Transhumanism: Recreating Humanity

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To bridge this world to others is to dream near in the fleet, letting our thoughts drift over to the other places.

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And it’s just the beginning.

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We like to talk about what nobody else is talking about.

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So many people today, especially young people, have asked questions in the back of their mind to discovering reality what’s really true.

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People should have a basic knowledge of what is happening.

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They most definitely ought to be advised them, warn them, because in the very near future it’s going to begin to impact all of us.

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People don’t realize about technology is that we think we’re using these tools to enhance our lives.

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Left unbridled, they can destroy the society as we know it.

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Is man going to live longer or is he going to be better or whatever? We’re missing the big picture here.

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We’re moving now from technology being a tool to actually being an active state.

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We don’t consider how much technology changes everything.

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We’ve already passed the rubicon.

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We’ve already entered in to what I would call the embryonic stages of human genetic modification.

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We have crossed that really important line in the sand and now we’re doing it.

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That should wake up by a lot of people and a lot of scientists that are really upset as they realize how far they’ve drifted from reality.

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What will the cost be to human society? Well, I’m very concerned about what that cost will be.

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And I’m not alone.

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Some of the brightest minds on Earth right now are concerned about what that might be.

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Our future is going to be more turbulent than most people have any capacity to imagine.

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And the people that are least prepared for that future are the American citizens.

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Be aware that what this film is discussing is not hyperbole.

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It’s not hype carrying it.

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Most people don’t realize that there are highly classified contracts by all the major developing countries.

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Whether you’re talking about China, Russia, the United States for the Super Soldier.

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They’ve learned how to read brainwaves and how to translate and interpret brainwave activity to the point that now games makers are making game systems and kids are moving objects around on screens by bought alone, just by wearing a headset.

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So much is happening right now and we’re reaching a point where we can do things that we never thought were possible.

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This is a brave new world that’s coming on the scene that I think is going to be shocking to a lot of people.

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It should be shocking for good reason.

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It’s shocking.

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This is where it starts to get interesting is because what’s pushing all these besides their normal pressures of investment, is an arms race.

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There’s this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked.

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As humans, we can identify galaxies light years away.

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We can study particles smaller than atom.

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But we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the £3 of matter that sits between our ears.

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The Brain initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to respond to our thoughts, and that knowledge will be transformative.

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The Jasons, the uppermost scale, most brilliant minds.

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They are an elite group of scientists that advise the US.

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Pentagon.

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They’re saying to our us? Military that they have to get ahead of human alteration, including genetic enhancement, because otherwise our competitors or enemies are going to dominate us, let’s say on the battlefield or in the marketplace.

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The soldier whose capabilities of motion, of fighting, of perception, of communication with their partners being enhanced by these technologies.

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There is a huge, well funded drive for the super soldier.

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We can’t afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the world raises that.

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We have to seize it now.

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We have it in military budget and the budget I will send to Congress next week.

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I will propose a significant investment by the National Institutes of Health, DARPA, and the National Science Foundation to help get this project off the ground.

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DARPA, for instance, the Defense Advance Research Project Agency, they have in this year’s budget literally millions of dollars to create the blueprint for changing the DNA of our soldiers on the battlefield, produce what they’re calling the 47th human chromosome.

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And every dollar we spend to map the human genome has returned $140 to our account.

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It’s kind of a high tech way of being able to jack in to soldiers on the battlefield in terms of, like, biological warfare.

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They would need to do something to make rapid genetic modification to them on the battlefield that might somehow approve their immune systems or something to make them more resilient for biological warfare purposes.

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So the world we’re looking at, that’s only a few years.

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We’re not talking decades of the year 2040 or something.

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You’re talking in the 2020s, if you will, where the kind of world we’ll be living in is very different than the one we know today.

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The thing that’s impacting all our lives is that the rate of progress within four technologies are converging genetics.

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Of course, we all have heard about DNA, and we understand that they’re constantly making huge discoveries in that area.

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But another technology that is relevant to all this is robotics.

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A third technology is nanotechnology making machines that the size of molecules, tiny, tiny little robots that you can put in the bloodstream that can find a diseased area and have a 10,000 to one advantage of administering a medication as an example.

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There’s a fourth that overlays all of these, called artificial intelligence.

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As computers continue to advance and the software also continues to advance, they predict a day only a few years away we’re not talking decades.

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We’re talking just a few years away, where the computers will exceed the capacity of the human brain.

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What has emerged here is a goal of what some people call transhumanism how do you do to create a superhuman being.

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It would be a little unkind to present this picture without just a word of friendly warning.

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We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God.

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He is one of the strangest tales ever told.

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He deals with the two great mysteries of creation life and death.

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I think it will thrill you, it may shock you, it might even horrify.

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What is it? We warn you, we’re not talking science fiction here.

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We’re talking about the aspirations of the most knowledgeable practitioners of these technologies.

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We’re heading into a very strange world.

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We have entered into what many people at work in advanced fields of science are calling the hybrid age.

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There are laboratories that are actually conducting experiments on human genetic reengineering.

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And when they use the term the hybrid age.

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What they’re saying is that in the same way that we went through the agrarian age.

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The same way we went through the industrial age.

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The same way we just are now in the information age.

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They’re saying that in the hybrid age.

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What we have been doing with genetically modified crops.

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What we are and have been doing with genetically modified animals.

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We also are going to do to humans.

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There are federal grants that are being given to universities for the very purpose of dividing the guidelines that will be used for human genetic alteration.

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We’re already merging human and animal genetic material in laboratories in literally tens of thousands of laboratories all over the world right now, including here in the United States.

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We are blending pigs with human genetics.

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And we’re creating humanized pigs for the purposes of what’s called xenotransplantation, so they can create organs that may have enough human genetic material in it that they could then transplant it into a human and not be rejected by our immune systems.

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And the Academy of Medical Science in Britain is like the FDA here.

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So it’s an important scientific body.

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And they put out a 200 page report just a few months ago called Animals containing Human Material, or ACHM.

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And I would advise people to read the report because they acknowledge that we probably already have islands of doctor moreau.

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We probably already have settings in which we are raising fully mature part human, part animals.

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And they have said that thousands of ACHM are being created around the world.

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And we need an international regulatory commission to oversee the creation of these exotic half human, half animals that they believe are probably being raised to full maturity.

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And then they start describing the things they’re concerned about, and that is animals that would have procreative abilities with humans so that you could literally breed a human with an animal and get an offspring.

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Animals that have human cognitive like abilities, the ability to think so that you could have a mouse questioning, where did I come from? Is there a God? What is my life about? Right? In fact, there was a very intelligent scientist by the name of Yvonne Balaban, who worked at the Miguel University in Montreal, Canada, took the developing brains of embryonic chickens and he genetically engineered it into the brains of embryonic quail.

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And then when that species was born, these chickens grew and started exhibiting the vocal trails and the head bobs of quail.

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What he was able to prove with that experiment is that very complex behavior patterns can be transferred from one species across specy lines to another species through genetic engineering.

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As we start changing ourselves genetically, as we alter our genotype and our genotype is what we get from our parents, it is the blueprint that makes us what we are.

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You’re born to two human parents.

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You have that genotype.

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Therefore you don’t become a monkey, you become a human.

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You have the blueprint.

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But if you start altering the genotype, you alter something else that we learn in basic biology in school, and that is the phenotype.

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Phenotype is how your genotype is expressed, meaning the way you walk, the way you look, your human characteristics, right? Your persona, the fact that you’re bipedal.

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That’s the phenotypic expression of your genotypic makeup.

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And what the Department of Defense is literally saying is that as we start altering soldiers on the battlefield in terms of their genotype, they’re going to begin expressing alterations in their phenotype.

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They’re going to walk different, they’re going to think different, they’re going to look different in the near future where we have crime scenes where a serial rapist who is part wolf has conducted some type of criminal activity and it would fall plumb.

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Outside of everything we know today about profiling, there are think tanks today, military strategists who are very concerned.

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I mentioned the jason’s earlier.

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They’re one of numerous groups that are writing white papers for our military talking about the dangers of the near future that cannot be avoided because the technology is already here and it’s already being developed around the world.

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And that’s actually the largest number one policy think tank in the world talking about things like near future genetically engineered humans that will be sufficiently different than you and I so as that you cannot assume that they would be protected by the Constitution, which was written for humans as we know them.

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In fact, it’s based on biblical ideas that we have a creator and that our rights are protected as a result of that divine act.

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They’re actually trying to create the legalese around this question right now in order to assure that near future genetically altered humans will be protected by the US constitution in the Bill of Rights because they cannot yet be assumed depending on how much they are altered genetically.

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What they’re saying is that forms of humanity on the near future will be created in the near future will be created.

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And we are their creators, not God.

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A man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God.

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My name is Rachel Haywire.

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I’m the founder of the Extreme Futures Festival for people that were into evolution.

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I was on the board of directors for Humanity Plus, the leading transhumanist organization.

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Transhumanism is kind of emerging of the technology world with the human world and being able to extend our capacity so we can do things that we’re not really supposed to do as humans.

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What we know as humanity today isn’t going to be what we know as humanity in ten years.

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We’re on the cusp of something really big right now, and what we’ve previously thought of as humanity is just going to become something that we look back on.

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It’s inevitable.

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It’s who we’re becoming.

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To what extent can we alter humans by rewriting their genetic makeup? And genetic enhancement is one of the more controversial parts of transhumanism.

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But I think it’s very important because transgenetics is the altering of our own DNA and transcending the genetic world that we’re currently living on.

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We should alter all of our DNA.

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Why stop at just a partial alteration? Let’s go all the way.

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Let’s see what we can do with genetics.

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And we are doing this now.

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In gene doping, like is suspected in a lot of the Olympics.

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This last time around, that was giving these people temporary superhuman like abilities and some of the incredible records that were reset.

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That would be one type of genetic modification of a human.

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But that does not become a permanent part of your genotype, meaning you would not pass that on to your children if you had children.

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It doesn’t affect your genotype.

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Now, at the germline genetic level, this is where you make alterations to a human at the embryo or even earlier at the sperm level or the egg level at such an early stage that it becomes a permanent part of the blueprint of that human, so that from there forward, all succeeding persons born down line from that individual will also inherit those genetic alterations.

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There are those who are strongly advocating that we begin altering humans at the germline genetic level so that we can make superior people who will then pass on forever those improvements as they perceive them to the human bloodline.

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And that’s one of the scariest parts in this germline genetic engineering because it could permanently undo what we know as the human genetic makeup.

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But of course, what you’re also really saying is that you will undo humans as they were made by God permanently.

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We have crossed that really important line in the sand, and now we’re doing it.

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One of the leading transhumanists in the world is a professor by the name of Nick Bastrom.

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Nick Bastrom says that whatever we can do to improve humanity, we should do.

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And I definitely agree with that statement.

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I think that if we have something available to us that we should use it because we’re in a perpetual state of evolution.

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And Professor Bostrom actually earned his prestigious seat at Oxford University by writing his thesis, a paper called Transhumanist Values.

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And it’s very interesting in there where he talks about as we begin merging ourselves with animals, we may open new modes of perception, because, he says, some animals can see into areas of the light spectrum that we cannot see into.

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I believe that he’s right, where animals may be able to see into other modes of perception, including what we would call the supernatural realm.

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I think merging animal and human DNA is a very controversial issue, and we should do it in a way that enhances our capacity and everything from being able to fly to having gills like fish, and being able to swim underwater, to being as able to run as fast as a cheetah.

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And everybody sees machines as the next step of evolution.

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But for all we know, it could be humans and animals.

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And I think that’s really exciting.

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So we should definitely look into merging animal DNA with human DNA, but we shouldn’t do anything that would violate the animals.

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So much is happening right now, and we’re reaching a point where we can do things that we never thought were possible.

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Whole series of lectures on transhumanism were being funded at the Arizona State University by the Templeton Foundation.

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Some of the kids there at the university started asking spiritual questions.

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We start changing ourselves.

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Do we also change ourselves spiritually? Would our ability to talk to God maybe be enhanced? Would we be able to see into dimensions where there are supernatural realities? They started asking those questions.

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And so Arizona State University started a brand new project called the Sofia Project.

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Sophia, after the Greek god who can help you make contact with the other side.

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That’s why it was called that.

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They stated on their website that the purpose of it was to confirm and or to make contact with.

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And then they named what they wanted to make contact with aliens, demons, angels, a universal mind God.

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So among transhumanists, there are those who also are very spiritual in the sense that they imagine how transforming us in terms of our biology is also going to transform us in terms of our spirituality.

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And there are among transhumanists those who believe that this might open a doorway that could bring us literally into the presence of God.

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Going beyond humanity is very spiritual because it’s reaching a Godlike state that has previously only been understood like a type of meditation or what some people call nirvana.

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But I think that we’re going to be able to reach those through exploring the technological realm.

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We get to know ourselves better.

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This is in turn, causing research to be done in some interesting areas.

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Professors are studying not only how to connect an arm directly to the mind, that’s part of it, but they’re actually connecting their neural network to machinery.

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A lot of the hackerspaces now where people are doing biomechanical implants and they’re actually giving each other a cybernetic implants.

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If we can jack into the Internet or some type of darkness, that would be very spiritual because we wouldn’t need to use the traditional methods of computers to go into a virtual state.

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We could just do it with our own brains.

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I understand that these are people that are incredibly skilled in their technologies that have absolutely zero understanding of demonology.

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The realization that opening up a communication channel can be a two way channel and that can create what we call in the analogy and entry.

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And they’re playing with things that they don’t fully understand.

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Even if you’re only scientific and you have no belief in anything spiritual, what do you think it is to expand your mind that is spiritual? You cannot get around that.

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People who have been tracking these four technologies are familiar with this.

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Hide of interest in the direction of transhumanism is the whole area of artificial intelligence.

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Or some people would express it, the simulation of cognitive behavior.

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But the fact that software can learn has staggering implications, especially in the large scale sense.

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And of course, this is very popular theme in fiction, but it’s also a very real horizon that we’re approaching that these machines go far, far beyond the capabilities of the designer.

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The combined intellect of the neuroscientists, engineers, mathematicians pales in comparison to even the most basic AI.

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Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology.

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In a short time, its analytical power will be greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world.

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Some scientists refer to this as the singularity.

182
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I call it transcendence.

183
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When you look at what the human brain can do, it’s really amazing the way we can reason about things and think very deeply about things.

184
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But where we start to run into a wall is when we’re faced with leveraging huge volumes of data in order to push the boundaries of human cognition.

185
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We want to provide access to all that data to facilitate or enable human cognition beyond these barriers.

186
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The essence of cognitive computing, to me, is making computers actually more like biological systems, whether or not their brains, the computers we’ve been using for the past 60 years, have been amazing machines.

187
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But they’ve all been slaves to a program that’s been prewritten, where we’re trying to invent an entirely new computer architecture that works more like the way our brains do.

188
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And there’s no program we do the things we do because of the way our brains are configured, but having that kind of fluidity where they respond and react appropriately.

189
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So you feel like you’re dealing with another living thing, not a machine.

190
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Some of the aspirations of the transhumanists is a presumption that they can take our consciousness, which is really software, not hardware, and transfer that into another environment.

191
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The day that the computer in its elegance exceeds the capacity of the human mind is a day where they can take a human consciousness and put it inside a computer and have it reside there.

192
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Mind uploading would be an example of transhumanism where you would put your brain into a computer and you would operate from, I guess like a more programmer type of stance where anything is possible.

193
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Ray Kurzweil likes to call that point of crossover the singularity.

194
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The singularity of technology becoming more Godlike and becoming more capable than humanity is when technology can do more than humanity can.

195
00:27:22,468 –> 00:27:28,910
We have reached a period of singularity but once they get that far, they’ve achieved immortality.

196
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Singularity for some people is like religion.

197
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First thing you need to understand I can’t really see you.

198
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I can see the temporary residence that you’re in.

199
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If I had my computer here and you knew everything there was to know about every resistor, every wire, every part in that computer could you tell me anything about its behavior? And the answer is no because the hardware is simply the environment that the software resides in.

200
00:28:01,960 –> 00:28:06,198
To know what its behavior is you have to understand its software.

201
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The real you call it soul, spirit, give it what labels you like.

202
00:28:09,304 –> 00:28:12,294
The real you is software, not hardware.

203
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Now, software has some peculiar characteristics.

204
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I can take software and send it through the air.

205
00:28:19,288 –> 00:28:20,560
It has no mass.

206
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Einstein made history by recognizing we live in a four dimensional continuum, not three the three spatial dimensions we know length, weight and height and time.

207
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The physicist today will not speak of space or time separate and speaks of space time.

208
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Time is a physical property and that’s profoundly important to understand.

209
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Software has no mass which means software has no time to mention the real you is eternal whether you’re saved or not.

210
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And that while our body might not go beyond death our minds might rarely scratch in the surface.

211
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There is a simulation argument which a lot of people would say is what we have right now and whether they think it’s that God created this universe and that we’re all living in it on creationism is simulation itself or whether they think that some hyper machine has created the spirals and now we’re living in a program.

212
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We look at the macrocosm, that which is larger than man and that puts us in the field of astronomy and astrophysics.

213
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We discover that the universe is finite.

214
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That means it had a beginning and that’s what led to the speculations that are clustered is what we call the Big Bang theory.

215
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If you go the other way and what I’ll call the microcosm things that are smaller than us that leads you into the field of subatomic particles.

216
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And there it’s even more shocking because we discover there’s a limit to smallness.

217
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That’s bizarre.

218
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If I have a string, I can cut it in half and take what’s? Half and take cut that in half.

219
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You’d think that at least conceptually, I can do that forever.

220
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In what we call quantum physics, we discovered, to our amazement that there’s a distance.

221
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Ten to the -35 believe the number is that if you try to cut it in half, your thing loses a property called locality.

222
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It suddenly becomes everywhere at one time.

223
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And that’s so bizarre.

224
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Some of the early discoveries of that commit suicide because they couldn’t handle the implications of it.

225
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I’m quoting from Scientific American, June of 2005, an article about the constancy of physics that if the constants of physics are changing, that implies that our reality is a shadow of a larger reality.

226
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Because if it’s finite in smallness and it’s finite in largeness, then the thing that we experience as physical reality is a subset or a shadow of a larger reality.

227
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I find the simulation argument interesting because you can’t really disprove it.

228
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For all we know, we could be in a simulation right now.

229
00:31:26,250 –> 00:31:41,018
So we’re dealing here in this discussion a thing called hyper spaces, spaces in more than three, whether it’s length, mass, energy, or time, they’re all made up of indivisible units.

230
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Units you can’t divide like pixels, so to speak.

231
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Now, that is shocking.

232
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That means that the universe that we’re in is a digital simulation.

233
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It feels like we are in a simulation because we can’t really get out of this universe.

234
00:32:00,134 –> 00:32:04,574
We have no idea what it’s like to be unplugged from this reality.

235
00:32:04,682 –> 00:32:11,014
When we reach a point where everything is connected, that’s going to become the dominant stage that we’re in.

236
00:32:11,172 –> 00:32:12,854
We won’t even call it digital.

237
00:32:12,902 –> 00:32:15,060
We’ll just call it the world around us.

238
00:32:28,390 –> 00:32:31,662
Some people they would consider Google Glass transhumanism.

239
00:32:31,806 –> 00:32:34,890
Other people, they would consider the Internet transhumanism.

240
00:32:35,010 –> 00:32:39,878
Transhumanism is the next step of evolution, the part that comes after human.

241
00:32:40,024 –> 00:32:49,754
Many in the transhumanist community are today designing their vision of the future based on some of those ideas, whether they’re really realistic or not.

242
00:32:49,912 –> 00:32:53,850
They may speak of the future in utopian like language.

243
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We’re going to be better.

244
00:32:55,360 –> 00:32:58,118
We’re going to be superhuman, right? We’re going to be X Men.

245
00:32:58,204 –> 00:33:01,130
We’re going to have these fantastic capabilities.

246
00:33:01,450 –> 00:33:04,626
The idea of superhuman is very exciting.

247
00:33:04,698 –> 00:33:17,154
We’re going to have these hyper capacities that make us almost into these godlike beings where our consciousness right now is going to merge with a higher cybernetic consciousness.

248
00:33:17,322 –> 00:33:18,222
Very exciting.

249
00:33:18,306 –> 00:33:25,674
Everybody knows about comic books, and everybody knows about the cyber reality that we’re creating.

250
00:33:25,782 –> 00:33:29,550
Science fiction is a driving force behind reality.

251
00:33:29,610 –> 00:33:36,570
People, they read science fiction books, and they literally copy what they read, and they make it into a reality.

252
00:33:36,630 –> 00:33:40,070
Now, I think Sci-Fi is the gateway to the future.

253
00:33:40,180 –> 00:33:44,874
People that are into transcending humanity are also into transcending.

254
00:33:45,042 –> 00:33:49,130
I guess what you would consider the dominant paradigm, the matrix, if you want to call it that.

255
00:33:49,180 –> 00:34:04,540
Free thinkers are into going beyond this world and into going beyond what they currently are, and what we can do to program our reality with psychedelics is going to be something is already something that we can do to program reality with technology.

256
00:34:04,930 –> 00:34:07,386
Technology is the new LSD.

257
00:34:07,578 –> 00:34:14,402
Everything that Timothy Leary talked about being able to alter our own consciousness, that’s what we’re going to be able to do with technology.

258
00:34:14,596 –> 00:34:16,300
That’s what we’re already doing.

259
00:34:32,990 –> 00:34:35,466
There are different groups of transhumanists right now.

260
00:34:35,528 –> 00:34:48,320
There’s everything from the hard scientists who only believe in logic and rationality to the more spiritual transhumanists that view the singularity as a spiritual event.

261
00:34:48,650 –> 00:34:55,470
I think it’s very spiritual to transcend the body by not having the confines of the human body.

262
00:34:55,520 –> 00:35:00,942
We’re entering a more spiritual realm by having our minds in a digital world.

263
00:35:01,136 –> 00:35:05,370
We’re living in a way that is very spiritual, that is very Godlike.

264
00:35:05,930 –> 00:35:17,526
They even go so far as to assume that if we can aggregate the collective consciousnesses, that will create what they like to think of as God.

265
00:35:17,708 –> 00:35:25,460
At the close of the interview with Ray Kurzwell, they asked him, do you believe that there’s a God? And his answer was, not yet.

266
00:35:26,330 –> 00:35:27,618
That’s a good answer.

267
00:35:27,764 –> 00:35:31,482
I like what Rick Kurzweil says about God not even existing yet.

268
00:35:31,556 –> 00:35:35,730
And I would agree with that, that we don’t even know what God is at this point.

269
00:35:35,900 –> 00:35:38,998
It’s no longer something that humans are creating.

270
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It’s something that has its own life, technology becoming its own entity.

271
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I mean, some people, they view that as a Godlike state.

272
00:35:46,688 –> 00:35:50,758
Other people, they just view it as a logical extension of science.

273
00:35:50,854 –> 00:35:56,130
That gets to the whole issue of the difference between technology and science.

274
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The technologist has his goal, producing something that’s useful and works, so he has a validating objective function.

275
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The scientist isn’t a priesthood that clings to dogma, and it’s important to understand those dogmas if you’re going to advance in your career in science, because it’s a religion and it’s been deified in our culture as some kind of super priesthood, but it’s still a priesthood.

276
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Technology and science are two different things altogether.

277
00:36:27,350 –> 00:36:33,030
Technology produces products, which means technology is self validating.

278
00:36:33,710 –> 00:36:39,920
Science used to be the quest for truth, but it no longer is.

279
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Science is a religion.

280
00:36:42,890 –> 00:36:44,410
It has a priesthood.

281
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It has creeds.

282
00:36:48,230 –> 00:36:54,330
If we’ve learned anything not from science, but from scientists and scientism.

283
00:36:55,190 –> 00:37:06,430
Scientism is the religious belief in science to make us gods, I suppose, to give us a better world, to give us immortality, to defeat death.

284
00:37:06,550 –> 00:37:16,206
Scientism, if there’s anything we’ve learned from that, is that it has no morals, it bows to no one, and it most certainly bows to know God.

285
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It wants to be God.

286
00:37:19,130 –> 00:37:22,282
So I think everybody wants something different to worship.

287
00:37:22,366 –> 00:37:29,770
And right now we’re kind of at a dead end where nobody really believes in God anymore.

288
00:37:29,830 –> 00:37:33,162
A lot of people are just doing it for the message.

289
00:37:33,356 –> 00:37:37,398
But I think that with the development of technology that we might be able to.

290
00:37:37,424 –> 00:37:41,060
Create gods ourselves, and then we’ll have something completely new to believe in.

291
00:37:43,410 –> 00:37:46,558
This is another religion that they can believe in.

292
00:37:46,704 –> 00:37:55,982
It’s new, but the idea is really not new because it’s a very old idea when you make God in your own image.

293
00:37:56,126 –> 00:38:06,070
With advanced technology, higher technologies, this is just a more sophisticated way of making gods out of rocks and wood.

294
00:38:26,470 –> 00:38:28,886
We are building our own idols right now.

295
00:38:28,948 –> 00:38:46,650
When we create Avatars, everything from going online and becoming a character on Second Life to creating a robot that has the human personality, we’re creating these new idols we want in our lives and that we want to worship.

296
00:38:46,830 –> 00:38:56,766
So just like building our own types of humans, we can build our own types of machines and we can extend that to say we can build our own types of gods.

297
00:38:56,898 –> 00:39:04,370
This is the ultimate form of a humanist religion where everything revolves around man.

298
00:39:04,480 –> 00:39:16,110
A lot of transhumanists are against anything related to God because they don’t want anything outside of transhumanism to really exist.

299
00:39:16,170 –> 00:39:20,140
They see God is like the other and they don’t want to dabble in that.

300
00:39:34,190 –> 00:39:42,342
We’re talking about, for the most part, people in the science community who would not share a moral world view.

301
00:39:42,476 –> 00:39:46,906
It would be more of a Darwinian survival of the fittest.

302
00:39:47,098 –> 00:39:59,130
And ultimately what that can wind up doing is lead to eugenics, that if we can improve the human species, we owe it to ourselves to improve the human species.

303
00:39:59,750 –> 00:40:11,986
But ultimately that creates a have and have nots kind of community so that you have some that have the privileges of being able to afford enhancement, others who can’t afford enhancement.

304
00:40:12,118 –> 00:40:20,346
And so you have a worker class, worker bees, and then you have the privileged communities and it starts developing a lot of different kinds of issues.

305
00:40:20,408 –> 00:40:23,790
Like you saw in World War II with Nazi Germany.

306
00:40:24,590 –> 00:40:36,210
They took the whole idea of eugenics to its ultimate belief system and started selectively persecuting the Jews because they considered them to be of an inferior bloodstock.

307
00:40:37,190 –> 00:40:41,146
And they had the idea they were going to create the Aryan super race.

308
00:40:41,278 –> 00:40:47,734
The Uber mentioned that Nietzsche, the German philosopher, had dreamed of, which would become Superman.

309
00:40:47,782 –> 00:40:52,290
In fact, the Uber mentioned is where we get the modern term Superman.

310
00:40:52,970 –> 00:40:54,210
But now we’re back.

311
00:40:54,320 –> 00:41:02,000
And imagine if Hitler had had the sciences at his disposal that we have today, a madman like him.

312
00:41:06,510 –> 00:41:11,474
I’m not sure there’s a definite point where we can say, okay, now we’re officially transhuman.

313
00:41:11,522 –> 00:41:15,782
But I think that by altering our own DNA, we’re a step closer.

314
00:41:15,866 –> 00:41:17,666
Nobody can stop transhumanism.

315
00:41:17,738 –> 00:41:19,822
Transhumanism is going to happen.

316
00:41:19,956 –> 00:41:20,882
It’s inevitable.

317
00:41:20,966 –> 00:41:22,330
It’s who we’re becoming.

318
00:41:23,670 –> 00:41:35,942
What will the cost be to human society if transhumanist aspirations are reached? There are a lot of existential risks involved in transhumanism.

319
00:41:36,086 –> 00:41:47,798
I mean, anything from the scenario of a bunch of killer robots to the idea of altering our own genetics in a way where we become like these Nazi superman, which is pretty scary.

320
00:41:47,894 –> 00:41:53,530
I think the cost is that people are going to lose what they consider their humanity.

321
00:41:54,030 –> 00:42:10,502
And even though we’re going to become hyper metahuman, a lot of people are going to feel that we’ve lost what they are, that they’ve lost their identities, that they’ve lost just their human conception, their human essence.

322
00:42:10,646 –> 00:42:13,906
And I think that’s going to be a big deal for a lot of people.

323
00:42:14,028 –> 00:42:18,154
Well, I’m very concerned about what that cost will be.

324
00:42:18,252 –> 00:42:19,570
And I’m not alone.

325
00:42:20,490 –> 00:42:26,242
Some of the brightest minds on Earth right now are concerned about what that might be.

326
00:42:26,436 –> 00:42:37,090
Professor Francis Fukayama, who is a celebrated intellectual, said that he thinks that it is the most dangerous idea in the history of mankind.

327
00:42:37,410 –> 00:42:45,670
And he believes that it could lead to an extinction level event that would wipe out all of humanity unintended consequences.

328
00:42:56,770 –> 00:43:05,810
Technology has always been abused by governments because the history of technology tends to be the history of weapons.

329
00:43:06,250 –> 00:43:12,950
In the past, as someone gained an advantage in technology, they used it for empire.

330
00:43:13,270 –> 00:43:21,870
Alexander with his phalanx, and the Romans with their short sword, the machinery and the unique techniques with it, certainly gunpowder.

331
00:43:22,050 –> 00:43:28,430
Governments have always used technology to gain their own leverage.

332
00:43:30,370 –> 00:43:35,750
The one interesting exception to that was the United States and the atomic bomb.

333
00:43:36,310 –> 00:43:42,220
We used that technology to end a war, but we did not use that technology.

334
00:43:43,090 –> 00:43:49,540
We could have, under a different leadership, could have used that to create a unified global government.

335
00:43:50,230 –> 00:43:53,018
Technology brings power.

336
00:43:53,164 –> 00:43:54,400
It brings control.

337
00:43:54,730 –> 00:44:01,850
A lot of our motivation for improving our technology is because we want more control, we want more efficiency.

338
00:44:03,430 –> 00:44:09,986
The technology encroaches upon us so steadily that we don’t realize how it’s changing us.

339
00:44:10,168 –> 00:44:18,590
Well, we are victims of our technology as well as Beneficiaries, obviously, especially in the electronic segments, in the information segments.

340
00:44:18,910 –> 00:44:20,730
Our gains have been enormous.

341
00:44:20,790 –> 00:44:21,880
On the one hand.

342
00:44:22,270 –> 00:44:26,210
On the other hand, has produced a culture that doesn’t read anymore.

343
00:44:26,650 –> 00:44:35,670
We used to be a culture that the elite, where people that read books, usually typically one a week or something, they took pride in the fact that they consumed books.

344
00:44:35,850 –> 00:44:37,000
People talked.

345
00:44:37,510 –> 00:44:40,970
They talked like books back in the 1800s.

346
00:44:41,140 –> 00:44:42,890
Now we talk like television.

347
00:44:45,190 –> 00:44:49,490
The essence of television is visual entertainment.

348
00:44:50,110 –> 00:44:52,430
It’s stimulation of the eye.

349
00:44:52,930 –> 00:44:54,460
It’s watching things.

350
00:44:54,790 –> 00:45:01,190
And we all witnessed how television has changed our attention spans.

351
00:45:01,570 –> 00:45:03,640
It’s changed our realms of interest.

352
00:45:04,390 –> 00:45:07,494
It has changed our command of language.

353
00:45:07,602 –> 00:45:18,930
And even as you start mixing technology, you notice, just keep in mind, notice how technology is more and more and more image oriented.

354
00:45:19,110 –> 00:45:27,186
When we think, we think in words, when we reason things out, when we discuss things with ourselves.

355
00:45:27,318 –> 00:45:33,042
And there is a direct correlation between our language and our thought patterns.

356
00:45:33,186 –> 00:45:37,950
When you take away the language, you start stifling the thought patterns.

357
00:45:38,070 –> 00:45:43,958
Technology is going to help us find out who we are and that technology is already helping us find out who we are.

358
00:45:44,044 –> 00:45:48,594
And if we keep taking bold steps like the one we’re talking about to learn about the brain.

359
00:45:48,702 –> 00:45:54,282
And I’m confident America will continue to lead the world in next frontiers of human understanding.

360
00:45:54,426 –> 00:45:58,540
Through exploring the technological realm, we get to know ourselves better.

361
00:45:58,990 –> 00:46:00,230
Computer chips.

362
00:46:00,790 –> 00:46:02,020
GPS technology.

363
00:46:02,470 –> 00:46:03,426
The Internet.

364
00:46:03,558 –> 00:46:06,462
We change our lives in ways that we could never have imagined.

365
00:46:06,546 –> 00:46:08,922
All these things grew out of government investments.

366
00:46:09,066 –> 00:46:14,020
And the most powerful computer in the world isn’t nearly as intuitive as the one we’re born with.

367
00:46:14,410 –> 00:46:22,770
We have a chance to improve the lives of not just millions, but billions of people on this planet in this brain initiative alone.

368
00:46:22,890 –> 00:46:26,930
Computers have become so small, so universal, so ubiquitous.

369
00:46:27,370 –> 00:46:29,210
Most of us can’t imagine life without them.

370
00:46:29,260 –> 00:46:31,310
Certainly my kids can’t.

371
00:46:31,930 –> 00:46:33,220
Things will get better.

372
00:46:41,630 –> 00:46:44,382
I think transgender are conquering death right now.

373
00:46:44,516 –> 00:46:50,902
If you talk to Audrey Gray, he’s a life extension scientist and he’s currently working to end aging.

374
00:46:51,046 –> 00:47:02,530
If we pursue anti aging and genetics, and that if we pursue robotics, that we’re going to find a way to not have to die, we’re going to find a way to not have to go through aging anymore.

375
00:47:02,650 –> 00:47:13,338
Now those folks are embracing science, or in some cases pseudoscience and science fiction in an effort to advance to a higher state.

376
00:47:13,424 –> 00:47:19,714
And I think broadly, those are people we call part of the transhumanist movement.

377
00:47:19,882 –> 00:47:23,010
Immortality is ultimately their goal.

378
00:47:23,390 –> 00:47:25,582
Immortality is very exciting.

379
00:47:25,726 –> 00:47:30,930
A lot of people don’t associate it with Sci-Fi, but it’s actually something that people are working on now.

380
00:47:31,040 –> 00:47:41,014
And by altering our own genetics and by altering our own neuro chemistry, we’re going to be able to end aging and we’re going to be able to end this process that makes people grow older.

381
00:47:41,122 –> 00:47:42,846
We are conquering death as we speak.

382
00:47:42,908 –> 00:47:46,760
People are looking to become immortal and we’re on the way right now.

383
00:47:47,690 –> 00:47:51,814
The Bible has a lot to say about immortality.

384
00:47:51,922 –> 00:48:09,790
We can create all kinds of ingenuity that allows people who otherwise might not be able to speak, might not be able to walk, may not have any control over their hands, to be able to use robotic assistance, to travel, to speak, to interact in society.

385
00:48:09,970 –> 00:48:11,034
I’m all for that.

386
00:48:11,072 –> 00:48:12,366
I think it’s a good thing.

387
00:48:12,488 –> 00:48:15,634
And healing started with the church.

388
00:48:15,742 –> 00:48:28,700
We’re the first ones who made crutches and wheelchairs and things like that because we believed that as part of our Christian ethos, it was our responsibility to provide healing, to feed the sick and all those things.

389
00:48:29,390 –> 00:48:35,718
On the genetic engineering side of it, I think we run into problems fairly quickly.

390
00:48:35,864 –> 00:48:46,386
And even among Christian ethicists, there are those who would allow genetic alteration to a point and not pass a certain point.

391
00:48:46,448 –> 00:49:08,694
There are people like me who believe that if we’re talking about genetic alteration in the sense of improved forms of medicine, if I had cancer, I’d much rather hope that a doctor could throw a genetic switch and turn the tumor off than to have to go through radiation therapy which is simply trying to accomplish exactly the same thing.

392
00:49:08,732 –> 00:49:13,460
It’s trying to kill the bad genetics and let the good genetics heal themselves.

393
00:49:43,710 –> 00:49:45,838
I think that a war is coming.

394
00:49:45,984 –> 00:49:53,722
I think that a war is coming that is going to pit Christian against Christian religious believers, against the true body of Christ.

395
00:49:53,796 –> 00:49:57,506
And I see the true body of Christ perhaps even going underground.

396
00:49:57,698 –> 00:50:03,490
To be a biblical Christian is going to be going to be more and more difficult to have meetings.

397
00:50:04,110 –> 00:50:08,270
I think the Christian collective collective started in homes.

398
00:50:08,330 –> 00:50:20,962
I think that’s what’s going to end up I think these megachurches and so forth over time will become the adversaries and the adversaries of the biblical believer in today’s world.

399
00:50:21,096 –> 00:50:25,690
If you take the Bible seriously, you need to be prepared to be marginalized.

400
00:50:26,190 –> 00:50:35,710
And the plight of the biblical Christian in tomorrow’s world will be very analogous to the plight of the Jew in Germany in the 30s.

401
00:50:35,820 –> 00:50:42,110
Our future is going to be more turbulent than most people have any capacity to imagine.

402
00:50:42,230 –> 00:50:47,798
And the people that are least prepared for that future are the American citizens.

403
00:50:47,894 –> 00:50:49,118
They ought to be aware.

404
00:50:49,274 –> 00:50:53,434
People should have a basic knowledge of what is happening.

405
00:50:53,592 –> 00:51:01,126
And I think churches ought to be talking about it because in the very near future it’s going to begin to impact all of us.

406
00:51:01,308 –> 00:51:11,170
Where are the Christians? Where are they in the disseminating of information, using technology to foster and spread the gospel? They’re nowhere.

407
00:51:14,350 –> 00:51:20,126
Most of the church is completely unaware of what is coming and how soon it’s going to be here.

408
00:51:20,248 –> 00:51:39,220
What Christians should be doing is educating themselves, in educating others and discussing the ethics that are involved in transhumanism and the coming human enhancement revolution because it is going to impact all of our lives in one way or another and probably sooner than most people would believe.

409
00:51:39,850 –> 00:51:46,818
The problem we have as Christians operating in the world is our own fault.

410
00:51:46,974 –> 00:51:52,934
It’s because we have abdicated our responsibility to be salt and light in that world.

411
00:51:53,032 –> 00:52:13,946
You’ve got dark places all across the world, totalitarian police states, you’ve got people living in slavery today and where are the cameras? Technology is once again on our side because you don’t need to have bulky equipment anymore to shine the light.

412
00:52:14,068 –> 00:52:16,086
You can do it with an iPhone.

413
00:52:16,278 –> 00:52:17,750
We got to have courage.

414
00:52:18,250 –> 00:52:19,866
We’ve got to take some risks.

415
00:52:19,998 –> 00:52:22,310
We’ve got to get involved, we’ve got to engage.

416
00:52:26,090 –> 00:52:30,226
I don’t believe in God but I believe that we are becoming more Godlike.

417
00:52:30,418 –> 00:52:35,550
God is not a reality in your life then you will invent him.

418
00:52:35,600 –> 00:52:40,158
What do we seek through God? We seek immortality in relationship through God.

419
00:52:40,304 –> 00:52:47,262
Right? But if you don’t believe in God, how do you do that? Well, then you seek immortality in relationship in other ways.

420
00:52:47,396 –> 00:53:02,790
And that’s what I think some people, for instance, the transhumanist movement sees as a possibility that they can both be immortal and transcendent.

421
00:53:03,590 –> 00:53:06,654
In other words, sort of becoming Gods themselves.

422
00:53:06,812 –> 00:53:11,938
Because if you can achieve immortality, then you have achieved a godlike status.

423
00:53:12,094 –> 00:53:17,660
If we were truly satisfied with our human state, then we really wouldn’t need to worship anything.

424
00:53:18,050 –> 00:53:26,194
But at the same time it makes us who we are because we want to improve ourselves and we have this philosophical yearning.

425
00:53:26,302 –> 00:53:34,086
Why do we have a desire to worship something? Maybe we shouldn’t be worshipping anything, but I think that we need something higher than us to keep us going.

426
00:53:34,148 –> 00:53:39,582
I think that defines what we’re doing to become better, to strive for something more.

427
00:53:39,716 –> 00:53:44,250
If we just accepted who we were, we would be boring.

428
00:53:47,010 –> 00:54:03,634
But Christians can use this as an opportunity, I think, to preach the gospel can use it as a special opportunity to refresh arguments in theology that many years ago people like C.

429
00:54:03,672 –> 00:54:03,874
S.

430
00:54:03,912 –> 00:54:13,020
Lewis would debate these very deep theological ideas about the exceptionalism of what it means to be a human.

431
00:54:13,410 –> 00:54:21,754
And now we’re talking about posthumanity and we’re going to alter ourselves and we’re going to become something better than what is human.

432
00:54:21,912 –> 00:54:29,138
Gives us that opportunity to talk about God’s special creation, how we were made in his image.

433
00:54:29,294 –> 00:54:38,510
Because ultimately we as believers are going to experience what transhumanists only dream of in Christ Jesus.

434
00:54:38,570 –> 00:54:44,820
We already are immortal and better than human as we know humans today.

435
00:56:41,350 –> 00:56:41,600
You.