Jeffrey Epstein Was A Transhumanist

I've been following commentary on the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and found a data point I hadn't seen before, that Jeffrey Epstein was a transhumanist. This source summarizes that New York Times article:

Transhumanists herald genetic engineering and artificial intelligence as promising ways to improve human performance. They advocate, essentially, for the use of technology — including nanomedicine, robotics, brain-computer integration, and more — that alters typical human physiology in order to better our body and brain.

The usual discussions of transhumanism are far too polite. Among its basic tenets is the idea that in the future, cures will eliminate diseases and conditions that are fatal now but will not be then. Thus it will be possible to freeze the bodies of people who die now, but at some point in the future, not only will medical advances cure the condition that killed the patient, but other future technology will be able to resuscitate the frozen body and bring the patient back to life.

But keeping an entire body frozen may be expensive and for that matter unnecessary, since at some future time, it may be possible to transplant just the frozen head onto a new donor body. So most transhumanists go for the economy solution of freezing just the head, surgically detached after their presumpive death. You can find more about this option at the Cryonics Institute.

According to the link,

Cryonics, the controversial process of freezing a body with the goal of bringing it back to life later, also has a place in transhumanist thinking. Currently, it only works for human embryos. But according to The Times, one unnamed transhumanist said he and Epstein once chatted about cryonics, and Epstein said he'd want his head and penis frozen.

Fringe fans treasure the hilariously ghoulish second-season episode "Momentum Deferred", which "followed the theft of cryogenically-frozen heads by shapeshifters from the parallel universe in their search for a specific head, while the Fringe team attempts to prevent this." This involved the shapeshifters hijacking a truck transporting the frozen heads and casually tossing each head away in their search unitl they find the one in question. "In January 2013, IGN ranked it as the third best episode of the series."

It's unknown if Epstein's head and penis were removed from his body and cryonically frozen following his autopsy. According to the Cryonics Institute,

Damage does occur in the cryonic suspension process, but there are sound reasons to believe that that damage can be limited, especially for patients and their families who are prepared, and can begin the process as soon as possible after clinical death.

Buit if we follow transhumanist logic, even if Epstein's body parts had gotten pretty rank before they were frozen, certainly future technology should be able to reverse this as well. And we can be sure that by then, the statute of limitations on Epstein's crimes (at least in this goaround) will have long since expired by the time they bring him back.

But I'm less concerned about Epstein's own beliefs about transhumanism and cryonics than what it reveals about the acceptability of those beliefs in the circles in which he traveled, and in fact amomg B-list elites generally. A Guardian story reports,

According to the [New York Times], Epstein’s circle included the molecular engineer George Church; Murray Gell-Mann, who proposed the quark; the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks; and the theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek.

. . . The Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker said he considered Epstein as an “intellectual impostor”.

“He would abruptly change the subject, ADD-style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack,” Pinker told the paper. The virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier said Epstein’s ideas did not rise to science that could be subjected to critical analysis.

The scientific community, like Trump and much of New York and Palm Beach society, would sooner forget their association with Epstein.

But they hung out with the guy, took his money, and in some cases his nymphets as well. But transhumanism is socially acceptable among B-listers who haven't even been on the Lolita Express. Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit blogger and law professor with an endowed chair, Yale and Yale Law alum, who's been a regular columnist in the New York Post and USA Today, is a self-described transhumanist. I took up this issue in the first iteration of the Mt Hollywood blog and just as I write now found a link to the controversy at the time:

The blogger John Bruce recently read Glenn Harlan Reynolds' Army of Davids, which promotes transhumanism, and has decided to launch a campaign to have newspapers drop Reynolds on the grounds that he promotes the "transhumanist cult." I exchanged some email with Mr. Bruce trying to bring him up-to-speed, but it had no effect. It seems clear that he is motivated by some personal and partisan agenda I don't full [sic] understand.

My effots were unavailing in any case. Over the years, Reynolds has soft-pedaled his views, and I'm not sure if he still holds them. I was never able to determine whether he has a contract to freeze his own head or other parts on his own death. The problem is that Reynolds is an example of how poorly educated you can be with multiple Ivy degrees and how easy it is to gain a platform with such a poorly formed outlook. Epstein is also an example of how easy it is for even an impostor to con and manipulate our elites.