Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, September 15, 2011

"Humanism" + Robot God Sooper Dad + Nanobotic Treasure Cave + Shiny Robot Body Transplant = Very Serious Philosophy and Movement

Over at Accelerating Future, transhumanist "richard holt" declares:
Transhumanism is really only humanism combined with an understanding of science. (ie. an understanding that minds can come in all forms, and that physics allows nanotechnology, self replicating machines and AI)
If by "humanism" you mean to emphasize and celebrate the historical tendency of humanisms to declare their values universal while always in fact securing them only selectively, and by "combined with an understanding of science" you mean to couple this parochialism to techno-fetishistic wish-fulfillment fantasizing as a consumer capitalist religion substitute, I daresay you are not far from the truth of the thing.

About your typically transhumanoid emphasis on "physics allow[ing] nanotechnology, self replicating machines and AI" and the rest, I will merely repeat my usual warning (to fall, no doubt, on the usual deaf ears) that logically possible worlds are not the same as actually existing worlds, actually desirable outcomes, or actually relevant concerns.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> . . .combined with an understanding of science. . .

More like, combined with a naive and literal-minded
expectation that "science" will reify the tropes
(what some literary critics have called the "megatext")
of post-1970 science fiction.

Dale Carrico said...

Quite right, not to mention even older tropes from folk mythology (golem, philosopher's stone, fountain of youth, aladdin's lamp, sorcerer's apprentice) and theology (omnipredicated god becomes super-predicated posthuman techno-transcendence, not to mention eden, resurrection, ascension, apocalypse).