Rationality Quotes: June 2011

Oscar_Cunningham

Y'all know the rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
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Y'all know the rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

The source is Bostrom's 2004 paper A history of transhumanist thought, page 4. I'll paraphrase the difference he lists:

Transhumanism uses tech to change bodies and minds, Nietzsche uses old pathways.

Yeah, that's his mistake. He points at the right goal, but can't say how to get there. As I said, no real work.

Transhumanism wants to boost everyone, Nietzsche only a select few.

I think that's unfair to Freddy. His Zarathustra puppet goes around telling everyone to do it, but they aren't interested. Obviously he was envisioning individual progress as opposed to inventing tech then distributing it to Muggles, so he thinks that if few people want to put in the effort then few people will get boosted.

Transhumanism likes individual liberties.

I don't understand what Bostrom means by that. AFAICT, Fred is huge on individual liberties.

Transhumanism comes from the Enlightenment.

I fail to see the relevance.

What I got from reading Nietzsche (before I got any exposure to transhumanism) was an extremely pretty way of saying "Striving to improve yourself a lot is awesome". No argument why, no proposed methods, some very sucky assumptions about what it'd be like. Just a cheer, and an invitation for people who share this goal to band together and work on it. Which is what transhumanists have done.

I didn't see much transhumanism in Nietzsche, I just like reading him because he has a lot of interesting ideas while living in a quite distant intellectual context.

1Marius15y

Nietzsche can't know what the Superman will look like - nobody can. But he provides a great deal of assistance: he is extremely insightful about what people are doing today (well, late 1800s, but still applicable), how that tricks us into behaving and believing in certain ways, and what that means. But he wrote these insights as poetry. If you wanted an argument spelled out logically or a methodology of scientific inquiry, you picked the wrong philosopher.

4Will_Sawin15y

Nietzsche seems to always see the project of self-improvement in opposition to the project of building a functional society out of multiple people who don't kill each other, and the second one always seemed more important to me. It's hard for me to understand what he's saying because he doesn't engage (much? at all?) with Actually True Morality, that is the utilitarian/"group is just a sum of individuals" paradigm. The question of whether it's OK for the strong to bully the weak almost doesn't seem to interest him. One man is not a whole lot better than one ape, but a group of men is infinitely superior to a group of apes. ETA: I often like to think of FAI as not the ultimate transhuman, but the ultimate institution/legal system/moral code.