Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
XI. BİYOETİK KONGRESİ, Sakarya, Türkiye, 13 - 14 Mayıs 2025, ss.32, (Özet Bildiri)
ABSTRACT
Biomedical technologies that humans use as a mean to regain their health convert into “bioconversion” technologies providing the human to have a healthier and longer life, slow ageing, eliminate obstacles, and ultimately achieve immortality. Particularly bioconversion technologies such as organoid, humanoid, cyborgs, and genetic manipulation supply human enhancement, however they also lead existential and ethical issues and change the medicine’s paradigm by exceeding the limitations of human nature. A thorough examination of the issues and paradigm shift entails a comparative evaluation of transhumanism and posthumanism developing out of human enhancement, due to being a root cause, through bioconversion technologies. The concept of transhumanism, deriving from the concept of humanism adding the prefix trans- meaning “beyond” and “above”, as the “augmented extension of humanism” implies the enhanced ontological continuity of human and human enhancement to reach the idea of “super/perfect human”. In this regard, human-centered transhumanism differs from anti-humanist posthumanism. Indeed, posthumanism as “after humanism” signifies the philosophical movement that redesigns human through bioconversion technologies, annihilates bodily existence of human by transferring the mind/consciousness into the digital realm, and achieving the infinite life. Trans-human as the “transitional stage between human and posthuman” represents a human, who lives longer, becomes healthier and intellectually superior. Hence, human identity and existence as a moral agent/subject subsists in enhanced form, and human value is not lessened by strengthening human biological existence, although the limitation of human nature is exceeded. On the other hand, posthuman as “transition stage between the materiality of body and the immateriality of mind” means the loss of boundaries between species, and annihilation of human identity and human value. In this study, new human identity and new human value as the base of current and possible ethical issues arising from surpassing the limits of human nature, human enhancement and paradigm shift of medicine through biomedical technologies that convert into bioconversion technologies will be scrutinized in context of transhumanism and posthumanism.
Keywords: bioconversion technology, biotechnology, human enhancement, paradigm shift, posthumanism, transhumanism