Thursday, 15 August 1996
Post No. 4 of 8
by Paulina Borsook

Max, I retain a skeptic's nervousness about the completeness of "rational" systems of thought. Our understanding of what "reason" is seems to evolve: phrenology and eugenics were reasoned scientific disciplines - in the 19th century. Will the new sciences you are enamored of, and the assumptions you base transhumanism on, seem similarly quaint - at best asymptotically suggestive - a couple of decades from now? Immortality, the secrets of life, escape from what ails us, the promise of the earthly (or in the Extropian case, extraterrestrial) paradise, the passion to make others agree with utopian philosophies: These unfulfilled desires seem native to the species.

Dogs were a metaphor, Max. Some linguists would say that what makes humans able to communicate - or not - is the ability to grasp each other's metaphors....

Instead of celebrating slavery, I was instead referring to the limits imposed by human hardware and software - and how the two are intertwined. While more people now live past childhood, and the three-score-and-ten age group is now the fastest-growing US demo, no one seems to be living routinely to, say, 140.

And many folks, when they conclude their seventh decade, begin to feel sated with experience. It's as if we are programmed - and who knows which set of neurophysiological interactions this is seated in - to live through, process, and enjoy a finite set of cognitions.

The Jungians call it the shadow: That the dark matter you try to ignore is precisely that which will come around and bite you on the nose - because it has something important to tell you. Think of how insipid Europop is, because it hasn't been informed, as US rock and roll has, by the bass note of R&B - music that refers far more to misery than to joy.

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