Pints With Aquinas - Transhumanism and Emerging Technologies w/ Fr. Michael Baggot

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

Fr. Michael Baggot joins the show to talk about Transhumanism. Who are the leading thinkers in the movement? What philosophies underpin the movement? What is the goal of tranhumanism? How does Transhumanism relate to Transgenderism? Father addresses all these questions. Show Sponsors: Ascension: https://ascensionpress.com/fradd Strive21: https://strive21.com/matt Father's Book: https://www.routledge.com/Enhancement-Fit-for-Humanity-Perspectives-on-Emerging-Technologies/Baggot-Gomez-Carrara-Tham/p/book/9781032115856 Fr.'s Links: https://www.magisterium.com/ https://upra.org  https://catholic.tech https://catholicworldview.com  @ThoseTwoPriests  References: When Harry Became Sally by Ryan T Anderson: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-harry-became-sally-ryan-anderson/1125792437 The Transhumanist FAQ by Nick Bostrom: https://nickbostrom.com/views/transhumanist.pdf Unfit for the Future by Julian Savulescu: https://www.amazon.com/Unfit-Future-Enhancement-Uehiro-Practical/dp/019965364X Better Than Well by Carl Elliot: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Than-Well-American-Medicine/dp/0393325652 A Free Man's Worship by Bertrand Russel: https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/264/fmw.htm The Space Trilogy by CS Lewis: https://www.amazon.com/Space-Trilogy-C-S-Lewis/dp/068483118X The End of Sex by Hank Greely: https://www.amazon.com/End-Sex-Future-Human-Reproduction/dp/0674728963  

Yes. Michael. Michael. Yeah, I know. But but I recently went into a Starbucks and I said, oh, Father Michael. And they misspelled Michael. And I'm like, have I been in Europe too long that I forgot how to pronounce my own name? And we're live with Father Michael Baggett. Hey, Matt. So what happened? You went to a Starbucks and.

So I was there in Starbucks and I said, hey, I'm Father Michael. Right. And so just give me my coffee with the name on there. And they misspelled my name. And I was like, have I been in Europe too long that I've forgotten how to pronounce my own name? Because I've been working in Rome for a decade now. And they just completely messed up my name. Did they misspell it or did they just write something different?

Yeah, they misspelled it. When I go to Starbucks, one of my favorite things to do is to give a fake name. Oh, because they said you have a name and I'm like, yeah, it's Jason Everett. Jason Everett, Steven, Sonia, whatever. Right. And then the fun bit is you kind of wait around and you have to remember that you're Sonia. Oh, Sonia. I usually have a fella's name, but. That's nice. I mean, I like the whole Waffle House set up though, because there you get to give your name and it's more affectionate, right?

Like come on baby doll, you need some meat on your bones. Come on, get your food. Right? I mean, that, that's a lot more fun. I do not have the same affectionate feel towards Waffle House that many of my friends do. Oh no. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Virginia.

So I was born in Texas and then we moved when I was very young. So I am a Virginian. I grew up in Virginia, but I'm a Texan when I meet Texans. It's on my passport. I'm a legit Texan, but really I grew up in Virginia. And you've been living in Italy for how long? A decade. The last decade of my life.

Yeah. I spent five years of formation there, studying philosophy and theology. Then I was ordained. So get this, I was ordained a deacon in St. Peter's Basilica. You've heard of that, right? I have. And then a priest in St. Paul outside the wall. So it was a double header. Peter and Paul, the great apostles of Rome. Plus my priestly ordination was on my mom's birthday, which was pretty awesome, right? So it makes it really easy for us to remember the anniversaries. Is it true that all the legionaries are ordained by the Pope? So we're not ordained by the Pope, unfortunately.

Back in 1991, there was a large group ordained by Pope St. John Paul II in St. Peter's Basilica. And of course, these priests are always reminding us that they were ordained by John Paul II. We're like,, we know. But hey, I do the same. Yeah, yeah, I do the same. But we are typically ordained in a major basilica. So there are four major basilicas in Rome and in the world and in the known universe. And so those four major basilicas are St. Peter's, St. John Lateran, which is actually the cathedral of Rome, right? Where the seat of the Bishop of Rome is at, not St. Peter's, but in St. John Lateran, St. Mary Major, and then St. Paul outside the walls. So those are the four major papal

basilicas of Rome and will be ordained in one of those. Okay. How long did it take you to learn Italian? Well, really in the first year or so, I'm just stumbling along and trying to figure things out and we get this three or four week crash course in Italian, which is really not enough. And then it's this, uh, sink or swim experience where you just get pushed in the pool, if you will, and you start taking classes in Italian and you're learning about metaphysics and cons and high Englishgger. Which is hard enough in English.

Right, exactly, in Italian. And so you're trying to figure this out. And then you sort of listen, you talk to your peers, did I understand that correctly? Is that what he really said? And then you start babbling a little bit, you start articulating yourself, you make mistakes, you get corrected and you move forward. Now I had an advantage because I had worked in Mexico

just before going to Rome for studies and so that really helped me to solidify my Spanish. So I was comfortable in Spanish, of course they're two different languages, but at least they're similar enough so that I could understand most of what was being said in class in Italian. And then over time, start to piece together my own sentences. And then sometimes I'd go and visit people, visit some

families in the area who had supported us, and you'd come over for these three to four hour dinners and you'd have plenty of opportunities to deepen in your Italian. Mason- So when you joined the legionaries, was it a kind of a greed upon that you would continue to go on study because you have your doctorate? So is that sort of part and parcel of being a legionary? Is that something you had to discern as you were coming up the ranks? Bregman- Yeah, so there's definitely a focus on education in our ministry and our work of evangelization, but not all of our men end up working in universities or even necessarily in other schools, right? So we have a strong emphasis on education, but only some are then sort of

chosen, encouraged to go specifically down that route of further studies. And so I saw it coming. I was interested in education. I had done some work as a teacher along the way, working with middle school and high school boys. And then eventually, as ordination draws near in dialogue with my superior, I said, okay, it's good for you to continue with the doctorate. Was this a strong desire of yours? Yeah, I'd say so. I have a very interesting Catholic education. But they could have said, we don't want you to go on to further study. We just like you to go to this parish.

Sure. Sure. They could have said, Hey, just, I don't know, go play soccer with kids. And say, well, that's, that's obedience, right? But normally the idea is that you try to find a way for the interests and the needs to align and meet up. So you usually don't want your men to just kind of be frustrated. That would be good. So did you have a master's degree at this point

when you were ordained or did you go on? Yes, so I had already done a master's in philosophy. Then they asked me to work on a doctorate in bioethics and also did a license in spiritual theology so I'm kind of all over the place but... So how many doctorates do you have? Just one, just one for now. But when did you get interested in transhumanism? Oh so when they asked me to do the doctorate in bioethics I knew from the beginning that I wanted to address a topic that had not been treated exhaustively by someone else.

Right, I don't want to just repeat what's already been done. There's so many important topics that have already been well covered. So I'm looking around at the options and I started to see lots of reports about this crazy idea of transhumanism. And I thought, Hmm, this is kind of weird, but interesting at the same time. And it involves so many emerging technologies. And I know we're going to get into this but just real briefly, how did you hear about it and what was conveyed to you as you began learning about this thing?

What is transhumanism as you understood then? Right, so at first transhumanism just basically seemed like using technology to make life better and then eventually turn us into kind of digital, immortal spirits. So I didn't have a great grasp on it initially, but then I discovered after reading a few other articles, okay, this is a really serious, small but serious cultural intellectual movement to radically enhance humanity. So, radical improvements through biotechnology and at a physical, cognitive, moral, mood, and lifespan level. So, using the tools of technology to basically make us smarter, fitter, happier, more beautiful, more productive in society, and to live longer,

if not forever. And so I started to see reports of this and like, I don't know, this is kind of odd, but there's some serious people with lots of money who are either behind this or at least sympathetic to these ideas. And so I'm reflecting on it. I was teaching at a summer program that I still teach at called the Catholic Worldview Fellowship. So shout out to the Catholic Worldview Fellowship, this great summer program that I've been

teaching at for five years that immerses students in Catholic culture through history, art, architecture, philosophy, theology in Germany and in Rome, Italy. And I was there and Ryan T. Anderson came to join us to teach. And he had just finished his book on transgenderism. When Harry became Sally. Exactly. So now banned from Amazon still, I believe. So he had just finished the book and I knew that he was following a lot of trends in bioethics.

And I chatted with him in one of the breaks because we were both teaching at the summer program and I asked him, Ryan, what do you think about this transhumanism idea? You've been dealing with transgender, what about transhumanism? Do you think that this is the next big thing or is this just a fad that's going to pass? Because I don't want to spend three to five years of my life in something that's completely irrelevant by the time I finish, right? So I'm chatting with him and he thought for a little while and he said, well, I think that transgenderism is a cultural moment. So it clearly has a big impact on society. It's worth writing a whole book about. It's serious, but it will pass. There is a kind of resiliency of human nature. People will fight back, will rebel, or will resist

these ideas eventually. We don't know how long the moment will last, but it's a temporary moment. And he said basically, I think that transhumanism will have a deeper and more long lasting, a longer lasting impact on society. That's really interesting from someone who's just spent so much effort on this cultural moment of transgenderism. And you know what, Matt, honestly, after so many years of research, after working on a book, after publishing articles, giving conferences, I think he's right. Because really, we're talking about a small little movement of convinced diehard transhumanists, you know, card carrying transhumanist in Silicon Valley and Oxford and a few other places. But there are so many other people who are at least sympathetic to these ideas, influenced by

these ideas, attracted by these ideas. And it's a great platform to talk about a relationship with technology in general and we're all immersed in it and I also am thoroughly convinced that there are so many philosophical movements that we in the West have already bought into that have prepared us for key tenets of transhumanism just to give an example right to believe inhumanism, to believe that we can get to a point of digitally downloading our personality and uploading it to another substrate, another body, another robotic structure, or to the network. That depends on a pretty strong anthropological dualism,

right, a separation, a split between the self, whatever that is, usually they don't want to call it a soul, but that mysterious self and this outward body which is seen as an external instrument, right? So that is key to the transhumanist projects, at least the most radical transhumanist projects like digital immortality. We have totally bought into that. Right, and that Cartesian idea kind of set the path for transgenderism, where I'm not my body, I am however I identify. Real quick though, I mean, people might hear transgenderism and then they hear transhumanism and they think it's kind of the same thing, but I mean, there's obviously, you know, with transgenderism I can decide that I'm something other than I am.

Right. That's not necessarily what we mean by transhumanism, right? By transhumanism, we mean. Right, yeah, so it's interesting that there is a connection, but it's important to distinguish the movements, right? So Nick Bostrom is a professor at Oxford University, and he's one of the leading philosophers of this movement. You get people like Ray Kurzweil, who was head engineer in Google for many years,

who has done a great job of telling the story and weaving the narrative and inspiring people. But I think Nick Bostrom is an even more serious philosopher who's wrestled with these ideas. And Nick Bostrom wrote this whole frequently asked question document with other leading transhumanist thinkers. And right at the beginning, he says basically, this is a cultural intellectual movement to radically enhance people through biotechnology at these different levels physical cognitive in terms of our intelligence mood in terms of how well we feel also moral in terms of how well we can make ethical judgments without prejudice and with the proper motivation

and in terms of lifespan to eventually overcome all of the major perennial difficulties of life. Aging, sickness, suffering, death, right? And so that's the goal of transhumanism. So transhumanism sounds sane, right? Transhumanism is delusion. It's a delusion to think that you're something other than you are.

Whereas transhumanism sounds like we're harnessing technology to enhance ourselves. So in that sense, it sounds like, okay, this is like a natural progression. Wanting a human to remain as he is in 2023 and not advance is sort of like wanting children to remain children and never advance. How could that possibly be a good thing?

Yeah, that's a good question. It's kind of tricky because usually the transhumanists think of transhumanism itself as a transition. Sorry for all the trans here, but basically we want to radically improve ourselves, enhance ourselves, get us beyond the biological norm that we know today, but usually with a goal of post-humanism where we somehow morph into the superior species, which is generally understood as a disembodied existence. Because if you go back to the main enemies, aging, sickness, suffering, death, a lot of that comes back to this lump of flesh, which is really frail and vulnerable. So let's fix it up. Let's use the best that we have in terms of technology, gene editing,

pharmaceutical products, body computer interface. Let's use all of our best tools and gadgets to make this work better. But best tools and gadgets to make this work better, but come on, this lump of flesh is outdated and we need to get to another state. And so let's get to a disembodied experience, which is also where we kind of circle back to this interesting connection between transgenderism and transhumanism. So there's a thinker that I've really enjoyed reading and studying, Martine Rothblatt. Martine Rothblatt actually founded the Sirius Radio Network and has also done a lot of other work,

including really interesting products, really interesting work in terms of medical care and treatment. So very accomplished, intelligent thinker. And Rothblatt has written articles in an entire book about the relationship between transgenderism and transhumanism. Rothblatt was born as a biological man and presents as a woman, right?

So clearly on board with transgenderism, right? Practicing the creed, if you will. And Rothblatt has written to say that transhumanism is the next logical step. Rothblatt says, look, transgenderism taught us that something as fundamental as our sexual identity is not determined by our biological anatomy. Transhumanism is going to show us that our very humanity is not determined by our biology at all. So you can see this logical natural development. We're constantly overcoming the body. For me, I would think that the next logical step is for men to identify as

animals, all sorts of animals. That seems to be. Well, that does, that does happen. It's within our grasp, at least what you're talking about with transhumanism, digitally uploading ourselves to the matrix or something seems. Farfetched. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you do occasionally get some of this trans-speciesism and guys who identify as cats or- Trans-ageism? Is that a thing?

Trans-ageism, I mean there's some really sad stories of individuals who basically live as though they're little babies. There's another case which is sad, but maybe a little bit humorous of this man who wanted to officially change his age from say 69 to 48. And he said that when he was going on these dating app services that he'd always get ads for elderly women, you know, of his age group. He said, no, no, I want to approach younger women and I feel youthful and vibrant.

It was very precise though, it was something like 48. You know, it wasn't some ideal, oh, I wanna go back to 25 or 30 years. No, I feel like 48. You know, I'm not that young, but I'm younger than people I identify me as. And some of his friends just kind of common sensically said, so why don't you just change your age on this service, right?

And his response was interesting. He said, well, I don't want to lie. So there was this profound conviction that no, somehow who I truly am, this mysterious inner self that I have discovered through an introspective process is this 48 year old, even though biologically and legally everyone identifies me as 69. Right? So it's that break between the true inner self and this outward body. And the outward body

is a tool. It's an instrument. It's basically raw material that we're called to manipulate. So it's interesting because we've seen in these past years how technological advances have allowed us to very radically manipulate the body for those who struggle with gender dysphoria and other ideas about their own internal gender identity. Right? And so we can do a lot that we couldn't do years ago in terms of manipulating the body. And what Rothblatt and the other transhumanists are saying is, okay, let's just take this principle further and let's use our new tools to accelerate this and to assert ourselves more fully. And Rothblatt is also very interesting in saying

humanity is fundamentally self-creating. That's the key to who we are, self-creators, self-inventors. And this comes up all the time in the transhumanist literature. But again, this idea has been with us for generations. This idea of you do you, this idea of that inner self. Lots of authors like Charles Taylor and Bella and others have spoken of expressive individualism. You look inside yourself, you find who that true self is, you project it, and then society needs to recognize that. It needs to approve it. It even needs sometimes maybe to celebrate it. So we see this clearly in different expressions of transgender ideology more recently. But again, these ideas are old. The technology of transhumanism is new, and there are new developments every day. But the philosophies are old. And I think

that we need to go to the roots, right? Not just sort of say, oh, technology is scary or oh, they're going to do something horrible tomorrow. But why is it that intelligent people start to think that, yeah, maybe we can download our personality, and maybe we can upload that to a network, and maybe I should devote my riches that could go to supply clean drinking water, or mosquito nets, or food to poor individuals. I'm going to spend that money instead on technology to do whole brain emulation where I basically try to map out all of the connections of our neurons and get all of the data of our brain to then store and transfer.

Like I said, you can transfer that to a better body that you develop in the lab, you can transfer that to a realistic robot, but eventually we want to get past even the limits of being in just one place at one time. Get that to the network and I can somehow have simultaneously all of these extraordinary experiences that maybe I can't even imagine right now. It seems to me that transhumanism is something we're all kind of engaged in. Well, not all, but I mean, think about a pacemaker. I mean, how is that not an example or an illustration of transhumanism?

So is it necessary that you get to the final stage of uploading your consciousness into a computer to call it truly transhumanism? Or can you think of just technology helping us? I even think of the smartwatch, which kind of has turned you into a cyborg. It's just not stitched into your flesh, but I mean, it's attached to you. Like, do you see what I mean? Like, this seems like a gradual unfolding that's already happening. So is it necessary that we go all the way to the uploading for it to be transhumanism or? Right, yeah.

Can we be somewhat pro transhumanism so long as it doesn't go that far? Yeah, exactly. So it really often depends on what you mean by this transhumanism, right? If you go to people like Bostrom or Rothblad or others who are kind of promoting this at a more formal level, Bostrom runs a future of humanity institute at Oxford University. You have a lot of thinkers in the U-Hero Center for Practical Ethics at Oxford

who are looking at these ideas. They're speaking much more in terms of that radical enhancement and eventually getting us to, at least some of them, want to get us to that post-human state. That's just, it's something beyond the human. But see, what would make it post-human if you've already denied that the body is part of who we are? Right, right. So why would they call it post-human?

Well, it's a good question. I think it's finally abandoning that body so that it's no longer an obstacle or something that's weighing us down. And it's also just getting us to that whole new range of experiences and capacities that maybe we cannot imagine. But to your question, I mean, I think it's important for all of us to wrestle with questions of how we're relating to our technology. And I think it's good and healthy to utilize technology to improve our lives, right? And I'm even comfortable with the idea

of certain enhancements. Enhancements meaning basically that, okay, when you go and you're looking at medical treatment, right, you think in terms of treatment, oh, we're repairing something, we're healing something, we're repairing something, we're healing something, we're fixing something, we're getting it back to this kind of norm of health, whatever that may be. And usually when we talk about enhancements, it means better than that, healthier than healthy, not just healthy, but above and beyond. And so I think that there can be instances of that that are good.

Anikonur Austriako has done some work and we've collaborated a little bit and he's developed this idea of- He's a Dominican priest, yes? Yes, he is. So he has developed this kind of paradigm to look at therapeutic enhancements. Because usually in the literature, whether it's Catholic thinkers or non-Catholic thinkers, they say, okay, if we can just figure out what a therapy, what is a therapy and what an enhancement is, then we say, therapy good, enhancement bad. Right, sort of like the difference between plastic surgery

and cosmetic surgery. Right, right, you say like, ah, no, that's superficial or that's excessive or that's prideful or that's vain, right? And you can say, oh, we probably don't want to invest too much in that, right? And he says, well, it usually isn't that easy, right? And it usually is more on a continuum, right? So he uses a pretty standard example. He's like, let's not think just futuristically. Let's think in terms of people who are struggling with their cholesterol levels, right? Low density lipoprotein, the LDL levels, right? And there's kind of an accepted statistical biological norm,

like 70 to 130, I think, milligrams per deciliter is considered a healthy range. So if you're in that range, the doctor will say, good job, right? If you're above that range, like, okay, we have to do something. And now we have good job, right? If you're above that range, like, okay, we have to do something. And now we have statins, right? We have medication that people will take

to lower that cholesterol level. But it turns out if we get it down below the 70, below the low end of that healthy norm, we get it to say 50, well, there aren't really like bad side effects. There aren't health complications. And it certainly does not seem like we're then inhibited from living other goods that we suddenly become proud or envious or self-absorbed and we're somehow prevented from living charity

or living friendships or pursuing the truth. So there are not really any bad health side effects. There are not any effects that health side effects, there are not any effects that are like holding us back from living a good life. And so, okay, why not be healthier than healthy? There are a lot of people in the world now who are healthier than healthy, and who are being prevented from experiencing a lot of cardiovascular difficulties, right? So there could be therapeutic enhancements, right? Enhancements because they bring us

beyond the statistical norm of health, but still therapeutic because they're preserving our health and they're also not really inhibiting us from pursuing other higher, like non-physical goods. So what would be another example? So I've heard that the appendix is essentially useless or that wisdom teeth are. I'm not sure if that's true or not

But that be another example where we could use technology to eliminate that in and future children or sure sure Well, I think a lot of people are trying to figure out. Okay Well, what can we do at the cognitive level to improve memory to improve? Concentration like a lot at the time be natural per se. It wouldn't be- Right, right. There'd be interventions, right? So we, you know, people have for years now been using Prozac or Ritalin or Adderall, right? To increase mood levels or to increase their concentration and focus.

Now in that area, it seems like the big problem is that we usually have trade-offs, right? So you might have, say with your use of Ritalin, some sort of short-term gain, but then maybe long-term negative cognitive effects on the brain. Coffee would be similar. I offered you an espresso and you said I'll start shaking if I have any more. Right. So it does help us, but then there are sometimes trade-offs. You might have a slump or you might get tired afterwards. Right, exactly. And so there are these trade-offs. Or for instance, in some of these, the dual use of the pharmaceuticals that are often designed, like for instance, Adderall is a

treatment for narcolepsy. But even if you don't have narcolepsy, right, if you don't have this sudden temptation or this sudden sleep that overcomes you during the day, you can take it with the hope of a greater wakefulness. Now, if you're a student and you're under pressure and it is exam time, this is very attractive, right? So it has this kind of enhancement effect for so-called healthy individuals individuals those who are not suffering the the disease or the the negativity that that

Treatment was designed to address But again, you might have okay side effects of headaches or nausea and and so you're dealing with these trade-offs And so maybe you get some short-term gains, but long-term you're just so distracted that even your academic life begins to collapse or is severely inhibited. So the very reason for taking into enhance might give you short-term benefits, but undermine that project in the long-term.

So that's an issue. There's also some interesting tests now on non-pharmaceutical approaches to cognitive enhancement. I say we, but I haven't been doing this, but some people out there have been looking very seriously at transcranial direct current stimulation, and they're trying to stimulate different sectors of the brain at first usually to address real problems, difficulties like depression. But then there are also questions,

hey, could we use this as a cognitive boost, as a cognitive enhancement? And there are some tests that suggest, for instance, if you use this transcranial direct current stimulation on one sector of the brain, the posterior parietal cortex, then that improves how well the patients learn new mathematical information. But then they show greater difficulty using what they already learned. But if instead of stimulating the posterior parietal cortex, you stimulate the dorsolateral

prefrontal cortex, then they're much better at using that math they already knew, but they struggle to learn new information. So you see the trade-off. You stimulate one part, it's easier to learn information but harder to learn to use what you've already learned. You stimulate another part, it's easier to use what you've already learned, but harder to learn new information. So there are these real trade-offs that suggest there's a kind of limit,

or there are other studies that suggest when we're using the pharmacological approaches that often affect dopamine levels, there's a kind of U-curve of dopamine. So it's the intermediate dopamine levels where we have the best cognitive function. So if you're on the low end and you get the boost, okay, you'll do better. But the thing is, when we're talking about enhancement, we're trying to help people who already have kind of a healthy range. But it seems like that boost doesn't bring the same benefit. And sometimes it even brings negative effects.

So there are just really serious questions about the scientific feasibility of achieving what we want to. But if we could, for instance, come up with some way through a pharmacological treatment or through non-invasive means of treatment or through transmagnetic current stimulation that does not lead to deafness or does not lead to seizures that tend to occur or could occur in some instances of these approaches, then if we could get this benefit without severe setbacks, it would seem to be at least a potentially good thing. I say it would be a good thing at the physical level, but the question becomes, what are we going to do with this? Okay, we have better cognitive capacities, right?

We have more potential to live a rich cognitive life. Now, I could use those cognitive gains as a professor to teach better, to research better, to publish more, to spread the truth and to assist more people. Beautiful. But I could also use my cognitive prowess to deceive people, to manipulate them, to take advantage of them, to prey on them,

to just gain more money for myself. So whenever I'm examining these different enhancements, my question is, can they be used to help us live virtuously, or are they going to incline us toward vice? And how do we respond? Basically, I do not think that any of these enhancements, even if they have little or no health side effects, are going to guarantee a good life. I think that unfortunately, a lot of the transhumanist thinkers are dealing

with a very reductive understanding of the person. And they're focused on real kind of physical goods, but we know that our life and the good life is so much more. So that's where virtue comes in. So this reminds me, I think it was C.S. Lewis in mere Christianity talking about you can't make an evil cow, but you can have a very evil angel. The greater the being, the more, the deeper it can sink into device.

Yeah, absolutely. And so you can, if you're a wicked person and you're a smarter person and you have more control over your emotions or you're just more engaged if you are stronger if you live longer well you can do more evil but of course if you're a virtuous person you can use these goods for a higher mission for service, for instance. So this is a really good point, because even now on the natural level, there are a lot of YouTube videos about

how to live your best life in the sense of health and wellness and cut out all alcohol and maybe don't even have coffee, or if you do, don't have it after 10, and when you sleep, make sure you sleep in this way and make sure you're exerting yourself at least this many times a week, right? You can get into that and really try to live at an

optimal level, but suppose you reach that level, the question still remains, now what? Now that you're an opt... I think Aquinas talks about this in the Summa Theologiae where he talks about ways we seek to make ourselves happy. And one of the things he says, you know, an increase in perfection in body and soul, and he says this can't make us happy. And it makes sense because if I'm now banging on all cylinders as it were, surely the point of my life is not to be at the point that I can then achieve the point of my life. This needs to be something beyond the optimal health.

Right, right. Yeah, exactly. So if you're dealing with a very narrow view of what life is about, like, okay, I guess I've kind of arrived or I've arrived at this stage of our evolutionary transition and I need to get to that superior disembodied state, like that's my goal. But if you're dealing with the rich tradition that we have and you appreciate the whole spiritual dimension of the person, our interior life, our relationship with other people, then you're very concerned about how these real goods are relative to that project.

And you still have to do the hard work of virtue formation. I mean, the whole idea of virtue is that you are habituated, that through good acts that you freely choose, you are made into a better person so that you can more spontaneously and joyfully pursue the good. But always as a free agent, that's our great dignity, we are created as free agents by the Lord to freely love Him and love our neighbor. And so that can't be forced, that can't be just guaranteed or manufactured through any device or any drug, but we are also bodily creatures. So that means that our life also has

a biological neurological foundation. So if I can dispose my body, say, to improved memory, right, there are biological, neurological factors involved in memory. And I could have a better memory. I could have better facial recognition, right? I've had better facial recognition. I remember my student's name. There are few things more frustrating

than seeing a student five years later and say, hey, you with the hair. And it's not fair, because they just have to remember father. Right, right. Right, it's so easy. They get out of forgetting your name. Right And it's not fair because they just have to remember father. Right. Right. It's so easy. They get out of forgetting your name. Right.

It's so easy. And then you're like, how can this happen? This student was really important to me. I poured my heart and soul into this course. And now, through my weakness, I can't even remember the student's name five years later. Wouldn't it be great to have that improved memory, which theoretically we could achieve or we could move toward.

But then the question comes, how am I going to use that facial recognition? Am I going to use that to really serve the other person, to recall, oh, okay, this person has this particular need academically, this person has this struggle in the family, and I'm going to ask how their sister is doing, I'm going to continue to pray for them. I could use that as the platform, as a foundation. And our very abstract thought, where you're getting to what distinguishes us from the other animals, the whole process of abstraction of finding the universal,

it depends on the phantasm, on that likeness that we have of the concrete individual. We first sense, we have this likeness, this image, this phantasm. And then from that we abstract. So the process of abstraction is a spiritual act, but it's set up, if you will, through a very animal biological process.

So we could continue to biologically improve our phantasms, which would have a kind of indirect effect on the more properly spiritual acts of abstraction, of coming to that universal. And so we could improve that intellectual life, again, to good or bad aims. I also think of the fact that, wow, this would be really helpful to have, say, physically fit, vibrant, attentive individuals in positions of service.

Like, I want my surgeon, you know, to be enhanced so that he or she is on top of their game for my surgery. Or I want that, you know, flight traffic control worker to be as attentive as possible, right? So you can see how some of these enhancements might not just be pursued for selfish reasons, I want to look pretty, right? But they might actually legitimately be pursued for the common good, for the service of others. And that could be great. But I would say one of the reservations I have or something we have to think about is Even if they're doing a better job and service to the community and their health is not impaired I think there's a greater risk that we might instrumentalize them

We might reduce them to their function and we might start demanding excessive hours say, okay We know that now you can physically perform hours. Say, okay, we know that now you can physically perform on top of your game for say 20 hours straight as a surgeon, as a air traffic controller, or maybe as a pianist who can now can create these amazing aesthetic experiences for us with new abilities. But if we're demanding that of them and we're expecting now, okay, 20 hours, we're sort of robbing them of a lot of other rich, beautiful things in life, like friendship, family, and so forth.

Will tell me if this is similar or different, but I mean, with the advent of the internet, there's an expectation that employees will respond to their employers because they have access to their email at home. So when I grew up, we had a phone on the wall and that was the only way you could contact us other than writing a letter or literally knocking on our door. Now I think a lot of people feel this desire or need to respond to people at all hours of the day. Now that's different to enhancing them cognitively. This technology has made it such that there are different expectations but you're right if we could alter you cognitively and your body, then there would be even more

of a demand. Like, why do you need to sleep? Yeah, exactly. We're already pretty good at instrumentalizing each other and using kind of technological means or excuses to do that. And yeah, definitely. And so it brings us, I think, to just these deeper fundamental questions of what sort of relationship do we want with these devices? Like, people are talking so

much now about the destruction of the world through out of control super intelligence, right? I'm actually going to present a paper at an event in Montenegro that's put on by a group of thinkers from this U-Hero Center of Practical Ethics, thinkers who have really done a lot of work on enhancement questions, some of whom are pretty open or supportive of transhumanist ideas, right? So it'll be a lot of fun to interact with them in person. And the whole theme of the conference

is about existential risk, like what's going to destroy humanity humanity or potentially what could destroy humanity? And we've been thinking about existential risk for a while, right? I mean, with the development of the atomic bomb, with questions about to what extent climate change will affect us. We've been thinking about these issues and now there's talk of super intelligence getting out of control, possibly even acquiring consciousness and its own plans and its own projects and destroying us Terminator style.

But in my paper, I'm going to look at another question. What if the apocalypse looks less like Oppenheimer, right, about the atomic bomb, and it looks more like this movie Her that came out almost a decade ago? Yeah, explain this to me. I've heard good things about it. Haven't seen it. Not sure if I should. You tell me. Right. Yeah. So it's a fascinating movie. I actually watched it on my way over to the United States again. And I was quite impressed by how applicable it is to the present moment, because the idea is that you have this man, Theodore,

whose job is to write moving, personalized, handwritten letters on behalf of people to their loved ones. So your wedding anniversary is coming up, you really want to do something special for your wife, but gosh, just so busy right now, and I'm gonna outsource this. So poor Theodore is there in the office all day writing these intimate, loving, attentive, handwritten letters. With your handwriting.

Well, he has a system, a computer system, to make handwriting, so I suppose he could choose any style. I see, okay. And it could be of the client, right? So he's involved in all of these intimate relationships all day, but in real life, you know, when it comes time to clock out, he's actually quite lonely and he's undergoing a divorce, right? His marriage is falling apart and he's very lonely, very vulnerable, right?

Should we do a little spoiler disclaimer here? Oh, yes, I may spoil some details here. So you can just mute the to develop a new operating system. It's basically advanced AI. And this new operating system is highly personalized. So you just start it up, you answer some questions about yourself, and then you say which voice and so forth you want. And then boom, the operating system kicks in.

In this case, it's Scarlett Johansson. She's the voice, she doesn't appear physically, but she's the voice of the operating system. She comes on and then shortly after the beginning of this new relationship with Theodore, Theodore gives greater access. So yeah, go ahead, look through my emails, look through my messages.

And of course, as the AI system is coming to all the info, it's getting a pretty good idea of Theodore's hopes, dreams, fears, frustrations, loneliness, and basically, a kind of friendship and romantic relationship develops here. And so it's this intimate bond that's created. But what's so fascinating is it's not that, oh, Scarlett Johansson appears and she's so beautiful and she deceives him and it's, she's really a robot, but you can't tell. No, no, no. No bodily interaction. Just the sound of her voice. The way, she's always there for him. She's always there. How many years was this produced before

the recent AI development? Yes, this is fascinating. This is 2014. Wow. This is 2014. So we're like, oh yeah, wow, sci-fi, futuristic. Like there's no way that Siri or Alexa could ever do this. And of course, now we are immersed in the world of generative AI. And you can go to, I don't know if you have a Snapchat account, but you could go to a Snapchat account and there are chat bots available. And these chat bots will engage in a dialogue with you and, oh, how's your day? How are you doing? How's this relationship going? Can I give you some advice? Right. And they remember previous conversations. Yeah. Yeah. They have plenty of data. They remember, like they are they and they remember previous conversations? Oh yeah, yeah, they have plenty of data on us. I say they remember, like they are they and they remember. Exactly.

And so they have plenty of data information. And that's the thing, right, in the operating system of Per, the system is just going through information and data of Theodore, the type of information and data that we're constantly accumulating and that we're constantly giving out by every click and every scroll and every interaction that we make online and social media.

And so these systems are sophisticated enough to respond realistically. And so you go to Snapchat today, this is real life, not the movie Her anymore, real life, and you can get relationship advice. But I mean, unfortunately it's really, it's out of control. Some people have done experiments and they've gone on

and they've presented themselves as say, a 13 year old girl and said, oh, and I have this relationship. You know, he's twice my age. My parents don't understand, but I think it's going somewhere. What should we do for a date? Right? And so the Snapchat is just there to give advice. And they're talking about entering into sexual relations and the Snapchat bot is not there to to judge or scold it's it's there to recommend a good restaurant recommend a good hotel room and so you can see how these systems can so easily prey on our vulnerabilities and our needs so that's why I say okay maybe the apocalypse in the future will involve weapons of mass destruction.

Maybe these systems will go out of control. But I think well before that happens, you're just- Brave new world. Yeah. That's what I'm reminded of. Yes. But I mean, I think before this happens, we're just gonna have a lot of lonely people out there,

a lot of vulnerable people who find in the technology we already have, which is just going to get better, just going to find patterns in data more quickly and more accurately in the future, they're going to find in those systems a companion who is always there, who always listens, who never judges, who never spurns, who never gets angry, who is supportive. And okay, that's frightening. You can also throw in a bit of sex bot technology, which is developing.

That's what I was gonna say, once you insert that into a robot, what does that look like? Oh yeah, yeah. So sex bot technology is advancing. I mean, without getting graphic, explain what you mean by that. It's advancing.

Yeah, so basically robotic structures that will offer sexual pleasure to clients, to men or women. And these are human looking robots? Yes, so the goal is to create increasingly more human-like, realistic robotic structures. So there are still plenty of people who think, okay, this is the path. Like I kind of want that bodily sexual experience. And so that robot can provide it. And it's a similar logic, right? Like, oh, great, a robot who's never tired, who never gets angry, who never gets sick,

who just wants to satisfy me. I guess maybe a more general question. I didn't know that we were this advanced in robotics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I mean, I suppose we're on the initial stages. I'm sure it will get better in the sense of more accurate. What's crazy is how like pornography is really responsible for the quick advancement of the internet

back in the early aughts. I imagine sex robots are going to be really the spearhead of advancements in robotics. Sure, sure. A deep desire for sexual pleasure. Absolutely. And so you have that whole realm of the sex bots. You also have this kind of parallel realm

that's maybe closer to the movie Her of individuals who just want their relationships with artificial intelligence more fully recognized. A few years ago, there was a case that gained some attention of this man, Mr. Kondo in Japan, who wanted an officially recognized marriage with an AI system who was presented only as a hologram. So here is not someone who is looking for all of the physical pleasures

of a sex bot, but who recognized this is a hologram, but we have such intimacy that I want this recognized. And so you have that kind of disembodied relationship with AI, you have the sex bots, and you have a small, but I imagine growing community of digi-sexuality. Okay, so a few years ago, a professor wrote a whole scientific peer-reviewed article on digi-sexuality, explaining this phenomenon of these different relationships, but kind of going further.

I'm not just saying like, hey, isn't this weird? But saying these are different legitimate ways of living human sexuality. And just as people who were same-sex attracted or had gender dysphoria were persecuted, were discriminated against, these people are being discriminated against. And as this spreads, they will be further discriminated against. So what we need to do is already anticipate that and see this as just one more legitimate form of sexual identity. So it's fascinating,

because we see this again and again in history, right? It's not just the behavior. It's the behavior that then becomes a kind of identity. This is who I am. Remember I talked about the true inner self and the outward body and that divide, and we can go back to Cartesian dualism, we can go to Rousseau and his whole process

of discovering the inner self, and we can look at other thinkers, right? Every new technology is a new opportunity to kind of live out that expressive individualism and to demand respect and demand appreciation from society. And I think a lot of this comes down to just the the lack of And I think a lot of this comes down to just the lack of teleology, like the lack of goal or purpose or objective meaning in our life. That's why I've written about the influence of postmodernism in today's transhumanism, because postmodernism kind of broadly described is this rejection of a meta-narrative, the rejection of the idea that there's some sort of true story that accounts for the origin, meaning, purpose, and goal of your life.

There are only particular narratives. Each community at a local level develops its own story. And they're all culturally, socially conditioned, and they're all culturally socially constructed, right? And so we shouldn't think that there's some sort of true story that unites us all. We just all have our own versions of different local narratives, which means the kind of the payoff of that is who are you to tell me that I cannot live according to this narrative, this identity. Who are you to tell me that there's some sort of firm category, whether that be the biological sexual binary? Who are you to impose your socially constructed category, binary on me?

Who are you to tell me that there's some sort of strict binary between the human person and a machine. And so I think this breakdown, this blurring of boundaries gets played out over and over. And you throw in a healthy dose of secularism as well, which is interesting, because people like Bostrom and other transhumanists, but Bostrom in particular say,

look, we as transhumanists are addressing the same issues that traditional religion has always tried to address. Aging, sickness, suffering, death. The difference, they say, is we're actually doing something about it. Al's isn't a fantasy. We're actually doing real work. We're taking real science

and applied science through technology, and we're making improvements. Whereas you religious believers are just holding out this pie in the sky dream. You're dreaming about it, we're getting it done. Exactly, exactly. So they see themselves as the kind of rational alternative and replacement for these religious ideas.

Do you know any trans, serious transhumanists who are working at at top levels who are not atheists? Yeah, that's a good question. There are some movements to present other versions of transhumanism. There's a Mormon transhumanist organization, there's a Christian transhumanist organization. I have met some transhumanist or transhumanist-friendly thinkers who are more agnostic and who appreciate more fully the real contributions of Christian thought, Judeo-Christian thought to society, and are much less dismissive of religion as just basically being a fairy tale. But it's also interesting because, well, the secularism is important, I think, because if there is no creator, then we are not creatures.

And if we are not creatures, we're not part of this great story, right? We believe in the story of salvation history that has a clear beginning, that involves this drama of our lives, the drama to live virtue, the drama to live the faith, the drama to grow and prepare ourselves for heaven, the clear destiny, the clear goal. We have a storyline that we're part of, that we're actors in, because we know the author of the story. But if there is no creator, if there's no

author, then I think it makes a lot of sense that we come to this notion of radical self-creation, because no one else can create the story except for me. And so we become the self-creators and we're just all telling different stories that don't really have so much of an objective grounding or purpose. Now, back in the mid-50s, Julian Huxley, who is the first head of UNESCO, so basically the United Nations group for education, science and culture. He's also the brother of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World that you mentioned,

which anticipates some of these themes of transhumanism. Julian Huxley years ago in the mid fifties wrote an essay where he used the term transhumanism in the sense that we understand it today of radically enhancing humanity and Advancing ourselves the evolutionary process. That's that's part of the account that we are not the end of the evolutionary Process we're just one step along the way and now we need to harness our technology to accelerate That process and maybe eventually make ourselves obsolete because we create something superior.

But he was talking in these terms of radically enhancing, of going beyond our limits. So a lot of people go back to him as a kind of father of transhumanism. But I want to go back much further in history. I want to go back to Dante, Dante the great Catholic poet. If you get to Paradiso, so his account of heaven, the last section of the Divine Comedy. The least interesting part in my estimation. Well, hopefully the real heaven is much more interesting than maybe the poem presents it to be. But if you get to Paradiso, to heaven, in the very first canto, like the first section,

Dante uses the term transhumanar, so transhumanize, right? To describe the saints, because they have gone beyond the limits of human nature. They are glorious and splendid, and they were able to do and act in ways that no human being could left to his own devices. So they transcended the limits of human nature and they were able to live the supernatural virtues and flourish and serve and praise the Lord. Christ's glorified body walking through doors. All of this, I guess, will be retrospectively looked at as a prophecy. So the transhumanists

can say, no, no, we want you as part of the story, Christians. You are the ones who prophesied this thing. Come alongside us and help us build this utopia together. Yeah. I mean, maybe there will be more dialogue along those lines, but I always find it fascinating that trans humanar was already present. And so this is an ancient concept, right? It describes what our life is about. It's divine grace. Second Peter 1, 4 talks of how we have this participation in the divine nature through divine grace.

So we are elevated. We are brought beyond our limits. I think in many ways that whether they're aware of it or not, the secular transhumanists of today are looking for the preternatural gifts. So the church speaks of preternatural gifts that Adam and Eve enjoyed. So the preternatural basically is that which perfects our human nature, but does not go beyond that nature. So there are kind of three main preternatural basically is that which perfects our human nature, but does not go beyond that nature. So there are kind of three main preternatural gifts that we can see in Adam and Eve. One would be the freedom from concupiscence.

Another would be infused knowledge. And a third would be bodily immortality. And I think that in a strange way, in an unexpected way, the secular transhumanists are trying to get these preternatural gifts back, right? So infuse knowledge. Think about all of the ways we can try to achieve cognitive enhancement. This freedom from concupiscence, well, think about how much work is done in terms of mood enhancement to bring a greater harmony and peace and joy to kind of get us over all this tension that we experience of anxiety and depression and sadness and so forth. And then of course bodily immortality that's a really big deal for

the secular transhumanists who speak of radical life extension and as I mentioned this idea of in some cases mapping out through whole brain emulation the data of our neurons to get the information that is us to then download it and transfer it to other substrates and perhaps up to the network to live on forever. But in this life, it's still always an earthly form of immortality. So I often say that the problem

with the secular transhumanist is not that they want too much and that the church has to come in and say, oh, just settle down. We could never get that. That's just a dream. You know, just be quiet and settle for this short little life of ours. It's not that the secular transhumanists want too much. It's that they settle for too little.

They're basically trying to get us back to the garden to the preternatural gifts The Catholic Church says no you are called to the supernatural trans human are the trans human are of Dante is above and beyond it's Supernatural and it is not something that we can ever engineer Through science or technology. Like I said, there are many great and beautiful ways that science and technology could be used well to help us live more virtuously, if we so choose. But there is nothing that will ever engineer or grant us the precious gift of divine grace

and enable each and every person, even those who never achieve even a healthy physical state or a kind of healthy level of emotional life or a healthy kind of cognitive level, right? Even the outcast, if you will, of society can be baptized and can live a flourishing divine life and be prepared for true eternity. Not just a quantitative extension of this life, but a qualitative elevation and leap forward above and beyond. That's what I want. I want the trans-humanar of Dante more than the secular trans transhumanist extension of this life. Mm. And I'm going to tell you guys about my new favorite app. It's called Ascension and it's by Ascension Press. This is the number one Bible study app in my opinion. And you can go to

ascensionpress.com slash frad, go there. And so that way they know that we sent you. It is absolutely fantastic. It has the entire Bible there, very well laid out. The whole Bible is read to you by Father Mike Schmitz or just sections of the Bible. It has the catechism there. It's cross-referenced absolutely beautifully. It's really actually quite difficult to explain to you how good this is. Just download it and check it out for yourself. It even has over 1600 frequently asked questions about scripture. So if you go to Genesis one, you might have a question about evolution. Well, there's a drop down right there. You can read an article that'll help you understand it.

I went through it with the guys at Ascension the other day and my mouth, my jaw was just it was dropped. It was absolutely amazing. It's had tens of thousands of five star reviews. Again, go to ascensionpress.com slash frad. It also has all of their amazing Bible studies. So I remember back in the day, I had a big DVD case of Jeff Kavan's Bible studies. Well, it's all there on the app. So go download it right now.

Please go to ascensionpress.com slash level. Right. Even the, the outcast, if you will, of society can be baptized and can live a flourishing divine life and be prepared for true eternity. Not just a quantitative extension of this life, but a qualitative elevation and leap forward above and beyond. That's what I want. I want the trans-humanar of Dante more than the secular trans-humanist extension of this life. And what I also find fascinating is that there are thinkers who recognize the connection between the stories

that are being told today by the trans-humanist and this older Christian story. One of my favorite authors in this area is Megan O'Giblin. And Megan O'Giblin grew up as a Christian. She studied theology as a Protestant, and so she was really thinking seriously about these issues. She had a falling out with Christianity, unfortunately. She set aside her Christian faith, and then she discovered Ray Kurzweil. So Ray Kurzweil for many years was the head engineer at Google.

And he has been talking about transhumanism, you know, before it was cool. Like he's been talking about these ideas of a singularity, of the meeting of machine and human intelligence to this breakthrough of superintelligence 2045 is that right? Yes, that's his goal of earthly immortality, this moment of super intelligence where the AI systems are capable of doing everything that we can do, they have all the capacities that we have and more and much better and they're our last invention because they can themselves invent and they will perhaps join with us for a period and then likely find us obsolete to bring us to a new stage

of existence. So he's been talking about the singularity and superintelligence and transhumanist ideas and potential earthly immortality for a long time. And so Megan O'Giblin, this fallen away Christian, she discovers Ray Kurzweil and she starts reading, oh, this is great, a rational, scientific account of life that kind of gives me direction and some purpose, but that does not depend on all of these fantastic stories of Christianity. And so now I have a more rational understanding of life.

But over time, she started to see all of the parallels between what Kurzweil was writing about and what she learned in Protestant seminary and in a Protestant university. She's, wait a second, wait a second, you're retelling the story and you're dressing it up in a lot of techno jargon at times and you're presenting it as a rational alternative but you're really demanding a lot of faith and you're proposing this mysterious future singularity, this kind of apocalyptic moment. It's a secular eschatology, right? It's a secular end times account. And you're demanding faith and hope that this salvation will be achieved. I don't think she draws this parallel, but you can think of the way in which so many forms of enhancement technology

are surrogates for the sacraments. They take off that role to kind of replace them. And she's saying basically you're retelling the story. And I think she's right about that. So she had a falling out then with transhumanism. Now she presents herself more as an agnostic. So I think she's searching. Mason- I see. So her falling out had to do with this isn't something that's really achievable. This is just repackaged Christianity. Instead of thinking this is the true Christianity. This is what we should really see. Can we have a good chance of attaining it? Exactly. She saw it as a retelling.

It's almost like a parody of Christianity. I think that we could also consider it almost a plagiarized Christianity that certainly is not as attractive or robust or full or satisfying as the original. Morality is interesting. So as we continue to grow cognitively, we have a greater capacity for evil, say, presumably the architects of this trans humanist universe are going to want to embed some form of morality. But it seems to me like speaking of reductionists, we've so greatly reduced morality to merely not interfering with another's autonomy. That's really all we mean. Nature doesn't come into account intrinsically evil acts,

presumably a set aside. So what does that look like? Yeah. So there are some really interesting proposals for moral enhancement as part of this project. Julian Savalaiscu, who for many years ran the UHERO Center of Practical Ethics at Oxford University, has been writing about this theme. He's moved to a university in Singapore, but he spent a lot of time at Oxford. And he wrote a whole book years ago called, Unfit for Humanity, or Unfit for the Future. And in Unfit for the Future, he basically says, look, we have evolved in a certain way.

And over the course of our evolutionary history, it was really helpful for us to survive by working together in a small little tribe. But the world is so much different now. We live in this globalized reality. And all of the big threats to the world are global problems. So he points out climate change, he points out weapons of mass destruction, he was writing about this already a decade ago,

so he would probably include today out of control AI systems, right? So our problems are global problems, which means we can't really just handle in our little tribe. But that's how we've been evolved, according to him, is just to think in those terms. So he says, we are unfit for the future and we basically need to do something drastic to get us in a better state. So he says, okay, we need to invest seriously in cognitive enhancement so that we can free ourselves of all the prejudice and the bias

that often affects our moral judgments negatively. And we also need to invest in emotional mood enhancements to help motivate us to actually do the good, right? Because plenty of people maybe know the good. We often know the good, but we can't find the motivation to do it. So we need that emotional boost. Plus, he thinks that we need the emotional bond and connection

with other people to collaborate with them. Otherwise, we're just going to focus on ourselves selfishly. Now, to his credit, he's very clear. Look, we haven't seen this work. Like, this hasn't worked yet. We don't have special moral enhancement approaches at the pharmaceutical level or the level of gene editing or through any other technique. So he's not saying we've achieved this but he's saying this is our only hope basically And so there are some interesting proposals right you take like Oxytocin right the so-called cuddle Cuddle hormone right the cuddle drug and so you increase oxytocin with the hope of oh

Then people will be less selfish, more inclined to bonding, more inclined to altruism. But it turns out that usually when we increase the oxytocin in these experiments, people are indeed more open and have a stronger sense of collaboration with their in-group. But there's a greater tendency, kind of a xenophobia, right? A suspicion of people who are not in that small in-group. So yeah, it may help bonding at a

small level, but remember, we're looking for a global altruism. We're looking for a collaboration at a global scale. So it doesn't seem like what we're doing now in terms of these what we're doing now in terms of these pharmacological approaches, increasing oxytocin or other experiments, is necessarily going to really give us the desired results. So that's just like at the level of scientific feasibility. There are questions of whether this is feasible. It doesn't seem like it's feasible now and it may never be. But then there are the the deeper philosophical questions. Who decides morality? Like what does it mean to live a good life? We're already thinking this aren't we with generated AI. When you ask questions about morality. Who's embedding these things into AI if anybody? Right. Yeah I

think it was a point where you could ask AI to tell you a joke about a man and then maybe it wouldn't give you a joke about a woman, for example. Oh, right, right. Or you could say something about certain races, but it wouldn't say something about other races. Right. So if that is the case, then who's interfering with that? And then you put that on this massive scale. What does that look like? Right, exactly. So we have to decide the correct morality. Some people say, well,

look, a person needs to be, have enough proper moral formation to even design the moral enhancement. But the moral enhancement is there to bring about proper moral motivation. So they, they say, well, there may be some limits there. But I think the deeper question is who is deciding the right morality? Like, do we all need to be conscience? Do we all need to be utilitarians? Can we make everyone a Thomist? Who decides the morality? And it's really difficult because a lot of these thinkers, Savalusco included, are very upfront about their neutrality

when it comes to metaphysics and their neutrality when it comes to objective morality. They say, it is not our place. They're very good disciples of Mill, of John Stuart Mill. This idea of political liberalism, of society is there to allow for a free range of different lifestyles. It's not the role of anyone to decide

which lifestyle is objectively superior or inferior. We just leave the space and the limiting factor is harm. Of course, harm itself is a pretty charged notion and the definition of that harm I think always implies a metaphysics and anthropology and an ethics. So I don't think we ever escape the dilemma, we ever escape the difficulty, and I just do not think it's possible to be neutral. But they present themselves as being very neutral so the question becomes, okay, who, who then decides what this moral enhancement looks

like? Um, you know, Savalaisku also has another really interesting proposal that I think also helps us remember that we're not just dealing with futuristic ideas when it comes to transhumanism. Years ago, he wrote about the idea of the principle of procreative beneficence. So basically, the principle of procreative beneficence is that couples or single reproducers have not just the possibility, but a kind of moral obligation to use technology at our disposal, especially right now, in vitro fertilization and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, to actively choose those children with the best chance of the best life possible. And so it is, I would argue, and others would argue, a kind of revived form of eugenics.

I was about to ask that. Yeah. But before we finally upload ourselves to the matrix, presumably we're going to, and people are living a lot longer or if they're living indefinitely, how then do we regulate births? Oh yeah. That's a terrifying thought, isn't it? Yeah.

So, yeah, so this idea is let's take a much more rational, reasonable approach, because procreation is messy. I mean, I'm not just talking about the sexual act, but the actual process of birth and childbearing and educating a child. And there are so many things that can go wrong at a genetic level or the level of environment and so forth. It's just, it's such a risk if you will. And so the idea is let's take a more rational approach and the ideas that any good parent is going to make efforts to provide a healthy diet for the child, to provide a quality education.

And so if we have technology to provide a better genetic makeup, it would be irresponsible not to do so, irresponsible to that child, but irresponsible to all of society. So let's actively harness this technology to create better children. Now, they're very upfront in saying that we are not at a point right now of so-called designer babies. Like a few years ago with

CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing developments, there was more talk and excitement about editing more precisely and creating designer babies. But the issue there is that while it's true, we can edit much more precisely and in particular genes, most of the traits that we want in these designer babies like intelligence or athletic ability or height or so forth are polygenetic. So it's not like there's just one gene you turn on, turn off, put in. There is an integrate relationship between these different genes that is very hard to map out and figure out,

plus a whole host of environmental factors afterwards that shape and decide how those traits play out. So they say, look, we're not at the level of designer babies. We can't create designer babies the way sometimes they're promoted on magazines, but we can at least use the technology at our disposal to, if you will, weed out the defects. I mean they might not want to be so clear and explicit about it, but that's basically the mentality. Weed out

the defects, the clear genetic losers. Then we can at least choose those who have good hopes of developing properly. And so this is a serious proposal and while again not everyone may be thinking of Julian Savalasco and the principle of procreative beneficence, I think there are plenty of people who are sympathetic to that idea. Hank Greeley in Stanford Stanford, geneticist there, he wrote a book years ago called The End of Sex and the Future of Reproduction. And he basically said, look, we need to get over

this whole way of reproduction right now. I mean, if people in the future want to have recreational sex, okay, more power to them. But in terms of the good of our society and the good of the future, let's be more reasonable here and let's embrace the technology we have. But of course, it brings back all of these profound ethical questions. You can say you're morally neutral, but if you're given the power to decide what the so-called best life for your very, very vulnerable embryonic child is,

then you're wielding tremendous power over them, and you are making a pretty strong metaphysical, anthropological, ethical judgment. Maybe you haven't articulated it, but it's implicit in what you choose and what you do not choose. It reminds me a lot of C.S. Lewis. We mentioned him earlier, right? In Abolition of Man, he was already talking about the idea of more selective breeding back in the 40s. And he said, this dream of man's mastery over nature

ends up becoming the mastery of some men over others with nature as the instrument. So we talk about being more reasonable and rational and scientific, but in the end, it's a minority group with power exercising that power over a large vulnerable population. And even the very notion that we can simply dispose with, abandon so many embryos in this process,

is already implicitly at least a very firm commitment to the controversial idea that these are not persons, that they do not have dignity, that they do not have value. We can have the argument about their identity and their value, but it seems unfair to claim a neutrality about metaphysical questions, while then kind of implicitly saying, oh, but those aren't important people.

That's biological material that can be disposed with so that we can protect and promote the superior embryos. And then of course, the question of, okay, what characteristics do I give to this particular child or that child kind of want or adapt well to those characteristics? And then there are also some odd self-contradictions involved. I could foresee, for instance, if this notion began to spread, that according to the principle, you would have parents who say, gosh, we live in a very sexist, racist country. And that's a bad thing. And because of sexism and racism, people of

color and women are just unfairly at a disadvantage. We hate sexism. We hate racism. So therefore, we will actively choose a white male child. You see kind of the the tragic irony involved in that I'm not just talking about The wicked racist and sexist who are going to try to get the master race. Mm-hmm. It's People who are good and who who correctly oppose these problems in society, who fall into the logic of procreative beneficence and say, well, as a responsible parent, one of the best things I can do is prevent my child from ever experiencing

the horrible disadvantage and pain of being subject to racism or sexism, which means I will actively avoid having children of certain colors or a certain sex. So you see some of the odd contradictions involved in this. And of course, just the mass sacrifice of life for the sake of the betterment of humanity, right? It's that the irony we see throughout history, so often people who want to improve the future of humanity do so by destroying concrete

particular actual human beings along the way. And the charge of eugenics is definitely there, but some thinkers, sympathetically this idea will say, well, yes, it's eugenics, but it's not like the bad old eugenics. The bad old eugenics was bad because you were dealing with this tyrannical government, this authoritative government that it was imposing itself

on the public and trying to create a society according to its interests. Now this is liberal eugenics. And by liberal eugenics, we mean that basically we are respecting the autonomy of the reproducers in their autonomous choices about their reproductive freedom. And so it's still liberal and it's not like the bad old eugenics. But of course, I think that the end goal is basically the same, to improve the human gene pool

and to purify and improve the future species, sacrificing those perceived to be an inferior along the way. And for all the talk of respect for liberal autonomy, whose autonomy, right? The autonomy of the strong grown up rich people who can afford this very expensive technology, not the autonomy of the thousands, hundreds of thousands of embryos who are created and abandoned and in some cases destroyed. When you look up transhumanism on YouTube or other places, there's a pretty bleak view about it, it seems to me. I was expecting there to be this kind of celebratory feel about it, but it seems like the common

man is anticipating what you're talking about, this elite group of people imposing it upon the rest of us. Do you agree with that assessment or do you think there's a growing movement of people who are willing to adopt transhumanism or, third option, are we all imbibing the transhumanist philosophy without even realizing it with our smartphones and smartwatches and things until one day we're just sort of, it's just, here's what it is. transhumanist philosophy without even realizing it with our smartphones and smartwatches and things until one day we're just sort of, it's just, here's what it is. Yes, so I think there are definitely people out there

who are afraid of these ideas. I think that there are legitimate reasons for concern. I mean, what I just described is definitely concerning and is already taking place and needs to be stopped and halted, right? And so there are areas that are very negative and bleak. The projects of digital immortality, I think, are ultimately philosophically impossible because we cannot abandon an essential element of humanity, namely, animality.

According to you, it's essential. Right? According to you, it's essential. Right. We could set that aside to prolong humanity, but that's a whole philosophical debate and conversation. But I think that beyond the small number of people who have either adopted these ideas or have thought seriously in critiquing them, there is a large, large group, as you correctly described, who are just sort of being prepared for these ideas and who are already, in a sense, sympathetic to the idea. I mean, hey, all of us live a much more disembodied existence

than we did, say, a decade ago. I mean, we live our digital lives. We're living a digital life right now with our viewers. We're going to spend time on our phones later. Some people are really immersed in video gaming. Others are immersed in film or YouTube, whatever it may be, right? We live a more disembodied experience. We have so many relationships primarily through texts rather than face-to-face conversations. You think of how Zoom meetings are replacing in-person meetings, all of the conversations in business about, hey, wouldn't it be a lot more cost-efficient to reduce the office time

and so forth? And, you know, wouldn't that be a better, more productive way of working? And so there are all these ways in which we are living a more disembodied experience. And hey, that makes it a lot more credible and believable to say, huh, maybe we could just go further. Like maybe I could cast off this microphone or I could cast off this body of mine that is just getting more frail and weak and limiting. So I think we are, we're being trained.

We're always trained by our technological use. And I don't say this to like scare us or to send people onto the streets to smash their phones, but you're being trained. So, so be aware. And I also just want to come back to a point when we're describing the her situation and we're describing how more and more people today are already having these kind of intimate, even romantic relationships with AI systems, their digital devices, and how that's only going to skyrocket in the future. Well, first we can say, okay, that's weird.

And we can say, that's bad. But we can't leave it there. Like we need to help people find the real, meaningful, embodied relationships that they hunger for and that they crave. Look, if a person is having a friendship or is romantically involved with an AI system, then something is not being filled in that person's heart. And rather than just dismiss him or her as a weirdo, how about forming a friendship and helping that individual? Because that person pretty much craves the same thing

that you and I crave, Matt, to love and be loved. Certainly at the divine level of our relationship with God, but also in our friendships and our families and our community. And so I think that we all need to step back and say, hey, we're living a very disembodied existence, and some of these tools are helping us do wonderful things. It's helping us spread pints with Aquinas, and it's helping us to spread all of this great teaching of the Church.

And I'm part of a scholarly advisory board for magisterium AI, which is a generative AI system. So people can chat with the magisterium and get their questions answered accurately is our, is our idea without hallucinations. Uh, so these tools can be helpful, but we all need to step back and say, look, this disembodied experience is forming me. And I need to make sure that these are AIDS and never ever replacements for the real deal. But what if I say to you that what if I what if I argue that that's not possible like it's it's going to come to a point and maybe we're already there where you are not using your tool as much as your tool is using you.

You can pretend to because you'd like the idea of being autonomous, but I mean, how many people say that they're not a slave to their phones, but you look at them for any given period of time, and it very much seems that they are. So I know that inanimate objects can't be intelligent, but it seems like they have mastery over us, these things that were meant to serve us. I mean, we all realize that.

Do we have mastery over us? So at what point can we say the nice things like that about, yeah, just don't get carried away, and when it's like, it's too late, it's way too late for that. We're all carried away. And then I wonder at what point are we going to see a kind of silent revolution where it might be a good idea for people to go into the streets and smash their phones and computers and to begin live in human communities. And those human communities will end up looking as barbarous as did the protagonist in brave new world at the end.

You remember? Right, right. Yeah. I mean, it may perhaps get to that point where we need these more radical, dramatic actions. And I wonder where that line is. Like at what point do you realize, oh, it's too far, the Amish were right, or whoever. Well, I think already now what we have to do is be more radically honest with ourselves.

Like you're right to say that there are moments in our own lives where we're already controlled by our devices and it's not enough just to say, oh I'm going to make sure my screen time is at a certain number of minutes, right? Because it's not just the timing, it's the way in which even if the phone's present, it beckons, it calls, it's there, I'm thinking about it. And then on my more disciplined days, I'm thinking about how I shouldn't be thinking about it, and I'm wasting time and energy on that. So we do have to think more seriously about radical discipline, right? Like, I mean, recently I was giving spiritual direction to someone and I just mentioned to him,

oh, and I found that it's very helpful that I begin my day with a holy hour, a personal prayer in silence, and I find it very helpful to enter into that holy hour, a personal prayer in silence, and I find it very helpful to enter into that holy hour because I turn off the phone. I don't just silence the phone, I turn off the phone and I put it to sleep. Radical idea. Yeah, yeah. It's like, it seems pretty simple to me. And I carry around this like old dumb phone that I just use as an alarm. So if I need an alarm, I have the alarm and I don't have to depend on the phone because that way I'm not tempted to look at all the notifications that will just create a lot of anxiety about all the things I need to do and address. And I'm not

even using energy to not look at the notifications. I'm just not even thinking about it and I can enter more easily into prayer. Like very simple practice, but it's like, wow, I never thought of that. Like I'm, and I mean, many people have never thought about that. And I'm, is a very intelligent man. It's never really considered that I'm going to buy a, an alarm clock today and I'm going to do that. Right? Like those simple practices that maybe some people seem kind of extreme, like, I know I need the phone all the time. What if there's an emergency? What if someone needs to get to me?

Um, those sorts of, uh, practices in our life are key already. And we probably need more, like we need more parameters. We need more discipline for freedom, right? It's not to punish ourselves. It's discipline for freedom, for joy, so that we can really use these. Because I'm definitely not of the technology is just completely neutral school, right? Like there are intelligent human beings who make this technology, right? And we've seen more recently that there are a lot of attorney generals now from different states across the political spectrum who are joining together and filing suits against Metta and

companies like this to say, you created knowingly products that have enticed and ensnared miners in this case. I mean, they're pretty good at doing it with adults, but in this case, the focus was on miners. And you knew what you were doing and you purposely preyed on their vulnerabilities and you've created this situation of greater anxiety and depression and envy and worry and self-loathing. And you've created notification systems that are affecting negatively their sleep. And you knew what you were doing

and it was good for your business model. And therefore we're taking steps against you, right? So, I mean, it's just one concrete example and reminder that while these are inanimate objects and tools, they're created by intelligent human beings and some of the most intelligent in the world who have a specific business model and are not so much interested in your vibrant, virtuous, flourishing life as in your connection and your engagement and the amount of ads that you're seeing and the products that you're consuming. So we do need to be aware that we're up against that and that we do need to introduce more

radical discipline and distance into our lives so that we have space to cultivate what we love most. Like, if I have a deep, meaningful relationship with God, with my family, with my friends, with people in my community, then I'm going to be less inclined to seek out a surrogate, a replacement in my Snapchat chatbot or in a sexbot, brothel or whatever it may be. And so I think that we need to do all we can to cultivate the art of living, like to recover maybe some things we've forgotten and to re-embrace our animality,

to re-embrace what it means to be an embodied creature. Yeah, let's continue to cultivate our intellectual, our spiritual lives, but that's always an embodied life. So sports and dance and prayer and ritual to cultivate our intellectual, our spiritual lives, but that's always an embodied life. So sports and dance and prayer and ritual and face-to-face conversation are all really beautiful, meaningful practices that for most of humanity we kind of entered into without too much thought that now perhaps we need to more consciously choose and prioritize so that we have a greater freedom and strength and joy in our lives that make these other items seem less interesting. I think that's part of the key that our technology should often be much less interesting than the people we're with and the

relationships we're having. So it's certainly a challenging time. There are lots of challenges and difficulties to face, but I think we also need to focus in on these opportunities to help cultivate these relationships. And hey, if the church is really what she says she is, if she's a master of humanity, and she knows the meaning and purpose of our lives, and she knows what virtue is about, she knows the goal of our existence, then she should be there on the forefront of helping people enter into a much richer life, a happier life, a more fulfilling life.

Again, I don't know in the future what sort of disciplines will be needed when we're gonna be smashing our phones or our computers or our virtual reality systems or whatever that may be. It'll begin with the hipsters. There'll be a backlash in small communities of people who are already seeing it right who are getting back to the land this kind of idea. What are some kind of upcoming developments in technology that maybe we haven't heard of. Are there artificial eyeballs yet?

Will there be soon? Like what else are we, that's on the horizon that won't just replace a deficiency, but may even enhance, what are we seeing? You mentioned cholesterol, but. Yeah, yeah, so I mean, there are advances in prosthetics, different replacements, people who've lost legs for different reasons or arms who are able to, you know, experience kind of a closer experience of that life that they once had.

And then there were already debates about, well, what happens when, say, these artificial legs help someone to run faster than a human being. First off, there's just the traditional sport question of is this fair or not? That you have people who maybe generally use this as a treatment because of some tragedy and they use it as a treatment now they're competing against other people. Is it fair that they compete in the in the same competition and so forth? But then there's kind of that additional pressure of, oh well if I could get an advantage, might I want to just chop off my healthy limb to get this advantage? Because I actually care more about winning this race than I do even about having fully

functioning legs. And if the answer is yes, then it would seem that there's going to be a growing industry of people who are surgically removing limbs such that you're doing ultimate damage to your bodily integrity and you can have this prosthetic limb put on. Right, right. So yeah, so I think that's a whole area that's going to develop and that we need to reflect on a lot. And then people will be saying, well, if you didn't allow doctors to cut off healthy limbs, you're going to have backyard. Oh yeah. Like back alley abortions, you'll have back alley people lopping off their legs. There was a book that came out in the early 2000s from Carl Elliot, Better Than Well,

and he was already talking about enhancements. What a great title, Better Than Well. Yeah, it's a great book. He's an excellent storyteller, a great philosopher, and he's looking at how this enhancement impulse is already with us, right? And he looks at this phenomenon at the time of apotemnophilia, which we tend to call

bodily integrity identity disorder. And this apotemnophilia is this kind of strong, persistent sense that I need to amputate or remove a limb that doctors declare to be healthy. And it's not just, oh, this feels weird on me. It's that I need to actively remove this. And they'll go to the doctors and so many of the doctors that said, no, no, I'm not going to do that.

I've analyzed you and you're of good health, go forward and so forth. But then the patients would come back and say, no, no, it's just, it's causing me a lot of distress. And you know what, doc, if you don't do this, I might commit suicide. And so you have these good doctors who had refused to do it earlier,

who kind of come in and say, okay, well, we'll do it now because I don't want this person to commit suicide, right? So we see that today in our own cultural climate, it's a concern of, if I don't- You want a living daughter or a dead son? That kind of manipulative language. Right, that's sort of a rhetoric. So imagine if that's extended to other areas of our lives.

You know, if you took that mentality of the true inner self and the outward body to be manipulated according to the wishes and dreams and desires of that true inner self, gosh, I'm a star athlete. That's who I am. And I am willing and happy to take off all of this outdated flesh or a few of these limbs to get that competitive edge.

And I don't know if I can handle being refused that. I might be being refused that. I might be a mental distress. I don't want to belittle those who are dealing with other, say, forms of bodily identity struggles, but I could foresee more and more these sorts of situations and that kind of that high demand. And then the whole realm, realm of course not just of the decisions we make as adults but the decisions that our parents make. I mentioned very briefly this

CRISPR-Cas9 technology. It's actually based on something that bacteria have been doing for ages and we found that bacteria are able to in in a sense, remember genetically invading viruses. And so they'll have some of the code of that invading virus so that the next time it comes, the bacteria is able to focus in and kind of cut and disable that virus. So by 2012 or so we realized, oh we could take that CRISPR technology and we could develop a messenger RNA to guide the Cas9, so it's the CRISPR associated protein, and we could guide it to a very precise point in the human genetic code to remove, alter, or replace part of that code. Now, on the one hand, that's really exciting

and I think positive because it has potential to help treat the say diseases that are tied specifically to say a single gene. So Huntington's disease which involves problems of the nerve cells that deteriorate over time in the brain, sickle cell anemia which inhibits the transfer of oxygen through the body, cystic fibrosis which creates this kind of mucus buildup in the person. So you have these really difficult conditions that are tied more specifically to a single

gene. So CRISPR-Cas9 and other similar gene editing technologies are better than ever in doing kind of, some have described as the control F of UKU find, and you can very precisely edit. Now that's very promising for these treatments, and there's some talk of, okay, well, could we also use that for enhancement? Now it's even more complicated because in addition to this therapy enhancement distinction,

there's also a fundamental distinction between germline and somatic cell editing. So basically somatic cell just means the cells of your body. So you may be able to alter the state, we hope improve the state of these individuals, as children, as adults, and whatever you do affects that person. Now there are still risks about off-site editing, basically it's a precise technique but maybe it cuts in the wrong place or maybe there are some unintended consequences like you alter this gene and it brings this benefit but it brings this negative consequence that we didn't anticipate. So in the sad situation that something goes wrong, it goes wrong in that individual.

And that's the sad end of the story. But germline basically refers to this more initial state. So sperm, egg, especially the work that's being done at the embryonic level. Now, what you do at that level is going to then, in a sense, be passed on, and it will affect also your descendants. So let's say changing one gene has positive consequence but also a really negative consequence, but maybe that doesn't even show up for a few generations, but okay, that's already, in a sense, been unleashed, right? And so the notion of using CRISPR-Cas9 for gene editing at a germline level

has already, it seems, become a reality. Back in 2018, there was a scientist at a major gene editing conference in Hong Kong. And some of the organizers said, oh, well, this is gonna be a pretty boring conference, but we have to go through it and we'll listen to each other's papers and da da da. And he dropped a bombshell. this is going to be a pretty boring to protect at least their identity in that sense. But I've genetically engineered Luluanana. And the idea here is that he went in for the CCR5 gene

associated with HIV resistance. And so now they're resistant to HIV, and this is something that theoretically is passed on to future generations. So, you know, on the one hand, they're like, oh, okay, that's nice, right? But then we don't know how precisely they were edited. We don't know if there were off-target effects.

We don't know if, in the sense, the CRISPR took for the whole person or only partially. We don't know if there were even maybe enhancements that were also included. We don't know about negative consequences in that. So there was this international outcry and a call for a moratorium on using CRISPR-Cas9 or other similar gene editing procedures at the germline level. So we need to kind of figure out the safety and efficacy of this. Now, part of it is a genuine sense that like,

this is potent technology and we're not sure if we should unleash it. But then one of the cynical readings was like, there were people in the audience who were jealous that he did it first and they're ready to do it, but they'll send him off as a scapegoat and then they'll work it on themselves. So yeah, there are a lot of questions on that. I mean, for instance, if we could, because sometimes we find mutations

like the CCR Delta 32 mutation that gives that resistance to HIV. Well, what if we could kind of tweak people to have that? Or what if we could work with PCSK9, which is associated with cholesterol synthesis in the liver? What if that was another way of lowering cholesterol? So there are some promising areas of, you could even say, a kind of genetic enhancement that if done safely, if done effectively could really benefit us, but there is a general global hesitancy about this. And right now we're still at a state where we're not sure how feasible some of our dreams are,

but it's still so important for us to already begin doing the work of ethical reflection and analysis so that when what was yesterday's scientific challenge becomes like tomorrow's standard practice, we're actually ready to address it and we're ready to help people. So yeah, there's a genetic level, there's prosthetics,

there's, yeah, there's so many new forms of technology, brain computer interface is also accelerating. I was gonna bring that up. I have a little podcast called Sibling Horror. I write little horror stories. One of them is called Patriots for those who are interested. But in this imagined future, there was something called a mind phone, which is just what you're talking about where they would somehow have the brain and the phone merge so that you have this kind of super intelligence, which doesn't sound terribly far away. What might that look like?

Some sort of, what do you say, you put in your eye to see instead of glasses. Okay, so what are they called? Your contact. Yeah, like a contact lens that somehow you're able to see things that you look up, you can look it up mentally, that sort of thing. Yeah, I think of augmented reality.

Actually, when I go through the Colosseum in Rome, I often think of augmented reality technology because you go there, you've been there, and they're ruins and they're impressive, but it's really hard to get a sense of what it was like in their glory days. So imagine being able to see the structure and to maybe hear some of the conversations that were taking place, the political debates, the philosophical reflections, the squabbles in the marketplace,

and really get a greater sense. And so you think like, wow, on an educational cultural level, wouldn't that be amazing? And wouldn't it be amazing if that technology were available to practically anyone? Sure, I guess. I don't know. Right. But then of course, there is that idea of immersion. With every advancement, there's a poverty that you don't usually see until months later.

But what might that look like? I mean, what do you think? I'm not asking your kind of educated opinion. I'm just inviting you to speculate with me as to what the future of the phone is, because we used to call it a phone and then we realized it's a computer. That's what it is. And it's a computer in our pocket. It's more convenient than a laptop. So like in 30, 50 years from now, what does the phone look like? What is a phone, would you think? Yeah. Again, your uneducated opinion. Sure, sure. Everyone loves hearing the guest's uneducated opinion. So I do think we're going in the direction

of ever more immersive technology, though I will admit that there was some pushback on the launch of the metaverse. And I still think that there's a kind of cultural resistance to putting on a big helmet and like being lost. Do you remember the google glasses that we talked about 12, 15 years ago? Didn't take off. Yeah. So I think there's still a bit of resistance like we like to have that sense that I can still pull out of this. Yeah. Like we may spend a lot more time on looking at our screen

than we realize or that we should. While we're driving, emailing. Right, but there's still that sense of like, oh, I could pull away. I mean, we kind of sound like the alcoholic who said I could stop any time I want, but there is some sense of, yeah, you could pull away a lot more easily than maybe if this is a more immersive experience.

So I suspect that the companies just have to find a way to develop a more attractive version of this immersive experience and to really sell all of the benefits for education, for entertainment, for business collaboration. And I think we're going that direction, which means it's all the more important that we keep these like human skills. No, no, no. You're doing your educated opinion again. I'm asking you, what will the phone look like? Oh, well, I don't think well.

The 50 years, is it going to be somehow stitched into our hand or? Yeah, I mean, it shouldn't be that hard to develop more forms of technology that's integrated seamlessly into our body, perhaps at our birth, whatever that looks like in the future. I mean, in the upload series, it's already typical where they just sort of do this with their hand and expand their fingers and the little hologram screen comes up and they can have a extra realistic FaceTime there just by flicking open their hand. So I could see us going in that direction.

I mean, hey, if we can think of something that sounds kind of cool in a TV series, why can't we just do it in reality? And then perhaps in order for that to happen, you would have to have new eyeballs or at least something attached into your. Yeah, I mean, I think we'll definitely go the direction of more inserts.

Look, right now people are kind of scared of Neuralink and I think the Neuralink work is primarily in helping, like Elon Musk and company, that's primarily looking right now at helping people with paralysis, right? Like if you have a spinal cord injury and you want to somehow interact more fully with your environment,

like there's not a neurological damage but there's a kind of break in the bridge at the spinal cord. And so you want to connect the fully functioning neurons and the signals they're sending to the external environment. So it's a lot of kind of moving, beautiful work that's helping people with paralysis interact with the environment.

But he's also clear that like he anticipates this technology could give us a more kind of direct, spontaneous, natural, if you will, involvement, integration with the internet. And it ruins so much of our human conversation. So if you've used this analogy before, where you and I might talk about who won the Super Bowl, there's that lovely human element of not being sure and speculating, or didn't this happen?

But now that's sort of subverted by somebody just pulling out their iPhone and kind of element of not being sure and speculating or didn't this happen. Right. But now that's sort of subverted by somebody just pulling out their iPhone and kind of ruining a nice conversation, I think. Oh yeah. That's just going to continue. I mean, if you want kind of the, the, yeah, uninformed opinion about where these tech designers might go, I could definitely imagine us just sitting around in any given room, whether it's a restaurant or your own living room, and having one of those squabbles

about the Super Bowl, and then of course the AI system just intervening to correct us and put us in our place. Like you silly humans basically. Like, hey, you're distracting me with your faulty memories. Like here is the exact score, the statistics, the MVP. Like an annoying friend who's always correcting you. Right, right, so we might all have, you know, lots of annoying friends around us just to chime in

at any moment, even if we don't desire it. You know, I was also, I haven't had a chance to write it yet, but I was thinking of a kind of sci-fi futuristic novel. Tell me. And so you would have your standard global catastrophe. Let's say it's AI weapons of mass destruction and climate change rolled into one somehow. So the world is falling apart and then the survivors are still around trying to you know figure out what it's like to live without their devices and their computers that they've become so dependent on. And quickly, an elite comes to power and they have been formed in the

liberal arts and they are able to write in cursive and they are able to give discourses and they've memorized poetry and they have engaged in rational thought and studied logic and can put syllogisms together and make music and they have all these wonderful skills from their liberal arts education and they rise to the top of society. But it turns out that they have actually... He is the twist. Which of course will ruin this novel that I will now never write. It turns out that they are actually the ones responsible for this global catastrophe and they have been

consciously training their children and generations. And they have been training their children with all this liberal arts education, not so much because they love knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but because they realize that that will put them at distinct advantage over all of the other people who are enslaved to their tech. Now here's another thing. Okay, so if we're, if, if transhumanism is moving to the point where we're all, at least the wealthy, maybe the rest to hell with them, but the rest can upload our consciousness

to the computer. Yeah. So what would it look like? Imagine this, this would be a cool story in 3000 years from now, maybe more, where all that exists on planet Earth are non-human creatures and hard drives. And we exist within those hard drives. That's probably where this is heading. I mean, just on a very practical level, if it is true that we can upload our consciousness, then the Earth will just be a place to safeguard hard drives. And we won't need humans to tend them because we'll have robots to tend them

to be sure that nothing goes wrong. That'd be so cool though if there was like a family of people in a bunker that came out and just unplugged everything. Yeah, well then, what would they do then? I mean, how do they envision that? I mean, we've got to take into account what some cosmologists, I think all cosmologists,

would say is the inevitable heat death of the universe. Right. Who wrote that excellent book, The Time Traveler at the end, you know, as the sun has grown large in the sky and most things are extinct, H.G. Wells. Oh yes. So I mean, this has to end in death one way or another,

doesn't it? Right, right. Well, yeah, I mean, it, many- Unless we can find another universe with another sun and we can just keep moving. Yeah, so many cosmologists definitely are concerned about- But that would have to be a multiverse, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. Right. And there is a, there are some real proposals

about space colonization, right? Part of the idea is that we probably will exhaust the resources here. And so we need to get to another planet, which of course means that we're going to deal with another environment, which means that we're going to deal with another environment, which means that we might need to actually enhance people to adapt properly to that environment.

I actually just read a piece in the New York Times of an excerpt from a whole book on space travel, and the particular question is like, wait a second, do we even know how to reproduce in space? Like, will this even work in terms of physics and gravity and so forth? So there's a number of concerns you can say about the feasibility of these projects, but still the idea is that, yeah, we have to colonize another planet and improve it. Lewis, as usual, was already writing about this decades ago, but it's true. Even

the universe itself seems to be on a time clock. And so there is a limit there. And we run up again and again against these limits. So I'm, I have no problem with us increasing the average lifespan of human beings. I mean, we've done it before in terms of medical care, and maybe your average person will live for an extra decade or two or three in the future. And to their credit, the transhumanists usually speak of extending the healthy lifespan. So they don't simply want us to spend another hundred years shriveled up in a hospital bed

in pain and agony. They imagine us living these kind of physically fit, vibrant, stimulating lives for a longer period of time before eventually getting up to the cloud. So I don't have a problem with that necessarily, but again the question is like, okay what are you gonna do with another five years or ten years or 15 years or 50 years? Like okay you can write that novel that you always wanted to write or I can write my sci-fi book that I've always wanted to write that I've already spoiled on air, or, you know, we can do a lot of other meaningful things, but it seems that all of that will also come to an end. So I'm also quite interested

in what comes after that. And so I think this is also a cultural moment for us as Christians to repurpose the beauty and splendor of what we have to offer in terms of our promise of eternal life and to say, okay, this is really a good thing that there are people out there who are interested in immortality, who are interested in moving beyond some of the limits of this life. Who can have a hunch that something's not right?

Like something went wrong. Aging, sickness, suffering, death, like, this doesn't seem right. And the Christian says, yep, something did go wrong. It was Genesis 3, right? And the whole chaos introduced by original sin and the ripple effects and the disorders that that introduced in our relationship with God and our relationship with each other, our relationship within ourselves, and even our relationship with the external environment. Yeah, like we can agree that something went profoundly wrong. But the issue here is that many of the supposed solutions that the transhumanists offered are, in some cases, legitimate helps and aids along the way

to assist us in our pilgrimage, right? Like it's a, they're nice items to have in our knapsack as we continue on our pilgrimage, but they're not the end goal of the pilgrimage. They can help us. There'll be a better experience along the way, but we actually know where that pilgrimage is going. Like we know the destination and I think we actually know where that pilgrimage is going. We know the destination.

And I think we need to repropose that. I'm not saying it's easy, but I think there is room for this kind of dialogue. And we certainly do not have to be simply afraid of technology. Yeah, there are some technological abuses that we need to be cautious about. But I think

that it would be a disservice to us and to the larger world if we only, like, dwelt on how wicked and horrible and scary all of these developments are. If instead we say, okay, there's a new development, let me think about this, let me assess it, and let me see how this could potentially be part of a good life. And if it's not, I'll show why. But maybe I can incorporate this, but as a relative good, not as the end all. Like this is something to help me not to replace a good life. I'm really glad. I want to tell you about a course that I have created for men to overcome pornography. It is called Strive21.com slash Matt. You go there right

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go through on your own, because literally tens of thousands of men have now gone through this course. And as you go through the different videos, there's comments from men all around the world encouraging each other, offering to be each other's accountability partners and things like that. Strive 21, that's Strive21.com slash Matt or as I say, text Strive to 66866 to get started today. You won't regret it. I'm really glad you're thinking about this. I'm glad you're writing about it, lecturing about it, interacting with those who are proposing it because once this does come to the fore and it really hasn't, I mean it has in your quarters and it ripples online, but then it's all these questions of emerging technology that we're all involved in.

And it's our time to think about how to live our current technological, technocentric lives better. That's what it's about. It's about living our lives with more virtue and happier lives, not about kind of, I don't know, retreating or running away. It's about using this better with all due discipline. So I'm not sure if I ever got a real answer to this earlier, not because you were evading it,

but just because I don't think we went there. Is it okay to be better than well? Like, does the Catholic Church permit one to be better than well? And by better than well, what I mean is not merely supplementing a poverty or reversing aging, but to actually be better than you ought to be. Yeah.

Maybe say that better than I just did, because I don't know if that made sense. So my short answer would be, yes. Yes, we can be better than well. Now, this is not a magisterial statement, because the Church has not put out a special document on transhumanism. Maybe I can get together. We know who the ghostwriter is. Exactly. Before I get too distracted, I just want to tell you a story of Pope Francis about this. So I was at the International Thomistic Congress last year and we had this encounter with the

Pope and the participants were brought into this beautiful hall and we had this encounter with the pope and the participants were brought in to this beautiful hall and we were blessed to come up and have a short one-on-one greeting. It wasn't your typical hundred thousand people in St. Peter's Square just see if you can stand on top of someone, watch out for the nuns to take out your kneecaps because they will so that you maybe can like touch the side of the pope. Or it was a more calm, controlled environment. So I came up to the, and I've been privileged to meet the pope briefly on other occasions. So I thought, well, I want to say something a little bit different. Right. So I came up, I greeted the Holy father and I said, you know, Holy father, I asked for prayers, especially for my work and in evangel in evangelizing culture and in this dialogue

with transhumanists. And he looked at me with this perplexed look. Now, I said it in Spanish, so I knew he understood. It wasn't a failure to understand the words, but he looked at me a little confused and then he nodded, which I actually really appreciated because I could tell that he thought about what I was saying. Yes. It wasn't just, oh yeah, sure, whatever. Oh, yeah, flexibly, yeah.

He had really thought about what I was saying. He was surprised because I doubt anyone else was asking for prayers for their work with transhumanists, but I did from the Holy Father. And after a thoughtful deliberation, he agreed to pray for my work with transhumanists. So I'm very happy about that. So anyways, there's not yet a document. Maybe he told someone in the Dicastery for the Doctor of the Faith, we need a document on this. So he came in, so after the greeting, yeah, we continued on with the conference, but there's no official document from the Church about this theme. And the Church has clearly expressed in a bioethics document from 2007, I believe, its concern about some enhancement projects and the fear that that was going to lead to a greater stratification in society, a greater division between the haves and the have-nots,

between those who could have access to this enhancing technology and were going to be stronger and faster and more competent and intelligent and so forth, and that they were just going to take on more and more power and manipulate those without access to this technology. So the church has expressed some concern about this enhancement technology, so I don't want to give the impression that she's just gung-ho on board. Yeah, enhance all you like. But I do think, as I had mentioned earlier, that there is room to legitimately embrace therapeutic enhancements. So enhancements,

things that are making us through biotechnology, through pharmacology, through whatever approach, are making us healthier than healthy. Like moving us above and beyond the statistical norm for health. You know what's gonna be weird is when we can see further than Tolkien's elves, okay, and make no noise like the hobbits. And I wonder at what point in human history if this continues to go on for thousands of years that the scriptures become unintelligible to us. We wouldn't understand why this human didn't, I don't know, fly or see further than he should be able to. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. And then we'll need new translations perhaps or a ton of footnotes.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We probably will, but I think we already do, right? You think of so many stories that would have just been immediately intelligible to these bumbling apostles. And we need to spend three years studying languages and historical critical analysis just to basically start to understand what they understood immediately through their life experience. So I think you're right, but I think we already need a lot of help going back to that culture. But this was weird, is if we advance our natural human capabilities, and then the glorified state in heaven doesn't involve those advances, won't it be in some sense a poverty?

Does that make sense? Well, it would. It would. Thankfully, I'm quite confident that the glorified body is going to be even better than whatever we managed to do here on Earth with our enhanced bodies. So thankfully, the glorified body will be qualitatively superior. And again, it's that supernatural, not just the kind of effort to get back to the preternatural and to perfect this nature, but it will be truly supernatural, be above and beyond what we could ever create or design ourselves. So we'll be superior. And that's, you know, Paul is very modest and he says, eye has not seen, ear has not heard is not even entered to the heart of man.

What is prepared for those who love him? So he basically says, look, we don't know exactly what it's going to be like, but it's going to be better than what you think it's going to be like. And it's so much above and beyond what we might conceive or dream or fantasize with that he doesn't even really have the words to describe it. So I think we can at least hold firm to that promise and not worry about the disappointment.

Also this question, the kind of tweaking with these capacities, it makes me think too, there's some reflections about, well, what if we were able to expand our, say, different senses, say our sight beyond the current visual perspective range? Well, maybe we'd have these great infrared or ultraviolet experiences that we can't appreciate now, but maybe we would lose out on the kind

of aesthetic experiences that this visual range permits. Right? So it's always that question too of what sort of trade-offs are involved. And so I think that we can be hopeful about some of these developments and see new opportunities, but also we have to be kind of modest about how much the tweaking will really bring us

and what kind of satisfaction will come from that. It seems like there's a moral question here about making human beings guinea pigs, which it seems like we're going to be for the next several hundred years until we can effectuate some of these things. Obviously, if I don't intend to harm and I intend to benefit,

then perhaps I'm not culpable for that harm. But if if I don't intend to harm and I intend to benefit, then perhaps I'm not culpable for that harm. But if we've got good reason to think that the more we tinker with humanity, the more we see these unintended side effects flaring up, at what point, or is there a point where it's like, no more? This is no longer a moral thing to engage in. Yeah, so I think that the moratorium

at an international level on using CRISPR-Cas9, this gene editing procedure. I don't know what that word means. Oh, so. Moratorium, what is that? Oh, moratorium basically is just stop it, like a global stopping. So there's a sort of agreement among scientists

that precisely for these reasons that you described of not knowing exactly the full scale of consequences and negative effects, it would be irresponsible for us to go forward. That's what moratorium is. What's the etymology of that? I'm not sure. We'll have to look that up.

Moratorium. It's just a mora. What's that? Moratorium, it's like dead. Dead. Mortician. Okay, yeah. Yeah, it comes from the Latin verb meaning death. So moratorium? It's like dead dead or mortician. Okay. Yeah Putting an end to it cool Yeah, word of the day you should do a pines with a coin as part of the day calendar

We have to have a Catholic editor. So that's get these nuggets because no one else would know all right with it There's a sort of desire to stop right now. I think for those reasons. Because well, in the case of somatic cell gene editing, you're using the body cells of one individual. Okay, you can have the individual give informed consent. You say, you know what, we think, and we have very good reasons to think that this is going to improve your life, but there are possibilities of off-target editing.

So it might affect other genes, which will probably not be so good for you, or it might not bring about all the intended good effects that you looked for. And it's actually right now, because it's new technology, it's going to cost you this much money as your family willing to take that on. So you can have this kind of process of informed consent

with an adult that you can't obviously have with embryos. So that's also a big concern and a big motivation for us to say like, okay, this is promising, this could be really good, but we're not in a stage where we know enough about the safety and efficacy, and we might not ever be in a stage to use that in this specific context of tinkering with embryos and looking into the future. Now, that very much is in line with the principle that comes up often, the precautionary principle. It's like this idea of, you know, we should be very sensitive to how affecting one aspect of our life might have a whole set of other consequences that are more difficult to anticipate, therefore even if something looks good we probably

shouldn't do it. Now in response to that precautionary principle there are others especially in transhumanist camp who have that kind of precautionary principle and they'll often say we get it but if there are all of these promises and we do not pursue them, then a treatment or a procedure not given is a procedure denied. So we're now condemning, in a sense, generations to an inferior cognitive life, to a less controlled mood state to more difficulty in tackling moral issues to a shorter lifespan. So they say we're actually morally culpable for depriving them of something that we could give them because we have these qualms and these fears and we're letting that dominate. And I mean, it's really tricky because it's so often the case in these issues of ethics

of technology. It's not a simple like, yes, you should use a computer. No, you should not use a computer. Yes, you should use CRISPR. No, you should not use it. A lot of, there are complicated issues that require prudence and that's not relativism. That's just a respect for the complexity of reality

and the need to make judgments and the need to take into account that there are usually downsides and pitfalls to any of the benefits that we might gain through this technology. And we've kind of been doing this sort of analysis in the past and now we're challenged to do it in a new way. And maybe what's changed is this the potency, like the impact of these technologies, especially for future generations.

So it's definitely not an easy procedure, but I think one we all need to kind of pitch in on and think about. So yeah, I'm open to these therapeutic enhancements. These enhancements make us better than well beyond the statistical norm of biological health, but that are consistent with the good of our health, and that are sensitive to the non-physical goods in our lives. So that they are not inhibiting us from growing in the pursuit of knowledge, in cultivating friendships and aesthetic experiences, in pursuing religious truth and contemplating

God, that they do not become idols, right, or inhibit those other important practices that are key to the good life, no matter what your physical or cognitive or mood state might be. I mean, why should anyone be interested in this? Because it doesn't seem pressing in the way, say, transgenderism is pressing.

If I've got some whack job teacher lying to my children that men become women, then that pisses me off and I want to fight that rightly and you're seeing people fight that and it's beautiful to see them do so. But it doesn't seem like there's an overt lie with transhumanism and there's nothing specifically that's being fed to us that I can perceive. Maybe I'm wrong. So why care about it? Well, I think that it very much is this development of what we're already dealing with. And if we have issues with transgenderism,

then it's probably because we have really serious issues about the view of the human person behind that, of that divide, that dualism, that self versus the body. And if we're really concerned about people manipulating the body in a radical way according to their own self-perceived notions of self, then we should also be concerned about how that very same vision, according to advocates of this,

remember Rothblatt, this is not just some radical Catholic priest who's coming in and trying to shove these movements together, the advocates of these movements recognize the connection. So if we're concerned about that view of the person that is, as you point out, having so many practical effects in society through transgenderism and other movements, then we should also be very concerned as our tools and our technology develop about how those tools are used to more radically manipulate our body

in different ways. I think you're right, except that I don't see these incremental adjustments to our daily use of technology being so disastrous. I mean, maybe it's disastrous you can make an argument that over time, look at the disaster, these people who aren't married, these people don't have friends, but this incremental advance in technology, I'm not sure at what point you can go that one cross the line. And so for that reason, I can't see people fighting against transhumanism with a lie against, you know what I mean? Right. Well, I mean, I think one of the issues is that these, any good cultural movement that really enacts a kind of revolution or takes root in society is going to be gradual

in some sense. And it's going to pave a way forward and help people to just sort of subtly enter in. I think- So we're in that paving way situation right now, perhaps. Yeah. I gave a talk on transgenderism back in 2012 and it seemed ridiculous, the things that I was saying.

Right. The Catholic Answers Conference, I talked about how some woman is naming her daughter this and was giving him a whore. And it sounded so stupid. Maybe people chuckled and said, oh, that was nice. Yeah, or that's crazy that there's people in Portland thought that was a good idea,

not knowing what was about to come. So do you think something's about to come in the same way that the transgenderism tsunami came that we have to be? Yeah, I mean, I think we're already immersed right now in a so-called AI revolution, but if we think about it, we've already been dealing with AI on a daily basis through social media, right? So we were very much prepared to interact with this technology, and we've discovered now that there are some benefits to it and then some already really negative consequences of it,

but it took us a long time as a society to begin to acknowledge that. So we talk of this new AI revolution, even though AI has been with us for a while and been part of our daily life. And so I think we're going into this next stage of interaction. And as I said, I think one of the more immediate transitions

will not be on questions of is this computer conscious or not? Does it have personal dignity? Should we craft a new constitution to protect the rights of these personal beings that are AI? I think before we get to that sort of discussion in daily life, there's just gonna be all of these deep,

intimate, personal, romantic interactions that absorb more and more of our time and energy. And we're not going to really be sure how to deal with that. We might think, oh, that's weird. We might think that's a phase. We might think this is digisexuality. This is another color to add to the rainbow, and this should be embraced and tolerated or celebrated.

So I think that kind of relationship with our technology is really going to intensify and absorb people in a way that is even greater than it is today. And then also, come back to some of these proposals for procreative beneficence, just look at the mentality with which we already approach reproduction, right? Like the fact that we speak of a kind of

reproduction industry, we've lost sense of procreation. It's not this wondrous collaboration with the creator and open to the gift of new life. It's no longer this procreation, it's a reproduction, I am making a product. And if we already have embraced this product mentality, why not bring it to the full? I want a good product, I paid for this product,

I don't want a defective product, I want a refund on my product, or I want the latest model of this product. And I think in the recent history, we've culturally embraced IVF and other forms of medically assisted reproduction. And we've done that often through this narrative of the child of desire. And so, oh, these couples who long for a baby and that's so beautiful, what a shame that they're denied that. Now this technical solution can address that

and bring the child of desire. And I think what we're seeing more and more is the shift, the subtle but real shift from the child of desire to the child as desired. So if this is the child of my desire, it ought to be the child as I desire, whether that's the sex of the child. And we know how much sex selection goes on in abortion today or other traits.

And again, you have people of all sorts of motivations. Some are more selfish and some are just trying to live vicariously through their children. And I want them to go to the best schools that I never got into. I want them to play the sports I was never good at. But then you get other people are just genuinely concerned about the future of their children and they do weird contradictory things like say, well, sexism is bad, so I'm only gonna have male children or racism is bad,

so I'm only gonna have white children because I want to save them and preserve them. So I think that the kind of transhumanist liberal eugenics mentality is not just futuristic. It's it's here and it's real and I think it's actually a place where we can have dialogue because there are plenty of people who are going to become uncomfortable when they hear Catholics talk about the dignity of of the embryo and the embryonic life But they might be a little bit more sympathetic

To some of these concerns about, say, social justice and these concerns about real racism or sexism that is part of this larger project. And so maybe we can at least find a little bit of common ground there and save human beings. Like that for me is a really practical way in which thinking about transhumanist thought at a broader level can and should inform the work we already do today, and then prepare us better for whatever new

developments and new proposals might come to us in the future. And also, it can help us recover an appreciation for our embodied life, which I spoke of earlier, and then also of the frailty of our life, of our limitation. Like, okay, yes, we feel the weight of that, and we can agree with the transhumanists that there's something wrong here, but isn't it so beautiful that we have a faith that actually gives meaning and value to that,

that there's a sense of redemptive suffering and a sense of universal dignity and a sense of to that, that there's a sense of redemptive suffering and a sense of universal dignity and a sense of living well. I mean, Aristotle had a pretty reductive view of who could really live full flourishing and happiness. But it's amazing that Christianity opens that up to people of so many different situations and circumstances. I thought a lot about Alastair MacIntyre, he's a great ethicist at Notre Dame, and he's spoken of our embodied life and how so often this frailty, vulnerability, and interdependence has been neglected in serious ethicists and how we need to recover that. And he says that, look, all

of us are on this kind of scale of disability You know some of us experience it more clearly invisibly and other us, you know, we're pretty healthy But even that that's that's temporary Right we enter we at least enter into this world and and typically exit this world in a state of Tremendous dependence like I wasn't going around making a lot of autonomous, intelligent decisions when I was, you know, three months old. Like I was utterly dependent on the love of my mother, Kathleen, Kathy, and my father, Mike. And so I am indebted to them,

but they didn't like hold that over me of saying like, okay, when you get older, you better get this back, you better give this back to us. And we're keeping track of every meal that we paid for. And every hour we've spent driving you around, there was what McIntyre calls this uncalculated giving and gracious receiving. And it's not this kind of onerous debt of burden, it's that mutual love and that relationship of interdependence. And if they come, my parents come to a state of greater vulnerability, then I want to, I desire to take on that role of caregiver and aid. And that's what life is about. It's about living our vulnerability and our frailty

together in mutual love. We are actually not just atomized, expressive individuals who create our own life project and just ask everyone to stay out of our way and to let us do what we want to do. We are born into our mother's arms in radical dependence and into this interpersonal relationship of love. And that frailty, that limitation can actually be a place of growth, of growth in so many virtues, whether we're on the uncalculated giving side or on the

gracious receiving side of humility and gratitude. I'm thinking of our Lord's words, he who seeks to save his life will lose it, but He who loses his life for my sake will gain it. Maybe it's just, yeah, this hatred of our vulnerability. Yes. And I think hatred of our vulnerability often comes from our woundedness from not being taken care of when we should have been and saying, I will never be weak again, I will not be vulnerable again, and I will not be a burden to my children.

And so I'd rather be euthanized than to be a burden, you see. Yes. Yeah, that's such tragedy. And that's the kind of darkness and despair that the gospel brings light to, to say that there is no utterly lost life, that no life is ultimately a failure, that there is redemption in any life, and that okay, you might not have the physical prowess or the intellectual ability or the perfectly balanced, elated emotional state that many people hold up in society as a kind of ideal, as happiness. But even if you're lacking that, you still are open to living a valuable life of interpersonal love,

and you're able to exercise all of those virtues, and you are being prepared for a supernatural eternity with the Lord. Not just an extension of this life, but an elevation to that life of love, which ultimately is going to be a life of sharing in the intercommunion of God Himself, who is Trinity. Yeah, if you were to ask me, would you like to live forever here on this earth? I think a lot of people would say no.

Right. Or then you might clarify and say, no, no, what I mean is you could be healthy forever. Would you like to live forever while being healthy? And I think a lot of people would say yes, but I don't think it would be as full-throated a yes as we might assume. Yeah. Don't you think? Yeah, that's very interesting. I agree. And some thinkers like Leon Kass and others have been

reflecting on these issues, these proposals of immortality for a while. Kass was not a Catholic, but he spoke of how there are different phases in our life that take on more meaning. There's a whole process as we grow and we gain in our autonomy and our responsibility, there's a sense, okay, we make our contributions to society, but then we enter into this physical decline, but there's a care, there's a mentoring for the next generation, and we're helping to prepare them to take on their own role.

And these different seasons of life have their meaning and value, and a certain urgency, because I know I won't have this period forever. I have a limited space. And these seasons are also lived with other people in kind of corresponding seasons. But if we start to extend that, then that really begins to disrupt a lot of that intergenerational relationship.

This reminds me of a story I heard, you might know it better than me and so feel free to add to it, but it was about an astronaut who found himself stranded on some debris floating through space. And maybe he came with two vials, a blue vial and a red vial. And if he found the perfect society, he would take the red vial, which would ensure that he would live forever. OK. But the blue vial was immediate death. Oh, OK. So he finds himself in this meaningless existence, just going throughout space. in this meaningless existence just going throughout space. And so he wants to kill himself, but he accidentally takes the red vial and now is just doomed to this meaningless existence.

And it seems that that's kind of if there is no meta narrative, as you say, if the postmodernists are right and I just get to extend this life that I'm doomed to just live a. Objectively meaningless life. Yeah, I think that some of the existentialists were maybe, you could say, more courageous in embracing how bleak this picture is. Maybe it wasn't so much an existentialist, but I think of Bertrand Russell, who certainly was an atheistic thinker, a great mathematician, but also heavily involved in philosophy.

And he wrote a great essay called A Free Man's Worship. And I highly recommend it because it paints so eloquently this picture, ultimately, of nihilism, right, this lack of meaning and purpose. And he says that all of our great accomplishments, our symphonies, our coliseums, all of our greatest accomplishments are doomed to ruin and to fade away. And we need to be ready to build our life on the firm foundation of unyielding despair. Yes. Yes, that's right. Like, yeah. Which brings a smile to our face, apparently. I know. Everything's awful. And you just have to accept that and then get on with it. Right. But when you think about that maybe for five minutes you say, oh,

I don't know if I really believe that. I don't know if I want to do that. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's also helpful when you look at these movements like transhumanism or others that tend toward nihilism or end in nihilism, it's an opportunity to say, okay, well, let's keep going, like push, push, push to the ultimate consequences. Okay, if you start with Descartes, you start with Rousseau, or you start with any of these thinkers and you throw in postmodernism, secularism,

political liberalism, radical anthropological dualism, put it in a blender and drink it down as a shake. Hegelian dialect too. So the idea that this can only be getting better. Right. There'll be some setbacks, but we'll keepian dialect too. So the idea that this can only be getting better. Right. There'll be some setbacks, but we'll keep advancing. Right. Like blend all that together and drink down that power shake

and then see what it does to you. Like really, really embrace it. Don't just give lip service to it. Really embrace it and see if you're willing to stare into the abyss. Can you build your life on the firm foundation of unyielding despair? Do you really think do you really want to live in a world where ultimately?

Might makes right because in this view We are not all beholden to any sort of objective common natural law because there is no natural lawgiver There is no creator. There is nothing to unite us So if we are not all beholden to this same standard Then really in the end the winners are the most powerful are the the ones who can use the technology and the tools best Do we really want to embrace that sort of life where it's just a minority who dominates over the majority? But without any kind of ultimately satisfying meaning or purpose or value.

So I think that while our dialogue is not going to just, you know, immediately convince the transhumanists, oh, I need to go to church and I need to go to Eucharistic Adoration, we can at least sow seeds of doubt and we can kind of promote an epistemological crisis. Like, think through what you're saying and see if you're really willing to embrace all of the consequences fully. And if you're not, let's have a dialogue and let's figure out how other traditions like Catholicism, Thomism in particular, have actually thought for a long long time very seriously about human nature human purpose and the meaning of the good life and

I think we can shed a lot of light on these deepest desires and aspirations because again, the aspirations are good improvement overcoming limits Living a full life achieving some sort of perfection, but they're just shooting too short life, achieving some sort of perfection, but they're just shooting too short. They're settling for too little when we have so much more to offer. Tell us about your book and whether or not this would be a good place to start for those who want to delve deeper. Yes. Or if not that book, maybe some other suggestions.

Yes. Well, I'm always going to promote my own book. So this book came out a few years ago called Enhancement Fit for Humanity, Perspectives on Emerging Technologies. And it's a collection on these questions of human enhancement, specifically biotechnical enhancement. And I'm the main editor and I wrote a long chapter there, which looks at the philosophical background of contemporary transhumanism. So it goes deeper into exactly how postmodernism, secularism, political liberalism,

understood as a focus on personal autonomy, limited only by the harm principle, together with that dualism, comes to prepare the way for today's transhumanism. And it's the first stages of a dialogue to see what is the common ground and what are the limits of this movement, but not just the limits according to some Catholic priest in Rome. What are the limits of transhumanism according to their own standards,

according to their first principles, their rules for evidence, their rules for arguments, their values? How do they show forth some inner tensions or even contradictions that prevent them from achieving the goals that they themselves set? And so if there are those limits, according to their own standards, they should consider looking at this other tradition.

And the tradition I'm working through is Thomism. So I think it's a deep but accessible introduction looking at this other tradition. And the tradition I'm working through is Thomism. So I think it's a deep but accessible introduction to the philosophical historical background to this movement. So enhancement fit for humanity, perspectives on emerging technology. The hardback that came out years ago is ridiculously expensive.

How much? I think around. 800, how much? For you, Matt, half price. No, it's about $180 or so, but thankfully... Academic books, right? Yes, it's ridiculous. They're being sold to libraries and I'm not sure who else.

But a paperback edition came out not too long ago, so the paperback is much more affordable, maybe $40, $50. So there's a paperback edition of that and then I'm also working on a whole book on transhumanism which is under review so once it's once it's out I'll come back and I'll let you know. Any other books or any other authors that you would think he'd be good to read to kind of get a grasp on this movement? So I think that it's well worth reading the original transhumanist authors. Read Nick Bostrom, especially the frequently asked questions document, to understand what he's trying to promote and what his colleagues are promoting. Read Julian Savaloscu's work

about human enhancement and about the future of humanity and moral enhancement. Read these series thinkers. Hey throw in some Ray Kurzweil to get more of a Silicon Valley take. Read a bit of Martine Rothblatt. In terms of more critical assessment, to be honest one of the reasons that I'm working on this book right now is because I am not aware of a book-length treatment critique of transhumanism from a Thomistic or just Catholic perspective for that matter. So I think the book will be an original contribution. But there are clearly other authors who are dealing with this question. My friend Jason Eberle has written some great articles.

Ryan T. Anderson actually wrote an article about enhancement questions years ago. Are there Protestant Christians addressing this that you know of? Yes, yes. Calvin Mercer, Ronald Cole Turner have put out some collections. They have a more recent collection

on the relationship between religion and transhumanism showing what different religious traditions Especially Christianity, but also other traditions have to say about these issues So there are Protestants working on this as well But I'm hoping to have the first full book length Catholic treatment of the theme because maybe I'm just the only person crazy enough to devote a whole book to this but I I honestly Think it is worthwhile the different reasons I've given earlier. And I think that we're already dealing with transhumanist mentality and it will continue to spread and influence our culture.

Were you a sci-fi guy growing up? Did you read sci-fi books? I like some sci-fi. I was more interested in fantasy, but I did enjoy some sci-fi. I'm wondering what you might point to that was somehow prophetic. I'm thinking of, what was that show that the creators of the Simpsons, I think it was the creators of the Simpsons. Futurama?

Yeah, Futurama. Maybe some of those elements. I think if memory serves, they change, and if it doesn't, then I need to enhance my cognitive abilities. When they had those pay booths, those phone booths turned into suicide booths, so people would just go in and they could choose for slow and horrifically painful, quick and easy. And you laugh and you're like, ah, how, what's stopping us from doing that?

Yeah, there are proposals for real suicide booths. Usually they're not long and painful. Usually you go off and you are brought in your little booth to a beautiful hill. You watch a sunset, you listen to your favorite symphony, and then you're disposed with. So, but there's some great sci-fi work also going on right now. I mean, the Black Mirror series,

which has been on for a decade or so, has dealt with a lot of these issues in the episodes. And just give people a real caveat there, because unfortunately it's filled with pornography, that stupid show. There's some excellent insights. I'll make sure those are interested. I'll make sure I'll either do a deep research

into the particular episode. And so long as there's none of that stuff, I might watch it or I might not. But it's unfortunate that stuff is becoming more prevalent. What's weird is this sex robot thing. From like Playboy to hardcore internet porn, right? That was a leap but the leap from hardcore internet porn to sex robot stuff is going to be all the greater, right? It's gonna be so destructive. Isn't it? Right, right. Yeah, we've talked a lot about this technology influencing romantic sexual lives and I mean we haven't even scratched the surface of the way this is going to

And already is influencing warfare. I mean the talk of autonomous lethal weapons There's some evidence that some of these autonomous drones may have already been used and will most likely be used more in the future I mean just imagine sending off an entire AI-generated fleet, not just a single, but a fleet of different planes or drones that can enter into this kind of unpredictable swarming pattern that will completely overwhelm the enemy. So the question is, okay, will this be a great deterrent

when they see, hey, look at what DARPA's doing and what we could unleash? Will this be a deterrent to warfare or will we just enter into this unending race where one superpower is trying to beat the other superpower and have better control over AI technology for this these destructive purposes but yeah lethal autonomous weapons and other areas in DARPA including kind of super soldier like proposals I mean yeah Captain America is not just fiction anymore including kind of super soldier like proposals. I mean, yeah, Captain America is not just fiction anymore. There's a- Universal Soldier with Van Damme, if you remember that.

Oh, okay, going back to classics. Is it Dolph Lundgren? That was funny. All right, well, but we are doing- Anything else? Well, we are doing some other exciting things. So I- You were waiting for me to wrap up and then realized I was,

and then went, no, they're both... No, no, stop, stop him. So I work in the Pontifical University Regina Apostolorum in Rome and we have a faculty of bioethics. So I teach various courses there. And so we've been thinking about these issues for a while and we offer master's programs and also doctoral programs for Catholics in particular, but also non-Catholics who want to go deep in ethics of emerging technology and other more classic bioethical themes. And one of the nice things is that if you live in the US or you live outside of Italy,

you can still come in four times a year and take all of your classes in the intensive mode. It's called, it's pretty intense. Because- Well, Catholic wants to have to visit Rome four times a year. Yeah all of your classes in the intensive mode. It's called, it's pretty intense because Catholic wants to have to visit Rome four times a year. Yeah, what a hassle. So you get to come to Rome, you get to enjoy Rome and you take your classes once a week for one week at a time, November, February, April and June. And you have your classes all in that week time, so morning and afternoon. And then in between, the professor indicates how to do your readings and your research papers and any of your group work,

but it lets you continue on with your life and your job and your family elsewhere. So you can come into Rome four times a year and get your master's license in these themes of bioethics, which of course continue to develop and are so important for the life of the church and the world.

So I'm working there at Regina Apostolorum, and then I will also begin. What's the URL so people might look into that. Okay, so if you go to upra.org, then you can just search for our offerings and we have a whole page with the bioethics faculty there. So we're doing a lot of work there. And then also this coming year, I'm going to start teaching at a new university, Catholic

Tech, the Catholic Institution of Technology. It is based out of Boston, but it will have its classes in Castel Gandolfo. So if you're not familiar with Castel Gandolfo, it's about a half hour outside of Rome, right by Lago Albano, where the popes for centuries would go to vacation. So this is the papal vacation residence and, more importantly for us, the site of a Vatican observatory. So it's a clear sign that the Church has been on the cutting edge of science and has always been interested in the possibilities and the good that science can do

and when necessary, as indicated and warned, where it can go astray. So we're going to gather great professors from major universities. We're hoping to work a bit with MIT, Stanford, Caltech, to bring in excellent professors to create this research institution to form high-quality Catholic scientists who study in a gorgeous place, Castel Gandolfo, in the Pope's summer residence, and will also, in addition to their STEM formation in the sciences, receive a liberal arts foundation and have the philosophical and theological tools to

navigate these questions. And I'm really excited about it because I know full well, Matt, that there are people out there who will not listen to me because of this collar and just are not going to enter into a dialogue. And it's a shame, but it's true. Well, we're looking to form great lay scientists who are experts in their field, who can stand shoulder to shoulder with their peers and then shed light on these issues with solid anthropology, ethics, moral theology, and so forth, and this whole tradition. And so I'll go off once a week to teach moral theology, bioethics. I'm really looking

forward to this project and the good that it can do to address these issues that really are just shaping our world. Can people get more information about that somewhere? Yes, they go to catholic.tech. I appreciate these simple URLs. Yeah. Right, right. Well, you have to keep it simple. And if I can throw in another one, if you go to catholikworldview.com, you'll get the Catholic Worldview Fellowship, which I mentioned briefly. It's this summer program. You spend a month in a German castle, it's this summer program. You spend a month in a German castle, well, three weeks in a German castle,

and then a week in Rome. And you study history, art, architecture, philosophy, theology, to see the richness of the Catholic worldview and what it has to say about contemporary issues. So we go deep in history, see how did we get here? What are the main trends of thought, what's the influence, how has Greco-Roman culture, how have the different

traditions, cultures of the barbarians, how has the revelation, Judeo-Christian revelation, all come together to produce this idea of a Catholic culture. And what does that mean, especially today, where we see so often a breakdown in culture, and what can we say to people today? So, we spend a lot of time studying, but we pray together in a beautiful chapel. We have gorgeous grounds for sports, for conversation. We have leadership training,

and lots of visits to important cultural sites. So, it's a great way to spend a July if you're a college student. So that's that's another tremendous program. And yeah, thanks be to God. There are so many great projects to be involved in and so many ways that I'm trying to work with others to build up meaningful lives, meaningful lives that that give a sense of purpose and direction and equip young people to really face the implications of the technology they're immersed

in. Now people might remember Father Dalton from a year or so back where we had a big discussion about the Shroud, 1.3 million views or more now just over that one long form. Are y'all still doing a podcast together? Yes, yes. Thank you. So we launched not long ago our own channel, Those Two Priests. Those Two Priests. So go to YouTube and look up Those Two Priests. It feels like someone may have mistaken it for The Two Priests. The emphasis you just put on those.

We're just Those Two Priests, right? On YouTube, you said? The two priests. The emphasis you just put on those. Those two priests, right? On YouTube, you said? Yes, it's on YouTube. And then we'll soon make it available also as podcast format, but right now it's just on YouTube. So we've had a lot of fun doing it. It's wonderful.

Father Andrew is a great partner to say the least. And it is all about how the Gospel meets culture. So we are spending time looking at trends in contemporary culture. We spend some time analyzing what Joe Rogan has said about the Catholic Church, dissecting that, responding to that a bit. We're also looking at the Gospel itself, so sometimes we'll do a deep dive into sacred scripture. We also love having a real authentic dialogue with people outside the church. So we had a fascinating episode with a real life transhumanist, more of a Nietzschean transhumanist, a different school than some of the Oxford thinkers I met. Stefan Sorgner came on and we had a great chat all

about transhumanism and we clearly disagreed on some pretty fundamental points But we were able to have a civil conversation and dialogue about that So one of the the primary goals of our channel is to foster this critical conversation of the the gospel and and the world and culture so that we can really collaborate with people and not just condemn or mock or scorn, but really collaborate and show them what the gospel has to say and show them how this gospel fulfills their deepest desires.

So yeah, go to those two priests, check us out, support us, like us, subscribe, do all the good things that you digital citizens of this digital world do. Well, thank you for coming on. Yeah, my pleasure. Appreciate it. All right.