From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Sep 18 2002 - 00:53:15 MDT
On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 04:24:07PM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>
> > > Harvey Newstrom wrote::
> > > But on this list, we should be discussing transhumanism.
> >
> > ### I second the motion.
>
> Cough. I believe if we go back through the archives we will find
> one or more very large debates on the meaning of "transhumanism",
> "posthumanism", "extropianism", etc.
...
> So I don't think we can easily define what we should and should
> not be discussing. Politics is a very sticky issue because it
> is the one of the more common means that human communities use
> to drive ourselves in specific directions.
We don't need a definition of terms so stringent that it would make a
mathematician happy in order to use them. Even if there are some
disagreement on the meaning of transhumanism we can do a lot with a
diffuse sense - I don't think many of us would have a hard time
distinguishing between a transhumanist and (say) a tax reform discussion
(some people and threads may of course be both).
My suggestion is simply that threads that could happen on other lists do
not really belong on this list. It is really a non-redundancy
principle. For example, the Iraq thread seems to be
highly redundant - clones are occuring all across the net. The computer
security and random number threads are less unsuitable due to the
importance (as has been pointed out) to future transhuman states and
discussions of physical eschatology, but they are somewhat borderline. A
discussion about nanosecurity or how to deal with rogue nations in the
context of fast technological change would likely be very suitable.
There are clearly some discussions that are not strictly extropian in
this sense we want to keep - a reasonable number of social interactions,
a minimal number of meta-threads like this one etc.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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