 Religion, of course, is not the same thing as spirituality. I have never abandoned an interest in spirituality, and I do believe that transhumanism has clear spiritual elements. So this talk is kind of interesting for me to do, because it takes me back about 20, 23 years or so. So the themes I was most interested in back then, were sometimes one of those came to be called perpetual progress. So originally it was, I think, a banalist expansion, but some people said that kind of gave me an impression that they wanted to pave over everything in the universe. So it changed that to perpetual progress. So the idea of extra-p, which is not a technical term, is met more as a metaphor for the opposite of entropy for increasing order, information, intelligence, well-being, creativeness, almost good things in life, that from the beginning embodied the idea of a continual endless process of improvement, not a state of static perfection. So it really takes me back to that. It takes me back to the article I wrote back in 1989-1990, which was published at Extra-P Magazine, about transhumanism towards the future as philosophy, in which I actually very explicitly put transhumanism in the context of religion, diagnosisism, atheism, and the search for meaning. And I'll be talking a bit about some of the ideas that I had in that paper there. So first of all, what is, nobody's actually really so much time to actually define transhumanism, perhaps it's not necessary. A couple of speakers very rapidly ran through a couple of the ideas. But one way to think about transhumanism, I'm going to skip ahead because I've decided to fit better up here, is one way to think about transhumanism very simply is it's really got two very large chunks that go together, both of which are very complicated. But you can think of transhumanism as both transhumanism and transhumanism. And I'm going to be talking more about the second of those, transhumanism. By transhumanism, what I mean really is the idea of transhumanism that through technological means and careful planning, we can overcome fundamental human limits, the human lifespan, the human intelligence, limits to our emotional sophistication and so on. So sharing with other people who believe in ameliorating the human condition some similar ideals, but going beyond that to attack fundamentally the limits on what it means to be human. So that's transhumanism. And for that, technology is essential. You can't really move beyond the human condition in this sense unless you can alter the basis of the genes, the biology, the neurology that makes us human that both enables and limits our humanity. But the other aspect of transhumanism is transhumanism. But transhumanism is really the heir to humanist ideas in the Enlightenment. So I'm going to come back to that in a minute, the idea of humanism being an important root and informing the spirituality of transhumanism. So spirituality then is not the same as religion. I think it's not very controversial to say that. Most people separate those two fairly well these days. It's a fairly blurry term. It can mean a number of different things. But I think for many people, spirituality implies a concern with your deepest values, deepest values, the things that give your life meaning on a fundamental level. And it sometimes can be combined with the idea of the sacred. If the sacred is not specific religious, but is a spiritual motion, that can really mean that which is set apart from the ordinary and which is worthy of veneration of some kind. And veneration not necessarily meaning prayer or belief that has an external root. So really it's all about core values, fundamental values, the things that are most important, finding those things that give meaning and value to life. So in that sense I see no reason why transhumanism shouldn't be entirely compatible with spirituality. So a little bit about the humanist roots of transhumanism. And here I'm going to violate the laws of public speaking and just read you a little bit of something. But I won't be the first to do that today. This is a classic early humanist. And I kind of picked this one because he's one of my favourites. And because he was a religious humanist. So this is a person who I think had clear transhumanist views in some sense, kind of undeveloped pre-technological sense really, was definitely a humanist but was also a Christian. This was Pico della Mirandola, writing in 1486. So let me just redo this passage by him because I think it nicely encapsulates both transhumanism and transhumanism, both those two aspects. So you can tell what religious tradition he's coming from here while he's making a statement that sounds very much in line with the kind of ideas that we share. The setting of this conversation is the craftsman, as he refers to God, explaining to humanity what the deal is, how he set him up, what is the situation in which humanity finds itself. And the craftsman says, Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone, nor any function peculiar to thyself, have we given thee, Adam, to the end that thou according to thy longing and according to thy judgment, thou mayst have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions, thou thyself shall desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with our own free will, in whose hand we have placed thee, shall ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world's centre that thou mayst from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honour, as though the maker amolder of thyself, thou mayst fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power out of thy soul's judgment to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine. That probably sounds more like, apart from a bit of the language, more like a Mormon speaking than a Christian, probably. But you can see, even in that tradition, he found room for the expression of this idea that instead of the traditional Christian relationship of God up here and us standing there and us being utterly different in nature and us being essentially corrupt and relying on God for salvation, instead, as we heard in the first talk, this discussion of theosis, that humans can actually participate in the divine. We can become self-creating, give ourselves our own form and challenge the limits to our own nature. So he was definitely a proto-transhumanist humanist. Now... Oh, and I should just probably say that other aspects of humanism... Humanism informs transhumanism in not just the idea of progress and in these ideas of being able to recreate ourselves and the world, but also by a strong emphasis on enlightenment ideals of reason, technological progress, science, and challenging authority. So I think it was all fed very strongly into transhumanism. Now, what is the relationship then between these concepts? Many people have assumed for a long time that if you're a transhumanist, you're automatically an atheist. And it's certainly the case, I think, that most transhumanists would probably identify themselves as atheists, a fair number as agnostics. I never liked the term isonotic myself, although I wish it's worth the distinction in between. Atheism can mean, and is quite commonly used, I think, unfortunately, to mean a denial of all gods, a belief that there definitely are no gods. Now, I think the more defensible form of the term is atheism without theism. It just means a lack of theistic belief. Someone who doesn't have theistic belief is an atheist. It doesn't mean they can prove that no god exists because the first question is, which god are we talking about? You'd have to disprove all possible gods you could think of. So it doesn't really require that. Now agnosticism, too, is two quite different ideas. There's a kind of a philosophical agnosticism which essentially says, again, A, meaning without, agnosticism, essentially knowledge, it can say that we cannot know whether there's a god or not. And, of course, it could be applied to other areas of knowledge. That is, it's making a very strong philosophical claim that we cannot know, no matter what, we will never know whether there is a god or not. That seems like a very dramatic and bold claim to make. The softer form of agnosticism simply says we lack knowledge. Not that we cannot know, but I lack knowledge and so I'm not going to commit myself one way or the other. Now, as to many gods, I'd have to be agnostic because I haven't even heard of many of the god concepts, probably. In fact, recently I was reading a really excellent novel by Neil Gaiman, who I recommend to everybody, in his book, American Gods. I found it a little bit frustrating because it broke up the flow. I had to quite frequently stop and write down names of gods I'd never heard of, so I got Wikipedia of them. Some of the well-known ones, the Norse gods, Odin is one of the characters there, as you find out. But he has, apart from Anansi, the African spider god I already knew, but there are many kind of obscure Celtic gods and other gods from around the world, and I had to go look this up. So I couldn't prove that they don't exist. I wouldn't even make a statement about those because I'd never heard of them. Now, if you did discuss them, I would probably end up not believing in them. I don't have an atheistic belief, but I wouldn't necessarily be able to disprove they exist if their existence doesn't really contradict anything I can observe in the world. I would say I'm an atheist in the sense of the traditional Christian kind of god who is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good for the usual reasons, the problem of evil and so on. I just don't think that kind of being is consistent with what I observe. But as for the rest, I certainly wouldn't think I could disprove them. I might just lack belief because it doesn't seem particularly plausible. No more plausible than if someone said, there's a tall green elf who lives on the moon and secretly manipulates the minds of all the heads of state. Can he prove there isn't? I should say, well, he got me there. No, I can't. It doesn't mean I believe in them. I will be one kind of atheist about that but not necessarily the other kind. So transhumanists tend to be atheist diagnostics, but if you think again about the distinction I made between transhumanism and transhumanism, you can already see why there might be an opening for not only spiritual belief but possibly religious belief in transhumanism, especially if you focus on the transhumanism part because that doesn't really say anything about the basis of your beliefs, whether they should be based entirely on reason or empirical evidence, whether you should have a component of faith mixed in and exactly how you define those tricky concepts in the first place. As we've seen recently in all the discussions we've had so far today have pointed out, you can actually, if you emphasize certain aspects of religion, you can find quite a few compatibilities between certain religions, especially perhaps Mormonism and perhaps Buddhism and as we've even seen perhaps even Christianity on a certain interpretation. So I don't think you can give a simple answer as to whether transhumanism is compatible with religious belief. Certainly psychologically it clearly is because there are people who are combining it so on a purely psychological level they are compatible. On a psychological level, just about any two beliefs you can find are compatible if somebody wants to find ways of combining them. Logically, there's going to be another question. Again, I think it would depend on what you think you can prove and disprove and where you think the boundaries of of doubt are. And I'm going to come to the simulation argument later on which has already been mentioned. That's a very interesting kind of new take on essentially a theological argument which tries to rely entirely on rational premises and rational argument to establish a traditional theistic belief. So you can't really say well, you know, believing God has to be irrational has to be based purely on faith because there you have an argument which quite explicitly is a reason-based argument which ends up with rather similar conclusions. So although I am an atheist in regard to the traditional Christian God and lack of the hard kind of atheist and a soft atheist lacking belief in all the other gods I can quite see how transhumanism can be compatible with religion and I begin to think that may not be such a bad thing. If you'd asked me 20 years ago I probably have said no, keep religion out of transhumanism but now maybe I'm just getting being a softie in my old age but I see a lot of very nice people I like who are religious and I'd rather they incorporate transhumanist ideas into their religious thinking than not. So I'm not saying this is incompatible I don't think it's even an undesirable mixture. But one thing that hasn't been mentioned very much and I'm not really going to discuss it much either today is the critical issue I think of rationalism versus phyteism, reason versus faith that really crosses over the distinct between religion and non-religious transhumanism again because you can attempt to support religious beliefs with reason or you can accept them on faith and there are people who I think actually accept certain empirical facts about the world on faith rather than reason any example I will bring up will be controversial but I've seen plenty of examples that probably on fairly non-controversial one would be the people who insist that Obama is not an American citizen to me it's very hard to see how there's any evidence based belief for that but maybe it's just because I haven't looked into it but it seems pretty implausible. There are certain ideas I'm not just picking on one side of the political spectrum on all sides of the political spectrum people accept beliefs I think very strongly certainly either not based on evidence or on an extremely selective reading of evidence and they hold those beliefs far more strongly by the evidence so the reason faith distinction is not the same as the one between religious belief and non-religious belief they can cross over I think any kind of sophisticated understanding of the relationship then between transhumanism which is tended to be explicitly a rationalist philosophy and religion has to take that into account okay so let's just say a couple of things about transhumanism and gods I find terror given to talk extremely interesting and I'd like to follow up on some discussions of that one problem I have with some attempts to bring religion into transhumanism or vice versa is the concept of god or gods in that it's quite common actually for transhumanists who are not at all religious to talk about us becoming god or becoming like god and the concern I have about that is that the concept of god has traditionally been something that's grown up from centuries in the past from millennia in the past and I think I raised in his talk Foyerbach's view that god is essentially a projection of human nature I think Foyerbach actually said the self-consciousness of man freed of all discordant elements so human beings have the ability to reason to create, to act in the world to do good things god is that on steroids to the maximum god is all knowing, all good able to do everything so essentially Foyerbach was saying that god is just a projection of human nature magnified and perfected, removed all discordant elements removed and perfected well if we're going to have perpetual progress that seems like a rather limiting notion of god maybe god is too limited an idea at least in the sense traditionally conceived because maybe our current concepts of maximum wisdom, maximum goodness maximum ability to act in the world are not the limit, maybe we can do better than that we're trying to imagine those possibilities from our limited human brains which is not very promising given that we've got these three pound pieces of fleshy meat in our heads it's kind of peculiar we can think of anything useful at all and to think that we can think of some ultimate concept of god that can never be improved upon that I think is dubious I think the very idea of perpetual progress if you really do support that idea of perpetual progress you have to have the idea that we can revise revise our ideals as we go along and our very concept of god or of a perfect being will also be revised as we go along we can imagine perhaps different beings and in fact I think that science fiction rather than theology has done a better job of imagining possible gods they're usually not quite on the level of the ultimate god but there's quite a variety of them from the good old familiar Jupiter brains or matrioshka brains somebody may be familiar with which are in the words of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy you brain the size of a planet and then there are more distributed intelligences where god is not really a unitary being neither is it a society it's something in between some interesting sense so you know there's a lot of discussions in science fiction of god-like beings which actually quite often the more interesting than the theological discussions which again censor just project linearly human abilities and magnify them so that's one of my problems with the god concept I'm not wanting I actually tend to want the discouraged talk of gods in transhumanism regardless of whether so one's religious or not I think we can probably do better than that or sort of redefine the term we'll make very clear we don't necessarily mean any of the traditional conceptions and after all many of the traditional conceptions are not very enlightening or inspiring especially the some of the older versions you know the Old Testament god for instance seems like a petulant child or as I put it one of one piece I wrote a cosmic sadist seems to like to set things up to torture us and causes enormous problems and not ready to help us out very much so certainly those conceptions of God are not very inspiring now obviously there are more sophisticated ones but they tend to be a little bit light on details they use terms like ineffable and other kind of infinite terms or terms beginning with I usually which really means what it really means God is ineffable what they mean is I have no idea what God is like except of course in Catholicism that doesn't stop them from going on to list a couple of dozen attributes of God they say yes God is ineffable cannot be known is beyond all knowledge but God is also this and this and this and this and this benevolent and so on and so on so that's kind of an interesting I think contradiction or at least attention the other aspect of of God as I mentioned earlier was this idea of the simulation argument we've really touched on that one so I'll try to deal with that rather briefly how many of you are familiar with the simulation argument just to okay it's probably most of you this beat around for quite a while in various different forms although it's a bit more recently been associated with Nick Bostrom as was mentioned he's put it out in the most sophisticated and well-developed form essentially the argument is that well his conclusion that's that with the conclusion is that it's somewhat likely that we are living in a simulation that this world is not the real world in the sense of the fundamental level of reality that we're actually a simulated world created by a higher being who to us would seem God like having ability to take laws of nature and alter them and at least in principle intervene if they apparently don't do that as far as we can tell and why did you get to that conclusion why is that likely it's a little bit different from the traditional cosmological argument or the ontological argument or any of those causal arguments what the argument essentially is saying is that you have to accept one of three different conclusions you have to either accept that we will destroy ourselves before developing the ability to create these simulations as James was saying in the last talk you can project computer trends and you can see we're already doing a lot of simulation now it seems pretty plausible that with the advanced computer power we will be able to do these simulations so one option is that we'll never reach that level we'll wipe ourselves out somehow or we will reach that level but for some reason nobody will want to do these simulations of worlds and with people in them and the argument why that's not reasonable to accept is that well if you've got billions of people with different interests and purposes maybe some of them will want to simulate those worlds have their own kind of mega second life and maybe we're in one of those worlds and so the third alternative is that we are living in a simulation now Nick I believe puts the gives his very precise standing estimate of 20% probability that we are living in a simulation I agree that's kind of pulling the number out of a hat I don't know how you really get that number but it's one of those questions where you can't really be an atheist about it how can you disprove that there is an actual logic to the argument it seems you have to give it at least some probability one kind of doubt I have about that and again this is very speculative I tend to believe that we are improving as we go through history I do believe in perpetual progress not constant progress clearly we take big jumps back every so often obvious things like Stalin and Hitler and so on and many other shorter run things are less drastic we do take big steps back we have improved throughout history our moral behaviour has improved as well as level of wealth and sophistication and I think that's likely to continue for all kinds of reasons that I cannot go into and so it does seem to me that makes it less likely and we can't possibly imagine what will really happen decades in the future and centuries in the future but it seems to be increasingly that people running simulations that have people in them who suffer would be strongly discouraged and it's impossible to say whether people could do it anyway without being monitored by any kind of technology there would be but I think people will be less likely to do that on their own and probably other people would discourage them more strongly so it's kind of a different version of the problem of evil if you like is that I think that we are going to better ourselves and we just wouldn't look very kindly along upon someone who ran a world even like this one because I think this world is very, very far from perfect and I think everybody would disagree there's horrible amounts of suffering which are not caused by people's own choices some of them are but a lot of it's completely just unfortunate circumstances just find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time and I can't imagine simulating a world like this if I could do better and I think I could do better if I was a super intelligent being and I can't imagine how much better so on with a lot more resources and smarts than I had would be I think if you sat down and thought about it if you had the ability to run a simulation you could think now of ways of improving this world if you had power to change the rules you could build in certain things which we can imagine technologically we could do that would save people's lives, reduce suffering maybe just take some one narrow little thing think about torture wouldn't it be nice if you could remodel the world so that at some point it doesn't have to be instant but at some point people just stop feeling pain when they're being tortured so maybe you give the torture 10 minutes because maybe there's some useful purpose in torture I don't know I don't see one myself but maybe there is so give them 10 minutes but then say have a cutoff switch redesign the human brain so that after 10 minutes you know say oh are you going to cut this finger off now okay go ahead it's not a big deal then you know they'll kind of remove the incentive for torture that's kind of like a very very simple very narrow little solution and you could probably fake it up to look like it was not a special intervention but something about the structure of our brains right if you're that capable and I'm sure there are many other problems that even we with our very limited brains can imagine solving so I don't think it's likely that this world is a simulation but again it's impossible to really know the future maybe there will be a lot of unpleasant crazy people or people like Walter on fringe if anybody watches that who kind of is pretty much amoral and just likes to conduct scientific experiments and it's fascinated by the outcomes it's not actively malicious necessarily but you know there is an example of a kind of a god if you want to call that a god the world the simulator of the world the great architect who we can't disprove and is a possibility because that does raise questions as to how should you behave if you are living in a simulation something which I'm not going to get into Robin Hansen came up with one answer to that question he said if you're living in a simulation you don't want to be shut down so you should make your life as interesting as possible because if you're boring then you may just get shut out of the simulation I mean I've had enough of these guys but do something interesting create something worthy I guess it doesn't have to be a good thing but make yourself memorable or interesting I guess it's better to be a good thing if you're assuming the simulator is basically good but I think it's pretty much impossible to answer that question but it does leave room for a certain kind of god okay how am I doing time okay it's up on the screen but not on that screen okay I have to be selective on what I cover here then okay so I've already talked a little bit about the concept of entropy so I'm going to kind of I guess I'll probably skip over this but this idea of apotheosis the theoses are apotheosis becoming godlike again for lack of a better term continual perfection that idea is built into the concept of entropy which was my version of transhumanism from the 80s and the 90s I'll move on a little bit from there one point I do want to make about that again I want to reinforce this idea quite often critics of transhumanism I've found have a couple of misconceptions about it at least I'm pretty sure they're misconceptions one is that they talk about transhumanists as believing in perfection now I don't think transhumanists I don't and most of the people I've talked to about it do are sophisticated on the subject don't believe in perfection they believe in perfecting being perpetually growing and improving that's a good thing that's what I value that's what's part of the concept of entropy so entropy is not about seeking perfection unless you understand that to mean a process of perfecting really it's all about instead it's all about striving growing improving pushing ahead if I had more time I'd give a whole historical perspective on that from everybody including Henri Bergson with his Ilan Vitao Aristotle with his views of growth and how that's part of his idea of excellence it's a rich historical tradition to that idea I think there's kind of a contrast between Plato and Aristotle in this respect there's two throughout history and their influences Plato is very much the guy who believes in perfection that there's another realm out there a platonic realm of forms in which everything is perfect and abstract but the physical world is kind of a dirty grubby poor imitation copy of it whereas Aristotle was a bit more of an empiricist and instead looked at how this is the actual world and how we tend to grow and improve as we go along one way which I'm going backwards in life unfortunately is that two years ago I didn't have to put on reading glasses to read my notes so this is one process of deep effecting unfortunately part of the idea of extrape also was the concept of dynamic optimism or practical optimism some people didn't like dynamic optimism because they thought it sounded like a Tony Robbins idea but so I kind of made it a bit more boring, practical optimism but a lot of people still like dynamic optimism but the idea of that is again to emphasize this idea that not only should we expect the future to be better but we should expect it to be better because we're going to make it better we can't just sit on our backsides and expect higher powers with their governments or gods or any other form to make the world better for us we each of us individually have to get out there and work on the technologies on improving our relationships improving our social institutions to make the world a better place so optimism I think is a plausible perspective and as I said I'm a big believer that we do have progress over the long term I see other people are sort of taking up this theme more recently because it's very unpopular basically it's popular to cry doom and gloom about everything these days but recently it's been encouraging to see a few people on more on the same wavelength like Matt Ridley his book The Racial Optimist came out recently which is very much in tune with the perspective I like to take he doesn't really address so much the kind of spiritual transhumanist aspects though I'm going to skip through that one because of shortage of time I was going to talk a little bit about some ideas in some versions of transhumanism of this idea of self-transformation which again was one of the principles of extrapity this emphasis on the idea that we have to work on improving ourselves both by current technological means and by inventing new technologies to fundamentally improve ourselves and this idea of what I've called the optimal persona I tend to not like that term so much anymore because optimal again sounds like an endpoint so I guess optimizing persona would be more like it really an idea of yourself your very identity at the core as being a person who changes and grows not someone who identifies not someone who identifies with anything static or fixed or any current beliefs or practices but someone who is always thinking about how to improve on those things doesn't mean doing it fanatically every second every day because you wouldn't get anything done but periodically reevaluating your life and your priorities I would also talk a bit more about the Aristotelian tradition which fits into that but I'll move on so I want to say a little bit about meaning, mortality and limits when we talk about the idea of perpetual progress, perpetual improvement number of things come up one of the most obvious ones is the specific application of that to the human lifespan most humanists or at least half of humanists I think probably a lot more humanists and most religious people don't like the idea of I don't really like the word physical immortality but indefinitely extended lifespan I actually rather like the term super longevity which I think Wired magazine is the first to use because super longevity sounds like a superpower and I've always wanted super power so super longevity is a good one I prefer immortality because I don't think we can guarantee at this point literal immortality, if you really mean literally endless life and immortality can also have the connotation that you cannot be killed that you're kind of stuck with it I'm pretty sure I want to keep living for a long time but I don't know if 5 billion years from now I might have said you know what I've done enough, I've had enough I might want to check out at this point I don't like to have that option so I don't want it to be enforced upon me like some punishment from the gods so it's one of the reasons I tend to avoid that term but interestingly many of these people seem to think that indefinitely extended lifespan removes meaning from life I'm sure you've all heard this from Leon Kass and all these kinds of people Francis Fukuyama Bill McKibbin which says it most succinctly of all enough, I like his title very effective anti-transhumanist title enough so I have the exact opposite reaction when I'm driving down the street and I see this side saying yield, every time I want to shout never but for the most part these critics think that you've got to have enough you've got to draw the lifespan to an end at some point now where it's not very clear because you're 20 years old, back in Paleolithic times then it used to be in the 40s, just a century ago now we're living to around 80 and most of them don't say well we've got to kill all the 81 year olds because obviously 80 is okay but 81 that's just no good your life suddenly loses all meaning on the 85th birthday so they leave it very fuzzy as to when is too much and they tend to sort of apply the idea of an infinite life I think one of the problems is they seem to think of the idea of an infinite life and then say what are you going to do with infinity which I think is a very stupid question because you don't have to plan infinity right now you don't have to go down and get out a large big chunk of note paper this thick and say okay I'm going to start by planning the next 5 billion years and then this afternoon I'll plan the next 5 billion and I'll keep going to infinity oh my god how am I going to fill all these notebooks well that's just stupid you're not going to do it that way because first of all by the time you go down your plan will be out of date when you actually get to that point things will have changed the interest you have will probably have changed into something else maybe one of our goals was to unify physics but dash 50 years someone already did that damn I have to find something else to do maybe you want to become an expert golfer but in 70 years nobody's interested in golf anymore so you move on to something else so you can't plan for infinity what you can expect is that you will change over time and hopefully in that positive direction of growth so because I'm going to probably have to skip over this little bit so we just stay on time I would refer you to my 1990 article on futurism toward a futureist philosophy where I do discuss a bit more kind of a transhumanist idea of the meaningfulness of life based on perpetual progress and improvement I don't think I'm really going to go into that discussion very much right now it's a real contrasting view to this idea that we need ultimate limits for meaningfulness I don't think we do I think we do need temporary limits we do have to limit ourselves in various respects at any particular time because you can't do everything you should just be a chaotic personality if you try to master everything and do everything and be everything so you have to choose things and set limits in the short term but I don't see any role for ultimate limits for purposefulness there have been kind of two main traditions in this regard if you think of perpetual progress it's not a smooth progression there are different possible goals the classical goal is that you grow and change in order to reach a new state of being and that's where you kind of stop and that's the meaning of that process is you grow in order to reach a certain state so that's the classical view the romantic view of progress is that when you reach a new unity the whole meaning in life is breaking that unity to explore new possibilities now I don't think either of those are really adequate on their own I think true deep meaning in life comes from connecting with various other values that are important to themselves and that comes from combining this idea of creating new unities integrating new things into yourself becoming a new kind of person and then after a while shattering that unity and growing again and that meaning comes from that process that continual process to which there is no limit you don't stop once you reach a new unity nor have you reached the end when you've broken that unity it's really a continual process and it's a process with a positive direction if you were just forming unities breaking them, forming them, breaking them it wasn't going anywhere in your life I don't think either so I'm talking about this process of reaching a new state challenging it, breaking it moving on, recreating yourself in a kind of a Nietzschean sense and doing that in a positive direction and I think that can be done endlessly and has meaning meaning therefore it requires transcending limits rather than respecting them ultimately okay I would have also disliked to have discussed, that I just mentioned very briefly another common criticism of transhumanism that I think is mistaken is this idea that we hate our bodies people are always bringing this up and I'm always very baffled by this because I've never heard a transhumanist say I hate my body I've heard Arnold Schwarzenegger saying that in the movie where he gives birth I was kind of a classic line there but I've never seen a transhumanist hating their body there are few people who seem to act that way because they don't take care of their bodies but that's hardly a transhumanist thing that's modern culture unfortunately transhumanists realize that the body as we have it is not the ultimate form which we can take we can improve on that we can already improve it in various ways both by exercise and diet and also by new technological means we can repair damage to the body through new technologies and the future shows much more radical possibilities starting with genetic engineering neural computer interfaces and implants nanomachines like a lovely design by Robert Freitas of the... I'm going to forget what it's called basically it packs oxygen into little tiny balls and you put it in your bloodstream and it lets you run up full out sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath or we can swim underwater for a few hours a spirocyte is the name of that one that's something already on the drawing board so it's not that we hate our body it's just that we realize that our current human form can be improved upon and as I kind of expressed in the letter to Mother Nature which I delivered some time ago it doesn't mean we hate nature it's just that these are amazing vehicles amazing devices that we have to respect and take good care of but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to work on improving them part of our nature after all what's natural for us is to keep changing to keep improving to alter nature itself I think it will be deeply unnatural for human beings to say nature as it is is the final word we're part of nature, thank you very much and it's our nature to keep on improving it so let me finish up just with going back to good old Pico de la Mirandola another much shorter passage this time from his oration on the dignity of man he said