[extropy-chat] Transhumanism: Teilhard de Chardin - Truth or Dare

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Natasha Vita-More wrote:
> 
> Why suggest that anyone who is fully versed in their field, such as 
> Aubrey de Gray, or evolutionary biologist Michael Rose, make up a point 
> for fiction sake? Further, are you suggesting that transhumanists's 
> ideas about evolution are, or should be, based in "human" transitional 
> views that center around a limited lifespan and that pushing the 
> lifespan father in years is an assault on humanity's acceptance and even 
> worship of death?

This is wholly unrelated to the theory of evolution.  It is not an idea 
about evolution at all.  It is a declaration of a goal, which will be 
achieved through means other than natural selection.

>> Transhumanism doesn't need, and can't have, and shouldn't have, its 
>> own model of evolution, any more than there should be a transhumanist 
>> model of physics. 
> 
> I think your argument is misplaced.  Transhumanism is based on ideas 
> about evolution that have been published and promoted for many years and 
> continue to be published and promoted as the science and technology of 
> new ideas surmount.  These ideas are transhumanist because they, in 
> their directive intent, are based on questioning traditional acceptance 
> of a limited lifespan and recycling of the human spirit into a mystical 
> landscape.

Mm... certainly natural selection, insofar as it replaces theological 
assertions about the operation of the universe, denies that human limited 
lifespan had what we would regard as a "good reason" behind it, either in 
terms of intelligent design or in exploded theories of group selectionism. 
  But this is not a transhumanist idea.  It is not the result of 
supervenience of transhumanist ideology on the development of a scientific 
paradigm.  It is a flat fact about the historical cause of the biological 
human lifespan, which any rational observer will accept regardless of 
whether they, personally, wish humans long lives, instant deaths, or 
precisely threescore and ten.

There is nothing wrong with a transhumanist outlook being *based on* the 
standard model of evolution.  Of course it should be based on evolutionary 
theory; evolutionary theory is the correct account of how we got here; 
what else would we use?  I object to the idea of a transhumanist model of 
evolution or even the idea that transhumanists, qua transhumanists, should 
have their own ideas about evolution at all, unless they wish to operate 
in a dual capacity as ordinary evolutionary theorists (which is what I try 
to do regarding the evolutionary psychology of human general intelligence 
and so on).

> If you are suggesting that any transhumanist be foolish 
> enough to fictionize the facts developed and being investigated, than  
> this is overly broad.  It is in opposition to the basics of 
> transhumanism to "make up" ideas to justify a cause.  I hardly think any 
> transhumanist would get away with it for more than a few moment to a few 
> weeks.

Right!  Whether it was a minor or major point, some helpful pedant on the 
Extropians list would object to it.

> Our society is very hard lined in attempting to make sure that 
> information is as plausible as possible, if not solely accurate.

There is no such thing as "plausibility" where information is concerned - 
either the probability one assigns is justified on observation, or it is 
not.  One who says, "Aha, here's a gap in science, now I can make up 
something plausible and no one will be able to contradict me" will, of 
course, end up being wrong, because plausibility combined with prior 
desire for a particular answer is not a good way to seek out truths.  They 
also end up being shot down because they didn't know what science could or 
couldn't say - a nonspecialist doesn't know where the gaps are and will 
invariably stumble over an issue science has already settled.  Ideology, 
transhumanist or otherwise, is not involved in which probabilities are 
*warranted*, even if through carelessness it should mess up the 
calculation in practice.  There are transhumanist technologies, there is 
transhumanist art, but there is no such thing as transhumanist science.

Solely accurate sounds good to me.  We cannot, will not, should not, have 
no need to creep into the dark forest of the plausible, and I fear we'll 
get into real trouble if we try.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence