[ExI] Transhuman

[Charlie Stross]

On 5 Sep 2012, at 03:38, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> Apropos transforming bodies, Shulamith Firestone recently died. She proposed artificial wombs as a way for women to  liberate themselves from biological constraints (and hence removing the main practical reason for patriarchal oppression), and in the long run post-genderism where the sex distinctions would evaporate as people could choose genital designs arbitrarily.
...

> But, beyond the Marxist apparatus she used in her arguments, I think one can make a cultural/memetic argument that just because we can change ourselves freely doesn't mean we will automatically do it: we will pursue changes that we think make sense, and that is conditioned on the extant culture. Sure, there are always somebody trying strange things, but most people are by definition mainstream. Being part of the mainstream likely provides economies of scale, reduces friction and has various more or less obvious stabilizing feedbacks. So even if all constraints suddenly disappeared cultures might turn out to be surprisingly slow-moving.
> 
> Those Japanese doll faces are a neat case in point. We can make anything, but people go for exaggerated things similar to our past. It will take a while before we discover the really important possibilities.

Skeumorphism, in other words. In matters biological. Our sense of self-identity is emergent over time from our experience of our interaction with our surrounding environment (including other people), and these interactions are mediated through our existing bodies. (Not to mention other peoples' reactions to us being coloured by their perceptions of us, again based on external physical appearances). So it would be unsurprising to find that most people (in a society with cheap and easy body modification) would only consider physical adaptations that tend towards the social norm: more "beautiful", in convergence with a socially-approved vision of beauty.



-- Charlie