Transhumanism is a late-20th-century intellectual movement that argues for enhancing and extending human beings through technology so that biological limits can be surpassed. In the provided context, its goals include life extension, cognitive enhancement, and liberation from bodily constraints. A central and especially prominent aspiration within transhumanist thought is mind uploading, understood as a route to digital immortality or even a form of deathlessness.
The movement is closely tied to the idea that the mind can be treated as information: a pattern extracted from the physical brain and preserved or transferred if the relevant structure and state can be captured. This background comes from earlier developments in cybernetics and related theories that framed the mind as something that can be copied, transferred, or implemented in another substrate. Within this framework, the body is often treated as a container, while the mind is treated as the transferable pattern.
The context names Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky, and Ray Kurzweil as representative figures who strongly argued that digital mind transfer would become technically possible. Moravec proposed scenarios in which a person could continue living after the brain is moved into a computer, and Kurzweil famously predicted that technological singularity would lead to human beings uploading their brains and existing as digital entities. These claims helped make transhumanist ideas more widely known.
At the same time, the context notes that transhumanism and mind uploading have faced substantial criticism, especially from technical/scientific skepticism and from philosophical or ethical objections. Based on the provided material, transhumanism should be understood as a vision of human transformation through technology, with digital immortality as one of its most radical expressions.