I think that some of what we call transhumanism will be folded into healthcare.
My bet is that the baseline of what’s considered adequate health will go up, but there will also be a separate category for exploration of what’s possible.
It seems to me more like an alternative to medical procedures. I suppose that if we developed the ability to make new brains and load minds into them, then upload+download would come to be considered a medical procedure—but that seems rather unlikely ever to happen.
I think we need to abolish the concept of healthcare. Everything is healthcare, so it is a null term. There is nothing that has no health effects e.g. due to stress.
Everything is math, but that doesn’t mean that the word “biology” isn’t useful. Even if healthcare isn’t a perfect word or even a perfect concept, it helps us in everyday conversations and discussions about the way the world works and should work.
it helps us in everyday conversations and discussions about the way the world works and should work.
The question is whether that’s true or whether the word creates more confusion than it helps. In particular the context of health care is that it’s about making sick people normal again.
… and that is precisely my problem. We would need education and institutions from childhood about how to be positively healthy, both in body and mind, which includes things like how to be happy. Instead… there are hospitals that work a lot like car mechanic garages, fixing up sick people to be average, but do little to people who have average levels of health.
Now, in the recent decades this has been changing, there is more focus on actually being all-over healthy and not just not sick, but this is my point, that after a certain point it would be better to reinterpret the whole thing.
Having a baby (in Austria), we can see the change very positively that we are getting a form of combined package of infant healthcare, development care, education and parenting help. It is getting more interlinked, which is good and the goal. For example our child was a bit slow in learning motoric skills, so now every week a lady drops by and leaves some developmental toys. This is not really healthcare in the tradition sick → diagnosis → treatment → release sense, it is closer to physical education perhaps, but it kind of covers both. The point is, it is a proper holistic approach, they are not just trying to make a sick person average, they are trying to help parents grow a baby towards the best possible developmental outcomes.
And this is is how it should be, but it is not really the classic sickness oriented healthcare anymore. We should call it humancare or something like that.
While the old hospital resembles a car mechanic garage, moving cars from broken state to fixed state, this new humancare paradigm more like having a car center where you can get repairs, or you can get extras and upgrades, or you can get driving lessons, so an overall optimization of your car-owning experience. Does this make sense?
We would need education and institutions from childhood about how to be positively healthy, both in body and mind, which includes things like how to be happy.
I have reservations about postulating “happiness” as some kind of metaphysical goal for humans. “Happiness” seems to have come about as an evolutionary spandrel, since unhappy humans can breed and keep the species in business just fine.
The implied teleology in Buddhist “enlightenment” also bothers me. Why would humans have the capacity for this experience? Again, it sounds like another spandrel.
Of course it is an evolutionary spandrel, but we don’t necessarily need to choose our goals to have the same ones as those of the evolution machine.
But I think the important part is that there is a very fine line of unhappiness with which humans can still be effectively working on goals. Even a minor, unnoticed, undiagnosed, and generally invisible depression can easily make people significantly less motivated to work on anything. If you choose any goal, say, colonizing the galaxy, you probably need at the very least almost happy people to work effectively on it. You need the kind of people who can joke and share a laugh while working, and feel content after a days work. If you have people who are constantly in a fuck-everything Office Space type of mood, they will not really achieve much.
Describing the source of human values is not the same as answering if those values SHOULD be our values. You’ve just pushed the is ought problem to a different place.
Was your answer trying to reply to my original question? (Why should the evolutionary history of an experience effect our pursuance of it as a goal?) If so, can you clarify how it answers that.
I’m responding the statement about question about evolutionary history and is=/=ought
I’m trivialising the question and suggesting that ‘ought’ should be reduced to ‘is’. I hypothesize this has therapeutic effects, since it approximates acceptance and commitment, and established therapeutic process.
For example, we have an explanation of how love works, and you want to love in other kinds of ways, but I, for one, get satisfaction from satisficing my apriori biological goals.
See where I’m coming from?
edit 1: here’s a wiki article to help the ethical naturalist explaination
If nothing else, we want to distinguish things that (we expect) have positive health outcomes from things that (we expect) have negative health outcomes.
Having sex is generally considered to be associated with positive health outcomes. The person who’s having sex sorely because it’s a promising health care intervention is still doing everything wrong.
What we call “transhumanism” in 2015, people in a century or two will call “health care.”
I think that some of what we call transhumanism will be folded into healthcare.
My bet is that the baseline of what’s considered adequate health will go up, but there will also be a separate category for exploration of what’s possible.
Some of it, perhaps. E.g., mind uploading surely counts as “transhumanism” but I’d be surprised to see it ever classified under “health care”.
Mind uploading might qualify if it becomes, say, an emergency medical procedure.
It seems to me more like an alternative to medical procedures. I suppose that if we developed the ability to make new brains and load minds into them, then upload+download would come to be considered a medical procedure—but that seems rather unlikely ever to happen.
I think we need to abolish the concept of healthcare. Everything is healthcare, so it is a null term. There is nothing that has no health effects e.g. due to stress.
Everything is math, but that doesn’t mean that the word “biology” isn’t useful. Even if healthcare isn’t a perfect word or even a perfect concept, it helps us in everyday conversations and discussions about the way the world works and should work.
The question is whether that’s true or whether the word creates more confusion than it helps. In particular the context of health care is that it’s about making sick people normal again.
Preventing illness also falls under the umbrella of health care, at least where I live.
And even if it didn’t, it’s still clear what (most) people mean with the word even if the word doesn’t mean what you want it to mean.
“Preventive medicine” get’s you doctors who do a lot of mammograms and then operate people who don’t really need an operation.
If the word had no meaning there wouldn’t be much gained by abolishing it.
… and that is precisely my problem. We would need education and institutions from childhood about how to be positively healthy, both in body and mind, which includes things like how to be happy. Instead… there are hospitals that work a lot like car mechanic garages, fixing up sick people to be average, but do little to people who have average levels of health.
Now, in the recent decades this has been changing, there is more focus on actually being all-over healthy and not just not sick, but this is my point, that after a certain point it would be better to reinterpret the whole thing.
Having a baby (in Austria), we can see the change very positively that we are getting a form of combined package of infant healthcare, development care, education and parenting help. It is getting more interlinked, which is good and the goal. For example our child was a bit slow in learning motoric skills, so now every week a lady drops by and leaves some developmental toys. This is not really healthcare in the tradition sick → diagnosis → treatment → release sense, it is closer to physical education perhaps, but it kind of covers both. The point is, it is a proper holistic approach, they are not just trying to make a sick person average, they are trying to help parents grow a baby towards the best possible developmental outcomes.
And this is is how it should be, but it is not really the classic sickness oriented healthcare anymore. We should call it humancare or something like that.
While the old hospital resembles a car mechanic garage, moving cars from broken state to fixed state, this new humancare paradigm more like having a car center where you can get repairs, or you can get extras and upgrades, or you can get driving lessons, so an overall optimization of your car-owning experience. Does this make sense?
I have reservations about postulating “happiness” as some kind of metaphysical goal for humans. “Happiness” seems to have come about as an evolutionary spandrel, since unhappy humans can breed and keep the species in business just fine.
The implied teleology in Buddhist “enlightenment” also bothers me. Why would humans have the capacity for this experience? Again, it sounds like another spandrel.
Of course it is an evolutionary spandrel, but we don’t necessarily need to choose our goals to have the same ones as those of the evolution machine.
But I think the important part is that there is a very fine line of unhappiness with which humans can still be effectively working on goals. Even a minor, unnoticed, undiagnosed, and generally invisible depression can easily make people significantly less motivated to work on anything. If you choose any goal, say, colonizing the galaxy, you probably need at the very least almost happy people to work effectively on it. You need the kind of people who can joke and share a laugh while working, and feel content after a days work. If you have people who are constantly in a fuck-everything Office Space type of mood, they will not really achieve much.
Why should the evolutionary history of an experience effect our pursuance of it as a goal? Is != ought.
this was an unhelpful comment, removed and replaced by this comment
Describing the source of human values is not the same as answering if those values SHOULD be our values. You’ve just pushed the is ought problem to a different place.
Was your answer trying to reply to my original question? (Why should the evolutionary history of an experience effect our pursuance of it as a goal?) If so, can you clarify how it answers that.
I’m responding the statement about question about evolutionary history and is=/=ought
I’m trivialising the question and suggesting that ‘ought’ should be reduced to ‘is’. I hypothesize this has therapeutic effects, since it approximates acceptance and commitment, and established therapeutic process.
For example, we have an explanation of how love works, and you want to love in other kinds of ways, but I, for one, get satisfaction from satisficing my apriori biological goals.
See where I’m coming from?
edit 1: here’s a wiki article to help the ethical naturalist explaination
If nothing else, we want to distinguish things that (we expect) have positive health outcomes from things that (we expect) have negative health outcomes.
Having sex is generally considered to be associated with positive health outcomes. The person who’s having sex sorely because it’s a promising health care intervention is still doing everything wrong.
I don’t think we want to do that. It’s more rational to expect both positive and negative health outcomes from most strong interventions.