Transhumanist Technological Quest Is a Religious Quest

Source

* Article: TechnoCalyps: the transhumanist technological quest is a religious/spiritual quest. Recovering our technological unconscious. Michel Bauwens, Nov 27, 2023

URL = https://4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/technocalyps-the-transhumanist-technological

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Michel Bauwens:

In the late 1990s, I co-produced with director Frank Theys, a 3 hour documentary called TechnoCalyps, subtitled, The Metaphysics of Technology and the End of the Human, which was an examination of the promise and peril of transhumanism.

Paradoxically, at the time I was very much involved in a spiritual quest, so I was immediately struck by the religious aspects of transhumanism and transhumanist technology, while Frank, a radical atheist, was enthusiastic about the practical possibilities to overcome human limitations.

My theory then, and it is still my theory now, is that the search for the transcendent, is an innate biological drive, inevitably linked to the human condition, but when we ceased to believe, roughly in the 17th century, collectively as a culture, in the possibility of spiritual transcendence, then this belief would express itself in another way, unconsciously. And unconscious drives are much more dangerous. Eric Voegelin places this much earlier, with Joachim de Fiore, who for the first time, spoke of the succession of spiritual ages in a temporal way, i.e. the Age of the Father, of obedience to the laws, the Age of the Old Testament; then came the Age of the Son, the era of Love, embodied in the Christian Church; but we were poised to move towards an age of the Spirit, where such an institutions was no longer needed, and all the people would live in brotherhood, as only the monks did in his time. For Voegelin, this amounts to a ‘Immanentization of the Eschaton’, i.e. a temporalization, of the hope for transcendence. It would lead to the Reformation first, then to the political ideologies of the 18th cy, which promised an ideal society on this earth, but finally, it morphed into transhumanism, a radical religion of physical transcendence through technological means, in new spaces and other planets.

So today, I want to explore how the development of human technology is the expression of our unconscious desires and ideals, which we put out in the world in technological artifacts, where it becomes an uncontrollable cybernetic machine ..

Let me elaborate on this idea on the technological unconscious, and its various aspects.

• First of all, technology is an unconscious expression of the individual human body.

This idea comes from Marshall McLuhan.

Technology starts as an expression of our extremities, hands and feet, in the forms of bows and spears, arrows and stones, used for cutting, hunting and fighting. This is the hunter-gathering phase of human evolution.

• In a second phase, we externalize our limbs, arms and legs, through human or animal powered mechanistic technologies, such as the plough. This is the craft-agrarian age.

• During the third phase, industrialism externalizes our digestive system, through transforming raw material into useful products and waste.

• Finally, networked computers, now AI-driven, represent our brains and nervous system.

But transhumanism represents a potential further stage:

In our current ‘transhuman’ stage, what we have invented comes back at us, ready to be internalized as physical or intellectual prothesis.

Note the following dynamic: every technology reinforces collective humanity, but weakens individual capacity. A technological tool literally handicaps us. The car cuts off our legs, the calculating machine destroys our capacity for internal counting, etc ..

This is obviously not just a good thing: for example, the introduction of computers and smartphones has been not just a catastrophe for education, but has led to an explosion of mental illness and isolation. In addition, we have virtualized and mediatized our relationship to our bodies and nature to unsustainable levels.

So we need to re-integrate what we’ve lost, through a process that psycho-analysts used to call: regression in service of the ego. We need to re-acquaint ourselves and our children with our dependence on foods and material production. The meta-medium that is the internet actually regresses us to reactive forms of consciousness and is harmful to the scribal depth-consciousness which was the achievement of a literate civilization.

Second, technology is an expression of the forgetfulness of the collective, planetary body, the living body of the earth.

In the 16th century, western humanity moved away from the organismic, holistic ‘cosmo-biological’ understanding of the cosmos as an animated and living being, and replaced it with mechanism.

Earth and the human and non-human beings on it became a ‘resource’, to be understood, that may be considered an advance, but most of all, to be ‘used’, for much baser motives of personal and collective greed, and for the competitive power of market and state institutions. The result is planetary overshoot.

Our planet once had an immature biosphere, which could not durably sustain life. But after the great oxygenation event, many organisms started cooperating to create the mature biosphere that was durably able to sustain life. Out of this came the most cooperative species ever, but unfortunately so far, we have created an ‘immature’ Technosphere, which durably endangers our planet and the life on it. Our task is obvious, and to enhance cooperation to the level of a mature Technosphere. This is really what the new eco-systemic technologies such as Web3, crypto, open source and the like are about: to move from a narcissistic vision of isolated entities, blindly competing with each other, and systemically unaware of their impact, to cooperative and ecologically aware (thermodynamically aware) ecosystems.

Thirdly, let us not forget that the current form of technological development is socially unconscious.

We largely ignore the ‘social body’ of the planet, of both human and non-human communities. A very large part of current crypto is motivated by the ‘exodus of the elites’, the creation of Elysium, believing that some will be able to escape the likely social and ecological catastrophes that seem to align themselves into a meta-crisis. As a result, we have a developing global civil conflict between the virtuals and the physicals, the nowhere and the somewhere.

In this context, I advocate for the cosmo-local option, i.e. the subsidiarity of material production (lowest realistic level), but coupled with the ‘supersidiarity’ of immaterial cooperation (highest realistic level). Everything that is heavy is local, everything that is light is global and shared.

Distributed manufacturing coupled with globally cooperating ‘protocol cooperatives’, which have been prefigured by the open source and crypto-ecosystems. In this context, we need ‘everywhere's', the organic ‘intellectuals’ of the network, able to link the local to the cosmic. We need an optimal alignment of the three coordination systems that humanity has developed so far: that of planning and state-centricity, that of pricing and market-centricity, and that of ‘stigmergy’ (mutual signaling in ‘holoptical’ open systems) and commons-centricity. The evolution of civilization can be seen as a pulsation of the commons, with the extractive institutions of markets and states in charge of ascending periods, and a popular striving to re-invent the only regenerative and protective institution that is the commons. We must address the global commons gap, and create Magisteria of the Commons that can balance the international state-system and the transnational financial system.

Technology can and should be at the service of the full spectrum of life. And this is of course where ‘pro-social’ technology and AI comes in, the tool that will give us the necessary thermo-dynamic context to be aware of natural limits, and that can mobilize collective intelligence at the service of life. It is time to marry the insights of Elinor Ostrom and Amartya Sen and to think of a global ‘commons of capabilities’ where technology enhances human cooperation, instead of atomizing us.

So naturally, we arrive at the fourth aspect of the unconsciousness of technology, that of spiritual unconsciousness itself!

When we abandoned the cosmo-biological vision and chose mechanism as the metaphor to see and use the world and its resources, when we turned away from the orientation towards the highest possibilities of the human spirit, we buried our transcendent drives in the unconscious. From the ancient orientation towards inner spiritual development, we devoted ourselves to the material advance. In the words of Eric Voegelin already cited, we ‘immanentized the eschaton’.

But what if spiritual transcendence is an actual physical need for the human species, what if the cosmos is indeed constituted, not of matter, but of meaning? If that is the case, and there is evidence for it, then the only thing that happens is that our spiritual drives become unconscious. But my argument here would be that unconscious religious and spiritual drives are much more dangerous than conscious ones. If that is true, then we should read certain current movements, not as motivated by purely instrumental motives but as unconscious expressions of religious drives.

Being unaware of them, they turn against us, and become a program not for extending humanism to a recognition of interdependence with other beings on a finite planet, but of dreams of abandoning the human, to become post or transhuman, and escape from life and the body, creating a mechanistic machine-based superorganism. A monstrous cybernetic system which we no longer control.

Many will think we are already there. My answer is, it is never too late to put consciousness and spirit at the center stage, to use technology for life, and not against it.