In this case, though, it makes no difference to me if people positively contribute to imminst, because they're trying to be egoists or altruists or want to get rich in the long term or whatever.
We have a lot of members like you diluting the meme.
From section 4 of the mission:
# Section 4 -- Nonprofit Educational & Charitable Organization
ImmInst is organized exclusively for charitable, educational, and scientific purposes as may qualify it as exempt from federal income tax under applicable sections of the Internal Revenue Code (1986), as amended, or corresponding section(s) of any future federal tax code. Notwithstanding any other provisions in this Constitutions or in the Bylaws, ImmInst shall not engage in any activities that would endanger its status as exempt from federal income tax under Section 501©(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, or its status as a corporation, contributions to which are deductible under Section 170©(2) of the Internal Revenue Code.
It's sad that you seem to be dismissing all the people that help your cause, but for different moral reasons than your own. I hope you don't scare them away! On the other hand I'm always trying to improve my understanding of "the meme" or much rather the science required to accomplish it, so I appreciate your concerns. But I am having a hard time understanding or applying "morals", I am having a hard time accepting their existence to begin with, so it's quite difficult to talk about "right" or "wrong" in any context. Thus I tolerate most things that do not cause me any harm. There is not one single person in this world that I can completely agree with regarding their motives, morales, etc, but I have to live with it...
You're talking about imminst as an
organisation once again, forum members are not part of this charity, this organisation, but part of a public board and as such I think we
have to tolerate their motives and there is not much point debating them, because naturally they will greatly differ. The same way we did not outright ban anyone heavily criticising our motives, ideas and intentions, but tolerated their opinion, even if their ideas were outrageous and stupid. Did you propose to ban them and delete their posts back then? Certainly they were diluting the meme and spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD).
Why do you think the mfoundation changed their style? Did they 'sell out'? No, they try to attract thousands of people further diluting the meme, do you think pictures of "happy old guys playing with their grand children" are going to attract hardcore immortalists, transhumanists or even the run of the mill life extensionists? Do you think they will really understand the meme, better than we do? Good joke!
The mfoundation is just trying to attract old people with lots of old money, who just want to slightly improve their health, those clueless people normally popping a centrum multi-vitamin to "improve their health" (it's not their fault anyway), but they are as helpful and as important to us as anyone else.
I mostly care about life extension and science. If you want to condemn me for my interest in life extension and science, which unfortunately is driven by different moral ideas than your own, fine, I'll be contributing to the cause - undiluted SENS-style, but devoid of any moral ideas - regardless of the fact.
ben, my interest is motivated by concerns for the whole of humanity too! It doesn't make it any less egoistical, though. I want humanity to thrive, because this will improve my life as much as it will improve their life and as humans
need to socialise this the
only way to improve my quality of life to the max.
Evolutionary biology has proven, more or less conclusively, that anything we do is motivated by some egoism. Richard Dawkin's selfish gene theory is one interesting example, we try to produce as many copies of our genes as possible, that's why we support family members and members of our species the way we do and it explains the existence of altruism pretty well. Whether this concept still completely applies to "intelligent" humans is another issue.
You see it depends quite a lot on one's interpretation, eventually one can reduce most motives to "I want xy", because xy makes
me happy or at least I think that xy will make me happy. The variable can be altruistic or seemingly egoistic.
Edited by kismet, 14 December 2008 - 05:39 PM.