Transhumanism
The Upgrade Paradox: What We Lose When We Try to Become More Than Human
Transhumanism promises to fix everything wrong with being human — but it has never quite settled the question of whether being human was the problem in the first place.
The Idea
Transhumanism is less a fringe fantasy than a coherent philosophical position with deep roots: the view that humanity is not a finished product, that our biological limits — aging, cognitive constraints, emotional volatility, death itself — are engineering problems waiting for solutions. Thinkers like Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu have argued this position seriously and rigorously, and the technologies they anticipated are no longer speculative. Neural implants, gene editing, life-extension research, AI cognitive augmentation — these are active fields, not thought experiments. But there's a tension at the heart of the project that doesn't get examined nearly enough. Transhumanism inherits the Enlightenment faith that the self is essentially a rational agent held back by a faulty substrate. Upgrade the substrate — the body, the brain, the lifespan — and the agent flourishes. What this framing quietly sidesteps is whether the 'flaws' it targets are separable from what makes experience meaningful at all. Vulnerability, finitude, the weight of not-knowing — these aren't just bugs in the human system. Many philosophical traditions, from Stoicism to Buddhism to existentialism, treat them as the very conditions under which depth, compassion, and genuine choice become possible. The question transhumanism rarely asks is: if you removed mortality, would the result still be capable of the kind of urgency and love that mortality tends to generate?
In the World
In 2016, Bryan Johnson — tech entrepreneur and founder of the brain-computer interface company Kernel — began investing heavily in what he called 'intelligence amplification': the idea that giving humans direct read/write access to their neural activity would be the most consequential step in our species' history. By 2021, he had launched Project Blueprint, a rigorously self-documented programme designed to slow and reverse his biological aging, measuring dozens of biomarkers monthly and optimising every variable of diet, sleep, and supplementation. His stated goal was to give the body of an 18-year-old to a 45-year-old mind. What made Blueprint philosophically interesting wasn't the science — it was what Johnson said about the experience. He described the protocol as requiring him to essentially override his own desires and impulses in real time, treating his spontaneous self as an adversary to be managed by data. He referred to this controlling, optimising function as 'the algorithm.' The irony is striking: in pursuit of a more capable self, he had divided himself into the self that wants things and the self that corrects those wants. The philosophical tradition would recognise this structure immediately — it is the ancient problem of akrasia, of acting against one's better judgment — but here it was outsourced to a spreadsheet. The question his project raises isn't whether he'll live longer. It's whether the entity produced by the protocol is more free, or considerably less.
Why It Matters
You don't need to have an opinion on brain implants for this to land somewhere useful. The transhumanist impulse — the drive to optimise, upgrade, and eliminate weakness — is already deeply embedded in how many of us relate to ourselves. Every productivity system that treats your attention as a resource to be maximised, every wellness regime that reframes rest as recovery for future performance, every self-improvement framework that positions your current self as a problem to be solved — these are transhumanism in miniature, at the level of daily life. Noticing this doesn't mean rejecting self-improvement. It means asking a sharper question: when you try to become a better version of yourself, are you working with your nature or against it? There's a difference between developing genuine capacity — patience, attention, skill — and waging a low-grade war on your own limitations. One tends to generate something that feels like growth. The other tends to generate exhaustion with a progress bar. The transhumanism debate is, at its best, an invitation to examine what you actually think a good human life consists of — and whether more is always the right direction.
A Question to Ponder
If you could eliminate your single greatest limitation — cognitive, emotional, physical — are you certain the version of you that emerged would be better at the things that matter most to you?
Get a new one of these every morning.
Start learning with Thinkable