From: Natasha Vita-More (natasha@natasha.cc)
Date: Sun Aug 03 2003 - 19:05:44 MDT
At 04:53 PM 8/3/03 -0400, P at hotmail wrote:
>This post will sound harsh but fair; I think it's the best way to show you
>all my appreciation.
>
>I think this community can be percieved negatively because of that "having
>visions that are shocking to the social consensus" thing; these visions
>being at the fringe of conjectures and actual trends, it can be frustrating
>for people who don't want to miss on the evolutionary advantages this tribe
>might have yet don't want to bet on duds.
Tribe is not a term that transhumanists use. The only group of futurists I
know who believe they are a "tribe" is a group who are into the singularity
(not Eli).
So, please don't use "tribe" because the connotations are inappropriate here.
>This situation saddens me because I find myself "shot by both sides" :
>extropianism and the majority of people are either at best lacking the
>historical culture to know these ideas are old hat or at worst voluntarly
>omitting this knowledge by sheer vanity.
Another false assumption on your part. First, drop the "ism" from extropy
and we can much better communicate.
>The visions and methodology of Extropianism hardly makes it a new
>philosophy.
>
>Charles Fourier, great historian of the future, philosopher of glorious
>musical tomorrows of harmonious bodies, way after civilizations, when the
>flesh will be invested of ideal qualities , who was appreciated by Marx and
>Engels, was proposing an harmonian revolution.
>Here's some traduction of passages from Oeuvre complètes tome VIII and
>Bulletin de Lyon, 1804:
>"humanity will wake itself to the materialist ameliorations it's body is
>suceptible to."
>He was forecasting living on other planets since at this point the earth
>would be too small.
>"New and useful properties gained by earthlings living in these new celestal
>countries: amphiby, night vision, perpetual growth of hairs and teeths,
>indolorism , whitening to the sun etc"
>Forecasting genetic manipulations:
>"from their torso a new appendice would grow: used either as a powerful
>weapon, to prevent falls, a superb ornament with infinite force and
>dexterity. Habitants of suns, lactées and ringed planets like saturn are
>amphibious, by the effect of an ouverture in the casing of their heart, and
>have a fifth member common to both sex: the archiarm who can kill an animal
>in one shot, be used as a whirling parachute, a motor for fake wings, a rope
>ladder, a swim-aid that gives man the velocity of a fish and thousand ohter
>possibilities either on earth or in the seas. The archiarm triples
>productivity of the industry and bring the body at it's ultimate degree of
>biological perfection."
>
>(He too, as I said in another post, could be a promoter of impossible
>bodies, but that's another story...)
>
>That ought to be enough for the vision part. A bit frivolous and funny but
>not much more than saying that in the future our children will be few and
>immensely valued, huanity will have to deal with hypermaturity etc.
>
>On the methodological front, I present you Condorcet who concludes his
>_Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain_ by
>predicting the end of stupidity, hypocrisy and the emergence of a new body
>made possible by technological, scientific and medical progress.
>Sounds cutting edge? It was written in 1795.
> Death is percieved as a hypothesis to be reserved to exceptional cases like
>accidents or rare probabilities. The lenght of life, considerably augmented
>"get close to for ever (...) an unlimited lenght".
>So it is : a body who escaped the laws of nature and entropy ...
>
>Genuine ignorance or vanity, it doesn't matter to me: as a group,
>extropians/transhumanists are a bit too eager to misread their predecesor in
>order to make room for themselves...
>Also, using the structure of an "institute" / "school of philosophy" is a
>massive philosophical regression, sad, a system of terror, with the
>pretention of making something new but is a king-sized povrety.
> I think we have great dreams but extropians don't go at it the right way.
>Don't even think of calling Fourier and Condorcet proto extropians, please,
>that would be disingenious for the other way around woud be more logical
>since they are already accepted in the academic network, humanity's common
>cultural heritage and they had more historical influence than their current
>poor unsuccessful incarnation: extropianism is just a materialism and
>realizing it by droping the usless brand name would be the mature thing to
>do for it would help in getting credibility and real life traction to our
>common dreams.
>Rejoice! You are not an extropian, you are a materialist ! :-)
>You are part of a tradition and your ideas are accepted more easily.
>Do I think this post will change anything to the established order? I know
>people who are branded extropians or transhumanists won't budge, I wrote
>this for people who will get interested in these problems of our time, so
>they won't needlessly cripple their game.
>May our dreams be reality!
No, because you use a hotmail account rather than communicate in a more
open fashion and you try to pad your comments with flowers and lace and
all sorts of exclamations?
Natasha
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