"Game of God": How people try to change the course of evolution
Despite evolution, the human body is imperfect - starting from the fact that it is painful for women to give birth, and ending with the non-ergonomic structure of the legs, because of which the knees often suffer from adulthood. This is how transhumanism appeared - a philosophical concept and movement that advocates improving the capabilities of the consciousness and the human body through science and technology. Some people see a great achievement of progress in the controlled evolution of man, because the purpose of such changes is to eliminate the “shortcomings” of the human body and improve the quality of life. Others - a dangerous "game of god", which can lead to unpredictable and tragic consequences. We understand what transhumanism is, whether it will bring us benefits and why many people fear it.
Text: Alisa Zagryadskaya
The future becomes the present
Man differs from his neighbors on the planet in that he can consciously influence the environment and his own body - that is, in fact, manage his evolution with the help of science and technology. It may seem that we are talking about science fiction, but we have already taken the path of artificially changing the species.
Achievements of science, allowing to change and improve the capabilities of the body, have become common practice of therapeutic and aesthetic medicine. Thanks to vaccines, people stopped suffering from diseases that had previously destroyed entire cities, dental implants often serve better than real teeth, and even their appearance can be changed beyond recognition in order to please their own ideas about beauty.
Technologies and biotechnologies are actively used in art - for example, the artist Marion Laval-Jante injected immunoglobulins (protein molecules produced during the immune response) of the blood of a horse into the blood - after training she managed to do it and did not fall into anaphylactic shock. In the last century, the cyberpunk actionist Stelark made a controlled third hand for himself in order to write the word "evolution" within the framework of the performance.
Artist Marion Laval-Zhante injected blood immunoglobulins into the blood of a horse - after preparation she managed to do it and did not fall into anaphylactic shock
Many ways to upgrade the body with the help of technology go to the people: someone at home implants under the skin tags that allow you to open electronic locks, manage smartphones and laptops. Recently, the first project on the editing of the genome in the body of an adult (that is, changing the genome to prevent the development of hereditary diseases) was launched; as a rule, scientists "edit" the genome of embryos). And although patients with a rare syndrome have noted an improvement, so far scientists have reacted to the successes of the experiment with restraint. Biohackers are experiencing drugs of their own production, and this is not all clear: a few months ago, Aaron Treyvik, CEO of Ascendance Biomedical, was found dead in a sensory deprivation chamber. He conducted medical research without the approval of pharmaceutical companies and scientists and urged employees to test for new products directly on themselves - and some time ago publicly injected himself with a home-made and uncertified herpes vaccine.
In a word, scientific news, which every year causes more and more resonance, is both admired and raises many questions.
Science against suffering
Philosophical and social movement for the intentional "improvement" of a person is called transhumanism. If, in more traditional concepts, man was perceived as a creation of God or nature, then in the transhumanist paradigm he becomes his own creator, that is, he can and must consciously influence his evolution. At the same time, the body is perceived as a technique that can be repaired, improved and even changed.
"Natural" bodies really often let us down: they get sick, suffer from allergies, accumulate mutations. Sometimes they are incapable of what their owners want, be it the conception of a child or just the opportunity to rebuild biorhythms to the desired. In addition, the body is easily broken. Because of this, the idea that the body can be tuned in a certain way, to strengthen or replace "insufficiently perfect" systems and organs, seems attractive.
Anthropologist Alice Roberts created for the BBC a project of an "ideal" woman: she used her own body and structural features of various animals to better change the model of her own organism, more adapted to environmental conditions. "Improved" Alice received steady legs, similar to a bird's, a bag like that of a kangaroo, which will make childbirth painless, and a dog's heart, not prone to heart attacks.
"Natural" bodies really often let us down: they get sick, suffer from allergies, accumulate mutations, break easily
Perhaps some of these changes really could improve our lives. The same can be said about the anatomy of the recent Internet star - designed by engineers, surgeon and artist Patricia Piccini Graham, a man who is adapted to survive in car accidents. From an anthropological point of view, a person without a neck with a thick skull actually has a greater chance of surviving an accident than fragile “ordinary” people - although it is necessary to get used to Graham’s appearance. These projects, which at first glance seem frivolous, can be a very real future for mankind. This, of course, is not just about appearance, but about becoming the way we want: healthy, enduring, and beautiful as part of our ideas about beauty.
The inventor and futurologist Ray Kurzweil, who shares transhuman ideals, is sure that very soon smart computers, no larger than living cells, will move inside our bodies, change our organs and cure diseases, and cyborgization will relieve people from suffering. According to his forecasts, in the 2040s a person will be able to change from the inside thanks to nanorobots, and the organs will replace better artificial counterparts. This Kurzweil sees not only practical, but also ethical sense: "Our neocortex will become more. We will be funnier, we will become more musical. We will be sexier. We will become the embodiment of our own values." True, Kurzweil's bold ideas are ambiguous.
Another well-known ideologue of transhumanism, Fereydun M. Esfendiari, who changed his name to FM-2030, in order to emphasize his futuristic beliefs, wrote several books on the future transformations of humanity. In particular, he owns the work “Are you a Transhuman?”, Which tells how one day we will become transhumans whose lives are fully regulated by science and technology. The futuristic idea of transhumans should not be confused with transgenderness. However, according to transhumanist notions, transgender people are just the real people of the future - after all, if they wish, they can turn to the achievements of modern science in order to make a transgender transition.
Already in the 2040s, according to futurologist Ray Kurzweil, a person will be able to change from within thanks to nanorobots, and the organs will replace better artificial counterparts
The final, most ambitious and controversial goal of transhumanism is the victory of man not only over bodily "imperfections" and diseases, but also over death. True, whether this will be done in reality and what will help in this — cyborgization, biotechnology or digitization of consciousness — cannot be said so far.
Moreover, this approach already raises many questions. Will a human being remain if he replaces all parts of his body? Where does the person end and the program begin? How, after all, to solve the "difficult problem of consciousness" (that is, to determine how consciousness is born) and to understand where our unique experience comes from? For example, manga and anime "Ghost in Armor" talk about this: after the accident, police Motoko Kusanagi gets a completely cybernetic body and throughout the whole history tries to figure out whether her personality and essence remain in him.
Inside transhumanism there are different movements and directions. For example, in it one can find almost Buddhist ideas of stopping the suffering of all living beings: bioethical abolitionism offers to deal with the pain forever, replacing it with signals of health and ill health that do not bring discomfort. Post-genderism suggests that people will become happier if they voluntarily give up their gender, use reproductive technologies that make anatomical differences unimportant, and choose alternative methods of reproduction. Advocates of technology believe that advanced technology should be clean and safe and help restore the environment. In a word, each social movement can find something of its own in science and technology and raise them to the banner.
There is also the international organization of transhumanists Humanity Plus. Its goals and objectives include disseminating information about transhumanism and supporting research aimed at improving human potential. By the way, anyone can join the organization, however, membership is paid.
Is it dangerous to influence evolution?
A world in which there is no place for suffering seems like a wonderful place. But is it really? While optimists like Kurzweil are confident that the benefits created by technology will be distributed evenly (with smartphones almost done), others fear that social inequality will only grow in the future. As a result, humanity can be divided into castes, the differences in their lives will become tougher than ever in human history. HG Wells once already came up with a scenario in which people were divided into two different types, the Eloy and the Morlok, descendants of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the class gap between which became too great.
In the end, one of the main principles of cyberpunk is "High tech. Low life", that is, "High technology, low standard of living", the so-called Dozua criterion (after the author of reviews on the novels of William Gibson, who first used the word "cyberpunk") . This implies that in the world the future development of technology will coexist with the lack of rights of economically vulnerable people, tough social stratification and controversial morality. “Almost everything that we do with rats can be done with a human. And with rats we can do a lot. It’s not easy to think about, but it’s true. It’s not going to disappear if we close our eyes. This is cyberpunk,” wrote science fiction and literary critic Bruce Sterling in the essay "Cyberpunk in the nineties."
It is easiest to trace these fears in pop culture. Often the works that are built around the ideas of transhumanism are anti-utopias in which all societies or the whole planet decay due to the loss of control over the morph of a person. This happened in the universe of the Deus Ex series of games, where the tough conflict of those who are in favor of and against “augmentations” (i.e. microchips and mechanisms in the body) leads almost to civil war. The situation was similar in the Bioshock games, in which ambitious scientists, unprincipled entrepreneurs and religious leaders freely distributed ways to enhance human capabilities - everything ended in riots and crowds of splice mutants ready to attack the protagonist from any angle. In the dystopia "Gattaka" people born "in the old fashioned way", that is, outside of thoughtful genetic programming, are subject to discrimination. In the novels of Canadian writer and neurobiologist Peter Watts, "False Blindness" and "Ehopraxia", there is a huge gap between modified people and intact source codes. Although, of course, there are positive scenarios: for example, the heroes of science fiction films by Luc Besson look pleased with the noisy and bright world of the future, and Marvel characters feel good with cybernetic hands or a chest reactor.
In the dystopia "Gattaka" people born "in the old manner", that is, outside of thoughtful genetic programming, are subject to discrimination
According to the philosopher Francis Fukuyama, transhumanism is a controversial ideology from a humanistic point of view: the desire for an upgrade will plunge people into a constant race in which everyone will envy others, and the results may be unpredictable. In addition, we do not know how these processes will affect the identity of both individuals and society.
So far, most of the fears of transhumanism are based on assumptions: at this moment, in principle, we don’t have so much material to analyze, and technology has not yet succeeded in surpassing the human body in all aspects. Cybernetic hands do not yet match the functionality of an ordinary human hand - and before you start worrying about the future, you should think about it.
Nevertheless, the qualitative changes in the organisms of people and the basic principles of life cannot but change the usual ideas about a person that have evolved over centuries and millennia. It is unlikely that it will ever succeed to keep progress artificially, so the first thing to think about is how to live and act in the new world and how we will change when the technologies change. And also to make decisions, analyzing risks, and not based on prejudice.
PHOTO: DmiT - stock.adobe.com (1, 2, 3)