Humanism without the Secular

I've had some fantastic conversations over the last couple months since seeing James Cameron's Avatar. One last night with virtual world veteran Larry Rosenthal (aka Cube3), may have snapped one more of the crucial pieces together. He and I discussed my review of Avatar and transhumanism, and he pointed out that my beliefs were just plain humanism. He's right. I don't think we can essentially "become God" as the strictest transhumanist beliefs go. I realize because I didn't explicitly state some of my assumptions, it may lead to a misconception that I'm a transhumanist in the "upload and become a super-being" sense, which I'm not. Instead, I assert that there are two rivaling understandings of what "transhumanism" really means. In my article about Avatar, I make an assumption that I am speaking from one understanding; anyone who is in the other camp's understanding might misconstrue what I wrote and get confused as to how I draw the conclusions that I draw.

In a literal sense, transhumanism means to transcend the human condition. But what does that mean? Does "transcend" mean to become something completely different? Or does transcend mean getting in touch with a nature of humanity that is normally hidden? Both could be valid ways of looking at it, and I'm in the latter camp. I see transhumanism as the means at which we can more fully reach some of human's potential. I don't see it as becoming other-than-human, as becoming a god, as it were.

Context: Politics and Belief in Science and Technology

Backing up a bit. Last year, from September through December I struggled to write a blog post essentially of a unified theory of the various prevailing sociological-political attitudes toward technology and science. The various camps include the Luddites, the technophiles, the transhumanists, and the secular humanists. The groups aren't mutually exclusive, strictly speaking, and I had a hard time probably because I was trying to relate it to my own personal experiences with 9/11 and the age of George W Bush and Obama in America. Clearly Obama's election is a product of the emergence of social media - that's easy enough to argue. Showing that it was a shift in attitudes toward science and technology themselves - well, that's a bit more of a tall order.

So the article kept getting rewritten and not published. But it made me deeply examine how people view science, technology, and humanity. It helped me look into why different camps of thought are so divided, especially on religious lines.

Humanism Does Not Imply Secular

I have a problem with secular humanism. It's secular. Well, strictly speaking, that's not the problem. The problem is that many people basically say that humanism implies secularism. Like somehow the exploration of reconnecting with the human condition automatically eliminates the need for God. Not that religion ought to be based on the need for God anyway; either you believe God exists or not. It is the atheist argument - that man invented God out of a need to explain the unexplainable. While this may be true, that still doesn't negate the existence of God. My counter-argument is that atheists also have that same need to explain the unexplainable, to fill every single gap of knowledge with a Religion of Science. It is the belief that science will ultimately explain everything, and we must have faith that it will.

Carl Sagan, the great astrophysicist spoke often that religion and secular science have the same aim and have the same faith-based root. Sagan saw wonder in the physical universe and drew spirituality through the exploration of it. Sagan was *not* an athiest, and was a self-avowed agnostic. Whether his spirituality included the belief in God, that's probably debatable. The important thing is that Sagan clearly believed that our spirituality and our scientific fervor could go hand in hand. It is a balancing act. It's the acknowledgment that even with scientific knowledge and spiritual exploration, we still can't know everything. That is very scary to most people. People like things wrapped up in a nice package.

Secularism Without Humanism is Just As Dogmatic As Anti-Science Religion

When you take science and you remove it from humanism, you get a dogmatic belief system in the same way as if you have religion without humanism. It is indeed true that religions have touched millions and millions for the better, spawned amazing works of art, and have and continue to serve altruistic purposes. At the same time, Religions also have this nasty habit of starting wars, even though every single major religion preaches peace and tolerance in its core beliefs. The key is that religions start wars when its leaders have abandoned compassion and humanist belief. Religions have been used to devalue the enemy, de-humanizing them, and making them prime targets for "cleansing". I shouldn't need to give examples to assert that religion are still usurped today as excuses for murder and war.

(And while I risk violating Godwin's Law), secular science-worship risks becoming what nazis did with their eugenics propaganda in World War II. When you worship Master Science as God and Master Science tells us that certain truths are true, then people will believe ridiculous ideas like Jews and Blacks and Gypsies and so on are inferior. It's bulls***, all of it, of course. The idea that somehow the nazi Germans were Aryan and superior is laughable to anyone who knows what the word "Aryan" really means. But the science sounded convincing enough to rile up the Germans in 1939 and cause the biggest, scariest human conflict ever. There was no humanity in Hitler's science, despite its stated goal of improving humanity.

Luddites and Anti-Science as a Reaction

Maybe this is why Luddites exist in our day and age; Science-worship can be a scary cult. For many, it is easier to wholesale reject technology and science than it is to come up with a balance between science and humanism. It's easier to have religion that doesn't care if it contradicts science, than to have to challenge one's religious beliefs and balance them with scientific laws. It's easier because it explains everything through faith. The Luddites are wrong for exactly the same reason that the Science-Cultists are wrong.

I'm with Darwin and Einstein and on this one - science is the exploration of the wonder which is God's creation. That doesn't mean God placed dinosaur bones in mountains to "trick us" as anti-evolutionists would assert. At the same time, it doesn't mean that evolution proves that God doesn't exist; it "merely" means that religions have been very, very wrong about how the physical universe works and needs to loosen up. I don't need to believe that God is up there listening individually to every single prayer and telling some poor legless man "no you won't get your legs back" or "Sorry, Haiti, you folks having a crappy worthless government and then getting struck by a giant killer earthquake is part of my divine plan." At the same time, I don't have to use tragedy as an excuse to simply drop all ideas about God and spirituality. Essentially, humanism doesn't have to be secular humanism.

Humanism is Actually A Religious Core Concept

And you know what? I believe all of the major religions' core beliefs agree with me. It is not like I am pulling this idea of humanism and religion going together out of thin air! Look at the stories of Jesus and Mohammad and Buddha and Moses. They all had transcendental experiences where they commune with the divine, each in their own different ways, and come back with a burning desire to show compassion to people who would be believers. It's a beautiful sentiment, and it's humanism. Not secular humanism, but humanism.

Transhumanism and Transcendentalism and Rival Definitions

There are rivaling definitions based on rival understandings about transhumanism and transcendentalism. As I wrote earlier, one is steeped in the idea of becoming a god. The other is more about a transformation that keeps us human, but opens up more potential to humanity.

The reason that I believe in the latter definition is a philosophical one. You can't change something into something completely different, unless there is an underlying common element to them both. For example, I can't change lead into gold using chemical means. However, I could hypothetically through nuclear means. This means requires understanding that, fundamentally, lead and gold are made of the same stuffs.

Human "Alchemy"

The same limits goes with doing alchemy on human beings. You can't change a human into "god" through transcendental means, unless humans and "god" already had some underlying connection and common elements. So if humans could transcend into "god", they would become all-powerful. But if there were more than one thing that was all-powerful, they would essentially overlap. So I conclude that humans can't transcend into an "all powerful god".

What then? If we use the definition of "god" in more of the polytheistic sense, that would imply that humans are just gods in a cocoon state. That's the widely believed transhumanist belief, where one would plug in one's brain into a computer and be far more powerful, but still not all-powerful. But isn't this a matter of perspective?

Is "god" a Matter of Perspective?

I've often referred to studies that say things like, "The average Sunday newspaper contains more information in it than an average Middle Ages person would come across in their entire life." Like Cortes and the Aztecs, the Spaniard conquistadors were gods to the Aztecs, simply with their knowledge of science and sailing and their technology of guns and galleons. But the Spaniards were a pious, religious folk; they certainly didn't view themselves as gods. My conclusion thus is that if humans were some sort of "god in cocoon state", that should we emerge from the cocoon, we still would view ourselves to be human beings.

Transhumanism Is Impossible, Literally Speaking

Ultimately, what it means to be human is clearly about access to external stimulus and responding (being alive) and sentience and perspective about our mortality, much more than it is about our bodies themselves. The idea that we could become something we would not recognize as human - literally transhuman - is impossible to me. Therefore, I am forced to look at transhumanism and come up with a pragmatic definition based in what's possible and what's more attuned to how humans actually operate and see themselves.

"Augmentationism" has been suggested to me, but that's not quite it, either. There is definitely a transformative property to how our technology will change us; at the same time, that transformation has always been happening - it's inherent to technology. And if technology is a product of human sentience, it's a product of humanity as well. You see! There's no escaping our human condition!

Quest for Immortality

That is what transhumanism - in the Science-is-God sense - ultimately boils down to. Humans constantly seek ways to become immortal. To become immortal is to escape the human condition which is mortality. It is our mortality that drives us, creates a hole in our lives that we need to fill. It is the premise behind asking the meaning of life. "Why do I have a limited time?" and "What do I do with my limited time?" People answer this question by having kids. They do it by creating art and literature. People contribute to society in the hopes that our collective civilization will live on and that each person will have become a small part of that. It's a biological imperative written into our most primal urges to procreate. And while we cannot escape our mortality, we can deny it and avoid it, and that is where we lose our humanity.

To deny one's mortality, and to avoid it, one is avoiding answering the question of "What do I do with my limited time?" It is willful ignorance. But that shadow - that hole which is mortality - still haunts us. We are reminded of it when we head or witness tragedy and loss of human life. That hole still needs to be filled, and people do it with money, sex, food, drugs, fantasy, and other diversions. However, let me clearly state: These are just things. They are not evil, nor good. It is how a human uses them that give them meaning. Therefore, I think that any philosophy which preaches the complete denial of these altogether is simply avoiding the question of mortality. It is more difficult to preach moderation and responsibility than it is abstinence, and yet it is moderation and responsibility which are the key tenets of any good ethical and moral system.

But we keep searching for immortality or perfection.. We call it a variety of things, like the Holy Grail, The Fountain of Youth, Shambala, or brain-uploading. We will never have these things, not the way we imagine them. It is Captain Ahab, searching for his white whale rather than caring for himself or his crew. If only I could catch that whale and take my revenge, then my life would be complete.

Religious Beliefs Can Be Corrupted By the Quest to Avoid Humanity

Religions that focus squarely on the afterlife and total denial of the current life are just avoiding what it is to be human. God made us human, right? Why would God make us human just for us to spend our whole life avoiding our humanity? That makes no sense whatsoever to me. At the same time, that doesn't mean I need to be a hedonist or a Satanist. Instead, I believe, one can accept one's own humanity as well as one's more eternal, spiritual nature. And the key is, again, moderation and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

A great deal of churches of various religions *do* preach these. However, from my own experiences, this seems to be more of a product of "listen to God's laws" rather than a fundamental understanding that it's our humanity that demands this. Is that a cynical view of churches? Yeah, probably. But it's the dogma that I've encountered over and over. It's definitely not an all-encompassing view, and I'm willing to have my mind changed that it's even a majority view.

But back on topic: It may be scary to religious conservatives, perhaps, but all that's needed is to go back and assert, "If God made man, God made humanity." I see humanism as a natural consequence of our nature - the good part of our nature. Didn't God make us "in his image" as the three big monotheistic religions say in their Creation stories? I argue that humanity and compassion are a large chunk of that.

Transhumanism as a Continuous, Non-Singulatarian Process

Now for me to practice what I preach, right? I need to perform more "human alchemy" on myself. And, well, actually, that's a good segue into my final point about transhumanism and technology. The singularity demands a single "before / after" point in time. I see that humans are constantly evolving as a civilization, in the same way that people don't simply get "saved" and then never have to worry about being a good person ever again. Being righteous is a continuous process, in the same way that civilization has and will continue to continuously evolve.

In any event, I believe one could be "transhumanist" with the focus on the "humanist". How we interpret the "trans" part ultimately lies in whether or not it is even possible to escape being human. If we can't, the trans simply reinforces the fundamental reality that the universe is in constant motion and we as humans and a civilization are constantly changing and evolving. If we can escape being human, then we won't care about humans because sentimentality and compassion are essential human traits. But to believe we can escape our humanity requires the same level of blind faith as believing "God put those dinosaur bones in the ground to confuse us."

You Can't Escape Being Human

And that's why the Na'Vi in Cameron's Avatar were so human-like. They had emotions. They had love and compassion toward each other, and even humans that they had no reason to show compassion. If this is indeed the result of bioengineering, as I asserted in my review, then we are still humans. We're just taller, and blue, and have more immediate ways of connecting with each other and our world.

Or maybe we've always had the ability to connect immediately with our world and each other, and we just need to step out of our cocoons.