We The Poopers?
I reacted to this Amor Mundi post with this comment: “Yet another apology of the body defined in terms of its mortality and vulnerability. You are beginning to sound like one of those preachers who tell people that they should be happy in their misery because we are born to suffer. Or like those Victorian writers who exalted the lives of the poor, while of course their masters accumulated wealth and they, like all good lackeys, got some crumbs of their masters’ wealth. I never considered myself as a rugged individualist, but if a rugged individualist is defined as someone who deals with things and achieves his objectives, then I am happy to be one. You claim to be a person of the Left - did you ever read Marx?”, and triggered a wave of anti-transhumanist posts, one of which personally dedicated to me.
Of course there are the usual personal insults: “idiot, bullshit, jackass...” and even a new word that I had to look up in a dictionary: “doofus”. But I am impermeable to Carrico’s insults, for which as usual the best policy is one-ear-in, other-ear-out. What I find interesting, instead, is that he is defining humanity in terms of shit.
Yes, shit. In his passionate defense of the body: “it is true that life is lived in bodies, and that bodies are various and vulnerable and mortal and hungry for connection, and that embracing embodied life demands an embrace of all this about bodies. To deny their variation, their vulnerability, their mortality, their sociability is to deny the body”, he makes references to the alleged body-loathing of “Transhumanists who want to talk about living forever in computers and not having bodies that have to poop”. I and other transhumanists are “dispirited at the prospect of continuing to have to poop or whatever it is that freaks you out so much about bodily life”.
My reply was:
“This is your second reference to poop in a few days and, to make things clear, I will state that I actually enjoy pooping. When I was a student I even wrote a poem about poop for a literature class and, while the teacher did not appreciate it too much (he wanted some loooong essay with biiiiig words), the other students appreciated it immensely and wrote parts of it on the walls.
On the reading table next to my WC (I am one of those who like to read while pooping) I have a nice little book titled “What’s Your Poo Telling You?” It is very refreshing to read this little book, whose intellectual content is certainly higher than some examples of poo (aka crap) disguised as deep insightful thinking.
The book begins with: “Not unlike a snowflake, each bowel movement has a uniqueness that should be regarded with wondrous appreciation”.
And I do appreciate it. When the Robot God will upload me to an angelic immortal body in Cyber Heaven, I think every now and then I will enter a VR simulation of a physical body taking a good crap.
This is to say that I am no enemy of poop. On the contrary, I am actually a friend of poop.
But somehow I do not consider it as a central defining feature of my identity as some people seem to do”.
Yes, I Shit. I Belch. I Fart. When I was in high school I won many farting contests, and I am as proud of this as of other sporting achievements. But if I had to choose between never farting again and never reading Shakespeare again, I think I would go for Shakespeare. I do not define human nature in terms of farts. I prefer to define it in terms of curiosity for reality, overcoming limits, and love for others. And I believe these things would survive the transition to an enhanced biological body or a uploaded consciousness.
To all those who define their human identity in terms of shit: please feel free to do so. I will feel free to define my human identity in terms of other things.
Posted by G.P. on 03/09 at 09:00 AM