The Road to The Machine-Man, Pt. 2

The transhumanist's desire to defeat death is ultimately a futile pursuit

Transhumanism is almost certainly going to become one of the most pressing ethical issues of the 21st century. What is currently a foreign concept to many, will soon force us all to think critically about what it means to be a human, what ‘being made in the image of God’ means, how much of our personhood we allow to be sacrificed to technology, and, most fundamentally, do we have the right to change and enhance what God has declared very good? What the transhumanist desires include: the merging of man and machine; the enhancement of the human body and mind; the alteration of our genetic code; the overcoming of our biological and genetic inheritance¹; and the transcendence of natural limitations. Wendell Berry is likely to be proved right in his prediction:

“the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and those who wish to live as machines.”²

In the previous essay in this series, I looked at how the “transhumanist urge”³ seeks to remove all natural physical and mental limitations we as humans are subjected to. This is because they argue that for humanity to flourish, every limitation must be removed. They even speak of the fundamental human right that is behind this “need for morphological freedom”⁴. The tragedy that the last essay concluded is they are seeking to destroy what has been given to us for our flourishing. These limitations are for our good, it is within their bounds that we work and function at our optimum. Therefore, transhumanists, contrary to their beliefs, are actually working against human flourishing and are creating an environment where environmental destruction, injustice, and vice can proliferate⁵.

There was one limitation, though, that I did not touch on last time. It is the limitation which is the ultimate of all.

Death.

We all know that “Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow.” (Psalm 144:4 ESV) and that death catches up with every one of us. For some of us, this is at the very beginning of our lives. Others of us live for “three scores and ten”. But no matter how long or brief life is - it will end. The transhumanist chafes against this fact, and deep inside they are repulsed. For them, this reality is not a truth to accept but rather a problem that urgently needs solving. And they are going to throw everything behind trying to do so.⁶

In their own words - why

The words of popular author and futurist Noah Yuval Harari epitomise transhumanist thoughts on death when he states in his bestselling book Homo Deus, that death is a “Crime against humanity and total war should be waged against it.”⁷ Harari isn’t the only voice decrying death, Max More, one of the founders of the transhumanist movement, forcefully put in his complaint in his seminal “A Letter to Mother Nature”:

“However, with all due respect, we must say that you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution. You have made us vulnerable to disease and damage. You compel us to age and die - just as we’re beginning to attain wisdom… What you have made us is glorious, yet deeply flawed … We have decided that it is time to amend the human constitution.”⁸

The hatred of death in these statements is stark. There is no question that death is their supreme enemy. Humans are full of ingenuity and potential, ideas and dreams, wisdom and strength. Death puts a total end to this all, depriving humanity of future discoveries, works of art, and acts of love. The transhumanist finds this absolutely intolerable. Total and unrelenting war is the only just response. They firmly believe we can only flourish as humans when we have done away with death, and more, that it is humanity’s fundamental right to remove this ultimate limitation to our flourishing. For the transhumanist, a species as wonderful and full of potential as the human does not deserve to die - and must not die.⁹

How?

Of all the transhumanist’s seemingly sci-fi desires, overcoming death is by far the most far-fetched. How exactly are the transhumanists proposing to achieve this monumental feat? With time, patience, technology, and a good dose of AI. In fact, they would say that they already have good ideas of some promising avenues of research that may defeat death in the future. These range from “mind uploading” where the body may “die”, but the mind (what they would describe as the essence of a person) continues to live on, uploaded into another vessel, to cryogenics where shortly after death, the body is frozen and stored away until technology allows this person to be brought back to life in as close as possible state as to before. Other developments concern reversing the ageing process, and advances in genetically-tailored medical care and gene alteration.

A necessary critique

Time will tell whether this ultimate vision will be reached, but a healthy dose of scepticism is still warranted. Even if the vision is achieved, central questions remain as to whether some of the proposals do indeed prevent the death of the person. For instance, if our personhood is fundamentally embodied, and thus inseparably related to our physical body, simply uploading our mind to a new vessel does not mean that our "person" lives on forever but instead a “digital doppelgänger”¹⁰ of ourselves is what continues to exist (not live).