#extropy

this page is listed as A-004 in the Omnias Network anomaly database. it discusses the concept of a house and links a specific instance of a house with strange physics to another structure, the tunnel network of Alcatraz Island. i immediately link this to the alcatraz zone on the map found elsewhere on the omnias network website

Perpetual Progress: Extropy means seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an open-ended lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to continuing development. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities as individuals, as organizations, and as a species. Growing in healthy directions without bound.

Self-Transformation: Extropy means affirming continual ethical, intellectual, and physical self-improvement, through critical and creative thinking, perpetual learning, personal responsibility, proactivity, and experimentation. Using technology — in the widest sense to seek physiological and neurological augmentation along with emotional and psychological refinement.

Practical Optimism: Extropy means fueling action with positive expectations — individuals and organizations being tirelessly proactive. Adopting a rational, action-based optimism or “proaction”, in place of both blind faith and stagnant pessimism.

Intelligent Technology: Extropy means designing and managing technologies not as ends in themselves but as effective means for improving life. Applying science and technology creatively and courageously to transcend “natural” but harmful, confining qualities derived from our biological heritage, culture, and environment.

Open Society — Information and Democracy: Extropy means supporting social orders that foster freedom of communication, freedom of action, experimentation, innovation, questioning, and learning. Opposing authoritarian social control and unnecessary hierarchy and favoring the rule of law and decentralization of power and responsibility. Preferring bargaining over battling, exchange over extortion, and communication over compulsion. Openness to improvement rather than a static utopia. Extropia (“ever-receding stretch goals for society”) over utopia (“no place”).

Self-Direction: Extropy means valuing independent thinking, individual freedom, personal responsibility, self-direction, self-respect, and a parallel respect for others.

Rational Thinking: Extropy means favoring reason over blind faith and questioning over dogma. It means understanding, experimenting, learning, challenging, and innovating rather than clinging to beliefs.

Reviewed The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, by Adam Kirsch, Columbia Global Reports, 100 pp., $16.00 (paper)

I very much think the NYRB picked the wrong person for this review.  The best reviews in the journal have writers with subject matter expertise who can both contextualize a given book within a larger discourse and who also know enough to spot mistakes or arguments that don’t cash out.

For example, O’Connell writes,

Just as they tend to be secular humanists, transhumanists tend to be libertarians and, if not always outright cheerleaders for capitalism, then certainly on the whole uncritical of it.

Also,

"Despite his justified reputation as a critic of range and depth, Kirsch’s treatment of transhumanism is really more of a journalistic survey than an essayistic engagement. He pays little or no attention to the fact that the movement is a metastasized outgrowth of capitalist individualism, concerned as it is with the perfection of the self and the extension of its reign into perpetuity. It’s an odd omission, because there’s a case to be made that capitalism—embedded though it is, like transhumanism, in liberal humanist principles—has itself become a profoundly antihuman phenomenon."

I don’t know whether it’s true statistically that transhumanism is libertarian dominant.  However, it would have helped for him to note that the World Transhumanist Association, subsequently and still Humanity+, was at one point run by a democratic socialist if I’m not mistaken, James Hughes.  Acrimony between libertarians and lefties has marked transhumanism possibly from its start.

Noteworthy is an informal poll of members of the transhumanist subreddit, which found an overwhelming preponderance of lefties of one stripe or another. 

It’s a case of underdetermination and guilt by association to claim that transhumanism is a metatstatic outgrowth of capitalism individualism.  Clearly you can find linkages with Silicon Valley and tech gurus like Ray Kurzweil, but, as already mentioned, democratic transhumanism is alive and well.  Also, it’s too glib to explain individualism, in the sense of a self-actualizing and self-differentiating tendency, with capitalism.  If you do this with transhumanism, you then must with various health trends, for example, or with new religious movements or virtually any lifestyle.  If you’re looking for social explanations for transhumanism modernity seems more apt.  But this is still too blunt to account for the specificities of transhumanism.  Nor does it seem very convincing to attribute transhumanism to some kind of generic religious tendency - itself an explanatory cliché that thinks it’s saying something sociologically useful about why one might want to overcome one’s limitations of mind or body.  You don’t  you need make any reference to transcendent religious categories though to understand the transhumanist impulse, only note that decline, debility and death are objectionable to you.

And that leads me to an observation that forms the backdrop of the discussion about transhumanism.  It seems to me that transhumanism (which it should be pointed out is not a univocal belief system) will be more likely to be seen as anti-human and extreme depending on how you’ve conceptualized the totality of the determining contingencies of our lives.  

In other words, if you never appreciated the following as a whole and recoiled from it - disease, illness, disability, death, ignorance, the limitations of short term memory/memory altogether, the limitations of the body, received prejudice and instinct operating everywhere, the inertia of institutions and society, the forced circumstances of history and previous technological choices - the sum of our limitations, it’s possible you’ve never felt a dialectical and moral pull in the opposite direction in all possible ways.  If you don’t have the sense that we’re much closer to hapless object and historical victim than we are possessed of radical agency and capacities for self-transcendence, then transhumanism will somewhat understandably be seen as anti-human.  But, what if we’ve never been able to be fully human?

I've never gotten a tattoo because I'm reluctant to impose fixed ideas on myself.  Plus, I seem to always have something else to do.

“This is what I’m about,” is simultaneously a possibly liberating individuation but also a necessary obsolescence if you’re continually learning, exploring, pushing, growing.  Today's self isn't necessarily the one I want tomorrow.  I don’t see the point of keeping an epidermal record of life stages.

I think of our current predicament: It can take considerable and sustained effort to transcend received roles, identities, views of self, a universe of limitations and ways of thinking and being.  I don’t want to mark my body with something that will, to put it negatively, almost inevitably become a symbol of well intentioned error.

An idea about the self might represent a new plateau of understanding and meaning, and hence an escape from something smaller and more limiting.  But in time it might very well yield to another more powerful idea.

Thus I’m left wondering what symbol might represent this continual evolution.  

Below is the extropian symbol.  Extropy (increasing order) is, if I’m not mistaken, a transhumanist coinage, and posited as the opposite of the idea of increasing disorder in a system, entropy. 

Must H+ ALWAYS be Optimistic?

The text below is mine, from comments on the TNET article “Futurist Arts & Culture”. My words are in response to a clear, calmly offered comment advocating consistent and total optimism in Transhumanist messages.

I must admit, that is a view which I have long taken issue with. I believe that while a dash of that stance is helpful (critical to the success of our efforts as a civilization, in…