THE TRANSHUMAN WORLD AND ITS FEARS

[Michael Bassey Eneyo]

• THE TRANSHUMAN WORLD AND ITS FEARS: The Fearological Guide for the Developing Countries
  
  Introduction
  The contemporary society is confronted with various new challenges and ambivalences that were not typical of the natural world. The effects of these challenges on humans and the move to solving them have notoriously brought a paradigm shift to the natural world order. The once mostly predictable regularities of the natural world have become unpredictable as the result of man’s wrongful interference with the things in his environment. The natural world is now unpredictable. We cannot know with certainty when the summer or winter will begin like what was the case hitherto. The marriage between a man and a woman has been challenged with the legalization of same-sex marriage by some countries. Robots have taken some of the jobs that were basically handled by human beings. More beautiful and ugly sights are coming up as the day goes by, and even more are still predicting by scientists and philosophers.
  These emerging evolutional challenges and renovations experienced in today’s world have the potentials to mar or make us. Just as technological advancements are rapidly increasing, new means of handling them keep emerging. Any move adopted toward solving an aspect of humans’ existential problems explains directly or indirectly what is behind the word; development. A society grows anytime an articulated move is made to solve a given problem of life. Such moves always compel human beings to invent or discover a system through which the challenges in contention can be addressed. However, these new ways introduced to solve humans’ problems always come with their unique challenges and fears.
  Since these problems are complicated and multifaceted, the approach to solving them cannot be static; but dynamic. For some decades now, human beings are gradually shifting focus from the natural, religious, societal, and cultural means of addressing the major problems of life to a technologically designed method which they see as a better and easiest means to providing solutions to their daily problems. Anytime there is a challenge, there is fear; the fear of how to overcome the challenge.
  This book is necessitated by the need to expose the implications of the wrongful applications of science and technology as the ultimate means of solving humans’ daily problems and to educate people on how to manage the fear that is starring at the present world, including the ones that will come in the future as a result of these wrongful applications. It is on this note that the book focuses on finding an approach to be adopted in an attempt to overcome the fears that will accompany the envisioned new world. This envisioned new world is what we tagged; the transhuman world.
  Apart from the above, the book also looks at the reason for the increase of fear in all parts of the world in recent times, and also attempt to evaluate the implications of the projection made by some scientists to transcend the present man’s limited ability to a new man (Superman) whose ability will supersede that of a natural human being in the envisioned transhuman world. Scientists are already on the course to transform the world and human beings living in it. This is an indication that the envisioned transhuman world is not far from its actualization.
  Since this book is acknowledging fear as one of the major challenges confronting humanity, some chapters of the book is dedicated to the notion of fear in general. The book is taking up the study of fear from where we stopped in the previous book to a level where the study of fear will help in preparing countries, especially the underdeveloped ones for the future world of technology. In this book, attempts are made in predicting how this future society would be and the measures to be put in place to tackle the likely fear that will become an impediment to a happy life as a result of humans’ negative activities. Humans, through the aid of technology, have challenged the natural order of how things are presently done. Man’s constant quest for absolute comfort in a world that is characterized by the phenomenon of good and bad experiences has affected human’s old paradigm towards life. One of the major problems of humans today is fear; it becomes necessary that some guides be given on how fear can be reduced rather than increasing it through our daily activities in the name of advancement in science and technology.
  For some centuries now, there have been concerted plans by scientists to enthrone a new world of “supermen”. Thus, the present push for a transhuman world by some scientists and philosophers is no longer news. The advocates of this new world believe that the enthronement of a technological society will grant humans the ability to put an end, or at least, liberate human beings from their tragic lives and fears. Already, there’s a rapid increase of incidents of fear in almost all parts of the world in recent times with many factors mentioned by different schools of thought as reasons.
  One of the indisputable reasons for this increase of fear is traceable to the ongoing wrongly calculated move by some scientists to transform the natural world that is characterizing by the phenomenon of life and death into a robotic, artificial, and highly technologically driven society, where man is believed, will have a technologically-based power to transcend his present existential limitations. This calculated attempt to go beyond the present humans’ limitations no doubt is partly caused by the desire of human to enjoy absolute comfort, and achieve his aspiration to overcome the fear of suffering, sickness, and death which are natural to every human being.
  Needless to say that human beings are tragic animals. They barely spend a day without being entangled in one or more problems of life. Man’s earthly life is built on challenges. Though, these challenges are not the axioms of the limitation to his attainment of goals as many people think; rather, the challenges demonstrate the fact of human existence which is full of joy and sorrow. Since having challenges is natural to human beings, looking for solutions to these challenges becomes the true attitude of mankind. This attitude of man becomes the motivating factor for progress.
  Man’s primary desire is to come out from his tragic life. However, he cannot completely get rid of these, because the challenges are routes to development and advancement that human being is naturally aspiring to attain. It is in human nature to look for a way to be free from the many challenges he’s facing in life. But then, no matter his efforts to free himself from the challenges of life, the challenges will remain. Human being can only come out from some of his problems, but never can he comes out from all. The struggle we make to come out from our problems often results in the creation of more problems for us. This nature of man makes every human being a “fighter”; a fighter with a strong desire to win. So long as these problems persist, human beings continue to live in fear; the fear of the problems of life. Since fear has long become one of the greatest problems for humans, it follows that the more serious challenge of man now is the struggle to overcome his fears.
  In the first part of the book, the concept of transhumanism, its historical framework, the aims, and the central ideology that drives it, the features and how different factors of fear would be created in the future through the aid of technology are the core areas we shall consider for discourses. The present world is already pregnant with futuristic tendency, ready to give birth to this transhumanistic society. Scientists have offered themselves as midwives that will offer a seeming successful delivery to this envisioned world. It is going to be an era where the natural phenomenon of human aging would be challenged, interrogated, and probed; thus, making for the possibility of putting an end to human aging (as some scientists envisioned). Scientists are working assiduously to change human history that is presently characterized by the reality of “life and death” and to transform it into an era where death would be a matter of choice, or as a result of negligence on the part of individuals living in the world. This envisioned world is believed, will usher in the longevity of life through artificial intelligence, robotic functionality, and other nanotechnology, and biotechnology measures. This curiously awaited world is coming with its unique fears and corresponding threats to the natural world order with its positive and negative consequences as it is already beginning to manifest.
  Assume that in the future one machine will do works that are presently done by one million people, what then would be the fate of these almost frustrated fellows? There are indications that a large number of people would be thrown out of the labour market. Suppose also that the phenomenon of aging would be eliminated; making it possible for people to leave for untold numbers of years, how will humanity survive the likely problem of overpopulation? What would be the possibility of human beings coping with the limited resources and the unending struggle for wealth acquisition; judging from the likely limited resources that would be eminent as the result of an increase in the population?
  The second part of the book introduces a new philosophy called fearism/fearology or philosophy of fear to explain how this new philosophical thought can be used in addressing the problems of fear in the future world. Here, we shall discuss the concept of fear in general. In my previous effort on fear studies called Philosophy of Fear, attempts were made to unravel what fear is, its scope, nature, types, and its impacts on human beings. The book hints that fear shouldn’t be seen as something that is always negative; that fear can be positive as well. With this new paradigm, fear is said to be categorized into two: The positive and the negative fear. Methods on how to manage fear and how negative fear can be overcome were the core messages of the book. In this second effort in our fear studies, attention is extended to knowing if fear is inherent in human beings or external to humans. If there can be fear without human beings. If other living beings can experience fear as men do. How useful are fear studies in the contemporary period and as it affects the shaping of the futuristic society? It is also our concern in this level of our fear studies to locate the most active abbot of fear and how the human mind is said to have the capacity to impose fear on objects other than humans. Over and above all, we shall learn the methods to be applied in addressing the problems of fear in the present and future worlds. It is hoped that if this effort will yield its expected result, the ability to control fear would be almost possible. This aspect of research on fear becomes imperative owing to the recent waves of interest on how the increasing level of fear in our societies which has almost become a norm can be curbed.
  The increase in global conflicts, terrorism, suicide killing, kidnapping, war, rumour of war, dwindling economic policies, unstable political system and policies, outbreaks of diseases with some of the viruses causing pandemic, high rate of corruption, nepotism, tribalism, racism, and religious intolerance are different signals of the alarming increase of fear factors in the present society.
  The methodologies of the fearological approach are provided in the last two chapters of the book. These scintillating methods are to be applied practically in our everyday life as a means to cope with the ambivalences of searching for comfort amid crisis in the years to come. It has also mapped out measures for the developing countries to adopt to become relevant in this new world.
  Though we haven’t gotten enough people globally that are taking fear study seriously, with the ideas that would be generating from the position of this book, and the ones we previously made, many people will come to know how important it is in engaging in fear studies, and the kind of result we shall get for doing so, especially now that the incidents of fear are increasing.