Transumanar

Today: Natasha Vita-More & Anders Sandberg on Morphological Freedom in Second Life

Updated after the event - yesterday March 9 there has been a very interesting seminar on Morphological Freedom in Second Life, organized by the SL-Transhumanists group, by Natasha Vita-More & Anders Sandberg: Do individual humans have a natural right to Morphological Freedom - the right to seek augmentation and enhancement - and the right not to be coerced to augment and enhance?

Natasha and Anders are two of the principal transhumanist thinkers. Natasha has given a good definition of transhumanism in a recent interview: “Transhumanism is a set of ideas which represents a worldview to improve the current situation that we as humanity are facing, which includes short lifespan, limited cognitive abilities, limited sensoral abilities, erratic emotions…starvation, lack of housing, or lack of, basically, getting any of the necessary fundamental needs met. We look ardently at how technologies, including the NBIC technologies—nanoscience, bioscience, information science, and cognitive science – can possibly be used to help solve some of the problems in the world that address humans being stuck in a state of stasis.” See also Anders’ recent list of top genetic enhancements that have already been done in mammals (and hence could presumbaly be done in humans).

It was a good seminar of a couple of hours with about 40 participants. Natasha and Anders gave their talks with voice and switched to text for the long Q/A session - I hope the chatlog will be available soon. I have posted a 7 min video clip of some parts of the talks and hope somebody has recorded a the full seminar in video or audio. Some Europeans missed the beginning of the seminar because we were not aware of the hour change in the US. I almost missed it myself. During the talk, in parallel, I was trading insults in almost realtime with Dale Carrico on his blog (the fun thing is that I am still doing this _now_ in another browser window). Dale ~~seems~~ _wants_ to think that all transhumanists are fascists who want to enforce one or another body modification norm on the rest of humanity, but at some point he concedes that “this seminar you’ve advertized about morphological freedom may be a step in the right direction, depending on its seriousness”. I must have written hundreds of times that I think an enhancement is whatever the person concerned considers as an enhancement, but of course Dale prefers to ignore facts (facts have the annoying habit of getting in the way of serious rethorics). I hope the chatlog of the seminar will be published soon, as both the question asked and the replies of Natasha and Anders will show that Dale’s allegations are _very far_ from the truth.

During the seminar our tireless super organizer Khannea Suntzu issued this call for volunteers: “After our recent successes, we’d love to expand our SL-Transhumanists endeavor, and for that purpose we’d like to see volunteers. If you have the urgency to spread this viral meme around a bit do join us. Start by joining the SL-Transhumanists group (!!) and have a look at our online resources. We have regular office hours and we’d love to increase our coverage in that. Additionally expect a sizeable increase in the number of big events like today’s”.

Posted by on 03/09 at 09:47 AM

It would be more sensible to announce such “pangeic” events by UTC time only and provide a link to a website about time zones, so everyone can quickly find out how much to add or subtract to get their local time.

See you next time, I guess.

Posted by on 03/10 at 11:52 AM
You are right, and I wish to apologize to all those who missed part or all of the event. The SLT = PST time was correct but we did not translate it correctly to UK - EU time because we did not realize that the hour had changed in the US. I hope to see you at one of the next events.

Posted by on 03/10 at 12:54 PM