Transhumanism is “an international philosophical movement that advocates for the transformation of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology.”

In other words, a movement to go beyond our current physical limitations by “upgrading” ourselves via technological, and therefore physical means. It’s a movement to become cyborgs, or totally artificial beings.

The philosophical elephant in the room of transhumanism is it’s embeddedness in the assumptions of philosophical materialism; this is not surprising, given the ubiquity of the materialist worldview today, especially among academics and the intellectual subset of society. You could say that transhumanism is a kind of materialist “spirituality” that isn’t spiritual at all; a way of attempting transcendence through completely physical, technological means.

Materialism is the orthodoxy of modern Western intellectual culture, and secular culture at large. Think about it, how often do you see spiritual concepts portrayed in film, music, or wider culture, outside of religion? Short of a few themes in movies like Dr. Strange, or an afterlife scene in Harry Potter, even our fiction operates primarily on materialist assumptions. Materialism has become the unspoken assumption of the modern world.

Often touted problematically as “The Scientific Worldview,” it basically amounts to reducing everything in the universe to interactions of particles and forces moving around randomly in a meaningless void. This belief has become such a “given” that anyone who questions it in academia puts their career and reputation at serious risk. Even questioning it at an intellectual, atheist-leaning dinner party is likely to get you some eye rolls.

Image Credit: Marvel Studios — Image Credit: Marvel Studios

Dust in the Wind

The materialist view is that particles and energy are floating around randomly in space according to natural law, which can be pretty well summarized by the phrase, Dust in the Wind. Scientific materialism is a Dust in the Wind ideology, and it’s logical conclusions are inherently bleak and nihilistic, although some modern intellectuals have tried to dress it up with positive hedonia, ethics, and aesthetics. In other words,

“Sorry you’re a meat robot in a meaningless universe and your consciousness isn’t real, but hey, at least we can be nice to each other, enjoy pretty things, and get high on pleasure chemicals.”

A full review of materialism and it’s problems is beyond the scope of this piece, but I would direct interested readers to the work of Bernardo Kastrup, and other philosophical dissenters, for a start. For now, let’s discuss how this worldview, which has arguably become the common orthodoxy of the Western intellectual world, is related to Transhumanism’s quest for physical immortality and transcendence.

Forever Young, and Probably Cyborg

Transhumanists emphasize and support a variety of goals, such as life extension to the point of lifespan being indefinite, replacement of biological body parts with superior robotics, even the “copying” of one’s mind or consciousness onto a computer. The movement, though not enormous, is large enough to have a transhumanist presidential candidate, and has influenced the wider culture through movies, books, public lectures, and other media. It’s also quite influential in the tech industry, unsurprisingly.

You could say that there’s one fundamental, thematic goal of the transhumanist movement: to overcome physical limitations through technology, including death. Thus, on a deeper level, we can see that…

Transhumanism and it’s goals are based on the assumption that we are only our physical bodies, which are limited and ultimately doomed to die.

If you take materialism and the implication that we are merely brain farts destined to decay, then the effort to transcend death and limitation via technology makes perfect sense. But how deeply have those who subscribe to transhumanism actually investigated those assumptions, or the evidence to the contrary?

Intelligent Spirituality:
Casualty in a War of Ideas

The dichotomy between religion and science in our culture is problematic. This ongoing ideological war radicalizes both sides, leading to a kind of dogmatic escalation, where each rejects any aspect of the other’s positions, or anything that even resembles them. Radical atheists chide about the “bearded man in the sky” and in response, religious fundamentalists cling ever harder to untenable religious dogmas, and even lobby to teach them in schools. This bickering is not a way to Truth, but only ignorance and confusion.

Meanwhile, many less vocal people somewhere between these two radical groups have been exploring possibilities that might bridge mankind’s experiences of the transcendent with our scientific understanding of the physical world. Movements ranging from secular buddhism, nondualism, or panpsychism, to Eastern spirituality, hermeticism, or liberal versions of religion are just a few examples of how many are finding that faith and science can be compatible.

Some from a scientific background have been forced to expand their definitions of reality by being confronted with certain evidence in their own research. Stories like this are common among near-death experience (NDE) researchers, for instance, or others who have researched non-ordinary states of consciousness. The current body of evidence for some existence beyond the body is found convincing by many knowledgeable and reputable thinkers and professionals, in spite of being heresy in the modern materialist intellectual hegemony.

Context is Everything: Dust in the Wind, or the Infinite Dream?

So, what if they’re right? Let’s just get “wacky” here for a moment, and entertain the possibility that all of the world’s countless reported and even systematically researched non-physical experiences aren’t just charlatanism and hallucinations, and that the people who believe them aren’t all just quacks or frauds. Let’s entertain the idea that the various scientists and other intellectuals who take these things seriously aren’t just total kooks, just for fun.

Let’s assume for a few moments that we do exist beyond our bodies, and we probably reincarnate too, since there’s some evidence for that. Let’s say that what near-death experiencers are told about life from the other side is true, and that this physical plane of reality is a kind of school or training ground, where we’re meant to learn and evolve as souls. This world is merely one layer in a much grander and inhabited trans-physical cosmos.

How would transhumanism look in that kind of universe? A universe where we aren’t merely dust in the wind?

For starters, it would mean that the fundamental materialist assumptions underlying transhumanism are mistaken. We are not weak and doomed to die, only these bodies are. We are seemingly some kind of spiritual being, consisting of an unknown non-physical substrate, which journeys across planes of existence, and whose limits are yet to be known.

We could further speculate that the limitations of these bodies are actually why we came here, to be challenged and grow in a state of spiritual amnesia. Our innate desire for transcendence would seem likely, then, to be because, on some level, we know we already are transcendent but have forgotten at the level of our normal consciousness, a concept sometimes referred to in spiritual literature as “The Veil of Forgetting”.

In this kind of world, why do we need to replace body parts to be stronger or faster? Why should we want to go to great lengths to cheat death? How likely is it that our true essence could ever be copied onto a microchip, and that our spirit would bond with a digitized mind in the same way it bonds with these miraculous biological bodies? From a spiritual worldview, such technological enterprises seem more likely to bring about a removal of our transcendental essence than they are to satisfy our desire for transcendence.

The Robo-Monkey Soul Trap?

If this were true, and personally I believe it is, then I would wager that this is the defining challenge on planet Earth, and perhaps that of any species that approaches our level of technological advancement. Working from the alternative assumption that we exist on other non-physical levels, and as Near-Death Experiencers tell us, that the purpose of this physical life is essentially educational, then we have to ask ourselves, what is the lesson here?

Is it merely by chance that we inhabited an ape whose tool-making abilities constantly outpace its morality and spirituality, as opposed to other intelligent species we could have merged with? Or is it rather the case that our tendency to manipulate the world to satisfy our desires with technology is exactly the test for which we came, of which transhumanism may well be the culmination, perhaps the final exam?

I can’t help but be reminded here of the archetypal Temptation of Christ story. In the story, before his ministry, the devil offered Jesus the entire world to rule, if he would only turn his back on God, an offer he rejected. There are also correlating temptations in the life of the Buddha before his enlightenment, so we can see this archetype goes beyond Christianity. There is a deep truth in this story, about the desire for pleasure and worldly power, and the desire for divinity.

I believe transhumanism is a collective version of the same archetypal temptation faced by Christ or Buddha, temptation to gain limitless power over this physical world and fulfill one’s desires endlessly, with the one price being the sacrifice of our soul, our connection to the divine.

One thing that most of the world’s faiths have in common is some reverence for the concept of surrender, and some element of surrender is even implied in faith itself: you could say that faith is, in a sense, a surrender of intellectual certainty for the sake of a powerful intuition or even experience. When one chooses to live a life of faith, they are choosing to surrender their desire for certainty in favor of a connection to something beyond themselves.

In Abrahamic religions, you are meant to surrender to God’s will; in Eastern religions, you have to surrender your limited self-concepts and attachments to realize your oneness with the divine or ultimate reality. Even shamans often have to surrender to being torn apart by a spirit animal, to be initiated and born anew to take up their position as tribal mediators with the spirit world.

The image of Christ on the cross communicates this surrender symbolically. The hands, being the instruments of control, are nailed to the cross, leaving the heart wide open to the infinite. The fact that his people expected their Messiah to be a superhuman warrior king who would lead them to conquer the world, exactly as the devil offered, adds even more symbolism to the story of his surrender, in the face of ignorance and darkness.

The Lesson, the Challenge, the Choice

I’ve mentioned that near-death experiencers are told that the purpose of this life is a process of learning and development, but haven’t touched on what the goal of the curriculum is.

Of the many thousands of documented cases of people from all kinds of religious or secular backgrounds, the overwhelming majority of NDEers who asked the “other side” about the meaning of life were told some version of this:

We are learning how to love

Why would we need to learn how to love? Well, ask yourself: when is love challenging?

Love is challenging when something outside of ourselves contradicts our will, by having conditions we don’t like. When someone’s behavior isn’t what we prefer, when circumstances aren’t in our favor, or when we come face-to-face with the limitations of these physical bodies, and death itself. Everything which contradicts our preferences is what keeps us from feeling love, the obstacles we face to being loving souls.

In other words, our common experience of love is conditional, meaning we require certain conditions to be loving. We will feel love and express love if the world around us, including other people, meets our conditions. So, perhaps the essence of the lesson we’re meant to learn is how to love unconditionally, rather than trying to manipulate the world to meet our requirements for our conditional love, joy, happiness, etc.

As I see it, there are two possible solutions to the archetypal obstacle of external condition X contradicting our desires:

Sacrifice our love to fulfill our desires, thereby freeing our will from the limitations of love
Sacrifice our desires to fulfill our love, thereby freeing our love from the limitations of will

You could say that #1 is the essence of transhumanism, and #2 is the essence of all great spiritual teachings. I believe that at some point, we will all have to make a choice between these two paths, and perhaps collectively we are approaching that choice-point now. Will humanity split into two directions?

Will we enshrine intellect and the will-to-power, hoping for a constantly expanded and upgraded physical self fulfilling endless desires, or will we enshrine love and surrender, recognizing our physical selves as merely limited experiences of a divine Self, in the context of unimaginable, perhaps infinite transcendental realities beyond this limited existence?

Death of the spiritual to live on in the physical — Death of the spiritual to live on in the physical

OR

Death of the physical to live on in the spiritual?

The choice is ours to make.

For a more extensive discussion of this topic, see:
The Universal Anti-Christ