Jeff asked:

I've been looking into Transhumanist ideology lately, and while some of it seems a bit "out there", it
brings a few questions to mind:

1. Transhumanists advocate the use of drugs and genetic engineering to eliminate all negative
   aspects of the human condition, and replacing it with a certain kind of self-regulated happiness. It
   seems to me that constant happiness would be boring, and that there's more to life than just being
   happy, although I'm not sure what, exactly. What's your philosophical perspective on the issue?

2. Transhumanists also advocate the idea of immortality. Not only does that seem like it could be
   boring, but it carries a certain ethical dilemma along with it, not the least of which being our
   responsibility to future generations. What do you think about this?

3. Regarding life-extension and immortality, if immortality is morally questionable, why isn't medical
   life extension?

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I'm not sure who or what group of people you are referring to as "transhumanist". But here's my brief
take on some of these issues:

1) I'm not sure what you mean by "drugs"; we all use drugs, from aspirin to antibiotics to caffeine. I'm
also not sure what you mean by "self-regulated", or indeed by "happiness". There doesn't seem to be
anything wrong with self-control to me, if that's what you mean; indeed, by many standards, including
the ancient Greeks, self-control and self-knowledge are almost supreme virtues. If you mean that they
advocate implanting electrodes into one's pleasure centers so that at the push of a button one could
experience intense pleasure — a perfectly realizable technology at this point, by the way (and Niven's
"tasp"), I think you'll find virtually universal condemnation of this as destructive to most of what are
considered human virtues. If by drugs you mean psychedelics... it's pretty well established that those
don't do what they were thought to do in the 60s, i.e., reproduce enlightenment. Their biochemical
effects are pretty well known at this point, and as far as being enlightened, it's a bit like hitting you
over the head to go to sleep: it looks the same, but it's not the same at all. There's lotsof literature on
this by now, just look it up.

Is there more to life than being happy? You mean, than feeling the emotion of happiness? Well, we
could all be put into tanks, tended by robots, and have constant stimulation of our pleasure centers —
not within present technology, but reasonably soon. That's the ultimate realization of constantly
feelinghappy, right? And I think virtually everyone, certainly everyone considered sane, would
condemn this, for pretty obvious reasons. Do you mean, doing something that makes you happy, as
in contented, fulfilled, joyful? Like being an artist because that's what you really want to do? Do I
really need to comment on that?

2) Well. I've always thought that the human lifespan is absurdly short... consider, for example, the
timescale of the galactic rotation, of which there have been, I believe, about 10 since the galaxy was
formed several billion years ago. Consider even local (on Earth) geological timescales: the formation
of continents, ice ages, etc. My feeling has always been that a lifespan of about 100,000 years is the
absolute minimum reasonable length, although by astronomical standards that's ridiculously brief. I'm
serious about this. Do you think that living, say, 100,000 years would be boring? How do you know?
What I've found is that the more I learn (now at 56 years), the more the horizons open up for things
unlearned and undone. As for immortality, i.e., living infinitely long, that's impossible, because there is
a finite probability that, to take just one example, a meteor will hit you on the head, and in an infinite
amount of time any finite probability will come to pass. So somethingwill eventually kill you. If by
immortality you mean that we're all going to heaven and sing hosannas for eternity, yes, that's about
as boring as it could get. I'd think most people would get pretty sick of that after only 10,000 years or
so, wouldn't you? And infinitymeans that anyfinite amount of time is basically the same relative to
the total span.

There is a moderately interesting ethical question here, which I think most people do not think clearly
about. Suppose we were going to live (including "life after death") for an infinitely long time. Now, why
would we have any obligation at all to future generations after any finite time? Any decision we make
we could postpone as long as we want; what's a few millennia more or less? Whereas, if we're only
going to live for, say, 1000 years, or for the flicker that we live now, I would say we have extremely
strong obligations to make that tick of the clock count; it's all we've got. Who knows what effects a
simple comment to a child, or a student, for example, or a single beautiful poem, will have, down the
years? Maybe the effects go on for a bit then die out, and maybe they multiply... who knows? Either
could happen, right? The ethical thing, then, is to a) try for actions with effects that look, as best we
can tell, as if they might last, and b) try for actions whose effects will be positive.

3) Why is immortality morally questionable, especially since, as I say above, it's impossible? I would
say that extending life as long as possible is moral; so much is lost when, to take just a couple of
examples, an educated person dies, or when a wise — educated or not — person dies, don't you
think?

Steven Ravett Brown