You’re saying that technology—tinkering with human biology and human psychology—can supply a technical fix for problems with sex and death. But the imperfection and dysfunction of social and cultural solutions will also extend to technological solutions. Some methods of life extension will be lethal. Some hopes will be deluded. Some scientific analyses of psychology will be wrong, but they will supply the basis of a subculture or a technological intervention anyway.
Rather than discuss it on a meta level first—whatever that means—it would be better if you supplied one or two concrete examples of what you have in mind.
Rather than discuss it on a meta level first—whatever that means
It means that we should not just start discussing whether e.g. polyamory is good, but instead discuss how we, in practice, think and make value judgments about such things—without dwelling too much on concrete examples.
You’re saying that technology—tinkering with human biology and human psychology—can supply a technical fix for problems with sex and death.
I hope that it will, but it might well not, or the cure might be as bad as the disease. That’s an useful thought in our current discussions because it puts things in perspective and by contrast illuminates the hard-wired, “inevitable” aspects of baseline humanity, that’s what I mean.
But the imperfection and dysfunction of social and cultural solutions will also extend to technological solutions.
Absolutely, but my main point is not that we should wait for 50 years/100 years/the Singularity and it’ll all be great, but that we should imagine a “good” condition of people and society that’s unachievable by “ordinary” means (e.g. hacking ourselves to negate men’s attraction to body shape and women’s attraction to tribal chieftains) and use it as an example of a desirable outcome when we’re talking policy—because this should allow us to notice the imperfection of all those “ordinary” means we’re considering. We should allow ourselves a ray of hope to notice the darkness that we’re in.
You’re saying that technology—tinkering with human biology and human psychology—can supply a technical fix for problems with sex and death. But the imperfection and dysfunction of social and cultural solutions will also extend to technological solutions. Some methods of life extension will be lethal. Some hopes will be deluded. Some scientific analyses of psychology will be wrong, but they will supply the basis of a subculture or a technological intervention anyway.
Rather than discuss it on a meta level first—whatever that means—it would be better if you supplied one or two concrete examples of what you have in mind.
It means that we should not just start discussing whether e.g. polyamory is good, but instead discuss how we, in practice, think and make value judgments about such things—without dwelling too much on concrete examples.
I hope that it will, but it might well not, or the cure might be as bad as the disease. That’s an useful thought in our current discussions because it puts things in perspective and by contrast illuminates the hard-wired, “inevitable” aspects of baseline humanity, that’s what I mean.
Absolutely, but my main point is not that we should wait for 50 years/100 years/the Singularity and it’ll all be great, but that we should imagine a “good” condition of people and society that’s unachievable by “ordinary” means (e.g. hacking ourselves to negate men’s attraction to body shape and women’s attraction to tribal chieftains) and use it as an example of a desirable outcome when we’re talking policy—because this should allow us to notice the imperfection of all those “ordinary” means we’re considering. We should allow ourselves a ray of hope to notice the darkness that we’re in.