Transhumanistic Era – New Posthuman, New Possibilities, New Morality

1.1. The philosophical shift of transhumanist anthropology

Transhumanists claim that the old foundations of conventional beliefs and values are collapsing before our eyes, and „old truths” and absolute beliefs in religion and politics are collapsing, leaving a metaphysical and ethical vacuum filled by postmodern cynical nihilism.22

Arguing the failures of the aforementioned philosophical positions of Western civilization, founded on Judeo-Christian tradition, they call for the liberation of man from religious shackles and old structures, while in general they do not object to the fact that the transhumanstic movement is also very religious. Transhumanists strive to make their dreams realized in this world, relying on scientific, technological and economic means of progress that become divinized and take the place of supernatural forces.23 Hiding behind the deconstructivist idea „the writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own”24, they fall into their own trap because there cannot exist a philosophical and ethical framework devoid of values, they are just being replaced by something else.

Transhumanists openly claim the need for a new philosophy and a new framework of thought, addressing postmodernism as empty of meaning, purpose, significance and value, while in fact it is a pure hard fact that transhumanist philosophy builds its philosophical framework on the foundations of postmodernism, which paved the way and prepared the ground for them. Despite what its proponents claim to the contrary, transhumanism emerged entirely from the materialistic, despiritualized, Cartesian philosophy.

The philosophical departure from the fundamental thought of Western civilization and a human as the center of society, transhumanism made by changing the perspective and understanding of man and nature. A human life is no longer the highest value of human society given by God, but the world, nature, and man can be grasped and concurred by technological achievements, algorithmically. Man is only valuable in the progress of enhancement of its human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology.25

Human life is reducible to a simple algorithmic combination of the living and the non-living, and the possibility opens up for a new, different human species, produced and improved, constructed as a post-human.26 That new form of humanity, as transhumanists imply will no longer have the DNA-based definition of homo sapiens, because DNA will no longer determine human abilities.27

The tenors of the postmodern who influenced the development of postmodern culture, deny the Judeo-Christian image of man as the created Imago Dei, who is the crown of creation and who completes the meaning of the created world and human society. This fundamental truth of the Christian anthology was especially fearlessly promoted by St. John Paul II, in the midst of a paradigm shift, that vehemently denies the fact that only in the Judeo-Christian environment could a man be awakened to the awareness of the person and personal freedom.28 Western society was built and shaped on the recognition of man as a human person with full dignity and human rights, to be the first historical civilization circle to do so.29

On the contrary, the idea of postmodernism on which the paradigm of the modern world was shaped and built, denies human individual value, emphasizing that the identity of the individual is largely constructed by the socio-linguistic groups to which they belong, and the groups are varying across dimensions of sex, race, ethnicity, and welth. Human nature, they believe, is determined by the struggles between these groups that are resolved by relations of domination, submission, and oppression,30 and the person has no inherent value but is merely an example of his race, gender, ethnicity, or another group. Taking this into account, it becomes clear what constitutes anthropological transformation to the transhumanist anthropology. The next scale is overcoming these biological-social material categories, and in the spirit of the Cartesian understanding of the mind as primary, the human body, sex, race, age, and ethnicity are absolutely irrelevant when one defines himself in the digital world or cyberspace. The digital sphere gives us a chance to easily change our identity in the form of qualities that we identify with, by simply changing a very few lines of text.31

Cyberspace is a mode of the existence in a purely bodiless, inhuman state, and the person becames an information, modelled and filtered words and ideas.32 The same cannot remain without influence on man and his self-concept, which consequently fundamentally changes the anthropological paradigm, changing human themselves.

One of the interesting paradoxes of the digital age is that challenges human autonomy and control is in the fact that people extend their bodyless powers through information control system they simultaneously open the door to being controlled and constrained by this very system they create.33 The ongoing paradigm shift and profound anthropological transformation create new dimensions, and requires new approaches and methods, because it seems that a new nature of man and a new form of humanism, which inaugurates its own system of values is being created.34

1.2. The Transhumanist Manifesto – Live to evolve – evolve to live

Transhumanism has indeed inaugurated a new value system, ushering in a new era with the Manifesto that enthusiastically and ecstatically celebrates man's taking control over his own evolution, being the first species to do so. It reaffirmed the well-established definition of transhumanism as „the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities”.35

Moreover, the transhumanist manifesto among others cites Gibson's thoughts on evolution turnover, human evolution became designer evolution, setting as the chief task of philosophy of the twenty-first century the unification of science and ethics.36 The Transhumanist Manifesto, published in Young's book Designer evolution, with the triumphant tone given by the technological reach of breaking the genetic code, which has been victoriously called the translation of the Book of Life, outlines the direction of man's liberation from the chains of biology, which will give a man the possibility to become designer of their own evolution.37

The Transhumanist Manifesto in its twenty-fourth chapter calls humans to Live to evolve and evolve to live, anticipating the no limits evolution human-designers once humans embrace the will to evolve beyond human „all too human” conditions.38 This enthusiastic call to action is more of an encouragement and proclamation than a scientific or scholarly program, which is very visible from the rhetoric and performance, but it outlines the guidelines that have become programmatic for transhumanistic movement.39

After proclaiming how transhumanism is ought to perceived, the Manifesto points out in chapters subjects such as homo cyberneticus, neurotheology, neuropsychology, nurethics, neurotypology, eugoics, supergenetics, superbiology, The DNAge, Evolutionary Ethics, all in the spirit of the new enlightenment, in which the will to evolve is symbolized by the Prometheus drive and immortological ideas of the defeat of death, made possible by sciphilia, and the new strength to dream. Although the aforementioned manifesto cannot be considered to single-handedly represent the transhumanist movement in its totality, each of the mentioned areas requires special elaboration and review, which will be attempted below, because these are key areas of the transhumanist effort.

All of this is summarized in the Transhumanistic Declaration, which was first drawn up in 1998, then supplemented and changed several times, and published by the International Transhumanistic Association.40 Broadening of human potential that is about to profoundly change humanity as we know it by overcoming limitations, it is clear that the transhumanist movement begins the creation of an entirely new world41 for which an entirely new human is needed, the post-human.42 In order to better understand the ideas proclaimed in the Transhumanist Declaration, it is necessary to include A Cyborg manifesto43 forming an ideological symbiosis with the aforementioned documents, created by the feminist theorist Donna Haraway, which became a reference point and unavoidable of discussion about the posthuman, even after the author herself distanced herself from the term posthuman.44

A cyborg is taken as s symbol because it is partly machine and partly organism, therefore a creature of reality as well as a creature of fiction,45 representing all human beings of the late twentieth century that the author considers chimeras or cyborgs,46 in which the human physical is encroached upon by the non-human, the organic by the mechanical. Cyborg became the symbol of the feminist struggle that criticizes feminist essentialism, by what it doesn't reject only assumptions that a woman's identity is predicated on the basis of nature exclusively, but also created nature and implications of mas created nature.47 „Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways”.48 The result of such a view is the Cyborg, a living example embodiment of the post-human, which transhumanists hope to achieve using science, technology and other rational means. This represents the transhumanist dream of people becoming posthumans, beings with greater abilities than current human beings have, which are not and should not be the endpoint of evolution.49

Therefore, posthumans are „possible future beings whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards. The standard word for such beings is posthuman.”50 Thereat, posthuman denotes the overcoming of all that is human, in the same way, that all post prefixes in postmodernism denote separation with the inherited categories in the relations subject-object, organic-inorganic, reality-virtuality.51

While in humanism there was a current search for defining human identity, rising from matter and animalism and purifying to perfect humanism, in posthumanism human identity is abandoned, and perfection is achieved by contaminating human organic matter with mechanical in order to achieve the perfection of the hybrid – posthuman.52 In rational subjectivism, man was considered a subject who objectified everything outside himself, in the same way, that humanism, especially in The Manifesto of humanism53, located man in the center, man is the moral center and the center of himself because he was not given a pre-defined nature so he defines it for himself – „fashion yourself in the form you may prefer”.54

The postmodernist turn occurs precisely in relation to such an established relationship between the subject and the object.55 Man is no longer perceived just as a subject, he becomes the intersection of both subject and object; to transhumanism, the man himself becomes the place of application of the technique, but not in order to become a better human, but in order to cease to be human through the superstructure.

Just as postmodernism inaugurates the aforementioned posthumanism by overcoming the humanist conception of man as the ultimate value, the same way postmodernist philosophy, strengthened by technological transhumanism, inaugurates post subjectivism by overcoming rationalist subjectivism. In this context, the prefix trans is just a label for the transitional phase or transitional state through which technological transhumanism will introduce a man or what will remain of him, beyond the human, into the posthuman.

To the mentioned transitional state of transhumanism, Young therefore gives a philosophical metaphysical framework, claiming that „the world is a process of evolutionary complexification towards ever more complex structures, forms, and operations.”56 Moreover, by trying to establish a philosophical framework, he turns to metaphilosophy, starting from the assumption that philosophy is a type of computer software program called a meme map. In this concept, the world is information, and the information is communicable pattern, wherefore philosophy is an attempt to construct metapatterns of information to describe the nature of the world.57

Many transhumanist authors, in an attempt to anticipate future posthumanism and a new upgraded artificial species that will certainly not be referred to as human, give up the term posthuman. Thus, the author of the Cyborg Manifesto vividly asserted that if the etymology is the human rooted in humus, it is not to be referred to as a „posthumanist but compost”.58

In the case of the realization of such ideas and the beginning of a world in which some other specie will rule; which will abandon the idea of created human nature and human essence from which human dignity and human rights derive, so it will no longer be applicable; the question arises: what will be base of the moral judgments, and what values will society be based on? These are questions raised by both theological anthropology and transhumanist anthropology59, but from different motives. Theology is interested in this because of the implications that kind of system will have on a human, who was created in the image of God, renounced by posthumanist would, while the transhumanist agenda is interested in those questions for solving pragmatic goals and making decisions.

2.1. Cyborgization as a first step

In technological transhumanism through it's technological power, transhumanists see a means that will make man the master of the universe. He will do it neither as a woman nor as a man, but as a better – cyborg. The cyborg is a creature in a postgender64 world not bounded by dimorphic binary gender categories or fragile biological structures. Humans were often seduced by the social levers of power that exploited them in the name of greater unity, while the cyborg, whose existence completely rejected the ties with the Western tradition of thought, will actually fulfill the aspirations of the contemporaries of Western civilization, and finally be freed from all forms of dependence or, as say transhumanists „man in space”.65

The cyborgization seems to be the first step of the transhumanist means of introducing the posthuman since in a way the first contact of the transhuman body with the human body already began with the artificial body parts used by man. On the other hand, the line in the understanding cyborgization is rather blurred and seems unclear whether cyborgization really started in people with artificial organs or the claims about cyborgization of modern people through the technological progress of bionics and prosthetics are just exaggerated scaremongering until it comes to a new species with red eyes.66

What is certain is that it began with technological, more precisely, mechanical and biosynthetic progress in the fight against human biological fragility, disease, and disability so that man could live longer and more qualitatively. The process started with the installation of bionic body parts, he wants to continue with the creation of new body parts from scratch that will replace the need for organ donation, and by placing chips in the brain, it would help the disabled control and manage robotic extremities.

Thus, the use of implants, artificial organs and prostheses has slowly entered the human body, both for the treatment of disabled people, and for the use of this bionics in handicapped people to create a "bionic man" and improve everyday life. The same desires and efforts have grown into attempts to replicate the human brain in nanotechnology, as they have opened up a whole new post-shell world of possibilities for human engineering.67

Thus, the repair of the perishability of man's biological structure quickly grew into the creation of a new being modeled after man, since there is certainly no question that it is not a human being when there is an artificial brain. One thing is certain, Christian anthropology does not need to worry about defining man, because the creation of man in the image of God stands at the very heart of Christian tradition and revelation. The only question is whether Christian anthropology can have an influence on the ethics of postmodern man and influence the development of the aforementioned.

For Christian attitude towards technological achievements isn't rejecting or denigrating, but reforming to comply with authentication human goals and objectives, in awareness of human created nature.68

2.2. Man's victory over death with mind uploading

The transhumanist project of overcoming the biological death of man, which has always been tragic for the human species, and in the postmodern materialistic reductionist world an even worse tragedy, brings the tempting idea of killing death.69

For materialistic reductionists, physical death is the ultimate enemy and the tragic end of an unfortunate human being who must take advantage of life here on earth while he has the chance, while for the Christian perspective, physical death is only a transition and transitus, while the death of the soul is what man should be afraid of.

For transhumanists, ultimative value isn't the eternal life of a redeemed man, but overcoming human limitations, therefore, death that marks the boundary of existence totally forecloses future development and growth. The cause of the death is the human body itself.70 Thus, the only tragedy of human life is the biological limitations and they are the ones that dictate the tragic view of mortal life to which transhumanists firmly say no, believing that it will overcome man's innate drive of the Will to evolve.71 In a way, man has evolved to became homo tecnicus from homo sapiens because he is capable of realizing and developing technology, producing artificial means and using them to transform himself.72

The transhumanist aspiration to overcome death, they believe, is realized precisely through mind uploading as the process of transferring an intellect from a biological brain to a computer73 or digital immortality.74 Digital immortality entered the discourse especially with the inauguration of the possibility of artificial intelligence that will ensure the resurrection of a personality, while Microsoft created and later closed a computer program for collecting immortal data.75 The resurrection of personality hopes for the future creation of avatars, like a virtual computer replica that people can already interact with.

Even though mind uploading and digital immortality seem to be the technological defeat of death, some authors argue that there is „little reason to suppose that an exact functional copy of the brain will actually produce similar phenomenological effects and even less reason to believe that the uploaded mind will be the same self as the one on whose brain it was modeled.”76

Transhumanism, therefore, fulfilled its own task, defeating death by making it voluntary and temporary. It is not actually the killing of the death but rather bringing it into the realm of human choice. One might decide to stop existing or continue to exist on a platform for some voluntary peace of time, with optional continuing.77

3.1. The Posthuman ethics in the Posthuman age

Young did not have to wait long after asserting that philosophy was not up to the scientific achievements that would offer an appropriate moral and ethical framework82, the creation of a posthuman ethic on the basis of the previously analyzed postmodern philosophical settings. The posthuman ethics created for the posthuman age may be referred to as a post-ethical time. If man was the very base of society as the barrier of human dignity and rights, the posthuman age needs no human ethics based on human dignity, therefore it seems like it is really going to be a postethical time, if ever arrives.

And since post theories establish the future now, post is what is to come and interrogates what has been, inspired by many frustrations in philosophy,83 having in mind that criticism of post is already postmodern in its disparity.

„Inherent in thinking posthuman ethics is the status of bodies as the site of lives inextricable from philosophy, therefore posthuman ethics questions certain types of the body to think new relations that offer liberty and a contemplation of the practices of the power which have been exerted upon bodies.”84 Some authors propose posthuman ethics to be referred to as posthuman bodies in reference to the status that the human body has in posthuman ethics.

„In as much posthuman ethics are about certain forms of life, they are ultimately about the end of speaking of life as the beginning of lives being ethically open to living.”85 However, posthuman ethics locks and leaves out of the discourse whether non-human subjects can have rights. There is no doubt where human rights and the concept of human dignity came from.

3.2. Christian anthropology versus transhumanist evaluation of man

The dignity of the human person in the context of the Judeo-Christian culture from which he emerged shows that man is not the bearer of human dignity per se, but it is given to him as a gracious gift of God as the crown and pinnacle of God's work of creation.86 It is not, therefore, a wrong perception of man as more than matter and irreducible to a mere particle of nature or an anonymous element of human society, because he transcends the entire reality by admitting to himself an immortal soul which is not only a product of false physical or social conditions, but on the contrary, he reaches the very essence and the truth of things87.

It follows that man is the only subject of law, the only reality that exists and participates in the category of subjects of law is man. Moreover, he is the only one created as a creature that has intrinsic value, that is, whose value is absolutely intrinsic.88

Despite the fact that it starts from the improvement of man, the concept on which the tenets of transhumanist anthropology are based, they have preliminarily removed from man or at least they do not count on his fundamental property, the mysteriousness of human life in the image of God. By eliminating the self-understanding of man as Homo Imago Dei, the possibility of acting as Homo co-creator was also eliminated. Through his work, man manifests the dimension of work as an act of a person, realizes himself as a man, transforms nature, even ”in some sense becomes more of a man”89, which doesn't include technological self-repair and self-improvements.

The transhumanist idea of the repair of man, of the reinterpretation of what man is represents and reminds of a new rebellion against one's own nature and what God has determined, as in the Garden of Eden. The doctrine of the original son, explains both origin of the rebellion and the consequences of the fallen nature.90 The eternal aspiration for self-determination and changing human nature by adding to it some knowledge and possibilities hidden by God, peeks into transhumanist ideas that lead man to posthumanism, by destroying his original good nature created in the Image of God.

It is strange and hateful to modern man to hear that his aspirations or what they lead to are sinful, and a rebellion against man and God. But this is just the truth from the perspective of Christian anthropology, which does not consider posthuman ethics to be human because it denies man everything that makes him human.