Ar ethere any extropians posting here? As one I am interested in seeing the crossover between extropianism and Libertarianism
Judging from wikipedia, I am.
Live indefinitely? Stop evolution? No thank you, whichever species achieves unlimited biological life dooms itself. I want none of that!
Screw the species, I want to be a god!
Merlin So you live as a slave to your species? Interesting!
Do you believe in post-scarcity?
Isn’t that just trans humanism? Either way I don’t really care one way or the other, I’ll do as compeled as the situations come to me. But I do find it funny when people take science and technology narratives and dramas to fantastic heights.
I consider myself a transhumanist, yes.
Do you consider it synonymous with this extropian thing; or is there a difference in catagory or a “all transhumanists are extropians, but only some extropians are transhumanists” type of thing?
The Wikipedia article states it is a derivitive, but other than that is pretty vacant for a sufficient answer.
And I’ll be damned, they have a manifesto. People are funny sometimes.
From my dip in the libertarian subculture, extropianism came and went in the 90s, and it was essentially a systematic exposition of libertarian transhumanism. Transhumanism, both as a label and as a philosophy, still thrives, but its not directly linked to libertarianism.
I’m certainly a slave to my children, gentlemen!
Yeah the transhumanism being a thriving concept I knew about, and think it is a growing even.
I suppose I could see the link with libertarianism. Than again, I suppose any political theory can and have some specific form of transhumanism. So I guess something like the Zeitgeist would be a commie exposition of transhumanism, etc, etc. If that’s the case that clears things up.
EDIT
merlin : I suppose thats the difference. I have no children and don’t intend to have any . I intend to live for as long as possible and I will be frozen on my death in the hope of resurection in the future.
of oucrse only a few hundred people will do this so the vast majoprity of people will just die.
As for evoloution we are devolving as a people since we encourage the useless,criminal and feckless to breed and take advantage of welfare systems whilst the most able people generally have teh least children.
It’s official. There is a link between libertarianism and utter kooks.
Some evolution is infinitely better than no evolution. The more feckless among the feckless we’re encouraging will gut each-other in bar fights over ladies of dubious morals while the bets of them will reach procreation age. Even among the ‘lower’ strata of society there’s much valour.
So I cannot agree that an almost halted evolution would be only slightly worse than our current subsidization of high time preferences.
Sounds more like eugenics.
Some evolution is infinitely better than no evolution. The more feckless among the feckless we’re encouraging will gut each-other in bar fights over ladies of dubious morals while the bets of them will reach procreation age. Even among the ‘lower’ strata of society there’s much valour.
I dont see why some eveolution is better than no evolution if it leads to more underclass thugs. In teh underclass the More thuggish have chidlren with teh stupidist women starting in tehir mid teens and continuing pumping out their welfare funded progeny at a constant rate. They don’t kill each other at any rate necessary ( we only have about murders in a year in the UK) so we just have more and more children born to stupid uneducated mothers by thuggish fathers.Valour? is that the new term for being a violent thug? Lets get rid of the welfare payments and suddenly that abortion clinic is going to be bussy again. I’m quite happy to financially contribute to free abortions for the underclass.Hell I SUpport those people who offers cash for addicts to be sterilised. Eugenics? Eugenics is wrong when it is compulsory I see no problem with eugenics by incentive.
Still not quite sure I understand the difference between transhumanism and extropianism. Is there a practical difference or is it just about adherents?
Darn it. You beat me to it. Sounds to me like AaronBurr is advocating such an ideology.
Anyway, not quite sure I subscribe to this theory. On one hand, man never thought he’d soar through the air until the Wright Brothers did the “impossible”. On the other hand, the second law of Thermodynamics seems to conflict with the theory. I’d be interested in reading more into it though, but unless we begin to colonize other planets, I don’t see the practicality of its application. I’ll do some more research on it in the days to come.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind living longer, but to immortal heights? No thank you.
Its rather funny because I’m re-reading Hayek’s The fatal conceit these days, and I agree that we should never presuppose we know better than evolution, be it biological, linguistical, cultural, social, etc. Thus I’d never pretend I can judge whether we can artificially do better than evolution, which could be interpret as what you’re saying.
Now I of course agree with both your statements, that welfare must go and that voluntary eugenics (which is known as ‘dating’ in some circles) is perfectly right. I just don’t feel qualified to say that, assuming the current welfare apparatus is going to stay, I’d rather ‘pause’ evolution by having anyone live forever than let it go on, regardless of the less-than-satisfactory framework.
But there might be a consensus here: if immortality where at hand now, I’m sure that it would be mostly those with higher time preferences who’d jump in without a second though. So, perhaps achieving biological immortality could actually speed up evolution. But who knows such things.