FREEDOM AS AN ISSUE IN THE CONTEXT OF TRANSHUMANISM AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, DIGITALIZATION, AND ROBOTICS (AIDR)

 

 

Ahmet Dağ

Bursa Uludağ University, Bursa-Türkiye

 

Ilahiyat Studies         p-ISSN: 1309-1786 / e-ISSN: 1309-1719

Volume 14         Number 1 Winter/Spring 2023            DOI: 10.12730/is.1261876

Article Type: Research Article

Received: November 4, 2022 | Accepted: April 17, 2023 | Published: July 31, 2023.

To cite this article:Dağ, Ahmet. “Freedom as an Issue in the Context of Transhumanism and Artificial Intelligence, Digitalization, and Robotics (AIDR)”. Ilahiyat Studies 14/1 (2023), 51-84. https://doi.org/10.12730/is.1261876

 

Abstract

Historically, the notion that knowledge and technology enhance human freedom has been accepted since the Renaissance. In fact, it cannot be ignored that “freedom” developed during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, industrialization, and technologicalization processes. While the development of the boundaries of the concept of freedom has increased with artificial intelligence, digitalization, and robotics (AIDR), this development has also created the problem of the violation of personal rights such as “privacy”, “confidentiality”, and “security”, which are the most essential concepts of humans and society. When the “Metaverse”, i.e., the “Web 3.0” process, is added to this phenomenon, the concept of freedom will develop more with the transcendence of time and space. Still, violations of personal rights, increased opportunities to commit crimes, and additional types of crimes will appear. The further development and increased visibility of AIDR require the ancient issue of freedom to be reconsidered in the context of “freedom and responsibility.”

Transhumanism is one of the 21^st century’s most influential scientific and philosophical movements, and its goals will make the issue of freedom more important. Transhumanism, first used as a concept in 1957 in the context of the physical and cognitive development of human beings, suggests that natural human limits can be overcome with the possibilities of biotechnology, nanotechnology, cyber-technology, and cognitive sciences. Research in areas such as delaying aging, eugenics debates and discourses legitimizing eugenics, the claim that immortality can be achieved, the development of the mind with the possibilities of nanotechnology, the brain-machine interface (BMI), the development of the body with biotechnological elements and similar studies aim to realize the biological freedom of human beings. This potential biological freedom may yield a result inversely proportional to social freedom. This is because differences between individuals will create a situation of “superiority” that will lead to differences between individuals and classes and thus to inequality. This situation can foster slave-master processes. This process may occur not only between people but also between humans and AI and robotic applications. In addition, AIDR itself, its producer, and its user will differentiate the processes of freedom. In particular, whether transhumanist people are forced to use healing technologies or whether they develop and adapt their own bodies and minds as a result of their own choice or as a result of coercion are other matters of debate in the context of the issue of freedom. This study discusses freedom, an essential issue for humanity, in the context of AIDR processes and transhumanism, which includes these processes.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence, digitalization, robotics, transhumanism, freedom

 

Introduction

Four crucial breakthroughs in human history are related to the differentiation in understanding nature, biology, and psychology. The first breakthrough in the understanding of nature was Aristotle’s attempt to abandon the mythical way of understanding nature and instead to understand (and explain) it scientifically. The second and most shocking change on the cosmological front was Copernicus’ challenge to existing assumptions by proposing a heliocentric understanding of the universe instead of the Ptolemaic earth-centered understanding. Darwin’s approaches to the field of existence, which created a new approach on the biological front with evolutionary theory, constituted the third major breakthrough. Darwinian theory shook the idea that humans are the center of life on earth and that other species serve humans. The fourth breakthrough is the advance on the psychological front brought about by psychoanalysis, which is the study of the spiritual and mental processes of human beings. Both Copernican and Darwinian theories made the centrality of the human being controversial. Ayala quotes Freud as calling these two revolutions “rages directed by man against his own conception.” The third revolution, the psychoanalysis revolution, is Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, which states that man is not the center or even “master of his own house (consciousness)”.[1]

These breakthroughs shook people’s self-confidence. The fifth front, which can be added to these four fronts that contributed to breakthroughs, is the technological front, which will make the breakthrough even more radical. Technology, seen as an instrument of divine action because it brings together the human and the sacred, has a structure that enables humanity to transcend itself as the subject of the freedom of imagination. Transcendence, the fundamental element of both human nature and technology, is a creation in the sense of imagination.[2] Through these five fronts, people have discovered that they are no longer masters of their own creations but are, in fact, controlled by their own self-created order (in which they do not know what will happen). Something like the sorcerer’s apprentice has been created that develops their own dynamism with technology. The 19^th and 20^th centuries, with the project of social and psychological visions of the new man and approaches ranging from humanism to racial theories, were devoted to the development of humans and the improvement and control of their actions.[3] The 21^st century is an era of transhumanism and posthumanism debates based on the transformation of human beings through technological means.

Transhumanism, the Techno-philosophy of the Human Demand for Freedom

The term transhumanism, designating the most ambitious movement of the 21^st century for human enhancement, was first used in J. Huxley’s New Bottles for New Wine in 1957. Transhumanism is a scientific and cultural movement that sees technology as a means to improve human beings mentally, physically, and psychologically and to delay aging.[4] Although transhumanism is a reality of the 21^st century that has its theoretical and practical roots in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, its theoretical underpinnings are found in scientists such as Darwin and Freud, and its practical underpinnings are found in practices such as industrialization and technologicalization. The 21^st century resembles the early 20^th century in clarifying the boundaries separating the social and natural sciences.[5]

Transhumanism is a movement with philosophical roots that sees technology, which includes both transcendence and the human nature it seeks to change, as a base and a tool for itself. The physics-, mathematics-, and mechanics-based philosophy of the 17^th century contributed to the birth of transhumanism, a material-based ontology. “Dead philosophers” have been instrumental in humanity’s scientific and cultural change to what it is today. Indeed, the vision of transhumanist philosophy is based on a semi-Aristotelian conception of nature in which everything naturally aims for perfection.[6] Frodeman says that the transhumanist impulse is the culmination of a 400-year philosophical project of modernity. The modern project has altered culture’s existing intuitions in relation to a wide range of issues that are seemingly quite far from science, such as the nature of the ego, the relationship of the individual to society, the character of freedom, the status of religion, and the meaning of the natural world.[7] Transhumanism has an attitude similar to the Baconian utopia, which is the initiator of modernity with its design of the perfect human and the perfected space. The space and life envisioned by Bacon, who initiated biological agency, including the creation of new species or chimera through organ transplantation and the Kawthar water that allows for longevity, is a plane that can be reconstructed on realistic and philosophical grounds to expand human life on an enormous scale.

Rooted in the Enlightenment and Western humanism, transhumanism’s approach to the continuation and acceleration of science and technology shows its Enlightenment roots. Transhumanism, which inherited many ideological contradictions from Enlightenment philosophy, also involves the conflict between atheism and belief or teleological techno-optimism and rationalist acceptance. The conflict between Locke’s and Hume’s views of ego is another Enlightenment contradiction in transhumanism. The debate on personal identity is more a debate of transhumanism than of the Enlightenment. What concretizes the debate on personal identity is the radically developing neuroscientific research and the possibilities for this field. The Enlightenment’s contradiction between Locke’s concept of the ego, the foundation of liberal individualism, and Hume’s empiricist assumption that the ego is a construct lay dormant until the 20^th century, when another product of the Enlightenment, neuroscience, revived the debate.[8] Enlightenment and Hume’s progressive mindset gave rise to the evolutionary conception of Darwinism in the 19^th century. Transhumanism is a Neo-Darwinian movement that is deeply committed to the idea that human beings must always evolve and that human nature must constantly transcend itself rather than being content with what is given. Transhumanism’s demand for body-swapping deliberately blurs the boundaries between nature-culture and human-nonhuman.[9]

The humanist and libertarian approach in antiquity and the Renaissance was further expanded by Copernican, Darwinian, and Freudian theories. Freedom in the modern sense, which is an attempt to make the particularized portrayal of humans in earlier ages a reality, aimed to eliminate borders. Transhumanism, an extreme libertarian movement that seeks to further expand the sphere of freedom, aims to liberate human beings not only from the obstacles and limits that surround them but also from themselves. Whereas in previous periods, human beings sought to be liberated through religious, scientific, and cultural processes, in the 21^st century, human beings seek to be liberated by freeing themselves from the limits of both the nature in which they live and their own bodies by developing them mentally, physically and biologically. Based on technologies that emphasize individuality and freedom (NBIC), transhumanism seeks to further advance the ideal of personality that it inherited from earlier forms of humanism on both the material and the spiritual plane.

When Galileo turned his telescope to space, humans’ horizons for space expanded. With Darwin’s understanding of evolutionary biology, humans acquired the idea that they were evolving and developing beings. Freud’s assertion that the unconscious is more determinative than consciousness further expanded the world of human perception through the flexibility and magnitude of both the self and the universe. Transhumanism, which is a reflection of this expansion of perception, aims to bring about change for human beings and to colonize space. Opponents of transhumanism specifically argue that human enhancement technologies will reduce individual autonomy and increase injustice in the world, while supporters of the goals of transhumanism argue that transhumanist technologies will allow for greater freedom and a just society. It is believed that humans who get rid of their bodies and live in virtuality by crossing the boundary between humans and machines will be more free.

Transhumanism attempts to realize its desire to make changes to the body through the discourse of sexual revolution and sexual freedom/sexual liberation, which is an extension of its technological mentality. Transhumanism seeks to transcend the boundary between men and women to achieve the goal of “desexing” and suggests that the artificial womb or the effort to realize reproduction on another ground will relieve women of a burden and eliminate masculine domination. The sexual freedom promised by transhumanism is an object that will be shaped to serve the human body, social hierarchy and ecology, and human designs and desires. Sexual libertarianism seeks to carry out a biological revolution on the human body by instrumentalizing the body. The Darwinian and Freudian revolution is to be carried to the top by the technological singularity, the machine-consciousness transference of engineers such as Kurzweil. Transhumanist sexual libertarianism, which perceives the body as crude materialism, envisions a society where postsexlessness and transgenderism are widespread and accepted. Whether the freedom of others will be violated in a plane where borders are abolished and the problems that unlimited freedom will produce will be matters of serious debate.

The Spine of Transhumanism’s Claim to Freedom: Morphological Freedom

Until transhumanism’s approach to the enhancement or augmentation of the human body, there was no scientific, cultural, or ideological movement in the history of philosophy that proposed modifications to the human body. Although La Mettrie envisioned a material-based human being in his work titled “Machine-Man”, his approach was about the existing human being. However, transhumanism does not claim to develop, increase, and transform. The human body is generally seen as a fixed and unconverted area. In fact, Krüger argues that bodies are seen as morphologically fixed, morally unfree, rebellious, and stubbornly conservative against the development of machines; they are unprogressive, outdated, unimprovable, and a dead weight that blocks the rise of machines. With the change of subjects of the free and the unfree, things are free, but humans are not. Despite the freedom of things, humans (the body) have no freedom. The transhumanist, who prefers to be transhumanist not only in relation to the body but also in relation to values, draws attention to ecology, freedom, self-awareness, and self-responsibility. One of the most important concepts of this self-awareness and responsibility is morphological freedom. Morphological freedom is an element of the move toward transhumanity, which is said to be based on posthuman rights such as the security of existence and the protection of personality, in other words, to be more humane.[10] Transhumanism directs both individual rights that allow for the happiness of the individual and the morphological freedom to be posthuman, the evolutionary prescription for the human species, through the affirmation of the benefits of science and technology that provide the ideals of rationality, secularism, liberalism, optimism, and progress.[11]

Morphological freedom, which is one of the basic concepts of transhumanism and is seen as a negative right, expresses personal autonomy and the individual’s desire not to be forced to change or prevented from changing.[12] Morphological freedom, seen as a continuation or extension of and complement to personality rights (especially rights over one’s own body), means the right to change one’s body in line with one’s wishes and desires.[13] Morphological freedom, used in the sense of having the right to change one’s own body according to one’s will, means the commitment and drive to transform oneself to continuously overcome psychological, social, physiological, genetic, and neurological constraints by questioning the limits of one’s potential and refusing to submit to mediocrity. It refers to the transformation of liberal pluralism, secular progressive cosmopolitanism, or (post)humanist multiculturalism by a destructive world of techno-scientific change and medical practices. Transhumanists, who see technological evolution as the next stage of evolution and regard morphological freedom, which is the engineering of evolution toward the goal desired by humans, as a right, claim that they will create a better world, not just a better human being.[14] Sandberg argues for morphological freedom based on individual happiness and living a “potentially happy life” when and where others are not constrained.[15]

Transhumanist values centered on freedom and diversity, including the morphological freedom to change one’s body as one wishes, were presented in the Transhumanist Declaration published in 1998. This declaration aims to prolong life and defeat death and to continue to explore eternal transformation and the universe. In the declaration, which was revised in 2009, Vita-More stated, “I am the architect of my own being. My (transhumanist) art represents my vision and values, it carries the foundation of my being”, emphasizing that she is the “architect of his being” and drawing attention to the importance of morphological freedom.[16] Morphological freedom is defined in the Transhumanist Bill of Rights as “the right to do what one wishes with one’s physical attributes and intelligence as long as it does not harm others.” The Bill of Rights states that individuals should be given a wide range of personal choices about how to exist in life, including the use of various technologies of human enhancement and modification. Reproductive technologies are included in the wide scope of choices that should be given to individuals to shape their own lives. In the Declaration, which adopts a libertarian attitude toward the freedom of reproduction as well as morphological freedom and suggests that all kinds of decision-making rights regarding reproduction should be left to parents in principle, the demand for freedom is included with the expression, “All conscious beings have freedom of reproduction, including new methods such as digital cloning, single-parent child acquisition, and creating benevolent artificial general intelligence.”[17]

Transhumanism, which sees freedom as the freedom to choose and positions the freedom to choose as the means to happiness and fulfillment, does not aim to transcend mere borders or to produce transformative hybridity. In this context, transhumanism seeks a wider scope for action and favors a more beneficial and secure future. When the emphases of transhumanist visions of the future are not questioned, these visions serve dematerialization and determinism.[18] The transhumanist David Pearce, one of those who voiced these promises, argues that the biohappiness revolution can enable potential parents to seek counseling for genetic screening and universal access to gene editing tools and design to ensure that all children are born happy.[19]

Rather than wanting to force everyone to live forever, transhumanists aim to eliminate involuntary death by allowing everyone to choose whether and when to take their last breath. Transhumanist messengers, who are technology enthusiasts of the highest order, use the rather negative term “neo-Luddite” to denote those who despise technology and scientific progress, especially in the biological field.[20]

The model of transhumanism is based on freedom and autonomy and sees current and future technologies as means of enabling the human good by both transforming and enhancing it.[21] Video games are the best mirror for approaches that aim for technological transformation, such as transhumanism. Resembling a game in terms of identifying and modifying the subjects, transhumanism proposes that the person who obtains the freedom to construct his or her character can be something more and that by entering into the world, one can create a specialized or idealized being that is an extension of one’s own being. Added technological elements allow people to change themselves easily and quickly. If the mind can be downloaded to the computer, there may be more areas of freedom for humans.[22] Technological singularity practitioners and android or robotic designers, engineers, and technicians are not building freedom but autonomy. That is, they are trying to build free will, but whether there will be freedom to choose is uncertain at the moment.[23] Factors such as training, research, evaluations, and critical thinking can enable people to make conscious choices by gaining consciousness.[24]

Transhumanists, who value individual freedom, share a common conviction that it is an individual choice to rebuild or modify their bodies. Transhumanism, which considers the transformation of the body through the use of technology a rational and free decision of personal autonomy rooted in individual freedom and bodily autonomy, demands an ideal human being and society. According to transhumanism, which glorifies an individual freedom that tends to be egocentric and selfish, choices are made based on what is best for oneself rather than what is best for others.[25] Human enhancement or improvement is interpreted as the moral challenge of contemporary biotechnologies to existing human nature as it seeks to push and exceed the limits of human freedom. In this moral challenge, certain questions gain importance: Can one freely choose to change one’s own personality, and is one free to undermine one’s freedom? Will it be necessary to make choices based on the personality developed in a mixture of genetic and environmental influences, or will it be necessary to make a choice to change my own personality to reach the state I desire?[26] Does changing basic personality traits weaken the continuum between action-achievement and internal states-external behavior, or does it otherwise make the individual in question a different person? If psilocybin indeed strengthens morality, does it reduce the freedom to act otherwise? Is the effort to change or transform unnecessarily playing God or tampering with human nature? Can moral reinforcers cause individuals to be overly empathetic or trustworthy?[27]

In addition to these questions, Walter Glannon poses questions such as, “Do brain interventions and other neural transitions in the transition from human to posthuman threaten free will?” and “Will free will disappear when we become posthuman?” Glannon argues that the issue of free will has regained importance in the new brain sciences (neuroscience) and that free will is the work of the brain and mind and not an illusion arising from the mechanistic view. According to him, the current neuroscientific arguments against free will do not support the explanation that we evolved from a human to a transhuman world. There is evidence from neuroscience that does not undermine free will and that the deterministic or mechanistic neural process fully explains human behavior. Advances in the neurosciences can lead to radical change in the interpretation of the self and the concept of free will. Deciding on gender change, the ultimate example of human free will raises the issue of human responsibility. Evaluating the concept of freedom of will and responsibility in the context of its Western philosophical reflections, M. J. White focuses on force majeure and analyzes the history of the problem of responsibility and determinism.[28]

In classical metaphysics, the question of freedom of will is formulated between determinism and the position of freedom in terms of consistency.[29] The person who changed this formula of classical metaphysics was Hume, who associated the relationship between free will and necessity with freedom by chance and accepted the concept of human nature and ego rather than the concept of free will. According to him, people cannot be held responsible for their actions if the idea of necessity is rejected. The main characteristic of his moral psychology, which he created while trying to build a science of morality, emerged from the discussion of the causal relationship between passion, character and behavior, and obligation and freedom, which are more motivating for will than reason.[30] Indeed, the pursuit of liberation and autonomy as a defining human goal is strongly associated with the desire for separation and control. The driving desire is to become independent of “everything else” in order to have the freedom and possibility to control and define who you are and the power to become your own individualized self. For transhumanism, this includes the freedom to control human evolution through the development and use of technological tools for biological enhancement. The reason for this quest for freedom and control is that humans can choose how they want to develop and relate to others (humans and nature) at will since there is nothing fundamental or essential about the existing human form and humans’ relations with other beings.[31] In this context, many transhumanists state that there can be no coercion to use human enhancement technologies and that individuals are free to decide whether to change themselves. In fact, C. T. Rubin states that people can choose their own attitudes in the case of modifying or enhancing their bodies; that the individual should freely choose the best tools for himself or herself, and no one can stop him or her.[32]

The possibility that the human genome can be altered indicates that there is no fundamental reason for banning genetic modification studies. The main task is to distinguish between different levels of development so that ethical decisions can be made in genetic regulation according to the degree to which they sustain and strengthen the person’s fundamental right to physical, cognitive, and social well-being by expanding or contracting individual freedom and mobility. Here, Habermas’ emphasis on personal autonomy can play an important role.[33] Habermas says that attempts are made to stop science and technology, with its unstoppable tendency to expand the sphere of human freedom at the expense of the socialization or the disenchantment of external nature, in the name of “moralization” by creating artificial taboo boundaries (by re-enchanting internal nature).[34]

Transhumanist utopian people are techno-liberal subjects, and the autonomy of the subjects is carved by elements mediated by technology. Transhumanists seek absolute freedom, choice, and controlled individuality.[35] For transhumanists (and bioliberals), individual freedom is considered one of the important, if not the most important, values. Individuals should be free to decide for themselves how to live, and institutions should be designed to guarantee neutrality across different lifestyles.[36] A liberal democracy should normally only allow interventions into morphological freedoms when someone abuses those freedoms to harm another person.[37] Some transhumanists eschew state pressure because the freedom of individuals to develop and redesign will change competition and social norms. For the time being, the aspirations of transhumanists are considered the aspirations of an elite class.[38] Transhumanists who support the liberal political system are called techno-progressive biopoliticians, which includes democratic liberalism or democratic transhumanism.[39]

Material conditions in the form of technological apparatuses are the fundamental aspect of the transhumanist revolution.[40] The material aspects of social structures ensure the proper productivity of the freedom of liberal democracy or capitalism.[41] In transhumanism, which adopts a liberal/libertarian discourse, demands based on equality/social justice are seen as utopian and fictional projects that will divert humanity from reaching the superhuman. While techno-libertarians (mainstream transhumanists) appeal to the Enlightenment ideal of freedom, democratic transhumanists emphasize the ideals of equality and solidarity.[42]

Eugenics as an Opportunity to Expand the Sphere of Freedom

Transhumanists who seek personal development beyond current biological boundaries defend the moral rights of those who want to use technology to expand human mental and physical capabilities and enhance their control over their own lives.[43] In fact, transhumanists such as Nick Bostrom and James Hughes claim that not only human beings but all living beings have the right to self-improvement or self-change and fair and equal access to such remedies.[44] There is little evidence, however, that they have considered questions such as whether the radical freedom and unlimited opportunities promised by transhumanism in comparison with social equality exist or whether these opportunities lead to the madness of some without clear moral boundaries. How can plans be made for such dangers? Transhumanism has an implicit and elite class structure. There is an assumption that some elites will be the first to have development or augmentation, and then things will be put in order.[45]

Some transhumanists argue that eugenics is a possibility and that through eugenics improvement, not only some people but humanity in general can benefit and build a better life. In fact, Bostrom said that some states can promote eugenics that will improve the human capital of the country and give the subject features such as obedience, indifference, and cowardice.[46] In contrast to Bostrom’s rationalization of eugenics, moral egalitarians believe that morality should be for all people, that no one should be less equal than another, and that no one should be treated as more than an equal. According to Wilson, who rejects Fukuyama’s idea that the transhuman or posthuman will be morally better than our equals in the future, the superiority of the evolved cannot be said to threaten the moral equality status of human beings. The question of development may even create justice between those of equal moral status, but the developed human being is not a creature of higher morality than the unequal human being whose abilities and capacities are not developed. Transhumanism raises concerns derived from the project of human development and questions of justice between those of equal moral status rather than presenting concerns based on moral status.[47] Habermas sees liberal eugenics, a threat to human nobility, as a threat to the foundations of the human moral community. However, according to Habermas, liberal eugenics will fundamentally change relations in the moral community and undermine moral equality, human rights, individual freedom, and autonomy.[48]

The issue of justice can ultimately lead to the issue of eugenics. In the 21^st century, in the transhumanist process that will lead to the emergence of eugenics, the transformation of human beings’ own nature through artificial interventions may create a situation of eugenics that can defeat both oneself and one's own species.[49] Transhumanists who advocate eugenics adopt a libertarian framework in an attempt to separate themselves from the atrocities of the 20^th century.[50] The techno-libertarian view suggests that the government should impose sanctions against attempts at genetic improvement by distancing itself from the eugenics advocates of the 21^st century.[51] Again, Habermas says that eugenics, for the purpose of enhancement, will reduce moral freedom by imprisoning people in their unwanted and irreversible plans according to the demands of third parties and will prevent people from perceiving themselves as full perpetrators of their own life.[52]

Transhumanists have the same ambitions as humanists and posthumanists: that human nature can be reflected, shaped, or changed/modulated in a radically free manner.[53] Anti-paternalist transhumanism has the idea of a “right to biological freedom” and seeks to advance individuals’ permission to modify their own bodies (e.g., laser eye surgery, breast augmentation). This is because radical improvements are within the scope of general biological freedom, and anything that is suitable for the body can be applied to the body.[54] Transhumanists, who defend the principles of bodily autonomy and productive autonomy, accept that genetic development through selection (avoiding wrong birth and wrong life) will provide people with more freedom and access to a happy life by providing multiple choices.[55] Transhumanists believe that improving the conditions of the individual human being will improve the conditions of human beings as a whole and defend the right of those who want to use technology to expand individual freedom, especially their mental and physical capacities, and to improve people’s control over their own lives. According to transhumanists, parents should be allowed to choose whether and how to reproduce and which technological methods to use in their reproduction. The use of genetic medicine and embryos to increase the likelihood of a healthy, happy, and multitalented child is a responsible and justifiable practice of parental reproduction.[56]

The cognitive and biological enhancements promised by transhumanism enter into the equation in regard to human enhancement or morphological freedom. This equation proposes radical, defiant changes in desire, memory, cognition, and identity that will alter our assumptions about the ego. Although most transhumanists do not see the proliferation of egos as problematic, they acknowledge it as an incompatibility between existing identity and transitional identity. The fact that there is more than one person creates the debate about whether the person truly exists.[57] The essence of the transhumanist project is to change the existing human essence. Fukuyama, who emphasizes the idea of equality of rights and attributes differences in skin color, beauty, and even intelligence to the human essence, has four propositions:

1.    There is a human essence.

2.   This human essence is a responsibility of our equal moral essence.

3.   This human essence can change if we develop ourselves in various ways.

4.   If we change ourselves, we will never have equal moral status.

Fukuyama claims that enhancing or improving human beings will create moral differences and that differentiations, especially in intelligence, will disrupt moral equality by creating a sense of superiority. Fukuyama states that political equality emerged from the (American) Declaration of Independence, which was founded on the empirical reality of the equality of human nature, and claims that transhumanism’s idea of human enhancement or human augmentation would abolish the Declaration of Independence, which is still functional.[58] The fact that morphological freedom is seen as a “value” indicates that it also has a moral dimension. In this context, Bainbridge argues that insisting that freedom is a universal right is also moral superiority; in the transhumanist process, every individual has the right to be anything.[59]

Transhumanists who want to promote individual rights also want to increase technological methods to benefit from people’s decisions regarding reproduction. Individuals should, on the basis of consent and taking into account rights and freedoms, apply human enhancement technologies that are within everyone’s reach to themselves (morphologically) and adopt children. In the minds of most transhumanists, individual freedom is important to make decisions about their own bodies and the character of their own children.[60] The aim of eugenicists was so-called public health for the benefit of the state or society. The current development agenda is promoted under the banner of individual freedom and prosperity, often with a distinctly libertarian favor. Transhumanists frame access to reproductive and morphological freedom against government interference in terms of fundamental rights. Parents’ reproductive choices that design their children are motivated to help their children, not harm them.[61]

Improved Possibility of Freedom

Both the design of the child to be born and the development or enhancement of the present human being are directly linked to the freedom-individual relationship that is influential in humans’ choices. Transhumanists seek to realize Sartre’s account (of the self) through the idea of morphological freedom, which offers the right to abandon and change the body.[62] In Marx’s words, transhumanism’s principle of morphological freedom corresponds to the desire of human beings to exist as capital already does. There is a close relationship between morphological freedom and the Lockean egalitarian libertarian approach, which is the approach through which human beings can realize their desire to exist. Locke’s empirical approach to the distribution of human ability is linked to the transhumanist doctrine of morphological freedom. Before Locke, families and corporations (e.g., governments, churches, universities) had personalities, and individuals became persons through membership in one of these entities. After Locke, the importance of being an individual or individual freedom without the need for belonging arose. Morphological freedom is more collective than individual in the sense that it is based on the social good. Despite the libertarian rhetoric of transhumanism, the value placed on morphological freedom is less compatible with a Lockean sense of individual responsibility than with a Hegelian sense of collective responsibility.[63]

Transhumanists defend the application of freedom of innovation and the development of methods (research - experiment - observation) to themselves as morphological freedom and the design of future generations with these methods as reproductive freedom.[64] According to Zizek, who says that postgenderism and transgenderism, a social, political, and cultural movement, envisions socialization and that gender can be abandoned with the latest advances in biotechnology and reproductive technologies, fixed gender roles and their social, emotional, and cognitive consequences are obstacles to the full emancipation of human beings, and new social and cultural possibilities will emerge on the ground where reproduction through gender is eliminated.[65] Initiatives such as nanotechnologies, genetic engineering, in vitro reproduction, artificial wombs, sex reassignment techniques, and virtual bodies simulated by computers will create not only our humanity but also the problem of gender transcendence/desexualization. It can be changed at will to achieve greater psychological usefulness and double sexuality. Postgenderism is related to morphological freedom in that it demands the abolition of sexual and gender differences and the acceptance of the fact that sexuality is the result[66] of individual choice, not genetic and cultural imposition. In fact, the transhumanist pursuit of morphological freedom implies that people should not be constrained by the biological sex they were born with but should instead be free to adapt their bodies to the gender of their choice or experiment with various gender identities. The best example is Martin Rothblatt, who underwent sex reassignment surgery after marrying his wife Bina and having children.[67]

“Capitalism 2.0” will be characterized by the freedom to choose commodities that include self-replacement technologies, as Fuller says, noting that human self-replacement will lead first to transhumance and finally to posthumanity, which characterizes the capitalism of the future. This implies the freedom to choose to be what one wants to be, not just what one wants to have.[68] While Nozick argues that we can do anything we want as long as the freedom of others is not restricted, transhumanists go further and claim that we can be anything we want.[69] People who are given the freedom to self-determine, if not in the sense that Sartre meant “self-determination”, in the future can be seen as beings in one of two forms: they can either be downloaded into advanced bodies or transferred from advanced computers. Advances in genomics emphasize increasing genetic information, which can be seen as a birth download. “Human flow” can take the form of holographic projections drawn from a computerized library of program and memory bases, anytime and anywhere.[70] Genetic manipulation of the nature of future subjects will raise a number of serious and fundamental moral questions. These problems, however, are not specifically related to the metaphysical problem of freedom of the will.[71]

The superhuman/overhuman, which is the cognitive and biologically enhanced state of humans, informs life and completely controls time. Autonomy, which self-affirms and overcomes the possibility of knowledge in itself, enables one to relate to one’s own life in a social and cultural context by knowing everything about oneself, taking into account the past, and ensuring freedom of personal choice. This leads to absolute self-knowledge and absolute autonomy. It is an evolutionary leap for the Nietzschean Superman.[72] Nietzsche, through the madman of “Zarathustra”, proclaims the “murder of God” and says that everything is possible with the absence of God. The fact that everything is possible, the abolition of all boundaries, and the rise of transhumanism are interrelated. Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” also states that freedom is a wonderful but overwhelming thing. Science and technology are as frightening as life is liberating.[73] Despite this frighteningness, opponents of transhumanism argue that transhumanism, which is based on science and technology, should not be stopped and that if biotechnological tools are available to “produce a human being”, these tools should be used to prevent the uncertainties inherent in life, namely, chance, and (unlimited) freedom. One of the 1965 Nobel Prize winners in medicine, F. Jacob, stated at the award ceremony that the things that confuse us should be “tampered with as much as possible” to better understand them.[74] At the apex of this (tampering) dynamic, transhumanism makes the (implicit) assumption that infinite technology will provide humanity with infinite freedom and infinite happiness. When Marx and Engels spoke of technology (evaporating the solid, denying the sacred), they meant the means of production that are constantly revolutionizing.[75] Bioconservatives, in contrast to those who advocate that transhumanism should not be fenced, are opposed to all kinds of development due to the loss of freedom and autonomy. Bioconservatives such as T. Horn, who have made strange bedfellows from the religious right to the secular left and have made arguments for banning advanced technologies to protect human nature, have denounced transhumanism as an “arrogant form” of humanism in which belief in God is replaced by belief in the human.[76]

Transhumanism, which does not claim to be a religious system but whose statements about human beings and salvation belong to the religious sphere, has religious goals such as immortality, the elimination of old age and disease from earthly life, and the promise of heaven on earth, and the construction of God from human beings or AI. Transhumanism is a religious movement that draws on traditional religions in terms of its claims and promises and the purpose of replacing God and humans. Aristotle says that the highest purpose of human beings on the natural teleological plane is God, their creator. If they want to develop their nature and possibilities, they should turn to God, their creator, who gives them the opportunity and freedom to live as they wish in order to lead a successful and moral life.[77] For transhumanists, the way to be moral and successful is to turn not to God but to humans themselves. Again, in Christianity, the doctrine of incarnation (ḥulūl) encourages humans to ascend while God is lowered. Christian humanism is the result of the equation of God with humans. T. Merton says, “Genuine Christian humanism is the full germination/growth of a theology of embodiment”. The human impulse in the form of spiritual or speculative humanism, the second form of religious humanism after materialization, is focused on common spiritual qualities abstracted from the particularization of religious traditions.[78] It has moved the form of the union of God and humans to the form of the human-machine union and from the form of God becoming human and humans becoming God to the form of the cyborgization of humans and the cyborgization of the android or humanoid.

As Sorgner puts it, Judeo-Christian theology emphasizes deep and intrinsic human freedom as proof that man is a son of God and possesses a portion of His free will. In the same way, the recognition of cyborgs’ autonomy and even their “self-will” from this relationship can deepen our conception of the human being and show new ways of enriching human science. Again, for an atheist fighting against God, human independence is understood as the death of God, while for a passionate posthumanist fighting against humanity, the independence of cyborgs is understood as the death of humanity.[79]

Hegel states that events have a rhythm, that innovations reflect results, and that progress provokes its opposite. The reality that Hegel pointed out gave birth to the reality that technologies make people weak as well as empower them. Man is an entity that is both excited and overwhelmed by his inventions, and the tools he uses and produces both increase and destroy his freedom. It was thought that technology would advance human freedom, but technology has created isolation and poverty more than increasing freedom and happiness. Human autonomy, numbed by technological tools, is crushed under corporate command. Freedom has been lost with technology that is supposed to increase autonomy, and we have become increasingly susceptible to the lies of the authorities who promise to restore this lost freedom.[80] As P. Virilio reminds us, “Speed shrinks the space of freedom”, and options are limited when one has to make decisions quickly.[81] When we look at the superficial view of transhumanism, which is based on the transformation of man toward freedom, the transformation of man is a transformation equivalent to annihilation.[82] While transhumanism presents itself as the fulfillment of freedom and pleasure, it represents the completion of Western metaphysics as nihilism.[83]

Freedom in AIDR and the Metaverse Plane

In addition to Darwinian and Freudian approaches, the understanding of non-Euclidean geometry, relativity, and quantum theories in the field of mathematics-physics gave rise to debates on poststructuralism and postmodernism. In the 21^st century, AI, digitalization, and robotics (AIDR) applications are the catalysts of the transhumanism movement based on nanotechnology, cybertechnology, information technology, and cognitive sciences. Big Data, the Internet of Things, and the Metaverse (virtual, augmented, and mixed reality), which are elements of information technology and digitalization, will bring about a renegotiation of freedom. As one of the 21^st century’s most effective and cutting-edge technologies, the use of AIDR applications will bring about debates on freedom in social life because it will violate the boundaries and expand the field of freedom. Considering the technological developments in the 21^st century, it is obvious that studies in the field of high technology, cybernetics, and AI will lead to serious transformation. Computing and decision-making AI, which will be more visible in humanity’s life in the near future, will expand human possibilities and limit the free will humans can manipulate. Freedom linked to new technologies is linked to biological and unnatural AI applications.

AI applications used in trade, service, education, health, and the military aim to expand the area of human freedom. AI, which builds intelligent beings, is a technology that emerges by imitating the thinking, understanding, learning, reasoning, and interpretation that exist in humans by programming them in the material. AI studies, which include the effort to produce objects that can think more intelligently than humans by imitating[84] human intelligence, are gradually distancing humans from their reality and making them artificial. The existence of biological humans with AI on the plane where the technological singularity phase is formed with AI leads to the discussion of how nonmechanical human beings are. According to AI researchers, machine ethics is a decisive factor when autonomous systems are allowed to interact with humans. It is also argued that knowledge of what is morally right and wrong could be incorporated into AI.[85] AI systems that will be used for unintended consequences may lead to a loss of responsibility and accountability, and the success of AI may be the end of the human race.[86] The support of studies in the field of AI by companies and states will concretize and defunctionalize the transhumanist process. As a transformative technology, AI systems, which in the short and long term pose ethical and legal issues related to the realm of freedom, contain possibilities and weaknesses regarding human freedom.

AI-fed digitalization refers to the organization, adaptation, or increase in the use of digital or computer technology by industries or countries.[87] Digitalization, which takes societies beyond national borders, increases freedom but erodes privacy and national security, reshaping not only concrete spaces but also minds. Quantification or digitization has also changed the anthropological understanding of the self in the encapsulated external world.[88] Interacting in the Web 1.0 process, such as “being informed” and “sharing, liking, and commenting” in the Web 2.0 process, has revealed a new “network” society and “homo digitus” human existence. In the Web 3.0 or “Metaverse” process, which is the peak of information and interaction and will bring digitalization to the ultra-plane, the virtualization of space and humans will increase even more. In this digitalization, discussions about security, privacy, confidentiality, surveillance, control, supervision, and the relationship between control and freedom will emerge.

At the intersection of the physical and digital worlds, the Metaverse is the next evolution of the mobile internet. It encompasses more than just the internet and includes augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) experiences.[89] The metaverse will not only provide human beings with a space of freedom but will also cut them off from real life and condemn them to the virtual. It is unclear what the principles and the limits of mobility will be in the Web 3.0 digitalization process, which will further raise the level of “information”, “interaction”, and “existence”. The need to resolve this uncertainty and to grasp the problems of freedom posed by digital planes with a new ethical and philosophical perspective will emerge.

After computers, robotics is a major area where AI has shown itself. J. S. Albus defines robotics as “a system science that seeks to integrate AI with the feedback control of mechanical tools.”[90] One of the areas where problems with freedom can occur is robotics, which feeds on AI. Because there is no absolute protection against AI, the mechanization of intelligence is the most important phenomenon on earth.[91] The visibility of robotic applications based on AI-based technology is increasing, and robotic and autonomous systems (RAS) are increasingly adapting to the way the world looks and lives. RAS technologies are set to enter challenging environments with the benefits they offer in a variety of sectors and industries. The development of robotic or autonomous systems has given rise to a new philosophical academic discipline, roboethics, which refers to the moral dimensions of robots. As an element of ethics, roboethics is a discipline that addresses issues related to robotic and autonomous systems and their interaction with animals, nature, society, the individual, and the world in general.[92]

With the further development of AI, it is important to discuss how robotic beings, which develop both mental and physical characteristics, narrow the freedom of human beings and what the limits of their freedom will be. Humanoids and androids will create ethical acts and rules both among themselves and in their relationships with humans as their abilities of reasoning, comparison, and interpretation develop even if they do not gain consciousness. Campa states that humanity produces more sophisticated machines and claims that manufacturers, owners, or users of advanced androids will face many interesting philosophical and speculative problems. In fact, according to Campa, designers hope that these machines can think and behave better than humans. This will be a process with ethical, psychological, and sociological effects and consequences.[93]

The digital or virtual world is not just a plane in which humans exist or interact but a world in which AI and, in the future, robots exist. The challenge is to create universality in such a multiuser world. In particular, important elements such as the protection of privacy, confidentiality, and personal rights of people and society must be protected in the digitalization process. With this protection, it would be easier to institutionalize and establish rules of law if digital ethics were theoretically textualized rather than the virtual world being controlling, ruling, and totalitarian. Ethics is the element that will create the healthy environment needed to control both the content of the user and the grounds of the producer.

Transhumanism embraces the management of engineering ideationality, where everything is designed and evaluated from the perspective of effectiveness. The essence of the transhumanist idea, the idea of quasi-perfection, is that human biology will be radically changed and even overcome, surpassed, and left behind by technology. Transhumanism, which draws attention to the achievements in AI research, attempts to eliminate the desire to augment human intelligence with a strategy of building machine intelligence. Transhumanism, which sees the transfer of the mind to the machine as possible, is in the desire to get rid of the body. Although the desire to eliminate the body is a demand for freedom, the problem of data security arises when the mind combined with the machine is compressed into a mechanistic container, and the information of the mind (memory, thinking, feeling) becomes data. The seizure and sharing of these data leads to the loss of privacy and creates the real problem of freedom.

In addition, the increase in AI applications and their inclusion in social functions as they become widespread in daily life may create the problem of enslaving human beings by exceeding human intelligence and the situation of human abandonment by enabling decision-making mechanisms to replace humans. Floridi speaks of the possibility of such a situation by saying, “When we adopt AI or its intelligent representations, we willingly leave some of our decision-making power to technological artifacts.” According to Floridi, who states that it is important to strike a balance between the decision-making power that people retain for themselves and the power they delegate to artificial intermediaries, people need to exercise freedom of choice when necessary and to give up this freedom when there are overriding reasons to do so; that is, they need to decide what decisions to make and retain the power to decide.[94]

Two common perspectives of transhumanism are the current understanding that human nature is not the end point or final state of evolution and that science and technology play an important role in human progress.[95] Based on four major technologies, nanotechnology, bio-technology, information technology, and cognitive science, transhumanism sees rapid advances in genetics, CRISPR technology, regenerative medicine, stem cell therapy, late aging therapies, morphology, pharmacology, cyber-technology, synthetic biology, and applied cognitive sciences as promising scientific and technological developments. All these technologies give transhumanism the hope that the current human condition can be transcended by improving it mentally, physically, and biologically. Transhumanists hope for a posthuman physical being that is different and more advanced than existing human bodies. Transhumanism, which aims for the development of individual human beings in a biological sense (human-computer interface study and functional development of human biological nature) and to ascend to the “posthuman” species, hopes for applications, including genetics, surgeries, implants of all parts of the body, brain, and species (neural implants, neuroprostheses), nanobots, brain-computer interface studies, pharmacological drugs to develop cognitive abilities and sensory motors.[96] Transhumanists place emphasis on the more developed individual (transhuman), focusing on enhancing the capabilities of the human being –its undeveloped predecessor– with special dimensions (longer life span, memory storage, computational power, motor abilities).[97]

Freedom is one of the fundamental values of humans. The human being who wanders in different universes, albeit virtually, is driven into uncertainty by the desire for limitlessness and –in the plane of exponential growth of information technology– may be faced with the problem of losing freedom as well as privacy due to the inability to ensure the security of individuals’ data. The areas of freedom in the virtual universe in terms of the bases, utilization, and results of AIDR applications also limit human freedom in real life. In planes where freedom is not based and grounded, human freedom can be violated. On such a plane, unforeseen and unavoidable problems will arise if the balance between scientific-technological/phenomenon and freedom/responsibility is not achieved. In an order where homo sapiens is said to have evolved into homo digitus, the consequences of AI digital and robotic applications will change the field and nature of freedom.

Conclusion

Humanity thought that as it progressed on the material plane, it would be spiritually happy, and as it was happy, it would be liberated. Indeed, humans fell for the promise that they would be free and immortal when they fed on a material element, the tree (the Tree of Life). The basic drive to build great states and civilizations is the desire to be happy and free. Again, the idea that freedom will be achieved as a result of Prometheus’ “stealing” fire, which is a material element, is a mythical narrative that shows a relationship between commodity and freedom. Antiquity, Renaissance, Enlightenment, industrialization, and technological developments in the 20^th century have been the continuation of the correlation between matter and freedom. This correlation is further radicalized by transhumanism. Aiming for the civilization of 3S (superlongevity, intelligence, and happiness), transhumanism promises that humans will be liberated and happy by becoming independent of their bodies by expressing that they will be improved mentally, physically, and biologically. It is predicted that the posthuman, who will be empowered physically and mentally, will be better and live a better life. Transhumanism is seen as an anti-slavery movement that both liberates human beings from their threatening and limiting nature and aims to build a happy life and biosphere through the elimination of diseases.

Transhumanism, with its desire for unlimited youth and infinite personal development, suggests that death, which is seen as a condemnation, can be overcome and that freedom can be achieved by transcending the existing body. The fact that this transgression is possible with technological means is a situation that will cause serious problems in terms of human freedom. Humans, who are said to be saved from the limitations of their nature or of God, their creator, are left to the mercy of technology-based capital. Moreover, the difference between augmented and nonaugmented (natural) humans can give rise to a master-slave reality. The human being may be doomed by the decisions of the AI he or she has replaced as the decision-maker.

If thinking (reasoning and judgmental decision-making) AI becomes the second thinking being in nature, it will make a significant difference in the world. In particular, the addition of AI to robotic (android, humanoid) elements will create a human-robot duality. Again, with the acceleration of the digitalization process and entering the Web 3.0/Metaverse process, the inclusion of people in the virtual universe with their avatars will expand the field of freedom. This situation will lead to existence in the virtual world rather than in real life and the transfer of the identity constructed in the virtual world to the real identity. In all of these processes, the question of human freedom may evolve into more uncertainty.

 

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

 

FUNDING

The author received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

 

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