[ExI] the ethics of the Vile Offspring

[Stefano Vaj]

On 22 May 2011 16:28, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
> Stefano Vaj wrote:
>>
>> Conversely, take Stross's Accelerando. How should we condone the
incredibly parochial hostility to what is cavalierly defined the Vile
Offspring which is expressed in the last part of the book?
>
> Moral relativists or people viewing value as being a purely social or
psychological construct  have no problem in accepting the character's
hostility to the VO.

... or, as I do myself, they can reject it simply because they choose to be
on the side of change and of the unknown... :-)

> I suspect Stross got the idea partially from Nick Bostrom's paper "The
future of human evolution" where he discusses scenarios where posthumanity
evolves into something that completely lacks whatever it is that actually
gives existence value, for example a very capable and expansive civilization
where there is no consciousness.

Yes, so do I. In fact, I was simply flabbergasted when I was first exposed
to Bostrom's inclination to justify what is exactly the argument against
trans-simianism by resorting to qualia.

And I cannot even begin to say how perplexed I was in seeing such philosophy
being labelled by its proponent not even as a peculiar brand of
"transhumanism", but as transhumanism tout court!

<<The "'welfare of the individual" is just as imaginary as the "welfare of
the species": the former is not sacrificed to the latter, species viewed
from a distance is just as transient as the individual. "Preservation of the
species" is only a consequence of the growth of the species, i. e., the
overcoming of the species on the road to a stronger type... It is precisely
with regard to each living being that it can be best shown that it does
whatever it can not to preserve itself, but to become *more* than it
is>> (*Will
to Power*, § 280 and 302).

Unsurprinsingly, Bostrom is the first to see his views at odd with all kinds
of overhumanism and posthumanism. As to transhumanism in general, the record
is however set straight in what I believe to be a very balanced fashion by
Max More in *The Overhuman in the Transhuman* (
http://jetpress.org/v21/more.htm), an article I was very pleased to
translate in Italian for the theoretical quarterly review of the Italian
Transhumanist Association.

--
Stefano Vaj
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