Charity

"If you watch a TV advert telling you to give food to a starving African child and you actually don't do that, it's not because you're particularly conceited, but because history has granted you little capacity in this area. I'm of the view that the image of the child is actually an extension of the abuse visited on that child - something you're thought to deserve, even though you don't." - Me

Wrote this in my previous post, and perhaps it needed either more explanation or another post.  So here's another post, and its own set of arguments.

In this post I'll try to argue why you shouldn't give to charity.  I don't give to charities.  The rational thing is always of course to see whether your opinion or behaviour is good enough for someone else to accept (you lucky person).  I'll take the third-world-oriented charities as my example.

I'll grant that if I gave money or clothes to a third-world appeal charity that some good would come of it for somebody in need.  That in itself makes it very difficult to disagree with the work of charities.  The logic is simple enough for even me to grasp - put in A, get result B, where A is affordable, and B is good.  You'd think that you'd have to go out of your way as an asshole to find arguments not to follow this simple logic, especially given that we live in a materialistic world in which the only thing you generally stand to lose is the rate of growth of your DVD collection.  So you can either get that Hitchcock DVD that wasn't included in your box set (which you purchased anyway becuase it contained many of the classics you wanted, just not this one), or you can provide fresh water, clothing, or education, to somewhere far away where the people will never enjoy what you take for granted.  And in fact, your materialistic way of life seems to have been responsible for the downfall of third-world countries anyhow - the capitalistic hunger of the post-WWII era furnished you with cheap fuel and technology and a responsibility to the now-starving populations left in its wake.

Yes, I'll stand to go against this.  Fool that I am.  Of course it doesn't matter that I do so here, it's just nice to write stuff down so that next time some Christian do-gooder comes to my door my mind won't go blank while they storm off down the drive bemoaning my self-centred barbarism.  Not that I intend to win any arguments or anything, it just would be nice to see their anger have something to be angry at, because they're not used to resistance.

I'll make a list of presuppositions, or whatever they are, precepts probably:

1 - I am politically unfree

I won't offer any explanation of this - if you can't think like this then, well, what can I say?  Good luck!

2 - I'm not responsible for third-world debt, starvation of resources, lack of food and medicines, infrastructure etc.

This is the same statement that might be made by someone who is right-wing, who says 'I was born in this country with advantages that I will enjoy, and nobody has the right to tell me that I shouldn't have those advantages.  Look, no hands!'.  For me it's a bare fact that I'm not responsible.  I'm also not secondarily resoponsible, through the economical or political system that I live in, due to the last statement - becuase I understand how un-free I am with regard to them.  Of course I can make myself responsible by making all sorts of 'green choices', and there are plenty to tick off, but that's another (but I guess related) issue.  If I want to help someone it's because I understand that they are suffering, and that's really all.

3 - I don't live a blessed existence

Typically, the west sees itself as living in peace and freedom, in which citizens choose careers and live otherwise at leisure.  It sees itself as refined when in fact it is brutish; it sees itself as resourceful when in fact it is wasteful; it sees itself as powerful when in fact we are weak; it sees itself as full of luxury when in fact it is full of tat; it sees itself as happy when in fact it is miserable.  Things is really, really bad, man.  And even in those areas in which I can say that I are living well at the expense of others, I have to know that this makes my life bad also - not because I can't ignore it, but because of its effect on me.  The happy man can never be the oppressor.  What would, for example, an alien species think of my inability to act at the suffering of others?  Surely they will see me as singularly imprisoned within a worthless and a hopeless life, in just a truly miserable condition that may not exist across a million other worlds.  Anything else wouldn't really make sense.  Oh, and privilege?  Shopped in a supermarket recently?  You haven't seen privilege until you've seen the cheap look on that middle-aged hag's face as she finds a broken ready meal in the reduced section, before she ghosts away into the crisps aisle with her underdressed and likely abused daughter.  Certainly you can say that someone who is starving is suffering much more than I am, that's true, but you can't use the image of me on my throne as motivation: it just isn't like that.

And on the subject of crisps, I recall the picture of a woman in the London riots of last year making off with a multipack bag of crisps from her local pound shop.  I mean, if you had unlimited freedom to take whatever you want, what would you take?  Some took TVs and so on, for sure, but she took her crisps.  How bad must you feel spending one measly pound on bland, underfilled junk food, to feel liberated in stealing them?  (it's possible she didn't feel bad buying them ever, but just lacked imagination.  I simply prefer the former, though both serve my argument).

So those three precepts (if that's what they are!) might exasperate you, or leave you wanting more defence of them or whatever, but you can probably see that the usual logic of philanthropic giving may not hold with me here.  First of all, to be a philanthropist you have to be rich, and whilst I might be rich in that I have Pounds and not Roubles in my pockets, I'm not rich in the control and exercise of my faculties, which we all have taken away from us via education and social conditioning (so now, if there was someone reading, I've finally lost you.  Whatever, your mom is fat).  Nobody I know behaves appropriately, nor anyone I've ever heard of outside of books and films.  For example, that Denzil Washington film where he goes nuts trying to get treatment for his ill son, is completely believable and yet doesn't ever happen in real life.  Another example - a nurse killed a man's wife by giving her an epidural incorrectly, and (I think! I hope I'm not pasting together two anecdotes!) he appeared on a news-like programme reading the form letter he got from the hospital and etc.  why didn't he go nuts?  Why don't we go nuts?  If there's a panic about paedophiles (and there should be), just organize and hunt them down!  People sometimes know where a paedo lives - why not off him? For goodness sake.  Are there problems that are less real than they could be because of the media?  Probably, but my point is that for all the times the media is accused of scaremongering or starting a panic, what happens? Nothing!  If only something ever happened, then we could talk.

Secondly, pity is worthless.  When people watch the telly and it's charity night and they go 'oh the poor children' or whatever, they completely misunderstand not only the position of the children, but their own position.  A suffering child deserves respect, not pity, and of course that goes for anyone, and that respect can then give birth to appropriate action (in principle).  But your lack of respect springs from a misunderstanding about your own self - you do not have the power to designate pity, since you suffer the same way I do, you just don't know it.  You need to know that you're not free, that you give to the telly fundraiser as a symptom of unfreedom, not as a hero, nor even as a prelude to more meaningful action (as lifestylers might say).

And this brings me to a larger point.  What you might call a physiological approach to charity - it makes you feel better.  You buy the disease and then you buy the cure.  The disease is guilt and pity and the cure is buying blankets.  Many arguments against charity show how it is a false economy, and others point out that wholesale politico-socio-economic change is necessary to stop untold millions starving to death in the near future.  Both of these arguments are interesting and correct, but need to be utilised somehow rather than simply 'taken note of', which never leads to anything.  They can be useful if I first of all describe how I feel when I spend my extra pounds on 'the poor children' - that basically I feel like I've saved them, or at least as many as is in my power, from further suffering, at least for now.  It's a bit like eating a meal: you feel full for a while, and then when the hunger strikes (or is induced), you have to eat again.  The issue for me is that my stomach is bigger than most people's (physically as well as metaphorically true, I assure you dear reader).  I don't anticipate the good feeling, and it doesn't happen for me, so far as I have knowledge.  And knowledge can't just be un-known: I don't want to feel happy or well about the fact that people are suffering and I can do very little to nothing about it by giving £3 a month or whatever it is.

So the most direct answer I suppose I have for not giving to charity is that I don't want to learn to fool myself into forgetting what a dire situation I'm really in. I feel the urgency of action, and I feel the paralysis that comes from living where and how I do, and something has to give. That tension has to be maintained for the sake of whatever might be posssible. I have to feel terrible about suffering and not swallow the charity pill, because it's something I'm going through, as a suffering person among suffering people, and it's something that has to end.  

The less subjective part of my argument says that as philanthropy is both politically and ethically backward (politically because our economic values create starvation, not what we do with our free cash, and ethically because giving requires the exercise of arbitrary power, which we must not count on), you could say that charity is no solution to the problems of the third-world because it assumes that reasonings that belong in the past (philanthropy is very victorian) can solve problems that require better reasoning in the future. 

So, if that's my argument, very roughly, I'll need to criticise charity.  Usually people are unable to believe in social critique becaue their imagination is only able to conjure up the notion of a barely concealed conspiracy, which they then reject out of hand. In saying that charity isn't a correct view, of course, it's really a world away from conspiracy that I'm speaking of. There is a dedicated, honest and caring photographer, with a caring, honest and dedicated journalist, somewhere out there in the third-world doing a job they believe is about the furthering of human life. They find the suffering, record it, and transmit it to their media bosses, who package it for me to consume, in the hope that I will give. The message, believed in from the source of the transmission to its eventual end, is one of humanitarianism, of damning judgement, and often of desperation.

This notwithstanding, if, when the TV turns itself on (don't they?) and makes me feel afraid for someone's life, there should have to be a very good reason to take that as a positive. By convention we grant this positivity immediately: it's good to show suffering because it's good to give, and the suffering should therefore not be done in silence. I would have it, on the contrary, that for the duration of time in which I'm incapable of acting suitably (that is, acting toward ending poverty etc.), the encounter with immediate suffering is counterproductive - as I've mentioned earlier, it's paralysing, and an extension of violence.

I'll identify therefore the anguish felt at others' suffering not as a motivation for charity but as a symptom of unfreedom.  But given that I am not free to change the situation of third-world countries, what happens to the freedom I believe myself to have when I give charitably? For there isn't a mere logic at work here, but a whole... what you possibly might refer to as a social apparatus or something... that places images of starving and sick children on television. Charity is big business, and my perceived freedom for philanthropic action is a huge part of this machine. That's the real meaning of my charitable giving, and it doesn't line up with ending suffering.

You could interject: perhaps it is the case that I'm not yet free enough, educated enough, to react appropriately to the message. Maybe the right thing to do is to give relief as part of my emotional response to the imagery, to carry on, learn, and someday 'get it'. Even if I'm politically in a cage, as I claim, surely that's something relative, and that there are more of less autonomous, more or less educated and therefore more or less free individuals within society, even if society itself acts to constrain them. On this view, the message of humanitarianism can still fully explain what is going on when starving children shake at the end of my living room.

Yet it isn't that I'm not free enough, like I have 10 beans when really I should have 50, and all I need to do is collect more beans vouchers and send them off before they expire (sorry). If there is a difference between the kind of freedom implied by charitable giving and the kind of freedom constrained to feel bad and capable of ending starvation (as I assert somewhat blankly), then it's not only unhelpful or lacking but simply incorrect to describe the appearance of the emaciated child in the usual way.  'Simply incorrect' probably needs a stronger and longer explication, as it's capable of doing a lot of work. In any case, this difference in kind is probably at the heart of what I'm saying, and why giving to charity isn't just a 'stopgap' measure that should be taken (i.e. to help someone right now) whilst the world sorts itself out (or until I feel capable to sort it out).  The pain of need - pleasure of giving logic detracts from the meaning of suffering, not just from my pocket or my DVD collection.


V

Two versions of atheism

'Being' an atheist is an ambiguous business.   It doesn't literally amount to any philosophy in itself but tends to exclude all philosophy.  Why?  Because the history of the negativity of the atheist still extends itself through the atheists of today.
Everyone knows that an atheist used to mean an immoral person - godless precisely because immoral.  All learning and rationality was unknown to or foolishly ignored by the atheist.  An atheistic 'worldview' would be the worldview of the beast: a mistaken image grounded in bodily hunger, and nothing more.  Not a great start, but the irony is that Christendom made up something impossible - man without God - in order to persecute and ridicule, and it turns out in the end that man without God may be something of a necessity.  'Looks like the foot's on the other hand' etc.  And yes, of course it should be strictly possible to be an atheist in the 16th century or whatever, as it is at least a legitimate worldview, but when I say the 'negativity of the atheist' I'm of course not talking about possible true atheists, I'm talking only about the historical, discursive atheist, the atheist-scapegoat of the past.

Today atheists have two outstanding features (other than feet).  Firstly, they tend to be republican with an emphasis on the development of 'secular society' away from the influence of the power of the traditional churches (in the UK this means decrying the place of the CofE in the House of Lords, for example).  At any rate it is assumed that an atheist is a secularist, and the atheist is held to be a statist - despite such people as, say, communists, anarchists and anarcho-communists,  And yes you can in fact take it for granted, as there are less and less people with alternate political persuasions these days.

A little intersting is the fact that some religious people and some ministers of religion feel that a secular society is the best or most progressive one (!), seemingly despite their instincts for a spiritually united people.  The question of how religions behave amonst others seems important here: whether they wish to gather power for themselves and treat rivals with suspicion, or whether they wish to live alongside other faiths.  They may well also believe that a secular society gives churches more freedom to flourish at their best - in control of the meaning of people's lives rather than control over their administration.  But this doesn't really bear on the argument, or whatever it is I end up writing.

I'll briefly point out the theological basis of the individual assumed to be capable of making fee choices and decisions in the atheists' radical secular democracy.  For a thoroughgoing conception of democracy, all citizens should be informed citizens, and as religion stands in the way of a clear understanding of human action and relationships, it really ought to be educated out.  However social science and philosophy (both of which many people hate because they make points like this one) tell us how the 'decision maker' model of human agency presumes a place for a human mind outside of nature, radically different in kind from the emotions, and a mere spectator to history.  This place is in fact somewhere a 'soul' used to be, and willing an informed citizenry that is able to make positive rational use of its democracy isn't in the end necessarily all that different from a Christian society preoccupying itself with God's will.  Why is this?  Probably because what people think and act like as well as what they're able to or likely to ever learn, is determined by their history, and a rational 'decision maker' belongs to historical lineage just as religious sentiment does, it just seems more likely for historical reasons.  If you watch a TV advert telling you to give food to a starving African child and you actually don't do that, it's not because you're particularly conceited, but because history has granted you little capacity in this area.  I'm of the view that the image of the child is actually an extension of the abuse visited on that child - something you're thought to deserve, even though you don't.  Well, maybe I'll write that one up another time.

If you granted the argument about the historical locality of your  supposedly ahistorical mental faculties, you could perhaps still say that the new democracy would rightly embody the good things about Christians without the bad things (i.e. weird beliefs like the ones that say that there is a God and that God wants us to do stuff).  Even if human beings don't have a mind outside of history or if they're constantly subjected to and compromised by their emotions, they still have to try and behave as if it were true that they made their own decisions.  And you actually have most of educated humanity summarised in that sentence.  Two problems of course - 1) politically, you lose any honest sense of a society freely chosen by the people once you admit that probably most people aren't 'behaving free enough' to effect it (though you could enjoy lots of controls, and that's why there should be suspicion!).  And also, 2) it's ethically demented. 

The second outstanding feature of atheists today (again, despite their feet), which is that you can be sure that they deny the place of God in explaining the universe, given the hard sciences' good form in doing so without reference to miraculous and other unexplainable occurances.  What is somewhat less clear is why the universe needs explaining, other than to get on God's nerves.  Of course, the pursuit of happiness, emancipation from superstition, the growth of the human race toward the stars and away from disease, the 'need' to have knowledge and to enjoy that knowledge (enjoying false knowledge has however been far more popular if you take a quick look at any amount of history), all these could be cited as reasons for explaining the universe, and they're ok, but why do I care?

If you're not a scientist or even particularly good at or knowledgeable about science, why do you care to further scientific understanding?  Given that at some important level you are recognizing that scientific understanding is really for the best, why do you therefore refuse to improve your own understanding (that old paradox - why do you not do good knowing that it is good?)?(?)...?....1+3=?  Now, you could be the kind of monster that watches children starve in Africa and does nothing about it, and therefore the kind of monster that can know that there is understanding and innumerable ways to gain understanding, but chooses to remain ignorant.  My point is that these chains of reasoning are (literally) no basis for your action and not injunctions you should want to entertain.  And of course, with Plato, I'll assert that if you truly knew in what direction lay justice, you'd move toward it in whatever way you could, and you wouldn't be ashamed.

Well, it seems too trivial to mention, since you're all aboard the Good Ship Lollipop and you imagine yourselves to be a part of the moving history of society that will eventually end in perfect democracy (no, really, you do!).  But your hypothetical involvement in understanding the world doesn't really make sense anyway.  You may say that your opinion regarding scientific understanding is a good one and that you're a 'good member of society' in holding to that opinion, and however inept you may be personally to further science yourself, at least you 'support' the idea of furthering science in principle.  Through the magic of democracy, the correct opinion then prevails within the political system itself, and society gradually becomes more science-oriented and less God-oriented.  Arguments against this kind of fantasising could take the form of showing how different it is to be a political subject on a matter such as race, and a supposedly political subject on the matter of science.  If you are a racist, you can vote for 'the racist party' - most countries have at least one, and be politically effective.  But there is no 'science is better than religion' party.  So this argument says that (even if democratic action were effective, which it isn't) unrepresented opinions can have no effect on the status quo.  Similarly, you can simply point out that the reason there isn't a science vs religion politics is that the political class sees this issue as suicidal, and so you can't vote on it.  Erm, so there.

The original issue was why the individual cares about there being scientific explanations for the world, instead of religious ones.  Atheists deny that God is an explanation for important things in their lives.  God doesn't explain what their actions mean and prescribe what they should morally do.  If this isn't a political thesis, then it is a personal one, but what is this personal value that merely denies its opposite?  As I've said, it seems that atheists believe in scientific understanding, and philosophical principles, that they don't further.  Does it not seem that atheists are therefore blind?  It just can't be enough to be an incidental atheist, to truly be an atheist.  On the face of it, anyone is an atheist who denies God, by definition, but in practice it seems that only a small percentage of these 'atheists' carry atheism through to some sort of active dimension (and I mean scientists, as philosophers are shit right now).  The risk, of course, is that an inactive and reactive atheism collapses back into religious practice.

There are problems with republicanism and problems with beliefs about science (not to mention the ignorance at the tenets of the philosophy of science), in these two characteristics of the modern atheist.  Who is to say that the irrational nature of the animalistic atheist of centuries ago doesn't significantly describe today's liberated atheists?

Atheism needs furthering and defending.  Media atheists like the New Atheists are all there is right now, and there needs to be something significantly more in entirely different directions.  The problem with the New Atheists is that they can only inform and entertain, whilst religious people have been willfully ignorant and cruel monsters for as long as human history.

V

Want to live forever? Musings on H+

Transhumanism is an interesting commitment.  If you watch a science documentary on TV or read a popular book on physics, you can feel certain that the knowledge that humanity now possesses places us beyond the medium sized world we live in, both in terms of very large objects like planets and solar systems and in terms of the very small quantum world.  Science has projected us past ourselves in every direction, and the unlimited technological innovation that it promises and the ability to grab and hold the wonders of the universe as a unique and all-encompassing goal is beyond all belief.  This being beyond belief seems an important issue, because we have so many beliefs that cannot possibly follow us into space, if you know what I mean.  And yes, you may point out that God can follow us into space, but firstly I'm not so sure about that and secondly, whatchagonnadowhenthelargestarmsinthewwfgetaholdofyoubrotherwhatchagonnado.

I have noticed that one very interesting consequence of belief in scientific futures is the negating effect those beliefs have on my political beliefs.  In a sense, human politics belongs to the Earth, to its territories and to its distributions of resources and systems of power.  Once I imagine humanity out of orbit, or even radically enhanced here on Earth, it becomes very difficult to conceive of humanity as a struggle in the same ways I think of it today.  Humanity becomes about exploration and space opera endeavours, and not at all about the existence of starving children with preventable diseases.  Does this mean I am fantasising away the political reality that allows for the emergence of hi-tech?

In Star Trek, the military model is wholly preserved to the purpose of exploration.  But what kind of military is that?  It's a colonial military, albeit an ideally purified and detached one (you don't even have to walk through Africa to get to the natives - you just float around amongst some pretty stars and then maybe you'll visit x y z planet.  That's if they're really lucky).  And come to that, why do I, as an engineering technician on a starship, want to work without a break?  Everything on the Enterprise is measured in masses of hours and no-one is ever 'off-shift' except where plots and sub-plots demand it.  They also wear the same boring clothes every day and care a lot about a rigid command structure even though there is absolutely no demand for it.  "I will make Captain one day, but what about all the responsibility, like having to be make the right command decisions at the drop of a hat, and having to be an inspirational influence on all that serve under me?" ...  Why would the future present only this measly short-sighted idea of self-worth?  It's not even good enough for right now here on Earth.  Why should people in the future be so insecure as to require a military hierarchy to regulate a supposedly perfected humanity?  And why does Earl Grey tea make me fascinating if it's ordered hot?  It didn't make me fascinating yesterday when I spilt it on my foot in the kitchen.

The reason noone worries about how holodecks are basically perfected forms of slavery supporting an entirely fascist society is the same reason noone asks themselves mid-documentary why it's hard to think about the tecnologically unlimited future of a Joburg slum-dweller who is likely to die some time this week.  The reason is there are a lot of 'orrible barnacles attached to the idea of science being the social future.  I have hi-tech because I happen to have been born where there is an abundance of hi-tech.  FM2030, in 'Are you a Transhuman', wrote this:
(sorry about the stupid formatting.  It is stupid and I can't seem to change it.  Stupid.)

" Who are the slow-growth poor?

...

The chronically poor in affluent societies. People with obvious talents who remain poor because

of guilt about affluence —deflated self-image—self-denial—pathological dependency on others
—unwillingness to give—or just unintelligent management of personal life.
...

Can one have high values and high-tech on iow [sic] income?

in other words can one be poor and enjoy a progressive life?

Poverty slows down growth: psychological—social—intellectual— economic—political.

Poverty is regressive.

Affluence is progressive."
Typical US attitudes that don't wash.  People aren't poor because they think poor, they're poor because society requires poor people - it requires the unemployed, the endebted, the ones that work like dogs to earn what can never truly support them.  True story - I saw an ad yesterday for 'office junior' and read it because it stated £7000 - £8000 as its salary and suspicion bit into me.  I read the ad and lo and behold the worker is expected to work Monday-Friday 9.00-5.30!  This equates to about £1 an hour, in case you're wondering - a slave's wage.  That ad runs on Reed.co.uk, a mainstream employment website/company.  Power even creates the wasteful and violent for ideological purposes, such as the old industrial working class in the UK now being a violent underclass.  What do you call high value people that rely on creating low value people? You call them the real low value people.

Reading FM2030 on this point reminds me that you don't get a happy-clappy vision of technology only by chance, you can also get it by being a douchebag.  Oh, he also says that being able to be productive anywhere will decrease the pace of our lives and increase our leisure.  How Victorian.  Because technology is the playground of the rich or 'affluent' (that word always sounded to me like a nasal problem), then we all just need to become rich, right?  Because the rich are free?  It seems to me as it seems to many people that the people who can't give up on the old industrial society values are precisely the rich, who require the values and economics of the modern period in order to have their position as a ruling-class.  There is no such thing as the 'self-limiting poor', that's a really very abusive position, not to say that it's plain false too (too).  H+, to be really anything more than an onanism for the would-be ruling-class, has to steer well clear of this kind of stuff.

Leaving politics aside, and because I do want to take transhumanism seriously as a starting set of beliefs, I find there's merely a different hook to the same problem coming from the consideration of science itself.  For H+, being extremely positive about the future, is certainly positivist in its apprehension of the realities of science. True science cannot ignore its environment, it cannot see itself as something above us all purified and powerful and capable of lifting us out of our mess like a saviour.   Faith in science such as H+ demonstrates identifies the potential strengths of technological advancement and ignores the embedded and interconnected natures of those very same technologies.

Crude examples follow.  Sorry.  It's late.

Man landed on the moon at the same time race issues divided the country that sent those astronauts up.  Astronauts report how fragile the Earth looks from space, and how sublimely beautiful and so on, and that's a true, honest, and brutal experience.  The idea of the Earth from space has the power to say to people that some other way is possible in life, but it's not for all that disconnected from their lives, it isn't really sublime.  The Space Program of the US (and I assume the USSR?) came directly out of the rocket science of the Nazis, who shot their rockets at civillian towns and cities.  Nazis exterminated the Jews.  For this they used IBM technology and more besides.  When astronauts look at the Earth from orbit, do they care that the Nazis put them there?

Scientists following pure physics created the atomic bomb, which was then dropped on civillian cities.  I remember reading that Richard Feynman wrote that that other well-known-but-the-name-escapes-me scientist (probably not Oppenheimer) who worked on the Manhattan Project advocated a 'social irresponsibility' for science that Feynman found reasonable.

In all this I'm not saying that science should curtail itself, or see itself as working within the midst of destruction and social chaos and therefore conceptualise its achievements as being less happy.  I'm merely pointing out that a complete conception of the wonders of science would resolve these difficulties as a matter of course, if science is to be seen as legitimately progressive and not crippled. 

I am therefore proposing that it's difficult to think about how society would look in space precisely because even the vast promises of space travel aren't good enough, aren't developed enough in themselves.  In short, if H+ were in fact properly demonstrated it wouldn't be a kooky belief system for short people with wire glasses, it would be an inescapable rewriting our values in the here and now, reshaping society itself by the force of necessity. 

But is there the philosophy to do it?  And is it really an issue for philosophy/philosophy of science?  Is it instead a standard political issue to be decided in standardly political means (that is, without the scientific ideal or the vision of technological progress)?  Is it correct and right that only short people are transhumanists, as an expression of a political category?  Well, I don't like that view given that H+ is really very underdeveloped and probably needs a chance to get going in an honest direction.  Also, I personally cannot afford to be a 'lets get down in the mud' sort of person because it all hurts too much, I think of political positions as fundamentally ignorant or hard-hearted, considering how bad things actually are.  To strive to see life in the midst of the future is to strive to develop what is truly great about humanity right now.

Maybe I'll write again about 'humanity', it's really overused.  In any case, and just to mention one last thing about immortality - yes, H+ cares about extending human life span, perhaps indefinitely.  But this already happens whenever you pick up a stick, or work a machine, you are already part of the great mechanisms of the universe and therefore immortal and irreplaceable.  And that's my two cents.  There's no reason that my body should stop with my organs, or that I simply want to keep my organs alive in spite of the other movements in the universe that I'm a part of.  The death of my personality should be negligible, should I be living within good ethics.   And that's a wibble on death.  For free. Lucky you, feel free to upchuck.

I am a robot.

V