On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 08:30:22PM +1000, Russell Blackford wrote:
> Waldemar said:
>
> >Aristotle is not only important just because he spoke about Artifical
> Intelligence more than 2. 000 years ago (the "automathon" that would enable
> the emancipation of all slaves, since they would do the work).
>
> Yeah, but Pythogoras beat him to a functionalist philosophy of mind.
And Empledoceles had the idea of evolution (of a sorts). But even if
they had been discussing nanotechnology and cryonics too, their main
importance was the "how to live life?" question. Just posing it as a
question was a huge step forward - that implies there are different
ways of living, and that you can choose between them. Transhumanism
extends the question into "what to become?", implying that there are
different ways of being human, and that we can choose between them.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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