Transhumanism
Bad Effects Of Transhumanism:
EXPLANATION AND TECHNOLOGY: Humans (and transhumans) are marked by a persistent desire to understand and control their environment and experience. Before the development of the scientific method, deductive and inductive logic, game theory, sophisticated epistemic principles and so on, humans resorted to superficial causal explanations based on observation for common phenomena, and theistic explanation for unusual events. Deities were invoked to explain unusual or destructive phenomena, and to try to provide a comforting model of the uncertainties and uncontrollable events in life. Storms, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, epidemics and madness could not be tolerated without some belief about their cause. In the absence of scientific explanation a religious or theistic explanation was almost inevitable.
Along with pre-scientific attempts at understanding came a crude attempt at a technology. A tension is evident here: On the one hand religions have frequently declared events to be determined by a divine plan and so have held attempts at changing things to be futile (this is common in Eastern religions, as well as other religions involving predestination). On the other hand, religions have offered certain limited and carefully circumscribed means of changing and controlling events, such as through prayer, ritual, and magic. The overall result has been entropic and anti-progressive since religious technology is ineffective (with the occasional exception of psychosomatic effects).
The role of religion in providing explanations, however poor, of human life and its environment has given way over time to the superior resources of empirical science. Science has been able to explain an enormous variety of phenomena, both commonplace and unusual. Protestations by theists that science has not and cannot explain the origin of life, the origin of the universe, or the nature of consciousness are increasingly ridiculous as we continue to learn and
EXPLANATION AND TECHNOLOGY: Humans (and transhumans) are marked by a persistent desire to understand and control their environment and experience. Before the development of the scientific method, deductive and inductive logic, game theory, sophisticated epistemic principles and so on, humans resorted to superficial causal explanations based on observation for common phenomena, and theistic explanation for unusual events. Deities were invoked to explain unusual or destructive phenomena, and to try to provide a comforting model of the uncertainties and uncontrollable events in life. Storms, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, epidemics and madness could not be tolerated without some belief about their cause. In the absence of scientific explanation a religious or theistic explanation was almost inevitable.
Along with pre-scientific attempts at understanding came a crude attempt at a technology. A tension is evident here: On the one hand religions have frequently declared events to be determined by a divine plan and so have held attempts at changing things to be futile (this is common in Eastern religions, as well as other religions involving predestination). On the other hand, religions have offered certain limited and carefully circumscribed means of changing and controlling events, such as through prayer, ritual, and magic. The overall result has been entropic and anti-progressive since religious technology is ineffective (with the occasional exception of psychosomatic effects).
The role of religion in providing explanations, however poor, of human life and its environment has given way over time to the superior resources of empirical science. Science has been able to explain an enormous variety of phenomena, both commonplace and unusual. Protestations by theists that science has not and cannot explain the origin of life, the origin of the universe, or the nature of consciousness are increasingly ridiculous as we continue to learn and