Is transhumanism a “Religion”?

Or “Ways of coping with the realities of life”

We live in an odd world. At its best, life can be great: I’m thinking of my first kiss, the day I learned I had got into my chosen university, the day I learned that I had earned a first class exam result. But life is seldom this good. Most often it is crowded with minor annoyances, and sometimes fairly major personal disasters. I remember well the shock and horror when, aged 17, I learned that my father was dead. Life is often unfair, and even the best moral philosophers cannot decide what ought to count as right or wrong. On top of all this, most people believe that their lives will end in the ultimate tragedy – their own death. How do we cope with such a world?

In general, when things go very badly for you – i.e. when the realities of life depart significantly from your conception of what is good or intrinsically valuable about life, you have three [psychologically tenable] options or “resolution strategies”.

Strategy #1: You can try to go out into the world and change things so that whatever is bad no longer occurs. For example, you could try to arrest and reverse human aging, or you could invest in a cryonics insurance policy. Clearly this option is not always available – sometimes the bad thing is not removable, like if a loved one has already died and been put in the earth for worms to eat.

Strategy #2: You can change your perception of what is valuable and what is not. For example, people often say they are “at peace” with their own mortality – which means that they have decided to strongly de-value their own continued existence. Mantras like “death is natural” and “it’s all part of the circle of life” are indicative of this response.

Strategy #3: You can delude yourself – this means that you keep your perceptions of value as they are, but you change your perception of what reality is like. You change your epistemological or factual beliefs to make it appear that the bad thing is not there, or so that some action can remove it. An example of this is a Christian who thinks to herself “If I believe in God, then I can still see my darling again when I go to heaven, therefore I will believe in God”. Map-Territory distinction failure has occurred.

At the end of the day, it is psychologically unhealthy not to interpret the "big picture" in an optimistic way. The alternative - to take a pessimistic view on the ultimate questions in life - leads to a sour, cynical outlook where one's only source of validation is to try and destroy other people's hopes and dreams; a kind of schadenfreude. So you have to pick one of the above options for each major discrepancy between what you want life to be like, and what it is actually like. Furthermore, a religious/political meme will succeed or fail to the extent that it helps people to resolve this issue.

Now I come to Giulio Prisco’s recent post Transhumanism, religion and Raelians over on Transhumanar. I quote [my bold]:

"I want our ideas to reach as many people as possible, in a clear and understandable way. Why? Because our worldview can give a sense of meaning of life, a vision of our place in the universe, peace and happiness. This has been the historic function of the world’s great religions and monolithic ideologies that, on the other hand, are now finally beginning to show some fatigue and soon will be completely unable to persuade people more and more culturally sophisticated and used to the scientific worldview. We should not forget that these are still a minority, but the trend is clear....

We cannot deny that the great world’s religions have managed, and quite well, to reach the masses. Religions’ success is due to the fact that they offer an answer to the nightmare of death. Yes, your loved one are dead, and sooner or later you will also die, but you will meet again in heaven. This is a *very* powerful meme as the penetration of religion demonstrates."

Giulio and I are clearly on the same wavelength here. He “gets it” – the power of the meme depends on it’s ability to help people resolve the conflicts between their expectations about life [I like my father and want to be with him!] and the realities of life [my father is rotting in a graveyard].

"I am very interested in the current experimental activities to create ‘transhumanist religions’, based on science, but still able to offer hope in ‘another life’ "

Exactly! This, I feel, is the essence of the transhumanist project. We resolve the discrepancy between reality and expectation by science and engineering. We will go out, and we will use the most powerful tools that mankind has ever invented – the tools of science and rational thinking – to reshape the world so that it is more like what we want it to be. But lastly, Guilio says something that worries me:

"... even for those who are already dead".

People who are already dead (and not frozen) are almost certainly information theoretically dead. Everything that we know about science, all of our rational thoughts tell us that they are gone forever, gone in a mathematical sense, and that no technology (of any level) can bring them back. So what does Giulio mean? I hope this is a mistake which he will retract, rather than a suggestion that we engage in strategy #3: delusion.

For me, the difference between strategies #1, #2, and #3 represent the differences between transhumanism (the go-getters), nihilism (the “I don’t care” crowd) and traditional religion (the global self-delusion network). There is no situation that I can think of that warrants self-delusion. Why? Self-delusion is the ultimate poison of rational action. Once you’ve twisted your view of reality, you will start taking actions that actually make things even worse (although you won’t realize it!). The errors will cause you to further delude yourself, which will make things worse still.

Take my personal tragedy. My father died in 2002 – in the 21^st century. And yet he was put in the ground for organic decay to finish the job. Why did we not freeze him? Because most of my family – and most of the rest of the country (Croatia) in which he died are firmly deluded that they will meet him in heaven. If it weren’t for this global delusion, I strongly suspect that cryonics would be much more common and socially acceptable, and there is a chance that my father would be safely inside a Dewar of liquid nitrogen today. The original problem – irreversible death – for which the delusion (heaven) was created has been partially vanquished, but now the delusion itself perpetuates the problem.

And on top of this, the delusion creates new problems. The scientific theory of evolution disagrees with the content of Christianity, which creates a new discrepancy between reality and the Christian conception of what is valuable. Certain individuals in America have decided that the best way to deal with this is another application of strategy #3: they are beginning to delude themselves about the way science works – creating institutions which systematically roll back the scientific progress that has so carefully accumulated over the last few hundred years.

I hope it is clear why transhumanism must not go down the road of iterated self-delusion. The bitter medicine of unbiased, rational thought is the only way out of our problems. On the question “Is transhumanism a Religion?”, I would say that transhumanism is like a religion in that it helps people to cope with the realities of life, but unlike a religion in that it must doggedly stick to rational, unbiased assessments of reality.

Perhaps the best terminology comes from Wesley J Smith: transhumanism is a quasi-religion: we use the tools of science and engineering to make the world better, and we spread the idea that rational thought and ethical application of technology will solve our problems far more effectively than self-delusion. [He was attempting to use the term in a derisory way, but if you remove it from his negative frame, I believe it is accurate].