On the "Ersatz Religion" of Transhumanism: Interview With Dr. Aaron Kheriaty

One of the Covid-19 pandemic's most suppressed voices speaks on the conflict between the transhumanist project and human nature

“I think it’s an ersatz religion,” says Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, of a transhumanist movement that is suddenly very relevant, in the age of people falling in love with their AIs, making radical changes to their bodies, and letting AIs counsel them toward suicide. “I think it’s a religious substitute for people living in a secular age.”

Racket readers know Aaron as one of the most suppressed voices from the pandemic. He lost his job at the University of California-Irvine as a psychiatry professor and director of medical ethics after refusing to be vaccinated, citing “natural immunity” (The Los Angeles Times added the scare quotes). His lawsuit was dismissed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which declared “Kheriaty fails to offer any appropriate historical example to establish a ‘fundamental right’ to be free from a vaccine mandate.” Along with Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, he went on to be a plaintiff in the Supreme Court’s digital censorship case Murthy v. Missouri, and at one point during peak Covid mania was deemed so toxic, podcaster Alison Morrow was fired from a Washington state job for interviewing him. By any measure, he’s one of the era’s biggest free speech heroes, having taken on both the medical and health establishments during a time when both may have been at their most censorious.

I called Aaron after the events of last week seemed to necessitate a crash course in transhumanism, about which he delivered a terrific speech earlier this year:

Oxford’s Nick Bostrum described transhumanism as the rejection of the traditional idea that the “human condition” is static, and that science and technology may be embraced to welcome in a “dazzling landscape of radical possibilities, ranging from unlimited bliss to the extinction of intelligent life.” That last notion may sound grim, but transhumanists usually focus on a more positive menu of possibilities, ranging from vastly extended life spans to lives of boundless pleasure to superintelligence to immortality. A precondition for any and all these beliefs, however, is the idea that human nature is neither fixed nor worth preserving.

It takes a scholar to see the whole landscape of the issues involved, and as a Roman Catholic Aaron also understands the many spiritual angles with which transhumanism intersects. Like me, he’s had the misfortune to deal with downstream expressions of the new utopian vision, particularly the idea that sheer processing power can and should erase “harmful” voices from the public square. Is transhumanism a new idea, brought by necessity into existence due to the appearance of truly transcendent technologies, or is this the same old doomed human attempt to escape our fate that ensnared everyone from Oedipus to Macbeth to Dorian Gray? Thanks to Aaron for the fascinating discussion below:

Matt Taibbi: When did you first become interested in that question, the transhumanism issue?

Aaron Kheriaty: I’ve had an interest in transhumanism, I would say, for a few years, just philosophically on a low level. Entry-level forms of transhumanism basically involve questions about the use of medical technologies for so-called human enhancement. So, that’s a bioethics question that I’ve had an interest in since medical school. I did a research paper when I was a fourth-year medical student on the use of psychotropic drugs for altering personality, basically. So, the idea of so-called enhancement is we can use various medical interventions, medications, for example, to make sick people well and to treat disease. But it also seems to be the case for some of these things that we can use them to make healthy people “better”… bigger, faster, stronger, smarter. And the easiest one to understand because it’s pretty ubiquitous is the abuse of something like Adderall. So, stimulant abuse or misuse — for some people it’s not abuse, they consider it enhancement. To help study for an exam, for example. Or to help pilots stay awake longer.

To bypass the normal sleep requirements or to try to get a little bit of a cognitive edge for performance on intellectual tasks would be one example of so-called team enhancement. And so, that raises questions. Is this an appropriate use of these technologies? Should physicians be participating in this? It seems contrary to the Hippocratic oath for doctors to provide healthy people with medical interventions that carry some degree of risk. So, that’s entry-level transhumanism, and you can go from there to much more radical attempts to remake human nature using science and technology, including already-available medical interventions and biotechnological interventions that haven’t been invented yet. And the idea of radical life extension, for example, through gene editing would be a next step up in terms of trying to refashion or remake human nature.

Matt Taibbi: About overuse of Adderall: we understand that to be something a doctor would consider abusive. You recommended reading Nick Bostrom, though, and I see back in 2001, he’s talking about “lifelong emotional well-being through recalibration of the pleasure centers” or “personality pills.” Isn’t that a next step up from merely using drugs as a temporary fix?

Aaron Kheriaty: That’s right. If you take transhumanism far enough, you get to the point where essentially there is no such thing as a human nature or a healthy, well-working human body that would be normative. The idea is that we’re just raw biological material. We’re a blank slate that you can refashion or remake with whatever technologies we’re capable of developing. And there’s this implicit idea in traditional Hippocratic medicine that there is a natural norm of health that the body tends toward when it’s working well. And we know what a healthy heart looks like. We know what healthy functioning kidneys look like. We know more or less what a healthy brain looks like, healthy, cognitive, and neurological functioning, and that’s what medicine needs to aim toward. But for someone like Bostrom, what we have instead is raw biological material that can be hacked and upgraded and the hardware is potentially infinitely malleable.

And so, why not implant a device in the brain that would stimulate the pleasure centers and put you on a perpetual high if that’s what someone wants to do with their life? And to my mind, the problem with these interventions is that not only that they carry medical risks, but also, that they end up being, in a sense, dehumanizing.

It might sound strange to say it, but a human life that is characterized by just perpetual pleasure is not really a human life that I would want to live. Pleasure is great when it’s attuned to reality. When my son graduates from college, I should feel good about that. But when my son injures himself in a snow skiing accident, I shouldn’t be on a perpetual high because I’ve implanted a chip in my brain. I should feel some level of distress and concern that’s being attuned to reality. And living in some sort of perpetual opium den because I turned on a switch in my brain is a dehumanizing existence that I think most normal people wouldn’t want and probably shouldn’t want. And a society where everyone is doing that is probably not a society that we would want to live in.

Matt Taibbi: This is the one area where these people have succeeded in implanting doubt in my mind. I recoil when transhumanists talk about being able to hack humanity, but I’m no scientist. I don’t know if they’re right. I believe, based on books I’ve read and my own experience, that human nature is real. Is my instinctive negative reaction just an article of faith on my part as well? Is the instinct to defend “human nature” a spiritual reaction?

Aaron Kheriaty: The question of whether or not there is such a thing as human nature could be construed as a religious or spiritual question, but it could also be construed as just a perennial philosophical question. You can look at pre-Christian philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, for example. Both of them believed there was such a thing as human nature. And particularly in Aristotle, you see his understanding of human flourishing, which is often translated as happiness, but it means more than just feeling good in Aristotle. It means the well-working of the human being as a whole is tied to an understanding of human nature. And so, human nature is a multilayered complex philosophical question, but there is such a thing as human nature and there are certain things that are appropriate to human beings and other things that are not appropriate to human beings.

I think you can endorse that idea without necessarily endorsing a religious or spiritual worldview. Although the world’s great religious traditions probably all would endorse some notion of this idea of there being a human nature. But if you just look at the great literature of the world, the most compelling stories generally explore, in some depth and subtlety, the question, “What does it mean to be a human being?” And they explore it in a way that resonates with most people and with our understanding of what it means to be a human being.

So, certainly, there are nihilistic or radically revolutionary philosophies that deny that there is such a thing as human nature that just say, “Well, we’re just raw material that we can remake any which way we want.” But as a friend of mine who teaches biology at Stanford likes to say, “Human nature always bats in the bottom of the ninth inning.” So, you could try to deny it, you could try to pretend that it doesn’t exist, and you could try to live your life as though anything goes, but that usually comes back to bite you in the end. And that usually comes back to bite societies in the end that don’t have some regard for the way human beings are meant to be.

So, okay, what are the broad characteristics of what I’m calling human nature? Well, rational animals. So, all men, by nature, desire to know. That seems to be part of what drives us. We’re social animals. Pretending that human beings are not hardwired to connect with other human beings might be a nice fantasy, but it doesn’t work. If you put someone in solitary confinement, you’re not torturing them physically. You give them food, clothing, shelter. Maybe you put them in a really nice environment. You give them all the books to read that they want or whatever screens or whatever drugs they want to take, but you don’t have any connection with other human beings. People in solitary confinement eventually become psychotic. They start hallucinating. The mind starts becoming unglued.

That would suggest that it’s not good for a man to be alone, as it says in the Book of Genesis, that there is something about us that requires meaningful connections to other people. I could go on. Part of human nature is having bodily needs. Part of human nature is having an emotional life. As a psychiatrist, that’s what I’m trying to attend to all the time and trying to help my patients.

Matt Taibbi: When I read [author] Yuval Noah Harari, my first reaction is to think, “Well, this person isn’t really any different than the Dr. Frankenstein story Mary Shelley wrote, or the Tower of Babel story.” I always believed those tales resonated because we understand, on some level, that they’re true – that there’s a punishment for trying to play God. But is there anything that makes this current situation different? Harari’s whole argument seems to be that things are different, because we have new tools.

Aaron Kheriaty: I think that the only thing that’s different is the technologies. The tools are admittedly more powerful, but if the underlying premise is still, “Let’s deny reality and try to remake human beings and see what happens…” When your tools are relatively primitive, you can only do so much damage. When they’re more sophisticated, you can do a lot more damage. So, in a sense, I don’t think human nature has changed. I don’t think reality has changed. I would agree that with the tools we have at our disposal now, when you’re talking about nanotechnology, gene editing, more radical surgical interventions, there is the potential for messing up and doing a lot of harm, compared to most projects to remake human nature, which were projects to remake society. The first philosopher in the Western tradition to deny that there was such a thing as human nature was Karl Marx.

The foundation of Marx’s philosophy was a radical rejection of any form of dependence. And he thought basically that mankind as a whole was a blank slate that we could radically refashion, but we did that by refashioning society. Because his materialism and his historicism basically said, “You’re entirely a product of social forces.” Or, “Matt Taibbi thinks what he thinks on politics or social questions, not because he reasoned to his conclusions or he examined evidence, or he did his research, or he learned some things from his friend, Walter Kirn, that made sense to him. Matt Taibbi thinks what he thinks because he’s white, male, cis, straight, and his biology is a product of these genes, and his ideas are just foam on the waves of those underlying material forces.”

So, basically, the way you change people’s ideas and ideals and thought process is by changing the underlying material forces. Marx thought you did this economically through the communist revolution, and while his economics has been rejected, his basic metaphysical premise that human nature can be radically remade is still very current among a lot of people. And that can happen either through science and technology or Marxist thought, or that can happen through radically remaking society, which would change the way in which people think you’re infected by bourgeois consciousness now, but after the revolution, then you’re going to be enlightened with proletarian consciousness, or whatever.

Matt Taibbi: New “ways of knowing.”

Aaron Kheriaty: That idea goes back to the 19th century. I think what we’ve seen in the 20th century and the 21st century is that this is going to happen through science and technology, the 2.0 version of that 19th century philosophy. But the basic metaphysical premise is the same, that there’s no such thing as human nature, and therefore, we can become whatever we want. It’s a utopian idea. And the development of a new science is typically accompanied by the development of a new utopia. It’s interesting, if you look back in the history of science, you can see this. It’s a recurring phenomenon. With the advent of psychoanalysis in the 1920s, you saw various utopian ideas accompanying that. With the development of neuroscience and with the development of genetics, we’ve seen this transhumanist utopia that we can control the direction of evolution through our own ingenuity and cleverness, and we’ll be able to create a society in which everyone’s happy all the time. And as with the communist utopias, when you start from faulty premises, it’s not just that you don’t end up where you thought you were going, but you end up in the opposite place.

The Soviets didn’t just fail to achieve a workers’ paradise. They achieved a worker’s hellscape. They achieved a society in which no one wanted to work. “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us,” was the joke among the people who were supposed to be liberated in this society. Look at any of the totalitarianisms of the 20th century. Not only did they fail to achieve their stated aims, they produced the exact opposite of what they aimed for.

I worry that transhumanism would do the same thing. Not only would it fail to create superhumans or super happy humans, I worry that it would produce an increase in human misery.

Matt Taibbi: One might bring up the transgender issue as an example.

Aaron Kheriaty: That whole ideology is really starting to come apart at the seams. It was sustained by censorship and propaganda for a long time, as was the COVID debacle, but people are waking up and the detransitioners are finally getting a little bit of a voice. And then, of course, you have these awful situations like the Minnesota disaster.

Look up Martine Rothblatt. Very wealthy philanthropist, trans-identified individual, who is also an ardent transhumanist, and she claimed that transgenderism is the on-ramp to transhumanism. Which I think is true. Gender theory, the underlying ideology is exactly what I described. Part of human nature is sexual differentiation. Male and female transgenderism simply denies that, right? We can refashion and recreate the body to match up with whatever a disembodied ghost in the machine mind says it ought to be.

She’s interesting because this is not a critic of transgenderism, someone trying to critique it. This is someone who says, “No, this is part of a consistent ideology, and the first step in totally refashioning human nature is the idea that we could totally refashion human sexual identity.”

Matt Taibbi: Lastly: how much of this current transhumanist movement is born out of the presence of new technology, and how much of it is born out of the loss of connection to old thought? It feels like there’s a convergence of the two. As people become less connected to lessons of history, the utopian vision seems more and more possible.

Aaron Kheriaty: I think there is something there, but I would prioritize a change in ideas and a change in philosophical outlook as the primary driving force. So, I don’t deny that technology obviously shapes our thinking. And while I critiqued Marx earlier, I don’t want to suggest that underlying material factors don’t condition history. They obviously do, but what I want to say is that they’re not the only thing that conditions and alters historical developments. So, yeah, new technologies change our way of thinking, and they change our trajectory as a society.

But then we also have to ask the question, why did human beings put their ingenuity and resources into developing particular kinds of technologies? There are lots of different technologies that we could be working on developing right now. There’s nothing inevitable about pushing in the direction of massive resources invested in AI, for example. That’s a choice that we’re making. And that choice may be driven by economic factors or large corporations that have financial interests in trying to develop this technology or whatever. But it is whatever the factors contributing to it are, a collective decision that we’re making. There’s nothing automatic about the direction we’re moving in with AI. In fact, we’re having to solve massive problems, especially related to energy, right?

We’re talking about building nuclear power plants in order to power the next generation of AI and to have enough energy to power the servers and the other hardware that’s necessary. There’s nothing automatic about that choice. That’s a pretty weighty political decision to do something like that. So, that begs the question, okay, what is driving us to embrace AI as the future that we want to have? I would argue it comes back to our ideas about what it means to be a human being and what’s going to be conducive to human health and happiness and flourishing and what it means for us to live together in society. I think new technologies are in part contributing to a revival of this transhumanist ideology. But I also think that just our collective underlying philosophies are primarily what’s driving us. I mentioned this in the lecture: I think transhumanism is an ersatz religion. I think it’s a religious substitute for people living in a secular age.

Whatever you think of it, religion is a proposed answer to certain recurring questions that I think can’t be suppressed. Questions like, where did I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life? Why do people suffer or why am I suffering? How can I find happiness and flourishing? How do I contend with the obvious reality of death and mortality? So, religions propose answers to these questions, and regardless of what you think of those answers, people I think are in part attracted to religion because those questions can’t really be suppressed. A secular culture can try to ignore them or can try to pretend that they’re not important or they don’t exist. Don’t worry about all those big philosophical meaning of life questions, just plug in and buy a nicer car and a better microwave oven, and get all your streaming services lined up and have a good time and make more money.

But for most normally-constituted people, that gets old after a while, and that doesn’t quite do it for them, especially if their wife gets cancer or some major life event happens that reminds them they’re not going to live forever. And if I’m playing the game of life like I’m playing Monopoly, what happens in Monopoly? You try to acquire everything. You try to get all the money and all the assets, and then you win. But at the end of the game, it all goes back in the box. That’s what happens to us. You can try to accumulate all the stuff you want, but then you’re going to die and it all goes back in the box.

So, I think transhumanism is a substitute religion that will not give people the fulfillment that they’re searching for, but it’s an attempt to answer those questions. No, you don’t have to die. You can live forever. That’s how we’re going to deal with the question of suffering and mortality.

I’m a Roman Catholic, so I believe in original sin, and I consider this life to be a vale of tears. But it’s great, there are many good things. The world is beautiful, I love the world that God created, but it’s also very broken and I really don’t want to live here forever. That sounds to me like a curse. This is an interesting recurring theme in literature as well. There are many stories in many different literary traditions about how living forever, in this world at least, is a kind of curse. The whole radical life extension project, when you play that tape to the end and when you think through what a life like that would be like – living for 500 years might not sound very attractive at the end of the day.

Matt Taibbi: Especially not in a world run by these folks. Thanks, Aaron.

Aaron Kheriaty: Thank you.