Tuesday, 13 August 1996
Post No. 2 of 8
by Paulina Borsook

Max, I think you're right that the Extropian impulse is quintessentially human in its desire to use instrumental intelligence and technology to transcend quotidian biological limitations. Similarly, the impulse towards self-medication that exists in every culture; the impulse towards mysticism - and in the West, the tradition of rationalistic schemata that try to comfort us with the illusion (think of how we now regard Aristotle) that everything is knowable - are evidence of this very human craving to go beyond our place in natural history, and have absolute self-mastery.

Yet the Extropian incarnation of these longings seems rather like saying you like dogs - but you want to change the brain of the dog, the cellular structure of the dog, the neurophysiology of the dog, strike out against/deny much of what gives dogs their essential doggy character. At which point you have to ask, maybe it's not dogs you like - but weasels. Or erector sets. Or what you'd really like is Gumby, and to enter into a mirror cartoon universe.

The Extropian emphasis on reason is sweet, if naïve: As if we have arrived at an epistemology that makes everything perfectly clear. As if biological systems, both within the individual organism, and as embedded in an ecosystem, aren't turning out to have ever more complexity and subtlety. A computational chemist commented that the anti-breast-cancer drug, Taxol, derived from yew trees, has just the sort of unexpected structure you would only find in nature, and was not something that would have been algorithmically predicted or derived in a lab. My friend, research scientist Jim Cook, says that transhumanism ignores the amazing high-tech creatures we already are, and idealizes the technologies we create.

What's more, it's not as if all the messy, dark, nutso-crazo parts of the human psyche (not to mention the merely subjective and intuitive) aren't often tied to creativity, genius, and innovation.

And to focus particularly on the Extropian attitude toward death, biologists now believe in programmed cell death, where in every cell's birth is programmed its death. Death is a necessary part of the eternal cycle - automating death away may certainly give you something - but what it is probably won't be life.

The pop version of existentialism posits that knowledge of death is unique to humans - and is part of what makes us cranky and cross as a species, ontologically insecure and inclined to chase after religion, afterlives, offspring, kingdom-building, entrepreneurial activity, the creation of art. Positive use of negative energy: displacement of anxiety. Think of Marcus Aurelius: Live each day as if it were your last.

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