From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sun Jan 04 1998 - 14:16:38 MST
dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu writes:
> But *is* extropianism a movement? And if so what is it a movement
> *toward*?
If we regard extropians as people who agree with the extropian
principles (as opposed to the more diffuse transhumans), then the
principles seem to imply that in order to achieve more extropy it is a
good idea to spread the meme (spontaneous ordering requires more than
one actor, and so on). So extropianism will become a movement of some
kind, due to the implications of the principles.
Maybe it is something like a quasispecies, a quasimovement. A
quasispecies is a fuzzy distribution of genotypes characteristic of
quickly mutating organisms and molecules. A quasimovement is a fuzzy
distribution of memes mutating into each other (of course, it is hard
to tell where our co-memes stop and the real extropian memes begin).
> but just how this would be an advance for extropianism as a
> movement is unclear to me, unless we regard every scientific and
> technological development, as well as every cultural and political
> development in the direction of greater freedom and diversity, as an
> advance for extropianism as a movement. Does extropianism just mean
> civilization, then?
It would be nice if they were equivalent, wouldn't it?
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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