What objections can be raised against this argument? I’m looking both for good objections and objections that many people are likely to raise, even if they aren’t really any good.
I’m not sure if this is an objection many people are likely to raise, or a good one, but in any case, here are my initial thoughts:
Transhumanism is just a set of values, exactly like humanism is a set of values. The feasibility of transhumanism can be shown from a compiling a list of those values that are said to qualify someone as a transhumanist, and the observed existence of people with such values, whom we then slap a label on, and say: Here is a transhumanist!
Half an hour on google should probably suffice to persuade the sceptic that transhumanists do in fact exist, and therefore transhumanism is feasible. And so we’re done.
I realize that this is not what you mean when you refer to the feasibility of transhumanism. You want to make an argument for the possiblity of “actual transhumans”. Something along the lines of: “It is feasible that humans with quantitatively or qualitatively superior abilities, in some domain, relative to some baseline (such as the best, or the average performance of some collection of humans, perhaps all humans) can exist.” Which seems trivially true, for the reasons you mention.
Where are the boundaries of human design space? Who do we decide to put in the plain old human category? Who do we put in the transhuman category — and who is just another human with some novel bonus attribute?
If one goes for such a definition of a transhuman as the one I propose above, are world record holding athletes then weakly transhuman, since they go beyond the previously recorded bounds of human capability in strength, or speed, or endurance?
I’d say yes, but justifying that would require a longer reply. One question one would have to answer is: Who is a human? (The answers one would get to this question has likely changed quite a bit since the label “human” was first invented.)
If one allows the category of things that receives a “yes” in reply to the question “is this one a human?” to change at all, if one allows that category to expand or indeed to grow over time, perhaps by an arbitrary amount. (Which is excactly what seems, to me at least, to have happened, and seems to continue to be the case.) Then, perhaps, there will never be a transhuman. Only a growing category of things which one considers to be “human”. Including some humans that are happier, better, stronger and faster than any current or previously recorded human.
In order to say “this one is a transhuman” one needs to first decide upon some limits to what one will call “human”, and then decide, arbitrarily, that whoever goes beyond these limits, we will put into this new category, instead of continuing to relax the boundaries of humanity, so as to include the new cases, as is usual.
Transhumanism, abbreviated as H+ or h+, is an international intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
So what I mean by “the feasibility of transhumanism” is just the “possibility” half of that definition, setting aside the desirability.
Even granting all that, I suppose you can still quibble about semantics, but I ran through several possible labels for what I had in mind and that seemed the best choice.
I’m not sure if this is an objection many people are likely to raise, or a good one, but in any case, here are my initial thoughts:
Transhumanism is just a set of values, exactly like humanism is a set of values. The feasibility of transhumanism can be shown from a compiling a list of those values that are said to qualify someone as a transhumanist, and the observed existence of people with such values, whom we then slap a label on, and say: Here is a transhumanist!
Half an hour on google should probably suffice to persuade the sceptic that transhumanists do in fact exist, and therefore transhumanism is feasible. And so we’re done.
I realize that this is not what you mean when you refer to the feasibility of transhumanism. You want to make an argument for the possiblity of “actual transhumans”. Something along the lines of: “It is feasible that humans with quantitatively or qualitatively superior abilities, in some domain, relative to some baseline (such as the best, or the average performance of some collection of humans, perhaps all humans) can exist.” Which seems trivially true, for the reasons you mention.
Where are the boundaries of human design space? Who do we decide to put in the plain old human category? Who do we put in the transhuman category — and who is just another human with some novel bonus attribute?
If one goes for such a definition of a transhuman as the one I propose above, are world record holding athletes then weakly transhuman, since they go beyond the previously recorded bounds of human capability in strength, or speed, or endurance?
I’d say yes, but justifying that would require a longer reply. One question one would have to answer is: Who is a human? (The answers one would get to this question has likely changed quite a bit since the label “human” was first invented.)
If one allows the category of things that receives a “yes” in reply to the question “is this one a human?” to change at all, if one allows that category to expand or indeed to grow over time, perhaps by an arbitrary amount. (Which is excactly what seems, to me at least, to have happened, and seems to continue to be the case.) Then, perhaps, there will never be a transhuman. Only a growing category of things which one considers to be “human”. Including some humans that are happier, better, stronger and faster than any current or previously recorded human.
In order to say “this one is a transhuman” one needs to first decide upon some limits to what one will call “human”, and then decide, arbitrarily, that whoever goes beyond these limits, we will put into this new category, instead of continuing to relax the boundaries of humanity, so as to include the new cases, as is usual.
Wikipedia defines transhumanism as:
So what I mean by “the feasibility of transhumanism” is just the “possibility” half of that definition, setting aside the desirability.
Even granting all that, I suppose you can still quibble about semantics, but I ran through several possible labels for what I had in mind and that seemed the best choice.