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As someone who was quite plugged into the transhumanist scene in the 1990s and well-acquainted with several of the people referenced, I have a perspective that
by jandrewrogers 4y ago
As someone who was quite plugged into the transhumanist scene in the 1990s and well-acquainted with several of the people referenced, I have a perspective that I think explains it more succinctly.
When I was introduced to it in the early 1990s, the movement was dominated by extremely technical doers and thinkers, with a culture that encouraged rigor. It was philosophical rather than political. In the late 1990s, transhumanism had its Eternal September moment, when it became fashionable and trendy to be "transhumanist". The discourse became dominated by people hijacking the transhumanist movement in service of their political and social agendas, with nary a nod toward rigor. The doers and serious people originally associated with the movement and which gave it its intellectual gravitas became greatly outnumbered and mostly moved on.
Many of the early transhumanists stopped labeling themselves as such because they did not want to be associated with the kind of people that came to define it.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoThis seems to be the progression with everything.
- orangepurple 4y agoI would like to draw attention to a classic transhumanist philosopher whose style has remained consistent for decades. https://www.hedweb.com/ https://www.hedweb.com/ The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture - a motivational system based on heritable gradients of bliss. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event. Two hundred years ago, powerful synthetic pain-killers and surgical anesthetics were unknown. The notion that physical pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed absurd. Today most of us in the technically advanced nations take its routine absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as psychological pain, too, could ever be banished is equally counter-intuitive. The feasibility of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of social policy and ethical choice.