Ye shall become like gods

I was a transhumanist long before I had ever heard of that word.

As far back as I can remember I dreamed of being more than I was. In my youth, those dreams were appropriately juvenile. The fantasies of a little boy ensconced in too much bad science fiction. But as I grew, it became something more. When I first heard of a philosophy that sought to use of technology to enhance and transcend the human condition, I thought I had found my intellectual home. It has influenced my desire to go into science and shaped my early research interests. It has driven me to where I am today and continues to direct my goals and decisions.

But homes are funny things. Stay in one place long enough and you begin to notice every crack in the wall. Every leaky pipe and loose floorboard. You start to wonder if the gaps and holes can be fixed with enough duct tape and spackle, or if the time has finally come to cut your losses and move on.

For years I have skulked around the edges of what passes for the transhumanist “movement”. Never a player, but always an observer. I’ve seen many attempts to mold and organize the various parts of transhumanism into a coherent whole. The Extropians, the WTA (now Humanity+), the US Transhumanist Party, and a dozen more who’s names I barely remember. At their best, they provided a scaffolding for a small community of like-minded individuals. At their worst, they were nothing more than a gimmicky sideshow. But ultimately, none have made more than a ripple in the long-term trajectory of technological progress.

I do not blame the organizations themselves. I blame us. It is a tall task to make bricks without straw and no group can accomplish anything if its members lack the desire to do so. Recently, I have started to give more thought as to why we have been so unsuccessful in building a true movement out of our erstwhile community.

Spend anytime at all in the places where self-professed transhumanists tend to congregate and you will notice certain trends. Enthusiastic discussion of mind uploading, immortality, cybernetic implants, and all the wonderful things that will happen when those technological miracles are available to us. Speculation about what life will be like for us when we are living in a science-fiction utopia. At least one person will reference the WH40K quote “From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh…”

What you will not find, as a rule, is anyone actually doing anything.

I have come to believe that this apathy, this malaise of idle speculation and navel-gazing daydreaming, is a symptom of a deeper rot within transhumanism’s philosophical foundation. A gaping hole in the center of our supposed worldview. Namely, that we have not properly defined the reason why we should be transhumanists at all. We talk of enhancement. Of using technology to transcend the human condition. But why should we seek that?

For those who already self-identify as transhumanists, the very idea of asking that question may seem ridiculous. Are not the promised benefits of technological advancement reason enough? Do we actually need to justify our desires for longer life, stronger bodies, and greater intelligence?

Yes. I believe that we do.

Philosophy, originally, was not an academic discipline reserved for scholars fortified in ivory towers. To ascribe to a philosophy was to live it. The philosophical schools of the ancients provided an all-encompassing world view. They taught a metaphysics, an epistemology, and above all a moral code. They informed, and were expected to inform, how a person lived their life. One judged a Stoic not by whether they had read all of Zeno, but by examining whether the manner in which they conducted their life adhered to Stoic values.

In searching for what is lacking in transhumanism as a philosophy of the future, we might start by comparing ourselves, ironically, to the ancients. Would Plato and Aristotle recognize us as a true philosophical school? Do any modern transhumanists actually live their philosophy?

The very question is laughable. For us to live it, it would have to ask something of us. It would have to proscribe, to instruct. To say, “This is what is required of you. This is what you need do to live your life in accordance with your principles.” The only action required of a modern transhumanist is to idlely daydream about the supposed wonders that will one day be at our fingertips.

There is a passivity to modern day transhumanism. A sense of waiting, with bated breath, for the gifts the gods of technology will one day bestow upon us. We are less a philosophical community than an apocalyptic religious group. The Singularity was once contemptuously described as The Rapture of the Nerds. Look at us and tell me, with a straight face, that we do not await our Rapture with as much static anticipation as any other of the faithful.

What can be done about this? Is it even possible to construct a true transhumanist philosophy that can infuse our lives? Recently, I have begun to consider what that might actually look like. A philosophy that takes the central premise of technological transcendence and asks “What do we do with this belief? What does this ask of us in terms of how life?”

We might start with pragmatic issues. We believe that technology should be used to expand our capabilities and, ultimately, to transcend the human condition. If so, then why do we wait for manna from heaven and ignore the technologies already available to us? We claim to believe in the power of technology to enhance us. But what do our actions say?

Ask a group of transhumanists if they think life extension is a worthwhile goal and all will answer in the affirmative. Ask if they think money should be spent (not their own, of course) pursuing advancements in cryonics or unlocking the molecular mechanisms behind the aging process, and they will nod their heads vigorously. Ask how many have a dedicated exercise program or know anything about their nutritional intake and you will more likely be met with blank stares.

Intelligence amplification is a common fantasy. Enhancements to make us smarter, more focused, and to accelerate our learning. Many will eagerly speak of the details of their (completely ineffectual) nootropic stack. But how many engage in meditation, arguably the oldest and best method we have for training and enhancing the mind? How many utilize programs for accelerated learning via spaced repetition schedules or build their own personal tutors with AI? For that matter, how many enhance their intelligence by simply learning things (mathematics, coding, languages) that will improve their problem solving and reasoning skills?

I realize this may all seem incredibly mundane. But perhaps that is my point. A true philosophy must speak to the mundane. To the simple, boring, everyday activities that, one by one and brick by brick, lay the foundation of our lives. For a philosophy grounded in the use of technology, that means it must speak to how we are using the means already at our disposal. From the moment we wake we are constantly interacting with our tools. So let us ask, are we using them as our beliefs would seem to require us to? Are we are using them to enhance or to debase ourselves?

Looking at the world today, I see little evidence of the former. technology that to our ancestors might as well have been magic is already at our fingertips and for too many of us it serves little purpose except to placate our basest desires. We have stolen fire from the gods and harnessed its might to wile away our hours watching 20 second clips on TikTok. We have summoned silica spirits of near omniscience, yet rather than using them to improve our thinking we seem to be more interested in using the to replace our need for thinking. Our bodies, our interface with the world around us, are too often fit only for sloth and mindless consumption. If, as our critics so often say, technology is our god, then we are failing in our worship of it.

But if so, then that leads back to our still unanswered and most important question: why should we do this? The crux of any philosophical system is the question “Towards what goal should my life’s efforts be directed and why?”

I will not claim I have the final answer. I am still at the beginning this journey. But I have come to one conclusion. For me, if there is any point to transhumanism as a philosophy, any actual reason for us to seek and advocate for the potential wonders that new technologies will bring us, it is this: to expand the boundaries of potential human experience.

Look at the history of technology and you will see that this is what it has always done for us. Fire allowed us to push back the darkness that enveloped us and see what was previously hidden. Clothing allowed us to walk in frozen lands our hairless forms were not suited for. Tools of stone gave us claws of our own to match the beasts we fought with.

With the development of language — ah, language — we truly began to become something new. For the first time, we could start to categorize the world around us. To identify patterns and (more importantly) to name them. Just as important, we finally could come to truly know, through story and conversation, the mind of another human. And with the written word, our conversation partners could span millennia.

After language and writing, mathematics is perhaps our greatest tool. Before its development we could speak to each other. After, we could speak to the cosmos in its own tongue. It is the foundation of our most advanced technological brilliance; the reason we have walked on the moon and split the atom.

Each of these advances opened new vistas for us, as individuals and as a species. They expanded the horizons we could see and the types of beings we could become. The tools we now have are no different, but only if we use them properly.

For it is not always true that technology extends our reach. Indeed, I have written before of my belief that the assumption of a new technology inevitably weakens us in some way, by disincentivizing us from developing comparable natural abilities and breeding reliance on our own creations. If technology enhances us, it does so because the benefits of its use outweigh the negatives; because the new realms of thought and space it allows us to explore are worth the sacrifice.

To make that judgement requires not blind belief in the power of exponential trends, not the careless and carefree embrace of every shiny new bauble, a more considered approach to our use of our tools. Technology can enhance our capabilities, or it can remove the need for us to develop our capabilities in the first place. With it we can build a ladder to the heavens or summon the very spirits that will drag us in the abyss.

I am disillusioned with transhumanism. But I am not yet ready to abandon it. I do not believe its promise is false, but I do believe that we have failed to live it truly. We are so focused on what we wish to become that we forget to live in the act of becoming. In the future, I plan to explore this topic more to see whether or not what is good in our philosophy can be salvaged.

I fear that without a more solid foundation, our belief in the power and potential of technology will leave us adrift in a sea of exponentially increasing slop. Without a true understanding of why and how we should use our tools, and how to select which tools truly serve our purposes, we leave ourselves vulnerable to being led by nose like beasts of the field; dragged this way and that by consumerist trends and the goals of those with more power and resources to shape the direction of technological progression.

But that requires that each of look at our lives with clear eyes. For how we interact with technology in these relatively mundane times is how we will interact with the truly god-like powers we may one day confront.