Is transhumanism compatible with animal and civil rights? Transhumanism here as the modification of the essentially human to improve its function, as opposed to posthumanism which is the erasure of the essentially human through technology.
As I see it, essential "humanity" has always been used to justify oppression does to those undeserving of it. Slavery is the obvious one, meat industry a more contentious example. Not gonna waffle one.
>thoughts
>abuse
>etc
quite drunk so just replace all the words which don't make sense with ones that do, you know what I mean
>>849493
t. PETA member
It depends on robust heuristics to decide in fuzzy cases.
As long as you define principles to redrive rights, you can apply these principals to "discover" the rights of new transhuman agents.
The trouble is parse out sociopaths who love to muddy the waters by arguing against human rights.
>>849504
nah PETA are mad idiots, was a bit reticent about the animal rights example desu so it's not a hill I'm gonna die on, I do think humanist essentialism (I think that works) needs to be ditched for a useful posthuman future though.
>>849519
what the fuck how did the word "desu" get in there ignroe that
>>849517
I read Bicentennial Man by Asimov recently and it got me thinking, I'm basically a physicalist so I'm happy that sentience and a sense of self is sufficient for humanity although that does leave the slightly sticky issue of newborns not being "human" til they're like a year old
>>849493
Why would it not be? How are animal/civil rights harmed by me taking nootropics?
>>849576
ok yeah so I could have been clearer, it's a bit finicky and technical but it's what I've been reading lately, essentially: transhumanism assumes that there is an essential human, who can be modified. The concept of an "essential human" is antiquated and the source of all sorts of bad shit. It's that we need to move past as much as our failing fleshy bodies.
The alternative (critical posthumanism) still buys into the technological utopianism by and large by just with "human" being radically redefined.
I don't know exactly what you are getting at so I'll just share some potentially relevant thoughts of mine.
In the distant future as AIs and cybernetics diverge the mental abilities of individuals, with human intellect varying widely and AIs ranging from calculators to demigods, the rights of individuals will similarly diverge. An AI demigod with a job of processing cultural forecast of society over the next century may attain more rights than a baseline human is allowed, like there might be laws restricting the detention of such AIs for the same reason it is okay to lock a dog up in a kennel all day but not a human child. The rights of animals will increase because the gradient of the rights of individuals will force us to recognize that all animals deserve a certain degree of rights, or at least all domesticated animals do since they are as much a part of the machine that is civilization as the rest of us. They won't have the rights of humans, but they will have more than they do now.
>>849777
Right, so the question here is the manner by which humanity diverges, because if only some people become advanced, who are they? And what reason do you have to think that this future doesn't have the same structural problems of today? I guess what I'm saying is you're assuming that we've advanced morally and politically as well as technologically and that rights will be ascribed in a relatively fair manner.
Isn't there a danger that only the rich attain this higher transhuman status? And correspondingly that they behave to maintain their position?
>>849596
Bleh. I'm inclined to ignore all "what is a human" questions as irrelevant semantic discussions. As I see it, there are two ways civil rights and transhumanism could collide:
>positive
At the heart of transhumanism is the concept that the limits we experience are not absolute, and can and should be pushed aside. As such, you could argue that civil rights and social transhumanism are part of the same movement. For example, if a transhumanist wants to live forever, isn't that the logical extension to supporting a human's right to life? The only difference is that you're pushing against biological constraints, not social ones.
>negative
Civil rights strive for equality. Transhumanism creates superiority, and thus deepens inequality. The two are completely opposed. Not to mention that gene tweaking will probably be a big part of the transhumanism business, and there's no concept more toxic to civil rights than 'genetic superiority'.
>>849926
I'm not sure about logical extension, we mustn't remove self interest from transhumanism. We already have racial and gendered societal divides and the benefits transhumanism provides might not be free from these. Rather, they will be amplified. The principal here isn't that "humans should live longer" but "these humans should live longer". Or maybe not. But my contention is that the category of "human" creates the latter desire far more than the former.
>>849926
As much as I agree that transhumanism will only be inflammatory for issues of equal rights, evolution isn't exactly fair in a pure egalitarian way. The smaller/weaker/dumber get left behind, even if it's totally arbitrary and that they were born that way.
>>850006
evolution in a Darwinian sense ceases to be useful when we consider transhuman technological progress. It was never meant for that purpose.
>>849493
I believe they are both compatible and that transhumanism is the natural extension and development of both civil rights technologies and animal rights techniques.
An essential component of humanism and trans-humanism is consent. Consent has repeatedly demonstrated itself to be a supremely effective technology for securing the good. The natural mishandling of consent by selfishness and prejudice has likewise produced grievous errors in judgement which resulted in unstable tyrannies and increased death tolls for both the practitioners and their would be victims.
I conclude from this experience that modification with proper consent does not threaten the integrity or nature of humanity either in the individual case or in the wider sense of the species, nor does it threaten relations with non-human species. Quite the contrary.
For example:
When you put your 'clothes' on this morning to look 'professional', your 'jacket' to stay warm, and then exited your 'house' you consented to use technology to modify the human condition out of all recognition to the baseline naked and shelterless loner that man without the technologies of society, shelter, and clothing may experience.
Further, at least one of these goals 'looking professional' is entirely synthetic. I neither decry nor advocate for this state of affairs. However one must square a rejection of transhuman modification through artificial selection with the current exemplars of the same.
If the human animal is harmed by the use of these tools, and they are provided the respect and liberty to further modify or even reject their use, consent is preserved and harm is all but eliminated.
I present the Amish and worldwide tribal communities as evidence of both the benevolence and the wisdom of this 'consent' technology.
>>849537
>he doesn't know about the filter
