Escaping the Ashes
“Something should escape the conflagration of systems and their ashes.” (Jean-François Lyotard)
Death, perceived as an imposition since the beginning of mankind, has been fought against more fundamentally than ever before in the last few decades. In transhumanism all imaginable technologies are bundled for this purpose. Posthumanism thinks even further.
The biogeneticist Aubrey de Grey believes that we will be able to live permanently at a biological age of 30 years, i.e. for up to 1000 years, from as early as 2050. But that cannot be the final frontier for transhumanists. They assume that with smart drugs, genetic engineering and other technologies we can stop the process of aging, optimize our minds and bodies, change our bodies and even resurrect ourselves again and again in different forms and embodiments. Soul transformation and reincarnation thus return in dazzling technological garb.
Is this all just science fiction or marketing promises of a booming two-hundred-billion-dollar market? Apparently not quite. As a human-machine interface, the brain implants from Elon Musk’s company Neuralink are already a promising basis for creating a digital copy of our personality. And next-generation nanobots should soon be able to scan our consciousness, thoughts and feelings, even without cutting us open.
The personality copies obtained could be made even more authentic and realistic by means of additional data and insights that can be effortlessly obtained from our behavior and our contributions in the various digital channels.
Whether in a cloud, an app or biological or technical life forms, whether with or without an uninterrupted stream of (un)consciousness: we could potentially live on indefinitely and transform ourselves almost at will or even embody ourselves several times. The only question is who or what we actually are then. We ourselves or another or many other beings? Does man reach his end in the age of his technical reproducibility as a transition to something unforeseeable? Which forms of existence and immortality could come up to us? What do they mean for us psychologically, socially, economically or legally? Who is responsible if something goes wrong in the process? And how will the predicted artificial superintelligences deal with us?
What are the limits of such a world or what could be the nature of its boundlessness? Does it still have an outside, more unthinkable, more unimaginable or more sublime than everything that could be imaginable and existent in it?
What will become of love, desire and friendship in the age of potentially completely different posthuman beings for whom there is no longer any norm? What will be their motivations and accepted legal frameworks?
These are questions whose answers we are still very far away from.
To systematically address all the transhumanist fables of inexhaustible possibilities of being would be a rather redundant undertaking in view of the many variants and overlaps. We should circle around the most important origins and visions of immortality and subject them to a trial by fire in order to read in their ashes what they might actually hold in store for us after the imminent burning of the systems in the longed-for resurrection.
First published on German on Valudis.
