(no subject)

[beetiger]

Although I really enjoy hanging out and dreaming with people who are, I'm definitely not a transhumanist.

I think one of the reasons probably overlaps with one of the reasons that I'm not a Christian. I'm wary of any philosophy that focuses on the "next world" while not paying enough attention to this one. I'm afraid of feeling disconnected from the things that are right in front of me. I love the warmth of sun and the stars in the sky and the smell of ozone from rain on pavement and the sound of human voices singing, not just because of my experience of them, but because of the mundane conceptual background that tells me that they are there, and real. From this spot in my life, I like the reality that now matters, because we don't have forever. I still really think this is one of the things that drives us to do the work that does, in fact, move our world into the future.

This pregnancy makes me feel very biological. It's draining, in some ways, and I certainly am not happy about the temporary loss of the ability to think as critically as usual, but essentially it's a marvel. There's a groundedness about knowing that my body knows how to make a person, a person who is currently squirming and kicking and is going to do something that I've never dreamed of, in a world I'm never going to see. Check in with me in a few decades and ask again, but right now, I think I'm going to be ready to give the world to him to do that.

Maybe I'm not a transhumanist because I don’t think I'm likely to be as smart as the people who come after me, if I'm willing to step aside and leave them the world to play in. Maybe I'm not a transhumanist because I want to love this life to its fullest, and I really don't believe we are ready to succeed in time for me to realize those dream, and that fills me with frustration, rather than anticipation. Maybe I'm just lucky enough to be living in a body that mostly works. Maybe I'm just not very ambitious.

But I don't see much of a point in living forever if we haven't even figured out yet how to fully live right here, right now.

Comments

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Thanks, my basic sentiments too. More detailed response coming soon (even if only over cafe desserts in a week), but my basic response is that the most important thing about transhumanism is the "humanism."

To me, it's about reversing the recent historical trend of technology being a means to put human beings to mechanistic uses and alienate them from the things they do best and most uniquely -- feeling, loving, contemplating, dreaming...

Some of the obstacles to those humanistic goals seem like natural ones, and we're afraid to surmount them, because we've taken them so much for granted. But there's plenty we can do in the here and now to take charge of our social and physical environment, use the tools our nature gave us to enhance the way we think, and use our technology to break the production-and-consumption cycle we're stuck in.

It's really just about questioning and testing the boundaries of what makes us human, believing we could have an active role in that definition and in our own evolution. It's not something that has to be accomplished purely with cold servomotors and nanopaste -- in fact, I don't think it can be. Dropping acid on a moonlit evening, reading about multiple personalities and recognizing that fragmentation in every human being, applying Zen deconstructive techniques to the mind, even dressing up like a vixen, if it's done as a deliberate show of the arbitrariness of "humanness" is IMHO part of the transhuman project. The spaceships and brain transfers are just a particularly showy part of it...

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

*laughs* All right, I'll admit, some of the lack-of-appeal for me about classic transhumanism is the aesthetic. I'm a nature lovin' hippie at heart. The part you describe about testing our limits in the context of the rest of our current world *does* in fact appeal to me. The idea of learning better ways to communicate with each other and find our home in the universe does, too.

But I guess I really think that our mortality is a driver of humanness I'd hate to see us lose. I also believe that body-knowledge is part of what we need to learn. Also, call me a neo-Wiccan dipshit, but I sincerely believe that there are things we've probably forgotten as we've gotten more divorced from our environment, things we ought to know.

It's really the life-extension drive that bothers me most, I think. There's learning in being around a long time, but there's also stagnation. I guess I'm unimpressed by the world I imagine would exist by just keeping an enhanced version of those of us here now for a much longer time, versus the one I imaging the people after us could build. On the other hand, I'm pretty happy with the disease curing progress we've made over the last cnetury or so, and I'm not sure exactly how long I think is getting to be too long.