Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy

My 1989 essay with current thoughts

Coming up soon: A piece on how the world is getter better overall and why people have a falsely negative view. Also, part 3 of True Transhumanism. I also plan to write about misconceptions about life expectancy and about effective accelerationism.

Over on the Biostasis Times Substack I wrote: Cryonics 101: Conveying the Basic Ideas.

If you prefer video, I discussed this topic with Tim Ventura on his podcast.

You might also want to check out the Humanity+ Academy discussion from October 27, 2023, which brought me together with Natasha Vita-More, Nell Watson, Joe Allen (author of Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity).

---

I’m not counting this as part of my “true transhumanism” series, although I easily could. A surprising number of people think that transhumanism started in the 21^st century. The essay that follows appeared in Extropy: Vaccine for Future Shock #6 in the summer of 1990, although I wrote it in 1989. Although I had been setting forth transhumanism at least since the start of Extropy magazine in 1988, this was the first essay to explicitly define transhumanism and to place it in the context of other worldviews humans use to make sense of life, the universe, and everything.

Tom and I published this in our Extropy magazine in 1990 – a year in which we were both working on graduate degrees in philosophy at the University of Southern California. Of course it was California. Where else, in the 1980s?

It is becoming increasingly difficult to understand why California seemed to represent the future but, back then, it shined as a place of new technologies, fresh and optimistic ideas, and as the potential launching pad for humanity. Timothy Leary had mapped out the westward march of the pro-future thinkers, ending up temporarily on the west coast of the United States, but soon to blast out into space. The spaceward-ho part got stuck for a long time and has only recently revived, thanks to private enterprise and not on the west coast.

Back in the mid-1980s when I was working on my degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford University in England, Europe was miserable and backward and California was the place to which future-positive thinkers were drawn and seduced and bribed with offers of free graduate school. When tech industry and culture writers started covering extropianism and transhumanism in the 1990s, they tagged it “the California Ideology”.

In 2023, some critics of transhumanist thinking are lumping together a range of worldviews into a slightly ugly acronym, TESCREAL – transhumanism, extropianism, Singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. These ideas, despite significant differences between them, are all strongly rooted in O.G. transhumanism from the 1980s and ‘90s. This 1989 essay conveys some of the deeper philosophical and humanistic ideas behind transhumanism.

When this essays appeared, transhumanism was not yet a “thing”. Once the intellectual movement had built up a head of steam, researchers found precursors and even the use of the term in earlier years (see my introductory essay in The Transhumanist Reader) but these writings did not lay out a full, self-conscious philosophy of life.

My early (and continued) writing about the philosophy of transhumanism and my penchant for writing declarations and principles[1] is what partly what led to my being described as “the father of transhumanism”. Being a philosopher by professional training put me in a good position to figure out a philosophy of life suited to the present and future. Most contemporary philosophers focus on tiny areas of the discipline, digging deep into recondite and obscure lines of thought. From the start, my attraction to philosophy came from my interest in forming a worldview, an understanding of what our purpose in life is or could be, and in forming guiding principles.

Introduction

The first full statement of transhumanism in its contemporary and complete form appeared in 1990. The Extropian Principles stated transhumanist values and goals while the present essay puts transhumanism in the context of humanism and puts it in counterpoint to religion. These two complementary essays provide a good early statement of transhumanism.

At the time I wrote this essay, I had recently got my master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Southern California and was in the very early stages of working on my doctorate. It had been over a decade since I lost the remnants of early religious beliefs. “Experiments” might be a more accurate term for my interest in religion and the occult from the ages of 11 to 15. I tried out Christianity, reincarnation, the Kabbalah, the Rosicrucians, and various other mystical and religious frameworks.

I was 15 or possibly 16 when I definitely left behind religious belief, as I developed critical thinking skills. Both my older half-brothers had become Christian fundamentalists so this led to some uncomfortable family discussions. One Christmas Day, my brother Martin told me that I was going to Hell because I did not believe that Jesus Christ was my savior. (Many years later he retracted that claim.)

A case could be made that my early explorations of religion and mysticism reflected a drive for transcendence. When religion couldn’t deliver the goods, science and technology backed by philosophy had to take over. This particular statement of transhumanism clearly shows the personal origin and the philosophical context of religion and humanism. I studied Philosophy of Religion at Oxford University, first under the eminent Prof. Richard Swinburne, and went on to teach the subject during and after graduate school. Religion now seems seriously in error but I acknowledged the role of religion and that rational alternatives were needed.

Humanism had been a philosophical alternative to religion in terms of providing a framework of meaningfulness. The pioneering humanist, Paul Kurtz, coined a term to denote positive and life-affirming but non-religious philosophies of life: Eupraxophy. Kurtz soon changed this to the even less elegant “eupraxosophy”. I have changed the text of this essay to match the later version.

Humanism was not enough. As I wrote in this piece: “No philosophy of life can be truly satisfying which glorifies the advance of intelligent beings and yet which condemns each and every individual to rot into nothingness.” “The abolition of aging and, finally, all causes of death, is essential to any philosophy of optimism and transcendence relevant to the individual.” I specifically addressed the humanists in my 1994 article, “On Becoming Posthuman.”

TLDR notice: If you want to skip the contextual discussion of religion, humanism, and nihilism you can jump to the last section: “Transhumanism: Meaning as Perpetual Transcendence of Limits.”

Corrections and reservations

At one point in this essay, I wrote: “Religion is most effective in bolstering the psychologically weak – those who find life a burden”. “Psychologically weak” is unduly harsh and reflects my rebellion against religion in my earlier years. I continue to believe that people seize on religion to provide easy answers and to reassure them as to the purpose of their lives and how to live them. Such people may be psychologically “weaker” in finding that need or desire hard to resist. That does not mean that they are necessarily more desperate for irrational answers to the big questions than non-religious people. Even people who do not consider themselves religious may have magical, dogmatic, or faith-based thinking. You can see this especially clearly in the form of Marxism or the increasingly common apocalyptic, anti-human forms of environmentalism.

I maintain the not-terribly controversial view that religion acts as a form of social control and domination. I would add that Christianity has also sometimes acted as a defense against authority and strengthened the idea of individual liberty by tying it to the individual soul. Religion has occasionally provided a rival authority rather than a collaborative one. The relationship between religion (even limited to Christianity) and rebellion. The Protestants broke the Catholic monopoly control of Christianity. But Protestant theology emphasized irrationalism whereas the Catholic Church at least sometimes remembered its tradition steeped in Aristotle and Aquinas. Protestantism was born in rebellion but soon became an equally restrictive system, often combining with political power in Europe.

In note 23 I say that Extropians seek immortality and not just extended life. Today, I would replace “immortality” with something less elegant but more accurate: “life for as long as we choose”, “indefinite lifespan”. The threat of death for the meaningfulness of life is lessened the farther away death lies. It remains a negative for meaningfulness but, when sufficiently remote, is of minor consequence.

Contemporary physics and cosmology suggest that a universe literally endless in time is not possible (at least, not one that can support expanding life) and that literal immortality is therefore not feasible. The difference between, say, 100,000,000,000 years and forever may seem trivial to us but it is an infinitely large difference. Given the tremendous amount of time that lies ahead of us, I am going to reserve judgment on literal immortality and wait to see if the physics of the future allows some loophole to the heat death or the Big Crunch. 

---

Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy — the essay

Originally published in Extropy #6, Summer 1990. Revised June 1994 and in 1996.

Religion, Eupraxosophy, and Transhumanism

Humanity is in the early stages of a period of explosive expansion in knowledge, freedom, intelligence, lifespan, and wisdom. Yet our species persists in old conceptual structures and processes which act as a drag on progress. One of the worst is religious thinking.

In this essay I will show how religion acts as an entropic force, standing against our advancement into transhumanity and our future as posthumans. At the same time I will acknowledge the necessary and positive role that religions have played in giving meaning and structure to our lives. The alternative to religion is not a despairing nihilism, nor a sterile scientism, but transhumanism. Humanism, while a major step in the right direction, contains too many outdated values and ideas. Extropianism – the principal form of transhumanism – moves beyond humanism, focusing on our evolutionary future.

Before launching the discussion it will be helpful to distinguish between the notions of religion, humanism, transhumanism, posthuman, eupraxosophy¹, and Extropianism.

The core of any religion consists of faith and worship. Other elements typical to religions are beliefs in supernatural forces, ceremony, a comprehensive view of life, and a moral theory or rule book. Generally religions hold that there is a god or gods which give our lives meaning by assigning us a role in a grand plan created and controlled by external supernatural forces. Our assigned function is to obey and praise these forces or entities. However, the essence of religion and religious styles of thinking is faith and worship rather than any belief in a god.

A eupraxosophy, a non-religious philosophy of life, plays a similar memetic role in that it is concerned to create or increase meaningfulness through a philosophical framework. In contrast to religion, eupraxophies are opposed to faith, dogmatism, ideological authoritarianism, and stagnation.

The concept of eupraxosophy encompasses within it humanism, transhumanism (including Extropianism), and possible a future posthumanism. Humanism is a eupraxosophy or philosophy of life that rejects deities, faith, and worship, instead basing a view of values and meaningfulness on the nature and potentials of humans within a rational and scientific framework. Transhumanism is a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition. Transhumanism shares many elements of humanism, including a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life rather than in some supernatural “afterlife”.

Transhumanism differs from humanism in recognizing and anticipating the radical alterations in the nature and possibilities of our lives resulting from various sciences and technologies such as neuroscience and neuropharmacology, life extension, nanotechnology, artificial ultraintelligence, and space habitation, combined with a rational philosophy and value system.

Finally, Extropianism is the foremost version of transhumanism. While all transhumanists as such will agree on many overall goals, they may differ over the principles that will get us to a posthuman stage. The philosophy of Extropianism affirms the values of Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, and Intelligent Technology, and Spontaneous Order.²

Why Does Religion Persist?

Many people find it puzzling and frustrating that religion has persisted despite enormous advances in scientific understanding. In order to see why this has been the case and what the future holds for religion, we need to determine the causes of religion³. I suggest that there are four basic causes: Religion is (a) a pre-scientific system of explanation and technology; (b) a source of meaning, direction, and emotional expression in life; (c) a means of social control; (d) a means of coping with uncertainty and death. I will comment on (c) and (d) briefly since I want to focus on (a) and (b).

SOCIAL CONTROL: Understanding religion as a form of social control and domination probably has little value as an explanation of its origin since religious belief had to exist before it could be used to this end. But it is plausible to think that religion has been fostered and developed by priests and state authorities in order to consolidate power over their subjects. If you can convince people that your authority derives from God or gods you will be in a stronger position than a merely secular authority⁴. This is illustrated by the historical record which shows that state authority and religious authority have been held in the same persons; this is still true in many less developed cultures, such as that of Iran. The entropic forces of religion and `state’ have synergistically boosted one another. For instance, `the divine right of kings’ means that King could do no wrong in law (or morals). Derived from this principle is the current policy of immunity of government agents in performing their functions.

Marx and Engels took essentially this view. They saw religion as part of an ideology that rationalized the position of the ruling class, teaching subjects the virtues of meekness, humility, obedience, non-resistance, and non-retaliation. They saw this as inevitable until social conditions resulting in alienation and unhappiness were changed, making religion unnecessary as an “opium of the people”. While there is some truth in this view, it ignores the radical and disrupting nature of some religious movements and undervalues the role that religions have sometimes played in undermining statist powers. Religion has occasionally provided a rival authority rather than a collaborative one.

DEALING WITH DEATH AND UNCERTAINTY: One of the great tasks before us, as transhumanists, is the reengineering of our consciousness to do away with the powerful desire for certainty of a dogmatic kind. Most humans feel that they cannot bear to be wrong. They fear an unknown future. They readily give up intellectual and emotion independence in favor of faith in another person, whether human or supernatural myth.

Humans are also driven to the comforts of religious dogma by the terrible fact of death. Some transhumanists expect religion to automatically decline as technological progress accelerates. Unfortunately, the faster technology and society changes, the greater the uncertainty in people’s lives, so the greater the appeal of religion in all its forms. (Hence the takeover by National Socialism and communism at times of great upheaval.) Scientific and technological progress alone will not abolish religious thinking. Transhumanist philosophies, especially immortalist philosophies such as Extropianism, will be vital to intellectual and emotional progress.⁵

EXPLANATION AND TECHNOLOGY: Humans (and transhumans) are marked by a persistent desire to understand and control their environment and experience. Before the development of the scientific method, deductive and inductive logic, game theory, sophisticated epistemic principles and so on, humans resorted to superficial causal explanations based on observation for common phenomena, and theistic explanation for unusual events.⁶ Deities were invoked to explain unusual or destructive phenomena, and to try to provide a comforting model of the uncertainties and uncontrollable events in life. Storms, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, epidemics, and madness could not be tolerated without some belief about their cause. In the absence of scientific explanation a religious or theistic explanation was almost inevitable.

Along with pre-scientific attempts at understanding came a crude attempt at a technology. A tension is evident here: On the one hand religions have frequently declared events to be determined by a divine plan and so have held attempts at changing things to be futile (this is common in Eastern religions, as well as other religions involving predestination). On the other hand, religions have offered certain limited and carefully circumscribed means of changing and controlling events, such as through prayer, ritual, and magic. The overall result has been entropic and anti-progressive since religious technology is ineffective (with the occasional exception of psychosomatic effects).

The role of religion in providing explanations, however poor, of human life and its environment has given way over time to the superior resources of empirical science. Science has been able to explain an enormous variety of phenomena, both commonplace and unusual. Protestations by theists that science has not and cannot explain the origin of life, the origin of the universe, or the nature of consciousness are increasingly ridiculous as we continue to learn and discover.⁷

An objection to this view of the origin and strength of religion is that it is unclear why religion is persisting and even growing as scientific triumphs abound. This objection makes two mistakes, however. First, as I am showing, there are other sustaining causes of religion that do not entirely or closely depend on the development of science. Second, the apparent strength and resurgence of religion is, I believe, an illusion generated from a limited perspective.⁸ Certainly religion is not declining rapidly and is continually taking new forms (such as New Age mysticism) but seen over a span of decades and centuries the trend is clear enough. Late twentieth century religion is very much less powerful than religion in the Middle Ages. In the past religion dominated all aspects of life and the idea of a separation of Church and state would have been considered incomprehensible and wicked.

The illusion is strong in North America, where TV evangelists have benefited from modern media exposure. A higher and louder profile does not necessarily mean that religion is actually more powerful. Europeans see the decline of religion more clearly. The numbers of people attending churches, and the strength of religious conviction have declined drastically. It is a notorious fact that a high percentage of priests and ministers themselves have weak or non-existent beliefs.

As science continues to squeeze out religion from its role in explanation, this factor in the persistence of religion will weaken. Just as important as the development of science in weakening religion is the scientific education of the population – something that is extremely poor in our monopolized and primitive state schools.⁹ Yes, as I noted earlier, religion could persist indefinitely unless we can spread transhumanist perspectives widely.

MEANING AND EMOTION: For psychological health and strength humans need to have metaphysical and existential beliefs capable of endowing their lives with a sense of meaningfulness. Religion does a fairly effective job at this, especially considering the falsity of its tenets. Religion is most effective in bolstering the psychologically weak – those who find life a burden: “You have a friend in Jesus”. So long as you obey the rules and believe you will be rewarded, you needn’t be too concerned at being a loser. Religion operates as a philosophical Band-Aid, sheltering weak selves, but is poor at positively promoting individual and social evolution. In being part of another’s grand plan one gains the illusion of meaningfulness, even if it is the kind of meaningfulness the peasant felt under feudalism.¹⁰

By providing a complexly structured myth, religions add drama to life, provide usable moral categories, and allow the expression of emotions unique to humans, such as metaphysical joy, love of abstract principle, and identification with deep values outside the self. One of the most gripping of any religion’s appeals is its ability to allow the feeling and expression of these powerful and transcendent emotions. An isolated self can neither express itself nor actualize and relate to broad values. By “letting in the holy spirit” or some other link to a divine being or force, one steps beyond the confines of one’s self as it is and connects into a meaningful condition. This feature of religious belief is related to its explanatory role since the being or forces which provide the meaningful structure also have important effects—such as creating, sustaining, structuring, and destroying humanity, the planet or the universe.

Ludwig Feuerbach¹¹ explained how religion conceives “God” and gods in anthropocentric terms. “Man—this is the mystery of religion—projects his being onto objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself.” (p.29). Feuerbach characterizes God as the self-consciousness of man freed from all discordant elements. Looking beyond ourselves as we are is a good thing, but externalizing our values is both alienating and an abdication of responsibility. As I will explain below, transhumanism focuses not on an external state of current perfection (as imagined by us with our near-primitive minds) but on a internalized process of growth and expansion taking us into the future.¹²

As a strategy (generally unconscious) to create meaningfulness, religion is a failure. This is only partly because it is based on ignorance and rejection of evidence and rationality. Even if reality contained the entities and forces claimed to exist, any remotely objective meaning would be absent.¹³ What kind of role in a divine plan could endow us with meaning? Being a trivial element of a plan would not satisfy us. We want to be near the center of the plan and to play an important and positive role. “If the cosmic role of human beings was to provide a negative lesson to some others (“don’t act like them”) or to provide needed food to intergalactic travelers who were important, this would not suit our aspirations. The role should focus on aspects of ourselves that we prize or are proud of, and it should use these in ways connected with the reasons why we prize them.” (Nozick. p.586-7).

Even this would not be sufficient. Fulfilling our role in the plan might require our voluntary compliance, or it might be imposed on us. If it is our choice, we may have no good reason to cooperate. In either case it’s unclear how fitting into the plan could give us meaning. Even if it did give us meaning it may not be good for us. A further problem arises when we ask what it is that gives God’s purposes meaningfulness; I refer the reader to Nozick for a tale concerning God’s crisis of meaningfulness.

Religion as Entropic

The urgency of the need to replace religions with other types of meaning-fostering system is all the more evident when we think of the inherent irrationalism of religion and its entropic retardation of progress.¹⁴ As I have noted, essential to religion is faith. This does not mean a rational, pragmatic decision to adopt a hypothesis; faith, in the pertinent sense, means a fixed belief which persists in the face of contrary evidence. As I stressed in my “In Praise of the Devil” (Extropy #4, 1989), hostility to reason may be explicit (as in Luther) or it may be revealed only after some probing of beliefs. This is true not only of traditional religions such as Christianity and Islam, and their offshoots such as Mormonism, but also of the diverse variants on New Age mysticism. Those who believe in astrology, crystals, angelic forces, and guiding aliens are not interested in evidence or plausibility.

Irrationality, the rejection of our best means of cognition, is necessarily dangerous and entropic. Entropy—the loss of order, information, and usable energy, is promoted by faith. Extropic values of increasing intelligence, freedom, enjoyment, longevity, and expansion can only be achieved by the most scrupulous employment of reason, science, logic, and critical thinking.

Apart from subverting extropic progress, the irrational faith of religion encourages an attitude of resignation. Why bother to try to improve one’s lot if it is “God’s Will” or “The Cosmic Plan”? On the one hand believers cannot take badness and evil seriously: Given the existence of perfect goodness and power, the bad aspects of life must be illusory, or unimportant compared to the afterlife. On the other hand, religious beliefs are usually accepted because of the person’s pessimistic, hopeless view of the human situation (or their personal condition). The surface contradiction is eliminated when we see that the overall view is of a tragic human condition made bearable by a separate realm of divinity, salvation, and paradise.

Where religion offers faith in the invisible and unknowable, Extropian transhumanism embodies the extropic principle of dynamic optimism. Unlike faith’s unquestioning belief in a superior realm to be bestowed on us through divine agency, dynamic optimism is an internally generated motivation for progress. It an attitude that looks at evidence, trends, and capacities, but goes beyond them (not against them) in setting inspiring goals in order to empower us to move forward, upward, and outward. It says (literally!): “Never say die”. Our goals and direction for the future are not rigidly determined by what we think we know now, since what we understand and what we can accomplish increases daily. Dynamic optimism makes full use of our current understanding and abilities and directs us to move beyond them. The Extropian rejects the common culture of negativity, the focus on negatives, the defense of stagnation and tradition, and advocates a surging forward into a bright future.¹⁵

The extropic striving for something better than what we have exists in religion in an irrationalist-fantasy form, in which a superior existence is given to us by a divine force, an existence only truly accessible after our physical death and decay. Locating “Paradise” in another realm removes from us the necessity and point of taking responsibility for our condition by using reason and technology to transform it. Sometimes Paradise is located (perhaps temporarily) in this world, but it will be brought about by divine power and not by our own efforts. Religion says we need not and should seek physical immortality through life extension, biostasis and so on, since we are already guaranteed these in the afterlife.

The Christian notion of salvation by the act of Jesus, rather than through our own restitution for wrongs and our self-transformation, can similarly result in moral hazard. Religion justifies complacency and stagnation. The religionist has no answer to the extropic challenge put by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “I teach you the overman. Man is something that is to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”

Nihilism

These defects are easy to overlook when it seems that the alternative is nihilism¹⁶ – a belief in the absence of meaning and purpose. The nihilist view, as put by Peter Atkins¹⁷ holds that “At root there is only corruption and the unstemmable tide of chaos.” Nihilism says that there is no truth about the way things are; the world is valueless and purposeless. As Hans Kung puts it, nihilism represents itself “as insight into the nothingness, contradictoriness, meaninglessness, worthlessness, of reality.”¹⁸

I will not explain what’s wrong with nihilism in detail here.¹⁹ I agree with Nietzsche (in The Will to Power) that nihilism is only a transitional stage resulting from the breakdown of an erroneous interpretation of the world. We now have plenty of resources to leave nihilism behind, affirming a positive (but continually evolving) value-perspective.

Briefly, to justify the assumption that there is truth to be discovered requires only a critical rationalism—that is, a pragmatic and fallibilistic, but optimistic empiricism. If there are regularities then our best strategy for discovering them is a fallibilist but optimistic empiricism.

A reply to nihilism about value is more involved, but essentially involves the observation that we are faced with choices, alternatives, and have conflicting desires that call for ethical principles. There is no intrinsic value built into the universe. Our situation as living, conscious beings faced with choices demands that we adopt and continually refine ethical principles. Rational values must be practical. Practical values are those conducive to each individual’s survival and flourishing. Given the objective existence of reality, and the existing nature of human or transhuman beings at any point in time, there will be objective (not intrinsic) values: those values that are actually conducive to our flourishing.

Transhumanism: Meaning as Perpetual Transcendence of Limits

Now that we understand the functions of religion, we can see that a narrow scientism will not succeed in replacing it. A deeply value-laden, yet open and critical system (or systems) will be necessary to dislodge virulent religious memes. The growth of humanism over the decades has begun this job, but now it is time to utilize the more inclusive and memetically attractive option of transhumanism.²⁰

The Extropian philosophy is the most developed form of transhumanism.²¹ It includes a broad metaphysical perspective on the development, direction, goal, and value of life and consciousness. It goes beyond humanism by peering into the future in order to better understand our possibilities. As we move forward through time our understanding of our immense potentials will evolve; there can be no final, ultimate, unalterable philosophy of life. Dogma has no place within transhumanism. Extropianism and other forms of transhumanism, if they are to be true futurist philosophies, must be flexible and ready to reconfigure into higher forms. Balancing this should be a resistance to change for the sake of novelty: transhumanism, if it is to guide us, cannot involve a pervasive skepticism. Truth, once found and expounded, should not be quickly jettisoned merely for newness.

Extropian transhumanism offers an optimistic, vital, and dynamic philosophy of life. We behold a life of unlimited growth and possibility with excitement and joy. We seek to void all limits to life, intelligence, freedom, knowledge, and happiness. Science, technology, and reason must be harnessed to our extropic values to abolish the greatest evil: death. Death does not stop the progress of intelligent beings considered collectively, but it obliterates the individual. No philosophy of life can be truly satisfying which glorifies the advance of intelligent beings and yet which condemns each and every individual to rot into nothingness. Each of us seeks growth and the transcendence of our current forms and limitations. The abolition of aging and, finally, all causes of death, is essential to any philosophy of optimism and transcendence relevant to the individual.

Humans have tried to imbue their lives with a fuller sense of meaning by a belief in the possibility of connecting with a higher realm, by transcending their limitations and merging with or at least communing with the Infinite and Eternal. Apart from the sheer falsity and irrationality of religion it has had the unfortunate consequence (identified by Ludwig Feuerbach) of debasing humanity. By inventing a God or gods and elevating them above us, by making external divinity the source of meaning and value, and by abasing ourselves before these higher powers, we have stifled our own emerging sense of personal value. We can look up while on our knees, but we cannot walk forward.

The Extropian philosophy does not look outside us to a superior alien force for inspiration. Instead it looks inside us and beyond us, projecting forward to a brilliant vision of our future. Our goal is not God, it is the continuation of the process of improvement and transformation of ourselves into ever higher forms. We will outgrow our current interests, bodies, minds, and forms of social organization. This process of expansion and transcendence is the fountainhead of meaningfulness.

What is meaningfulness and why is the extropian philosophy of transhumanism especially effective at nurturing and feeding it?²² A static life, one which is closed up within itself and never seeks new values, never grows, never explores, is a life lacking meaning. If the universe were controlled by a malevolent being who frustrated all of your plans even before they could move you forward, you would be unable to connect with anything beyond your current condition. Even if you were free to plan and act, your life would lack much meaning if your long term plans reached no further than current narrow concerns (such as the pursuit of immediate gratification and the conditions for its continuance).

It will be clear why death undercuts meaning. The involuntary termination of life limits the ways of and extent to which you can connect your life to other values. People seek meaning by connecting with many different things and causes: Political and social causes of all kinds, having children, seeking beauty or knowledge, relationships with others, and self-development. We worry about lack of meaning when we ask ourselves “Is this all it comes to?”, “Is it merely this?”. We find more meaning as we realize the connections of our concerns to broader values, and as we become more intensely involved in these transcendent concerns.

No matter how broad the field of value we connect our lives to, we can intellectually step outside that field and ask ourselves “what does that come to? What does that mean?”. Even if the values we link to are themselves extremely broad and important it seems we can always stand outside that system of meaning and be concerned about its adequacy or its ultimate meaningfulness. The wider the field of the meaning- relations the more difficult and strained will be this questioning.²³

If, no matter how wide the realm with which we connect ourselves and our purposes, there is always a wider context from which to question meaning, perhaps what we require is a field of meaning that is unlimited and outside of which we cannot stand.²⁴ As Robert Nozick notes, “The intellectual life seems to offer one route across all limits: there is nothing that cannot be thought of, theorized about, pondered.”(597) However, though thinking can link us to everything, it is only one particular type of link. A meaningful life will involve more than simply abstract consideration of values.

Meaning involves transcending limits but transcending limits to connect with something trivial will not serve to provide meaning. For the transcendence of limits to bestow meaning, what we connect with must be valuable. The meaning of a life will be the structure of value with which it connects. If value is organic unity or a certain internal ordering,²⁵ the transcendence of limits involved in meaningfulness requires the breaking up of old orders, the demolition of stagnant unities. On one view (which Nozick identifies as the classicist) the point of transcending limits is to reach ever higher levels of value. The goal is the unifications, the new levels of value and ordering. An alternative view (the romanticist) locates the goal of the process in the destruction of the unities.

We need not choose between these views. Neither the construction of new orderings and unities nor their transcendence alone is what matters. The importance lies in the process of ordering-and-transcendence. The value of the process is in its alternating unification and transcendence. This alternation alone will not suffice; if the alternation was akin to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, or Sisyphus’ endlessly repetitive task, it would quite meaningless. The process of alternately creating and breaking organic structures can be seen as meaningful if it has direction.

This is the core of the Extropian approach to meaningfulness: Life and intelligence must never stagnate; it must re-order, transform, and transcend its limits in an unlimited progressive process. Our goal is the exuberant and dynamic continuation of this unlimited process, not the attainment of some final supposedly unlimited condition. The goal of religion is communion with, or merely serving, God—a being superior to us. The Extropian goal is our own expansion and progress without end. Humanity must not stagnate—to go backwards to a primitive life, or to halt our burgeoning move forward, upward, outward, would be a betrayal of the dynamic inherent in life and consciousness. We must progress on to transhumanity and beyond into a posthuman stage that we can barely glimpse.

God was a primitive notion invented by primitive people, people only just beginning to step out of ignorance and unconsciousness. God was an oppressive concept, a more powerful being than we, but made in the image of our crude self-conceptions. Our own process of endless expansion into higher forms should and will replace this religious idea. As extropians pursuing and promoting transcendent expansion we are the vanguard of evolution. Humanity is a temporary stage along the evolutionary pathway. We are not the zenith of nature’s development. It is time for us to consciously take charge of ourselves and to accelerate our progress.

No more gods, no more faith, no more timid holding back. Let us blast out of our old forms, our ignorance, our weakness, and our mortality. The future is ours.

Notes

^[1] ‘Eupraxosophy’ (‘good practice’ or ‘active wisdom’) was devised by humanist Paul Kurtz (see Free Inquiry, Winter 1987/88), and means ‘philosophy of life’ or ‘life stance’. It allows humanists (and transhumanists) to answer the question: If humanism (transhumanism) isn’t a religion, what is it?

² See the Extropian Principles 2.6.

³ Giving a causal explanation of religion does not, of course, amount to a refutation of its truth. My purpose in this essay is not to prove the falsity of religion. Excellent arguments against religion can be found in J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, Oxford University Press, 1982. Also recommended is George H. Smith’s Atheism: The Case Against God, Prometheus Books, 1979.

⁴ However, secular authoritarians can substitute for God the authority of the Race, the Proletariat/History, or the Collective.

⁵ I have addressed the need for a view of knowledge and a sense of self that encourages the discovery of mistakes and welcomes change. See my “Pancritical Rationalism: An Extropic Metacontext for Memetic Progress” in the Proceedings of EXTRO-1 The First Extropy Institute conference on Transhumanist Thought. This essay can also be found on my Web site.

⁶ A classic work on this topic is David Hume’s The Natural History of Religion.

⁷ For secular thoughts on these issues see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, and Paul Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective.

⁸ See FM-2030’s Are You a Transhuman?, pp.172-175 (Warner Books, New York, 1989).

⁹ For a free market alternative see, for example, The Twelve-Year Sentence, ed., William R. Rickenbacker, or Privatization and Educational Choice, by Myron Lieberman.

¹⁰ The communitarian movement in political philosophy appears to be a similar yearning for meaning by submerging the self.

¹¹ In The Essence of Christianity, trans. by Marian Evans (Kegan Paul, London, 1893).

¹² Hence the extropian exclamation: “Forward! Upward! Outward!” The corresponding religious exclamation might be: “Outside Us!”

¹³ For a more detailed discussion of this view, see Robert Nozick’s incisive analysis in Philosophical Explanations, Harvard University Press, 1981, pp.585-594.

¹⁴ Many of the evils of religion are well expounded by George H. Smith in Parts Two and Four of Atheism: The Case Against God.

¹⁵ See my essay “Dynamic Optimism: Epistemological Psychology for Extropians” in Extropy #8 (1991-2). This can also be found on my Web site.

¹⁶ There are other possibilities which I will not examine here. An example would be the non-theistic view known as extreme axiarchism. See J. Leslie, Value and Existence (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1979). For an examination of extreme axiarchism see chapter 13 of Mackie (see note 3).

¹⁷ “Purposeless People” in ch.2 of Persons and Personality: A Contemporary Inquiry, eds. Arthur Peacocke and Grant Gillett, Basil Blackwell, 1987.

¹⁸ H. Kung, Does God Exist? (Collins, London, 1980) p.421.

¹⁹ See Mackie, ch.14.

²⁰ Transhumanism has started to gather in strength rapidly in recent years. Apart from Extropianism, there is Venturism (and its variant: The Order of Universal Immortalism), and loose clusters of ideas held by many immortalists, space enthusiasts and others.

²¹ Books presenting aspects of transhumanist thought can be found in the reading list found at the end of the Extropian Principles.

²² My discussion of the meaningfulness of life draws on Robert Nozick’s excellent treatment of the topic in Chapter Six of Philosophical Explanations.

²³ Extropians take this concern seriously. That is why most of us seek immortality and not just extended life. This also explains why Mike Price’s “The Thermodynamics of Death” appeared in Extropy #6: Meaningfulness would be limited if there were no way to avoid the heat death of the universe.

²⁴ For a critique of the idea that our goal should be an unlimited condition see my response in Extropy #6 to A’s “Arch-Anarchy” (in EXTROPY #5). For problems with the idea of an unlimited being see Nozick, pp.600-610, 747-748, and George H. Smith, Atheism, ch.3.

²⁵ See Nozick, ch.5:II.

---

[1] In an early Village Voice review of extropian ideas, Julian Dibbell mentioned “Max More in one of his periodic manifestos.” [Dibbell 1993] Whether meant as a neutral or a slightly sarcastic comment, it still rings true, I confess.