History & overview · every faith gets one
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.
The founding
Julian Huxley used the word in 1957 for the idea that the species might consciously transcend itself, meaning something closer to culture than to biotechnology. The organised movement dates from 1998, when Nick Bostrom and David Pearce founded the World Transhumanist Association and an international group of contributors drafted the Transhumanist Declaration; the association renamed itself Humanity+ and adopted a revised eight-point declaration in March 2009.
Its founding is bound to Nick Bostrom and David Pearce, who founded the World Transhumanist Association — 1998 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Material and open to intervention at every level, including the level of the intervener.
The divine. No 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..
Death and after. To be abolished if possible. Cryonic suspension is an attempt to convert death into a pause; nothing is claimed about survival if the attempt fails..
The line
descent is public here — where it came from, what left itBranches:
Terasem — Life is purposeful, death is optional, God is technological, love is essential.