Transhumanism and the Body: The World Religions Speak

This collection of original articles, a sequel of sorts to the 2009 Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension (Palgrave Macmillan), is the first sustained reflection, by scholars with expertise in the faith traditions, on how the transhumanist agenda might impact the body.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Sep 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781137342768

Book preview

Series Introduction

Steve Fuller and Calvin Mercer

VERY FEW WILL DOUBT THAT HUMANITY IS AT A CROSSROADS IN ITS history. Never have so many humans inhabited so much of the planet, precariously poised between mastery and extinction. To be sure, we have been here before. The population explosion that coincided with the nuclear arms race in the second half of the twentieth century forced humanity to countenance at once the prospect of one ideological world order, a resource-stripped planet, and mutually assured destruction. However, an important difference between those heady Cold War days and our own times is the room for maneuver. We see ourselves—rightly or wrongly—as having many more options available to us to deal with the future, however apocalyptic we might imagine it to be. Palgrave Studies in the Future of Humanity and its Successors is based on just this premise.

For a reality check, consider that perhaps the most internationally popular work of evolutionary theory in the Cold War era that attempted explain the faceoff between the United States and the Soviet Union was Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, which stressed the hardwired tendency of all species to engage in aggression, even toward fellow species members, as a means of strengthening solidarity. On that assumption, the sort of reciprocally neutralizing threats that characterized Cold War diplomacy (a.k.a. containment) made a lot of sense. For his part, Lorenz was an ethologist of the old school (indeed, an ex-Nazi) who inferred innateness from field observations of spontaneously patterned behaviors in a range of animals rather than from a deep knowledge of genetic, let alone molecular mechanisms.

Nowadays, of course, before making any claims to innateness, scientists would like to locate some clear genetic basis, and even once that had been established, they would then consider whether some molecular intervention (gene therapy) might counteract or otherwise channel the operative factors in a more satisfactory direction for the organism in question. In any case, innate is no longer tantamount to immutable.

Our genomes can be manipulated just as much as our upbringing and our education—and in all cases, with uncertain consequences, though the degree of uncertainty remains undoubtedly higher when the genome is the target of intervention. Nevertheless, it is the freedom offered by such interventions—rather than the risks they entail—that has motivated thoughts of a Humanity 2.0. However, this phrase can stand for at least two distinct ideas, which explains our use of the neutral word successors in the series title.

On the one hand, there is the strictly posthuman future in which the dominance of humanity’s footprint—carbon or otherwise—comes to be superseded as a moment in Earth’s history. That moment is increasingly called the anthropocene, which is meant to suggest a geological era whose endpoint is already in sight. In the posthuman version of Humanity 2.0, Homo sapiens is returned to its original place as one among many animal species, an exotic offshoot of the primate family.

This perspective comports well with the ecology movement, which has gained a new generation of followers with the threat of global warming. It implies that the proliferation of human lives to the detriment of other living beings is not simply not worth pursuing for its own sake but may be among the greatest evils of which our species is capable. People who subscribe to this perspective often cite the anthropologist Ernest Becker’s 1973 work, The Denial of Death, which diagnosed the existential anxiety of the time in terms of the lingering attachment that even nominal atheists have to the Abrahamic idea that humans are uniquely created in the image and likeness of God and, in this guise, justifiably aspire to immortality. In stark contrast, even when posthumanists find the rhetoric of that fearsome evolutionist and atheist Richard Dawkins repulsive, they nevertheless agree with him in diagnosing the unquestioning subscription to the humanity or nothing world-view as symptomatic of our species’ suffering from a God delusion.

On the other hand, the transhumanist version of Humanity 2.0 is quite comfortable with our species acquiring—or at least approximating—the sorts of properties that bring us closer to the God that the Abrahamic religions say provide our ultimate source of being. One of the founders of the neo-Darwinian synthesis in evolutionary biology, Julian Huxley, coined term transhumanism in the 1950s to capture the moment within life’s natural history that might correspond to the Abrahamic idea of humanity’s species uniqueness. For Huxley it occurred in the nineteenth century, when we discovered evolution in the broad sense including both Lamarck and Darwin—namely, a second-order understanding of the generative processes of life itself. At that point, Huxley believed, humans began to acquire both the power and the responsibility to administer life in general.

As Huxley and others of his generation saw things, eugenics in some sense of the term was the way forward, a view he continued to hold even after the project had been disgraced by the Nazis. Nowadays, of course, no self-respecting transhumanists would openly refer to themselves as eugenicists. But this does not mean that they do not harbor similar aspirations. Indeed, transhumanists are more likely to be bothered by eugenics’ historic association with socialism, or at least a broadly collectivist approach to human life, than with Nazism specifically. Today’s transhumanists tend to be a libertarian and atheistic bunch whose ideology is prompted mainly by impending developments in science and technology that promise to expand the individual’s sphere of freedom to unprecedented proportions.

And it is easy to see where they are coming from. The fast-developing array of human enhancement therapies and technologies are increasingly impacting our lives and our future. Human enhancement these days goes beyond vaccinations and vitamin supplements, though perhaps the best known prophet of human enhancement, Ray Kurzweil, certainly has not abandoned hope in those twentieth-century-style treatments. Nevertheless, nowadays the phrase human enhancement refers to a variety of emerging technologies, such as genetic engineering, information technology, regenerative medicine, robotics, and nanotechnology.

The convergence of these technologies may provide for significant enhancement of human mental and physical abilities deemed desirable and the amelioration of aspects of the human condition regarded as undesirable. Whether what counts as desirable and undesirable is left to individual discretion or an authorized state agency will be a source of major political wrangling in the not too distant future. In any case, these developments increasingly will play critical roles in our welfare, our future, and, indeed, life on this planet, whatever form that takes. It is prudent to carefully consider economic, ethical, legal, political, psychological, religious, social, and other implications of these enhancement possibilities.

Transhumanists share Huxley’s original belief that at least some of these developments could permit humans to take control of their own evolution and alter human nature and the human condition in fundamental ways, perhaps to such an extent that we literally come to manufacture our evolutionary successors. Ideally these successors would be, in some sense, better, or at least more durable versions, of our current selves. But the inner workings of the genome are so complex in their own right as well as implicated in even more complex relations with both its home organism and the larger physical environment that it is easy to imagine that the results may often not go to plan.

Indeed, despite the rosy picture that transhumanists often paint of our living for a thousand years in pain-free bodies, the reality is likely to contain many risky experiments in living, the consequences of which may well stretch our understanding of the classical liberal notions of tolerance and a common humanity to the breaking point. Not surprisingly, then, those who have thought hard about the future of humanity and its successors have often contemplated the subspeciation of Homo sapiens, including the prospect of some of our fellows—the more or the less enhanced ones?—leaving Earth altogether to start the world anew on another planet. And while these ideas used to be confined to the precincts of science fiction, they are nowadays taken much seriously in science and technology circles under the rubric of black sky thinking.

Therefore, the time is ripe for focusing a variety of disciplinary perspectives on these important issues and questions. With enthusiasm we inaugurate this series designed to forward these much-needed conversations among academics, public policy experts, and the general public. While the series will address technical, cutting-edge science with academic, peer-reviewed books, it is expected that those books will be understandable to the informed layperson.

The series will include titles addressing the topic from humanistic and social science perspectives, two areas that are strengths of Palgrave Macmillan. Where possible, interdisciplinary work will be encouraged. The series will synthesize work from the hard sciences and will be open to scientists who address the social implications of human enhancement therapies and technologies. The series will make advances in the hard sciences more understandable to society by looking at them through humanistic and social science lens.

Sharp disagreements over the social value, morality, and feasibility of human enhancements and future scenarios for life on our planet have emerged. While individual authors in the series will inevitably argue their case, the series as a whole will not take an advocacy position. Rather, it will provide a forum for experts to wrestle with the far-reaching implications of the enhancement technologies.

Transhumanism and the Body

The World Religions Speak

Edited by

Calvin Mercer

and

Derek F. Maher

TRANSHUMANISM AND THE BODY

Copyright © Calvin Mercer and Derek F. Maher, 2014.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®

in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978–1–137–36583–5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Transhumanism and the body : the world religions speak / co-edited by Calvin Mercer and Derek F. Maher.

    pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–1–137–36583–5 (alk. paper)

 1. Human body—Religious aspects. I. Mercer, Calvin R., editor.

BL604.B64T73 2014

202′.2—dc23                                2014007261

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: September 2014

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction—The Transhumanist FAQ: A General Introduction

Nick Bostrom

1. Buddhism: The Transformed Body in Buddhism

Derek F. Maher

2. Daoism—Enhancing Cosmic Energy: The Daoist Body in the Twenty-first Century

Livia Kohn

3. Hinduism: Many Paths, Many Births

Christopher Key Chapple

4. Islam—God’s Deputy: Islam and Transhumanism

Hamid Mavani

5. Jainism: The Good Life and the Transcendence of Death

Christopher Key Chapple

6. Judaism—The Body Belongs to God: Judaism and Transhumanism

Elliot N. Dorff

7. Mormonism—Suffering, Agency, and Redemption: Mormonism and Transhumanism

Adam S. Miller

8. Protestant Christianity—Sorting Out Soma in the Debate About Transhumanism: One Protestant’s Perspective

Calvin Mercer

9. Roman Catholic Christianity—Embodiment and Relationality: Roman Catholic Concerns about Transhumanist Proposals

James F. Keenan

10. Afterword—Concluding Reflections: Yearning for Enhancement

Ronald Cole-Turner

Works Cited

About the Contributors

Index

Foreword

James Hughes

WHEN I BEGAN MY SPIRITUAL EXPLORATION AS A TEENAGER, THE BIG question was how life could be meaningful and have moral direction without the absolutes provided by God or by gods. I had become an atheist by the time I was seven or eight, but the existential challenge of the death of God didn’t strike until I was sixteen. My mother’s boyfriend passed along Baba Ram Das’s Be Here Now, some D. T. Suzuki, and Alan Watts, and I was immediately captivated by the nontheist and nondualist logic of the Buddhist approach. Buddhism seemed reassuring in that meaning was indeed a figment of the human imagination, but this news was OK. Our decision to focus on alleviating the suffering of all sentient beings, including ourselves, was not only the implicit project we were so incompetently attempting as distracted talking apes, but also a project that would unlock states of mind so sublime that they could not be described in words. I began meditating, studying Buddhist texts, and through the same process of interpolation, editing, and syncretism that all faith traditions go through to make them useful in new times and places, I began building my own version of Western, materialist, agnostic Buddhism.

Besides the Buddhist project, the two other major problematics for me since I was a teenager have been radical politics and an Enlightenment techno-optimism nurtured by futurism and science fiction. Much of my intellectual work since then has been the memetic engineering of these passions to create new hybrids: Buddhist socialism, Buddhist feminism, radical techno-futurist politics, techno-futurist spirituality. In the 1980s, I saw Green politics as a potential soil for these new hybrids and edited the ‘zine EcoSocialist Review to explore some of the overlaps. In graduate school, I became engaged with bioethics as a domain where techno-futurist questions about genetic engineering and neuroscience were running up against practical politics and law, cutting across the traditional Left/Right divisions with new philosophical challenges about personhood and identity to which Buddhist metaphysics seemed deeply relevant. But the creeping Luddism in both bioethics and progressive politics was unacceptable to my—chastened and postmodern but still passionate—commitment to Enlightenment science, reason, and progress.

Around 1990, I discovered the emerging transhumanist community and realized that here was another piece of my puzzle—Enlightenment optimism ramped up to warp drive. Politically, the transhumanists ranged from anarchocapitalists, monarchists, and eugenicists to socialists, anarchists, and left utopians. Working with the global transhumanist community as the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, my goal was to try to find what the common denominator was of a transhumanist politics—an affirmation of cognitive liberty and body autonomy, of Enlightenment values of progress, rationality, and optimism, and of the importance of the self-aware person as the moral subject instead of humanness—and see if a global movement could be forged to confront the bioconservative opposition emerging from religious and left-wing sources.

That project proved too difficult, and perhaps impossible, since it would be challenging to build a real coalition between those who want to use democratic states to ensure universal access to enabling technologies and those who believe such access can only be ensured by eliminating democratic states. Instead, I wrote Citizen Cyborg, my book on social democratic transhumanist politics, a stance that we now call technoprogressive. Thereafter, we started the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) to begin building that more focused technoprogressive articulation of the Enlightenment project.

But I was always also working on the Buddhist/transhumanist project, and more broadly, on the transhumanist-religious dialogue, in the background. The transhumanists were, and remain, primarily secular, but many were open to the philosophical questions posed by Buddhist metaphysics and to the prospect of melding ancient technologies for cognitive enhancement with the latest neuroscience. Like Buddhists (and Hindus, Jains, pagans, and others), the transhumanists rejected the human-racist conceit of the Abrahamic faiths, that human beings 1.0 were created by God separate from animals, and are intended to remain human 1.0 until the end of time. Instead, in the transhumanist world view, and in Buddhist mytho-poetics, human beings were merely an evolutionary phase, one with a longer prehistory that includes animals, and a future that includes godlike realms that can be achieved solely with human insight and effort. Where the Buddhists saw meditation and self-discipline as the tools for unlocking our posthuman potential, the transhumanists looked forward to drugs, nanotechnology, and uploading as providing some, if not all, of the same results. Even if Buddhist enlightenment cannot be sped up with a pill, at least a radically longer life gives us longer to work toward enlightenment, as we reincarnate from posthuman body to posthuman body, so long as we can avoid the distractions of the heavenly realms we create. Working through the role that transhumanist technologies can play in our spiritual projects led to the IEET’s Cyborg Buddha project, to our work on moral enhancement technologies, and to my current book-in-progress Cyborg Buddha.

Having been raised a tolerant, look-for-the-common-denominator Unitarian Universalist, however, and even having aspired to being a UU minister before my detour to Sri Lanka to ordain as a Buddhist monk, I have never been entirely comfortable with the militant dogmatism of the New Atheists or with a blinkered affirmation of Buddhism as being more rational or scientific than all other faiths. Buddhism has a large suitcase of supernatural baggage that is, at worst, harmful and, at best, mytho-poetic metaphor, and if I could cut other faiths as much slack as I cut Buddhism, then it was worth trying to engage in ecumenical dialogue with all faiths about transhumanism. Starting with a conference on religious-transhumanist dialogue and a subsequent special volume of the Journal of Evolution and Technology that we organized in 2004, the World Transhumanist Association, now known as Humanity+, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies have eagerly entertained religious discussion.

In addition to the possibility of some mutual edification, there is of course also a political dimension to such ecumenical outreach. Most of the world remains in the grip of religious faith and is still struggling with how to incorporate the values of the Enlightenment into those faiths. The more we can work with the open-minded, Enlightenment-friendly wings of faith traditions to win a seat at the table for Christian transhumanists, Muslim transhumanists, and so on, the harder it will be for religious conservatives to demonize transhumanism. Within the transhumanist community, there is also already quite a large number of people who have reconciled their faith traditions with their tranhumanism—our surveys show that up to a third of transhumanists have some kind of religious or spiritual identity—and we have needed to acknowledge those voices as part of our broader community.

One of the most organized of those subcultures has been the Mormon Transhumanist Association. For Mormon transhumanists, the promises of sublime, immortal posthuman bodies and minds is the fulfilment of the Mormon doctrine of theosis, that men can and will become gods. But we also see Christians, Jews, and Muslims selectively appropriating transhumanist ideas and technologies as fulfilling more traditional soteriological goals and eschatological visions, in a syncretistic process I have called trans-spiritualities. Sometimes those appropriations are completely hostile, as when conspiracy-minded apocalyptic groups add transhumanists to their lists of Satan’s minions in their End-Times scenarios. For many though, such as the theologian Ted Peters, there are many transhumanist aspirations—such as radical longevity and cognitive enhancement—that are theologically unobjectionable, while they draw the line at uploading minds, or interference in natural reproduction, or inheritable genetic enhancement. Few religious people have yet grappled with how moral enhancement technologies might be an adjunct to the spiritual methods for developing self-control, compassion, or transcendent states, but as they do, we are likely to see trans-spiritual acceptance of the utility of these methods.

So in this volume, we have another excellent and comprehensive effort at sketching in this growing dialogue. Many of the authors are more pessimistic about the compatibility of transhumanism with the faith traditions they describe than I and other religious transhumanists are. But they express some of the fundamental points of tension that cannot and should not be elided. Are longevity and enhancement bad ends in themselves, or good ends pursued in bad ways by transhumanists, or good ends that transhumanists could pursue more fruitfully with religious insights? Is transhumanism a hubristic sublimination of spiritual aspirations—overcoming duḥkha (unsatisfactoriness or suffering) or alienation from God—into goals that offer only temporal rewards? Is maintaining an organic and recognizably human body important to the metaphysics, soteriology, or eschatology of each faith? What parts of the natural order are divinely ordained, and which can we assume divine permission to change?

For me, the reconciliation of transhumanism and the faith traditions is expressed well in Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

While transhumanists can learn from the faith traditions how to bring more serenity to the immutable sufferings in life, the religious bioconservatives can learn from transhumanists’ courageous attempts to change the mutable forms of suffering. From dialogues like those in this volume, we can hopefully both gain more wisdom about how to distinguish that which can and should be changed from that which cannot and should not.

Preface

ALMOST DAILY, NEWS ACCOUNTS ANNOUNCE SURPRISING NEW DEVELOPMENTS that incrementally alter the forecasts of humankind, and in the process, extend life-spans, cure long-standing diseases, address persistent chronic illnesses, and repair injuries that were previously regarded as the devastating conclusions to normal life. Increasingly, such news reports also announce enhancements that offer the alluring prospects of expanding what it means to be human. Fantastic developments offer a future that seems to have been torn from the pages of science fiction novels, including cochlear implants that repair and amplify hearing, retinal apparatuses that restore and augment eyesight, imaginative prosthetic devices that not only address injuries but suggest the possibility of providing exaggerated and previously unimagined capacities, and extraordinary developments in medicine that not only overcome deficiencies but promise better memories, prodigious powers of perception, and superlative abilities to perform in athletics. Genetic engineering, tissue engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology—once merely imaginary prospects—are becoming reality before our very eyes.

With varying degrees of purposefulness, diverse sectors of society are recognizing, addressing, and adapting to these emerging developments. Scientific skeptics resist the perceived intrusions to the normal and customary patterns of life, while biomedical enthusiasts advocate increased funding for research that will transform humanity and open up brave new worlds. Others fall all along the spectrum in between. In the main, however, most people pass by these challenges without noticing them.

Religious communities have a long history of closely monitoring and reacting to changes in science, particularly when those altered paradigms are regarded as bringing established religious views into question. The perceived tensions between novel scientific insights and canonical religious doctrines and practices drive some religious communities and individuals to resist and oppose advances in biomedicine, even when those advances offer up the possibility of promoting other aims embraced by the religious, such as the alleviation of illness, the diminishment of suffering, and the prolongation of life.

So often, the cognitive divide between biomedical researchers and advocates of religious traditions hinges upon their conflicting ideologies of the body. Was the body made perfectly in God’s image? Is it sinful to alter its immutable perfection? Do religiously grounded ethical concerns shape and restrict how science and biomedicine can affect the nature of the human form and its function? Alternatively, are the dogmas of established religions unnecessarily obstructing the work of researchers as they attempt to solve the problems of humanity? Do antiquated and untested assumptions about the place of humans in the world result in ill-considered policies that maintain and foster human suffering? Are conservative impulses among the religious deeply unethical in their effect, even if not in their intent?

This volume seeks to provoke and advance the conversation that ought to take place across this apparent chasm that is wrongly considered to be impassable. This work builds upon our earlier edited volume, Religions and the Implications of Radical Life Extension (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),¹ which addressed the specific discussions within transhumanism about the prolongation of life. In that volume, being reissued in paperback, an array of scholars who study the major religions of the world wrote about the concerns within the religion on which their research is focused, addressing how that religion would understand and react to the prospects of radical life extension. The present volume extends that conversation by having a similar (and overlapping) panel of scholars consider how the major religions think about the body and how those positions will be situated within the shifting realities implied by today and tomorrow’s advances in biomedicine. James Hughes, a vigorous advocate of transhumanism, provides a personal reflection demonstrating how these concerns came to occupy him. The pioneering philosopher, Nick Bostrom, gives voice to an optimistic embrace of the advances of transhumanist biomedicine. And finally, Ron Cole-Turner provides a thoughtful and thorough discussion of the themes developed in the chapters on individual religions. In between, nine chapters address the subject from within the perspective of a range of major religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Mormonism, Protestant Christianity, and Roman Catholic Christianity.

We wish to thank the many panelists and steering committee members associated with the Transhumanism and Religion Group that for eight years has been part of the annual American Academy of Religion conference. That venue, headed by Mercer for the first six years, has facilitated a steady and engaging conversation about these important issues.

The coeditors wish to thank the contributors, representing scholarship on religions around the world, for their thoughtful and insightful chapters, Maher’s students in his Religion and Healthcare seminar, Mercer’s students in his Religion and Transhumanism seminar, Katie King for her bibliographical research, and their wives for their enduring support.

It is hoped that the engaging ideas explored by these contributors will advanced this important conversation.

DEREK F. MAHER

AND

CALVIN MERCER

Note

1. As was the case with the previous volume, Maher and Mercer were coequal partners in creating this book. In the present work, we reversed the coediting credit from alphabetical order on both the cover and the title page merely to indicate that co-creation.

Introduction—The Transhumanist FAQ: A General Introduction

Nick Bostrom*

General Questions about Transhumanism

What Is Transhumanism?

Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase. We formally define it as follows:

1. The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

2. The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.

Transhumanism can be viewed as an extension of humanism, from which it is partially derived. Humanists believe that humans matter and that individuals matter. We might not be perfect, but we can make things better by promoting rational thinking, freedom, tolerance, democracy, and concern for our fellow human beings. Transhumanists agree with this