On the day it comes to you that living a longer, healthier life is something you'd like to do, that an extra year or ten of good health (or hell, why not more?) would be just peachy keen, think of the transhumanists - because you just became one. You saw a limit in the human condition, thought about what life would be like with that limit removed, and liked it.

Welcome to the party!

Transhumanism, make no mistake, is just a fancy name for common sense. Change for the better is good, right? Common sense. It's what we humans do in our scattered finer moments - we work to change things for the better. It's common sense to fetch in the harvest on wheels rather than on foot, and it's common sense to repair the biomolecular damage of Alzheimer's before the mind begins to rot. It's common sense to build perfect immune systems from nanomedical robots, and it's common sense to develop the technologies of regenerative medicine to their logical end.

It takes work, but what is work compared to a world of suffering? Choosing not to attain these goals makes about as much sense as standing out in the rain to spite yourself.

New technology cannot set slaves free, remove poverty brought of corruption, make the willfully blind see, or the unhappy bring themselves to good cheer of their own free will ... but it can remove the limits placed upon us by evolution, and it will one day give us all much, much more time in health and life to work on our other, very human issues. You can't rid the world of poverty when you're sick, decrepit and aged to death. The limits to our lives that we cannot negotiate away by talk and travel are the most confining, don't you agree?

Transhumanism, common sense with a slick name, is really simple humanism - which is also really no more than a name for common sense. It is only humanist to work to give people the choice to live without suffering, and without death. To live, for without life, there is nothing.

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Posted by Reason at March 16, 2007 10:34 PM | TrackBack (1)