From: Nick Bostrom (nick@nickbostrom.com)
Date: Fri Dec 22 2000 - 10:04:18 MST
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>When I began to look at ethics more seriously I discovered another
>benefit of philosophy: by having a bit of structure in your thinking
>about what things are valuable and why and how to deal with such
>issues, you can argue much more convincingly in favor of
>transhumanism. Most criticsm against transhumanism is deep down about
>ethics and values, but most people haven't even articulated their own
>values.
That's true (although who "wins" in a popular debate is often not closely
related to how good arguments one can muster, but rather one's skill at
pressing the right rhetorical buttons). More generally, there is a value to
being able to analyze positions and break arguments down into smaller
parts. Without this ability, disagreements often degenerate into idle
posturing at a distance, each side feeling frustrated of the other's
failure to see "the obvious".
I remember when I did my first logic course that it was initially quite
perplexing to be asked to prove that 1+1=2. The proof could never be more
obvious or convincing then the demonstrandum! Yet the discipline of trying
to reduce such simple arithmetical statements to even more basic logical
propositions led to the development of predicate logic, which has since
produced a great many important and non-trivial results (e.g. Godel's
theorem etc.).
The lesson is that foundational work, even when it looks like pure academic
game-playing, sometimes turns out to have been essential for progress later on.
...which suggests that we should make more efforts to work out the
foundations of our transhumanist outlook! And exactly what the problems are
that need to be solved is usually not apparent until you actually begin to
try to write a paper. I have a large number of aborted papers on various
transhumanist topics rotting on my hard drive. Each started with the
intention to write down some simple idea in a couple of pages, but in the
process of doing so one is led to think more carefully about the subject
and all sorts of complications arise. Still, I don't see these efforts as
wasted.
Nick Bostrom
Department of Philosophy
Yale University
Homepage: http://www.nickbostrom.com
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