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Philosophical Criticism of the Ideas of Transhumanism
Authors: Natalya N. Rostova
Number of views: 97
The article examines the philosophical foundations of the key ideas of transhumanism. According to the author, transhumanism is based on a fundamental misconception that is found in the thesis about overcoming a human and expanding his abilities. As shown in the article, this thesis involves the use of a subject language to describe a human. Resorting to it, transhumanism deals with the non-human in human, which determines the whole variety of his private initiatives. The article proposes to identify three basic ideas that this diversity is reduced to, namely: the ideas of emotional isolation, increasing degrees of freedom and liberation of a person from the body. The study is conditionally divided into three parts, each of which is devoted to a detailed analysis of the designated ideas. Turning to the strategy of emotional isolation, the author comes to the conclusion that transhumanism claims to eliminate the possibilities of establishing direct emotional connections in our world, which are the basis of any action that we call human. The tools of such isolation are technologies, legislative acts, but, mainly, a change in the mode of our perception of ourselves, when we agree to outsource what is the essence of human. Analyzing the idea of increasing degrees of freedom put forward by transhumanism, the author shows that it is based on the rejection of the anthropological grounds by which a person keeps himself in consciousness. Exploring projects aimed at freeing a human from the limitations of the body, the author shows that they are based on a reductionist understanding of consciousness, thinking and communication. A human is reduced to algorithmized information.