Plants as biological machines whose genes can be tweaked and replaced and improved. Humans as very complicated, computer-like brained primates, whose consciousness is an epiphenomenon, who are genetically controllable and should be improved both via genetic manipulation and screening and via cyborg enhancement and computer interface. Animals are biological machines with excellent genes to be harvested for human enhancement and also food crop enhancement both via GM. Examples of each species will be saved for future harvesting but also for 'natural' dioramas and quasi natural 'reserves': entertainment. Ecosystems as inefficient resource basins that can be improved and streamlined. All parts are replaceable or improvable. Irrational nostaligia may be felt by homo sapiens before they reach the transhuman stage. This may occur regarding pets, wild animals and plants, particular landscapes and other natural phenomena. There is, clearly, no objective basis for this nostalgia and is simply value projected by homo sapian mammals onto both organic and inorganic matter. This and other sentiments are hindrances to progress, but not critical ones. Likewise any objections based on free will, another delusionary concept. In fact, most objections can be countered by saying the changes are inevitable. Guns, Germs and Steel as nouns of inevitability can be replaced with key trigger words, nanotech, genetech and computerization. Tough, native Americans becomes Tough, homo sapiens (those who resist the transformations of progress). The earth as homo sapiens first niche, replaceable when technology improves and resources have been used up. At a later date perhaps, after significant advances in terraforming, we can recycle and reuse the planet. Other planets will be the interim and continued new niches for the transhumans - those that still need some form of atmosphere and gravitation to thrive. Relationships as irrational mixtures of qualia and hormone levels and hallucinations. These can be improved via CBT and gene and psychopharmacological therapies - also computer interfaces that monitor hormone levels and provide ongoing feedback from mini-MRI scans can streamline these relationship before the period when transhumans are the rule. Instrumental reason can and should be applied to everything. Everything can and should be either improved or replaced by something better, including what will have become the former homo sapiens. Capital should be given the primary decision-making power around these decisions, either directly through its control of governmental , or indirectly (though barely so) via control of media and thus the minds of child and adolescent homosapien primates - read: when their brains are most plastic.
I have read your post three or four times, Pineal, and I have absolutely no idea what you are on about here. But the statement I quote above gives me cause for alarm. Who is it that will decide what is "better"? Rich
It's rather dense, my post. Sorry for the lack of clarity. I share your reaction to that sentence. We could ask already 'who is already deciding what is better?' and 'how are they convincing others, in those cases where they need to?'
If I was told that my unborn child carried sickle cell trait or another of the thousands of genetic illnesses and that there was a special treatment that could cure him, would it be "desacralization" for me to say yes? Or would that be merely holding something else more sacred than the current human genome?
You'd be paying many thousand times more for the child than the child is worth - and that is not rational, is it?
@wynn -- Wow, I didn't think that you were "in to" making value judgments for other people. Perhaps I'm an individual with a low sperm count and thus have great difficulty producing offspring? Would not the worth of a human life, a complex assortment of atoms, perhaps be worth more than the sum of it's parts?
Well, if you believe that you are your body (and as far as I am aware, you do, taking the body-mind dualism as merely provisional), then how is it rational to invest into it more than it is worth?
@wynn -- Biologically? Because of the potential gains and because it's sort of the whole reason we exist. What the hell are you even trying to argue? That a materialistic worldview leads to less caring individuals? Good luck with that.
Well, it should lead to less caring individuals, if they are to be consistent in their materialistic worldview.
@wynn -- You haven't thought this through very far have you? Why should a materialistic worldview lead to less caring individuals?
The thread title is apt, I think. There really is a widespread nostalgia for a more pantheistic and medieval worldview, in which the world around us was perceived as alive with magic, with sacred power, and not just a heap of dead matter spasmodically feigning life (so people feel) as physical and chemical machines. We see it expressed in the wide and in some places expanding gap between what CP Snow called "the Two Cultures", the scientific and engineering culture on one hand, and the religious, literary and artistic culture on the other, incomprehending of each other and increasingly at odds. One precise and empirical, the other all about transcendent feelings. Historically we see it sort-of reflected in the enlightenment's "age of reason" as compared to the romantic reaction against it in the name of passion and art. There's a sense that the rise of science, and of scientific ways of thinking, has kind of turned human beings into machines along with everything else, into cogs in an unfeeling and uncaring system. Knowledge of good and evil have evaporated, God is dead, and all we have left is capitalism confusing and misleading everyone with images and advertising for somebody else's profit. In my opinion this is a seriously distorted and overly cynical view of history, but it's seemingly widespread and perhaps even dominant in much of the European humanities, particularly in Paris. It does express Europe's sense of shock and disillusion at their two world wars, at the intellectual and moral compromises that most people made, and at their squandering of their inheritance of world leadership. European intellectuals are still trying to come to terms with the disaster of the 20'th century, with the flaming collapse of all of the continent's once grand enlightenment optimism. Seen in that light, much of the contemporary European humanities aren't unrelated to Islamic fundamentalism, which displays similar nostalgia for an imagined past in which everything was still sound, certain and sacred. Of course, the Europeans, again particularly the French, also have a strong libertine tradition of passion, sex and feeling that are almost totally alien to the Islamic world, so the simularity isn't complete by any means. The Europeans want to escape from what they see as scientistic oppression into a magical Dionysian garden of anything-goes freedom, where they can be children again, except with adult sexual lives. The Muslims want to restore their lost discipline, come together again as a community and once again be subserviant to God's holy will. Given the disasters of the 19'th and 20'th centuries, from the opium war to the cultural revolution, China is almost certainly nostalgiac too. But in China, that nostalgia is probably for the highly centralized world of Imperial Confucianism, for once again being the "Middle Kingdom" in the cultural and economic center of the planet, and for a strong virtue ethics built around family, community, respect for authority, compassion for subordinates and a stronger sense of social duty. If there's any truth to that Confucian vision, then it's not hard to see why China is currently on the rise now that the country's traditional ideals are being combined with the Western-originated science and industralism that Europe no longer entirely trusts.
Thank you very much, I am from Europe, and I do not share your analysis of us!! Personally, I experience the tension between the two worlds primarily in terms of how to deal with those who are in superior positions and who like to dish out terms like "objective," "truth," "reality" and such. It is not so much a matter of scientistic oppression - as it is simply a matter of oppression, on an intellectual level. For example, after WWII, Wolfgang Kayser developed the theory of interpreting a work of art accoding to what it inherently is ("werkimmanente Interpretation"). This was a reaction to the Nazi approach which interpreted everything according to the Nazi agenda. But whether Kayser intended it or not, his approach spawned yet another tyranny as generations of students in Europe had to learn, and many the hard way. What was supposedly "inherent" to a poem was what a particular teacher said it was, and the student was an idiot for not seeing it that way. The meaning of "inherent" was bastardized to the extreme. There is a kind of intellectual vileness in Europe that you Yanks are simply not capable of. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Projected values...yes, much of what our species does is about projected values. Projected values are very important to us, else we'd all live in the same (ideal) house, drive the same (ideal) vehicle...a rather Soviet-esque state of affairs... I don't look at animals as things to be manipulated and twiddled with as we please, but beings that clearly have thoughts and feelings in their own right. I feel vaguely insulted that you'd call this nostalgia. Also, it seems illogical to treat what is currently our-less-than-perfectly-understood life support system as some sort of mere accessory to our species. I think of it as a moral value; my species isn't the only one, I do not get to act like we are. We have a species-wide tendency to "improve" on things before we understand precisely how they work. This has long caused us problems. Ecosystems are remarkably complex things. Will we really understand how they work before we try to "improve" them? That would be a first for us. Too, my reservations about GM...I don't want to go into them yet again, after the thread from h3ll on said subject... http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=106836&highlight=foods It's not that I don't embrace science and technology...I do. I've just noticed that when our species gets a shiny new toy in terms of a new technology, we just go on and use it, rather than considering the secondary or tertiary effects...or even knowing what those are. We unleash whatever it is we have willy-nilly, and then let the chips fall where they may. So the idea of "streamlining," our ecosystems...making them more efficient from the human perspective (and presumably not that of the species living in said ecosystems)...fills me with foreboding. What will they F up now, how badly, and what will it do to the rest of us? I can't help thinking. You said "All parts are replaceable or improvable." But if that does not extend to our precious selves, you've made a value judgment. Are we all replaceable? Every one of us? just components as well?
The "next generation" (or two) can be relied upon for succumbing to temptations or traitorous activity of some degree, concerning the former one's values and inclinations -- though this was a much slower change in former times. I.e., if no clear institutional source steps up to the plate, "who decides" will be worked-out by the relentless process of replacement. And the results can even involve a return to the past (change need not always be a transition to the completely novel, though it usually seems to be otherwise in this era). Whatever advantages or disadvantages the less inhibited newcomers derive from their adventurous decisions will determine if the rest will jump on the same bandwagon, or become less suspicious of it. Few mimicking monkeys want to be left behind when such risk-taking turns out to be successful, beneficial, or entertaining for at least the short term. And once the new habits and addictions are installed, very difficult to eliminate even if the luster of a specific technological or social "progress" should later fall away. Imagine, for instance, that mobile phones truly were exposed as being significantly detrimental to health -- who but the most ardent dinosaurs of "still plowing by horse" would let the finding deter them? Countless opinions and studies were issued since the 1950s about television's broadcast and cable programming gobbling-up traditional family interactions and doling out its supposed various effects upon children -- yet it took even more distracting and captive-taking toys to come along to finally diminish interest in such.
So an example of where technology would be considered good means that the concerns in the OP are invalid?
Frankly this all strikes me as a generalized ad hominim. It is as if the concerns in the OP must be coming from some naive, childlike nostagia SO THEREFORE they are invalid. I, personally, do not think I fit the patterns described here, but even if I did, this is not a response to the OP, but more of a psychoanalsis of the hypothetical average person with those concerns.
