[ExI] Religion Conference

Wed May 6 07:21:50 UTC 2009

Some weeks ago, this list saw a call for papers I issued for a “Transhumanism and Religion” session at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Montreal November 7-10.  The call for papers generated interesting discussion on this list about what the religion scholars were up to.  Our session steering committee has now completed its blind review of the proposals.  For those interested in a follow up, here below find the session paper abstracts for the November meeting.  –calvin mercer

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Saturday - 1:00 pm-3:30 pm

Calvin Mercer, East Carolina University, Presiding

Jeffrey Bishop, Vanderbilt University

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Ontotheology and the Post-human God

Proponents of transhumanist philosophy claim for themselves the twin philosophies of liberalism and humanism. After a brief genealogy of transhumanism, I shall show, using Heidegger’s critiques of onto-theology and technology, that transhumanism remains part of Western metaphysics. The two prongs of Western metaphysics are matter—ontology-and will—theology. Technology mediates between these two prongs in the chain of being. I shall show how transhumanism and the meta-narrative of the post-human future remains tied to onto-theology. I shall claim that the deployment of technology is no neutral process, with technology acting as neutral tool, with the world—matter—awaiting human management—will. Transhumanist technology deploys its metaphysics of efficient control. In doing so, it also deploys an ethics, a politics, and an economics, all of the same cloth as Western onto-theology. And in manipulating human material it hopes to create a post-human god in a post human future.

Brian Green, Graduate Theological Union

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Would Aristotle Be a Transhumanist?

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Would Aristotle be a transhumanist? Certainly the desire to enhance natural human capacities and help humans become more virtuous would be commendable from an Aristotelian perspective. Aristotle specifically encourages humans to pursue superiority and even “immortality.” But what would Aristotle think of the most radical transhumanist departures from human nature, such as mind uploading and disembodied existence? This paper will propose an Aristotelian response to two major strands of transhumanism—embodied and disembodied—and show how Aristotelianism can both critique transhumanism and assist our understanding of it.

M. Dominic Eggert, Vanderbilt University

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Omnilibertarianism: How Human Beings Can Become Virtual Gods Through Technology

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Transhumanism is the attempt to achieve traditional religious aspirations by naturalistic (usually technological) means. 'Omnilibertarianism' is a species of transhumanism, specifically of libertarian transhumanism, which can be interpreted as a secular religion that advocates a kind of self-deification. This paper attempts to refute Nozick's arguments against the desirability of living in an 'experience machine' by calling into question our confidence in knowing how to distinguish between reality and a simulation. I argue that consistent libertarians should want to become 'Maximally Autonomous Rational Agents' (MARAs) or 'virtual gods' who have complete control over what they experience. In so doing, I endorse a conception of negative liberty that recognizes that natural laws can be just as oppressive as human ones.

Stephen Garner, University of Auckland

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Image-bearing Cyborgs?: Hybridity and Hope in the Landscapes of Transhumanism

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The cyborg occupies a place where traditional categories, such as organic and inorganic, animal and plant, human and machine, and male and female, have shifted and blurred. The Judeo-Christian theological motif, where human beings are bearers of the image and likeness of God, is realized in hybridity, and as such, it is able to engage with the cyborg and its associated transhumanist landscape. This engagement is supplemented by other theological motifs of hybridity, and themes of social justice, embodiment and redemption, resourcing wise-living in contemporary technoculture.

Robert Ross, Graduate Theological Union

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Singularities: Crypto-Religious Models of Human Transformation through Technology

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Singularities: Crypto-Religious Models of Human Transformation through Technology

AI developer Ray Kurzweil articulates the vision of a world in which geometrically accelerating technological progress enables humans to transcend the limits of their biological substrate. The paper sketches Kurzweil’s major technical proposals, assessing their ethical implications, then identifies three crypto-religious conceptual models underlying his judgments about technological advances: (1) an anthropology which assumes an imperfect/incomplete human nature in its current state that needs to be perfected through technological intervention; (2) an eschatology, expressed through his concept of singularity, that invokes the notion of some limit of humanness that is surpassed, but, at the same time unreachable; (3) an idea of transcendence that sees meaning in the universe a consequence of human purposiveness. The paper concludes by considering how religious models provide structure to human thinking about their place in the universe in such a way to function as more real, more powerful than the data of actual experience.

Business Meeting:
Calvin Mercer, East Carolina University

Calvin Mercer, Ph.D.
Co-Director, Religious Studies Program
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC  27858  USA
252 328 4310 (off & vm)
252 328 6301 (fax)
mercerc at ecu.edu<mailto:mercerc at ecu.edu>
www.ecu.edu/religionprogram<http://www.ecu.edu/religionprogram>

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