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Can someone please direct me to a philosophical delineation of transhumanism? Specifically I am looking for any sort of epistemic musing on the ontology of transhumanism and any potential conflicts in ideology or philosophy between contemporary humanistic principles and transhumanism.
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Re: Reconciling transhumanism with humanism
Wed, March 24, 2004 - 7:28 AMYou can read the central essay of Habermas's
_The Future of Human Nature_, "On the way to liberal eugenics," an English translation is available for free at:
www.habermasonline.org/
Or here:
groups.yahoo.com/group/habermas/
Check Files section: groups.yahoo.com/group/hab.../JH_Texts/
Download: Liberal_Eugenics.pdf
Also you can find interesting Peter Sloterdijk' texts on poshumanism: "Regulations for the Human Park"
About it:
artsci-ccwin.concordia.ca/Philo...k.html
artsci-ccwin.concordia.ca/philo...jk.pdf
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Re: Reconciling transhumanism with humanism
Thu, March 25, 2004 - 7:58 AMYou may also be interested in the writings of Nick Bostrom.
His website:
www.nickbostrom.com
A writing on Transhumanist values:
www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/values.html
Transhumanist FAQ
www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html
Max More also writes from a strong philosophical perspective, but a lot of his stuff is 'pop'. I think he tries to make philosophy palatable for the general public. His website is www.maxmore.com -
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Re: Reconciling Transhumanism with humanism
Thu, March 25, 2004 - 8:28 AMAnd as someone that brings the classical perspective to the discussion I encourage you to make the comparison to 19th Century Transhumanists of Thoreau, John Muir, and even Whitman, and later Also Leopold.
I find these influences in the early metamorphic works of Lovelock, Dostoevsky, and later even Twain and H.G. Wells.
While most people seek the modern version as if born whole in the latter 20th Century actually some aspects of the relationship of Humanism and Transhumanism even can be traced to ancient mythologies. Ovid and the earlier Orphic traditions for example and certainly the Promethean Tales. -
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Re: Reconciling Transhumanism with humanism
Thu, March 25, 2004 - 8:32 AMI have got to learn to proofread better. It was supposed to say:
"I encourage you to make the comparison to 19th Century Transcendentalists of Thoreau, John Muir, even Whitman, and later Also Leopold."
I suggest that the humanist and especially secular humanist aspects of the American Transcendentalist Movement are a major shared lineage for modern Transhumanism, whether recognized and acknowledged by many or not. -
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Re: Reconciling Transhumanism with humanism
Thu, March 25, 2004 - 8:37 AMLazarus, you can explain a little more about the link between American Trascendentalist Movement and the Transhumanism Wave? -
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Re: Reconciling Transhumanism with humanism
Thu, March 25, 2004 - 8:54 AMI would need a treatise to do it justice but actually folks like John Muir were highly skilled engineers that rejected dominant Christian dogma in favor of both remodeling mankind and yet preserving a profound respect for environment as sacred and replacing the theocratic dogma of Western Christian "anti-nature" with a New World blend of science and spirituality.
This relationship is more subtle than obvious at first until you read deep into the principle of meaningful dissent from social conformity and the responsibility for self definition as defined by Thoreau. I can go on but I do not have time at the moment. Try a re-read of actual statements by these authors rather than the assumptions of their intent.
The were not simply abolitionists, but argued for machines to replace slave labor but also felt industrialism needed to learn a respect for environment and society needed to give suffrage for not only women, but among their more private musings anticipated gay rights. They practiced a developmental philosophy of Mind and Body over Matter.
They were the idealist balance to the American Pragmatists that once synthesized int he post WWII late Industrial period begin our understanding of modern Transhumanism as a replay of similar issues to those they faced but now on a larger global scope with profoundly more powerful technological application to adapt with.
I will try and return to this tomorrow with some links but I am testing a new rule that I must stop writing by noon and switch tasks. Six hours of comp work every morning gets a lot written but leaves me free to accomplish other work and enjoy a life outside too. -
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Re: Reconciling Transhumanism with humanism
Thu, March 25, 2004 - 11:54 AMThank you all for your replies. It looks like I have some reading to do. -
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Re: Reconciling Transhumanism with humanism
Fri, March 26, 2004 - 4:59 AMI forgot to mention Teilhard De Chardin
www.gaiamind.com/Teilhard.html
www.december.com/cmc/mag/1...nning.html
www.wired.com/wired/archi...eilhard.html
When attempting to reconciling the differences and similarities of Humanist and Transhumanist themes I think it is also necessary to address this author's work and influence. The reason I compare the Transcendentalists to Transhumanists is that there is also a pragmatic relationship of common origins and similar focus even when the choices being suggested by many differ widely from what is today seen as "Humanism".
While as a religious scholar his work is more complex and holds appeal as secular, even though when written was considered "mystical'. It has become far more prophetic than many are comfortable with actually and it describes one perspective of accelerating social and technological change.
His efforts impacted the works of Foucault and even many modern Singulartarians. -
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Re: Reconciling Transhumanism with humanism
Fri, March 26, 2004 - 6:32 AMI think Lazarus is right, Teilhard of Chardin' influence on transhumanism is obvious, omeganism/singularitianism is a fruit of it.
We can also explore another ways of reconciling transhumanism with humanism.
At least from Marx writing philosophy to change the world, a part of humanism is a transformative theory and praxis.
I find this transformative goal a nexus between revolutionary humanism [anarchism, socialism, etc.] and transhumanism. This nexus is by now weak, maybe because revolutionary humanism hide the possibility of a really radical change of human condition, focusing on changes of social and economic conditions. There are not too much connections between these traditions, when connections between libertarianism and transhumanism are strong.
I knew some works of cyborg democracy folks in that way, exploring a new field, but I recently discover this essay by greenrd, a author I did not know:
What is Transhumanist Socialism? (Diaries)
with a interesting discussion on the Long-Term Socioeconomic Effects of Advanced Molecular Nanotechnology [MNT]:
www.kuro5hin.org/story/200.../134818/22
Another essay with discussion on >T, socialism and MNT:
www.kuro5hin.org/story/200.../234129/84
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Re: Reconciling transhumanism with humanism
Sat, March 27, 2004 - 6:31 AMThis is an essay of mine forthcoming in the humanist journal Free Inquiry:
Humanism for Personhood, and against Human-Racism
By J. Hughes
Yesterday the Bush administration found pro-life bioethicists to replace two members of the President’s Commission on Bioethics who had defended the use of embryos in stem cell research. In the Florida case of Terri Schiavo, the religious right continues to fight to keep “alive” a permanently unconscious woman whose husband would like to pull the plug. The Great Ape Project is fighting to ban experimentation on chimpanzees and gorillas. Technology critics like Langdon Winner, Francis Fukuyama and Bill McKibben warn humanity is threatened by an emergent posthumanity, while the National Science Foundation encourages the cross-fertilization of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the information and cognitive sciences (NBIC) towards the goal of “improving human performance.”
All these issues are connected as part of a broad political struggle between advocates and opponents of two basic humanist propositions. First, humanists believe that what is of value in human life is our capacity for thought, feeling and conscience, our “personhood,” and not our biological characteristics like our genders, race or genomes. Secondly, humanists believe we should be free from superstitious taboos and religious authority in our free use of reason and science, that we should be able to freely use human powers to reach our fullest potentials. In previous eras the struggle over these propositions emancipated slaves and gave women suffrage. The anti-humanists insisted that women and Africans were biologically incapable of equality with white men, while the humanists insisted that women and Africans had the same capacities for thought and feeling, and therefore the same right to citizenship.
In the emerging biopolitics of the 21st century, the struggle will be to determine which kinds of life have rights and citizenship. For human-racists fetuses and the brain dead are vulnerable human beings facing slaughter. Champions of personhood see fetuses and the brain-dead as pre- and post-persons, lives whose interests are trumped by the interests of existing persons, such as women wanting to control their bodies, the disabled and sick looking for therapies from stem cells, and families waiting to bury their dead. Advocates of personhood take seriously the claims of great apes and cetaceans to some rough moral parity with humanity on the basis of their cognitive complexity, while human-racists reject rights for non-humans out of hand.
Now that we are on the cusp of transcending the human condition, of living longer, healthier and smarter than our ancestors, the human-racists insist on divine prohibitions and dire consequences for hubris. In their essay “Protecting the Endangered Human,” for instance, bioethicists George Annas and Lori Andrews call for an international treaty to make it a “crime against humanity” to improve your genome in ways your children could inherit. Inheritable genetic modification, they say, “can alter the essence of humanity itself (and thus threaten to change the foundation of human rights) by taking human evolution into our own hands and directing it toward the development of a new species, sometimes termed the ‘posthuman.’...Membership in the human species is central to the meaning and enforcement of human rights.”
But the humanist tradition is not the same as the fetishization of humanness, and human rights do not depend on biological similarity. Not all humans are persons (fetuses, the brain dead) and humanness is irrelevant to personhood. John Locke defined a person as a “thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.” As humanists facing the challenges of contemporary biotechnology we need to embrace a trans-human understanding of the humanist project and humanist values, a humanism beyond human-racism.
The trans-humanist works toward the fullest flowering of each person’s potential, freeing them from the domination of other people, ensuring they are educated, housed and fed, and that they empowered to control their own lives. John Stuart Mill said, "What more can be said of any condition of human affairs, than that it brings human beings themselves nearer to the best thing they can be?" Creating institutions to fulfill promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be a great step towards this goal. But reaching our fullest potential also requires access to technology, from the printed word and electricity to vaccinations and birth control. With democracy and human rights we push back the social and economic constraints on our personhood. With technology we push back the natural constraints.
In the coming decades humanists and trans-humanists need to wage a global campaign to radicalize the idea of human rights. We need to assert our rights to control our own bodies and brains, whether we choose to change our genders or medicate our brains. We need to assert that the measure of a society’s fairness is how universally available we make the prerequisites for achieving one’s fullest potential. We need to defend the right to enhance ourselves - whether through education and exercise or genetic engineering and cybernetic implants. We need to extend these “human rights” and citizenship not only to all humans, regardless of nationality, but to all persons, great ape, human, posthuman or machine. We need to build the global institutions that can protect the rights of persons, and expand the freedoms they enjoy.
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Re: Reconciling transhumanism with humanism
Sat, March 27, 2004 - 6:50 AMExcellent work James.
In Florida Jeb actually has examples of both cases. Beside the Terry Schiavo case he also forced to term a pregnancy of a woman by denying the right to a medical abortion for a woman with severe learning disability who was raped by appointing a state assigned guardian for the fetus.
This is the source of concern over current federal legislation identifying the fetus as a second murder victim, for a second charge.
Clearly there's an intent to use this law as a means of closing off Roe v. Wade.
www.guardian.co.uk/print/0%...2C00.html
**** {excerpt}*****
Jeb Bush stirs up abortion debate
Oliver Burkeman in Washington
Thursday May 15, 2003
The Guardian
Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida and brother of the president, has ignited a fierce new debate on abortion after ordering the appointment of a legal guardian to represent the interests of an unborn foetus being carried by a woman with severe learning disabilities who was raped.
A court in Orlando was expected to rule late yesterday on whether Mr Bush was acting legally in calling for two guardians to be appointed: one for the woman, described as a 22-year-old living in government-run care, who cannot speak and has no family, and another for the foetus.
Abortion-rights campaigners have petitioned the court in protest, arguing that the move would flout legal precedents stating that a foetus is not a person in the eyes of the law.
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The Path to Posthumanity
Wed, March 31, 2004 - 5:54 AMBen Goertzel has been writing on a "humanist transhumanism" and a bigger picture of "posthumanist philosophy".
You can find his book "The Path to Posthumanity.
Computing and Bioscience at the Dawn of the Posthuman Era" online at:
www.agiri.org/path/index.htm
Some chapters deal directly on reconciling transhumanism with humanism...
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Re: Reconciling transhumanism with humanism
Wed, March 31, 2004 - 6:38 PMThis debate really grows out of nothing new,
Perhaps it's quite old.
Truth be told, societies fear genius more than they fear mediocrity. Even before transhumanism was a consideration those of superior intellect and ability have often suffered at the hands of those who wish to retain power at all costs, and also with the help of those who are mediocre but feel insecure and hostile when someone outshines them.
What people are afraid of is more geniuses, when they are already afraid of and those who already they are stuck with by merely random genes floating around the pool. Think of the character of Saliari in the movie "Amadeus", the bitter envy and admiration, the hatred and self loathing. A true genius causes people to reflect on their dreams of acheivement they never may have been equipped to actually fulfill, their reaction is usually the same.
This attitude doesn't have a party affiliation. A communist might say they want no one who excelles to benefit any more than one who does their quota of work. A christian in the spirit of Cromwell might feel threatened by all forms of artistic expression. A liberal might try to pursuade a school to remove all competitiveness from sports programs and gym classes feeling that competition is bad, and all children should have to feel like a winner. A conservative might feel like intellectuals ask far too many questions and are therefore un-patriotic.
What it reduces down to is that there are a group of people that NOBODY finds offensive. They are not especially bright, but not so stupid they cannot care of themselves and work for others. They are not particularly talented, are easily amused, don't want intellectual stimulation, not creative types. They don't question, are patriotic, but not so gung-ho that they'd harm anyone. They do average work, make an average pay. They excell in nothing, they read little. They are reasonably good looking but not overly attractive. Perhaps if they can have an abundance of anything it might be a certain passiveness and loyalty, reasonably strong adherance to a set of ethics, emotionally healthy... not depressed.
They are in essence a model citizen for Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
If transhumanism promised to make more people like the above, rather than talking about making Geniuses alone (a bit like brave new world) perhaps they'd be less feared by those who fear human excellance and champion mediocrity. As the Japanese say "the nail that stands out gets hit on the head"
Remember that impulse can get bad, in Cambodia PoPot did indeed kill any learned men he could. That might give you an idea of how violent the reaction could be if a signifigant part of the human population has altered genes that enhance beauty, longevity, intellect, strength, youth.
Envy is very powerful, even the christians that oppose us realize that the first murder was based on the envy of one who didn't prosper against one who did.
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