From: Michael Nielsen (mnielsen@tangelo.phys.unm.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 06 1998 - 08:47:20 MDT
On Mon, 6 Jul 1998, Kathryn Aegis wrote:
> As for the response of others, name me one truly revolutionary set of ideas
> that was taken seriously in its beginnings!
One question I have of transhumanism, which I sent to Nick Bostrom as
part of his email survey, is to ask how revolutionary transhumanism is?
If you strip away the details of the transhuman technologies,
some of which are truly revolutionary, in many (not all) ways it seems to me
that the core transhuman philosophy is a natural progression from
earlier ideas. Some time back I asked myself what was especially new
about transhumanism, and was quite surprised by the answers I came up
with; I highly recommend going through the exercise.
(Just for fun, I'll answer Kathryn's challenge: quantum mechanics,
special and general relativity, the theory of evolution, Newton's laws of
mechanics, Turing's theory of computation, Goedel's incompleteness
program :-)
Cheers,
Michael Nielsen
http://wwwcas.phys.unm.edu/~mnielsen/index.html
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