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The Not-Quite-Human Rights Movement
An anonymous reader writes "Yale University hosted a conference on transhumanism which organizers say served to
coalesce transhumanism from a subculture to a 'movement.' They're even sketching out where the role of violence becomes legitimate in the quest to become a cyborg.
But most of the talk was of peaceful integration and continuation of democratic values."
I think this is quite similar to the Segway, aren't we jumping the gun a bit? Trying to enact legislation before this even becomes widespread?
It is great to discuss this sort of stuff in groups and think about what they could do in the future, but to seriously believe that they would need to make sure laws could handle this before anymore than a handful of people are "cyborgs" (there is only one person that I know of that has actual shit inplanted in his body)?
It seems a little excessive. Maybe as implants begin to become more commonplace (I can't see this happening for at least 15-20 years) we should start thinking about it, but until then, how about we try to enact useful legislation (re-opening our freedoms, ending the corporate stranglehold on consumers, forcing competition in corporate markets, etc).
Yay for timewasters!
If we make these limbs much, much better - are we to expect anything different?
Yes! That's basically the whole point. Currently, even the best artificial limbs are a poor substitute for the genuine article. People get artificial limbs because they have lost their natural limbs, and have no other choice -- we do not hate or shun these people any more than we hate or shun people with any other disability. However, if artificial limbs become far superior to natural limbs, people will be able to choose whether they want their (perfectly healthy) natural limbs removed in favor of mechanical ones. At that point you will certainly have fear and loathing between the people who undergo the procedure (the superior beings) and the people who don't (the all-natural people).
As for your further point, it's not the role of bioethics departments to sell stem cell research. It's their role to think about the consequences for society of any new innovatio, and sometimes they might not agree with the techies.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Damn right.
One of these days, we're going to look at ourselves, our families, our friends and neighbors, and realize that all of us have various synthetic bits (almost said "metal bits," but there's no guarantee that metals will be the materials of choice -- and anyway, "metal bits" brings something else entirely to mind) and other bits that are genetically engineered, and that we're all living longer, happier, healthier lives as a result -- and it won't seem extraordinary; it will be just the way it is. And the current "bioethics" debates will seem precisely as meaningful as arguments over whether 'tis best to lower a patient's level of bodily humours by bleeding, or raise them by fortifying him with red wine.
I'm sure by then the Luddites will have found something else to bitch about, though.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
In my, admittedly limited experience from taking a semester of ASL and having "deaf culture" lessons intermingled with that, what you're saying doesn't seem to be the actual issue.
People who subscribe to "deaf culture" seem to have constructed a world-view in which deafness isn't a biological flaw, but rather a "variation". They promote the view that a diminished or absent ability to hear is a healthy variant of the human biological norm. This is, I assume, a social reaction to the idea of being "flawed" or broken, and stems, I am sure, from the fact that by and large deaf people are capable of fully interacting with human society, so long as concessions are made for their lack of hearing.
But now its gone far beyond that, and in some cases (such as this) its gone to ridiculous extremes. Instead of being ostracized by hearing (aka "normal") humans, they ostracize people who recognize that deafness is not the human norm, and actually use technology to fix it.
It saddened (and angered) me when I first encountered this. Deaf people of this opinion think that folks who want to "fix" them just don't "get it", and that we as hearing people (as they call it) are just some sort of other normal variation on homo sapiens. As if the ability to hear is akin to hair color or something equally as irrelevant to human functioning.
I wonder if the same people would consider other birth defects "normal variations", and acceptable.
Here's what we need to tell people:
When you're on your deathbed, only days or hours from kicking the bucket, will you regret your opposition to stem cell research during the early 21s century, that might have let you happily live another 20 or 30 years?
Nobody cares unless it directly affects them. We need to convince people that it will directly affect them.
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English is a lot more complex than you give it credit for. Most verbs have three 'conjugations', actually - four if you count third person singular. Some have more. In some, two of them are the same, but by no means in all.
Also, I was going to craft an example that showed English does have a past future tense, but then realised it would be redundant, since I've just used one.
And English gets a lot more complex than that. I would have been going to illustrate that, but I was unable to come up with a good example that didn't sound convoluted. Oh, wait a minute, there's a conditional pluperfect past continuous future (or something like that) right now...
English's use of the verbs 'to be', 'to do', 'to have' and 'to go' as auxiliaries, plus its 'will', 'would', 'shall' and 'should' semi-modals, combine with the three 'conjugations' - the pretirite, past participle and present participle (gerund) of verbs ('went', 'gone', 'going' for example) - to make some tense constructions possible in English that simply don't exist in other languages.
Surprised, if you know three romance languages, that you didn't know that. And while you're about it, you might contemplate just what tense 'you didn't know' might be in, and consider that I know of no language other than English which can express precisely that meaning (as distinct from 'you knew not', 'you have not known' and 'you were not knowing' (oo, there's those three conjugations again)...