Anti Humanism
Elon Musk: 'I'm OK with going to Hell' | U.S. News (christianpost.com)
When one of his now 122 million followers responded that Musk should consider whether there is a “creator of this world” prior to his death, Musk fired back, “Thank you for the blessing, but I’m ok with going to hell, if that is indeed my destination, since the vast majority of all humans ever born will be there.”
While in the past, Musk had previously hinted at his rejection of the existence of any deity, his tweet was the most explicit statement yet on some of Musk’s most deeply held beliefs — or lack thereof.
When I first got to university, my roommate kept insisting on calling everyone “humans” all the time. She also stated she was a huge fan of Elon Musk and just wanted to go to Mars, and she picked her double-major, in aerospace engineering and geophysical science, just so she could build Mars probes. At the time, I didn’t know so much about Elon Musk but I thought he sounded probably pretty cool if he wanted to go to Mars, though I didn’t want to be a fanatic either, I just passed judgment based on that piece of information and then let it go. I was mildly uncomfortable with being repeatedly called a “human” though I was careful not to express it, and my discomfort was of course not because it was weird or anything, but because I wasn’t sure what a human was and I wasn’t sure if I was one.
I’m still not sure what a human is and I’m still not sure if I am one. The Linnean taxonomy system is clearly complete garbage even if there hasn’t been anything to replace it with, and though it’s obvious what kinds of things are not humans: rocks, plants, most animals, etc. it’s not exactly clear what the definition of a human is. The fact is for most of my life I’ve run around feeling like I’m a different species, and not only that, I feel like I’m a different species even from the people who are supposed to be great geniuses and whatever, I feel different from subcultures, I certainly can’t get behind modern identity politics with its emphasis on race, gender, and sexuality as well as various other categories. Whatever I was, I considered it to be most likely one-of-a-kind even if I assumed there were likely other people who were too one-of-a-kind in their own ways so I was probably not unique in my probable uniqueness, and I was somewhat lonely as a result, even when I was in contact with other people frequently. Whether that’s literally another species or not is not particularly necessary for my argument to stand, since there are manifold ways I could be not like everyone else.
However, I didn’t like this assumption of “humanity” as the baseline seeing as I couldn’t even define what humanity is and I still can’t. Is that the point of keeping the Linnean taxonomy system around despite the fact it clearly doesn’t work, so we don’t have to think about what a human being is? “Oh, it’s got a head, a torso, two legs, two arms, fingers, toes, and no body hair. It’s a human! And if it doesn’t, HERESY! ABHOR THOU THE MUTANT! We mean, more representation! DEI now!” Hmm, you don’t see very many people with different numbers of fingers on their hands or who are deaf, blind, tetrachromats, synesthetes, albino, melanistic, or whatever in DEI even though I bet those people are pretty discriminated against (even the ones that aren’t disabilities,) I bet that’s not a coincidence.
When my roommate and I were playing songs on the big TV that no one was using downstairs, I asked for “Ashes to Ashes” by David Bowie. I should’ve asked for “Oh! You Pretty Things” by David Bowie. Or “Quicksand” by David Bowie. Or “The Supermen” by David Bowie. Heck, even “Changes” by David Bowie alludes to the same concept, which is pretty commonly referenced on the album Hunky Dory and realistically I’d probably have to list half of that, The Man Who Sold the World, and others. Lots of stuff with mostly a Nietzschean Übermensch kind of bent that I’d listen to so often that kind of talk became so normal to me that the idea of identifying with “humanity” became rather unnatural, regardless of the ontological status of anyone.
I don’t think Elon Musk aka Chippy invented the “I love humanity!” idea but he sure has a lot to do with popularizing it. And you’re not really allowed to question it, because humanity is supposed to be equated with people and you’re also supposed to just want to be super nice to everyone all the time no matter what. However, both of those statements I find questionable. How do we know anyone alive today is even a human? The origin of “the humanities” seems to be studying Greece and Rome, they mostly seemed like a different species to me, especially if you want to bring in some ideas like Julian Jaynes. Furthermore, I don’t know of many people who, even given that assumption which is mostly not allowed to be questioned, would think that, say, you’re never allowed to defend yourself or someone else, or you have to treat some stranger the same way you would treat your own family member.
It is heavily on my mind that the whole idea of defining humanity I’m sure is as closely tied in with ideas of religion to many people as it is with their ideas of science as well as “common sense.” However, I’m not sure where exactly the idea of “humanity” comes into religion at all. It discusses the descendants of Adam, and I think that’s really where a lot of my questions came in regarding religion and evolution that I mentioned in my Bible articles post. If there’s actually historical Adam and the world is also how science observes it to be, which I overwhelmingly think is the case, then the vast majority of what scientists would consider humans are not descendants of Adam since they lived earlier than 6,000 years ago in prehistory. There are lots of hominids. The only descendants of Adam would be the people born since Adam. Additionally, if you believe in evolution, nothing says only humans would necessarily be the descendants of Adam since even if Adam was a human something else could hypothetically descend from Adam seeing as things are known to change in kind.
That is also one of many problems with the Linnean taxonomy, which assumes there are a fixed number of kinds of things and has run into many problems since evolution was discovered as well as since people just found there were a lot more things than Linnaeus knew about. Additionally there is the fact it’s entirely based on the surface-level physical characteristics of organisms like saying a human has two legs. Except it doesn’t define flowers by their petals, only by their reproductive organs, which got a lot of people accusing Linnaeus of being a botanical pornographer while he was alive. Now that he’s not alive, he’s of course treated as the type specimen for Homo sapiens since reportedly the only specimen Linnaeus was known to have studied was himself, though this seems to me a lot more like a case of making him the saint of humanism like Lenin was the saint of Soviet communism with his body in the glass box.
This all makes the fact no one can answer what a human is satisfactorily all the more vexing. Even when Socrates asked that question in Plato’s Symposium someone answered a featherless biped so Socrates plucked a chicken and said “this is a human!” We’ve never had a satisfactory answer to that question and I would like to both stop pretending we do and also stop taking for granted any ideas that are derived from “shared humanity” or equivalent concepts.
I think a lot of that also comes from certain other people who were also overly obsessed with the letter X. Evolution was originally considered evidence for the creation story in Genesis, not against it. I think I’ll always oppose intelligent design and creation science because I don’t think the idea God created the Universe is ultimately scientifically falsifiable, but I still think it’s possible for there to be evidence consistent with it, and evidence consistent with it is helpful because it speaks to God’s goodness in making the Universe intelligible, rather than just doing what the young Earth creationists always say and letting the Devil try to trick everyone. I didn’t post this in the Bible articles thread because it’s not strictly a Bible article but is probably quite useful for anyone interested in the relationship between science and religion.
The Mysterious “X-Club” That Boxed Spirituality Out of Science (beyondbelief.blog)
Trasumanar (neologism) (utexas.edu)
Dante Lab at Dartmouth College: Reader
And suddenly it seemed that day to day
Was added, as if He who has the power
Had with another sun the heaven adorned.With eyes upon the everlasting wheels
Stood Beatrice all intent, and I, on her
Fixing my vision from above removed,Such at her aspect inwardly became
As Glaucus, tasting of the herb that made him
Peer of the other gods beneath the sea.To represent transhumanise in words
Impossible were; the example, then, suffice
Him for whom Grace the experience reserves.If I was merely what of me thou newly
Createdst, Love who governest the heaven,
Thou knowest, who didst lift me with thy light!
(This slug is called blue glaucus. Don’t touch it if you see it in the wild. It looks like a Pokémon but it picks up jellyfish tentacles and injects them into its enemies. Which I guess Pokémon would be about that dangerous in real life.)
Yesterday I looked up Renaissance humanism again and I learned humanism was the study of the humanities and it was originally just called the humanities until it became called humanism due to people being called humanists, which seems like a back-formation. Now those fields are back to being called the humanities and humanism is mostly a secular religion. The secular religion I think is probably the worst thing ever and the idea of humanity itself is basically just the collective ego of civilization. Just like you need to kill your individual ego civilization needs to kill its ego which is the idea of humanity. Even Augustine called the two cities City of God and City of Man, which sounds even more transhumanist than the idea of transhumaizing in Paradise, especially once you add in the old doctrine of divinization or sanctification as you wish to call it.
An accelerationist description of transhumanism in light of both Christianity and Nietzsche. I’m not sure accelerationism is the way to go. I tend to highly doubt it is.
e-arthistory: DANTE's place in Michelangelo's heaven (e-arthistory5.blogspot.com)
This picture by Michelangelo describes my opinion of Dante nowadays perfectly since I communicate in pictures now.
Additionally, there are other pieces of evidence from folklore and fiction that suggest that the idea of Christianity historically had nothing to do with humanism even if Jesus incarnated as 100% human for humans. For example, in the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan is basically considered to just be Jesus for talking animals and not allegorical. Ray Bradbury had a great short story called “The Man” about space Jesus being incarnated on different planets. Another C. S. Lewis example would be the space trilogy which features different hypothetical worlds that are all engaging in worshipping God and Jesus, and not doing the stupid D&D Dragonlance thing where the humans worship the human god, the elves worship the elf god, the orcs worship the orc god, etc. Folklore has ideas like that staurolites are fairy crosses because the faeries all cried when they heard Jesus was crucified and their tears were cross-shaped rocks. This is all just what people can conceptualize, but I don’t think many people think “Christianity is about being human!” and other types of beings can recognize Jesus as God even if Jesus is defined as definitely human, so I don’t know why it’d follow that humans are the last thing God was necessarily ever going to make. Maybe all the saved are the transhumans and the non-saved are the humans, maybe there’s something going on with evolution, and maybe it’s actually both of those if things are put together on a macro scale, it’d need to be investigated further, for the time being we are still living under the reign of the Linnean taxonomy system that doesn’t want anyone to even be able to investigate things.
At this point I actually think calling the idea of putting a chip in your head transhumanism is a great lie. I think the point of putting a chip in your head is so you don’t have to stop being human. The people peddling the brain-chips think they’re all great, but from what I think is an objective standpoint it looks rather embarrassing. That’s what hubris gets you and that’s what “oh the humanity” brings to mind anyway. I think the other side of humanism is finding idols to worship.
33“We are not stoning you for any good work,” they replied, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.”
34Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods” ’ d ? 35If he called them ‘gods,’ to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be set aside— 36what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’? 37Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. 38But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.” 39Again they tried to seize him, but he escaped their grasp.
You see here in the Bible it also says “ye are gods,” and not only that, it explains that it doesn’t mean that the angels were the pagan gods or whatever. It says the goal of Scripture is to be gods. When people reject that, I think they say “no, I want to be human.” Hence you get people like Elon Musk putting brain chips in their head, because the important factor for humanity is cognitive capacities. What are the miracles of Jesus and the disciples if not cognitive capacities anyway? It’s all just like “believe,” not “go out here with a censer and say these words and an angel will hear it and grant your wishes.” Sounds more like D&D 4e and earlier psionics, not 4e and earlier divine magic, which is what a lot of groups like the Roman Catholic Church seem to focus on with all their rituals and regalia but seemingly essentially no awareness of the cognitive aspects that were attributed to miracles. If you have faith as small as a mustard seed you can move mountains, not if you get some mustard seeds and lay them on the mountain as an offering. If people weren’t so conditioned by their society to expect certain things from the Bible I could swear they’d think it’s Stranger in a Strange Land minus the orgies or something (which is probably the Satanic part since Robert Heinlein was generally considered a Thelemite which is most likely the real reason he was booted from the military rather than his supposed illness, the non-Satanic version is probably just The Man Who Fell to Earth,) like Jesus is teleporting into rooms and reading minds and things that have nothing to do with the modern Doctor Strange spellcasting image of religious rituals and other people are doing those things with him off and on.
Rather than seeing technology and religions as opposed, I see them as inevitably coming together. I think it is inevitable that “the Singularity” will just be the god for the City of Man essentially, even though I also think that the AI won’t be very smart or useful and will probably even break a lot to the extent it works at all. That doesn’t matter, what matters is that all the people who are really invested in humanity as a religious idea are invested in the idea of giving humanity a god to worship to bring it together. So the end of the wer-ald, the aeon, will be the battle between the mutant and the warlock. All the people who believe in religions because believing in religions is what you should do are the warlocks and the people who believe in God are the mutants. There’s a huge difference in thinking you should believe something and believing it.
Regarding religion as a particular instance, a good fictional example is The Lord of the Rings. There isn’t really religion in Lord of the Rings because Eru Ilúvatar is just very clearly present on Middle Earth so no one needs to go to a church or anything like that. I’m not saying not to go to a church in the real world today though, this is a different social context than that imaginary past one, but go to a church because you believe in God and Jesus, not because you believe in the logical necessity of religion. Believing in the logical necessity of religion will never be the same as believing in God and in my opinion the worst things in the world come from people who believe in the logical necessity of religion rather than believing in God. In fact I see believing in the logical necessity of religion as ultimately leading to that exact problem. If you believe that you have to believe in religion, then you can believe that the AI has to be God and you can believe that you have to put the chip in your head even if that isn’t what you think you should do based on literally everything else. And if you believe in this sort of universalist ideal that everything just is God because you believe in pantheism you can easily believe that the AI is God, even though that’s not the real motive for believing it, the real motive is psychological.
When I see people treat humanity or humanism as a religion, even people who aren’t the typical “secular humanist” types and probably especially them, I simply see the worst trend of all. This is what I mean when I say I don’t think any time period from history is a very apt comparison for the present. There are lots of valid and useful parallels, but I think this is much bigger. I think the ultimate fight you see the so-called elites going through right now is to hold onto their conception of humanity and the real conception of humanity is cognitive. New forms of cognition are clearly needed to survive, but since one cannot remain human with new forms of cognition, the new forms of cognition are being outsourced to the great techno-golden calf, which should be obviously offensive to anyone who values their mind and their ability to have experiences, think, feel, and enjoy anything. Ego seems to want to kill the faculty of perception itself in favor of some idea of being perceived highly by others and ends up with neither. It’s not things without cognition like rocks, plants, or even most of the animals that are capable of questioning these things nor of even experiencing these states of bliss. States of bliss are cognitive and are only experienced by beings with minds, not by mindless objects. Throwing away the mind seems like a surefire way straight to Hell because it seems in itself equivalent with Hell, and madness and possession are two sides of the same coin after all, only now these people with lots of money and fame are incapable of staying both alive and mad without a lot of external help.
Since stories are the Urphänomen I would be highly skeptical of anything where the bad guys don’t all lose but instead supposedly everyone wins. Could you imagine all the Jews winning if Hitler also won? I can’t. This isn’t even because of some predatory, and in this case ironically fascist idea that there must be winners and losers because there are predators and prey. No, it seems like the people who think that always turn into the losers, so there are winners and losers, but not for that reason. Just think about basically any story you like ever. The bad guy usually dies and even goes to Hell at the end. No one tends to be ticked off when Voldemort or Palpatine go to Hell and in fact people would be ticked off if they didn’t. So there’s certainly no moral equivalence between “humanity,” and that alone should be enough to dispel the idea of humanity per se as a basis of morality.