[extropy-chat] ExI profiled?

[Anders Sandberg]

"vogue memories", I guess those are Natasha's memories of her career as a
supermodel? :-)

spike wrote:
> My question was extremely open ended;
> Natasha’s heart might indeed be in the south of France.

Yes, I have discovered that my heart seem to have been in England all this
time (it was last observed climbing around on the parapet of one of the
nearby cathedrals; like previous times it escaped capture). Seriously, I
think that I have more in common with the Anglosphere than Sweden both
culturally, politically and intellectually. It is a very refreshing
feeling to discover just how weird one's home for the past 33 years looks
from the outside.

> With respect to Mike’s question about how having a baby has changed my
> perspective on privacy, one ethical principle that I hold dear is that I
> do
> not wish to impose my own views on others.  I am open to transparency
> myself, but my being transparent forces my own son to be partially
> transparent, a matter with which he has not yet expressed comfort.  To
> keep
> his options open, I must limit to some extent my own transparency.
> Paradoxes abound.

Interesting argument. One might argue that before a certain age children
do not have a concept or need for privacy, so they could be forced to live
in their parents transparent life. Normally they will want privacy after a
while (5 years?), and that would limit the initial transparent period. But
if you reared your child in a transparent way, would he then want privacy
when he got old enough? It is an interesting question. If yes, then the
desire for privacy may indeed be fundamentally ingrained in us humans and
we might take this as evidence that transparent societies (despite their
other benefits) might not truly suit us. If no, then there might not be
any problem imposing the transparency - except that a choice has indeed
been made for the kid that he did not participate in, yet now would
wholeheartedly agree with. Ah, kids are such ethical problems! Trolleys
running down branching tracks, brains in jars and frozen embryos in
burning IVF labs are so much more manageable!


-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University