The transhumanism debate

[Mister D]

She laughs a lot, too, at what she says, as a way to avoid being offensive, but here also avoiding predicting the future, I think. Not even Bohan, who champions transhumanism, knows what it will bring.

I think this transhumanism goes beyond personal autonomy into natural autonomy, a complete break of man from his nature to something created by man. Harrington early on spoke of the Classical Greek warnings about such hubris.

I think they're intimately connected but I was speaking only to her comments regarding faith, reproduction and "evolutionary feedback".

It is hubris with some intellectuals but I think it's simply blind faith in science for a majority.

[Chris]

I think they're intimately connected but I was speaking only to her comments regarding faith, reproduction and "evolutionary feedback".

It is hubris with some intellectuals but I think it's simply blind faith in science for a majority.

Blind faith in science, just to repeat for emphasis.

[Chris]

I think here post-humanism is transhumanism and this piece is on the aim of reactionary conservative humanism, if such a seeming oxymoron can be said to exist.

Conservative Humanism & the Challenge of the Post-Humanist Age

Since humanism has been the core of the Western tradition through the centuries, the emergence of anti-humanism and post-humanism represents an inflection point of our civilizational crisis. In confronting this crisis, conservative humanism aims not to erase the positive achievements of modern humanism, but to graft them back onto their roots where they can draw vitality from life-giving tradition.

Is humanity coming to an end? Is the great drama of human history drawing to a close? One could be forgiven for thinking so. The misanthropic narratives of “post-humanism” and “trans-humanism “are very much in vogue. Yuval Noah Harari—one of the most acclaimed and popular authors of our time, not least among Silicon Valley elites—writes that technology is in the process of making humans beings obsolete:

For thousands of years history was full of technological, economic, social and political upheavals. Yet one thing remained constant: humanity itself…. However, once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end and a completely new kind of process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend. (Harari, Homo Deus, 46).

For misanthropes, post-humanism is something to be earnestly embraced. Anti-natalists philosophers call for the voluntary extinction of the human race as a blight upon nature and its animals. There are surely others as excited as 20th-century eugenicists about the prospect of using machines or gene-editing to take control of human evolution and produce a “higher” species of supermen. But for many, post-humanism provokes revulsion against the entire trajectory of Western modernity. In the spirit of romantic protest, the Russian right-wing anti-liberal philosopher denounces the “…properly postmodern, post-humanism, promoting cybernetics, genetic modification, cybernetics, and chimeras” (Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory, 75).

...The possibility of reducing man to a consciously designed product was already envisioned by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In a 1969 interview with Richard Wisser, Heidegger spoke of:

… what is today developed as biophysics: that we may soon have the possibility to create the human, that is … regarding his organic nature…to construct him just as we need him to be.

Heidegger´s main point was that technology was a force that had entirely slipped beyond human control; it was instead becoming an alien force threatening to subordinate humanity to itself:

I see in technology, namely its essence… that the human being is standing in the range of influence of a power, which challenges him, and in regard to this power he is no longer free.

This contemporary vision of man enslaved to the machine could not be further from the original humanist vision of those great pioneers of modern technological civilization some four centuries ago. Sir. Francis Bacon famously imagined that the knowledge of nature opened by inductive science would lead to “… the relief of man´s estate…” (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, I.v.11), while Rene Descartes believed that by science “… we would render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.” (Descartes, Discourse on Method, VI). How is it that this modern project which envisioned the development of technology as a tool to establish human mastery over a domesticated nature culminated in a vision where the tool becomes the master? How in short did the project of humanism culminate in post-humanism?...

The rest of the article tries to answer.

[Chris]

Came across this today, The Psychology of Digital Dehumanization, a review of Antón Barba-Kay's A Web of Our Own Making:

...Digital Disembodiment

The optimal means of keeping our attention is continually to show us something new, which digital technology excels at because it is incorporeal and immaterial. Barba-Kay observes that digital objects are always on screen “for the time being.” This makes them different from artifacts made by craftsmen or words printed on paper pages, the corporeality of which substantiates their intention to stand the test of time. It is easy for corporations and “content creators” to provide something new when the things provided are not really things. Images displayed on screens have no lasting presence, and thus no lasting effect on viewers. There is no canon of online art or online literature comparable in quality to our enduring Western and Eastern canons. Our identities, money, and personal effects are dematerialized, “hosted” in password-protected “clouds” that exist only in the digital ether. What is valuable to us is now so formless as to permit editing and even deletion.

As digital technology habituates us to the moral and social physics of incorporeality, we lose touch with our own embodied nature. Seeming starts to matter more than being. We become avatars of our online selves rather than the other way around, identifying ourselves with our “personal brands,” gorging like disembodied pigs on our media “feeds,” and “binging” shamelessly on digital “content.” The internet’s paradoxical status as a place that is both nowhere and global lulls us into believing we are not bounded by our geographical locations or local borders. The language of local politics abounds in digital rhetoric (forum, site, home, community, marketplace, public square), and it is a sad reminder of the warmth of real places and the cold loneliness of their digital facsimiles. Conceptions of political form (nations, regions, cities) become confused in our minds as citizens become “netizens” and our bounded common life expands into a worldwide web. Fewer of us engage in the selfless compromises and tense negotiations required for genuine community building. Political participation means clicking to vote or changing your profile picture in protest, then refreshing the page to see how good it looks....