From: Mark Walker (mail@markalanwalker.com)
Date: Wed Jul 10 2002 - 07:55:33 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anders Sandberg" <asa@nada.kth.se>
> We are not mainstream NOW, but we can change that if we want. Or rather,
> each of us individually has a responsibility to our own ideas to promote
> them if we want to see them come to fruition. Thinking that we can never
> be a part of mainstream implies that the best we can do is sit and have
> fun discussions while the rest of the world gets to decide how the
> future looks.
>
> The scary part is that the mainstream is catching up with us in many
> respects. I would say that there is not a vast difference between our
> current transhumanist concepts and the ones we had in 93 - sure, in some
> fields quite a bit refinement and plenty of neologisms, but very few
> fundamentally new transhumanist ideas. Meanwhile the mainstream has more
> and more adopted ideas of nanotech, cryonics (yes, although most mock it
> they know the concept), biotech, AI and so on.
>
> As I said in a post yesterday, it is not the tech stuff that is
> essential to get into the mainstream. It will get there in its own time.
> It is the ideas we have of what it could be used for that needs to be
> spread. The combination of practical optimism, an open society, rational
> thinking and a vision of an autoevolving humanity as something good
> expressed in the extropian principles - THAT is what we need to
> mainstream.
>
I agree in the main although I think it is important that we explain not
just *what* technology can be used for but (perhaps more importantly) *why*.
It is easy and somewhat facile to say who wouldn't want to live forever, be
smarter, healthier, etc.? Not that this sort of response is wrong, but I
think it leaves people a little stunned. What we need to do, in my opinion,
is work harder in connecting the dots between transhumanism and the ongoing
cultural products of the West. To philosophers, for example, we should say:
If you are serious about pursuing the truth then you should take serious the
idea that humans are congenitally incapable of fulfilling the telos of
philosophy, which is to say you should endorse the transhumanist experiment.
The same point applies to scientists. To artists we should invite them to
fulfill the dialectical process of art whereby not just the world but the
artist herself is remade according to an aesthetic ideal. To ethicists,
political theorists we should say that if you are serious that the point of
ethics and politics is to make our lives go better then you should consider
making better persons, i.e., transhumanism (so as to increase the
probability that our lives will go better). To the religious we should say
that if you are serious that we are children of God then you should consider
growing up and becoming like your Father. I think by embellishing our
response to the 'why' question by pointing out that transhumanism is the
logical conclusion of the cultural projects that so many already hold dear
we might make further progress. The drive to perfection is already so
embedded in the telos of the cultural projects of the West it is a true
testimony to the inadequacy of our attempts to explain ourselves that we
have not be able to make this case. (In the East, of course, there is a
venerable tradition that says we should negate this desire for
perfection--in some ways it would be harder to make our brief there.
Obviously this contrast is overdrawn: the West has made attempts to negate
this will, e.g., American pragmatism of James and Dewey, and the whole
gaggle of postmodernists).
Mark
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:17 MST