If mating is partly about choosing half the genome of your children, do your potential partners in parenting have an obligation to disclose that they have had so much “work” done on their face and body that they now look nothing like their original phenotype? Will cosmetics and plastic surgery blunt the selection of more beautiful women via sexual selection?
Transhumanism’s relationship with postmodern philosophy and critical theory is a strange one. For example, Nick Bostrom’s influential “A History of Transhumanist Thought” spans centuries, covering the gamut from Utnapishtim to the President’s Council on Bioethics, but makes little mention of those who radically challenge the core Enlightenment narrative upon which he builds his history. Figures like Nietzsche, Marx, and Donna Haraway do all receive a nod in Bostrom’s essay, including Haraway’s cyberfeminist motto, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” but their ideas go unanalyzed. Of course, the context for these thinkers is often ignored and their works simply mined for epigraphs and potent, argument-punctuating lines such as Haraway’s.
Athena Andreadis, Associate Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, author of To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek, and IEET Fellow, talks about human-hybrids, werewolves, settling on other planets, and human evolution both past and future in this interview posted at Crossed Genres.
I have watched Jon & Kate plus 8 since the beginning. For those of you who don’t know this is a show about a mother and father who had a set of twins and then a set of sextuplets, totaling eight children. For those of who are wondering why I am doing a two-part musing of this show and don’t like reality TV I say give it a chance, again. There is a lot to see in reality TV other than people making a debacle of their lives and I have watched my fair share of it.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Despite the recent outcome on Proposition 8 in California, I believe that the American conscience has awakened concerning the right of gay people to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in this country. Yes, there remain groups of people who would deny gays their human rights out of fear, blind adherence to religious dogma, or a simple hatred of what they don’t understand, but those groups are shrinking.
[Warning: Contains spoilers for the Battlestar Galactica episode Deadlock ] How would the human relationships we form evolve if instead of decades we had thousands of years to nurture them? Would we form deeper connections, strengthened by shared experiences we cannot yet imagine? Would we find find new ways of expressing love for one another, linked mind-to-mind with the sharing of emotions? Perhaps we would be able to work out the conflicts in relationships, and improve ourselves not only on the individual level but as a synergistic community. On the other hand, we could seek to preserve our relationships in their present form with all their eccentricities and flaws, much as Ellen and the Final Five Cylons seem to have done.
Between the approach of Valentine’s Day and recent discussions in a forum where a lot of stale sociobiological doctrines about women were put forward, I thought I’d put this up… planting a flag, as it were.
The IEET and the editors of the Journal of Evolution and Technology (JET) are pleased to announce the publication of two special issues of JET, one brought together by Sky Marsen with the intention of publishing a book on transhumanism, and the other a collection of papers from the IEET’s May 2006 Human Enhancement Technology and Human Rights conference at Stanford University. Together they represent the wide array of issues at play in the debate over human enhancement and our transhuman future, from the daily lived experience of pushing to maximize one’s potential, to the legal, political and philosophical arguments we will need to secure universal access to safe enhancement technologies. Enjoy!
Over at the Bad Idea Blog, “Bad” notes that advocates of same-sex marriage often simply dismiss slippery slope arguments such as the claim that judicial rulings in favour of same-sex marriage would lead to the legal recognition of polygamy.
An IEET White Paper by By George Dvorsky and James Hughes.
Abstract: Postgenderism is an extrapolation of ways that technology is eroding the biological, psychological and social role of gender, and an argument for why the erosion of binary gender will be liberatory. Postgenderists argue that gender is an arbitrary and unnecessary limitation on human potential, and foresee the elimination of involuntary biological and psychological gendering in the human species through the application of neurotechnology, biotechnology and reproductive technologies. Postgenderists contend that dyadic gender roles and sexual dimorphisms are generally to the detriment of individuals and society. Assisted reproduction will make it possible for individuals of any sex to reproduce in any combinations they choose, with or without “mothers” and “fathers,” and artificial wombs will make biological wombs unnecessary for reproduction. Greater biological fluidity and psychological androgyny will allow future persons to explore both masculine and feminine aspects of personality. Postgenderists do not call for the end of all gender traits, or universal androgyny, but rather that those traits become a matter of choice. Bodies and personalities in our postgender future will no longer be constrained and circumscribed by gendered traits, but enriched by their use in the palette of diverse self-expression.
Wonderful ways of being may be located in the “posthuman realm”, but we can’t reach them. If we enhance ourselves using technology, however, we can go out there and realize these values. This paper sketches a transhumanist axiology.
Drawing upon both the insights of Buddhism and the Western liberal tradition, this essay criticizes established Buddhism’s restrictions on the involvement of women and develops a Buddhist feminist agenda appropriate to our own age and culture.
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