Jeff Davis <jdavis@socketscience.com> writes:
> The World, the Flesh & the Devil
> An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul
>
> at: http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Bernal/
>
> What I find most interesting is that he wrote this in 1929, despite which
> he seems to have anticipated much of modern science and future science
> including: Matrishka brains/Dyson spheres, nanotech (he was an x-ray
> crystallographer and beat Feynman to the importance of 'small' by thirty
> years), and human-directed evolution (transhumanism).
He is quite impressive. I regard him as a bit of a high point of the
pre-WWII transhumanism. What bothers me with the then-current ideas
was the total emphasis on collective solutions - it was about the
evolution of the *whole* human species, the *whole* society, no
exceptions allowed. Compare this to the liberal/libertarian form of
transhumanism that is common today, where we do not claim there is a
need to direct the destiny of all people, but rather to enable them to
create their own.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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