Transhumanism: The World's Most Dangerous Idea

Transhuman Electonic Interface

Transhumanism is a global philosophical movement that advocates for transforming the human form through technologies that enhance human physiology. A transhuman being would be a human with artificially enhanced mental, physical, and/or psychic abilities. These abilities might include improved intelligence, telepathy, strength, durability, longevity, and the capacity for direct computer and AI interfaces with or without implants.

The past century has proven that moral and ethical responsibility inevitably lag behind technological advancements, resulting in dangerous periods of sociopolitical adjustment. How much greater might this gap between wisdom and increased human capability be if mankind essentially splits into two kinds: one enhanced and the other natural? Indeed, could humans in their present form become victims of a self-imposed genocide as the natural form gets exchanged for artificially enhanced versions? The realization that powerful people seriously entertain plans to experiment on babies as well as adults is alone alarming, but in considering the consequences of such tampering, the future is looking ominous.

Transhumanism is not new. It first appeared in a 1923 essay by British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, entitled Daedalus: Science and the Future. He predicted that scientific advancements would one day be applied to human biology, providing great advantages. He supposed that each advancement would initially be regarded by some as perverse, indecent, and unnatural.

In 1929, J. D. Bernal, in his work The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, imagined radical physical and intellectual changes to humans through bionic implants and cognitive enhancements as a precursor to space colonization.

Transhumanists contend that humans have an ethical imperative to progress and improve human capacity to become enhanced beyond what is naturally human. In 1960, a manifesto came out of Japan as part of the Metabolist Movement, which outlined goals to encourage the active metabolic development of society through design and technology. In this transhuman state, natural evolution would be replaced by deliberate, participatory, directed evolution. In the Material and Man section of the manifesto, Noboru Kawazoe suggested that:

"After several decades, with the rapid progress of communication technology, everyone will have a 'brain wave receiver' in his ear, which conveys directly and exactly what other people think about him and vice versa. What I think will be known by all the people. There is no more individual consciousness, only the will of mankind as a whole."

The idea here goes beyond merely eliminating individual rights to privacy; it eradicates individual will altogether.

The New Haves and Have-Nots

Dissenters argue that the transhumanist agenda would cause unfair advantages to those who received the enhancements, comparing it to steroid use by athletes who have an unfair advantage over those participants who perform naturally. For instance, if some people had neural implants that granted them a super-fast, pervasive AI computer interface, they would have enormous advantages in education and virtually all economic endeavors. M.J. McNamee and S.D. Edwards argued that the human species would get split into two different and distinct species, one having tremendous physiological and economic advantages over the other. The likelihood of a resulting disparate cast system becomes highly probable.

If that isn't frightening enough, research on brain and body alterations has been accelerated under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Defense, which is interested in the battlefield advantages the technology would provide to super-soldiers of the US and its allies. They have already instituted a brain research program to extend the ability to manage information, and military scientists are now looking at stretching the human capacity for combat to a maximum of 168 hours without sleep.

Given that human enhancement experiments are conducted in the utmost secrecy and are very well funded with tax dollars but without civilian oversight, the public will not know what kinds of brutal experiments are being done on their dime nor whether enhanced humans have been unleashed upon them.

Some predict that no later than the midpoint of the 21st century, radical human enhancements and other emerging technologies will be commonly employed in society. Elon Musk's venture, Neuralink, is aggressively working to bridge the gap between humans and artificial intelligence by implanting tiny chips in the brain that would link the brain to the internet.

At a press conference on July 16, 2020, the ambitious plans of Neuralink were billed as a technology to grant people with brain or spinal cord injuries the capability of controlling 3D digital avatars, potentially as a precursor to one day operating assistive devices. In its purported effort to help people with severe disabilities, Neuralink is developing the means to yoke human brains to the internet and eventually to AI.

The question that arises is whether Neuralink is really about helping people with disabilities or whether it is about transforming human civilization into a pervasively interconnected, non-individualist dictatorship.

Musk envisions a future in which humans achieve a symbiosis with AI, which he regards as "important at a civilization-level scale." His brain implants are being designed as a wireless, high-bandwidth brain-machine interface with the internet, with the option of merging with AI. Neuralink is expected to have an interface inserted into a person's brain within a year, if it hasn't already. As for their longer range goals, they plan to eventually inject the human embryo with seeds to enable a thorough and permanent connectivity to the internet and to AI.

Experiments on Babies 

Criticisms of transhumanism and its proposals take two main forms: the practical criticism, which objects to the possibility of transhumanist goals being achieved, and the ethical criticism, which objects to moral issues, as transhumanists' goals are seen as posing a threat to human values. A third critique targets the idea of "algeny" (a blending of alchemy and genetics), defined by Jeremy Rifkin as "the upgrading of existing organisms and the design of wholly new ones with the intent of 'perfecting' their performance" (see Algeny: A New Word, by Jeremy Rifkin).

Critics of "Algeny" have expressed concerns over the unpredictability of the development of products of biological evolution. Biologist, Stuart Newman, pointed out that cloning and germ-line genetic engineering of animals are error-prone and inherently disruptive to embryonic development. Such experimentation would create unacceptable risks for human embryos. Experiments that have permanent biological consequences for developing humans would violate accepted principles governing research on human subjects as outlined in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki. Since outcomes in one species are not automatically transferable to another species without further experimentation, there is no ethical route to genetic manipulation of humans at early developmental stages.

(See Averting the Clone Age: Prospects and Perils of Human Developmental Manipulation, by Stuart Newman, Journal of Contemporary Health Law & Policy, 19: 431).

Unfortunately, international protocols on human subject research may not present legal obstacles for transhumanists and others who would experiment on their own offspring using germinal choice technology. Legal scholar, Kirsten Rabe Smolensky, pointed out at a public address at Stanford University in 2006 that existing laws would protect parents from future liability arising from adverse outcomes of allowing enhancements to their child's genome. Not only is this a void in the protection of the unborn, but it is also an open door for those who want to inject human embryos with the technology to connect to AI, as long as they use their own offspring. Moreover, should their efforts be successful, they will be raising those AI-connected children to do their bidding. Psychopathic scientists are free to make their children into powerful hi-tech commodities for their own employment, which includes weapons and terrorist potentialities.

Religious Perspectives

Western theologians see transhumanism as an attempt by humans to substitute themselves for God, as they regard the human form as having been created in the image of God. They contend that altering the genetic identity of man is radically immoral. The implication is that every person has the right to be born into a naturally formed body. They argue further that creating a superhuman or spiritually superior being is "unthinkable," since true improvement can come only through religious experience and realizing more fully the image of God.

Christians, in particular, argue that they already attain, in the afterlife, what radical transhumanism promises, namely: indefinitely prolonged life and the abatement of suffering. Not all Christian theologians are at odds with transhumanism. Ronald Cole-Turner and Ted Peters hold that the doctrine of "co-creation" imposes an obligation to use genetic engineering to improve human biology. They regard the human mind as inherently free to counteract genetic determinism.

Transhumanism also has implications from an Eastern religious perspective. Altering the mind, and therefore the emotional body, would likely have a profound effect on the spirit, where spirit is defined as the astral body that survives the death of the body. In India, where reincarnation is commonly accepted, stories abound of people having had an injury in a past life and later being reborn with a birth mark or abnormality in the corresponding part of the newborn body. If deliberate damages are done to the brain or to the entire human form, these might affect the astral body to the extent that newborns of reincarnating transhumans could also be born altered in some way.

This would suggest far longer range consequences of damaging the genetic and physical forms of children. The current epidemic of children being born on the autism spectrum raises the question of whether they could be suffering from atrocities that were done to them in their past lives by UFO abductions where gametes were stolen and re-engineered into hideous small grey mutants. While difficult to prove that the reincarnation of children who were mutant greys are suffering cognitive and emotional abnormalities when reborn, it stands as a possibility of how transhumanism might have unforseen extended consequences. Altering the physical form could very well alter the astral, emotional, and intellectual form of the transmigrating entity.

For more on the Small Greys as gentically modified humans, read Forbidden Disclosure.

Where reincarnation is concerned, some might propose that transhuman enhancements could potentially grant people the ability to recall past lives. The argument might go so far as to claim this as the climax of all human activity, the realization of eternal life.

In actuality, it could lead to the harboring of transmigrational grudges and possibly the continuation of punishments for past-life misdeeds. Conversely, children might be granted undue adulation for past-life accomplishments where nothing has yet been accomplished in the present life.

From a non-religious perspective, critics point out that problems would arise from the availability of extreme body co-modification in a consumer culture. The excessive plastic surgeries, tattoos, and piercings of the eyes, tongue, nose, and genitalia of today's generation could be supplanted with spyware, malfunctioning gadgets, or toxic materials that could not be easily removed from the brain. Add to this the prospect of parents designing their offspring to suit their whims, and the result is a complete disintegration of the rights of the unborn and a loss of the integrity of the human form.

Transhumanism: The All-To-Final Frontier

Perhaps the greatest danger of transhumanism lies in individuals becoming too plugged in. Already, society has become extremely vulnerable via its ubiquitous dependence on the internet for all basic functions, like buying and selling, communicating, working, and playing. If a few satellites get taken down, all civilian activity ceases. How much more vulnerable might global society be if interfacing with the internet became a mandatory bionic function without which one could not survive? No one could buy or sell without the proverbial bionic "mark of the beast," so to speak.

This is not a science fiction scenario: Russia's 2045 Initiative expects to digitize the human brain by 2045 for precisely this and other undemocratic purposes. Certain proponents of this kind of transformation assert that humans, in the future, will need to become cyborgs to be "economically relevant." To be sure, the oligarchy of the future would not be easily defeated once its grip was on the inside of every human, born and unborn.

Given human nature, transhumanism will inevitably become a way of controlling the masses while masquerading at first as beneficial or enhancing. Bionics, microchips, and nanotechnology have the potential to solve many problems, but this potential could also be used as a ruse to acclimate people to a devastating technology before realizing its most sinister consequences. The worst of these would be the creation of a hive mind. Individuals could easily become so pervasively plugged into the system that all individuality would give way to a common will, with all individuality, autonomy, privacy, and personal will dissipated into a huge system with no meaningful direction other than self-perpetuation at all costs.

If the system were to have any direction at all, it would fall under the control of wealthy elites who would regard transhuman technology as a way to keep satiating their never-ending thirst for more and more power. Political economist and philosopher Francis Fukuyama further contends that transhumanism is the world's most dangerous idea because it could undermine both the egalitarian ideals of democracy and the prospect of personal freedom via a fundamental alteration of "human nature" itself.

Social philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, similarly argued that moral autonomy depends on not being subject to another's unilaterally imposed specifications. The dictates of embryo-stage genetic alteration would undermine the human "species ethic."

Those who regard transhumanism as a threat to social order and human equality worry that such technologies would result in the normalization of social hierarchies, placing additional means of control in the hands of dictators. AI pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum already sees misanthropic tendencies in the language and ideas of some of his colleagues: Marvin Minsky and Hans Moravec, in particular, devalue the human organism and promote a discourse that enables divisive and undemocratic social policies.

Critics point to eugenics, social Darwinist thinking, and previous master race ideologies and programs as warnings of what the promotion of eugenic enhancement might unintentionally encourage. At first, the danger would be a return to coercive state-sponsored genetic discrimination and human rights violations, such as compulsory sterilization of persons with genetic defects, the killing of the institutionalized, and the segregation and genocide of races perceived as inferior. After that, eugenics wars could ensue.

Discourse among scientists frequently centers on the prospect of designing transgenic astronauts as a more practical way of sending "humans" into space. However, this brings up the question of human worthiness to go into space in the first place. If people have so little regard for their own babies that they turn them into commodities to serve the state, how much less regard would they have for other life forms that they might encounter in space?

Perhaps humans need to decide, before going any further, whether they want to be ultimate users and supreme sociopaths or whether they want to be problem-solvers who aren't afraid to spend more time and money on finding a way to make sure that no one becomes a servant of technology. Technologies that will work only for transhumans might be faster and cheaper to develop than technologies that can be used equally by anyone, but if they inevitably lead to the degeneration of individuality and personal freedom, culminating in a pervasive, stagnant, totalitarian dead end, would this not make the cost way too high in the long run?

At the core of it all, making transhuman astronauts would require forced mutations in the unborn, who have no say in being altered. Once people start going down that road, the precedent will pave the way for forced genetic alterations on the unborn for all kinds of purposes. In that case, would not those transhumans designed to serve utilitarian purposes constitute slaves from their very foundation?

Following from that, would the alterations done to them render them proprietary to those who altered them? Slavery would appear to be an inevitable outcome of the transhuman utilitarian prospect.

Beyond this, the possibility arises for the complete genocide of the original human species through pervasive genetic alterations. If some humans having the original form were to be preserved, then would they not also become property of the state, with no rights to have alterations in order to ensure the survival of the original form? It would seem, then, that everyone inevitably becomes property, and all human autonomy and dignity are lost.

Artificial Intelligence versus Spiritual Gnosis

If brain implants and nanotechnologies bring the virtual experience into the brain itself, the likelihood of this altering the qualitative function of the mind and emotions is very high. In addition to making the constantly plugged-in user into a subservient cog in a great wheel, invasive AI connectivity threatens to permanently alter users at their spiritual core.

Studies have shown that immersion in digital entertainment imposes alterations on the brain and emotions, causing users to be less emotionally responsive and to feel less connected to the real world. These are, likewise, symptoms commonly seen in people suffering from depression. Depression makes attaining spiritual enlightenment more difficult, as the dark, uninspired mood is not readily converted to a sense of the sacred, let alone to ecstatic states of mystical experience.

Furthermore, a close relationship exists between ecstatic spiritual attainment and creativity. Some of the great geniuses in both mathematics and the arts have described having their inspiration come from a higher intelligence outside of themselves. If deep immersion into the digital realm through AI were to further dampen the emotions and a real-world mental presence, the spigot of creative genius could get turned off, along with any motivation to achieve creative ideas in the first place.

The so-called "economic relevance" of a world full of cyborgs might make the elites wealthier for a time, but how sustainable would a stagnant, uncreative world of subhuman transhumans be? Would such a system have a breaking point, or would it go on and on for an unimaginable length of time in which nothing new would be achieved? It doesn't sound like the kind of world that children would want to be born into, and the extreme interconnectivity and lack of private thoughts would likely make checking out of that world nearly impossible. Indeed, as Christian scripture portends, the world could become a place where men might "seek death and not find it." Perhaps the better question to ask is not whether or not transhumanism should be developed but, rather, how can it be stopped?

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For more information, see the CNET presentation: Elon Musk says Neuralink plans 2020 human test of brain-computer interface: https://cnet.co/2Zb3piU and also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA77zsJ31nA

Further details on human enhancement and how it might impact the human race can be found in a book called, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, by Raymond Kurzweil, and also in the book, Physics of the Future, by Michio Kaku.

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See what can go seriously wrong with transhumanism, read FORBIDDEN DISCLOSURE, available here.

A must read for anyone experiencing alien abduction. You will gain a different take on claims of human-alien hybrids and earn a healthy skepticism of what abductees are told by their captors who have multiple motivations for their deceptions. Do not be deceived. Learn the truth.