[ExI] Reframing transhumanism as good vs. evil

[AlgaeNymph]

On 1/11/11 5:42 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote:
> 1) What is the boundary between "enhancement" and "medicine"?

Medicine is considered an act of caring, unless it's professional and 
technological and icky corporate bad.  Enhancement is considered 
cheating (steroids!), unless it involves Hard Work and /natural/ 
supplements.

> 1a) Does, say, curing cancer necessarily fall into only one of the two?

Medicine, but it's a rich white man's disease.  What we should /really/ 
be doing is preventing disease caused by Unhealthy American Diets.

> 1b) What about prosthetics?

Medicine, because it's Restoring the Balance.

> 1c) What about prosthetics that exceed human baseline performance?

Permissible only if the enhancement is accidental.

> 2) What part of "making life better for everyone (who wants a better life) and
> eliminating many of the root causes of evil (resource scarcity, fear of death,
> lack of understanding)" is not a long term and more complex form of "fighting
> evil"?

"But is it /really/ better?"  The people who control the 
socially-accepted definition of morality feel that all you need is love 
and organic gardening.  Wanting more is Consumerism, which is what the 
Corporations make you buy into!  Instead, we should be Respecting the 
Earth and Doing Our Part in the Community.

> 3) Is not part of the discomfort we cause, because we propose to do
> something about evils that most people have accepted as inevitable?

Oh, but you'll only improve quality of life for The Rich (who may as 
well be the aliens from They Live) and create a caste system.  Also, 
without death, we'll have overpopulation and Rich People living forever.

At this point, I expect you'll tell me that there's nothing I can do 
about such people and that I should just ignore them.  How is that a 
good idea when they're not ignoring us while getting more people 
listening to them than we are?

> That last one may be the most significant part.  People make up all sorts of
> evil motives for us, but they rarely turn out to be true.

How do we convince the public otherwise?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20110112/6722e65c/attachment.html>