Talk:Transhumanism

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 January 2021 and 16 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Paul Gambone.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 11:39, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Content/citation dump from cleaned debate section

Giuseppe Vattino, a supporter of transhumanism elected as a member of Parliament in Italy, believes that, although transhumanism may make us less human, there are both positive and negative consequences. He believes that transhumanism will make people “less subject to the whims of nature, such as illness or climate extremes”.

Fukuyama points out that, while the concept of being able to do away with negative emotions is appealing in theory, if we did not have the emotion of aggression then "we wouldn’t be able to defend ourselves".

Struck by a passage from Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski's anarcho-primitivist manifesto (quoted in Kurzweil's 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines), computer scientist Bill Joy became a notable critic of emerging technologies. Joy's warning was seized upon by appropriate technology organizations such as the ETC Group. Related notions were also voiced by self-described neo-luddite Kalle Lasn, a culture jammer who co-authored a 2001 spoof of Donna Haraway's 1985 Cyborg Manifesto as a critique of the techno-utopianism he interpreted it as promoting. Lasn argues that high technology development should be completely relinquished since it inevitably serves corporate interests with devastating consequences on society and the environment. (looks to have been improperly classified as existential risk)

Some also argue that strong advocacy of a transhumanist approach to improving the human condition might divert attention and resources from social solutions. Sometimes, however, there are strong disagreements about the very principles involved, with divergent views on humanity, human nature and the morality of transhumanist aspirations.

Transhumanists, therefore, argue that parents have a moral responsibility called procreative beneficence to make use of these methods, if and when they are shown to be reasonably safe and effective, to have the healthiest children possible. They add that this responsibility is a moral judgment best left to individual conscience, rather than imposed by law, in all but extreme cases. In this context, the emphasis on freedom of choice is called procreative liberty.

Artist and filmmaker Tim Holmes sees a similar but subtler danger in the devaluation of the body by the progress of civilization itself, which he says encourages mechanical values of expediency, rather than body values of quality of life, leading us to ever more mechanical, anti-flesh solutions. In his TEDx talk "The Erotic Crisis", he warns against abandoning the hidden wisdom of the flesh, which cannot be digitally comprehended.

References

Add this to the series on dystopia as well

One man's utopia is another's dystopia

Transhumanist Ridicule

Quite often Transhumanists are Included in Discourse as a Niche Political Ideology. They are teased for "Just wanting robot arms. This is a Humourous definition of Transhumanist and is probably why you came to this article for a clarification of this Loose definition. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doggo 52 (talk • contribs) 04:19, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

I see someone here watches Jreg. 108.20.174.117 (talk) 21:34, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Singularity

The article states without source that

The concept of the technological singularity, or the ultra-rapid advent of superhuman intelligence, was first proposed by the British cryptologist I. J. Good in 1965

Here is a source that this idea was not new even a year before, Stanislaw Lem, translation by Joanna Zylinska:

We can imagine it in a form envisaged by many cyberneticists today—that of building ever greater “intelligence amplifiers” (which would not just become scientists’ “allies” but which, thanks to their “intelectronic” supremacy over the human brain, would quickly leave scientists behind)

--Rainald62 (talk) 16:30, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

make page: Digiperson (species)

An individual which manifests personhood and isn't merely a transhuman (half digital), but s/he/it has a digibrain (digital brain) which has the equivalent of the limbic system to exhibit emotion and sentience (thus not merely exhibiting a convincing Turing personhood to pass the test, but [the digiperson is] a truly experiencing being). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:587:411E:7C76:713D:79BE:56ED:AB1 (talk) 10:53, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

This is very much WP:SYNTHESIS and WP:FRINGE territory, but you can try your luck here: WP:AfC. Symmachus Auxiliarus (talk) 10:56, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

See Also "Body Hacking" link not working

May someone please advise why the link to Body Hacking which is from this Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_hacking isn't working in the See also section please? If someone could teach me what the issue was I will learn for the future thanks. SumeetJi (talk) 13:03, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Olaf Stapledon

Last and First Men (and Starmaker, for that matter), while fictitious and androcentric, may be a relevant work to mention here, as the entirety of it is concerned with transhumanism and posthumanism (albeit from the perspective of a man in the 1930s). It also is a somewhat less disturbing and semi-psychopathic work that many others in the field, owing partially to it's (unusal for the genre) disregard for the pursuit of personal immortality.