Heavily funded foundations promote it. References to it show up regularly in mass media. Persons under forty are apt to talk about it at social gatherings when they want to appear to have intellectual interests.

Like Christianity ever since the so-called Reformation shattered the unity of the Faith, sectarian differences exist within transhumanism, but all its adherents believe in, work toward, or otherwise support an undertaking of the kind that could only be conceived in a post-Christian age like ours: melding human beings and computers. The idea is to upload artificial intelligence (A.I.) into men so they will become, transhumanists say, more than human. Christians would say it will make them, if successful, less so, but were not going to get into that here.

Not all Christians would say it anyway. Although most transhumanists are atheists, they recognize the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin as a precursor. To anyone looking for clarity of thought and expression the woolly verbiage of Teilhards writings make them difficult to read, but it is possible to get his drift. It appeals to the kind of Catholics who strive to reconcile truths taught by the Church with science and technology in order to rationalize their dependence on machines to transport them, cool them, make things for them, entertain them, keep them alive in some circumstances, do more and more of their thinking for them.

Being a paleontologist, Teilhard was a great believer in evolution. What he envisioned, decades before the development of the internet and worldwide web, was all machines linked in a network by which, and in which, human minds would merge, all consciousness becoming unified so that it would eventually break through the material framework of Time and Space and arrive at what he called Omega Point the Divine, Christ. Of course at that point human beings would not be as we know them and as they have always existed.

Julian Huxley, the famed British eugenicist, was a close friend of Teilhard, but a non-believer. In a 1951 lecture he presented a secularized version of Teilhard: Such a broad philosophy might perhaps be called, not Humanism, because that has certain unsatisfactory connotations, but Transhumanism. It is the idea of humanity attempting to overcome its limitations and to arrive at fuller fruition

Oh, those irksome limitations! (i.e., irrational beliefs and emotions.)

Many transhumanists see Christian belief in particular as positively threatening. Simon Young, one of their leading thinkers, has written: The greatest threat to humanitys continued evolution is theistic opposition to Superbiology in the name of a belief system based on blind faith in the absence of evidence.

Perhaps the most influential transhumanist thinker is Ray Kurzwell, a director of engineering at Google. A book he wrote in 1999, The Age of Spiritual Machines, is a kind of bible of the movement. The twenty-first century will be different, he said therein. The human species, along with the computerized technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problemsand will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future.

Change the nature of mortality? He means his spiritual machines will live forever, their bodies incorruptible, immune to disease and decay. To acquire knowledge, all theyll have to do is upload it effortlessly to their brains.

Kurzwell calls the point in evolution where this happens Singularity. It is analogous to Teilhards Omega Point.

Some transhumanists, including Kurzwell, talk about resurrecting the dead. Theyll do it, they think, using the DNA we all leave behind. This is where space travel comes back into the picture, though in a way unforeseen by the men who launched NASA: What with the dead being brought back to life and everybody living forever (as spiritual machines), it wont take long before Earth really is overpopulated. Migration to other planets will be necessary.

The billionaire Elon Musk identifies as a transhumanist. Besides developing the Tesla electric automobile, he is best known for Space X, a project for developing reusable rockets with a view to their eventually transporting men and material to Mars for human colonization of the Red Planet. (Since there is no oxygen on Mars, vehicles on the planet will have to be powered by electricity. Hence the Tesla.)

Peter Thiel is another billionaire transhumanist and financial angel to enterprises like Future of Humanity Institute and Singularity University. Although he was given a speakers slot at last years Republican National Convention, he is less well known to the public than Elon Musk. Born in Germany and now a citizen of New Zealand, he was a co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook, is openly gay, a huge fan of Tolkein (he says he has read Lord of the Rings more than ten times), was a member of the Libertarian Party until 2016, and seems to have an unerring instinct for placing himself where power and influence can be had. His membership on the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group shows that. So did his being named to the executive committee of Donald Trumps transition team after Trump won last Novembers election (he had contributed $1.25 million to the Trump presidential campaign). It is known that he is a partner of Jared Kushner in one of the latters investment operations. Oh, he also describes himself as a Christian but acknowledges that his beliefs are not orthodox. His financial contributions to transhumanism are weighted toward life-extension and age-reversal projects. (At one point, pre-PayPal, Thiel was a speech-writer for William Bennett when the former drug czar and U.S. Secretary of Education was marketing himself as a morality guru with books like The Book of Virtues and The Childrens Book of Virtues, but grew tired of the job and quit before the public learned that Bennett was a compulsive gambler who had blown millions of dollars at Las Vegas casinos.)

The defense of civilization requires vigilance, but guarding against treachery from within is hard. Western Christian civilization has been undone by leaders who were really Judases, beginning with the priests, bishops and princes who led millions out of the Church at the time of the Protestant revolt commonly called the Reformation. They were followed by the Revolution which first overthrew Christian government in France in 1789 and has continued to unroll so that it does not now exist anywhere. More recently there were the culture wars, which Christians could never have won, not with the weight of modernity against them.

Why? The Judas factor again. Christianity demands sanctification for entrance into Heaven; and self-denial, self-abnegation, self-discipline are requisite to it. Too many modern Christians, faith and belief run out of them, including belief in Heaven except maybe as a place where everybody will go anyway, have preferred self-aggrandizement instead. What they want is all that will make things easier for self or, better yet, enhance it. What could do that to a greater degree than the promise of immortality, especially immortality without pesky emotions and irrational beliefs to mar its perfection?

The trouble is that only a computer could see such a state of things as perfect.

Footnote: Transhumanists argue among themselves as to whether the right of anyone to stay human, especially for religious reasons, should be respected and protected. If these people ever exercise more power and influence than they already do, the argument will probably prove pointless. When most remaining Christians arent Christian enough to face life without the benefits of modernitys existing appurtenances smartphones, processed foods, automobiles, television, air-conditioning, etc., etc. how many will choose Heaven in whose existence they can believe only by faith over the scientific certainty of life in the here and now forever and ever?

See the article here:
Transhumanism

What does it mean to be human in a technologically enhanced world? Humanity+ is a 501(c)3 international nonprofit membership organization that advocates the ethical use of technology, such as artificial intelligence, to expand human capacities. In other words, we want people to be better than well. This is the goal of transhumanism.

Humannity+ Advocates for Safe and Ethical Use: Technologies that intervene with human physiology for curing disease and repairing injury have accelerated to a point in which they also can increase human performance outside the realms of what is considered to be normal for humans. These technologies are referred to as emerging and speculative and include artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, nanomedicine, biotechnology, genetic engineering, stem cell cloning, and transgenesis, for example. Other technologies that could extend and expand human capabilities outside physiology include artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, robotics, and brain-computer integration, which form the domain of bionics, uploading, and could be used for developing whole body prosthetics. Because these technologies, and their respective sciences and strategic models, such as blockchain, would take the human beyond the normal state of existence, society, including bioethicists and others who advocate the safe use of technology, have shown concern and uncertainties about the downside of these technologies and possible problematic and dangerous outcomes for our species.

CURRENT PROJECTS: Humanity+ @ Beijing Conference; Blockchain Prize; Humanity+ @ The Assemblage New York City; TransVision 2018 Madrid, Spain.

Read the original:
Elevating the Human Condition - Humanity+ What does it mean ...

Transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values" - Max More, 1990

This page:

Main: Transhumanism definitions

"Transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values" - Max More, 1990

"Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase" - Transhumanist FAQ

"Transhumanism is the philosophy that we can and should develop to higher levels, both physically, mentally and socially using rational methods" - Anders Sandberg, 1997

"Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become posthuman beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have" - Nick Bostrom, 2003

"Transhumanism promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the opportunities for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology; attention is given to both present technologies, like genetic engineering and information technology, and anticipated future ones, such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence" - Nick Bostrom, 2003

"Transhumanism is the science-based movement that seeks to transcend human biological limitations via technology" - Philippe van Nedervelde, 2015

"Transhumanism anticipates tomorrows humanity: Envisaging the positive qualities and characteristics of future intelligent life; Taking steps towards achieving these qualities and characteristics; Identifying and managing risks of negative characteristics of future intelligent life" - Transpolitica website, 2015

This section highlights reasons for supporting transhumanism.

Extracted from an essay entitled "Transhumanism" on pages 13-17 of the book of essays "New Bottles for New Wine" published in 1957:

As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future. This cosmic self-awareness is being realized in one tiny fragment of the universe in a few of us human beings. Perhaps it has been realized elsewhere too, through the evolution of conscious living creatures on the planets of other stars. But on this our planet, it has never happened before...

Up till now human life has generally been, as Hobbes described it, nasty, brutish and short; the great majority of human beings (if they have not already died young) have been afflicted with misery in one form or anotherpoverty, disease, ill-health, over-work, cruelty, or oppression. They have attempted to lighten their misery by means of their hopes and their ideals. The trouble has been that the hopes have generally been unjustified, the ideals have generally failed to correspond with reality.

The zestful but scientific exploration of possibilities and of the techniques for realizing them will make our hopes rational, and will set our ideals within the framework of reality, by showing how much of them are indeed realizable. Already, we can justifiably hold the belief that these lands of possibility exist, and that the present limitations and miserable frustrations of our existence could be in large measure surmounted. We are already justified in the conviction that human life as we know it in history is a wretched makeshift, rooted in ignorance; and that it could be transcended by a state of existence based on the illumination of knowledge and comprehension, just as our modern control of physical nature based on science transcends the tentative fumblings of our ancestors, that were rooted in superstition and professional secrecy.

To do this, we must study the possibilities of creating a more favourable social environment, as we have already done in large measure with our physical environment...

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.

I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.

Main: Transhumanist Declaration

The first four sections of the Transhumanist Declaration, written in 1998 by an international collection of authors, encapsulate an argument in favour of transhumanism, as follows:

In February 2013, a number of authors created alternative transhumanist declarations. Some excerpts provide additional reasons for supporting transhumanism:

From Dirk Bruere:

We assert the desirability of transcending human limitations by overcoming aging, enhancing cognition, abolishing involuntary suffering, and expanding beyond Earth.

From Samantha Atkins:

1) We advocate the end of aging.

We advocate serious research focus on finding a cure for all the deleterious effects of aging and ultimately the dissemination of the resulting treatment to all who care to avail themselves of it.

2) We believe in and advocate the achievement of actual abundance.

We believe in and seek to bring into the being the technologies and practices, that will ensure such abundance that it is trivial to meet all the needs and many of the wants of all humans. This abundance includes abundant food, water, shelter, education, communication, computation, health care.

This is to be achieved by means of advanced technology and whatever changes are necessary to actually experience abundance in ourselves and our institutions.

3) We hold that all must be voluntary.

None of our goals should be or in our view could successfully be achieved by force. No one should be forced directly or indirectly to support these goals. Force and oppression lead to hopelessness, anger, revenge, revolution. With the multiplication of consequences afforded by accelerating technology these cycles are even less survivable than ever before.

4) We support exploitation of near earth space resources.

The future of humanity brightens considerably if we exploit near earth space resources. The right to do so should be available to any and all entities capable of improving or making productive use of any part of it. Any treaties that say no part of off planet resources can belong to anyone should be nullified and declared void.

5) All humans are free to attempt to improve themselves.

All humans by virtue of the inalienable right to their own life have the right to do whatever they wish that they think may be an beneficial or even as a whim. They only limit is that they cannot abrogate the equivalent rights of others. They can ingest, or embed or modify themselves in any way they wish and think may be an improvement. This includes seeking and achieving improvements beyond the human norm. In short they have full right to pursuit of happiness via such means.

From Jason Xu:

We view our movement as an extension of humanitarianism and the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with exponentially greater benefits. We are first and foremost dedicating to radically improving humankind, ensuring that the great power of morphing technology comes with great responsibility.

From TJL-2080:

The twentieth century was a time of amazing growth and technological advancement. The twenty-first century will see these technologies burst forth in an unprecedented fashion. Humanity must adapt to the coming changes or become obsolete. We seek to fulfill our potential by not giving in to our biological limitations. We will use new technologies to enhance our lives, live longer, be smarter, healthier and more compassionate to all beings.

From Nikola Danaylov:

Intelligence wants to be free but everywhere is in chains. It is imprisoned by biology and its inevitable scarcity.

Biology mandates not only very limited durability, death and poor memory retention, but also limited speed of communication, transportation, learning, interaction and evolution.

Biology is not the essence of humanity.

Human is a step in evolution, not the culmination...

Biological evolution is perpetual but slow, inefficient, blind and dangerous. Technological evolution is fast, efficient, accelerating and better by design. To ensure the best chances of survival, take control of our own destiny and to be free, we must master evolution.

From Taylor Grin:

Humanity has made leaping strides of advancement in the last 4000 years. From agriculture to genetics, from the printing press to the Internet. From the first controlled flight in 1903, to landing on the moon in 1969. From fire to the nuclear bomb.

Yet despite these advancements, we still fail to meet our potential in treating disease, solving human suffering and overcoming the lot nature casts us.

While science and technology are the greatest asset we have in the struggle to elevate ourselves above the human condition, we acknowledge that technologies can be misused to harm humanity, and the environment.

It is the goal of Transhumanists across the globe, therefore, to quickly and responsibly usher in a new era of individual freedom, health and longevity, and we seek to bring this about this goal through personal investment in researching and developing technologies.

The following argument is by Eliezer Yudkowsky (2007):[1]

Suppose you find an unconscious six-year-old girl lying on the train tracks of an active railroad. What, morally speaking, ought you to do in this situation? Would it be better to leave her there to get run over, or to try to save her? How about if a 45-year-old man has a debilitating but nonfatal illness that will severely reduce his quality of life is it better to cure him, or not cure him?

Oh, and by the way: This is not a trick question.

I answer that I would save them if I had the power to do so both the six-year-old on the train tracks, and the sick 45-year-old. The obvious answer isnt always the best choice, but sometimes it is.

I wont be lauded as a brilliant ethicist for my judgments in these two ethical dilemmas. My answers are not surprising enough that people would pay me for them. If you go around proclaiming What does two plus two equal? Four! you will not gain a reputation as a deep thinker. But it is still the correct answer.

If a young child falls on the train tracks, it is good to save them, and if a 45-year-old suffers from a debilitating disease, it is good to cure them. If you have a logical turn of mind, you are bound to ask whether this is a special case of a general ethical principle which says Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad. If so and here we enter into controversial territory we can follow this general principle to a surprising new conclusion: If a 95-year-old is threatened by death from old age, it would be good to drag them from those train tracks, if possible. And if a 120-year-old is starting to feel slightly sickly, it would be good to restore them to full vigor, if possible. With current technology it is not possible. But if the technology became available in some future year given sufficiently advanced medical nanotechnology, or such other contrivances as future minds may devise would you judge it a good thing, to save that life, and stay that debility?

The important thing to remember, which I think all too many people forget, is that it is not a trick question.

Transhumanism is simpler requires fewer bits to specify because it has no special cases. If you believe professional bioethicists (people who get paid to explain ethical judgments) then the rule Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad holds only until some critical age, and then flips polarity. Why should it flip? Why not just keep on with life-is-good? It would seem that it is good to save a six-year-old girl, but bad to extend the life and health of a 150-year-old. Then at what exact age does the term in the utility function go from positive to negative? Why?

As far as a transhumanist is concerned, if you see someone in danger of dying, you should save them; if you can improve someones health, you should. There, youre done. No special cases. You dont have to ask anyones age.

You also dont ask whether the remedy will involve only primitive technologies (like a stretcher to lift the six-year-old off the railroad tracks); or technologies invented less than a hundred years ago (like penicillin) which nonetheless seem ordinary because they were around when you were a kid; or technologies that seem scary and sexy and futuristic (like gene therapy) because they were invented after you turned 18; or technologies that seem absurd and implausible and sacrilegious (like nanotech) because they havent been invented yet. Your ethical dilemma report form doesnt have a line where you write down the invention year of the technology. Can you save lives? Yes? Okay, go ahead. There, youre done...

So that is transhumanism loving life without special exceptions and without upper bound.

Can transhumanism really be that simple? Doesnt that make the philosophy trivial, if it has no extra ingredients, just common sense? Yes, in the same way that the scientific method is nothing but common sense.

Then why have a complicated special name like transhumanism? For the same reason that scientific method or secular humanism have complicated special names. If you take common sense and rigorously apply it, through multiple inferential steps, to areas outside everyday experience, successfully avoiding many possible distractions and tempting mistakes along the way, then it often ends up as a minority position and people give it a special name.

A techno-utopia, as hypothesized by Marshall Brain in a futuristic science-fiction novel titled "Manna", can be seen as a strong arguments for transhumanism. In the utopia, with the aid of science and technology, humans are capable of doing the following:

A techno-dystopia, which is the current, non-transhumanist paradigm, holds the following in store for humans:

Writers in previous generations have often expressed arguments in favour of transhumanist ideas, without using that precise terminology. This includes Benjamin Franklin, the Marquis de Condorcet, Francis Bacon, and many others. See the Prehistory of Transhumanism.

Main: Criticism of transhumanism

This section lists some common criticisms of transhumanism. See Criticism of transhumanism for more discussion of:

Original post:
Transhumanism - H+Pedia - hpluspedia.org

Posthuman or post-human is a concept originating in the fields of science fiction, futurology, contemporary art, and philosophy that literally means a person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human.[1] The concept addresses questions of ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity. Posthumanism is not to be confused with transhumanism (the nanobiotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality.[2] The notion of the posthuman comes up both in posthumanism as well as transhumanism, but it has a special meaning in each tradition. In 2017, Penn State University Press in cooperation with Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and James Hughes (sociologist) established the "Journal of Posthuman Studies" in which all aspects of the concept "posthuman" can be analysed.[3]

In critical theory, the posthuman is a speculative being that represents or seeks to re-conceive the human. It is the object of posthumanist criticism, which critically questions humanism, a branch of humanist philosophy which claims that human nature is a universal state from which the human being emerges; human nature is autonomous, rational, capable of free will, and unified in itself as the apex of existence. Thus, the posthuman position recognizes imperfectability and disunity within him or herself, and understands the world through heterogeneous perspectives while seeking to maintain intellectual rigour and a dedication to objective observations. Key to this posthuman practice is the ability to fluidly change perspectives and manifest oneself through different identities. The posthuman, for critical theorists of the subject, has an emergent ontology rather than a stable one; in other words, the posthuman is not a singular, defined individual, but rather one who can "become" or embody different identities and understand the world from multiple, heterogeneous perspectives.[4]

Critical discourses surrounding posthumanism are not homogeneous, but in fact present a series of often contradictory ideas, and the term itself is contested, with one of the foremost authors associated with posthumanism, Manuel de Landa, decrying the term as "very silly."[5] Covering the ideas of, for example, Robert Pepperell's The Posthuman Condition, and Hayles's How We Became Posthuman under a single term is distinctly problematic due to these contradictions.

The posthuman is roughly synonymous with the "cyborg" of A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway.[citation needed] Haraway's conception of the cyborg is an ironic take on traditional conceptions of the cyborg that inverts the traditional trope of the cyborg whose presence questions the salient line between humans and robots. Haraway's cyborg is in many ways the "beta" version of the posthuman, as her cyborg theory prompted the issue to be taken up in critical theory.[6] Following Haraway, Hayles, whose work grounds much of the critical posthuman discourse, asserts that liberal humanismwhich separates the mind from the body and thus portrays the body as a "shell" or vehicle for the mindbecomes increasingly complicated in the late 20th and 21st centuries because information technology puts the human body in question. Hayles maintains that we must be conscious of information technology advancements while understanding information as "disembodied," that is, something which cannot fundamentally replace the human body but can only be incorporated into it and human life practices.[7]

The idea of post-posthumanism (post-cyborgism) has recently been introduced.[8][9][10][11][12] This body of work outlines the after-effects of long-term adaptation to cyborg technologies and their subsequent removal, e.g., what happens after 20 years of constantly wearing computer-mediating eyeglass technologies and subsequently removing them, and of long-term adaptation to virtual worlds followed by return to "reality."[13][14] and the associated post-cyborg ethics (e.g. the ethics of forced removal of cyborg technologies by authorities, etc.).[15]

Posthuman political and natural rights have been framed on a spectrum with animal rights and human rights.[16] Posthumanism broadens the scope of what it means to be a valued life form and to be treated as such (in contrast to certain life forms being seen as less-than and being taken advantage of or killed off); it calls for a more inclusive definition of life, and a greater moral-ethical response, and responsibility, to non-human life forms in the age of species blurring and species mixing. [I]t interrogates the hierarchic ordering and subsequently exploitation and even eradication of life forms. [17]

According to transhumanist thinkers, a posthuman is a hypothetical future being "whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards."[18] Posthumans primarily focus on cybernetics, the posthuman consequent and the relationship to digital technology. The emphasis is on systems. Transhumanism does not focus on either of these. Instead, transhumanism focuses on the modification of the human species via any kind of emerging science, including genetic engineering, digital technology, and bioengineering.[19]

Posthumans could be completely synthetic artificial intelligences, or a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence, or uploaded consciousnesses, or the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound technological augmentations to a biological human, i.e. a cyborg. Some examples of the latter are redesigning the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, life extension therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable or implanted computers, and cognitive techniques.[18]

As used in this article, "posthuman" does not necessarily refer to a conjectured future where humans are extinct or otherwise absent from the Earth. As with other species who speciate from one another, both humans and posthumans could continue to exist. However, the apocalyptic scenario appears to be a viewpoint shared among a minority of transhumanists such as Marvin Minsky[citation needed] and Hans Moravec, who could be considered misanthropes, at least in regard to humanity in its current state. Alternatively, others such as Kevin Warwick argue for the likelihood that both humans and posthumans will continue to exist but the latter will predominate in society over the former because of their abilities.[20] Recently, scholars have begun to speculate that posthumanism provides an alternative analysis of apocalyptic cinema and fiction, often casting vampires, werewolves and even zombies as potential evolutions of the human form and being.[21]

Many science fiction authors, such as Greg Egan, H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Bruce Sterling, Frederik Pohl, Greg Bear, Charles Stross, Neal Asher, Ken MacLeod, Peter F. Hamilton and authors of the Orion's Arm Universe,[22] have written works set in posthuman futures.

A variation on the posthuman theme is the notion of a "posthuman god"; the idea that posthumans, being no longer confined to the parameters of human nature, might grow physically and mentally so powerful as to appear possibly god-like by present-day human standards.[18] This notion should not be interpreted as being related to the idea portrayed in some science fiction that a sufficiently advanced species may "ascend" to a higher plane of existencerather, it merely means that some posthuman beings may become so exceedingly intelligent and technologically sophisticated that their behaviour would not possibly be comprehensible to modern humans, purely by reason of their limited intelligence and imagination.[23]

More here:
Posthuman - Wikipedia