For centuries there has been this attempt to create a better human being.
There is no God in the machine.
And if you do not take that into account there is neither purpose nor goal and man becomes some kind of pleasure machine.
You have to avoid these inflated thoughts, these fever halucinations.
Today Kla.TV talks to Prof. Dr. Paul Cullen on the topic of transhumanism.
Thank you for taking the time to share your insights on this exciting topic!
[Prof. Cullen: Yes, I'm originally from Dublin, Ireland.
I studied human medicine there, I'm a doctor.
I later studied molecular biology and biology in London, I worked in research for many years.
I am head of a large medical laboratory in Münster, and I'm at the university there too.
I give lectures there as an associate professor.
And I got into the topic of transhumanism because I've always been interested in science fiction, even as a young kid, and
I did a lot of genetic research myself, it just interested me.
And at first I thought it was just a whim, that it wasn't meant seriously—that it was just one of those quirks rich people have.
Then I realized, no, it's no quirk at all, they're dead serious about it, so I realized that's actually a very important issue
since it is fundamentally linked to our conception of man which is something I'm interested in, so that's how I got into it.
Today's talk is on transhumanism - a big topic also at the Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum.
One of the key speakers was Yuval Harari, I would say the WEF's prophet as far as visions are
concerned dealing with where humanity should be heading.
He proclaims transhumanism as this "rescuing ark". The backgrounds are, in the Fourth Industrial
Revolution, which is very much based on AI , where humans are basically unable to keep pace, according to Harari.
Meaning that sooner or later, if humans are not optimized in terms of their abilities, so they can keep pace
with AI, they will practically die out as completely useless creatures, according to Darwin's theory.
What does this human optimization, this transhumanism, look like in practice in purely
physical terms? What is to be manipulated in humans?
[Prof. Cullen: Well, transhumanism is the idea that you can improve humans by using technical devices.
So first of all, the idea is that you can improve certain bodily functions.
For example, there are people who cannot hear.
And this is a birth defect - a congenital deafness, the inner ear has not formed.
Nowadays it is possible to attach an artificial inner ear and connect it directly, electronically to the
brain pathways where hearing takes place, with the result that this person can actually hear.
So compensate for disabilities?
There are attempts to overcome blindness, for example in the case of retinal degeneration.
Elon Musk is working on a system for people who have paraplegia - that the bridging between the nerve pathways
and the muscles is restored. So, that's the first stage.
Being a doctor, I would say, I'd support that.
I have nothing against that, we've been doing this for years.
Just think, for example, of heart valve replacement or cataracts where you get an artificial lens, that's the continuation of it.
Or artificial teeth ...
Yes, but artificial teeth do not touch the essence of what it means to be human, so to speak. It's actually just a first stage.
The second stage is, you don't accept humans as they are.
So first we have a situation where we want to restore the normal state that has been disturbed.
The next stage is that you are not satisfied with the normal state and want to improve it.
This is called enhancement.
And here's the idea - it's something that is interesting for the military, for example, that you can either genetically or
via technology, enable a person to perhaps see better in the dark, see better, hear better or have other abilities.
a better orientation ...
Exactly, or to be stronger, whatever. And this is where it becomes a problematic issue, because
you need to look at what exactly is "better" now?
For example, today we have a prevalent specific beauty ideal in the field of fashion, a few hundred years
ago a completely different beauty ideal was common.
And if you break that down, it's the idea that it depends on certain abilities, that one human is better, or better
performing than the other, and that's where it becomes dangerous.
As if being human is about performing somehowl. And that's what makes this critical.
And just to finish this thought, the idea of transhumanism is that you first have an
improvement, then enhancement through certain options ...
and finally, the idea is to be able to directly tap into people's consciousness and perhaps even upload it to some kind of machine,
computer, cloud, or whatever, so humans can continue living in the machine, so to speak.
This is featured in many science fiction films.
Just a few days ago, I saw that a movie came out with a robot - and from my point of view, I think this conception is
absolutely insane - and that's basically the old idea of how can we live forever, how we can become like the gods.
That's basically the idea behind it.
[That's why Mr. Harari wants to create what he calls Homo Deus, or human God?
If the human is to be optimized, that means you could program him somehow via a chip or something else to be like
Beethoven, for example, so you could suddenly turn everyone into a Beethoven. Would that be technically possible?
[Prof. Cullen: No. First of all, people like Beethoven, Mozart, Einstein or Newton, these are all such
unusual people and their sparks of creativity really...
The interesting thing about these people is that you can only follow up to a certain point ...
That's the case with Einstein, if you look at the history of physics and his thoughts, how he
developed, you can follow to a certain point.
And then he has a thought that you cannot follow up on.
Charisma ...
It's like with Mozart. As far as I know, Mozart's musical scores had virtually no corrections.
And then Mozart was asked, how do you do that?
And he said, I hear the music and I write it down.
I just hear it and write it down.
Intuitively ... Inspiration ...
Yes, the idea that conciousness can for example somehow be manipulated... Our current model of a human
being at the moment is some kind of mechanistic model.
And that means?
Humans are a kind of machine, a physiochemical machine.
And all processes take place in the central nervous system, in the brain, in the skull. But we don't even know if that's true.
We don't know where so-to-say this consciousness comes from, whether we are recipients of this....
I'm not saying that's how it is, I'm just saying we have no knowledge about that.
In other words, at the end of the day, we don't know at all how humans function, especially creativity.
And we also do not know about the essence of what makes us human, emotions, love - all these things.
We don't have the slightest idea of how these function.
[I understand that well. If you want to provide humans with a better orientation system in the military field, e.g.
that - for instance, he knows all the cards by memory or so,
how do you do that simply technically?
[Prof. Cullen: Well, of course the military has the idea of the super soldier. And there are already approaches for this,
For example, it is possible to influence thoughts through magnetic coils - so there is a helmet with magnets in it,
magnetic coils - which can actually influence brain waves.
And they ... it's called "flow"... It means when you're in the creative process, you
lose your sense of time and you're in the flow.
And this was used for example on snipers.
The snipers become relaxed, deeply relaxed, and can hit more targets per time unit.
with magnetic waves from the outside.
[Prof. Cullen: Yes. Also with patients that have Parkinson's disease, for example. by stimulating deep regions of the brain,
immobility can be partially remedied and things like that.
That exists. That's the level we're on, so to speak. But that's not what they want.
There are basically two ways of trying to change humans.
One is through biology, via genetics.
And the second is via technology, via computers, via technical aids.
And when it comes to genetics, the problem is that we don't understand genetics either.
I'm old enough to remember when the human genome was sequenced.
We betted on how many genes humans have.
And we all thought we have more genes than animals and so on.
You usually have around 100,000, 150,000 genes. In the end it was 26,000 or 27,000.
The other thing is: when it comes to what is a gene...
There are so many variations, there is epigenetics , it's like with physics:
The more you look at the material, the more it falls apart between your fingers so-to-speak.
And in biology, for example, we basically have no answer to the question of what life is.
For example, as a thought experiment ... you have a cell and the cell is alive, and
then there is the dead cell, it has just died.
All matter, everything is there. All the machinery is there.
Just the life is missing.
Life is missing and this cell cannot be restarted. And what is it that's missing?
What is in the living cell that is identically not existent in the non-living cell?
Certainly nothing mechanical.
There you go. And that's a fundamental problem with transhumanism.
In my opinion, this is a fundamental misunderstanding, according to nature - it's a false anthropology in my opinion .
Okay, yes. So false assumptions you build on?
[Prof. Cullen: Yes. A false understanding of what humans are.
And a very materialistic understanding. I personally believe that without a transcendent dimension in general ...
What do you mean, transcendent?
[Prof. Cullen: That there is a God, or that there is a reality behind reality.
That this reality is not the actual one, that there is a reality behind reality, a different reality which is the real one.
This concept is what gives life a direction, what gives life meaning.
And if you leave that out, the human has neither purpose nor goal, and man becomes some kind of pleasure machine.
There are different forms you can have, but it simply falls too short.
And in my view, by the way, this is a false understanding of science, of today's science.
But that would be going too far. In my view, this is not just wrong on the surface or
wrong in the details, but fundamentally wrong.
So when I think of Einstein, where did Mr. Einstein suddenly get his thought, his mental leap?
It can be an intuition of the reality behind the reality.
So some inspiration, let's put it that way.
And you can't compensate for that with machines, can you.
[Prof. Cullen: No. It's a mystery, a secret. It's a miracle, a mystery. We don't know.
AI, for example, is great at reproducing, but it cannot be creative in that sense. Because this last step ...
... this intuition ...
[Prof. Cullen: ...exactly, this last spark, devine spark, you could almost say, that's missing.
There is no God in a machine. And the idea is... this is an old question, can we create God in the machine? No, we cannot!
You could put it this way: AI, no intuition.
Now, Mr Cullen, this issue of wanting to improve and optimize humanity, humans, this is nothing new.
It already existed under communism and, to put it bluntly, it never worked, did it.
It was always a shot in the arm. Can you tell us something about that?
[Prof. Cullen: Yes, for centuries there has always been this attempt to create the better human. - Utopia.
Yes, so not just a new society. But, Utopia, Thomas Morris, was the new society.
One said, no, we want to create the new society by creating the new human being.
And that of course had a real boost in England with Darwin.
Darwin himself never postulated this.
This social Darwinism, in my view, is a vulgar understanding of what Darwin actually said.
And this has been transferred from the biological to the social world, where it does not belong.
But then people came up with the idea of eugenics - not only in Germany, also in England and America.
Eugenics, meaning...?
Yeah, In the 1930s in Germany that was a biological project ...
... that through selecting species ...
Yes!... better people could be achieved - the better humans, sub-humans, also this idea of racism... It all has to
do with the concept of having better and less good humans.
And the basic idea of eugenics is that the better humans do not reproduce enough and less good humans reproduce too much.
This goes back to Thomas Malthus, as early as the 18th century.
He said that the humans you don't want, like the poor, you should have their settlements near ponds - so that they
would get malaria, for example - in order to restore balance.
And that is a very old idea, it was the same in the Soviet Union, one not only wanted to create the new
society, but the new human, Homo sovieticus it was called.
Which then would be compatible with society.
The thought was if you would eliminate the injustices in society...achieve dialectic materialism then... .
... equalize ...
... then the human will be liberated, won't have to work much, just a few hours a day and the rest of the
time he can improve himself and everyone has the potential to become a Tolstoy and so on.
Of course, this didn't work out at all. The economy didn't work either.
One problem with these things is - when you look at the example of the Soviet Union, i.e. the Russian
Revolution of 1917, it was already clear at the beginning of the 1920s that the economy wasn't working.
Then a portion of capitalism was reintroduced and Stalin came to power.
In other words, it was clear very early on that this system would not work economically.
But they didn't leave it at that, they said, okay, we're going too fast, we'll do a bit of
capitalism, it was called the New Economic Program, NEP...
... to acclimatise ...
[Prof. Cullen: Yes, that's interesting. So, in any case, Stalin came and said, now full speed ahead.
We want collectivization now.
We want to socialize the private ownership of rural production means.
The idea being to catapult Russian society into the new century.
And the rural population has the task of providing food and nourishment for the city ...
and the revolution is taking place in the city.
The peasants in the Soviet Union initially supported the revolution because they thought they would receive a bit
of land back, since serfdom had previously been in place.
And in Ukraine they took on collectivization.
You can basically imagine it like this: the soldiers came and wanted the harvest.
Then farmers said, ok, you can have the harvest, but you have to pay us for the harvest.
And the soldiers said: no, no, comrade, you misunderstood, this is for the revolution.
And they confiscated the harvest.
So no proceeds.
The next year the soldiers came back to have the harvest again.
And they hid the harvest.
The following year - it wasn't exactly like that, just schematically - they started to
burn the harvest before giving it away for free.
And then they said we can't go any further. So collectivization was enforced under pressure.
Collectivization means that there is no longer a large landowner and everything belongs to the state.
[Prof. Cullen: Yes, people were also relocated so they were cut off from their roots.
And that led to a famine in the 1930s in Ukraine, which is one of the most fertile places on earth and
traditionally the breadbasket of the entire region and there was a famine. This was called Holodomor.
We don't have exact figures, but around five million people died out of a population of perhaps 25 - 30 million at the time.
And that's where this leads. You would think, that there should be a realization that this
doesn't work and this idea would be dropped again.
But no, that's not what was done. What was done? The effort was doubled.
And it won't work, because it can't work, since it is against human nature.
What do you do then? You double the effort once more.
And, I see that if these technologies pose a danger ...
it's not so much in the sense of the world being taken over, in my opinion, I see the danger in trying to
push these ideas through again and again, more and more.
That's the great danger lurking for us.
[Kla.TV: Ah yes. If I've understood correctly, transhumanism can't actually work because it's based on false premises. - Correct.
Just like with communism, you start from a false conception of man.
You can't simply impose something on a human being that is against its nature.
That won't work, and no amount of pressure or more pressure will help.
This may help to achieve a certain status, possibly.
But at some point it comes to a dead end.
The person says, I'd rather burn my harvest than give it away for free.
And so with transhumanism possibly it will be quite similar.
Exactly. I think that when there is a technological development, we don't have any examples for it having been reversed.
So these things are out in the world, AI is out there in the world.
These opportunities to improve people's lives technologically are out there in the world.
It depends on how we use them.
If we use this technology according to human nature, it can be extremely positive.
I am not an opponent of technology, not at all.
We use it in my own lab every day and it helps us a lot.
But the issue is the wrong application and this wrong use stems from a false conception of man.
[I understand, I understand very well.
So a human being is more than just a machine that can somehow reproduce things and in which things run.
This whole topic of intuition, what makes a human a human being?
How does he also perhaps interact with the cosmos?
Or how do we still interact with each other?
This whole thing hasn't really been researched.
And Mr. Harari is not talking about these issues.
He definitely wants to enforce such a homo deus.
[Prof. Cullen: Well, I wouldn't say that. I do like this guy, sometimes, because he's very lively and has very good thoughts.
I don't believe he is pursuing a false agenda out of malice - I don't believe that.
I don't think he's a believing person, I think he even said that about himself.
So an atheist.
[Prof. Cullen: I think so, as far as I'm informed.
And of course, from his world view perspective , it is logical to a certain extent. But it falls short.
And that then leads to him saying things like that there are surplus humans. What do we want to do?
AI will replace the jobs and then humans will be superfluous.
And maybe you can sedate them with computer games or drugs or something.
But basically this is an unsolved problem.
Unfortunately, his conception of man leads him down the wrong path.
[Kla.TV: Yes, I understand very well. Now in conclusion:
what advice would you give me or the viewer concerning the topic of transhumanism?
Well, the machinery is running. It is being pushed with enormous financial resources.
This is also being pushed very strongly by the media.
It's like an agenda that is to be implemented by hook or crook, like communism back then.
We know that won't work. What can we humans do about this?
[Prof. Cullen: So I think we have to relax a bit.
I don't think it makes sense to rage against the technology, because the problem is not the technology.
It is also not a technological question ...
...rather a question of world view, conception of man ...
... a philosophical, metaphysical question . ... I think that as citizens, of course, we have to keep an eye on this.
And then we have to draw on the benefits of it for ourselves, our families, our societies.
You just have to avoid these inflated thoughts, these halucinations, and make
sure they don't turn them into reality ...
... that you don't allow yourself to be taken in by this misconception that humans are just like clockwork.
Instead you may remind yourself of the fact that I am actually infinitely superior to this AI.
AI can only reproduce - I can produce something new. I am something creative!
Exactly. And it's very important not to allow yourself to be manipulated by fear - not be afraid.
They work a lot with fear.
Or with feelings of inferiority.
And it is said the entire middle class will be unemployed in three years because of AI.
It will of course change the work world.
But, as long as I've been working, I've heard that we'll have to work less.
I have not experienced that We will not run out of work.
And we can be very confident that this is one of the most interesting times to be living in.
And we have the opportunity to live better today, much better than any other generations before us.
We are always told the opposite. This means that especially today we have unimagined possibilities.
And it's up to us to tackle and use them properly.
And maybe even finally find our true identity as human beings.
And to no longer let yourself be thrown off the track by the many past mistakes.
That's right, exactly right!
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