Data & DNA: The lifeblood of technocratic control

May 29, 2023

Humanity and Evolutionary Transhumanism: The End of Our Species as We Know It?

May 9, 2023

By: Gary D. Barnett

“Singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.”

~ Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

This subject will likely be very foreign to most, will be avoided by many, and will certainly offend those clinging to a god or religion in hopes of gaining everlasting life, by accepting certain dogma laid down in the past by ancient beliefs, religions, churches, monarchs, or rulers. Those who depend on what is currently called ‘science,’ may be more interested, but will normally fail to see as clearly as they might, the true ramifications of this world being created today. The saying, “living in interesting times,” takes on a new meaning given our circumstances, and the great ‘advancement’ of ‘artificial intelligence,’ technological discovery, and the drive for global dominance, all happening at the same time.

What most all tend to forget, is the history of man, at least what is known or thought to be known, regardless of which beliefs or doctrines are accepted. The new world unfolding before us, whether viewed from a traditional, modern, or futuristic perspective, is one of great wonder. This does not mean it is only good or bad, or only beautiful or evil, as it is much more complicated than one can imagine. The reason it is so complex, is strictly due to the unknown, as man literally knows nothing of all there is to know, and with the drive toward Singularity, global domination, and mass artificial intelligence, how can any be certain of the outcome?

Those who are apt to jump on board with the notion that all change and advancement of the human mind and body, at least from the standpoint of artificially enhancing ‘knowledge, brain power, and longevity of life by technological means, are considering only the supposed benefit of ‘everlasting’ life and ‘intellect’ through artificial means. There certainly can be and are many benefits to unlocking the power of the mind, but one has to understand the entirety of this process, and who is controlling it.

It is easy to be fooled by only looking at benefit without scrutiny of the process, and that could easily become a fool’s game given normal human inclination. Viewing what is happening due only to technological advancement, and the ‘good’ it may bring, is likely very shortsighted. Will a utopian society with no wars and cooperation be evident? Will humans be programmed to be super-intelligent, and only be able to live in harmony with one another? Will ‘heaven’ on earth be the result, or will all the strings be pulled by a master class of controllers? And who will be selected to live or die in this new world being created?

The other side of this new world may be viewed as completely dystopian in nature. Can man alter his own being so as to live outside the realm of the natural in favor of the super-natural? Or will this transformation bring a kept society of drones, all acting due to a programmed singular identity? Can real freedom exist in a world of computerized transhuman occupants? Can biological engineering through nanotechnological means bring about a better world? By adding nanotechnology to this process, what manner of man will result? Will humans even exist in a world where people are artificially enhanced, and controlled by computerized systems? One has to wonder if that is actually living, or is it a world of controlled robots?

In all the time that man has been on this earth, his climb from the beginning, where survival was the only goal sought, to modern times when survival may be left to scientific and technological advances, has been slow and incremental, and fruitful progress may have peaked considering our current state of being. Today, everything is happening at lightening speed. Humanity has always been a mess, and inhumanity has been evident throughout history. At this stage, I would posit that man, even with the advent of intellectual advancement through technological means, has already achieved the epitome of human growth, and is now abandoning most all the good in order to replace himself with a non-human mechanical version controlled by technocrats. Could this be an effort based upon the assumed failure of man to ever achieve long-lasting love, peace, harmony, and universal knowledge, with the rest of mankind, or could it be the very controlled conclusion forever sought by the few who choose to rule over all others? This distinction is of vital importance to understand, as where we came from is just as important as where we are going.

As advanced as assumed science, technological growth, and artificial intelligence may seem, we are likely far behind in understanding the reality of the actual ‘progress’ that has been achieved, and being pursued, in the field of technology. In the past, most have remained in the dark about what is actually known, and what actually exists in the present, as secret military research has remained unknown, and many would claim that what the ‘public’ is aware of at any given time, is twenty years behind the curve. How much is being hidden? What is actually known and being pursued by the controlling ‘elite’ who run the government and the military? How dark are their secrets? Is this plot of evolutionary transhumanism far ahead of what is recognized by the masses?

In order to have gotten to this level of ‘thinking’ by the many, man’s achievements, supposed morality, history, and societal norms, had to be destroyed and demoralized, so that artificial life would be sought and desired by the herd. Given all that is happening, the absolute hatred and division that is evident, the loss of freedom, the insane drive for global dominance, and the mass belief in sameness and equality, all at the expense of others, and life itself, one cannot help but see the writing on the wall. In order to achieve this fully controlled, technological, computerized non-human world, a world where robotic existence is deemed necessary and essential for survival, the mindset of the herd must be altered to such an extent, as to reach a level where the abandonment of this species is accepted as beneficial.

This is not science fiction, this is science fact. Much of what is happening today is merely part of the plan to capture and control all of humanity in a technocratic system. When technology is helpful and useful, and is meant to ease pain and suffering, or make life better and more efficient, then people can enjoy the prosperity of it, but when this same technology is used to dehumanize society, to turn people into machines, to artificially extend life in a lifeless manner, are we better off, or destroying our own existence? Each of you has to decide how far you are willing to go in this human experiment.

It does it seems, boil down to control. In a world of make-believe, where one lives forever as a machine, who will control the machinery of life? To accept transhumanism is to accept control; I believe this to be the obvious conclusion. Will the few control the many in a world of robots? Will love, compassion, empathy, joy, and nature exist in such a world?

Do humans have spiritual awareness and a conscious understanding of life from without or within? This is a question that has never been properly answered in my view, regardless of the multitude of belief systems that claim the contrary. And if so, can we retain that inner mental energy in a non-biological body and mind created by artificial means? Actually, no one knows for certain, and cannot at this stage of the game. One’s beliefs are his own, but no one to date has ever found or proven the meaning of all life. Do any actually believe though, that making humans non-human will advance that particular knowledge? It does not seem so, but understand that control is the key. Computers are not human, but they are controlled by humans. If it is ever the other way around, will humanity have survived?

“Uniqueness is like a signature, nobody can forge it’s exact copy.”
~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Buy Me a Burger

Source: Health Impact News

“Dataism” is the New Religion of AI and Transhumanism: Those Who Own and Control the Data Control Life

Total Views : 2,221

Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He is one of the leading technocrats today who promotes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and makes techno-prophecies about the future, claiming that AI is advancing so rapidly, that we are the last generation of homo sapiens, because transhumans will soon replace us.

Harari makes it clear that “dataism” is the new religion that fuels AI, and he claims:

We are probably one of the last generations of homo sapiens. Within a century or two earth will be dominated by entities that are more different from us than we are different from neanderthals or from chimpanzees.
Because in the coming generations, we will learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds. Now how exactly will the future masters of the planet look like?
This will be decided by the people who own the data. Those who control the data control the future, not just of humanity, but the future of life itself, because data is the most important asset in the world.

Yuval Noah Harari believes that one day we will be able to “hack humans”, because he believes that the human mind is no different than a computer, and our thoughts are simply “biochemical algorithms.”

This is a religion, not science. It is based on a Darwinian biological view of life, which sees reality as simply the observations of the physical world, ignoring the human soul and spirit.

In this new religion called “dataism,” you must surrender your data to the network, whether you want to or not, because refusing to share all the personal data of your life is “a sin.”

We mustn’t leave any part of the universe disconnected from the great web of life. Conversely, the greatest sin is to block the data flow. What is death, if not a situation when information doesn’t flow? Hence Dataism upholds the freedom of information as the greatest good of all. (Quote from “Homo Deius, A brief History of Tomorrow” – section on The Data Religion.)

These technocrats view the universe as a closed system, and therefore they believe it is just a matter of time before all the data of the universe can be cataloged and be put into one large digital database. This view believes that the “data” is finite, and obtainable by man to catalog and digitize for AI.

This contradicts the teaching of the Ancient Scriptures, which views man as the creation of God, where God also created the universe, and exists outside of the creation.

The teachings of the Ancient Scriptures, or the Bible, states that only God contains all the data, because the data accessible to God is infinite, not finite. It is beyond the reach of man to be able to access all the data in the universe.

Great is our Lord, and mighty in power. His understanding is infinite.(Psalms 147:5)
Haven’t you known? Haven’t you heard? The everlasting God, Yahweh, The Creator of the ends of the earth, doesn’t faint. He isn’t weary. His understanding is unsearchable. (Isaiah 40:28)
Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing out! (Romans 11:33)
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. (Psalms 139:14-18)

I came across an excellent article today that does a deep dive into the teachings of Yuval Noah Harari and “dataism.” It was written last year.

The author is Zechariah Lynch, who is an Orthodox Christian and an Orthodox priest. Unlike Catholic priests, Zechariah Lynch is married and has a family.

This is my first exposure to his writings, and I want to republish this particular article, because like myself, he understands that the real danger to the technocrats are not their false prophecies about AI, but their desire to control the data for the purpose of enslaving us.

Full Spectrum Data Surveillance, Transhumanism, and the Religion of the End.

by Zechariah Lynch
The Inkless Pen

In 1957 Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous Huxley, coined the term “Transhuman.”

Julian was a staunch evolutionist, eugenicist, and globalist; he was also the grandson of T.H. Huxley, a contemporary and proponent of Darwin and his theory of evolution. In basic, Julian believed that up until the modern area, humanity had hitherto naturally evolved by chance.

Yet now before modern man stood the opportunity to take the reins from “natural selection,” humanity could guide its own evolutionary process. Of course, not all of humanity, only those who have been chosen by history to do so.

This idea was not unique to Mr. Huxley. Others such as Jonas Salk, to name but one, also spoken in similar terms in his book “Survival of the Wisest.”

It seems very plausible that the “mystic” evolutionist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (himself a Jesuit priest), brought a certain religious aspect to the Transhuman ideology.

It is certain that Transhumanism, as we know it, is religious in its application and intent, as will be made clear in this article.

Vital to Transhumanism is Evolutionism, or Darwinism. Mr. Teilhard himself states,

“Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more – it is a general postulation to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforth bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow – this is what evolution is” (Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, the Orthodox Christian Vision. Platina, CA. pg. 582).

Although he did not coin the term “Transhuman,” he speaks in such terms,

“May the world’s energies, mastered by us, bow down before us and accept the yoke of our power. May the race of men, grown to fuller consciousness and great strength, become grouped into rich and happy organisms in which life shall be put to better use and bring a hundredfold return” (Ibid. pg. 585).

It is worth noting that Julian Huxley wrote the introduction to a book by Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man.

Early Transhumanists looked more to social institutions to mold the “new” man, yet as technology advanced rapidly over the 20^th and 21^st centuries, it was soon recognized as the most potent tool in the Transhumanist desire to remake man and the world.

Central to the Transhumanist dogma is Artificial Intelligence (AI).

It is very important to comprehend that most of the current “elites” are Transhumanists.

Transhumanism seeks an event called “Singularity.” When achieved, it claims, humanity as we know it will be no more. It seeks to overcome sickness and death and liberate the human consciousness from the bonds of the body.

Transhumanism is profoundly anti-Christian and has developed an anti-Gospel, in which AI will save humanity.

Recently a video by the prominent Transhumanist, Yuval Noah Harari has resurfaced on the internet, in which he clearly proclaims the Transhumanist message.

Mr. Harari is a lecturer, department of history, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is part of the World Economic Forum (WEF). This organization is devoted to Transhumanism.

In 2015, Mr. Harari published a book entitled, “Homo Deius, A brief History of Tomorrow.”

As even the title indicates, in the Transhumanist mind, the future is already history. History is something that has been accomplished.

They are convinced that the coming epoch of Transhumanism is inevitable. They believe it to be unstoppable. They believe their goals for the future are already “history.”

The reader should understand, first of all, not everyone will be chosen to enter the Transhumanist AI world.

An aspect of the Transhumanist agenda is depopulation. The unfit will be given over to biological death so to purge the gene pool.

But we little people of the masses may rest assured that the elites have been endowed with the power to direct evolution, so just trust them (remember just trust the experts!).

Many of the modern agendas being promoted, such as Environmentalism and Globalism, are grounded in aspects of the Transhumanist teaching.

Elite Transhumanists view themselves as the architects and molders of the new coming age. Many of the current crises have the intent of reshaping the world.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, aka the Great Reset, is essentially Transhumanist in its agenda. Illness, war, economy, environment, social relations, and so forth, are all potential tools, so they believe, in achieving a Reset that will usher in Singularity. Much of the chaos in the world is intentional.

I have touched upon many of these topics in past articles. Yet, it never hurts to remind the reader that much of the agenda surrounding Covid-19 is also being influenced by the Transhumanist ideology. Covidism is a instrument of Transhumanism.

In the above-referenced book by Mr. Harari, there is a chapter entitled “The Data Religion.” In my article “Green Pass to the Abyss” I explored the writings of another WEF member, globalist, and Transhumanist, Jacques Attali. There I provided substantial quotes that reveal the goals of utilizing technology for enslaving and controlling the masses.

Vital to this in the current age is data. I think it wise to understand that much of the Covid crisis was a massive data collection event.

Now we may believe that much of what Transhumanism is teaching is nuts. We may feel that it is far-fetched.

Yet, the reality remains this is the philosophy – the religion – inspiring and driving much of the global agenda and is funded and promoted by many global agencies and even governments.

It is also a major trend with Silicon Valley, University teachers, and bioethicists. Thus as far-fetched as it may strike the “average” persons, it is an ideology that deeply influences the mentality and actions of the “elites,” people with substantial worldly power.

Dataism and Humanity as Algorithm

A primary dogma of Transhumanism is what Mr. Harari calls “Dataism.”

Mr. Harari writes,

“Dataism says that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing. This may strike you as some eccentric fringe notion, but in fact it has already conquered most of the scientific establishment … the life sciences have come to see organisms as biochemical algorithms. Simultaneously, in the eight decades since Alan Turing formulated the idea of a Turing Machine, computer scientists have learned to engineer increasingly sophisticated electronic algorithms” (pg. 351).

Please note, he himself says this is not a “fringe notion.” He claims most of the scientific establishment has embraced this notion. Who have we been so fervently instructed to “trust” over the past few years?

He continues,

“Dataism thereby collapses the barrier between animals and machines, and expects electronic algorithms to eventually decipher and outperform biochemical algorithms … For scholars and intellectuals it also promises to provide the scientific holy grail that has eluded us for centuries: a single overarching theory that unifies all the scientific disciplines” (Ibid).

Based on its grandparent, Darwinism, Transhumanism views humanity as a “biochemical algorithm,” as it does all biological life. It teaches, humanity’s own creation of “electronic algorithms,” such as computers and AI, will surpass humanity itself. This is known as “Singularity.”

The barriers between animals and machines will collapse, which means the current barriers will be transcended and biological life will merge with AI.

Singularity means the end of humanity as we have known it, so they profess. As Teilhard viewed Evolutionism as an indispensable theory, its child Transhumanism views itself as the emerging single binding overarching theory that will unite all scientific disciplines.

Since the human mind will be surpassed by AI, it is not trustworthy; thus we are told, “Dataists are sceptical about human knowledge and wisdom, and prefer to put their trust in Big Data and computer algorithms” (pg. 352).

He goes on to reveal, “Dataism is most firmly entrenched in its two mother disciplines: computer science and biology. Of the two, biology is the more important” (Ibid).

Biology is more important because they believe, it will give them the ability to control the human “algorithm” (which as he noted is not “trustworthy).

He boldly proclaims,

“You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. But you should know that this is current scientific dogma, and that it is changing our world beyond recognition” (Ibid).

Please note that he uses the word dogma. He claims that the world of “science” is already operating upon a central dogma of Transhumanism.

Dataism as the Master System

Some further goals are elucidated for us,

“In the coming decades, it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on politics. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies – and our bodies and minds too – but they are hardly a blip on our political radar” (pg. 359).

Ah, so a goal is to overhaul even a person’s body and mind!

Transhumanism seeks to achieve this down to the genetic level. Thus, gene-editing is an important part of Transhumanism.

As part of the process, humanity must be genetically modified. Also, it is worth noting again that the assimilation of even the body and mind is a clear goal of the Internet of Bodies (IoB).

In interesting and telling words, he proclaims,

“In the twentieth century, dictators had grand visions for the future. Communists and fascists alike sought to completely destroy the old world and build a new world in its place. Whatever you think about Lenin, Hitler or Mao, you cannot accuse them of lacking vision. Today it seems that leaders have a chance to pursue even grander visions. While communists and Nazis tried to create a new society and a new human with the help of steam engines and typewriters, today’s prophets could rely on biotechnology and super-computers” (Ibid).

Communists and Fascists sought to destroy the old world and build a new one, such is also a Transhumanist goal!

Or, rather, it is continuing the goal of its predecessors. These early attempts simply lacked the technological advantage afforded today (they utilized mainly the social construct approach), so it seems implied. Yet, today’s “prophets” are of the same cloth as Lenin, Hitler, and Mao.

Mr. Harari does confess that no current political system will be able to fulfill the vision of Transhumanism, thus a totally “new” one will be required. Such a system should be controlled by AI, which makes its just decisions based upon an endless supply of data, thus imparting to it god-like omniscience.

As humans we must be willing to offer ourselves up on the altar of “data,”

“From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. If so, we can also understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system” (pg. 361).

The human “worth” is only found in it being of benefit to the “system,” or as he himself says, this new religion.

“Like capitalism, Dataism too began as a neutral scientific theory, but is now mutating into a religion that claims to determine right and wrong. The supreme value of this new religion is ‘information flow’. If life is the movement of information, and if we think that life is good, it follows that we should extend, deepen and spread the flow of information in the universe. According to Dataism, human experiences are not sacred and Homo sapiens isn’t the apex of creation or a precursor of some future Homo deus. Humans are merely tools for creating the Internet-of-All-Things, which may eventually spread out from planet Earth to cover the whole galaxy and even the whole universe. This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it. This vision is reminiscent of some traditional religious visions” (pg 364).

The Data Commandments

Humans are not sacred, we are but tools to create the Internet-of-All-Things.

So, humans create technology and AI, and this creation of man will transcend man himself and become “like God.” It will control everything and our destiny is to merge into it.

Not too far off from idol worship, human hands make an idol and then bow down and worship it as a “god.” Now we are simply making technological “gods.”

In case we still have lingering doubts, he elucidates,

“Well then, if we could create a data processing system that absorbs even more data than a human being, and that processes it even more efficiently, wouldn’t that system be superior to a human in exactly the same way that a human is superior to a chicken?
Dataism isn’t limited to idle prophecies. Like every religion, it has its practical commandments. First and foremost, a Dataist ought to maximise data flow by connecting to more and more media, and producing and consuming more and more information. Like other successful religions, Dataism is also missionary. Its second commandment is to connect everything to the system, including heretics who don’t want to be connected. And ‘everything’ means more than just humans. It means every thing” (pg. 365).

Don’t want to be connected?

Too bad. For the AI-god to work as it should, everyone and everything must be assimilated.

This helps shed light on the reason why the “everyone must do it” mentality is being cultivated.

During Covidism this mentality has been applied to masks and injections, for example. Everyone has to be in, like it or not, or else.

As a person, you have no privacy you have no choice, for your one point of existence is to generate life-giving data. This is one of the underlying motives to digitize everything. Data must not be private or personal. It must be open to all.

Sins against Data

And so we truly understand that Transhumanism seeks to subjugate and dominate everyone and everything,

“We mustn’t leave any part of the universe disconnected from the great web of life. Conversely, the greatest sin is to block the data flow. What is death, if not a situation when information doesn’t flow? Hence Dataism upholds the freedom of information as the greatest good of all” (Ibid).

Ah, blocking the flow of data is a “sin!” Thus those who do not offer themselves to the data gods are sinners and promoters of death. It should be clear to Christians how this is an anti-gospel.

But wait, freedom of information? Isn’t that a nice thing? Let us see,

“We mustn’t confuse freedom of information with the old liberal ideal of freedom of expression. Freedom of expression was given to humans, and protected their right to think and say what they wished – including their right to keep their mouths shut and their thoughts to themselves. Freedom of information, in contrast, is not given to humans. It is given to information. Moreover, this novel value may impinge on the traditional freedom of expression, by privileging the right of information to circulate freely over the right of humans to own data and to restrict its movement” (pp. 365-366).

It is the freedom for “information” to demand anything and everything from you, and your responsibility to submit.

Remember it is a sin to restrict the flow of data. Transhumanism is a fundamental denial and destruction of the human person. It is Technocracy par excellence.

So grand will be the blessing of being part of the “data flow” that Mr. Harari tells us we should be happy to relinquish our privacy, autonomy, and individuality (cf. pg. 368). It will be great to be a technological slave with no personhood. Anyway, free will does not really exist. It is just a construct of humanity, so they say.

And in the warmest words, he tells us,

“As the global data-processing system becomes all-knowing and all powerful, so connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning. Humans want to merge into the data flow because when you are part of the data flow you are part of something much bigger than yourself. Traditional religions told you that your every word and action was part of some great cosmic plan, and that God watched you every minute and cared about all your thoughts and feelings. Data religion now says that your every word and action is part of the great data flow, that the algorithms are constantly watching you and that they care about everything you do and feel. Most people like this very much. For true believers, to be disconnected from the data flow risks losing the very meaning of life” (pp. 368-369).

Silly people use to believe in a Divine Being who was omnipresent and omniscient! No, humanity has created AI that will be god and watch over you.

Believing in God is stupid but believing in AI is so profound! Just join the data flow and become a believer.

Humanity has no intrinsic value

The Transhumanists assure us that there is no meaning intrinsic to humanity, no value that we can find in ourselves. Human experience has no value unless it is feeding the data god. “It has nothing against human experiences. It just doesn’t think they are intrinsically valuable” (pg. 370). No hard feelings.

Humanity as we know it must be retired. It must be transcended.

“When the car replaced the horse-drawn carriage, we didn’t upgrade the horses – we retired them. Perhaps it is time to do the same with Homo sapiens” (pg. 371).

Transhumanism is anti-human, that is it is totally against the traditional understanding of humanity, most of all as taught by Christianity.

When it claims to not be “anti-human,” it means humanity as it defines it. As the reader may discern, it has no true value for humanity or personhood.

Confirming, in a certain way, observations made even by Orthodox Christian saints, Mr. Harari writes,

“In the days of Locke, Hume and Voltaire humanists argued that ‘God is a product of the human imagination’. Dataism now gives humanists a taste of their own medicine, and tells them: ‘Yes, God is a product of the human imagination, but human imagination in turn is the product of biochemical algorithms.’ In the eighteenth century, humanism sidelined God by shifting from a deo-centric to a homo-centric world view. In the twenty-first century, Dataism may sideline humans by shifting from a homo-centric to a data-centric view” (pg. 372).

In sidelining God, humanity has ultimately sidelined itself. As a substitute, Transhumanism now offers to humanity a product of its own creation – AI – to be god over it.

Transhumanism is in its essence subhumanity.

Since humanity is an obsolete algorithm, it should not even listen to itself. It must place all its faith and trust in Data,

“Consequently you should now stop listening to your feelings, and start listening to these external algorithms instead. What’s the use of having democratic elections when the algorithms know how each person is going to vote, and when they also know the exact neurological reasons why one person votes Democrat while another votes Republican? Whereas humanism commanded: ‘Listen to your feelings!’ Dataism now commands: ‘Listen to the algorithms! They know how you feel’” (pg. 373).

Humans should not make any decisions or choices, they are illusions anyway – just let Data do it for you.

What are some practical steps of Transhumanism? How can we become beneficial servants of the Data god?

Conveniently, Mr. Harari has some Transhumanisn praxis for people to follow,

“Here are some practical Dataist guidelines for you: ‘You want to know who you really are?’ asks Dataism. ‘Then forget about mountains and museums. Have you had your DNA sequenced? No?! What are you waiting for? Go and do it today. And convince your grandparents, parents and siblings to have their DNA sequenced too – their data is very valuable for you. And have you heard about these wearable biometric devices that measure your blood pressure and heart rate twenty-four hours a day? Good – so buy one of those, put it on and connect it to your smartphone. And while you are shopping, buy a mobile camera and microphone, record everything you do, and put in online. And allow Google and Facebook to read all your emails, monitor all your chats and messages, and keep a record of all your Likes and clicks. If you do all that, then the great algorithms of the Internet-of-All-Things will tell you whom to marry, which career to pursue and whether to start a war.’ But where do these great algorithms come from? This is the mystery of Dataism. Just as according to Christianity we humans cannot understand God and His plan, so Dataism says the human brain cannot embrace the new master algorithms” (pp. 374-75).

Read the full article at The Inkless Pen.

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Source: UK Column

What is transhumanism?

by Johannes Eisleben

Tuesday, 21st February 2023

Transhumanism is a very strong trend among the Western élites. Its aim is to overcome the natural limitations of human biology using technology.

Proponents of transhumanism, including Yuval Harari and Klaus Schwab, believe in ideas such as these:

that we can improve the human body to create cyborgs, which are fictive organisms in which human organs and technology are seamlessly combined;
that properties such as human intelligence can be genetically enhanced by germline genome manipulation;
that mRNA technology will soon allow us to “write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers” (as worded in President Biden's Executive Order on biotechnology);
that we will soon cure cancer using genetic or even nano-mechanic (tiny machine) therapies;
that machines will shortly be able to read thoughts;
that there is no free will because the mind is a collection of biochemical processes;
that soon we will obtain digital immortality by “uploading our minds to the cloud”;
that “artificial intelligence” (AI) will soon lead to machines more intelligent than humans;
and either
that AI will make most humans useless to society because all their work will be taken over by machines,
or
that we will be able to genetically reprogram the sex of adult humans in the near future—

to name just a few of the ideas they espouse.

Why is all of this unscientific balderdash? And why do so many—including clever people like the billionaire Elon Musk—believe in it? What are the roots and goals of this movement? Let's answer these questions in reverse order.

What are the transhumanists’ goals?

There are two groups of transhumanists.

The first group sees transhumanism as the ultimate method of self-actualisation (alias self-realisation), supposedly allowing those who think they can afford this eye-wateringly expensive alleged self-improvement to escape the biological limits of their bodies. For example, the transhumanist Martine Rothblatt, whose cells have the XY karyotype but who “became” a woman, says that self-defining one’s gender is just the first step on a path that will lead to a cure for cancer and other lethal diseases and ultimately to digital immortality.

Related to this goal, but of lesser importance, is the idea that transhumanism could promote universal equality of outcomes in the tradition of the French Enlightenment ideal of equality by law (as opposed to the Protestant Enlightenment ideal of equality under the law, or isonomy). In this flavour, transhumanism has an emancipatory character akin to abolitionism (the fight against slavery in the nineteenth century) or feminist emancipation, the absurd idea that both sexes should be equal in every respect. Proponents of this variant of the creed believe that all human beings could be altered using transhumanistic technology to achieve equality of outcomes. We will see in the last two sections below that none of these hopes can be fulfilled.

The second group of transhumanists hopes to use transhumanism as a technical means of power in the spirit of Aldous Huxley, who describes the engineering of human classes with planned properties in artificial wombs. Implanted sensors or molecular effectors (for example, delivering pulsated drug dosages into the circulation) are believed by transhumanists, as is genetic engineering, to afford physical control and manipulation of the masses, to direct their will and to leave most human beings superfluous. For example, Harari believes that artificial intelligence will make most humans useless; according to him, only a small élite of superhumans will be needed in the future. He also thinks that technology can be used to direct and manage the will of the masses.

We will see below that, while technology can be used to manipulate the masses culturally, it cannot be used to control them physically (other than in the pushing of chronic mass intoxication and addiction, which is not a new phenomenon), nor to render them obsolete as a workforce. Also related to this intention is the idea of using the transhumanist narrative to exert cultural power via fear of the future, as has been done with the climate change and the Covid fear narratives. This is by far the biggest effect that the transhumanist narrative has had so far, but it will lose its hold once its preposterousness and anti-scientific character become obvious and once its cultural precondition, the current collective Western spasm of fear, has dissipated.

What are the cultural roots of transhumanism?

Transhumanism has several major cultural sources:

self-actualisation, an idea originally developed in the Italian Renaissance which was further elaborated and popularised by Herder but which has since degenerated into a flat form of hedonistic consumerism;
emancipation in the sense of the French Enlightenment;
Cartesianism and neo-positivism;
postmodern anti-rationalism; and
eugenics.

We will discuss each in turn.

Self-actualisation

The idea of self-actualisation was originally developed by Pico de la Mirandola and other thinkers of the Italian Renaissance. It was a programme for cultural élites to realise the full potential of their personality and arose with the discovery of the modern individual. The individual was thought to be primarily related to himself and was tasked with maximising his own culture, knowledge and pleasure.

In the eighteenth century, the German Protestant theologian Johann Gottfried Herder reformulated the concept as a philosophy for the masses, but in accordance with Christianity. Self-actualisation was meant to happen in the context of the “liberty of a Christian” (a doctrine as old as the New Testament) who is simultaneously “a freeman unto himself, but a bondsman unto all” (Luther). In the nineteenth century, when the followers of Hegel separated the modern individual from God, one of them, Max Stirner, enunciated a radical agenda of self-actualisation by declaring that each man is his own god, possessing his own uniqueness.

The Western bourgeoisie developed a romantic manifesto of self-actualisation during the nineteenth century, which became a broad social movement of the upper classes. However, its subjectivist tendency quickly became apparent. Heidegger, one of the fathers of contemporary anti-rationalism, saw this movement as a form of “subjectivism, including the most dangerous kind, which is hidden in the cult of the personality”. He also saw a link to globalism (which he called “planetarism”) and said that “planetarian imperialism” (by which he meant US-led globalisation commencing in the 1930s) would culminate in an “oblivion of being (Seinsvergessenheit) embedded in subjectivism”.

In like vein, Heidegger calls this Western subjectivism the “rule of Man”, an elegant pun in the original German (where man is routinely used as a pronoun indicating anonymity, collectivity or unspoken agency, like one in English and on in French, but which Heidegger repurposes as a noun). Hard to translate, this coining of his means the rule of a standardised, soulless type of posthuman. After all, a trans-anything is on the way to leaving it behind altogether (post-). Foucault—who, like his main sources, Bataille, Marx and Heidegger, is rarely a source of valid insight—adequately characterised this cultural megatrend as the “Californian self-cult”, and later Charles Taylor called it “pseudo-authenticity” in his Ethics of Authenticity, a redoubtable book on this very topic.

All of these thinkers realised that this pseudo-self-actualisation is a form of consumerism in which the realisation of the potential of the person is trivialised to a certain selection of goods and services churned out by the megamachine (Lewis Mumford). In transhumanism, the idea of self-actualisation attains a peak. Transhumanists affirm that we can completely reshape our entire bodily and mental existence to maximise the potential of our personality. The would-be woman Rothblatt, who not coincidentally resides in California, is the consummate embodiment of this ideology.

Emancipation

Emancipation is an idea originating in the French Enlightenment and contains a factor that the Protestant Enlightenment (Britain, the Netherlands, the German-speaking countries and Scandinavia) does not recognise. The main ideas of the Protestant Enlightenment are the dignity of the individual, the individual's freedom and rights, and the sanctity of design of the bourgeois society built on these ideas, namely a state respecting and protecting the rule of law and enabling democratic participation.

In the French tradition, however, there is a notion to create a secular paradise on earth, which was described explicitly by Abbé Étienne-Gabriel Morelly in his Code de la nature (1755), the first communist manifesto ever written. Morelly proposed the creation of the state that owns everything and distributes goods and services to achieve perfect equality and social justice. His ideas influenced Rousseau, who distinguished the vulgar volonté de tous (the will of everyman, a bottom-up democratic participation in Scottish Enlightenment terms) from the ostensibly noble volonté générale (the universal will), to be discerned and implemented by an élitist oligarch group supervising and directing society to achieve a higher optimum.

The idea of emancipation, according to which humans need to be liberated from oppressive power structures of society by breaking with traditional rules, was very potent in the French Revolution, and later on in feminism, as well as in anti-racist movements. It has, of course, a fully justified core that is clearly visible in abolitionism (the campaign to end slavery), but tends to become dangerous if the liberation it seeks is combined with the intention to plan a new and better society with new social norms from scratch, as the French revolutionary Babeuf described it. It did not take long for Burke and Hegel to realise this and point out that societies can only be stable if social norms evolve spontaneously.

In transhumanism, there is the idea that technical manipulation of human nature can free us from the burden of our physical existence and make us immortal. It is a secularised eschatology aiming at the total absence of constraints imposed on us by nature or society (which is the natural system resulting from human nature by the interaction of individuals in large groups). The slipping of the bonds of nature is part of the self-actualisation aspect of transhumanism, but the creed also contains an aspect of social emancipation based on technology. This view is thoroughly detached from any realistic perspective on anthropology.

The last emancipatory promise based on technology was propagated in the 1990s: it was the idea of the free internet, which was supposed to be shared by mankind and to enable new models of participation. Today, the internet has instead become a tool of commercial data collection and exploitation, mass surveillance, propaganda and political exclusion, trammelled knowledge and censorship.

Cartesianism and neo-positivism

Cartesianism—the philosophy of Descartes summed up in the deductivist maxim I think, therefore I am—has many aspects, but the one we are concerned with here is the view that humans can systematically describe, understand and manipulate the world using mathematics and the sciences based on them. For Descartes, the entire world is a mechanism that can be modelled mathematically to enable its mapping and manipulation. Major Cartesians were Lagrange, La Mettrie and Laplace.

Lagrange was a mathematical genius who invented a very elegant mathematical expression of Newton's laws. Like Boyle and Hooke, both British physicists, he believed that the laws of physics were “written by God into the book of nature” and merely await our discovery, which is the task of science. La Mettrie, a contemporary of Lagrange, was a drastic materialist and saw the human being as a machine. Laplace, who lived a generation later, believed that if we could measure all physical magnitudes of the world, we could write down a gigantic system of differential equations, plug the measurement values into it, and calculate the future: an idea later dubbed the “Laplace demon”.

Scientists with a higher power of judgement than the French scientific utopians, such as Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, saw that this was impossible, and it became apparent in the course of the nineteenth century that classical physics (mechanics plus electromagnetism) was running into problems that could not be resolved in the universal framework originally defined by Newton, Leibniz, and Euler.

Many philosophers apprehended early on that we are unable to model and manipulate nature in the way the Cartesians longed for. Giambattista Vico may well have been the first, but others—from Herder to Max Scheler, who solemnly pronounced Cartesianism dead—followed in his wake.

When, with the development of quantum mechanics, it became evident that the mathematical models of particles making up matter merely lead to stochastic (guesswork) models of reality, many physicists abandoned Cartesianism as well. The theory of complex systems which emerged from thermodynamics and chaos theory made it obvious to every physicist that the models we have are superb for predicting the behaviour of highly restricted systems and for engineering technology based on them, but that we cannot model complex systems using mathematics.

But though Cartesianism is dead from the point of view of philosophy and mathematical physics, it is still a major driving force of our culture, as is evident from the fact that so many engineers, entrepreneurs, biologists, representatives of the humanities and politicians believe in Cartesianism. They are hoodwinked by Cartesianism because they do not understand physics and because they are bedazzled by the great success of physics and its applications over the last two centuries.

Closely related to Cartesianism is neo-positivism. It is the heir to positivism, an ideology which was fully formulated by Auguste Comte, who coined the term. The basic idea of positivism is that all true propositions which constitute scientific knowledge have to be based on empirical data that can be verified using independent observations or experiments. It is based on the English tradition of empiricism going back to Aristotle and Bacon (Novum Organum), Locke, and then the Scottish Enlightenment; above all, David Hume. No sources of science other than experience and its verification are allowed; there is therefore no religious or metaphysical knowledge.

Positivism is strongly linked with the idea of the teleological (end-state), necessary progress of mankind, a secular (post-Christian) eschatology. Comte believed that there was a necessary movement towards a science-based (where have we heard that adjective recently?) global culture that would enable mankind to surpass its current dismal state. He founded the secular-positivist “religion of humanity” (église positiviste) for “positivist societies” to fulfil the cohesive function once held by collective worship.

Though positivism was dismissed as an ideology by Scheler, the Vienna Circle in the 1920s revived its ideas as logical (or neo-)positivism. The movement failed philosophically, but the ideas of positivism are still vivid in transhumanism and its teleological ideas. A core feature of both Cartesianism and positivism notable in transhumanism is the alleged technical feasibility of effecting a change in human nature using mathematical models.

Eugenics

The ideas of eugenics go back to Arthur de Gobineau, the theoretician of the master race, and Herbert Spencer, the coiner of the term survival of the fittest. Eugenics became a political movement in the 1920s in the United States and Britain. Its core idea is that the genomes of the individuals of a population (the totality of their genetic material) should be improved to yield a higher genetic quality of the individuals and a better overall genetic quality of the population. It was inspired by the success of animal and plant breeding in agriculture, which was first genetically explained by Mendel and then systematically used to improve the properties of agricultural life forms.

But because even basic human traits such as body height have an omnigenomic inheritance pattern (the whole genome encodes the trait), and since nothing is known about the genetic causation of higher qualities such as intelligence or emotional stability, eugenic strivings cannot succeed even theoretically. Any attempts to implement eugenic programmes, such as those pursued by the Nazis in the 1940s, are deeply anti-human and evil. Nevertheless, transhumanism is full of dreams of improving mankind using genetic manipulation.

Postmodern anti-rationalism

Transhumanism also has a deeply anti-rational aspect. Postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler reject the idea that there even is reliable knowledge of the world. For them, human language is an expression of power; all propositions have to be interpreted from a power perspective. The will to surmount biological sex by replacing it with gender, to overcome racism by pronouncing that races do not exist, to transgress traditional cultural identities and social norms by declaring that they are merely oppressive structures—all are hallmarks of postmodern anti-rationalism. The emancipatory arm of transhumanism is strongly influenced by these ideas.

The irrationality of transhumanism

Transhumanism is anti-rational because it hankers to apply scientific methods to systems that cannot be modelled using mathematical physics, chemistry or biology in the way transhumanists fondly fancy. Let us look at the main plans cherished by transhumanists, starting with eugenics.

We cannot genetically reprogram our mind-body continuum because we are unable to model how the phenotypical properties which we would like to alter are caused by our genome as well as by the non-genetic cellular material we inherit from the blastocyst and embryonic and foetal development. In medicine, there are many examples of technologies that successfully alter properties of the body, but they can only address partial systems and are unable to model and manipulate the complex system of the mind-body continuum as a whole. This is why there is no cure for solid malignant carcinomas (cancer) and why we cannot cure schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s disease. We could not even manipulate a genome to increase body height, though for such basic properties this can be done by way of breeding in animals.

The other dreams of transhumanism are as naïve and absurd as its eugenic expectations. We cannot build interfaces to our sensory apparatus, because the models of the neuronal systems we have are far too superficial and partial in nature. The problem is that we do not understand in detail how the different types of energy reaching our various sensory cells are even translated into neuronal signals. While this shortcoming in our knowledge can be remedied, we will not be able to achieve more than harnessing the afferent neurons that are already present in the nervous system.

Why is this so? Because the sensory unit from the peripheral sensory cells to the end points in neuronal processing form a hard-wired, closed biological system that we cannot change. For example, we can build glasses that can sense the presence of radioactivity and then translate this into a light signal that can be mixed into our regular vision—but we cannot add neuronal subsystems to our nervous system, with the specialist task of processing radioactivity, to add a “Geiger sense” to our heads.

A flick through a modern textbook of neuroscience is highly instructive in this context: it contains almost no mathematical models, and thus the curtailments of what can be engineered are certain. We can only engineer if we have mathematical models that allow us to calculate the characteristics of a technology. True, engineering is also a heuristic science; but its process of discovery is always based on scientific models.

Though we can build prostheses that can be connected in a rough-and-ready manner to motor nerves, we will not manage to model the sensorimotor circuits that drive our conscious and unconscious motions at a level sufficient to build a “cyborg”. Nor is such a project necessary, as we already have interfaces with which we can direct high-precision instruments such as quantum sensors or huge machines like the Large Hadron Collider and the International Space Station.

That is not to say that further technical progress will not happen, but our ability to change humans is restricted by the complexity of the mind-body continuum, the most complicated individual complex system there is. The same applies to human thought and mind. Transhumanist slogans that we will soon be able to “read thoughts using quantum sensors and AI” are ludicrous.

Even when we will be able to measure some of the signals occurring during the physiological process that we experience as propositional cognition (thinking in sentences) with higher temporal and spatial resolution than today—which we certainly will shortly be able to do—we still won’t be able to understand how the 100 billion neurons of the brain (and the additional glial cells that support them, ten- to fiftyfold more numerous) encode propositional thoughts. That is a process in which the cells involved use hundreds of thousands of different molecules each. The same is true for nuanced emotions, acoustic, olfactory or visual memories, and all the other rich modes of inner experience with which we are endowed.

Furthermore, transhumanist dreams of digital immortality are utter nonsense. The mind-body continuum is, as the name suggests, a unity. We do not understand the processes that we experience as consciousness and inner experience at all, after a century of furious philosophising and research on the subject. It is impossible to model them to an extent that would allow us to emulate these processes in a Turing machine (a computer, or a quantum computer in the future).

Authors like Harari who extrapolate from the technology that is available today to predict achievements of transhumanist technology do not appreciate how the insights of physics were translated into technology over the last three centuries. Transhumanists fail to grasp the limits of physics and engineering. They have no idea of biology and its swingeing limitations. In other words, their predictions reveal that they do not understand science at all. That is why these visions should not scare us: they are all mere fantasies. Transhumanism is nothing but neo-Lysenkoism, an ideological pseudoscience.

However, there is a dangerous aspect of transhumanism, just as there was a massive danger in the eugenic ideology of the Nazis.

The hazards and the failure of transhumanism

As long as transhumanism was just an ideology detached from reality, it did not warrant too much attention. The first fundamental application that the transhumanist ideology could relate to was the surgical and hormonal change of the outer appearance of patients with transsexual personality disorder who had a normal gonosomal karyotype (XX or XY chromosome pairs). Of course, these successful interventions do not change the fundamental biology of the treated person; but with the introduction of these methods erroneously called “sex reassignment surgery” (erroneously, because the intervention does not change the sex, only the appearance) since the 1960s, early transhumanists were flushed with the hope that more might be possible.

Today’s widespread usage of gonadotropin-releasing hormone modulators (“puberty blockers”) to stop the onset of adolescence, and the performance of surgery on underage children with a normal gonosomal karyotype without a long period of clinical observation to establish the diagnosis of a transsexual personality disorder (which would represent a valid indication for such treatments), demonstrates the dangers and the nihilism of the transhumanist ideology. The damage inflicted on children is grievous in the extreme, and once the cultural hysteria that brings about such surgical activism is over, Western societies will reel under the weight of coming to terms legally and culturally with this collective crime.

Another example of the danger of transhumanism is the so-called Covid vaccination programme. The treatments consist of repeated injections of genetically modified nucleic acids, either as modified RNA contained in lipid nanoparticles, or as adenovirus-packaged cDNA (complementary DNA). As was clearly visible from the trial data of the various licensees, the treatment has no prophylactic effect on an infection with SARS–CoV–2, but it is significantly toxic. One in a thousand to one in five hundred treated people have already died, and an order of magnitude more (one per cent) are chronically ill because of the treatment, as a careful evaluation of the numbers undertaken by a German scientist shows. Stillbirths among vaccinated pregnant women have reached unprecedented levels, and it is unclear how severe the mid- to long-term effects on fertility will be.

This massive damage to the unborn, while appalling, is not astonishing, since the spike protein encoded by the nucleic acid vectors destroys the endothelium of embryonic and foetal blood vessels when administered at an effective dose (which does not happen with every injection, due to quality problems with the vectors). But the “vaccination programme” has not been stopped, even though the damage continues to mount up. The producers of these nucleic acid treatments and the regulatory authorities in charge of approving the treatments knew all of this when the injection campaign started. The willingness to perform this medical crime, which is the worst in human history, was patently impelled by transhumanism, with its stated intent to genetically modify those who were vaccinated.

Politicians and health executives who support these programmes subscribe to a transhumanist agenda. This is evident from recent government publications across the Western world. The executive order on biotechnology issued by the Biden Administration on 12 September 2022 states:

We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers; unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence; and advance the science of scale-up production while reducing the obstacles for commercialization so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.

To view biological systems as deterministic electric circuits that can be programmed like a computer is highly characteristic of transhumanism. The above quotation exemplifies all the characteristics of the ideology described above. At the same time, trying such anti-rational methods on human beings is dangerous and criminal.

Transhumanism will fail when the functional élite, the one-in-twenty carrying out the management of society (the “outer party” as George Orwell called them) on behalf of the tiny overlord class of owners (the “inner party” in 1984), start to understand to what extent they themselves have been physically damaged by ineffective “therapies” that do nothing but harm. Transhumanism is bound to fail because its ideas cannot be achieved—they are technically unfeasible, and will not pass the reality test. The Covid vaccination campaign clearly illustrates this, but it could well be that more harm will be done before the failure is apparent to society as a whole.