Mortality as an engineering backlog: lifespan, cognition, and the body as a draft to be revised — and the counter-question, asked in every dialect on this site, whether a self indefinitely revisable remains a self.
Tagged: Buddhist Catholic Jewish
Transhumanism proposes to treat the human body as a draft: lifespan extended indefinitely, cognition merged with machines, mortality reclassified as an engineering backlog. Its secular prophets (Kurzweil, Bostrom’s more cautious institute literature, the Mormon and Christian transhumanist associations arguing the program can be baptized) meet critics in every camp who share one objection in different dialects: a self that is indefinitely revisable is no longer clearly a self, and a death abolished by technique may take meaning’s scaffolding with it.
The traditions’ documents are thinner here than the debate’s volume warrants — this flashpoint is kept deliberately honest about that. What exists: Orthodox and Catholic theological conferences on enhancement, Jewish responsa-adjacent essays on radical life extension (mostly permissive: more life is more time for mitzvot, with distributive worries), Buddhist analyses of the craving structure inside the immortality project, and a secular bioethics (President’s Council, Beyond Therapy, 2003) that made the conservative case without a church in sight.
References
- President’s Council on Bioethics, Beyond Therapy (2003)
- Nick Bostrom, ‘A History of Transhumanist Thought’ (2005)
Related Across the Site
- Artificial intelligence and human dignity Flashpoint — Learning systems that counsel, accompany, and target: the live question is not machine consciousness but what may never be delegated — and every tradition on this site answers that accountability stays with persons.
- Gene editing and the germline Flashpoint — Easy technique, unconsenting subject, speculative benefit: the 2018 edited babies drew one condemnation in many vocabularies, and the line between somatic therapy and germline design is now the field’s governing border.
- The limits of medicine Flashpoint — The ventilator meets the ars moriendi: a working consensus against vitalism, hospice as a shared institution with Christian roots, and the assisted-dying argument proceeding jurisdiction by jurisdiction through every tradition’s courts of conscience.
- Artificial intelligence Technology — The newest entry and already the most argued: Rome’s algorethics, halakhah’s golem, Buddhism’s attention diagnosis, and a secular governance regime — all converging on one refusal, that accountability may not be delegated to the machine.
- Evolution by natural selection Technology — The mechanism that reorganized biology: embraced, adapted, and fought over — usually inside traditions rather than between them, from Asa Gray’s theistic evolution to today’s divided evangelical house.
- Germline gene editing Technology — The technology every framework was waiting for: Rome refuses it, the responsa and the fiqh academies condition it, Hindu and Buddhist evaluations run on intention — and the academies of science govern it while disagreeing about whether it should ever be used.
- Organ transplantation Technology — A near-consensus on the gift and commerce refused — and a live, published disagreement about the definition of death that transplantation forced every tradition to state.
- Surgical and medical abortion Technology — The register’s most documented case: refused absolutely by Rome and by the evangelical mainstream, governed by ensoulment in the classical fiqh, divided in the responsa by stage and by the mother’s priority, grave in Buddhist and Hindu ethics — each in its own premises, left standing.