"Steve" <steve@multisell.com> writes:
> Having kicked about in Extropian and transhuman circles for a while now, I
> am clearer in my mind why the transhuman 'gradualist' approach is not
> sufficient.
>
> The so-called 'radical' transhumanism is no longer radically futurist - it
> is just a philosophical wing of big business and the political mainstream.
This is an interesting accusation. As I see it, the goal of much of
the transhumanist movement has been just to become mainstream. Being
radical has no intrinsic value if you strive to do something
practically. If your goal is to be part of a hip, exclusive little
group in order to boost your ego, then it makes sense to try to keep
apart from the mainstream at all costs.
As for being a philosophical wing of big business, that seems to be a
standard accusation these days. We in Aleph were told that we were
bought mouthpieces of the biotechnology business - I just wonder where
the millions are? :-) In fact, the overall slant among transhumanists
seems to be rather anti-corporativists, even if plenty are
libertarians or otherwise capitalistic.
> With the adoption of the internet on a wide scale and the NASDAQ explosion,
> the
> weight of mainstream commercial and media opinion has actually been
> "transhuman", for some time, particularly in the wake of the 2000 millenium
> build-up.
This is actually true - our ideas are diffusing into the mainstream at
an accelerating pace. We better keep up with them.
> So the swifter and more positive, radical, option is to declare yourself
> post- or neohuman at the outset, act as though it were true, and wait for
> the changes to happen all by themselves!
Oh! I'm a jupiter brain. This easter I'm going to act as if I was a
~100 km sphere of diamondoid quantum dot cellular automata, surrounded
by a corona of solar collectors and radiators and with a mental
capacity a few billon times the whole of humanity (it could have been
more, but those posthuman screensavers take a *lot* of memory, even
when they are not running). I can think billions of superhuman
thoughts at once, weaving together strands of ideas without the least
risk of getting confused. I understand all of human history and
knowledge just as easily as a human could understand a simple
equation. Hmm, let's start with terraforming Sweden...
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
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