Abou Farman’s research while affiliated with New School and other places

AI and robotic technologies are reshaping embodied experience, specifically experiences of the relation of mind to body as well as experiences of “reality,” which necessitate the qualifiers augmented or virtual. Such technologies have allowed people to infuse the expanding assortment of technological experiences with spiritual meaning, thus expanding the ambit of spirituality and religiosity; at the same time, the technology has provided many researchers with occasion to argue that all spiritual and virtual experience—including of soul and deities—may only just ever be in the brain, putting the virtual back into the body but not without changing each. We are comparing three sites—VR, gaming, and transhuman mind uploading in Europe, the US, and Japan—not as sites of confusion but of “ontological opportunity,” that is, occasions for remaking experiences of embodiment and disembodiment, and changing the relation between reality and virtuality.

Silicon Valley donors have been investing heavily in a range of transhumanist longevity and immortality ventures. Theirs is a particular, culturally embedded endeavor, shaped by specific histories, ideologies, and futures that present new posthuman views of life, death, and survival. These projects aim for a future world in which the fundamental ontological categories of mind, life, and nonlife will have finally collapsed into one another thanks to the intercession of silicon-based digital or informatic technologies. The key term that denotes such a project is ‘convergence’ – used as much by transhumanists as by mainstream scientists and policymakers. Here I critically explore the ‘project of convergence’, tracing its history in the United States, and examining some of the projects and activities that have coalesced around it. These specifically include artificial intelligence, in which human persons are to be transferred from carbon-based to silicon-based substrates, and nanotechnology, in which work at the nano resolution aims at the reconstitution of the carbon-based or biochemical body. Although the concept of convergence emerges out of a transhumanist imaginary, the ideas and plans behind it have gained increasing traction in mainstream technoscientific projects. In contrast to some other health concepts that have been recently expanded to incorporate the organic nonhuman environment, these projects expand notions of health via robotic and computational formations in ways that, I argue, are moving health beyond the carbon barrier, pushing us toward an era in which intelligent existence deserving of care will not be understood as exclusive to carbon-based life forms.

Transhumanism, as social movement and ideology, pushes for the technoscientific transcendence of the limits of the human. Some within the movement have also adopted terms like religion and spirituality to denote their own groups and goals and describe their metaphysical forays. Secularism, which is to contain religion and define its domain and boundaries clearly, and maybe eventually replace it, keeps generating religion and spirituality as its own effect. Transhumanism presents a complex technoscientific case of this. The question is not whether transhumanism is religious or is a religion but rather what kind of new formations and subjectivities, new allegiances and attractions, are emerging in the secular interplay of religion, spirituality, science, and technology, especially as put into play by transhumanism—that is, more broadly speaking, as put into play in the transitional human space in which technology, power, and ideology are changing the way we can be humans.

With an ethnographic focus on cryonics, this chapter explores secular temporalities of death and modalities of suspension. In cryonics, medico‐legally dead bodies are stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures, in suspended animation, in the hope that future science may be able to reanimate them. Since secular endings are final, that is, there is no time after life, continuity as a secular project has had to be constantly reimagined and reinscribed in other terms. The politics of suspension in the age of biotech is one such project, involving the constant and ongoing technoscientific translation of life into time, or rather of chronically incomplete lifetimes into promise‐bearing forms of future life.

This article is an attempt, through a personal encounter with terminal cancer, to elaborate some of what terminality consists in, compared with other similar concepts, such as living in prognosis, dying, or suspension. The terminal body is a body from which promise, hope, and potential have been withdrawn. Linking it in part to the secular elimination of the afterlife and the confinement of person to a finite body whose time is limited entirely to itself, such that time and body become coterminous, the author argues that terminality changes the embodiment of time in a specific way: feeling temporality as a countdown in hours, days, or months, terminality is experienced as a body ticking with the sound of its own end.

The relationship between life, death, and personhood is articulated by the body, without which there would be no such relationship to begin with. How do secular institutions and modes of knowledge understand, produce, and manage this relationship? What can this tell us about the secular and the body in its purview? As part of a larger ethnography of “American Immortalism,” I tackle these issues through a case study of “neuropreservation” in cryonics, the practice of preserving people at very low temperatures at the time of legal death with the hope that they might be revived in the future. Cryonicists are scientifically oriented secularists, and yet find themselves in frequent conflict with secular medical and legal institutions over the categories of life, death, and personhood. Whilst recent critical reevaluations of secularism focus on its entanglements with religion, these differences serve to highlight some tensions internal to the secular as they are played out in the United States. I will use the figure of the cryopreserved patient to focus on the secular body as a body produced institutionally in the interplay between law and medicine, suspended in the indeterminacies of the mind–body problem and caught in the tensions between two secular epistemologies, rationalism and materialism. What appears in this midst is speculative matter, matter that has indeterminate speculative status, but serves as a medium for speculation.