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Transhumanism
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Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international and intellectual
movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and
creating widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual,
physical, and psychological capacities. Transhumanist thinkers study the
potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome
fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics of using such technologies.
The most common thesis is that human beings may eventually be able to
transform themselves into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded
from the natural condition as to merit the label posthuman.
The contemporary meaning of the term transhumanism was foreshadowed by
one of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught "new concepts of
the human" at The New School in the 1960s, when he began to identify people
who
adopt
technologies,
lifestyles
and
worldviews
"transitional"
to
posthumanity as "transhuman".
This hypothesis would lay the intellectual groundwork for the British
philosopher Max More to begin articulating the principles of transhumanism as
a futurist philosophy in 1990 and organizing in California an intelligentsia that
has since grown into the worldwide transhumanist movement.
The year 1990 is seen as a "fundamental shift" in human existence by the
transhuman community, as the first gene therapy trial, the first designer
babies,[8] as well as the mind-augmenting World Wide Web all emerged in that
year. In many ways, one could argue the conditions that will eventually lead to
the Singularity were set in place by these events in 1990.
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Influenced by seminal works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a
transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from
a wide range of perspectives including philosophy and religion. Transhumanism
has been characterized by one critic, Francis Fukuyama, as among the world's
most dangerous ideas, to which Ronald Bailey countered that it is rather the
"movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative and
idealistic aspirations of humanity".
History
According to Nick Bostrom, transcendentalist impulses have been expressed at
least as far back as in the quest for immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh, as
well as in historical quests for the Fountain of Youth, the Elixir of Life, and
other efforts to stave off aging and death.
There is debate about whether the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche can be
considered an influence on transhumanism despite its exaltation of the
"Übermensch" (overman or superman), due to its emphasis on selfactualization, rather than technological transformation. The transhumanist
philosophies by Max More and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner have been influenced
strongly by Nietzschean thinking.
Early transhumanist thinking
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Fundamental ideas of transhumanism were first advanced in 1923 by the British
geneticist J. B. S. Haldane in his essay Daedalus: Science and the Future, which
predicted that great benefits would come from applications of advanced
sciences to human biology—and that every such advance would first appear to
someone as blasphemy or perversion, "indecent and unnatural". In particular, he
was interested in the development of the science of eugenics, ectogenesis
(creating and sustaining life in an artificial environment) and the application of
genetics to improve human characteristics, such as health and intelligence.
His article inspired academic and popular interest. J. D. Bernal, a
crystallographer at Cambridge, wrote The World, the Flesh and the Devil in
1929, in which he speculated on the prospects of space colonization and radical
changes to human bodies and intelligence through bionic implants and cognitive
enhancement. These ideas have been common transhumanist themes ever since.
The biologist Julian Huxley is generally regarded as the founder of
transhumanism, after he used the term for the title of an influential 1957 article.
(The term itself, however, derives from an earlier 1940 paper by the Canadian
philosopher W. D. Lighthall.) Huxley describes transhumanism in these terms:
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… 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…
The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an
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individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its
entirety, as humanity.
Huxley's definition differs, albeit not substantially, from the one commonly in
use since the 1980s. The ideas raised by these thinkers were explored in the
science fiction of the 1960s, notably in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space
Odyssey, in which an alien artifact grants transcendent power to its wielder.
Japanese Metabolist architects produced a manifesto in 1960 which outlined
goals to "encourage active metabolic development of our society” through
design and technology. In the Material and Man section of the manifesto,
Noboru Kawazoe suggests that:
After several decades, with the rapid progress of communication technology,
every one will have a “brain wave receiver” in his ear, which conveys directly
and exactly what other people think about him and vice versa. What I think will
be known by all the people. There is no more individual consciousness, only the
will of mankind as a whole.
Artificial intelligence and the technological singularity
The concept of the technological singularity, or the ultra-rapid advent of
superhuman intelligence, was first proposed by the British cryptologist I. J.
Good in 1965:
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Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all
the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of
machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could
design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an
'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.
Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever
make.
Growth of transhumanism
The first self-described transhumanists met formally in the early 1980s at the
University of California, Los Angeles, which became the main center of
transhumanist thought. Here, FM-2030 lectured on his "Third Way" futurist
ideology. At the EZTV Media venue, frequented by transhumanists and other
futurists, Natasha Vita-More presented Breaking Away, her 1980 experimental
film with the theme of humans breaking away from their biological limitations
and the Earth's gravity as they head into space.[28][29] FM-2030 and Vita-More
soon began holding gatherings for transhumanists in Los Angeles, which
included students from FM-2030's courses and audiences from Vita-More's
artistic productions. In 1982, Vita-More authored the Transhumanist Arts
Statement[30] and, six years later, produced the cable TV show TransCentury
Update on transhumanity, a program which reached over 100,000 viewers.
In 1986, Eric Drexler published Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of
Nanotechnology, which discussed the prospects for nanotechnology and
molecular assemblers, and founded the Foresight Institute. As the first non-
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profit organization to research, advocate for, and perform cryonics, the Southern
California offices of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation became a center for
futurists. In 1988, the first issue of Extropy Magazine was published by Max
More and Tom Morrow. In 1990, More, a strategic philosopher, created his own
particular transhumanist doctrine, which took the form of the Principles of
Extropy, and laid the foundation of modern transhumanism by giving it a new
definition:
Transhumanism is a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a
posthuman condition. Transhumanism shares many elements of humanism,
including a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a
valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life. [...] Transhumanism
differs from humanism in recognizing and anticipating the radical alterations in
the nature and possibilities of our lives resulting from various sciences and
technologies [...].
In 1992, More and Morrow founded the Extropy Institute, a catalyst for
networking futurists and brainstorming new memeplexes by organizing a series
of conferences and, more importantly, providing a mailing list, which exposed
many to transhumanist views for the first time during the rise of cyberculture
and the cyberdelic counterculture. In 1998, philosophers Nick Bostrom and
David Pearce founded the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), an
international non-governmental organization working toward the recognition of
transhumanism as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry and public policy. In
2002, the WTA modified and adopted The Transhumanist Declaration. The
Transhumanist FAQ, prepared by the WTA (later Humanity+), gave two formal
definitions for transhumanism:
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 The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and
desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through
applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available
technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human
intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
 The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of
technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human
limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in
developing and using such technologies.
 In possible contrast with other transhumanist organizations, WTA
officials considered that social forces could undermine their futurist
visions and needed to be addressed. A particular concern is the equal
access to human enhancement technologies across classes and borders. In
2006, a political struggle within the transhumanist movement between the
libertarian right and the liberal left resulted in a more centre-leftward
positioning of the WTA under its former executive director James
Hughes. In 2006, the board of directors of the Extropy Institute ceased
operations of the organization, stating that its mission was "essentially
completed". This left the World Transhumanist Association as the leading
international transhumanist organization. In 2008, as part of a rebranding
effort, the WTA changed its name to "Humanity+". In 2012, the
transhumanist Longevity Party had been initiated as an international
union of people who promote the development of scientific and
technological means to significant life extension, that for now has more
than 30 national organisations throughout the world.
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Transhumanist-themed blogs by Zoltan Istvan are in mainstream media on
Psychology Today, Vice's Motherboard, and The Huffington Post. Istvan is the
founder of the Transhumanist Party and is its 2016 US Presidential candidate.
The first transhumanist elected member of a Parliament is Giuseppe Vatinno, in
Italy. In 2015, Vatinno became a member of the Board of Directors of
Humanity+.
Theory
It is a matter of debate whether transhumanism is a branch of posthumanism
and how this philosophical movement should be conceptualised with regard to
transhumanism. The latter is often referred to as a variant or activist form of
posthumanism by its conservative, Christian and progressive critics.
A common feature of transhumanism and philosophical posthumanism is the
future vision of a new intelligent species, into which humanity will evolve and
eventually will supplement or supersede it. Transhumanism stresses the
evolutionary perspective, including sometimes the creation of a highly
intelligent animal species by way of cognitive enhancement (i.e. biological
uplift), but clings to a "posthuman future" as the final goal of participant
evolution.
Nevertheless, the idea of creating intelligent artificial beings (proposed, for
example, by roboticist Hans Moravec) has influenced transhumanism.
Moravec's ideas and transhumanism have also been characterised as a
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"complacent" or "apocalyptic" variant of posthumanism and contrasted with
"cultural posthumanism" in humanities and the arts. While such a "cultural
posthumanism" would offer resources for rethinking the relationships between
humans and increasingly sophisticated machines, transhumanism and similar
posthumanisms are, in this view, not abandoning obsolete concepts of the
"autonomous liberal subject", but are expanding its "prerogatives" into the
realm of the posthuman. Transhumanist self-characterisations as a continuation
of humanism and Enlightenment thinking correspond with this view.
Some secular humanists conceive transhumanism as an offspring of the
humanist freethought movement and argue that transhumanists differ from the
humanist mainstream by having a specific focus on technological approaches to
resolving human concerns (i.e. technocentrism) and on the issue of mortality.
However, other progressives have argued that posthumanism, whether it be its
philosophical or activist forms, amounts to a shift away from concerns about
social justice, from the reform of human institutions and from other
Enlightenment preoccupations, toward narcissistic longings for a transcendence
of the human body in quest of more exquisite ways of being.
As an alternative, humanist philosopher Dwight Gilbert Jones has proposed a
renewed Renaissance humanism through DNA and genome repositories, with
each individual genotype (DNA) being instantiated as successive phenotypes
(bodies or lives via cloning, Church of Man, 1978). In his view, native
molecular DNA "continuity" is required for retaining the "self" and no amount
of computing power or memory aggregation can replace the essential "stink" of
our true genetic identity, which he terms "genity". Instead, DNA/genome
stewardship by an institution analogous to the Jesuits' 400 year vigil is a
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suggested model for enabling humanism to become our species' common credo,
a project he proposed in his speculative novel The Humanist - 1000 Summers
(2011), wherein humanity dedicates these coming centuries to harmonizing our
planet and peoples.
The philosophy of transhumanism is closely related to technoself studies, an
interdisciplinary domain of scholarly research dealing with all aspects of human
identity in a technological society focusing on the changing nature of
relationships between humans and technology.
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