P.sure you’re the first anti-transhumanist I’ve ever encountered in the Solarpunk community, and that appears to largely stem from a great deal of ignorance about the philosophy.

The fundamental question of transhumanism is what it means to be a person. Some say that it’s what it is to be “human” but such consider humanity and personhood to be synonymous. Solarpunk doesn’t grapple with this question; instead, it uses the answers that transhumanists tend to give as a core to build off of. Transhumanism is a way of thinking about humans, technology, nature, and how we interact with each other. A really good art piece for introducing this idea to people is Landsailor by Vienna Teng. Every piece of technology we make, be it a mobile phone, a quern, cattle, nuclear weapons, or prosthetics are extentions of ourselves. They’re all products of artifice that we collectively use to affect our environment, ourselves, and each other. Consider the devices we’re using to communicate: these allow for crude but potentially rapid telepathy over vast distances, and augment our minds to the point of superhuman ability. You’re probably thinking “no it’s just a phone/computer/tablet, that’s stupid, my mind uses it; it’s not a part of me” but that fails to consider the changes your mind undergoes when using the device. Set aside the brand-new functions like making calls and you’re still left with the fact that you’re offloading years or decades of memories onto a device as well as computing power. When you do math several parts of your brain communicate with other parts to do the calculations piecemeal. So, when you’re punching numbers into your calculator, that’s essentially just a cruder mechanism for doing the exact same thing; one part of your mind asking another part to perform a task to accomplish a larger goal. What’s really fascinating is that this is backed up by neurology; when humans use a tool, our brains process the information as if it was a part of our actual bodies. Just as is true of a human and their engineered tools, so is also true of humanity and our environment. Our infrastructure: plumbing, vast sky scrapers, villages in the countryside, farmland, food banks, tended woods, steam pipes, hospitals, the internet, all of these augment humanity as a whole or subpopulations thereof. As outlined in Yudkowsky’s essay: Transhumanism as simplified humanism Transhumanism seeks to preserve and improve the lives of everyone it can. It is fundamentally about using technology to perform acts of altruism for its own sake. It’s about what’s practical and possible and bringing the first closer to the second without compromising on anything we don’t need to. We can have enough food, water, and power for 10,000,000,000 and have a beautiful environment and have a society more equal than any in history. Yes, that will mean that things will need to change, yes that means we need better sustainability, yes that means we need to work for decades engineering new, innovative, and unintuitve solutions, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it. So we have a philosophy that advocates for using technology to engineer our environment to be more sustainable and allow for a better society for all people, meanwhile compromising on nothing and being optimistic about the future if we work together. What does that sound like to you?

Solarpunk eschews the stereotypical transhumanist aesthetics in favor of a synthesis of a richer natural aesthetic, but transhumanist philosophy is fundamentally aesthetic-neutral. This is something that I think confuses people, and probably why you personally regard the two as fundamentally opposite. All you see are robots in one frame, trees in the other, and think “these are opposites” but transhumanism and Solarpunk are fundamentally about what you don’t see. You don’t see that the robot has a human brain inside that’s only able to live because of a full-body prosthetic. You don’t see that the trees are biologically engineered to give unnaturally nutritious fruit. As a side note this is why I don’t consider people like ol’musky transhumanists; he wants weird robots and brain implants because it looks futur-y, not because he’s grappled with the pros and cons of the solutions for decades and determined that this is the best way to help people. He’s a sham who pretends to know what he’s talking about after looking at a cool photo instead of honestly engaging with the philosophy he pretends to advocate. I am reminded of him through my interactions with you.