[extropy-chat] Pretranshumanist

[Brandon Reinhart]

I figure I would make a post to introduce myself. I don't know if that is
standard behavior on this list, but since its standard behavior in most
social groups I'll fire away.

 

My name is Brandon Reinhart. I am 27 years old, I live in Austin, Texas and
I design and engineer massively multiplayer computer games and world
simulations. I am currently employed by a startup company working on a new
project, but prior to that I worked at Sony Online Entertainment.

 

I am a secular humanist and critical atheist. I consider myself to be
"pre-transhumanist." The values, ethics, and goals of transhumanism reflect
my own views, but I do not consider myself a master of the material or its
component arguments. I'm learning and I'm making use of the resources
provided by many members of this list to do so. In my early life I was
exposed to viral fundamentalist Christianity and as a result I've developed
a cautious mental immune system. (Reference USENET archives with my name for
a few posts I made while infected.) I'm working through several documents
and arguments a night, spending time thinking about the points of view and
how it relates to my own understanding of technology and the direction of
human progress.

 

I held several transhumanist beliefs before I became aware of the term, such
as a belief that death is the result of preventable halting states. I have
never been satisfied with the agenda of either American political party and
so I am in the process of building my own complete socio-political
philosophical view.

 

I had no idea what extropy was until I read "Iron Sunrise" by Charles Stross
-- a book I bought because I liked the title. I didn't realize people had a
name for technology heavy views like mine. Researching extropy led me to
research humanism, transhumanism, etc. It helped give me a vocabulary I
could use to identify my values and further develop them. Tools I can use to
get inside my own head. Kick ass!

 

I am hesitant to accept the historical exponential view of evolution. This
is one of the things sitting in my meme filter awaiting development. The
predictions of a technological singularity that might occur within my
lifetime is not something I currently accept, because I cannot accept it
without further research and thought. 

 

I have a blog at www.extropica.com <http://www.extropica.com/>  that I
worked on briefly earlier this year and have picked up again. At the moment
it doesn't have a goal or focus. It is largely regurgitation of concepts
I've read, because writing an idea helps me contemplate and understand the
idea. Eventually, I would like that page to become a more directed sounding
board for my views (as I become more able to articulate them).

 

I'm playing around with building a personal concept map in Visio:

 

http://www.extropica.com/images/transcend/concept_map_v1.jpg

Non-Normative UML

 

Core beliefs are represented by classes. Belief values are represented as
class members.

 

Dashed arrows indicate correlations of the type "reasonably leads to." In
other words "rationalism reasonably leads to humanism." "Humanism reasonably
leads to altruism." The atheism arrow is backwards. "Reasonably leads to"
relationships aren't qualifications for a given belief, but are more like a
road map of how my own development works. Humanism, for example, creates the
context and logic for me to be altruistic. That isn't to say that altruism
depends on humanism. 

 

I need to do a lot more work on this, but this is kind of how I think. I
like to make graphs of concepts and write out or visualize my ideas to try
and internalize them. Now if only I could get an integrated agent to help me
do that!

 

Brandon Reinhart

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