How to Build a God
Welcome to Machine Life
They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently, whom your fathers had never dreaded.
— Deuteronomy 32:17 (ESV)
In June 2009, author Dr. Riccardo Campa, a professor of Sociology at Cracow University and the founder of the Italian Transhumanist Association, argued for a sort of doctrinal purity among those who wish to become gods:
The central Transhumanist idea of self-directed evolution can be coupled with different political, philosophical, and religious opinions. Accordingly, we have observed individuals and groups joining the movement from very different persuasions. On one hand such diversity may be an asset in terms of ideas and stimuli, but on the other hand it may involve a practical paralysis, especially when members give priority to their existing affiliations over their belonging to organized Transhumanism.[1]
Campa’s last sentence reveals a great deal about the so-called diversity of Transhumanist thought. In order to remove any philosophical disagreement and overcome this “paralysis,” it may be necessary to find a way to merge all religious persuasions into one—and promising eternal life through science might just provide such a point for agreement.
Unlike the “fitter families” programs of the early twentieth century, Transhumanism can reward its congregation with the Holy Grail: Live forever without the need for a mediator. Upgrade yourself and save yourself.
How? We combine ourselves with something beyond our species. We merge with machines.
Cognitive robotics is a new field that pursues the idea of recreating human minds in silica. The following is an excerpt from Mark O’Connell’s insightful book, To Be a Machine:
You are lying on an operating table, fully conscious, but rendered otherwise insensible, otherwise incapable of movement. A humanoid machine appears at your side, bowing to its task with ceremonial formality. With a brisk sequence of motions, the machine removes a large panel of bone from the rear of your cranium, before carefully laying its fingers, fine and delicate as a spider’s legs, on the viscid surface of your brain. You may be experiencing some misgivings about the procedure at this point. Put them aside, if you can.
You’re in pretty deep with this thing; there’s no backing out now. With their high-resolution microscopic receptors, the machine fingers scan the chemical structure of your brain, transferring the data to a powerful computer on the other side of the operating table. They are sinking further into your cerebral matter now, these fingers, scanning deeper and deeper layers of neurons, building a three-dimensional map of their endlessly complex interrelations, all the while creating code to model this activity in the computer’s hardware. As the work proceeds, another mechanical appendage—less delicate, less careful—removes the scanned material to a biological waste container for later disposal. This is material you will no longer be needing.
At some point, you become aware that you are no longer present in your body. You observe—with sadness, or horror, or detached curiosity—the diminishing spasms of that body on the operating table, the last useless convulsions of a discontinued meat.
The animal life is over now. The machine life has begun.[2]
O’Connell spent weeks traveling and talking with a variety of prominent Transhumanists before writing his informative book. While this scenario sounds like science fiction, it is exactly what specialists like Hans Moravec want to do in the very near future. Morevac has been fascinated by the idea of artificial life since his childhood, and he now pursues his dream as an adult, serving as an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
This is an excerpt from our 2024 book The Gates of Hell. If you want to own a copy, it’s available in paperback, as a Kindle e-book, and as an audiobook at Amazon and Audible.
In an interview, Moravec said this:
“Consider the human form. It clearly isn’t designed to be a scientist. Your mental capacity is extremely limited. You have to undergo all kinds of unnatural training to get your brain even half suited for this kind of work - and for that reason, it’s hard work. You live just long enough to start figuring things out before your brain starts deteriorating. And then, you die. But wouldn’t it be great, if you could enhance your abilities via artificial intelligence, and extend your lifespan, and improve on the human condition?”[3]
Dr. Raymond Kurzweil would agree with Merovac. In his book, The Singularity is Near, Google’s head of artificial intelligence research says this:
An emulation of the human brain running on an electronic system would run much faster than our biological brains. Although human brains benefit from massive parallelism (on the order of 100 trillion interneuronal connections, all potentially operating simultaneously), the rest-time of the connections is extremely slow compared to contemporary electronics.[4]
While on the one hand, computer programmers and futurists like Merovec and Kurzweil consider human brains worthy of emulation, they see us rather slow and limited. Despite this left-handed admiration, whole brain emulation, or WBE, has become a burgeoning new field, and companies are rushing to join the research. One such company is Carboncopies. Started by Dr. Randal Koene, the Carboncopies Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that provides support and coordination for researchers in the WBE field. Their “About Us” page says this:
Our machines are now able to think and plan in 15 dimensions, to process and respond to events in a universe at the micro- and nanosecond temporal scale. They can comfortably inhabit and travel through the vacuum of space. However, we ourselves cannot do those things and are therefore effectively shut out of those realities. In fact, we cannot even reliably and accurately remember things—our retrieved memories are constructed approximations. The machines we design are able to upgrade and advance. Outcomes and experience with a computer program can improve simply by running it on a better processor. Unfortunately, the biology of a brain is not equipped for back-ups or fundamental improvements.
In other words, Koene believes mankind, who is capable of inventing machines with mental and storage capacities beyond our own, will have to emulate our silicon children by performing whole brain simulations of ourselves. He wants to recreate man in the image of machine.
This goal is outlined in Dmitry Itskov’s 2045 Initiative, whose stated aim is to achieve transcendence by uploading a human mind into an eternal avatar. This project foresees four stages to this transformation:
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android “avatars” controlled by a “brain-computer” interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars” will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, “avatar”, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.[8]
“Substance-independent minds” is a more scientific-sounding way of describing the “hologram-like avatar” into which Itskov hopes to transfer human minds by the year 2045,[7] effectively using as-yet uninvented technology to transform humans into spirit beings. Having read 1 Corinthians 15, we can assure you that if you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as Lord, that transformation is already in your future—and you won’t have to worry about your software glitching or being hacked.
Obviously, Itskov’s roadmap is either behind in its goals, or else our corporate media news sources are letting us down. We suspect it’s a little bit of both. Surely, there’s a reason why Ray Kurzweil has revised his dream of singularity by 2045 to one achieved as early as 2029.
Might it be that humanity is already being changed? And if so, who’s designing the “upgrade”?
[1] Riccardo Campa, “Toward a Transhumanist Politics.” Re-Public. https://web.archive.org/web/20090628054257/http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=837, retrieved 3/3/24.
[2] Mark O’Connell, “‘Your animal life is over. Machine life has begun.’ The road to immortality.” The Guardian, March 25, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/mar/25/animal-life-is-over-machine-life-has-begun-road-to-immortality, retrieved 3/3/24.
[3] Makena Kelly, “Superhumanism.” Wired, Oct. 1, 1995, https://www.wired.com/1995/10/moravec/, retrieved 3/3/24.
[4] Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
[5] https://carboncopies.org/mission/, retrieved 3/3/24.
[6] “About Us.” 2045 Initiative, July 17, 2012. http://2045.com/about/, retrieved 3/3/24.
[7] That goal is put in exactly those words in a graphic still available at the home page of the 2045 Initiative, 2045.com.
[8] “About Us.” 2045 Initiative, July 17, 2012. http://2045.com/about/, retrieved 3/3/24.