July 2025
The materialist vision of a better human life is based on technology. At its most extreme — transhumanism — it envisages a merger of human and machine with medically invasive interventions at the core. A new report by The Galileo Commission lays out the huge and serious implications of this agenda.
SCREEN SHOT from the GC report
“Transhumanism – Next Step in Human Development, Dangerous Ideology, Negligible, or What?” by Professor Harald Walach*, a clinical psychologist and a philosopher of science, takes a deep-dive into the movement, its driving forces and its consequences.
It asks: What is a human? How do we evolve and improve? By exploring and activating our inner, nonphysical, essence, or by optimising our physical bodies through artificial means?
These questions rise from the transhumanism movement and are considered against the backdrop of scientific evidence that consciousness is perceived – not produced – by the brain. This latter holistic approach is gaining ground, yet the prevailing societal mindset appears to be physicalist. Activists push for bettering human life by way of technology and science. This is the agenda of transhumanism.
To a physicalist mind, the human body is a machine and the brain basically a computer. Subjective experience is not seen as relevant to understanding the “machinery”. Since this has been the dominant official view in the Western world for as long as people alive today can remember, it is not surprising that transhumanist ideas have a foothold in the general population. For example, between 20 and 47 percent of the German population are positive to genetic modification in humans, according to surveys.
When people no longer accepted religious answers to the ‘big questions’ about life, we began searching for truth in the secular realm. But, paradoxically, it is impossible for us not to have a religion of some kind, according to Walach. If we discard one kind, we produce another.
“Transhumanism can be seen as a religion”, Walach said at the report launch event. “It is a belief in materialist science”.
Just as in Christianity and other religions, there is an expectation of future fulfillment and glory – salvation. In transhumanism, it is provided by the power of science.
The promise of progress and utopian visions of a better future have an allure in secular society, but Walach warns that scientism – the belief that science has the answers to all of life’s questions – is intrinsically totalitarian; both claim a monopoly on knowledge.
Medical interventions are a crucial transhumanist tool. “Medicine is the field where the hopes and fears of humans, their pains and joys, their aspirations for a life without suffering intersect with economic added value and hence with political decisions … Hence, medical progress and the transhumanist agenda are deeply intertwined”, Walach writes.
However, transhumanists overrate the benefits of medical interventions and underplay or ignore side effects.
One highlighted example in the report are the closely coordinated policies during the Covid 19 pandemic, in particular the rollout of the prophylaxes labelled as vaccines. The interventions were not traditional vaccines but a technology of genetic modification, and gene technology is “one of the bearers of light for the transhumanist movement”.
He opens up the possibility that the relentless implementation of the vaccination campaign was a first test of something that had been planned in advance. The consistent refusal by authority figures to accept evidence showing that lockdowns did more harm than good, or that there were cures (doctors who brought this up were ridiculed and ostracized), or that the interventions were ineffective and unsafe, is hard to make sense of if there was no agenda. However, if this was not the case, the massive coordination of the medical intervention demonstrates the power and appeal of scientism, by extension transhumanist ideas, in our modern world.
What happened could portend what is to come, if transhumanists have their way, Walach argues.
Ironically, transhumanists don’t really understand science, he states. Science always changes, but this basic fact is not accounted for. One drastic example is the dark concept of eugenics, defined by U.S. National Institutes of Health as “the use of selective breeding to improve the human race”. This was once seen as scientific facts; today it is considered racism.
Therefore, a scientism religion is either self-contradictory or held by people who don’t understand what science is, Walach said.
Despite their grand promises about what genetics can achieve, knowledge of DNA and how genes work is very low among transhumanist authors, in Walach’s assessment. Their view is simplistic: If you know the code, the ‘book of life’, you can control and change everything. This is not correct. Only a tiny fraction of our genes code for proteins. What the rest does is still unclear. Furthermore, what we know today about epigenetics, that the environment alters the expression of genes, pulls the rug out from under the transhumanists’ claims of what is possible to engineer.
The idea that the brain is the producer of not only all cognitive and emotional abilities but consciousness itself is central to transhumanism. Hopes are that high-tech implants will enhance our neurons. Elon Musk’s Neuralink has already begun. Eventually, we could see a humanity of cyborgs, human-machine hybrids. A new species.
But, as Walach points out, neuroscientists have been pondering the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ for three decades now without getting closer to the assumed answer, that consciousness is produced somewhere in the brain. Most likely, it is the other way around: The brain and its activity are produced by consciousness.
If one believes that we are biological machines, it is logical to consider death the ultimate evil. Transhumanists like Aubrey de Grey want to abolish this aberration by genetic engineering to make cells stop aging.
Walach exposes the absurdities this leads to. For one thing, there would be a need for harsh birth control policies. We would become a humanity of only elderly, which would mean arrested development. Only the young have new ideas. Therefore, such a world would be self-destructive.
From a spiritual point of view there is no absolute death. Physical death is a transition, a mirror of physical birth. But even from a strict evolutionary viewpoint, one that transhumanists generally embrace, death is natural. It is the fulfillment of a cycle. If we don’t die, we don’t need to make any decisions, which is a crucial part of life’s purpose, whether one believes in an afterlife or not.
Scientistic transhumanists are not the only ones who dream of a better human world, obviously. Spiritually oriented people also do. The crucial difference is that in the latter case, the potential for improvement lies within each and every one of us.
Author, scientist and educator Gregg Braden often says that there is a battle going on for our humanness. Braden was one of the experts in a panel at the report launch.
“We are the only species that can self-regulate our genetics through epigenetics. We can change the way our body performs”, he said.
Braden pointed to new science showing that our neurons, and our DNA, are biological fractal antennae. They pick up signals from the environment.
“There is a part of us that isn’t in the body. The transhumanists are ignorant of that”, Braden said. “When we give our humanness away to technology, we atrophy. This is how you lose a species”.
Historian and Jungian analyst Anne Baring, another panelist, had an idea of why this succumbing to technology happened.
“I think this has come out of human despair and disillusionment. The religions haven’t been able to satisfactorily answer the big questions: who are we, what is the purpose, where are we going”? This has led to “a cosmological disenchantment and an inflated ego”, she said.
Neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, the third panelist, asked rhetorically if we really are trying to fulfil our true human potential.
“Who wants to be a machine? Are we trying to find out who we really are?”
So, how to manage the attempts by influential transhumanists to steer humanity towards a technocratic future? Walach realises it is not possible to change the minds of dyed-in-the-wool transhumanists. But we should encourage open discourse and make the public aware of what is at stake. There is ample room to reach the fifty percent of people who describe themselves as spiritual, Walach thinks.
Meanwhile, Braden reminded us of our free will: “We all have the opportunity of non-compliance”!
*Harald Walach is a professorial research fellow with the Next Society Institute at Kazimieras Simonavicius University in Vilnius, Lithuania; and a founding director of the Change Health Science Institute in Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of more than 200 peer reviewed papers, 14 books, and 100 book chapters.
Anders Bolling
