Axis: Enhancing human nature — Should we use technology to enhance human nature beyond healing?
Human nature is not sacred: it is a transitional state that we have the right, and perhaps the duty, to improve. Through biotechnology, we could expand our physical and cognitive capacities, , and reduce suffering.
Where bioconservatism sees in human nature a limit to be respected, transhumanism treats the body and mind we are given as a contingent starting point, shaped by blind evolution. Nothing sanctifies this inheritance: to forbid medicine, genetics or cognitive enhancement from extending our capacities in the name of "nature" would be a superstition. Enhancement is merely the deliberate continuation of what culture and technology have always done.
More, 'Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy' · Bostrom, 'In Defense of Posthuman Dignity'
Foundations and implications
↑ What grounds itA leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.
↑ What grounds it
Explaining nature
If the living body is a machine governed by physical laws, it can in principle be repaired, augmented and reconfigured like any mechanism. The mechanistic view of the living, which La Mettrie once turned into "man a machine", feeds the transhumanism of Bostrom, for which human nature is not a sacred given but a perfectible state. The link remains a contestable inference: classical mechanism did not aim at enhancement, but it removes the objection to it in principle.
↓ What it implies
A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.