From: Nick Bostrom (bostrom@ndirect.co.uk)
Date: Sat Aug 14 1999 - 12:51:03 MDT
Brian Manning Delaney wrote:
> That's not a lot to chew on, but that sums it up pretty well. To put my
> objections to both "post-" and "trans-humanism" somewhat turgidly: The "human"
> itself is already the permanent "self-post-ing" of what we are (the
> "self-overcoming beast," to sound Nietzschean and/or Aristotelian). To be
> post-human would thus amount almost to being "post-post-human" -- not something
> I want to be (assuming no state of perfection is possible). "Trans-human" would
> mean moving towards adding that second "post-." Who needs it?
I'm not convinced about the need to uproot our terminology just when
it has begun to get settled.
Maybe humans are essentially a "self-overcoming beast" but that
doesn't mean that all such beasts need to be humans. For example,
there could be non-human extraterrestrials who are also essentially
self-overcoming beasts. So why no posthumans who can also overcome
themselves (and become more advanced posthumans, and maybe when they
are sufficiently more advanced then it might be useful to invent a
new term for what they are then).
Think about it like this: An egg, let us say, is something whose
nature it is to overcome itself and become a chicken. Does that mean
that the egg is not really an egg or that the chicken is strictly
speaking an egg? Of course not. And yet it is in the chicken's nature
to "overcome itself" and become a full-blown bird, somthing that is
different from the chicken. Still, egg, chicken and full-blown bird
are all different.
The egg is the human or the transhuman
The chicken is the posthuman.
The full-blown bird is a more advanced posthuman.
Also note that there is no implication that posthumans must replace
humans. In nature, there are eggs, chickens and full-blown birds, and
some of our own evolutionary ancestors are still around (though, as
it happens, not our immediate ancestors).
> So, again, I wonder: why not "human," and "humanism," or some ratcheting up of
> the same: like "neo-humanism," or "ultra-humanism"?
"ultra-humanism" seems to mean almost exactly the same as
transhumanism (though with somewhat tackier overtones IMHO), so why
not stick with transhumanism? The term "posthumanism" is not very
well established so if you don't like it, don't use it. As for
"posthumans", well, I quite like the term. As Technotranscendence
said, it makes people think. If some people get the erroneous
impression that being posthuman entails giving up some things we
treasure about being human, let's explain to them why that need not
be the case. However, we could use the term "ultrahuman" as a synonym
to posthuman, and see what catches on.
Nick Bostrom
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
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