Posthumanism and The Death Drive
The point is to recognize that to genuinely love life, one must have “signed a contract with death.” The love of life — to the extent that it is something other than naiveté, delusion, or cynical manipulation — will (ambiguously) emerge from, nourish, and incorporate necrophilia. A “love of life” that seeks to exclude or refuse death is not, in fact, a love of life at all, but the worship of an idealistic myth whose inevitable effect will be a devaluing of life in its real and tragic fullness. — [[ https://xenogothic.com/2019/11/02/how-green-was-my-velocity/ ][found at Xenogothic, How Green Was My Velocity?, originally: Alexander Irwin, /Saints of the Impossible/]]
I think this quote is especially interesting from the perspective of someone like me: not just a transhumanist — seeking the expansion and transformation of the human mind and body — but a posthumanist — seeking the dissolution of the human into new things beyond it — as well; mind uploading (whether gradual or not), life extension, and whatever else we're capable of — precisely because I agree with it! I agree with the quote that, as long as death is inevitable, then to love life, we must also love death. Doing that is hard for us, because of our deeply evolutionarily ingrained instincts, but part of the point of being human is being able to overcome those.
Why then embrace — if they were possible — things like life extension, and digital uploading?
Not out of fear of death, but out of an enjoyment of life: out of being interested to see what we can achieve! That exploration of the possible is an important part of enjoying life to the fullest.
More than that, most of those technologies, when understood from a standpoint that what we fear in death is not biological cessation — which even those using transhumanism as an escape from death are fine with — but a fundamental transformation, or a cessation of continuity at the extreme, still come with death:
Life extension won't make you literally immortal, and even if it could, you would just get swallowed up by the sun or the heat death of the universe — if you didn't voluntarily choose death before then!
Similarly uploading your mind doesn't actually keep you living forever. Unless we're talking about gradual uploading, which is even more speculative, it creates a copy of you! Moreover, the most scientifically feasible methods of brain scanning must be destructive. So uploading is a form of death. Let me repeat: it is death!!
Yet, for me, because I'm not a billionare terrified of death like Peter Thiel, that doesn't make it less interesting to me, because it's death that gets to create something new and interesting. Yes, what would be created wouldn't be likely to be you, and it certainly wouldn't be human; it might be something like you, in some ways, perhaps, but the lack of a physical body with a nervous system, and a gut, and a physical existence with drives like hunger would change the thing created significantly, not to mention the massive differences in subjectivity a mind living inside a computer would have. Even transhumanism, when applied to your brain — becoming a cyborg not only in your physical body, but also in your mind — is in part a sort of ego or personality death. It would have to be!
Hell, conversely, a lot of the disgust that I see people direct towards ideas aligned with the singularity and post-humanism is this fear of the idea of human race as we know it, or human subjectivity as we know it, ceasing to exist. And if that's not a form of the fear of death, I don't know what is. So perhaps it's precisely those who don't want posthumanism, transhumanism, whatever, who are afraid of death?
So for me, I don't think being a trans/post humanist involves fearing or ignoring death. I envision it not as a retreat to the safety of eternal stasis, as billionares afraid of death do, but as an ecstatic yet terrifying merging, a mutual consumption not by mouth but with one's whole being, a falling-into identity loss and reconstitution into a fundamentally new kind of being — for better or worse, but at least it's new. Whether that being is "me" in the sense of having immanent causal, experiential, and memory continuity with me, or something new entirely that I give way to when I'm ready to die — none of it is a retreat away from death, but an embrace of death of some kind in the same way that a seed must die for a tree to grow; after all, even changing with the days, months and years of regular human life brings with it the death of who you were, and the birth of a new person who remembers who you were, but is not that former person.
"All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."
"We have been subordinate to our limitations until now. The time has come to cast aside these bonds and to elevate our consciousness to a higher plane. It is time to become a part of all things."
— Puppet Master, Ghost in the Shell