WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

The great minds of medieval Europe once spent a fair bit of their time struggling to make sense of angels. How could an angel, an ethereal being without eyes or ears, recognize Jesus's mother Mary among the other women of Galilee? For Thomas Aquinas, the solution was in the ability of angel consciousness to pick out the unique signature of a person's thoughts. Aquinas didn't consider the small matter of whether angels might be figments of human imagination. Angels had something irresistible to say about animal life. If disembodied entities like angels were above humans in the ranks of beings, then intelligence didn't need a body. The evolution into a superior state lay in the abandonment of flesh.

These days, we have our own latter-day angelologists. Roboticist Hans Moravec sees a future of "exes"--short for ex-humans--existing in a post-biological world. "Physical activity," Moravec tells us, "will gradually transform itself into a web of increasingly pure thought, where every smallest interaction represents a meaningful computation." Such flesh deniers are everywhere now. For a futurist like Giulio Prisco, the grand frontier of space "will not be colonized by squishy, frail and short-lived flesh-and-blood humans... It will be up to our post-biological mind children." Our enlightenment, these men claim, lies in the freedom from our animal bodies.

Similar views now motivate whole research programs and commercial enterprises dedicated to the notion that we can somehow exist without being animal. The embattled Human Brain Project, a multibillion-euro Swiss research initiative, alongside Hewlett-Packard, was conceived to build a whole simulation of the human brain in a supercomputer.

"The ultimate goal should be to model the unique capabilities that distinguish humans from other animals." Around the same time, Russian media mogul Dmitry Itskov founded the 2045 Initiative with the aim of life extension for humans in the form of computer avatars. The aim is "to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual's personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier."

Not to be outdone, Google's Larry Page launched the Calico life-extension project, while its head of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, announced a few years ago that a "shot full of nanobots will someday allow the most subtle details of our knowledge, skills, and personalities to be copied into a file and stored in a computer." Even the physicist Stephen Hawking stated that it is "theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer and so provide a form of life after death." As a man whose body had forsaken him, we can hardly fault him for this.

Posthumanists are the intellectual heirs to ancient dualist ideas that it isn't our bodies that make us who we are. An offshoot of humanism, these thinkers see the human condition as nothing more than a technical issue we've not yet solved. Today's posthumanists are convinced that being human is neither here nor there, so long as personal consciousness is present. Individuals like Itskov and Prisco say to hell with the body. We can reboot the personality in an immortal form or project it out into space like human thought gone wireless. For them, the animal body is a problem best done away with. Where once humanists were concerned with making sense of how matter becomes thought, now posthumanists are concerned with how thought can escape matter. It's an exotic twist on an old tale.

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