The presentations in this session will explore constructive and critical considerations of the roles of identity and embodiment in emerging technological landscapes, including the roles of strong and weak digital avatar identities, the evolutions of human personhood in the work of Sylvia Wynter, and embodiment understood through emerging models of disability and identity. These constructive papers will offer new insights into the relationships of bodies and transhuman technologies in relation to religious movements and values.
The rise of new artificial intelligence based services has implications for the development of autonomous AI replicas. These new technologies are AI avatars that can model the visual of natural speech, AI chatbots that can write in a conversational tone, and synthetic voice generators that can mimic the speech of a particular person. The convergence of these three technologies makes it possible to design AI replicas that can mimic a particular person. This paper will explore how these new AI technologies bring us closer to the qualitative improvements necessary to achieve digital immortality. Transhumanists will be increasingly incentivized to use AI services to create a replica of themselves given the uncertainty of the feasibility of mind uploading technologies, enabling a scenario in which they may be resurrected, even after death.
In this paper, I attempt to highlight and engage critical aspects of Sylvia Wynter’s postulations about personhood and the socio-historical and aesthetic rationale that gave rise to human enhancement innovations today. While personhood as an ideological concept may be elusive, its existential importance in achieving a framework that delineates epistemological formations; guides experimental activities, and assesses iterations of being-ness in recent human history cannot be overemphasized. Drawing from a collection of Wynter’s oeuvres, this paper juxtaposes her reflections on the historical developments that laid the foundations for the current understanding of personhood and beingness in essentially biocentric cum aesthetic terms, in the wake of the biotechnological revolution – genetic designing, transhumanism, cybernetics, and many others; vis a vis her postulation of humans as hybrid beings. Is there more to personhood than the biological? Will human enhancement diminish or advance personhood in the nearest future?
Keywords: Sylvia Wynter, Human enhancement, Personhood, Biocentric
In this paper we suggest that discourses within disability theology can be brought into fruitful dialogue with ethical/theological reflections on human interconnectedness with technology, enhancement and transhumanism. We do so by bringing ideas related to Creamer’s limits model of disability to bear on such discourses. Creamer’s model challenges essentialist views of limits and enables both examination of the values behind our postures towards limits and judicious theological conversations about what it means to live with them. However, Creamer does not address how specific human limits might be lived with and negotiated. Thus, we also turn to Graham’s practical theology based on Heidegger’s idea of “indwelling” as “finding one’s place”, which allows us to consider more broadly what it means to live with our technologies. We bring these concepts to discourses on human enhancement and transhumanism in order to explore possible correlations, and the implications and insights that emerge.