Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision of Our Future Evolution

by Ted Chu

Only the yoke for the thousand necks is still lacking: the one goal is lacking. Humanity still has no goal.”1

infer—I am convinced that our purpose is to transcend our limiting biology and the resulting limitations in our consciousness, thus enabling the rise of new kinds of sentient beings, freed from our genetic limitations in the pursuit of the highest transcendental aspirations and the promotion of cosmic evolution.

Looking beyond today’s conception of humanity is unsettling because it requires a profound recalibration of the rules of the game.

The prominent political scientist Francis Fukuyama has called transhumanism “the world’s most dangerous idea” because it may undermine the egalitarian ideals of liberal democracy.

Winner further portrays posthumanists as elitists going down the path of being “unsocial, single-unit atomism” loners, which will threaten the inherent sociality of humans. Those who envision a post- or transhuman world, he believes, are selfish “hedonistic dreamers” because such a world would exist at the expense of time-tested principles of morality and human dignity.

I believe that this sense of a greater calling, this great ideal of abandoning the self in order to embrace the larger world, lies deeply within every one of us. Just like the fearless pilots in the Apollo program, there are those of us who are still willing to sacrifice, even die, for scientific adventure. What we lack is a cosmic vision, together with a down-to-earth understanding of the problems we should tackle and the accomplishments we should aim for.

those history-making heroes in the past. These men and women kept an eye on the future and persistently sought the most ambitious goal they could identify themselves with; and then they devoted themselves to realizing that goal.

For today’s political, social, cultural, and economic leaders, there seems to be little aspiration to move beyond the current “gold standard”: the development of a strong and democratic state combined with a market economy that is built on the rule of law and private-property rights.

In fact, our most overarching human objective seems to have been reduced to the simplistic notion of the maximization of human happiness, which requires little more than that everybody be nice to others and “do no harm.” This feel-good goal is at best egocentric complacency, with the implicit assertion that humankind is an end in itself. It plays safely and pleasantly to the lowest common denominator of human desires. At worst, however, it represents a decadent self-indulgence that flatly flies in the face of what we now know about how the universe evolved, where we came from, our place in evolution, and what our potential is—all of which we will discuss at length. I therefore argue that peace, prosperity, harmony, and human happiness are not ultimate ends in themselves; they become great goals only in the context of how they can serve a larger, cosmic purpose—which I will refer to as the one true Creation. Although I do not pretend to be able to fathom this purpose in its totality, or what the next great leaps in evolution and consciousness will “look like,” our ever-increasing understanding of science and evolution has given us some tantalizing clues. We can say that we are part—or maybe even a focal point—of an amazing cosmic process that started with the Big Bang more than thirteen billion years ago. We can also say that the effort to consciously participate in the unfolding of this grand evolutionary process is the greatest purpose we can find and identify with, and i...

The most extraordinary fact about public awareness of evolution is not that 50 percent don’t believe it but that nearly 100 percent haven’t connected it to anything of importance in their lives. —David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone

Darwin himself summarized as “multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die”;

ezcept compassion and love witht that "let.yhe weakest die"

What startled Darwin’s European contemporaries was neither the idea of species change nor the possibility of humanity’s humble origin, but rather the vision of a seemingly purposeless process without a guiding hand toward preordained perfection.

The crucial question now becomes: If novelty endlessly arises in the course of time, how can one be sure that humanity is the pinnacle of the entire cosmic evolutionary process? The evolutionary answer is: the human is no perfect being, and there could be better things ahead! Compared with the 13.7-billion-year-old universe that contains at least billions of galaxies, our existence is of absolutely negligible magnitude, both physically and temporally. Humanity has yet to comprehend this implication and shift its attention from an inward-looking fatalist being to an outward looking, willful, autonomous becoming.

Currently, the best abstract description of life may be the unifying principle of “supple adaptiveness”—the unending process of producing novel solutions to unanticipated changes in the problems of surviving, reproducing, and flourishing.6

agile leadership! Lila!

But a more comprehensive answer to the question “What is life?” requires attention to multiple levels of meaning. The basic definition scientists give is that life is a carbon-based structure that features self-replication, metabolism, and information processing. This is probably the lowest common denominator for all existing life on Earth. If we rise to a higher level of analysis and ask what life is capable of, one can say that it is capable of giving birth to complex living organisms with a central nervous system called the brain. And further, given the evolution of more and more complex brains, life is capable of allowing consciousness to emerge. Further, when asked what consciousness as such is capable of, I would say it can consciously design new forms of intelligence that will embrace the cosmos and then fundamentally alter it. In other words, life and mind are capable of self-transcendence. Looked at from this perspective, the human being is neither the final product of the universe nor merely an accidental happening on a little planet. It is exactly these deep implications of Darwin’s ideas that are still misunderstood, ignored, or rejected today. Almost all academic and popular books and discussions about natural and cultural history, including those that promote an evolutionary understanding of history, have narrowed themselves to the explicit or implicit purpose of teaching us about how to make human lives better.

For instance, we feel bad, and very rightly so, about our historical wrongs—war, genocide, slavery, torture—and yet they have been part of the evolutionary process.

These efforts and successes in preventing them are also part of the evolutionary process. Nevertheless, the process of elimination goes on as evolution dictates; only the unit of selection has changed. Today we move forward by changing or eliminating failed governments, useless institutions, bankrupted businesses, and obsolete products.

impersonal,

meaning....

To summarize, humanity is not the ultimate creation of God (or the glorious pinnacle of evolution), nor is it just an accident (“the naked ape” or “the third chimpanzee”). Humanity is indeed special and unique. We can even say we are “chosen”; but we must ask why humanity was chosen and what it was chosen for. Humanity has to create to earn that “center of the universe” status and recognition, and we should never accept the human being as it is in a universe that is in eternal flux. The freedom from human genetic bondage is in our hands. This is our frontier. Let us step forward with joy, courage, and responsibility.

We can have faith in the posthuman future because, if we examine what we know today and keep an open mind, we can perceive a movement in the universe toward higher levels of complexity and consciousness that is as convincing as experiencing the power of love or the beauty of the natural world. Once we glimpse that possible future, even without knowing its unknowable details, we will want to open ourselves to it in whatever ways we can. Having contemplated its import, we will feel compelled to act in ways that maximize our ability to navigate and influence this new reality.

In another sense, however, evolution is not “ruthless” but rewards cooperation. We have seen a lot of discussion and stories centered on the question of whether selfish superhumans (or human-like machines) will overpower the unselfish ones. Here, natural and cultural history both show the counterintuitive results: The ones who cooperate as if they are endowed with the big picture tend to prevail, under the aegis of what the mathematical biologist Martin Nowak calls the altruistic law of evolution and what evolutionary theorist Robert Wright calls the non-zero logic of human destiny. Evil, with its biological origins in predator/parasite behaviors, can cause huge damage and suffering, but it has never prevailed in history. Why do we want to bet that billions of years of evolution will be structurally different if we continue to follow the principles underlying that process? The confidence at the macro level, of course, should not prevent us from being cautious at the tactical level and recognizing the utter importance of self-preservation.

The machine itself makes no demands and holds out no promises: it is the human spirit that makes demands and keeps promises. Just watch the American TV series The Jetsons to see how people can lead an utterly conventional lifestyle with futuristic technologies.

The popular notion of a better human being—what you wish you and your children to be—depends on these new technologies to become reality: to make us healthier, more beautiful, more athletic, more intelligent, more creative, more pleasant, and many other “mores.” Making people better seems like making all our dreams true by today’s standards. But still, this is not it.

Things that only a madman wants to do today can suddenly become the adrenaline rush of some new sentient beings. Things that nobody has ever thought of doing can suddenly become a new being’s obsession. In the first phase, we get what we want. In the second phase, we get the “want” (new motivational and spiritual system) that we want.

like having a child?

In this book, I will refer to such a new mind as a Cosmic Being6 (or in abbreviated form, CoBe, which is also an abbreviation for “Could Be,” and shorthand for the NASA satellite Cosmic Background Explorer). More precisely, this term is reserved for the sentient beings that are on the cutting edge of cosmic evolution.

Karl Jaspers coined the term Axial Age to refer to the period from approximately 800 BCE to 200 BCE, during which several civilizations simultaneously (and separately) experienced revolutionary changes in thought and worldview—

This was the beginning of what Karl Popper called the “open society,” where concrete, local, and personal tribal relations were increasingly displaced by abstract, impersonal, and anonymous urban social relations.

Even chimpanzees have been observed to get excited during thunderstorms and to wear expressions of wonder in front of a waterfall. They behave as if they are facing some supernatural force, which stirs the

“Races or tribes die out not just when they are conquered and suppressed but when they accept their defeated condition, become despairing, and lose their excitement about the future.”

“The Chinese were ‘ecological’ in their religious and philosophical thinking . . . they saw everything as forming part of a single interacting system, in which no internal cleavages of an ultimate nature could exist, and in which every part affected every other part to some degree.”

No faith is potent if it is not a faith in the future: we are less ready to suffer or die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have or to be.

At its best, scientific rationalism is the most open doctrine ever invented—but it is also the least tolerant: that is, it does not allow wishful thinking by anybody without a reality check. It is the mind’s sharpest knife that opens the toughest boxes and cuts out most of the rubbish, regardless of what is involved. The ultimate and most transcendental science is one that is ready to abandon anything, even the scientific method itself.

The idea that religion is a product of people’s ignorance of science is an incomplete picture of reality. Just like a child growing up who has to push away his parents at some point and later begins to appreciate them, many of us, by pushing God back, have later developed a deeper understanding of God and feel closer to God than ever. Discoveries of natural laws have replaced personal revelation when it comes to understanding the world, but the motivation for the search remains a religious one.

The tension between the scientific democratic principle and “the tyranny of the majority” in a true democratic state is a crucial limit of Western wisdom. How can we overcome the limits of our spiritual tradition while relying on them for inspiration? How can we continue to believe we are “the chosen ones” while attempting to overcome ourselves?

Conscious evolution is beginning to dominate cosmic evolution.

The universe is unified yet modular, lawful yet playful, and messy yet directional. There are no individual miracles in this universe, yet the universe itself is a perpetual miracle.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem tells us that we can get close to answering all questions, but never answer every question about a system as long as we are part of the system. Thus, even in theory, we can never know why the universe exists and why it is the way it is without jumping out of it, which is impossible. In Einstein’s famous words, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” The material cosmos, life, and mind would not evolve if there were no stable patterns, but why there are repeatable patterns is beyond the understanding of anyone inside the universe.

In a similar fashion, just as we domesticated animals and plants, we have also domesticated ourselves: over the last 30,000 years, human brain size has decreased by 10 to 15 percent, reversing a trend over the last two million years. The intensifying social interactions in permanently settled agricultural communities could have exerted strong selective pressure against antisocial personalities, resulting in alteration of both brain structure and size.

Only a few of us retain a childlike wonder throughout our lives. A typical life’s journey is one with increasing knowledge but decreasing mental and physical adaptability. Our mindset unknowingly gets trapped in conceptions and categories that we create. As Aristotle observed, as we grow older, we aspire to nothing great and exalted and crave the mere necessities and comforts of existence. Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

Yup

Brilliant point

The person begins to adopt an attitude of radical openness to all input, a so-called second naiveté, which is neither a wishy-washy neutrality nor mere curious fascination with the exotic features of alien cultures. It is a “willed naiveté.” The danger of this radical “see-it-all” stance is a potential loss of inspiration that can lead to complacency or cynical withdrawal from real-world problems and challenges. Individuals attaining this stage also can become isolated from others, who may not understand or be sympathetic to this point of view. As the Chinese saying goes, “The mountain peak is unbearably cold” (高处不胜寒).

This abandonment of the self is very difficult to achieve since it requires a “holy indifference” to the temporal success or failure of the cause to which one has devoted one’s best efforts. Detached from the specific social/cultural/personal contexts, the simplicity, elegance, and unifying power of post-conventional perspectives ultimately originate from the Tao.

Too many cases have shown that under grinding poverty there can be no virtue.17 Indeed, the preliterate societies are dominated by people with Stage 2 characteristics.

higher perspectives may not be able to maintain them throughout life. As physical and mental power wanes, one may well “shrink” to lower, more comforting perspectives and allow them to guide their lives. They may retain an awareness of higher perspectives but no longer express their former concerns about the larger world beyond themselves or their own family and community.

John Anthony Froude illustrates the cyclic nature of history when he says, “Virtue and truth produced strength, strength dominion, dominion riches, riches luxury, and luxury weakness and collapse.”

John Dewey went so far as to define as religious anything that introduces perspectives: All religions have dwelt upon the power of religion to introduce perspective into the piecemeal and shifting episodes of experience. We need to reverse the ordinary statement and say that whatever introduces genuine perspective is religious, not that religion is something that introduces it.25

One who is pre-occupied with basic needs of food, shelter, and security will find higher levels of perspective elusive. A hungry person is not free. Weakness corrupts the mind, just like power. An insecure person lacking self-confidence is intolerant.30 The reflective mind cannot function properly under the stress of constant fear and anxiety.

In other words, it is almost impossible for us to formulate or act on a real-time and real-life basis from a historical perspective. In a striking parallel to the messy workings of our body and our brain, the details of history are always messy—far less coherent and purposeful than what was written down by historians.35 What may look in retrospect like farsighted, wise actions may be experienced in real time as utter confusion and wrenching dislocation. What leads a civilization on a path of stagnation may have been hailed by its contemporaries as the dawn of everlasting peace and prosperity.

The power of our emotion is like a camera with a fixed focal length that generates sharp pictures at one distance (the personal perspective) and blurs objects either too far or too near. The aggregates that are significantly higher than the individual—species or society—are too abstract. They attract our emotional attachment only indirectly, through individual representatives (for example, a dying child). The units smaller than the individual (such as a body cell or a gene) do not attract our emotional attachment.

Wanton disregard of our natural environment almost always spells trouble, but we must go beyond merely “not disturbing” the environment and learn creative ways of adapting to this ever-changing planet. To be free and prosper, we need to respect Mother Nature, but not worship it.

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