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Wow, few things:
Paragraphs help most writing by breaking it up into readable chunks. I'm not saying this will help here, but it does seem like the most easily addressable aspect of this ... thing?
I'm not sure why you think you are liberal. Do you just like the way the word sounds? I can't figure it out. You are at most a "progressive" but I don't want to insult all progressives by lumping them in with you. I think you fit in best with communists / maoists / stalinists / etc. They share your belief in "everything will be great once I kill all the people on the right that disagree with me".
Its always possible that you are a troll, and that is what some people will think here. I've become a big believer in a variant of Poe's law: doesn't matter how crazy it sounds there is someone out there that believes it. I'll treat the views you espouse seriously, even if the actual person writing them doesn't see them as serious.
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Upvoted for cogent analysis, though I'll add that as a staunch transhumanist myself it felt a bit like pulling teeth.
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Most of the arguments I’ve read against transhumanism seem to boil down to some variant of:
I don’t find this convincing? If your best argument is “I don’t like it,” you may want to reassess your position.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that my gut instincts have evolved over millions of years of pressure, and wouldn't have done so for no reason. When I'm disgusted by the smell of shit, it's because it's unclean and I'm being warned to stay away. When I get an "off" feeling about someone, it's some long-buried threat detection instinct briefly flaring to life again.
Check what were instinctive "gut reactions" of "the people" to wearing glasses, autopsy of the dead, vaccination, anesthesia, open body surgery, blood transfusion, organ transplants and other medical treatments we now take for granted when they were first introduced.
ANCESTOR: Grandson? Are you mad? You let a Jew to poison you till you are unconscious, cut you open with knife, and then suck blood from someone else and pump it into your body? And you even pay the Christkiller for this satanic black magic? Are you even good Christian?
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
You're using cherry-picked examples. I'm sure you can think of plenty of other things that people's gut reactions told them to laugh at and which turned out to be laughable.
And even your cherrypicked list includes things that didn't work well when they were introduced (operations before sterile conditions were understood, blood transfusions before blood types were known.) And I know of no evidence that glasses were ever rejected using gut feelings.
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Pointing out the lack of limiting principles is always fun, and the best part about it is that it can be done both ways.
DESCENDANT: Happy birthday Grandpa! Go ahead open it! It's a gift card for the local CRISPR clinic, they have a new treatment for making penises grow out of your forehead, the first 5 are free! What do you mean you don't want it? Why do you always have to stand in the way of progress, grandpa?
Comparing my gut reaction to getting a dick on my forehead somewhere in old age to my gut reaction of succumbing to dementia and osteoporosis in old age... I'll take the dicks, thanks.
Sure. If there weren't obvious temptations to transhumanism, I wouldn't find it half as dangerous as I do.
That said, are you going to stop at dicks, gramps?
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"I don't like it" is the only argument ever uttered against any political position by the nature of political positions.
Any political statement is ultimately a moral statement about what ought to transpire which is ultimately an aesthetic statement about what good circumstances and good lives look like.
All of the arguments that could possibly exist for trans-humanism boil down to "I like it" and vice versa.
Wars have been fought over lesser sentiments than disgust.
Ah, but you forget the «otherwise you're getting made obsolete and reduced to praying for generosity of your superhuman overlords» argument, which is a pragmatic appeal to values of self-determination and self-preservation the other party plausibly (and in most cases, including this one, obviously) shares.
Transhumanism proper isn't about fetishistic bullshit like embedding chips into the skin, nor is it analogous to casual sex. It's not merely a moral hazard to conservatives, and doesn't really allow for smug prudish attitude.
It doesn't really matter that little people find transhumanism icky, except for those unfortunate enough to depend on their goodwill. The class that holds power will be augmented, by more or less icky technical means. One can argue it already has been.
The idea that normative beliefs are ultimately founded on aesthetic instincts is a strangely exuberant and infantile one to be proposed by a conservative. Maybe that's a stage preceding acknowledgement that your worldview has been deboonked in your own mind and only hinges on obstinacy. Generally, people think their oughts are derived from what is, and I'd charitably assume they are informed at least by what these people believe is factual truth.
Ah yes, "Gott mit uns".
If we grant the transitive argument, this still rests upon the axiom that living the life that is being proposed is better than death, which, again, relies on an aesthetic framework which is non obvious. And I think it's obviously anathema to my own. "Live free or die" and so forth.
Consider the supposed irrelevance of John the Savage v. The World Controllers. Now which is the good man?
I hear you, it is about something much more sacrilegious, which is transcending the human condition to become something else. It's about bringing heaven on earth and other such utopianism. You will find nothing more opposed to the goals of conservatism and traditionalism, which hold our nature to be immutable and that one should refrain from immanentizing the eschaton.
I'd refrain from calling Aristostle a child if I were you.
Now how exactly do you propose to "deboonk" unfalsifiable metaphysics? I mean seriously, when someone claims to have solved the problem that has stumped all occidental philosophers since the modern period you'd think they would bring some receipts.
What's it going to be this time, logical positivism?
That people delude themselves into thinking that their moral tastes are dictated by reality does not make them right about such things. For surely if they were right, they would all agree or be able to debate themselves to agreement. And yet that is not the case. Even among especially reasonable people.
The existence of the is-ought gap should be enough to convince anyone of the vacuity of this idea, but we now have studied moral impulses enough that we can model how people react to dilemmas. And it has basically nothing to do with reason, facts or truth.
People do not reason themselves into morality, they create rationalizations for their preexisting moral jugements.
Hey, I totally dig the aesthetic of suicidal resistance.
But the point is, there's a great deal of difference between mere dislike and maximally committed antagonism. For most people, their life (and related issues, such as avoidance of suffering, enslavement and mental decline, which I'll omit for simplicity) ranks very highly in the hierarchy of values, so when facing the choice between certainly losing their life and embracing some disliked proposition, they don't hesitate long (this is why mugging works). Indeed, they may fold even over minor discomfort, seeing as they routinely hand over chunks of their autonomy and privacy and ability to shape future to save a bit of time or mental energy, to get a nugget of entertainment or stick it to the outgroup.
Thus for them this is a pragmatic, not aesthetic argument: a factual claim about ways towards realizing their own genuine desires; their aesthetics are compatible with transhumanism by default.
And many arguments are pragmatic in this sense. Outside the context of soapboxing, people rarely deal in absolutes, and live lives full of contingent compromises. On this topic, too, we know the score. Had OG Luddites known what fate awaits them, I'm sure most of them would have made peace with machines; just like most other workers have.
Eh, I may be able to think of a few competitive options. What's the trad opinion on subhumanism? It's my invention, fresh outta the oven. The gist is that, forget immanentizing eschatons, being a baseline human is a chore, and most reasons to be one have been diminished by progress, so we should accept being less than that. We should return to monke, to a masturbating animal with shriveled neocortex, an irrelevant and fungible load-balancing appendix to corporate economics, and burn out in sedated contentment.
(This is plausibly the sort of shape your descendants will assume, should they inherit your obstinacy. Seeing as transhumanism is the worst thing possible, would this alternative make you happier?)
And I wouldn't be so sure about that: people are very good at motivated reasoning, to which they owe their prowess at denying reality.
One of intensity, not of nature.
Start turning people's children against them, see how much they value their lives over your doom.
You can boil the frog because people don't like to think much about where things are going or don't have the ability to see very far. But when things are clear the moral calculi can become quicker than even conscious thought.
And pray tell, what are those "genuine desires" and how are they decided?
I'm sorry but you're just repeating the same objection and it doesn't work. Just because one can make instrumental arguments about what works doesn't answer the underlying question of "works in the service of what?".
No. Nor are we able. Nor are we able to advance to krab either.
We're not Australopithecus and we're not something beyond either, we're Homo Sapiens, and that's what we must deal with instead of dreaming of reforming humanity in the image of modernism.
That said I'm not against adopting new useful technology. I'm against the idea of pretending that compromising our humanity over it is useful or even possible.
My view of the far future is far closer to Dune than it is Eclipse Phase. We may get more sophisticated or different gizmoes, but for all intents and purposes we'll still be the same great apes and given all attempts at turning us into something different have ended in massive fucking disaster, I'll hold that it is the inevitable consequence until proven wrong.
But as I've often mentioned in this place, if it comes to my descendants having to be space north korea to remain humans, so be it. That's still the preferable option in my opinion.
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I think IGI would say: What exactly is wrong with being "made obsolete and reduced to praying for generosity of your superhuman overlords", other than us not liking it?
For what it's worth, I agree with you that this is the likely consequence of avoiding transhumanism, but I think IGI is saying that both sides of the argument are simply pointing to consequences and pointing out how undesirable they are.
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The thing about ought and is, is: it's as much a compelling argument to join the Borg, as it is a compelling argument to declare the Butlerian Jihad now, rather than later.
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Was he trying to convince you, or just describe his reactions?
Quite the opposite, always beware anyone that tells you to ignore your gut.
Feeling your way around an issue beats reason and knowledge any day. The illiberal trads and woke can agree on that.
Not just wokes and trads, everyone. Never met a centrist that was guided by reason over emotion.
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