Why I Want to be a Hyperhuman When I Grow Up

Inspired by Dr. Carl Hayden Smith's upcoming event in The Portal

The “human being” seems to be up for grabs

What is often overlooked in Nietzsche’s work, is that it all revolves around a dramatic reconceptualisation of the human being, not as an identity, but as a becoming beyond the human. More precisely, Nietzsche’s work involves thinking the human identity as a becoming towards the Overhuman, where he invites us to think the human identity as a bridge. From Thus Spoke Zarathustra:¹

“What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose: what is loveable about human beings is that they are a crossing over and a going under.”

I have come to think about Nietzsche’s perspective on the Overhuman as pointing in the direction of Flight against the Spirit of Gravity via a courageous confrontation with one’s own fear and laziness. In Judeo-Christian terms this could be thought of as the suspension or even reversal of the Fall from God and into an Other type of being. On the surface this may not seem so different from an Orthodox perspective where one thinks about God becoming human so that the human may become like God.²

“God became human so that humans might become God”

The main difference is that this process for the Orthodox involves a reversal of the Fall in recognising the Son is not guilty of the sins of the Father. In this metaphysics there is a type of inverse connection between the human being as in sin/sinning and becoming-Other towards or returning home to God.

However, in both cases, the “human being as identity” is not reified in-itself but rather perceived as a process towards something other (Overhuman/God). If perspectives as seemingly opposed as Nietzschean atheism and Orthodox Christianity perceive the human being as a process to something other, how are we to best converge along lines that reflexively lead to this something other? Or maybe there is no convergence and only splitting and divergences? Perhaps a naive question, but: what is the difference between God and the Overhuman? Both categories seem to point towards an overcoming of the self/identity of the human being, and both seem to involve a suspension or reversal of the Fall/Spirit of Gravity.

Naive questions are a good place to start because if you ask our leading academic intellectuals about very basic categories, like what is a “human being”, what you find today is that no one knows what to think. Following philosopher Alenka Zupančič, whether we like it or not, we are fully in the middle of mass disorientation qua “object disoriented ontology”.³ This is actually one of the reasons I taught the Science of Logic:⁴ Hegel’s logic seems to imply that we not only need to move from thinking about the “human being” as a “human becoming”, but we need to make this move in sublating the human being as “being-nothing”. If we miss this move, we can fall into a superficial form of becoming.⁵

Perhaps we are seeing the emergence of these superficial forms of the human being becoming something-other in the form of the metaphysics of transhumanism and posthumanism? Trans/post-humanism are framed on the battlefield of our contemporary becoming in a way that leads to confusion and disorientation. Moreover, the stakes seem to be growing higher and higher by the year if not the month. Just last week, Elon Musk announced on Twitter that the first human received a Neuralink implant and is “recovering well”:

Yikes!

As I discussed with Michelle Garner of

O.G. Rose

, are we going to have a situation in 10 years where, instead of going to the Apple Store to update our latest iPhone, we go to a type of Apple Store-Hospital hybrid where we get the latest Neuralink chip implanted?⁶ Philosopher Slavoj Žižek has noted, both in one of his more recent works, Hegel in a Wired Brain (2020), as well as in a recent article “Elon Musk ruined my sex life”, such a situation involves the precise closure of a gap that makes us human. Moreover, the closer of this gap seems to imply some divine actualisation that sounds a lot like a recapitulation of an Orthodox metaphysics that humans will become “God”. From Žižek in “Elon Musk ruined my sex life”:

In Singularity, not only we, humans, become divine, God himself becomes fully divine. In so far as Singularity also implies a kind of synchronicity of minds, no wonder that it calls for spiritual-philosophical speculations: Singularity is perceived as nothing less than our redemption from the Fall. That is, from our existence as mortal and sexualised beings as described in Genesis.

And also in Hegel in a Wired Brain (2020):⁷

Musk (and other proponents of neuralink) wants to heal the wound literally: to fill in the gap, to have man united with God by way of making him god-like, i.e., by way of providing him with properties and capacities which we (until now) experienced as “divine.”

We can put this in anthropological perspective. Since the beginning of humanity, we have been “making tools” — the first hominid, Homo Habilis, literally means “man the tool maker” or “handy man” — but this process has remained (for the most part) within the comfortable “gap” separating inside from outside. In other words, “we” (human beings) have a basic sense-perception originating from an “inside” and “it” (the world) is externally mediated with the development of our tools/technologies. This gap holds from the Oldowan hand axe to the iPhone15.

However, with neuralink this gap is breached. The screen is no longer external to us but inside of us, fused with our brain as a “brain-machine interface”.⁸ When we think about brain-machine interface coupled to the internet, coupled to virtual reality, coupled to social media/networks, coupled to artificial general intelligence, you start to lose any connection to what we have conventionally called “reality”.

Moreover all this seems impossible to stop. In other words, it all feels imminent.

Let’s return to Nietzsche.

My first encounter with Nietzsche was unlike probably most intellectuals who encounter Nietzsche. I found his work referenced in the transhumanist literature, most notably by post-humanist philosopher Nick Bostrom in “A history of transhumanist thought” where Bostrom concludes that Nietzsche’s Overhuman and the modern concept of the transhuman, while unified by the idea of overcoming the human condition, actually have little to do with each other:⁹

“What Nietzsche has in mind, however, was not technological transformation but rather a kind of soaring personal growth and cultural refinement in exceptional individuals.”

This article inspired intellectual debate in transhumanist circles, with some transhumanists, like Max Moore, arguing that “The overhuman is the transhuman”, but more precisely that Nietzsche’s thought can be understood as a type of precursor and major influence to transhumanist thinking:¹⁰

My goal has not been to show that transhumanism must be Nietzschean. It has been to show that central elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy are not only compatible with transhumanism, but have historically had a considerable direct influence on major strands of this philosophy of life.

These debates within transhumanist circles are still active today, with some philosophers like Stefan Sorgner arguing that there is a fundamental connection,¹¹ even to the point of thinking of transhumanism as opening “Zarathustra 2.0”,¹² and philosophers like Elise Bohan arguing that Nietzsche at best can be conceived as a “weak-proto-transhumanist”.¹³

This connection between Nietzsche and transhumanist circles even led to an interview with Nikola Danaylov of Singularity Weblog when I was preparing to teach Thus Spoke Zarathustra last year:

In any case, Bostrom started to differentiate from this debate in part by using the term “posthuman”, even writing the famous and comically titled essay “Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up”. In this article Bostrom argues that “extreme enhancement” driven by technology could result in “posthuman” modes of being related to (1) health span, (2) cognition, and (3) emotion.¹⁴ Basically the posthuman would (1) live for a much longer span of time in full physical and mental health, (2) would have increased general intellectual capacity, whether related to memory and reasoning, attention and understanding, as well as appreciation for music, humor, eroticism, narration, spirituality and maths, and (3) would have heightened capacity to enjoy life, as well as respond with appropriate affects to real life situations.

Its not clear whether the pathway to this reality for Bostrom involves Musk’s Neuralink, but it seems to involve what he refers to as a “Whole Brain Emulation” which also happens to open the door to “digital immortality” via mind-uploading. In terms of metaphysics this could be framed as the ultimate “gnostic fantasy” in the sense of a release from the “sinful mortal sexed body” and into the “perfect immortal digital body”.

While Bostrom’s point of view may seems terrifyingly optimistic — presupposing that a type of human merging with technology and artificial intelligence would lead to a posthuman being with longer health span (or immortality), enhanced cognition and emotionality — he also became quite concerned with the dangers along this pathway, even writing perhaps the most famous book on the possibility of artificial general intelligence, Superintelligence (2014), warning of extreme existential risk scenarios.¹⁵

All of the mind binding problems associated with transhumanism or posthumanism is one of the reasons why I invited Dr. Carl Hayden Smith to The Portal this month. Dr. Hayden-Smith will be featured in “The Edge”, a space to explore the “razor’s edge of contemporary thought and practice” in relation to under-conceptualised issues.

Last year Hayden-Smith published in the second Philosophy Portal anthology, Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in an article titled “Overbecoming: Hyperhumanism as a Bridge Towards Interbeing”.¹⁶ In his article he developed an interesting new argument in the tension between Nietzsche and transhumanism. He suggested, paradoxically, that trans/post-human phenomenon actually represented, not Nietzsche’s Overhuman, but rather Nietzsche’s “Last Man”. Nietzsche’s Last Man is often represented as a symbol for the human being that has given up on uncertain struggle and becoming, in favour of predictable security and safety. From Hayden-Smith:¹⁷

The last man does not care or even remotely try to answer the questions of his existence. He cannot despise himself and does not have the consciousness nor the insight, to such a degree, that he finds it not only acceptable, but also agreeable to be the Last Man. Nietzsche warned that the society of the last man could be too barren and decadent to support the growth of healthy human life or great individuals.

For Hayden-Smith, what is really motivating the trans/post-human movement — beyond the grandiose narratives of an overcoming to a type of immortal being freed of the body — is actually a desire to get out of the human struggle of becoming a bridge beyond itself, and rather becoming totally subservient and dependent on technology:¹⁸

Transhumanism forces us to become utterly dependent on technology, which subverts our ability to develop the skills for ourselves. Through the use of current technology, a vast majority of humans have fallen prey to the digital feed that directs us on how to behave, what to have, what to achieve and to what to aspire.

In short, following Žižek’s concerns, if we all get “hooked up” to Neuralink we are closing the very gap that makes the human struggle possible, i.e. the gap as the condition bridge-making. Neuralink and associated transhumanist technologies guarantee us that there will never be a distance between ourselves and the immediacy of our desires. Moreover, any escape route also does not seem possible, but rather seems like we are entering a type of “forced choice”. From Žižek:

To return to the book of Genesis, the voice of Singularity is another address given by the snake; it promises the annulment of the Fall and the achievement of immortality and superior knowledge if we eat its fruit; that is, if we immerse ourselves into it. As in Genesis, we should be aware that this choice is a forced one: we cannot but go along with it – no withdrawal is possible.

In Lacanian terms, it seems that this situation puts us in the situation where we never really have to move from the imaginary to the symbolic, i.e. we never have to develop our linguistic capacities in relation to the desire of the other, we never have to confront subjective destitution of what we thought we wanted because we always immediately get what we want. Paradoxically in relation to Bostrom’s “I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up”, trans/post-humanism is not “growing up”, but perhaps, the condition of possibility of never having to grow up at all.

Perhaps that is why it feels we are entering a society where the links between elder and child (in the most general sense) are totally breaking down. We are being put into a situation where we cannot not be children, we do not have the means to grow up, to affirm a basic adult life world and continue the biosocial experiment of reproducing ourselves.

While perhaps under-conceptualised, which is why he is coming to The Edge, Hayden-Smith proposes an alternative route: what he calls the “hyperhuman”. For Hayden-Smith the hyperhuman thinks with the symptom of being human, even to the point of claiming that thinking the symptom of being human is the paradoxical essence of the hyperhuman.¹⁹ He quotes

Daniel Fraga

’s Ontological Design (2023) on this point:²⁰

Hyperhumanism would necessarily have to map the human symptom. If hyperhumanism doesn’t know symptoms, doesn’t have some symptomatology, doesn't have something to think the symptom with, it's not really hyperhumanism, it’s just humanism but faster, it’s not qualitatively different, to be qualitatively different it needs to have a different conception of the human subject.”

Here to think the symptom we have to think the gap, and to think the gap, is to open the condition of possibility of being a bridge. But a bridge to where? To what? To the Overhuman? To God?

For Hayden-Smith it is “to inter-being”. The hyperhuman is for Hayden-Smith the way out of, not only the pitfalls of a technological dependence/enslavement of the trans/post-human direction, but also a way out of the pitfalls of a humanism which can become too anthropocentric, idealistic and rationalistic.²¹ The hyperhuman uses technology only as a container to build human skills (of working with symptoms?), expand sense-experience (becoming curious about our symptoms?), and accelerates the growth of human emotionality towards inter-being (seeing our symptoms as the conditions of possible connection with others?).²²

What Hayden-Smith repeats and repeats as a type of mantra — against the logics of “human to Overhuman” or “human to God” — is that “we may not yet be human”. It is a nice thought. In this frame the hyperhuman is the opening, an invitation, to view the gaps and the symptoms of our humanity — not as something to recoil against into the isolated individualism of technological transcendence (closing the gap with a neural implant) — as pointing towards a new form of relating or “inter-being”.

In the end this is why Hayden-Smith’s “The Edge” session at The Portal is nested with the “Month of Communism” (see: Thinking Communism). He is trying to think deeply about the ways in which technology can be part of the bridge to a deeper sociality. Thus, the essence of his hyperhumanism, to me, is shifting focus between ends and means:

1. Technology is not an “end-in-itself”, i.e. something that will “save us” from our humanity and hence our limited capacities for a type of uploaded digital immortality

2. Technology is rather only a part of the bridge, a piece of the puzzle, to helping us befriend symptomatic parts of our identity that we currently avoid and efface (perhaps with dreams of becoming Overhuman or becoming God?)

In that sense, The Portal is aiming to be a hyperhumanism space, perhaps something where we can strive to become more human by recognising our gaps and lacks. Maybe I could even go so far as to say, following Hayden-Smith: “I Want to be a Hyperhuman When I Grow Up”! If being a hyperhuman means courageously working with the symptom (what we think are our “sins”), fearlessly accepting gaps/lacks, as opposed to closing them up with technology and ideology, or a technological ideology, then why not? The only thing we have to lose is our visions of being an impossibly perfect being, the only thing we have to lose is our vision that God became man only so that man could become God, as opposed to God becoming man so that God would not be “lifeless and alone”,²³ i.e. without man and his struggles to become more man.

Will that becoming more man involve sticking a Neuralink chip in my head? The current version of myself certainly recoils against the idea, but maybe in the future I will look back on this article and laugh? Who knows, certainly not me.

If you are equally puzzled, if you are interested in exploring the gap, join us at The Portal to explore some of these questions and mysteries on February 11th @ 6pm CET. Dr. Carl Hayden Smtih and I will also be presenting at a Dark Renaissance Productions (cc:

Dark Renaissance Radio

,

Raven Connolly

, Filip Lundstrom, David Hogberg) event “More Than Machine / Less Than Human” in Gothenburg, Sweden on March 1st-2nd with

Daniel Fraga

and Thomas Hamelryck. You can find out more at the link above or in the videos below:

1. Nietzsche, F. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Cambridge University Press. p. 6.

2. Evdokimov, P. 1979. Orthodoxy. New York City Press. p. 11.

3. Zupančič, A. 2017. Chapter 4: Object-Disoriented Ontology. In: What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 73-139.

4. Philosophy Portal’s Science of Logic course.

5. I argue in Abyssal Arrows that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra can be conceptualised as trying to teach about this form of becoming, i.e. human being as a being-nothing towards the becoming of the Overhuman, see: Last, C. 2023. Spirit’s Logic: Zarathustra as the Becoming of Being-Nothing. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. p. 19-48.

6. See: Lacan’s Sublimation in the Real (O.G. Rose podcast).

7. Žižek, S. 2020. Hegel in a Wired Brain. Bloomsbury. p. 89.

8. Learn more: Millán, J.R. & Carmena, J. 2010. Invasive or noninvasive: understanding brain-machine interface technology. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine 29: 16-22.

9. Bostrom, N. 2005. A history of transhumanist thought. Journal of evolution and technology 14.1.

10. More, M. 2010. The overhuman in the transhuman. Journal of Evolution and Technology 21.1: 1-4.

11. Sorgner, S.L. 2020. On Transhumanism: The most dangerous idea in the world. Pennsylvania State University Press.

12. Sorgner, S.L. 2011. Zarathustra 2.0 and beyond: Further remarks on the complex relationship between Nietzsche and transhumanism. The Agonist, a Nietzsche Circle Journal 4(4).

13. Bohan, Elise. 2019. Nietzsche and Transhumanism: Much Ado About Nothing? Deliberatio, 1(1): 19-31.

14. Bostrom, N. 2008. Why I want to be a posthuman when I grow up. Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity. Gordijn, B. & Chadwick, R. (Eds.). Springer. pp. 107-137.

15. Bostrom, N. 2014. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press.

16. Smith, C. 2023. Overbecoming: Hyperhumanism as a Bridge Towards Interbeing. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 547-574.

17. Ibid. p. 550.

18. Ibid. p. 550-1.

19. Ibid. p. 555.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid. p. 556-7.

22. Ibid. p. 559-60.

23. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 493.