Ethical Enhancement Technologies

The first thing that I've noticed about a strong majority of the h+ movement, is that those that are writing a lot on the movement are bald. You would think that baldness would be conquered before global risks. But, global risks are politically empowering while the issue of balding is not.

Taking the IEET Serious

Three of the main artcles over at the IEET website that is headed by Bostrom, deal with the Republicans as evil, a comic book series who is overwriting the Bible as stories that happen all at the same time, but with different storylines. And, the end of capitalism.

The news over at on that site make it difficult to see this as a serious movement.

Human 1

I guess is if my effort is to synthesize Christianity with posthumanism, then to have a full construction of a belief of what a human is  - apart from just my theological construction - then I need to define a human before I go into transhuman.

Wikipedia breaks humanism down into some good catagories to look at.

* Sociology
* Sociobiology
* Psychology
* Philosophy
* Theology

Douglas Rushkoff - Testament

...grad student Jake Stern leads on an underground band... who use any means necessary to combat the growing threat to freedom.  In the process, he discovers a modern threat that has roots in the ancient tale of the Bible.

IEET's posting.

Comic book aiming at Christianity.

"The idea that the Bible is not something that occurred in some real moment in history, but rather in all moments of time. It's happening now - as the underlying narrative of human experience. And, even more importantly, it's hackable. The stories don't have to end the same way for us that they did for these characters."-Douglas Rushkoff

I'm having a hard time taking Rushkoff seriously.  I love Frontline documentary work, but this is fiction aimed at presenting itself as something that might be true to some extent.  Time theories are usually very Sci-fi, and not real science.

Again Rushkoff: "It's no secret that Judaism was invented in large part to get people to stop sacrificing their first born sons to the god Moloch. (It was terrible for a nation preparing for war, because all those sons were being killed.) But it was also really upsetting to people. So the Israelites came up with some substitutes, like sacrificing animals, or doing circumcisions, that didn't require the murder of babies. "

The problem is that animal sacrifices and circumcision predate the Moloch episodes.  If you are migrating out of tents, and it becomes hard to create a shrine for Moloch in areas that are not under ancient Israeli occupation at the time.  Even if you start with the premise that the Old Testament is myth, you still would ble able to see a chronological progression of events, or myth development.  Rushkoff by this statement that he hasn't studied what he's talking about.

"In theory, the Nephillum were parents to a lot of the people in our best Bible stories. I mean, how did barren Sarah get pregnant so suddenly after the visit by those angelic "strangers." She made them her special buns - a temple prostitute action - and everything."

Douglas, THIS STATEMENT IS IDIOTIC - WTF!  And, your transliteration of "Nephillum" is wrong.


Douglas' work is fiction, and what comes out of his mind is fanciful.  Movies produced today are sometimes built upon older movies structures.  Douglas is doing the same with the Bible stories.  The stories are good and timeless, it is hard to mess up good and proven material.  Most of Douglas' statements shows a lack of Torah knowledge (I don't know exactly what he means by Torah - the five books of the Law? I don't know.).

Onpedia - Second Coming

The direction of Christian Transhumanism needs to be thinking in the area of human nature and technology, and the modification that emergent technologies show potential in. Any Post, Pre, or Mid-Tribulation theologies that are so prevalently tied with the Singularity needs to be avoided. Christian prophecy and transhumanistic thinking becomes too fantastical. At this stage in technological development, the focus needs to be on human nature.
Post-human and Christianity are not compatible. The idea of the Rapture, or the Second Coming, or the consummation of all history in the return of Christ to rule the world is related to becoming Adamic, not posthuman.

John Rogers Searle - The Material and Mental

"Seen from the perspective of the last fifty years, the philosophy of mind, as well as cognitive science and certain branches of psychology, present a very curious spectacle. The most striking feature is how much of mainstream philosophy of the mind of the past fifty years seems obviously false... in the philosophy of mind, obvious facts about the mental, such as that we all really do have subjective conscious mental states and that these are not eliminable in favor of anything else, are routinely denied by many , perhaps most, of the advanced thinkers in the subject." - Searle

HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

Consciousness remains an indefinable concept, the exact way the mind and body react to human’s sensations, feelings, and emotions. Humans cannot fully master the definition of this.




I hold to Creationism, not Evolution. The arch of human existence for the Creationist - I hold to the belief that the Earth and our universe is ancient, I can accept billion years concepts into my Creationism – goes from the “image of God” creation of man, then into a declined state of existence. For the Evolutionist, the human existence arch is one from a decreased existence level, then to a continual incline towards a highly modified monkey, that at some point achieved this high degree of consciousness making them a human.



With the Evolutionist model of the human existence, anything that can progress into a level of high consciousness on par with a human (I’m really hitting at AI here), what does so needs to be treated with the ethics endowed to a human.