People have long had an ambivalent relationship to the body, which is a source of both pleasure and pain. These are primordial functions of the physical body, survival mechanisms. Pleasure signifies what is good for the body, pain what is bad. Of course, we have extended those meanings to include intellectual pleasure and emotional suffering. In fact, humans have abstracted experience in general, away from its ties to the body, so that experience has become a sort of private entertainment to pursue for its own sake, apart from its relevance to bodily needs.

It is natural to seek pleasure and avoid pain, because these represent states of the organism, which tries to maintain itself. However, when experience is sought for its own sake (rather than the body’s), the link with the body’s wellbeing is broken. We can then find pleasure in things that are bad for the body, and reject things that are good for it. When thus detached from the body, we can come to resent it as a source of suffering and inconvenience. (How bothersome to have to feed and groom it! How horrifying, disease and mortality!) We resent the whole set-up—the addiction to pleasure and revulsion at discomfort. We rebel against utter dependence on the body, as though upon a stranger.

While cursed with this alienation, we are also blessed with imagination that can conceive how things should be, ideally. Until recently, this was the province of religion. We conceive the possibility of disembodied existence—of the soul after death, of eternal life: in the bliss of heaven or the torment or hell. Ironically, these project the mortal experience of pain and pleasure into a non-material future. While Christianity offers the promise of resurrection from the dead, Buddhism offers release from the cycle of suffering of bodily incarnation. What they have in common is rejection of the natural condition—the system of nature we find ourselves born into, literally the biological body.

Alongside metaphysical ideas, religions also assert ideals of human conduct and relationship. Having noticed that nature imposes certain unsavory behaviours, religion asserts the Golden Rule or kindness toward all beings. If life only exists because of the ruthlessness of natural selection, we have power individually and collectively to temper its effects. Though the more aggressive naturally proliferate and prevail, what good to gain the whole world and lose your own soul? Our species has proliferated and prevailed to gain the whole world. What might it have lost?

Technology updates the promises of religion. We can now imagine a disembodied digital existence, uploaded to cyberspace; or copies of our “selves” that continue our lives post-mortem. We can imagine superintelligent overlords—artificial gods—to either save or menace humanity. Or to replace it entirely. Just as individuals must die, so must the species in the longer run through some extinction event—if not far sooner through our own foibles, then when the sun burns out in 5 billion years. Technology promises survival or resurrection, in some artificial form or venue, the chance to redefine our nature according to our best ideals. That could be the great opportunity we have hoped and prayed for over the millennia, or it could be trivialized like most human endeavors.

For the present, we are stuck with our bodies, for better and worse, until death do us part. We are stuck with societal arrangements and political and economic behaviours largely dictated by our biological nature. Before we can re-create ourselves in a divine image, or rapture ourselves to cyberspace, it could be useful to contemplate and catalogue the ideals we would hope to enshrine in an upgraded humanity or its artificial successor. Such a vision could be the basis for a unifying and broadly ecumenical secular religion.