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, push back aging and death, 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.