Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from house stop
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I am
Speaker 1: Christian Seger. Hey, Robert, I got a question for you.
Speaker 1: Let's say you want to pick up a paper clip,
Speaker 1: but it's just it's giving you a really hard time.
Speaker 1: You know how sometimes paper clips it's difficult to get
Speaker 1: your fingers around them and pick them up off of
Speaker 1: the surface they're on. What is paper What a paper clips?
Speaker 1: You know, the little metal, metal bendy things. Yes. So,
Speaker 1: so now let me ask you this. You're having a
Speaker 1: hard time picking up this paper clip. Would you cut
Speaker 1: your finger open, put a magnet in there, suitre it
Speaker 1: back up to make it easier to pick up that
Speaker 1: paper clip? Probably not, because that that does not sound
Speaker 1: like I'm making the process any easier. Yeah, but it
Speaker 1: is kind of in human nature, the same way that
Speaker 1: we we try and vacuum up something, and if the
Speaker 1: vacuum cleaner is not picking it up, we will pick
Speaker 1: the object up, look at it, and then place it
Speaker 1: back on the carpet and then give it another go
Speaker 1: with the vacuum. Right. Yeah, technology must succeed. It is
Speaker 1: kind of like that. Yeah, so, uh, that's what we're
Speaker 1: talking about today at its very basic form. We're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about bio hacking in the present on the
Speaker 1: road to transhumanism. Will explain what all that means. That
Speaker 1: might have just been a bunch of gibberish to you
Speaker 1: just now if you're unfamiliar with these movements, But that's
Speaker 1: a real thing. People are really implanting magnets in their fingers, uh,
Speaker 1: and they pick up paper clips and bottle caps with them.
Speaker 1: But that's not really just why they're doing it. We'll
Speaker 1: we'll talk about more about that later. Yeah, we're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna look at some individuals who are either in
Speaker 1: some cases pioneers of trans humanism, innovators who are going
Speaker 1: out there hacking their bodies U upgrading their bodies with technology,
Speaker 1: as well as individuals for kind of harbingers or even
Speaker 1: profits of trans humanism who were who were engaging in
Speaker 1: these acts, uh, to sort of comment on where we
Speaker 1: are and where we can go with our technology. And
Speaker 1: along the way, we're also going to define what trans
Speaker 1: humanism is, discuss some of the different approaches to trans humanism,
Speaker 1: the different uh, philosophies and mindsets that that entail it,
Speaker 1: as well as us a general proposed checklist for how
Speaker 1: we might know when we have become trans human as
Speaker 1: a society exactly. Yeah, And so you know, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of you out there. Again, like if you
Speaker 1: haven't heard of this before, you've probably got some pop
Speaker 1: culture touchstones, and I'm sure Robert and I are going
Speaker 1: to be referring back to throughout the episode. But like,
Speaker 1: for me, the first one I think of is American Mary,
Speaker 1: the horror movie which you've seen right by the SOSCA sisters,
Speaker 1: in which you know there's a lot of body modification
Speaker 1: going on, but the body modification is sort of leading
Speaker 1: to ard something more than human. Right. Also, I mentioned this,
Speaker 1: uh in our Summer Reading episode. The graphic novel Junction
Speaker 1: True is about stuff like this. Warren ellis a lot
Speaker 1: of his comics and prose work is based on this
Speaker 1: stuff like Black Summer, dr Sleepless Desolation Jones, and especially
Speaker 1: trans Metropolitan are about uh, sort of moving towards a
Speaker 1: trans humanist future and what the ethical I guess conflicts
Speaker 1: and repercussions of that would be. And then for me,
Speaker 1: there's this game it's a role playing game called The
Speaker 1: Clips Phase, and I have been in love with it
Speaker 1: since I first read the book of it, and I
Speaker 1: actually played it one time with Joe McCormick, our host. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: and basically the ideas you build your sort of trans
Speaker 1: humanist character that exists in a far future along the
Speaker 1: lines of the philosophies that we're going to present today. Yeah, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is of course, so this idea of just upgrading
Speaker 1: the body with grenetic parts. You do see this in
Speaker 1: a number of different role playing scenarios. There's all video
Speaker 1: games where you're kind if you need to upgrade your character, well,
Speaker 1: get a chip for this, which exactly. Yeah. Yeah, like Fallout.
Speaker 1: I play Fallout a lot, and there's plenty of bio
Speaker 1: hacking that goes on in that, and BioShock is essentially
Speaker 1: a bio hacking game. But those are science fiction. Today,
Speaker 1: we're gonna really try to focus in on the reality
Speaker 1: of this stuff. What's actually going on, how close are
Speaker 1: we to doing this, what are the current benefits of it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: the science fiction examples are our key two because those serve,
Speaker 1: as you know, it's kind of avatars of what is possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Uh. And in any of these ideas we discussed
Speaker 1: here today, they're not They're not too far removed from
Speaker 1: the sci fi visions that at least partially inspire them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree. Uh. And I want to kick things off
Speaker 1: with a quote that I found during the research, which
Speaker 1: is from a pretty well known own bio hacker who
Speaker 1: goes by the name anonym Uh. And she says, bodily
Speaker 1: health takes a big f off second seat to curiosity
Speaker 1: when she's referring to her own bio hacking. We're gonna
Speaker 1: talk a lot more about her own biohacking, but this
Speaker 1: is the kind of philosophical ethos we're talking about here.
Speaker 1: Very d I y approach, and they're less worried about
Speaker 1: their health and more about sort of the innovation, the curiosity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: claiming their body saying this is this is my form,
Speaker 1: and if I want to augment it, if I want
Speaker 1: to upgrade it, that is what I'm going to do.
Speaker 1: Health come second. Yep. So Okay, you're out there saying
Speaker 1: I don't know what you guys are talking about at all.
Speaker 1: What is trans humanism? Well, the basic premises something like this, right,
Speaker 1: we can improve being humans through technology and science, and
Speaker 1: we're basically taking evolution into our own hands. Now, those
Speaker 1: of you've listened to our episode on the philosophy of
Speaker 1: cyborg ism, Uh, this is gonna sound familiar, right if
Speaker 1: there they touch on each other. There's a nice big
Speaker 1: ven diagram of trans humanism and cyborgs. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of it touches into this area to where
Speaker 1: you know, essentially human evolution has has has long been
Speaker 1: altered or even stunted by our culture, by by just
Speaker 1: the way that we live as individuals. Now natural selection
Speaker 1: doesn't quite work the same way anymore. So this is
Speaker 1: the idea that the next phase of human evolution is
Speaker 1: one of largely self guided technological scientific achievement. Now it is.
Speaker 1: We'll discuss exactly how that breaks down. Varies greatly, and
Speaker 1: it runs the gamut from like fully semi androids, cybernetic
Speaker 1: futuristic beings, uh you know that are essential essentially like
Speaker 1: technological angelic beings too, more sort of near future but
Speaker 1: sometimes lofty ideas about just simply making society better, making
Speaker 1: our world better, kind of going after that Star Trek
Speaker 1: s Gene Roddenberry inspired uh utopia ideal. Yeah, And this
Speaker 1: is you know, what. This is a good point where
Speaker 1: I want to throw out a plug for you, which
Speaker 1: is that you last week published a piece on how
Speaker 1: stuff Works Now that was an experiment in looking at
Speaker 1: a trans human cyborg future, uh, specifically along the lines
Speaker 1: of space travel, as we discussed in our Cyborg episode,
Speaker 1: and it was called Silba Dreams of Earth and it
Speaker 1: was basically it was a great short story about a
Speaker 1: trans human or a post human I guess on Jupiter,
Speaker 1: thinking about what life was like on Earth. Oh yeah, well,
Speaker 1: thank you. That one was a lot of fun to
Speaker 1: put together and definitely uh I spun that off of
Speaker 1: ideas that we discussed here on the podcast. Well, I
Speaker 1: think if anybody who's listened to those episodes or this
Speaker 1: episode and you like that stuff, go check that out.
Speaker 1: Go look for Roberts piece which the Silva Dreams of
Speaker 1: is the title of the short story. What's the title
Speaker 1: of the article? That's it's a question about what the
Speaker 1: our trans human future like. I'll make sure that we
Speaker 1: link to it on the landing page for this Episodeah,
Speaker 1: you should, because it's great and it's really connected to
Speaker 1: what we're doing here. Yeah. The thought experiment thing is
Speaker 1: pretty interesting. Um, Former co host Julie Douglas also did one,
Speaker 1: and and you've been invited to so I have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I haven't thought up of one yet. I think Julius
Speaker 1: was something about like, what would life be like if
Speaker 1: we were crawling all the time? Yeah, if we were
Speaker 1: still sort of like quadrupeds. Yeah. Yeah. So it's an
Speaker 1: interesting had some cool illustration, So hopefully we'll see more
Speaker 1: and more of these from members of the house. Stuff works. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna try to take a stab at it one
Speaker 1: of these days. Uh. The thing about trans humanism, though,
Speaker 1: that I want to go back to, this isn't exactly new, right.
Speaker 1: For a long time, people have sought out ways to
Speaker 1: change their bodies, in particular extending the human life. Right.
Speaker 1: We've talked about this before with our episodes on Egyptian
Speaker 1: burials or just the practices. And they're trans humanists though
Speaker 1: they're not just interested in being immortal, that's part of it.
Speaker 1: But what about things like, for instance, adding technology to
Speaker 1: your body so you have different senses, or maybe learning
Speaker 1: how to be telepathic by having science and technology connect
Speaker 1: you to another human being. That's the kind of stuff
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about today. Now there's three categories,
Speaker 1: according to our House Stuff Works article on trans humanism.
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna see a little bit more than
Speaker 1: this today, though, but help me out. There's the longevity one,
Speaker 1: which we primarily see nowadays through cryonics, the idea of
Speaker 1: you know, freezing your body basically, uh so after you die,
Speaker 1: so in a far future where there's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: technology that would be able to cure whatever you've got, Well,
Speaker 1: I would say that's that's one version. That's certainly a
Speaker 1: lot of the word going into this, Particularly the work
Speaker 1: of Aubrey de Gray, revolves around this idea of that
Speaker 1: the death is something we can we can get or
Speaker 1: come to, right. We just have to take We have
Speaker 1: to take death divided up into the various uh approachable problems,
Speaker 1: and then tackle each of those problems individually in order
Speaker 1: to defeat death. Sounds a little lofty, but at least
Speaker 1: prolonged human life to where the average individual will live
Speaker 1: at least a century. Yeah. The second category is becoming
Speaker 1: a what they call super well being, and that's basically
Speaker 1: guaranteeing that you have the best traits so that you
Speaker 1: feel the best possible way that you can and you
Speaker 1: can exist in the best way that you can within
Speaker 1: your environment. This is an area where and arguably there's
Speaker 1: a lot of scientific arrogance here, because the idea here is, hey,
Speaker 1: if you let science and technology take care of it,
Speaker 1: we got your well being, you're gonna be happy as if.
Speaker 1: And I don't want to totally discount that argument, but
Speaker 1: you really get into this this clash between science and
Speaker 1: every other discipline out there that has some approach to
Speaker 1: human well being in human happiness, be its spiritual or
Speaker 1: philosophical or well, that's gonna that's gonna go beyond sciences team, right,
Speaker 1: so yeah, right, yeah, uh. And then the third one
Speaker 1: would be super intelligence, which I didn't find too many
Speaker 1: examples of in the uh the sort of practical examples
Speaker 1: that we're encountering nowadays. But the idea here is essentially,
Speaker 1: either through genetics or technology, augmenting our brain so we're
Speaker 1: smarter or have a capacity for more memory. Right. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I mean I would say we're we're already seeing like
Speaker 1: a soft shade of that in terms of our just
Speaker 1: constant use of cloud based devices and constant wireless connection.
Speaker 1: Like it's it's not a direct augmentation of the brain,
Speaker 1: but we're we're making sure that we're we're almost painfully
Speaker 1: attached to the infinite knowledge. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Right, Like
Speaker 1: when we're watching a TV show and you're like, hmmm,
Speaker 1: I don't know who that actor is, what other things
Speaker 1: has he been in? Just whip out your phone. Right,
Speaker 1: less than five minutes you figured it out. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: knowing is no longer acceptable. Ye used to. There was
Speaker 1: a day when you're when you were like, Hey, I
Speaker 1: wonder who that that character actor is? He just didn't
Speaker 1: know you you you could maybe go research it tomorrow,
Speaker 1: but right now, just or you talk to other human
Speaker 1: beings about it. Hey, who's that guy that's on that
Speaker 1: Pete Holmes has a really good bit about this. Uh,
Speaker 1: we're basically like we've we're losing like our social connections
Speaker 1: because phones. Yeah, yeah, he does have a great bit
Speaker 1: on this. I've heard I've heard that bit. Um. But
Speaker 1: so a lot of people equate transhumanism with the singularity,
Speaker 1: right that eventually it's going to lead to the singularity.
Speaker 1: And but what we what we mean by that is
Speaker 1: the point where artificial intelligence surpasses the abilities of biological intelligence. Now,
Speaker 1: I would say the research that we did today it's
Speaker 1: not going to take us too far down that path.
Speaker 1: That's another episode for another time. Yeah. That that that
Speaker 1: this singularity is definitely a transition point and into an
Speaker 1: entirely different mode of existing. So let's talk about, uh,
Speaker 1: what there's different types of trans humanism. Let's let's sort
Speaker 1: of just like upfront, established the philosophies. And you found
Speaker 1: a great piece from Omni magazine in a twenty sixteen
Speaker 1: article called trans Humanism Sexual Identity. Let's start there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this puts a cool little article and towards the end
Speaker 1: of it, they did a great job of just laying
Speaker 1: out some of these different approaches to it um, which
Speaker 1: which serves as a nice sort of starting point for
Speaker 1: exploring some of them, and and just you know, briefly
Speaker 1: explaining the other ones. Um. First up, democratic trans humanism.
Speaker 1: This is trans humanism for the people, for the species,
Speaker 1: the idea that only when you can you apply this
Speaker 1: to everyone at every socio and socioeconomic level, will we
Speaker 1: really be able to evolve or elevate the human race.
Speaker 1: And uh, and I find this one interesting because on
Speaker 1: one level, it's the most reasonable incarnation on the list.
Speaker 1: It's the Bernie Sanders trans humanist movement. Yeah, yeah, because
Speaker 1: like you can't. How can we say that we've evolve
Speaker 1: the human species if we're ultimately talking about just one class. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And that's where this thing often goes, right, is like, well,
Speaker 1: is only the are the one percent going to be
Speaker 1: the only ones who can afford this kind of trans
Speaker 1: human operation, whereas like bio hacking is primarily about just
Speaker 1: like d I Y do it in your garage, your
Speaker 1: kitchen or whatever and literally cut yourself up and jam
Speaker 1: stuff into your body. Yeah. So yeah, this is the
Speaker 1: idea that you can't you leave no humans behind if
Speaker 1: we're going to evolve as a species, We're gonna involve
Speaker 1: as a species. But it also there's a little bit
Speaker 1: of Western arrogance to it as well. And I heard
Speaker 1: Terry Gross on NPR Fresh Air interview Donald g McNeil Jr.
Speaker 1: Author of Zeka The Emerging Epidemic, and he discussed, you know,
Speaker 1: the various countermeat measures of delaying sexual reproduction in Zeka
Speaker 1: danger zones as to have avoid the threat to newborns. Yeah. Right,
Speaker 1: it's a big topic of conversation right now. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: but as he pointed out, this sort of effort in
Speaker 1: developing nations often comes across as white people a world
Speaker 1: away telling Africans or Asians not to have babies, and
Speaker 1: they even they even avoid some of the loaded language
Speaker 1: by referring to it as spacing out births rather than
Speaker 1: talking about birth control. Yeah. I think I don't know
Speaker 1: if we've talked about this on the show, or maybe
Speaker 1: we just talked about it in the office one time.
Speaker 1: But the idea that because of the ZA epidemic and
Speaker 1: ideas of spacing out births like this, that there will
Speaker 1: be like huge gaps in classes in various schools down
Speaker 1: the road in the future because, for instance, like a
Speaker 1: year or two will have gone by where no babies
Speaker 1: or less babies were born, right, Um, and what kind
Speaker 1: of impact does that have on a society going forward? Yeah? Indeed, um.
Speaker 1: But but then certainly that the transhumanist angle here is,
Speaker 1: you know, do you end up go walking into all
Speaker 1: these places around the world and saying, hey, everybody, this
Speaker 1: is what it means to be human. Now you need
Speaker 1: to upgrade fingers. Yeah, so it's you're kind of danny
Speaker 1: if you do dander. If you don't, right, if you
Speaker 1: leave everybody behind, that's bad. But if you if you
Speaker 1: offer it to everybody in a little too insistent about it.
Speaker 1: Then that's a that's also a little less shady. Okay,
Speaker 1: the next version, we have a libertarian trans humanism, and
Speaker 1: this is trans human for every Humanism for everybody, but
Speaker 1: without government getting involved. And this, for all intents and purposes,
Speaker 1: seems to be the style of trans humanism represented by
Speaker 1: the United States trans Humanist Party, who currently has a
Speaker 1: US presidential hopeful in the form of of Zoltan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in fact, Zoltan wrote me on Twitter last night
Speaker 1: to let me know that he was willing to help
Speaker 1: us out with this episode. Unfortunately I received it too
Speaker 1: late into the research game, but maybe in a future
Speaker 1: episode we can consult with Zultan. I didn't know what
Speaker 1: it was at first because I just randomly tweeted something about, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm researching bio hacking and trans humanism and I gotta ping,
Speaker 1: like midnight last night or something, and it was from
Speaker 1: him or whoever is running his account. It was basically like,
Speaker 1: if you've got any questions, come to me. Yeah. It's uh.
Speaker 1: It should come as no surprise to anyone out there.
Speaker 1: This election cycle has a lot of there's a lot
Speaker 1: of noise and it's easy for some of the other
Speaker 1: candidates to become lost in that noise. Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: think it would be interesting, uh you know, potentially in
Speaker 1: a future scenario for the show where we might have
Speaker 1: Zultan on or we might talk to him and get
Speaker 1: some of his input on stuff like this. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: a lot of these movements, to one of the like
Speaker 1: the really cool things about them is that they're they're
Speaker 1: very pro science, they're very pro technology, and that you
Speaker 1: know what what whatever the other lofty ideas involved there are,
Speaker 1: there is a definite pro science agenda. And similar to
Speaker 1: the libertarian trans humanism, there's also an arco trans minism.
Speaker 1: This is like the stronger anti capitalist, anti state trans
Speaker 1: humanist movement. Uh. These individuals believe that in the wake
Speaker 1: of these advances that we're unleashing, society is going to
Speaker 1: find a democratic form without the need of government or
Speaker 1: massive corporations. This is like almost exactly how that game
Speaker 1: Eclipse phase breaks down. There's like different factions that you
Speaker 1: can be a part of. Everybody's trans human in it,
Speaker 1: but almost all of the factions line up with these
Speaker 1: factions we're talking about here right now. Like there's an
Speaker 1: anarcho one. There's a corporate one. There's uh one that's
Speaker 1: we have extropianism down here, there's an extropianism faction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's basically like within the game, you have to
Speaker 1: choose what your character is. Sort of philosophy about being
Speaker 1: trans human and modifying their body is are there is
Speaker 1: there are there any groups that just have no part
Speaker 1: of trans humanism at all? Uh No, you're I don't
Speaker 1: think that there's a way for you in the game
Speaker 1: to just have a like straight up human body, because
Speaker 1: the whole idea is that, um, we've gotten past the
Speaker 1: singularity in the game, and you can upload your mind
Speaker 1: into any kind of body and then modify that body.
Speaker 1: In fact, like some of the characters are uplifted animals
Speaker 1: in human bodies or vice versa, human minds uplifted into
Speaker 1: animal bodies, Like you can be like an octopus with
Speaker 1: like cybernetic augmentations, but you're human mind. That reminds me
Speaker 1: a lot of Banks. If there's an engine, I think
Speaker 1: it's heavily inspired by his work. Yeah, you should totally
Speaker 1: check this out. It's right up your alley. The religious question, though,
Speaker 1: um came up because it reminded me in um Richard K.
Speaker 1: Morgan's Altered Carbon series. His world involves that just an
Speaker 1: extreme use of this re sleeving of human consciousness. That's
Speaker 1: exactly what they call it in the game sleeving. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I can't recommend this game enough. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: really smartly done. It's I mean, if you're out there
Speaker 1: and you're like, I don't care about game like role
Speaker 1: playing games, and that's cool, but I haven't even other
Speaker 1: than that one time with Joe played it. But just
Speaker 1: reading the book is fascinating because it presents all this
Speaker 1: stuff we're talking about here and then sort of like
Speaker 1: science fiction visions for where we could go down the
Speaker 1: road with trans humanism. Interesting. Yeah, Now Morgan, in his world,
Speaker 1: certain religious groups, such as I think specifically there's a
Speaker 1: branch of Catholics, do not engage in this trans humanist
Speaker 1: re sleeving. Okay, so they're all in their original but
Speaker 1: they're all in their original bodies, and they're just kind
Speaker 1: of set apart from sort of you know, almost like
Speaker 1: normal humans, and that all these strange new approaches to humanity.
Speaker 1: There's some kind of thing in the game's world in
Speaker 1: which there was like an apocalyptic event on Earth that
Speaker 1: prevents you from basically being born with a regular old
Speaker 1: human body. Um, I think because a I got out
Speaker 1: of control and it was like a terminator type skyp. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: speaking of religion and trans humanism, there are religious trans humanists. Essentially,
Speaker 1: these are non atheistic trans humanists to see trans humanist
Speaker 1: ideas it's fully compatible with their religious views. Two interesting examples.
Speaker 1: One in particular, since we've been we've recently spoke about
Speaker 1: about Mormons space. There is a Mormon trans Humanist Association
Speaker 1: fascinating and it is quote the world's largest advocacy network
Speaker 1: for ethical use of technology and religion to expand human abilities. There.
Speaker 1: I would never have thought that, but that's fascinating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's I was really hope to ask. I have a
Speaker 1: I have a friend, UM whose Mormon and lives out
Speaker 1: in Utah and is really kind of progressive in his
Speaker 1: Mormon views. I'll have to ask him if he's familiar
Speaker 1: with this. Yeah, I kind of want to check in
Speaker 1: with a couple of my old Mormon friends who I know.
Speaker 1: They're both UM, both definitely into science, both science UM advocates,
Speaker 1: but UM, this particular Mormon take on trans humanism it
Speaker 1: also entails something they call transfigurism uh and this is
Speaker 1: This is from their website. Transfigurism is religious trans humanism
Speaker 1: ex amplified by synchronization of Mormonism and trans humanism. The
Speaker 1: term transfigurism denotes advocacy for change in form and alludes
Speaker 1: to sacred stories from many religious traditions. Uh. And they
Speaker 1: refer to uh uh, the Universal Form of Christiana and Hinduism,
Speaker 1: the Radiant Face of Moses and Judaism, and several other
Speaker 1: incarnations and other faiths. So I found that one interesting.
Speaker 1: There's also this Christian trans Humanist Association and they have
Speaker 1: a number of tenants here that are interesting. Include the
Speaker 1: idea that God's mission involves the transformation and renewal of
Speaker 1: crenate creation, um, growth and progress along every dimension of humanity. Uh,
Speaker 1: science and technology as a tangible expression of of the
Speaker 1: God given impulse to explore and discover. Yeah, well that's
Speaker 1: interesting because that is something that comes up over and
Speaker 1: over again, regardless of whether it's connected to religion or not.
Speaker 1: But that's that's really what's given as like the ethical
Speaker 1: motivation for a lot of bio hacking. Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: wanted to touch on those because you see far more
Speaker 1: of the of the secular body hacking and a secular
Speaker 1: trans humanism, so it's interesting to look at a religious
Speaker 1: spin on it. Yeah, I can't imagine. One of the
Speaker 1: things I was thinking about, like while we were doing
Speaker 1: this research was sitting down at my grandmother's house at
Speaker 1: the kitchen table and just like having a conversation with
Speaker 1: some coffee and being like, hey, did you know grant
Speaker 1: me that there's people who cut their fingers open and
Speaker 1: her magnuts in there, and just having her My grandmother's
Speaker 1: reaction would just be like oh my, you know. But
Speaker 1: but like trying to explain to her and then adding
Speaker 1: into it because you know she's a practicing Christian, well
Speaker 1: there's a Christian element to this too, and explaining that
Speaker 1: to her as well. It would be a weird conversation
Speaker 1: for sure, But I might try to have it someday.
Speaker 1: Well I'm gonna try and blow through some of these
Speaker 1: other ones just to give everyone a basic idea here.
Speaker 1: But essentially you have you have hedonistic trans humanists to
Speaker 1: just want to figure out how to eliminate the pain
Speaker 1: and folk is on the good stuff. You have survivalist
Speaker 1: transhumanists that are that are hyper focused on the idea
Speaker 1: of longevity. And then there are singularitarianists and their ideas
Speaker 1: that technological singularities coming. The machines are gonna outpace this.
Speaker 1: Let's get ready, it's inevitable. Yeah, all we can do
Speaker 1: is prepare ourselves and try and steer the course. Cosmism
Speaker 1: is on here too, and that's actually something that I've
Speaker 1: been thinking about proposing that we do for a future episode.
Speaker 1: I know that there was some kind of cosmism that
Speaker 1: was working its way around Russian science thought earlier in
Speaker 1: the century that might be fun to explore. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: there's that. This is a slightly different thing that arises
Speaker 1: from the work of AI researcher Hugo did Garis, and
Speaker 1: he's a very interesting dude and of himself. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's retired now, but he predicted a war against machines
Speaker 1: that were resulting numerous mega deaths, like essentially matrix kind
Speaker 1: of world. Okay, Yeah, So he has this, he has
Speaker 1: this whole philosophy uh laying out and it involves this
Speaker 1: idea that um that you're gonna have the cosmists and
Speaker 1: you're gonna have the terrans who oppose uh, you know,
Speaker 1: upgrading humans and becoming this this trans human force and
Speaker 1: essentially the trans humanists are going to have to leave
Speaker 1: the planet and the others are gonna have to stay.
Speaker 1: Um people a little more complicated than that, but that's
Speaker 1: sort of the basics. Well, that sounds like something that
Speaker 1: might be worth revisiting in the future. And if anybody
Speaker 1: out there knows more about that too, because I found
Speaker 1: when just doing kind of basic research on it, it
Speaker 1: wasn't widely available. Um, let us know, stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind at how stuff works? Sorry, uh, blow the
Speaker 1: mind at how stuff works dot com? Uh, and let
Speaker 1: us know if you've got some opinions on that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So those are some of the basic philosophies floating around
Speaker 1: in the heads of individuals who start down this trans
Speaker 1: humanist path and get into this body modification, bio hacking realm.
Speaker 1: So this all brings up a question that I want opposed.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's not one that we answer now. It might
Speaker 1: just be a rhetorical question or's something to think about
Speaker 1: as we go through the rest of the episode. With
Speaker 1: all these types of trans humanism, regardless of its religious
Speaker 1: or philosophical or whatever, is it ethical and so. And
Speaker 1: the reason why I ask is because there are some
Speaker 1: people who compare trans humanism to eugenics as being some
Speaker 1: kind of division between superior and inferior versions of humanity,
Speaker 1: where one person is superior to another. And I guess
Speaker 1: that's something that we should consider as we're going forward. Um,
Speaker 1: and and especially in the case of like you know,
Speaker 1: like we're saying, like, if there's like a I guess,
Speaker 1: like a capitalist faction of trans humanists and only the
Speaker 1: rich have access to biomodifications that prolong their life, is
Speaker 1: that ethical? I think there's a strong argument that it's not.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can already look at at the highest
Speaker 1: level of medical care is essentially a transhumanist endeavor, and
Speaker 1: it is not available to everyone. So it's kind of uh,
Speaker 1: it wasn't that sort of the premise behind Elysium, that movie,
Speaker 1: the Neil blom Camp movie. Oh yeah, yeah, with the
Speaker 1: rich people in Orbit and everyone else is on Earth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like they didn't always have access. The people on
Speaker 1: Earth did always have access to like the medical benefits
Speaker 1: that they had. What was there, Like there's like some
Speaker 1: kind of machine that you could just climb in and
Speaker 1: wold like cure cancer or something. Yeah, and that's what
Speaker 1: I think the whole plot was based on. There was
Speaker 1: an interesting film, a bit a bit heavy handed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it also kind of like went off the rails
Speaker 1: a little bit, but I kind of like it. I
Speaker 1: know most people were upset by it after blomb Camp's
Speaker 1: work on District nine, but I thought it was okay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think he He even admits though that he he
Speaker 1: would have he wished he could have had more time
Speaker 1: writing it than he wasn't able to get the script
Speaker 1: exactly where he wanted it, but it's still a wonderful world.
Speaker 1: I'd love to see him potentially revisited even Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be interesting. So we're getting into body modification
Speaker 1: bio acting, and I do want to just just briefly
Speaker 1: mentioned that when you look at ways that we have
Speaker 1: we have always altered the human form, you can sort
Speaker 1: of look at three basic areas. They're sort of symbolic
Speaker 1: um body modification figuring in terms of, you know, stuff
Speaker 1: that's even superficial, like altering one's hair, altering one's nails,
Speaker 1: and then getting into the you know, tattoos and other
Speaker 1: things that are more permanent but still you're not altering
Speaker 1: um the form too much. Then you have things that
Speaker 1: are certainly altering the form more, and then things that
Speaker 1: are actually altering the functionality of the human body. And
Speaker 1: that's where we we really see some of the more
Speaker 1: interesting examples of modern body modification with the trans humanist spent. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: like examples of altering the form would be like subdermal
Speaker 1: or transdermal implants, which we have a really great article
Speaker 1: on how stuff works about in our team put together
Speaker 1: this fascinating infographic on how the whole like surgical process works.
Speaker 1: But again, that's not sort of evolving you into another
Speaker 1: stage of humanity's enhancing you. Yeah, but like even even
Speaker 1: wearing clothes is a is a body modification and an
Speaker 1: enhancement of who you are. You are your physical manifestation.
Speaker 1: But it's certainly it's not necessarily changing the form or
Speaker 1: changing the function. And what we're basically going to be
Speaker 1: talking about here for the rest of the episode is
Speaker 1: bio hacking. Uh. And it's called that for a reason
Speaker 1: because it's the d I Y version. You get out
Speaker 1: your own tools and upgrade your body yourself. Bio hackers
Speaker 1: ask why should we wait for the industry or for
Speaker 1: the government to catch up to our way of thinking.
Speaker 1: Let's democratize science and do this to ourselves. Right, And
Speaker 1: we're already seeing versions of this, from everything to people
Speaker 1: wearing smart watches and other wearable devices to the really
Speaker 1: extreme stuff that we're gonna talk about today. The inspiration,
Speaker 1: as with many of the philosophies that Robert just mentioned,
Speaker 1: is basically to create and discover. It's that human urge
Speaker 1: to continuously innovate. And we're gonna talk about people like
Speaker 1: Kevin Warwick and left anonem that I mentioned earlier. These
Speaker 1: are well known bio hackers, but there are also community
Speaker 1: labs that work on this stuff too. They're basically either
Speaker 1: doing this in their kitchen or in some kind of
Speaker 1: body parlor. Uh, and they're working together as a community
Speaker 1: to share their information and their resources. Some are building
Speaker 1: wearables that they hope that they'll eventually implant. Right. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, like, there's a hat out there that electrically
Speaker 1: stimulates the prefrontal cortex that you can wear. But what
Speaker 1: if you took that the step further and you were
Speaker 1: able to install that into your head. Uh. There's an
Speaker 1: anklet that vibrates in the direction of due north. And
Speaker 1: I know from the research that anonem is actually one
Speaker 1: of the people who's talking about actually building that and
Speaker 1: putting it in her knee so that her knee will
Speaker 1: be able to tell her where due north is would
Speaker 1: be helpful if you get lost a lot, I would assume, yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: other dabblings that we're not going to go into full
Speaker 1: depth here on our for instance, modifying mouth bacteria so
Speaker 1: that it eats plaque and instead recalcifies our gums, or
Speaker 1: inserting organisms into our water that detect arsenic or bacteria
Speaker 1: that you eat that kill tumor cells. Okay, so these
Speaker 1: are all things that are on the table. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean when you get into the synthetic biology realm, which
Speaker 1: I think we touched on some of these previous did Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's entirely different sphere of trans humanist body improvement. It
Speaker 1: takes place at the smallest level, and it's all possible
Speaker 1: because the tools are getting cheaper and more accessible. Think
Speaker 1: of it like this. Instead of having a local bike
Speaker 1: coop where you all get together and you work on
Speaker 1: your bicycles together and make sure that you know share resources,
Speaker 1: these folks are having a local biohacker coop where they're
Speaker 1: sharing resources and information on how to do this stuff safely. Uh,
Speaker 1: and what they're getting out of it, and and we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna dive into all of But remember this
Speaker 1: is also sidestepping academia in a big way. It's getting
Speaker 1: rid of the stuffy methodology for a faster but also
Speaker 1: riskier application. There are there's dangers here when you when
Speaker 1: you're just like cutting yourself open and shoving stuff in
Speaker 1: your body. Yeah, I mean this is self experimentation and
Speaker 1: and mad science if it is yeah, uh and and
Speaker 1: I'm going to just throw this out there, especially going
Speaker 1: back to the idea of the government getting involved. I'd
Speaker 1: say we're one major accident away from this getting a
Speaker 1: lot of attention from the media and the government getting
Speaker 1: involved and regulating what you can do with your body
Speaker 1: in terms of technology or certainly you're one new story
Speaker 1: about this is what the kids are doing exactly? Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, always think of the children. If if if
Speaker 1: kids start doing this, then there's gonna be a lot
Speaker 1: of scrutiny on it. Then what happens does it go underground?
Speaker 1: I mean it's already a subculture, but like does it
Speaker 1: become like an illegal underground where people are modifying our
Speaker 1: bodies secretly. I don't know, but we'll have to keep
Speaker 1: an eye out for it. Yeah. And by the way,
Speaker 1: I want to add this too, because of the efforts
Speaker 1: of body modifiers, transdermal implants now have impacts on our medicine. Uh.
Speaker 1: There are examples where you can use them to create
Speaker 1: chemotherapy ports that run directly into your veins while you're
Speaker 1: getting cancer treatment. Uh. There's also transdermal implants that are
Speaker 1: anchored directly into bone for prosthetic limbs. And some scientists
Speaker 1: are even looking into animal horns as natural transdermals that
Speaker 1: can be inserted and they won't be rejected by the
Speaker 1: body because of infection. And that's something we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about a lot more when we get into the specifics here. Yes,
Speaker 1: stell Arc this is this is the guy that I've
Speaker 1: been fascinated with for for years, and certainly he's been
Speaker 1: he's been around for quite a while. He was born
Speaker 1: in forty six and had his name legally changed to
Speaker 1: Stollac in nine two. He is a performance artist and
Speaker 1: Australian performance artist and you have probably seen images of
Speaker 1: one project or another of his over the years, because
Speaker 1: they often are extreme enough to capture mainstream media. I mean,
Speaker 1: I did not know his name, but I knew about
Speaker 1: the ear Thing, and I think, well, go on ahead.
Speaker 1: I think he's had some influence on our pop culture too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he uh, I mean, the guy is essentially feels like
Speaker 1: he stepped out of William Gibson novel because if you
Speaker 1: if you see an interview with him and hear him
Speaker 1: talk about his work, he is a like a very
Speaker 1: thick Australian accent that it feels like it would be
Speaker 1: more in keeping with just almost like a backwoodsie like
Speaker 1: down to earth kind of guy, especially now as an older,
Speaker 1: older man. He might seem just like it was just
Speaker 1: an older Australian dude. And I think didn't didn't Motherboard
Speaker 1: do like a documentary on him or something like that? Pervice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so if you really want to see him in action,
Speaker 1: you can probab watch that. Yeah. Yeah, he's and uh
Speaker 1: he comes off pretty uh pretty down to earth even
Speaker 1: in one off in one of these interviews, he's also
Speaker 1: hooked up to a large mechanical spider body because he's
Speaker 1: also been and he's long been involved with some pretty
Speaker 1: extreme stuff. Between between seventy six and eighty eight, he
Speaker 1: completed twenty five different hook body Suspicion performances. So now
Speaker 1: that seems to be kind of like the groundwork of
Speaker 1: his body modification slash performance art world. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: is the one that I think, uh, I have to
Speaker 1: imagine that the people who made that movie The Cell,
Speaker 1: the character of Vincent Dinofrio must have been inspired by
Speaker 1: a stell Arc in some way, because I don't know
Speaker 1: if you remember, but he was hanging from hooks a
Speaker 1: lot in that movie. That was like part of Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I forgot about that aspect of that. That movie is
Speaker 1: pretty loaded with stimuli. Yeah. Um so, so from here
Speaker 1: he engaged on a whole string of projects that involved
Speaker 1: it basically came back to his is his thesis, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is essentially, we're progressively extending ourselves into our environment
Speaker 1: through technological artifacts. Sounds like trans humanism to me. Uh
Speaker 1: So his argument is that we're making ourselves both cyborgs
Speaker 1: and zombies by doing this. Yeah. So, so many of
Speaker 1: these projects they're they're not necessarily about Hey, I'm doing
Speaker 1: this thing with my body and technology that's useful but
Speaker 1: it's more about a comment on what we are already
Speaker 1: doing and what we will be doing. So just to
Speaker 1: run through some of his projects here, he did the
Speaker 1: third arm project. This was a grasping and risk rotating
Speaker 1: mechanism with the rudimentary sense of touch that was attached
Speaker 1: to him and activated by e MG from other body areas.
Speaker 1: He uh, he had, he has this, He had his
Speaker 1: stomach sculpture and this one I read almost killed him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were this is certainly he's all about getting into
Speaker 1: that area where health comes second to the art, to
Speaker 1: the technology. But this was the thing that was into
Speaker 1: scopic went down his throat into gopic cameras. It would
Speaker 1: open up like a like a metallic flower and then
Speaker 1: there would be a light and a lot of this
Speaker 1: was you know, conceptual. You know that the stomach is
Speaker 1: a dark, lightless place that with this technology there's light
Speaker 1: and movement in there where otherwise there would not be
Speaker 1: um And yeah, fortunately it did not kill him. There
Speaker 1: was an exoskeleton project that he did and this involved
Speaker 1: like these this large array of pneumatic spider like legs,
Speaker 1: this big walking machine that that he kind of sat
Speaker 1: in the middle of and allowed him to control the
Speaker 1: machine through arm juicers. He essentially looked like a like
Speaker 1: a spider man villain and yeah, very dark, thinking of
Speaker 1: those what are the dn D monsters dried? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that did look a lot like centaurs with spider bodies. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He also did a few different performances fractal flesh, pink body,
Speaker 1: and parasite and these explored involuntary and remote uh internet
Speaker 1: choreography for the body with electrical stimulator stimulation of the muscle,
Speaker 1: so essentially outsourcing his movements to direct control via the Internet. Um.
Speaker 1: He did a project with his partner Nina Sellers where
Speaker 1: they took essentially they took different biomaterials such as um,
Speaker 1: subcutaneous fat, peripheral nerves extracted from both of their bodies,
Speaker 1: put them in this uh, this slurry and this pressurized
Speaker 1: tank and then it just kind of gets um blended
Speaker 1: up periodically. Yeah. Um. And then what do they do
Speaker 1: with it afterwards? Oh? You just you just kind of
Speaker 1: look at it. Okay. I thought I was thinking it
Speaker 1: would be like Ghostbusters too, where they like put it
Speaker 1: into like those uh squirt guns maybe squirted on ghosts. Now,
Speaker 1: I think this one was more about like like bodily identity,
Speaker 1: and I would happened to be taken like this mass
Speaker 1: is still human if it's just this Yeah, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is this one was probably one of the more grotesque creations,
Speaker 1: but it depends, like us, where you stand on his
Speaker 1: most famous work the third year. So this and we
Speaker 1: touched on this a little bit in a previous episode.
Speaker 1: But this involved taking a bio compatible scaffolding surgically inserting
Speaker 1: it into his left forearm. And this happened in two
Speaker 1: thousand six, creating the shape of an ear, and then
Speaker 1: over the in the years to follow, additional surgeries after
Speaker 1: they found the surgeons willing to do it, uh to
Speaker 1: to form this out even more. And I don't think
Speaker 1: they still need to add an earlobe to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think we should clarify here. He has just
Speaker 1: added the shape of an ear to his arm. And
Speaker 1: the way that we described va grown organs as being
Speaker 1: sort of framed by scaffolds, this is not a functional
Speaker 1: ear on his arm. No, it's it's not his actual ear,
Speaker 1: but but creating the form of the ear on the arm.
Speaker 1: And then the big plan is to have a microphone
Speaker 1: in there that is connected to the Internet, so that
Speaker 1: allows the ear to hear, so that you might be
Speaker 1: able to say, go to his webs sight and then
Speaker 1: listen through his artificial ear. It has not come to
Speaker 1: fruition just yet. There was a previous attempt to install
Speaker 1: the microphone and there was an infection and they kind
Speaker 1: of had to scrap that. But my understanding is that
Speaker 1: he's currently moving towards getting a second attempt and this
Speaker 1: time hopefully it will stick. He needs to kickstart that.
Speaker 1: I don't know if Australia. Yeah, surely he gets a
Speaker 1: lot of he gets a lot of funding. Where is
Speaker 1: he getting the funding from, like like like a private
Speaker 1: equity or is it like from grants or something different?
Speaker 1: Grants Like he's he's been the artist in residents at
Speaker 1: various universities um so. And also I feel like maybe
Speaker 1: he's like general generationally, maybe he's not as into the
Speaker 1: kickstarter culture, but probably not, but I could see this
Speaker 1: being a highly successful Kickstarter or they stellar Patreon account. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you get to you get to listen to his ear
Speaker 1: arm for an hour every day if you chip on
Speaker 1: ten dollars a month. But it's it's an example of
Speaker 1: how the project is a is commentary on where we
Speaker 1: are with the technology, how interconnected we are, and what
Speaker 1: are the you know, what are the limits of my
Speaker 1: body as identity once we get all this technology involved.
Speaker 1: So he's one of those those guys that just throughout
Speaker 1: his career he has he has been kind of an avatar,
Speaker 1: kind of a harbinger of trans humanism, exemplifying things that
Speaker 1: are kind of scary and inhuman about what's possible, but
Speaker 1: also highlighting where we are already. Yeah, so there's a
Speaker 1: couple other bio artists that I want to cover before
Speaker 1: we get into real like bio hackers. Stellarc is, you know,
Speaker 1: essentially doing art with his body modification, but he's not
Speaker 1: necessarily trying to take his body to like the next
Speaker 1: level of human evolution. Uh. I guess you could say,
Speaker 1: like the third arm might function that way, but but
Speaker 1: having an ear on your arm isn't necessarily going to
Speaker 1: give you that much of an advantage, right, He he
Speaker 1: is an artist first and foremost. But there's this great
Speaker 1: Ionine article on the topic, and so I just wanted
Speaker 1: to cover a real quickly. A couple of these ones
Speaker 1: that were listed in here. The first was Orlan, who
Speaker 1: is a bioartist that uses cosmetic surgery to transform her
Speaker 1: face into different forms with elements of famous paintings, So
Speaker 1: that sounds interesting. There's Jennifer Genesis Briar p Oorridge, not Porridge.
Speaker 1: This is a person who explores gender, occultism and sex work.
Speaker 1: They did something called Project Pandrogeny with his wife, Lady
Speaker 1: j where they tried to create an amalagam of their
Speaker 1: two bodies together. They underwent breast implants and other physical
Speaker 1: alterations to basically get closer to being the same being. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she Lady Jay sadly died in two thousand seven, But
Speaker 1: there's a very well received documentary came out in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eleven called The Ballot of Genesis and Lady
Speaker 1: j Um. If you want to know more about that project,
Speaker 1: check that out. But Genesis po Orage in general is
Speaker 1: a pretty important figure just in the history of industrial music.
Speaker 1: If you're familiar with Robbing Gristle, Psyche tv um, just
Speaker 1: a very influential artist. Okay. Eduardo cac was also listed there,
Speaker 1: And this is a person who took the Book of Genesis,
Speaker 1: translated it into Morris Code, and converted it into base
Speaker 1: pairs of Genetics This sounds familiar because we talked about
Speaker 1: showing that in one of our recent episodes, but not
Speaker 1: with Genesis. It was a different book. Uh. Then they
Speaker 1: implanted the genes into bacteria. He also created a green
Speaker 1: fluorescent rabbit named Alba. Uh. And this is something we've
Speaker 1: talked about on the show before too. If you take
Speaker 1: the green fluorescent protein that's found in certain jellyfish and
Speaker 1: you and plant it in other animals, it turns out
Speaker 1: you can make them also biofluorescent. So we did that
Speaker 1: to a rabbit. Natasha Vita Moore. Her best work is
Speaker 1: Primo post Human, which shows a futuristic version of the
Speaker 1: human form that is overcoming disease and aging. So kind
Speaker 1: of more along those immortality lines of trans humanism. Uh.
Speaker 1: She proposes, I don't believe that this is something that
Speaker 1: was actually built. I think this is a sort of
Speaker 1: sci fi proposal, an outer sheath of smart skin that
Speaker 1: would be both It would have design and communication purposes.
Speaker 1: It's also going to be engineered to self repair with nanobots,
Speaker 1: both the epidermis and dermis, and it would tell the
Speaker 1: brain the texture and tone of the surface required on it.
Speaker 1: It would also alter your body's temperature, tell you the
Speaker 1: percentage of toxins in your surrounding environment, and extract radiation
Speaker 1: effects from the sun. Now this sounds like bio hacking
Speaker 1: if it was real. Yes, though without knowing a lot
Speaker 1: about the project, I have to say that a number
Speaker 1: of the things that the second skin does the the
Speaker 1: the actual skin already. So yeah, you're not getting any
Speaker 1: superpowers from this one. Like it already self repairs, it
Speaker 1: already absorbs energy from the sun. Um you know, it
Speaker 1: already regulates my temperature. You get into problems when you
Speaker 1: cover that up. But that's a separate tangent. Yep uh.
Speaker 1: There's also Micah Cardinas. In two thousand and eight, she
Speaker 1: performed Becoming the Dragon, which was a three hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty five hour mixed reality performance that took place in
Speaker 1: Second life. That's why it was in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: because I don't think much people many people would watch
Speaker 1: a performance in second life. In sixteen, she took the
Speaker 1: form of a dragon in there and basically lived her
Speaker 1: life as a dragon in second life, and that was
Speaker 1: part of it. So that's a it's a little more
Speaker 1: virtual than of what a lot of these other people
Speaker 1: are doing and The last one listed here is Amy Mullins,
Speaker 1: who is a paralympian athlete. She collaborated with a fashion
Speaker 1: designer named Alexander McQueen project and yeah he's great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he basically built her. She she her legs were
Speaker 1: amputated when she was one year old. Uh so he
Speaker 1: built out hand carved wooden prosthetics that had integral boots
Speaker 1: connected to them and built those out for her to
Speaker 1: pose in. So those are the art versions of this.
Speaker 1: But then we've got a whole another group of trans
Speaker 1: human pioneers, and these are the These are the bio
Speaker 1: hackers that are really looking at ways to build things
Speaker 1: into their bodies that give them more than human perception
Speaker 1: would allow. So functional trans humanism over symbolic transhumanism exactly. Okay,
Speaker 1: So let's start with probably one of the most infamous
Speaker 1: bio hackers, known as Captain Cyborg. His real name is
Speaker 1: Kevin Warwick. Warwick In launched the first phase of what
Speaker 1: he called Project Cyborg, and he designed and r F
Speaker 1: implant to perform basic tests like basically use a signal
Speaker 1: to open remote controled doors or control lights in his home.
Speaker 1: It's basically like it sounds like he had nest in
Speaker 1: his arm right like, Uh, he could send commands to
Speaker 1: computers with it. Surgeons inserted a glass capsule that contains
Speaker 1: several microprocessors into his body. Phase two of this project, Cyborg,
Speaker 1: began in two thousand and two. Warwick installed an array
Speaker 1: of electrodes directly into his nervous system to monitor the
Speaker 1: activity at his median nerve. As a result, he was
Speaker 1: able to control a robotic arm with mental action alone.
Speaker 1: He also implanted these in his his wife, Arena, and
Speaker 1: he wanted to see if they could record their sensory
Speaker 1: experiences together, including pain, pleasure, and sex. Uh. They didn't
Speaker 1: reveal what the results of that were, but they could
Speaker 1: correctly identify one another's nerve signals percent of the time.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of interesting. Um, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: interviews with this guy. He's all over the place. He's
Speaker 1: a interesting figure. He's also pretty public about the work
Speaker 1: that he's doing. And he said in a w magazine
Speaker 1: interview that his primary interest was in this one so
Speaker 1: he could come up with electric electronic procedures to combat
Speaker 1: diseases like Parkinson's blindness, arthritis in schizophrenia. But too he
Speaker 1: wanted to upgrade humans to be able to do pretty
Speaker 1: much anything. Sounds like trans humanism to me. He's also
Speaker 1: had some involvement in attempts to beat the Turing test.
Speaker 1: You might remember this from a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: the infamous example where Eugene the computer program was basically
Speaker 1: celebrated as having finally beaten the Touring test. If you're
Speaker 1: unfamiliar with the Touring test, the idea is basically that
Speaker 1: a computer program would be able to trick a human
Speaker 1: into thinking they were talking to a human and not
Speaker 1: a computer. So yeah, he was involved in that. Lately,
Speaker 1: he's been talking about ways to increase the number of
Speaker 1: neurons in the human brain because he thinks that our
Speaker 1: brains are getting bored. Uh, and he wants to connect
Speaker 1: brains and incubators to robots. He claims he's actually working
Speaker 1: together with one of his students on a learning, living
Speaker 1: brain that's connected to a robot body via bluetooth. So
Speaker 1: that sounds fun. It sounds like uh. In Fallout, like
Speaker 1: I was talking about earlier, there's these robots called robot brains,
Speaker 1: and they're just these like kind of clunky, lunch box
Speaker 1: looking robots. But there their CPU is a brain in
Speaker 1: a job seeing. But now you don't have to have
Speaker 1: the your brain in a jar on bot. Your your
Speaker 1: RoboCop too can be empowered from the next ram. Yeah, exactly. UM.
Speaker 1: There are others who have sort of sprung off of
Speaker 1: Warwick's research. So, for instance, in two thousand four, there
Speaker 1: was an experiment inspired by him to use electronic implants
Speaker 1: to enable basic communication between two people's nervous systems. Brown
Speaker 1: University also developed rechargeable neurotransmitters to communicate from human bodies
Speaker 1: to external devices. They hope that this will allow humans
Speaker 1: to communicate telepathically with multiple nervous systems. I can tell
Speaker 1: you we're spoilers. We're gonna get into this later. That
Speaker 1: has happened. Uh and and act Uh. It was a
Speaker 1: team of international researchers who did this. They've built the
Speaker 1: first human to human interface. And in front of us,
Speaker 1: Robert and I have this and I suggest that you
Speaker 1: go look it up. It was it's part of a
Speaker 1: really good article on this that was on Extreme Tech
Speaker 1: called the first human brain to brain interface has been created.
Speaker 1: In the future, we will all be linked telepathically. UH.
Speaker 1: And what we're looking at here is basically how it works. Um. So,
Speaker 1: one researcher attached a brain computer interface to themselves and
Speaker 1: they were in India and they were able to send
Speaker 1: words into the brain of a researcher who was in France,
Speaker 1: and that person was wearing a computer to brain interface.
Speaker 1: So what we're talking about here is essentially telepathy. But
Speaker 1: how does it work. It's not like you're hearing their
Speaker 1: thoughts right, Basically, you're moving data. You're putting it into
Speaker 1: someone else's brain. Uh. And the B c I uses
Speaker 1: an electro and cephalogram. The c b I uses a
Speaker 1: transcranial magnetic stimulation rig something that's very similar to the
Speaker 1: transcranial magnetic stimulation that we've talked about on this show
Speaker 1: and many other has to have worked shows before. It's
Speaker 1: kind of an obsession around here. The idea of blasting
Speaker 1: your brain with electricity to maybe get smarter kind of
Speaker 1: works the same way the words getting coded into binary
Speaker 1: they're transmitted and then translated back to the recipient's visual cortex.
Speaker 1: They then see flashes of light uh, and it triggers
Speaker 1: their body to produce phosphene that makes this light appear
Speaker 1: to them. So basically, it's like Morris code, like this
Speaker 1: flashing light that only your eyes see. So that's you know,
Speaker 1: it sounds like, oh, well that's not that big of
Speaker 1: a deal, but they're doing this from India to France.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a big deal. Uh. It's basically brain
Speaker 1: to brain Morse code essentially once they're translating it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is something that even in this this small example,
Speaker 1: even in just the what's what's provable and doable today,
Speaker 1: it it alters our perceptions of what it means to
Speaker 1: be a singular human entity. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean
Speaker 1: I think this is really where a lot of trans
Speaker 1: humanists would like to see this go, right, is a uh,
Speaker 1: it's using technology to be able to improve both our
Speaker 1: senses but also our understandings of ourselves, uh, changing what
Speaker 1: we mean by identity all that stuff. So certainly if
Speaker 1: you're able to communicate with one another, even just through
Speaker 1: Morris code without speaking, that would I would be a
Speaker 1: step forward in that direction. Then we have a few
Speaker 1: different versions of the eyeborg. Yeah. So the one I
Speaker 1: read about was an artist named Neil Harbison, and he
Speaker 1: went to the hospital and and basically said, hey, can
Speaker 1: you help install this stuff in me. I'm color blind.
Speaker 1: I want to be able to detect colors. So he
Speaker 1: used this device called the eyeborg that translates colors into
Speaker 1: vibrations in his skull that he can subsequently here. So
Speaker 1: to me, sounds like trans human synastasia basically, yeah, taking
Speaker 1: taking one form of sense day to transforming it into another,
Speaker 1: enabling them to experience these colors through uh, through bone
Speaker 1: conduction of sound waves. Yeah, but you have other eyeborg
Speaker 1: applications here too. Well, yeah, there's there's one other main one,
Speaker 1: and that's uh that has to do with this guy,
Speaker 1: Rob Spence, Canadian film director, and he uh sustained permanent
Speaker 1: damage to his right eye, and in two thousand nine
Speaker 1: he hooked up with camera provider Omnivision as well as
Speaker 1: a group of engineers, first ocularist Phil Bowen, then engineer
Speaker 1: uh Coasta Grammatis, and then electrical engineer Martin Ling to
Speaker 1: replace his prosthetic prosthetic eye with a functional digital video camera. Interesting,
Speaker 1: I wonder if some of our guys here in our
Speaker 1: video production team would be willing to do that, if
Speaker 1: they're willing to give up an eye, and uh, they
Speaker 1: have some talented individuals to because one of the problems
Speaker 1: is then you have to try and fit everything in
Speaker 1: to that eye ball um space. Yeah. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's fairly sounds like a cenobyte, Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of those. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's a task that
Speaker 1: you have to you have to pull off without the
Speaker 1: individual looking like a cinabyte. Yeah. Um, well, given and
Speaker 1: harder with two thousand nine technology and technologies come along life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: That's what I was gonna say, is like, given how
Speaker 1: small the video cameras in our phones are nowadays, that's
Speaker 1: that wouldn't be that hard. So he was able to
Speaker 1: to do to do this, to replace his prosthetic eye
Speaker 1: with a functional digital video camera uh, touted as quote
Speaker 1: the world's first literal point of view, uh, including glancing
Speaker 1: around and blinking. Wow. Yeah. And he's on Twitter, he's
Speaker 1: uh you can follow his efforts here his ongoing efforts
Speaker 1: with the with the ibor project. He's on Twitter as
Speaker 1: Iyborg and his website is eyeborg project dot tv. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I'm imagining he does like a lot of periscope events,
Speaker 1: but on fortunately in his periscopes you can't see him.
Speaker 1: You just see what he sees. Yeah. I mean, well,
Speaker 1: there's something beautiful in the idea, right that you you
Speaker 1: take this injury and then you turn it into something
Speaker 1: that actually enables your passion, enables your career. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: And I think that that's a lot of what trans
Speaker 1: humanists are looking to do, or bio hackers are looking
Speaker 1: to do, you know, like especially like come up with
Speaker 1: ways for the quote disabled to be able to operate
Speaker 1: in almost uh enhanced fashion, right, Yeah, which brings us
Speaker 1: to Jerry je Lava Uh, a finished software developer who
Speaker 1: in two thousand nine lost half his index finger in
Speaker 1: a motorcycle accident. So if he was working with the
Speaker 1: with with doctors to get a prosthesis there, he did
Speaker 1: what came natural, do you? Uh? You simply have a
Speaker 1: USB drive there in the end of your your new
Speaker 1: artificial finger, so you can just remove the cap from
Speaker 1: the end of your finger and you have USB drives.
Speaker 1: So he's got all of his data. I hope it's
Speaker 1: a good USB drive though, like one of those ones
Speaker 1: with a couple of gigs. It's not like one of
Speaker 1: those cheap OH ones that have He's got like a
Speaker 1: couple of MP three's in his finger. At the time
Speaker 1: it was a two gigabyte storage drive. I can only
Speaker 1: imagine being a software developer that he has he has
Speaker 1: far more storage capacity now if he still has kept
Speaker 1: with it, hopefully modifiable, and he can just keep putting
Speaker 1: new ones in as the technology improves. Yeah, so then
Speaker 1: you know, this is kind of neat. It's also kind
Speaker 1: of it's it's kind of spy movief, the idea of
Speaker 1: inserting your finger into a computer. Yeah. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think also it's like the USB drive comes out because
Speaker 1: because once you sort of break to break it down,
Speaker 1: it's not very practical to just set there because he
Speaker 1: only got one hand operate the mouse and the keyboard.
Speaker 1: But I can only imagine it it played well at
Speaker 1: parties and the bar trick like, hey, you want to
Speaker 1: see my USB drive. Well, speaking of fingers and party tricks,
Speaker 1: let's talk about subdermal magnetism. So this is what I
Speaker 1: insinuated or implied at the beginning of the episode with
Speaker 1: the idea of installing tiny magnets into your fingertips. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is a thing that a lot of people have done.
Speaker 1: The magnets are coated with materials I couldn't exactly figure
Speaker 1: out what the materials were that they're coated with. But
Speaker 1: this seems to be a common thing so that the
Speaker 1: magnets aren't rejected by your body. And the hackers say
Speaker 1: that this provides them with a sixth sense that allows
Speaker 1: them to feel magnetic fields. It creates basically sensations in
Speaker 1: their fingertips. Uh. And as I said at the top
Speaker 1: of the episode, you can pick up paper clips and
Speaker 1: bottle caps basically. Um. And I do find the paper
Speaker 1: clip thing hilarious because such an outdated thing for trans
Speaker 1: human is to be messing well. And one of the
Speaker 1: guys was even saying that, like, I think his broke,
Speaker 1: like the magnet itself like broke apart in his finger,
Speaker 1: and then the mag pieces kind of came back together
Speaker 1: again naturally over time, but the magnetism was weaker. He's like,
Speaker 1: I can only pick up small paper clips now. I
Speaker 1: used to be able to pick up large paper clips,
Speaker 1: but no longer. But there is something else to this.
Speaker 1: It's not just the paper clips. They're really interested in
Speaker 1: the sensory stuff. But big warning right up front, do
Speaker 1: not do this and then climb into an m r
Speaker 1: I machine, because it will rip the magnets right out
Speaker 1: of your fingers. Also, airport security is problematic. If you're
Speaker 1: walking through airport security and you've got magnets built into
Speaker 1: your figer fingers, it's going to mess things up. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Trying to explain to the t s A. Agents that
Speaker 1: you are a trans human um and you have magnets
Speaker 1: and plant in your body, I can only imagine that's
Speaker 1: just gonna lead to more delays. Absolutely, So I pulled
Speaker 1: up a couple of different articles on this that we're interesting.
Speaker 1: Gizmotos really covered it in depth. They actually had a
Speaker 1: piece by Dan Berg on Gizmoto where he shared his
Speaker 1: experience of having one of these implanted into his pinky finger.
Speaker 1: He was initially wary after seeing the early prototypes and
Speaker 1: what they did when they broke down and corroded inside
Speaker 1: somebody's finger. He goes through the procedure pretty clearly, he says,
Speaker 1: and this is a direct quote from him. My finger
Speaker 1: was marked in two places where the magnet was going
Speaker 1: to go, as well as the incision spot around a
Speaker 1: quarter to a half an inch away from the final
Speaker 1: resting spot for the magnet. His body modifier then made
Speaker 1: the incision with a scalpel, used a tissue elevator to
Speaker 1: separate that tissue, slid the magnet into place, and sealed
Speaker 1: the incision with surgical glue. Next, a bit of tissue
Speaker 1: compression went on. They wrapped his finger up and he
Speaker 1: was on his way. He said it took fifteen to
Speaker 1: twenty minutes total. However, it took him months before his
Speaker 1: finger regained full sensation. But he was noticing vibrations from
Speaker 1: magnetic fields, primarily in cash registers, microwaves, and laptop fans.
Speaker 1: He also noticed that when he handled other magnets, the
Speaker 1: magnet in his finger would flip uncomfortably. He said. It
Speaker 1: wasn't painful, but it was uncomfortable. Uh. He said this
Speaker 1: especially happened with the speakers and his iPad because those
Speaker 1: are magnetized. Uh. Over the years, he noted too, that
Speaker 1: the magnet in his finger has lost strength. Huh. You
Speaker 1: gotta have a certain amount of confidence in what you're
Speaker 1: doing too. Yeah, I I definitely think so. I can't
Speaker 1: imagine doing this myself. Um, it sounds intriguing the idea
Speaker 1: of having the sort of magnetic sense, but I don't
Speaker 1: know that I would want to go through the process. Uh.
Speaker 1: Then Ionine and Gizmodo. They also talked with Eric Boyd
Speaker 1: who's at hack Lab in Toronto, which is one of
Speaker 1: these bio hacking sort of community centers, and he says,
Speaker 1: you know, he clarifies, this is more about sensory augmentation.
Speaker 1: It's not about the party tricks of pick picking up
Speaker 1: paper clips. It's useful for people, especially who work with
Speaker 1: electronics because they can feel the difference between live and
Speaker 1: dead wires. He mentions a group called Grindhouse wet Wear
Speaker 1: that I'm going to come back to later. Uh, there
Speaker 1: were working on a device called bottle nose that fits
Speaker 1: over your finger if you've got one of these magnetic implants,
Speaker 1: and it augments the experience further. It could, for instance,
Speaker 1: since infrared, it can also transmit information through vibrations, or
Speaker 1: it could be used to measure distances as a ranging device.
Speaker 1: It's supposedly safest if you're going to get the magnetic
Speaker 1: implementation to do so on your ring finger, on your
Speaker 1: non dominant hand, because it is quote your least useful finger.
Speaker 1: So apparently, like if you have to choose, like if
Speaker 1: you're in like a game throne situation and somebody's gonna
Speaker 1: cut off one of your fingers. If you have to choose,
Speaker 1: the ring finger on your least dominant hand is the
Speaker 1: best one to go because it has the least to
Speaker 1: do with gripping action. Interesting. So, but you also have
Speaker 1: to be careful that this is not placed between uh,
Speaker 1: your touch surface and the bone, because if you're like
Speaker 1: in an emergency situation where like, let's say you fell
Speaker 1: off of something, you have to grip it really hard, right,
Speaker 1: it would crush the magnet, So it's usually embedded on
Speaker 1: the inside corner of the finger. Also note that the
Speaker 1: body artists who performed this, they're not allowed to use
Speaker 1: anesthesia because they don't have licensing for that. So it's
Speaker 1: real painful. Uh. And the basically all they can do
Speaker 1: is put your hand in ice water to numb it.
Speaker 1: It takes some say less than ten minutes, and damn
Speaker 1: earlier said fifteen to twenty. So we're talking to some
Speaker 1: real cowboy trans humanism here, Like you put a stick
Speaker 1: between your teeth and staring into the campfire bite not
Speaker 1: a bullet, yea yeah. And they use standard neodymium magnets
Speaker 1: for this. Uh. What you need to do though, there's
Speaker 1: the whole biocoding thing and that's you know, as we've
Speaker 1: talked about with background organs and organ transplants and all
Speaker 1: that stuff, your body rejects foreign material, so you need
Speaker 1: this biocoding to help it keep that from happening. You
Speaker 1: definitely don't want this to fail and you don't want
Speaker 1: the magnet to shatter, otherwise you're gonna end up with
Speaker 1: head V metals exposed to the inside of your body.
Speaker 1: One other thing to note, the magnets are too small
Speaker 1: to wipe out at hard drive, so don't worry about
Speaker 1: that if you're planning on getting this done. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: would be because that would be especially problematic. Give finger
Speaker 1: on this hand, as the usped of a divide finger
Speaker 1: on this hand is a powerful magnet, and you do,
Speaker 1: like the small wonder thing or sorry not small wonder
Speaker 1: out of this world. You touch the two fingers together
Speaker 1: and you raise all the information off your USB drive. UH.
Speaker 1: The other reason why people are doing this in their
Speaker 1: fingertips is because it's one of the areas in our
Speaker 1: bodies where we have the highest nerve density. UH. The
Speaker 1: movement of the magnet there in response to e M fields. Basically,
Speaker 1: it stimulates the somati sensory receptors in your fingertip. These
Speaker 1: are the same ones that are responsible for us to
Speaker 1: perceive pressure, temperature, and pain. Now grindhouse wetwear that I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier. They've also inserted something called Circadia into one
Speaker 1: of their members. It's a biosensor that accumulates weeks of
Speaker 1: body to amperature data and sends it to a smartphone
Speaker 1: via Bluetooth data. The idea is basically that eventually we'll
Speaker 1: have something like this that will give us biometric data,
Speaker 1: like quantify what's going on in our real time evaluation
Speaker 1: of what our body is doing. That is a very
Speaker 1: useful trans humanist daema. Yeah, it's sort of like a
Speaker 1: fitbit in your body, but with more application. So many
Speaker 1: of the problems that arise with our health you don't
Speaker 1: have like real time knowledge of, but you find out
Speaker 1: months down the line, maybe years down the line, far
Speaker 1: past to the point of easy intervention. So the biometric
Speaker 1: possibilities of trans humanism I think are some of the
Speaker 1: most exciting and most most useful. Yeah, it makes me
Speaker 1: think back to like it's very easy to sort of
Speaker 1: dismiss this stuff and just be like, oh, whatever, this
Speaker 1: is like this crazy subculture. But like again, like think
Speaker 1: about like the transdermal how transdermal implants ended up becoming
Speaker 1: useful for chemotherapy. Right, so there are are some applications
Speaker 1: here that are going to, you know, spring out of
Speaker 1: this that I think we're gonna start seeing in medicine
Speaker 1: in the future. All Right. That brings us to who
Speaker 1: left anonym who I started off the episode quoting, Uh.
Speaker 1: She is a Berlin based Scottish d I Y bio
Speaker 1: hacker uh. And there is an interview with her and
Speaker 1: Wired magazine that just gave me kind of an overview
Speaker 1: that I want to present to you all. She does
Speaker 1: most of her work in her own apartment, sterilizing her
Speaker 1: equipment with vodka. This definitely sounds like a Saska Sisters
Speaker 1: style bio hack. It hurts a lot, she says, and
Speaker 1: she's also passed out before while she's been doing this. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of d I Y body hacking that
Speaker 1: is referred to as grinding when you're just and this
Speaker 1: is not to be confused with grinder, the social media
Speaker 1: application for dating. This is grinding, as in like you're
Speaker 1: in your kitchen with a scalpel and uh some something
Speaker 1: to separate the flesh out, so you and put devices
Speaker 1: into your body on your own. She does all her
Speaker 1: own surgeries with a scalpel. She does have a spot
Speaker 1: or there with her in case she passes out. She
Speaker 1: once tried to implant a temperature sensor transdermally that would
Speaker 1: show varying brightness under her skin to indicate what the
Speaker 1: temperature was. But this was a total disaster. She didn't
Speaker 1: buy a proof it right away, so she ended up
Speaker 1: in the hospital, and she's ended up in the hospital
Speaker 1: several times because of bad implement implementations. Her implants have
Speaker 1: actually rusted under her skin, and her surgeries have turned septic.
Speaker 1: She did the whole magnets in the fingers thing too,
Speaker 1: except she didn't want to go through the effort of
Speaker 1: paying a body artist to do it. She thought that
Speaker 1: was too expensive. So what she did was she coded
Speaker 1: the magnets in suguru, which is like a silicon putty,
Speaker 1: is my understanding. Or sometimes she just uses hot gun glue.
Speaker 1: She said something to the effect of like, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: believe how many things I've put in my body that
Speaker 1: are covered in gun glue. Uh, And she inserted the
Speaker 1: magnets into all of her fingertips, and she said, well,
Speaker 1: that only costs twenty pounds, so she got the magnets.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know if she's like ordering these
Speaker 1: on eBay or Amazon or whatever. She just gets the magnets,
Speaker 1: some hot gun glue and a knife and vodka and
Speaker 1: just did it herself. Now, I imagine a number of
Speaker 1: people are thinking right now, this sounds an awful lot
Speaker 1: like mental illness. And maybe. But but I do want
Speaker 1: to remind everyone of the old adage, if I'm repeating
Speaker 1: it correctly here, that the pioneers are often massacred and
Speaker 1: it's settlers that profit. So we're definitely talking about pioneers here.
Speaker 1: Oftentimes pioneers don't have the best outcome. These are the
Speaker 1: individuals that are trying new things, going into new places,
Speaker 1: and it's gonna be the people that come after them.
Speaker 1: They're gonna have the easier time of it and maybe
Speaker 1: actually benefit um in a larger sense from the from
Speaker 1: the advancements. Yeah, this is true and left anonym I mean,
Speaker 1: I can tell you she gives a lot of lectures
Speaker 1: about this stuff, so she's treated seriously. A lot of
Speaker 1: people invite her to come and speak about her experiences
Speaker 1: and how they've gone. But you know, uh, this is
Speaker 1: the more brutal side of bio hacking for sure. At
Speaker 1: the time that the article was written, which was in
Speaker 1: two thousand and ten, she was talking about installing a
Speaker 1: compass chip and a power coil and her left knee
Speaker 1: so she could sense magnetic north. And I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: the device that you would wear. It was a wearable
Speaker 1: that would do the same thing. She wanted it in
Speaker 1: her body. Okay, here's uh so that's that's an individual.
Speaker 1: But we got another. Um, this is a really good one. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it and it comes from another sort of collective.
Speaker 1: It's mainly two guys. They called themselves Science for the Masses.
Speaker 1: And you may have heard of this story as it
Speaker 1: was making around. This is the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: comes across Robert and my desk on a Monday morning,
Speaker 1: and we wonder do we write about this this week
Speaker 1: or is this is this bogus? And it turned out
Speaker 1: it wasn't bogus. Uh. They created night vision eye drops uh,
Speaker 1: and they described themselves as an independent bio hacking collective.
Speaker 1: In their experiment experiment, they used the chemical chlorine E six,
Speaker 1: which is a relative of chlorophyll. It's been used to
Speaker 1: try to treat cancer, and it occurs naturally in deep
Speaker 1: sea fish to enhance the light receptors in their eyes.
Speaker 1: In cancer treatment, it's used in combination with energy from
Speaker 1: low powered light sources to destroy cancerous cells by inducing apoptosis,
Speaker 1: which we've talked about on the show before as such,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna put this stuff in your eyes, you
Speaker 1: really want to stay away from bright or ambient daylight
Speaker 1: because it could harm your eyes cells and cause permanent damage.
Speaker 1: Their idea came from the work of a guy named
Speaker 1: Ilias Washington who's at Columbia University, and he wanted to
Speaker 1: test this chlorophyll derivative to make proteins in our eyes
Speaker 1: respond to red light instead of green light. He tested
Speaker 1: it on mice. What he didn't tell other people was
Speaker 1: he also tested it on him self and he didn't
Speaker 1: report the results. Uh. They were inspired by this. They
Speaker 1: were also inspired by an experiment that was a patent
Speaker 1: that was filed by Totada our Shanta is a Georgian
Speaker 1: doctor who lost his license for medical fraud. Dr Nick, Yes,
Speaker 1: it does sound like him, doesn't it. Um. What they
Speaker 1: did was, they said, well, like many bio hackers. Well,
Speaker 1: we can't get you know, actual academic approval for this,
Speaker 1: so we're intested in ourselves. So Gabriel A. Chinia, I
Speaker 1: believe is how it's pronounced. He was the subject and
Speaker 1: his co conspirator Jeffrey Tibbitts was the one who applied it.
Speaker 1: They put fifty micro leaders of the C six, together
Speaker 1: with sailing and insulin, into his eyes with a drip.
Speaker 1: Within an hour, it interacted with the photo receptors in
Speaker 1: his eyes. He could distinguish images and symbols beyond fifty
Speaker 1: meters in the darkness. He was also able to identify
Speaker 1: people up to fifty meters away in the dark. The
Speaker 1: effect did wear off after some time, however, uh and
Speaker 1: I should also mention like he had to wear these
Speaker 1: sort of eerie looking demonic black contact lenses over his
Speaker 1: eyes while he was doing this, So when you see
Speaker 1: pictures of this, you'll see a guy with just completely
Speaker 1: black eyes. That's not because of the stuff they put
Speaker 1: in his eyes. Is because of the lenses he was
Speaker 1: wearing for protection. The idea of the insulin being in there, well,
Speaker 1: that was to allow absorption of the chemical CE six
Speaker 1: into his eye. They also used a chemical called d
Speaker 1: M s OH to increase the permeability of the cellular membrane,
Speaker 1: basically to allow the free passage of the chemicals into
Speaker 1: his eye. Uh. There is a high risk of cellular
Speaker 1: toxicity here though, especially if you're gonna the d M
Speaker 1: s O. It allows that chemical into your eye, but
Speaker 1: it also allows outside contaminants that could be absorbed with
Speaker 1: the chemical, so it should be totally handled with caution.
Speaker 1: This is this is not uh, don't do this at home. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is some pretty heavy biohacking here. This is incredible,
Speaker 1: and especially because that stuff can all so be absorbed
Speaker 1: through your skin. From their site, uh itself, from Science
Speaker 1: for the Masses site, they have a review on the
Speaker 1: whole experiment and this is what they said. First of all,
Speaker 1: I want to just say it's really cool. The research
Speaker 1: that they did is all under the Creative Commons license,
Speaker 1: so anybody can go look it up and they can
Speaker 1: see exactly what they did and follow their notes. Uh.
Speaker 1: They provide a disclaimer right at the top, and they
Speaker 1: say increased light amplification may have adverse effects on the
Speaker 1: cellular structure of the eye. So some materials in this
Speaker 1: mixture should not be used on animals or humans, and
Speaker 1: that there had been previous research in the patent I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier that claimed the mixture would absorb to the
Speaker 1: retina increased vision in low light. So basically, here's how
Speaker 1: they did it. They pinned open his eyes like clockwork
Speaker 1: orange style with a speculum and had a micropipette to
Speaker 1: slowly add the solution to his conjunctival sac Then they
Speaker 1: placed the black Sclero lens as I mentioned earlier, into
Speaker 1: each eye. Then on top of that, they gave him sunglasses.
Speaker 1: All this was to reduce the potential light that was
Speaker 1: entering his eye because they didn't want this stuff to
Speaker 1: start destroying the cells in his eyeball. His eyesight returned
Speaker 1: normal by morning. Twenty days later they checked him out.
Speaker 1: There were no noticeable effects. Okay, so he's okay for
Speaker 1: future research. What they want to do is they want
Speaker 1: to take a gans filled stimulator and an electro electro
Speaker 1: tinograph to measure how much electrical stimulation the eyes actually
Speaker 1: receiving during this kind of experiment. They want basically quantifiable
Speaker 1: numbers so that they can measure the ranges of vision
Speaker 1: that are being amplified. So this, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: this is bio hacking to the extreme. Right. They're giving
Speaker 1: us superpowers. You're giving what indungeons and dragons would be
Speaker 1: called low light vision, uh to a human being and
Speaker 1: then having to wear the the the black contact lens
Speaker 1: is the sunglasses, essentially wearing sunglasses at night to keep
Speaker 1: track of the vision. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. Uh. These
Speaker 1: guys have since like broken up their collective. Licinia has
Speaker 1: worked in a handful of molecular biology labs tibots as
Speaker 1: a registered nurse. These guys are professor professionals. Other bio
Speaker 1: hacking groups have tried this experiment as well, but no
Speaker 1: one has the money for testing it on a large scale.
Speaker 1: This is one of the things that people don't talk
Speaker 1: about with bio hacking is that because it's not through
Speaker 1: a big institution like a company or a university, there's
Speaker 1: no money at hand, especially for the proper legal ramifications
Speaker 1: that might come if you run clinical trials on people
Speaker 1: as volunteers. Uh. And look, the National Institute of Health
Speaker 1: is not likely to fund somebody who's just going to
Speaker 1: drop chemicals into a humans eyeball for night vision, right, Um,
Speaker 1: but what about other people who might fund this, so
Speaker 1: they said, uh, these are the guys who perform the experiment.
Speaker 1: They actually said military contractors got in touch with them afterward,
Speaker 1: and we're interested in it. They also said a voting
Speaker 1: magazine contracted them and said that could have applications for
Speaker 1: sailors who were working at night and instead of having
Speaker 1: to put on like heavy goggles or machinery or whatever
Speaker 1: so they could see at night, they could use this
Speaker 1: night vision stuff. And if you happen to have a
Speaker 1: very spacious basement with a pit in it, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just a no brainer, perfect way to test it. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: as long as there's lotion in the pit as well.
Speaker 1: Um Lacinia when he was interviewed by Gizmoto, he said,
Speaker 1: let's be fair here, it's kind of crap science. So
Speaker 1: he's not, you know, fooled in anything like thinking that
Speaker 1: they've made some big headway, other than you know, they
Speaker 1: basically took what an academic wrote down in a paper
Speaker 1: and just did it in their garage. It sounds like um.
Speaker 1: They also wanted to clarify for the media they didn't
Speaker 1: inject this stuff into his eye. They used eye droppers
Speaker 1: to put it in his eye. So there's some problems
Speaker 1: here as well too, right, Like, so the biohacking thing
Speaker 1: kind of gets around the I guess pure you nature
Speaker 1: of academic papers in that, Like there's no way to
Speaker 1: really follow up on this, right, Like what if he
Speaker 1: already had better than average night vision, or what if
Speaker 1: it was a placebo effect that was taking place and
Speaker 1: they didn't have a control group in place to sort
Speaker 1: of measure it against you, Like, if I go to
Speaker 1: these to these extremes to improve my night vision, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna kind of want my night vision to be improved,
Speaker 1: and that's gonna potentially have an effect on my perception
Speaker 1: exactly right. All right, One more totally crazy one. Have
Speaker 1: you heard of aquaman crystals? Who I have? Not a
Speaker 1: synti street drug? Yeah, man, everybody's doing it. No. Aquaman
Speaker 1: crystals came out of a study at the University of
Speaker 1: Southern Denmark. They discovered a crystalline substance. This is actually
Speaker 1: one that's not really bio hacking. It happened at an university.
Speaker 1: They discovered a crystalline substance that absorbs and stores huge
Speaker 1: amounts of oxygen. Now these are synthetic, but they're derived
Speaker 1: from cobalt to lifeen oxygen from both air and water,
Speaker 1: and they might let people breathe underwater. It hasn't been
Speaker 1: tested yet, but it could also help people who need
Speaker 1: like an oxygen tank, for instance, if they have lung ailments.
Speaker 1: So you should have a small Yeah, I do remember
Speaker 1: when this research came out. I I'm not mistaken. This
Speaker 1: is the one to where the other sensational spin on
Speaker 1: it was that you could suck all the oxygen out
Speaker 1: of a room with a bingo that actually comes up
Speaker 1: right in the next notes Motherboard cover it, and they said,
Speaker 1: if you use ten liters of this stuff, which is
Speaker 1: called crystalline cobalt salt, it can draw twenty one of
Speaker 1: the air out of a room like instantly. Uh. It
Speaker 1: binds basically to individual oxygen molecules and it works like
Speaker 1: artificial hemoglobin. So the idea here is that it would
Speaker 1: be able to operate indefinitely. UH. The oxygen would bind
Speaker 1: to the iron in your blood, it would also bind
Speaker 1: to the metal cobalt that are in the crystals and
Speaker 1: then just sort of replenish itself. Um. And according to them,
Speaker 1: they say a few grains contain enough oxygen for one
Speaker 1: breath and since it continually resupplies itself, a diver needing
Speaker 1: oxygen would only need a few of these grains. So
Speaker 1: this is like something out of the ABYSS, right. I
Speaker 1: think in the Abyss they use liquid oxygen, but sort
Speaker 1: of like you would inhale a couple of these grains
Speaker 1: and then you can just breathe underwater indefinitely. Yeah, just
Speaker 1: the micro micronization of existing technology. Yeah, exactly, So another
Speaker 1: potential medical application there. All right, So we've talked about
Speaker 1: sort of the trans humanist dreams, we've talked about some
Speaker 1: of these biohecking realities. We've talked about the the Harbingers, uh,
Speaker 1: and the Pioneers. You're probably wondering, well, how do we
Speaker 1: know when we get there? How do we know who
Speaker 1: we've actually achieved trans humanism? I mean, needless to say,
Speaker 1: if we if we reach the point where we have
Speaker 1: these like really crazy out there sci fi incarnations of
Speaker 1: human existence, yeah, we're trans human at that point. But
Speaker 1: but what actually has to take place? Yeah? I mean
Speaker 1: Google glasses and trans humanism right now, you can't check
Speaker 1: it off the list just because you have some Google Yeah. Well, uh,
Speaker 1: as with everything trans human it's kind of in the
Speaker 1: eye or the bionic eye of the beholder. But bio
Speaker 1: ethicist Kyle mckinrick weighed in on this in two thousand
Speaker 1: eleven and Discover magazine piece that he did, and he
Speaker 1: was basically expanding some previous comments where people would ask him, well,
Speaker 1: how are we going to know? What are the what
Speaker 1: are the qualifications for transhumanist evolution? This is a great article,
Speaker 1: by the way, I really liked his tones, right, he
Speaker 1: had some funny bits in there. So these are his
Speaker 1: seven qualifiers. First of all, prosthetics are are preferred. This
Speaker 1: is the basic idea that you're going to get to
Speaker 1: the point where not only is a prosthetic limb as
Speaker 1: good as the limb you're replacing, not only is a
Speaker 1: synthetic organ of that grown organ or an artificial organ
Speaker 1: as good as the original, but it's actually an improvement. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we're a bit far away from that being a reality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but I'm just thinking, like man, like every week,
Speaker 1: I feel like stories just pop in more and more
Speaker 1: and more about prosthetic limb enhancements and b c I
Speaker 1: s being used to control prosthetic limbs. Yeah, and they're
Speaker 1: if you're selective in how you judge it. Certainly we
Speaker 1: have examples of say, you know, runners with artificial legs
Speaker 1: that are able to perform to you know, a high level. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: depending on how you look at it, Yes, prosthetic limbs
Speaker 1: are getting you know, crazy good at at replicator or
Speaker 1: sometimes even exceeding normal perform performance. But across the board
Speaker 1: when it comes to performance, uh, you know, the sensory
Speaker 1: realm uh, there's still a lot of room for improvement.
Speaker 1: So we can't check that one off just yet. The
Speaker 1: next one better brains. This is the idea that beyond coffee,
Speaker 1: beyond taking whatever brain enhancement drugs are available, this would
Speaker 1: be the use of of of neural implants, of cybernetic
Speaker 1: enhancements to upgrade the human mind. And it would have
Speaker 1: to be a situation where we wouldn't worry about brain doping.
Speaker 1: This would just be the natural thing to do with
Speaker 1: the available technology. And this is why so many people
Speaker 1: get excited about a transcranial direct stimulation that I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: that the possibility of that being the avenue for this. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we're seeing some promising developments here, but we're still
Speaker 1: not quite there. Right Next, artificial assistance this would be
Speaker 1: ubiquitous use of AI and augmented reality in our daily life.
Speaker 1: I have to say, I feel like we're very close
Speaker 1: in this one, because I'm constantly having to drive places
Speaker 1: where I put my my phone up there I use
Speaker 1: Ways or another map based program, and it's thinking for me,
Speaker 1: and it's displaying a version of reality that I'm depending
Speaker 1: on to get somewhere in real life. Oh yeah, totally
Speaker 1: same for me. Like I have gotten horrible, especially since
Speaker 1: moving to the city of Atlanta at like learning my
Speaker 1: way around the city on my own because I rely
Speaker 1: on Google Maps or whatever to tell me how to
Speaker 1: get there. Uh maybe if I do it like repeatedly
Speaker 1: over and over again, it sort of works out that way.
Speaker 1: But if it's a location that I've never been to before,
Speaker 1: I don't retain that information because why why would I? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's the natural part of our our cognitive economy
Speaker 1: is that is that if you can outsource something to
Speaker 1: another person or another thing another source, your brain does
Speaker 1: it because it has a tight ship to maintain. So
Speaker 1: think about Ways and which I think Google bought Ways
Speaker 1: and incorporated into Google Maps to it also tells you
Speaker 1: information about traffic patterns that you wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: experience through your regular senses. You wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: see that far down the road to know that there's
Speaker 1: a roadblock, So you have sort of superhuman information in
Speaker 1: a matter of speaking. Ways in these other programs, are
Speaker 1: are are getting us close to checking off this artificial
Speaker 1: assistance uh um qualifier, but also playing into the better
Speaker 1: brain idea because we are you know, augmenting our our
Speaker 1: neural ability, are cognitive abilities via this external device and
Speaker 1: its properties. Absolutely. The next one, number four on this
Speaker 1: list is amazing average age, longer life from everyone, with
Speaker 1: a roughly hundred and twenty year average lifespan for humans.
Speaker 1: So we have a long ways to go in this one,
Speaker 1: but when you start breaking down uh death mortality into
Speaker 1: smaller winnable battles, it does seem more and more likely
Speaker 1: we could get to that point. Uh. The next one
Speaker 1: is responsible reproduction. So this one is very interesting and
Speaker 1: gets into some of that the potentially problem problematic um.
Speaker 1: You know, Western rich people telling developing nations not to
Speaker 1: have babies, so sort of this uh the borderline ethics
Speaker 1: of like is this like eugenics talking about superior humans
Speaker 1: versus inferiors. So in this scenario, mccentrick is saying that
Speaker 1: we would we need to all start treating human reproduction
Speaker 1: and or parenting as an act to be undertaken by
Speaker 1: choice and uh and responsibly, rather than as a mere
Speaker 1: biological occurrence. Uh. The obvious benefits here are, you know,
Speaker 1: global population woes, swelling of orphanages, many a troubled home life. Um.
Speaker 1: Because I mean, seriously, what what sort of selfish moron
Speaker 1: is going to thank him or herself futuristic and evolved
Speaker 1: with the robot eyes if they're still blind to social
Speaker 1: horrors that arguably stem from all these overpopulation woes and
Speaker 1: unwanted birth. So that's like sort of taking the bio
Speaker 1: hacking thing to like the larger scale, like um population hacking. Yeah. Really,
Speaker 1: And if you think of human the human population is
Speaker 1: kind of the meta organism. It's saying, not only am
Speaker 1: I gonna let's let's not only take control of the
Speaker 1: individual organism, let's take control of the meta organism, its form,
Speaker 1: it's function, and let's streamline it as well. But then
Speaker 1: how do you get into that scenario without getting into eugenics,
Speaker 1: without getting into imperialist um, you know, dog Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: it's it sounds very like a dangerous road to go down.
Speaker 1: But it also reminds me. I see this on Facebook
Speaker 1: all the time. Uh. I have friends who don't have kids,
Speaker 1: and they'll say something along the lines of, you know,
Speaker 1: you have to have a license to drive a car,
Speaker 1: you should probably have to have a license to have
Speaker 1: a kid. Um, And this is basically that, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there's plenty of plenty of room for argument and
Speaker 1: hurt feelings and strong emotions on this one. And speaking
Speaker 1: of which number six, um Munkinstrick refers to as my body,
Speaker 1: my choice. So obviously you need to own your body
Speaker 1: in order to augment it. That means voluntary self surgery,
Speaker 1: ownership of what your body does and how it's defined.
Speaker 1: And this is really getting into the regulation aspect of
Speaker 1: like whether or not the government's going to get involved. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because think about, you know, to any degrees in different countries,
Speaker 1: how much control the and the government already has over
Speaker 1: your body and what say you have already concerning your body.
Speaker 1: So this gets into everything from sexuality to reproduction to abortion,
Speaker 1: physical augmentation. Um. Some of the limits than the natural
Speaker 1: progression of this too is going to go down to
Speaker 1: the vaccination route. Yeah, indeed, I mean that's that's another
Speaker 1: another um, you know, face of this problem. Um. I
Speaker 1: mean on the surgery side, we see this a lot too.
Speaker 1: We see individuals who want something dramatic but they can't
Speaker 1: go to just a normal surgeon to get it done.
Speaker 1: Um and no anesthesia. Right. It reminds me a lot
Speaker 1: of the work of plastic surgeon Joe Um Rosen, who
Speaker 1: have brought up on here before. This guy is a
Speaker 1: huge advocate of like let people be what they want
Speaker 1: to be through plastic surgery. Plastic surgery allows to change
Speaker 1: the body and therefore change the sof you want to
Speaker 1: be a tiger, right, Like the isn't that one of them?
Speaker 1: The Tigerman is like the big body modifier. I think
Speaker 1: he might have passed away actually, but you know what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about, right, Like he like modified, so he
Speaker 1: had fangs and cat eyes and kind of um stripes
Speaker 1: on his skin. Yeah. One of the examples that Rosen
Speaker 1: always brings up is why is it okay for someone
Speaker 1: to walk in and say I want bigger breaths and
Speaker 1: they can make that happen. But if you say you
Speaker 1: want blue nipples, that's too far for some reason, you
Speaker 1: know why, So we have to That's that's another hurdle
Speaker 1: to really embracing this trans human um notion. And then finally,
Speaker 1: the seventh caveat on Kyle mcintrick's list is person not people.
Speaker 1: So this is the idea that we're gonna have to
Speaker 1: depend more on concepts of personhood rather than mere human rights.
Speaker 1: So we're talking grill as, dolphins, robots, computer aies, because
Speaker 1: if we're gonna step beyond and outside of the traditional
Speaker 1: human experience, we need to, you know, have rights and stuff.
Speaker 1: We new humans need to be people to even if
Speaker 1: they have thumb drives and wings. This is what that
Speaker 1: Eclipse Phase game is all about. And so I think
Speaker 1: it's I think it's a really interesting, like it's interesting
Speaker 1: is a game, but it's also just like an interesting
Speaker 1: like site to go to and kind of read through
Speaker 1: what they're working on there for their fictional reality, just
Speaker 1: because like it's addressing questions like this and saying like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: if we uh, if we take a gorilla or a
Speaker 1: dolphin and we give it uh an enhanced intelligence and
Speaker 1: then we upload it into a human body, does it
Speaker 1: have rights? Interesting? Wow, that's now I'm just trying to
Speaker 1: imagine that the dolphin human gorilla hybrid body. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of weird ways to go with it.
Speaker 1: But I mean some of it's science fiction. But as
Speaker 1: we revealed here today, I mean we're on our way
Speaker 1: towards this stuff. Yeah, I mean, like all great science fiction,
Speaker 1: science fiction, echoes, the the the are contemporary fears, hopes, uh,
Speaker 1: and dreams concerning our current technology are current science. All right,
Speaker 1: So that about wraps it up. But I want to
Speaker 1: know from you guys out there, talk to us right
Speaker 1: into us. Let us know, would you do some of
Speaker 1: these things? Would you put magnets in your fingertips? Or
Speaker 1: would you drop night vision goo into your eyeballs? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know? Or would you like a hook up some
Speaker 1: sensors to your body so you could feel your wife's
Speaker 1: sensation of pleasure and pain? Are those things that you
Speaker 1: would be interested in? And also, here's the thing that
Speaker 1: I want to know, what did we miss? Because there
Speaker 1: is this whole bio hacker community out there that like
Speaker 1: we barely scratched the surface of, and I'm sure there's
Speaker 1: lots of cool stuff going on out there that if
Speaker 1: you're a bio hacker and you're out there listening, You're like, oh,
Speaker 1: these guys they don't know a bunch of squares. They
Speaker 1: completely missed all this cool stuff. But let us know
Speaker 1: right into us, tell us what you just finished under
Speaker 1: your forearm or your yeah yeah. So what are the
Speaker 1: ways to do that? Well, you can start with social media.
Speaker 1: We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler, we're
Speaker 1: on Instagram. On all of those we are blow the Mind.
Speaker 1: You can also visit us at our mothership stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you're gonna find
Speaker 1: all of our podcasts, all of our videos, the articles
Speaker 1: and galleries and lists and all that stuff that we
Speaker 1: put together. And then there's the final place, the final frontier,
Speaker 1: where you can write to us. And what's that, Robert,
Speaker 1: that's right. You can always send us an email at
Speaker 1: blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. Well
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics How stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Little bit first