Re: The image of transhumanism

Kathryn Aegis (aegis@igc.apc.org)
Mon, 6 Jul 1998 11:24:01 -0700 (PDT)

Michael Nielson:
> One question I have of transhumanism, which I sent to Nick Bostrom as
> part of his email survey, is to ask how revolutionary transhumanism is?

If this becomes part of the FAQ, I volunteer to draft the reply.
>
> If you strip away the details of the transhuman technologies,
> some of which are truly revolutionary, in many (not all) ways it seems to me
> that the core transhuman philosophy is a natural progression from
> earlier ideas.

For those of us who have pursued certain paths of thinking throughout life, yes, but then major paradigm shifts always seem a reasonable progression to their adherents. And we are talking about something even more than a paradigm shift, we are talking about a metafilter through which all human information can be processed in some way or other. Whole chunks of human delusion must be rejected once processed through that filter, and to most of the human population, this represents a huge and scary leap.

Sin,

Kathryn Aegis