transhumanism

http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_034.htm

"Rule 110"

by Aaron Diaz

February 2, 2007

Dresden Codak


The storyline is about the singularity and transhumanism and also stuff. In this installment, the protagonist remarks "To be more than human is to be human." I lead with this remark because I have, at times, evinced a pro-attitude towards science, and its ability to transform the way we live, that may at times seem unfounded. In defense of that, let me tell a story: once upon a time, alchemists spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to turn lead into gold. These days, they are roundly mocked for their efforts - a professor of mine once remarked that building a computer that can really do a good job with English semantics is as realistic as turning lead into gold. The funny thing is, we can turn lead into gold. We did it more than twenty-five years ago.

http://chemistry.about.com/cs/generalchemistry/a/aa050601a.htm
"Turning Lead Into Gold"
by Anne Marie Helmenstine
About.com

Ok, that said: what exactly are we going to do with all this science? To get back to Dresden Codak:

http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_058.html
"The End"
October 22, 2008
by Aaron Diaz
Dresden Codak

In this final installment, our heroine is disappointed when the fellow from the first comic, about whom she had such high hopes, can't think of any better way to change people than to make them better at sports. To get closer to the things I'm interested in, let's take a look at Frankfurt.



Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right
by Harry Frankfurt
page 11
2006
Stanford: Stanford University Press

"However, the mere fact that a person has a desire does not give him a reason. What it gives him is a problem. He has the problem of whether to identify with the desire and this validate it as eligible for satisfaction, or whether to dissociate himself from it, treat it as categorically unacceptable, and try to suppress it or rid himself of it entirely. If he identifies with the desire, he acknowledges that satisfying it is to be assigned some position - however inferior - in the order of his preferences and priorities. If he externalizes the desire, he determines to give it no position in that order."

Unfortunately, sometimes our desires are insistent. Sometimes they make their way into the order of our preferences and priorities, despite our wishes; maybe we even become used to this fact and process. Sometimes we're not successful at ridding ourselves of the things we'd like to be rid of. On a level perhaps more insidious than Frankfurt discusses, we may find ourselves consistently overlooking certain possibilities for action; we may find ourselves consistently subject to certain cognitive biases. And so forth.

In other words: one of the things we can do with new tools is change the world. This is an important goal. But no matter how many tools we have, we'll never cease being finite creatures. In other words, new tools aren't a solution to that problem - though they may be solutions to more particular problems (e.g. smallpox). On the other hand, one of the other things we can do with new tools is change ourselves. Our desires and perceptions enter into our deliberations in a way that is different from the way that problems in the world do. It is problems with the former that are most worth being solved by transhumanism. (Put another way, one thing that new tools can do, though again, not merely by themselves, is help us have well-ordered souls).

Now, I don't mean to suggest that science alone will solve all these problems. That is, if we can't even see what the problem is in the first place, all the science in the world won't do a thing for us (except possibly accidentally). But there are situations in which we know what the problem is, more or less; we just don't know how to fix the damn thing.

love

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/twilight-vampires
The Atlantic
"What Girls Want"
December 2008
by Caitlin Flanagan

Somehow I find this article disheartening. It presents a vision of love that I find really annoying. Is this all we can hope for? Of course, it's explicitly about adolescent love, specifically female (American middle-class female?) love. But is even that image the image we should be selling to our children? Can't we tell a better story about how two adults can come to love one another? (Moreover, why is the theme of sex as defilment so compelling to teenage girls?)

Another way of putting what I find distasteful or disheartening is exemplified in the remark that nobody reads like young girls read. I find this somewhat insulting. I want to say, about this and many other claims: Yes it's true, but is it necessarily true? Do we want it to be true? How can we change things?

On a more constructive note:

I'm still trying to work out what love is - what it is for adults to come to love one another. I want to write about love in such a way that Sophocles' comment (that he is glad to be rid of his sexual desires) is not applicable: I want to write about how two self- and other-respecting individuals can fall in love, and what that sort of love would be. Love is not madness.

(I want to say some things about gender also, but they're better said in a coming post about (racial) stereotypes).