There’s been some gum-flapping lately here and here (there are multiple posts, so I’ll let you find ‘em if you care to - you’ve probably already read more of them than I bothered to) wrt transhumanism and the issues revolving around “human nature”. My take on human nature: who cares? I hate to resort to sematics (wait - no I don’t), but if I want to genetically engineer my offspring’s nature, then that’s natural and by definition human nature is mutable. If you’re more into the nitty gritty than the word-play, and have a million “well, what if…”s, my answer to all of them is: Bring it on. The more hits upside the head with a crowbar that human nature takes, the better… it’ll be harder for idiots with agendas to assert that they know what it is or what it should be. Democracy seems to be in bloom lately - let’s democratize the genome and run the high priests of human nature out of town on a rail.
So anyway, in this TimesOnine article one finds the usual stuff we’re all familiar with. But there are two gems. The first:
The idea is, in medical terms, revolutionary; in social, political, psychological, philosophical, economic and even aesthetic terms it is earth-shaking, transformative, unimaginable in its implications. In a nutshell, it signals the end of the human.
It will not be necessary for my grandkids to have shark DNA that lets them sense your electric field with their skin, or grow little ULF-sensing organs from their foreheads, to ring in the new age. When enough people start living past, say, ~110 years, our transhuman future will have arrived. The second:
On a lighter but no less gripping note, de Grey’s timescale presents a nice problem for a very spoilt generation, the babyboomers. This population bulge, caused by the increasing number of births after the second world war, covers people aged roughly between 50 and 60. If it is to be 30 years before immortality technology becomes available, this most pampered generation in human history might also be the last generation to die. They got their decaff lattes but they didn’t get eternal life. It is hard not to laugh.
It sure is.
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Huzzah! Huzzah! What he said.
“You can’t go against nature,
Because, if you do
Go against nature, it’s part of Nature too!”
Was it Niven who wrote “The only unnatural act is the one you can’t do”?
I couldn’t remember those lyrics this afternoon, though… all I could think of was The Church, but I knew that wasn’t it. It was some Daniel Ash project, right? Tones on Tail, or Love and Rockets?
The post title is an album by Tortoise, btw.
Yah, it’s Love-n-Rockets.