neuro mods.....

From: Bostrom,N (pg) (N.Bostrom@lse.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Feb 23 2000 - 09:44:00 MST


John Grigg wrote:

>Robin Hanson wrote:

No, I'm the guilty one!

>but why not find a way of changing our emotional state into
that "noble"
>state - of humility and resignation or whatever - directly,
rather than go
>through the inefficient and horrendous process of getting
to that state
>through having long series of painful experiences. That
would be lot more
>transhumanist in my book

                I can't help but say on a kneejerk level that I find this
somehow a quickfix
                that offends me.

When I wrote it would be "more transhumanist" I didn't mean to make a
serious distinction between transhumanist and non-transhumanist technologies
(I agree with Anders that that doesn't make sense). But I thought that
transhumanists would be less likely to experience this "kneejerk reflex"
that the quickfix would be offensive - so in that sense the proposed method
would have a distinctive transhumanist character.

But you seem to be a counterexample to that. (Either that, or we just need
to continue to work on brainwashing you for a little longer until you lose
all your natural instincts ;-)

Nick Bostrom
Dept. Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
Email: n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk <mailto:n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk>
Homepage: http://www.analytic.org <http://www.analytic.org>



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