From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Sat Jun 30 2001 - 14:41:55 MDT
-->> Greg Burch
> The conflict between these two points of view lies behind the three
> different strategies I described in that talk. The truth is that large
> portions of humanity probably aren't really polarized in their thinking
> about progress in general and the incremental augmentation of the human
> animal that marks the path to post-humanity. Thus, appeals to the "middle
> ground" is indeed the best strategy for the short term in seeking progress
> in the transhumanist agenda. And some periods of history evidence the
> success of cultural compromise, or at least the benign neglect of
> fundamental cultural contradictions. Look at the West in the
> 19th century:
> While the scientific world peacefully went about its business, the
> mainstream culture continued to be "religious", adopting the fruits of
> science and technology in a fairly peaceful, incremental fashion.
Some well-thought out thoughts there.
Insofar as technology and the human body go, I think that we already have a
very good set of guidelines to follow for promoting a transhumanist/life
extensionist agenda, and in decided where present culture actually is in
your spectrum. To wit: the behavior, successes and failures of the AIDS
activism and awareness movements over the last 20 years.
Consider:
1) we might loosely consider aging -- or indeed any other major limitation
of the human condition -- now to be perceived in the same way that AIDs was
in 1980. It's bad, but most people are conditioned to not feel threatened by
it, or deliberately put it out of their minds. The inevitability of death is
something that humans like to ignore.
2) how did the AIDS activism groups make progress? I believe by aiming --
deliberately or otherwise -- at two goals; a) educating a wider pool of
people to feel threatened by the disease, b) persuading that pool of people
that death associated with AIDS is not inevitable; i.e. tackling the problem
is not an exercise in futility.
The overall success of the AIDS movements in the face of something that
kills a good deal fewer people than simple ageing should be a model for
anything that transhuman movements want to promote or achieve insofar as
changing the human body and changing the human condition -- things shared by
all of us.
My own particular bias at this time is ageing, of course, rather than any
form of bootstrapping. With all due respect to the many far sighted people
here, horse goes before the cart. Fix ageing and then we have time for
everything else.
<optimistic>If we could get a welter of activism organizations going from a
standing start right now, again taking a look a scientific progress in AIDs,
30 years might see a cure. Soon enough for most of us to beat the
curve.</optimistic>
The question in my mind these days is how best to tackle 2a) and 2b) for
aging? Definately open to suggestions. A number of points below that come up
in discussion with "normal, everyday" people:
a) many, many people have a view of life extension as meaning they'd be
physically old forever, or in some way just staying alive as their body
grows continually more and more infirm. I'd love to know the origin of this
meme and why it's so prevelant. But it needs to go -- it's a good first
point for education.
b) the first response from many people is that they'd get bored quickly, or
run out of things to do. Very resistant, too; hard to talk them out of this
viewpoint. What do you do with people like this who are just suffering
massive failure of imagination?
c) People don't want to think about dying or becoming infirm, especially in
the culture of youth we've inflicted upon ourselves. It's very hard to get
people to help you when it's unpleasant for them to think about the issue.
This couples with 2)b) above -- the way forward would seem to be
demonstrating that efforts can make a difference; it's not futile. Another
problem would seem to be the long timelines involved...but then, people have
been educated to save for retirement on 30 year timescales. What tricks and
strategies have been used to make that come about?
Enough for the moment.
Reason
http://www.exratio.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:08:23 MST