Intergalactic Summit

Confessions of a Transhumanist: On Life


- This Dystopian Heaven, Writings by a capsuleer


- Response statement by Capsuleer Korinne

We were hunters once. We were explorers, foragers, wanderers and nomads. On Earth, that long lost forgotten seed of a homeworld, our ancestors first looked up to the stars in wonder. What dreams must those first human children have dreamed, long long ago in the genetic record? In those thousands of generations that have passed, are we so different now then then? If those long lost ancestors could see us now, astride the stars with the power of suns, yet still trapped in our childish human conflicts, what would they think of us? We who can not even peacefully put our little corner of space in order, riven with rivalries and hatred, is this truly to be our fate for all of time? Is our destiny of light to be defined by a perpetual sea of bloodshed that only grows with the population? Is this tortured existence, with so many suffering, really all that we can hope to achieve as a species? Is it truly human nature to be an agent of violence and conflict? Can we truly not do better?

It would seem that for many, we really cannot do better. The world is as it is, and we mere humans will never be able to achieve lasting peace or equality. Our human nature, as it would be put, is selfish, chaotic, violent and destructive, and that will never change. But is that truly human nature?

I do not believe that to be so. Before the Amarrians, the Minmatar Empire saw the longest period of peace and prosperity in recorded history. In nearly a thousand years, there were no major wars or conflicts. The nations of Matar, the tribes, were at peace with each other and created great works of science, expanding out across their solar system to settle the other worlds it contained. Does the destruction of this nation negate its existence, proof that humans destroy everything good they manage to make? I would not argue so.

Instead I would argue that the only fixed part of human nature is its mutability. We humans have spread like an infection across space. We’ve taken hold everywhere we can, from sun scorched balls of iron, to cold hunks of ice, from the bottom of the ocean to the skies of gas giants. We can learn, we can adapt, and we can change our minds. A child is not born with hate in their heart, hate is learned. Racism is learned, slavery is an institution, it has to be taught. On Caldari Prime, there was no concept of slavery until contact was made with the Gallenteans. Religion, both its good and bad aspects, have to be taught. And we can teach differently. We can teach peace, tolerance, acceptance, equality, and humanism. We can imagine a better world. And if we can imagine it, then we can make it real. Somewhere, long ago, the idea of travelling to those distant points of light in the night sky was seen as a manic fantasy, impossible at best. Now its a daily occurrence for billions of people.

The role of human imagination is to conceive of all these delightful futures, chose the most amazing, and then pull the present forward to meet it. These past two centuries of conflict will pass into history as everything else has. In 500,000 years, the age of our species lived again, what will we be? Will those beings even be able to call themselves human?

In that much time, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. The necessity will have changed us. We’re an adaptable species, one constantly moving forward, striving to do better. It will not be we who finally bring about the utopias of our dreams. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders undreamt of in our time will we have wrought in another generation and another. How far will have our nomadic species have wondered, by the end of the next century and the next millennium?

We are not monsters. Simply because we are capable of being monsters does not make it a core trait of our species, something we can never escape from. We are capable of so much better, so much greater. A destiny of light awaits, and I intend to do everything in my power to reach for it.

Ad Astra Per Aspera
Saede Riordan

Saede is a visionary, I believe. Her visions point us towards a path we could put our feet on if we wished our children's children to, one day, come over a rise and see utopia spread out before them.

Sad, indeed, that it would require the destruction of everything I am pledged to protect. This is how the file of the visionary often becomes marked "Engage on sight."

Oft times, the innocence we wish to create for tomorrow requires us to become monsters today.

The human-centric view that is espoused in the above musings is just another incarnation of the egotism that spawns the conflict, rivalries and hate that the author bemourns so much. The idea that human 'adaptability' allows for a human made 'progress', that is the solution to all problems is just the expression of the age old human hubris that makes us believe we can be our own creators.

Nor is it necessity that shapes us so that we are morally better: Not changing into another species is what solves ethical problems. Ethical behaviour isn't something that is rising from necessity, it is not brought about by evolution.

Though the human ability to imagine all kinds of futures and then to pursue them is what opens up the space of ethics it is what is opening to us the possibility to do good as well as evil. Neither adaptability nor imagination guarantee that we or our children do better. Ethical behaviour, thus, remains always a personal struggle. Right education is an invaluable help up to the point of being a necessity in pursuing a righteous life, but even that doesn't prevent anyone from failing if the test finds them.

The greatest problem here is that humans again and again take the means to be the ends in pursuing what is good. They think that if they can produce more efficent, that then production is automatically better - in an emphatic, ethical sense of 'better'. Or they think even that what is 'good' is simply up to what humans define as such. That the future we imagine as 'best' must be the best and that if we can imagine it, then it must be realizable. But that isn't how it works. At all.

Just look at Sansha: What he wanted is what he imagined to be best. The realization of his dream, though, was and continues to be a nightmare.

It is not up to us to simply pick the future we like best. In our imagination it might be wonderful if 'everyone could do what they liked', but such imaginations don't survive reality. (Just like it would be great in imagination if we could all decide for ourselves whether to drive on the one or the other side of the street - while in reality it is good if everyone drives either to the right or the left, but not some, that feel like it, drive right and the others, that feel differently, left.) There are objective standards to what is right and what is wrong, good and evil - and it is not for humans to make those standards, but for us to discover them and to accept them, to conform to them.

Humans already have the capability to do so. Doing better isn't achieved by pursuing some amazing imagined delightful future: It is achieved by hard work on your own character and going through the hardship of discovering and adhering to the moral law that just as much as the laws of nature are part of the cosmos.

Transhumanism is a sin against a holy and righteous God. All Transhumanists follow the path of the Jove — the path of Apotheoisis and Gnosis — and shall have meted unto them the same punishment that a holy and righteous God meted unto the Jove. Any Chosen who follows the path of Transhumanism has thrown away his entry ticket to Paradise and shall glorify God in his destruction.

(P. S. Vivisection is not all bad. When performed within the strict confines of a God-glorifying ritual sacrifice of a filthy Minmatar subhuman upon the altar of God, vivisection is not only morally permissible but morally praiseworthy. However, the vivisection of tourists of random bloodlines in pursuit of transhumanist scientific aims is not morally permissible, but instead heaps up wrath for the vivisector in God's mighty storehouse of wrath. Amen. Amarr Victor.)

You are a capsuleer. That makes you a transhumanist.

Technically speaking, it only makes him a transhuman, miss Kernher. He might not like the present state of affairs at all. Who can say - Perhaps he was kidnapped, and the multi-million ISK surgical routine was cruelly forced upon him! And now he simply can't seem to find where he left the neocom details of his clone provider so he can cancel it, and so has no choice but to keep coming back to life.

He seems to be enjoying himself quite a lot, though, so I doubt it.

Very well said.

If they were perfect, they wouldn't be supposedly dying off, would they? Perfection means "without flaw". Dying off might reasonably be considered a flaw, and therefore incompatible with perfection.

That being said, for the lives of me I don't know where this whole "the Jove are dying/dead" thing came from. Last I checked, the most we know of them is that they're reclusive and scientifically accomplished. People seem to be taking it as an established fact that they're slumping into extinction via some kind of gripping social ennui, but every challenge I've thus far made to produce a credible source for that rumour has gone unanswered.

I feel I should clarify, in light of Mademoiselle Dougan's response, that my original statement was not meant as a judgment or justification on or for any single individual. Instead, it is meant to simply illustrate that often times we strive to remove from tomorrow the sins and evils we ourselves commit.