Nerdvana
The Transhumanist dream
Speaking of minds, before you’re uploaded, Transhumanists want you to improve your thinking abilities. This leads us to cognitive enhancement.
One way to accomplish this is with chemicals. Caffeine is a mild nootropic, but stronger pills, powders, and policies are on the rise. Students, professionals, and even homemakers who are searching for that edge can find numerous products sold online and in “health food” stores. There are Vitamin B complexes, Ginseng, Co-Q10—all claiming to increase energy levels and blood flow.
Other nootropics act on neurotransmitters like serotonin, glutamate, and dopamine. Some interact with neuroreceptors and synapses to enhance neurotransmitter uptake; still others claim to alter brainwaves. These are similar in mechanism of action to prescription drugs like Prozac and Ambien, which can lead to altered brain chemistry with dangerous side effects.[1]
However, a new approach is being discussed that would alter the neuron at the nuclear level, through genetics. If you read the scientific literature, the promise usually focuses on curing or treating cognitive impairment, such as in the case of Alzheimers. Step one in these proposed therapies is to screen for genetic defects that would lead to a predisposition for cognitive malfunction. This is reminiscent of eugenics because screening inevitably requires an action.
Like an algorithm, the stated formula is “if this, then what?” If the newborn or developing embryo has a perceived defect in his or her genes, then do we repair it or simply scrap the growing child and start again? What about adults with defects? Do we repair them, or simply sterilize them so they cannot reproduce? This utilitarian approach to children may sound shocking, or at least far-fetched, but it’s happening now. Ninety percent of British children diagnosed in the womb with Down’s syndrome are aborted,[2] and nearly all the Down’s babies in Iceland never see the light of day.[3]
As society moves forward into what Aldous Huxley described in his 1931 dystopian novel Brave New World, we will continue to stratify into castes, where births are regulated and artificial wombs—already becoming a possibility—“hatch” humans as five basic types, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Alphas and Betas are at the top of the caste system and perform the more intellectual jobs. The lower three castes perform menial jobs. As a result, these are usually clones—however, in this day and age, these jobs would likely go to robots.
Huxley claimed his book was a response to H. G. Wells’s Utopian novel Men Like Gods about a parallel world of superior humans who live in peace without disease or infirmity. In a way, Wells envisioned the Transhuman condition as positive, while Huxley revealed the seamy underbelly of the egalitarian dream. Simply upgrading humans does not negate the reality of sin.
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.
The more power a thinking machine possesses—that is, humans who’ve been transitioned into robotic or synthetic bodies—the greater opportunities to sin and oppress those we deem lower than ourselves.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, the privileged alpha and beta classes had superior intellect. In the ceaseless drive towards human improvement and self-directed evolution, unlocking the potential of the human brain has become a worldwide goal.
In April 2013, the US announced the Brain Initiative and soon after in October 2013, the European Union announced the Human Brain Project. Both programs hope to map the entire human brain and its many associated neurons, often referred to as the connectome. One of the reasons given is to combat neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s. A lofty goal indeed, but there is another aspect to the research that is slowly emerging into daylight. This is way more than just finding cures for organic disease. This is about upgrading. Mapping the connectome is step one in creating an in silica version of you. It is step one to Project Avatar.
And so we’re back to artificial intelligence; that is, creating sentient computer programs—in our own image. Transhumanists like Dr. Raymond Kurzweil see in silica substrates as a natural extension of human evolution. Kurzweil actually created a “replicant” of his father, who died when Kurzweil was 22 (he’s 76 as of this writing), by using all the information he was able to glean about him and feeding those attributes into a computer program built on a neural net architecture, based upon the connectome model of the human brain.[4]
His next goal, Kurzweil says, is to bring his father back to life using nanotechnology and DNA harvested from his father’s remains. This is both disturbing and tragic—disturbing because of the ethical implications, and tragic because it suggests that Dr. Kurzweil has been so consumed with grief by his father’s death more than half a century ago that he’s devoted much, if not all, of his adult life to find a way to bring his father back from the dead.
It also implies that Kurzweil, despite his acknowledged brilliance, does not possess the blessed assurance of the followers of Jesus Christ, whose literal, bodily resurrection, attested by more than five hundred eyewitnesses,[5] assures us that we will have eternal, incorruptible bodies that won’t be vulnerable to hardware failures or software errors.
But Kurzweil’s goal begs a question: Assuming the technology can be developed to make it a reality, what spirit will inhabit the flesh-and-nanobot shell he creates? When a child is conceived when a sperm fertilizes an egg, something happens that science can’t explain. Beyond the miracle of a new life coming into being is the mystery behind the creation of a new mind. It’s something more than the just neural links that form a connectome; there is a spiritual aspect to the creation of new life. Does a body require a spirit to animate its flesh? If so, where does the spirit originate? If one cannot “build” a spirit, are disembodied spirits—demons—waiting for an opportunity to occupy these empty, artificial humans?
Although Transhumanists may argue that the human mind is “just nature’s first quick and dirty way to compute with meat,”[6] they know there’s much more to it than that. Kurzweil himself sees the arc of history leading inevitably toward the merger of technology and human intelligence, culminating in the awakening of the Universe—significantly, spelled with a capital “u”—and the merger of human-machine hybrids with this newborn superintelligence.[7] That is a religious belief founded on faith in silicon. (The concept of a spiritual merger with a cosmic mainframe is very Eastern. Call it Nerdvana.)
Science is determined to conquer death by inserting our very essence into what they overconfidently promise will be an everlasting, resurrection machine. But why stop there? If the mind can be uploaded, then why not copy it, as Ray Kurzweil hopes to do with his father? Create multiple Beethovens, Mozarts, and Shakespeares. But also risk the proliferation of multiple Mussolinis, Neros, and Hitlers—or worse.
If what’s created are “meat suits” for the spirits of the long-dead giants of Noah’s day, then the gates of hell will be thrown open and a demonic horde loosed on an unsuspecting and unprepared world.
In fact, that may be the goal of the Fallen. Remember that the prophesied army of Gog appears to include “Travelers,”[8] the term used by Canaanites for the demonic spirits of the Rephaim.[9] If we’re right about that, then the Antichrist will lead an army of the evil dead to the battle of Armageddon—making it the ultimate zombie apocalypse.
The question is this: Where will the Travelers get their “meat suits”?
[1] Kareem Yasmin, “The Weirdest Things That Happened When I Took Ambien.” Healthline, Aug. 30, 2018. https://www.healthline.com/health/side-effects-of-taking-ambien, retrieved 3/4/24.
[2] Allison Gee, “A world without Down’s syndrome?” BBC News, Sept. 29, 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37500189, retrieved 3/4/24.
[3] Julian Quinones and Arijeta Lajka, “‘What kind of society do you want to live in?’: Inside the country where Down syndrome is disappearing.” CBS News, Aug. 15, 2017. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/down-syndrome-iceland/, retrieved 3/4/24.
[4] Rob Waugh, “‘I actually had a conversation with Dad’: The people using AI to bring back dead relatives - including a plan to harvest DNA from graves to build new clone bodies.” Daily Mail, Oct. 22, 2023, retrieved 3/4/24.
[5] 1 Corinthians 15:6.
[6] Bart Kosko, “Heaven in a Chip.” Free Inquiry 15 (1994), p. 37.
[7] Ray Kurzweil, “The Six Epochs of Technology Evolution.” Big Think, Sept. 20, 2011. https://bigthink.com/guest-thinkers/ray-kurzweil-the-six-epochs-of-technology-evolution/, retrieved 3/5/24.
[8] Ezekiel 39:11.
[9] Klaas Spronk, “Travellers,” ed. by Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Leiden; Boston; Köln; Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Brill; Eerdmans, 1999), p. 876.