Re: The Politics of Transhumanism

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Jan 21 2002 - 09:27:57 MST


On Fri, Jan 18, 2002 at 05:40:35PM -0600, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> estropico wrote,
> > transhumanism = CMT + humanism
> > extropy = CMT + libertarianism
>
> These don't make any sense to me. I suggest:
>
> humanism = humans + philosophy

I think I would quote Max on that, although with fewer nos and
exclamation marks :-)

Humanism is a rather specific set of philosophies (it is not a single
philosophy, more like an equivalence class of philosophies and views
that share certain core ideas like e.g. that humans are important, have
an inherent value and can improve). You don't get it by adding
philosophy to humans.

> transhumanism = "trans" + humanism
> extropian philosophy = extropy + transhumanism

Maybe, but then we better define what the trans and extropy parts are. I
did a short attempt to show the delta between humanism and my view of
transhumanism in my answer to Emlyn (and I promise a more detailled
version later). As for extropy, the delta would likely be the parts of
the principles not directly derivable from "trans" and humanism, but I
wonder how large that set really is. Most of it really follows rather
directly.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
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


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 13:37:35 MST