The Transhuman Age
Dorothy Deasy
2011-02-06 00:00:00

A recent article in Slate titled "Are You There God? It's Me, Brain" discusses "theory of mind." The article, an excerpt from the book The Belief Instinct by Jesse Bering, discusses our human tendency to try to understand how someone else is thinking. This tendency is so strong that we may even anthropomorphize objects:

When inanimate objects do unexpected things, we sometimes reason about them just as we do for oddly behaving-or misbehaving-people. More than a few of us have kicked our broken-down vehicles in the sides and verbally abused our incompetent computers. Most of us stop short of actually believing these objects possess mental states-indeed, we would likely be hauled away to an asylum if we genuinely believed that they held malicious intent-but our emotions and behaviors toward such objects seem to betray our primitive, unconscious thinking: we act as though they're morally culpable for their actions.


The article suggests that it is this mechanism that may be behind our belief in God:

It would appear that having a theory of mind was so useful for our ancestors in explaining and predicting other people's behaviors that it has completely flooded our evolved social brains. As a result, today we overshoot our mental-state attributions to things that are, in reality, completely mindless. And all of this leads us, rather inevitably, to a very important question: What if I were to tell you that God's mental states, too, were all in your mind? That God, like a tiny speck floating at the edge of your cornea producing the image of a hazy, out-of-reach orb accompanying your every turn, was in fact a psychological illusion, a sort of evolved blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? It may feel as if there is something grander out there . . . watching, knowing, caring. Perhaps even judging. But, in fact, that's just your overactive theory of mind. In reality, there is only the air you breathe.


As I read the article, it occurred to me that this same theory could be applied to our belief in technology.

We do not know yet whether radical life extension or the full aims of transhumanism will ever be realized. It is questionable at this point whether or not machines will ever gain consciousness, or whether uploaded life-blogs (aka mindclones) will ever result in digital avatars that can anticipate our biologically-embedded thoughts, much less our feelings. For a great many people, such technologies are shadows of life, but are not life itself.

Such aims are, I believe, externalized quests targeted to address our deepest internalized fears.

What we can not doubt, though, is that we already are in a transhuman age. Technologies are here now that allow us to transcend the limits of biology, and advances are occurring each month (if not each day).

One of the travesties of the past is that if a person were to experience harm or bad luck, especially if the result was a disfigurement, many people would stigmatize that misfortune. But now, emerging technologies offer the hope that such stigmas can be reduced.

A new technology such as the "skin gun" offers the promise that the trauma of an accident need not damage that person for life. The skin gun applies a layer of the person's own stem cells over a burn allowing the skin to heal in a matter of days, without scarring.


Watch the video below (warning: contains graphic images of burn damage).