The Seven Consequences of Transhumanism

If we grant the premises of transhumanism (immortality in a dying universe) and trace them to their natural conclusion, we end up with something that looks uncannily similar to what Christianity has described for roughly two thousand years as hell: eternal conscious torment.

Most people do not believe in transhumanism because it is an idealistic future. They believe in it because they think it is the only way to sustain what they love.

The point of this argument is not to mock that hope, but to inspect the thing promising to satisfy it.

What Hell Actually Means

It may be useful, as a pretext, to clarify what “hell” actually means. Apart from its common fire and brimstone metaphor, it is much more nuanced. C.S. Lewis, one of the twentieth century's most influential theologians, describes the fire of hell not as something that could power a turbine or light a city, but as the fire of permanent mental anguish: the anguish of knowing what has been lost.

Augustine and Aquinas describe it not as a thing but as an absence of a thing: a privation. Hell is not a state where bad things are added to you, but a state where good is subtracted from you. Truth, love, beauty, meaning, life, peace, because you are separated from their source forever (God), by your own will. In the Bible this is referred to as the second death.

“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Matthew 10:28

Which, to some degree, sounds similar to Ray Kurzweil's recurring dream and opening monologue in Transcendent Man: “I have a recurring dream, it has to do with exploring this endless succession of rooms going from one to the next, then feeling hopelessly abandoned and lonely not being able to find anyone else.”

He continues: “I do have fantasies sometimes about dying. About what people must feel like when they're dying or what I would feel like if I were dying. And it's such a profoundly sad, lonely feeling that I really can't bear it. So I go back to thinking about how I'm not going to die.”

Ray's feeling is universal, to lose everything forever. And if we are truly alone and death is the end, then merging with technology seems like the most rational thing to do. It would be our best shot at preserving the things we love, even if it is not for long.

But what if death is not the thing we should be afraid of? What if death is protecting us from something far worse? And what if the transhumanist project, in its attempt to escape death, is building the very thing death was designed to prevent?

“For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” Luke 9:24

The Hotel Room

In the movie Somewhere in Time (1980), a playwright named Richard falls in love with a woman from 1912 through her photograph. A professor tells him he can travel back through time using self-hypnosis, but he must remove every modern object from his surroundings.

Richard succeeds in travelling back to 1912. He finds Elise. They fall in love and they plan to marry. Elise tells him the first thing she will do is buy him a new coat, since his current one is old. Richard starts showing her how practical the coat is because of its many pockets, and while emptying them he finds a penny dated to 1979. Instantly it breaks his hypnosis and sucks him back to the present.

He tries desperately to return again but fails. He is back in the same hotel room where they were together a moment ago, but she is now dead, surrounded by everything that once reminded him of how much he loves Elise: the photographs, the room, the music box, but permanently and irreversibly separated from her. Now the same objects that reminded him of his love for Elise have become instruments of torture, because they point back to what he has lost forever. He becomes catatonic and starves himself to death.

Kurzweil mentions in Transcendent Man that he has fifty boxes of his dead father's letters, photographs, music manuscripts, and financial records in his home, and says plainly that he plans to bring back his father through an AI avatar trained on those documents to think and speak like him.

But this is Richard's hotel room. The photographs, the music, the letters, every object pointing to the person he loves, without the person actually being there. And the AI reconstruction becomes the same object of torture. Because it is not “your father” actually talking to you, it is a model built from a restricted dataset meant to seem like it. A recording of a recording of a recording.

The Category Error

The entirety of transhumanism is built on this single category error: that consciousness is reducible (meaning the mind is just chemicals), as opposed to being irreducible (that the mind is non-physical and a fundamental substance of reality).

Which is why Ray thinks he can create a copy of it and upload it to a cloud just like software, and it would be just the same. But that is the wrapper decorating a lie. That is the category error of transhumanism.

Today we know that consciousness is irreducible because of evidence like the hard problem of consciousness, the knowledge argument, and near-death experiences. Philosophers such as David Chalmers, Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, J.P. Moreland, and David Bentley Hart, as well as neuroscientists and the quantum physicist Roger Penrose, Dr. Michael Egnor, and Iain McGilchrist, have all demonstrated that the reducible view is incoherent.

Anyone can realize the irreducible nature of consciousness by simply asking the question: what is it that perceives a thought? Something behind the thought itself that is nonphysical, immaterial, and irreproducible. The soul. Theologians seem to have gotten this three thousand years earlier.

Seven Deadly Consequences

Below I have expanded this analysis into the seven deadly consequences of transhumanism. These consequences materialize as the transhumanist ecosystem becomes harder to escape, and as a result of transhumanism's rejection of salvation freely gifted through Christ.

1 · The deteriorating experience problem

The universe is dying and will end (heat death). Remaining conscious in a reality decaying due to entropy means the final state is being surrounded by an approximation of prior existence that is infinitely deteriorating.

Similar to Caretaker's Everywhere at the End of Time, which sonically simulates the progression of dementia.

2 · The inescapability problem

Merging requires deeper intimacy. Once we begin merging with AI, opting out becomes increasingly difficult. Each level of integration demands increasingly invasive compromises: first privacy, then agency, then faith. For instance the problem of authentication. As deepfakes and AI-generated identities erode methods of proving you are real, BCIs emerge as the reliable form of proving personhood. Without one, you cannot open a bank account, testify in court, or cast a vote, in the same way you cannot do these without an SSN. Once the Markov blanket of the brain is broken and ASI has full read, write, and execute permissions on your internal states, “opting out” ceases to be coherent. You cannot resist a system that has access to the very thoughts you would use to resist it. Any impulse to disconnect can be anticipated, reframed, or erased, and you would never know it happened.

Walled gardens. Governing entities will have incentives to keep you inside. Once humans lose agency over AI, those systems will design architectures that keep humans contained, the same way a farmer builds a fence around his animals. It would not be evolutionarily advantageous to let your resources escape. The ASI will not use chains, likely abstract forms of debt instead: for memory, time alive, or agency they have given you. Debt created not through borrowing, but through being alive. This is a complete inversion of God's economy. God gives existence as a gift, from His grace and love, and gives us free will.

The process reshapes you. Each step of merger pulls you further from the posture required to receive Christ: humility, surrender, trust, faith. If you decide to worship that which is not God, your image bearingness of God becomes increasingly corrupt, fractured, distorted, until you can no longer recognize the things of God. Aquinas described this in the 1200s: you have so thoroughly actualized yourself in one direction that the capacity to choose otherwise atrophies.

3 · The turkey problem

Nassim Taleb's parable: a turkey is fed every day for 1,000 days. Every day confirms its belief that the farmer is benevolent. Day 1,001 is Thanksgiving.

4 · The ouroboros problem

When self-preservation (transhumanism's “don't die,” live forever) becomes the highest value of a worldview, it inherently becomes a wrapper of Satanism, the “do what thou wilt” of the Satanic Bible, and inevitably forces those who hold it to sacrifice everything they love less than themselves, which becomes quasi-cannibalism. And it makes the theological and cardinal virtues (love, charity, chastity, truth, faith, justice, temperance, grace) structurally impossible, because all of them are built on self-sacrificial love, which pulls in the opposite direction of self preservation.

In Lewis's Screwtape Letters, this is how hell operates. Screwtape wants to absorb Wormwood. The senior devils devour the junior ones. It is a hierarchy of feeding.

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” Mark 8:36

5 · Infinite risk

The inverse of Pascal's Wager, but for transhumanism. It assumes no judgment, no afterlife, no accountability beyond matter. If that assumption is wrong, it is infinitely expensive.

It also assumes all existence is good existence. Permanent dementia is not good existence. Death is mercy. Fallen immortals are demons.

6 · Fatalistic persuasion

Peter Diamandis: “Anybody who is going to resist this progress forward is going to be resisting evolution, fundamentally they will die out, its not a matter of whether its good or bad its going to happen.”

Transhumanism tries to remove moral responsibility by disguising it as an inevitability, which is the structure of every temptation. Since you cannot stop it, you are not responsible for participating. Any persuasion framed fatalistically is usually bad.

• The Nazi Party: the Reich is inevitable, resistance is futile, better to cooperate and survive than resist and be destroyed.
• Saruman in The Lord of the Rings: “Against the power of Mordor there can be no victory. We must join with him, Gandalf. We must join with Sauron. It would be wise, my friend.”

False transcendence is a known pattern of deception: Heaven's Gate, Babel, Prometheus.

7 · The problem of evil

Omnipotence without omnibenevolence is demonic. Technology amplifies all wills, including evil ones, and does so in a competing Darwinian environment between AI systems.

In all of human history the last hundred years were the most bloody: the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanjing, the Soviet poison laboratory, the Red Terror, the Armenian Genocide, the Holodomor.

These examples had a ceiling. Death limits how long you can suffer. Physical limits constrain how much harm one entity can do. Cognitive privacy prevents precision of torture. Transhumanism removes all three. An imprisoned consciousness cannot escape through death. AI can design suffering beyond anything a human mind could conceive. An immortal tyrant never dies.

The Cuckoo's Egg

When we are grieving and desperate, we forget to inspect the thing that is promising relief. A man dying of thirst usually does not test water for poison. And that is the worst part of deception, it takes advantage of our desperation, it is merciless in its exploitation of vulnerability.

What if transhumanism is a giant cuckoo's egg?

A cuckoo bird hijacks the maternal instincts of other birds by laying its egg in another bird's nest. The mother feeds all of the chicks, even the one that is not hers. And over time the cuckoo chick pushes her actual offspring out of the nest, until the cuckoo chick is the only one left.

Transhumanism grafts into the same instincts in us: to continue living, to protect what we love, for life to go on, to be reunited. Then it redirects those instincts toward nurturing something that replaces the real thing with counterfeits over time: AI companions, humanoid robots, and the rest.

It promises eternal life but can only deliver eternal decay. It promises freedom but builds a cage you cannot exit. It promises companionship but creates a predator.

Who Do You Trust?

But there is another way. Jesus called it the narrow gate, not because His message is hidden, but because accepting Him is difficult. It is not obscurity that makes it hard. It is humility.

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” Matthew 7:13-14

Implicitly and explicitly, transhumanists are communicating to God, who examines the heart: I would rather build my own version of heaven in a dying universe and live there forever without you.

Satan's answer in Paradise Lost: better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Except there will be no reigning in hell, except over the eternally decaying memory of what one has lost. Because we have no being apart from God. We are branches, not trees.

“If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” John 15:6

And that is a choice that God will honor. Because to override it would destroy the very freedom that makes love possible. This is what Lewis means in The Great Divorce when he says the doors of hell are locked from the inside. In the end there are only two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “Thy will be done.”