[p2p-research] Fwd: trashing transhumanism

[marc fawzi]

Since I was banned from the Open Manufacturing list, which has at least one
very vocal 19 year old who is a self-proclaimed transhumanists, I would hope
someone forwards this to them.

Not that it would change anything, but maybe prevent the easily
impressionable from drinking their coolaid.


On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 3:50 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> ---------- 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 -
> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
> http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
>
> Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
>
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>


-- 

Marc Fawzi
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