[ExI] transhumanist as a philosophy

[Damien Broderick]

On 6/16/2010 8:23 PM, natasha at natasha.cc wrote:
>> a perspective, a set of interpretative principles and principles of
>> action, tends be regarded as a *formal philosophy* only after it has
>> been canonized in one or more major texts.

> Extropy.

I never know what is meant by this word, used this way. I realize you 
disapprove of "Extropianism" but at least that word makes a sort of 
clumsy sense: the doctrine and activity of trying to maximize *extropy* 
which is something like the opposite of entropy. But I keep feeling that 
speaking of Extropy as a movement or philosophy is like talking about 
Energy the same way. It doesn't seem to work in English.

In any event, the question I was raising was: what are the major texts 
of transhumanism?

Ah, do you mean the retired journal *Extropy*? Or is there now a book 
with that title?

You mention _The Journal of Transhumanist Thought_ which I'm ashamed to 
admit I've never heard of before. Waaaiiit a minute: I now see a version 
of this cited at

<http://www.extropy.org/extropyonline.htm>

<Extropy: Vaccine For Future Shock, started by Max More and Prof. Tom 
Bell (T.0. Morrow), debuted in August 1988 as a printed magazine, with 
only fifty copies of the first issue. The title became Extropy: Journal 
of Transhumanist Thought, and a total of seventeen issues were 
published. Then, in November 1997, it moved to the Web as Extropy 
Online, where it continued to publish articles for three years. After a 
year of dormancy, it returned to the Web in February 2002 as its current 
form, Extropy: Journal of Transhumanist Solutions.>

But that site implies that it expired in 2003, and the link

<http://www.lucifer.com/~exi/ideas/journal/previous/index.html>

is defunct. This one

<http://www.lucifer.com/~exi/ideas/journal/previous/2002/index.html>

is also expired, alas. I find linked only one 2003 essay by Max, on 
democracy and transhumanism. I'm not sure all of that amounts to a major 
text for a new philosophy. I hope there's a big book on the way 
somewhere, consolidating this lost material.

Damien Broderick