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This chapter addresses an implication of radical enhancement that is obscured in some of the more lighthearted presentations of the idea. Radically enhanced beings are not only significantly better than us in various ways, they are different from us—so different that they do not deserve to be called human. Moderate enhancement raises serious moral issues; advocates of radical enhancement are divided on the question of whether our humanity can withstand radical enhancement. Some—compatibilists such as Huxley and Kurzweil—hold that radical enhancement is compatible with our humanity. Incompatibilists like Nick Bostrom and James Hughes, by contrast, emphasize just how different from us radically enhanced beings will be. The chapter argues that although it is not logically necessary that a human who has been radically enhanced will become a nonhuman, it is likely that he or she will.

The Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth century lent a new sense of plasticity to our conceptions of human nature, and helped clear the way for such concepts as eugenics and biotechnology. While Aldous satirized attempts to change human nature with technology, Julian was more open to the idea. After WWII, Julian coined the term Transhumanism, giving name to what would become a growing movement advocating the deliberate improvement of the human species through the use of new technologies. This movement has gained prominent advocates such as the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom and prominent critics, such as the Catholic intellectual Fabrice Hadjadj. In the future, the debate over human enhancement would benefit from remembering an important quality that was common to the best work of Julian and Aldous Huxley: their profound reverence for the complexity of human nature, and the fragility of the web of life on which we all depend.

It is not easy to ascertain what is true, whether we are talking about science, religion or everyday life. Issues raised by such films as The Truman Show and The Matrix and Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument have similarities with one of the foundational arguments in Western philosophy: Plato’s Cave. There are a number of ways of interpreting Plato’s Cave but what any of us thinks is true may not turn out to be so. Every field of knowledge aspires to articulate the truth and how this is done depends on the field, so that there are different approaches to discerning the truth in mathematics, the natural sciences, the social sciences, moral philosophy, and religion. Postmodernism is widely held to be an attack on truth but can be seen more positively as a way of critiquing the ways in which those in power control what is generally accepted to be true.

This chapter provides the capstone to this book’s argument that humankind has adopted quantification as a worldview. It describes how quantification has permeated our lives, far beyond just academic formulas to all domains, whether mathematical or otherwise. Examples are given first from the intersection of mathematics and art in da Vinci’s drawings. Next, the connection between mathematics and music is made, with a discussion of J. S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier and music theory’s circle of fifths. The chapter then provides an elementary explanation of artificial intelligence (or AI, as it is commonly known) with Bayesian logic, and a discussion of Nick Bostrom’s idea’s that the possibility of a computer having “superintelligence” poses a supreme danger to humanity. In addition, the chapter describes Max Tegmark’s innovative work in astrophysics and his belief in a wholly mathematical universe as part of a larger four-system multiverse.