Transhumanism Conference
I just got home from a transhumanism conference ("Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights")being held at Stanford through tomorrow (Sunday). Among the items I learned today are: Feminist bioethics supports genetic engineering so that men can be altered to have babies and women can be freed from the tyranny of menstruation; animals should be enhanced to permit them to become equivalent to humans, including the ability to use the Internet--before, that is, all animal life is transformed into non biological states of existence, which apparently the living planet Gaia requires in order to survive; funding anti-aging research is more important than funding treatment for fighting disease in Africa; we probably should permit people who want to be amputees to achieve their desires; and, freedom requires a maximum morphological license to enhance our biological units.
I covered the conference for the Weekly Standard and will be writing about what it all means in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, Will Saletan from Slate is also in attendance, and I have no doubt he will be weighing in with his impressions soon. When he does, I will link it here.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:22 PM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
Wesley, is this for real? It sounds like something sponsored by the Weekly World News.
I know that feminists by and large oppose many of the new technologies because they tend to dehumanize women.
It probably doesn't bother the transhumanist camp to dehumanize humanity because that's an ideal for them. We oppose them because we have a fundamental belief in the dignity of humanity. For a group whose basic beliefs state explicitly or by implication that humans are no different from nonhumans, there is no conflict. "No standard, no violation."
After we humans have completed our role reversal so that men can bear children instead of women, I wonder whether or not there will be "masculists" with an agenda similar to that of the current feminists. If the feminists and transhumanists are to be ultimately "benevolent" in their aims, they should actually be working toward bringing about the kind of Brave New World that Aldous Huxley wrote about, in which no one has to bear children. That would minimize the oppression of men and women, assuming we overlook the oppression by prohibition of those who choose to remain human rather than become post-human in that manner.
It also strikes me as odd that no one seems to have a platform to say that we should be attempting to advance animals beyond ourselves. Given that we're already dealing with a transhumanist movement that sees us all as more or less politically or economically expedient, they should be attempting to enhance our lives through the use of "customization" for animals as well as humans. In that case, there would be no case for the status of any creature; all creatures would be judged individually according to the assigned task of each one. It seems to me that lurking behind the rhetoric of the transhumanists is the unavoidable acknowledgment that humans are innately given a particular status that is not to be surpassed.
It's for real. Some feminists do indeed oppose these issues. For example, check out the WEB site for Hands Off Our Ovaries, that seeks to prevent women from being exploited for their eggs in biotech research.
It has always intrigued me that many in the moral and ethical "avant garde" also cling to certain bizarre ideas concerning the world, such as the Gaia hypothesis. For people to often do not seem to know how to define life consistently or meaningfully, they make a lot of the notion that the world is a vast organism. It seems nonsensical to claim to understand the world as Gaia by studying its biological and non-biological relationships and then to assert that there must be a fundamental shift away from the biological in order for Gaia, known and defined in part biologically, to survive. It's as if redefining the nature of everything continually is expected to lead us one day to the moral and ethical certainty all sides imply by their thoughts and actions is there.
Hi Wesley
While accepting we’ll never agree, I’d like to make the point that it’s important to distinguish between extremist and reasonable Transhumanist organizations.
The conference you attended was organized, as you know, by the dominant figure in the ‘World Transhumanist Association’, James Hughes, a member of the Loony Left who believes in votes for genetically-enhanced elephants, the creation of ‘boy unicorns’, and a World Government providing free access to universal ‘eugenic programs’.
By contrast, the newly formed World Transhumanist Society respects the millions of people who, from strong religious beliefs, want nothing whatsoever to do with attempts to enhance the human condition through modern medicine.
The WTS is for those who personally believe in self-development, don’t wish to impose their beliefs on anyone else, and support the development of medical techniques by which to:
1/ cure and prevent physical and mental disorders.
2/ slow down aging, and the suffering that goes with it.
3/ increase the usable power of our brains
Not all Transhumanists are extremists. As the Founder of the WTS, despite my pro-Transhumanist polemics, I personally oppose both the use of ‘cast off’ IVF embryos purely as material for research (a denigration of life); and ‘voluntary euthanasia’ (a charter to co-erce unwanted relatives into suicide).
I like to think that those opposed to extreme Transhumanism might encourage sensible organizations like the WTS, and rightly focus their opposition on the Loony Left dominated WTA – for Dr Hughes’ frightening belief in a World State dishing out eugenics programs to the masses really does mean the prospect of a Brave New World.
Cheers!
Simon Young
Brighton, UK
info@designerevolution.net
thetranshumanist.blogspot.com
Thanks, Simon. Hughes was actually one of the more conservative people at the Stanford conference!
I have not explored the World Transhumanist Society's thoughts on a variety of issues, but I do wonder whether or not some of the resistance that some people have to the idea of transhumanism is rooted in the philosophy that no one should seek enhancement by certain means. If that is a key tenet of some anti-transhumanist philosophies, the WTS may be simply a group of moderates among radicals in the same general movement. The fundamental issues will remain the same and will rightly deserve the same opposition from those who oppose transhumanism in principle. It would seem that a group like the WTS will need to explore and publicize the real philosophical differences, if any, between themselves and more radical groups.
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