Great Throughts Treasury

"According to the dictionary entry on extracellular matrix in the Biology Online resource, biologists have recently become aware of the fact that an organism?s environment or substrate (e.g. extracellular matrix) can influence the behavior of cells quite markedly, possibly even more significantly than DNA in the development of complex organisms. The removal of cells from their usual environment to another environment can have far-reaching effects."

"And so Pascal?s wager: either you believe in God or you don?t; if there is no God it can?t do any harm to believe in him because he?s not going to punish you because he doesn?t exist; on the other hand if you don?t believe in him and there is one then he?ll be mad at you and you won?t get eternal life. That argument convinced a lot of people that it didn?t do any harm to believe in religion. But in fact it did them harm and it?s what killed them all because if they had believed in science instead of religion 2,000 years ago we would all be immortal now."

"Although seamless and reliable technologies deserve a place as a goal for transhumanists, the ideas of perfection and paradise do not. We find those concepts in religious thinking but not in transhumanism. There are one or two possible exceptions: Some Singularitarians may be more prone to a kind of magical thinking in the sense that they see the arrival of greater than human intelligence almost instantly transforming the world beyond recognition. But even they are acutely aware of the dangers of super-intelligent AI. In contrast to Ihde?s straw man characterization, most transhumanists?and certainly those who resonate with the transhumanist philosophy of extropy?do not see utopia or perfection as even a goal, let alone an expected future posthuman world. Rather, transhumanism, like Enlightenment humanism, is a meliorist view. Transhumanists reject all forms of apologism?the view that it is wrong for humans to attempt to alter the conditions of life for the better."

"Art in the twenty-first century may come to constitute a form of mediation between human and post-human consciousness, just as in past cultures it has been used to mediate between mankind and the gods."

"Continued technological innovation and advance are essential for our progress as a species, as individuals, and for the survival of our core freedoms. Unfortunately, human minds do not find it natural or easy to reason accurately about risks arising from complex circumstances. As a result, technological progress is being threatened by fundamentalists of all kinds, anti-humanists, Luddites, primitivists, regulators, and the distorted perceptions to which we are all vulnerable. A clear case of this shortcoming is our reasoning about the introduction of new technologies and the balance of potential benefits and harms that result."

"I suspect this cultural tendency to see indefinite lifespan or potential immortality as a curse serves as a psychological defense against the historically undeniable fact of human mortality. So long as mortality was an unalterable part of the human condition, it was understandable if we fooled ourselves into believing that physical immortality would be dreadful. I am suggesting that mortality no longer need be accepted as inevitable. If indefinitely extended longevity is achievable, continuing to cling to the immortality-as-curse myth can only destroy us. To begin uncovering the errors fueling opposition to extreme longevity, consider first the distinction between seeking immortality and seeking indefinite lifespan. Suppose we were to grant that we might become bored of life, whether it be centuries, millennia, or eons from now. We might even grant that boredom was inevitable given a sufficiently extended life. Granting these suppositions for now, what follows? Only that literal immortality?living forever?would not be desirable. But forever is infinitely longer than a billion years. If there were, in principle, some limit to the length of a stimulating, challenging, rewarding life, we could not know where it lies until we reached it."

"For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant ? Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely."

"If immortality should not be a goal, indefinitely long lifespan can be. If, one day we find ourselves drained, if we can think of nothing more to do and our current activities seem pointless, we will have the option of ending our lives. Alternatively, we might change ourselves so radically that, although someone continues to live, it?s unclear that it?s us. But we cannot know in advance when we will reach that point. To throw away what may be a vastly long stretch of joyful living on the basis that forever must bring boredom and stagnation would be a terrible error."

"If it be admitted that a man possessing absolute power may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should not a majority be liable to the same reproach?"

"How fast will the future arrive? How will that future differ from the present? We need to have a good sense of the possible and plausible answers to those questions if we are to make smart decisions about technology, the economy, the environment, and other complex issues. The process of envisioning possible futures for the purpose of preparing more robust strategies is often called scenario planning. I prefer scenario learning or thinking, because scenarios foster prepared minds by ?learning from the future?, and they provide a forum for integrating what has been learned into decision making."

"Most of us want to do two things at the same time: Protect our freedom to innovate technologically, and protect ourselves and our environment from excessive collateral damage. Our traditional thinking has shown itself not to be up to this task. If we are serious about achieving a better balance of progress and protection, we need help. Suppose your friend wanted to make your favorite meal for you, and you knew he was clueless about cooking. To improve the chances of enjoying a delicious feast, while minimizing wasted ingredients, damaged utensils, and hurt feelings, you might gently urge him to use a recipe. Reasoning about risk and benefit is similar. Only we call the recipe structured decision making."

"Mother Nature, truly we are grateful for what you have made us. No doubt you did the best you could. However, with all due respect, we must say that you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution. You have made us vulnerable to disease and damage. You compel us to age and die?just as we?re beginning to attain wisdom. You were miserly in the extent to which you gave us awareness of our somatic, cognitive, and emotional processes. You held out on us by giving the sharpest senses to other animals. You made us functional only under narrow environmental conditions. You gave us limited memory, poor impulse control, and tribalistic, xenophobic urges. And, you forgot to give us the operating manual for ourselves! What you have made us is glorious, yet deeply flawed. You seem to have lost interest in our further evolution some 100,000 years ago. Or perhaps you have been biding your time, waiting for us to take the next step ourselves. Either way, we have reached our childhood?s end. We have decided that it is time to amend the human constitution. We do not do this lightly, carelessly, or disrespectfully, but cautiously, intelligently, and in pursuit of excellence. We intend to make you proud of us. Over the coming decades we will pursue a series of changes to our own constitution, initiated with the tools of biotechnology guided by critical and creative thinking. In particular, we declare the following seven amendments to the human constitution: Amendment No.1: We will no longer tolerate the tyranny of aging and death. Through genetic alterations, cellular manipulations, synthetic organs, and any necessary means, we will endow ourselves with enduring vitality and remove our expiration date. We will each decide for ourselves how long we shall live. Amendment No.2: We will expand our perceptual range through biotechnological and computational means. We seek to exceed the perceptual abilities of any other creature and to devise novel senses to expand our appreciation and understanding of the world around us. Amendment No.3: We will improve on our neural organization and capacity, expanding our working memory, and enhancing our intelligence. Amendment No.4: We will supplement the neocortex with a ?metabrain?. This distributed network of sensors, information processors, and intelligence will increase our degree of self-awareness and allow us to modulate our emotions. Amendment No. 5: We will no longer be slaves to our genes. We will take charge over our genetic programming and achieve mastery over our biological, and neurological processes. We will fix all individual and species defects left over from evolution by natural selection. Not content with that, we will seek complete choice of our bodily form and function, refining and augmenting our physical and intellectual abilities beyond those of any human in history. Amendment No.6: We will cautiously yet boldly reshape our motivational patterns and emotional responses in ways we, as individuals, deem healthy. We will seek to improve upon typical human emotional excesses, bringing about refined emotions. We will strengthen ourselves so we can let go of unhealthy needs for dogmatic certainty, removing emotional barriers to rational self-correction. Amendment No.7: We recognize your genius in using carbon-based compounds to develop us. Yet we will not limit our physical, intellectual, or emotional capacities by remaining purely biological organisms. While we pursue mastery of our own biochemistry, we will increasingly integrate our advancing technologies into our selves. These amendments to our constitution will move us from a human to an transhuman condition as individuals. We believe that individual transhumanizing will also allow us to form relationships, cultures, and polities of unprecedented innovation, richness, freedom, and responsibility. We reserve the right to make further amendments collectively and individually. Rather than seeking a state of final perfection, we will continue to pursue new forms of excellence according to our own values, and as technology allows. Your ambitious human offspring."

"No more gods, no more faith, no more timid holding back. Let us blast out of our old forms, our ignorance, our weakness, and our mortality. The future belongs to post-humanity."

"One of the core transhumanist principles of extropy has been that of Self-Transformation."

"I find ludicrous the claim that our problems result from a lack of regulation. The real situation is one of continuing heavy regulation but with decreased effectiveness and ever less accountability. As economist Tyler Cowen put it, ?That?s dysfunctional governance, not laissez-faire.? He points out that, just in the regulatory category of finance and banking, inflation-adjusted expenditures have risen 43.5 percent from 1990 to 2008. The Federal Register puts out something like 70,000 pages of new regulations each year. Between 1980 and 2007, the highest growth rate in regulation was in "homeland security". The second-largest growth rate was in regulation of finance and banking, where spending almost tripled, rising from $725 million to $2.07 billion. Some of the worst things happened in the highly regulated housing and bank mortgage lending sectors, including among the government-sponsored mortgage agencies. Banks are regulated by rules and agencies including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the international Basel accords on capital standards, state authorities, the Federal Reserve the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and particular laws such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act."

"I don?t doubt that problems can arise in financial markets through poor decision making and herd behavior. But that doesn?t mean that regulation is the answer in most cases. In genuinely free markets, or anything close to them, problems will usually reveal themselves before they grow as large as the recent Western financial problems. They only grow monstrous if the government won?t allow the fuse to blow. Some of the specific problematic regulations and institutions, in my view: The Federal Reserve, formed by the government, played a central role in the financial crisis with its insistence on keeping interests too low for too long. The government thereby contributed to what economists call moral hazard. The longstanding mortgage interest deduction encouraged overinvestment in real estate. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were formed by the government and given a legally-enforced monopoly over ?conforming loans.? These institutions contributed to the credit crisis by pushing money at borrowers who wouldn?t otherwise have received loans. The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) reinforced this problem when the government pressured banks to loan lots more money to people with bad credit. The mortgage market collapsed when many of those people could no longer repay the loans. The CRA, passed in 1977 and strengthen in 1995, compelled banks to extend loans in high-risk areas. If they refused to do so, they would be liable for fines and would find it harder to get approval for mergers and branch expansions. The federal government added to the subprime problem through a change in regulations by the comptroller of the currency in December 2005. This triggered some mortgage borrowers to default."

"In 1975, the SEC created a credit rating cartel by mandating that debt be rated by a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO). By establishing the NRSRO, the government raised barriers to entry, leaving those in the favored group protected from competition in the ratings business. It also spurred the inflation of debt ratings. How? Before the NRSRO, it was the debt buyers who had to go to the ratings agencies to evaluate what they were buying. After the NRSRO, it was the issuers of debt who sought out the ratings. Naturally they sought out the highest rating possible. Those are just a few of the bad moves originating in government regulations and institutions. I could also point to increased uncertainty created by inconsistent actions, such as the government bailing out AIG but not Lehman. The government even spurred the use of securitized mortgages through federal regulations allowing the banks to hold much smaller loan loss reserves on the condition that they used securitized mortgages. The point here is not that the market works perfectly. Nor is it that all regulations necessarily make things worse. It is that regulations have unintended consequences and that therefore we should be applying much smarter and more critical thinking to how we design and evaluate them. I believe that the most promising role for regulation is in helping markets work better, that is, in creating smart markets. But the regulations listed above are of a different kind: they attempt to directly force the highly complex system that is the economy to produce outcomes desired by politicians and interest groups in the name of the public interest."

"In reality, the FDA consistently follows a path close to one that the precautionary principle would prescribe: It puts all its energies into minimizing the risk of a new drug that might be approved, then goes on to cause harm. Very little energy goes into considering the potential benefits from making the new treatment available. Regulators can make mistakes on both sides of this balance. If they approve a drug that turns out to be harmful, they have made a ?Type I error?, as it is called in risk analysis. They might also make a Type II error by making a beneficial medication unavailable?by delaying it, rejecting it for consideration, by failing to approve it, or by wrongly withdrawing it from the market. Both types of error are bad for the public. For the regulators, the risk of Type I errors looks much more frightening that Type II errors. If they make a Type II mistake and prevent a beneficial treatment coming to market, few people will ever be aware of what has been lost. Probably the media will be silent, and Congress will join them. Regulators have little incentive to avoid Type II errors. But what of the prospect of making a Type I error? This is a regulator?s worst nightmare."

"If life is the universe, and if the whole of nature is alive, is death not just a transmutation of matter, thereby affirming that nothing is dead or inanimate?"

"It?s important to realize that scenario learning is not a forecasting method. Its purpose is not to pinpoint future events but to highlight large-scale forces that push the future in different directions. If we are to develop robust strategies, policies, and plans, we need a sufficiently diverse set of scenarios."

"Religion is (a) a pre-scientific system of explanation and technology; (b) a source of meaning, direction and emotional expression in life; (c) a means of social control; (d) a means of coping with uncertainty and death."

"Progress should not bow to fear, but should proceed with eyes wide open."

"One recipe for making decisions and forming policies about technological and environmental issues has become popular. This decision recipe is known by the catchy name of the precautionary principle. This principle falls far short at encouraging us to make decisions that are as objective, comprehensive, and balanced as possible. It falls so far short that cynics might wonder whether it was devised specifically to stifle technological advance and productive activity."

"Stress Testing Government Regulations: Given that the economy will only grow more complex in the future, I find it disturbing how so many of us still run to Great God Government for top-down solutions to the intricacies of complex economic systems. I do believe there are many opportunities for improving the functioning of markets in the economy ? for turning markets-as-we-find-them into what I call ?smart markets? (or designer markets). But we continue to turn too quickly to poorly thought-out regulation to solve problems, often unaware of how previous poorly designed regulations created or contributed to the problems."

"Plato says: [The young democratic man] spends as much money, effort, and time on unnecessary pleasures as on necessary ones ? And he doesn?t admit any word of truth into the guardhouse, for if someone tells him that some pleasures belong to fine and good desires and others to evil ones ? he denies all this and declares that all pleasures are equal and must be valued equally ? And so he lives on, yielding day by day to the desire at hand ? And isn?t it inevitable that freedom should go to all lengths in such a city? ? a father accustoms himself to behave like a child and fear his sons, while the son behaves like a father, feeling neither shame nor fear in front of his parents ?"

"The human brain has up to one hundred billion (1011) neurons and between one hundred trillion (1014) and one quadrillion (1015) synapses."

"Stagnation sets in when motion ceases. Motion, change, and growth form the core of living. We will stagnate if we either run out of the energy to stay in the flow of life, or if we exhaust all the possibilities. I suggest that while some people run out of energy at any age, doing so is not inevitable. I further suggest that life?s possibilities are literally unbounded. Certainly we can see this to be true for millennia to come."

"Regulators find the principle attractive because it provides a seemingly clear procedure with a bias towards the exercise of regulatory power. The precautionary principle?s characteristics suit it well for the political arena in which regulators, hardcore environmental, and anti-technological activists pursue their agenda. Their interests, and the nature of the principle, practically guarantee that no consideration is given to an alternate approach: making decision making less political and more open to other methods. With rare exceptions, political decisions ensure that for every winner there is a loser. That?s because political decisions are imposed by the winners on the losers. Decisions made outside the political process typically enable all sides to win because there are multiple outcomes rather than just one."

"Sadly many people don?t wait for old age to become boring. The prospect of extended longevity repels them since even their current lives are dull. What makes them become weary? They make themselves that way in several ways. 1: They have developed a habit of thinking boredom-inducing thoughts. They tell themselves there is nothing to do, that ?it?s not worth it?, that activities are boring when they need not be. 2: Their vision of their lives consists of a narrow tunnel-reality, like the view of a mountain range seen through the end of a pipe. Having become so used to the way they live, they fail to see the opportunities beckoning them. 3: They have become apathetic. Laziness sets in when people develop an attitude that says ?Entertain me?. Apathy reflects a disengagement from living. Laziness forms a vicious circle with underactive imagination. If we are too lazy to imagine new careers, new activities, new places to go, we will see only the old and familiar. If we see only the familiar and unchallenging, we will find it hard to get excited. 4: Related to these problems we find an unwillingness to experiment. Whether fed by fear or laziness or lack of imagination, getting out of the youthful habit of experimentation eventually produces a jaded, dull individual."

"Precautionary restrictions are never justified. It is not that unfettered innovation is always best. It is not that environmental concerns are to be dismissed. It is that an excessive focus on preventing one perceived problem can create even worse problems. Nor is this a counsel of despair. Better decision processes are available."

"The pervasiveness and importance of spontaneous orders is poorly appreciated by most people. There are three reasons for this: First, concrete, constructed orders are easily perceived because of their relative simplicity. Since constructed orders are designed and organized by one person or one integrated group of persons, they are necessarily limited to the degree of complexity comprehensible and controllable by those minds. This is not true of spontaneous orders. Spontaneous orders can achieve any degree of complexity. SOs that are extremely complex may be difficult to recognize as orders. For example, we sometimes hear of ?the chaos of the market?, a phrase signifying the speaker?s failure to understand the enormously complex spontaneous ordering at work in a decentralized, free market economic system. As this person sees it, there is no order in economic affairs unless they can see some person or group of persons designing the order, setting a pattern for the outcome."

"The I is a grammatical fiction (Nietzsche). There are bundles of impressions but no underlying self (Hume). There is no survival because there is no person (Buddha, Parfit)."

"Those looking for easy and centralized answers to current financial and economic problems have renewed the ideological attack on free markets? or on anything remotely close to free markets in our very heavily regulated economy. I have long since repudiated the ?libertarian? label as inadequate to describe my economic and political views. Even so, I think the best answers to economic matters almost always reside in the smart design and use of markets rather than in direct government intervention. Since I don?t want to be taken to support the latter in the current situation, I feel compelled to list here some of the ways the government has caused or strongly contributed to the financial and economic problems."

"Transhumanism is both a reason-based philosophy and a cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition by means of science and technology. Transhumanists seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values."

"To say that humans are composed of machines is not to say that we are merely machines. Humans are dignified machines. We are (so far) the most extropic, most complex product of billions of years of evolution."

"Transhumanism is about continual improvement, not perfection or paradise. Transhumanism is about improving nature?s mindless ?design?, not guaranteeing perfect technological solutions. Transhumanism is about morphological freedom, not mechanizing the body. Transhumanism is about trying to shape fundamentally better futures, not predicting specific futures. Transhumanism is about critical rationalism, not omniscient reason."

"Transhumanists go beyond most of our traditional humanist predecessors in proposing fundamental alterations in human nature in pursuit of these improvements. We question traditional, biological, genetic, and intellectual constraints on our progress and possibility. The unique conceptual abilities of our species give us the opportunity to advance nature?s evolution to new peaks. Rather than accepting the undesirable aspects of the human condition, transhumanists of all stripes challenge natural and traditional limitations on our possibilities. We champion the use of science and technology to eradicate constraints on lifespan, intelligence, personal vitality, and freedom. Or, as I put it in a ?Letter to Mother Nature?: ?We have decided that it is time to amend the human constitution. We do not do this lightly, carelessly, or disrespectfully, but cautiously, intelligently, and in pursuit of excellence. We intend to make you proud of us. Over the coming decades we will pursue a series of changes to our own constitution.?"

"Transhumanists of all kinds?Extropians, Venturists, Immoralists?look forward to making some radical alterations in the human condition. We want to remake ourselves into something more than mindless nature has generated. This will require some powerful technologies and will produce enormous social changes. We are therefore obligated to think about appropriate constraints on the pursuit of our goals. The purpose of this paper is to argue for the recognition of spontaneous ordering as just such a constraint."

"There is no contradiction in the idea that a technology can develop so that it enhances us and eventually becomes part of us."

"There?s been talk recently about ?stress testing? the banks to determine their financial strength. It seems odd to me that we don?t say much at all about the need to stress test government regulations and institutions. Two of the tenets of the Proactionary Principle is to take a comprehensive and maximally objective look at proposed actions, policies, regulations, and institutions. Perhaps we need a constitutional amendment to require the stress testing of proposed regulations. They should be carefully tested under widely varying assumptions and scenarios."

"True transhumanism doesn?t find the biological human body disgusting or frightening. It does find it to be a marvelous yet flawed piece of engineering, as expressed in Primo Posthuman."

"We have achieved two of the three alchemists' dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly. Immortality is next."

"We won?t really make major progress in moderating the business cycle until we can find better ways of reducing the endemic biases in human thinking. We also need to continue improving our understanding of feedback systems and problems resulting from imitative behavior. (Imitation may be why all major mortgage debt rating agencies used the same flawed ratings models for poorly-understood derivatives, though that may have more to do with SEC regulations.) One factor that no doubt contributed to the problems is the way executive compensation has been incentivizing executives to take on excessive risk in pursuit of short-term gains. That is not inherent in the market system; it's a result of the specific compensation schemes used."

"We have no grounds for asserting the necessity of limits to life. We can find no impenetrable barrier to endless life. We have no room for any dogma about the inevitability of stagnation. Let us keep our options open. Even at the farthest extremes of time, life may continue without bound."

"Expand our sense of the possible."

"Avatars show that it can also mean ?an altered form of consciousness that expands opportunities for experiences, and escape from the conventional system of moral constraints.? Part of the human condition (except in rare pathological cases) has been the equation: one body= one person. Now he can already see that one individual may have many different avatars, which is a step along the way to possibly becoming a multiplex or protean personality."

"For several decades, it has been fashionable in some circles (especially the postmodernists and poststructuralist) to sneer at Enlightenment ideas, declared that they are outdated, human centric, or na‹ve. Trans-humanism continues to champion the core of the Enlightenment ideas and ideals ? rationality and scientific method, individual rights, the possibility and desirability of progress, the overcoming of superstition and authoritarianism, and the search for new forms of governance ? relative rising and refining them in the light of new knowledge. The search for absolute foundations for reason, for instance has given way to a more sophisticated, uncertain, and self-critical form of critical rationalism. The simple, unified self has been replaced by the far more complex and puzzling self revealed by the neurosciences. Unique status of human beings has been superseded by an understanding that we are part of a spectrum of biological organisms and possible nonbiological species of the future."

"Becoming post-human means exceeding the limitations that the fine the less desirable aspects of the ?human condition.? Post human beings would no longer suffer from disease, aging, and inevitable death (but they are likely to face other challenges). They would have vastly greater physical capability and freedom of form ? often referred to as ?morphological freedom?."

"One point on which all trans-humanists agree ? and one that distinguishes trans-humanism from humanism and other philosophies of life ? the view that it is both possible and desirable to scientifically overcome biological aging and death. In an important sense, the quest to bring the aging process under control and to push back death even farther is central to trans-humanism. The possibilities opened up by greater intelligence, wisdom, well-being, and physical capabilities will be severely limited aging continues to cause us to weather and parish within a handful of decades."

"No specific predictions, however, are essential to trans-humanism. Trans-humanism is defined by its commitment to shaping fundamentally better futures as defined by values, goals, and general direction, not specific goals."