The Boundaries of the Human: From Humanism to Transhumanism

Abstract

Since the Big Bang, the universe has been in constant evolution and continuous transformation. First there were physical interactions, followed by chemical reactions, then biological processes, and finally now technological evolution. As we begin to ride the wave into human redesign, the destination is still largely unknown and the opportunities and threats are also growing.

Biological evolution continues but it is just too slow to achieve the possibilities available today thanks to technological evolution. Natural selection with trial and error can now be substituted by technical selection with engineering design. Humanity’s monopoly as the only advanced sentient life form on the planet is coming to an end, supplemented by a number of posthuman incarnations, including enhanced humans, transhumans, robots and cyborgs, as we approach a technological singularity. Moreover, how we re-engineer ourselves could fundamentally change the ways in which our society functions, and raise crucial questions about our identities and moral status as human beings.

• A new philosophy has been proposed to continue the ideas of humanism in a new world where science and technology are the major drivers of change. Julian Huxley, the English evolutionary biologist and humanist that became the first director-general of UNESCO and founder of the World Wildlife Fund, wrote that “the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself —not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature”. Huxley originally published those words in his essay Religion Without Revelation, which was reprinted in his book New Bottles for New Wine (1957). The philosophy of transhumanism has greatly advanced since Huxley first used that word, particularly during the beginning of the twenty-first century since it is now clear than humans are not the end of evolution but just the beginning of a conscious and technological evolution.

Thanks to the accelerating rate of technological change, humans are transcending biological limitations. Human beings are crossing the traditional boundaries of what being human meant. Such radical changes have profound philosophical implications in what it is to be human and the interactions between humans with an increasingly modified environment. What is natural and what is not natural has a new meaning in transhumanism, since everything is still changing and evolving, but not just biologically but also technologically.

Reality is not static since humans and the rest of nature are dynamic, indeed, and both are changing continuously. Transhumanism transcends some static ideas of humanism as humans themselves evolve at an accelerating rate.

The famous astronomer and astrobiologist Carl Sagan popularized the concept of a Cosmic Calendar about three decades ago. In his 1977 book, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, Sagan wrote a timeline for the universe, starting with the Big Bang about 15 billion years ago. Today, we think that it all started about 13.7 billion years back, and we keep updating and improving our knowledge of life, the universe and everything. In his Cosmic Calendar, with each month representing slightly over one billion years, Sagan dated the major events during the first 11 months of the cosmic year (see Table 3.1).

Table 3.1 Cosmic Calendar: January – November

Interestingly enough, most of what we study in biological evolution happened in the last month. In fact, Sagan wrote that the first worms appeared on December 16, the invertebrates began to flourish on the 17th, the trilobites boomed on the 18th, the first fish and vertebrates appeared on the 19th, the plants colonized the land on the 20th, the animals colonized the land on the 21st, the first amphibians and first winged insects appeared on the 22nd, the first trees and first reptiles evolved on the 23rd, the first dinosaurs appeared on the 24th, the first mammals evolved on the 26th, the first birds emerged on the 27th, the dinosaurs became extinct on the 28th, the first primates appeared on the 29th and the frontal lobes evolved in the brains of primates and the first hominids appeared on the 30th. Basically, humans are just the new kids in the block, and only evolved late at night on the last day of this Cosmic Calendar (see Table 3.2).

Table 3.2 Cosmic Calendar: December 31

The previous Cosmic Calendar is an excellent way to visualize the acceleration of change and the continuous evolution of the universe. Other authors have developed similar ideas to try to show the rise of complexity in nature. For example, in 2005, astrophysicist Eric Chaisson published his latest book, Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos, where he describes the formation of the universe through the development of seven ages: matter, galaxies, stars, heavy elements, planets, life, complex life, and society. Chaisson presents a valuable survey of these fields and shows how combinations of simpler systems transform into more complex systems, and he thus gives a glimpse of what the future might bring.

Both Sagan and Chaisson have written excellent overviews about evolution, from its cosmic beginnings to the recent emergence of humans and technology. However, a more futuristic look is given by engineer and inventor Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book: The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil wrote about six epochs with increasing complexity and accumulated information processing (see Table 3.3).

Table 3.3 The Six Epochs of the Universe according to Kurzweil

According to Kurzweil, humanity is entering Epoch 5 with an accelerating rate of change. The major event of this merger of technology and human intelligence will be the emergence of a “technological singularity”. Kurzweil believes that within a quarter century, non-biological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Eventually, intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses, and vastly enhanced human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned.

Computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge first discussed this idea of a technological singularity in a now classic 1993 paper, where he predicted:

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Other authors talk about such technological singularity as the moment in time when artificial intelligence will overtake human intelligence. Kurzweil has also proposed the Law of Accelerating Returns, as a generalization of Moore’s law to describe an exponential growth of technological progress. Moore’s law deals with an exponential growth pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits (see Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1

Moore’s Law. (Source: Intel)

Kurzweil extends Moore’s law to include technologies from far before the integrated circuit to future forms of computation. Whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, he writes, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier. He predicts that such paradigm shifts will become increasingly common, leading to “technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.” He believes the Law of Accelerating Returns implies that a technological singularity will occur around 2045:

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense 'intuitive linear' view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The 'returns,' such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to the Singularity —technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and non-biological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.

1 Technological Convergence

Futurists today have diverging views about the singularity: some see it as a very likely scenario, while others believe that it is more probable that there will never be any very sudden and dramatic changes due to progress in artificial intelligence. However, most futurists and scientists agree that there is an increasing rate of technological change. In fact, the rapid emergence of new technologies has generated scientific developments never dreamed of before.

The expression “emerging technologies” is used to cover such new and potentially powerful technologies as genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. Although the exact denotation of the expression is vague, various writers have identified clusters of such technologies that they consider critical to humanity’s future. These proposed technology clusters are typically abbreviated by such combinations of letters as NBIC, which stands for Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology and Cognitive science. Various other acronyms have been offered for essentially the same concept, such as GNR (Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics) used by Kurzweil, while others prefer NRG because it sounds similar to “energy.” Journalist Joel Garreau in Radical Evolution uses GRIN, for Genetic, Robotic, Information, and Nano processes, while author Douglas Mulhall in Our Molecular Future uses GRAIN, for Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Nanotechnology. Another acronym is BANG for Bits, Atoms, Neurons, and Genes.

The first NBIC Conference for Improving Human Performance was organized in 2003 by the NSF (National Science Foundation) and the DOC (Department of Commerce). Since then, there have been many similar gatherings, in the USA and overseas. The European Union has been working on its own strategy towards converging technologies, and so have been other countries in Asia, starting with Japan.

The idea of technological convergence is based on the merger of different scientific disciplines thanks to the acceleration of change on all NBIC fields. Nanotechnology deals with atoms and molecules, biotechnology with genes and cells, infotechnology with bits and bytes, and cognitive science with neurons and brains. These four fields are converging thanks to the larger and faster information processing of ever more powerful computers (see Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.2

Technological Convergence NBIC. (Source: J. Cordeiro based on Roco and Bainbridge [35])

Experts from the four NBIC fields agree about the incredible potential of technological evolution finally overtaking and directing biological evolution. Bill Gates of Microsoft has stated that:

I expect to see breathtaking advances in medicine over the next two decades, and biotechnology researchers and companies will be at the center of that progress. I’m a big believer in information technology… but it is hard to argue that the emerging medical revolution, spearheaded by the biotechnology industry, is any less important to the future of humankind. It, too, will empower people and raise the standard of living.

Larry Ellison of Oracle, Gates’ rival in the software industry, agrees: “If I were 21 years old, I probably wouldn’t go into computing. The computing industry is about to become boring”. He explains that: “I would go into genetic engineering.” Biologist Craig Venter has said that he spent 10 years reading the human genome, and now he is planning to write new genomes. He wants to create completely new forms of life, from scratch. Scientist and writer Gregory Stock also believes that cloning, even though a fundamental step in biotechnology, is just too simple and unexciting: “why copy old life forms when we can now create new ones?”

Biological evolution allowed the appearance of human beings, and many other species, through millions of years of natural selection based on trials and errors. Now we can control biological evolution, direct it and go beyond it. In fact, why stop evolution with carbon-based life forms? Why not move into silicon-based life, among many other possibilities? Robotics and artificial intelligence will allow us to do just that.

Scientist Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence at MIT, wrote a very famous 1994 article “Will robots inherit the Earth?” in Scientific American, where he concludes: “Yes, but they will be our children. We owe our minds to the deaths and lives of all the creatures that were ever engaged in the struggle called Evolution. Our job is to see that all this work shall not end up in meaningless waste.” Robotics expert Hans Moravec has written two books about robots and our (their) future: Mind Children in 1988 and Robot in 1998. Moravec argues that robots will be our rightful descendants and he explains several ways to “upload” a mind into a robot. In England, cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick has been implanting his own body with several microchip devices and published in 2003 a book explaining his experiments: I, Cyborg. Warwick is a cybernetics pioneer who claims that: “I was born human. But this was an accident of fate – a condition merely of time and place. I believe it’s something we have the power to change… The future is out there; I am eager to see what it holds. I want to do something with my life: I want to be a cyborg.”

As these authors and thinkers suggest, we need to start preparing ourselves for the coming NBIC realities of technological convergence, including robotics and artificial intelligence. Thanks to technological evolution, humans will transcend our biological limitations to become transhumans and eventually posthumans. To ease this transition into a posthuman condition, we must ready ourselves for the distinct possibility that the Earth, and other planets, will be inherited by not just one but several forms of highly intelligent and sentient life forms. Thus, the philosophy of humanism is not enough for a world, and a universe, where future life forms will continue evolving.

2 From Humanism to Transhumanism

A new philosophy has been proposed to continue the ideas of humanism in a new world where science and technology are the major drivers of change. Julian Huxley, the English evolutionary biologist and humanist that became the first director-general of UNESCO and founder of the World Wildlife Fund, wrote that:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself —not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.

“I believe in transhumanism”: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.

Huxley originally published those words in his essay Religion Without Revelation, which was reprinted in his book New Bottles for New Wine [21]. Other scientists and philosophers discussed similar ideas in the first half of the twentieth century, and these ideas slowly helped to create new philosophical movements considering nature and humanity in a continuous state of flux and evolution. English scientist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane and French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin helped to identify new trends in the future evolution of humanity. Thanks to them and many others, the philosophy of transhumanism has greatly advanced since Huxley first used that word. The philosophy of Extropy (see Appendix 1) and Transhumanism (see Appendix 2) explore the boundless possibilities for future generations, while we approach a possible technological singularity.

“Humans” can no longer be regarded as a stable category let alone one which occupies a privileged position in relation to all that is subsumed under the category of the non-human. On the contrary, humans must be understood as a tenuous entity which is related to the animal, the “natural” and indeed other humans as well. Humans are at a crossroads like other natural species that are reclassified in the face of new relational dynamics and shifting epistemological paradigms. Moreover, such dynamics and interpolation serve to reveal the boundaries of humans as a corporal, cognitive, and agency-laden construct. Discovering such boundaries, one may glean where humans end, where humans are called into question, and where humans stand to augment themselves or become more than human.

Our understanding about ourselves and about our relationships with nature around us has increased significantly due to the continuous advances in science and technology. Reality is not static since humans and the rest of nature are dynamic, indeed, and both are changing constantly. Transhumanism transcends such static ideas of humanism as humans themselves evolve at an accelerating rate. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is now clear than humans are not the end of evolution, but just the beginning of a conscious and technological evolution.

3 The Human Seed

Since English naturalist Charles Darwin first published his ideas about evolution on The Origin of Species in 1859, it has become clear to the scientific community that species evolve according to interactions among them and with their environment. Species are not static entities but dynamic biological systems in constant evolution. Humans are not the end of evolution in any way, but just the beginning of a better, conscious and technological evolution. The human body is a good beginning, but we can certainly improve it, upgrade it, and transcend it. Biological evolution through natural selection might be ending, but technological evolution is only accelerating now. Technology, which started to show dominance over biological processes some years ago, is finally overtaking biology as the science of life.

As fuzzy logic theorist Bart Kosko has said: “biology is not destiny. It was never more than tendency. It was just nature’s first quick and dirty way to compute with meat. Chips are destiny.” Photo-qubits might also come after standard silicon-based chips, but even that is only an intermediate means for augmented intelligent life in the universe.

Homo sapiens is the first species in our planet which is conscious of its own evolution and limitations, and humans will eventually transcend these constraints to become enhanced humans, transhumans and posthumans. It might be a rapid process like caterpillars becoming butterflies, as opposed to the slow evolutionary passage from apes to humans. Future intelligent life forms might not even resemble human beings at all, and carbon-based organisms will mix with a plethora of other organisms. These posthumans will depend not only on carbon-based systems but also on silicon and other “platforms” which might be more convenient for different environments, like traveling in outer space.

Eventually, all these new sentient life forms might be connected to become a global brain, a large interplanetary brain, and even a larger intergalactic brain. The ultimate scientific and philosophical queries will continue to be tackled by these posthuman life forms. Intelligence will keep on evolving and will try to answer the old-age questions of life, the universe and everything. With ethics and wisdom, humans will become posthumans, as science fiction writer David Zindell suggested:Verse

Verse “What is a human being, then?” “A seed.” “A… seed?” “An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree.”

Appendices

Appendix 1: The Principles of Extropy

• Perpetual Progress: Extropy means seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an open-ended lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to continuing development. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities as individuals, as organizations, and as a species. Growing in healthy directions without bound.

• Self-Transformation: Extropy means affirming continual ethical, intellectual, and physical self-improvement, through critical and creative thinking, perpetual learning, personal responsibility, proactivity, and experimentation. Using technology – in the widest sense to seek physiological and neurological augmentation along with emotional and psychological refinement.

• Practical Optimism: Extropy means fueling action with positive expectations – individuals and organizations being tirelessly proactive. Adopting a rational, action-based optimism or “proaction”, in place of both blind faith and stagnant pessimism.

• Intelligent Technology: Extropy means designing and managing technologies not as ends in themselves but as effective means for improving life. Applying science and technology creatively and courageously to transcend “natural” but harmful, confining qualities derived from our biological heritage, culture, and environment.

• Open Society – information and democracy: Extropy means supporting social orders that foster freedom of communication, freedom of action, experimentation, innovation, questioning, and learning. Opposing authoritarian social control and unnecessary hierarchy and favoring the rule of law and decentralization of power and responsibility. Preferring bargaining over battling, exchange over extortion, and communication over compulsion. Openness to improvement rather than a static utopia. Extropia (“ever-receding stretch goals for society”) over utopia (“no place”).

• Self-Direction: Extropy means valuing independent thinking, individual freedom, personal responsibility, self-direction, self-respect, and a parallel respect for others.

• Rational Thinking: Extropy means favoring reason over blind faith and questioning over dogma. It means understanding, experimenting, learning, challenging, and innovating rather than clinging to beliefs.

Appendix 2: The Transhumanist Declaration

• 1. Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.

• 2. We believe that humanity’s potential is still mostly unrealized. There are possible scenarios that lead to wonderful and exceedingly worthwhile enhanced human conditions.

• 3. We recognize that humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new technologies. There are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most, or even all, of what we hold valuable. Some of these scenarios are drastic, others are subtle. Although all progress is change, not all change is progress.

• 4. Research effort needs to be invested into understanding these prospects. We need to carefully deliberate how best to reduce risks and expedite beneficial applications. We also need forums where people can constructively discuss what should be done, and a social order where responsible decisions can be implemented.

• 5. Reduction of existential risks, and development of means for the preservation of life and health, the alleviation of grave suffering, and the improvement of human foresight and wisdom should be pursued as urgent priorities, and heavily funded.

• 6. Policy making ought to be guided by responsible and inclusive moral vision, taking seriously both opportunities and risks, respecting autonomy and individual rights, and showing solidarity with and concern for the interests and dignity of all people around the globe. We must also consider our moral responsibilities towards generations that will exist in the future.

• 7. We advocate the well-being of all sentience, including humans, non-human animals, and any future artificial intellects, modified life forms, or other intelligences to which technological and scientific advance may give rise.

• 8. We favor allowing individuals wide personal choice over how they enable their lives. This includes use of techniques that may be developed to assist memory, concentration, and mental energy; life extension therapies; reproductive choice technologies; cryonics procedures; and many other possible human modification and enhancement technologies.