[p2p-research] Fwd: trashing transhumanism

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <samfar at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 5:01 PM
Subject: Do not ask and ye shall receive...

 Amor Mundi trashing Transhumanists (not mere transhumanism). This is great
stuff!  Reminds me of my own lost
writings<http://www.openintegral.net/blog/?p=135>
:

http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2009/04/superlativity-and-its-bigger-picture.html

(ALL emphasis added)

"That shared superlative futurological identification tends to come at the
cost in the present of an ambivalent dis-identification with their worldly
peers -- *hence all the glib talk of "post"-humanity -- but this cost
typically seems to them negligible if not actively desirable given that the
Robot Cultist's desire for transcendence via superlative
imaginarytechnodevelopments
* (superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance) expresses the
ambivalence, or even loathing hostility, here and now, of the Robot Cultists
with the frustrations of an error-prone passionate thoroughly social
embodied *intelligence*, with the frustrations of a disease-prone demanding
vulnerable socially legible embodied mortal *life*, with the frustrations of
the stakeholder *politics* of reconciling the ineradicable diversity of
aspirations of peers with whom we share the world and the fragility of the *
freedom* bodied forth through that interminable reconciliation.

"Quite apart from the "technical" implausibility of the imagined outcomes
and developmental timelines proposed by superlative futurologists -- hence
their utter marginality from scientific consensus in the actual fields they
superficially, selectively, and opportunistically graze for "signs" that
their wishes might finally come true for them -- *the Robot Cultists divest
the concepts of intelligence, life, progress, and freedom of their
social/embodied substance and then invest them in a compensatory
amplification of blind, brute instrumental force, first rendering them
meaningless and then adding insult to injury and confusing this with
"emancipation."* This in my view is what Superlativity's "wider picture"
finally amounts to, really, an obliteration here and now through dumb
robotic insensitivity of the open futurity inhering in the collaboration and
contestation of the diversity of worldly peers with whom we share the world
and history, all in the name of transcendence via the One True Way -- an
arrival at "The Future" -- in which Robot Gods clash meaninglessly and
inhumanly through the eternal dead night."

*BONUS! (THE WHOLE FRONT PAGE IS SCROLLING WITH GREAT ANTI-EXTROPIA
SENTIMENT):*

"I hate to break it to you but these figures Kurzweil, Drexler, Moravek,
even enormously likable fellows like de Grey (and don't even get me started
on that atrocity exhibition Yudkowsky) and so on you like to cite as your
authorities are quite simply not taken seriously outside the small circle of
superlative futurology itself -- at least not for the claims you are
investing with superlative-endorsing significance."



-- 
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
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