Category Archives: Transhumanism

Humans and robots were first introduced to each other in a theatre. Karel apeks play RUR, which premiered in Prague in 1921, contained the first use of the term robot, and featured uncannily human-looking artificial people. So Mark OConnell tells us in his 2018 Wellcome prize-winning book To Be a Machine, an exploration of transhumanism, the belief that the human race can evolve beyond its limitations through technology and even thereby escape death.

OConnells book has now been adapted by the Irish theatre company Dead Centre into a stage show, co-directed by Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel, exploring the relationship between man and machine that has only become more vexed in the intervening century. And there will be no humans in the stalls. Instead, audiences watch from home, but have their faces pre-recorded and broadcast into the theatre on iPad screens placed in the seats, so they can be seen by Jack Gleeson as he performs the one-man show.

I spoke to OConnell and Gleeson, mediated fittingly enough by our laptop screens, about how they arrived at this premise. Over lockdown, the team were spitballing Covid-safe ideas that would mean they could still put on a theatre production in 2020. These semi-jokingly included performing to just a single audience member, like when Wu-Tang released that album that there was only one copy of, said OConnell.

The innovative format they landed on is more than a workaround forced by circumstance, though. Not to say that it was lucky, but the coronavirus situation dovetailed really nicely with some of the concerns of the book, said OConnell.

In the book, OConnell visits people at the heart of the transhumanist movement, in cryonics facilities and Silicon Valley conferences, and even in a coffin-shaped campaign bus of a transhumanist 2016 presidential candidate. But the stage show is less an adaptation of the events of the book than its ideas, such as self-alienation, the frailty of the body, the primacy of technology in our lives and our innate fear of death concerns that have only become more topical in the pandemic era.

How does the you that is presented on a screen relate to your physical, flesh and blood form? Where does your identity truly reside? Theyre ideas that can make you feel dizzy if you let them, and feelings that many of us have experienced through being beamed into the homes of friends and colleagues through machines over the past months. Gleeson and OConnell both speak about being familiar with alienation from the self. Gleesons image is associated with a character who could not be more different than the affable person speaking to me. He is best known as the sadistic villain King Joffrey on Game of Thrones.

That feeling of not recognising yourself, as Gleeson put it, is something OConnell also felt devising the stage adaptation. I got obsessed with how much time had passed since I wrote [the book] and how I was, in a lot of ways, a different person.

The stage show will consider transhumanism seriously, just as the book did. Its not just, Wow these guys are eccentric nerds, said Gleeson. Its a bigger meditation on things that we all feel, about how crappy our bodies are, and how mortal. And, ultimately, the desire to live forever can be traced back to our basic human wiring to fear death. Transhumanism is an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, writes OConnell.

Is the answer to existential dread, made worse by a pandemic, to escape our bodies once and for all? OConnell feels the opposite. Ive been thinking about how effectively flattened so much of our lives are, by being online all the time. And when I think about what it might be like to be an uploaded consciousness, it just feels like a horrific version of that.

Being an uploaded audience member, however, is a choice we might have to continue to make as theatre-goers for some time. One of the main ideas in the show is that maybe you cant recreate that feeling of being humans together in a room listening to a story thats so ingrained in us as a species, said Gleeson. But in many ways, the team behind To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), as this first showing at the Dublin theatre festival is titled, feel that they have managed to produce something that is enhanced, rather than limited, by being online: a final product rather than a first version. For one thing, the show makes use of videography that would not be possible live.

I cant help but be hopeful that this show and others like it work. As long as we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about the desire to escape our human bodies, to become something other than the animals we are, writes OConnell in the book. And for the moment, being uploaded to a theatre crowd might be the best way to achieve that much-needed abstraction from ourselves as we consider the near future and our place in it.

Read more from the original source:
Kings and machines: Game of Thrones star's daring transhuman adventure - The Guardian

There's no evidence of an afterlife. But there's also no proof that our medical death needs to be the end of our subjective experience. There's no proof that death is irreversible, or immortality impossible.

In fact, some researchers believe immortality isn't just possible, but inevitable.

Alexey Turchin, an author, life extensionist, and transhumanist researcher from Moscow, believes artificial intelligence will eventually become so powerful that humans will be able to "download" themselves or, the quantifiable information contained in their brains into computers and live forever.

It'll take a long time to develop that technology anywhere from 100 to 600 years, according to Turchin.

"The development of AI is going rather fast, but we are still far away from being able to 'download' a human into a computer," Turchin told Russia Beyond. "If we want to do it with a good probability of success, then count on [the year] 2600, to be sure."

That might be out of reach for modern humans. But downloading yourself onto a computer is just one potential route to immortality. In 2018, Turchin and Maxim Chernyakov, of the Russian Transhumanist Movement, wrote a paper outlining the main ways technology might someday make resurrection and, therefore, immortality possible.

The paper defines life as a "continued stream of subjective experiences" and death as the permanent end of that stream. Immortality, to them, is a "life stream without end," and resurrection is the "continuation of that same stream of experiences after an arbitrarily long gap."

Another key clarification is the identity problem: How would you know that a downloaded copy of yourself really was going to be you? Couldn't it just be a convincing yet incomplete and fundamentally distinct representation of your brain?

If you believe that your copy is not you, that implies you believe there's something more to your identity than the (currently) quantifiable information contained within your brain and body, according to the researchers. In other words, your "informational identity" does not constitute your true identity.

In this scenario, there must exist what the researchers call a "non-informational identity carrier" (NIIC). This could be something like a "soul." It could be "qualia," which are the unmeasurable "subjective experiences which could be unique to every person." Or maybe it doesn't exist at all.

It's no matter: The researchers say resurrection, in some form, should be possible in either scenario.

"If no 'soul' exist[s], resurrection is possible via information preservation; if soul[s] exist, resurrection is possible via returning of the "soul" into the new body. But some forms of NIIC are also very fragile and mortal, like continuity," the researchers noted.

"The problem of the nature of human identity could be solved by future superintelligent AI, but for now it cannot be definitively solved. This means that we should try to preserve as much identity as possible and not refuse any approaches to life extension and resurrection even if they contradict our intuitions about identity, as our notions of identity could change later."

Turchin and Chernyakov outline seven broad categories of potential resurrection methods, ranked from the most plausible to most speculative.

The first category includes methods practiced while the person is alive, like cryonics, plastination, and preserving brain tissue through processes like chemical fixation. The researchers noted that there have been "suggestions that the claustrum, hypothalamus, or even a single neuron is the neural correlate of consciousness," so it may be possible to preserve just that part of a person, and later implant it into another organism.

Other methods get far stranger. For example, one method includes super-intelligent AI that uses a Dyson sphere to harness the power of the sun to "power enormous calculation engines" that would "reconstruct" people who collected a sufficient amount of data on their identities.

Turchin

"The main idea of a resurrection-simulation is that if one takes the DNA of a past person and subjects it to the same developmental condition, as well as correcting the development based on some known outcomes, it is possible to create a model of a past person which is very close to the original," the researchers wrote.

"DNA samples of most people who lived in past 1 to 2 centuries could be extracted via global archeology. After the moment of death, the simulated person is moved into some form of the afterlife, perhaps similar to his religious expectations, where he meets his relatives."

Delving further into sci-fi territory, another resurrection method would use time-travel technology.

"If there will at some point be technology that allows travel to the past, then our future descendants will be able to directly save people dying in the past by collecting their brains at the moment of death and replacing them with replicas," the paper states.

How? Sending tiny robots back in time.

"A nanorobot could be sent several billion years before now, where it could secretly replicate and sow nanotech within all living being[s] without affecting the course of history. At the moment of death, such nanorobots could be activated to collect data about the brain and preserve it somewhere until its future resurrection; thus, there would be no need for forward time travel."

Pixabay

The paper goes on to outline some more resurrection methods, including ones that involve parallel worlds, aliens, and clones, along with a good, old-fashioned possibility: God exists and one day he resurrects us.

In short, it's all extremely speculative.

But the aim of the paper was to catalogue known potential ways humans might be able to cheat death. For Turchin, that's not some far-off project: In addition to studying global risks and transhumanism, the Russian researcher heads the Immortality Roadmap, which, similar to the 2018 paper, outlines various ways in which we might someday achieve immortality.

Although it may take centuries before humans come close to "digital immortality," Turchin believes that life-extension technology could allow some modern people to survive long enough to see it happen.

Want a shot at being among them? Beyond the obvious, like staying healthy, the Immortality Roadmap suggests you start collecting extensive data on yourself: diaries, video recordings, DNA information, EEGs, complex creative objects all of which could someday be used to digitally "reconstruct" your identity.

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Can we resurrect the dead? Researchers catalogue potential future methods - Big Think

The pandemic has forced authorities around the world to scramble for solutions within the realm of possibility. One of the more futuristic, radical solutions which is still relegated to the sidelines is transhumanism. It is a branch of philosophy that believes in transcending the limitations of the human population through technological augmentation. From hearing aids, pacemakers, bionic arms, the manifestations of transhumanism are very much present in our lives. However, the radical applications of being able to tweak biology to suit ones interests and needs at a commercial cost is yet to see the light of day. The basic tenet of transhumanism is extension of human life. Yet, eternal life comes across as a utopian thought where inadequate manufacturing of PPE kits for doctors and nurses have us jolted back to the harsh realities of current pandemic dwelling.

Since the globalized nature of modern capitalistic order and the consequent interconnectedness of our lives has made the possibility of frequent pandemics ever so plausible, we find ourselves at the juncture of a major shift towards increasing receptivity to transhumanist solutions. The famous American inventor and futurist Kurzweil wrote in his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology about a journey towards a meshing point of humans and machine intelligence The Singularity. He envisioned nanobots which allowed people to eat whatever they want while remaining healthy and fit, provide copious energy, ward off infections or cancer, replace organs and augment their brains. There will come a future where human bodies will carry so much augmentation that they would be able to alter their physical manifestation at will.

Even if the coronavirus fades off without wiping humans off the planet, it has given an eerie trailer of what future outbreaks might hold in store. Hence due security measures have to be pondered upon -whether in the labs, where deadly pathogens are being researched upon or in the malicious possibilities of a biowarfare. Frontline workers can be provided tech enhancements to ensure better armament against infectious, mutating viral diseases. Protective exoskeletons, real-time blood monitors for pathogens, can bid riddance to any temporary means of protection which are vulnerable against quality and efficacy issues.

In 2011, surgeons in Sweden had successfully transplanted a fully synthetic, tissue-engineered trachea into a man with late-stage tracheal cancer. The trachea was created entirely in a lab with tissue grown from the patients own stem cells inside a bioreactor designed to protect the organ and promote cell growth. Under transhumanism, artificial organs would be superior to ordinary donor organs in several ways. They can be made to order more quickly than a donor organ can often be found; would be grown from a patients own cells and hence wont require dangerous immunosuppressant drugs to prevent rejection.

As of 2018, prototypes of artificial lungs are also surfacing at the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch, where the team spent the last 15 years developing the prototype. Upon completion, the bioengineered lungs were transplanted into four pigs. There was no indication of transplant rejection when the animals were examined at regular intervals for months after transplant. The researchers also observed that the bioengineered lungs became vascularized, establishing the necessary blood vessel networks to do its job. For diseases like covid-19, which affect a particular body organ, having an option of a bioengineered organ could very well be a safeguard.

But transhumanists are not just trying to extend human lives, they also want to revive them. They aim to merge bioengineering, AI capabilities, 3-D printing to resurrect the dead victims of any catastrophe much like the pandemic on our hands right now. Ways of dealing with grief at the loss of a loved one can possibly be placated with measures like interactive custom-holograms, social media feed powered by AI that could generate new messages based on the pattern of the old ones.

There are strong ethical considerations that also pop up in the discussion of transhumanism. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, a German philosopher and bioethicist believes that processes like cryonics will go against most ecological principles given the amount of resources needed to keep a body in suspended animation post-death. Even though, transhumanism does not explicitly encourage breeding for the superiority of one specific group, the methods endorsed by some prominent transhumanists aim for physiological superiority. Considering that for the time being, solutions emanating will be heavy on the monetary end in the healthcare set-up, it could breed inequality in access. A huge gap in resources will be experienced in the society, as the affluent section amasses money and influence to set out an eternal timeline for themselves, coming at a lethal cost for the other half of the society.

Solving problems that will plague us in the future is a rising urge shared by leaders, philanthropists and billionaires around the world. This is why proponents like Zoltan Istvan fear the fact that the exponential rise of transhumanist technologies might leave governments fumbling to discuss and bring about policy directions to regulate and guard changes. Important questions like how far is too far? will need phased guidance as we have learnt from the chaotic response to systemic changes being implemented in the medical field during Covid-19. A conversation on transhumanism should not be put off any further and needs to permeate across different strata of stakeholders.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Pandemics and transhumanism - The Times of India Blog

Image: Screen shot from That Hideous Strength: C.S. Lewis's Prophetic Warning against the Abuse of Science.

Editors note: Published on August 16, 1945,C. S. LewissThat Hideous Strengthis a dystopian novel that eerily reflects the realities of 2020, putting into a memorable fictional form ideas expressed in Lewiss non-fiction work, The Abolition of Man. To mark the former books three-quarter century anniversary,Evolution Newspresents a series of essays, reflections, and videos about its themes and legacy.

James A. Herrick is the Guy Vander Jagt Professor of Communication at Hope College in Holland, MI. His books include The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition.

This post is adapted from Chapter 10 ofThe Magicians Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, edited by John G. West. See also,

Not surprisingly, contemporary Transhumanism has attracted a number of informed critics. I will briefly review two prominent voices in the opposition camp who reflect concerns at the heart of C. S. Lewiss own case. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, a skeptic as regards the Transhumanist vision, echoes one of the central arguments of The Abolition of Man biotechnology now threatens to exercise control of nature itself:

Due to genetic engineering, humans are now able not only to redesign themselves but also to redesign future generations, thereby affecting the evolutionary process itself. As a result, a new posthuman phase in the evolution of the human species will emerge, in which humans will live longer, will possess new physical and cognitive abilities, and will be liberated from suffering and pain due to aging and diseases. In the posthuman age, humans will no longer be controlled by nature; instead, they will be the controllers of nature.1

The question of altering human nature also remains at the center of the developing case against Transhumanism and related proposals. Famed historian Francis Fukuyama, for example, has argued that contemporary biotechnology raises the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a posthuman stage of history. This possibility poses a real danger to individual rights and threatens the foundation of democratic institutions:

This is important because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species. It is, conjointly with religion, what defines our most basic values. Human nature shapes and constrains the possible kinds of political regimes, so a technology powerful enough to reshape what we are will have possibly malign consequences for liberal democracy and the nature of politics itself.2

Though the deeper dangers of biotechnological alterations of humans have not yet manifested themselves, Fukuyama adds, one of the reasons I am not quite so sanguine is that biotechnology, in contrast to many other scientific advances, mixes obvious benefits with subtle harms in one seamless package.3 The essential correctness of Lewiss case is evident in the duration of major components in his rebuttal to Bernal, Stapledon, Haldane, Shaw and other enhancement proponents of his own day.

C. S. Lewis exhibited remarkable prescience in The Abolition of Man. Was there anything that he failed to see? Writing in the war years of the early 1940s, Lewiss perspective was understandably shaped by present circumstance and personal experience. As a result, he did not anticipate certain cultural and historical developments that have become critical to the rise of posthumanity thinking.

As noted, Lewis harbored a deep antipathy for faceless state institutions where atrocities are plotted out according to cost-benefit pragmatism and inhuman schemes are hatched in dingy meeting rooms. In such settings was the banality of evil expressed in war-torn Europe. Lewis does not appear to have anticipated the postwar power of the large corporation, the modern research university, and sophisticated mass media. Such shapers of 21st-century American culture, not the cumbersome state agencies of mid-century Europe, have taken the lead in developing the biotechnologies, educational techniques and persuasive prowess Lewis cautioned against. The user-friendly smile of the high-tech firm, not the icy stare of a government department, is the face of the new humanity. Moreover, justifications for enhancement research are not hammered out in centralized planning meetings, but tested on focus groups and winsomely presented in entertaining public lectures. Financial support for posthumanity comes not come from Big Brother bureaucracies but from Silicon Valley boardrooms.

The scope of research related to human enhancement is incomprehensibly vast and accelerating at an incalculable rate. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of university and corporate research facilities around the world are involved in developing artificial intelligence, regenerative medicine, life-extension strategies, and pharmaceutical enhancements of cognitive performance. An ever-increasing number of media products including movies, video games and novels promote Transhumanist and evolutionist themes. Each technological breakthrough is promoted as a matter of consumerist necessity despite the fact that personal electronic devices and the companies marketing them are increasingly intrusive and corrosive of personal freedoms. Innovative educational organizations such as Singularity University are forming around the Transhumanist ideal. Indeed, so immense, diverse and well-funded is the research network developing enhancement technologies that the collective financial and intellectual clout of all related projects is beyond calculating. Suffice it to say that the enhancement juggernaut is astonishingly large and powerful.

Tomorrow, Science and Scientism: The Prophetic Vision of C. S. Lewis.

Original post:
CS Lewis and Critical Reactions to Transhumanism - Discovery Institute

Im reticent to use the phrase iPhone moment for brain surgery in the first sentence here, but Elon Musk and the team at Neuralink are set to demonstrate the progress made by the company over the past year this Friday and Im excited.

First, its been rumored the company will announce human trials are set to begin this year at the event and thats a pretty big deal. Ill get to why in a moment.

And second: Musks confirmed the event will feature a live demonstration of neurons firing. This is what Im referring to when I talk about an iPhone moment for brain surgery.

Neuralink was founded with a single purpose, one Musk recently reiterated in an interview with Axios: The long term aspiration for Neuralink would be to achieve symbiosis with artificial intelligence.

The big idea here is that Neuralink is building a brain computer interface (BCI), a robot to surgically install it, and all the necessary components to facilitate direct communication between computers and our brains.

Neuralinks BCI is invasive, it has to be implanted in the skull so that tiny wires can be directly inserted into the brain. Per a research paper published by the company last year:

We have built arrays of small and flexible electrode threads, with as many as 3,072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads. We have also built a neurosurgical robot capable of inserting six threads (192 electrodes) per minute.

Each thread can be individually inserted into the brain with micron precision for avoidance of surface vasculature and targeting specific brain regions. The electrode array is packaged into a small implantable device that contains custom chips for low-power on-board amplification and digitization: the package for 3,072 channels occupies less than (23 18.5 2) mm3.

A single USB-C cable provides full-bandwidth data streaming from the device, recording from all channels simultaneously.

You read that right: Neuralink is literally going to put a USB-C cord in or on your head. Dont get too excited at the prospect of using a fast charger to get a full nights sleep in just 30 minutes though, because thats not the kind of connectivity were looking at. While details arent clear yet, its assumed the USB-C cable connects the internal device to an external wearable that sends and receives outside signals. However, when it comes to a Musk-inspired gadget. who knows? His cars have external speakers that play fart sounds and snake jazz.

What we do know is that Musks pushing the device through regulatory bodies as a medical device patterned after other similar BCIs. These are typically used to deliver intracranial stimulation or other brain-modulating medical treatments.

Neuralinks plans involve similar capabilities. Musks stated that the device will be able to solve many brain, nervous system, and mental conditions. Hes claimed itll successfully treat everything from strokes to Alztheimers and even made dubious claims that it could eliminate autistic spectrum disorder.

[Read:Elon Musk says Neuralink can solve autism with a brain chip. We call BS]

Musks known for making grandiose claims and then failing to deliver (remember when he invented the tunnel and called it the future of transportation? Or when he said thered be a million self-driving taxis on the road by the end of 2020?). But this is different. At least I hope it is, because Neuralink could be a big damn deal for humanity if hes been playing straight with us.

Neuralink represents the first bold steps towards transhumanism for our species. If you want to really dumb it down, think about BCIs like the computers manufacturers started installing in cars in the 1990s. There was a time, long ago, when youd take your car to a mechanic and theyd diagnose itlike a human doctor making a house call. They listen to it, maybe drive it around the block, and eventually start taking things apart to see if they could confirm their suspected diagnosis.

With computers, myriad mechanical and electrical automobile problems can be diagnosed by simply connecting the car to a workstation. A BCI could offer humans similar sensing capabilities. Imagine if you could diagnose health conditions that require anecdotal evidence such as headaches and other neurologically-induced pain through direct, real-time analsysis of brain activity. Thatd be a game-changer for anyone whos ever had a migraine.

All thats interesting, but none of it is new. Scientists have toiled to create a suitable BCI for medical purposes for decades. The reason Neuralinks event is, potentially, so exciting is that it represents the first time a serious organization has attempted to bring an invasive BCI out of the realm of medicine and into the general consumer sector.

Make no mistake, Musks vision for Neuralink clearly states this device is aimed at everyone. The obvious non-medical benefits would include things like unlocking and opening doors with your mind or sending and receiving text messages as thoughts. These might seem like far-future tech, but the truth is that the ability to do these things has been around awhile. Neuralinks working on the hard parts: designing scalable software andhardware and making the surgery to implant it as much like a clockwork outpatient procedure as possible.

The real benefits, the exciting stuff, has more to do with data gathering than telepathy. A BCI capable of translating brain activity in real-time with enough bandwidth to constantly stream could theoretically make mental health conditions as easily-diagnosed and treatable as physical injuries. Imagine if the mental health equivalent of a sprained wrist say, a mildly traumatic experience could be diagnosed with precision and treated in such a way that progress and improvement could be codified and monitored.

At any rate, the skys the limit. A functioning BCI may or may not bridge the gap between us and whatever fictional supercomputers Musk and the other harbingers of AI-doom think are going to makehumans their pets. But it sure would be nice to have as clear an image of our own brains as we do a 2002 Ford Taurus. If anyone can convince the powers that be, and the general population, that a BCI is a good idea its Elon Musk.

The idea of true human-AI symbiosis seems spooky but heres the tech take: Youre already a human-AI hybrid. You use apps for everything. Computers tell you when to wake up, what email to read, how to spell difficult words, and which lane you should be in on the interstate. You accept all of this direction most of which is controlled by machine learning algorithms because its easier than doing everything the hard way.

Now imagine controlling everything in your home and office with your mind while you bask in the glow of your newfound healthy mental state. We can all worry about the privacy and horror-scenario implications another day right?

Were unclear exactly what time on Friday or on what platform the event will take place, but in the meantime stay tuned to @neuralink and @elonmusk on Twitter.

Published August 24, 2020 18:52 UTC

Read more:
Elon Musk may announce human trials at the Neuralink demo. Heres why thats awesome - The Next Web

Ethics professor Parker Crutchfield said "morality pills" in this case, psychoactive medications might be the best option to fight against the continued spread of COVID-19.

In a lengthy essay for the Conversation, Crutchfield an ethicist from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo said that the government could mandate "morality pills" to force citizens to comply with federal and state government mandates and to make them more cooperative and receptive.

Such mandates currently include social distancing and mask-wearing, and "morality pills," in effect, would chemically coerce citizens to follow the rules in order to eradicate the spread of coronavirus.

In his remarks, Crutchfield said that the government could use hormones and/or synthetic drugs to force people into following health regulations due to COVID-19 or, as he put it, "morally enhance" people.

"To me, it seems the problem of coronavirus defectors could be solved by moral enhancement: like receiving a vaccine to beef up your immune system, people could take a substance to boost their cooperative, pro-social behavior," Crutchfield wrote. "Could a psychoactive pill be the solution to the pandemic?"

He later said, "I believe society may be better off, both in the short term as well as the long, by boosting not the body's ability to fight off disease but the brain's ability to cooperate with others. What if researchers developed and delivered a moral enhancer rather than an immunity enhancer?"

Crutchfield, however, despite his apparent excitement over the notion of forced compliance through chemical means, conceded that hormone therapy specifically using the "feel-good" hormone, oxytocin could result in some concerning unintended consequences, such as a promotion of ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism is a belief in inherent superiority of one's own culture, race, or ethnic group when compared to others.

According to Dr. Richard Weikart, in an article published on Evolution News, moral enhancement which is associated with transhumanism, the idea that human behavior is genetically determined and could evolve through scientific and technological advancements is a slippery slope.

Weikart wrote, "Oxytocin, one of the darling hormones proposed by those pushing 'moral enhancement,' seems to promote cooperation in [a testing] in-group, but hostility toward the out-group. Thus it may actually increase conformity to one's own society, but perhaps increase racism."

"Do we really want to increase conformity to COVID-19 regulations, if it increases racism?" Weikart asked.

Weikart continued by pointing out the theory of transhumanism is problematic at best.

"[T]ranshumanists have no basis for any objective morality, so whenever they talk about promoting morality, they are merely pushing for whatever they personally think is moral," he reasoned. "If other people disagree with their moral vision, there is no way to adjudicate (other than by reference to who has the power to impose their morality on others ...)."

He added that in such a case, "morality pills" will impose the "moral vision of the technocratic elite."

Weikart explained, "[I]f people are really in need of 'moral enhancement,' how can we trust them to bioengineer 'moral enhancement? What if the technocrats are in need of 'moral enhancement,' too?"

"Some, like myself, think the opposite is true the intellectual elites of our society have been promoting immorality for decades, and if anyone needs 'moral enhancement,' it is them," he concluded.

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Ethics professor suggests mandated 'morality pills' instead of vaccine in COVID-19 fight. Doctor hits back with frightening reason why this should...