What Do Brain Implants and Spirituality Have In Common? (Joe Allen)

Let me start off by saying, I have zero interest in participating in what many call the transhuman movement. Specifically, implanting some type of technology into my body in order to alter or enhance the way in which I experience the world.  That being said, I do think it’s important to understand what is going on. This is clearly going to be a thing in our lifetimes that will vastly impact culture and society and I’d rather be informed. A few weeks ago someone had recommended Singularity Weekly to me and I was startled to see how far along we are in this field. I wanted to have Joe Allen the author of singularity weekly and Steven Bannon’s War Room transhuman expert.  The most interesting thing that emerged from the conversation was the realization that transhumanism is very much a religion. There is a group of people that are attempting to transcend their current condition and achieve salvation. In these higher states, they also strive to achieve greater abilities of unity and access to higher intelligence. Gee. Sounds kind of like most wisdom traditions. I guess the main difference is the mechanism they believe will usher into this change is technology. Joe called this worship of technology as our savior an inversion of spirituality. I tend to agree, but this new understanding certainly helped me better understand what is more fundamentally driving the leaders of these movements.  I can’t say that my opinion has really shifted. I am increasingly getting excited about living a more analog life. Having less technology dominates my experience and generally being more connected to nature. This probably means I will have to move from my urban existence at some point, but I am okay with that. I increasingly think living in Urban areas with high degrees of invisible environmental toxins make it harder to be healthier than it needs to be. And I care more about myself and family being healthy than nice dinners with friends and access to luxury experiences. I think we will start to see this appeal to more and more urban professionals in the next decade. I guess we already are.