The Key and Promise of Transhumanism for a Skeptic

Name: The Key and Promise of Transhumanism for a Skeptic
Uploaded: 2017-04-20T12:00:00.000Z
Duration: 19 min 17 s
Description: Explore transhumanism through a skeptical lens! Jacob Baker examines its promises and potential conflicts with pessimistic philosophy. Is progress real?

2017.04.20

Jacob Baker, a philosopher following the pessimistic tradition, offers a skeptic’s charitable exploration of what he finds compelling in Mormon transhumanism. He presents a “Trinity of Transhumanist Skepticism”: Thomas Ligotti’s cosmic pessimism, Slavoj Žižek’s questioning of autonomous subjectivity, and Mary Shelley’s warnings about unchecked ambition. Baker finds redemption in the concept of “transascendance”—that we transcend one another through relationship, making the other person a figure of the infinite. He suggests transfigurism uniquely addresses his critics: relationships themselves become the teleology, personhood emerges from messy entanglement rather than isolated autonomy, and the system is willing to climb its own ladder to its death rather than becoming an idol.

Jacob Baker

Jacob Baker is a scholar of philosophy of religion and theology who completed his doctoral studies at Claremont Graduate University’s School of Religion. His dissertation explored the inherent unthinkability of the problem of evil in philosophy and theology, arguing that this unthinkability is central to its status as a problem. ¶ Baker’s graduate work spans an impressive range of philosophical and theological traditions. He studied continental philosophy under Ingolf Dalferth, examining figures such as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. His paper Heidegger and Wittgenstein: Worldliness and Surveyable Representation in the Architecture of the Ordinary argued that both philosophers share a fundamental orientation toward allowing phenomena to show themselves without philosophical interference. His work on Nietzsche explored how the philosopher’s critique of truth was ultimately in service of affirming and enhancing life itself. ¶ In phenomenology, Baker engaged deeply with Jean-Luc Marion’s work, arguing that love is the privileged theme of phenomenology and that Marion’s phenomenology of givenness can reveal how love enables the other to give herself as herself in particularity and unsubstitutability. His paper on Badiou and Zizek’s readings of St. Paul explored how these atheist philosophers converge on understanding Pauline love as work, labor, and struggle—far removed from sentimental notions. ¶ Baker has contributed significantly to Mormon intellectual discourse. His article The Grandest Principle of the Gospel: Christian Nihilism, Sanctified Activism, and Eternal Progression appeared in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (Vol. 41, No. 3, 2008), examining how early twentieth-century Mormon intellectuals developed eternal progression as an existential response to what they perceived as the nihilistic stasis of traditional Christian heaven. In Element (Vol. 4, Issue 1, 2008), his essay The Shadow of the Cathedral argued that “open system” approaches to systematic theology can accommodate Mormon continuing revelation. ¶ His work on Joseph Smith, written under Richard L. Bushman, explored the connection between Smith’s personal experiences with friendship and his developing theology of sealing, arguing that the “welding link” concept emerged from Smith’s vision of uniting all humanity across time through bonds of love. Baker also examined whether Mormon theology can be meaningfully articulated within panentheistic discourse, suggesting that “pansyntheism”—meaning “God with us” rather than “God in us”—better accommodates Mormon emphases on divine personhood and the distinct identities of God and humans. ¶ In process theology and medieval theology, Baker examined how panentheism provides a framework capable of unifying disparate experiences—religious and secular, scientific and theological—into a coherent whole. His work on medieval atonement theory argued against contemporary calls to subordinate atonement to incarnation, demonstrating through Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas, and Bonaventure that these doctrines are mutually interdependent. ¶ During his presentation at the MTAConf 2016, he offered philosophical challenges to transhumanist thought through the lens of cosmic pessimism. His engagement with transhumanist literature reflects his broader interest in how philosophy and theology address questions of human potential, meaning, and transcendence.

Transcript

Scroll to current paragraph while playing

Speaker 1

Next up we have Jacob Baker, who is a PhD student in philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University. He’s working on a doctoral dissertation that explores the inherent unthinkability of the problem of evil in philosophy and theology as central to its status as a problem. Jacob, come on up.

Jacob Baker

Alright. So the clicker’s not here, right? Just making sure.

Speaker 3

Is it the arrows to boot? Or do I have the same problem as Blair?

Speaker 1

Try the arrows.

Speaker 3

Maybe it’s a Certain combination of the arrows.

Speaker 4

Secret MTA combination.

Speaker 3

The keyboard network. Luckily, there’s no technological aspect of this association. Or else this might be kind of embarrassing right now. For the total breakdown of everything close humanity.

Jacob Baker

I can I can answer music from the back. Oh, like I could do that.

Speaker 3

I also have my own computer, but that’s that that would probably work. Or I could just read kinda read it off and you’ll just have to use your imagination I could probably follow alone. I could read it here right now, but that’s okay. Well, you can actually do that if you want, and I could just read it or I don’t know. It’s up to you. It’s not the most amazing PowerPoint presentation. Wouldn’t it? It was supplemental. It’s not the blares. Okay. Yeah, that’s fine. Sure. All right.

Jacob Baker

So at the beginning of the conference, Chris mentioned that there was this concerted effort to Can everyone hear me? It seems like it’s a little bit. I don’t know how to raise it. Is any better? How’s that? That’s going to get a little uncomfortable.

Jacob Baker

So he mentioned that there was this concerted effort to focus as much on the T. as on the M of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. But I am personally more interested in the A. Because while I am a Mormon, I don’t know that I identify personally as a transhumanist, but I have friends that are transhumanists, and that’s what interests me most. About transhumanism. So it’s more the association of people that want to get together under a certain basket of ideas. And I don’t really care what those ideas are that much. I just like associating with people.

Jacob Baker

But also, as a philosopher, I’m very interested in ideas. And I’ve been trying to explore. So, this presentation was kind of an exploration. Of what I could really find compelling about Mormon transhumanism, because I’ve been kind of a philosophical critic to a certain degree. And that’s partly because I follow the pessimistic tradition of philosophy to a certain extent, and transhumanism to me seems enormously optimistic. So, it’s almost like my Joker to my Batman, in a sense. And so, this is an exercise more or less in the extension of the hermeneutics of charity. In trying to figure out the nuggets of things that I think are really compelling from an outsider’s point of view.

Jacob Baker

I kind of feel like Unfrozen Cape Men lawyer, to a certain extent. Have you seen the SNL skit with Phil Hartman from the 80s where he’s like, your world frightens and confuses me. Feels a little bit like that to me. And so this is me trying to dip my toes in sincerely to the transhumanist world. Okay, just making sure what’s up there is on here.

Jacob Baker

So yeah, why so skeptical in the first place? Well, one of those reasons is because, as someone who follows the pessimistic tradition a little more closely than most, I’m a little bit skeptical of the broader idea of human progress. Not so much of certain developments within human constructivism, like technological developments or cultural developments and things of that nature. Obviously, those things develop and they advance. I’m just when you look at the entire big picture of things, to think that there’s this linear progress from an ancient time to the present time, I’m a little bit skeptical of that idea.

Jacob Baker

And this is partly because when you look at the history of human thought and advancement, there were some changes in time consciousness in the late medieval and early modern period. Where humans went from thinking in kind of cyclical ways to thinking in a much more linear fashion. The idea of linearity then was sutured to the idea of progress. Yet, linearity Need not be inherently progressive. Change can occur, but not necessarily permanently for the better. Technologies have obviously improved. The powers of science have been manifested again and again. But these are often related to greater sets of costs. And has science touched the core of the human condition? What if history is, in the end, ironic? Everything appears to be getting better when actually it’s getting worse, or just no better at all? We cannot help, it seems, but to be drawn to ideas of progress, not necessarily because they’re real, but because anything else would be too painful to bear. We’re kind of in the middle of it, and we have to make the most of it.

Jacob Baker

Okay, so if you want to go to the next slide, the following three critics are what I kind of call the Trinity Actually, go to the next slide again. The Trinity of Skeptics. Is that what I called it in the thing? Yeah, there it is. The Trinity of Transhumanist Skepticism. And this is more like a Trinity, not necessarily the Trinity. Not being as familiar with transhumanist ideas as many of you are, I probably missed some really key. philosophers that have criticisms of the ideas that transhumanism promotes. But these are three that I have found compelling in the past. And so I’m going to outline what it is that they say, and then I’m going to try to respond in a charitable way and push back a little against their ideas.

Jacob Baker

So let’s start with Thomas Legatti, who is actually a fictionist and who wrote one particular philosophical treatise that I really like a lot, which is the philosophical basis for the series The True Detective Series. If any of you are familiar with that, it’s called Conspiracy Against the Human Race. And transhumanism gets some ink in that particular work. I’m sure it’s been excoriated in various forums by transhumanists, and I didn’t have the time to go and research that and figure out if anyone’s actually said anything about that.

Jacob Baker

But essentially, he has a problem with what he calls future philia, which is essentially this positive, optimistic obsession that the future is going to be good. Not just that it will just inherently be good no matter what we do, but that we actually have the capacity to make a good future. And he Is a future foe. He doesn’t think humanity has a future at all. And frankly, he’s an extremist in a lot of senses. That doesn’t totally work.

Jacob Baker

But he essentially says that evolution It being true tells us that we got made. We didn’t bring ourselves out of the primeval ooze. Everything we’ve done is a consequence of being made. We do what we were made to do. Period. Nature still has plans for us. And those plans could very well be nothing that we would think of as good.

Jacob Baker

He says, transhumanist, and this is a direct quote, transhumanists need being alive to be vastly more alright than it is. And that’s the underlying assumption of his entire work: that being alive is not alright. And the whole book is essentially an exploration of that idea. That we are going nowhere and have never been going anywhere is not actually a curable condition. although going nowhere at the fastest possible velocity, which is what he considers transhumanism to be, might be curable, but probably not.

Jacob Baker

What if the ideal being at the end of evolution is one who finally realizes that the best of all possible worlds is useless? And not just useless, but malignantly useless? And since the human condition is untouchable, so we can create technologies that can intervene in our mortality or immortality and cure diseases, etc. , etc. But that which makes us human That’s more questionable that that can be manipulated. What if self-extinction is the optimal course to take? And our enlightenment through our post-humanity is to realize that finally?

Jacob Baker

Moving on to Slavoj Žižek. His question is, where is the autonomous subject who freely decides to change its own nature? On the one hand, I’m the object of my interventions, that which has properties that can be manipulated and changed. But on the other hand, I act as if I am somehow exempt from this manipulation. Acting at a distance, deciding how and where to intervene in myself. But what if the loop gets closed, or even more terrifyingly, has already gotten closed? So that my very power of decision making gets meddled with and the autonomous subject disappears. How might my interventions have affected the definition of my humanity? So his final question then is, can the free autonomous individual survive the passage into the post human era? And perhaps there’s a sense in which we are no longer free autonomous individuals, we just haven’t realized it yet.

Jacob Baker

Okay, and finally Mary Shelley. Now Shelley for many many reasons is very very different from Zizek and Logadi The subtitle of her famous work, Frankenstein, is A Modern Prometheus, taken from one version of the Greek tale of the Titan whom Zeus commissioned to create humankind. but whom Zeus then punished for allowing humans to have fire, thereby allowing them to advance and evolve. One of the primary morals of the story is the consequence of the naive, though mostly innocent, hubris and ambition of Victor Frankenstein. or Frankenstein, if you prefer, who sought to create life only to have it ravage him in completely unanticipated ways. Perhaps most interesting, however, is his conclusion that humankind seems doomed to pursue knowledge almost as if we’re addicted To pursuing knowledge and advancement and progress, and we could never stop if we tried, even at the cost of the tranquility of simple pleasures and relationships with others. And that’s one of the main themes of the Frankenstein work. Okay, if you want to go to the next one.

Jacob Baker

In the end, really, transhumanism is just a story, like other stories. It exists to bring people together to do certain things, create groups, social bonds, etc. And depending on how this story is told, the trajectory toward a particular end will be different. Alastair McIntyre, the famous virtue theorist, once said, I can only answer the question, what am I to do if I can answer the prior question, of what story or stories do I find myself apart? It seems to be that we want to locate ourselves in stories, especially in relationships to others. This is both the appeal and the problem of transfigurism, as I understand it, which I probably completely don’t. But if you if you’ll kind of bear with me and take what my understanding is, it kind of val it kind of there’s a valid Chain of premises here. On the one hand, it problematizes the story of transhumanism further by not ignoring the religious question of transcendence.

Jacob Baker

Because obviously religious transhumanism can’t ignore the religious question of transcendence. But on the other hand, that question is a vital part of human stories. And not just in terms of the divine, but also in terms of what it means to be human in the first place. The problem of transcendence is the problem of reconciling a seemingly imminent human subjective experience. In being with the religious proposition that there is something beyond being. If you want to go to the next slide.

Jacob Baker

But as James Faulkner, who is a BYU professor of philosophy, nicely lays out, following Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean-Luc Marion, other people are also transcendent as persons. To experience another person as a person is not to experience an object, a being among beings within being, one more tool in my world. but instead it is exposure to one who disengages me from my world of objects. In this sense, the other person is infinite and therefore otherwise than being. otherwise than the usual assembly of objects in my world. Faulkner, borrowing a phrase from Gabriel Marcel, refers to this as trans ascendance.

Jacob Baker

In relation to God, we are drawn out of ourselves toward and by someone infinitely higher, someone to whom we are indebted, and someone by whom we are judged. The other person, however, is the figure of God, toward whom we transascend. In relation to another person, and I can only be an I. In relation to persons, I am transcendent. The other person interrupts my interiority and brings me outside myself. And my world. So there’s an important sense then in which we transcend one another. This offers an interesting response to our three critics. Go ahead and go to the next slide. And I have actually little fun animations with captions as I mentioned these critics. I don’t know if you want to try to recreate that. You can have some fun back there.

Jacob Baker

To Ligati, we might say that while we might not be ultimately going anywhere worthwhile, it could be that our relationships might be a kind of ultimate teleology. So, not the end goal of a destination, but relationship itself is an end goal. Relationships could just be ends in themselves, regardless of how far we progress or regress.

Jacob Baker

To Žižek, we might ask if the autonomous free individual so sacrosanct in Western thought, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Is the right model for persons who cannot exist as persons without one another, in which personhood is a messy entanglement of subjectivities and interpersonal bedazzlements. rather than flesh containers in which free decisions are made.

Jacob Baker

To Shelley, on the other hand, we might assent to the notion that simple pleasures and relationships constitute the essence of the human, while at the same time positing that a more cautious application of growing knowledge is compatible with this more meaningful project. Broadly speaking, and again as far as I understand it, transfigurism fits into these responses in an interesting way that might kind of salvage the transhumanist impulse for me.

Jacob Baker

It seems to me that transfigurism is a system of thought that takes both the phenomenology of transascendence and its own future consummation seriously. In other words, from what I understand, because of the specific Mormon religious undergirdings of transfigurism, which mark out a ritual understanding of human relationships with one another, and with God, the role of human relationships and their preservation is given a place of paramount importance.

Jacob Baker

But also, as a system of thought, Transfigurism thinks its own consummation and transcendence. So it’s not just a system of thought that thinks transcendence in particular ways, it itself is concerned with transescendence as a system of thought. In other words, it thinks how to transcend itself.

Jacob Baker

If the primary goal of this relationship engineering and preservation is ultimately theosis, then to achieve godhood is to consummate or fulfill the system or superstructure designed to achieve that end. In other words, transfigurism in theory is willing to climb the ladder that it created or that it sees within its religious underpinnings to its own death. To take seriously the teleology of such a superstructure as a means and not as an end. Once achieved, it tips the ladder over, as it were, or perhaps it builds another ladder or finds a new ladder. If this is true, it avoids the religious criticism of idolatry by not putatively being self-concerned and self-interested, but pointed at something larger it is willing to be subsumed in. and the broader philosophical criticism of pointless and possibly even malevolent superhuman engineering for the sake of itself. Thank you.