Abstract
What would you change about yourself if you could? If you could design and build a feature and add it to yourself, what would it be? Would you design something that makes you better at something you’re not very good at? Maybe you love music, but haven’t ever been very good at singing. If you could buy a piece of technology that would allow you to be able to sing well, would you? Or might you further improve on a skill you’re already good at? What if you could design a chip that would make you able to do extraordinarily difficult calculations and statistical modeling in your head? Would you? Or might you give yourself a skill or ability that is currently outside the range of human ability. What if you could buy a piece of tech that could give you the ability to fly, or access the internet with just a thought? Such approaches raise the potential for completely re-engineering the human body. Would you re-engineer yourself?.
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Notes
- 1.
I use the term “bodymind” in the tradition of Feminist, Black Feminist, and Disability Studies literature as a term which rejects the Enlightenment philosophical separation of body and mind.
- 2.
Brother of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World. This relationship puts Brave New World in a whole new light, as a novel-length rebuke to the entirety of his brothers’ work.
- 3.
We will return to this in Part 2.
- 4.
Every year the Transhumanist Party holds a forum where members of their organization discuss, make amendments, and vote on the platform and bill of rights. A majority vote of all members is necessary for a change to be made official.
- 5.
This book is what got me interested in the transhumanism movement.
- 6.
I am using this term incredibly loosely, here.
- 7.
The Modern Synthesis was when Darwinian Evolution was finally put together with Mendelian inheritance models, and the discovery that chromosomes each held different sets of genetic material, which establish a mechanism by which heredity could be explained: “genetics.” The Synthesis has been refined since, most notably by Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, and the integration of Punctuated Equilibrium by Stephen J. Gould in 1972, which solved the problem of events such as the Cambrian Explosion.
- 8.
A deeper discussion of eugenics is beyond the scope of this chapter. For more information about eugenics, its methods, and its legacy see: Paul Lombardo’s Three Generations: No Imbeciles (2008) and Nathaniel Comfort’s The Science of Human Perfection (2012).
- 9.
Phrenologists be damned.
- 10.
Also the phrase “morphological freedom” is just punchy and a great moniker for the idea they’re proposing.
- 11.
Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the Transhumanist Party, even holds a semi-regular video round table with officers of the party and other Transhumanist thinkers which he calls the “Enlightenment Salon.”
- 12.
Race and disability are also relevant here. Race in ways that are too complex to include in this chapter, disability in ways that are clear from Part 2 and the discussion of eugenics.
- 13.
There is a large body of literature on expertise that I do not have the room to go into in this paper. Please refer to Harry Collins’ Rethinking Expertise (1997) and The Tea Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks (1974), and Steven Epstein’s The Construction of Lay Expertise (1995).
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Earle, J. (2021). Engineering Our Selves: Morphological Freedom and the Myth of Multiplicity. In: Pirtle, Z., Tomblin, D., Madhavan, G. (eds) Engineering and Philosophy. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70099-7_13
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