The Catman Cometh
SMITH, WESLEY J.
The Catman Cometh Among the Transhumanists. BY WESLEY J. SMITH IF YOU WANT TO KNOW what it fccls like to wander into a Salvador Dali painting, try attending a conference of transhumanists. Case...
...Meanwhile, many bioethicists urge that we redefine death to include a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state so that the organs of the cognitively devastated can be harvested...
...futuristic mumbo-jumbo...
...Posthuman women "will not have to rely on men for genetic material" if they want babies, and men will be able to become biological mothers by being surgically altered...
...Bostrom once taught at Yale but got promoted to Oxford, where he directs the Future of Humanity Institute...
...In Brave New Britain, late-term babies with correctable conditions such as cleft palates and clubfeet are being aborted, while embryos are destroyed because they exhibit a genetic propensity to adult onset cancer...
...Cosmetic surgery is a growth industry, steroid use is rampant, and Viagra isn't just used to treat impotence anymore...
...Nick Bostrom—cofounder of the World Transhumanist Association—wants to protect "post-human dignity...
...The ultimate goal is a utopian world of "post-humans," such as human/robot hybrids and human consciousnesses downloaded into computers that will live for thousands of years...
...Antibiotics are beginning to fail...
...Perhaps predictably, government is being seduced by transhumanist fantasies...
...Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, a $773,000 down payment on those billions was just paid by the National Institutes of Health to Case Law School in Cleveland for a two-year project to determine whether and how "ethically acceptable rules" could "establish the safety and efficacy of genetic technologies intended for enhancement rather than therapy," enhancement being defined as improving "form and function beyond the base-line of normalcy...
...If he sired a son, the child wouldn't be Kittenboy...
...But transhumanists ultimately want to do more than make Halloween costumes of their own bodies...
...But getting from here to post-humanity will exact a steep moral price...
...The conference was rife with such Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture...
...Case in point: the symposium "Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights" hosted May 26-28 by the Stanford Law School...
...This effort, along with his cofound-ing of the Methuselah Mouse Prize that will award millions to scientists who break records for extending the lifespan of mice, has made de Grey something of an international media darling, in particular the subject of an admiring segment on 60 Minutes...
...The idea, Stryker told me later, is to allow people with Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) to become "whole"—even if that means becoming a one-armed man or a legless woman...
...Catman—whose real name is Dennis Avner—has tattooed his face, sharpened his teeth, undergone cosmetic surgeries, had "whisker" implants, and reportedly wants a tail implant—all to make himself look like a cat...
...It had to do not with abortion or euthanasia but with humans' putative right never to die...
...Thus, Annalee Newitz, a contributing editor at Wired magazine, told conferees that a proper feminist transhumanism should "fix" female biology so that women can exert "better control over female evolution...
...Just read the headlines: After 25 years, we still can't cure AIDS...
...All of the fantasizing about living forever and morphing into "post-biological units" won't change the hard fact that we are born to die...
...Dismissing the intrinsic value of human life is always dangerous, and presuming to determine which human traits are desirable and which not leads to very dark places...
...He is the author of Forced Exit: Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide, and the New Duty to Die...
...Artificial wombs are a must so that gestation does not keep women from "important work...
...Thus, all mammalian life— including us—must become "post-biological," and so eliminate suffering by moving us all beyond the "hazards of nature...
...That endlessly incipient bird flu pandemic could actually appear...
...And it is true: We increasingly use technologies and medications intended originally for therapeutic purposes to "enhance" ourselves...
...Until that great day dawns, women can at least be freed from "unnecessary" menstruation through a new birth control pill that inhibits menses for up to three months...
...Of course, given the power of peer pressure, successful transhuman-izing might well result in stultifying sameness, a concern acknowledged by at least one presenter at the conference...
...Ditto discrimination based on "ontogeny," that is, how a consciousness comes into existence, which I guess means whether it is born, assembled, or hatched...
...Department of Commerce issued a report—"Con-verging Technologies for Improving Human Performance"—that recommended government spend billions pursuing technologies that trans-humanists crave...
...Transhumanism is mostly an intellectual game, a fantasy...
...The Catman was held up as an example of early transhumanized recreationism...
...And medical advances will continue to increase life expectancy and health in old age...
...Even if cancer is eradicated and the aging process slows, other afflictions will do the job...
...Under per-sonhood theory, some humans would be excluded, but all self-aware enti-ties—whether human, post-human, machine, chimera, or robot—would qualify for the rights, privileges, and protections of citizenship...
...To actualize this right, de Grey— whose long, dark beard and ponytail make him look like a cross between ZZ Top and Rasputin—is working on a "cure" for human aging that will erase the "physiological differences between older and younger adults...
...This obsession with defeating death made the eccentric trans-humanist anti-aging researcher, Cambridge professor Aubrey de Grey, the clear star of the conference...
...James Hughes, a professor of health policy at Hartford's Trinity College and author of the trans-humanist manifesto Citizen Cyborg, insists that we must cast off "human racism," the belief that humans possess unique moral status flowing from their humanity...
...Sounding a lot like Aubrey de Grey (and Al Gore), the report warns that success "is essential to the future of humanity...
...While his thoughts remain "a work in progress," Bostrom stated that society must understand that discrimination "based on substrate"—the kind of material from which a being is made, whether organic, silicon, or other—is as odious as racism...
...The technological breakthroughs necessary to create a true post-humanity will almost surely never come...
...He is currently working out the ethical issues involved in the creation of artificial minds...
...It will also permit "reimagin-ing the family...
...Transhumanists like to say that their movement cannot be stopped, that we are already on the slippery slope to the posthuman future, so we might as well enjoy the ride...
...The goal is to end all suffering," including animal predation against other animals...
...About 90 percent of Down's syndrome babies are aborted in the United States...
...De Grey is obsessed with his work and believes we should be too...
...He told the conferees that inaction—society's unwillingness to make the arresting of aging its top scientific funding priority—is really a form of action, akin to killing the people who would be saved if the research were bounteously supported...
...But, as Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, "If it's not one thing, it's another...
...If we but pursue the dream, it enthuses, "the twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment...
...In 2002, the National Science Foundation and U.S...
...A near-absolute right to be "enhanced"—even if it is physically harmful—was advocated by Susan Stryker, an expert in transgender studies, and Nikki Sullivan, an Australian college lecturer and author of books on tattooing and body modification...
...Indeed, many of the male tran-shumanist attendees looked a lot alike, with shaved heads and close-trimmed Vandyke beards...
...Catman is weird, but of no real concern except for the harm he has done himself...
...His transhumanizing, after all, is merely skin deep...
...But this doesn't mean that transhu-manism is benign—far from it...
...For all of its emphasis on enhancement, the emotional core of trans-humanism is a yearning for immortality...
...H]umanity would become like a single, distributed and interconnected 'brain' based in new core pathways of society...
...De Grey's presentation was entitled "Our Right to Life...
...Posthuman enhancements are meant to flow down the generations, including through the genetic design of offspring, resulting eventually in the yearned for, radically individualized posthuman species...
...He even asserted that anti-aging research is more important than access to health care in Africa, and he likened the withholding of funds from anti-aging research to "killing with a time bomb in a car...
...We shouldn't take all of this too seriously, of course...
...Other presentations revealed trans-humanism to be obsessively solipsis-tic...
...Thus, a new eugenics has arisen...
...In place of humanness as the conveyor of rights, Hughes urges society to substitute "personhood"—a status earned upon achieving "brain birth" and becoming self-aware...
...Nature causes suffering," Dvorsky said...
...By paying bioethicists to contemplate and perhaps draft guidelines for future human enhancement research, NIH is encouraging scientists to embrace the transhumanist dream...
...Matters became even more surreal when George Dvorsky, deputy editor of the online transhumanist journal Betterhumans, asserted that people have a moral duty to use genetic and other enhancements to "uplift" animals to human levels of intelli-gence—at which point animals, too, are to achieve some sort of engagement with the Internet...
...Transhumanism is a radical movement emanating from the universities that seeks to enhance human capacities via technology...
...Far better, then, to embrace our fully human lives than to seek in vain for a post-human future that will never come...
...Their joint paper on "transsexual surgery and self-demand amputation" seemed to favor—though it was hard to figure out exactly what they were saying—allowing people to have healthy limbs removed if they want to, by analogy with transsexuals, who are permitted to surgically change their sex...
...No gathering of radical academics would be complete without attacks on the patriarchy...
Vol. 11 • June 2006 • No. 39
