From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Mar 12 2002 - 02:42:49 MST
On Mon, Mar 11, 2002 at 08:02:44PM -0800, Adrian Tymes wrote:
> John Grigg wrote:
>
> >I would suggest doing the following twelve ideas as a group, and as
> >individuals if we want to make this a better world.
>
> Sorry, I'm to busy building the technologies on which our dreams for the
> future depend, to spend that much time, effort, and money on debating
> the dreams.
Many of the greatest scientists of history were prolific writers not
just about their own subjects but also about their relationship with
the world. That really helped their supporters debate them as
necessary - Darwin was not much of a public speaker, but his support
helped Huxley defend evolution in public.
Division of labour is good, but I have a hard time imagining that our
community is nearly entirely composed of active researchers and
engineers building transhuman stuff with no time to spare.
> This may be another angle of why transhumanism is seen as detached from
> humanism and similar values held by much of humanity: because the latter
> are pure thought, pure debate, pure compassion and emotions and hopes
> and dreams...but transhumanism has an aspect, however small, that
> actually shapes how the common man really lives (at least, to such a
> radically large degree as to make mere humanism seem to have zero
> effect). To think that a force other than your own has that much real
> power scares people.
Hmm, have you ever participated in a discussion of politicial
ideology with real politicians? Then you will see that in many cases
political ideologies have a very real component of practical attepts
to shape the lives of common people (when politicians become cynical
pragmatists they drop the ideology and just shape society anyway). In
fact, I would say that compared to socialism, environmentalism or
conservatism, transhumanism appears so far to be an enormously more
"pure words" ideology than any of them.
> And, yes, I use the present tense deliberately. From this perspective,
> the Internet is but an inkling of things to come. That came fast, on
> the scale of human history, and we predict (with some evidence) the rest
> to come even faster. Witness the entire concept of the Singularity, for
> instance...and efforts to make the public more familiar with, and thus
> less scared of, it.
>
> Sorry. I like making threads come full circle like that. ^_^;
Gives a nice sense of closure. I reall think that card game can
become quite good.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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