[ExI] Essay: "The hermeneutic challeng of genetic engineering: Habermas and the transhumanists"

[Aleksei Riikonen]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 11:32 PM,  <natasha at natasha.cc> wrote:
> I just finished a fairly quick read-through of this article.  Some misquotes
> of data, but it is perceptible in taking on Haraway's use of cyborg to
> soften the blow of transhumanist technologies. Nonetheless, it is quite
> beclouding.  Would anyone like to comment on the last sentence:
>
> "... transhumanism is at root not grounded simply in the embracing of
> technological promise (as say Kaku suggests) but rather in a radical
> demythologised lifeworld, incapable of supporting moral discourse."

Just another humanities professor/whatever who has managed to pretty
thoroughly detach his/her thoughts from reality. I wouldn't bother
seriously commenting on folks who think transhumanism is e.g.
"incapable of supporting moral discourse". In reality, the world is
ever more technocratic, and such fools don't have sufficient influence
that we would need to take them seriously, even though they hold high
status within the anti-intellectual culture unfortunately so rampant
within the humanities (which they are for the most part reducing to
ranting kooks without real influence on what actually happens in the
world -- before the powers that be take away their funding, and us
westerners thereby join the smarter ever more successful and
eventually dominant Asian countries who don't give much funding at all
to such pseudo-academic clowns).

One might observe them and talk to them for fun and laughs, but there
is no serious reason to do so. (Except for people like James Hughes
who strive to build "transhumanism lite" that also manages to recruit
some of the sillier folks -- which recruitment and alliances I see as
unnecessary; we should rather strive to be more connected to the smart
no-nonsense Asians, who find our core ideas to be pretty obvious and
normal.)

-- 
Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei