IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 26

emotional well-being. So far we
can think and have freedom in the
mind, but technology is impacting that as well. New technologies
can actually read brain-waves and
decipher what is going on in the
mind in a general sense. I think that
they develop that technology, initially for good purposes, and then
we will see mind reading technologies of one degree or another. We
can also operate some of the prosthetic devices using brain waves.
So these technologies can be very
useful but also very invasive. They
can be so beneficial and yet they
can be so destructive at the same
time. All technologies are that way
and I worry that these technologies

Of course, transhumanism
is a religion.
are proceeding along ways that
ethics is of no consideration in the
creation of them and how they are
used. Ethics is one of the first casualties on this side of the road.
KM: Is there a danger of overstating the short-term technological
possibilities?
LP: Oh yes, because people
make a profit by overstating things.
Most of the pop-ups on your computer, and most of the ads on television are always overstated and
that is what makes them sell and
of course that is what makes us
vote for certain politicians as well.
The trouble with the electorate
is that people will vote for false
hope, they'll never vote for truth.
So everything has to be hype and
overstated in a society where that is
the norm, and it is really the norm.
In the case of transhumanism,

of course it is going to be hyped
and overstated. As an actual construct, transhumanism, doesn't
worry me so much. It's the people who believe in transhumanism
that concern me. It's not the actual
construct itself that is of concern,
because it is not going to happen
the way they desire it to. I don't
know if you have watched the Star
Trek series? Well, all I can say is
that what we are trying to do now is
imitate the phrase, "we are Borgs;
resistance is futile." Cyborgism is
a real concern, but it is a difficult
concern because it can develop out
of valid prosthetics. Transhumanism suggests an engineered spiritual evolution as much as anything
else, and it is very gnostic.
Transhumanism presumes
that the soul and the body
are totally separate entities so that the soul can
function outside the body
and be downloaded into
an avatar and also that
it can be evolved to be
totally independent of the human
body. Of course, transhumanism
is a religion. Any movement that
aims at affecting the afterlife or the
next life, or talks about immortality, must be classed as a religion
per se, because just the idea of
attaining immortality by some
means makes it a religious movement. That is transhumanism, not
that I think it can be accomplished,
but it can impact mentality and
spiritual understanding in a way
that removes people's concept of
God. That this can be achieved by
human beings through some form
of technological means, opens the
door to some new spiritual dimension that diminishes the value of
humanity and mankind's relationship with the divine.

What will be some of the short-term
consequences?
LP: Well, consequences would
be some very foul experiments
involving humans. You know we
have these things taking place in
secret anyway. It is like in the 1930s
when various people were being
sterilized under the influence of the
eugenics movement. This did not
take place only in Nazi Germany,
but in America and in other Western democracies. People are willing
to carry out very harmful, concrete
experiments on other human beings
to achieve the imagined ends
of some ideology. I do think that
transhumanism downgrades human
beings. I think that some of the
people that get involved in transhumanism are in the highest levels in industry or associations, and
that their reasons for it have to do
with power. At that level many of the
people are sociopaths anyway. They
get there by crushing and destroying anybody that gets in the way.
When they get a hold of something
like this it's very difficult to predict
what they might do with it. The idea
of posthumanism, in which we have
gone from a kind of directed evolution to a condition in which we no
longer can be defined as human, in
the present day sense of the word,
anyway, is floating around in the
transhumanist world. Some of these
people believe you can download
the contents of the brain into an
avatar, essentially, the memory,
which means our knowledge and
consciousness of self, and that
may very well become feasible in
the future. However, there is also
a concept that one could actually
download the human soul into an
avatar. There is even the idea that
you may, with future technology, be
able to transplant the human brain
into one of these avatars, which is
seen as a way to keep it alive and
functioning artificially. People will try

KM: What do you think the consequences of such a belief are?

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september 2015

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