I watched Transcendence a few days ago which despite playing with its audience fears, it frames the pursuit of the singularity as the quest to create God in a favourable sense. Its the stupid monkey humans who are in error - irredeemably future-shocked by the awe-inspiring emergence of a higher intelligence. What is interesting to me, is that transhumanism has definitely replaced humanism and modernity as the spearhead of progress and co-opts the human instinct for ontological transcendence to return to The Good, The One, toward a purely technocratic development aimed around appeasing the often arbitrary vagaries of human desire. The language of the transhumanists is an appropriated religious language, though they stand in denial of any actual innate capacity of the human creature for transcendence, or of any significance or purpose to the human essence as it stands. It must be engineered out of its perceived imperfections. The intention may seem good (and the unrolling of transhumanism appears initially humanistic - new prosthetics for amputees, advancements in organ replacement) but further down the path we find technologies for removing negative traits and removing bad memories and being happy and pain-free or uploading. Could we think about the implications of being able to remove and create memory? Or simulate people. Of technology that can put one in a happy and painfree state even if it would be more appropriate to try to change ones circumstances? Transcendence for the trans-humanist seems more of an extension of the manipulation of substance - essence and quality has no part of this. Spiritual teleology has been replaced by the quest for self-engineered evolution, where essence is an arbitrary outcome of the quantitative domain. As a community we are yet, really, to grapple with the long-term consequences - a clear-headed ability to judge whether we as a species, as a peoples, really do want to be ever more augmented by technology, is clearly lost through slow acclimatization over generations via facebook and smart phones. What I really think is at risk, is, as a friend recently put it this that we become created from the outside in, rather than from the inside, out - that it is as Terrence McKenna put it, we turn ourselves inside out - but this inversion is by no means positive. In other words, that in the preoccupation of altering quantity, matter, that we entrench our identification with surface, and begin to create further and denser obstacles to finding that secret of our divine image and connection hidden in the deepest and most unknown place God could hide it - in our own hearts. Perhaps we should understand our nature as a species before re-engineering it beyond recognition. ~ https://youtube/watch?v=OuOGy6NrCqc
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 10:37:20 +0000
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