Transhumanism

Abstract

The social and intellectual movement known as transhumanism questions the figure of the ‘human’ at the centre of humanism and modern political formations. As part of a broader ‘posthuman turn’ it is frequently associated with technological enhancements that redefine human bodies and their limits. However, the core argument of transhumanism has to do with the human mind or consciousness. Transhumanists suggest that the human mind is reducible not only to its biochemical substrate but also to something more fundamental called information that characterises all existence in the universe. Since silicon-based computation is the basis of informatic processes today, transhumanists argue that machine intelligence can become conscious, eventually making fleshy humans obsolete. This process of technological advancement towards a super-intelligent computational civilisation is regarded as part of a larger unfolding of intelligence in the universe, a universal telos of existence of which humans are only one instance. Thus, human intelligence is set to yield to a nonhuman destiny. This entry traces the formation of transhumanism, reviews some of the anthropological studies, and concludes by questioning transhumanism’s narrow social and metaphysical visions of post-humanity in which both intelligence and biology end up being delimited around particular (civilisational, racialised) forms of life and thought.