The Toxic Marriage of Transhumanism, AI and Eugenics
The Handless Maiden and the Forces of Redemption
by Irina Kuzminsky
Foreword by Anne Baring
Hardback edition with 22 colour illustrations.
Paperback edition with 22 black and white illustrations also available.
“A well-researched, timely, sensitively written, and urgent appeal that we wake up to what is threatening our humanity. I wholeheartedly recommend this book.”
Andrew Wolpert
Irina Kuzminsky’s new book confronts the history, promises and dangers of transhumanism and human ‘enhancement’, addressing the two core questions underlying the whole transhumanist debate: what is a human being, and what is consciousness?
Transhumanism is emerging as a new secular faith, distorting and inverting spiritual traditions of human transcendence, and positioning itself as a new religion, with AI as its enabler. The ‘Superhuman’ AI, supposedly imminent, is projected to outstrip all human abilities and render humans obsolete and expendable – except for the promoters, who see themselves as the privileged elite. Enter eugenics, with the author exposing in detail the shocking views of many of the influential and wealthy proponents.
The crux with transhumanism: if we start defining ourselves as comparable to the machines we ourselves have created, we are welcoming in our own devolution.
This book is a gripping meditation on evolution, identity, the sacredness of life and the soul of humanity itself.
Acclaim for The Toxic Marriage of Transhumanism, AI and Eugenics
“This book is a brilliant in-depth study and analysis of transhumanism – one that should be on the reading list of every university student… The aim of this inhuman technology seems to be to eliminate our emotional intelligence: our capacity to feel, to imagine, to create, to dream, to love as well as to hate and to fear; to banish or degrade the relationship between child and parent, between man and woman, and between human beings in general… I find it hard to believe what I am communicating, because it is so evil and so utterly destructive of the values that we, as a species, have fought for centuries to articulate and defend.”
From the Foreword by Anne Baring, D.Phil., author of Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God and The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul
“This is an important, immensely readable and very learned book which I highly recommend… The most powerful, the richest and the seemingly cleverest people are invested, materially and mentally, in this movement and will try to use their political leverage to make its tenets compulsory.”
Prof. Harald Walach, Ph.D., author of Transhumanism: Next Step in Human Development, Dangerous Ideology, Negligible, or What? (Report for the Galileo Commission)
“This is immensely interesting, important, very well written… The debate about transhumanism is insufficiently widespread in public and urgently needs addressing. This book brings the key issues into focus and should spark that wider discussion”
Prof. Anthony Grayling, CBE MA DPhil (Oxon) FRSL FRSA
CONTENTS
Foreword, by Anne Baring
Preface
Part 1: Transhumanism: Origins, Actors and Usurpations
Chapter 1: Introduction to Transhumanism – or, What’s it all about?
Reality and hype
Chapter 2: Stuck in the Web
Article headings and where they take us
Trans–
Technology – good or bad?
Where’s the human in posthuman? or, The end of humans
A roadmap for the book
Chapter 3: Transhumanism According to the Transhumanists – A few definitions, or ‘It’s a strange strange world we live in, Master Jack’
Cartesian dualism and materialistic determinism
Taking God’s place?
Chapter 4: The Transhumanist Agenda – or ‘We are gods’ and the denial of the Feminine
What does it mean to be the Creator? And a dive into history
Pygmalion, Frankenstein and Coppelia
Lost in the labyrinth of matter - or alchemy, cyborgs, and robots
Where to from here – themes to explore
Chapter 5: Transhumanism – the Roots of a New Religion: The underpinnings of a revolutionary secular faith
The makings of a new religion
Huxley, Bernal and Haldane: or eugenics rears its ugly head
Guénon, Evola and Eliade: or eugenics once again
Chapter 6: Transhumanism and its Russian and Soviet Predecessors – Materialistic determinism and transhumanism
Egalitarianism vs ‘sobornost’
More predecessors: the Russian Cosmists
Chapter 7: A Dive into Theology – Transhumanists, Cosmists and Hesychasts – or the distortion of an ideal
TheĊsis vs transhumanism
Man-god or God-Man: the crux of the matter
Russia and the quest for cosmic regeneration
Agreement in dissonance
A vision gone wrong: reproduction without sexuality
More on the origins of transhumanist thought
Chapter 8: Transhumanism and Nietzsche – Overlaps, misinterpretations and the spectre of eugenics
Overhuman vs posthuman and the Great Feminine
The Ausnahme-Mensch vs the crowd
The mind/body split – again!
Darwinism or Intelligent Design?
Technology and eugenics – or what to do with Nietzsche’s ‘many, all too many’
Nietzsche, the Eternal Feminine and the role of woman
The ‘death of God’ and the ‘truth of woman’
Part 2: AI as the Enabler of Transhumanism
Chapter 9: Do AI and Transhumanism Spell the Imminent Destruction of the Human Race?
'Shut it all down’
More Trickster energies?
The domestication of human livestock
Webs – or are we in thrall to the Trickster?
Webs: internet or spider’s web?
Chapter 10: Transhumanism and what Makes Us Human? Promises and threats
Who are we according to transhumanists?
What makes us human? What is a human being?
Threats and promises
The military and endorsement of AI in defence
Voices from the sciences
What’s it all about?
Chapter 11: Future Superhuman
The new elites
Sexbots and rights
The dance of the Three
Chapter 12: Humans are –Really – the Problem, Or transhumanism unveiled
EUGENICS – or Humans REALLY are the Problem
How can we work together to prevent such outcomes and a resurgence of AI facilitated eugenics?
An antihuman agenda (or Antihumanism writ large)
Saving humanity
Chapter 13: On the Other Side of the ‘Cloud’ – The Field
Ervin Laszlo and the Field: the mysteries of the (real) Metaverse
Non-local coherence, Akasha and the Field
Outtake - Nikola Tesla and Hindu cosmology
Consciousness revisited – Brahman under a diff erent name
More trans–
Fleeing from reality
Chapter 14: An Excursion Back to the Humanities and into a Different Story
Sacred geometry
A critical time
Back to sacred geometry
Lucifer and dualism
Talking of ‘sentient’ AI: perspectives from the humanities
Archetypal Figures – yes they’re relevant!
The Trickster
Chapter 15: Transhumanism – the View from AI
Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell, Paolo Benanti – mitigating the risks of AI
Life 3.0? Alpha and Omega or should that be Utopia and Dystopia?
Cyborgs and ersatz souls
Chapter 16: What is a Human Being, What is Consciousness and Other Hard Problems
Brain? Mind? What’s the diff erence?
Thorny questions around consciousness expanded
Chapter 17: Transhumanism and the Metaverse – the Posthuman World Transhumanism Is Transitioning to
Some recapitulation
The metaverse and the world of make-believe
The path of separation
The metaverse versus fantasy and fairy tales
Chapter 18: Gods and Singularities – AI as the Artificial Idol (AI)?
Nature as fallen and non-sacred
The AI god
Pendulum swings and paradoxes or the coincidence of opposites
Chapter 19: The Importance of Story – the Curious Links of Transhumanism to Science-Fiction
Chapter 20: Transhumanism, Software and Cyborgs or, “It’s up to us”
Consciousness and human–AI mergers
Or - “Are we already digital humans”?
Chapter 21: Coming Full Circle – Transhumanism and the Lost Feminine Voice
Materialism versus the psyche
Intelligence or consciousness?
The temptation of the devil
A return to alchemy
Chapter 22: Afterthoughts
What do I personally have against transhumanism?
Appendix: The Story of The Handless Maiden
Bibliography
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Index
An InterActions title
Hardback
22 colour illustrations
540 pages
22.2 x 14.5 cms, 8¾ x 5¾ inches
ISBN 978-1-915594-13-6
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