Been There, Enhanced That

Over at Slate, William Saletan visits a "transhumanism" conference at Stanford Law School. Transhumanists believe that there is nothing particularly special or even desirable about "normal" human beings and believe that the human form should be regarded as raw material for technological "enhancements." According to Saletan, the transhumanists are into more than just the odd downloadable memory modules for the brain or super-vision cameras replacing eyes:

The sessions were ... interesting. A panel on religious views consisted of a transhumanist Zen Buddhist priest, an advocate of human enhancement as divine healing, and a pro-cryonics "Christian immortalist." Another panel addressed "the self-demand amputation community." You've heard of a woman trapped in a man's body? Imagine being a one-legged person trapped in a two-legged body, said the speakers. A third panel brought up the "cyborg dialectic": thesis, antithesis, synthesis, prothesis. I have no idea what a prothesis is. I assumed the cyborg dialectic would culminate in a prosthesis.

Which seems downright tame compared with this:

My favorite panel began with the president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association. He runs a Web site called betterhumans. He and I share a moral objection to killing animals. But letting animals live isn't enough for him. Inspired by an experiment in which chimpanzees were given a kitchen and flush toilets, he wants to use cyber- and biotechnology to elevate all animals to human status. "Anything less than human-level capacity would be unacceptable," he declared—including the ability to operate tools remotely through the Internet.

Saletan tries to make the point that however odd the transhumanists sound, they have a valid argument in that modern society already goes in for all sorts of athletic enhancements, plastic surgery and mood-altering medications. Leaving aside that these examples already range from the controversial to the perverse, the one thing that is clear is that if this is representative of transhumanism, then it is a movement that has raced so far into anarchy that it won't be long before it collapses under its own silliness.

I've never had much of an interest in this lot, as it's the sort of thing that's been bouncing around in popular science for nearly a century and the logical conclusion that this kind of wool-gathering leads to was neatly summed up by C. S. Lewis in his classic The Abolition of Man and given form by Dougal Dixon in Man after Man, which shows a future world where genetic engineering has spawned a race of soulless demons. But the most telling point is that none of this is new. In the 15th century, Hieronymous Bosch showed us a perfect illustration of a transhumanist world.