From: Wayne Hayes (wayne@cs.toronto.edu)
Date: Wed Jun 07 2000 - 19:55:49 MDT
Brian Atkins <brian@posthuman.com> writes:
>And again no offense, but spending your days tending your garden is not
>exactly helping you get closer to the days of posthumanism.
I think you need to step back and take a good, long philosophical look
at *why* you're an extropian.
I tend to lurk more than post here, but if I were to try to sum up
extropian values in one sentence, it would be this: to create and
harness technology for the purpose of extending the length and
improving the quality of human life.
That seems to be a noble and practical goal, until one delves deeper
and asks: why?
The answer is obvious, and can be expressed by saying the same
thing in even simpler language: we want to live long, healthy and happy
lives.
Why do we want to live long? Because we want to have time to do stuff.
Stuff we *like* to do. That's the "happy" part, and to me that's really
the ultimate goal. We want to be happy *as long as possible*. That's
the "long and healthy" part. Of course, until such time as life
extension techniques become commonplace, an extropian has some overhead
to attend to: *creating*, or at least supporting research into, life
extension. But pursuing that goal to the exclusion of all else misses
the whole point of the life in the first place, which is to be happy.
If Bonnie chooses to spend a substantial chunk of her thousands of
future years in this world tending to her garden (because she enjoys
it), who are you to claim that she's wasting her time? If she has
enough financial resources to do so, why should she instead hoard her
money entirely for the hollow goal of life extension for its own sake?
You must also face the sobering fact that you may simply die before
life extension techniques become available. If that's the case,
hedging your bets and living life to it's fullest NOW (keeping a
watchful eye on, and hopefully supporting, extropian values) is
certainly in line with being extropian.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:29:03 MST