Is the transhumanist movement changing our perception of death and eternity?

Transhumanism is a movement defined by Max More in 1990 as “… a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values.” The movement believes death should be voluntary; hence it opposes the idea of an eternal life after this (something various religions express beliefs about), and instead seeks eternal life in this life. The last couple of years several expressions of such an avoidance of death have been starting to show up in the B2C market.

In 2013 Google founded the company Calico (short for the California Life Company) with the mission to “harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan” (Calico 2020). Still no results have been shown and Calico is very secretive of their research.

The American company Alcor offers services within cryopreservation. Cryopreservation is when the whole body is frozen in the hope that one day it will be possible to revive it. Alcor has already frozen 150 people since the start in the 1970’s, and they don’t view their frozen customers as dead, rather as in a suspended, in-between state. Their belief is that by freezing the body today, it will be kept frozen until the time comes when the technology has become so advanced there is a way to revive it. But when that will be, no one knows.

There are also experiments starting to be made with mind uploading. Mind uploading is a technique where a person’s brain is scanned in great detail, and then recreated in a computer simulation. This will then create a duplication of the person’s mind, memories, emotions and personality that exist in a digital form. And as this digital form could be kept forever, it is potentially a way to eternal life. The technology is still far into the future, but a lot of interest and effort are directed towards it. A company hoping to offer this to their customers sometime in the future is the American company Nectome. Nectome preserves your brain after you have died and will in the future scan in order to turn it into a computer simulation.

What I find the most intriguing in this trend is how beliefs around death, the body and eternity are made acutely aware by the transhumanistic ideology. For example the question of the division of mind and body. The transhumanist dualism clearly distinguishes between mind and matter. But is it actually possible to separate mind and body? Another implication of this exaggerated division between mind and body might be the introduction of new terms; one that has been created in the response of the cryonic movement is “information theoretical death”. Information theoretical death occurs when “the structures that encode memory and personality have been so disrupted that it is no longer possible in principle to recover them.”. Will this influence how we are to understand what a person is? A collection of data? And when that data is non retrievable the person is no longer alive?

There are also all the implications of mind uploading. If we are able to upload our minds, is that to be understood as eternal life? And who is in charge of this eternal life? If you upload yourself to a cloud function a company will most probably own the server that fuels your eternal life. What happens if the server fails? Is that the end of eternal life? It is also the question of how the business model of such a company works, is it your relatives that pay for your mind to stay uploaded? And what if you decide you want to exit the mind uploading service, but your relatives don’t, who owns your eternal life?

Another concern is, could eternal life be used for punishment? One of the writers of the Black Mirror episode “Black Museum” which used mind uploading as a theme, said in an interview: “Right now, we throw people in jail for life because it’s more humane than killing them (in most instances), so I can’t really imagine us artificially extending someone’s life indefinitely to torture them like this. But then again, we do give our worst offenders multiple life sentences in cases where it’s deserved, so perhaps this could be a way for them to actually fulfil their sentences?”

Sources

Abril, G 2017, Could science one day cure us of old age? World Economic forum

What is transhumanism, 2020, What is transhumanism,

Innes, S 2019, Scottsdale cryonics facility, The home of Ted Williams’ head, hopes frozen dead people will live again,

Graziano, M 2019, What happens if your mind lives for ever on the internet?, The guardian,

Regalado, A 2018, A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”, Technologyerview, viewed july 25 2020

Merkle, R (1992). The technical feasibility of cryonics, Medical Hypotheses (Elsevier) 39 (1): 6–16. doi:10.1016/0306–9877(92)90133-W.