Transhumanism

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Tue May 2 11:53:34 CDT 2017


Transcending Death via whatever technologies are available or imaginable is
nothing new.  Those technologies include AI (as in transference of personal
consciousness to an artificial brain), cryogenics, genetic engineering,
etc, as Pynchon noted in that essay (which was it?).

David Morris

On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 10:59 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Part of a longer article which will look long so many will not even start
> reading it.
>
> If this doesn't remind you of the dismantling of V, tell me why?
>
> "Transhumanists view the human body as a system in need of technological
> disruption and ultimate transcendence, and neo-reaction views the state,
> the body politic, in much the same manner."
>
>
> Part of longer article:
>
> There is, in transhumanism itself, a strain of old-timey historical
> romanticism: a sense of history as an inexorable progress toward a
> teleological vanishing point, where all human meaning is subsumed and
> obliterated by a godlike technology. This belief that flesh is a dead
> format, and that our future — or that, at least, of a technological elect —
> involves a final merger with machines is one that interlocks in sinister
> ways with the view of democracy as a failed and outmoded institution.
> Transhumanists view the human body as a system in need of technological
> disruption and ultimate transcendence, and neo-reaction views the state,
> the body politic, in much the same manner. Seen in a certain way, this is a
> mind-set — a reductionist understanding of the world as a hackable system —
> inherent in the culture of computer science. The flesh is weak, and
> democracy is entropic; both are subject to forces of decay, to human
> inefficiencies and failings. As eccentric and fringe a phenomenon as Dark
> Transhumanism may be, it’s usefully viewed in this sense as an
> extrapolation of tendencies inherent in the mainstream techno-capitalism of
> Silicon Valley.
>
> **A version of this article appears in the May 1, 2017, issue of *New York
> *Magazine.*
>
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