Re: Present Dangers to Transhumanism

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Mar 13 2000 - 17:14:17 MST


"Michael S. Lorrey" <mike@datamann.com> writes:

> > Splitting the political spectrum into more than one dimension seems to
> > help- see http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html for a basic version of the
> > concept. That site is obviously biased toward a libertarian agenda
> > (fine by me but a bit blatant for my tastes). I think that someone (not
> > me!) should look into adding a third or maybe even a fourth (useful)
> > dimension that would better separate the political stances of various
> > politicians and parties.
>
> I would suggest that 'technological freedom' be added as a third axis. Doing so
> would definitely split up all the camps to indicate relative loyalty to extropic
> vs. borganist positions.

I like a left-right (collective-individualist), forward-backward
(progressive-reactionary), upwards-downwards (tech-antitech)
scale. Dynamism is found in the individualist-forward octants, a
borganist would be collective-forward-up while the cartoonish luddites
we like to bash are left-backward-down.

Still, things are more complex than this. Political space has no
clearcut metric structure, and groups can agree on some tenets while
being fiercely opposed on other tenets (both postmodernists and
transhumanists share the same mutable view of the self, but are very
different about objective reality). Perhaps a better way would be to
list basic tenets ("humans are free", "objective reality exisats",
"the needs of the many are always more important than the needs of the
few", etc), and then look at how much different groups overlap, or
give each tenet a rating and then calculate dot products.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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