Transhumanism debunked: Why drinking the Kurzweil Kool-Aid will only make you dead, not immortal

Tuesday, June 25, 2013 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: transhumanism, Ray Kurzweil, cult

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(NaturalNews) In this article, I'm going to reveal how transhumanism is a dangerous, irrational death cult shrouded in the language of geeky cybernetics. In fact, the entire idea that you can "upload your mind to a computer" is complete junk science quackery, as you'll soon see.

In case you're new to the term, "transhumanism" means uploading your mind to a machine, discarding your body, then achieving immortality by living forever through machines and robots. Google's director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, has been pushing this cult for many years, and just recently he promised that by 2045, humanity would achieve what he calls the "singularity," where our minds can be uploaded to computers. (Click here for the source of this claim.) In less than a century, Kurzweil says, we could all discard our "fragile" human bodies and inhabit advanced robotic systems as our new immortal selves.

Kurzweil's cult is so bizarre and dangerous that following it can only lead to a lunatrocity of mass death and deception. Kurzweil's sci-fi cybernetic mind-meld theories are so outlandish that they make Scientology's galactic narratives sound like Christian Sunday school.

Where to even begin the debunking of it all? Let's start with its claims...

How would transhumanism even work?

Let's examine the claims of the transhumanism cult leaders like Kurzweil. They are saying that by 2045, all the following technology will exist:

Technology #1) A way to "scan" your entire brain and record every neuron and holographic patterning that exists in your brain.

Technology #2) A way to build an equally complex computing system that has equivalent computational capabilities as your brain.

Technology #3) A way to COPY your brain scan into the computing system. This is called "uploading" your brain to the machine.

Once these three technologies exist, we are promised, we can all transfer our minds to computer systems and experience "digital immortality!"

But wait a second. Something's already missing here, do you see it? In this plan there is no mechanism to transfer your consciousness to the machine. So even if all three of these technologies are adequately developed (which is possible, by the way), they still don't provide a way to merge your mind with a machine.

Nothing more than a computer simulation of your brain

All you've really done, even if all three technologies are developed and working by 2045, is made a copy of your brain. This copy may, indeed, be able to run on the machine, but it's nothing more than a simulation of your brain. It is not you.

Similarly, if someone takes a photo of you and posts a print of the photo on the wall, they can say they've made you "immortal" through photography, but your mind is obviously not living inside the photograph.

If you're a star in a motion picture, you may be "immortalized" by your fans who see you as "living forever" in your famous films, but your consciousness does not live inside the movie. The real "you" is still inhabiting your human body.

No matter how complex the depicted simulation, a "scan" of you that is replicated in another medium (a photo, a movie, or a highly advanced computer) is not you. Thus, the promise of transhumanism is a fraudulent one, and "uploading" is the wrong metaphor. You aren't uploading your consciousness to a machine; you're simply creating a non-conscious computer simulation of your brain.

And how do we know that's true? To answer that question, we have to dig deeper... into the definition of YOU.

What are YOU?

I'll keep this short by beginning with the ending: You are not merely your body.

"You" are far more than your body. And the way we know this is because the instant you die, your body is still the same it was, but the "you" is no longer present.

"You" are actually a non-physical consciousness interfaced with a physical brain. "You" are a non-physical consciousness sometimes called a soul or spirit. This consciousness experiences the world through your physical sensory organs.

This discussion of consciousness is the part that drives the transhumanists bonkers because to be a member of their cult, you have to believe that there is no such thing as consciousness... or a soul... or free will. You have to believe that consciousness is an artifact of the brain itself -- a kind of "ghost in the machine," if you will, that somehow gives rise to the self-delusion of awareness.

This means you have to believe free will is an illusion and that if you copy the brain and paste it somewhere else, then somehow magically that other thing becomes "you."

But this makes no sense. There is no mechanism for the transfer of the focal point of consciousness. If you copy and paste your brain (i.e. "upload" your brain) to another machine, but your human body is still alive and breathing, then you haven't "uploaded" your consciousness anywhere. You have only made a complex facsimile of your neurology.

Transhumanism debunked

Such is the great gap in the theory of transhumanism: There is no mechanism to transfer your consciousness (your soul) from your body to the machine. How do you "transplant" your soul? The transhumanists have no answer for that. They simply pretend your soul doesn't exist and therefore need not be considered at all.

There is nothing in their plan to transplant your soul. So what's actually going to happen to all these transhumanism cult members -- and here's the hilarious part in all this -- is that people like Ray Kurzweil will just DIE, and if they did manage to copy their brain to a machine, that machine will simply run as a simulation, carrying on the computational appearance of Ray Kurzweil, but doing so mindlessly, with no soul or consciousness.

What do you call fifty transhumanists who have uploaded their brains to machines and then killed off their physical bodies? A busy day at the morgue.

Transhumanism is a death cult, much like Heaven's Gate

Ultimately, transhumanism is a death cult much like the infamous Heaven's Gate cult led by Marshal Applewhite. Marshal promised his followers that their minds would merge with space aliens who were hiding in a mothership piggybacked on the Hale-Bopp comet. Just like Ray Kurzweil, Marshal Applewhite promised immortality and said that disconnecting from your body (via suicide, of course) was the path to enlightenment.

Believe it or not, Applewhite said that he was actually an alien spirit who hijacked a human body, taking it over for his own delusional purposes. (He never explains what he did with the previous soul that once occupied the body.) You can watch a video of him explaining this here:



Mirroring all this kookiness, Ray Kurzweil promises that you will live forever if you discard your body and merge your brain with machines that have yet to be invented. At some point, just like with Heaven's Gate, you will need to "kill" your physical body in order to complete the "upload" to Kurzweil's cybernetic computers. There's probably some Kool-Aid involved in all this, no doubt. Kurzweil-Kool-Aid.

Both Applewhite and Kurzweil are obviously insane. Both are also extremely convincing and charismatic. Kurzweil's shtick is that he's very convincing to techno-geeks at Google... people who have now put him in charge of Google's technology. This alone is frightening, realizing that Google has been suckered into the cult of transhumanism -- a cult based on such bizarre sci-fi distortions that it makes Scientology look downright conservative by comparison.

Perhaps Google will soon announce its own cult: Googletology. Or Kurzweilianism.

But there's something even more frightening in all this: The transhumanists may succeed in creating such convincing simulations that they fool huge numbers of other people into thinking the mind-meld with machines actually works! And they may then commit suicide to "merge with the machines" as Kurzweil describes.

Are you getting this yet?

A convincing simulation is still not you

See, if you do manage to scan a human brain and copy it over to a highly-complex computer system -- and this very well may be possible by 2045 -- it may create a strongly convincing simulation that appears to be alive. It may be able to talk with you, reason with you and even inhabit a humanoid robot that walks around the world much like a human. This illusion of consciousness may be so convincing that large numbers of individuals are convinced to kill themselves as part of some sort of "transference" to the machine. It will be given a friendly-sounding name, of course, such as "You 2.0." Drink the Kool-Aid, kill off your physical body, and then your brain pattern gets copied to a digital simulation of you while the Kurzweil cultists stand back and say, "Shazam! You've been uploaded into a machine!" Ain't it trendy?

Not really. You're actually dead, and now the machine is running a "convincing simulation" of your personality. This simulation may manage to convince your friends that you're still "alive" inside the machine, but your spirit is actually long gone, having departed the earthly realm when your physical body died (from drinking the Kool-Aid).

Realistically, the task of creating computer systems capable of fooling human beings into thinking they're "real people" is not so astonishing given a timeframe of 30 years or so. But the Turing test never took into account the existence of a non-physical consciousness or soul. Turing's theories were missing something vital to existence: consciousness!

So if you see a computer system running an on-screen personality that claims to be Ray Kurzweil, and it invites you to drink some Kool-Aid and merge with the machines, just hit delete and go back to playing Farmville.