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Astronomer and physicist Robert Jastrow, for example, envisions this in his 1983 book The Enchanted Loom: "A bold scientist will be able to tap the contents of his mind and transfer them into the metallic lattices of a computer… . It can be said that this scientist has entered the computer and now dwells in it. At last the human brain, ensconced in a computer, has been liberated from the weakness of the mortal flesh… . It is in control of its own destiny … housed in indestructible lattices of silicone, and no longer constrained in its span of years … such a life could live forever." Well, at least as long as one can supply the needed batteries or power.

Many scholars are anticipating cyborg and nanotech enhancements as means of forestalling aging, or even pursuing immortality. The possibilities belong mostly in the realm of science fiction right now, but they seem less and less improbable as the years go by.

The ethical implications of nanotechnology are great, but even more troubling is the philosophy of some of its proponents, who subscribe to transhumanism. This is the belief that someday we will re-engineer our natures to such an extent that a posthuman species, or several new species, will be created that are "superior" to homo sapiens.

That we are biological creatures is simply our current status, transhumanists believe, but it is not necessary for defining who we are or who we should be. Bart Kosko, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, puts it more bluntly in his book Heaven in a Chip (2002): "Biology is not destiny. It was never more than tendency. It was just nature's first quick and dirty way to compute with meat. Chips are destiny."

British roboticist Kevin Warwick put it this way: "I was born human. But this was an accident of fate—a condition merely of time and place." This sounds startingly reminiscent of what nihilist Frederick Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra: "I teach you the overman. Man is something to be overcome."

Transhumanism is in some ways a new incarnation of gnosticism. It sees the body as simply the first prosthesis we all learn to manipulate. As Christians, we have long rejected the gnostic claims that the human body is evil. Embodiment is fundamental to our identity, designed by God, and sanctified by the Incarnation and bodily resurrection of our Lord. Unlike gnostics, transhumanists reject the notion of the soul and substitute for it the idea of an information pattern.

Katherine Hayles, a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, says in How We Became Posthuman (1999) that "in the posthuman, there are no essential differences, or absolute demarcations, between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals." She concludes her book with a warning: "Humans can either go gently into that good night, joining the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but is now obsolete, or hang on for a while longer by becoming machines themselves. In either case … the age of the human is drawing to a close."

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January 2004, Vol. 48, No. 1