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Notes -
How about a pallet cleanser?
In the other thread a few people brought up surrogacy, and maybe I've spent too much time with TERFs, but am I the only one that overwhelmed with the feeling of Lovecraftian horror whenever it's brought up? The feeling is even more uncanny, because it's like I slept through some great societal debate where everybody decided it's actually a lovely thing that should be celebrated. Although maybe it's not all that bad, there's a certain "how it started, how it's going" quality to the NYT headlines. In any case the casual way it's supporters talk about surrogacy freaks me out even more than militant pro-choicers.
Then there's the whole slippery slope thing:
Love is love, we have a right to get married just the same as you! - Yes I agree!
We also have a right to adopt! - Sure! I mean I have my issues with adoption in practice, but in principle if there are kids without parents, and willing gay couples to adopt them I don't see an issue.
We also have a right to biological children! What? Do you expect us to be ok with not having children?
Wait what? Yes I do! I'm all for tolerance, and living and letting live, but you're not going to make me see this as a lovely family moment, and anyway I don't remember signing on to turning a fundamental human experience into an industry when I supported the gay rights movement. Accept the limits of your biology, and move on.
Which brings me to Dase's idea "postrat «don't mean-spiritedly dunk on a rationalist» challenge (impossible)". Indeed, I can't help myself, and even though I used to be rat/rat-adjacent, I find myself having growing disdain for the entire philosophy. There's a meme that's slowly gathering momentum, that all the trans stuff, and 72 genders is just a foot in the door for transhumanism, and after I heard the idea for the first time, I can't seem to unsee it. This twisted ideology will drive us to throw away our humanity, turn us into a cross-over between Umgah Blobbies and the Borg, or trick us into committing suicide, because there's a subroutine running on some GPU somewhere, that's somewhat similar to the processes in our brains. Given the utter dominance of the trans ideology, the vindication of the slippery slope argument, and the extrapolated trajectory of these ideas, I believe we have no other choice - Transhumanism must be destroyed!
Two points I guess.
First, can I get some theory or principle for when people are obliged to accept the limits of their biology and when they aren't? I'm assuming your ok with humans ignoring the limits of their biology when it means not going blind, or letting deaf people hear, or crippled people walk. If I'm correct about the above why are LGBT people obliged to respect the "limits of [their] biology" with respect to having children but the others aren't for their conditions?
Second, why care specifically about being "human"? Whatever that means to you. I see downthread you complain about playing the definition game so I'll sidestep that and say that if becoming a "cross-over between Umgah Blobbies and the Borg" leads people to live longer, happier lives of the kind they want to have I think that's good, whether or not you (or anyone) would call the resulting entities "human."
Catholics have had a longstanding argument about which kinds of technological help are warranted within a respect for God's creation and I must say I find their conclusions very reasonable.
The line between health and degeneracy is repair. It's fine to do anything to repair broken humans and allow them to do what they would be able to do if not for some disease or mutilation holding them back.
It becomes immoral when you start trying to augment humans beyond their natural existence and try to turn them into something else. Humans are not immortal, they don't reproduce asexually, they don't have 10 arm, etc.
Of course the debate at the margins can be fierce, especially since industry has changed a lot about the human condition and arguably too much already so that we suffer ills of our own making, but I think it's a generally sound principle.
Aging is merely the ability of the body to repair itself breaking down. Who says we mustn't repair that one, too? (Rhetorical question, Christians!)
Death is a necessary and natural part of life. You don't repair what's not broken.
You are a traitor to humanity, aider and abetter of the Great Enemy. I genuinely can't believe so many people hold this view.
Seems that describes you better since you don't even want to be part of humanity.
Humans die. People that don't are something else.
As I’ve said elsewhere I’ll die, I just hope it’s billions of years away instead of 50 years away. What’s the difference?
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Right back at you, neighbor.
You posted somewhere else in the thread that the obvious core drive of a human is to escape death. I assure you, I find that statement as repugnant as you appear to find its opposite. I see it as a repudiation of everything I recognize as noble within humanity, of the true core function to choose well from limited, fraught options. Obviously, I can't force you to adopt my view, and neither can you force me to adopt mine. All that can be done is to point out that the chasm between values, even for baseline, unmodified humans, yawns wide indeed.
Then you die and let me do as I will.
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You're Christian, yes?
I find the Christian objection to transhumanist anti-death pushes fascinating, because "death" means such different things to Christians and atheists. To a Christian, there is no need to escape death on Earth, because Christ already overcame the bonds of death for us with the Resurrection, and we too will be resurrected and raised to a state of perfection if we hold firm. To seek to overcome death on Earth looks like pursuing a shallow, partial, impossible form of what is already granted free of cost to all of us. Christians have fulfilled this drive already in their minds. The rest of us, lacking such a perceptual safety net, do what we must.
This fundamental disconnect over what death is makes it complex to have a meaningful conversation about the nobility of pursuit of immortality between Christians and non-Christians, as the rest of us seek to build what you believe you already have.
I am Christian, but I've been an atheist too. Even from an Atheist perspective, I think people are better off making their peace with death than fighting to the bitter end. One of the things that makes life good is people being willing to eat the badness set before them, rather than desperately attempt to avoid it or pass it off to others. Even on the assumption that death is the absolute end, how one reacts to that end is the product of immediate and indirect choices. Abject terror is largely, I think, a choice, and not a very good one given that it seems pretty unlikely to me that such death is going to be avoided for most of the current population. Where such fears grow especially pernicious is when the threat of death might appear to be forestalled by exploiting or victimizing others. In that case, the opportunity for evil is nearly boundless, and the attitude that takes death to be the worst possible thing just weakens one's resolve.
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the resurrected person would be a copy of that person who long ago died and was buried in a grave, I think its arguable to say that its the same thing as extending your life without death.
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I’m glad we have so much diversity of values!
I was a bit hyperbolic there I admit - I apologize. What do you find noble in humanity?
The ability to choose what is Good, even when the choice is hard. Death and pain are among the things that make it hard, but it seems to me that one of the choices we have to make is between accepting them, and acquiescing to them. Avoiding death is of great value, but it is not a terminal value. Treating it as a terminal value often allows one to be "forced" into choosing evil, in an attempt to avoid the ultimately unavoidable. Evil is the Great Enemy. Death is just an unfortunate fact. One might as reasonably declare that the speed of light is the Great Enemy, and all that matters is breaking physics by achieving FTL. Any passive feature of reality can be transformed into the ultimate villian, if one is willing to torture perspective sufficiently.
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