Transhumanism as a radical remedy for suffering

Alina Vitukhnovskaya, writer

It is interesting that in the Russian-language Wikipedia, in an article about transhumanism, there appears an equally profane, just as fashionable term "dehumanization", which is interpreted as "...a gradual loss of a person's specific, sexual, social and spiritual body, already in the course of thinking about the very possibility of this".

First, all of the above concepts are the attributes of a person as a socially managed object. That is, every time we come into contact with the concept of “person” as such, we are dealing with a declared set of properties, but, in fact, not with the person (subject) himself. It is also worth noting that such concepts as species and sexual self-identification are a priori incorrect. And they are authoritarian management constructs.

Secondly, the very idea of changing your body to fit your specific needs, either in order to get rid of suffering or make your life more comfortable, according to critics of transhumanism, is something deliberately reprehensible and therefore labeled with the negative term "dehumanization" ... Is this not a clear sign of the direct dictate of beingness (life for the sake of life, not for the sake of the individual), carried out under the general slogan "God endured and bade us"?

Thirdly, when faced with what is commonly called “traditional values” in your life, you involuntarily ask yourself whether they are already a real dehumanization, moreover, forced and therefore carried out under the flag of good intentions, you know where the leading ones? If you really progress in a world that has long stood upside down and continues to dance native dances under Azathoth's flutes, then, in my opinion, the very logic of its architects and guardians should be thoroughly analyzed.

In general, when it comes to interfering with one's own body, placing chips or implants seems to me to be a more progressive type of intervention than sex and childbirth. No matter how provocative this statement may seem at first.

For example, a conventional scientist of genius, having provided his body and brain with the latest technologies of civilization, can carry out his activities as much as is required for the full development, substantiation and implementation of his theory. And do not count on “grateful offspring” who will continue his path. After all, on the one hand, it is absolutely not obliged to do this, but on the other hand, when transferring previously obtained knowledge, both errors due to the human factor and the rooting of conceptual mistakes of previous researchers are inevitable, to refute which, in fact, means to start a fundamentally new concept. And here the technology of transhumanism would be useful as a single Gnostic answer to all traditionalism in the question of the methodology of scientific knowledge as such.

To my thematic poll on Facebook, some worried readers generally reacted in such a way that, as a result of radical progress, a person can simply stop feeling and also experience pleasure. But what are “sensual pleasures” if not in advance “predetermined” by nature (accumulative inertia of being) psychophysiological programs, conditioned by the characteristics of both a particular biological being (individual) and the characteristics of the entire species of Homo sapiens, including its social forms?

And here I want to give some answers from my readers and subscribers on Facebook:

"Intervention into the body as a self-organizing system by the engineering method (which produced chips, algorithms, etc.), in principle, cannot end well".

“I think transhumanism is the most promising existential solution. For me personally, the most interesting transhumanistic concept is the complete digitalization of the personality - the creation of a copy of one's consciousness in an artificial neural network. True, with the current pace of technology development, I hardly have time to digitize. But other approaches of anthropomodification could also be tried".

“I look at the question this way. We (humanity) separate ourselves from the Cro-Magnons, although we admit that we are their descendants. Likewise, those who will combine their body with technology to gain new opportunities, in fact, will not be human. These will be new "creatures" who will have the same kinship with us as we do with the Cro-Magnons.

In this sense, it is logical that they will rethink all the roles of people, from biological to social. Up to the point that they will learn to add organs and body parts to themselves if they wish. Then there will be many wonderful creatures, but it will no longer be what we call "man".

“I don't see a problem in transhumanism - I see it as a natural development of medicine. And yes, I am ready to participate if this option is available to me. Regarding the "ethicality" of transhumanism, questions like - to what proportion of the proportion of a "living" organism to consider an individual a human - IMHO, these questions are identical to dilemmas like "make a patient a heart transplant or let him die" and, therefore, are not ethical in principle. Of course, the more difficult the intervention in the body, the higher the risk of any failure, the more harm: amputation of a limb after a fracture (18th century) excludes any harm to this limb in comparison with bone fusion in a cast (19th century) and already all the more so for an implantable mechanical prosthesis (XX century). An autonomous prosthesis controlled directly from the brain is just the next step, I don't see anything fundamentally new in this".

In fact, "feelings" are just unconscious endogenous reactions to typical exogenous stimuli, a kind of by-product, a collision of biological instincts and cultural imprints. Let's add to this all sorts of factors of a changeable (dangerous) natural environment, overcoming which the human mind is engaged in all the conditional time of its existence. Actually, what makes it different from even the closest in structure biological forms, still rotating in the organically limited linear-cyclic mechanisms of the evolutionary spiral.

Complete and final relief from physical pain, for example, is generally a separate conversation. If transhumanism cancels physical pain as such, replacing it, say, with feedback information communication, this will mean the cancellation of everything that was associated with pain in a person's life. This will make torture absolutely senseless, as well as any force (physical) impact on the subject, which means it will expand the field for constructiveness and agreements. If only this one progressive bonus is the result of giving up "feelings", then I am ready to drop them immediately. And about the total senselessness of moral suffering and reflections, in huge quantities presented in Russian classical literature, I have repeatedly expressed myself both as a writer and as a politician.