{"id":2111,"date":"2012-03-05T12:34:55","date_gmt":"2012-03-05T17:34:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=2111"},"modified":"2012-12-09T22:31:26","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T03:31:26","slug":"spotted-a-new-patheos-blogger-with-a-dedicated-transhumanist-tag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2012\/03\/spotted-a-new-patheos-blogger-with-a-dedicated-transhumanist-tag.html","title":{"rendered":"Spotted: A New Patheos Blogger with a Dedicated ‘Transhumanist’ Tag"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. \u00a0I\u2019m\u00a0one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog<\/a>. \u00a0More details here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The trouble is, that the newest addition to Patheos\u2019s Catholic Portal is dead set against it<\/a>. \u00a0In his intro post for God and the Machine<\/a>, Thomas L. McDonald writes:<\/p>\n

Emerging technologies are shaping, reshaping, and sometimes warping, our perception of reality. This cannot happen in moral vacuum. It cannot exist without a moral dimension. Anything that is\u2014anything that can be perceived with the senses or apprehended with the intellect\u2014has a moral quality to it. Technology can be another tool for building up the Kingdom, or for tearing it down, but it cannot be morally neutral. Whether we realize it or not\u2013whether we even use the technology or not\u2013humanity is changed by the mere existence of 3D printing, video games, nanoscale structures, text messages, mobile devices, and myriad other elements of modern life\u2026<\/p>\n

The idea that we will one day be able to \u201cdownload\u201d our consciences is patently absurd, but genetic engineering and \u201cbody hacking\u201d are already here in their nascent forms. They are not going away, and they appear to be in the hands of people who believe moral and ethical concerns are irrelevant.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m in total agreement with McDonald about the need to think hard and fast<\/em> about the way technology changes or warps our moral considerations (cf the ethics of drone<\/a> warfare<\/a>). \u00a0These worries are far from \u2018irrelevant\u2019 to me, but I do have\u00a0different <\/em>moral and ethical concerns than McDonald, and I look forward to highlighting some of his pieces to talk about how and why we differ.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To start with, I was interested in his take<\/a> on Shapeway\u2019s contest to design a 3D-printed visualization of Siri<\/a>, the iPhone assistant. \u00a0Pretty much all of the entries were humanoid. \u00a0McDonald wrote:<\/p>\n

We anthropomorphise everything, even our technology. A species that creates proxy personalities and even body-images for cell phones isn\u2019t going to be abandoning the flesh any time soon.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s just one tiny example. Siri is the voice recognition software for iPhone 4S. It was created to have a more human tone and personality, so much so that some people have been trying to imagine what \u201cshe\u201d would look like. It\u2019s a kind of reverse transhumanism, in which we take a \u201cpure\u201d technology already freed from the \u201climitations\u201d of the human body, and inject it into the the form of human physiology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I agree with him that we see purposeful agents everywhere, and we tend to imagine them as human, but I don\u2019t know if that heuristic reflects a truth about the world. \u00a0When I read novels, if the race of a character isn\u2019t specified, I tend to assume the person is white, but that betrays more about me than it does any intrinsic\u00a0properties\u00a0of humans real or fictional. \u00a0After I moved to DC, I tended to assume people would know Yiddish words like \u2018schlep\u2019 or get jokes with the punchline \u201cWhy is this<\/em> night different than all other nights?\u201d but my assumption doesn\u2019t prove<\/em> that New York is the apotheosis of culture and everyone else is severely\u00a0impoverished. \u00a0I\u2019m just bad at modeling other minds.<\/p>\n

Reality is not circumscribed by my imagination. \u00a0The limits of what I can dream up aren\u2019t disproof of what can exist, and contra<\/em> Lewis, the ideas that stick in my head aren\u2019t proof that they can be realized<\/a>. \u00a0If I want to stretch my ideas of what kind of bodies minds can use, I look to the augments developed for people with disabilities<\/a> and the way they shake our assumptions about how to achieve a particular task<\/a>. \u00a0And then it\u2019s time for more R&D in the philosophy\/ethics lab.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. \u00a0I\u2019m\u00a0one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog. \u00a0More details here. The trouble is, that the newest addition to Patheos\u2019s Catholic Portal is dead set against it. \u00a0In his intro post for God and the Machine, Thomas L. McDonald writes: Emerging technologies are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-2111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-morality-in-practice","tag-transhumanism"],"yoast_head":"\nSpotted: A New Patheos Blogger with a Dedicated 'Transhumanist' Tag<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. \u00a0I\u2019m\u00a0one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog. \u00a0More details here. The trouble is,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2012\/03\/spotted-a-new-patheos-blogger-with-a-dedicated-transhumanist-tag.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Spotted: A New Patheos Blogger with a Dedicated 'Transhumanist' Tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. \u00a0I\u2019m\u00a0one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog. \u00a0More details here. 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