Transhumanism, Technological Evolution, and Theosis

The entrepreneur Elon Musk announced in 2024 the first successful implantation of a wireless brain chip in a human patient through his company Neuralink. The project seeks to fulfill Neuralink’s mission to “restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs” by giving paralyzed users the ability to communicate with others through mentally controlled computers or to restore limb mobility.¹ The project might also contribute to the second half of Neuralink’s mission to “unlock human potential tomorrow” by enhancing cognitive functions and opening new mental possibilities.²  

Musk’s innovation is the latest installment in a long line of simultaneously exciting and frightening technological developments that show how emerging technologies promise both therapeutic healing and human enhancements. Like Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, and other big tech billionaires, Musk is sympathetic to the Transhumanist project.³ Though not a card-carrying member of any explicitly Transhumanist association, Musk believes that major improvements through machine-human interfaces are essential if humans want to avoid super-intelligent AI systems leaving them behind as outdated apes.⁴ This essay examines Transhumanism’s fundamental principle that humans have a responsibility to correct the limits of biological evolution through technological tools. This work also evaluates the ethical implications of Transhumanist proposals and presents an understanding of human transcendence through the Catholic notion of theosis, the Christian’s journey of becoming like God.

FROM BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION TO THE TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY 2.0

Transhumanism is the intellectual and cultural movement that applies technology to radically enhance human beings cognitively, physically, emotionally, and morally. Evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley used the term in 1957 to describe a new stage of human-driven evolution in which humanity would live a higher life form through a commitment to economic and scientific progress.⁵ Later, the landmark Transhumanist FAQ, the movement’s most comprehensive and systematic text, emphasizes that

transhumanism is “based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.”⁶ Thus, Transhumanism presupposes biological evolution. Yet Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom, a lead author of the text, elsewhere describes the human product of evolution as a half-baked work-in-progress in need of technological improvement.⁷ Similarly, bioethicist Allen Buchanan observes that “fickle” evolution is indifferent to human welfare and that “when it does happen to achieve what’s good for us the means it uses are typically ghastly.”⁸ Buchanan and others perceive no guiding intelligence behind humanity’s evolutionary history but only blind, uncaring forces. Early Transhumanist Max More captures this discontent with the evolved human condition in “A Letter to Mother Nature: Amendments to the Human Constitution.” While acknowledging the “many wonderful qualities” humans have received over the long, slow evolutionary process, More laments human vulnerability to injury, disease, aging, and death. He also bemoans that evolved humans are “functional only under narrow environmental conditions” and must constantly suffer from “limited memory, poor impulse control, and tribalistic, xenophobic urges.”⁹ He thus proposes seven amendments to the human condition that will correct and surpass the limits of natural selection. More recently, historian Yuval Noah Harari presents humans on the verge of the next step of the evolutionary process through their ingenuity.¹⁰ He speculates that super-intelligent algorithms will rapidly accelerate human transformation. Such systems could even separate consciousness from biological substrates and physical limitations altogether. These leaps forward would seem to be both humanity’s evolution and its extinction since superintelligence-generated disembodied entities would replace fragile old fleshy hominids. 

Transhumanists like Harari want us to be protagonists rather than products of this inevitable evolution. They see technological enhancement as the most promising corrective to the somewhat sad state biological evolution has brought humanity. Emerging technologies will open new vistas of human experience and allow humans to shape rather than be shaped by the evolutionary process, Transhumanists claim. The genetic revolution positions society to “hack Darwinism” and advance the species more consciously according to its own wishes.¹¹ Prosthetics, pharmacological substances, brain-computer interfaces, and other technology will provide for smarter, stronger, happier, and longer-living individuals. Transhumanists thus have a strong sense of mission that makes technological progress more than an occasion to make financial gains. They admit that many goals are still beyond reach, but trust that scientific advances will bring a longer and lovelier life. 

Bostrom and his collaborator, Anders Sandberg, explain their rationale for using human-driven technological interventions to improve on biological evolution.¹²

First, what helped a primordial hunter-gatherer in an African tribe does not necessarily serve a contemporary citizen of a globalized post-industrial world.¹³ Today’s humans have gained new resources and face new environmental demands. For instance, the tendency to switch attention frequently between tasks was once vital for survival in a hostile environment. However, such shifting is detrimental to the sustained concentration privileged in today’s safer societies. Easy fat storage of high-calorie foods was beneficial when food was scarce but dangerous in today’s societies of food abundance. Cells that fight off once common parasites now produce allergies in places in which antibiotics are common.

Bioethicist Julian Savulescu also contends with his colleague Ingmar Persson that humans have evolved with a deficient morality for present challenges.¹⁴ Fixation on in-group interests was helpful for our primitive ancestors who lived and died in small tribes but is woefully inadequate to address international threats like weapons of mass destruction, climate catastrophe, or the management of artificial intelligence in a globalized age. Savulescu and Persson encourage the use of serotonin to lower aggression and improve a sense of justice, and oxytocin to decrease fear of strangers and facilitate collaboration in a diverse society. 

Second, Bostrom and Sandberg point to a discordance between the objectives of biological processes and changing human values as another major reason for technologically improving on the limits of biological evolution.¹⁵ For instance, while evolutionary mechanisms push toward reproduction, humans often decide to limit their number of offspring through natural family planning or contraception. Similarly, although biologically evolved impulses do not generally encourage life-long monogamous relationships, many people still long to achieve such a challenging ideal. To address this desire, bioethicist Brian D. Earp and Savulescu have explored the possibility of chemically increasing levels of oxytocin and vasopressin to foster stable bonds between couples who find themselves drifting apart emotionally.¹⁶ The authors do not advocate monogamy as an objectively superior romantic arrangement, much less as a religious norm. They simply recognize it as a value many individuals freely choose and that would benefit from chemical enhancement. Moreover, while evolution seems to care little for the elderly who have passed their childbearing capacities, many people today value a long health span. Technology again gives us the chance to realize the contemporary values the evolutionary process does not favor.

Third, Transhumanists believe that restrictions to the evolutionary process beg for technological interventions.¹⁷ Evolution tends toward a local optimum for reproductive fitness in a given time and place. It cannot, however, foresee the uniquely human capacity for mobility through technology. Such mobility includes not only adapting to wildly different climates on this planet but extends to potential space travel and colonization to take advantage of hitherto untapped resources. Moreover, evolution suffers from a lag that severely limits the speed with which humans can change as they must wait for the slow build-up of mutations and multigenerational selection of those genetic changes most apt to a given environment.

In light of the limits of biological evolution, Savulescu and others encourage a more intentional use of assisted reproductive technologies to build a better future.¹⁸ A shift away from biological reproduction, with its potential for debilitating mutations, toward more controlled, medically-assisted reproduction would be, for Transhumanists, a welcome respite from some of the physical sufferings children with genetic conditions experience, as well as the emotional and financial burdens their conditions place on society. Greater reliance on in vitro fertilization and pre-implantation genetic testing would empower parents to select among those offspring with the best chance of the best life, Transhumanists say. While what they view as old-fashioned sexual reproduction is unpredictable, screenings can give Transhumanists better guidance. Parents may not be able to choose exactly the traits of their designer babies, but they can at least improve the likelihood of auspicious results.¹⁹ Although the process seems to favor the autonomy of adult clients, the well-being of the large quantity of unselected embryos is disregarded. The utilitarian morality common among secular Transhumanists justifies sacrificing some of the unfit for the sake of the genetically superior and the overall good of humanity’s future.

TRANSHUMANISM’S RESISTANCE TO GOD AND RELIGION

Unfortunately, many contemporary Transhumanists neglect the contributions of Christian belief to humanistic models. They extrapolate an atheistic philosophy from their focus on scientific evolution to arrive at extra-scientific philosophical conclusions that fail to consider other theistic models of evolution.²⁰ Emblematically, Bostrom dismisses organized religions as ineffective paths to salvation that ought to cede the way to scientific paths like Transhumanism. While religions promise unsubstantiated future benefits, “transhumanists seek to make their dreams come true in this world, by relying not on supernatural powers or divine intervention but on rational thinking and empiricism, through continued scientific, technological, economic, and human development.”²¹ Bostrom sees Transhumanism as the most promising and rational path to combat the sickness, suffering, aging, and death traditional religions tried and, in his opinion, failed to address. Technoscience is not so much a complement to theological wisdom as it is a replacement for it. 

These secular presuppositions close Transhumanists to the possibility of recognizing the intelligent origin and destiny of a world marred by suffering. Yet if no Author of the natural law exists it is difficult to imagine it binding all peoples at all times. Further, those who reject God also cast doubt on the normativity or even the existence of a shared human nature. The atheistic vision renders the notion of a teleological human nature and a natural moral law unintelligible. Deeply felt values become mere personal preferences without a solid metaphysical foundation to show them to be real goods fitting to a common human nature. The subjectivistic ethics that stem from their secular vision deprive Transhumanists of the conceptual resources to speak of “enhancement” as an improvement. They can only speak of change if there is no nature or telos toward which that nature should aim. This theoretical lacuna in Transhumanist thought is particularly glaring when recalling the aspirations to achieve a technical moral enhancement. Any such effort for moral growth presupposes some notion of what is good or bad for the human person.

The absence of a solid notion of human nature leaves Transhumanist thought with a posthuman, fluid concept of human identity.²² In turn, ethical concerns center on respect for radical autonomy in pursuing a personally chosen life project without reference to a notion of human flourishing according to the common goods of a shared human nature. In the disenchanted world of the immanent frame, it seems quite reasonable to privilege humans as the self-creators of their own purposes. When the transcendent is relegated to an obstructionist and superstitious religious past, emerging technologies are humanity’s last, best, and most rational hopes for betterment. If religious fictions and unknowable abstract philosophies provide no truth, then the quantifiable and technically controllable should drive progress.²³ 

The atheistic evolutionary model Bostrom, Buchanan, Savulescu, Persson, and others present seems to leave no grounds for accounting a special worth to human beings. Humans are simply the most advanced and best equipped of the beasts in the present moment. They have developed the finest techniques for exploiting natural resources and keeping competing creatures at bay. Yet humans are not ultimately bound to respect the natural worth of fellow citizens nor obey the inbuilt moral ends and dynamism of their given natures. Savulescu, for instance, insists that humans have no intrinsic worth as members of a particular biological species.²⁴ True persons must exhibit rationality, self-consciousness, preference formation, and visualization of the self over time.²⁵ Such a view excludes from the moral community the preborn who have not developed the coveted personal characteristics, the elderly whose use of such key characteristics has faded, and all others who find themselves in states of impaired cognitive functioning. Personal dignity is gained and can be lost.

TRANSHUMANISM AND THEOSIS

Finally, the contemporary push to evolve the species according to secular Transhumanist values should inspire believers to recover a Catholic notion of theosis. Centuries before Huxley wrote on man’s responsibility of “determining the future direction of evolution” through human cunning, the poet Dante marveled at the saints whom divine grace had elevated beyond the limits of mere human nature: Trasumanar significar per verba/ non si poria… (“To transcend the human cannot be described in words.” Par I, 70-71).²⁶ Not even one of history’s greatest poets can find the words to describe the experience of Transhumanism. More recently, Pope John Paul II highlighted the transhumanizing value of religion during the 1984 beatification of Fra Angelico, patron of Catholic artists.²⁷ The aesthetic experience that sacred art enables should bring us to contemplate and assimilate in the depths of our person the goodness that attracts and enthralls us. We can then imitate such holiness in our daily life of virtue and docility to the Holy Spirit.

In Catholic anthropology, the human person is not simply the mediocre product of biological forces. The person is Imago Dei (the image of God) and is by nature capax Dei (capable of knowing and receiving God). Human nature is open to an elevation it cannot manufacture or provide. It enjoys a specific obediential potency by which the Creator can elevate without destroying the nature endowed with intellect and will to know and love supernaturally Inexhaustible Beauty in the beatific vision.²⁸ The vision fulfills the intellect’s inclination toward truth and the will’s inclination toward good while exceeding what humans could ever hope or dream. The life of grace introduces a divine enhancement that transforms the person more profoundly and fully than any technological intervention. Since grace perfects without destroying nature, it is fair to say that the ultimate divine enhancement perfects without destroying any of the natural goods technological enhancement can contribute. The Catholic vision relativizes the value of biotechnological enhancements without necessarily spurning them.

This new divine relationship begins in the waters of baptism and is sustained through the presence of sanctifying grace by which the believer is made a participant in the divine nature. While final glorification awaits the Christian in Heaven, he shares already in a divine elevation that empowers him to exercise supernatural acts through the infused virtues and to follow more promptly the action of the Holy Spirit through His gifts. While technology promises physical improvement and an extension of bodily life, it cannot bring about the radical newness of sharing in Risen life. Pope Benedict XVI notes that the Paschal Mystery introduces “a qualitative leap in the history of ‘evolution’ and of life in general toward a new future life, toward a new world, which, starting from Christ, already continuously permeates this world of ours, transforms it, and draws it to itself.”²⁹

Secular Transhumanism can, at best, offer something approaching if not fully replacing the preternatural gifts of infused knowledge (through cognitive enhancements), integrity (through the inner harmonization brought by mood enhancements), and immortality (through radical life extension enhancements). Catholic spiritual life, however, brings the person to a supernatural state and to supernatural acts that exceed the capacities of even the most technologically fine-tuned human nature. Moreover, the Church’s communal worship calls us from individual isolation into interpersonal communion. The Church’s sacramental system uses the visible to bring embodied spirits to transforming contact with invisible realities.

Catholic theosis offers a qualitative elevation rather than a mere quantitative extension of this life. We are creatures destined for a glory that surpasses all earthly projects and accomplishments. We should humbly accept our given nature. Yet our nature is dynamic, not static. Through the acquired virtues and the divine life in the Spirit lived through the infused moral and theological virtues, we are transformed into supernatural beings prepared for the indescribable divinizing bliss of the beatific vision. 

Footnotes

1. “Our Mission,” Neuralink, accessed March 4, 2024, https://neuralink.com/?202308049001.
2. “Our Mission.”
3. See Jonathan Taplin, The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023).
4. See Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, “Elon Musk: Humans Must Merge with Machines,” Axios, November 26, 2018, https://www.axios.com/2018/11/26/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-neuralink.
5. See Julian Huxley, “Transhumanism,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 8, no. 1 (January 1, 1968): 73–76, https://doi.org/10.1177/002216786800800107.
6. Nick Bostrom, “The Transhumanist FAQ: Version 2.1,” 2003, 1.1, https://nickbostrom.com/views/transhumanist.pdf. References to this work are according to paragraph divisions.
7. See Nick Bostrom, “Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 37, no. 4 (2003): 493–506, https://doi.org/10.1023/b:inqu.0000019037.67783.d5.
8. Allen Buchanan, Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Biomedical Enhancement, Reprint Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 49.
9. Max More, “A Letter to Mother Nature: Amendments to the Human Constitution,” Max More’s Strategic Philosophy (blog), May 25, 2009, https://strategicphilosophy.blogspot.com/2009/05/its-about-ten-years-since-i-wrote.html.
10. See Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Illustrated Edition (New York: Harper, 2017).
11. skipped.
12. See Jamie Metzl, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2020).
13. See Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg, “The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement,” in Human Enhancement, ed. Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 375–416. This section is also indebted to Paschal M. Corby, The Hope and Despair of Human Bioenhancement: A Virtual Dialogue between the Oxford Transhumanists and Joseph Ratzinger (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2019), 67–71.
14. See Bostrom and Sandberg, “The Wisdom of Nature,” 381–92.
15. See Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
16. See Bostrom and Sandberg, “The Wisdom of Nature,” 379, 392–97.
17. See Brian D. Earp and Julian Savulescu, Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships (Stanford, CA: Redwood Press, 2020). For reservations about the scientific feasibility of such proposals, see Peter N. Herissone-Kelly, “The Evidence for the Pharmaceutical Strengthening of Attachment: What, Precisely, Would Love Drugs Enhance?,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 31, no. 4 (2022): 536–44, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963180122000196.
18. See Bostrom and Sandberg, “The Wisdom of Nature,” 379–80, 397–405.
19. See Julian Savulescu and Guy Kahane, “The Moral Obligation to Create Children with the Best Chance of the Best Life,” Bioethics 23, no. 5 (June 2009): 274–90, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8519.2008.00687.x; Julian Savulescu, “In Defence of Procreative Beneficence,” Journal of Medical Ethics 33, no. 5 (2007): 284–88, https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.2006.018184; Julian Savulescu, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children,” Bioethics 15, no. 5–6 (October 2001): 413–26, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8519.00251.
20. See Henry T. Greely, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
21. See Mariusz Tabaczek, Theistic Evolution: A Contemporary Aristotelian-Thomistic Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco et al., Thomistic Evolution, Second Edition (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019).
22. Bostrom, “The Transhumanist FAQ,” 5.3.
23. See Michael Baggot, “A Thomistic Assessment of Contemporary Transhumanism as a Postmodern, Secular, Liberal Movement,” in Enhancement Fit for Humanity, ed. Michael Baggot et al. (New York: Routledge, 2022), 129–76.
24. For an insightful genealogy of positivism as the background for Transhumanist efforts, see Corby, The Hope and Despair of Human Bioenhancement, 92–100.
25. See Julian Savulescu, “The Human Prejudice and the Moral Status of Enhanced Beings: What Do We Owe the Gods?,” in Human Enhancement, ed. Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 211–47.
26. See Savulescu, “The Human Prejudice,” 221.
27. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, ed. Emilio Pasquini and Antonio Quaglio, 18° edizione (Milano: Garzanti, 2014), I, 70–71.
28. See John Paul II, “Omelia Solenne Celebrazione Del Giubileo Degli Artisti Nella Basilica Di Santa Maria Sopra Minerva,” February 18, 1984, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/it/homilies/1984/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19840218_giubileo-artisti.html.
29. See Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters, Second Edition (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2010), 112–14, 443–47.
30. Benedict XVI, “Easter Vigil Homily,” April 15, 2006, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/homilies/2006/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20060415_veglia-pasquale.html.