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Ishaan comments on Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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NancyLebovitz didn't imply the rugby player was showing signs of ideological transhumanism - only that they're doing something transhumanist. Transhumanists don't have the monopoly on self modification. It's the same sense that Christians refer to kind acts as Christian and bad acts as un-Christian.
Transhumanists would claim the first intentional use of fire and writing and all that as transhuman-ish things. (And yes, I would consider self decoration to be a transhumanish thing too. Step into the paleolithic - what's the very first thing you notice which is different about the humans? They have clothes and strings and beads and tattoos, which turn out to have pretty complex social functions. Adam and Eve and all that, it's literally the stuff of myth.)
So, using tools. Traditionally, tool-using is said to be be what distinguishes humans from apes. That makes it just human, not transhuman.
Yes, I bite that bullet: I think "you aught to use tools to do things better" counts as foundational principle of transhuman ideology. It's supposed to be fundamentally about being human.
Well, me might just be having a terminology difference.
My understanding of "transhuman" involves being more than just human. Picking up a tool, even a sophisticated tool, doesn't qualify. And "more" implies that you standard garden-variety human doesn't qualify either.
I'm not claiming there is an easily discernible bright line, but just as contact lenses don't make you a cyborg, a weirdly shaped metal tooth does not make you a transhuman.
But that's because everyone uses glasses, as a matter of course - it's the status quo now. The person who thought "well, and why should we have to walk around squinting all the time when we can just wear these weird contraption on our heads", at a time when people might look at you funny having wearing glass on your face, I think that's pretty transhuman. As is the guy who said "Let's take it further, and put the refractive material directly on our eyeball" back when people would have looked at you real funny if you suggested they put plastic in their eyes are you crazy that sounds so uncomfortable.
Now of course, it's easy to look at these things and say "meh".
Edit: If you look at the history of contact lenses, though, what actually happened is less people saying "let's improve" and more people saying "I wonder how the eye works" and doing weird experiments that probably seemed pointless at the time. Something of a case study against the "basic research isn't useful" argument, I think, not that there are many who espouse that here.