Jason Silva on Transhumanism: Are We Decommissioning Evolution? | Big Think

Transhumanism is essentially the philosophical school of thought that says that human beings should use technology to transcend their limitations. It's perfectly natural for us to use our tools to overcome our boundaries, to extend our minds. To extend our mind, we're using these technological scaffoldings. The philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers talk about technology as a scaffolding that extends our thoughts, our reach, and our vision. Reycarts reminds us that 100,000 years ago in the savannahs of Africa, when we picked up a stick off the floor and used it to reach a fruit on a really high tree, we've been using our tools to extend our reach.

Technology is us; technology is our extended phenotype, as Dawkins says. Technology is our second skin. We're not the only species that does so. You know, the termites build these enormous termite colonies, which are temperature controlled. I mean, our cities, like the termite colony, are really who we are. You know, if you're able to like make that cognitive shift and transcend what Andy Clark calls the skinbag bias, and realize that we don't end where our skin tissue ends, but that we are tethered through our technological surroundings and to our dwellings, and that what we design designs us back, because what we design is us. Ultimately, you start to realize that technology—we are a technology-making species, the same way a spider is a spider web-making species.

You know, Terrance and Kevin Kelly, who co-founded Wired magazine, describe technology as the seventh kingdom of life. He calls it the Technium. He says that it's subject to the same evolutionary forces as biological evolution. You know, that's the craziness here; we're finding more and more that our technological systems are mirroring some of the most advanced natural systems in nature. You know, the internet is wired like the neurons in our brain, which is wired like computer models of dark matter in the universe. They all share the same internal filamentous structure. What does this tell us? That there is no distinction between the born and the made. All of it is nature; all of it is us.

So to be human is to be transhuman. But the reason we're at a pivotal point in history is because now we've decommissioned natural selection. No, this notion that we are now the chief agents of evolution, right? Edward O. Wilson reminds us we now get to decide who we become. Freeman Dyson, in the near future, envisions a new generation of artists composing genomes with the fluency that Blake and Byron wrote verses. You know, with biological biotech transformation, we're talking about software that writes its own hardware. Life itself, the new canvas for the artist—nanotechnology, patterning matter, programmable matter. The whole world becomes computable; life itself becomes programmable and upgradeable.

What does this say about what it means to be human? It means that what it is to be human is to transform and transcend. We've always done it. We're not the same species we were a hundred thousand years ago; we're not going to be the same species tomorrow. Craig Venter recently said we got to understand that we are a software-driven species. Change the software, change the species. And why shouldn't we?