Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:
The repudiation of reductionism in the sense I mean is not an embrace of supernaturalism but a simple reminder that one cannot derive ought from is, coupled with the reminder -- unfortunately, less widely affirmed but quite as crucial -- that oughts are nonetheless indispensable to human flourishing.
That life, intelligence, freedom are not supernatural but natural phenomena suggests that they are, indeed, susceptible, in principle, of natural analysis. But this is certainly no justification for treating our own conspicuously preliminary empirical understandings of life, intelligence, freedom -- or, better yet, essentially figurative formulations that scarcely even pretend to factuality (or consensus, whatever futurological protests to the contrary) except to their faithful -- as already adequate to these phenomena when they palpably are not adequate, just because it is not logically impossible that eventual understanding may become adequate.
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17 comments:
so what?
Giulio Prisco, ladies and gentlemen.
Thanks. Note that I don't disagree with what you say above. And I repeat my question: so what?
Don't thank me, I'm declaring you to be an idiot. And what kind of "question" is that supposed to be? I describe the salience in the post itself -- either you don't understand the post or you don't care about it and yet still somehow care enough to declare you don't care. Either way, I find your assurance that you "don't disagree" pretty odd, since I see little indication that you have arrived at the basic comprehension that should precede agreement or disagreement. But, you know, thanks.
You are saying that we don't understand things well enough yet, with which I don't disagree
You are also saying that we may understand them much better someday, with which I also don't disagree.
Great.
The operative word here is "may" while transhumanists always use "will" instead...
Let me just add that the first paragraph matters more than the second one anyway.
You sure that the first paragraph matters more than the second one anyway?
Say I am unhappy because I am sick and poor. If these are facts, denying them would be stupid and useless. But if I must stay sick and poor forever, I would not consider this life as worth living, and take the necessary measures to end it.
So, while acknowledging that I am sick and poor today, I hope to be healthy and rich one day. Hope is enough to get out of bed in the morning and try to do something to change things.
No I won't "say" that, I won't concede the idiotic assumption. Surely you know enough "healthy" and "rich" people to know that they are not necessarily happy and so that those who are "sick" and "poor" are not unhappy always only for those reasons -- which is not to deny the fact of their suffering, nor to accede to who knows what facile notions who have in your head when you deploy the words "sick" "healthy" "rich" "poor" and so on. And nothing I have ever said would lead a sane person to attribute a valorization of passivity or hopelessness to me, so who knows what you're going on about there at the end.
So, anyway, yes, I am quite sure that the first paragraph matters more than the first.
This will be utterly lost on you no doubt, but I defend the substance of freedom as practices of public judgment and testament and promising and forgiving in which humans make meaning unpredictably out the vicissitudes of their lives, practices that are all about the making of and coping with oughts, and I defend this substance of freedom against any prioritization of violence, duress, force, instrumentality (especially instrumentality misconstrued as a substitute for or "enhancement" of this freedom) all of which imperil it with their relentless is-es.
The reductionist wants to imagine that any protest against their reductionism can only arise out of an unjustifiable faith in the supernatural, but as I have said many times, I am entirely worldly in my concerns and yet also a pluralist in matters of reasonable belief and conduct.
The wants answered to by belief differ in their actual substance and proper warrants depending on whether they are instrumental, moral, aesthetic, ethical, or political.
The fault of the reductionist is not that they deny some supernatural realm but that they try to rewrite all modalities of reason in the image of the one they happen parochially to prefer and in a way that devastates dimensions of human intelligence and value without which few can flourish, while at once distorting even their preferred mode beyond sense, rendering it less capable of doing its own indispensable work in its proper precinct by stretching it to accommodate others to which it is profoundly unsuited.
The very familiar dichotomy of is from ought speaks to this, and so I framed my pluralist point through it, hoping that very familiarity would provide a way into what may me an alien viewpoint. No such luck, it seems.
No I won't "say" that, I won't concede the idiotic assumption.It is an assumption about me. You must concede it, because I say so. If I (not a generic person, but this person who is writing) am sick and poor, I am probably unhappy and want to do something about it. Period. I would also hazard an educated guess that I am not the only one.
Hiding behind noise again i see.
yer dumb
Giulio, perhaps engaging with the actual real world is more likely to result in increased happiness, health, and wealth. Even you would probably admit that five years from now few aspects of a transhumanist vision will be achieved. Will you have spent those years living a meaningful life in our imperfect but still magnificent world, or will they have been spent dreaming and arguing about apocalyptic visions? What seems like the right thing for a rational person to do?
Camus called hope "philosophical suicide."
I've always loved that about Camus.
If you had told me when I started graduate school in 1998 that existentialism and continental philosophy would someday provide me with powerful ways of re-thinking my very analytic work, I would've probably bet large sums of cash that you were insane. But I would've been very wrong.
bambi: perhaps engaging with the actual real world is more likely to result in increased happinessThis is very true. Don't forget the magic word though: AND. Believe me, I do engage in in our imperfect but still magnificent world. I may sound monochrome here, because I answer black with white.
'The operative word here is "may" while transhumanists always use "will" instead.'
I hardly ever use the word 'will', as it happens. But then, I am not a transhumanist (it just seems that way to people who are mistaken in their assumption that I am a human being).
You know, it is actually possible to follow the transhumanist ideal without expectation of any personal radical benefits. (Very modest benefits are more likely).
Damien Broderick once wrote, "let's not look at a guaranteed income as a 'natural right', like the supposed innate rights of freedom of speech and liberty. Rather, it is an inheritance, something owed to all the children of a society whose ancestors for generations have together built, and purchased through the work of their minds and hands, the resource base sustaining today's cornucopia".
That argument also works for the promises and perils associated with nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, narrow/general artificial intelligence. Those capabilities, if they can arise at all, will arise from the minds and works of generations, building on the knowledge and technology of the past, hopefully ensuring the next generation have a bit of a head-start, thereby taking them a step closer to the goals.
I know Giulio acts as if his generation is one of the 'children'; the generation that reaches these goals. But a transhumanist does not need to adopt such a belief. There is nothing wrong with believing you are part of the ancestral generation, helping to build the bridge without much hope of crossing it yourself.
Maybe I am wrong, but I feel the transhumanists' 'can do' attitude is more constructive than Dale's 'silly, silly, impossible, cannot be done, stop dreaming' attitude. His is a destructive, negative stance which, had it been adopted by our ancestors, would have ensured we remained in caves with no capacity to make tools and picking fleas off each other's backs.
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