Parallel metaphors in theosophy and transhumanism

Abstract

Parallel Metaphors in Theosophy and Transhumanism aaron FrenchMan is something that shall be overcome.What have you done to overcome him? 1 A recurring vision swirls in the shared mind of the Net, a vision that nearly every member glimpses, if only momentarily: of wiring human and artificial minds into one planetary soul.This incipient techno-spiritualism is all the more remarkable because of how unexpected it has been.The Net, after all, is nothing more than a bunch of highly engineered pieces of rock braided together with strands of metal or glass.It is routine technology.Computers, which have been in our lives for twenty years, have made our life faster but not that much different.Nobody expected a new culture, a new thrill, or even a new politics to be born when we married calculating circuits with the ordinary telephone; but that's exactly what happened.2 In The Singularity Is Near (2005), pioneering transhumanist Raymond Kurzweil described the end goal of a six-epoch evolutionary cosmology, claiming that "once non-biological intelligence gets a foothold in the human brain … the machine intelligence in our brains will grow exponen-tially… Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence.This is the destiny of the universe."3 This future destiny will be a world in which the limited physical body has been transcended through a merger of human beings and machines.Similarly, the above quote from Wired magazine founder and technologist Kevin Kelly points to this merging of technology and living nature (including humans).Other prominent transhumanists such as Max More, James Hughes, Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky, and Nick Bostrom also share this vision of a post-humanity in which our physical bodies have been replaced by circuits 1