Übermensch: Children Of Dead Men
ÜBERMENSCH:
CHILDREN OF DEAD MEN
When Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency in 2008, we were
plagued with the word “change” as a selling point to his campaign – that
word was “change.” While the left wing and the right wing saw change in
different ways there was another wing that saw the world differently.
These are the “Up-Wingers”. Their idea of change was more Promethean and bold than with mere political ping pong. “Up-Wingers” aren’t really a political party, they are just a group of what are called “forward and evolutionary I-theists.”
They believe that our “change” should come from enhancements in
technology. That becoming more than human is our next phase in
evolution.CHILDREN OF DEAD MEN
“Up-Wingers” are kind of secret group of people that don’t rally, they don’t protest and they really don’t think about politics, that is of course if the politician supports their views of the super human or the Übermensch.
The “Up-Wingers” movement is excited about the prospect of how we are integrating so quickly into a technological hyper-reality that the simulation is far more real than the mediocrity of the real.
Everything is intensified that our stimulation sensors need upgrades in order to sustain the kind of stimulation we are seeing today. In order to do this we may have to face voluntary human extinction with the promise that a better life awaits through technological advancement.
We are living in the age of the technocrats. Big business, big data, and the big brains who control the intelligentsia and are responsible for the DNA databases, the genome mapping, the medical surveillance state and the micro chipped society that will eventually end up part of the singularity.
In government, the technocrats are on top, too. Their policies are beginning to sound like something out of Huxley’s “Brave New World”, many of the technocrats and “Up-Wingers” give us our GMO’s and sit on the board of directors of pharmaceutical companies.
Technocrats both helped cause and failed to predict the global financial crisis and they are also helping to both promote and destroy the information age by fighting these small battles and according to the government fueling sedition and terrorist ideologies.
Technocrats can be your science fiction prophets that tend to guide the conversation about how we feel about machines and the relationship that we eventually have to have with them. These machines will help us, serve us, will be involved with law enforcement and without care we can also see these machines as an enemy plotting to kill us.
Science fiction illustrates the extremes of Transhuman form. Even though the idea of Transhumanism extends the promise of neutralized pain and suffering, we must understand that it is pain and suffering that makes the joy of the human experience more meaningful. It has been demonstrated in Science fiction that while Transhuman technology may prolong the life of one man, he still remains a slave buried in a technological prison. In “Star Wars”, Darth Vader was enslaved by technology and his ego. In “Robocop”, the protagonist was fighting to regain his lost humanity.
Nietzsche’s description of the Übermensch is one who has surpassed humankind, but still cares for the transience and vitality that humankind represents. We all know the story of Pinocchio wanting to be a real boy – and yet there are many humans that feel that they need to become Pinocchio’s. The need for love and the need for humanity can be found in the movie “A.I.”. The story was haunting, the creepiness compelling and it served as a warning to those who believe that full evolution from MECHA to ORGA is possible.
While there are pacemakers, titanium heart valves, and now bionic limbs in order to improve life, there are people that believe that voluntary conversion to machines will help in creating a heaven on earth. The new evolution is being prepared as we speak and many people are ready to convert.
However, with the conversion there are consequences that we need to address and some of these consequences sound like nightmares that challenge our morality.
In the mind of the “Up-Wingers” and technocrats there must be a separation from mind and body. You have to train your mind to accept the idea that you are nothing more than a machine that can be salvaged through repairs and mechanical expertise.
This includes anything to do with medical health and reproductive health.
The main value that exists in the technocratic paradigm of medicine is separation. There is the principle of separation that states that things are better understood outside of their context, that is, divorced from related objects or persons. Techno-medicine continually separates the individual into component parts, the process of reproduction into constituent elements, and experience of childbirth from the flow of life. But first and foremost, it separates the human body from the human mind.
The transhumanistic and technocratic style is more or less without the obstacle of a soul that literally gets in the way of the process of treating the body like a machine that may be in need of an artificial part or substance to sustain it.
Mechanizing the human body and defining the body-machine as the proper object of medical treatment frees techno medical practitioners from any sense of responsibility or care for the patient’s mind or spirit. In the future and at times in our present we begin to see that medical doctors do not necessarily have the need to engage with an individual who has a medical condition. They merely use language that reflects a more mechanical view of the patient. You go from being a named patient with a bad knee, to merely the knee replacement coded and signed ready for tracking and prepared in room 223.
The passage in the Obama care proposal page 1001 illustrates this perfectly. The Affordable Health Care Act Subtitle C-11 Sec. 2521— National Medical Device Registry reads:
“The Secretary shall establish a national medical device registry (in this subsection referred to as the ‘registry’) to facilitate analysis of post market safety and outcomes data on each device that— ‘‘is or has been used in or on a patient; ‘‘and is ‘‘a class III device; or ‘‘a class II device that is implantable, life-supporting, or life-sustaining.””
There have been many attempts to downplay this section by those who don’t want to believe that this may entail an implantable device, namely a transponder or chip, however this is exactly what this is meant to address along with other devices that can be used to prolong and sustain life.
In fact, the very purpose of these devices are to collect data in medical patients such as “claims data, patient survey data, standardized analytic files that allow for the pooling and analysis of data from disparate data environments, electronic health records, and any other data deemed appropriate by the Secretary.”
These provisions are necessary in order to restructure that which is seen as being an old system. The Affordable Health Care Act was proposed and made into law, not improve health care, but to control who gets medical care, who is need of new technologies to prolong life, and to regulate reproductive health in order to identify and observe those with genetic defects or mental problems.
Yes this is all part of a surveillance and eugenics program that many people think is all for the benefit of the people.
Obviously, they were wrong and now we are part of the machine that will decide if we are eligible for health care and even technological breakthroughs that will sustain life or even recreate it.
Ever since man walked the earth he has made his world, destroyed it and made it all over again. As it is written Biblically that God made man in his own image, it must be said that man has made things in his own image to his own liking in ways unprecedented for thousands of years. It has been speculated by many theorists that as man realizes his power he most often sees himself as a God and develops technological creations that imitate what is termed “natural“ or “human.”
By the time we get to the postmodern world that many human beings inhabit today, the lived-in, physical environment is for the most part, culturally produced. Reality is encountered mostly as virtual, or produced as an effect of human enhancements and operations. We are kept constantly surrounded by human productions and technology that is indistinguishable from magic. We are transported everywhere by machines within a realm totally fabricated by human engineering. We remain mesmerized by phenomena that are electronically simulated. We lose ourselves in virtual worlds.
Most memories now are collective unconscious thoughts that have been pumped into you through electronic transmission. You accept reality through the electronic medium. All things both real and simulated have had an effect of your brain. You have retained everything based on what a controlled electronic dictum has given you. Our rational minds are now far from rational because we have had most of the objective reality replaced by Hyper-reality.
The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. From robots, to enhanced humans and even synthesized sperm and ovum, the new science is here and Transhumanism is the next phase in our evolutionary shift.
A loose definition of Transhumanism is a point in evolution where man becomes something that is beyond human. Transhumanists see the human body as something that can be improved through science and technology. They also see technology as a means to where we can overcome suffering, aging, loneliness, and involuntary death. Transhumanist thinkers predict that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label “posthuman.” The symbol for Transhuman is H+ or “Enhanced Human.”
With the post-Homo Novo human breakthroughs, we are now capable of creating human beings both organic and artificial through a synthesizing of human matter and the use of technological constructs that raise the limits on what we call human life.
Human sperm can now be created outside of the human body in a laboratory. The sperm can be made from a small sliver of skin. It raises the possibility of babies being born entirely through artificial means, and even the macabre scenario of long-dead men ‘fathering’ children from beyond the grave.
This means that we are at a point in our evolution where human reproduction is not a purely biological process. Imagine making sperm from the DNA of a dead man. Or how about making sperm from the DNA of a child? How would that affect us psychologically, socially and ethically? The process could be done in a lab with machines monitoring the embryo as it grows.
With this technology it is feasible to get the same result from the stem cells of an aborted fetus. This would mean that if a woman wanted an abortion she could request that the cells of the unborn fetus to be salvaged, kept in liquid nitrogen, and then used later when the baby could be born at a more convenient time for the mother. Does this technology now eliminate the murdering of babies in abortion clinics?
Would conservative groups praise this type of technology if it meant that the baby would eventually be born instead of killed off?
Honestly, the biggest frustration is that technology now has raised issues that the Bible with all of its “divinity” does not address. That is, of course, “Up-Wingers” and the “Technocrats” are allowed to play God by enhancing or terminating creation for the sake of Transhumanist pursuits.
We also will see some very interesting legal rulings with the new technolies and sciences – many will be unfair and dismissive.
For example, according to Wikipedia, a legal case entitled Astrue v. Capato, a court ruled that posthumous birth are not entitled to Social Security Survivors benefits.
“In 1999, Karen Capato’s husband, Robert Capato, was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Out of fear that he would become sterile due to the chemotherapy, Robert started to deposit sperm in a sperm bank in 2001. He began to recover and discovered that he was not left infertile by the cancer treatments. This led to the Capatos conceiving a son. Robert’s condition started to worsen in 2002 and he died of cancer.
Obviously, it is going to be difficult o adjust to the new idea of Transhumanist procedures and policies. Some believe they are unethical and immoral.
In 1958, Robert Sheckley wrote a piece of speculative fiction about a human’s consciousness being transferred into a brain-dead body. This can unleash something known as the Frankenstein consciousness where ethics once again need to be examined. While we have the capability of creating artificial intelligence do we have the capability of building a model of a brain complete enough to allow a conscious mind to emerge?
“The other question is concerned with identity. Some people argue that, if a copy of a conscious mind is identical by all measures (ignoring the fact that one is biological and the other is neuromorphic software/hardware) it should be thought of as a continuation of the mind that was mapped and uploaded. Others argue that a copy cannot be considered the same as the original, so the newly awakened consciousness must be another person.”
This where we wonder if Transhumanism is literally killing off a part of you to extend other parts of you. The brain is the most delicate and we debate the ethics of its transplantation. We don’t bat an eye about the use of other organs to be harvested from donors and to use body parts in order to live on in others.
In the book “Change of Heart” dancer Claire Sylvia claims that after a heart and lung transplant operation, she discovered that new organs were not the only thing she inherited. She began to crave beer and Kentucky fried chicken. Her friends were also noticing that she would sometimes act like a teenager and walk like a boy. She claims that she inherited the traits of her young male donor.
There have been other accounts of this phenomenon, as well, which raises awareness about psycho-spiritual issues regarding consciousness and death. Is there organ memory within the body and if we transcend the body to machine will our mechanized bodies yearn for human needs like spiritual and emotional desire?
As you can possibly understand, Transhumanism or Trans-post-humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new technologies. There are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most, or even all, of what we hold valuable. Some of these scenarios are drastic, others are subtle. Although all progress is change, not all change is progress.
While there are advantages to most Transhuman or human enhancement technologies, we need to understand that perhaps it is a moral imperative to limit our ability to integrate with machines and technology. If not, we are looking at voluntary genocide.
However we may not have to worry about the possibility of totally disappearing, perhaps our salvation could be that machines would be able to someday find the DNA data of many who have previously died in a possible extinction level event. They could be programmed to somehow find a way to artificially create a fetus, nurture it and feed it. Thus the civilization of the future could very well be the Ubermench created by machines synthesized from the dead bodies of our ancestors.
Could it be that this is how it has been all along?
This gives new meaning to the Latin phrase Deus ex Machina.
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