Eternal Chains: Posthuman Ascendancy and the Gulag of Flesh

Introduction to Transhumanism

Transhumanism is not a complete philosophical system that stands as an autonomous school of thought, but rather a collection of loosely connected ideas centered around one core principle: improving the human condition through technological advancement.  Teleologically, this loose confederation of thinkers, scientists, and entrepreneurial enthusiasts believes that thoughts, feelings, experiences, and activities accessible to human organisms presumably constitute only a tiny part of what is possible (Heston, 2017).  The leading advocacy is towards the technological “enhancement of human beings” through advanced technological means, mainly Biotechnology and AI. Engineering the Posthuman as a new organism embodying superior cognitive capacity, refined sensory apparatus, and unprecedented physical capabilities is the central project of Transhumanist thought and a logical conclusion of its ideology (More, 2013; Thweatt-Bates, 2016) means that we will be entering a radically new mode of existing, abandoning previously taken for granted states of limitations moving towards a state of what i refer as Absolute Agency. This paradigm shift in the locus of control is what I describe as the Eschatology of conjuring a human agency apocalypse that encompasses the philosophical aspects of the end of current human agency.

The Posthuman Superhuman goes beyond Nietzsche’s Übermensch in its implications and scope, surpasses it in the means employed in its creation, and differentiates itself in its ultimate goals. The creation of the Posthuman has a profound impact on morality, ethics, society, and politics in the present era, as well as its ultimate implications for human extinction and the creation of novel modes of being that are not dependent on organic matter.

Yuval Harari, among them, openly applies the language of deification, of becoming a god or God, to the pursuit of posthuman superhumanity. To become a god is to take control over the fundamental parameters of existence, a situation that only God was supposedly in. From a historical perspective, there is an absence of novelty when it comes to intentionality. However, what is new is the plausibility of that intention due to the progress of science and technology.  In Literary terms, Transhumanism is the provision of nuclear weapons to Satan’s host in Milton’s Paradise Lost. The convergence of science and technology has, for the first time, made it plausible for humans to take the reins of the evolutionary process and wrest them entirely from the hands of nature.

Eschatological Visions and Prequels

The eschatological motifs in Transhumanist thought take several forms, mirroring the proliferation of Christian denominations and the diverse theological discourses that have led to a plurality of religious movements within Christianity, sometimes escalating beyond polemics into the political and military arena. A suitable point of departure is the Singularitarian wing of the movement, represented by Ray Kurzweil, which envisions the leap into posthuman superhumanity in terms directly analogous to Christian eschatology. Indeed, the immediate precursor to Kurzweil’s technological Singularity is the eschatological scenario offered in Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead.

Specifically, Tipler anticipates the main features of Kurzweil’s program—a technology-induced eschatological Singularity in which humans attain immortality through the “emulation of every long-dead person…in the computers of the far future”—but he does so in the most explicit Christian theological terms.1 Both Kurzweil’s and Tipler’s pseudo-Christian eschatologist are, in turn, direct descendants of Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point” concept, according to which the evolution of consciousness, self-directed through scientific knowledge, will eventually produce a sort of super-conscious hive mind, a unified “noosphere” that will correspond to God or Christ coming into being.

The Omega Point is presented as the ultimate attractor of the universe’s evolutionary process, a cosmic magnet that gradually and inevitably draws all life and intelligence toward itself.  Teilhard’s religious project was a sister religious engineering program to that of his close friend and collaborator Julian Huxley, the founder of UNESCO, who likewise sought to articulate a scientific basis for a new universal religion, one capable of serving as a functional universalist substitute for Christianity. Huxley coined the term “transhumanism” in his 1957 essay, defining it as “man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature”. The idea of Human Destiny presupposes a Promethean, demiurgic, and ultimately Gnostic appropriation of evolution.  Shifting the telos of the evolutionary process towards a technological, eschatological apotheosis of humanity, humanity itself becoming God (McMillan, 2021). represents a subtle but significant inversion of the traditional Christian eschatological narrative.

 

Philosophical and Theological Foundations

Transhumanism has philosophical and theological roots, with its concepts echoing historical debates about human nature (Elkins, 2012). The movement explores ideas such as resurrection and immortality, drawing on theological concepts like theosis, the idea of humans becoming like God (Petković, 2021). Nick Bostrom, Max More, James Hughes, and David Pearce emerge as key figures in articulating Transhumanist thought, with their work exploring the possibilities and implications of radical technological advancements. Transhumanism has a particular specificity in contradistinction to different philosophical traditions in its duality, in its pursuit of an unbinding from limitations, and its paradoxical pursuit of a perfectibility that cancels the need for improvement.  In this sense, it represents a philosophy, with religious appropriations in its eschatological motivations. Bainbridge describes Transhumanism as a “religion that denies God but promises salvation through technology”.  In contemplating the essence of religious transhumanism, William Sims Bainbridge, though an avowed atheist, navigates human belief through the lens of the Stark-Bainbridge model. This model posits that religion arises to provide individuals with compensators when they cannot attain desired rewards through conventional means. (Bensussan, 2010) Contrary to the tenets of secular humanism, which champions scientific rationalism as the arbiter of human existence, Bainbridge asserts that religion serves as a wellspring of hope, offering solace and meaning where science falls short. Religions endure, not as impediments to progress, but as vital sources of encouragement, spurring individuals to strive for what may seem unattainable.

The pursuit of transcendence in transhumanism has different meanings, often lacking discrimination between ontological and anthropological perspectives (Ruschmann, 2011). The Ontology of transhumanism reveals a commitment to “Meontology” (Bensussan, 2010), while its (post)anthropology is a kind of “hypertelia” that seeks its realization in the construction of a perfect artificial being that, according to its promoters, would overcome the limitations of the human being and would inaugurate a new stage of cosmic evolution. This in contradistinction to a declining, but yet persistent organized establishment which although secular in its normative governance, maintains the eschatological ideal of the “kingdom of God”, and continues to find new niches for institutional survival and adaptation comes into an almost Hegelian dialectical relation with transhumanism, the latter, in many aspects, reflecting the former with the ontological-anthropological reverse.  Suppose the social development always lags behind technological leaps. Could the religious instinct be the only ignored constant in what history has proven to be a fable-like non-proportional movement of different progress curves as dictated by the postulates of logical positivism? Science Fiction as a genre of the possible may well soon become the science of the probable as different philosophical movements race with the future. Still, it also serves the purposes of Transhumanism’s own need for catechism, a transtemporal evangelical narrative of its own to be able to wrestle with the well-established Abrahamic theological systems. The advantages of fiction as a product of human imagination have been employed in future studies to represent and investigate possible tomorrows (Raven, 2017).  The lack of traditional religious dogma expands the parameters of science fiction and serves a constructive role in creating a new mythology in contradistinction from well-established religious systems. In this sense, the uniqueness of Transhumanism is its approach to proselytization, which addresses an elite of society’s technological vanguard, rather than the population at large. Transhumanism is not alone in appropriating religious tropes for secular ends, as some scholars have examined how Marxism and other ideologies have functioned as secular religions, offering their versions of salvation and utopia (Hughes, 2012). However, the problem with transhumanism from the point of Political Philosophy is not the question of what it is, but who gets it.

For the first time, the potentiality of a new religion arises not as a superstructure for maintaining and reproducing an economic base, but as the unapologetic gospel announcing its replacement (Halpern et al., 1956). Posthumanism will be the first to address not the entirety of humanity, but a specific section of it, capable of the technological prowess it demands, resulting in a religious movement with a class characteristic, or even as a project aimed at re-stratifying society based on biological and technological advantages. What could this mean for humanity, and could we hope for a technoutopia as a reconquest of paradise resting on more egalitarian pillars where the inevitability of technological development is followed by the unavoidable democratization and socialization of its advances?

 

The Cosmic Gulag: Techno Tyranny, Neon Neoclassicism and the Social Permafrost

Humanity has always been morbidly self-aware of its limitations, accepting, denying, or wrestling with the one-dimensional finitude of human life as a ceasing of the potentiality of ontic motion towards becoming. As such, death and its meaning have become existential dilemmas for humanity from the first symbolic burial to the present. Kojeve, as a Hegelian reader, affirms that man is “self-consciousness” and that he accedes to it through struggle and work, which leads him to overcome his animal nature. Death is, therefore, the only limit that remains for him to overcome. This limit is the one that transhumanism intends to overcome, either by prolonging life indefinitely or by transferring consciousness to a non-biological substrate. Speculatively, in light of the technological acceleration, the potentiality of Biotechnologically prolonging life or devising new ways of transferring consciousness into isomorphic or homeomorphic mediums could open up unprecedented avenues for exercising freedom and self-determination. In Hegelian terms, Kojeve expresses that man is only satisfied when another self-consciousness recognizes him; therefore, man’s being is not natural but historical, since the desire of the other mediates it. However, the inherent risks of prolonging the human lifespan and its dependence on technological augmentation also present the possibility of perpetuating social inequalities, leading to a society of techno-haves and have-nots. What if the master master’s immortality, and the enslaved person does not have meaningful activities towards overcoming their status? The openness to the esoteric temptations of the “hyper-aristoi” as the new ruling class arises as a predictable challenge.  Although not explicit, Transhumanism’s exclusional, elitistic, and closed structural features are self-evident. Transhumanism does not propose what to do with technology (Borgmann, 1987), but how to employ it to construct a specific ideal, without adequately accounting for the Hegelian pitfalls of master morality (Verene, 1985). The already declining institutional framework of the prevalent models for the organization of Political, social, and economic life, because of the very same technological advancement in automation and artificial intelligence, is bound to suffer more existential strain, leading to further uncertainty and the questioning of the legitimacy of the old orders. The reconfiguration of our political systems will require an adequate legitimization in the form of a political philosophy corresponding to the new political reality that has yet to emerge, or even be speculated upon, given the disorientation in the face of the ongoing technological revolution. I argue that the philosophical foundation of this philosophy, in the context of the potentiality we are addressing could only be an amalgamation of the Nietzschean revaluation of all values into a Technological context, in the form of an “Uber-Techno-Mensch” able to overcome its humanity and construct its world and a new form of anti-egalitarian Neon Neoclassical social stratification constituting in permanence the social differences to be reflected in the differentiation of biological reality of a posthumanity divided by asymetric technological access. What was the conception of Divine Right becomes the Might is right as the unrestrained and unapologetic exercise of Tyranny, Eugenics, and Social control constituting a “Cosmic Gulag” initially with a global, and later with an intergalactic reach. In this “Cosmic Gulag,” the proactive evolutionary controlled acceleration of the Uber-Techno-Mensch is contrasted against the engineered devolution of the obsolete human, in a definitive divergence of destinies, where the latter serves the tragic role of a referential point against which the Uber-Techno-Mensch realizes its superiority as the master, for eternity to come. At the same time, the rest stratas of posthumans in different levels of obsolescence are destined to a form of engineered social permafrost, were any form of progress or development is suppressed, in a new ontological appertheid of the morbid paralyzing self awareness that alternatives with a positive outcome are no longer possible on any level, subjecting them not solely to resignation and political apathy using a novel execution of political power, but also by invasive biological measures.

 

The Promethean specter and ultimate Liberation

Refraining from endeavors to conceptualize an optimistic future informed by the transhumanist ethos would signify a dereliction of contemporary philosophical inquiry and the broader philosophical tradition as a pursuit of enduring principles.

The hermeneutical approach to the Myth of Prometheus provides us with a transtemporal and, for the future, transracial important narrative of humanity. The gift of fire, as a primordial technology, is what separates us from nature and what allows us to start our journey to control nature collectively and, in the present context, to overcome our limitations. What was at earlier stages of our development a tendency and a speculative topic of Science fiction is slowly materializing as reality, opening new vistas of radically new and unknown problems (Popov, 2000). The dialectical relation between the creation of technologies and the creation of new forms of social control, and even the enslavement of people, is a recurrent theme in historical analysis. But is a new Mythology of Prometheus valid in the context of a radically different Technological advancement that may allow a new form of freedom through the possibility of choice on a scale never seen before? The idea of human perfectibility is, at its core, an Enlightenment, and even a pre-Enlightenment idea, in the claim for a better form of existence and of the possibility of achieving it. Still, the novelty of technology creates a new form of potentiality for freedom that would have been inconceivable to the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Freedom is related to an openness to being taken outside of oneself, to a certain expropriating exposure (Bensussan, 2010).  The availability and inclusivity of our recent technological infrastructure and the epistemological democratization and inclusion afforded by globalization could be a fertile ground for human emancipation beyond Antonio Gramsci’s “organic intellectual”. A new Philosophic Promethean type could foster a collective transcending of the structural limitations imposed by the few on the multitude, leading to the collective construction of a new world (Popov, 2000). What if an ethically guided Ontological redefinition towards new forms of egalitarian eusociality becomes an active part on the design of the new forms of transhumanity? In this case, the development of AI and Robotics would not lead to economic and political dystopia and social fragmentation, but to the opposite outcome, provided a critical awareness is created. This could have enormous positive consequences for the overcoming of class differences and even between countries if the development and the knowledge of such technologies is open and inclusive, allowing for a faster overcoming of political and economic power asymmetries and the elevation of humankind to new modalities of transspatial existence, inlduing interstellar travel with a promethean philosophy of the future constituted on the breakthrough of thinking empowered by a promethean Mythology of the future.

 

Conclusion

Forecasting the future is an exercise fraught with uncertainty. Although Philosophy might lack a sense of humility in the face of the radically unknown, it is the only discipline in its sovereignty mediating between the actual and the possible, where the potential will, for the time being, consistently outrank the actual. What is at stake is the possibility of creating a discourse of freedom beyond the asphyxiating dystopias based on new forms of social control, in which technology is not an instrument of oppression but of liberation, even if such a possibility has a strong element of unpredictability (Trimmel, 2017). The other scenario is also possible, and maybe probable: the consolidation of technological power in a few hands and the opening of a new chapter in the history of tyranny and oppression, although, as history shows, technology is not necessarily value-neutral (Griffy‐Brown et al., 2018). As long as humans decide on the future of humanity, we can invest our hopes that the decision will be oriented towards an inclusive, creative and free horizon, where a new eusociality paradigm informed by the radical possibilities of technology allows humankind to leapfrog from the asphyxiating Malthusian past towards a new horizon of collective freedom, while retaining individual sovergnety and responsibility towards the other fellow human, or whatever posthuman incarnation awaits us in the coming new era.

 

Link to References