In this episode, I chat with author and consultant Grayson Quay about his new book, "The Transhumanist Temptation," and how transhumanism has infiltrated every area of our lives, from the spiritual to our business to our personal lives.
00:00:00.260Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:08.720Transhumanism is a huge issue and it's one that I don't think we talk about near enough. It's something that is approaching us at every level of our lives from the spiritual to our business to our personal lives.
00:00:20.720Everything we do seems to some way interact with technology. We're being asked to alter our bodies, our minds in so many ways. I think it's critical that we think about this now before it all overtakes us.
00:00:33.500My guest today is a consultant and an author. He's just written a book called The Transhuman Temptation. Grayson Quay, thank you so much for coming on, man.
00:00:42.920Absolutely. So like I said, most people, when they think of transhumanism, you know, they think, okay, this is a problem, but I see it in like a sci-fi movie somewhere.
00:00:52.080Someone's getting an artificial, you know, cyborg body, something like this. It's very radical. It's in the future.
00:00:59.480Maybe they start to see a little bit of that in their day-to-day life, but they don't think of themselves as being in a transhuman world.
00:01:06.080And I think a lot of this comes from a limited definition of what transhumanism would mean, which is something you definitely address in your book.
00:01:14.500So could you talk to me a little bit about your understanding of transhumanism and how it applies to someone who's just going in through today's world?
00:01:23.120Yes, this is one of the big goals I had in my book was to try to get people to see this larger definition of transhumanism,
00:01:30.120to kind of see all the ways that it's already infiltrated the world around us.
00:01:34.100So, yeah, like you said, it's something that's very easy to sort of dismiss as science fiction or as kind of kooky.
00:01:40.200You see, you know, Brian Johnson doing his weird, you know, biohacking thing.
00:01:45.040I don't know if you saw it the other day. He just tweeted, there's microplastics in my ejaculate.
00:01:50.240Yeah, he's constantly like measuring the number of erections his son gets at night.
00:01:54.960It's a very disturbing obsession for sure.
00:01:57.960Yeah, or Ray Kurzweil, who famously, you know, is big on the uploading my brain to the cloud and living forever thing.
00:02:06.100See, all this very bizarre stuff, you know, they put out these books that are kind of poorly formatted and badly written.
00:02:13.780You know, they make these grandiose predictions that like, oh, if you can live to 2020, you'll live to be a thousand years old.
00:02:19.300Uh, and none of it seems to pan out, but the problem is what they're doing is they're just taking the, uh, premises or the, the ideology that so many people have already accepted just tacitly.
00:02:34.360It's just kind of in the air we breathe and sort of taking it to its logical conclusion.
00:02:38.240Um, they're just a little further down the slippery slope than the rest of us are.
00:02:42.360Uh, the kind of root of transhumanism is really a denial of what you'd call, uh, the natural law tradition that, you know, you can find running through the, uh, you know, the scriptures and through Plato and Aristotle and Cicero and Aquinas and all the way through the Western tradition.
00:02:59.960This is kind of one of the central ideas of the Western tradition is that human beings have a nature and because we have a nature, there's a type of, of excellence, uh, that's fitting to what we are, um, that there's a type of flourishing that's proper to us.
00:03:15.780The eudaimonia is the Aristotelian term and that, you know, our telos or our goal is aligned with achieving that.
00:03:22.860Um, transhumanism is basically the rejection of all of that.
00:03:26.520It's this, you know, Nietzschean or Sartrean idea that, you know, humanity has no nature.
00:03:32.260Humanity has no essence except for what we define for ourselves.
00:03:36.180It's up to you to decide what a good human is.
00:03:40.180It's up to you to decide what a human is in general.
00:03:42.920Uh, you know, the meaning of your life is to give your life a meaning, right?
00:03:46.540And once you've accepted that, like once you've.
00:03:50.440Sort of enshrined your will in the central location where some fixed idea of human nature used to be.
00:03:56.520Then suddenly all of the things that the transhumanists propose are on the table.
00:04:01.040There's no reason not to do any of that.
00:04:05.840I think for many people who think of themselves as political conservatives, because obviously what they are usually trying to do is conserve the last version of their current society.
00:04:16.440They, they don't always see around these corners.
00:04:19.160And one of the problems we run into repeatedly is as technology develops, we usually are introduced to the technology before we've really evaluated the moral implications of it.
00:04:31.680And so when you think about abortion or trans stuff, in a lot of ways, Christians were lagging behind on these issues because the technology appeared before the theological, you know, bulwark could be built up against these possible problems.
00:04:47.640And so one of the things that happens when we lose sight of that telos, when we lose sight of our excellence, what we are supposed to be a part of, what tradition we are supposed to achieve that excellence inside, when we don't have that as a guiding light from the beginning, it's very, very easy for technology to go well past us.
00:05:05.600And we've spent all of our time playing catch up because we simply don't recognize the dangers before they've already arrived.
00:05:12.380Yeah. And we've lost the philosophical resources that we would need to really draw a line in the sand for how a lot of these technologies are used.
00:05:19.240So if you take one piece of technology, like artificial wounds, for example, this is, you know, a big transhumanist technology.
00:05:27.080Feminists have been talking about it for decades, going back to, I think, Shulamith Firestone in the 1970s.
00:05:31.280You know, she says that the other feminists were wrong.
00:05:34.320It's not society that's oppressive, it's biology.
00:05:37.460And the only way to conquer that is through artificial wombs.
00:05:41.560And there hasn't been one yet that really works for humans.
00:05:45.100It hasn't been tried, but they've tried it on animals and it's worked okay.
00:05:49.640But there's actually a really valid application for those, which is if, you know, a woman goes into labor before the baby is viable,
00:05:58.180you could stick it in an artificial womb and let it kind of come to the point of viability.
00:06:04.320When the technology was first being discussed, there was actually some feminist outcry against it because they thought it would be used to restrict abortion for that reason.
00:06:10.960It kind of undermines the whole bodily autonomy thing because now suddenly you can expel the intruder without killing it.
00:06:19.400The point is to avoid parenthood altogether.
00:06:21.960But anyway, we don't have the philosophical resources we would need to actually draw that line there and say, no, like this would be a good use of this technology.
00:06:31.380But making it the new default for human reproduction and just growing all the babies in giant warehouses full of pods would be a step too far.
00:06:42.300And we're going to restrict that or ban that.
00:06:46.720You know, it's going to be sold to people.
00:06:49.520This is what always happens is they'll sell you a new technology with kind of the most unobjectionable version of it possible or the most unobjectionable use of it possible.
00:07:01.840The first person they give it to is a quadriplegic who wants to use it to move his mouse around so he can play Civilization VI and do his online Bible study.
00:07:11.760But if you think that that's where that technology is going to stop, you're crazy, right?
00:07:15.500It's going to become a general purpose consumer technology and suddenly we'll have an entire society of glassy eyed people who are staring into space, just kind of operating this digital UI with their brains, which will only be a slight deterioration from the current society of glassy eyed people we have staring at phone screens, but a deterioration nonetheless.
00:07:38.040So this actually creates, I think, a problem even for people with our perhaps concerns when it comes to transhumanism, because, you know, I think about something like surrogacy, right?
00:07:51.240Again, something that Christians just had not caught up on.
00:07:55.060They, you know, it was sold to them as, well, this is just helping people who want to have families have families, right?
00:08:00.940And that's a pretty easy thing to sell Christian conservatives on.
00:08:05.340They want people to have the ability to have children.
00:08:07.860We couldn't have children because of our biological situation or some other one.
00:08:12.260And so therefore we're just getting assistance in this right now, down the road, we start to see, oh, no, there are like gay couples, specially ordering children.
00:08:21.040If they don't get the right one, they force the mother to have abortions.
00:08:24.220And in several documented cases, special ordering children specifically to abuse.
00:08:32.960And someone who was arrested for messaging in a group chat saying like how they plan to abuse their surrogate child once it was born.
00:08:39.920Right. And so we see that the horrific uses of the technology show up after, you know, the horse is kind of out of the barn.
00:08:49.320And so I think about this when it comes to an artificial womb.
00:08:52.120So you say, well, a legitimate use of this would be to keep a child alive who otherwise wouldn't be viable outside the mother's womb.
00:09:00.320Right. But as you point out, once that technology has been sold for that use, there's no reason it won't expand to all the other uses that you're terrified of.
00:09:11.140The existence of the technology itself is, you know, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:09:32.600This is a much larger problem for, I think, those who are worried about the transhuman issue.
00:09:38.520Is some level of neo-Ludditism required to eventually avoid some of this or is ultimately it always about simply trying to find the most ethical use for technologies when they come out, even if they will inevitably get, you know, corrupted by some other application?
00:09:57.880Yeah, I think I think there will need to be some kind of point at which people who want to keep their humanity just draw a line in the sand.
00:10:08.280I think, you know, a good way to do that is just not getting implants, maybe, because I think that'll be I don't mean like breast implants, though.
00:10:15.340You probably shouldn't get those either.
00:10:16.440But I mean, you know, like a neural implant.
00:10:18.740I think that, you know, kind of letting them inside your head is probably a bridge too far.
00:10:23.600I really admire people, though, who've tried to make the step back to dumb phones.
00:10:27.000I haven't taken that step yet myself, but it's something I've thought about a lot.
00:10:31.200Generally speaking, though, I think that most technologies, there's certain reproductive technologies that I think probably don't have any good uses, really.
00:10:42.120You know, I would probably ban surrogacy altogether, for example.
00:10:44.740But with most things, I think it's a question of whether we use it as a tool or whether we use it as something that's going to make us into a different type of being.
00:10:54.660All right. So one of the examples I use in my book is, you know, I'm not against technological innovation.
00:11:00.520I would love it if a construction worker could go to work and plug a, you know, plug a set of four robot arms into his into his brain and operate them with his mind as though they were part of his body and use them to pick up giant steel girders and carry them around the construction site all day.
00:11:20.140It would increase productivity. It would have all it would have all these benefits.
00:11:24.280But when he clocks out, I want him to unplug those and leave them at the work site.
00:11:28.060I don't want him to go home and move through life as a six armed transhuman cyborg.
00:11:33.360But unfortunately, that's what's going to happen.
00:11:37.040Or, you know, I think that something like augmented reality technology where, you know, glasses now and then potentially, you know, implants in the future give you some kind of digital overlay over the visual field that you're perceiving.
00:11:52.800I think there's a lot of uses for that in the workplace and in job training and in education and things like that.
00:11:59.100My concern is that you will keep those on all the time.
00:12:04.140And now suddenly everything you see is mediated by and filtered through the preferences of whatever big tech company controls your your neural implants and the augmented reality interface.
00:12:16.340So get ready for a lot of pop up ads in your peripheral vision.
00:12:20.160And, you know, perhaps if you're seeing anti social behavior by, you know, members of groups that the the powers that be would not want you to form a negative impression of it'll just blank it out for you or something.
00:12:37.660Yeah. And this is what really I think it creates the huge problem for me is, as you say, of course,
00:12:43.040we could all see the benefit of some construction worker not having to break his own back to lift all these girders and, you know, having the interface that allows that.
00:12:52.920But I just think of the cell phone, right?
00:12:54.920The minute I have this phone, it it yeah, in theory, it allows me to do more work.
00:13:00.620But it also is a Pandora's box into 9000 other things simultaneously.
00:13:06.120And so the creation of that interface itself, you know, it's the McLuhan.
00:13:31.760But it was it's a very interesting show in that the conceit of it is basically people keep all their memories in like this, you know, implant that goes in the back of their spine.
00:13:40.940And if you want to travel into some other body or you want or you die, you can be basically moved in these things.
00:13:48.140But it's it's only the rich that can really afford to continually swap the bodies and keep, you know, most average people get stuck in some kind of digital slavery with their with their memory because they can't afford the next upgrade, the next body, that kind of thing.
00:14:03.620The only people that maintain a real human existence are the Catholics, because they're part of their religious commitment is literally to turn to make their stack unmovable.
00:14:16.800So they still have to keep the memory thing.
00:14:18.820They still have to adapt the technology, but they have a hard block on it as part of their religious practice that makes it impossible for anyone to hack in or move them around or, you know, extend their life by moving them to a different body.
00:14:33.540And so, you know, that is the only, I think, sci fi that I've seen in, you know, addressing this issue of transhumanism that explicitly showed how a religious minority might stop themselves from being pulled into this.
00:14:49.440They're they're still integrating the technology, but they're putting the heavy limitations on it that make them particularly unique and often seen as backwards in that scenario.
00:15:00.260Yeah, I grapple with this a lot in the conclusion of my book where I look at potential kind of ways forward and ways to sort of arrest the progress of transhumanism.
00:15:10.760One that I talk about a lot is this sci fi novel by Neil Stevenson from the 90s called The Diamond Age, where there's sort of a kind of minarchist, you know, global justice system of sorts that you can opt into.
00:15:26.400And then everything else is these kind of large, decentralized, intentional communities.
00:15:32.120They're called files, you know, from the Greek P-H-Y-L-E-S.
00:15:35.100And they can be built on ethnicity, on ideology, on religion, on some kind of shared belief system, anything.
00:15:44.660So one is the one is just the Han Chinese.
00:15:47.460One is the some of them go like full transhumanist.
00:15:51.300One's called the Drummers, and they just have this this neural uplink that turns them into this hive mind.
00:15:56.620And they just are underground having this constant like hive mind rave orgy.
00:16:02.680But the one that you kind of spend the most time with in the book is called the Neo-Victorians.
00:16:08.340And their whole thing is being very intentional about the ways they use this advanced nanotechnology and all the other stuff in this world in order to kind of maintain competitiveness with the other files in this world,
00:16:20.720while also maintaining the kind of morals and mores of their own society.
00:16:25.380And I think that the Diamond Age gives you a really good vision of that, because when it's just you or it's just your family,
00:16:32.940it is really hard to swim against the current with technology.
00:16:37.040It is really hard to be the only kid on the block without a smartphone.
00:16:39.760But if you have a large intentional community that's making specific choices to reject these technologies,
00:16:46.960you can reinforce each other in that and you can even potentially extract concessions from the outside world.
00:16:52.800So, you know, one example, this wasn't like a transhumanist technology thing,
00:16:56.620but a lot of apartment buildings in areas with high Jewish populations will have these Sabbath elevators that stop automatically on every floor
00:17:06.760because you can't press an electronic button on the Sabbath.
00:17:10.020You know, that's a way that a particular community's restrictions on the use of technology have caused the outside world to accommodate them in some way.
00:17:17.500Now, how long our, you know, enlightened, immortal, you know, 300 IQ transhumanist overlords will accept and accommodate us,
00:17:29.060you know, un-augmented peons in their beautiful utopia is another question.
00:17:35.260And the Catholic Church is an interesting question.
00:17:37.600You know, I'd love to believe that the Church would, and practicing Catholics, would reject certain technological innovations in that way.
00:17:46.540I mean, it is the case that a large number of Catholics use birth control, for example.
00:17:51.480I think it's like 90% of self-identified Catholics, which doesn't mean a lot.
00:17:55.000But, you know, if you just look at the ones in the pews, it's a lot lower, of course.
00:17:59.300But, you know, I think that the Church will have to probably be a little more aggressive with excommunicating and disfellowshipping people
00:18:09.920who disregard its bioethical teachings in this way if they want to sort of try to hold the line against this onslaught of transhumanism.
00:18:21.140Yeah, I would bet much more on the intentional communities that you're pointing to than I would a wider, you know, transnational body, you know, ultimately applying those things.
00:18:34.320It's interesting, actually, the scenario that you're describing there from that sci-fi novel sounds an awful lot like neo-reactionary patchwork.
00:18:42.840It sounds a lot like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land suggesting the way that communities could interact in the future.
00:18:49.100But we said, okay, transhumanism isn't all this sci-fi stuff.
00:20:13.660So I think that part of it is just that, you know, it all comes back to this rejection of teleology and of an idea of human nature and of the substitution of the sovereign human will where we used to believe in human nature.
00:20:28.040So, yeah, the transgender thing is an excellent example.
00:20:32.620You know, ideally, there would be kind of a teleological understanding of medicine where, okay, you are a human being.
00:20:39.780We know what a healthy, flourishing human being looks like.
00:20:42.800It is my job as a physician to restore you to that state of flourishing.
00:20:46.460You come to me with your arm broken, I will set your arm so that it heals in the way it used to be.
00:20:52.180Or even, you know, you come to me with your arm cut off, I'll supply you with a prosthetic that approximates the function of the limb you lost as best as possible in order to do what I can to restore you toward kind of normative human flourishing.
00:21:06.100You know, transgenderism, throw that out the window.
00:21:09.900That's, you know, I go to the doctor and say, my left arm makes me upset.
00:21:17.160And any doctor that would do that, you know, most doctors probably still wouldn't do that.
00:21:20.560But, you know, I've had trans people argue that they should if it's genuinely causing me distress.
00:21:24.540So to really understand, I think, what the trans movement really is and where it's headed, there's two people you should read.
00:21:32.700One's Andrea Longchu, who, you know, had these two essays.
00:21:37.240One was called, who's a male to female transgender who wrote, famously wrote this long book about how watching sissy porn turned him trans and that that's fine and okay.
00:21:51.600One was called something like, if puberty blockers are too extreme for children, then puberty is too.
00:22:01.000Which right off the bat is just this bizarre false equivalency.
00:22:03.760Like, one is your body doing what it's naturally supposed to do and the other one is inhibiting your body in its attempt to carry out this normal physical biological process.
00:22:19.740The only difference is that, is whether you want it or not, right?
00:22:23.480It's, again, it comes back to this idea of the sovereign will and how even your own biology doesn't have the right to restrain that sovereign will.
00:22:31.580It's all about your desires, not about your nature or about your flourishing.
00:22:37.000Chu has this other essay called, My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy, And That's Okay, where he basically argues that, he actually admits that he didn't become, I shouldn't use the word, he didn't have the desire to take his own life.
00:23:11.860He actually says, like, happiness and desire are totally separate things, which is like a complete rejection of the entire Western tradition, you know, both Christian and classical, right?
00:23:23.260There's always this idea that your rightly ordered desires will point you toward eudaimonia, toward proper human flourishing and in the Christian sense, ultimately toward God.
00:23:34.600And actually, in the Christian understanding, the place where your desire and your happiness becomes fully divorced is hell.
00:23:40.880Because you get what you desire at the cost of the only thing that can ultimately make you happy, which is God.
00:23:47.240And so this is really, you know, there's really a Luciferian impulse here.
00:23:51.240My original title for the book was actually The Serpent's Promise, because part of my argument is like transhumanism goes back to the Garden of Eden in a sense.
00:24:02.240The other person you should read is Martine Rothblatt, who is another male-to-female transgender, was one of the inventors of Sirius Satellite Radio, interestingly.
00:24:15.160I think may have gone to school with Chris Rufo, maybe, to business school, something like that.
00:24:22.940But yeah, Martine Rothblatt wrote this book called From Transgender to Transhuman.
00:24:29.500And on the cover of this book is actually his avatar in the video game Second Life, who is a black woman.
00:24:36.500So it's just kind of, you can see sort of the progression.
00:24:39.700It's like physically I can go from being, you know, a Jewish, a white-looking Jewish man to a white-looking Jewish woman who still looks like a man.
00:24:48.840But in cyberspace, you know, all this meat isn't holding me back.
00:24:54.260And this is really, you know, he says that the first, transgenderism is just kind of a first baby step toward what he calls freedom of form, right?
00:25:04.700That I am this kind of free-floating will and consciousness, and that should be able to take any shape or no shape according to my whims and my desires.
00:25:15.660So it sort of comes back to what you were talking about with our altered carbon.
00:25:18.260There's this kind of stick that contains your personality, and that can be swapped between, you know, vat-grown bodies or robotic bodies of any type or shape.
00:25:28.180It can even just kind of bounce around in the cloud and not be physically embodied anywhere.
00:25:34.480And then at that point, you know, his argument is once you have people who are just living in virtual spaces entirely,
00:25:41.580then who's to say that you can't have people who are created in those virtual spaces?
00:25:47.780You know, these AIs that can then later be downloaded into, you know, vat-grown bodies and just walk around and interact with everyone else in society.
00:25:58.460He actually says, like, if you have an AI assistant that can impersonate you, you know, to make appointments or carry out mundane tasks or whatever,
00:26:07.200and you die and that AI says, you know, I'm Grayson or I'm Orin now.
00:26:11.400So Rothblatt says we should have a psychiatrist talk to the AI, and if the psychiatrist thinks the AI is, you know, close enough, then it can continue your legal existence.
00:26:26.620You know, it can take possession of all your assets and your birth certificate and everything and be you, which really just –
00:26:33.400And then, you know, one of his other crazy things is that you can actually, you know, if you fall in love with an AI,
00:26:40.880you can have children with the AI by just kind of melding your mind files together.
00:26:46.100And then now you have sort of purely post-human digital beings that have been born there in cyberspace,
00:26:54.180you know, which I think we're already experiencing with people just getting one-shotted by these chatbots
00:26:59.880and, you know, falling in love with them and, you know, losing their minds and jumping off buildings
00:27:04.540and trying to fight the police and all this other stuff.
00:27:06.740Like, there's really – so far, it's kind of, I think, at the fringes of people who are already very lonely
00:27:13.420and already maybe a little mentally unstable.
00:27:15.400But I think as the technology gets better, it's going to swallow up more and more people.
00:27:20.520Well, we also have more and more people who are lonely and mentally unstable,
00:27:23.400so the market is going to keep growing as well.
00:27:25.260Yeah, yeah. And the, you know, there's going to be such a – and also there's going to be AIs all over social media
00:27:32.740and all over any, you know, online platform you use.
00:27:36.260So you're going to have to perform the Turing test a million times a day,
00:27:39.020and you'll get it wrong some of the time.
00:27:40.740So we're already seeing an erosion of the idea that there's something special about humanity