Transhumanism: beliefs, history and sources

History & overview

Human nature is a first draft, and the draft is editable.

The position that ageing, disease, cognitive limits and death are engineering problems rather than the terms of existence, and that it is right to solve them. It has a declaration adopted in 1998 and revised in 2009, an organisation, and — unusually for a philosophy — a small number of adherents who have made concrete arrangements to be frozen at death, which is the closest thing it has to a sacrament.

Why it is filed this way

Filed as a philosophy because that is how it operates: a position argued in books and papers, held by people who mostly belong to nothing. It has organisations — Humanity+, the Extropy Institute before it — but no membership that anyone is expected to hold, no rite of entry and no leadership with authority over doctrine. Critics have called it a religion of the engineers, pointing at the structural resemblance between mind uploading and resurrection; transhumanists generally answer that a testable claim is not a creed.

DeitiesNo god, and no substitute enthroned — but the position a god occupies is not left entirely empty. Some transhumanists expect a superintelligence to end up with capacities traditionally described as divine, and argue about whether that is a hope or the central danger. Others regard the whole comparison as an embarrassment. The movement has no answer it agrees on, which is why deity_structure here reads none and the argument sits in the claims.

Founded1998 CE · England

FounderNick Bostrom and David Pearce, who founded the World Transhumanist Association

AfterlifeTo be abolished if possible. Cryonic suspension is an attempt to convert death into a pause; nothing is claimed about survival if the attempt fails.

TextsThe Transhumanist Declaration (1998, revised 2009) · Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (2014) · Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine (1957)

The map

Transhumanism’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →

1998 CE Transhumanism 2004 CE Terasem

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum Enter →

Ageing and death are problems, not conditions. The moral move is small and total: reclassify what everyone has always treated as the frame of life as a defect inside it, and the obligation to fix it follows from ordinary medical ethics. Go deeper — context →

Whether the transition kills us first. The movement contains both the people most eager to build a superintelligence and the people most alarmed about it, and frequently they are the same people. Bostrom wrote the declaration and then wrote Superintelligence. ⚖ contested within Go deeper — context →

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle Enter →

N Nick Bostrom — who wrote both documents. Co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association and co-author of the 1998 Declaration; author, sixteen years later, of the book that made existential risk from artificial intelligence a mainstream concern. Domain The argument for enhancement, and the argument against rushing itStanding Wrote both the movement's founding declaration and its most influential warning Meet them — context →

Rites & Ritual

what its people do — and when Enter →

Signing up to be frozen. It is paperwork, not a ceremony: membership, a life insurance policy assigned to the provider, and a bracelet so the standby team is called in time. It is nevertheless the one thing transhumanists do that costs money every month and marks them out. When Once in a lifetime, arranged years in advanceWho Individuals; a few thousand people worldwide have arrangements Go deeper — context →

Where next

the museum exit — every door leads deeper in

Terasem — Life is purposeful, death is optional, God is technological, love is essential. Christianity — 9 shared ideas, a different faith Hinduism — 8 shared ideas, a different faith Judaism — 8 shared ideas, a different faith Islam — 8 shared ideas, a different faith Branch Transhumanism — inherit everything, change what you must The library of ideas — what Transhumanism shares with every other faith A faith at random — somewhere you have never been