Transhumanism

Based on Wikipedia: Transhumanism

In 1964, a man legally changed his name to FM-2030. The letters stood for his initials, and the numbers? That was the year he expected humanity to reach a turning point—the moment when we would begin transforming into something beyond human. He chose to embody his philosophy in his very identity, walking through life as a living reminder of the future he believed was coming.

FM-2030 was a transhumanist, though that label wouldn't fully crystallize until years later. He was part of a growing movement of thinkers who looked at human beings and saw not a finished product, but a rough draft. A species capable of rewriting itself.

What Transhumanism Actually Means

At its core, transhumanism is a philosophical movement that says yes to human enhancement. Yes to developing technologies that could dramatically extend our lifespans. Yes to augmenting our cognitive abilities. Yes to fundamentally improving the human condition through science rather than accepting our biological limitations as permanent.

This distinguishes it from garden-variety optimism about technology. A transhumanist isn't simply someone who likes new gadgets or believes science will cure diseases. They believe we can and should transcend the boundaries that define human existence itself—boundaries like aging, cognitive limitations, and perhaps even death.

The word "transhumanism" suggests this trajectory. The prefix "trans" means across or beyond. Transhumanists see humanity as being in transition toward something greater, which they sometimes call the "posthuman" condition. Not post-human as in "after humans are gone," but post-human as in "beyond current human limitations."

The Ancient Roots of a Modern Dream

Here's the thing about wanting to live forever and become more than human: it's probably the oldest dream our species has.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, written roughly four thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, tells of a king who goes on a quest for immortality after watching his friend die. He fails, ultimately, but the desire itself pulses through every subsequent civilization. The Fountain of Youth. The Elixir of Life. The Philosopher's Stone that alchemists sought, believing it could grant eternal existence.

Transhumanists claim this heritage. They see themselves not as radicals breaking with human tradition, but as the latest chapter in humanity's longest-running story: the refusal to accept death and limitation as final.

Even Dante, the medieval Italian poet who wrote the Divine Comedy in the early 1300s, coined a word that captures this aspiration. In the first canto of Paradiso, he wrote "trasumanar"—meaning to transcend human nature, to pass beyond it. Seven hundred years before anyone called themselves a transhumanist, Dante was groping toward the concept.

When Philosophy Met Science

The Enlightenment changed everything. Suddenly the dream of transcending human limitations had a new ally: the scientific method.

René Descartes, the French philosopher famous for "I think, therefore I am," wrote something remarkable in his Discourse on Method in 1637. He envisioned a future medicine that could grant both physical immortality and enhanced mental powers. This wasn't mysticism or religion—it was philosophy anticipating what science might accomplish.

A century and a half later, the English political philosopher William Godwin went further. In his 1793 work Political Justice, he argued for the possibility of what he called "earthly immortality." Not heaven after death, but indefinite life extension here on Earth. Godwin was Mary Shelley's father, and scholars have suggested his ideas may have influenced her when she wrote Frankenstein—that story of a scientist who dares to create life itself.

The thread connecting these thinkers is a shift in how humans related to their own nature. Rather than seeing human limitations as divinely ordained or naturally fixed, they began to see them as problems to be solved.

The Twentieth Century Turns the Corner

The real intellectual foundations of transhumanism were laid in 1923, when a British geneticist named J.B.S. Haldane published an essay called Daedalus: Science and the Future.

Haldane made a prediction that has proven eerily accurate. He said that every major advance in applying science to human biology would first appear to most people as blasphemy or perversion—as something "indecent and unnatural." Think about in vitro fertilization, which was called "playing God" when it debuted but is now routine. Think about how people once recoiled from organ transplants. Haldane saw this pattern clearly: moral disgust followed by gradual acceptance followed by widespread adoption.

He was particularly interested in ectogenesis—the creation and sustaining of life in artificial environments, essentially growing humans outside the womb. He also wrote about eugenics, which at the time hadn't yet been tainted by Nazi atrocities, and about using genetics to improve human health and intelligence.

Six years later, in 1929, the crystallographer J.D. Bernal published The World, the Flesh and the Devil. The title sounds like a sermon, but the content was pure science fiction made plausible. Bernal speculated about space colonization, bionic implants, and cognitive enhancement. He imagined humans modifying their own bodies and minds to become something new.

These weren't cranks. Haldane was one of the founders of population genetics. Bernal would become a pioneering figure in molecular biology. They were serious scientists allowing themselves to think seriously about radical possibilities.

Huxley Names It

The term "transhumanism" finally got its modern baptism in 1957, when the biologist Julian Huxley—brother of Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World—published an influential essay using it as the title.

Actually, the word itself appeared earlier, in a 1940 paper by the Canadian philosopher W.D. Lighthall. But it was Julian Huxley who gave the concept cultural traction.

Huxley quoted Thomas Hobbes's famous description of human life as "nasty, brutish and short." For most of human history, he noted, the great majority of people either died young or lived afflicted with misery. But Huxley argued we could hold a justifiable belief that these limitations could be surmounted. Not through supernatural intervention, but through human effort.

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity.

This is the transhumanist vision in a sentence. Not just exceptional individuals becoming more than human, but humanity as a whole ascending to a new level of existence.

The Intelligence Explosion

In 1965, a British cryptologist named I.J. Good proposed an idea that would become central to transhumanist thinking: the technological singularity.

Good's reasoning went like this. Imagine we create a machine that's smarter than any human. Call it an "ultraintelligent machine." Now, one of the things smart beings can do is design machines. So this ultraintelligent machine could design an even smarter machine. Which could design an even smarter one. And so on, in a rapidly accelerating feedback loop.

There would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

Think about what that last sentence implies. If we can create something smarter than us, it can solve all the problems we can't solve, including how to make something even smarter than itself. It's the ultimate force multiplier. The last tool we'd ever need to build.

This idea—that artificial intelligence might trigger a runaway process of self-improvement—has become one of the most debated concepts in transhumanist thought. Some see it as humanity's greatest hope. Others see it as an existential risk that could end our species entirely.

California Becomes the Center

By the early 1980s, transhumanists had found each other. They started meeting formally at the University of California, Los Angeles, which became the movement's intellectual headquarters.

FM-2030—remember him, the man who turned his name into a date—was there, lecturing on what he called his "Third Way" futurist ideology. An artist named Natasha Vita-More was presenting experimental films about humans breaking free from their biological limitations and Earth's gravity. They started hosting gatherings, attracting students and artists and dreamers who shared their vision of a transformed humanity.

In 1982, Vita-More wrote something called the Transhumanist Arts Statement. By 1988, she was hosting a cable TV show called TransCentury Update, reaching over 100,000 viewers with discussions of transhumanist ideas. The movement was going mainstream, or at least reaching beyond academic circles.

The same decade saw Eric Drexler publish Engines of Creation, which introduced many readers to nanotechnology—the manipulation of matter at the molecular scale. Drexler envisioned molecular assemblers, tiny machines that could build anything atom by atom. The implications for medicine, manufacturing, and human enhancement were staggering.

More Formalizes the Philosophy

In 1988, a philosopher named Max More—yes, another evocative name—launched Extropy Magazine. Two years later, he published the Principles of Extropy, which gave transhumanism its modern definition and intellectual framework.

More positioned transhumanism as a descendant of humanism, sharing its respect for reason and science, its commitment to progress, its valuing of human existence. But transhumanism went further. It anticipated and embraced the radical alterations that science and technology would bring to human nature itself.

The word "extropy" was a deliberate contrast to entropy, the tendency of systems to decay into disorder. Extropy meant the opposite—growth, increasing complexity, expanding intelligence and capability. It was optimism given a scientific-sounding name.

In 1992, More and his colleague Tom Morrow founded the Extropy Institute. It hosted conferences and, crucially, ran a mailing list that exposed many people to transhumanist ideas for the first time. This was the early internet age, when online communities were forming around every conceivable interest. Transhumanism found its tribe.

Going Global

By 1998, transhumanism had outgrown its California roots. Philosophers Nick Bostrom and David Pearce founded the World Transhumanist Association, an international organization working to establish transhumanism as a legitimate subject for scientific inquiry and public policy.

The association produced something called the Transhumanist Declaration, along with a detailed Frequently Asked Questions document that offered formal definitions. According to these documents, transhumanism was two things. First, an intellectual and cultural movement affirming that we can and should fundamentally improve the human condition through applied reason—especially by developing technologies to eliminate aging and enhance our physical, intellectual, and psychological capacities. Second, a field of study examining the promises and dangers of such technologies, along with the ethical questions they raise.

Notice that dual character. Transhumanism isn't just cheerleading for enhancement technologies. It's also supposed to involve serious thinking about what could go wrong.

The Dark Side of the Dream

And plenty could go wrong. Transhumanists themselves spend considerable energy worrying about existential risks—threats that could end human civilization or even human existence entirely.

Some of these risks are familiar. Asteroid impacts. Pandemic diseases. Nuclear warfare. Societal collapse.

Others are stranger. "Gray goo" refers to a hypothetical scenario in which self-replicating nanobots consume all matter on Earth while making copies of themselves. It sounds like science fiction, but if molecular assemblers ever become possible, the question of what happens if they malfunction becomes deadly serious.

And then there's artificial general intelligence—the kind of superintelligent AI that I.J. Good described. If we create something smarter than ourselves, how do we ensure it remains aligned with human values? What if it decides that its goals, whatever they are, would be easier to achieve without humans around?

This is why Nick Bostrom, one of transhumanism's most prominent philosophers, has spent much of his career at the Future of Humanity Institute studying how things might go catastrophically wrong. Transhumanism's optimism about enhancement comes paired with genuine anxiety about the future.

The Politics Get Complicated

In 2006, a political struggle erupted within the transhumanist movement. On one side were libertarians, who tended to see enhancement technologies as matters of individual choice and free markets. On the other were progressives, who worried about equal access and social justice.

Think about it this way. If we develop technologies that dramatically extend lifespan or boost intelligence, who gets access to them? If only the wealthy can afford cognitive enhancement, does that entrench inequality permanently? If genetic engineering becomes possible, do we risk recreating eugenics under a more palatable name?

The World Transhumanist Association moved leftward during this period, under the influence of its executive director James Hughes, who argued that transhumanist goals required attention to social forces, not just technological development. Meanwhile, the Extropy Institute shut down in 2006, its founders declaring its mission "essentially completed."

In 2008, the World Transhumanist Association rebranded as "Humanity+." By 2012, a Longevity Party had formed as an international union promoting life extension technologies, with chapters in over thirty countries.

When Transhumanism Meets Religion

You might expect transhumanism to be hostile to religion. After all, it proposes that humans should take their evolution into their own hands rather than waiting for divine providence. Many religious critics have indeed condemned transhumanism as hubris—the sin of trying to become like God.

But the relationship is more complicated than simple opposition.

In 2006, the Mormon Transhumanist Association was founded. By 2012, it had hundreds of members. These were people who saw no contradiction between their faith and the pursuit of technological transcendence. In their view, using technology to enhance humanity was consistent with Mormon theology about human potential and eternal progression.

This shouldn't be entirely surprising. Many religions, including Christianity, contain traditions of theosis or divinization—the idea that humans can become more godlike. Transhumanism offers a technological path toward something those traditions have long imagined through spiritual means.

Of course, other religious critics see this as precisely the problem. From their perspective, transhumanism represents a Promethean overreach, a attempt to seize by technology what should only be received as a gift from God.

Posthumanism's Complicated Cousin

Transhumanism often gets confused with posthumanism, and the relationship between them is genuinely murky.

Both movements envision futures in which humanity transforms into something new. But they come from different intellectual traditions and emphasize different concerns.

Posthumanism, as it developed in the humanities and arts, tends to question the very category of "the human." It asks whether our traditional concepts—the autonomous individual, human rights, human nature—are stable or useful. It's often critical of how Western thought has defined humanity in ways that excluded women, non-white people, animals, and the disabled.

Transhumanism, by contrast, tends to accept the humanist tradition and simply wants to extend it. Rather than questioning whether "the autonomous liberal subject" is a valid concept, transhumanists want to give that subject superpowers. They want to expand human prerogatives into the posthuman realm rather than rethinking what those prerogatives mean.

Critics from the posthumanist camp argue that transhumanism is therefore politically naive. By focusing on individual enhancement rather than questioning underlying assumptions about what counts as human or valuable, transhumanists might simply amplify existing inequalities and prejudices.

Transhumanists might respond that they're being practical where posthumanists are merely theoretical. But the tension reveals something important: the question of how to become more than human depends heavily on what you think "human" means in the first place.

The Nietzsche Question

One of the most contentious debates in transhumanist intellectual history concerns Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher famous for proclaiming that "God is dead" and introducing the concept of the Übermensch.

Übermensch is usually translated as "overman" or "superman." It refers to a being who has overcome the limitations of conventional morality and created new values. On the surface, this sounds transhumanist: a vision of humanity transcending itself.

But Nietzsche's Übermensch wasn't supposed to be achieved through technology. It was about self-overcoming in a psychological and spiritual sense—creating meaning in a godless universe through sheer force of will and creative power. Nietzsche probably would have been contemptuous of the idea that mere gadgets could transform humans into something greater.

Nevertheless, several prominent transhumanists, including Max More and the philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, have drawn heavily on Nietzschean ideas. They see a continuity between Nietzsche's call for self-overcoming and the transhumanist project of self-directed enhancement.

Others argue this is a misreading. Nietzsche was concerned with the quality of human life and achievement, not with extending its quantity or augmenting its biological substrate. There's a difference between wanting humans to live more authentically and wanting them to live forever with computer chips in their brains.

The Transhumanist Declaration

What do transhumanists actually commit themselves to? The Transhumanist Declaration, adopted by the World Transhumanist Association in 2002, offers some answers.

It advocates for "the well-being of all sentience"—not just humans, but also artificial intelligences, hypothetical posthumans, and non-human animals. This is notably broader than traditional humanism, which centered on human beings specifically.

The declaration also emphasizes what it calls "morphological freedom"—the right of individuals to modify their own bodies and minds as they see fit. This positions enhancement as a matter of personal liberty rather than social engineering. You shouldn't be forced to enhance, but neither should you be prevented from doing so.

Critics have pointed out that this language of individual choice obscures the social dimensions of enhancement. If enhancement becomes widely available, social pressure might effectively coerce people into upgrading themselves to remain competitive. The choice to stay "natural" might become economically unviable.

Where Are We Now?

In 2012, transhumanism achieved a small political milestone: Giuseppe Vatinno became the first self-identified transhumanist elected to a national parliament, in Italy.

In 2017, Penn State University Press established the Journal of Posthuman Studies, the first academic journal explicitly dedicated to exploring these ideas. The editorial board included both philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and sociologist James Hughes, representing the ongoing conversation between transhumanist and posthumanist perspectives.

The movement has grown far beyond its California origins. It has academic journals, international organizations, political parties, and religious associations. It has influenced science fiction, which in turn spreads its ideas to wider audiences. It has shaped how many people think about artificial intelligence, life extension, genetic engineering, and the future of technology generally.

Whether its predictions will come true is another matter. FM-2030 believed 2030 would be the turning point. That year is now just a few years away. Humans have not yet merged with machines, uploaded their minds to computers, or achieved biological immortality.

But we have extended average lifespans dramatically. We have begun editing genes. We have created artificial intelligences that can beat humans at games once thought to require uniquely human intuition. We have developed brain-computer interfaces, even if primitive ones. The trajectory, at least, points in the direction transhumanists anticipated.

Whether that trajectory leads to utopia, catastrophe, or something stranger than either, remains to be seen. What seems clear is that the questions transhumanists raise—about enhancement, about risk, about what kind of beings we want to become—will only grow more urgent as the technologies they contemplate grow more powerful.

The dream that began with Gilgamesh's quest for immortality hasn't ended. It has simply acquired new tools.