Gurdjieff and His TranshumAnts

Up until recently, I thought that Gurdjieff predicted transhumanism. After doing some simple research, I have to admit that I was probably wrong, but if you were wondering WTF I was talking about when I made a recent comment about Gurdjieff's logical deduction, here was my line or reasoning.

One element of Gurdjieff's space-opera cosmology is the ants. According to Gurdjieff, ants were an failed experiment by the Sun to create self-developing life forms. The ants chose instead to tinker "with their organs" and in doing so were reduced to what they are today -- cogs in a hive mind.


Also, according to this cosmology, mankind is another experiment of the same kind and has the same choice and can fail as an experiment in exactly the same way the ants did.

The "moral of the story", in my opinion, is to point to the necessity for self-direction in self-development. Several examples of the same "moral" are well-known in science fiction, for example, the purpose of the prime directive contrasted with the nature of the Borg in Star Trek; and the overall character of Doctor Who contrasted with that of the Cybermen.

I thought that this was also a logical prediction of transhumanism, which would have been logical given what Gurdjieff understood during his time.

Understanding the that the brain is a machine, that humans have remained relatively unchanged since the stone age, and noting the rapid advancement of technology, it's a simple logical deduction that humans would one day open the black box of the human brain and try to advance ourselves by applying technology to our brains.

This is an integral part of transhumanist philosophy, many writers of which also come to the conclusion that this process will result in mankind becoming a part of a technological hive-mind.

But, I'm most likely wrong on my transhumanist interpretation of Gurdjieff's ants.  I was completely unaware that Gurdjieff had written about the ants in a stand-alone parable.  Interestingly, Gurdjieff's parable was recently told in reverse, with cats wearing boxes, in a episode of Adventure Time: The Box Prince.

Stay Frosty.