A Passage to More than Mars
Transhumanism, Manifest Destiny, and Human, All Too Human Pursuance
Greetings from Underground!
This week, I’m reading Whitman. I’m listening to Coltrane. I’m teaching my three year old multiplication tables. Maybe someday he’ll go to Mars.
We seem to be going places. It feels good. I want to talk about it.
I offer you two readings. The first is from the Patron Saint of American Optimism:
…
Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!
Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!
Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!
Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?
Have we not grovell’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes?
Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?
Sail forth— steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
O my brave soul!
O farther farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
O farther, farther, farther sail!
—Whitman Passage to India
The second is an excerpt of the famous 1989 essay Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy by Max More. The full essay is available here.
Transhumanism: Meaning as Perpetual Transcendence of Limits
Now that we understand the functions of religion, we can see that a narrow scientism will not succeed in replacing it. A deeply value-laden, yet open and critical system (or systems) will be necessary to dislodge virulent religious memes. The growth of humanism over the decades has begun this job, but now it is time to utilize the more inclusive and memetically attractive option of transhumanism.20
The Extropian philosophy is the most developed form of transhumanism.21 It includes a broad metaphysical perspective on the development, direction, goal, and value of life and consciousness. It goes beyond humanism by peering into the future in order to better understand our possibilities. As we move forward through time our understanding of our immense potentials will evolve; there can be no final, ultimate, unalterable philosophy of life. Dogma has no place within transhumanism. Extropianism and other forms of transhumanism, if they are to be true futurist philosophies, must be flexible and ready to reconfigure into higher forms. Balancing this should be a resistance to change for the sake of novelty: transhumanism, if it is to guide us, cannot involve a pervasive skepticism. Truth, once found and expounded, should not be quickly jettisoned merely for newness.
Extropian transhumanism offers an optimistic, vital, and dynamic philosophy of life. We behold a life of unlimited growth and possibility with excitement and joy. We seek to void all limits to life, intelligence, freedom, knowledge, and happiness. Science, technology, and reason must be harnessed to our extropic values to abolish the greatest evil: death. Death does not stop the progress of intelligent beings considered collectively, but it obliterates the individual. No philosophy of life can be truly satisfying which glorifies the advance of intelligent beings and yet which condemns each and every individual to rot into nothingness. Each of us seeks growth and the transcendence of our current forms and limitations. The abolition of aging and, finally, all causes of death, is essential to any philosophy of optimism and transcendence relevant to the individual.
Humans have tried to imbue their lives with a fuller sense of meaning by a belief in the possibility of connecting with a higher realm, by transcending their limitations and merging with or at least communing with the Infinite and Eternal. Apart from the sheer falsity and irrationality of religion it has had the unfortunate consequence (identified by Ludwig Feuerbach) of debasing humanity. By inventing a God or gods and elevating them above us, by making external divinity the source of meaning and value, and by abasing ourselves before these higher powers, we have stifled our own emerging sense of personal value. We can look up while on our knees, but we cannot walk forward.
The Extropian philosophy does not look outside us to a superior alien force for inspiration. Instead it looks inside us and beyond us, projecting forward to a brilliant vision of our future. Our goal is not God, it is the continuation of the process of improvement and transformation of ourselves into ever higher forms. We will outgrow our current interests, bodies, minds, and forms of social organization. This process of expansion and transcendence is the fountainhead of meaningfulness.
What is meaningfulness and why is the extropian philosophy of transhumanism especially effective at nurturing and feeding it?22 A static life, one which is closed up within itself and never seeks new values, never grows, never explores, is a life lacking meaning. If the universe were controlled by a malevolent being who frustrated all of your plans even before they could move you forward, you would be unable to connect with anything beyond your current condition. Even if you were free to plan and act, your life would lack much meaning if your long term plans reached no further than current narrow concerns (such as the pursuit of immediate gratification and the conditions for its continuance).
It will be clear why death undercuts meaning. The involuntary termination of life limits the ways of and extent to which you can connect your life to other values. People seek meaning by connecting with many different things and causes: Political and social causes of all kinds, having children, seeking beauty or knowledge, relationships with others, and self-development. We worry about lack of meaning when we ask ourselves “Is this all it comes to?”, “Is it merely this?”. We find more meaning as we realize the connections of our concerns to broader values, and as we become more intensely involved in these transcendent concerns.
No matter how broad the field of value we connect our lives to, we can intellectually step outside that field and ask ourselves “what does that come to? What does that mean?”. Even if the values we link to are themselves extremely broad and important it seems we can always stand outside that system of meaning and be concerned about its adequacy or its ultimate meaningfulness. The wider the field of the meaning- relations the more difficult and strained will be this questioning.23
If, no matter how wide the realm with which we connect ourselves and our purposes, there is always a wider context from which to question meaning, perhaps what we require is a field of meaning that is unlimited and outside of which we cannot stand.24As Robert Nozick notes, “The intellectual life seems to offer one route across all limits: there is nothing that cannot be thought of, theorized about, pondered.”(597) However, though thinking can link us to everything, it is only one particular type of link. A meaningful life will involve more than simply abstract consideration of values.
Meaning involves transcending limits but transcending limits to connect with something trivial will not serve to provide meaning. For the transcendence of limits to bestow meaning, what we connect with must be valuable. The meaning of a life will be the structure of value with which it connects. If value is organic unity or a certain internal ordering,25 the transcendence of limits involved in meaningfulness requires the breaking up of old orders, the demolition of stagnant unities. On one view (which Nozick identifies as the classicist) the point of transcending limits is to reach ever higher levels of value. The goal is the unifications, the new levels of value and ordering. An alternative view (the romanticist) locates the goal of the process in the destruction of the unities.
We need not choose between these views. Neither the construction of new orderings and unities nor their transcendence alone is what matters. The importance lies in the process of ordering-and-transcendence. The value of the process is in its alternating unification and transcendence. This alternation alone will not suffice; if the alternation was akin to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, or Sisyphus’ endlessly repetitive task, it would quite meaningless. The process of alternately creating and breaking organic structures can be seen as meaningful if it has direction.
This is the core of the Extropian approach to meaningfulness: Life and intelligence must never stagnate; it must re-order, transform, and transcend its limits in an unlimited progressive process. Our goal is the exuberant and dynamic continuation of this unlimited process, not the attainment of some final supposedly unlimited condition. The goal of religion is communion with, or merely serving, God—a being superior to us. The Extropian goal is our own expansion and progress without end. Humanity must not stagnate—to go backwards to a primitive life, or to halt our burgeoning move forward, upward, outward, would be a betrayal of the dynamic inherent in life and consciousness. We must progress on to transhumanity and beyond into a posthuman stage that we can barely glimpse.
God was a primitive notion invented by primitive people, people only just beginning to step out of ignorance and unconsciousness. God was an oppressive concept, a more powerful being than we, but made in the image of our crude self-conceptions. Our own process of endless expansion into higher forms should and will replace this religious idea. As extropians pursuing and promoting transcendent expansion we are the vanguard of evolution. Humanity is a temporary stage along the evolutionary pathway. We are not the zenith of nature’s development. It is time for us to consciously take charge of ourselves and to accelerate our progress.
No more gods, no more faith, no more timid holding back. Let us blast out of our old forms, our ignorance, our weakness, and our mortality. The future is ours.
What say you, friends?
Join us— Fridays at City Club.
Yours Truly,
JKLC