Joachim Bauer

Children who find it difficult to contact their caregivers because they are under the spell of their smartphones; millions of people who transfer their sense of existence to their social media accounts, and many more who escape reality through daily gaming. In these striking phenomena, Joachim Bauer sees a loss of reality and a threat to humanity.

According to Bauer, the philosophical superstructure of the phenomena described is formed by so-called transhumanism – the merging of man and machine. In the near future, humans will be able to have their minds “uploaded” to a computer and thus become immortal. In the lecture, he presents arguments that unmask these narratives as a return behind the Enlightenment and emphasizes: “Humans do not derive their value from cognitive miracle performances, but from themselves”.

Prof. Dr. Joachim Bauer is a neuroscientist, physician, psychotherapist, and author of books such as Wie wir werden wer wir sind – Die Entstehung des menschlichen Selbst durch Resonanz (2019) and Das empathische Gen (2021). He holds a visiting professorship at the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin and runs, also in Berlin, a medical practice. In 2022, Cicero magazine ranked him among the most influential intellectuals in the German-speaking world for the fourth time in a row.

As part of the International Science Festival – Geist Heidelberg