From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sun Sep 22 2002 - 06:04:09 MDT
(Sorry for being serious in this thread :-)
On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 03:33:30AM -0700, nanowave wrote:
>
> But, unbelievable as it may sound, some bioethicists and philosophers
> explicitly endorse engineering animal DNA into human embryos as one method
> of producing the "post-human" race.
>
> There are a lot of things wrong with this statement, and they all stem from
> a single tiny word. Imagine how different it would read if Wesley had chosen
> the word ?a? in place of the word ?the.? After all - are any of us
> explicitly stating that there will be only ONE posthuman race? And isn?t
> saying there will only be one posthuman race tantamount to saying NO HUMANS
> ARE LIKELY TO SURVIVE. Gosh, for a casual human reader, that might just be a
> bit scary.
Exactly. And we must remember it, because quite a few of us often speak as
if we are striving for the wholesale transformation/replacement of humanity
with some new version. By explicitely pointing out that we are instead
working for the emergence of many new possibilities (including the
non-posthuman possibility) we will defuse these kinds of fears, and also
open up the discussion beyond "should there be posthumans?" to "what kinds
of posthumans do we want to become?". Instead of a binary choice there is a
whole range.
> Progeny design and fabrication? Most transhumanists don?t even like
> children ? too illogical, they don?t type fast enough, and your neck gets
> really sore whenever you talk to them for any length of time.
Not to mention that they ask so hard questions.
> Transhumanist theory has arisen in the context of a strengthening nexus
> between the views already popular in bioethics and animal-rights advocacy.
> This intellectual intertwining is most evident in "personhood theory" ?
> according to which rights come not from simply being human but rather from
> possessing relevant cognitive capacities.
This is actually a quite interesting observation about our memetic
whereabouts. He might be oversimplifying the position (and what we think),
but that nexus is real and it is cropping up a lot in our discussions about
personhood here. It also suggest that we should be a bit careful in
choosing which ideological beds to lie in.
> All three misanthropic ideologies ? animal rights, "personhood" bioethics,
> and transhumanism ? threaten universal human equality.
>
>
> Um, what?s that?
He is levelling a rhetorical bombshell at us here, and he actually does a
fairly good job for his intended audience. He misrepresents us as
misanthropic, but it isn't that hard to do given how many "oh, I so much
want to get rid of all this cumbersome flesh"-rants there are on the net.
He shows that there are relevant links between the animal rights movement
(which often is misanthropic) and transhumanism through personhood
bioethics, and then load the grenade "human equality" (it could have been
human dignity; both weapons have compatible calibers and can be used in
rhetorical mortars interchangeably). The trick is not to define universal
human equality, because then things get hard and you get stuck in real
philosophy. Just invoking it by saying something threatens it enables a good
attack, but actually showing how transhumanism does threaten equality would
be useless rhetorically - usually neither the reader or author actually
knows or cares.
> So what to do pending a breaking of the cloning impasse? Allow me to suggest
> a new tack that should not generate major opposition except from ideologues
> with a science uber alles mentality: I propose that the United States outlaw
> the genetic manipulation of human embryos with non-human DNA.
Hmm, I think he is really using a battering ram on an open door here. To my
knowledge there are bans against that already. If the US didn't have such a
ban I would be surprised; all the European countries have had them for many
years.
That he talks about non-human DNA is a mistake, since many of the most
interesting genes are from other humans.
> Most importantly, by prohibiting researchers from manipulating nascent human
> life, we would send a clarion message that we are not just another animal in
> the forest. We cannot be manipulated like so many transgenic sheep. Human
> life has ultimate value simply and merely because it is human.
And what is a human being, then? :-)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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