Transhumanism ( or H+ for short) is the idea that introducing technology into the human body will create a 'posthuman' A superman, An ubermensch:
Now as I began to research this subject, a very odd thought dawned on me--maybe re-dawned--that the two most influential speakers and writers on the subject of psychedelics since the 1960s , Timothy Leary and Terrence McKenna, were both psychedelic transhumanists !!
Timothy Leary had actually been against the Ecology Movement, seeing it as a seductive hinderence against what he believed was our h+ destiny -- leaving "womb planet" Earth and exploring the stars in our computerized Startrek crafts, whilst also biologically evolving into a diverse species of posthumans. It's all set down in his book, Exo-psychology. This book was written by Leary whilst serving a five to ten year jail sentence for possession of 00.1 grammes of marijuana, and in one found himself put as next cell-door neighbour to Charles Manson. Maybe it is not so suprising then Tim dreamed of leaving planet earth? His trauamatic experiences of prison life are described in his book, Neuropolitique.
Terrence Mckenna, it appears to me, was coming from a more contradictory perspective---on one hand claiming that Goddess and nature were essentially important to commune with, whilst on the other hand, raving about what a buzz it will be when we can download our 'consciousness' onto a computer, his premise being that 'consciousness' is a 'thing' which can be downloaded.
Another strange thing I have found researching this subject is that there hardly exists any criticism whatsoever up to the present date, as far as I'm aware, against psychedelic transhumanism. There are quite a few good sources of critique against H+, but when you add 'psychedelic', no. It seems to me that members of the academic, political, and creative psychedelic community seem to not envision any need to critique this subject? So I will.
It is as though those in the psychedelic 'movement' who embrace the ideals of H+ do not realize the history of it! If they did they would learn that the Eugenicist Sir Julian Huxley coined the term, 'Transhumanism' to replace 'Eugenics' --post World War 2-- so it would not be linked with Hitler and the Nazis' use of Eugenics in their genocidal doings against disabled people, the Jews, etc etc etc!! How would they like to be known as 'Psychedelic Eugenicists' me thinks, yet 'Transhumanism' means exactly the same, accept with more advanced technology, and which Fukuyama argues is the most dangerous idea in the world.
So, as I see it, members of the psychedelic community who embrace these H+ ideals surely cannot understand the awful past of this idealism, and the elite's futurist corporate intentions for H+, and would rather, comfortably, idealistically, 'cooly', assume that all the nasty stuff of war, classism, racism, genocides, and ecocides are all going to somehow disappear when the oligarchy, whose power set-up forms a continuum with that past, 'kindly' let us psychedelically experienced artists--and 'the people'-- loose on their machines---machines with which they are planning to penetrate our intimate skin boundaries. The propaganda about this, also known as 'predictive programming' is in films, and music videos, and commercials--the 'brave new world'.
The propaganda will make out that H+ is merely a very advanced extension of animal breeding, implying that was a natural consequence of human ingenuity for helping the evolution of animals, but will hide the horror of the reality of animal breeding: " ...perhaps most shocking was the callous and deluded attitude of many breeders (apart from a few honourable exceptions) and their representative body, the Kennel Club. The links between the Kennel Club, the eugenics movement and Nazism went some way to explaining the warped attitudes that sustain the breeding industry: the notion that it is acceptable to sacrifice sentient individuals for the sake of ‘racial purity’. Some of the breeders, frankly, had a tenuous grip on reality, and that’s putting it generously."
DNA manipulation of unborn babies is part of this H+ agenda. It surely is obvious to anyone who has studied the history of the patriarchy that they, fathers-who-rule, supervising and funding those in lab coats, would want to take over role of the feminine womb, as they did in the past in their mythologies, and forcibly taking over the role of childbirth from the midwives.
Below I will respond to a series of enboldened quotes taken from the above link: psychedelic transhumanists
"McKenna: Our technologies... are obviously lethal I would say, but they are fortunately a kind of chrysalis of ideological constraint that technology is in the process of dissolving. William Butler saw this in the 19th Century, Teilhard de Chardin reached it in the forties and the fifties McLuhan expressly articulated this vision in the fifties and the sixties.
Everything is about to get very much more complicated, much larger, the number of choices are about to exponentially explode. In a sense, these technologies point us toward, if not literal godhood, then a kind of fictional godhood. We are all going to become the masters of the narrative in which we are embedded. Our separate stories are going to take on dimensions so multifarious that for all practical purposes we will each move into a cosmos of our own creation and control."
WHO is 'we'? Is it the elite and the middle class? The oligarchy has never given technology to the people. Look at the medical services in America 'land of the free'. Poor people do not have same access to technological medical help like those who have adequate insurance and can pay for it. So why would things suddenly change one morning with this H+ technology? Surely it must be realized by now that all the elite and their lackies care about is PROFITS?
As I compose this blog post the 'worst oil disaster' has caused untold ecocidal destruction to the Gulf of Mexico, and wetlands. The oil companies rake in BILLIONS yet do not even know what to do when anything goes wrong with their technology. In fact they will not even spend money to try and ensure potential accident prevention. This same profit-blinded mindset pervades the whole enterprise we call civilization.
"David Pearce: ...I think it’s fair to say the transhumanist community is mostly interested in intelligence-amplification — superintelligence rather than supersentience...Psychedelic drugs can briefly give us a tiny insight into how “blind” we normally are; but we soon lapse into ignorance again. Such is the state-dependence of memory. " ibid
Who is he speaking for? He doesn't bother to look deeply into what 'blindness' and ignorance means. He doesn't explore the roots of this, and just, himself, blindly assumes that more of the very same insanity which is causing this blindness and ignorance will be our saviour. You know the saying: 'insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result'.?
Well it has been found that over-stimulation of the young with gadgets--computers, vid games, cell phones, i pods, all contribute to BOREDOM. All this over-stimulation atrophies the imagination, because their sense of reality is being constantly filled up with stimulation from techno-entertainment-land all the time. Once they don't have access to it they don't know what to do and feel 'dead bored'. I personally spoke to a young girl of about 16 girl who is all the time looking at and using her cellphone, and she admitted to me that if she doesn't have it she feels all "shakey".
The feeling I get from this is that it is like the 'man' is a 'jealous man' (for after all wasn't 'God' wanting to be called the 'jealous God'. So 'Man' takes over 'his' throne in the Enlightenment and becomes the 'jealous man'---He takes on the role of the previous patriarchal archetype?) and doesn't want you gazing lovingly at the natural world, and feeling content looking at the dynamic changing clouds, of the shifting patterns of shadows on the trees, listening to the wind, and hearing birdsong, and feeling that this is all sacred. No, he wants a SCREEN in your face with his entertainment packet, his 'virtual world' and make sure he is getting a good rent from it, with hope of further rents to come as he applies new techy dagets with more apps, and more apps.
At the time news broke out about the BP oil disaster, was news of the mad rush of people and celebrities all wanting to get the new Apple IPad. Long queues of people spent all night sleeping on the pavements waiting to get into the store and be the the first in the UK to get their hands on this latest shiny techno-toy, and we saw a picture of highbrow celebrity, Stephan Fry, smiling at camera for the paper, with his head resting against the corner of his precious little newly bought IPad.
But other news not reported, but very connected with the Ipads ----- from the Chinese factory where these toys are made-- Foxconn, there have been 11 suicides! Mostly young workers so soul-destroyed by the tedious conveyor belt drugery of churning out these 'cool Ipads', long hours, and not even allowed human contact with other workers, they all have--over a period of realtively short time-- jumped off the top floor windows and roof of the factory. This video really says it all for me.
So regarding Pearce's quote, again he is really speaking about his experience with psychedelics, and integration, and projecting his negative experience onto everyone--hence the 'we'.
In my experience with psychedelics it is not like his at all. What I have learned from psychedelic experience is that generally people are asleep yes, but to look for the reasons. And this has inspired me to look at the very civilization we get born into and take for granted, and the history we're taught, and the social-controlling mental illness myth, and mass media propaganda, and the so-called 'education system', and the so-called 'war on drugs' etc--and to explore how all these issues interconnect and make the dead 'wasteland' many of us 'return' to after we have the sacred ecstatic experiences possible with psychedelic experience---this return usually referred to as 'coming down'.
Pearce, instead of seeing the H+ idealism as being part of the problem--interconnected with all the other onslaughts on our souls, and nature---he is looking at it as the solution. Ironically so, as the means to increase intelligence. But his 'intelligence' cannot it seems survey all I am trying to point out--which when explored surely increases intelligence-- or apparently understand how a minority who would imagine they were now posthuman intelligence would feel even more superior than they normally do in contrast with other people, labelled 'terrists', because they haven't 'upgraded' themselves, who haven't got the same appropriate tech-attachments inserted, never mind all the other species! I see the solution an unlearning more than an adding machine-parts. UN-learning the propaganda that is the same old one with shiny robot clothes and flashing lights on.
Timothy Leary likened being humans trying to imagine our interfusion with advanced technology as like “caterpillar fantasies about what post-larval life will be like.” ibid
But why not understand that trying to imagine what we have lost is far more hard--as in lost our soul!
"Eric Davis: How do we live with creative intelligence and awakened senses in a groundless world beyond our control? Behind the veneer of objective medicine, psychopharmacology is simply offering its own resolutely philosophical answer to the eternal problem of human suffering: Use technology to control its symptoms. The posthuman self is a self on drugs — SSRIs, hormones, brain boosters, neurotransmitters. We have entered an era that sanctions the psychoactive use of commercial chemicals, not just to cure disease or even to relieve suffering, but to reformat who we feel we are."
Is that so? As far as I am aware this era does not sanction people--even terminally ill people--to have access to entheogenic or empathogenic experience. The only slight current change is a very tight-arsed selective so-called 'resurrgence' where 'studies' are being done with people, including the terminally ill, where they are 'allowed' to take psychedelics and empathogens.
WHO has the authority to say who can and cannot explore their consciousness with sacred plants and substances---yet Davies claims they sanction.
He mentions SSRIs in a positive light, but no mention of the exploitation of all that---the myth of mental illness, and the coercive drugging of poeple and children as social control, nor the dangers to health from the drugs. As usual---Eric Davies seems to think he is as techo-psychedelic's thinking man, in the know, but doesn't seem to have any knowledge of the elite politcal motives behind these 'sanctions'. He rather implies it is all cool.
He continues:
"It’s likely that people will become ever more comfortable with the notion that unpleasant (and unproductive) psychological states are simply bad code in the Darwinian bio-computer. And once you’re comfortably ensconced inside that materialist cosmology, where meaning is secondary to mechanics, there is no particularly compelling reason (other than medical fallout) not to debug the mind with consumer molecules. The paradox is that these mechanistic molecules can produce deeper, more authentic selves. People on SSRIs often describe themselves as finally feeling like normal people, like the person they were meant to be. This paradox… lies at the heart of the posthuman condition."ibid
Well people I know personally, have spoken to, and others' stories I read about, don't tell me they feel like 'normal' people (whatever that means) after taking SSRIs--it is more they don't feel real! They feel that there is a drugged barrier between where they feel 'happy' but yet.....! Is that surprising when these mechanistic-brain-chemical tweakers imagine us as bio-computers who shouldn't be feeling down, and that it is 'chemical imbalance' and that soon we should all expect a literal dial on our heads 'we' (or they!) will be able to turn it and receive smiling 24/7 pleasure. And no death of course.
But look what he does. He asserts that we are "bio-computers" which is the current mechanistic philosophy and theory of Computationalism. I do not dig this theory at all. It comes from a long line of mechanistic reasoning starting proper with animal-torturer Rene Descartes, Descrates tried to describe his concepts using state of the art engineering mechanisms of the tile, pulleys and so on. Sigmund Freud also used mechanical metaphors to describe his theory of the ego, id, and superego.
So I see this now----Men of science have come up with their 'baby' the computer and now all the universe and consciousness has to conform to its perimeters. To its reason. We are all told we are 'bio-computers', and so we believe we are though there's no actual proof.
Accepting this common description of what we are will of course make it very easy for us to ask to be plugged into the Big Computer when the corporate time-is-right, for after all we are a 'bio-computer'.
The 'bio-computers' I have been reading above don't seem to have an insight to the real problems like for example, who OWNS the gadgets they wanting to stick in us? From whence is this very paradigm coming, and what for? What about all the terrible exploitation of the poor going right back in history, and continuing now? And much more!
"Pesce:...The question of the body is one of the largest questions in virtual reality. Where is the body in cyberspace? Where are you when your email is flashing across the net, when your agents are doing your bidding? Where are you, and how do you maintain your self?"
Where am I when I send an email? I am sat here? if I post a letter I am at the post box? The body in 'cyberspace' is usually in one place attached to a technological device. Where else would it be? On the roof?
If I see the shaman collapse in a trance where is his body? I can see it lying down. THERE is his body. Hir physical body. If I am having a psychedelic experience and with eyes shut am flying through space, and yet eyes half open am sat in a chair where am I? Both sat in a chair and flying through space. What is 'body'? my physical body is in the chair for sure.
Psychedelics can produce these boundary dissolutions where you flow into another thing. What we’re going to see, and it’s actually quite true, is that certain types of VR can produce the precisely same affect. There are zones where virtual reality can be very dangerous for that reason, or incredibly powerful and meaningful for that reason. So... I really want to work from the heart.
I personally think in my own philosophy that to work in technology, you have to work from the heart center. Because otherwise you’ll create golems, you’ll create Frankensteins, your creations will run away from you. That’s the essence of the story of the golem — that this is a creature that was created with the breath of life but without the light of knowledge or the heart. The heart of God." ibid
But what is technology now? What is it doing to the soul, and to the earth. More and more is taken from the earth to build more and more technology, and this pollutes the REAL world not the virtual world, but the computer-wannabe-posthumans try and create the myth that reality is really a virtual reality, simulated reality
because of their metaphysical assumption of computationalism which they call reality.
