[ExI] Blackford and Egan on >H

[Damien Broderick]

See Russell Blackford's blog entry on transhumanism,

http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/

and especially the comments:

<https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=24761391&postID=3749500042141962458>

where Greg Egan offers remarks such as:

<The word "transhumanism" (or, even worse, "posthumanism") sounds 
like a suicide note for the species, which effectively renders it a 
political suicide note for any movement by that name. No doubt there 
are people prepared to spend 90% of their time and energy explaining 
that they didn't *intend* any negative connotations, but this is not 
one of those cases where other people will be to blame if 
"transhumanists" are reviled as the enemies of humanity on purely 
linguistic grounds. It's no use people proclaiming "Please, read my 
1,000-page manifesto, don't just look at one word!" The name is 
stupid, and anyone who doesn't drop it deserves the consequences.

And I'm not sure quite how much solidarity I'm compelled to have with 
someone, just because they've also noticed that we're not going to 
see out the millennium with physical substrates identical to those 
we've had for the last 200,000 years. People who think their manifest 
destiny is to turn Jupiter into computronium so they can play 10^20 
characters simultaneously in their favourite RPG are infinitely more 
odious and dangerous than the average person who thinks this whole 
subject is science-fictional gibberish and would really just like to 
have 2.3 children that are members of his/her own species, so long as 
they don't have cystic fibrosis and live a slightly better life than 
their parents. >

Damien Broderick