Interview with Dr. James Hughes

• A Conversation With Dr. James Hughes (Part 1 of 3)
• Part 2 of 3
• Part 3 of 3
  
  

The always excellent Worldchanging posted a fantastic interview with leading democratic transhumanist Dr. James Hughes, who I was just blogging about. Some highlights from part one:

The basic argument between transhumanists and human-racists is a debate about what is really important and valuable in the human condition, self-aware existence, consciousness, emotionally rich experience and rational thought, on the one hand, or having the modal genome and body type of human beings circa 2000 (which is very different from what it was even 20 years ago, but never mind that)? The transhumanist position is known in bioethics as "personhood theory": you can be a self-aware person and not be human (great apes for instance) and you can be "human" and not be a person (such as fetuses and the brain dead). Rights are for persons, not humans. [. . .]



I understand that people do get frightened by the idea of a transhuman society, with increasing diversity of persons. People were frightened that the end of slavery and Jim Crow would unleash anarchy and race-mixing, and people are still scared that legal gay marriage will destroy Western civilization. We need to try to convince those who are afraid of human enhancement that we can still have peace, prosperity and tolerance of diversity in that future. And at the same time we need to remember that the transhumanist claim is that people should control their own bodies and minds, and other people don't get to tell us to go to the back of the bus because of their vague anxieties and yuck reactions to our choices. [. . .]



Libertarian individualism is completely self-defeating for the human enhancement movement. You want to make yourself and your kids smarter? You can take a smart pill and do your mental gymnastics, but you still need good books, stimulating friends, a solid education, a free and independent press, and a stable, well-regulated economy so your PDA keeps beaming Google searches and email chat into your eyeball through that laser display. And it might be nice to have a strong, independent Food and Drug Administration to make sure that your smart pill doesn't cause dementia in five years, and that that laser display doesn't blind you.

I'll add links to the other two parts in this post as they become available.