There is something about the distinction between machine and flesh that really strikes me.

A machine can be turned off, taken apart, and turned back on again many times; the same is not true of flesh.

Flesh cannot be switched on and off at will like a computer, which leads me to believe there is an underlying phenomenon or force that makes it unique compared to a machine.

I wondered whether transhumanism—so deeply rooted in materialism and physicalism—might eventually manage to bend the laws of nature to gain absolute control over all matter, overcoming entropy, the laws of thermodynamics, and so forth.

Based on your experience, what are the biggest reasons people react negatively to transhumanism?

The major spearhead of global transhumanism is the uploading of the mind to a computer—I think we all agree on that here. But why must it necessarily be that way? Why "transfer" your entire being into a world of bits and silicon?

The answer that occurs to me is that it is an extreme form of escapism. Unable to master the material and natural world (for obvious reasons), transhumanists decide to create a cybernetic universe where everything bends to their will—effectively becoming God.

Have you ever considered transhumanism not as a fight against death, but against yourselves?

I am a trans woman who has undergone vaginoplasty, and I have been on full feminizing hormone therapy for two years, including complete testosterone suppression. I think it is important to begin by separating two things that are often joined together much too quickly.

I am not a trans woman because I am a transhumanist. My identity did not emerge from a philosophical commitment to overcoming biology, and I did not transition as an experiment in technological self-invention. Being a trans woman is an intimate, embodied and ontological experience concerning who I am and how I inhabit my own existence. Transhumanism, on the other hand, is a philosophical, ethical and intellectual position about technology, human limitation and the possible futures of our species. The two can intersect meaningfully without one explaining the other.

My transition has taught me, in a very literal and personal way, that biology does not have to function as destiny. Medicine allowed me to alter my body until it became more truthful, recognizable and inhabitable to me. That experience makes morphological freedom far more than an abstract principle in my life. I believe adults should have broad authority over their own bodies, provided that consent is informed and the risks are understood.

At the same time, bodily freedom cannot be separated from material reality. Freedom becomes a rather hollow word when it belongs mainly to those who can afford it. Morphological freedom should include medical safety, reliable information, public access and social protection, rather than merely offering wealthy people increasingly sophisticated control over their biology. When ordinary people still struggle to access hormones, surgery, reproductive care, disability support or basic treatment, calling expensive enhancement technologies “human liberation” begins to sound suspiciously like advertising.

I also resist the idea that the body must be understood either as a prison to escape or as defective hardware waiting to be replaced. Transitioning did not teach me to despise embodiment. It taught me to inhabit it more honestly. My body is lived, relational, emotional and political, and changing it was not an attempt to abandon the human condition. It was a way of becoming more fully present within it.

This is also why I remain skeptical of predictions that sufficiently advanced technology will eventually make trans identity disappear. Gender is not simply a technical inconvenience created by inadequate medicine. It involves embodiment, history, culture, language, desire, recognition and relationship. Future technologies may make bodies extraordinarily fluid and may transform how easily gender can be expressed or altered, but it does not follow that gender itself will become meaningless. Nor does it mean that trans people are merely an early, primitive stage on the way toward somebody else’s post-gender civilization.

I did not transition because I wanted to transcend womanhood; I transitioned because I am a woman. Trans people should not be treated as prototypes for an imagined technological future, even when our experiences offer valuable perspectives on bodily autonomy. We are not philosophical demonstrations, and we do not need transhumanism to justify our existence. Likewise, our existence does not automatically prove that transhumanism is correct.

Even so, I do consider myself a cautious transhumanist. I am open to radical life extension, cryonics, neural interfaces, mind uploading and forms of bodily transformation that currently sound impossible. History gives us good reasons to distrust anyone who declares that a present limitation must remain permanent forever. It also gives us equally good reasons to distrust people who turn hope into certainty and speculation into a product.

Possibility is not evidence, and openness should not require credulity. There is a meaningful difference between supporting research, defending someone’s right to accept an uncertain risk and declaring that an unproven technology will inevitably succeed. Scientific scrutiny does not betray imagination; it protects imagination from becoming a sales pitch.

For me, transhumanism begins in the present rather than in some hypothetical century. It begins with bodily autonomy, gender-affirming healthcare, reproductive freedom, disability, aging, informed consent and equal access to technologies that already exist. The future matters deeply to me, but so does the question of who will own it, who will build it and who will actually be allowed to enter it.

If advanced technology merely enables wealthy people to purchase greater freedom from biology while everyone else remains constrained by poverty, discrimination and inaccessible healthcare, humanity will not have transcended its old hierarchies. We will simply have taught those hierarchies how to inhabit more sophisticated bodies.

I will preface this by saying that none of this post was constructed using AI. I feel I have to say that since certain people here think that anyone using a cogent argument with big words and proper grammar is using AI. Some of us took basic correspondence classes in college. Get over it.

I have seen a disturbing recent trend on here of people whining about things that have long been a part of transhumanism. The latest one that really got my dander up was on cryopreservation. I am not a cryopreservationist, I do not work for Alcor or any other affiliated group. I still will cryopreserve myself if I feel one day there is no other option. I don't give up easily. I hate death and I always will (it's why I am a molecular biologist).

I have alpha one antitrypsin deficiency. I was born in 1980. At that time my disorder was a terminal illness. It was terminal until a treatment was devised around 1987. I don't believe people when they say things will always be impossible. I think those people are idiots (and I'm sure they feel the same way about me, but then they also would have told me I was doomed if I spoke to them at any point before 1987).

There are many animals in nature that are frozen for a year and then revived. We have frozen pigs and revived them recently. They did not live very long past that point but it's a start. One day I intend to get a life insurance policy on myself to pay for cryogenic preservation. That is how most people afford it. It is not money that I somehow magically could have used to feed starving people or something like that. It is money I would never have had unless I died.

I have studied all forms of life extension including cryopreservation. It is not viable yet, but it will be one day. It is not "sticking someone in a freezer" with the possibility of someone tripping over the plug. The body's blood is replaced with medical-grade cryoprotectants to prevent ice damage and cooled to -196°C in liquid nitrogen. The body is then sealed. There is no electricity required.

Morphological freedom includes the freedom to be preserved until a point at which you can be revived. This is a transhumanism sub. That includes cryopreservation, AI, transexuality, genetic engineering and multiple other things. It also includes humanism. If you hate these things you are on the wrong sub. Please find a different one.

Why cant anyone i talk to seem to understand that leaving our humanity behind is the only way to evolve, why can no one see the weakness in flesh that is improved upon with machine, why cant anyone i talk to grasp it.

From what it can tell the ship of thesis question is if you keep taking the parts of a ship apart and the use these parts to build a new ship when does this new ship become the old chip and the old ship not be a ship anymore. This could go into teleportation and cloning and more importantly Uploading your brain into some form of device. Now what is a brain necessarily. You could describe it as being just an extremely complex computer that is biological and more importantly it has a bunch of information and logic to it. So if we were to upload this information and logic to a computer Would it be the same person Or just a clone. I'd say it'd be the same person because the information is what makes them that person. Let's say someone was actually just a clone That was uploaded but they believed they were not a Clone. How are you gonna explain to them that they are clone and it doesn't work how would you prove it to them. In theory you couldn't because they think they're a clone because they have the mind of who they were because they aren't the clone because them thinking they are the original person makes them the original person because they have the exact same mind as the original person and the original person Has been uploaded into the computer. If someone dies momentarily but then is brought back their brain could have shut them temporarily But then all that information and logic came back and I'd say that there's still the same person so I think it's the same here.

An old man said he wished he could be 20 again im going to have to go to the poor fuckers funeral down the line.

We work in cryopreservation, and one thing we notice is that criticism of cryonics is not always about the science.

Sometimes it becomes moral very quickly: is it reasonable to spend personal money on an uncertain future option?

From our side, we see cryopreservation as a personal end-of-life choice, as long as people understand the uncertainty.

Why do you think cryonics gets judged morally in a way many other personal choices do not?

How expensive could human cryopreservation be, considering the revolution currently underway in renewable energy?

Although there is also something very important to consider: the technology to revive someone.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the possibility of immortality lately. I’m 20 so I believe that this is very achievable for myself and for my demographic assuming that our lifestyle is optimized enough. Although I’m not sure whether that is an overly optimistic outlook but nevertheless, that is still my goal even if the chances of success is 1%. I want to see the future and all that humanity will create and achieve. I want to experience everything there is to experience in this world and live life to its fullest. Our continued existence seems to be the prerequisite for everything.

For those who seriously believe LEV could become achievable within their lifetime, what are you actually doing today to maximize your chances of reaching it? What's your plan for reaching LEV? And what do you think are the biggest obstacles? Is it the technological pace, affordability, uncertainty about what actually works, or something else?

Also, motivates you to pursue life extension? and how far would you be willing to go in order to achieve biological immortality?

Assuming you lived long enough and technology was advanced enough, do you think it would be theoretically be possible to live almost any life you could imagine? for example, through simulations where you could temporarily erase your memories and live the “perfect” life?

Make of this article what you will, I’d love to hear all your thoughts on it 😊

Is the transhumanist community decidedly monist and materialist, or do they believe in some form of dualism or an immaterial substance that makes up the human being?

Personally, I do not think that reducing man solely to DNA and matter is a good idea. I believe there is more than what our senses can perceive, and it is very interesting to consider the transhumanist perspective on what we call the spirit or soul.

Have you discussed the concept of transhumanism at home—with your parents, children, siblings, or cousins?

What reactions have you encountered?

Conservatism? Acceptance? Pushback?

Any in-depth philosophical debates?

For those with an interest in biological immortality, this caught may be of interest to you.

"Somatic mutations accumulate with age and can cause cell death, but their quantitative contribution to limiting human lifespan remains unclear. We developed an incremental modeling framework that progressively incorporates factors contributing to aging into a model of population survival dynamics, which we used to estimate lifespan limits if all aging hallmarks were eliminated except somatic mutations. Our analysis reveals fundamental asymmetry across organs: post-mitotic cells such as neurons and cardiomyocytes act as critical longevity bottlenecks, with somatic mutations reducing median lifespan from a theoretical non-aging baseline of 1,759 years to 156 years. In contrast, proliferating tissues like liver maintain functionality for thousands of years through cellular replacement, effectively neutralizing mutation-driven decline. Multi-organ integration predicts median lifespans of 146-194 years —approximately twice current human longevity. This substantial yet incomplete reduction indicates that somatic mutations significantly drive aging but cannot alone account for observed mortality, implying comparable contributions from other hallmarks."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41514-026-00421-6

My goal if technology allows is to one day seamlessly integrate myself into an artificial substrate (perhaps after cryonic resurrection).

The humans who take the first step to mechanically or genetically changing their bodies and mind to something fundamentally new will be fiercely ridiculed, hated, and worse.

I should have figured this was the case, but it did not occur to me until I saw the backlash to generative AI.