So I had a good convo with an acquaintance of mine today while I was about to leave the coffee shop I had spent a few hours working in. He holds regular transhumanist meetings with a couple of friends of his but is a rather thoughtful guy. We had a mutual discussion about the state of affairs within the transhumanist world that brought together a lot of thoughts I’ve been having.

I’ve started doing the first of what I hope to be a longer series of textual and conversation based analyses of various discourses around technology and I am seeing a lot of the classic transhumanist themes and strategies coming through quite strongly even in common discourse on the Internet. I have begun to see how they are developing a certain outlook on the world and way of speaking that I find rather troublesome. To be clear, I find the the transhuman movement to be particularly important for my own reasons–but these reasons do not seem to be the reasons that most people have. My philosophical reasons for pursuing these thoughts differ quite drastically, as does my feelings on the rhetorical and contextual methods used to discuss them. Although I am trying to separate myself from making judgments on the stuff I am studying (and failing), I fear that the transhumanist movement, as it is forming now, is flawed and dangerous. Unfortunately, the leaders of the movement (Ray Kurzweil, Audrey DeGrey, Robert Frietas, even the more serious Nick Bostram) in many ways fit right into this mentality and discourse that I am talking about. They created it.

What precisely am I referring to? A few things:

1) The absolute insane propensity for scenario building. And I mean every one of these people do it.  A large part of their discourse involves constantly building and cycling narratives about what is and isn’t going to happen. This is important and distressing because A) they all speak as if they know what they are talking about and assume a psuedo-scientific narrative style, even naming objects and attempting to integrate their little knowledge of science into the story. B) This knowledge is usually rather limited and often has holes in it. Scientists who do not have the knowledge and authority to speak on topics beyond their field feel free to anyways. C) They often skip by enormous steps in either logical or scientific progress–such as speculating about nanomachines when we haven’t even created many viable carbon nanotube applications. I read one comment of a guy who was demanding we create a way to make bricks from everyday dust and dirt so we’ll have a way to have materials in our space colonies–as if that is the biggest obstacle to space colonization for us.  D) This creates a melding of science fiction and nonfiction, so that they essentially become the same. This is dangerous on many levels, most importantly because it toys with the reality of practical technologies and assumes that speculation is what is going to come about. When fiction starts leaking into reality, how will we make good, sane policy judgments? For example, how could we make good regulation of nanoparticles if our legislators are thinking they’ve got nanobots around the corner?

2) My second problem lies in the way that traditional ideas and mentalities have continued on into this mindset. These people want to live forever. They want to become semi-gods. It is the same mindset that we’ve had for ages that consists of basically two things: A) Progress is essential and is measured by the systematic replacement of the old with the new and B) Our bodies suck and we ought to do whatever we can to replace/control/manipulate them. These subsume an even deeper conception of  a world in which the purpose of life is to survive longer and live more comfortably in the process.  My question is this: WHY? Why do you want to live forever? What will you do then? If you can’t live with this world, what makes you think you’ll be able to live in this futuristic one? If you aren’t satisfied with this body what makes you think you’ll be satisfied with an enhanced one? The philosophical conceptions that are driving these people are the very ones that, when their end is achieved, will implode and leave them meaningless.  They’ll have their “transcendence” of sorts but for what?

3)  This is the other thing. They pretend as if they know what these things will be like. And even though they still know so little about the actual nature of what it would mean to live forever or what substance our bodies would have to take, they desire it anyways. And not just living forever. In this discourse I constantly hear ppl say things like “I can’t wait to upgrade my brain!”  But they have no idea what it would be like, how it would change their experience or screw with their whole existence. Its an enormous leap to make prior to knowing the nature of the stuff

4) This is all from the insane trust in science that these people have. Science will figure it out. Science will get us there, no matter what. It is an insane technophilia driven by the insistence that, with enough time, we’ll iron out all the details. But we better hurry up cause the technology needs to be here before I die. This makes it like a race to the black abyss–but its ok, science will catch us.

Look, we don’t know what is going to happen or what it is going to be like. Yes, some amount of scenario building and speculation is needed. Yes, its fun. But the convoluted reality, the twisted up ideals of classic christian struggle over these evil bodies, this psuedo-spiritual quest for the final ideal–these things completely miss the substance of what could be a true transhuman movement. If they want to be transhuman they have to stop thinking like normal humans. And they can do that today. Its part of what Nietzsche was getting at before we took him and twisted his ideals all to hell. More intelligent, smart, careful, critical creators of value.  Technology has already done enough to us today. We don’t need to be talking so much about this uncertain and theoretical future. The best thing we can do to bridge ourselves to that future, and guide and control it and make it what we want and not what forces beyond our control dictate, is to look at our society now and adjust our rhetoric and philosophies to fit this changing world, as we can make sense of it in the present. This, I believe, will yield a transhuman discourse, but one vastly different from the sort that circulates now.