From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Sep 05 2002 - 03:06:49 MDT
On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 01:34:43AM -0700, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> Anders Sandberg wrote:
> >
> >As James Hughes pointed out in his text about the politics of
> >transhumanism (and as I have repeatedly experienced myself),
> >there is a small cluster of people with transhumanism-like views
> >(i.e. an interest in technological transformation of humanity)
> >that overlaps with the eugenics/racist community. It just goes
> >to show that ideology matters: if transhumanism is viewed as
> >believing in transformative technology, then they are
> >transhumanists. If it is viewed as a continuation of the
> >enlightenment humanist tradition, then they clearly aren't.
>
> I don't precisely follow that. There is no reason that you
> cannot believe in transformative technology and large parts of
> the enlightenment humanist tradition. Do you have some specific
> conflicts in mind? And what does either have to do with white
> racism?
Universalism. The enlightenment (and I would claim the
renaissance humanist ideas it builds on) conception of human
nature is centered on universal properties like intrinsic human
dignity, rationality, being a moral subject responsible for one's
own life, human potential for education, change and
perfectibility and so on. These universalist assumptions fly
straight in the face of racism, which claims there are
differences between races or cultures which should imply
different treatment.
Racism is usually (there are after all many different forms)
essentialistic, claiming there is some essence to race that
carries some important meaning and mustn't be lost. It seems to
me that this is just the same kind of conservative argument made
by Fukuyama as regarding to human nature when he argued that a
posthuman future would be immoral. It seems extremely unlikely
that current racism would embrace technological transformation
outside a fairly narrow range.
On this list we are usually discussing a kind of "generalized
humanity" which really encompasses everything from unaugmented
humans to posthumans to AIs to borganisms to uplifted animals to
alife to aliens - and deliberate mixtures between them. These
beings share universal "human" traits as mentioned above without
belonging to any fixed species; any distinctions made are usually
done on observable differences (such as need for oxygen or
different processing speed), rather than any inherent essence of
being human or AI.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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