Human Flourishing in a Technological World Philosophers, biologists, and theologians collaborate to shape a vision of human flourishing in a technological society. Fri, 29 Jan 2021 18:08:54 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 Technology and the disappearance of the person https://www.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/2021/01/technology-and-the-disappearance-of-the-person/ Fri, 29 Jan 2021 18:08:54 +0000 https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/?p=899

The achievements of technology for the enhancement of human life are rich in promise, pointing to a glorious future of health and happiness.

New gene-editing tools such as CRISPR-Cas9, nanotechnology advances in health care and continuing progress in neuroscience raise hopes of healing hitherto incurable defects or diseases.

To borrow an enthusiastic line from The Scientist on technological progress in restoring eyesight: “Scientists have accomplished what previously was saved for miracle workers.”

Surely, no one would want to gainsay the gift of alleviating suffering should science make the blind see and the lame walk through genetic engineering, brain implants or robotic prostheses.

We should not overlook, however, that our increasing focus on technology for alleviating human suffering is sustained by a worldview that alters our self-perception. Our immersion in technology goes hand in hand with the disappearance of the person.

Of course, to note the disappearance of something is to imply that we know what is missing. What exactly a person is, however, remains difficult to say. In “What Is a Person?” — one of the best modern books on the subject — the sociologist Christian Smith defines a person as follows:

“By person I mean a conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending center of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who — as the efficient cause of his or her own responsible actions and interactions — exercises complex capacities for agency and intersubjectivity in order to develop and sustain his or her own incommunicable self in loving relationships with other personal selves and with the nonpersonal world.”

Three features of the person in Smith’s definition are especially important. First, a person has a body. The spirit or presence of a human person exists only in bodily form.

Second, a person is a moral agent. Unlike other animals, human beings as persons can step outside their immediate environment and evaluate the world, themselves and others according to abstract ideals. This ability is the basis of the particular human quality of reasoning that makes possible art, literature, science and religion.

The third notable feature of Smith’s definition is the most crucial, because it takes us beyond the notion that human beings are merely rational animals. The human person is an “incommunicable self.”

That is to say, a person is not something exhausted by its definition — not merely the sum of certain characteristics. Or, said another way, a person is not like an onion, made up simply of layers of qualities, so that when we peel back the last feature, we hold nothing in our hands.

No doubt, certain abilities and features are always intrinsically part of a person, helping us identify someone as John, Ruth or Mary. Yet a person’s “incommunicable self,” as Smith says, cannot be captured by even the most complete list of characteristics. A person is not a something, consisting of many individual features, but a unique someone, who has, holds and inhabits those features.

The incommunicable self, a presence irreducible to any particular identifiable quantity or quality, is the essence of personhood. It is a mystery impossible to capture in concepts or words yet nonetheless real.

The only word that comes close to describing the presence of the person is “love,” defined as the will to promote another. Perhaps the best image to describe this love is the mother-child relationship. Ideally, from the first moment, a mother wills her child to flourish and ultimately become independent of her as another free, happy individual.

From the viewpoint of the child, this scenario also explains why the individual’s existence as a person has the fundamental quality of a gift. Each of us has been deeply shaped in our way of engaging the world by others. In this way, human consciousness is by definition reciprocal.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, in his book “On the Origins of Cognitive Science,” recounts a story of a man and his wife, Holocaust survivors, who were reunited after their release from separate concentration camps. Six months later, the wife died from an illness contracted while in camp, throwing the husband into the deepest despair, seemingly incapable of continuing with life.

In therapy, the famous psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, himself a Holocaust survivor, asked the man, If God granted me the power to create an exact replica of your wife — including her memories and demeanor, so you could not distinguish her from the wife you lost — would you want me to do it?

After a long silence, the man stood up and said, “No thank you, doctor,” and left to start a new life.

What happened? The man realized that even the most perfect simulation still cannot capture the incommunicable self, the essence of unique love for another that makes us persons.

Yet this understanding of the person has disappeared in our present cultural obsession with technological solutions. A case in point is the transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, famous for predicting that by 2045 we will be able to upload our minds to computing platforms like the cloud.

Like Christian end-time prophets, Kurzweil keeps revising the date, but what interests me is the technological claim itself.

Will the day come when we upload our minds? I want to convince you that it will not, because mind uploading is premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of the human person.

It is important to note that by “mind” Kurzweil means our personality profile, a replica of our actual selves. His dilemma is touchingly similar to that of the Holocaust survivor who lost his wife: Kurzweil misses his father(link is external) and wants to bring him back by creating a computer replica of his personality.

How? By feeding into a computer all the data he has collected about his father: voice recordings, pictures, letters, musical compositions — hundreds of boxes of stuff.

Of course, even if this process worked, you would end up, not with a real person, but with a replica. Kurzweil’s answer is that this doesn’t matter, because even in living human beings, personal identity is really nothing but input and output patterns of information. And the brain is essentially a pattern recording and recognition machine, much like a computer.

Once visionaries like Kurzweil have reduced cognition to the brain and the brain to a biological machine, it is easy for them to imagine that we can reverse-engineer the brain and digitally remaster all its functions, that we can upload our unique self-identity to digital memory devices and then either enjoy a disembodied future or download ourselves into any kind of cool synthetic body that technology can provide.

Now, I don’t think we should lose any sleep over the possibility that the futuristic visions of transhumanism will become reality. No, the real issue is a battle for our imagination.

The more people like Kurzweil tell us our human identity is like the profile stored on our smartphones, the more we might actually believe this to be true. Look at the way we pour ourselves into our social media accounts.

The problem with Kurzweil’s concept of the person is that the human self, our personal identity, cannot be reduced to patterns of information exchange. Contrary to the claims of transhumanists, neither the brain nor human cognition works like a computer; they both depend utterly on an organic body.

We don’t negotiate the world as information-processing algorithms. No, we skillfully navigate a world of human meaning and dimensions based on our ensouled bodies.

Kurzweil has no trouble turning people into machines, because he already considers them to be machines. Kurzweil’s transhumanist dream is possible only if you believe in a stunted vision of the human person based on a computational, disembodied and individualistic view of consciousness.

In this view, true personhood has disappeared. Whatever the world Kurzweil envisions, it is not a human world dependent on the embodied, loving relationships that mark us as persons — and therefore made in God’s image.

This was first published in “Faith and Leadership”

]]> Aging, Technology and Identity: Reflections with Jean Améry https://www.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/2020/06/aging-technology-and-identity-reflections-with-jean-amery/ Wed, 10 Jun 2020 22:48:46 +0000 https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/?p=871

by Dr. Michael Mawson, Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology & Ethics and Research Fellow in the Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre at Charles Sturt University, Australia.

What is the significance of human aging—especially of our bodily and cognitive decline—for who and what we are as human beings? In what ways should we draw upon and make use of technology(s) for negotiating aging and its negative effects? How does this use of technology itself begin to shape how we understand and experience ourselves as aging beings?

In my ongoing work on these questions, I recently came across a short book by the Austrian-born philosopher and essayist Jean Améry: On Aging: Revolt and Resignation (1968). Améry’s book consists of five essays, each of which engages a different aspect of aging: ‘aging human beings in relation to time, to their own bodies, to society, to civilisation, ultimately to death.’ (xxii). Central to Améry’s work, as the English translator summarizes, ‘is his determination to look at the phenomenon of aging without blinking, to assess it without sentimentalizing, consoling, or mincing words about the horrible nature of what he sees’ (xviii).  In what follows I summarise a few of Améry’s key insights, and then suggest how these might complicate some of our standard ways of appealing to technology for responding to aging.

Jean Améry on Aging

First of all, what does Améry’s ‘unflinching’ look at aging reveal about how we experience time and space? When we are still relatively young, Améry proposes, we experience space or the world as open and available to us. Correlatively, when we are young we experience time as something distant and insubstantial: ‘To be young is to throw one’s body out into a time that is not time at all, but life, world and space’ (15). All of this begins to change, however, as we age and become old. As we become old, we increasingly experience space or the world as something that stands over against us. Here Amery takes an example of someone who had once enjoyed being in nature: ‘Mountains, valleys, forests he once loved, are now, to him, a club into which he has not been admitted’ (35). For the aging and old, the world is experienced as inaccessible and inhospitable. Furthermore, as we become old, time no longer simply lies before us; it has now accumulated and solidified within us: ‘The old have life behind them, but this life that is no longer actually lived is nothing but time gathered up, lived, passed away’ (14). Accumulated time and memories become ever more substantial, even as the actual world becomes ever more distant and elusive.

What is at stake with this loss of space and accumulation of time? For Améry, both this loss and accumulation involve increased social isolation. This is because space and our access to space is precisely what mediates our relationships with other people: ‘Space, even my space…. is always the space of others: an intersubjectively understandable phenomenon….’ (22). As we age and lose access to the world, however, we find ourselves cut off from others and excluded from society.

Furthermore, according to Améry, this loss of space and accumulation of time involves discovering the body. We discover the body ‘in the way it [aging] heaps burdens upon us more frequently every day. Since in suffering it no longer transcends itself to dissolve in world and space….’ (42). As we lose space and accumulate time within us, our bodies themselves become more substantial and present to us: ‘This body, which is no longer the mediator between the world and us, but cuts us off from the world and space with its heavy breathing, painful legs, and the arthritically plagued articulation of our bones, has become our prison, but also our last shelter’ (34). The aging body isolates us, even while also becoming our point of refuge from an inhospitable and elusive world.

This phenomenon indicates a certain ambivalence in how we experience our bodies as aging. As Améry narrates it, ‘one feels one’s aging body to be ‘something external and imposed and yet at the same time as that which is most his own, to which he is more and more reduced and to which he devotes increasing attention.’[1] In aging, we are confronted by the body from outside, yet simultaneously as that which we properly are. Thus, as Améry summarises this point, ‘I am myself through my body and against it’ (40).

This dialectic also extends to identity more basically. Even as we discover the body in a new way in aging and pain, so too are we pressed back into ourselves and forced to confront who we are. Indeed, as Améry rather poetically puts it, ‘pain and sickness are the festivals of decay the body organises for itself and me. Their purpose is to ensure that I am absorbed in the body and consequently…though certainly reduced in my ability to function…I gain in ego’ (43). By separating us from the world and sociality, pressing us into our bodies, aging and decline gives us a new sense of self or identity.

In the final essay of his short book, Améry frames this dialectic using the language of ‘death in the midst of life’. In aging and old age, ‘death is already in us, making room for equivocation and contradiction. We become I and not-I. We possess an ego enclosed in our skin and may at the same time find out that the limits always were fluid and stayed that way. We become more alienated from ourselves and more familiar with ourselves…Day and night cancel each other out in twilight.’[2] The presence and anticipation of death in the very midst of our aging and decline simultaneously forms and fragments us at the deepest level.

Aging and Technology

What is at stake with Améry’s complex account of aging and its implications? How do some of Améry’s insights help us better negotiate the use and impact of technology for responding to aging and its effects? Here I will simply make three observations that draw upon the preceding discussion.

First, as we have seen, Améry draws attention to ways in which aging and old age is integral to how we experience both space and time. Among other things, he draws attention to how memory and accumulated time emerge only through the progressive loss of space and access to the world. This is how memories and past experiences become substantial and central for who we are. At the very least, Améry’s analysis implies that ongoing attempts to use technology to radically forestall and mitigate aging are on some level misguided. Could we still have experience and memory, at least of the kinds that are deeply formative and substantial, without the corresponding loss of space and accumulation of time which occurs through aging and bodily decline?

Second, appeals to technology in response to aging and its effect tend to promote and presuppose an understanding of the body as something significantly at our disposal, that is, as something over which we can and should exert a high level of control. For Améry, by contrast, the body emerges as my body in its very intransience, precisely in its failure to mediate the world and others. The body becomes fully mine only through pain and suffering, and perhaps especially in kinds of suffering that we resist or did not choose. Once again, this ambivalence challenges straightforward assumptions that the body is something available to us, that is, something that can be straightforwardly manipulated and managed through technical and technological means.

Finally, this ambivalence is captured by Améry’s language of ‘death in the midst of life’. Following Améry, aging and the realities of aging disclose death’s presence in life, in ways that both continually enframe and elude us. Indeed, the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer has elsewhere drawn attention to this same ambivalence and dialectic: ‘we cannot get beyond our death, our loneliness, and our desire with our utopias—they all belong inextricably to the cursed Earth. But in fact we are not supposed to get beyond them at all.’ For both Bonhoeffer and Améry, living and dying are intertwined in ways that we can never fully separate out. And this is perhaps especially the case in aging and the final stages of life. Insofar as appeals to technology fail to recognise this ambivalence—that is, by more straightforwardly pursuing and promoting living over against dying—they once again fail to recognise what human beings concretely are; such appeals fail to recognise the messiness and complexity of human beings and identity as disclosed through aging.

[1] (34-35, Quoted in Hamilton, p.308).

[2] Améry, 52.

]]> The Grace of Creatureliness: Technology, Disability, and Human Limitation https://www.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/2020/05/the-grace-of-creatureliness-technology-disability-and-human-limitation/ Tue, 26 May 2020 17:59:08 +0000 https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/?p=881

by Eleanor McLaughlin, Lecturer in Theology and Ethics, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, and Course Coordinator of the MTh and PGDip in Applied Theology, Faculty of Theology and Religion, Oxford

Gathering at the timeless Eynsham Hall in Oxfordshire to consider the relationship between advances in technology and human flourishing might seem at first glance to be an odd combination. The Hall is emblematic of a time before the types of technologies that are often seen as insidious, a more peaceful, less frenetic time before the advent of social media, 24-hour news channels, the ever-present mobile phone. However, on closer inspection, some of these very technologies underpin the success of Eynsham Hall. The Hall promotes itself through a carefully curated presence on twitter. When guests walk into their bedroom for the first time, they are greeted by classical music emanating from a discreet digital radio. There are televisions in every room, and, of course, complimentary WiFi is everywhere. Somehow, the team running Eynsham Hall have managed to intertwine the use of technology with the retention of peace and tranquillity, traditional aspects of life in a country house, to create a restful and welcoming atmosphere. Can this splicing of technology with inherited values be done in our daily lives to the same good effect?

The focus of my research for the Human Flourishing in a Technological World project is on disability theology and technology. I’m interested in how the integration of technology into our lives can be put to beneficial use, in particular for people with disabilities. Theological anthropology that takes the variety of human embodiment seriously can help us identify ways in which technology can be beneficial and increase human flourishing. It can also help us flag up the ways in which technology is used to harm people; again, my concern in particular is with the ways in which technology can be used to harm people with disabilities.

It’s clear from our experience of every day life that some recent advances in technology are extremely beneficial for people with disabilities. For instance, Augmentative Alternative Communication technologies such as eye tracking or head pointing devices help people to communicate with others. Online discussion groups allow people to meet, play games, and access support networks even if they are unable to move from their bed. Medical technologies such as the Freestsyle Libre sensor allow people to monitor their glucose levels much more easily than doing finger pricks, leading to greater control over sugar levels and thereby avoiding dangerous hyper- or hypoglycaemic episodes. Of course, these technologies could be put to nefarious uses too, but it’s easy to see how a great many people can have enriched lives thanks to these technological developments.

But what about technologies that allow us to select, for instance, one embryo over another for implantation in cases of IVF? Or technologies that are meant to make life easier, but in fact make things a lot harder for people with disabilities, such as the ‘chip and PIN’ payment system (see the recent Guardian article by Anna Tims, ‘How shops sign away the self-worth of disabled people,’ (20 January 2019). As with the examples mentioned above, it is not the technology itself that is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but the use we make of it. These latter examples of developing technologies tend, intentionally or unintentionally, to separate people with disabilities from those without. Why is this? Why is there an enduring ‘us and them’ divide in society between those without and with disabilities? Why is it so often taken for granted that human embodiment is embodiment without disability? My work suggests that this divide is to do with how we perceive human limitation, and how theology has some great resources to help us tackle this problem.

By taking as a starting point a theological anthropology that reminds us of the human condition of creatureliness, we can begin discussions of the impact of technology on our lives in a way which does not separate those with disabilities from those without disabilities. This is not to deny any differences between those with and without disabilities, but rather to highlight that while the variety of human embodiment leads to myriad experiences of being human, we all share a common starting point of being creatures. As such, we experience the limitation of being creatures rather than all-powerful creators. We exist within certain parameters that are set for us, instead of by us. This starting point prevents the traditional dichotomy between people with and without disabilities, according to which people with disabilities are portrayed as limited, and people without disabilities are portrayed as not having any limits.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his lecture series now published as Creation and Fall, discusses the limit that all creatures bear when in right relation to God. Bonhoeffer investigates the Genesis story and asks what we can learn from it about our condition as creatures of God. He suggests that before the Fall, when Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden, they realise that the prohibition that God sets on eating the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden is a limit that is given to them. However, this prohibition, this limit, is not experienced as negative. Bonhoeffer argues that the tree represents God’s being present at the centre of human existence, showing the humans that they do not have to live out of their own resources, but can rely on God, who occupies the centre of their existence. Thus, the limit imposed on Adam and Eve (to not eat the fruit of that tree) is, for Bonhoeffer, grace bestowed on them by God. This grace is defined as ‘that which holds humankind over the abyss of nonbeing, non living, not-being-created’. (Bonhoeffer 1997, 87). For Bonhoeffer then, being a creature of God means having a limit, but that limit represents God’s grace to humanity: the grace which means we can rely on God rather than having to rely exclusively on ourselves.

As we go forward into the next year of the Human Flourishing project, I will be pursuing this investigation using resources from within the disability theology movement. I will ask how creaturely limitation can be experienced as grace by all human beings, and whether this common experience can help us re-structure discourse around disability.

]]> Remembering Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Feb. 4, 1906-April 9, 1945) https://www.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/2020/04/remembering-dietrich-bonhoeffer-feb-4-1906-april-9-1945/ Thu, 09 Apr 2020 17:15:19 +0000 https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/?p=836

Today, 75 years ago, on April 9, 1945, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the order of Hitler for his involvement with the conspiracy to topple the Nazi regime. Many will commemorate Bonhoeffer’s death today, especially Christians who will likely hold him up as an exemplary believer who died for his convictions. Indeed, Bonhoeffer’s legacy seems obvious: Politicians of all stripes praise him as Nazi resister, champion of human justice, and defender of human rights. He also enjoys great popularity as a devotional writer, whose wisdom is sanctified by his martyrdom at the hand of Hitler’s executioners.

And yet, for anyone who cares to dig a little deeper, Bonhoeffer’s actual relevance lies elsewhere. The reason he remains one of the most studied modern theologians is his Christian humanism.

By Christian humanism, I mean the overall character of his theology, a theology certainly tested by Nazi politics but, more importantly, a theology molded in the crucible of modernity, shaped by the intellectual climate that still influences us today. Bonhoeffer wrote at a time when philosophers criticized the facile positivism of science and when many had become disenchanted with the traditional pieties of religion. He thought about God and reality at the beginning of what we now call postmodernity, and wondered how God still speaks to us in a largely secular age.

Bonhoeffer’s answer to this question was the incarnation. His theology is a Christian humanism because it centers on God’s becoming a human being and entering into creation in order to restore it. Among the many consequences of this theological outlook, two especially ensure Bonhoeffer’s relevance for our current intellectual climate.

First, because God became human in order to save creation, Bonhoeffer affirms the importance of the body, creation care, and human rights. He claims that we exist only as bodies. “Living as a human being,” he wrote, “means to live as a body in the spirit.” For Bonhoeffer, the body was part of God’s image in us, tying us in responsibility to the earth and to one another. “Through the body one is related to the earth and other bodies, does one exist for others, and depends on others. In our corporeality do we find our brother and the earth.” Not only did he insist on our care for creation, but he was also the first Protestant of his time to promulgate natural human rights based on the freedom to bodily life.

Second, Bonhoeffer developed what we now call an interpretive or hermeneutic view of revelation. Our knowledge about God, he believed, has to follow the pattern of the incarnation itself, in which God reveals his truth via a concrete person within a certain historical context of language and culture. Consequently, God’s will has to be discerned within the human domain. As Bonhoeffer liked to put it, “revelational is found in the rational, and the sacred in the profane.” Truth, we’d say today, requires interpretation.

Clearly, Bonhoeffer’s view of human identity and of human knowledge makes him an important conversation partner for anyone interested in the topic of technology and human flourishing!

In fact, one could put together a long list of topics that would demonstrate Bonhoeffer’s relevance for our time, ranging from his ecumenical spirit, to his deep love for worldly life in all its aspects, for his important ethical definition of freedom as responsibility for others, for his personalist vision of human beings, his non-conflictual view of science and theology, or for his profound appreciation of embodied life.

In light of the present COVID-19 crisis, we should also add Bonhoeffer’s confidence in God’s providence, exemplified in the verses entitled Von guten Mächten wunderbar geborgen (By faithful, quiet powers of good surrounded) he sent from prison to his fiancé Maria von Wedemeyer, a poem that has become a well-known church hymn in Germany. The two verses included here, give us a good sense of Bonhoeffer’s trust in God. The absence of any entitlement to life free from suffering, while also relishing every earthly joy, reveals a markedly different attitude from much that we hear from secular and religious sources these days in the context of the Coronavirus.

And should you offer us the cup of suffering,

though heavy, brimming full and bitter brand,

we’ll thankfully accept it, never flinching,

from your good heart and your beloved hand.

But should you wish now once again to give us

the joys of this world and its glorious sun,

then we’ll recall anew what past times brought us

and then our life belongs to you alone.

All of Bonhoeffer’s memorable insights, however, may be summarized by calling him a Christian humanist. The Christian life, Bonhoeffer concluded, is all about becoming truly human, through living faithfully by discerning God’s will in the concrete challenges of our lives, caring for creation and one another. That’s what it means to become like Christ, the archetypal image of God and exemplar of true humanity. Christian humanism is what makes Bonhoeffer relevant today.

]]> Technology and Human Creativity in Theological Perspective https://www.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/2020/03/technology-and-human-creativity-in-theological-perspective/ Mon, 23 Mar 2020 16:43:44 +0000 https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/?p=528

by Victoria Lorrimar

Created to be creators?

In engaging with transhumanist visions of the future, and the more general notion of human technological enhancement, from a theological perspective, a helpful starting point is the place of technology within a doctrine of creation.

Within a Christian understanding, an examination of the biblical language for creation (i.e. a word study of the Hebrew *bārā’*and yātsar –the first of which is reserved only for the action of God while the second is an activity that both God and humans carry out) suggests that it is appropriate to speak of humans as being genuinely creative from a theological perspective. Drawing on a metaphor of God as divine artist, we might situate human making within a theology of creation, rather than relegating it to the more distant doctrines of preservation, providence or redemption. Trevor Hart sums up this approach, arguing that viewing creation as “a project divinely begun and established, yet one that is handed over to us with ‘more to be made of it yet’ and inviting our responsible participation in the making, affords a fruitful perspective on the matter” (Making Good, 2014: 8).

For a long time, the semantic scope of “creation” rejected the possibility of such parallels and served to underscore the radical otherness of God. We can chart the historical shift which saw the notion of creation extended from its previous preserve of God alone to human artistry. “Creation proper” may still apply solely to the work of God in certain instances, but the idea of creation more generally has expanded in scope.

In fact, we can track the understanding of human creativity as it diverges from its humble scriptural origins. The language of creativity is first ascribed to humans during the Renaissance, as the idea of art being a faithful imitation of divine creativity gave way to the idea of the artist or poet as a creator in their own right. This extends through the Romantic era and the Enlightenment period, with the result that the modern understanding of the arts is, on the one hand, more limited than its classical and mediaeval counterparts, in that earlier understandings of art encompassed human productivity more generally, but also more audacious in the claims it makes on behalf of human capacities and originality.

From the time of Francis Bacon, the “father of modern science”, we see this understanding of human capacities bound up in the promise of empirical science, the immense confidence in the expansion of human knowledge, the drive to master nature and the flourishing of utopian thought. This emphasis on dominion came to be enmeshed within theological understandings of creation, as “creation” found its way into the vocabulary used for human activities.

This does not mean, however, that it is inappropriate to speak of humans as genuinely “creative”. Hart, after an extensive historical analysis of the language of creation, reaches the conclusion that: “at various key points in the story of God’s creative fashioning of a world fit for his own indwelling with us, divine artistry actively solicits a corresponding creaturely creativity, apart from which the project cannot and will not come to fruition” (Making Good, 2014: 37).

We find similar ideas in the work of Jacques Maritain and Dorothy Sayers, who reinforce the theological significance of human making and its proper place within a doctrine of creation. Maritain describes the creativity of the artist as a development of divine creation, a work proceeding from the whole soul which bears the image of God. Though he distinguishes the creation of God (who is able to truly generate another substance through divine utterance) and human works of creating (which can only ever be signs), Maritain nevertheless grounds the dignity of art in his assertion that it “realizes in act one of the fundamental aspects of the ontological likeness of our soul with God”. Sayers, too, locates human creativity in our being made in the image of a triune Creator, introduced in her play The Zeal of Thy House(1937) and unpacked further in The Mind of the Maker (1941).

Technological Enhancement and Human Creativity

The challenges posed by transhumanist visions of the human future require us to develop a sufficiently robust account of theological anthropology in return. Of course, theological anthropology is a very broad category, and I’ve focused on the understanding of human creativity within that. If we reflect on enhancement technologies, this prompts the question as to whether these kinds of technology are a legitimate exercise of our creativity, set within the framework of a broader doctrine of creation.

Treating technology as a mode of creativity finds some support in other fields to a limited degree. There has been a tendency toward the corporatisation of “creativity” in technological programmes of this century. A prime example is Kimberley Seltzer’s and Tom Bentley’sThe Creative Age: Knowledge and Skills for the New Economy, which outlines a goal-oriented and problem-solving approach to creativity bearing little resemblance to the understanding of creativity that I’ve already described. The aim, instead, at least from the stated commitments that direct this project and recent conference, is to consider technology in light of the more comprehensive scope of creativity described thus far, and within a theological framework. The decision to ground this theological treatment of human enhancement technology within a doctrine of creation and theology of human creativity garners theological support from a long history of identifying humans as “co-creators” with God. Could technology itself be considered part of the co-creative task?

Most of the detailed theological treatments of human creativity we might turn to focus almost exclusively on the arts. If they do treat technology, they tend to have developed within the science and religion field and often are accompanied by an over-privileging of rationality and an epistemological confidence in human capability that neglects an account of fallenness and the need for discernment (here I’m thinking mainly of Philip Hefner’s “created co-creator” proposal outlined most comprehensively in his 1993 work The Human Factor). In these latter discourses, even if they are moving beyond a foundationalist epistemology, the role of the imagination for understanding and discernment is often neglected.

Yet, transhumanism as a philosophy is veryimaginative. There are all kinds of synergies with science fiction that other scholars have drawn out, but (whatever we say about some of the ideologies involved) we have to admit that transhumanist visions of transcendence are captivating for many (even if not always taken seriously). If we are to engage these movements from a theological perspective then we need to meet them with equally compelling theological accounts of the future, and the good news is that Christian theology has a deep well of resources to draw on in this area.

James McClendon argued for the need to enter the “tournament of narratives” competing for attention within a postmodern milieu. Presented in ways that “recruit” the imagination (as James K. A. Smith describes the imperative for good stories in the moral arena), the visions of transcendence and glorification proclaimed so confidently in transhumanist literature are ripe for reclamation by Christian theologians, philosophers, writers and artists. We might respond with a fuller vision of the human future, a greater hope to set alongside the imaginings of transhumanists and techno-utopians. Of course, this is already a move to eschatology, but then we don’t want to separate out creation and redemption as entirely independent doctrinal loci.

Whereas technology itself tends to occupy many of the classic roles of a deity in the present technological paradigm, theologians are able to expose the “pretensions to self-love” inherent in certain technological mindsets (as theologian Brian Brock puts it). A Christian account of hope declares that in conceiving, assessing and implementing technologies, we bear neither the burden of correctly envisioning or accomplishing redemption for ourselves nor the risk and dread of complete failure. Technology occupies its proper place within the work of a gracious God who allows creation to participate in bringing the creation toward glorious fulfilment.

By reflecting on our technological activity in the context of theological accounts of co-creation (recognising and challenging the ways in which understanding has diverged from a biblical account of creativity), and by setting imaginative portrayals of Christian hope alongside transhumanist projections, we might think of theology as entering the “tournament of narratives” competing for victory over the human (and non-human, an aspect often neglected by transhumanists!) future.

]]> Friending the World – Sociality and the Transhuman Vision https://www.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/2020/03/friending-the-world-sociality-and-the-transhuman-vision/ Mon, 23 Mar 2020 16:43:02 +0000 https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/?p=519

by Clark Elliston, Assistant Professer of Religion and Philosophy, Schreiner University

Friends are all-too-frequently taken for granted, both in everyday human experience and in theology. It seems that for many people friends simply emerge; a shared laugh or thought becomes many and through some unseen alchemy a friend is created. Theologically the situation is a little more delicate. The concept of friendship poses a problem for theology insofar as friendship, in both antiquity and early theology, remains largely a preferential love. We choose our friends based on any number qualities, but we nevertheless choose them. This is a good gift, but as Soren Kierkegaard makes all too plain, this can be problematic for followers of a Savior who commands a neighbor-love of all persons. A preferential love which by necessity excludes others (as no one can love the whole world equally) thus violates the universality of Christ’s command to love all. Yet even here there are perplexing tensions. After all, the New Testament repeatedly mentions “the beloved disciple” and Jesus suggests an appropriate category of friendship when he notes that the greatest love is laying one’s life down for friends. Nonetheless such difficulties, as well as the embedded character of human friendship, have made it strikingly absent from much theological discourse.

Yet like so many areas of human life in a technological world, sociality too has been affected. Study after study indicates that the social life of Westerners is suffering. We are more lonely, depressed, and anxious than ever before. We also know that self-reported social encounters are perhaps the greatest source of meaning and happiness available to us. Yet this is not to say that we simply need more social encounters – after all, we are in the midst of one of the greatest social revolutions in history courtesy of the Internet. Though we may seclude ourselves physically from the surrounding world, most people will have hundreds of online interactions a day. As we work harder, as traditional ties lessen, and as the allure of instant communication grows, we should not be surprised as social media opportunities increase. Yet this transition into an online context poses myriad problems. Not least is the devolution of friendship as a fundamental form of human relationship. Instead, social media technologies promise ever-greater connectivity to others while paradoxically eroding constituent elements of friendship classically considered.

Two immediate issues arise when considering the digitalization of friendship through social media. First, social media friendship lacks consideration of character and the time it takes to cultivate character. Second, social media friendship remains crucially limited in terms of its presence with the other as friend. These issues, to be sure, do not undermine the project of social media entirely – meaningful encounters with others can happen on several platforms. However, social media disciplines and forms our online relationships in crucial ways. When this disciplined thinking and formation creeps into other realms of life it becomes toxic.

When Aristotle wrote one of the most influential treatises on friendship, books seven and eight of the Nicomachean Ethics, he delineated between three types of friendship. Two are immediately familiar to us: friendships based on pleasure and on utility. In these we are friends with those whom we enjoy or who provide clear benefit to our personal projects. These are inferior modes of friendship, however, relative to friendships based on virtue. The friendship of virtue, in contrast, centers upon the character of the friend. We befriend those whose character we admire and who admire us for our character. While this emphasis on virtue possesses problems of its own, it nevertheless offers insight into a crucial facet of authentic friendship, namely that friendship should involve something other than deferred self-love. Friendships of virtue rightly privilege an other for their performance of virtue, rather than our own gratified desires or pursuits.

Social media fails to appreciate or develop character because it cannot account for time within relationship. Though the immediacy of social media provides instant feedback on every communicative overture, it cultivates its own set of values and virtues which may be antithetical to the cultivation of virtue classically considered. For example, wit serves as a key “good” on social media networks. The fastest and cleverest poster earns status through impressing other viewers. Yet, wit has never deepened a serious relationship. This may simply seem like an inefficiency, but for the fact that such a value militates against the sort of reflection that generates considered responses. Privileging a kind of communicative good (wit) precludes the pursuit of a higher good (reflectivity). Conversely, friendships of virtue require time as a prerequisite. As virtue constitutes a habit, it takes its form over extended time. To befriend someone else for their virtue, then, requires an appreciation for time which social media does not allow.

Second, social media cannot mediate the distance between persons. If time poses an immediate issue for the cultivation of relationship, then we should not be surprised that place does as well. More specifically, friendship is centrally related to presence with and for the other. This is poignantly and pastorally put best by Nicholas Wolterstorff when he writes about the death of his son:

If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it’s not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief, but place yourself off in the distance away from me. Over there, you are of no help. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench (Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son, 34).

The images of proximity in this passage resonate. It is not the demonstration of either wit or wisdom which mitigates the distance between self and other, but the sheer presence of oneself alongside another in suffering. Whereas social media, as a quintessentially intellectual exercise, exists primarily in the mind, genuine friendship becomes incarnate in the concrete situations in which we find ourselves. The sympathy that undoubtedly exists in social media communities is thus closer to pity than compassion. Pity remains, while deeply sympathetic, apart from the one being pitied. I can pity someone’s circumstance from a distance. In contrast, and as indicated above, the practice of compassion requires that I be both present and willing to get my hands dirty. This is profoundly difficult and undermines the easy deployment of what we commonly call “compassion.”

Social media can be engaged wisely, and it indeed allows for convenient communication. Yet, its value lies primarily in its capacity to support already-existing friendships – it is not generative of friendship. Friendship requires the patient cultivation of virtue alongside the courageous willingness to walk alongside another in their suffering. Such friendships school us for loving both God and world. Thus, “Nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things.” (Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.i).

]]> Transhumanism and Human Flourishing: A Critical Engagement https://www.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/2020/03/transhumanism-and-human-flourishing-a-critical-engagement/ Wed, 11 Mar 2020 04:52:57 +0000 https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/?p=743

In June of 2019, a group of scholars gathered in Oxford to share ideas and discuss the impact of technology on humanity. A follow-up to the 2018 conference on personhood, this conference is the 2019 contribution to the ongoing research project “Human Flourishing in a Technological World: A Christian Vision,” directed by Jens Zimmermann. The lectures here focus on the mutual relationship between humanity and technology. How do humans use technology to shape the world around them? And, reciprocally, how is technology shaping and impacting its human creators? The explorations captured in video, below, explore these questions by examining the live issues of genetic engineering (human and non-human), human enhancement, robotics, artificial intelligence, and the nature of consciousness.

Dr. Scott Midson: Critical Posthumanism and Human Flourishing

In this presentation, Dr. Scott Midson takes us on a tour of posthumanist theory and practice, offering probing suggestions for theological engagement in this important area of research. Posthumanism is a rich, complex, and sometimes confusing set of theories, technologies, and practices, and Dr. Midson breaks down the various strands of the posthumanist movement with clarity and critical theological awareness. Watch the video not so much for definitive answers as for these intelligent questions: Do we know what it means to be human and how our technologies either contribute to or hinder our human growth? Will we ever “arrive” at a point of perfect technical and humanistic relationship? How do the theological notions of “the image of God” or creatureliness contribute to the posthumanist discussions? These questions and more are raised through summary and engagement of key posthumanist texts, theories, and various fascinating and (perhaps) troubling examples of how technology and humanity are deeply and perhaps irrevocably intertwined.

Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Fuchs: Embodied Cognition and the Neo-Gnostic Roots of Transhumanism

In this lecture, Dr. Thomas Fuchs engages with a fundamental inclination of transhumanism: the notion that human beings are imperfect, particularly in our fleshly, embodied existence, and that advances in technology will allow us to be freed from the imperfections and limitations of the body. He analyses one key proposal which springs from this transhumanist philosophy: the possibility of “uploading” human consciousness from the brain to a computer, thus severing the link between the human mind and the imperfect human body. Fuchs suggests that this possibility is thoroughly misguided notion. He engages in careful criticism, arguing that the mind cannot be so severed from the body. The human being is a mind-body unity, a living person. It is not only the logical impossibility of this “uploading” which Fuchs criticizes, but also the ethical and spiritual worldview which underlies such disdain for finite, embodied existence. For rigorous philosophical argumentation, and rich insights into the human condition, watch this lecture from Dr. Fuchs.

Dr. Anders Sandberg: The State of Transhumanism

Dr. Anders Sandberg discusses, in these remarks, some very specific problems which transhumanism faces as a movement. He sketches a broad overview of transhumanism, referring to philosophers and fiction writers from past decades and centuries. As this history unfolds, Dr. Sandberg suggests that transhumanism is not a unified perspective or worldview. The key challenge here is the lack of a unified value theory, as many different transhumanist communities and individual thinkers have vastly different notions of what values should undergird the expansion of human possibility and capacity. Dr. Sandberg also includes some lighthearted anecdotes about young transhumanists concerned with absolutely optimizing themselves through diet and sleep patterns. And he also discusses current transhumanist projects, particularly cryogenics (medically freezing the sickened or dead body until medical advances can restore it to full health). Watch below for an intriguing discussion of the history, debates, and activities of transhumanism from a scholar who strives in his own thought and action the meaning of transhumanism.

]]> Technology’s ‘Invisible Hand’?: An Account of Divine Providence and the Techno-scientific Myth of Progress https://www.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/2020/02/technologys-invisible-hand-an-account-of-divine-providence-and-the-techno-scientific-myth-of-progress/ Mon, 10 Feb 2020 20:46:45 +0000 https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/?p=711

This presentation is guided by the question: How do we understand and how ought we understand God’s purposes being realised in history, society and nature alongside what is clearly becoming more apparent today in the way human technological agency is impacting history, society and nature? Simply put, how does an understanding of divine providence relate to the increasing public belief that technology drives history and drives it for the better? The presentation will first provide a brief genealogy of how technology has become implicated in how we understand the shape, direction or purpose of history, society and nature. Part of that genealogy will involve explaining how the doctrine of providence gets transformed and secularised into the ‘myth of progress’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and continues to operate today. The ‘myth of progress’ as an ultimate belief of liberal western society depends today on technological production and the goods technology makes possible in those societies. The presentation then turns briefly to how one ought to understand normatively this technological agency in light of divine providence. Should the impact of technology on society, history and nature been seen as a moment within what has been called Heilsgeschichte (holy history or salvation history)? The presentation argues that it really should not even if it might change our perception of particular categories or doctrines in Christianity. Instead of elevating technology to such a sacred place (as many religious and non-religious transhumanists do) it would be better to understand how God might work through creaturely technological forces as a subset of secular history which God enacts as part of His divine plan.

]]> Where Tech and Humanity Meet: Practice and Formation in the Church and Posthumanism https://www.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/2020/02/where-tech-and-humanity-meet-practice-and-formation-in-the-church-and-posthumanism/ Mon, 10 Feb 2020 19:23:05 +0000 https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/?p=693

This presentation argues that a Christian incarnational response to posthumanism must recognize that what is at stake isn’t just whether belief systems align. It seeks to relocate the interaction between the church and posthumanism to how the practices of posthumanism and Christianity perform the bodies, affections and dispositions of each. Posthuman practices seeks to habituate: (1) A preference for informational patterns over material instantiation; (2) that consciousness and the self are extended and displaced rather than discrete and localized; (3) that the body is merely a tool, the original prosthesis we learn to manipulate and (4) that human life is organized such that it is seamless with intelligent machines. The Christian performance of embodied life, on the other hand, has Christ as template and, in the Eucharist, Christians are marked by offering, sacrifice and celebration in a community that affirms the integrity of our common incarnate life.

]]> Abandoning Earth:  Personhood and the Techno-Fiction of Transhumanism https://www.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/2019/12/abandoning-earth-personhood-and-the-techno-fiction-of-transhumanism/ Wed, 04 Dec 2019 19:11:35 +0000 https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/humanflourishing/?p=627

by Jens Zimmermann, Project Director, Human Flourishing; Canada Research Professor for Interpretation, Religion, and Culture at Trinity Western University; Visiting Professor for Philosophy, Literature, and Theology at Regent College; Visiting Fellow of the British Academy at the University of Oxford; Research Associate at the Center for Theology and Modern European Thought in Oxford. Read more about Dr. Zimmermann.

Contemporary Society and Techno-Reasoning

One of the most important contemporary issues is our relation to technology. To be sure, technology is nothing new but has always been integral to human evolution; never before, however, has technology suffused every area of life or shaped human self-understanding to the extent it does today.  Consequently, debates about the benefits and possible drawbacks of technology currently dominate all crucial, formative arenas of human existence: work, education, healthcare, social development, and even religion. Critical voices are not lacking in these discussions but, on the whole, we increasingly place our future hopes for society in technological enhancements. Transhumanism, in its pursuit of a humanly engineered evolution that will eventually leave the body behind by uploading our digitized brains to computing platforms, a vision that includes merging human with artificial machine intelligence, is merely the extreme edge of a techno-reasoning that increasingly forms our collective social imaginary.

How is one to assess this development? I suggest that the most effective assessment of techno-reasoning is to probe the range of its imagination. After all, how we perceive the world, others, and ourselves is principally a matter of the imagination. As the well-known Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye put it in The Educated Imagination:

we use our imagination all the time: it comes into all our conversation and practical life: it even produces dreams when we are asleep. Consequently we only have the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well trained one, whether we ever read a poem or not.[1]

Frye’s reference to poetry indicates his view that literature best exemplifies the language of the imagination, of how we perceive the world in all its semantic complexity: our use of metaphors and choice of words in everyday speech reveals the vision of society, and indeed of reality that underlies our thoughts and actions. Equally important, “the fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce out of the society we have to live in, a society we want to live in.”[2]  We need fiction to envision reality differently. We often use the word fiction to refer to what is untrue or false, but the word actually means creative invention and describes our capacity for understanding and shaping reality meaningfully through narrative. Hence reimagining society differently depends in turn on the sources that train our imagination to produce narratives for our self-understanding.

What should concern us is that Transhumanism’s imagination runs only along engineering and computational lines. Transhumanists like to call themselves “critical rationalists,”[3] but the fact is that this “critical” aspect is limited to a techno-reasoning that produces a narrative of techno-fiction. When we examine the current techno-reasoning of transhumanism, we will find a strongly diminished view of human identity that reduces consciousness to the activity of neuronal networks we can detach from the body and transfer to a computing platform.[4]

Transhumanism’s Ignorance of Human Cognition

It is generally known that transhumanism denigrates the human body as rather primitive biological form of existence that requires perfection through nano- and computing technologies. Ultimately, as Ray Kurzweil argued in his book How to Build a Human Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (2012), the brain is a complex biological machine in which human ideas, feelings, and intentions are ultimately tied to neuronal functions of the brain. Kurzweil imagines that the imminent completion of mapping this biological machine anatomically will allow us to digitize its functions and thus transpose human thinking into computational format, permitting in turn the uploading of one’s mind (of consciousness, self, or personality) to a data cloud storage. This transhumanist vision indicates a breathtaking ignorance of human cognition and its dependence on biology for a human consciousness. For one, aside from being technologically unfeasible, the computational model of the brain and its possible detachment from the body is flatly contradicted by recent neuroscience and its insistence on embodied cognition.

For example, the well-known neuroscientist Antonio-Damasio breaks with the traditional cognitivist view of “human beings as rational minds inhabiting insentient bodies.”[5] In his book The Self Comes to Mind (2010), Damasio reintroduces the body as essential for structuring the brain, albeit still based on a representational view of cognition: “Because of this curious arrangement, the representation of the world external to the body can come into the brain only via the body itself, namely via its surface. The body and the surrounding environment interact with each other, and the changes caused in the body by that interaction are mapped in the brain. It is certainly true that the mind learns of the world outside via the brain, but it is equally true that the brain can be informed only via the body.”[6] You may not consider this concession very great, but eight years later, Damasio rejects the Cartesian mind-body dualism behind traditional neuroscience, arguing that “a new, biologically integrated position is now required.”[7]

This new position leaves behind a computational model of the mind, rejecting “the dried-up mathematical description of the activity of the neurons” because it disengaged “neurons from the thermodynamics of life.”[8] New brain science acknowledges, according to Damasio, that the body as organism, for example through our nervous and immune systems, possesses a kind of perception conveyed through feelings that are registered in turn as “complex mental experiences” that help us navigate life. Damasio concludes that “neural and non-neural structures and processes are not just contiguous [i.e. adjacent, sharing a common boarder] but continuous partners, interactively. They are not aloof entities, signaling each other like chips in a cell phone. In plain talk, brains and bodies are in the same mind-enabling soup.”[9]  On the basis of this new insight (new to brain scientists at any rate), Damasio rejects the reductive, but sweepingly common notion in “the worlds of artificial intelligence, biology, and even neuroscience,” that “natural organisms would somehow be reducible to algorithms.”[10]

Transhumanism’s Lack of Historical Self-Reflection

Damasio’s “new insights” from Neuroscience are a welcome antidote to the severely stunted imagination of the Transhumanists. Even so, neuroscience in general, and transhumanism in particular, suffer from a striking lack of philosophical reflection on the historical origins of the naturalist and functionalist view of organic life that still forms the imaginative framework of cognitive science. Natural scientists, along with all those who pursue their research into human perception in the investigative mode of the natural sciences, still have a hard time with admitting that metaphysics is always at play when imagining what it means to be human. How many scientists (and indeed philosophers) are fully conscious of the historical developments that made possible a purely materialist view of reality?

The philosopher Hans Jonas offers a superb philosophical analysis of this development and its effects on the study of human nature in The Phenomenon of Life: Approaches to a Philosophical Biology (1994). He describes how the duality of mind and spirit of the ancient world was reified into a mind-body dualism by Descartes’s division of reality into the two spheres of timeless mental ideas on the one hand, and spatio-temporal mechanisms of material stuff on the other hand. Leaving the side of mental ideas to religion and philosophy, he reduced nature (including animals and the human body) to an inert machine running on functional, mathematical principles, wholly explorable through quantifiable data. The legacy of Cartesian dualism was the modern conception of nature “without soul or spirit.”[11]  Encouraged by the enormous success of the scientific method, it was only a matter of time until a secularist science, eager to do away with Descartes’ God, also claimed the mental sphere for its mechanistic understanding of reality.

This mechanistic monism was further aided by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Naturalistic evolution exploded Cartesian dualism or a separate mental realm by integrating human beings into a general developmental process. Jonas argues that even though evolution raised once again the problem of how the transcendent freedom and intentionality of consciousness could arise from such a process, the functionalist bias of naturalism closed the door to any arguments that may have led out of the reductionist dead-end of materialist monism.  Early evolutionary theory dogmatically adhered to a mechanistic view of causality that tried to explain organic life analogously to complex machines, declaring consciousness to be an epiphenomenon, a random side-effect of an essentially material process. This view, argues Jonas, inverts how organic life forms, and in particular human beings, actually function. Human thought and action originate from an intentional center and exercise volitional freedom in their striving to
accomplish goals. While we are certainly able to automate strategies for accomplishing goals, this ability does not warrant reducing our humanity to the workings of a complex machine.

Jonas’ work has helped inspire profound changes in evolutionary theory, including the growing conviction among evolutionary psychology that an embodied intentionality or consciousness is intrinsic to organic life itself. The phenomenon of organic life is impossible to describe, let alone understand, without recognizing that a minimal form of intentionality, individuation, and indeed freedom is evident in even the most primitive living organism’s striving to survive.

Neither transhumanism, however, nor the AI research that fuels transhumanists hopes for melding human and machine intelligence, have followed this trend of evolutionary biology. Instead, the transhumanists and AI researchers remain beholden to the basic premise of cybernetics that human life and thought boil down to mechanisms controlled by the exchange of information and are therefore amenable to transposition into algorithms so that the essence of human thought and emotion can be digitized and replicated on computational platforms.

This brief historical sketch shows us that transhumanism’s abandoning of the earth by leaving behind the body constitutes not a neutral fact based on scientific progress but is indeed a historically conditioned choice. This choice takes one particular aspect of human perception, namely our ability to abstract material from the rich flow of experience to objectify and quantify it for better understanding, and then re-imagines all of reality in these terms. This reductionist ontology ignores the organic and especially the personal aspects characteristic of human life.

Abandoning the Earth: Not a Necessity but a Historically Conditioned Choice

Without these essential organic and personal dimensions, however, this choice is untrue to the reality of life itself, not least because functionalism overlooks the essential interdependence of body and mind. The basic machine analogy for the human brain and action simply has no explanatory purchase on the instinct for self-preservation that founds the varying degrees of intentionality in animals and also the human desire for meaning. Indeed, in reducing human society to communication networks for the sole purpose of transmitting, collecting, and exchanging information, the functionalist premise discourages the very quest for meaning. As Jonas points out, “a more empty conception of human society has never been proposed. It has nothing to say about the content of information and why it should matter having it. In fact, the [cybernetic] schema has no room for even posing such a question.”[12]

It is worth reiterating that the materialist, functionalist premise of transhumanism (and much AI research) is neither empirically convincing nor in any way morally neutral. From a historical point of view, it is actually astonishing how beholden the field of techno-science still is to scientistic attitudes originating in the scientific revolution and the European Enlightenment.

For example, the well-known AI researcher Marvin Minsky (d. 2016), equated belief in consciousness with the kind of religious “mumbo jumbo” science is supposed to combat.[13] For Minsky, “there is no such thing as consciousness, there is no such thing as understanding.”[14]  Those who believe in such “silly superstitions” ignorantly hold to “this religious idea that there is magic understanding: there is a magic substance that is responsible for understanding and for consciousness, and that there is a deep secret here.”[15] For Minsky, the problem of consciousness and understanding with regard to AI simply doesn’t exist because he has a thoroughly mechanical, functionalist view of the human mind. For this reason, he looks to Freud as “an important figure because he’s the first one to consider that the mind is a big complicated kludge of different types of machinery which are specialized for different functions.”[16]  While most of psychology and other sciences have moved on from Freud’s naïve mechanical view of the psyche, transhumanism and much popular opinion has not.

Why Transhumanism Matters

One cannot blame transhumanists for wanting to improve human life, but a sober, historical-philosophical analysis of transhumanism exposes it as delusive and naïve. The whole idea of engineering a post-human existence by abandoning the organic body is based on an untenable materialist metaphysics. As Hans Jonas perceptively put it, “materialistic biology (its armory recently strengthened by cybernetics) is the attempt to understand life by eliminating what actually enables this attempt in the first place: the authentic nature of consciousness and purpose.”[17] Only because they suppress the basic structure of organic life and reduce consciousness to an epiphenomenon of materialist functions can transhumanists propose their futuristic vision. Only because they have already reduced life to a machine, however complex, can they imagine a post-humanist future of immortality through technology. The transhumanist imagination concerning our humanity is deceived by the strange proclivity of human reason to “interpret human functions by the categories of the artifacts created to replace them, and to interpret artifacts by the categories of the human mind that created them.”[18]

Given that transhumanism is driven by this historically conditioned reductionist view of human life, I am less worried about the question whether transhumanism functions as Ersatzreligion, though the growing number of Christian transhumanists is somewhat alarming. Their belief in technology as providential means for procuring god-likeness and immortality makes one wonder about the efficacy of the incarnation. Why did God bother to become a human being rather than a cyborg? Only an imagination already hooked on techno-fiction could suggest that the divine transformation of biological matter is inferior to, or even akin to a man-made metamorphosis through technology.

From a traditional Christian perspective at least, techno-fiction that deems the body to be optional ranks among gnostic heresies. As the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer explained, from an incarnational point of view, we don’t have bodies but “we are our bodies,” and are thus rooted in the earth. Abandoning the earth, he declared, therefore means also to lose touch with our fellow human beings and with God who created us as embodied souls. Bonhoeffer concluded that “the man who would leave the earth, who would depart from the present distress, loses the power which still holds him by eternal, mysterious forces. The earth remains our mother, just as God remains our Father, and our mother will only lay in the Father’s arms him who remains true to her.”[19]

However, what is of greater concern than grouping transhumanism among gnostic heresies is that the movement perpetuates the pervasive techno-reasoning in our culture by glorifying the functionalist image of human existence that continues to enthral the public social imaginary by means of social media and AI research. Transhumanism is just one example, perhaps the most glamorous one, of our current culture’s delusion that the human mind, human language, and human relations boil down to functions that computers will eventually master in far better ways.

We would do well to listen to critical voices of those well familiar with the computing industry like Jaron Lanier. Lanier, credited with inventing virtual reality, exposes the false and dangerous presuppositions of techno-fictions. For example, he debunks the delusion that AI has anything to do with computers gaining intelligence, let alone sentience. “AI,” he reminds us, “is nothing but a story we tell about our code.”[20]  This story, he confesses, was originally invented by tech engineers to procure funding from government agencies. AI, in short, does not exist if one implies that machines actually think or feel with even the lowest form of consciousness we know from organic life.

Lanier warns that current techno-fiction and our use of technology are deeply dehumanizing. Social media apps are designed to manipulate users into addiction to exploit their consumer habits. Moreover, the whole gamut of computing technology erodes our self-understanding of what it means to be truly human. Lanier worries that “if you design a society to suppress belief in consciousness and experience—to reject any exceptional nature to personhood—then maybe people can become like machines.” The greatest danger, he concludes, is the loss of what sets us apart from all other entities, the loss of our personhood. His warning echoes the prophetic voices of other critics like the former software coder Steve Talbott, or the late philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who also worried that instead of adapting technology to human intelligence we slowly conform human consciousness to the functional logic of machines.

These thinkers show us that one does not have to be a luddite or religious zealot to reject transhumanism or entertain a critical attitude towards the naïve embracing of current technologies. What is at stake in the discussion about technology and transhumanism is nothing less than our true humanity. Now, it is certainly the case, in my view, that the more holistic approach to human existence offered by religions, and in particular the Christian teaching that God became a human being, provide better anthropological frameworks for approaching technology than secularist or naturalist approaches; however, the time may be ripe for all those concerned about losing our true humanity to come together in exposing the dehumanizing misconceptions put forward by transhumanists, no matter how much these are presented in the radiant, Luciferian promises of divinity. Sicut eritis deus . . . .

[1] 134–135.

[2] 140.

[3] Max More, “The Philosophy of Transhumanism” in Transhumanist Reader (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 1-17), 6.

[4] Martin Rothblatt, “Mind is Deeper than Matter,” in Transhumanist Reader, 317–326.

[5] Economist John Grey’s endorsement of Damasio’s recent book The Strange Order of Things (2018).

[6] The Self Comes to Mind, 97.

[7] The Strange Order of Things, 240.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 200. Damasio recognizes that “the worlds of artificial intelligence, biology, and even neuroscience are inebriated with this notion. It is acceptable to say, without qualification, that organisms are algorithms and that bodies and brains are algorithms. This is part of an alleged singularity enabled by the fact that we can write algorithms artificially and connect them with the natural variety, and mix them, so to speak. In this telling, the singularity is not just near: it is here.” For Damasio, these common notions are “not scientifically sound” because they discount the essential role of the biological, organic substrate from which feelings arise through “the multidimensional and interactive imaging of our life operations with their chemical and visceral components” (201).

[11] Jonas, Phenomenon of Life, 140.

[12] Das Prinzip Leben, 219.

[13] “Why Freud was the First good AI Theorist” in Transhumanist Reader, 169.

[14] Ibid., 172.

[15] Ibid., 170.

[16] Ibid., 169.

[17] Das Prinzip Leben, 230.

[18] Prinzip Leben, 199.

[19] Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English, 10, 244-45.

[20] Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

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