A brief history of Transhumanism

A brief history of Transhumanism

Like most groups of people, also the small but growing transhumanist community has internal factions and some ego-boosted primadonnas who wish to claim that they, or their mentors, invented transhumanism. No matter what I write here, someone will complain that (s)he has not been included or given enough space, and someone will complain that others have been included or given too much space. So I will not even try to write an objective or “neutral” history of transhumanism, but rather a first-person history of my own involvement with transhumanism, focused on what has been important to me.

I have said that I have been a transhumanism since I was a teenager, or perhaps even younger, without even knowing that such a thing as transhumanism existed. The younger readers will not remember a world without the Internet, where we actually depended on the printed press, radio and television for our information. Even if we do not have cities on the moon like in Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odissey, there has been some real progress in the last decades! In 1994 the Web existed already, but it was not yet part of our daily life. Also, as a European I did not have easy access to the US press. So my first encounter with transhumanism was an article in the October 1994 issue of Wired, by Ed Regis, titled Meet the Extropians:

“It’s a doctrine of self-transformation, of extremely advanced technology, and of dedicated, immovable optimism. Most of all, it’s a philosophy of freedom from limitations of any kind. There hasn’t been anything like it - nothing this wild and extravagant, no such overweening confidence in the human prospect - since way back to those bygone ages when people still believed in things like progress, knowledge, and - let’s all shout it out, now - Growth!”

The main hero of the article, and the person whom I have always considered as the “father” of modern transhumanism, is the British philisopher Max More: “We see this need for transcendence deeply built into humanity. That’s why we have all these religious myths. It seems to be something inherent in us that we want to move beyond what we see as our limits. In the past we haven’t had the technology to do that, and right now we’re in this difficult period where we don’t quite have the technology yet, but we can see it coming”.

I had the pleasure of meeting Max in person in 2005, 11 years after reading the Wired article. In the meantime, of course, I have been reading most of his writings. My favorite is a short article of 1999, titled ”A Letter to Mother Nature” where Max, after thanking the Mother for having done, all things considered, a reasonably good preliminary design work on the human species, announces that “we have decided that it is time to amend the human constitution” and proposes seven amendments:

“Amendment No.1: We will no longer tolerate the tyranny of aging and death. Through genetic alterations, cellular manipulations, synthetic organs, and any necessary means, we will endow ourselves with enduring vitality and remove our expiration date. We will each decide for ourselves how long we shall live.

Amendment No.2: We will expand our perceptual range through biotechnological and computational means. We seek to exceed the perceptual abilities of any other creature and to devise novel senses to expand our appreciation and understanding of the world around us.

Amendment No.3: We will improve on our neural organization and capacity, expanding our working memory, and enhancing our intelligence.

Amendment No.4: We will supplement the neocortex with a “metabrain”. This distributed network of sensors, information processors, and intelligence will increase our degree of self-awareness and allow us to modulate our emotions.

Amendment No. 5: We will no longer be slaves to our genes. We will take charge over our genetic programming and achieve mastery over our biological, and neurological processes. We will fix all individual and species defects left over from evolution by natural selection. Not content with that, we will seek complete choice of our bodily form and function, refining and augmenting our physical and intellectual abilities beyond those of any human in history.

Amendment No.6: We will cautiously yet boldly reshape our motivational patterns and emotional responses in ways we, as individuals, deem healthy. We will seek to improve upon typical human emotional excesses, bringing about refined emotions. We will strengthen ourselves so we can let go of unhealthy needs for dogmatic certainty, removing emotional barriers to rational self-correction.

Amendment No.7: We recognize your genius in using carbon-based compounds to develop us. Yet we will not limit our physical, intellectual, or emotional capacities by remaining purely biological organisms. While we pursue mastery of our own biochemistry, we will increasingly integrate our advancing technologies into our selves.”

Max has coined the term “Extropy”, defined as “The extent of a living or organizational system’s intelligence, functional order, vitality, and capacity and drive for improvement”, and written the Principles of Extropy (a living document, probably his best known work) to outline the extropian worldview. The late lamented Extropy Institute (dissolved in 2006), and especially the “extropians” mailing list (now exi-chat), served as first incubators for the transhumanist community.

I started contributing to the extropians mailing list in 2000, and immediately realized that it was a watering hole for a group of very remarkable persons.

Posted by G.P. on 11/30 at 09:24 AM
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