[extropy-chat] TechnologyReview joins anti-transhumanists

[Damien Broderick]

What's truly extraordinary is that while Dr. Nuland ends by asserting "It 
is a good thing that his grand design will almost certainly not succeed. 
Were it otherwise, he would surely destroy us in attempting to preserve 
us", he makes no attempt at all to show why this might be so, let alone 
must be.

All we get is smarmy handwaving and loaded language:

"biogerontologists who study caloric restriction in mice and promise us the 
extension by 20 percent of a peculiarly nourished existence;" (i.e. not 
eating like glutted swine on fats and sugars until we expire from our 
self-inflicted obesity)

"if we are to accept de Grey's first principle, that the desire to live 
forever trumps every other factor in human decision-making, then 
self-interest--or what some might call narcissism--will win out in the end."

`Narcissism', for what it's worth, is the psychiatric label for basing your 
self-estimate on the way other people regard you (as Narcissus fell in love 
with what he took to be the face of another gazing back at him in a 
mirrored pond). Yet de Grey as portrayed in the article, and in the 
disgraceful editorials, is quite immune to that kind of socially imposed 
self-evaluation. How interesting and self-lacerating this error is.

But in any case, does the desire to live a maximal healthy life trump 
*every* other factor? I doubt that Aubrey, or most of those in this forum, 
would make that claim. The curious thing is that at the basis of the 
scornful attitudes deployed in those editorials and the essay itself is a 
conviction that life is `granted' to us--by some supernatural agency, 
presumably--and that this *does* trump every other factor: "Aging is the 
condition on which we are given life," we are instructed. Well, I guess 
that settles it. No further argument is required. Luckily, because none is 
offered.

Damien Broderick