The Guardian | God in the Machine: my strange journey into transhumanism
May 8, 2017
publication: The Guardian
column: The Long Read
story title: God in the Machine: my strange journey into transhumanism
story author: by Meghan O’Gieblyn
date: April 18, 2017
story excerpts from essay with Ray Kurzweil:
1. | Humanity will change the nature of mortality in our post-biological future
I first read Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines in 2006. Kurzweil writes, “The 21st century will be different. The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age old problems. It will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a post-biological future.”
Ray Kurzweil is one of the first major thinkers to bring these ideas to mainstream — and legitimize them for a wide audience. His ascent in 2012 to a director of engineering position at Google, heralded for many, a symbolic merger between the philosophy called transhumanism and the clout of major technological enterprise. By 2045, Kurzweil predicts technology will be inside our bodies. At that moment, the arc of progress will curve up into a vertical line.
2. | Ray Kurzweil writes that humans will be transformed in “spiritual machines”
Within months of encountering Ray Kurzweil’s book, I became totally immersed in transhumanist philosophy. I researched topics like nanotechnology & brain-computer interfaces. I wanted to know if transhumanist ideas were compatible with Christian eschatology. Was it possible that tech could be how humanity achieves immortality? At bible school, I studied a branch of theology that divides all history into successive stages by which god reveals truth.
Like the theologians at my school, Ray Kurzweil — a leading proponent of transhumanist philosophy — has his own historical narrative. In his book he divides the evolution of life into successive epochs. We’re living in the 5th epoch, when human intelligence begins to merge with tech.
Soon we’ll reach singularity, Kurzweil says — the point where humans will transforme into what he calls “spiritual machines.” We’ll be able to transfer our minds to computers, letting us live forever. Our bodies will also become immune to disease & aging. Using tech, humanity will transform earth into a paradise — then migrate to space, terra-forming other planets.
on the web | essentials
Meghan O’Gieblyn | main
n plus 1 | magazine
n plus 1 | issue no. 28: contents
n plus 1 | issue no. 28: Ghost in the Cloud: transhumanism’s simulation theology by Meghan O’Gieblyn
on the web | notes on topic
Wikipedia | spirituality
Wikipedia | religion
Wikipedia | theology
Wikipedia | eschatology
Wikipedia | emerging technologies
Wikipedia | transhumanism
Wikipedia | human enhancement
comments 3
by James Redford
I’m glad to see Meghan O’Gieblyn’s present articles on the religious implications of the advancement of technology (viz., “Ghost in the Cloud: Transhumanism’s simulation theology”, n+1 [n+1 Foundation, Inc.], No. 28: “Half-Life” [Spring 2017]; and a shortened version: “God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism”, The Guardian [UK], Apr. 18, 2017).
The concept of man being gods and becoming ever-more Godlike is simply traditional Christianity, going all the way back to Jesus’s teachings (e.g., see John 10:34), that of Paul and the other Epistlers, and that of the Church Fathers. In traditional Christian theology, this is known as apotheosis, theosis or divinization. For many examples of these early teachings, see the article “Divinization (Christian)” at Wikipedia (dated Mar. 26, 2017). Though this traditional position of Christian theology has been deemphasized for the last millennium.
Indeed, the words “transhuman” and “superhuman” originated in Christian theology. “Transhuman” is a neologism coined by Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy (Paradiso, Canto I, lines 70-72), referring favorably to a mortal human who became an immortal god by means of eating a special plant. For the Christian theological origin of the term “superhuman”, see the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.), the first appearance being by Henry Montagu, 1st Earl of Manchester, in his Al Mondo: Contemplatio Mortis, & Immortalitatis (London, England: Robert Barker, and the Assignes of John Bill, 1636).
Technological superintelligence and immortality are to become ubiquitous throughout the universe. This is actually a mathematical theorem within standard physics (i.e., the known laws of physics) by physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler termed the Omega Point cosmology, which requires the universe to diverge to infinite computational complexity. Tipler’s Omega Point cosmology has been published and extensively peer-reviewed in leading physics journals. For a great deal more on this, see my following article: James Redford, “The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything”, Social Science Research Network, orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011 (since updated), doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708.
by Ian Clarke
Both religion and transhumanism are born from our deepest desires, so it’s no surprise that paralells are drawn. But it’s only now that these desires have a chance of being realised.
by asiwel
An extraordinary blog/article to read and think about.