Transhumanism: Man, Machine, and the Quest
for Godhood
BY: VISHNUJANA DASA
Jul 11, 2012 — USA (SUN) — This article will appear as the first in a series entitled "Technocracy: The Scientific Takeover of Humanity".
"Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of man as god…" – C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945
"No more gods, no more faith, no more timid holding back. Let us blast out of our old forms, our ignorance, our weakness, and our mortality. The future belongs to posthumanity." – Max More, On Becoming Posthuman, 1994
What is Transhumanism?
Transhumanism is the belief that through the use of technology, man will "transcend" the limits of his conditioning - his mortal coil - and will become something "post-human" - a god essentially.
Throughout the ages, the Puranas tell us of many stories of great demigods, sages and demons who've tried to transcend the limits of their material existence, i.e. birth, death, old age, and disease. In the modern era, man's technological development has been to such a rapid extent that many envision him eventually merging with machine, and by so doing, "transcending" his current conditioning. Man, to the Transhumanist, is only in the beginning phases of what he is ultimately meant to become.
There is nothing essentially wrong with the idea of human improvement, and indeed, devotees of Lord Krishna would agree that the human form of life is the platform from which to attain transcendence. But as devotees try to attain freedom from Samsara by devotion to God, the Transhumanists want to become God (Hiranyakashipu and Ravana quickly come to mind). Indeed, they recently stated that this will be the "new spirituality, the new metaphysics of man."
When compared to his ancestors, contemporary man already is virtually a god. He can travel the world in but a few hours through the air; he can travel into space, communicate around the globe instantly; he can command vast amounts of knowledge at his fingertips, and obliterate cities in but moments. Indeed, man has stolen Prometheus' fire.
Srila Prabhupada once mentioned that a German visiting India said he wasn't seeking yogic powers, because modern technology had already achieved such yogic siddhis: "A German scholar once said that the so-called yoga perfections had already been achieved by the modern scientists, and so he was not concerned with them. He intelligently went to India to learn how he could understand his eternal relationship with the Supreme Lord by means of bhakti-yoga, devotional service." (Nectar of Devotion 1: 'Happiness in Krishna Consciousness') We can travel through the water with subs, through the air with planes, and through the ground with drills, etc. The Transhumanist movement however, plans to go beyond these "siddhis"; they plan to solve all of the age old problems plaguing man since time immemorial: Birth, death, old age, disease- and even our confinement to planet earth:
"Transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values." (Max More 1990)
Humanityplus.org adds, "Transhumanism seeks the ethical use of these and other speculative technologies. Our theoretical interests focus on posthuman topics of the singularity, extinction risk, and mind uploading (whole brain emulation and substrate-independent minds)."
The term ‘Transhumanism' was coined by biologist and Darwinist Julian Huxley. He defined it as "man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature."
Julian Huxley was the grandson of the evolutionist H.T. Huxley, and brother of Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World.
Transhumanism is nothing new however. The idea that man will become a god or God is an old one. From the examples of Hiranyakashipu and Ravana in the Srimad-Bhagavatam, Mayavada philosophy in ancient India, to the mystery religions and epics of the ancient Middle East and Greece, up to the Alchemists of Medieval and renaissance Europe, man has been on the quest for Godhood since time immemorial. Max More, one of the most outspoken advocates of Transhumanism, writes: "We have achieved two of the three alchemists' dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly. Immortality is next." (On Becoming Posthuman)
Global Future 2045: Moscow, Russia
Transhumanism is a highly organized and well financed movement meant to radically alter the very nature of who we. As stated above, it alleges to transform our physical biology, our minds, goals of life, and spirituality. Some prominent Transhumanists include Bill Gates, Marvin Minsky, Bill Clinton, Steven Hawking, and many of Silicon Valley's most influential business leaders and minds, to name a few (Bill Joy, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, published an article in 2000 titled "Why the future doesn't need us").
This past February, the Global Future 2045 International Congress, was held in Moscow. It dubbed itself as a ‘strategic social movement,' with aims to ‘evolve humanity' and extend life towards the everlasting. The group admittedly met to draft a "resolution that will be submitted to the United Nations demanding the implementation of committees to discuss life extension Avatar projects as a necessary tool in the preservation of humankind."
"Avatar projects" refers to projects in which a human brain and mind will be transferred to an "avatar", meaning a robot. The robots, they say in the video on their homepage, are foreseeably developed by 2025, and by 2040-2050, they eventually become "…bodies ‘made of nano-robots' that can take any shape, as well as hologram bodies."
The Mystery of Consciousness
The Transhumanists in their video anticipate that these technologies will help them to understand consciousness. The mind and consciousness itself are still a great mystery to most modern scientists. Lord Krishna states in the Gita (2.25), "…the soul is invisible, inconceivable and immutable." The scientists can at best infer the existence of the soul: "As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change." (Bhagavad=gita 2.13)
Sadaputa dasa (Richard L. Thompson) has written many books and given many lectures on the subject matter (i.e. transferring the mind to avatars, uploading the mind into a computer, etc.). If you've ever read his books or heard his lectures, you would have found a large body of opinions and reasons given by him and many other prominent scientists as to why many of these concepts are implausible. Sadaputa points out that even if they were possible, scientists estimate that it would take centuries to program a machine to carry out the complex processing of the human brain or to map out how the brain itself processes things (there are varying estimates from 1014 to 5 x 1014 synapses (100 to 500 trillion) in the average adult brain). Referring to artificial neural networks (that would be used in Artificial intelligence such as robots), A. K. Dewdney, a former Scientific American columnist, wrote in 1997, "Although neural nets do solve a few toy problems, their powers of computation are so limited that I am surprised anyone takes them seriously as a general problem-solving tool." (Dewdney, p. 82)
Criticisms
"Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of man as god…" – C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945
From the quote above we can see that the famed author C.S. Lewis denounced Transhumanism as early as 1945 in his novel That Hideous Strength:
"What should they [the scientific technocrats] regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective byproduct of the physical and economic situations of men?…From the point of view which is accepted in hell, the whole history of our earth had led up to this moment." (p. 156-7)
The relative morality Lewis is referring to here is that of the technocrats, who plan to destroy the "retrogressive, unintelligent population…now a dead-weight." (p. 156-7)
This reminds one of Lord Krishna's statement in the Bhagavad-gita (16.9): "Following such conclusions, the demoniac, who are lost to themselves and who have no intelligence, engage in unbeneficial, horrible works meant to destroy the world." In his purport to this verse, Srila Prabhupada says, "Such materialistic inventions are considered to be advancement of human civilization, but the result is that people grow more and more violent and more and more cruel, cruel to animals and cruel to other human beings. They have no idea how to behave toward one another."
George Orwell, C.S. Lewis' famous contemporary, commented on Lewis' book That Hideous Strength. His commentary was published in the Manchester Evening News in 1945 with the headline "THE SCIENTISTS TAKE OVER." Orwell wrote,
"All superfluous life is to be wiped out, all natural forces tamed, the common people are to be used as slaves and vivisection subjects by the ruling caste of scientists, who even see their way to conferring immortal life upon themselves. Man, in short, is to storm the heavens and overthrow the gods, or even to become a god himself…Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realizable."
Srila Prabhupada also comments on such dreams in one of his Bhagavad-gita Purports (16.8):
…They take it for granted that all manifestation of diversity is a display of ignorance. Just as in a dream we may create so many things which actually have no existence, so when we are awake we shall see that everything is simply a dream. But factually, although the demons say that life is a dream, they are very expert in enjoying this dream. And so, instead of acquiring knowledge, they become more and more implicated in their dreamland.
While it would be wonderful to be able to download the entire Vedabase into one's memory, or be able to have a technologically enhanced body that could engage in devotional service twenty-fours daily without having to break down, the reality is that you can never program devotion into someone's brain, or love into someone's heart. Moreover, the demigods already enjoy most of these theoretical innovations-and beyond. There is a reason though, that the demigods pray for a human birth on earth…
They are done being dazzled and implicated by Maya's dreamland.
