[
David Icke]: If, through biotechnology, we could drastically enhance
ourselves—such that our ability to absorb and manipulate information was
unlimited, we experienced no disquiet, and we did not age—would we?
Should we? For advocates of radical enhancement, or “transhumanism,”
answering “yes” is a no-brainer. Accordingly, they press for the
development of technologies that, by manipulating genes and the brain,
would create beings fundamentally superior to us.
Transhumanism is far from a household term, but, whether or not they
use the word publicly, its adherents are in places of power, especially
in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is devoted to
boosting “cognition” and co-founded the company Neuralink toward that
end. Having raised more than $200 million in new funding in 2021, in
January, Neuralink proclaimed its readiness to start human trials of
brain-implantable computer chips for therapeutic purposes, to help those
with spinal-cord injuries walk again. But Musk’s ultimate target in
exploring brain-computer connections is “superhuman,” or “radically
enhanced,” cognition—a top transhumanist priority. Those with radically
heightened cognitive ability would be so advanced that they wouldn’t
even really be human anymore but, instead, “posthuman.”
In transhumanist fantasy, posthumans could, philosopher Nick Bostrom
assures us, “read, with perfect recollection and understanding, every
book in the Library of Congress.” Similarly, according to futurist and
transhumanist Ray Kurzweil—who has worked at Google since 2012—they
would rapidly absorb the entire contents of the World Wide Web. Pleasure
would be pervasive and boundless: Posthumans will “sprinkle it in
[their] tea.” On the flip side, suffering wouldn’t exist, as posthumans
would have “Godlike” control of their moods and emotions. Of course,
posthuman bliss would not be supreme absent immortality. This last
facet, the quest to conquer aging, already garners substantial backing
from Silicon Valley. In 2013, Larry Page, Google’s co-founder—and CEO of
its parent company, Alphabet, until December 2019—announced the launch
of Calico Labs, whose mission is to understand aging and subvert it. A
growing list of startups and investors, dedicated to the “reprogramming”
of human biology with the defeat of aging in view, has entered the mix.
This list now includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who, in January,
contributed to the $3 billion that launched Altos Labs.
Today, transhumanism’s name recognition has spread beyond Silicon
Valley and academia. In 2019, an opinion piece in the Washington Post
stated that “the transhumanism movement is making progress.” And a 2020
essay in the Wall Street Journal suggested that, by making “our
biological fragility more obvious than ever,” COVID-19 may be “just the
kind of crisis needed to turbocharge efforts” to achieve transhumanists’
goal of immortality.
You’re probably already familiar with certain enhancements—like
athletes using steroids to gain a competitive advantage, or individuals
using ADHD drugs like Ritalin and Adderall off label in search of a
cognitive boost. But a chasm separates such enhancements from
transhumanism, whose devotees would have us engineer a species-level
upgrade of humanity into posthumanity. And key to all of transhumanism’s
planned advancements, mental and physical, is a specific understanding
of “information” and its causal dominance in relation to features that
advocates prize. This focus on information is also transhumanism’s fatal
flaw.
Arguably, transhumanism’s closest antecedent is Anglo-American
eugenics, inaugurated by Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics in
1883. Among the many substantive parallels between transhumanism and
Anglo-American eugenics are an insistence that science set humanity’s
guiding aspirations and that human intelligence and moral attitudes
(such as altruism and self-control) require major, biological
augmentation. The term transhumanism was first used by a British
eugenicist, Julian Huxley (also the brother of Aldous Huxley, author of
Brave New World). Transhumanism as we know it, however, is a marriage of
sorts between substantive commitments shared with Anglo-American
eugenics and the notion that living things and machines are basically
alike—the latter stemming from developments in computing and information
theory during and after World War II.
Here, the key idea is that animate entities and machines are, in
essence, information, their operations fundamentally the same. From this
perspective, brains are computational devices, genetic causality works
through “programs,” and the informational patterns constituting us are,
in principle, translatable to the digital realm. This informational lens
is the crux of transhumanism—its scientific convictions and confidence
in prospects for humanity’s technological self-transcendence into
posthumanity.
Some of transhumanism’s greatest promises rest on the assumption that
genes, as information, drive and dominate people’s standing in relation
to complex phenotypic traits, such as intelligence, self-control,
kindness, and empathy: in other words, that they “code for” these
features. Thus construed—transhumanists assure us—these traits are
manipulable. The roots of these ideas go back more than 50 years. For
instance, in The Logic of Life (1970), François Jacob announced that,
“with the accumulation of knowledge, man has become the first product of
evolution capable of controlling evolution.” Jacob’s expectation of
boosts to complex mental features, once we pinpoint “the genetic factors
involved”—in other words, attain due familiarity with the informational
“mechanisms” playing key roles in their causation—is palpable in
transhumanism. Today, however, the perspective represented by Jacob is
increasingly rejected by scientists, philosophers of science, and
historians.
That genes influence human features is not in question. Where
transhumanists err is in the disproportionate role assigned to genes in
creating their favored traits. In contrast to clear-cut physical
features, such as eye color, the relationship of genetic “information”
to characteristics such as intelligence and kindness is nuanced and
indirect. Today, developmental systems theory supersedes the dominant,
unidirectional causality previously lodged with genes. From this vantage
point, development spans a range of levels and a wealth of factors,
biological and nonbiological, that interact in complex ways. Crucially,
as philosopher of science Susan Oyama observes, none of these
factors—genes included—“is privileged a priori as the bearer of
fundamental form or as the origin of ultimate causal control”; rather,
“everything [the] organism does and is rises out of this interactive
complex, even as it affects that very complex.”
