John Grigg wrote:
>Robin Hanson wrote:
No, I'm the guilty one!
>but why not find a way of changing our emotional state into
that "noble"
>state - of humility and resignation or whatever - directly,
rather than go
>through the inefficient and horrendous process of getting
to that state
>through having long series of painful experiences. That
would be lot more
>transhumanist in my book
I can't help but say on a kneejerk level that I find this
somehow a quickfix
that offends me.
When I wrote it would be "more transhumanist" I didn't mean to make a
serious distinction between transhumanist and non-transhumanist technologies
(I agree with Anders that that doesn't make sense). But I thought that
transhumanists would be less likely to experience this "kneejerk reflex"
that the quickfix would be offensive - so in that sense the proposed method
would have a distinctive transhumanist character.
But you seem to be a counterexample to that. (Either that, or we just need
to continue to work on brainwashing you for a little longer until you lose
all your natural instincts ;-)
Nick Bostrom
Dept. Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
Email: n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk <mailto:n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk>
Homepage: http://www.analytic.org <http://www.analytic.org>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:06 MDT