From: Jfvirey@aol.com
Date: Thu Mar 04 1999 - 11:12:22 MST
Although not an anarchist myself, I completely agree with Anthony Garcia's
"Philippic From the Old School", both for its spirit and its content. I also
consider myself an "old school Extropian", considering the recent rejection of
libertarianism (i.e. minarchism in my case) a blatant illustration of the
disintegration of the principles of the movement.
But does extropianism really have *any* principles?
The best way to answer this question is look at how "extropianism" is defined,
which requires combining the three definitions that open version 3.0 of the
Principles.
This gives us:
"Extropianism is the evolving transhumanist philosophy of those who seek to
increase the extent of a system's intelligence, information, order, vitality,
and capacity for improvement."
In other words, this philosophy is defined as whatever set of ideas is
currently held by the people who seek to increase a very vague set of
characteristics of an undefined "system".
"Extropy" is just a name that "feels good" to science graduates who have
learned to associate its alleged opposite, "entropy", with chaos and the
"heat-death" of the universe.
But how is it defined? By enumeration, which is an invalid form of definition.
I cannot define the concept "animal" by saying; "animals are horses, cats and
fish", which is roughly the epistemological status of the definition of
"extropy".
This is not logical nit-picking, as I know some members of this group consider
logic a tyrannical imposition on their minds (fine for you, I share Rand's
contempt for those who would reject the tyranny of reality), and most are
infatuated with "fuzzy logic". The practical consequences of this invalid
definition are extremely severe.
For instance: If I classify the books in my library by colour, I have
increased the order of a system, which makes my act "good" by extropian
standards. If I download all sorts of crap from the Internet and store it on
my computer, I have increased my computer's information- another instance of
an "extropian" action. And didn't Hitler increase the "order" of the political
system of Germany?
Moreover, the various "ingredients" of extropy contradict one another. Take
order and capacity for improvement, for instance. Doesn't Stuart Kaufman argue
that evolution takes place in areas where a balance between order and chaos
can be found, and that extremes of chaos and order prevent it? Well then, it
is impossible to maximize both order and capacity for improvement.
"Extropy" is therefore an invalid, self-contradictory concept. This is why the
philosophy will soon dissolve in the kind of nonsense that has almost always
been coalescing around it, and why there's no way we can save it from such
trash.
Extropy is a philosophy that seeks "more" of a undefined "something". This is
all the irony of the principle of self-transformation (into what? a toad?) and
of Max More's own nickname (more of what? dumbness?).
Sincerely,
Jean-Francois Virey.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:03:14 MST