On Transhumanism

Revised from “1/13/23 – On Transhumanism”

Contemporary cultural movements, such as identity politics and label-making as a result of the progressive soft-sciences, suggest that humanity is approaching a state where the general populace hold an awareness of a ‘shared condition of the soul’. More acutely, we are moving toward ideologies of perfect individuality and a rejection of labels (not as useless in defining phenomena, but as ineffective for describing the essence of a human being).

The most direct example of this being “LGBTQAI+”, a moniker that perfectly highlights the direction of the broader movement and also what is happening to our use of labels. The queer revolution is composed of poorly organized groups which generally accept the same core idea: that identity, sexuality, and preference are a spectrum without (effectively) any discrete unit from end-to-end. This has created an interesting culture where, in order to explain the spectral nature of the axes of identity, we will tend to resort to labelling and drawing lines. It’s little wonder that placing borders onto smoke has turned into many, many lines.

Rejecting the classical binary systems of identity has, for many, collapsed the ‘two bins’ of sex, romance, identity, and preference into many, many bins. All with their own name and intended meaning: asexual, aromantic, bisexual, pansexual, demisexual, polyamorous, men-loving-men, women-loving-women, gay, lesbian, genderfluid, non-binary, agender, cisgender, allosexual, and so on.

Yet we would seem to agree that everything would be simpler and happier if there was no societal desire to label at all. If all people could simply be what they are, then there may fewer sources of suffering in this world. Or, at least, there would be more understanding. (I recommend considering here what you think, and looking up on your own the arguments for both sides on the benefits and drawbacks of accepting labels.)

I believe the current dissection of sexuality and gender identity is the stirring of a greater transhumanist revolution across the world. It stands to reason that further and further we would mince words, label the distinctions, and eventually find that each individual is so perfectly incongruent with the next that we would eventually give up, and come to that final understanding that ‘we are simply what we are’.

What is to stop this revolution of identity sublimation from proceeding beyond sexuality and gender once that apex is reached? I say nothing. There will come a time when the lessons learned in these collective self-discoveries returns a truth to be applied over any number of aspects capable of being discriminated against: that of race, choice of parenthood, heritage, physical ability, mental facility, even a person’s memories and their past.

Let me describe to you an image of a perfect world, never to be achieved by humanity by the nature of our corporeal forms. This utopia belongs to something far beyond us, somewhere else, in another galaxy.

A creature comes into existence and so it is itself. Like humans, it is an island of consciousness out of which (and into which) no information can perfectly transit. It is like you, but it is the “best” version of you for the things it does not have:

It does not have a body. It is not born of others of its kind. From the moment of its presence, there is only it and the impenetrable medium between it and others. It is capable of learning “speech”, that is, a collection of processes through which to probe its surroundings and feel the results of the others around it who also probe. It is not hunted. There is no predator to it there in the medium. There is only the clean space between it and another.

Is it not nearly human? The human of a great utopia on Earth? Maybe. But we will never be rid of our bodies or material needs. We will always be shackled to the electrochemical systems which make the foundation of our consciousness. Theses systems arose by evolution, purely by chance, and so are only “good enough”.

Without the direction of a grand architect, sapience has entered into this universe by accident, and into something so worldly, so animal, that one could wonder why even to have bothered. The perfect condition of consciousness (if confinement to an individual is its natural state), I have described above. In no other way is it free to simply be what it is. Instead, the human condition is the same as that perfection but with the cluttered medium of 13 billion years of slag left by a universe simply doing what it does, and then up popped us.

This slag contains “the rest of it”: our brains evolved by survivor’s bias, our bodies need for sustenance, the world (slowly dying) still lush with the components of our nutrition, the animal instinct which grew alongside our sapience and so, too, shaped the brain, seven-thousand languages, cultures un-numbered, seas and mountains between us all, and an atmosphere slowly strangling us all to death.

That heart of transhumanism, perhaps incorrectly described here versus the common definition, strikes me as the mantra for a combined consolation between each-other, for it is all we have. The human condition is that of victims of the most horrible acts conceived, left so battered, skulls asunder, incapable of perceiving beyond the grasp of their broken fingers and the pain of burst ribs. Near and around us, always, are our friends and family who got it worse than us, and we are all dying very soon. We know that our legs are gone, we dare not look. There is no walking out of here, no one is coming to save us. All we have left are those moments, when you grasp at something moving in front of you, and say to it: “It’s okay. Everything is going to be alright.”

Don’t mistake such a grizzly description as a denunciation of the beauty of life, or the ‘divine’ value of our souls. Of your soul. The beauty here is in the decision, in that terrible place, to say to your fellow man that you love them, you have always loved them. It is an honor to have been here beside you. I am glad that we are friends.

Of course, we can only imagine dying, but I prefer to imagine it as this state of awareness, of presence. When everything ahead of you is gone, and everything you have done will soon be lost and remembered by no-one; All we will have is the pain of our transience in this world, and the people beside us experiencing the same thing.

Suppose instead of pain it was simply the awareness of your mortality, the acceptance of it, and sharing that moment with everyone else. Suppose you don’t need to be dying at all to exist in that way.

What is stopping you now? Can you not, in this moment, think of someone you know and see beneath “the rest of it”? Can you not, in this moment, reach out and tell them that you love them? That you see them? That you are both not alone?

Can you not live now in every moment, as though it were your last?

Where Zen might be the achievement of this state, transhumanism is a Western philosophy of work on existing systems, intending to create opportunities for ourselves to more readily enter this state. Eckhart Tolle describes the final achievement of this work ‘The New Earth’. It is a place not devoid of suffering, but where human awareness is endemic such that we are always prepared to be there for each-other, to help each-other, and to become ourselves through the calling of our souls against the cruelty of fate.