[ExI] Bodies

[natasha at natasha.cc]

And what you say below is cutting edge?  Come on Keith! :-)  When we  
stop making claims about what will or will not occur, we might become  
imaginative.

Oscar Wilde's statement: "Anyone who lives within their means suffers  
from a lack of imagination" makes me think of the "means" as being the  
level of knowledge transhumanist have obtained and that living within  
that knowledge could prevent furthering imagination.

I witness this quite a bit within societies of thinkers who are neatly  
resting on their laurels.  The Donna Haraway crowd of cyborg theorists  
repeatedly signal their peers and gain a nod by falling neatly in line  
behind the postmodern feminist cyborg theory.  Mark Twain said "Be  
careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."  The  
intellectual vitamin of Haraway's cyborg theory, as a consequential  
source of knowledge on the future human, is a misprint of and on  
intelligence because it is taking minds away from deeper inquiring of  
human futures.

Okay, so transhumanism has intellectual capital in human futures and  
cyborg theory expressly ignores transhumanism. What could  
transhumanists be missing or ignoring right now?  I'm not sure. Maybe  
it is, in spirit, similar to the angst of cyborg feminist theory which  
kicked the pants of male dominance and which parallels, in part,  
Giulio's politically incorrect salvo, which kicks the ass of human  
biology.  The bridge is how it is voiced.  For me, anyway, I do care  
that students and the public are given information about their future  
apart from Fukuyama and Joy and McKibben, et al.  I don't really care  
about academic cliques, but I do darn well care what students are  
taught and what information is available to them in order for them to  
question and imagine their own future.

Natasha








Quoting Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>:

> The recent discussion doesn't seem cutting edge.
>
> I suspect that virtually all humans will abandon physical reality entirely.
>
> You can see this starting with Second Life and WoW.
>
> I expect to see laws passed within a few years attempting to limit the
> amount of time people can spend in virtual reality.  The laws will
> fail, traffic will dwindle as people both work from home and spend
> much of their off time playing games there.  There are already a lot
> of people who average over 12 hours a day in virtual spaces.
>
> Eventually nanotechnology based medicine will permit reversible
> uploading.  People will go in and out for a while and then slam the
> door on physical reality, leaving machines to maintain the physical
> infrastructure.
>
> At most there will be a small remnant physical state population.
>
> Keith
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