by James Wallace Harris, Saturday, September 22, 2017
Are you a transhumanist? I am not. I reject transhumanism for the same reason I reject religion – both unrealistically crave immortality. The faithful feel their soul will leave their body upon death and move into another dimension. Transhumanists believe technology will someday copy their soul to a machine or clone body. Science has never found any evidence for souls. I’m confident our conscious self-awareness can’t be separated from our bodies. In fact, I believe our body is essential in creating our consciousness.
That said, I find transhumanism to be a fascinating philosophical topic. Transhumanism is a very popular theme in 21st-century science fiction, and a goal embraced by many in our high-tech culture. Religion is the old way people hope to escape death. Transhumanism is the new way of fulfilling that old hope. I think both reject the reality of our finite lives. Transhumanism is just another belief system that lets its believers avoid who we really are.
To Be A Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O’Connell is a book about the future of humans I just finished. O’Connell, a journalist from Dublin traveled the world exploring transhumanistic endeavors by men and women whose goals feel more like science fiction than science. O’Connell is a skeptic of transhumanism, and so am I. However, wherever O’Connell went, he found brilliant, often eccentric people working hard on exciting projects. I thought it would be fun to find links to each of those endeavors and people he describes in the book.
I envy journalists who get to see in person the exciting events and people they write about. That’s why I love a good documentary. Seeing is believing, and O’Connell got to meet many far-out prophets of transhumanism. O’Connell’s book is well worth reading because he applies contextual history and philosophy to a growing belief system emerging our of technological culture. The men and women O’Connell interviews are the John the Baptists of Transhumanism.
Anyone who is interested in the future should enjoy this book, but especially science fiction readers and writers. I’m going to go chapter-by-chapter providing links to what O’Connell writes about. I envy him for being about to wander the globe to check out cutting-edge research.
System Crash
This first chapter deals with death and transhumanism. Transhumanists are people who seek everlasting life with the help of technology and not waiting on any promises from theoretical entities.
An Encounter
- London Futurists
- Dr. Anders Sandberg
- Alberto Rizzoli
- The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler
- Mind uploading
- Future of Humanity Institute – University of Oxford
A Visitation
This was my least favorite chapter, about people who freeze themselves in hopes future medicine might give them life again, or transfer the contents of their brain to a new body or machine. We might eventually invent some kind of suspended animation, but I flat out disbelieve we can copy our conscious minds to another body.
- Alcor Life Extension Foundation
- “The False Science of Cryonics” MIT Technology Review, Michael Hendricks
- FM-2030 – Motherboard
- The Tomorrow People
- Extropy: Journal of Transhumanist Thought
Once Out of Nature
- Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence by Hans Moravec
- The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil
- The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
- “Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap” by Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom
- 3Scan
- De Corpore by Thomas Hobbes
- The Human Brain Project
- Miguel Nicolelis
- The Relativistic Brain by Ronald Cicurel and Miguel A. L. Nicolelis
A Short Note on the Singularity
- The Technological Singularity
- “The Coming Technological Singularity” by Vernor Vinge
- The City of God by St. Augustine
Talkin’ AI Existential Risk Blues
- Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
- MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute
- The Future of Life Institute
- Viktoriya Krakovna
A Short Note on the First Robots
- R.U.R. by Karel Čapek
Mere Machines
- DARPA Robotics Challenge
- Boston Dynamics robots
- Pepper
- “Treatise on Man” by Descartes
- “L’Homme Machine” by Julien Offray de La Mettrie
- Tesla and robots
Biology and Its Discontents
- Grinders and Biohackers
- Grindhouse Wetware
- Biohack.me
- Tim Cannon
- Practical transhumanists
- Qualified Self
- Kevin Warwick and Project Cyborg
- Norbert Weiner and Cybernetics
- “A Cyber Manifesto” by Donna Haraway
- Cyborgs in Space
- The Pentagon’s Brain by Anne Jacobsen
- Brain-Computer Interfaces
- Stelarc
- The Ship of Theseus and Identity
Faith
- First Things – Wesley J. Smith
- H+ Magazine
- Transhumanism and Religion
- “On the Marionette Theater” by Heinrich von Kleist
- Terasem – Jason Xu
- Martine Rothblatt
Please Solve Death
- Life Extension Foundation
- Peter Thiel
- SENS Research Foundation
- Aubrey de Grey
- Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
- Google Calico
- Laura Deming
The Wanderlodge of Eternal Life
JWH
Wow James, a prodigious amount of work. I just read Egan’s Wang’s Carpet and was wondering how one would describe the two branches of humanity he described. I realize they would probably be Transhumanists. I am very tempted to get O’Connell’s book and use your links to follow along. Thanks for all your work I really appreciate the lists and things you share with us.
Regards
Guy
Many science fiction stories deal with transhumanistic concepts without using the label. I’m not positive, but the transhumanists might have gotten their ideas from science fiction first.
I read a bit on one of your links and the Wikipedia page, and their ideas most definitely did originate from science fiction.I’ve never taken science fiction, as I assume you haven’t, that literally or so narrowly.I have taken it very seriously yes, as a creative form of writing that pushes the boundaries of modern fiction, but that has been under-appreciated it seems by these people who merely want to treat its themes as an actuality.It seems a shame that they have no eye for the written genre’s finer points as a literary art form, and seem to view it so cynically.
It doesn’t matter if I have any viewpoints regarding spiritual or metaphysical matters and find them interesting within the context of speculative fiction, but the actual cultivating of them into the tangible matter they seem to want to make it is limiting and dangerous.
I wonder if the popular Professor Jameson stories by Neil R. Jones might be the “patient zero” of transhumanism? Those date back to 1931, but Jones was actually not the first author to use either suspended animation or brain transfer to robot bodies.
That’s a fantastic idea. I was thinking Frankenstein’s monster was patient zero, but Professor Jameson is a lot more exact.
Hi
I love the connection to Professor Jameson and I have been happily reading the linked article you provided. I think I will have to look at the books again and see what else I can find.
Thanks and Happy Reading
Guy
The Professor Jameson stories are in print again:
https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Jameson-Saga-Book-One/dp/1612872751
And here’s more to read:
https://www.blackgate.com/2015/01/17/the-shock-of-the-old/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_R._Jones
I read the Professor Jameson series when ACE Books published them decades ago. ARMCHAIR FICTION has reprinted Neil R. Jones’s wonderful series in trade paperback format: http://www.armchairfiction.com
The basic question is whether Death is part of the human experience or is Death a problem to be solved.
Personally, I believe death is inevitable. We may extend life some, but everything in this reality comes to an end except reality.
I must have read one or two of the Jameson stories too long ago to remember details, but I dimly recall them as pretty pulpy. The idea of flitting around the universe as an intellectual tourist caught my imagination, but I must have been young enough not to appreciate what doing without the “pleasures of the flesh” might be like.
Another “transhuman” story I found memorable was C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” (December 1944 Astounding) about a badly burned dancer who is given a robot body that is humanoid, but not android. I first read it in one of the brilliant Ballantine/del Rey “Best of” collections (The Best of C. L. Moore – 1975).
You can read it here:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-5-JeCa2Z7hbEJ4NU9kenZNT3M/edit
illustration:
http://www.hildebrandt-art.com/art/covers/clmoore.htm
I liked this cover so much I posted it to Space Opera Pulp.
Yep. Evocative and does right by the story, too. Another favourite illustration is the Frank Kelly Freas piece for Shambleau, Moore’s first published story and still one of her best.
Oh, and here’s something for you fans of the recent film Ex Machina
from this post:
https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2013/02/24/adventures-in-science-fiction-cover-art-look-im-really-a-robot-chest-flaps-faux-skin-mechanical-brains/
What an odd coincidence. I recently posted this cover to Space Opera Pulp on Facebook. It’s a fun group of people who love science fiction cover art, and recently passed the 10,000 member mark.
Pretty racy for a fifties cover, don’t you think? I wondered if a young person looking at the reflector the doctor is wearing might assume it’s some kind of futuristic gear invented by the artist.
Went to Facebook and had a look — boy, you could lose hours there. Great site. I always feel bittersweet looking at such collections of art, though. Don’t know if it’s frustration at all the stuff I never read, or just missing the excitement of youth and more optimistic times. I do know that if I were to read these stories now it wouldn’t be the same. Part of it is also a longing to escape into these fantasy worlds, but then looking at non-genre art often affects me the same way. Basically melancholy brought on by the limits of mortality I guess.