Are we already transhuman?

Transhumanism is “the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.”

You might think that it is a long way away, something in the distant future that may or may not happen. However, according to Marcelo Gleiser we may already be transhuman. According to him, if we take a drug that changes our chemistry to treat depression or high blood pressure, we are not the same. We are who we were before plus the medication. That’s not quite the same as going beyond our current human state. But it is a change. Arguably even vitamins and superfoods are enhancing physical performance. Then there is the case of people who have prosthetic limbs.

To me it’s a little like the argument about what is natural. An ant’s nest is said to be natural but the Eiffel Tower is not. I have often struggled with this distinction. We build things but we are part of nature. So isn’t it the case that what we build must be natural? Perhaps the boundary between what is natural and what is not is not so sharp, perhaps it is a blurred line. In the same way, the boundary between human and transhuman may be much less distinct than many people thing. It is not necessary to by a cyborg to be transhuman.

In the future there is little doubt that technological devices will be implanted in our heads and bodies, extending our senses and cognitive abilities. However, perhaps we have already taken the first steps to be more than what we are.

Read his full post here.

sample chapter for free

Sample chapter for Mutation is available here.

The first girl to live for 1000 years has already been born

Welcome to The Millennium Girl Series website.

I created this website to support and provide further information about a series of novels about the first girl to live for 1000 years. The first book, Mutation, was published on 8 June 2014. The second book, Retribution, was published on 17 January 2015.

The books, which I would categorise as dystopian science fiction, deal with several issues such as genetic transformation, immortality, technological singularity and transhumanism. I am a scientist. I hold a full professorship at a prestigious British university. I worked as an academic in a School of Neuroscience for ten years so I would like to think that my novels have scientific credibility and are ‘realistic’. But at the end of the day they are novels; works of fiction. The novels are also intended to be an easy read. There is nothing too heavy and they are the sort of books you might enjoy on holiday or on your commute to work.

That said, some of the issues that connect to my stories such as transhumanism and singularity are very real possibilities that are currently being debated by serious scientists in the world.

Click on the images below to buy from Amazon.

My writing influences

Earlier this month I published the first of a series of novels about the first girl to live for 1000 years. I wrote the novel in about 4 weeks and it is just over 40,000 words. It took a few more weeks to get it proof-read, get the cover deigned, and get it uploaded to Amazon. But I consciously wrote it quickly. I have tried writing before – in fact, I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember – but I have found that the longer I work on a project, the more critical I become of my own work. Self-doubt creeps in and I start to think too hard about what I have written. And I find then I start to lose something in my writing that I like, perhaps that is even original. Suddenly I am in a vortex of despair and the more critical I become, the more I edit the work, and the less I like it. So on Mutation I wanted to finish the work quickly and now that it is finished and out there, I actually really like it. Maybe it will do well, maybe it won’t, but far more important to me is that I like it.

Certainly I must have been influenced by other authors so I decided to make a list of the main authors that I have been “into” over the last *** decades and who may have influenced me. Note that the years are the years I read them, not the years they were written.

1970s – Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton, Dr Seus, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Michael Moorcock
1980s – Isaac Asimov, John Fowles, Milan Kundera, Iain Banks, Ian McEwan, HG Wells, Graham Greene
1990s – Arthur C Clarke, Robert Rankin, Tom Sharpe, David Lodge
2000s – Jonathan Coe, JK Rowling, Kasuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami,

I may come back and edit this list as I remember more from the past. This is the list as I recall it on 19th June 2014.