[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd9cf_vLviI]
In this TED talk which was viewed in class Nick Bostrom outlines the three BIG problems which plague our species: death, existential risk and the fact that life isn’t usually as wonderful as it could be. His proposed solution to these problems is a fundamental revolution in our biological make-up known as Transhumanism.
Followers of the transhumanist movement look upon advances in the field of human-technology convergence (nano-technology, genetic manipulation, human-machine hybridization, to name just a few) as the means by which members of the human species may transcend our biological shortcomings and expand our lives both in longevity and experiential quality.
In exploring this movement’s presence on various internet sites I was struck by the resemblance of transhumanism to an earlier transcendental movement lead by Harvard scientist Timothy Leary. It seems clear to me that Leary’s “acid revolution” was motivated by much the same philosophy as are transhumanists such as Bostrom and others. This shared philosophy begins with the belief that human beings are flawed in ways that are fundamentally detrimental to the development of our underlying potential. The solution to these flaws is similar for both movements as well: that through the use of external “tools” – LSD, nano-technology, etc… – we may someday succeed in overcoming these flaws and moving into a new era of human consciousness.
In fact, I will go so far as to say that the transhumanist movement isn’t merely similar to Leary’s earlier project, but that it is actually a natural extension of that project with the introduction of technological advances that would have been at best science-fiction in Leary’s hey-day. Leary himself was a firm believer in the use of technology, particularly the personal computer, to aid in the process of self-discovery characteristic of the LSD experience. This connection with Leary and technology is apparent in his “Mind Mirror” video game that he helped produce in the early 80’s, which if you watch the following video is actually a very crude precursor to the “mind-upload” concept of the transhumanists.
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To shift gears slightly I will conclude with a discussion of what I feel is a very insightful critique of the transhumanist movement and which is equally relevant to Leary’s movement as well. In this “critical analysis” to transhumanism the narrator criticizes the transhumanist movement for ignoring the simple fact that the world is run by a “sociopathic group of elites who are anything but generous.”
Whether or not you believe in the dark robbed Illuminati which these words invoke it is hard to disagree that the structural inequalities of power and wealth distribution which permeate our entire global society would likely survive into the transhumanist age just as they have survived various other radical paradigm shifts across millennia. As the video points out, this means one of two things: either the availability of transhumanist technology will be withheld from the poor and disenfranchised of the world, or the implementation of these technologies will be used by those in a position of power to further concentrate their power and influence. Transhumanism could usher in, not an era of transcendental bliss, but one of “a completely digitized population that could be manipulated in the same way one controls a computer. Just who will be behind the post-human keyboard?”
Aldous Huxley, author of the classic dystopian novel Brave New World, leveled this critique some 40 years ago when he posited the “scientific dictatorships” of the future we now inhabit.
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“We are in process,” he said, “of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy, who have always existed and presumably always will exist, to get people actually to love their servitude.” These techniques he speaks of include technological advances such as those characteristic of the transhumanist’s vision, but also the “pharmacological methods” which seem to fall in line with much of Leary’s vision as well and may “make people thoroughly happy even in the most abominable circumstances.” In this sense, it seems, the transhumanists and the acid-revolutionaries are similar in not just their philosophies but in their inherent dangers as well.