Transhumanism dives head first into all of those fields while at the same time they’re all ruled independently. There are legal substances which are banned from specific disciplines (think hair), some you can take to limited amounts (alcohol), tobacco will prevent you from taking parts in studies or getting full insurance benefits, etc.

Thing is, substance ingestion will usually have a temporary effect, whereas implanting a chip or trading your left eye for a 30 MiPixel camera are usually permanent changes.

Like you, it’s something I expected to deal with more in 20 years, probably from the other side of the fence though. Lately, I’ve been giving that more thought. It’s part of my 300 year plan after all :)

1) I don’t want to get involved in *every* single wiki-battle I find.

2) The bias is not explicit. And I’m not an expert in this field. I don’t even know how to start editing that page. Especially because the term which is being defined might be a negative one dreamed up by it’s critics.

I’m not saying i don’t like wikipedia. but it just shows me that we need other complimentary resources.

and :-p again for your reckless use of sarcasm. ;-)

Just take a look through that whole grouping of transhumanism + human enhancment content. There are 20 or so entries all interconnected and they all advance the same agenda. even the “critical” ones.

Clicking “edit” and chaning a line here and a line there is not really the solution. and it’s simplistic to say that it is. the larger problem is who uses and who creates wikipedia and what are there values.

I say it’s my one best first stop for information on the net.

it’s also seriously flawed, it’s seriously messy, it’s filled with acrimonious pedantic and bizarre battles. trust me. but it’s a good source of info. and it’s free, which i like.

but no i don’t think it’s the true way. it’s just a good tool amd seems to do what I need it to do most of the time. and when it doesn’t & I have the ability to make it a bit better, I try to.

“There is a time to think, and there is a time for action. And this is definately not a time to think!”

As for ‘morphological freedom’, I must say that I stand strongly in the corner of those who feel that the control of their body is theirs and theirs alone. In some cases, that will mean radical modifications, but we are not able to decide on others’ behalf what makes them happy.

If you are finding yourself an opponent of Transhumanism, assess (perhaps publicly, in a blog post) where you draw the line. I can’t replace my arm with a cyborg arm (as an elective procedure), say, but can I put plugs in my ears? How about enhancing or replacing my hearing mechanisms with higher quality ones? That last one is a trick question. :)

but right now - making new changes to fetuses for the hell of it (cosmetic reasons) would be over the line. I know that it’s a tricky question re: abortion rights, but I think this stuff is really tricky.

for the person - i’ve met people with rfid tags. that’s fine if that’s your thing. i don’t care if people self-amputate or commit suicide. but what about cloning yourself to have spare parts? I think that’s also over the line - at least for right now.

my point is this stuff should be a discussion.

i’m just wondering, not trying to hold you to something. A discussion would help me figure out what I think.

I have to say that while I do not give this a huge amount of thought in my every day life and had not even heard of the appellation “transhumanism” until I read this entry, I am slightly conflicted about the whole thing (owing both to being a woman and having a disability and therefore having had a lot of people besides myself trying to decide what to do with me and my body and also being someone who in general thinks “well, que sera sera”).

But in essence, based on who and where I am now, I believe that one’s right to decide over one’s body is sacred *unless* it can be absolutely proven that one’s mind is no longer able to decide and that said decisions put one at grave risk (and still, that is tricky because what guidelines are we using to ascertain whether one is no longer able to decide ? ; these things have been absolutely known to evolve with time and, in most cases, that has been a good thing).

And I believe that one’s right to decide over someone else’s body (whether a foetus or a child or an adult) is conditional to having their best interest in mind, being in a knowledgeable and ethical position to do so and having an efficient, objective and humane system to monitor those decisions. Demanding I am !

Still, personally I am not surprised that this stuff is coming up so soon. After all, what is plastic surgery (which has been around for what seems like almost forever), if not the possibility and the right (as long as one can pay, of course) “to modify oneself according to one’s desires” ? What is abortion based on the known fact that the future human being will be flawed somehow if not the conscious act of weeding out imperfection ? What is medical research into any number of physically limiting but non-threatening conditions if not an attempt to reproduce or regain an ideal… according to whoever ?

And as for wikipedia, funny you should talk about all this because over at French wikipedia, we had a big tussle a while ago over the objectivity of the “accessibility” topic. It was quite a saga, lots of drama. Still, wikipedia is a great resource but like others have said, cross-checking is always a good idea (as with most things in life ;)

i don’t want plastic surgery to be illegal, but I do want to keep some discouragment towards some types of cosmetic surgery. that’s closer to my view on modification for the point of “transcending” human. it’s okay if it’s marginalized but some people do it, but if it becomes encouraged and mainstream, then I would be worried.

so I don’t care if people cut their tongues in two, but if suddenly 1/2 of people are self-amputating to have cyborg limbs, i would be concerned. and there’s ways to fight against that without wanting to make it illegal.

I wouldn’t worry too much about this transhumanism stuff. Take a moment to think how a cellphone changed your life. Do you still take appointments, or do you find yourself settling meetings at a much shorter interval with other that have cellphones, for instance?

Hey, I’m suddenly reminded of a song by King Missile, Detachable something :)

I don’t think we’re the same. civilization / technology has brought a much larger possibility of living far away from my extended family my sister lives in seattle and none of my extended family lives in montreal because of stuff like cars, airplanes and long-distance communications), a society that medicates individuals instead of addressing societal problems (i’ve been medicated to fit into the school system), etc.

i’m not worried because of the “ohmigod, someone’s going to make a nano-gene-smthng-bomb in their washroom”. That’s scary too, but i’ll let other people worry about that. I’m not thinking about the technology at all. I’m worried about how people relate to themselves and too others. And technology is important, because it currently has such a central role in our minds. We talk about technology the same way we used to talk about religion - most explicitly with stuff like Transhumanism.

Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy

http://www.fortda.org/fall_00/socialconstruct.html

good article

“book that nevertheless makes a few intriguing points. Cushman deftly illustrates how different societies customize their definitions of mental illness according to their own agendas. In the established culture of 19th century Europe, people suffered from hysteria, seen as the incomplete control of dangerous, antisocial impulses. In young America, a country striving to settle a continent, they contracted the opposite: debilitating neurasthenia. “The absence of initiative, the inability to work,” Cushman observes, “was considered sickness.”"

our relationships with ourselves can change. a lot. i don’t believe that we enact transhistorical selves

are eating disorders similar across all countries? rates of child sexual assault? depression / suicide? aspergers?

it’s unfortunate that I know so little about this stuff.

just found a quote I like from the same book:

“Once again, we are treated to a discussion of the dislocating effects of urbanization, industrialization and secularization; and the moral conflicts engendered by the Indian wars, slavery and the Civil War. Mr. Cushman tells us how the idea of character came to be replaced by personality, how heroes gave way to celebrities, how manual labor was increasingly supplanted by sales. As the country grew more and more secular, he says, as entrepreneurial zeal increased, the search for transcendence was removed from the communal realm and relocated within the individual; a sense of fulfillment became an end in itself instead of a byproduct of communal participation.”

There is a whole connection between technology and transcendance that gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I think that at the core, bipeds are bipeds and human nature has not changed all that much over time (and I think this even after having read that extremely long article you referred to with only one cup of coffee to sustain me ;) In that sense, I agree that civilisation has not seen any drastic evolution of what being human means and how we think and feel. We are still struggling with basically the same existential questions but now we have more fancy and important-sounding labels to choose from.

However, I think that technology in the broadest sense has repeatedly had a profound impact on how we live and how we deal with the world around us. It is much more than just clothes and watches and contact lenses. One easy and very scary example is genetic engineering that is totally here now and, despite certain kinks that we have yet to work out but that I have no doubt we eventually will, there is already too much we can do in this area without having really had the time or the opportunity to discuss and decide how we want to deal with that and where we want to draw the line. The opportunity has mostly been taken out of our reach by big thinkers and prophets of the impending apocalypse. I think that religion has been the greatest force of resistance but I think that it has not really done it rationally.

I also think that because bipeds are bipeds, and I admit that I do not hold much faith in humans being very reasonable most of the time, we can not always count on people doing the right thing and that discouragement will be enough. If something is deemed inappropriate or wrong by society (and I will not get into what and how and why without more thought and more coffee), in a lot of cases, making it illegal will be necessary because if people want it bad enough, no amount of discouragement is really going to change that (think pedophilia) and legal means will sometimes fail anyway but at this juncture, it is the strongest thing we have.

That being said, I am not too worried about half the planet self-amputating to achieve borg perfection for a good while still. Aside from the fact that it would be quite painful and irreversible (not to mention that medicine still has a lot of stuff to work out before that can be a reality), I doubt it really represents an ideal for the majority. I could be wrong but I doubt we will see this in our life time or if so, very far down the road and then we will probably be like our grand-parents were when CDs, cell-phones and microwave ovens came along, a little off to the side, shaking our heads in disbelief and wonderment, asking ourselves how we got from there to here but all the while somewhat intrigued by the possibilities.

as for fetuses, i am highly dubious of stating any opinion as though it is a well researched one - mine isn’t at all. all i know is that it feels wrong to force someone to potentially wreck a woman’s life in order to protect the rights of something that doesn’t have free will (on a biological level, a vegetable of sorts) and that, on societal levels, forcing children to be born that their parents don’t necessarily want to deal with has a tendency to cause social problems (rising crime, etc.) - or at least, it has been proposed that this is the case. but this is so much of a longer conversation than can be written up on a weblog comment.

What i was asking was a bit more involved. I don’t know if I support a woman’s right (or a parent’s right) to do gene modification for cosmetic purposes. or what about terminating babies of the wrong sex (like what you hear about happening in china)?

I know it get’s complicated, and that there are very serious reason’s not to fuck with a woman’s right over her body, but you can get into some pretty weird situations.

“as such, i must say that i accept literally anything that anyone does with their own body.”

i wonder if you would have any reservations and where those reservations would spring from. This whole subject is discussion that is really important. I’m not interested in hearing people’s “final conclusion” about anything - i’m more interested in hearing their ambiguities, concerns, hopes, feeling for the intersections of new tech + humanity.

Better addressed in person at laika, i guess.

yuck.

My point is, context matters a lot, and that’s why we have various jurisdictions.