From: Natasha Vita-More (natasha@natasha.cc)
Date: Thu Jul 10 2003 - 13:36:40 MDT
At 12:08 AM 7/10/03 +0200, Benoît Mussche wrote:
>On Thursday 10 July 2003 01:02, Natasha Vita-More wrote:
> > At 10:10 PM 7/9/03 +0200, Anders wrote:
> > >On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 06:40:33PM -0400, Hughes, James wrote:
> > > > We need some folks from the WTA to show up at this Christian
> > > > bioconservative conference and politely distribute some WTA literature.
> > > > Contact me if you think you can attend. - secretary@transhumanism.org
> > >
> > >Maybe an even better approach is to engage them in discussion, based on
> > >some memes that are not too out there. Asking "but isn't prolonging and
> > >enhanching life exactly what all the miracles of Christ was about? And
> > >didn't he say that it was up to the faithful to do his work?" can have
> > >very interesting effects in this kind of venue.
> >
> > Anders, I agree with you. Good twist on the topic. Another point is that
> > what we need to get are a lot of transhumanist-friendly people there and
> > not push any one organization to be there. Geez.
>
>Indeed, transhumanism should remain a modern philosophy, using the internet,
>the obvious means of communication designed to spread it. Why: nowadays,
>smart people that could deem useful to develop mankind forward tend to be
>cultophobic, ie. they see any unipolar philosophy groups popping up as lead
>by gurus seeking to pocket as much money as possible (having an intelligence
>doesn't mean being open). We'd rather remain a distributed intelligence,
>mostly leaderless, and a natural leadership of the collectiveness of our
>beings will pop up in the long term as technology integrates. Don't let those
>who try to feed on us make us what we don't want to be.
Precisely. This is disconcerting. I noticed a couple of new transhumanist
organizations starting up recently that are like cults, especially stemming
from the Singularity advantage. Recently at the TransVision Conference,
whichwas excellent (except for the fact that room I was assigned to give my
second lecture which was totally inappropriate - not an auditorium/lecture
space :-) geez), anyway, at the TransVision Conference I noticed at least
one organization that rang like a religious organization looking for
followers and promising all sorts of high-flown things. Not very rational.
Natasha
Natasha Vita-More
http://www.natasha.cc
----------
President, Extropy Institute
http://www.extropy.org
Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture
http://www.transhuman.org
http://www.extropic-art.com
http://www.transhumanist.biz
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