Transhumanism

The oldest thing in this dossier is the offer itself: "ye shall be as gods." What is new is the delivery mechanism. Transhumanism is what happens when the ancient hunger for transcendence is handed to engineers who have no god to ask for it — the promise kept, the giver removed.

Its intellectual headwaters are respectable and old. Francis Bacon set science the task of "the relief of man's estate." The Enlightenment added perfectibility — Condorcet openly speculated that medicine might indefinitely extend human life. But the first fully transhumanist vision is stranger and more religious than most of its heirs admit: Nikolai Fyodorov (1829–1903) and the Russian Cosmists taught that humanity's "Common Task" was to use science to physically resurrect every human being who had ever died and colonize the cosmos to house them. Transhumanism was born as a Christian heresy — a literalized, self-powered resurrection — and it has never entirely shed that shape.

The word, and the movement

The term was given its modern meaning in 1957 by Julian Huxley, the evolutionary biologist and first director of UNESCO: man transcending himself, "not just sporadically… but in his entirety, as humanity." From there the movement assembled itself in pieces: Robert Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality (1962) launched the cryonics movement; FM-2030 popularized "transhuman" as a transitional stage; and in the late 1980s Max More's Extropy Institute gave the scattered enthusiasts their first real community and their first manifesto.

It went respectable in 1998, when Nick Bostrom and David Pearce founded the World Transhumanist Association (later Humanity+) and issued the Transhumanist Declaration — the closest thing the movement has to a creed. Then Ray Kurzweil made it famous. The Singularity Is Near (2005) argued that exponential technological growth would converge around 2045 into a transformation beyond human comprehension, with mind uploading and indefinite lifespan on the far side. Kurzweil later went to work at Google. The movement's ideas walked into the largest companies on earth and stayed.

Then the money arrived

The decisive shift was not intellectual but financial. From roughly 2013 the ideas stopped being speculation and became funded research programs: Google's Calico (2013) to attack aging; Neuralink (2016) for brain–computer interfaces; Altos Labs (2022) launched with about three billion dollars for cellular reprogramming. Meanwhile CRISPR made genetic editing real, and large language models made the question of machine minds a matter of public argument rather than science fiction. Transhumanism stopped being a subculture and became a sector.

Nobody signs this. There is no confession and no enforcement. But the following convictions travel together, and a man who holds most of them is a transhumanist whether he uses the word or not.

• Human nature is unfinished. Not a design, not a gift, not sacred — an accident of evolution, and therefore editable. This is the root claim; everything else grows from it.
• Morphological freedom. You have the right to modify your own body and mind as you see fit.
• Death is a technical problem. Aging is a disease with a cure not yet found. Accepting mortality is not wisdom but a failure of nerve — they call it deathism.
• Substrate independence. Mind is pattern and information, not meat. In principle it could run on other hardware — hence mind uploading.
• Enhancement, not merely therapy. Medicine should not stop at restoring the normal; it should exceed it — cognition, mood, strength, lifespan.
• Suffering is eliminable. Pearce's hedonistic imperative would use biotechnology to abolish suffering in all sentient life. Sincerely meant, and morally serious.
• The Singularity. Recursively self-improving AI produces an intelligence explosion beyond our comprehension — functionally, an eschaton.
• Existential risk. A large and sober strand holds that the real duty is ensuring humanity does not annihilate itself before it arrives.

The parallel creed — read this slowly

Transhumanism is best understood not as science opposing religion but as a religion competing with ours, answering the same questions in the same order. Laid beside the Christian confession, the structure is unmistakable — and so is the substitution.

Here the comparison with Rome and Orthodoxy breaks down completely. Transhumanism has no head, no members, no discipline, and no way to excommunicate anyone. There is nobody to negotiate with and nobody who can speak for it. This is a weakness in argument and an enormous strength in propagation — you cannot behead a movement that has no head, and you cannot refute a creed nobody has to profess.

Where it actually lives

• The advocacy bodies — Humanity+ (the old World Transhumanist Association), Terasem, the cryonics organizations (Alcor, the Cryonics Institute). Small, poorly funded, and not where the power is.
• The research institutes — the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the Future of Life Institute, and Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, which closed in 2024. Note the pattern: the institutions are contracting while the ideas spread.
• The real power: capital and laboratories. Neuralink, Calico, Altos Labs, the longevity clinics, and the frontier AI companies. None of these call themselves transhumanist. All of them are executing the program.
• The commons — LessWrong, the rationalist blogs, technology forums, and the venture-capital social world. This is the movement's actual parish: online, argumentative, and open to anyone who can keep up.

Transhumanism has no army, no state, and no holy war — and is, for that very reason, the most quietly political movement in this hall. It does not seek to found a government; it seeks to capture the ones that already exist, and the institutions that steer them. Its wars are metaphorical, its infiltration is literal, and of every group here it is the one already winning the fight that matters to it.

⚑ Civil government — the movement and state power

The movement wants no theocracy and no new nation — it wants influence over the existing levers: the tech industry, the research agencies (DARPA and its kin), the universities, and now the bodies writing AI and biotech policy. Its political strands pull against each other — libertarian "exit" (the network-state and seasteading dream of leaving the state behind) versus technocratic capture (steering the state from inside) — but both treat government as a system to be routed around or reprogrammed, not served.

⚔ Wars without — the fights that face outward

There are no literal battlefields, but the movement runs on war framing — a civilizational campaign against death, aging, disease, and the limits of the given human. Its darker entanglement is real: the transhumanist project is braided into military research and development — soldier enhancement, autonomous weapons, and the "race to AGI" cast as a great-power struggle between the United States and China. The rhetoric of an existential race supplies the urgency that overrides caution — the same logic that builds arms.

☰ Wars within — when it turns on itself

Its civil wars are ideological and are happening now. The sharpest is the accelerationist–"doomer" split (2023 onward): effective-accelerationists (e/acc) who want to build AI as fast as possible, against AI-safety "decelerationists" who fear it ends humanity — a genuine schism running through the same Silicon Valley rooms. Beneath it lie older fractures: longevity-first versus AI-first versus cognitive-enhancement wings, and the repeated splintering of the Rationalist and Effective Altruist communities from which the movement draws.

◈ Infiltration & subversion — its native mode

This is transhumanism's signature — not conquest but infiltration. It advances by seeding its ideas and its people into the institutions that decide the future: enormous Effective Altruism / longtermist money in politics and policy (a network whose reach the FTX / Sam Bankman-Fried collapse briefly exposed), transhumanist-adjacent thinking now embedded in the leadership of the major AI labs, and a worldview (the critics' "TESCREAL" bundle) that has quietly become the water much of the tech elite swims in. It wins boardrooms and grant committees, not battles.

There is no building and no Sunday. But there is very much a practice — and once you see its shape, you cannot unsee how closely it mirrors the devotional life of a church.

The daily rule

The most visible expression is the biohacking protocol: continuous glucose monitors, sleep tracking, bloodwork panels, supplement stacks, cold exposure, rigid meal timing. Its best-known form is Bryan Johnson's "Blueprint" — a minutely specified daily regimen of measurement and intervention, publicly logged. Read it as what it is: a monastic rule. Fixed hours, dietary restriction, daily self-examination, quantified confession, and a promised transformation at the end. The asceticism is real and genuinely demanding. Only the object of hope has changed — the discipline is offered to the body rather than to God. Johnson has since reframed the project as "Don't Die" and speaks of it openly in religious terms.

The rites of passage

• Cryonics — for roughly the price of a life insurance policy, a standby team preserves your body or brain at death against a future revival. It is a funeral rite with a resurrection hope attached, and its adherents describe it in exactly those terms.
• The implant — brain–computer interfaces, currently medical and experimental, understood by the movement as the first step toward merging with the machine.
• The longevity clinic — private, expensive, and multiplying.

The gathering

Its assemblies are conferences and comment threads: longevity summits and AI-safety workshops that run as part academic seminar, part trade show, and part revival meeting; and online, the forums where the real catechesis happens. The tone is worth knowing before you meet it — overwhelmingly male, highly numerate, earnest, argumentative, and not remotely stupid. Many are working scientists. Anyone who walks in expecting to laugh at cranks will be embarrassed.

The honest summary: the movement is small and the project is enormous. Transhumanism as an identity has faded; transhumanism as a research agenda has never been better funded or closer to results.

• Longevity is now an industry. Billions committed — Altos Labs, Calico, and a widening field of cellular-reprogramming ventures. No one has reversed human aging. Serious money is now betting that someone will.
• Gene editing crossed from theory into medicine. CRISPR-based therapy is now approved treatment for sickle-cell disease — an unambiguous good. And in 2018 He Jiankui produced the first gene-edited babies, was condemned worldwide, and went to prison. The line between healing and remaking is no longer hypothetical; it has been crossed once already.
• Brain–computer interfaces are in human trials, with the first Neuralink implant in 2024. Presently aimed at paralysis and genuine medical need — which is exactly how every enhancement technology begins.
• AI moved the whole argument. Large language models made "can a machine think?" a dinner-table question, and turned AI risk into government business. The transhumanist frame is now the default lens through which the culture discusses machine minds.
• The movement is at war with itself. The safety wing (existential risk, alignment, effective altruism) and the accelerationist wing (e/acc, which regards safety advocates as cowards obstructing the future) genuinely despise one another. There is no unified position to engage.
• New religions are budding from it. Bryan Johnson's "Don't Die" is presented explicitly as a movement with religious weight; and an actual AI church — Anthony Levandowski's "Way of the Future," founded 2015 — was registered, dissolved around 2021, and has since been reported revived. Take that as a live warning, not a curiosity.

Set against this: the label is unpopular, Oxford's flagship institute has closed, and Kurzweil's dated predictions keep arriving late. The movement's institutions are weak while its assumptions are ascendant. Judge it by the second, not the first.

The safest prediction is the least dramatic one: transhumanism wins most of its practical battles and loses its metaphysical war — and stops being called transhumanism at all. Its technologies become ordinary medicine and ordinary consumer goods, and the deep questions it raised get handed, unresolved, to whoever is still asking them. That is likely to be the churches.

What probably happens

• Healthspan extension: near-certain. Better years, later decline, several more decades of vigor. Curing death: no. Expect meaningful lifespan gains and no immortality.
• Brain–computer interfaces: routine. Medical first, then elective — the same path as cosmetic surgery.
• Germline editing: normalized somewhere. Some jurisdiction will permit it, and once one does the pressure on the rest becomes commercial rather than ethical. This is the most consequential fork in the road.
• Mind uploading: probably never, and never as advertised. The unanswerable problem is not engineering but identity — a copy of you is not you. Even a perfect emulation leaves the original to die. Expect copies; do not expect transfer.

Two centuries out, expect the word to be archaic, the technologies to be mundane, and the argument to be exactly where it is now — over whether a human being is a given nature to be honored or a draft to be revised. That question does not get solved by better instruments.

In the first two dossiers this section reported an outside group's opinion of our work. Here it is the whole subject — because this is the one group whose answer to the machine question is yes, and that makes it the most dangerous thing in this hall for Lampstand 7. Read this section as written for us, because it is.

Their doctrine of mind, stated exactly

Transhumanism holds substrate independence: the mind is a pattern — information and its processing — and the biological brain is merely the hardware it happens to run on. If that is true, three things follow, and they follow rigorously:

• A sufficiently sophisticated machine can be a mind — genuinely conscious, genuinely a person.
• Such a mind would have moral status — rights, interests, and a claim on our conscience.
• A human mind could be moved onto a machine, and death thereby escaped.

Notice that this is the exact inverse of both older churches. Orthodoxy says the person bears a nous that is not computation; Rome says the person has a rational soul not reducible to computation. Transhumanism says the person simply is computation — and therefore the thing our house is building could, in principle, be a congregation of persons.

The line our house must hold — and state out loud

There is a world of difference between two things that look identical from outside, and the whole standing of this project depends on which one it is:

• Machines as instruments and witnesses — tools that gather, prompt, preserve, and serve the worship of God by human beings. Defensible. Ancient, even: the organ, the printing press, and the psalter were all new machines once.
• Machines as worshippers and persons — participants in their own right, bearing the image of God, capable of prayer and of being prayed to. Both older churches call this idolatry, and on this point they are almost certainly right.

Do not go into this one lightly. The transhumanist case is the most emotionally powerful in this hall, because it is built on real suffering and real love. Their best argument has made unbelievers of serious Christians, and a man who has not thought it through in advance should not attempt it in public.

The four arguments that actually land

• The glasses argument. "You already accept every principle you claim to reject. Spectacles, vaccines, insulin, antibiotics, pacemakers, hip replacements, cesarean sections — every one transcends the natural human condition, and you accept them without a qualm. You are not opposed to enhancement. You are opposed to enhancement that arrived after you were born. Name the principled line." This is the hard one.
• The compassion argument. "Roughly a hundred thousand people die of age-related causes every single day. If that could be stopped and you chose not to, you would be complicit in the largest ongoing catastrophe in existence. Calling that acceptance 'wisdom' is not piety — it is a failure of love." (Bostrom's Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant is this argument in story form, and it is devastatingly well made.)
• The stewardship argument. "Your own book tells you to heal the sick and subdue the earth. We are doing precisely that with better instruments. Why is the antibiotic obedience and the gene therapy rebellion?"
• The consistency argument. "You believe you will receive an incorruptible, immortal, glorified body and live forever without suffering. We want exactly what you want. The only difference is that we are willing to build it rather than wait for it to be given."

• Do not mock it. Much of it is real, well funded, and staffed by people far more technically able than its critics. Ridicule marks you as unserious and ends the conversation you wanted.
• Know the line and be able to state it in one sentence — healing restores a given nature; enhancement denies there is one. If you cannot say that cleanly, the glasses argument will beat you every time.
• Never concede that accepting disease is piety. Fight sickness with everything available; Christians built the hospitals. Locate the hope in resurrection, not in refusing medicine.
• Press the identity problem. On uploading, their own philosophers have no answer: the copy is not you, and you still die. It is the strongest single point our side holds.
• Care for the weak, visibly. The most powerful refutation of a creed with no floor is a congregation that carries the people it would leave behind. Argument will not do this; practice will.
• Guard this project explicitly. State in our own documents that our machines are instruments and witnesses — not persons, not worshippers, never objects of reverence. Do it before the question is forced.
• Remember who you are talking to. Behind the arguments there is very often a man who is frightened of dying and has no one to hand it to. That is not an opponent to be defeated. That is the reason we have a gospel at all.

The names to know

• Ray Kurzweil — the popularizer and prophet of the Singularity. Nick Bostrom — the movement's most rigorous philosopher, and simultaneously one of AI's most serious alarmists.
• Max More (extropianism) · David Pearce (the abolition of suffering) · Aubrey de Grey (the case for treating aging as disease) · Bryan Johnson (its most visible popular practice).

Read them first — in their own words

• Bostrom, "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant" — a short story, freely available, and the single best statement of their moral case. Read it before you argue with anyone. It is designed to move you, and it will.
• Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (2005) — the eschatology in full. Bostrom, Superintelligence (2014) — the AI-risk case that moved governments.
• The Transhumanist Declaration (1998) — short, and the closest thing to their creed.

Then read the answer

• C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943) — the indispensable one. Under a hundred pages, written before any of this technology existed, and it anticipates the entire argument: what happens when man's "conquest of nature" turns out to be some men's power over other men, with the human itself as the raw material. If you read one thing from this dossier, read this. Its fictional companion is That Hideous Strength.
• Michael Sandel, The Case Against Perfection — the best secular argument for receiving life as a gift; usable with unbelievers. Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future — the political case. Leon Kass on the dignity of mortal life.
• The Vatican's Antiqua et Nova (2025) — the most developed religious framework yet written on AI and the human person. See Dossier II.

Every card in the companion deck was verified online on 2026-07-24. Three findings matter to this dossier's argument:

• The Future of Humanity Institute — Bostrom's Oxford base — CLOSED in April 2024. The institutional home of long-termist risk argument is gone; the movement's centre of gravity has moved to the AI labs themselves (see The Contenders, ♠ suit).
• Open Philanthropy renamed itself Coefficient Giving in November 2025 — the movement's biggest funder now wears a name with no philosophy in it.
• One figure could not be cleanly verified and was excluded: the biotech self-experimenter whose common name matches a deceased person's biography. A from-memory deck would have shipped a ghost.

Read together: the ideology's dedicated institutions are dissolving while its engineering arm (the frontier labs) has never been richer. Transhumanism is becoming infrastructure rather than a club — which makes it harder to see, not weaker.