 I'm really glad that Jacob pulled out all the stops to make it here today. He is a PhD student in philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University. He is working on a doctoral dissertation that explores the inherent and unthinkability of the problem of evil in philosophy and theology as central to its status as a problem. I'm really interested in hearing what he has to say about the horror of transhumanism at the limits of thought, and I think it'll be very provocative and interesting discussion. Jacob. Can I see it here? Is that better? So I had an interesting day while he's pulling this up, I'll tell you about it a little bit. I'm going to be speaking on something called cosmic pessimism, and my day kind of reflected that because on my way here I got pulled over by a cop for speeding, and then while I was out here kind of finishing up a couple of things from my slides, I got a call saying my daughter might have gone into like a diabetic coma or something, which was news to us that she might be diabetic in some fashion. So went to the hospital, she ended up being okay, they're still running some tests. She was recently released. And then I finally got the last slide put in about 15 minutes ago, so it started out being a somewhat of a pessimistic day, although cosmic pessimism is a little bit different. So I have a provocative title, as one should have probably, when presenting something to a group. It's not, it might sound like something that is anti-transhumanist, can that be seen? You okay? Randall, you okay? It might be, yeah, it might be both. It's not anti-transhumanism, the main reason why it's not is because I don't know a whole lot about transhumanism. So I couldn't possibly speak on the opposite of transhumanism per se, or be against transhumanism. Nevertheless, this presentation is kind of a philosophical challenge to transhumanism, but I mean that in the greatest possible respect because of course we want to be challenged to the hilt with our philosophies and theologies, not in the sense that they could be destroyed but they could be strengthened and revised to fit with both our needs and our reality. So in that sense, it's not anti-transhumanist, but it is what I think is a challenge to one of the philosophical, or part of the philosophical core of what I understand transhumanism to be, which probably isn't what everyone else understands transhumanism to be. I was actually invited to speak by Carl, who we have some interaction on social media, and I've always been intrigued by this group, but I was hung out with like the humanities people, and they're actually going on right now, but I shunned them this time around in favor of this, and in so doing I was able to do some research on transhumanism, obviously just bare bones. I read Lincoln's article in last year that you published, I don't remember the venue, which I thought was fascinating. I read the Frequently Asked Questions section of Humanity Plus and a couple of other articles I found in Lynx, and transhumanism ended up being something quite different from what I had imagined, and it was far more detailed and had a lot more depth and breadth than I had originally thought, particularly in its anticipation of some of the dangers of developing into post-humanity, and what could be some of the dangers from the human race, not just because of the nature of humanity, but due specifically to technological development, which I thought was really prescient. Okay, just a little bit of background of myself. As Carl said, I am working on a PhD and have been for millennia in philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University. As far as I know, this is kind of a unique PhD, which isn't good for working and eating, but it's great if that is your thing that you like to study and talk about, and it is. It won't be something I can eat with, but I thoroughly enjoy the subject, and you study philosophy from ancient philosophy to the present as well as theology from the beginning of Christianity to the present. My advisor there is, his name is Engulf Delforth. He's the most brilliant human being I've ever met and knows everything there is to know about philosophy and other things that no one knows as well, and I've been very fortunate to study under him and to work with him while at Claremont. Now, Claremont is a unique place if you're a Mormon, because that's where the, at that time at least, the largest Mormon studies program was inaugurated under Richard Bushman, and while I was there I took philosophy and theology classes and Mormon studies classes, and it was a fantastic experience. I would replace all of CES with the Claremont experience if I could, and I promise we would be global as a church in like a year. It was a fantastic, challenging, dazzling experience. I'm really sad that I'm not there anymore. I'm in the dissertation phase so I don't have an excuse to live near the campus. A little bit about what I studied. I studied both analytic and continental thought and philosophy, and I won't get into the major distinctions there, but my advisor is kind of an expert in both, and so I studied in both areas under him. Phenomenology, theology, particularly postmodern theology, which I think personally is kind of where any theology that intersects with what I understand transhumanism to be would kind of fall under the postmodern theology rubric. I studied process thought. I don't know if process thought, Randy knows process thought. If that's been talked about here a whole lot, I haven't unfortunately been able to be here very much today. There's a lot of resonances and I would love to see a presentation or maybe even put one together myself at some point between transhumanism and process thought, which is a very developmental philosophy that's focused more on becoming rather than being on the transformative nature of God and humanity, and Mormon studies. I'll apply some of that a little bit later in the presentation where I talk about just briefly kind of the horror of Mormonism as it relates to the horror philosophy, the horror of transhumanism, and specifically I studied the problem of evil, which has always really fascinated me. I took a seminar on the problem of evil while I was there. The problem of evil is essentially trying to wrap our minds around what in traditional Christianity is given to us as a benevolent, all-powerful God, and yet there exists waves upon waves of evil and suffering in the world. The problem is how do we reconcile both of those things? Of course, throughout the centuries there have been various ways that theologians and others have sought to reconcile God's love and power with the amount of evil that's in the world. My particular angle on this relates to my presentation and that's the fact that there's an inherent unthinkability or there are limits to thought. This is part of what I'll get at with the horror philosophy in particular and those limits to thought compound the problem of evil in particular ways so that it becomes difficult to think the problem because there are these boundaries, horizons that we can't seem to get past. And so while most of the allusions and philosophers will focus on specific concrete things in Scripture or in the world or specific logical propositions and things of that nature, my focus and my dissertation is on thought itself and how thought limits our ability to conceive of the problem as it's been traditionally formulated. Okay, I won't be able to get into that too much but that's how it relates to the current presentation. Okay, now I'm going to give, I felt I had to give just a kind of a bare bones, okay, this is the transhumanism that I'm working with. I imagine there's many transhumanisms out there and I'm just going as basic as I possibly can, mostly because that's all I can do for the moment, but also hopefully because it will engender wider agreement in general over what transhumanism is so that as I talk about it later on that'll be the basic the baseline and this is just taken directly from the frequently asked questions at humanity plus where they kind of boil transhumanism down to two basic things and then they have of course um they elaborate on those at length the first being the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual physical and psychological capacities and second the study of the ramifications promises and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies and that's actually the the ways in which I've heard about transhumanism in the past don't really focus on on point two as much and I think point two is absolutely essential because the typical criticism from someone that will hear about transhumanism in the first place is well yeah but what about you know technology that could cause the extinction of of every living thing or is it is it moral to want it to develop into something beyond what we are right now and who gets left out of that right and who gets included in it well those questions obviously have been discussed um from the beginning of even the inklings of something like transhumanism and they've kind of grown with and developed um with that philosophy as as it's grown and developed um so this isn't obviously a new area and I'm not going to get too heavily into those things because I don't feel like I'm qualified to speak about the intricacies of the ethics of uh post-human development but what I want to call attention to just briefly with these definitions is how affirming and positive they are which which is great right and obviously that's going to be the context of when I talk about um human thought and from a more pessimistic angle and again not to endorse some sort of pessimism as like that's my personal philosophy about the world necessarily um but to throw out what I think are the more provocative in-depth challenges to a view that is inherently uh positive about humanity which I think transhumanism is I mean it knows it understands there's dangers associated with with this sort of thinking but at the same time I think overall it's a very affirmative uh philosophy about the human race and its future okay okay um a few books that I'll be going that are kind of my baseline for this okay um this is the horror of philosophy series by an author by the name of Eugene Thacker who is a professor at the new school in New York yeah okay oh yeah actually I didn't notice that good good thing I'm about eight minutes away from the end so excellent okay no this is actually good I this is not the beginning of that I mean this is probably a third of the way through so so you're good okay now these books basically form the baseline of what I'm going to talk about today okay and they basically hit on what he calls the horror philosophies we'll talk about in a moment which he looks at through philosophy proper supernatural horror and fiction and a kind of a combination of the two in the final book okay also Neheel Unbound from Ray Barassier which looks at nihilism uh one of the most important books on nihilism in the last 50 years easily and also one of the most difficult philosophy books I've ever read uh which is why I've started over four times on it because it's really hard and then finally the conspiracy against the human race from Thomas Legotti who's a horror writer this is an unflinchingly despairingly pessimistic book which I don't recommend you read if you're in a particular mood he he he's completely unsparing uh in his understanding as uh as humanity as inherently worthless and inherently meaningless and and I agree I laughed as well when I read the back cover but he makes a compelling argument not not in the sense that now I'm persuaded that everything's meaningless I'm going to throw myself off a cliff but in the sense that it's a challenge to how we develop meaning in human communities okay okay um the world according to Thacker, Legotti, Brassier and other nihilists uh is inherently unthinkable on a lot of levels one because the there's so much about the world that continues to be strange so we learn more and more about the world scientifically we talk about our lives and the world narratively um we paint the world through art and we develop greater and greater understandings of the world but that doesn't seem to erase the strain in fact in some ways it makes the strangeness that much more poignant and that much more visible to us okay there's a mystery and strangeness about the world which isn't necessarily good or bad but that remains with us okay and so in that sense the world isn't completely thinkable okay uh the other thing about the unthinkableness of the world is how we encounter catastrophe um we're constantly being we're constantly confronting climate change and wars and other kinds of disasters but potential cosmic disasters okay in theory we could come up with technology that could help mitigate against those sorts of things but generally speaking anything that's living is constantly being confronted with its own extinction okay whether it develops technology that causes its own extinction or not okay so these two things kind of make up how the world is ultimately unthinkable okay now the horror philosophy is essentially the thought that the baseline principle of philosophy after Leibniz and Kant in particular is the principle of sufficient reason which essentially states that there's a reason why everything happens okay that's the basis of thinking that there's a cause for everything and we might not know the cause right now but we we are absolutely certain that there is one and that given enough time given enough technology given enough thought and research we'll figure out what that cause is or if there are causes that are there are mysteries to us we'll understand what those are okay the horror philosophy is to consider that the principle of sufficient reason is false that there is not a cause for everything that happens or there's not one that we could possibly know okay there might be uh we might understand intermittent causes but ultimate causes or other kinds of causes we couldn't possibly we couldn't possibly know okay and so the principle of sufficient reason if it's undermined then everything that follows comes into question okay okay and then finally the idea of extinction now this isn't just the idea that no matter what we do according to some astrophysicists we're all going to die even if we somehow figure out immortality the universe is going to have its heat death or the big crunch or whatever okay we got maybe maybe if we're lucky a hundred trillion years and then it then we're toast and it doesn't matter what we develop into okay at some point that thing that we develop into is going to go away and never return okay um now I don't have time to get into the the nuances of this Ray Brassier's book Nehal on Bound is all about the idea of extinction and it's ridiculously complex but needless to say that's part of the unthinkability of the world this thought of that no matter what we do we can't ultimately stave off extinction okay okay question nihilism this is this is Brassier the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind independent reality which despite the presumptions of human narcissism is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the values and meanings which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable okay this is the thought which I think I connect up okay on the next slide this is the thought essentially that there is a reality out there that no matter how we uh manipulate it and use it to our benefit to further our own existence or our own understanding of the world that is utterly indifferent to us um and that put in perspective makes our existence much more humble than it really is okay uh and our place in the universe etc okay gonna kind of move somewhat quickly through some of these okay now I probably won't get be able to read this entire quote but basically Ligotti here I'm comparing the first two notions of transhumanism at the very beginning which I said were very affirmative very positive with Ligotti's thought and Ligotti specifically speaks about transhumanism which I didn't actually know until about four days ago when I got to this part of the book okay and he has like 12 pages on transhumanism which wow really okay um and he has a lot of different problems with transhumanism obviously but the his baseline problem with transhumanism is essentially that it's too optimistic that it has no real basis for its optimism okay I mean it feels good to be optimistic like that and we want to we don't even know how human communities could progress without some kind of optimism that they'll survive and get better okay but nevertheless he says yeah well that makes that's that's a nice feeling that's a great distraction but the reality could be that none of this is warrants the optimism that is clearly inherent in a philosophy like transhumanism okay which leads briefly kind of a preface into the end which is the inherent optimism of Mormonism right which is sometimes irritatingly optimist right I mean so thorough gory and the optimist that sometimes you wonder if if if Mormon thought can really deal with reality on the ground right and I rounded this all the time doing in Mormon studies classes you know where we talk about various authors we talk about particularly in philosophy the suffering of the world and then we talk about we bring in some some Mormon elements about suffering and the best we could get to was you know God suffers as well it's another process theology commonality right but we couldn't really ever get past that kind of surface detail that yeah God suffers too but how awful is that suffering right I mean would that change God's conception of the world or is God in a sense suffers awfully but at the same time is indifferent enough to be able to function as a God right so he's able to kind of just put it in the back of his brain just enough that he's able to be the God that we need God to be okay we'll get a little more into this at the very end particularly if there's any time at all okay now three concepts from Eugene Thacker okay that he wants us to think about the first is the concept of the world and the world is the human world the world for us the world as it exists for our benefit and our understanding okay this is the world that we deal that we deal with and we often want to think that this is the only world okay the world that is to our benefit and that and that we understand through human eyes but there's also what he calls the earth which is the world in itself okay that's geology and meteorology and zoology okay the world as is experienced by non-humans okay and finally there's the planet which is the world without us now the world without us is a subset of the world in itself obviously it's not experienced by humans but the world without us is explicitly indifferent to humanity so much so that it's dangerous to humanity okay and this is where a lot of the strangeness and catastrophe part of the unthinkability of the world already talked about comes in okay kind of move along a little quickly okay this is legati again on cosmic pessimism i'm going to read this one this is this is pretty important as for us humans we reek of our own sense of being something nature proceeds by blunders that is its way it is also ours so if we have blundered by regarding consciousness as a blunder why make a fuss over it our self-removal from this planet would still be a magnificent move a feat so luminous it would be dim the sun what do we have to lose no evil would attend our departure from this world and the many evils we have known would go extinct along with us so why put off what would be the most laudable masterstroke of our existence and the only one okay oh right okay but this is important because this if you could take the opposite of transhumanism at least as i've understood it and kind of disseminated into one paragraph that might be what this paragraph looks like okay okay this is this i mean this is essentially saying it what there you've won yeah okay but that's but that's where the battle is that's my point is right that's that's where the philosophical rubber meets the road okay it's it's not in the the details in the technology or the ethics it's in the actual uh the actual logical feasibility right okay let me just move to the end here since time is technically gone okay thank you okay cosmic pessimism this is kind of the same now this is this is a this is Thacker who basically says look uh pessimism in america especially is completely foreign right we can't even we can't even begin to confront the pessimists without wanting to exile him or her immediately right the pessimist has no place in our society whatsoever right um to live in such a color cultures to constantly leave in the shadow of an obligatory optimism a novel type of coercion that is pathologized early on in child education in the assessment do not play does not like to play with others okay okay oops that's a weird slide okay there okay two more slides okay so the horror philosophy this is kind of a distilled only in that brief moment of absolute uncertainty when both options seem equally plausible or implausible when neither thought can be accepted or rejected when everything can be explained and nothing can be explained only in that moment do we really have this horror of philosophy this questioning of the principle of sufficient reason okay so Thacker wants to kind of twist the knife a little bit to say um we're we're often too optimistic in our optimism too optimistic in what we think we understand about the world and the whole causal chain that gets to our ability to understand in the first place okay so the horror of transhumanism if you were to overlay that onto transhumanism is the uncertain valuation of the worth of humanity now legati will say humanity is all totally worthless or at least no more or less worthless than anything else right but there's also gradations here as well Thacker would probably say oh we're still worth something but far far less than we want to believe that we're worth particularly when you put us into the mix with the world in itself and the world without us okay as we as we ultimately have to do so that would be what Thacker would say and finally the horror of Mormonism now this is legati quoting one of his favorite authors who's even more pessimistic than he is if you can believe it okay and and and this will be my last point okay what is the horror of Mormonism as it relates to itself theologically if something like god exists or once existed what would he not be capable of doing or undoing why should god not want to be done with himself because unbeknownst to us suffering was the essence of his being why should he not have brought forth a universe that is one great puppet show which is destined by him to be crunched or scattered until an absolute nothingness has been established really kind of of this earth in the sense that god is corporeal and that god suffers in the same way that we suffer and importantly that if we were to become gods would that really entail just an eternity of reproduction and you know dancing and singing together or would it be doing what god and christ have been doing for as long as we've known about which is sitting in the blood in the mud with humanity and trying to save some people right if that's what gods do and that's what we would do then what do we look for have to look forward to as immortal beings is essentially a life of suffering okay now that suffering might be couched in a huge context of meaning and there might be joy associated with it which we couldn't understand without the suffering etc but nevertheless that that kind of deification is somewhat horrific the horror right to contemplate if being a god means anything at all like we understand god to be and if being god means that you are with your creation in all of their horrific suffering then there's not a place of rest that we have to look forward to at least not ultimately okay and that kind of bleeds into this principle of is the principle sufficient reason sufficient well maybe not is immortality a good maybe it isn't or maybe it's an inevitability and we just have to get used to the fact that it's an inevitability and it's not a good right okay so that's that's basically it thanks