From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 09:50:24 MST
On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 08:22:42PM -0500, Technotranscendence wrote:
> What do you some of you think of the family in the context of
> transhumanism and Extropianism?
If we leave out our dear ideas of weird forms of reproduction
(cloning, polyparents, xoxing, random generation), child-rearing
and an economic unit and instead look at the family as a social
institution, it seems that the main property of the family is
the strong altruist bonds that are commonly present. They can be
explained sociobiologically as the result of selection for kin
altruism. This makes the family a natural network of trust and
security (hardly every family, but enough to matter).
Transhumanism systematically problematizes the human condition,
asking about every human trait: "How could it be different?
Could it be better? Can it be changed?". In the case of the
family it is interesting to consider what happens if this
altruism is removed or extended.
Non-altruistic families would be essentially the kind of
economic units described in the paper, producers of children,
socialization and economic interfaces. It doesn't sound very
fun, and these functions could likely be implemented by other
market actors.
On the other hand, extending altruism and trust might be useful.
If the altruist network can be extended, more cooperation and
security would result. But since social complexity grows with
the number of possible interactions and the probability of
defection remains finite, there is likely an upper bound on the
workable size of even an altruist-enhanced family. On the other
hand, it might be useful to disconnect the altruism from genetic
similarity and explore the possibilities to create non-genetic
families. If altruistic bonds could be *deliberately* created
between people (right now we rely on people falling in love, or
being married and growing to love each other), then families
could be extended to new functions.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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