Why Transhumanism

Michael Anissimov, in his incredible blog Accelerating Future, collected these seven definitions of transhumanism in an entry last year.

Transhumanism shares roots with secular humanism in the Enlightenment-era ideas of Progress, a movement that brought us concepts like democracy and equal rights, concepts that are yet to be fully realized. But it specifically promotes the use of technology to achieve a better world, a world where our potential is greatly expanded. It is true that the technologies we are now embarking upon, such as nanotechnology and genetic engineering, could be incredibly dangerous. Transhumanists seem to be more cognizant of the risks as well as the rewards, and advocate proceeding with great care.

Dorian Sagan, in his book Biospheres, makes a compelling argument that technology is a natural development. Furthermore, he proposes that it is the mechanism by which the biosphere reproduces. At some point in the future, we will be able to form closed-loop biospheres in other places.

One might ask, what utility is there in life expanding and evolving to new niches? Here are some possible answers.

• A livelier universe is a more beautiful universe.
• Greater amounts of awareness/consciousness are inherently good.
• Maximizing thought & creativity fulfills our potential.
• Richer thought ecosystems provide for the next level of life, whatever that might be.

I particularly like the open-ended nature of the last idea, that consciousness itself might ultimately provide a substrate for some type of virtual entities that take a life of their own. It's waaay out there, but fun to think about. Memes are like the atomic level in this virtual world, riding from host to host, transmitted by language and expression. Sets of connected memes form meta-organic structures. A branch of science for instance, could be seen as life-like, but only connected to physical reality through our thought processes. Or imagine a distributed simulation that uses small parts of our brain power as a computational grid. Could that simulation itself become aware? Would you mind being the host for such a process, if you were barely aware of it, or derived some benefit from being aware of it? What would it, having access to all knowledge, think about? Would creatures such as this use memes to attract our attention to capture our spare thought cycles? Ultimately, will our "branches of thought" become more alive than we?