36 replies to this topic

[samson]

Sure, sure. Whatever you need to tell yourself to feel significant.

I'll see *you* when you come begging for scraps after your economy, infastructure and society collapses. And boy will I laugh when I kick you in the face.

[Shepard]

I know karate. Plus, you know, everyone in America is armed.

[Aegist]

http://www.albinobla...m/flash/end.php

wtf mate?

[Live Forever]

I know karate. Plus, you know, everyone in America is armed.

I'll pull my gat and mow some mofos down. I ain't even scared.

[maestro949]

Philosopher Roger Scruton writes a long-winded Dystopian view of the future in Technology Review where the immortalists are dangerous because they would have worked out ways to exert and survive aggression and have developed a system of totalitarian control.

Of course, like so many others who fear change, he is worried about the affects it will have on religious traditions.

There is hope, as the fertility expert Robert Winston suggested in his Alfred ­Deakin Lecture in Melbourne on May 13, 2001, that we might engineer the removal of the gene that causes beta thalassemia (a form of anemia)--a gene carried by one out of seven Sardinians. We can replace body parts with artificial versions, and we can transplant organs from one body to another. We can wire computer chips into the body--and maybe soon into the brain, to enhance memory or even intelligence. We are on the verge of a stem-cell therapy that could reverse some forms of blindness (see "Using Stem Cells to Cure Blindness" on technologyreview.com). All such developments both fascinate and alarm us. They promise relief from degenerative diseases. But they also undermine that "fixed point" on which the "we" attitude is focused, the fixed point of human nature--the fixedness of which was safeguarded by traditional religion in the doctrine that we are created in God's image and are therefore as unchangeable as He.

It is a sad statement that our value systems are intricately tied to our mortality. It helps us cope with the knowledge that we will someday cease to exist but it is a twisted line of logic. One must actually prop up death as a good thing. This is so ass backwards it makes my head spin. It's no wonder so many people have difficulty reconciling instincts with the fairytale bullshit we're fed on a daily basis.

With longer life we can still be noble in community endeavors, have virtues, values and pursue a spiritual understanding of the universe. I argue that lifting the veil of fear through life extension and chemically altering our biological fight-v-flight, aggressive tendencies and mood imbalances, we will be able see more clearly, appreciate more deeply and love more intensely. It is only fear that inhibits us.

[samson]

I'll just go ahead and call the man a looney, but a few in his writing things piqued my thoughts. Amongst the feeling of utter hate towards his glorifying conservatism. I like hate.

What I see as quite amusing in Scrutons writing is that he falls to the same folly as his targets of critique, the failure to see the truth and the fact that things change. Because, really, they do.

What Scruton sees as a dangerous trend of shifting moral good from the confortable ideal of self-sacrifice (and the utter bullshit about living in communion with nature and shit) and communion to individualistic egotism and reaching of selfish favour, is actually just that. A shift of morals. I mean really, it's been done before, both in drastic terms of coding teamwork into both genetic and memetic inheritage, and concerning specific topics like starting to keep black people as humans (some people evidently have trouble with this one. I guess the reason lies in borked memetics. Oh I'm so funny).

Anyways, the reason we can "finally" concentrate on ourselves is because we have largely perfected teamwork into a system that doesn't usually require our conscious thought. We pay our taxes and the taxes are used to teamwork, and that's all for most people. We have the practical freedom to create moderately independent personalities, a privilige that was unavailable for most human a hundred or two years ago.

Scruton cannot apparently accept the reality that shift happens. Things won't go along as they always have, because the tides change grow larger with every turn of the century, gaining momentum like a lumbering behemoth. Scruton and his like cannot, luckily, do much to stop it. Oh I'm so poetic.
However Scrutons incoherent ramblings do raise an important thing to remember; you are not a one man island. We (still and for now, depending on ones' personal view) need each other to survive, even though we may not see it every day. And even if there is no apparent benefit in feeding the poor and helping the needy, I'll promise that it won't hurt your platinum ass-wipe to give a dime or two. For example, *I* wouldn't be alive without Finlands stupendously splendid public healthcare, and we all know much you would miss without *me*. [tung]

The fact is that humans are *inheritently* (yes, you heard me right, priori knowledge coded in our genes. May not be directly, but through systems, surely) empathical and caring things, and you cannot eliminate those characteristics altogether from culture. Yes, there have been a few bad apples in the form of Nazis and all, but those have their complications.

In conclusion, I do place a quite high vigilance on maintaining the general feeling of empathy as to avoid the horror of the Nazi and Stalin and the rest, but I don't hold the lack of empathy and conscience as a crucial term in order to avoid dystopia. It's crucial, but not a real threat (as of now).

PS. "Humanity: A Moral History of The 20th Century". For those who are really interested in the unpleasant characteristics of human nature. I considered it rather hilarious, so I'd prepare for serious blood, tears and death session.

[ziddy5]

With longer life we can still be noble in community endeavors, have virtues, values and pursue a spiritual understanding of the universe.  I argue that lifting the veil of fear through life extension and chemically altering our biological fight-v-flight,  aggressive tendencies and mood imbalances, we will be able  see more clearly, appreciate more deeply and love more intensely.  It is only fear that inhibits us.

Precisely. It is a travesty that more people do not realise this, that the very "human nature" that they so greatly adore is the progenitor of everything they find wrong with the world. Rather than it being unethical to go against "human nature," it is actually far worse to let this cruel paradigm keep us from experiencing the wonders of the universe.