BS Summary: This article contains 17 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, Confirmation Bias, and Indoctrination, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 17.5% saturation with 288 hits. Analysis detected 1,018 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,643 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 26.1% and a BS Rank of 10% (20,216 of 22,405 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 90.20% of the article peer group.
After holding a developmental reading of a play I have been working on about a fictional transhumanist and his world, I was able to briefly correspond with Bryan Johnson.
One friend passed the play on to the entrepreneur-turned-anti-aging guru; another found out that he had read it.
Eventually, we connected on WhatsApp.
Johnson, the most famous avatar of transhumanism, thanked me for writing something that presented the issue in a neutral way, without heroes or villains.
Johnson’s bio on X, where he has 1.8 million followers, reads “conquering death will be humanity’s greatest achievement.”
He is now best-known for his quest to defeat age and achieve immortality, which he has branded as Project Blueprint, and for the various tech initiatives and companies he has founded or financed to help others do the same.
But his original fortune came from Braintree, an online payment company, which he founded and which later acquired Venmo; the combined product was sold to PayPal for $800 million in 2013.
The immortality influencer has dark hair, marble-white flesh, and a neutral, Tom Cruise-ish affect.
His physique reflects rigorous daily workouts; he seems to have created a body much younger than his 48 years.
And his posts on X are intentionally, I think, provocative: he gained notoriety most recently by posting in praise of the health of his girlfriend’s “vaginal biome .”
In a viral post this past month, however, Johnson announced that he is suffering from a rare autoimmune disorder, AIG (autoimmune atrophic gastritis), in which the stomach lining consumes itself.
AIG isn’t a death sentence, but it is a bad sign for someone who doesn’t plan to die.
On July 29, Johnson made headlines again, by posting on X : “been thinking things over and wonder if I’ve taken this whole longevity thing too far.”
Before Johnson’s diagnosis, I had already begun to see him as a tragic hero in a classical sense: larger than life but also susceptible to the kind of tunnel vision the gods punish their heroes with.
So his illness, which he insists he will find a cure for, is cosmic irony.
AIG increases inflammation, abhorred by biohackers, and prevents the absorption of critical nutrients like iron and B12.
In my own play, I didn’t write a tragic ending where the Bryan Johnson character gets sick or dies, nor do I think anyone should wish for Johnson to have an encounter with death to learn his lesson.
Rather, I think that we should take the ups and downs of Johnson’s immortality “journey” as early feedback on a philosophical experiment that is just beginning, and that may soon become a global, radicalizing phenomenon.
Johnson isn’t the first techno-utopian to be an immortality influencer: Google language-recognition expert Ray Kurzweil has been a transhumanist since the 1990s.
But Johnson represents the migration of these ideas to the mainstream.
I know someone writing a book about Próspera, an island off the coast of Honduras that is attempting to create a year-round life-extension clinic, an immortality spa, if you will.
And unlike early transhumanists, Johnson’s message arrives at a time when technology has visibly accelerated in radicalizing ways.
No one used AI four years ago; now it is everywhere in everything.
Many of Johnson’s posts regard therapeutic breakthroughs and many of these breakthroughs are driven by supercomputers solving problems exponentially faster than any human laboratory could solve them.
Whether normies know it or not, elites are planning to live for a very long time; the effort is already well underway to radically alter the destiny of the human body, or at least some human bodies.
Autocrats like Xi Jinping and Putin are on advanced therapeutics, it’s safe to say.
They will live as long as they can, and will rule as long as they live.
Business leaders, thought leaders, and athletes are having longer primes, eventually, maybe, they will have indefinite ones.
Tom Brady, Lionel Messi, and LeBron James have already demonstrated that the window for elite athletes can be longer with the right practices.
Getting to see our favorite athletes play longer doesn’t seem so bad; ageless autocrats, however, are less desirable.
Bioscience is also offering women the opportunity to have children much later in life.
Celebrities with access to expensive health care, like Anne Hathaway, now regularly have children in their 40s; the next horizon is childbearing in the 50s.
“Whether or not anyone succeeds in radical life extension, the cascade of trying will result in a change of belief.”
Our quest for immortality may be active, in the form of broscience, next-generation supplements, and extreme fitness, or passive, via surgeries and organ replacement.
But soon, or perhaps even now, there will be a marked distinction between those who are intending to die — and refusing any enhancements — and those intending to live.
What this amounts to is a secular immortality cult that replaces heaven with perfected existence forever on earth — and former heaven-focused mortal activities such as prayer and religious practice with constant techno-biological self-enhancement.
Among the rich and soon the merely affluent, an extremely deep piece of cultural memetics — the ultimate acceptance of mortality — will start to fade.
And whether or not anyone succeeds in radical life extension, the cascade of trying will result in a change of belief.
Johnson’s announcement of his chronic illness made headlines around the world.
This reflects, I think, the extent to which he has already succeeded as an influencer and quasi-philosopher.
His is the first announcement from a future that believes it’s a surprise to get sick and die at all.
It is impossible to overstate how much of a change this presents.
The supreme value in a society that accepts mortality is to pass something on to the future.
In one that doesn’t, the direction of human activity boomerangs back upon itself.
The point of life becomes biological self-maintenance.
Moreover, the transhumanist ideal threatens the monopoly of all mortality-derived wisdom — and mortality-backed experience, altogether.
We can’t experience the same moments, works of art, highs, or griefs over and over, without fundamentally changing their impact on us.
It may be that life is rich because it is limited, and extended life becomes a form of torture.
It may also be that our cognitive hardware is well adapted to our natural lifespans, and that experience does not get better with time.
For some of the characters in my as-of-yet-unstaged play, life becomes unbearably lonely as some choose to die and others choose to live out enhanced lifespans.
Longer lifespans, or the promise of longer lifespans, will also change the calculus between parents and children, and the decision-making of prospective parents.
If you believe you may escape death, why have children at all?
On the other hand, bringing children into a world with less death may also be an incentive to have children; but the globe cannot, in the long run, support a world with life and no death.
Something will have to give.
The most laudatory thing that one can say about Johnson’s moral framework is that it is a moral framework, and that it is not nihilistic, even if it is arguably narcissistic.
He uses his own resources and he has defined his own values.
It would be hard to argue that he is hurting anyone, and his self-experimentation, even if it doesn’t yield immortality, will likely end in useful therapeutics for the rest of us mortals.
But it is also likely that his Faustian quest commences a Faustian epoch — anything short of total control over our bodies, down to the level of not only cells, but maybe subatomic particles, will be considered a failure.
In the face of such a terrifying prospect we will need powerful — and not entirely rational — protection.
Johnson was raised Mormon, and it is hard not to see that his vision of an immortal, multi-planetary species with extended consciousness resembles the multi-planetary heaven of Mormonism.
In general, his message of “don’t die” is part of the message of the later phases of Abrahamic tradition; to never die is to constantly “resurrect” the youth of the aging body.
All cults promise some kind of immortality, whether through forgiveness, salvation, consciousness-raising, bodily resurrection, or in this case, scientific super-enhancement.
Thus, even if Johnson himself is having doubts, his announcement of a chronic illness, instead of discrediting his philosophy, takes part in the miraculous.
He is now a prophet, attempting to perform the miracle of healing or raising the dead.
And he has the world’s attention.
It is another irony that the lucid, rational promise of secular immortality seems guaranteed to produce mysticism.
Transhumanism offers salvation through the supposedly knowable, but it confronts us with existential shocks.
The Christian faith, which offers salvation through faith — the fundamentally unknowable — has been more stable.
For better or worse, the latter half of this century seems like it will be more existential than the first half — and more existential than technological.
Technology will be merely the foundation for a revision of what it means to be human.
Casual agnostics and atheists may soon find that to not think about mortality or immortality with greater intensity and purpose is considered extremely strange or bad.
And established religions may turn toward the supernatural and “proofs” of eternal life, to compete with the promise, backed by data-driven therapeutics, of indefinitely extended life.
Pascal’s Wager argued that faith was the best bet based on probability, especially considering the possibility of eternal damnation.
Johnson’s Wager, on the other hand, asserts that there is no downside to seeing how far you can take biological life.
But like any philosopher, Johnson is liable (and free) to change his mind, when the thought experiment becomes a real experiment.
We’ll see what the next phase of his immortality, or mortality, brings us.
Analysis
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